This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

Boris Johnson’s latest column in the Daily Mail is a defence of his friend Donald Trump. According to the former Prime Minister, a second Trump presidency could be just what the world needs. Putting to one side the reality that no, it really isn’t just what the world needs for a host of reasons that should be apparent to anyone with access to a television, the internet and a brain, Johnson’s column contained an egregious sideswipe at one of the greatest cocktails known to man. 

“In the cocktail parties of Davos,” writes Johnson, “I am told, the global wokerati have been trembling so violently that you could hear the ice tinkling in their negronis.”

They’re trembling because it looks like Trump may win. As so often with Boris, it’s a good line but also unintentionally rather revealing of his loner status, unsociability and unfamiliarity with the drinking tribes of Britain. Look, he’s saying to the reader, I’ve been inside the halls of dreadful Davos many times on your behalf to try to convince these terrible people, the global wokerati, of great common sense truths and I’ve seen what they get up to. When they drink at all they sip fancy, effeminate cocktails rather than foaming pints of English ale or the gassy continental lager that is now the national British drink. At this point, a mental image is meant to pop into the head of the Daily Mail reader surveying Johnson’s latest column. Good old Boris, man of the people like Henry V among the yeomanry of old England clutching a pint of beer and doing a “thumbs up” for the camera.

Whatever “woke” is, the negroni cocktail isn’t it. This is rocket fuel, in combination one part gin, one part red vermouth, one part Campari, mixed and stirred, never shaken, poured over ice. Yes, a slice of orange can be involved, as with its great summer cousin the Campari spritz, but the negroni is more likely to contain a twist, a small peel of orange to add zest and visual allure.

The democratisation of drinking is one of the great shifts in British culture of the last fifty years or so. Wine went mainstream as continental travel opened up for all classes. The workforce changed and women became powerful consumers of hospitality. Alongside the traditional pub, wine bars opened across the country and in the last decade or so the cocktail bar has taken off in the most unlikely of places.

The negroni features on the Pizza Express menu these days. No, it is not yet on the list of cocktails served in Wetherspoons, the vast value-for-money pub chain engineered very cleverly by Sir Tim Martin, the Brexity entrepreneur, but other cocktails are, sometimes served by the pitcher, apparently. When popping into my packed local Wetherspoons for a quick pint on the way home on Friday, various parties were getting going and vast jugs of cocktails were being ordered.

There’s a dark side, obviously, with a minority, sometimes a large minority, over-indulging. When it comes to drink, Britain has a problem of proportion and it falls to the police to pick up the pieces in town and city centres at closing time.

Of course, what Boris Johnson is really doing by praising Trump, mocking cocktails and trying to sound blokey, is positioning himself in preparation for the populist electoral wars of 2024 on both sides of the Atlantic. Cynics might say that Johnson has an eye on keeping the US lecture circuit side of his revenue streams flowing. In an election year there will be an opening for highly paid speakers in the US who can explain populism and who know Trump and can convey an impression of intimacy. If Trump wins, Boris will be back in business politically, available for the occasional encounter with the President and trying all the while to persuade him not to abandon Ukraine. Trump likes Johnson, recognising celebrity power when he sees it.

Inevitably, this being Boris, he plays both ends against the middle in that piece in the Mail. After praising Trump, he says:

“Let me stress that this is in no way to diminish the ­excellent qualities of Joe Biden, who has done many good things and who is a firm ­Atlanticist and friend to this country. Nor do I minimise Trump’s egregious error of January 6, 2021, and the riot that followed on Capitol Hill.”

Either way, Boris is at it, spying an opportunity this year via the land of his birth, America, to make himself internationally relevant again.

Simultaneously, this year the Conservatives in Britain will be attempting to avoid a wipeout scenario, with some of the party’s crazier MPs (many of them Boris supporters) rebelling and flirting with joining Reform, the Nigel Farage-owned populist vehicle that threatens to turn a Tory general election defeat in November into a rout.

As the year goes on and the Tory poll position becomes more desperate, cries of “bring back Boris” and “look at Trump” will be heard from some Tory activists and on GB News, the populist television channel.

Those cries are highly unlikely to resonate with the broader British public, who were very pleased to see Johnson removed and associate him with chaos. But they will create another problem for Rishi Sunak, adding to the sense that politics on the centre-right has become a weird shambles. More to do with the needs of the right-wing entertainment complex, of which Trump is the biggest manifestation, than the problems of this country.

For all that we hear that populism hasn’t gone away – that Reform may cause havoc here and populists are surging in Europe – the British public are very clear on the US-style of populism as personified by Donald Trump. They, we, don’t like him.

A YouGov poll published earlier this month for Times Radio showed that only 18% of Britons want Trump to win the US election in November, against 56% who favour Biden and 26% who don’t know. Even among Conservative 2019 voters, some not averse to a blast of populism, only 28% favour Trump. Down the age categories, Trump is most popular, interestingly, with 18-24 year-olds but even then only 21% back him. In the 65+ range, only 15% of Britons want him to win. Among women overall it is just 12%.

This has been termed “unpopulism” by Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank British Future. Nigel Farage, and performative GB News presenters, and Boris Johnson, can big up Trump all they like, but the audience to which it appeals is tiny. To many Britons it is terrible, toxic stuff.

Who all this helps, a lot, in the short term at least, is the Labour party because of the impression it creates. While Rishi Sunak battles away in vain, hoping the economy turns, trying to get the electorate to give him any kind of hearing, and the likely date of the UK general election draws near, there will be Boris back bouncing around and Farage speaking at Trump rallies this summer and autumn.

Labour doesn’t even need to say anything about this. It simply needs to point.  

Arbuthnot, a hero of the Post Office scandal

When the Mull of Kintyre helicopter crash happened in June of 1994, thirty years ago this summer, James Arbuthnot MP was a Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department of Social Security. A year later, he was bumped up to be minister for defence procurement at the MoD. In that capacity, Arbuthnot was assured by officialdom that the official explanation for the Mull of Kintyre crash was correct: the pilots were to blame, said the MoD. Only they weren’t. It is still unclear precisely what caused the crash, but campaigners led by Arbuthnot once he had left office, as a backbench MP, spent years digging for the truth. There were serious flaws with that Chinook. It was unsafe and should not have been flying on the night when four crew and twenty five passengers, among them most of the country’s intelligence experts on Northern Ireland, were killed.

Thanks to a remarkable series of coincidences, dogged campaigner Arbuthnot only took on the Post Office scandal campaign from 2009, in which he played a central role fighting for justice, because of his involvement in the Chinook disaster.

We discuss all that and more on the latest edition of the Reaction podcast, where James, now Lord Arbuthnot, is my guest.

You can listen here.

A night at Ronnie Scott’s

To Soho on Wednesday evening, for a night out, and what a night. As guests of generous friends, we watched a band that is playing a sold out series of concerts at Ronnie Scott’s. The band’s name, the Royal Scammers, is a reference to an album by the American band 1970s Steely Dan. It would be an insult to call the Scammers a tribute band, as this is a part-time project, an homage, run for fun by some of the country’s best musicians. They recreate the jazz-flavoured songs of Steely Dan.

For one subscriber to this newsletter – an old friend who hates jazz as a general musical form even more than he hates Steely Dan in particular – this is the worst possible combination. Steely Dan songs, in an actual jazz club.

For me, for us, it was a pleasure and an education. Steely Dan have, until this week, always left me cold. Perhaps this is odd. I’m a music obsessive and a jazz fan, so what never worked for me about Steely Dan I don’t know. Sometimes you need to see the songs played well, in the perfect venue, to get the point.

At the start of the pre-dinner gig, the compere at Ronnie Scott’s (founded in 1959 and still going strong) encouraged us to turn our phones off, focus on the music and enjoy an “analogue evening.” Bliss.

And yes, when the waiter asked for our orders I opted for a negroni.

What I’m watching

Another generous old friend said recently over dinner that this newsletter is “mainly about what you’re watching on television.” This is deeply unfair. It is only partly about what I’m watching on television, and as I hate most television this newsletter leans towards cinema, though sometimes you have to use the television to watch films.

This week at home we discovered a way to deal with my pet hate, the “box set” TV series. What in the olden days – thirty years ago – would have been made as a digestible one-piece drama with a beginning, a middle and an end, telling a story lasting somewhere between ninety minutes and two and half hours, let’s call it a film, must now extend to eight parts and possibly multiple “seasons.”

This week at home we discovered a great way to handle the problem, though not watching at all is probably the best option. Short of that, we tuned into the first episode of Fool Me Once, a Netflix series about which there has been a lot of “buzz” in the papers. It was the usual stuff – nice houses, murders, hammy acting, baffled police, a confusing plot, improbable twists. After thirty five minutes we decided enough was enough. But how did it end? We both wanted to know. I Googled the outcome – the Mail has a service explaining endings of confusing box-set series. But one of us wanted to watch the final episode and be surprised in real time. We watched it, with me adding clarifying commentary based on knowing the ending. Fool Me Once? We won’t be watching it again. Time saved missing six episodes and just watching the first and last episodes? Three and half hours. 

I hope you’re having a good weekend.

Iain Martin,
Editor, Reaction

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