A naive twat writes: why can’t there be more political consensus? And something ugly might be stirring in China, though exactly what is anyone’s guess

A few years ago, I did something which to many of my friends seemed quite inexplicable and which even I must admit was out of character. But if I outline why I did it and what took me to the point of doing it, it might, perhaps, make a little more sense.
I am not, for a variety of reasons what can for the sake of simplicity be call ‘a joiner’. I like to plough my own furrow and loathe following the party line on anything. But about ten years ago I signed up with the Conservative Party, although it is only fair to me that I should add that 14 months later I signed down again, that is I wrote to the branch vice-chairman informing him that I would not be renewing my annual subscription, thank you and goodbye.
My reasoning at the time was simple: Blair was about to help to invade Iraq, which I was wholly against, and he was anyway proving to be the nine bob note I had long suspected him of being. It is easy these days to claim that one spotted what a self-serving, shifty cunt he was and is early on, but I thought so even before the 1997 election which brought New Labour to power. Being, ten years ago, the father of a six-year-old and a two-year-old and — ahem — having matured a little more in my old age (I had just turned 52), I took more seriously the direction the country was going in and what was happening. But I was reluctant to be just another pub bore, sounding off about ‘that bastard Blair’ or ‘that idiot Duncan Smith’ before getting another round in. There are enough pub bores around, sounding off in every language under the sun, to populate the world twice over, and I did not want to be just another one. So I thought to myself that the time had come to put up or shut up, to become politically active or to resign myself to being just another of the sheep. But I also knew that no one can do anything on his or her own in the way of politics and that, my ‘non-joining’ mentality notwithstanding I would have to throw my lot in with one of the three main political parties. Ah, but which one? I fell in with the Tories by a process of elimination. I asked myself with whom did I disagree least, and the answer was the Conservative Party.
I am not ‘a Tory’ and I have never been ‘a Tory’ and I hope to God I never shall be ‘a Tory’, and from the off I felt like a fish out of water. But that, I told myself, was a sacrifice I would have to make. I did become active: I stood for the local council and thoroughly enjoyed the campaigning, I did more than my fair share of licking envelopes, I organised a ‘fund-raising event’, I attended a party conference in Blackpool (although to be fair I did that because I was curious to see what such conferences are like and as Blackpool once played such a significant part in the British psyche, I wanted to visit the place). I even managed to get myself onto the Conservative Party list of approved parliamentary candidates and put myself forward to be the local Tory candidate.  And I put up with the discomfort of being regarded by most of the other branch members as something of a pinko. And the truth is that in their political terms I am ‘something of a pinko’.
What struck me from the off and what disappointed me right from the start was that no one, not one of the members I came into contact with or for some reason or other spent time with seemed to be interested in ‘politics’. Not one. For many it was more a social club. For a few, those who were active, it was ‘to do with politics’, but their efforts in that regard almost wholly consisted of trying to raise funds in some way or another. Politics themselves (itself? I’ve always wondered) just didn’t come into it, but it was for the politics that I first swallowed my pride, overcame my reservations and signed up. Another sacrifice was having to put up with people saying, when I had put forward my view, ‘well, you would say that — you’re a Tory’. No, dear heart, I would tell them, I’m not saying it because I’m ‘a Tory’ but because it’s what I believe. Then there was the discomfort with having to keep my mouth shut when in the company of hangers and floggers and swallowing the sarcastic comment I was just itching to make. And after 14 months I had had enough. I was simply wasting my time. But I didn’t want my membership to dribble away: it was important to me that I should do the thing properly. So I wrote to the vice-chairman (a retired rear-admiral and a nice guy) telling him I would no be renewing my membership and why. It meant, and means, that I am back at square one, of course, itching to be politically active but not having the wherewithal to do much, but that, I’ve decided is the lesser of the two evils.

. . .

More to come...

. . .

Meanwhile, after an unexpected invitation to lunch at Rick Stein’s seafood restaurant in Padstow, no supper but a glass or three of red wine, all followed by a pretty aimless trawl through the net in search of nothing in particular, I have come across rather odd reports of an ‘attempted coup’ in Beijing. What is being reported, but for one reason or another can no longer be substantiated, is that there as a ‘movement of tanks’ in an around Beijing (and I am itching still to spell it Peking, but I understand the British PC police will have my guts for garters if I even consider doing so), followed by ‘reports of gunfire’. The Washington Post has carried a report as had the Daily Mail (‘The Trumpet of The Truth’ as guardianistas like to call it), but what is going on – if anything – is your gues as well as mine. Apparently, and my ‘apparently’ must of necessity be more speculative than any previously used ‘apparently’a power struggle has started. I can’t actually tell you between whom, but I can say that it is at present being presented as a struggle between those who want a return to the purer values of Mao and those who are keener on business. It seems a chap called Bo Xilai was sacked in these past few days. The Mail bills him as an ‘anti-corruption official’, but at this point think was should hold fire on sanctifying the chap as there are also claims that his ‘anti-courruption’ zeal was rather limited to his habit of rounding up his ‘corrupt’ political opponents. Mr Bo is said to have close ties with the ‘nationalistic military’ whatever that means. As ever it would seems in all things Oriental, ‘inscrutable’ is the word we are all obliged to use when describing, or trying to describe, what is going on, so perhaps my sagest advice here might be to ignore every word I have just written. If, of course, things are beginning to go tits up in China, that is not very encouraging news for the rest of the world in as far as something like 99pc of what is produced in the world is made there. On the other hand this must surely be very good news indeed for the commentariat as whatever they claim is going on there is utterly unverifiable and thus whatever they say cannot be proved wrong.

How one of Britains's most noble redtops/prominent gutter newspapers (delete as appropriate) is slowly going to the dogs at the hands of one Sly Bailey

In the whacky world of newspapers which I inhabit and which I trust I shall be able to inhabit for the next two years and eight months (of which, as the Mail like to put it, more later), the career of one Sly Bailey must be one of the whackiest. If her abilities are to be judged by her performance as chief executive of Trinity Mirror, she has less talent than a one-legged tap dancer. But surely, you might be asking, she could not have risen to the dizzy heights in which she now exists unless she had some kind of ability? That’s the £64,000 question. In the past few weeks I have come across three facts about La Bailey which, put together, do make curious reading:

Last Sunday, Peter Preston, an ex-Guardian editor and – except for one unfortunate incident when he shopped a source, the great no-no for hacks – one of the great and good of the London liberal left, wrote a piece in The Observer defending our Sly. The lady had not only been awarding herself – or allowing herself to be awarded ‘renumeration packages’ exceeding £1.5 million, she did so while profits in the group she leads fell by 40pc to just £74 million. For a media organisation that is a truly appalling figure. She blames all sorts for the fall, but the question has to be asked why Trinity Mirror is doing so badly when other print media groups are not doing so badly? They are all, after all, facing the same ‘adverse conditions’ or whatever euphemism is the currently trendy one to use. Certainly there will be variations in how they go about doing business which ensure that one group is doing better than another, but it is those very ‘various ways of doing business’ which are the point: if Sly Bailey isn’t coming up with any which are as effective as those the opposition is pursuing, I think it is reasonably to wonder whether she is any good at her job and whether she deserves and ever-increasing ‘remuneration package’.

Preston’s piece would seem to be a response from a chap called Roy Greenslade, a former red-top deputy editor but now a professor of applied cliché or something in some university media department or other (University of Southwark?) who reports the City equivalent of ‘the natives are getting restless’ – shareholder unease. Well, I’d be uneasy, too, if the business I part-owned was reporting repeated falls in profits while the man, in this case, woman put in place to ensure the profits rise rather than fall was not only apparently useless at her job but was paying herself ever-greater wads of dosh.

Most people in the business will have heard the name Sly Bailey (her given name is Sylvia and Sly is just a pet name, though an extremely unfortunate one, it has to be said) and most people in the business will be familiar with her tactic to try to re-float a sinking ship: sack staff to cut the wage bill. Why this ploy is attempted again and again is beyond me because it never, but never, ever, works. Staff are sacked, the ‘product’ gets shoddy, sales go down, more action is needed so more staff are sacked, the products gets shoddier, sales go down even more, more action is needed, and the whole sorry routine is repeated until there is no more ‘product’ to sell, the poor bloody infantry are cast off as just so much baggage while the senior officer class move elsewhere, probably to fuck up some other entrerprise.

One ruse Ms Bailey is attempting to bring down the bills and stave of the evil day when the Mirror goes down the tubes is by raiding the Trinity Mirror pension fund to pay off debts in the U.S. Quite apart from the dubious ethics of the move – newspapers and ethics, now there’s a comic partnership – Mirror proprietors – or rather one of them – have form on matters pension fund. Good ole’s Captain Bob aka Robert Maxwell, about the crookedest nine bob note to haunt Fleet Street for many a year – and there is a long list of characters to choose from – also raided the Mirror pension fund when his web of grandiose and bent deals finally began to unravel. So naturally when the words ‘Mirror’, ‘pensions’ and ‘fund’ are used in the same sentence alarm bells ring loudly from Kensington to Cheapside. Well, Sly is doing it again, which is why just under half of the big investors in Trinity Mirror are wondering just how healthy the company is.

. . .

At the top right of The Guardian’s comment website page is a piccy of some Victorian-looking gent whose name is given as C.P. Scott. Left-liberals revere the man, a former Guardian editor, and often quote, as the website does, his noble pronouncement that  ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Sounds grand, of course, and what right does a cynical bullshitter like me have to query such a noble sentiment? Well, let me give an example by way of trying to explain that when all is said and done, Scott’s thesis is just more vacuous nonsense which, rather like candyfloss, melts in the mouth in a moment with no discernible aftertaste except a sickly sweetness. Take for example ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘terrorist’, or, if you like and are feeling in a particularly pernickety mood ‘terrorist’ and freedom fighter’. Who would be foolish enough to claim as a fact that any individual is the one but not the other? For whatever you choose to insist upon, as sure as eggs is eggs someone will pop up and insist that the opposite is.

I would give another example if I could think of one, but I can’t, so that one will have to do, but you will already have taken my point: facts simply aren’t the copper-bottomed certainties we pretend they are. Is the Pope a bastard (whoever he is)? Well, yes, and that’s a fact if you are an enthusiastic Orangeman. Is Israel more or less a fascist state behaving intolerably towards and oppressed minority? Most certainly, and that’s a fact if you are your average Guardian reader. No, she’s not if — as far as I am concerned — you try a little harder to understand the ineffably complex history of the Middle East and the genesis of the state of Israel. So, here’s a plea: let’s have a little less of the ‘facts are sacred’ bull. They should be, of course, but they rarely, if ever, are.

. . .

If you are a sentimental old hack (which I hope to goodness I am not) the ongoing decline of The Mirror, once known as the Daily Mirror, is sad, sad, sad. In it’s heyday, the late Thirties, the war years and the Fifties, it was a force to be reckoned with. But by the Sixties it and its staff had been corrupted by very generous expense accounts and the paper had become a flabby version of its former self. Furthermore, the world of which it was once the mouthpiece had changed. Between the world wars it still made sense to talk of a ‘working class’ and ‘working class values’ and ‘working class culture’, the Andy Capp world view. It was the world of ‘factory fortnights’ and workingmen’s clubs, when the Labour Party consisted of real socialist rather, as it does today, with vaguely left-of-centre politocrats who regard politics as just another career.

By the Sixties the Mirror, or the Daily Mirror as it still was, was loathed by men such as my father (he told me in all seriousness after Harold Wilson was first elected in 1964 that Britain ‘would be communist within six months’) but its days were numbered. Yes, it was still a successful paper which sold well and made oodles of dosh, but it was by then going through the motions. It was no longer the Daily Mirror, it was playing at being the Daily Mirror. Then, but the early Seventies when The Sun was launched by Rupert Murdoch the decline started. It’s always a bad sign when a newspaper has several proprietors within just a few years but the Mirror did. At one point it was being run by some guy who had cut his business teeth running a building society and knew as much about newspapers as I do about nuclear physics.

A real irony is that the Mirror was first established by Alfred Harmsworth, later known as Lord Northcliffe, in 1903 as a paper for ‘gentlewomen’ and was a nice genteel middle-class paper owned and run by Harmsworth’s brother Lord Rothermere until he sold his controlling interest in 1931 and the new editor took it in a left-wing direction. (The word tabloid gained its modern meaning after Northcliffe told someone that he wanted his new paper, the Daily Mirror, to go down as easily ‘as a tabloid’. This was a reference to a particular kind of headache tablet called a ‘tabloid’ by the guy selling it which he insisted was easier to swallow than conventional tablets. Bet you never knew that, although thinking about it, I might well have written that before in some earlier entry.)

After the chappie who was quite possibly a whizz at running building societies but hopeless at publishing newspapers, the Mirror fell into the hands of the infamous Robert Maxwell (who was, in fact, really called Jan Hoch and originally from Czechoslovakia). And once he had nearly wrecked it it passed into the hands of the Trinity group (I think) and the decline is almost complete. Something similar— a once great newspaper collapsing in on itself on itself and becoming an embarrassing verision of it former proud self — is also happening to the Daily Express which is now owned and run on a shoestring by a pornographer. But that’s another story, it is now way after midnight, I am tired, so if you want to know more along those lines, count me out.

We all had a youth and mine was The Kinks. But even they can do nothing for the PIGS, and the Baader-Meinhof gang throw up a disturbing fact (if it’s true)

We all had our fave bands when we were still in our salad days and life was a roller-coaster ride which seemed beautiful and perfect one minute, dull and dreary the next. In those days 25 was old, 30 was ancient and - as I now know for certain - anyone over 40 was invisible or dead. We were all, each and every one of us, unique, except that, oddly, no one else seemed to realise it. That was in those moments when life was beautiful. When the following moment life was nothing but abject misery of a kind surely no one else had experienced before, ever, I would put on one of my favourite tracks by one of my favourite bands. It was I’m Not Like Everybody Else by The Kinks, and I listened to it again and again and again.


In those long off days The Kinks and The Beatles were my bands, and although in time I went off both, to this day their early stuff is still for me magical. And had I been asked to choose between the two, I would, without hesitation, have plumped for The Kinks as my favourite. The first ‘LP’ I owned was on the long defunct Marble Arch label, one of as far as I can tell several thousand Kinks compilation albums (and it is the sheer number of Kinks compilation albums available which sparked this particular blog entry.) On that album there were around ten songs, and each one was gold: Set Me Free, Where Have All The Good Times Gone, Till The End Of The Day, Tired Of Waiting, A Well-Respected Man, All Day And All Of The Night, Don’t You Fret and You Really Got Me Going (plus a couple of others I can’t remember off-hand): pure gold.

This period came immediately after the first Kinks period when they played R&B (not the R&B now known as R&B, but the R&B then known as R&B if you get my drift) and played debs parties and hunt balls. It was followed by the Sunny Afternoon Years. The first single I ever bought was Dandy, and then I bought the LP Face To Face, which I thought was also gold. I liked the guitar sound. I’ve always been a sucker for guitar sounds, everything from The Kinks Dave Davies to Jo Pass, John Scofield, Dave Fiuczynski, Jimi Hendrix, George Benson, Jeff Beck and any number of other guitarists - give me a guitar band any day, although grunge does fuck all for me, as does heavy metal. Then there was Ray Davies’ voice: most certainly not sweet, but he managed to project all the cynicism, irony and occasional venom I felt, but he could also hold a tune, rather like Donald Fagen and Bob Dylan can despite their somewhat unorthodox voices. The harmonies he and his brother Dave came out with were sublime, in my view far, far better than anything The Beatles or The Beach Boys could produce. Just listen to the harmonies on Waterloo Sunset. And the songs: they were not just funny, but could be very sad, poignant (Little Miss Queen Of Darkness), telling, lyrical (Autumn Almanac), scathing (Plastic Man) and honest.

The last album I went for in a big way was Muswell Hillbillies (Skin And Bone, Demon Alcohol), before they took off - or, I suppose, Ray Davies took off in a direction I didn’t really want to follow them in, for example Schoolboys In Disgrace. I could never see the point of it all.

But it is the compilations which to this day astound me. Ray Davies is undoubtedly and extraordinarily prolific songwriter, but there must be tens if not hundreds of compilations which all, more or less, contain the same songs. I like to think that they had a good business manager who ensure that they get a fair whack of the royalties, but I suspect and rather fear that rights to the songs were sold of early on and someone else is trousering all the moolah from those compilation albums. More’s the pity.

I had another brush with The Kinks when they got their third or fourth wind in the Eighties, but I only bought one album and I can’t even remember what it was called. But nothing, but nothing could top that early stuff (Beautiful Delilah, Long Tall Shorty) and I listen to it to this day.

. . .

Despite Ray Davies’s unfortunate flirtation with a rather theatrical theme, as far as I can see The Kinks never committed the cardinal sin of taking themselves seriously as ‘artists’. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t put their soul and whole being into their work, but there came a point, as far as I am concerned a very shameful point, when rock and pop became respectable, which killed off much of it for me. It became ‘art’ and was treated as ‘art’ by any number of fuckwits writing for the Guardian. Why must everything be intellectualised in that way. John Lennon fell for it, as did Paul McCartney. I don’t think the Rolling Stones did, but then they disappeared up another cul-de-sac, becoming increasingly ordinary despite all the PR hype as ‘the greatest rock ’n roll band in the world. Says who? Well, says their record labels marketing department, and there were plenty of impressionable young idiots to swallow that line. The general standard of guitar playing has improved 1000pc, so that your average pub band plays ten times better than many of the pop professionals (though not necessarily the jazz guitarists of the time, who were, however, being comprehensively ignored by the whole Sixties’s pop phenomenon).

My next fave band was Steely Dan who I ignored for quite a while for the very silly reason that they were cool. I was the left-field type (or thought of myself as the left-field type) who scorned what was ‘cool’ and thought himself even cooler for doing so. Then one day in 1976 I disvovered in, of all places, a bargain bin in a newsagents in Ebbw Vale, where I was working as a reporter, Aja by Steely Dan. It cost a song and had me hooked. I bought all the previous LPs one by one and Gaucho when it came out, followed by Donald Fagen’s first solo album, Nightfly. After that they gave up the ghost for many years. They finally got back together to write songs and came out with Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go, both of which I like, but ... But they, too, now give the impression of taking themselves a little too seriously and I just can’t stomach that.

Then came Prince, but he, too, eventually went off the boil and, sad to say, if you have heard one Prince funk workout of recent times, you have heard quite a few of them. Oh well.

Now to listen to a few more early Kinks tracks. The magic is still there.

. . .

I’ve have stopped ballsing on about the euro and the EU, though not because I am bored. It’s just that the collapse of the euro seems not such a racing certainty that there seems little point to bang on about it. Remember, according to the chap from The Slog (John Ward or Anthony Ward, I can’t quite work out which) March 23 is the day to look out for. But it could all go tits up tomorrow or it might limp on for another six months. The more I consider the whole shambles - Brussels insisting the Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland should starve their people in pursuit of what most now realise was an utterly inconceived project - the more I realise that the one difference between you and me and the idiots who decided to go into politics is that, in some odd way, are a sandwich short of a picnic. I don’t doubt that many of them are quite clever, but I also know that there are even more quite clever people out there to whom it never occurs to go into politics. But I am also quite certain that there is a greater proportion of mediocrities pursuing their destiny in politics than in the secular world. You have probably heard it quoted before, not least quite possibly here, but someone perceptively observed once that ‘politics is Hollywood for ugly people’. And Lord is the euro crisis proving him right.

. . .

I saw a very good film on BBC iPlayer the other night which threw up a very frightening statistic. It was called The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhor Komplex), directed by Uli Edel, and it traced the evolution and development of the gang. I have no idea how accurate the film was in its depiction of the various characters, but if it was accurate, Christ what a bizarre bunch they were. Andreas Baader came across as nothing but a charming, psychopathic, narcissistic idiot without a political thought in his bones who basically got off on the excitement of it all. Ulrike Meinhof had rather more intellectual

backbone but quite how she could make the transition from thoroughly disaffected leftie hack to part of a murderous gang is also bizarre. Gudrun Ensslin came over as a rather hysterical retarded adolescent and Brigitte Mohnhaupt seems to have been yet another psychopath.

All of them seem to have come from middle-class backgrounds and, except for one or two characters who escaped from youth centres, they did not seem to want much (want as in need). There has been and always will be any number of disaffected youth who flirt with the extreme left for a while, but few will make the transition to actually killing people and, furthermore, spend a great deal of time justifying it intellectually.

As I say, I have no way of know just how accurate the film was, or whether it was in some way skewed - the police rank and file didn’t get much of a sympathetic portrayal, although a character played by Bruno Ganz who was apparently top man on the police anti-terrorist side of things did show some intelligence in that he argued that in order to combat the gang, one had to understand what made them tick. But the frightening statistic was that unbelievably amid all the mayhem and murder a reputed one in four of Germans questioned confessed to having some sympathy with the gang. Now that is frightening. Incidentally, there is a very good piece about the film by Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair which you can find here.

. . .

Now here’s a strange thing: courtesy of this blog’s stats feature, I know that in the past 12 hours or so, readership has soared, and one entry in particular - this one – has been getting all the attentention. It can’t be the ongoing (as in going on and on and on) euro crisis involving Greece, because that has never before elicited must attention. That leave my mumblings on The Kinks, Steely Dan, Prince and The Beatles on the one hand and the Baader-Meinhof gang on the other. I have no way of know which it is, but my gut instinct is the Baader-Meinhof idiots. What does that prove? Well, I don’t know, except it would seem to indicate that we all still live bad boys and gals. The stats also indicated that many visitors actually stayed and read the entry rather than find it, take one glance, decided boring, and bugger off again. Odd.

. . .

Later that same day: I now know why this particular entry has attracted an unprecedented number of visits. Mention of The Kinks was picked up by a Kinks fansite and its link was followed to this blog. So it wasn’t after all, as I initially expected, just a surge of interest from several thousand Baader-Meinhof wannabes with murder on their minds looking for a useful website to pick up a couple of tips (‘Disaffected? Spotty? Can’t cut it with the chicks? Want to be a psycho killer with political pretensions like wacky Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin? Here’s how. And don’t bother with cheap, inferior websites - we give you the real lowdown.’).

Incidentally, Anonymous (not, I think, the same Anonymous who has left an earlier comment) has left a comment (below) pointing out that ‘Ray Davies is God and undoubtedly far more important than Jesus Christ’ and ‘what the fuck make me think I am even allowed to speak His name?’

Why for this old fart tweet is still rather uncomfortably close to twit. But don’t worry, you young things, I know my place

For many years after Twitter came into being, I simply could not see the point of it. Tweeters, I thought, were simply irritating neophiles who would sup on shit if they were assured it was the latest, coolest thing to do. It wasn’t that I was behaving as your standard meldrew, hating whatever happened within 20 years of my birth. In fact, I didn’t hate it at all. It was that I simply couldn’t see the point of it. At it’s silliest it is just another PR tool to keep the client in the public eye. Or there is the angle of drumming business, with Robin Lustig trailing an interview with the Devil in tonight’s The World Tonight (he’s a keen tweeter) or Evan Davis twittering away about what this morning’s Today will be doing.

Most certainly there’s an element of neophilia, as evidenced by the disproportionate number of Guardianistas twittering to inform us of their most recent thought. But there is most certainly more to it than that, although for the life of me I can’t put my finger on it. The silliest thing is that I have had a Twitter account for the past few months and have tweeted now and again. But still can’t tell you what the point of tweeting is. And how daft is that? I do it but I don’t know why I do it. Unkind readers might suggest that I have lost the plot, and who might I be to deny it. If I have indeed lost the plot, I would most certainly, by definition, be the last to realise it.

It’s not that tweeting is simply a new technology. The fact that a great many people tweet - and here I really must stress that in the following analysis I am not including those press agents who tweet on their clients behalf - in an odd kind of way signifies a paradigm shift of some kind. It seems to indicate dimension in our conception of how we might relate to others. Now that sounds, or possibly sounds, rather grand, so let me bring it down to earth if possible. I suspect that essentially tweeting is not very new at all. What gives it the impression of novelty is the technology which makes it possible. That is to say if in years and decades and centuries gone by folk were able to proclaim their very opinion to the world, they would most certainly have done so. The difference is that they didn’t have the technology. That reminds me of what someone once said after the first transatlantic cable had been laid and Europe and America were able to communicate telegraphically. ‘Now,’ said someone portentously, ‘London can speak to New York.’ To which someone replied with what to me seems to be the obvious comment: ‘Yes, but does London have anything to say to New York?’

It’s rather the same as tweeting: it’s all find and dandy that we now have the means to trumpet our view and opinions to everyone on the planet with  access to a smartphone or a computer, but it doesn’t necessarily make those views and opinions any the more important or even interesting. Part of me is as yet unconvinced and suspects that it simply boils down to the fact that the larger the crowd able to make a noise, the greater the cacophony. I’ll be more impressed by technological advances such as Twitter and the epistemological shifts they are claimed to bring about when rather fewer people vote in X Factor polls than bother to turn up to cast their vote in national elections. We all have opinions, but unfortunately 99 per cent of us are also as thick as shit.

Dictators v democracy: a (perhaps necessary) clarification. And as things go ever more wrong in Argentina, it begins to fake inflation figures and pick another fight with Old Blighty over the Falklands

After my entry of a few days ago highlighting Peter Hitchens report from Moscow, it occurred to me that I should, perhaps, clarify my view in case it is misinterpreted. The essential point I was trying to make was that everything comes at a price, just as energy cannot be created from nothing, but merely changed from one form to another, or ground gained here must be lost there.


Most certainly I would like to live in a free society, a democracy, and I do. But Britain achieved its freedoms after many centuries of complex evolution. Even the Commons we had at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century was more a gathering of rival gangs of cronies than anything resembling a group which represented the citizens of Britain. The apparently progressive Reform Act of 1832 was, at heart, just a cynical exercise by the ruling class – that is no mere buzz phrase, there really was one – to ensure its survival by allowing the upcoming commercial class to vote. This was done while memories of the French Revolution, which took place uncomfortably close to Britain, were still real for many.

It is, therefore, not just sheer nonsense to claim that democracy can be introduced to countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, is dishonest nonsense. Certainly, they can have a parliament which is elected by universal franchise and most certainly the voters will be glad for the chance to have their say. But there is far more to democracy than holding an election every few years. And it takes just a little more than an edict from Washington for a people to think democratically, for its culture to be so suffused with the principles of democracy that not living in a democracy is quite inconceivable. Democracy demands, at the very least, the rule of law, and where the rule of law is absent, claims that a country is a ‘democracy’ are pretty premature.

By all accounts the rule of law has absent from modern Russia. Certainly, a the level of traffic offences, of course, or petty theft, there is likely to be the usual mechanisms involving the police and the courts, although one does here that corruption among the police is widespread and that is quite possible to bribe one’s way out of trouble. But rule of law most certainly doesn’t exist where the stakes are higher. Any number of businessmen who fell foul of the Russian leadership – for which read Vladimir Putin – suddenly found themselves under lock and key for ‘tax offences’. And until there is a true rule of law, which would, for example allow businessmen and women who feel a contract has not been honoured to go to court for an impartial judgment on the matter, Russia can kiss goodbye to any thoughts of a thriving economy which doesn’t rely on selling off the family silver, or in its case oil and gas.

The trouble with democracies is that they can be messy. When a free vote was held in the Gaze Strip several years, Hamas came to power, an outcome which the West and Israel could well have done without. One of the difficulties slowing down all attempts to resolve the euro crisis is that our democratic principles demand that everyone affected should have their say according to the protocol laid out in a country’s constitution. And it is that delay (which in the case of the euro will most certainly lead to disaster) which is the price we pay for living in a democracy.

Conversely, in countries led by a ‘strong man’ there is, apparently, far more order. Things happen far faster (although the country is not necessarily more efficient as a result), for the simple reason that no one need be consulted. Wise ‘strong men’ ensure that the majority of their nations people life in comfort and have no immediate cause to get uppity and question the arrangement. Those at the bottom of the pile, of course, are kept in check by terror and sheer brutality.

My analysis is, of course, broad brush and each country will have its own local variations on the two themes. But I feel my central point still holds: you pays your money and you makes your choice. Opt for freedom and the rule of law and put up with any number of irritations, delays, petty differences and the like. Opt for a more totalitarian state and, if you watch your Ps and Qs life need not be too bad. But you have to watch what you say.

There’s the story of the dog who arrived at the Ukrainian/Russian border and demanded to be let into Russia. The amazed border guard told him that he got many dogs coming the other way, but he was the first actually wanting to leave the Ukraine.
‘Why do you want to go to Russia?’ he asked.
‘Because I’m fed up with going hungry every day,’ the dog told him. So he was let through.

The dog was back a week later.
‘I thought you were fed up with going hungry in the Ukrained,’ the border guard told him.
‘I was said the dog, and I shall be hungry again. But at least I can bark in the Ukraine.’

. . .

No one would or could, I think, claim the Economist is sensationalist, although almost every fourth issue contains an apology of some kind or another, so it might even gain a certain reputations among those who care about these things as being a maverick. It does often take an oddly high-handed tone as in: ‘The world is coming to an end: here’s how to stop that happening’, and my brother once suggested that the line it would take in the issue which appeared after Armageddon would be: ‘Well, the worst is over. What lessons can be learnt.’ But as a rule it is surely classed as one of the world’s more ‘boring’ newspapers and magazine (despite is glossy, A4 format, it likes to call itself a ‘newspaper’) along with the FT, the FAZ, Die Zeit, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Actually, they are anything but boring, but that, at least, would seem to be how they are regarded by the mass of people who would prefer to watch a soap opera than think.
One of the Economist’s features at the back of the magazine (‘back of the book’ is the newspaper jargon to this day I have never been able to get used to, though I couldn’t tell you why) are loads of economic data. This is very interesting stuff, I’m sure, if you understand it, but I don’t (understand the data, though I do many of the issues) so I have not spent more than eight seconds reading that section since I started reading the Economist.
Part of that data is the rates of inflation from around the world, and last week the Economist announced would no longer be publishing the official Argentine inflation figures, but would still publish relevant data from private sources. Why not? Well, because as far as the Economist is concerned, they they are thoroughly phoney: whereas Argentina claims inflation is running at around 8/9 pc, private sources reckon it is well above 20 pc. Remember, Argentine pulled the plug on all is debtors and defaulted a few years ago, so it has form.
When official figures are fake (as we can now only suppose they are), the obvious conclusion is that the economy is in a terrible state, and has been for some time. In recent months, Argentina has also become increasingly bellicose about what they like to call the Malvinas but which we all know are really called the Falkland Islands. This is no flash in the pan and it has already persuaded neighbouring countries to deny access to British flights and  only yesterday a cruise ship was unexpectedly and without notice turned away from the Argentine port it was heading for. Things are going wrong domestically, so external trouble is created to take the restless citizens’ minds off matters: a strategy as old as the hills.

. . .

It is just before 9am. Just outside my brother’s flat in London where I sleep when I come to work is a primary school. By this time I am usually up and gone to work (a short 20-minute walk away in Kensington) but occasionally I am still here. And as the young children arrive for school, they gather in the playground and play until the bell is rung to summon them in. And from around 8.45 until just before 9, there is a crescendo of young shouts, young shrieks, young calls and all the other noise young innocents make when they are playing with each other. For me, it is one of the most delightful (and when I am in a certain mood, most moving) sounds on earth: children playing. I just love it.

A ‘strong man’ or ‘democracy’? Peter Hitchens sticks his neck out (again). And three cheers for a man who refuses to play the game

Oh, if everything in life were as simple as it was when you were five, supper at 5pm, followed by bath, story and bed. We who are no longer six know what lies in store for all innocent five-year-olds. Most of us survive into and beyond adulthood more or less painlessly, learning and adopting along the way into our dotage various strategies which will make the transition from birth to death a little easier. Others, of course, have shitty lives. But what we all have in common is that for three, four or five years we were utterly innocent of the ways of the world.

I mention this innocence because, ironically, as we grow older, it is what lingers longest if life is reasonably kind to us. The usual knocks and bumps meted out to us as we hit 20, then 30, then 40, then 50 might hurt, but at least they teach us a little and the personal innocence diminishes by the year. But there is another kind of innocence which no amount of experience seems to be able to - well, I was going to write ‘cure’, but even for me that would seem cynical beyond imperatives which dictate the attitudes of a hack writing a blog. So I will settle for ameliorate. Often that innocence, or some aspect of it, is necessary if the kind of idealism which fuels the anger of the young is to survive.

For us old fogeys youthful protest - for a freer country, against this, that or t’other dictatorship, for lower college fees, the list of what the young want to protest against is endless - might often elicit a sigh of resignation, but without that youthful idealism, are sighs would, sooner or later, come a lot thicker and a lot faster. We might despair that ‘the young’ rarely seem to wash, listen to ‘awful music’, drink far too much for their own good, and never seem to get a good night’s sleep, but at the end of the day they are doing us all a very big favour. And it mainly down to the fact that more or less each and every one of them is as innocent as the driven snow.

The innocence which keeps the world alive occurred to me when I came across a piece by a certain Peter Hitchens in today’s Daily Mail. Peter, the brother of Christopher who died recently, prides himself on being right-wing. And there is nothing wrong with that. Whenever guys like Peter Hitchens are derided for their political views, I always reflect on just how intolerant are a bunch which regards tolerance as one of the cornerstones of its philosophy life. The irony is, of course, that they tolerate only what they sanction. Views which are wholly at odds with their own are not to be tolerated.

So Peter Hitchens is something of a rarity in our liberal society: a man utterly at odds with established thinking, but one who is not insane, evil or stupid. That Hitchens (I shall now drop his first name because it should be obvious that I am talking about Peter not the late Christopher) is not a member of the great liberal consensus is important because as far as I am concerned he is a vital counter-balance to a great deal of woolly thinking.

In his piece today, which you can find here, he is skating on thin ice. But that is something he always does anyway, as he is rather more inclined to speak his mind than many another commentator. Next week, Russia goes to the polls to choose a successor to President Dmitry Medvedev and his predecessor, mentor and prime minister Vladimir Putin seems like a shoo-in. And Hitchens, who worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow for two years in the dying days of the Soviet regime, is backing Putin.

The headline to his piece in the Mail on Sunday will give a flavour of what he writes and works well as a neat summary: ‘If not Putin, who? It’s because I love my own country that I can see

A Russian democrat. He might even be a liberal
the point of this sinister tyrant who so ruthlessly stands up for Russia.’ You can see why I describe him as skating on thin ice. There were surely gasps of disbelief around Britain when many opened their Mail on Sunday or logged onto the Mailonline website and saw what Hitchens was writing.

I trust readers overcame their horror and went on to read what Hitchens writes, because I think he makes some very good points. Were one to be very unfair, and, it has to be said, dishonest, his thesis could be described as: ‘What Russia now needs is a strong man’. But he is not actually saying that, and it should be obvious to all but the dullest that Hitchens values freedom and the rule of law. He is not urging the Russia should once again be ruled by a dictator, but warning (yet again, as it happens, it is more or less the leitmotif of his journalism) that not only is a certain kind of liberalism rather less effective than it might consider itself to be, but that it can often prove to be quite dangerous. The innocents of this world will cry out: Russia/Libya/Syria/Burma and the rest must become democratic. To which I give two cheers. But the rather less innocent, those who have been scarred by life a little will also know that it is rarely that simple and even more rarely that neat.

In short there is a dilemma: neither arrangement is perfect (and the naive search for perfection has caused a lot of misery). A ‘strong man’ might well ensure that the lights turn on when you want them to, that food is in ready supply and that, generally, order is predominant. But you have to be very careful what you say, and the rule of law is rather fragile. In a ‘democratic state’ you are free to express your thoughts and feelings and, in theory, are protected by the rule of law, and that will keep the idealists happy. But such states are often chaotic, especially when they are in the throes of transition from a dictatorship to a democracy.

Don’t forget that for all our huffing and puffing and rather smug pride about living in a stable democracy, it took centuries of political evolution to get here, and the road could, at times, be very bloody indeed. And in the United States, which can, at times, be the most insufferably smug of all the smug democratic states, racism, poverty and unemployment make life extremely unpleasant for a substantial minority. Yes, they are free to vote for whoever they want, but if you are being evicted, you’re hungry or you’ve fallen ill and can’t afford health insurance, that freedom slips rather lower on your list of priorities. And, another irony, in a democracy too many citizens take their freedoms for granted: in the 2008 presidential election only six out of ten voters bothered to go to the polls. That’s not bad, I hear you say. Perhaps, but it’s not good either.

Here I must confess to a certain cowardice. I like to make out that I am neutral, neither proposing nor opposing ideas. When I write above of the eternal dilemma between, very broadly, a ‘strong man’ who brings stability and a ‘democracy’ in which too much tends to chaos, you will notice that I don’t come down on one side or another, which would be in keeping with my ‘neutrality’. I like to present myself as solely describing the dilemma. But therein lies my cowardice: at the end of the day none of us is ‘neutral’. All of us must make a choice. But we should also be fully aware of the consequences of that choice. That is one reason - there are many others - why life is just so much sweeter for a five-year-old. The trouble is none of us remains five for longer than a year.

. . .

Peter Hitchens is an interesting cove. Like his brother Christopher, he was a member of the hard left in his salad days, but quite soon drifted to the right of centre. Christopher did the same (though he would have denied it). There was a terrible sibling rivalry between the two, which began, according to Christopher, when Peter was born. Pyschologists could have a field day sorted out the roots of it all, but then psychologists could have a field day delving into the psyche of each and every one of us, and furthermore, as it quite a lucrative profession, at least, for private practitioners, psychologists treat themselves to as many field days as they possibly can.
As far as I can tell, Peter is a one-off. There are swivel-eyed, proudly right-wing Englishmen and women (and the women are twice as bloodthirsty as the men) who demand the return of capital punishment, flogging, the deportation of ‘immigrants’ (the irony being, of course, that we are all the descendants of ‘immigrants’ and insist to the point of apoplexy that garlic has no place whatsoever in an English kitchen. Peter is not one of these. In fact, I am often quite surprised that he calls himself ‘right-wing’. He seems to me less interested in the politics and rather more interested in highlighting the hypocrisy and cant which plays such and important part in our lives. I find I agree with a great deal of what he says, and I most certainly do not regard myself as right-wing.


His one failing might be that given we have to deal with the hand we are dealt, he is rather unworldy. For example, the Conservative Party under David Cameron has become as insufferably right-on as Labour and the Liberals. The point is that they really have no choice: no politician in his or her right mind would these days refuse to sing the praises of ‘green policies’ and ensuring ‘sustainability’ even though privately they think it’s all a load of cock. If you take part in the game, you are obliged to play the game. What I like about Peter is that he resolutely and honestly refuses point-blank to ‘play the game’.

Arriving home to misty, drizzly Cornwall and trying to appreciate what I have perhaps forgotten to appreciate

I first began to visit Cornwall after my father retired, remarried and settled here in St Breward, in a cottage less than a quarter of a mile from where I now live. His second wife, my stepmother (of whom I have become increasingly fond as the years go by) was born of an Irishman and Irishwoman in Bodmin. Her father, Ignatius Aloysius O’Keeffe, ran the local - well, what do you call it now? In years gone by it was, tactlessly, called a ‘lunatic asylum’ or, more colloquially a ‘looney bin’. I can’t offhand remember what his qualifications were, whether he was a medical doctor or a psychiatrist [she has since told me he graduated from Dublin University in ‘medical pysychology’, so really your guess is as good as mine], but I can tell you that the mental hospital - a more genteel, not to say kinder, description was St Lawrence’s Hospital. It was (according to the website I have just googled) ‘originally known as ‘Cornwall County Asylum’ it was founded in 1815 at Westheath Avenue, Bodmin and became known as St Lawrence’s Hospital under the National Health Service’.
Ignatius Aloysius was one of four: he had three sisters, one who, as it was told to me, ran away from home to become a nun and went off to China to work as a missionary, a second who died of cancer in her early 30s, and a third, Fanny, who came over to Bodmin with him and worked as a physiotherapist in the local hospital. My stepmother’s mother, Gertrude, a name she always hated, came from a far bigger family: she was one of 14. Both Ignatius Aloysius and Gertrude were Irish born and bred, and my stepmother, who will be 75 on March 19 and was born the fourth child and third daughter, has a great many of the virtues of that admirable nation. But as she was born and grew up in Bodmin, she might reasonably also be able to call herself Cornish. I put this to her yesterday, but she was having none of it. She regards herself as Irish, not Cornish.
In the early Seventies her Aunt Fanny died and left her a legacy. With this my stepmother - born Patricia Mary Josephine O’Keeffe, though known as Paddy O’Keeffe, a name perhaps familiar to some who regularly tuned into BBC radio’s From Our Own Correspondence which she produced until she married my father and took early retirement in the mid-Eighties - bought a cottage here in St Breward. My father had a little earlier sold our family home in Henley-on-Thames (which, oddly, makes it sound rather grander than it was) after my mother died in 1981 and with the cash he and his new wife the cottage. The kitchen became bigger, as did the bathroom, and above the kitchen a new room was created which was officially my father’s study in which he wrote the book he had always wanted to write, a history of relations between the Germans and the IRA.
Initially, after my father’s second marriage, relations between myself and my stepmother were, on my part at least, a tad frosty. Until, as they say, my father made an honest woman of her, my stepmother had been my father’s mistress for around 20 years, and I found it a little difficult to adapt to the new set-up. I had been close to my mother almost all my life, although in my early 20s, after a kind of very silly disagreement over my then girlfriend, I did not treat her as well as I might have done as is the way of the kind of self-regarding idiot I was in those years, and her death hit me rather harder than could reasonably be expected. She died of a heart attack at the comparatively early age of 61 and, more to the point, I had found her dead. Looking back, it took me quite a few years to deal with a shock which, at the time, I thought I had completely taken in my stride.
But my stepmother is a good-hearted sort and when, within two or three years of her marriage I began to come to see her and my father regularly, she was very kind to me. At 67, my father developed prostate cancer. The cancer eventually spread and he died at the age of 68 just over 20 years ago. One of his last wishes was that we, his four children, should take care of Paddy, so I began to visit her here in Cornwall more and more often.
From mid-1990 until I moved down here myself at the end of 1995, I lived and worked in London. I didn’t then run a car - there was no need to do so - so when I came, I caught the train at London Paddington to Bodmin Parkway. And - this is the whole point of this entry - every time I got out of the train at Bodmin - every time - I was struck by how much slower and more tranquil was the pace of life down here in Cornwall, and how much more peaceful. I must stress that this struck me the moment I opened the carriage door and stepped out of the train.
An hour or two ago, I arrived back home after leaving work in West London and taking the train to Exeter and then driving the 60-odd miles back here to St Breward. (I get out at Exeter and drive the rest of the way because it’s a damn sight quicker like that, quite apart from the fact that the last train to leave London which makes its way all the way to Bodmin leaves at 6.35pm.) But each time I get out of the car once I arrive back home, I am conscious that I no longer get that sensation of life being slower and more peaceful. I have, unfortunately, become immune to the change of pace. It’s something I reflect on every week when I arrive back home, but tonight I didn’t immediately go into the house after locking the car but stayed for several minutes to try to recapture that sensation. I’m sorry to say I didn’t, but I did once again appreciate being able to call deepest rural Cornwall my home. The weather was misty and drizzly and I love it. I really couldn’t tell you why, but I do. One day, I hope, I shall really be able to slow down properly and fully appreciate it. But I was glad that tonight I did manage it, if just a little bit.

Are they mad or just insane? Surprise as the Greek nation agrees to come quietly - or rather incredulity, Dom Strauss Kahn is revealed as pimping Mr Big (allegedly – I’m not daft) and will the real Angela Merkel please stand up (according to yet another group of conspiracy theorists)

I’m sorry if I’m behaving like a dog with a bone, but the more I consider the ‘crisis in Greece’ and various ‘solutions’, the more I think that an awful lot of people have seriously taken leave of their senses. According to the Financial Times, which I don’t think anyone would regard as sensationalist, the list of EU demands of Greece in order to qualify for its bailout includes a change to its constitution to ensure paying off its debts the top priority of any government of whichever hue. The Greeks are also being asked to agree to a permanent team of ‘monitors’ based in Athens to ensure they – well, the only way it can realistically be described it to ‘do as they are told’. And they will not get one cent of bailout money until the austerity package agreed last week is actually seen to have been put into practice.
I know I am running the risk of being thought racist and could well find myself up before a magistrates court if a clever Crown Prosecution Service were dyspeptic enough to get me charged with something like ‘racism’, but for Christ’s sake, we are dealing with a proud nation of hotheads here, not a gang of dull Dutchmen or catatonic Scandanavians who could hardly be enthused to riot in a month of Sundays. It’s all very well for Greece’s politicians to agree to bend over and take it up the arse if that’s what’s necessary (an apt metaphor as it happens as I am writing about Greece), but that leaves the Greek people completely out of the equation. Does anyone reading this or anyone living high on the hog in Brussels honestly think that, fingers crossed, the EU might well see this one through? Does anyone seriously believe that either the extreme Left or the extreme Right in Greece whose ratings are soaring as high as those of the centre-left and centre-right are plummeting will feel in the slightest obliged to support and honour the austerity measures by agreeing to help form a coalition? And does anyone really believe that the election due in April will actually be conducted peacefully. Does anyone seriously believe that, y’know, with a bit of luck, God willing and all that, they might, just might . . .? Do they hell.
I wrote yesterday of The Slog’s conspiracy theory – that a Greek default will be formerly announced just after 6pm EST on Friday, March 23, and that everything else is simply a masquerade to avoid a run on the banks in the meantime – and although I am usually not a great supporter of conspiracy theories, judging by the incredible behaviour of many protagonists and the utterly naïve assumptions one has to adhere to if you swallow the whole bailout story, his theory tends to make a damn sight more sense than anything else at the moment.

. . .

When I look at the stats to see what people happening on this blog like to read, two names are always prominent: Mandy Rice-Davies and Dominique Strauss Kahn. And Dom is back in the news again and it involves sex, again. Now there’s a surprise. Lord, the Left in France must be thanking their lucky stars that the whole, extremely murky, business in New York happened before Dom, as expected by almost everyone, was put forward as their candidate for the presidency. It now seems that Dom wasn’t just the boss of the IMF. Oh, now, he was also moonlighting as a Marseille pimp, incredible as that might sound. Come again, I hear you ask. OK, it now seems that Dom – if that was even his

‘What can I say? Bang to rights?’

real name – was just swanning around with politicos worldwide as a cover for his real existence as the biggest of the Mr Bigs in Marseille. You can’t a couple of keys of coke? Dom, or more likely one of his minions, was your man. You wanted a couple of good-time girls for that party you were organising for a gang of visiting Red Chinese capitalists. Have a word with Dom. And he’s a card, too. Here’s a Dom quote I love (which isn’t actually from Mr Big himself, but from his lawyer Henri Leclerc, a name which could have come straight from the pen of an English novelist who has not once set foot in France). Responding to claims that Dom had been ‘romping’ with whores, M. Leclerc replied: ‘I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked women.’ On the face of it that sounds quite reasonable. The giveaway is, of course, that he the naked woman has either demanded money upfront or indicated that she will be demanding money after the act, then she’s a prostitute. Well, sort of.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, I have a vague recollection of there being one around the time Dom was up on sex charges in New York. I don’t remember the details (and can’t really be arsed trying to track them down), but the theory was that he was being stitched up in order to scupper his chances of being the Left’s presidential candidate and possibly even being elected Frances’ president. Like all conspiracy theories it makes sense, though that doesn’t mean it is true. And it might well have been either the left or the right stitching him up, if stitched up he was.

. . .

Yesterday I mentioned happening upon another blog called The Slog, which I read primarily for it’s claim that there is conspiracy afoot to kick Greece out of the euro towards the end of March and that the conspirators are biding their time in order to erect a firewall around the banks they wish to protect (or something like that). But another entry caught my eye: a profile of Germany chancellor Angela Merkel which is not complimentary. Reading that I followed another link and came across a German website in English which strikes me already tending into paranoia country, or if not paranoia country, a nearby neighbour. (Incidentally, can one ‘tend’ or have I just made up a word?) All that got me thinking along the lines of: is it ever really possible to get neutral information about anything which can help one make up one’s own mind. I rather think it isn’t.
I’ve long believed, and long claimed publicly, that our newspapers aren’t quite as powerful as some would have us believe, that, in fact, they tell us what they think we want to hear. Well, OK, it isn’t usually that straightforward, but the tend to do that. I suspect something similar goes on with arguments: most of us believe what we believe, however irrational it might be, and then cast about for ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’, discarding any ‘facts’ we encounter which rather argue against what we believe and highlighting those ‘facts’ which ‘prove’ we are right in our belief. Well, I don’t want any of that, and that is why increasingly I choose not to take part in any discussion which strikes me - it’s always pretty obvious from the outset - as being essentially just another exchange of prejudice. I want to take part in what I can only call ‘neutral’ discussion. For example, when there is discussion of the euro crisis, I’m not at all interested in hearing from those who loathe the EU and everything they think it stands for and, given half a chance, will bend your ear till dawn with ‘facts’ proving it is nothing by a dark conspiracy organised by murky bureaucrats. Conversely, I’m not in the slightest interested in being invited to cheer along the European project and how it will, in time, bring about peace on Earth and goodwill to all men.
The blog entry about Merkel’s past is interesting and the facts are, admittedly intriguing (more of which another time). But I am disinclined to go along quite yet, if ever, with the writer’s conclusions.

I selflessly give another blog (The Slog) a plug and wonder whether in years to come GlaxoSmithKline will be in the hamburger flipping business

Added April 4, 2014.

I notice that this blog post has had several visits over the past few weeks, and I thought it might be best to add this preface. Although I shall leave the post below unedited, I should point out that my opinion of The Slog, the guy who writes it - John Ward, a retired advertising executive - and what he has to say was severely revised several months after I came across the blog.

I admit, rather ruefully, that I was taken in by The Slog’s ramblings for a while. Superficially, with all his talk of ‘my contacts’ in Frankfurt, Washington, Berlin and I don’t know where else, he seemed well-informed and in the know and gave the impression of doing a great deal of ‘research’. It was only when his apparently copper-bottomed predictions of the demise of the euro and other matters failed to come true time after time that I began to wonder whether he was tin rather than lead.

I began to wonder even more whether John Ward was the real deal when I found myself falling foul of him. It became apparent (and still will if you want to try) that anyone daring to disagree with his prognoses, querying his thinking, criticising him even slightly or even choosing not to share his very high opinion of himself, would have his or her comments removed and be banned from the blog (in the sense that future comments were always removed). I know this because after it happened to me, I was emailed by several others whose comments were also regularly removed.

I must stress that my comments were not in the slightest abusive - it was just that it was obvious to anyone reading them that I refused to share Ward’s ineffably high opinion of himself and his abilities as a sage and increasingly could not take him at all seriously.

Having said all that, you must make up your own minds. Perhaps it is me who is a post short of a blog. Perhaps it isn’t. Decide for yourselves.

There are conspiracy theorists and there are cock-up theorists and I usually pretend to belong to the second group. Actually, that is not quite fair as it implies that I am, after all, a conspiracy theorist. So I’ll try again: there are conspiracy theorists who believe humankind is the result of genetic engineering by spacemen who also built the pyramids, erected Stonehenge and were generally responsible for kick-starting the world as we know it. Then there are conspiracy theorists for whom the cynical saying ‘don’t believe anything until it is officially denied’ could be a motto. I suspect I belong to the second bunch.

We never really know the ins and outs of any affair until years later when it is safe for those who really knew what was going on to go public and for those who did awfully naughty things at the time to decry their admissions, confessions and revelations as just so much bloody nonsense. In other words, only when it doesn’t matter any more do we learn the salient facts and by then it is called ‘history’. There are one or two bloggers around who do keep their ear to the ground and like to go public on what they hear long before anyone else. The trouble is that what they say is always immensely deniable and is, naturally, always denied. I’ve come across on such blog which is written by a retired adman called John Ward who blogs under the name The Slog. You can find his blog here.

I came across it following up links about the latest wheeler-dealing going on to save the world - no, sorry, that’s global warming - to save the euro and, by all accounts the EU. The Slog claims to have reliable information that a Greek default is a done thing and that after the close of business on Friday, March 23, Greece will be declared bankrupt. He suggests - no, he insists - that all the various meetings about haircuts and bailouts and Troikas and the rest is just so much hooey used to stall everything until that announcement on March 23. Naturally, the parties involved - which don’t involve Greece - want to protect the banking system and make sure their plans are watertight to protect themselves from the worst of the fallout. This, says Mr Ward, is why every single time a deal seemed within grasp for the Greeks and their creditors to agree on the size of how much the creditors would lose, various bods would stick their oar in to scupper the talks. ‘The Greeks need to put in place more austerity measures’ was one recent ploy.

Anyway, whether or not it is all true, whether or not is is all complete bollocks, it is a good read which, I’ll repeat, you can find here. And, yes, The Slog is a conspiracy theorist, but has the saving grace of not involving spacemen in any of the theories he puts forward and to my knowledge has never yet claimed to have been abducted by aliens.

NB As I write this, EU finance minsters are still meeting in Brussels - it is now 23.40 on February 20 - to decide whether they can trust the Greeks with €130bn of bailout moolah. They will be unable to reach a decision and will want ‘further reassurances’ or some such in order to ensure that Greece does go bankrupt. So if by the time you read this tomorrow an agreement has been reached, you will know The Slog is bollocks. If, on the other hand, there is a delay - well, was there something in it?

UPDATE (Feb21 at 9.58am sitting at my desk just dying for another cup of tea): It’s only fair that I should this morning add a rider to the above in view of the news that the Eurozone finance ministers ‘have reached a deal’ with Greece on what Athens should do to get the next bag of used fivers to pay off its debts. The Slog is utterly sceptical and is confident this is just the latest scene in a long-running farce which will culminate in the announcement on Friday, March 23. Me, I know rather less financial jargon than he seems to, so I’ll just admit that I’m sceptical, too. That’s because too many of these ‘last-minute’ solutions (although, strictly, this isn’t ‘a solution’) began to unravel within hours of being reached. It remains to be seen what will happen.

I should point out that Mr Wards’ conspiracy theory is rather supported by one detail of the handover deal: that Greece’s austerity measures will reduce its debts to 121pc of is GDP by tomorrow lunchtime or whenever they are supposed to do so. Until now it was, I think, 124pc. And – a detail which eluded my hawk-like eye last week – the ECB’s boss Mario Draghi announced that when it came to creditors getting their debts, those bonds held by the ECB would get preference over those held by private investors. But things aren’t too bleak for those nasty capitalist scum who masquerade under the oh-so-innocent description of ‘private investors’: they have previously insured themselves against losses so they won’t be quite as out of pocket as might seem apparent and aren’t too concerned about Draghi muscling his ECB to the front of the queue.

What is so utterly farcical about the whole business is that, even if the meeting was gen, even if whoever is going to stump up €130bn to hand over to the Greeks – and I can only admit that I’m very confused on that matter - where does the money come from? Is it from the taxpayers of the rest of the Eurozone countries? The there is the very pertinent point that as the ECB and a great many French and German banks hold Greek bonds, this bailout will simply be used – must simply be used – to pay off some of the debt they hold. So, in effect, all the ezone finance ministers are doing is paying off their own.

Then there’s the complete unknown: with one in five young people without a job and with enough time on his and her hands to do nothing but cause trouble; what with pensions being slashed; what with the mainstream centre parties’

ratings plummeting in the polls and the popularity of the parties of both the left and right extremes rising ever faster, all this talk of a bailout is just so much piss in the wind if there is real trouble there. Remember, the Greeks are due to hold a general election in seven weeks, so after that all bets might well be off, however much backslapping the ezone finance ministers indulge in (pictured above. Aren’t they a lovely bunch).

Oh, and how anyone in Greece is expected to react with equanimity to the demand by the EU that a gang of North European technocrats should be permanently based in Athens to give their consent or otherwise for every item of proposed government spending is beyond me. But there you have it: the wacky, wacky, wacky world of the EU. But still no aliens, UFOs and spacemen. It's all very puzzling.

. . .

Well, there we have it: science advances in leaps and bounds and is, apparently, on the brink of creating meat in the laboratory. Haul out the bunting and crack open the bubbly! Could the news be any better. Dutch scientists - despite their cuddly we-don’t-mind-if- you-smoke-dope liberal image, the Lowlanders have as potent a Frankenstein tendency as the rest of us poor saps - have used stem cells to create a ‘strip of muscle’ several centimetres long, one centimetre wide and on millimetre deep. This, they assure us, is the future and in the future the meat we eat will be grown in labs rather than in fields. The strip they produced cost around £200,000 to produce but ‘costs will come down’ production is commercially viable.

What, you are entitled to ask, is the point? Well, they claim that the point is to ‘save the environment’ because conventional meat production does it no favours. Well, I must say that that’s a new one on me. I have read claims, with which I am inclined to agree, that if the land we use to grow foodstock for cattle which we then eat were used to grow food for humans, it would be used more efficiently. It’s a veggie argument, but not necessarily the worse for that, and does rather forget that land which cannot be used to grow crops for humans can still be used to rear some cattle and sheep. But I was unaware of the suggestion that farming animals actually damages the environment.

Actually, I rather suspect that ‘saving the environment’ and finding new ways to feed mankind is rather less of a motive for these Dutch scientists than to justify the funding they get to keep their labs in operation. I would be happier if they put their intellects and energy to better use ensuring that several million more people had access to clean water. And if and when ‘lab-grown meat’ us available to feed us, you can bet your bottom dollar that those who might benefit most from this additional source of food will be the least likely to benefit. The fat West is inclined to think of itself and its own needs first, last and exclusively.

Damned if they do and damned if they don’t: please lay off the Germans. They really do mean well

In the beginning there were no greater Euro fans than the Germans, for reasons which have been well-rehearsed. They were also a, if not the, driving force behind the creation of the euro. They are one of the hardest and one of the best-managed nations in Europe and have a tendency to keep things tidy. For some reason it is a joke to many that the Germans value Ordnung, but the joke falls very flat indeed when you find yourself in deep in a situation where there is no Ordnung, as the unfortunate Greeks now do. But as one of the great Euro fans it is only right that they should shoulder some of the responsibility of how things have gone wrong. So why am I feeling very, very sorry indeed for all the abuse now being hurled at the Germans?

I have just read an interesting piece by Gideon Rachman in the FT in which he says Germans are slowly beginning to admit that the concept of the eurozone was fatally flawed: that in the long run a single currency would not and could not succeed unless all those in the eurozone belonged to a single state with all that entailed. Many people made that very point 12 years ago when the euro was established and were decried as little nationalists and killjoys. But here is not the place to shout, like kids in the schoolyard, ‘we told you so’. It would not only be impolite, but also utterly pointless: we’re in the shit and the priority is to get back out of the shit. Deciding who and what to blame can be done in many years’ time when the crisis is a matter of history. But it is interesting that influential Germans are now admitting that the whole euro project was flawed from the outset (and leave aside for now the important point that although a successful eurozone needed to be created in the context of a single state, creating that single Euro state would then, as now, have proved politically impossible to achieve.) In Rachman’s FT piece, he also quotes the head of Bosch as advocating that Greece should leave the eurozone. That, too, is a new development: until Christmas the very idea would not have been countenanced.

Solutions to the crisis - that is solving the crisis with the minimum damage - rest on Germany coughing up even more money and Germany agreeing to underwrite the debts of other eurozone members. Germany is adamant that it will not do the latter by agreeing to the creation of eurobonds and feels that not only would it be unfair to ask its taxpayers to pay up more, it is also politically impossible. I agree with them because I think the German position is the only sensible position. Unfortunately, many disagree, and when - not ‘when’ not if - the euro crisis explodes in sheer misery for millions throughout Europe, it is a very safe bet that Germany will come top of the list when appointing the scapegoats. And that is very, very unfair.

Predictably, images from Germany’s Nazi past are being hauled out of cold storage with Greek and Italian newspapers usually regarded as ‘serious’ and ‘respectable’ indulging in some of the worst behaviour. This, too, is wholly unfair. From where I sit, the very worst the Germans can be found guilty of is calling a spade a spade: they are inclined to speak their minds and that often comes over as tactlessnees. So when someone or other in Germany suggested that an EU-appointed commissar should oversee the Greek budget, this was immediately portrayed as a ‘renewed attempt by Germany to dominate Europe’. It would be funny if it were not so insulting. It is not a point one can prove, but of all the nations least interested in ‘dominating Europe’ it is the Germans. I think my German cousins would agree with me that the pervading sentiment in Germany is to lead as comfortable a life as possible, and ‘dominating Europe’ would not enable the Germans to lead a very comfortable life. Ah, I hear some of you cry, what about the Nazis. That’s a fair point. But perhaps you would allow me to ask: what about the Italian fascisti? What about Spain’s long dictatorship under Franco? What about Portugal’s long dictatorship under Salazar? What about the dictatorships, which lasted longer than the modest 12 years of Nazi rule in Germany, by the Communists in the then Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania? What about the Croatian fascists?

Are we all really so certain that every single last German in the country from 1933 to 1945 was wholeheartedly behind the Nazis? What happened to those on the Left, the communists and the socialist, all very active and who often engaged in street-fighting with the Nazis? Did they all, almost overnight, become convinced National Socialists? Do you know, I rather think not. Dredging up Nazi imagery and metaphors sells papers, most certainly - the British Daily Mail’s Simon Heffer has come out with some of the same crap, except that he is able to express himself in a more genteel fashion - but it is wholly unfair.

. . .

Just seen a trail for a programme on tonight: ‘Britain’s favourite supermarket food’ (ITV1 at 8pm). No doubt several tens of million viewers with rather more time than sense will be tuning in and congratulating themselves when a product is featured which they, too, ‘enjoy buying’. For God’s sake, get a fucking life. I won’t claim that the population is being dumbed-down because I think mankind, for the pas 300,000 years, has always had a dumb streak. So nothing really to worry about.. . .

A family visit to London tomorrow by the Powell family. They are coming up by train, and we shall spend the next two days visiting the Science Museum in South Kensington, Hamley’s in Regent St followed by Selfridges in Oxford St, and then go to a matinee performance of Billy Elliot in the afternoon before driving back home to Cornwall. I’m rather looking forward to it. It is all also costing me an arm and a leg.