We British: The Poetry of a People

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It begins in the year 657 with the Northumbrian poet Caedmon, and takes us up to the present day, each chapter wisely and wittily guiding the reader through successive poetic movements. Marr’s argument is that the British are peculiarly good at poetry (better than we are at painting, architecture and music). And it’s not just that we have Shakespeare and the war poets—we also have wonderful geographic diversity. Irish, Scottish and Welsh poets are well represented. Labelling the current Tory part a government "governed by Whatsapp", Marr added that "like the country at the time of the Brexit referendum, he didn't know what was coming next. Again, I refused. I resisted both of these proposals, not just because of the implications for the role of parliament, but mainly because of my firm belief that it would have been unthinkable to bring the monarch into these matters. By sanctioning the idea of prorogation, the hard-line Brexiteers were taking a sledgehammer to the British constitution.” I’ve interviewed seven prime ministers: Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak. I interviewed Liz Truss, too, but not as prime minister. Almost nobody did. There wasn’t time. I’m sure we’d have got round to it in due course.

Labour have had their own teams flat out in Uxbridge (where Boris Johnson was MP) and Mid Beds – and in Selby and Ainsty, whose Conservative MP Nigel Adams has also stood down. Selby looks almost as safe as any Tory seat could be, and Adams had a 60 per cent share of the vote at the last election. But his seat is being redistributed in a way that helps Labour and it has become one of its less obvious targets: the party will fight very hard here. Reflecting on what is to come where British politics is concerned, the presenter noted that the future is set to be far from plain sailing. Boris Johnson: Laura Kuenssberg on the facts, farce and his futureQuitting Parliament is entirely on brand and raises questions about his next move, writes Laura Kuenssberg. We are in a big hole as a country, we have very, very hard choices to come and frankly if Keir Starmer takes over, he has a bit of a nightmare on his hands."

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Yet this isn’t the time for uncontroversial journalism. We are told not to connect the history of Israeli occupation with the foul terrorism unleashed by Hamas. But without context, without explanation, all we are left with is a chaos of inexplicable human evil from which there is no political exit. I quoted Yeats. Here’s Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939”, written at another ominous moment: “I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.” The speech proved divisive among viewers, with some hailing it as “speaking for all of us” while others accused Marr of delivering his criticism too late.

Even putting to one side the talented MPs outside government already – Jeremy Hunt, Tom Tugendhat and the rest – a Sunak-Javid leadership challenge would be formidable. Up to now, the Johnson loyalists have been able to say, “Trouble is, whatever you think of him, there isn’t really anyone else.” This book isn't quite a history of British (i.e. English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish) poetry from Caedmon to the present day; it's more a sort of annotated anthology, with poems and excerpts from poems giving a representative sample of each period. As such, it's an excellent introduction for the person who enjoys poetry but isn't well-informed about the history of the craft in the British Isles. The Forward Prizes have established themselves as central to the literary landscape of modern Britain.” Andrew Marr The conversation around this book will inevitably focus on Brexit. But the rest of its content must not be ignored or elbowed aside. May has been haunted by a phrase used by the former Anglican bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, who chaired the independent panel on Hillsborough and titled his report on the experiences of the victims’ families “The patronising disposition of unaccountable power”. In what might have been an unremittingly bleak account of British public failures, she finds heroes – more often heroines – to admire, from the campaigning Hillsborough families to the medical expert Dr Isabel Gal, who spotted the dangers of Primodos and was persecuted for it; or the youth worker Jayne Senior and the South Yorkshire Police analyst Angie Heal, who tried desperately hard to blow the whistle on the Rotherham child abuse cases, and were threatened for their pains.

A new executive for the 1922 Committee could change the rules and, if submerged by a sea of new letters, hold a leadership contest almost immediately. “We could do the whole thing in a matter of days,” one anti-Johnson Tory told me. Any normal politician in Johnson’s position would go now, trying to retain a sense of dignity. Whether or not Johnson is forced out by a vote of Tory MPs, he is likely to be confronted by the chairman of the 1922 Committee, Graham Brady, telling him the jig is up. Politicians in London must start talking to forces inside Israel beyond Netanyahu’s cabinet. We need better conversations with Egypt, Fatah, Jordan and the Israeli opposition, and a major international aid programme. How developed is Labour’s foreign policy network beyond Europe? That is, suddenly, an important question. Dismissive about Labour – she’s a proper Tory – May is prepared to be sharp about her own side, too. Looking at the wider picture after Grenfell, she complains that too many Conservatives came to see social housing as a matter of problem families and problem individuals, refusing to hear what they were saying. She thinks that, in Laurie Magnus, Rishi Sunak has appointed an ethics adviser without sufficient experience. And after a withering account of modern slavery in Britain she says of the current Prime Minister: “To my dismay, the government’s approach… has been driven by the desire to deal with illegal immigration rather than by the wish to stop slavery.”