Politics: A Survivor's Guide E-Book

Rafael Behr

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 562

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A WATERSTONES BEST POLITICS BOOK OF 2023 'Passionate, clever, and often very funny' Marina Hyde 'A wonderful meditation on populism, nationalism, politics and truth' Rory Stewart We live in an age of fury and confusion. A new crisis erupts before the last one has finished: financial crisis, Brexit, pandemic, war in Ukraine, inflation, strikes. Prime Ministers come and go but politics stays divided and toxic. It is tempting to switch off the news, tune out and hope things will get back to normal. Except, this is the new normal, and our democracy can only work if enough people stay engaged without getting enraged. But how? To answer that question, award-winning journalist Rafael Behr takes the reader on a personal journey from despair at the state of politics to hope that there is a better way of doing things, with insights drawn from three decades as a political commentator and foreign correspondent.

Leseprobe

Politics:A Survivor’s Guide

Rafael Behr is a political journalist and broadcaster. He writes a political column for the Guardian. His work has also been published in The Times, the Sunday Times, the New York Times, the Irish Times and Prospect magazine. He is regularly a commentator on the BBC, Sky News and Times Radio. He also hosts the Politics on the Couch podcast. Rafael was formerly Political Editor for the New Statesman, chief leader writer for the Observer, a business writer for BBC News Online and a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, based in Russia and the Baltic region.

Politics:A Survivor’s Guide

RAFAEL BEHR

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in 2024 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Rafael Behr, 2023

The moral right of Rafael Behr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 506 9

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 505 2

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Emily, Edie and Martha

CONTENTS

Preface:

Introduction:

Heart Failure

Part One:

Exile

Chapter 1:

The Old Country

Chapter 2:

Promised Lands

Chapter 3:

Finest Hours

Chapter 4:

Jus Soli

Part Two:

Hypertension

Chapter 5:

The Potemkin Syndrome

Chapter 6:

Fracking Democracy

Chapter 7:

Off Balance

Chapter 8:

Stupefaction

Chapter 9:

Join the Dots

Part Three:

Revolution

Chapter 10:

The Broken Pendulum

Chapter 11:

Inside Out

Chapter 12:

The Arsonists’ Cake Party

Part Four:

Perspectives

Chapter 13:

The Revenge of History

Chapter 14:

The Paradox of Vigilance

Epilogue:

Rehab

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACETO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

I wrote this book while Britain was spiralling from one crisis to the next in dizzying succession. We pulled away from the European Union but couldn’t escape the gravitational field of our home continent. We yo-yoed in and out of lockdowns during the COVID pandemic. Two prime ministers resigned in the space of four months in 2022, yet the same party remained in power. Everything was turned upside down while nothing seemed to change. Chaos at Westminster unfolded against a backdrop of economic stagnation and decay in public services. We were hurtling forwards whilst also slipping backwards, which is a sickening kind of motion.

It was like being trapped on a ride in a sinister political theme park, with grinning maniacs at the controls and a rickety old constitution barely holding the track in place.

Rishi Sunak arrived in Downing Street promising to govern with steadier hands. He restored a measure of calm, but the new prime minister was locked onto ideological rails that were laid by his predecessors. Slowing the rollercoaster couldn’t compensate for the lack of direction or change the minds of passengers who just wanted it to stop.

I will not hazard predictions about a general election that might already have happened by the time you read these pages. I make only one forecast with confidence: the campaign will showcase the demoralizing and infuriating features of politics that made me want to write a survivor’s guide in the first place.

Every precedent of recent years suggests the national debate will continue to be aggressively polarized, contaminated with deliberate misinformation and fixated on trivia in ways that militate against an honest appraisal of the challenges facing this country. Digital media will accelerate the flight from seriousness, with analogue outlets in hot pursuit.

Elections are the mainstay of a democratic system and, too often, the point where it looks most degraded. To win a mandate for solving difficult problems, candidates pretend the solutions are simple. They issue promises that can’t be kept, pleading for trust in terms that make disappointment inevitable. Adeptness at winning power is no guarantee of competence when wielding it. The knack for public persuasion can be a symptom of ethical elasticity.

This is a book about the origins of that dysfunction and how to navigate it. Not knowing exactly what the next crisis might be naturally stirs a journalist’s fear of printing something that will be overtaken by breaking news. But this is not a work of journalism. The task I set myself was to understand the causes of a chronic condition, not to track every symptom.

That process focuses mostly on British politics but necessarily draws from a wider international context. Much of what I know about vulnerabilities in democracy was learned as a foreign correspondent in Moscow at the turn of the century. Some of what I understand about the complex relationship between history, culture and national identity is informed by having grown up in a Jewish household with family connections to Israel. When I started writing about those experiences in this book I didn’t anticipate how relevant they would become to current events. I was able to include Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the first draft. As I write this preface to the paperback edition, the Middle East is spiralling into war. The nature of publishing prevents a rolling integration of the latest horror into a printed text, and to attempt such a thing would distort more than it might illuminate.

News reporting privileges urgency over reflection. That can be a valuable service to readers but so is attention to recurrent patterns and constant forces operating beneath the surface when history appears to lurch in violent spasms.

This book is partly about the benefits of retaining that perspective, especially when shocking events militate against it. How successful I have been in that endeavour isn’t for me to judge.

Uncomfortable though it may be, political uncertainty is also cause for gratitude. The future is unknowable because we have the power to change it. We have agency in the process even when it is driving us to despair.

Constant anxiety about the direction of our politics contains the consolation of knowing that multiple outcomes are available and that meaningful differences exist between parties and candidates. It is a rebuke to the nihilistic cynicism that casts democracy itself as a sham.

The years I have spent writing about politics would have been much less stressful if the conspiracy theories were true and I had only to take dictation from a nefarious, omnipotent elite pulling the strings behind the scenes. Thankfully, that isn’t how it really works.

What follows describes the evolution of turmoil, personal and political, over many years. That account shouldn’t be made obsolete by unforeseeable events. But, paradoxically, the closer the narrative gets to the present, the faster it goes out of date. Facts will change; new information will come to light. The passage of time can falsify things that seemed true when I wrote them. I can’t insure the text against errors of that kind, but I do apologize for them in advance.

Rafael Behr, October 2023

INTRODUCTION

HEART FAILURE

Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.

Alan Bennett

(i) The widow-maker

On 31 December 2019, shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, I put on my running kit and set off from my home in Brighton. The weather was mild for late December, but there was still a chill in the air that felt sharp in my lungs once I started breathing hard, which I did almost immediately. I trotted in the direction of the local park, roughly a kilometre from my front door, all downhill. A 45-year-old man jogging not very fast should manage the journey without stopping.

Around three quarters of the way there, I felt a familiar tightness in my lungs; a pinch that also burned. It was a sensation I had come to think of as that chest feeling – a syndrome associated with running that I thought was normal for middle-aged men who exercised sporadically. I had lived with it for years, carrying it ruefully as a badge of age and unfitness. When I got back from a run, I would collapse onto the sofa clutching my chest, panting and wincing, my face flashing red and white, barely able to speak.

‘Are you all right?’ my wife would ask.

‘Yeah . . . just . . . gimme . . . a . . . second.’

Eventually, my breathing would return to normal, and that chest feeling would subside. So when it appeared on that New Year’s Eve run, I was frustrated but not alarmed. Then my chest exploded. First, a detonation in my ribs. Then waves of hot pain came streaming out from behind my lungs, like lava from a volcano. Molten agony seared up and over my left shoulder, down my arm to the tips of my fingers. I stopped running.

Along with the burn, there came a crumpling constriction, as if my chest was trying to fold itself into a smaller person. Also, a wave of nausea that leaked out from my body and soured everything I could see. The sky darkened and curled at the edges, like paper on a fire. I felt drenched in impending doom; an all-encompassing state of ill-being. The air tasted ominous. It took me around 30 seconds of weighing the evidence before deciding to go home. On one hand (the left one, in particular), I appeared to be experiencing exactly the sort of things you might expect while suffering a massive heart attack. But on the other hand, that was the sort of thing that only happened to other people.

Besides, we had old friends coming for dinner. I was looking forward to a fun evening. It would be preposterous to have a heart attack now. I had already prepared the salmon.

Then I remembered Eric Rink.

One Sunday morning in Cape Town, 12 years before I was born, Eric Rink had gone to play golf, as he often did at the weekend. He always returned in time for lunch. But on this particular Sunday, lunch went cold on the table. Eric never came home. His heart had stopped. He was 45 years old. His daughter, my mother, was 14 at the time.

My maternal grandfather’s absence had always been a vague presence in my life – a story only half told. I knew that he had been an aerial photographer in the Second World War, taking reconnaissance pictures of bomb sites; that he was born Eliyahu Rinkunsky into the large Jewish population of Lithuania; that the surname had been truncated by a South African immigration official when the family emigrated in the 1920s.

The name Eric was chosen later. The rebrand was suggested by his wife, Dina, my grandmother, after the war, when Ely (as he continued to be known to family) set up a commercial photography studio. He had a blue Ford Prefect with ‘Eric Rink Portrait Studios’ painted down the side in red. He and my mother had been close. He had sometimes taken her to the studio and taught her how to develop prints in the darkroom. I knew that she was the same age as my own daughter when she lost him. It was enough information to steer me into a U-turn and send me loping and staggering back up the hill towards home. I remembered that heart attacks were exactly the sort of thing that sometimes happened to middle-aged men like me.

My wife drove me to the hospital. I pressed my back hard into the passenger seat and gripped the door handle. I wound down the window, hunting the oxygen that refused to enter my lungs. We stopped at a red light. Ambulances are allowed to ignore these, I said, unhelpfully.

The hospital was no more than 15 minutes away. I told myself I was not going to die because I would soon be in front of a doctor and medical science had come a long way since my grandfather’s day. It occurred to me that there is a moment when every parent sees their children for the last time, and that mine might already have passed that morning. I didn’t remember what I had said. It wasn’t goodbye.

There are no good heart attacks, but some are worse than others. Mine was a major obstruction to the left anterior descending artery, the main pipe supplying the left ventricle, which pumps oxygenating blood to the vital organs of the body. Somewhere inside that pipe was a plaque caused by cholesterol deposits that had built up over years – a fatberg. It split open as I was running down the road and clogged the artery. My blood cells then tried to be useful and formed a clot at the site of the rupture, which compounded the blockage. If you are lucky, a heart attack is a traffic jam on one of the B roads of the arterial network. By the time I reached the hospital, I had blocked both carriageways of the M25.

Old-school cardiologists call it ‘the widow-maker’. The longer you leave it, the higher the risk of ventricular fibrillation, where the heart muscle goes into spasm and, if not treated quickly, stops beating altogether. You then need someone to sit on top of you compressing your chest until an electrical defibrillator can be applied. Two paddles, administering up to 1,000 volts, can jump-start the heart back into a steady rhythm.

We arrived at the hospital. I got out of the car while it was still moving and loped into A&E. I saw the reception window up ahead and thought about how best to communicate my predicament. I collapsed onto the floor, which did the job. I was soon on a bed moving down corridors.

The diagnosis didn’t take long.

Doctor (hurriedly): Have you taken any illegal drugs,

Mr Behr?

Me (defensively): What, ever?

Doctor: Today, in the past 24 hours.

Me: Oh, right. No.

Doctor: Do you know of any family history of heart

disease?

Me: Yes. Both sides.

Cardiac calamity had been advancing in a pincer movement down the generations towards me. It wasn’t just Eric Rink. My paternal grandfather had also died from a heart attack. My dad had recently needed a triple bypass.

‘Next time, call an ambulance,’ the doctor said.

Pro tip, I thought, but I’m not planning on making this a regular gig.

I was taken to the coldest room on earth. I later learned that the temperature had to be kept low because the high-tech machines involved in scanning and probing a heart can overheat. I was still in my running kit and felt underdressed for the occasion. That, combined with the general state of shock and failing blood circulation, caused one side of my body to shake violently. The other side would have joined in, but it was held down by surgeons and nurses trying to insert a catheter through a small incision in my wrist.

Angioplasty is a marvel of science. The catheter is passed up the arm, over the shoulder and into the heart. Dye is injected, which shows up on a scan, revealing the location of the problem. I could see it on the screen, clouds of inky reflux bouncing back from the place where the blood wasn’t flowing properly. Once the blockage is located, it can be forced open again with stents – tiny inflatable tubes that reinforce the artery wall. I was conscious through all of this but full of morphine – full in the sense that I had reached the safe limit, not in the sense of sated. I asked for more, but was told I had maxed out.

The drugs did strange things to my sense of time. It felt as if the whole thing passed in a few minutes, but some of those minutes took years. The catheter smooshes open the artery, but the inflation of the stent temporarily re-blocks it. That feels like starting the heart attack from the beginning again. Then the balloon inside the stent is withdrawn, and blood can rush through. At that point, every cell of my body gave a little cheer, like a nation of drought-stricken farmers celebrating the first drops of rain on parched fields. When the surgeon loaded up a second stent, I braced myself. I didn’t want the nice cool rain feeling to stop.

‘Could you just give me a moment?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Time is very much of the essence here, Mr Behr.’

By early evening, I was lying in a hospital bed, pale, weak, with a lingering pain in my chest but otherwise feeling marvellous. My mood overshot relief and landed somewhere in exuberant conviviality. I tried to joke with the nurses, but the morphine had me less than coherent. Also, cardiac emergency wards aren’t very funny places. I sent upbeat messages to friends and family explaining where I was and how I had got there, as if dispatching postcards from an exotic holiday. I told work I’d be back at my keyboard soon.

Psychologists call it survivor elation. My body was physically debilitated but also hyper-alert from shock and adrenaline. When people came to visit, they found my joviality disconcerting, given how terrible I looked. It was a matter of alternate perspectives; different ways of registering the same information. They saw the old me, diminished by a brush with mortality. All I could feel was the upside of still being alive.

Then the consultant came round and explained that my heart, having been starved of oxygen, was operating at around a fifth of normal capacity. An unknown portion of the damaged muscle was merely stunned and would wake up in time. Meanwhile, I was in a condition technically classified as heart failure – the organ wasn’t up to the job. It could pump enough to get me across a room, but not far; not up a flight of stairs.

The prognosis wasn’t too bad. I was relatively young for a cardiac patient. I didn’t feel very young. I asked the doctor if events of this magnitude were common in people my age. He said: ‘You were unlucky to have a heart attack that big so young, but lucky to be young enough to survive a heart attack that big.’ Neat, I thought.

A cardiac nurse talked me through the rules once I was allowed to go home: build up activity gradually; listen to your body; don’t be afraid to move around but don’t push your luck; no heavy lifting. And above all, avoid stress.

What did I do for a living? Journalism.

What did I write about? Politics. Oh, how interesting. Was that stressful?

(ii) Attack of the Furies

In the parliamentary press gallery, where I worked, we had joked about ‘Brexit Derangement Syndrome’. It was an affliction among MPs who had previously seemed quite balanced but lost all sense of perspective working themselves into hysterical lathers over the politics of leaving the European Union. It erupted in the Commons chamber from time to time but was more pronounced on social media, inflamed by a million amateur demagogues.

People who had voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum were frustrated that it wasn’t happening faster. People who thought Brexit would be a disaster found vindication in the bungled implementation. The righteous indignation of each side stoked the other’s resentment, whipping politics into a frenzy of rage and despair.

British politics had been in febrile campaign mode for years. It started with the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. Then there was a general election in 2015, followed by an exceptionally fissile Labour leadership contest, triggering a protracted civil war on the left over the wisdom of keeping Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Then came the Brexit plebiscite, followed by a Tory leadership contest, which made Theresa May prime minister. Then a general election in 2017. The level of public enthusiasm for yet another ballot, promising more heated rhetoric, more uncertainty, was communicated by Brenda from Bristol, a middle-aged woman who was accosted by a BBC news crew on the day the election was called and asked what she made of it:

‘You’re joking. What? Another one. Honestly. I can’t stand this. There’s too much politics going on at the moment.’

There was too much politics, but there was about to be a whole lot more. The election produced a hung parliament. Corbyn did much better than his critics predicted, but still lost – a result that further aggravated Labour’s internecine strife. May clung on to power, but without authority, having squandered her parliamentary majority.

There followed two nerve-shredding years of legislative deadlock over Brexit. The wheels of political debate were spinning frictionlessly without propelling the argument or the country forwards. A lot of people were radicalized in the process. I had been a committed Remainer in 2016. Part of that choice was patriotism. I liked Britain and didn’t want it to undergo what I saw as pointless damage. I was also attached to the founding idea of the European Union. I believed in political integration as the antidote to the bloodthirsty nationalism that had once made the continent so unsafe for my grandparents that they had fled to another hemisphere.

It pained me to lose the argument for Britain’s alignment with that ideal, but not as much as it hurt when the winners turned vindictive in their victory, referring to the losers as quislings and traitors. When May called the 2017 election, the front page of the Daily Mail had urged her to ‘crush the saboteurs’.

Like many Remainers, I had so much anger sloshing around inside me that there wasn’t a lot of room for sympathy with the other side. The rational part of me recognized a journalistic duty to see things from their point of view. I knew that Euroscepticism had deep cultural roots and that the vote had given expression to social and economic grievances that had been brewing for decades. I could see how irritating it must have been, having cast a ballot for drastic change, to find the country bogged down in pernickety parliamentary wrangling over the small print. On a calm day, I could appreciate how arrogant and undemocratic it looked to Leavers when Remainers insisted on re-asking the question in order to solicit a better answer. Our anger was making them angrier, which was fuelling the nationalistic rhetoric that was making us fearful and less inclined to compromise.

No one was satisfied. But some of us were suffering in metric units and some were measuring their outrage in imperial yards. The tragedy was that we couldn’t find a formula to convert one into the other.

I also felt homeless in Britain’s party system. I had always been a Labour voter, but that allegiance was broken by an epidemic of anti-Semitism under Corbyn. Jewish Labour MPs were hounded out of the party and the leader didn’t lift a finger to protect them. His fingers were busy wagging at journalists for querying his record of comradeship with terrorist sympathizers and Holocaust deniers. He was a magnet for every crank who imagined Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes of media and government.

Then the Tories elected Boris Johnson as their leader, a man as unsuitable to be prime minister as Corbyn, but for different reasons. As the 2019 election loomed, I wanted them both to lose. I imagined them colliding and cancelling each other out, like something from a science fiction movie: two particles fired into each other from opposite ends of the political spectrum head on, causing both candidates to be vaporized; a flash, a shock wave and then an eerie calm and normal politics restored. But the British electoral system didn’t work like that. Normal was not an option.

I started to feel ‘that chest feeling’ more often. I drank too much and put on weight. In photos from that time I look puffy, a greener shade of pale. It was not the first time I had experienced work-related stress, but it was the first time I was conscious of it infusing every part of my body, stalking me, interfering with my sleep and distracting me from my family.

I failed to enforce any boundary between work and life. There was a toxic substance flowing through Westminster and it was my job to filter and siphon and analyse it, but I didn’t observe good laboratory discipline. I carried it in my pocket, brought it home, spilled it on myself. My phone was the leaky vessel, dripping poison into every room. It was the last thing I saw at night and the first thing I reached for in the morning. I was spending too much time on Twitter, keeping the furnace of my anger stoked.

I was consumed by a twitchy lassitude, pulling me in opposite directions. If I was in the car and politics came on the radio, I wanted to turn it up and also turn it off. As a political columnist for a national newspaper, I felt a professional duty to throw myself into the debate. As a citizen, I felt a self-preserving instinct to pull away and hide.

The more I cared about politics, the worse I was as a husband and father. I was short-tempered, prickly, unresponsive. I shouted at my children and zoned out of conversations with my wife. I was present in the room and emotionally absent. I could be sitting at the table eating dinner while mentally pacing the room, knotted in agitation, turning political arguments over in my head.

It was an emotional vortex that fed upon itself, raging against the despondency it induced. And always there was the undertow of foreboding and a compulsion to withdraw. The Israeli writer David Grossman has called it ‘a clenching of the soul’.

Politics didn’t cause my heart attack. I did that myself, heaping pastries and cigarettes on top of a genetic predisposition to cardiovascular disease. But stress didn’t help. By the end of 2019, when Johnson won his landslide election victory, I was furious at the state of British politics and furious with British politics for the state it had put me in.

I had many conversations with friends and colleagues in Westminster and beyond who felt the same. I knew journalists, MPs, civil servants, Commons clerks and special advisers who had suffered physical and mental health problems – depression, breakdowns, substance abuse, chronic anxiety – which they attributed to the furious mess of British politics. Many quit because the atmosphere was too toxic.

In ancient Greek mythology, the Furies were vengeful goddesses, progeny of darkness who hounded their victims into madness. I’m not sure what we all did to deserve that fate. Complacency was our original sin. We had not thought British politics could get so bleak, and when it felt as if the whole edifice was tipping into an abyss, we had no idea how far we could fall. History offered horrific worst-case scenarios to contemplate in the event of democracy breaking down. It was hysterical to think we were on that trajectory but irresponsible to rule it out as a possibility.

(iii) Permacrisis

‘We still don’t know much about this virus,’ the consultant told me. ‘Be careful. You could do without it.’ It was a routine cardiology appointment at a time when nothing felt routine. Brexit had been swept out of the news by the novel coronavirus that had already marauded across Europe and was now infecting people in Britain. The disease was reported to be especially menacing to older people and anyone with underlying health problems. I wasn’t sure whether 45 plus a dodgy ticker put me in the vulnerable category.

The doctor explained that my body was still battered and traumatized by the loss of oxygen when the artery had been blocked. ‘Think of yourself as more like 55 to 60,’ he told me. In the hours between the first explosive convulsion in my chest and the stents going in, I had burned through a decade’s supply of heart.

In the years that followed, it felt as if the whole country experienced a trauma of accelerated ageing. The pandemic lockdowns were disorienting and also made time seem strangely elastic. It reminded me of morphine – hours lasting years, while months disappeared in seconds. The longer it went on, the clearer it became that whatever we had once thought of as ‘normal’ politics was consigned to history.

There was a moment when it seemed that some of the divisions might be healing. The partisan clamour of the previous years was replaced by a palpable craving for solidarity, expressed in the ritual of doorstep applause for health workers every Thursday evening. But that spirit quickly dissipated as the ordeal went on. The toll of the pandemic in terms of economic resilience and mortality rates was uneven. The virus inflamed pre-existing social morbidities. It also inflamed culture wars, the diligent and disobedient wrangling over lockdown rules and vaccines. Boris Johnson’s popularity peaked when the disease nearly killed him, and then cratered when it turned out the rules imposed on the nation had been serially ignored in Downing Street.

Johnson’s short but unruly period of government brought a different kind of temporal distortion. Scandal and confusion tumbled out of Downing Street so fast, it lapped the normal news cycle. One drama was not over before the next one began. Monday’s outrage blurred into Tuesday’s blunder, compounded by Wednesday’s sordid misdemeanour, lost amid Thursday’s provocation, triggering Friday’s backlash. Seven days in Johnson time aged politics by more than a week.

The mood was captured by a caller to a radio phone-in after some new revelation connected to the ‘Partygate’ scandal that ultimately led to Johnson being ousted. I didn’t catch the despondent citizen’s name, but I wrote down what he said because it tallied so neatly with what I kept hearing all around me. ‘I don’t care any more. And I’m angry with myself for not caring any more, because I know it really does matter.’

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and shook European politics to its foundations. It was territorial aggression of a kind that had not been seen on the continent since 1945, and conceived by Vladimir Putin as a challenge to the institutions and rules of a global order that had risen from the ashes of the Second World War. It also had a second front – a war of economic attrition against Western governments that relied on Russian oil and gas exports. The pandemic was pushed aside by a cost-of-living crisis just as COVID had once submerged Brexit, which was still there in the background, an open wound poorly dressed on the body politic. Boris Johnson’s government unravelled, to be replaced by Liz Truss’s administration, which imploded. Britain has changed prime minister four times since the Brexit referendum – as many times as it did in the preceding thirty years.

Each crisis compounded the one before until they merged into one constant state of permacrisis. During this time of frenetic volatility, I returned to work. Slowly at first, engaging gingerly with politics, unsure whether I even wanted to go there. It felt like working as a cartographer in the middle of an earthquake, where the ground you want to map is moving and the landmarks you note are at constant risk of tumbling down.

In those conditions I found it hard to keep things in perspective. How bad was it compared to previous periods of historical disturbance? How should I judge the health of British democracy – against an ideal of how a perfect system would work or relative to other countries that were in an even worse state? How much consolation should I take from a government that was merely incompetent and self-serving when there was murderous tyranny abroad?

When events pile shock upon shock, it can be hard to stay shocked while also staying sane. We need to adapt to the changing shape of reality, resisting the temptations of retreat into nostalgia and disengagement. But adaptation opens the trap of normalization, where the unacceptable is rebranded as inevitable. Anger is a rational response to bad government and an ingredient in democracy. It stimulates taste for change and is a spur against apathy. But that mechanism requires confidence that the system will respond. The most toxic state is the fusion of fury and despondency, when it feels that the democratic process itself has become the engine of grievance and disharmony. In that doom loop of rage I came to fear elections for the rancour they might spread, when I should have cherished them as opportunities for renewal.

I was mindful of the years I had spent in denial, on both a personal and political level. I had been running with angina, stopping periodically to recover my breath, without considering the systemic obstruction building in my arteries. I had been cruising through Westminster, imagining that the politics I had known all my adult life would determine the pace and ethical parameters of politics in perpetuity.

Eric Rink, the grandfather who had died suddenly of a heart attack in 1962, had shaken me out of denial when part of me wanted to plod on through the chest pain, hoping it might subside. I turned to him again.

There aren’t many pictures. He was a photographer, more likely to be holding the camera. One of the only prints I have shows him and his two brothers on the day they were demobilized after the Second World War. He had served in the South African Air Force, attached then to the British RAF, taking reconnaissance pictures. He was later haunted by the thought of images he had developed setting targets for bombs. From the stories my mother tells, it seems likely he suffered from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress.

In the photograph, you see impatience for civilian clothes tugging at the young brothers’ uniforms. Their weary-eyed smiles rhyme with their crooked berets. Ely was the eldest. He had supported his younger brothers since they were children. Their father had died suddenly not long after their emigration – a heart attack. Ely was 14 years old.

I looked at that picture a lot. It became a meditation on the forces that connect people – the bonds of shared history, blood, identity and experience. This man’s childhood flight from anti-Semitism in Lithuania had somehow landed me in Britain. I found it comforting to find familiar traces in my grandfather’s features: not an uncanny likeness, but unmistakable; something in the line of the chin, the nose. Also the heart. Eric Rink had nudged me to the hospital. He looked out from the photo, asking me what I planned to do now that, unlike him, I had survived.

(iv) What this book is and what it isn’t about

In Unreliable Memoirs, Clive James wrote that ‘to wait until reminiscence is justified by achievement might mean to wait forever’. This is not a memoir, but it is as much about me as anything else, apart from politics. If I had made achievement the threshold for publication, it would surely never have been written. It is unreliable to the extent that it is deliberately subjective. I have been writing about politics for more than 25 years, and have tried in that time to achieve some analytical detachment. But what appears in my newspaper column is inevitably coloured by background and personal experience. The world as I see it gets filtered through lenses of culture, history, identity. This book is about those filters – what they magnify, how they distort – as much as politics itself.

It was conceived in convalescence and in hiding from COVID. I knew that before I went back to work, I would have to learn new ways of looking at politics. I wanted to reengage without getting enraged. That was a personal quest before it evolved into an attempt to say things of interest to anyone else. Only after conversations with enough people from different backgrounds and with different party allegiances did I start to feel confident in extrapolating from my experience to reach broader conclusions about the state of politics.

I was wary of aggrandizing a liberal whinge into a national syndrome. Or worse, there was a danger of over-diagnosing a chronic ailment where really there was just a bout of electoral indigestion from swallowing too many defeats.

How to disentangle banal dismay at being on the losing side of an argument from legitimate concern over the health of democracy? How absolute is the duty to be reconciled to bad ideas and rotten leaders if enough people have voted for them? What if those ideas and leaders undermine democracy itself? And who will judge if they do?

These are the questions I asked myself as I nursed a limping heart back to a more robust beat.

There is some elision from the first person singular to plural – what I think and feel blurs into what we face as a country. That is a big leap between small words. If it doesn’t feel justified, I hope the overreach still points in a useful direction. I don’t expect a reader to share my view on everything. I limit my ambition to the offer of company that might be agreeable even when we disagree.

To organize material that threatened to sprawl in every direction at once, I have given the story a beginning, a middle and an end. Each section is anchored in a phase of my own engagement with politics, but the chapters are linked more by theme than chronology.

Part One is about origins and belonging – what it means to feel connected to a country through politics; the anguish and causes of disconnection.

Part Two begins in Russia, where I was a foreign correspondent, and applies some of the lessons I learned there about how a democracy is meant to work; lessons acquired by watching one fail. From Russia, I return to British politics, polarized and carved into culture-war trenches.

Part Three is based in Westminster and charts a revolution that succeeded by exploiting huge reserves of public discontent while doomed never to satisfy those grievances. The concluding section is an attempt to put some of the observations from the previous parts into some broader global and historical perspective.

Any book steeped in lament for the health of democracy must acknowledge how often throughout history similar complaints have been made that look overwrought in hindsight. The long view of human civilization contains more grounds to believe in progress than it gives cause for panic. But the scale of current volatility militates against complacency. In my conclusions, I have tried to find a place of equilibrium between alarm and reassurance.

History doesn’t naturally punctuate itself with full stops and neat paragraphs, but authors have deadlines. Mine dictated the point beyond which new developments could no longer be included in the narrative. Since most of the book is about history and trends, the absence of breaking news should not, I hope, undermine my conclusions. If recent precedent is a guide, politics will have taken dramatic turns between me writing this sentence and you reading it. I can’t predict the backdrop against which the analysis in these pages will be received. I can only ask for indulgence where new facts have superseded my observations. I hope that all the years of political journalism stuffed into this book make a cushion of judgement sufficient to withstand the inevitable assault by events.

What do I mean by engagement with politics? Something more than just turning up at election time but distinct from active involvement via membership of parties and campaigns. I have great respect for people who back up their beliefs with activism. Democratic politics couldn’t function without the civic spirit of volunteers who canvass for candidates, stuff envelopes, knock on doors and attend meetings in front rooms and chilly church halls. They often get a bad press as maniacs and obsessives. Some are. Mostly, in my experience, they are decent, fair-minded, principled citizens, doing a vital service for society.

But a healthy democracy also needs people in the middle, neither activist nor apathetic; engaged, but not fully immersed. The most committed participants tend not to be swing voters. Activists don’t often change their allegiances. Power changes hands in free elections because of currents and trends in the broad stratum of society that cares enough about politics to follow the news, while also going about life, neither frantic to hear every latest Westminster development nor repelled by dread of what it will be. That middle tier of reasonable civic engagement is the segment I fear is being depleted and demoralized by our state of permacrisis. That is where the epidemic of rage threatens to hollow out democracy.

I cannot claim to have covered the full extent of the challenge, let alone solved it. I am sorry for all the omissions and simplifications. I could list some of them up front, but I’m too embarrassed. Large tracts of political terrain are not covered. I had to draw limits somewhere. I stuck to the narrow plot of my own experience, painfully aware that beyond lies a sweeping prairie of ignorance. I don’t think my choice of material is wildly idiosyncratic, but it is personal, which might be the same thing.*

This is a book about the way a healthy democracy should connect people to each other and to the place they call home. It is about the toxic politics that disrupt and reverse that process. It is about failures at the heart of democracy, written on a journey of cardiac rehabilitation.

The world as I knew it was turned upside down by political crisis and medical emergency that happened to coincide. It would be a solipsistic fallacy to conflate the two. I briefly considered an epic allegory of heart disease in the body politic, connecting failures of political function in a democracy to the circulation of blood around vital organs, and so on. I couldn’t sustain it, so I won’t labour the metaphor any further. But there was therapeutic purpose to writing this book. If I was ever to resume journalism, I needed to tease out the personal, historical and cultural threads from the knot of political rage in my heart.

The result of that diagnostic disentanglement follows, in case anyone else should find it useful.

_______

* I use footnotes in the text to make comments aside, like this one, not for references and sources. There are too many of those and they would clutter the text if identified by this method. There is instead a bibliography at the end.

Part One

EXILE

CHAPTER 1

THE OLD COUNTRY

Motherlands are castles made of glass. In order to leave them, you have to break something – a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you. To be an émigré, therefore, means to forever bear shards of glass in your pockets. It is easy to forget they are there, light and minuscule as they are, and go on with your life, your little ambitions and important plans, but at the slightest contact the shards will remind you of their presence. They will cut you deep.

Elif Shafak

(i) Homeland insecurity

The little Lithuanian town of Linkuva, around 170 kilometres north of Vilnius, was uncertain about its Jewish past. The first person I asked, a woman at the bus station, was terse. ‘No one here knows anything.’ It sounded like a rebuke. ‘No one remembers anything.’ Many of the people I met walking into the centre of town didn’t want to speak at all.

Sometimes curiosity overcame suspicion. Foreign tourists don’t go to Linkuva, and visiting Lithuanians wouldn’t start asking about Jews. Some people had no idea what I was talking about. Others had heard tell of a thriving community, once upon a time, but couldn’t explain its disappearance.

After a succession of blank looks and sullen rejections, I finally met someone chatty. Danite was a middle-aged woman with a trapezoid frame and a silver-capped, nicotine-stained smile. She pointed out a yellow brick building set around 20 metres back from the town square. It had once been a synagogue. After the Second World War, it was converted to a cinema. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Lithuania gained its independence, the cinema fell into disuse and, judging by the smell, now served as a public toilet for people of all faiths and none.

Danite explained that many of the brick buildings in the centre of town had been the properties of Jewish tradesmen. They had been the urban middle class. The rest of the houses were wood. ‘There used to be lots of Jews here,’ she told me confidently, although she would have been too young to remember them. ‘But they all went away. Or they got killed.’

She told me where to find the Jewish cemetery on the road out of town and drew me a map. It was easily missed, although there was a small sign in Lithuanian and Hebrew. The lopsided, broken gravestones were overgrown with weeds. Their pale grey mottled faces were barely visible from the road. There was no boundary where the grassy roadside verge ended and the cemetery began, just a crop of fractured memorials that seemed to get more numerous the longer I stared at the field and my eyes got accustomed to their camouflage. It felt like they were emerging to meet me, wary creatures intuiting that I posed no threat.

I examined a few of the headstones, but the inscriptions were badly weathered and my Hebrew, also eroded by time, wouldn’t have been up to deciphering them anyway. I took some pictures with an old-style analogue camera. This was 2001, before smartphones.

When I was growing up in London, we had a stash of old sepia photographs dating back to the first decade of the twentieth century, taken in or around Linkuva. One shows a cheder class, a group of around 30 Jewish schoolchildren with a couple of their teachers. The children mostly appear bored, or maybe resentful at being made to sit still. They are outside a rickety-looking wooden building that is presumably the school house. The boys all have their heads covered with flat caps. One, looking younger and more alarmed than insolent, has a badge of some sort on his cap. What it designated is unknown. He is Jacob Behr, my father’s father. The picture is thought to be from around 1906. Six years later, Jacob – Jack, as he would later be known – moved with his parents and a cousin to South Africa. Other cousins stayed in Lithuania.

One was Bertha Gilman – Baska to her family. We have a couple of photographs of her, too. In one, she is maybe three or four years old, fair-haired, sitting on a simple wooden chair set on the hard ground. In another picture, dated 1923, Baska is a young woman, standing for a formal portrait. She wears a long plain dark dress; her hair has turned darker too. She has a black bow or scarf tied into her hair, falling down over her shoulder. There is an inscription in Yiddish on the back, written to my grandfather and his parents. The translation:

When you take this picture in hand may you remind yourself of the face, which was at one time well known to you, and may you remember your relative who is over the sea, and may you think happily of a time when we can be together. As a reminder of your dear niece and cousin.

The record goes silent after that.

The road out of Linkuva past the cemetery leads to Pashvitinys, another small town that was home to my paternal grandmother’s side of the family (they called it Pashvitin). And there I stood, 27 years of age, roughly a hundred years after my great-grandparents had left, in a meadow somewhere between their home towns, staring at illegible tombstones that might have belonged to some distant family member but probably didn’t. I waited solemnly for a few minutes, long enough to justify the journey to myself, reaching for some transcendental connection to the place, not feeling much more than the brush of gnats against my arms. What was Linkuva to me? A place in a story I had been told about a land we once came from called Lithuania; a point of origin in family folklore. But when I foraged for roots on the outskirts of the town, I found nothing to hold on to.

Deracinated. Literally it means uprooted. Britain was my home. But did I think of it as my homeland? The word implies ancestral connection, although less explicitly than ‘motherland’ and ‘fatherland’. Those terms seemed to me atavistic as well as archaic. They spoke of intimate bloodlines in a way that I associated with demagoguery and war.

As for patriotism, it was something I was still discovering in myself. I was intensifying fondness for the place I grew up by the reliable method of absence abroad. Even then, I found it easiest to be proud of British culture when it was squeamish about effusive displays of national pride, self-deprecating, understated. Asked to name the quality of Britishness I most admired, I would probably have identified the ironic humour that can’t itemize national greatness without wanting to mock the pomposity of the exercise. And nationalism? I thought of it as an antique doctrine from previous centuries, a crude instrument that people had once used to dig their independence out from under foreign domination.

Nationalism was a big part of politics in Lithuania at that time, as it was in neighbouring Latvia and Estonia. The three Baltic states had only recently broken free from the Soviet Union. The engine of their liberation had been defiant assertion of national cultures – folk songs and stories in the native tongue – stubbornly preserved through decades of forced Russification.

I was there as a correspondent for the Financial Times, my first overseas posting, awarded to a rookie reporter on the basis that big stories rarely came out of such small countries. When the Baltic states had stood heroically against Kremlin crackdowns in the late 1980s, they had briefly felt like the centre of the world. They were the loose thread that pulled at the edge of Soviet power and unravelled the whole shoddy weave.

It was a much more slow-moving story by the time I got there a decade later. When I told people I was heading off to the Baltic, they would congratulate me for being so intrepid but wondered whether I would be safe. It usually turned out they thought I had said Balkans. They thought I was going to Europe’s most notorious crucible of armed national vendettas.

Phonetic similarity wasn’t the only point the two regions had in common. In the mid nineties, when civil war was ripping apart countries of the former Yugoslavia, there was some speculation among Western analysts that inter-ethnic grievances could also turn violent in the Baltic states. The fear was that communist rule had bottled a load of nationalist rage that would spill blood wherever it was uncorked. But it didn’t happen. The Baltic transition to democracy was not effortless, but nor was it botched. A lot of the success was down to the twin prospects of European Union and NATO membership. That was what I spent most of my time covering as a journalist. Britain was an enthusiastic sponsor of EU enlargement to include former Warsaw Pact countries. I saw at ground level how the European project incentivized democratic reform and embedded the rule of law in places where many worse trajectories looked plausible. It was a bureaucratic miracle, which is to say it was a wonderful thing that was boring to write about as a journalist. I was happy for the Baltics that their politics were becoming more boring to the outside world.

Boring was good. Boring meant nationalist ferment subsiding.

Post-Soviet tension didn’t dissipate overnight. The trickiest issue – and one where the EU and NATO leaned on nationalistic governments to adopt more liberal policies* – was citizenship rights for local Russians. There were millions of them. To many Balts, the Russians were ethnic jetsam deposited on their land when the Soviet tide rolled back eastwards. Some had family roots in the region going back generations, but most were there as a consequence of Kremlin policies that used migration of the Soviet Union’s various ethnicities as an instrument of political control. Russians were deployed as demographic weapons in places that were thought to harbour congenital disloyalty. Sovietization, by means of Russification, was a way to suffocate ‘bourgeois nationalism’.

The Baltics were especially suspect. They had been absorbed later into the Union than most Soviet republics. They had broken away from the Russian Empire amid the chaos, mud and blood of the Bolshevik Revolution and the First World War. They were independent for a couple of decades before being recaptured by Stalin as part of the territorial carve-up agreed with Hitler in 1939, formalized as the Molotov– Ribbentrop pact.*

Occupation by the Red Army was a national calamity for Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians. Their interwar governments had started out democratic, but tilted fascist in the thirties. When Hitler did the double-cross on Stalin and the armies of the Third Reich marched east across the Baltic, many locals welcomed them as liberators. They had nothing to fear from Nazi race policies, which ranked Balts above Slavs. And, of course, much higher than Jews.

On 28 June 1941, the Germans arrived in Linkuva. Its Jewish population, depleted by years of emigration, was topped up by refugees fleeing the Nazi advance. The total was somewhere around 1,000. There is no definitive account of what happened next, but according to the testimony of the few survivors and witnesses, the Jews were rounded up by local Lithuanian police and accomplices, acting partly on orders from German commanders but made thorough in their work by native anti-Semitism. The men and women were separated, locked in local barns and warehouses that had belonged to Jewish enterprises. Over the following days, the stronger prisoners were made to dig mass graves in the nearby forest. Then all were shot. Among them Baska Gilman and an unknown number of my other relatives.

(ii) Concentric circles

When I was eight years old and needed to write my name and address, I would include as many elements as I could, expanding the sphere of reference as wide as imagination would stretch:

Rafael Behr

81 Gordon Road

Finchley

London

England

Great Britain

Europe

Northern Hemisphere

Earth

The Solar System

The Milky Way

The Universe

I think a lot of children do that as they emerge from the solipsism of early infancy. There is a stage where the only reality that matters is the one you can see. When you start to see beyond, there is a giddiness at the adjustment of scale. You play with the zoom on the lens to see how small you can make yourself in relation to the world, while still being its centre.

Over time, we lose that elasticity of perspective. Our sense of place hardens. The outer reaches fade from view. Somewhere along the line, our usual location is also imbued with a feeling of belonging. This is home, defined by the presence of family and feelings of security. It doesn’t have to be a building. It is a space defined by familiarity. It is the place where nothing you say or do is alien to the people who call that same place home, because they know you as well as you know yourself, or better. ‘Make yourself at home,’ we say to someone when we want to indicate the opposite of being a stranger.

That is what makes the idea of a homeland powerful. It is the country where you cannot be an alien, even to people you don’t know, because there is a common culture. Strangers are bound to each other by shared language, food, music, history, stories. In politics, the concept of a homeland is commonly bundled together with the idea of a nation, although in the long run of human social evolution, that is a recent development. The organization of cultural, religious and ethnic communities into distinctly national identities dates back to the eighteenth century. The aspiration to organize those groups into discrete countries with their own flags and anthems only picked up serious momentum in Europe in the nineteenth century. Usually, it grew from resistance to imperial rule or, for the empire-controlling nations, as part of the drive to consolidate imperial identity and repress those resistance movements.

Nationalists do not like to admit that the whole concept of a national homeland is that modern. For them, politics is the business of mobilizing people based on identities that have existed for millennia. Forever. That involves a lot of storytelling. History must be selectively narrated to cast a particular group – the nation – as the lead protagonist. We, the national tribe, must be the heroes. We overcome obstacles and vanquish enemies to fulfil the greatness for which we are destined – or look destined if events past and present are plotted on a particular line.

That line does not necessarily track historical reality. Meanwhile, other nations are drawing their own lines on different trajectories, often using the same historical points. There are problems where the lines intersect. One nation’s victorious battle of liberation is another’s tragic loss of ancestral territory. One people’s driving out an oppressive colonist is another’s massacre by savages. That is how nationalism becomes such a powerful and self-sustaining engine of conflict. It is a perpetual grievance machine that excavates memories of enmity, steeps them in present resentments, refines them into fissile material and loads them up into political arguments.

Much of what looked like politics in the Baltic at the start of the twenty-first century was wrestling over control of twentieth-century history.

I had a lot of sympathy with countries that had been trampled by more powerful neighbours for generations. They were trying to reflate a culture that had been flattened by the Soviet monolith. That sympathy wore a bit thin when it came to Riga’s annual celebration of the partisan legions – veteran soldiers who had resisted the Red Army on its way to Berlin in 1944. To most Latvians, the ‘legionnaires’ were national heroes fighting a desperate battle against Russian reoccupation. Awkwardly, those battalions had also been under the command of the Waffen SS. It took some effort of diplomacy by NATO and EU dignitaries to persuade the Latvian government that if they wanted to join the clubs of Western democracies they needed to drop the Nazis from their summer parades.

Growing up in Britain, I acquired what I thought was the standard version of the Second World War. The narrative has its beginning, middle and end, passing all the famous landmarks on the way. Germany invades Poland; Dunkirk; the Battle of Britain, etc. It builds to a crescendo for D-Day, and then victory. But there were other wars within the war. Other war stories. For Americans, it starts with Pearl Harbor and there is no Blitz. France venerates its resistance and glosses over its collaborators. All the Western Allies play down their reliance on the Soviet Union. The atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not much mentioned in victory commemorations. Some perspectives have been mythologized in multiple movie renditions. Others – the view from possessions of the British Empire, for example – not so much.