Europe

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. What have Fidel Castro, Nicolás Maduro, Hamas and the Khomeinist regime in Iran got in common? That the US has not exactly seen eye to eye with them over past years and decades? Well, yes. But there is another thing too: Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party leader who could soon be the British prime minister, has warmly praised them all. Castro, according to Corbyn on the occasion of the former Cuban leader’s death in 2016, was a ‘champion of social justice’. Corbyn rang in to a Venezuelan TV program in 2014 to praise Maduro, who introduced him as a ‘friend of Venezuela’.

The former British chancellor of the exchequer – or finance minister – Nigel Lawson once described the National Health Service (NHS) as the closest thing the British have to a religion. For some, however, is a worse than that – less mainstream religion than messianic cult. Yesterday, Donald Trump reassured British radio listeners that in seeking to do a trade deal with Britain it is not attempting to interfere in the NHS.  Not that it made any difference. Activists for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, which will face Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in a general election on December 12, continued to make the accusation that there is some secret plot to break up the NHS and sell it off to US healthcare corporations.

For a president about to face ‘The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History’, Donald Trump sounded thoroughly unperturbed when, as presidents often do when the House votes to impeach, he turned his attention to that essential part of the top job: a long, relaxed and amiable phone interview with Nigel Farage, addressing such matters of central import to the American public as the electoral chances of Jeremy Corbyn. Trump was on comedic top form, bantering about ‘Boris’ and ‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Pocahontas’, and explaining to his out-of-town audience that impeachment proceedings weren’t going to proceed anywhere because the Republicans control the Senate.

Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex and dim millennial virtue-signaler, has complained that she and Prince Harry are ‘existing, not living’. We should all be so lucky to merely exist on millions of pounds of taxpayers money in a selection of posh country houses with a loving spouse worth somewhere north of £40 million; with a new baby who is seventh in line to the British throne and whose great-grandmother, according to the Church of England, has a hotline to God; with Elton John’s jet on permanent stand-by to whisk you off to the sunny and exclusive hideaways of the extravagantly rich and famous; and, perhaps most valuable of all, with those keys to the kingdom of a life of impossible luxury: the goodwill of the British people.Not enough, apparently.

The Hitler of our century, Boston Celtics basketball player Enes Kanter has said, is the president of his native Turkey. In response to Lebron James playing interference for China following Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeting support for Hong Kong’s protesters and their struggle for liberty, Kanter responded with his experience: his outspoken criticism of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s human rights abuses has cost him his family and his safety. 'FREEDOM IS NOT FREE,' Kanter wrote on Twitter, also listing the consequences for his disobedience, including his father being jailed, Kanter’s attempted kidnapping, and having not seen or spoken to his family in five years. Him and his family became pariahs.

In 2006, as British Euroskepticism was gathering steam, Boris Johnson published a book called The Dream of Rome, in which he held up the Roman Empire as a successful model of European integration and as a foil to the unlovable European Union. That was a rather peculiar choice. You would hardly have expected the future Brexiteer to yearn for a time when Britain was but a marginal province of a ‘European super-state’, a label that Margaret Thatcher had once applied to the EU, yet which is a much better fit for imperial Rome. But Johnson also failed to realize that it had actually been the end of Roman power that launched Europe’s long, tortuous and unique journey toward modernity — a journey in which the sovereign United Kingdom came to play such an outsized role.

Should the United States be sending hundreds of millions of dollars in lethal weaponry to Ukraine? That's not a policy discussion we’ve heard aired in the past two weeks. This seems odd, because the provision of such lethal weaponry is at the center of the rapidly-unfolding Trump/Ukraine/impeachment drama. Trump is accused of withholding ‘aid’ for the purpose of ‘pressuring’ Ukranian authorities to carry out investigations that advance his political interests. At least at first blush, it’s a valid matter for inquiry. But what about the ‘aid’ itself?

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange has tabled a $37 billion bid for its London rival. Li Ka-shing is buying the pub chain Greene King for $3.3 billion. The American buy-out firm Advent has offered $5 billion for aerospace supplier Cobham. On an almost weekly basis, foreign predators are swooping on one British company after another. But hold on: the UK is meant to be plunging into an economic abyss. A chaotic departure from the European Union, a political system in meltdown and the looming threat of a Marxist hard-left government have made Britain the one country that investors don’t want to touch. To many, the ZAVs — Zimbabwe, Argentina, and Venezuela  — look attractive by comparison. And yet, the flurry of buyouts by foreign firms is not as odd as it may seem.

The great triumph of recent American politics is for the people of your fine country to have elected as president a man who is the precise embodiment of what supercilious Europeans think Americans are really like. Pig-ignorant, arrogant, jingoistic, contemptuous of foreigners, loud-mouthed, badly dressed and irredeemably bumptious. So consuming is the European antipathy toward Donald Trump — he’s never read a book! He eats steak with ketchup! — that it afflicts leading politicians across our continent, people who would be better advised to button it a while and show a little bit of diplomacy to the leader of the free world. But they can’t: the contempt always bleeds through.

Is Boris Johnson approaching a Brexit breakthrough? That’s the question being asked among Conservative Members of Parliament after there appeared to be movement last week from the government and Democratic Unionist party that could help to secure a deal with the European Union. Today the prime minister met with EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker in Luxembourg to discuss the prospect, over a lunch of chicken oysters and risotto. On the conclusions of the meeting, a No. 10 spokesman said the pair had agreed to step up discussions and for Michel Barnier and Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay to hold talks on a political level: ‘The leaders agreed that the discussions needed to intensify and that meetings would soon take place on a daily basis.

For all its ferocious momentum, Boris Johnson’s government is capable of making pretty bad mistakes – as we saw with Priti Patel’s announcement that free movement of people will end with Brexit on October 31. This is a massive problem, if it hasn’t worked out what regime will replace it. As I say in this week’s UK cover story, this decision plunged millions of European Union nationals into uncertainty. The Home Office has only managed to process one million of the three million living in the country. And what would happen to the other two million on October 31? If they change jobs, how would a French baker who has lived here for 30 years distinguish himself from a French baker just off the ferry if he starts a new job?

In Arthur Miller’s superb examination of the nature of fanaticism, The Crucible, the key moment comes not with the initiation of the Salem witch trials which form the subject of the play, but in the leading character finally and fully rejecting them. The point of crisis comes when John Proctor refuses to sign his name to the condemnation of supposed witches which would justify their horrific punishment. 'How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul, leave me my name.' It is the moment when a man finally finds the courage that is essential to any meaningful masculinity, the courage to defy the absolute consensus of opinion that harms the innocent and taints those who accept it with complicity in evil.

The French president Emmanuel Macron is as flighty as the movie character he most resembles, Harold Chasen, the eponymous sillyboy boy in Harold and Maude. As the world’s economies shudder under a variety of eco-angst initiatives, uncertainty over Brexit, the disruptions of Trump’s steely tariff initiatives, and the truculence of a surprised China, the blinking boy wonder jettisoned all the careful laid plans for the G7 meeting in Biarritz and announced without warning that the summit should focus on the 'emergency’, the 'international crisis’ of (as one news report put it) 'the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle.’ 'Our house is burning.

Another year, another weird joint letter from Sen. Tom Cotton and his buddies to a foreign power. In 2015, it was a terse warning to the mullahs in Tehran. The Iran nuclear deal was 'nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei,' Cotton and 46 other Republican senators wrote. 'The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen… We hope this letter enriches your knowledge of our constitutional system.' In 2019, Cotton & co. turned not to foe but friend. 'Congratulations again to you,' Cotton and 44 others wrote Boris Johnson over the weekend.

Last night, during his entertaining slugfest with Jeremy Hunt, his rival for Number 10, Boris Johnson promised to take Britain off the 'hamster wheel of doom.' I thought it was the best line of the night. Judging from the applause, the audience did, too. I should acknowledge that Boris was somewhat parsimonious about exactly what mechanism he intended to employ to effect the announced emancipation. But about two of the evening’s chief issues — Brexit and Britain’s relations with the United States — Boris really didn’t need details. He needed, and demonstrated, determination. The Sir Humphreys of the world hate Boris, and they hate Brexit.

Dr Johnson, who was right about so many things, was certainly correct about London: when a man is tired of London, he said, he is tired of life. I have been in that great metropolis for the last few days and I am once again impressed by the truth of Johnson’s declaration. Not for the first time, however, I find myself asking myself why I am so impressed. Plenty of other cities have conspicuous charms. Paris, for example, is in many ways more beautiful and picturesque than London, more patently sensual, not to say sybaritic. New York is more virile and commanding. But London, for a Yankee like me, exercises a special fascination. One of these days I will sit down and try to plumb the lineaments of that fascination.