Brexit

President Trump returns to Britain this week for his second state visit, to a country which is much changed yet depressingly still the same. On his first, six years ago, Britain had yet to complete its departure from the EU, Elizabeth II was still on the throne and the Conservatives still in power – with three Prime Ministers to go before their eventual ejection from office. He will no doubt receive a warm and dignified welcome from King Charles, whatever is going through the monarch’s head – the impeccable neutrality of the British throne has survived the change of reign. Yet the President will find a country that is anything but transformed by Brexit or by its change of government.

Since the United Kingdom left the European Union five years ago, the pair have been in battle to prove who has performed better. But the real story of the past five years is not a stagnant UK falling behind a buoyant EU, but of Britain and Europe being trapped in the same cycle of relative decline. It’s America that has quietly raced ahead of Europe this century. Following the pandemic it has become impossible to ignore the gulf in economic vitality between the US and Europe, the former growing by 16.3 percent per capita since 2008. There are very good reasons for America’s success, or rather, Europe’s decline. The EU and the UK increasingly treat their industries as pieces of heritage which must be preserved against disruptors and foreign competition.

Cambridge, England Inscribed on the lid of a two-manual harpsichord in Holy Trinity Church at Hildersham in Cambridgeshire is the Latin tag Musica Donum Dei — music is a gift of God. It was a sentiment I could hardly quarrel with as I listened in the little twelfth-century church to a variety of baroque sonatas for violin, recorder, cello and harpsichord. They were expertly performed by the Azur Ensemble, which is comprised of recent graduates of the Royal College of Music. A particular standout was the French harpsichordist Apolline Khou, who has performed widely in Europe and in a solo concert for King Charles III.

I think that Thomas Babington Macaulay had the last word about Boris Johnson’s forced resignation as prime minister of the UK: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” Macaulay wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Macaulay’s line needs to be slightly adjusted, it is true, because, ridiculous though public displays of puritanical moralism are, in this case it was mostly Boris’s colleagues in Parliament, not the public at large, that suffered that unbecoming fit of morality. Indeed, throughout it all, Boris — a politician with more élan than any prime minister since Margaret Thatcher — remained popular with the public. He was especially popular, I think, with the American public. And why not?

On Monday evening, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, diagnosed 11 days’ earlier with COVID-19 and taken to hospital for ‘tests’ on Sunday afternoon after showing ‘persistent’ symptoms, was moved into an Intensive Care Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. A brief statement from 10, Downing Street described Johnson’s ‘worsened’ condition and confirmed that Johnson, who had continued working in isolation throughout his illness, had asked foreign secretary Dominic Raab to ‘deputize for him where necessary’.Forty-six-year-old Raab is also the first secretary of state, the most senior member of Johnson’s cabinet.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Montpellier, France As the new year dawned, it was business as usual in France, with transportation paralyzed, hundreds of cars burning in the suburbs, violent demonstrations in the cities, a whiff of tear gas in the Métro, police beating protesters. Train drivers, air-traffic controllers, nurses, garbage collectors, ballet dancers, opera singers were all on strike — and so, even, were lawyers. If the country is not wholly immobilized, it’s because the French are pretty adaptable and, to be honest, some only pretend to strike. My garbage was picked up in the normal way. Making the French swallow bitter medicine is hard, even in a nation of hypochondriacs.