Angela Dorothea Merkel has become almost as much a feature of the German landscape as the glacial waters of the Mecklenburg lake plateau, the crystal caves of Thuringia and the snow-capped verticalities of the Hochfrottspitze. As a rugged outcrop of centre-right Christian democracy, salient in the chancellery since 2005, she has stood like a rock through four terms of economic, political and viral crisis. When she steps down later this month, anyone navigating Germany’s political topography is going to need a new map.
Her supporters are trembling at the prospect of a centre-left resurgence in the parliamentary elections. Though Merkel’s popularity has scaled new heights during the pandemic, Armin Laschet, the new leader of the Christian Democratic Union, is still in the foothills. “Merkel’s successor faces uphill struggle to unite his party”, ran a Guardian headline (those mountain metaphors just won’t go away).
Perhaps it’s time for a change of metaphor. “Politics”, said Ronald Reagan, speaking with unique authority, “is just like show business.” In both, success can be determined by where you appear on the bill. Reagan entered the stage as his predecessor was receiving the slow hand clap for his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. (Younger readers may need to be reminded that in 1980, Jimmy Carter was perceived as a pretty easy act to follow.)
Merkel isn’t a star performer like Reagan. She does small, pinched smiles, not poster quotes, jazz hands or a Grecian-2000 twinkle. But she has endured, like “The Mousetrap” endures in London’s West End, by being effective, competent, reliable and familiar: a two-decade overnight sensation.
The next German chancellor may be forgiven for feeling like George Lazenby reading the reviews of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, or Donna Reed slipping into Barbara Bel Geddes’s dressing gown for 24 episodes of “Dallas”, or all those lesser double acts given the impossible task of succeeding Morecambe and Wise, the kings of 1970s primetime British comedy.
The disadvantages of this position, however, are ones that electorates and audiences understand. They may even come to admire those who occupy it. When John Major became prime minister in 1990, for instance, the pundits portrayed him as the speaker of a boring epilogue to the passion play of the Thatcher years. Then he won the 1992 general election.
We accept, I think, that it takes a certain kind of bravery to risk being the whimper that follows someone else’s bang. After the star, the understudy. Beyond the mountain, the foothill. The show must go on. The journey must continue. That, or the theatre goes dark and we turn away from the view.
Last walk to freedom Nelson Mandela
If you father a nation, you must also bereave it. In South Africa that process happened slowly and painfully. In his last months Nelson Mandela, plagued by a lung infection, ticked away on life support while his family wrangled over where to bury his body and those of the three children who predeceased him.
His final breath, in December 2013, was apparently made unaided. When his successor, Jacob Zuma, announced the end, Mandela had not made a public appearance since attending the football World Cup three years earlier.
This absence had not diminished him. His status as Madiba – a Xhosa honorific – and as a global emblem of virtue, was not dependent on his visibility. The Robben Island years proved that. During Mandela’s long incarceration, a movement formed in his name: one that extricated him from the brutal pragmatics and questionable financial activities of some of his comrades.
“Mandela in his silence”, wrote Time magazine in 1993, naming him Man of the Year alongside F.W. De Klerk, “became South Africa’s most persuasive presence: an inspiration to blacks, a recrimination to whites.” Three more years of silence worked the same effect, and did not grant any more moral authority to Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, or anyone else attempting to administer post-Apartheid South Africa.
By that point, Mandela had been canonised as a secular saint. Even Clint Eastwood, a man who thought Barack Obama was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”, made a movie to burnish him.
The Apple of his eye Steve Jobs
In September 1997 Apple was $1bn in the red and six to eight weeks from bankruptcy. Then its real dad, Steve Jobs, came back to save it. He had assistance: the device that helped shunt Apple back into profit, the iMac, was the work of Jonathan Ive, a young British designer who did for the maximalist desktop pc what the Reformation did for the interiors of 16th-century churches. (Before moving to California, Ive was a member of an evangelical church in south London: I know because I rented his old flat, and the monthly cheques were collected by its warden.)
Between 2003 and 2006, the company’s share price rose from $6 to $80, boosted by an attractive new product called the iPod. When pancreatic cancer took Jobs’s life in 2011, Apple’s annual revenue was $108bn.
And still it rises. Partly because Apple wasn’t the one-man band suggested by Jobs’s ted talk-style product launches. Partly because his contribution is preserved, posthumously, in the management culture. Every new Apple executive recruit undergoes a training programme designed to make you think like Steve Jobs. Faintly culty, but it seems to work: the company is now worth over $1trn.
Boos and bust Tony Blair
The recent electoral history of the Labour Party, as certain factions never miss an opportunity to remind us, goes: lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose, lose. Yet in 2007, when Blair abdicated in favour of his chancellor, neither his nation nor his party put on black armbands.
Gordon Brown looked sure-footed, serious and sincere. He was unbesmirched by the horrors of the Iraq war. Then came the return of the economic bust he professed to have abolished, the parliamentary expenses scandal, and the unlikely nemesis of Gillian Duffy, a Lancashire grandmother whom he dismissed as “that bigoted woman” after she heckled him about the number of Polish immigrants in Rochdale.
Today, you have to be in your mid-30s to have helped elect a Labour prime minister. He’s still here, a vigorous player in public life. A higher share of the British population can recognise a photo of Tony Blair than they can the present labour leader, Keir Starmer. (98% to 88%, according to a YouGov poll.)
Here lies the unique difficulty of Blair’s legacy: he represents rare glory, but many in his own party regard him as a regrettable aberration. What remains of Corbynite Labour looks more sympathetically on Assad and Putin than it does upon the architect of the 1997 landslide. That view, as much as any turn of ideology or demography, is the source of Labour’s crisis.
In the beginning Peter Gabriel
Genesis is usually followed by Exodus. Not in the case of Britain’s most tenacious band of public-school prog rockers. Between 1968 and 1975, Genesis’s lead singer and creative prime mover was Peter Gabriel. Gabriel had an instinct for theatre. He sometimes performed in a furry fox mask and his wife’s best red frock, sometimes in a pustular carapace of green foam rubber known as the Slipperman. When he left, the band did something that sounded like suicide – they promoted the drummer to the front of the stage.
Phil Collins was sceptical about Gabriel’s costumes, and thought the Slipperman was “an inflatable dick” inside which his predecessor was barely audible. Perhaps the audience agreed: under Collins, the band developed a relatable sense of humour, broke America and went multi-platinum.
There are no rules in this game. Kajagoogoo was moribund, post-Limahl. Bruce Dickinson gave Iron Maiden a storming second act. Like 1970s Maoists, Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz split into two rival groupuscules, fought each other in court, then underwent a merger.
The most tenacious outfits know the wisdom of Plato’s thought-experiment about the Ship of Theseus. The Drifters, for instance, have altered their line-up for decades, but their sound remains unchanged. None of its original members – or their first replacements – remain in the group. Theirs is an act that can’t be followed because it has no need to end. It may persist for eternity, the immortal fungi of doo-wop.
Forget her not Diana Rigg
“The Avengers” – the real ones, not those spandex Wagnerians who clutter the gymnasium of contemporary cinema – were the tv secret agents who defined 1960s British cool by prosecuting a Carnaby Street version of the cold war.
The show’s smartest episodes starred Patrick Macnee as John Steed, a sharp-suited spook with a bowler and swordstick, and Diana Rigg as Mrs Emma Peel, his intellectual and physical superior, a judo black belt with a thing for leather catsuits. Some of these traits were inherited from her predecessor, Honor Blackman, but Rigg saw the series into colour and international success – until the Royal Shakespeare Company came calling with an offer of higher art on lower wages.
There’s a branch of screen connoisseurship that celebrates the people who enter a successful series to replace a star who has either got into trouble or got a better gig. They’re the ones who love Dick Sargent, who materialised in “Bewitched” when the first Darrin, Dick York, succumbed to a painkiller addiction. Or Tom Conway, who became the Falcon when his more famous brother George Sanders got bored with the part.
Among such people, Linda Thorson, who played Mrs Peel’s replacement, Tara King, is a bottle of Château Lafite. Tara was a softer proposition: she had a handbag rather than a black belt. She gazed dreamily at Steed, whereas Mrs Peel used flirtatious scepticism. De-Rigged, “The Avengers” survived only one series. But Thorson was never resentful, and, five decades later, is back in the cast of an audio version of the programme. This time she is playing the villain.
Try fighting with your head “To Kill a Mockingbird”
There are some artists whose greatest rivals are themselves. Imagine being the 26-year-old Orson Welles, trying to follow the act of the 25-year-old Orson Welles. Or J.D. Salinger, ordering his agent to shred all incoming correspondence about “Catcher in the Rye”.
Harper Lee, in similar circumstances, chose silence. “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960), her moral drama of racial injustice in the deep South, flew swiftly from a Pulitzer to a Hollywood adaptation, to school and university syllabuses. Lee never recovered from the success.
Four years after publication, disoriented by her triumph, exhausted by boring questions and – important this – extravagantly wealthy, she stopped giving interviews, turned down all requests to write an introduction to the novel, and tried to live as if she had never written it.
In pursuit of this ambition, she stopped writing. She drank martinis before lunch. A rumour started that her only book was the work of others. Her death, in 2016, allowed the publication of her only other work of fiction. “Go Set a Watchman” was promoted as a sequel to “Mockingbird”, but really it’s an early draft of the same story.
Did its release betray Lee’s desires? I’d say not. “Go Set a Watchman” is an inferior thing. But the act of publishing it raised the ghost of an alternative timeline in which Lee released this book instead, and was granted her apparent wish of small success, or none.
She rules the waves Queen Elizabeth II
Even republicans dread the death of the Queen. Not just because they’ll be disgusted by the sombre tv coverage and black-edged newspapers but because Elizabeth II represents Britain’s strongest living link with the post-war consensus that, in 2021, just about holds.
It’s harder to defend the welfare state when the generation that founded it has gone. Harder to justify free health care when nobody can remember how it felt to endure sickness in order to avoid a doctor’s fee.
Her death will carry a psychic shock. The Queen isn’t just a head of state and a fixture of the currency. Britons carry her image in their heads as well as their pockets. Some dream about her. And they may doubt whether the next generation of royals is sufficiently compelling to live rent-free in the national collective unconscious as well as in that great neoclassical slab in London sw1.
When she goes, we may almost hear a crack opening up between the past and the present. Or a rushing sound, as ve Day, the 1945 settlement and the coronation go tumbling over the Niagara of living memory.
By Matthew Sweet, a regular contributor to 1843, and a writer and broadcaster in London
ILLUSTRATIONS: JAKE READ
ADDITIONAL IMAGES: GETTY, SHUTTERSTOCK
THE ECONOMIST
