Boris, the Hitchens brothers and Shirley Williams on Rushdie's knighthood

The BBC's Question Time, 22 June 2007. Christopher Hitchens (looking very good at 56) and his conservative brother Peter defend Sir Salman Rushdie's knighthood, as does the Labour Party minister, Boris Johnson opposes it simply because his books are unreadable and Shirley Williams says it's 'not wise and not very clever'. Christopher Hitchens says 'that's a contemptible statement'.

Christopher Hitchens wasn't bad for a Trotskyite, right about free speech but wrong about most things. A very good writer and great speaker. I heard him at the Cambridge Union when I was 19.

Putin biographer Philip Short, yesterday in the Guardian, explains why Putin invaded Ukraine - please take note, people

'Why, then, did Putin stake so much on a high-risk enterprise that will at best bring him a tenuous grip on a ruined land?

'At first it was said that he was unhinged – “a lunatic”, in the words of the defence secretary, Ben Wallace. Putin was pictured lecturing his defence chiefs, cowering at the other end of a 6-metre long table. But not long afterwards, the same officials were shown sitting at his side. The long table turned out to be theatrics – Putin’s version of Nixon’s “madman” theory, to make him appear so irrational that anything was possible, even nuclear war.

'Then western officials argued that Putin was terrified at the prospect of a democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border, which would threaten the basis of his power by showing Russians that they too could live differently. On the face of it, that seemed plausible. Putin hated the “colour revolutions” that, from 2003 onwards, brought regime change to former Soviet bloc states. But Ukraine’s attractions as a model are limited. It is deeply corrupt, the rule of law is nonexistent and its billionaire oligarchs wield disproportionate power. Should that change, the Russian intelligentsia may take note but the majority of Russians – those fed on state propaganda who make up Putin’s political base – would not give two hoots.

'The invasion has also been portrayed as a straightforward imperialist land grab. A passing reference to Peter the Great earlier in the summer was taken as confirmation that Putin wanted to restore the Russian empire or, failing that, the USSR. Otherwise sensible people, mainly in eastern Europe but not only, held that Ukraine was just a first step. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” a former Swedish minister told me last week, “if, in a few years, Estonia and Latvia are next in line.”

'Given that Putin once called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, that may seem to make sense. But he also said: “Anyone who does not regret [its] destruction has no heart; anyone who wants to see it recreated has no brain.” Leaving aside the fact that the Russian military is already hard-pressed to achieve even modest successes in Ukraine, an attack on the Baltic states or Poland would bring them into direct conflict with Nato, which is the last thing that Moscow (or the west) wants.

'In fact, Putin’s invasion is being driven by other considerations.

'He has been fixated on Ukraine since long before he came to power. As early as 1994, when he was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, he expressed outrage that Crimea had been joined to Ukraine. “Russia won Crimea from the Turks!” he told a French diplomat that year, referring to Russia’s defeat of the Ottoman empire in the 18th century.

'But it was the possibility, raised at a Nato summit in 2008, that Ukraine should become a fully-fledged member of the western alliance that turned his attitude toxic.

'Bill Burns, now the head of the CIA, who was then the US ambassador to Moscow, wrote at the time in a secret cable to the White House: “Ukrainian entry into Nato is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests … Today’s Russia will respond.”'

Belarus 2020

I wrote this today two years ago.

Lots of high minded British people want democracy in Belarus but spent two years trying to prevent the Brexit referendum result being implemented. They like democracy but not the demos, not hoi polloi. A lot of Americans want democracy in Belarus but hate it that ordinary people defied the bipartisan political establishment and brought Donald Trump to power. They then draw parallels between Trump and Lukashenko. Many of these people are very clever, very silly academics.

Talking of which, Timothy Garton Ash said,

'One worker at the Minsk tractor factory where Lukashenko was heckled, gave this impressively downbeat assessment: “The oligarch who runs the factory next won’t be any worse than the state is now.”'

The Christmas before last was the most fun I ever had, in Bitez near Bodrum with a great bunch of people who had floated there and stayed because of the pandemic. One of them was a Venezuelan with a Slavic name who lived in Minsk. He said he couldn't understand what the protests are about. 'Everything is so well run in Belarus.'

Philip Short thinks Putin may well win

"I’m not convinced that the risk [Putin]’s taken is going to prove his undoing. I put that very cautiously. He may get perhaps even the most important parts of what he wants from the war in Ukraine, it’s not over yet, it’s going to be very nasty and it’s going to go on.”

So says Philip Short, former BBC man and graduate of Queens' College, Cambridge, who has just brought out a biography of Vladimir Putin, in a recent interview.

History is the only discipline at which you get better in old age. Mr. Short is in his 70s and writes with wisdom.

He wrote an article on the Guardian from which I quote this.

"Moscow does not have to achieve a great deal for Putin to be able to claim victory. It would be enough for Russia to control all of the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea. He would certainly like more. If Russian troops take Odesa and the contiguous Black Sea coast, it would reduce Ukraine to vassalage. But even more modest gains would show the limits of US power. It is possible that Ukraine, with solid western backing, will be able to prevent that. But it is far from certain."

The decline and rise of the West

I do not have a great rapport with economics, but I am listening to a very interesting interview of Dr Steve Davies, an historian at the Institute of Economic Affairs. 

He is a monetarist who thinks things will be hard for the west for the next decade or longer, but ultimately will be peachy. 

Inflation isn't anything to do with the price of oil. (He didn't mention that Switzerland and Japan have 2 percent inflation.)

He blames the current crisis on European and American folly. I suppose he means the war. He thinks European countries have themselves to blame for not standing up to the USA at the Bucharest conference in 2008. He means George W. Bush's announcement that Ukraine and Georgia would join Nato.

How disastrous the Americans are as the world's policeman. 

Sanctions are hurting the West more than Russia but they are hitting Russians. Nevertheless Russians have come behind the invasion and see the conflict as existential. Most countries are not imposing sanctions and financial Sanctions have much less effect than America expected. As Russia depends on exporting commodities it is less vulnerable to sanctions than more sophisticated economies.

Nuclear energy is important but not the silver bullet for the West. We shall continue to use a lot of oil and gas, but Dr Davies thinks we might use much less energy in the future, as  happened in the mid-1970s in the West.

Was there a more wonderful opening to a book review?

 

How people misunderstand the Ukrainian war

I got round at last to hearing this, a talk by Sky News Australia host Cory Bernardi, criticising Zelensky and the Americans for their role in Ukraine before the invasion, which I left unwatched before I went on holiday. 

I don't like watching or listening rather than reading and clicking but it's worth ten minutes, it's interesting and mostly fairly true, though he gets the details of the Minsk accords wrong. They offered Ukrainian Russians home rule, not independence.

That does NOT mean I think Russia's invasion of the Ukraine is in any way justified but I do think Russia was provoked by the US State Department and Zelensky.

Mark Galeotti on a recent podcast said he sees that Putin believes he is on the defensive against America 'however ridiculous that may seem', although he is very anxious repeatedly to assure listeners that he is not 'advocating this'. 

In fact, Putin is right but Mark Galeotti cannot see this. He sees that from around 2020, but he can't be too exact, Putin's policy to Ukraine changed. 2019 was when Trump started arming Ukraine heavily to create jobs but the election of the fiercely anti-Russian Joe Biden was probably the big trigger. 

Depressingly he thinks a negotiated peace was possible in the spring but no longer is. Everything points to a long war in which Ukraine is ruined and a pointless cold war. The first cold war served little purpose, because Communist Russia was not going to attack Western Europe but at least that was its raison d'etre. A second  cold war would not have a raison d'etre, except in the minds of paranoid people who think Putin wants, after somehow defeating Ukraine, to march somewhere else.

How did the war happen? Because of American and EU folly and of still greater folly on the part of Putin. Lawrence Freedman said, ‘Autocracies tend to make catastrophic decisions. That’s the case with Putin’. Yes indeed but America has made some catastrophic decisions too. Think of the second Iraq war, Libya and add others to taste. Syria is not the Americans' fault but they would have made very bad much worse had Hillary won. 

She said 8 days before her defeat at the polls that regime change in Syria was her number 1 priority. 

Thank God we were spared that. Had she won I suspect the Ukraine war would have started years ago, partly in response to her actions in Syria.

All are invited to the Transylvanian Book Festival next month

All are invited to the Transylvanian Book Festival next month. I am so looking forward to it and warmly recommend it. September 14-18. Great craich last time, in 2018! Very nice people. Rather Chiantishire. Transylvania is becoming slightly Tatler, which is fine by me, and lots of interesting people come from England and from Hungary.

How wonderful to be back in Bucharest

How wonderful to be back in Bucharest. I felt that every time I returned from holiday. I like this town in summer more than any other place I've been on the globe, possibly excepting Havana.

Great one-upmanship. 'Possibly excepting Havana'. I didn't intend it like that. I was just being pedantic.

Girl in the park.

Antim monastery.

Party PM!

The attractive female Finnish Prime Minister has been filmed dancing at a party and this makes headlines.

Move along. Nothing to see. Though odd to have a young and hip female PM.

How very different from the home life of Harold Macmillan. Though he and Harold Wilson did drank a bottle of whisky a night they were not hip at all. Eden was drugged up to the eyeballs, -'half mad baronet, half beautiful woman' but not hip. 

Do the young people still say 'hip'?

As Mr Macmillan said at the time of the Profumo scandal, I move so little among young people. Actually that's not true. Well actually, yes it is.

Ain't that the sorry truth?

'Writers are the engineers of the soul.' Stalin

Writers include academic writers, of course.

Reception

 

The Moldovan (ethnic Romanian) receptionist in my hotel in London says Putin is completely to blame for the war in Ukraine. Her Ukrainian (ethnic Ukrainian) colleague thinks America is partly to blame for the war and wants peace as quickly as possible, not a war to oust Putin.  Both young women think people behind the scenes benefit from and will probably prolong the war. Hotel receptionists, waiters, barbers and taxi drivers know much more about human nature and life than academics.

I am eating a full English in St James's Square

 'You can eat better in England than in any other country in the world, so long as you eat breakfast three times a day' (Somerset Maugham).

Legacies

Margaret Thatcher's three biggest legacies are devolution, Brexit and Tony Blair. Tony Blair's legacy is the same plus: more immigrants into England each year than in the period 1070-1950, England ceasing to be a free country, giving into the IRA,  unjust and pointless wars for values that led to the loss of countless, innocent lives and too many other things to enumerate. Boris’s legacy is Brexit and the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine.

Do not believe the media

The newspapers are full of propaganda and untruths on every subject. The Taliban are not the reason Afghans are selling their children. Sanctions and the Americans stealing £7 billion from the Afghan reserves are. Sanctions are very cruel to the innocent and almost never do any good.

Moon over Budapest

I saw this huge glowing golden moon resting above the rooftops in Budapest last week. It is here in Edinburgh, where for some reason the Times calls it the Sturgeon supermoon.

  

Salman Rushdie has been stabbed in the neck but is still alive

Salman Rushdie has been stabbed in the neck and badly hurt at a talk which had been advertised and was open to the public in New York. Barbara Amiel said 33 years ago that she couldn't forgive the Ayatollah for forcing her to defend Rushdie, but we all do have to be on his side.

Rishi Sunak has blown his chances and perhaps that's a good thing - except Liz Truss looks pretty useless

Rishi Sunak is a humbug and, worse, he badly lacks political skills, as this damning article by Patrick O’Flynn, a UKIP MEP who became SDP, points out. Not only was he filmed pulling a pint even though he does not drink, he was filmed putting petrol into a car that was not his but much cheaper than his. As Sherlock Holmes said of the villain in The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, 'Touch him where you would he was false'.

On the other hand, Liz Truss is very far from clever and looks like another Theresa May, as Edwina Curry said. Neither wants to take the UK out of the ECHR or the 1967 Protocol to the Geneva Convention on Refugees which obliges the UK to accept refugees from outside Europe. Neither seems to know what a man or a woman is or to oppose Carbon Zero. 

I suppose, on the evidence of Rushi's behaviour this year, she is slightly less bad than he is. She is a phoney too, of course, but slightly better at hiding it. She is also a useless debater and has no charisma, but if debating skills were enough Penny Mordaunt would have been best and she was the least conservative and least able of the candidates.

Both candidates for British Prime Minister are phonies and humbugs

 

Rishi Sunak still seems the least bad of the two to me but he's a phony. He is a lifelong teetotaller but had himself filmed drawing a pint in a pub. That's as bad as Liz driving a tank, in imitation of Mrs T. Then there is this.

On the other hand he has a good brain. Roy Jenkins played a game with his civil servants guessing how far his cabinet colleagues would have reached in the civil service. Had Ernest Bevin, Woy said, not been Foreign Secretary the only other job in the FO he could have held would have been liftman.

Rishi would have probably been a Permanent Secretary with good luck and Liz Truss would not, not even for diversity reasons, but the qualities of a good civil servant are not the ones a Prime Minister needs.

Men and women

'No woman minds the first look. It's the second that offends.' Lady Diana Cooper


2 foreign women told me they hated England because they felt invisible there. 2 Romanian women complained to me that Italian men call out compliments in the street to all women, including ugly ones. Both objected not to the compliments but to their being paid to their ill favoured sisters.