The TLS blog

Santorum and the Cicero brothers

BY PETER STOTHARD

I can barely hear the the words Super Tuesday without wishing I had been in Ohio or Georgia this week.

For any political journalist (as once I was) it is the best of times.

Today I made a tiny contribution to the coverage in the Wall Street Journal with a piece on the Commentariolum Petitionis (translated in its most recent version as How to Win Elections) a practical, cynical and eerily modern guide to winning votes that is commonly (and probably correctly) attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero's younger brother Quintus.

I thought of Robert Kennedy's help to JFK and Jeb Bush's for GWB and Roger Clinton's and Billy Carter's hindrances. 

And I wondered what help the younger Santorum brother was giving.

I asked but no one seemed to know.

Is anything fraternal happening out there?

 

Politicians, historians and the Holocaust

DAVID HORSPOOL

Do you know about Godwin's law? You may not know it's called that, but the gist of it is:  "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches". Not only online, of course. There was an example of it this week, when the Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu,  speaking on Iran, held up a historic correspondence from 1944 between the US War Department and the World Jewish Congress, in which the Under Secretary of War gave reasons for his government's refusal to bomb Auschwitz.

Surely Godwin's Law doesn't apply to Israel and its Prime Minister? If anyone has carte blanche to invoke Nazi crimes, the perils of appeasement and to keep alive the memory of victims of the Shoah, is it not the leader of the country which rose from the ashes of those crimes? Absolutely, but that is no reason for listeners to Mr Netanyahu's speech to forget that when politicians use history, it is rarely in the way historians do. That is, they use those bits of the historical record that assist their argument, rather than sifting the evidence and seeing where it all leads them.

I do not presume to go into the case Mr Netanyahu was making for potential military action against Iran. I am ignorant of the details and TLS history editors are probably not the best people to pronounce on matters of international current affairs. But history is another matter. So let's concentrate on that.

Norman the Magnificent

BY PETER STOTHARD

My friend David Hare, the aesthete and distinguished designer of interiors who lives in France, has just emailed me about the death of Norman St John-Stevas.

We were last month planning to arrange dinner with the unique Lord St John — but were now forestalled by a death of which, I must admit, I had been unaware till David told me of it.

Perhaps I need to keep up with the obits more. The TLS does not require constant vigilance to rumour or reports or what we used to call ‘the wires’ but which now have other names.

Nor does the Man Booker Prize, whose chairmanly duties are currently quite demanding, nor the Classical Association which demands of its president a little too.

But none of that is quite an excuse.

 I see that there are already fine tributes this morning to Norman who, amongst his other grander glories, chaired the Booker Prize  in 1985 and had given me a liitle good advice which, like all Booker communications, must remain confidential even in death.

I told him that I did not think these days too much about the Thatcher era, the time when we first met. Since I have watched barely more than a dozen films in all my life (he was a bit shocked by that) I am unlikely to see Meryl Streep in the role.

So deaths of political friends (how few of them there really are) are an excuse for a little nostalgia, especially if their news arrives a little late from France.

Norman was magnificent in many ways as a subversive Cabinet minister at the beginning of the Thatcher government. But he was an unusually magnificent source in my earliest reporting days.

As a boy from Chelmsford I had once been his constituent. But he was not a great lover of the place and thus, while we shared that view, it was only a small help. His words on the County Town of Essex were merely wittier than mine.

Nor was I on his side of the big political arguments — or even particularly against him — at a time of the intensest  divisions. He thought my position in this regard to be ill-starred but entirely reasonable. Anyway, I was a very junior political journalist for The Sunday Times at the time and it hardly mattered what I thought.

I did, however, always listen carefully to what he said. My words with him were my first, and never equalled, experience of being told the opposite of what those words, if seen in print or over heard, would seem to mean.

Norman was a master craftsman of being a source. I suppose that any examples of that should remain Man-Booker-confidential still.

When I later became editor of The Times he both congratulated and claimed a little credit for my advance. He claimed a little payback from time to time when there might be stories about art or architecture that might otherwise have been neglected.I was happy to oblige.

I most of all this morning wish that David Hare and I had had that supper.