I think that political labels are losing their meaning, if they ever had one. If forced to label myself I would choose “liberal” because, shallow though it is, it probably comes closest as a single word descriptor to describing my personal politics. And yet the Tony Crosland Gaitskellite version of “socialist” isn’t far away either. “Social Democrat” and “Liberal” aren’t that far away from one another. The LibDems in their very name embrace this truth.

The post war pre Brexit Conservative Party, the Thatcher years aside, was not extremist. Heath removed Powell. Nor were successive Labour governments and shadow governments (Michael Foot aside) extremist before the insanity of Corbyn. Britain was governed from the centre ground. “Butskellite” was more than just a handy descriptor. Both main participate had their lunatic fringes. But Harold Wilson was Bevan when campaigning and Gaitskell in office. Edward Heath talked “Neoliberal” but had to govern a mixed economy. Blair undid little that Thatcher/Major had introduced

But Brexit hasn’t gone away and One Nation Conservatives are a threatened species. My liberalism is strongly underpinned by my internationalism, the two go together. But internationalist Tories like Clarke, Patten, Heseltine and before them Heath weren’t exactly liberals! And yet they and thousands of other internationalist Conservatives were cast aside as the Party became not Thatcherite (their delusion) but Powellite (the truth). Remember the most vocal Conservative opponent of the Common Market was the nakedly nationalist and imperialist Enoch Powell.

The centre didn’t hold and we can analyse the reasons. Brexit is, of course, the primary one. Whilst Cameron must take most of the blame for launching the referendum and then mismanaging the 2016 campaign Corbyn was almost as much to blame giving lacklustre support to continued EU membership which had been central to his party’s manifesto only a year earlier.

Brexit turned the Tories hard Right, and Labour hard Left. The Conservatives are still there. Starmer is the heir to the centrist policies of the past whether they be of Blair or Macmillan. Sunak emphatically is not.

In. 2014 @IainDale chose Nigel Farage as his “Most influential person on the Right”, ahead of David Cameron. Ten years on this looks a perceptive choice. The EU Referendum designed to marginalise Farage had the reverse effect because he played a major part in Leave’s victory

Does anyone doubt that the Conservative Party has been irreversibly changed by Farage’s external threat? It’s happened because of Brexit, his single issue proposition. His predicable anti Asylum seeker and anti Immigration stance today is part of his National Conservative stance. A stance that is virtually identical to the “Popular Conservatives” actually in the Party.

The One Nation Tories of yore have become a distant memory – in part a consequence of the Farage threat. Post Brexit the likes of Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve, Michael Heseltine and more have sought new homes. And those Tories who stayed active (or returned in David Cameron’s case) have had to swallow the Brexit Kool-Aid. Cameron, who led the “Remain” campaign, is now a Brexiteer !

Nigel Farage is a shallow, narrow and bigoted man. I have described the time I spent with him elsewhere – suffice to say that to have suggested then that he could be a serious political influence would have been preposterous. But beware. He will be elected in Clacton. All bets are off

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The Trump story is a sort of malignant Alice in Wonderland. Nothing is but what is not. Donald Trump’s all too visible deficiencies should have prevented him being elected in 2016. But it was the year of the world’s two largest English-speaking nations taking leave of their senses in elections. I reflected at the time that at least Trump would only be in office for four years – we Brits wouid be stuck with the consequences of Brexit for a decade or more. I was right. At least so I thought.

Trump’s failed Presidency and its hideous coda on January 6th 2021 should have seen the end of this repulsive man. That it didn’t is attributable to three main factors. Firstly a movement grew in America, much larger than a cult, which totally irrationally, sanctified Trump and even saw him as the representation of their simplistic religious beliefs. Second the Republican Party adopted Trump despite the fact that his history, performance and behaviour had nothing in common with the party of Lincoln, Reagan and Bush. And third commentators actually made the case for Trump – a case based on the bizarre notion that the Conservative Right had no one better.

I would add that some people who should know better made the case for Trump because they personally benefited from his presidency, or thought they did. An American senior ex colleague of mine, a rich man, supported Trump because the stock market did well during his time in the White House. Self interest before decency and logic.

There is no precedent for the Trump phenomenon, certainly in modern times. Richard Nixon was a crook but a brilliant though deeply flawed one. Many of his successors had their moments of fallibility but in the main they all earned respect from opponents and the public alike. Now after his conviction nobody, even surely his most fanatical supporters, can respect Donald Trump.

It’s too easy to blame American culture and society. True a totally rational nation would have had checks and balances that would have prevented the “Donald” from being in any way near power. But there was a gut anti-establishment appeal in Trump that led many deprived and deluded electors to vote for him. The “It can’t get any worse” syndrome.

Well it did get worse and the very fact that despite everything people are today, post the New York verdicts, promoting Trump for President puts us firmly in Mad Hatter territory. Oh my fur and whiskers!

““The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

JFK: Volume 1: John F Kennedy: 1917-1956″ by Fredrik Logevall

The quote is that of a very young John Kennedy before he left Harvard, before he took his first steps in politics and before his war service. It has the classic Kennedy “Ask not what your country can do for you…” balanced rhetoric we were to become familiar with later.

My point about what JFK said way back in 1938 is that it frames the key political question not just in those distant days but always, especially today and especially in Britain today.

John Kennedy was not an idealistic young student protesting against the iniquities of the capitalist system. His father was one of the wealthiest men in America and though a supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal was hardly an enthusiastic one and no sort of Socialist ! And nor were his children.

But John Kennedy was looking at America and modern Europe (which he had recently extensively toured) and seeing the extremes of wealth and privilege, on the one hand, and poverty and distress on the other.

Roosevelt had seen the extremes as well and with his “New Deal” had been in a position to do something about it. In Britain it wasn’t until after the War that Attlee’s government created the Welfare State to address the “Two Nations” reality – a hundred years after Disraeli looked at Victorian Britain and coined the term!

In 2024 Britain and America we have to an unacceptable extent returned to Two Nations and to argue for economic redistribution conflicts with the institutionalised norm of laissez-faire neoliberalism which governs us. The “Sunday Times Rich List” records in some detail the “abundance of those who have much” in these polarised times.

Food banks in Britain are a response to need and some politicians of the Right see their proliferation as an achievement. That’s how low we’ve sunk. I have used the term “redistribution” deliberately to suggest that it is not the quantum of the economy that is the main problem (though a growing economy is obviously better than a stagnant one). It’s how the wealth of the economy is distributed that we need to address.

“Trickle down” , as a national goal along with its cousin “Levelling up” implies that you can leave it to the system to benefit all. Up to a point, but as Roosevelt and Attlee showed us, intervention is essential in times of extreme distress for many.

The point about economic distress is that it is uneven:

We have in London the richest region in Northern Europe, but in Britain we also have nine of the ten poorest regions. Take London out of the British economy and we are the poorest country in Europe. This should be debated in the General Election campaign but if it is the inherent structural reasons and potential cures will be ducked.

The young John Kennedy was right – judge a system and a country on how well it provides for those who have “little” not on how it celebrates those wallowing in abundance. Gordan Gekko said in “Wall Street” “Greed in all of its forms. Greed for life, money, love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind” The “Greed is Good” mentality has far from disappeared in modern Britain and the Times “Rich List” symbolises this. As do the seven figure salaries the head honchos in Britain’s top firms pay themselves, whilst median disposable income for the poorest fifth of the population actually decreased by 3.8% to £14,500 in 2022.

Will inequality and the need for redistribution be addressed in the Election campaign? Don’t hold your breath.

Top of the League unbeaten after ten games, then losing nearly half (12 out of 28) of the remaining League fixtures. Beaten by Fulham in the League Cup and kicked out of the FA Cup early (admittedly by Manchester’s City!). And all this with no European tournament complications.

The fall in the League shows the problem. Not, in my view, a lack of quality players but failure to select and use what we had properly. The opposition rumbled Postecoglou’s inflexible tactics and knew what to do. He was implacably rigid until the final City game when, with a back three, the team played well and were a tad unlucky.

After failing with high quality managers in Mourinho and Conté Spurs chose a middle aged unknown in Postecoglou. Any half decent coach could do well in a League with only one credible opponent in it as he had in Scotland. The Premier League is different and Arne soon stumbled in his first experience in it.

Decades of failure to win a trophy continues for Tottenham but with one of the best grounds in Europe, a well run and financed Business model and a strong brand we really should be doing better. Having sold one of the game’s best forwards with no replacement of approaching the same quality it was going to be a struggle. But it’s Aston Villa with nothing like Spurs advantages who will be in the World’s best club competition next season and Spurs will be playing on Thursdays. Not good enough.

“…almost all of our universities are staffed by third-rate academics who inhabit monocultural bubbles devoid of rationality, and that every year hundreds of thousands of gullible kids find they have been fleeced to the tune of £40,000 for a useless degree as a consequence of the entirely mistaken belief that this might enable them to gain lucrative employment. Or, indeed, any employment.” Rod Liddle in the “Sunday Times”

It was ever thus . Take the London School of Economics (LSE) for example. Such a hotbed of radicalism that some of its graduates in the 1970s and later became outspoken Lefties and even joined the dreaded BBC! A breeding ground for revolution and Marxism that was.

Of course the students at the LSE weren’t pursuing the goal of learning for its own sake – broadening the mind you might call it. No they then were seeking “lucrative employment” , for example in journalism where despite being unable to produce rational copy they could persuade gullible employers to pay them to rant.

As a student of that era myself emerging blinking into the real world after four years of anti Vietnam War and Anti Apartheid protests I and my fellow long haired graduates struggled for employment. Other than most, like me for example, who then had forty year plus careers in business or medicine or the Arts (etc.).

We Baby Boomers were beneficiaries of the growth of tertiary education opportunities from the foundation of “red brick” universities. This gave the unmoneyed from humble backgrounds a chance. Scandalous!

“Great British Energy” refers to Starmer’s promise of “A new, ­publicly owned green energy company to bring down bills.”

Where to begin with this nonsense? Well let’s correct the terminology first. What this refers to (the “green energy” bit) can only be power (electricity) generation. Britain’s energy mix will continue to be substantially reliant on hydrocarbons for transportation, home heating and a number of other oil/gas specific applications:

The use of renewables for power generation is significant and rising, but it represents little more than 5% of the country’s overall Energy consumption. ( see graphic above).

The only significant “green” options for electricity generation are Wind and (possibly) Solar. The private sector invests in Windpower subject to the returns being adequate. Government can encourage this with subsidy but the value of the electricity generated is broadly determined on the open market.

A “publicly owned” Windpower and/or Solar company for power generation would have no significant advantage over the private sector. It’s generating costs (including the very high upfront capital costs of the turbines) would be little different to the private sector. The need not to pay dividends would benefit operating margins but in truth the effect of this would be marginal. To “bring down bills” is another term for “subsidy”.

Government can subsidise electricity prices if it chooses to but why would they do that ? Most of our expenditure on energy is on petrol for our cars and gas to heat our homes. Labour’s “green energy company” cannot have any effect on the prices of these essentials. And the claim that there will be overall lower bills is a chimera.

Around 30% of Britain’s electricity is produced from renewables by private sector companies. Assuming these are not nationalised the private sector will remain the dominant renewables provider for a long time to come. “Great British Energy” would be a minor player in electricity production for a very long time and an insignificant contributor to the country’s overall energy mix. It’s smoke and mirrors.

During the first half I wondered if Postecoglou had handed over to someone who actually knows how to coach a football team. We even seemed to have tactics to counter the opposition. A first this season during which in most games Spurs have followed an utterly predictable “High line” attacking “plan”. It worked for ten games when we found ourselves unbeaten and top of the table. Then opponents rumbled us with Chelsea turning us over at home and we finished with nine men! And we are finishing the season not just trophy-less (again) but with some of the fans caring more about abusing Arsenal than cheering for Spurs.

The blame culture is rife at N17 with the man who gave us the “country’s best stadium” unfairly in the firing line. The truth is that Postecoglou is no Wenger, or Ferguson or even Pochettino. He’s not the saviour, just out of his depth – inflexible and tactically naive.

Dan Levy has given Spurs a great venue, a sound business and a decent squad. But the blame culture attacks him and some of the players rather than a coaching team that broadcasts in advance its cunning plan for every game (“Same again”).

We didn’t fall apart last night but Pep Guardiola finessed City’s tactics at half time and that was enough. As versus Chelsea in November a violent tackle opened the door for the better second half team to win comfortably. At Seven Sisters station on my way home a group of thuggish fans were shouting abusive anti-Arsenal chants. Is that the best we can do?

I visited the “John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum” in Boston yesterday. It’s a magnificent building designed by the late I.M.Pei at a prime location overlooking the city of Boston and is the nation’s official memorial to President John F. Kennedy.

For many of my generation JFK was what made politics interesting. Kennedy was the first President to have been born in the 20th Century and in my early teens I related to him in a way I couldn’t to the old guard.

JFK was multi talented but it was his speechmaking that truly excelled and probably won him (narrowly) the presidency. There was, as you’d expect, a fair bit of Blarney in what he said! The genes will out. Listen to any of his speeches and admire the cadences and the rhetorical balance, for example this from his inaugural address:

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Kennedy worked with Ted Sorenson on that speech and it’s perfect. It’s like a brilliant piece of theatre, or music. At the Museum it’s the first of the many video displays there to be in colour. A clever bit of symbolism about the new era Kennedy promised.

One of my favourite political quotes is “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” a remark made during the 1988 United States vice presidential debate by Democratic nominee Lloyd Bentsen to Republican nominee Senator Dan Quayle in response to Quayle’s mentioning the name of JFK. The point is, of course, that nobody could be.

Kennedy was in office for just over 1000 days – a period not without its challenges ! Had he completed two full terms how different would the United States and the world have been? This is the great unknown of 1960s politics. Obviously Vietnam being the key issue. Also in the inaugural address he says this:

“To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.”

This is a barely disguised commitment to counter the “tyranny” of Communism which suggests JFK could have escalated America’s involvement in Vietnam as his successor did. But who knows?

JFK’s father Joe had been less than complimentary about Britain when Ambassador in London during the war. Clearly Kennedy’s reference to “colonial control” is a reference to the imperialism of Britain and, in Indochina, France. Suffice to say he looked his happiest visiting Ireland the country of his heritage – and one that had ceased to be a colony!

As you walk through the Museum you follow Kennedy’s life before and in the White House. But , of course, you know the terrible ending that is approaching. You enter a darkened corridor where the only display is the date, illuminated in red in small type “22nd November 1963” on one wall. The only other displays are small screens showing Walter Cronkite’s announcement of JFK’s death:

This is astonishingly well done. The Museum is about Kennedy’s life and achievements not about his assassination, (Nor about his adventurous love life for that matter!)

My memories of JFK are about the good (Cuba, Civil Rights, inspirational leadership) far more than the bad and ugly (Vietnam, the assassination). He was irreplaceable and hasn’t been replaced. Was he a Saint and always right ? Of course not. Was he in a different league from some of the minnows who succeeded him in the Oval Office! Indisputably.

This is a very twenty-first century take on Gatsby. We seem to demand more from musical theatre than just the telling of a story, memorable songs and competent “appropriate” staging. We want glitz, and glamour and pizzazz in spades. And we certainly get it in the Broadway Theatre’s “The Great Gatsby”.

The quite young audience seemed to love it when I went this week and that has to be good. With so many other claims on their attention to bring the millennials to live theatre is terrific.

Scott Fitzgerald, however, is about more than storytelling however well he does it. “The Great Gatsby” is a deeply cynical novel about the haves and the have nots. – about the loaded and the struggling. To stop struggling and advance in that world you can’t be overburdened with a social conscience. Clear echoes of today in that reality !

The new staging of Gatsby gave us the sex and booze and drugs and privilege. But it also gave us the rock and roll, at least the interwar years version of it. It was loud and brash and almost entirely unmemorable. Nobody left the theatre humming the songs – Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe it wasn’t!

R&H tackled difficult subjects, placed ballet in their works and gave us melody after melody. Stephen Sondheim did the same as did Andrew Lloyd Webber. “ The Great Gatsby did none of this – it resembled a Juke Box Musical with no songs we knew in the Juke Box.

So entertainment in the modern style with panache, special effects, superb dance and staging. The youthful audience stood screaming at the end. I wonder how many of them will now buy the novel?