The village King Charles keeps going back to

The disturbing echoes of the Weimar Republic

To understand the “convulsions gripping our society”, says Michael Gove in The Spectator, it is perhaps best to look back to another country and another time: the Weimar Republic. Of course, no one in British politics today warrants comparison to Hitler. But other echoes of 1920s and 1930s Germany are “inescapable”. Politics has increasingly moved from parliament to the streets: Tommy Robinson’s rally last weekend followed months of pro-Palestine marches, much like the “reds and the reactionaries” coalescing around the flags in postwar Germany. And these demonstrations reflect widespread frustration with political failures. Just as Weimar’s final years were marked by a rapid turnover of leaders, the prime ministerial merry-go-round under the Tories has given way to an “enfeebled Labour leader openly derided by his own intimates”.

Economically, the dire state of our public finances leaves the pound “dangerously close to Reichsmark territory”. Culturally, the intellectual energy is with the most radical and transgressive forces: in Weimar, the right sought a “reactionary revolution” and an unconstrained leader ready to “take on the enemy within”; today, the appetite for something similar is growing. Perhaps the most “chilling” parallel is that those feeling the pressure first and most forcibly are the Jewish population. Anti-Semitism has become “the new normal” in Britain: synagogues daubed with faeces, Jewish students shunned on campus, thugs targeting MPs supportive of Israel. My concern over all this isn’t “performative”: the Islamist fanatic who killed Tory MP David Amess in 2021 also tried – six times – to kill me. Unless our democracy can start responding to the challenges it faces, our institutions will decay so much that many will “prefer to burn them down rather than refurbish and renew”.

The V&A’s new exhibition Marie Antoinette Style makes for a “lavish show”, says Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. It includes 17 different portraits of the young French queen showcasing the “striking headgear” she invariably wore on top of her colossal hairstyles: a cap celebrating the discovery of the smallpox vaccination; a hat with a ship on top to mark a naval victory. She ordered around 300 new and extravagant gowns each year, fragments of which are on display, and there is a “ravishing” collection of her painted fans featuring lovers, gods and a satirical scene in which a hairdresser stands on a ladder to work on a woman’s hair. More intimate relics include jewels, silk slippers, her piano, her perfume bottles and pot pourri bowls – “Versailles apparently stank”. It all brings you “as close as it’s possible to get to the real Marie Antoinette”. Runs until March 2026.

“Chancellor, you know f*** all about defence”

Field Marshal Charles Guthrie, who died this week aged 86, gave politicians little slack, says The Times. In April 1997, after being appointed chief of the defence staff, he arranged to meet Tony Blair at Claridge’s for breakfast. As the man set to become the next prime minister enthused unrealistically about special forces, Guthrie asked him how many men he thought there were in the SAS. Blair hazarded a guess: “Forty thousand?” Guthrie told him to take off a couple of zeroes. Later, during a fractious meeting with Gordon Brown in the Treasury, the then-chancellor said: “General, I do know a bit about defence, you know.” Guthrie replied: “Chancellor, you know fuck all about defence.”

Born in 1938, Guthrie joined the Welsh Guards after Harrow, where he was head of school and captained the first XV, and was later fast-tracked into troop command for the SAS. His talent was obvious – “That Colonel Guthrie,” Margaret Thatcher said after being briefed by him, “he’s going to the very top of the army” – and by July 1994 he’d risen to become chief of the general staff. Despite that inauspicious start with Blair, Guthrie worked well with the New Labour leader – the media called him “Tony’s general”. One moment that stuck with him was when, early in the NATO peacekeeping mission to Kosovo, he had lunch with the commanders of the French, Italian, German and US contingents. When he asked them all whether, if it came to it, they would fight, the French brigadier responded with some typical “Gallic cod-philosophy”, the Italian pretended not to hear the question and the German just replied “No”. The US brigadier? He looked at Guthrie and said: “You can count on us.”

👑💰 When he was made chief of the defence staff, Guthrie was told he’d have to buy his own field marshal’s baton, which cost an eye-watering £75,000. After mentioning this to Prince Philip, the royal said: “Oh, I’m sure there must be a few lying around somewhere.” Sure enough, a few days later the Duke of Edinburgh’s private secretary rang to say a baton had been found in an attic and that the Palace was “quite happy for him to have it”.