It’s been a busy week. I know, this is not an opening sentence that you will see often these days but if you extend your definition of the word ‘busy’, you’ll know what I mean. Think of it as a verb rather than an adjective; as in “I have been busying myself with a variety of sedentary activities”.
 
These ‘activities’ – another word I use loosely – are better characterized by the original Old English bisig, meaning careful, anxious, diligent.
 
And it is carefully, anxiously, diligently, that I have been following the news. I have watched and listened, read and wrote, considered, responded and ‘reacted’. I have liked, shared, commented, and re-tweeted far more than my blood pressure can handle. I have busied myself with some thankless and demeaning exchanges on local political forums – “I have photocopied your vile post Mr Smith” – and engaged in a series of WhatsApp conversations without discovering what’s up or down.
 
But then two things happened that transformed my sense of ennui.
 
The first was the appearance on Channel 4 of live test cricket, and those who took the decision to outbid Sky must be very happy. I certainly am, because the test, which finished an hour or so ago with a victory for England, was a superb game from beginning to end.
 
Joe Root batted magnificently and captained well. Given India’s fightback on the last day of their final test against Australia, his decision not to enforce the follow-on was sensible and correct.
 
Of course, Root knew that he could rely on Anderson, and Anderson did what Anderson does. That first over, in which his reverse swing did for Gill and Rahane, was as good as any I have seen. And I saw Michael Holding.

​

​The day the test match began, I received my pre-ordered copy of Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera, and I read the opening chapters between overs. He has done his research on the attitudes and methods of British imperialism, and is not afraid to itemize some of the quite appalling actions carried out in pursuit of power and profit, necessary because, as he points out, this aspect of the Empire is not even mentioned, never mind taught in British schools.
 
But his sub-title is How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain. It’s more specific and personal than this, because the book is actually about how imperialism has shaped Sathnam Sanghera: he is open about his own experience growing up in Wolverhampton (Enoch Powell’s constituency), not knowing English until he attended school, but took a first in English at Cambridge and has forged a career in journalism and writer (not always the same thing).
 
He was working for the FT when I knew him, but is now with The Times and Sunday Times, so I seldom see his columns and features, restricting myself to his books (The Boy With The Top-Knot, Marriage Material and now Empireland) where I find myself in awe of his honesty and his prose.
 
Test cricket and a good book. Reasons to be cheerful, part 1.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Joan Osborne sang with the Dead, or at least the post-Jerry variants of the Dead, and I have long been an admirer. But have only just discovered that she also tackled Bob’s oeuvre. Today, I am playing a show from Charleston, WV in which she shows that she is one of the few who can bring something new to a Bob song. Her version of Spanish Harlem Incident is sublime. Reasons to be cheerful, part 2!

​Crow Court by Andy Charman is greater than the sum of its parts, of which there are fourteen. Each might stand alone – and indeed a couple have been published as such. But it is in this form, in this novel, that the short stories, with their precise observations of people and landscape, are integrated and interwoven to create the diverse community of Wimborne Minster between 1840 and 1863.
 
It is a fascinating read, which I can’t tell you too much about without triggering a spoiler alert. But it begins with marriage plans and the apparent suicide of the chorister scheduled to perform a solo at the ceremony. And this is closely followed by the murder of the choirmaster, which prompts suspicion and relief in equal measure throughout the town. What follows is the long search for justice, examining the suspects and their relationships.
 
So it’s a murder mystery. But it is also a description and an examination of a changing way of life in a provincial town, with its class consciousness and power structures, its received pronunciation and its ‘Dorzet’ dialect. Dorset in general and Wimborne in particular are central to the narratives. This is not a story that could be transported to any other part of the country: its truths, its authenticity, stem from its sense of place, which we see from the inside and the outside.
 
Nor could it be transported into another era. In 1840, Victoria is on the throne and the Victorian Age is off to a flying start. The railways are opening up the provinces, welcome to some, frightening to others. And by the end of the book, Darwin’s Origin of Species has been published. This new world-view reaches Wimborne as the story evolves to its conclusion.
 
So it’s a history book also. A social history. It is possible to read it as a form of allegory, with characters ‘representing’ their class, their status, their position. Don’t. They are far from stereotypes. Characters are developed with a gentle, nuanced, understated accumulation of detail over many episodes and more years.
 
I read Crow Court in a single sitting. I shall read it again because Andy Charman’s beautiful prose belies the issues of his subject matter. I shall read it again because it works on so many levels and I know it will repay my attentions. I shall read it again in order to master the Dorzet dialect, for which a glossary is helpfully included, as fascinating to read as an Amis footnote. Jill and I have already adopted ‘dewbit’ to describe our first morning meal.
 
Most of all, I shall read it again because it’s without doubt my book of the month and will probably be my book of the year. Unless I am very fortunate.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday was the birthday of Franz Schubert. I am celebrating with the String Quartet #15, played by the New Orford String Quartet.
 

“We should treat the 2017 manifesto as our foundational document; the radicalism and the hope that inspired across the country was real.” These are my thoughts exactly; but they are not my words. The words are Keir Starmer’s, during his leadership campaign, and he went on to commit himself and the Labour Party to ten pledges. These included raising taxes on big business and the rich, increasing public investment and public ownership, scrapping tuition fees, abolishing and replacing Universal Credit, and defending the rights of migrants.
 
I was passionately involved in the events which Owen Jones describes in his new book, This Land: The Story of a Movement. But it turns out I didn’t know the half of it.
 
I knew, of course, of the McNichol groupuscule and its determination to undermine the new leadership at any cost. I knew that Mandelson had claimed that each day was an opportunity to bring down Corbyn. And I knew of the chicken coup, the machinations of Tom Watson, the claims of anti-semitism, the frustrating policy changes over Brexit.
 
What I didn’t realize was what a contrary old bugger was Corbyn himself. What made him an inspirational leader made him a shit CEO.
 
Owen tells of his sulking fits, his refusal to speak to McDonnell for weeks, his tardiness, his dislike of conflict, is going AWOL for hours and days.
 
And he also tells us of the incompetence of his hand-picked staff.
 
One of the key criticisms we make of Johnson and Gove is that their background as newspaper columnists makes them ill-equipped to run a country. There is a great divide between banging out a thousand words once a week and mastering the detail required to conceive and implement policy. The latter matters.
 
Owen of course is also a newspaper columnist, and in my judgement, a good one. He writes well and fluently in his columns, on Twitter and in this book. But he knows his limitations. He rejected a role in the inner circle.
 
Seamus Milne, the so-called posh-boy Stalinist, did not. He accepted with alacrity. And although he and Owen were both Guardian contributors, it is clear that Owen made the right choice and Milne the wrong one. Milne was more than capable of over-ruling the decisions of others, but barely able to make one himself.
 
He was, however, responsible for Labour’s strapline in 2017. “For the many, not the few” was not a new phrase by any means – it goes back to at least to Shelley - but it resonated as strongly as “Take back control” and “Get Brexit done”.
 
Newspaper people should stick to the knitting. And the essence of leadership is to surround oneself with people with specific and complementary skills. One such is John McDonnell who emerges from this story, unsurprisingly, as one of the few grown-ups in the room. He had – he has - the experience and expertise, the total commitment and work ethic to run an economy and a leader’s office.
 
Which makes reading of Corbyn’s sulky disagreement with him all the more difficult to take. And it is not made easier by Owen’s final chapter, entitled “The centre cannot hold”.
 
It is, as Owen says, important that we learn the lessons of the last five years, that Labour integrates its radicalism with organisation and competence. I suspect that those who voted for Starmer had something like this in their minds as they did so.
 
So far, I have seen and heard very little competence and no radicalism at all.
 
Let’s hope I am wrong.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: A lovely studio session from Mike Bloomfield and Janis Joplin. Not sure where I got this. It’s marked Unknown Studio, San Francisco, December 1969. But it’s brilliant. Listen to Janis singing Had To Get Out Of Texas. So glad she did.

Yesterday was August 30th. It was devoted to celebrations of the birthday of Ted Williams and John Peel. A long lunch, England overcoming Pakistan in the T20 slugfest, followed by the Sox beating the World Series Champions at a deserted Fenway by way of Raphael’s 4 for 4 and a debut home run from young Bobby Dalbec, the first since Daniel Nava’s Grand Slam a decade ago. A good day.
 
But t’was not ever thus. In fact, this shortened season has been no fun at all. No Mookie, no Sale, no Price and now no Mitch. More than half way through the season, we sit bottom of the AL East, with a 12-22 record. We are 11.5 games back
 
How does this member of the Red Sox Nation find consolation at such a time?
 
With a wonderful new(ish) book from Gabriel Schechter entitled Spanking the Yankees: 366 Days of Bronx Bummers.
 
In the UK, we call this a ‘bog book’. I’m not sure whether there is an American equivalent of this expression but you can probably guess that it is a book for opening at random and dipping into on the lavatory.
 
It is a detailed record of cock-ups and disasters which have beset the Evil Empire month by month and day by day.
 
For those who have suffered over the centuries from the smug superiority of the Yankee franchise, and this includes not only obnoxious Boston fans like myself but also the millions out there who have no allegiance to the Sox, this makes for great reading. It has extended my morning ablutions schedule significantly because there is so much material out there, and now it’s all in here.
 
It’s page after page of gaffes on and off the field. Defeat from the jaws of victory. Bad trades (remember DLsbury?) and poor plays. From Opening Day to the off-season.
 
I’ve been starting each morning with these healthy doses of schadenfreude, smiling and chuckling at each entry. And then the book comes with me to the office where the indexes allow me to revisit specific events, particular players and on-this-day embarrassments.
 
I commend this to anyone who loves baseball and hates the Yankees. Even Yankees fans can benefit, because it proves what many of us have known all along.
 
Yankees really do suck.
 
I am pathetically grateful to Fawn Neun of Summer Game Books for sending me a review copy. Thanks Fawn.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: My eldest daughter recently sent me a playlist of the stuff she listens to in her evenings on the veranda in Cary, North Carolina. Amongst the dross (sorry Vix!)was a track from a duo called Mandolin Orange. Serendipitously, a day or so later, a Deadhead friend also emailed me a few links to the same band. And now I have half a dozen albums and several live shows. Check out Wildfire and their cover of Boots of Spanish Leather and then listen to … well, pretty much everything.

Prompted by an excellent Radio 4 dramatization of The Plague, I have been re-reading the Camus novel for the first time in maybe thirty years. And this time round, for me, it is more powerful, more frightening and more relevant, on both a literal and an allegorical reading, than before.
 
Before, I read it as an allegory of the struggle against Fascism. I was not alone in this; indeed, I was in good company. Barthes, Sartre, de Beauvoir all saw it this way, and criticised Camus for using allegory to address such an issue. Too trivial, too slight, too frivolous for such gravity. It is a criticism which could equally be levelled at Orwell.
 
This time, I found myself – it was neither conscious nor deliberate – reading it as a straightforward narrative, taking it at face value.
 
Of course, I noted the parallels and prescience, permitting myself a smile of recognition at references to face masks, to death counts, to the quarantine precautions, the dithering and delays of the authorities.
 
But it is also a story, and a damn good one.
 
It is the history of an outbreak of plague in the town of Oran.
“The town itself, let us admit, is ugly”. Its inhabitants are bored and boring, living an abstract, tedious, routine-filled existence; what Heidigger called “everydayness”.
 
But Jean Tarrou, the communist turned pacifist who is instrumental in the volunteer resistance, records, “I am determined to be the historian of those who have no history”.
 
The plague, the Absurd, transforms the everydayness. Gradually, reluctantly, the Oranians come to realise that they must succumb or fight. No-one can remain indifferent to the indifference of the universe.
 
At first, the townsfolk complain about petty, personal discomforts. They are “like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves”. They believe that their own specific suffering is more important than the communal suffering.
 
But soon, they begin to recognise that the plague erases each individual life: “a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike”.
 
It is a community issue, that it must be fought by each individual on behalf of all. The protagonist, Doctor Rieux, is one of those who choose to fight, to rebel, on behalf of the community.
 
Rieux and his comrades pursue their fight against this suffering each in his own way. But each of them knows that it is futile. Each of them knows that it increases the chance of contracting the disease.
 
Of course, each of them also knows that they can contract the plague even if they do not nothing.
 
So they choose to do something in the full knowledge that it is useless, futile, pointless.
 
It is a meaningless choice. But the plague frees them to make it.
 
Because, as Camus wrote, it is “the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference which will nourish (human) greatness”. 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Emma Swift's Blonde On The Tracks. It's the songs of course, but it's also and primarily that voice.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. Friends have alerted me to the fact that it is more than 100 days since I last posted at Not Dark Yet: in other words, not a single post during the quarantine. True, I have had more time at my disposal but I have wasted these weeks. I have been musing rather than thinking, reading more than writing, drinking more than eating. And those issues which I cannot discuss, I have consigned to silence. Now, due to popular demand, I give you what has kept me going during these 100 days or so:
 
 
Angst and Anger
 
But primarily anger.
 
Anger at the sheer incompetence of this government – the lies, the procrastination, the inability to ensure the most elementary of precautions – testing? tracing? supporting? - until it is too late.
 
Anger at the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey, based on a malicious conflation of legitimate concerns about the actions of the Israeli government with anti-semitism. It allows Netanyahu free rein to continue with his annexation. It diminishes the cause it claims to espouse.
 
Anger at the media – not solely for what it is telling us, but what it is not.
 
 
Words
 
Other people’s words. As ever, I have been reading and re-reading a great deal of crime novels and thrillers, notably Don Winslow’s The Force, a morally nuanced policier which I commend to everyone. But I have also managed to force my brain into gear in order to understand Carolyn Steedman’s History and The Law: A Love Story. What I relished in these essays on the minutiae of interactions between the two disciplines is the focus on the lives and works of ordinary people. It is what Carolyn does best, and never better.
 
I have also been listening to words. Podcasts and audio books are the soundtrack to my daily route marches around the parks of Leamington. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I read as a chore as a young man, illuminated a couple of cloudy days along the river. Joyce promised that his life and writing would be based on “exile, silence, and cunning”.
 
I wish those words had registered with me 50 years ago.
 
​
Music
 
The lethargy-inducing impact of the lockdown has been mitigated significantly by Bob. First, he gave us three pre-releases from the new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. And then, the new album itself. If we thought the plethora of allusions in Murder Most Foul or the exquisiteness of I Contain Multitudes was sufficient raw material for exegesis, it’s because we hadn’t then heard Key West. I am still playing this album a couple of times a day, still learning and enjoying as it reveals more on each listening.
 
(By the way, was anyone else confused by Bob’s reference to playing the Moonlight Sonata in F# rather than C# minor? I have since discovered that F# is urban slang for ‘fuck off’! Not many people know that. Or perhaps you did.)
 
 
Family, Friends and Other Bubbles
 
The family are fine – thanks for asking. I have now managed to see my Mum, now in her 94th year, three times face-to-face or mask-to-mask. She lives alone and has no wifi or internet skills. It’s been tough.
 
Most friends, of course, have the means to communicate virtually. And we have relished the apéros, the conversations, the debates on policy, the projections of the 60 game baseball season, the test-and-trace initiatives, the concerns over diminishing cellars, the celebrations of Coventry City’s return to the Championship, and a million other things.
 
Only once have I consciously broken the quarantine advice. Black Lives Matter is a cause which cannot wait and Jill and I were proud to be part of the demonstration in our town. It was, most of the time, physically distanced but emotionally and politically close.
 
The pubs can open on Saturday. Chances are I will call in to one or more during the day, even though my instincts and “the science” say we are re-opening too early.
 
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

It’s not dark yet … but it’s getting there. I’m a week into my eighth decade and on borrowed time. I’m not thinking (much) about the inevitable physical and mental decline which kicks in about now and some would say already has. I’m more concerned about the state of my nations, here in the UK and over in New England, the home of the Red Sox Nation.

I will be devoting a column to the fall from grace of the 2018 World Series Champions shortly when I’ve got my head round the sacking of Dombrowski and its timing as well as the underperformance of the team from the start to the probable finish of the season. But right now, with Parliament prorogued, the government in chaos, and the country divided, there can be no doubt about the theme for the week.
 
It is, of course, what Donald Tusk has called “a dog’s brexit”.
 
One of the tangential issues of the ‘debate’ has been the diminishing of language. I am conscious that I have been guilty of this as emotion and anger takes over from reason. But I use this word advisedly: it is a coup: a sudden, illegal, takeover of government.
 
As such, it must be fought by all means.
 
Parliament has made a start. A no deal brexit is illegal. The Court of Sessions has found that prorogation is also unlawful and it is to be hoped that the Supreme Court will, on Tuesday, find similarly. It is worth noting that the English court did not make a ruling about the legality or otherwise of the suspension; like Pilate, it washed its hands of the issue, stating that this was a ‘political’ matter that is the preserve of the ‘politicians’.
 
That is not a judgement. It is not even an error of judgement.
 
It is an avoidance of judgement. It is an evasion of judgement. It is a shirking of judgement.
 
So much for the rule of law.
 
In law, the referendum was advisory. It was not mandatory. The country cannot be held to a promise made by David Cameron a few days before he resigned and retired to his shepherd’s hut to write a book I shall never read but suspect will be exculpatory in the extreme. (And there is a great deal to exculpate, which probably explains the rumoured volume - sheer bulk - of the volume.)
 
In law, the prorogation is unlawful because of its motives and its duration.
 
In law, no-one is exempt from the law. Not even a prime minister.
 
I’m entering this eighth decade with a profound sense of foreboding. But I shall be consoled by the generosity of my family: my Dylan weekend chez Grey and Beattie, our night in the New Forest, my birthday lunch and my life in a cake.
 
Thank you. This decade is on loan from you.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: As the talk turned to Dylan covers – covers of Bob and Bob covers of others – Ms Beattie introduced us to a version of Absolutely Sweet Marie by Jason & The Scorchers. I have played it at least once a day every day since my return to the UK and suspect I will continue to do so throughout the next decade.
 
​

In a House of Lies is Ian Rankin’s 22nd Rebus. He (Rebus) is retired now, has quit smoking and barely drinks. But this is a ‘cold case’, with which Rebus was involved years back, an excuse he uses to infiltrate himself into the investigation. In so doing, he is back with the usual cast of characters: Big Ger Cafferty from the dark side and, representing the forces of ‘good’, DIs Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox. But of course, this being Rankin and Rebus, the distinction between good and evil are rather more nuanced than this simple characterization. Everyone has something to hide, even – especially – Rebus himself. As the story unfolds, we learn what they are hiding and how well it is hidden, with each loose end neatly tied up in knots (and crosses). Masterly.

​Another cold case. Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night brings together Harry Bosch with the more recently created Detective Renée Ballard to look into the brutal murder of 15 year old Daisy Clayton. As a mystery, it’s not really satisfactory: the attention paid early on to character one would expect to be peripheral gives it away. But as a procedural and a study of two characters interlocking and intertwining, it’s excellent. And, at the end, surprise surprise, the two – having both solved cases on the side – agree that they might well work together again. If they do, I’ll be there.

And yet another cold case, the 23rd Reacher novel from Lee Child. In Past Tense, the case in question is the absence of records of the Reacher dynasty in Laconia NH, contrary to family lore. But the paper trail opens up nefarious activities in both past and present. With his own version of Renée Ballard to assist, Reacher continues the more cerebral and caring approach of last year’s The Midnight Line. Which is not to say that fans of old-fashioned Reacher will be disappointed. The closing chapters, set in a New Hampshire killing ground, are as violent, suspenseful and gripping as anything Child has written.

​Finally to Tombland. Who would have thought a novel set in Norwich could be so fascinating?
 
Sansom has taken half a decade to research the latest Shardlake, and it shows. In a good way. His mission from the Lady Elizabeth is to investigate the circumstances of the murder of the wife of one of her distant kinsmen, a Boleyn, and the whodunnit element unfolds in a more than satisfactory manner. But Shardlake being Shardlake, he finds himself at the centre of Kett’s Rebellion, and this and its causes is the real subject of the book. I confess I was unaware of the rebellion which defeated a couple of royal armies and controlled much of Norfolk for a few brief weeks in 1549. But I know a hell of a lot now, thanks to both the novel itself and the historical afterword. It’s a great read, as educational as it is entertaining.
 
Also palliative. Because as I turned the last page of the last book, I realized that my cold had gone.
 
I was cured.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Since 2010, the Dead has been releasing a highlight track on each day of November. These are not just great in themselves, but serve to remind one of hidden gems and forgotten shows. The 2018 is currently two-thirds of the way through, and I am relishing each morning as I download the latest carefully chosen track.

Had I been a US citizen, I would have voted for Trump. By which I mean, of course, I wouldn’t have voted for Trump. But I am nevertheless fascinated by the man and even more by his rise to power, a development which I now read was in the confident expectation of losing but building his brand, rather as Boris Johnson expected defeat in the Brexit referendum but saw it as a prerequisite for his leadership ambitions.
 
I read this in Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, which has been sitting on my Kindle since its publication. Opening it was prompted by the recent visit to our shores of the man himself and his subsequent ‘summit’ with Putin.
 
Who is he? What motivates him? Is there a real political ideology at the root of his rhetoric? Or is he, as I have long suspected, a kind of alt-right situationist: “It is not enough that thought should strive to realize itself; reality itself must strive toward thought.” That’s Marx by the way. But it is also Dadism and it’s also punk.
 
I doubt whether Trump will have any idea what I’m talking about. But I bet that Steve Bannon does.
 
Bannon is by some distance the most interesting character in the book, a bizarre combination of Lenin and Rasputin. It is his finger on the pulse of the electorate, his popularizing of the ideology, his instincts and his ability to pander to Trump’s political ingenuousness.
 
We already know much of the stuff that Wolff records. It's all on Youtube or in the newspapers. What's interesting is the detailed story of how Bannon loses out to the family. Or rather, how he loses out to daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. ‘Jarvanka’, as he calls them and their supporters did not, as did Bannon, give long interviews to Wolff, but it is clear that they are the enemy. Not least because they are part of the political elite which has always been the main target of Trumpism-Bannonism; and also because, when a President is likely to go with those who had the last word with him, the family will always triumph.
 
But the last words in the book are Bannon’s: “It’s going to be wild as shit” he says.
 
Those are the words of an instinctive situationist. Those are the words of someone who looks to create and exploit social disorder and cultural divergence. Those are the words of a man who relishes fire and fury and knows how to sieze the opportunities it creates.
 
That is why Bannon is now embarking on his alt-right world tour. His theory is that Trump’s election is not the realization of Trumpism, merely the start of it.
 
And the only man who can see the project through to its conclusion is not Trump, but Bannon himself.
 
It’s going to be wild as shit. And the rest of us are right in it.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday afternoon I shoe-horned myself into a crowded pub in Upton-upon-Severn to see the first Swaps gig of the year. Despite the temperatures, around 30C, they gave us a great two-hour set, including a superb new song called Gravity. So today, I have all their albums on shuffle. Welcome back James, Beth, Adam, Dave and Tomo. And thanks.

Last night, Mookie Betts treated us to a 13 pitch at-bat, before hitting a Grand Slam into Lansdowne Street. It was the 10th straight win for the Sox, who are now 37 games above .500 for the first time, apparently, since 1949, the year I was born. And there are still three games to go before the All Star break.
 
In a week which has seen England’s defeat in the semi-final of the World Cup, the Trump visit, the Brexit shambles descending to new depths, and my apparent inability to write anything worthwhile about the 1871 Paris Commune, I can rely on the Sox to provide some measure of cheer as I fall asleep with Dirty Water flowing through my head.
 
The Town Nine are on pace for a 113-win season. Which sounds insane, but is possible. It really could happen!
 
Not least because the last few months have seen many things come to pass which sounded insane on first hearing. And we need something to focus on at a time when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. 

​Which brings us to inexorably to Boris Johnson.

What rough beast is he, slouching towards Bethlehem to be reborn?
 
Of course, Johnson manages to lack all conviction and simultaneously be full of passionate intensity. His allegiance is only to himself, his ego and his ambition. His resignation was prompted only by his fear of being out-flanked in a future Tory leadership race by David Davis of all people.
 
As Aung San Suu Kyi pointed out, Lord Acton got it wrong.

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it …”.

Johnson is an opportunist who sees his opportunity disappearing and will grasp any nettle to retain it.
 
I am not denying his intelligence, although he does a good job of concealing it. But as Harold Wilson confessed, the trouble with his first cabinet was that there were too many Oxford firsts around the table: a classical education is no longer a useful attribute in politics. And despite my admiration for Mike Duncan’s podcasts, I am not convinced that there are many parallels to be drawn between the situation now and the end of the Roman republic. And if there are, they are not instructive.
 
It may be difficult to conceive of a situation where Johnson outside the tent is less dangerous than inside, but I fear that will be the case.
 
His only roadplan now is for a disaster. He is hoping for disaster. He is counting on disaster. And he will work hard to ensure that the disaster happens. Regardless of the cost to his colleagues and the country.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have never been convinced by Mark Knopfler, but some recent listening has made me reconsider. My issue, it appears, was not with Knopfler per se but with Dire Straits. The listening has been the complete Dylan/Knopfler recordings – outtakes, alternatives and rehearsals - posted by Mat Brewster recently. Quite excellent.

Today from the everysmith library: Reading Rick Gekoski's A Long Island Story. This is the difficult second album after the triumph of Darke, and I am not finding it easy. I will return to it, maybe next time.