Sunday 11: From Kapka Kassabova — writer in residence at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival

9 months
3 weeks ago

A day of democracy and britishness

I’m in the autumn-glorious festival tent village where a whole nation of readers and their kids have come to browse books and sip cappuccinos. The only visual flaw, as you enter the Imperial Gardens crab-like from the side, is a photo of Robert Mugabe on a black Times banner. Of course The Times are the festival’s sponsor, and there are more newsy images on other Times banners, but a blown-up dictatorial visage staring at the middle distance is a bit of an odd choice.

Which takes us straight to our Saturday lunchtime event — a discussion on democracy with two political authors: professor John Keane and correspondent Humphrey Hawksley. Keane is the author of the impressive-sounding The Life and Death of Democracy, and Hawksley of the alarming-sounding Democracy Kills. He confessed to choosing the title for entirely commercial reasons. But they are only partly commercial. The other part turned out to be ideological, always a bad sign in journalism. Before he talked — without explaining anything — about the lethal nature of democracy as seen in Iraq and other failed states, Hawksley made a necessary concession to basic human rights, as seen in democratic states. Let’s not forget, he said, that ‘it’s nice to sit here and not have our heads cut off at the end of the talk.’ Then he went on to forget, with sweeping statements like ‘Democracy is not working: Africa is getting poorer. Democracy as we know it — with free and fair elections — kills. We have to think of something else.’

Keane — who looks like Bono and speaks like Churchill — was already thinking of something else. He warned us against a current zeitgeist of excessive disillusionment with democracy, and urged us to distinguish the real thing from its misuse, as in Berlusconi’s Italy. ‘The word democracy is in a hairy state of abuse,’ he said, an apt way to describe Berlusconi’s tortured hairstyle. He talked grippingly about hubris and how democracy is the only way to prevent it from fully expressing itself for an indefinite amount of time. Hawksley retaliated by inviting the audience to imagine that an apocalypse has befallen Britain. You have two choices, he said. A dictatorship (Cuba), or a nominal democracy (Haiti). I had no idea that Haiti — one of the poorest and most violent places on earth — was a democracy, which says something about the above-mentioned misuse of the word. Anyway, hands went up for Cuba, but that’s a predictable old chestnut among those unreconstructed Western idealists who haven’t actually lived in Cuba. Keane keenly observed that if we have a problem with liberal democracy, there is always Venezuela or Burma. Indeed, in countries where people are bludgeoned to death with dogma, at least we can’t blame democracy for the killing.

I followed Democracy with Britishness, briefly pausing to admire Cherie Blair who was Speaking for Herself and looking sharp in a navy suit.

Being British was the subject of former Sunday Telegraph and Spectator editor Matthew D’Ancona’s talk about a new collection of essays on Britishness. The idea was originally Gordon Brown’s, but as ‘he’s been a bit busy’, D’Ancona did the commissioning. The introduction is by Brown himself, but D‘Ancona stressed that his own sense of Britishness is not necessarily the same — it isn‘t all about ‘being nice and brushing your teeth twice a day, it isn‘t necessarily about “values”.’ It’s more about attitudes and if one attitude emerged from the essays as being British, it’s the desire to cohabit peacefully. D’Ancona was insightful, amusing, thought-provoking, and all-round great company as he gave us the highlights on Britishness as seen by his authors: ‘an amicable blur’; ‘diversity, porousness, heterogeneity’; ‘a rising tide of pebbles’ compared with the rock-solid, monolithic establishments of yesterday. The consensus is that there is no final consensus on Britishness — and that’s a healthy thing. Because with consensus comes stasis. And with stasis come dogma, abuse and hubris. And then we’re back with Mugabe and Berlusconi.

In other words, I was ready for a tea break at The Times Café featuring a performance of a chapter from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. How very British of me.

Kapka Kassabova is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Kapka Kassabova, Vesna Maric and Sathnam Sanghera in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Kapka’s latest book is Street Without a Name published by Portobello Books.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Sunday 11 October 2009.