This is England? Thoughts on Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer

“Prime Minister Starmer’s father wanted his children to lead ‘useful lives’ and Starmer undoubtedly succeeded in that—two, three, four times over. Yet it is unclear, as yet, just how useful he will be as Labour Prime Minister.”

Changing—and Staying the Same

Prince Fabrizio, the eponymous leopard of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s literary masterpiece of 1958, The Leopard, lives in a state of “perpetual discontent.” Residing in a condition of “shabby grandeur,” the Sedara family to which he belongs, and to which he is now paterfamilias, has for centuries “been incapable even of adding up their own expenditure and subtracting their own debts.” So low have standards fallen among the Sicilian aristocracy that the Prince’s most accomplished son, Giovanni, prefers to work as a modest clerk in a coal depot in England than lead a life of pampered ease in Palermo. And at the first sign of weakening control, the city rabble, Prince Fabrizio predicts, will take to looting and rape—a repellent prospect, needless to say.

The novel begins in 1860, and most of the action takes place between August of that year and November of 1862. It is set, in other words, during the Risorgimento, the political and social movement that forged the Italian nation state in the mid-to-late-19th century, and the island of Sicily is soon overrun by Redshirts, the plebeian army of the revolutionary republican, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Defeated in advance by hundreds of years of social and technological torpor, Prince Fabrizio—a distinguished and peculiarly intelligent noble—therefore watches “the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance” without making a single move toward saving it from destruction.

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the system of feudalism on which it is based, is unsalvageable, he thinks; the liberalism brought in by the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions is essentially unstoppable. But if feudalism cannot be saved, what can be controlled at least is the character of the system which succeeds it—a constitutional monarchy or a Mazzinian republic—and the social composition of the forces which lead the bourgeois revolution—the fanatical hoi polloi of Garibaldi or aristocratic liberals in the stamp of Count Cavour, the Prime Minister of Piedmont. Would the Risorgimento involve a peaceful transition to a system of free persons and free markets, or would it mean decades of bloodshed and struggle? Would the Sedara perish? Would their privileges be withdrawn and their property expropriated instantly? Or would they be shown clemency, and, through negotiation and compromise, granted an extra, yet finite, lease of life?

A novel, at bottom, about prudent leadership, Prince Fabrizio ensures the Sedara survive. Unsurprisingly, they do not flourish. Nevertheless, they retain as much dignity as it is possible to hold on to in the circumstances, uniting, through marriage, with the parvenu Falconeri, an upwardly socially mobile family of erstwhile peasants. A proponent of honesty, decency, and plain good manners, Prince Fabrizio abhors the primitive greed and chicanery that animates the petty local Liberals. Yet, notwithstanding his distaste for the jackals and hyenas which are displacing the leopards and lions of old, he has little room for manoeuvre. If there is a single sentiment associated with Lampedusa’s terrifically perspicacious novel it is succinctly expressed by Prince Fabrizio’s talented and far-sighted nephew, Tancredi—an Italian Mirabeau—when, early on in the book, he explains to his uncle: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”