The fundamentals here are not hard to grasp: the earth is warming at an alarming rate thanks to our prodigious appetite for fossil fuels. What follows, then, is not climate denialism, but a reminder that the green transition has a class system. At its upper reaches everything is agreeably frictionless. From the edgier neighborhoods of Western chancelleries, its future can look positively convivial: solar panels on the roof, an electric car at the curb, an oat cortado in hand and a bottle of pét-nat chilling for later. Consumption becomes cleaner, the carbon footprint contracts, and modern life proceeds much as before, only with improved appliances. At Davos, the same transformation is rendered in the more desultory language of targets and taxonomies. Yet it is somewhere farther down the class pyramid that the gigawatts are actually made. There, at the bottom of the pecking order, the lower orders drill tunnels, pour concrete, mine copper, string transmission cables, drive trucks in interminable nocturnal capers, and climb inside power stations when rivers rise.

Decarbonization appears in prospectuses bedecked in green; but the labor behind it remains blue-collar. Émile Zola, whose coal mining opus Germinal (1885) ends with miners drowning underground, would have instantly recognized the arrangement. Nearly a century and a half since its publication, the fuel has changed and the carbon ledger has improved, but the laborer is still in the tunnel.

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In Nepal last week came a grim illustration of this new class divide. On 26 August, near the Tibetan frontier, a sizeable chunk of Himalayan ice detached itself from the mountainside, plunging with such violence that the impact seismically registered on the Richter scale. Rock, ice, water, boulders, and pulverized mountain were funneled through Nepal and Tibet, where, in scarcely half an hour, the swollen Trishuli River began consuming the valley around it. Roads disappeared, then bridges, and helicopters were obliged to perform duties ordinarily entrusted to highways. An impressive rescue operation managed to save 11,800 people, even as over a thousand perished, with a further 4,500 missing.

Farther down the valley, a rather more hopeless story was unfolding. A dozen hydropower projects were struck, and, at the time of writing, around 900 workers remain unaccounted for. Reports say that 500 of them are still in tunnels, awaiting rescue. Indian specialists have joined Nepali soldiers, while China has sent drones and DNA-testing kits. Meanwhile, some 700 megawatts of generating capacity, roughly a tenth of the national total, has been lost. Nepal has spent two decades transitioning to clean energy, in the main by turning Himalayan water into electricity. It is a bleak irony that the men building this green future have now been buried under it.

For Kathmandu, hydropower was never simply an environmental policy. The dream long pre-dated the climate transition. In 1966, the Nepali engineer Hari Man Shrestha, armed with a Moscow doctorate, calculated that the torrents tumbling off the Himalayas contained some 83,000MW of theoretical generating capacity. Later estimates reckoned roughly half of it commercially exploitable. Here was an intoxicating proposition for a poor, landlocked country with few conventional energy resources and an energy-hungry giant to its south. So it was that in 1992, the government formally opened hydropower to private and foreign capital, explicitly envisaging electricity for export. A power-trade agreement with India duly followed five years later. By the following decade, politicians and developers were talking of Nepal as the “hydropower battery of South Asia.”

As it was, for decades, the battery remained uncharged. As late as last year, Nepal’s installed capacity was roughly 3,400MW, still a fraction of the old 42,000MW dream. Now, however, the dams are going up quickly. India has agreed to buy as much as 10,000MW over a decade, while Nepali electricity already travels through the Indian grid to Bangladesh.

This was no minor achievement for a small nation, wedged between two capricious giants, chronically deficient in merchandise exports, and accustomed to its best workers emigrating to more hospitable economies. Clean energy was a ticket out of poverty and dependency. The rivers promised electricity and reindustrialization, foreign exchange and domestic jobs. Some of the more utopian Nepalese mandarins even imagined that, after sufficient megawatts, the old hierarchy of landlord and peasant would give way to the more benign modern compact of engineer and technician. In short, the green transition was industrial policy, foreign policy, and class conciliation all rolled into one.

The latter, in particular, was a big deal. Nepal has spent the past generation accomplishing political revolutions rather more efficiently than economic ones. The Maoist insurgency began in 1996 among the impoverished populations of the western hills, where feudalism was still very much a lived reality; by the time the guns fell quiet a decade later, some 17,000 people were dead. The Maoists finally entered government in 2008, abolishing the 240-year-old Shah monarchy and installing their former guerrilla commander Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known by his revolutionary sobriquet Prachanda, “the Fierce One” – as prime minister.

Republican Nepal had its achievements. Extreme poverty fell precipitously — the share of Nepalis living below the World Bank’s $3-a-day poverty line falling from 22% in 2011 to 3% in 2023. Caste discrimination was outlawed, representation widened and public services improved. Nepal also developed an Italianate — or dare one now say, British — appetite for changing governments. By 2024, there had been fourteen prime ministers in about as many years. Meanwhile, far-Left factions multiplied with a fecundity to rival Marx (father of seven). Maoists joined Marxist-Leninists; Marxist-Leninists embraced their centrist enemies of old, discovering the novel attractions of cabinet office. At one point, the country counted 25 different communist parties — all very People’s Front of Judea versus Judean People’s Front. As the Nepali political scientist Krishna Khanal observed: “Ironically, there are no communists in Nepal even with an abundance of Communist parties.” With the revolution over, the new political caste settled into the more temperate business of coalition arithmetic, familiar enough to any observer of the South Asian scene.

For all these Communists, however, the lower orders remained obstinately lower. Nepal had abolished its king, survived a civil war, and installed former revolutionaries in the Singha Durbar, Kathmandu’s neoclassical seat of power. But what failed to materialize was sufficient productive work for the working classes in whose name all this had taken place. Capitalism here appeared with peculiarly Nepali characteristics: the country’s most dependable export is its own proletariat. After a decade-long People’s War, the people are still obliged to go look further afield for work: at the 2021 census, 2.2 million Nepalis were living abroad, representing around 7.5% of the population. Remittances — money that foreign-based workers send back home — still supply around a quarter of GDP and reach well over half of households. Youth unemployment has hovered above 20%; many find work in the black market. The IMF calls the resulting dispensation a “low-trust, low-investment equilibrium.” Put less decorously, Nepal cannot employ enough of its people, so they leave at a rate of roughly 1,700 per day to earn poverty wages building stadiums in the Gulf and operating factories in Malaysia, which they then send home to their pensionless families. Hydropower was meant to break this cycle. If the Maoists had failed to emancipate Nepal’s proletariat, perhaps the megawatt would.

This is not an appealing social contract and something eventually had to give. It did so last September, when Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli — of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) — decided to ban 26 social-media platforms. Nepal’s Gen Z had spent years unemployed or watching friends depart, while the offspring of Communist grandees displayed designer handbags and holiday snaps. On 8 September, security forces opened fire on protestors marching on parliament, killing nineteen in the first crackdown. The people of Kathmandu answered the following day with riots and attacks on politicians’ homes. By the time the upheaval subsided, at least 76 people were dead, and some 2,300 injured. Oli duly resigned. Having successively tried kings and communists, Nepal plumped for a rapper. Balendra “Balen” Shah — engineer, hip-hop artist, independent mayor of Kathmandu, scourge of illegal buildings, and habitual wearer of dark glasses — had spent his musical career rapping about corruption and unemployment. He cannily declined the interim premiership, waited for elections and, in March, demolished the septuagenarian Oli in his Jhapa-5 constituency. His Rastriya Swatantra Party duly swept parliament.

Six months later, the rapper-ruler has inherited a disaster, and, with it, an uncomfortable lesson in political economy. Contrary to liberal assumptions, decarbonization does not abolish class relations merely by altering the fuel. To be sure, a dam may emit less carbon than a coal-fired power station; yet it still has owners, creditors, contractors, engineers, and laborers, and they do not share its attendant dangers equally. It is Nepal’s hydropower proletariat who drill and blast through unstable Himalayan rock, working underground among explosives and sleeping beside the river systems being harnessed for Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese electricity.

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Shah has responded vigorously enough, mobilizing the army and hospitals while accepting Sino-Indian assistance. His government has also, understandably, reached for the language of climate justice, seeking compensation from the richer, heavier-emitting powers for the costs of a catastrophe Nepal did vanishingly little to cause. Yet the workers entombed in Nepal’s hydropower tunnels expose a less convenient injustice: the fault line runs through Nepalese society as well as between Nepal and the carbon-rich West.

The green transition promises to transcend carbon. But, as Nepal shows, it cannot quite transcend class. As trillions are poured into dams, grids, batteries, mines, and transmission lines, the old question of who profits, and who is placed in harm’s way, merely acquires new terrains.

The independent producers who now generate roughly two-thirds of Nepal’s hydroelectricity are the toast of the Kathmandu financial press. Their workers understandably occupy the less photogenic end of the boom. At the Tanahun project, a 2025 study found barely two-thirds observing adequate safety practices, amid reports of electric shocks, musculoskeletal disorders, and skin disease. Meanwhile, at Upper Tamakoshi, injuries were significantly more common among men working inside the tunnels than among those above ground. None of this, of course, caused last week’s glacial collapse. Yet once a warming and geologically unstable mountain range becomes a workplace, natural hazard acquires a class dimension: someone must be sent underground; some regulation decides what protections follow him there; and some state authority must possess the machinery to retrieve him when the mountain moves.

Marx, whose ideas have enjoyed a rather eventful afterlife in the Himalayas, would have found 21st century Nepal a familiar place. His account of commodity fetishism turned on the way relations between people come to assume the appearance of relations between things. It followed that the finished commodity confronts us as an object complete in itself, while the social relations, not to mention the labor that produced it, recede from view. Something similar afflicts the modern imagination when it comes to clean energy. We see the turbine, the solar panel, the electric car. Less visible, however, are the Congolese cobalt miner, Chilean copper worker, Chinese solar-factory hand, and Nepali tunneler beneath the Trishuli — until, that is, disaster strikes, making the class relations concealed inside the innocent abstraction of the “green transition” suddenly impossible to miss.

This was never part of the joke. Harvey has stood against each incumbent prime minister and London mayor since 2017. Like the licensed fool of old, Binface existed to puncture pretension from the safety of the margins, his purpose corrective rather than competitive. Yet in Clacton, the fool finds himself inheriting the responsibilities of a ruling class missing in action. Binface is the establishment. Après Binface: le déluge.

The popular misconception is that the character belongs to that all-too-familiar, dreary, disillusioned British genus of affectionate political nihilism. The nation has a talent for converting disappointment into panel-show persiflage, stretching from That Was the Week That Was to Have I Got News for You. But Harvey is a more interesting figure than that. He is a stand-up and writer with background in television comedy, and credits that include the Westminster satire The Thick of It. But he is, at heart, a defender of democracy; he has spent two decades anatomizing political absurdity without ever surrendering to the fashionable conviction that politics itself is absurd. Astonishingly, he remains a radical. 

Comedy, by Harvey’s own account, was first an escape from a difficult childhood with a bibulous, domineering father, then a way of surviving the sudden death of his diabetic, morbidly obese brother. His memoir, A Fan for All Seasons, chronicles a painful year spent wandering from sporting event to sporting event after discovering Dan’s body in his London flat, searching in the rituals of spectatorship for a way of making grief publicly bearable. One begins to understand why someone so preoccupied with civic ritual should eventually end up standing in elections dressed as a piece of municipal infrastructure.

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It was only after this sporting odyssey that Harvey emerged in the political arena, confronting Theresa May in Maidenhead in 2019. (He initially adopted the “Lord Buckethead” persona which had previously been wheeled out by a rotating cast of performers.) He later recalled: “Thursday night I was in a sports hall in Maidenhead. Sunday morning, I was flown first class to New York to appear on John Oliver. It was the weirdest experience of my life.” It would have been an excellent point at which to become a professional ironist. Harvey chose a more curious vocation instead. 

The easiest posture in our age of institutional exhaustion is cynicism. But it has its costs. As David Foster Wallace observed, “irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage”. Harvey’s bin cosplay has resisted that temptation. And for every daft Binface pledge — nationalize Adele; make Piers Morgan emission-free by 2030, etc — there is an decent one. It’s hard to maintain that British life would not be improved if we were indeed to ban the use of speakerphones on public transport. At one hustings, Harvey remembers a voter saying: “I can’t believe Binface is making the most sense of all the candidates.”  

His gloriously absurd manifestos conceal beneath their delirious surface an unexpectedly coherent political disposition: abolish the House of Lords; clean up Britain’s rivers; build houses; invest in public transport; return the Parthenon Marbles; tie ministers’ salaries to nurses’ pay; house the homeless before the royal family acquires its seventh palace; make Thames Water executives swim in their own excrement-encumbered effluent. Much of this is of course indistinguishable from old fashioned municipal socialism. 

His jokes may be bait. But the politics are earnest. When Harvey promises to build “at least one affordable home”, the punchline is not the number but the implied accusation that every supposedly serious politician’s housing pledge has become less believable than his own. The target is never democracy but bad government. 

But most revealing of all is Harvey’s attitude to elections themselves. Asked by the Big Issue why people should vote, he scarcely mentions Count Binface: “I’m more interested in the idea that people vote at all because democracy is a very precious thing.” Every Brit, he argues, should treasure the right to stand for election, “no matter how idiotic the get-up”. The campaigns raise money for Shelter. Eradicating homelessness is repeatedly described as one of the manifesto’s “key tenets”. The publicity is only a means to that end. This is an almost embarrassingly unfashionable creed. Strip away the “intergalactic space warrior” mythology and what remains is recognizably social-democratic — not revolutionary in the Marxian sense, certainly, but possessed of that civic egalitarianism of a Cromwellian vintage which assumes the commonwealth ought to be run in the interests of its citizens rather than, say, Bangkok-based crypto speculators or someone called “Posh George”.

Confronted with the possibility of becoming Farage’s principal opponent by default, Harvey’s first instinct was not triumphalism but disbelief. He told the Guardian he had been preparing for a relaxing return to his supposed home planet, Sigma IX, before Farage “self-detonated”, forcing “a swift intergalactic handbrake turn”. Asked what he would do if Clacton actually elected him, he merely replied that he would “do my very best to represent them”. He came close to campaigning for the removal of Clacton pier before somebody pointed out that it was by the sea, not in the House of Lords. 

The striking thing here, though, is that Count Binface risks being the the last social democrat standing. Britain’s Overton window, never a particularly capacious aperture by continental standards, has in recent years contracted still further. Labour has shown the Corbynites to the door with the brisk efficiency of a club steward removing a spivvy guest, while the Conservatives have hurriedly buried whatever bizarre ideological enthusiasm it was that briefly animated the Truss interlude.

The dispiriting upshot has been the better part of a decade governed, if not by a formal coalition, then by something rather more insidious: a pensée unique so pervasive that party labels increasingly resemble matters of branding rather than belief. In 2023, the Economist christened its heroine “Ms Heeves”, a composite stitched together from the managerial instincts of Rachel Reeves and Jeremy Hunt, much as an earlier generation spoke of “Butskellism” to describe the comfortable convergence of Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell. 

These days, it might be appropriate to speak of Starmenoch or even Burnoch. But the invidious comparison flatters the present settlement. Butskellism at least presided over an argument about the distribution of prosperity; today’s orthodoxy contents itself with administering degrowth more competently than the other chap. SW1 remains as theatrically adversarial as ever — PMQs still proceed with all the decorum of a boxing match — but the ideological chasm between the front benches has narrowed to the width of the despatch box itself.

One may quarrel indefinitely over fiscal rules, denouncing a tax-to-GDP ratio of 35% as Bolshevism and 32% as neoliberalism; or over the precise degree of performative cruelty to be directed at asylum seekers. But anything touching the larger architecture of Britain’s political economy — the distribution of wealth; the ownership of land and capital; the country’s constitutional settlement; even the purpose of the state itself — is ruled out of order.

Increasingly, the electorate has declined to play along. Brexit was one expression of the new peasants’ revolt; Reform is another. Equally eloquent is the subtler protest of abstention. Turnout, a stately 84% in 1950, settled into the high 60s through the 2010s before slumping to barely 60% at the election that carried Starmer into Downing Street. 

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Seen in one light, the Clacton caper is proof of the point that Farage has been making all along — namely that British politics is controlled by an Establishment cartel that is now engaged in an all-out coordinated war against both him and his politics. Farage resigned his Commons seat after the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened investigations into his failure to declare a £5 million personal gift from his sugar daddy, the crypto-Croesus Christopher Harborne. Rather than await the slow ecclesiastical processes of Westminster discipline, which might eventually have ended in suspension and a recall petition, Farage leapt ahead, testing himself against the people of Clacton instead. He also reminded them that: “I could go out and try and make some real big money. I could go to the USA, where I’ve got plenty of offers”, which will no doubt go down extremely well on the Essex seafront. 

The open question is whether the response of Britain’s sensible parties in declining to stand against him is the tactical masterstroke that their press cheerleaders seem to think. Kemi Badenoch dismissed the contest as a “fake” election, while Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens unanimously refused to lend legitimacy to Farage’s stunt. And yet together the exnominated parties have conspired to prove Farage’s core point — that they are indeed “all the same” and will do anything to preserve the status quo. Labour in particular has form here. When Farage first descended upon Clacton in 2024, Labour HQ set about stripping resources from its own local campaign, dispatching its characterful candidate, Jovan Owusu-Nepaul — who was “getting more retweets than Keir Starmer”, according to a party source (shocker) — to more electorally profitable territory in the West Midlands and leaving local activists aghast that the party appeared content to grant Farage an unobstructed run. Even then, the instinct was less to defeat Reform but to contain it.

One hesitates to improve upon an opponent’s script so generously. For years Farage has insisted that Westminster is not a genuine arena of political disagreement but a single interchangeable establishment, united less by ideology than by its instinct for cartel behavior whenever an insurgent threatens the settlement. One might have expected his centrist adversaries to resist the caricature. Instead, they have enacted it with touching fidelity. Against the dismal backdrop of this de haut en bas consensus, Harvey’s intervention becomes easier to understand. He is doing what the establishment doesn’t dare to do, which is actually to participate in democracy.

Meanwhile, he offers a critique of political celebrity. At precisely the historical moment when every ambitious politician has become the curator of an increasingly elaborate personal brand — Farage himself used the word “influencer” in his Clapton speech — Harvey performs the opposite maneuver. He abolishes the individual altogether. The bin is an anti-charisma machine. It is commonplace and probably entirely accurate to note that Farage is the 21st century’s canniest political operator as well as its most recognizable figure — and without Farage, Reform would be nowhere. Against all this, the bin performs an act of almost monastic self-abnegation. 

It asks a question almost indecent in its simplicity: if a proposal sounds perfectly sensible when uttered by a man dressed as a bin, why has Westminster spent so many years insisting that it was impossible?

Time was when the Labour Left did ambition. Whatever one thinks of Tony Benn, and opinions divide sharply, nobody could accuse him of thinking small. His 1975 Alternative Economic Strategy, a patriotic blueprint for autarky, envisaged public ownership on a colossal scale, capital controls, industrial planning, tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing, and a self-respecting state capable of directing investment towards national priorities. At one point, he floated the nationalization of Britain’s 25 largest companies. The aim was not merely to regulate capitalism but to grab it by the lapels and reorder it through state action. To Benn, the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for national sovereignty were inseparable. His socialism amounted to a species of Anglo-Gaullism. The objective was to ensure that Parliament, rather than plutocrats or Eurocrats, ruled Britain.

That patriotism informed Benn’s hostility to the European Economic Community — Euroskepticism was then still an honorable, even intellectually formidable, tradition on the Labour Left. Benn regarded the EEC not as a post-national panacea but as a constitutional straitjacket designed to frustrate democratic control over the economy. If Westminster could not direct investment, subsidize industry, regulate capital flows or protect strategic sectors without running afoul of Brussels, then the entire project of socialist transformation became an elaborate exercise in make-believe. Compared with today’s notionally Left-wing Europhilia — which often amounts to little more than a Pavlovian urge to applaud whatever annoys the Tories and, latterly, Reform — Bennite Euroskepticism at least rested on a clutch of thoughtful and well-articulated premises.

Benn, moreover, was not some lonely crank muttering socialist incantations and shouting from the backbenches. By the late Seventies and early Eighties, much of the Labour Left shared his conviction that Britain’s economic malaise demanded structural remedies rather than desultory managerial tinkering. Michael Foot, now remembered chiefly as a disheveled romantic in a donkey jacket, led a party committed to an astonishing program of economic intervention. The 1983 manifesto promised new public enterprises in electronics, pharmaceuticals, and high tech; proposed renationalizing key assets; advocated extensive industrial planning; and sought to extend democratic control over economic life. To modern ears, accustomed to politicians boasting about breakfast clubs and advising men to whisper “maaaate” at misogynists, the sheer scale of the ambition feels almost foreign.

Yet there was a minor snag. Bennism never came remotely close to persuading the proletariat. The 1983 manifesto may today read like the last serious attempt by the British Left to think systematically about power, but it also delivered Labour’s worst post-war result. For an electorate still haunted by inflation and strikes, nationalization and withdrawal from the EEC looked less like a program for renewal than a recipe for further turmoil. Nor was the electorate the only obstacle. The Labour Left spent almost as much time arguing with itself as it did with its opponents. Benn and Foot did not exactly belong to a single political tendency. Foot’s subsequent reputation as a wild-eyed Bennite firebrand was always somewhat exaggerated. An old-fashioned parliamentary socialist, he romanticized the Commons in a way Benn never did. He also regarded some of Benn’s more ambitious proposals with skepticism, describing the idea of nationalizing Britain’s 25 largest companies as “crazy”. Where Benn sought to remake Labour, Foot often sought to hold it together, preserving a heteroclite coalition that still stretched from Tribune socialists to elements on the Labour Right.

For all their differences, both men possessed something now largely absent from Labour politics: a theory of power. They believed that Britain’s problems stemmed from the structure of ownership: a state in hock to a rentier class that preferred inflating house prices to financing factories; a financial system that found speculation and offshoring more profitable than domestic production, and democratic institutions hollowed out by budget cuts and Brussels. The central question, as Benn saw it, was not simply how wealth was distributed but who possessed power, and whether democratic institutions retained the capacity to challenge it. Reflecting on his years in government, he wrote in one of his voluminous diaries: “As a minister, I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour government.”

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Burnham’s politics, by contrast, start from the tacit assumption that the argument has already been settled and lost. Finance will remain dominant. Capital will remain mobile. The ownership of the economy is no longer a political question but a fact of nature, somewhere between gravity and the weather. As one former colleague put it, Burnham’s beliefs are “not ideological” but rooted in “people’s daily experiences”. Benn began with a theory and worked downwards to policy; Burnham begins with a conversation in Morrisons and works upwards towards a philosophy. The commanding heights have disappeared into the mist; the task now is to ensure that the buses arrive roughly on schedule. Benn wanted to socialize the economy. Burnham is content with contactless ticketing.

The retreat began long before Burnham. Neil Kinnock’s achievement as party leader from 1983 onwards was not to construct a new theory of power, but to dismantle the old one in the shadow of Thatcherism. After the electoral catastrophes of the early Eighties, Labour’s idée fixe became electability rather than transformation. It accordingly spent 40 years sanding down its ambitions in pursuit of intermittent office, trapped in a vicious circle whereby each electoral victory was achieved by abandoning the very ideas that might have justified it. Public ownership was quietly downgraded, trade-union power curbed, Euroscepticism abandoned, and socialism itself pushed into the loft conversion alongside conference samizdat. Yet Kinnock never quite replaced what he had discarded. Labour shed policy after policy without offering much in the way of a positive alternative. By the time he left office in 1992, the party had become more respectable but intellectually thinner, more adept at winning the confidence of ordinary Brits before elections than improving their lives afterwards. The ambition to stem decline had given way to the more modest goal of reassuring Middle England that Labour’s bark was worse than its bite.

John Smith represented a further step down the mountain. An insufferably moralizing chap, he looked less like a tribune of the working class than a Scottish bank manager who had wandered into the wrong conference. Smith grasped that Labour needed constitutional reform, decentralization and a more liberal conception of politics, but he lacked both the temperament and the time for anything more audacious, preoccupied as he was with the battle over One Member One Vote. Where Labour once dreamed of reindustrialization and redistribution, it now devoted its energies to redesigning the method by which delegates selected the shadow cabinet.

With Blair and Brown, the comedown became complete. New Labour in power accepted not merely the institutions of Thatcherism but many of its underlying assumptions. The task was no longer to challenge the dominance of finance but to manage it more effectively; not to reverse globalization but to adapt to it; not to democratize economic power but to skim enough tax revenue from the City to finance a few public services. By the end of the Blair-Brown years, finance accounted for a larger share of the economy than ever, manufacturing had shrunk further, and vast swathes of public expenditure were being funneled through private contractors. The party had moved from promising to assume the commanding heights to Cool Britannia. 

If New Labour represented the abandonment of Labour’s old ambitions, Ed Miliband represented their uncertain rediscovery. The timing ought to have been propitious. The Conservatives were imposing the most severe fiscal retrenchment in a generation. Real wages were stagnant, public services under pressure, and the financial crash had discredited the hubris of many a Hayekian. Yet Miliband proved strangely unable to convert this conjuncture into a compelling alternative. Though he flirted with a critique of “predatory capitalism” and occasionally hinted that his marxisant father Ralph might have been right all along, he never developed these instincts into a coherent political project. The whole unhappy experiment culminated, appropriately enough, in the EdStone. Unveiled in a Hastings car park during the 2015 election campaign, the two-tonne limestone monolith bore a handful of pledges so anodyne — “a strong economic foundation”, “higher living standards”, “an NHS with the time to care” — as to be quite meaningless. The stone was intended for Downing Street’s rose garden; instead, it became a monument to Labour’s inability to explain why it deserved power. Faced with a choice between austerity and tax-and-spend, the British electorate displayed a touching preference for someone else’s suffering. Miliband’s defeat duly followed.

In the aftermath, Labour briefly returned to something resembling Bennism in the form of Corbynism. The program amounted to moderately higher public spending — raising the state’s share of GDP from roughly 40 to 45%, bringing Britain closer to its continental peers — alongside the renationalization of selected utilities and a modest industrial revival: hardly the storming of the Winter Palace. A surprising number of voters appeared to recognize as much in the snap election of 2017. Yet his leadership was undone two years later by fifth columnists and a cackhanded commitment to two referendums — Brexit and, potentially, Scotland — at precisely the moment when the public wanted none. The Labour Left thus contrived to squander what may have been its last once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Now, with Starmer’s purges having culminated in the discovery that even the purger can one day become the purgee, we are witnessing the extraordinary recrudescence of the Labour Left. Starmer survived the paid-for clothes and Mandelson’s penchant for removing his own but not Burnham’s by-election victory. The irony is that the Labour Left’s great returning hope arrives not bearing a new economic settlement but a municipal case study, albeit a successful one.

Yet the more remarkable fact is that Burnham may now inherit the Labour leadership, and with it the premiership, without ever being forced to explain what, precisely, he believes. His supporters treat his coronation as a foregone conclusion. That is curious. For a party supposedly rediscovering its radical tradition, there has been remarkably little appetite to subject its newest savior to public scrutiny. The Conservatives spent much of the past decade airdropping prime ministers into Downing Street and presenting the electorate with a fait accompli. Unlike them, though, our future prime minister is an empty signifier. 

Burnham’s backers speak reverently of “Manchesterism”, but it is not entirely clear what the term means beyond competent local government. The flagship achievement of his mayoralty has been fixing Greater Manchester’s bus network. The policy has been successful enough: usage in the first franchised areas rose by around 8%, punctuality improved, and the city’s now-iconic yellow buses have become a visible symbol of municipal renewal. Yet there is an undeniable mismatch between the scale of the achievement and the scale of the claims made for it. Britain’s productivity growth has averaged barely 0.5% annually since the financial crisis. Business investment remains among the lowest in the G7. Housing construction consistently falls short of demand. The country’s capital stock is aging, its infrastructure creaks, and regional inequalities remain among the highest in the developed world. Against this backdrop, Burnham’s prime ministerial pitch appears to amount largely to better buses.

What is missing is the very thing that animated Benn, Foot, and even, in his own coy fashion, Corbyn: an explanation of how the economy works. Burnham can tell you who broke Britain — “the four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deregulation, privatization, austerity, and Brexit” — but he has remarkably little to say about what should replace the existing model. His cri de coeur is “business-friendly socialism”, whatever that focus-grouped inanity might mean. Perhaps this accounts for his popularity. A Labourist Zelig elevated by the party machine, he has built a career on being all things to all people. Whether this party trick will work in power as it has in party intrigue remains to be seen. 

The latest object of cathexis for India’s unhappy youth is the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Its prospects, non-existent as they are, matter less than its provenance. The CJP is not an Indian eccentricity but the latest expression of a wider Gen-Z convulsion. Across the Global South, from the students who felled Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh to their coevals in Nepal, Kenya, and Madagascar, a generation trapped between economic stagnation and digital overstimulation has discovered the pleasures of rebellion. Yet rebellion is easier to summon than purpose. For every movement that matures into a political force, dozens dissolve into little more than a collective tantrum conducted through hashtags and megaphones. The significance of the CJP lies less in anything it is likely to achieve than in what it reveals about the poverty of the political imagination of a generation coming of age amid pervasive unemployment, institutional sclerosis, and digital hyperconnectivity.

The story begins with a meme. In May, Chief Justice Surya Kant, during a hearing concerning fraudulent professional credentials, remarked en passant that unemployed young people drifting into journalism and activism resembled cockroaches. The entomological insult ricocheted across the Indian internet. Within 24 hours, the CJP was born. Its mascot was the eponymous cockroach, smartly besuited; its slogan “the voice of the lazy and unemployed”; its natural habitat, the teeming meme swamps of the Indian internet. Within days, the movement had amassed millions of followers, transforming an offhand judicial insult into a political identity.

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How Bangladesh’s revolution failed

By Pratinav Anil

The architect of this improbable insurgency is Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old sometime comms man from Maharashtra and now, by his own telling, another superannuated recruit to the ranks of India’s educated unemployed. Dipke read journalism in Pune before moving to Boston University to pursue a master’s degree in public relations. Before discovering fame as India’s chief cockroach, he did time in the digital trenches, helping develop the populist Aam Aadmi Party’s meme-driven social media operation. By his own account, the CJP began as a Kafkaesque half-joke. Within days, however, a satirical website hastily assembled from Boston had become the toast of Indian newsrooms.

The CJP’s runaway success owes much to its status as an empty signifier: it possesses not so much an ideology as a vibe. In this respect, the party is very much a product of Dipke’s intellectual formation in PR. It is anti-establishment without being systematically anti-capitalist, oppositional without being programmatically Left-wing, and youthful without being especially radical. Its rhetoric revolves around a familiar omnium gatherum of grievances among educated urban Indians: joblessness, corruption, the persistence of political nepo dynasties, and the sense that the country’s gerontocratic political class has ceased to speak the language of younger generations. The movement’s genius lies in its ability to convert these diffuse frustrations into a collective identity. To call oneself a cockroach is at once an act of self-deprecation and solidarity.

The grievances animating students are, to be sure, far from imaginary. India produces millions of graduates each year while struggling to generate enough sensible employment to absorb them. Millions of young Indians enter university expecting social mobility, only to emerge as the immiserated caput mortuum of the credential economy: examined, certified, and yet no closer to the prosperity they were promised. Public recruitment examinations, meanwhile, are routinely engulfed by allegations of paper leaks and malpractice. Last year’s controversy over the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) — the fiercely competitive examination that serves as the principal gateway to medical education for more than two million Indian students each year — became a national scandal after allegations of leaked question papers and irregular scoring procedures cast doubt on the integrity of the process.

The broader crisis of educational credentialism is impossible to miss: ever more degrees chasing ever fewer opportunities. It is hardly surprising that the CJP struck a chord with this generation, giving it a carapace beneath which to nurse its dashed hopes and accumulated disappointments.

Yet what remains striking is how little substance accompanies the symbolism. The movement has flirted with demands ranging from education reform and the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to judicial independence, safeguards against voter disenfranchisement, stronger anti-defection laws, and greater representation for women in political office. Taken individually, these are not unreasonable demands. The problem is that they amount less to a political program than to a catalog of civic frustrations.

The movement possesses grievances in abundance, enemies in plenty, and memes beyond counting. What it lacks is any coherent account of power, class, or institutions — the very stuff of politics. One searches in vain for a theory of the state, a vision of economic and cultural transformation, or even a stable hierarchy of priorities. Does it have anything to say about caste, the deepest hierarchy in Indian society? About confessional violence and Hindu vigilantism? About a political economy built on an extraordinarily narrow tax base and a state too fiscally weak, and too unwilling, to provide adequate healthcare and education? The CJP knows what it dislikes; it is far less clear about what it wants.

There is a long history to such movements. India’s cockroaches belong to a familiar global species: the anti-political protest movement. Its natural habitat is not the factory floor or the party branch meeting but the social media feed and, occasionally, the street. It thrives on symbolism, irony, and virality. It excels at expressing discontent while remaining conspicuously reluctant to define what should replace the existing order. One can trace its lineage through the Occupy movement that sprang up after the Crash, whose ecumenical language of the “99%” captured widespread anger at inequality but, precisely for that reason, struggled to convert protest into durable political organization. It appeared again in the movements of Spain’s indignados and France’s gilets jaunes, whose denunciations of an austeritarian political class resonated with millions but proved more adept at rejecting the system than articulating a coherent alternative.

What unites these disparate episodes is not a shared ideology but a shared style — a sophisticated repertoire of symbolic resistance. The CJP is perhaps the most Indian expression yet of this broader tendency. There is a certain irony here, for India has no shortage of traditions of radical politics. The 20th century produced movements whose ambitions were nothing if not grand. Nehruvian socialists sought to remake society through planning, dams, steel plants, and new cities. Naxalite guerrillas, meanwhile, took up arms in pursuit of land redistribution. Student radicals once debated Mao and Marx with a seriousness that now feels almost retro. For all their defects, India’s socialists and communists at least possessed a utopian conception of the future. Above all, they believed politics was about power. The meme movements de nos jours, by contrast, often appear content to remain permanently in the realm of gesture.

The CJP’s closest antecedents are therefore not the communist and socialist movements that once dominated India’s forests and campuses but a different lineage altogether: the great anti-political mobilizations organized around moral renewal rather than social transformation. The most important precedent is the JP Movement of the Seventies. Like the cockroaches, it emerged from genuine anger at corruption and misgovernment, mobilized students on an enormous scale, and presented itself as a revolt against a political class that had lost the plot. Yet Jayaprakash Narayan’s celebrated call for “Total Revolution” was, upon inspection, a remarkably nebulous doctrine. It was at once non-partisan and anti-Congress, hostile to Marxism yet willing to paralyze the administration, committed to direct democracy while proposing unelected “struggle committees” to police elected representatives. At times Narayan gestured towards collective ownership; elsewhere he dismissed land redistribution and collectivization as impractical. The inconsistencies in the event mattered little. Narayan himself was unusually candid about this, remarking at one point that what was needed was “the end of all ideologies.”

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A similar story unfolded four decades later with India Against Corruption. Anna Hazare, a kind of JP redivivus, channeled widespread disgust with graft and elite privilege in the 2010s. Once again, the promise was not a new political vision but a cleansing of public life. The movement presented itself as standing above conventional politics, transcending the stale divisions of Left and Right. The immediate result was the birth of the Aam Aadmi Party. The broader consequence, however, was a further delegitimization of the political class and the strengthening of authoritarian Hindu nationalism. As experience elsewhere has repeatedly shown, from the Five Star Movement in Italy to Lava Jato in Brazil, anti-corruption anti-politics often ends by clearing the ground for the far-Right. Meloni, Bolsonaro, and Modi are all, after a fashion, beneficiaries of the populist, anti-political movements that preceded them.

Gandhi himself was, in many respects, the original anti-political politician. His Olympian moral authority rested on an obsession with a peculiarly unhinged conception of non-violence that left him all too ready to sidestep questions of class. Faced with demands for land reform, he preferred conciliation to expropriation; confronted with caste, he sought to soften rather than abolish it. He chipped away at the enormities of untouchability while leaving much of the broader architecture of hierarchy intact, and urged landlords to behave a bit more nicely towards peasants rather than advocating their removal as a class.

The CJP belongs squarely within this desultory tradition. Properly speaking, Dipke is one of Gandhi’s bastard heirs. His party’s politics are less ideological than therapeutic. Society is imagined not as a terrain of competing interests but as the victim of elite incompetence and indifference. The remedy is therefore not economic redistribution but moral renewal. In this sense, the movement possesses an elective affinity with conservatism. For all its youthful rhetoric and anti-establishment posture, it leaves many of the deepest structures of Indian society curiously untouched.

This would matter less were India not simultaneously home to people engaged in rather more consequential forms of dissent. While the CJP dominates headlines and timelines, there remain students, journalists, academics, and organizers whose encounters with the state have been anything but playful. Theirs is not the politics of memes but the politics of consequence, where the price of opposition is measured not in likes and reposts but in years lost to courts, prisons, and legal limbo.

Consider Umar Khalid, the former student leader who has spent years incarcerated under anti-terror legislation. Or Sharjeel Imam, arrested after speeches critical of the Modi government. Or those caught up in the Bhima Koregaon prosecutions: the scholar Anand Teltumbde, the trade unionist and lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, the poet Varavara Rao, among many others.

Yet public attention is finite, and absurd, algorithm-friendly spectacle perforce has a tendency to monopolize it. The CJP thus embodies a wider paradox. It is at once a protest against political failure and a symptom of it. Most likely, it will disappear as quickly as it arrived, joining the ever-expanding graveyard of internet phenomena that briefly convinced journalists they had glimpsed the future. Dipke may think otherwise. But I suspect it will take more than a few memes — and considerably more than a cockroach — to break the hegemony of Hindu nationalism.

To the Indian migrant of recent vintage — such as myself — the curry house was always something of a culture shock. No such institution quite exists in India: no laminated menus promising “Madras (Hot)” as a fixed rung on the Scoville scale; no vindaloo calibrated for stag nights; no chicken tikka masala swimming in its sunset-colored gravy. That last dish, famously christened Britain’s “national dish” by the Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in 2001, at the soggy zenith of the Blairite multicultural rapture, was less a testament to British cultural absorption than to a proclivity for unadventurous adaptation.

For better or worse, that Britain is on its way out. Where once Brick Lane’s neon promised a Soviet sameness, today’s openings — typically regional, not national; a touch evangelical about provenance — suggest a city that prefers its cuisines less translated. If the old curry house served up a hospitable fiction, the new arrivals dish out the real thing.

And yet, just as London acquires a taste for the truly local, one of its grandest culinary generalities approaches its centenary. This week, if fate and the facilities managers permit, the Michelin-starred Veeraswamy will turn 100. For a century now, the establishment has served mulligatawny beneath low chandeliers, its monogrammed silver and formal service staging a certain vision of Anglo-Indian continuity above Regent Street.

Mulligatawny itself — from the Tamil milagu tanni, or “pepper water” — began as a thin broth before being refashioned into one of the statelier soups of the Raj. In trendier circles in 1780s London, it was thickened with stock and meat, standardized with curry powder, and promoted to a fashionable first course. Thereafter, tins accompanied Victorian expeditions, and, on one occasion, an overgenerous cook left David Livingstone’s party incapacitated for “several days in severe suffering”. In a later age, it surfaced in Seinfeld as Kramer’s tepid libation of choice: “Yeah, it’s an Indian soup. Simmered to perfection by one of the great soup artisans in the modern era.”

Mulligatawny remains the signature dish at Veeraswamy, theatrically poured at the table from a silver tureen. Other offerings, too, flit with similar ease between the Subcontinent and the Home Counties. A “Calcutta” beetroot croquette, for instance, appears with a Stilton sauce and Bhutanese chili — the Raj rendered as canapé.

The mains, too, are curiously gentle. The spices arrive almost meekly, as though still mindful of interwar digestion. One imagines the ghost of a Twenties diner, moustache bristling, brow beading nervously at the prospect of chili. By modern standards, the seasoning is restrained to the point of bashfulness; yet there is a quiet pleasure in that restraint.

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Such easy-going culinary federalism has long been the restaurant’s métier. But now, the institution faces a singularly modern demise. The Crown Estate, which owns the building, intends to refurbish Victory House — that splendid slab of Twenties Imperialist Baroque — to bring its offices up to contemporary standards. The plans involve altering the ground-floor entrance: a minor architectural adjustment, perhaps, but unfortunately the very corridor through which diners ascend to the restaurant upstairs. Once the lease expires, there will be no practical way for Veeraswamy to remain where it’s been for nearly a century.

The result has been a curious spectacle of culinary petitioning. More than 20,000 people have appealed to Charles Windsor to intervene and preserve this slice of Anglo-India. The Crown Estate, meanwhile, speaks in the antiseptic idiom of modern property management, explaining that the redevelopment is required to “bring the building up to modern standards”, and free up office space to secure long-term value. Free-market fundamentalism, in royal livery, has come at last for the chutney trays.

Founded in 1926, Veeraswamy was the brainchild of Edward Palmer, the great-grandson of an East India Company general and a Mughal princess, a lineage so operatic it sounds like something conjured up by E. M. Forster. The restaurant opened in Piccadilly Circus and has remained there ever since, stoically serving through the Blitz and Brexit. It has some claim to being Britain’s first upscale Indian restaurant: not the first curry house, since lascar sailors had been feeding Londoners since the 19th century, but the first to present Subcontinental fare with silverware and ceremony.

Palmer’s ambition was pedagogical. The early menu was designed to introduce Britons to Indian cooking: in a form tempered for insular palates. Royal, diplomatic, and political patronage duly followed. A Danish prince, legend has it, even helped inaugurate the great British ritual of “pints and curry” by arranging for his preferred lager, Carlsberg, to be shipped over for his visits.

The original Veeraswamy menu, as the food writer Sejal Sukhadwala notes, became the template for what would later solidify into the standard curry-house repertoire: kormas, biryanis, rogan joshes. It also came to structure expectations: poppadoms first, vindaloo for the brave, korma for the timid. The British curry, then, owes something of its grammar to this glitzy setting — aristocratic beginnings for what would become a thoroughly plebeian pleasure. There is some irony there. Curry, that workers’ favorite, once dismissed as little more than “blotting paper” food — useful chiefly for soaking up heroic quantities of beer — was in fact born in one of London’s grandest dining rooms.

The story has come full circle. When the journalist Mihir Bose first arrived in Britain in the Sixties, Indian food was regarded with something approaching suspicion. Factory colleagues in Leicester warned him not to bring his “funny-smelling” cooking into the workplace. Curry would later enjoy a quite different sort of ascendancy, becoming a firmly hoi-polloi favorite, with no pretensions to haute cuisine. Now, half a century on, it has drifted loose from its working-class associations once more. A clutch of Indian restaurants hold Michelin stars, while nothing announces bourgeois takeaway quite like Dishoom. In his memoir, Bose recalls a young fitness trainer confessing to sudden late-night cravings for curry — and refusing to believe there had ever been a time when Brits recoiled from it.

What’s more, “going for an Indian” no longer means going for a curry. If Veeraswamy once educated Londoners about Indian food, today the capital scarcely requires instruction. The city’s culinary map runs from Punjabi grills in Southall to Keralan cafés in East Ham, from Gujarati thali houses in Wembley to tasting menus in Mayfair that treat asafoetida with the reverence once reserved for truffles. The children and grandchildren of postwar migrants have moved the cuisine on. Paradoxically, post-imperial, post-Brexit Britain is more cosmopolitan, more culinarily curious, than imperial Britain ever was.

When I visited on a Thursday evening, Veeraswamy was oddly heaving. The lift kept disgorging diners in twos and fours, many of them casting the same slightly conspiratorial glance around the room. Variations of the same question drifted between tables: was this to be our last meal here? At the entrance a genial usher, splendid in durbar-kitsch regalia, greeted arrivals with the air of a man presiding over a minor pageant.

To step inside Veeraswamy today is to wander into a minor museum of late-imperial camp. The place has the air of a colonial cousin of Wiltons. One senses the regulars have been coming for decades, perhaps generations. Lights hang low over white tablecloths tended with mortuary diligence; chintz and polished silver conspire to evoke not India so much as a certain idea of India once issued by an Edwardian pen. This is not the India of Bombay or Delhi but the India of The Far Pavilions, which is to say it feels unmistakably British — certainly, a relic of Britain that has largely slipped from view.

My waiter, who combined clubland bonhomie with flashes of dramatic flourish, told me business had rarely been brisker. The threat of closure has evidently sharpened appetites. People want, as he put it with a shrug, “their last mulligatawny”. There is also a final opportunity to sample the house cocktail, dating from the restaurant’s founding and simply called the 1926: an arrestingly verdant concoction, floral and faintly medicinal, like something a Raj apparatchik might once have taken to steady the nerves when the natives began entertaining ideas above their station.

There is, of course, no accounting for taste. Veeraswamy will not be to everyone’s liking. Yet establishments are not preserved because they are fashionable but because they carry institutional memory. The spectacle of campaigners beseeching the King to save their curry house, no doubt, has about it the air of an Evelyn Waugh plot twist: empire’s aftertaste petitioning empire’s heir. But one can smile at the absurdity and still feel the pathos.

If it closes, London will not starve. There are fiercer curries and cleverer chefs across the city. But a world will have vanished. It says something about the state of Britain today that empire — or at least its culinary afterlife — could survive decolonization, yet may not survive the unsentimental logic of property and profit. Neoliberalism, after a fashion, has defeated imperialism.

The heat was gentle — “therapeutic”, as the twentysomethings would have it — yet the prevailing mood was one of intense concentration. Around me, bodies glistened with purpose. A girl on the top bench scrolled through her phone with the solemn attentiveness of a monk of Iona illuminating a manuscript; opposite her, a boy communed restlessly with his smartwatch, as though the experience might not quite count if it were not measured. Nobody spoke. Nobody even cleared a throat. This was not the companionable hush of a library but the disciplinary silence of a wellness rite — the sort imposed by shared belief rather than mutual ease. We were not sweating together so much as performing parallel acts of self-surveillance, each of us sealed inside our own small regime of improvement.

The contrast with the New Docklands Steam Baths — my salt-of-the-earth haunt in Star Lane — is instructive. This is the real thing: a place of noise and noisome sweat, set up in the late Seventies at the urging of East London’s Eastern European immigrants and still patronized largely by Slavic construction workers and Caribbean Tube drivers. The heat is more ferocious, the décor stubbornly down-at-heel, the badinage unavoidable, and one may encounter rather more pubic hair than one bargained for. Men and women argue about the footie, marital failure and mésalliances, about whether the country has finally gone to the dogs, while actual dogs, and occasionally a curious goat, wander through the premises. 

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By Pratinav Anil

When I first started frequenting New Docklands, newly down in London during plague times, lockdown skepticism was cheerily aired at full volume between plunges, an antidote to the antiseptic misanthropy of social distancing. Nobody had much time for such quaint notions as wellness, let alone healing. You go to sweat, chat, and kill time. No one checks their phone. Nor does anyone monitor their heart-rate variability. You emerge not calmer, exactly, but looser, altogether less sealed off from the world. Heat here functions as a social solvent, making the banya one of the few remaining heterotopias where people still mix across class lines — rather than merely endure one another in sullen solidarity as on the Tube. Hierarchies melt and you are reminded — bracingly — that other people, annoying and indispensable, continue to exist.

Saunas were once part of the city’s unpretentious social plumbing: humble, functional spaces attached not to aspiration but to routine. They belonged to the working week and the working body. In Turkish baths, Jewish shvitzes, and Russian banyas from Brick Lane to Bayswater, people went not to transcend the self but to mislay it for an hour or two. Like booze, the heat loosened tongues and muscles alike. Sweat was a leveler. Everyone shuffled home smelling roughly the same. You did not attend in pursuit of improvement. You went because it was Tuesday.

This instinct, of course, is ancient vintage. We’ve been steaming ourselves into sociability for millennia now. Archaeologists have unearthed what look suspiciously like prehistoric sweat lodges on Orkney and near Stonehenge, complete with pits and hearths, suggesting that even the Bronze Age ancestors of wellness influencers understood that warmth and water made life more tolerable. When the Romans arrived, they merely formalized what they found: grand thermae built atop sacred springs, where sweating and bantering were civic obligations. The laconicum — their dry hot room — was not so much a private spa as a public utility.

Victorian Britain, for all its repressed skin and buttoned-up anxieties, revived the tradition, after a fashion. Turkish baths spread through industrial cities as municipal institutions rather than upscale indulgences: places where laborers and lords alike might boil, plunge and scrub themselves into a condition fit for public life. Later arrivals brought their own versions. Shtetl Jews established vapor baths in the East End — steamy sanctuaries where health and identity were maintained in tandem. In the mid-20th century, Finnish expatriates quietly introduced their own severe, wood-fired gospel of heat, first as cultural diplomacy, later as community infrastructure.

The sauna survived sanitary ascendancy, English pudeur, and the popularization of the private bathroom in great measure because it answered a need in a cold, inhibited society. Then, without ceremony, the wellness industry arrived and performed its usual act of cultural alchemy. The sauna was tarted up, priced up, branded, and, most decisively, quieted. What had once been a collective habit was reframed as a private project; what had functioned as a communal lubricant was rebottled as a protocol. Somewhere between the stratospheric rise of kombucha and rents, London decided to embrace the sauna as its latest bourgeois sacrament. Sweating ceased to be something that happened between people and became instead another exercise in managed selfhood.

Thus hot-cold therapy became — in the language of a lifestyle zine — “Shoreditch Saturday… part endurance test, part Instagram opportunity”, catering to the new tribe that has seized control of Hackney, Peckham, and cognate neighborhoods. You have seen them: pale of limb, bold of tote bag, trudging from their warehouse conversions towards some waterside industrial estate clutching a robe made from a fabric called something like ScandiCloud. Their destination is one of the proliferating “Nordic-inspired” thermal ecosystems, usually constructed from reclaimed Lithuanian barn wood and smelling faintly of eucalyptus and encanaillement.

Inside, conversation, when it breaks out at all, tends to concern the benefits of infrared therapy or how capitalism has “co-opted wellness” — a bravely expressed sentiment from someone who has just shelled out £85 for a session of as many minutes. The rules of bourgeoisified sauna culture are stringent, if unwritten. You must book some 52 weeks in advance. You must take a cold-plunge snap while discoursing earnestly on how sweating is, in fact, self-care. You must vibe to the playlist, titled something along the lines of “Heatwave Reverie (soft techno remix)”. And you must allude vaguely to Nordic ancestry, performing a delicate tight-rope act while steering well clear of such alarming notions as craniometry.

All of this, admittedly, is less oppressive than it sounds. Sneer at the £12 cans of rehydrating birch sap and the ritualized pouring of essential oils that smell faintly like Gwyneth Paltrow’s understudy all you like; the fact remains that, against all reason, it is rather pleasant. 

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Yet this life-affirming exercise in tasteful self-regard still misses the point: the social function of the sauna. Happily, however, there are holdouts where the sauna is less an arena for performative middle-class self-improvement and more the communal, unpretentious, inexpensive cultural practice of old. In these rough and ready enclaves, the sauna performs the work the pub once did, fostering that unfashionably un-English state of disinhibition — not by means of alcohol, but through the deprivation of clothes and the surrender of dignity. You talk because it would be peculiar not to. You listen because there is nowhere else to look. Conversation ranges widely and indiscriminately: you may find yourself discussing municipal planning, commiserating over someone’s dead grandmother, or picking up a date in a manner pleasingly pre-Tinder — all before your circulation gives out.

In a city where traditional “third places” — the sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 coinage for bars and barber’s shops, cafés and churches — are thinning on the ground, the tradition of the communal sauna remains strong. Writing at the tail end of the 20th century, Oldenburg worried that modern life was collapsing into a binary: first place, the home; second place, the workplace. What was disappearing, he argued, was the informal territory in between where people encountered one another without appointment or agenda. The signal virtue of the third place was that it asked little of one’s purse and nothing of one’s pedigree. Conversation was the main activity. Regulars set the tone. Status was checked at the door, not by policy but by custom. Above all, they were places where civic trust accumulated incrementally, like limescale.

London once excelled at such spaces. The corner pub before it became a gastropub with Edison bulbs; the Turkish baths at Porchester; the greasy spoon in Clerkenwell where cabbies and solicitors alike might share Formica and food; the Irish parish hall hosting bingo and wakes; the Hackney caff where builders and novelists queued for the same bacon roll. Even the old municipal libraries, with their faint fug of carpet and concentration, functioned as third places in their way. None of these promised transcendence. Their draw, instead, was proximity. The slow attrition of such venues is well documented. Pubs close weekly. Churches hollow out. High streets become corridors of identical coffee chains in which one may gloomily sit but not quite belong. 

This is where the communal sauna, improbably, re-enters the story. It meets Oldenburg’s criteria with surprising fidelity. It is neutral ground: nobody hosts, nobody performs. It is relatively inexpensive and, crucially, recurrent. You return, you recognize faces, you become a regular. Conversation is both inevitable and unforced. The heat levels distinctions more efficiently than any HR policy. None of this is utopian. Third places have always harbored tedium, argument and the occasional bore. But they perform a civic function that no co-working space quite replicates. At their best, they are convivial without being contrived, social without being therapeutic. Nobody promises transformation. Nobody tracks your progress. You emerge flushed, vaguely euphoric, and on first-name terms with people you did not know an hour earlier. In an age of curated loneliness, this is no small thing.

The likely victor is the center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), comfortably polling north of 50% and now led by Tarique Rahman, the sleek-haired heir and near-stranger to his homeland after 17 years of English exile. His admirers both at home and abroad cast him as a chastened liberal: a steady pair of hands, sobered by history and burnished by absence. His voters, who will back him faute de mieux, remember rather more. During the BNP’s spells in office in the Nineties and 2000s, power rested with his mother, Khaleda Zia — the formidable widow of the soldier-president Ziaur Rahman, assassinated in a failed putsch in 1981. She broke the glass ceiling as Bangladesh’s first female prime minister and broke records soon after, presiding over a country that managed the rare feat of being ranked the world’s most corrupt for four consecutive years by Transparency International. Rahman himself was later described in leaked diplomatic cables as a walking emblem of kleptocracy. Memory, however, is a luxury in Bangladeshi politics.

The principal alternative is the Jamaat-e-Islami, the once-banned Islamist party now enjoying a brisk revival under the leadership of Shafiqur Rahman, a solemn scold, skull-capped and maned. Buoyed by a disciplined grassroots machine and an electorate weary of secular strongmen, it polls at 30%. After 15 years of Sheikh Hasina — daughter of the nation’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and long the imperious matriarch of Bangladeshi politics, presiding over electoral farce, colossal corruption, and systematic repression — a turn towards piety has an obvious appeal. The Jamaat insists it has reformed — no theocracy, no Taliban theatrics — yet urban liberals rightly remain unconvinced. It is surely no coincidence that the party of the mullahs has not fielded a single female candidate, while also flirting with limiting women’s working hours. Then there is the amateurism: hardly surprising for a party that has never run anything larger than a student union. Still, in rural Bangladesh, where the state has faded into a footnote, the Jamaat’s draw is less ideological than practical. To the local peasantry and déclassé salariat alike, Islamism carries the warm glow of welfarism. 

Hovering uneasily on the margins is the National Citizen Party (NCP), the political afterlife of the Monsoon Revolution that toppled Hasina in July 2024. The NCP casts itself as the custodian of revolutionary virtue, staunchly anti-corruption and stoutly pro-free speech. Its ebullient leader, Nahid Islam, is conspicuously young — 27 — an age that can read as either bracingly fresh or mildly terrifying, depending on one’s appetite. Bangladesh, it turns out, has little of the Gallic taste for jeunisme. Popular approval has followed a familiar roller-coaster: at the height of the student protests in September 2024, the party’s predecessor briefly polled an eye-watering 35%, only to slump to barely 2% a year later. 

Uprisings, as ever, do not translate neatly into votes. Chronically underfunded and organizationally thin, the NCP has compounded its troubles by entering an electoral mésalliance with the Jamaat — a union that has already alienated many supporters, particularly those for whom the Jamaat’s opposition to Bangladesh’s independence in 1971 remains scarcely forgivable. Senior figures have defected in protest, muttering that an anti-corruption movement has yoked itself to an Islamist machine it neither commands nor quite trusts. The alliance has secured the NCP a meager 30 seats, a thumping return to earth for a party born of street-level heroics.

Presiding over this fragile interlude is the caretaker prime minister, Muhammad Yunus, Nobelist and neoliberal. Installed as a compromise by hot-headed students and cautious generals after Sheikh Hasina’s violent fall, the octogenarian microfinancier cuts an almost comic figure amid the mêlée, a technocrat without a popular mandate who has clung on for 18 months, preaching reform to a political class that has elevated evasion into a civic art. His proposed constitutional changes — term limits; an upper house; new anti-corruption machinery — are logical enough, and will almost certainly be endorsed in the accompanying referendum. Whether they will survive first contact with lived reality is another matter. Bangladesh has never lacked for handsome constitutions; it has merely struggled to obey them.

The economic backdrop is bleak. Food inflation has hovered near 13% under Yunus; flooding has battered rice production; and the Adani Group, which supplies roughly a tenth of Bangladesh’s electricity, has begun curbing power exports from India over unpaid bills. Communal tensions have sharpened, too, with attacks on Hindus — some 8% of the population and disproportionately associated with Hasina’s discredited Awami League — puncturing the interim government’s claim to calm stewardship. Yunus’s preferred party trick has been to rattle the begging bowl abroad rather than tackle the altogether trickier proposition of taxing his own citizens. Dhaka is already propped up by a $1.2 billion American aid package and a $4.7 billion IMF bailout, with Washington assisting efforts to recover an estimated $17 billion siphoned abroad under Hasina’s rapacious rule. It will almost certainly need more. Should Western lenders or India lose patience, China stands ready, dangling a further $5 billion.

Yunus himself remains a curiously divisive figure. A darling of Western chancelleries and long the object of Hasina’s personal vendetta — she believes the Nobel Prize ought properly to have been hers, for having eventually called time on the massacre of tribal groups in the Chittagong Hill Tracts — he was welcomed at home precisely because he belonged to neither of the rancorous political dynasties. His Cabinet leaves little doubt as to his instincts: clanking heavily with military brass and technocrats inclined towards privatization, though leavened with an ecumenical clutch of box-ticking human rights lawyers and environmentalists. 

Hasina’s Awami League, the agent of Bangladesh’s liberation from Pakistani overlordship, has now been banned outright. Her collapse, when it came, appeared abrupt only to those not paying attention. The fuse had been smoldering for years; July 2024 merely supplied the spark in the form of the resurrected Quota Reform movement. The civil service reservation system, devised after independence in 1971 to reward liberation fighters, had long since curdled into a system of hereditary entitlement. Over the decades it came to swallow ever larger portions of public employment (at one point, only 20% of jobs were “merit based”), even as graduate unemployment ballooned. Hasina’s inspired decision to extend these privileges to the grandchildren of freedom fighters proved a bridge too far. The resulting protests were beaten down with the usual admixture of police batons and Awami bruisers, only to resurface with tedious regularity.

In 2018, Hasina attempted a tactical retreat, abolishing the quotas altogether in the hope that the movement would obligingly pack up and go home. For a time, it did. Then, in a final act of institutional self-harm, the Supreme Court reinstated the system in July 2024, siding with aggrieved nepo bureaucrats. Hasina responded with characteristic grace, branding the protesters Razakars — the name reserved for those who collaborated with Pakistan’s genocidaires in 1971. The slur landed like a lit match in a petrol station. Protests swelled; curfews were imposed; the internet went dark. Party cadres and security forces fanned out, shooting indiscriminately. 

By this point, repression was less a tactic than a reflex. Hasina’s government had perfected a system of secret prisons like the notorious “House of Mirrors”, where dissidents were tortured, bitten by insects, and prepared nightly for execution, before being dumped in fields at dawn. At least 1,400 people were killed in the final crackdown; dozens more vanished into the state’s oubliettes. Even when the Supreme Court hurriedly revised the quotas once more, restoring merit as the dominant criterion, the concession came far too late. Bangladesh was already ablaze. Hours before fleeing to India, Hasina pressed the army to fire again on the crowds. This time, the generals declined. The tinderbox finally went up — and the regime with it.

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Last year, a special tribunal sentenced Hasina to death in absentia for crimes connected to the crackdown. Dhaka requested her extradition and Delhi, pointedly, declined. She is, after all, India’s creature. Geography ensures that Bangladesh must always reckon with its Himalayan neighbor; under Hasina, reckoning slid into outright deference. Her government signed spectacularly lopsided energy deals with Indian firms, including an agreement with Adani Power that obliges Bangladesh to pay for electricity it may not even use, and cheerfully backed a coal plant beside the fragile Sundarbans mangroves. In June 2024, she granted India tariff-free access to Bangladeshi railways, allowing Indian trains to trundle across the country — the final straw that helped ignite the Boycott India movement and confirmed, for many, that sovereignty had been quietly mislaid.

The stench of Hasina’s regime drifted as far as Hampstead. Last year, a Bangladeshi court sentenced her niece and Labour MP Tulip Siddiq to two years’ imprisonment for corruption linked to a land allocation scheme allegedly facilitated by her aunt. The verdict, delivered in absentia and unlikely ever to trouble her liberty, was airily dismissed by Labour as politically motivated. Siddiq resigned her ministerial post under pressure but remained defiant, thanking “distinguished lawyers” — among them that legal maven Cherie Blair, no less — for highlighting the deficiencies of Bangladesh’s justice system. Starmer, perhaps sensing a diplomatic tarpit, declined to meet the country’s interim leader during a London visit aimed at clawing back the billions siphoned off under Hasina’s venal rule.

Between a tainted dynast and an amateur Islamist, a youth movement belatedly discovering the price of compromise and a banned incumbent, Bangladesh’s electorate is offered not so much a choice as a sorting exercise. The real contest — over the political economy of plunder — has been deferred once again. For years now, Bangladesh has been evangelically sold in the NGO archipelago as a neoliberal miracle: 7% growth, humming garment lines, microfinance lifting the benighted by their bootstraps. The balance sheet now tells a less flattering story. State revenues languish at around 7% of GDP (the British figure is 39%), derisory even by Asian standards, leaving the government dependent on regressive taxes and foreign handouts. A recent Bangladeshi white paper concluded that the growth figures were massaged perhaps too enthusiastically by Hasina’s economists, and that between 2009 and 2023 some $230 billion was spirited out of the country through illicit channels: a steady annual hemorrhage of roughly 3 to 4% of GDP. 

This was crony capitalism with gusto. Banks were treated as private larders; infrastructure projects became toll booths for ministers and their cronies. The garment sector — the backbone of exports — relied on wages so low that tea plantation laborers, earning barely two dollars a day, could feel positively cosseted. Trade unions were strangled. After Rana Plaza, an eight-story factory building, collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 workers, the response was not reform but rubber bullets, arrests, and the discreet disappearance of labor organizers. Bangladesh now routinely features on lists of the world’s worst countries for workers. The indifference extends abroad. Migrant labor is one of Bangladesh’s most lucrative exports, its workers lionized as “remittance warriors” while being quietly abandoned to Saudi serfdom. When the bodies of abused domestic workers are repatriated from the Gulf, ministers shrug; deaths, it is suggested in Dhaka circles, are an acceptable overhead. In 2022 alone, nearly 4,000 Bangladeshi migrant workers returned home in coffins.

This election will alter nothing of consequence. The BNP may win, the Jamaat may surge, and a few students may scrape into parliament. Power will change hands, perhaps even politely. But the bargain — cheap labor, hollow institutions, money siphoned abroad, dissent managed — will endure. None of this diminishes the courage of Bangladeshi voters, who have braved bullets before and may yet do so again. Elections matter enormously, which is precisely why they are so carefully stage-managed in Bangladesh. The banners will come down; speeches about renewal will be made. And as Tomasi di Lampedusa had it, everything must change so that everything can stay the same.

Certainly, Clark cultivated the air of a man whose worst nightmare would be the loss of a good umbrella. He looked, sounded, dressed and carried himself like a plum-voweled Tory grandee. Vibe apart, however, he was a socialist, if one allows a very English, decidedly unstrident, institution-loving, patrician declension of socialism.

Born into a textile fortune in Grosvenor Square, Clark grew up in ginormous piles in Suffolk and Argyll that made Brideshead look cozy. It was an Edwardian upbringing that he later described as “vulgar, disgraceful, overfed, godless”. Winchester, then, came as a culture shock. There, at school, he acquired the habits of mind — a certain social conscience; commitment to public service — that his biographer James Stourton described as a kind of Wykehamical socialism, by turns patrician and progressive, of which Rishi Sunak is, after a fashion, a product. The school produced generations of civil servants, diplomats and a surprising number of Lefty intellectuals — Clark mingled with such socialist grandees as Hugh Gaitskell and Richard Crossman. “Winchester may not have had the Whig insouciance and Athenian elegance of Eton,” Stourton wrote, “but it had a high seriousness of purpose and an intellectual distinction that has produced generations of ambassadors, permanent secretaries, heads of Oxbridge colleges, and field marshals.”

Oxford added a second education, further nudging Clark towards the Left. An outsized influence was the classics don Maurice Bowra. Outrageous, erudite, and forever teasing the priggishness out of Clark with the delicacy of a surgeon removing shrapnel, he saw himself as the chief of the set he variously called the Immoral Front, Homintern, and the 69th International. Bowra widened Clark’s literary diet — Yeats, Rilke, Turgenev — and cemented his socialism. In later years, they would spend Christmases together. Clark never abandoned his self-styled Bowrista politics. It was a blend of the socialism of Clark’s older lodestars, William Morris and John Ruskin, both patron saints of his adolescence who dissolved his aristocratic complacency, as well as that of the Christian socialist R. H. Tawney, a name to reckon with in working-class reading groups of the Twenties. As a boy, Clark had regarded the local working men’s club as “a different species… as figures of fun” but Ruskin persuaded him by his late teens that beauty belonged to everyone. Art, he decided, was not a private indulgence but a universal right. This was the conviction he took into adulthood.

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Already in his early twenties, Clark had traded the effortless connoisseurship of his class for something more serious. Under Charles Bell, keeper of fine art at the Ashmolean, and the incomparable art historian Bernard Berenson at his Florentine palazzo I Tatti, Clark shed the skin of a gifted amateur and emerged as a scholar. Promotion followed at an indecent pace: Bell’s job at 28, Director of the National Gallery at 31, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures shortly thereafter.

Life at the National plunged him into the social kaleidoscope of interwar London. There were weekends at Port Lympne with Philip Sassoon, whose Cape Colonial fantasia of a country house was the playground of what Clark called the “unorthodox Tory fringe”. It was here, amid Sassoon’s murals and monocles, that Clark acquired his reputation as the token Red in Tory circles and the token tweedy baron in progressive milieus.

War supplied him with a mission. At the Ministry of Information’s Film Division, Clark revealed a surprisingly deft hand for propaganda. Those years also exposed the marrow-deep socialism he rarely owned up to in company. “Every day makes me a more committed socialist”, he wrote to his mother, railing against “the present system, where private profit is the controlling factor”, before remembering that courtesy calls do not ordinarily fan out into plodding treatises: “however I mustn’t turn this letter into a Ruskinian tract.”

Yet a touch of Ruskin was unmistakable during his decade at the National, and even more during the war. It was Clark who orchestrated the evacuation of the entire national collection, hiding it in the slate caverns of Manod in North Wales like some modern monk protecting manuscripts from marauders. As the Luftwaffe reduced London to rubble, he transformed the emptied Gallery into a sanctuary of music with lunchtime concerts and then, with inspired theatricality, brought back one masterpiece each month — one work to remind a battered people that civilization was still flickering.

More radical still was what happened outside London. Clark sent touring exhibitions of masterpieces into the provinces, ensuring that miners in South Wales and factory workers in the Midlands could stand, unmediated, before a Rubens or a Rembrandt. It was redistribution, in a way — of beauty rather than wealth.

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Meanwhile, his wife Jane set about decorating the so-called British Restaurants, those wartime communal kitchens, with murals by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Clark himself lent pictures from his own walls, ladling out high culture with cauliflower and carrots; East Ham alone received 22. His collectivist instinct even seeped into his sexual affairs. Collecting relationships as others did prints, he tangled himself in what Stourton coyly calls “a series of amitiés amoureuses”. Yet through all the flutter, Jane remained the center of his emotional orbit. He was, improbably, an uxorious philanderer.

After the war, he brooded incessantly on Britain’s future: how art and architecture might improve ordinary lives, how the state might support culture without turning it into a bureaucratic terrarium. Attlee’s victory thrilled him, even as he continued to cherish his Tory acquaintances. This delicate straddling of camps confused his contemporaries but is clearer in retrospect. Clark was an elitist who believed art should belong to the many. He never liked Marxism, distrusting historical materialism, but he admired the Marxist art historian Frederick Antal’s learning and found Marxist social history invigorating in small doses. His own view of art history was stubbornly individualist. “My approach to history,” he explained, “was unconsciously different from that now in favor in universities, which sees all historical change as the result of economic and communal processes. I believe in the importance of individuals, and am a natural hero-worshipper.”

At the same time, Clark believed, with an almost touching sincerity, that it was the state’s duty to safeguard the basic conditions necessary for human flourishing. This was not the language of the class warrior but the civil servant prescribing the correct temperature for afternoon tea. His faith in institutions — galleries, universities, libraries, the Beeb — bordered on the devotional. It was in this spirit that Clark, as chair of the Arts Council in the Fifties, inherited the cultural flank of the Attleeian welfare state. Before the war, England had no state opera, no subsidized orchestras, and no government spending on living artists. The cumbersomely titled Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, later the Arts Council, changed all that. “The best for the most,” declared the Observer drama critic Ivor Brown when he joined CEMA, and Clark made it his credo. For him, the arts were not a luxury but a necessity, fully on a par with health and education in their claim on the public purse.

It was Civilisation, however, that distilled Clark’s singular worldview into a single decanter. It was a charmingly improbable premise: 13 prime-time episodes, funded by the license fee, in which a life peer guided viewers through Aquinas, Caravaggio, and the fall of Rome in chiseled sentences that never once insulted their intelligence. The Left accused him of Edwardian pieties; the Right embraced him as their mandarin mascot. Clark, delighted, insisted he had only intended to offer “no more than a sequence of pretty pictures in color”. David Attenborough thought the secret lay in Clark’s manner: “absolute mandarin prose” punctuated by colloquial jolts that revealed he actually knew how ordinary people thought. “People don’t necessarily dislike toffs,” Attenborough observed. “Toffs who speak directly are quite appealing.”

And Clark did speak directly. The miracle of Civilisation was not its grandeur but its assumption that the proles had brains. He presumed the nation could cope with Chartres, Gothic proportion, and the darker recesses of the Dark Ages. Beneath the feline elegance, the whole series was a collectivist sermon: that civilization is sustained by shared memory and shared institutions; that beauty is a public good; that culture is “our inheritance”. One could almost hear Tawney nodding with approval. One could not, however, prefigure Thatcher.

His professional colleagues were uncharitable. A few sneered reflexively at the art historian who elected to live in a castle and liked slumming it on the telly, wafting above their seminars like a benevolent archangel. Clark reciprocated in kind, likening their “scholarly minutiae to knitting”. Later, more assured as a master practitioner of the Reithian tradition of haute vulgarization, he offered a more measured response: “academics were furious at the simplification of their labors.”

Yet the public adored him at the time, even if his star has since faded. He became the national shorthand for art history, as if some kind of ambulant National Gallery. And this, as he knew, he owed to Ruskin, who taught him, above all, the heresy that beauty is everyone’s birth right. Clark carried this Victorian gospel into the 20th century in lapidary prose. But he was, in short, a product of Edwardian England: his socialism was Anglican and ethical, smelling faintly of pipe smoke and polished pews. Small wonder that when asked to tell the story civilization, he politely ended his tale in 1914, as if the guns of August had closed the cultural ledger.

But for all his paradoxes — the socialist in the castle; the elitist championing access; the bureaucrat preaching beauty — Clark believed one thing with utter conviction: civilization does not maintain itself. It requires guardianship. It requires money. It requires institutions. And it requires the shared belief that the best of human achievement belongs to everyone, not merely to the connoisseurs. In an age of conservative philistinism and progressive iconoclasm, that belief seems less reactionary than revolutionary.

Over 60 volumes, each approaching this idée fixe from a slightly different angle, attest to that monomaniacal pursuit. The same preoccupation animates his correspondence — some 25,000 letters, a slender selection of which is due to appear next week as A Life in Letters, edited by the Cincinnati don James Schiff. Here, as in his fiction, the erotic and the ecclesiastical intertwine, rendering his theology of tumescence in full relief. By turns fascinating, embarrassing, and even moving, the letters reveal that Updike’s ceaseless coupling was never quite about lust at all. It was about faith — about locating meaning amid the mundanities of the modern world. Though he merely flits through these pages, the presiding spirit of this collection is the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, one of Updike’s heroes, whose theology equipped him with a worldview.

Updike was, for all his libidinous reputation, a surprisingly serious fellow; and the fact that so little scholarly or journalistic ink has been spilled on this unexpected influence is testament to how precipitously his star has fallen in our century. He is now read, if at all, as a period curiosity. In a letter to Ian McEwan in 2005, he saw it coming: “It occurs to me that since you interviewed me that first time in a BBC studio you have risen to be generally called the best novelist of your generation whereas I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of suburban American sex are hopelessly yawnworthy period pieces.”

He was right. Updike has been superseded by events. His tales of New England adultery, those lovingly lacquered chronicles of cocktail parties and postprandial assignations, now have the texture of foxed antimacassars. What enormous strides we have made since Couples, which surveyed the lives of wife- and breastmilk-swapping swingers in suburbia, became a succès de scandale in 1968. At the start of that decade, he feared imprisonment for the indecencies of Rabbit, Run; now, in the age of gooning, it is hard to imagine the average teenager feeling so much as a smutty frisson reading Updike.

Then there have been the belated stabs at outright cancellation. Patricia Lockwood, in a takedown calibrated to appeal to the pustular trust-fund babies of Brooklyn and Brixton garrets who howl “problematic” with dispiriting frequency, likened his prose to “a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter”. The charge is familiar: that his femmes fatales are fantasy projections, his patriotism tedious; that he mistook vaginal depth for his own. And there is truth in it. He could never quite portray women — only paint them, in glossy, adulatory strokes, as creatures of allure. 

Nor do his politics endear him to contemporary sensibilities. Updike was a reactionary Democrat, given to taking pot-shots at the civil rights movement. More egregiously, he was a cheerleader of the Vietnam War. Finding himself, awkwardly, in a minority of one as the only prominent American novelist “unequivocally for” the war, he attempted a feeble course correction that was at once defensive and disingenuous: “How could anyone not be at least equivocal about an action so costly, so cruel in its details, so indecisive in its results? The bombing of the North seems futile as well as brutal and should be stopped… I differ, perhaps, from my unanimously doveish confrères in crediting the Johnson Administration with good faith and some good sense.”

Such views scream suburban parochialism, of which he was a product. Born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania to Lutheran parents, Updike grew up in a world of scripture and Sunday school. Aged 13, however, he moved to his maternal family’s farm in Plowville: “Never since leaving it,” he later wistfully wrote, “have I enjoyed such thrilling idleness.” Later came Harvard, followed by a year at Oxford’s Ruskin School and then a position as a staff writer at the New Yorker. There, he developed a lifelong allergy to what he called the “elegant hacks” of literary Manhattan. In 1957, aged 25, he decamped with his wife and two children to Ipswich, Massachusetts (the real Tarbox of Couples), a move he justified as parental prudence, but one suspects small-town anti-intellectualism had rather more to do with it. He would never return.

His great creation Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a Pennsylvanian without a degree, embodies this stubborn provincialism. Like in Updike himself, there’s something of the autodidact in Rabbit’s steady accretion of a menagerie of lovers. These were not the one-night assignations of the skirt-chaser. Rabbit, rather, was trying to find existential meaning through concupiscence, to transcend the vapidity of postwar American life. 

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As in Updike’s fiction, so in his letters. The Ariadne’s thread here, inevitably, is Updike’s sexual excursions and their ramifications. For a man so routinely portrayed as America’s priapic laureate, his body count — 13 — feels almost monastic. Then again, he was a late starter. His first marriage, to Mary Pennington, a Unitarian minister’s daughter, began with virginal vows. “I am very interested in sex,” he had admitted to her in 1952, before conceding his knowledge of it was chiefly theoretical. 

Then there is the “adulterous affair”, as Schiff fustily puts it in his footnotes, with Joyce Harrington (“the life of the party”) in 1961-62, later written up as Marry Me, a work that, were Updike a fortysomething woman today, would pass for autofiction. Two years later came Joan Cudhea: “You are visually charming,” he wrote to her, before dispensing with the gallantry and thanking her “for your goodness, your shyness, your eyes, your tongue, your glimpsey ass, your yummy cunt”.

By 1974, his marriage had taken a desultory turn. Martha Bernhard — his neighbor, who studied under Nabokov at Cornell and later became Updike’s wife — rekindled his joie de vivre. On the eve of their marriage, he confessed to a ménage à trois with two Australian women (“awful of me”). Apart from this drip-feed of revelations, Martha also had to fend off literal blows from Mary: “you knocked her down as a mechanic would wipe a piece of grit out of a balky machine,” Updike wrote of a catfight.

These letters double as field notes from the sexual revolution. Updike, it seems, recognized them as such, repurposing them in his fiction. “Driving back from taking the babysitter home,” goes a line in one typical story, “Frank would pass darkened houses where husbands he knew were lying in bed, head to murmuring head, with wives he coveted.” Perhaps he was thinking of Martha, who was married to a clerk when she started seeing Updike. In another story, he surely had Joan in mind when he wrote: “Ever since my days of car-seat courtship I’ve liked to press my face into a girlfriend’s nether soul, to taste the waters in which we all must swim out to the light.”

Yes, the prose can be overwrought, the sex inadvertently comic. Updike’s sentences luxuriate perhaps a little too much in particulars. For some, this is style without substance. “Updike has nothing to say,” declared the literary critic John Aldridge. But he does. Behind the bustle and bumping, one senses the specter of Søren Kierkegaard, whose book Fear and Trembling features among Updike’s favorite books, listed in a 2005 letter to his Knopf publicist. Four decades earlier, in 1965, Updike wrote an entry on Kierkegaard for a compendium of biographical sketches. In a 1974 letter to Mary, he remarked that life in Ipswich was “very depressing, but for the Kierkegaard”. At one point, he even admitted that “for a time, I thought of all my fictions as illustrations of Kierkegaard”.

Like Kierkegaard, Updike prized interiority: inwardness and individuality were what mattered, not collectives or society. From the Dane, the American learned that desire ought not to be condemned but redeemed. This is the crux of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, which sets out two lifestyles — the aesthetic and the ethical. Love and sex belong to the former, a realm of sybaritic hedonism that can, through acts of faith, be transfigured into the latter. This is Kierkegaard’s fideism; faith is placed above reason and passion before proof.

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Updike’s strategy is much the same. In Couples, as in the Rabbit novels, sexual desire is not denied (far from it) but elevated into a quasi-religious register, made almost an article of faith. His aim is to render the ordinary radiant — to “give the mundane its beautiful due”, as he put it. Writing to his publisher Victor Gollancz in 1960, Updike explained that sex was, in his fiction, merely a springboard for reflection on “the innerness that nourishes Christian orthodoxy”.

So far so Kierkegaardian. Yet there is, all the same, a distinctly American inflection to Updike’s Kierkegaardianism, as David Crowe observes in his rather desiccated but valuable study Cosmic Defiance — still the only sustained treatment of this intellectual lineage. Crowe notes, rightly, that Updike’s characters rarely complete the Kierkegaardian ascent from aesthetic indulgence through ethical responsibility to purblind faith. They quail at the leap, lingering instead at the threshold. To my mind, this is to Updike’s credit. There is no preachiness in his pages, no hortatory insistence that we discern the piety beneath the prurience, the hymn beneath the hard-on. The irresolution is precisely what makes his heroes human.

From Downton to Bridgerton to Saltburn, aristos continue to hog our screens, big and small. But as a class they have been in visible decline. The Whigs — those original wokes — delivered the early blows, repealing the Corn Laws and widening the franchise. Then came the fin-de-siècle pounding: Harcourt’s death duties of 1894, which were the first serious taxes on the rich; by 1946, they had reached a respectable 75%

The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed à la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks.

By the Seventies, their kind were truly on the back foot. The V&A’s doleful 1974 exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House”, invited the public to mourn the plight of the poor aristos. It opened in December, just two months after miners had kicked out Edward Heath, the only instance in postwar European history where working-class muscle toppled a ruling party.

To be sure, there were holdouts. American nouveaux riches came galloping to the rescue of cash-strapped British anciens pauvres through canny marriages. The aristocracy itself was padded out with parvenus: the infamous “beerage” of nouveau peers who had merely brewed enough pints or befriended the PM to warrant their elevation.

Some piles these days host festivals. Noseley Hall in Leicestershire, for instance, was until recently the unlikely home of the psychedelic trance festival Noisily. Then we have the aristocratic rhotacists who stwuggle with their Rs flogging themselves on YouTube, the likes of the Viscount and Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, who scrape a living from posting lifestyle videos for the gawping pleasure of the lower orders.

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The contemporary trend is less marriage than outright sale. Highland acres have been snapped up wholesale by Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish fashion billionaire who is now Scotland’s largest landowner. Meanwhile a great many native landlords, far from being wellie-wearing custodians of tradition, have abandoned their home. The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, sniggered at English girls as “round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of pink champagne” before decamping to France for a dissipated life. Many of his peers now live off private wealth management funds on the Riviera.

But for most aristos, the decline has been grim. Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces, a modern history of the aristocracy, is a surprisingly candid and stylish peek into that well-heeled world; surprising because her acknowledgements brim with such reassuringly posh names as Lady Celestria Hales, the Duke of Buccleuch, and Thomas van Straubenzee, not to mention her throwaway reassurance that she has one foot firmly anchored in the clubs of St James’s. Still, she lapses into a certain breathlessness at times, succumbing to titular gewgaws: “Though we are friends on Facebook, I cannot help but always call him Lord Derby.” But then, this is the sort of book where Stuart Hall denotes not the founder of the New Left Review but a country pile of that name in County Tyrone.

Doughty parades before us the symptoms of decline: braces of yachts sold, Van Dyck rooms denuded of Van Dycks, visiting grandees of yore replaced by wide-eyed day-trippers with lanyards. One architectural historian noted a Lazarus-like lady of the house who, unable to afford maids, “exuded a sour smell of unwashed clothes” — a mephitic reversal of the old order, where aristocrats wrinkled their noses at the poor.

Worse than the stench, it seems, is their boorishness. Freed from pecuniary cares, one might have expected these families to take up learning or cultivate a little sprezzatura. Instead, they plodded into finance, ignorant of their own collections. Henry Somerset, showing guests his Canalettos, could only remark they were “very like the house”. The decimation of foxes was the only pursuit that quickened his pulse.

The decline in servants worsened things. The half century on either side of the First World War coincided with rising wages. Thousands of footmen and scullery maids took city jobs, leaving aristocrats to fend for themselves. Suddenly Job was less the Old Testament character than a métier one might be forced into. The Earl of Arundel became an insurance salesman after a stint as a Formula 3 driver, Baron Milne a chair-caner, Baron Kenilworth a horticulturist, and the son of the second Viscount Monckton — what else? — a monk. Baron Teviot found a job behind the butcher’s counter at Sainsbury’s before becoming a bus driver. Baron Feversham, for his sins, made porn flicks.

Contact with commoners no doubt proved salutary for these men. For, by and large, the non-working aristocracy has remained insulated from shifts in social attitudes. Indeed, they have effectively sat out the 20th century as if in a time-warp, clinging to arch-conservatism even as the lower orders have embraced progressive ideas. It is no accident, then, that the Lords has always lagged a generation behind the Commons. Women peers only arrived in 1958, amid spluttering opposition from the 28-year-old Earl Ferrers, who moaned: “Shall we in a few years’ time be referring to ‘the noble and learned Lady, the Lady Chancellor?’ I find that a horrifying thought.”

On divorce, too, they trailed behind popular sentiment, sneering long after the rest of the country had stopped caring. There were, it is true, emancipated outliers. Mollie Buccleuch, known as “Midnight Moll”, maintained a sprightly reputation for seduction well into senescence. The 7th Marquess of Bath lived as a polyamorist with 74 “wifelets” while remaining married. But such figures were the exception, not the rule.

Throughout the 20th century, many made a show of ordinariness — roast beef on Sundays, cottage pie on Mondays — in stabs of working-class cosplay that conveniently ignored their own preference for endogamy. Eton in the Seventies could still field classes with two earls and a viscount; another student recalled classmates named Guinness, Charrington, Whitbread, and Worthington: “it made me drunk just to look at them.”

To be fair, there were aristos like Tony Benn, who disclaimed his title, and the red toff Wogan Philipps, the only member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to sit in the Lords. But such class traitors were rare. The majority clung to their exclusivity. At their most accommodating, the Bolshie levellers among them go no further than insisting their tenants address them by their Christian names.

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Britain's new Class War

By Terry Eagleton

Aristocratic decline has been good for us proles. Many of its ranks happily disposed of their white elephants to the National Trust, which has done noble work rescuing crumbling porticos and pergolas — though its deferential tone still grates on the average republican who visits such establishments for reasons of architectural interest rather than to admire aristocratic twee. Much of the art was absorbed by our national collections, with Kenneth Clark, the soi-disant socialist director of the National Gallery, astutely scooping up treasures for the people. Back in 1873, a land survey revealed that 710 people owned 80% of this isle. This vampiric monopoly, the statesman John Bright complained in 1871, had “divorced the English from the soil”. It is no bad thing that the monopoly was smashed, clearing space for hoi polloi. Home ownership increased from 10 to 70% in the 20th century.

And yet, for all the decline, the aristocracy persists. Doughty reminds us there are still 796 families with hereditary titles. They hold some 3.2 million acres — three-quarters the size of Wales — and remain, as the great political theorist Tom Nairn insisted, not so much a quaint relic as an active abetter of our “national backwardness”, impeding our progress toward a truly classless society. Even Ken Livingstone, that tribune of municipal socialism, Nairn lamented, was prone to going moist-eyed before the queen in his lime-green hat sporting wobbling baubles — making him resemble “some form of royal bird-scarer”, as The Times conjectured.

Pace Bagehot, Nairn argued, Britain is not a “disguised republic” with its real rulers the modernizing commoners and the ancient nobodies merely for show. Republics are built upon equality among the orders. This has never been the case in Britain. As Nairn puts it: “No amount of fulmination about the immorality and cost of the system can hide a basic truth: the aristocracy is an expression of mass conservatism… People enjoy the monarchical twaddle, and show very little sign of being robotized or brainwashed.” The upshot is continued deference to nobs. The sort of people who fly into a rage when a lumpenproletarian type jumps a Tube turnstile will in the same breath wax rhapsodic about Elizabeth Windsor: yes ma’am; thank you for your service; three bags full, ma’am.

This rings true. The British working classes have never despised the aristocrats as their continental counterparts did. Here, as in sub-Saharan Africa and the subcontinent, deference to bigwigs remains the default mode. Britain’s peculiar solidarity is inverted: high and low are united in despising the middle — with its associations of thrift and moderation, education and culture, museums and literature, its self-preening moral seriousness and pseudo-high-mindedness, dedication to an assortment of causes, disdain for such vices as whoring and heroin. As the working-class comedian Billy Connolly put it: “The serious upper class, the proper bigshots, they’re all nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts as well and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks.”

It’s fun to épater la bourgeoisie, no doubt, but the worldview has consequences. Britain today suffers the highest homelessness rates in the Western world, the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe, and a public realm in visible decrepitude — drafty homes, leaky plumbing, collapsing trains, a health service on life support. We tolerate this partly because our culture still whispers that some are born to better things. The cult of the aristocracy, and its royal apex, supplies the nation with a pensée unique: a defense of hierarchy, inequality, and indeed decline.

With our love of twee, pomp, and ceremony, we are an anachronistic society, much like the fictional Kakania in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As Nairn puts it, we live in Ukania — a broken, fractured society held together only by the weak glue of monarchic attachment. Britain’s regions and nations are bound with a royal tint of Ruritanian nostalgia, its protocols and etiquette: misty-eyed guff about past glory, Second World War memorabilia, and endless “yes, ma’ams”. Nations are usually built on a sense of comradeship. Not so in Britain, where a surrogate nationalism has formed around the enchantments of the aristocracy and the Crown — around the “glamour of backwardness”. The Windsor-worshipping queues during Truss’s brief tenure made this plain. It is hard to escape the conclusion that our fascination with the aristocracy has reduced us to a nation of groveling gimps.

And no doubt there was an ecumenical interest in nature spirits and serpent divinities. Like all ancient societies, Indians were fascinated by fertility cults; the good life, after all, turned on bountiful harvests and ample sexual reproduction. The perennial preoccupation finds expression here in pneumatic yakshis — female nature spirits — and stone lingas, Shiva’s threateningly girthy member.

Ophidiophilia likewise owed to the supposed life-giving powers of snakes. Buddha sought shelter under a serpentine canopy. On display is a bronze sculpture dating between 1300-1500 of the Jain tirthankara (teacher) Parsvanatha with a snake on his back. The god Shiva, too, loved his snakes; we have a painting here of Shiva sporting a polycephalous Vasuki around his neck, as if the snake were a shawl.

But the exhibition’s emphasis on the common ground shared by the three faiths is misleading — perverse even. It serves only a Hindu agenda, annexing the two dissident religions to the larger and older tradition. But historically, the relationship between Hinduism on the one hand, and Buddhism and Jainism on the other, has been marked by enduring animosity. And how could it be otherwise? Seen instrumentally, Hinduism amounts to no more than a stylized defense of hierarchy, supplying society with a cultural alibi for the practice of untouchability and an injunction against social mobility.

Very simply, Hinduism is the caste system. It was a critique of this very premise that gave rise to Buddhism and Jainism. Small wonder a great many Dalits — ex-Untouchables — elect to convert en masse to Buddhism every year, following in the footsteps of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit architect of India’s Constitution and one of the more eloquent critics of the caste system. The absence of class conflict in the Indian setting, he explained, stemmed from the very nature of the caste system — a system of “graded inequality” that precluded solidarity on account of “an ascending scale of hatred and a downward scale of contempt”. Indians, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont concluded, belonged to an altogether different species as a result of the caste system: homo hierarchicus, as distinct from homo æqualis. Even the idea of equality, let alone its practice, was alien to their temperament.

Dumont overegged his case a bit, but his point is well-taken. Still, it is worth remembering that the logic of the caste system was not uncontested. For one thing, Buddhism set out explicitly to reject caste hierarchy and untouchability. Buddha himself gave the subject a great deal of thought in the fifth century BC. When asked which of the four castes were the purest, his reply was that all were equally pure. A disillusioned prince — a useful perch from which to reflect on the transience of wealth and fame — he renounced his Nepalese kingdom aged 29 to craft his own belief system counterpointing caste as well as priestly intercession. Discarding the polar opposites of sensualism and asceticism, he plumped instead for a third way, which he called the Middle Path. Nirvana, a state of void achieved through simple living and detachment, held the prospect of liberation from the cycle of births and rebirths.

The philosophy proved a hit. To the lower castes especially, reeling from the stigma of untouchability, Buddhism held the thrill of liberation from Hinduism. To them, of greater importance than “the similarities in the devotional art of these religions” — as the curators of this exhibition have it — was the major difference between them. One regarded them as beyond the pale; the other welcomed them as peers. As the social historian Romila Thapar has shown, caste discrimination also extended to education. Learning, in Hinduism, was a Brahmin monopoly. The lower castes were banned from so much as picking up a book, on pain of punishment. Buddhist monasteries, by contrast, were open to one and all.

It was on the strength of their easy-going pragmatism that Buddhist centers of learning stole a march on their Hindu rivals. Indeed, we have Buddhist viharas to thank for the existence of Western universities. In a dazzling genealogy of education, William Dalrymple has argued that it was no accident that the West’s first universities — Bologna, Salerno, Naples, Montpellier — were established in towns bordering the Muslim world. They were emulating the pedagogic contrivances of Arab institutions — departments, degrees, scholarships, libraries — which in turn derived from South Asian madrassas, which, for their part, modeled themselves on such Buddhist viharas as Naw Bahar, now in northern Afghanistan.

As with education, so with commerce. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism did not object to usury, and looked kindly upon the accumulation of capital. Wealth in this life was a sign of good karma in the previous one, ran the theological rationale; contrariwise, poverty suggested that your previous avatar had been up to no good. This was a comforting assurance to traders on the run from Hinduism, which — if some of the early Hindu codes of law are to be believed — classed businessmen alongside drunkards, sadists, and lepers. Being itinerant peoples, traders were able to spread the word of Buddhism far and wide. Hindus, of course, explicitly forbade foreign travel; sea travel entailed a loss of caste status.

The emperor Ashoka’s Constantine-like conversion to Buddhism in the third century BC gave the faith a firm bridgehead in the Mauryan Empire, the largest the subcontinent had ever seen. By the first century AD, Buddhism’s worldly monks could be found managing the Mes Aynak copper mine in Afghanistan, these days mined by a Chinese consortium on the Taliban’s behalf. It was around this time that Buddhist aristos of the Kushan Empire began throwing up enormous Buddha statues, turning him into an icon. Their Hephthalite heirs built the Bamiyan Buddhas in the sixth century that the Taliban later dynamited. By then, Buddhism had already made inroads into China. Once suitably Sinicised, Buddhism was made the state religion of the Kingdom of Northern Wei in the fifth century; south China followed suit in the following century.

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Hindus reacted to the spread of Buddhism with panic. Strategic emulation, they decided, was needed to ignite a Hindu revival. If there are any similarities between the three faiths, it is because Hindus readily adopted Buddhist and Jain best practices in order to steal their thunder. There was, for example, a turn from extravagant ritualism to renunciatory asceticism, as Brahmins took to emulating the self-denying Buddhist and Jain shramanas, the roving low-caste forest-dwellers who escaped the caste system by embracing poverty.

But emulation was only one half of a two-pronged approach. Violence was the other half. The Shaivite Hindu kings Mihirakula and Sashanka acquired reputations for destroying Buddhist monasteries and killing monks in the sixth and seventh centuries, respectively. The eighth-century Hindu saint Thirumangai Alvar, meanwhile, stole a statue from a Buddhist monastery and then repurposed it in a golden gate. Around the same time, the Nyanmar Shaivite Tamil poets began composing hymns railing against Buddhists and Jains. So much for the eirenic ecumenicism touted by the curators of this show.

To be sure, there were rulers who bridged the traditions. The Guptas, Chandra Gupta II in particular, could be quite open-minded in their patronage. The emperor of Kanauj, Harsha, who moonlit as a playwright, was something of “a religious eclectic” according to the Indologist Wendy Doniger. But these figures were exceptions. Suppression was the norm. So much so that Buddhism all but disappeared from India in the second millennium. As late as the 1850s, it was perfectly reasonable for a Calcutta intellectual to hypothesize that Buddhism was a foreign faith of Norse origin. It took a codicological collaboration between an East India Company official and a Nepali gentleman amateur to return Buddha to India. By piecing together Buddhist texts in Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, they made the case that the Enlightened One had, in fact, lived much closer to home.

If the curators exaggerate the commonalities between the three faiths, they completely ignore the Abrahamic religions. As Peter Frankopan pointed out in the Financial Times, this is a deeply troubling omission. The ever-so-subtle Hindu nationalist message is that Christianity is foreign to the Indian genius — that it never quite belonged to ancient India.

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But truth be told, Christianity in India may well be as old as Christianity itself — the “Mar Thoma” Church there maintains a foundation story that goes back to Thomas the Apostle. By the fourth century there was a thriving Christian community along the Malabar Coast. They lived largely in peace with the Hindus, even to the point of internalizing their customs; this appalled Iberian Catholics in the 16th century, who pulled gargoyle faces at their “Nestorian” heresies. One would think the inclusion of Christians would have strengthened this exhibition’s message of confessional unity. It’s a shame, then, that the curators only saw the foreignness of Christianity, and excluded it from the show.

More galling still, though of a piece with the Hindu nationalist-lite politics of the exhibition, is a clutch of short films depicting Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists in Britain today. Rather perversely, we are expected to celebrate that Hinduism is “now part of our shared British cultural life”, the import of which is presented in entirely benign tones: Diwali, house shrines, and suchlike. Yet it has by no means been a purely salutary development, introducing into British life the entirely novel prejudice of casteism.

What infuriated me was the lack of any mention of caste in this Panglossian narrative of multiculturalism. Today in Britain, 50,000-200,000 lower-caste Hindus face daily discrimination from their snooty confrères on streets and in schools. Sometimes, this shades into outright exploitation, as in the case of Permila Tirkey, who was brigaded into modern slavery in Milton Keynes by her upper-caste employers, who kept her in domestic servitude, working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for 11p an hour. She was awarded £184,000 compensation in what was “one of the UK’s first claims of caste discrimination”, the Guardian reported in 2015.

Justice, however, is rare. I have it on good authority from a victim of caste discrimination at Cambridge that bigotry is all too common even in such cloistered precincts. At Oxford, too, Dalit students have spoken of cancellation by their coevals. Meanwhile, efforts to include caste as a category of discrimination in the Equality Act have failed thanks to lobbying from the so-called Ghent School, a diasporic drudgery of Hindu nationalist dons based at the University of Ghent who have spuriously convinced unsuspecting lawmakers that the caste system was a “colonial invention”, thought up by the wily Brits. Ambedkar, in a fit of optimism, had hoped that the migration of Hindus to foreign lands would result in the erosion of the caste system. Yet precisely the opposite has transpired. Wherever Hindus have gone, the caste system has followed in tow.

In their memoirs, almost all of which read like giddy schoolboy confessions, the accent has always lain on personal experience, but what they describe is in fact a broader social change. “You’re not special,” they make one want to scribble in the margins. Indeed, the move from Left to Right is, in a nutshell, the story of the 20th century. It may well be an iron law of history that no society emerged more Left-wing from it. The change in meaning of the words “social democracy” is a reliable index of this world-historical shift: in the first third of the century, a social democrat was practically a communist; in the second, something of a Keynesian; in the final third, a brazen Blairite.

What sets apart Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel-winning novelist who died on Sunday, aged 89, from his Left-leaving peers is the completeness of his transformation. While he shared some vestigial commitment to democracy and equality — both of a piece with the general repertoire of Cold War liberalism — for most of his post-conversion life, he began to rapidly slough off these wimpy beliefs towards the end of his days. By then he was a poster-boy of the hard Right.

In his youth, Left sympathies came naturally to Vargas Llosa. While he was a member of the mezzanine class, an untypical upbringing in Arequipa, Peru precluded any simple identification with the bourgeoisie. His father was a martinet, who abandoned young Mario and his mother, only to brutally reinstate himself 10 years later. The return was not a happy one. A macho type, Mario’s father had him sent off to a military academy to become a man; the son’s bookishness apparently was taken as “proof of homosexuality”. The experience left him scarred and hostile to all manner of authority, parental and state included. Democratic Marxism, rejecting both the patriarchal family and military authoritarianism, was of obvious appeal.

A trio of novels followed, cementing his reputation as a communist writer of promise in Lima’s Left circles. Their presiding spirit appears to be the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who welded the class struggle with indigenous millenarianism. Vargas Llosa’s debut, The Time of the Hero (1963), took aim at the military academy, depicting a dark world of racism and casual violence. In it, the scions of the ruling class murder a hapless cadet and gang-rape a chicken. The book enjoyed a succès de scandale when Peruvian nationalists burned it as a work of Ecuadorian propaganda; the two countries had fought a war in the Forties, and any domestic criticism in Lima was taken to be malicious disinformation emanating from Quito. The Green House (1966), too, served up a small fresco, this time taking in a worm’s-eye view of the Church, military, and political class during the dictatorship of the US-backed Manuel Odría from the bowels of a brothel. Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) complicated that picture with an upstairs-downstairs dynamic worthy of Joseph Losey; the title was a misnomer, referring to a bar-brothel of that name, where an upper-class hack converses a chauffeur. Along the way, Vargas Llosa bitingly takes in the snobbery and corruption of Lima’s rulers.

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The Seventies saw Vargas Llosa turn his back on communism, though this was no Damascene conversion. Events chipped away at his beliefs. The twin shocks of 1956 — the Suez Crisis and Hungarian Uprising — had birthed a generation of Western Leftists who swore by “neither Washington nor Moscow”. Something similar transpired in Latin America in the mid- and late-Sixties. Thanks to the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and the Brazilian military coup d’état with American support three years later, identification with the US had never been a realistic option for any self-respecting Latin American. Vargas Llosa, for one, had cheered Castro, for standing up to the gringo coup-makers.

Equally, there were reasons for disillusionment with communism. When Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Vargas Llosa became convinced that here was another imperial power, only one which flew a red flag. The priggish censorship of the sex scenes in his debut novel by La Joven Guardia, his Russian publisher, likewise confirmed the impression that the Soviets weren’t exactly free speech crusaders. To Vargas Llosa, they were no different from Franco’s blue pencilers, who had scrubbed unflattering references to authoritarianism from the Spanish edition. Castro’s support for the crushing of the Prague Spring was another blow. The final straw was the humbling of the Cuban poet Heberto Juan Padilla, who had to grovel before Castro for his “Right deviation”. Padilla’s eventual arrest in 1971 made a mockery of Castro’s claim to represent some kind of happy medium, reconciling state ownership and intellectual freedom.

The ideological quandary, the erasure of old certainties, must have been difficult to process. Vargas Llosa busied himself with two comic turns, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), the latter on which his Western reputation stands. A work of autofiction with baroque touches of Iris Murdoch, it sends up his liaison with his vivacious and ribald Bolivian aunt, Julia Urquidi, 13 years his senior. “To have an affair with an older woman was very exciting,” Vargas Llosa later said. No doubt it was, for it appears to have equipped the 19-year-old with the precociousness that typically comes from such entanglements. He emerged from the affair a prose stylist with enormous reserves of sensitivity — literary assets that would for long allow him to get a free pass from the press, no matter how odious his politics became.

Thereafter, his writings took an overt political turn. A pivotal episode was an English encounter — a dinner party in 1980 attended by Margaret Thatcher, Philip Larkin, and Isaiah Berlin. By then, Vargas Llosa was already an Anglophile, having taught Latin American literature at KCL. Now, he reinvented himself as a tribune of “Andean Thatcherism” — his words. Reading Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Adam Smith, and Berlin — lodestars he later eulogized in The Call of the Tribe (2018) — he developed a deeply English skepticism of utopianism. Perfectibility was the creed of fools, he argued. Man’s fallibility demanded realism. Accordingly, he would never have any truck with magical realism, which he would equate with pie-in-the-sky utopian socialism. He was on to something: the doyens and doyennes of magical realism — the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Isabel Allende — were all unreconstructed Leftists. Vargas Llosa, however, was cut from a different cloth. Even his early communism had been a practical, nuts-and-bolts affair, no dreamy exercise in worldmaking. “I have an invincible weakness for so-called realism,” he would declare in his memoir A Fish in the Water (1993). A decade later, he had this to say to The Guardian: “that idea of a perfect society lies behind monsters like the Taliban.” Thus, with a single invidious comparison, he discarded any association with the Left.

The new embrace of neoliberalism rested on a casuistic logic. In his discussions of the Left, it was always its actually existing deficiencies that Vargas Llosa paraded before his readers: curbs on free speech, arbitrary arrest, and so on. Neoliberalism, by contrast, was an entirely theoretic possibility for him. Vargas Llosa spoke of the free market and free speech as belonging to a single package. It’s a quaint view, given how rarely the two have gone hand in hand in the Latin American setting. More often than not, elections there have pitched markets against democracy, the former usually with foreign (read: US) and military backing, the latter defended by the socialist Left.

Tellingly, Vargas Llosa praised Pinochet’s dictatorship for his dalliance with the Chicago Boys but upbraided him for violent suppression of labor and civil society — all without pausing to consider that Chile’s neoliberal growth had precisely been made possible by violence against the unions and wage suppression. Likewise, there was no reckoning with the practice of Anglo-American neoliberalism — reliant on an ever-expanding warfare state, public contracts, coups d’état, and prison labor. In later years, as a columnist for El País, he would pillory Leftist intellectuals for their economic illiteracy, though, on the strength of his own economic writings, the charge could easily be reversed.

A collaboration with the economist Hernando de Soto, Peru’s Hayek, resulted in a pamphlet calling for the transfer of property rights to the poor, who, with adequate credit, were to set about forming petit-bourgeois businesses. The magic bullet theory, however, failed to account for the fact that Peru’s problems were structural — that overnight, an exporter of raw materials could hardly rival the Asian Tigers, all of which had benefited from colossal state intervention. Indeed, it was only in the absence of state intervention that Peru brought about its worst nightmare. When, in 1980, the newly elected Fernando Belaúnde abandoned the land reforms of the previous government, he effectively set the stage for Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist militia that murdered some 30,000 people in the Eighties.

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In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for president on a neoliberal ticket — austerity, privatization — losing to Alberto Fujimori in the second round. Still, it could be said that he won the argument. In the “Fujishock” that followed, the very same slate of reforms Vargas Llosa ran on were implemented by his opponent.

In the new millennium, especially after his 2010 Nobel Prize, Vargas Llosa became progressively unhinged. In 2022, he threw his weight behind Dina Boluarte, Peru’s unelected president, and cheered her suppression of students and indigenous groups. The following year, he came out in support for Bolsonaro, whose “clowning around” — as Vargas Llosa put it — included conspiring in a failed far-Right coup against Lula. In Chile, too, the novelist bet on the wrong horse, praising José Antonio Kast (who opposes gay marriage and abortion rights) who went on to lose to the Leftist Gabriel Boric. More risibly, apropos of #MeToo, Vargas Llosa dubbed feminism “the staunchest enemy of literature”. A potential Podemos victory heralded a “return to caudillismo”.

The penchant for outré pronouncements revealed a man utterly out of his depth. Luckily for him, his reputation in the world of belles lettres rests not so much on his political forays as his high-minded erotica and formidable command of literary history. Happily, there coexisted two Vargas Llosas, the one a columnist and the other a novelist. His authoritarian neoliberalism scarcely intruded on his later fiction, and it takes a magnifying glass to detect minute traces of it in, say, The Feast of the Goat (2000) or The Dream of the Celt (2010). The Vargas Llosa that will be remembered is the playful chap who whispered “Henry James is shit” to his friend José Donoso on the latter’s deathbed, to which came the reply: “Flaubert, more so.” As a fan of Flaubert’s, Vargas Llosa no doubt would recognize that his tired shilling for autocratic and neoliberal shibboleths wouldn’t have been out of place in the master’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

There was something quixotic about the whole enterprise: the discarding of one culture (imperial Portuguese), deemed alien on decolonial grounds, and the embrace of another (indigenous Brazilian), just as foreign to Brazil’s self-respecting, nationalist elite. Take Tarsila do Amaral, the star of Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, the new show at the Royal Academy (on until 21 April). An accomplished painter as well as an astute theorist, she was no doubt a brilliant mind. De Andrade was her husband, and his Anthropophagic Manifesto of 1928 owed more than a little to her oeuvre. There, in feverish aphorisms, he had worked up much resentment against Portuguese imperialism, a distant memory since decolonization over a century earlier in 1822 but one which nevertheless exercised a hold on the native imagination through an imperialism of the mind. “Down with Father Vieira… Down with every catechism… Down with all the importers of canned consciousness” is the gist of it.

As it was, even in his defiance to dispose of that distasteful Lusophone inheritance, de Andrade couldn’t help but appropriate its gaze, even if only to turn it on its head. The interwar Brazilian avant-garde called themselves “anthropophagites” — cannibals — only because the Portuguese had insinuated that one of their own, a particularly rotund bishop called Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, had been devoured by the Caeté Indians in 1556. Western modernism was to be relished with equal abandon.

Do Amaral was very much the art cannibal par excellence. A canvas called “Antropofagia” was produced in 1929, a year after the manifesto, depicting a black woman with a single burdensome breast drooping groundward against a background of cacti. At first blush, this is the portrait of a Gauguinesque exotique, a sentimental celebration of the “noble savage” as it were, but there is a lot more going on. Her subject very likely is the same woman in “A Negra” (1923), do Amaral’s Cubist nude of a former slave. There were still many of them about between the wars, as Brazil had only abolished slavery in 1888, two-thirds of a century after independence. The seemingly implausible elasticity of the black woman’s breast, do Amaral later recalled in an interview, was achieved through the manipulation of stones with the objective of slinging it back over her shoulders; a Brazilian custom, apparently, that allowed black women to breastfeed and toil away in farms at the same time.

On whose farm, you may ask, was this degrading practice imposed upon her? Do Amaral’s own, it turns out. She hailed from São Paulo’s coffee aristocracy, which made a killing at the turn of the century; Amazonian rubber and northeastern sugarcane, both casualties of the abolition of slavery, had released a mammoth wave of manumitted labor into the southeast. For her part, do Amaral showed little awareness of having battened on cheapened labor. More interesting to her were the decolonial aesthetics of national identification: “I feel more and more Brazilian,” she wrote to her family. “I want to be the painter of my homeland. How grateful I am to have spent my entire childhood on the farm.”

The black slave, I would hazard, would have seen less reason to feel grateful for her inclusion in the national sorority of epistemically liberated postcolonials. No doubt do Amaral’s pontificating would have struck her as tone-deaf. The two Brazilians couldn’t have been more different: one was patting herself on the back for emancipating herself from the tyranny of Western modes of representation whereas the other perhaps dreamed of emancipation at a more elemental level. One person’s decolonial emancipation is another’s postcolonial oppression. One person’s languorous nostalgia is another’s living nightmare.

It should come as no surprise that there is something deeply unfeeling about do Amaral’s early art. Her nationalism, properly speaking, was just academicism. She was an alien in her own homeland. A Belgian nanny taught her her first letters. On her grand piano, she played French composers to an audience of French upholstery. French literature dominated her downtime. Like so many Westernized Asian and African nationalists, then, she only discovered her poorer compatriots through an adventitious agency: it was the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, in Brazil to make a documentary on the local art scene, who convinced her and de Andrade to take Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian culture seriously. He was hot on samba and carnival, both hitherto dismissed by artsy metropolitans as the unformed festivities of benighted primitives, and his enthusiasm proved infectious.

Yet the results of this belated recognition were oddly sterile. Do Amaral’s subjects aren’t so much people as placeholders, standing in for grander themes. It is no accident that the face of the woman in “Antropofagia” is featureless. Likewise, there’s not much more to the woman in “A Negra” than her “huge, pendulous lips”, as do Amaral put it.

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As in painting, so in fiction. Macunaíma, the novel associated with this scene, is heavy going. Its biracial, bisexual novelist Mário de Andrade — no relation to Oswald — set out explicitly to cast away its Lusophone past. Accordingly, after immersing himself in a five-volume work by the German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, he dashed off a draft in six days of self-imposed immurement. The upshot was a hurried, self-published affair. Its hero is a concupiscent, shapeshifting Lothario, a kind of Brazilian Michael Jackson, born black but then turned white. Over the course of this bizarre novel, he sleeps his way across the rainforest, conversing with loquacious worms and slurping on wine, only to be dismembered by a river monster and then transformed into Ursa Major. Like so many postcolonial novels, this one only works at the level of national allegory — though it doesn’t work for me.

Part of the problem is stylistic. These are well-meaning works, of course, but, as Flaubert had it, “you don’t make art out of good intentions”. The other defect is more structural: the self-defeating exercise of consciously fashioning a national culture. To be sure, national cultures do exist. They are, all the same, easier to define historically than to create artificially. For instance, it was easy enough for Nikolaus Pevsner to identify a set of characteristically English qualities — compromise, understatement, empiricism — running from Reynolds to Blake and beyond in The Englishness of English Art. But it was an altogether harder proposition for a set of interwar practitioners, not theoreticians, to construct a distinctively Brazilian style from scratch.

Cobbling together a national signature out of the dissenting currents of Continental modernism was easier said than done. All too often, the source material was plainly visible, jutting out like a bone from an anthropophagite’s mouth. The Lithuanian-born and Berlin-trained Lasar Segall’s paintings on display here, for example, are of obvious Cubist derivation. The failed liquor baron turned painter Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s work, similarly, is unquestionably Art Deco. Anita Malfatti’s pictures are, by turns, Fauvist, Cubist, and Expressionist.

Decolonial aims notwithstanding, the foreignness showed — especially to their nationalist compatriots. The leading critic of the period taxed Malfatti with the “diplopic influence of rebellious schools” and “ephemeral theories”. Her uncle’s verdict was much of a muchness, only more demotic: “This is not painting. These are Dantesque things!” The São Paolo press was savage when her exhibition opened in 1917. Thereafter, she retreated into an anchoritic life, altogether giving up exhibiting a decade later.

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The more convincing paintings here are the ones with no obvious nation-building “decolonial” agenda. The former dentist and autodidact Rubem Valentim, for one, knew what he was about. An Afro-Brazilian who had witnessed Candomblé religious ceremonies first-hand, he achieved a satisfactory synthesis of cultures. So it is with the half-indigenous Djanira da Motta e Silva, also self-taught, who deployed her knowledge of local art and custom to brilliant effect. They weren’t cosplaying. They were the real deal.

Their art is a far cry from Monteiro’s, whose grand theme, too, was the life of indigenous people — only he had had no contact with indigenous people himself. He had learned a trick or two from Rio’s Museu Nacional, but that was it. Like an old colonial, he divided his time between Paris and Recife, setting great store by his eclecticism and cosmopolitanism: “I’m a citizen of nowhere, but I love Paris above all.”

Sensibly, if belatedly, do Amaral came to the conclusion that cannibalism wasn’t for her. The Depression radicalized her against such decolonial doctrines. It instantly destroyed Brazil’s coffee business, ruining her family in the process. The Revolution of 1930 followed in short order. The oligarchy was overthrown and replaced with Getúlio Vargas’s regime, welding autocratic nationalism and social reformism in a heteroclite alliance of organized labor, the gentry and military. Fired by these events, do Amaral traveled to Moscow the following year, and was briefly arrested on her return. By then, she had long since abandoned cultural nationalism for socialist realism. Some of the best pictures in the exhibition belong to the latter tradition — not only do Amaral’s “Second Class” (1933), a moving depiction of discalced peasants, but also Candido Portinari’s “Coffee Agricultural Worker” (1934), a muscular fellow in contrapposto.

The artists, and indeed activists and academics, of our time who go doolally over decoloniality would do well to follow in do Amaral’s footsteps. Banging on about a supposedly pristine indigenous past lost to the sands of time, she realized, achieves precious little. Better, then, to swap the sentimental appeal of cultural nostrums for the hard-nosed allure of proper class politics.

Siddiq was born into a large connection of power and property. Her family has been dubbed the Kennedys of Bangladesh. Her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, ruled Dhaka from 2009 to 2024 more or less as a dictator. And like most aunts, she was given to maternal largesse. To begin with, there was the electoral meddling. Her party, the Awami League, apparently helped her niece on the hustings in 2015; “Had it not been for your help,” Siddiq said to an Awami crowd on her election as MP for Hampstead and Highgate, “I would never have been able to stand here as a British MP.”

Then there were the houses. Rather in the manner that bird droppings fall on unlucky souls, properties would seem to have lashed down on Siddiq and her family. First came a pied-à-terre in King’s Cross, bequeathed by a developer, an Awami man, in 2004. When prying hacks had the temerity to inquire into the ownership of the flat in 2022, Siddiq threatened them with lawsuits, asseverating that the property was a gift from her parents. Thereafter, were two Hampstead flats, both owned by Awami figures. Another party man owns her current East Finchley digs, a semi-detached dwelling worth £2 million. A billionaire advisor of Hasina’s, meanwhile, owns Siddiq’s mother’s Golders Green house through an offshore trust.

Publicly, Siddiq has let on that a vile press, pandering to popular prejudice, has made much ado about what are blood ties and no more: “Are you aware that I am a British MP and that I’m born in London?” But there was that little faux pas on her part, when she accompanied her aunt to the Kremlin in 2015, shaking hands with Putin as the two leaders inked an arms and nuclear energy deal. Siddiq, however, maintains she was only there to spend “time with her family”. Oh.

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Since Hasina’s government was toppled by students in August 2024, we have seen a drip feed of accusations from Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission — one of which sealed Siddiq’s fate on 14 January. Quite apart from lodging at Awami houses on both sides of the Heath, Siddiq was allegedly involved in the allocation of a plot of land in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone to her mother. She announced her resignation on the same day.

But the Tulip Siddiq affair, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger story is Hasina’s kleptocratic regime and Britain’s role as its handmaiden. Dhaka’s court has now revealed that the price tag of the Rooppur nuclear power plant, being built for the Bangladeshis by Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom, was inflated by $5 billion — allegedly misappropriated by the Hasina family and its cronies.

And where should the money end up but in bent Britain? Hasina’s ministers and oligarchs, the Observer has revealed, own British real estate worth almost £400 million. They include the tycoon Salman Rahman, who runs the vast Beximco conglomerate, which, among other contracts, was handed over the national monopoly to distribute the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Rahman and his family own seven apartments in Mayfair through shell companies. Apparently a career politician, Hasina’s land minister Saifuzzaman Chowdhury meanwhile owns hundreds of properties in Britain, with a combined worth north of £160 million. Then we have the Sobhan family, real estate magnates who couldn’t repay state loans, yet somehow managed to purchase a £10 million Kensington mansion.

Hasina’s kith and kin are accused of benefitting from “plain robbery”, in the words of Muhammad Yunus, Nobel laureate and now Bangladesh’s stopgap ruler. They have waged, as it were, a two-front class war against Bangladeshi taxpayers and British renters. And in this endeavour, they have been aided by Butler Britain: estate agents, private banks, law firms, and indeed lawmakers, who have developed a Swiss-cheese style compliance regime, whose very edifice was designed to allow the Rahmans and Chowdhurys, Abramovichs and Kulibayevs, to squirrel away their riches in this island. The loopholes are the system. This is why Siddiq had to go. She is alleged to be benefitting from the very world she was meant to oversee.

And a grim world it was. Auntie Hasina’s wealth and power were built on an empire of violence and malversation. But things didn’t start out that way. Indeed, for a long while, she was the great hope of democracy in a land eternally cleaving to khaki rule. Her father was the country’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Bangladesh, it will be remembered, was once “East Pakistan”, part of the cartographic oddity sandwiching India ruled first from Karachi, then Rawalpindi, and finally Islamabad — all in “West Pakistan”, which was hegemonic culturally, economically, and militarily. In 1970, Rahman won the election. Stinging from the humiliating prospect of having to salaam an “effete” Bangla ruler for the following five years, Pakistan’s generals promptly unleashed a genocide. Over the following months, three million were killed. India, sensing an opportunity, invaded the country. Pakistan’s army was sent packing, and Rahman declared independence.

Four years later, it was another set of generals who came to cause grief to Rahman. Perceived as too much of a leftie, with his unhealthy penchant for redistribution and nationalization, he was massacred, along with the rest of his family, by army personnel in a Scarface-style mansion shootout in 1975. The very Bangladeshi coup brought to power a military junta.

As it was, Hasina emerged unscathed from the violent contraction of the Rahman ménage, thanks to a European holiday. Six years later, she emerged from Indian exile to take charge of the Awami League. In that role, she fashioned a reputation as a level-headed democrat, opposed to both General Ershad’s military dictatorship as well as her father’s socialist zeal.

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From this cautious start, for which she garnered global sympathy, Hasina grew into one of the most unprepossessing politicians of our age. It is a trajectory South Asians wearily recognize; Aung San Suu Kyi, another nepo baby, similarly went from being the toast of the free world to a toasted pariah. Hasina’s autocratic turn owed much to the “battle of the begums” that played out around the turn of the century — a dialectic of violence and corruption that sustained the competition for the top job between two well-heeled women, Hasina and her rival, the Bangladesh National Party’s Begum Khaleda Zia. Hasina won out. Zia was put under house arrest, and her son exiled.

Following her victory in the 2009 election, the country’s last free and fair one, Hasina set about belligerently consolidating power. Elections became farces boycotted by the main opposition party, and kangaroo courts mushroomed. The police acquired a taste for torture, for pulling nails and hanging prisoners. Her detractors and dissidents developed the uncanny ability to simply disappear.

The economy ostensibly did well. Bangladesh achieved a 203% per capita increase in GDP in the last quarter-century, on a par with peer nations — India (216%) and Vietnam (244%) — and leagues ahead of the land from which it seceded, Pakistan (44%). This owed in great measure to the roaring success of the garment industry, profiting a wafer-thin entrepreneurial class that scarcely paid anything in taxes — the top rate is 25p — and concealing Hasina’s cataclysmic handling of state finances: soaring debt; eye-watering inflation; depleting reserves. Serious public investment is scarcely possible under such constraints. At any rate, a tidy chunk of the budget under Hasina vanished into the hands of its trigger-happy army.

Keeping the generals happy exacted a toll. Having to perennially whip out her begging bowl before Delhi and Beijing, Hasina proved singularly incapable of crafting an independent foreign policy. Indeed, her critics with some justice described her as Delhi’s creature. The crumbs the Indians threw her way were repaid through accommodating water-sharing arrangements and market access — another big market, given recent figures put the Bangla population at 173 million. Delhi sweetened the pill by helping cool tempers in DC, where periodic excoriation of the human rights abuses of other nations is very much the norm. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, was responding to Indian pressure when he instructed his ambassador to Dhaka and the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs to “knock it off with Bangladesh”.

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In the end, Hasina’s cronyism and brutality proved her undoing. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a nakedly clientelistic job scheme — three in 10 government jobs were to be reserved for the heirs of the “veterans” who fought for the country’s liberation in 1971, which is to say for legacy Awami Leaguers. The upshot was last summer’s Monsoon Revolution. The state’s tyrannical security apparatus met its match in the idealistic bright young things amassing on Dhaka’s streets.

Hasina went down kicking and screaming. More than 1,500 protestors were killed, and 20,000 injured. But the students kept at it until Hasina was forced to flee to India on a chopper. The 84-year-old microfinancier Muhammad Yunus, who had for long been a thorn in Hasina’s side, was dragged to Dhaka from his Paris hospital by students and installed as interim leader in August. And so the curtain fell on autocratic misrule.

Hasina’s successors, it must be said, did not put their best face forward on seizing power. Awami Leaguers were massacred wholesale in retaliatory violence; the country’s Hindu minority, too, bore the brunt, not least because Hasina had cultivated a reputation as an Indophilic anti-Islamist. Indeed, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party, once mercilessly suppressed by Hasina, has renewed its shariatic hopes; there is even talk of a Bangla caliphate.

But hope springs eternal. Hasina’s fall and now Siddiq’s are reasons for optimism. Tying up the loose ends, in metropole and former colony alike, will of course prove harder. The billionaire Banglagarchs are nothing if not powerful; Butler Britain, nothing if not efficacious. Both Dhaka and London have their work cut out.

Nationalists, for whom history is no more than an accoutrement of righteous vindication, have annexed their arguments. So it is that a fairly recondite debate turning on economies of old has acquired new geopolitical significance. Accordingly, a crude heuristic now has it that Frankopan is on Team China, and Dalrymple on Team India.

But they are, truth be told, on the same team. The presiding impulse of their respective books, The Silk Roads and The Golden Road — both on global trade — is to vanquish that old foe, seriously hobbled but not quite dead: Eurocentrism. Hence the emphasis on cultural diffusion, seen in the popular imagination as a set of Western bequests to a benighted East. Here, by contrast, the aim is to show that traffic was in great measure, though by no means entirely, in the reverse direction.

There is, of course, a difference in emphasis in their accounts — Frankopan being a Byzantinist, and Dalrymple an Indianist. Yet the world-historical objective is the same — guided, one surmises, by their similar intellectual formation. Born to a Dalmatian father and Swedish mother, Frankopan was fired by the lectures of Jonathan Shepard, a historian of the Byzantine world at Cambridge. His debut was an account of The First Crusade that swapped Latin for Greek sources, reversing the conventional gaze. Dalrymple, a Highland aristocrat, also passed through Cambridge before cutting his teeth as a travel writer, traversing the same subcontinental lands as some of his forebears. For both, then, there were strong biographical imperatives that militated against insularity. With such backgrounds, it is hardly surprising that they didn’t turn out to be little Englanders.

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This habit of mind was aligned to a historical sensibility. Born in 1965 and 1971, respectively, Dalrymple and Frankopan belong to the same cohort, coming of age as writers at a time when the British reading public was happily devouring 1,000-page tomes on, say, the French and Russian Revolutions. It was an age when doorstopper histories sold like air-fryer cookbooks, which is to say an age that lent itself easily to public-facing history. Happily, it was also an age relatively innocent of precarious contracts and pretentious postmodernism; pecuniary considerations and the stylistic dictates of the academy would prevent many from scaling the heights of public intellectualdom in a later age. Dalrymple took up the cudgels for popular history with a quartet on the Raj — a darker riff on Jan Morris’s trilogy — before moving backwards to Indian antiquity. Frankopan, by contrast, moved in both directions, encompassing the longue durée in histories of the Silk Road and climate change.

Billed as a “new history of the world”, no less, The Silk Roads offered a highly idiosyncratic take on global history, giving us the view from the Stans, as it were. Halford Mackinder called the region the world’s “heartland”, control over which is the sine qua non of global hegemony — a provocative argument when it was made in 1904, though these days seen as common wisdom in think-tank circles. Frankopan’s sweep — taking in the Achaemenids and Abbasids, commending the Persians and Mongols, depicted here not as barbaric cretins but as begetters of a sophisticated civilisation — no doubt had a touch of Whiggishness to it, confirming Herbert Butterfield’s wry observation that historical compression often tends towards upbeatness. One can see why Beijing’s mandarins fell head over heels with it. Trade gets top billing in these pages. War and prejudice — between Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim — often recede from view. This was the kind of feel-good story the architects of a new Silk Road could get behind.

All the same, Frankopan was at pains to argue that the term itself was, in fact, of recent vintage. He didn’t go as far as Khodadad Rezakhani in dubbing it the “road that never was”, though he did maintain that the East-West carrying trade — ferrying money and maladies, goods and gods — coursed in the main through Indian ports. Overland routes from China were a minority taste. The fact is that no “Silk Road” ever existed in antiquity or mediaeval times. The Romans and Chinese were hardly aware of one another’s existence. On the other hand, Rome and India did a roaring trade in diamonds and drugs, amethysts and eunuchs, hair and diaphanous fabrics. Fast-forward a millennium to the 9th century, and it is still Gujarati entrepôts, topped up with the likes of Basra or Siraf in the Persian Gulf, doing the heavy-lifting.

Historically, the camel and caravan were no match for the ship. Across Central Asia, disconnection — not connection — was the norm. Then as now, sea transport was exponentially cheaper than land transport. Thanks to the revolution that is containerisation, these days it costs next to nothing to have your Shein jeans conveyed halfway across the world; the real expense, and environmental harm, lies in last-mile delivery. As it was, the “Silk Road” only became a proper thing in 1877. That is when the Prussian geographer Baron von Richthofen, enlisted to supply a fanciful genealogy for a railway linking Berlin and Beijing, coined the word. It was still later, in 1938, that the Silk Road made its Anglophone debut.

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These subtleties were lost in the reception of The Silk Roads. Coming at a time of the Middle Kingdom’s return to the world stage under state-capitalist aegis, the hype around it neatly dovetailed with the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s latest effort to win friends and buy influence. It followed that Beijing was unencumbered by real history, preferring a nostalgic version of it. As Don DeLillo’s quip has it: “longing on a large scale is what makes history.” Very simply, the ancient Silk Road was good PR, another win for China’s “heritage diplomacy”.

It is only fitting, then, that the British Museum has cleared some precious Bloomsbury real estate to commemorate its (chimerical) existence in its blockbuster show. Not in any sense a work of Chinese propaganda, of course, the Silk Roads exhibition is nevertheless of a piece with the deceptive Silk Road Revival. Its message of global connection inevitably, if inadvertently, plays up its popular image as a Belt and Road Initiative avant la lettre. Rather much is made of silk, a commodity that scarcely featured in international trade. Historically speaking, an emphasis on more important items — cotton, pepper, ivory, sandalwood — would have placed India to the fore. Indeed, as Dalrymple has argued, the elision of India in the show was striking, even as a great many of the exhibits screamed the Subcontinent. One suspects that the omission owed to curatorial parochialism, not a willingness to regurgitate Beijing’s talking points, but it was revealing all the same.

On this score, Dalrymple’s The Golden Road, published this year, is a salutary corrective to the Scylla of Sinocentrism. Yet in its upbeat Indocentric pushback, it makes itself vulnerable to the Charybdis of Hindu nationalist appropriation. Time was when India was number one, Dalrymple argues, exporting mathematics and medicine, music and mythology, religion and architecture across what he calls the “Indosphere” — “the Sanskrit ecumene” to pointy-heads in the know – spanning Kandahar and Singapore from c. 250 BC to AD 1200.

It’s a story that is bound to give Hindu nationalists hard-ons, not least because the Indosphere bears a passing resemblance to an akhand bharat — a Greater India fencing in much of Southeast Asia under direct rule from Delhi. This, apparently, was the way things were in Asia’s deep past. The more hare-brained of the Hindu nationalists, the historian Sara Perlangeli has shown, continue to harbour fantasies of an “offshore Hindu nation” protected by Delhi. Dalrymple’s own retort, prefigured in The Golden Road — that a great deal of ancient “Indian” soft power was of Buddhist, definitely not Hindu, stamp — one suspects falls on deaf ears in this puerile milieu.

Historians have no control over how their books are received — more’s the pity. Frankopan is under no illusions. “I know my place as a commentator and it’s not to shape answers for politicians… I’m a mere historian sitting in Oxford,” he has said with resigned candour. Dalrymple’s version could run: “…sitting in a farmhouse in Mehrauli.”

The Golden and Silk Roads have acquired lives of their own, as signs of forgotten, precolonial national greatness. Conceived at the outset as correctives to Eurocentric history, they will be read in an altogether different light in certain quarters. For the votaries of China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” — Global Times editor Hu Xijin (who once likened Britain to a “bitch asking for a beating”), for instance, or China Daily EU bureau chief Chen Weihua (who once called an American senator a “lifetime bitch”) — accounts of the Silk Road no doubt serve as comforting reminders of a seemingly endless golden age before the country’s “century of national humiliation”. In India, too, histories of precolonial gloire will go down swimmingly in milieux brimming with postcolonial resentment. One imagines India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar might cull a titbit or two from The Golden Road for inclusion in a future speech rehashing his obligatory swipes at “the West” and its “old habit” of imperialism.

Yet it can scarcely be denied that both India and China have long since ceased to be colonised nations. If anything, they are now both colonial powers in their own right. No longer the “sick man of Asia”, China today is the world’s largest debt collector. Exporting its surplus capital and flexing its military muscle, its ruling class has come to treat a large chunk of Southeast Asia — everything west of its so-called “9-dash line” — as its own private garden. Power projection on the high seas has gone hand in hand with economic exploitation further afield, with Chinese tycoons snapping up everything from Zambian copper to Liberian redwood.

India’s ruling class, likewise, has come to assume that it is the sole keyholder to the Indian Ocean, propping up favourable regimes from Mauritius to the Maldives. Again, the Indian national oil company’s stab at controlling Sudanese oil and the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s monopolisation of Ghana’s 5G network are hardly lessons in Third World solidarity.

Small wonder forgotten histories of Asian greatness are in such demand. As Benedetto Croce put it, “all history is contemporary history”.

The fact is that Churchill, who would have turned 150 this week, was no curmudgeonly conservative. His Right-wing fanboys and Left-wing haters today would both no doubt prefer to live down his reputation as the “grandfather of the welfare state”. Indeed, along with Lloyd George, he was the architect of the Liberal programme — a slate of pension, healthcare, insurance, and wage reforms. He was also viewed as a “class warrior” by his Tory contemporaries. In his handling of the 1910 miners’ strike in the Rhondda, for instance, he came under fire in the press and in parliament for his leniency. In his lax Lib-Lab ways, he had kept the army at arm’s length, hoping for a peace between labour and capital. This is the wet Churchill whose life-size portrait greets you as you walk into the National Liberal Club.

Here, then, is one of the unexpected ways in which Churchill’s England is now dead. From austerity Osborne to scrounger-baiter Starmer, the welfare state has now become something of an embarrassment across the spectrum. Churchill, perversely, is too lefty for our unforgiving age.

This is not to suggest, of course, that Churchill was on the Left. He was, after all, the same chap who, on returning to the Tory party in 1924, returned the pound to the gold standard as chancellor of the exchequer — a move that betrayed “jejune and intellectually sterile” thinking, thought Keynes. Churchill at a stroke caused an unemployment crisis, the upshot of which was the General Strike. This he put down with the help of blacklegs drawn from the constabulary and British Fascisti. His politics, in short, were clear as mud. Even Lord Beaverbrook, a crony of Churchill’s, recognised this, maintaining that he had held every opinion on every subject over the course of his life.

It was precisely Churchill’s chameleonic character that enabled him to clamber upwards despite chronic blundering. Having the right background helped: he was born at Blenheim Palace, birched at Harrow, and schooled at Sandhurst. So, too, did the derring-do: he fought as a mercenary in Cuba and the Soudan, and escaped his captors after a jailbreak in Pretoria. Politically, he proved a poor fit in the Tory party, calling for defence spending cuts practically until the eve of the First World War. Then, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he abruptly reversed his position by defending his department’s budget. Churchill likewise wasn’t exactly married to party fidelity in the prewar period, crossing the floor to join the Liberals in 1904; as MP for Oldham, a cotton town, he was committed to free trade, and therefore could have no truck with imperial preference, the creed of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition. As it was, Churchill returned to the Tory party two decades later, closing ranks against Labour in 1924.

Churchill’s First World War record showed a man out of his depth. Disregarding the counsel of his generals by trying to “force the Dardanelles” and finish off the Ottomans, he ended up getting 50,000 of his men killed at Gallipoli. The Turkish victory was followed by Churchill’s demotion. After the war ensued another cack-handed operation was launched to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib”, as Churchill put it. Once again luck eluded him. The British soldiers dispatched to assist the Whites were sent packing. The Second World War saw him reprise his role as First Lord of the Admiralty. Disaster struck again with his botched handling of the Norwegian campaign. Still, strategic failure was one thing, personal advancement another. Chamberlain lost the premiership over the affair. So it was that when Lord Halifax, declined the top job, it fell to Churchill — some irony, given his mishandling had brought about his predecessor’s fall.

Churchill’s luck turned in his precarious prime ministership. Dunkirk proved to be a serendipitous success, if only thanks to the Wehrmacht. The blitzkrieg was halted 13 kilometres from the evacuation because the Germans had other fish to fry. Still, the final outcome of the war, decisively resolved by American money and Soviet manpower, nevertheless secured Churchill’s place in history. He was able to claim that he had been right all along about British strength, even if much of his understanding derived from questionable racist assumptions. Indeed, race was an all-consuming obsession for Churchill, which sets him apart from a great many of his contemporaries; generally speaking, Brits in the first half of the 20th century were more likely to think along class or developmental lines. Not Churchill, though. Small wonder he was struck dumb by the fall of Singapore: “How came 100,000 men (half of them of our own race) to hold up their hands to inferior numbers [35,000] of Japanese?” Elsewhere, he was blunter: “I hate people with slit eyes & pig-tails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them.”

Even Bolshevism was cast in ethnic terms: it was a “sinister confederacy” of “International Jews”. Ashkenazi Jews supplanting dark Palestinians in the Levant, on the other hand, was a positive development: “I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race has come in and taken their place.” As for black people, they were really not “as capable or as efficient as white people”, he said to a Kenyan settler in 1954. The following year, Eden noted in his diary as Caribbean migration picked up steam, “Churchill thinks ‘Keep England White’ is a good slogan.” Churchill, of course, wasn’t alone in expressing such views, though it must be said they weren’t exactly comme il faut even in his time. These days, moreover, ever-fewer Brits set store by racial thinking — we don’t really have a racial wage gap; nor are our cities as ethnically segregated as, say, American ones —  which is one of the reasons why Churchill has come in for a cool reassessment.

There was a time when he was seen as the arch-defender of democracy. We know better now. As it is, he was no antifascist to begin with. In 1935, he expressed his “admiration” for Hitler, applauding his “courage” and “perseverance”. Only after Munich did he drop the idea of cutting a deal with the Nazis, by which point Clement Attlee, too, had come out against appeasement.

Then again, the sore point was balance of power on the Continent, not fascism per se. On taking office in 1940, Churchill was not above trying to appeal to the better instincts of Franco and Mussolini. The latter he called “the greatest lawgiver among men”, endorsing his “triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism”. The former likewise was a bulwark against the red menace: “I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism.” In 1944, Churchill reacted violently to Allied plans to impose oil sanctions to foil Franco’s bid to reignite the civil war: “You begin with oil; you will quickly end in blood.” Worse, without Franco, the communists would “become master of Spain”.

Churchill also propped up the Greek monarch George II — discredited for supporting Ioannis Metaxas’s fascist dictatorship — who decamped to London once the Wehrmacht stormed Athens. Real resistance was left to the communist partisans of EAM and ELAS, which moved from strength to strength once Roosevelt ruled out Allied landings in August 1943. Aghast at the prospect of a red Greece, Churchill called for “bloodshed if necessary” to suppress EAM and ELAS. Accordingly, Nazi collaborators were brigaded into British-sponsored militias to massacre liberation fighters. Meanwhile, Greek soldiers in Egypt clamouring for the Resistance to be included in the government in exile were deported to African camps on Churchill’s orders.

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When the Germans abandoned Greece, thanks to the Red Army push into Bulgaria, Churchill had George Papandreou installed as a puppet ruler. With the help of the British military governor Ronald Scobie, Papandreou set about rehabilitating Nazi collaborators and disarming ELAS partisans at gunpoint. Protests ensued, and Churchill sent in some 75,000 troops to crush the Resistance. So it was that communism was stamped out of Greece by the White Terror unleashed by Churchill. It was one of his last achievements before he was kicked out of office, in part because of his lack of enthusiasm for the Beveridge Report and in part thanks to an 11-hour crass gaffe, likening Labour to the Gestapo, that repelled voters.

A desultory final term of little moment followed in 1951. Domestically, its biggest triumph was Harold Macmillan’s housebuilding programme. Internationally, it is remembered for the brutal violence inflicted on Kenyans and Malayans in a misguided attempt to cling to the British Empire, by then already seen as an anachronism by both parties. Churchill was one of its last cheerleaders. To this end, Agent Orange was deployed on the Malayans, many of whom were left with the kind of crippling deformities that would become commonplace in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the slaughter of the Kikuyu and the corralling of over 100,000 souls into detention camps without trial forced Churchill to recognise that the Kenyans were a proud people wronged by empire — not “savages” but “persons of considerable fibre and ability and steel… armed with ideas — much more difficult to deal with”. This was Churchill the liberal imperialist, the chap who once showed some consideration for the natives of Natal and Omdurman and condemned the Amritsar massacre.

Yet this was the same man who had deployed the paramilitary Black and Tans to dispatch Irish nationalists, and used chemical weapons against the Kurds: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… Gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would leave a lively terror.” In Bengal, three million had starved to death in 1943 as a result of wartime policies despite there being enough food supplies to go around. The anxious viceroy of India had demanded urgent wheat supplies, to no avail. Absurdly, London arm-twisted Delhi into exporting rice from famine-struck Bengal. Churchill’s own response had been to take a dig at “Indians breeding like rabbits”. As it was, Bengal went a long way in discrediting the colonial enterprise in the eyes of its already dwindling fan base of compradors. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” Churchill had declared in 1942. Yet in the years that followed, he played an outsized part in begetting the world that buried his own tout court.

Now, evidently, we no longer live in Churchill’s world. Decolonisation has been achieved, and with the Chagos handover, even overshot. Denigration of the darker races, too, has lost its edginess; a third of Brits will be mixed by the end of our century. Deference to the ruling class likewise has slipped into quaint oblivion; “posh” these days has departed from the lexicon of the aspirational classes to become an adjective of disparagement, often preceding a ruder four-letter word. This is no country for Churchillians anymore.

In practice, however, the division of labour between policy and politics, architect and salesman, has never been quite so benign. Far from being shrinking violets doing what is best, the powers behind the throne have all too often been true believers — feverish sectarians for fanatical causes. Here lies the paradox of the political aide. As misfits, they possess a greater desire for domination than do the exnominated parroters of establishment opinion. It is this quality that endears them to rulers. Donald Trump surely believed that only a batty figure like Steve Bannon was capable of doing something as daunting as draining the Beltway swamp. And yet the zealous aide is his own worst enemy. With no real curbs on his shadowy authority, there is the all-too-real danger of enemies accruing and mistakes multiplying. Ultimately, his unsound decisions catch up with him. So it is that his downfall is just as dramatic as his rise.

Take that political aide par excellence, Thomas Cromwell, who supplied the template for the tragedy of the power-drunk maverick. Half a millennium on, our fascination with the Cromwell story is still going strong. The late, great Hilary Mantel bagged two Bookers retelling it in her Wolf Hall series, which was followed by a Beeb adaptation. Now, the TV series is back with a sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, another chiaroscuro romp through draughty Tudor piles enlivened by chiselled persiflage. The upshot of the renewed attention, no doubt aided by the taciturn brilliance of Mark Rylance’s sad-eyed performance, has been a reversal in Cromwell’s fortunes. Long vilified as an intemperate megalomaniac, he has been recast as one of history’s heroes.

What’s more, to contemporary sensibilities, Cromwell appears as a meritocrat. Here is the story of a plucky parvenu, a fellow of “base degree” as he himself put it, who rose to the very top through sheer skill.  It’s a rags-to-riches tale that has beguiled the very best. The German historian Geoffrey Elton’s mid-century view, now discarded but explosive at the time, was that Cromwell yanked England out of its mediaeval past by ushering in the “Tudor Revolution in Government”. Cromwell himself cultivated that image. This is the Cromwell of Holbein’s stern portrait, a mandarin hard at work with his quill and papers, unflecked by emotion, begetting England’s modern bureaucracy.

Truth be told, he did no such thing. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, his no-nonsense biographer shows, Cromwell was the quintessential mediaeval fixer, a hard-nosed, power-grubbing politico. There was nothing modern about the way he went about gobbling offices, hogging the king’s calendar, and staffing all echelons with loyalists. The rationalisation of the Privy Council as a modern cabinet of sorts, which Elton credited him for, in fact came in the way of Cromwell’s progress. He thrived in the cut and thrust of court life, its perils and possibilities, much as his descendants have done. The maverick political aides of our century — from Alastair Campbell to Dominic Cummings — really are a throwback to this Henrician world of old. Properly speaking, they are the Cromwells of today.

His modern heirs, of course, aren’t quite up there with the OG. Cromwell could be quite unsentimental in his handling of adversaries. For prophesying against the royal mésalliance with Anne Boleyn, for instance, the Catholic nun Elizabeth Barton was hung and beheaded, becoming, according to MacCulloch, “the only woman in English history to have her severed head placed among those spiked on London Bridge”. Then there was the fire and fury brought to bear on the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular uprising by conservatives protesting social change.

Such bestial blitheness pointed to a willingness to tear up the rulebook if the occasion demanded it. But while Cromwell was a disruptor, he was also a diplomat. During his teenage stint as a globetrotting merchant, he absorbed tongues like a sponge, and in due course became “the best Italian in all England” — a linguistic ability he turned to good account by becoming Cardinal Wolsey’s protégé and later Henry VIII’s advisor during his break with the Bishop of Rome. Cromwell’s savoir-faire extended to delicate situations as well. It was as a marriage broker that he got into the good graces of England’s ruler, dealing with his breakup with Katherine of Aragon; the marriage to Boleyn, and then her beheading; and finally his wedding to a German princess, Anne of Cleves. It was the latter foray into matchmaking that proved his undoing. The well-upholstered Henry, in that innocent age before Ozempic, couldn’t get it up with Anne. Poor Cromwell became the fall guy.

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Throughout his brief decade in power, what was never in doubt was Cromwell’s ruthlessness as Henry’s enforcer. He proved capable of accelerating the pace of history without losing his grip on power — no mean achievement. Many historians have typically explained away some of his more radical measures as the work of a manipulative Machiavelli, loyal to no calling but his career. We now know, however, that Cromwell was that rare thing, a true believer, something of a fanatic even. His Protestantism, or more accurately his evangelicalism, was serious business. The historian Dominic Selwood wasn’t too far off the mark when he described Cromwell’s creed as the “Islamic State of his day”.

The same fanaticism can be glimpsed in Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s enforcer and latterly has-been podcaster. In recent years, he has tried to present himself as no more than a ventriloquist for New Labour, but at the time, Campbell appeared to be a true believer. Blair certainly thought so, describing his first encounter with the former tabloid hack as some kind of coup de foudre. Campbell had “clanking great balls”, Blair wrote in his memoirs. A rather abrasive character, Campbell was prepared to bare them at the slightest provocation, as he did during his war of retribution against David Kelly, the weapons inspector who accused Campbell of “sexing up” the Iraq dossier that made the case for the invasion that New Labour was itching for. Soon after, Kelly committed suicide. Relations between the press and government continued to deteriorate in the runup to the war thanks to Campbell’s bullying and hectoring. As a result, Campbell was dropped as Downing Street director of communications in August 2003.

Campbell may not have “sexed up” the dossier, but it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The fact remains that Campbell not only joined in beating the drums of war, but did so with an amplitude that put many of his party mates to shame. Like the cocksure Cromwell, he had something of the fundamentalist about him. And like Cromwell, his actions exacted a toll on the world beyond. The Iraq war resulted in some 600,000 deaths according to Lancet. Blair himself paid a price: along with his weird pact with Gordon Brown, it was his plummeting popularity on account of the war that led to his resignation. Still, as late as 2010, Campbell could declare that the war was one that Britain ought to be “proud of”.

The bearded Brummie Nick Timothy, by contrast, was a lesser Rasputin, despite his appropriate mien. As unelected advisors go, his reign wasn’t in any way damaging to the national fabric. His sin was more of a peccadillo. But he seems to have shared the hubris of a Campbell or Cromwell, and like them, was ultimately responsible for the reckless gambit that led to his downfall. Along with his joint chief of staff Fiona Hill, Timothy had the bright idea of cajoling his ruler into calling a snap election in 2017, thus giving Corbynism a new lease of life and his English compatriots a lesson in Northern Irish politics when May inevitably lost her majority and needed to be shored up by the DUP. After an inevitable Tory revolt, Timothy and Hill were duly put out to pasture.

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Thomas Cromwell’s greatest modern heir, undoubtedly, is Boris Johnson’s Svengali, Dominic Cummings. Their backgrounds, though, couldn’t have been more different. Cummings is no working-class lad from Putney. He may be an anti-establishment figure, but his credentials signal its deepest depths: Oxford via public school; father-in-law the baronet owner of Chillingham Castle; an Islington townhouse for a pied-à-terre. Also unlike Cromwell, who kept his cards close to his chest, Cummings likes to lay it on the line, as those subjected to his epithets know all too well: David Davis (“vain as Narcissus”), Nick Clegg (“revolting character”), Ed Llewellyn (“classic third-rate, suck-up-kick-down sycophant”) among others. Like Cromwell, however, Cummings was capable of being perfectly unforgiving when the occasion demanded it. Take his defence of herd immunity: the aim of the government, he declared early on in the pandemic, was to “protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. It’s a sentiment Cromwell might have approved of.

As Johnson’s unelected fixer, Cummings unleashed a “reign of terror”, according to Whitehall mandarins. He went over the head of Sajid Javid to fire one of the chancellor’s advisors, ordering “an armed police officer to escort her out of Downing Street”. Javid later resigned over Downing Street’s penchant for muscling in on Treasury appointments. Throughout his career, Cummings has cultivated the reputation of an iconoclast, by turns intrepid and independent. His Oxford tutor recalled that he was a bit of a Robespierre: “someone determined to bring down things that don’t work.” When he left his job as advisor to education secretary Michael Gove in 2014, Cummings explained his decision with a 237-page manifesto in which he argued that education ultimately didn’t really matter, since in the end it was genetics that determined ability.

The following year, he found himself in charge of Vote Leave, a perch from which he urged Leavers to “pick up a baseball bat and smash David Cameron and George Osborne over the head”. Cummings ran a slick show. “Take back control” was a clever empty signifier, throwing up a tent wide enough to encompass Left sovereigntists, Right xenophobes, and patriotic bien pensants. Less convincing was the downright dishonest claim that some 80 million Turks would descend on the Thames and Tyne. Cummings and his cronies would have surely known that Ankara’s accession was never a real prospect. The misrepresentation brings to mind the manner in which Boleyn was thrown under the bus by Cromwell, who maligned her for, inter alia, conducting incestuous relations with her brother.

Cummings’ next gig, his last real one, was his 16-month tenure as Johnson’s chief advisor. Early on, he set about courting “weirdos from William Gibson novels”, whose presence in the civil service would, he hoped, diminish the outsized influence of “Oxbridge English graduates”, the kind, apparently, “who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers”. At all events, unlike Cromwell, Cummings never really had a chance to shape the government in his image. His general disdain for “the rules” no doubt prompted him to break them by driving up to Durham despite reeling from Covid with his family, and then making a further sojourn to Barnard Castle despite a “weird” sensation in his eyes. His sorry-not-sorry mea culpa cut no ice. Not even Benedict Cumberbatch playing him in a biopic, nor for that matter BrewDog’s Barnard Castle Eye Test IPA, could save him from the Tory MPs clamouring for his ouster. Very simply, Cummings had made too many enemies.

These days, Campbell is a sterile podcaster, Cummings a logorrhoeic Substacker — forlorn advisors abandoned by their masters now adored only by a vanishing minority of diehards (Campbell) and blowhards (Cummings). They can thank their lucky stars that they don’t live in the age of Cromwell, when the ruling class tended to be rather literal-minded about the expression “heads will roll”. For all that, Cromwell’s age is closer to us than we might think. Shadowy figures of the likes of Morgan McSweeney, purger of the Left, and Waheed Alli, Santa to the front bench, continue to haunt Westminster, running the Labour show from behind the scenes. The throne may be gone, but the powers behind the throne remain.

Insecurity, then, drove Hastings into devising the “system of conciliation”, essentially a vanity project that entailed winning over the déclassé intellectual elites of India to the Company cause. And so, surrounded by a coven of Hindu and Muslim clerics and thinkers, he was able to reinvent the Company man as a patron of the native intelligentsia. The upstart merchant-mercenary of yesterday was now the enlightened scholar-statesman of the new dispensation. As it was, the overwilling Hindu and Muslim pundits cynically, and perhaps understandably, treated the whole exercise as a power grab, letting on to the Company’s pen-pushers that they were the repositories of India’s unchanging laws. Their spurious claims about the existence of a fairly coherent body of “Hindu law” and “Muslim law” were taken at face value and willed into being.

With a few minor tweaks, it’s a system that still exists in India today. Under its original terms, the state abdicated responsibility on matters relating to inheritance, marriage, and divorce, ceding control over “personal law” to hastily appointed ultraconservative religious authorities. The upshot for Indian Muslims was a legal regime of shariatic derivation in which unilateral divorce without alimony was a male prerogative. The inheritance law was of a piece with this vision: sons were entitled to twice the share passed to daughters. This was just as well for the “orientalists” of the East India Company, enamoured of “authentic” native custom, even if no such thing existed. It likewise suited its more hard-nosed businessmen, anxious to rule on the cheap. Public law — land contracts, taxes — was kept in British hands, while pesky personal law was offloaded to priests.

Over the past quarter-millennium, no universalising countervailing influence has been able to breach this identitarian consensus. Indeed, only two serious stabs have been made by rationalists to undermine religious authority, the first of which was the zestful Utilitarian attack of the early 19th century on a range of religious customs. The second was the largely passive revolution of 1947, when the baton passed from an English to Indian elite, committed notionally to secularism. But Hindu and Muslim personal law remained on the books.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Hastings is to blame for Modi, or that a direct line can be drawn from 1772 to 1992, when Hindu fanatics sparked nationwide riots after tearing down Babur’s Mosque, a pivotal episode in the rise of Hindu nationalism. Rare though it was, precolonial India was no stranger to confessional violence between Hindus and Muslims, not least over matters of cow worship and slaughter. Yet the fact remains that Indians, in the main, clung to their primary identification as members of this and that sect and subcaste. It took British legal reform and Hindu and Muslim religious revivalism in the 18th century to convince a great many to start thinking of themselves above all as Hindus and Muslims.

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Devolution added a further fillip to fanaticism. As the franchise expanded from the 1860s on, and first councils and then provinces fell into Indian hands, religion offered a crude shorthand for political difference. Hindus and Muslims milked votes through their respective positions on cows, and increasingly the stakes went beyond bovine blood, also encompassing human flesh. Here was the unholy alliance between votes and violence that would have crippling consequences for the country after independence. And the arrival of the new intellectual current of nationalism only compounded this confessional problem. Deciding to mine the rich vein of national identity, the Hindu-dominated Congress Party, established in 1885, propounded an anticolonialism which amounted to a sentimental tribute to Hindu gods. It unsurprisingly found itself at loggerheads with the Muslim League, founded in 1906, which successfully lobbied for a Muslim quota in the services and in parliament, essentially an electoral extrapolation of the Hastings principle. If still far from a foregone conclusion, the road to Partition was now clear.

By the time the cantankerous and identity-obsessed Mohandas Gandhi seized control of the Congress in 1920, it was, in a sense, already too late for course correction. Rather favourably disposed to Muslims unlike many a rabidly prejudiced Congressman, Gandhi nevertheless inaugurated a political style that precluded any semblance of common ground between Hindus and Muslims. “My Hindus” could strike deals with, even befriend, “you Muslims”, but any alliance between the two faiths could only ever be skin-deep. The chasm between Hindu and Muslim was far too existential to warrant any meaningful connection with a member of the opposite team. More dismayingly, Gandhi’s handpicked henchmen didn’t so much as even pay lip service to the official ideology of secularism. By 1937, a mere 2.2% of the party membership was Muslim; at the time, one in four Indians swore by Islam. When the bulk of the provinces fell to the Congress that year, the trial run at independence revealed what a farcically one-sided affair the party was. Cow slaughter bans were introduced. In schools, idolatry was forced down the throats of hapless Muslims. Not long after, in 1940, Jinnah’s Muslim League would demand a separate homeland for Muslims.

So it was that when the Brits Brexited the subcontinent seven years later, the transfer of power was accompanied by a carve-up: a largely Hindu India achieved independence sandwiched by two pools of Pakistan snipped from its sides.

Since independence, Indians have struggled to make one nation out of two communities. Already in the early Fifties, a purge of Muslims had left the higher echelons of the civil service entirely devoid of minorities. More recently, the Hindu nationalist BJP — in power since 2014 — has given carte blanche to Hindu militias to break up interfaith marriages and bulldoze Muslim homes. Its new citizenship law is designed to disenfranchise millions of Muslims in the borderlands. In cities such as Ahmedabad, laws have been passed preventing Muslims from buying and renting property in Hindu areas.

Detached observers will rightly point out such enormities are par for the course in young democracies, where the demos falls hostage to the ethnos. Indeed, the Indian dilemma is far from unique. As in the former colony, so in the metropole. Postwar Britain, too, was after a fashion a new nation, having just emerged out of the British Empire. It is no accident that the rise of English nationalism in the mid-century was roughly coeval with the rise of Hindu nationalism. As the historian Olivette Otele has recently reminded us in African Europeans, race mattered rather little in Europe in the age of empire; prejudice turned instead on religion.

The experience of black Britons in the 20th century confirms this. In their brilliant sociology of the British elite since Victorian times, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman recall an interview with a black British woman who contrasted her experience of Oxbridge in the Seventies (“Don’t come to my room while my parents are here. They don’t like coloureds,” she was told) with that of her parents in Thirties Oxbridge (they “absolutely loved it, so I had a slightly rose-tinted view of the whole thing. So I walked into the kind of prejudice that my mother never met. She was met by a lot of curiosity, but not overt racism”.)

Their strikingly different experiences point to a broader phenomenon. As a rule, modern empires have handled diversity better than nation states. In the latter, parochialism has all too often trumped cosmopolitanism; and prejudice, toleration. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the experience of a black Briton in the Thirties, when Britain was still an empire with at least a smidgen of commitment to ethnic plurality, was altogether different from that of her daughter in the Seventies, when Britain was in the throes of a rabidly intolerant postimperial nationalism. It is the reason why, despite being a Brexiteer, I maintain a theoretical sympathy to supranational projects, even the one that has gone horribly wrong next-door. For it can hardly be denied that Britain’s return to cosmopolitanism, in great part of Europhilic stamp, took the edge off English nationalism.

If Hindu nationalism has succeeded where English nationalism has failed, it is because identity politics has won out in India. Segregation in all its declensions — legal (the long shadow cast by Hastings and the orientalists); electoral (the marriage of votes and violence); social (Modi’s war on miscegenation and mixed neighbourhoods) — has been placed on a pedestal. Contrariwise, in England, a steady universalisation of laws has resulted in the dismantling of the pillars of minority oppression — Catholic emancipation in 1829; decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967; abolition of blasphemy laws in 2008 — all the while steering clear of the kind of identitarian quotas and carve-outs, exemptions and exceptions, that have gained ever greater currency in India. It is no accident that, beyond the crenellated confines of the ivory tower, so few Brits set any store by racial or religious identity politics today. Compare Tommy Robinson’s itsy-bitsy fan base with that of Enoch Powell’s in his prime. Small wonder the far-Right’s brat summer proved to be such a damp squib.

All too often, an admixture of careerism and cynicism prompts them to throw in their lot with the most reactionary causes, which, amplified by the tabloid press, lead to disastrous social consequences. The stakes vary, oscillating between well-heeled prissiness and outright skinhead violence directed against homosexuals and racial minorities. Hollinghurst, of course, is too clever to tax us with straightforward causality. He works through implication and omission. Allied to this Jamesian habit of mind is a very English scepticism of theory.

But theory is one thing, morality another. Hollinghurst’s mannered, swaggering debut unquestionably brims with it. The Swimming-Pool Library is nothing less than an indictment of the moral shortcomings of Britain’s ruling class. Set in 1983, the novel takes place in a world of prelapsarian promiscuity before AIDS permanently consumed the gay scene. Just down from Oxford and in no real need of a job, William Beckwith, a sinewy 20-something aristo, is able to take full advantage of it — “the sex-sharp little circuits of discos and pubs and cottages” — thanks to his grandfather’s fortune, prematurely handed over to him to avoid death duties. His aristocratic ennui is offset by his penchant for predatory sex with subalterns, men “vastly poorer and dimmer than himself — younger, too. I don’t think [Will’s] ever made it with anyone with a degree. It’s forever these raids on the inarticulate.” His is the proprietary lust of the possessing classes. “I must have him” is Will’s refrain, and what he wants, he usually gets.

An encounter with a queer peer, Charles Nantwich, in a public lav soon results in a friendship. Rather taken by Charles and his club, a happily old-fashioned institution full of men of “fantastic seniority”, Will agrees to write his biography. And so, in a pivotal scene, Will lights upon an astonishing find in Charles’s diaries. The poor chap’s life, he learns, had been destroyed by an up-and-coming Tory politician, who whipped up a moral panic over homosexuality after Charles had been caught soliciting. If that isn’t awful enough, it turns out that the person behind it all was in fact Will’s own grandfather. Will’s cheerfully disinhibited gay existence, in other words, had all along been sustained by proceeds from the original sin of gay oppression.

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At the time of its publication, the politics of The Swimming-Pool Library attracted much less comment than did the sex. Naturally enough, readers were rather more taken by its concupiscent protagonist, unencumbered by such quaint notions as consent. Will, who divides his time between clubland and cottaging, pines for young black men: “Oh, the ever-open softness of black lips; and the strange dryness of the knots of his pigtails.” Arthur, of West Indian origin, fits the bill, and lets Will have his way with him: “after a few seconds’ brutal fumbling, [I] fucked him cruelly. He let out little compacted shouts of pain, but I snarled at him to shut up and with fine submission he bit them back.”

As it was, The Swimming-Pool Library was a tamer affair than The Folding Star, Hollinghurst’s answer to Lolita and Death in Venice. Here’s his narrator, Edward Manners, finally having it off with the object of his sexual fantasies, his precocious pupil Luc Altidore, a Flemish teenager, in the novel’s climax: “I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddie doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty… I had a dim sense of protest, postponed as if he wasn’t quite sure.”

Now, in Our Evenings, his latest novel, Hollinghurst bites back the gay sex. Gone, too, is the racial fetishisation of his early works. Reviewers have been quick to detect a note of repentance in the new novel, and The New Yorker, of all places, complained how boringly PC it is. Its narrator is a gay Anglo-Burmese actor; its themes, prejudice and parochialism in postwar British life.

But the contrast between Hollinghurst’s early and late style is overdrawn. True, veiny members “of a dimension” — as the hero of The Line of Beauty calls them with Jamesian portentousness — are out, but then again, his fiction is about gay sex only in the sense that Proust’s À la recherche is about dinner parties. Hollinghurst has said as much himself: “I only chafe at the ‘gay writer’ tag if it’s thought to be what is most or only interesting about what I’m writing. I want it to be part of the foundation of the books, which are actually about all sorts of other things as well — history, class, culture” — and architecture and painting, theatre and opera, love and loss, ephebophilia and gerontophilia, one might add.

Indeed, there are clear political echoes of The Swimming-Pool Library in Our Evenings. The gilded scion Will has his counterpart in Giles, who treats Dave with the same de haut en bas disdain that Will treats his black lover. Dave, 13 when the novel begins, is the son of a single mother — latterly a sapphic dressmaker — and her Burmese beau. As kids, Giles is given to giving Dave Chinese burns and assaulting him at night. And already, there are signs of the brat politician that Giles will become, a Viscount Beckwith après la lettre: a “violently self-important” Tory MP, a consummate little Englander Borisishly bumbling his way up the political ladder. He is (but of course) the architect of Brexit.

Their life chances supply an interesting study in contrasts, as Hollinghurst charts their lives from the Seventies to Covid, counterpointing Giles’s aristocratic philistinism to Dave’s bourgeois earnestness. Biracial, gay, Dave makes do with character parts, ultimately becoming a thespian of some standing. Giles, meanwhile, has a vertiginous ascent.

Yet Giles’s progress from school bully to the bullying beast of Brexit feels a little too on-the-nose, a facile concession to bien-pensant opinion. Hollinghurst has been subtler in the past. It betrays, moreover, a perspective ignorant — or perhaps innocent — of the rich tradition of progressive Euroscepticism in this country, encompassing inter alios Wynne Godley and Tony Benn. To The Times, Hollinghurst has recently pronounced Brexit a “national humiliation”, no less. Yet he is undoubtedly on the money in using it as a shorthand for the recrudescence of racism: hate crimes soared by 41% after the referendum.

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There was a touch of Whiggishness to Hollinghurst’s previous two novels, which seemed to be saying “look how far we have come”. Undeniably true, of course: take, for instance, the long march from decriminalisation in 1967 to gay marriage in 2013. Here, by contrast, Hollinghurst offers a corrective. The dial can just as easily be rolled back by crafty agents provocateurs in politics and the press.

Our Evenings is also reminiscent of The Line of Beauty in that both novels are, after a fashion, lessons in elite reproduction. Dave and Giles study at the same posh school, yet only one of them is able to effortlessly step onto life’s escalator. Dave is only ever an interloper in polite society. The same is true of Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst’s most overtly political Bildungsroman. There, he set out to document “the Thatcher boom years from the inside,” as he later told The Guardian.

Down from Oxford to take a doctorate on Henry James’s style at UCL, Nick is a guest at the Feddens’ in Kensington Park Gardens. Fedden fils is a college crony of his, Fedden père a Tory MP. A petit-bourgeois parvenu among patricians, Nick at first feels welcome in this milieu, but as time wears on, we realise that this in fact is the story of a young man precipitously coming down in the world. Far from being the face of a new Tory tolerance, Gerald Fedden happily throws Nick under the bus to distract from his own financial and sexual improprieties. A “little pansy”, “little ponce,” Gerald’s mates call Nick, and the MP agrees: attaching oneself to a “real family” was “an old homo trick”.

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Nick learns in a hard school of the existence of such a thing as toff solidarity. It’s a coming of age that mirrors his creator’s own. Hollinghurst, the son of an ex-RAF bank manager, grew up in Tory Stroud, before going up to Canford, a public school in Dorset in a repurposed country house. “We were terribly ignorant about anything to do with politics or society or real life. I was unthinkingly conservative. I absorbed conservatism from my parents and assumed that was all one did,” he later said. Magdalen College, Oxford, opened a world of radicalism, much as it did to Dave Win, an unthinking Liberal forced to think through his politics at Oxford.

Hollinghurst’s own progress reveals volumes about the immunity from politics denied to homosexuals, a people more buffeted than most by political interventions throughout modern history. He discovered that “to write about gay life, even if one’s intentions are not militantly political, can have political implications”. In an interview with the Oxon Review, he elaborated on “the Nick Guest paradox”: his protagonists want to assimilate into broader society without having to “follow through the socio-political implications of being gay in any radical fashion”, but political elites in particular, and society at large, will never leave them be. A belle-lettrist by disposition, he never set out to be a political writer (“I’m not a particularly political person”), though became one as a “by-product of something else”: the coming of AIDS and “the antigay moral backlash which ensued in this country, the whole ghastly experience of the Thatcher period”. Ghastly is about right. Her 1987 campaign unabashedly associated Labour with “gay pride” in a bid to discredit her opponents. The following year, Section 28 banned councils and schools from promoting tolerance to homosexuals.

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Unsurprisingly, top-down homophobia has been one of Hollinghurst’s abiding preoccupations. It no doubt helps that elite mischief makes good copy: “I have written about rich or other upper-class people because they are good value. They have more scope for misbehaviour and thoughtlessness,” he said to Robbie Millen of The Times. It’s an eminently Jamesian sentiment. As the Master once observed, “there are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organised”. Unlike his wide-eyed protagonists, however, Hollinghurst is firmly unillusioned about this set: “What I’ve always been interested in is moral weakness.” Viscount Beckwith represents one version of it in The Swimming-Pool Library, through his sordid pandering to Sixties homophobia. He reappears in the Eighties, with a cameo in The Line of Beauty, as “a handsome old saurian of the right enjoying fresh acclaim these days”.

As for Gerald Fedden, that “uxorious bigamist” with photos of both his wife and the prime minister on his desk, he very much embodies the moral weakness of the ruling class of that decade. Hollinghurst sends up with great effect the ludicrous hold, by turns slavish and sexual, Thatcher had over her acolytes. “A foolish Tory MP” finds himself at the centre of the eponymous Sparsholt Affair, a sex scandal involving rent boys in 1967. In the real world, a mere six Tory MPs voted in favour of decriminalisation that year, even as polls showed that 63% of Britons supported the decision. It was as late as 2002 when the first gay Tory MP, Alan Duncan, came out; though there had been many gay Tory MPs since the age of John Macnamara and Chips Channon, that “fleeting flibbertigibbet” (as Hollinghurst called him) who once described Hitler as a “semi-divine creature”.

As we have seen, Our Evenings has rather more to say on elite irresponsibility than elite hypocrisy. Like his previous six novels, it is a bravura performance of empathy and observation, freighted with the kind of high-cultural allusions (Aeschylus and Alma-Tadema, Janáček and Jonson, Palladio and Pevsner) that have won him a cult following but also prevented him from becoming the object of tote-wielding deification of the cortado classes in the manner of a Sally Rooney. And once again, he has proven his chops as a superlative sociologist of the moral weaknesses of our ruling class.

Cumulatively, these incidents reveal more than mere quirks of character. They tell us that behind the façade of technocratic competence — confected largely by the liberal press — is a man utterly out of his depth. Indeed, his chronic indecisiveness, let alone the vestiary vanity that dictates his behaviour, betrays a sensibility rather at odds with the trappings of technocracy. Technocrats typically see themselves as political plumbers, dour managers capable of unsentimentally transcending popular preoccupations in order to push through unpopular, if necessary, policies. Above all, they have a vision, however misguided; take their appalling record in the eurozone or the Third World.

Starmer, it is true, mimics the lexicon of technocrats with remarkable facility, all the trite soundbites about “sound money” and “short-term pain for long-term good”. Versions of these dicta have been repeated ad nauseam, most recently at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week. Yet the fact is that Starmer is no technocrat. He is, rather, a man without a plan, cluelessly blundering and muddling through from one crisis to the next. Lacking a vision for Britain, the “short-term pain” he promises with Calvinist glee can only be a prelude to long-term pain.

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Political incoherence, while damaging socially, can be rewarding individually. Indeed, it has stood Starmer in good stead. Possessed of a cynicism bordering on nihilism, our chameleon was happily reconciled to Osbornism in 2015 before taking a seat on Corbyn’s shadow cabinet only a year later. Two years on, by then already a darling of Islingtonian Europeanism, he led the anti-democratic putsch to reverse the result of the referendum, only to abandon the demand once its real objective — the displacement of the Left, of course, not re-entry into the EU — was achieved in 2019. His ascent to the party leadership followed shortly thereafter, on the strength of retaining the slate of reforms promised in the manifesto of old, including sweeping nationalisation and redistribution. Unsurprisingly, these pledges were swiftly jettisoned in a bid to refashion his party as a cut-price New Labour tribute act.

Adherents of a tradition less susceptible to spin-doctoring would no doubt have been left scratching their heads at Starmer’s seemingly endless capacity for reverse-ferreting. As it is, though, the mavens of self-respecting liberal opinion hardly batted an eyelid. The rare pleas for clarity voiced in the usual quarters of Labourist opinion — “Labour desperately needs to stand for something,” declared the New Statesman in 2021 — were drowned out by the plaudits of pundits praising such concessions to electability.

Much the same was said of Starmer’s bot-like proclamations to the press. We were led to believe that colourless Keir doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem, let alone a discerning literary taste. As a child, he had no fears, no phobias, the Guardian reported. “He doesn’t know what he dreamed last night — or ever: ‘I don’t dream.’” In the end, though, his carefully crafted conventionality counted for little. With fewer votes than Corbyn received in 2017 and 2019, Starmer was able to seize power only thanks to the distorting effect of the simple plurality system.

Having won, Starmer nevertheless finds himself at a loss. He has achieved power, but he has no idea what to do with it. There will be no more austerity, we are told, but we have every reason to believe otherwise. Committed, like Procrustes, to shortening the limbs of the state to fit the size of their budgetary bed, Starmer and Rachel Reeves have effectively set about outlawing growth. The first casualty, before the election, was the £28 billion “green prosperity” plan, scrapped in favour of a paltry £7 billion National Wealth Fund, literal peanuts compared to, say, Biden’s $369 billion climate package to reboot growth. Then, after the election, our austeritarian girlboss doubled down, doing for the £1.7 billion Stonehenge tunnel and slashing winter fuel payments for pensioners to the tune of £1.5 billion. All this, ostensibly, to help fill the £22 billion “black hole” that Reeves discovered on taking office — almost half of it in fact of her own making; Labour signed off on a £9.4 billion wage settlement with, among others, striking junior doctors and train drivers. Meanwhile, Labour has also committed to enforce additional spending cuts to the tune of £20 billion every year with the aim of shrinking public debt in year five of Starmer’s Labour.

Like a rope fetishist, then, Reeves has tightly bound the British economy. There can be no room for growth in such a circumscribed setup, the Financial Times and Institute for Fiscal Studies have independently warned. The figures speak volumes about the priorities of Starmer’s Labour. Capital investment, and therefore growth, have been sacrificed on the altar of wage expenditure for what has become a tiny aristocracy of Labour, while the Deliverooisation of the rest of the working class proceeds apace. On these benighted and un-unionised sections, austerity and casualisation can agreeably be imposed with no great loss to the carpetbagging Labour MPs of rentier, managerial and lobbyist backgrounds.

The upshot will be a return to Osbornite austerity after the brief one-nation Tory interlude of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Reeves denies this, even as she continues to subscribe to a heterodoxy no more dubious than extispicy, divination by means of inspecting animal entrails. “To my mum,” she says, “every penny mattered, and the basic test for whoever is Chancellor is to bring that attitude to our public finances.” Now, the cheese-paring mindset may have some value in the kitchen; but as every economist worth his salt has pointed out, it is of no use whatsoever in running the 6th-largest economy of the world. “Hard choices,” as she has it, in practice mean underinvestment in infrastructure, and accordingly low productivity and no growth, which in turns means less tax revenue and more spending cuts. It’s a vicious cycle. We know this not only through the sophistication of economic theory, but through historical experience.

Time was when Britain was the most productive nation in the world. These days, however, peer countries, even strike-ridden France, are on average 15% more productive. Post-communist Poland is set to overtake Britain on this metric by 2030. The contrast with our neighbours across the Channel, a recent policy paper persuasively argues, is painfully instructive. There, in France, massive investment in housing, infrastructure, and energy have sustained greater productivity even as French workers work fewer hours and take longer vacations, as anyone who has visited Paris in August knows. With roughly the same population, France has 38 million homes to Britain’s 30 million, with the result that the French enjoy lower rents and mortgages. Thanks to investments in clean energy, especially nuclear power, electricity is half as cheap as in Britain. France has opened 1,740 miles of high-speed rail since 1980; Britain, 67 miles. As with rail, so with roads: France has 12,000 kilometres of motorways; Britain, 4,000. Since 1945, metropolitan Paris has trebled in size; London is only a few % larger. Britain holds the dubious distinction of having Europe’s largest city without mass transit: Leeds. Chronic underinvestment, far below the OECD average, is to blame for all of this.

The upshot has been plain to see. When Starmer was sworn in, he took over a country in which 4 million households were in debt over utility bills, 7 million were forgoing food, heat, toiletries to make ends meet. The penny-pinchers at the Treasury could take pride in running the cheapest health service in the advanced capitalist world: the EU14 spent 21% more per capita on healthcare in the 2010s. The collateral damage, however, was world-leading cancer mortality rates, and the lowest number of MRI and CT scanners in the developed world. No doubt Starmer’s majority was augmented by the fact that 8% of Britons were awaiting an NHS procedure at the time of the election; or that real wages have flatlined, by some measures even fallen, since 2008.

Had there been no Osbornite austerity, and had capricious bureaucrats likewise not denied practically every investment proposal emanating from the private sector, it is likely — following the 1979-2008 trend line — that Britain would be some 25% more productive today. This, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows, would have translated into a GDP per capita of £41,800 instead of £33,500, producing tax revenues of £1.28 billion instead £1.03 billion, with the result that our annual deficit of £85 billion in these years would have instead been an annual surplus of £170 billion.

It follows that in fetishising the fiscal straitjacket, Osborne, and by extension Starmer and Reeves, have in fact got it backwards. It was tax-and-spend investment that deflated the debt from 250% to 20% of GDP from the late-Forties to the early-Nineties; and it was the imposition of austerity and effective banning of investment that has now inflated it to 100%.

There was a time when politicos understood this. In the post-war period, they could be sanguine about high debt, knowing that they were committed to growing the pie, and assured by Keynes’s maxim: “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” These days, Reeves and her ilk are more likely to pull gargoyle faces at the very thought: “If we can’t afford it, we can’t do it,” she has declared.

Somehow foreign policy is exempt from these strictures. Starmer has promised Zelensky £3 billion a year “for as long as it takes”, a strong disincentive, if any, to diplomatic settlement in Donbas. His foreign secretary, meanwhile, has outlined his grim vision of “progressive realism” in the pages of Foreign Affairs, essentially a return to military power projection and democracy promotion at taxpayers’ expense, topped up with an unswerving commitment to Nato expansion.

Starmer, furthermore, is unruffled by the prospect of creating a £13 billion hole in public finances by bringing down legal migration — bad news for Britons a touch long in the tooth, who depend on bright young things coming from abroad to pay into their pension pots. As we have seen, Starmer is coming after the elderly; after the winter fuel subsidy, the triple-locked pension might be next. More pressing for our ruler is the £3 billion spent on housing the 30,000-odd refugees (0.05% of the national population) arriving annually in small boats.

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To save us from the indignity of having to facilitate the rapid assimilation of Syrian seamstresses and Afghan architects into the national populace, Starmer strolled about the Villa Doria Pamphili taking lessons from the Italian prime minister. No doubt reminding her that he is a figlio di un attrezzista, he praised at length the “remarkable progress” Giorgia Meloni had made in tackling refugees — which includes impounding vessels and curbing the funding of humanitarian groups who rescue migrants from drowning at sea, not to mention forging a deal with a Tunisian despot accused of torturing and dumping refugees on the Libyan border without food and shelter. Britain, Starmer says, has a lot to “learn” from Italy’s handling of refugees. One wonders if these are the practices he had in mind when he once declared that “the best of British values are also the best of Christian values”.

Then again, morality has never been at the heart of Starmer’s pitch. Fiscal prudence has. Truth be told, however, it’s really much ado about nothing. Based on the paltry figures I have already mentioned, unsuspecting readers might be forgiven for thinking that the Treasury has only a few billion lying about to toy with. The fact is that state spending exceeds £1 trillion. And a lot can be done with that sum, as Starmer himself sometimes recognises. Offsetting the doom and gloom that has been the core of his messaging, he has on occasion gestured towards ambition, as in his pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the course of his term. Good news, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It will take a sea change in culture to combat council nimbyism and rentier interest. Michael Gove, that Whig interloper in the Tory party, discovered this the hard way when he attempted leasehold and eviction reforms. Today, 85 landlords sit in the Commons, 44 of them Labour’s, including Jas Athwal, the current parliament’s biggest slumlord with 15 mouldy and ant-infested rental properties to his name. It is likewise too early to tell what Labour’s sugar daddies like Lord Alli want from Starmer in return for indulging his penchant for paid-for pants.

At any event, reforming ambition doesn’t come naturally to self-respecting sensible centrists like Starmer. When it comes to fixing Britain, he declared at the Liverpool party conference, “there are no easy answers”. But there are. For one thing, a one-off, 1% wealth tax on millionaires, paid annually for five years, would raise a whopping £260 billion without punishing pensioners. For another, the Treasury could stop paying interest on the reserve balances of commercial banks, a scandalous subsidy to the tune of £35 billion a year. Labour would be saved from the unedifying spectacle of haggling over trifles like skint hippies in a Levantine flea market. Failing bold moves like these, it is hard not to come away with the impression that Starmer and his cronies are not serious people.

The reality is that, excepting a few enclaves, crackpot identity politics is as alien to this sceptred isle as chlorinated chicken. We’ve never had much use of such foreign imports to be rude to our compatriots. For we have our own very English system of discrimination, and it is called the class system — at times, subtly registered through the policing of accents; at others, less subtly so, as when Thatcher brought out the blowtorches to discipline the miners.

Seen in the longue durée, there was only a brief mid-century blip — Enoch Powell’s Britain — when many abandoned class-thinking and became race-mad, in no small part on account of the identity crisis provoked by the shrinking of the British Empire into the British nation. This had damaging consequences: two generations without black and brown representation in the Commons (not a single person of colour was elected between 1929 and 1987); scores of race riots and hate crimes; and a general aura of unpleasantness and violence, captured with brio in This is England.

Yet there have undeniably been some stabs at course correction in the new millennium. Race is mostly passé. Class is back. It’s a point that Tommy Robinson’s near-namesake Tomiwa Owolade made in a compelling polemic published last year, the gist of which is conveyed by its title: This is not America. These days, there isn’t much of a racial gap to speak of. In Britain, blacks earn 6% less an hour than whites (in the US, 22% less), even outliving the latter (in the US, they die four years earlier on average). The wage gap increases to 13% between Caribbean and white men, and to 42% between Bangladeshi and white men; yet Indian men make 13% more than white men. Class more convincingly accounts for these disparities than race, Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities being overwhelmingly working class. Indian and Nigerian migration, by contrast, tends to be more middle-class.

Therein lies the rub for the hammered herberts who howl “Ingerland” at far-Right rallies in SW1, appealing to a misplaced sense of racial solidarity. For no such thing exists. Their white bourgeois brethren, in fact, see them as an atavistic bunch of yahoos and yobs, primitives from another planet. Ironically, the only people likely to sympathise with their lot are their dark-skinned working-class neighbours, the very migrants they detest.

All of this Tommy Robinson learned in a hard school earlier this month, when, from his Cypriot resort, he exhorted his million followers on X to “show your support” for the “real” England, after the stabbing of three children at a dance class in Southport by an embittered Taylor Swift critic apparently called “Ali al-Shakati”, supposedly a former small-boat passenger. As it was, that the attacker was born in Cardiff to Rwandan immigrants didn’t deter the dregs that drool at the dicta of Robinson from rampaging through the Midlands and the North, torching mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. The extent of public support for the Robinsonistas was duly revealed a week later, when racist protestors were vastly outnumbered by antiracist counter-protestors across the country. Robinson was shown his station.

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Despite their numerical insignificance, though, there’s no denying that the Robinsonistas represent a Powellite neuralgia that hasn’t entirely died out in Britain. Most Brits have moved on, seeing race as a non-issue, as relevant to the business of friendship and marriage as handedness. Yet a tiny section has clung to its empty certitudes. Suffice to say it pays to inquire into this milieu, its penchants and thought-world, which is why I laboured through Robinson’s literary productions, a dud triptych of semi-literate reflections on race relations.

The facts of his life are well-established, and covered in extenso in his first memoir, Enemy of the State, which appeared in 2016. Né Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a name that conjured up images of bespectacled hippiedom, our antihero very early on took up a rougher nom de guerre for much the same reasons, it seems, that Herr Schicklgruber preferred not to go by that handle. The original Tommy Robinson was a Luton lout, a football hooligan of some prominence in such circles. The one born in 1982 qualified as an aircraft engineer, but then derailed his career for the faux pas of kicking a police officer — intervening to prevent Robinson from attacking his missus — in the head. “For that one kick, I spent five months in jail.”

Thereafter, Robinson set up as a plumber, moonlighting as a football hooligan boss. He turned to politics in 2004, joining the BNP in response to British Muslims allegedly celebrating 9/11. Still, he first became aware of “racial trouble” at a much younger age. Aged 13, he had discerned a “growing gang mentality among the Muslim kids”. In Enemy, he paints a tenebrous picture of Luton — drugs; knives; rapes — as something of a Caracas on the Lea. This he pins exclusively down to the character of Islam, much as one would, I suppose, blame Catholicism for the curse of the Colombian drug cartels.

But he misses the elephant in the room. As the Luton-born, working-class academic Thomas Peak has recently pointed out, if Robinson’s Muslim classmates in Eighties Luton appeared less “integrated”, it was at least partly because they sought safety in numbers after hooligans destroyed their neighbourhood following a football match; the 1985 Luton riot was one of the most egregious of that decade. Despite that episode, Peak recalls a fairly post-racial youth, kids of all colours having a laugh together at the local boxing club and Luton Carnival.

Slow on the uptake, Robinson left the BNP after belatedly discovering that it was a racist outfit. His black friends — who seem to exist only to point to his own reserves of tolerance — were made to wait at the door, since membership was reserved for whites. Five years later, he established a tanning salon and the English Defence League, the latter after having recoiled in horror at Muslim protestors holding up such heretical messages as “butchers of Basra”, as if one had to be a rabid Islamist to oppose Blair’s war, which pointlessly dispatched countless Brits and Iraqi civilians to a premature grave.

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For brawling, then breaching bail conditions, Robinson was sent to prison in 2011. HMP Bedford was full of surprises. “A problem more and more these days,” he incredulously writes, “is that you just don’t know who the Muslims are. Everyone’s dressed the same, and it isn’t just Asians who are Muslims. So blacks, whites, mixed race… anyone and everyone can be a Muslim.” The converts riled him up. “This white geezer McDonald said, ‘I’m fucking Muslim bruv’. And the way he said it, well, that was it. We ended up fighting across the servery and I battered him.” Later, Robinson went on a hunger strike because — so he claims — he was being fed halal meat.

In 2013, our recidivist found himself behind bars again, this time for using a friend’s passport to circumvent a travel ban in order to attend an Islamophobic symposium in the US. Once again, in another telenovela-ish turn, he recanted, making a big show of leaving the EDL and breaking naan with Mo Ansar, the disgraced Lloyds Bank employee turned soi-disant voice of British Islam (one of those dodgy “community leaders”, whatever they are) who helped “reform” Robinson. Profiled in the Telegraph, Ansar was described thus:

“He speaks the language of tolerance and moderation, yet he refuses to condemn the chopping off of hands for theft in Islamic states or homophobia… He has creatively, and quite dramatically, sexed up his professional experience, including falsely claiming to be a lawyer… He runs a sock-puppet Twitter account which he uses to defend himself and attack perceived rivals.”

Incredibly, Robinson warmed to him — “if every Muslim was like you there would be no problem” — even if later in his memoirs, he struck a less charitable note: “Mo was very much a cartoon character, a muppet Muslim.” At all events, it seems that the clincher for leaving the EDL was an £8,000 cheque paid by the think-tank Quilliam, which in return took credit for Robinson’s deradicalisation. But the good character shtick didn’t last long. Yet another prison sentence came hard on the heels of When Tommy Met Mo — the documentary about the encounter — and Tommy wound up in jail once again, this time for mortgage fraud.

Some of the stuff in Enemy of the State is admittedly rather tame. In his criticisms of the niqab, for instance, he appears to have the making of a clubbable French Lefty: “at least the French had the courage to ban the face veil.” But time and again, his racial idée fixe rears its ugly head: the “ethnic cleansing” of Luton by brown Muslims, who apparently have an innate fondness for “grooming gangs”. The facts, of course, tell a different story. As the Home Office concluded in 2020, “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white”. Across Britain, race appears tells us little. But then again, nor does economic deprivation, there being wide variation in similar councils. Sometimes statistics can be illuminating, and sometimes they aren’t. This is a case of the latter.

The most crippling defect in Robinson’s oeuvre is unquestionably his ethnicisation of class, as if the “white” in “white working class” means anything, as if him and Helena Bonham Carter might just have more in common than he does with some thick-necked Muslim bruiser he once shared a cell with. There are passages where he almost gets it, as when he wryly observes that the working classes, irrespective of hue, are typically appreciated only when they dig trenches and die en masse “on the orders of the snooty and superior upper classes”. But then he veers off on a tangent, whingeing about the white working class being “racially victimised” in Britain. Even so, he’s sanguine about the prospects of a cross-class white coalition. His job, he thinks, is to convince “middle-class Englishmen and women to say enough’s enough”. But there are some real howlers in his understanding of class markers — “middle-class tweedies” are apparently “too busy catching up on the latest Sky Atlantic box set” — which makes one suspect whether he’s the right messenger for his audience.

Yet one can see why Robinson might be squeamish about using the c-word, or even “working class” for that matter, without qualifying adjectives. This is because, economically speaking, he has seceded from it. Soon after Enemy came a lucrative gig with the Canadian website Rebel Media. Practically a sinecure, he was paid £8,000 a month for his canny ability to materialise, mirage-like, camera in hand, at the opportune moment when Islamists struck Britain. All the same, he scarcely lasted a year in that job, because he was raking in far greater sums through donations to justify having a boss. These days, he’s toying with the idea of taking up Spanish residency to evade an HMRC investigation; along with two cronies — his ex-wife Jenna Vowles and Man Friday Adam Geary — Robinson owes the state something like £800,000 in unpaid taxes.

It was perhaps only natural, then, in the time-honoured tradition of the gentleman amateur, for the newly minted man of independent means to aspire to the scholarly vocation. Accordingly, Robinson donned his skull cap and set to work on his second opuscule. A departure from his autobiographical obsessions, Mohammed’s Koran, co-authored with the grooming-gang obsessive Peter McLoughlin in 2017 and bearing the lurid subtitle “Why Muslims Kill for Islam”, is a work of Koranic exegesis. But it is not a tome intended for Muslims, we are told at the outset: “If you are a Muslim, please put this book down. We do not wish you to become a killer because this book leads you to understand the doctrines and history of Islam more thoroughly.”

Pitched as a corrective to the thought-world of the “educated” elite, Mohammed’s Koran tells us that peaceful Muslims exist, to be sure, but they’ve got it all wrong. They’ve misunderstood their faith. The rest of the book is taken up with the reordering of chapters of the Koran. The game here is that old parlour game of the Muslim clerical classes: naskh, or the doctrine of abrogation, allowing for the repeal of Koranic verses contradicted by later passages to iron out inconsistencies. By rearranging the text like a clerical DJ, Robinson is able to place all the peaceful bits in the book fairly early on, and so “abrogate” them in favour of the later, violent bits. There you have it: a most vile, violent faith. It’s desperate, puerile stuff.

The exegetical turn proved short-lived. Within weeks, Robinson was back on his laptop, counselling the terrorist Darren Osborne, who went on to drive a van into a Muslim crowd in Finsbury Park, killing one and injuring 11. “I’m not justifying it,” Robinson later wrote on Twitter, adding with a touch of apophasis that “the mosque where the attack happened tonight has a long history of creating terrorists”. Two years later, in 2019, our jailbird did time yet again, for contempt of court, after which he appealed for asylum in the US on InfoWars, a website that vends conspiracy theories and dietary supplements: “I beg Donald Trump, I beg the American government, to look at my case,” he said on air. Sadly for him, this cut no ice with his ochre overlord. He had to stay content in his country pile in Greater Manchester, complete with a hot tub in the garden and a TV set above his bathtub.

A fool and his money are soon parted, however, and Robinson had to pay £100,000, plus legal costs to the tune of £1.5 million, for libelling 15-year-old refugee Jamal Hijazi, who was assaulted by far-Right thugs and forced to relocate after Robinson falsely accused him of attacking “young English girls”. Even Robinson was forced to concede that he had cancelled the kid on the strength of faulty intel: “I have been completely had, how embarrassing man.” He declared bankruptcy soon after, busying himself by stalking an Indy journalist and her partner for which he received a five-year stalking protection order, and swearing at a taxi driver in Bologna: “little paki who drives a car… I’m going to punch you in the head, kick you in the face, because I am the king of the whole Islam race [sic].”

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Like a dog that returns to its vomit, Robinson returned to the Hijazi affair in his third book, Silenced, a tedious reprisal of who said what to whom about who. Telegraphically put, a précis could read thus: “I was right. The courts were wrong.”

For all his energetic antics and massive platform – Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, the Today programme, Oxford Union, BBC, a Channel 4 documentary, all supplied by a guilt-ridden bien-pensant commentariat questing for earthy authenticity — it is cheering to note that only a miniscule minority of souls have fallen for Tommy Robinson’s grift. In 2019, he polled a mere 2.2% when he ran for MEP. When Gerard Batten brought him into the Brezhnevite bureaucracy of Ukip as “grooming gang advisor”, Farage and seven other MEPs promptly resigned, fearing reputational damage. These are, after all, rather different traditions: Ukip’s origins lie in a fairly conventional postwar Euroscepticism, whereas Robinson’s roots are in the interwar fascism of Oswald Mosley’s kind, now beyond the pale.

Robinson, in short, is an anachronism. There is no existential struggle between white and coloured Britain. Rather, what we have on our hands is an existential struggle between white and Muslim fundamentalists, both sides as thick as mince, and, after a fashion, two sides of the same coin. It is no accident, then, that Robinson has recently praised Muslim conservatives for being “strong in principle” and joined them in opposing the teaching of tolerance to sexual minorities in schools. “Homosexuality is a heinous horrible thing,” a conservative Muslim told the press; “it’s not acceptable in Islam.” Robinson’s response: “I stand with the Muslim parents.” A plague o’ both your houses.

That’s the vibe conveyed by Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, the hero of Ivan Goncharov’s second novel, published in 1859. He embodies that mid-19th century Russian ideal type — common enough in Turgenev and Pushkin — whom we would do well to emulate: the “superfluous man”. He is an “incorrigible, carefree idler”, his pal Penkin observes, but that’s an understatement.

Oblomov is paralysed by indolence. His achievement, in the first 50 pages, is to negotiate a relocation from his bed to his chair. He isn’t handicapped, Goncharov explains: “Lying down was not for Oblomov a necessity, as it is for a sick man; or a matter of chance, as it is for a tired man; or a pleasure, as it is for a lazy man: it was his normal condition.” Oblomov spends much of the novel in a state of near-permanent recumbency, wearing “an expression of serene unconcern, thoughts promenading freely all over his face”, his presence adding nothing to society, any more than detracting from it.

Oblomov, we learn, was once a clerk before he decided that working wasn’t worth the trouble. “In his opinion, life was divided into two halves: one consisted of work and boredom — those words were synonymous for him — and the other of rest and quiet enjoyment.” Accordingly, he decided to commit himself to a life of literary lethargy. He could afford to. With 350 serfs to his name, he has a modest rentier income that frees him from the indignities of work. His overseers swindle him, but he can’t be arsed to put in an appearance in distant Oblomovka, “on the borders of Asia”. Nor can he be bothered to stay au courant with the news. The morning papers bore him. So, too, does high society. He can’t stand the highfalutin eggheads at the Mussinskys’ salon, where they discuss da Vinci and the Venetian School: “Pedants. How boring!”

Oblomov was always a bit of a philistine. At school, “he was quite satisfied with what was written in his notebook and showed no tiresome curiosity when he failed to understand all that he heard”. So it was that, on reaching adulthood, Oblomov withdrew from society, spending his days like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, that inveterate slacker, though in the Russian’s case, his chosen uniform is a capacious oriental dressing-gown rather than a bath-robe, and he doesn’t reside alone in his bachelor pad but has a cantankerous Gogolesque manservant in tow. The two of them bicker like a married couple. Oblomov scolds Zakhar for his appetite: “Are you a cow that you have munched so much greenstuff?” The servant, in turn, faults him for his profligacy with glassware: why can’t the master imbibe directly from the decanter?

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The foil to Oblomov is his dour German workaholic schoolmate, Andrey Stolz, a votary of the Protestant work ethic. Stolz laments Oblomov’s laziness: “What do you do? You just roll up and lie about like a piece of dough.” Much of the book is taken up with Stolz’s efforts to make a dull and dutiful German out of the lazy Russian. Needless to say, Stolz fails to improve Oblomov. At first, though, he succeeds in getting our slothful hero to hook up with Olga, and for a minute, Oblomov becomes a party animal, hopping from one soirée to the next. But it doesn’t last. His laziness returns, as it dawns upon him that “intimacy with a woman involves a great deal of trouble”, all the more with those high-maintenance “pale, melancholy maidens”, the kind that make you suffer “tormenting days and iniquitous nights”.

He breaks off the engagement with Olga, who proceeds to tie the knot with Stolz in Crimea. Meanwhile, two artful cadgers make Oblomov part with his fortune. The imperturbable Oblomov, however, can scarcely be bothered by such mundanities. He knows he’s coming down in the world, and he has stoically made peace with his station. Towards the end of the book, he moves in with Agafya Matveyevna, his old childminder. She takes care of him, just as she had when he was a plump putto of seven years.

Childhood, freighted with associations of innocence and simplicity, was a 19th-century invention, and Oblomov, a child of that century, was unsurprisingly obsessed with recovering it. In a lyrical chapter about his pastoral upbringing, titled “Oblomov’s Dream” and published a year earlier as a short story, Oblomov describes his tranquil youth, when “troubles flew past him like birds”. It’s a state of mind he clings onto until his affliction — Oblomovitis — kills him. And so Oblomov dies, just as he lived, in blissful apathy.

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In lesser hands, Oblomov would have been a morality tale, a warning against idleness written in the run-up to the abolition of serfdom in 1861; this was a period of flux when “superfluous man” acquired a whole new meaning in landowner circles. Yet it is clear from his treatment that Goncharov’s sympathies lie with the protagonist of his roman à thèse. Goncharov himself was something of an Oblomov. Not exactly a gentleman amateur — he was a bureaucrat in St Petersburg — he was nevertheless an unhurried writer. He left behind only three novels. Oblomov was workshopped in his head for some 13 years, before he rapidly wrote it up at a spa in Marienbad. Like his titular character, Goncharov never married the love of his life, shacking up instead with the widow of his manservant to whom he left his estate.

Oblomov was written in reaction to the sentiments of the age. In fiction, the desultory everyman had triumphed over the Romantic of old. Dostoevsky was all the rage. In politics, there was a growing sense that Tsarist Russia had been left behind. Some levelling up was needed, to which end the proles were expected to make some sacrifices. Hard work, patriotism and austerity were the insufferable watchwords of the day. Goncharov had had enough. Oblomov was his stab at ripping this consensus to shreds. If Russians could be infected with a heavy dose of Oblomovitis, and so made to prize poetry and disdain drudgery, then all the better.

The book was like a brick lobbed at the pensée unique. A small minority immediately panegyrised it as an instant classic. Tolstoy, for one, wrote that he was “in raptures over Oblomov”. The majority, though, felt otherwise. The same year it was published, the literary critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov turned its languorous hero into a term of abuse. His essay “What is Oblomovism?” concluded that was the ailment plaguing Russia’s ancien régime. It was this sense that Lenin inveighed against the Oblomovs of the Twenties, “always lolling on their beds”. The battle lines were drawn. The presiding conflict of rest of the century was the existential struggle between Oblomov and Stakhanov, that mirthless miner who set a world record for mining some 200 tonnes of coal in single shift, for which he became a Soviet celebrity, gracing the cover of Time magazine to boot.

These days, in Britain, our latest ruler has taken up the cudgels against Oblomovism. Indeed, Starmerism is really just Stakhanovism by another name. A rather plodding Stakhanovite himself, Sir Keir wrote a 12,000-word manifesto of sorts in 2021, a blueprint for his Labour, the gist of which was the need to “put hard-working families first”. Since then, along with his papa’s métier, it has become one of those characteristically vacuous utterances that he parrots ad nauseam. If Starmer ever gets around to putting up his own version of the EdStone, I wager that “hard work” would be right up there.

Starmer and Rachel Reeves present their war on the scrounging Oblomovism of the lumpenproletariat and lumpenpatriciate as Leftist common sense. In truth, it is anything but. It’s actually an aristocratic worldview masquerading as a proletarian one. It was always the upper classes who thought it absurd that the lower sort should have anything resembling free time, time, that is, to be up to no good. To them, the layabouts were loiterers and loafers to a man, given to boozing and wife-beating, ball games and Betfred. The great achievement of the Left, of trade unionism in particular, was to yank them away from the clutches of Dickensian miserabilism. That was the point of capping the workweek, abolishing child labour and legislating a minimum wage. Even in Stakhanov’s Soviet Union, one joined a trade union above all to enjoy its perks: spas, saunas and vacations in Black Sea dachas.

Pace Starmer, then, the Left is not in the business of ennobling work but enabling leisure. His rhetoric, in fact, mirrors that of the Right, recalling David Cameron’s obsession with “hardworking families”. Starmer would do better to take a page instead from John McDonnell, who, in the expectant days of Corbynism, received unlikely praise in The Spectator — from Oblomov’s heir and editor of The Idler, Tom Hodgkinson — for making the case for a 32-hour week, on the strength of the sensible proposition that we “work to live, not live to work”.

We can all be Oblomovs. At first blush, of course, Oblomovism appears to be the luxury that can be afforded only by the few, not the many. Oblomov was a rentier. So, too, was Seneca, that Oblomov avant la lettre, who preached the gospel of otium, a sense of leisure grounded on a commitment to the high literary life, even as he ran the Wonga of his day. Seneca was a loan shark, whose predatory ways prompted Boudica’s anti-capitalist revolt in 60 CE. But you don’t need pots of money to be a cut-price Oblomov. A great many Zoomers and Millennials have discovered a way of sustaining a sybaritic existence on the cheap: quiet quitting. This is not the same as quitting proper, which is to say withdrawing from the workforce. Rather, it is to treat one’s job as no more than a sinecure, doing no more than the bare minimum to hold on to one’s perch.

Quiet quitting created quite the stir during the pandemic, though it’s been around for a while. Across La Manche, in 2004, the economist Corinne Maier published what was effectively a call to arms for quiet quitters. In Bonjour paresse — the translated title, Hello Laziness, loses the pun — she calls time on corporate culture, its penchant for fancy dress, for ritualised hierarchy and dissembling jargon. “It’s in your best interest to work as little as possible,” she concludes, instead of chasing that “ever-elusive little bonus”. That’s what she does at EDF, the state electricity supplier that made her book a bestseller when it subjected her to a disciplinary hearing. She exhorts her readers to “follow my example, ye small-time yuppies and wage slaves, ye wretched of the service sector, brothers and sisters led by the nose by dreary, servile little bosses and forced to dress like puppets all week long and to waste time in useless meetings and bogus seminars.”

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Many have followed in her Oblomovian footsteps since the pandemic hit, aided by the recognition that work has ceased to pay as it once did. Holding back on luxury purchases, one avocado at a time, does nothing to alter the fact that in London, where I live, homes are worth 12 times the average annual wage; half a century ago, it was only three times. If “work hard, play hard” was the credo of those who entered employment at the turn of the millennium, nowadays it is dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing.

Not the quiet quitting types, many young refuseniks have quit rather loudly. The upshot was the Great Resignation of the pandemic, as some four million Americans and just as many Europeans cocked a snook at proper employment. Some sought refuge in suburban self-employment, others in premature retirement. They also did a great service to those in the workforce, as wages spiralled upward thanks to reduced labour supply. For the first time since the Seventies, capital suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of labour. The conceit of Ayn Rand’s reactionary novel Atlas Shrugged, in which the billionaires go on strike to prove their indispensability, was turned on its head.

As in the West, so in the East. In China, the Tang Ping — lying flat — movement caught on, as young men and women got off the hamster wheel. Its Oblomovian logic was spelt out by Luo Huazhong, a 26-year-old blogger: “I can live like Diogenes and sleep inside a wooden bucket, enjoying sunshine. I can live like Heraclitus in a cave. Lying down is my philosophical movement. Only through lying flat can humans become the measure of all things.” In a culture where 2,200 hours of work every year is the norm — as against 1,600 in Britain and under 1,400 in Germany — the attractions of lying flat are obvious. Accordingly, many have left the heaving metropolises of the coast for the Himalayan courtyard homes of Yunnan. The movement has driven Xi Jinping mad. His avuncular counsel to “eat bitterness” for the sake of the country’s future, of course, cuts no ice with the young.

Mechanisation and Artificial Intelligence have taken the wind out of the sails of Stakhanovism, Starmerism and Xi Jinping Thought. In the Thirties, Keynes predicted that 100 years on — today — people would have to work no more than 15 hours a week. That this hasn’t come to pass, the anthropologist David Graeber argued, is because we have created “bullshit jobs”. Encompassing HR and PR, not to mention some of the more recondite acronyms, we have a Red Army-sized militia of middle-management flunkies and box-tickers. Put in place a universal basic income and liberate the lot of them from their superfluous jobs. Make them happy superfluous men à la Oblomov.

One suspects she has still not got around to plodding through DeLillo’s Underworld. What a shame, you might say, but rest assured that in her case, it was a sensible choice. For the past 30 years or so, perhaps more so than any other denizen of her class, Roy has ventriloquised the rage of the rabble. What’s more, hers has been an admirably dependable dissidence, all the more welcome in a landscape where liberals such as the columnists Ashutosh Varshney and Pratap Bhanu Mehta turn coat at the drop of a hat; both have since returned to their original anti-Hindu nationalist positions, the latter only after he was hoisted with his own petard when Hindu nationalists forced his resignation from Ashoka University. Roy, by contrast, has been a paragon of clarity, nothing short of a national treasure. ¡No pasarán! has been her motto, and it has largely served her well.

Until now. Smarting from his recent humbling at the polls, India’s Hindu nationalist ruler Narendra Modi has decided to lash out at his long-standing critics. Roy, it seems, is enemy number one. A speech she made in 2010 has been strenuously unearthed, on the strength of which she has been charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which permits detention without trial. Accordingly, Delhi’s top mandarin has given the city police the green light to prosecute Roy. Will she be arrested? We don’t know yet. What is clear, though, is that the celebrations by liberals following the election have been premature. So long as Modi is in power, his reduced majority notwithstanding, the war on free speech and religious minorities will continue.

Roy’s small-minded critics can tar her with the brush of “anti-Indian” sentiment all they like, but, as she has time and again made clear, it is a higher nationalism that she tenaciously answers to. Indeed, there can be no greater act of patriotism than to point to the enormities in one’s own land. Lesser mortals, of course, would much prefer to sweep injustices under the carpet.

Roy’s cardinal sin, it appears, was to argue that “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India”, a self-evident truth to any right-thinking person. A third of the majority-Muslim region is, in fact, directly administered by Pakistan. As for the part that falls in India, it has alternated between military, presidential, and scarcely democratic rule; in other words, Kashmiris have been denied the free and fair representation accorded to their brethren in the Hindi belt. To all intents and purposes, Delhi’s rulers have treated the place as an internal colony, subjecting its people to the strappado, pellet guns, internet blackouts, and — until 2019 — even different laws. But in stating the obvious, Roy has been consigned by both of India’s main parties, the press and the bien-pensant bourgeoisie to that circle of hell reserved — in her words — for “hysterical, lying, anti-national harridans”.

Her critical perspective, one surmises, owes to her intellectual formation. Born in Shillong in India’s forested and tribal northeastern enclave — a world away from the Hindi heartland — Roy perforce could not partake in the democratic self-congratulation of the country’s ruling class. This was a land — in nationalist lexicon — infested with insurgencies. The governance of these areas was for long given over to Delhi’s emissaries, typically paramilitary outfits operating a shoot-on-sight policy.

Then there is Roy’s Jacobite Syrian heritage, something her Hindu nationalist critics never fail to mention. When they call her Suzanna Arundhati Roy — her full name — it’s a dog whistle everyone can hear. As a contemptible Christian, the insinuation goes, she has it in for India. Roy, however, has never been an uncritical admirer of the faith. She has followed in the footsteps of her feminist mother, Mary Roy, who used to be a name to reckon with in the Eighties, when she successfully campaigned to institute equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women, hitherto denied their fair share.

Thereafter, Roy grew up between Kerala’s backwaters and the hilly Nilgiris, both pastoral arcadias that nurtured an interest in conservation, before going up to the School of Planning and Architecture, where she read the latter and met her beau, Gerard da Cunha. The two spent the rest of their university years quite literally slumming it in a nearby slum, not long after she became estranged from her family; “they pretended to be married in deference to the slum’s conservative mores,” the New York Times explains.

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A second relationship accompanied a turn to the cinema. This was a productive period for Roy, who played a “tribal bimbo” in Massey Sahib and wrote the screenplay for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, both directed by her husband Pradip Krishen. Fame and notoriety followed in 1994, when she took the director Shekhar Kapur to task for depicting the rape of Phoolan Devi, a Robin Hoodesque outlaw turned lawmaker, in Bandit Queen. “You’ve turned India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous rape victim,” and without her consent at that, wrote Roy.

Her breakout year was 1997. It was, in a sense, India’s breakout year too. The country celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence amid serious stocktaking. Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things, for which she received a £500,000 advance, no doubt profited in some small measure from its propitious timing — Elizabeth Windsor was visiting India when Roy won the Booker, and the British press was gripped by a sense of patrician benevolence to the former colony — though this, of course, does not diminish her many considerable talents. Roy’s achievement was her singular authorial voice, reassuringly universalist but at the same time free from the corny clutches of magical realism. “My book doesn’t trade on the currency of cultural specificity,” she said at the time.

The laboriously political work of intercaste erotica wasn’t for everyone. Carmen Callil, chair of the previous year’s panel of judges, thought it “vulgar and execrable”. Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times found it twee and puerile. Even so, few could deny that it was unlike anything else available in the post-Cold War literary market — passionate, political, punchy, prurient. Kerala’s communist government put her on trial for obscenity, though one wonders if it was instead her “anti-Communist venom” — as Kerala’s chief minister put it — that incensed the apparatchiks. Roy lampoons the democratic Left much in the manner of Jaroslav Hašek, who sent up The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law. In Small Things, communist waiters dance attendance on fat-cat tourists at the Hotel People, located in the ancestral home of the communist party chief, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, no less.

If all of this is a little on the nose, it also points to a broader defect in her writing, and indeed her activism, which has taken centre stage since the publication of Small Things: her intransigence. The fact is that the violent overthrow of the state that she advocates has failed every time it has been tried: 1948, 1967, 1969. In the face of state repression, the insurrectionary Left simply doesn’t stand a chance. The democratic Left that she disparages has, by contrast, delivered not only high literacy and decent healthcare, but also meaningful land reform in Kerala.

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Likewise, as the historian Ramachandra Guha has pointed out, Roy’s earnest stance of ¡no pasarán! may be well-meant, but it is hardly a principle fit for the real world. As an activist, she cut her teeth opposing the construction of the Narmada dam in Gujarat that would have displaced half a million with only a smidgen of compensation. A laudable cause, no doubt, yet her outright opposition to that project, many felt, did the proles a disservice. More moderate parties called for higher compensation and a smaller construction, recognising the uses of a dam to the water-starved peasants of arid Saurashtra and Kachchh. Roy, however, would have no truck with compromise. In her radical zeal, she was ready — in the words of the sociologist Gail Omvedt — to sacrifice the “drought-afflicted” on the altar of the “dam-afflicted”.

Guha upbraided her for her “atavistic hatred of science”, though it seems to me to be more a case of primitivist enchantment. Roy’s bedside reading, one Guardian journalist discovered, was Thomas Paine and Charles Dickens. In the same interview, she gave vent to her disgust with bourgeois philistinism: “the Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism.” Elsewhere, she has patted herself on the back for forgoing a life of cultivated literary elegance in “ridiculously posh” hotels out of love for the lower orders.

Her embrace of the Naxalites, who are waging a guerrilla war against the Indian state, is of a piece with this worldview. True, their grievances against a parade of governments that have dispossessed them in order to sell their lands to grasping industrialists, not to mention deployed private militias to persecute them, are real enough. But the monochromatic fresco she has painted of the militants, extolling them as saints, has been just as misleading as the official narrative, villainising them as terrorists. The districts under Naxal control are no prelapsarian paradise. Many of the Naxal leaders are upper-caste, upper-class Calcutta types, on the run from well-heeled boredom; as it is, they treat the hapless primitives with the same contempt as state authorities. Protection rackets, even deals with the very capitalist nemeses they are meant to be fighting, are common enough.

Similarly, in pooh-poohing what she calls the “Progress project”, Delhi’s target of 10% growth, she betrays the same impulse of Western degrowthers, who fetishise permanent recession. Now, world-historically speaking, no society has been able to redistribute the pie in a more egalitarian fashion without also growing it. Roy would do well to remember the instructive example of the trente glorieuses.

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Still, all of this is minor carping. She does a marvellous job of asking the big questions, though one wishes she would also ask the hard ones. For all that, the world needs Arundhati Roy more than it needs her critics. In the war against casteism and sexism, she has distinguished herself as an intrepid front-line maquisarde. The political boldness, moreover, has gone hand in hand with snappy lucidity. Roy’s chosen idiom is the thundering zinger. Here she is ironising the misplaced priorities of Hindu nationalists: in contemporary India, “it is safer to be a cow than it is to be a woman”. On the priapic flood ejaculated in the press in the wake of India’s nuclear test: “reading the papers, it was often hard to tell when people were referring to Viagra and when they were talking about the bomb.”

This is a voice at once playful and powerful. That Narendra Modi can do no better than silence it with brute force is evidence enough that the Hindu nationalists have lost the battle of ideas. If anything, Roy’s impending arrest is a vindication of her worldview.

To be fair to Brod, there would be no Kafka without him. As Kafka’s literary executor, Brod did posterity a favour by refusing to consign his friend’s diaries to flames, as was instructed of him. Fifteen years later, in 1939, he did another good turn, ferrying the files to Palestine along with him when Prague fell to the Nazis. By then, however, Brod had already committed his original sin of apotheosising his mate in Kafka: Eine Biographie, which came out in 1937. There, Kafka appeared less the sex fiend that he was in reality, and more the tortured saint that he later became in the public imagination.

Brod set the tone. After the war, he ran his blue pencil through Kafka’s diaries, which appeared in two volumes in English in 1948-9, the second translated by the humourless Hannah Arendt. It was on the strength of Brod’s bowdlerisation that the contemporary TLS reviewer was able to conclude that Kafka’s diary was “one of the saddest books ever written”. Brod himself artfully leaned into the theme. Kafka’s diaries, he wrote in 1955, “resemble a kind of defective barometric curve that registers only the lows, the hours of greatest depression, but not the highs”.

This was, to say the least, utterly disingenuous. If there were no highs in his edition, it was because he had expunged all of them. He had his reasons, of course. In canonising Kafka as a writer with serious pretensions, he was seeing to it that his own star rose. There was perhaps a touch of pudeur, too, in his calculus. Brod may not have wanted kith and kin to find out about their nocturnal escapades to brothels together. Not for nothing did Kafka’s father think Brod was a meshuggener ritoch — a crazy hothead.

Ross Benjamin, by contrast, has no axe to grind. In translating a German edition brought out by the S. Fischer Verlag, he has now restored the diaries to their original form. What we have here is a record of Kafka’s life in all its messy glory. Benjamin has essentially given us a facsimile: 700 dense pages of mid-sentence pauses and spelling mistakes, anachronisms and repetitions, doodles and drafts.

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This is, above all, the portrait of a sex-mad dandy. “Wrote nothing,” reads more than one diary entry. “Nothing, nothing,” reads another. As a writer, I can attest to the inverse relationship between living and writing. What was he doing? Those laconic entries tell us that the man who wrote little knew how to live a little. A trip to Paris finds him and Brod living it up during the last gasps of the belle époque: “how easily grenadine with seltzer goes through one’s nose when one laughs.” Back in Prague, we find Kafka among his friends, all of them cackling heartily as he read aloud drafts of his stories. The Kafka of these diaries is a bon vivant, a man who enjoyed his puerile jokes and Quaker oats, a theatre aficionado who hit it off with a Yiddish theatre troupe, the kind his father — an assimilated German-speaking Jew — disapproved of.

As a law student at Charles University, Kafka desultorily did his doctorate. His rather unoriginal thesis, by his own admission, was “intellectual sawdust that thousands of others’ mouths had already chewed up for me”. His heart evidently wasn’t in it. More important were his literary and sexual pursuits, in which Brod was a partner in crime.

These continued into adulthood proper. Kafka took up a job as an insurance assessor — dealing with workplace accidents and the like — that apparently frayed his grey cells and left him too knackered to moonlight as a writer. But this isn’t quite true, though Kafka himself is in part responsible for the misleading picture. As he has it in the diary: “here, in the office, for the sake of so wretched a document I must rob a body capable of such happiness.” As a result, he sought solace in seedy brothels. It is a sentiment that Don DeLillo was able to pin down later with droll brevity: “talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.” Yet in Kafka’s case, it doesn’t have the benefit of being true.

Far from sucking his energy, his job was in reality a sinecure. He typically clocked off at 2 pm and spent his afternoons writing and whoring. What’s more, there was nothing sordid about his life. Kafka was a known quantity in the beau monde of Prague. As his biographer Reiner Stach shows, Kafka frequented not the shabby establishments of the lower orders but Weinstuben, those permissive wine bars where waitresses joined guests at tables. The draw was harmless flirting, though the chambres séparées held the possibility of deeper connection. Sometimes, Kafka and Brod used to meet at 5 am and, as it were, “have two girls” for breakfast before heading off to work.

These days, we would call Kafka a hipster. He was certainly a faddist. Before the war, he moved about in Lebensreform circles, where ventilation and vegetarianism were in vogue. Kafka took up the creed of Horace Fletcher, “the great masticator” who was given to maniacally chewing food until it turned into mush. Then there was the Wandervögel movement, which turned on coming to terms with vile bodies, au naturel and in nature. Kafka exercised twice daily, naked, with windows open. From his diaries, we learn that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony in the Harz Mountains. He had green fingers, liked spas, and enjoyed rambling and wild swimming. He succumbed to bouts of gluttony: “candies are poured into me like hail.”

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The biggest advance of these unredacted diaries is unquestionably in our understanding of Kafka’s sex life. Brod had prudishly done away with such passages as the one in which Kafka waxes poetic about a hirsute Spanish prostitute, with “hair running thickly from her navel to her private parts”. At a synagogue, Kafka observes a brothel-keeper in attendance; Brod had kept the line, even as he omitted the relevant detail that Kafka knew the man’s occupation not as a finger-wagging busybody, but as a patron of the place.

Brod had likewise censored anything that suggested that Kafka’s sexuality was more complex than what the Hays Code could handle. Now, we have Kafka lustily eyeing up two Swedish boys, their legs “so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them”. Then we have him fantasising about the “sizeable member” of a commuter in his train carriage. Posing in the nude at a sanatorium for a friend, Friedrich Schiller, must have no doubt thrilled him; though it transpires that Kafka had been coy about getting his kit off — perhaps on account of circumcision. To Brod, he confessed dreams in which he kissed Franz Werfel, the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the epic novel about the Armenian genocide.

But Kafka wasn’t a homosexual as we would understand the word today. For sexuality wasn’t a binary business in 1910s Bohemia. Indeed, he was something of a womaniser, a tubercular lady-killer consumed by an insatiable appetite — “senselessly drawn, senselessly wandering through a senselessly dirty world,” as he put it. His diaries are littered with references to his mistresses. The great love of his life was Felice Bauer, to whom he was engaged twice; though they saw one another in person only on 17 occasions. It was, for the better part, an epistolary relationship. Kafka sent her more than 500 letters. All the same, he was quite disillusioned about the affair. “Blonde, somewhat stiff, charmless hair” was his first observation about her. When they met, he had casually introduced himself as a “gadabout”. To his diary, he confided the main reason for wanting to marry her: his “inability to endure life alone”. The engagement ceremony found him “bound like a criminal”. When they went shopping for furniture together, all Kafka could think of were tombstones.

Then there was his engagement to the tubercular clerk Julie Wohryzek, broken off when he transferred his affections to his Czech translator, the married grass widow Milena Jesenská. This was followed by an affair with the waitress Juliane “Hansi” Szokoll, who called him “Franzi” and had a penchant for living life lockdown-style, Proustianly in bed for days on end.

At some point before that was his fling with Hedwig Weiler. She was “very bright, very Social Democratic”, he wrote to Brod, but she needed “to keep their teeth clenched so as not to come out with a conviction, a principle, at any provocation”. Kafka was wholly uninterested in her politics, which clearly mattered a lot to Weiler, who went on to earn a doctorate in 1914. Needless to say, the affair didn’t last very long.

Finally, there was Dora Diamant, a Jewish Chassid girl on the run from her ultra-Orthodox Polish family; later a prominent communist actress. The two lived together in Berlin during Kafka’s dying days, day-dreaming about opening a restaurant in Palestine. Dora would cook, and Kafka would wait tables. His tuberculosis, with which he had lived for seven long years —“with such a body, nothing can be achieved”, he noted in his diaries — killed him in Klosterneuburg in 1924. Kafka was only 40.

All in all, it had been an uneventful, fairly apolitical life. Later critics made him out to be a raging critic of communism and fascism, but these are posthumous annexations. The fact is that he was too consumed by his interiority to really be preoccupied with politics proper. In his diaries, he devotes some 500 words to the subject of Russian circumcision, but then registers the onset of the Great War with laughable concision. His 2 August 1914 entry can be quoted in full: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming school in the afternoon.” Indeed, his indifference to world-historical events is the most striking aspect of his diaries.

Much has been made of Kafka’s pacifism. But this view, too, rests on over-interpretation. Kafka simply didn’t have too strong an opinion on the war. If he didn’t fight, it wasn’t on principle but because he failed to make the cut. Kafka tried thrice to enlist in the Austrian army. Later, he purchased war bonds and visited replica trenches in Prague to vicariously live life on the front.

Kafka was, according to the historian Ritchie Robertson, a “conservative modernist” like Conrad. True, he was fond of Flaubert, but for the most part, the culture he consumed was rather pedestrian. He enjoyed adventure stories. When it came to cinema, he had a preference for Westerns and melodramas. His literary tastes, Robertson writes, were cosmopolitan if “mildly conservative” — as one would expect from a subscriber of Die Neue Rundschau. His themes, both in his short stories and novels, were ambiguity and decline. His protagonists are typically weak men in the throes of existential crises flailing about in a world of bureaucratic intransigence.

It is easy to see why Cold Warriors took so well to his oeuvre. In the age bookended by the rise of Nazism and the fall of the Soviet Union, Kafka’s works were effortlessly appropriated as antitotalitarian pamphlets. At first blush, they appear to be on the money. The Trial, for instance, is the story of the arbitrary arrest, then execution, of Josef K. Hairs have been split trying to figure out whether Kafka had the Soviets in mind when writing the novel or the would-be autocrats closer to home. Some have argued the book is really about colonial violence — about the Herero, who were consigned to German concentration camps in Namibia in 1904-7, an episode generally regarded as the harbinger of the Holocaust.

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It’s a persuasive thesis. But those of us who have caught a glint of Occam’s razor may prefer a simpler explanation: Kafka’s books aren’t about authoritarianism at all. They’re instead about his father. They’re not so much about anti-statist as filial rebellion.

Kafka had daddy issues. The young Franz was mortally afraid of his father, who used to beat him. Hermann Kafka was by all accounts an abrasive and choleric character, given to banging on insufferably about the poverty of his youth, and abusing his employees, who once threatened to resign en masse from his haberdashery shop. It was left to Franz to cajole them one by one into staying on. “All I have written has been about you,” Franz wrote in a letter he never had the courage to send Hermann. “I was oppressed by your sheer corporeality.” Hermann was a huge man, whereas Franz was “a little skeleton”. He developed a stutter in his father’s presence. In his diaries, Kafka workshops a story that was later published as “The Judgement”, about a carefree twentysomething condemned “to death by drowning” by his killjoy father. More famously, in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect who is, in the end, fatally wounded by an apple hurled at him by his father.

Kafka no doubt had good reasons for being politically passive. The Bohemia of his youth was an intensely political place, brimming with Czech nationalists who had it in for the elite German minority. As a Jew, though, Kafka had no skin in the game. Moreover, he knew from experience that, for all their differences, both sides were united in their antisemitism. In 1897, when Count Badeni made Czech one of the two languages of government along with German, violence broke out between the Germans and Czechs. The biggest casualty, however, was Prague’s Jewish population, whose homes and shops were singled out for attack.

For Kafka, aged 14, it must have been a formative episode, even if the business owned by his parents was spared. It might have been what turned him off politics. It also goes a long way in explaining Kafka’s Zionism, though it must be said he wore these ideas lightly. It seems he was less interested in following the mundanities leading up to the creation of a settlement in Palestine — the tawdry business of lobbying the Ottomans and the like — than in learning Hebrew and dabbling in Jewish history. Indeed, there was no more to his Zionism than a healthy cultural curiosity. As Kafka himself put it, “What do I have in common with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself.” Convictions of any kind he found boring. But above all, he was bored by politics.

Kafka had fun. He liked to épater la bourgeoisie, but beyond that, if his diaries are anything to go by, he was a rather vacuous chap.

I can, moreover, enter and leave Britain at will. Modi was banned from Blighty for a decade for having blood on his hands. When raucous Hindu pilgrims aboard the Sabarmati Express were torched alive by a Muslim mob in 2002, it came as manna from heaven for Modi, the newly descended carpetbagging chief minister of Gujarat. Dipping into his sixth-form science textbook, he declared that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. The police were pressured to stand down as Gujarat descended into violence. Muslims had to be “taught a lesson”, Modi told senior policemen.

In the pogrom that ensued, Hindu nationalists unleashed fire and fury, using electoral rolls to smoke out Muslims. Some 2,000 were killed, and more than 125,000 displaced to refugee camps. One of Modi’s close associates later boasted to the press how he had “slit open” a pregnant Muslim woman during the riots. Meanwhile, his ministers and marionettes were spotted marauding about Ahmedabad, orchestrating the violence.

In London and Washington, the revulsion prompted visa bans on Modi. At home, however, this only stirred sympathy. So you had the liberal journalist Vir Sanghvi only half-ironically working up much patriotic indignation: “He may be a mass murderer, but he’s our mass murderer.” Modi made hay while the sun shone, bullying the election commissioner into — in that splendid Indian-English word — “preponing” the election in Gujarat, insinuating that if he didn’t, it was only because he was a Christian in the pay of foreign masters.

The snap election produced the desired result. Hindus closed ranks and Modi won his first election. Twelve years later, he gave us a repeat performance, only this time it was on the national stage. Hard on the heels of the anti-Muslim Muzaffarnagar riots — again choreographed by Hindu nationalist parliamentarians, whom Modi hailed as “heroes” on the hustings — his Bharatiya Janata Party coasted to victory in 2014, permanently displacing the Congress Party that had ruled the country more or less uninterruptedly since independence. The chief minister of Gujarat was now prime minister of India. By this point, his mates had exonerated him for the 2002 riots.

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The French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot recently wrote a superlative study of the early life and dark times of India’s current ruler. (Full disclosure: my book on the Emergency, aforementioned, was co-authored with him.) Gujarat Under Modi languished in “legal read” hell for a decade. Timorous lawyers felt it betrayed “an unyielding view of Narendra Modi” — thanks, captain obvious — and, accordingly, recommended cuts so extensive as to make a Vatican censor squirm. Jaffrelot exercised good judgment in waiting for a plucky publisher (Hurst) to come by rather than suffer the surreal indignity of seeing his book stripped to the bone.

The early chapters tell us how the young Modi, a low-caste tea-seller’s boy, was drawn to the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the BJP. On the face of it, the RSS was an upper-caste affair, whose very existence owed to the déclassé resentment of the high-born in a world where the lower orders had begun to get ideas above their station. The aim was to sublimate their frustrations, heightened on account of their vow of celibacy (yes, Modi’s likely still a virgin), through punitive calisthenics, sweaty wrestling and textual exegesis. These days, with less time on his hands, Modi squeezes world leaders in ever-tighter embraces — the “hugging diplomacy” for which he has become infamous.

Modi, however, would have felt no reason to dwell too deeply on the caste contradictions inherent in his embrace of the RSS. True, its high-born apparatchiks would have taken a dim view of his caste origins. The modh ghanchis — oil pressers — were officially recognised as a “backward caste” in 1999. But Modi himself, like other lower-caste Indians, would have truckled to his caste superiors rather than resented them. Even a figure such as Mahatma Gandhi, a Gujarati like Modi, thought it perfectly comme il faut to rail against intercaste “interdrinking, interdining, intermarrying”, even as he set about uniting the country in the Twenties and Thirties.

The RSS gave Modi a social purpose. One suspects he was also thankful to the Sangh friends who helped him flee Vadnagar, saving him from the clutches of an arranged marriage aged 17. Still, in the Fifties and Sixties, there was something unfashionable about being an RSS man; the outfit had been forever tainted by Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 by one of its members.

All of this changed with the Emergency, the dictatorship of 1975-77. The Congress’s enemies, Left and Right, were banged up in prison together, where they, perforce, warmed to one another. After the Emergency, they rode to power as one big coalition. For the first time, though only briefly, out-and-out Hindu nationalists sat in the cabinet.

Modi turned the bleak biennium to good account, liaising with bigwigs underground and distributing samizdat. We have, from this period, some improbably convincing snaps of him disguised as a Sikh to elude the police.

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By the Eighties, the Congress in Gujarat was in an increasingly tenuous position. Already discredited by the Emergency, they had managed to scrape by thanks to the support of the backward castes, the lower-middling sort clamouring for affirmative action. The BJP, on the other hand, monopolised the upper-caste vote, stirring violence every now and then to expand its base. It was a gory business, of course, but there was an arithmetic logic to it. For interfaith conflagrations had the perverse effect of producing intercaste unity. Put differently, uniting Hindus against Muslims was a way of papering over their unwholesome caste divisions: Muslims accounted for a mere 8% of Gujarat’s population, Hindus the remaining 92%.

The 1985 Gujarat riots, one of the bloodiest the country has witnessed to date, brutally underscored this dynamic. Led by chanting Hindu priests, a mob of 100,000 entered Muslim neighbourhoods, torching everything in sight. More than 2,500 homes were flattened, and some 12,000 Muslims made homeless. Much of the dirty work was done by Dalits, hitherto antagonised by caste Hindus but now on the same side, even if hierarchically split.

Thereafter, the BJP moved from strength to strength in state elections. Modi made his bones as the campaign manager of Haren Pandya, a rising star who beat the sitting chief minister in a stunning by-election upset in 1993. By all accounts, it was an ugly campaign, with undue emphasis on the Muslim bootleggers undermining prohibition. Two years later, the BJP permanently displaced the Congress in Gujarat. A seismic stroke of luck came Modi’s way in 2001, when Keshubhai Patel’s botched handling of the Bhuj earthquake prompted his ouster. Never having fought an election before, Modi was airdropped as chief minister. It would, again, be thanks to backroom manoeuvring that he would become the BJP’s national candidate in 2014 — making history as the man who became PM without having ever been an MP.

As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi ruled with an iron fist. Jaffrelot shows how he turned the police into a vigilante force with a penchant for extrajudicial killings. The victims were invariably Muslims, one of them a 19-year-old college girl. Law and order was given over to Babu Bajrangi’s shock troops, who were tasked with “rescuing” — kidnapping — Hindu women from their marriages to Muslim men on pain of abortion and torture.

Modi’s government, Jaffrelot argues, was as corrupt as it was violent. Unpossessed by a cupidity of his own — the rare celibate among dynasts — Modi has nevertheless facilitated the fortunes of the grasping oligarchs around him. His favourite one, Gautam Adani, was given state-owned land for a pittance, which he then immediately sublet to state-owned companies at market rates. Schemes such as these briefly made him the second richest man in the world. An Adani Green Energy Gallery was inaugurated at London’s Science Museum in March.

Modi’s rise has been good for Adani — and Adani’s for Modi. But while Adani claims his motto is “nation building”, this is hardly clear from the situation in Gujarat. The state’s wealth, much vaunted by the press, only trickles upwards. Surveys dubbed Modi’s Gujarat the malnourishment capital of India, with three in five children underweight. Wages stagnated, consumer spending plateaued, household debt burgeoned, investment rates fell off, even as a few billionaires did a roaring trade.

Modi ran one of the most thuggish and corrupt governments in Indian history, Jaffrelot concludes. Yet electorally he remains invincible, thanks in no small part to a piss-poor opposition. The Congress high command routinely depicts the chaiwallah’s son as a chav — when he met Obama, Modi showed up in a monogrammed pinstripe suit spelling out his name a million times in gold — which is hardly a sensible charge in a country where nearly everyone is working-class.

Modi’s charge, by contrast, sticks. He paints his rivals as a bunch of cosmopolitan elites cut off from hoi polloi. There’s no doubt an element of schoolboy crassness to his epithets, a touch of Berlusconi perhaps, but it goes down well. The leader of the opposition party, the Veneto-born Sonia Gandhi, was sent up for her Italian ethnicity as “Pasta-ben”, Sister Pasta. Rahul, her pallid son and lately successor, has been nicknamed “Jersey Cow”.

Compounding the gift of the gab is Modi’s facility with technology. Enlisting the services of the PR firm APCO, whose choice clientele included the Nigerian and Kazakh dictators Sani Abacha and Nursultan Nazarbayev, Modi was an early adopter of 3D holograms in election campaigns. The advantage of addressing multiple audiences simultaneously was magnified in a highly illiterate setting where mesmerised audiences were left wondering whether Modi was an avatar of Vishnu’s.

Then there is his braggadocio, so extravagant as to put Putin to shame: his 56-inch chest; his penchant for wild swimming surrounded by crocodiles, one of which he nonchalantly brought home only to be reproached by his mother. His fans lap it up, as they do his antisemitism. The BJP’s latest campaign depicted a befuddled Rahul Gandhi dangling on puppet strings manipulated by a vulpine George Soros, omnisciently above him in black-and-white. Modi has form here. As early as 2005, he had the Holocaust removed from history textbooks. In its place came a paean to the Third Reich: “Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government… He brought prosperity to Germany… He instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.”

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For most of the last quarter-century, Modi was unassailable. His party rivals learnt this the hard way, as when a fake sex tape surfaced at just the opportune moment to see off the party secretary Sanjay Joshi, who had it in for Modi. By the time Joshi cleared his name, it was too late to rehabilitate him. At the same time, Modi can cannily switch his weapon of choice from the stick to the carrot. These days, it isn’t unusual for Congressmen to cross the aisle for the BJP; the going rate for legislators is about £3 million. One of these turncoats, a Canarese septuagenarian, was spotted sporting a Rolls-Royce post-defection.

Ideologically, too, everyone now plays by Modi’s rules. Before Modi, the BJP trick was to tar the Congress with the brush of “pseudo-secularism” while vehemently declaiming the real thing. “Hindu nationalism” used to be a term of opprobrium. No more. Modi has repurposed it into a term of approbation.

Until very recently, Modi’s rise left Congressmen dumbstruck. As early as 2002, they saw no better option than to mimic his policies. Over the following decade, the best the opposition could come up with were attacks on Modi’s deficient Hinduism. The chief minister stood accused of destroying 200 temples while gentrifying Gujarat, and, horror of horrors, not lifting a finger to stop the butchering of 100,000 cows.

Batting on Modi’s home turf proved disastrous for the Congress. A few years ago, Gandhi was to be found criticising Youth Congress party workers in Kerala for their “thoughtless, barbaric, and completely unacceptable behaviour”. And what would that be? Cooking a calf to protest Delhi’s absurd cow slaughter laws. Gandhi has spent the better part of the last few years trying to out-Hindu Modi, inter alia prancing around temples and perusing the Upanishads, to no avail.

Now, at long last, some efforts are being made at course correction. In the 2024 election, widely seen as a victory for the opposition and Indian democracy, a gaggle of two dozen parties contested together to deprive Modi of a decisive majority in parliament. For one thing, the first-past-the-post system worked in their favour, eliminating triangular and quadrangular contests that would have split the anti-Modi vote. For another, Modi’s popularity in recent months took a dive, what with slower growth rates and higher unemployment. The clientelism and corruption of his regime, too, went a long way in discrediting Modi in the eyes of voters. Still, even as the opposition coalition rejoices at its better-than-expected showing, it would be remiss not to point out that this is still a defeat for Modi’s foes. Modi is still in power. If the Congress and its allies don’t get their act together, they’ll be on the opposition benches until the cows come home.

Kandinsky styled himself as the champion of the “little man”, rebelling against such snobbish notions as harmony, which is to say against the consensus that ran from Raphael down to the Royal Academy. Yet it was, ironically, the “little man” himself who railed most against abstraction. And so, along with Klee, Feininger, and countless other radicals, Kandinsky’s works were tarred as Degenerate Art by the Nazis in 1937, in the infamous exhibition of that name.

But if Kandinsky was a victim of Right-wing cancel culture, he was also a victim of Left-wing cancel culture. This should surprise us. For Kandinsky was practically a communist. At Moscow University, where he read law and economics, he produced a sympathetic dissertation titled “On the Legality of Labourers’ Wages”. The Blue Rider collective — whose paintings are now on show at Tate Modern (25 April – 20 October) — he spearheaded was established in 1911 with a stirring call to arms that recalls the last line in Marx’s Manifesto. “Der Blaue Reiter will be the call that summons all artists of the new era and rouses the laymen,” declared Kandinsky and his mate Franz Marc.

On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky’s slim opuscule timed for the group’s first exhibition, likewise made clear that the true purpose of art was to defeat the vacuous materialism of modern man. All the same, as that title suggests, there was a decidedly romantic strain to Kandinsky’s leftism that left his more dogmatic comrades cold. In 1908, Kandinsky had been fired by the German translation of Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, a nutty pamphlet by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater that preached the gospel of Theosophy, its esoteric message encased in the book’s frontispiece, a palette bearing the legend “Key to the Meaning of Colours”. The pair, it seems, believed in “auras”, essentially coloured emanations around human bodies that conveyed emotions. Today, we would call them vibes.

Proper, positivist Marxists, one imagines, would have impatiently clicked their tongues at this sort of claptrap, but not Kandinsky. All the stuff about the “vibrations of souls” somehow spoke to him. And so colours replaced objects in his painterly imagination. We may think, at first glance, that the Blue Rider pictures are no more than decorative wallpaper, but in fact, as Kandinsky’s writings show, many of them are essentially works of religious art, dealing with such premonitory themes as the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment.

As it was, though, Soviet Russia’s revolutionary bureaucrats were after depictions of Large Projects, whereas Kandinsky wanted to paint Small Pleasures. They were in the business of dreary instruction, not Dreamy Improvisation. What was needed, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky felt, was “art of five kopeks”, not worthless art but art within the means of the masses. Accordingly, Kandinsky fell out of favour. He had been a bit player in the Revolution, and had done his bit curating provincial museums for the Bolsheviks, not to mention helped establish the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. Still, it was a tough racket being an Expressionist in a world of Social Realists. Routinely and puerilely assailed as bourgeois and boring, he leapt at the first chance to leave. In 1921, he moved to Dessau, throwing in his lot with Gropius’s Bauhaus, which remained a going concern until the Nazis shuttered it when they seized power. The remaining decade of his life was spent in Parisian wilderness. Kandinsky died an unhappy man in 1944.

That the Soviet Union effectively hounded out its most creative artistic talents, from Kandinsky in the Twenties to Neizvestny in the Seventies, was not inevitable. Indeed, there is nothing inherently authoritarian about communism. We would do well to remember the historical contingencies that led up to that outcome. The early Marx himself waxed eloquent about “the benefits of a liberal constitution, of a country where there is freedom of discussion, freedom of association, and where a humanitarian seed can flourish for the good of all Europe”. Here was a supremely convincing reconciliation of socialism and freedom. The proles were treated as intelligent grown-ups.

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In later works, it is true, he betrayed a regrettable preference for de haut en bas technocratic solutions, the kind befitting the worst kind of Brussels Eurocrat. Still, it was left to Lenin to turn an instrument of proletarian emancipation into a tool of authoritarian centralisation. As for Lunacharsky, he was not such a terrible killjoy, but rather a mondain character with a lively past simply obeying orders; before the revolution, he had moved in rather choice circles in Paris and Capri.

Needless to say, the upshot was most damaging. By the time high Stalinism took hold, the intellectual and artistic energies of Soviet communism had more or less completely fossilised. The baton passed to Western Marxism. From the Frankfurt School in the interwar period to structuralism in post-war France and operaismo in post-war Italy, some of the most arresting developments in Left-wing thought occurred in the free West. More so than Soviet Marxists, their British counterparts recognised — in the words of Perry Anderson — that “to take liberties with the signature of Marx” was to “enter into the freedom of Marxism”.

The new Expressionists show at Tate Modern underscores just how important the freedom of expression was to the development of art. Indeed, it was no accident that Kandinsky thrived not in his native land but in relatively free Munich. The young Wassily knew a thing or two about unfree societies. His parents, clamouring for liberal reform, had been exiled to the tea plantations of Kyakhta on the Mongolian border by Tsar Alexander II. It was only in the 1860s, that radical decade that also saw the abolition of serfdom, that they were rehabilitated along with other dissidents; Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866.

University life was dull. Some respite came from a research assignment that took him to Vologda, whose pagan peasants enchanted him. Throughout his life, Kandinsky maintained his fidelity to the Orthodox Church, though the colourful and exotic never failed to fascinate him. A staid, bourgeois life awaited him after his marriage to his bookish cousin — one of very few women at Moscow University at the time — when a professorship in Roman law came through at Tartu University. But then a midlife crisis intervened, provoked by Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896. Kandinsky had a eureka moment of his own: academic life, he concluded, was bollocks. There was no certainty in the world. Thereafter, it was only the subjective world of art that mattered. Monet’s Haystacks and Wagner’s Lohengrin, both encountered in Moscow, further convinced him that art was his calling. More prosaically, a loaded uncle kicked the bucket that year. Aged 30, Kandinsky came into a sizeable inheritance that was his ticket out of the professions – and Tsarist Russia.

Munich could have been Mars. It certainly felt like another planet. This was a land where painters “had the status of generals”. So wrote the Irish painter John Lavery. It was also an oasis of tolerance, thanks to the urbanity of its ruling class. Jewish painters like Albert Bloch and Elisabeth Epstein, on the run from antisemitism, found a home there. So, too, did dissidents from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, and the promiscuous Russian bohemians Marianne Werefkin and Alexis von Jawlensky. Their favourite hangout spot was the famous pink salon owned by Werefkin — an “independently wealthy” polyglot noblewoman according to the catalogue — that doubled as an atelier.

It was in this cosmopolitan, permissive milieu that Expressionism was born. For too long, the movement has been both celebrated and denigrated as a singularly German graphic idiom. Even Pevsner, who evidently wasn’t terribly fond of the Expressionists, thought it fitting to summon up the rare word of praise for their Teutonic moral seriousness. Yet as this exhibition shows, it was a fundamentally international cast — led by the Russian Kandinsky — that conjured up the movement.

Munich artists had already laid the groundwork for Kandinsky. Four years prior to his arrival, the Munich Secession had parted ways with the academicism and conservatism of the Munich School; its leading light, Max Liebermann, made it a point to paint working-class subjects. Kandinsky’s move to Munich in 1896 coincided with the birth of the journal Jugend, the house organ of modernism to which we owe the German term for Art Nouveau, Jugendstil.

Five years later, Kandinsky founded Phalanx, seducing the dissatisfied spirits of the Secession to the new splinter group. One of them, his pupil Gabriele Münter, he seduced in more than one sense; not long after, the two were off to assignations in Sèvres (where they came in contact with Gauguin, Picasso, Cézanne, Rousseau, Munch, and van Gogh) and Murnau, where they had a love-nest in the foothills of the Alps.

In 1909, Kandinsky had an epiphany: “subject matter is detrimental to my paintings.” The upshot was Composition II, a mad riot of colour that a contemporary critic thought was the work of “someone under the effects of morphine or hashish” — now sadly lost. By then, another fan of Theosophy, Hilma af Klint, had independently reached the same conclusion as Kandinsky, though few took her admixture of Eastern piety and camp Christianity seriously. She may have painted the first abstract pictures in 1906, but thanks to his Münchner Rolodex and his inexhaustible capacity for self-publicity (“I painted the first abstract picture”), the world remembers Kandinsky’s Picture with a Circle of 1911 as the first ever abstract painting.

Whatever may have been the lineage of abstract painting, the fact is that the Blue Rider was the most visible expression of it. There were others involved, as the curators are at pains to remind us (two in five paintings here are by women, and Münter is — deservingly — given more prominent billing than Franz Marc, usually seen as the most important of the Blue Rider sidekicks), but it was incontrovertibly Kandinsky’s brainchild, as the very name of the collective suggested. He made a painting called Der Blaue Reiter in 1903; more generally, he thought blue was a “heavenly” colour and enjoyed painting riders, especially St Georges slaying dragons, as it were the spiritual triumphing over the material.

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All the same, it proved a short-lived affair. Two pop-up shows in 1911-12 and one almanac — more scrapbook than catalogue — was all it had to show for it. The cultural shadow it cast over 20th-century art, however, is another matter. Like J. D. Salinger and the Sex Pistols, the Blue Rider isn’t remembered for its output, but for revolutionising the field.

The curators of this exhibition have done a marvellous job reconstructing the eccentric, eclectic world of the Expressionists. They have, quite unjustifiably, received much pushback in the press for shoehorning “present preoccupations” and forcing a “woke” interpretation of their subject. But this is an historically illiterate view. Indeed, we tend to exaggerate the foreignness of the past. Depending on your politics, the past appears either more racist or less woke than the present. As the new Taylor Swift song goes, “My friends used to play a game where we would pick a decade we wished we could live in instead of this/I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.” Risible nonsense, of course. The 19th century was, world-historically speaking, a lot less racist than the 20th. Likewise, it can hardly be denied Munich in the 1910s, and the interwar Weimar Republic, were a lot woker than our present, with their queers and queens. In the exhibition, we have a rather gamine Self-Portrait of Werefkin, who evidently was something of a gender bender: “I am not man, I am not woman, I am myself.” Then there is her portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sacharoff, noted for his “aesthetic hermaphroditism.”

Good for them. Or rather the going was good for them until the Nazis showed up. These days, the crackpots and would-be despots who have thanklessly tasked themselves with the policing of sumptuary, sartorial, and sexual habits would do well to remember which side of history they are on: the one applauding or censuring Degenerate Art. Britain in the Thirties evidently chose the latter. For the following year after the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, a show of the Blue Rider artists opened at the New Burlington Galleries in London. In the introduction of that catalogue, the curators declared “that art, as an expression of the human spirit in all its mutations, is only great in so far as it is free”. Hear, hear.

“Was it performance art?” Rushdie wondered. Or a case of magical-realist memory? It had been, in August 2022, 33 years since Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to kill Rushdie, well beyond the bounds of Matar’s lifetime. Or a hair-raising exercise in irony? Rushdie was at the Chautauqua Institution, in upstate New York, to talk about “writer safety”. Matar’s own mutterings suggest nothing quite so sophisticated. The picture that emerges from his interview with New York Post is that of a bumbling Four Lions type completely out of his depth. What of his politics? “I respect the Ayatollah. I think he’s a great person.” And Rushdie? “I don’t think he’s a very good person.” Why? “He’s someone who attacked Islam. He attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.” Their beliefs? It doesn’t sound like Matar cared much for them himself.

Matar evidently isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer (Rushdie missed a trick there). I suppose he would react to a subordinate clause in much the same way as a deer would to headlights. Schooled in sunny California before settling in suburban New Jersey, Matar’s locutions are to me yet another reminder of how the American education system is failing its citizens. He grew up in a comfortable $700,000, four-bed home with his twin sisters and mother, and saw no reason to earn a living until a few months before the botched assassination, when he took up a gig at Marshalls, America’s version of Poundland. For most of his late teens and early 20s, Matar led an inverted life, “sleeping during the day”, and, at night, “playing video games, watching Netflix, stuff like that”. The Italians would have called him a bamboccione, the quintessential man-child, eking out a lumpen existence in his mum’s basement.

He was, in short, hardly an unreconstructed, ideologically driven Islamist. He had no contact with the Revolutionary Guard. Nor was he of Iranian heritage. His parents were in fact from Yaroun in southern Lebanon — Hezbollah heartland. His mother, who has since disowned her son, wanted nothing to do with that world, to which his father returned after their divorce. In 2018, the young Matar visited him in Yaroun, where he developed a heightened awareness of his cerebral shortcomings. Indeed, he chafed at this on his return. “He was angry that I did not introduce him to Islam from a young age,” his mother would later say to the Daily Mail.

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Still, the Koran and Hadiths were not for him. He instead sought identification with a couple of Hezbollah militant apparatchiks, two of whose names he fused to adopt the nom de guerre Hassan Mughniyeh, the alias under which he arrived at Chautauqua. In Knife, Rushdie recounts a doctor’s remark: “You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,” as clueless about murder as he was about Rushdie’s oeuvre or Islam. Clearly, his motivations were less theological and more political. Notice how he has nothing to say about the sharia or the actual beliefs of Muslims. Rushdie’s sin rather seems to be that he “attacked their beliefs”. This is not the language of Islamists, but rather the impeccably liberal — if you like “Western,” even “woke” — language of minority rights and safe spaces, of hate speech and minoritarian victimhood.

Matar has given his grievance an adventitious, exotic colouring, but the truth is that his sense of wounded entitlement is of a piece with the general hostility to free speech we see around us in the West. There is, no doubt, something deeply illiberal about this declension of liberalism — with its stress on silencing those cruel children of the Enlightenment, with their unfeeling, universalising, secularising ways — but I suspect its votaries aren’t over-bothered by the contradiction. Contrary to what critics of wokery think, this isn’t a new development. As Faisal Devji has argued, much the same was true of the original controversy around The Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s critics, then as now, were not Islamist fundamentalists but woke — avant la lettre — Western Muslims. As Devji put it, their grievance turned more on “secular hurt than sin”.

Indeed, Rushdie’s book was burned in Bradford and Bolton and banned in Delhi long before it was noticed in the Muslim world. Khomeini was late to the party. Then again, his fatwa against Rushdie (properly speaking, a hukm since fatwas are juridical pronouncements made by religious authorities to clarify points of Islamic law, whereas hukms are ordered by government figures in a purely secular capacity) had more to do with his geopolitical wooing of Sunnis invested in the Prophet (the Shias by contrast revere Imam Ali more) in the wake of the First Gulf War than “Islamist” outrage. Meanwhile, British Muslims were using the thoroughly modern language of blasphemy — ironically a concept of Christian vintage. In the Muslim world, as Sadakat Kadri reminds us in Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Sharia Law, “prosecutions for blasphemy” have been “extremely infrequent in the historical record”. Indeed, in their last 1,400 years of existence, Muslim societies have for the better part done without them. It is no accident that the first time blasphemy rears its head in the Muslim world is in Eighties Pakistan, under the Islamicising rule of General Zia-ul-Haq; Bradford, and Yorkshire more generally, boasts a significant Pakistani Muslim population.

The very first year of Zia’s rule — 1978 — saw the release of a hagiobiopic celebrating the carpenter Ilm-ud-Din, widely regarded as South Asia’s first modern blasphemy murderer. Hung aged 20 in 1929 for killing a Hindu publisher who brought out a book apparently blaspheming the Prophet, Ilm-ud-Din languished in relative posthumous obscurity until Zia passed a slate of blasphemy laws. These days, Ilm-ud-Din is revered as a martyr, as I recently learnt at his Lahore shrine. This was the milieu that bred resentment, not the real theological dispute at heart of Rushdie’s novel — the titular “Satanic verses”. Of doubtful historicity, in this narrative of early Islam, Muhammad proclaims a revelation demanding the adoption of three polytheistic deities, but later recants as having been of “Satanic suggestion”. But it was not this, nor the two other prosaic but blasphemous details in Rushdie’s novel (that the Prophet Abraham was called a bastard, and that his wives were depicted as prostitutes) that mobilised Yorkshire’s Muslims.

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What they really wanted was to have their country’s blasphemy laws extended to Muslims as well; at the time, they only covered Anglican beliefs. It was, in short, a very British demand. The debate has since died down, if only because blasphemy laws were abolished in 2008 in England and Wales, and in 2024 Scotland, where they were replaced by a hate crime law that is, by all accounts, as ecumenical as it is Orwellian (the lineage is telling: hate crime laws are, properly speaking, the blasphemy laws of today). Across the pond, too, it is the new lexicon of hate speech that has animated the most sustained assaults on the First Amendment — some of it with good reason (in a world of swastikas and fasces, it would be churlish to be a free speech absolutist), some of it patently not. Hadi Matar only represents the more extreme, extrajudicial end of the hate speech spectrum. But distrust of the marketplace of ideas is a common enough reflex in our time.

The current obsession with hate speech and cancel culture owes to two developments. The first is the retrenchment of the authoritarian state, the second the retrenchment of the church in the West. Both effectively passed the business of policing opinions from the hands of Big Brother-style governments and God’s earthly mediators to crusading individuals. This is just as John Stuart Mill predicted would transpire in the age of democracy. “Society can and does execute its own mandates,” he wrote, by imposing conformity on the non-conforming — or the “eccentric” as Mill called them. And the cancelling of “eccentricity” isn’t a singularly Left-wing phenomenon. Take the cancelling of Palestinian novelists, artists, and musicians on both sides of the Atlantic since the war. Or, for that matter, the Kulturkampf playing out in American universities. One study has revealed that out of 1,080 attempts made to cancel academics since 2000, just over half — 52% — were made by the Left. The rest were the work of Right-wing snowflakes.

If the likes of Hadi Matar are more visible in this intolerant landscape, it is for two reasons. The first — the obvious — is the act itself. Knifing novelists is both unusual and unhinged, so newsworthy on at least two counts. The second is his chosen idiom. That he plumped for Islam tells us more about the poverty of 21st-century radicalism than anything else. Time was such energies were channelled into avowedly progressive causes. Think the Weather Underground, Brigate Rosse, the Baader Meinhof Group. These days, a young chap itching for the violent overthrow of the ruling dispensation isn’t exactly spoilt for choice. To some migrant youths, or more accurately some youths of migrant extraction, the attraction of Islam isn’t feasibly resisted. It helps that their communities are often the only pious holdouts in an increasingly godless world: West Africans and South Asians in Britain; Maghrebis in France. For French orientalist Olivier Roy, what we have witnessed since the end of the Cold War, then, is the “Islamicisation of radicalism”, and not, as it were, the radicalisation of Islam.

Rushdie, poor chap, has fallen victim to the zeitgeist. His efforts to fight so valiantly against it are, of course, nothing short of heroic. Now, more so than ever, he has become the metonym for free speech. Yet one wonders how justified this honour is. “Language was my knife,” he observes in Knife, “the knife I could use to fight back.” A great sentiment, surely, though in the paragraph that follows Rushdie lets on that he’s unsure of its efficacy: “but was that just a consoling lie I was telling myself?”

The “intimate encounter” with Matar prompts some tormented reflection: “Why didn’t I fight? Why didn’t I run? I just stood there like a piñata and let him smash me.” These are questions that ought to have dogged him much sooner. In 1990, far from being a martyr for free speech, Rushdie rushed to apologise to Khomeini, loudly affirming his Muslim faith. Later, he went as far to implore his publisher, Viking, to halt the publication of The Satanic Verses in paperback. It’s only because none of this cut any ice with the Iranians that Rushdie returned to free speech. It was left to others to take one for the team. The following year, Rushdie’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in Tsukuba; his Italian translator, too, was stabbed in Milan, though he survived. Rushdie meanwhile got to make jokes about “fatwa sex” on Curb Your Enthusiasm, as he set about accruing a bevy of spouses, as if a male Zsa Zsa Gabor.

If Rushdie hasn’t quite lived up to the hopes invested in him, his liberal critics have even less to recommend them. Indeed, compared to them, Rushdie shines like a beacon of moral clarity. Liberal uneasiness with free speech is proverbial. The Royal Society of Literature, for instance, refused point blank to condemn Matar. Here’s Bernardine Evaristo, its president: “the society cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues, but must remain impartial”. Rushdie spelled it out with greater clarity: “Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder?”

It would be too simple to pin down liberal equivocation to a generational quirk — that the young are woke and spineless, whereas the old are unwoke and tough as nails. Not so. Just a cursory glance at the roll call of Rushdie’s detractors at the time of The Satanic Verses should disabuse us of such notions. John Le Carré in the Guardian: “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.” Jimmy Carter in the New York Times: Rushdie’s book was “a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Independent: “I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer.” George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury: “we must be more tolerant of Muslim anger.”

None of them, it hardly needs saying, were Islamists. Yet they were, on balance, more sympathetic to Rushdie’s “Islamist” detractors than to Rushdie himself. Perhaps there is nothing “Islamist” about the Rushdie-hating Islamists in the first place. Perhaps this was never really a battle between Western liberalism and intolerant Islam, but rather between — as Rushdie puts it in Knife — “those with a sense of humour and those without one”. And the latter, it must be said, are a homegrown menace.

Yet what will transpire will not be, in any meaningful sense, an electoral contest. Narendra Modi, India’s ruler since 2014, will trounce his rivals for a third time. And if the cards appear stacked in his favour, it’s because he owns the pack. Cobbled together at the eleventh hour, the hapless, heteroclite alliance ranged against him, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance — INDIA for short — has had to suspend campaigning for want of funds; its bank accounts have been frozen by Modi’s government ostensibly on account of tax evasion.

Smaller parties, too, don’t stand a chance. Arvind Kejriwal, locally in power in devolved Delhi, has recently joined some of his party mates in prison. Kickbacks on liquor contracts are alleged, though everyone sees the ruse for what it is: a means to destroy the Common Man’s Party, which has for long been a burr in the ruling BJP’s saddle.

What of popular protest? Revolting farmers calling for higher procurement prices for wheat and rice, both Indian staples, learned their lesson in a hard school last month, when police and paramilitary forces were set on them. During the pandemic, the tractor classes had dealt a major blow to Modi, who was forced to climb down on agrarian reform — allowing big business to enter the wholesale market — in the face of a Delhi blockade. This time around, however, Delhi’s ruler gave no quarter. Farmers beat a hasty retreat as drones rained smoke bombs and tear gas upon them. On pain of fines and even imprisonment, social media apparatchiks were arm-twisted into blocking accounts critical of Modi and suppressing reports about the protests. To Elon Musk’s credit, though, X went public about government intimidation where previously Twitter had quietly gone along.

As for the press and television, the less said the better. The latest World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, ranks India below Afghanistan and Libya; in a list of 180 countries, India comes in at 161st place. This in a land that, at the height of the Cold War, was arguably the freest between Berlin and Sakhalin. These days, however, a single critical piece of reporting is sufficient to warrant the taxman’s — or the policeman’s — knock on the door, as the BBC discovered last year.

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Nearing 10 years in power, Modi hasn’t held a single press conference. His favourite Bollygarchs, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, both cronies of old, have a stranglehold on the legacy media. Ambani controls 70 outlets, which have a combined viewership and readership of 800 million. Meanwhile, the last independent network of sorts, NDTV, fell in 2022 to Adani, whose chartered plane Modi used on the campaign trail. Since the Prime Minister’s election, Adani has serendipitously scooped up all manner of contracts from airports to seaports, petroleum to edible oil.

As with the press, so with the judiciary. Time and again, the Supreme Court has proven itself as little more than the current ruler’s rubber stamp, ruling in Delhi’s favour over the construction of the Ram Temple atop the ruins of the razed Babri Mosque; over the suspension of rights in the disputed northern enclave of Jammu and Kashmir, whose residents were denied internet and phone access for 18 months; over Aadhar, a comprehensive China-style biometric database designed to be used, inevitably, as a mass surveillance tool.

Last month came a belated display of juridical independence: the Supreme Court scrapped electoral bonds — backhanders by another name — which in recent years had become the main source of campaign finance. Too late. The BJP has already raked in £600 million from them, as against the Congress Party’s £140 million. No surprise there. The donors — in the main mining and construction magnates tangled in red tape — naturally preferred the incumbents to their opponents.

The Congress, it is true, doesn’t inspire much confidence. That it ruled virtually uninterrupted from independence in 1947 to Modi’s election in 2014 — 54 of those 67 years — was in itself a little miracle, thanks in no small part to its historical role in displacing colonial rule, and the distorting effects of the Westminster system that guaranteed it supernumerary representation in parliament. Still, each passing decade registered growing disaffection with Congress misrule: bovine growth rates in the Fifties; wars in the Sixties; dictatorship in the Seventies; pogroms in the Eighties; corruption in the Nineties and 2000s.

By 2014, the Congress had run out of steam. Worse, it was hoist with its own petard. Decades of cosseting Hindu nationalists in its ranks had paradoxically mainstreamed their outré ideology. Similarly, just as the first-past-the-post system had worked to its advantage from the Fifties on, it now benefitted the BJP. In 2014, with 31% of the vote, Modi commanded 52% of parliament. Conversely, with its 19% vote share, the Congress boasted a mere 8% of lawmakers.

Now, it seems, we’re in for a repeat performance. Polls predict a BJP sweep. Modi’s coalition is set to win three quarters of the seats. If playing dirty works for Modi, he has been helped along by his duff opposition. Led in name only by the Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, a cipher by all accounts, the face of INDIA in fact is Rahul Gandhi, fourth-generation nepo baby and loser of the last two elections, now awaiting his third drubbing. Watching him on the hustings is a painful experience. He comes across as insufferably smug — also humourless, guileless and entirely lacking in irony. Modi, by contrast, laces his speeches with sarcasm, revelling in the double entendre and bon mot. Substantively, Gandhi’s pitch consists of no more than a vague rehearsal of multicultural shibboleths. Stylistically, he affects the élan of a cut-price Modi: scraggly beard, staccato delivery, superfluous appeals to piety.

All the same, too much should not be made of these personal defects, or indeed of Modi’s strengths. For there is a third dimension enabling India’s slide into dictatorship (or, at any rate, “electoral autocracy”, the more precise expression favoured by political scientists): the Indian masses. The fact remains, though it is unfashionable to point it out, that the people never really took to this democracy business. But one can hardly blame them. As the economist Pranab Bardhan has argued in a superbly lucid analysis, democracy was imposed from on high by competing Indian elites, none of whom were strong enough to rule single-handedly. Indian democracy was, above all, a gentlemen’s agreement. Liberty, equality, and fraternity had nothing to do with it.

Properly speaking, the people themselves have had a say only in a handful of elections — the two following the dictatorship of the Seventies, and the six between 1989 and 2004. Before that, India was essentially a one-party state, a state of affairs to which the country has now once again returned. Then as now, structural reasons — political violence; business backing; media clientelism; mass defection — conspire against a free and fair vote.

The upshot has been political ossification. In the grey expanse of ramshackle slums, where scavenging counts as gainful employment, politicians’ promises are understandably received with cynicism, even incredulity. Decades have gone by since independence, and India has nothing by way of a national health service to show for it. State schooling remains a shambles. A recent study found that less than a third of 10-year-olds could handle basic maths. Only 84 million — 6% of Indians — make more than $10 a day.

Yet, at a popular level, inequities provoke little resentment. For vertical deference counts for more than horizontal solidarity. The average Indian looks up to his betters, and shares no fellow feeling with his equals. To the latter sentiment is attached the rank odour of Marxism — by turns foreign, unnatural and even a little sinister. G.K. Chesterton held that “the oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.” Nowhere is this truer than in India.

Here, in a nutshell, is how the caste system is sustained, every stratum content with its station. Against this backdrop, elections degenerate into computational games played out in panelled boardrooms, with parties vying for the support of “caste leaders”, who, in exchange for public sinecures, deliver votes en bloc. Democracy proper, needless to say, can hardly thrive in cultural conditions where individuality is at such a discount.

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Indeed, no observer of the Indian scene can fail to note the oppressive conformity — ideological; cultural; sartorial — of the place, of an order with few world-historical equivalents outside the Muslim world. From haircuts to home décor, one is hard-pressed to detect even a hint of deviancy. Outside elite ghettoes, public displays of heterosexual, let alone homosexual, affection are as rare as alien sightings. Women remain practically absent from the workplace; the female participation rate hovers around the 28% mark.

Pop culture offers no respite. Barring the odd tour de force such as the Amazon show Pataal Lok, a coruscating, chiaroscuro masterpiece that pulls no punches in depicting the dregs of Delhi, film and television rarely deviate from the usual formula: slapstick snoozefests interspersed with mechanical dancing and nationalist propaganda; think Adam Sandler meets Jane Fonda with hints of Leni Riefenstahl. The premise, invariably, is boy meets girl, something which is all too rare in the real world. Marriages — few of which are open (quelle horreur), mixed (caste taboos apply), or liable to termination (1% of Indian marriages end in divorce, as against 42% in Britain) — are customarily brokered by parental fiat.

Intellectually speaking, what was once a luminous world of letters is now a backwater. Time was when — as late as the Nineties — the hottest name was Vikram Seth, a terrific prose stylist unafraid to tackle the darker recesses of Indian culture. His heirs, if they can be called that, are Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi, both subliterate dispensers of postcard schlock. Tellingly, their celebrity rests not on their vapid writing but their vigorous cheerleading for Modi.

The review and opinion pages, likewise, used to be a punchier affair. There was a real joy to be had leafing through the latest number of Seminar, Quest, Swarajya, even the Economic Weekly. The latter nowadays throws its writers under the bus, pulling pieces to placate offended industrialists. The leading dailies, for their part, simply toe the party line. Real investigative reporting is left to the dissident press — the likes of Caravan, Scroll, and The Wire, which eke out a tenuous existence amid spurious lawsuits and tax raids. Anti-caste academics and activists are routinely carted off to jail on trumped-up charges of conspiracy.

All of this evidently enjoys popular approval. With polls showing that 85% of Indians express a preference for autocratic or military rule, one can only conclude that the vast majority of Indians don’t exactly swear by democracy. On the eve of what promises to be a sham election, with opposition leaders in prison and party funds frozen, it seems they have finally got what they wanted.

In parliaments and the press, the latest peasant revolt has been met with raised eyebrows, hostility even. “This class has been spoilt by decades of copious public support,” declared La Stampa, Italy’s soi-disant “progressive” newspaper. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s premier conservative paper, was blunter: “Pampered farmers,” read its headline. Below, the protests were quaintly described as an “impertinence”. Europe’s politicians are likewise exasperated. Germany’s home secretary, Nancy Faeser, has pinned the blame on far-Right coup-makers, accusing them of seducing the unsuspecting subalterns.

In short, peasants appear to be not only obtuse but also obsolete in our modern world of slacktivism and semiconductors. So, this is an appropriate week for the publication of the 78-year-old social historian Patrick Joyce’s deeply sympathetic swansong to the world of his parents, Remembering Peasants.

Not that the thinking classes have ever taken peasants seriously. Even Marx thought they were morons: there’s an off-hand aside about “the idiocy of rural life” in The Communist Manifesto. Factory workers were supposed to be at the vanguard of revolution. Farmhands, by contrast, stood “outside history”; not for them the whiggish march of Progress. Generally speaking, the Left has been instinctively hostile to peasant populism, with its reactionary affection for faith and family.

And yet, conservatives haven’t tended to champion them either: their general view is that peasants’ suffering is entirely self-inflicted. This perspective was summed up by the anthropologist — and later advisor to Nixon and Reagan — Edward Banfield, who in 1958 laid into the “amoral familism” of the peasants of Basilicata. Too absorbed by the complacent parochialism of family life, they were simply incapable of thinking of their salvation — which, of course, lay in the free market. Peasants, so the argument ran, weren’t good capitalist citizens.

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As landowners, peasants are unmistakably conservatives. But they are not a rich people. As smallholders, they can be classed neither as oppressors nor as the oppressed. The peasant’s politics is a quaint admixture of Left and Right, then: the state, they feel, should be kept at arm’s length, but so, too, should the free market. Change of any kind is to be resisted — and it is here that the radicalism of the peasant comes in. “The peasant is a conservative, not a progressive,” writes Joyce. “Slow to move, but once roused, unstoppable, as in the peasant revolt, the jacquerie.”

Indeed, the history of the peasantry is a history of protest. Western Sicilians, for instance, used to greet one another with cries of “cuntrastuma”: we are resisting. But this isn’t a history that is widely known. This is a world, for the better part, shunned by trade paperbacks and Beeb documentaries. How many of us have much of an inkling about, say, the German Peasants’ War of 1524, Europe’s largest uprising before the French Revolution? And it isn’t often that we commemorate the killing of 11,000 peasants by the army and police in what Joyce calls “the last great European peasant uprising”: the 1907 Romanian rebellion. Nor, for that matter, do we recall that one of the earliest and biggest challenges to Russia’s October Revolution was the Tambov Rebellion of 1920, in which peasants launched a guerrilla war against the Red Army. Put down by the Soviets, the conflict resulted in a quarter of a million deaths.

Much of Europe scarcely remembers the peasant revolts of the 20th century, perhaps because the peasants themselves are a vanishing people. As recently as 1960, 40% lived in the countryside; that figure has now almost halved. In the EU, scarcely 4% work in agriculture. What’s more, those who do aren’t stricto sensu farmers, but rather “five o’clock farmers”, who double as miners, cleaners or factory workers. Before the turn of the century, Pierre Bourdieu lamented that you’re more likely to find peasants in theme parks than villages.

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Even the farm has fallen out of the hands of the farmer. Agribusinesses have trumped subsistence smallholders, with some 90% of the global grain trade controlled by five corporations. Today’s revolting peasants also complain of crippling taxation, environmental legislation, foreign competition. Ukraine, for instance, exempt from EU standards on account of the war, is dumping cheap grain across Europe, while a proposed Free Trade Agreement with South America threatens to steal a march on indigenous European meat and produce.

The result is that peasants now only properly belong to the world’s poorest societies: Somalia, Moldova, and India, that “greatest peasant nation on Earth”, as Joyce calls it in his introduction — though he has the chutzpah to then completely omit the country — and its 600 million farmers — from the rest of his book.

The English are perhaps more guilty of ignoring the peasant than other Europeans. After all, ours is the land that pioneered capitalism. In early modern England, serfdom was superseded by a tenurial system in which land was concentrated in a few hands. By 1500 or so, serfdom was nearly extinct in Britain. Russia would only get there in 1861, the US in 1863, Brazil in 1888. So it was that, in Elizabethan and Stuart England, the countryside divided into tenants and landlords, with the more astute farmers becoming large landowners and the rest their paid labourers. By 1861, Joyce writes: “almost three-quarters of the British Isles was in the hands of less than 5,000 people”. Peasants, which is to say subsistence smallholders, never had a fighting chance in such an unforgiving world.

It was only in the diminutive enclaves bordering England that the peasant — that great anti-capitalist subject — survived. It is no coincidence that there was no English equivalent to the Scottish Crofters’ War, Welsh Tithe War, and Irish Land War in the late-19th century. And it is not surprising that the farmers’ protests now troubling Europe have not crossed the Channel.

Peasants elsewhere did their best to resist their overlords. In South Italy, peasants rose time and again against the tyranny of their absentee landlords and the proto-Mafia, as in the Fasci Siciliani of 1893. Across the continent, landlords were punished for cupidity in acts of “expiatory violence”. So it was that Lord Leitrim, a “notorious evicting landlord” in Counties Galway and Mayo, met his just deserts in 1878. After his assassination, peasants showed up at his Dublin funeral to desecrate his corpse.

Time was when historians did not look kindly on such acts of violence. But over the years many have been rebranded. The so-called Galician Slaughter of 1846, for instance, has now been rechristened the Galician Peasant Uprising. Its moving spirit, the revolutionary Jakub Szela, is no longer seen as a fevered rabble-rouser, but rather a critic of serfdom and corvée labour. Far-right Poles may continue to vilify him, blaming Szela’s peasants for crushing the Krakow Uprising, in which Polish nationalists tried to oust Austrian overlords. But the prevailing narrative now is that the serfs saw not the Austrians but the “liberal” nationalists — most of them of noble and gentry stock — as their oppressors.

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Accordingly, 5,000 nobles and landlords were “scythed, flailed, pitchforked, and sickled to death”, and 500 country manors sacked and destroyed. Szela smashed the tombstones at the Siedliska cemetery, shouting “there must be equality in this”. The peasants turned up at the Burzyn church “asking for absolution for the murders they were about to commit”. Their violence was not senseless, then. Here, the peasants appear as a sober and hard-nosed people, alert to the reality of class and admirably clear-headed about the cold comforts of nationalism.

And yet our disdain for peasants lives on, linguistically. Most of us in the West have a wide lexicon of disparagement at hand. French pejoratives include cul-terreux (earthy arse) and plouc (plebeian). The truly dense North Italian finds no lazier slur to malign his southern compatriot than terrone (literally, land person). English readers are no doubt familiar with louts, boors, yokels, dolts and clodhoppers. When defeated by argument, online trolls typically fall back on the unimaginative putdown, “shut up, peasant”.

We really ought to show more gratitude. None of those jacqueries was in vain. Without the unruly peasant of yesterday, the ordinary worker of today would have considerably less autonomy and dignity. In 2024, we might find peasants surplus to requirements, and sure enough, the current round of protests may well be their last hurrah. But it is, all the same, an instructive episode. In our quiescent age of worker passivity, the unrelenting, uncompromising peasant could show us the way forward.

Millions watched the spectacle. A 30-metre priapic incense stick made of 1,500kg of cow dung was lit for the occasion. Babies were prematurely induced so that they would be born on this holiest of days. Yet, for all the pomp, the pilgrims will doubtless be returning home disappointed. For the Ram Temple, which is supposed to be the third-largest in the world, isn’t even close to completion. Not even its first floor has been built: it is set to be inaugurated in December — too late for Narendra Modi, who is evidently a man in a terrific hurry. At the height of the pandemic, either conscious of his mortality or deliberately disregarding the convention of posthumous recognition, Modi had the Ahmedabad cricket stadium renamed after him. This time around, there’s an inconvenient event just around the corner: a spring general election.

And so, like the Italian umarell — the ubiquitous pensioners who have an inexplicable penchant for observing construction sites, and every so often proffering unwanted advice to workers — Modi’s fans have had to content themselves with what is essentially a work in progress. To the bhakts — diehards — of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), there was the consolation prize of seeing their ruler lather mascara on the idol’s eyes.

Indian liberals, by contrast, observed the proceedings with obituarial gloom. To them, this is the end of an era. The curtain has fallen on secularism — on the grand vision of the country’s founding fathers. The Fifties and Sixties, so the story goes, were a golden age of religious peace; the Congress Party that had ruled uninterruptedly since independence in 1947, we are told, not only protected minorities from the worst instincts of the Hindu majority but also gave them considerable constitutional concessions. Muslims, for instance, were allowed to conserve such folksy and innocent practices as polygamy, unilateral divorce without alimony (a male prerogative only, of course), and discriminatory inheritance (sons being entitled to twice the share of daughters). The meddlesome state was kept at bay.

This arrangement was proof, apparently, of the genius of “Indian secularism”, which liberals saw as superior to French laïcité, with its unedifying principle of separating church and state. Such a severance would have resulted in monstrous godlessness, argued Indian liberals. Worse, the very idea stank of foreignness. Fortunately, though, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had no truck with such heresies. As the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has argued in The Argumentative Indian: he understood that only by making concessions to religion can religious passions be controlled.

The political theorist Rajeev Bhargava, doyen of Delhi’s liberal intellectual aristocracy, made a similar case. Nehru had cracked the formula. His secularism did not disregard Hinduism and Islam; rather, it maintained a “principled distance” between the two. Stanley Tambiah, anthropologist, also praised Nehru’s “large-hearted and genuinely accommodative” secularism, which — unlike laïcité — won over minorities. Or so he claimed.

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The end of secularism is nigh

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Try telling that to the Muslims who actually lived through the Nehruvian period. For all his secularist bravura, Nehru scarcely lifted a finger to stop the massacre of Muslims in Hyderabad in 1948. Some 40,000 were killed, and another 13,000 imprisoned, as the kingdom was annexed to the republic. Further north, in Uttar Pradesh, Muslims were fired en masse from government after accusations that they were a fifth column in the pay of Pakistan. In the eastern borderlands, some 98,000 Indian Muslims were deported to East Pakistan. Meanwhile, influential Muslim leaders such as Sheikh Abdullah and Kasim Razvi were thrown in prison.

What’s more, the Congress Party singularly failed to tackle the scourge of interfaith riots — although “riots” doesn’t quite cut it. These were, in fact, pogroms. They claimed nearly 3,000 Muslim lives in the 10 years to 1963; at just under a tenth of the country’s population, they accounted for 82% of the fatalities in this era of violence. The following year, in the wake of the theft of the moi muqaddas — a strand of hair that once nestled in the Prophet Muhammad’s beard — a few thousand Muslims were slaughtered in and around India’s eastern rustbelt. Many responded by giving up on the nation altogether: around 800,000 — one in 50 Indian Muslims — left for Pakistan.

All this in the golden age of Indian secularism. Yet half a century on, liberals remain in denial, forever regurgitating the sophistry of the secularists. The unthinking celebration of Indian secularism was in fact wishful thinking disguised as wisdom. In recent years, scores of revisionist studies have shown, with good old-fashioned empiricism, how Indian secularism appeased violent Hindu nationalism. Sadly, these have been greeted with a deafening silence. Rather disingenuously, India’s liberals remain oblivious to the dangers of religious appeasement. Few recognise how, for instance, calls to introduce a ban on cow slaughter might alienate Muslims and low-caste Dalits, who see no reason to uphold the upper-caste Hindu injunction against consuming beef.

Such concessions to Hindu majoritarian sentiment have been the cause of much grief and interfaith tension. Not that secularist liberals — many of them card-carrying Congress members — were over-bothered by such unpleasantries through the second half of the 20th century, when the party was in power for all but nine years. Their attitudes began to change when the BJP, the Congress’s explicitly Hindu nationalist rival, came to power for the first time in 1996. Now that the Congress was in the opposition, it was fair game to fault Delhi’s rulers for failing to put a stop to Hindu violence against Muslims. The process accelerated under Modi in 2014 — the same Modi who as Chief Minister of Gujarat had been criminally negligent at best or complicit at worst in handling the riots of 2002, in which a thousand Muslims perished.

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Gandhi hasn't aged well

By Pratinav Anil

The liberal secularists, however, have been loath to admit that the Congress was just as nasty to minorities when it was in power as the BJP is today. In fact, the BJP did not come out of nowhere. Both parties have shared a pensée unique: a commitment to caste and class hierarchy, coupled with an allergy to redistribution, sustained electorally by roaring appeals to Hindu tradition. This was the worldview that produced a Congress that murmured secular pieties, claiming that its ranks were a “mirror of the nation”, even though in the Thirties and Forties Muslims accounted for a mere 2 to 3% of its total membership — while making up 25% of India’s population.

In the provinces the Congress controlled, idol worship was forced down the throats of hapless Muslim students. Discriminatory licensing policies destroyed Muslim businesses. Cow slaughter bans bankrupted Muslim butchers. History textbooks were rewritten to heroise Hindus and malign Muslims. And so the path to Partition was laid. But no lessons were learnt. Indeed, scarcely any attempt was made at course correction after 1947. Very simply, the Congress needed religious appeals to win elections. This was true in the late-19th century: when devolution and the extension of the franchise to the middling sort proved a challenge, religion had come to the rescue, with Congress leaders wrapping themselves in the saffron flag of Hinduism. And it was true in the mid-20th century as well. In the absence of redistribution and land reform, Hinduism was the glue that held the orders together. Election campaigns began in temples. Religious festivals became indistinguishable from political rallies.

Still, before the century was out, it had become clear that the Congress was a spent force. Poor economic growth rates had steadily discredited it; staggering corruption in the Eighties and Nineties ultimately did for it. But the BJP was able to steal a march on the Congress not because it was radically different but because it was essentially the same — only less inhibited and more articulate in its majoritarianism. Indian secularism was the first step on a slippery slope to Hindu nationalism. We can now see that the Congress Party was simply BJP lite.

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The modern history of Ayodhya illustrates this point rather well. When the idol of Ram magically appeared overnight at Babur’s Mosque in 1949, no doubt through the agency of local delinquents, the Congress took a rather indulgent view of the whole affair. The mosque was boarded up and the idol left inside, giving oxygen to Hindu zealots. In 1985, their demands that the locks be opened were answered by the Congress, whose leader cynically launched his election campaign four years later at the site, amid raucous calls for Hindu renewal. But it was the BJP that proved more adept at that game, demolishing the mosque completely in 1992. Predictably, riots ensued across the country, and the BJP rode to power four years later off the back of religious polarisation.

By 2010, Hindu nationalists enjoyed a comfortable presence in all walks of life. That year, the Allahabad High Court pronounced Muslims “junior partners” in national life, dividing Babur’s Mosque into three tracts and pledging two to Hindus. Then, 10 years later, with the BJP once again in power, the Supreme Court handed the entire plot to Hindus, to construct a temple on the ruins of the 16th-century mosque. Now, with the consecration of the Ram Temple, and by extension the effective inauguration of a new theocratic regime, I suspect we have finally heard the last about that spurious, self-congratulatory declension of laïcité that was Indian secularism. Perhaps it is time liberals defended the real thing.