Photo by David Rose - WPA Pool /Getty Images
I blame John Peel for dying. Or rather I blame Tony Blair for replying to the death of John Peel in the way he did.
It is 15 years since the disc jockey died. Such was Peelâs popularity that Tony Blair felt compelled to make a statement almost immediately. It followed a large number of other Prime Ministerial statements on famous peopleâs deaths. For some of us it was an already wearying trend. I wouldnât say that it is a foundational issue of trust in our society, but surely we ought to assume that when a celebrity dies the Prime Minister of the day isnât privately punching the air and exclaiming: âGood, we got another one!â
But for whatever reason, Mr Blair acted as if a failure to issue a swift response might leave room for doubt. So out the statements of commiseration came. And kept coming. Until one day Mr Blair ended up hoist with his own petard.
A few weeks after the death of John Peel a vastly larger number of people were killed as a tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean. More than 200,000 lives were lost in that terrible event, and for a short period, as the full extent of that tragedy became clear, some of the press did not know what to do. Among their number (especially among those portions of the press that were expressly hostile to Blair) there was a faked-up outrage along the lines of âWhy has the Prime Minister not yet issued a statement condemning the tsunami, or otherwise explaining why he was opposed to it?â
Again, you might think that the Prime Ministerâs condolences on such an occasion could be taken as read, or you may not. But a political leader who insists on commenting on everything will, in this fallen world of ours, find themselves having to respond to everything. So it was on that occasion when a clearly fraught Downing Street rushed out a statement to show that the Prime Minister was indeed not only saddened by the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives but also opposed to the natural disaster in question.
I thought of that strange episode last week as I noticed the lead story on the front page of the BBCâs website, which was that Theresa May had condemned President Trumpâs recent tweets about four American congresswomen. And I immediately wondered â assuming that anything survives from the age of Twitter outrage â what historians will make of episodes such as this. Putting aside the rights or wrongs of Trumpâs comments for a moment, what a historian may find interesting is that the most powerful person in Britain, at the most significant moment in recent British history, should have felt impelled to comment on Trumpâs tweets.
Of course there are those who insist that this is different, that on this occasion (unlike any other occasion with President Trump) some Rubicon has been crossed, that a line must now be drawn and a heap of other clichés. But I cannot quite see how this is so. Similar things have occurred throughout the current Presidency. And people who are interested in outrage machines and their workings really ought to have figured out by now that the piling up of affront against the 45th President does not always work against his interests.
The point is not the tweets, but rather how British politics in particular got caught in this strange, reactive mode. It is possible that it is the effect of minority government or a government in its last days. But the trend has gone on even when Theresa Mayâs government looked comparatively strong. So here is a trend which must be identified if it is also to be reversed.
In the aftermath of the Trump tweets No 10 fell into the reactive mode. But the reactive mode is catching, for once the most prominent political figures condemn a thing the same is expected of everybody else as well â more junior politicians, other public figures, even light entertainers. Theresa Mayâs condemnation of the Tweets ensured that the media got the opportunity to pursue the two contenders for the Tory leadership for replication of her comments. Both Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson were expected to make statements on the matter. And any unwillingness to condemn the President was once again portrayed as being a reflection on the character of the person not doing the condemning. And â ergo â a demonstration that the candidate was a racist by proxy.
And here is just one of the many things that is wrong with this style of politics. It has a set of expectations built into it. On this occasion the first assumption was that the Presidentâs Tweets were indeed racist. The next step is to presume (or pretend to assume) full agreement with the worst interpretation of the tweets for anyone who does not publicly condemn them. This of course bypasses a whole set of other perfectly permissible other reactions including, though not limited to, âNot my businessâ, âNot my thingâ, âNot my styleâ and âNot my problemâ.
Most importantly it ignores the permissibility of the reaction that almost every mainstream British politician would feel and ought to be able to say. Which would be something along the lines of: âI donât much care for the tone of these comments, but worse things happen at sea and frankly we have to get on with our best allies rather than pretend that our role is to lecture them like some glorified school prefect.â
Assuming that Boris Johnson does end up becoming the leader of the Conservative party and thus Prime Minister, this is a very good time for him to change the game. He who feeds the outrage machine, the announcement machine, the condolence machine and related devices will find themselves caught in the workings and dragged along remorselessly. Lured in by the media, previous Prime Ministers have found themselves hopelessly enmeshed. But at the outset of his Premiership, Boris Johnson has an opportunity to stand clear and refuse to feed the machine.
The world is a hideously complicated place. The variety and multitude of potential reactions to that complexity can create a cacophony. To make it stop, it is only natural that a desire should emerge to simply sing along with the chorus. But that is to mistake reaction for action and response for leadership. A better way would be to try to locate and then move to a different beat. What was it that Thoreau said? âIf a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears.â
If there is one beat that our next Prime Minister should hear it is the one that reminds him that Britain has been a serious country in the past, and can be again. But that in order to be a serious country again our political leaders must step outside of the march of reaction and get back to that path of action we used to recognise as reality.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribePoor old Jimmy Carter!
He was certainly a talented individual â a polymath. But his promotion of the human right industry during his term in office propelled this philosophy to the forefront; and we live with the negative consequences today. The rise of wealthy human rights lawyers/politicians like Blair and Obama is one such outcome of Carterâs obsession with this concept. He never balanced his view with a corresponding emphasis on human responsibilities. Much damge was left in his presidential wake.
Carterâs meddling in the Middle East by calling Israel an apartheid state while remaining silent over the wider crimes of Assad Sr. was unalloyed disgraceful. Underneath Carterâs rural country boy persona was the distrust and dislike of rural Southern pastors toward Jews and the big city.
Carter was a good man, too idealistic though, which resulted in a certain naivety in foreign policy. His major success was the Egypt/Israel peace deal which both countries have benefited from since. Believing that the Shah of Iran provided stability in the middle east was a mistake, but that was a continuation of policy from the 1950s and past presidents including Nixon, unluckily for him this blew up on his watch. Had the rescue mission to free the hostages succeeded he may have been reelected, the military was not prepared in those days for such a mission. The hostage crisis killed his reelection chances. The invasion of Afghanistan was a typically opportunistic move by the Russians which eventually blew up in their face later, there was little Carter could do and the US had no vital interests there. The result was the Carter doctrine which drew a red line for protecting oil supplies in the middle east which the Soviets did not cross risking a major war. But by then it was election time , Iran was his undoing, so yes poor Carter was dealt a bad hand. So was Johnson with Vietnam, unlike Nixon with Watergate which was his fault.
Eisenhower left some similar to his last few days in the White House. Carter had the courage and the honesty but not the skill to do it earlier.
Carter was all that described above. Nobody ever mentions how he got to POTUS.
1. 1976 was the first post Watergate presidential election. ANY DEM, probably even Harris, was going to win.
2. Carter was from deep south. Dixiecrats had not yet been policied out of party. Thick southern drawl made him a lock. (Clinton used this in 1992, PLUS Perot drew votes from Bush)
So an unlikely man got drafted into office.
Canât believe everyoneâs falling for these MAGA lies about Jimmy Carter. Away from the cameras and in the presence of George Clooney and NYT the old peanut farmer is as sharp as ever and totally on top of his game. Fox News have mendaciously edited together a few unfortunate clips of him lying very still but heâs absolutely fine.
Maga lies about everything, why would it be any different with Carter, a Democrat
Carter was a good man, but totally unfit for the position, as many who have since followed him. He had no intuition, just vacillating policies that changed with events. No real leadership, vision, or the will to carry it out. His good works came after he was defeated. Rest in peace.
The sad Parable of Jimmy Carter from the eyes of the American public:
âMy new financial advisor promised me great investment returns if I hired him, but after all of his great promises, he then lost much of my retirement savings in bad trades.
âHe now tells me that earning good returns is much harder than used to be, that people are too worried about capitalism rather than doing the right thing, that his fellow financial advisors are the worst kind of narcissistic âsharksâ that jealously guard their investorsâ money and only care about making money for them, that he missed his career chance early on to be a small-town preacher in the South, that heâs a really nice guy who cares about Mother Earth and doing good, and so on.
âMaybe my financial advisor is a nice guy. Maybe he speaks the truth now. But why didnât he tell me all of his issues upfront before he destroyed my retirement and wasted my time?â
Despite all of his protests across the decades, Jimmy Carter had only one job when he chose to run and was elected the President of the United States of America. And he failed miserably at this job, regardless of his other, unrelated merits.
Carter now holds the dubious distinction of being second Worst President Ever in the eyes of the American public (only falling behind Joe Biden by a nose).
Good men donât belong in the White House because they donât know how things work in the real word. Jimmah was a micromanager who didnât get the big picture. He spent time scheduling who got to play on the tennis court outside his window. Some were getting more time than others. Carter saw to it the problem was fixed. The time would have been better spent being a competent president.
It was during the Carter years that the United States implemented the Community Reinvestment Act. The explicit purpose of the Act was to force banks to advance âsubprime loansââthat is, to advance home loans to people who no business getting home loans.
The CRA turned out to be a time bomb. It blew up in 2008.
It was also during the Carter years that the country implemented an âenergy efficiencyâ standards regime. That regime has given us dishwashers that donât wash and appliances that are much more expensive but only last maybe eight years.
The regime has morphed into the âEnergy Efficiency & Renewable Energyâ program, a massive regulatory regime that supports the Green Dream of Net Zero. Howâs that going?
The CRA was amended nearly a half dozen times after its implementation. Heavily during the Clinton years. Blaming the 2008 crisis on the original Bill may be shortsighted. Also, Equating energy efficiency initiatives by the Government with quality and planned obsolescence initiatives by Corporations is a reach.
Enjoy your heat pump!
Thats a great response. You make a good point. Living in Maine I donât see the day when a heat pump will be a viable and cost effective alternative for me. Electricity rates are absurd and the efficiency of these units at low temps are not good. They are being installed all over, I even look out at one now at my neighbors house. One size fits all is a problem with many Federal Policies. Crazy.
Regardless of how many times it was amended, giving mortgages to people without the means to repay them, all the while knowing that the taxpayer was on the hook for the impending bad debt, should have been a criminal act.
Thatâs what happens when you have deregulation and encourage the greedy animal spirits to take over.
It was in November, 1999, that President Bill Clinton signed off on the singled most misguided Congressional legislation of his White House tenure titled âThe Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999â. Among other things, this act repealed critical provisions of the Depression Era Glass-Steagal Act. One major result was removing the prohibition on commercial banks (banks that had customers including businesses and people just like you and me) from providing investment advice and services on things like common stocks, various types of commercial paper, mortgage-backed securities and new products like derivatives that, under Glass-Steagal, were previously the sole province of investment banks, who were prohibited from providing the services commercial banks offered.
Intended to provide a life line to commercial blanks complaining that competition from overseas was making it impossible for them to remain solvent, the 1999 act had a few consequences that only the morons In Congress who drafted the legislation, as well as the nit-wit in the White House who signed it into law, failed to anticipate:
Commercial Banks started gaming the system such that they could choose which federal agency would audit their books, and determine their overall health. To the surprise of absolutely no one not an elected legislator, banks would look to the weakest regulatory institutions (Iâm talking about you, Office of Thrift Supervision), and other agencies neither qualified, nor staffed, to conduct such financial audits.
With reduced oversight, and encouragement from the same Congressional morons, along with leadership of the Federal Reserve, looser mortgage qualifications and the advent of liar loans (âNo, really, they pay me $100,000/year to wash dishes), while the Federal Government abdicated its responsibilities to keeps tabs on the financial industry, it came as a surprise to no one living outside Washington, DC, that mortgage defaults skyrocketed and mortgage back securities collapsed. Then, because of all the rest the stock market lost around 60% of its value between October, 2007 and January, 2009.
Everyday investors had their portfolios destroyed, their retirement plans obliterated, while the to-big-to-fail banks all tippy toed away from their roles as vile confidence tricksters luring unsuspecting, naive individuals with retirement accounts into âinvestmentsâ that were anything but.
Of course, billions of taxpayer dollars went to bail out the financial institutions who led the charge into high risk investments, while local banks caught in the collapse were sold off to other banks with the taxpayers taking the loss on any assets from those sales.
Heads They win, and Tails taxpayers lose.
All of this is to say that Democrats and Republicans, President and Congress ruled by either party, pulled an incredible scam on the American people. And, we allâbamboozled and frightened as most of us wereâlet them all get away with it.
Quel surprise.
Iâm wondering. When Jimmy Carter spoke about the moon landing (if he did at all) did he sound like he believed it happened?
I was in the States more or less at that timeâŠGrad School at VanderbiltâŠa mixture of West Coast/NE progressives and trainee âGood oleâ boysâ from the old ConfederacyâŠthat speech didnât help. But the failure to find helicopters that worked in the deserts of Iran was worse. One side hated the military/industrial complex and the other were in ROTC and planned to join itâŠ
âŠbut all of them expected it to workâŠ!
I missed the opportunity to vote for Carter by one year. However, I did not miss some effects of his alternative energy policies since my folks had hydronic solar panels installed on our homes roof in middle class New York suburbs. I chose my Engineering discipline in Energy Co-Generation, a subset of Mechanical Engineering largely because of Carters policies. I graduated in the Boston area, a hotbed for co-generation Industries in the US.in the late 1970âs. Rachel Carson was a required reading at University. Unfortunately, those industries dried up as our government shifted focus to armament as the Reagan-Thatcher coalition restarted the Cold War and advanced the desires for US Hegemony. I know Carter was a Neo-liberal, policy wise but I honestly feel our world would be a better place if his type of leadership were an asset not a liability. Humility should be a foundational quality. I for one will miss Jimmy Carter.
The only other speech in the canon of American presidential rhetoric comparable to Carterâs âcrisis of confidenceâ speech is Abraham Lincolnâs second inaugural address in March 1865. At his moment of victory, with the Confederacy on the point of total destruction, Lincoln did the most extraordinary thing â he blamed everyone
This is an idiotic comparison. Lincoln was trying to reunite the nation after four years or horrible civil war. The toll on Americans on both sides was disastrous. A victory speech of any sort would have been absolutely tone deaf and likely would have resulted in retaliation â on both sides â even worse than what occurred after the war ended. This guyâs âspecialismâ is the American Civil War? Good grief.
Nixon, the greatest US President
Yes, he fully understood that his job was to look after and benefit the USA and its people. But the MSM hated him for ending the Vietnam War which the Democrats had expanded and prolonged. He was never forgiven and his downfall was their main aim.
Nixon did his share of prolongation of the war too.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461/
Only Bush II saves Carter from being the WOAT president. As bad as inflation, high interest rates and unemployment were (and having all three at the same time was pretty bad), his creation of the departments of energy and education was even worse.
His foreign policy was delusional. He thought there was such a thing as an inordinate fear of communism, a delusion which only the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lifted from him.
His touted post-presidential legacy is also a delusion. All the houses he built are more than offset by his vouching to President Clinton for the Notth Korean regimeâs basic benignity. (Of course, Clinton knew full well Carter would be the perfect knave to provide such testimony and relieve him of the opportunity to to eliminate North Korea while there was a chance: the fleeting, only chance.)
Itâs not good to speak ill of the recently deceased but someone has to in view of the flood of revisionism sweeping the media presently.
WOAT? Iâm sorry, have you never heard of Woodrow Wilson? FDR?
Those would be my favourites for the title, with perhaps Kennedy and Johnson
One of the architects of the Islamic Iranian revolution that his spirtual successor B Obama pursued so enthusiastically. Both leaders of Satanâs very own political party.
Am I alone in finding this a slightly graceless article at this time ?
Whatever Jimmy Carter was or was not as a president, the US electorate chose him in 1976. Blaming him alone â and excusing them entirely â for anything that went wrong seems rather facile. And if Carter was the best choice on the menu in 1976 , but Reagan was in 1980, I donât see that as an automatic fault in Carter. Just as different times require different skills and leaders.
What Carter certainly was was a decent and honest man who continued working for the the public good well into his 90s. Surely in todayâs context thatâs not nothing.
Iâm also a little sceptical of commentators who pronounce with great certainty on events they didnât witness first hand. Professor Smithâs DOB doesnât appear to be public information, but heâd need to be over 60 to have any meaninggful memory of the times in question and his biography suggests thatâs quite unlikely.
I agree with you, Peter; this is a time to grieve for the lost, whether we see eye to eye with them on every issue or not.
Agreed. Cheers.
Graceless indeed. Well put.
I expect you will find this article even more graceless, even though it is peppered with truths:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/jimmy-carter-was-a-terrible-president-and-an-even-worse-former-president
Sorry, canât read that without allowing the site to data dredge me.
Thereâs certainly a case to be made against Carter. But we should recognise that he largely did what he was elected to do. The US electorate may well have changed their minds between 1976 and 1980, but they got what they voted for. Carter didnât do a complete âBoris 180â on what he was elected to do.
Agreed. Okay, heâd wind me up in many ways, but a bloke who keeps on giving years after being booted out as president, is ultimately on the right side.
To pick someone of the same era, can you imagine that of Ted Heath ? Or compare him to the Clintons ?
This article was going well until the author Lasched out at the incumbent Trump administration, like the twitch of a just-deceased intellectual corpse.
I asked myself: but does he have a point? The superficiality of the âpathological narcissismâ charge is gainsaid by the mountain of votes cast for Trump by the swathes of the US population who arenât narcissists so much as âdeplorablesâ and âleft-behindsâ, in addition to those who can see a greater narcissism in the liberal progressive attempt to hoodwink them with a ghost candidate on the Democrat ticket: both before and after the deposition of Biden for Harris.
Trump is the anti-Carter. Vulgar, immodest, impulsive, but an effective, popular, and competent President.
Well said. Too many people vote for the POTUS as if they should be a buddy, not a President. The world is a mean place and it takes a certain someone to keep our interests at heart so our people can prosper. And yes, even if it results in others not prospering. Hard truth to swallow.
The CEO of a successful company is often possessed of hard-driving character traits.
I can no longer marvel that the President of the United States when I was born was still alive. People born as recently as 20 January 1993 could not say that. But I could.
Once he was no longer President, then I would not bet against another 20 years for Joe Biden. But it is all visibly catching up with Bill Clinton, always the archetypal Boomer.
Carter was an incompetent president who knew very little about foreign policy, and even less about economics.
His success in getting Egypt to cry uncle against a far stronger Israel is heavily outshadowed by his enfeebled bungling in Iran, a far larger and more important threat, and his weakness against the USSR and China was very obvious.
We are still dealing with fallout from the incompetence of Carter era foreign policy, even today.
Carterâs reliance on FDR era wasteful spending, along with libraries full of federal regulations, created economic misery throughout the US, dooming the Rust Belt and much of our working class to soaring inflation, unemployment, and high interest rates. Carterâs policies were ultimately the last few nails in the coffin of our industrial base, before so called free trade threw dirt on top.
Much like outgoing President Biden, Carter was unable to govern. The country fired both men, rather than re-electing them, and rightly so.
Were the oil crisis and the fact US Industry could no longer compete with Japanese and European competitors really his legacy?
Also Reagan spent much more than Carter.
Democrat supporting unions opposed new technology and priced car workers out of the market.
All true. But party was over by first oil crisis in 73. Coincidentally this when US got off the gold standard. So oil price had to rise. Japan was ready with small high mileage cars.
So, clearly not an admirer!
However, to whom is Iran a threat? Obviously not the USA, or nuclear armed Israel; an attack on either would mean Iran ceasing to exist, so it wonât.
Surely inflation was caused by the âNixon shockâ of detaching the US dollar from gold and becoming merely a fiat currency, propped up by being the âoil currencyâ as agreed with Saudi Arabia by Kissinger? We continue to live with the consequences of currencies being just nicely printed bits of paper (in fact just âbitsâ nowadays, not even pieces of paperâŠ).
Even the âoil crisisâ was effectively the oil producing Arab nations trying to maintain the real value of their product in relation to gold as opposed to printed pieces of paper called dollars.
With regard to China it was Nixon/Kissinger who further detached it from the USSR, and created a better relationship with it. It was a great idea at the time, not looking so good now.
Also Carter had to deal with the effects of the USA losing the Vietnam war, a severe blow to the USAâs pride and confidence which was bound to result in a sort of national nervous breakdown. The realisation that, having been the top dog, one can lose, is devastating to self worth.
So Carter had a poor hand to playâŠand played it appallingly badly. The USA, and the West, needed not a counsellor, but an inspirational leaderâŠand he wasnât it.
Happily Reagan, â the Great Communicatorâ was. And happily the UK had Thatcher, who was lucky enough to have Reagan during the Falklands War. Without his help she would have lost the war and the next election, and the UK would have entered a terminal nervous breakdown (although possibly it was just postponed for some yearsâŠ).
How did Reagan have anything to do with the UK winning the Falklands war?
Because the USA, at Reaganâs direction, supplied extremely helpful intelligence information.
Sorry, but I thought this was widely known. Without it, Thatcher would have lostâŠand many in the US establishment opposed it.
American assistance to the British campaign went beyond the sharing of intelligence. The Reagan administration allowed British aircraft and vessels to use American bases and provided logistical support. The U.S. military was even ready to lend aircraft carriers to the British in case theirs got damaged or sunk.
Ascension is actually a British base which is leased by the US.
Reagan also rushed through supplies of the then-new AIM-9L variant of the Sidewinder. In a TV interview a Sea Harrier pilot described its performance as âa bit of an eye-openerâ. âAnd a bit of an eye-closer tooâ, Alan Bennett noted in his diary.
Iâm not an expert. Nonetheless, without any ingratitude towards the United States, I donât see a way in which the UK could have lost the war in the absence of US help unless the Argentinians had managed to sink a couple of carriers. British losses in men and material could easily have been worse without US support, but I think Argentina would have needed extraordinarily good luck in order to exact losses of servicemen and equipment so grievous as to prevent the UK waging a successful land campaign.
Best regards
Well said, although put in a more polite way than I would. Carter was a spinless piece of ****. I have no regard for him as a leader.