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Although it has been widely noted that Lord Liverpool was the last prime minister before Boris Johnson to marry while in office, the more apposite precedent is Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd Duke of Grafton. In even shorter time than Johnson 253 days against 675 he managed to combine the duties of high office with both divorce and marriage.

Grafton was a notorious gadabout who, before he entered Downing Street, was caught in flagrante delicto in his box at the opera with a tailors daughter and courtesan called Nancy Parsons. His brief premiership (October 1768 to January 1770) was undistinguished. He lost Corsica to the French, which wasnt as disastrous as his successor Lord Norths loss of America, but still a blow to national pride.

A persistent critic, writing under the pseudonym Junius (probably Philip Francis, a Dublin-born MP), observed in a public letter to Grafton that the genius of your life carried you through every possible change and contradiction of conduct, without the momentary imputation or colour of a virtue; and the wildest spirit of inconsistency never once betrayed you into a wise or honourable action. If only Keir Starmer were so eloquent.

[See also:How Boris Johnson escaped the blame for Tory austerity and what Labour can do about it]

Johnson has never made a secret of his wish to appoint the former Daily Mail editor and pro-Brexit warrior Paul Dacre as chair of the media regulator Ofcom. Now, after the interview panel declared Dacre not appointable, the Prime Minister has ordered a rerun of the contest.

The four-person panel was reportedly unanimous. It is headed by Paul Potts, a journalist who is a director of Rupert Murdochs Times Newspapers Holdings and a close associate of John Whittingdale, minister of state at the culture department, who, like Dacre, is a long-standing critic of the BBC.

The others comprise a former Tory minister (albeit a Remainer); a civil servant appointed under Johnsons government to a senior role at the culture department; and a recent deputy chairman of the financial auditor KPMG. If even these people find Dacre not up to the job possibly because about 90 per cent of Ofcoms work involves smartphones, broadband and the internet, technologies with which Dacre has only a nodding acquaintance it seems likely any sane group of men and women would reach a similar conclusion.

Johnson is entitled to overrule them and appoint Dacre anyway. But that isnt enough apparently. He wants them to consider the error of their ways and repent. Will he also demand public confessions?

[See also:Can Matt Hancock survive? Here are two reasons why he might]

The resignation of the National Trust chairman, the business executive Tim Parker, is greeted as a victory for anti-woke campaigners. A group called Restore Trust, which wants a return to the Trusts apolitical ethos, had circulated a motion for this autumns annual general meeting calling for Parker to go. Parker, who has already served more than six years in the unpaid post, planned to step down anyway, but readers of Tory newspapers are told he leaves because he presided over a report last year that detailed links to slavery and colonialism among the Trusts properties.

Under Parker, no houses or gardens were shut (except temporarily due to the pandemic), no statues demolished, no paintings removed, no individuals cancelled. But with noisy commentary from self-styled libertarians such as the columnist Toby Young, Tim Parker himself has been well and truly cancelled.

[See also:Gordon Brown on vaccinations, poverty and the climate crisis]

As the end of all measures against Covid-19 approaches (perhaps), I suddenly realise there will be a very large downside. No longer can I look forward to all Leicester City football and Leicester Tigers rugby matches being brought live to my home by Sky and BT Sport.

Once more, I shall have to explore dubious, malware-infested streaming services and join betting websites. I may even have to decipher impenetrable railway timetables and pay exorbitant ticket prices to attend matches in person. Come the autumn, I wonder how many of us will be crying Can we have our lockdown back please?

Originally posted here:
First Thoughts: The culture wars reach the National Trust, Dacre and Ofcom, and lockdown longings - New Statesman

A view of the telescope domes on the roof of the Vatican Observatory, at the Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo, in 2015. Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A view of the telescope domes on the roof of the Vatican Observatory, at the Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo, in 2015.

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy At a time of growing diffidence toward some new scientific discoveries, the one and only Vatican institution that does scientific research recently launched a campaign to promote dialogue between faith and science.

It's the Vatican Observatory, located on the grounds of the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, a medieval town in Alban Hills 15 miles southeast of Rome.

The director, Brother Guy Consolmagno, is giving this reporter a guided tour of the grounds. We drive along a cypress-lined road, admiring majestic gardens and olive groves nestled near the remains of a palace of the Roman Emperor Domitian, before reaching a field with farmworkers and animals.

"This is the end that has the papal farm, so you can see the cows the papal milk comes from," Consolmagno says as he points out the working farm that provides the pope at the Vatican with vegetable and dairy products.

(Pope Francis, known for his frugality and habit of not taking vacations, decided not to use the papal summer villa, which he considers too luxurious. But he ordered the estate become a museum open to the public.)

For most of its history, the Catholic Church rejected scientific findings that conflicted with its doctrine. During the Inquisition, it even persecuted scientists such as Galileo Galilei.

In the Middle Ages, it became apparent that the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar and established in 46 B.C., had accumulated numerous errors. But it wasn't until 1582 that the Vatican Observatory was born with the reform of the Gregorian calendar (named for Pope Gregory XIII) that, based on observation of the stars, established fixed dates for religious festivities.

Consolmagno takes pains to rebut the anti-science image of the Catholic Church. He cites the 19th century Italian priest Angelo Secchi as a pioneer in astronomy and the 20th century Belgian priest Georges Lematre, known as "father of the Big Bang theory," which holds that the universe began in a cataclysmic explosion of a small, primeval superatom.

Astronomical text books in Latin are displayed at the Vatican Observatory. Sylvia Poggioli/NPR hide caption

Astronomical text books in Latin are displayed at the Vatican Observatory.

Run by Jesuits, the Observatory moved to this bucolic setting in the 1930s, when light pollution in Rome obstructed celestial observation.

One domed building in the papal gardens houses a huge telescope dating from 1891. It's called Carte du Ciel map of the sky and it stands under a curved ceiling that slides open. Consolmagno says, "It was one of about 18 identical telescopes that were set up around the world to photograph the sky, and every national observatory was given its own piece of sky to photograph." He adds, it was "one of the first international projects of astronomy."

A native of Detroit, Consolmagno studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, volunteered with the Peace Corps in Africa and taught physics before becoming a Jesuit brother in his 40s. He has been at the Observatory for three decades. His passion for astronomy started with a childhood love of science fiction.

"I love the kind of science fiction that gives you that sense of wonder, that reminds you at the end of the day why we dream of being able to go into space," Consolmagno says.

A passionate Star Wars fan, he tells this reporter proudly, "even Obi-Wan Kenobi came to visit" the Observatory, pointing to the signature of actor Alec Guinness, who played the role in the original movie trilogy, in a visitor's book from 1958.

Top scientists teach at the Observatory's summer school. And scientists and space industry leaders have come for a United Nations-sponsored conference on the ethics and peaceful uses of outer space. It cooperates with NASA on several space missions and it operates a modern telescope in partnership with the University of Arizona.

Left: A visitors' book signed by actor Alec Guinness in 1958. Right: A photo of a prelate decades ago reclining to view the telescope. Sylvia Poggioli/NPR hide caption

Left: A visitors' book signed by actor Alec Guinness in 1958. Right: A photo of a prelate decades ago reclining to view the telescope.

"But where we still need to work is with the rest of the world," says the Observatory director, "the people in the pews, especially nowadays. There are too many people in the pews who think you have to choose between science and faith."

To reach those people, the Observatory recently launched a new website and podcasts exploring issues such as meteorites hitting the Earth or how to live on the moon.

And an online store sells merch hoodies, caps, tote bags and posters of the Milky Way.

In just a few months, says the director, visitors to the website have doubled.

As to how the faith-versus-science culture wars can be resolved, Consolmagno says what's most important is that he wears a collar he is a devoutly religious person who also considers himself an "orthodox scientist." "That fact alone shatters the stereotypes," he says.

Another American at the Observatory shattering stereotypes is Brother Robert Macke, curator of the collection of meteorites rocks formed in the early days of the solar system.

Holding a dark rock a few inches long, he says it was formed 4.5 billion years ago providing clues on how the solar system was formed.

"In order to understand the natural world," he says, "you have to study the natural world. You cannot just simply close your eyes and ignore it or pretend that it is other than it is. You have to study it and you have to come to appreciate it."

Consolmagno asked how the study of the stars interacts with his faith says astronomy doesn't provide answers to theological questions, and scripture doesn't explain science. "But the astronomy is the place where I interact with the Creator of the universe, where God sets up the puzzles and we have a lot of fun solving them together," the director says.

And he believes the recent dark period of the pandemic has weakened the arguments of those who are skeptical of science.

"Because people can see science in action, science doesn't have all the answers," he says. "And yet science is still with all of its mistakes and with all of its stumbling is still better than no science."

The rest is here:
The Vatican's Space Observatory Wants To See Stars And Faith Align - NPR

Last week, for the first time in months, the burning eye of the outrage industry pivoted westwards and came to rest upon the city of Bristol. On Friday, the statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last June during a Black Lives Matter protest, was put on display. To the fury of some, it was not returned triumphantly to its pedestal in the centre of the city, but exhibited in Bristols M Shed museum.

The debate around Colston in the summer of 2020 was largely conducted in a fact-free zone. So it is surely disconcerting for those determined to defend the memorialisation of a mass murderer that in this new setting Colstons bronze effigy is surrounded by displays that give a detailed history of the slave traders grim career and the strange story that explains why, in the 19th century, a cult was created around him and the statue erected.

For most of the 300 years since his death in 1721, Colston was little known outside Bristol. Few would have imagined that his statue would become the totemic image for Britains 21st-century history wars. Still, the professionally outraged have never allowed Colstons relative obscurity to stand in their way as they rushed to his defence, having first looked him up on Wikipedia.

Yet as Colston appeared on display last week, carefully preserved and presented by conscientious curators, it was not obvious what the source of offence would be. The statue has, after all, been retained and with so much actual history included in the exhibit, there was a danger that those sent to report on Colstons second coming might have to write about the suffering of his victims.

Luckily, two petty grievances were found. The first is that the statue is being displayed at an inappropriate angle. Perhaps there is a perfect angle, as yet unknown to museum professionals, for the public display of mass murderers at which their crimes become more acceptable, perhaps even quaint? The second grievance: that the statue still carries the graffiti sprayed on it during the demonstration of last June.

What the Bristol curators appreciated is what curators anywhere would appreciate that the graffiti is now an integral part of its story, like the graffiti carved into Stonehenge and the pyramids or daubed on the walls inside the Reichstag by soldiers of the Red Army in 1945. Would those who argue that Colston should have been cleaned also advocate that we chip away the historic signatures and poetry of Julia Balbilla carved into the monuments of Egypt? Should we sandblast the graffiti off the hundreds of slabs of the Berlin Wall that now stand in museums and parks across the world? The historical significance of the blood-red paint on Colstons bronze hands will become greater with each passing year.

The art critic Alastair Sooke, who last week compared Colston, a man complicit in the deaths of an estimated 19,000 people, to a disgraced celebrity, concluded that not removing the graffiti was a calculated insult. Colston, not the thousands whose lives he helped snuff out, Sooke felt, was the real victim here. Have we stumbled upon a murder scene? he asked. The answer, of course, is yes and Colston was the perpetrator, not the victim.

London art critics who casually portray mass murderers as victims, like Westminster politicians who fan the flames of cultural conflict, do so from a safe distance and in a consequence-free environment. Since Colstons fall, those of us who call Bristol home have been disturbed by the way that the city has become targeted by those from outside who seek to deepen divisions rather than heal them. At the time, I wrote of the dangers and distractions of the moment. But as a public historian, rather than a public servant, the task of trying to actually defuse those dangers fell to others.

Those fraught weeks of last summer are the subject of a new BBC documentary, Statue Wars: One Summer in Bristol (declaration: I am one of the executive producers). Filmed over the summer of 2020, it is a classic fly-on-the wall documentary, made by the Bristol film-maker Francis Welch. It follows what happened in City Hall as the worlds media, the London artist Marc Quinn and agitators from outside all focused on Bristol.

From the moment BLM went global and statues in the US began to fall, Bristol, a city that has struggled more than many to acknowledge its slave-trading history, was always destined to face difficulties. What made it all the more significant is that it also happens to be the first city in Europe to be run by an elected mayor who is a descendent of enslaved people, Marvin Rees, who has just been re-elected.

The confected battle lines of our confected culture war run through both Bristol and its mayor. Mixed-race, with a working-class, white mother and Jamaican father, Rees was brought up in one of Bristols poorest districts. For him, as for many black people, myself included, the white working class do not belong to a rival group but are family members, friends and members of the same communities.

What comes across in the documentary are the dangers of the road we are currently walking down and the nightmare of division and distraction confronting local leaders.

The culture wars look very different from behind the desk of a city mayor than on the pages of the tabloids or in our social media feed. Not for the mayor the easy gesture: he has to work through solutions, try to balance competing interests, particularly the interplay of class and race.

Anyone thinking of a future in politics might well watch Statue Wars and change their mind. Anyone unconcerned by the dangers of this moment might rethink their complacency.

Statue Wars: One Summer in Bristol will air on BBC Two at 9pm on Thursday, 10 June

David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster

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A year on, the battered and graffitied Colston is finally a potent memorial to our past - The Guardian

Journalist Zaid Jilani on Tuesday said that former Speaker Paul RyanPaul Davis RyanZaid Jilani: Paul Ryan worried about culture war distracting from issues 'that really concern him' The Memo: Marjorie Taylor Greene exposes GOP establishment's lack of power The Hill's 12:30 Report - Senators back in session after late-night hold-up MORE (R-Wis.) in telling conservatives last week to not become too focused on culture wars showed his fear ofsuch battles crowding "out the issues that really concern him.

Ryan in a speech last Thursday, delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, cautioned GOP members not to get caught up in every little cultural battle, adding, "our party must be defined by more than a tussle over the latest grievance or perceived slight.

Jilani in an interview on Hill.TVs Rising, said that Ryan, who after leaving office started the policy group the American Idea Foundation, likely sees that Republicans in public office are not mobilizing in large numbers against the welfare state, against social spending, and other issues.

It doesnt mean that theyre not concerned about it, but its not really the hot button issue, Jilani said.I think that would threaten someone like Ryan, because Ryan would prefer that we were talking about Medicare being unsustainable, social security needing some form of private accounts or privatization, the journalist added.

Jilani went on to say, I think in many ways, the reason that he doesnt want there to be culture wars is not necessarily just because the culture war can be very annoying at times to people on both sides, but because it crowds out the issues that really concern him and I think thats part of why he gave this speech.

Watch part of Jilanis interview above.

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Zaid Jilani: Paul Ryan worried about culture war distracting from issues 'that really concern him' | TheHill - The Hill

Its often said that Conservatives and the rightwing press are good at stoking divisions. Whats perhaps less acknowledged is that they do so mostly by inventing them: those who campaign for more inclusive policies become the woke mob and the loony left; those who want students to learn about the darker parts of Britains history become people who hate Britain; judges and politicians who want to follow basic parliamentary procedures become enemies of the people, saboteurs, and traitors, and so on.

In every case, were told that the future of the nation is at stake. The relentlessness of this culture war narrative leaves us with the image of an irreconcilable rift at the heart of British society: between liberals obsessed with identity politics who live, literally or spiritually, in north London, and sidelined social conservatives who live or rather, are left behind everywhere else (most emotively in the red wall). These fantasy constructions are now the twin pillars of Conservative rhetoric.

But this image of an irreconcilably divided nation is just that: an image. A spate of polls have shown that we are not as divided as many would have us think. Views in the so-called red wall are largely consistent with the rest of the country and, nationwide, few people know what either the culture war or wokeness even mean. Yet the right still pushes this narrative relentlessly, railing against a lefty elite that somehow manages to both wield a hegemonic control over Britains culture and be hopelessly out of touch with it. The new rightwing television channel, GB News one of many new ventures to pitch itself as an urgent corrective will host a segment called Wokewatch, to illuminate and amplify examples of the loony lefts looniness.

As the sociologist William Davies has written, this is the logic of the culture war: Identify the most absurd or unreasonable example of your opponents worldview; exploit your own media platform to amplify it; articulate an alternative in terms that appear calm and reasonable; and then invite people to choose. Exaggeration is therefore intrinsic to culture wars: it is a battle waged mostly by straw men.

Its no surprise that Boris Johnson thrives in this environment: a journalist by trade, a liar by nature, he is all too familiar with the energising power of some well-placed hyperbole. As the Daily Telegraphs Europe correspondent in the 1990s, Johnson wrote all kinds of wild and made-up provocations about the EUs regulatory overreach: before Wokewatch there was Brusselswatch. The aim of Johnsons exaggerations wasnt any particular political agenda, but rather to stoke animosity. Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, Johnson recalled in his Desert Island Discs interview for Radio 4 in 2005, and it really gave me this rather weird sense of power. As prime minister Johnson pursues the same approach, but his plaything is now the nation at large.

The cynicism and bad faith that underlies so much of the culture war should warn us against one of the dominant tendencies within the vast and burgeoning literature on our polarised times: to blame evolutionary biology and an inherent tribalist instinct we share. The mechanism is evolutionary, New York Times writer Ezra Klein writes in his recent bestseller, Why Were Polarised, because our brains know we need our groups to survive. But by conjuring up a primordial past as the source of our divisions, we lose sight of all the contemporary forces and strategies that are deliberately designed to inflame and exaggerate our differences. The climate crisis wasnt destined to be such a divisive issue, for instance it required, in the words of climatologist Michael Mann, the most well-funded, well-organised PR campaign in the history of human civilisation. The Flintstones might not have agreed on everything either, but at least they didnt have Fox News.

The culture war is in this sense the ultimate fiction: what seems like a battle for the soul of our country is a pantomime where we are conscripted to play both gladiator and spectator and obliged to pick a side. The hope seems to be that, amid all the sparring and theatre, we lose sight of what truly frustrates us: in Britain, that is an increasingly harsh economy, imposed by a callous government, which has left us with the worst wage growth in 200 years, public services that are chronically underfunded and a third of children living in poverty a misery offset by one of the stingiest welfare systems in the developed world. If society now feels coarser, its because it is but the reason is not a sudden decline in civility.

Yet while the Conservatives, in power for over a decade, are the main architects of this dreary, resentful state of the nation, they are also its main beneficiaries. The Conservatives have always excelled at stoking resentment and redirecting it elsewhere; now is no different: they are clear favourites to win the next election, a record fifth in a row.

So even amid this total and unsettling ascendancy, the Tories will still insist that the blame for Britains woes lies elsewhere: with Londoners hoarding all the nations wealth, with university professors teaching cultural Marxism in their classes, or asylum seekers trying to cross the Channel, or any other phantom threat they can think of. This strategy goes beyond the usual divide and conquer. It was said of the Romans and their imperial dominance that they make a desert and call it peace. The Tories are trying a different tactic: make a desert and call it war.

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The culture wars are a symptom, not the cause, of Britains malaise - The Guardian