Letters

David Elstein chooses to interpret the 2024 general election result – and the UCL and More in Common report on that result – rather selectively in order to support his gloomy conclusions (Letters, 1 August). Labour’s support was so ‘anaemic’, he writes, that ‘if voters who supported Johnson in 2019 but abstained in 2024 returned to the Conservative fold next time it would cost Labour 33 seats.’ Considering that Labour won 411 seats to the Tories’ 121, this does not seem so alarming, even if it were as straightforward as that. Elstein goes on to warn that if the Conservatives and Reform made an electoral pact, they might win back the 140 constituencies in which their combined vote share was larger than Labour’s. This is close to the argument that the Tories need to ‘unite the right’ to win again. But the UCL report is explicit: first of all, only 31 per cent of Reform voters would have voted Conservative had the Reform Party not stood, resulting in only forty gains; and second, had there been a ‘merged’ party at this election, it would have lost the Conservatives the equivalent of 2.3 million votes, producing a nationwide gain of just 500,000 votes. The authors of the report agree that the Tories have to win back votes lost to Reform, but conclude that ‘a straight Conservative/Reform merger is the least likely way to achieve that goal.’ An electoral pact is not a merger, but it may look enough like one to produce much the same result.

Malcolm Gaskill writes about levitation in early modern Europe (LRB, 9 May). I practised levitation myself, aged about fifteen, at a girls’ grammar school in the late 1960s. The subject lay on the ground and six of us knelt around her – one at the head, one at the feet and two on each side – with two fingers of each hand positioned under the body. The girl at the head started the chant ‘She looks pale,’ repeated in turn by the other five. This was followed by ‘She IS pale – she looks ill – she IS ill – she looks dead – she IS dead,’ and then in unison: ‘The power of levitation never fails.’ At which point, with just our fingers supporting it, the body would levitate about a foot into the air and remain suspended for a few seconds before settling gently back to the classroom floor. Only one member of staff, who was tall and large-boned, so quite a challenge, allowed herself to be levitated. We’d been planning to sell levitations in a tent at the annual school fair but she must have rumbled us to the headmistress as the practice was banned.

Vivian Gornick’s apotheosis of the Village Voice mentions Richard Goldstein ‘leading the way for gays’ at the paper, but leaves it at that (LRB, 6 June). Goldstein did write up some political activities and Arthur Bell wrote gossip. But anyone reading only the Voice would have been unaware of any LGB contribution to culture in the 1970s and 1980s. There was no popular music department, so disco’s worldwide explosion went unremarked. The fashion and design that accompanied pop music was a complete Voice no-show. The film critic Andrew Sarris was stridently heterosexual. As for books, I became momentarily ‘hot’ and was asked by the books editor at the Voice to review ‘anything’ I wanted. I brought her a review of a book I’d received galleys for. Her comment when rejecting it was: ‘We’re not interested in lesbian négritude.’ The book was Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. Was the problem the lesbianism or the négritude? I didn’t stick around to find out.

David Goldblatt, writing about the history of the Olympic Games, mentions that the official programme for the 1900 games included a range of sports that were popular in 19th-century France (LRB, 18 July). For the sake of completeness, he might have added another sport that was decidedly not popular in France at the time – cricket. Just two nations took part. (There were to have been four, but the teams from Belgium and Holland didn’t show up.) Great Britain was represented by the Devon and Somerset Wanderers, only two of whom had played first-class cricket before. The French team mostly comprised British expatriates living in Paris, some of them from a sports club formed ten years earlier by English workmen constructing the Eiffel Tower; only two of the French team were French.

The match was played over two days before a handful of spectators at the Vincennes cycling track. Both sides arrived with twelve men so the captains agreed to play with twelve a side instead of the usual eleven. The British team scored 117 and 145 for 5 in its two innings, the French 78 and an ignominious 26, giving Britain victory by 148 runs. The British were awarded silver medals, the French bronze – apparently the medals were downgraded because only two teams had taken part. The players were also given miniature replicas of the Eiffel Tower.

The two teams didn’t know that they had taken part in the Olympics. But in 1912 the match was formally recognised by the International Olympic Committee and the medals were upgraded back to gold and silver. While this remains the only time cricket has been played at the Olympics to date, the games will be reintroduced at the next Olympics, in Los Angeles in 2028.

Tom Stevenson mentions various historical multinational alliances that matched the longevity of Nato (LRB, 1 August). The fundamental difference between these alliances and Nato was summed up by Charles de Gaulle. Nato, he explained, is ‘first an alliance and second an organisation’. Hence France could withdraw from Nato’s integrated command structures even though it remained in the alliance.

Nato only slowly became a mechanism of US hegemony because the early European members attempted to use it as a means to maintain their prewar empires. France tried to integrate Algeria into Nato; the UK and France attempted to hold on to Suez, Belgium to the Congo. The US wasn’t enthusiastic, and the European empires gradually lost their possessions anyway. But it was the rise of nuclear weapons, especially during the Eisenhower presidency, that finally secured US dominance over its European allies.

Nato developed multiple spin-off organisations, and a presence in government through the ministerial meetings, parliamentary assemblies and hierarchical bureaucracies that handled procurement, contracts, inter-operability and much else. Yet no Nato member has a government committee that oversees the development of Nato policy. The status of the nation-state as the sole authority on foreign policy and matters of war and peace is seriously eroded.

On the one occasion Article Five of the Nato Charter was invoked, after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the US ignored Nato structures and instead cherry-picked allies to fight alongside it in Afghanistan. The rest of the world, including other Nato members, was left to carry out peacekeeping duties through the supposedly UN-led International Security Assistance Force in a parallel but separate command structure. As the US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld put it, ‘The mission determines the coalition. And the coalition must not determine the mission.’

David Trotter has a soft spot for the movie Against the Wind, which was, alongside Saraband for Dead Lovers, one of Ealing Studio’s two big box-office bombs of 1948 (LRB, 18 July). Trotter is particularly pleased when Simone Signoret shoots Jack Warner, whom Trotter enjoyed as Dixon of Dock Green, the adorable 1950s television policeman. ‘How might its original audience have felt,’ Trotter asks, ‘as they watched the moment that makes it?’

Bored, say contemporary accounts. In the New York Times, A.H. Weiler called the film ‘unconvincing fare’ with ‘little in the way of great drama to offer’. Though he acknowledges Simone Signoret’s ‘competent performance’ and praises Warner, among others, for ‘tense and understated portrayals’, Weiler informs prospective moviegoers that Warner plays ‘the traitor who cares more for cash than country’. In the Spectator, Virginia Graham was more philosophical, and even more bored:

Against the Wind does not nearly succeed in creating the atmosphere of suspense which should be its primary quality. It is possible, though, that our leathery souls, still armoured against the shocks and horrors of war and very conversant with films about them, have to be pierced by a far subtler weapon than this latest of Sir Michael Balcon’s productions before they yield … We remain obstinately outside, unmoved by disaster, untriumphant in success, the breath coming easily in and out of the body without any serious danger of being held.

David Trotter writes that Jack Warner ‘made his name as the embodiment of imperturbable Cockney good humour and worldly wisdom in It Always Rains on Sunday and Easy Money’. I haven’t seen Easy Money, but Warner’s detective in Robert Hamer’s film is presented as a humourless, implacable agent of repression.

In the context of films and war, it’s worth recalling what the US and its film industry – still glowing from a rich banquet of wartime propaganda films – imposed on postwar French filmmakers. The 1946 Blum-Byrnes Agreements, intended to extinguish French war debts to the US, included a provision that for four weeks each quarter French cinemas could screen the local product, with the rest of the quarter, eight weeks or more, open to competition from American films. A nice little earner for Hollywood and, intentionally on the US side, a great propaganda opportunity – spreading the ‘American way of life’ to benighted Europe.

Susannah Clapp writes about pockets and the lack of them in women’s garments (LRB, 25 April). Lady Isobel Barnett, the ultra-ladylike panellist on What’s My Line? and Any Questions in the 1950s, later in life sewed a poacher’s pocket into the lining of her coat in order to shoplift from her local grocer. She was spotted doing it several times and in the end she was arrested. She admitted to an interviewer she had been shoplifting for years.

Andrew O’Hagan, writing about the recent Republican Party convention, imagines a fiction in which a presidential nominee stages his own apparent assassination (LRB, 1 August). An inflection of that fiction exists in the 1962 film version of The Manchurian Candidate. The monomaniacal wife (Angela Lansbury) of a fascistic senator (James Gregory) proposes using her own son (Laurence Harvey), previously programmed as an assassin by the Chinese, to kill the presidential nominee as he accepts the nomination at the party convention. She spells out how, as the bloodied body of the victim falls, her husband will take the corpse in his arms and harangue the convention into accepting that only he can avenge the dead nominee and, presumably, make America great again. Television viewers’ hysteria will ‘sweep us up into the White House,’ Lansbury concludes, ‘with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy’.