Inside politics
Andy Burnham at Cambridge with his future wife, Marie-France van Heel. Instagram
An English degree is the ideal preparation for public life
I will never forget the first question I was asked in my interview for a Kennedy Scholarship to study at Harvard, says former Labour culture minister Chris Smith in The Telegraph. I had studied English at Cambridge, then spent three years researching for a PhD on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and then applied. “Well Mr Smith,” said one of the Great and Good conducting the interview, “it would seem that you want to have some sort of career in public life. What’s the relevance of English to that?” Somehow, the perfect answer occurred to me: there is no better preparation for public life than English literature, I told them, because it tells you more about “character, relationships, society, joy, sorrow, emotion and intelligence” than anything else ever could. I got the scholarship. “And I still believe what I said to be profoundly true.”
Whenever I talk to employers they tell me the skills they’re looking for are an ability to understand and relate to people, a capacity for human empathy and emotional intelligence. Yes, AI is likely to be very good at maths, science, engineering and so on, but we need “wit, intelligence and understanding of the human condition” to steer AI in wise directions. It may be naive, but I can’t help hoping that Andy Burnham, who also studied English at Cambridge, will bring some of the human understanding he must have acquired with him into parliament. If nothing changes, he will be our first prime minister to have studied English at university, and that will be a “very good thing”.
📚🤝 The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood recently wrote: “Human beings are not simply data sets, and in human societies – such as those we all live in – understanding human beings in all their complexity is crucial.” She added: “The study of English, through novels, poetry, plays and essays, will take you into the heart of our shared humanity. It might even allow you to see the world with new eyes, and help you make it more humane.” How very true.
Property
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Comment
Gibson in 1985, rejecting the “paper internet”. Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty
Long live cultural gatekeepers
When the science fiction writer William Gibson was first starting out in the 1970s, says Jason Guriel in The Walrus, he made a point of avoiding what he later called the “paper internet” – an ecosystem of self-published magazines in which novices could place their work for free. He felt strongly that unless he could persuade someone whose job it was to select good stories to publish his work, he shouldn’t bother. He sold his first story for $23 in 1976, and went on to sell millions upon millions of books. It’s an idea that has become so alien in 2026 that it may as well be science fiction: “We should let someone else decide if our words are worth airing.”
In today’s world of blogs, social media, YouTube, podcasts, Substack and all the rest, the gatekeeper (publisher, commissioner, editor etc) is a diminished figure. Prose goes unedited, facts go unchecked and “algorithmically incentivised brainrot” – a Washington DC pizzeria harboured elite paedophiles; Winston Churchill was the “real villain” of World War Two – is broadcast globally. The funny thing is that many people waved gatekeepers off with a smile. The very idea of cultural tastemakers reeked of the “smoke-filled backroom” – too male, too white, and so on. But look where we’ve ended up: a din of unedited voices that make it all-but-impossible for genuine talent to be heard, and where those who do break through are painfully exposed to their audience, without the cover of an editor – that necessary membrane between the writer’s half-formed, typo-addled words and the wider world. They triage opinions, bash the best ones into shape and crucially, sometimes say no. I say bring back gatekeepers, and save us from ourselves.
Quirk of history
Churchill departing South Africa for England in 1899. Bettmann/Getty
One of the great feats of imperial derring-do
Earlier this month, says Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times, a letter was put up for sale, written in 1899 by a young Winston Churchill while he was being held as a prisoner of war in Pretoria. The fact that the 25-year-old novice newspaper reporter was in Pretoria at all speaks volumes about his love of adventure. Three days after the Boer War broke out, Churchill wangled a commission from the Morning Post and set sail for South Africa with six cases of claret and champagne. A fellow passenger remembered him burning with an unabashed ambition that was “frankly egotistical”, though he could “laugh at his dreams of glory” and had an “impish sense of fun”.
After being caught in a Boer ambush, Churchill’s captors considered shooting him but decided to keep him instead. As one cheerfully put it: “We don’t catch the son of a lord every day.” The young reporter hated his confinement in the Boers’ makeshift prison, so after a month he climbed over a wall behind the lavatory block and strolled out through suburban Pretoria, 300 miles from the safety of the coast. After concealing himself on a goods train, he hopped off in the middle of nowhere and wandered through the hills until he stumbled across a mine. By an extraordinary stroke of luck, the manager, a British sympathiser, agreed to hide him until he could board another train through the Transvaal to the border with Portuguese East Africa. Crossing the border, he fired his revolver several times in the air in celebration. As well he might have done. He had just pulled off one of the great feats of imperial derring-do and turned himself into an international celebrity.
The Knowledge Crossword
Global update
Servicewomen of the “Fighting witches” mobile group of Ukrainian Air Defence Forces. Yevhenii Vasyliev/Global Images Ukraine/Getty
The women winning the war for Ukraine
Last year, says Ken Harbaugh in The Atlantic, a Ukrainian housewife in a lonely marriage traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander stationed somewhere in occupied Ukraine. They talked about their days, disappointments and hopes for after the war. When she asked to see a picture of life at the front, Achmad sent a grinning selfie from his barracks. On the wall behind was a map showing the unit’s position. Shortly afterwards, it was struck by a Ukrainian drone. The “housewife” had been a middle-aged Ukrainian officer working for his country’s intelligence directorate. “Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.”
Such honeytraps are helping Ukraine’s resistance become “more lethal than ever”. A vast network of operatives, managed by handlers in unoccupied Ukraine, identify targets, verify coordinates – the location of Achmad’s barracks would have been confirmed by a ground agent – and smuggle documents through occupied territory. Phones that evade Russia’s surveillance software are delivered to them by drones, while print shops hide instruction manuals within best-selling paperbacks, allowing them to bypass the Russian guards at checkpoints. And with Russian soldiers less likely to suspect women of being combatants – few grasp that a grandmother passing their barracks every morning, shopping bags in hand, is the first link in a kill chain – the resistance’s backbone is female. Known as “vidmas”, essentially meaning “wise witches”, these women infiltrate Russia’s civil administration – at clinics, schools, government offices – then covertly pass information back to Ukrainian intelligence. Asked what would happen if Ukraine ran out of men, one former parliament member said: “Be careful what you wish for. If Ukraine’s women are in charge, there won’t be a Russian left alive.”
Quoted
“If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”
Edith Wharton
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