The living dead

This week: if Rishi is really sick of being asked when the election will be, there’s an easy way out. Also, a trip to Highgate Cemetery; and a map of Britain’s tourist industry.

There are aspects of Rishi Sunak’s predicament that are still, despite his best efforts, hilarious. There was the interview with Sky’s Trevor Phillips this weekend, in which he declined to name an election date, and expressed his genuine irritation that he kept being asked about “polls and politics” like he’d forgotten what his job was. Or consider Monday’s story in the Telegraph in which “Tory critics” urged the Prime Minister to “do a major reshuffle to bring in all sides of the party” after this week’s local election results come in. This meant, it inevitably transpired, two unnamed right-wingers were urging the Prime Minister to promote other right-wingers, with names being mooted including Priti Patel, Robert Jenrick and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Like I said: hilarious.  

Other things, alas, are rather less funny. Every week this government spends trying and failing to prevent its inevitable demise is another week when we aren’t fixing any of the myriad problems currently facing the country, and in which businesses will be tempted to delay investment because of the continuing political uncertainty. Worse than that: each week that passes is another week in which this inept government can make things worse. Further “fiscal events” featuring yet more tax cuts may do little to revive Tory fortunes; but they will gnaw away at the ambition and inheritance of the administration all but certain to take their place. 

And they leave space, too, for horrors like the week’s other big political event. On Monday, the Guardian reported, the Home Office began a two-week operation to detain asylum seekers at routine meetings, with the intention of putting them on planes to Rwanda. How successful an operation this would be is not yet clear: two days later, the same newspaper reported that the Home Office had simply lost thousands of potential deportees, and word that a Sudanese man told he would be the first on a plane was being paid up to £3,000 to relocate must surely raise questions about whether this is quite the deterrent the right-wing press had been demanding. Nonetheless, the visual of UK government forces rounding people up to deport them is disturbing; the fact this is clearly being rushed through in the hope of saving a few Tory councillors, repugnant.

What all this will mean for this week’s election results remains to be seen: my suspicion is that expectations are now so low that merely retaining the Tees Valley or West Midlands mayors will be enough for supportive papers to declare victory, and start another round of coverage about a potential Tory comeback, even though the results as a whole suggest no such thing. That should put paid to unconvincing talk of a general election happening this side of the summer, rumoured to be spread by Number 10 in an attempt to quiet restive MPs. 

But it does mean several more months of Britain on an election footing as the country sinks further into the mud. If the Prime Minister truly is tired of being asked about polls, politics and when the election might be, then he knows what to do.

Books, etc

Well, there’s a reference that dates me.

Some cool things that happened on the book promo front this week: firstly, I did a lovely interview about it with Count Binface, the comedian/satirist/mayoral candidate/alien previously known as Lord Buckethead, and I don’t want to worry anyone but it was genuinely one of the most interesting and best-informed conversations I’ve had in ages. 

Secondly, one of the other most interesting and best informed conversations I’ve had recently was with the bin-free Andrew Harrison for The Bunker podcast, concerning both my extensive knowledge of borders, and the book I’d written as a result. Here’s a video clip, just because.

And thirdly, I enjoyed talking about borders with James O’Malley and Sam Hampson for their excellent podcast, What’s Happening Now, during the course of which I accidentally covered both my views on the Middle East AND Taylor Swift. 

Look! I have my own table in the Covent Garden Waterstones now! Image: J. Clive Matthews.

You probably know where you can buy the book by now, don’t you? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, etc.

The City of the Dead

The thing about living in any big city is that you never do the stuff the tourists come to see. That, at least, is my excuse for why it is that, until recently, I’d never actually visited Highgate Cemetery, probably London’s finest and most famous necropolis. I did try to, once, on one of my walks – but I hadn’t realised you had to pay to go in, and I was in a bit of a huff about that and also running late. And so I just didn’t bother. And then, suddenly, 10 years had gone by.

I don’t regret that, though, because it meant that a few weeks ago I got the experience of visiting for the first time. It is gorgeous, genuinely one of the prettiest and most peaceful open spaces I’ve ever seen in London. Really, it’d be a privilege to be dead there. (Literally: a plot will set you back upwards of £20,000.)

So if you do fancy a sunny day out among the dead, what should you expect? Well, firstly, you do, as noted, have to pay to go in – £10 for an adult at a little booth on Swain’s Lane, just by the entrance to the cemetery’s east side. That fine thoroughfare splits the cemetery in two, and the nice lady in the ticket booth advised us to begin on the more fashionable¹ west side, so we crossed the road and passed through a chapel, to find a courtyard surrounded by colonnades and paths leading upwards. Dotted around the place were signs asking visitors to behave respectfully as there was a funeral today. This to me raises questions about what exactly sightseers have got up to here in the past.