For every parent, there comes a moment when children leave home. My older daughter recently moved out to live with friends, and – though I know it’s a happy advance for her – I’m in mourning. The walls of her old room are spattered with Blu Tack, which for years held up posters and photos, all now binned. But there’s one thing she asked me to keep hanging: some words of St Augustine which we had written beautifully by a calligrapher, and framed, for her Confirmation:
“Trust the past to the mercy of God,
The present to his love,
The future to his providence.”
At a time of huge change, not just for me but for the whole country, this seems a good prayer.
*****
The Tablet editorial this week reflects on the seismic change brought about by the general election. To take one measure of this: while the great majority of ministers in previous Conservative governments were at fee-paying schools, 92 per cent of those appointed to office by Sir Keir Starmer had a state-funded education. Voters have rejected an “ethos of entitlement” and “naked self-interest”. There is no room for complacency: as Immanuel Kant wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”. Original sin is inescapable. But Starmer is off to a good start, not least in turning against centralism towards regionalism and localism. His wish to amend the machinery of government to give local leaders proper weight in the determination of public policy should hold elitism at bay, at least for a while.
*****
Tablet lobby correspondent, Julia Langdon, reminds us of how bizarre it is for the Labour Party to have won a general election within five years of its worst ever defeat: it’s a result of which the most indefatigable party optimist could never have dreamed. The electorate has voted for ABC – Anything But Conservative – a thumping repudiation of the self-serving, dishonest, shambolic government of recent years. But the challenges facing Starmer are formidable – not least the lack of money with which to fund issues screaming to be addressed: the breakdown in our justice system and the overcrowding in prisons; social care and the NHS; planning and housing; defence in a war-torn world; help for the poor and vulnerable; climate change; education; the asylum system; immigration. To name but a few. The new government needs to move fast to earn trust, which might in turn lend it authority.
*****
For The Tablet’s Liz Dodd, pictured, who was in America for the election, Labour’s landslide victory was initially underwhelming: at 59.9 per cent, the turnout was among the lowest in her lifetime, the sharp rise of the hard-right Reform UK was dismaying, and Labour won on a platform that seemed to compromise some of its core values around asylum, workers’ rights and peace-making. But in his first day in office, Starmer appointed the first ever female chancellor, and a foreign secretary who once described Donald Trump as a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”. And he halted the Rwanda deportation scheme. So perhaps there is something to celebrate – not so much in a Labour win, but in “the shaking up of a smug system that under-represents the marginalised”.On 1 July the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in the evocatively titled case of Trump vs United States. The court ruled that Donald J. Trump and other former presidents enjoy “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for acts involving their core powers and at least “presumptive immunity” for other official acts. Michael McGough, former senior editorial writer of the Los Angeles Times, considers the implications of the ruling, which provoked spirited dissents from the Democratic-appointed justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in an opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said that the decision “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law”. Sotomayor concluded her opinion: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”
*****
Not many monarchs have ever been proclaimed saints, and few of us in the English-speaking world know of Henry II, Germany’s great saint-monarch, the millennium of whose passing will be marked on 13 July. Medieval historian Levi Roach celebrates a king who lived by the biblical maxim that “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled: and he that humbles himself shall be exalted”, and who remained steadfastly loyal to his wife, Cunigunde, when she was unable to bear him an heir. This is the “story of a king and queen whose love, devotion and unwavering belief in the inviolability of marriage came before politics and personal gain”, writes Roach. “If there’s a better claim to sanctity, I’d like to hear it.”
*****
Amid rumours that the Pope may be about to ban the Tridentine Mass, 48 public figures – a random and surprising bunch including Sir Nicholas Coleridge, Sir Rocco Forte, Lady Antonia Fraser, Michael Gove and Bianca Jagger – have signed a letter of protest to The Times. Tablet editor Brendan Walsh asks some of them why they feel so strongly. The pianist and composer Sir Stephen Hough says that he believes passionately in “the need to preserve things of beauty in a living context”. Economic historian Lord (Robert) Skidelsky explains that in signing the letter he was expressing his “hostility to the secularisation of religion”. And A.N. Wilson expresses his love for the “awe-struck silence of the rubric of the old rite, which reminds me … of the Christmas carol – ‘How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given’.”
In Letters, however, Gerard Hore, from Queensland, Australia, protests that, three years after Traditionis Custodes, the “previous form” is still not extinct. Edward Butler laments the failure of church leaders to deal with the reality that compulsory celibacy has failed, and that homosexuality is still “a love which dare not speak its name”. And David Harold Barry SJ writes from Harare to complain that solutions offered by The Tablet to its Sudoku puzzles are unhelpful: “You give the result without saying how one gets there. It is a bit like the synod. Pope Francis tells us if we get the process right, the results will look after themselves.”
*****
Our lead book review, Christopher Bray on MP Torsten Bell’s Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back, has an irresistible opening. One morning a few years back, Bell took a train from Stansted to London. At the first stop, a chap with a packed lunch boarded. As the train pulled out, the man’s phone rang. The man, who was telling his caller that he’d already forked out for a train ticket, a sandwich and childcare, was being told that there was no work for him today, and that he should go home. What’s most shocking about this, Bell says, is not that it happened, but that it’s entirely legal.
*****
In reading Kapka Kassabova’s Anima: A Wild Pastoral Fiona Sampson is transported to the Pirin Mountains in south-west Bulgaria, where pastoralists still practise transhumance. Chris Nancollas speed-reads books on hypochondria, gaslighting and the wonder weight-loss drug Ozempic. Daniel Johnson celebrates the life and gifts of Frances Ellis. And Michèle Roberts loves Monique Roffey’s new novel, Passiontide.
*****
In View from Rome, Austen Ivereigh writes that we caught a rare glimpse inside the workings of the “contemporary Inquisition” last week, when Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published the full text of the decree declaring his excommunication for schism. Ivereigh explains: “Viganò is warned that in case of ‘prolonged contumacy’ – that is, if he persists in disobedience – he could be subject to further punishments, including dismissal from the clerical state. None of this, of course, will bother him; he delights in the attention and the chance to heap more scorn on Francis.”
We hope you enjoy this week’s Tablet.
Maggie Fergusson