RBO’s Boris Godunov | Image by: Mihaela Bodlovic

4 min read59 min

Power – how to get it and to hold on to it – is the stuff of opera. Richard Jones’ Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO) production of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (here revived by Ben Mills) exposes, unflinchingly, how power deludes and destroys. It is a triumphant partnership with conductor Mark Wigglesworth and the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who returns in the title role for a third time since 2016.

Boris Godunov is one of the definitive operas of the 19th century, as innovative musically as it was in its mission – to bring the voice and the vexed history of the Russian people into Western European view. Its influence, particularly on the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, was profound.

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s drama of 1825, Richard Jones uses Mussorgsky’s 1869 version (later revised in 1875) to compress the tragedy into a graphic novel of seven stylised scenes, in the course of which the tsar Boris Godunov is destroyed by external enemies and internal demons.

But it is not quite as simple as that. It’s the 1590s and as the curtain rises we witness the assassination of Dmitry, the youngest son of the late tsar Ivan the Terrible. The child is clutching his spinning top. Boris Godunov, a boyar (an aristocrat), is a reluctant and troubled successor who is “heavy in his heart” even as he is crowned. (Ukrainian baritone Andrii Kymach is superb as the clerk to the boyar’s council, as is British tenor John Daszak as the traitorous Shuisky.)

Dmitry’s suspicious death opens the way to every sort of superstition. Boris is undone by two devious monks, both wonderfully sung. The elder, Pimen (the Polish bass, Adam Palka), is inventing a new history of Russia, which casts Boris as the murderer and invests the dead Dmitry with miraculous powers. Grigory (American tenor, Jamez McCorkle) assumes Dmitry’s identity in a bid to claim the throne.

The gorgeous orchestration and playing fuse brilliantly with the drama unfolding on stage

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What sets Mussorgsky and this thrilling production apart is how the composer’s passionate conviction – that music should reveal an interior world – takes actual voice and shape. As Boris descends into paranoia and hallucination the gorgeous orchestration and playing fuse brilliantly with the drama unfolding on stage.

Equally, we hear and see Mussorgsky’s ambition that music should represent ‘life as it is lived’ in the vitality, depth and sweetness of the huge chorus. The orthodox choral tradition, voiced first by a sullen mass in monochrome grey gives way to Russian folksong as, transformed by technicolour robes and amplified by the coronation bells, the chorus of ‘Slava’ nearly takes the roof off.

But even Boris’ best intentions are overwhelmed by famine (“divine revenge”) and a hungry and ungrateful crowd are more likely to believe the Holy Fool (Chinese tenor, Mingjie Lei) when he accuses Boris of murdering Dmitry. Reason is defeated by superstition.

Bryn Terfel’s bass baritone (in tone from light to dark) lends itself uniquely to the interpretation of Boris – as an empathetic, conflicted figure, consoling and desperately trying to protect his own children – while maintaining its visceral power.

One final image: Dmitry’s spinning top becomes the motif for a world out of control. As Boris sits alone beneath a vast map of Russia the parallels are inescapable: the chimera of power, the historic geopolitics of Europe, frailty of truth and human nature – as evident now, chillingly, as then.

Baroness Andrews is a Labour peer

Boris Godunov

Conducted by: Mark Wigglesworth

Directed by: Richard Jones

Venue: Royal Opera House until 18 February

Joe Egerton is a former Parliamentary candidate for Leigh who once worked for the Macmillan family.

The commentariat is drawing a comparison between the Profumo affair of 1963 and the Mandelson affair. It is important to start by recognising that the Profumo affair, although very damaging, did not bring about the fall of Macmillan. As it is often suggested that it did, the brief facts are as follows.

On 8^th July 1961, Profumo, Secretary of State for War, was introduced to Christine Keeler “a very pretty girl and sweet” who had been swimming naked in the pool at Cliveden and was trying to cover herself with a skimpy towel. The next day there was “a light-hearted and frolicsome bathing party, where everyone was in bathing costumes and nothing indecent took place at all”. One of the party was Yevgeny Ivanov, nominally a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy but actually GRU.Profumo arranged to meet up with Christine Keeler. The two had a brief affair which ended before the New Year.

In 1963 the affair became fairly widely known. On 21 March 1963, George Wigg MP, Harold Wilson’s witch finder general, many years later to be convicted of kerb crawling, hinted at it in the Commons. That night Profumo was got out of bed and questioned by colleagues. On one account, Iain Macleod, the Leader of the House, asked Profumo outright:  “John, did you fuck her?” The next day Profumo made a statement in the House denying “any impropriety”.

Rumours continued and on 4^th June, during a short Commons recess, Profumo confessed to Macmillan’s Principal Private Secretary Tim Bligh who telephoned Macmillan who was in Scotland. Profumo resigned from the government and resigned his seat. The press had a field day. Family newspapers could safely recount a story of fun-loving attractive girls, a cabinet minister, the Russian Naval attaché, a leading member of the House of Lords (Lord Astor) and other rather shady individuals frolicking round the swimming pool at a great house. I was at prep school at the time and we had great fun piecing together a story parents judged not suitable for our innocent ears…

We can take up the story from Macmillan’s Diary and an entry written on 7 July recorded that on 17^th June 1963 seventeen Conservative MPs abstained – a very large rebellion for those days. During the week there was a flood of rumours of widespread discreditable sexual behaviour involving numerous ministers. The Diary recorded that on 24^th June “I had announced the appointment of Lord Denning to hold a judicial enquiry” and added “I hope that this will clear the ministers and make people a little ashamed of their behaviour” (Diaries, Page 572)

On 3^rd August, Macmillan noted rumours that Denning would condemn (“or rather fail to clear…of scandalous conduct”) one important and one unimportant minister. Macmillan then commented:

However all this is pure rumour. Naturally I have been careful not to see or get anything out of Lord D. I think he will, in fact, seek the unofficial help of the Ld. Chancellor (Reginald Manningham-Buller, Lord Dilhorne) before he actually sends in his report.

(Emphasis in original)

Macmillan was not disappointed. On 19^th September, he recorded:

At 2.45, Wilson came with his Chief Whip. He had read the report on Tuesday and commented rather sadly to Bligh that there wasn’t much in it. I suppose he meant ‘not much for me’.

During the summer of 1963, Macmillan had reflected on whether he should step down as  leader. But for the Profumo scandal, he might have done so in June, but he was determined not to look as if he had been driven from office. By the time the cabinet met on Tuesday 8^th October he had decided to stay on to fight the next election. He told the cabinet, left the room and the cabinet, with only one dissenting voice (Enoch Powell), endorsed his decision to remain and fight the forthcoming election.

At this point fate – in the form of his prostrate – intervened and he was told he needed an emergency operation. Although both de Gaulle and Pope St Paul VI were to have similar operations and continued to work, neither faced the constant pressure Parliament imposes on a British Prime Minister. Also Macmillan knew he  needed to use the rally at the end of the Conference to give impetus to the party as it prepared for an election in 1964. So he resigned. Profumo did not cause his resignation.

The real lesson from the Profumo affair is that Macmillan survived it because he kept his nerve and set up an enquiry headed by Britain’s best-known judge. With this assurance, there was no question of handing the files over to Parliament. Nobody could object to Denning and nobody did at the time.

The contrast with Starmer’s announcement that he would entrust Sir Humphrey Appleby with providing those papers on Mandelson which did not impinge on national security or international relations to Parliament is marked. Starmer has done what Macmillan avoided – provoked the House of Commons and his own backbenchers into setting up a process bound to lead either to a flood of damaging papers or a steady stream of embarrassing disclosures.

Macmillan of course knew exactly what he was doing in appointing Denning. In 1980, Denning was to preside over a claim for damages from the Birmingham Six, men convicted of bombing a pub in 1974 who alleged that they had been forced into giving false confessions. This was how Denning dismissed their claim:

Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.

In time it turned out that the allegations against the police were well-founded, the convictions quashed and substantial compensation paid for the many years imprisonment the men had suffered. In his 1991 book The Conscience of the Jury Lord Devlin – the distinguished judge Parick Devlin – wrote that together the miscarriages in the cases of the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six were “the greatest disasters that have shaken British justice in my time”.

But as Macmillan knew Devlin was a judge of a very different character from Denning. Four years before Macmillan had appointed Denning, Mr Justice (later Lord Justice) Devlin had produced a damning report on the killing of 11 detainees at the Hola Camp in Kenya on 3 March 1959. This provoked one of the most famous passages in the Macmillan Diaries:

Incidentally, I was away in Russia when the Devlin Commission was chosen.Why Devlin? The poor Lord Chancellor (Lord Kilmuir, David Maxwell-Fyfe, who had prosecuted at Nuremburg so knew what a concentration camp looked like) – the sweetest and most naïve of men – chose him. He was able; a Conservative runner-up or nearly so for Lord Chief Justice. I have since discovered that he is:

1. Irish – no doubt with that Fenian blood that makes Irishmen anti-Govt on principle
2. A lapsed R.C. His brother is a Jesuit priest; his sister a nun.   He married a Jewess who was converted and has remained a Catholic
3. A hunchback
4. Bitterly disappointed at my not having made him Lord Chief Justice.

I am not at all surprised that his report is dynamite. It may well blow the Govt out of office. (Diaries  13 July 1959 Pages 234-5)

Macmillan would have enjoyed Devlin’s later humiliation by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse which published evidence from his daughter on the abuse she had suffered from her long-deceased father.

One can understand why Macmillan took care to appoint a Denning rather than a Devlin when the future of his government was at stake.

He may well have given Mrs Thatcher some helpful advice on the inquiry into the Falklands War. When Galtieri seized the Falklands in 1982, Mrs Thatcher was given invaluable support by Harold Macmillan in the days immediately after the invasion. His son Maurice who had served in the Heath cabinet played an important role in calming colleagues in the Parliamentary Party and had encouraged Macmillan to give public support to a beleaguered PM.

Forced to agree to an inquiry into how the Galtieri was allowed to grab the islands, in due course Mrs Thatcher appointed as chairman a distinguished 77-year-old civil servant, diplomat and provost of an Oxford college – Lord Franks – an old colleague of Macmillan’s whom he had defeated for Chancellor of Oxford.   Macmillan dropped her this note when the Franks report was published:

I am glad to observe that the time-honoured judgment in the famous case of Albert and the Lion has been respected by these distinguished Privy Councillors.“The magistrate gave the opinion that no one was really to blame.”

We can learn indeed something from how Macmillan survived the Profumo affair by setting up a process that was pretty certain to clear him. No doubt is left that Sir Keir Starmer lacks the political skills of a Macmillan or a Thatcher.

There is one other point worth noting. In 1963 shameful allegations were made by male MPs against the fun-loving attractive girls who had been caught up in the scandal – one MP even called them prostitutes. When the affair Mandelson is discussed in the Commons, there are repeated reminders that the victims of Epstein have suffered appalling mistreatment. The large number of women MPs who all too clearly empathise with the victims guarantees that these reminders are sincerely and deeply meant.

Keir Starmer has vowed to fight on as prime minister following the resignations of two top aides. 

Morgan McSweeney, one of the prime minister’s longest-serving and closest lieutenants, resigned as Downing Street chief of staff on Sunday. In a statement, McSweeney said he took “full responsibility” after personally advising Starmer to appoint Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the United States.

The outgoing No 10 chief of staff said the decision to appoint Mandelson was “wrong” and had “damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself.”

McSweeney stated: “When asked, I advised the prime minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice. In public life responsibility must be owned when it matters most, not just when it is most convenient. 

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