The bluest Monday of my life

A tale of a shining city on a hill

Assisi two weeks ago

I wanted to write to you about St Francis of Assisi. I started, in fact, a post to you about St Francis of Assisi. Two weeks ago, I started describing the trip I had just been on to his birthplace. I talked about the way the sun bounced off the golden stone. I talked about the white towers gleaming against a blue sky. I described Assisi as a shining city on a hill.

I mentioned that the son of a rich silk merchant and a French noblewoman who later took a vow of poverty was not just the patron saint, with Catherine of Siena, of Italy, but also, since 1979, of ecology. I pointed out that ecology was the study of the interaction between humans and animals and between humans and their planet. I said that that interaction wasn’t going well.

And it wasn’t. It isn’t. Some of the fires in LA are still raging. More than 12000 buildings have been severely damaged or destroyed. Tens of thousands of people have lost their homes. And these aren’t the usual people we see on TV staring at the charred remnants of the life they have built up. By which I mean people who are used to losing things. These are people who are used to winning things. Paris Hilton. Billy Crystal. Jeff Bridges. Mel Gibson. Sir Anthony Hopkins, who has won two Oscars, managed to lose two homes. "The only thing we take with us,” he said on Instagram, “is the love we give".

For some of the people who have lost their homes, love may be the only thing they have left because it’s not clear that their insurance will replace much else.

Many people on this platform, Substack, will know people who have lost everything. I can’t imagine what that would be like. St Francis of Assisi may have liked the idea of poverty, but I really, really like my stuff. When the world seems mad – and let’s face it, the world currently seems truly mad – I take great comfort from the objects I have picked to line my nest. The Swedish painting in my study, for example, of a rowing boat on a lake fringed with silver birches. That painting makes me feel calm. It makes me feel that the world is a safe and lovely place.

The painting in my study. Not great art, but it makes me think of Sweden (and my mother)

It's nice to feel that the world is a safe and lovely place when it is, in fact, on fire.

In the newsletter I was going to write, I was going to tell you about the frescoes in the Basilica of St Francis. There are, it turns out, two Basilicas of St Francis, an Upper Church and a Lower Church. In the upper one there are 28 paintings depicting the life of the saint, or the man who Catholics think of as a saint. Of these, 24 are thought to be by Giotto, described by the great Renaissance painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari as the pioneer of "the great art of painting as we know it today”.

I was going to tell you how I felt when I walked into that Basilica and the Basilica below it. That feeling would have been quite hard to describe. It was something along the lines of: how could humans create something like this? This was nearly 800 years ago. People lived in stone houses with no heating, no electricity, no gas, no plumbing, no medicine, no support, except perhaps from their family. And somehow people, or at least some people, were able to produce things that looked like this:

Frescoes in the Lower Basilica of St Francis

I thought: why does everyone talk about the Sistine Chapel, which is, of course, extraordinary, and not about this enchanted place? I thought that it felt like a miracle to be in a place that was so alive with colour and that even the buildings in those frescoes were painted the colours of jewels and that these people from 800 years ago seemed to care a lot more about beauty and colour than we do now. I wondered what it would be like to go from a day tending your animals or ploughing a field to sink on your knees in front of paintings that would be hailed 800 years later as some of the finest works ever to be produced by human beings, paintings that told you that you were loved, you were cherished, you were not alone.

I wanted to sink down on my knees. When I went down to the tomb of St Francis, I wanted to bob and cross myself or at least make some gesture to say that yes, I understood that this was a special place, a holy place, a place that inspired wonder and awe.

Anyone who knows me, or who has read my books, will know that I had a turbulent youth as an evangelical Christian followed by a dramatic loss of faith. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in saints. I do believe in wonder and awe.

I wanted to write about this shining city on a hill, bathed in sunlight, and the treasures in it and the courage of the man who swapped great wealth for poverty and who gave most of his attention to the vulnerable and the poor. I thought I might write something that talked about the importance of kindness and beauty and art in spite of darkness. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

But then some things happened that made me think I can’t write and what’s the fucking point?

There was the moment when the man who will today become President of the United States, who will become, in fact, the most powerful man in the world, said he would like to “buy” Greenland. And did not “rule out” taking military action to acquire it. There was the moment when he said he would like Canada to become “the 51^st state” of the United States. There was the moment when he said he would not “rule out” military action to seize the Panama Canal.

How, I wondered, was any of this different from the threats that Putin has made and then enacted?

Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

And then there was Meta’s meta-shift, from something that pretended to be vaguely interested in facts to something that is literally abolishing them. There would, said its founder, no longer be fact checkers. In the name of “restoring free expression” on his “platforms,” it would now be fine to call women “property”, gay people “mentally ill” and refer to transgender people as “it”. That founder has also, by the way, had a makeover of his own. Gone is the Caesar haircut and the sober grey T-shirt. Now he’s all chunky chains, $900,000 watches, baggy T-shirts and a mass of curls.

He thinks we have all gone a bit namby-pamby. Corporations, he told Joe Rogan on his podcast, needed more “masculine energy” and “aggression”.

Yes, he really did say that. Hilarious, in a way, but also not. (Women make up just 35% of the tech workforce and hold only 11% of executive roles, but sure, what tech needs is more men.)

None of this cheered me up, but this was not what winded me. What winded me was reports that Elon Musk had been having private discussions with strategic allies about how to oust Starmer and destabilise the UK.

It has been obvious for a while that he wants to attack us. He has been re-tweeting lies about our prime minister and our government since last summer. He has been open about his plans to fund Reform. He has been dictating not just our news agenda but also our government’s policy. The UK government has been forced into announcing a new set of inquiries about the grooming-gang scandals that took place more than a decade ago, even though the last inquiry said that the important thing now was to act on the reports that have already been written. But you can’t say no to the richest man in the world, can you?

Can you?

From today, the richest man in the world will be part of the American government. He has never been elected to anything, but he is actively trying to overthrow elected governments in Europe. And he has been planning this, plotting this, for months.

Our politicians are having to scuttle around pretending that this is all fine. They have to pander to the whims of Musk and the MAGA-crew because the price of not pandering is too high. They have to pretend that we have a “special relationship”. They can’t say what is now stomach-churningly obvious:

America is not our friend. America wishes us harm.

When the Tories marched us out of the EU, they clearly dreamt of cosy chats at White House tables.

I don’t think so.

What will tariffs do to our economy? What will happen to NATO? What will happen to Ukraine?

If you want to stand up to a dictator, or even pretend to stand up to a dictator, it does help to show that democracy is something worth fighting for. It helps to show that democracy is better, as Churchill said, than the alternatives. From today, we have a leader of the free world who has actively tried to overthrow democracy, threatened to invade other countries, denied climate change and vowed to undo measures to tackle it, vowed revenge on his enemies, threatened journalists and denied facts. And he is supported by tech oligarchs who are actively pushing misinformation and backing him every step of the way. Who, in fact, control the flow of information for most of the world’s population. And who are, in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase, flooding it with “shit”.

We have never been here before.

So yes, I wanted to write about a shining city on a hill. That, of course, is the phrase often used for the vision of America, taken from a sermon in 1630 by the English Puritan lawyer John Winthrop who became the first governor of Massachusetts. His sermon was called “A Modell of Christian Charity”. It has been quoted by almost every American president to hold office.

I wanted to tie it in with a man who renounced poverty and really did become a model of Christian charity and who inspired some of the world’s greatest art.

But I couldn’t do it because the city is not shining and it looks very much as if the rich – the very, very, very rich – have lost whatever moral fibre they ever claimed to have.

They moved fast, they broke things and they lost us something beyond price. I have no idea how we get it back.