All sorts of revealing things have been said in recent days about the survival chances of the euro. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, declared that talk of disintegration was ‘complete nonsense’, as crazy as the suggestion that California might break away from the dollar. EU economics commissioner Joaquin Almunia reached for a different comparison, describing the euro as ‘an old-style marriage where divorce does not exist’.
Ross Clark says that the government’s PFI deals allow private companies to prosper at the public’s expense Imagine you are a left-leaning Guardian reader with a social conscience. You are not a communist, but your attitude towards private enterprise is less one of enthusiasm than grudging tolerance. If we are going to let private companies run things and make things, you believe, they must at least follow a Will Huttonesque paradigm of virtue, looking after their staff and the local community before distributing a few crumbs to their shareholders. And, of course, capitalists must be kept away from the things which really matter.
Damian Thompson says that the new Pope wants to promote the Latin Mass — and radical purification Benedict XVI is the first pope in history to have gone about his daily life as a Catholic priest wearing a collar and tie. In this country, the practice is almost unknown; in Europe, it is the mark of a liberal theologian. But the other day the Catholic Herald printed a photograph of Fr Ratzinger dressed like a businessman that dated from 1977, long after his supposed conversion to hard-line conservatism. Apparently Ratzinger, as a professor at Regensburg, was merely following university convention. Even so, it’s a revealing detail, suggesting that, despite shared roots in folk Catholicism, Benedict’s intellectual history has little in common with that of John Paul II.
Dept d’Hérault Our TGV, slipping through La France Profonde from Lille to Montpelier three days before the referendum, would now end its journey earlier, at N.
Anthony Browne says the French model has failed. Britain must now show the way forward — and save the European Union by her example Brussels You might feel safe reading your Spectator, confident that you will die in a bed, but I can reveal that yet another world war is about to break out across Europe, that genocide is stalking the land, and Islamist terrorists are about to blow up innocents by the trainload. I know this is going to happen, because Dutch MEPs warned of it in a TV commercial. Archive footage of Jews being herded on to trains, of mass graves from the Srebrenica massacre, and bodies lying on tracks after the 11 March train bombing in Madrid were used to warn the Dutch what would happen again if Europe didn’t get its constitution.
Martin Gayford examines the extraordinary lives — and deaths — of great artists and suggests that there is a link between manic depression and creativity In the summer of 1667 the architect Francesco Borromini — one of the most brilliant figures of the Italian baroque — fell into what was later described as a ‘hypochondria’, complicated by fever. ‘He twisted his mouth in a thousand horrid ways, rolled his eyes from time to time in a fearful manner, and sometimes would roar and tremble like an irate lion.’ Doctors and priests were consulted, all of whom agreed that he should never be left alone, should be prevented from working, and all efforts made to encourage him to sleep so that ‘his spirit might calm down’.
The sun set on the 20th century more than four years ago but you can still see a blood-red glow on the horizon. The century that saw unprecedented technological progress also saw unprecedented slaughter. Previously, religion had served mankind’s deep needs for explanation, order, spiritual comfort and transcendental meaning. Now a new and hideous thing was summoned up to serve the same needs. The thing was ideology, and in a few decades it caused more bloodshed than millennia of religion. It was darker and more irrational, and contained within it something unknown to all the Religions of the Book: a death wish. Religious leaders, however bad they may be, however prone to hubris and hatred, are constrained by fear of God above and by ancient tradition and wisdom.
What with Jamie Oliver dictating government policy last month, and Lady Isabella Hervey flaunting her tanned bod for the lads on Celebrity Love Island, you could be forgiven for thinking that social mobility in Britain, both upwards and downwards, has attained what scientists might call inertia-free perfection. Daily observation suggests that the game of snakes and ladders between the classes has never been so vigorously played, and that the rules have been entirely rewritten. An expensive education and a father with friends in high places no longer buy you a double six to start; received pronunciation is now a positive handicap in any career in which you might ever have to open your mouth in public.
In his first interview since the election, Lynton Crosby tells Alice Thomson what he has enjoyed about living in Britain and running Michael Howard’s campaign He is the Wizard of Oz. During the election campaign he used to stand behind the curtains at press conferences directing operations. He never talked to journalists and no one ever saw him on television but everyone assumed that the Tories’ Australian campaign manager, Lynton Crosby, was pulling all the levers. He was credited with many great and evil powers, with revitalising the Tory party, with demonising asylum-seekers, with forcing Gordon Brown to hold hands with Tony Blair. All three parties were afraid of him.
Like many of my countrymen, I find the cantankerous figure of Charles Clarke somewhat alarming. In fact, I think on balance I would rather live next door to David Boag. It would certainly be more entertaining. Boag, a 28-year-old warehouseman from Dechmont, West Lothian, is a man of unusual habits. He likes to watch the film An American Werewolf in London, after which he spends some time howling. Not only that; neighbours who have taken to watching him through his curtainless windows have spotted him climb up a step ladder, leap on to his sofa and then dance around the room with a Christmas tree. Whether Mr Boag is a little mad or just eccentric I don’t feel qualified to say. Perhaps he needs to meet some girls, or at least broaden his taste in films a little.
The Kyrgyz-Uzbek border To people in Central Asia, home to some of the most oppressive regimes in the world, President Bush’s inaugural speech in January was important. ‘When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you,’ said Bush, and his words sounded very promising. Thirteen years after the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship, no country in Central Asia has yet held elections which could be described as even remotely free or fair. While the presidents, their families and entourages amass enormous fortunes, 80 per cent of the population struggles to survive on less than $1 a day. Celebrating VE Day in the Baltic states, the US President lambasted the Soviet occupation and ‘secret deals to determine somebody else’s fate’.
Looking back at the 1960s and 1970s, when I grew up in Germany, one of the most striking things was that everyone talked about work and money. The country was infuriatingly materialistic. The old West Germany felt more like an economy than a country. It used to have a proper currency, the Deutschmark, but it lacked a proper political capital. At a time when the British believed in incomes policies, capital controls and state ownership, Germany was as laissez-faire an economy as you could find anywhere in Europe. The Germans were the Americans of Europe, as a friend remarked at the time. Everyone was brimming with confidence and the superiority that comes with the belief that you are running the world’s most superior economy.
Recently I found myself idling away an afternoon in Angelina Jolie’s Winnebago. Angelina and I were discussing books. More specifically, she was talking me through her taste in erotic fiction, which spans the centuries from the Marquis de Sade to ‘more modern stuff’. ‘Sometimes,’ she remarked, ‘you find a passage that works for you and you can go back to it over and over.’ Crikey! Glancing around her rather anonymous trailer, parked inside a vast hangar about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, I was disappointed to see no evidence to support her claim to an interest in mucky literature. Instead, there was only one book on her sofa, there to keep her company during the longueurs that accompany the shooting of any big Hollywood film.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the drums of revolution beating once more in Washington. The neoconservatives have found another regime that needs changing, another enemy of ‘freedom’, and they are setting about putting matters right in their usual way. This time the target is Belarus, a small country in between Poland, Ukraine and Russia with a population of 10 million. Since 1996 Belarus has been run as a communist dictatorship by President Aleksander Lukashenko. All the usual precursors to a US-sponsored ‘revolution’ are in place: an influential Washington NGO — the US Committee on Nato — has said that fostering democracy in Belarus is an ‘essential, moral and strategic imperative for US foreign policy’.
A peculiar arrangement prevailed in 8th-century France, during the final decades of the Merovingian dynasty. The power of the kings, once savage and formidable, had subsided and then collapsed. They continued to enjoy the title of monarch, but the real power was exercised by officers of the royal household, the so-called ‘mayors of the palace’. The mayors ruled, while the Merovingians, who were regarded with contempt, occupied a purely formal and instrumental role. This pattern of indirect rule, with its separation of real and titular authority, is by no means unique. Japanese emperors in the 9th century ruled in name only. The Fujiwaras, a dynasty of court officials, exercised the real power though they were content to maintain and honour the throne.
Brendan O’Neill says that Lapsed, or Recovering, Catholics are wallowing in their victim status now that a traditionalist has been elected Pope Lapsed Catholics are sorely disappointed that the 265th Pope of Rome, Benedict XVI, is — shock, horror — a strict Roman Catholic. The 20 million lapsed Catholics in America had hoped, according to an Ohio-based newspaper, that the Church would become a ‘friendlier place’ after the demise of John Paul II, and coax ‘hurt, angry and lapsed Catholics’ like themselves back into the pews. Lapsed Catholics in Britain also prayed for a new happy-clappy era under a less dogmatic Pope, who might, a friend of mine hoped, ‘bend some of the old rules’.
‘If my next child’s a boy, I’ll stop. If not, then I’ll keep trying until I get one.’ These words weren’t spoken by an Asian or Indian woman, desperate to give her husband an heir, but by a white woman, upper-middle-class and married to an investment banker. She spoke from the cosy confines of her flat in Hampstead two months after giving birth to her first child, a girl. Of course, she loves her daughter and she is a wonderful mother. Still, there it is: the disappointment that she didn’t bear a boy. This was not the first time I had met someone disappointed not to have a boy.
If we political pundits were truly blessed with the gift of accurate prophecy, we would not be writing about one of the most sordid subjects known to man. We would be earning shedloads of money as astrologers, with premium-rate telephone lines conveying our charlatanry to the masses, and conveying the masses’ money back to us. Since by the time you read this we will be having, or will just have had, the most unpredictable election of modern times, it is harder than ever to base any argument on its likely outcome. I had better risk humiliation, therefore, by stating that what follows is based on the unkind assumption that on Friday afternoon Mrs Michael Howard will not be measuring up for curtains in No. 10 Downing Street.
He was always Maggie’s favourite. She loved him. He adored her. But as in most hot romances, there was a cooling. And finally the embers died. Essex Man had found another. In slightly less than a decade a Tory majority of 17,000 in Braintree had turned, incredibly, into a 358 majority for Labour. Braintree, with an electorate of 82,000, is now the second most marginal majority in England and may well hold a clue to how the rest of the South votes. Mrs Thatcher had a special place in Essex Man’s heart. She had given him a chance to buy his own council house plus the confidence and tax breaks to start his own business, instead of working under the union yoke.
The reputation of Gordon Brown has never stood higher than it does this election weekend. The Chancellor has pulled off a double which has eluded virtually every chancellor in history: he is hailed simultaneously as a political genius and as an outstanding manager of the British economy. Politically, this reputation is well enough justified. The general election has granted Gordon Brown the prize he has sought for almost two decades. He is now the universally accepted Labour leader-in-waiting. Tony Blair has publicly pledged his endorsement, but only because he had no choice. The Chancellor is a far more powerful and trusted figure than the Prime Minister, both inside the Labour party and in the country at large. Gordon Brown has become the crutch of a widely despised Prime Minister.