Eindexamen Engels vwo 2024, tijdvak 2: vragen en antwoorden

Entirely Different Cooking Show by Our Plagiarism Staff Kat Koppy

1 BBC executives leapt to the defence of their new programme “Strictly Come Baking” yesterday, insisting it was in no way similar to their previous show “The Great British Bake Off” for which Channel 4 paid millions for exclusive rights last year.

2 “For a start, it’s got a completely different presenter,” said one executive. “Her name is Mary Berry and she’s a whole year older than the one who presented the original show that this one is nothing like.”

3 He added, “This new show is a cooking show, which has nothing to do with baking cakes, except when the cooking task involves the baking of cakes. Oh, and by the way, the contestants in “Strictly Come Baking” are members of the public who are totally different from the members of the public who were in the original show. The presenter is Claudia Winkleman, a witty female Cambridge graduate who is entirely different from Mel and Sue, who are two witty female Cambridge graduates.”

4 The BBC has just announced a spin-off show called “An Extra Spice”, which will analyse the highlights of the cooking show in a totally amusing and different way with a comedic cooking enthusiast, possibly Katy Brand, or maybe Jo Caulfield, or some combination of the two.

5 Channel 4 is outraged by the attempts to copy the “Bake Off” format. Said a furious executive, “Why can’t the BBC come up with an original idea for a programme instead of just copying the one we bought off them?”

Private Eye, 2017

Climate calculations In “ClimeApocalypse!” (Skeptic), Michael Shermer draws on the widely criticized work of Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg to conclude that climate change is not a large concern when compared with poverty and global health. This is 3 ; few global issues we face are of greater consequence to the poor and to all living creatures on the planet than climate change. Without immediate, large-scale action, global water supplies, agriculture, disease rates and extreme weather will have profound negative consequences on all of us. RAFAEL REYES San Mateo, Calif

Scientific American, 2014

THEN & NOW

by Alejandro de la Garza

1 Last year, Elon Musk seemed to have escaped the force of gravity. Stock prices for carmaker Tesla hit all-time highs, while SpaceX had landed a NASA contract to put astronauts on the moon. It was, as my colleagues and I wrote in the 2021 Person of the Year profile, “the year of Elon Unbound.”

2 But hurtling through space, one risks falling into the orbit of something else. Musk has spent an increasing share of his time on Twitter in recent years

• 4-1 that paved the way for him to buy the platform this year for $44 billion.

3 Musk found success on the leading edge of technological change. Twitter, though, was an aging empire, and the revolution that Musk proposed was based not on innovation but on politics. He ’s spent the year banging a “free speech” drum to justify 4-2 , and in the weeks since the sale went through has reinstated once banned users and even appeared to take direction from the far right over which left-wing accounts to delete. He wants to rebuild the platform, but his shake-ups have cut engineering talent to the bone and cost the company many of the moderators who helped assuage advertisers’ fears over toxic content. As of Nov. 22, half of the platform ’s top 100 advertisers had left, according to progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America.

4 Observers might point out that Musk ’s 5 is what brought him success in the first place. But his brashness has formerly been checked by other forces

• among them former NASA engineers at SpaceX and Tesla CTO JB Straubel, known for insulating subordinates from Musk ’s ever shifting demands. There are no Straubels surrounding Musk at Twitter. He may yet remake the world ’s information universe as he sees fit. More likely, this is Musk ’s white whale, his Russian campaign. To grow, one must have an understanding of one ’s own limitations. Musk appears to have lost sight of his.

time.com, 2022

Needs, Wants and Desires By Oliver Burkeman

1 As anyone who counts a three-year-old among their acquaintances will know, there’s a fiery purity to the will of a small child that’s difficult to oppose. Once my son has figured out that there’s ice-cream in the freezer, and decided he wants some for dessert, my role is equivalent to that of the ineffectual UN diplomat attempting to persuade a major nation-state to stockpile fewer weapons. Yet frequently, on receiving the ice-cream, he’ll decide to let it melt

• then forget about it completely. He wants ice cream, monomaniacally, with a force his little frame almost can’t contain. But he doesn’t like it so much that some other absorbing activity can’t banish it from his mind.

2 I only clearly grasped this distinction ─ and realised how it applies to me, too ─ when I encountered the findings of a study of coffee drinkers reported on the Research Digest blog. Using various psychological tests, researchers showed that “heavy” drinkers had a much greater desire for coffee than those who consumed less of it, or none. But they took roughly the same, far lower level of pleasure as light drinkers when it actually came to drinking it. More serious addictions ─ to alcohol, or hard drugs ─ are characterised by a similar split between wanting and liking: you want the substance more and more, but like it less and less.

3 The ancient idea that what we desire isn’t necessarily what we enjoy has received support from modern neuroscience, which indicates that the two processes involve distinct circuits in the brain; dopamine, the so-called pleasure chemical, is probably better understood as a desire chemical, which can be triggered in huge quantities in the near-total absence of pleasure.

4 10 From your genes’ point of view, it’s helpful that things like sex, or eating a meal rich in sugar and fat, should be pleasurable ─ but what’s really crucial is that they’re alluring. It’s much more important that you should want them, than that you enjoy them once they arrive.

5 Just bearing this distinction in mind, as you trundle through the day, can be surprisingly empowering: there’s at least a chance you’ll remember, next time you’re gripped by the urge to check your phone, or have a second cocktail, that you might not enjoy it as much as you predict. It’s not that desire needs to be squelched. It just needs to be understood as a not-useful guide to an enjoyable existence. Wisely or not, I’ve also found myself surrendering to the three-year- old’s demands. That way, wants arise and move through him, like a passing storm, and soon enough we’re back to enjoying ourselves. It’s a lot easier than trying to fight the weather.

Guardian Weekly, 2020

The opportunity “Framing Britney Spears” missed

by Sonny Bunch

1 “Framing Britney Spears,” the new documentary about the iconic pop star from the New York Times on FX and Hulu, is a competent recap of the “Oops!…I Did it Again” singer’s life and struggles. But in the absence of access to Spears’s inner circle, the filmmakers can’t tell us much that’s new about Spears. And they missed an opportunity to take advantage of, and tell a story about, the people who were willing to talk to them: the superfans who have turned Spears and her conservatorship into a cause. These obsessives and their search for meaning in Spears’s social media posts are a fascinating example of the lengths to which we will go to find order in a world that seems chaotic and mysterious.

2 The program ably educates us about the flaws in California’s conservatorship laws. And it has no difficulty demonstrating the evils of the paparazzi. But, formally, this has all the pizazz of a VH11) special with the additional gloss of the New York Times’s brand. And if you’re unaware of Spears’s mistreatment by the public, that’s a personal choice; “South Park” ably covered society’s abuse of Spears 13 years ago.

3 The truly new story is the devotees with which “Framing Britney Spears” opens and closes, some of whom are so intensely attached to Spears that they attend her conservatorship hearings with placards pronouncing their love and support. Like all fandoms, the people who love Spears find personal meaning in their enthusiasm, whether crediting her with being the person “who made it okay to struggle” with mental health or who “gave me permission to be myself growing up as a gay boy in suburban Virginia.” And for some, Spears isn’t merely 13 . Her Instagram account

• an intimate glimpse into her life free of the paparazzi’s filter that strenuously avoids mentioning the conservatorship
• is a sacred text potentially full of hidden truths.

4 Babs Gray and Tess Barker, who host the podcast “Britney’s Gram,” are perfect examples of this mentality. “We started noticing more and more these very cryptic things she would post, like a hole cut out in a wall, and the caption is ‘There’s always a way out,’” Gray says. “And it was just like, what is this? It almost seems kinda dark.” The podcasters pore over Spears’s missives like philosopher Leo Strauss combing through the writings of Torah scholar Maimonides to find hidden truths, analyzing what

it means when she uses a smiley emoticon

• that is, “:)”
• rather than a smiley emoji.

5 “If you think that Britney is calling out for help, you’ll find a reason in those videos that’s proof that she’s calling out for help,” says VJ Dave Holmes, who probably has more in-person experience with Spears as an unknowable cipher than anyone in the documentary, working as he did at MTV from 1998 to 2002. “Everyone’s interpretation of what Britney is putting forth is something that they are bringing to those Instagram videos.”

6 A more interesting documentary might have used this as a jumping-off point to chronicle how interpreting Spears gives meaning and order to a generation desperate for both. As Holmes suggests, and as is made clear by the diverse cadre of misfits who believe she helped them “be themselves” growing up, Spears acts as a blank slate of sorts that people can project themselves onto. Instagram’s focus on imagery rather than text encourages a sort of Rorschach effect: The people who follow Spears there see what they want to see, allowing fans 16 .

7 During this part of the program, I couldn’t help but wonder what documentarian Rodney Ascher

• whose “Room 237” and “A Glitch in the Matrix” focus, respectively, on people who are obsessed with “The Shining” and people who believe we are living in a computer simulation
• might have done with the same material. In “Room 237,” he shows how an ambiguous piece of art becomes a touchstone for people’s own obsessions: Some see “The Shining” as a metaphor for the genocide of Native Americans while others believe it to be about repressed sexuality. And “A Glitch in the Matrix” shows how people unable to connect to the world ease their troubled minds by embracing the idea, popularized by novelist Philip K. Dick and 1999 blockbuster “The Matrix,” that we all live in a simulation
• to occasionally disastrous results.

8 We live in an age of Internet-driven obsessions. Whether it’s QAnon’s gamified rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, those whose adventures on Reddit have convinced them that we live in a simulation or Britney Spears superfans thinking she’s sending coded messages via Instagram, many of us are using the Internet to fill that religion-sized hole in our chests.

9 And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to scan the latest news about the Snyder Cut of “Justice League.” That hole isn’t going to fill itself.

washingtonpost.com, 2021

noot 1 VH1 = an American basic cable television network with a focus on music personalities and celebrities

An Ode to Insomnia JAMES PARKER

1 You have to get up. That’s the first thing. Don’t just lie there and let it have its way with you. The sea of anxiety loves a horizontal human; it pours over your toes and surges you up like a tide. Is your partner lying next to you, dense with sleep, offensively unconscious? That’s not helping either. So verticalize yourself. Leave the bed. Leave its maddening mammal warmth. Out you go, clammy-footed, into the midnight spaces. The couch. The kitchen.

2 So now you’re up. You’ve reclaimed a little dignity, a little agency. You’re shaken, though. You make yourself a piece of toast; it pops up like a gravestone. Insomnia is no joke. The thoughts it produces are entirely and droningly humorless. Failure, guilt, your money, your body. Someone else’s body. On and on. And over there, look, the world: the whole flawed and shuddering and horribly lit life-and-deathscape, with all of us shambling around the circuit like broken beetles. At 2:41 a.m., everyone who’s awake turns into Hieronymus Bosch.

3 And therein, my sleepless friend, lies the key: you’re not alone. Even as you twist in these private coils, these very particular difficulties, you are joining a mystical fellowship of insomniacs. We are all out there, keeping an eye on things: a sodality, a siblinghood, an immense and floating guild of piercingly conscious minds. What might happen, if not for our vigilance? Into what idiocies of optimism and vainglory might humanity collapse? We’re like the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones, except there are millions of us. Above the city rooftops it shimmers and flexes; it tingles over the leafy suburbs: the neural lattice of our wakefulness.

4 “God time”

• that’s what my late friend, the writer Gavin Hills, used to call insomnia. Meaning, I think, a release from the individual and partial, a release into the eternal. The clock goes weird in the small hours. It speeds up and it slows down. It has moods. You yourself have moods. Now the Gothic backchat of insomnia fills your mind with terrible news, terrible apprehensions; now you feel at peace. Now panic seizes you: How will you function in the morning, on so little sleep? You’ll be grumpy, you’ll feel ill, your brain won’t work! All those things you have to do and say! And now you feel something else: a serene compassion for your social self, for the buttressed and bashed-together you, so brittle, trying so hard, that you present to the world. Maybe you think about the other bashed- together selves that you’ll encounter, in the grayness of the day, and you experience compassion for them too. This is quite precious.

5 It’s 4 a.m. You’ve experienced yourself, fully and purgatorially. You’ve preserved the balance of global sanity. You’ve had pity on your fellow man. You have sniffed timelessness. Your work is done, insomniac. Go back to bed.

The Atlantic, 2020

The Weekend Charlotte Wood (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99)

1 THIS BOOK is an example of what is both right and wrong with British publishing at the minute. Australian novelist Charlotte Wood isn’t well known here ─ this is her sixth novel but only her second to be released in the UK. Her publisher has taken a chance with it, given it a bit of a push, and it’s one that deserves to pay off. But there’s something depressing about how it’s being sold and received.

2 The publisher trumpets how Wood’s books have done well in the Stella Prize ─ the Australian version of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The advance copy screams on the back cover: “MEET CHARLOTTE WOOD, THE WRITER OF FIERCE, REAL WOMEN YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR”, which could only be thought to be a novelty by someone who hasn’t read much contemporary fiction. (And the patronising description of “fierce, real women” is reminiscent of the old joke about Hollywood’s definition of “feminist” as “an attractive woman who is also feisty”.) Obligingly, British newspapers have assigned the book exclusively to female critics to review ─ 25 .

3 The Weekend is, sure enough, about a group of three women, lifelong friends now in their seventies. Jude, Adele and Wendy are survivors, watching friends and husbands die and shuffling up the line towards the payout window themselves. Their friend Sylvie is the latest to go, and as a favour to her daughter who lives abroad they agree to meet up and clear out her house.

4 If strangers in confinement is the engine of great comedy and drama, then old friends might be a richer, more fruitfully complicated one. Having three main characters offers plenty of thinly buried history while giving enough space to define each woman properly. Jude is ascetic and sceptical of sentiment; Wendy is chaotic and has brought her deaf, lame, incontinent dog with her (an obvious analogue for senility and one of the few missteps in the book). Adele is an actor who fears herself to be trivial and frivolous and is retired by necessity, but with all her vanity intact.

5 Clearing out a house doesn’t lend itself to dramatic action, but the book never seems static: it’s fed instead by the three women’s pasts and the way they work together like scissor blades, dangerous but mutually dependent. Jude controls the others by imposing generous gifts on them; Adele borrows money from Wendy; Wendy is moved that Sylvie kept an old postcard she sent ─ as she cheerfully chucks out everyone else’s.

6 The Weekend is bracingly unsentimental about ageing and death. Adele “at times felt on the verge of discovering something very important about the age beyond youth and love. But she had not uncovered it yet”. Jude observes, when witnessing a dead body, that the absence of muscle tone after death “made you

look younger, it was a fact”. As a portrayal of ageing that’s sympathetic but cynical, The Weekend brings to mind recent novels by Margaret Drabble or Elizabeth Strout ─ except that unlike those authors Wood, who is 55, is not writing from experience but using a little-known novelist’s tool called 29 , which was until recently believed to be obsolete in our age of “autofiction” and thinly disguised personal essays.

7 The story heads towards a bit of a reckoning, helped by careless words and a rare appearance by secondary characters (Adele meets every older actor’s worst nightmare: a busy colleague), even if it hardly matches the blurb’s promise of “a storm that threatens to sweep away their friendship for good”. It’s just a shame that only the most intrepid male reader will break through the book’s marketing carapace and try it. Men are interested in women too, you know. Some, I’m told, even live with them.

Private Eye, 2020

To the Editor:

Re “The Truth May Yet Be Out There,” by Adam Frank (Opinion guest essay, June 2):

As a nonscientist, I hesitate to quibble with a professor of astrophysics about the criteria for acknowledgment of extraterrestrial life. However, Dr. Frank addresses the matter as if it can be adequately probed by the application of current scientific and technological tools. Wouldn’t it be safe to say that, whatever might be out there, a few quadrillion miles away from us, is likely to be utterly dissimilar to everything we know with our earthbound consciousness? If so, we literally couldn’t even conceive of that world’s nature or its inhabitants, if there be any. If an 18th-century scientist were somehow to obtain a view of our 21st-century world, what capacity would he have to recognize nuclear power, an M.R.I. scan or Wi-Fi? Or, indeed, the principles behind spaceflight? He would be, as we all are, a prisoner of his paradigm. Extraterrestrial “life” may be no more graspable by science than the charms of music.

Simon Marcus, Oakland, Calif.

Adam Frank ignores an important aspect of this issue: the possibility that any extraterrestrials from an advanced civilization visiting us may not be friendly, which should be of great concern to all of us. Let us hope that whatever aliens we encounter do not turn out to be like us

• blithely devastating and exterminating other creatures and the biological systems that sustain life on Earth. Even and especially if they are kind and compassionate, they might feel obliged to exterminate such a dangerous and destructive “pest” species as human beings. We clearly represent a threat to most other life-forms on our planet. Our sense of morality and ethics rarely restrains us in our pursuit of domination of animals and nature. Why should aliens treat us any differently?

Lewis Regenstein, Atlanta

If extraterrestrials indeed exist, the answer to Adam Frank’s question of why they don’t simply announce themselves on the White House lawn may be that they are too far above us in every way to be bothered trying to establish contact with so inferior a life form. 33

Pamela Reis, Branford, Conn.

I, too, am a physicist who works on finding planets around other stars and life on them. While I largely agree with Adam Frank’s essay, many scientific advances have come about through eyewitness accounts of phenomena. One of the more interesting of these stories, which I have written about, involves meteorites. Ernst Chladni published a book in 1794 asserting that rocks fall from the sky, based on many nearly identical stories spread over time and location. That there were rocks in space was considered absurd at the time, and his book was largely dismissed, precisely because he relied on eyewitness evidence.

A few months after the book was published, a large fireball appeared over a city in Italy, and later a 56-pound rock fell in England. Chladni was right, and he helped form an entire subfield of science, based on eyewitness accounts. While U.F.O.s may indeed be explainable, eyewitness accounts by nonscientists ought not be automatically dismissed.

Rebecca Oppenheimer, curator in the astrophysics department at the American Museum of Natural History, New York

newyorktimes.com, 2021

John le Carré never won the Booker

• but then he preferred it out in the cold Simon Jenkins

1 John le Carré never won the Booker prize. His genre

• a mix of espionage and detective thriller
• wasn’t always in literary fashion even though it was hugely popular, selling some 60m copies. Le Carré refused to let his work be entered into literary prizes, though he did in his early career and in recent years has been recognised with honours such as the prestigious Olof Palme award. The complexity and deftness of his narratives left the illusion, for some, that they somehow skimmed the surface of life. That plots overwhelmed his characters’ depth of personality.

2 To anyone reading ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, ‘Smiley’s People’, ‘A Perfect Spy’ or the recent Smiley retrospective, ‘A Legacy of Spies’, this is absurd. I cannot think of a novelist who intruded so utterly into the psychology of their subject’s profession as did le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell. Each of the characters in ‘Tinker Tailor’ was dismembered, frailties exposed, as was the father-and-son relationship

• so close to Cornwell’s own
• in ‘A Perfect Spy’. A former spy himself, he was able to penetrate the balance between personal ambition, loyalty to colleagues and duty to principle that afflicts any career. Private Eye might tease him as John le Carry-on-trying-to-write-the-great- British-novel, but in a sense this was an acknowledgement that he succeeded.

3 Le Carré probably also suffered from the television celebrity of his hero, George Smiley, in the person of the actor Alec Guinness. If le Carré was Smiley to many, so too was Guinness. His semi-retirement, his world-weary face, misted-over glasses and sardonic comments on his introverted world placed him among the seminal characters of post-war fiction. He emerged from the screen as much as from le Carré’s pages as embodying the wretched later years of the cold war.

4 In his 2018 study of the Smiley novels, the critic Toby Manning points to how the cold war’s ideological conflict, so central to the world le Carré dramatised, is “elided, submerged, repressed” in his novels. For Smiley the west’s superiority lay not in ideas but in “the man”. He declares in ‘The Secret Pilgrim’, “I never gave a fig for the ideologies … Man, not the mass, is what our calling is about … It was man who ended the cold war.” By that he meant the people of “our sworn enemy”, who went into the streets, bravely confronted guns and batons and won.

5 Any novelist writing about contemporary politics can swiftly seem out of date. It was a measure of le Carré’s breadth that he could turn from cold war to new war, to the evils of big pharma, the arms trade and terrorism

• though never with the same panache as espionage. Perhaps herein lay his only shortcoming. While he dissected what he saw as the moral dubiety of his calling, he did not 39 . It was always spies doing each other down, endlessly. We are left to suspect for ourselves that their profession’s part in “winning” the cold war was trivial, irrelevant. That should have been Smiley’s last stand.

6 40 , if ever there was a case for a posthumous Booker prize, le Carré it is.

The Guardian, 2020

ARTS

THEATRE

Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 Barbican, London

Sarah Hemming

1 There is no shortage of corpulent, white- whiskered old chaps around in December, but the twinkly gent now in residence at the Barbican is no Santa Claus. And his twinkle is deceptive. This is Antony Sher giving a magnificent and exquisitely pitched performance as Falstaff at the centre of Gregory Doran’s Henry IV productions. Sher’s Falstaff, short of breath and broad of girth, is a masterpiece of venal, duplicitous charm ─ untroubled by conscience at the heart of a drama in which anguished conscience drives the action.

2 And Doran’s fluent Royal Shakespeare Company staging rolls the contrasting worlds through one another, with court scenes bleeding into the Eastcheap tavern, so emphasising Shakespeare’s masterly evocation of a whole country, thrumming with life, but riven and restless.

3 Doran’s production is studded with sympathetic, rounded performances and revels in the famous comic scenes, such as the mock interview between Prince Hal and his father, with Falstaff playing the king enthroned on a bar stool. But it also draws out their place in the bigger picture. Falstaff’s glee at playing the monarch contrasts sharply with the palpable agony of Jasper Britton’s actual king, tormented by guilt, fearful that he has failed to quell the very disorder that impelled him to usurp the throne and given to volcanic rage.

4 There are dull stretches and a few flat notes, particularly as the tone grows more sombre. But this is a mature and beautifully detailed production, through which rebellion and turmoil roll as individuals and country grope towards a sort of stability.

Financial Times, 2014

Language matters

Oh, the irony! The Aug. 26 Thursday Opinion essay by DeAnna Hoskins and Zoë Towns, “How the language of criminal justice inflicts lasting harm,” cautioned against employing dehumanizing, desensitizing language to describe subjects and urged “news media and the general public to adopt more responsible and humane language.”

Then I turned to the Metro section and was immediately struck by the headline “Armed motorist killed by D.C. police.” Nothing in the article suggested that the victim, Antwan Gilmore, did anything that was an imminent threat to police (and subsequent information revealed that the gun was still tucked into his waistband), and yet the article adopted law enforcement’s self-serving spin and led with a headline that suggested the victim was the primary perpetrator.

The Post does it, too. It must do better.

Paul Holmes, Silver Spring

washingtonpost.com, 2021

Lees eerst de opgave voordat je naar de tekst gaat.

What to read to understand the Conservative Party

The Tories, to borrow a phrase from party leader Winston Churchill, have buggered on regardless for 200 years or so, scattering opponents in the process. In the 20th century they held office for longer than any other party in Britain. How do they pull it off? A relentless appetite for power and a commensurate willingness to change have helped, spiced with a savage streak of political ruthlessness. The following books explore the DNA of this apex political predator.

The Conservative Party from Peel to Major. By Robert Blake. Faber and Faber; 480 pages; $17.99 and £16 The classic history of the Conservatives by one of their own. Blake was a Conservative peer and the biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, the party’s outstanding leader of the 19th century. This remains the most readable and cogent account of how the party has prospered over time. Policies may have changed since the 1820s, but not, Blake argues, the essential beliefs of a Conservative: that Britain, “especially England”, is usually in the right; that the rights of property should be upheld; and that ancient, independent institutions (such as the monarchy) should be maintained. Equally, Conservatives share a healthy distrust of overbearing government and “doctrinaire” intellectuals ̶ that is, socialists. Belying their name, Conservatives will embrace inevitable change

• indeed, it is key to their survival
• but only, as Disraeli put it, if it is “carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people”.

The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change. By Tim Bale. Oxford University Press;

384 pages; $44.95 and £32.99

A more contemporary, objective and analytical take on the party by a political scientist, first published in 2012. Among several books Mr Bale has written on aspects of the Conservative Party, this is probably the most comprehensive. He runs the rule over the party’s finances, organisation and personnel. His is also a useful reminder that for all the puffed-up pre-eminence of the Tory leaders in parliament, the party is still, to a great extent, run by voluntary membership in local associations. This matters. Mr Johnson’s successor, and thus the next prime minister, will be chosen by the 180,000 or so party members

• and they will have decidedly different views on what

constitutes a proper Tory prime minister than the bien pensants at Westminster.

Diaries. By Alan Clark. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 416 pages; £9. Conservatives profess to believe that government is a noble business, requiring the utmost probity and an unselfish interest in the public welfare. Self-righteous twaddle, according to the diaries of Alan Clark, a junior minister in Lady Thatcher’s governments. The first volume of his diaries caused a sensation when it was published in 1993, lifting a veil on the dark underbelly of Tory politics, the petty jealousies, seething ambition and endless back-stabbing. Douglas Hurd was memorably skewered for behaving as if he had “a corncob up his arse”. The philandering Clark also reveals the misogyny and predatory sexual politics of Westminster, on display again during Mr Johnson’s doomed premiership.

Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain. By Phil Burton-Cartledge. Verso;

336 pages; £18.99 This is the book for ideological opponents of the party, written by a Labour-supporting lecturer in sociology

• just the sort of man to get Tory danders up. Mr Burton- Cartledge has a good point to make: one of the reasons for the Tories’ continuing success is that their opponents never take them seriously enough. Left-of-centre thinkers assumed that the Tories would be swallowed whole by the “materialist conception of history”, only to be repeatedly disappointed. Mr Burton-Cartledge may fall for some of the old traps, such as dismissing Tories as merely “self- appointed defenders of privilege”, but at least offers some original analysis. Indeed, he claims to have spotted a reason for the long-term demise of the party in its failure to connect with younger voters. But even he is not entirely convinced. “No one got rich betting against the Tories,” he concludes. Quite.

Thinking The Unthinkable; Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983. By Richard Cockett. HarperCollins; 416 pages; £25 The book chronicles the fightback by free-market economic liberals against Keynesians and Socialists after the second world war, leading to electoral victories for Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in America. The Conservative Party was transformed in the process, and Britain too.

economist.com, 2022

►►► ν