Hardwicke Circus is a roundabout in Carlisle. One of my more unusual intros, but I hope you will stay with me to understand how that roundabout connects to Ukraine, and via King Charles to JD Vance’s utter unfitness for any high office, let alone the US presidency.
Before I start on that journey, a little more about the roundabout, which is prettier than most. Built in the 1970s, it is a very nicely landscaped home to flower beds, splendid trees and walking paths.
So when two brothers from Carlisle, Jonny and Tom Foster, formed a band, they named themselves after the roundabout. I hadn’t heard of Hardwicke Circus until former home secretary Alan Johnson messaged me saying he was a fan (despite both of us being outside their younger demographic), that they had written songs for which they wanted bagpipes on the backing track, and would I help?
As my neighbours know, I never need to be asked twice to get the pipes out. However, as when asked to do this by the Welsh band Cardinal Black, I wanted my piping buddy Finlay MacDonald alongside me. Finlay heads the National Piping Centre in Glasgow, and last week made the journey south to a Harrow recording studio. If, like me, you love the creative process, there is something really special about working with professional musicians to create a new sound.
It meant getting to know more about the band, not least that Bob Dylan asked them to play at his Hyde Park concert in 2019, and Paul McCartney asked Glastonbury to put them on in 2022. But more than any of that, I loved hearing about the tours of Ukraine they have done since the full-scale invasion of 2022. Indeed, one of the two tracks for which Finlay and I wrote a few harmonising bars is a song for Ukraine. The other is called The North Awakes, surely an Andy Burnham campaign song in the making!
Lead singer Jonny regaled us with stories about life on the road in Ukraine, having driven their decrepit van all the way from Carlisle, and which by the time the tour was over was incapable of making it back. The band also raised funds to buy a 4×4, which they donated to the Ukrainians for medical evacuations and supply runs to the frontline.
There is a film to be made about the whole story. Four of the six original Hardwicke Circus team refused to go, not least because they had mums or partners who wouldn’t let them.
So, instead, the two brothers travelled with 81-year-old Irishman Dave “Stiff Records” Robinson, who once tour-managed Jimi Hendrix, 72-year-old Texas rocker Joe King Carrasco, for whom Michael Jackson once sang backing vocals, Australian keyboard player Conor Morrissey, former Cumberland Wrestling world champion Ben Wilde, and Roman Korchevskyi, a Kyiv saxophonist they met just two hours before their first show in Ukraine.
They also performed in hospitals and schools. Foster told of playing in a hospital for amputees, where a soldier who had just had his leg removed, and still had blood stains seeping through his bandages, sang along.
He gets very moved telling the story, and very angry that the arts world has not done more to support Ukraine. “These are amazing people, and the truth is they are defending all of us, in the face of Putin’s evil, and Trump’s hostility.” As for Nigel Farage, the great Putin-Trump admirer… best not to get him going.
In addition to the sirens, the bunkers and the “fireworks at night”, they came face to face with Putin’s evil when their van finally clapped out, and the HopeFull charity loaned them a reconditioned ambulance. “We were advised to remove the red crosses,” recalls Foster. “They told us the Russian drones seek out ambulances, so we scratched off the crosses with pen knives. How anyone can defend what Putin is doing is beyond me.”
Which brings me to JD Vance, and his starring role in the reaction to King Charles’s speech to the US Congress. I said before the speech that I really hoped His Maj spoke up for Nato, for Ukraine, for Europe, and for the fight against climate change. He did all that and more.
International law and alliances, checks and balances, Magna Carta, inter-faith dialogue, a reminder that 9/11 was the only time Article 5 had been invoked, the warning to the world to stop “beating ploughshares into swords,” the direct quoting of “my prime minister,” the support for AUKUS, the reference to “Kennedy’s ‘soaring vision’ of an Atlantic partnership based on twin pillars: Europe and America”.
We know that Trump is not strong on maths – he thinks 50% is the same as 500% – but assuming he can count to two, I hope he noticed that JFK got two mentions in the speech to his one. Charles knew what he was doing.
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So did Vance. Sitting behind Charles alongside speaker Mike Johnson, as Democrats roared their approval of many of the points Charles was making, and Republicans were moved by his wit and charm to join in, Vance looked more and more as if a lemon coated with ammonia had been forced into his mouth, and his swallowing functions had been disabled.
When he rose along with everyone else to applaud King Charles’s clarion call to support Ukraine, Vance’s slow-motion clapping hands barely touched each other. This, remember, is the man who recently told a near-empty stadium of Charlie Kirk supporters that stopping funding for Ukraine was one of his proudest achievements. And here was his Congress, and his own Republican Party, wildly cheering total support for Ukraine.
As President Zelensky said recently, if you’re proud of stopping funding for Ukraine, you’re proud of Russia killing Ukrainian children. Jonny Foster put it more succinctly. “JD Vance is repugnant. If that man becomes president, the US has had it.”
By the time Charles got to describing nature as our “most precious and irreplaceable asset,” while the majority on both sides of the chamber rose to their feet, Vance remained seated and stony-faced; the lemon was still in his mouth, but also a giant penny had dropped… this was as close to a full-frontal assault on Trumpism as an apolitical king could make.
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The full rich genius of the speech was exemplified by the very next line: “Millennia before our nations existed, before any border drawn, the mountains of Scotland and Appalachia were one; a single, continuous range, forged in the ancient collision of continents.” Vance has made an industry out of his Appalachian roots, while in Hillbilly Elegy he said you couldn’t understand him unless you understood he was Scots-Irish.
There are few, if any, Scots or Irish who can understand how a man could look quite so bitter at a nice old man calling on us to respect the planet. Though I remain a Republican (of the British, not American variety), I loved Charles for a superb speech, brilliantly delivered. Weirdly, he looked like the future, while the much younger Vance looked very much the past.
Sticking with Ukraine, through the post arrive a host of badges made by their Football Association, each signifying a stadium bombed by the Russians. (The same Russians who claim they only hit military targets.)
In Ukraine a few weeks ago, an 18-year-old student told me “hope is an act of resistance”. In bombing football stadiums and the like, the places of enjoyment that make life special, the Russians are trying to drive out hope, and normalise despair. It’s why we need more sport, more music, more Hardwicke Circuses.
