The disruptive ambitions of “aggressive, hostile powers” were a clear concern of Sir Olly Robbins, the former permanent under-secretary to the Foreign Office, in his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee yesterday. But he is now dismissed from his post, along with the weight of institutional expertise he carried. Sir Keir Starmer explicitly blamed Robbins for the fact that he was not until recently told of the damning UKSV assessment which deemed Mandelson high risk before his departure for Washington. A career civil servant, long steeped in the nuances of internal process, Robbins offered explanations with the eloquent but slightly stunned air of a man roughly pushed out of a space capsule, suddenly breathing different air. Yet as his quizzing by MPs shed light on the battle between the Government and civil service, it was the civil service that came out bruised but on top.

At the heart of this row are two different understandings on process, both flawed in different ways. The Government is simply careless of process, unless its pious invocation serves to advance a policy goal — which is why, for instance, a particular interpretation of “international law” was so loudly and persistently invoked over the doomed Chagos deal. With the Mandelson fiasco, though, Starmer’s inner circle has been exposed as unusually contemptuous of the civil service, along with its operations and safeguards. It is a dispiriting development from a Prime Minister elected in large part because of his professed adherence to ethics.

In response to pressure from No. 10, the civil service didn’t jettison process. But it did burrow deeper into it, finding procedural levers which technically permitted it to give the government what it so badly wanted. By Sir Olly’s account, an uneasy Foreign Office tried at times to stand its ground, and at others worked diligently at the flexible outer limits of permitted procedure to fulfill the Government’s requests. Ironically, it was for pursuing the latter path that Robbins has now found himself shoved into a pothole. Yet neither strategy exactly inspires full confidence in how the British state works.

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Before the question of the Peter Mandelson appointment ever reached Sir Olly’s desk, barely a week into his new job in January 2025, it had flouted normal process in almost every way possible. As a candidate for ambassador to the US, the UK’s most sensitive diplomatic posting, Mandelson was already a dubious choice. From his earlier resignations to his infamous “Prince of Darkness” nickname, it didn’t take tremendous insight to guess that Mandelson might run into some difficulty with higher-level vetting.

Aside from his now notorious friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Mandelson had business links to China and Russia through his Global Counsel consulting firm. This was flagged early during due diligence, of which Starmer was made aware. Even the most naïve inhabitant of 10 Downing Street would surely have taken a cursory look at the Mandelson CV and thought “one to watch” — and Starmer was no greenhorn but a former director of public prosecutions. Quite apart from this, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary in November 2024, had openly warned the Prime Minister that if he intended to make a political appointment to the post of Washington ambassador, then the Foreign Office would develop a vetting plan to reveal any issues “of which you should be aware before confirming your choice.”

Case’s advice was ignored, for reasons which Starmer still hasn’t explained. The fact is, No 10 wanted their man in post quickly. Mandelson, a long-standing mentor to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was seen as a potentially invaluable, politically sinuous Trump-whisperer: the whiff of sulfur was a key element in his appeal. Downing Street publicly trumpeted the appointment in December, long before Mandelson’s full vetting was completed. Robbins said that some in the Cabinet Office queried whether Mandelson needed vetting at all, something Number 10 denies. Either way, Mandelson’s transition to Washington was clearly treated as a done deal, including giving him advanced access to high-level briefings. By late January, when responsibility for high-level vetting arrived in Robbins’s in-tray, the political stakes were very high indeed. There were frequent phone calls and “constant pressure” from the Prime Minister’s office, Robbins said, asking when the vetting was going through.

Even as No. 10 apparently sought first to ignore, then rush, then pressure the process around the appointment, it completely lost sight of the essential principle such a procedure is meant to uphold: that individuals deemed dangerous to national security must not be placed in positions of high trust and influence.

Robbins, in contrast, was clearly concerned with national security. Even during his grilling from MPs, he expressed anxiety that the spotlight on the details of developed vetting might be of undue interest to malevolent foreign states. When the negative UKSV evaluation trickled in, it must have proved an awkward moment. But the Foreign Office had the final say, and Robbins said that its own security team had expressed full confidence that they could “manage the risks” from Mandelson, which is why he signed the appointment off.

The most obvious flaw in the process arises from how the UKSV assessment was passed on to Robbins. He learned of it, he said, in terms of an oral briefing from a Foreign Office security official who described the UKSV judgment on Mandelson’s status as “a borderline case” but “leaning toward” recommending clearance be denied. By this reading, the final call might still be up for grabs, with mitigations. But that is far more tentative than the actual UKSV document now being circulated, in which the “overall concern” about the candidate was marked “high” and the outcome was “clearance denied or withdrawn”. It appeared Robbins was discouraged from seeing the physical UKSV document, according to department protocol. Yet while he rightly defends the high confidentiality of developed vetting, there seems no reason why a hard copy of the outcome alone should not have been made visible to him.

Was the secrecy of the process such that Robbins himself was misled? Either way, the debacle suggests that for all the British state’s theoretical commitment to correct procedure, its fulfillment is highly dependent on the government’s respect for it. And the more that is known about the Mandelson affair, and No. 10’s behavior around it, the more apparent it becomes that the impatient or deliberate casting aside of proper protocol and safeguards is not a bug of Starmer’s government — but a feature.

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In his testimony, Robbins said that Downing Street made inquiries as to whether a “head of mission” diplomatic role might be found for Matthew Doyle, then serving as the PM’s head of communications. Robbins had explained that this would be hard to defend at a time when he was in danger of making very senior and experienced diplomats redundant. There was also a suggestion from No. 10, Robbins said, that Mandelson might make Doyle part of the US embassy team. In the end, Doyle was elevated to the House of Lords, where he was subsequently denied the Labour whip after campaigning for a candidate accused of paedophilia. But Robbins saw the Doyle discussion as part of a wider push to put political appointments in roles previously occupied by civil servants, which had generated discomfort in the Foreign Office.

Beyond Starmer and McSweeney, meanwhile, there are other signs that members of the Prime Minister’s inner circle are resistant to external examination. Consider Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser (NSA). He has often been quoted as observing that Mandelson’s appointment process was “weirdly rushed”. But his own has not been without controversy. His appointment as NSA is the first time that the role, created in 2010, has been given to a special adviser and political appointee; normally it’s occupied by a career civil servant.

Unlike his predecessors, and despite repeated requests, Powell as NSA hasn’t once publicly appeared before the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) — though he has agreed to attend in private. Having appointed a special adviser to the job, the Government has since argued that it is not “appropriate” for serving special advisers such as Powell to give evidence before select committees. It seems comfortable with an unusual degree of opacity surrounding his international operations.

In late March, a JCNSS report expressed concern over the national security threat from China, and the balance which the Government is striking between security and trade in its dealings with Beijing. It was published days after Powell met the Chinese foreign minister in Beijing, a trip not publicly disclosed in advance. The “lack of clarity” over who was responsible for national security, the report said, “hampers the possibility for external scrutiny and challenge.”

In opposition, trust and transparency were Labour watchwords. Yet the disabling of Starmer’s ethical antennae will surely go down as one of the tragedies and mysteries of modern British history. A lawyer by profession – and by all accounts a conscientious one – did he allow himself somehow to be persuaded that this is how clever people do politics? If so, his team of young bucks and old Blairites has not served him or the country well. During the Prime Minister’s painful, tight-lipped performance in the House of Commons on Monday, he was asked if there could be other instances in which people had failed UKSV vetting with national security implications. He flatly indicated that this, and more, would form part of the coming review. The questions summoned by the erstwhile Prince of Darkness still have a very long way to run.

Not in 1971, when he was photographed in a black beret, marching in a guard of honour at the funeral of a Provisional IRA man. Not in 1972, when he was flown to London with Martin McGuinness and the IRA chief of staff Sean Mac Stíofáin for secret talks with the British government (Mac Stíofáin later categorised the delegation as “All IRA”). Not in 1987, when he was asked about the murder of Charles McIlmurray — a West Belfast taxi driver whose body had been found with a plastic bag over his face, his hands tied behind his back, and a gunshot wound to the head. He responded by saying on camera, almost indignantly: “Mr McIlmurray, like anyone living in West Belfast, knows that the consequence of informing is death.” Not in 1993, when he helped to carry the coffin of Thomas Begley, an IRA man who died when a bomb he was carrying prematurely exploded in a Shankill Road fish shop, killing 9 Protestants, including two children. And never in the Nineties, when both he and McGuinness were central to the drawn-out negotiations that ultimately led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement and the cessation of the IRA’s long campaign.

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By his own account, Adams himself was more of a loyal, if prominent, camp follower of the IRA, a reliable defender and justifier of the “armed struggle”, although not of everything it did. His fealty, however, ran deep: as he told the 2019 Ballymurphy Inquest, “I have never disassociated myself from the IRA, and I never will, until the day I die.” And, as he also informed the court in a Dublin libel action last year, “I have never resiled from my view that the IRA’s campaign, whatever about elements of it, was a legitimate response to military occupation.”

So, if he argues that he wasn’t an IRA member, what does he want or expect the public to believe he was? An intensely supportive yet occasionally questioning political co-traveller, it seems, who never joined the organisation yet nonetheless was involved in much of its most crucial decision-making over a period of more than 30 years.

Others have a very different story to tell. They include diehard but outspoken IRA men and women; British and Irish intelligence and security services and politicians; and journalists steeped in decades of reporting on the Troubles. Over the years, Adams’s continuing assertion that he had never joined the IRA began to rankle with a lot of people, including a number who had formerly been his close associates and freely admitted their own past membership. As time wore on, some former friends in the “republican movement” felt that Adams’s denial had become more than a pragmatic strategy to avoid arrest — the IRA was, and is, a proscribed organisation — and more of a long-term psychological and moral get-out clause. Some, such as his old Long Kesh comrade Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, felt Adams was managing somehow to distance himself from the blood and misery of the IRA’s long campaign, and from any direct responsibility for the suffering of its victims. Nor did Hughes favour the Good Friday Agreement, which he felt rendered the IRA’s campaign, and its heavy toll in human suffering, meaningless by settling for less than its original aim of a united Ireland.

Hughes himself had engineered the appalling “Bloody Friday”, 21 July 1972, when more than 20 IRA bombs went off simultaneously in Belfast, killing nine and injuring over 130 others. But when interviewed in later life by the former IRA man Anthony McIntyre, Hughes said that Adams, in a strategic role, “was the man who made the decisions”. Troubled by the long shadow of the conflict, Hughes died early, at 59. Of Adams’s IRA membership, he had said frustratedly, “Everybody knows it. The British know it. The people on the street know it. The dogs on the street know it. And he’s standing there denying it.”

*****

The dogs on the proverbial Belfast street, famously alert to politics as they are, are not habitually called upon to give evidence in British courtrooms. That task is left to others. Earlier this month, in Court 16 of the Royal Courts of Justice, Gerry Adams — by now the senior statesman of republican politics — sat on a court bench for hours, then days, as he calmly listened to barristers and witnesses debating his CV. Now and then he got up to stretch his back.

The space next to him was frequently occupied by his longstanding friend Richard McAuley, who was also a fellow prisoner in Long Kesh in the Seventies. McAuley has a long history in Sinn Féin public relations. Back in 1981, in his role as Provisional Sinn Féin press officer, he helpfully explained the rules of IRA “punishment” shootings of youthful miscreants to a curious New York Times reporter. “No one is kneecapped who is below the age of 16. If he is under 16, he might get a beating.” Most people, he said, were in fact shot in the thigh and not the knee: “They’re in the hospital for a day or two and they hobble around for a week after. It’s more the scare that’s effective than the injury itself. It’s awfully frightening to sit and watch a man pointing a gun at your leg. You have to be very bad to be shot in the knee, and if you are very, very bad you are shot in the kneecaps and elbows.” The Belfast orthopaedic surgeon quoted immediately after McAuley was not so sanguine about the level of long-term damage: he said that roughly 10% of such shootings resulted in amputations, and one-in-five victims would walk with a permanent limp.

Also in the courtroom, sitting on the long bench behind Adams, was Barry Laycock, 86, one of three claimants in this crowd-funded civil action brought against the former Sinn Féin leader. Laycock, a British Rail worker at the time, was injured when the IRA’s 1996 bomb in Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre blew him across the room. He has lived with constant pain ever since, which he dulls with morphine patches. His expression was stoically impassive, but his blue eyes watched proceedings intently. His co-claimants, John Clark and Jonathan Ganesh, were victims of the 1973 Old Bailey bombing and the 1996 Docklands bombing, respectively.

The three claimants sought to establish that Adams was not only a member of the IRA, but was instrumental in directing the bombing campaigns which had caused them lasting pain and distress. They were asking for “vindicatory” damages of just £1 each, but the real point of the exercise, Laycock explained, was that “I want to see justice in the end, and I want to see closure”. The witnesses on behalf of the claimants — testifying to Adams’s pivotal role within the IRA — included a former IRA letter-bomber, a former RUC special branch intelligence officer, a BBC investigative journalist, and a retired Army commander.

Some spoke from beyond the grave. At the end of the court sitting on Monday 16 March, Gerry Adams sat listening carefully, stroking his beard with a greater frequency than usual. The rasping, confiding voice filling the courtroom was that of the late Dolours Price, a former IRA member. Along with her sister, Marian, she had gained notoriety for her active role in a series of London bombings in 1973: as two good-looking young Belfast women, they had attracted unusual levels of publicity and opprobrium when put on trial, and had been force-fed during their hunger strike in jail. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph a year before her death at the age of 62, Price recounted how, in advance of the London campaign, Adams had attended a meeting in Leeson Street, Belfast, and warned those present: “This is a dangerous operation, but a big operation.” He had told those who did not wish to be involved that they could leave, she said. It was clear that Price still retained a certain pride in being one of the women who stayed, when so many men had left: “I said: ‘Hey, lads, don’t knock me down in the rush’. Swear to God, they ran out the door.”

On Wednesday, an immaculately besuited Adams took to the witness stand for his second day. The previous day, March 17, had been his first experience of cross-examination in an English court: he had taken the time to wish the judge, Justice Swift, “Happy St Patrick’s Day”. Throughout the questioning from Sir Max Hill KC, acting for the claimants, the former Sinn Féin leader’s manner was measured, if occasionally prickly, and impeccably evasive. Bespectacled and silver-bearded, dutifully scouring the court papers — with a recurrent difficulty in locating relevant detail that may or may not have had an intended effect of breaking up Hill’s flow — he had the puzzled yet attentive air of a retired sea captain invited to pore over a fusty log book.

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Over the decades, Adams has perfected a response when directly confronted with indignation over IRA killings. He regrets the suffering of all the victims of violence during the Troubles, he says, including those of the IRA. When particularly horrific cases of IRA murder are pointed out to him, he doesn’t hesitate to say that a particular act was “wrong”. Then he goes on to talk with practised certainty and cadence about civil rights and British occupation and armed struggle and the republican movement. He proclaimed himself “stunned” by the 1996 IRA Docklands bomb.

Alongside such lulling assurances, he doggedly continues to celebrate IRA members who committed sectarian horrors against their fellow Northern Irish men and women. On his X/Twitter account, where he now describes himself as an “Optimistic and Hopeful Activist”, Adams recently retweeted a commemoration for Brendan “Bik” McFarlane, remembered “with pride”. The president of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, staunchly echoed the sentiment, saying of the late IRA man that he “dedicated his life to the pursuit of freedom, unity, peace and equality…it was a life well lived.” McFarlane, as the 24-year-old leader of a three-man unit of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, was the driver for a 1975 IRA gun and bomb attack on the Bayardo Bar in the Protestant Shankill Road. In it, five people were killed, and 31 injured. One, a 17-year-old girl called Linda Boyle, was pulled out of the rubble. She took a week to die of her injuries. Her younger sister Anne, who was 15 when Linda died, said last year, “Me and Linda shared a bedroom together. I remember the exact clothes she wore that morning going to work. It never goes away.”

It is this frequent clash between an official republican narrative and victims’ reality that leads many Northern Ireland Protestants to mistrust Adams in particular and Sinn Féin in general, along with their own future position in any united Ireland where the party plays a leading role. They know that — behind Sinn Féin’s palatable talk of inclusivity — if it ever faces a choice between mythologising IRA members and acknowledging the human misery that they caused, the former will win out. This has its dark mirror in the Loyalist paramilitaries and their grotesque commemorations for the sectarian killers of Catholic civilians: these organisations, too, publicly confirm their existence by riding roughshod over the pain of the bereaved. But the political traction of Sinn Féin, and therefore its domination of the narrative across Ireland and beyond, is far greater. It is now the biggest single party in Northern Ireland, and the second largest party in the Republic of Ireland.

There was one moment, on his second day of giving evidence, when the net did seem to tighten somewhat around Adams’s IRA membership. It related to Adams’s authorship of the “Brownie” columns in the Seventies, which were written under a pseudonym from inside Long Kesh and published in Republican News. He admitted that he had written some of them, but not all. In one, entitled “Double Talk”, published in May 1976, the author said outright, “Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer”. That particular one, Adams said, was in fact written by Richard McAuley. But the column spoke of the author’s wife and young son, said Hill, and at that point McAuley had neither — yet it accurately described Adams’s own family set-up. And the last “Brownie” article, published five days after Adams was released from Long Kesh in 1977, once again referenced his wife and child, and their reunion.

Throughout the trial, Adams had produced some form of answer, most often that anyone who said he was in the IRA had a political axe to grind. But on “Brownie”, he seemed temporarily to have run out of arguments: the column, and its contents, has dogged him for decades. Only The Irish Times, which reported the case in some detail, gave the exchange its proper weight. But then, two days later, all the carefully accumulated evidence fell away, because the case collapsed. The judge raised the issue of “abuse of process” — in which a case brought for one reason appears to be a proxy for another — and with it the prospect that the claimants might become liable for Adams’s legal fees, something they had previously been assured would not happen. Suddenly facing the possibility of terrifying personal bills, the claimants felt compelled to discontinue their case with no order as to costs. Barry Laycock, who had hoped for closure, said he was “completely devastated”.

Although the case has succeeded in airing an argument, its conclusion on Adams now remains legally undetermined. Many in the public at large, and perhaps the British establishment, are content to let it stay that way. The appetite for news on Northern Ireland and its sorrowful histories has sharply waned in England. In Ireland, in recent years, Sinn Féin has been retrospectively refashioning the chief impetus for the IRA’s campaign from an “armed struggle” for a united Ireland into one for Catholic civil rights (an argument most neatly, if fiercely, skewered by the late dissident republican Kevin Hannaway, Adams’s cousin and a former IRA man, who was quoted in 2019 saying: “If they were out for an Irish Republic, they failed. If they were out for civil rights, they got it in 1973. So what the fucking hell was the other 30 years of war for?”).

The veteran BBC journalist John Ware, explaining why he was giving evidence for the claimants, said quietly, “as journalists you have an obligation to prevent falsehoods of this magnitude from becoming settled in history… I’m interested in objective truth.” While Adams had indeed played a key role in bringing about an IRA ceasefire, he said, the “rather important missing bit” was the part he had played in the conflict.

Yet, internationally, objective truth is at present having a particularly rocky time. In the multiple fragmented perspectives thrown up by online media, there’s increasingly only “your truth” and “my truth” rather than “the truth”. For many people, facts are a shrinking source of interest: they want stories instead. It’s a cultural shift that has found its ultimate political expression in Donald Trump, and his constant generation of unreliable assertions. Adams was, in many ways, ahead of his time in realising that if you only expound a line doggedly enough, the public memory of what actually happened fades and blurs — apart from for those most directly affected — to be replaced by a narrative of choice. And Sinn Féin’s narrative, in which Provisional IRA freedom fighters reluctantly but bravely took up arms in Northern Ireland primarily to claim their civil rights from the “Orange State”, is one that strongly appeals to many younger voters — so long as the bereaved and the body parts can be successfully kept in the background. The party has been bolstering its position with a high volume of legal actions against journalists, at times raising concerns among press freedom organisations.

At one point during the case, Adams seemed to step back and take a more detached view. Watching proceedings, he said, “I listened to what I thought was old men squabbling over a war that’s over.” Somewhat disarmingly, he included himself, now 77, among that number. But the impression of spent forces is disingenuous. The IRA’s war might indeed be over, but Sinn Féin’s battle for Ireland and control of its narratives is very much alive. And the party is keeping firmly in mind a lesson drawn from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Even though the poem was never actually written down, it ended very badly for its author. One or more informants in Mandelstam’s trusted circle memorized the lines and passed them on to the secret police. The poet was arrested and sentenced to internal exile, and later — after being rearrested and consigned to forced labor — died of illness in a transit camp. One might ask why, in circumstances of such extreme danger, Mandelstam had decided to speak his criticism at all? It was because the unceasing performance of lies had become so exhausting and diminishing. To feel that he truly existed, as a poet and a human being — or even that reality itself existed — he needed to proclaim the truth in the hearing of at least a few others. His wife Nadezhda Yakovlevna later said that he “did not want to die without stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things around us”.

In the last year, an unfamiliar way of talking has fully established itself in UK Labour government circles, chiefly evident in its utterances on the actions of US president Donald Trump and his entourage. It goes well beyond the usual diplomatic courtesies practiced among democratic nations. Instead it involves the rigorous self-vetting of public speech of the kind once practiced by the citizenry of the former Soviet Union as they moved through daily life, acutely conscious that the wrong word could trigger catastrophic results. Few people in the UK can now be unaware of the syndrome: from the outset of Trump’s second presidency, our leaders have sought to skate over any of their previous public criticism of the US president and have stubbornly withheld fresh criticism even when it is obviously due. The result is now an unusually extreme gulf between what we all know they believe and what they feel able or willing to say.

The rest of Britain has watched this political performance with varying emotions, but mainly the weary tolerance born of the consciousness of impotence. Those who follow politics may well know, for example, that the justice secretary David Lammy, formerly foreign secretary, previously called Trump a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath” and a “profound threat to the international order”. They may also recall that after the events of January 6, 2021, when a crowd of Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol, Sir Keir Starmer told reporters that “President Trump has to take responsibility. What happened was appalling. It wasn’t protest — it was an attack on democracy. And responsibility lies with President Trump. No doubt about that. This is the culmination of years of the politics of hate and division, and this is where it leads.”

These were not controversial views at the time, nor were they confined to the left of politics in the UK or elsewhere. John F Kelly, the former Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff during his first term, unambiguously warned the world prior to Trump’s re-election in 2024 that his former boss met his definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if permitted, and had no concept of the Constitution. The thing that most worried him was Trump’s declared readiness to use the military against the “enemy within”, namely his fellow Americans. Even to say such a thing for political purposes, Kelly argued, was a “very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it”. More than a dozen former Trump staffers, all self-described “lifelong Republicans”, came out in support of his remarks.

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With Starmer’s entry to Downing Street and Trump’s subsequent return to the White House, however, the Labour leadership’s observations were consigned to the memory-hole. A decision was clearly taken to manage a uniquely tricky diplomatic situation not only by refraining from denouncing Trump, but by overtly flattering a man widely thought to be unusually susceptible to praise. Last February, Starmer flew into Washington for his first meeting as British prime minister with President Trump. Shifting a gear beyond civility and into effusiveness, he brandished a letter from “His Majesty the King” inviting Trump for a second state visit. “This is really special,” he said, as if himself astonished by the King’s depth of admiration. “This has never happened before. This is unprecedented.” The next day there followed a memorably depressing scene in which Trump and his vice-president JD Vance, primed by a sycophantic reporter, made a strikingly crass verbal attack in the Oval Office on the visiting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The British press and public have watched this process, and even at times applauded its guile, without ever believing in it. They know that Starmer has been doing it in an effort to protect both the interests of the UK and democracy in Europe, on two pressing areas in particular: the British economy, in his quest for a lasting US trade deal, and the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression, in which US military and intelligence assistance is essential. Beyond that sits the necessity of American support for maintenance of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, and the unique closeness of US-UK intelligence sharing. Onlookers therefore initially understood that the prime minister’s flattery of Trump was wholly tactical, like someone trying to placate a madman on the top deck of a crowded bus by complimenting him on his hat. Yet it was also impossible to watch without a frisson of national humiliation. When there is an explicit gulf between someone who is free to speak their mind, no matter how unfiltered its contents, and someone who must habitually mute, conceal and flatter, it is a raw demonstration of power, and all onlookers know it.

The intensity of the UK’s “Trump-whispering” strategy thus far has been underpinned by two assumptions. The first is that the US president has a strong and sentimental attachment to the UK and that — if only Britain remains sufficiently “on side” — it will predispose him to offer us significantly favorable treatment. The second is the Foreign Office’s belief that it is cleverer than the incumbent of the White House, and can effectively steer and “manage” his wilder tendencies internationally. Nearly a year into Trump’s second term, both are looking hollow. Even given the erratic nature of the US president’s pronouncements on Ukraine, the bulk of his approach has served to appease and embolden Vladimir Putin while weakening Nato. A recent shift to underpin a European “coalition of the willing” security force with US guarantees has yet to be nailed down. Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly frequent outbursts on the necessity for the US to seize and “own” Greenland — currently a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark — whether by purchase or military force, have sent shock waves through Denmark and the rest of Nato. Back home, the president’s declared intention to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military is proceeding apace. Last September, he advocated just that as part of tackling an alleged “war from within”, the very process about which an alarmed Kelly warned in 2024.

Few would argue that Starmer is a natural politician, but he does show signs of a conscience. Within this increasingly uncomfortable diplomatic straitjacket, he has done his level best to shore up support for Ukraine and Denmark. But the domestic political price of “Trump-whispering” is growing steadily higher. As time goes on, and the US administration’s moves become more extreme, its muting and confusing effect on the Labour front bench is becoming ever more noticeable. Last week, David Lammy proudly posted pictures of his White House meeting with JD Vance on X, even as Vance himself was on X vigorously defending the masked ICE officer in Minneapolis who shot dead Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and US citizen. Vance described the dead woman as a “deranged leftist”, deciding her culpability well in advance of any formal investigation. In the pages of the Spectator, the former Labour party éminence grise Peter Mandelson — recently recalled as Britain’s ambassador to the US over his links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — energetically praised Trump’s “decisive approach” to foreign policy while scolding Europe for its “histrionics about Greenland”. Whatever moral nuances the UK government’s Trump game originally contained, they are increasingly abandoned or irrelevant as the US presidential court exercises its dark magnetism: you’re either in or you’re out. And if one justification for sycophancy was to buy time to pivot away from Britain’s overdependence on the US — time which should rightly be spent on a heavy and accelerated investment in the UK’s military and industrial base — then the Treasury is notably failing to enact it.

A paradox lies at the heart of a looming electoral problem for Labour. In surveys, between 60 and 70% of the British public hold an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Yet Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party — the most Trumpian on offer, with explicit links to the MAGA movement — is currently leading by some distance in the polls. Voters appear to yearn above all for direction and definition: they often say things like “I might not like everything Farage says, but I know what he stands for” while signaling the opposite about Starmer. The difficulty for Labour is that the accusations it seeks to direct at Reform — dog-whistle racism, social divisiveness, ambivalence on Russia, unrealistic economics — are partly nullified by its tactical, smiling silences over similar, or far worse, manifestations in MAGA.

Compelled into a “special relationship” cage and trapped in a kind of moral paralysis, a muted Starmer steadily appears blurrier, grayer and more inauthentic as Trump explodes in lurid technicolor. And despite Trump’s occasional magnanimous word for Starmer in the Oval Office, he will shed no tears for his British counterpart’s political difficulties: it is one of the most time-honored tricks of the imperial tyrant to manipulate an ideological opponent into gradually erasing himself. Yet Starmer’s current strategy of transatlantic ambiguity cannot hold indefinitely. He, his fractious party, and the wider country may soon have to choose openly between the path of cynical realpolitik and that of dangerous conviction, between Mandelson and Mandelstam.

On that day in 1768, an unsettled throng of around 15,000 people — “an unarmed giddy mob”, according to one chronicler — had gathered outside the King’s Bench prison in London to protest against the imprisonment of the radical MP and journalist John Wilkes. He had been charged with seditious libel for criticizing King George III and the Prime Minister in his newspaper The North Briton. Concerns over freedom of speech and individual liberty were at stake, fueling the crowd’s discontent: troops had been sent to guard the prison in anticipation of trouble. But tensions soon boiled over. A judge read out the Riot Act and ordered the crowd to disperse, but when it defied the order, with some individuals throwing stones, the soldiers turned their guns upon the demonstrators. Among the dead was a blameless publican’s son who was mistaken for a leading agitator, hunted down, and shot dead in error. The incident inflamed popular fury, and sparked wider disturbances all over London. The disturbances were so severe that it was rumored the shaken King contemplated abdication.

Certain common ingredients can be found in incidents throughout history in which the state and the populace have clashed disastrously. They include an intensifying political tension, which finds its flashpoint in a single issue; a large crowd of mainly peaceful protesters, a small minority of whom are bent on violence; the deployment of troops; continuing provocation from an element in the crowd; confused and exasperated official warnings; and finally, excessively forceful military retaliation against demonstrators that results in the death of blameless civilians.

From the Champs de Mars massacre in Paris, 1791, to the grim events of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972, this pattern repeats itself. And Donald Trump’s decision to deploy 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles recreates many elements of these historical clashes. In an unusual presidential move against what he dubbed “violent, insurrectionist mobs”, the troops were drafted in against the explicit wishes of the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and Newsom’s attorney general, Rob Bonta. Indeed, the LA police chief, Jim McDonnell, said that he was confident that his police department could handle the demonstrations on their own, and that the arrival of the Marines would only make things more difficult.

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The National Guard troops were said to be receiving two days of training on civil unrest in batches of 2,000, including crowd control and the protection of property. It isn’t much time for schooling a force of that size in the nuances of civic policing. Yet, in the past when the military has been enlisted to quell civilian protest, what plays out long-term is rarely the promised imposition of order. Should the gamble misfire, the ensuing casualties instead lead to the rapid radicalization of an even larger number of citizens in outright opposition to the state.

On 17 July 1791, for example, a different National Guard appeared in front of a crowd of up to 50,000 people at the Champ de Mars in Paris. They were there to sign a republican petition demanding the removal of King Louis XVI, who had attempted to flee France with his family in the previous month, and been forced back to the city. Early in the day, a small group of vigilantes in the broadly peaceful crowd had discovered two men hiding, and summarily hanged them in the apparent belief that they were foreign spies. The nervous Paris mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly characterized all the petitioners as “brigands”: he declared martial law, dispatching the National Guard, who ordered the protestors to disperse. When the soldiers were insulted and, by some accounts, pelted with stones, they opened fire, killing between 30 and 50 people.

Thereafter, the working people of Paris abandoned trust in the more moderate revolutionaries who had previously been their leaders: the path was set clear for the rapid rise of the radical Maximilien Robespierre. The latter ensured that, in November 1793, the former Mayor Bailly was executed on a scaffold specially erected for him in the Champ de Mars, a pointed retribution for his role in sending the National Guard there just over two years earlier. The desired restoration of order was replaced by violent radicalization.

As in most situations of this sort, Mayor Bailly — mistakenly, as it turned out — had deemed the introduction of the military helpful for containing unrest in volatile circumstances. Similarly, when Harold Wilson first sent troops into Northern Ireland in August 1969, it was a response to weeks of violent sectarian rioting which had exhausted the capabilities of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a force that was also perceived by many Northern Irish Catholics as biased in favor of Protestants. People were aware even at the time, however, that this seemingly unavoidable course of action was nonetheless fraught with dangers: a Guardian editorial warned that if the presence of British soldiers “can give both police and rioters time for reflection and for tempers to cool, they will contribute to peace. But officers and those who are giving them their orders should have no illusions about the gunpowder keg on which they are now sitting.”

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By 30 January 1972, a large number of metaphorical and literal explosions had already detonated, resulting in the deaths of civilians and soldiers alike. The calculated risk was facing worsening odds. The events of Bloody Sunday in Derry carried broad echoes of St George’s Fields: a banned march, anti-internment protestors demonstrating against unjust incarceration, sporadic stone-throwing and petrol-bombing, a confusion of rioters and peaceful marchers, and an increasingly keyed-up soldiery. After members of the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 unarmed Catholic marchers, the Northern Ireland conflict intensified sharply: the events were described as the best recruiting sergeant the Provisional IRA ever had. In post-ceasefire Northern Ireland, the lesson has been learned: during the current spate of severe rioting in mainly Protestant towns, the Police Service of Northern Ireland has called for back-up from UK-wide police forces: it has not asked for assistance from the army.

In a historical context, there is something unusual about President Trump’s decision to call the troops into LA: it has not been forced upon him by necessity, but engineered by choice. Indeed, many high-ranking former military figures have expressed their unease. Despite a measure of far-Left violence and the torching of some self-driving cars, certainly worthy of police containment, the current unrest has not remotely approached the level of disorder seen in early-Seventies Northern Ireland. Nor is it comparable to the last time troops were called into LA itself, during the 1992 Rodney King riots in which 63 people died and thousands were injured. Indeed, Trump’s mobilizing of the National Guard in a civilian setting has already had a catalyzing rather than a restraining effect upon public protests, which have spread to numerous cities across the US.

Much of America is now waking up to the profundity of the presidential power-grab. The rather lackluster military parade in Washington on Saturday, in which the Army’s 250th anniversary coincided with Trump’s own birthday, contained less civic vigor than many of the “No Kings” demonstrations in 2,000 cities and towns across America. The slogan itself knowingly harks back to the American Revolution and the rejection of arbitrary authority that sits at the very heart of the United States.

Where can the dispute go next? The potential for further conflagration is still there. The president’s rhetoric before Saturday’s parade — that “any” protestors would be met with “very big force” — made no apparent distinction between violent and peaceful protestors, leaving it to journalists to clarify with his press secretary that he continued to support the rights of the latter. Thus far, the active role of the National Guard has been limited. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prevents the military from being used for domestic law enforcement, and Trump’s order currently sits in a kind of legal limbo: a federal court has ruled that his actions were illegal, while the appeals court put that ruling temporarily on hold. Yet by describing protestors as “insurrectionist mobs”, Trump has been laying the verbal groundwork for invoking the 218-year-old Insurrection Act, signed by President Thomas Jefferson, which allows the president to deploy the military directly to suppress an “insurrection”. It was notably not invoked on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol, with some violently assaulting the police.

In the US, once described by John F Kennedy as a “nation of immigrants”, the question of immigration has now become a cauldron of contention. But the time-honored mechanisms for solving problems with democratic argument and consensus are being swiftly eroded. The old cross-party courtesies and conventions, which do more than most people realize to oil the moving parts of a nation, are being replaced by open contempt and muscular force: last Thursday a Democratic senator for California, Alex Padilla, was wrestled to the floor and handcuffed for seeking to ask a question during a news conference held by the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The murder by a lone gunman on Saturday of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted murder of a state senator and his wife, was an even bleaker signal of an overheating political system.

President Trump, who avoided the Vietnam draft in his youth due to “bone spurs” in his heels, has now developed a growing escalatory instinct, a taste for combat and constant drama. It is telling, perhaps, that seconds after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear last July, he began yelling “Fight! Fight!”. A fight needs enemies, and Trump is locating them — not among the world’s despots, but among his fellow Americans. The President is turning up the heat in a country long held together by a unifying national ideal which he is now vigorously dismantling. Is he ready for what he could unleash? Those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland, where democracy did indeed catch fire, can only watch his dangerous game with a sense of foreboding: an elderly child, in a room stuffed with kindling, playing with matches.

Tate built up his online business and personal notoriety with these sorts of clips. Along with his younger brother Tristan Tate, he served up online courses such as a “Pimping Hoes Degree”, which bragged of trapping women into lucrative webcam work using the “loverboy” grooming method: first get a woman to fall in love with you, then exert tightening control over her, and finally turn her into a kind of Tate-branded human cash machine.

With the shocking Netflix drama Adolescence, and its theme of teenage boys being sucked into the misogyny of the online “manosphere”, both parents and UK politicians have expressed heightening concern over Tate’s influence. It is unlikely to worry him: controversy is a design feature of his personal roadshow. Tate is a highly astute self-promoter, mingling explicit contempt for women with exhortations to physical self-improvement and turbo-charged earning power: for a certain cadre of young men, confused by what modern manhood requires of them, it’s a seductive message. But those who argue for a more ethical version of masculinity, as the former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate did in a recent public lecture, now face a more difficult time than ever: Tate and his philosophy have effectively been endorsed at the highest levels of political authority, by the US President Donald Trump and the aggressively macho coterie that increasingly surrounds him.

Though the Tate brothers are facing a raft of charges in Romania and the UK, from human trafficking and money laundering to, in Andrew Tate’s case, rape and sex with a minor — all of which they deny — a private jet flew them from Bucharest to Florida at the end of February. The Romanians denied they had lifted the travel ban because of political pressure, yet also admitted that Richard Grenell, special envoy to Trump, had asked them to relax it. Questioned at the White House, Trump replied that he knew nothing about it. On BBC Question Time last Thursday, Greg Swenson, the head of Republicans Overseas UK, expressed similar bemusement. The arrangement appears to be that the Tates continue to comply with the letter of their Romanian legal requirements: on Friday, Andrew Tate posted on X that they were returning to Romania by private jet “to sign one single piece of paper”. What is increasingly clear, however, is that the Tates have influential champions in the President’s inner circle.

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Donald Trump Jr previously called Tate’s detention in Romania “absolute insanity”. Elon Musk reinstated Tate’s X account after a five-year ban and tweeted “He’s not wrong” in response to a video in which Tate talked about running for prime minister of the UK. Dan Bongino, the new deputy director of the FBI, has promoted Tate’s account on Rumble. Alina Habba, counselor to the President, told Tate on a podcast that she was a “big fan” and “I got your back over here”. One of Tate’s lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, who once called Tate “the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence”, is currently the White House liaison with the Justice Department.

The brothers were greeted in the US in early March by Roger Stone: the flamboyant, self-confessed “dirty trickster” who helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election. Stone, a 72-year-old Republican insider who first worked on the Nixon campaign — he sports a tattoo of Nixon on his back — was convicted in 2019 of deliberately impeding investigators into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election: his sentence of 40 months in jail was later commuted by Trump. At one point Stone was censured for putting a photograph of the female judge who presided over his case up on Instagram with what appeared to be crosshairs near her head. No matter. In a milieu where personal loyalty to the President is the chief qualification for advancement, Stone’s entanglements with the law — without ever denouncing Trump himself — have only intensified his perceived fealty.

Posing with the Tates — all three accessorized with outsize cigars — Stone posted the photograph on X with a caption saying “Richard Grenell secured the release of the Tates because there was no evidence against them…” The post was subsequently deleted. But it has further abolished any doubt that the Tates are now effectively under the close protection of Trump’s administration, which they themselves ceaselessly praise.

Andrew Tate, and the brutal, hardcore misogyny that he preaches, might even at the start of this year have been considered at the very outer, risky circle of the “manosphere” that surrounds Trump: a loose affiliation of podcasters, pranksters, and mixed-martial arts fighters that helped attract a valuable young male vote to his campaign. It promotes a form of semi-parodic, performative masculinity that posits itself in direct opposition to what it relentlessly portrays as a “woke” feminized philosophy that captured the US under the Democrats. Installed in the Oval Office, however, Trump is moving faster and further even than many of his voters expected: Tate has been fast-tracked to the heart of the Trumpian manosphere.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump claimed at a 2016 campaign rally in Iowa. His administration’s effective endorsement of Tate is, likewise, a demonstration of raw power that shrugs off moral norms. But not all Republicans are happy. When the Tates landed in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis — who has his own checkered relationship with Trump — immediately said the brothers were not welcome there, and Florida’s attorney general declared the opening of a criminal investigation into the men. That may partly be because it is in Florida that a US woman recently filed a civil suit against the Tates, accusing them of luring her to Romania and conspiring to coerce her into sex work. But it is also likely that DeSantis has correctly anticipated that the increasingly outré manosphere is on an inevitable collision course with the values of much of Republican-voting Middle America. He is not alone in that judgment: both the prominent conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and the Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley have echoed his outrage over the Tates.

Shortly after their brush with DeSantis, the Tates were aboard a plane yet again. This time they were headed for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in Las Vegas with the Nelk Boys, a group of Canadian-American hard-partying pranksters and podcasters. There they were welcomed by Dana White, the UFC president and close ally of Trump. The Nelk Boys have worked with Tate before, three years ago, on a 2022 trip to Croatia entitled “Andrew Tate Stole Our Girl At The Club!”. They are also the licensed clowns of the Trump administration, flying with him on Air Force One during the 2020 presidential campaign. When the Vice President JD Vance did his first TikTok last August, it was with the Nelk Boys, who presented him with a crate of their Happy Dad Hard Seltzer.

Watching the Nelk Boys on YouTube is like observing a bunch of unusually crass 14-year-olds who have been unaccountably released into the world with their passports, except that some of them are now 30 or over. One of them on the trip to Croatia, declaring that he loves Andrew Tate — “I love how sexist he is…I love his mindset.” — also says, “I didn’t even know Croatia was in Europe”. The toothily genial Kyle Forgeard, the group’s de facto leader, is accompanied by an eager comic sidekick called Steiny, whose apparent role it is to attempt and largely fail to seduce attractive girls. Upon getting off the plane in Croatia, he mumbles to their local driver, “Do chicks here fuck or what?” There is a young woman called Alyssa traveling with the Nelk Boys, but she hardly says anything at all: her job is to look pretty, which she does, and to smile tolerantly at the guys’ antics. When Tate appears, it’s clear that the Nelk Boys are impressed by his confident, bombastic rhetoric and what they consider his superior ability to attract and dominate “hot chicks”. Somewhere along the way, ugly, extreme misogyny has been culturally translated — for a significant number of young men — into edgy fun.

That cultural corruption now manifests itself in a thousand different spheres, including 12-year-old boys in the UK who now reportedly shout “make me a sandwich!” at their female teachers and call girls in their class “bitches” and “hoes”. Recently an even darker strand of potential influence emerged, with the UK sentencing of the 26-year-old Kyle Clifford, who murdered his former girlfriend Louise Hunt, her mother and her sister in the space of an afternoon, during which he also raped Louise. It later emerged that in the 24 hours before the attack, Clifford had watched up to 10 Andrew Tate videos: he was a fan. The prosecutor referred to Tate as “a posterboy for misogyny”.

When Tate was asked in the US about Kyle Clifford’s fondness for his videos, he became angry: “It’s a clown show. Anyone with a brain knows it’s completely unfair.” Clifford is, of course, responsible for his own actions. But what was it that kept drawing him back to those Tate videos in the hours before the rape and murders? Something clearly chimed with the way he was thinking. Perhaps that a woman is a man’s property, to be controlled, obedient, kept in line and punished for exercising her independent will, a philosophy which he then took to its most extreme conclusion.

As Tate continues his trajectory through the US manosphere, it is therefore likely that he will increasingly divide the Republican base. The younger, heavily online, MAGA fans of Musk, crypto, porn, TikTok and conspicuous consumption will be broadly excited by his presence, while Trump’s Christian conservative supporters may well become ever more disturbed. It’s hard to listen to Tate for very long: he’s prone to loud, relentlessly aggressive monologues. But if you do, it’s striking what tediously distorted, self-serving nonsense it all is: an admittedly talented kickboxer, who has built a squalid career on badmouthing, abusing and exploiting women, constantly talks as if he is some kind of rebel superhero on the run from dark forces: “I’m way too large now, the matrix is going to try and get me… it’s Icarus, I’m too close to the sun… I’m Trump’s number one soldier.” He is currently trailing a podcast with Kanye West, the multi-millionaire rapper and entrepreneur who has boasted of “dominion” over his wife Bianca Censori, who often accompanies him silently and near-naked in public.

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For now, Trump appears unconcerned about the limits of public tolerance for the excesses of the manosphere: his White House guest on St. Patrick’s Day was Conor McGregor, an Irish mixed martial arts fighter who lost a civil rape case last autumn and was ordered to pay his victim more than $250,000 in compensation. The elevation of such characters is not an oversight, but a deliberate reflection of Trump’s world view, one that extends from the UFC into geopolitics. He respects brute physical force, notoriety and personal wealth, but not traditional ethical codes, protection of the vulnerable, and geographical or sexual boundaries. If one is looking to define a “Trumpian” philosophy, then these are the themes that run through his championing of men such as Tate and McGregor, and his indulgence of dictators such as Vladimir Putin.

In alignment with the so-called “strongman” leaders, Tate recently pronounced on Ukraine: Russia and America are now “strong nationalistic patriarchies” he said, which have much more in common with each other than with “these femcentric matriarchal garbage woke shitholes in Europe”. In fact, he thinks, “the restraint and the patience that Putin has shown is truly remarkable”. The use of mass rape by Russian soldiers as a weapon of war against Ukrainian civilians seems not to concern him.

What now appears guaranteed, however, is a growing tension between Trump’s inner circle and US conservatives who felt that the new orthodoxies of the progressive Left on questions such as gender ideology and DEI had gone too far, but yearned for a return to traditional touchstones of “family values”. What they’re getting instead is something radically different. Compared to what both the US Right and Left so long promoted as a masculine ideal — broadly defined by the love of country, community and family — Tate appears as a bullying, hollow man, crudely obsessed by individual status and material things. But he’s a hollow man who is all the rage in Trump’s increasingly misogynistic vision of the US.

In the UK the received wisdom, long after the pager disappeared, remains that success is defined by the clarity and unity of the message. The imminent electoral failure for any party is invariably signalled by the spectacle of MPs and ministers going off on constituency-courting sprees of their own. Yet new incumbents in Downing Street, buoyed by a fresh mandate, still understand coherence as the route to public respect.

Across the Atlantic, however, Donald Trump has now smashed the tried-and-tested delivery system. In its place comes something much more complex, apparently chaotic and instinctively manipulative: the “multi-message”. In place of details he generates “vibes” and his message is spread by a broad cast of actors, only some of whom have formal political roles or are even nominally accountable to the American public.

All the while, unelected figures from Elon Musk to Joe Rogan keep alive a bubbling, rolling dialogue on X and YouTube, setting the tone for the Trumpian take on any given topic, even before the President himself has officially adopted it. Trump himself is adept at sending out multiple signals, often shifting position or contradicting himself. The perpetual uncertainty generated by this approach, accelerated by its rapid delivery on social media, has a destabilizing, mesmerizing effect on domestic opponents and potential foreign allies alike.

Individual members of Trump’s entourage, particularly Musk, are effectively licensed to crash through all previously accepted boundaries of political protocol and veracity. In January, for instance, the technocrat’s relentless and baseless online attacks on Keir Starmer’s history as director of public prosecutions represented outrageous libels that 10 or even five years ago would have placed the accuser beyond the pale.

Musk — despite wild attacks on friendly heads of state, his energetic support of the far-Right AfD in Germany, or even his admission that “some of the things I say will be incorrect” — remains Trump’s most visible henchman. Yet when the President himself talked about Starmer later that same month, he was warm and emollient. “I get along with him well,” he said. “I like him a lot. He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and he’s done a very good job so far.” In Trump’s world, such a statement is not at all incompatible with his closest political ally’s false accusation that Starmer is guilty of heinous moral crimes for which he should be literally imprisoned.

Such is the nature of the multi-message, which depends on the unbolting of speech from verifiable truth, and the unapologetic liberation of rhetoric from consistency. In America’s new sphere, with Trump at its heart, the primary function of speech is not to build a shared understanding towards a common purpose but rather to produce an effect. The intended effect of Musk’s attacks, pumped out to millions online, was to smear Starmer’s reputation and weaken his popular support. Meanwhile, Trump’s praise was aimed at peeling Starmer away from potential European allies, while dangling the hope that cultivating a warm personal relationship with the President might protect the UK from economic tariffs. While these two messages might appear contradictory, they have a unified logic: a weakened prime minister, who is nonetheless fighting to defend his country’s interests, is more liable to agree to demands which he might otherwise refuse. This logic of dual effect is why Trump never chided Musk for his intemperate comments.

For adherents of the old post-war politics, the newly fluid, multi-message order is proving disorienting. So too is its orchestration and staging. Take, for instance, the recent, acrimonious Oval Office meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump and his Vice President JD Vance. Despite what some more credulous observers may have believed, it was clearly very far from a spontaneous personality clash which erupted out of nowhere.

For months beforehand, Musk and Donald Trump Jr had laid the groundwork by assiduously promoting contempt for Zelensky online, sharing memes which mocked and belittled him. They presented him as a chancer and supplicant, the Home Alone 2 kid intent on fleecing Trump and the US taxpayer for the defense of a corrupt administration. On his podcast last November, Rogan expressed his furious impatience over Ukraine’s resistance to a Russian invasion. “Fuck you people!” he cried. “You people are about to start World War Three!” Earlier this year, meanwhile, Trump dubbed Zelensky “a dictator without elections” on Truth Social (despite the practical impossibility of holding elections in the midst of war) and suggested that Kyiv “never should have started it” (despite Russia being the invader).

A few days later, though, General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy in Ukraine, met Zelensky and praised him as “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war” — something which may have reflected Kellogg’s genuine opinion, but also offered worried European leaders a strand of reassurance. At the same time, Musk called Zelensky “a fraud machine feeding off dead bodies of soldiers”. Yet when Trump was asked about calling Zelensky a “dictator” during Keir Starmer’s visit to the White House, he dissimulated. “Did I say that?” he asked aloud. “I can’t believe I said that.” The head-spinning, multi-message mechanism for smear, distraction and disinformation was in full swing.

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It’s in this context that we come to Trump’s infamous meeting with Zelensky at the White House. It was purportedly arranged to sign a deal with Trump for the extraction of Ukrainian minerals — though, as yet, without any assurances of US protection if Putin reinvaded after a ceasefire. The descent into wider ill humor was triggered by a question over sartorial etiquette. “Why don’t you wear a suit?” one reporter suddenly asked Zelensky. “Do you own a suit?”

This strange interjection can be understood by who that journalist was. Brian Glenn works for the “Real America’s Voice” cable network, and is the partner of the far-Right Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. He was a recent addition to the White House press pool after Trump banned the Associated Press, took over control of access from the White House Correspondents’ Association, and hand-picked a number of supportive outlets from outside “legacy media”. It is frankly inconceivable that Glenn would ask such an aggressive question of a foreign dignitary without prior sanction from the very top, a suspicion intensified by the wink which Trump aimed at the reporter after his question.

As JD Vance escalated the argument, accusing Zelensky of disrespect and ingratitude, Trump weighed in with the same language as Rogan: “You’re gambling with World War Three!” The US president’s subsequent remark — “this is going to be great television” — was a pat on the back for his own orchestrated reality, casting a dignified Zelensky, attempting in a second language to correct untruths, in the role of a grifting ingrate. But a staged row, followed by a peremptory dismissal, is territory in which Trump feels comfortable: his long-running role in The Apprentice was his bridge to his first successful run at the presidency.

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There’s another parallel, too, with the way in which the Trump administration advances its aims: the coercive control of the domestic abuser. Such people are masters of the shifting multi-message: first charming, then cruel; gaslighting, insulting and complimenting; denying things they said, and keeping the more vulnerable person invested with promises of a future together, while chipping away at their external friendships and sense of self. This is not a comparison that should offend the administration, since members of Trump’s circle apparently helped facilitate the flight to the US from Romania of the misogynist online influencer Andrew Tate, who has often boasted about pimping and abusing women, and is being investigated in the UK for rape and human trafficking. The action has sparked outrage from the Republican governor of Florida, where Tate arrived.

An idea common to many victims of abuse, at least for a time, is that if you only play the abusers’ tightening game very carefully, you will be all right where others aren’t. Keep smiling, give him all the things he likes, speak softly, don’t wind him up. Something of this can be spotted in commentary about Zelensky: he should have humored Trump and Vance, critics say, instead of trying to correct their false assertions. But to argue this is to miss the point. Starmer’s visit went well largely because the Trump team wanted it to, and Zelensky’s imploded for the same reason.

The supposed offense given by Zelensky will be used as an excuse to further sideline Ukraine from a future US-Russia deal. Trump’s performative exasperation — “America will not put up with it for much longer!” — has already been used to suspend US military arms to Ukraine, and to press Zelensky into a minerals deal without a security guarantee. It should not go unnoticed that Musk’s new demand is that the US should leave NATO.

There is a warning here for Britain. It is time to wake up from the last woozy traces of anesthetic concerning the historic “special relationship” with a clear-eyed understanding of the malign profundity of the change in Washington. Even as the UK’s survival strategy is under construction, it really needs to start reading the multi-message.

Secrets, lies and half-truths, too, have always been part of government, and under discussion in the press. This was true even in the postwar years where there was a relatively greater culture of public deference towards politicians. It was, after all, the legendary 20th-century Times journalist Louis Heren who wrote: “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’” Yet the act of exposing a politician for lying had its own rules of engagement. The traditional avenue for an allegation was generally via the British press and broadcast media, which exposed it to editorial scrutiny, the attention of lawyers and a significant degree of financial and reputational risk for the accuser. It could even lead to a judicial or public inquiry.

The operations of the British “legacy media” have of course not been an unbroken chain of good behavior, but there has nonetheless been some framework of accountability. Regulatory bodies such as the Press Complaints Commission and, after 2014, the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) rein in press operations, along with libel laws and, when necessary, the police and criminal courts. A number of British tabloid journalists went to jail over the phone-hacking scandal. As a last resort, the public could boycott a publication, and inflict lasting commercial pain: Liverpudlians were so incensed by The Sun’s front-page coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy — a splash egregiously entitled “The Truth” which wrongly blamed fans for the disaster in which 97 people died — that sales in Merseyside remain very low even today.

Yet online, this system for restraining or punishing the most extreme false allegations has now been sharply eroded. The overheating, unchecked rhetoric of rumor and smear is a swelling presence in modern British politics, and there is every likelihood of it intensifying. In recent months, much of it has been directed personally at Keir Starmer, and already it has begun to warp and destabilize British democracy itself.

Some of the elements in this contemporary collapse were introduced decades ago. The rise of celebrity culture in the Nineties and Noughties, along with a plethora of magazines that detailed every supermarket trip and gym visit of a cast of briefly famous characters, attuned the public to a heightened churn of gossip. When newspapers entered the game, most notably with MailOnline’s “Sidebar of Shame”, the primary focus remained on figures from the entertainment industry — but the appetite for gorging on fast-moving trivia had been created.

The advent of social media in the early 2010s then further accelerated the circulation of both hearsay and personal vituperation. This time, self-righteous fury entered the equation. For a period, X became the chief conduit for the policing of acceptable speech, with perceived transgressors singled out as objects of outrage by a “progressive” online mob. The effect could be personally devastating: in one early Twitter storm, in 2015, hysteria was unleashed upon the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Tim Hunt for making some silly passing remarks — which he meant to be humorous — about women in science labs. During that same speech, he had also actively exhorted women to enter science as a career. He was nonetheless asked to resign from his role at University College London, as well as several other research positions. A growing nervousness spread throughout institutions, particularly academia and publishing, that any digression from a progressive-approved line on issues such as sexism, racism or trans rights could be career-threatening.

Then came the 2016 Brexit vote, which sparked a series of political crises that made normal, day-to-day governance extremely difficult. The survivor of Conservative Party dramas emerged as Boris Johnson, perhaps the first prime minister to envision politics — as he had journalism — primarily as a form of entertainment. He kept the British public supplied with an excess of narrative and a paucity of workable policy. Truth and public trust were casualties of his premiership: the “Partygate” revelations appeared to confirm that there was one rule for the political classes and quite another for ordinary citizens. Louis Heren’s maxim had rarely seemed so apposite.

This was the state of the nation when Elon Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in October 2022. The prospect of libel payments didn’t daunt him: by December 2024, he was the first person in the world to have attained an estimated net worth of over $400 billion. From a technical rather than a media background, he had long demonstrated no awareness of any responsibility to restrain his speech or accusations, either on the grounds of accuracy or civic responsibility. Confronted with anyone who offended his mercurial sensibility, his instinct was to trash-talk, escalate and inflame. He had already emerged unscathed after one defamation case in 2019, in which he dubbed Vernon Unsworth, a cave diver who bluntly dismissed Musk’s intervention in a cave rescue plan, “pedo guy”. Unsworth, not surprisingly, sued. But he lost: Musk had accepted that the slur was baseless, but managed to convince the US jury that in South Africa, where he grew up, “pedo guy” was just a regular insult without specific connotations. Unsworth’s lawyer said afterwards that the verdict had sent a signal “that you can make any accusation you want to, as vile as it may be and as untrue as it may be, and somebody can get away with it”. The observation was prophetic.

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Since securing his close alliance with Donald Trump — and the apparent license to do exactly what he wants — Musk has heightened his explicitly political interference in the governance of other countries. In Britain at least, he inherited a user base that was already receptive to gossip, accustomed to intemperate expressions of online rage, and with a post-Covid, post-Johnson collapse of trust in politicians. Musk took things further. By ceasing moderation on X, he has permitted a constant wash of unverified rumor to ebb and flow over Labour politicians, leaving a stain behind even as it recedes. In the aftermath of the horrific Southport killings, the rumor mill began working overtime among Right-wing accounts, grinding “I know something you don’t know” in numerous different styles. In response to some of the false accusations about the killer which helped to trigger riots in the streets and attacks on police officers and mosques, Musk posted: “Civil war is inevitable.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage went so far as to speculate in a video that “the truth is being withheld from us”.

In early January this year, Musk began vociferously tweeting about what he called “the Pakistani-ancestry grooming gangs” scandal in Rotherham, Rochdale and other towns, which stretched from the late Eighties until 2013. His tweets on the topic were mixed up with expressions of support for Reform UK and far-Right activist Tommy Robinson, who is currently in prison for contempt of court. On 3 January, Musk posted: “Starmer was responsible for the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.” This wild statement was not only wholly unfounded, but a brazen inversion of the actual truth. While many in authority do bear culpability, most notably the local police and councils, those most closely involved in the story say that Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, was instrumental in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Andrew Norfolk, the former Times reporter who spent years exposing the crimes, said: “I want to put the record straight on this. It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.”

At this point, one might reasonably have expected British politicians of all parties to unite in some kind of staunch defense of actual evidence and objective truth. Chillingly, that did not happen. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, in tandem with Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, has developed a habit of using Musk’s lines of argument as political ammunition. Not only did she taunt Starmer in the Commons with a petition — boosted by Musk — calling for the Prime Minister to resign, but she and Jenrick both fed the X-based rumor factory by publicly hinting that there were important facts the public was not being told concerning the Southport case.

Those British politicians who are tempted to hitch a ride on Musk’s bandwagon, rather than defend the honest ground of political opposition, might heed the warnings from history. In the early days of the French Revolution, for example, a sudden explosion in newspaper titles and a collapse in regulation created a febrile, sparring press that might almost be seen as an early prototype of X. Between July and December 1789 alone, a total of 250 newspapers sprang up for public consumption, each vigorously competing in the battle for attention. While many were vehicles for astute debate and analysis, they also became mouthpieces for various factions, promoting denunciations against political rivals. Sometimes, claims carried a measure of truth; often, they didn’t. The thickening atmosphere of violence and suspicion began to exert its own dynamic force upon society.

Smears were used as a way of hobbling troublesome rivals. The radical newspaper editor Jean-Paul Marat helped to finish off the career of firebrand activist priest Jacques Roux by falsely alleging that he was a “venal intriguer” whose real name was the Abbé Renaudi. The lawyer and journalist Camille Desmoulins destroyed the reputation of a former friend, Jacques Pierre Brissot, in a scathing pamphlet called “Brissot Unmasked”. When he saw Brissot later being sentenced to death, he reportedly cried in remorse: “My god, I’m sorry for this!” When Maximilien Robespierre backed the Law of 22 Prairial in June 1794, rumor and accusation became the only things needed to secure a conviction, since the suspect’s right to a defense had been discarded. Most of the newspapers which had fed debate had been shut down and silenced, one by one. Marat, Roux, Brissot and Desmoulins were all dead.

The separation of accusation from verifiable evidence, or from any potential restraints upon the accuser, is a dangerous game that rarely ends well. It is even more disturbing when regularly practiced by the US President’s right-hand man. To play along with it for temporary political advantage — helping to dissolve the very principles that have reliably underpinned the British parliamentary and justice system — is to play with fire. The rise of rumor is closely related to the collapse of objective truth, and the slide of political systems from rational persuasion of the electorate to a feverish struggle for domination. Musk’s revolution, one way or another, will devour its children.

The atmosphere is becoming a little feverish: according to Le Figaro, festival organisers are assembling a crisis management team, in the belief that 10 high-profile directors and actors may be publicly denounced at Cannes. It is said that the list of names has already been sent anonymously to organisations that finance French films.

A long-standing omertà — as many refer to it — over the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse in France’s creative industries has finally been broken, and some of the most respected cultural figures of the post-1968 era are in the firing line. The most recognisable of them is Depardieu, who in the last few years has seemed to stagger from scandal to controversy without a pause. Last December, his personal reputation seemed to hit a new low with the screening of a French documentary, Depardieu: The Fall of the Ogre.

The film showed footage of the actor in North Korea in 2018, invited there on a celebratory jolly to mark the 70th anniversary of the dictatorship. Depardieu was relaxed, on good form: he could scarcely encounter a young woman without blurting out sexual comments, a kind of ongoing chatter between himself and his libido, with constant references to his genitals — “I’ve got a beam in my pants!” — her genitals, and the attributes of both. A visit to an equestrian centre sparked a stream-of-consciousness reflection on the sexual pleasure women allegedly get from riding horses, which managed to include a passing 10-year-old girl. His female interpreter, compelled to accompany this honoured Gallic guest of the regime, tried to stay smiling and polite. In North Korea even more than in most places, I imagine, she really didn’t feel she had much choice.

Depardieu was there with his friend, the author and film-maker Yann Moix, a winner of several French literary prizes who crashed into the Anglo-Saxon consciousness in 2019, aged 50, when he said that women over 50 were “too, too old” to love. Equally unbearable, romantically speaking, were “white western” women, he said: in fact, he now preferred dating young Asian women. The predictable outrage had ensued, followed by Moix’s equally predictable defence of the freedom to state one’s preferences and predilections. But compared to Depardieu, Moix was a junior league sexual troll. On the North Korean trip, sometimes he looked a bit anxious. “You picked the short straw with Gérard!” he told the interpreter, in what may have been a stab at empathy. In the end he had chosen not to screen the film he initially meant to make about their trip: it is only glimpsed here, in clips.

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The Fall of the Ogre detailed a number of accusations of sexual assault against Depardieu, on film sets where other crew members had allegedly responded with laughter or turning a blind eye. “That’s Gérard!” people used to say. Another young woman, Charlotte Arnould, who had thought of him as a friend of the family, accused him of sexual assault and rape when she was 22. Questions were raised over earlier press interviews, in which Depardieu suggested he had participated in rapes in his famously delinquent youth, in Chateauroux in central France. The first remark was in Film Comment magazine, in 1978, when he said: “I had plenty of rapes, too many to count.” In 1990, an interviewer from Time magazine asked the actor to clarify whether he had indeed taken part in rape, and he replied, “Yes. But it was absolutely normal in those circumstances. That was part of my childhood.” A column in The Washington Post expressed outrage, but Depardieu said he had been mistranslated, and denied raping anyone. Back then, France had shrugged its collective shoulders.

The actor’s one-time agent Jean-Louis Livi gave a telling response in the documentary. “I know Gerard Depardieu,” he said, “He is neither a rapist nor a predator. He’s a monster, yes. But he’s also a sacred monster. He’s a monument.” It’s an interesting series of statements to unpack. First, a flat and decisive denial: “He is neither a rapist nor a predator.” Then, a disarming admission: “He’s a monster, yes”. But if Depardieu is indeed a “monster”, then how did it manifest itself, precisely what kind of monster was he? No matter: a “sacred” one, apparently, too big and legendary to attack, his talent, whims and eccentricities placing him beyond restraint or criticism; a “monument” to French culture, in fact, to the very idea of France. Attack Depardieu, and you are attacking France itself.

It’s a notion which goes right to the top. When President Macron was asked about the actor, following the screening of The Fall of an Ogre, Depardieu was already under formal investigation for rape. Macron said, correctly, that the judicial process should be allowed to take its course, and Depardieu be presumed innocent until proven guilty. But then he added: “I’m a great admirer of Depardieu; he’s an immense actor…a genius of his art. He has made France known across the whole world. And, I say this as a president and as a citizen, he makes France proud.”

That statement of solidarity — “he makes France proud” — triggered fury in French feminists and Left-wing politicians. Yet it also missed the essential point, perhaps deliberately. No-one, even Depardieu’s accusers, has ever questioned his talent as an actor. It’s clear that he brings something exceptional to the screen, a kind of primal energy, an instinctive and restless intelligence which may indeed be partly related to the survival skills honed during his rough upbringing, spent in petty criminality and the hectic flouting of middle-class norms. The question now being asked is whether his status in French cinema should place his alleged harassment, assault and possibly even rape of women beyond social condemnation and the reach of the law.

That question doesn’t only pertain to Depardieu: it goes to the heart of the French cultural establishment. For a long time it was tacitly accepted in French culture that the celebration of male genius and creative self-expression took precedence over the sexual boundaries of women, and sometimes those of children. When #MeToo exploded in America, France stood apart for a time, wary of a spate of denunciations and cancellations. But then stories from French women themselves started to emerge. They were fuelled by a pent-up, long-held female anger at male abuses which had long operated under the cover of a seductive idea of a liberal French culture that was proudly distinct from the punitive, uptight mores of the Anglosphere. Many of them circled painful questions of age and consent.

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Consent was, in fact, the title of the 2020 memoir by Vanessa Springora, a prominent French writer and editor, who said that she had been abused as a teenager between the ages of 14 and 16 by the well-known author Gabriel Matzneff, then aged 50. He first began having sex with her when she was 14, after they met at a dinner party, and thereafter she became his “girlfriend” or his “muse”. Matzneff was open about his preferences for very young girls and boys: in 1974 he published a pamphlet called “The Under-16s” which included lines such as “to sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure”. In another book, in the Eighties, he detailed his sexual experiences in the Philippines with boys aged between eight and 14. For decades, such unabashed revelations did nothing to threaten Matzneff’s apparently secure place within the cultural establishment.

Reputational risk, where it existed, seemed not to await those who pursued children for sex, but those who challenged them. When, in 1990, Matzneff appeared on a French literary chat show, the host quizzed him playfully about his penchant for very young girls, and the author began to expand confidently upon his theme. There was one strongly dissenting voice, however: a French-Canadian novelist called Denise Bombardier, who attacked his behaviour “an abuse of power”, remarking that “literature cannot serve as an alibi”. For this, she was roundly derided by a number of French intellectuals: the late author and critic Phillippe Sollers called her a “bitch”. Her publisher explicitly warned her that “your future as a writer in France will be compromised”; Le Monde, she said later, never afterwards published another article about her books.

The late Bombardier has been vindicated by history, but the elderly Matzneff cuts a disgraced figure: his books have been pulled from shops, and he was stripped of the state aid given to writers. He might be forgiven a degree of confusion at his current pariah status, however, if only because at one time his world-view had so many friends. When he wrote a letter to Le Monde in 1977, arguing that under-age children should be permitted in law to consent to sex with adults, it was co-signed by such luminaries as Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

As Springora did with publishing, Judith Godrèche has now placed a stick of gelignite under the French film industry. At the age of 14, she said, she became the “girlfriend” of the then 39-year-old arthouse director Benoit Jacquot, with whom she stayed until the age of 20. She describes a strange relationship: she was never actually attracted to him, she said, and yet she became his “child-wife”, initially over-awed by his aura of worldly success, his encompassing control, and, she alleged, his domestic violence. The odd thing was, she says, that none of the adults around her seemed to treat it as at all abnormal. In fact, she attracted another adult predator, she alleged, in a situation tolerated by Jacquot: when the film director Jacques Doillon was directing her, at 15, in a film called La Fille de 15 Ans Godrèche says he sexually assaulted her on two occasions, once at the home he shared with the English actress Jane Birkin.

A common theme is of children who felt confused and abandoned by the code of the grown-ups around them. In 2021 Camille Kouchner published a book which revealed that her step-father had regularly sexually abused her twin brother when he was just 14 years old. Her step-father was Olivier Duhamel, a prominent intellectual and politician. Her mother, Evelyne Pisier, was a star of the French Left: a well-known feminist and political scientist who had a four-year affair with Fidel Castro. The family was stylish, wealthy and well-connected: its members prided themselves on not being “prudes”. Boundaries were so far sunk under the concept of “freedom” that the twins at first didn’t know how to process their stepfather’s behaviour. Camille’s brother told her, “I don’t know if we should be angry”. When they finally told their mother, she supported her husband.

Each set of allegations is specific to its case, and the individuals concerned: it is important not to conflate them. But nonetheless there are certain themes common to the culture in which French women have been steeped. The career of Serge Gainsbourg, the famously louche balladeer whom President Mitterrand called “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire” is a case in point. While no-one has suggested that Gainsbourg crossed a line privately, his public persona knowingly toyed with the transgressive charge associated with under-age sex: Lemon Incest, which he sang with his then 12-year-old daughter Charlotte, was an ambiguous paean to father-daughter love; his album “The Ballad of Melody Nelson” is about the adult narrator’s sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl. France seemed to agree that Gainsbourg was shocking, charming, sexy, a great seducer. Certainly, his talent was undeniable. But by the end, his provocations looked increasingly crass: a drunken Gainsbourg on a French chat show, pawing the hair of a young, startled Whitney Houston while mumbling “I want to ferk yeu”.

For men such as Matzneff and Jacquot, however, it is not simply that society affected not to look. It did look, and it approved. In fashionable Parisian circles, the ability to seduce and parade the very young was a status-enhancer, signalling a man’s cultural power. Crashing through barriers in plain sight was the sign of a bohemian risk-taker, sanctioned by the spirit of rebellion.

Now the erstwhile objects of that quest for sexual freedom have grown up, and are interrogating who owned the freedom in the first place. They are often women in their forties and fifties, bent on protecting a younger generation, asking why they received no protection from adults themselves. They are pointing out that the concept of sexual freedom, so prized both by strands of the French Revolution and the soixante-huitards, is not owned equally, but heavily subject to status and context. The “freedom” of the child was never remotely equivalent to the freedom of the adult, nor that of the star equivalent to that of the extra on set, paid by the day. That may not invalidate art, but it does place boundaries on the artist. At Cannes, and elsewhere, France’s age of the sacred monster is coming to an end.

At this, the newspapers were soon in uproar. The prime minister David Cameron called the comments “completely misguided and completely wrong” and the Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed they were “pretty offensive”. Mantel doggedly refused to back down, saying that her remarks had been twisted out of context, and that she was in fact writing with sympathy about the perceptions that are forcefully projected on to royal women, the cage in which they are held to be goggled at. That was true, but also perhaps not the entire truth, for there was still a perceptible trace of authorial vinegar in the portrait: which of us would be happy to learn, even in sympathy, that we were held at low risk for “the emergence of character”?

Royals are public as well as private figures, of course, and authors are free to hang intellectual ideas on them to try out, as designers do with clothes. Yet while much of the lecture was sharply perceptive, I didn’t agree with the portrait of Kate. That word “selected” had rendered her passive, when in fact her behaviour thus far had suggested both an active intelligence and an unusual degree of self-discipline. The context of her entry into “The Firm” was different from that of other royal brides. Unlike Diana, who had barely emerged from the fractured chrysalis of her troubled aristocratic family when she first met the much older, more worldly Prince Charles, Kate was a contemporary of Prince William’s at the University of St Andrews. Her family background, which appeared warm and supportive, was comfortably middle-class. She seemed generally cheerful and unruffled, even when the press was at the barbed peak of its “Waity Katie” hysteria, trying to goad Prince William into a proposal or abandonment.

After the wedding, in her approach to royal duties, she clearly took the role she had inherited with marriage seriously. The royal whose attitude her own most resembled was the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had long understood the essential nature of the job: to turn up to public events looking the part, intuit precisely what was needed — gravitas, fun, consolation or reassurance — and deliver it while keeping one’s personal emotions on the back burner. This is what a monarchy demands, and the ability to act as an impeccable interpreter of the public mood, year after year, is a particular and testing art. A few have a natural aptitude for it, but most of us do not, and would quickly find its scrutiny and restrictions intolerable.

Grace under consistent pressure is an admirable quality. Were a ballet dancer to execute a string of flawless performances, or a pilot to conduct numerous flights without incident, it would not be deemed evidence of an absence of character: quite the opposite. Yet in Kate — especially for those who increasingly conduct their lives online — serene self-possession seems to drive a proportion of onlookers insane: what lurks behind it, what dark secret is waiting to destroy it, how best might it be disrupted? The uncomfortable truth is that what many people deeply crave in a young and beautiful royal wife and mother is not competence, but crack-up.

The increasingly bizarre treatment of Kate, or the idea of Kate, is connected to the most dominant phenomenon of our age: a cultural prioritising of drama over duty. The supply of drama has spilled beyond the confines of the novel, theatre, cinema or television to become a commodity on which our public figures are judged. When Mantel spoke of Kate’s apparent absence of emerging “character” she was assessing her primarily through the hungry eyes of a novelist. In books, central female characters often generate dramatic tension by chafing against their circumstances, by the intensifying dazzle of their discontents, something that Kate refused to transmit. In contrast, Mantel described Diana as a “carrier of myth”: Diana, publicly trapped in the disappointments of her marriage, certainly carried more plot twists than any author had a right to expect. Unfortunately for her, the final one was her shockingly premature death.

Set against this artistic conception of “character” — distinctive qualities or flaws that, one way or another, deliver drama — is the societal judgement “of good character”, meaning someone who is broadly reliable and respected in relation to their behaviour to others. In recent years the electorate, in line with Neil Postman’s warning in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, has proved increasingly ready to select the former over the latter, even to the marked detriment of our civic health. The former prime minister Boris Johnson instinctively understood it as his job not to deliver the detail of workable policy, but to satisfy the public’s appetite for story: “People live by narrative,” he once told UnHerd’s Tom McTague. In the US, Donald Trump — that relentless generator of low mockery and high fury — is now running for a second term as president, after his first one ended in his supporters storming the Capitol building.

Men are often permitted to survive the frantic generation of drama: it is everyone around them who suffers. Yet women — in art and life — have a greater tendency to be destroyed by it. There is no strutting female equivalent of the male “hellraiser”, but rather a woman who, soaked in the crocodile tears of the tabloids, is tragically “causing concern” among friends. Art and its audiences have always relished the restless struggle and disintegration of female characters who are, or become, unmoored from the harbour of marriage and children. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — her imagination inflamed by reading novels — is bored with her marriage and disenchanted with motherhood; she seeks solace in affairs and excessive spending, the consequences of which hasten her suicide. Zola’s Nana, a courtesan who ruthlessly captivates Parisian society, has her beguiling face eaten away by smallpox. Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, immolated on their blazing talent, are hung posthumously high in the musical hall of fame, next to Sylvia Plath in the poetry section and Marilyn Monroe in cinema.

In Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, a middle-aged English woman called Sasha Jansen, mourning an unhappy marriage and a dead child, finds herself in Paris, a vulnerable drifter seeking solace from stray men. Rhys herself, who died at 88 after a precarious but surprisingly long life, had much in common with her literary creations. As the writer and editor Diana Athill crisply put it: “Jean was absolutely incapable of living, life was just hopelessly beyond her. When she was young, she floated from man to man in a hopeless way… by the time she was old, she floated from kind woman to kind woman.”

In Rhys’s latter years — hard-drinking, irascible and impoverished — Athill and a small group of female friends formed what they called “The Jean Rhys Committee” which met regularly to ask “what should we do next?”. Rhys’s claim to such loyalty, I suppose, was the weight of her literary talent, her ability to exert an odd kind of fascination, and the fortunate soft-heartedness of her friends. The dramatic collided with the dutiful, and was kept alive by it.

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From what I can see, the Princess of Wales exists at the opposite end of the feminine spectrum from Jean Rhys. Pinned firmly in place by her royal obligations, her wealth, her marriage and three children, she belongs to the realm of the respectable and dutiful rather than the erratic and dramatic. She is not a “character” in the artistic sense, nor does she desire to be, but both a survivor and upholder of an institution: hers is the territory of the prompt thank-you note, the kept promise, the commitment to public service, the uncomplicated pleasure in children, the stoic endurance of difficult times in the hope that better ones will come along soon. The public senses an emotional solidity in her, and it is partly why she is held in broad esteem. In this age of insistent self-definition, duty to others might be an unfashionable concept, but it is nonetheless one that keeps families and institutions from chaos and collapse.

With the advent of the internet, however, anyone with a keyboard can become a form of author, with the freedom to insert a toxic form of drama into real-life situations. What was extraordinary, during the Princess of Wales’s recent health problems, is how speedily and carelessly such speculations overrode the bounds of decency. It was already known that she had undergone major abdominal surgery, and was taking time to recover. And yet — egged on by the participation of silly celebrities and malicious US comedians — conspiracy theories about cosmetic surgery and affairs and nervous breakdowns spread like knotweed. According to social-media researchers, these were also vigorously introduced and amplified by fake accounts set up on Twitter and TikTok, some associated with Russia-linked disinformation eager to spread the termites of mistrust and doubt in Western institutions. Only the Princess of Wales’s revelation of cancer, which carries a testing drama all its own, served to shut up the majority of them.

Unlike these callous gossips, Mantel recognised her own complicity in dehumanising royalty. Upon encountering the late Queen, the novelist said: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.” The Queen looked back at her, she said, briefly hurt. Mantel warned of the way in which “cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty” precisely as it has done in recent weeks. Her talk concluded with a prescient instruction for those who comprehend monarchy mainly as a source of entertainment: “I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”

In the midst of treatment and recovery, the most hitherto stable of royal women could be forgiven a keen sense of injustice: her job description, it seems, must now include the ability to weather the online public’s fits of brutish mania for drama. With its contempt for duty, and its savage appetite for story, it is hungry to chew up far more than just the Princess of Wales.

Mr Hand was at first informed that his daughter had been killed, then told by the Israeli army that they now believe Emily is in fact alive and being held in Gaza. He appealed to Hamas at least to release its child hostages, to “have some humanity, some pity”. His daughter turned nine without him last Friday: he must now pin his hopes on the successful outcome of the newly forged hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.

On a brief trip to Ireland recently, Mr Hand appealed to Irish politicians for any help they could give. Both the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Tánaiste Micheál Martin pledged their support in the strongest possible terms. Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Féin, also expressed sympathy, saying that “the trauma and heartbreak being endured by this family is unbearable. I reiterate my condemnation of the taking of hostages and again reiterate our clear demand that hostages be released immediately”.

There is considerable sympathy in Ireland for Mr Hand’s situation, even as the public is appalled by the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza. But the plight of a young Hamas hostage of Irish-Israeli heritage is delicate territory for Sinn Féin. It has long been highly vocal about the Palestinian cause, and has had a number of contacts with Hamas over the years with an ostensible view to “furthering the peace process”. In 2020, for example, Sinn Féin hosted an online event — introduced by Mary Lou McDonald — featuring Palestinian speakers, including representatives of Fatah and Hamas. They included Dr Basem Naim, Hamas’s head of international relations, who joined from Gaza. Following the events of October 7, it was Naim who repeatedly told a clearly flabbergasted Sky interviewer that Hamas hadn’t killed any Israeli civilians.

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Even as news was first leaking out about the horrors Hamas had enacted upon Israeli civilians, Sinn Féin’s youth wing, Ógra Shinn Féin, was assiduously tweeting about the historic crimes of Israel. Ms McDonald has herself condemned the Hamas attack, but has repeatedly called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, Dana Erlich, over Israel’s bombing of Gaza. At the annual Sinn Féin party conference earlier this month, the Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid, was met with a standing ovation and shouts of “Free Palestine!”.

Yet this tension runs deeper, too. While McDonald is no doubt sincere in her calls for Emily Hand’s return, the past activities of the Provisional IRA, and her own role in commemorating and defending the organisation, cast an ineradicable shadow over present events. On October 9, she said that “the targeting of civilians and the taking of hostages is to be condemned outright”.

But is it? Not, it seems, if targeting civilians, taking high-profile hostages, or simply “disappearing” people has been sanctioned by the IRA Army Council.

It is unfortunate timing for McDonald that the detail and consequences of PIRA tactics in the Seventies and Eighties are very much in the news recently. Last Saturday, the Irish businessman Ben Dunne Jr, the former director of Dunne’s Stores, died aged 74. Prominent Irish politicians spoke warmly of the deceased: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described him as “larger than life”; McDonald tweeted that her “thoughts are with his beloved family”. It’s fair to say Sinn Féin’s thoughts weren’t primarily with his family back in October 1981, when Mr Dunne was abducted by masked IRA gunmen on his way to open a new supermarket in Co. Armagh; he was released a week later, reportedly after the payment of a very large ransom.

Compared to many other IRA kidnappings, however, Dunne’s had a happy ending. Many others didn’t, not least for the families damaged irrevocably by their trail of violence. A new book, The Kidnapping, by the Irish journalists Tommy Conlon and Ronan McGreevy, tells the grimly dramatic story of the IRA abduction of the Quinnsworth supermarket executive Don Tidey in November 1983. Mr Tidey was driving his 13-year-old daughter Susan to school near his Co. Dublin home when he was flagged down by someone he thought was a policeman. In fact, it was an IRA man, whose associates shoved young Susan Tidey to the side of the road — along with her brother Alistair, who was driving the car behind — and abducted Mr Tidey at gunpoint, seeking a £5 million sterling ransom.

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By Aris Roussinos

Garda intelligence eventually tracked his IRA captors down to a place called Derrada Wood in Co. Leitrim and mounted a rescue operation. During it, two agents of the state were killed by the IRA: Gary Sheehan, a 23-year-old trainee Garda, and Patrick Kelly, a 35-year-old Irish Army soldier and father of four. The eldest of Private Kelly’s sons, David, later described the catastrophic effect of his father’s murder upon the family: his vulnerable mother remarried a controlling man who took them all to England, where they endured poverty and domestic violence: “we had fallen a long way in a short few years.”

In 2020, McDonald said of the IRA’s violence: “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign.” David Kelly then asked her to condemn his father’s murder outright: when pressed, she owned that particular IRA killing, of an Irish soldier, was “wrong”.

Which killings, then, were right? Sinn Féin culture — which McDonald plays an enthusiastic role in upholding — is one of frequent, sentimental commemorations for “fallen volunteers” whose deeds are clothed in hazy euphemisms of “liberation struggle” and “active service”. It falls to others to document the brutal generational trauma which PIRA visited on the families of its victims.

Among the most harrowing are those cases in which an abduction was simply followed by silence, causing untold agony for relatives. Last week, the sixth search for Columba McVeigh was called off after failing yet again to uncover his burial site. Columba was a 19-year-old Catholic boy from Co. Tyrone abducted by the IRA in 1975: the IRA spread rumours that he was an informer, which his family has strongly denied. But love is stubborn, and for nearly 24 years after he disappeared, his mother Vera clung to the hope that he was still alive. She and his father bought Christmas and birthday presents for Columba every year, in case he came home. Then, in 1999, the IRA at last admitted that their son was one of the “disappeared” whom it had murdered and secretly buried in unmarked graves. Vera died in 2007 without ever knowing where Columba’s body was.

Thomas Niedermayer was another civilian who never returned home, after two men knocked on his Belfast front door just after Christmas in 1973, saying there had been an accident involving his car. His daughter Renate answered the door and fetched her father, who went out in his house slippers to take a closer look at the problem. As the recent documentary Face Down by the Irish director Gerry Gregg searingly records, it was the last time anyone in the family saw Niedermayer alive.

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A married father of two daughters, Niedermayer was the well-respected German director of the Grundig plant in West Belfast, employing both Catholic and Protestant workers. Unluckily for him, the factory shop steward for a time — with whom, his former secretary recalls, he occasionally clashed — was a man called Brian Keenan. By 1971, Keenan was the quartermaster of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA. It appears he bore a grudge towards his former boss.

No one outside the IRA knew what had happened to Niedermayer, or who had taken him. His wife kept pleading to know his whereabouts, but myriad false rumours — deliberately planted — swirled around her husband’s disappearance, talk of affairs and gun-running. Then, seven years after he had vanished, thanks to a tip-off from an IRA informer, his body was discovered by police, buried face down in a fly-tipping site in Belfast’s Colin Glen.  

The plan had been masterminded by Keenan, the informer said. It was intended to use Niedermayer as a bargaining chip with the British government for the return to Northern Ireland from England of the IRA bombers Marian and Dolours Price. On the third day of captivity, however, Niedermayer had made an escape attempt and was so brutally beaten by his captors that he died.

Much of Face Down is narrated by Niedermayer’s brave and dignified granddaughters, Tanya Williams-Powell and Rachel Williams-Powell. They are the only ones left to tell the story, because the murder took an almost unimaginable toll on the family. Mr Niedermayer’s wife Ingeborg, and their daughters Renate and Gabriele, all took their own lives by different means in the years after his death. So too did Gabriele’s husband Robin, in 1999.

The architect of the kidnapping, Brian Keenan, lasted quite a bit longer. In the IRA his tactical ruthlessness led him to be regarded as a figure of immense authority. He certainly seemed to impress the up-and-coming Mary Lou McDonald, eager to bolster her republican credentials after arriving in Sinn Féin from Fianna Fáil. In 2003, she appeared publicly alongside him at a commemoration for Sean Russell, an IRA man who died of a gastric ulcer in 1940 while on a German U-boat, having requested and received assistance from Nazi Germany to mount a proposed invasion of Northern Ireland. In 2008, after Keenan died from cancer, McDonald carried the coffin at his funeral. He is commemorated annually, with party members encouraged to join the Brian Keenan Mountain Challenge, a Sinn Féin fundraising walk.

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With Sinn Féin now the largest party in Ireland, there is a distinct possibility that McDonald could be Taoiseach after the next election: her brand of confident outspokenness and vigorous indignation on grass-roots issues appeals to that large section of the Irish electorate which is disenchanted with the failings of the political old guard.

Yet the memory of Provisional IRA violence cannot be consigned to the past — as many would no doubt wish — in large part because Sinn Féin doesn’t want that to happen. The party is not interested in apology: it doesn’t crave forgiveness, but vindication. It doesn’t wish to forget Provisional IRA violence so much as to rewrite it, to repackage what was brutal, heart-breaking and squalid as something radical, exciting and heroic to a generation that never experienced the reality of the Troubles.

In so doing, Sinn Féin is steadily propelling the Republic of Ireland towards a kind of heightened internal battle of self-definition. There can be no easy reconciliation between those who seek to document Ireland’s gritty reality and those who energetically promote Sinn Féin doctrine: the portrait of the Provisional IRA and the Troubles that arises from The Kidnapping and Face Down is simply incompatible with the Sinn Féin narrative in which Gerry Adams or the late Brian Keenan are morally unimpeachable Irish patriots. And so the argument has become no longer simply about what Ireland does, but what Ireland is. Who is the true guardian of the nation’s identity: those who would commemorate the late Irish soldier Patrick Kelly, or those who would honour the organisation that killed him?

One can sense this deepening anxiety in the statements of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael leaders. In September, after watching Face Down, Micheál Martin said that Sinn Féin was “infecting a new generation of young people” by “trying to triumphalise the horrible deeds” of the Provisional IRA. Leo Varadkar said recently that the idea of a Sinn Féin justice, foreign affairs or defence minister was “repugnant to me” given the party’s refusal to “acknowledge war crimes that may have happened in this country”. That is unusually strong language to use about an opposition party in a Western democracy, but the rift it signifies will only grow more intense. Part of that will be because — as we see now with the Middle East — the debate around other conflicts persists in holding up a mirror to Ireland’s past.

Still, who could ever have guessed that the treble-winner of The Sun “Shagger of the Year” award — the self-confessed owner of a “Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory thanks to the ol’ fame” — might stray into territory which the words “rape” and “assault” would feature? Of course, there was that 2015 Mail on Sunday interview with Brand’s ex-girlfriend, an articulate former model called Jordan Martin, in which she said that during their six-month relationship, in 2007, the star was controlling, verbally cruel and sexually assaulted her. She warned politicians such as Ed Miliband — recently interviewed by Brand — to stay away. But the wider media didn’t really want to hear. Exes, eh? And anyway, Brand was box-office: a quick-witted, motor-mouthed Essex Byron in a fright wig and skinny jeans who made scant secret of his predilections, although his rhetoric cleverly shunted them more towards the seaside-postcard end of sexuality: his helpless eagerness to service a non-stop parade of willing dolly birds — “different women three, four, five times a day. In Ireland, nine times a day” — which had intermittently landed him in the sex addiction clinic, alias “sex chokey” or “winky nick”.

There are no doubt numerous women for whom sex with Brand delivered more or less what was expected: a fleeting encounter with celebrity, and a longer-lasting anecdote. The details that emerged from the joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches, The Sunday Times and The Times, however, were grimmer and more shocking. One was of Brand pursuing a star-struck 16-year-old girl, Alice, now a regretful adult. At first, the fact of taking Alice’s virginity was enough to excite him, she said. Later, she alleged, his kick came from spitting in her mouth and compelling her to swallow it; or forcing her into oral sex until she punched her way free. Another woman said he raped her at his LA house, an allegation backed up by her visit to a rape crisis centre, and text exchanges in which she wrote “When a girl say(s) NO it means no” in response to which Brand apologised. Yet another woman — whom he met at AA and later worked with — described a sexual assault from Brand which she finally fought off, reportedly leaving him furious.

Dispatches is not a courtroom, of course, and Brand has not been found guilty of a crime. But, then, this type of incident often doesn’t make it to court, as both predators and victims are acutely aware. They unfurl in territory with which many women are nauseously familiar, but which a certain proportion of men seemingly struggle to see clearly or take seriously: situations in which a woman agreed to one sexual act but not another; or consented to sex on a previous occasion but not this time round. Situations in which a measure of trust is swiftly and starkly betrayed.

Brand, who denies the allegations of rape and assault, is now married with two children. He has created a bolt-hole from cancellation in his social media platforms, flanked by an army of 6.6 million followers on YouTube alone. From there he accuses the mainstream media, or “MSM”, of having “another agenda at play” and seeking to silence him for asking difficult questions about Big Pharma and other hot-button topics. Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson have already responded to the clarion call with sympathetic comments. Yet the truth is that Brand himself is a creature of the MSM, as he must know. Mainstream broadcasters and media built him up, flattered him, fawned over him and handed him the keys to the sexual “Wonka factory”. And if its previous record is anything to go by, his spell in what Brandspeak might dub “reputation chokey” may not last long.

A brief list of things that — by a kind of communal consensus — the media has ultimately found excusable in the past: John Peel’s penchant for sex with underage girls (broadcasting genius, and it was the Seventies). Bill Wyman’s sexual relationship with Mandy Smith, then 14 (he was a Rolling Stone, for god’s sake, and it was the Eighties). Jimmy Carr’s Channel 4 rape jokes, such as “what’s the difference between rape and football? Women don’t like football” (if you don’t like “spicy content’” don’t listen). Frankie Boyle’s rape jokes about female athletes, and foully relentless gags about the abducted child Madeleine McCann (ditto: anyway, Frankie’s ‘progressive’ now).

If you’ve been around long enough, however, some things stick in your mind — extraordinary pieces of moral blindness, enabled by the media. One came when Dylan Jones, then editor of GQ, commissioned the late A.A. Gill to write and direct a porn film. What could be more “outrageously funny”, as Jones recalled in 2016, than to see “the country’s best critic immersing himself in the seedy world of hardcore pornography”? Until you read it, that is. Perhaps wisely, the article itself no longer seems to be available online. But it’s included in a 2002 collection of Gill’s journalism. In his other pieces there is room for elegant flourishes of authorial compassion, but not here: the subject-matter — commercial sex — has blotted it out.

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Russell Brand's latest addiction

By Tanya Gold

The setting is LA, in 1999, and Gill is busy directing his own lurid script. In his own words, a half-Mexican girl called Clarissa – who is “very young and exceedingly nervous” – is being plastered with make-up for her scene, which is with the “truly, madly, deeply hideous” veteran porn actor Ron Jeremy. He’s “funny and he can act” but is considered so unattractive that Clarissa is getting “a $200 premium to do it with Ron”.

Clarissa’s wary of doing porn, but she’s “grateful for the money”. Why, we don’t know: Gill doesn’t ask. Perhaps he senses that her answer might spark the libido-killing onset of sympathy. This is only her second film, and so she isn’t really listening to Gill droning on quasi-ironically “about motivation and the Method”. Gill is contemptuous, describing her as “such a bad actress” and “not bright”. She is “horrified’ when she sees Ron, who — perhaps mercifully — can’t get an erection, and ends up masturbating on to Clarissa’s cheek. After this young girl finally leaves the set in distress, Gill — having orchestrated the entire grotesque scene — follows her out to ask “Are you all right?”. Ever the English gent.

A coda to the article: earlier this year — due to advancing dementia — Ron Jeremy was deemed incompetent to stand trial on serial charges of rape and sexual assault, involving 21 victims aged from 15 to 51. Allegations dated back to 1996, three years before the making of Gill’s Hot House Tales. The comments beneath the news reports were telling: many were sceptical, asking why Jeremy would “need” to do this, given the numerous sexual opportunities afforded by his work. They appeared unable to consider an alternative scenario: that Jeremy was so steeped in the mores of porn plots — and his own star status in the industry — that he had lost sight of any sexual boundaries, in particular those of consent.

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Northern Ireland's dangerous future

By Jenny McCartney

These real-life stories aren’t about sex, freely if recklessly exchanged in mutual appreciation: the happy, heady original vision of sexual liberation. Instead, to varying degrees, they’re about porn, ego, power, money, cruelty and humiliation. Some men saw the direction of travel early. In 2001, the novelist Martin Amis also travelled to an LA porn set, not to direct a movie but to write about the dynamics on set. Amis wasn’t exactly a feminist saint: he’d once cut a swathe through literary London, leaving women stung by his infidelities, and was sometimes accused of misogyny in his depiction of female characters. But he wrote about the performers with feeling, and in his brilliant and disturbing article “A Rough Trade” he recognised straightaway where the industry was headed: “the new element is violence”.

The thing that Amis feared most in porn’s endless pushing of boundaries to darker places, its taboo-breaking quest for the “polymorphous perverse”, was what it might speak to in the user: that it might draw out the inner “Mister Monster” in him, triggering arousal at something his value-system knew to be wrong. “Porno, it seems, is a parody of love,” he wrote, “It therefore addresses itself to love’s opposites, which are hate and death. ‘Choke her!’ ‘Spit inside me!’ ‘Break me!’”. Amis had perhaps more reason than most to contemplate where male lust, when fused to violence and cruelty, might take society in general and women in particular: in 1994 he discovered that his 21-year old cousin Lucy Partington, an English student missing for 20 years, had been murdered by the sexual abuser and serial killer Fred West.

In the years since Amis’s article, porn has indeed followed his prophecy. It’s more ubiquitous, more extreme and being absorbed in heavier concentrations at a much earlier age. A report by the Children’s Commissioner earlier this year found that young people were regularly exposed to content in which “pictures of degradation, sexual coercion, aggression and exploitation are commonplace, and disproportionately targeted at teenage girls”. Earlier this year, the Times journalist Helen Rumbelow wrote searingly about a day spent “watching what the kids are watching” on Pornhub. Of the 32 sites deemed “most popular in the UK”, 12 showed men being physically abusive to women, and 11 featured “pseudo-incest” between step-parents and adult step-children or step-siblings. One of the most popular categories is “teens”: in many videos, young-looking girls, officially over 18, are bound, frightened, or shown with restricted airways. It is deeply chilling to think that — barring actual murder — the stuff of mainstream porn is inching ever closer to the practices of 25 Cromwell Street.

There remain many adult men who instinctively understand the line between consent and its refusal, pleasure and abuse. But online porn culture does not, and its effects have already manifested themselves in real life: in a 2020 BBC Disclosure survey of 2,049 UK men aged between 18-39, 71% said they had slapped, choked, gagged or spat on their partner during consensual sex. One third of that percentage said they wouldn’t ask verbal consent for such acts, either before or during sex.

The 48-year-old Brand is perhaps unusual in his generation for the degree to which he was steeped early in prostitution and porn, starting with the stomach-churning way his father introduced him to sex as a teenager, hiring prostitutes for them both in their shared hotel room. But now hardcore porn is schooling children en masse through their smartphones, while much of the “mainstream media” long ago paved its way by demonstrating that — when it came to women, at least — boundaries of legality and taste could frequently be transgressed at no cost to career. Even as Dispatches puts its spotlight on Russell Brand, the painful reality is that future generations of young women will almost certainly experience much more of the behaviour the programme describes, not less. A.A. Gill and Martin Amis are both dead, but it was Amis who saw the danger and called it correctly. The genie’s out of the bottle: Mister Monster is everywhere.

Books of condolence were opened in numerous cities. Politicians from all sides voiced their deep regret. It moved the world, to see this representative of an apparently post-Troubles Northern Ireland — a young, gay, working-class Catholic woman with many Protestant friends — cut down by something that had darted out of the shadows to re-assert what many outsiders assumed had disappeared from the political scene: the fanatical pursuit of a united Ireland by means of violence.

Lyra herself hadn’t been much of a cheerleader for either side of the border argument: she wrote in 2014, “I don’t want a united Ireland or a stronger Union. I just want a better life.” By 2019, in personal terms, life had indeed got much better since the days when she was a lonely, unhappy teenager, bullied for her emergent sexuality. She had a partner, a successful career as a journalist, and a two-book deal with Faber. Politically, however, Northern Ireland was in much worse shape than many might have hoped when the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998 — something Lyra was acutely aware of. Her articles circled the dark psychological legacy of the Troubles, including the high suicide rate among the generation who grew up after the Agreement, many of them trapped in pockets of deprivation and neglect where violence still held sway.

In her last essay, published posthumously in the Guardian, Lyra skewered the bargain made for her generation, or at least how it had played out: “We were to reap the spoils and prosperity that supposedly came with peace. In the end, we did get the peace — or something close to it — and those who’d caused carnage in the decades before got the money. Whether they’d abandoned arms (as the Provisionals did) or retained them (like the Loyalists), they’d managed to make a ton of paper. We got to live with the outcome of their choices.”

The politicians had made three promises to sell the peace deal to the Northern Ireland electorate, she said. The first, peace itself, they “barely delivered on”: paramilitaries may have stopped murdering “the other side”, but they quickly began “terrorising their own” with renewed vigour in working-class communities, something that barely excited attention outside of Northern Ireland. The second promise was prosperity in a thriving new peacetime economy, one which failed to materialise for most younger people. The third failed pledge, she said, “was the one that hurt the most”, and was felt mostly in the areas where “the gunmen continued to roam”. The politicians had promised that “the days of young people disappearing and dying young were gone”. As everyone knows — not least Lyra’s own family — they weren’t.

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By Ruth Davidson

Three years on, Lyra McKee’s analysis of the way in which her generation had been let down remains, sadly, accurate. Northern Ireland required a unified, determined and highly thoughtful approach to rebuilding a civil society: it never got one. The British government bolted unionists and nationalists together in the oddly-constructed power-sharing Stormont administration, and then retreated with great relief, intervening like a distracted parent only at moments of crisis and collapse.

The concessions granted to paramilitary organisations in order to broker the Agreement — such as the release of republican and loyalist prisoners from jail — were not seen as one-off gestures, after which authority would clamp down hard on paramilitary activity and its routine glorifications of a murderous culture. Instead these concessions became a template for a new, politically tentative approach to paramilitarism, which has uneasily endured for almost 25 years.

Its central tenet appeared to be that so long as the loyalist and republican paramilitaries avoided explicit acts of sectarian violence, and refrained from bombings and shootings outside Northern Ireland, they should not be overly antagonised at home: their working-class fiefdoms would effectively remain their own, “policed” by bullets and brutal beatings doled out to troublesome youths, or those who simply defied bullying.

A series of post-Agreement IRA murders of young Catholic men, from Andrew Kearney in 1998 to Paul Quinn in 2007, were politically overlooked. Sinn Fein politicians frequently commemorate what Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill calls “our freedom struggle” in terms which gloss over the squalid reality of IRA killings. Flags of the Ulster Volunteer Force — responsible for some of the most grotesque sectarian murders of the Troubles — have been put up sporadically in mixed Belfast housing estates, no doubt intended to intimidate Catholic residents. Despite the valiant efforts of many small-scale community projects aimed at building reconciliation, the self-laudatory nature of former and current paramilitary organisations has persistently worked against building an idea of Northern Ireland as a “shared” place.

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What if Ireland were united?

By Colm Toibin

Loyalist paramilitaries, the UDA and the UVF, are meanwhile securing their finances by means of extortion, intimidation and the drugs trade. And republican “dissident” groups such as the New IRA and the Continuity IRA are embroiled in criminal activity while also pledging to continue with their violent campaign for a united Ireland. It doesn’t seem as if the PSNI’s Northern Ireland Paramilitary Crime Task Force, set up in 2017, is going to be retired any time soon.

If the current paramilitary scene is a volatile mix, with a fair amount of money and arms sloshing around in it, the bad news is that the wider politics is far from steady either. Indeed, the strongest feature of Northern Irish politics since 1998 has been the steady erosion of its middle ground, with the more centrist unionist UUP and nationalist SDLP losing out to the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively. Sinn Fein, which includes many prominent former IRA members, is currently on course to be Northern Ireland’s largest party after the May 5 elections — as well as Ireland’s richest, its slick electoral machine oiled by nearly £4 million left to it in the will of an eccentric Englishman, William Hampton.

Ulster unionism has perhaps never, in living memory, felt itself so precarious. A long spell of devolution has eroded bonds with the — nominally — Conservative and Unionist party, leaving unionists with few other political allies in the UK. Nor have DUP politicians served their own cause well: narrowly focused on small gains, their reputation as canny political horse-traders has too often been undermined by an acceptance of limping nags tricked up for market-day. The most notable was an early acquiescence — later rescinded — to Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan involving a degree of “regulatory divergence” for Northern Ireland, sold by their Prime Minister with fervent assurances that a customs border in the Irish Sea would happen only “over my dead body”.

The customs sea border is now long established, under the Northern Ireland protocol, and Johnson is very much alive. Perhaps no other British Prime Minister would have been so reckless as to amputate one part of the UK from the rest and believe that the consequences would be negligible, but the deed has been done.

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The IRA's hunger for martyrs

By Jenny McCartney

For the moment the political pain is largely experienced by unionism, and it is growing more intense, as are the arguments between the unionist parties over how best to oppose the sea border. There have been attempts to overturn the Protocol in the courts, but the most recent judgement by the Court of Appeal was that it “lawfully modified” the 1800 Acts of Union and could stand. A series of local rallies have been held to emphasise public anger against the legislation, but they have drawn little attention from London. Westminster had been sabre-rattling towards the EU about triggering Article 16 to suspend Northern Ireland customs checks — but with the British government preoccupied by Ukraine and its own rolling scandals, this rhetoric has grown notably quieter.

The loyalist paramilitaries — who, like their republican counterparts, view violence as the ultimate means of political conversation — are growing restless. Earlier Brexit proposals, involving some form of “frictionless” land customs border with the Republic of Ireland, were later shelved in no small part because the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar energetically emphasised the risk of a return to republican violence if a customs border were put in place. The loyalists are now clearly beginning to wonder if their violence is deemed to be of inferior quality, and pondering how they might put that right.

In a grim echo of the IRA’s campaign in England during the Troubles, they have begun to speak of threatening politicians and targets in the Republic of Ireland. To emphasise the point, the UVF recently put on a disturbing theatrical display during a visit of the Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney to Belfast, by hijacking a van and using it to transport a hoax bomb to the event he was attending.

The wider unionist population has little time for such threats and theatrics, but it is nonetheless politically worried. A Sinn Fein First Minister in Stormont would be a symbolic defeat for unionism, especially when allied to the possibility of the party entering government in Dublin in 2025. The vision of an Ireland presided over by Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald — who has described the IRA campaign as “justified” — with the elder statesman Gerry Adams celebrating in the background, is one which horrifies even the most moderate of unionists.

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By Carlo Gebler

It is far from a done deal, since older voters in Ireland remain wary, having a keener memory of IRA atrocities, and many in the other Irish parties are acutely conscious of the possible harm which a Sinn Fein government could do to a broadly successful state: in recent polls, Republican parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael regained a measure of electoral ground. Still, Sinn Fein success remains a distinct possibility: younger voters may be swayed by promises on health and housing, and the party’s bogus but strategic rewriting of the Provisional IRA campaign as necessary for “civil rights”.

The landscape in Ireland, North and South, is not what one would have hoped for in 1998, or even at the time of Lyra McKee’s death in 2019: an increasingly unmoored, isolated unionism, twitchy loyalist paramilitaries, a triumphalist Irish republicanism, and a democratic Irish electorate potentially sleepwalking towards installing a government organically linked to a long and bloody sectarian campaign.

And yet, in the thick of it all, the border is not the burning question for ordinary people in Northern Ireland that many might imagine: a recent poll found that only 30% would back the reunification of Ireland if a border poll were held tomorrow, with 45.3% voting against it. When they are asked what they want, Northern Ireland itself is a more settled entity than it often appears. Like any other voters, they are currently more preoccupied with the health service and the cost-of-living crisis; like Lyra, they “just want a better life”.

But Northern Ireland’s intensifying political situation now merits urgent attention from any British or Irish politicians who can co-operate to defuse it: chaos in Northern Ireland, after all, has almost never taken account of what ordinary people want.

That’s why the British police model is often referred to as one of “policing by consent”. The service is run with the blessing and co-operation of the public, rather than as an arm of the state. We know that the police regularly walk into situations which most of us would instinctively avoid, often showing great courage in difficult situations. A YouGov poll in October suggested that the police in general are positively viewed by the public, with 65% saying they trust them and 31% saying they don’t. But recent scandals have taken a toll on the specific reputation of one force in particular: only 33% of the British public say that they trust the Metropolitan police (although the figure is higher among Londoners, at 57%).

The Met’s standing has been damaged by Sarah Everard’s abduction and murder by Met officer Wayne Couzens, and the disgraceful conduct of two Met officers at the scene of the 2020 murders of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. Much has been said about the need to root out so-called “bad apples” in the force, along with tackling persistent pockets of misogyny and racism. But our model of policing by consent faces another challenge. Recently, the police have been taking on powers that the bulk of the British public never asked for them to have.

What the public wants from the police — as a 2020 report from the Police Foundation think tank suggests — is pretty much what you’d expect: more visible policing on the street, and a focus on “sexual crime, violent crime, investigating serious crime, responding quickly to calls for help, tackling terrorism and taking action on organised crime”. In other words, we want the greatest energy focused on the crimes with the highest potential to devastate lives.

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There will always be bad men in the police

By Tom Chivers

Of course, as the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales — set up to shape a “long term strategic direction for the police service” — acknowledges, a lot of crime has migrated from the streets to electronic highways. Fraud and computer misuse now make up 44% of all crime in England and Wales. The number of police officers in England and Wales, however, fell by 20,000 between 2010 and 2019. The government has promised 20,000 additional police officers by 2023, more than half of whom have now been recruited. Ideally, this should contribute to a more efficient police force with an enhanced presence on the streets. Add in more rigorous safeguards against bias and corruption, promised in the aftermath of this reputationally disastrous year, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to hope for a new, improved force.

But there’s a problem: recent, fuzzily-framed powers are taking our police in a direction that the public — and many officers — clearly do not want. Instead of patrolling the pavements, officers are increasingly encouraged to patrol the finer nuances of legitimate public debate. At a recent football match, Crystal Palace fans unveiled a large banner criticising the Saudi-backed takeover of Newcastle United. It featured a bearded character clearly depicting the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, along with a trenchant critique of Saudi Arabia’s shocking record on human rights. Croydon police promptly tweeted that they had “received a report of an offensive banner displayed by Crystal Palace fans” warning that “any allegations of racist abuse will be taken very seriously.” A later tweet from them thankfully confirmed that “no offences have been committed”, something which most sane people could have recognised with one glance.

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Hate crime is the new blasphemy

By Mary Harrington

The argument over trans rights and women’s rights, too, has triggered lengthier but similarly doomed police investigations. One such case culminated in the bizarre 2019 prosecution of Miranda Yardley, a transsexual, for allegedly committing a transphobic hate crime online. The police investigation had been prompted by complaints against Yardley from a trans rights activist (who was not herself trans); the judge threw the case out after one day, awarding costs to the defendant. More recently, “gender-critical” feminist Marion Millar was charged under the Malicious Communications Act for potential hate crime. One of her offending tweets was reportedly a picture of a suffragette ribbon, which a complainant had argued was a noose. All charges were ultimately dropped. In both cases, the lengthy process to which the defendants were subjected was a punishment in itself.

Many of these threats to investigate, or unsuccessful charges, make the case that a “hate” crime has been committed — that is, an offence motivated by the plaintiff’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. (Ordinary crimes, it seems, take an equal opportunities approach.) Hate crime carries an enhanced sentence, but at least — since it involves an actual crime — it is bound by certain legal definitions.

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The law can't end the culture wars

By Adam King

Hate crime’s little brother is a sub-category called “non-crime hate incidents,” which can’t be prosecuted. For someone on the wrong end of an accusation, however, it can be very uncomfortable. Although the public collectively consents to the police holding power, we have little say as individuals in how that power is used over us. Police activity can be a factor in us losing our livelihoods or our liberty. And, despite not being a crime, a “non-crime hate incident” can go on your record and potentially show up on enhanced DBS checks. It might close off certain job opportunities. To better understand the offence, I turned to the West Yorkshire police website, where the Hate Crime Co-ordinator PC Emma Harrison explains it via video:

“A hate incident can be any incident that the victim or any other person perceives to have happened to a person as a result of their faith, their race, their sexual orientation, their disability. It doesn’t have to be a criminal offence. As the definition says it can be any incident, so it can be perhaps just the way that somebody looks at you or it might be something that somebody says to you that might upset you. It literally can be anything at all that you feel is there as a result of something about you, something very personal to you, it might be the colour of your skin, it might be a disability that you have, and it doesn’t even need to be a disability that can be seen.”

Around 120,000 such offences were recorded between 2014, when the College of Policing brought in the “non-crime hate incident” guidance, and 2019. Of course, it is often sensible for police to keep records of especially upsetting or threatening behaviour that nevertheless misses the threshold for criminal prosecution. But the net here is cast extremely wide, and could easily include a legitimate personal opinion that someone else simply doesn’t like. The “non-crime hate incident” exists entirely in the perception of the allegedly aggrieved party.

It seems chilling that “any incident” — including “perhaps just the way that somebody looks at you” — can potentially land an individual with a police record, not least because “looks” are frequently open to misinterpretation. If you are deemed the perpetrator, there is currently no evidential means by which you can overturn the ruling, save for an expensive and drawn-out judicial review. As the former director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, wrote recently: “This power has real world consequences. We need hardly imagine what an HR manager would make of a job applicant with a police history of hate.”

A world in which self-described victims cannot be challenge is a dangerous one. The police’s desire to semaphore its wholehearted belief in the testimony of alleged victims, before investigating any actual evidence, was a key factor in the Met’s catastrophic Operation Midland. For nearly a year and a half, they pursued a highly energetic investigation into an alleged VIP sex ring on the basis of luridly fabricated evidence from the fantasist and paedophile Carl Beech, anonymised as “Nick”. His allegations resulted in the baseless persecution of both a former Home Secretary, Lord Brittan, and a former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Bramall.

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One of the glaring mistakes of that investigation occurred when one senior officer abandoned all rules of due process publicly to declare “Nick’s” allegations “credible and true”. They were both incredible and false. The assertion flew directly in the face of the eighth “general instruction” of British policing: that police should “refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.”

Leon Brittan died in 2015 without knowing his name had been cleared. The usual apologies were made by Dame Cressida Dick. And yet the same principle of “guilty if accused” has somehow been allowed to spread quietly in the thicket of “non-crime hate incidents.”

It is a tenet of our democracy that other people are allowed to say things with which we do not agree, and might even find offensive. The mission creep of the UK police force — which now risks effectively handing out police records to a growing pool of law-abiding citizens — is worrisome not only for the public at large, but also for the force itself. And it comes at a bad time: in what should be serious cause for concern, the October YouGov poll mentioned earlier also found that more people (48%) were now “unconfident” of the police’s ability to solve crime in their local area than were “confident” (43%).

If the general public sees more individuals being hounded and investigated for opinions which many of them may hold, while the conviction rate for high-harm offences such as knife crime and rape remains dismal, they may well conclude that the police service is no longer set up to serve the best interests of ordinary citizens.

That bodes ill for the co-operative model which has broadly served the UK well for so long. The best of police officers understand this instinctively, as did the “general instructions” from 1829, which saw much of this coming, in rule five, which says that the force should “seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law.”

There used to be, too, a difference between the things people said — remarks intended to vanish on the air — and the things they wrote and published, which were generally more considered: physically laborious to produce, and passed through selected gatekeepers in order to reach a mass audience.

And then came Twitter, the most powerful modern illustration of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message. Here, the flow of news is continuous, unregulated and fierily interactive. The instant, throwaway nature of conversation has been imported into a published, preservable medium. Spats that arise on Twitter now regularly flow back into the “old media” of print; and then — with the ease of retweets and replies — it has technically enabled the rapid amplification of praise or abuse, the latter resulting in the “pile-on”.

As with the emotional contagion that sweeps through a physical mob, the particular structure of Twitter encourages users to behave in ways which would have been contrary to their “public self” five or ten years earlier — although it may, sometimes worryingly, have unleashed the private self to speak more freely. Those who join in often sport the blue ticks denoting a verified account, and it’s clear that they don’t think of themselves as bullies, but as the righteous enforcers of a fluid but tangible moral order.

One recent episode involved Darren Grimes, a young, gay, pro-Brexit conservative commentator who has over 150,000 Twitter followers. In the aftermath of the Euro 2020 final, when emotions were running high, Grimes posted a tweet in which he tagged in the young England footballer Marcus Rashford — who had missed a penalty — and said “penalties not politics from now on, aye?”

It was a snide tweet, partly designed to set the Twitter hive-mind buzzing in irritation. It was unfair, too: plenty of hard-training players miss penalties — and since the press and public spent years berating footballers for their boozed-up, skirt-chasing antics, it seemed weird to deride one young player for dignified campaigning on free school meals. Many people disagreed with Grimes’ tweet, and said so. But the blue-ticked rugby pundit Brian Moore went one better, tweeting of Grimes that “this little done-nothing twat deserves a good kicking.”

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The kicking was duly delivered elsewhere, in electronic form. A different tweeter, from the now-defunct account @hepcatsector, came up with the dubious story that his cousin had gone to school with Grimes, and that in year 9 he had a nickname associated with masturbation under a desk. This tweeter also posted a series of messages between himself and Grimes, which later turned out to be fake. The allegation was designed to be both sexual and shaming. Twitter adored it, naturally, and sent it viral — endlessly hashtagging the alleged nickname, expanding on it, illustrating it with obscene memes and videos.

Grimes replied that he didn’t have that nickname at school, but that he was certainly called “poofter,” “fag” and beaten for being “gay”.

The Twitter rumour wasn’t directly homophobic, although certainly nasty. But anyone who recalls homophobic taunting from their schooldays will remember how frequently it caricatured gay adolescents as inappropriately sexual, prone to getting “turned on” in situations and ways that allegedly repelled their tormentors. In effect, the baseless rumour that Twitter spread about Grimes as a schoolchild is precisely the kind of rumour that school bullies spread about gay teenagers. Those revelling in it would mostly count themselves on the “progressive” side of politics, and would no doubt officially deplore homophobia. Yet somehow that line of attack arose – and they all joined in.

The spat had barely cooled when Giles Coren, a columnist on The Times, posted a tweet about Dawn Foster, a Left-wing fellow journalist who recently died suddenly aged just 34. Foster, who could be a combative Twitter presence herself, had made acerbic comments about Coren some years earlier. These had rankled, and upon her untimely death — to sum up his tweet, which was later deleted — he wondered aloud about a response which began in faux-commiseration and ended in gleeful laughter.

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His tweet itself suggested someone playing a high-stakes game of risk, not only with the boundaries of taste in the aftermath of a death, but with a huge and volatile audience: a kind of Russian roulette with a “post a tweet” button, testing if this might be the one that triggers disaster. And Twitter did indeed respond, sometimes with pained disbelief, and sometimes with foul insults and escalating threats of real-life reprisals over many days.

British speech was once heavily associated with understatement, which itself was tied to civic virtue. The most inconceivable pressures and agonising wartime losses, for example, were often described in stoically minimal terms such as “a spot of bother” or “a bit sticky”. Quite the opposite mode of speech, however, has spread throughout social media: the language of wild overstatement. It frequently employs adjectives once applicable to the extreme depths of human behaviour – “vile” “disgusting” “horrific” – to perceived minor transgressions of some fast-moving social code. This fury is often triggered by nuance, while leaving major, real-world offences untouched.

The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, for example, recently described Scarlett Johansson’s “sensuous cough-syrup purr” in a review. The actress is known in Hollywood for her seductive voice: in my days as a film critic I wrote about it myself. Yet this mild expression of admiration drew the ire of an LA features editor called Alisha Grauso, who tweeted her anger at a “middle-aged male film critic” being “so GD f*ing creepy when writing about female characters.” Thanks to outrage inflation, a key element in the Twitter economy, a large band of Grauso’s 27,000 followers were soon rocking away in performative horror like the young maidens of Salem: cue vomiting GIFs, fierce accusations of “fucking gross”, and the now-formulaic imitation of stunned disbelief: “…I just…what…”

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What is this? Anger looking for a place to earth, I suppose. Restless anger coming out, sometimes skimpily dressed as satire, and attracting more and greater waves of anger to it, as a kind of confirmation of its existence. Boundaries of what it’s acceptable to say are being dissolved. And, increasingly in modern Britain, physical boundaries are being crossed too. Twitter’s mechanics are reshaping national codes of behaviour.

Last June a crowd demonstrated outside Dominic Cummings’ family home, erecting a giant screen. A different crowd recently sought out the place where it thought the chief medical officer Chris Whitty lives. Whitty himself was mauled, jostled and filmed in a park by two young men, who had just been to an anti-lockdown rally and had its speeches ringing in their ears. The wall outside Coren’s house was daubed with Foster’s name, and dog excrement left on the pathway.

In every case, the people crossing the boundaries believed that outrage and circumstance had given them the moral authority to behave outside normal codes, and to take the argument directly to their opponent’s door, sometimes to family homes in which partners and young children also live. What people do when they think they’re allowed, of course, is what part of them wanted to do when they weren’t. Regardless of what one thinks of each individual trigger, this is cause for concern.

I grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a conflict in which physical boundaries were frequently crossed in the most horrific ways. People were shot as they answered the door or blown apart when starting up their car. It didn’t begin with that, of course. It began with the gradual heating-up of rhetoric, the stentorian sectarian speeches of the young Ian Paisley, the impassioned orations at IRA commemorations, all fanning the existing fears and resentments of their listeners into uncontrollable action.

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For conflicts more explicitly activated by the media itself, one need only look to the central role that the Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines played in the Rwandan genocide. Its hate-filled patter inciting murderous violence against Tutsi “cockroaches” was woven in with jokes and songs, pop music and phone-ins. Conscious of the part the station was playing in directing genocide, human rights groups including the US Committee for Refugees asked that US military resources be used to jam their broadcasts. The US government refused: for reasons outside Rwanda, it had a strong commitment to broadcast freedom, and was culpably slow to see the urgency of the argument in this case.

We’re a long way from these horrors in the West, but a strange inversion has already taken hold in the thinking of many — especially those who are most vocal on university campuses. It’s said that ideological difference, even when thoughtfully and politely expressed, is “literal violence” and deserves a commensurate response. But actual, direct threats of stabbing, raping, killing or bombing are meant to be interpreted as metaphorical.

The area where this pattern of thought is most apparent is in the current highly charged argument over trans issues. It was evident in a recent article in Jezebel magazine, in which the writer, Ashley Reese, berated JK Rowling for making public a tweet wishing her “a very nice pipe-bomb in the mailbox”. Discussing the tweet, Reese mocked the idea that anyone would feel directly threatened by a Twitter user who in this case describes themselves as “a genderfluid lesbian and a cybermarxist” and uses an anime avatar.

Yet the article demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of who issues violent threats, and of what such threats — even if not enacted — are intended to do. Is there really a “type” from whom we should take threats seriously, and another we should comfortably ignore? History suggests that would be foolish. The Price sisters, Marian and Dolours, for example, were intelligent, highly attractive young women who had attended teacher training college. In 1973, aged 19 and 22 respectively — fired by a belief in the purity of their cause — they participated in the IRA Old Bailey bombing which left 200 people injured and one dead. The journalist Neal Ascherson remembered Ulrike Meinhof as a “tender and vulnerable” 30-year-old journalist, the mother of young twins. That was before she “took up the gun” as a leader of a gang responsible for a wave of bombings, shootings and assassinations across Germany.

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Soon after the tweet that Rowling highlighted — one among many threats she has received — another piece of writing came to light, this time from a paper written by an LSE Gender Studies student, Matt Thompson. In it, the author makes an explicit threat to “TERFs” or gender-critical women. “Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness in your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.” It’s the type of statement frequently found on Twitter, now immortalised in an academic paper. Thompson self-defines as “an autistic genderfuck” and also someone “who loves cats, running, books and plants.” By Reese’s logic, who could possibly be afraid of a student who loves cats?

And yet it seemed Thompson very much wanted certain women to feel afraid. There’s a negative, insidious power to open threats of harm, which is exactly why people and paramilitary groups make them. They deliberately invoke fear to shut people up. They take root in the victim’s psyche, stealing their peace of mind, making them feel that violence might be just around the corner. And sometimes death threats do come true.

We cannot put the genie of social media back in its bottle. But we can certainly stop persistently lying to ourselves — as individuals and as a society — about what it is permissible to say to those we dislike or disagree with, and how we say it. The truth is that, most of the time, the state’s not going to stop you from bullying, smearing or even directly threatening someone online: there’s simply too much material for it to handle. But brick by brick, word by word, we’re either building or tolerating a world that we will all then have to live in. And most people in the UK are simply not prepared for what that could entail.

It’s partly sexual, of course: a woman aged 50, however stylish or attractive, is unlikely to get the same level of male attention as a woman in her 20s. For many, this is a blow to self-esteem, but the consequences aren’t confined to personal feeling. Youth and sexual attractiveness remain an undeniable form of currency in the world, and in certain professional settings they are disproportionately valued — even more in women than in men. We are all familiar with the long-preferred pairing of the grizzled male newsreader with the younger, highly-groomed female counterpart. Not that younger women aren’t competent. But the professional qualities that accrue with age as palpable advantages in men — knowledge, contacts, experience — count for less in women. Instead, ageing often renders them professionally “invisible”.

It’s not only a question of age. The broader erasure of women, both young and old — along with everything associated with them — has become something of a publishing phenomenon. Caroline Criado Perez kicked it off with her best-selling Invisible Women: Exploring Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, in which she used a wealth of research to illustrate how big “data gaps” around women and their needs has led to a world predominantly designed around a “default man”. Everything from car and seatbelt design to the inadequate floor-space allocated for women’s toilets lead to worse outcomes for women: we wait in a much longer queue for public lavatories and, if unlucky enough to be involved in a car crash, are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 17% more likely to die.

Following Criado Perez, and featuring a quote from her on the cover, is a new book by the London-based Swedish journalist Katrine Marçal: Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men (out tomorrow). It expands on the hot topic of women being ignored, but delves into its own territory: how technological innovation has traditionally been seen as a male pursuit, resulting in female inventors being written out of history and new proposals being downgraded.

Marçal has a knack for pulling out sharp insights and illustrative stories. She tells the tale of Bertha Benz, who — without informing her husband Karl — manoeuvred the early automobile, or “horseless carriage,” he had built out of the factory — and took it on a trip to a town 90km away. Along the way she used a hatpin to clear a fuel pipe blockage and a garter to insulate an exposed ignition wire; and invented the world’s first brake linings by getting a shoemaker to cover the troublesome brake blocks with leather. But then, Bertha had a personal interest in proving that the “horseless carriage” worked: she had invested her entire dowry in the enterprise.

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What repeatedly emerges in Mother of Invention is the complex collaboration, often between traditionally ‘male’ and ‘female’ skills, that permits technological innovation to happen. Expert seamstresses, for instance, worked with NASA to make the soft, 21-layer space suits that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong wore for the first moon-landing. ILC, the company that made the suits, understood “that sewing was a technology, and that soft things can perform hard functions.” Yet while an emergent technology may rely on women as a work force, once it becomes successfully established, a new narrative often emerges — one in which the work becomes higher status, better paid, and increasingly designated as “instinctively” suited to men.

The first “computers”, Marçal writes, were women: banks of relatively low-paid female employees who sat for hours at a time doing calculation work. By the 1900s, the industry was female-dominated: the University of Pennsylvania alone employed more than 200 women as “computers”. In the war years, women made up 75% of the workforce at Bletchley Park, where they worked on cracking the Enigma code. Indeed, when the engineers there built the “world’s first electronic, programmable computer,” it was operated by female volunteers from the Women’s Royal Naval Service: in essence the first programmers.

At some point in the 1960s, however, the tide turned. As computers became increasingly central to industries and government, a campaign drive was launched to recruit “promising young men from the right social class.” The women who knew how to program were now “tasked with training up the young men to effectively become their own bosses.” With little prospect of promotion, women began to leave computing in droves, and a wealth of experience was lost.

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It was not the first sea-change in sex and status within an industry — the historical shift in “secretaries” from male to predominantly female was another — and Marçal also makes an interesting point about what might be waiting in the future. The growing sophistication of AI and the looming “second machine age”, she says, could redistribute work status in a fundamental way. Robots — like Deep Blue, the computer that beat Garry Kasparov at chess — are good at “thinking” but bad at anything that requires complex physical movement, emotional intelligence or unpredictable situations. Work such as caring for children and the elderly, or cleaning houses, is therefore the least likely to be replaceable by a robot. Could it be that so-called “soft skills” will rise in prestige, and see male competition for entry?

Nothing can happen without this work. Those in jobs which offer the highest prestige, top earnings and longest hours are dependent on a raft of others: a compliant (usually female) partner who is willing to either perform or outsource a greater proportion of the domestic burden; a nanny, to help with the children; a carer, to look after elderly parents; a secretary, to manage appointments; restaurant staff, to make work-related entertaining possible, and so it goes on. Yet these essential jobs — disproportionately done by women — are relatively low-status.

The disparity of professional status between men and women, and why it might exist, is the central concern of Mary Ann Sieghart’s new book The Authority Gap (out 1st July). It opens with an uncomfortable moment between Mary McAleese, then President of the Republic of Ireland, and Pope John Paul II. As McAleese was on the point of introduction to the pontiff, he walked past her to introduce himself instead to her husband, and asked him, “Would you not prefer to be President of Ireland rather than married to the President of Ireland?’ The “joke” went down understandably badly with President McAleese (it can’t have felt great for her husband either). It’s an example, Sieghart argues, of the way in which women are “underestimated, talked over, ignored, patronized and generally not taken as seriously as a man”.

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She collates an impressive bank of research to drive home the point, with some interesting social experiments: when social scientists sent out applications for a lab manager position to male and female science professors at top universities, identical save for the “randomly assigned” male or female names at the top, the professors — including the women — rated the “male” applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the “female” one. Students taking an online course rated their instructor more highly if they thought they were being taught by a man. And identical CVs with a man’s name at the top were more likely to lead to a job offer.

The experience of trans people strengthens her case. The trans men cited in the book found that their authority went up after transitioning, along with their pay: as men, people generally accorded them more respect and approval. The trans women had the opposite experience: post-transition, many were shocked suddenly to find themselves being talked over, queried and assumed to be incompetent. They had been used to different treatment.

Women in the very top jobs report that they are insulated from such negative behaviour by the authority that comes with the role itself. The book does succeed in demonstrating, however, that — below a certain professional level — many men and women have difficulty accepting female authority. Yet there are also men who are very supportive of female colleagues, and I did often find myself questioning whether it is valuable for professional women to nurse outrage over mildly insensitive comments, rather than simply ridicule or ignore them. The amplification of silly remarks, so that others might share performatively in the horror, has become fashionable. The author describes a dinner in which the older male banker beside her asks what she does, and she duly lists six impressive elements of her “portfolio career,” from sitting on the council of the Tate Modern to writing a political column. Perhaps stunned by this deluge of achievement, the banker replied, “Wow, you’re a busy little girl!” A bit patronising, yes. But the outraged Sieghart describes it as “probably the most egregious example of being (literally) belittled that I can recall” and ends up complaining about it on Twitter.

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Status is inextricably linked to respect, pay and promotion, meaning the absence of it has material and psychological effects. It makes sense to want it. But there is a distinction between the professional authority that derives from seeking to do a job properly, and the egotistical authority that craves a particular reverence from those around you. The former is more admirable, but the latter is what often drives ambitious employees to ask for pay rises, apply for the top job, and treat not just the work itself but their own position with the greatest seriousness. Some people get to the top of hierarchies because it is the most effective way to have control over their work, others because they enjoy dominance over others. Although a dollop of ego is often a professional necessity, philosophically there is something faintly ludicrous about regarding a status achieved at work as a just reflection of one’s essential worth.

There’s sometimes a whiff of this tendency in “fifty of the world’s most powerful, successful and authoritative women,” whom Sieghart interviews for the book (invariably mentioning their startling intelligence). Frances Morris, the Director of Tate Modern, laments how, “As director of Tate Modern, I can spend all day as a powerful, articulate person who’s taken seriously, and I can leave this building and I am nobody. Because as a woman in the world out there, I’m not taken seriously.”

But isn’t that simply life? At home we have to unload the dishwasher and pay the bills. At parties we make conversation with people who have no idea what we do. We are all our context, to some extent. And the drug of workplace importance has a limited efficacy for men too: a month after retirement a male CEO will no doubt find himself in the garden centre, a silver-haired man in a baseball cap staring at a pair of garden shears, wondering where all the phone calls went. And if women are sometimes held back by bias, then strong social expectations of what a man should be, including successful and dominant in the workplace, also take their toll on the male psyche — something which may be reflected in the higher rate of male suicide.

The testimony in The Authority Gap is often interesting, and many of the social syndromes it identifies are recognisable. But it is mainly focused on the nuances of female status in the upper echelons of politics, business and the media. It eloquently describes the frustration of a higher-status woman being mistaken for a lower-status one, for example. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former Danish PM, was confused with a secretary when she was an MEP. Dawn Butler, a black Labour MP, was told by a fellow MP, in a comment compounded by racial bias: “This lift really isn’t for cleaners.”

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That focus only takes us part-way. One step forward will indeed come when men stop making uninformed assumptions about the roles that women around them play. But the next step will come — as Marçal’s book suggests — when the gulf in status between MPs and the secretaries and cleaners who make their jobs possible itself starts to narrow.

But it’s just as possible to step backwards as forwards. These books, which emphasise the historical precariousness of female power, have been published at a time when a rapacious market is more alert than ever to the cash-generating properties of female bodies. A number of US states have already legalised commercial surrogacy, for example, while a multi-billion pound porn industry churns out increasingly violent sexual images which have consequences in real-life behaviour: impoverished women especially are seen as holes to be drilled and wombs to be filled.

At the same time a belligerent “progressive” agenda is performing its own reduction in the name of “inclusion”, pressing for resonant words such as  “woman” and “mother” to be removed from institutional language that emphasises functionality: “people who give birth” or “menstruators”. Should women choose to express the view that their biological sex is meaningful and immutable, they are publicly shamed and threatened online with rape and other violence, while men who make similar points are generally left alone. A number of organisations have been startlingly eager to join in the punitive enforcing of “acceptable speech” for women.

In just a few years, with little official acknowledgment, the treatment of women in society has transformed into something chilling, surreal and often poisonous. And I can’t help thinking that, as things stand, these thoughtful, data-driven and necessary books about nuance and bias are a little like talking about redesigning a forest park in the middle of a wildfire. In the current cultural climate, many women are, quite rationally, now deciding that to be an invisible woman is the safest option they have.

One boy said that it might be a good idea not to go into town for a while, by which he meant Belfast city centre. It sounded to me like something he had heard his parents say. When news came of Sands’s death, riots broke out across Northern Ireland. A milk lorry was stoned in the Catholic New Lodge area, and an incoming brick hit its milkman Eric Guiney, 45, on the head. He fell unconscious and the lorry crashed. His 14-year-old son Desmond, who was riding alongside him, died first. Desmond was mad about horses, his mother said, and had wanted to be a jockey: two children on horseback led his funeral cortege. Eric, who had remained in a coma, died the day after his son’s funeral.

Another three hunger-strikers died within a fortnight of Sands. The stand-off between the Irish republican hunger-strikers and Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, had become an elemental contest of wills. The IRA men in the H-blocks of the Maze prison were demanding the status of political prisoners. They had “five demands”: lost remission restored, the right to free association, better privileges on recreation and visiting, to wear their own clothes and to decline prison work. Mrs Thatcher was equally adamant that the British government would continue to regard convicted IRA members as criminals. On the face of it, all the players were immovable.

Things had taken years to reach this feverish pitch. “Special category status”, which effectively treated IRA prisoners as prisoners of war, had first been introduced in July 1972, following a shorter-lived IRA hunger strike. That status came to an end in March 1976, when Harold Wilson’s government decided to treat convicted IRA members like any other criminal in prison. IRA leaders within prison were infuriated that their command structure in the blocks had been disrupted, and the “screws” placed back in charge. They duly sent word to the organisation outside to step up the assassinations of prison officers.

The first prison officer killed by the IRA, in April that same year, was Pacelli Dillon, a married Catholic father of five children, one of whom had been blind and disabled from birth. He was shot outside his house as he got into his car, on his way to finalise the purchase of a new family home. Between the start of the criminalisation policy and the end of the hunger strikes, a total of 18  prison officers were murdered, including the deputy governor of the Maze Prison, Albert Miles. It did not improve ongoing relations between inmates and prison staff, who — despite being paid extra to work on the H-blocks — were operating under skyrocketing levels of stress.

Nor did the “blanket protest” which began in September 1976. IRA prisoners refused to put on prison uniform. Denied the right to wear their own clothes, they vowed to wear no clothes at all, but instead wrapped themselves in the blankets on their beds. When that made little headway, they escalated it in 1978 to the “dirty protest”. Instead of “slopping out” the chamber-pots in their cells each morning, they daubed the walls and ceilings with faeces and poured the urine on the floor. Conditions in the cells became unimaginable. Images began to circulate of long-haired, bearded IRA prisoners, wrapped in blankets, staring out from the swirling chiaroscuro of brown walls. Prisoners complained of random beatings and invasive strip searches from the prison officers; officers spoke of death threats to them and their families. Northern Ireland was an intimate society, where people watched each other closely. “I hear your daughter’s just started school,” might pass for polite chit-chat in other places. In the Maze, it could make a prison officer’s blood run cold.

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Meanwhile, two opposing interpretations of the conditions began to emerge, involving Irish emotion and English logic. Cardinal O’Fiaich, then the Roman Catholic Primate of All-Ireland, visited the H-blocks 3,4 and 5 in 1978. He spoke passionately afterwards of his revulsion at the “stench and filth in some of the cells” and the “inhuman conditions” in which “over 300 prisoners are incarcerated”. These were conditions, he said, in which one would not keep an animal. The Northern Ireland Office responded coolly, “These criminals are totally responsible for the situation in which they find themselves. It is they who have been smearing excreta on the walls and pouring urine through the cell doors.”

Still, the issue failed to stir any great sympathy in the broader nationalist electorate. And nor did the prisoners seem any closer to achieving their goal. Then, in October 1980, came the first hunger strike.

It was led by Brendan Hughes, a well-known IRA man who had been the main organiser of Bloody Friday, the day in July 1972 on which the IRA had set off 22 bombs across Belfast, killing nine people and injuring 130. Hughes, a veteran of the blanket protest, was the IRA commander in the prison.

This hunger strike started with seven republican prisoners, including Hughes, but a much larger number joined it as it went on. It was called off after 53 days. Hughes’ fellow hunger-striker and friend Sean McKenna was at death’s door, and it seemed that the British had privately offered significant concessions. Later, upon closer examination of the offer, the IRA inmates decided that they hadn’t. The consensus among the British, wrongly, was that the IRA men were not prepared to take the hunger strike all the way.

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The prisoners often spoke Irish to each other in a bid to elude the understanding of the prison officers. Bobby Sands — who had taken over as commander while Hughes was fasting — reportedly told his fellow-prisoners “Fuair muid faic.” (“We got nothing”).

Sands, 27, had come of age amid the intensifying sectarianism of the late 1960s and early 70s, when both Catholic and Protestant families were driven out of estates dominated by those of the other religion. His own family had been compelled by loyalist thugs to leave Rathcoole, a predominantly Protestant housing estate. He himself, he said later, had been threatened out of his job at an apprentice coach-builder by members of a loyalist “tartan gang”. Aged 18, he joined the IRA. Sands had a wife, Geraldine, and son, born in 1973, but his growing involvement with the IRA had put a strain on the marriage, and his wife had taken the child to live in England. Now he was willing to devote everything to the cause.

When it came to organising a new hunger strike, Sands thought he could do better tactically: this time with a staggered strike which would prolong and intensify the pressure upon the British. A true believer in the republican “armed revolution” he kept a diary for the first 17 days of his fast: it details his concern at what he is putting his family through, pleasure at the messages of support he is getting from people outside, and his loathing of the “petty vindictiveness” of the prison authorities. Sands liked ornithology and poetry: he writes of birds he can hear, such as a passing curlew, and admires some of Kipling’s verses in a book he has got from the library. The tone is high-flown, single-minded, ascetic and, to a degree, romantic. It’s sad to read.

That same month Frank Maguire, an Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died of a heart attack. It was decided to run Sands as an “Anti H-Block” republican candidate against the other contender for the seat, the Ulster Unionist Harry West.

The moderate nationalist party, The Social Democratic and Labour Party, had already selected their candidate, Austin Currie, but it was eventually decided not to field him, and to give Sands a free run at the seat. The vote on 9 April would shape the direction of Northern Ireland up until the present day: Sands was returned as the MP. Less than a month later he was dead.

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In order to try to understand the hunger strikes, and the radically different set of reactions to them then and now, it is necessary to keep in mind a number of seemingly contradictory pictures at once.

One picture is of the IRA activity ongoing outside the Maze prison at the time: a brutal, bloody campaign conducted without scruple for human suffering. Two days before Sands won the election, for example, the IRA shot dead a young Protestant woman called Joanne Mathers, a 29-year-old mother of a toddler who was working in Londonderry as a census-taker, an activity of which the IRA disapproved. Throughout the 1980s, the IRA continued to murder police officers, soldiers, alleged informers, civilians and those it later called “mistakes” by means of shooting, landmines, mortar bombs or car bombs.

Another picture is of the scene inside the prison, where a series of otherwise healthy young men were wilfully starving themselves to death, on a point of principle which to them had overtaken the importance of family or future. There was, however, a genuine sense of shared purpose and comradeship among the IRA men in the Maze. The images of them that reached the outside world — wild-haired, gaunt-faced — looked almost biblical. By willingly embracing a lingering death on behalf of Irish Republicanism, they were tapping into the potency of religious martyrdom. The emotions generated by the history and iconography of the Church had now been repurposed for a modern armed campaign.

Something else was going on, too. The argument had dredged up and crystallised ancient enmities. On one hand were Sands and his fellow hunger-strikers, long-haired and bearded Irishmen with defiantly naked torsos; on the other, Margaret Thatcher, an Englishwoman armoured in an immaculate suit, with a golden, coiffed bouffant. They were locked in intransigence, drawing strength from conflicting notions of authority. It echoed an argument that went all the way back to the 16th century, when Elizabeth I, another unbending Englishwoman, sought to impose her government’s rule on mutinous Gaelic chiefs. One of her colonial administrators in Ireland, the poet Edmund Spenser — an enthusiast for the brutal repression of native Irish rebellions — nonetheless spoke of Irish soldiers or “kern” as “great endurers of cold, labour, hunger and all hardness” and “very great scorners of death”. The IRA hunger-strikers were ready to show Thatcher that they, too, were “scorners of death”, determined, if necessary, to carry their resistance to English rule beyond the grave.

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In Northern Ireland itself, Protestant unionists were both unsettled by the hunger strikers and broadly unsympathetic to their aims (IRA demands were shared by loyalist paramilitary prisoners, who had briefly joined the blanket protest). The hunger-strikers were proud members of an organisation linked to appalling acts of violence, and had often arranged such acts themselves. Unionists saw in this new prison strategy a risk that the IRA — who they experienced as aggressors — would be seen internationally as victims. They well understood how hunger could fuse to myth, however, since Protestants had their own foundational story of stubbornness and starvation: the 1689 Siege of Derry, when Protestants locked the city gates against Catholic Jacobite forces. By the end of the siege half of those inside, around 4,000 people, had died either of starvation or injury. Those who survived had done so by eating rats, cats and tallow.

The effect of the hunger strikes on the psyche of many Catholic nationalists, in contrast, was striking and profound. Many of those who had strongly condemned the IRA’s activities — and would continue to do so — were nonetheless deeply moved by what they saw unfolding in the Maze. It was not simply the imagery of the wasting men that affected them, evocative of martyrdom as it was. It was something particular about the clutch of men’s unyielding opposition to the heavy machinery of British government and bureaucracy. The British were getting tugged into the same misunderstanding of Irish psychology that had led them to execute the rebels of the 1916 Easter Rising in cold blood, and thereby turn popular opinion against the British themselves.

The charge was that Thatcher was “letting the hunger strikers die”, but within that lay existing questions of nationhood and authority. In 1940, the Taoiseach Eamon de Valera had himself let two old IRA men die in Mountjoy Prison while on hunger strike for political status, which he consistently refused to grant. His decision had failed to kindle public outrage; he was after all an Irishman and former IRA man himself, in dispute with his own people. Mrs Thatcher was not, and resentment against her perceived hard-heartedness steadily intensified. In Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Sands won the seat with over 30,000 republican and nationalist votes.

Not long afterwards, the IRA leadership realised that the powerful popular emotions kindled by Sands’s suffering and death had opened the way to a new tactic, which was to accrue electoral gains in the nationalist community at the same time as carrying on with paramilitary violence. To wring the maximum success from this strategy, at a time while the whole world was watching, it was necessary to sustain the grim momentum created by the hunger strikes.

Those inside the H-blocks, and the families of the dying men, didn’t always agree. Even as a child, with only a hazy understanding of events, I found myself looking at pictures of those gaunt men with burning eyes. It was a terrible way to die. I remember thinking how difficult it might be to abandon such a course of action, even if you wanted to, when everyone else now clearly expected you to carry on to the death.

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In 2005, a former IRA prisoner called Richard O’Rawe published a book called Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-block Hunger Strike. O’Rawe had acted as a public relations officer for the hunger strikers while in prison for armed robbery. He now disclosed that the British government offered a deal in July 1981 which fulfilled most of the prisoners’ demands. By then four hunger strikers had died, he said, and the prison leadership was willing to accept the British offer. But the IRA army council outside the jail — represented by Gerry Adams — prevented it from doing so. Owen Carron, Sands’s election agent, was standing as a republican in the now-vacant seat. One explanation for the IRA’s decision, O’Rawe suggested, was that the six IRA and INLA men who died after the prospective deal was rejected were used as “cannon fodder” to boost Carron’s election campaign, “thus kickstarting the shift away from armed struggle into constitutional politics”.

When O’Rawe’s book came out, its assertions were regarded as a form of heresy in Sinn Fein circles, and it was bitterly denounced and denied by senior party figures, as well as the IRA commanding officer in the Maze at the time. O’Rawe stood his ground, however, and two other Maze prisoners — including a former cellmate — later backed up his story.

Whatever the IRA leadership’s intention, the tenth and last hunger-striker to die, the INLA man Michael Devine, did so early in the morning of August 20th. Not long before, Devine’s son, aged three, had sat by the bed asking his father to give up the hunger strike: “Please Daddy, don’t die!”. But there was no way back. Later that same day Owen Carron was elected MP in Bobby Sands’ place by an even larger majority than his predecessor, with over 31,000 votes.

After Devine’s death, new prisoners were still joining the hunger strikes. But they were increasingly coming up against a force equal in obstinacy to either the young republican prisoners or Margaret Thatcher: that of mothers, in conjunction with a redoubtable Catholic priest, Father Denis Faul, who successfully urged the families of hunger-strikers to intervene medically to stop their loved ones from dying. The unity was disintegrating. On 3 October, the hunger strike was officially called off. The following month, Sinn Fein unveiled its new strategy: to take local government seats in Northern Ireland, “with a ballot box in one hand and an Armalite in the other.”

The republican and loyalist paramilitary violence would grind on for another 13 years, until the ceasefires of 1994, and sporadically thereafter. But looking back, the course of Ireland today was indeed set by the feverish events of 1981. The differing responses of many Northern Protestants and Catholics to the hunger-strikes created a fresh gulf of understanding between them, to add to those that already existed. Sinn Fein has continued to surge electorally, to the point where — at the last Irish general election — it had the largest share of the popular vote. The moderate nationalist SDLP vote has correspondingly declined.

Bobby Sands has become a treasured icon for today’s Sinn Fein, a touchstone of republican purity, and a form of secular saint. But since the 1998 Belfast Agreement members of the Sands family, in particular his younger sister Bernadette, have shunned Sinn Fein and rejected its participation in a political settlement which falls short of a united Ireland. It was a sellout, Bernadette Sands said, deploying the memorable phrase: “Bobby did not die for cross-border bodies with executive powers.” She married Michael McKevitt, a former IRA quarter-master who went on to found the dissident Real IRA and died in January this year.

“The Armalite and the ballot box” strategy has split, leaving Sinn Fein with a bursting ballot box, and the dissidents holding the Armalite. Would Bobby Sands have agreed with his younger sister? He certainly loved her, but we’ll never know. The world was extremely interested in him: when he died cities, including Paris and Tehran, named streets in his honour. Irish bars in New York were closed for two hours in mourning, and Milanese students burned the Union flag. And the curious world keeps returning to his story, in films such as Terry George’s Some Mother’s Son, Steve McQueen’s Hunger, and the more recent documentary 66 Days. There is something that fascinates it about this young man who chose to die rather than back down. Abroad, his image has often served to obscure the squalid brutality of the IRA’s long campaign.

Still, when you’re from a place, you so often remember the people who didn’t choose to die, even more than the ones that did. And when I recall that particular, febrile time just before I went to secondary school, those death-laden months that belonged to the hunger strikers, I can never stop my thoughts from also turning to the milkman and his son.

Our fascination encompasses both the frivolous and the fundamental, from the avid consumption of television home make-over shows to the bitter frustration of young and middle-aged people who are priced out of the property market. And the naming of Johnson’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, as “Carrie-Antoinette” is a more profound echo than many Twitter wits realise.

Marie-Antoinette, like Symonds after her, was entranced by the possibilities of interior design, and indulged her passion to the full in the Petit Trianon — her Versailles “folly”— as well as in the Chateau itself. She went so far as to commission a model rural village at the Petit Trianon, with 12 cottages clad in artfully distressed stucco to look like aged and cracked brickwork, concealing elegant comfort within. Similar flights of fancy were in vogue on the estates of her admiring aristocratic friends. The rumblings of popular discontent at the extravagance seemed churlish to them. “All that fuss about a Swiss village!” pronounced the Baronne d’Oberkirch after her visit.

“The cost is totally out of control, she’s buying gold wallpaper!” It could so easily have been Louis XVI complaining about his wife; but it is Boris Johnson fretting to aides about the lavish redecoration of his flat in Downing Street in 2021. Reportedly, the cost lies somewhere between £85,000 and £200,000 — small beer by Marie-Antoinette’s standards.

An anonymous “friend” told the newspapers that “Carrie has exquisite taste”. One might well ask why, if that is the case, Carrie had to pay such an exorbitant sum to the interior designer Lulu Lytle to choose wallpaper and sofas for her, rather than simply doing it herself. But that is to misunderstand the language of the milieu in which Symonds moves, or aspires to move. There, “taste” means the ability to select the correct interior designer.

That much Marie-Antoinette would certainly have understood. The problem was, however, that Marie-Antoinette’s eye-watering expenditure on interiors and fashions stood in stark contrast to the tightening circumstances of the French people. As David Garrioch notes in his book The Making of Revolutionary Paris, between the periods of 1726-41 and 1771-89 wages in Paris rose by about 17%, but the prices of necessities went up by 62%. Rents in Paris rose by 130-140%. Parisians generally were getting poorer: “the percentage of Parisians able to leave something to their children diminished across the century: an increasing proportion left only debts.”

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Today, our Prime Minister is meant to be a public servant, yet Boris’s premiership carries a growing whiff of divine right. It grew stronger on Tuesday, amid one of those telling juxtapositions that politics has a way of casting up. Even as the war of Johnson’s wallpaper hogged the headlines, another wall-covering made a more modest and tragic story. It lay in the news that the Commons had voted down a House of Lords amendment which would have protected leaseholders from being forced to meet the exorbitant expense of making their homes safe in the aftermath of the Grenfell fire.

The cause of that inferno, which left 72 people dead, was unsafe external cladding. And homeowners in similarly affected buildings — below the 18m height which qualifies for government help — can now be held liable for the cost of altering cladding which was never their fault in the first place. Often at the lower end of the income scale, they now find themselves facing bills upwards of £25,000, and in some cases as much as £100,000.

Without the necessary repairs, which so many can little afford, these residents’ homes are both potentially dangerous and unsellable. Their dream of owning property — which Margaret Thatcher once nurtured so effectively among working-class and lower-middle-class voters — has turned to an inescapable nightmare. And the decision to abandon these property-owners to their fate has been taken by the Conservative Party under the leadership of Boris Johnson.

Nor are they the only voters in dire straits. We have not yet reckoned on the degree of economic devastation caused by the Covid pandemic, but it seems clear that a significant proportion of those who were already struggling are now sinking. A Resolution Foundation survey in January found that household spending decreased among the highest-earning families with children since the onset of Covid-19, but increased almost as noticeably among the lowest-earning ones. As the health effects of the pandemic begin to ease, the social cost will become ever more glaring.

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The Electoral Commission investigation into the Number 11 redecoration will play out against this backdrop. It will unfurl partly as entertainment — the whole country now yearns to gawp at the ridiculously expensive refurbishment — and partly as fodder for genuine outrage. Although Johnson is the one officially in charge, or supposed to be, there is already a powerful element of cherchez la femme, just as there was in the late 18^th century, when Marie-Antoinette was routinely depicted as a spendthrift, libidinous schemer who ran rings round her hapless husband. In her later years that was increasingly unfair, and the feverish libels against her were often malicious and untrue, but the die had been cast.

King Louis XVI, however, once mistakenly imagined that popular devotion to the French monarchy was unassailable, just as Boris believes himself perpetually lovable simply for being Boris. He dislikes being held to the rules by which others are routinely judged. But it’s the brazen contrasts that infuriate people in the end. The cladding and the wallpaper. The hardship and the profligacy. In at-risk flats across the country “ordinary, hard-working people” — the kind many Tories once considered their natural electorate — are being driven to financial desperation by the cost of fixing life-threatening construction flaws that they played no part in creating.

Not only did their Prime Minister break his earlier promise to support them, but his political energies are entirely focused elsewhere: on preposterous expenses which he seemingly sought to palm off on party donors.

I’m not sure he sees it yet, but the walls are closing in.

What’s it all about? As ever when Northern Ireland catches fire, the match does not fully explain the kindling, although the two are closely related. The match, in this case, was the decision by the Public Prosecution Service not to charge any Sinn Féin politicians with breaking Covid restrictions during the funeral last June of Bobby Storey, a former IRA intelligence director.

Sinn Féin has never been a party to play down a funeral, apart from those the IRA brought about, and Storey’s was a notable event. Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, headed the procession along with Mary Lou McDonald, the party leader, and Gerry Adams, the former party leader. More than 2,000 people lined the route and followed the cortege, and a snap showed O’Neill with a fellow-mourner’s arm around her, displaying a cavalier disregard for social distancing.

After a public and political outcry, an independent investigation by the Cumbria Constabulary drew up a file relating to 24 Sinn Féin representatives. But the public prosecutor recently refused to take it further, on the basis that the Police Service of Northern Ireland had been substantially involved in agreeing the Storey funeral arrangements in the first place. The perception among Unionists, and some Nationalists, was that Sinn Féin politicians were blithely operating outside the rules, and that the PSNI leadership was helping them do it. Arlene Foster, the DUP leader and first minister, called for the resignation of Simon Byrne, the PSNI chief constable. So did every other Unionist party. He has thus far refused to resign. Against this extraordinary backdrop of authority in chaos, ordinary police officers are now going up nightly against crowds of youths wielding Molotov cocktails.

The scenes on the streets are depressing ones, reminiscent of the dark days of the Troubles. The young rioters themselves are, of course, directly responsible for their violent actions. But behind them, particularly in South East Antrim, one can sense the steering hand of older loyalist paramilitaries. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the Loyalist Communities Council — an “umbrella group” for the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando — announced its withdrawal of support in early March for the 1998 Good Friday agreement. The reason was its anger at the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol, which creates a sea border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom by keeping the former a part of the EU’s single market for goods.

Both loyalists and the wider Unionist population feel strongly that the Protocol fundamentally undermines Northern Ireland’s position in the UK, an analysis which most outside observers would surely find hard to counter. The question now is what anyone is going to do about it. Although the LCC was careful to say that opposition to the Protocol should remain “peaceful and democratic” the declaration sounded — and was fully intended to sound — an ominous note. And this Good Friday, in terms of peace, was a bad one.

I have reported on riots in Northern Ireland, and the unfortunate truth is that for the youths involved they are often wildly exciting occasions. The tacit permission conferred by “political anger” allows young people out on the streets, drinking lager and setting fire to things in a kind of carnival of rage: whoops and laughter are inevitably mixed in with the guttural yells.

There will be serious and sometimes irreparable costs, of course: injury to police officers and rioters themselves, damage to vehicles and property and the possibility of acquiring criminal records. Last week a loyalist rioter set his own clothes on fire. It was at a republican riot in Derry that the young journalist Lyra McKee was shot and killed in 2019. Such considerations might certainly weigh heavily with the more responsible local parents. But they will make little impression on a teenager clutching a petrol bomb, springy with adrenalin and pent-up frustration, particularly after a year in which Covid restrictions have rendered daily life more constricted and colourless than normal.

For most of these rioters, too, violence or the threat of it will be far from abnormal to them, despite the official “peace” in post-1998 Northern Ireland. They have grown up in largely Protestant working-class areas, dominated by the presence of former or current loyalist paramilitaries, many released early from prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Some of these ex-prisoners are now salaried “community workers”. Among their ranks, some are no doubt sincere about helping young people avoid the vicious sectarian brutality which warped and defined their own lives. Yet numerous others have energetically exploited the “peace” to celebrate sectarianism and expand criminal empires involving drugs and extortion. They entrench their fiefdoms by dispensing beatings and shootings, sometimes fatally, to any fellow-Protestant who crosses their path.

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In the years since 1998, little has been done to restrain them. The unspoken official bargain with both loyalist and republican paramilitaries has been that — so long as such organisations hold off on explicitly sectarian murders — they will be broadly untroubled by the authorities. The efforts of the PSNI to hold such criminality accountable have often been hampered by the lack of a wider political will, and reluctance of witnesses to give evidence. The British government imagined, perhaps, that with time and the steady flow of government grants operating as some kind of opiate, the loyalist paramilitaries would eventually grow tractable. If so, it was a miscalculation.

Since 1998, Sinn Féin — many of whose prominent members were in the IRA — has attained ever more political clout, making striking electoral gains in the north and more recently in the south. But parties representing the loyalist paramilitaries have been hampered in their political ambitions by the fact that the bulk of the Protestant community simply declined to vote for them. This has created a disparity of influence of which the loyalists are both keenly aware and resentful. The paramilitary murals in loyalist areas have become more explicitly menacing, deliberately evoking the murderous height of the Troubles.

One grouping in particular, the South East Antrim brigade of the Ulster Defence Association — thought to be most heavily involved in the drugs trade — has recently upped the ante, making open death threats against journalists and politicians who have exposed or criticised it. It was further enraged by the recent arrest of four of its members by the PSNI on drugs charges. It is perhaps not a surprise that names of areas in which this brigade dominates – including Newtownabbey, Carrickfergus and Ballymena — all featured in recent reports of rioting.

The young Protestant rioters we now see on the nightly news are the children of post-ceasefire Northern Ireland. They are in many ways its lost boys. In their streets — unlike more middle-class areas — the paramilitary threat never went away. A couple of years ago, I recall attending a community event for schoolchildren on the Protestant Shankill Road in West Belfast, in which a travelling theatre group put on a lively play meant to illustrate the dangers of getting sucked into the criminal orbit of the paramilitaries. Afterwards, there was a question-and-answer session that included a local policewoman. The teenage boys behind me — quick-witted, both cocky and vulnerable — had watched the play attentively, and later one of them spoke up to ask: “Are the cops scared of the paramilitaries?” The policewoman rather predictably assured him that they weren’t.

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Afterwards, I asked him why he had posed the question. It emerged that his father had been shot in the legs by paramilitaries for alleged “anti-social” behaviour years earlier. When he himself had got into an argument with another boy at school, one whose father was “connected,” his family had been warned to leave their house immediately or face the consequences. A local “mediation” service had managed to get the threat lifted, but I imagine its potential return never felt very far away. The entire landscape of his childhood had been laced with menace, in which the rest of society appeared largely uninterested. As such youths grow up, the local hard-men can appear as their tormentors, role models or, paradoxically, both things at once.

Working-class Protestant boys have the lowest educational achievement in Northern Ireland. The shipyards and mills that provided their ancestors with employment have melted away. A wealth of potential talent often lies untapped, as I am reminded every year when I see the annual Twelfth of July bonfires that so many toil long and hard to build, teetering miracles of engineering — bemusing to outsiders — which will do nothing more than blaze fiercely and briefly, emitting clouds of noxious smoke. Politically, there is a sense of embattled defensiveness, of belonging to a community inexorably on the slide away from a UK which is increasingly contemptuous of them, and towards a Republic of Ireland which is even more so.

The majority of Unionists — including many people in working-class communities — will regard the rioting with deep disapproval, and want it stopped. But that will not eradicate their abiding dislike of the Protocol, and the effect it is having on businesses, trade and their sense of Britishness. They have been cut adrift by Boris Johnson’s vision of Brexit, in a way that even those Unionists who backed Brexit did not foresee, and which Johnson himself had explicitly promised would not happen. Perhaps they should have predicted what Johnson would actually do, and not listened to what he said, but then it has been a recurrent tendency of Unionists to place excessive faith in the word of a British prime minister.

In appealing for peace on Northern Ireland’s streets, however, the British Government faces one great obstacle: the widespread perception in Belfast that violence — or the threat of it — works to secure political ends. That perception has flowed in part from the peace process, and not without reason. The SDLP politician Seamus Mallon once recalled asking Tony Blair why he spent so much more time in private talks with Sinn Féin, when the moderate SDLP was at that time the larger party. Blair replied, memorably: “The trouble with you fellows, Seamus, is that you have no guns.”

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An oft-repeated phrase in the peace process was “parity of esteem”. As Unionists see it, that is rapidly eroding. What loyalist paramilitaries seem now to be seeking is “parity of menace”. When considering where a customs border might be placed in the event of a hard Brexit, it was repeatedly emphasised — most passionately by the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar — that a land border was unconscionable, lest it run the risk of reigniting republican violence. This argument was taken very seriously by the US and EU, and no land customs border was forthcoming.

The opposite possibility, however — that a sea border might do the same to loyalist violence — scarcely seemed to figure on the international radar. Johnson’s Government showed a blithe disregard for the danger, although Theresa May had previously taken steps to avoid it. But by showing that Unionist concerns will be downgraded rather than run any risk of republican violence, the British Government and the EU have now created an awful incentive for loyalist paramilitaries to demonstrate an equivalent level of threat.

That incentive is not just implied, but actually written into Article 16 of the Protocol itself. There, it states that UK or the EU can unilaterally suspend aspects of the Protocol’s operation if it is causing “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist”. That’s the political equivalent of a teacher telling a delinquent school pupil that they can only get out of a locked classroom by setting it alight. The loyalist paramilitaries — whether by instinct or conscious design — will now make it their business to create “serious societal difficulties” that are “liable to persist”. It’s a terrible script. And unless Britain and the EU can somehow rewrite it, fast, it’s going to make for a very long, hot summer.

These resonated strongly with many readers, particularly — but not exclusively — young men. They were augmented by lectures, debates and YouTube videos; the book itself has sold over 5 million copies worldwide, and counting.

His follow-up, Beyond Order, seeks to go further — this time into the necessary balance between “the two fundamental principles of reality”, order and chaos, and their manifestations in authority and creativity, conservatism and change.

As we learn from the preface, it was written in the course of a highly turbulent period which included his daughter’s surgery, his wife’s diagnosis with a terrifying form of cancer and Peterson’s own traumatic withdrawal from benzodiazepine, which triggered severe insomnia, crippling anxiety and a form of incessant restlessness known as akathisia. Under such circumstances — in which both Peterson and his wife felt near to death — it might be considered a triumph to have produced a book at all. The opening rule is, in part, an explicit acknowledgement of how difficult it is to make something, as opposed to tearing it down: “Do not casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.”

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In the course of his rise to public prominence, Peterson has faced rather a lot of casual, and not-so-casual, denigration himself, along with unusually powerful levels of adoration from those who feel that they have been greatly helped by his books and lectures. The very nature of what Peterson represents — an unashamed didacticism, a strong emphasis on personal responsibility and a dogged resistance to progressive orthodoxies — has made him a kind of human lightning rod for the cultural conflicts of our age.

In Beyond Order, Peterson is reliably thought-provoking, often engrossing and occasionally a little ponderous in style. Indeed, with its careful explorations of myths, symbolism, fictional themes and clinical case studies, it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it. But then it is also hard to tell which version of Jordan Peterson, real or constructed, they were primarily reacting to: the author, the Toronto psychology professor, the YouTuber, the Tweeter, the combative debater, the indignant scourge of much left-wing dogma, or — more recently —the public player in a painful and complex human drama of illness and addiction?

Beyond Order, of course, is the creation of Peterson the author, whose words are weighed and qualified, and whose instructional paragraphs seek to strip his readers of their most damaging self-delusions while shoring them up with a measure of empathy. It “explores as its overarching theme how the dangers of too much security and control might be profitably avoided” and how to face fear and harness creativity in a way that is useful.

By way of illustration, Peterson includes a number of case studies from his clinical psychology. In these he comes across as a conscientious practitioner, who listens sympathetically to clients, cares about their recovery and searches for ingenious — if at times unusual — ways to help them.

Among his patients are a young, black, gay man who was psychologically devastated by a violent row with an ex-boyfriend, and a young, white woman emotionally paralysed by the workaday cruelties of the wider world, including the array of death laid out for consumption at the butcher’s shop. In both cases Peterson’s clients needed to come to terms with the troubling aspects of human nature — sexuality, violence and mortality — and wrestle them back into proportion (in the case of the hypersensitive young woman, his recovery plan included accompanying her to watch the embalming of a corpse).

Peterson has a sharp eye for the vagaries of human nature, and he can be a compelling storyteller, especially when narrating his own experiences and those he has observed from life. There is a fair amount of wisdom in Beyond Order, of the kind that used to be called common sense, but which might need restating in an era when views on what constitutes sense are no longer reliably held in common.

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A waiter tells Peterson, for example, how helpful his book and videos had been, as a result of which — in the author’s words — the waiter had “changed his attitude toward his comparatively lower status (but still useful and necessary) job”. Instead of despising his job, and himself, he had applied himself as fully as possible, and as a result been promoted three times in six months.

Peterson anatomises the considerable skills and interactions needed to be a successful waiter, from constant attentiveness to fostering good relations with chefs and tricky customers alike. For those who apply themselves to the difficulty of doing such jobs well, Peterson says: “The skills they acquire will be eminently portable.” Perhaps young people used to absorb this kind of nous instinctively when watching and learning from older mentors in practical settings: the farm, the workshop, the restaurant, the factory. No doubt many still do. But for those who may be freshly entering the world of work after an extended period in school and college, where the focus is placed more narrowly on intellectual achievements, it is worthwhile spelling it out.

Peterson is never shy of spelling things out — but then again, it seems that plenty of his readers welcome his didacticism, and if they don’t, why pick up a book with another 12 rules in it? In any case, he’s adept at blending the practical, the personal and the philosophical. Chapters such as “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible” — a progression from his earlier instruction to clean up your room – move into an exploration of the role and transcendent power of art, his own past failure to enjoy the world through the eyes of his small children and an inherently comic run-in with a disapproving university administrator after he hatched a plan to beautify his office with Hammerite paint and wooden panelling.

Yet while the book repeatedly stresses the need for a balance between conservative and liberal forces in society — order and chaos again — its arguments become much hazier on political territory. Peterson’s own experience of the increasingly feverish displays of thought-policing in modern universities no doubt partly informs his impatience with the devotees of ideology. But some of the “-isms” which he criticises — such as socialism, feminism and environmentalism — began as a way of addressing genuine wrongs in the existing society, and often did so peacefully and successfully, which is no small achievement.

It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service. It was feminist campaigning that secured women votes, equal pay legislation, property rights, financial independence and a network of women’s refuges from domestic violence. Peterson, who makes a convincing case for marriage in general, also vividly acknowledges that failures occur even within broadly beneficial social institutions: “Sometimes, you have married someone who is a psychopathic brute, a congenital and incorrigible liar, a criminal, an alcoholic, a sadist (and maybe all five at once). Then you must escape.”

Yet how exactly might a woman have escaped from such a marriage, say, in the Republic of Ireland of the 1960s, except in the most abject of styles? Up until 1976, a husband could sell or mortgage the family home without the consent or knowledge of his wife. The “marriage bar”, which prevented any married woman from working in the public sector, was not revoked until 1973. And divorce itself was not legalised until 1996. It required a movement to exert sufficient social pressure to alter these things, and the movement required a name.

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Women already have a Jordan Peterson

By Sarah Ditum

Today, the feminist movement contains many different strands, some of them seeming to work in opposition. It can often appear now as if useful social action is being supplanted by stunts, relatively trivial shaming campaigns and ideological rows conducted in increasingly jargon-laden language. Energies may arguably be flowing into the wrong place: it is striking, for example, that while so much feminist academic discourse is generated in the US, it remains the only OECD country without a national statutory paid maternity leave. But in a world that still includes FGM, forced marriage, domestic violence, “revenge porn” and a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, there is surely still a place for a vigorous international movement which explicitly centres the concerns of women and girls.

In his writings and YouTube videos, Peterson speaks engagingly of strategies for self-transformation, with emphasis on bolstering one’s character and moral purpose before taking on the rest of the world: stand up straight, clean your room, do not lie, do not do what you hate. Some of Peterson’s critics find the simplicity and directness of such advice mockable, but I think there is sense in it, and its effect may be more profound than one might initially imagine.

One cannot expect a single book — or even two books — to contain the theory of everything. But since Beyond Order explicitly discusses the tension between the status quo and the necessity for change, one might reasonably ask: how exactly does Peterson think that the change part should be pursued?

Both the rage and the gratitude which flows towards Peterson from millennials and Generation Z, for example, is partly a result of the way in which certain social structures have hardened around them. It is not simply that they have been conditioned to consider their rights over their responsibilities, as he says, although that might well be true. In many cases their passage towards independent adulthood, even to the point of affording a home and supporting children, has been made much more difficult by forces beyond their control. A combination of high house prices and the rapid expansion of an insecure “gig” and freelancing economy has placed many young workers — including highly-educated, middle-class ones — in a financial situation of near-permanent precarity.

Peterson, rightly, warns against resentment, “that terrible hybrid emotional state, an admixture of anger and self-pity”. But even worse than resentment, surely, is misdirected resentment. Much of today’s ideological fury, which plays out on social media, strikes me as a form of generational revenge, whereby language has become the only battleground upon which angry young people can score a decisive victory. We have all now seen the drama unfurl a number of times: a professionally successful person might say something mildly questionable in Twitter, say, or state an opinion at odds with the fast-changing template of what is considered socially acceptable by a vociferous minority. The clamour for their instant ejection from public life begins. Corporations join in because policing the nuances of acceptable speech has become an easy way of signalling solidarity with “progressive” youth and attracting their disposable income. They also find it preferable to paying adequate tax or offering young employees a solid pay and benefits structure that might permit them a more economically secure life.

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To some extent, Peterson has turned this implicit modern bargain on its head. His books have proved highly profitable at the same time as he decries the burgeoning call-out culture of the Left. Much of Beyond Order delves deep into myth, embodying chaos in the form of the snake or the dragon. But it is hard to avoid the suspicion that when a younger generation looks at Peterson they find themselves wrestling, not with Grendel’s mother, but with a different archetype: Dad. Some of them, perhaps lacking paternal authority themselves, are clearly heartened by his insistence that they have agency in the world, and must therefore own it. Others are infuriated by his apparent repudiation of the arguments on societal structure that they consider vitally important.

Peterson does not seem a duplicitous person, but rather unusually sincere and emotional. That is, perhaps, what makes him both so testy and so effective when challenged in debate. He operates with a degree of personal courage under considerable stress, and has clearly been wounded, in the past, by the ways in which some critics have made blithely contemptuous suppositions about him. The Canadian writer Tabatha Southey, for example, once dubbed him “the stupid man’s smart person”, a phrase that reeked of intellectual entitlement. But who exactly are these “stupid men” to whom she referred? And if the “smart man’s smart person” hasn’t yet worked out a way to make themselves broadly intelligible to ordinary people, then whose failing is that?

Peterson has an army of loyal online followers, some of whom enjoy framing verbal debate like an MMA fight — “Jordan goes beast mode!” — and there are times when it feels as if Peterson himself (as in the interesting, broadly courteous debate with Helen Lewis) subsequently characterises the interaction as more malevolent than it appeared to many who watched it.

It is natural to like people who are explicitly on your side, especially when you often feel yourself assailed by waves of genuine hostility. Yet there can be more shared values with perceived opponents than this electronic reiteration of opposition allows for. The amplification of bad feeling by commentators on social media can result in Peterson and whoever has publicly engaged with him, particularly women, both feeling bruised by the encounter. And, given his intermittent tendency to depression, the growing visibility of his own, clearly beloved family on Twitter and YouTube — those unpredictable, exposing arenas whose effects we do not yet fully understand — worries me a little.

The alt-Right and its conspiracy theories have recently gained a concerning amount of ground, while much of the volatile energy of the “progressive” Left is now primarily directed not at self-evident bigots and racists, for example, but also at anyone who dares to argue for working in a different style towards a better, more harmonious society. That has stifled actual progress and sucked political energies into the never-ending competitive pieties of the culture wars. But it is also leaving a growing number of liberals feeling alienated from this particular version of left-wing politics. If Peterson is right to be wary of policies that demand enforced equality of outcome, there is surely much common ground to be found in reducing the existing disparities in equality of opportunity — or at least those that can be reduced.

Perhaps Peterson’s next book might engage with the looming question he has left broadly unanswered in this one, interesting though it is. Many institutions contain much that is of value, but we cannot always assume that the “hierarchy of competence” which he talks about is working, especially where the careful sifting of evidence shows that it is not. Governments are repeatedly lobbied by forces that do not always have the best interests of ordinary people at heart, and policy is often corrupted by short-term thinking and responses.

So when things do go awry, what can we agree needs fixing, and how might disparate groups of individuals best co-operate to effect valuable political change? In a world that has come to salivate over the constant drama of a battle, that is one discussion which might really subvert expectations.

The way in which the wider United Kingdom metabolised the recent story of Scotland’s drugs deaths is a case in point. It emerged earlier this month that the country’s drug-related death toll is now 3.5 times that of England and Wales, and leads Europe by a shocking degree; in 2019 there were 1,264 drug-related deaths in the country of 5 million, roughly seven out of ten of whom were male.

The findings have proved a political scandal in Scotland, taking up numerous column inches and leading to the resignation of Joe Fitzpatrick, the SNP minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing. In the rest of the UK the story has briefly touched the news agenda before melting away. It is admittedly a period of unusually feverish political drama, with a new strain of Covid-19 on the rampage and a Brexit deal in the balance until Christmas, but I don’t think that in other circumstances things would be any different. They never are. On my Twitter timeline, Scottish drug deaths — rather like the victims of Northern Irish paramilitary shootings and beatings — scarcely surface at all as a topic of serious concern among members of the London media and professional classes. Nor have they done so for many years.

There are a number of reasons for this, I think. One is that England has become used over the years to the insidious idea that what might be dubbed “Celtic dysfunction” is an immutable fact of life, a bit like the rain. This dysfunction, it is thought, is most often expressed through violence, abuse of alcohol or drugs, although occasionally it snakes into eloquence. At times it may become a topic of heightened cultural interest, as with Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting or Douglas Stuart’s recent Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain, but that rarely translates into any sense of political urgency. When Scotland movingly or humorously dramatises its pain, the results are praised and savoured, but little sustained effort is made to alleviate the reality.

Along with devolution, another question has arisen: who owns this reality? In Westminster the attitude is that Scotland does, particularly with the SNP in charge: if they want to claim Scotland, the thinking goes, they can take responsibility for its human misery as well. But the truth is that neither Holyrood nor Westminster owns it fully: an effective drugs policy appears to have fallen down a gap in approaches between the two administrations. Where the British Government treats drug abuse primarily as a criminal justice matter, the Scottish Government increasingly regards it as a health emergency, leading to the Home Office blocking proposals for a “safe consumption” facility in Glasgow.

For drug users, the two opposing policies seem to represent either punishment or what might be called despair management. It may be that neither offers a satisfactory outcome. The Orwell prize-winning Scottish writer Darren McGarvey — who himself overcame addiction to drink and drugs — has eloquently argued that the punitive approach does not work and that a form of decriminalisation would give the authorities more policy options. But he also says that the SNP’s “harm reduction” model is itself flawed, and will lead to continued deaths: the SNP has actually cut drugs services and reduced spending on rehabilitation facilities, which are most likely to offer addicts a decisive path out of addiction.

There are no easy solutions, since many potential elements may feed into a drugs crisis: family dysfunction, economic deprivation, the easy availability of drugs, the fragmentation of community, a history of criminal offending, a spiral of shame and the individual’s sense of his or her own loss of meaning in the world.

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Will anyone ever say 'sorry' in Northern Ireland?

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A large amount of what holds true for Scotland also seems to be reflected in my birthplace of Northern Ireland, which itself has sharply escalating numbers of drug-related deaths. As in Scotland, the greater proportion of such deaths are among men, and many involve the mixing of a number of different substances. Those living in the most deprived areas of Northern Ireland — with their additional history of Troubles-related losses — are five times as likely to die a drug-related death as those in wealthier parts, and around 70% of those deaths will be among men. A separate but linked phenomenon is the relatively high rate of suicide in both places (although some of Northern Ireland’s suicides have recently been recategorised as accidental drugs deaths). The group most vulnerable to suicide across the board in the UK is that of middle-aged men.

Is there any truth in the notion that a predisposition to drink, drugs or even despair is a notable streak of the communal psyche of Scotland or Northern Ireland in a way that is less pronounced elsewhere? To say so is to run the risk of overlooking societal factors, or romanticising sadness. Some of the characteristics that seem innate may in fact be cultural and historical. Both Glasgow and Belfast, for example, once had heavy industries — in particular ship-building — that provided stable employment, rewarded engineering skills, and to some extent defined masculine meaning. When such industries melted away, they left a hole in working-class communities which nothing in successive generations has adequately filled. Women, too, have had to navigate the wider consequences of this loss, not least its damaging effects on the men around them.

The prevailing religious culture in both places, too, put a particularly strong emphasis on personal responsibility and hard work — both important values, but if one then repeatedly lapses from them, the internalised sense of shame is especially acute. The drug addict is often presented as someone who is essentially feckless, irresponsible and selfish. Yet it might be truer to say that while addiction makes addicts behave in a selfish way, the spur to the addiction is often deeply rooted in feeling too much rather than too little: the shameful sense in moments of lucidity of being worthless and unlovable, and of having routinely disappointed friends and family in a manner that now seems irrecoverable. The pain demands a quickly palliative measure, which when it wears off is likely to intensify the source of pain.

I spent some time a couple of years ago interviewing male teenaged victims of post-ceasefire paramilitary shootings and beatings in Belfast, attacks in which they had almost died and from which they were permanently scarred. Some had been targeted by the local “hard men” for their alleged involvement in petty crime, including small-time involvement with drugs. They were now almost certainly self-medicating more often to dull their anxieties, not least in constant anticipation of their attackers returning.

They displayed a remarkable lack of self-pity, in part because it was a pointless emotion, since there was and is very little coherent political will or strategy to help them rebuild their lives. Aside from a few brave community workers and academics who regularly speak up on their behalf, and their own families, there is almost no meaningful wider support shown to them. In the vast majority of cases they are too intimidated to consider giving evidence against their attackers in a public prosecution.

One spoke of a friend who had taken his own life after an attack of unimaginable brutality. Another told me he was fine now, and then casually mentioned that he had tried to kill himself on the night of his own engagement party. These youths were trapped within layers of indifference, both local and national, and immobilised in policy failure. I imagine that, albeit for less immediately brutal reasons, much the same sense of being officially considered either a non-person or a public nuisance applies to many of those who lose their lives to drugs in Scotland. The prevailing narrative around them is not one of empathy or outrage but ennui.

The by-products of stress and tension are not always wholly negative, provided there is at least some place in society where one seems to matter. Some of the wittiest people I have known — both men and women — have had extremely difficult childhoods. Their self-preservation demanded an enhanced attentiveness to the world, including the ability to closely  observe the innately unreliable adults and situations around them. Humour became a way both of detaching from emotional hurt and translating it into a usable currency: the dark, quick wit that so often characterises working-class Belfast and Glaswegian banter frequently has its origins in discomfort of some sort, whether outside the family or within it. The Glaswegian comedian Billy Connolly, for example, was only four years old when his mother abandoned him and his beloved older sister Flo to the erratically cruel care of paternal aunts and his father’s physical and sexual abuse.

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As an adult, talking about the abuse, Connolly revealed an extraordinary ability to sift and separate elements in his father’s character: “I love his memory now, as much as I loved him when he was alive. It was disloyal of him to do that to me, but there were other aspects of him that were great.” This heightened alertness to the agonising complications of others — the perpetually shifting, layered quality of the world — can be a great asset to a comedian or writer. But early betrayals also create an abiding reservoir of pain, into which people can pour drink or drugs or eventually their whole selves.

Connolly recognised this about himself in time to give up alcohol and cocaine, while holding on to the humour like a life-raft. Others don’t. One certainly would not wish the darker aspects of Billy Connolly’s childhood on anyone, but the question remains: would he have been the same electric stage presence had he grown up in a gently nurturing, stable middle-class family in Surrey?

Probably not. Yet the fact that dysfunction can give rise to compelling humour or art should not be a reason for a complacent failure to address it in policy terms. For every Billy Connolly or Douglas Stuart — who manage by means of resilience, talent, hard work and luck to alchemise their early adversity — there are numerous others who will be entirely crushed by it.

Another factor, I think, now mitigates against effective action on both drug-related deaths and suicides in Scotland in particular, and the wider UK in general, even as the statistics climb. It is the current style of political discourse, especially in sections of the Left, which accords moral status to victimhood while becoming increasingly selective about who is granted that status. If the wrong “category members” knock on the door, they’ll often find that the empathy police have quietly closed the club.

At present, public discussion of disadvantage often emphasises necessary questions of race and gender while simultaneously underplaying those of class, familial care, education and poverty. This is partly because the online public conversation around disadvantage — like many public conversations — is often dominated by the middle and upper-middle classes, a large proportion of whom have little personal experience of poverty or class discrimination, for example, and tend to minimise the importance of these factors in determining life chances. The most disadvantaged people in society often aren’t making their voices heard in the argument at all: they’re too busy struggling, and sometimes failing, to get by.

In much of academic and social media discourse, “white men” are routinely glued to the top of the privilege tree — somewhat illogically, since without further qualification the category can encompass both a homeless, unemployed person and Jeff Bezos. As an automatic shorthand for privilege, however, it doesn’t really work, especially once geography and socio-economic class are factored in. It will certainly include a notably high proportion of those in both the drug-related deaths and suicide statistics: seven out of ten drug-related deaths in Scotland are among men (including all races, of course, but at the last census Scotland was 96% white.)

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Despite much cultural discussion of race, the prevailing policy direction is doing very little to help less well-off black and Asian men across the UK either. Those social problems which are male-dominated (although of course they affect women as well) are also those to which society is increasingly unsympathetic. Budgets for drug and alcohol treatment programmes have been widely cut in recent years.

Men in the UK have roughly three times the suicide rate of women. According to the Samaritans, men who are less well-off (defined as a household income of less than £17,500 a year) are up to ten times more likely to take their own lives than those who are better-off. We need to talk about this, just as we acknowledge that women are disproportionately victims of domestic violence.

These are grim statistics of a brutal epidemic of self-destruction and loss, and it is striking how little they feature in the broader national conversation. Devolved responsibilities, shame around deprivation and addiction, institutional indifference and the oddly skewed prism through which once-progressive movements now view privilege and victimhood, have combined to make male despair increasingly invisible, even as it mounts: somebody else’s problem, and nobody’s problem at all.

Take, for example, the discussion that emerged some weeks ago when Billy Hutchinson, the leader of a small loyalist party called the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), launched his memoir, My Life in Loyalism, with a number of press interviews. Hutchinson’s previous career was in the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary organisation — linked to the PUP — which was primarily known for brutal sectarian killing.

Hutchinson’s public profile rose in line with the ‘peace process’ and his support for a loyalist ceasefire. But back in 1974 he was convicted of a UVF double murder, in which he and another UVF man shot dead two young Catholic half-brothers, Michael Loughran, 18, and Edward Eric Morgan, 27. The young men were walking down the Falls Road on their way to work one morning when a car drew up beside them and gunmen opened fire. The court was told that the victims were selected at random for what were described by the judge as “cold-blooded murders”.

Hutchinson’s mention of his victims in his book, as reported by the Irish Times, is somewhat different. The men had, he said, been identified as “active republicans. How accurate the information was, I don’t know”. The passivity of the voice is striking, as is the ambiguity of “I don’t know”. Yet there was no indication whatsoever during court proceedings that his victims were involved in the IRA. They have never been claimed or commemorated by any republican paramilitary organisation.

Their cousin, only 12 years old when they were shot, later wrote Hutchinson an open letter in which he reiterated their lack of paramilitary involvement. In it, he movingly described the catastrophic shock for his family, and the few items that his cousin Eric left behind: a handful of albums — “Tubular Bells at the front” — and the little military pewter figurines he liked to paint.

Hutchinson has said that, “I accept responsibility for what I did”. So why continue to prolong a family’s pain by insinuating a political justification? Because the alternative is Hutchinson taking the consequences of his own action fully upon himself. This he refuses to do, despite arguing for the necessity of a peaceful future. In fact, he said as much in the recent interview with the Irish Times: “I justify everything that I did in the Troubles, and I have to do that to stay sane.” That, at least, comes close to an honest analysis of his own thought processes. But the wider question is: who in society pays the price for the preservation of Hutchinson’s sanity?

The UVF and UDA are still active in criminality in Northern Ireland. The PUP, however, is a very small player on Northern Ireland’s political scene: it currently has some councillors — of whom Hutchinson is one — but no representatives in the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly. The same cannot be said of Sinn Féin, the party linked to the Provisional IRA, which has seven MPs in the UK House of Commons (from which it abstains), 27 seats in the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly, and 37 seats in Dáil Éireann in Dublin. Indeed, the runaway success of the party in February’s general election in the Republic of Ireland — backed by many young voters, in particular — came as something of a shock to the Irish political establishment.

Once, voters in the Republic of Ireland were largely repelled by the party’s links to extreme violence. Today, many appear unbothered by that dark history, or might even consider that it adds a touch of radical spice to an otherwise bland democratic soup. That fresh acceptance has been enabled by a narrative — energetically propagated by Sinn Féin itself — which attempts to distance itself from the grotesque detail of IRA violence while simultaneously celebrating an airbrushed version of “the armed struggle”.

Although the image that Sinn Féin broadly chooses to project under its leader Mary Lou McDonald is that of a modern Left-wing, progressive party, campaigning on housing and healthcare,it occasionally flashes naked pride in its IRA past — as in February when David Cullinane shouted “Up The ‘Ra!” to celebrate his election as a Sinn Féin TD, or again last week when Brian Stanley, another Sinn Féin TD, tweeted gloatingly that the 1979 “narrow water” incident had taught the British “the cost of occupying Ireland”.

Stanley was referring to an attack on Warrenpoint by the IRA’s South Armagh brigade in which 18 British soldiers were killed, and over 20 injured. It took place on the very same day that the IRA blew up Lord Mountbatten’s fishing boat, killing him along with his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas, the 83-year-old Dowager Lady Brabourne, and a 15-year-old schoolboy called Paul Maxwell who was working as a “boat boy” for the summer.

The deaths of two elderly people and two teenage boys that day were presumably also intended to school the British in — to borrow Stanley’s parlance — “the cost of occupying Ireland”. Like the soldiers at Warrenpoint, the small party on the boat fell under the IRA’s broad definition of “legitimate targets”, and their deaths would have been greeted with glee.

The collective memory of Ireland, North and South, is in the throes of an ongoing struggle between actual human experience, factual truth and political propaganda for dominance, in which great swathes of human experience and factual truth are being routinely downgraded, dismissed, insulted or selectively interpreted. That is where the role of the scrupulous historian becomes of great and immediate importance. The book Lost Lives, for example, an authoritative compendium of Troubles-related deaths, has long been considered an invaluable chronicle of the reality of that bleak time. Each individual’s death is accompanied by a short factual account which tells its own heart-breaking story. Neither the IRA nor the loyalist paramilitaries come out of it well.

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Another important contribution to Troubles history has just been published, this time by Liam Kennedy, an emeritus professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. It bears the title Who Was Responsible For The Troubles? — a bold choice, since such a question presses directly on the inflamed nerve-endings of historical sensitivities, and has the potential to kick off the debating equivalent of a dust-up in a Belfast bar. Yet Kennedy — a Tipperary-born long-time resident in Belfast, who intimately understands the psychology of both North and South — goes through “the parade of candidates” with an admirable and forensic calm, painstakingly assembling the relevant facts and weighing the role of “both state and non-state actors”.

Much of this is directly relevant to Sinn Féin’s current attitude to the IRA’s past violence — which seems, in its carefully calibrated mixture of dogged justification and fuzzy regret, very similar to Billy Hutchinson’s attitude to UVF killing.

Earlier this year, Mary Lou McDonald said of the IRA campaign, “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign,” going on to describe it as “utterly inevitable”. As the years have gone by, and its electoral base in the Republic of Ireland has grown, Sinn Féin’s retrospective justification for past IRA activity has changed emphasis. Where once it was broadly accepted — including by Sinn Féin — that the IRA waged its armed campaign in order to bring about a United Ireland by force, the party now prefers to depict the brutal campaign as an unavoidable historical necessity in the fight for basic civil rights and freedoms for Catholics in Northern Ireland. This canny, if bogus, alteration serves two purposes: it is infinitely more palatable to a modern audience, and it also permits the party to slide past the uncomfortable fact that after a long and bloody conflict a united Ireland has not yet been achieved.

Kennedy’s book debunks that interpretation, although it does not gloss over Protestant sectarian bigotry and violence, disastrous early mistakes of the British Army, or the shortcomings of the Unionist-controlled Stormont government from 1922 to 1972. But he argues that significant changes were already well underway by the late 1960s, including “electoral reform, changes to policing, and reform of housing”. In a survey of popular opinion in the spring and summer of 1968, 65% of Catholics thought that relations between Catholics and Protestants were better than five years earlier.

The clear policy goal of the nascent Provisional IRA was a united Ireland won by force, he says, just as the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht vowed in February 1970: “We will erect the Irish Republic again in all its glory no matter what it costs.” The author’s contention is that the Provisional IRA’s long-term motivation was very far indeed from a civil rights agenda, not least when one considers the high numbers of Catholics that it killed and maimed in Northern Ireland. Indeed, he considers PIRA to have been the primary engine of the Troubles.

His view is supported elsewhere by a source somewhat closer to the republican heartland — Kevin Hannaway, a republican dissident who also happens to be Gerry Adams’ cousin, who remarked not long ago of contemporary Sinn Féin, “If they were out for an Irish Republic they failed. If they were out for civil rights they got it in 1973. So what the fucking hell was the other 30 years of war for?”

In recent years, however, Sinn Féin has been extremely vocal on the case of Pat Finucane, a Northern Ireland criminal defence lawyer who was murdered by loyalist UDA gunmen in 1989 as he ate Sunday dinner with his family. Ken Barrett, a UDA member, was later convicted of his murder. An independent 2012 review of the case found evidence of collusion between Finucane’s killers and elements in the Royal Ulster Constabulary — for which David Cameron subsequently apologised — but “no over-arching state conspiracy”. Last week, the Secretary of State Brandon Lewis ruled out the full public inquiry demanded by the Finucane family – although he kept the door open for one in the future. This decision met with widespread outrage, including from the Taoiseach Michéal Martin and Amnesty International.

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It is justifiable and understandable that Pat Finucane’s family should seek information on his appalling murder. Historic state collusion with paramilitaries in Northern Ireland should be held to account where it exists. What is not justifiable is Sinn Féin’s own refusal either to express any genuine regret or disclose information on the murders of lawyers and judges by the IRA, of which there were very many: among them Edgar Graham, a young Unionist law lecturer gunned down outside Queen’s University; William Doyle, a Catholic judge shot dead as he left Sunday Mass; Rory Conaghan, a Catholic judge murdered in front of his young daughter; and Martin McBirney, a left-leaning magistrate, civil rights campaigner and literary figure who was shot dead in his family home at breakfast.

Sinn Féin is no longer a movement outside the state: it has long been part of the government in Northern Ireland, and it is actively seeking to become the government in the Republic. For how long can it argue its own right to repress and deny “legacy” information on the murder of citizens in Northern Ireland?

It is hard now, perhaps, to convey the impact of what families bereaved by paramilitary murders went through at the time of the 1998 Belfast Agreement. They had to accept that the killers of their loved ones would gain early release under its terms; in one instance, the parents of Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, the last soldier killed in the Troubles, had to witness their son’s killer, Bernard McGinn, laughing as he was sentenced to 490 years in prison for offences that also included making the Docklands Bomb, knowing he would be free in 16 months. Many of them accepted this because they believed it would bring an end to the sectarian killing that had destroyed their own families — and to a large extent it did.

Very few, however, had fully anticipated the degree to which former paramilitaries and their vocal supporters would come to dominate the political narrative in post-Agreement Ireland, whether in terms of media coverage or electoral success. The emotional comfort of former paramilitaries has been broadly indulged and preserved at the expense of those their organisations have bereaved.

Many of the bereaved have now taken refuge in privacy and silence. Some speak out from within victims’ groups or are active online, bringing their stories of loss to a wider audience. On platforms such as Twitter, I have seen a measure of the online abuse endured by courageous campaigners such as Ann Travers, whose 22-year-old sister Mary, a primary school teacher, was shot dead by the IRA during a 1984 attempt to murder her father, the judge Thomas Travers, as the family walked home from Mass. The icy statement from the Sinn Féin spokesman Danny Morrison at the time was that “Miss Travers’ death was regrettable but understandable as her father was a member of the British judiciary.” The party does not seem to have shifted fundamentally in its thinking since.

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'Fake news' is old hat in Northern Ireland

By Douglas Murray

That chilling “regrettable but understandable” over a young woman’s murder back in 1984 sits very close to Mary Lou McDonald’s “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign” in 2020. Or, indeed, Billy Hutchinson’s remark, “I justify everything that I did in the Troubles”. Yet any credible way forward for Ireland, North and South, must surely involve a genuine manifestation of respect for all those who lost their lives.

And if Britain is to re-examine the points where intelligence-gathering operations veered into criminal collusion, as it should, then the Republic of Ireland might also reflect on the degree of popular sympathy for the IRA in that jurisdiction, and the extent to which that funded and fuelled the murderous conflict in the North – a theme examined in a new book, A Broad Church by Gearóid Ó Faoleán.

Acknowledging and owning uncomfortable truths in history is a complicated and painful path for all parties, and so it should be. The best historians recognise this, I think, but the electorate now seems increasingly disinclined to do so. Much of Northern Ireland remains sharply divided among sectarian lines. Both there, and certainly in the Republic of Ireland, there is a resurgent, simplistic and deeply polarising IRA triumphalism, which many among the younger generation — who never lived through the raw misery of the Troubles — are finding quite an intoxicating brew. It must feel a bit exciting to them, I suppose. It doesn’t bode well.

In the Christian tradition of which Pepinster largely writes in Martyrdom, the martyr knowingly accepts and endures unimaginable suffering by means of a particular form of stubbornness. This enables them to override a combination of intense psychological pressure and appalling physical pain, or the imminent promise of it.

That extraordinary willpower derives chiefly from the power of faith and the confidence in an afterlife. The earliest martyrs made a hard but simple choice to assert their Christianity in the face of an oppressive Roman authority. From “the late first century until the early part of the fourth” the leaders of the Christian communities were persecuted by officials of the Roman Empire as members of a subversive and dangerous cult. Refusal to renounce the Christian faith brought a death sentence, which the Roman historian Tacitus described being carried out in the cruellest forms under the emperor Nero, including Christians being “burnt, to serve as nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his garden for the spectacle…”

What quickly became apparent, however, was that the grotesque circumstances of death could involve an unpredictable transfer of power between oppressor and martyr (an echo of what occurred during the crucifixion of Christ). Some Christians refused to cower in terror when they met their end, but publicly embraced death as “a means to redemption”. St Ignatius of Antioch, “condemned to the beasts at Rome” in the second century, for example, wrote a series of letters to fellow-Christians in which he said: “Let me be fodder for the wild beasts; that is how I can get to God… I shall coax them to eat me up at once and not hesitate, as sometimes happens, through fear.”

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Sinn Féin's triumph is a victory of forgetting

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If the state had enacted its ultimate authority by means of torture and death, the Christian martyrs now knowingly exercised a more expansive authority of their own in return — a defiant moral command that they believed derived from a higher power, which was not bounded by earthly conceptions of time, and news of which could be spread by word of mouth, writings and the distribution of relics.

Martyrdom sites became the objects of pilgrimages; the actual body of the martyr, fragmented and widely disseminated, seeded new, dedicated churches around these holy objects; commemorations became part of the liturgical calendar. The more Christians were killed, the more the religion flourished. As the author writes: “Martyrdom created a kind of ecclesiastical economy.”

The martyrs themselves were, quite literally, the life-blood of this spiritual and material economy, and their trials still make agonising reading — particularly those of the women, who seemed to be singled out for especial brutality based on their sex. This book returns us sharply to the human realities of their stories. Vibia Perpetua, for example, a married noblewoman and mother, was put to death in Carthage around AD 203 at the age of 22, along with a slave named Felicity.

She left a contemporaneous diary describing her distraught father holding her infant son, pleading with her to renounce Christianity — “Perform the sacrifice. Have pity on your baby!” Upon refusal, Perpetua was tormented by aggressive animals before being murdered by gladiators. Felicity, who died alongside her, gave birth to a daughter in prison shortly before her execution, and went out into the arena with her breasts dripping milk.

Such stories convey the extraordinary degree of resistance and disruption that conscious martyrdom entailed — not only to state power, but also to the accepted role of women within the family, and the physical and emotional tug of parental love.

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Is France's secularism worth dying for?

By John lichfield

Although propelled by faith, martyrdom has historically been inextricable from politics. Across the ages, Christian martyrs have invariably pitted their individual conscience against the dictates of the state. From Thomas à Becket, who clashed with Henry II in the 12^th century, to Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a dissident priest murdered in communist Poland in 1984, they have demonstrated an obstinate refusal to be muzzled by fear. This ability to act as a symbol of both individual and communal resistance — and the intensity of authoritarian violence it provokes in response — is what sears martyrs into wider memory.

Such a potent and intoxicating brew, however, inevitably demands a measure of regulation. The Catholic Church has therefore attempted over the years to provide a working definition of a true martyr. The criteria set out by Pope Benedict XIV in the 18th century included that the martyr must not deliberately seek his or her own death; must show courage in the face of persecution; and be subjected to a specific case of odium fidei (hatred of the faith) which prompted the attack. Later theologians broadened the criteria, to include a person “killed by someone who hated his or her faith and the values it stood for” or who had “known that the values he or she lived for could end in death”. Pepinster is at pains to point out that “Christian ideas of martyrdom rule out death in battle and engagement in any form of aggression.” Despite his religious motivation, she says, Guido Fawkes is not a contender.

This is a timely moment for a discussion of what martyrdom means, in part because the title of “martyrdom” is now so often being claimed — albeit in a different form — by a militant Islamism. Although actively rejected by the majority of Muslims, this Islamist definition refuses to recognise the prohibition on either seeking out self-destruction or pursuing aggression. Islamist groups have thus frequently hailed as “martyrs” those Islamists — such as a 9/11 or Bataclan attackers — who are killed in the course of murdering numerous others.

Another reason is that Christian martyrdom, of the kind caused by odium fidei, is far from a thing of the past. The late Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi, said in 2014 that “the persecution of Christians throughout much of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, and elsewhere is one of the crimes against humanity of our time”. By 2016, the author writes, Christians were being targeted in 144 countries. A report by the Bishop of Truro, the Rt Revd Philip Mounstephen, found that the relative silence in the West on this persecution stemmed — in Pepinster’s words — from “some misplaced idea that Christianity was a product of colonialism rather than a religion that was willingly embraced by today’s believers”. Yet it is some of the most ancient Christian communities which have found themselves under the fiercest attack: the beleaguered Copts of Egypt, for example — who can trace their Christian roots in the region back to 42 AD — have been repeatedly targeted by Isis, not least in horrific church bombings in 2016 and 2017.

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The West's shameful indifference to Christian genocide

By Giles Fraser

But if Western societies appear relatively uninterested in the immediate and desperate plight of many Christian communities worldwide today, they are nonetheless still gripped by the idea of martyrdom and its semiotics, which can be selected and adapted for other contemporary causes, whether that of social justice or secularism.

This transference from religious to secular uses is not new, although it sits broadly outside the intended range of Pepinster’s book, and some definitions are lost in the process. But the imagery of religious martyrdom has often been adopted and adapted by revolutionary movements, for example, which keenly understand how heavily it presses upon the limbic systems of ordinary people.

The French Revolution — which explicitly turned against the Catholic Church and persecuted priests — nonetheless speedily annexed the rituals and iconography of Christian martyrdom for its own ends. The revolutionary Paris deputies Louis-Michel Lepeletier and Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed to death in 1793 by political opponents, became newly-forged martyrs in a vigorous revolutionary cult which manifested itself in banners, parades, shrines, songs, paintings and statues — all the devotional trappings of a recently sublimated church, now redirected into revolutionary fervour.

In volatile times, those authorities which are slow to understood the political and popular potential of “martyrdom” have often found themselves overwhelmed by it. In Ireland in 1916, many ordinary Dubliners at first opposed or even jeered the small number of Irish rebels who had enacted the brief and militarily unsuccessful Easter Rising against British rule. Asquith’s government, however — despite warning voices from Ireland — made effective martyrs of the leaders by executing them over a 10-day period, including shooting one, James Connolly, while he was wounded and tied to a chair. It was an outcome that had been anticipated by some leaders of the Rising, in particular Patrick Pearse, who had spoken of the necessity for a “blood sacrifice” to regenerate Irish nationalism. His intention was fulfilled: a large proportion of Irish nationalists who had previously been unsympathetic to the rebels shifted their allegiance following the executions, resulting in a radicalised Irish nationalism and a subsequent intensification of the conflict.

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Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

In 2020 we have again seen — in a different form — the reach of non-religious ideas of martyrdom in cohering protest. The first time was in May, over the death of George Floyd during police arrest in the US, an event which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide. Floyd, who was 46 when he died, had a complex history which included early success as a high-school star athlete and rapper, a decade lost to prison terms for drugs and robbery, and then an attempt to rebuild his life in conjunction with a Christian ministry and a move to Minnesota, where he worked as security guard.

Yet the cause of his death was not his faith but, many believed, his race. Following arrest over a minor allegation, the policeman Derek Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes while Floyd repeatedly warned, “I can’t breathe,” called for his late mother, and eventually slipped into unconsciousness. Floyd neither sought nor accepted his situation — far from it, having repeatedly told the officers that he was claustrophobic and already had trouble breathing. But the excruciating, publicly visible footage of his gradual asphyxiation nonetheless held a terrible echo of the earlier physical trials of religious martyrs.

The second politically significant “martyrdom” of 2020 was that of Samuel Paty, the French schoolteacher who was beheaded by a young Islamist following a lesson in which he discussed freedom of expression and showed his class the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

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The secularism of the state, or laicité, is central to France’s conception of itself and its ideal of equality, and education is the means by which this communal vision is delivered. In that sense the murder of Samuel Paty, killed outside his school, was interpreted as an even greater outrage to the French state than the equally brutal 2016 killing by Islamists of the elderly French priest Jacques Hamel in his church in Rouen. Hamel, a gentle man who sought inter-faith dialogue, was certainly widely and intensely mourned — including by leading French politicians — but he was nonetheless a martyr of the Catholic church, as Pope Francis made clear at the time.

Paty, in contrast, is a martyr for the secular French state, and has been treated as such. A national memorial was held at the Sorbonne, and Paty was posthumously awarded the Légion d’honneur. His attacker — prior to being shot by police — posted an image of his victim’s severed head on Twitter in a bid to shock and terrify. Yet the image of Paty that has been most widely circulated, shows him in his role as a teacher in the classroom, a scarf loosely knotted around his neck, in the act of discussing and explaining. It’s a poignant photograph, as potent in its way as any icon. It demonstrates, not force of faith, but faith in the power of reason, and its intended role — reiterated by the French authorities — is to help reunite a shaken France in defence of laicité.

Asphyxiation. Stabbing. Beheading. These actions, with their medieval echoes, sit at the heart of some of the leading news stories of our age. But which comes first, the movement or the martyr? It can appear as if a mass movement is sparked by a single death, but I think the interaction is more complicated than that. There are many brutal and cruel deaths in the world, occurring daily. Each carries its own individual cargo of grief and injustice, yet only a few will decisively spark wider indignation and action. Those that do are the ones that act — by a coincidence of time, place, visibility and circumstance — as a kind of lightning rod for existing political electricity, a gathering frustration and anxiety that is looking for a place to earth.

The elevation of martyrs in any society, however, is also a sign that the existing political conversation has broken down. The forces of reason, pluralism, legality and democracy are fractured. The consensus among citizens has been stress-tested, and is fraying. Too many people either feel that reasonable, agreed avenues for legitimate change and expression are blocked, or that existing cohesive values are collapsing. Martyrs therefore become soldiers in an emotional battle for moral authority: the deep appeal to unity via the veneration of the dead is all that is left.

It is a grim irony that the West now appears so indifferent to the continuing reality of Christian martyrdom globally, while still drawing on so much of its historical signage and poetic resonance. But the fundamental alchemy of martyrdom, the transformation of individual death into communal cause, is as strong as ever. Martyrs arise at the smoking interfaces of social and political conflict. They are birthed in violence, and thereafter can be used either to inspire or further to inflame. Either way, we have not seen the last of them.

In India, and among the Indian diaspora, marriage is mostly treated with unashamed high seriousness, something that often makes it a source of fascination for non-Indian communities in the West. Although light in its approach — which made the most of the fascination across all cultures with an individual’s search for lasting love — Indian Matchmaking also touched upon the more painful side of a heavily marriage-oriented society: the sometimes uncomfortable intensity of family pressure to find a spouse, the anxiety about being older and unmarried, particularly among women, and the stigma of divorce.

The programme met with a mixed response from critics – particularly from writers of South Asian heritage, some of whom had felt the pressure of an arranged-marriage culture themselves. It sparked a fierce debate over the matter-of-fact way in which Taparia’s tick-list evaluation of any given client aired not only prejudices around looks, height, weight, affluence and education, but also of ‘colourism’ (with a preference for fair-skinned matches) and conformity to caste — prejudices which infuse Indian society in complex ways.

It seemed that the programme was caught up in the modern argument on what a television show is meant to do – whether it is enough simply to reveal a situation to the public gaze, and allow viewers to draw their own conclusions, or whether it is imperative also to steer the viewer’s judgements in an approved direction. The zeitgeist has shifted towards the latter.

What did become clear, when watching it with my mother-in-law, was that the full complexity and range of situations covered by the term ‘arranged marriage,’ were not touched on. For Taparia’s educated, upper and middle-class clientele, the modern ‘matchmaking’ service was akin to a hand-picked dating opportunity, in which they were free to refuse the proposed matches, and often did.

A large number of my mother-in-law’s contemporaries had a more traditional form of ‘arranged marriage’, in which their spouse was chosen by their parents, with very little input from the bride and groom themselves — a scenario which is reliably met with Western fascination or horror. My mother-in-law herself had a ‘love marriage’ which took her across both religion and caste, since she is Sikh and my late father-in-law was Hindu. Yet many ‘arranged marriages’ among her close friends – some of whom met on their wedding day — appear to have been notably long and happy ones.

Part of the reason that such marriages succeeded was because they were rooted in a different era and set of expectations from those in contemporary white Western culture. They were — and are — seen as not just the union of individuals, but of families, in which specific roles, duties and wider relationships are implicitly understood. Love was expected to deepen over time, rather than follow the initial ‘thunderbolt of attraction’ narrative now beloved by the West.

To observe this – and to note that for many couples, it has worked well — is not to ignore those for whom it has done the opposite. Some arranged marriages turned out to be terrible mismatches, from which extrication was difficult. And a culture which places a very high value upon marriage per se can bring a blessed sense of security and wider support to a happy couple, and their children.

But it can also function as a trap for the unhappy, whereby women in particular who abandon a marriage for any reason – including a spouse’s domestic abuse, addiction or infidelity — are at risk of being stigmatised. So, too are those who are deemed undesirable in the heterosexual marriage market, or who actively choose to reject it because it asks too high a sacrifice of their career ambitions, sexual orientation or personal freedom.

In its most negative form, a society that places too much weight on the institutional, structural or financial importance of marriage can obliterate the rights and wishes of the individual almost entirely. In India, that finishes up in instances of child marriage or the demand for heavy dowries (both now illegal, but still prevalent).

Elsewhere, the institution of marriage — beneficial in so many ways — has nonetheless often been bolstered by shunning those who fell outside it, and sometimes silencing those within. In Ireland, for example — until the late 20^th century — young women who had a baby out of wedlock were deemed ‘fallen’ and could be incarcerated in institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries. So too could girls deemed too troublesome or flirtatious, or who spoke out about abuse. For women in bad marriages, divorce was only legalised in the Republic of Ireland after a referendum in 1995, when it was passed by a wafer-thin majority.

The template of ‘the good girl’ sits at the centre of a heavily traditional vision of marriage and family, in which a woman’s role as wife and mother is understood to supersede all other possible ambitions. The good girl is demure, stoic, hard-working, loving, domesticated, faithful and uncomplaining. She unquestioningly sacrifices her own desires and ambitions for the care and advancement of others. Her education is useful only until her ambitions appear to get in the way of her fulfilling the immediate needs of the family, at which point it is dispensable.

Some of this, of course, overlaps with the notion of simply being a good person: it would be a highly selfish individual, male or female, who always insisted that their own concerns and wishes should take precedence over everyone else’s. But the notion of ‘the good girl’ is slightly different, in that the expectation of domestic virtue and self-denial automatically falls upon the woman.

In its most rigid incarnations, any woman who walks away from a marriage — for whatever reason — is held to have broken a priceless social pact. If a girl in the family is subjected to sexual abuse by a male relative, it is tacitly understood that she should protect the family’s honour with her silence: in such circumstances, the only way she can remain a ‘good girl’ is to say nothing. While such codes still persist in many parts of the world, the battles to break down this aspect of culture in the West were hard-won and relatively recent.

It may seem self-evident to most young women in the UK and Ireland now that a woman should be able to leave an abusive marriage without blame or economic ruin. But feminism in the West had to engage forcefully with such attitudes, and publicly challenge them. Girls in both the UK and Ireland who spoke about sexual abuse in families or communities were often chastised, disbelieved or dubbed a disgrace for even raising the topic.

Those of us who came of age in the UK in the late 1980s were the beneficiaries of arguments won by feminists in the 1960s and 70s on issues such as equal pay, sex discrimination and domestic violence legislation. A broader set of negotiations within marriage became possible. Many women of my generation have navigated a way pragmatically — and often erratically — through the career path that feminism opened up and the demands of relationships and children (if we have them). Life has often become a series of messy compromises between work and family, particularly for women with children, as we try to balance security and freedom, ambition and duty.

But, then, life itself is messy, and mined with competing demands for most adults: bills need paying, children need care and meals need cooking, and it is now widely understood, at least, that roles can be shared and men can be expected to compromise too.

In the case of women’s rights, having won many of the big legal battles on equality in the West, one might perhaps have thought that feminism would then concentrate on campaigning for the most vulnerable in our society — such as low-income mothers, female prisoners, at-risk girls or women escaping domestic violence — while also speaking up for fundamental women’s rights worldwide.

Further reading

Pity the women locked in with their abusers

By Joan Smith

All credit is due to those committed grass-roots feminist groups who do work and campaign tirelessly on exactly such issues. But another, more popular and media-friendly strand of feminism seems to have spun off from practical concerns, into the realm of endless ideological debate or personal performative signalling, for which university campuses and social media are the perfect arenas. Meanwhile, just as #MeToo has been ‘calling out’ historic and current incidences of sexism in the workplace, violent misogyny has been given a free pass to plant a worryingly large flag in the bedroom.

Every so often you read a story that makes your brain spin a little in the gap between the gravity of the experience it describes and the relative casualness of the discussion. For me it was the BBC report last year that “more than a third of UK women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sex”. A young woman called Anna spoke out about three separate sexual encounters with “ordinary guys” in which this had happened to her without any prior discussion or warning. The first man, she said, began with hair pulling and slapping before he tried to put his hands around her neck to choke her. When she talked to her friends about it, many reported a similar experience.

As Anna observed, “If someone slapped or choked you in the street, it would be assault.” What she experienced was also assault, of course, and arguably more terrifying than a street attack because she was alone with someone in whom she had placed trust. Why is violence now becoming such a common element of young women’s sexual experience, something which the generation before them would have found aberrant?

The explanation that keeps cropping up from women and women’s organisations alike is the unparalleled contemporary reach and content of porn. In recent years, not only has hardcore pornography become normalised and ubiquitous, but sexual violence against women, including strangulation and choking scenes, has risen rapidly to become a very big element of it – so much so that many male consumers, steeped in the repeated imagery, either confusedly assume that’s what all women want in real-life encounters, or simply don’t care enough to ask.

The porn industry constantly seeks out new taboos, and enriches itself by the thrill that comes from busting them. (Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, has written of the new mainstreaming of ‘step’ porn with incestuous themes, often using actresses who are over 18 but look much younger.)

But certain taboos — especially those against incest and sexual violence against women — exist for a reason: to protect vulnerable women and children. The behemoth site Pornhub, owned by MindGeek — which has boomed in lockdown and cannily tweets its “solidarity against racism and social injustice” — has been repeatedly accused of hosting and profiting from actual images taken from ‘revenge porn’, rape and child trafficking.

Further reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

Along with the mainstreaming of porn, and its staged depictions of incest and violence, a new female role model has arisen: the ‘cool girl,’ who reframes her own experience of male violence as empowerment to general cultural acclaim. The first notable ‘cool girl’ in porn was a young actress called Sasha Grey, an intelligent, articulate 18-year-old brunette who – to hipster delight – referenced existentialism, French New Wave cinema and sexual self-discovery.

Grey quickly became known for something else too. In 2006, on her first day on set with a veteran porn star called Rocco Siffredi, Grey reportedly asked him to punch her in the stomach – something she later instead called “an exercise in improvisational fantasy”. Her willingness to ‘push the envelope’ on combining violence with sex gave her a unique selling point, and she rapidly attained celebrity within the industry, before departing it at 21 to pursue a career in mainstream acting, writing and presenting.

If Grey helped to normalise depictions of violent sex in pornography, the fashionable mainstream — with virtually no self-interrogation — quickly moved to do exactly the same in real life. The Huffington Post called Grey “a role model for sex positivity“. Art Tavana in LA Weekly said “she made self-degradation seem like fine art, and, for that, she appealed to edgy tastemakers like American Apparel and VICE”. Allure magazine did a feature on her make-up, and how in her porn work she had decided to “‘amp up the scenes’ realism” with non-waterproof products.

Vanessa Grigoriadis, who profiled Grey for Rolling Stone, said: “To me, what’s most important about her is her impact on feminism”. She noted that “porn has been one of feminism’s most divisive issues” and that, “Grey says, ‘If you look at me and you think “Here’s a woman who’s intelligent, cognizant and making her own choices”, and you still tell me that what I’m doing is wrong, screw you, because that should end the debate.’”

Further reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Louise Perry

It didn’t end the debate, however, because the argument wasn’t about Grey’s sexual choices – which are indeed her own – but the way a multi-billion pound, international porn industry decided to commodify and popularise those choices, cheered on by much of the women’s magazine industry, without any thought for how that might play out for women in real life. The result has in fact been to sprinkle ‘progressive’ icing sugar on some deeply regressive and dangerous misogyny.

Women’s Health magazine, for example, breezily asked its female readers in 2016, “Choking as a sex move – is it for you?”. The report said, “If blindfolds and sex moves have veered into vanilla territory for you and your partner, there are still plenty of sex moves that are considered extra freaky. Like choking.” In a piece that explored the potential excitements of what it called “breath play” it did have one little moment of warning, “If choking is up there on your sexual bucket list, prepare for a buzz kill. The reality is that it’s crazy dangerous for beginners”. The ‘buzz kill’ — as spelt out by an expert — was a pretty big one: how easy it was to die if things went slightly wrong.

Another potential ‘buzz kill’ – not mentioned in the article – is the increased risk of stroke and brain injuries from non-fatal strangulation, which a recent Bangor University study showed might take days or weeks to manifest themselves. Researchers said that strangulation was now the second most likely cause of a stroke in women under 40. None of this seemingly concerned Cosmo magazine this April, when it promoted ‘breath play’ as a “great place to start” for young female readers who “fancy trying something new” in bed (the magazine subsequently amended the article following complaints).

We are beginning to get some idea how the cultural normalising of violent sex on a vast scale is playing out. A large number of women under 40 (38% in the BBC survey of 2002 women) reported experiencing non-consensual violence at one time or another during consensual sex – in other words, assault of varying degrees.

Further reading

How sexual empowerment screws women

By Mary Harrington

But just as the ‘good girl’ of the 1950s found it hard to name date rape or marital rape – which society often viewed as just a man ‘going too far’ or ‘insisting on his conjugal rights’ – so the ‘cool girl’ of 2020 often can’t quite find the words to protest against violent assault, and not only because a pair of hands is clamped around her throat. The collision, and collusion, of ‘rough sex’ pornography and women’s magazines has inculcated many girls and young women with the idea that affectionate or simply passionately enjoyable non-violent sex is ‘vanilla’ or boring. To react with outrage or anger at violent or contemptuous treatment in bed is to be deemed unfashionably prudish.

In what has become another form of glamorised self-harm, some young women are now openly proud of their ability to absorb damage. The Netflix Polish thriller 365 Days, with a plot in which a woman is abducted and subjected to sexual violence, has sparked a series of memes on TikTok in which girls parade their bruises as a badge of honour. One fresh-faced young woman, Kiara, posted footage of extensive bruising across her body with the perky words “Decided to watch 365 days with my ‘guy friend’”. The bruises were difficult and sad to look at. The post got millions of likes.

Young women today grow up in a world in which increasingly brutal, immersive porn provides sex education to boys, and often to girls too (even back in 2010, a study of 302 popular porn videos found that 88% contained physical aggression such as slapping or gagging, overwhelmingly towards female performers and received with apparent approval). Some girls or women have internalised its codes, to the extent that I have heard of men saying they have been made uncomfortable by requests from younger women to hurt them during sex. Many other women will become the unwary victims of those men who increasingly feel sexualised violence is normal and permissible. Some women will both seek out such violence and be harmed by it.

It’s not the job of society to police choices which people make in their bedrooms, including consensual BDSM within the limits of the law. But nor should it be society’s role to cheerlead for things that potentially cause significant psychological and physical harm to women.

Further reading

Why arranged marriages make sense

By Ed West

Those young women who are understandably horrified at the prospect of being suddenly choked, gagged or punched during otherwise consensual sex, are now compelled to navigate a landscape in which there is a significant likelihood that such a thing might happen to them. Meanwhile such violence is often processed socially — not as the criminal assault which it is — but as a lesser offence, a male lapse in erotic etiquette, a manifestation of permissible ‘kink’ that failed to declare itself with sufficient clarity at the outset. Precisely such ‘mitigations’ used to be applied to cases of rape.

Western society now broadly acknowledges how the historic template of ‘the good girl’ worked to confine and silence women, and still does. It is often vocal in its critique of other, more traditional cultures and the ways in which they can render women voiceless.

But one day perhaps it will also be honest enough to ask itself how easily the West — including a significant section of self-described ‘sex-positive’ Western feminism — allowed sexualised violence to be commercially rebranded, glossily mass-produced and re-enacted in real life on innumerable ordinary girls and women who never consented to it. The consumer construct of the ‘cool girl,’ who drinks up pain like champagne, has sold a generation of women down the river.

Something else is happening too, as we stand in our doorways making a noise: there is a certain relief in making ourselves visible again, at simply being physically on the street at the same time as a significant number of other people, albeit while ‘socially distanced’.

Many of those who are now shut indoors, particularly white-collar workers, are unused to being invisible. They are accustomed to being endlessly busy and seen to be busy, in offices, in meetings, with an ever-changing cast of people. (‘busy,’ after all, had become one of the chief indicators of modern merit.)

Now, many higher-paid workers find that both their visibility and their perceived importance has been unexpectedly muted, while that of others has soared. At the same time, many among them are also understandably worried about their livelihoods in a post-Covid landscape.

This alteration in perceptions of value — a national redistribution of esteem — has happened very rapidly. Within a few weeks, the advent of Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdown — amid an unprecedented peacetime death toll — has pared Britain down and exposed the essential workings and workers of our country.

Most notably, there are those at the NHS front-line, united in a communal effort to prevent the very sick from dying. Around them are the others who help to keep the entire populace fed, watered and safe from harm, including workers in the emergency services and transport, delivery and food supply networks. Among the remainder of the population, there is a new intensity of gratitude felt towards those who brave potential infection to assist others.

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Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

And yet — in recent years, well before Covid-19 struck — the life of a ‘key worker’ in many parts of the UK was proving ever more of a struggle. Last year, Mark Chiverton, a Unison representative for the south-east, representing public service workers, told its local government conference: “It is almost impossible now for many of our members to live in many of our towns and cities, with homes out of reach.”

The problem was worst in London. In 2015, commentators such as Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times were observing that London property was not only unaffordable for essential workers on relatively low salaries — such as nurses, firefighters, hospital porters and ambulance drivers — but increasingly so also for middle-class professionals such as doctors, teachers and professors. The complaint had been heard for many years before, of course — intensifying since the financial crisis of 2008 — but nothing decisive on the part of the government was done to address it.

The escalating cost of renting or buying London property — an increasingly attractive investment for large companies and overseas buyers — was damaging both its social coherence and its wider economy. In terms of housing, London had gradually priced out first its working-class, and then its younger middle-class, particularly those with families.

Three years ago, a report called Estimating The Value of Discounted Rental Accommodation had found that this skewing led to mass relocation from the inner to the outer boroughs of London, or further afield. It came, researchers said, at a cost to the capital of billions of pounds a year, and risked resulting in a pattern of financial segregation similar to that of Paris, in which the city centre is serviced by a large population who mainly live in densely-populated suburbs.

One of the authors of the study, Professor Peter Urwin, said that “the wage of a teacher, or nurse or tourism worker is much lower than the productive contribution they make to the economy and society’” — something long recognised, but more often informally expressed in hazy terms of moral rather than economic worth, and thereby more easily ignored by policy-makers.

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Urwin’s report, however, estimated that supplying subsidised rental housing to ‘key workers’ resulted in an average benefit of £27,000 per household to the capital’s economy. If the average cost of the subsidy for affordable homes was £14,000, as he calculated, then the net gain to the economy for each household stood at £12,500 or so. The alternative would be that — given a choice between a struggling city-centre life, and a more affordable life even with a potentially stressful commute — key workers would increasingly either choose the latter, or simply leave London entirely and find jobs in their new locality.

Despite some valiant local efforts, to date there has been no coherent national strategy to resolve this situation. Serial Conservative leaders have clung to versions of Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policy of ‘right to buy’ for social housing stock, even as rates of building new social housing remain very low. As such stock has steadily dwindled, need has increased, and both homelessness and social housing waiting lists have soared.

While home ownership remains an ideal for many, it has long been clear that security of tenure at a manageable cost — of the kind once widely guaranteed by a strong social housing supply — would fundamentally change the deep sense of precariousness now experienced by so many lower-paid workers and younger people.

Housing has long been both one of the public’s most fundamental concerns, and a growing source of political disruption. In a Britain suddenly reshaped by Covid-19, these already pressing considerations of who is housed where, and with what measure of security, are going to take on a new and even more urgent form.

Housing, though, is only the most obvious in a succession of policies over a number of decades which has made ordinary life more difficult for many of those on low to moderate salaries, including a high proportion of those in ‘key worker’ roles. Between 2011 and 2018, most public sector pay was frozen or capped at a 1% rise, outstripped by inflation. Why has the UK government’s treatment of its most necessary citizens been so cavalier?

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By Samuel Hughes

A partial explanation might be that where culture leads, policy follows. In the decades immediately following the shared national effort and trauma of the Second World War, social status attached to ideals of duty, hard work and sacrifice. To some extent war had been a democratising force: the Princess Elizabeth had joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and trained as a driver and mechanic. When Buckingham Palace took a direct hit during the Blitz in September 1940, the Queen Mother famously said, “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

Without idealising those decades, or glossing over their inequalities, there was nonetheless a post-war acceptance that it was the job of government to provide the public with broad access to decent healthcare, education, and secure housing of reliable quality. Orwell, writing during the war, had predicted that “this war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue.”

That wasn’t wholly true, of course, but the war had certainly resulted in a greater equality of perceived value, which demanded its echo in public policy. Politicians answered the call: in the early 1950s, for example, Harold Macmillan, then the Conservative housing minister, launched an ambitious housing drive which successfully committed to delivering 300,000 new homes a year.

In recent decades, however, perceptions of public value have grown increasingly patchy and distorted. I have lived through much of that period of distortion, and — as with all personal observations — memories must be handled with care. But I can certainly recall that in my childhood in the 1970s and early 80s the prevailing adult judgement of other people related to the word ‘decent’ — not in the sense of ‘respectable’, but in that of good-hearted, kind and willing to put oneself out for other people.

Money was useful, we were given to understand, and could provide for a greater degree of comfort and opportunity: if you were comfortably off, as we were, you were lucky and should be grateful. Both my parents had grown up in working-class Belfast families with little money to spare, and so they appreciated the security a higher income could provide.

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But they also understood that having money had no bearing on someone’s essential decency, and often existed in inverse proportion to that valuable quality. This wasn’t an unusual view then, and I don’t expect it is now — at least not within families and close-knit communities, where people are dependent on one another and have the ability to observe personal characteristics at close quarters. Yet for the past few decades it has not been reflected in the broader culture of the UK.

One of the first changes was that personal value began increasingly to be signalled by the possession of ‘designer’ gear. I remember a distinct excitement when a Next store first came to Belfast in the mid-Eighties, and clothes from there were at first considered ‘designer’ — until the concept of ‘designer’ travelled further into the higher echelons of cost throughout the 90s, to the point at which flashing a  £1,000 handbag or teetering through the streets in a pair of Manolos somehow established you as a person of desirability and taste.

At the same time, the word ‘chav’ began to be widely used to describe working-class people, especially those who appeared to be signalling their status through material possessions (something which those in higher income brackets were already frequently doing, but with different accents and approval ratings.) A ‘chav’ was urban, sexually unrestrained, low on educational aspirations but high on booze and bling, and seemingly undeserving of wider support. Both the term ‘chav’ and its usage were soaked in snobbery.

From the new millennium onwards, a new class-based cruelty was reflected in — now discontinued — television shows such as Jeremy Kyle, which put hard-up guests, often from difficult backgrounds or with addictions, on display before studio audiences for popular censure and mockery. Culture was dividing society more explicitly into winners and losers: even peak-time programmes such as Big Brother or the X-Factor encouraged an atmosphere of voyeurism and selective humiliation for those who failed to judge either their own talents or the nuances of self-presentation accurately.

Poverty was increasingly depicted not as a practical material condition but as a form of moral disease, seemingly experienced by those who failed to budget properly, or were reluctant to work. At the same time, however, a number of London hotels began catering to the new international super-rich, with suites priced upwards of £10,000 a night. The old feeling in Britain that there was something inherently repellent about such obvious excess had been replaced by a new climate of deference to it. 

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By Giles Fraser

Yet as the ‘gig economy’ became established, and employment benefits grew more precarious, the fast-expanding ranks of the ‘working poor’ found their daily reality was very far indeed from the spendthrift caricature of the worse-off. Members of this group were increasingly counting every hard-won penny. A study in March found that three-quarters of children in relative poverty in the UK were in families where at least one adult was in work — something that is likely to be sharply exacerbated by the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

***

At the beginning, the virus was occasionally spoken of as “a great equaliser” and in a few aspects that is true. We’re all on lockdown, with only necessary exceptions. The virus seized the heir to the throne, and sent the Prime Minister to intensive care.  Famous people now film themselves cutting their own hair. International travel is banned, and social life has shrunk to Zoom calls and socially distanced walks.

Yet the more we know about Covid-19, the more we discover that it is indeed discriminatory in its attack. Statistically there are worse outcomes for the elderly, those with underlying health conditions, men and BAME people. And the risk of catching it is heightened by existing inequalities: it is much harder to stay virus-free, for example, if you already live in overcrowded accommodation, have to take the Tube to work at rush hour, or are a ‘key worker’ with insufficient PPE.

It is hard right now to imagine the shape of a post-Covid UK — but even if this pandemic is wrestled under control, the awareness of the effect that might be wrought by another one in the future will write society an altered script. 

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Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

Some changes may play out naturally. With packed public transport recognised as a potential source of contagion, it will make more sense for ‘key workers’ in London and other UK cities to be housed nearer their city-centre workplaces, so that they can walk or cycle to work. A proportion of city-centre office space could fall empty or be converted to housing, as higher numbers of white-collar employees work from home; more affordable city rental properties suddenly become available for a greater number of people. Across the UK, the future may be simultaneously more spread out and more local, with ‘The Great Wen’ no longer exerting its outsize magnetic tug.

The most severe impact of the economic devastation will fall, as it invariably does, upon those who have the least financial security to begin with. But the precise nature of how government responds to the extreme challenges of the post-corona future, and whom it supports, will also — in large part — be determined by the demonstrable strength of public opinion.

Let us assume that ministers, and Boris Johnson in particular — whose life was recently saved by the NHS — are genuine in their admiration and gratitude for the health service and its workers. Yet already that gratitude does not seem to be translating into unambiguous policy. 

Last week the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, indicated that migrant healthcare workers, currently employed by the NHS and paying tax and National Insurance, must continue to pay the designated ‘immigration health surcharge’ to help fund the NHS, which will reach £625 per person later this year. An outraged British Medical Association correctly observed that ‘skilled international colleagues’ are putting their lives on the hospital frontline to fight Covid-19 in the UK, and that ‘it beggars belief that they are still being charged to use the very service they are working for.’

A leaked government document also hinted at a possible two-year NHS pay freeze, which met with outrage from unions and professional bodies — and was swiftly denied by the Prime Minister with the emphatic words: “Absolutely not. Anyone who suggests that can sit on it.” But the Prime Minister has robustly denied things which have come to pass before.    

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By Fiona Sturges

In the past 30 years or so, British society has gradually become more mesmerised by gossip, celebrity and wealth, and more respectful of people for how they appear and what they possess rather than what they actually do. The forces of glamour and entertainment gobbled up quieter, more altruistic measures of public service. An ‘influencer’ in his or her twenties, who could provide an online illusion of a desirable body and an aspirational life, held considerably more kudos than a middle-aged hospital porter or cleaner who managed to remain cheerful while doing arduous, necessary work day after day. Even conceptions of virtue became increasingly performative, more often located in joining vociferous denunciations on Twitter than in quietly emptying a bedpan or helping an elderly neighbour.

In a very short and disorienting time, these mores have been turned on their head: the public has a tendency to assess social worth more clear-sightedly when it is afraid. The real question is whether the aftermath of Covid-19 will translate into a more permanent alteration in society’s values. Wilde said that a cynic was someone who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, and I don’t think that the bulk of the British public is cynical. It can, however, be forgetful.

Yet unless the present sound of clapping is not to ring hollow in retrospect, the public will need to keep reminding the government that it expects a fundamental and long-lasting change in the treatment of those ‘key workers’ who keep the UK running.

For decades these employees have been steadily exposed to ever greater levels of insecurity, a kind of slow-grinding institutionalised contempt. Now they are regularly exposing themselves to Covid-19 in the name of duty, on behalf of the wider public. Will the rest of us remain grateful, once the clapping quietens down? I hope so. Let’s see.

The people he killed were all from immigrant backgrounds, although four had German nationality. Rathjen appeared to hate immigrants, railing against ethnic minorities and arguing that people from African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries should be “completely annihilated” from Germany. In other passages, this escalated to his calling for the genocide of half the peoples of the world, including entire countries such as Egypt and India; he spoke sweepingly and icily of “ethnic groups, races or cultures in our midst that are destructive in every respect”. He had never had a wife or girlfriend, he said, something that for the past 18 years he attributed to his perceived state of “being surveilled”.

He deliberately targeted an area with a high proportion of Muslim immigrants, leaving behind him a trail of innocent victims, one of whom, Mercedes Kierpacz, was a pregnant 35-year-old mother of two. It is likely that, had psychiatrists examined Rathjen prior to his rampage, they would have found him seriously mentally disturbed. Yet strands in his mania are immediately recognisable as ideologies that are not only highly recognisable in the outside world, but that appear to be growing in popularity. They include white supremacism, conspiracy theorising, and a desire either to heavily dominate and control women or avoid them entirely (in Rathjen’s case, the latter).

In her recent book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists, the author Julia Ebner describes how she infiltrated a number of extremist groups in order to understand from the inside what motivates and inspires their members. Whether Islamist or far-right, there are a striking number of similarities in their internal machinery. She describes how members are gradually radicalised in online forums and real-life meetings. Lines of argument or terminology that would be taboo in the wider world are regularly crossed and normalised. Meanwhile, the ‘secrecy’ of the group fosters a sense of belonging and special status: the feeling of being misunderstood and persecuted by the prevailing culture is constantly nourished.

By the same author

How rival extremisms are firing up Britain

By Jenny McCartney

An early chapter describes the chat on a white-power website, which is full of coded allusions and signifiers of Nazi sympathies: ‘88’ referring to the initials ‘HH’ (Heil Hitler); WP (White Power); or W.O.T.A.N. (Will of the Aryan Nation). Many users have an intense interest in their genetics, she says, and are seeking out DNA-testing firms such as 23andMe and Ancestry in order to bolster their historical sense of white identity.

As might be predicted, however, “white supremacists’ genetic ancestry test results don’t always match their own purity requirements, which can push them into profound identity crises”. Sometimes, unexpected DNA results might lead them to question their existing racial philosophy — but often instead they move into denial, reaching for “even more absurd conspiracy theories” to deny the validity of their test results, such as that Jews or ‘global elites’ are distorting the genetic tests as part of a plot to eradicate the white race. The ‘chat’ that Ebner describes is part-playful: a mélange of pseudo-irony, insider jokes and emojis, verbal ‘transgressions’ framed as wind-ups of the Left, surreally combined with brutal expressions of hatred such as “Gas the Kikes. Race war now”.

The chatroom she infiltrated is known as MAtR: a reference to Men Among the Ruins, a book by the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who inspired Mussolini and worked for the SS. The goal of its leaders, the author writes, is to establish a white ethno-state, an Aryan nation. One means by which this might be achieved — as a chat forum member called Mr White describes — is by ‘red pilling,’ a reference to the Matrix films, in which the hero Neo takes the red pill and discovers that he is living inside a computer simulation designed by AI robots to enslave humanity. Alt-right recruits, says Ebner, use the film’s metaphor to “persuade sympathisers that they are caught up in an illusionary world created by ‘the global establishment’’’ to control the populace.

When white supremacists talk of ‘red pilling’ it refers to the practice of seeking ideological converts: the spreading of memes or news — often distorted — designed to ‘prove’ that the perceptions which the majority hold are comforting fictions. The author argues that “the ultimate red pill for white nationalists is the belief that the Holocaust never happened”.

Anti-Semitism, of course, is one belief that white supremacists hold in common with Islamists. But both ideologies also dangle before followers the vision of a struggle, supercharged with importance and meaning, which will draw the devotee away from the contemptible, safe banalities of ordinary life.

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In a chapter called “Sisters Only” Ebner shifts her attention to Islamism, and describes taking part in the encrypted “small but international ‘Terror Agency Sister’ chatting group’’. One edict of the group is ‘situational estrangement’ (gurbah) which — according to one higher-ranking participant, Dahlia — involves gradual distancing from “anyone and anything that tries to stop you from Jihad even with arguments that sound Islamic”.

In an inversion of how wider society might see things, Dahlia describes how she heard the Shaytan (devil) whispering: “You are becoming extreme.” But the female jihadist in her warned that it was necessary to silence this inner voice, and remind herself that “you are only feeling what every true believer should feel: hatred of Kufr and all its people”.

Although the allure of Islamist sub-cultures is built on belonging, individual members are highly dispensable when necessary. Ebner describes how an ‘Indonesian sister’ reveals that intelligence officers have come to monitor her. The woman in question is immediately dropped from the chat circle: “If the risk and potential damage exceeds the value a member adds to the network, the verdict is usually expulsion.”

Along the way, some of the ‘Terror Sisters’ discuss their role as female jihadists: “What are your duties and responsibilities? How can you best support your husband in jihad?” For many ‘Isis women’ — in among trading grisly news of suicide bombings and jihadist actions — identity is partly forged in the zealous expression of submission to male authority.

That submission, at least, Ebner finds they have in common with US ‘Trad Wives’ or Red Pill Women, anti-feminist women who are constantly critically evaluating themselves through male eyes. They discuss their ‘SMV’ (sexual market value) and their ‘RMV’ (relationship market value) in matter-of-fact terms, try to practise the philosophy of STFU (‘Shut The Fuck Up’) to avoid irritating men, and submit to being verbally or even physically disciplined if they have displeased their husbands. Politically, the US Trad Wives movement is often linked to the alt-right (unlike the current UK version, which seems keener on 1950s dresses and Cath Kidston than political extremism).

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Yet it is ‘Isis women’ who have made the most life-changing decisions, seemingly undeterred by ample evidence of Isis atrocities. In many cases, they left their homes — and, often, relatively comfortable lives in the West — to seek the chance to be the wives and mothers helping to build the new Caliphate.

Another book, Guest House for Young Widows, by the journalist Azadeh Moaveni, provides a more complex portrait of Isis women and their motivations. What often seemingly began in discontent and the desire to rebel or escape — from a stultifying home life, repressive parents, violent husbands or an authoritarian Arab secular state such as President Bourguiba’s Tunisia — took on a different shape once they entered the airless mixture of heavy ideology and physical hardship and cruelty of Islamic State. Some reacted by hardening their ideology yet further, others by attempting to flee from what they had once sought.

Discontent and injustices feed a desire to rebel: Moaveni tells the story of Nour, who grew up in Le Kram, Tunis, and for whom donning the face-veil was initially a form of rebellion which escalated into a stand-off with school. Early marriage followed, to a religiously devout husband, Karim, with a low-paid job. A move to Syria, with the promise of salaried employment, was seen as a way out of the cramped accommodation they shared with Nour’s parents. When Karim went to Syria first, Nour was detained and interrogated by the Tunisian police, with sexual violence in the atmosphere: at one point Nour was told that unless she talked about her husband’s activities, another woman in her cell would be stripped naked as humiliation. Nour didn’t talk, and four officers ripped off the girl’s clothes.

One feels, certainly, for Nour’s beleaguered parents, ordinary Tunisians on low incomes who somehow found the bribe needed to get her out of jail. Yet, when Moaveni meets Nour for the final time, her superficial appearance has changed but not her loyalties: once a political line has been crossed, it can be hard to go back. She is working in a shoe shop, perfectly made up, her hair uncovered, and elegantly dressed in Western-style clothes, but now feels that she is “living a lie”. The author asks Nour what she thought of the Paris attacks by Isis in 2015, which had killed 130 people in a concert-hall and cafés, including many Muslims. She supported them fully, Nour said: “They kill our people. They don’t play by the rules. Why should we?”

Taken together, Ebner and Moaveni’s books do much to illuminate the process of radicalisation, and the complex mechanisms by which extremist groups work. A common factor among them all is the reiteration of belonging by means of the perpetual denial of feeling for the ‘enemy’. To have an ‘us’ of such intensity, held passionately close, requires the non-stop evocation of a contemptible ‘them’.

The internet is the perfect forum for radicalisation, since it allows geographically distant ‘true believers’ to communicate closely and plan in secrecy; it also permits the constant bombardment and repetition of propaganda to create a potent ideological bouillon in the mind of the adherent, one which sometimes bubbles over into real-life violence.

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By Daniel Kalder

In both Islamist and far-right narratives, the group rhetoric of persecution is so strong that adherents come fully to believe it: the ‘community’ presents itself as in a state of siege against some advancing, dominating source of moral and physical pollution. For Islamists, that is the non-Muslim ‘Kufr’ hordes of unbelievers, along with fellow-Muslims who are insufficiently fanatical. For white nationalists, it is Jews, Muslims and ethnic minorities.

When murderous attacks take place — such as the Christchurch mosque shooting by the white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, or the Isis attacks on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris — the vast majority of observers understand them clearly as obscene violence against the most vulnerable targets. In the minds of their perpetrators, however — entirely scrubbed of empathy — these are courageous defensive or retaliatory strikes in a global struggle, conducted on behalf of other group members. The Isis statement after the Bataclan, written in the grandiose, faux-historical voice which both sides intermittently favour, warned “France and all nations following its path” that “the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they partake of the crusader campaign”. Tarrant described himself as “a regular white man” who “decided to take a stand for the future of my people”.

What has evaporated from the killers’ thinking is any connection to a sense of common humanity: the awareness that the individuals they are murdering have feelings, accomplishments, histories, personal struggles and families who love them. Their victims are reduced to one-dimensional targets, representatives of an opposing force.

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The adherents of extremist groups — arriving at their positions via tangled personal and political routes — have broadly rejected the rampant materialism of a consumer society. They often seem to yearn instead for rules, restrictions, direction, identity, comradeship and even hardships. But what their most fanatical adherents want above all is a dehumanised enemy and, beyond their own ranks, a pool of more passive support that may at some point also be radicalised.

In achieving these goals, Islamists and neo-Nazis require the presence of one another to galvanise their own support bases. They can, and do, frequently point to the most extreme, hate-filled representatives of the ‘other’ – a white Australian attacking a New Zealand mosque, or a young Muslim bombing a Manchester concert-hall – and claim that such individuals are the truest representatives of the whole. In this way, they readily fuel each other’s myths, implicitly endorse their own violence, and seek to ensure the mutual escalation of activity.

That activity comes at a tremendous, ongoing price, of course, for ordinary people suddenly caught up in their maelstrom of prejudice and violence. But — despite the constant, feverish reiteration of the language of ‘defending’ we hear in both these books — the spread of suffering has always seemed the very least of their concerns.

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, is exultant. Gerry Adams — now billed on his Twitter feed as an ‘Optimistic Activist’, and cultivating an increasingly bardic, elder statesman appearance — posted a clip of himself and colleagues enthusiastically singing the IRA song Come Out Ye Black and Tans with lines such as “and the dirty English feet they walked all over us”, and “tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away”.  The lyrics of the song, although officially referring to the old IRA of the War of Independence era, take on a darker, sharper flavour when sung by a Belfast-born former leader of the modern Provisional IRA campaign.

The same song was belted out by Sinn Féin’s Dessie Ellis and his supporters, draped in a giant tricolour, at his victorious election count in Dublin North-West (Ellis, who served 10 years in prison, was once better known as an accomplished Provisional IRA bomb-maker and explosives expert). To be fair, Sinn Féin didn’t save all the songs until after the count: during the campaign itself, a party election van toured Kingscourt, Co Cavan on behalf of candidate Pauline Tully with the chorus “ooh, ah, up the ‘RA!” blasting out the windows (Tully later claimed that “perhaps” the audio had been superimposed on the recording).

There was a time when such republican triumphalism would have wholly alienated mainstream opinion in the Republic of Ireland. Yet today, although many Irish people have indeed indicated their strong unease with such scenes — a discomfort that will no doubt find its voice in coming weeks — a growing number of Irish voters now interpret it as forgivable nationalist exuberance.

That is not how it will sound, I fear, either to the families of more than 1,700 people killed by the Provisional IRA during its long and bloody campaign, or to unionists of any variety in Northern Ireland.

Why does support for Sinn Féin plummet sharply among the over-65s? Perhaps because a 70-year-old, born in the Republic of Ireland in 1950, would have been 20 or so when the Troubles began in Northern Ireland. Over nearly three decades, he or she would have witnessed the raw pain and chaos unleashed by republican and loyalist paramilitary violence. For many of this generation, Sinn Féin remains synonymous with the Provisional IRA, and to them the atrocities committed by the IRA were not abstract, but very real.

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For today’s younger Irish voters, however, IRA violence belongs to history. For those with the inclination to romanticise it, the organisation’s long campaign is now distant enough from their actual experience to count as a form of radical chic. For others, that history may simply dwindle in importance when set next to the current appeal of Sinn Féin’s energetic promises on house-building, health service funding and heavily flagged support for causes such as trans activism. Those who wanted to shift politics to the left could always have voted for Brendan Howlin’s Irish Labour party, of course, but its campaign was widely felt to lack Sinn Féin’s pizzazz.

The scale of Sinn Féin’s success has taken Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael by surprise. It has also taken the party itself by surprise: such were its expectations, it fielded only 42 candidates in the race for the 159 seats. But the fact that there has been a sudden, seismic political change in the Republic of Ireland does not greatly surprise me.

In UnHerd last December I reviewed Fintan O’Toole’s book Heroic Failure, The Politics of Pain, in which he argued, among other things, that Brexit was a uniquely English act of self-harm partly inspired by a misplaced nostalgia for Empire. I disagreed, because I thought that many of the destabilising factors that led to the ‘Leave’ vote in the UK – a housing crisis, income inequality, precarious employment among the ‘working poor’ and a widespread unease about the meaning or dividends of national identity – were held in common with Ireland, and could well erupt there in a different form.

While the UK “somnambulist state” had long ignored voters’ fundamental concerns, I wrote, Ireland would be foolish to do the same, “and to believe that just because Ireland isn’t England, the painful fall-out from such a question is inevitably very far away”.

The fall-out has come even sooner than expected. Irish voters were reacting to long-term Fine Gael policy failures on housing, welfare provision and healthcare, the Irish version of the “somnambulist state”.  The result was a localised brew of the populism that has already intoxicated so many other countries – in this case embodied in Sinn Féin’s combination of energetic Left-wing economic pledges, zeal on ‘social justice issues’ and pugnacious Irish nationalism, all bound up with its chilling legacy from 30 years of armed conflict.

What did surprise me a little, however, was the muted response from a commentator such as O’Toole, who has previously been so intensely and eloquently exercised by populist surges in the UK and the US. Yet, with Sinn Féin electoral successes already looming last week, he quickly concluded in a column that “there can be no progressive government in Ireland without Sinn Féin”. Sinn Féin was a “party of change”, he said, “a radical party” – and although he personally was very uncomfortable at its history, “younger people” have decided that the “political statute of limitations on atrocities” had expired.

O’Toole said, however, that on no account must ministers in a Dublin Sinn Féin government seek instruction from very senior IRA figures, as they had done in Stormont: “This is intolerable in a democracy. If Sinn Féin were to take office in Dublin, a precondition would have to be a strengthening of the official code of conduct for ministers to explicitly ban such unaccountable influence.”

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But who, exactly, might police this ‘precondition’? Would Mary Lou McDonald, for example, be prevented from discussing policy matters with her former party leader Gerry Adams, or Adams be stopped from discussing anything he liked thereafter with the broad range of ‘veteran republicans’ in his acquaintance?

The idea that assiduous Irish government officials could somehow effectively prevent or sanction the flow of information between Sinn Féin and the IRA is frankly ludicrous. But such statements nonetheless offer a window on to a worrying illusion, that it is somehow possible to invite Sinn Féin into the running of the Irish state and fully expect the party meekly to abide by new rules.

This electoral outcome is what Gerry Adams has long wanted and worked towards. He is not likely to lose interest in it now. Back in 2017, a former member of the IRA’s West Belfast brigade said this about Adams to Henry McDonald of the Guardian: “He still thinks he can push them on to power in the south [Irish Republic] as his final achievement. So he will be staying around, in the back room, working the controls.”

Many in the Republic of Ireland will point out that Sinn Féin has long participated in government in Northern Ireland (admittedly with a recent three-year break, when Northern Ireland had no power-sharing government at all). But the Stormont administration is devolved, with ultimate power still remaining in London. It was designed as part of a difficult, complicated package to persuade republican and loyalist paramilitaries to exchange a violent 30-year conflict for electoral politics, and is therefore a uniquely odd political structure — consisting of compulsory coalitions in which ministries are doled out like fiefdoms to different parties, the mechanism of government is prone to freezing, and irregular financial practices once thrived (as was exposed during the ‘ash for cash’ RHI scandal).

The democratising of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland delivered a welcome cessation of sectarian violence. But it has also paramilitarised democracy: driven Northern Irish voters to the political extremes, entrenched sectarianism, permitted loyalist and dissident republican illegal activity to flourish in working-class areas, and failed to resolve the ongoing horror of paramilitary beatings and shootings, which hardly ever result in a conviction. None of this is an enviable template, I would think, for the Republic of Ireland.

The Republic, in contrast, is an independent sovereign country, which ultimately resolved its own painful arguments over independence and partition to forge a largely successful and confident modern state. It did not need to beckon Sinn Féin and its Provisional IRA legacy into government; its voters have done so not by compulsion, but by choice, because of dissatisfaction with their existing establishment. They have signalled their desire for a very different political party. But I am not sure that all of Sinn Féin’s new voters have realised exactly what forms that difference may take.

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Most modern political parties are haunted by similar things: the long legacies of bad policies, ideological schisms, media gaffes and personality clashes. Sinn Féin is unusual, however, in that it has a particular problem with mothers — mothers who pursue the party leadership asking for justice, even while it is attempting to conduct soft-voiced conversations with a forgetful electorate.

The late Jean McConville is one such mother. A working-class widow, the mother of 10 was seized from her West Belfast home by a group of IRA members in December 1972. She was driven across the Irish border and into County Louth, where she was shot in the back of the head and secretly buried on a sandy beach — or, in the terminology of such killings, ‘disappeared’. McConville’s traumatised young children were split up and sent to care institutions.

As adults, a number of the McConville children courageously began to ask the IRA questions about their mother’s death. They requested answers from the then Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams. The more that came to light about the McConville murder, the more troubling it became for the public image of Sinn Féin: two former Belfast IRA members with close involvement in the McConville murder, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, both alleged that the order for the killing was given by Adams himself in his role as their Belfast ‘officer commanding’, something which he denied.

The McConville case — long the subject of newspaper articles — was recently forensically examined in an Orwell prize-winning book Say Nothing, by the US writer Patrick Radden Keefe. It details the IRA’s contemptuous attitude to the human rights of those it regarded as opponents, not least the right to life.

Adams has now retired as Sinn Féin President, ceding the role in 2018 to Mary Lou McDonald, who has spearheaded the party’s electoral drive in the Republic of Ireland. McDonald does not carry the same whiff of cordite: she was born and educated in Dublin and has no direct IRA involvement, although she has in the past been active in IRA commemorations. Yet McDonald, too, was haunted by a mother throughout this election campaign. This time the mother is alive, and her name is Breege Quinn.

Breege Quinn, an elegant, quietly determined Cullyhanna woman, and her husband Stephen, are still seeking justice over the death of their 21-year-old son Paul, who was beaten to death in an October 2007 attack carried out by local members of the IRA.

Paul and a friend were lured to an isolated cattle-shed in County Monaghan on the promise of work. The phone call had come from another friend, who was forced to make the call under threat. Paul arrived to find about a dozen masked IRA men waiting for him.

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It was an intensely brutal and professional operation. His attackers beat Paul with nail-studded clubs and iron bars for over half an hour. At one point, an assailant shouted out to his horrified friends, confined in a nearby shed: “Can you hear your friend squealing?” Paul Quinn died in hospital: every major bone in his body had been broken and his ear was hanging off.

The local Sinn Féin politician Conor Murphy — now a Sinn Féin finance minister in the resurrected Stormont government — said at the time that the IRA was not involved in the murder. He also said: “Paul Quinn was involved in smuggling and criminality, I think everyone accepts that.” A subsequent report from the Independent Monitoring Commission found that current and former members of the Provisional IRA had been involved in the murder, although it concluded that the attack did not happen with the authorisation of the leadership.

When Paul’s death became an issue in this election, Mary Lou McDonald denied that Murphy had made an allegation of criminality about Quinn, until journalists confronted her directly with Murphy’s quotation to the BBC at the time. At that point McDonald admitted that Murphy had indeed said it, whereupon he – at last – apologised for his remarks and “unreservedly withdrew them”.

In the immediate aftermath of the Quinn killing, Murphy had done everything he could to minimise any suggestion of IRA involvement, including making an allegation that caused continuing pain to the Quinn family. The allegation was only retracted 13 years later, under considerable political pressure in the heat of a landmark general election.

Quinn’s family say that Paul was in fact murdered because he got into arguments with the local IRA. The IRA members resented the fact that he seemed unafraid of them. In that, this terrible killing followed a recognisable pattern for the post-ceasefire IRA — its recurrent, disproportionate fury at young, physically strong Catholic men who refused to kowtow to local IRA authority.

Over 20 years ago, I reported on the IRA murder of Andrew Kearney, a 33-year-old West Belfast man who had reportedly been involved in a fist-fight with a north Belfast IRA commander in which the IRA man came off worse. That victory was unlucky for Mr Kearney, because in July 1998 — only a few months after the Belfast Agreement was signed — at least five IRA men battered their way into his flat in the New Lodge, where he was looking after his two-week-old daughter. They disabled the telephone and the lift, overpowered Kearney — allegedly with chloroform — dragged him out to the landing, shot him three times and left him to bleed to death.

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I recall meeting his white-haired mother Maureen Kearney, a life-long Irish republican who was now doggedly demanding answers from Sinn Féin: as a gesture, she took her son’s funeral bill to Sinn Féin headquarters, but never got a reply. Gerry Adams called at the house to commiserate with her loss, and promised to return, but never did. Maureen Kearney died a year later, broken-hearted. No-one was ever convicted of Andrew Kearney’s killing.

Then, in January 2005, Robert McCartney — another 33-year-old Belfast Catholic man — was murdered outside a Belfast city centre bar. An altercation had occurred between McCartney and his friend Brendan Devine and a group which included prominent IRA men and numerous Sinn Féin representatives. It ended in a ferocious attack in which McCartney and Devine both had their throats slit: McCartney died in hospital. More than 70 people were in the bar at the time, yet there were no witnesses. During the dispute, it appeared that they were all in the toilet. After the murder, the IRA sealed off the scene, removed CCTV and forensically cleaned the bar.

Mr McCartney’s sisters and fiancée fought a long-running international campaign to bring his killers to account. Despite a trial involving three men — including one who was charged with McCartney’s murder — no-one was convicted. The case failed due to the lack of witness testimony and undisputed evidence.

One of the two men charged with, and acquitted of, affray in relation to the McCartney attack, Jim McCormick, was the Sinn Féin treasurer in South Belfast at the time. He was later sentenced to 14 and a half years for the attempted murder of another man, Joe Henry, by stabbing.

The McCartney case had notable similarities with a murder that happened a few months later, in Dublin, of a 29-year-old called Joe Rafferty. Rafferty, a hard-working courier and fitness fan, had got into a dispute with another local man after the man allegedly assaulted his sister. The man threatened him, speaking of his connections to the IRA, and the threats escalated, followed by approaches of Rafferty’s worried family to a Sinn Féin councillor to have the threats withdrawn, and his reported assurance that nothing more would come of it. In April 2005, Rafferty was shot twice and killed as he left his Dublin flat to go to work. An Independent Monitoring Commission report found that “a member or former member of PIRA may have been involved” and that members of Sinn Féin and PIRA “were aware in advance of the threat and did not take sufficient action to prevent it”.

In 2016 the jury at an inquest into Rafferty’s murder delivered the verdict that he had been unlawfully killed by a person unknown. Rafferty’s sister, Esther Uzell-Rafferty, said, “that line is hard to listen to because we know who killed Joseph. It makes me so angry” – but, to secure a conviction, they needed more witnesses to come forward with information.

Despite the ongoing torment of the families involved, a popular line of argument during this election has been, “Why does this stuff even matter? It’s all in the past, isn’t it?” Sinn Féin, under McDonald, are keen to represent themselves as progressive and forward-thinking, increasingly distanced from IRA violence while simultaneously profiting from a carefully sentimentalised and historicised vision of “the armed struggle”.

Yet this election has shown that Sinn Féin does not want to disown its IRA past; it wants to control, curate and selectively celebrate it — to turn the agonising human detail of an intensely sad, squalid sectarian conflict into something hazy, generalised and noble.

The real stories stubbornly resist that narrative. Andrew Kearney. Robert McCartney. Joseph Rafferty. Paul Quinn. All these post-Belfast Agreement killings — of fit young Catholic men who could handle themselves in a fight — have certain factors in common. A perceived slight by the victim against a local IRA member or members. An IRA retaliation of extraordinary violence, resulting in murder. A cover-up, a public denial of IRA involvement by Sinn Féin, and the spreading of rumours about the victim’s alleged involvement in criminal activity. The intimidation and silencing of witnesses. The politically soothing judgement that the killing was not “officially sanctioned” by the IRA at the highest levels. A persistent campaign by relatives of the dead man who refuse to be cowed by the IRA, resulting in a measure of media attention — which, when it reaches a critical point, leads prominent Sinn Féin politicians to utter conciliatory words and publicly seek contact with the victim’s family.

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When the spotlight moves away, however, the “concern” for victims quickly evaporates. An insight into how Sinn Féin really views those who have been harmed or bereaved by the IRA was given by a 2017 WhatsApp chat linked to the Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis and used by party members.

When the prospect of a snap general election was raised, one user complained that it would result in the media being “on the phone to Cahill, Stack, Quinn and all and every other waster they can wheel out with a sob story”. The names cited referred to Mairia Cahill, who went public with the testimony that she was abused as a teenager by a senior IRA member and that the IRA covered up the abuse; Austin Stack, the son of a Portlaoise chief prison officer murdered by the IRA in 1983; and the parents of Paul Quinn.

Sinn Féin is clearly resentful of the fact that these individuals speak to the media at all. They’re supposed to know their place, and keep quiet. A common theme among Sinn Féin supporters on social media during the election campaign was that the media had disgracefully ‘exploited’ the Quinn family. It fell to journalists such as Suzanne Breen, an experienced Northern Ireland reporter and commentator, politely to remind Twitter users that she had been covering the Quinn story in detail since Paul’s murder in 2007, when his parents first began their campaign for justice. If the public hadn’t paid attention before, it wasn’t for a lack of available information.

A significant proportion of the Irish electorate, however, has decided that Sinn Féin’s history is no longer an issue – and the principle of democracy is that what voters want, or think they want, voters get.

Yet, looking North, there is one particular paradox of Sinn Féin’s success. Since it is the most hardline nationalist party, its poll-topping performance has already caused some to talk of a border poll and a united Ireland as a genuine possibility. At the same time, the triumphalist nature of its republicanism also makes unionists much less likely to see their future in an agreed united Ireland.

Post-Brexit, some Remain-voting Unionists – particularly among the middle classes – were softening in their attitude to joining an economically successful, socially liberal Republic of Ireland. One component of this softening was the belief that the air in the Republic of Ireland was not as toxic, in sectarian terms, as that of Northern Ireland, where the loyalist UDA and UVF and Sinn Féin regularly commemorate members linked to appalling deeds which in any conventional war would be considered war crimes.

Sinn Féin’s sudden accession in the Republic will have stalled that instinct in some unionists, and replaced it with a deep apprehension. The atmosphere has changed: even the most post-political unionist would now think twice about entering a united Ireland to the theme tune of “ooh, ah, Up the ‘RA!’”.

There’s a line of Milan Kundera’s, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The steep ascent of Sinn Féin towards power in the Republic of Ireland represents the temporary triumph of forgetting. In the past the party, too, has shown itself to be very effective in enforcing silences. One can even sense a silence spreading in Ireland now, as many of those who are normally loquacious on Twitter fall uncharacteristically quiet on their opinion of the election results, as if trying to puzzle out their own place in the altered political order. I predict that ultimately Sinn Féin’s victory will create a new ideological schism in mainstream Irish society.

Once the election excitement dies down, however, Ireland must surely brace itself for a different and searching national conversation. The questions for Sinn Féin, and the grieving relatives, won’t go away, you know: memory has a way of knocking to be let back in.

There is, however, perhaps no other author who catches so keenly the confusion and distress of individuals who have lost all confidence — and sense of their own rights — in a system that appears to be operating according to its own unknowable rules, which are riddled with failings so familiar that they are now factored into expectations.

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The Trial, in particular, is acutely relevant to our current age, in which our criminal justice system — once internationally renowned — is in a deepening state of crisis. Meanwhile, away from courts, informal ‘trials’ with inconstant rules and outcomes have become a frequent feature of both social media and company policy.

These latter ‘trials’ — although they lack legal force — nonetheless have the power to ruin a life: to destroy an individual’s reputation, to sink current and future prospects of employment, and in some especially bleak cases to push those involved towards suicide.

The Trial, written in 1914-15 and first published posthumously in 1925, begins with the line: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Thereafter, K. finds himself immersed in an interminable and terrifyingly hazy case in which he is the defendant. There is something particularly chilling about such an opening line, because precisely the type of event it describes is familiar from immediate UK history.

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The fantasist and paedophile Carl Beech has recently been jailed for perverting the course of justice — “telling lies,” indeed — by falsely alleging that a string of public figures were involved in a paedophile ring reportedly characterised by rape, torture and murder. Beech’s testimony was given weight by the senior police officer in charge of the investigation who declared his evidence “credible and true” on national television without awaiting the outcome of the ongoing investigation.

In the face of Beech’s unsubstantiated accusations, a lifetime of service to the state apparently counted for nothing. One of those accused by Beech was Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a hero of D-Day, who, in a searing recent interview with Dominic Lawson, described the circumstances of discovering that he was a suspect in an ongoing investigation.

He was having breakfast in March 2015 with his late wife Avril, who was then in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when two police officers arrived at the door. They said: “Accusations have been made.” He asked: “Against whom?” They answered: “Against you.” In Lord Bramall’s words:

“All they would tell me was that 40 years ago I had abused an underage male. And at that moment they showed me a warrant, and 20 policemen in overalls came in and they searched this house for 10 hours.”

His lawyer later found out the charges, which included the most lurid accusations, such as “supervising the torture of small boys on Salisbury Plain”.

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Lord Bramall lived long enough to see Beech imprisoned, although his distressed wife did not. Nor did Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary: he died of cancer before hearing that his name had been cleared.

Paedophiles do exist, of course, and so do paedophiles in positions of public trust. Allegations from complainants need to be properly investigated. What distinguished the Carl Beech case from other cases – what made it worthy of a Kafka plot – was the willingness of the police to court publicity while openly abandoning due process and the essential principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

Those caught up in Operation Midland had both the misfortune and the good luck that it unfolded in the public eye. Misfortune, because their status amplified the pain and shame of being stained with such appalling allegations, and good luck because it ensured that the case was at least subjected to press scrutiny and their exoneration was decisively publicised.

Yet it begs the question: how many more injustices are routinely pursued, largely unseen, against those who have few resources with which to counter them? The protections of our criminal justice system have long been intended to guarantee that all accused are treated equally in the eyes of the law. But those protections have been steadily eroded on a number of fronts. Kafka’s imagined world creeps ever closer.

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In January this year, The Law Society submitted a parliamentary briefing on a “criminal justice system in crisis”, which it argues has been caused by “years of underinvestment and neglect”. The challenges it cited included increasing shortages of duty solicitors; a restrictive means test for legal aid; inefficiencies in the system; more and more courts being closed; and crucial evidence often not being disclosed.

To take but a single example, the role of criminal duty solicitor – the person you can call for professional advice if you are being held in a police cell – is now so badly paid that younger lawyers are refusing to go into it. The youngest duty solicitor on the Isle of Wight is now 55 years old. She is understandably concerned about what happens to the rights of suspects once she retires.

The rates that criminal barristers are paid for undertaking legal aid cases are often less than £100 for a day’s work, out of which they must pay travel costs and fees to chambers. Many are finding that – despite an extensive education, for which they have usually incurred sizeable debts, and working long hours – they cannot afford even a modest mortgage out of their professional salary.

Young barristers are therefore leaving crime work in their droves for commercial or corporate practice. There is no area of the law in which the stakes for the individuals concerned are so high; yet those lawyers who remain in criminal law see cases being postponed and court buildings and their machinery crumbling.

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It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the ongoing underpayment of criminal barristers and solicitors, the degradation of the infrastructure in which they operate, and the squeezing of public access to legal aid itself, is driven by an unspoken but resolute political intent. In one passage in The Trial, Kafka describes the surreal and miserable conditions in which the Advocates (those who represent defendants) work:

“It wasn’t saying too much if the Advocates called these conditions scandalous. Complaints to the authorities had not the slightest effect, and it was also strictly forbidden for the Advocates to make any structural repairs or alterations at their own expense.”

The narrative voice offers the reasoning for this situation:

 “Still, there was some justification for this attitude on the part of the authorities. They wanted to discourage defending counsel as much as possible, the whole onus of the Defence must be laid on the accused himself.”

Does this sound a fanciful translation from fiction, if applied to our current circumstances? Perhaps not when one considers a policy that is already in place, dubbed ‘the innocence tax’. Those who are above the threshold of legal aid funding – in the magistrates’ courts, anyone with an annual household income of £22,325, and in the crown court, above £37,500 of disposable household income – are currently compelled to fund their own defence privately, often at a considerably higher rate than legal aid fees.

Should they then be acquitted, however, the government will only reimburse them at legal aid rates (a deliberate policy: before 2012, they were allowed to claim back “reasonable costs”). This can leave people, after acquittal, with a large outstanding fee which in some cases has led to bankruptcy or the loss of life savings.

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The former Commons deputy speaker Nigel Evans experienced this personally, when he was acquitted of charges of rape and sexual abuse but lost his life savings in the fight to clear his name. He has since said:

“People don’t see people like me as victims, and there’s a sense that it could not happen to them. That’s what I thought too, but it’s completely wrong. There’s nothing easier than someone falsely accusing you of a crime.”

It has long been accepted that if one has the misfortune to be wrongly accused of a crime, a conviction is disastrous. Now, thanks to the ‘innocence tax’, so too might be the aftermath of acquittal.

Our legal system is the ultimate guarantor of individual liberty. It should be the last line of protection against the arbitrary persecution of the state, individual malice, and the passing mores or prejudices of wider society. The law should be broadly immune to contagious emotions or fashionable ideology.

Today, legal independence seems more necessary than ever, as the shifting traps of judgement and taste that are laid by social media – the complex blurring of private and public life – can have life-altering consequences for the unwary.

In June this year, for example, a 54-year-old disabled grandfather, Brian Leach, was fired from his job at Asda for posting an anti-religious skit – which mocked both Christianity and Islam – by the comedian Billy Connolly on his Facebook page. Asda, which itself sells Billy Connolly DVDs, said that he had breached the company’s social media policy. Leach was summarily dismissed, despite having deleted the post and apologised for any potential offence to colleagues.

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That the behaviour of the police can also be influenced by perceived public mood was evidenced by Operation Midland: it is widely thought that the misplaced eagerness to find Beech’s testimony “credible and true” was in part a reaction to the bad publicity generated by the acknowledged previous failure of the police themselves to investigate sexual abuse allegations properly in relation to Jimmy Savile and others.

Recently the police also appear to be taking a worryingly keen interest in patrolling lines of opinion and argument – resulting, for example, in a bizarre case being brought earlier this year by West Yorkshire police, Essex police and the CPS against Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, for ‘harassment’ allegedly motivated by ‘transphobia’. It is worth noting that while Yardley, the defendant, was and is transsexual, the complainant was not trans, but a ‘trans ally’: the origin of the complaints was a spat on social media.

District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case against Yardley in a one-day hearing, saying there was simply no evidence, and awarding costs to the defence. In his blunt summary: “There is no case and never was a case,” something that neither the police nor the CPS were apparently able to perceive within a ten-month investigation.

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Meanwhile another recent development has been worrying solicitors, who witness clients increasingly trapped – like the unfortunate Josef K. – in a legal limbo without apparent end: the rapid rise of the phenomenon of ‘released under investigation’ (RUI). Criticism of the pre-charge bail system – in which suspects were endlessly bailed and re-bailed without their case being resolved – led to bail being widely replaced with RUI.

This is arguably much worse: unlike with bail, there are no fixed calendar dates whereby suspects can discover the progress of their case. Instead, a suspect’s relationships, studies or career must be placed on hold while the case stagnates or inches forward. The suspect will be notified at some point of the case’s direction, but he or she will have no idea of exactly when that might be, and nor are the under-resourced police under any formal obligation to tell them within a given time-frame.

When the Law Society Gazette ran an article on RUI recently, anonymous solicitors spoke below the line of their own experiences. One read: “I’ve had one client RUI for 25 months and counting and the case is not yet even at the stage of being sent to the CPS for a charging decision. That will be a minimum of another four months, so the case might yet break the three year mark in due course.” It goes without saying that such delays also grievously affect the lives of complainants.

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For those of us who are not routinely involved with the criminal justice system, such stories crop up troublingly and drift away again. They do not touch our lives – until one day, perhaps, they do indeed affect us or our loved ones, with catastrophic consequences.

Yet something is going profoundly awry with the justice system in the UK, and if it is not understood and addressed as a coherent picture – which it is – it will have deeply corrosive and long-lasting effects. Start, if you like, with reading or re-reading The Trial, and then listen out for its many echoes today.

Those echoes keep on coming, right up until the miserable moment of Josef K.’s death. Two men in frock coats and top hats come for him eventually, officials of the state with malign intent, and K. asks himself: “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court to which he had never penetrated?”

One man holds him down, one stabs him, and then K. watches them watching him die: “’Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.”

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Well, we must all be wary of hysteria and exaggeration. Frock-coated officials are certainly not stabbing suspects to death in the UK today. Yet still those stubborn little echoes persist – “like a dog!”.

An inquest jury concluded this July that the death of Rafal Sochacki, a 43-year-old Polish national, on 21 June 2017, was most likely due to him being subjected to excessive heat. Sochacki had been arrested on an extradition warrant and was being transported in a prisoner-escort services van, a task outsourced to the private company Serco, on one of the hottest days in central London for over 40 years.

The van stopped outside Charing Cross police station, holding Sochacki in a cell inside the vehicle for 50 minutes with the engine and air conditioning turned off. He was then taken to court at 10am, soaked in sweat, and put into a very hot, unventilated cell: the air conditioning at the court had not worked for weeks, and mobile air-conditioning units were proving ineffective.

Rather like K., in fact, he never got to see the judge or the court. Having been noted as behaving oddly and erratically, he was finally found unresponsive in his cell at 2.45pm, having died of severe heatstroke and hypertensive heart disease.

And it is strange, because when I read about the circumstances of Sochacki’s death, my very first thought was that there might have been a greater public outcry if a dog had been treated in this way.

Throughout England’s history, it has been loved, respected and admired, as well as feared, loathed and resented. It has, however, rarely been ridiculed. And now it worries that — in its very public contortions, its prolonged inability to make up its mind or forge a course of action — it may at last be appearing ridiculous.

I was, admittedly, slow to register the emotional impact of English embarrassment, partly because I grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and had no experience of belonging to somewhere that might quietly congratulate itself on a landscape of stability, tolerance and common sense. I loved home, but our society had leapfrogged well beyond loss of face and into spectacular dysfunction.

At the risk of seeming pious, I also thought that — if the Westminster government was going to be embarrassed by anything — there was plenty to trigger that emotion before the 2016 EU vote. England had a rising number of working people who — despite being in employment — could not afford adequate housing or make it to the end of the month without using food banks. It was — and is — steadily wrecking the world-famous British criminal justice system for the sake of a relatively small investment. It has continued to ingratiate itself heavily with repressive states such as Saudi Arabia, while talking on the international stage about the importance of human rights.

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And despite these and many other issues becoming glaringly apparent, over a number of years, it seemed oddly impossible for anything to change course. It was as though the state had become a kind of smiling somnambulist, oblivious to the obvious. But these things, I suppose, were primarily regarded as internal, domestic matters, and few abroad had recognised or cared about the extent to which Britain now wasn’t working for so many of its citizens. The moment of globally visible chaos had not yet arrived.

It has now, in the three years of wrangling that have followed the vote for Britain to leave the EU — an outcome that took even its ‘Leave’ supporters by surprise. The long-held international belief in British competence has been steadily eroding ever since June 2016, as first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson proved unable to get their EU deals through Parliament.

Having at first, perhaps, hoped that the UK would change its mind, the EU now seems eager to see us off. The Brexit argument has exposed polarities of class, age, income, education and geography which grew unchecked and largely unseen over many decades, and have accelerated since 2010.

As anyone who has been through a personal and public crisis knows, one of the most difficult things about it is that it opens a space for other people to begin openly discussing your problems and personality. Often, along the way, they will characterise you in a way in which you would never choose to see or characterise yourself. It’s uncomfortable, and certainly embarrassing.

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The most obvious literary manifestation of this was Fintan O’Toole’s Heroic Failure, Brexit and the Politics of Pain, which has just been published in America as The Politics of Pain: Postwar Britain and the Rise of Nationalism. It’s a long and often caustic look at the national psychology of England and where it has led. He accepts, of course, that the Brexit vote was part of a global phenomenon partly triggered by “budgetary austerity”, rising inequality and anxieties over immigration — but argues that it was also brought about by “a drilling-down into the half-buried layers of a very distinctive English mindset. It hit pay-dirt, and out gushed a flow of feelings highly specific to the mental terrain of post-war England.”

According to the author, one of these is England’s belief that it is, by its very nature, exceptional, rendering it unhappy at being just one part of an organisation that included 27 other member states. Another is that the open expression of racism gradually became more unacceptable in Britain throughout the Eighties and Nineties, and that “this left a vacancy which was filled by the European Union”.

In rather an odd flight of fancy, O’Toole likens the appeal of Brexit to that of Fifty Shades of Grey “a fantasy of submission and dominance” with the EU playing the role of Christian Grey tying Anastasia Steele — the United Kingdom — up in acres of bureaucracy and red tape (I’m not sure to what extent this analogy works, since the point of the book, surely, was that Steele rather liked it). He argues that the belief that the UK was oppressed by Europe was a kind of false consciousness, a fantasy of humiliation, which has now resulted in the reality of humiliation — a post-Brexit Britain that must operate in the economic orbit of the EU without playing an active role in it. Play-acting has generated its own reality: “Brexit is a strange hybrid – a genuine national revolution against a phoney oppressor.”

The author — an extremely readable writer — is, with his outsider’s eye, incisive on the peculiarly English combination of camp, class, and parody that characterises the personae and popular appeal of Conservative politicians such as Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The anecdote that struck me most forcefully about Johnson is the one about the speech that he made as a prospective parliamentary candidate in 2001 to the selection committee for the seat of Henley-on-Thames. In it, Johnson described how his wife was brought tea and toast in an NHS hospital after giving birth to one of their children.

Since she was asleep at the time, Johnson ate all the toast, and when she woke up and asked for it he was then dismayed that the system did not allow him to pay for a second batch. There is something telling about the fact that Johnson not only ate his wife’s toast in such circumstances, but then subsequently used the anecdote to advance his career.

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As O’Toole’s broader psychological dissection continues, however, the English psyche is sketched as ever more unlikeable and dysfunctional: wounded by loss of Empire, infused with self-pity, dogged by a superiority complex and subliminally racist. Historically, England can do little right.

The Falklands War, for example, was “a last hurrah for Britain’s imperial pretensions” which “played out the invasion fantasy of SS-GB…but at a safe distance of 8,000 miles.” Furthermore, it helped that “the tiny Falklands population” was “almost entirely white” because it therefore served “as a kind of make-believe England with no black or brown immigrants”. The war itself is therefore depicted as a kind of communal exercise in emotional fraudulence.

But the Falklands crisis — although certainly played with echoes of WW2 by Margaret Thatcher, who had a popular instinct for such showmanship — was not of the British government’s making, nor primarily conceived as a kind of national drama. Argentinian forces under General Galtieri’s military junta — one which ruthlessly presided over the torture and disappearances of thousands of leftists and dissidents — had invaded British sovereign territory, an action condemned by the UN Security Council. The British government’s choices were to oppose this action or to acquiesce in it; if the latter, England might reasonably have been accused of a Little Englander mentality by simply abandoning to a fascist regime a faraway population which, while small, overwhelmingly supported British sovereignty.

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By Polly MacKenzie

In this, and other passages, I kept getting the worrying feeling that the author’s pleasure in metaphor and analysis were running away with themselves, beyond blunter historical realities. And sometimes the argument seemed to contradict itself. On page 128, for example, a striking passage begins “Being angry about the European Union isn’t a psychosis — it’s a mark of sanity. Indeed, anyone who is not disillusioned with the EU is suffering from delusions.”

He goes on to describe its “slow torturing” of Greece — and also Ireland, Portugal and Spain – under the auspices of “fiscal discipline”. “There is a European technocratic elite (especially in unaccountable institutions like the European Central Bank) that has lost its memory.” It has forgotten, he says, that “poverty, inequality, insecurity and a sense of powerlessness have drastic political repercussions”. Instead, “the project became arrogant, complacent and obsessed with grand schemes like the ill-designed euro”.

That is a powerful and frank indictment of how the European project has played out in recent years. And surely it is possible to believe that quite a number of voters who shared O’Toole’s analysis were led in 2016 to vote ‘Leave’ by very similar conclusions, without being spurred to do so by nostalgia for empire, latent racism or the irrational embrace of nationalism.

To consider that, it is worth rewinding from the current garish national panto of UK politics to the period just before the 2016 EU referendum. The UK did indeed differ from other countries in one important respect: it put the question of EU membership directly to its people. Since the then prime minister David Cameron so clearly thought ‘Leave’ a highly undesirable option, that was an unwise move on his part.

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Brexit will accelerate the inevitable in Ireland

By Giles Fraser

Aside from a small minority of voters for whom the EU question was historically of paramount importance, for the vast majority it sat well below those of housing, education and the NHS. But the trouble with asking a national question via a simplistic referendum is that the very act of answering arrives with politics of its own. Many voters who felt — just as O’Toole argues — that aspects of the EU had fostered economic inequality, and were instinctively uncomfortable with the dynamic and undemocratic nature of its grand projects, also felt that to vote ‘Remain’ was to give an active endorsement of both these things. It is one thing to rub along somewhat irritably with a flawed status quo, quite another to give it the thumbs-up.

Binaries were forced upon us — although the ‘Leave’ vote originally came in many shades and intensities, as did that for ‘Remain’. With time, the identities of ‘Leaver’ or ‘Remainer’ have hardened into tribes, a situation not helped by the ambivalence and obfuscation of the Labour leadership — including that of Corbyn and McDonnell, both lifelong Eurosceptics — which have in part permitted Brexit to become a project of the Conservative Right.

I enjoyed reading The Politics of Pain, even if I disagreed with significant elements of its tone and analysis: it is stylishly written and seethes with ideas. And its warm reception in large swathes of London literary circles confirms at least one stereotype: that the English upper middle-class are more amenable to flagellation than many other nationalities would be.

Every country, as with Tolstoy’s definition of unhappy families, is unhappy in its own way. I have difficulty, however, with the argument that England was predisposed to Brexit — and its attendant political convulsions — by a uniquely English combination of historical arrogance and contemporary hang-ups. Despite England’s long-term ambivalence about EU membership, the argument seems partly designed to make non-English onlookers feel better about themselves.

Yet, beyond that, any sense of complacency would be unwise, because right across the EU — including in Ireland — many of the same internal stresses that led to Brexit are apparent, and erupting in a politically unpredictable manner.

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A rapacious form of capitalism has taken root in much of Ireland, with Dublin in particular experiencing an acute housing crisis. Ireland itself now has its highest homelessness figures since its records began. Reliance on food banks has gone up, and for many Irish people, the nature of employment has become more insecure. There are public anxieties around higher levels of immigration which are beginning to express themselves in troubling and complex ways, such as local protests at the opening of large “direct provision” centres offering accommodation for asylum seekers in rural areas (centres in which it is also alleged that residents are sometimes subjected to tough and dispiriting treatment).

The knotty question “what does it mean to be British?” — including a widespread loss of faith in the protective power of the state — has thrummed through the Brexit debate. Something in the UK’s current nervous breakdown is attempting to puzzle that out, and I hope that, somewhere down the line, it might end up in the acceptance that we badly need a country that is closely and strategically planned to function better and more equally for everyone in it.

The question “what does it mean to be Irish?” has yet to bubble up with quite the same intensity, and the authorities are highly unlikely to give it an EU hook to hang itself on. But it would be reckless for Ireland to follow the example of the UK’s somnambulist state before June 2016 — and to believe that just because Ireland isn’t England, the painful fall-out from such a question is inevitably very far away.

That year, from one March to the next, saw rising IRA and loyalist paramilitary violence, the introduction of internment, and the fateful events of Bloody Sunday, on which British army paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed demonstrators at a Londonderry civil rights march. Thereafter, things descended into greater mayhem: the summer of 1972 ushered in Bloody Friday, on which 20 IRA bombs exploded across Belfast in different locations.

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I was too young to be aware of such events, but by the time that I was even dimly cognisant of our contorted politics — in the mid-to-late 70s — individuals and political patterns were entrenched in ways that were to endure for decades. Ian Paisley, who began as a young loyalist firebrand, had by 1971 gained both a Westminster seat and his own party, the Democratic Unionists.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had been identified as key representatives of the IRA when they were flown to London for secret talks with Willie Whitelaw in 1972. By 2007 such “players”, formerly of the extremes, were firmly at the centre, and in charge: Paisley and McGuinness were leading a new Stormont government as First and Deputy First Minister respectively.

The family that I grew up in was pro-Union and Protestant but non-sectarian. My father was a barrister and also an independent Unionist politician, but I had little notion of Catholics as alien: we had Catholic relatives and family friends. It seemed to me that aspiring to a united Ireland by peaceful means, like an attachment to union with the UK, was a justifiable political viewpoint that could be debated.

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The making of a reactionary

By Peter Hitchens

The heavily electrified dividing-line lay not in religion or political views, but in the means you were prepared to use to get there. Both the republican paramilitaries (the IRA and the INLA) and the loyalist paramilitaries (the UVF and the UDA) openly considered it acceptable to murder people in order either to advance the cause of a United Ireland or to defend the status quo in the United Kingdom. They had a broad and elastic range of “legitimate targets”.

Sometimes the “legitimate targets” were politicians. When I was at primary school in 1981, the IRA shot dead the Ulster Unionist MP Robert Bradford at his South Belfast constituency office. Two years later, the IRA gunned down the young unionist politician and law lecturer Edgar Graham, in the grounds of Queen’s University opposite my secondary school.

Other brutal killings of politicians stuck in our communal memory — back in 1973, Loyalist paramilitaries had murdered the nationalist Senator Paddy Wilson and his girlfriend, Irene Andrews. Both unionist and nationalist politicians were routinely offered personal protection weapons. The entire society was permanently mined with unease.

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'Fake news' is old hat in Northern Ireland

By Douglas Murray

By the time I was 10 or 11, it was clear to me that, once the dehumanising of the people on the other side of the political divide got started in earnest, some very dark territory awaited. Separately from that, it was becoming evident that the pro-Union position in Northern Ireland was a psychologically complicated one. It involved a loyalty to Great Britain and a shared history cemented in the losses of two world wars, combined with constant insecurity about the degree to which the affection was requited.

Northern Irish unionists were British in Ireland and Irish in Britain. They belonged to neither nation’s mythic conception of itself. The wider Northern Protestant tradition contained plenty to be proud of — its history of dissent, its industrial capabilities, writers, musicians and sporting heroes — but too often an intensely localised culture of Orange marching bands and gigantic bonfires drew negative media attention and threatened narrowly to define it.

No broader tribe was waiting to welcome Northern unionists warmly, and in any case — from what I could see — tribal loyalties had a way of turning nasty. Although a sense of identity is important to everyone, I began to be suspicious of any overweening communal identification that overrode individual values.

*

I have now lived in London for 25 years. Part of England’s appeal used to be the calmer way in which politics was discussed. Yet something else felt different in London too: a more acute class consciousness. In recent years it has become increasingly apparent to me that, in many ways, class is to England what religion is to Northern Ireland.

George Osborne, as Chancellor of a government heavily dominated by former pupils of England’s leading public schools, pressed home an austerity budget in 2012 with the words: “We’re all in this together”. We weren’t, of course. A report for the Institute of Fiscal Studies in 2015 found that low-income families with children bore the brunt of the coalition government’s austerity drive.

Official austerity collided with a new style of labour market — the rise of zero-hours contracts, without holiday or sick pay — and an overheating UK housing market, mingled with a severe shortage of social housing. The combination has, in recent years, seen the emergence of the “working poor”, who struggle to make ends meet despite being in employment.

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As a headstrong activist, I was a dangerous thing

By Paul Embery

The Leave vote was in part an expression of political frustration from those in England and Wales who had felt marginalised by their new set of circumstances and wished to return their government to more direct accountability.

If many low-income Leave voters seemed unconcerned about the potential economic effect, that is partly because the system was already working out so badly for them that they preferred to accept even a short-term worsening of their circumstances in exchange for a gamble on a different long-term deal. It may be a gamble in which the odds remain stacked against them, but it was not wholly irrational.

There were many means by which this polarisation by geography, class and age — evidence of which bubbled up after the referendum — could have been avoided. One such means lay in how different social groups talked — or rather, didn’t talk — to each other.

Over the decades that I have lived in London, I’ve gradually noticed a broader contempt for the working class creeping into both public policy and the language of the more socially influential and financially secure — the notion that, if poorer people were failing to rise, it wasn’t because of any barriers placed in their way, but because they were simply what the UK meritocracy had left behind. The poor were seen as a kind of inevitable underclass: not quite fully equal citizens, but a form of societal sludge.

The better-educated and better-off have had a tendency to close down discussions which, in all fairness, should have ended with the considered redistribution of national resources.

One example relates to immigration and housing. It is generally accepted that higher rates of net immigration place a greater strain on social housing supply. That’s not because foreign-born UK residents use social housing at any greater rate — foreign-born usage is roughly the same as that of UK-born people — but simply because a rapidly expanding population naturally requires more social housing provision, and construction rates haven’t kept up.

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By Giles Fraser

Not long ago, I watched an edition of BBC Question Time in which a man in the audience said something like: “I’m not racist, but with all these foreigners coming in my daughter can’t get a council house.” I knew that the immediate middle-class reaction to his blunt phrasing about “all these foreigners” would be to conclude that this man was indeed a racist or xenophobe, and dismiss his comments thereafter. And sometimes “I’m not racist, but…” is indeed a prelude to a racist remark.

But suppose policymakers took what the man said at face value? Suppose that, just as he said, he wasn’t a racist, but his experience was that high rates of net immigration — including that of some families categorised as at higher priority need — really did lessen his daughter’s chances of getting affordable, secure social housing?

The discussion wouldn’t have had to end up in resentment of foreigners. A better-functioning democracy, maybe one less imbued with class consciousness, might have actually listened. It might, perhaps, have concluded that — though freedom of movement brought significant benefits for UK citizens — lower-income groups were disproportionately likely to experience any negative effects of a rapidly expanding population.

To counter this, a succession of governments might have made it a clear priority to build social housing at a much higher rate, so that there was a better supply for all those who needed it. That way, UK-born people on lower incomes wouldn’t have been in competition with a growing number of foreign-born UK residents for a shrinking resource, for which 1.1 million households are now on the waiting list.

None of this national conversation happened, of course. The reason was that, for very many years, those in positions of power quite literally couldn’t find the common language for an honest, pragmatic discussion on sharply rising rates of immigration.

Socially and economically, I’m solidly in the metropolitan middle class. But I’ve absorbed enough lessons from my birthplace to understand the dangers of automatically dismissing and deriding people who don’t think exactly like you.

*

The decision to ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ is a genuine strategic and cultural disagreement — in this case on Britain’s long-term economic outlook, our government’s political accountability to the people, the nature of British and European identity, and our role within the wider world.

Despite our current flamboyant political chaos, there are arguments on both sides, neither of which require the automatic reduction of one to “traitors” and “enemies of the people” or the other to “morons” and “racists”. But tribal excitement is in the air.

I like Twitter, for its fast-moving coverage of politics and access to direct sources. For a time now, however, we have all seen the escalation of deeply nasty rhetoric, often from an angry, hard Leave perspective from outside the London sphere of influence — including anonymous, vicious threats to female MPs such as Anna Soubry, Diane Abbott and Jess Phillips. The UK is in a troubling place when judges are receiving death threats from Leave zealots and MPs require police protection from baying crowds on both sides.

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Yet, increasingly, individuals with more prominent public voices, often on the Remain side, are joining in the nastiness, and delighting in crude insults or crafting ornately obscene insults for retweets and likes.

I’m not talking about passionate political disagreement, but statements that relish imputing the basest motives to those who think differently; people with whom, in any future version of the UK, the speaker will nonetheless have to share a country.

A couple of recent examples, among many — singled out only because they are freshest in the memory: firstly, the Guardian journalist Zoe Williams tweeting that the 76-year-old Labour MP Ronnie Campbell is a “scab” for deciding to vote for Boris Johnson’s withdrawal deal. (Campbell, incidentally, is an ex-miner who went down the pits at 14 and was on picket lines during the miner’s strike.)

Secondly, the writer John Niven tweeting a picture of his sweet-faced young daughter about to march in protest against Brexit (while carrying a large banner reading “Cock, Piss, Brexit”) — and attacking anyone who objected as a “gammon” and much worse.

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By Jenny McCartney

I have lost count of the number of times reasonably well-known comedians, writers and commentators, incensed by the prospect of Britain leaving the EU, have called people they disagree with politically a “cunt” (although usually the word is embroidered with further eye-catching expletives to jazz it up). Each time, it brings me up a bit short. Maybe this feels to them like a swashbuckling expression of justified fury; they think it’s okay because they’re so sure they’re right. But then people on all sides think they’re right.

My political awakening involved a growing mistrust of tribal intensity, and a wariness of extreme rhetoric. To this I can now add a third element, contrary to what I might once have imagined — the realisation that England really isn’t so different from Northern Ireland, now that Brexit has given it a way to divide itself in two.

Be careful with the excitement, England, for those of you who are presently carried away with the thrill of belonging, the sudden exhilaration of full-throttle hating. After a while, you will become indistinguishable from your means, and your means will distort the ends. Believe me, it won’t be the first time that has happened.

If you’ve ever looked at the Weinstein case and thought but why didn’t someone say something earlier?, the detail of She Said goes a long way to answering that question. By far the most painful truth about Weinstein is that until a couple of New York Times reporters started digging for testimonies, few people in Hollywood even realised they were supposed to care. Certainly, although whispered warnings circulated among Weinstein’s female staff, not many outside that circle knew the full extent of his sexual behaviour. Then again, they hadn’t really looked: ‘pushy producer pressures young women for sex’ was hardly a new script for Hollywood.

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story and wrote the book, which starts with the memory of 2017, when “women held more power than ever before” in the job market and political representation. But, the authors say, “all too often, women were sexually harassed with impunity” while the perpetrators “frequently sailed to ever-higher levels of success and praise”.

They single out Donald Trump: “Megan wrote some of the original articles in which women alleged that Donald J Trump preyed on them – and then she covered his triumph in the 2016 election.”

He remains US President despite such claims, of course, as did Bill Clinton, whose presidency was also dogged by allegations of sexual assault and harassment. But in the main, what helps a sexual harassment case gain credibility? Numbers of alleged victims, and bulk and quality of evidence. In Weinstein’s case, the volume of female complainants, along with records testifying to clandestine pay-outs and hushed-up internal memos about his behaviour, gradually enabled Kantor and Twohey to nail down the story – but not without a furious struggle.

Weinstein’s penchant for young actresses was an open secret in the film industry – so much so that, in 2013, the comedian Seth MacFarlane joked at the Oscar nomination announcements: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” Navigating Harvey and his considerable sexual ego was evidently understood to be part of a well-trodden Hollywood career path for young female stars.

It was less clearly spelled out – and not fully understood by many young assistants and actresses at first encounter – that this might also involve navigating the formidable tonnage of Harvey in his bathrobe, demanding ‘massages’, bombarding them with sexual propositions, and in some cases reportedly physically assaulting them and making it difficult to leave the room.

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The actress Rose McGowan said that she had been sexually assaulted by Weinstein during a hotel meeting, and was thereafter paid a hefty sum in a non-disclosure agreement to keep silent. Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow – so long the ‘golden girl’ of Miramax – also reported incidents of harassment. Judd described Weinstein’s modus operandi: a hotel breakfast meeting with Weinstein in his bathrobe, offering her a ‘massage’, then a shoulder rub, then asking her to help pick out his clothes, then more sexual requests, then the offer that she could watch him take a shower.

Eventually Judd left the room with a joke: “I’ll make you a deal, Harvey. When I win an Academy Award in a Miramax movie, I’ll give you a blow job.” Both Weinstein and Judd knew that, if such a moment happened, that ‘bargain’ would be null and void: an Academy Award would catapult her beyond Harvey’s control.

In a piece entitled ‘Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster, Too,’ the actress Salma Hayek – who held back during the initial allegations – wrote in December 2017 about his sexual harassment, bullying and threats during the making of the Miramax-backed Frida. She also spoke about the previous “inertia of acceptance” around him.

“Inertia of acceptance” was what the reporters encountered when they first began asking questions. It was “Harvey being Harvey”, as if he were some tempestuous natural phenomenon. It was the “casting couch”, industry insiders said, as though that were some kind of proud Hollywood tradition, back to when the studio boss Louis B Mayer could lay a speculative hand on Judy Garland’s left breast as she sang, and Marilyn Monroe – who described Hollywood as “an overcrowded brothel” – told the young Joan Collins, recently arrived in Hollywood: “Watch out for the wolves, honey – if they don’t get what they want they’ll drop your contract.”

Young, beautiful women were necessary to Hollywood, but if Hollywood broke one it could always get another.

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This era of hysterical certainty does women no favours

By Jenny McCartney

The basic Weinstein formula existed long before he did: a blend of sexual pressuring, wheedling, threatening and kindling female insecurities in an already insecure business. Joan Collins, speaking recently on a television show, remembered going as a young actress to meet a producer about a role and finding him lying in the bath. She declined the offer to join him, after which he asked her age. “Twenty-five,” she replied. “Twenty-five?” he repeated, “That’s not young in Hollywood anymore.”

Was Harvey just seen as part of a very old Hollywood deal, sex for casting – a corruption so entrenched that it now seemed part of the landscape? That’s what Germaine Greer suggested when she touched on the topic with her typical directness: “If you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent, and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.” Women must react immediately to harassment, she said.

But in this instance, Greer was missing the point – that it was women who didn’t consent to Weinstein who were speaking out, having survived or rebuffed his forceful advances, left the room, and then reportedly found themselves frozen out of jobs or tied up by zealous lawyers in secret settlements because of it. They didn’t want Harvey, but they did want careers in the film industry. Harvey was so well-connected that it often seemed as if the two things were inextricable.

*

In popular theory, the correct way to respond to a crass sexual overture is with a stinging rebuff and an instantaneous exit, honour intact. In films, women who behave like that are the proud heroines of the story. In real life – particularly among working-class women, in more precarious jobs with little financial safety net – such a reaction may well lead to instant joblessness, without a reference, and quite possibly with dependents hungrily awaiting the arrival of the next pay cheque.

Even among the better-off, a walk-out can mean the death of a long-held career ambition. That’s why, in response to workplace harassment, many female employees will evaluate the level at which it is pitched, hoping that it’s a one-off incident, and consider how best to bat it away without destroying the professional relationship. Hence those innumerable pics of Harvey and his glassy-eyed, smiling actress ‘friends’, Gwyneth Paltrow et al on the red carpet.

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A little story: when I was 17, I went to live in Paris with a friend in the belief that it would be easy for us to find work. It wasn’t. The big hotels that we had written to before leaving, offering our services as chambermaids, had no openings. The Left Bank boutiques that advertised for English-speaking shop assistants wanted someone who spoke better French.

Finally I found a job as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. It was run by a husband and wife from Shanghai. I really liked the wife, who had three young children and worked non-stop. The husband was small, slight and brusque: he had one front tooth missing, but then he rarely cracked a smile.

One day I turned up for the evening shift, and only the husband was there. He was unusually genial, pouring us both a glass of Chinese wine. I noticed that he was smiling, alarmingly, and uncharacteristically making a minimal amount of small talk. Sensing something odd in the air, I drained my glass and went to get on with the washing up in the narrow galley area, but shortly afterwards he materialised beside me, fumbling tentatively at my chest. I can’t remember exactly what I said to dissuade him – possibly a pointed reminder about his wife – but he stopped pretty quickly.

There was a faint lack of conviction to the whole enterprise, mercifully, as though he had perhaps been put up to it by sleazier friends and felt obliged to give it a go. Thereafter, he went back to brusque, to my relief, and we all carried on as normal with no more trouble.

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I could have left the job if necessary, but it never came to that. But when I recall even the brief disorientation of that little moment, it is possible to understand how – at the other end of the scale – an encounter with Weinstein alone in his hotel room must have been deeply shocking for a young assistant such as Rowena Chiu, then in her early twenties.

Unlike my employer, Weinstein was physically imposing, at six feet tall, heavy, and with a strong undercurrent of aggression in his psychological make-up (he once punched his brother Bob during a disagreement in the office, leaving him with a bleeding face in the presence of colleagues). He knew everyone in the industry, all the power-players, all the stars, and he came festooned in lawyers. As well as being terrifying, he could also be funny and generous. He carried his own dramatic, appalling atmosphere around with him, and he wore young women down.

Chiu was working alone with Weinstein late into the night on a Venice trip, she later said, going through a stack of scripts. As a precaution she was wearing two layers of tights. Weinstein kept interrupting with “an escalating series of sexual requests, for massages, a bath” and repeatedly touching her. She was, she said, “worried about being raped”. It became a kind of terrible bargaining situation, with Chiu trying to get the work done while mollifying Weinstein, within limits: at one point, she said, she ended up on the bed with him promising that with one single thrust, it would all be over.

But Chiu rolled over, wriggled away, and carried on with the script-reading shift, finally leaving around 2am when the work was done. There is something poignant in reading about how Chiu slogged on with the work, as though by being excessively diligent she could help return this out-of-control situation to normality. But soon there was no more work, for Chiu at least, because she and her supportive colleague Zelda Perkins – both having made a complaint – were out of the company, silenced with another of Weinstein’s draconian non-disclosure settlements.

Weinstein invested heavily in concealing his activities, not least by assiduously courting prominent women on the Democratic left. He donated to Hillary Clinton and accompanied her to fundraisers. He “gave a large donation to help endow a professorship in Gloria Steinem’s name”. He had even joined in the first women’s marches of January 2017. When Meryl Streep won a Golden Globe in 2012 for her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, she thanked Weinstein, jokily referring to him as “God”.

*

One of the most disturbing revelations in the book is a ghastly email sent by Lisa Bloom, a leading US ‘feminist’ lawyer who was retained by Weinstein in December 2016 at a rate of $895 an hour. In it she advised simultaneously attempting to fob off the actress Rose McGowan with “directing” opportunities, while running a “counterops” campaign to smear her as “increasingly unglued”. “I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of this world,” she wrote to Harvey, “because I have represented so many of them.”

Bloom devised a reputation management strategy that involved a strictly limited mea culpa from Weinstein: “You should be the hero of this story, not the villain. This is very doable.” Some of her suggestions are now beyond satire: that he “establish the Weinstein standards, which seek to have one-third of films directed by women, or written by women…”.

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One particular case illustrates how complaints got hushed up. Back in 2015, a junior executive called Lauren O’Connor left the company after filing an internal memo in which she noted the “toxic environment for women” and how “female Weinstein employees are essentially used to facilitate his conquests of vulnerable women who hope he will get them work”.

After the memo landed, O’Connor was contacted and told not to come back into the office. An exit agreement was finalised, including a settlement with tight confidentiality clauses. So why would anyone sign?

Partly, it was because complainants had little idea what others had experienced. If they were the first to speak out, they correctly felt that Weinstein would go to every effort possible to destroy their personal and professional reputation (as he did during the New York Times investigation, at one stage even hiring an Israeli private intelligence firm, Black Cube, to dig dirt on the women who accused him.) Furthermore, to leave such a prestigious company without any agreed explanation could injure future career prospects. Harvey’s omerta held fast, and for a long time.

*

Kantor and Twohey’s investigation not only revealed how Weinstein operated in the heart of left-leaning Hollywood, expertly using its causes and characters as camouflage, but also helped to trigger the #MeToo movement. The book goes into a number of stories beyond Weinstein, such as Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of attempted rape in high school against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and Rachel Crooks, who accused Donald Trump of forcibly kissing her when she was a 22-year-old receptionist.

At times the binding-together of ‘women who spoke out’ in the book feels awkward, since every case brings its own distinctive weight of evidence and set of dilemmas: rather like Tolstoy’s definition of unhappy families, each sexual harassment allegation is unhappy in its own way. And beyond the prominent accusations against public figures cited in She Said, there has also been a complex, rolling, international argument on where the outer boundaries of ‘harassment’ lie.

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The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

A large part of what the new movement should surely be doing is building pragmatic support and protections for low-paid women such as Kim Lawson – mentioned briefly in the book – who said she was repeatedly sexually harassed at her McDonald’s job by a co-worker and manager (Lawson had already faced homelessness for rejecting the attentions of a landlord).

In fairness, the Time’s Up Legal Defense fund has indeed partly helped enable Lawson and nine other McDonald’s employees to file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But much more is needed: around 40% of women working in the US fast-food industry, for example, have experienced sexual harassment on the job, and 42% of those said they felt they needed to accept it rather than endanger their jobs. For harassers, there’s generally no aphrodisiac like a woman’s economic vulnerability: in the aftermath of their much-publicised Weinstein reporting, Kantor also “reported on low-income workers, whose experiences suggested little had changed structurally”.

Yet in the academic, political and media sphere, the former silence around harassment has been replaced with ‘call-out culture’ in which men can be shamed for everything from making a mild joke in a crowded lift about pressing the button for the ladies’ lingerie department (Professor Richard Ned Lebow) to hugging a young democratic staffer for what she retrospectively judged “just a beat too long” (Joe Biden). To their credit, the authors acknowledge the difficulties around the broadening #MeToo movement: “There was a lack of process or clear enough rules.”

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When did empathy become so dangerous?

By Gerard DeGroot

There are, however, certain risks to this rapid category expansion of what is ‘inappropriate’, which often now veers more towards the ideological than the practical.

One risk is that public outrage at very serious harassment or assault will be diluted by its conflation with more trivial matters of social etiquette, allowing men with retrograde attitudes to women to present themselves as moderates battling a rising tide of feminist insanity. Another is that non-predatory men – wary, rightly or not, of an outsize fall-out from any small perceived transgression – may gradually retreat from useful one-to-one interactions with female colleagues at work, as a recent large study suggested.

As in Right-Left politics, the centre ground between men and women should be expanding, but often appears to be eroding: on the one hand, there is a US President who speaks more crassly about women than any other within living memory; on the other is an academic such as Suzanna Danuta Walters, director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, who wrote a ludicrous article titled ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men?’ last year, informing males: “Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this.”

Three specific things enabled Weinstein: the sexism already long entrenched in Hollywood culture; the fact that his considerable wealth and success meant that people were willing to overlook his overt tantrums and concealed harassment; and the use of ‘non-disclosure agreements’ (NDAs), which permitted a systematic pattern of harassment to continue in silence.

Legislators in the US and the UK are closing in on the abuse of NDAs. There has been, at last, a welcome corrective to the ‘inertia of acceptance’. When it comes to reshaping a post-Weinstein future, however, we should carry on checking whether the preoccupations of the new movement are really taking all women – and particularly those on low incomes – to a better place.