Features

The Treasury will be the engine room of David Cameron’s government. It will have to be, given the ghastly economic inheritance. But the economy will be only one of the incoming Chancellor’s headaches — his department will be in no fit state to do the leading. The Treasury — once the citadel of high-quality policy advice and the driving force behind the economic and financial reforms which revived Britain in the 1980s — now lies prostrate. It is a casualty of Gordon Brown’s personality, ten years of trench warfare between him and Tony Blair and the appointment of a new Chancellor, broken backed on arrival. This financial crisis has brutally exposed some of this.

In theory, Europeans find American elections vulgar and plutocratic. In practice, they find them utterly gripping. This is partly because the US is wealthy and powerful, but mainly because American campaigns, being more participatory than European ones, are more interesting. All organisations grow according to the DNA encoded at the time of their conception. The US was founded in a revolt against a distant and autocratic regime. In consequence, its polity developed according to what we might call Jeffersonian principles: the idea that power should be diffused and that government officials, wherever possible, should be elected. Most European constitutions, by contrast, were drawn up after the second world war.

It’s not often a chap gets to shake a hand that has personally accounted for 31 Japs in the space of one battle. But such was your correspondent’s privilege outside the Royal Courts of Justice this week at the launch of a splendidly righteous case demanding fair and just citizenship rights for Gurkha veterans. A tearful Joanna Lumley was there — her father fought with the Chindits as a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles — as was a typically well-mannered crowd of perhaps 300 ex-Gurkhas and their families. But the stars of the show were the two frail, elderly men sitting impassively in wheelchairs, with their un-mistakable crimson-ribboned bronze crosses stuck proudly on their chests.

On Monday afternoon I rang a Wall Street friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. ‘What’s the mood?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think this is the turning point?’ ‘Hold on a moment,’ he replied. ‘Let me just climb back in off the window ledge.’ There was a pause, then a nervous chuckle. For the half-second of that pause, I actually wondered whether he was serious. And that was just Monday: since then, things have got really frightening. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says the current financial crisis is ‘a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event’, but he’s wrong.

Looking every inch the Brit that he isn’t, American playwright Christopher Shinn takes a bite of a sandwich in a Shepherd’s Bush rehearsal room on a rainy summer afternoon and confesses that, although grateful, he still finds it ‘a mystery’ that it should have been London’s theatrical community, rather than New York’s, that made his career. For his latest play, Now or Later, recently opened at the Royal Court, will be his fifth to premiere in London before going anywhere near his own continent, about which he relentlessly writes. It’s not that Shinn, 32, is not successful in his native country.

Isn’t it about time Muslim terrorists rethought their strategy of recording glorious martyrdom videos, in advance of failing to blow anything up? Wouldn’t it be a bit less embarrassing for all concerned? Time after time we see these imbeciles on our television news promising all sorts of mayhem and misery, the righteous and cleansing fires of Allah poured down upon we imperialist decadent kafir scum, ‘body parts’ scattered in the streets, etc. And then they forget to take a cigarette lighter with them to the airport, or the detonator doesn’t work, or they’re arrested buying 5,000 bottles of hydrogen peroxide from the local hairdresser’s shop and thus somehow arousing suspicion (just how blond do you want to be, Mohammed?).

At a Google conference in Rhodes, Matthew d’Ancona finds himself part of a bid to break the world record for Zorba dancing — and to relive one of the greatest scenes in cinema ‘Teach me to dance. Will you?’ Few scenes in cinema have the emotional poignancy and magic of the last moments of Zorba the Greek (1964), as Basil, the young English writer played by Alan Bates, seeks his final lesson in life from Anthony Quinn’s majestic peasant-magus, on the Cretan shore.