Sunday West: January 15

It's all about Harry

Good morning, and I hope the winter blues are not getting you down, as we endure the most depressing time of the year (tomorrow is Blue Monday, the saddest day in the calendar in Britain, according to the PR company who made it up to sell holidays). Anyway, what better way to cheer yourself up and drive away the January blues than reading some articles by Ed West? This week I wrote about Prince Harry and the historical problem of royal brothers falling out; I wrote about the benefits of high-trust societies; and yesterday, with the death of Paul Johnson, I wrote about his book Intellectuals.

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Elsewhere, Ian Leslie on how internet conflicts are mutually beneficial, because all that really matters is engagement (inspired by the Andrew Tate v Greta Thunberg Twitter beef).

When I say ‘system’ here, I don’t just mean the platform but also the circuit that their interaction sets up. The bi-directional and multi-player nature of social media makes it distinct from TV or film. Every conflict between two more people forms a micro-system which generates energy in the form of more tweets and more engagement, for the people who start it, from everyone who joins in. The social internet teems with these conflicts and to some extent is powered by them. Venkatesh Rao calls it the Internet of Beefs (which makes McLuhan’s image of the steak seem even more prescient). As soon as Thunberg responded to Tate, she was participating in a game from which both players would benefit, whether she realised it or not (I think she was being naive rather than credulous). Paradoxically, the better she played the game, the more her opponent benefited.

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Speaking of systems and incentives, Ellen Pasternack on The Traitors. I’m not hugely into reality TV — I think the last one I watched was Big Brother season 2 — but I’m interested in the game theory aspect, and this one seems deliberately designed to plug our most irrational instincts:

‘This would be a very different show if it was structured to incentivise reasoning. Instead, because almost all clues to who is trustworthy are removed, contestants rely on vibes only. Even when someone was under suspicion, all they generally seemed to be able to do to defend themselves was reiterate their innocence. You can’t argue your case by saying “if I was a traitor, then I wouldn’t have done xyz”, because you cannot allow the tainting words “if I was a traitor” to pass your lips. In this very high paranoia, low information context, being associated with even the hypothetical of traitorhood could be fatal.

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Stuart Ritchie on whether we should be worried about falling sperm counts. Yes, basically.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that meta-analyses are unreliable. But several of those individual high-quality, prospective studies – the ones that compare people of the same age over decades – have shown worrying, declining trends in at least some parts of the world. Then again, as with the original 1992 study, we have much less data from further in the past, making the comparison across time much harder. Neither side should be too certain, but to my eyes, the evidence we have should at least concern us enough to look at this much more closely.

Interesting, and concerning. I have to say that, as I get older, I become more sympathetic to the once wacky Right-wing fringe theory that ‘they’re turning the frogs gay’. Maybe there really is something in the water reducing our testosterone: if you look at the younger generation, they do appear to be considerably more feminine, to a degree that cannot just be explained by culture. Even the boys in my school in the 90s were all Robert Mitchum in comparison.

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Helen Lewis reviews Spare, comparing our cruel system of monarchy to the Ursula K Le Guin dystopia The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

Harry and Meghan, on Netflix, was cringe because all the billing and cooing about the couple’s world-shattering romance sat uneasily alongside Harry’s grumbles about the tabloids. Spare succeeds as a memoir by putting that romance in context. Again and again, girlfriends fall for Harry—and then see their private life systematically trashed. One calls him in tears about the paparazzi outside her flat. Another loves him but decides she would rather be free. By 30, Harry is wondering if he will ever find anyone prepared to deal with the curse of being his partner. Meghan Markle is the only woman who is prepared to endure the wholesale razing of her life to be with him. But even then, he compares his royal status to a disease: “I’d infected Meg, and her mother, with my contagion, otherwise known as my life.” …..

Whatever else this book might be, it is a superb historical document. We know now that the King of England had an emotional-support (stuffed) animal called Teddy, used to do headstands to cure his bad back, and wears an overpowering cologne called Eau Sauvage. You can’t accuse Harry of holding back about himself, either: This book is soaked in booze and caked in vomit and even describes the unfortunate effect of anxiety medication on his bowels. He wets himself during a yacht race because he’s too nervous to take a leak in front of the crew. He applies his mother’s favorite moisturizer to his frost-ravaged “todger,” in a scene that my eyes almost physically rejected reading: “I found a tube, and the minute I opened it the smell transported me through time. I felt as if my mother was right there in the room. Then I took a smidge and applied it … down there.” The book ends with the birth of his daughter, Lilibet. The scene in the delivery room finds him down the business end, fielding the catch. “I wanted to say: Hello,” he recalls. “I wanted to say: ‘Where have you come from?’” (I mean, I can hazard a guess.)

And James Merriott in the Times on the same subject.

Doubtless Harry loves Meghan because she’s beautiful and, er, an (ahem) talented actress and marvellously committed to all her “women’s issues” and so on. But reading between the lines of the book, you feel that the obsessional quality of Harry’s attraction derives from the fact that Meghan is more than his wife; she is a saviour. Whereas Harry had fretted about being second best for his entire life, Meghan is unflappably certain that she’s the centre of the universe — and if the British royal family disagrees, well, she’ll happily take down the British royal family. Then Meghan and Harry can be the centre of the universe together. How gratifying it must have been when in the interview broadcast on Sunday, Tom Bradby told Harry that he was probably “the most famous person on the planet”, which is the thing they used to say about the Queen. Thank you, Meghan. Couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, Meghan is perfect, perfect, perfect. After an argument over cooking a roast chicken, she tells Harry to go to therapy, where he learns how to cry. She shares his tedious enthusiasm for the elephants of the Okavango Delta. She oh-so-adorably calls her pets “fur babies” and oh-so-hilariously they nickname one of the swans in the Royal Parks “Steve” (one suspects the quality of conversation in the Markle-Windsor household is not high). This book is the best PR Meghan will ever get and even here she’s quite annoying.

I think I wrote, or tweeted, that I wouldn’t swap places with Harry, although having learned that his book sold 400,000 copies in one day, I’m not so sure.

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John Oxley on why a period in opposition will not be good for the Tories.

Time in opposition will be costly for right-of-centre politics, but it also might not bring the benefits that those who are dreaming of its desire. There’s no guarantee that the whiplash of going from an 80-seat majority to the other side of the House will produce the rejuvenation thinking they crave. Political parties find it hard to reinvigorate themselves after a loss and there is every chance that defeat in 2024 leads to a prolonged ostracism for the Tories.

Tories currently in parliament should see the warnings in Labour for this. The party were narrowly beaten in 2010, just 50 seats behind the Conservatives, after a long period in government that ended on the buffers of a huge financial crisis. There was no overwhelming reason why they could not bounce back, yet instead of a resurgence, there came a decade of chaos. In 2015 they failed to score electoral blows against the Tories, then lurched to the left, fighting themselves and alienating the electorate to suffer two more election defeats. Indeed, it is only with the Tories’ implosion that they have become an electoral force once more.

This is hardly an isolated position. Labour in Scotland has failed to recover from the 2015 surge of the SNP, regaining few of the seats they have lost to them either in Westminster or the Scottish Parliament. Older Tories will remember the failure to recover from the 1997 defeat, where two subsequent elections saw the party struggle to find new ideas or connect with the electorate. There is every chance defeat begets more defeat.…

Equally, being frozen out of power alienates you from many of the sources of reinvigoration. The young and ambitious will avoid you, whether they be prospective candidates or advisors. Think tanks will have little interest in feeding you ideas unless they are already so aligned with you that they have no interest in influencing your opponents. Donors will also dry up, as paying millions to losers neither appeals to ego nor self-interest. Electoral failure is easily something that compounds.

I suspect he’s right, but I don’t see any alternative now; the Tory Party has really come to the end of the road in a way that is deeper than the existential crisis suffered by Labour in the 2010s. For all the struggles and divisions, Labour’s MPs and intellectual leaders still, passionately, believed in their core ideas; the people who run the Conservative Party just don’t anymore. The one thing (some) passionately believed in was Brexit, for good or ill; otherwise they’re unable to articulate what they stand for, and that’s why they’ve wasted 13 years and their opponents are going to further transform the country in a way we’re not going to like.

Anyway, hope that cheered you up — happy Sunday!