I had a horrible feeling I might have to end up rewriting my diary column this week. In my original version, written on the flight over to the USA for special election episodes of The Rest Is Politics, I had said this: “I have a big fear of what I might be flying into. ‘President Trump’ – it doesn’t bear thinking about. It was really, really bad first time around. There aren’t enough reallys to express how bad it would be if the Americans gave him a second go.”
Well, now it has happened, and it is hard to overstate how consequential it is for the world. Ukraine; the future of Nato; the climate crisis – “drill, baby, drill”; global trade – “love those tariffs”; human rights, women’s rights, the rise of the US oligarchy, what it says about an era of impunity in politics that a racist, misogynist sexual predator awaiting sentencing on 34 felonies can return to the top elected position in the world, having screwed it up first time around.
The reason for the horrible feeling in advance was partly a series of conversations with Peter Hyman, a friend and former No 10 colleague who helped Labour win working for Keir Starmer, and has since embarked on a project to work out how progressives can better counteract populist, polarising, post-truth politics.
He has spent weeks travelling from Trump rally to Trump rally, talking to people who see Trump not as most of the readers of this paper do, but as a saviour on a par with Jesus Christ. On the eve of the election, he went to the final Trump rally, and the final Harris rally, and he told me over breakfast on Tuesday morning: “He is going to win. The fundamentals are with him, and he has a better story to tell.”
As to why – yes, it’s partly the economy, stupid, and the sense so many people feel left behind. But it is also that they feel disrespected. “They think he listens to them,” he said. “They think the Democrats don’t talk TO them; they talk ABOUT them.” American writer Michael Lewis told me this week: “Trump is the angriest man on the planet, and he taps into everyone else’s anger.”
Historians will analyse this election, and the phenomenon of Trump, for the rest of time. The pain for progressives right now feels pretty intense. But there needs to be more pain ahead, because genuine soul-searching can be painful indeed; but genuine soul-searching is what Democrats and their supporters around the world have to do. Get the answers wrong, and democracy as we understand it may have had its day. Elections don’t get more consequential than that.
Millions of words have been written and spoken on the budget, but please memorise these, from page 35 of the Office for Budget Responsibility economic outlook report. “Weak growth in imports and exports over the medium term partly reflect the continuing impact of Brexit, which we expect to reduce the overall trade intensity of the UK economy by 15%….” The chances are… you read it here first.
If you follow me on social media, you will know I am partial to a nice tree, and most days post my Tree of the Day. You may even recall a piece I wrote years ago proposing a Tree Olympics, in which countries choose their Tree of the Year in a primetime TV public vote, the winners go to a final, the ultimate winner decided by a global version of the Eurovision Song Contest voting system!
We already have the UK contender, chosen by a Woodland Trust public vote, the Skipinnish Oak, so-named because it was discovered, in a remote area of the Scottish Highlands, when the band of that name played nearby.
I am especially delighted because Skipinnish are my favourite Scottish folk band, and some of its members good friends; also because it is close to a spot I visit every year with my bagpipes to play a lament for Charles Kennedy, who would be thrilled that a tree in his constituency now goes into a European Tree of the Year competition. I am sure one of the reasons the oak won was because of the brilliant post by the band’s piper, Andrew Stevenson, playing in front of the tree. Trees. Winning. Bagpipes. And getting back into Europe… the stars truly align when so many of my obsessions come together.
Check out Skipinnish’s music, too, and as a starter a wonderful haunting tune called The Iolaire. It tells the incredibly sad story of young men from the Hebridean island of Lewis who had survived the horrors of the first world war but who drowned when the ship taking them home struck rocks known as the Beasts of Holm, within sight of Stornoway harbour, as Abigail King wrote previously in these pages.
Of the 280 men on board, only 75 survived. That ship was the Iolaire.
It was in the early hours of January 1, 1919, and amid the bodies were the Christmas presents the men had brought home for their children.
“The morning tide brought home our boys,
They lay among the scattered toys,
Our tears of love and deep relief
Became the tears of tearing grief.”
A story the song doesn’t tell is what followed. Lewis and neighbouring Harris had already lost more men per head of population than any other area of the UK. Add the enormous loss from the Iolaire, and it meant that there were a lot more young women than young men, and many of the young women emigrated.
When the boat sank, Mary MacLeod, the youngest of 10 children born to a Gaelic-speaking crofter and fisherman, was just six. In 1930, aged 18, she too decided there was little hope of building a life or raising a family on the island, and left for the US, immigration number 2669191. In New York, she lived with her sister, who had emigrated ahead of her, and worked mainly as a domestic servant, but then met and married a man by the name of Fred Trump.
They had five children, the fourth of whom they named, yes, Donald.
The Iolaire’s sinking may have given Skipinnish one of their best songs. But as butterfly effect moments go, it is right up there with the worst. No tragedy in 1919, no Trump in 2024.
Thanks for all the kind messages last week from people who share my loathing of litter, including reader BJ Rowland, who sent me a Substack written by Tory MP Neil O’Brien. His piece on “The biggest missing idea in British politics” was an even longer cri de coeur than mine about the so-called little issues of antisocial behaviour that make life a misery.
I didn’t agree with all of O’Brien’s ideas, but I did love his intro, a piece of wisdom offered by the head of his sixth-form college: “In a third-class society, there’s a lot of litter, and no one picks it up. In a second-class society, there’s some litter, and some people pick it up. In a first-class society there’s no litter, and if there was any, someone would pick it up.”
I really want to live in a first-class society, not the second-class one that Britain currently is.
