Letters

Michael Gray finds it hard to imagine a British bakery growing its own wheat (Letters, 1 August). There is no need to imagine: E5 Bakehouse in London was a pioneer with its farm in Suffolk; the clue is in the name of Field Bakery in Somerset; Torth y Tir in Pembrokeshire emulates the cherished French paysan-boulanger; and Scotland the Bread has revived and democratised local production of heritage wheat varieties.

I now work as a baker in France, and it’s true that ‘peasant bakeries’ remain well established and relatively abundant here. But Gray, following Patrick McGuinness, seems to subscribe to the widespread belief that in France there is nothing but ‘excellent’ bread on offer (LRB, 6 June). In fact, many French bakeries are affiliates of a small number of corporate mills, which supply them with additive-laden flour mixes and recipes. The croissants are bought in frozen. What continues to distinguish the French and the British on the matter isn’t so much the actual quality of the industrially controlled product, as the seeming universality in France of the notion that access to good bread is a right. What’s more, French bakeries are infamously reliant on underpaid or unpaid apprentices, low salaries and dismal hours. In both countries, admittedly more disastrously in the UK, bread produced too quickly and cheaply is a significant driver of digestive ill-health and diabetes.

It is in this light that I take issue with McGuinness’s implication that the presence of a ‘sourdough bakery’ epitomises gentrification and symbolises the abandonment of the working class. Sourdough may have become a byword for luxury, but in fact it simply refers to the ancient method of making naturally leavened bread: the more down-to-earth pain au levain in French. Rather than sneering at sourdough bakeries, we might support those, loosely united under the UK Grain Lab CIC banner, which are trying to find a way forward that makes good bread accessible to all, gives bakers a fair wage while ensuring the fair and direct remuneration of farmers, decentralises the processing of cereals into flour, and rewards low-impact agriculture.

Wolfgang Streeck makes passing reference to an ‘anti-immigration rally’ in East Germany in 2018 (LRB, 15 August). He is presumably referring to the events in Chemnitz that summer. After a man was fatally stabbed on 26 August, rumours spread that his killers were Muslim asylum seekers (a Syrian man was later convicted of manslaughter). Far-right groups called on their supporters to take to the streets to ‘defend’ Germany, and a demonstration organised on 28 August attracted as many as six thousand people. Some of them gave Nazi salutes; there were reports of protesters shouting ‘Get lost!’ and ‘You’re not welcome here!’ at people they thought were immigrants, and eyewitnesses described foreigners being chased through the streets. As Streeck points out, Hans-Georg Maaßen, the then head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was sacked after he dismissed videos of the harassment as fake. Maaßen later went further, claiming that all of the newspaper reports of ‘hunts’ by far-right gangs in Chemnitz had been ‘made up’.

Felice Picano writes that ‘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’ (Letters, 15 August). I wrote for the Village Voice during that era, and I would say that this is a gross mischaracterisation. It’s true that the Voice was embarrassingly slow on the uptake after Stonewall, which was before my time. But in the early 1980s, the paper was printing more (often controversial) stories about Aids than any mainstream New York outlet, the Times definitely included.

As for Picano’s claim that the paper had ‘no popular music department’, what about the legendary ‘Riffs’ section, which was hugely influential during Robert Christgau’s tenure? One of his favourite writers was the gay critic and curator Vince Aletti, who championed disco back when many of us – me included – were boosting the Ramones instead.

Finally, it was unfair of Picano to dismiss Arthur Bell by saying that he ‘wrote gossip’. He did that, and very entertainingly too. But he could also switch hats on a dime to write serious investigative pieces on the murder of gay men in the Village.

Tom Billington thinks I exaggerate the signi­ficance of a possible pact between the Tories and Reform (Letters, 15 August). An electoral pact does not have to be formal to be effective. Peter Mandelson, writ­ing about the election in the Spectator, said that ‘Labour’s central task was to allow the ruthless tactical voting system to do its work and cut a swathe through the Tory ranks.’ Hence the tiny number of Lab­our and Liberal Democrat candidates who ­finished second in seats won by the other party. Labour and the Liberal Democrats didn’t have much in common other than a visceral dislike of the Conservatives. But each gave the other effectively a clear run to concentrate the anti-Tory vote where it mattered, and by doing so maximised their number of seats.

Reform and the Conservatives needn’t have anything in common in 2029, other than a desire to defeat Labour, in order to conduct a similar tactical campaign, where each is effectively passive in, say, 150 seats where the other stands the better chance of success. No merger or anything like it is required to achieve the ­requisite outcome. There are 140 Labour seats where the total of Reform and Conservative votes in 2024 exceeded not just the Labour vote but the combined Labour/Liberal Democrat vote. Losing those seats would deprive Labour of its majority.

As for Labour’s 2024 vote being ‘an­aemic’ – a word Billington seems to find objectionable – Keir Starmer attracted 560,000 fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, despite the fact that half of the fourteen million voters who supported Boris Johnson that year abandoned the Conservatives this time. After four successive Conservative prime ministers man­aged to self-destruct, and a fifth barely reg­istered with voters, ‘anaemic’ seems a char­itable ad­ject­­ive to describe Labour’s performance.

‘Clothes have rarely mattered more,’ Nicola Jennings writes, thinking about Velázquez, ‘than they did at the Spanish court in the 17th century’ (LRB, 1 August). Any painter having to produce a full-length portrait has a lot of fabric to deal with. John Singer Sargent painted the American statesman Henry Cabot Lodge, who, like all the men in his family, was more than six feet tall, and so mostly suit. The likeness hung at the end of a long hall in the family mansion in Washington DC. As boys, my old friends Harry and George Lodge used to play hockey in the hall and once lofted a puck into the senator’s flies. The painting was repaired and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in DC, but you can still see the trace of the damage, if you know where to look.

Tom Stevenson’s piece about the history of Nato may remind us that Article 5 of the Nato Treaty is not a binding universal obligation to respond to aggression collectively (LRB, 1 August). On the insistence of the US, Article 5 was drafted to say that if a Nato ally is the victim of an armed attack, each member of Nato will assist them ‘by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area’.

The US constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. The president then directs the military action as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. However, presidents have engaged in military operations without a congressional declaration of war, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Storm, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq War of 2003. Hence the weakness of Nato Article 5. Other Nato members cannot know how the US will act when an attack occurs.

Andrew O’Hagan, writing about Donald Trump, imagines ‘a short novel, in which a nominee … stages his own attempted assassination’ (LRB, 1 August). Self-organised assassinations by leading politicians also occur in reality. In his biography of François Mitterrand from 2013, Philip Short mentions that Mitterrand staged a failed assassination attempt on himself in 1959 in order to boost his poll ratings. A fictional account of this incident followed in the French film noir Le Combat dans l’île (1962), directed by Alain Cavalier.

Andrew O’Hagan describes Trump’s shooter as ‘a registered Republican who donated $15 to ActBlue, a register-to-vote pressure group’. ActBlue is better understood as a payment-processing agent for a wide range of small political and advocacy groups broadly aligned with the Democratic Party. It’s hard to know what to make of the donation without knowing which group was the beneficiary.

David Todd concludes his piece about the recent French elections by sketching the possibility, ‘logical’ to some, that Macron might address his lack of support among the working class by striking a deal with the Rassemblement National (LRB, 1 August). This is, he admits, no more than a ‘frightening fantasy’, but living as I do in an area where all the surrounding constituencies are now held by the RN, I find the scenario inconceivable. It remains the main electoral strategy of Macron’s party, Renaissance, and others to run against an RN candidate in the second round of elections, on the basis that the ‘republican front’ will come out on top (even if it clearly doesn’t any longer in some areas). What’s more, one of the most powerful motivations of RN voters is to teach the white-collar classes – which Macron epitomises – a lesson. Why would either side give up the grounds of their legitimacy or their route to power?

A.W. Moore writes about poetry, musicality and nonsensicality in Wittgenstein’s work and its translations (LRB, 1 August). In 1989 the Finnish musician M.A. Numminen released an album of quotes (in a number of different languages) from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as The Tractatus Suite. The music is a tongue-in-cheek blend of jazz, swing, rock and folk, and the treatment of ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann’ sounds like it could have been done by Monty Python. It’s a great joke, but also a guaranteed dancefloor-emptier, which I listen to only when no one else is around.

Kim Phillips-Fein writes that Richard Nixon ‘left office in ignominy after being impeached for Watergate’ (LRB, 15 August). In fact he was never impeached. Nixon resigned when Republican senators indicated to him that his impeachment would be inevitable.