2020: A tough political year in review
To most people, history is what happened to them and their families and friends as far back as they can remember. Everything else is a gradually fading backdrop to their lives, recalled only if it was either entertaining or dramatic.
I was thinking of this when I read mid-December about the death of John le Carré. Of those queuing up to pay tribute to the novelist, most were at pains to praise his later work, especially The Night Manager, which just happens to have been made into a successful TV mini-series, starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie.
But there is little doubt that le Carré’s place in the literary pantheon will depend on the sequence of novels set during the Cold War in which a demoralised and underfunded MI6 is held together by the ageing, world-weary George Smiley.
When the books came out in the 1960s and ’70s, East-West tensions were at their height. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was published just two years after the building of the Berlin Wall, which has now been down for two years longer than it was ever up. The Soviet Union has vanished, as has East Germany, home to Smiley’s arch-foe, Karla.
The sword of annihilation no longer hangs over our heads – unless, of course, Kim Jong-Un wakes up in a fury one morning and sends missiles in the general direction of Japan. In terms of East vs West, the role of Russia has largely been taken over by Communist China, which has no interest in the insanity of mutual destruction but would much rather be acclaimed as number one in trade.
What will new generations of readers make of Smiley and his “lamplighters,” obsessed as they are by what the KGB is up to while desperate to prevent Karla from getting hold of their address book? Will it resonate? Will anyone under fifty connect with either the characters, in their shabby raincoats, or the issues at stake, none of which seem to matter outside of the Lubyanka or Le Carré’s Cambridge circus? I am not sure. I tried reading War and Peace this year, but gave up after 30 pages, as unmoved by the events described as I am when I occasionally try to work out what was funny about Punch in the 1870s.
Much the same may well be the fate of the year 2020. It was an eventful twelve months, but difficult to recall. Like the Covid-19 virus, which has killed millions of people across the world, it was vitally important without ever being even faintly interesting.
The movie Independence Day, which I re-watched the other day on Netflix, turned on the fact that the aliens in their monstrous spaceships were bent on wiping out humanity and making off with the Earth’s raw materials. It was thus less than surprising when the pygmies of the Congo, waving their spears, were as interested in the outcome as the US High Command. But in the case of the coronavirus, the main threat is to the elderly, especially those over 80. Those who have lost loved ones are obviously grieving, but to the world at large – and I speak as someone in his seventies – the prospect of a partial cull of the old is less compelling than the obliteration by a death-ray of the world’s cities.
Climate change is another one. I am not a huge fan of the 17-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg (who must have been frustrated after a blistering start to the year to be upstaged by Covid), but I can’t deny that she makes a lot of sense. Her problem is that she knows the value of everything but the price of nothing. She seems to expect world leaders to acknowledge that she, and she alone (with the possible exception of Sir David Attenborough), knows what has to be done to save the planet and the speed with which it must be accomplished. That is not the way the world works. The reality is that the leaders applaud her speeches while substituting her remedies for a mix of gradual improvements and lofty promises. The likelihood is that Thunberg is right and that tomorrow, or more likely the day after, we will all pay the price for pretending otherwise. But, hey, waddyagonnado? As Donald Trump might say, the world’s response is what it is.
In Europe, there are very few out-and-out Covid-deniers. There are, however, millions who think that governments and “experts” have got their priorities wrong and have no idea how to handle the problem. We pour scorn on ministers and administrators when they lock us down. At the same time, the moment restrictions are eased, we congregate together like lemmings on their way to Beachy Head, only, as we fall sick, pausing to condemn those in charge for exposing us to a second or third wave of the infection.
Boris Johnson, who remains oddly popular in spite of the fact that he hardly ever gets anything right, has been a victim of Covid twice over. The first time, when he caught it and nearly almost died, then again when he realised that he had to do something when all he wanted to talk about was his genius at getting Brexit done. In the end, he muddled through, which is probably the most that anyone could have done in his position. More than 60,000 Brits have died, not all of them old like me, which is a pretty grim state of affairs. Yet at least half the electorate doesn’t honestly blame Boris. His critics may think he is selfish, narcissistic, lacking in basic competence. It’s just that, unless they are dyed-in-the-wool Remainers, or Socialist levellers, or climate revolutionaries, they believe that he is doing his best. It’s just unfortunate, they think, that his best doesn’t amount to much.
Which bring us to the deal with Europe. Just before Christmas, talks were still going on, and on, headed in no obvious direction, until there was a deal. Michel Barnier and David Frost seemed destined to keep talking forever, without coming up with anything original. Meanwhile, the prime minister, who is an intellectual in the sense that he can sprinkle his speeches with Latin phrases, knows that Brexit is the answer to a question that should never have been asked. He is a columnist, and a pretty lightweight one at that, not a statesman. If he could start again and the force appeared to be with Remain rather than Leave, he would be relieved – except that he wouldn’t be in Downing Street, which is the actual focus of his ambition. That is his tragedy, but only if you regard a man whose trousers have fallen down as a tragic figure.
Throughout this wretched year, we were assured again and again that everything would all be alright in the end. The EU would give us the guts of what we needed and the Good Ship Royal Sovereign, crewed by stalwarts of a recreated East India Company, would set sail into a permanently sunlit future in which sight of the Red Ensign brings joy to the world. In the sense that a deal of some sort was plucked out of the fire, charred and missing entire paragraphs once thought essential, they might just be right.
In this context, I am put in mind of the American Declaration of Independence, best known for the paragraph beginning, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Less well known is the preceding paragraph, the first, which reads in full: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The referendum was won, above all else, because millions of Britons – perhaps as many as ten million of the 17.4 million who voted Leave – wished to end the right of EU citizens to move to the UK. But as the present year, now dying, progressed, this undeniable truth was airbrushed out of the official history.
The mantra became that it was an overwhelming national desire for sovereignty – “taking back control” – that put paid to Remain. The fact that to most people this meant ending freedom of movement (plus giving £350 million a week to the NHS) and little else was a matter of no account. What Leavers really wanted, it turned out, was that the UK should leave the arcane Single Market and Customs Union, rejecting with scorn the undemocratic European Commission and its equally undemocratic accomplice, the Court of Justice.
Which reminds me: how have the mighty fallen? A year ago, Nigel Farage was the Kingmaker of English politics, the Earl of Warwick to Boris Johnson’s Henry VI. Today, the former MEP has lost his seat, lost his radio show and lost his invitation to the White House. He is reduced to sweeping the south coast for illegal immigrants while denouncing the government’s handling of Covid.
On the Commons virtual benches opposite, Keir Starmer has made headway, but only slowly. With parliament no longer the obvious cockpit of policy, the new leader of the Labour party is rarely centre-stage, and when he is it is as a man struggling to establish his identity while sloughing off the tarnished legacy of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn (another nearly man, nearly forgotten). It will be in the years ahead, when Brexit takes shape for good or ill and the Covid vaccine starts to counter the impact of Covid that we will see what Starmer is made of. Will he still win on points each week at PMQs or will he suddenly find that Populist Boris has returned, like Tyson Fury, ready for the fray?
On the world front, the big new factor is Joe Biden, the soon-to-be 78 year-old President-Elect of the United States. For America, 2020 was an unmitigated disaster. Donald Trump could scarcely have cared less about Covid, which he regarded as an interloper raining on his parade. His only concern amid a death toll that recently passed the three-hundred-thousand mark was that he should be re-elected to the Oval Office for four more years. The voters, or enough of them, thought differently. Biden won not by a landslide, but comfortably, casting Trump and his supporters into paroxysms of impotent rage.
The new man, in old man’s clothing, will, like Starmer, have to impose himself on the country. He has to give a lead, not only domestically, where he will face a possibly divided Congress, but internationally too. Trump has worked hard to queer his pitch in the Middle East. He ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan; he moved the American embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem (and recognised the right of Israel to occupy more of the occupied West Bank); and through his joint programme with Benjamin Netanyahu of assassinating top Iranians, he reinforced the distrust and enmity of Iran. Aghast at the President’s casual insults and brazen abuse of his office, European governments tried to avert their gaze, getting on with their own business while awaiting the restoration of normality that they feel sure is guaranteed by the arrival of Sleepy Joe.
There is little doubt that Biden will go out of his way to make peace with EU leaders, though less obviously so with Boris Johnson, for whom he has a disregard. He is certain, though, to echo Trump’s demand for an increase in across-the-board defence spending and an assurance that on China – America’s new number one opponent on the world stage – the US and Europe are on the same page, if not necessarily the same paragraph. Trump is not the only one who feels that Europe has been coasting in recent years, if not decades, as far as NATO and western solidarity are concerned. Biden does, too. The British PM clearly feels that he can exploit this, but to do so he must first convince the Pentagon that his newly expanded military budget is more than a flash in the pan.
This year was Angela Merkel’s last full year in office as Chancellor of Germany. She will bow out next summer. Her handling of the coronavirus crisis was exemplary, at least in the period from spring into high summer. To date there have been just 22,000 deaths in the Federal Republic, a third of the UK total. German industry and commerce remains disciplined and is as well prepared for the economic crisis as could reasonably be expected; the immigrant surge has quietened; existing new arrivals are learning German and acquiring valuable skills; and the Chancellor’s CDU party, though under sustained pressure from left and right in the states, is just about holding its own.
On the other side of the Rhine, President Macron has endured a terrible year. He was slow to realise the impact Covid would have on the French people and economy, and though he recovered well, he was promptly hit again by a wave of Islamist terrorism and anarchist street protests. If he ever thought he was a shoo-in for re-election in 2022, he doesn’t now. What cause he has for optimism lies mainly in the paucity of the Opposition, which has largely run out of ideas. The Greens may have risen in July’s metropolitan elections, but the Socialists, Conservatives and far-right National Rally remain stuck in the doldrums.
Elsewhere, Spain and Italy, hardest hit by Covid, are sitting up and taking soup, but remain weak. Ireland, by contrast, is stable under its new centre-right coalition government and is reckoned, at least for now, to enjoy the West’s highest growth rate. If only the European Union to which they all belong was in as good shape. The EU did manage to secure a one-billion-euro rescue and recovery plan, and even agreed its budget – the first without the UK since 1973 – for the next seven years. But Hungary and Poland have gone from difficult to positively delinquent. Dealing with these two Central European States, with their Janus-like stance towards democratic and statist government, could well prove as intractable as Brexit.
The year is not leaving us without a fight, mainly between Covid, continued lockdown and the various vaccines now coming on stream. Let’s hope 2021 will be an improvement.