Francis Pike

While drinking, dancing and laughter were the order of the day in Britain on the VE Day, things were not so hunky dory in Germany. At the liberated Belsen concentration camp situated 65 miles to the south of Hamburg, nurse Joan Rudman cut a depressed and lonely figure. She recalled: ‘One could hardly think of peace when there’s so much human misery here.’ Meanwhile for many Germans, there were mixed feelings. Relief that the war was ended combined with bitterness and a sense of humiliation. These were feelings that led to most Germans blotting out their memories of this period. In Germany is known as Tag der Befreiung (day of liberation), in other words liberation from Nazi rule.

Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch, was found hanged in his Sunningdale home in March 2013. Born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Berezovsky converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1994. His leap of faith, I suspected, was more political than spiritual. ‘So why,’ I asked him at dinner one evening, ‘do you buy Russian Icons?’ Berezovsky told me that he tried to bribe Vladimir Putin with motor cars, but he refused them. He was more successful with gifts of Russian Icons, which Putin passed on to churches and monasteries. Throughout his political career, the Russian president has taken care to look after the Russian Orthodox Church. Does this reflect a genuine religious belief? His mother was a devout Christian who had her son secretly baptised.

In 1996, I flew to Dhaka to meet Sheikh Hasina, the newly elected prime minister of Bangladesh, to discuss her economic strategy. It was not a pleasant experience. Hasina was humourless, arrogant and bitter – by a long stretch, the most unlikeable politician I’ve met in the sub-continent. By contrast her diminutive niece, Tulip Siddiq, Labour’s anti-corruption minister who has just resigned over her ties to her aunt, is a charmer.  It just stretches credulity that Siddiq and the Labour party did not know that aunty Hasina was a rotten apple To be fair to Hasina, she had excuses for her unattractive demeanour.

Over Christmas, president-elect Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social site that: ‘For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.’ Trump’s overture, while highly unwelcome to the Danes, is not a new idea. He made the proposal first in 2019. When Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen described the idea as ‘absurd’ and said, ‘Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there’, Trump promptly cancelled his visit to Copenhagen. Frederiksen has been equally dismissive this time round. But the main response has come from Greenland’s premier, Mute Bourup Egede: ‘Greenland is ours.

As the media alarms us about an approaching ‘quad-demic’ of diseases this winter (Covid-19, Flu, RSV, Norovirus) it is a timely moment to think about the travails of our mediaeval forebears. Their common scourges were typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, anthrax, scabies and syphilis – all untreatable at the time. And then there was the plague. The plague tore up the foundations of society and paved the way for dramatic economic, political and social change Arriving at the ports of Venice, Pisa and Marseilles in 1347, shipboard rats carrying the Yersinia Pestis bacterium disbursed the bubonic plague in Europe. Originally it is thought that plague was brought by Genoese ships from their trading fortress, Caffa, in the Crimea.

On the 15 November Xi Jinping will mark the 12th anniversary of his becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party – the sixth paramount leader in China since Mao Zedong established communist rule in 1949. One of the consistent features of Xi’s rule has been China’s hostility to India. People’s Liberation Army incursions across Indian borders became a given. So, the announcement yesterday that India and China have reached a Himalayan border agreement comes as something of a surprise. Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar announced:  We reached an agreement on patrolling [the border], and with that, we have gone back to where the situation was in 2020, and we can say... the disengagement process with China has been completed.

In the third century BC the city of Rhodes, in celebration of the defeat of Demetrius I of Macedonia, built the Colossus, a 30-metre-high statue of the sun god Helios. It became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now there is a new Colossus to wonder at, not a statue but a supercomputer, reputed to be the most powerful in the world. So which American tech company built it? Apple, IBM, Google, OpenAI? Actually, none of the above. The new Colossus has been built by a US auto company… Tesla. How come?

Now that Sir Keir Starmer has unilaterally decided to give up British ownership of the Chagos Islands, the last vestige of our imperial inheritance in the Indian Ocean, it seems an appropriate moment to look back at the long-forgotten history of this remote possession. Mauritius will be the happy recipient of the Chagos Archipelago, which consist of some 60 islands, mainly low-lying atolls and their lagoons. The Chagos Islands were ruled under Mauritius’s mantle until 1968.  Today Mauritius is largely known as a destination for the British middle class who cannot bear the thought of a winter without a week or two’s break on an island on which they can broil under a tropical sun. Mauritius has become the poor man’s Barbados.