Risk assessment

Given that we now seem to be inhabiting a somewhat medieval world of plague and portent, I’d like to make the case for the prophetic powers of the US journalist Michael Lewis. Last year, his book, The Fifth Risk, identified a new threat to civilisation to set alongside the climate crisis, nuclear war and the rest.

The “fifth risk” was the attack from populist politicians on the idea of good government – bullying and firing independent experts and undermining the deep institutional knowledge of civil servants – in their crowd-pleasing efforts to “dismantle bureaucracy”. Or, in Lewis’s terms, to carelessly destroy “what you never learn that might have saved you”.

I spoke to Lewis in December and wondered if he could imagine anything that might challenge that drift in our politics, that might make us desire leaders with a respect for independent expertise within robust public institutions.

“For people to suddenly start to value what good government does,” Lewis said, “I think there will have to be something that threatens a lot of people at once. The problem with a wildfire in California, or a hurricane in Florida, is that for most people it is happening to someone else. I think a pandemic might do it, something that could affect millions of people indiscriminately and from which you could not insulate yourself even if you were rich.”

I remember thinking at the time that the notion seemed wildly far-fetched. Four months on, it seems we will get the chance to find out if he was on the money.

The first eco-warrior

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wordsworth: An eco-pioneer. Photograph: National Trust Images/John Hammond

I was wandering lonely among the handwritten treasures of the British Library last Thursday lunchtime, when all at once I came upon a display – a crowd, a host – of original manuscripts by William Wordsworth to mark next month’s 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth.

I have always felt that Wordsworth should occupy the same space in English hearts that Burns occupies in the soul of Scots: the great champion of plain speech (“the language really used by men”), the radical poet of empathy with those on the margins and the rural poor, the most persuasive of all environmentalists. Instead, he is too often dismissed as a weedy sentimentaliser of spring bulbs. Among the manuscripts on display in the British Library are several that give a vivid impression of his character, including the only surviving draft of Composed upon Westminster Bridge. That poem was written, we are reminded, from the roof of a coach on which the poet was travelling to France to meet, for the first time, his daughter, Caroline, and her mother, his former lover, Annette Vallon, from whom he had been estranged for a decade by the revolutionary wars. And not a daffodil in sight.

Timely for some

Friday’s cancellation of the football programme inevitably had fans of all stripes considering what the shutdown might mean. For my own team, Aston Villa, the immediate Twitter consensus was that the enforced break could hardly have come at a better time. A run of five defeats, plus reports of training ground head-butts, left the club facing relegation. Suddenly there was a chance to regroup, renewed hope. Jurgen Klopp was right to say that football is only ‘the most important of the least important things’, but still there seems something life-affirming in viewing the prospect of packed hospitals and economic catastrophe and having as your first thought: “It could set us up nicely for the last 10 games of the season.”