CONFESSIONS OF A BREXIT TELLY WATCHER..... Adèle Geras

This post is going to be a bit different from my usual  kind. It's somewhat of a confession. It will be light on photographs because I haven't the energy to go fossicking among Wikipedia Commons to find pictures of the protagonists, so I'm going to assume you all know what each of my cast of fascinating characters looks like. They've been in  front of the nation for months now and you will each have your own image of every single one. 

I'm going to confess two things. The first is my complete fascination with the coverage of the Brexit crisis. The second is my obsession with the necklaces of our Prime Minister, a subject I can't bring up much on Twitter for two reasons. The first reason: I have vowed to shut up on on Social Media about politics. Any political opinion gets you abused, trolled, and insulted, so I try to keep firmly silent.  And if I were to write about the PM's jewellery, I might be accused of being trivial, or writing about Mrs May as a woman. Heaven forfend! For the purposes of this piece, all you need to know is: I was and remain a Remainer. That's it. Anyone who thinks I'm going to yell and scream about Brexit has another think coming. The actual leaving of the European Union is not my concern here. Rather it's how I've reacted to total immersion in the coverage of the last few months in Parliament. I will say it here: I am hooked. A total Brexit news junkie. I watch everything I can: the news and Newsnight of course but also Politics Live every single day and it's on a series link on my telly so that I can catch up with the programme if I happen to be out when it airs at 12.15. on BBC2. For those of you who don't know it, it's 45 minutes of six people talking, under the guidance of the excellent Jo Coburn. She has a good mix of people on the show: men and women, Labour, Tory and every other party, young and old and you often get a visit (especially on Wednesdays, when the programme takes in Prime Minister's Questions) from the redoubtable and always impeccably-dressed Laura Kuenssberg.

Here is my Brexit blanket. It's perfect tv knitting and it's growing apace. 

Okay, Brexit. What I really love about it and especially in the last couple of  months since we didn't leave on March 29th, is the drama. And the dramatis personae. For a drama is what it really is. There's the wonderful setting of the House of Commons leaking already and in danger of falling down altogether if measures aren't taken, but meanwhile both picturesque and historic. Then there's a very huge and important Ticking Clock. Any writer will tell you that such a thing is an enormous help in making everything more tense and exciting. And you have a dream cast! What an array, what a veritable gallimaufry of people is ranged in front of us! There's something for every taste: Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ken Clarke, Michael Gove, Boris-who-doesn't-need-a-surname (which may become important in any General Election) Keir Starmer with his intriguing hairstyle, and of course the Leader of the Opposition about whom I will say nothing. In charge of the Government for good or ill is Theresa May, who came into office after the Referendum result produced another drama ( see Boris and Michael Gove, above.)

We also have another cast in Europe: Michel Barnier, Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron (who comes decked in Napoleonic trappings and has an Older Wife...the stuff of soap operas). They are fascinating in themselves. I like listening to Laura K and Katia Adler when Mrs May goes to Brussels or Strasbourg, because they paint a picture of our Prime Minister being..well, not exactly welcomed and you can understand why. We are, after all, trying to leave. (But in parentheses, I loved the video clip of Merkel and May exclaiming over an iPhone at the coincidence of both wearing a royal blue suit on the same day.)


Now look at our heroine: here's a 62 year old woman. She's diabetic. She has to get up every single day and put on decent clothes and an iconic necklace, and stand in front of more than 600 people who are constantly at her for not doing this, not doing that, not listening to them, listening too much to the others, especially the DUP under Arlene Foster. who seem not much given to gentle, emollient chat. Mrs May is not particularly liked. She's not clubbable. She doesn't have the gift of the gab. She's wooden in interviews. She's called the Maybot. The ERG group in her own Party would like to see her gone. They failed in a coup attempt...that was dramatic. I was glued to the sofa for all that, you may be sure. But her Weeble-like gift for getting up again when knocked down is amazing. 

There are others who think they'd make a better fist of it if they were Leader...but not a single one of them wants their fingerprints on a Bad Deal and to be left holding the Brexit Baby. Also, very importantly, no one has a PLAN to put up against Mrs May's Deal. Not one single idea put forward has the solid support of Parliament behind it. And, like it or not, the UK voted to Leave. This is the background to every single drama: we voted to Leave. I was desperately sorry that we did and sincerely wish we hadn't, but I fail to see how overturning a democratic vote by another Referendum would be the answer....oops. Sorry. A bit of politics there. Back to Mrs May and her necklaces.

Here's another confession. I adore jewellery and can talk about it for hours with anyone interested. When Mrs May first took office, my immediate thought was: hurray! Something new to look at every day. And she's done me proud. Her necklaces are brilliant. I like some more than others. The metal chains and complicated silver affairs are terrific. Best of all, I love her green glass beads, which are I think, faceted glass. She has a similar ruby-looking one, and sometimes she wears gobstopper pearls. And a couple that look like those models of atoms: globes clustering together that you find in science labs. I'm keen on her Jackie Brazil flagstones number. Mrs May wears good bracelets too. There's one which bears an image of Frida Kahlo. Often her chain necklace has a matching bracelet...I could go on.

She's got the knack (rare) of knowing where a necklace should sit on your chest. Nothing dangles. Nothing chokes. Every piece falls in exactly the right place.
She has the advantage of height but also the tall woman's stoop, as if she's trying to disguise it. 
Her shoes are legendary. She has good legs. Not every one of her outfits works, but she has a better strike rate than many other public figures. I did get a little tired of the famous pale blue coat....but I live in hope that the warmer weather will see the back of that.

Look closely and you'll see my Brexit blanket has grown...but now we're in unknown territory. At the time of writing, we have an extension till October. But will we leave in time to avoid the dreaded European elections? Will a Tory-Labour agreement about something be reached? Will the group that's prevented us from leaving agree to get May's deal through Parliament? Will there be a vote of confidence? Will the Government fall? Will Theresa May survive for more than a month or two? She has shown remarkable stickability. See "no one else has a plan" above.


I'm writing this during the Parliamentary recess in April. Who knows what will have happened by the time this post goes live? May have to add a ps or maybe not. In any case, I'm longing for the break to be over so that the drama can begin again. This is a kind of interval and I want to be back on the sofa with Laura K, Katia A and Andrew Neil who does the best interviews of all and lets no one at all off any hook. I want the performances to resume in the Mother of Parliaments. The cast of characters is always full of surprises. There will be alarms and excursions. Social Media is helping meanwhile..but the Drama goes on and this particular one has that priceless thing: not a single person knows what's going to happen in the end...back to the sofa to see if there's a Final Twist!

The Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder - by Lesley Downer

Dawn over the Ayeyarwaddy (Irrawaddy) at Mandalay

'What will our descendants think of us when they read that the British banished the King of Burma, annexed his country, and proceeded to govern it by officials of their own race? Historians will add that we saw no harm in this, though we always resisted such a fate to the death when it threatened our own land.' - Maurice Collis, The Journey Outward, 1952

King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat
and her sister Princess Supayalay

In 1885 King Thibaw of the Konbaung dynasty was governing Upper Burma from his palace in Mandalay. He was 26 years old and had succeeded to the throne after his father, King Mindon, died suddenly in 1878. Following Mindon’s death, seventy nine of the king’s relatives who were potentially Thibaw’s rivals were murdered in a plot hatched by Thibaw’s implacable mother-in-law to make sure that he took over the throne.

Thibaw was convinced that his father’s apartments in the palace were haunted by Mindon’s ghost. He had them moved out of the palace grounds and rebuilt as a monastery. It’s a gorgeous building made of teak and covered in intricate and delicate carvings depicting the Jatakas, the Buddhist scriptures. You can still see King Thibaw’s meditation couch there. As it transpired the vast palace complex which forms the heart of Mandalay was destroyed in World War II. King Mindon’s apartments were the only part of the palace to survive. 

Thibaw set about reforming the administrative structure of his kingdom, Upper Burma. His government was one of the best educated the country had ever seen, including many scholars who had returned from Europe and were fluent in the Burmese classics as well as English and French. 

King Mindon's palatial apartments,
now the Shwenandaw Kyaung, Mandalay

The British had annexed western Burma in the First Burmese War of 1824 and had ruled Lower Burma for thirty years, since the Second Burmese War of 1853. Jane Austen’s brother, in fact, Rear Admiral Charles Austen, commanded the British Expedition of 1853 and died in Burma of cholera. 

The king was determined to win back his kingdom and started making moves to align more closely with the French, signing a Franco-Burmese commercial treaty which both he and the French swore had no military or political clauses. But the British were not convinced. There was also the Great Shoe Question. Visiting British dignitaries refused to remove their shoes on entering Thibaw’s palace, causing deep offence. 

Old capital at Sagaing, outside Mandalay

In 1885 Thibaw issued a proclamation calling on his countrymen to liberate Lower Burma, thus providing the pretext the British were looking for. Declaring that the king was conspiring with France, they denounced him as a tyrant who reneged on his treaties and sent an invasion force of 11,000 men in a fleet of flat bottomed boats and elephant batteries. Great paddle steamers crowded with troops thrashed up the broad Ayeyarwady - the Irrawaddy, as the British called it.

Mandalay fell almost immediately. The next day the British escorted the king and his wife away on a bullock cart. It was said that Thibaw begged for his life but his proud queen refused to bow her head. They were exiled to Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, in India, where they lived out their days. Thibaw’s kingdom was officially annexed by Britain on January 1st 1886.

Stupa at Bagan

To crush any residual support for the monarchy, the British painted Thibaw as an ogre, despot and drunkard, uniquely weak, not up to the task of government, all of which was taken until recently as gospel.

British rule was hated. Resistance by fighters whom the British derided as dacoits or bandits continued for many years and for the colonialists Burma was a hardship posting.

Four years after Thibaw’s fall, in March 1889, a little-known 23-year-old journalist called Rudyard Kipling passed through Burma. He was there for just 3 days, in Rangoon and Moulmein. In his famous poem, Mandalay, he conjures up the magic of Burma and the siren call of the east:

‘ ... “If you’ve ’eard the East a callin’, you won’t never ’eed naught else.” ...’

When Boris Johnson quoted Mandalay when he visited the Schwedagon Pagoda in Yangon in 2017, he was lambasted on the basis that Kipling was a racist and a colonialist. But when the poem was first published in 1890 what annoyed everyone was the line, ‘An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay’, China of course being not across the Bay of Bengal at all but a long way north and east.

Sunset over the stupas of Bagan

Thirty years later, starting in 1922, another young Englishman called Eric Blair spent five years serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Moulmein. I spent much of our own trip along the road to Mandalay reading George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, published in 1934. It’s a savage indictment of colonialism. But it’s also a paean to the extraordinary spell the east can cast, evoking Burma’s maddening heat, drenching monsoon rains, dark tangled forests and mesmerising culture in glorious prose.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale based on a true story, set in nineteenth century Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration. It’s out now in paperback. 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com

The picture of King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat and her sister Princess Supayalay in late November 1885 is made from a negative found in the Royal Palace, Mandalay, and is by an unknown photographer; in the collection of Willoughby Wallace Hooper, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

The other pictures are mine.