Letters

David Runciman is too generous in writing that, after his landslide election victory in 1997, Tony Blair was determined to prove his credentials as a moderniser and introduce electoral reform for the 1999 European elections (LRB, 9 October). There was a commitment to PR for the European elections – but not yet. The plan at first was to keep the Liberal Democrats dangling and leave it until 2004.

But Blair had unfinished business with the European Parliamentary Labour Party. In 1995 Labour MEPs had signed an advert in the Guardian attacking his attempt to abandon Clause IV. In 1997, soon after the general election, the Parliamentary Labour Party was pushed into adopting tough new standing orders enjoining MPs to do nothing which brings the party ‘into disrepute’. The EPLP rejected an identical formulation at its AGM. The infuriated Labour leadership made the hasty decision to introduce PR immediately.

As the EPLP spokesperson on home affairs at the time, I strongly urged four-member, maximum five-member, constituencies, but Jack Straw, pressed for time and wary of annoying Labour’s regional barons, settled for the easy option of using the grossly uneven Labour Party regions – meaning the North-East had three seats and the South-East ten. If Straw and Labour had adopted my proposal neither Ukip nor the Greens would have won a single seat. The reel of history might have unrolled very differently.

David Todd describes Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s ‘defence of constant rebellion against the capitalist order’ as being ‘a throwback to the notion of permanent revolution’ (LRB, 9 October). But the word ‘permanent’ has gained too much in translations of Trotsky. A clearer synonym would be ‘uninterrupted’.

The dominant view before 1917 had been that because Russia was a primitive absolutist monarchy, it had to go through a ‘bourgeois democratic’ revolution to sweep away feudalism and allow broader capitalist development. Socialist parties should support this, but know their place and not try to lead it, instead digging in for a longer-term struggle.

Trotsky’s argument was that this did not account for the fact that economic and political development weren’t only uneven but combined. The conditions for less developed countries were significantly determined, and constrained, by the power of more developed ones; this prevented them from simply following in the footsteps of more developed countries to become comfortable, well-off bourgeois democracies.

Lenin, similarly, came to argue that the ‘bourgeois democratic phase’ had to be leapfrogged because the Russian capitalist class was not strong enough to consolidate a new social order as leaders of the people against the old regime. Instead they were aligning with the military warlords to crush the terrifying underclasses that had erupted out of their place: fascism with Russian characteristics. The revolution had to push beyond those limits and establish a socialist state: the revolution had to become ‘permanent’ in the sense that Trotsky had meant it.

Thus in France today the centre does not lean towards the far right because it is frightened by Mélenchon being too fierce, but because in extreme circumstances, when the centre can no longer hold, the bourgeoisie will turn to the extreme right as the last-ditch defence of its power and wealth. So too in Britain. ‘The template,’ as Kemi Badenoch put it to the Financial Times, ‘is Javier Milei.’

As I read Patrick Cockburn’s fascinating piece on Norman Ebbutt I became aware of a ghost hovering nearby: Ebbutt’s contemporary G.E.R. Gedye (LRB, 9 October). Gedye was four years older, and while Ebbutt was the Times correspondent in Berlin, Gedye had that role in Vienna, where he was based from 1925. His dispatches on the rise of fascism and proto-Nazism in Austria became ‘too left-wing’ for the Times and he switched to become Central European correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and bureau chief of the New York Times. His reports on the relentless Nazification of Austria following the Reichstag fire in 1933 are copiously – often horrendously – detailed. So are his eyewitness descriptions of the Viennese authorities’ shelling of Red Vienna’s workers’ apartment blocks in the bitter February of 1934 and the hangings that followed. In 1938 Gedye was declared persona non grata and put on a train to Prague, from where he launched excoriating attacks on Chamberlain’s government for reneging on promises to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid when menaced by Hitler (he mocked Chamberlain as M. Neville J’aime Berlin). In the summer of 1938 Gedye noted with approval Claud Cockburn’s posting to Czechoslovakia and welcomed him as ‘the enfant terrible of British journalism’.

Ebbutt had similarly earned expulsion from Germany in August 1937. He was exhausted, and as Cockburn writes, a subsequent stroke prevented him from finishing a book about the rise of Nazism from his perspective in Berlin. Gedye published his own bestselling Austria-based account, Fallen Bastions, in 1939.

Patrick Cockburn writes that Norman Ebbutt ‘was contemptuous but wary of Hitler, taking him seriously far sooner than other foreign correspondents and diplomats in Berlin’. Ebbutt had tried several times (unsuccessfully) in 1930 to persuade the Times to accept an article on the rise of the Nazis. It is perhaps worth noting that D.A. Binchy, who (before embarking on an illustrious career as a scholar of Early Irish ‘Brehon’ Law) served as Ireland’s plenipotentiary extraordinary to Weimar Germany between 1929 and 1932, had a premonition of Hitler’s rise almost a decade earlier. In an article entitled simply ‘Adolf Hitler’, published in the Irish Jesuit journal Studies in March 1933, Binchy writes that he ‘first saw Hitler on a murky November evening in 1921’. He was a PhD student in Munich at the time and the occasion was a meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller of what his German companion described as ‘a new freak party’. Asked by his companion after the meeting what he had thought of the new party leader, Binchy said (‘with all the arrogance of 21’): ‘A harmless lunatic with a gift for oratory’. To which his companion replied: ‘No lunatic with the gift of oratory is harmless.’

Binchy quit the Irish diplomatic service in 1932 (when de Valera came to power at home, not when the Nazis came to power in Germany), but that was not the end of his interest in the rise of fascism. He published a lengthy book, Church and State in Fascist Italy (1941), on commission from the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In it, as well as his account of Hitler’s beerhall speech, he included other pen-portraits of some of the most prominent political figures in prewar Germany and Italy (Heinrich Brüning, Paul von Hindenburg and Pope Pius XI). When I joined the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1979, one of the initiation rituals was to lunch with Binchy at his club, where he entertained with an endless series of fascinating anecdotes about his diplomatic career. Sadly, his personal papers have not survived.

Ian Penman makes a good case that Brian Eno’s openness and ‘infinite’ explorations are sometimes too, well, open (LRB, 25 September). Infinite music goes, in the end, nowhere. When you’ve seen a couple of things through a kaleidoscope you rarely want to see more. Yet the Portsmouth Sinfonia, in which I played a tiny part and Eno a much larger one (both on clarinet), might have led him to a different model of stochastic endeavour. As the orchestra, most of whose members could barely play the instruments they held, started on a beloved overture or Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, they held roughly together because everyone knew the tune. But under the baton of a conductor who followed rather than led the orchestra, and as less well-known bars hove into view, the music fragmented and slowed, describing the arcs of players’ various incompetences as to pitch, time, articulation, musical notation etc, and registering their false musical memories rather than the composer’s schema. The overall effect was to brilliantly and amusingly spread the piece out in space and time. Yet it invariably came back together as islands of familiarity were reached, often to massive relieved applause. Randomness and infinite-ish combinatorial juxtaposition need constraints, a rule or two and the odd anchor, to be adequate as art. Then you can have more fun and explore more emergent properties.

It’s not quite true that all future members of Roxy Music were, as Ian Penman puts it, ‘born into working or lower-middle-class families’. After leaving Dulwich College, the group’s guitarist Phil Manzanera took his stage name from his Colombian mother, his father Duncan Targett-Adams having worked for the British Council and BOAC in Latin America. Manzanera believed that his father might have been an inspiration for Graham Greene’s MI6 anti-hero Wormold in Our Man in Havana.

Thomas Laqueur remarks that in 1963 the Trieste Piano Trio, unable to fly from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, ‘foolishly decided to take a boat down the fog-enshrouded River Plate … hit a submerged wreck, burst into flames and sank’ (LRB, 9 October). The possibility cannot be dismissed that the boat struck the remains of the scuttled Admiral Graf Spee, Germany’s first major naval loss of the Second World War. Until finally removed, the wreck of the battleship remained a navigational hazard into the early 21st century.

David Trotter suggests that the ‘imbeciles’ encountered by Virginia Woolf and her husband on the Thames towpath might have travelled by train from an asylum in Wandsworth (LRB, 23 October). In fact they would almost certainly have made the short walk down to the river from Normansfield Hospital in Teddington. The Normansfield Training Institute for Imbeciles was founded in 1868 by John Langdon Down, who was the first to identify the condition given his name. Perhaps Woolf would have been slightly reassured to discover that the establishment was founded as a private asylum for mentally handicapped children from upper-class families and ‘those of good social position’.

I very much enjoyed Neal Ascherson’s thoughts on Asa Briggs (LRB, 9 October). When Briggs became master of Worcester College in Oxford I was a lowly Ruskin student living just down the road. I wrote him a letter asking whether I could be permitted to fish in Worcester College lake. I knew others did. I received a note by return: ‘No you may not fish in my lake. Yours, Briggs (Lord)’. So much for socialism.

Michael Wood comes off as quite the cricket fan in twice calling the home of the Bronx Bombers ‘the’ Yankee Stadium (LRB, 9 October). I will be calling it ‘the’ Wembley Stadium from now on.