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Lynda Goetz There is life beyond the Covid bubble Reflect on some of these headlines: Myanmar coup sparks massive street rallies; Flood kills at least seven after glacier burst in India; Gay men sent back to Chechnya are in ‘mortal danger’; Trump’s campaign to overturn election cost taxpayer $500m; Fears rise for three climbers missing on K2; Yazidis bury 104 victims of 2014 Islamic state massacre; Covid deaths of Yanomami children fuel fears for indigenous groups; Risk of eternal lockdown; Hundreds of academics investigated over weapons links to China; Draghi moves closer to forming Italian government; millions spent on ‘coaching’ NHS staff for death inquests. Had you only watched television news in the UK, it is unlikely you would know about the news behind any of those headlines, bar the first two. Watching either the BBC or the ITV evening news over the last weeks and months you could be forgiven for believing that the entire world had been reduced not only to a series of mainly dire UK Covid statistics, but to a succession of miserable personal stories more suited to those ‘real life story’ magazines which churn out tales of woe, misery and tragedy, interspersed with real-life, fairy-tale romance. Unfortunately the fairy-tale romance element is completely lacking in the current news feeds. Their reports seem to focus almost entirely on the numbers of Covid cases and Covid deaths, on the personal misery and despair of families bereaved or possibly about to be bereaved by coronavirus, or else on weary, stressed, overworked nurses and doctors on Covid wards; plus, of course, further statistics on the UK vaccine roll-out programme. Is this really necessary? Will all this propaganda reach those who are not taking this illness seriously or will it simply add to the distress, fear and anxiety of the majority who are, it would appear, already anxious, fearful and distressed? The BBC has often been accused of being anti-government. Currently it is hard to see it as being anything other than a puppet of the government and possibly even of the NHS; briefed to present the government’s and government scientists’ line on all things Covid. ITV is little different. Whatever happened to unbiased worldwide news? In 30-minute news programmes we are subjected to 25 minutes of UK Coronavirus-related news, whilst in ‘the day’s other news’ we are offered pictures of huge new vaccine centres (small ray of hope?), items related to the increase in unemployment (caused by lock-down) or, currently, clips of children tobogganing down snow-covered open spaces accompanied by comments about police cautioning or even fining those who have the temerity to have snowball fights and so ignoring social distancing. During the American elections some time was, to be fair, given to issues of American politics, but other international news? So very little as would leave those who only get their news from television seriously ill-informed. The more one thinks about this, the odder it seems. It is not long since we finally left the EU, supposedly to strike out as a global-trading nation once again; and yet here we are with our leaders seriously considering shutting us all up in fortress Britain with enforced quarantine for those entering the country (a situation which would have appeared laughably unbelievable a year ago) and our only news appears to be parochial in the extreme. To find out what is happening out there in the big wide world you need to find other sources. The Today programme on Radio 4 used to be a fairly reliable source of information. The other week the last 4 minutes or so (which felt interminable) of two consecutive programmes were devoted to actor Rory Kinnear ‘who lost his sister to the virus’ reading out a list of names of ‘your loved ones’. I am really sorry for those who have lost loved ones to the virus. I am equally sorry for anyone who has lost loved ones to cancer over the last year, or to strokes, heart attacks or suicide, but reading their names out to me on the radio is meaningless; literally, utterly meaningless. You might as well read out the telephone directory. Unless you are a friend or relative, those names cannot possibly mean anything. If the statistics can be relied upon and over 100,000 people have died of Covid 19 (and not just within 28 days of a positive test, having died of something else), this still represents only 0.149% of the population. If you believe the statistics have under-reported Covid-19 deaths and believe that maybe closer to 120,000 have died, we are still talking about 0.179% of the population. Mortality rates in historic pandemics have been much higher: 30-45% died in this country during the Black Death; some 15-20% of the population of London died in the 1665 Plague and some 3% of the UK population died in the Spanish Flu pandemic after the First World War. Listening to the UK television news it would be easy to believe that the country had never suffered anything comparable to the coronavirus pandemic. This reporting is unhelpful, even damaging. It lacks any sort of perspective or any sense of proportion. Those who are watching TV news are likely to be those who have already had all their perceptions skewed by the government warnings and fear-mongering; those who are already scared. Clive Myrie repeating ‘We are all scared’ over pictures of ITU wards, morgues and graves is alarmist propaganda. It is not news. If we are going to do nothing but focus on ‘the virus’ (which I would not advocate) we need balancing statistics like how many people were discharged from hospital having recovered or how many came out of ITU having received effective treatment. Statistics on the number given ‘the jab’ are not actually that encouraging either when at the same time we are still subjected to warnings about how far away we are from a return to normality and suggestions that the AstraZeneca jab may not protect against the South African strain of the virus. It is easy to be critical of the way the pandemic has been handled. It is easy, if we are not in charge, to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that this or that should have been done. My own views on the damage done by lock-down, rather than the coronavirus itself, are a matter of record in the Shaw Sheet, but it is clear that the immediately international nature of the modern world, the interconnectivity and the power of social media have all played a part in the way countries around the world have dealt in very similar autocratic ways with this latest ‘plague’. What our broadcast media should not be doing at this stage is retreating into dubious statistics and sob stories to increase the fear when what is required is a little rationality and sense of proportion. To counteract the inward-looking and closed-down nature of the world we are all inhabiting, not only should the broadcast media be looking outward and increasing our engagement with the rest of the world, but perhaps we as individuals should be actively looking for other sources of news. Whether or not we lean to the right or to the left, it is perhaps incumbent on all of us to seek out news and opinions and to be open to what is going on around the world. The coronavirus owes its success to the global nature of our contemporary world; to the interconnectivity, the travel and the international nature of our 21st century lives. It should therefore be of importance to all of us that we are aware of what is happening around the globe, not just in our own small corner of it. There are endless sources of information out there these days. Thanks to the internet, there are a variety of sources of news and almost no limit to the number of articles to be read on any topic. At a time when the world is ‘smaller’ than ever we would be foolish to allow our own horizons to be shut down by simply taking the easy route and absorbing what the BBC and ITV news choose to prioritise. Subscribe to any of the old ‘dailies’ if you can make the time each day; read them online if you prefer; get weeklies such as The Week, The Economist, The Spectator if daily is too much; read online magazines such as Spiked, UnHerd, the Shaw Sheet or the many others, if you would like a different emphasis on world events. Only Connect has today joined those online magazines and will attempt to lift the news from the parochial (which of course has its place) to the global as we head (eventually) into a post-pandemic world facing issues which will affect all of us.

Stoker Poor David Cameron. Not an expression which comes readily to mind. One of the mysteries of the book publishing world is the enormous advances paid to politicians for their memoirs. Fierce battles between publishing houses, no doubt three-way struggles between commissioning editor, finance director, and very happy writer’s agent, seem to produce marvellous sums of dosh. And for what? Harold MacMillan wrote a pretty turgid set of reminiscences in six volumes (he did own the publishing firm though). Anthony Eden restricted himself to three volumes, keeping his secrets by making them pretty unreadable. In mitigation, in great old age he wrote a slim volume, Another World, about his childhood and First World War service which is beautifully written, very moving, and showed a sensitive and fascinating man under that patrician crust. Margaret Thatcher managed to get her life into two volumes, the first one dealing with her period of high office, and the second starting from the famous Grantham grocer’s shop, but left it to Charles Moore in a further three volumes to tell the truth, whole and nothing but. Most surprisingly, Tony Blair dealt with his whole life in one quite slim volume, which though it reveals not much about his ministry, does tell a lot about the man himself – rather to his credit. To be fair, it is not easy as a senior cabinet minister to reveal all. The Cabinet Office does not like revelations – any revelations at all one suspects – and certainly likes to delete anything that might impact on current matters or policies or on persons now living if they might suffer disadvantage. That means proposed memoires, no matter how senior the autobiographer, must be submitted to those in Cabinet Office equipped with green, red, and thick black pencils. This, rumour has it, was a particular problem to David Cameron, who in spite of the comforts of country retreat, a shepherd’s hut and an alleged £800,000 advance, struggled to get finger to laptop, then to be bounced about on the pencils of Whitehall censorship. Alas, poor David. Not only is his book, For The Record, (just one volume), published only 16 months ago, already heavily discounted at Abe Books (down from £35 to around £8) (there’s an advance William Collins must be regretting), he was then considerably upstaged by the saucy volume of Lady Swire. Sasha Swire, a very well connected Tory and wife of junior minister, Hugo, was part of the Cameron inner circle. She was. She probably isn’t now. Her book told a few juicy tales about our former Prime Minister which do not improve his reputation but has certainly helped Lady Swire’s book fly off the shelves. And now DC is once again facing embarrassment from tales told out of school, and once again by a lady, indeed, a Lady. Lady Heywood of Whitehall. Not tittle tattle this time though, heavyweight revelations, and not about Lady Heywood’s distinguished career, which though is worth summarizing. She took degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, was fast tracked into H.M. Treasury where she rose rapidly, leaving after only four years to join McKinsey and Company, rising to a partnership within ten years, and then into various senior and distinguished posts in the commercial and arts worlds. Her book though is about the even more astonishing career of her late husband, Jeremy Heywood, a man of modest background but great intellect, who also joined the Treasury, becoming at the age of only 30 Principal Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, and talent spotted in 1997 into the Prime Minister’s Office by Tony Blair, becoming his Principal Private Secretary in 1999. He had a career blip by becoming embroiled in the David Kelly affair in 2003, resigned to go into commerce, but returned to the Civil Service in 2007; rising through various senior and highly sensitive jobs to become Cabinet Secretary in 2012, and then Head of the Home Civil Service in 2014. It was a career path that placed him in some of the most sensitive seats in the senior civil service, made him a close and much relied upon confidante of leading politicians at crucial points in British history, and enabled him to develop a reputation as an exceptionally safe and talented pair of hands. His later career was dogged by ill-health, and he died in late 2017 just after taking early retirement and being created a peer by Theresa May. During his last months of life he worked closely with his wife to draft a book about his life and career, and it is that which has just been published*. According to Lady H, the book had been largely written by her husband before his death and although completed by her, and published under her name, is essentially his and as he would have wished it. Which is interesting, as under current Civil Service rules regarding staff publishing material about their careers, he would be unlikely to have received consent for parts of the book; the more interesting parts, it has to be said. In this case there is in practice little that could be done to stop publication, it being carefully positioned as a biography, not a memoire, and there is no evidence that any attempt was made. Lady Heywood has hinted that David Cameron did at least try to hold it up until after his own volume was published, though whether so as to get his version of events on the street first or so as not to damage his sales is not made clear. Neither Lord and Lady Heywood were part of the traditional British establishment. Lady Heywood was mostly home-educated on a modest yacht sailing the Pacific, and Lord H was schooled at a Quaker boarding school. They have a degree of modest radicalism about their careers and lives, always happy to consider new ways of doing things – no harm in that. They were not over-modest – the title which Jeremy Heywood took, Heywood of Whitehall, raised an eyebrow or two, and the new book’s title - “What Does Jeremy Think?” - suggests a level of deferral to an advisor which might be better modestly played down. The book itself does reveal a lot more than is traditional about the relationships between senior politicians and their advisors, and as to how government works at that rarefied level. You may again be thinking; “well, no harm in that either”. But is there? Let us return briefly to Jeremy’s career misstep in 2003. The cause of his departure from Whitehall to the much more richly rewarded pastures of Morgan Stanley and merchant banking, was a breach of Civil Service rules. He was in various meetings regarding the death of David Kelly, the scientist embroiled in the Iraq weapons of mass destruction claims. Heywood however did not minute parts of those meetings. It seems unlikely that he took that decision off his own bat, but that is why there are Civil Service rules on minute-taking, and lots of other matters; so that politicians may be held to account in the future. It shows, as do other elements of his life, a degree of somewhat headstrong independence. He seems to have been perhaps more assertive in his advice and views than most Sir Humphrey’s have traditionally regarded as entirely wise; albeit many political leaders perhaps welcomed greater directness from their advisors. The problem, one might argue, is not the detail, but the implication. There are no great ground-shaking revelations about dangerous events or things said in this book, but what is unusual is that it has been published now, still so close to the happenings that Heywood was advising on; Iraq and Brexit in particular are still in play. He was very central to both those matters, and the impression is that he played a more crucial role than some civil servants – and observers of that institution – would find usual. It also rather gives the impression that Jeremy was not a team man, but that matters were concentrated into his own hands, leaving a void that proved difficult to fill. Certainly he went on working, even from his bed, until very shortly before his death. Equally certainly, Sir Mark Sedwill and Simon Case, his successors as Head of the Civil Service, have maintained a much lower profile. Lord Heywood was a highly distinguished, hard working, and loyal servant of the crown. His wife has recorded a life devoted to his country and its values. It is a book that will be of great interest to political observers and scholars. But like royalty, sometimes it is better that magic cannot be seen, at least until some time after the illusion has passed, and one cannot help but wonder if publication of this work might have been more prudently delayed for a few more years. *“What Does Jeremy Think?” Suzanne Heywood, published by Harper Collins, c.£25