Rishi Sunak is the man behind the Eat Out to Help Out scheme. During August 2020, public money was used to subsidise people eating meals at restaurants and pubs, the aim being to boost the economy. A smiling Sunak was filmed, pretending to be a waiter, delivering dinners to customers. The economic benefit of the scheme was questionable, and it soon became clear that Eat Out to Help Out led to an increase in Covid cases, at a time when it looked as though the pandemic was relatively under control. Other schemes set up by Sunak to help businesses struggling during the pandemic proved open to fraud.
Sunak was born in 1980, educated at Winchester College (a public school) and Oxford University, before working for Goldman Sachs (a multinational bank) and a series of Hedge Funds. Sunak was elected MP for Richmond, in Yorkshire, at the 2015 General Election – being the successor to William Hague, who took early retirement to the House of Lords. Often referred to as a “rising star”, and tipped as a future leader of the Conservatives, Sunak joined the government in 2018, and became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020, replacing Sajid Javid.
Rishi Sunak is married to Akshata Murthy, a businesswoman, and the couple are known to be multi-millionaires. They own several houses, including one in London believed to be worth about £7 million. It is doubtful whether Sunak understands the experiences of the millions of people on average, or below average, incomes. Sunak’s October 2021 budget set out planned tax increases, forecast to take the tax burden, as a proportion of gross domestic product, to its highest level since 1951. In contrast to the Conservative Party’s tax cutting propaganda, Sunak was carrying out the reverse.
Patti Smith has long been one of the most original women in rock music, riding onto the scene with her debut album, Horses, way back in 1975. Smith’s records have often included poetic pieces, and she has complemented these with several books of poetry and short stories. In recent years, Smith the musician has largely been eclipsed by Smith the writer of amazing memoirs. Having dazzled with Just Kids (2010) and M Train (2015), Patti Smith continued the sequence in 2019 with Year of the Monkey.
I read M Train a few months after it appeared. At the time, I found it a bit of a challenge, due to the narrative style. I returned to the book in 2021 – with the cream pages already yellowing around the edges, this was starting to feel like an old friend – and found it a much more enjoyable read. I think that, having increased my knowledge of Patti, and her artistic hinterland, during the intervening years, a lot more was now clear to me. Perhaps relatively recent reading of other non-linear memoirs, including those of Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan, may have shown me the light. Strangely I can also see parallels between Patti Smith’s fact and the fiction of Ali Smith – with shifting narrative, and dazzling wordplay.
M Train is a beautifully rambling, in the best sense of the word, snapshot of Patti’s activities – illustrated with the black and white Polaroid photos for which she is renowned. Ahead of publication, Patti spoke of the book being intended as “a roadmap to my life”. Whereas Just Kids focussed on Patti’s friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, told chronologically, M Train is a diverse, but equally enthralling, journey. Although there are not many dates in the book, references to Hurricane Sandy battering the New Jersey shoreline, where Patti has recently acquired a beach house, and the aftermath, place a large part of the narrative during 2012 and 2013.
Patti spends a lot of time in a New York coffee house, writing in notebooks. This in turn leads to tales of travels, both physical and intellectual. A recurring dream about a cowboy, who advises Patti, runs through the book. Possibly the cowboy symbolises the legacy of Fred Sonic Smith, her late husband. “It’s not so easy writing about nothing” is the opening sentence of the book, courtesy of the cowboy. He has a point, but Patti has the ability to turn mundane daily activity into the starting point for many a fascinating anecdote. Some of these chronicles are stimulated by meditation, while Patti enjoys drinking one more cup of coffee for the road. Events in the present merge with memories from the past, many of which focus on Patti’s life with Fred, including a trip to Surinam and French Guiana, in 1981, in celebration of their first wedding anniversary. There are fond recollections of the childhoods of Patti and Fred’s son and daughter, Jackson and Jesse, as the family live quietly in St Clair Shores, Michigan, until the idyll is shattered by the death of Fred, in 1994. Patti also offers memories of her own childhood, with love for parents and siblings.
M Train is possibly unique, as a memoir of a musician in which music is rarely mentioned, despite Patti releasing the Banga album during the relevant period. She has so much else to share with us. Patti’s travels stretch across the Americas, several parts of Europe, northern Africa, and Japan. Appreciation of art and literature spans a dazzling variety of themes, from the work of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), the Mexican painter, to Patti watching the detectives in British television dramas. Throughout the book, Patti is modest about her many artistic and cultural achievements, which often stem from imaginative collaborations. One of the revelations is Patti’s role in the Continental Drift Club, a (now defunct) society, honouring the work of Alfred Wegener (1880-1930). Wegener was a German scientist, and explorer, who played a major role in developing the theory of Continental Drift.
Dominic Raab was appointed Foreign Secretary when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, in 2019. At the same time, Raab was given the position of First Secretary of State, making him an unofficial deputy to the premier, which in turn meant Raab led the government when Johnson was unwell with Covid, during the Spring of 2020. In August 2021, Raab refused to return home from a luxury holiday, on the Greek island of Crete, when colleagues expected him to work with the international community, to support people in Afghanistan, as the Taliban seized control. Johnson demoted Raab from his Foreign Secretary role the following month, but kept him in the Cabinet as Justice Secretary, and Lord Chancellor, while formally promoting Raab to the role of Deputy Prime Minister. It was a strange combination.
Raab has been MP for Esher and Walton since 2010. He was a junior minister in the final months of Cameron’s premiership, and returned to office, in the May government, after the 2017 General Election. Raab studied law at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but has not always been assiduous in the pursuit of knowledge. During his short spell as Brexit Secretary, in 2018, Raab said: “We want a bespoke arrangement in goods which recognises the peculiar, frankly, geographic, economic entity that is the United Kingdom. We are, and I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK, and if you look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing”.
At the start of 2019, Raab admitted he had not read the Good Friday Agreement. He claimed to have “used it as a reference tool” during Brexit discussions, but thought “it’s not like a novel where you sit down and you say do you know what, over the holidays, this is a cracking read”. Raab had failed to study a key document, that ran to only 32 pages. He entered the 2019 Conservative Leadership contest, but was eliminated in the second ballot.
Raab is one of several ministers in Johnson’s government who have benefitted from funding by Russian donors. During 2021, Raab’s local Conservative Association received £25,000 in contributions toward campaigning costs from Dmitry Leus, formerly a Russian banker, accused of money laundering. Questions were asked about the wisdom of the Foreign Secretary accepting money from such a source, at a time when the official line regarded Russia as potentially hostile to Britain.
andrewgodsell 