Unexpected arrivals

This week: the predictably unpredictable year ahead; some lingering evidence of Vikings; and a map for when your station is just too big.

When I was young and callow and still thought smart ass emails were a good idea,¹ I replied one January to a PR pitch in which some big-brained thought leader or another was putting forward his musings on the year ahead. “All forecasts are about the future,” I told his publicist. “The famous Niels Bohr quote is that it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” The warm feeling of smugness at correcting someone’s error turned out to be a lot shorter-lived than the annoying dialogue I’d just given the PR guy a licence to begin. 

I have occasionally toyed with making forecasts myself since then, and have indeed found them to be a tricky business. I’m quite good at identifying the thing that a politician will, inevitably, come one day to be loathed for. (May: robotic inflexibility; Sunak: being out of touch and petulant about it; etc.) But on the questions of when they will become thus loathed, or what impact this will have on either the timing or results of elections, I’ve proved to have an almost unblemished record of failure. The single most worrying thing to me about the Labour party’s current electoral prospects is how confident I feel that they will win the next general election. This has not, historically, been a great sign.

But one thing I do feel confident about – this has also not historically been a great sign, but what the hell, let’s go with it – is that there will not be an election this May. Current rumours to the contrary are clearly being put about by the Labour leadership, so that they can call Rishi Sunak a bottler when it doesn’t happen. But they are going to do this whatever he does, short of calling an election, and no Prime Minister is going to call an election until he has to when his party is 20 points behind in the polls. Sure, combining locals with national elections might protect a few Tory councillors; sure, if he waits, things very well might get worse. But even if parties were minded to leave office earlier than they have to, which they’re not, to focus on factors like these is to conflate the interests of the Tory party as a whole with those of Rishi Sunak specifically. There are only two things I can think of that might persuade him to press the self-destruct button on his premiership this May: a sudden shift in the polls, of the sort there’s been no sign of in a year and a half; or a juicy Silicon Valley job offer, with a start date in June. 

All of which means that we’re stuck. For the next few months, infrastructure and public services will continue their decline, because no one can take the decisions necessarily to arrest it; random Tories will continue to make headline grabbing statements about pro-natalism or how appalling it is that you can already buy Easter eggs in the shops, in an attempt to either shore themselves up with the party faithful or set themselves up for the post-Sunak world. (Not every former Tory MP can hope for a slot on GB News, so the competition is likely to be tight and the audition pieces increasingly insane.)

And the political correspondents, bored out of their mind from waiting months on end for what feels like the inevitable, and desperate for some sniff of a story, will continue to pretend that these people matter. When, at risk of yet more top-quality forecasting, they quite simply don’t.

As things stand, then, the autumn seems the most likely date for an election. That, though, might mean clashing with the United States, which is constitutionally required to go to the polls on Tuesday 5 November. Might that encourage Sunak to go in October? Or wait until December? Or even, god forbid, January? What would a Trump victory – unnervingly plausible, according to current polling – mean for the UK election result, or the new government that follows it? The later the election is, the harder it is to be confident about any of this. That, too, might push Sunak to wait.  

Bohr was right: predictions are difficult, especially about the future. And anyone who claims to know how that’s all going to play out is deluding themselves. 

Hold the front page, I forgot something

In last week’s round-up newsletter, I wanted to make sure I’d thanked everyone who’d supported this newsletter while I was dealing with the unexpected death of my beloved Agnes. And inevitably, I forgot someone. What’s worse, it was an award-winning someone. 

In September, TV writer Ian Martin – The Thick of It, Veep and so on – was kind enough to write about Keir Starmer, history and metro maps in a single edition, thus showing he’d really grasped the tone of this newsletter. He’s a truly lovely man and I feel ashamed to have left him out. Rest assured that I’ll be having strong words with Jasper the editor about how he allowed this calumny to happen.

Some evidence of Vikings

In the year 789, the king’s reeve – a sort of aAnglo-Saxon local government official – made his way to the coast of Wessex, where three ships of “northmen” had landed, so as to welcome their leaders and take them with him to court. They killed him. But no one much cares about council officials, either then or now, so the start of the Viking Age in England is generally dated instead to the attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of Northumbria, on 6 June 793. 

From then on, the Vikings – who came first to plunder, then to settle, then ultimately, if briefly, to rule – would be a major factor in the history of these islands for more than two centuries. There’s little agreement about exactly when this period ended: the most popular date seems to be 1066, when the defeat of a last attempted Viking takeover by Harald Hadrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge was followed, almost immediately, by the successful invasion by another bunch of Vikings (who we often don’t think of as such because they’d long settled down and learned French) at the Battle of Hastings. However you measure it, though, that’s over two and a half centuries of history – a period longer than the entire history of the United States – in which fear of terrifying axe-wielding blond blokes was a major theme of life in these islands.²

No surprise then, that the period should have left its mark. Here are a few ways in which it did.

Viking place names. The clues are found in the suffixes. Any place name ending in the Old Norse “-by” (Selby; Whitby) suggests a Viking farmstead/village/settlement; so do those ending in “-thorpe” (Cleethorpes; Sc*nthorpe, which I’ve asterisked for email filter reasons), but with the additional sense that these were probably a satellite of somewhere bigger, on which they relied for protection. 

In the same way, “-kirk” (Ormskirk) suggests a church, “-keld” (Threlkeld) a spring, “-toft” (Lowestoft, Langtoft) a building, and so on. These things aren’t always clear cut – the “-ness” meaning “headland” in Skegness is Old Norse, but the one in Sheerness is Old English, while the one in Inverness is the name of a river: the “Inver” is Gaelic, and means “mouth” instead. ³But pleasingly, by plotting the Norse place names geographically, you do get a fairly clear map of Viking settlement:

Image via the Viking Network, a charmingly antiquated educational website funded by the Norwegian ministry of education in the mid 2000s.