It's not the side effects of the cocaine

I found this post very hard to write; I'm not sure I've done it justice. I don't think I realised before last Monday how much I would care when Bowie died. I definitely didn't imagine I would ever lay flowers at his mural, but I did. In a way, it's no surprise, I was obsessed by Bowie in my teens - he accounted for about half of all the CDs I owned at one point - to put this into context, I owned sixteen of his albums before a single one by Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. I adored him, and this was despite my teens coinciding with his prolonged creative slump and his ill starred foray into drum and bass. But I spent more of the 2000s excavating the roots of pop music than delving into modern experimentation, listening to people who grew up with Johnny Cash, not those who listened to Bowie. But when he died, I realised I remembered every album in far greater detail than almost anything else I've ever listened to.

I don't think I'm alone in that. I've read a lot of of the appreciation, and the analyses of how important he was and why. I note that you'd be a lot better off if you started reading about Wednesday because the first few days had some dodgy analysis in, by some people who clearly hadn't listened to everything recently either. There were pieces banging on about the 'Berlin trilogy' which only namechecked tracks from 1972-4 (As an aside, I find the term Berlin 'trilogy' lazy and inaccurate. Lodger has very little in common with the other two). But I'd also note that the devotees of Bowie didn't talk too much about all the the weirder, more experimental music they then listened to, but rather how much he inspired other acts, almost all of whom were closer to the mainstream than he. That's no bad thing. While the coverage repeatedly praised his uniqueness as an artist, they also point to the unique role in Britain we've accorded him. He was our accepted window onto the weird stuff; the acceptable face of the avant-garde.

Now no-one starts there, and the vision, brilliance and bravery to aim for that and deliver is extraordinary. Given the volume of the tributes, I don't have to do any detail here. I did like this by Dylan Jones (see the end) and I thought the Economist was typically judicious in a rare two page obit about where the real value is (I've mentioned this before). They had a lovely graphic as well. Even the inevitable from Fact to Fiction was mediocre, rather than typically terrible. It is also definitely worth listening to Mitch Benn's the Fat Pink Duke which we've repeated from last year. We should luxuriate in this level of coverage; we will only get this again when Dylan dies. None of it really explains why I loved him. For some, his being an outsider crashing into the mainstream made all the difference. I am obviously not an outsider, but I am very grateful that he brought the esoteric to pop and kept it there. I am very much in favour of the esoteric.

Most people aren't, which is why Bowie was so important - transgressive, inventive, endlessly curious. There is no comparable artist that took such a range of odd, weird interests and obsessions, made them central to their output, sold in the millions, and then changed everything because they got bored. There are plenty of odd people with strange interests. They tend not to be pop stars. They certainly aren't very successful pop stars. That's a testament to his artistic ambition, but it's also a testament to his charisma: that magnetic, shape-shifting personality and wonderful cleverness that remains on view throughout. And I think that's an essential component, because while the restlessness that made him search out ever more obscure new genres makes him fascinating to follow, it does make him exhausting. And no-one can possibly like it all. When I was first discovering Bowie (early 1970s version), he released Earthlings, which, although on a re-listen is nowhere near as unpleasant as I remember, is never going to be the genre for me. A friend of mine told me it was the only Bowie album he'd ever thought was any good. All pop frontmen are charismatic, but few if any attempt to get over that hurdle of proving yourself again every time. He was an exceptional man.

And he leaves a body of work that is genuinely special, affecting and wonderful. Others can and have said much about the fashion and the theatre and the rest, but the quality of the music is what everything rests on. After he died, I listened to everything (except Tin Machine - I've always been scared to listen to Tin Machine). Some of them I haven't listened to for a long time. Some were really bad, and there is no disguising that everything after Let's Dance just isn't as good as what preceded it - soberingly too, I realise now I am already older than Bowie was when that was released. But the volume and pace of output through the 1970s is still bewilderingly brilliant. For me, though Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Station to Station remain the obvious pinnacle, there is so much scattered around the rest in almost all his albums that it's a hopeless task to gather up the pieces. Better instead just to listen to them, and be very grateful that you can.

In the end, I think I loved him because I couldn't believe he existed. There is no way anyone would imagine that mix of cleverness, art and weirdness being transmuted into the music he made. I won't see his like again and I will miss him terribly; we all should.

Mad, bad and dangerous to know

I've delayed this because I was rounded on social media for even briefly celebrating the return of the Stansgate viscountcy three weeks ago. Hopefully the dust has settled. Tony Benn is still dead; there is still a Viscount Stansgate again (it's his eldest son). And, hopefully, all those people who didn't really like Tony Benn now feel a bit silly for lauding him to the heights.

Because everyone (and I mean everyone, with the noble exceptions of Matthew Paris) fell over themselves to praise him. And I don't really know why. Now, I'm sure Tony Benn was personally lovely. His diaries make him out to be so, though he did write them himself. And he was certainly a fine example of the the benefits of a good education (Westminster. A fact he tried, despite his legendary 'integrity', to have removed from Who's Who) and a constant desire to document and make sense of the world. 

But he was wrong, about everything, and - for his party - wrong in a disastrous way.

I find it curious that the left lined up to bang on about how wonderful he was, when the only people who should celebrate his political career are the right. Benn was a, if not the, key facilitator of Thatcher's dominance. He was one of the major figures on the Labour left - a candidate for the deputy leadership (he lost), a potential leader - and he dragged the party leftwards into appalling places. His own politics by then were actively crazy: he wanted to nationalise everything (this was when the Government owned Pickford's), leave the EU, and forcibly reunite Ireland. They sound mad now; they sounded pretty mad then. And as a result, the party split, the vote collapsed, Thatcher got three terms, and in desperation, Labour jettisoned some decent elements alongside all the mad. If you were feeling uncharitable, you might make a direct link from Benn to New Labour. He would have hated that. 

And I don't think he ever realised it either. He had more self-awareness than most: in his later years, when called to explain the affection with which he was held, he used to say that he was 'harmless now'. That was definitely true, but he was also irrelevant, and I don't think he appreciated that. His facile quip in 2001 that he was 'leaving parliament in order to spend more time on politics' is revealing. He didn't spend more time on politics - he went on lecture tours. His audiences loved it; I suspect he did too. It did nothing, though I imagine it made everyone involved feel warm inside.

On one level, the obits were right. He will be missed; he was erudite, charming and he had conviction - all probably only possible because he lost. But without him, the Labour party would have been in better shape in the 1980s and I venture the country would be in better shape now. That's not a legacy to be proud of.

The hammer of justice

Pete Seeger would have been a terrible hammer-wielder. Though an admirer, almost to the end, of Stalin (I'll come back to that), he was no dominator of men. When he spoke of the hammer of justice in his famous , and prosaically named, 'Hammer song' for at least part of the song, it's being used to hammer out a warning, rather than to fight. The only possible instance of him wielding weapons outside a military service is when he tried to take an axe to Bob Dylan's electric cables at Newport (allegedly).

I say this not to belittle him: he was tough, and exceptionally stubborn. Among the many obituaries, I discovered in one that he is the only member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be convicted of contempt of Congress. He spent much of his prime years under the shadow of prosecution and indeed spent time in prison for it. This was no accident of course - he was a communist; and a proud one; a Stalinist long after most follow travelers had fallen away. We should be grateful that, by his lights, his activity was almost entirely unsuccessful. The image repeated in his obituaries is that he was 'America's tuning fork.' It's a hopeless metaphor: if America is using Pete Seeger as a tuning fork, then it's tone deaf. It's also woefully shortselling his potency - Seeger wasn't a tuner, he was a prophet - an Old Testament prophet. Like those men who came from the wild places (some having gone into them from rather more comfortable billets in the city, as Seeger did) and excoriated the people for failing to act justly. They placed themselves outside order, in opposition to authority, and preached righteousness. You wouldn't have put them in charge of government either: I love the writings of the prophet Amos, but I'm reading him for what he says about the poor, not the administration. 

And that's how I think we should think about Seeger. Of course he was wrong about the remedy, but the sniping from the right misses the point. His songs and speeches weren't exam answers, but pricks of conscience. Just as we would be fools to import his doctrine into the exchequer, we'd be even more foolish to explain away his ideals or his criticism. They represent a bright vision of America and of humanity, and he sang proper protest songs for the right reasons. Along the way he helped inspire an extraordinary flowering of popular song. We won't see his like again.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Dead, Dead, Dead! (II) Historiography

I meant to do this a fortnight ago, just after my reflection on the Thatcher legacy. But even more interesting  is the context in which that debate happened. To me, the unnoticed story of the coverage was that this was really a debate about the 1970s. Because what you think of Thatcher is really about what you think about the decade before her. If you think that we were on our knees in 1979, Go Maggie; if you think we would have sorted it out given time, Go Foot (or something like that). It’s no surprise that this debate would have been made better by context. Sadly, it was done stunningly badly.

In particular, no-one knows any figures. I've lost count of the times someone appeared and lamented that she destroyed manufacturing. Helpfully, the Guardian did some nice data which tells us that industry was 34% of output in 1990. Incidentally, we also still had 4.5m council houses (20% down on 1979, but hardly a wholesale sell-off). There are plenty of figures to show Thatcherite failure (both those may be seen to be failures depending on your position), but saying untrue things makes you look stupid.

On reflection, it's not true that no-one knows any figures. A number of people know one figure. If you're smart, like Ken Livingstone has been, you bang on about it - conveniently forgetting everything else. Every time the erstwhile mayor has been on anywhere, he's talked about the fall in levels of investment. He's right, it's fallen too low, but there was other stuff going on you know. I'm reminded of when I went to Baltimore and the Americans discussed how they 'won' the War of 1812 or at least got away with a good draw, neglecting to mention that a) we burnt the White House to the ground and b) we were a bit busy with this French chap (just in case) nearer to home. Focusing on one thing to the exclusion of the rest is irrelevant really. It's like a referendum - i.e., bad, and stupid.

But although this lack of figures isn't helpful, it's not the biggest problem. That was both sides going overboard on the polemic, because they can't do counterfactuals properly. On the right, we started talking about her saving the country. The left simply ignored the state of the political and economic landscape in 1979. Neither will do. She didn't save the country. This is a nonsense which does no-one any favours. North Sea oil would still have come in; the ability of, for example, France to come through 1980s, without major market reform suggests that, even in decline, we’d have been alright. I’m pretty convinced we would have been worse off, but Callaghan wasn't a Bennite. On the other hand, it's no good saying that Britain in 1979 wasn't in real trouble; or that Labour would have fixed the unions in a nice way, or indeed at all. Industrial strife had been a characteristic of the entire preceding decade. It's preposterous to suggest that it could have been addressed easily. Similarly, privatisation: no-one really thinks the state should own BA, BT and BP, yet Labour's 1987 manifesto still advocated bringing them back into state hands. And I think would have done regardless of 1979.

I find this lack of contextual sensitivity a bit depressing. It's ahistorical. It polarises opinion around abstract positions that aren't rooted in reality. It judges people against ideal standards which no-one will ever fulfil. And it doesn't help assess the record. In this case, it means Thatcher isn't judged by the reality of the situation in 1979, but rather some kind of theoretical face-off between left and right. And that's pointless. History judges records, and since the late nineteenth century, we've tried not to judge things outside the context of their time. With Thatcher, despite it being a few decades ago, we've failed that basic test.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Dead, Dead, Dead! (I) History

Now the dust has settled, I thought I'd do a reckoning. This is in two parts, with one on the historiographical issues to follow. The title, by the way, is what they chanted in Brixton on the night. I thought it was funny, though I don't doubt the people were being objectionable. Even A thinks it's all rather distasteful, but I think we can rise above that.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about Thatcher. She's a Tory icon; I'm a Tory etc. But I'm a big wet, old fashioned Tory, firmly on the Heseltine - Clarke axis in the party, the one that doesn't really exist any more (see this mediocre article on the subject). I'm pro-European, pro-state, I even think we should have an industrial policy. She would have purged me from any cabinet she had. Some of her policies leave me cold, some of her legacy even more so. Nonetheless, she was, in her words, one of us. And she did many more of the right things than the wrong things. Better modern historians and politics students will argue the detail better than I can, but below is my personal ledger, why I would happily have voted for her every time, and why I think she was good for us.

Let's do some big wins:

• Unions, clipping the wings thereof. It's now fashionable (in certain circles) to say that this would have happened anyway. I find this annoying and disingenuous. Unions had been the undoing of the previous two governments, possibly three if you count 1969/70. To dismiss it as inevitable is bad history and wishful thinking. The Unions we had through the 1970s were destructive and disastrous. I'm glad we don't have overpowerful trade unions, closed shops and strikes without elections. Well done Maggie.
• Privatisation. When I'm feeling cruel, I like to bait the ignorant left. It's an amusing game. In particular I like to list companies and ask them how many should be renationalised. I could go on for hours, but they usually cave after BA, BP, Jaguar and BT, and this was before I discovered Pickfords was also on that list. There is no doubt that rail hasn't worked (not Thatcher), but overall, it's a rebalancing that was overdue. And no-one here, or in most of the west, would go back.
• Deregulation. Now, I won't have this simplistic, 'sowed the seeds of the crash' nonsense. Regulation is a balancing act. Take finance, over-regulated in 1979, under-regulated in 2008. Thatcher moved in the right direction.
• The Falklands. This was obviously right, and no other candidate for power would have done it.
• The Cold War. We wouldn't be having this debate with the Czechs and the Poles.

What's characterised this debate since her death is the total absence of recognition of the bad ones on our side. Let's do those too:

• Grammar schools. If nothing else, this stands against her. Appalling educational vandalism. A caving in to the teaching profession that damaged educational standards and social mobility and led to greater middle-class segregation at the same time, which is an impressive feat. Not all Thatcher, but she was supine when she should have been steadfast.
• Monetarism. It didn't really work, and even Thatcher et al resiled from it pretty quickly.
• Industrial policy. We should have had one, and we should have used it to help the provinces. Actually there was an industrial policy, in Liverpool thanks to Hezza, and, er, Canary Wharf, but there should have been more. 
• The Gays. I know, I know.

I would have liked her to be different, but I would rather have had her than any other option around (and to govern is to choose). I'm not interested in whether she was a nice person (Lloyd George wasn't). I'm not interested how you think the 1990s should have played out (she wasn't there). I'm not interested what you think she would have done if she had stayed in power longer (she didn't). I'm interested in the record, and, overall, it's a win. 

By the way, I hope this stays up.

The other Presley

When Andover-born Reginald Hall was searching for a stage name, he opted for one that looked very much like delusions of grandeur. He didn't care - and Reg Presley and the Troggs were born. He died yesterday and I've been playing them all morning. In truth, there are only five tracks that have stood the test of time, but what tracks. A world without Wild thing, With a girl like you, Any way that you want me, I can't control myself (all 1966) and Love is all around (1968) would be a much poorer one.

A world without Reg Presley would have been a much poorer one too. Despite his lack of chart success since 1968, he and the Troggs played on for the following four decades - only his final ill health ending it last year. Along the way his songs burst occasionally into public consciousness, Wet Wet Wet's version of Love is all around making him a fortune in the 1990s. He was also a proper eccentric, in a fine English tradition. Obsessed with UFOs, he spent the money he made on researching them, published here. There aren't many people who connect Jimi Hendrix (who also covered Wild Thing) with standing around in wet English fields looking at crop circles. Reg Presley may even be unique in this respect.

In the obituaries, he was called a 'very real person in a sometimes very unreal world.' That's a fine tribute, and a very fine one for a pop star. We should have more people like him, and now we've one fewer. Farewell.

A.E.I.O.U.

At the centre of my dining room is a large family tree of the Habsburg dynasty. I bought it in Austria in 1997 and had it framed once returned. It's brilliant: visually arresting as it shows the slenderest of threads on which this greatest of dynasties hung when Maria Theresa succeeded and the vast sprawl of her many descendants; and important because it is the greatest of dynasties.

I don't mean the greatest in formal achievement, despite the motto signified by the vowels above - Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan. While Charles V and Philip II genuinely bestrode Europe at the head of an enormously powerful transnational empire, most Habsburg Emperors occupied places towards the bottom of Europe's top table, usually eclipsed by at least one other crowned head. However, as a dynasty it was unparalleled, leading to the rather waspish description 'let others wage wars, but you, happy Austria, marry!' I prefer the description I read many years ago which described the inheritance of Charles V as a 'genealogical joyride' - either way, they were magnificent, and enduringly fascinating as the increasingly complex and baroque Empire moved through the centuries. It was a tragedy for the dynasty, their people and for Europe that they ended up on the losing side in the First World War.

The person whose life it changed most was Otto von Habsburg - Lothringen (the formal name for the dynasty since the union with Lorraine). Born in the purple in 1912 as the heir (but two) the Empire, his father was the last Habsburg Emperor and from 1922, aged nine, he has been the head of the dynasty and claimant to the thrones of central Europe. He died on Monday aged 98.

Death of exiled potentates is not normally of great interest, but Otto mattered. The Nazis were terrified of a restoration and named the Anschluss Operation Otto; after the war, he was instrumental in securing Austria for the free world rather than let it be partitioned amongst allied soldiers, and he served as an MEP for decades, rather ironically given the Habsburg rivalry with the Wittelsbachs, for Bavaria. During his term, he is most famous for removing Ian Paisley from the chamber when he began to shout 'antichrist' repeatedly at the Pope. He was a magnificent man, and a monument to a vanished age, recalling the dedication of his great-great-uncle Franz-Josef, and the transnationality of his distant ancestor Charles V.

It's fitting perhaps that he goes at the same time as Patrick Leigh Fermor who recorded the world that outlasted its rulers for a single doomed generation between the wars. Yet, while Leigh Fermor was rightly lauded by the full set of news outlets a few weeks, only two broadsheets covered the Habsburg death in Britain, an oddly matched pairing of the Guardian and the Telegraph. We were relatively poor and the rest should be ashamed.

Love the legacy

They buried Ballesteros today; and I didn't really have time to notice, which is a shame.

I was too young to see him in his pomp, though I have of course seen the footage since. By the time I started following golf, even cursorily, in 1993, he was fading, though he had a couple of Ryder cups left and even won the odd tournament.

But he was a titan of the previous decade and a bit, and - as every obituary has made clear - one of a tiny number of sportsmen to genuinely change their sport. I don't mean in achievement: his record is impressive, but it didn't redefine the era. Nor in style, though the manner he played is still magical. But he literally changed the geography and contours of professional golf and he created one of the few major competitions in English sport where people genuinely want the Germans to win.

It's not clear exactly how he did this. He was described as being the vanguard of European golf , but a brief look at the 1979 Ryder cup suggests that although he was one of the two first non Brits to play, he and they were rubbish, and he didn't play in the thrashing in 1981. By the time the Europeans had assembled a competitive team it had a raft of Spaniards and Langer in it. But, it will always be Ballesteros who remains at the heart of those 1980s teams and he lives long in the centre of folk memory. When we won the Ryder cup back in Wales, they revealed they'd had an image of Seve in the dressing room throughout. And he was as ever-present in the speeches as he was on the course in 1997, in captaincy.

So, whether he is missed because of what he had come to represent or what he was, it's fitting that he is. Few can do what he did, and no-one else would have had so much fun doing it.

Underappreciated

When we come to write the economic history of the 1990s (and there will be lots of them), people will be surprised at the hostility and reputation for incompetence that the Conservative government of the time will be held. Major's personal reputation may have been slightly rehabilitated in recent years, but largely as a result of him being seen a nice chap, with interesting sidelines, rather than anything he did in office.

Reading the obituaries of Eddie George, who died today, reminds me just how unfair this is. Given where we are now (as the centre-left finally realise that it is hard to get economies to work and stay working). it is striking how little credit goes to the mid 90s Tory policy on this issue, which actually took a deep-seated problem in the UK economy (high inflation) and fixed it. This of course contrasts with our current position where we took a positive position and tanked it. Labour claimed credit for this once, but they did nothing towards achieving it, only reaping the rewards.

Eddie George gets an enormous amount of credit - it's never easy being a central banker, especially when (as in the 90s) the Chancellor can override you as Clarke did a couple of times. Yet, despite the heightened tension of a recovering, but still weak, economy, he worked better with his meddlesome master than Brown and King appeared to have done. And he got the job done, while having time for jokes, the BBC obit reprises the old one about there being three kinds of economics, ones who can count and those that can't. Few other people will note his passing today, but he deserves to be remembered and he deserves to take credit for a very difficult job well done.

Are we missing the point?

Never normally one to downplay the importance of bringing the crimes of communism to a wider audience, I find myself doing just that over the coverage of Solzhenitsyn's death. I get the feeling we have forgotten how good the books are.

Of course, for Solzhenitsyn the distinction between the political and literary is blurred. Almost every one of his books deals with the evil of Soviet communism. However, by focusing exclusively on A day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the Gulag Archipelago - as the obituaries do - , I cannot help by feel we are missing the point a little. The first is mostly autobiography, and striking for its revelatory power as well as for its writing, and the second essentially a historical work.

Yet he literary reputation doesn't rest on the Gulag, which he wrote after the Nobel prize, but on his other works. In particular The First Circle and The Cancer Ward are both brilliant.

So, let us applaud and commemorate his stance on communism, for it was a brave and necessary one. But let us not forget that he was a writer first.

In praise of Henry Chadwick

When I was young, and politically ambitious, I was very excited by the fabled "double" achieved by William Hague at Oxford, who as successively president of the Conservative Association and the Oxford Union. It hadn't been done since when I went up and wasn't done again until a friend of mine completed it in 2003. However, as it didn't really turn out well for Hague, and - let's be honest - it's not that interesting, it occurred to me there were more impressive and greater double achievements. As I get older, I find myself instead excited by those individuals who display polymathic abilities: Jonathan Sumption, who combines a highly successful practice as a QC with an academic career that is equally stellar.

However, when I read last week that Henry Chadwick had died, an older feeling of veneration for a single - career double kicked in. Chadwick is rare in having held the Regius professorship in Divinity at Oxford then Cambridge, as well as head of house at both Oxford (Christ Church) and Cambridge (Peterhouse); in effect, a double double in his chosen career. It was once said, that 'The Anglican church may not have a Pope, but it does have Henry Chadwick."

He was an astonishing scholar as well. I won't dwell here on his publications and contribution to patristics and late antiquity. By the time I got to Oxford he was in his late 70s, though still publishing and giving the occasional seminar, which were still enormously fascinating. However, I want to record here my personal thanks for one of his shorter and less weighty tomes. Having avoided the early church throughout my undergraduate history career, I read his Pelican history of the early church in 2001. Written in 1967, it is fresh, illuminating and remains brilliant. And it changed my academic life, beginning the process that brought me historically earlier into late antiquity and the early councils. Everyone should read it - it's also short.

His death has been noted by those in his field, just as he was garlanded with honours in his life; the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote his Guardian obituary, from which the quotation above comes, but he passes largely unknown to the great mass of the population. A great shame; for we shall not see his like again.