wot i red on my hols by alan robson (res publica)

Political Intrigue is Intriguing

Most political biographies, autobiographies and memoirs make for grey and tedious reading because most politicians are grey, tedious, and very boring people, often possessed of negative charisma, and quite disconnected from the people whose interests they purport to represent. Many of them are self-serving people who enter political life in search of a sinecure and by and large, most of them find one. The books these people (ghost)write are much concerned with self-justification and political point scoring particularly against opponents who are long dead and who are therefore rendered rather more inarticulate than usual. Not that most of them were all that articulate when they were alive – English is a second language for a lot of politicians. Unfortunately for them, none of them have a first language…

Feel free to call me a cynic. I will happily agree with you.

Jacinda Ardern’s autobiography A Different Kind Of Power has none of these typical attributes because she is by no means a typical politician. Her book is warm, very funny, often insightful and full of compassion, Jacinda isn’t interested in point scoring – except perhaps for one fairly vituperative passage where she talks about David Cunliffe, the man who led Labour to a catastrophic election defeat in 2014. She paints a portrait of him as a self-absorbed, grandiose and ultimately quite ridiculous person. Anybody who has read any of Cunliffe’s own political memoirs (as I unfortunately have) will find themselves nodding in quiet agreement…

By and large Jacinda doesn’t see any need to blow her own trumpet and she tells her tale with a charming openness because she doesn’t think of herself as being in any way exceptional. She sees herself as being just like everybody else, albeit perhaps with a stronger than normal passion to help people who, for whatever reason, cannot help themselves. She genuinely identifies with the people who elected her and she genuinely has their best interests at heart. After all, she herself is one of them. Been there, done that.

She’s one of the very few real people in a House of Representatives overly populated with cynical, brain-dead muppets. Like her or loathe her, you simply can’t deny that she is not cast in the usual political mould. Perhaps that is why, despite her inarguable accomplishments and triumphs, she ultimately fell from grace.

When I first arrived to live in New Zealand Jacinda Ardern had just been born, though of course I had no way of knowing that at the time. When she became Prime Minister I was intrigued to discover that fact and even though I was physically some three decades older than her, in a very real sense I was exactly the same age as she was. We both arrived in the country at about the same time and we both grew up during the same years, both of us learning what this country called New Zealand was all about, and how it worked. I felt a proprietary interest in her career – what person does not wish  their contemporaries well?

Our upbringings couldn’t have been more different. Jacinda grew up in a small village in the wop-wops. Her family were Mormons and her faith was very important to her, at least to begin with. In later years she found it hard to reconcile her religion with her growing social conscience and eventually she withdrew from the church. I, on the other hand, grew up in New Zealand’s bustling (by comparison) capital city and I had long since disowned what little religious dogma had originally been beaten into me. Nevertheless, as her autobiography made very clear to me, we both saw the world, and the people living in it, in exactly the same way.

One passage in her autobiography that really impressed me was her well argued and strongly held belief that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was not, in and of itself, a reliable measure of the health of the country as a whole. All it measures, of course, is the economic health of the country and Jacinda is firmly of the opinion that while the strength of the economy is certainly important, it is by no means the be-all and the end-all metric of a properly healthy society. She searched long and hard for some other measure that could define (if you like) more amorphous things such as happiness, stability and mental health. She could never quite pin anything down, but the fact that she even tried is admirable.

Of course the defining events of her five years as Prime Minister were the volcanic eruption on White Island and the resultant casualties, the Christchurch mosque shootings and the Covid pandemic. The way she handled all three of these was exemplary. She devotes a fair bit of space to a discussion of all three.

I was particularly impressed with her approach to the pandemic. Although she had been presented with position papers that attempted to define an acceptable number of deaths (what a cold and heartless statistic), she rejected all of the proposed numbers. As far as she was concerned, the only acceptable number of deaths was zero. All her planning was aimed towards that (realistically quite impossible) goal. It paid dividends – as a direct result of her policies, New Zealand suffered less (and recovered faster) than any other country in the world. I think she deserves to feel very proud of herself for that accomplishment. Without her, it is highly likely, given my age and circumstances, that I would not have lived to write this review. And even if I had, you might not have lived to read it.

Jacinda Ardern proved that it is possible to govern successfully with compassion, and with empathy. These are not the weaknesses that more self-serving politicians would have you think that they are. Rather they are strengths, Jacinda Ardern completely redefined what effective political leadership was all about. What a shame that the crop of narrow-minded, ignorant traditionalists who are currently "running" (limping) New Zealand have forgotten the lessons that she taught them.

Jacinda dedicated her book To the criers, worriers, and huggers. I am proud to consider myself one of that company.

* * * *

Nero and Tyrant by Conn Iggulden are the first two volumes of what will eventually be a trilogy about the life and times of the Emperor Nero.

Iggulden’s story tells us of the birth of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, later known to history as the Emperor Nero. He was the son of Agrippina (herself the great-granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus) and one Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. Like Agrippina he too was a member of the royal dynasty though perhaps from a slightly less distinguished branch of the family than her. By all accounts, Agrippina had not married well. Suetonius described her husband as "a man loathsome in every respect". Perhaps it isn’t surprising that Agrippina, a political manipulator par excellence arranged for him to be killed once he’d succeeded in his husbandly duty of impregnating her with a son.

Around this time, the old Emperor Tiberius returned from his self-imposed exile in Capri. In his absence Sejanus, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard had consolidated his own position as de facto ruler of Rome. Tiberius, perceiving this as a direct threat to himself and his dynasty accused Sejanus of treason and had him executed. Not long after that Tiberius himself died, almost certainly murdered by his son (and Aggripina’s brother) Caligula who then ascended to the throne. Caligula’s excesses as Emperor soon proved to be so extreme that even the Praetorians tired of him. Following a bloody rampage that left Caligula hacked to pieces, Caligula’s uncle Claudius was proclaimed Emperor. For a time, the Empire stabilized – Claudius proved to be an efficient and skilful ruler and administrator. Among his many other accomplishments he devised the military campaign that added the British Isles to his Empire, something that even the great Julius Caesar himself had singularly failed to achieve.

Agrippina, always seeking political advantage and power and with an eye to the main chance, convinced Claudius to marry her – both of them ignoring the inconvenient facts that not only was he her uncle, he was also much older than she was. Since she was now a significant power behind the throne, she persuaded Claudius to formally adopt her son who she renamed Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus after her husband the Emperor and various other important and distinguished family members. With so many heroic names attached to him, how could anything possibly go wrong? Her political machinations culminated in her eventual mariticide of the Emperor Claudius himself, thus paving the way for her son Nero to inherit the throne. Once Nero felt secure in his position, he naturally had Agrippina killed. Clearly she was far too dangerous to keep around…

Here Iggulden’s novel sequence ends for the moment, paving the way for a third book that will presumably examine the bulk of Nero’s reign (when he was arguably barking mad), his eventual downfall and his suicide.

Iggulden’s two books cover much the same ground as Robert Graves’ classic novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. By choosing to tell the same story, Iggulden is clearly inviting a comparison to be made between himself and Graves. In my opinion, Iggulden comes off very well indeed. I always found that Grave’s prose tended towards the turgid and his narrative always felt distant and somewhat impersonal. Iggulden, on the other hand, brings the drama and the personalities involved fully to life with his lively, sparkling prose and deft characterisation. Neither novelist can be faulted on the details of the political intrigues – contemporary accounts leave much that is murky and open to interpretation – but both writers provide convincing motives, means and opportunities.

I must confess that when I settled down to read Conn Iggulden’s novels I was already quite familiar with the events that he chronicles. Partly this was from Latin lessons at school, and partly it was from my reading of Graves’ novels, but mainly it came from the utterly brilliant dramatisation of Graves’ novels produced by the BBC in 1976. I, Claudius (known to the cognoscenti as I, Clavdivs for reasons that will become obvious should you ever watch it) brought Robert Graves’ books compellingly to life in much the same way that Conn Iggulden’s "re-write" of the material has done. Iggulden’s two novels Nero and Tyrant are actually complete in themselves (though I expect the third novel, whenever it appears, will carry the story forwards in a lively manner) so I strongly recommend that you read them now. Trust me, you will not be disappointed.

* * * *

David J. Gatward is in the process of writing a series of detective novels about one Detective Chief Inspector Harry Grimm, and I’m thoroughly enjoying reading them. Currently there are twenty novels in the series and so far I’ve only read five of them, so clearly I have a lot of fun ahead of me…

Harry Grimm himself is from the south of England (Bristol, to be precise). For vague reasons which form a long story arc that stretches out over several novels he is temporarily seconded to a backwater police force in the far north of Yorkshire – Wensleydale to be precise.

I strongly suspect that Gatward chose the name of his protagonist simply in order to make a clever pun in the title of the first book in the series: Grimm Up North.

Most English people despise most other English people based simply upon where they come from – even people from the next village down the road are often treated with suspicion because they are not from round here. No, I’m not exaggerating (well, not much, anyway). As a result, people from the south of England are quite convinced that life is indeed rather grim up north – it’s a very common saying. Northerners, of course are equally convinced that all southerners are reet soft buggers, completely unable to cope with the stresses of real life (the phrase effete southerner is not completely unheard of). These prejudices may be silly, and they are often expressed with the tongue firmly in the cheek, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

The Guardian newspaper (itself a northern publication) once famously printed a map of England drawn from the point of view of an effete southerner. The roading system petered out at the Watford Gap service station, which is where intrepid travellers had to transfer themselves to the stagecoach service. The Arctic Circle went through Manchester – actually, that last may well be true...

I must confess that I started reading David Gatward’s books out of a sense of nostalgia. I was born in Yorkshire and even though it is getting on for six decades since I actually lived there, I still think of myself as a tyke (one of the many names we Yorkshire folk have for ourselves). We also have a (possibly well deserved) reputation for frugality – we claim to be just like the Scots, except that we lack the well known Scottish generosity:

Ear all, see all, seh nowt!
Eat all, sup all, pay nowt!
And if tha duz owt fer nowt
Allus do it for thissen

I’ll leave the translation of that verse as an exercise for the reader. My wife, who knows me better than anyone else does, claims that it is all true. It seems that you can take the lad out of Yorkshire but you can’t take the Yorkshire out of the lad…

Harry Grimm is an ex-para whose face is terribly scarred from when he was blown up by an IED while he was serving in Afghanistan, About a century and a half ago, Arthur Conan Doyle introduced us all to Dr. John H. Watson, a veteran soldier who bears the scars of his army service in Afghanistan. It seems that nothing ever changes very much, does it?

Harry arrives in Wensleydale where he finds that the locals prefer drinking tea to drinking coffee and that they eat cheese with their cake. All of this makes him feel quite out of place. He doesn’t like cheese, and the thought of combining it with cake really turns his stomach.(Crackin’ cheese, Gromit is a phrase he often hears for Wensleydale is, of course, Wallace’s favourite cheese). However, with time, Harry comes to appreciate the benefits of his exile up north and he really begins to fall in love with the place. So much so, in fact, that he starts to seriously consider the merits of applying to make his temporary secondment a permanent one. He feels so comfortable in his new skin that the word "nothing" starts to vanish from his vocabulary, replaced by the Yorkshire dialect word "nowt". His detective sergeant takes great delight in counting the number of times that Harry says the word "nowt", and he uses the rapidly inreasing total as irrefutable evidence of Harry’s acclimatisation.

The plots of the novels are decidedly dark, not to say grim(m) – yes, I know. Shut Up! Despite this, the stories are filled with a gusty good humour that shines like a beacon through the darkness, though sometimes the wit is so dry (a typical Yorkshire trait) that it will certainly desiccate you, and you will turn to dust and blow away in the wind. We get a lot of wind in Yorkshire.

It is clear that David J. Gatward is very much in love with Yorkshire. His characterisations of the people who live there and his descriptions of the rugged terrain both above and below the surface (Yorkshire has a lot of caves) are lyrical and evocative. I felt quite homesick at times. He also likes to play with form and function, refusing to limit himself to traditional detective story themes – Restless Dead, for example, is a rather clever ghost story – all of which tends to keep the reader on their toes. I’m really looking forward to lots more good reading entertainment.