Diary: Jess Phillips’s shtick is wearing thin
A relative dark horse for the Labour leadership Lisa Nandy had a good week. She won backing from the NUM and could well make sure the final run-off isn’t a dreary two-horse race between Sir Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey. Of the famous five, Jess Phillips has not yet set the world alight.
Her faintly ludicrous slogan, “Speak truth. Win power,” is of a piece with her increasingly bizarre media appearances. Every single article or interview or campaign video she makes is dominated by solipsistic references to her apparently unique leadership style.
“You need a big personality” to succeed in modern politics, she wrote in the Yorkshire Post. In a campaign video released yesterday, she said: “There are a lot of people who find it difficult to accept a woman with a voice saying things.”
In repeatedly ascribing to herself various qualities that she may or may not have depending on your view, Phillips ends up patronising the observer. One of the most important rules of politics and screenwriting is “show, don’t tell”.
The second aspect of her leadership pitch – i.e. making a virtue of articulate gobbiness – pathologises what she thinks of as the aspirations and virtues of “normal people.” In an interview with the Birmingham Mail, she said: “90 per cent have lived a life like I have lived. And I think that does matter.” What might be called the old working class was scrupulously polite and anti-swearing – the legacy of the mutant nonconformist traditions of the 19th century.
The Corbynite left does the same thing. In the Long Bailey view, for example, the working class are gripped by morbid visions of industrial decline and Thatcherism. Imagine if during a Labour leadership race in 1975, the contestants were still squabbling about the world of 1935!
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At the end of every year, Barack Obama publishes a list of the books he has enjoyed reading. His list for 2019 was fairly unremarkable, including Sally Rooney’s Normal People (find me a tube carriage in which someone isn’t reading that book), essayist Jia Tolentino’s celebrated Trick Mirror and William Dalrymple’s excellent history of the East India company, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.
The post drew an unwittingly comic response from popular intellectual Nassim Taleb: “These are largely newspaper articles under bindings.” He then posted photos of his own reading list full of huge books on probability and stats.
There are many ways to skin a cat. The great French philosopher Montaigne, who dotted vast swathes of Classical quotations into his essays, said that he only read two writers in a systematic way, Plutarch and Seneca. Much of the rest of his learning, Montaigne confesses, is dimly remembered from casual observance and skim-reading.
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It was with great sadness that I heard of Roger Scruton’s death last Sunday. I will remember him best for his exceptional writing on Wagner. I was lucky in the summer of 2019 to undergo what I can only describe as a revelation, seeing Tristan at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, built according to Wagner’s exacting instructions onto Grüner Hügel, a folly of sloping lawns with clumps of trees dotted here and there.
As I walked back to my AirBnB after the performance, I felt as if I had been transformed into some element of the performance itself, something imminent in the landscape and the night above. It remains the most important aesthetic experience of my life so far.
As Scruton once wrote of the drama, in his 2004 study Death Devoted Heart, Tristan shows us a way of feeling “both determined and free.” “Those moments in and out of time constitute our redemption,” he continues, “they are moments of consecration, in which life is shown to be worthwhile.” For a period of about 20 minutes I felt this to be true.
Scruton’s affection for Tristan shows us that his thought was not – as his critics would have it – a philosophy of rejection, but of interrelation, of moral and spiritual freedom, and a powerful argument for “man himself as his own redeemer.”