Politics

Oh Bondage …

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An original Corgi edition of the ‘Goldfinger’-tie-in Aston DB5. About £750-odd now. I had one, when I was six. If only my parents had hidden it from me; a determined child can do a lot of damage with a hammer and a few fireworks.

‘Bond tensed in the darkness and reached for his teeth.’

The above sentence was written by the late Alan Coren and comes from a satire he wrote for Punch magazine in the 1980s, a meditation upon the fate of fictional heroes in later life. Coren’s piece came to mind whilst I was watching No Time To Die, the latest 007 saga and the final outing for Daniel Crag in the role. I confess that I only went to see the film out of a sense of duty, knowing that I was going to be writing this post, as I am not a big fan of the Eon/Bond franchise. However, I will also confess to having slightly enjoyed No Time To Die, against what felt like my better judgement. 

By way of prologue we get a seemingly endless pre-credit sequence – actually two pre-credit sequences, opening with the secret backstory of Bond’s girlfriend – detailing the carnage of Bond’s emotional life by means of a romantic trip to Italy interrupted by the usual chases and ultra-violence. This climaxes with Bond’s novelty Aston Martin DB5 transforming itself from vintage grand tourer into every schoolboy’s fantasy weapon. (How do you think Bond insures his various Astons? Can you imagine what his premiums are like? And the DB5 is a government vehicle, isn’t it? So why is he on holiday in it? Wouldn’t Accounts be asking why he didn’t hire a Fiat?) Anyway, after the credits we get to see Bond in retirement in Jamaica, a nod to Ian Fleming’s love of the island: a solitary fifty-ish gent who lives a simple life consisting of yachting, fishing, brushing his teeth under a waterfall, and meeting CIA and MI6 agents in local bars. And we’re off again. The screenwriting seemed improved this time; the addition of Phoebe Waller Bridge to the credits is clearly significant, as there are flashes of real wit that stand out from the standard lumpenbond dialogue (it would not be a Bond film without the odd line thudding on deck like a harpooned albatross). But the story is a strange mixture of elements; this time, SPECTRE threatens the world with a doomsday bioweapon stolen from a British government lab, picturesquely situated in a skyscraper in the middle of London, as opposed to hidden away in the depths of Wiltshire. This sinister nano-bot virus can be genetically tailored to target individuals or entire populations, inducing fatality – with grotesque physical symptoms – within moments. (This aspect of the plot reminded me of a similar device in The Satanic Rites of Dracula, wherein Christopher Lee – as he unhappily described it – played the lord of the undead as ‘a mixture of Howard Hughes and Dr. No‘.) This genuinely nasty idea sits rather oddly with the slapstick violence of the action set pieces, although Ana de Armas’s brief appearance in one of them, playing a  gauche spy, was an opportunity to exercise some of the aforementioned wit (especially Ms Armas’s nonchalant dispatch of the regulation vodka martini, a welcome acknowledgment of the absurdity of that fixture of 007’s world).

Daniel Craig in ‘Casino Royale‘

Daniel Craig’s fifteen-year turn as 007 has been an opportunity for the film-makers to give Bond sensitivity and depth, which is where the rot sets in. Of course, the entire 007 project is an adolescent fantasy. Ian Fleming made no bones about this. Fleming’s biographer Andrew Lycett suggests that Bond is the kind of agent Fleming would have liked to have been, rather than the largely desk-bound operative he was at the Admiralty during WW2. That said, Commander Fleming was uniquely positioned to research methods of covert warfare which he later elaborated upon in his novels. Contacts in the Ministry of Supply furnished him with details of gadgets issued to agents in the field: hollow golf balls or shaving brushes, gas pens, shoelaces that could be used as saws, and so on. The germ of Casino Royale appears to have been a visit to a casino in Estoril in 1941, whilst en route to a diplomatic meeting in Bermuda. Fleming was intrigued by the idea that it would have been quite something if the nondescript Portuguese businessmen he had played (and lost) against had really been Nazi agents. And elements of Thunderball were derived from his knowledge of the Italian Navy’s submersible operations around Gibraltar in 1942. As to Bond’s sexual predilections, these seem to have sprung directly from Fleming’s id. In The Spy Who Loved Me, Fleming puts these words into the mouth of his female narrator: ‘All women love semi-rape … It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made the act of love so piercingly wonderful.’ (And, it should be noted, there is a startling scene in the 1965 film of Thunderball where Connery’s Bond forces himself upon Molly Peters‘s masseuse, a rape treated as a bit of prurient/comic business). Fleming was, it seems, keen on sado-masochism, although the various desires recorded in his letters to Ann Rothermere, his lover and, eventually, his wife, sound comically suburban rather than genuinely perverse. Elsewhere he referred to Bond as a ‘blunt object’ and not a hero, although he seems to have been conflicted as to the true morality of his own creation. The fetishisation of good living in Fleming’s novels obviously reflects the author’s enjoyment of the high life; but Bond is a spy, so his catalogue of lifestyle snobberies makes him rather conspicuous, which you would have thought would been a liability in his profession. In the novels he drives a 3.5 litre ‘blower’ Bentley, which is almost as ludicrous as the fully weaponised Aston Martin DB5 Sean Connery drives in Goldfinger, and which has been resurrected for Daniel Craig’s use. But on the whole it is futile to pick holes in Fleming’s project, as it is Never-Never Land. John Betjeman, in a letter to Fleming, compared Bond to Sherlock Holmes: ‘The Bond world is as real and full of fear as Conan Doyle’s Norwood and Surrey and Baker Street. I think the only other person to have invented a world in our own time is Wodehouse.’ That makes sense but it becomes problematic when fantasy leaches into reality.

Ian Fleming

Personally, I cannot stomach the novels. I enjoyed them when I was twelve, but a recent attempt to read one I was unfamiliar with (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) ended at the start of chapter two. I quite like some of the films. For all the antediluvian sexism of Connery-era Bond the cartoonish nature of the enterprise was offset by the loving treatment of travel and high living, as well as the swirling gorgeousness of John Barry’s scores. By the 1970s, with Roger Moore essaying 007 as a man in a safari suit whose gait suggested a slight case of piles, the film-makers simply opted to parody Britain’s post-imperial delusions; hence Bond becomes the protagonist in a series of hi-tech pantomimes which, whatever their merits as cinema, seemed appropriate treatment for the material. I remember watching Octopussy in a cinema in New Orleans in 1983, and being the only audience member to get Roger Moore’s very British joke at the expense of BBC TV’s dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse. Moore’s 007 even dresses up as a clown at one point; one can’t imagine Daniel Craig’s special agent plumbing such depths. But Octopussy doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a joke (starting with its title). The trouble, it seems to me, is when the 007 franchise is adduced as indicative of national character: that Bond represents Britain. This was put into queasily explicit form at the opening of the 2012 London Olympics, when Daniel Craig was drafted in to play Bond alongside HM The Queen, who was playing herself. A funny idea, except … the absurdity seemed out of place. A piece of entertainment had fused with an idea of national identity in a way that now seems rather worrying. I write this at a time when the British Government’s position over the Brexit agreement re: Northern Ireland has moved into the realm of macho fantasy, a mendacious confection as absurd as the machine guns and bulletproof glass fitted to Bond’s Aston. No sane person would want to disinter Bulldog Drummond, the proto-Blackshirt forerunner of Bond, who worked off his post-Great War energies by beating up uppity foreign villains; but I can’t be alone in thinking that 21st Century Bond caters to a similarly delusional notion of British supremacy. We’re still celebrating VE Day in a world that no longer needs us.

There is one aspect of No Time To Die where the screenwriters missed a trick. The fiendish techno-virus was overseen and kept secret by Bond’s boss, M. Bond is certainly unhappy about this turn of events but it seems to this viewer that, rather than maintain the status quo, it would have been refreshing to have seen Bond going for M’s throat, then following the trail right to the top. After all, we currently have a Prime Minister who possesses many of the essential qualities of a Bond villain, and it would have been satisfying to have seen a ‘Borisfeld’ immolated in some suitably resonant context. Killed by his own hair, perhaps.

N.B.: A dry martini is made with gin, and is stirred, not shaken. (The drink goes watery if you shake it.)

See also: A Drunk At The Flicks

How Was It For You?

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It is human nature to minimise the peril that seems passed. The town, so recently roused out of despair, indulged an exaggerated confidence. From The Great Plague In London In 1665 by W.G. Bell, 1924.

It feels strange to be constantly living through history, one preposterous event following another in quick succession. A bit like being Chris Morris’s reporter in On The Hour, ‘… standing next to the hole out of which the events are emerging.’ Yesterday was something called ‘Freedom Day’ which, in true British fashion, turned out to be something of a fiasco: a queasy admixture of nervous hedonism, ongoing grievance and hubris. We were, thankfully, spared Boris Johnson’s planned ‘Victory Day’ speech as he was forced into reluctant self-isolation after Sajid Javid’s Covid diagnosis. A friend of mine did manage to celebrate yesterday, by having an eight-hour lunch at Soho House. This demonstrates admirable spirit and might have been something I would have done if I wasn’t broke. I did do a bit of indoor drinking but that wasn’t a celebration, merely business as usual. Only the ferocious heat seemed different. Anyway, what are we supposed to be drinking to? Celebrating ‘freedom’ from a contagious virus that is not fully understood is so idiotic that one winces and wonder what it says about the state of the nation. I don’t think anyone ever waved a flag to declare that the Spanish Flu was now over and we could all have a party. Perhaps the end of the Black Death was marked with the odd roast swan or two, easier to poach in the de-populated countryside than before. In any case the Brexit mess is the very definition of unfinished business, so Johnson’s ‘Churchillian’ speech would have gone down as yet another national embarrassment. (To paraphrase the late Artist Formerly Known As Prince, ‘Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1938 …’)

Recent parallels being of limited use (after all, ‘you can’t catch the Blitz‘) I consulted W.G. Bell’s account of the Great Plague of London in search of historical resonance for the present moment. (I’ve written about The Plague before, at the start of the Great Covid.) Bell marks the official end of the Plague with the King’s return to London. The Plague had started in the spring and Charles II and his court abandoned London in July. Administration of the city was left to George Monck, first Duke of Albemarle, a tough but efficient soldier who had played a vital role in Charles’s restoration. The contagion raged through the hot summer months but the infection was checked by a cold winter and Charles made his royal return to Whitehall Palace on 1st February. But whilst the Plague might have receded from the commercial and fashionable areas of town it still lurked in less salubrious corners. The first four months of 1666 saw 781 Plague deaths reported in the Bills of Mortality and the true number was certainly higher than that. There was alarm in Whitehall Palace in April when the king’s ‘closet keeper’, Tom Chiffinch, died suddenly of the ‘pestilence’, less than twenty-four hours after he was reported to be cheerfully playing backgammon (but at least he got to be buried in Westminster Abbey). There were fears of the Plague returning at full strength but it petered out in the capital – although towns like Deal, Colchester, Norwich and Cambridge suffered terrible outbreaks in 1666. (And then there is the heroic story of the village of Eyam in Derbyshire.) The official total of Plague victims was 68,596. Bell extrapolates that if allowance is made for error, lack of reporting and concealment, the true number is in the vicinity of 110,000; he goes on to calculate that, beyond the wealthy who had fled the city, about one in three of London’s population died from the disease.

So where does this get us, exactly? Dominic Cummings is all over the news today, as he is giving his first broadcast interview to Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC. It appears that one of his claims is that Boris Johnson resisted a second national coronavirus lockdown because he believed those dying were ‘essentially all over 80‘. Johnson is also reported as denying that the NHS was overwhelmed. Cummings is backing up his claims with WhatsApp messages purporting to be from Johnson, who he accuses of ‘putting his own political interests ahead of people’s lives‘. Cummings is, of course, the slipperiest of slippery operators, who spent a significant portion of last summer smirking his way past accusations that he had himself had breached lockdown for trivial reasons (at a time when families were prevented from seeing each other by Covid restrictions, when family members were unable to say goodbye to mortally sick relatives , etc. etc.) And he was all over Brexit, let’s not forget that. But he was at the centre of government and, if he is dishing the goods on his former boss now, it seems congruent with the culture at the top. Can someone have social immunity from a disease? In his history of the Plague, W.G. Bell pointedly notes that: ‘No single gap was made by the Plague in the ranks of statesmen; no member of Lords or Commons is returned dead by Plague. […] I have not found that a magistrate succumbed to the Plague. The Court and the professional classes, the big financiers […] who assisted King Charles in his often desperate need for money, the wealthier London merchants and tradesmen – all returned to London to take up the broken thread of their affairs. Yet there were one hundred thousand dead. To these others the Plague had been an inconvenience, a monetary loss, no more. […] It had been ‘the poore’s Plague.”

It would be tempting to compare Johnson to Charles II – the foppishness, the entitlement, the sleaze, the girls, etc. – but at least Charles knew his limitations and was smart enough to delegate Plague command to the very capable Albemarle. And, of course, Charles was a monarch rather than a politician, someone who was lumbered with his dynastic legacy and whose obligations were pre-destined. (I’m not going to get into an argument about the Restoration now, we can do that another time.) He wasn’t a career politician or an opportunistic chancer whose default setting is to treat national leadership as a branch of the entertainment business. Cummings also claims that Johnson had to be stopped from meeting with the Queen early in the pandemic, when official advice was to avoid unnecessary contact, especially with the elderly, amidst signs that Covid-19 was already spreading in Downing Street. This is where we enter a level of reality that is beyond satire – although one could see this scenario work in the format of a situation comedy. This is political history as an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour, with Dominic Cummings as Sid James, Sajid Javid as Bill Kerr, and Johnson, of course, as ‘the lad himself’. In this episode the Queen plays herself, although we only hear her talking to her corgis. Waiting outside, in a Buckingham Palace ante-room, Hancock tousles his hair to achieve a look of endearing boyishness as Sid tries to persuade him that passing on a deadly virus to HMQ might be a bad look with the electorate. Then his phone rings: it’s Bill. ‘Tub? I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news …’

(Priti Patel as Hattie Jacques? Discuss.)

Dominic Cummings’s interview with Laura Keunssberg is on BBC2 at 7pm tonight.

See also:

Dry Quarantini

A Man Doesn’t Walk Into A Bar

21st June, 1815: Mrs Boehm Throws A Party

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Sergeant Ewart of the Royal Scots Greys capturing the Standard and Eagle of the French 45th of the Line at the Battle of Waterloo on 18th June 1815. Painting by Denis Dighton, 1815-17, Royal Collection.

The Morning Post, 13 June 1815:
Mr. and Mrs. Boehm will entertain the Prince Regent, the Duke of York and a large party of distinguished personages, with a grand dinner, on Wednesday, the 21st instant, at their house in St, James’s Square.

As John Adams’s version of Richard Nixon sings in that catchy number from Nixon in China, ‘News … News … News … News … [repeat x 8] Has a … Has a … Has a … Has a … Kind of mysteryyyyyyyyyyy’ … Of course, that opera was set in 1972; today we take for granted our access to instant information (or disinformation); indeed, I have met ‘digital natives’ who find the idea of living without the internet as being impossible to comprehend. Imagine those times when news was disseminated slowly, by ship, by horse, by foot, and over great distances.

On the night of 21st June 1815, the Prince Regent was attending Mr. and Mrs Boehm’s ‘grand dinner’ at their swanky townhouse at 16 St. James’s Square. The Boehms were not aristocrats but a pair of shrewd grafters; Edmund Boehm was a rich banker and his wife Dorothy was a social butterfly with a gift for public relations. By 1815 they were well established as society hosts; but, even though it was the middle of the London ‘season’, their grand dinner on Wednesday 21st might have been better timed. On the previous Sunday the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo; but as guests were arriving at the Boehms’ supper party three nights later, news of Wellington’s victory had yet to reach London. For days the city seethed with rumour, newspapers presenting conflicting reports based on conjecture and wishful thinking. The news of Wellington’s victory had been entrusted to Major Henry Percy, who was still en route from the battlefield. Percy had in his possession Wellington’s official dispatch, as well as captured French flags and a pair of Napoleon’s imperial eagle standards. (Although they were relics of Napoleon’s Roman grandiosity, the eagles were charged symbols of the Imperial French army and were seized in the battle at great cost.) Percy had made slow progress to the French coast and by Wednesday morning found his ship becalmed in the English Channel. Despairing of the situation, Percy disembarked twenty miles off the Kentish coast, and was rowed ashore in a small boat by four sailors, making landfall at Broadstairs at 3 p.m. on the 21st. Percy then chartered a coach and aimed towards London, seventy-five miles distant. His mission was to hand Wellington’s dispatch to the Secretary of State for War, to the Duke of York, and deliver to the Prince Regent the dispatch and the French flags and eagles: definitive proof of Napoleon’s defeat. It took him about eight hours to reach the capital and when his carriage finally made it across Westminster Bridge, just after 11 p.m., he had to locate the addressees. He finally tracked down the Secretary for War and the Prime Minister at a dinner in Grosvenor Square; and as the news spread, crowds followed Percy’s progress as he headed to St.James’s to alert the Prince.

Major Percy leaves Belgium for England bearing Wellington’s dispatch, with captured French flags and standard signifying victory; from a contemporary aquatint.

As Percy’s coach headed down St. James’s Street, the dancing was about to begin at the Boehms’s establishment; but the noise of the mob in Percy’s wake became audible to their guests in the first floor ballroom, the windows thrown open because it was a warm night. The coach turned into St. James’s Street and moments later pulled up outside 16 St.James’s Square. Percy ran into the building, bolted up the stairs to the ballroom and threw the French flags and eagles at the feet of the Prince, saying ‘Victory, sir!’. Percy was still covered in mud and blood from the battlefield, the smell of cordite clinging to him and the tokens of war: an emissary of carnage materialising in polite society. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, who had accompanied Percy in the coach from Grosvenor Square, read Wellington’s dispatch aloud, which made it clear that many of the most eligible men in London were now either dead or gravely injured. The Prince Regent wept as the names of those who had suffered and died were read out. The party broke up very soon after that, the roll call of casualties acting as something of a wet blanket on the proceedings. But London the following day was in full, bellowing roar.

Accounts of Waterloo have plugged directly into the national psyche, whether it be the calm nobility with which Lord Uxbridge told Wellington that his leg had been blown off (a story that is so inadvertently comic that it has to be true), or Wellington’s – apocryphal – remark as he surveyed his troops before the battle: ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God they frighten me.’ It cast such a spell over British identity that the start of the First World War took the War Office rather by surprise, as the top brass had been preoccupied with plans for ceremonial proceedings to mark the centenary of Wellington’s victory. Reading Brian Cathcart’s magnificent book The News From Waterloo (to which I am indebted) one is struck by the football fixture flavour to the proceedings: a comparison which is more acute now than it was just a few years ago, before British foreign policy was infected by ersatz soccer fan sentiment. Wellington’s other legendary (i.e., probably untrue) comment about Waterloo was that ‘it was won on the playing fields of Eton.’ That comment now rings very hollow indeed. Wellington’s victory (at vast human cost) and its aftermath is an amazing episode of history that, like so many other moments in British history since, feels like an anchor around our collective necks. It’s as if our place in world history is defined by winning the 1966 World Cup. But Wellington’s victory was assured by the late but decisive intervention of Blucher and his Prussian troops; we don’t hear so much about Blucher and his mob these days. What was it that Churchill said in the House of Commons in September 1940? ‘You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ ? Something like that. Here we go, here we go, here we go.