Max Hastings

Saturday

22 Jun 2019
Max Hastings

History will wonder how we trusted Boris with Britain

I am besieged by media folk asking when I shall make good on a four-year-old threat to flee to Buenos Aires should Boris Johnson become prime minister. How can I get on to a flight, I ask, when so many other voters are already waitlisted? In truth, however, we are being served successive courses in a national banquet of self-harm, too grisly to merit jokes. Nobody should blame Johnson for wanting to be prime minister: many unsuitable people do. But there will be infinite historical curiosity about how the Tory parliamentary party could scramble to deliver Britain into the custody of a man whom few of its members would entrust with their wallet, handbag or spouse, save to secure a cabinet seat. A year or so back, I asked a sensible MP what could stop BoJo becoming prime minister, granted his mile-high profile.

History will wonder how we trusted Boris with Britain

Thursday

20 Jun 2019
Max Hastings

Diary - 20 June 2019

I am besieged by media folk asking when I shall make good on a four-year-old threat to flee to Buenos Aires should Boris Johnson become prime minister. How can I get on to a flight, I ask, when so many other voters are already wait-listed? In truth, however, we are being served successive courses in a national banquet of self-harm, too grisly to merit jokes. Nobody should blame Johnson for wanting to be prime minister: many unsuitable people do. But there will be infinite historical curiosity about how the Tory parliamentary party could scramble to deliver Britain into the custody of a man whom few of its members would entrust with their wallet, handbag or spouse, save to secure a cabinet seat. A year or so back, I asked a sensible MP what could stop BoJo becoming prime minister, granted his mile-high profile.

Diary - 20 June 2019

Thursday

13 Dec 2018
Max Hastings

Critical injuries

A decade ago, a publisher produced a set of short biographies of Britain’s 20th-century prime ministers, which I reviewed unenthusiastically. My wife reproved me: ‘What did you do that for? For a fee of a few hundred pounds you have made a dozen entirely gratuitous new enemies. If you don’t have something good to say about books, don’t write about them.’ Honest reviewing would grind to a halt if all its practitioners deferred to her advice. It is nonetheless true that victims of an unfavourable notice seldom forget or forgive. As authors, we commit our souls as well as our bodies. Memories of the most flattering reviews of my own books fade within hours. Yet wounds from the stinkers fester for years. American academics are especially generous heapers of camel-dung upon titles that fail to satisfy them.

Critical injuries

Thursday

20 Sep 2018
Max Hastings

Diary - 20 September 2018

The Hastingses have idyllic lives but, like most seventysomethings, we find ourselves in ever-closer proximity to mortality. We hold season tickets for hospital and care-home visits, funerals and memorial services. Prostates are a staple of dinner-party conversation. We have not got quite as far as the 94-year-old contemporary of the painter Raoul Millais, who quavered in the churchyard after the two had bidden farewell to a friend: ‘Hardly worth you and I going home from here, is it, Raoul?’ But we are mindful of La Rochefoucauld’s observation that compassion represents the intelligent anticipation of one’s own troubles to come. When my old friend Christopher Bland was diagnosed with the cancer which eventually killed him, my wife Penny, who has had her own experiences of that hateful malady, remarked sensibly that none of us is going to get out of this alive.

Diary - 20 September 2018

Saturday

9 Dec 2017
Max Hastings

The great Brexit unsayable

On Monday, we held a dinner party in the Cavendish Room at Brooks’s, one of the most beautiful spaces in London. Our guest list started with Matthew Parris, whom my wife was panting to meet, observing that she agrees with him about absolutely everything except that she is reluctant to become gay. After that, it was merely a matter of ensuring that we included nobody who might profess enthusiasm for Trump, Brexit or — following their treatment of Dwin Bramall, Edward Heath and now Damian Green — policemen. We discussed the problem that scarcely anyone active in British politics dares to tell voters important truths, foremost among these that Brexit will make them poorer. Moderate Tory MPs remain imprisoned by the party’s right, masquerading as tribunes of the plebs, while their Labour counterparts are chained to the left.

The great Brexit unsayable

Thursday

7 Dec 2017
Max Hastings

Diary - 7 December 2017

Lunch with the great Sir Michael Howard, 95 last week. During a conversation about BBC1’s Howards End, he said: ‘I met Forster once, at a lunch party in London in 1943, given by Arthur Koestler, just before I went to Italy. We spoke much about Richard Hillary, then just beginning to be canonised. Forster suddenly turned to me and asked: “What do you think about sardines?” I was confounded, and have often since wished that I had produced some appropriately witty riposte.’ Michael expresses ironic gratitude for the state of the world, saying that without its horrors, at his age he might be frightfully bored: ‘The distinction between war — a word that signifies the use of force — and warfare — clashes between states using every other means — has seldom seemed so significant.

Diary - 7 December 2017

Friday

25 Aug 2017
Max Hastings

Brexit is irrelevant to the gravest problems facing Britain

One entirely foreseeable consequence of Brexit is that although it is irrelevant to the gravest problems facing the nation, the government talks about nothing else. There is a black hole in the defence budget: instead of reshaping policy to address this, starting by mothballing the Royal Navy’s absurd new aircraftless-carrier, ministers merely scrabble to keep the crisis away from the Commons and front pages. My wife Penny says, with her accustomed good sense: ‘People only really care about terrorism and cyber-attacks. They are not interested in the Russian threat to the Baltic states.’ Yet real political leaders, as distinct from placemen, would aspire to inform voters, rather than merely chortle because they can scrap soldiers without losing by-elections.

Brexit is irrelevant to the gravest problems facing Britain

Thursday

24 Aug 2017
Max Hastings

Diary - 24 August 2017

It has been a summer of tears, both of joy and sorrow. The latter first: how could stones not weep at the spectacle of this Gadarene government leading us towards the cliff edge with a show of insouciance on the part of Fox, Davis, Johnson that would be thought excessive at a wedding, never mind a funeral? At Daily Telegraph leader conferences 25 years ago, our young turks bewailed John Major’s government as the worst in history. Bill Deedes justly rebuked such hyperbole: ‘Are we really saying that Samuel Hoare was a better foreign secretary than Malcolm Rifkind?’ Today, however, it is hard to name a senior minister, with the possible exception of Philip Hammond, who seems to compare favourably with Hoare. However serious the Corbyn menace, and for that matter the Rees-Mogg one, I shall never vote for a Brexit Tory party.

Diary - 24 August 2017

Sunday

2 Apr 2017
Max Hastings

Is Trump leading America to war?

Michael Howard (the good one, OM, CH, MC) is 94 and still razor-sharp, but depressed by echoes of the 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic — ‘and I am one of the few people still alive who watched it all happen’. At Wellington he learned, and recites to me from memory, lines from Auden’s 1937 ‘Danse Macabre’: It’s farewell to the drawing-room’s civilised cry, The professor’s sensible whereto and why For the Devil has broken parole and arisen, He has dynamited his way out of prison. Michael believes that President Trump will get his country into a war, and I hear that some of America’s top soldiers share this expectation. This is an extract from Max Hastings' Diary, which appears in this week's Spectator

Is Trump leading America to war?

Saturday

1 Apr 2017
Max Hastings

We should worry more about Putin’s Russia than Muslim fanatics

Last week’s events in London raised a recurrent dilemma for journalists, including me. It is a huge story when a terrorist kills four people then is shot down in Palace Yard, Westminster. Yet dare we say how fortunate we are that since 9/11 Muslim terrorists have proved incapable of mounting an attack remotely as lethal as that on the Twin Towers? An intelligence officer told me recently that he worries far more about Russia than about Muslim suicidalists, and this must be the rational assessment. The public needs awakening to the menace posed by Vladimir Putin’s adventurism. Meanwhile, Khalid Masood’s dreadful deed reflects the flailings of a death cult. These will cause us regular surges of distress, but — to contradict David Cameron’s silly words — Muslim fanaticism does not constitute an ‘existential threat’.

We should worry more about Putin’s Russia than Muslim fanatics

Thursday

30 Mar 2017
Max Hastings

Diary - 30 March 2017

Last week’s events in London raised a recurrent dilemma for journalists, including me. It is a huge story when a terrorist kills four people then is shot down in Palace Yard, Westminster. Yet dare we say how fortunate we are that since 9/11 Muslim terrorists have proved incapable of mounting an attack remotely as lethal as that on the Twin Towers? An intelligence officer told me recently that he worries far more about Russia than about Muslim suicidalists, and this must be the rational assessment. The public needs awakening to the menace posed by Vladimir Putin’s adventurism. Meanwhile, Khalid Masood’s dreadful deed reflects the flailings of a death cult. These will cause us regular surges of distress, but — to contradict David Cameron’s silly words — Muslim fanaticism does not constitute an ‘existential threat’.

Diary - 30 March 2017

Wednesday

28 Dec 2016
Max Hastings

The brutal legacy of the Russian Revolution must never be forgotten

Few 20th-century historians doubted that the 1917 Russian revolution was one of the most influential events of their time, indeed of all time. As the centenary commemoration approaches, however, it seems remarkable how far and how fast the ideology that inspired Lenin and millions of his worldwide followers has receded in significance. Many are the imperfections of capitalism, but almost nobody outside Jeremy Corbyn’s office any longer supposes that communism, least of all the old Soviet brand, offers a credible alternative. This would amaze our grandparents’ generation on both sides of the struggle. The novels of C.P. Snow are indifferent fiction but intriguing middle-class social history. During the interwar era, many of the intelligent acquaintances of Lewis Eliot, Snow’s fictional alter ego, took it for granted that socialism, or perhaps communism, not only should but would prevail as the guiding doctrine of most democracies.

The brutal legacy of the Russian Revolution must never be forgotten

Thursday

8 Dec 2016
Max Hastings

Red with the people’s blood

Few 20th-century historians doubted that the 1917 Russian revolution was one of the most influential events of their time, indeed of all time. As the centenary commemoration approaches, however, it seems remarkable how far and how fast the ideology that inspired Lenin and millions of his worldwide followers has receded in significance. Many are the imperfections of capitalism, but almost nobody outside Jeremy Corbyn’s office any longer supposes that communism, least of all the old Soviet brand, offers a credible alternative. This would amaze our grandparents’ generation on both sides of the struggle. The novels of C.P. Snow are indifferent fiction but intriguing middle-class social history. During the interwar era, many of the intelligent acquaintances of Lewis Eliot, Snow’s fictional alter ego, took it for granted that socialism, or perhaps communism, not only should but would prevail as the guiding doctrine of most democracies.

Red with the people’s blood

Thursday

29 Sep 2016
Max Hastings

Diary - 29 September 2016

Monday night’s US presidential debate should convince a majority of American voters that Hillary Clinton is their only credible choice for the White House. Yet it may well fail to do so, in the new era of ‘post-truth politics’. The historian Sir Michael Howard suggests that on both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing a retreat from reason, an attempt to reverse the onset of the 18th-century Age of the Enlightenment, which banished superstition and religious faith as a basis for reaching conclusions. The progress of Donald Trump supports his thesis. I have just spent a fortnight in southern California, researching a book on the Vietnam war, and saw everywhere manifestations of Trumpery. A big Jeep overtook me on the coastal highway, bearing a window sticker: ‘I AM A STRAIGHT CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVE GUN-OWNER.

Diary - 29 September 2016

Thursday

9 Jun 2016
Max Hastings

Wine Club 11 June

I never drink before noon or 7 p.m., but find myself ever more often glancing at the sundial and licking my lips as the appointed hours approach. Thereafter at least a bottle of wine a day goes down the pipeline, which distresses government health advisers but gives boundless pleasure to me. It is hard to detach expectations from knowledge of price. On that basis, grand vintages often disappoint: to us barbarians, no liquid can really be worth, say, £400 a bottle. Some generous hosts recently produced for us such masterpieces as Lafite and Pétrus ’82, both of which felt as if they would have been more impressive a few years back. Some very old Haut Brion seemed positively nasty. But we all savour the difference between pub fare and modest excellence within the £20 a bottle range, of which FromVineyardsDirect.

Wine Club 11 June

Thursday

10 Mar 2016
Max Hastings

American Notebook | 10 March 2016

I have been driving many hundreds of miles across America, interviewing Vietnam veterans for a book. Though I have been doing this sort of thing for 40 years, the fascination of the serendipity persists. I meet an extraordinary variety of people, way outside my usual social round. Some talk in modest bungalows, others in motels, one last week in a conspicuously wealthy gated community. Many rich Americans now live in such places — essentially their own country clubs, fortified by wired perimeters. The one that I visited covered 6,000 acres, with lots of lakes and a golf course. There is excellent food in the clubhouse, skeet ranges, riding stables and a small army of black staff. The notional population, mainly elderly, is around 400, though most inmates live there only a few months in the year, between vacations.

American Notebook | 10 March 2016

Thursday

10 Sep 2015
Max Hastings

Diary - 10 September 2015

During our annual odyssey around the Scottish Highlands, I read Tears of the Rajas, Ferdinand Mount’s eloquent indictment of imperial expansionism in India. One of Ferdy’s themes is that the British lived in the country without ever attempting to make themselves of it. How far is that true of sporting visitors to Scotland? The SNP’s persecution of landowners gains traction from the fact that guests in shooting and fishing lodges encounter only keepers, gillies, stalkers. We disport ourselves within a social archipelago utterly remote from the mainland of the society in which it lies. In our defence, however, that is what tourists do everywhere in the world, much to the advantage of host nations. We must wait to discover whether Ms Sturgeon and her comrades hate tweedy foreigners so much that they will forgo our cash — and that of proprietors who spend tens of millions employing people and doing things that would otherwise become charges on the public purse.

Diary - 10 September 2015

Thursday

14 May 2015
Max Hastings

Demob unhappy

After all the carousing and flag-waving that followed VE day in 1945, millions of young men fortunate enough not to be still fighting the Japanese faced a problem. Having spent five or six years in uniform, they needed jobs. For those who lacked explicit civilian skills, which meant most, it was hard to persuade employers that a talent for flying a Spitfire, commanding a gun battery or navigating a destroyer qualified a man to run a factory or even sell socks. For years after the shooting stopped, newspapers bulged with small ads placed by demobilised officers. Many such entries exuded unconscious pathos. That quirkily brilliant writer Richard Usborne had the notion of investigating the responses received by such men, who had risked much and borne life-and-death responsibilities.

Demob unhappy

Thursday

2 Apr 2015
Max Hastings

Prince Charles letter: “There is a DIVINE Source which is ultimate TRUTH”

I notice an online howl of anguish from a Kentucky professor of biology who faces demands from local evangelical Christians that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in his classes. This, it seems to me, parallels the Prince of Wales’s successful lobbying for some NHS funds to be diverted from conventional medicine to homeopathy. I have beside me a copy of a letter allegedly written by him some years ago to a cultural institution, asserting the conviction that ‘there is a DIVINE Source which is ultimate TRUTH… that this Truth can be expressed by means of numbers… and that, if followed correctly, these principles can be expressed with infinite variety to produce Beauty’. The heir to the throne is entitled to believe such things, but if he aspires to influence public affairs, he has no claim to keep his interventions secret.

Prince Charles letter: “There is a DIVINE Source which is ultimate TRUTH”

Thursday

19 Sep 2013
Max Hastings

Max Hastings’ diary: I love the British Army (but not the Blackadder version of it)

The looming centenary of the outbreak of the first world war offers an opportunity to break away from the Blackadder/Oh! What a Lovely War vision, which dominates popular perceptions. Nobody sane suggests a celebration. But, in place of the government’s professed ‘non-judgmental’ approach to commemoration, ministers could assert that although the war was assuredly ghastly, it was not futile. Whatever the shortcomings of the Treaty of Versailles, a peace imposed by a victorious Germany would have been much worse. David Cameron often mentions with pride Britain’s role in resisting Hitler. In 2014, it would be good to hear him acknowledge that Britain, and those who died in her name, were also right to resist the Kaiser’s generals.

Max Hastings’ diary: I love the British Army (but not the Blackadder version of it)

Saturday

11 Aug 2012
Max Hastings

Reykjavik notebook

Anybody hunting for Britain’s lost summer need look no further than Iceland. I spent last week there salmon-fishing, in torrid sunburn conditions caused by a northward shift of the Atlantic jetstream which means that the place has scarcely seen rain since spring, and not many salmon. I failed to hook a single fish, which caused unkind critics to mutter that it is lucky I write books rather than cast a fly for my living. But if I were a Greek, irrespective of the rotten angling conditions, I would head north for a look at Iceland. Since its bank collapse and debt default four years ago, normality has returned amazingly quickly. Tourism is booming, thanks to the currency devaluation. I know nothing about economics, but almost all my numerate friends, including one at the Bank of England, reckon Greece could bounce back equally well if it quit the euro and abandoned the hairshirt policies which promise only depression and extremist politics.

Reykjavik notebook

Saturday

16 Jul 2011
Max Hastings

Never trust an editor

Long before the phone-hacking scandal attained volcanic proportions, I scarcely knew a journalist in London unastonished to hear that last Christmas, the prime minister dined at the Oxfordshire home of Rebekah Brooks. Even were she Mother Teresa, which some evidence suggests she is not, it was plainly a lapse of judgment for David Cameron to be seen to accept Brooks’s hospitality, as he regularly did.This was on four counts: 1) The immensely sensitive issue of BSkyB’s future ownership was on the government’s plate, and Brooks is a senior executive of News International. 2) The News of the World phone-hacking scandal was ongoing, and Brooks was a deeply involved party. 3) Brooks’s access to Cameron was bound to feed jealousies elsewhere in the media.

Saturday

14 Aug 2010
Max Hastings

The guns of August

Anybody who wants to get on in America must give handsomely to good causes. In our own essentially philistine society, the newly rich get further faster by buying grouse moors. I recently heard a tycoon observe sardonically, in an inimitable gravelly Norwegian accent: ‘Grouse-shooting makes all the English prostitutes.’ He meant that lots of people who otherwise think themselves principled, honourable, choosy about the company they keep, prostrate themselves before hosts who offer them an early entry to paradise, shooting the red grouse amid some of the most glorious landscapes in this island.I became an addict very young, and almost ruined myself renting a little place in Sutherland where we walked miles, shooting grouse over pointers.

The guns of August

Saturday

19 Jun 2010
Max Hastings

How much defence can we afford?

Max Hastings says that the stakes are high for Liam Fox’s strategic defence review: but we must maintain our current troop numbers and cut in other areas to pay for themBritain’s armed forces are entering a dangerous period of upheaval. The new government’s strategic defence review (SDR) will impose swingeing cuts, and the only uncertainty concerns where the axe will fall. Defence Secretary Liam Fox has announced — in the Sunday Times, rather than to parliament, that the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, will step down in the autumn. Stirrup will therefore remain as a lame duck while the SDR is carried out. This is deliberate. Fox wants to emphasise that the SDR’s outcome will represent the intentions of government, which a new CDS will then be required to carry out.

How much defence can we afford?

Saturday

16 Jan 2010
Max Hastings

The Tory defence policy will be simple: cut, brutally

The British military has been horribly overstretched by the wars of the Labour years, says Max Hastings. But the Tories’ only option will be to cut further still. Hideous decisions lie aheadBritain’s armed forces sometimes suppose that they get a better break from Conservative governments than Labour ones, but their recent experience suggests otherwise. After 11 years of Margaret Thatcher, it proved necessary to cannibalise the entire armoured resources of the Rhine Army to deploy a weak division for the First Gulf War. Today, the services welcome the prospect of a Tory government after a long period of policy paralysis. But they are also braced for bad news. They know the Tories intend brutally to reduce defence spending.

The Tory defence policy will be simple: cut, brutally

Saturday

6 Oct 2007
Max Hastings

The worst of friends

In this his latest book Max Hastings aims not so much to write another history of the war in the Pacific but to describe ‘a massive and terrible experience, set in a chronological framework’. It is a companion volume to his Armageddon which did much the same for the last phase of the war in Europe; but the experiences he describes are yet more terrible, and the framework will be even less familiar to British readers. The book does indeed concentrate on the truly terrible experiences of those caught up in the war, whether they were American marines, British prisoners of war, Chinese peasants, Japanese kamikaze pilots, or even Russian soldiers rushed across Siberia from a war they had just won to fire the last shots in one they had never even heard about; for one of the many merits of this book is that it gives due attention to the war on the mainland of Asia as well as the far better known campaigns in the Pacific.

Saturday

10 Dec 2005
Max Hastings

Diary - 10 December 2005

The avalanche of words on last week’s Adair pensions report seemed to miss one significant point. Retirement is likely to be delayed to 67 or even later. Yet there is no realistic possibility that most people can sustain, at such an age, the jobs they held at 47 or 57. Even in an era when we are bursting with expensive health, few workers performing functions that require physical exertion or creative imagination can meet such demands late into their seventh decade. Commercial life will become moribund, if senior executives are given a right to stay at the helm into their late sixties, keeping big salaries and perks, even if exceptional individuals can justify them. Approaching 60, I know that I am already past a sensible age to edit a big newspaper, even if someone were rash enough to want me to.

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