Will Self

A French friend, in town for a couple of days recently, was suitably and ­stereotypically bemused by our latest bad news about terrible crimes: Justice Lowell Goddard’s resignation as the head of the inquiry into historical child abuse was closely preceded by new results from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, according to which 11 per cent of the women questioned, and 3 per cent of the men, said they had been sexually assaulted during childhood.

“What is it with you British!” he exclaimed. “Of course we have such scandals in France, but they’re largely confined to the Catholic Church.” Then he predictably went on about “the English vice”, and how the old British establishment is composed of upper- and upper-middle-class men riven by sexual frustration because of their single-sex boarding-school educations. Under such circumstances was it any wonder they all ended up becoming paedophiles?

I bristled at this bowdlerisation; yet when I came to consider the matter, it did seem as if some explanation was in order. I concede I haven’t researched the matter exhaustively, but I am unaware of any other country in which a statistically significant sample implies that 7% of the adult population are survivors of serious abuse.

The Panglossian view would be that, as British society has liberalised, becoming more open and therapeutically aware, so victims of historical abuse have felt able to come forward; concurrently, the police have become better trained in such matters, and more committed to seeking justice.

But unfortunately we have no evidence whatsoever that we are living in the best of all possible worlds – on the contrary, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this is a pretty scuzzy world. After all, what could be more morally dubious than announcing a great clearing of the Augean stables and then proceeding to dump a whole load more ordure on the heads of those who have already suffered?

The idea that a Kiwi lawyer can swan over here and pick up rather more than £300,000 for rather less than a year of futile “inquiries” is infuriating even if you have no personal stake. At least the criticism Lowell Goddard was facing related to personal rather than institutional peccancy: those that preceded her – Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and Fiona Woolf – were compelled to go because they were personifications of the very knotted establishment they sought to unpick. Their first investigation needed to be into themselves.

Which leads us back to the high prevalence of child abuse in Britain. I was a child in the 1970s, and have, in recent years, watched as the sunny uplands of my recall are darkened by successive revelations of widespread, institutionally engrafted child abuse. If I want to infuriate my own children, I have only to summon up this redundant cliché about the recent past: “It was an innocent era.”

But I do still think the Seventies were innocent in this sense: the seismic waves were rippling out from the sexy Sixties, but people were completely naive when it came to both the politics and the morals of greater promiscuity. Second-wave feminism had hardly any traction on sexual discourse, and liberals and socialists alike made a specious equivalence between free collective love and free collective bargaining.

We were young idealists in a culture that dinned this into us: more sex = good sex. No wonder we were easy pickings for the Saviles and the Smiths. Though not as easy as the boys and girls who were in care, at boarding schools, or otherwise at the mercy of the men in authority, and the women who were complicit in their crimes.

The picture that emerges from the survivors’ evidence is of an organisational culture, in businesses, the BBC, local government and even hospitals, typified by a sort of surly yet fawning subservience. The famous disc jockey is visiting; give him a key and the run of the place. The local MP wants to come by late at night to talk to some of the boys; fine, let’s leave him to his own devices. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to turn a blind eye, because the corridors in these establishments were so labyrinthine that no one could see clearly for more than a few feet: minding-your-own-business was the shibboleth sealing everyone’s lips.

In a way, the pattern of institutional child abuse, with powerful individuals who bestrode the national stage being allowed unrestricted underage footsie at a local level, seems like a bizarre analogue of Britain’s equally labyrinthine local government finances. Ever unwilling to cede its tax-raising powers, Westminster retains a whip hand over councils, such that even the lowliest lobby fodder becomes a veritable nabob once he’s dealing with the little people, whether they be metaphorically or literally little.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has tried to steamroller its way into public acceptance by its appellation alone; but its capacity to interrogate Westminster meaningfully remains utterly unproven. For victims, this can’t help but seem like some deranged repetition: the first time they were sexually abused it was a local tragedy; since then, they’ve been abused again and again, and now it’s a national farce.

I wish I could have consoled my friend by complimenting him on his native system of devolved tax-raising powers, but in point of fact the system in France is just as Byzantine and centralised as our own; which is why, I suspect, there are a good many fonctionnaires out there still minding the business of powerful French paedophiles.

In a post-Brexit world, one in which we are supposedly committed to mending the fabric of our civil society, it seems to me the Prime Minister’s priority must be to make the inquiry she herself announced in 2014 truly fit for purpose – and if that entails some siphoning off of power from the centre, so much the better.

At the corner of the rue D’Hauteville and the rue de Paradis in the tenth arrondissement of Paris is a retro-video-games-themed bar, Le Fantôme, which is frequented by some not-so-jeunes gens – the kind of thirtysomethings nostalgic for an era when you had to go to an actual place if you wanted to enter virtual space. They sit placidly behind the plate-glass windows zapping Pac-Men and Space Invaders, while outside another – and rather more lethal – sort of phantom stalks the sunlit streets.

I often go to Paris for work, and so have been able to register the incremental militarisation of its streets since President Hollande first declared a state of emergency after last November’s terrorist attacks. In general, the French seem more comfortable about this prêt-à-porter khaki than we’d probably be; the army-nation concept is, after all, encrypted deep in their collective psyche. The army was constituted as a revolutionary instrument. France was the first modern nation to introduce universal male conscription – and it continued in one form or another right up until the mid-1990s.

Even so, it was surprising to witness the sang-froid with which Parisians regarded the camouflaged phantoms wandering among them: a patrol numbering eight ­infantrymen and women moved up the roadway, scoping out doorways, nosing into passages – but when one peered into Le Fantôme, his assault rifle levelled, none of the boozing gamers paid the least attention. I witnessed this scene the Saturday after Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ran amok on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice – it was a little preview of the new state of emergency.

On Monday 18 July, the French premier, Manuel Valls, was booed at a memorial service for the victims of the Nice attacks – while Marine Le Pen has been making all the populist running, whipping up anxieties about the enemy within. For many French, the events of the past week – including the failed Turkish coup – are steps along the way limned by Michel Houellebecq in his bestselling novel Submission; a via dolorosa that ends with La Marianne wearing the hijab and France itself annexed by a new caliphate.

Into this febrile drama comes a new player: Boris Johnson, the British Foreign Secretary. What can we expect from this freshly minted statesman when it comes to our relations with our closest neighbour? There is no doubt that Johnson is a Francophile – I’ve run into him and his family at the Tuileries, and he made much of his own Francophone status during the referendum campaign. In Paris last winter to launch the French edition of his Churchill biography, Johnson wowed a publication dinner by speaking French for the entire evening. He was sufficiently fluent to bumble, waffle and generally avoid saying anything serious at all.

Last Sunday, I attended the Lambeth Country Show, an oxymoronic event for which the diverse inhabitants of my home borough gather in Brockwell Park, south London, for jerked and halal chicken, funfair rides, Quidditch-watching, and “country-style” activities, such as looking at farm animals and buying their products. Wandering among ancient Rastafarians with huge shocks of dreadlocks, British Muslims wearing immaculate white kurtas blazoned with “ASK ME ABOUT ISLAM” and crusty old Brixton punks, I found it quite impossible to rid my mind of the Nice carnage – or stop wondering how they would react if armed soldiers were patrolling, instead of tit-helmeted, emphatically unarmed police.

I stepped into the Royal Horticultural Society marquee, and there they were: the entire cast of our end-of-the-pier-show politics, in vegetable-sculpture form and arrayed for judging. There was Jeremy Corbyn (or “Cornbin”) made out of corncobs – and Boris Johnson in the form of a beetroot, being stabbed in the back by a beetroot Michael Gove. And over there was Johnson again, this time rendered in cabbage. The veggie politicians were the big draw, Brixtonians standing six-deep around them, iPhones aloft.

The animal (as opposed to the vegetable) Johnson has begun his diplomatic rounds this week, his first démarches as tasteless and anodyne as cucumber. No British abandonment of friends after Brexit . . . Coordinated response to terror threat . . . Call for Erdogan to be restrained in response to failed coup . . . Blah-blah, whiff-whaff-waffle . . . Even someone as gaffe-prone as he can manage these simple lines, but I very much doubt he will be able to produce rhetorical flourishes as powerful as his hero’s. In The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, Johnson writes of Winnie overcoming “his stammer and his depression and his ­appalling father to become the greatest living Englishman”. Well, I’ve no idea if Bojo suffers from depression now but he soon will if he cleaves to this role model. His Churchill-worship (like so many others’) hinges on his belief that, without Churchill as war leader, Britain would have been ground beneath the Nazi jackboot. It may well be that, with his contribution to the Brexit campaign, Johnson now feels he, too, has wrested our national destiny from the slavering jaws of contingency.

Of course the differences between the two politicians are far more significant: Johnson’s genius – such as it is – lies in his intuitive understanding that politics, in our intensely mediatised and entirely commoditised era, is best conceived of as a series of spectacles or stunts: nowadays you can fool most of the people, most of the time. This is not a view you can imagine associating with Churchill, who, when his Gallipoli stratagem went disastrously wrong, exiled himself, rifle in hand, to the trenches. No, the French people Johnson both resembles and has an affinity for are the ones caught up in the virtual reality of Le Fantôme – rather than those patrolling the real and increasingly mean streets without.

We all know the form: a Terrible ­Political Thing happens – and like many terrible political things that happen, it appears to have been caused by a combination of sheer contingency and human error. An inquiry is established to find out how far appearance conforms to reality (a philosophic question that has bedevilled thinkers for millennia, but let’s not dwell on that) and witnesses are interrogated to see if they either conspired or cocked up. In due course a Report is written comprising millions of words – and eventually (often after many years), it is released to be filleted by journalists in hours then reduced to two or three headlines, such as: “BLAIR EXONERATED” or indeed the reverse.

Unlike with Terrible Things in the domestic and civil sphere, where some sort of justice for wounded and aggrieved parties can possibly be achieved by criminal prosecution, TTs in the political and international sphere almost never result in such, for obvious reasons: jurisdictions are difficult to establish, “laws” are disputed, while enforcement is patchy and subject to realpolitik.

Anyone on the left who imagined the Chilcot report would definitively name the guilty parties, so leading to their indictment as war criminals, can’t ever have understood too much about the Britain we’ve all been living in. Perhaps that’s why it’s been Alex Salmond who has so vigorously pursued the idea: he doesn’t want the Britain we’ve all been living in to exist. Yet even if the British state is going up in flames, I don’t expect cosmic justice to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes. The purely coincidental arrival of the report and a major constitutional crisis in the same week should, however, give us pause to consider what exactly we’ve hoped for in terms of the Iraq conflict’s aftermath. By “we” I mean those of us who, on and around 15 February 2003, got it into our heads that the popular will – which took the form of many thousands chanting: “Who let the dogs out? Bush! Blair!” – was being flouted by our elected representatives.

Thirteen unlucky years later, with Iraq a failed state, its sepsis infecting its neighbours, anodyne British military boots still on its ground, and the British Muslim community widely and confusedly disaffected, we remain gripped by a free-floating fantasy that settles on anything – such as the Chilcot report – that seems to offer redress. What would we like? Why, the clock turned back, of course: the dead to rise from their graves, the maimed to be made whole, the dossier-sexers and the Dr David Kelly-outers to be arraigned, even as the entire political class that bought the phoney pretext for war hangs its collective head in deep shame.

What we don’t want to do, however, is examine the paralysis this fantasy has plunged us into. For the past 13 years there’s been no serious reappraisal of Atlanticism possible on the left; we’ve been too busy resenting Connaught Square’s most infamous inhabitant – a man who cannot pop out for a pint of milk without being accompanied by eight policemen armed with Heckler & Koch automatic rifles. And that’s the way we like it.

But holding on to a resentment – as the adage has it – is like drinking a cup of poison and expecting the other person to die. TB, who was in the frame for the TT even before the balloon went up, may look considerably older and have gone to Rome in order to save his eternal soul, but he ain’t dead yet. Meanwhile, the party he sidelined in the slipstream of his own hubristic ambition carries on knocking back the poison with predictable results. Since the EU referendum there’s been considerable soul-searching on the left – the trouble is, it isn’t our souls we’re searching, but rather those of the lumpenproletariat wot won it for Brexit. They may be deracinated “tribal Labour” – they could be altogether non-partisan; but they’ve emerged from the cracks and crannies of run-down northern estates to inflict this terrible wound on the British body politic. How could they have done it? We reach in our grab bag of hoary old epithets (the one we got “lumpenproletariat” from), and come up with “false consciousness”. Yes! That’s it – they must be suffering from a confusion about where their true interest lies, or else they couldn’t, in their millions, have made their exterminatory marks.

What about us? Our consciousness, I think, has been far more deceptive: it has prevented us from acknowledging the truth about all sorts of Terrible Things, such as our complete failure to push for a serious geopolitical realignment post-Iraq. In the run-up to 23 June, rather than espouse the positive case for a united Europe as a counterweight to the existing Great Powers, we, along with the political class we so poisonously resent, remained blinkered, with our heads still firmly rammed up the hegemon’s back passage. The late Willie Donaldson, in his alter ego as Henry Root, used often to opine, satirising the left-liberal position: “We’re all to blame.” And indeed, we are all to blame for this impasse; yet for as long as the possibility of holding someone else to account for Iraq remains, we can neither think clearly, nor act decisively.

Soap Street in Manchester is filthy. A thick, decades-old deposit of soot and grime coats the old warehouse buildings, while underfoot there’s rotten fruit, discarded takeaway cups, broken glass: all the casual droppings of the urban herd. At its westerly end, the street – which is really little more than an alley – dog-legs right, and in the crook of this bricky elbow, beside bulging wheelie-bins, This & That resides. A local institution for rising thirty years, it offers a selection of three curries and rice, for a modest prix fixe, either to take away, or to eat in on melamine-topped tables.

Or at least the tables were melamine when I was last in Manchester; now, horror of horrors, This & That has had a refurb, such that through its gloomy windows I see clean white-and-blond-wood surfaces. A shiver runs down my neck: Soap Street is in the increasingly hip Northern Quarter, where new-builds and conversions continue apace. True, it’s surpassing difficult to imagine this great, raddled old Victorian city being given a complete, luxury-apartment-and-barcode-façade-office-block makeover – but New Labour began it in the late Nineties and, ever since, the wild horses of speculation they unleashed have been snorting up and down the Mancunian streets. You could be forgiven for thinking they won’t rest until all Salford looks like Media-bloody-City.

People such as myself, who loosely style ourselves psychogeographers, can often appear as insensitive voyeurs on the urban scene. We seem to valorise in particular locations such as Soap Street, which for us are productive of reveries we prize. Surely, our desire to maintain these zones of desuetude and dereliction is proof positive of our disconnection from economic realities – while our ecstatic embrace of the buddleia bursting from the perished brickwork is surely nothing but nostalgie de la bou; in this case, a bou we ourselves will never have to touch. Well, I understand it may appear this way, but in what follows I hope to convince you that the lather Soap Street provokes in me is a rather more interesting phenomenon – a state of mind accessible to all, one that both liberates and empowers.

I stand enfolded by the crook of Soap Street’s elbow, looking up past peeling posters to the fire escapes. The ones to the right are ornate, decorative, the last gasp of the vegetative in the airless, anthropic world, as Walter Benjamin characterised the Belle Époque. But the fire escapes to the left are more angular, with a smoothly kinking and curving balustrade: these are streamlined, interwar flights, for hurrying on down towards the Modern. I hold myself in this declivity between decades and façades, eyes roaming window frames and brickwork. I sense the relationship between the two buildings as longer and more intense than any I’ve ever had. I may have been penetrated and penetrated in turn for – oh, moments, these two have knitted together over the years in a mucilage of mortar . . .

. . . and all at once I’m no longer in the city as prosaically conceived – no longer in Soap Street, in the Northern Quarter, no longer in Manchester. These purely human designations have no currency as I sense the city as a strange sort of biota: a layer of stuff that includes sewer systems and cabling ducts, canals and railway tunnels, stuffy office units and basement Chinese laundries. And the entire colloidal mass heaves and ripples down the ages as it interacts with the morphology of the land in which it is implanted and the fantasies of the myriad species – human, canine, insect, avian, feline – that infest it.

This sense of being disjointed from place and time sustains as whoever-I-am wanders distractedly around the corner, past an estate agent’s selling blond-wood-and-white surfaces by the square metre, across the road and into the Arndale Centre. You can’t blame Tony Blair for everything; the unreal IRA has to take some responsibility for the weird atmosphere in the Arndale: for the massacre of innocent fish and fowl going on in the food court, the jitterbugging along the central concourse. The sites of terrorist outrages bear their psychic scars – the bomb that demolished the adjacent Marks & Spencer in 1996 is still sending its shock wave howling down the years; I see it in the faces of the shoppers as they stream past me, feel it in the slow and clammy shudder of my own skin.

Not that I’m that embodied yet; it will take me another half-mile or so of my own streaming before I re-coalesce in my social identity. For now, I remain a flux, a shadow in sunlight, a smirch on a shop window. I pause by the wall alongside the Quaker Meeting House on Bootle Street. Every time it fools me: the venerable tree spreading its boughs over the ancient brickwork seems to beckon to some secluded garden, but there’s only a scrap of car park behind the wall. Or is there? H G Wells wrote a story about mystical experience that takes its title from a nondescript green door off the Cromwell Road which acts as a portal for his protagonist’s trip to the Other Side, and while I’ve no truck with nirvana, I am a true believer in the power of deep absorption into the spirit of a place; it liberates, imaginatively empowers, and can make of a half-mile’s walk across Manchester a journey deep into inner space.