Ministries Of The Interior: Rory Stewart & The Crisis Of Cumbrian Masculinity

Cumbria’s suicide rate is 50% higher than the national average.  Among the county’s farming community, it’s higher still.  Hang on to these facts, because they’re important later in this piece.

All celebrities are psychologically damaged; celebrity politicians dangerously so.  Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics On The Edge is subtitled Notes From Inside, possibly a nod to Dostoyevsky but both labels are ambiguous. His account of his time as MP for Penrith & the Borders and as a minister under Cameron and May is not just about the challenges of representing a constituency at the overlooked edge of England. It’s also about operating within a system of governance so dysfunctional that, if Stewart’s experience is an accurate indicator, it’s very possibly now beyond any kind of reform (& most definitely beyond the moronic opportunism of the capitalised variety).

The subtitle is a more interesting double, or just possibly quadruple, entendre.  It’s not only that Stewart very obviously has a miserably frustrating time of things as successively a backbencher, committee chair, junior minister and cabinet minister. His plans for change are frustrated at every turn (as I write this, news stories about wrongly released prisoners make it clear that all of the problems he identified as prisons minister 10 years ago persist today, and none of the solutions he championed have delivered change).  He makes no secret of his belief that change can only be successfully implemented from the very top – ideally by Prime Minister Rory Stewart who, it is implied, would have been a sort of benevolent governor of HMP Whitehall, bringing education and reformation to the chronic re-offending of the long-term inmates of an institution that’s clearly part open prison, part secure unit hospital. 

The subtitle also promises or at least implies some degree of interiority from the author and that is where the memoir becomes genuinely intriguing. One expects all politicians’ propensity for lies, evasion and half-truth to originate in deception of the self: they and not their electorate are the real first victims of dysfunctional ambition and self-promotion.  What we get is the visible agony of a serious commitment to public service attempting to find its way through a world focused on the celebrity narcissism of showbiz for ugly people.  Perhaps we should not be surprised by how little he achieved, rather that he got so far and lasted so long.  Stewart has a notably low opinion of almost everyone he encounters at Westminster (full disclosure – one of the very few people he has a good word for is a long-standing friend of mine; I have never discussed Stewart with him).  Conversely, and oddly, it soon becomes obvious that almost everyone Rory encounters in turn takes a decided dislike to him.  It’s striking that he offers no insight into why this should be the case. When asked rhetorically by a friend and ally that he must surely know why, he repeatedly disclaims all understanding.  Perhaps its no more than the fact that he’s committed two long-term cardinal sins for a Tory and a toff – those of being  egregious, and of being unapologetically clever.  If so, neither of these trouble him as possible explanations. 

There is however a moment where the ignored and unmanageable suddenly come up close and personal, when Stewart baldly admits there was a time that he considered suicide.  We should, I think, take this claim profoundly seriously rather than dismiss it as the performative self-dramatisation of  a public schoolboy caught out in the manner of Richard Branson at Stowe.  (There is not so much as a distant echo of “And then you’ll all be sorry”, the usual end-point of such cases).  The occasion was a maliciously selective quotation in the press that gave the impression, falsely, of a snob’s disdain for the poorer sort of farmers who were the backbone of traditional Tory support in his constituency, and he was clearly utterly mortified by what it might be thought to reveal about him.  This moment is made all the darker by the complete absence, anywhere in the book, of any mention or awareness of the epidemic of suicide (see above) in that community and in his wider constituency. 

What we do get is the gradual revelation of an elusive pathological hinterland in which political struggles are made unbearable by crippling attacks of migraine.  He is an avid exponent of the Walking Cure - long tramps through constituency and borderland that are probably not so much fact-finding missions as self-medicating ministrations of his own interior. One is tempted to shake him by the shoulders and demand “But Rory, what exactly is it that you are walking away from in such a brisk and purposeful manner?”  I suspect that this would elicit the same null return as the ‘Surely you know why?’ question above. 

Does any of this, in the context of a bestselling political memoir, really matter?  Well, up to a point or two, yes it does.

First point: Stewart is still a shaper of political attitudes amongst the bien-pensant podcast-consuming classes via his lucrative sideline The Rest Is Politics. (Shorter version of his take on being a neo-colonial administrator in an unstable satrapy – “You have to ask yourself – who do I shoot first?”). Second point: in Cumbria rumours abound that Stewart intends to run as an independent candidate in the 2027 election for Cumberland and Westmorland’s strategic mayor.  I have little in common politically with either Tories or toffs, but it could well be that if he runs he could win and be a decently good holder of the office. Stewart is clearly one of nature’s District Commissioners – and the job of strategic mayor of a remote, impoverished region with complex problems that have chronically escaped the solutions of conventional Westminster would probably quite suit his blend of individuality, intellect and bloody-minded persistence.  He would, I guess, get a decently strong personal vote, plus those of the excluded middle who with the collapse of both Conservatives and Labour locally want to ensure that Reform UK Ltd’s coalition of the whining are not allowed anywhere near the levers of power, as well as the 2^nd preferences of those prepared to tolerate a winner so long as he’s not ‘one of that other lot’, whoever that lot may be. And that may just constitute a coalition of the winning. 

If he runs and if he succeeds then I very much hope that he will treat as his first priority the mayor’s strategic responsibility for health and wellbeing and bring his considerable talents and energy to bear upon the problem of Cumbria’s bloody epidemic of suicide and self-harm.  Our people have suffered more than enough.

In Memoriam T.H.

Years ago my centaur’s random course through life crossed the path of a great poet. I was invited by friends from Cambridge days – the poet’s daughter & son-in-law – to a reading in London, and went along, vaguely imagining a brief, small event in a cramped bookshop. Instead a figure walked sideways into the limelight of the National Theatre with a modest, self-deprecating smile and proceeded to turn the cavernous space of the Lyttleton auditorium into an intimate nook in which we joined him on a voyage of discovery, understanding, memory and passion.  Later on, in the bar, he was great company - & when I mentioned to my friend that I found her dad to be dazzlingly stimulating and engaging but clearly not a man to tolerate any kind of shit, she said that I’d got him about right.  Learning that in his study at home in Newcastle he had a small gallery of portraits of poets that he admired, a few days later I sent him a photograph I’d taken years earlier in Italy of the death mask of Dante Alighieri. Grainy, grey and with the shallowest of focus on facial features, it’s one of the very few images I’m satisfied to have captured. The Italian looks out from blurred death with lidless eyes, drawn and exhausted by the malaria that probably killed him, transmitting to us the pain suffered and the wisdom grasped during a journey through and out of hell.  At our next meeting the poet was kind enough to thank me for the gift.  This was at a meal after a performance of ‘The Trackers Of Oxyrhynchus’, a verse-drama based on a long-lost Sophoclean satyr play, in which he’d mixed classical scholarship, Victorian colonialism, Greek myth and notions of high and low culture into a titanic parable of the uses and dangers of art, class, truth and power.  (My abiding memory of that meal is actually a bawdily low conversation with the costume designer who had given each of the masked and clog-dancing satyrs of Sophocles’ chorus personality by creating wildly individual designs for the alarmingly prominent prosthetic penises they sported). 

And some time later, the poet sent me a gift in return – a signed and dedicated copy of some just-published poems about the Gulf War of 1991.  The cover photograph was an image straight out of hell – the burnt-to-bits head of an Iraqi soldier killed by American fire during his retreat from Kuwait.  (The picture is well-known in the UK, but never seen in the USA according to American friends).  In ‘A Cold Coming’, the poet imagines meeting the dead Iraqi, being upbraided by him for shirking the poet’s responsibility to tell the truth, and then going on to hear his story and that of the three American soldiers who killed him.  It’s a chilling, terrifying tale of an individual life snuffed out by forces utterly beyond its control.  And it takes as its departure not just Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ – to which it was compared at the time – but Dante’s incontro with Virgil at the gate of hell, and then reaches further down to Homer’s account of the chthonic world where you encounter the spirits of the unappeasable dead, and if you’re lucky or know the right words, you might just placate them for as long as it takes you to speak.  

And this poem was published on the news pages – not the culture section or entertainment supplement, please note  – of a national newspaper.  It’s difficult now to imagine, in our world of enshittified social media, that a poet can command that size of readership and speak with that sort of moral seriousness in a form that’s accessible and in language that scintillates with intellect, humanity, erudition and compassion, via such a channel (The Guardian, as it happens). But Tony Harrison did so, and gave us strength and understanding in the face of evil.   

But we live in diminished times, and a time diminished still further by his passing.  Where now the scholarship, the wit, the intelligence, the compassion, the bursting-with-relish-and-energy language, the profound learning (much Latin and more Greek), the wisdom, the utter commitment to telling the truth about our condition?

I weep for Tony Harrison - he is dead. His words shine back to us across the void and the gathering years, and will illuminate every one of our tomorrows.

 

A Northern Voice

The estimable Jen Bowden produces an outstanding regular podcast 'Northern Voices', in which she interviews writers from the north of England about their work, their craft and the challenges and beauties of being a 'northern writer' (however you may frame that particular label). I'm delighted to report that in Episode 87 Jen & I talk about my historical novel 'The Judas Case', the odd biases against partnership publishing and other challenges facing writers in the north.

You can find it here: https://soundcloud.com/northern_voices/episode-87-nicholas-graham

Review - The Lamb by Lucy Rose: Cumbria On A Plate

You probably have to go as far back as the Brontes to find three women having as dysfunctionally miserable a time of it in the uplands of the north as Margot, Mama and Eden, the bizarre love triangle at the heart of Lucy Rose’s The Lamb.

First a disclaimer: I’m prejudiced against serial killers.  Time was, the better class of murder involved the violation of complex knots of financial, familial or sexual obligations; betrayal, intrigue, the deep roots of personal and social dysfunction, long-hidden animosities and ancient or tribal hatreds.  Then along came the serial killer, blown in from the anonymous, asocial wildernesses of the Empty Quarter of America, at just the moment that Margaret Thatcher announced there was no such thing as ‘society’ and the value of a life was reduced to its position – or lack of one - in the marketplace.  The age of consumer entitlement made the psychopathology of the compulsive killer the focus, and murder fiction became a sort of action-painting.  At its worst, plot became a crossword puzzle to be cracked by ticking boxes and recognizing patterns not meanings.  At its best, a tool for the dissection of the enflamed horrors of the human soul.  The interiority of the killer, not the social relations of the victim, became the focus of narrative discovery.   (I exclude from this opinion the work of the excellent Patricia Cornwell, whose Scarpetta is, throughout, a deeply political figure).*

What Rose does in The Lamb is take that interiority to a new level, if only because she brings the intense social relations of the killers’ family romance into play, and watches unspeakable horror play out through the eyes of a not-that-innocent child. 

The Lamb is, at its most basic – and it is about basic urges, no doubt – a sort of post-feminist eating-disorder retelling of Sawney Bean, the Galloway cannibal who lurked in the darkness at the edge of Renaissance Scotland.  Here the family occupy a cottage somewhere anonymously remote in the Cumbrian fells (it’s probably no coincidence that Cumbria is currently a serious foodie destination, with 13 Michelin-starred restaurants and many more adorning the Good Food Guide), though a convenient bus-ride away from Margot’s school, which she continues to attend without care-workers batting an eyelash while the culinary horrors play out at the other end of the line in broken Britain.  The route between these two worlds, from the oppression of the mundane to the horror of the underworld, is important: its overseen  by the driver of the school bus, and it says a lot for Rose’s adeptness with ambiguity that we can never be quite sure whether he is genuinely concerned for Margot’s wellbeing – or subtly grooming her. 

All journeys into the world of childhood enchantment begin with the absence of the father, and the identity & whereabouts of Margot’s are subjects of persistent mystery and reticence. (There’s an early clue to Margot’s own withholding of information from us in a family of rampant appetites when they have the local gamekeeper – father of one of Margot’s schoolfriends – for dinner and the identity of exactly which body-part Margot consumes is coyly elided in a way reminiscent of how we’re never quite told exactly what Heathcliff actually does with the exhumed body of Catherine Earnshaw). 

Release from this double hell comes when Margot reaches puberty.  I’ll maintain my own reticence on the details of the denouement, but will say that while there is a pitiless logic to the plotline – the astute may have seen it coming for some time – the voice and viewpoint by which it is  transmitted raises some deep questions for the reader.  Have we, after all, been participating in a fictional abuse memoire (well, yeah, unavoidably)?  And the continuation of Margot’s voice by other means implies the omniscience of eternity, quite the shift after the relentlessly visceral, corporeally messy details of the narrative.    

*Fun fact: I had the good fortune, many years ago, to study creative writing under Anthony Abbott at Davidson College, a year or two after Cornwell had graced his seminars.  Tony's influence and encouragement had a profound effect upon my own work.

For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 5: End Times & The Leopard

Just how long does it take for gangsters to be mistaken for aristocrats?*

In the latest edition of For Whom The Book Tolls, DK Powell & I discuss two seminal books for our age – End Times by Peter Turchin and The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa.

Watch the podcast here:  https://youtu.be/948ZNduVtCc

In End Times Turchin claims to have invented a new science – ‘cliodynamics’, effectively the crunching of large sets of historical data that suggests history is predictably cyclical after all.  So far, so psychohistory & Hari Seldon / Isaac Asimov.  ‘Real’ historians of my acquaintance when told about him tend to sigh and say ‘Oh no, not another one . . .’

But Turchin is originally a studier of animal population behaviours, and he’s brought scientific rigour to his thesis.

His point: the accumulation of wealth upwards leads to 3 things fatal for any society – gross inequality, the immiseration of the majority of the population, the over-production of new elites who compete for power. Result: political disintegration followed by the persistence of the underlying conditions.

Now, do those three things remind you of any societies either on this side of the Atlantic or the other? 

And on the subject of new elites replacing old, it’s time for you to read – or re-read - one of the great historical novels, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard.  Set in Sicily during the 1860s revolution that led to the unification of Italy, it charts the managed decline – and persistence by other means – of Fabrizio, Prince of Salinas, whose nephew Tancredi recognises reality early on – “If we want things to stay as they are – things will have to change.” 

The novel has been filmed twice – once in 1963 by Italian aristocrat and Marxist Lucino Visconti, starring Burt Lancaster as the prince, Alain Delon as Tancredi and Claudia Cardinale as Angelica.  This version is hypnotically ravishing & I warmly recommend it.

Available via Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B00FYGUMKS

There’s also a new adaptation available on Netflix that really opens out the book’s oblique, interior narratives – we get a lot of wartime action scenes - and re-casts Tancredi’s romantic relationships in a way that’s not encumbered by the social codes of 19^th century Sicily  (if you so much as glance at a girl with living male relatives, be prepared either to marry her or to fight for your life). 

Available via Netflix:  https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81392676

You can find End Times here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Times-Counter-Elites-Political-Disintegration-ebook/dp/B0BFB71KPC

And The Leopard here:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leopard-Revised-material-Vintage-Classics-ebook/dp/B0041RRH6S

 *Two generations at most, in either direction, judging by the above. 

For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 4: Solaris & The Spittle Of Zimolax

In the latest edition of For Whom The Book Tolls, Ken Ford Powell and I pitch a couple of recent must-read books to each other.  Ken talks about The Spittle Of Zimolax, a between-the-wars mystery featuring an intrepid female sleuth working for MI5 in pursuit of a tantalisngly well-imagined McGuffin.

And I pitch to Ken the great Polish sci-fi novel ‘Solaris’ by Stanislaus Lem (1921 – 2006).  Much-filmed, Solaris is that rare thing – a book that contains multitudes of other books, a sort of Borgesian multibrary.  It’s not ‘just’ science fiction, it’s a ghost story, a heartbreaking love story, a political satire, an enquiry into knowledge and how we think about the world, an exploration of consciousness, a warning on the dangers of AI – virtually everything that disturbs us about our contemporary world is contained within it, and it was first published in 1961.

It also provides the cultural missing link between George Clooney, a visionary Russian film director, and the Sex Pistols . . .

How, exactly?  You’ll have to listen to the podcast . . .

https://youtu.be/YrmbVZXwag4