Giorgia meloni

I recently attended the Young Dancer of the Year competition at the Royal Opera House, organised by the formidable Jacquie Brunjes. Sixteen young girls and boys aged 14 to 16 who had won a place in the final, all strutted their stuff in the hope of becoming the eventual winner. I watched each performance with a keen amateur eye, and selected my three to be awarded prizes, and not one of them made it to the final. Dame Arlene Phillips selected Cooper Filby, and I asked her afterwards if he had a chance of making it on to the professional stage. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘The standard of young dancers in Britain today has never been higher and Cooper can look forward to a promising career.’ I returned home and switched on the television to see Vladimir Putin on the early evening news.

Pope Francis wants you to have sex. Or at least he wants Italians to have more sex. The country, he says, is facing a ‘Titanic struggle’ against demographic doom. Last year, the population dropped by 179,000 people – and Italy is projected to lose another five million by 2050.  What’s happening in Italy is, to a greater or lesser extent, being repeated across the western world. In the UK in 2020, there were four workers per retiree. By 2041, the ONS projects there will be just three. We’re getting older, there are fewer of us and, all other things being equal, we’ll poorer for it. Either we tax the declining population more to maintain the same level of welfare or we will have to cut back on things like care and pensions.

For a UK audience, the most striking moment in the new Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s victory speech will have been that she anchored its peroration to a quote from G.K. Chesterton. ‘Chesterton wrote, more than a century ago,’ she said, ‘“Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” That time has arrived. We are ready.’ G.K. Chesterton? The creator of the excellently herbivorous Father Brown mysteries, the Isaac Newton of what we now call ‘cosy crime’? That G.K. Chesterton? The author of a poem, memorised by many a previous generation of English schoolboys, about how ‘the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road’? That one?