The Bluestocking, vol 219

There is, actually, careful thought behind bimbology

Happy Friday!

One of today’s items has left me thinking: who IS the Mary Poppins of the Labour party? Answers to the usual address.

Helen

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The End of The Dry Decade (The Atlantic)

In accommodating characters who are mothers, without that being their only identity, television has brought new tensions and texture to established genres. Where male detectives have tended—to the point of cliché—to be troubled, maverick loners, Olivia Colman’s Ellie Miller found her investigations complicated by her own family turmoil and deep links to the local town in the British crime show Broadchurch. Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan is similarly embedded in her community, at the center of a loving, chaotic, and grieving clan in the kind of suburb where everyone has secrets and everyone is trying to cope: with addiction, with loss, with something as mundane as America’s lack of affordable child care.

Something I wrote for the print magazine about how the boom in television has created more interesting roles for women in midlife.

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Wes Streeting: I’m Not The Mary Poppins of the Labour Party (Observer)

“There are a bunch of people who were relatively recent joiners to the Labour party who didn’t understand its history or traditions or how you win elections. A lot of people have left who were never really committed to it and frankly, a lot them were barnacles on the boat. The people who denied there was a problem with antisemitism. The people who didn’t understand why voters were affronted by the Labour party. We’re better off without them, bluntly. There has always been a problem with elements of the left, particularly the far left, who revel in their self-righteousness, who love telling voters how disappointed they are in them.”

You can see why the Labour left are pissed off right now. Wes Streeting is the party’s big new hope—this Observer interview follows swiftly behind a New Statesman profile and an appearance on Nick Robinson’s BBC podcast, plus a Times interview last autumn. He couldn’t be more ostentatiously signalling his desire to be Labour leader if he hired a skywriter. And if Starmer doesn’t censure him for these comments, that means that the Labour leadership tacitly endorses them.

So is the left firmly back in the “sealed tomb” (copyright Peter Mandelson), at least for the moment? It doesn’t seem to be organising much of a fightback in parliament. Andy McDonald, who was elected in 2012, resigned from the Shadow Cabinet during autumn conference but hardly troubled the conversation. The older generation—Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott—seem spent (not surprising, after their exhausting experience of being in charge of the party). And there’s a very thin middle-aged cohort where the Blair years were, and you just didn’t get selected if you said you loved Cuba and nationalisation.

What about the younger generation? Laura Pidcock lost her seat in 2019 and recently quit the NEC, where she would have been involved in party rule-making. Rebecca Long-Bailey was cast out of the shadow cabinet for linking to Maxine Peake indirectly blaming Israel for the death of George Floyd. Richard Burgon and Lloyd Russell-Moyle have the tactical sense of a bunch of bananas: both used up their valuable slots at PMQs last week to call for Boris Johnson to resign, which is the kind of thing people demand on social media, but in practice just leads to him batting it away with some boosterism about his amazing vaccine rollout.

So who else is there? The two I’m watching are Nadia Whittome and Zarah Sultana. Sultana has 225,000 Twitter and 257,000 TikTok followers, and has a very firm grasp of which issues upset centrist commentators—and therefore fire up her base. As for Whittome, she is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, but also retweets Starmer, and is working with Ed Miliband on a climate bill. A fork in the road may lie ahead.

PS. While I’m here, I should say that on the soft left/centre, the name of the MP most commonly cited as under-rated is Bridget Phillipson, now at shadow education.

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Bluestocking recommends: The Glow at the Royal Court. Compellingly weird science-fiction mystery with two of my favourite young actors, Ria Zmitrowicz and Fisayo Akinade. Loved the set, agnostic on the costumes, opposed to the video projections. Two hours, including an interval. Even better, there’s a fake academic afterword in the playtext which seems to have convinced at least two blog reviewers that it’s real.

Jonathan’s review: briefly rested his eyes in the first half but was alert like a Schnauzer through the second half.

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Quick Links

1. Fascinating little story about the paintings designated as “on show to the public” in private homes, in exchange for a tax break.

2. “Johnson is an example of a man who governs — or performs — for the media. In Cummings’s telling, he is an imbecile. ‘In January 2020,’ Cummings says, ‘I was sitting in No. 10 with Boris and the complete fuckwit is just babbling on about: ‘Will Big Ben bong for Brexit on the 31st of January?’ He goes on and on about this day after day. Eventually I say to him: ‘Who cares? What are you talking about? Why are you babbling on about Big Ben?’” Tanya Gold interviews Dominic Cummings (NYMag). The key line: “Is it fair though? What he’s doing to Johnson now? He looks at me as if I am a child. ‘What’s fairness got to do with anything? It’s politics.’”

3. “The modern-day bimbo is a fresh approach to intersectional feminism. There is, actually, careful thought behind bimbology, and it could be a way to reach true liberation. . . ‘A bimbo isn’t dumb. Well, she kind of is, but she isn’t that dumb! She’s actually a radical leftist, who’s pro sex work, pro Black Lives Matter, pro LGBTQ+, pro choice, and will always be there for her girlies, gays and theys,’ they said, in a video that went viral immediately and still continues to circulate, now sitting at six million views and 2.1 million likes.” Yea, and verily, how capitalism quakes in the face of hot young women being sexy on the internet. (Vice)

4. The Times has had some cracking obituaries lately, the type that make you think you’re wasting your life and you really ought to do a survey of camels in the Gobi desert or get over your family losing the Russian throne by making artworks out of Shrinky Dinks in California (£).

5. Barry Cryer’s Great Lives episode on JB Priestley.

6. Is there a more perfect Twitter personality than Man Whose Whole Schtick Is Criticising Stuff Cannot Take Criticism?

See you next time!