UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Image: PA/Phil Noble)

VANISHING POINT

This week in Side View I have been investigating absence. Absence is my favourite state of being. Absence is a philosophically complex subject, as you will learn from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for “holes”. How many holes does a straw have, by the way? Are two holes just part of the same bigger (w)hole? And what does that have to do with George W Bush and Al Gore? Can presence arise from absence — or, put another way, can the universe come from nothing? Turns out it perhaps can. And how can you read climate change into Western culture through its absence?

POWER, CORRUPTION AND LIES

The sleaze and hatred of accountability surrounding Boris Johnson’s government recalls earlier, sordid eras of British politics. All that’s left of Trumpism is Donald’s ego and bitterness (wait — that wasn’t the whole lot before?). If you think the violent fringe of Trumpism is made up of the white underclass, you’re very wrong — these are comfortable middle-class people engaging in violence in support of conspiracy theories. And can Sweden offer some lessons in fighting misinformation online?

TOUCHED BY THE HAND OF GOD

A right-wing Christian group has brought a free speech case to the US Supreme Court to compel a government body to fly a Christian flag — and the Biden administration is backing them. Speaking of which, here’s a Christian take on how to prevent another attack on US democracy. And entrenched conservatism and hatred of secularism within the French Catholic Church is preventing it from dealing with its horrific legacy of child abuse.

TEMPTATION

How the sale of music rights by some of the world’s biggest artists will inexorably lead to further copyright extensions. Meantime, Winnie-the-Pooh has only just come into the public domain. A group of crypto idiots bought a copy of Dune for €2.66 million and think that therefore they own the copyright to the entire work. The Chinese regime and dictator Xi Jinping are now locked into a zero-COVID policy that will cause rolling disruption across China for months to come. And one of the world’s worst climate criminal states — even by the standards of its Middle Eastern neighbours — is becoming unliveable due to heat.

WAY OF LIFE

Over the break I finished the first volume of Chips Channon’s unexpurgated diaries; for me at least, the person who suffers most from the addition of so much material excluded from the Robert Rhodes James version isn’t anyone else (it’s unsurprising that the Queen Mother was pleasant to the point of terminal tedium even as a young woman) but Channon himself. The more we get of Chips, the less substantial he seems. The deeper we plunge into this deeply conflicted man (an American who despised America; a hater of democracy who was repeatedly elected MP, the closeted, married bisexual, the Chicago commoner who only felt at home with royalty, the man who longed for more children but refused to touch his wife), the shallower he gets.

And for one of the world’s most notorious 20th century gossips, what’s remarkable is his lack of insight. 1938 is Channon’s annus mirabilis — he is appointed parliamentary secretary to Rab Butler, the foreign affairs minister in the Commons with Halifax in the Lords, and the appeaser clique is riding high: Halifax and Butler have replaced Eden, Joseph Kennedy is the new American ambassador, and Channon celebrates Chamberlain as “the greatest man since Jesus” on his return from Munich.

He repeatedly notes in his diary his plans (none of which are ever enacted or even detailed) to oust from the Foreign Office officials he deems insufficiently pro-Hitler. Channon is so enamoured of fascist dictators and so terrified of the Soviet Union that he believed Chamberlain shares his view and will do anything he can to keep Germany onside. At no stage does it occur to him that Chamberlain is buying time to re-arm, and in particular to build up the RAF and build sufficient numbers of Spitfires — two policies Chamberlain had pursued in teeth of both internal and Labour opposition throughout much of the 1930s.

Channon, however, was so blinded by his anti-Semitism, anti-communism and hatred of democracy that his proximity to the greatest events of the age counts for nothing, and his analysis of the Munich crisis is no different to the chatter of other dupes of the Nazis at the aristocratic dinner tables in the luxurious residences in which he spends the summer of 1938. A perfect example of how ideology can blind politicians to even the clearest reality.

FINALLY

Meet the conservative who really liked Don’t Look Up. As for your compulsory canine content, how can one go past the golden retriever who is once bitten by a glass door and forever shy.