We're all in Wolf Hall now

Lovely curtains, shame about the mirror

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII

He’s bursting out of his clothes. His eyes flash. His teeth flash. His smile, when it comes, is sudden and cruel. You can see the fear in the eyes of the people around him, but still they fawn, still they bow, still they place their hearts and minds and lives in the line of his wrath and his whims.

It’s a feast for the eyes: the glittering jewels, the flickering candles, the velvet, the gold, the fur. You are there, in those halls with vast oak tables gleaming in the half-light. You are there, in those palaces, those castles, those monasteries, waiting to hear who will be in, who will be out and whose head will be the next to roll.

We are talking literal rolling, of course, like the head that flew from the slender neck of a young woman in a grey velvet dress, a dress trimmed with beads and lace. I flinched when the sword swung and even more to see a woman kneel to scoop the head up and place it in a muslin bag that started to turn from white to red.

I thought it would be a kind of escape, this drama set in Tudor England, this drama based on two novels which both won the Booker prize, by the only British author ever to win it twice. I thought it would be relaxing to collapse on the sofa with a Charlie Bigham fish pie and bathe in the beauty. It is certainly beautiful. Peter Kosminsky, who also directed the first series of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall in 2015, has made this series as sumptuous and entrancing as the first.

Regular readers of this newsletter, and anyone who knows me, will have gathered that I’m a sucker for a fine curtain, a well-turned cushion, a battered Persian rug. I have, in fact, already spent an hour this morning scouring Etsy for Scandinavian landscape paintings. (Strangely omitted from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but suddenly urgent in mine.) I’d always vaguely assumed that most people felt a sudden pressing need to Google curtain material or thatched cottages in the English countryside. A recent psychometric test crushed my assumption. My “aesthetic” score (in terms of “motives, values and preferences”) was 98%. My “commerce” score was close to zero. Perhaps not ideal for a freelancer, but the heart wants what it wants etc.

So yes, the visual boxes were ticked. The acting was superb. Mark Rylance is mesmerising as the son of a blacksmith turned consigliere, Thomas Cromwell. Damian Lewis is chilling as the man who changed the constitution, and the law, to marry the latest woman to catch his eye and then arranged a show trial, and execution, to marry the next. Lewis’s Henry VIII leapt out of the screen. Flesh – a lot of flesh – and blood and even some glimpses of the human behind the tyrant. History sprung vividly, viscerally and shockingly, to life.

Entertaining, yes. Escape? Well, let’s just say that it would be more of an escape if the action on the screen were not ringing quite so many bells. A big, fat, greedy man with a voracious appetite for food and sex spends his days amassing wealth, issuing threats and making deals. He gets other men to do his dirty work: to remove the people who need removing, to change the laws that need changing, to give the bags of money to the people who need to be kept quiet.

He wants men around him who are loyal. A flicker of anything that might suggest an independent brain and you are over, you are out. The courts will come after you. The men in long, dark coats will come after you. There will be thumb screws. Thumb screws can come in many, many forms.

The rules are simple. Money buys power. The truth is whatever the big man says it is. The truth can change every second, every minute, every hour. When the weather changes, you change with it. And if you don’t. Well, let’s not think about what happens if you don’t. Let’s just say it won’t be pretty.

In the past week, I haven’t been following every twist and turn of the men selected to run the world’s leading superpower. What is clear is that they are pretty damn rich. The first time Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, he put together the wealthiest cabinet the country had ever seen. This time round, they’re even richer. Their combined wealth is over nine billion dollars. If you include Elon Musk, and other members of the Trump entourage who don’t need to be confirmed by the Senate, it rises to more than $340 billion.

The trouble is, it’s already beginning to seem normal. The world’s richest man, the owner of a social media platform that deliberately spreads misinformation and a man who has never been elected to public office, is now the second most powerful man in the world. And people just laugh. Isn’t it going to be funny, they say, when his monstrous ego clashes with his boss’s?

Is it going to be funny? Well, it might be, if it were, say, an episode of Masterchef and Gregg Wallace had just had his face shoved in a vat of rhubarb fool. But the world’s richest man has been put in charge of cutting costs. Which means cutting public services and jobs. How many thousands of people will have lost their jobs, healthcare and educational rights by the time Musk and Trump lock horns?

Perhaps we were all fools to think that there had been a thing called the Enlightenment which had led human beings to think that there might be better ways to run countries than with tyrants and their courts. Perhaps we might have considered the possibility that we would vote for tyrants, given the chance.

For those of us in the UK feeling horror-struck at what American voters have done, here’s some food for thought. Trump is more popular than Keir Starmer, according to a recent poll. Maybe one to take with a hefty pinch of salt, but it certainly shows the problem for what political commentators like to call “incumbents”.

As far as we know, there were no polls in Tudor England to show whether people were happy with heads on spikes and public beheadings for women who failed to produce baby boys. We do know that people loved to watch an execution. They liked to see other people suffer, which is presumably one of the reasons millions of Americans voted for millions of their Latino neighbours and colleagues to be forcibly removed now.

From this, we can reach some clear conclusions:

People like greed. They like to see men who love money, sex and power throw their weight, libido and power around.

People like cruelty. They like to see people who don’t have very much have what little they have taken away.

People like simple solutions. Ship them out. Lock her up. Slam tariffs on all imports. That will teach the Chinks/pick your country and ethnic slur.

They don’t like to be told that you can’t do these things without fuelling inflation or wrecking industries, which will mean that prices will be higher and jobs will be lost. People seem to prefer a bad man who promises to do impossible things to a good man trying hard to do a very difficult job.

All people? No, not all people, but enough to have consequences for all the people in the country they live in, for all the people who live on our planet – and for the planet itself.

In the UK at the moment, we’re having a bit of a break. What I mean by this is that we’re watching a government try to make things better for the majority of people and not making a very good job of it. It’s not ideal, but in the Western world, in 2024, that may be as good as it gets.

America is about to launch a very different experiment. Theirs is about trying to make very, very rich people even richer and stripping very poor people of their basic rights. Plans are being hatched, in a pink palace on a Florida beach, decked out to look like Versailles. (Oh, and Trump has just appointed his son-in-law’s father to be ambassador to France, so he will get to the real Versailles.)

Will it be entertaining? It might if you’re rich. If you’re cushioned, if you have a nice home and a nice job and good healthcare and if you like charting the moods of a Mafia boss who just happens to be the leader of the Western world. If you have a cruel streak, you might even think: this will be great material. No need for script writers. No need for novelists.

Populists are not big readers. They see the whole world as their stage. Who needs fiction when you can just call reality “fake news”?

I don’t know if we can wrest back power from the populists, the algorithms and the billionaires who fuel both. I want to believe we can, but the evidence isn’t encouraging and it’s hard to see how AI is going to help. I do know that I have my one brief, wild and precious life and so do you. I know what I believe in. I believe in reading widely, listening carefully, studying history and trying to learn.

America has just turned into Wolf Hall. We don’t have to watch it, but we will all be affected, whether we watch it or flick the switch off. And no one knows where we will be by the time this show has run its course.

During the Vietnam War, Hannah Arendt, the great German-Jewish philosopher, came to believe that public opinion seemed ready to condone “all political transgressions short of murder”. She said that those in Nixon’s inner circle were so attracted to the “aura of power, its glamorous trappings,” that they came to see themselves as above the law. She said that Nixon and those around him thought they could get away with anything because they believed that “all people are actually like them”.

This, clearly, is what Trump believes. Please, please, please, let’s show him, his circle, his supporters and the ghost of Henry VIII, that they’re wrong.

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