How to solve the Ukraine crisis

Paul Gottfried observed that for the neo-cons it is always 1938. The Churchillian mythology of the origins of the Second World War is a powerful as ever or more so judging by people objecting to Robert Harris, in his film screenplay about the Munich crisis trying to rehabilitate Chamberlain. 

It seems the neo-cons or people who think like them are running things again in the US and UK. I don't think they went away but under Donald Trump's administration they were suppressed. They are the foreign policy arm of the Swamp. 

The British defence secretary who regrets not taking in many more Afghan refugees has sent materiel to Ukraine. 

He thinks Russians invading Ukraine are a threat to Great Britain. Meanwhile several Afghan refugees who hope to go to the USA are held in Kosovo suspected of being terrorists. 

Pat Buchanan is right. NATO should declare that it will not admit any new members.

When Fukuyama declared the end of history I thought him absurd. I was a foreign policy realist without knowing it. 

Much later I came to understand the foreign policy liberals - why should free democratic countries make war one another?

But Austria, France and Germany had universal manhood suffrage in 1914. (England, Hungary, Turkey and Russia did not.) More recently we have seen democratic countries start a number of wars to export their democratic liberal values.

Edgar Allen Poe in Timisoara

 

Quotations

Hatred

It is the left who are full of hatred and always were. Even racists (there are lots in Romania) probably do not really hate people but anti racists really, really hate racists.

Sunset behind the Telephone Palace

 

Why is the right unattractive to disenchanted leftists? Because of conservative nostalgia for the 1950s?

 

What liberal or former liberal would want to find themselves in an ideological movement in which opposition to the right to abortion, opposition to no-fault divorce, and a nostalgia for the era before the invention of the pill are commonplace? This isn’t to say that the conservative movement in America should not make these arguments. They can make them as much as they want. But they can hardly be surprised if others outside of their flock refuse to join them as a consequence.

'At the heart of this lies a centuries-old tension in America between the worlds of politics and religion. It was always said that the genius of keeping religion in the background during the founding of America was that it allowed it to flourish in the foreground later on. By contrast, the centrality of the established church in England almost guarantees the obscurity of religion’s place in public life.

From Douglas Murray's latest article, about American politics, yesterday in Unherd. 

I read that with great interest. It explained why I didn't think Margaret Thatcher ever did anything conservative. I had in mind the sort of conservatism he thinks former leftists find repellant, now called social conservatism. 

In fact I was wrong - her economics were an important part of conservatism, and restricting the power of the trade unions and governing without prices and incomes policies was a huge achievement which seemed quixotic in 1979. 

Criminals believe in private property

Almost all criminals are right-wing conservatives. The exception are serial killers who are quite often left of centre and take the Guardian.

The essence of Marxism and of the Woke anti-discrimination ideology is nihilism. Nihilism morphs.

Countries like people can go mad. America is having a nervous breakdown and infecting the rest of the Western world. Russia and China are immune - were they to ally they would be a formidable foe to Biden and the Swamp.

Marxism was always about destruction not economics. Marxism played a part in the American Civil Rights movement and the 1960s social revolution which continues now, but the desire for destruction which is the essence of Marx morphs into other left-wing ideologies such as Woke.

Boris told the House of Commons a whopping lie on Wednesday and nobody noticed

I watched Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. The leader of Her Majesty's Opposition Sir Keir Starmer was no good - he told two rehearsed, unfunny jokes and landed no blows - but some backbenchers did. 

Lloyd Evans in the Spectator was absolutely right.

Sir Keir turned into a self-adoring giggle-pot and spent the entire session smirking, laughing, rolling his eyes, tossing his head, and throwing up his hands in contemptuous disbelief. All done to humour his baying supporters. He’s over-excitable. No gravitas. Today he simply needed to do his ‘disappointed waxwork’ routine and let public anger fill in the gaps. Instead, he tittered and simpered like a teenage boy who’s just been kissed.

Former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis landed what might have been a killer blow when he told the Prime Minister:

“I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take.

“Yesterday he did the opposite of that.

“So, I will remind him of a quotation which may be familiar to his ear: Leopold Amery to Neville Chamberlain.

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.”

The Prime Minister replied with a whopping lie to the House:

“I must say to him, I don’t know what he is talking about.

“What I can tell him, I don’t know what quotation he is alluding to."

Everyone in Parliament except perhaps the most uncultured and ignorant Labour MPs knows that famous quotation. Boris, who wrote a book about Churchill, certainly does.

Actually Davis mumbled the line and it seems it had no great impact - he is not popular or respected.

He was hopeless in the Brexit negotiations but his resignation from the cabinet led to Boris Johnson copying him and thus to his becoming Prime Minister.

Davis would have done better to have saved his knifing for next week.

Leo Amery was of course quoting Cromwell dismissing the Long Parliament but Cromwell did not use those words, which were put into his mouth by Thomas Carlyle.

One of the 2019 intake of Conservative members crossed the floor to join Labour just before Boris rose to speak and this paradoxically seemed to have made the Conservative rebels have second thoughts.

Boris should go this year, but not before Covid subsides and not when Russia might invade Ukraine and not over this scandal. 

Thank God the Remainer Jeremy Hunt didn't become PM. A Brexiteer was needed. But not Michael Gove, who is responsible for Theresa May being Prime Minister, went along with her awful mess of Brexit and has since argued for lockdowns incessantly. 

Fraser Nelson today:

How surprised can we really be about Boris Johnson’s No 10 shenanigans? He has always been a rule-flouting, outrage-inducing politician – that’s why he managed to deliver Brexit, save the Conservative Party and win the biggest majority they’ve seen in a generation. Covid-19 restrictions are now being dropped because his vaccine programme (again) triumphed. He has arguably achieved more in 30 months than John Major did in seven years – and he gets kicked out because his staff held a few parties?

But then again, think of all that hypocrisy. No one forced him to send the police after those who broke lockdown rules, but he did so anyway.

Lord Frost and Dominic Cummings are the most impressive men of the last few years in British politics, but Cummings is obviously flawed. Sir Keir Starmer, who forced Corbyn to go for a second referendum, is the least admirable man of the last few years. A dull, wooden man with fewer principles than Corbyn. 

Sir Anthony Blair from his point of view played a brilliant game in trying to prevent Brexit, but failed badly. He could have engineered the Norway option.

Covid mass hysteria

Deaths from all causes in England and Wales from 28 December 2019 to 7 January 2022 were below the five-year average.


(Thank goodness the British cabinet (not Boris) decided to ignore the scientists' recommendation to have another lockdown at Christmas.)

‘China is the best implementer of Catholic social doctrine’

Damian Thompson, former editor of the Catholic Herald in London, wonders if China pays the Vatican and this is why the Pope cooperates with the Communist regime to the detriment of the previously underground Church in China. 

He also wonders if the Chinese blackmailed the Vatican using information form a homosexual dating app they own call Grindr - I do not think there is much that is shocking to come out about the Vatican, considering what we already know about corruption, egregious child abuse and cocaine fueled homosexual orgies.

Gentle Catholic reader, please do not believe the misinformation that being a good Catholic means liking lots of employment laws and regulations, an active state or left-wing politics. It does not.

Popes and bishops are not infallible, and in fact are not even authorities, on economics, politics (including immigration policy) or climatology. They are infallible when they teach what the Church taught at all times and in all places and, in the Pope's case, when he declares a new dogma, which he has promised he will not do

Because of the Pope's position his utterances are deserving of respect, if possible. Remember, before you take the Pope's teaching on social doctrine completely seriously, the words of Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the Argentinian chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, who said, back from a visit to China in 2018, that ‘China is the best implementer of Catholic social doctrine’.

The Dâmbovița this morning

 

Does Red China subsidise the Vatican?

Headline in the Daily Mail:

How Beijing uses its billions to buy political influence around the world

I asked myself if China gives money to the Vatican and buys favours.

The Telephone Palace at sunset today

 

You know where you are with Boris. He always lets you down.

More than 20 years ago, Boris Johnson was beginning to be famous. I was asked to appear in a documentary about him. He had recently been adopted for a parliamentary seat while editor of The Spectator, despite having indicated to the paper’s proprietor, Conrad Black, that he would not do this.

“How did Conrad Black feel about that?” asked the interviewer. In the funny way that sometimes happens when broadcasting, I could hear myself saying, “Well, I think he might have felt like David Niven, who said of Errol Flynn: ‘You knew where you were with Errol Flynn. He always let you down’.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt I had been unfair to Boris and rang him to apologise. He was, not surprisingly, annoyed with me. It is not true that Boris always lets you down: he is capable of acts of great kindness. But I was not completely wrong either. The fairer way to put it would have been to say that Boris is reliably unreliable.

Thus begins an article in the Sunday Telegraph in support of Boris, by one of my favourite living Englishmen, Charles Moore. Edward Norman and Lord Salisbury are the others.

The miracle-working icon of St Anthony in the old town in Bucharest

Today is St Anthony’s Day in the Orthodox and Catholic calendars. 

Not having eaten lunch by half past three, I stopped to drink the always excellent fish soup at Dinescu's restaurant, Lacrimi și Sfinți. 

The restaurant was hidden by a very long queue of people waiting to kiss a miracle working icon in the church of St Anthony around the corner. 

The saint is devoted to orphans, the poor and unmarried girls, who pray on this day to find a husband. Orthodox tradition says that praying nine Tuesdays in a row to the miracle-working icon should lead to prayers being answered. 

More than anything else it’s the Orthodox religiosity and mysticism of Romania which make her such a wonderful country. 

Religion here is very Byzantine, has pagan roots, is mysticalm otherworldly and, as Eugen Ionescu said, means something very different from in Catholic or Protestant countries. It certainly means something very different from the polite, understated, mildly depressing religion of the Church of England. 

Very different from other Orthodox countries in the Balkans, which are becoming godless.

I imagine Catholic England was very like Orthodox Romania before Communism. 

I suppose Protestantism and Communism hijacked the countries in which they were imposed. 

Sunny Saturday in January

Sunny morning. Statue of the martyred democratic statesman Iuliu Maniu in front of Central Committee of the Communist Party building, now the Romanian Senate. Ceaușescu spoke from the balcony and his helicopter took off from the roof. 

Iuliu Maniu began his career in the Budapest Parliament. During the Second World War he tried to persuade the dictator Antonescu to save Jewish lives and acted as a means of communication with England and America. Had the 1946 election been conducted fairly his party, the National Peasant Party, would not have won, according to Petre Țurlea, but they and the other democratic parties could have won enough votes between them to form a coalition. Instead the Communists rigged the election and the left-wing parties won. He ended his life in prison. 

This is the București cinema. I love the ancient, haunted cinemas in this odd, delightful town, but never enter them. One of them, now the (awful) Casa Doina restaurant, belonged to a firm in which James Joyce was a partner.

Quotations

"Civilizations die because they want to. Nations that live for the present and eschew a vision of their future do not take the trouble to raise children. Today’s demographic decline has precedents in the hollowing-out of Hellenistic Greece after the Alexandrian conquests, and the decline of Rome several centuries later." David Goldman in this essay.

“My supreme idea is to get on. I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my Juggernaut if it obstructs the way.” David Lloyd George, writing to his future wife, Maggie Owen.

"Failure, so despicable in others, in oneself the only dignified thing." Claude Cockburn

'In this world it is essential always to be pushing, but fatal to seem so.' Benjamin Jowett

“I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.” William Faulkner

“Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” Flannery O'Connor

The 20th May 2020 Downing Street party that the Johnsons attended was not illegal. They did not attend any of the other dozen parties.

Charles Utley is the son of the great Telegraph writer T.E. Utley and a barrister and my Facebook friend. What he has to say about the 20th May 2020 party that might bring down the British government has convinced me that it did not break the law.

(By the way I thought on Thursday that this would blow over, yesterday I began to think it would bring down Boris. In many ways I hope so. He is not up to the job by normal measures, he is a liar and hopelessly inattentive to detail but much worse are his plans for Carbon Zero, to settle a million Chinese or more in England and his war his ministry wages on fur coats to keep his new wife happy. Yes he refused to lock down in December because of Omicron but only because Tory MPs and his cabinet wouldn't let him. His enemies are so awful that I don't want them to win but a swift exit would be better than a prolonged agony. But who else is there? And is this the moment for a prolonged election?)

Over to Charles.

Was the 20th May 2020 Downing Street party illegal?

 

The media are sure the party was criminal, but most of the journalists who have come to that opinion have not bothered to read, or understand, the regulations in force at that time. They have simply grasped that the rules allowed people to meet one person outside in a public place who was not in their household and assumed that it followed from that that being in the 10 Downing Street garden with thirty or forty other people was a crime.

Droll. Acknowledgements Matt Williams

Tom McTague

@TomMcTague

If Johnson is forced from power, it would be a political and personal failure unprecedented in modern British politics. Since ‘45, no other PM at this stage of the electoral cycle, having won such a majority, has suffered such a fall. It’s worse than Eden.

Tom Holland

@holland_tom

·

Jan 13

And Adam only picked a bit of fruit!

This morning

 

Swedish All-Cause Mortality, from 1 December 2020 to 30 November 2021- was lower than average of recent years, despite no lockdown

 

I suspended my news embargo for Boris receiving six of the best - he probably should go but Theresa May was far, far worse, and the next PM will be awful

Johnson’s sense of entitlement may grate, but it is the sense of entitlement within the public sector — and especially the higher echelons of the civil service — which is the real problem for this country. Martin thought a garden party would be a nice idea (and so, presumably did the 40 or so colleagues who turned up) at a time when ordinary people were barred by law from visiting dying or elderly relatives. It was a perfect expression of the divide in our country, between an endlessly entitled public sector which considers itself above the fray and a beleaguered private sector which pays for its existence.

Rod Liddle today.

It may be necessary for Boris to go. If not now it will be something else, possibly leaked by Cummings. He is in many ways not up to the job but this is something I wrote in September 2019 to remind you that his predecessor was an infinitely worse Prime Minister. His successor will be appalling too.

Theresa May was never anywhere near up to the job of Prime Minister - or up to her previous job

Winston Churchill's successor as Prime Minister Clement Attlee was famously a man of few words and unemotional about firing ministers. When one minister asked him why he was being fired Attlee tersely said

"Not up to the job."

Back in the 1980s, when I disliked Margaret Thatcher very much, I remember people telling me that there was no alternative (her phrase) because Labour leader Neil Kinnock was simply not up to the job of being Prime Minister. My reply was that no Prime Minister I ever heard of was not up to the job. The grace of office (Norman St John Stevas's fey expression) descended on them.

This was true except for Sir Anthony Eden, but the grace of office did not descend on John Major who was hopeless and much too small a man to be Prime Minister. The same is true of Gordon Brown and most of all the present incumbent.

Rafael Behr in the Guardian yesterday says her fellow European leaders realised this in September:

"The point of no return was the summit in Salzburg last September. May was invited to make the case for what was left of her “Chequers plan” to European heads of government. It was late. They were tired. There were other difficult matters to attend to. And instead of speaking candidly, persuasively, passionately or even just coherently, the British prime minister read mechanically from a text that was, in substance, no different from an op-ed article already published under her name in a German newspaper that morning. It was embarrassing and insulting. Many European diplomats say that was the moment when Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and others realised they were dealing with someone out of her depth, unable to perform at the level required for the job that needed doing."

It sounds as if the European leaders find her as embarrassingly dim  as did David Cameron and George Osborne in cabinet, which is why she did not offer the latter a job. She told him to get to know the party, which is the moment when satire died.

At the Davros conference in January 2017 when influential people wanted to hear her ideas about Brexit she made a boring and authoritarian speech, urging more regulation of social media companies, that she had made before. 

Her dullness and lack of imagination are not a clever act. They are the woman.

No Prime Minister leaves No. 10 Downing Street sane, they say. I am not sure that's true, though Eden didn't nor Heath. 

Wilson may have been suffering from incipient dementia and was an alcoholic, like Macmillan, but neither of them was mad. Nor certainly was Lord Home, the best Prime Minister of the last seventy years. 

Did Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair go mad? Many would say yes. 

Gordon Brown's mental extreme strangeness, which was known to Mr Blair and others, should have made them prevent him succeeding as Prime Minister. Mrs May too was always very odd, we can see. She now seems pretty clearly to be having a profound psychological crisis. Marina Hyde's column in the Guardian today has the headline:

For Theresa May, ‘I’m a tin-eared lunatic’ seems to be the hardest word

For her sake and her country's, but mostly for the country's, let's retire her.

She was never up to the job of being Home Secretary, a job she was given by David Cameron, on George Osborne's advice, simply to have a woman in one of the great offices of state. She is one of many great examples of the dangers of promoting people for diversity reasons.

A man I know who knew her in OUCA at Oxford remembers her as sweet, sly and not very bright. These qualities have not changed except that the sweetness is nowhere to be seen, but she has not been sly enough - or bright enough.

She also shows that we needed as Prime Minister a Leaver who believed in Brexit to sell Brexit at home and abroad and to convince the EU leaders that we might well leave with no deal unless they gave us a good reason not to do so.

Here is a link to a Telegraph article by Jonathan Foreman in the 2016 Conservative leadership election campaign headlined “Theresa May is a great self-promoter, but a terrible Home Secretary”, which was pulled after pressure from her campaign. 

"In general Mrs May has avoided taking on the most serious institutional problems that afflict British policing. These include a disturbing willingness by some forces to let public relations concerns determine policing priorities, widespread overreliance on CCTV, the widespread propensity to massage crime numbers, the extreme risk aversion manifested during the London riots, and the preference for diverting police resources to patrol social media rather than the country’s streets.

"There is also little evidence that Mrs May has paid much attention to the failure of several forces to protect vulnerable girls from the ethnically-motivated sexual predation seen in Rotherham and elsewhere. Nor, despite her supposed feminism, has Mrs May’s done much to ensure that girls from certain ethnic groups are protected from forced marriage and genital mutilation. But again, Mrs May has managed to evade criticism for this.

"When considering her suitability for party leadership, it’s also worth remembering Mrs May’s notorious “lack of collegiality”.

"David Laws’ memoirs paint a vivid picture of a secretive, rigid, controlling, even vengeful minister, so unpleasant to colleagues that a dread of meetings with her was something that cabinet members from both parties could bond over.

"Unsurprisingly, Mrs May’s overwhelming concern with taking credit and deflecting blame made for a difficult working relationship with her department, just as her propensity for briefing the press against cabinet colleagues made her its most disliked member in two successive governments.
"It is possible that Mrs May’s intimidating ruthlessness could make her the right person to negotiate with EU leaders. However, there’s little in her record to suggest she possesses either strong negotiation skills or the ability to win allies among other leaders, unlike Michael Gove, of whom David Laws wrote 'it was possible to disagree with him but impossible to dislike him'."

As Home Secretary she is to be congratulated on insisting that immigration should fall to the tens of thousands for the sake of preserving social cohesion. However, she presided over annual numbers of immigrants of over 300,000, though the numbers of people permanently settling in the UK were possibly less than half of that.

She is out of her depth but she is also malign, chippy, authoritarian, mendacious, insipid, an egalitarian and a statist, a centre left social democrat with no love for British traditional life. 

Had she led her party to a big majority in 2017 things would be much worse than they are now. 

Fur coats, vegans and abortion

I wonder how many people who think fur coats and hunting foxes are cruel approve of abortion. I wonder how many vegans do.

Universities should be free

Universities should not be businesses. They should be free, online (a handful of historic ones excepted) and not passports to employability. All undergraduates should be set an exam in major pre-1900 poets.

Violent immigrants in Sweden

The New York Times three days ago: 

"More associated with Abba than with sharp-edged rap, Sweden has for at least six years been struggling with a tide of gang violence that has contributed to its shift from one of the safest countries in the world to among Europe’s most violent. Last year, there were at least 342 shootings resulting in 46 deaths (up from 25 shootings in 2015), along with dozens of bombings. ....In December, Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s newspaper of record, published an analysis of everyone arrested or prosecuted for gun offenses since 2017. About 85 percent were people born abroad, or had at least one parent who was."

The New York Times along with the Washington Post is the leading US paper. it was once considered impartial but for years has been left-of-centre as has New York.  It's now the US equivalent of England's The Guardian. It's been very much in favour of mass immigration and taking in asylum seekers, so this article is a significant turning point. 

It's like the moment, a while back, when the BBC started to report violence by immigrants in Sweden, instead of making programmes asking why people worried about Sweden and being unable to answer the question.

Quotations

Is Romanian the only language in which a 5-word vowel-only sentence is possible? "Oaia aia e a ei" (That sheep is hers).

Dominic Cummings, blog post January 2017: "Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse educated far from power. Why? In the field of political opinion they are more driven by fashion, a gang mentality, and the desire to pose about moral and political questions all of which exacerbate cognitive biases, encourage groupthink, and reduce accuracy. Those on average incomes are less likely to express political views to send signals; political views are much less important for signalling to one’s immediate in-group when you are on 20k a year."

Wilfred Scawen Blunt: "I love to do as my fathers did/In the days ere I was born."

Richard Nixon: “Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

Calvin Coolidge: “When people are bewildered they tend to become credulous.” This applies to Covid and to migration from the Third World. 

Mark Twain: "If you take a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between men and dogs."

Sir Patrick Vallance, the British Chief Scientific Officer, in March 2020.
"If you completely locked down absolutely everything, probably for a period of four months or more then you would suppress this virus. All of the evidence from previous epidemics suggests that when you do that and then you release it, it all comes back again. The other part of this is to make sure that we don’t end up with a sudden peak again in the winter which is even larger which causes even more problems. So we want to suppress it, not get rid of it completely which you can’t do anyway, not suppress it so we get the second peak, and also allow enough of us who are going to get mild illness to become immune to this to help with the whole population response which would protect everybody. "

BBC headline in 2014: 'Top EU official accuses British Government of stoking fears on immigration.' I wonder why stoking fears on immigration is a bad thing. Fearlessness about immigration has irremediable consequences, fears do not.

Neil McCartney, 1977: "I never line up with enemies of the papacy: least of all with its worst enemy, bad popes."

Foggy Sunday morning in the North Korean Quarter of Bucharest

My morning walk to the Hilton Garden Inn for breakfast. Comfort food, a toasted bacon and tomato sandwich, ambrosia of the gods. This is the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism, 2 centimetres longer than the Champs Elysee, which leads to the largest building in Europe. 

Romania is the Balkans dreaming that it is France. This gargantuan street is Bolshevik Romania's tribute to France, a declaration of her Latinity. 

At least it is not modernist. 

Much uglier things were done in Western Europe by architects possessed by Satan. 

My college at Cambridge (Queens') suffered badly at their hands, as did most colleges.

And over the bridge and into the Old Town.

When Sir Alexander Korda went through the procedure of becoming a naturalised subject of King George VI he celebrated by taking his closest English friends to lunch at the Savoy and raising a toast

Down with all bloody foreigners!

That wouldn't be considered in quite good taste nowadays.

Lionel Shriver is an American novelist and gifted journalist who lives in England. She loves England, supported Brexit and does not understand why the English didn't mind the lockdowns. She votes Democrat by post. Even though she didn't like Hillary Clinton she voted for her. She voted for Joe Biden too and is very ashamed of him.

She wrote an article in the Spectator in August, just after the fall of Kabul, about Afghan and other migrants, called 

Would you want London to be overrun with Americans like me?

I quote from it:

In Britain, Migration Watch released two reports this summer whose key findings I will try to present as succinctly and neutrally as possible. In the past 20 years, foreign-born residents of the UK have doubled to nine million, going from 8 per cent to 14 per cent of the population. In tandem, the white British proportion of the population has fallen from 89 per cent to 79 per cent, while ethnic minorities have grown from 10 per cent to 21 per cent. Since 2001, 84 per cent of UK population growth has been due to immigrants and their children, rising to 90 per cent since 2017 — the majority non-EU.

How many little Iraqi children died in the streets?

I have given up reading the news, except for skimming it over breakfast. In the time that gives me I keep finding interesting things. For example, I recently came across a reference to the deaths caused by sanctions in Iraq between the two Iraq Wars. I looked up the figures on the net and saw that UNICEF said that around 1,500,000 Iraqis, primarily children, died as a direct consequence of the sanctions.

Is this figure true? According to researchers writing in the Washington Post, it is a fraud concocted by Saddam.

It seems incredibly high and I trust neither the UN nor the Washington Post. Still, something to bear in mind.

Many more Iraqis would die as a result of the invasion, of course. 

According to Iraq Body Count site there were between 186,057 and 209,241 violent deaths of combatants and civilians added together as a result of the war. According to Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian, the site "is widely considered as the most reliable database of Iraqi civilian deaths" but some researchers say the real number of deaths is much, much higher.

A Ruritanian page from the history of the Second World War.

By Ghitta Carell (1899-1972)

I was in Rome at the New Year and after watching the Nutcracker had dinner in a fairly good restaurant near the Rome Opera (Trattoria Antica Boheme). The aged Italian president stood and mouthed his New Year's message to the nation with the sound off.

When in Italy I always regret Italian unification, despite having this year read Mack Smith's eulogistic biography of Mazzini. I have no sympathy for the House of Savoy particularly but it seemed obvious that if you have a parliamentary system a constitutional monarch is so much better than a president, not only for romantic or conservative reasons but for a management consultant's reasons. 

This led me to look up the Italian royal family and I learnt some interesting things.

The last Queen of Italy - the former Princess Marie-José of Belgium - 'the May Queen' who only reigned from 9 May 1945 to 2 June, when the monarchy narrowly defeated in a referendum - was educated in the Ursuline Convent school in unromantic, lower middle class Brentwood, Essex, during the First World War.

She was a looker. She was very much more attractive to my eyes than Marie of Romania.