Monday 4 January, 2021

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HNY???

I saw this on Quentin’s blog. He got it in a WhatsApp feed, and so couldn’t give it an attribution. But one of his readers had a go and found an earlier version on Reddit. So, in a way, it’s sort-of generic. But it made me laugh this morning because it expresses what many people were thinking on Friday last!

Quote of the Day

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY: The World Health Organization tweeted: “China has reported to WHO a cluster of pneumonia cases — with no deaths — in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Investigations are underway to identify the cause of this illness.” (H/T Anne Alexander.) A year on, the WHO says there have been 83,322,449 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 1,831,412 deaths.

  • From Politico this morning

Errata — Jerry Garcia and Bernard Malamud

This blog, the product of a multitasker equipped with the wrong algorithm, is prone to typos and occasional howlers — which, in general, are pointed out by sympathetic but razor-sharp readers. One, for example, pointed out an intriguing (but for a Deadhead like me deeply embarrassing) Spoonerism when Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead became Gerry Jarcia. And then the other day I described Bernard Malamud as a ‘playwright’ when he was, in fact, a novelist and short story writer. Many thanks to the readers who politely drew my attention to these gaffes.

When these things happen, I fondly recall Dr Johnson’s response to the indignant lady who asked him how could he have come to define “pastern” as “the knee of a horse” in his great Dictionary. “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance!” he replied. It’s always best to come clean.

Distant intimacy

I’ve been reading this over Christmas and really enjoying it. Raphael and Epstein are two writers I admire. But they’ve never met, nor even spoken to one another. They decided, however, as an experiment, to embark on a year-long email correspondence as a way of producing a book. As the weeks progress, one can see their friendship growing, and also appreciate the way they are egging one another on. Since they’re pretty good writers, it makes for great reading at times. They’re particularly good on their pet hates, which include Susan Sontag (Raphael) and Gore Vidal (Epstein). Here’s the latter on Vidal:

Gore Vidal is now in his early eighties and is perhaps best likened to a car with a dead engine whose horn nonetheless keeps sounding off. His act has been that of the crusty American aristocrat — Henry Adams with a bit of Edmund Wilson thrown in, the Wilson who claimed to look at Life magazine and not recognise the America in which he grew up — who finds his country vulgar, make that greedy, vile and vastly ignorant. The twist Vidal rang on this great American crank act was to hate America from the left instead of, more traditionally for this role, from the right. Nothing in the country he couldn’t look down his nose upon: its politics, its literature, its entertainment, above all its people. All this was admixed with a strong homosexual strain; Vidal used to call himself a “homosexualist,” a term that always reminded me of “aerialist”.

Music

Zadok the Priest | Choir of Westminster Abbey

Link

If that’ll doesn’t get you going on the first working day of 2021 then nothing will!

How to Get Rich Sabotaging Nuclear Weapons Facilities

With every passing day, assessment of the extent of the damage caused by Russia’s penetration of one company’s software update grows more sombre. But not enough attention has been focussed on the software company whose laxity let the hackers in — SolarWinds.

Matt Stoller has done sterling work in remedying this omission.

The point of entry for this major hack was not Microsoft, but a private equity-owned IT software firm called SolarWinds. This company’s products are dominant in their niche; 425 out of the Fortune 500 use Solar Winds. As Reuters reported about the last investor call in October, the CEO told analysts that “there was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which [they] did not provide some level of monitoring or management.” While there is competition in this market, SolarWinds does have market power. IT systems are hard to migrate from, and this lock-in effect means that customers will tolerate price hikes or quality degradation rather than change providers. And it does have a large market share; as the CEO put it, “We manage everyone’s network gear.”

SolarWinds sells a network management package called Orion, and it was through Orion that the Russians invaded these systems, putting malware into updates that the company sent to clients. Now, Russian hackers are extremely sophisticated sleuths, but it didn’t take a genius to hack this company. It’s not just that criminals traded information about how to hack SolarWinds systems; one security researcher alerted the company last year that “anyone could access SolarWinds’ update server by using the password “solarwinds123.’”

The New York Times had a story about one “security adviser” at SolarWinds, who said that he warned management … that unless it took a more proactive approach to its internal security, a cybersecurity episode would be “catastrophic.” The executive in charge of security quit in frustration. Even after the hack, the company continued screwing up; SolarWinds didn’t even stop offering compromised software for several days after it was discovered.

This level of idiocy seems off-the-charts, says Mr Stoller, but it’s not that the CEO, Kevin Thompson, is stupid.

Far from it. “Employees say that under Mr. Thompson,” the Times continued, “an accountant by training and a former chief financial officer, every part of the business was examined for cost savings and common security practices were eschewed because of their expense.” The company’s profit tripled from 2010 to 2019. Thompson calculated that his business could run more profitably if it chose to open its clients to hacking risk, and he was right.

And yet, not every software firm operates like SolarWinds. Most seek to make money, but few do so with such a combination of malevolence, greed, and idiocy. What makes SolarWinds different? The answer is the specific financial model that has invaded the software industry over the last fifteen years, a particularly virulent strain of recklessness typically called private equity.

Of all the abuses of neoliberal capitalism in recent decades, private equity seems to me to head the list. The argument for it is that it provides a kind of corrective to lazy and incompetent management of viable businesses. In practice, much of the activity of private equity investors looks more like that of termites tearing an ageing wooden building apart.

Of course I’m prejudiced. Compared to Mr Stoller, though, I’m a Panglossian optimist. Private equity investors are, he writes,

financiers who raise large amounts of money and borrow even more to buy firms and loot them. These kinds of private equity barons aren’t specialists who help finance useful products and services, they do cookie cutter deals targeting firms they believe have market power to raise prices, who can lay off workers or sell assets, and/or have some sort of legal loophole advantage. Often they will destroy the underlying business. The giants of the industry, from Blackstone to Apollo, are the children of 1980s junk bond king and fraudster Michael Milken. They are essentially are super-sized mobsters who burn down businesses for the insurance money.

Except that in this case they seem to have burned down not just a lot of companies who depended on SolarWinds software, but a good deal of the US government as well.

Other, hopefully interesting or useful, links

  • The immediate future of European travel for British Citizens. Useful info. Link

  • The Mediterranean nearly dried up. A cataclysmic flood revived it. Wow! Who knew? Link

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Sunday 3 January, 2021

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When tourists roamed the earth

Quote of the Day

”Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

  • Sophia Loren

Hmmm… I wonder.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan – Subterranean Homesick Blues | 1965

Link

My favourite version of this song.

Long Read of the Day

 Monopoly Versus Democracy in the New Gilded Age

Terrific Foreign Affairs essay by Zephyr Teachout about lessons from previous progressive, anti-monopoly movements.

The parallels with the present day are obvious, and it has become commonplace to hear the current era described as a new Gilded Age. As the journalist Barry Lynn points out in his book Liberty From All Masters, the robber barons shared with today’s high-tech monopolists a strategy of encouraging people to see immense inequality as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of capitalism and technological change. But as Lynn shows, one of the main differences between then and now is that, compared to today, fewer Americans accepted such rationalizations during the Gilded Age. Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. Back then, a critical mass of Americans refused to do so, and they waged a decades-long fight for a fair and democratic society. On the other hand, today’s antimonopoly movements are intentionally interracial and thus avoid a massive failure of the populists and progressives of the late Gilded Age, who abandoned Black Americans even though they had played a crucial role in fostering both movements.

Worth a read. The obvious takeaway is that you can have democracy or you can have powerful monopolies, but you can’t have both. Another historical lesson is that in order to deal with corporate power, we have to tackle it in a wider framework — for example, it’s necessary to clean up the mess of private funding of political campaigns. And in the UK we’d also need to make the electoral system more fairly representative. Nearly 4m people voted for UKIP in the 2015 general election and got… precisely one MP.

All I want for 2021 is to see Mark Zuckerberg up in court

This morning’s Observer column. The tech giants’ law-free bonanza is coming to an end on both sides of the Atlantic, but let’s speed up the process.

Interestingly, Stoller suggests that another approach (inspired by the way trust-busters in the US acted in the 1930s) could have useful leverage on corporate behaviour from now on. Monopolisation isn’t just illegal, he points out, “it is in fact a crime, an appropriation of the rights and property of others by a dominant actor. The lengthy trial is essentially akin to saying that bank robbers getting to keep robbing banks until they are convicted and can probably keep the additional loot.”

Since a basic principle of the rule of law is that crime shouldn’t pay, an addition of the possibility of criminal charges to the antitrust actions might, like the prospect of being hanged in the morning (pace Dr Johnson), concentrate minds in Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. As an eternal optimist, I cannot think of a nicer prospect for 2021 than the sight of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai in the dock – with Nick Clegg in attendance, taking notes. Happy new year!

Do read the whole thing.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

  • How to read 50 books in 2021. Some useful tips from James Crabtree. Link
  • 21 Things That Kept Me Going In 2020. Some lovely discoveries from Jason Kottke (Whom God Preserve). Link
  • Adobe Flash rides off into the sunset. Adobe terminated support for its Flash software on Christmas eve. It won’t start blocking Flash content until January 12th but major browsers seem to have shut it down already and Microsoft will block it in most versions of Windows. It’s over. Link.

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Saturday 2 January, 2020

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The lake in Winter

Quote of the Day

”I distrust camels and anyone else who can go a week without a drink.”

  • Joe Lewis, American comedian, 1971

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Corelli Christmas Concerto 2nd movement

Link

On Brexit, grief and moving on

One of my strongest memories of the day after the Brexit vote in 2016 was the number of people who said to me that it felt to them like a bereavement. (Remember that I live and work in a bubble which voted heavily for Remain, and many of my friends and colleagues are, like me, Europhiles.) The word they chose for how they were feeling was interesting and, I think, significant, so over the succeeding four years I often found myself returning to it.

An obvious source to consult was Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s book, On Death & Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy & Their Own Families in which she set out her famous ‘five stages of grief’ model, which postulates that those experiencing grief go through a series of five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

In the four years since the Brexit vote, I’ve seen my fellow-Remainers going through some or all of these stages. But since 11pm last Thursday evening, it seems to me that the only one that now makes sense if the fifth: acceptance.

In that context, a reader pointed me to an interesting Guardian column by the paper’s Economics editor, Larry Elliott, under the headline “The left must stop mourning Brexit – and start seeing its huge potential .”

The lefties who voted for Brexit see it differently. For them (us, actually, because I am one of them), the vote to leave was historically progressive. It marked the rejection of a status quo that was only delivering for the better off by those who demanded their voice was heard. Far from being a reactionary spasm, Brexit was democracy in action.

Now the UK has a choice. It can continue to mourn or it can take advantage of the opportunities that Brexit has provided. For a number of reasons, it makes sense to adopt the latter course.

For a start, it is clear that the UK has deep, structural economic problems despite – and in some cases because of – almost half a century of EU membership. Since 1973, the manufacturing base has shrivelled, the trade balance has been in permanent deficit, and the north-south divide has widened. Free movement of labour has helped entrench Britain’s reputation as a low-investment, low-productivity economy. Brexit means that those farmers who want their fruit harvested will now have to do things that the left ought to want: pay higher wages or invest in new machinery.

I can see where he’s coming from. During the Referendum campaign two things puzzled me. One was the feebleness of the Remain campaign — it was as if nobody was interested in making a passionate argument for continuing to participate in the greatest geopolitical experiment in European history. As a result, the Remain campaign was essentially negative — as the Europhobes dismissively labelled it — ‘Project Fear’.

The other puzzle was the failure to make a reasonable case against the European experiment. The truth about the EU is that it has always been an elitist, technocratic experiment. It would never have happened as a democratic project — it had to be driven by political elites from the moment the European Coal and Steel Community was established in the early 1950s as a (laudable) attempt to ensure that the nations of Europe could never go to war against one another again. But as it developed into the EEC — and, later, the EU — the project always had a yawning democratic deficit (as Jurgen Habermas lamented in his book The Lure of Technocracy) — a deficit that was only partially filled by the creation of the European Parliament.

In that sense, there never was much in the way of democratic legitimacy for the EU project. And in a number of crises, notably the 2008 banking catastrophe, that lack of legitimacy was painfully obvious. Similarly the creation of the Eurozone was an elite project — it had to be — because its internal contradictions would never have withstood proper democratic scrutiny. (Indeed, one of the really good things Gordon Brown did was to keep the UK out of the Euro, despite Tony Blair’s anxiety to join it.) And then there was the crazily-accelerated post-1989 drive to incorporate the Eastern European states liberated by the implosion of the Soviet empire. And, finally, there’s the fact that all these initiatives and policies were driven or inspired by a Commission staffed by a technocratic elite that had been drinking the neoliberal Kool Aid from the time they’d been in kindergarten.

So in 2016 there were plenty of reasons to debate the wisdom of continuing to belong to such a flawed institution. But mostly those arguments were never made — or if they were they were drowned out by the crude xenophobia of the two Leave campaigns. Worse still, the corollary was never explored — the idea that a Britain governed by a radically reformist regime could forge an interesting future for itself outside of the EU.

But we are where we are: out. So it makes sense to think about the future as one that could have real possibilities for radical improvement — if Britain had a radical reforming government that was competent. It doesn’t have that at the moment, so the question is: where could such an administration come from?

The Johnson administration is incapable — for social, ideological and capacity reasons — of measuring up to the task. All that vapouring about “levelling up” is just sloganeering. They don’t have a clue about even where to start. (Dominic Cummings’s fantasies about the revolutionary possibilities of a British DARPA were the ravings of an elitist technocrat on steroids.) There’s no strategy, or indeed no real understanding of what would need to be done to transform a ‘liberated’ UK into a progressive, successful, fairer, more dynamic society.

So the odds are that the slogans will fizzle out and the decay set out by ‘Project Fear’ will come to pass. The United Kingdom will fracture, with Scotland eventually going its own way; Ireland slowly re-uniting, de facto if not de jure; and a Westminster parliament with just one pocket borough left — England. Or, as Philip Stephens put it in the FT the other day, “Forget the guff about embarking on a new Elizabethan age. ‘Global Britain’ is at present heading towards the rocks of constitutional break-up.”

So what could be done to move on creatively from Brexit? The only answer I can see is a radically revitalised Labour Party that comes to power four years from now. The question then becomes: could Keir Starmer build such a party? And where would its ideas come from?

Long Read of the day

 Where loneliness can lead

Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism.

Nice essay by by Samantha Rose Hill

The companies that have done best in the pandemic year

The FT has a list of the companies that did best last year. I was interested in the nationalities of the winners.

Here are the top 6:

  • USA: 33 companies

  • China: 32

  • S. Korea: 6

  • Japan: 4

  • Denmark: 3

  • Germany: 3

And, just for completeness:

  • UK: 1

Could this be the same “Global Britain” about which we have been hearing so much lately?

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Friday 1 January, 2021

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A dog’s life

Quote of the Day

”I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.”

  • Bernard Malamud, playwright, 1975 in a Paris Review interview.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Grateful Dead | I Fought The Law | Live

Link

Like many of my student generation, I was a fan of the Grateful Dead — the first band to really understand the power of bootlegged music and (later) the Internet. I once shared a (speaking) platform with their lyricist, John Perry Barlow (who was one of the founders of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and author of the famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace). This particular number has a fascinating and extensive discography. There’s an excessively clean-cut early version of it by the Bobby Fuller Four, and an impressively noisy and aggressive rendition by The Clash. Green Day also recorded it, and doubtless many others. But as a Deadhead I still prefer Gerry Jarcia and his crew.

Long Read of the Day

The Master and the Prodigy — Bill Janeway on biographies of John Maynard Keynes and Frank Ramsey

This is a masterful review essay on two fascinating and impressive biographies — Zachary Carter’s  Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes and Cheryl Misak’s  Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers. I devoured both during the first lockdown and talked about them in my audio diary, and felt that I’d got a lot from them. Reading Bill Janeway’s long essay, however, made me realise that I had only scratched the surface. So it’s really worth making an appointment with yourself to read it.

The Beatles: 60 years on

Yesterday’s post about the poster for the Fab Four’s Litherland gig after their return from Hamburg prompted a small stream of interested reflections.

Hugh Taylor (Whom God Preserve) wrote:

Interesting to compare the price of that Liverpool gig in 1960 with the Beatles’ appearances in Cambridge. In March 1963 they were playing support (even though they’d released two singles by then – one of them rather successful) for a date in which prices were between 5/6 and 8/6. But by November, it looks as though the cheapest Rear Stalls had increased to 6/6. But they were headliners by then, with two number ones to their name.

Source

There’s an entertaining description of their November visit on singer and activist Tom Robinson’s blog – his brother worked for Varsity (didn’t we all!), and was sent to interview them…

The brother was allocated three minutes for an interview in a dressing room after the show. His report of the encounter is a hoot (or, if you’re of a pedantic turn of mind) an hoot. Here’s a sample:

Local journalists queued outside the dressing room door. There were grumbles as I was led to the front. “He’s only a student!” said PR. “He’s only got three minutes. You’ve all got five!” The grumbles subsided, but only a bit.

PR knocked. “Enter at your peril!” shouted a Liverpudlian voice that could have been John, Paul, George or Ringo. PR pulled a face and gingerly opened the door. I edged in behind, pulling out my compact notebook and pencil stub.

The Beatles sat perched like parrots on a line of cane chairs, clutching cigarettes and wine glasses, glistening with perspiration.

“Who’s this fine figure of a young man?” said John Lennon pretending to screw up his eyes as he peered at me while drawing heavily on his fag.

“Varsity, University newspaper,” said PR. “He’s only got three minutes.”

“Ringo! Stopwatch!” said Paul McCartney.

“Haven’t got one,” said Ringo Starr. “But I’ll count the seconds.”

“One hundred and eighty,” said George Harrison. Ringo started counting down aloud.

“He’s clever!” said John pointing at George. “He does MATHS!”

“Aren’t YOU supposed to be clever?” said Paul pointing at me. “Being a student!”

I nodded.

“He’s NOT a student,’ said John. “He’s an UNDERGRADUATE. Under-Grad-U-Ate! Students call themselves that at Cambridge Uni-Ver-Si-Ty. Right, Mister Undergraduate?”

“We’re in Cambridge?” asked Paul. “I thought it was Oxford.”

“Ordinary universities have students,” said George. “Posh places like Oxford and Cambridge have UNDERGRADUATES.”

The interview wasn’t heading in the direction I’d planned…

Wonderful. Do follow the link.

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Thursday 31 December, 2020

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King’s in the Frame

An unusual view of a famous building.

Quote of the the Day

”We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage. Then, at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other.”

  • Boris Johnson, speech in Greenwich on February 3, 2020.

Note the date. This was arguably the most stupid speech ever made by a British Prime Minister. (See below for more detail.)

Five reasons the UK failed in Brexit talks – Jonathan Powell

Really salutary Politico piece by Jonathan Powell, who was Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff and played the lead role in negotiating, for example, the Good Friday Agreement.

I have spent the last 40 years involved in international negotiations of one sort or another, and I have never seen a British government perform worse than they did in the four years of negotiations that concluded with the Christmas Eve Brexit agreement.

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of Brexit, purely in terms of negotiating technique, it is an object lesson in how not to do it. As the bluster and self-congratulation dies down, it is worth standing back and looking at what we can learn from the debacle.

We have ended up with an agreement which is more or less where the EU started. It is true that there have been a few sops to the U.K. position on the dynamic alignment of state aid and the role of the European Court of Justice. But on every major economic point, even including fisheries, the EU has got its way.

There are five principal reasons why.

It’s worth reading the whole piece. But in summary, here are the five mistakes Powell lists.

  1. From the outset the UK massively overestimated the strength of its negotiating position.

  2. May’s government fired the starting gun before it had worked out its own position, with the result that Britain spent the first two years negotiating with itself while the EU’s clock was ticking.

  3. Third, the UK prioritised abstract principles of ‘sovereignty’ over pragmatic economic interests and wasted time protecting a theoretical concept it didn’t actually want to use ahead of practical benefits.

  4. The government wilfully destroyed the EU’s trust in its commitment to implement what it had already agreed by threatening to unilaterally renege on the Northern Ireland Protocol. Johnson & Co imagined they could provoke a crisis and thereby give themselves the whip hand as the EU panicked. Instead the EU negotiators kept their cool and achieved the bloc’s objectives while the government wasted time on futile tactical games.

  5. The UK never developed a strategic plan for the negotiations — an an incomprehensible omission for any kind of government. But the Johnson crowd seemed to think it was OK to turn up for talks and hope things would work out.

My take on this: Johnson’s administration was never capable of conducting serious, successful negotiations because of (a) the PM’s fundamental laziness, incompetence and inexperience, (b) it had a Cabinet full of second-and third-rate politicians, and (c) it was in thrall to a powerful party cabal of Europhobic MPs with delusions about British exceptionalism.

Given these factors, the resulting ‘agreement’ — which largely seems to give the EU what it wanted all along — was predictable. This is of course bad for the country, but it has the merit (from the Leave crowd’s point of view) of enabling them to blame the EU for their own failure. It’s a Trump-lite strategy in other words.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ode to Joy Flashmobbed

Link

I know I blogged this during the first lockdown, but if ever there was a day for repeating it, this is it.

60 years on

Charles Foster’s Plenty of Taste blog has a lovely post this week marking the 60th anniversary of the Beatle’s return to Liverpool after their sojourn in Hamburg.

The 27 December 1960 performance at Litherland Town Hall was a breakthrough – with over 1500 tickets sold – and cemented their name as Liverpool’s top live draw.

Just as sensational as the performance is this wonderful hand-drawn poster for the gig. The exuberant lettering for this and many other of their Liverpool concerts was done by a very talented signwriter, Tony Booth. The one above has been recreated from the original posters he did at the time for Brian Epstein. Booth’s story was told in a 2016 documentary for local BBC TV, which unfortunately I haven’t seen in full. It is previewed in this clip for BBC News, where you get a glimpse of Booth at work. Sadly, he died less than a year later, as this further clip tells us. His work lives on at this website, where you can buy the modern reproductions.

Imagine: you could have seen the Beatles live for three shillings! Nowadays you have to pay £1 billion to get 12 votes from the DUP.

Implications of the new variant of Covid-19

I’m temperamentally sceptical of soothing official advice about Covid. At the moment, the consensus seems to me that the existing vaccines will probably work ok, etc. Hopefully they will. But that’s not the really significant thing about the variant: it’s its much higher transmissability.

Zeynep Tufecki has a great piece in The Atlantic about this. “A more transmissible variant of COVID-19,” she writes,

is a potential catastrophe in and of itself. If anything, given the stage in the pandemic we are at, a more transmissible variant is in some ways much more dangerous than a more severe variant. That’s because higher transmissibility subjects us to a more contagious virus spreading with exponential growth, whereas the risk from increased severity would have increased in a linear manner, affecting only those infected.

Increased transmissibility can wreak havoc in a very, very short time—especially when we already have uncontrolled spread in much of the United States. The short-term implications of all this are significant, and worthy of attention, even as we await more clarity from data. In fact, we should act quickly especially as we await more clarity—lack of data and the threat of even faster exponential growth argue for more urgency of action. If and when more reassuring data come in, relaxing restrictions will be easier than undoing the damage done by not having reacted in time. [As if we in the UK didn’t know that.]

To illustrate the difference between exponential and linear risks, Tufecki cites an example put forward by Adam Kucharski from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who’s an experienced modeller of infectious-disease outbreaks (and author of a rather good book on the subject, which I’ve read).

Kucharski compares a 50 percent increase in virus lethality to a 50 percent increase in virus transmissibility. Take a virus reproduction rate of about 1.1 and an infection fatality risk of 0.8 percent and imagine 10,000 active infections—a plausible scenario for many European cities, as Kucharski notes. As things stand, with those numbers, we’d expect 129 deaths in a month. If the fatality rate increased by 50 percent, that would lead to 193 deaths. In contrast, a 50 percent increase in transmissibility would lead to a whopping 978 deaths in just one month—assuming, in both scenarios, a six-day infection-generation time.

There are lots of things we don’t know at the moment. Just how much more transmissable is it, for example? 50%? 70%? We don’t know yet. What’s certain is that, as Tufecki puts it, “we are in a race against time, and the virus appears to be gaining an unfortunate ability to sprint just as we get closer to the finish line”.

2021 could be tougher than we think. Hope I’m wrong about that.

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Wednesday 30 December, 2020

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Who said robots can’t dance?

Link

Quote of the Day

”If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”

  • Motto embroidered on one of Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s settee cushions.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tommy Emmanuel, Richard Smith and friends

Link

“The best jam I’ve ever witnessed.” Recommended by Andrew Ingram, Whom God Preserve, who writes :

“Tommy is famous (and I think this is why I just love the guy) for jamming with other people – helping them to improve their technique, learning from youngsters with good ideas etc. Apparently if he stays in a hotel after a gig, there’s usually a session in the bar / back room, and usually with amateurs. This is him with Richard Smith (who is a pro) and two others who I think are just getting a shot at jamming with the master. No notes, no music sheets, just bring your brain, memory and fingers. And ears.”

Long Read of the Day

How mRNA went from a scientific backwater to a pandemic crusher

Terrific story in Wired UK

In 1995, Katalin Karikó was at her lowest ebb. A biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Karikó had dedicated much of the previous two decades to finding a way to turn one of the most fundamental building blocks of life, mRNA, into a whole new category of therapeutics.

More often than not, Karikó found herself hitting dead ends. Numerous grant applications were rejected, and an attempt to raise funding from venture capitalists in New York to form a spin-off company had proved to be a fruitless endeavour. ”They initially promised to give us money, but then they never returned my phone calls,” she says.

By the mid 1990s, Karikó’s bosses at UPenn had run out of patience. Frustrated with the lack of funding she was generating for her research, they offered the scientist a bleak choice: leave or be demoted. It was a demeaning prospect for someone who had once been on the path to a full professorship. For Karikó’s dreams of using mRNA to create new vaccines and drugs for many chronic illnesses, it seemed to be the end of the road…

Read on. It all comes good in the end.

Christmas in an alternate 2020

Lovely blog post by Tim Harford.

Perhaps there is no wrong way to exchange Christmas gifts, but in a hurried rendezvous just off junction six of the M40 must come close. My sister was furious; we had planned to go for a walk in the woods together the day before Christmas Eve, one of the safest activities imaginable. No longer: true to form, the prime minister had promised far more than seemed possible, realised it wasn’t possible after all, and then snatched it all away in a tumble of confusion. If the present-swap was to be legal, we had just hours to get it done.

As I drove to the rendezvous, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. For 15 years I’ve been writing columns discussing the problem with Christmas gifts, and now we were testing the idea to destruction. If nothing remained of Christmas except the presents, what would I do? The situation revealed the answer: at almost any cost, I’d hand over the damn presents.

We economists have a troubled relationship with gift exchange…

They do. That’s because they think people are very bad at choosing gifts.

To a brother-in-law who likes cricket, we give a cricket-themed tchotchke whose sole purpose is to symbolise the fact that we know he likes cricket. To a music-lover, we give CDs, not realising that she threw out the CD player years ago and listens only to vinyl. The shirt is lovely but does not fit; the toys would have been cool three years ago; the book is so perfectly chosen that in fact the recipient read it over the summer. Many pitfalls lie in wait even for a gift-giver who has empathy, imagination and patience — and by mid December many of us are running low on all three.

But because gift-giving remotely is one of the few things we have been able to do this Christmas, Harford comes up with an interesting thought-experiment. “The pandemic”, he writes,

has operated like a neutron bomb, destroying the hugs and the feasting and carol services and the visiting of elderly relatives, while allowing the flow of gift-wrapped plastic to continue unabated. What a shame that things aren’t the other way around. Imagine an alternate universe in which Christmas carols and pantomimes and parties and feasts with family and friends were all possible, but because of a strange virus that lived on wrapping paper, it was unsafe, illegal and deeply antisocial to offer Christmas gifts.

Might be worth a try.

On the other hand…

On Sunday, December 20, my phone buzzed with a news alert. From midnight, the government was going to put London and lots of other places into Tier 4. This caused alarm in our household because my son lives in London and is currently renovating his place, and a special new sink that he had ordered had been delivered to us. He had been planning to collect it on a day trip around Christmas, but that would now be out of the question. Since it was on the critical path for the renovation, the work might be delayed for weeks or even months.

So we hit on a plan. We would meet him half-way at an open air venue and hand over the sink so that we could all be back in our respective bases before midnight. The meeting place we arranged as the car park of a large motorway service station.

We got there early and sat in the car waiting for him to turn up. And then a strange thing began to happen. Cars were arriving in large numbers, parking at a slight remove from one another. And we watched as people got out, opened the boots, extracted gift-wrapped boxes and bags and brought them to other cars, where people were doing the same thing. Over half an hour, the entire parking lot was briefly transformed into one massive gift-exchange venue. Families and friends stood outside in the cold under street-lights, mostly observing social distancing, talking and laughing and taking photographs.

It was a lovely, moving scene — of friends and families whose plans to spend Christmas together had been abruptly squashed by the government’s abrupt decision, but who were determined to mark the season somehow. A profound reminder of human resourcefulness and of how cruelly a basic human need — to touch, to embrace, to kiss — has been denied by the virus.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

  •  Swan song: German firefighters remove ‘mourning’ bird blocking railway line. Its mate had been killed by flying into an overhead high-voltage line, and it had settled at the point of his/her death. Swans apparently do that sometimes. Link.
  • Some modellers think that by February 1 over 90% of Covid infections in the UK will be of the new variant. Link.
  •  How My Record Player Helped Me Feel the Music.. Analogue nostalgia rules OK. Link

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Tuesday 29 December, 2020

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Antibes, August 2010

How to do data visualisation well

Global Energy Production by Source 1860 – 2019

Link

My Quarantine Diary

I kept an audio diary for the first 100 days of lockdown. You can find it in the online version of this blog for March-July 2019.

Alternatively, the text is now available as a Kindle book.

You can get it here

Quote of the Day

”Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”

  • Norman Mailer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tubas in the Moonlight | Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band

Link

Long Read of the Day

 “If it Hadn’t Been for the Prompt Work of the Medics”: FSB Officer Inadvertently Confesses Murder Plot to Navalny

Wonderful investigative reporting, with a neat twist. Bellingcat, like Wikipedia, is one of the wonders of the online world. Note the trick question about the colour of his underpants!

Link

The perverse political effects of Covid-19

Gideon Rachman has a column in today’s FT (probably paywalled) on the geopolitics of Covid.

Nothing, it seems, can get in the way of geopolitical rivalry. Not a pandemic, not the collapse of international travel or a worldwide recession. In different ways China, the US and the EU have all treated Covid-19 as a very public test of their rival approaches to governance — and as part of an international contest for prestige and influence.

The obvious preliminary conclusion is that the pandemic will turn out to be an overall geopolitical win for the People’s Republic of China. The PRC’s success in largely suppressing the disease stands in marked contrast with the terrible toll that Covid-19 has taken on the west.

But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19….

Wishful thinking, methinks.

WHO warns Covid-19 pandemic is ‘not necessarily the big one’

According to the Guardian, the organisation’s end of year media briefing warned that the virus is likely to become endemic and that the world will have to learn to live with it.

The head of the WHO emergencies program, Dr Mark Ryan, said: “The likely scenario is the virus will become another endemic virus that will remain somewhat of a threat, but a very low-level threat in the context of an effective global vaccination program.

“It remains to be seen how well the vaccines are taken up, how close we get to a coverage level that might allow us the opportunity to go for elimination,” he said. “The existence of a vaccine, even at high efficacy, is no guarantee of eliminating or eradicating an infectious disease. That is a very high bar for us to be able to get over.”

That was why the first goal of the vaccine was to save lives and protect the vulnerable, Ryan said. “And then we will deal with the moonshot of potentially being able to eliminate or eradicate this virus.”

Ryan warned that the next pandemic may be more severe. “This pandemic has been very severe … it has affected every corner of this planet. But this is not necessarily the big one,” he said.

“This is a wake-up call. We are learning, now, how to do things better: science, logistics, training and governance, how to communicate better. But the planet is fragile.

I’m sorry to say that I’m not surprised.

The Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator

But here’s an antidote to gloom.

Go on — try it here!

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Monday 28 December, 2020

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The genius who is Matt

Matt, the Daily Torygraph‘s cartoonist, is a genius. Which — my lovely daughter thought — is why his annual collection would be a great Christmas present for her Dad.

She was right. Here’s just one reason:

Quote of the Day

”The privately educated Englishman – and Englishwoman, if you will allow me – is the greatest dissembler on Earth. Was, is now and ever shall be for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damned fool.”

  • George Smiley in John le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim.

Remind you of anyone?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird

Link

Long Read of the Day

John Rawls: can liberalism’s great philosopher come to the west’s rescue again?

Good question, thoughtfully discussed by Julian Coman in this Guardian Long Read:

He begins with the arguments that broke out in the New York Times on how the paper should cover Trump after his election as President. Confronted with a leader who delighted in flouting democratic norms and attacking minorities, was it the duty of this bastion of American liberalism to remain above the fray or should it play a partisan role in defence of the values under attack?

As journalists and staff argued online, a prominent columnist “uploaded a PDF of John Rawls’s treatise on public reason, in an attempt to elevate the discussion”. Rawls, who died in 2002, remains the most celebrated philosopher of the basic principles of Anglo-American liberalism. These were laid out in his seminal text, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. The columnist, Elizabeth Bruenig, suggested to colleagues: “What we’re having is really a philosophical conversation and it concerns the unfinished business of liberalism. I think all human beings are born philosophers, that is, that we all have an innate desire to understand what our world means and what we owe to one another and how to live good lives.” One respondent wrote back witheringly: “Philosophy schmosiphy. We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?”

In an age of polarisation, the exchange encapsulated a central question for the liberal left in America and beyond. Jagged faultlines have disfigured the public square during a period in which issues of race, gender, class and nationhood have divided societies. So was Bruenig right? To rebuild trust and a sense of common purpose, can we learn something by revisiting the most influential postwar philosopher in the English-speaking world?

Worth reading in full.

Reasons to be cheerful?

The economist Tyler Cowen is temperamentally an optimist; his glass is always three-quarters full. In his Bloomberg column 2020 “gets an asterisk for Covid”, but he thinks the year also saw great scientific progress. For example:

  • The astonishingly rapid creation of several kinds of Covid-19 vaccines
  • A “very promising” vaccine candidate against malaria, perhaps the greatest killer in human history
  • New CRISPR techniques that appear to be on the verge of vanquishing sickle-cell anemia
  • GPT-3 (AI) technology that composes remarkably human-like prose
  • DeepMind’s machine learning system that seems to have cracked the problem of protein folding
  • Driverless vehicles appeared to be stalled, but Walmart will be using them on some truck deliveries in 2021
  • SpaceX achieved virtually every launch and rocket goal it had announced for the year.
  • Toyota and other companies have announced major progress on batteries for electric vehicles, with related products are expected to arrive in 2021
  • Lots of progress in affordable solar power
  • China has developed a new and promising fusion reactor
  • Many more Zoom meetings will be held, and many business trips will never return.

You get the picture. Professor Cowen is an upbeat kind of guy. But he’s also pretty perceptive about what’s going on.

Talking Politics @5

Talking Politics, the podcast founded and hosted by my friend and colleague David Runciman, has been going for five years. I’ve been a fan of it from the beginning, and occasionally ‘appeared’ on it (if that’s an accurate of describing participation in an audio recording). By any standards — and especially those of academic ‘engagement’ and outreach — the podcast has been a knockout success.

How do I know that? Well, ponder some of the statistics:

  • Total downloads over the five years: 19.6m (20.57m if we include the History of Ideas strand)
  • Total downloads in 2020: over 8.1m
  • Weekly listens in 2020: 155,000 per week
  • Countries reached in 2020: 197

This week’s edition was #295 and was devoted to some reflections on the five tumultuous years by David, Helen Thompson and Catherine Carr, the producer of the show. It’s well worth a listen. After hearing it I fell to pondering why TP has been so successful. Here are the notes I made…

  1. Timing and luck. David made the point well — five years ago turned out to be a perfect moment to launch a show like TP because 2015 was a moment when democratic politics suddenly began to be interesting again. My own take on it is that the academic study of politics was just entering a phase which had the hallmarks of Thomas Kuhn’s description of the intellectual crises which scientific disciplines periodically go through as a field’s theoretical paradigm encounters increasing scepticism among researchers and a rival theoretical framework begins to emerge. A key feature of these crises, Kuhn observed, was incommensurability — the absence of a neutral language in which the merits of the old paradigm and its emerging rival could be objectively assessed. (Think Newtonian dynamics with its billiard balls vs quantum physics with its neutrinos, quarks and Higg’s boson.) So there’s initially no way of knowing which one ‘should’ win. The difference between the exact sciences and the social sciences is that, in the former, the experimental and observational facts are obtainable and so eventually obsolete paradigms die a natural death. That’s not the case in the social sciences (or indeed the humanities), which is why pathological paradigms (like rational expectations in economics) live on long past their sell-by dates. My hunch is that the theoretical paradigms which had governed what is laughingly called ‘political science’ lost credibility after the 2008 banking crisis and its aftermath, and TP thrived in the resulting vacuum of ideas.

  2. Given that, the fact that TP was often ‘wrong’ –in its predictions and analyses but cheerful in its acceptance of that — was a feature not a bug. When you’re in a crisis of incommensurability, that’s the only way to act rationally. And, critically, it’s what conventional political analysis cannot do: it has to purport to possess a coherent narrative for what’s going on because those involved believe that their credibility depends on it. This is perhaps a measure of intellectual insecurity, and one of the defining characteristics of TP is that the main contributors and hosts don’t suffer from that and were therefore able to live with radical uncertainty in a way that members of the political commentariat could not!

  3. Another thing that marked out TP from the burgeoning ruck of ‘politics’ podcasts was that it was forever escaping from “the sociology of the last five minutes”. No matter how urgent the question of the day, there was always Helen Thompson excavating the long history and political economy of how we got here, or Gary Gerstle or Adam Tooze doing the same, or Ken Armstrong explaining the incomprehensible complexities of regulatory divergence and related arcana. And so on.

  4. In that sense, the podcast has been a showcase for the advantages of sheer erudition. There’s no substitute for it — as the discussion of the Corn Laws that was highlighted in this week’s edition demonstrated perfectly. And one of the great advantages TP had was that of being located in a major research university. It wouldn’t have been able to tap into this huge pool of collective IQ, however, had David Runciman and Helen Thompson not been recognised by their peers as formidable thinkers in their own right. Being invited to appear on TP was recognised by many distinguished thinkers as a real compliment.

  5. Finally, TP was a great exploiter of the fact that podcasting has a wider intellectual bandwidth than other media — especially broadcast media which even on a good day have the bandwidth of smoke signals. When my son Pete (also a podcast producer) was making his ‘MPs’ Expenses’ series for the Telegraph, I remember thinking that if journalism is the first draft of history, then podcasting looks very much like the second draft. And Talking Politics is v2.1.

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Control shift: why newspaper hacks are switching to Substack

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This morning’s Observer column:

Way back in March, at the beginning of the first lockdown, I fell to wondering what a columnist, academic and blogger under house arrest might usefully do for the duration of his imprisonment. My eye fell on my blog, Memex 1.1, which has been a harmless presence on the web since the mid-1990s and a source of puzzlement to journalistic and academic colleagues alike. The hacks unanimously shared Dr Johnson’s view that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, while my academic colleagues thought it peculiar to waste one’s energy writing anything that would not figure in scholarly citation indices. The idea that one might maintain a blog simply because one enjoyed doing it never crossed their minds.

So there it was, with a modest readership, which occasionally spiked as it caught some brief wave of attention. Given that many people were going to be locked down like me, I wondered if the regularity of receiving the blog as an email every morning might be welcome. The thought came from observing how Dave Winer’s wonderful blog, Scripting News, drew an even wider readership after he offered it as a daily email to subscribers. So I began looking for an easy way of doing something similar.

The obvious solution would be an email list service like Mailchimp, but that looked like hard work, so I opted for Substack, which made it really easy. My blog would be published and available on the web every day as usual, but every night the day’s version would be neatly packaged into an email and delivered at 7am the following morning to anyone who had subscribed. The only change I made was to include a daily five-minute audio diary – something I’d never done before.

It was such an obvious thing to do. But the results were surprising – and often gratifying…

Read on

Sunday 27 December, 2020

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The Swiss Park in Versailles, on a peaceful Sunday morning walk.

Quote of the Day

”There are no credentials. They do not even need a medical certificate. They need not be sound either in body or mind. They only require a certificate of birth — just to prove that they were the first of the litter. You would not choose a spaniel on those principles.

  • Lloyd George on the House of Lords, 1909.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert, Trio op. 100 – Andante con moto

Link

Long Read of the Day

What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy

Nice Bloomberg column by Noah Smith.

There’s no clear consensus on how to measure happiness. Some neuroscientists have tried to link it to various measures of brain activity. But economists tend to use a method that’s a lot cheaper and quicker — they send out surveys and questionnaires asking people how happy they are.

Happiness research has led to some surprising and troubling discoveries. People seem to reliably seek out a few things that make them unhappy…

(Spoiler alert: it’s about a certain social media company).

Fast Food in Pompeii

Well, what do you know? According to the Guardian an “exceptionally well-preserved snack bar” has been unearthed in Pompeii!

Researchers said on Saturday they had discovered a frescoed thermopolium or fast-food counter in an exceptional state of preservation in Pompeii. The ornate snack bar, decorated with polychrome patterns and frozen by volcanic ash, was partially exhumed last year but archaeologists extended work on the site to reveal it in its full glory. Pompeii was buried in ash and pumice when the nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, killing between 2,000 and 15,000 people. Archaeologists continue to make discoveries there.

At first sight it looks like one of those counters in supermarkets where you make up your own pizza toppings — except that Tesco & Co don’t do classy frescoes. And of course you’re unlikely to be interrupted by a volcanic explosion.

What comes after Google search?

Nobody knows, but there are signs that Google isn’t hitting the spot any more. Daniel Gross has an interesting blog post about this.

In 2000, Google got popular because hackers realized it was better than Lycos or Excite. This effect is happening again. Early adopters aren’t using Google anymore.

They aren’t using DuckDuckGo either. They’re still using Google.com, but differently. To make Google usable, users are adding faux-query modifiers that to supress the “garbage Internet”.

You see this in the typeahead logs.

Gross has noticed also that more advanced users use modifiers like “site: filetype: intitle:” because adding “reddit” isn’t strict enough, because spammy websites often manipulate content to optimise their search results. Or searches for “Reviews UPDATED JANUARY 2020” exploit the fact that customers suffix queries with the year. What such experienced searchers are looking for is freshness, not a title match. “Something’s broken”, he says, “and a tiny share of Google is open for the taking”. A tiny bit in this context could be an awful lot.

One of the interesting things about this is that it reminds one of how much craft knowledge there is in using an established search engine well. I like to think I’m an experienced user, but there are often times when some of my smarter colleagues can find what I’ve failed to unearth. Which suggests there might be an opening not just for a specialised alternative to Google but also for a good course on ‘Advanced Search with [name your engine]’. Probably they already exist and I just can’t be bothered to Google them!

How to mark a fateful transition

Since next Sunday’s edition of the Observer will be published in a United Kingdom that is no longer a member of the European Union, today’s issue has gone to town on marking the significance of the change. As someone who has happily written for the paper for a long time (I think my first piece was published in 1982) I’m obviously biased, but I think that today’s edition is really special.

Just to pick some examples at random…

Tim Adams has a terrific long essay reflecting on how we got to this point.

One of the pointed ironies of the long farewell of Brexit has been that nothing has become the EU quite like Britain’s leaving it. Having tried hard for 70 years to find a single theme that unites the disparate nations of the continent, the EU has finally discovered common cause in the spectacle of serial foot-shooting that has marked Britain’s efforts to depart. As delay led to extension and to prorogation, the approval ratings for the EU never soared so high. Guy Verhofstadt, the Brexiters’ pantomime villain in Brussels, told me last year that Britain has come to represent to Europeans the consequences of not standing up to divisive populism. “You want to see what nationalism does? Come to London.”

The sadness of that observation is a reminder of Britain’s failure to bring to Europe the values with which we were once more clearly associated: democracy, scrutiny, a robust sense of fair play. Rather than successive governments insisting on a semi-detached “we know best” approach to Europe, for fear of riling the tabloid press, there would have been more courage in wholeheartedly engaging to reform its institutions. Britain, in retrospect, perhaps always flirted with crashing out because it misunderstood Europe from the start.

One of the points Tim makes is that just because the UK has left doesn’t mean that it can forget about the EU. This is spelled out in a sober, informative piece by Sam Lowe, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Reform. The UK may have won the power to diverge from EU rules, he points out, but the new relationship will be one of constant renegotiation. The Trade Deal, for example,

marks just the beginning of the UK’s new relationship with the EU, and will inevitably evolve over time. Next year, for example, the UK will need to decide whether to link its own domestic carbon-pricing scheme with the EU’s, find out whether the personal data of EU citizens can still be stored on UK servers, and re-enter discussions on the working of the sea border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

There is also the outstanding question of financial services equivalence – a unilateral EU decision whether to allow certain UK-based financial businesses to continue selling directly to EU-based clients. Even if such permission is granted, we should not assume it will be permanent.

The UK will also need to decide whether to use the new-found freedom to diverge from EU rules and approaches, and if so whether it is willing to accept the consequences of doing so. If it chooses to do so, years and years of disputes and reviews await.

In the longer term, it is inevitable that every successive UK government will want to renegotiate, or alter, aspects of the relationship with the EU…

If one adopts the ‘divorce’ metaphor which has been endlessly popular with the British tabloids, the UK has got its Decree Nisi. Now comes the awkward period of finding a working relationship. Who picks up the kids from school? What happens at Half Term? What happens with one of the parents is ill? And how to handle Christmas?

There’s also a lovely piece by the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole, who had been a merciless critic of the Brexit shambles from the very beginning. In today’s essay, headlinded “So long, we’ll miss you – we Europeans see how much you’ve helped to shape us”, he points out the ways in which the UK helped shape the EU about which it always seems to be ambivalent.

The single market is the EU’s great achievement – protecting it was, ironically, the overwhelming aim in the negotiations on future trade with the UK. It simply would not have happened, when it happened, if Margaret Thatcher had not pressed so hard. It is easy to forget – because it has suited almost every side to do so – that the blueprint for the single market was a booklet called Europe – The Future that Thatcher presented to her fellow leaders at the Fontainebleau summit in 1984.

The problem was that Thatcher could never accept that the workings of a single market would have to be counterbalanced by common social, environmental and safety standards, with the political, legal and administrative capacity to enforce them. The fact remains: the force that has shaped the EU for the past 30 years was set in motion by Britain.

Equally, without Britain, it is not at all obvious that the EU would have responded so boldly to the fall of the Berlin Wall by bringing the Warsaw Pact states into its fold. Again, it was Thatcher who proclaimed the goal of enlargement in her Bruges speech in 1988. It was under a British presidency that talks on membership were opened with the first wave of central European states. It was Tony Blair who later pushed for Romania and Bulgaria to be allowed to join. Here, too, the implications of a British policy were not really understood in Britain. It was not explained that free movement would mean more immigration from these countries. Or that the governance of a much bigger EU would inevitably have to be more closely co-ordinated. Nonetheless, on these two defining issues, Britain was adventurous, ambitious, energetic and effective.

History, says O’Toole, will judge that the long relationship between the UK and Europe has been good for both. So now is the time to forget the rancorous parting and get on with life. He’s right.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!