I am bemused by the reaction to the climate salvation protests, which include some journalists suggesting motorists assault protesters when they glue themselves to the road. (Their obvious intentions are littered with lawyerly caveats, which is offensive. Euphemisms are for the cowardly and lost).
The bemusement extends to myself. I was so upset by the throwing of soup over the Van Gogh in the National Gallery I screamed and muttered to myself: don’t even think about coming for the Rembrandts. But why did I scream when Van Gogh’s sunflowers, as perfect a representation of natural bounty that exists on canvas, were threatened by soup? (In fact, they were fine, being glassed in. The real mango fields of India, and the olive fields of Spain, aren’t). I analysed it, and thought: it’s all denial, which comes when you know someone is speaking the truth, and it is too painful to bear. We are furious because, whether we can admit it or not, we know they are right.
I have been a journalist for more than 20 years and I know that sometimes journalists talk nonsense. I call it anti-journalism: the act of making people less informed; of knowing less when they finish your article than when they begin it. I have covered many elections and felt shame at our bias — either one way or the other — but I can’t think of anything in which we have failed the public more than in the coverage of the climate crisis. The single most important victim of the post-truth world is our planet and, by extension, ourselves. The first warning of the impact of burning carbon on temperature appeared more than 100 years ago. We’ve had plenty of time to digest the information. I accept that some things are too painful to face but if you feel like that, you shouldn’t be a journalist.
I believe the scientists, you see, not some dismal hack railing against the truth because he has confused it with his father. And scientists — have you met any? — are gluing themselves, and their data, to government buildings in the UK because they read the data and they know the truth. You can tell yourself it’s just annoying upper-middle-class teenagers with stupid hair — do you remember the purity of feeling, and fearing, that only young people have? — and so it’s fine to rough them up, and dismiss them as narcissistic bourgeois socialists. It won’t serve us. We are heading for a rise of 2.5 degrees, and when we hit it we hit tipping points that will destroy our ability to live on the planet. That is not speculative. We will burn and we will drown: first the Southern Hemisphere, and then the Northern.
When I ponder our denial I think of the poet W HAuden’s line in his marvellous retrospective of the 1930s: September 1st, 1939. “Faces along the bar / cling to their average day / the lights must never go out / the music must always play. All the conventions conspire,” he continues, “to make this fort assume / the furniture of home”. But outside is the haunted wood, and it will soon be a desert. That is what is happening here: denial. We must stop burning carbon. Everything else is details.
In other news...
The fifth season of The Crown is coming, and it seems increasingly fraying and pointless. The early seasons were superb because they starred Claire Foy, pictured, as Elizabeth II and Jared Harris — probably Britain’s finest screen actor — as George VI. It was a plausible fairytale. The creation of Elizabeth II — as distinct from Elizabeth Mountbatten — was canny and touching, because, true or not — who can say? — it was possible to believe in it.
That ended with Olivia Colman taking over as the Queen in season three. Colman is a gifted actor, but I could not believe in her Elizabeth: she is too isolated, too modern, too heartsick.
As The Crown approaches modern times it loses its power. The real characters are too full in our minds for fictional ones to replace them. It will not be a pleasing fairytale but a poor impersonation. Reality, in this instance, is more thrilling.
