Jay Elwes
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Dep ed at theneweuropean.co.uk. Formerly theArticle, Prospect.
e. jayelwes@gmail.com
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Articles by Jay Elwes
Dictators with the luck of the devil
‘What brings strong personalities to power?’ asks the historian Ian Kershaw. ‘And what promotes or limits their use of that power?’ Those two questions are at the centre of this book, a study of some of the 20th century’s most important leaders. The result is partly an analysis of character, but also an attempt to gauge how much history’s main players directed world events, and how much events directed them. Kershaw begins with Lenin, whose rise was punctuated by huge strokes of luck.
Democracy demands a British election now not in two years time
Liz Truss has gone. The polls show that, if a general election were held today, the Conservative Party would be wiped out. Hundreds of Tories would lose their seats, including Jeremy Hunt, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Labour would win a huge majority. It is clear that the country does not want this government. Public opinion has turned sharply against the Conservatives. So why will they provide the country with its next prime minister?
Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European research body, was upgrading its particle collider to create what it called the Large Hadron Collider. This underground apparatus ran beneath the French-Swiss border and it was so vast that its diameter equalled that of the Circle Line.
Boris Johnson's resignation speech — and his poisonous legacy | TheArticle
Boris Johnson has been a disaster for Britain. He was always unsuitable. He had the wrong temperament, the wrong relationship with the truth, an excess of self-interest, a complete disregard for other people and an inability to build consensus. It was clear from the start that his time in power would end quickly and in catastrophe. And now has is responsible for the messiest and most damaging departure from office by a British Prime Minister.
PMQs and the end of Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson is a very obvious character type. He is the person who will say anything to get himself off the hook. He is an improviser. He is an intuitive sniffer-out of political and social advantage. He is a slippery debater with a sophist’s sense of humour. He is a man motivated entirely by self-interest. If there was one positive aspect to his character, it was that he did not seek to disguise it. Johnson never presented himself as anything other than what he was. It was all there on the surface.
The rottenness at the heart of Johnson's Tory Party
I grew up in a firmly right-wing household and though not a conservative, I am not an instinctive anti-conservative. And yet it seems clear now that there is something very wrong with the Tory party. Somewhere along the line a viable political institution, capable of generating ideas and of acting responsibly, has devolved into something else.
The descent into crisis
It is becoming quite difficult to be optimistic about Britain. Inflation is rising. The Bank of England predicts that it will hit 11 per cent. Interest rates are following, having now reached their highest level in 13 years. A bank rate of 1.25 per cent is still low by historic standards, but that will rise. The real question is not where rates are now, but where they will peak. If the bank is correct and inflation is heading for double figures, then interest rates have a long way to go.
The deep roots of global inequality
Thomas Piketty, the French economist who shot to fame for writing a colossal work of economics that many people bought but few actually read, recently received some advice. ‘What you write is interesting,’ a friend told him, ‘but couldn’t you make it a little shorter?’ Piketty has answered the call for brevity with a book which by his standards is the equivalent of a Post-it note. It’s certainly ‘brief”– but is it a ‘history of equality’? Alas, no.
A very un-Conservative Tory
What was so striking about the letter from Jesse Norman to Boris Johnson, aside from saying that he could no longer support the Prime Minister and calling for him to go, was his suggestion that Johnson’s style of government was at odds with Conservative values.
The Jubilee is good for Britain — and that means business too | TheArticle
We are just days away from the pomp and fanfare of The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee weekend. After two years of Covid-induced social isolation and distancing, the public is long overdue a big celebration. The Queen has reigned for an astonishing 70 years, a landmark never previously reached by a British monarch, and the country will rightly wish to mark the occasion in style.
Douglas Murray’s war on the west
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According to Vladimir Putin, liberalism is an ‘obsolete’ doctrine, a worn-out political philosophy no longer fit for purpose. In this well-timed, rather urgent book, Francis Fukuyama attacks that view and puts a vigorous case for the defence. Despite its faults, liberalism is a force for good, he says, and it remains the only political philosophy capable of taking on the authoritarians of Moscow and Beijing. But the despots are not the central focus of his argument.
No job for a liar
The decision by MPs to hold a formal investigation into whether Boris Johnson lied to Parliament is a reminder of the great weakness at the centre of our political system. That weakness comes from the assumption that the people who run our country act in good faith. That they are decent. That they tell the truth. It’s often referred to — in somewhat arcane language — as the “good chap” theory.
Has the past decade blunted our sense of the duty of care?
Modern British history can be divided into two parts: before Covid and after. That is the central pillar of this at times arid but ultimately compelling account of British social policy since 1945. We recovered in the aftermath of the second world war. Can we do it again, post-pandemic?
Inside Putin’s mind: the lessons of Chechnya
As far as Vladimir Putin is concerned, ‘we are nobody, while he who chance has enabled to clamber to the top of the pile is today Tsar and God’. So said Anna Politkovskaya, the eminent Russian journalist, in her book Putin’s Russia. She continued: ‘In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a huge scale, to civil wars. I want no more of that.’ She wrote those prophetic words almost two decades ago.
How Brexit weakened the West
The Ukraine War is a confrontation between Putin and the West. We know what Putin is — but what is “the West”? It includes the nations of western, and now central Europe, as well as the United States and Canada. But it also includes Australia and New Zealand, countries of the far southeast, as well as Japan and South Korea.
The cost of lies
When Kim Philby defected to the USSR in 1963, he got a surprise. Even though he’d spent nearly thirty years as the KGB’s top agent in the West, burrowing his way through both MI5 and MI6, the Soviets still didn’t trust him and gave him no formal role in their intelligence set-up. Traitors like him were considered too good at lying to be reliable and instead he ended up becoming a sort of PR tool for the KGB. His book, My Silent War, showed the unmistakable influence of his Moscow handlers.
The end of leadership
What kind of leader do we want? What kind of leader do we expect? What kind of leader do we deserve? These questions, and more — but particularly these — have sprung to mind in the last few weeks, as scandal and disgrace have engulfed the British government. But these questions have become especially pressing in the last 24 hours. Last night, a mob accosted Keir Starmer and David Lammy in the street.
Is it an exaggeration to talk of a ‘gender war’?
According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in a ‘battle over sex’. And while that has been going on, ‘another war is being waged. This one is against men, the whole damn lot of them!’ To back up this ‘war on men’ idea, Power cites, among other examples, I Hate Men, a book by the French writer Pauline Harmange in which she damns men as ‘violent, selfish, lazy and cowardly… men beat, rape and murder us’.
No one in their right mind should want to succeed Boris Johnson
Photo: ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo It’s not so much a question of if, but when. The prime minister is on the way out. We know this by the parade of senior Conservatives who are now ostentatiously “ruling themselves out” of any leadership bid.
The BBC is not the problem
What better way to get people’s minds off all those parties in No10 than by attacking the BBC? It’s a tactic that might please some of Boris Johnson’s backbenchers, but most people will be bemused by the sudden leap into the culture war fray. And they are not stupid. Voters recognise a cynical diversionary move when they see one.
When Christ came to Bath
Selassie: “a figure of global cultural significance, far beyond the bounds of the Rastafarian religion.” Image: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo About a mile outside the city of Bath, on the Kelston Road, a track leads down to a broad 19th-century house, built of the familiar, golden Bath stone. In any other town, Fairfield House would be a building of some renown. It is Grade II listed, and surrounded by neatly kept gardens.
The beginning of the end
It all seems to be coming apart. The illegal party held in No10 and the ensuing resignation of the PM’s spokeswoman Allegra Stratton comes on top of the disastrous revelations about Britain’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which in turn had followed the equally disgraceful attempt to bend Parliamentary rules to save the Conservative MP Owen Paterson. But when it comes to Johnson, so many journalistic cases have already been made for the prosecution that there is almost no need to write another.
Who was the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century?
I. Who was the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century? Some questions are so huge, so preposterous and so impossible to answer that they are irresistible. This is one of them. It’s a question that has bothered me for years and has led to some quite serious arguments. People get very wound up by questions like this. Because to rank artists is to assign rank also to the people who happen to like those artists. You are effectively ranking people. And people don’t like that.
Solving the longevity puzzle
Senior citizens in Japan. With one of the world's fastest ageing populations, the country has become a real-time experiment in how other countries might face the challenges brought by low fertility and low mortality rates © Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Alamy Stock Photo People are living longer lives. In the course of the last century, improvements in diet, sanitation, medical science and healthcare drove a steady increase in longevity, both in Britain and around the world.
Malicious and charming
Cathy Curtis, A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick (NY: Norton). More than Nora Joyce or Vera Nabokov, even more than Proust ’ s mother, Robert Lowell’s wife Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007, pictured above) deserves a book of her own. Cathy Curtis overrates what she calls Hardwick ’ s splendid intelligence, formidable character, sharp wit and brilliant work to justify her subject. But assertions are not evidence, and she does not substantiate these exalted claims.
Love in a cold climate: Snow Country, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed
Sebastian Faulks. [Getty Images] In the months before the outbreak of the first world war, Anton Heideck arrives in Vienna. Family life offered him the prospect of a job in his father’s meat factory, but he goes to the big city to start a career as a writer. What he finds is Delphine. They fall in love, move into a flat, then a house in the countryside outside Vienna; but when war breaks out the fragility of their happiness is brutally exposed.
The corruption of British politics
In 2019, the Parliamentary authorities suspended the Labour MP Keith Vaz from the Commons for six months. Conservative MPs did not complain. In 2020, the Conservative MP Conor Burns was suspended for a week. Again, there were no complaints, just as there was no government complaint when David Laws, the Liberal Democrat MP, Paul Flynn, the Labour MP and Ian Paisley Jnr, the DUP MP were all suspended from parliament.
The insatiable human appetite for exorcism
A cleric casts out the evil spirit. Image of engraving: Prisma Archivo/Alamy Reviewed here The Penguin Book of Exorcisms by Edited by Joseph P Laycock Prospect receives a commission when you buy a book using this page. Thank you for supporting us. The idea of possession and exorcism is, in many ways, ridiculous. Surely all those demons and spirits belong to the collective imagination of less enlightened times—to the mud and dungeons of Dark Age paranoia? Perhaps so.
Covid is not convivial
I have Covid. It’s not especially nice. The PCR test confirmed it a day or so ago. Three of my family now has it. One of us is holding out against infection, but not for much longer. The cat seems happy to have us all round the house like this. Can cats get Covid? I do hope not. It goes like this: first there’s a swirling in the head and chest, a bit like the feeling of lightness you get in the queue for a roller-coaster. It’s like an adrenaline kick, but without the sense of focus. A fog comes down.
Brexit, Covid and the failure of Panglossian optimism | TheArticle
Pick one hundred people at random from across the country and chances are you’d have a fairly equal spread of optimists and pessimists. Of the two, optimism is generally regarded as the preferred outlook. To be optimistic is to be sunny, chirpy — a positive person. The optimist gets things done because they regard the future as worth fighting for. Most high-profile politicians today, certainly in Britain and especially in the Conservative Party, would describe themselves as optimists.
Review: Silverview by John le Carré’s
John le Carré in Hamburg in 2012. Credit: Anton Corbijn /Penguin-Viking Reviewed here Silverview by John le Carré Penguin/Viking Buy on Bookshop.org Prospect receives a commission when you buy a book using this page. Thank you for supporting us. John le Carré died in December last year and Silverview is his final novel.
The AUKUS agreement exposes China's greatest weakness
If the sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan gave the impression that “the West” was in retreat, then yesterday’s announcement of a new security and defence agreement between Australia, the UK and US — AUKUS — says otherwise. The “West” is not finished, but recalibrating, resetting itself to confront the new challenge — China.
The futility of war, from Vietnam to Afghanistan
Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress and she took her seat in the House of Representatives in 1917. A Republican, she was also a pacifist who voted against US involvement in both the First and Second World Wars, and was the only member of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on Japan after Pearl Harbour. Rankin summed up her view of military action in the famous phrase: “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake”.
Quentin Tarantino’s first novel is startlingly sadistic
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Quentin Tarantino $9.99 There’s no doubt that Quentin Tarantino is a movie director of brilliance, if not genius. But can he write? Well he can certainly tell a good story. What we have here is Tarantino’s ninth feature film, a 1960s Hollywood yarn about a fictional actor and his stunt double, but rendered in book form. Rick Dalton is the TV and B-movie actor, while his stuntman, Cliff Booth, ruined his own career by beating up Bruce Lee during a shoot.
Where does Britain’s Culture War come from? And what is it about?
Britain is suffering from a Culture War. Taking the knee, bringing down statues, campaigning for healthier food, booing other national anthems, Brexit, Corbynism, mask-wearing, climate change, identity politics, vaccine scepticism — the Culture War swirls with its own unnerving energy. But who are the combatants in this war? What do they want? As with so many cultural and political trends, culture warfare is an American import.
The land beyond England
The leaders of the G7 have gathered in Cornwall this week. Perhaps they might visit some of the sites of local interest. Sadly, President Joe Biden’s visit to St Michael’s Mount was cancelled due to poor weather. A very Cornish mizzle had settled in. It’s not often that Cornwall and high politics converge. And now that the global power elite is down in the far southwest, it brings up the question of what those visitors might think of it.
Michael Lewis on how to spot a crisis coming
In the teeth of the US pandemic, a biochemist named Joe DeRisi set up a Covid testing unit called Biohub. The aim was to provide testing kits to local health officers. Biohub would process the completed tests and inform the health officers of the results. But there was a hitch. Most local health authorities could not receive Covid test results electronically. The information needed to be sent by fax.
The housing dilemma—our new special report - Prospect Magazine
Successive governments have known that Britain has needed more housing and the construction industry agrees. So why hasn’t it happened? That is the question behind this collection of articles by experts, politicians and architects. The picture that emerges from what they have to say is a frustrating one. At the centre of it all is the planning system, designed to make sure new developments are socially and economically suitable, but which acts as a brake on progress.
It’s time the British faced some uncomfortable truths, says Matthew d’Ancona
As Britain starts its long Covid recovery, are deeper problems lurking beneath the surface? Matthew d’Ancona certainly thinks so, and in this brief, rather shrill polemic, he urges us to face some uncomfortable truths. Uppermost in his mind is the threat posed by the populist right, which he worries will try to blame Britain’s post-Covid economic hardship on immigrants. D’Ancona suggests that a message of intolerance would fall on fertile ground.
Everyone knows we need to build more homes. Why hasn’t it happened?
Britain doesn’t build enough homes. From that one fact, a long chain of consequences follows. For one thing, it means that homes in Britain are extremely expensive. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average salary in Britain in 2021 is £29,744. The average house price in the UK (as of March 2021) is £256,405 and prices have risen 10.2 per cent in the last 12 months. And if you want to settle in London, the average property price is now over half a million.
Britain is a one party state. How could we let it happen?
Britain is a one party state. It’s a great shame, not least because the party in question, the Conservative Party, is little more than a worn-out husk. Like the man who leads it, the Conservative Party is devoid of ideas. It has no agenda except its own self-promotion. That vacuum is now a threat to the country. It was Peter Mandelson who pointed out the extent to which we live in a Conservative country. The Labour Party has just lost his old seat, Hartlepool, to the Tories.
How World War Three Was Narrowly Averted
Nuclear weapons carry a payload of cold logic: if both sides have them, neither will ever use them. But in 1962, when the Soviet Union and US squared up to one another over Cuba, that logic broke down. As this superb new book shows, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of miscalculation, ignorance and staggering recklessness. Read Full Article »
How the third world war was narrowly averted
Nuclear weapons carry a payload of cold logic: if both sides have them, neither will ever use them. But in 1962, when the Soviet Union and US squared up to one another over Cuba, that logic broke down. As this superb new book shows, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of miscalculation, ignorance and staggering recklessness. The main culprit was Nikita Khrushchev. His first error was to mistake the US president for a callow weakling.
Living Map is digitising the world around us
For as long as civilisations have existed, humans have mapped their surroundings. The earliest surviving example is the Babylonian Map of the World, a broken stone tablet dating from around 600 BC, depicting the course of the Euphrates. Maps have been integral to human progress. They have helped explorers and allowed for the development of trade and diplomacy. Modern society is just as reliant on maps, albeit of a different kind.
Living Map is digitising the world around us
For as long as civilisations have existed, humans have mapped their surroundings. The earliest surviving example is the Babylonian Map of the World, a broken stone tablet dating from around 600 BC, depicting the course of the Euphrates. Maps have been integral to human progress. They have helped explorers and allowed for the development of trade and diplomacy. Modern society is just as reliant on maps, albeit of a different kind.
The economic crisis: in numbers
© Kay Roxby / Alamy Stock Photo / Prospect Sometimes a chart says it all. UK GDP plummeted as the country went into lockdown. It was the largest hit to the UK’s economy in three centuries, as GDP fell by 11.3 per cent. And yet, the world carries on. Chart two shows that in the case of sustainable investments, activity actually went up as the pandemic hit—a measure of changing financial priorities. Even so, the global picture can’t be ignored. Chart three shows the global drop in economic output.
news, politics, life & arts
We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News Eliot Higgins $28.00 In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a group of turquoise canisters with what appeared to be tail fins attached. He picked up one of the objects and filmed it. Later he uploaded his video to YouTube. What were those strange turquoise cans?
Why does the Left single out Israel? A response to David Herman
David Herman recently wrote a piece for The Article on Tuvia Tenenbom, whom David describes as “an Israeli version of Michael Moore or Borat”. Tenenbom specialises in drawing interviewees into revealing their prejudices, especially when it comes to anti-Semitism. Tenenbom has got a new book out, with the arresting and provocative title The Taming of the Jew: A journey through the United Kingdom, in which he recounts conversations had when travelling across Britain.
Why does the Left single out Israel? A reply to David Herman
David Herman recently wrote a piece for these pages on Tuvia Tenenbom, whom David describes as “an Israeli version of Michael Moore or Borat”. Tenenbom specialises in drawing interviewees into revealing their prejudices, especially when it comes to anti-Semitism. Tenenbom has got a new book out, with the arresting and provocative title The Taming of the Jew: A journey through the United Kingdom, in which he recounts conversations had when travelling across Britain.
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