The collapse of Mrs May’s Chequers plan, followed by Tuesday’s failure of the Tory Remainers to defeat the government, creates a new situation. Mrs May greatly underestimated the threat to her from the ‘betrayal’ narrative which her plan invites. Two years of getting nowhere have made people long for decision and furious at Brussels dogmatism. There is a new appetite for no delay and for no deal. ‘No deal’ however, is not the right phrase. There is a deal — and we and the member states of the EU are already signed up to it. It is called World Trade Organisation terms. The clue to its nature is in the name: it allows the world to trade. It should carry no fears and must now be urgently prepared for and publicly explained, by the whole government, starting with Mrs May.
I don’t like articles called ‘Why we still need the novel’, because they unwittingly imply that we don’t. It is a loser’s argument to insist we must read novels because they are good for us. When novels first became popular, they were widely considered bad for us. Women, thought to be particularly susceptible, were forbidden in respectable families from reading them in the morning. As a result, they sold more. One reason novels are now at a low ebb is that they suffer from producer capture. Novelists should not form a trade union for novels: they should write for readers. Writers are also curiously unwilling to recognise how much form and technology change content. The novel arose partly because of the possibility of printing and distributing unprecedentedly large numbers of hardbacks (and later swelled with paperbacks). It is falling now, partly because the nature of fiction is expanded by online technologies which allow a huge variety of stories to be told with equal success.
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