James Lewisohn

Posterity has graced Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. Its tale of a man who since birth has unwittingly been held captive in a Hollywood soundstage as the subject of a reality TV show was a worldwide commercial hit. Yet it did not massively appeal to the prevailing Hollywood establishment: at the 1999 Oscars, it received best director, supporting actor and screenplay nominations, but nothing for the star performance of its lead, Jim Carrey; and no best picture nomination. Instead, this was the year the now-incarcerated rapist Harvey Weinstein is said to have spent $5 million on Oscar marketing for the eventual best picture winner, Shakespeare in Love).

Iran is looking increasingly Danish, which sounds like a strange thing to say. What could Iran (a theological dictatorship which massacred 30,000 of its citizens earlier this year) and Denmark (a social democracy which is one of the world’s most generous foreign aid donors) possibly have in common? Iran has chosen a great short-term policy in asserting its control over Hormuz, but a mediocre long-term one But Iran’s theologians like to keep themselves half a millennium back from contemporary mores.

In the aftermath of the bitterly contested 2000 US presidential election, Bill Clinton famously commented: ‘the American people have spoken; but it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said’. That election ultimately took over a month plus a US Supreme Court decision to finalise and remains hotly debated to this day. Pity the poor Danes, then, who now face a similar period of extreme uncertainty. The snap Danish general election produced a polarised and atomised result for its smorgasbord of 12 political parties, with no party gaining more than 22 per cent of the vote, and no overall majority in Denmark’s 179-seat parliament.

Hans Christian Andersen didn’t write a fairy tale called ‘The Ugly, Pornographic Duckling’, yet his stories often feature alienation, exile and the struggle for acceptance. ‘Ugly and pornographic’, meanwhile, is how Politiken newspaper’s art critic, Mathias Kryger, has described the ‘Big Mermaid’: a 14-ton, 13-foot tall, notably buxom statue which between 2006 and 2018 stood on Copenhagen’s Langelinie promenade – only a few hundred feet away Edvard Eriksen’s iconic 1913 ‘Little Mermaid’ original (itself based on an Andersen fairy tale).

If Francis Fukuyama was wrong about the end of history, he was right about one thing. Back in the scary days of March 2020 as the pandemic first hit the West, Fukuyama made one of the few predictions about Covid that turned out to be correct. It would be clear when the pandemic eventually subsided, he said, that 'the crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity, and above all, trust in government'.  A study published this month in the Lancet backs up his theory. It suggests that countries whose citizens trust both their governments and each other have been the world’s big Covid winners. Why?

Denmark’s greatest philosopher, Søren Kirkegaard, experienced only one epidemic in his lifetime, the cholera outbreak of 1853, which occurred after Denmark foolishly lifted the coastal quarantine that had saved the country from Europe’s miserable 19th century cholera pandemics. Yet he aptly sensed our response to indeterminate lockdowns: ‘the most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have’. Danes and Britons are keenly ‘remembering’ summer 2021 and are desperate for lockdown to be over.

Professor Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, has finally said something about the diesel emissions scandal that desperately needed to be said. 'These companies have blood on their hands – I say that without any doubt', he told the Daily Telegraph. 'The number of early fatalities in Britain is really very, very large due to NOx (nitrogen oxides) [in the] air, with governments across Europe encouraging diesel on the basis that the catalyst traps worked'. So now we know that policies which favoured diesel cars (mostly produced by EU carmakers) over their non-diesel competition (mostly produced by non-EU carmakers) are actually killing people. But how did we get to this sorry outcome?

If Hillary Clinton is still unwell and proceeds to the Oval Office in November, she will not be its first incumbent suffering imperfect health.  She will not even be the first newly-elected president with pneumonia, nor the first requiring antihistamines to control their allergies.  HRC will be merely the latest in a very long line of US presidents who were much less healthy than they liked to let on. You might not even recall the first US president with pneumonia, because it killed him so very rapidly.  That was William Henry Harrison, who had difficulty adjusting to the hectic pace of the White House after his election in 1841.