The Elizabethan Age: is libertarian Liz tough enough to triumph as PM?
To describe Sir Winston Churchill as a critic of Charles de Gaulle would be an understatement. Having been given sanctuary here following the fall of France in 1940, when Churchill called him “the man of destiny”, the General went on to make himself serially prickly and unhelpful, infuriating Britain’s wartime leader with his moods and demands.
Andrew Roberts, in his definitive single volume life of Churchill, details how President Roosevelt grew to loathe de Gaulle for his French chauvinism. “I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more,” said FDR. Churchill told the President he was no more enamoured of de Gaulle, but he would rather have him involved to some degree rather than letting him be free to strut about as “a combination of Joan of Arc and Clemenceau.”
And yet, in public, in office, Churchill kept such concerns to himself and lauded France. Britain’s great wartime leader was a sentimentalist who adored France, its countryside and its attitude to civilisation. The two nations had sacrificed so much between 1914 and 1918, resisting Germany’s then imperial ambitions to dominate Europe. De Gaulle’s bad behaviour never altered Churchill’s conviction that Britain and France are natural partners.
Today, there are obvious echoes of Charles de Gaulle’s behaviour and attitudes in President Macron’s demeanour. On Russia and Ukraine, the French policy establishment believes that thanks to history France has some quasi-mystical relationship with Russia, a great power civilisational connection rooted in literature and a shared scepticism of the English-speaking powers. This may have driven the French President’s early attempts to arrange a “peace” deal. This infuriated President Zelensky and was at odds with British policy that Ukraine needed every assistance to fight and win for freedom, a policy which has since been vindicated.
On Brexit and future cooperation Macron is determined to be as unhelpful as possible.
Even so, it was a mistake, a taste failure, for Britain’s incoming Prime Minister Liz Truss to say “the jury is still out” this week when asked if Macron is a friend or foe. The correct if hypocritical answer is that of course he is a friend. He is the President of France. The navies of the two countries are operationally intertwined. Defence treaties have brought Britain and France closer than at any time since the period before May 1940. Intelligence cooperation has stepped up in the last decade. We are neighbours and indispensable allies. Sometimes the leaders may disagree, but that does not alter the underlying condition of the relationship.
In defence of Truss, she was joking. It is important to maintain some sense of humour and perspective, especially when electricity prices are through the roof, millions of households fear the worst, and hundreds of thousands of businesses face an impossible winter, during a proper war in Europe and great power competition over energy resources.
But the time for jokes is over. Now it is time for Team Truss to go into government mode, where the Foreign Secretary is about to be tested like no new Prime Minister since Churchill took office.
At Chevening, Liz Truss and her team have been preparing in the last ten days and will have to arrive on the 6th of September with a plan to prevent the energy crisis turning into the beginning of a recession and sustained slump. There has been a lot of speculation as to why Truss is reluctant to indulge in a massive bailout, of the kind that is impossible to avoid considering this is a wartime emergency.
The answer is that Truss is a proper libertarian who wants to make the state smaller. Indeed, she will be Britain’s first libertarian Prime Minister. Her heroine Margaret Thatcher was not, not, not a libertarian, she was more an unorthodox classical liberal, or a Manchester liberal. But Thatcher was also rooted in the Methodist tradition, and shopkeeper culture, which gave her politics a classically English flavour. Truss is much more drawn to the libertarianism of think tank land, an almost American focus on prioritising the individual, maximising personal freedom. Might drugs policy change in Britain now? We’ll need something to dull the pain of the global energy crisis.
The problem is that libertarianism, ultra-individualism, is not very popular in Britain, and never was really. While some of my best friends are libertarians, it is a cause with only thousands of supporters in a nation of 66m. Public tastes have also shifted in a more collectivist direction since the financial crisis, through pandemic and war.
Can Truss square this circle? Doing enough, as she says, to liberate the economy so that it becomes more dynamic on the other side of the energy crisis while utilising state power now to get the country through this crisis without social unrest.
Truss has proven to be much tougher and far more ingenious than her critics assumed. She has outwitted all her male rivals. Now, she will have to apply every scrap of this guile and inventiveness, dumping ideas if they are unsellable or impractical, to get herself and Britain through. She has just a few weeks and months to establish her authority. The new Elizabethan Age is going to be interesting.
Free jazz
To Stockholm this week in late summer, and the nights are already drawing in. Walking across Kungsträdgården, past the wine bars and cafes, I’m lost in the beauty of the city’s surroundings. Commuters and holidaymakers hop on and off boats out to the archipelago. Up and down the square there are endless elegant people on e-scooters humming about.
There are some signs of trouble and turmoil. Lamp-posts feature election posters, a reminder that Sweden is in the middle of a general election campaign with gang-related shootings out of control. The image of one centrist politician has been defaced in the universal manner, with a toothbrush moustache added to suggest a connection with an Austrian politician prominent in European affairs between 1933 and 1945.
From the window of a nearby restaurant , the heavily amplified sound of a jazz saxophonist warming up with a mellow run through of assorted phrases floats across the square. A drummer kicks in, and a sampler adds orchestral texture. It’s an impromptu free concert. But what’s this? Suddenly, the musical mood darkens. Now the band is accompanied by some very loud, discordant, metallic shrieking. Is it a Yoko Ono gig? Or some free form experimental jazz freakout of the kind that in the mid-1970s was popular with perhaps as many as 500 people globally?
No, passing the restaurant very slowly is a cyclist on a rogue electric bike making a racket with its faulty braking system.
What I’m watching
It was with a sense of dread that I agreed to watch the new Baz Luhrmann epic biopic about the life of Elvis Presley. Luhrmann makes cartoonish films, in which the characters are often drawn too big and simplistic. Every shiny cinematic device is maxed out. The make-up cupboard is raided. Wham! Here’s a spinning set of newspaper headlines to indicate vintage Hollywood excitement. Bam! There’s another flashback underlining, if there be any doubt in the mind of the viewer, that the hero has, you guessed it, a tragic flaw.
And yet, with Elvis, starring the sensational Austin Butler as the doomed king of rock’n’roll, Luhrmann has made his masterpiece.
There are moments when an Elvis fan will quibble. This is a fairy tale Elvis. Sometimes the sequencing looks wrong. Is Tom Hanks believable as the monstrous manager and carnival huckster Tom Parker, or is it just Tom Hanks in a fat suit doing a Dutch accent? In the end Hanks makes it work.
Anyway, these are minor, pedantic complaints. Luhrmann has got the essence of what needed saying about an artist who is slipping away into history like Chaplin and Sinatra.
The story is framed around the two great Elvis periods. First from Sun records through the RCA peak in 1956-57 until he left for the army in 1958. There was a joyous rebirth on record and on stage between 1968 and 1972, and then horrible decline to death. In between those glories and in the final phase were sentimental mush, poor career choices, terrible records and substance abuse.
When he was good, he was great. And Luhrmann appears to understand why, particularly in relation to the idea of Elvis as a post-racial figure. Thanks to his upbringing, he was immersed in and completely comfortable with gospel, the blues and rhythm and blues. In the 1968 Comeback TV special, Elvis closes with a protest song, hymning Martin Luther King, If I Can Dream, by Walter Earl Brown.
The Elvis tragedy, lost and dead at 42, is a cautionary tale about celebrity. Elvis could not cope with the enormity of the fame, and so on. He was first on that scale, bigger than Hollywood, sex on legs and desired across continents. Elvis wanted to be in Memphis, at his home, with his mafia and hangers on.
What would have been better, and I’ve long thought this, ever since reading Peter Guralnick’s classic two part Elvis biography, is that in a parallel universe Elvis has a different and long life. After the early records, which were not down to Parker and would have got noticed without him there as manager, alternative Elvis moves to New York in 1957. There he encounters all manner of other cultural influences, tastes and people, potential managers and producers. He takes proper acting lessons, makes different film choices and concentrates on making serious records. A grown up Elvis hosts a welcome party for the Beatles (who idolised him) when they land in New York in February 1964. Elvis dies content, in 2020, having seen Donald Trump defeated in the Presidential election. Ah well, if I can dream, as the song goes.