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Telegraph
25-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Anti-Trump protests make me embarrassed to be Scottish
During a previous visit to Scotland by Donald Trump, the late comedian Janey Godley caused a stir by holding up a placard describing the president as a c-word. To many this appeared vulgar and offensive, and just a little lacking in imagination. But to many within Scotland, this insult soared into the stratosphere of Wildean pithiness, revealing Godley's genius, courage and – this is Scotland, after all – her downright goodness as a human being. To many Scots, however, the knowledge that Godley's insult was being broadcast across the globe and would be seen by our American friends was a source of embarrassment. Name-calling? That's the apotheosis of political satire in Scotland? Really? Today there will be more protests at the start of the president's five-day visit to Scotland, which will take in his two golf courses here. If only there were a way of explaining to our American cousins that such protests are less about the president himself or his policies, or even about the contempt in which the protesters hold the US citizens who voted for him last year. They are about one thing and one thing only: the protesters themselves. The Trump visit is a public relations opportunity for the likes of Scottish Green MSPs and activists, as well as a hodgepodge of the usual people: the climate change, refugee rights, trans rights and, naturally, anti-Israel activists. Perhaps they imagine that their earnest sloganising and placard-waving will have some influence on the president himself – in which case, it's disturbing that they harbour such ignorance of the nature of their hated target. More likely, they probably believe that their antics will impress and attract their fellow Scots, although to what end who can tell? When the president has dusted off his golf clubs and set off home across the Atlantic, the chief aim of the protesters will have been achieved: they will feel good about themselves. They will still retain just a modicum of the righteous indignation that motivated them to rehearse, memorise and perform the weekend's radical slogans, but the feeling will be one of overwhelming self-satisfaction that they stuck it to The Man and – more importantly – that they were captured on video doing so. For the sane majority of Scots and their fellow Brits, the visit by an American president – any American president – is a valuable opportunity to forge a deeper friendship and to develop new trade, political and military ties. Having Trump could be particularly advantageous to the UK, given the uncertainty in the global economy over the US administration's threatened and actual tariff regime. Britain has managed so far to escape the worst of the policy's impacts and even secured a comprehensive US-UK trade deal. There is far more to be gained from treating the president with respect than with derision. But that's not how our domestic army of middle-class, virtue-signalling, keffiyeh-adorned protesters see things. Their need to be seen protesting Trump – and it is a need, not a preference – simply must be sated. During the president's first term, even the House of Commons surrendered to this performative self-indulgence, with the then Speaker, John Bercow, shredding his obligations to political neutrality and announcing that he would not authorise the use of Westminster Hall for Trump to address both houses of Parliament – even before such a request was made. The announcement had its intended effect, not so much in its rebuke to the president (even if he had been aware of the Speaker's snub) but in the thousands of Twitter users praising Bercow as 'progressive'. Consider this question: were this weekend's protesters unable to share memes and videos of their activities on social media, if the TV news cameras didn't cover their activities or invite them to explain their personal animosity towards the president, would they bother to turn out at all? If a protest happens and nobody notices, does it make a sound? Fortunately for the semi-skimmed oat milk latte crowd, such a scenario is unlikely. They will have their few seconds of notoriety on the TV news bulletins and across Twitter/X and Instagram. They will not seek to try to understand why a man like Donald Trump was elected in the first place, or why their preferred candidate was so humiliatingly rejected. It is enough for them to be angry – or appear to be angry – at the president's very presence in their country. But a plea to all my American friends: please don't assume that these protests represent the whole, or even a large minority, of Scotland. They do not. They're just embarrassing attention-seekers that we all must put up with in a modern democracy. Like toddlers, they'll eventually get tired of their own tantrums and have to be put to bed, leaving the grown-ups to have an adult conversation in their absence.
Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A memoir doesn't always have to be true
The news that Raynor Winn's bestselling memoir The Salt Path may not have been the whole truth has been met with a mixture of outrage, hilarity and 'I told you so'. Many readers have smugly informed the world that Winn's journey along the Salt Path with her husband Moth (Moth!) was so obviously a work of fiction that they saw through it months before anyone else. The fact that they have waited until now to make their dissent public suggests they, like so many others, may have been wise well after the fact. Personally, I watched the news unfold with more than usual interest, because it took me back to my own dabblings with memoir. Not my own, thankfully – we shall have to wait a few decades for that – but when, more years ago than I care to remember, I was working at a Soho literary agency and was asked to assist the dandy, artist and drug addict Sebastian Horsley in recalling what, precisely, had happened to him in the heady days of the Eighties and Nineties. My first meeting with Horsley was an auspicious one. I had read the existing draft of his memoir, entitled Mein Camp, and found it simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. It was a stream of consciousness that not only painted Horsley and his parents in the grimmest possible light, but gave the sense that his life so far had been an endless wallow in squalor and misery. I was fascinated to meet this man and discover the pain that he had been through. I was therefore surprised that the cheerful, rather Wildean character who greeted me – a cross between a Byronic hero and a Dickensian grotesque, clad in a glittering red suit – did not seem like someone who had suffered beyond measure. Of course, I understood that he had led more of a life than just about anyone else I had met. After all, he kept a revolver by his bedside, a collection of skulls (including one, he claimed, that belonged to his former mother-in-law) and drugs paraphernalia. The suggestion was that he had walked on the wild side with dealers and users alike. But was this jovial figure really the catamite of hard-man Glasgow drug dealers? Had he really spent days immersed in his own filth, naked, listening to Beethoven? I raised this with Horsley, gingerly, and his response was both surprising and disarming. 'I made it all up.' All of it? He laughed. 'Oh, come on, it's a memoir, not a work of history.' It was not for me to quibble, and the question of fact-checking an autobiography as inimitable – and shamelessly, hilariously personal. Horsley had a simple idea for what we should do with the second draft: 'Let's make some more things up.' 'I made it all up.' All of it? He laughed. 'Oh, come on, it's a memoir, not a work of history' Creating fiction out of fact is an intoxicating, liberating experience. Horsley was a fabulous storyteller, spinning yarns with the brio of an actor, and it was impossible not to be swept up by his loopy charisma. I knew that my role was to play good cop and to turn his fantasies into some sort of cohesive whole, but I was too enraptured by the sheer lunacy of what he was peddling to want to impose any literary discipline upon it. Horsley and I worked together on the memoir – entitled Dandy in the Underworld – for the next couple of months. I tried to encourage Horsley to tell the truth, in as entertaining and evocative a fashion as he could. But it was obvious that a combination of class-A drug use and telling his stories so many times had meant that the line between fact and fiction had long since blurred. Eventually, I threw up my hands and allowed Horsley to print the legend, rather than fact. To this day, I have no idea how much of the memoir on which I worked was literal truth, how much was embroidered fact and how much was simple creative fantasy. In a sense, it does not matter. The book remains Horsley's epitaph – his sordid story told in splendidly entertaining fashion, in his own words. Should Raynor Winn be hauled over the coals for her own inability to be wholly accurate, she might be tempted to respond that she, too, was writing 'her truth' rather than documented fact – and that this is the prerogative of any memoirist. Some might even sympathise with her.
Irish Examiner
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Do not put this book on hold
I have long suspected it's the independent presses that are printing the most interesting, daring, and inventive fiction around. Published by Indigo Press, Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes — the sophomore offering from Katharina Volckmer — certainly supports this suspicion. Our protagonist, Jimmie, works the late shift on a zero-hours contract in a soul-crushing London call centre — half-listening to disgruntled holidaymakers rant about a hair on their pillow or too much sand in their drawers. The novel compactly follows Jimmie through a single workday, where a scheduled meeting with his supervisor looms over the narrative, leaving us to wonder if his increasingly bizarre disengagement from the job might have finally backfired. A drama school graduate and part-time clown who imagines backgrounds and castings for the people on the other end of the line, Jimmie has little time for annoying customers but treats the vulnerable with a poignant tenderness — while exposing everyone to his Wildean wit and meandering digressions. Volckmer's canvas is satire, although anyone who has slogged through a customer service job or waited an inordinate amount of time to talk to someone who cannot actually help, will recognise how close we are to reality here. Jimmie's acts of defiance include muting his telephone, donning his mother's lipstick, and drawing genitalia on his deskmate's notepad. He has no desire to occupy a higher position but resents that management are allowed to forgo the ugly company hoodie and sit on chairs that have armrests. In hilarious dialogue and inner monologue, scathing observations on everything from late capitalism to wellness culture punctuate Volckmer's animated prose: 'In this new world nothing was tangible, and when Jimmie couldn't breathe he only had his lack of self-care to blame.' The majority of the jokes land and, for the most part, Jimmie's generalisations are either valid or good natured: 'Italians all wore the same puffa jacket in winter' made me laugh out loud. Still, others, particularly in relation to his appearance, feel a little cheap in a story ablaze with wisdom. I tend to steel myself when I see the word 'transgressive' attached to a modern writer's work, preparing for material so preoccupied with disruption that it becomes untethered from fundamentals. This worry is unfounded with Volckmer, a master of pace with a talent for creating captivatingly flawed characters. An eclectic cast of co-workers, who provide connections both platonic and passionate, are brilliantly rendered. In the novel's claustrophobic, communal interior, windows offer solace and hope for the future, doors deliver comfort from the life currently being endured, even if it is temporary; 'a knock on the door, the loose bolt shaking like a lost promise'. Dismissed by acquaintances as an oddball, to the reader Jimmie is a quiet rebel, a philosophical, imaginative thinker just trying to make it through another workday. He is also a fantasist, and beneath the novel's humour lies an unsettling undercurrent that lingers. Yet, despite its bleak backdrop, Calls May Be Recorded… ultimately offers optimism amidst society's strain. As Jimmie remarks: 'The only real revolution is to be happy in spite of your circumstances.' This is fresh, highly considered work, from a writer deserving of the praise garnered for her debut. Her follow-up more than delivers, and cements Volckmer as a beguiling voice in literary fiction. For fans of irreverent novels from the likes of Ottessa Moshfegh and Fien Veldman, or cult TV comedy such as Peep Show, this pithy, delightfully peculiar book would prove the ideal holiday companion — possible to enjoy in the combined amount of time you may have spent listening to looping hold music on your phone this year.
