If last night’s ITV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was exceptional, it was only for its inanity. Two men, neither of them with much stage presence or prone to thinking on their feet, traded prepared barbs and crowbarred in their key messages. Each made sure to name audience members, Janet – or was it Paula? – as an empathetic consolation prize for dodging their actual questions. Be honest about when – or if, or how – we’ll fix the NHS? Not on your life.
All modern politics is stage management. But the debate’s structure and leaders’ charmlessness made this an exceptionally airless event. Sunak seemed desperate, Starmer stolid. The format is designed for people who aren’t interested in politics and don’t know anything about the candidates: the host presses for one-word answers and 45-second responses; the candidates cram in their various totems (toolmaker Dad, NHS, fourteen years of failure v. NHS parents, tax, tax again, trust my plan, it’s really good). This might have been plausible in the era of linear TV, but the truth is that nobody except political obsessives and the professionally obliged watch the debates, which accounts for their aura of futility. Solid performances make little difference: only disasters count. The snap verdicts called it a dead heat, though it felt closer to the heat death of the universe.
The police have been regular visitors at Oxford’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment since we set it up outside the Pitt Rivers Museum on 6 May. The university’s vice-chancellor, Irene Tracey, says they are there to ensure our safety. The cops try to keep up the illusion with chit-chat. Was it cold last night? Will we be around for much longer? How did we manage to source so many tents? But answering these questions would tell them which, and how many, of us are sleeping at the camp; who has been organising what; and what we are going to do next. When they ask about the weather, I say: ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
After the 1843 Disruption, when the Free Church of Scotland split from the Church of Scotland, some of its leaders tried to raise money from Presbyterians in the American South. Some of those who gave money were slavers. There was disapproval, but the money spoke louder – some sources say the church accepted £3000, others $3000. The American abolitionist Frederick Douglass came to Edinburgh in 1846 to urge the church to ‘Send Back the Money’. Last year, the Free Church Board of Trustees agreed to set up a committee of inquiry into these donations, led by the principal of the Edinburgh Theological Seminary, Rev. Iver Martin. The expectation was that it would report to this May’s General Assembly. ‘It’s an important issue,’ Donald Forsyth, the chairman of the trustees, said, ‘and we’re not going to dodge it. It needs to be addressed.’ It looks like it has been dodged.
Rishi Sunak visiting the Titanic Quarter in Belfast, 24 May 2024. Photo © Stefan Rousseau / PA Images / Alamy
It is difficult to explain Sunak’s decision to call an election now. The Conservatives’ chief electoral strategist has stressed the ‘enthusiasm gap’ for Labour. But it takes some elaborate self-deception to read that voters despise you more than they like the other guy and take it as good news. Sunak must know he is going to lose. Perhaps he just wants it all to be over.
Last Saturday, 25 May, was Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon. It commemorates the date when the south of the country was freed from Israeli occupation in 2000. The Israeli army had entered Lebanon in June 1982 in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, reaching as far north as Beirut, and had retreated to the south by 1985, where it remained for fifteen years until it was forced out by Hizbullah fighters. There was no celebration this year. The strip of formerly occupied villages has been heavily bombed since October. Most of the residents have left.
The coincidence of the centenary of Kafka’s death, on 3 June, and the publication of the first complete, uncensored English translation of his diaries a month before, is less straightforward than it seems. There are more obvious texts through which to tell the story of his last days.
The ANC’s rising clout in the Global South recalls its glory days as a national liberation movement. Its abysmal domestic record, however, indicates a common post-colonial quandary: how to transition successfully from protest to power. Despite South Africans’ flair for exceptionalism, this is not the only place in the world where erstwhile liberators, once they’re tasked with ruling, become as loathed as the former oppressors. The question that will begin to be answered after tomorrow is what might come after national liberation.