The “Lincoln Center” production of “My Fair Lady” has been transferred largely intact to London’s Coliseum Theatre and placing it on a conventional stage rather than semi in the round (as it was in New York) has taken away none of its engaging intimacy. It is the first major production of the great musical in London for twenty years.

“My Fair Lady” is, of course, “Big Theatre” – it is over three hours long, has a big cast and an even bigger orchestra which makes a big sound! But in essence it is a simple story addressing big themes. Gender, Class, Wealth (or the lack of it), Morality…it’s pretty much all there. Along of course with the fin de siècle certainties of the virtue of Englishness (especially of the English language) of those still Imperial times.

The simple story asks the question “Can a flower girl pose as a Duchess and persuade those who might see through her. “ But in posing the question George Bernard Shaw, in “Pygmalion”, weaves in an acute dissection of the norms and mores of Edwardian England. There has been some debate in recent times as to whether GBS’s plays are truly feminist. That debate seems rather sterile to me. From Pygmalion to Candida, Major Barbara to Man and Superman (and others) Shaw’s women were groundbreakingly strong, confident and self-assured.

The original play and it’s musical version are set in the England of a few years before the Great War. It was the time of the Suffragettes “Votes for Women” campaign and we see that briefly in a crowd scene. Shaw wasn’t to know that war would shortly give that campaign a resolution as women played a key role and did a lot more than just keeping the home fires burning. After 1914-1918 there was no turning back.

The world of Eliza Doolittle is an overwhelmingly male world both in the refined surroundings of Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering and in the raucous world of Eliza’s father the Dustman Alfred Doolittle. Doolittle and Higgins, different though they are, have the same views of women and marriage. “Let a woman in your life and your serenity is through” as the latter puts it!

Higgins attitudes and behaviour sound vile to modern ears, a male chauvinism that would get him vilified if not locked up today. Extreme though he is, however, he is not really challenged except in the most subtle, and effective, way. Eliza shows him up occasionally with words but mostly with her exemplary behaviour.

Henry Higgins thesis is that language use, and especially accent, is the definitive discriminator between the classes. Improve the way a flower girl speaks and she improves her station – especially if you give her a good dress to wear. But Eliza does more than this. As her transformation is underway we see her curled up on the sofa with a book. For her self-improvement is more than talking posh.

Colourblind casting

Eliza is played by the excellent Amara Okereke who is black and of Nigerian heritage. Colour-blind casting is pretty much the norm these days. We’ve seen a black Curly in Oklahoma at Grange Park Opera and Okereke herself was Laurey in the same musical at Chichester in 2019. There is an unspoken agreement between the audience and the performer in such productions. We all know that Curley and Laurey could not have been African-American but agree that it doesn’t matter. When Curley sung “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” offstage at Grange Park there was no audible sharp intake of breath as he appeared on stage. Hooray !

But in the new “My Fair Lady” there’s a difference. We are colourblind to the Eliza until, perhaps, her father appears and we see that he is black as well. The premise changes at this point. Now we have two members of a black family in Edwardian London. We can surely no longer be colourblind at this moment. Having cast Okereke the Director cast Stephen K Amos as her father. Had Shaw wanted to address the issue of race in Pygmalion he would have done so. But he didn’t. The casting here has become deliberate, not colourblind any more.

A Five Star Production

For me this is a five star production dramatically and musically and it is brilliantly staged. The leads are excellent and the chorus carries us along with pace and style. The ENO’s terrific orchestra is pitch perfect – what a delight to have so many players ! Above all Shaw’s intention is properly realised.

The golden age of the American Musical was for thirty years after WW2 driven primarily, of course, by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lerner and Loewe, in “My Fair Lady” at least, were their equals. Perhaps the key point is that from “Oklahoma” onwards the story mattered. Hardly one contentious or controversial subject was missed. Whilst the fripperies of pre war musicals like “Anything Goes” or “42nd Street” were (and still are) fun “My Fair Lady” is about more than song and dance. The Lincoln Center production realised so well at the Coliseum honours Alan J Lerner and Frederick Loewe – but crucially it honours George Bernard Shaw as well.

This by William Hague in “The Times” today is a very fine article indeed. Informed, analytical and measured. There is a tinge of regret, as you’d expect from a Conservative, but no sentimental tosh. And it avoids completely the nonsense being spouted by others about “getting the big calls right” , a claim that is self evidently the reverse of the truth.

Hague uses the term “gifted leader” to describe Johnson and given the good sense of the rest of the piece I wondered why. I think it may be a bit of envy of Johnson’s charisma, not a characteristic one would associate with Hague who has never been Tiggerish. For that is what I think Johnson is at his best – a bouncing self-confident creature who entertains and perhaps inspires in a devil-may-care way. Boris is Boris.

But leadership is more complex and more nuanced than this. Theresa May couldn’t hack it because she was dull and frit. Cameron made a good fist of it for a while by following the model of Blair who, warts and all, was along with Thatcher Britain’s best post war leader. Every leader is a one-off – providing there is intellect and decency there is an infinite number of leadership models.

Johnson fails the leadership test because he fails the “decency” test. He is a lying reprobate and after a while people get sick of that. It’s not that he sells snake oil, though he does, but that he has no discernible moral compass. It was not Johnson’s performance on trial in the vote but his character.

“Johnson comes from a background where it is regarded as beneath one to make an effort: men like him are loath to stick to the rules because that would involve admitting the rules apply to them.” Camilla Long in The Times today.

I remember when a very old Harold Macmillan accused Margaret Thatcher of “Selling off the family silver” during her privatisation spree. It was one of the last sightings of “Noblesse Oblige” that quaint notion that privilege brings with it a duty to understand the needs of the underclass. Macmillan had it because he had gone from the playing fields of Eton to the Great War trenches, and learned from the experience.

Our two more recent Old Etonian Prime Ministers seem untroubled by those less advantaged than themselves. They have a sense of entitlement that they have never questioned. Maybe it started when they were fellow members of the Bullingdon Club where to flaunt wealth and privilege was de rigueur.

Will David Cameron criticise the permanently dysfunctional Johnson? Well it seems unlikely as the whole point of being a Buller was to break the rules. Johnson was much less of a toff than Dave but he outdoes his predecessor in the openness of his contempt for the little people.

Every aspect of Johnson’s personality and behaviour confirm that he is above “petty” restrictions whether moral or, as we see in “Partygate” legal. If you have a leader so cavalier it sets an example. The Gray report shows this in gruesome detail.

If a man (someone with all the physical characteristics of the male sex) decides that he wishes to be perceived in future as a woman I have no objection. Wear a dress if you like James and ask people to call you Jane. No problem. If the law of the land agrees, which it does, that’s fine by me as well. If Jane has drug treatment to reinforce her femininity that’s OK by me too. But nothing will change the fact that biologically Jane is still a man.

This is a conflict that should never have happened. In allowing people to transition and be perceived as a different gender we should have applied some common-sense rules. Most (not all) sports should not permit biological males to compete as women. This seems so obvious that I find it bizarre that anyone disagrees. Lavatories in public places (and similar facilities) need to be designed to accommodate the fact that some users will have biological characteristics different from their declared and perceived gender.

I don’t know where it all went wrong, where the origins of this war were. It all seems so unnecessary but I’m with Ricky Gervais

Those who know me will know that I’m not a sycophantic supporter of the Shell establishment – either as a Pensioner or for 40 years as an employee. We did a lot wrong and in some cases shamefully so. But overall the Shell I knew was run by able, decent and convivial colleagues. I loved (almost) every moment!

I viewed the shenanigans at the AGM as reported in the media with alarm. The ignorance and the bias of the protesters was shocking. But I criticise the company as well. Shell is primarily a hydrocarbon enterprise. And, in the main, we do it well. One of the reasons for this is that, in Tom Peters’ phrase, we stick to our knitting. A raft of step out activities have been tried and in the main, from Coal to Metals to Forestry to Solar to Power Generation (and the rest) we failed.

The world will need Oil and Gas for a very long time. This is our knitting and we should stick to it and continue to do it well. The protestors object to Shell producing and marketing hydrocarbons , to satisfying demand. We do not create demand, that’s our customers. We meet it, that’s us.

I want our communications to be more confident and to tell the green lobby some home truths. Many energy demand segments are “oil specific” for the forseeable future. As a former Energy planner I can explain this. The Marine and Aviation sectors will stay oil specific – and they are very large. Switching from Gas to alternatives is a very long term thing in many sectors – home heating in northern Europe for example. And also cars and commercial road transport.

We don’t need to defend what we do, but we do need to explain it better. We need to explain our sources and application of funds better. We need to explain our approach to tax – it’s perfectly legitimate to minimise our tax liabilities within the law. Who the heck pays tax they don’t need to ?

There is no need to be apologetic or diffident. But there’s no need to be myopic either. I worked on Scenarios a couple of times – we were pioneers in this technique. It’s exactly what the world needs now. Academically robust truths not polemics and protests.

Things have moved on from the 1980s. Globalisation has broken the insular link between wages and prices. We import nearly all our consumer goods priced in dollars or Euros or Yen. The decline of Sterling due to Brexit makes these goods more expensive – not least oil and gas.

The favourable trade arrangements we had as an EU member no longer apply and we pay more for our imports. Whilst exports, particularly invisible ones, help the trade balance we are losing our competitiveness to those within the Single Market and the Customs Union.

Our public services are under stress, starved of investment and in many cases of foreign labour. Reduce the supply and the price goes up – inevitably inflationary pressure results. The market mechanisms of being a member of an economic union with huge supply of labour and capital kept prices under control. Without them there is inflationary pressure.

In short many of the causes of inflation are a consequence of our decision to abandon international partnerships for ideological nationalist reasons. If public sector wage controls are the only lever we can pull the cost in bad industrial relations and poverty will be considerable.

That the preposterous Woke v Non Woke war in Britain should have a battlefield in the Church of England is hardly surprising – it’s everywhere. But in reality there is an inverse relationship between the Church’s propensity to pontificate and the likelihood of them being listened to.

That we have an “Established Church” is an anachronism but in truth it doesn’t really matter. That there are Bishops in the House of Lords is illustrative of the unsuitability of that ludicrous , unelected and overblown institution. That these prelates can actually vote is absurd. But it’s Gilbert and Sullivan pomp and self regard rather than anything more venal.

There is no temporal subject on which normal people’s first thought is “I wonder what the Archbishop thinks”. He’s less significant than Marcus Rashford in public debate. Our society is overwhelmingly secular and the church’s role is for many of us confined to the provision of a bit of structure and pageantry to national events. For example a secular Remembrance Sunday event or one with multi religion content would be unthinkable. You don’t have to be a Christian to support the style and structure of how we remember the fallen.

You don’t have to be a Christian either to appreciate Cathedrals and Churches and to find solace in them if you’re seeking it. Or to enjoy religious music and Art. The spiritual rather than the dogmatic aspect of a beautiful building or (say) the St Matthew Passion.

But words can of course matter if they inspire you even if the context is a religion which, overall, you reject. It’s hard to fault the Sermon on the Mount as a life template. You don’t have to buy into the “Word of God” meme. One of my favourite passages about religious belief is in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited between Sebastian and Charles:

Charles: I suppose they try to make you believe an awful lot of nonsense.”

Sebastian: Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”

“But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.”

“Can’t I?”

“I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”

“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”

But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.”

“But I do,” Sebastian replies. “That’s how I believe.”

I’m recently returned from a brief visit to the Holy Land – Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee, Nazareth. Like Sebastian Flyte I know the “lovely ideas”. To stand on the Mount of Olives or see Christ’s birthplace was moving despite rational me knowing that the whole shebang from the manger to Calvary is a complex and extended parable.

Like arch atheist Christopher Hitchens I found value in the twice daily religious services in the 1960s in the Chapel of The Leys School which we both attended. I can’t quite explain that but in a way we are back in Brideshead territory. “Lovely ideas” as well as terrible ones in fiction can move us and teach us even though we know that they are inventions. But to believe that an Archbishop has a right to be listened to purely because of his job is nonsense.

When proud parents put their new baby in either blue or pink baby clothes they are not performing a terrorist act but recording a fact. The same when they register the child. At birth the physical characteristics of a child are in 99.9% of cases indisputable. Not only that but those characteristics change over time as the child becomes an adult but they change only within the birth gender.

EmotIonally, however, a very small number of people feel uncomfortable with their gender and some seek to change other people’s perception of it. This is the crucial point. Transition is an act of changing perceptions, not an act of changing fact. If James wants to be seen as Jan he is entitled to request it and the law permits it. When he becomes she the new She gets a new name, a new wardrobe and a new persona. But beneath these externalities the biology doesn’t change. Even hormone treatment and gender reassignment surgery cannot alter the given biology.

To be transphobic is to deny the right that we have to change how others perceive our gender. And that is as unkind and offensive as it is wrong. But to argue the fact, as I have here, that physical biology does not change does not make me transphobic, just informed

The principle of subsidiarity, enshrined in the European Union’s treaties, says that decisions should be taken at the lowest level possible practicable. It’s arguably an essential component of trans-national agreements and bolsters national sovereignty. In general nation states should take their own decisions and in the EU, despite the moaning of hard line Brexiteers, they do.

Which brings me to federal nations and other countries, like the United Kingdom, which have elements of federalism about them. Let’s deal with the latter first. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do some things differently but are, arguably, no less British for it. The Scottish legal system is different to the English. Since devolution and the setting up of parliaments in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff subsidiarity in the U.K. has increased.

Federal republics are premised on a voluntary association of separate states. This, nominally at least, gives these states the freedom to be the different. In Germany, for example, the differences between, say the states of, Prussia and Bavaria are minor. It’s a federal republic but the nation is more important than the state.

Which brings us to the United States where there are few more contentious issues that “States’ Rights”. The founding fathers seeking to find a way of binding different ex-colonies together created a Constitution which enshrined a high degree of subsidiarity in their governance. Less than a hundred years later this led to Civil War.

The American Civil War was a conflict about States’ Rights – in particular the right of individual states to keep slavery. South of the Mason-Dixon line eleven states seceded from the Union over the matter leading to war.

Slavery is a Human Rights issue and for Abraham Lincoln no member state of the Union could have the option to do their own thing on human rights. After the War the Constitution was amended to recognise this – at least as far as slavery was concerned.

But what is a nation if it is not consistent across its territory on human rights? Let’s predicate an imaginary situation where a murder is committed in one state and just down the road, across the state line, an identical murder takes place in an adjoining state. One guilty murderer could face the death penalty whereas the other would not because his offence was committed in a state that had abolished capital punishment.

Should individual states really have the freedom judicially to execute someone – surely, like slavery, this is an area where national consistency should apply ? Which brings us to Roe v Wade.

In 1973 the US Supreme Court ruled that the right to have an abortion is a human right that should be applied consistently across the country. It was an issue where, like slavery before it, States’ Rights should be subordinate to federal law. Recently changes to the composition of the Supreme Court thanks to Donald Trump’s appointments are such that it looks like Roe v Wade will be overturned. As with capital punishment your human rights will be determined by which side of a state line something happens.

Subsidiarity is limited in most jurisdictions for practical and sometimes cultural reasons. But in a nation, and arguably at a higher level, surely human rights are a constant? Should one American state be liberal whilst an adjoining state is conservative? Should human rights, especially in the case of abortion womens’ rights , be determined by the serendipity of location ? Surely not.

Douglas Murray is an apologist for slavery in The Times today – his arguments are unconvincing.

For Britons the issue is less about slavery as an evil but about Empire. Yes it is true that owning slaves was not an exclusively Anglo-Saxon amorality nor even only a second Millennium phenomenon. But imperialism was arguably an even greater evil and our British ancestors were the prime movers in that.

The conceit that a developed nation has the right to venture abroad, set up camp, exploit natural resources and dominate and enslave native peoples is about as venal as it gets. And still, astonishingly, we praise this venality by singing “Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be spread” at least once a year!

Empire and Slavery are inextricably interlinked. When British adventurers found natural resources to exploit, but without the indigenous labour to do so, they imported people to do it. Slavery was always driven by commercial ambition and the slaves were property – a factor of production rather than human beings.

To our modern sensibilities imperialism and slavery are abominations, though far from vanished. Putin’s attempt to enlarge the Russian Empire, the Chinese in Tibet, the mistreatment by Israel of Palestinians and all too many other examples are imperialism by another name. As was Hitler’s search for “Lebensraum”.

In short the British Empire was built by slaves and none of us should be sanguine about this. I commend Susan Neiman’s fine book “Learning from the Germans”. The Empire is not something to glorify but to be honest and, yes, contrite about.