The Labour Party and the anti-anti-Semites

After they were booted out of office in 1997, the Tory Party spent a good ten years re-playing House of Cards. Everyone wanted to be FU. And every leader ended up being knifed in the back, or elegantly falling on his sword for the sake of the greater good, and/or going down to pointless, needless defeat at the polls.

On the other hand the Labour Party currently seem to be having so much fun re-enacting the final season of The Thick of It (that’s the British version of Veep, for American readers) that one wonders if they’ll ever have time to think about re-taking power. Though I suppose right now they (like the rest of us) don’t really have very much else to do.

For what it’s worth, it sounds to me a lot as if their anti-anti-Semitism* report was “leaked” by the people who wrote it for the simple reason that they don’t trust Sir Keir Starmer and they were quite sure he was going to bury it when he became leader. Which, if you think about, would have done him much more harm than this leaking stunt will. But then the Far Far Left of the Labour Party have never been known for their keen strategic intelligence.

*Rebecca Long-Bailey's friend Maxine Peake somehow managed to complain about “systemic” racism whilst peddling actual racism! Nice!

The British Establishment and the Deep State

We were supposed to believe, with thanks to the absurd Sir Kim Darroch, that Trump ditched "the Iranian nuclear deal" purely to "spite" Obama - in much the same way, presumably, as Obama pulled troops out of Iraq in order to spite George Dubya (before of course sending them back in again almost as soon as he'd been re-elected).

Unfortunately of course the story was bollocks! Sir Kim Darroch was a Deep State, British Establishment tit of the worst order. (What do we imagine he thinks about Brexit? Duh!) In reality Trump scotched the Iran treaty partly because it was crap (Obama signed off on it in spite of significant political opposition at home, partly because he could, partly to be a dick, but mainly because geopolitically he was backed into a corner after his cut-and-run policy in Iraq) and partly because he was under pressure from the neo-cons.

Because in truth there’s more to politics than just party politics, and the idea that the Israelis were just going to sit back and let the Iranians do anything and everything they liked in the region (now that Saddam’s gone, of course!) was only ever going to be a fantasy. And now that Israel has already kicked off its own “quiet” war with Iran, the Americans (and the British) are going to have to think hard and act quickly if they want to regain the initiative and stop the situation escalating.

One would of course like to be able to get excited about characters like Darroch, and Lord Geidt. And indeed about Rory Stewart, given his background! He’s got Special Forces, MI6, Deep State, ultra-Establishment, etc. written all over him. But...

One’s overwhelming sense is that beneath that nonchalant show of British phlegm the complacency is pretty much baked in. Stewart in particular comes across as simply another one of the overconfident narcissistic buffoons that Eton and Oxford between them seem to specialize in producing. Some are on the “Right”, some are on the Far Left, others are apolitical to the extent that they’re only really in politics for the sake of their wallets and their egos. Currently my feeling is that Rory is probably one of the latter, and whichever way one looks at him he’s utterly un-electable. I may be wrong, of course, but thankfully the Covid-1984 crisis has put his convoluted joke of a campaign to (fail to) be elected as Mayor of London out of the capital's misery.

And is Boris any better? The first big disappointment of the Boris era was his caving in to the old guard on Huawei. But then what were we expecting? Boris is not Trump. (And then again Trump isn’t really Trump - indeed, he’s a mostly vacuous media creation of a man who happens to be called Donald Trump, but perhaps that’s just by the by.) He was never going to face down the Establishment on this one, let alone stand up to the Deep State. (And of course Brexit got that little bit more complicated.) Even after life returns to "normal", the old problems are still going to be there - and with civil society having been so fundamentally weakened not so much by the Coronavirus itself as by the State’s response to it those old problems may very well be not just older but even worse. The British Government has never let a good crisis go to waste, and I can’t believe the Deep State ever will either.

Despite Brexit, Trump and Boris, the show will go on. And on! And on!

The Duke of York and the British Establishment

I have to say, I’m not really interested in the Duke of York, beyond saying that I think he’s probably not a nonce. The Murdoch Press want him to be, obviously, but that’s really only because Rupert Murdoch hates the Monarchy.

It’s also just possible that the reason the Queen is so protective of him is that his real father is Lord Carnarvon (i.e he of the real-life Downton Abbey).

OTOH, his relationship with Epstein was genuinely weird, and one wonders who exactly in the British secret state was “handling” him at the time.

It’s not unusual for minor royals to run on little errands if not for ministers of state then at least for the Deep State - whose official head is of course HM herself, even though in practice she can often be just as in the dark as anyone else.

And of course the more minor they are the further they can go. Let’s not forget whose nephew Princess Di herself was having it off with when she met her untimely end.

What’s tricky about Prince Andrew of course is that he’s not exactly “minor”. He’s a Prince of the Blood and a Royal Duke. His mum is literally the Queen of England. And so if the Firm really were hiring him out to other elements of the Establishment it does tend to make one wonder quite how legitimately royal he might really be.

Things to Do in Dallas When You're Bored

The first season of The Umbrella Academy was genuinely quite appealing. It was basically what you'd get if Wes Anderson did a reboot of the X-Men, and even when it wasn't wholly original it was at least knowingly so and even, at times, slightly subversive.

Season 2 tries to repeat the successes of Season 1, but it does so with an utterly leaden, beat-for-beat approach that is altogether un-involving and which at times is slightly repulsive. Indeed by trying simply to repeat the formula of the first season it completely fails to build on its successes, which has the effect of freezing the series' worldbuilding, hamstringing its plot, and all but throttling its character stone dead. Indeed by the end of Season 2 the members of the Umbrella Academy have either stayed where they were at the beginning of Season 1 or indeed regressed and become even less sympathetic (and thus less interesting) than they've ever been before.

So now for example we have a 5 who is more homicidal than ever - though to be fair he is at least still trying to save the world. Klaus meanwhile has gone clean, but then he relapses. Luther is now a rebellious and complacent git. The Rumour (because I can't even remember her name) is a self-righteous revolutionary. (Even if you think that it's fair enough that a black woman would support the race revolution in the 1960s, she's from the future. She knows that it's going to happen anyway. Why exactly is she taking out her personal problems on the white people of her grandparents' generation? Somehow I can't imagine it's because she was bullied at school for being black.) The Hispanic one is just an oaf who wants to save JFK, without caring or even thinking about the consequences. (Spoiler: He fails anyway.) And Vanya is now just an obnoxious little marriage-wrecking bean-flicker.

In other words all the characters we liked in the first season (and Vanya) are now just as unappealing as ever, nay more so. The dysfunctional family joke is no longer endearing. It's just tedious and disappointing. None of it feels fresh anymore, nor has it moved on from what went before, in terms of either character or plot.

Even the stuff about the Gallifreyan-style Time Agency (or is it the Temp Agency - which is a fun joke, if you think about it, but quite possibly one the neo-socialists who work in modern television wouldn't get?) makes no sense. If the 2019 "apocalypse" was a fixed point in time, how can the new one in 1963 be another one?

And the weirdest thing is that the show's mythology hasn't grown either. The main thing that made Season 1 so enjoyable was its inventiveness - constantly introducing new characters and ideas. And even if they weren't particularly original, at least they were introduced in an enjoyably kooky, left-field but ultimately knowing way. The old man in a child's body? It's been done before, but not for a while in a mainstream show. So why not? Time-travelling assassins? Ditto! Dysfunctional super-family? Might as well! Just turn it up to eleven. Super-intelligent chimp butlers are cool. So are robot moms. So are murder mysteries and apocalypses and adorable short trousers. Put it all together and what do you got?

My own hopes for the series - that they'd reboot the characters as children, and then have a genuine battle of minds and wills between what their father wanted them to be and what they eventually became - was obviously never going to happen. But in Season 2 there's virtually nothing new or even imaginative. We already know Hargreeves is an alien. But we don't find out anything more about him other than that. It's enough to leave one googling for Wikipedia.

Indulging in Far-Left fantasies isn't a good idea either, especially when the writers have to compensate for a singular lack of likeable negroes and lesbians by making every straight white adult male a bully and/or an incompetent buffoon. (This includes the baddies, unfortunately, making them unpleasant to no dramatic purpose and not really scary either.) Ellen Page for example is just as horrible as ever - narcissistic and one-dimensional to a tee. If your case is that she's an overgrown child actress playing a character with severely arrested psychological development then fine. But that none of the Hargreeves children has been able to form a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex is something of a given. Page is just bad - and is particularly badly shown up by actual child actor Aidan Gallagher's range and energy (though in season 2 even 5 regresses to a somewhat one-dimensional mean here).

The characters hardly ever use their superpowers to move the plot along. Is this deliberate? The point that you don't need special powers to be a hero is perfectly legit. And more to the point the only dramatically satisfying victories are ones where superheroes don't use their powers. But here it's Vanya's super powers that lead to the end of the world (again!) and it's 5's time-travel powers that end up saving the day (again!).

The villains meanwhile have almost no motivation. (The Handler wants to make the time commission more "jazzy". That is literally it.) And the heroes just aren't motivated - with the exception of Aidan Gallagher, who still has just enough teenage energy to make his own scenes interesting, but not nearly enough to save this season in the way he both literally and figuratively saved the first. In fact both literally and figuratively the Umbrella Academy is more than the sum of its parts, and by splitting up the characters to do different boring things (boring boxing, boring asylum, boring sex cult, boring civil rights pressure group, boring nanny to a beautiful but boring autistic boy, etc.) we see just how boring each character is by himself.

What really drove the first season were the back stories and the flashbacks. They're almost entirely missing from the second season. What made us fall in love (or at least mildly warm to) the characters of The Umbrella Academy was that we were able to see the "good" versions of them (in their adorable short trousers and knee-socks). And yes, turning the Monocle from being a proud papa, who rewards his prepubescent charges with ice cream each time they save the day, into a straight-up dick (albeit an extra-terrestrial one) was definitely a mistake. Interestingly one of the few good things about Season 2 was the partial "redemption" of Hargreeves, but we'll see if this is a story-arc the show's writers are really going to continue with in Season 3.

And Season 3 need not (yet) be a total write-off. Arguably the biggest problem with Season 2 was a lack of source material, in principle because of how much of the second Umbrella Academy comic book went into Season 1. Well there's one more comic book still to go, and perhaps another in the pipeline, so it's to be hoped that the Sparrow Academy may offer some return to form next year.

But as usual we'll see.