Robert Lewis's 'Dark Actors'

After Dr David Kelly, the government scientist, died in 2003, Lord Hutton was asked to investigate the surrounding circumstances, his report appearing in January 2004. Hutton concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life. In 2007, Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has since become Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport in the coalition government, published The Strange Death of David Kelly and concluded that Kelly’s death was due to hands other than his own. David Aaronovitch in his 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History, devoted a chapter to debunking Baker, Mr Pooter Forms a Theory, which ends:

In conclusion, it is worth referring to the preface to the English edition of Fritz Tobias’s book on the Reichstag fire, in which one great British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, quotes another, Sir Lewis Namier: ‘There would be little to say on this subject, were it not for the nonsense that has been talked about it’.

Now, 10 years after the tragedy, Dark Actors, The Life and Death of Dr David Kelly by Robert Lewis has appeared. Is it worth reading? The opening chapter describes the events of the day of Kelly's death. The choice of its title, An Inspector Falls*, sets the tone. To establish the reader's enthusiasm for ploughing through what follows, or even to induce the book’s purchase in the first place, Lewis sets about raising expectations, eg on page 5:

And then the official account turns abruptly hysterical.  

If there was anything more substantial than her husband’s suddenly stricken visage that caused her to become ill with worry, she has never revealed what it was.  

So some nameless, unspoken crisis appears to have quickly descended.

but gives the impression that his heart isn’t in it:

So the scene of death was demonstrably disturbed by individuals that [sic] had nothing to do with Thames Valley Police, for reasons that remain unclear, one of whom was very likely an unaccountable intelligence officer whose very existence has been denied – to the extent that several witnesses claimed he was a uniformed police officer, while his Special Branch liaison, DC Coe, maintained for seven years he was never there at all. (page 14)

The next eight chapters are chronological, most of them concerned with Kelly’s professional life after joining the Ministry of Defence at Porton Down. Then, despite the attempt to pick loose ends at the start, in the final chapter Lewis concludes that his subject did indeed commit suicide. Any value that the book may possess therefore largely depends on the quality of its account of Kelly’s life. To be fair, the reader has to recognise the problem presented to Lewis by the confidentiality surrounding much of Kelly’s government work. But remembering that it was said of Kelly that “he had such an eye for detail that nothing got past him” (page 39), at least one can try to assess how Lewis dealt with those matters of detail which he could be expected to get right. With a far from expert eye, I came across the following:

Page 37: Terence Taylor is described as “… a former weapons inspector who went on to direct the Institute of Strategic Studies” – he was an Assistant Director at the International Institute of Strategic Studies.  

Page 184: The same individual is referred to as Lantos, Santos and Lantos within seven lines of text.  

Page 249: “The new UNSCOM … with its own (foot high) communications mast …”.  

Page 379: “Harris, Robert and Jeremy, Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing London 1982”.

which could all be dismissed as trivia. But more disconcertingly from a writer who expects to be taken seriously:

Page 282: “Bill Clinton f****d a 22-year-old White House intern …” [the asterisks are mine].

and there are digressions like the one on page 189 about the controversial book Bravo Two Zero by Chris Ryan (aka Colin Armstrong) from which Lewis has to return to topic with a crashing non sequitur:

Desperate to extricate himself from Iraq, Colin Armstrong would cross one hundred and eighty miles of hostile terrain. And years later David Kelly would walk three thousand yards of Oxfordshire countryside.

not to mention his proneness to off-the-point platitudinising:

All the members of the household have gone their separate ways, as modern families generally must, if they are to live the life that is due to them. (page 338)

Rather more worrying is the way Lewis uses notes and references. It can be argued that a non-academic work has no need for them, or that they should be kept to a bare minimum. In the case of this book, it’s their unevenness which is the problem. The second chapter, Dai, which takes Kelly from birth to the age of 40, is supported by just three notes whereas Chapter 8 has 120, nearly two per page. To see why this matters, take the following example from Chapter 2:

Another contemporary of Kelly’s at Leeds was Jack Straw [**], who was elected chair of the university’s Labour Society in 1966, whereupon he rebranded it the Socialist Society and then withdrew its support for Labour because the party was insufficiently left-wing. Straw gained further notoriety on campus when the British Council selected him to go on a student trip to Chile, where, instead of building a youth club, he spent his time quarrelling with his colleagues, posturing as an insurgent communist, and demanding an audience with the opposition leader Salvador Allende. All of which he made up for in later life, when as Foreign Secretary of the Thatcherite New Labour party he helped ensure safe passage home for Allende's murderer Augusto Pinochet at a time when Spanish relatives of the Chilean 'disappeared' were demanding he be tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity.  

To his credit, Kelly had as little to do with Straw as possible.  

‘He won't remember me; he later told his half-sister, 'because I wasn't a political animal, but I remember him.'  

And so it proved. Kelly and Straw met professionally for the first time in 2002, when the former supported the latter in a hearing before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. The Foreign Secretary made a point of complaining to his department that they had sent a nobody along to accompany him. The following year, when Kelly became drawn into the farrago over the government's claims of an Iraqi WMD arsenal, Straw was a part of the Downing Street cabal that secretly exposed him to the press and then belittled him in public.

There are various assertions about Straw here, none of them ascribed to a source. This, in itself, doesn’t mean that they aren’t true, but they present a problem for the reader, particularly when Lewis could have made reference to Straw’s autobiography, Last Man Standing, published (and posted about here) last year. One has to accept that Straw, a lawyer turned politician, may well have been economical with the truth about his student days, and he wouldn’t have been the first person to have moved to the political centre after graduating. Straw makes no mention of rebranding Leeds University’s Labour Society as the Socialist Society, but does state:

The Labour left at Leeds University worked as part of a broad front with the CP [Communist Party] and we spent much of our time fighting the destructive politics of the various active Trotskyist groups.*  

*These included the Socialist Labour League, led locally by lecturer Cliff Slaughter, and Tory Cliff of the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers' Party). (LMS, page 65)

Straw also provides an account of the NUS delegation to Chile which is somewhat at odds with Lewis’s (LMS page 69). He devotes a whole chapter to the Pinochet affair during his Home Secretaryship (A Dictator Calls – Straw, too, could have done better) and reveals that he:

might have met Allende at a reception in Santiago de Chile, perhaps even shaken his hand, but I’d had no other dealings with him whatever. (LMS, page 255-6).

But these are not particularly significant issues, unlike the following:

If I was asked which single individual most influenced my view that Saddam did pose a serious threat to international peace and security, my answer would be unambiguous: Dr David Kelly, who tragically died in July 2003.  

Dr Kelly was a microbiologist who started his career at the UK’s Biological Weapons Establishment at Porton Down, and later became a weapons inspector. As a member of UNSCOM's staff, he made thirty-seven trips to Iraq during the nineties. I met him just once, in September 2002, when he accompanied me to give evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. At the hour long 'pre-brief' I was struck both by Dr Kelly's depth of knowledge and understanding, and by the clarity of his belief that, if diplomacy failed, then military action would have to follow. (LMS, page 368)

The reader with sight of both accounts is forced to conclude that either Straw is breathtakingly hypocritical or that Lewis’s unsourced version (‘The Foreign Secretary made a point of complaining to his department that they had sent a nobody along to accompany him’) is wrong. I’m afraid that I’m inclined to the latter view. Lewis never goes on to mention Kelly’s appearance at the Select Committee in 2002, a fairly important and public event. But then he makes no reference to Kelly’s being awarded the CMG in 1996. He also informs us that:

The debate over why we invaded and occupied Iraq has rumbled on for over ten years. Unless Tony Blair can deliver a plausible answer, which would require him to experience an actual spiritual [sic] journey, unlike the pathological levels of self-justification that comprise his autobiography, it will be argued over for the rest of my life.

but omits any mention of the Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry (report forthcoming) or Lord Butler ‘s 2004 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction. There are no links (ie URLs), by the way, in Dark Actors, to Lord Hutton’s Inquiry (as in the opening sentence of this post) or to anything else. This seems rather old-fashioned given the age of its author. Blair’s A Journey is not in the Bibliography.

Given that Lewis doesn’t challenge Lord Hutton’s conclusion that David Kelly committed suicide, it is legitimate to ask what his book has to offer - “Is it worth reading?” If someone is looking for an insight into the lives of weapons inspectors operating inside a hostile Middle Eastern regime, it may be. As a source of information about the career of Dr David Kelly in particular, I’m doubtful. The errors and weaknesses in Dark Actors, apparent even to a casual reader, undermine its authority. Judged by Kelly’s own standards it isn’t the book he deserved but, perhaps more than anything else, he and his family deserve to be left in peace.

*Kelly was a weapons inspector who committed suicide. In JB Priestley’s play, An Inspector Calls, a mysterious ‘inspector’ interrogates a wealthy English family about their responsibility for the suicide of a young working class factory girl. An Inspector Falls seems a facile and misleading title for the content of the chapter concerned.

** Straw, born in August 1946, was an undergraduate at Leeds from 1964 to 1967 (LMS, pages 9, 62 and 69). Kelly, born in May 1944, was an undergraduate from 1963 to 1967 (DA, pages 26, 33 and 35). That Kelly’s degree took four years and that he entered Leeds a year later than might be expected from his birthdate, are points not addressed in Dark Actors.

Bojoburg

Two members of the commentariat fixated on the same idea last week. The London Evening Standard on 14 May ran a piece by Simon Jenkins, London should quit the EU and ditch the UK too, and, the next day in The Times (£), David Aaronovitch explained why it was necessary to Unshackle London from the backward shires.

According to Jenkins:

There is an easy solution to Britain in Europe. Let the rest of Britain stay but let London leave.  

… Its future is global. Its two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. They depend on self-government, on regulatory discipline and on the value of the pound. Financial services are worldwide in application. They are clearly threatened by what Lord Lawson called “jealous European banking officials”, by regulations designed to underpin German bankers and clip London’s wings.  

The new city state would have a physical boundary, roughly that of the M25. Digital mapping would police the circumference, though open borders are no great problem. They exist like those between Gulf states, between Ireland and Ulster, Monaco and France. London already has its own government under its elected “monarch”, Boris Johnson.  

The rest of Britain may have reasons for wanting to “stay in Europe”. It is time for London to “get out”, of both the EU and the UK.

Goodness knows what Jenkins thinks digital mapping is. Aaronovitch saw the problem as being one of culture, typified in PMQs the day before:

… of the six Conservative MPs who stood to ask questions, no less than five were talking about when to have a referendum on Europe. They might as well have been in Caracas.  

… Where they sit for in Essex, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire or Wiltshire, the EU may indeed be more important than it is to me in London. On questions such as immigration, perhaps my metropolitan attitude seems as peculiar to them as their parochialism does to me.  

… Londoners differ from some of their compatriots in attitudes towards the outside world. The pollsters Ipsos/Mori sent me figures for the regional variations on immigration and the EU. Aggregated for January-December 2012, polling showed an average of 21 per cent of Britons naming race relations/ immigration/immigrants as “one of the most important issues facing the country”. The highest figures were the South East with 28 per cent, then the East Midlands, East of England and Yorkshire/Humberside all on 25 per cent. In London it was 13 per cent. This was less dramatically true for Europe/EU. In the South East 10 per cent had it as a vital issue, compared with 5 per cent in London and 6 per cent nationally.  

It is clear that London and the South East are in some ways two different countries and that is why Boris has to be Janus-faced. To become Tory leader he must somehow finesse the fact that he knows a lot of rural/ suburban Tory-Ukippery just doesn’t make sense in the big, competitive, changing world. Like Boris, I do not want to inhabit this parish of 1950s retro enthusiasts.  

… So we may need to secede from the hinterland. And the same is true of our other great cities and university towns which, together, could make an outward-looking, open-minded polity.

So not so much an island state as an archipelago one. Well pundits have to write about something – in 2011 Aaronovitch thought the UK should become part of the USA. And it might have been inhibiting if the position Mrs Thatcher found herself in in 1982 had been remembered:

On the morning of Wednesday 22 September I and my party took off from Tokyo, where I had been visiting, for Peking. Fifteen years remained of the lease to Britain of the New Territories which constitute over 90 per cent of the land of the Colony of Hong Kong. The island of Hong Kong itself is British sovereign territory, but, like the rest of the Colony, dependent on the mainland for water and other supplies. The People's Republic of China refused to recognize the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, by which the island of Hong Kong had been acquired by Britain. Consequently, although my negotiating stance was founded on Britain's sovereign claim to at least part of the territory of Hong Kong, I knew that I could not ultimately rely on this as a means of ensuring the future prosperity and security of the Colony. (The Downing Street Years, page 259)

London, with its “boundary, roughly that of the M25” (see above and the surrounding regions), would be far worse-placed than British Hong Kong. Being on the coast (see below, right), the former colony could trade with the rest of the world without having to enter PRC airspace or territorial waters and at least produced its own electricity and gas.
 

Somehow I don’t see “monarch Boris” converting Tate Modern back into a power station. A secessionist London would have to import electricity and gas from the English grids, would be dependent for its water on the English Thames into which it would also have to discharge its sewage. No doubt the supply of all these things, and a few others (like the westward extension of Heathrow or its replacement) could be arranged amicably – at a price and in return for financial services from London. Until BNP Paribas arrives in Bristol and Crédit Agricole in Birmingham. Of course, London has virtually no armed forces apart from the ceremonial, so all defence capabilities including the nuclear deterrent would be in the hands of the Welsh-English-Scottish rump, as would GCHQ. London would be run out of the Mayor’s office because Jenkins thinks that:

The bulk of British government would have to relocate out of the present capital. Because no one would agree on where, departments would be fragmented around the provinces, to the benefit of all. Parliament could relocate, perhaps to Salford or to an Orwellian “Elizabethville” in south Yorkshire. Essex and Sussex would concentrate development around Stansted and Gatwick, relieving pressure on Heathrow.

All quite barking because London, unlike Singapore (above, left), is land-locked and geography dictates that it cannot become an island city-state. But perhaps there is an even deeper flaw in Jenkins’ concept that London’s

… two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. … Financial services are worldwide in application.

He should have read an article in the Financial Times (£) on 7 May, Cornwall beach buoys London’s financial status. It explained that a beach near Bude in north Cornwall in SW England:

… is one of the main landing points for thousands of miles of submarine cables that carry trading data from New York. Britain’s westerly location means data can reach traders in London several milliseconds quicker than competitors in Frankfurt and Paris – a key advantage in the era of high-frequency trading.  

… “The UK is an underwater cable hub for all the financial institutions in Europe,” says Jack Steven, asset manager at the Crown Estate. “The alternative is to go through somewhere like Portugal, which is closer to the US but which historically hasn’t developed capacity in the same way.”  

According to the Crown Estate, about 95 per cent of the UK’s communication, such as email, internet and telephone calls, is transmitted through submarine cables. They are cheaper and more reliable than satellites, which are expensive to get into orbit and vulnerable to collisions with space debris. The shorter the cables, the quicker data can be transferred. It takes about 65 milliseconds to trade between London and New York. From east London it takes a further five milliseconds to Frankfurt.

Anyone interested can learn more about the global undersea cable network (above) on the Guardian Data Blog.

Boris Johnson, to be fair, has not expressed any opinions, as far as I know, in favour of London’s independence, even though Aaronovitch seems to think he is a closet isolationist. A shame when London could so easily be renamed Bojoburg in his honour as its first head of state. I don’t think either Aaronovitch or Jenkins think for one minute that their proposals will ever happen but, as part of London’s media elite, they are expressing their exasperation with the rest of us.  But most people don't live on six-figure salaries, probably getting away with a day’s work a week writing a thousand words or so about whatever they chose, and having expenses-paid lunches in top restaurants with interesting people talking off the record.

With no particular place to go

So near and yet so far: Goering and German top brass regard the
White Cliffs of England from the French coast on 1 July 1940

Max Hastings could never fairly be accused of over-optimism. Writing in today’s Daily Mail he contrasts his family’s recent enjoyable day on a Devon beach with Europe’s being, as he sees it:

… in the early stages of what will probably prove its gravest and most frightening tumult of our lifetimes. Our political leaders have not mentioned this, not told us Europe is up the creek without a paddle, because half of them are in denial about what is going on, and not one has a sensible idea what to do about it.

Turning to where it leaves Britain, he concludes that:

I seldom pity politicians, but ours deserve some sympathy, as almost impotent spectators of unfolding disaster. Since we are not eurozone members, there is little a British Government can usefully do or say.  

… My own strong hunch — and I say this without any pleasure — is that within a decade Britain will find itself outside the European Union. … The bust-up could come quite swiftly if Chancellor Merkel persists with her determination to impose a Europe-wide financial transaction tax to fund the next stage towards eurozone integration. This, in turn, would devastate the City of London.  

… Though our separation from Europe looks increasingly plausible, I do not share the enthusiasm of those of UKIP’s persuasion, who see this as a glorious liberation. The Germans at the conference I attended in April warned repeatedly that we would find life alone, out in mid- Atlantic, remarkably chilly. On this they are probably right. In a world of giant economic blocs, and especially up against China, Britain looks ill-fitted to compete on its own. But what else can we do if a statist, over-regulated, undemocratic and unaccountable Europe remains bent on economic and political suicide in a mindless, obsessive pursuit of the euro-ideal?

An alternative to the metaphorical mid-Atlantic might be to move even closer to the US East Coast; in the extreme, as David Aaronovitch suggested at the end of 2011, “the nations of the United Kingdom become the 51st, 52nd, 53rd and 54th states of what might be known as the United States of America and the East Atlantic.” Though I doubt whether Hastings would find that prospect particularly attractive. In a previous Mail column “Turning our backs on Britain's fallen: How a new generation believes it was just U.S. troops that won World War Two thanks to Hollywood” (as much a précis as a header), he clearly approved of how on the anniversary of D-day:

François Hollande made a gesture of reconciliation with ‘Perfidious Albion’. He became the first ever French president to visit a British cemetery in Normandy.

He concluded that article:

We should learn to value our heritage, as French governments cherish theirs. The Continent today is threatened not by war, but by greater turmoil and dissension than it has known for half a century. Only by knowing and understanding its past history, and our part in it, can we hope to come to terms with its present and future.

A debate on the viability of a “mid-Atlantic” United Kingdom (with or without Scotland) is probably overdue. Are we trapped in the invidious position, primarily in population terms, of being too large to occupy a niche, but too small to be a player? Or are there ways in which the UK could make itself too big to ignore? Perhaps this would be by leveraging our time zone and language advantages. We could also adopt a ‘smart’ and selective policy for immigration which would allow entry to talented and skilled people from anywhere, but particularly Europe if the train wreck anticipated by Hastings actually happens. This could in the short to medium term help overcome the deficiencies of our educational system. The UK could also take advantage of its status as a (relatively) ‘safe haven’ and sell gilts to fund infrastructure such as very high speed broadband and develop the regions to compensate for the over-development of the South East.

20 JULY 2012 - An update to this post is here.

A Cabinet of Geeks?

Given the disgruntled tone of some of my past posts about attitudes towards “techies”, the way the terms engineer and technician are abused in the UK and the realities of STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) training – the “math-science death march”, I suppose I should have been pleased with an article by David Aaronovitch in The Times (£) last week, Enough placebo politics. Vote for the geeks. Inspired by a new book, The Geek Manifesto, written by a former Times colleague, Mark Henderson, Aaronovitch set about arguing that “There are too many lawyers in Parliament. For less rhetoric and more rigour we should take the scientific approach”. About the former he said:

I love lawyers. I love their intellect. I love their forensic skills. I love their persuasive capacities. I love the way they take the complicated and make it sound almost comprehensible. I adore their lack of self-doubt. … But lawyers are not, in the way that scientists are, truth seekers. When lawyers test the evidence, they do so not to get as close to the truth as they can, but to make an argument or to decide whether a law has been broken or upheld.

whereas:

Scientists are not super-people who are beyond the tug of ego and the capacity for error. But the scientific method — the process of evaluation and re-evaluation, of test and experiment — is a vital discipline. It is no disgrace in science (as it is politics and occasionally even in journalism) to be proved wrong. The new results are studied, validated and incorporated and the circus moves on. Whether the issue is drugs policy or the introduction of phonics into schools, we don’t apply the methods that we could to help us to make better decisions. Rather, we rely on selective evidence, persuasion, rhetoric and crossing our fingers and hoping like hell.

Noting that:

Of 650 MPs there are 158 from business, 90 former political advisers, 86 lawyers and 38 journalists. Just one MP worked as a research scientist and two have science PhDs.

he ended by anticipating:

a Cabinet table presided over by Stella Creasy (Labour, PhD in social psychology), or Therese Coffey (Conservative, PhD in chemistry) or even Julian Huppert (Liberal Democrat, PhD in Biological Chemistry). And, if the evidence points in that direction, they might even let a lawyer or two in to join them.

So what can there be to dislike about this? Well firstly, I’m not too struck on his explanation of the scientific method (“evaluation and re-evaluation, of test and experiment … new results are studied, validated and incorporated and the circus moves on”). I’m certainly not an authority on the philosophy of science but Karl Popper’s concept of conjectures and refutations seems to get a bit closer to what goes on. Particularly if it is combined with Thomas Kuhn’s insight of that a conjecture, so well-established as to have become a paradigm, will take a revolution to shift – the circus doesn’t always readily move on.

Secondly, Aaronovitch is right to say that lawyers are not truth seekers –they are deliberately selective in their use of evidence in order to support one side of a case or proposition. That the other side might be right and yours wrong is not a professional consideration for a lawyer. When Galileo was put on trial in 1633 and found guilty of the heresy of heliocentrism one would like to think that he had legal representation, but the legal process was ultimately irrelevant in that his scientific conjecture endured and the papacy’s didn’t. In 1926 two lawyers, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, fought enthusiastically over evolution in the Scopes trial. No doubt lawyers could, and perhaps will, be found to argue the case for teaching creationism in schools, whatever the prevailing scientific opinion may be.

However, it has to be accepted there are certain areas of government policy which are not particularly amenable to resolution by a scientific approach. For example, according to the Financial Times (£), the Ministry of Defence is reconsidering the value of the “Moscow Criterion”:

Under the criterion, UK planners assume if a major world power, such as Russia, were to attack the UK, Britain should be able to retaliate by destroying the independent capability of that aggressor, by destroying targets deep inside that country. … Abandoning the Moscow Criterion, however, would open up a major debate on what capability the UK needs. As Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute think-tank puts it: “The UK could adopt a new doctrine which assumes that it would be sufficiently threatening to maintain a capability to destroy a significant number of important targets on enemy territory ... So you could have a smaller nuclear weapons capability.”

In this particular argument, it’s not clear how far the scientific role can extend beyond assessing the capability that meets a particular criterion. Nor is it obvious that science would be Aaronovitch’s “vital discipline” in any debate over the choice of criterion, what constitutes a sufficient threat, or even whether the UK should remain a nuclear power.

Thirdly, Aaronovitch uses the words “science”, “scientific” and “scientist” 18 times in his article but makes no reference to engineering or technology – in fact he seems unaware of STEM as an entity. This is a shame, because his geek Cabinet would be much improved if the MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central, Chi Onwurah, who trained as an electrical engineer at Imperial College, were a member. Nor does medicine get a look in.  Perhaps he should reflect on Martin Vander Weyer’s observation in the Any Other Business column in the Spectator after the March budget:

In my own banking days, I once worked for a doctor, as it happens. He was the former chief surgeon of Malaysia, and he had been drafted in as chairman of the local merchant bank to which I was seconded. A lifetime in the operating theatre had equipped him with powers of concentration that outlasted us all in long credit committee meetings, allowing no sloppy thinking or verbiage: each borrower was a patient under his scalpel. Like engineers, doctors deal in hard data, and that makes them better decision-makers than financiers who deal in evanescent notions of money and value.

Perhaps it’s that quality, rather than having been trained in the scientific method per se, that explains the amazing development of China under its lawyer-free, but engineer-heavy, Politburo. But where they will take their country and the rest of us, who knows?

United States of Anglophonia

In a recent comment piece in The Times (£), David Aaronovitch, no doubt with tongue firmly in cheek, proposed that the UK, having given up on Europe, should join the USA rather than go it alone. His proposal was that:

… the nations of the United Kingdom become the 51st, 52nd, 53rd and 54th states of what might be known as the United States of America and the East Atlantic.

Admittedly,

Joining the US would mean Prince Charles not succeeding to the throne after his mother, but would also suggest that this was nothing personal. The Royal Family would continue in theme-park fashion, with hundreds of millions of additional fans in the other states.

which in part matches someone else’s predictions. He concluded:

Reader, as we enter 2012, please say that you too can see by the dawn’s early light, catching the gleam of the morning’s first beam, the contours of our Atlantic destiny.
Switzerland? Meh.

I don’t think Aaronovitch would make much of a negotiator. Consider. The population of the USA is about 313 million and that of the UK a bit over 62 million. Our accession would therefore represent a 20% increase in the number of US citizens and so would justify the number of states in the union increasing from 50 to 60. The population of a state is about 6.2 million on average but ranges from that of the smallest, Wyoming with just over ½ million, to the largest, California with nearly 38 million. So Aaronovitch’s proposal that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each become states seems quite reasonable (see table below).

However, England would then need to be divided into the remaining seven states, and while this might be problematic (to put it mildly), the existing nine regions provide a basis for this to be done as the diagram below shows.

The obvious two candidates for removal are the North East by merger with Yorkshire and the Humber, together a respectable 7.5 million population, and the East Midlands by merger with the West. But the combined Midlands would be 8.7 million, so shedding Worcestershire and Herefordshire to the South West would be in order. The latter could be raised further to about 5 million population if the bloated South East were to lose Oxfordshire. The result would be a set of seven states-to-be with populations between 5.3 and 7.4 million, nicely straddling the US average.

And finally, on a parochial South Western note, in his article Aaronovitch suggested that Wales would take on the nickname of the Dragon state. Here in the state of South West England, although Plymouth was the final departure port of the Pilgrim Fathers, we would probably have to make do with Mayflower state (after their ship), Pilgrim being already in use for Massachusetts.  Also, there might be an interesting first senatorial race in a part of the UK which up until the last election had become mostly split between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. If all the Conservatives (blue in the UK) become Republicans (red in the US), and Labour (red) moved entirely to the Democrats (blue), would the Liberal Democrats just stop being Liberal so Democrats would win both Senate seats? As they used to say in these parts, a pig would win with a blue ribbon!

Great fun, but it ain’t going to happen! Anyway Puerto Rico and Washington DC are ahead of us in the queue.

(UK population statistics 2010/11 from ONS, here)

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens died on 15 December at the age of 62. So much has been written in the last few days by people who knew him, (for example Ian McEwan, [but not yet it seems] Martin Amis, and Simon Schama and, of course, his brother, Peter,) that there is not much left for the rest of us to say. When I was reading his memoir, Hitch-22, I found, rather to my surprise, that we seemed to have a few things in common. One was obvious, also we were both born in the late 1940s and had 1950s boyhoods, and went to not dissimilar sorts of school. But not much after that, as is to be expected in the land of CP Snow’s 'two cultures'*. And the small point that he was exceptionally talented.

Most of us in now our sixties didn’t go on the ‘political journey’ which David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) describes Hitchens as having made – obviously from the ‘Left’, the word appearing 10 times in the article, but where to? Surely not to the ‘Right’, which isn’t mentioned. It seems more like a journey from Trotskyism to Neo-conservatism, but how many neocons are atheists?

Hitchens was a very elegant writer, but I stumbled on one sentence in Hitch-22 when he was describing an interview not long after Oxford for a traineeship at the BBC:

I wasn’t stupid enough not to realise that he wouldn’t have asked that question if he didn’t already know the answer to it.

which I reckon to be a quadruple negative, and not to be attempted by novices!

Hitchens’ death seems to have induced a ‘Diana moment’ among the literary intelligentsia in London and on the East Coast (judging from here). But probably not a global one like Steve Jobs’ passing at the age of 56 in October. In Paris Le Figaro covered Hitchens’ death briefly, describing him as a “polémiste réputé dans le monde anglo-saxon”. The political intelligentsia in London had had their Diana moment in November when New Labour’s polling expert Philip Gould died at the age of 61.

Our expectations of life expectancy are now such that any death under 70 seems to induce a sense of loss. Not least because of the things that these three men in particular might have done if they had worked for another 10 years or more. Gould could well have influenced the outcome of the next general election in the UK. Both Hitchens and Gould died as a consequence of the relatively rare cancer of the oesophagus, associated with tobacco smoking and heavy alcohol use.

* For a recent view of this, see ‘CP Snow’s Two Cultures Revisited’, the 2009 CP Snow Lecture given by Professor Lisa Jardine (Jacob Bronowski’s daughter) downloadable here.

ADDENDUM 22 DECEMBER

A thoughtful piece about Hitchens by David Goodhart has now appeared on the Prospect Magazine website.
(Personal hobbyhorse: the US, not the UK, had babyboomers.) 

ADDENDUM 24 APRIL 2012

On 20 April 2012 a memorial service for Christopher Hitchens was held in New York. Martin Amis delivered the eulogy which Vanity Fair (to which Hitchens was a contributing editor) has made available.

ADDENDUM 31 AUGUST 2012

Martin Amis in an interview with Joseph Weisburg of Slate on 29 August offered “reflections on the life and passing of his dear friend, Christopher Hitchens.”