The Bluestocking, vol 325: RFK and the Zynternet
shirtless and running from a rhinoceros
Happy Friday Saturday!
As you might imagine, I was busy on Thursday night writing my snap election piece for The Atlantic after the election poll went out, and then mainlining television coverage until I fell asleep with the remote control in my hand. (Jonathan woke me up with the news that Liz Truss had lost her seat.)
As I said on Twitter, I got a bit annoyed with all the commentary overnight that ignored the fact that Labour had just won a huge majority—and from an incredibly poor starting position. They gained more than 200 seats! Bloody hell! Polls always shape election coverage (and voting intention) and this was a very obvious example. Going “oh wow that is a big majority” felt to many people like an unbearably banal and basic take, because it was so expected, and so we had a lot of chat about Reform for the first few hours of the election programmes, instead of focusing on the actual next government. No, but really. The vote share might have been low, but that is a big majority. “My MPs will be rebellious and factional because there are so many of them,” is a nice problem to have, and not something that ever bothered, say, Vince Cable. “We might lose a lot of those seats next time,” is a worry that can probably be parked for, ooh, a couple of months.
I’m not sure that even I — as someone who has written about politics for 14 years, always under Tory rule — has quite got my head around how big the switch over to a Labour government will be. Keir Starmer is prime minister, and that means more than getting to stand behind the lectern and do PMQs. I just read a piece saying the Rwanda plan was “dead” and my brain went: oh, yeah! When you’re in government, you can just . . . do things! The legislative agenda will no longer be plotted around “what will make Suella Braverman and the other Telegraph columnists leave us alone for a bit”. We don’t have a prime minister who would need to be put behind a puppy gate if he caught an infectious disease. Never again will I hear breathless whispers about “how many letters Graham Brady has”. We might even . . build some bloody houses. A new dawn has broken, has it not?
For me, one of the nicest things about this election is the sheer luxury of remembering all the people whose opinions no longer matter. Sorry, Grant Shapps, but your much vaunted “ability to count” will now be inflicted on the private sector. Farewell, Jacob Rees-Mogg, have fun on the witness-protection programme that is your GB News show. Liz Truss, I will see you at CPAC, where absolutely no one will understand why you are there.
There’s a fresh new cabinet to scrutinize: I already like the sound of James Timpson, who has done such good work on employing prisoners, going to justice as a minister in the Lords. And while I’m familiar with most of the big beasts in Labour, there are several dozen new Lib Dem MPs to get to know, some of whom might rise quite quickly through the ranks. Less happily, I suspect that some of the small party and independent candidates might not have been vetted as thoroughly as you would wish, and we’ll be getting to know more of their views soon, too. The total collapse of the SNP in Scotland hasn’t yet had the discussion that it merits, and I confess that I haven’t looked into Northern Ireland’s results yet, except to note that Sinn Fein came top, giving it a sweep across Westminster, councils and Stormont as the largest party.
One other thing I do want to mention: I thought Rishi Sunak’s departure speech was (mostly) incredibly gracious, particularly when he referred to Keir Starmer as “our prime minister”. Jeremy Hunt’s speech was also well-judged, telling his children not to be sad, because they were watching democracy manifest (sorry).
Losing with dignity—and at a fundamental level, accepting that you lost—distinguishes politicians I respect from those I do not. Think about how Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton went to Trump’s inauguration, but he flew off to Florida in a sulk rather than going to Joe Biden’s. Is it any surprise that George Galloway didn’t turn up to hear he had lost to Labour’s Paul Waugh? That Liz Truss had to be slow-clapped on to the stage while all the other candidates waited for her? That the supporters of the Workers Party candidate heckled Jess Phillips as she gave her victory speech?
Populists, headbangers and self-styled rebels excuse themselves from the rituals of democracy, because deep down, they don’t believe that they could ever be wrong—and so the voters must be.
Helen
PS. Anyone want to guess how many of those Reform MPs last the whole parliament? I’m going with two.
RFK Jr’s Family Doesn’t Want Him To Run (Vanity Fair)
Theories about Kennedy’s reckless behaviors abound. Long before it was reported, members of the family knew about the brain worm, which in court testimonies Kennedy conjectured he’d picked up from food he ate in South Asia. He said the tapeworm consumed a portion of his brain and led to protracted “brain fog.” But more often his family points to Kennedy’s 14 years as a heroin user, which began when Kennedy was 15 and didn’t end until he was 29. Kennedy has made his history of addiction part of his campaign narrative, arguing that he is more equipped to fix America’s addiction problem. Critics in his family feel otherwise.
[…]
Many tried and failed to get him off heroin. Instead of guiding him to greater glory, Billings followed Bobby into heroin addiction. Meantime, Kennedy looked for heroes outside the family bubble, befriending Roger Ailes, the late Fox News founder who at the time was an independent TV producer and adviser to Richard Nixon. In 1972, when RFK Jr. was 18, Ailes took Kennedy to Kenya to shoot a wildlife documentary in which Kennedy appeared shirtless and running from a rhinoceros.
This American electoral cycle is defined by cowardice—the Republican heavyweights who didn’t stand up to Trump while he created a personality cult; the Democratic elites who are pretending they think Biden is fit to serve; and the Kennedy family, who think that Robert F. Kennedy Jr is a dangerous fantasist whose candidacy could help deliver the election for Trump, but won’t say so out loud.
As well as presumably being the result of a Democrat oppo dump, this piece is a reminder that rich people get written about a lot because they have the means, when they go bananas, to do so in a much grander style than most of us can manage. For example, at Harvard, RFK Jr “kept an owl in his house and carried a live snake around campus.”
And he isn’t even the standout screwup of the family! “The other Kennedy men of his generation, however, were busy blowing up the family’s legacy. Cousin William Kennedy Smith was tried for and acquitted of rape in a highly publicized 1991 trial; brother Michael Kennedy’s relationship with an underage babysitter was exposed before he died in a skiing accident in Aspen in 1997; older brother Joseph II bowed out of a race for governor of Massachusetts after his ex-wife wrote a damaging tell-all in 1997; and then cousin John F. Kennedy Jr., who was considered the quintessential Kennedy of his generation, died in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999.” Another cousin died of a heroin overdose at 28, and another one admitted masturbating outside the bedroom window of a 15-year-old who was found beaten to death with a golf club the next day.
Quick Links
A Canadian woman who pretended her daughters were Inuit has been jailed (The Guardian).
“But curiously, the fruits of Bezos’s investment during the Trump era consisted almost exclusively of more and better stories. A decade later, it’s the Times, not the Post, that has reinvented “that glorious bundle”—including Wordle and a wildly popular cooking app—while the Post has done surprisingly little to adapt its business to the digital-news era.” A very long read on the Washington Post (The Atlantic).
“Over the last ten years or so, a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings—mostly but by no means entirely male—has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. . . the Zynternet is made up of the kind of guys, and I say this without judgment, who have a favorite professional golfer.” Max Read digests the cultural importance of the HAWK TUAH girl (Substack, NSFW).
Andy Mills and Megan Phelps-Roper have made an update to their podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, in which I talk about how the debate has shifted since it was released (Reflector Media).
“A smattering of men with an air of genuine menace are outnumbered by shirtless it workers and wealth-management professionals with a 2:1 from a redbrick university, who can shout abuse at opposing fans in the knowledge that nothing dangerous will happen.” Very funny column by Duncan Robinson on modern masculinity as demonstrated by England fans on the lash in Germany (Economist, £)
See you next time!
Could not possibly agree with more you take on the election coverage, it was genuinely making me angry that the coverage was just ignoring the Labour achievement and speaking as if Labour only failed slightly less badly than the Tories
And how suddenly the electoral system and getting majorities without 50% of the vote is suddenly a major source of concern despite that never being an issue when the left vote was split for decades but now the right vote is split suddenly it’s a major issue
Infuriating
Excellent piece, Helen. I especially love this: ‘Losing with dignity—and at a fundamental level, accepting that you lost—distinguishes politicians I respect from those I do not.’