Greece

Thursday

Taki

High life | 24 September 2015

Gstaad Jeremy Clarke has wiped me out again, for a change. His accounts of the high jinks on board the SpectatorAt the age of 79, I'm seriously contemplating becoming a bird-watcher cruise had the mother of my children laughing out loud, something she’s not known for among those of us who consider laughing loudly a staggering breach of taste. Never mind, Jeremy’s talents and his ability to describe the indescribable in vivid prose is a badly kept secret among those of us who love good writing. The only thing wrong with Jeremy is that he shows me up week in, week out. Being the fall guy does not suit me one bit. And I hope I won’t be falling this week in Amsterdam, where I’m competing in the world veteran judo championships. This is my last competition ever.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 20 August 2015

These are the languid, sensuous days of summer, and I’ve had another birthday, which is the bad news. But it’s the silly season, so I’m going to be silly yet again and tell you about Patrick and Isabelle Balkany, a couple who got into trouble last week in the land of cheese. I don’t know them, but I had the bad luck to run into the wife about 20 years ago in Rolle, Switzerland, where the Rosey school is located. It was September, the first day back at school, and my son J.T. was miserable at the prospect of going to boarding school for the first time. He had tried every trick in the book as his mother and I were driving him down from Gstaad.

The Spectator

Letters | 20 August 2015

The morality of the A bomb Sir: In questioning whether we should celebrate VJ Day (Diary, 15 August), A.N. Wilson is confusing ‘why’ with ‘how’. The debate on the rights or wrongs of the nuclear attack will continue probably until long after the grandchildren of the last survivors have passed on. What should not be forgotten is the necessity to defeat the cruel, expansionist, militaristic regime that arose in Japan between the wars. Something happened to Japan during that period. The treatment of Allied prisoners of war and the atrocities in China during the second world war are well documented. What is less well known is the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war during the first world war.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 August 2015

Home Andrew Burnham described calls from Yvette Cooper, a rival candidate for the Labour leadership, for him to withdraw from the contest as ‘quite strange’. The problem was how to prevent Jeremy Corbyn, a left-winger, from being elected by the alternative vote system by 610,000 party members and registered supporters. Gordon Brown, the former disastrous Labour prime minister, contributed by making a 50-minute speech in a small room at the Royal Festival Hall, during which he paced up and down continuously for an estimated 1 mile 1 furlong 5 chains and did not mention Mr Corbyn’s name. Kezia Dugdale, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, was elected leader of the Scottish Labour party; the party has only one seat in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Isabel Hardman

Tsipras triggers second election

Greece has already had one election and a referendum this year. Now it's going back to the polls again with Alexis Tsipras announcing his resignation and snap elections. Tsipras says he has a moral duty to go to the polls after securing Greece’s third bailout, arguing that ‘we did not achieve the agreement we expected before the January elections’ and that he wants voters’ approval before continuing with the programme. But this is also his attempt to secure authority by calling an election at an advantageous time for him, given he was facing a no confidence vote. He had lost the backing of many of his own MPs after his bizarre decision to call a referendum which then made little difference to the way he conducted negotiations over Greece’s bailout.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 13 August 2015

The wind is maddening and constant, and gets stronger as the sun falls below the horizon. The streets are lined with plastic and rubbish, the beaches covered with greasy bodies and sunbeds, and ghastly music blasts away all day and night. Motor scooters without mufflers and cars choke the tiny roads that lead to the centre of town, where literally thousands of sunburned young people wearing expensive rags down tequilas with a thousand-mile look on their unshaven faces. Welcome to Mykonos, once a brothel of an island, now reverting to type after 30 years as a gay paradise. I am on a 125-foot schooner, the Aello, which was built in Hamburg, Germany, in 1921, by Max Oertz, and commissioned by Anthony Benakis, a great Greek benefactor.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 August 2015

Home The Metropolitan Police encouraged people to celebrate VJ Day despite reports in the Mail on Sunday (picked up from an investigation by Sky News) of plans by Islamic State commanders to blow up the Queen. The RMT union announced two more strikes on the London Underground for the last week in August. Network Rail was fined £2 million by the rail regulator for delays in 2014-15, many of them at London Bridge. A tanker carrying propane gas caught fire on the M56 motorway near Chester. England won the Ashes series after beating Australia by an innings and 78 runs at Trent Bridge; Australia had been bowled out for 60 before lunch on the first day. Unemployment rose by 25,000 in the second quarter to 1.85 million.

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

Watch: Nigel Farage on why Ukip is still relevant

Nigel Farage emerged from his summer break today to kickstart his party’s No campaign. The Ukip leader hit out at Eurosceptic Conservatives who he believes are lazy and ‘there is no No campaign’ at present. But he won’t be putting himself forward as a candidate to lead the official No campaign —  instead focusing on his grassroots efforts with a tour of the country in September. I caught up with Farage, who appeared refreshed after ‘trying to keep away from people like you’. He denied that by attacking Tories, he is beginning Ukip’s No campaign on a negative footing: ‘You will have seen in national newspaper columns this week a shed load of abuse thrown at me by some of these people.

Paul Wood

‘The smugglers don’t care’

 Lesbos A young woman in a headscarf stumbled over some rocks and onto the beach. She stood there, rigid, stunned, then burst into tears. A grandmotherly German tourist hugged her. ‘It’s over now, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘You’re in Europe.’ A Burmese man from the same boat looked around anxiously and asked: ‘Will the police here beat us?’ It was after dawn on the Greek island of Lesbos, the sun glinting off the turquoise sea, an idyllic holiday-brochure landscape of hills with whitewashed houses. But the Turkish coast is so close that you can see it, and so this tiny island has become the front line in Europe’s migration crisis. Hundreds of people arrive here every day in rubber dinghies.

Douglas Murray

Despair springs eternal

The literary emissions of the left are hardly ever enjoyable, but they can be instructive. Last year Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century became one of the biggest-selling political books of the year. Like a thousand-page Soviet report on tractor production, it hardly seemed intended to be read. The point of its success was that it could be said to ‘prove’ the left’s argument. They could then hit their opponents over the head with it and move to the next stage. Last year they questioned some premises of capitalism and now Paul Mason, the economics editor of Channel 4 News (and Spectator diarist), is here to say that capitalism is in fact over.

Martin Vander Weyer

Do Nikkei and the FT really share the same journalistic values?

It’s nearly 30 years since I worked in Japan, but I still have a few words of the language and a certain idea of how the place worked. The role of the business press, for example, was to trumpet export successes of Japanese corporations, and not to report shenanigans in which securities firms boosted prices of selected shares by pushing them to housewife investors, to generate campaign funds for favoured politicians. So I’m curious how the Financial Times will fare under its new owner Nikkei, the very Japanese media group that has paid £844 million to acquire the world’s most prestigious business title. Has the culture changed since my day?

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 July 2015

Don’t write off Assad Sir: Ahmed Rashid refers to our ‘Arab allies’ supporting al-Qaeda (‘The plan to back al-Qaeda against Isis’, 18 July). Clearly they are no allies of ours, so thank you Mr Rashid for pointing this out. Apart from that, his perspective is peculiar. He starts off by accusing Assad of plunging Syria into a bloody civil war. Clearly that is not the case. The civil war was started by Assad’s opponents, encouraged by the ‘success’ of the Arab Spring elsewhere. Of course we now see that the ‘success’ was illusory. He also suggests that Assad is finished. Now that his ally Iran has come in from the cold, I think it is a bit early to write him off.

Taki

High life | 23 July 2015

I think back to my Greek childhood and longing for the once cosiest and most romantic of cities overwhelms me. Actually it’s too painful to think back: all the blood spilled during the communist uprising, the beautiful neoclassical buildings destroyed by greed and lack of talent, the impeccable manners of the people that showed respect for the elderly, the church and the nation. They all went with the wind, that horrible sirocco from the south that has been used as an excuse for crimes of passion committed under its influence. This ache for a lost past is nothing new. Elsewhere and memory are most vivid in one’s mind, as are loss and the innocence of childhood. Mind you, the distilling process of memory can play tricks and is also extremely selective.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 July 2015

Home Parents would be able to have their children’s passports removed if they were suspected of planning to travel abroad to join a radical group, under provisions outlined by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to deal with Islamist extremism. It emerged that five British pilots embedded with allied forces had been taking part in air strikes over Syria, which Parliament had voted against in 2013. Julian Lewis, the Conservative chairman of the Defence Select Committee, accused Mr Cameron of making up policy ‘on the hoof’. Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, the former Chief of the Defence Staff, said that in order to defeat the Islamic State, ‘tanks would have to roll and there’s going to have to be boots on the ground’.

James Bartholomew

Degrees in disaster

So farewell, Yanis Varoufakis. You used to be Greece’s finance minister. Then you resigned, or were you sacked? You took control of the Greek economy six months ago when it was growing. Yes, honestly! Growth last year ran at 0.8 per cent, with forecasts of 3 per cent this year. The government had a primary budget surplus. Unemployment was falling. Until you came along. Varoufakis was a product of British universities. He read economics at Essex and mathematical statistics at Birmingham, returning to Essex to do a PhD in economics. With the benefit of his British university education he returned to Greece and, during his short time in office, obliterated the nascent recovery. The economy is now expected to contract by 4 per cent this year — an amazing transformation.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 July 2015

Home The government postponed a Commons vote on relaxing the Hunting Act in England and Wales after the Scottish National Party said it would oppose the changes. Scottish police admitted that a crashed car off the M9, reported to them on a Sunday, was not examined until the Wednesday, when one of the two passengers inside it was still alive. She died three days later. A case of H7N7 bird flu was found at a poultry farm near Preston, Lancashire, where 170,000 chickens were slaughtered. British people were being urged by the Foreign Office to leave Tunisia because ‘a further terrorist attack is highly likely’. Up to 5,000 were flown home.

Harry Mount

Greece Notebook

At the weekend, I tried — and failed — to get some money out of an empty cashpoint near Omonia Square. The Eurobank cashpoint was covered in fresh anti-German graffiti: ‘No to the new German fascism,’ it read in Greek, ‘No to the “dosilogous”.’ That’s the Greek for Nazi collaborators in the war. For any cashpoint users who couldn’t speak Greek, the graffiti artist helpfully added, in English, GERMANY= 卐. If the new, German-led EU austerity package goes ahead, the swastikas will keep spreading through Athens. I felt sorry for a German family eating ice cream in the deserted Estia café in Plaka. The couple, with four strapping children and granny in tow, looked the picture of six-foot-tall, blond, Teutonic health.

Martin Vander Weyer

A deal for the good of the world, but in Vienna rather than Brussels

As an occasional lecturer on the abstruse topic of the efficacy of sanctions in conflict resolution, I find myself much more excited about the emergence in Vienna of a settlement of the Iranian nuclear stand-off than I am about a third Greek bailout — which left-wingers of the Syriza party regard as a vindictive form of sanctions regime designed to humiliate the government in Athens and remove its fiscal autonomy. The only thing that’s clear about the Greek crisis is that it’s not over: impossible to see how it could be ‘over’ without the debt relief Prime Minister Tspiras asked for but the Germans adamantly refused.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs Sketch: Cameron’s lurches to the left

‘Put that on your leaflets,’ snarled Cameron at PMQs. Inwardly he was gloating. Labour voted against Tory welfare reforms last night so the PM was able to boast that Labour is fighting the new living wage. Some say Cameron is lurching to the left with his Five Year Plans and his state-controlled pay rises. The same applies to law and order. He’s getting a pinkish tinge. Philip Davies asked him to review the regulations governing early release for serious offenders. Cameron said he’d give it a go. It’s not good enough, he seemed to imply, having murderers murdering people shortly after gaining their freedom by promising to become pillars of the community. But he didn’t seem too bothered by it. Then he made some astonishing disclosures about open prisons.

Tuesday

Toby Young

An independent Scotland could easily have been the next Greece

I wonder how many Scots who voted 'Yes' in last year’s referendum are watching events unfold in Greece and having second thoughts? It’s not quite a 'there, but for the grace of God' moment, but it’s not far off. This analogy depends upon two big assumptions, both of which will be disputed by the nationalists. The first is that Scotland would not have automatically been allowed to remain in the EU following a 'Yes' vote, but, as a new state, would have had to apply for membership and, as a condition of joining, would have been forced to join the euro. How questionable is this assumption?