Television has seemed unusually prescient at times during 2020—but actually, it often is. It’s just that this year, we’ve had no choice but to notice it more, be more sensitive to its dramatic gambits and the way they resonate with our own lives. In the absence of live theatre, live comedy, live music and, for many of us, much in the way of intimate personal contact, it’s seemed more important than ever. We’ve projected our needs onto it. Television is an incredibly versatile medium—a filter through which everything passes. It can be ineffably trivial or as serious as your life. It can stimulate or pacify. It can be a window to the world or an escape route from it. In spring 2020, we needed it to be all of these things at once.

Who could have imagined that the two runaway TV hits of early lockdown would be a comedy drama about possible cheating on a game show and a sprawling documentary series about underground big cat breeding in America? And yet in some ways, ITV’s Quiz and Netflix’s Tiger King had more in common than you might imagine. Both seemed to exist inside entirely self-contained parameters; bubbles in which normal logic held no sway and the rigour of the outside world was, for a time at least, kept at bay.

At a couple of decades’ remove, the story of Charles Ingram, the former army Major who may or may not have attempted to cheat ITV’s prime time juggernaut Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? out of its jackpot seems delightfully eccentric and marginal. The details of the narrative seem too silly to be serious. There’s a striking moment in the drama when, just as ITV’s executives are processing events, someone pops their head around the office door and suggests they turn the television on. The date is September 11, 2001, and surreal and horrific real life events are crashing the TV party. Oddly, Quiz evoked a similar unease for viewers in 2020 as they tried to process the “new normal”. It was a temporary safe space, a place of refuge in a more trivial past. But after every episode came the ten o’clock news.

Tiger King, of course, was far weirder. In fact, its weirdness was the point. The story, which would have been far too absurdly lurid to work as a piece of authored narrative fiction, was the ultimate in escapism. If Quiz evoked familiarity and occupied a world we’d only recently vacated ourselves, for the vast majority of viewers Tiger King might as well have taken place on the dark side of the moon. And in retrospect, that constituted approximately 95 per cent of its appeal. Because in all honesty, there wasn’t much else.

There’s been talk of a second season of Tiger King—but the producers might want to tread carefully on that score. It could very well be that our fascination with the tawdry affairs of Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin is quarantined in April and May 2020. Tiger King was analysed to death at the time: what did it tell us about animal welfare; about LGBT issues in rural America; about humanity’s relationship with nature? But really, that wasn’t why anyone watched it. This was surely a one-off. The phrase “guilty pleasure” is usually infuriating for the snobbery and pusillanimity it implies. But in this instance it felt fitting—this really was an unredeeming, consistently dispiriting, morally blank freak show of a series whose only useful quality was its relentless supply of sensation and therefore, the grip its aberrant oddness was able to exert on our imaginations. It took us out of ourselves and most of us needed that badly.

Fortunately, TV also had something rather more nourishing and edifying up its sleeve. The future—and indeed the present—didn’t become any easier to reckon with. And escapism didn’t become any less necessary. But the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s breathtakingly intimate tale of first love, Normal People, was escapism of an entirely different order. Lockdown summoned introspection, remembrance and nostalgia: in the early stages, a series of diversionary games zipped around social media: what was your first concert, your first film, your formative cultural experience? Normal People dovetailed with that impulse, feeling simultaneously minty-fresh and bittersweet, evoking the sheer drama of youth with uncanny accuracy.

There were, of course, resonances with our situation in 2020—the discomfort of late adolescence; the sense of constraint; the feeling of not quite understanding new boundaries. But there was also human warmth; something we had been suddenly denied. And crucially, Normal People didn’t sugar-coat the memories it dramatised. Remember that day when you were 16 and you found yourself sitting next to the girl or boy of your dreams for an hour on the bus and you couldn’t think of a single thing to say? Surely the vast majority of us do? Teenage romantic yearning is exquisite torture but torture nonetheless. And Normal People never forgot this. Accordingly, it felt honest; a lockdown emotional crutch that we could trust to tell us the truth.

Inevitably, given all this navel-gazing, lockdown was an opportunity to take stock. The externally imposed suspension of normal human activity was—for those of us lucky enough not to have to worry about money—most constructively viewed as a collective sabbatical. BBC Two’s good-natured competitive travelogue Race Across the World functioned as both a vicarious jaunt through various exotic locations and a reminder to live; to never take opportunities for new experiences for granted. It felt both soothing and salutary. Could we, as individuals, emerge stronger from this? And more widely, could society learn a few lessons too? There was plenty of the usual British exceptionalism in the early stages of the pandemic—for example, BBC One’s self-parodically boosterish Our Finest Hours took great delight in the explicit conflation of Britain’s wartime endurance with our current situation as handled by our cosplay Churchill, Boris Johnson. “Now, as we did in World War Two,” boomed the voiceover, “we’re uniting in a common endeavour . . . once again we can be proud to be British.” Would Covid-19 be cowed by this performative display of British pluck? Sadly not.

Nevertheless, more thoughtful, challenging and even subversive material was on the way, once again reflecting with remarkable precision, 2020’s most influential trains of thought and pointing to a different future. BBC One’s Sitting in Limbo would have been a thoughtful, enraging and timely drama in any circumstances. But screening as it did, one day after a group of Bristolians dislodged the statue of slave trader Edward Colston from his plinth and rolled it into Avon Lake, this story of the Kafka-esque and seemingly malicious bureaucracy which ensnared black Briton Anthony Bryan when he attempted to secure a passport in 2015 seemed freakishly prescient. We were creeping out of lockdown and, partly thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement stirred in America by the police killing of George Floyd, we were asking questions of our own about entrenched inequality and racism. Michaela Coel’s startling drama I May Destroy You (BBC Three) also addressed race in subtle and nuanced ways—but the very fact that this adventurous, challenging drama, created by and starring a young, black, working-class woman, had been commissioned felt like significant progress. Was a different Britain beginning to emerge?

Maybe it was. But as the leaves turned yellow, the temperature fell and the Covid infection rate began to rise again, a grimmer reality returned. The pubs were closing again and parks suddenly looked like less hospitable places. In logistical terms, this year has been as much of a nightmare for the creators of TV as it has for anyone else. A glance at the prime time schedules over the last month or so suggests that the well of new programming is running worryingly dry. But there was always The Great British Bake Off. In spite of everything, the Channel 4 pastry staple had managed to pitch its marquee in the heart of summer—an immovable feast, even in a year whose exigencies had defeated the Olympic Games, Glastonbury Festival and Notting Hill Carnival. And how welcome it was, even to sceptics: a warm blanket to dive under as an impossibly forbidding winter lockdown loomed.

On November 3, millions of us prepared for the nervy reality of a night staring at coverage of what felt like the most consequential US election in a generation with an hour in the Bake Off tent. An hour during which no tragedy greater than a collapsed soufflé could possibly occur. It felt like television as palliative care. Escapist? Of course. Necessary? You bet. 

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The Creative Industries Federation has just surveyed 2,000 creative businesses in the UK. An astonishing 50 per cent of them said they would probably not survive beyond the end of June. Half of one of our most important industries has been devastated in a matter of weeks.

And now, the dilemma. Never in the history of television has the entire population of the country been at home, all day and all night, crying out to be informed, educated, and, perhaps most importantly, entertained. This has kickstarted a scramble for content as broadcasters and producers rush to get lockdown-friendly material  on air.

This dilemma is intensified by the complex nature of television scheduling. Some projects—high-end dramas, for instance—can take years to come to the screen. Others, particularly in entertainment, have much shorter gestation periods. Series can be commissioned to air in a matter of weeks. Big-hitting family favourites such as Saturday Night Takeaway and Strictly Come Dancing are broadcast live.

This means that holes start appearing in the schedules relatively quickly. If you add the tens of thousands of hours of live sport that have been shelved, and throw in the fact that all our soaps are on the cusp of running dry, the velocity and vandalism of this virus on the body of the industry comes into stark relief.

Entertainment chiefs have been battling valiantly. Technology is a useful weapon in the fight. Shows continue to be produced, remotely, and beloved brands like Have I Got News For You continue to air, albeit differently. A handful of new formats have been quickly cut in editors’ kitchens and served up to hungry audiences.

It’s been hit and miss. But then entertainment always is. We have quickly reached a certain Zoom-tolerance threshold when it comes to original content. But the pandemic is making us all ask more profound questions about what it is we do. As the television community in the UK (and all over the world) reels from the triple-pronged assault of production shutdown, evaporating advertising budgets and a mass exodus of skilled workers, there are, inevitably, more existential questions to be asked.

Whereas big-hitting scripted shows like Game of Thrones propel us into fantastical worlds in which magic, sex, power and death collide in an intoxicating swirl of the impossible made real, it’s the unscripted entertainment juggernauts that keep us firmly rooted in the present.

One veteran producer describes a good entertainment format as: “Any show where decent, ordinary people get to win something.” Simple, yes, but also poignant. From X-Factor to Big Brother, watching our fellow human beings strive to become better versions of themselves is addictive, therapeutic and even cathartic. (I know I’d be useless at riding a dragon or wielding a broadsword, and would make a terrible international drug baron, but I think Paul Hollywood might quite like my tarte tatin.)

We will always watch fictional kings and queens, witches, daemons, heroes and villains but, in great entertainment, the players that strut and fret upon the stage . . . are you and me. That’s the important difference, because in a time where our very survival seems to be at stake, content that values us as participating members of society has a heightened sense of purpose.

Claudia Rosencrantz, who oversaw a golden decade of entertainment at ITV and the creation of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Britain’s Got Talent, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and Love Island, is passionate about its higher purpose: “The role of entertainment at times of great stress . . . is to offer unity—a focus for social cohesion amongst families and friends of all ages and groups which allow them to watch together, share together, be together even when they are separated. So the shared experience of watching the same content bridges distance and generations.”

But she is also wary of the new future that we face. The fear of coronavirus, so successfully sown in the national consciousness by the government, is not something that can be weeded out as quickly as it was seeded. Yes, at some point we will again be allowed to put TV crews together, to film members of the public, even to assemble large studio audiences. But this presents a challenge, a moral and behavioural conundrum for producers and broadcasters alike. The cancellation of this summer’s series of the hugely popular Love Island was inevitable, but putting twelve young strangers on a plane to Majorca and asking them to live together in  a villa, and then beds, feels like an improbable aspiration even for next year right now. This unseeable enemy will have long-term subliminal impacts on us all, an Israeli scientist recently observed.

Looking back on the years during which I produced Big Brother, I realise that we imposed a strangely prescient kind of lockdown on all our participants, every summer for nearly twenty years. So, what now? There is some optimism that things might quickly return to some kind of normality. We are told that many of our favourite shows will return later this year. I hope they do. I suspect they will not.

Television has excelled itself in recent weeks. The BBC has effortlessly glided its way back into untouchable National Treasure status. But the virus has latched on to many, if not all, of the main arteries that supply and sustain the wider body of television production here in the UK. The coming weeks and months could herald a catastrophic diminution of the resources and people needed to provide those shared experiences that sustain us, through good times and bad. Let’s hope our revels now are not ended.

The fee for this article will be donated to the Covid-19 Film and TV Emergency Relief Fund.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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The screen version of the intelligence world displays a perplexing interest in getting a few, small details right while otherwise throwing common sense to the wind. Why hire some ex-intelligence officer to assure that Ryan’s badge looks real and the file folders are the right colour, if the basic story has no connection with reality whatsoever? The handful of people who know what a real burn bag for classified papers looks like will also be those most critical of the show’s other failings.

Hollywood’s primary interest is to entertain the audience. Car chases,  explosions, escapes across rooftops and murders—lots of murders—do provide a sugar high, but they fail as more enduring stories. Placing the espionage genre inside the category of “action films” has been a disservice to quality writers who know how to tell a real story, and ultimately a disservice to the audience. It is possible, indeed realistic, to explore high-stakes issues with life and death consequences without having a lone intelligence officer chase someone or shoot them.

The underpinnings of the spy game are exactly what Hollywood (and literature) does best: human relationships. Real espionage is about the human factor. It explores flawed individuals, trust, betrayal, ego, manipulation, secrecy, psychology, cowardice, bravery and vulnerability, all placed within the pressure cooker of international politics and national security. It is less a story of good against evil than a constant balance of moral and ethical dilemmas in an environment with no obvious answers. Each situation is different and worthy of exploration.

Anyone who has lived in the clandestine world knows that the relationship between source and handler is often the most intense non-romantic connection that two people can share. A source betraying his country cannot share his opinions and feelings with anyone else in his life. Living with the knowledge that you could be arrested and killed at any moment provides an atmosphere of intensity to those few times when you meet the one person who knows your reality.

The Soviet spy Adolph Tolkachev was so committed to damaging the communist state that he insisted on stealing and passing secret documents to his CIA handler even as he feared he was coming under scrutiny. Every time he was called to his boss’s office, he would place a CIA-issued suicide pill into his mouth, between his cheek and gums, for fear that it might be a KGB ambush to have him arrested. He wanted to be able to bite down at any minute so that he would not give the KGB the satisfaction of interrogating and torturing him. Following the meeting, he would hide the pill and continue spying. Imagine the intensity of the covert relationship with his CIA handler.

A former colleague tells the story of a burgeoning relationship with a senior official of a country with state-mandated religion. After building trust, the official shared something that he could not tell anyone, not even his wife. He did not believe in God. Unable to discuss his doubts with his friends, he continued to pray with his family, friends and co-workers, always wondering if they too had doubts. Confiding in the wrong person could mean the loss of his job and family. The one place he could be himself was in his relationship with the CIA. The failure to depict the asset’s perspective is a common lapse in the Hollywood approach.  He or she is the one in real danger and many, unlike us, do not have any training. We have the PACE (which stands for Primary Alternate Contingency and Emergency) in the communications plan drilled into us. They are struggling to remember it, when any lapse puts their lives (and their family’s safety) in our hands.

By far, the most-asked question to anyone with experience in the intelligence community is, “how close is Homeland to reality?” After explaining that real intelligence work does not involve shootouts on American streets, or dependence on officers with mental problems, it is nonetheless difficult to offer an alternative that is closer to reality. Some shows get parts correct. The Americans included elements of street tradecraft and a reliance on sources that did not stray too far from reality. The Spy, with Sacha Baron Cohen, provided a reasonable look at how intelligence agencies and policy-makers can pressure operatives to produce results. The Little Drummer Girl gave a good sense of the slow planning and rehearsal that precede a successful operation.

That said, most productions fall into the trap of providing constant motion and action. Of course, intelligence agencies accrue some benefit in allowing the myth to remain. A smaller intelligence service like the British SIS benefits from the reputation of James Bond. Many a potential source may have been swayed to speak to British diplomats and spies having been brought up with the fantasy that the British maintain some special skill in the art of espionage. Likewise, foes of the Israelis probably lose some effectiveness due to their need to hide in fear of being assassinated.

Intelligence officers like to see ourselves as the fit, attractive and multi-talented actors on the screen. But the actual skills required to succeed are more mundane—and also rarer. A good officer must be comfortable dealing with ambiguity. They must have a honed sense of judgment, be able to develop deep relationships and engender trust, be a good listener, have a facility with foreign languages, have a sense of spatial awareness and ability to operate on the street, write effectively, be comfortable in foreign cultures and keep up-to-date on political, diplomatic, scientific and military issues. We may need to carry a gun or trek to places our military colleagues cannot go, but shooting our way out of trouble or using our sexual wiles to infiltrate a closed facility are not taught at our training facilities—and we watch them on screen with amusement and bafflement.

Spy fiction

A dozen tropes in the espionage genre that drive practitioners crazy

1.  Accounting
   We work for the taxpayers and are held
   accountable for all the things that we use and destroy. James Bond never seems to fill in his expense forms.

2. All-knowing, all-seeing
   The State Department once lost a colleague’s household goods for six weeks, but the CIA can find Jason Bourne hiding in an isolated home in the south of France from one phone call and then get a hit team there in the blink of an eye. If only!

3. Basic security failures
   The prime responsibility of any intelligence officer is to protect their sources. No one would engage in cellphone conversations with sources, or from the field to headquarters. Anyone who has public meetings with clandestine sources, or brings sensitive documents to public places or hotel rooms, would have a very short career.

4. Blackmail
   A staple tension-builder in spy films—but it is  drilled into us from day one that we just don’t do it. Like torture: not only is it wrong, it doesn’t work. Anyone strong-armed into cooperating looks for a means to get out of it. We would not be successful if those people working for us despised us and were looking for revenge.
5. High-level involvement
   Senior officials make policy and run large programmes. They do not micro-manage complex operations taking place thousands of miles from home. Likewise, most senior leaders and Congressional overseers do not really grasp the art of espionage. When practitioners meet to swap stories, tales of silly Congressional questions are a favourite topic.

6. High-tech gizmos
   Good intelligence involves data analysis, surveillance, encryption and occasionally a gadget. Unlike on film, our offices are rarely filled with multiple TV screens and feeds; we must be able to lock everything up at night. The crux of the business is people-to-people communication, and technology offers no shortcut to building trust.

7. “Losing” surveillance
   Trying to speed away from those watching you in a foreign country guarantees that you will become a prime target for that country’s spy-catchers, and will never be able to meet sources there again.

8. Rogue operatives
   Good intelligence is highly organised, coordinated and planned. An intelligence officer who takes action without fully informing the team will find themselves without the support they need to succeed. At the CIA, we say that if it isn’t written and communicated, it didn’t happen. Does anybody ever do a write-up? 
9. “Sweeping” for bugs
   Finding hidden microphones and cameras is the job of experts. It is slow and often destructive.

10. Sex with sources
    Sleeping with a source or prospective source is not just a career killer. It is against everything we learn and preach.

11. The singleton hero
    He/she recognises some form of evil (often involving his own bosses), and, unbound by regulation or law, fights against the system, personally taking down the bad guy, usually via gunfire, and often displaying near-superhuman powers. Real spy agencies succeed only by teamwork, which brings a variety of experience and expertise to bear.

12. Weapons galore
    Everyone has a gun and is ready to use it at any time. I know more field officers who sent guns home from their overseas offices for fear they might be misused, than colleagues who shot someone. Most clandestine operatives have had only a few days familiarisation with a couple of weapons. The paperwork from an accidental discharge is monstrous, by the way. 

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Jones (who had earlier worked as foreign affairs adviser for the former prime minister David Lloyd George) travels to Moscow to reignite an old friendship and find out how the Soviet regime is funding industrial development. On arrival, he discovers that his friend, a journalist who had hinted that he was on to a big story, has been murdered. 

Vanessa Kirby (Princess Margaret in the first two series of The Crown) is the fragile and conflicted love interest, Ada Brooks. Like many young idealists in the 1930s, she has found that the reality of Soviet Communism falls short of the promised utopia. She reveals that she has the dead journalist’s notebook and Jones sets out to investigate the cover-up.

Jones wangles a trip out of Moscow, where other Western journalists are confined, and then escapes from his minder. He journeys deep into Ukraine, supposedly the country’s breadbasket, where he stumbles across of one of the great horrors of the 20th century: the Holodomor, Stalin’s enforced famine, which the regime is trying to hide from the world.

The luxury of the first-class train he leaves for an unlit cattle car crammed with starving peasants foreshadows what he is to find.

The Soviet Union of the Western imagination is a Potemkin village, a stage-set which hides the brutal reality of repression and mass murder. He almost stumbles over the first of many bodies, lying in the snow on the platform, as he disembarks. Others walk by unconcerned. Narrowly escaping arrest, he finds himself in an almost deserted village, inhabited only by the dead and the dying. The horror unfolds. Body collectors appear and throw a corpse onto the pile already on their sleigh. Then toss a howling infant on top of its dead mother. The shock is a body blow. Worse is to follow.

Despite similarities in the setting, Mr. Jones is no Doctor Zhivago. Where David Lean’s snowscapes had an epic romanticism, Holland’s are dark and bleached of colour. The skies are grey, never blue. Even in Moscow, the grand interiors are bleak: the rooms are vast, the ceilings high, walls bare, the uncarpeted floors—always stone—echo with every step. In Doctor Zhivago, there is hope. Love can still win through. In Mr. Jones, hauntingly, there is none.

Those who know the story will find frustrations. Crucial characters like journalists Eugene Lyons, who also turned on Jones; Malcolm Muggeridge, who broke the famine story too;  and the British engineers working for Metropolitan Vickers cannot be developed. The Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, at one time a political refugee in Hampstead with a British wife, appears but is not clearly identified. 

Yet many scenes reveal a faithful attention to detail: the typically obstructive receptionist at Jones’s first Moscow hotel, the bribe to get a room at the second one, Ada’s noisy communal flat and Jones’s minder’s row of gold teeth and his unlabelled “half-litre”, the standard vodka bottle, drunk neat with slices of sausage. These all resonate authenticity.   

James Norton’s portrayal of Jones is accomplished. He captures well the youthful determination and enthusiasm, the combination of innocence and wisdom that contrasts sharply with the jaundiced cynicism of the old Russia hands in the Moscow press corps, especially in the repeated conflict with Peter Sarsgaard’s loathsome, unprincipled Walter Duranty, of the New York Times.

“You are really rather dull, Mr Jones,” sneers a drunk Duranty, dressed only in a suspender belt, as the teetotal, non-smoking Jones leaves one of his debauched parties early. In one of the film’s best lines, Jones quips straight back: “Well, I’m standing opposite a completely naked Pulitzer Prize winner. My life can’t be that dull, can it?”

As the story gathers pace, Duranty, by now lauded in both Moscow and Washington, goes on the attack. We become increasingly engaged with the lone Welshman’s costly struggle and are left to reflect upon the enduring temptation of moral compromise in a troubled world.

In real life, Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize has remained a sore point. In 2003, the Pulitzer Committee refused appeals to revoke it on the grounds that the award was for articles written in 1931, two years before Duranty dismissed Jones’s famine reports as a worthless “scare story”. No action, the Committee insisted, could be taken without evidence of “clear and convincing deliberate deception” in the earlier articles. We now know that that evidence exists. At the time that he wrote them, Duranty told a diplomat that, by agreement between the New York Times and Moscow, his reports reflected the Soviet propaganda line. Mr. Jones should prompt a rethink of that—and more.

“Mr. Jones” opens in UK cinemas on February 7. Jones is also the hero of “The Useful Idiot”,
a new thriller by the journalist John Sweeney

The post A hunger for the truth appeared first on Standpoint.

After the war the British government offered a home to 1,000 Jewish orphans. But only 731 visas were issued: many of the youngsters point-blank refused to accept the offer from the country they had come to see as an enemy. The orphans wanted to travel to Palestine, but the British, in control of the Mandate territory, were blocking their route with Royal Navy patrols. Despite promises that they would lift the restrictions on Jewish emigration to Palestine, Clement Attlee’s new Labour government kept the strict pre-war quotas that had been implemented to avoid antagonising the Arabs who controlled Britain’s crucial oil supply.

This did not deter the Jewish teenagers. They rejected the British visas to join  thousands of others attempting to enter Palestine on illegal immigrant ships. A hundred youngsters tried to break through the British blockade on the Josiah Wedgwood, a former Canadian corvette. The survivors joined battle against the Royal Navy sailors who had boarded their illegal immigrant boat on the high seas off the Haifa coast, pelting them with potatoes and tinned food.

While researching the story of “The Boys” and the survivors of the Josiah Wedgwood, I meet Jack Bursztain, who died in 2012, in the virtual world of Holocaust testaments. He was born in the Polish industrial city of Lodz in 1927, was incarcerated in the Lodz ghetto and survived not only Auschwitz, but three death marches. The US Army liberated him and other survivors from Gunskirchen camp.

Yechiel Aleksander was also one of “The Boys”, and, now 97, he told me how after the liberation, as soon as he was well enough to leave the hospital where he’d been treated for malnutrition, he was turned out onto the streets to fend for himself. He soon joined Bursztain and with their friends the two 17-year-olds lived a feral existence, setting up a base in the railway station in Graz, in southern Austria, where they had found temporary shelter.

“We went out in groups of eight to 10,” Bursztain told me. “We stole potatoes, selling them for cigarettes and then selling the cigarettes on the black market.” They stole everything they needed and dressed in German uniforms that they found in a storehouse. (Bursztain remembered ripping off the hateful Nazi insignia before he and his friends would don the uniforms.)

“We did not listen to anyone, not that anyone offered to help. Then one day soldiers from the Jewish Brigade came and saved us,” Aleksander remembered.

A British army unit of Jewish recruits from Palestine that had fought its way through Italy, the Jewish Brigade had, after the end of hostilities, disregarded orders and crossed into Austria to help Holocaust survivors. Aleksander recalled how his friends admired these soldiers, with Stars of David painted on their guns and jeeps. In June 1945, as the Brigade took the youngsters to a Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Graz, one soldier, Yehuda Tobin, wrote home: “These boys . . . were 10, 11, 12 when the war broke out. They ‘spent’ most of the [last] five to six years in ghettos, concentration camps, forests, on the run . . . Fear grips me when I think about those young boys. What have they not endured?” 

It was in the DP camp the British offered the group UK visas. “We all said ‘No!’”, Aleksander told me. “We only wanted to live among Jews.” The Jewish Brigade soldiers and the Zionist organisations that led the survivors agreed: the orphans’ new home should be Palestine. 

The Brigade took the boys illegally across the border to Italy in their British army trucks. Bursztain was still wide-eyed as he remembered that moment, decades later. “It was the first time in my life I ever ate a cherry tomato. First time in my life I have seen white bread that the Anglo-Saxon world eats.”

Just like “the Boys” who came to Britain, the teenage survivors in Italy were taken to hostels to recuperate. Their new home was the stunning Villa Bencistà in Fiesole, above Florence. Bought by the Simoni family in 1925 and turned into a hotel, the villa boasted a breath-taking panorama of the Tuscan countryside, and a series of opulent rooms, including one that had served Arnold Böcklin, one of Adolf Hitler’s favourite painters, as a studio.

The Italians, according to Aleksand-er, welcomed the survivors with open arms and did everything to help them. (When I asked him what Italy meant to him, he jumped up from his chair: “Amore! Civilizzazione!”)

Simone Simoni, now 90, was 16 years old in 1945 when the teenage survivors arrived. He recalled how the group cut down a large cypress tree to make a flagpole: “Every morning they raised the unofficial Israeli flag and sang a patriotic song.” 

The Jewish soldiers helped Aleksander and his friends rebuild their lives, filling their charges with a love of Palestine and a deep Zionist commitment, but also giving them a wider education: Aleksander learned Italian and recalled an expedition to see La Bohème; at Yom Kippur the teenagers were taken to Florence’s huge Moorish-style synagogue. In particular, Aleksander remembers Arieh Avisar, the Jewish Brigade soldier who ran the house. As a British serviceman, Avisar received alcohol rations, which he sold to raise cash for the boys’ food. At 20-something he became a father figure, Bursztain said: “He taught us how to be a real mensch. He taught us reading, writing and arithmetic and above all he sat us down and listened to our problems.”

None of this is likely to appear in The Children. The Villa Bencistà cannot be considered a British triumph. It was, however, a humanitarian one.

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This distaste takes many forms. Most of them are cultural. Those who feel it spurn christenings and church weddings.  Sometimes, they reject marriage itself, even its most stripped-down and patriarchy-free form. They are often actively furious that so much of the better education in this country comes with Christian extras. And they feel uncomfortable at just how much of the British cultural inheritance, from architecture and music to literature and poetry, is tinged and flavoured with Christian sentiment and references.     

The novelist Philip Pullman has been taking swipes at the Christian church for decades now, turning a small personal preoccupation into a sizeable industry. He has been frank and explicit about seeking to attack the basis of Christian belief, though many of his readers don’t know about his vehemence and are disturbed when it is pointed out to them.  But now he has more worrying companions in Margaret Atwood and Robert Harris. These are accomplished novelists with large followings who have not really been identified as ideologically anti-Christian until now. Margaret Atwood published her clever, enjoyable novel about an America ruled by evangelical fanatics, The Handmaid’s Tale, an amazing 34 years ago. It became reasonably well known, over the years, but it was not the great overpowering cultural monster it has since become.

Its adaptation into a TV series has changed it into a much more explicitly anti-Christian work. Many of its readers thought, when it came out, that it was very much based on the Iranian Islamist revolution of 1979, still an event of gigantic, shocking force in 1985. There is evidence that Atwood thought so, too. Until the recent rise of anti-Christian feeling in the West, nobody would have had any doubt of what was being described, in a nation in which women were stripped of former freedoms, and compelled to scurry about with their heads bowed and their gazes controlled, in enveloping robes.

The satirical endnotes, supposedly a transcript of a historians’ convention in 2095, mention a study of “Iran and Gilead: two late-20th-century monotheocracies”. And in the years when Atwood was writing it, the images of westernised Persian women being forced into submission and compelled to hunch timidly in black chadors shocked a culture that had come to see female emancipation as irreversible and worldwide. The invented Gilead, on the other hand, never came to pass in its predicted time (as Nineteen Eighty-Four did not, and as Brave New World did, though hardly anyone noticed). Nor did anything like it take place in any Western or Christian country. Atwood followed it with many other successful novels, which were often radical and feminist in tone, but made no attempts to revisit Gilead, the patriarchal, misogynist republic of The Handmaid’s Tale.

The rather nasty TV series, amusingly starring a Scientologist actress, Elisabeth Moss, as the anti-religious heroine, Offred, gave the Handmaid and her tale a completely new existence, as TV tends to do. Just as Colin Dexter’s fictional Inspector Morse acquired a red Jaguar car in Dexter’s later books, to bring him into line with the TV version, Offred’s miseries became much more rooted to one time and one place—an alternative modern USA. This heavy-handed melodrama turned Atwood’s carefully-revealed imaginary world ,which she gradually uncovers to the reader, into a relentless, leadenly-explained reality.  The TV series placed Gilead quite definitely in the 21st-century USA, and gave it an explicitly Christian character, with a recording of a choir singing “Onward, Christian soldiers” rather oddly chosen to accompany a scene of officially sanctioned rape. As it extended itself beyond the original, it also became more graphically cruel and melodramatic.

The same has happened in The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, £20), the sequel now launched on a world that knows very little of the Ayatollah Khomeini, but a great deal about #MeToo, Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein. It also has to make up for the fact that in 1985 the great new faith of anthropogenic global warming had yet to be born, and must now be inserted into the story. Gilead is denounced in its fictional demonstrations in Canada as a “climate science de-liar”. 

I suspect Atwood set to her work without much enthusiasm but with a strong sense of duty. The fiction writer’s motto is show, don’t tell. But The Testaments tells as well as shows, relentlessly and ploddingly. Officials of Gilead speak to each other like this: “Our own version is that the Canadians are covering up, and the depraved Mayday terrorists enabled by Canada’s lax tolerance of their illegal presence killed Aunt Adrianna. Though, between you and me, we are baffled. Who can tell? It may even have been one of those drug-related killings so prevalent in that decadent society. Aunt Sally was just around the corner purchasing some eggs . . .” and so on and on, a bit like the not-very-thrilling later Le Carré thrillers, where duty has replaced pleasure or excitement. This leaden dialogue may be meant to be satirical, but I am not sure.

One quite good running joke, which millions will not get, is that the dreaded Aunts, traitors to their sex who operate a kind of puritan secret police, relax from their labours over cups of hot milk in the Schlafly Café. I think this unalluring place is the only thing in Gilead named after a real figure in modern politics. Its regime, of puritanical censorship, hangings, torture and imposed illiteracy, is thus identified with the late Phyllis Schlafly, the highly-educated, resolutely unfashionable, Roman Catholic, Republican woman who defeated the Equal Rights Amendment in the USA, opposed abortion and argued against second-wave feminism. It is a perfect illustration of the total loss of proportion that sometimes afflicts the radical movement.

In the cross-cutting between funky Canada and strait-laced puritan Gilead, leaving aside the repression and the persecution, there is no question that Atwood is declaring an allegiance. On one side of the border is freedom, which is, deep down, all about bodily autonomy. On the other is repression, enforced ignorance and hypocrisy, which is, deep down, identified with Christianity. TV has transformed Atwood from an interesting author into a propagandist. I doubt anyone will read the later work for pleasure.

But what has brought Robert Harris, master of the intelligent thriller, to his condemnation of Christianity? Harris is famously grumpy about the vote to leave the EU, but how has he managed to identify Nigel Farage with the King James Bible and the Church of England, if that is what he has done?  And if not, what has motivated this very odd work?

The premise of The Second Sleep (Hutchinson, £20) is as good as all Harris’s ideas. Civilisation has ended because it became too reliant on computers, which failed. Hundreds of years later, in rural Wessex, we are introduced into a new dark age. Our world has ended in terror and is a matter of myth and archaeology.  Out of the ruins man has built a society that is relentlessly hostile to the scientific ideas that are believed to have led to an apocalypse.  Far from seeking to find out how the past was so prosperous and healthy, and to avoid the problems that brought it down, it has turned its back on “science” and “scientism”, without making much distinction between the two. 

This wilfully stupid and ignorant regime suppresses knowledge of the past, burns books, and calls those who seek that knowledge “heretics”. It imprisons them and brands their foreheads.

Somehow this rather moronic despotism has settled on Stuart England as its ideal era. It has its attractive side. Though they struggle with exactly when to say “Ye”, or “Thee” or “Thou”, its people speak something like the language of the King James Bible or the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is back in universal use. English customary measures are restored, and the metric system is forgotten. But we are not spared details of the squalid poverty and cruel, untreated and unprevented disease, which the lack of “scientism” has inflicted. The Bible has become a sort of Oldspeak Dictionary, whose words are the only ones allowed to be used. Somehow, this restriction is supposed to deter “scientism” and science, which makes one wonder how Isaac Newton managed.

I cannot say that it is Harris’s best work, though I longed to like it. Its plot is, like its mud-choked brambled roads, reminiscent of Launcelot Andrewes’ great description of the journey of the Wise Men: “The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, the very dead of winter.”

But there is a spite in it: the identification of the Church, especially the Church of England and its glorious, poetic texts, with the suppression of human inquiry. At least Atwood’s conflict between bodily autonomy and Christian conscience is real, for the Church is ultimately on the side of the stable married family against the new fluid world, even if this is not a recipe for a repressive police state. But science is not the enemy of Christian belief. It is based upon the idea that the universe is a purposeful thing governed by discoverable laws. Einstein, though no sort of religious believer, was emphatically not an atheist. And in any search for human freedom under a proper rule of law in a world where these things are rare, those countries where Protestant Christianity has been the predominant belief are the best places to look.

Yet intelligent, literate, creative people such as Atwood and Harris—and many of their readers who will no doubt endorse both these books—continue to identify Christianity as an enemy. Will they only realise their mistake when it is too late, as is so often the case? 

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Everyone lies about sex, and measurements of the porn market’s size are notoriously unreliable. Journalists quote a figure from 2010 that 37 per cent of the internet is made up of porn. It’s not true now, and almost certainly was not true then. The best estimate is that the sweaty fingers of users looking for pornography type about 13 per cent of all searches. Even the scaled-back figure reveals a vast market for carnal pleasures. Just one site — Pornhub — had 28.5 billion visitors in 2017.

Radical feminists and moral conservatives aside, the dominant mode of thinking in Western societies has held that society has no right to interfere. “What consenting adults do in private is their business. As long as they harm no one else, they should be free to behave as they choose.”

The harm principle is about to be put to a searching test as technology makes the dividing line between virtual reality (VR) and actual reality meaningless. VR platforms can provide immersive experiences, which are so convincing the user feels they are authentic. Soon you will be able to turn yourself, your friends, neighbours and celebrities into avatars. Headsets will deliver sights and sounds as you play with them. Olfactory gasses and oils will provide the appropriate smells. The sensations of touching others and being touched yourself will be created, indeed already are being created, by “haptic” vests, gloves, masks and armbands. Meanwhile, a patent that crippled the development of teledildonics — web-controlled vibrators and dildos — that can mimic sex at the command of a long-distance lover or a machine that reads the participants’ responses — expired in August. Maxine Lynn, a US intellectual property lawyer with expertise in sex and technology, announced in a suitably ecstatic voice that “the race will be on to create the most fantastic orgasmic experience possible over an internet connection”. The SexTech market was “exploding with demand”, as the existing traffic to pornographic sites showed. It will be met.

No “others” will be hurt in the new world of immersive sex. Indeed, no one apart from the user need be involved in the games. VR can be a solipsistic entertainment with just one player. But the moral questions will be extraordinarily hard and push the liberal consensus on sexual morality to the point of breakdown.

Consider the following examples offered by Jamie Susskind in Future Politics (Oxford, £20), his study of how modern societies should respond to the web revolution. Should 21st-century onanists be allowed virtual sex with avatars of their husband’s or wife’s best friend, or the woman across the street or across the desk at work? No one would be harming them. But if they found out, they would in all likelihood be disturbed, maybe profoundly so. My guess is that they would want easily enforceable image rights over virtual incarnations of themselves so realistic it was possible for people they knew and near-strangers — the man in a corner at the bar, the colleague they never noticed at work — to have sex, of a sort, with them without their consent. Porn stars are already selling the rights for VR companies to use their images in the sexual equivalents of avatar-based gaming. The actresses have consented. What happens when the technology accepts and reproduces images of people who have not?

Children, by definition, are not consenting adults. The ban on child pornography is justified because its production inevitably involves their rape and abuse. That explanation sounds reasonable until you notice how it ducks a moral issue. Most people think the consumers of child pornography are dangerously immoral: they don’t want “pervs” near children. But liberal philosophy justifies the ban on child pornography because pornographers abuse the young , who cannot give adult consent. Soon the almost imperceptible difference in the moral emphasis on the depravity of the consumer and the crimes of the producer will gape open. Technology will allow consumers to “abuse” avatars of children. No actual child will be raped or harmed. All that will be “touched” are computer-generated images. Does that feel right?

The argument about sexual morals was settled by the Hart-Devlin debate of the 1960s. Professor H. L. A. Hart echoed John Stuart Mill and said the law had no business regulating the sexual morals of adults in private as long as they caused no harm to others. Lord Devlin, a judge of the old school, said society needed shared morals. To let immorality go unpunished, even if it harmed no one, would turn us into a “nation of debauchees”.

They were arguing about the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and I am glad to say Hart’s views prevailed. But his and Mill’s victory was far from total. Look around and you will see that the Victorian neuroticism about sex has been replaced by the modern neuroticism about race and gender. “Hate speech” laws and codes punish real and imagined racist speech, for example, without bothering to prove that the speaker was inciting harm in the form of violence against a targeted ethnic minority. It is enough that it causes offence, just as it once was enough that men exchanging kisses caused offence. They may hate to admit it, but many “liberals” share Lord Devlin’s view that the defence of the fabric of society requires that immorality be punished, regardless of whether they can prove that it caused harm to identifiable victims.

Attempts by the radical feminists of the 1980s to demonstrate that pornography caused men to rape or demean women failed. But I wonder if modern societies will pause and enter learned discussions on whether virtual child abuse leads to actual child abuse, or the “torture” of prisoners in a virtual reality concentration camp leads to sadism and cruelty. My guess is that most citizens won’t wait. They will just assume that it does and say the risk of waiting for proof is too great. Although I am a convinced defender of sexual freedom, as long as it does not harm others, and of freedom of speech, as long as it is not an incitement to violence, I won’t oppose them, because the virtual sex will feel too real to be dismissed with a knowing shrug of the shoulders.

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Step back, and you can see the appeal. Traditional news sites have “journalists” who are no better than press officers. Left-wing websites have weaselly apologists for Jeremy Corbyn, with an apparently limitless number of half-truths and distractions to suffocate objections to anti-Semitism and leader worship. Right-wing sites have Brexit boosters, who once again spend most of their time denouncing their opponents for raising legitimate questions. They are true propagandists rather than engaged writers because they do not offer intelligent support to their causes while retaining the intellectual integrity to speak out when they believe their allies have made a mistake. Watching them is like watching reporters, who began in journalism with high ideals, taking the easy road and easy money by moving into corporate PR. You think that if you could have told their younger selves what they would become, they would have walked away and chosen a different career.

From a commercial point of view, propagandists generate two kinds of business. Trump, Brexit and Corbyn have made many learn the depressing truth that large numbers of people want to be lied to, or at the very least have their prejudices confirmed. Less well appreciated is that traffic also comes from their shocked opponents, who have their biases confirmed by seeing how politically correct a proponent of identity has become or how far into racial prejudice a right-wing columnist has sunk.

The difference between broadcasters and news sites is that a TV or radio station can increase the commercial benefits of extremism exponentially. Conservative newspapers cannot hire left-wing columnists without alienating their readers. But because broadcasters are non-aligned, they can promote left and right-wing propagandists simultaneously. And not just political loudmouths, but extremists for any and every cause. Most people who make public arguments will eventually receive a call from a BBC researcher asking in an expensively educated voice whether they will reduce their argument to absurdity, and  say 2+2 = 5, or black is white, or night is day, in the most doctrinaire manner they can manage. Grasp the commercial logic behind the request and you will understand modern broadcasting’s imperative to create as much noise as possible. You will understand too why Facebook and Twitter only remove incitements to violence and abuse when they are threatened with regulation by the state.

The retirement of David Dimbleby from Question Time after a quarter of a century has  brought fears of cultural debasement to a head. Dimbleby will be remembered, if he is remembered at all, for fanning hysteria, and his departure provoked something close to disgust as broadcasters looked at their future and recoiled.

Adam Boulton of Sky described Dimbleby’s complicity in Question Time’s drift towards “the ritual confrontation and humiliation of its guests”. His and the BBC’s laziness and ugliness had led to a “coarsening of public discourse”. Among my political allies Dimbleby and his producers are the first item of evidence used to prosecute the claim that the BBC has not merely covered populism but promoted it by putting Nigel Farage on Question Time more than any other guest this century.

Although I find it repugnant to see men and women who have had nothing but privilege in their lives make money by  building up demagogues, the bias accusation misses the point. Or rather the bias is not political but “the bias against understanding” that long-forgotten BBC executives complained about. The worst broadcasters aren’t remotely partisan. Having settled political convictions would harm rather than hurt their careers. Rather, they exploit the dogmatism of others and transform it into ratings and pay rises. They know that outrage keeps the audience tuned in; it stimulates and infuriates the viewers. Better that than a difficult argument that would only drive them away.

To think we need only worry about one nasty BBC programme is to miss the wider cultural problem.

In a clear-eyed essay on the Arc website, which is well worth reading if you can search it out, Bonny Brooks dissected the economics of extremism. Corporations want to appear politically engaged, not because they are planning to turn themselves into workers’ cooperatives or even put worker representatives on their boards, but because “woke” credentials  drove their social media profile. Booksellers, she wrote, increasingly believe that to market their products they must find authors who “are willing to talk about themselves and their issues — a lot. They must find people who are willing to hashtag threads pertaining to hot takes du jour while testifying to their own experience. They must be seen to be woke.”

Publishers may be wrong. People who denounce or praise  an author on Twitter may never buy a book from one year to the next. But they are not being stupid. An author’s follower count, the number of retweets and Facebook page likes, provides a commercial measure of sorts.

For broadcasters it may soon be the best measure they have. I looked at the summer television ratings recently, and was struck by how old the audience was becoming. Once the World Cup was over, the most popular programmes were traditional soap operas on ITV — Emmerdale and Coronation Street — and nostalgia on BBC1 — Poldark,  Antiques Roadshow and Countryfile. The young are as likely to see a broadcaster’s work on a social media clip as a television set. And the clips that go viral are the clips that provoke righteous outrage or gormless applause.

At least one BBC executive has talked about raising standards now that Dimbleby has gone. I am not sure it can be done. As so many Americans have said, the possibility of creating a common space where, whatever disagreement’s of opinion citizens have, they agree on commonly accepted facts, is vanishing. It won’t disappear entirely. But, inevitably, only a minority will want fact- checked information or opinions that do not merely confirm their prejudices. Mass democracy in the West was built on imperfect but generally honest mass media — the broadcasters in particular. They are shrinking now, and their remnants face enormous pressures to abandon basic standards. It will be interesting, to put it mildly, to see how democracy can cope with their loss.

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The conservative mentality now flourishes everywhere except among conservatives. Take their assertion that they are sceptical realists, even if they do say so themselves. Sceptic is an honourable title, which can only be bestowed on you by others. When men and women claim to be sceptics, as when they claim to be brave or honest, you should ask who they are fooling. More often than not, they are fooling themselves before they try to fool you. True sceptics examine their own prejudices and biases. They are aware of the dangers of groupthink — if they lose friends by contradicting the views of their party or circle, they reason, those friends weren’t worth having in the first place. They also have some understanding of the perennial human tendency to seek information that confirms their beliefs. In the words of the economist Chris Dillow, sceptics seek facts that make them uncomfortable the better to challenge their easy assumptions.

It is a sign of the propaganda success and intellectual failure of modern conservatism that British nationalists got away with calling themselves “Eurosceptics”. If they had been sceptical, Britain would not now be a laughing stock. The conservative press and think tanks would have had debates about the world as it is, not as conservatives would like it to be. They would have acknowledged that Britain was a part of an integrated European economy and leaving the single market with its web of rules and standards would inevitably have traumatic consequences. Instead, they failed to admit that the anti-European movement was based on a paradox: the EU was simultaneously a vast bureaucracy that had spread its influence into every corner of national life and an institution it would be remarkably easy to leave. Britain would be in a less dismal state if it had a conservative press and conservative intellectuals, who might have told their leaders that both these statements could not be true.

Sceptical conservatives would have recognised too that the neo-liberal world of the 1990s was dissolving. The World Trade Organisation is weak and directionless. First China and now Trump’s America are becoming ever more mercantilist. The only way to maintain our trade after Brexit with the one bloc we are part of would be to accept EU standards and laws without having a say in them.

Put these two factors together and Conservatives would have had to conclude, either that the grand project Brexit was not worth it, or that the pain was a price worth paying to cut immigration and restore nominal sovereignty, if not actual control. But just as Scottish nationalists would never admit that leaving the UK single market would hurt, so Eurosceptics lacked the integrity to acknowledge the consequences of leaving the European single market. Shamefully an entire generation of conservative writers failed to make them do so.

Assuming Theresa May is still Prime Minister by the time this issue is published, we are heading to the soft Brexit that the economics and geography of the “real world” always dictated was the only available Brexit. One should not over exaggerate its softness. The EU will probably give us a deal on manufactured goods but not on services, which make up 80 per cent of the economy, unless we commit to abiding by the freedoms of the single market. Either way we will be in a servile and diminished position. Jacob Rees-Mogg may not be much of a conservative or an intellectual but his comment that we are heading towards being a “vassal state” contained a grain of truth.

How will the conservative intelligentsia, to use the politest available term, react now they have to live with the consequences of vassalage — along with the rest of us? One option is to get out of politics. Paul Dacre picked a good time to retire as editor of the Daily Mail. Others may feel the moment has come to take up watercolour painting or Pilates classes. A few may admit they have made a mistake and seek to reverse the consequences of their actions. Most, however, appear determined to stay in their land of make believe. Just get out, their argument runs, and then we renegotiate all the concessions the current administration has made. If Britain had conservative intellectuals, who were candid friends rather than crowd pleasers and mob followers, they might have warned that, if you treat your neighbours as enemies, they will treat you with suspicion. EU leaders and the European parliament will not sign a treaty unless Britain makes unbreakable commitments. I have thought from the moment they won the referendum, conservatives would then slip into the final degeneration: a right-wing version of socialist special pleading. Just as the failure of the workers’ revolution is not the fault of the revolution but of the revisionists who betrayed it, so as the years drag by, the complexities mount, and all the promises made to the public are blown away, it will not be the Brexit revolution that is at fault but the quislings and saboteurs who betrayed the people’s will. Such revanchism is profoundly unconservative. But where are the conservative voices outside parliament warning of the dangers of descending into stab-in-the-back conspiracy theories? After turning my eyes from Matthew Parris in The Times, I struggle to find any.

You can read endless commentary on how Labour and other left-wing parties have become movements of middle-class graduates, that are losing the white working class. No one can doubt that workers’ parties without workers face a crisis of purpose. I could write a book on the deformations of middle-class leftism: in fact, I have written a book on it. Far less is said and far fewer books are written about what happens to conservative parties when they lose the educated middle class. Or to be fair, when their loudest voices scream intelligent conservatives into compliance or silence. Now we know. What happens is the national crisis you see unfolding around you.

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The natural reaction was to burst out laughing. Hollywood had spent decades lauding Polanski. Only a few years ago, no less an authority that Whoopi Goldberg had decided that his abuse of the 13-year-old Samantha Gailey that caused him to flee the US before a judge could sentence him was not “rape-rape” and therefore did not really count. When The Pianist won an Oscar, Martin Scorsese led the audience as it rose to give Polanski a standing ovation.

You could say in their defence that the life has nothing to do with the work; that an artist’s personal conduct is irrelevant. Wholesome and kind men and women can make terrible art and the most shameful specimens of humanity can make great art. Arguing against the “therapeutic fallacy” that art makes people better, Robert Hughes told the salutary story of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. The Lord of Rimini was one of the most discerning connoisseurs of the Renaissance. His patronage of Leon Battista Alberti, Agostino di Duccio and Piero della Francesca did not stop Pope Pius II making him after his death the only man to be officially condemned to reside in Hell — a distinction he earned by trussing up a papal emissary, the 15-year-old bishop of Fano, and sodomising him before his cheering troops in Rimini’s main square.

You could turn the “it’s the art not the man” argument upside down and defend Polanski by saying the man is the art, and it is daydreaming to believe otherwise. Kevin Spacey portrayed calculating villains far better than actors whose private lives were models of gentleness exactly because he was a scheming predator.

Polanski, however, tried a tactic he had used before: a tactic that goes to the heart of the difficulties the Me Too movement faces: he threatened to sue.

The justice system is at the centre of any attempt to improve the treatment of women. Rapes aren’t reported because the alleged victims think the police won’t listen to them, and 13 out of 14 reported rapes do not end in a conviction because prosecutors and the courts don’t believe there’s enough evidence to convict a defendant. Contrary to the excuse trotted out by every ageing celebrity marched off by the gendarmerie that “everything was different in the 1970s”, the police took Samantha Gailey’s accusations seriously in 1977. The testimony they presented to a Californian grand jury can still make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
Polanski met Samantha’s mother and offered to get her daughter into Vogue. He took her to Jack Nicholson’s mansion instead, gave her a glass of champagne and drugs. She was frightened and kept saying she wanted to go home.

“He reached over and kissed me. And I was telling him ‘no,’ you know, ‘keep away’. He goes ‘Are you on the pill? And I went, ‘No’. And he goes, ‘When did you last have your period?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know’.” Polanski had heard all he needed to know. The girl was not on the pill, and she could not remember when her last period was. According to her testimony, he therefore sodomised her.

Polanski fled to France rather than face sentencing. No one can say that the American justice system did not try to catch him in the dark days before the third wave of feminism. Ever since 1977, he has faced arrest and a date before an angry judge if he returns to the US. Polanski was sustained because the wider culture in which he moved did not think child abuse mattered. When he arrived in France, fashionable Paris lauded him. In a textbook example of nostalgie de la boue, Le Matin said he was a victim of America’s “excessively prudish petite bourgeoisie”. 

Along with French indifference, Polanski was able to mobilise English authoritarianism. In 2002, he seized on a passing reference in Vanity Fair to his alleged attempt to seduce a woman in a New York restaurant and sued for libel in London. Even by the low standards of the English libel law, the case was absurd. Libel is meant to protect men and women of “good” reputation. Polanski was in exile fleeing charges of child abuse, and had no good name to lose on matters sexual. Anyone in any doubt should have noticed that if he had appeared in court in London to defend his good name, the Metropolitan Police would have arrested and deported him. An obliging English judge pooh-poohed these objections. He ruled that the jury could not read the full transcript of Samantha Gailey’s testimony. “We are not a court of morals,” he continued. “We are not here to judge Mr Polanski’s lifestyle” — even though the naive might have thought the lifestyle of a convicted sex offender had some bearing on the case. In these circumstances, Vanity Fair inevitably lost and had to pay damages of £50,000 and costs of £1.5 million.

The culture that allowed Scorsese to cheer him, the French to protect him, and the English to compensate him is meant to have changed. I am not doubting that  third-wave feminism is transforming the landscape. We are witnessing a feminist bourgeois revolution against the aristocratic pretensions of male managers in the workplace, most noticeably their droit du seigneur.

But change when it comes never progresses in a straight line. Women, and indeed young men preyed on by the likes of Spacey, still face vast challenges when they speak out. It’s worth noticing that every report on Harvey Weinstein in the UK media contains the line that “he denies the allegations against him”. It’s there, not because journalists believe his denials, but because their lawyers insisted on its insertion. Worth noting, too, is that Polanski dismissed Me Too as mass hysteria comparable to McCarthyism or the French Revolution, and is now suing the Academy for failing to follow due process. There’s no guarantee that he will lose.

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