Sunday 30 October 2022
Andrew Neal tweeted this
The new normal, just so you know
Friday 28 October 2022
The 18th-century Schitul Maicilor
I finally found the 18th-century Schitul Maicilor open. I never tried in the morning before. It was the first church moved on wheels and was relocated 245 metres/ 278 yards away from its original site in 1982 by a wonderful man called Eugeniu Iordăchescu, the saviour of many of Bucharest’s churches.
Thursday 27 October 2022
Russian universities ordered to teach anti Western ideology
'Russian universities ordered to teach anti-western ideology' (headline in The Times this evening). I am not sure I get this. Western universities have done this for decades so is anti western ideology anti western or western?
Wednesday 26 October 2022
Don't take the BBC on trust - before the referendum our GDP was 78% of Germany's - now it's 76%.
Tuesday 25 October 2022
Monday 24 October 2022
Habemus Richi
"As returning officer in the leadership election I can confirm that we have received one valid nomination." Rishi Sunak will meet the King and kiss hands tonight or tomorrow and be Prime Minister.
Her drama school training and experience being sawn in half, as a magician's assistant, around the seaside resorts of England has given Penny a sense of the theatrical. She dropped out of the race at literally the last moment.
Three narrow escapes
Saturday 22 October 2022
Communism was always terrorism
Very comparable with other forms of nihilism, such as Islamist terrorism.
Romanians are not politically correct
Strada Blanari 2 years ago and in the 1960s
The king over the water is on his way back
“He would have been campaigning for the maximum possible drama. There is of course a box-set element in which characters who drop out of the drama come back for later runs.”
I feel exactly the same.
One of the reasons I found myself thinking Donald Trump would win in 2016, despite very clever American Democrats assuring me it was impossible, is that victory for Hillary would have been such a dramatic let-down.
The return of the king over the water....
And it would have the advantage that the return of Boris would answer the question posed by protesters to Liz Truss during her speech at the party conference. 'Who voted for this?"
Nevertheless, I don't want him to return.
His Carbon Zero folly and wasteful spending on furloughs is inflicting and will inflict terrible poverty on his country.
He wants millions more immigrants. Up to 3 million Chinese for a start.
He allegedly persuaded Mr Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia.
He was an obedient servant of America, in his last speech as PM in the Commons advising his successor to keep close to America.
He even wanted regime change in Syria when he was Foreign Secretary.
And many other sins that I cannot at present call to mind, as Catholics say in the confessional.
But I think he might well be back and he does make things fun.
But even though the Beeb despises him he is not remotely conservative. No, my unenthusiastic choice is Richi.
Friday 21 October 2022
This morning's quotations
"In the 1970s Britain tried being Belgium and didn't like it." Julie Buchill in the 1980s. I quote from memory.
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” The Cocktail Party, TS Eliot
'All cases are unique, and very similar to others." Ibid.
Miss Truss's Little Outing
"Liz Truss was dealt a bad hand and played it badly, but despite the broadcast media spending a fortnight treating every day as if it were Black Wednesday (which in reality was Golden Wednesday for the economy from then on), she did not ‘crash the economy’, as many have hysterically claimed. The economy was already in pieces and there is much worse to come. Goldman Sachs has already taken 0.6 per cent off the UK’s GDP forecast for 2023, partly because of the rise in Corporation Tax. (Don't forget Truss was not proposing a cut. Merely not implementing an increase. An important distinction our broadcast media have chosen to ignore.) There is nothing to celebrate about the return of an ‘orthodoxy’ that has brought us an insane housing market, negative real interest rates, double digit inflation, taxes at a 70 year high, exponential spending on the worst health service in Europe, £2.4 trillion of debt and lower wages than we had in 2008." Chris Carter
Thursday 20 October 2022
Come in number 56, your time is up
Sir Anthony Eden 1 year, 279 days
The Earl of Wilmington 1 year, 119 days
Marquess of Rockingham 1 year, 113 days
The Earl of Rosebery 1 year, 109 days
The Duke of Grafton 1 year, 106 days
Lord Grenville 1 year, 42 days
Sir Alec Douglas-Home 363 days
The Earl of Bute 317 days
The Earl of Shelburne 266 days
The Duke of Devonshire 225 days
Andrew Bonar Law, who was dying, 211 days
Viscount Goderich, 144 days
George Canning, who died in office, 119 days
Liz Truss 45 days so far but has up to 8 days to go.
Thank God she has resigned! Maybe this can all be forgotten?
'The moving finger writes and having writ moves on...'
'Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.'
'I have spoken to HM the King to notify him that I would be resigning as Prime Minister'. Thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God.
The dream team now would be Kemi as PM, Gove as her consigliere and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Richi as a very vindicated Chancellor of the Exchequer, Penny as Foreign Secretary, Suella as a tough Home Secretary.
The BBC man Chris Mason is terribly stupid, isn't he? He seems to think the next PM will be shamed into an early election.
Some levels of stupid are beyond belief.
I actually think Miss Truss is relieved because she must see that she is not up to the job or to being asked questions.
I never really thought there could be a worse PM than Theresa May but she was not only worse but much worse.
Wednesday 19 October 2022
Thank God she is going but is Brexit ruined and Tory England smashed?
Tuesday 18 October 2022
The herd is wise, but why doesn't it get a move on?
Everything is theological
'Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in moulding life than nationalism or a common language.' Hilaire Belloc.Many people nowadays not only don't understand why religion is fundamental but don't think nations are either. Not all these people, by any means, are left-wing. 'Why can't we all just get along?', they ask.
It was all a bad dream
'Fiscal order has been restored at breath-taking speed. Jeremy Hunt has done exactly what you have to do in fast-moving crises of this nature.'Dribbling out half-measures was never going to work. You have to outflank the markets with shock and awe moves that entirely change the conversation.
Monday 17 October 2022
This morning's quotations
By July of that year he was on the back benches after the referendum he had opposed was won by Leave and the world of May 2016 had ceased to exist.
G.K. Chesterton said: “He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative. "
"We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable." - John Updike
Sunday 16 October 2022
An American Trump supporter tweeted: Describe President Donald Trump in two words.
Peter Hitchens today in the Mail
"Yes, Liz Truss is perhaps the most woefully unconvincing Prime Minister we have ever seen, but it is unfair to concentrate on her. Sir Anthony Blair is at least as dim, but is a better actor and had much better handlers. David Cameron was unable to cover up the fact he believed in nothing, but like the great actor George Sanders, he played the part of likeable bounder to perfection. Poor Theresa May should never have risen above the level of Chairman of the Policy and Resources Committee of Trumpton Borough Council.
"But you will look in vain for another Margaret Thatcher or Denis Healey, a new Michael Heseltine or even a new Neil Kinnock, because all the parties have been captured by the deadly dogmas of equality and diversity. All live in fear of the BBC, which – like the medieval church – decides which ideas are acceptable and which are heretical, and will seek to destroy anyone who steps outside its chosen limits.
"You cannot now discuss whether the sexual revolution was a good thing. Parents must surrender their children to the power and ideas of the state. You cannot oppose multiculturalism or mass immigration.
"....I don't think Liz Truss has any consistent beliefs. So instead she bought some opinions on eBay. She posed as a free-market liberal (probably out of nothing more than ambition, since we know how easily she changes her mind). This is not an especially conservative view, but some people think it is. The trouble is that our economy, loaded with debt and taxes, is far too decrepit to cope with such measures. You can say you are going to stimulate it back to health, but you might as well try to turn a hobbling pensioner into an Olympic athlete by giving him a handful of amphetamines, an electric shock and a can of Red Bull."
Slightly unfair about David Cameron who never looked like a bounder (think Jonathan Aitken or Alan Clark, though both of them were not bounders but cads). Boris Johnson had the measure of Mr Cameron when he called him "girly swot" in the margin of a civil service memo and later tried to make it illegible. Sir A. Blair has animal cunning, which is the only intelligence a politician needs, to an amazing degree.
Peter Hitchens points out that all three parties have lost their meaning and deceives himself that they can therefore be replaced. They can't. It's the same in the USA but parties there can reconstitute themselves because of the primary system, which let Donald Trump become president.
The article is here.
Saturday 15 October 2022
Liz Truss in quotations
A quotation that came into my head and everyone else's was James Carville musing: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”
Liz Truss’s Thatcherism is explained by Carl Schmitt's observation, “An historical truth is true only once.”
And then there's Groucho Marx: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them…well, I have others.”
And Mike Tyson: "Everybody has a plan till you hit them in the mouth".
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, returning to London from the IMF meeting a day early, learnt about his sacking on Twitter, which reminded me of Lord Chancellor Kilmuir, who heard about his dismissal from the woolsack on the wireless.
Kilmuir: You have given me less notice than I would a housekeeper.
Harold Macmillan: But good housekeepers are so hard to find.
Kilmuir was one of seven cabinet ministers whom Macmillan fired that day, which led Jeremy Thorpe famously to say:
"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life".
Thorpe scored a palpable hit with that but was later accused of hiring a hitman to murder one of his friends, something Supermac would not have done.
Professor Matthew Goodwin, opinion pollster: “These numbers mean that Liz Truss is more unpopular than Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn ever were – she is basically in what I would call Prince Andrew territory.”
The Daily Express today:
"But for a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher of "the lady is not for turning" fame, Ms Truss has proven less an iron lady and more a woman of straw blown and buffeting in the winds of events.
"Her press conference lasted just eight minutes. Throughout the Prime Minister appeared to be on the verge of tears. She then just allowed four questions before fleeing the room at 9 Downing Street to bunker down again next door."
Matthew Parris on August 19:
"...Stick to your first impressions. Liz Truss is a planet-sized mass of overconfidence and ambition teetering upon a pinhead of a political brain. It must all come crashing down.
Thursday 13 October 2022
'I'm just saying, if I got my dog vaccinated against rabies 3 times and he still got rabies, I'd have questions'
"They haven't tested the vaccine to see if it's stopping the spread of the virus. So we're asking again: what are they hiding?"He is a Romanian who belongs to the PNTCD (National Peasants Christian Democratic Party) after being elected on the PSD (Social Democratic Party) list.
Wednesday 12 October 2022
Colo(u)r blind, fascist America
Tuesday 11 October 2022
'The EU is planning to train up to 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers in the next two years'
Instead Liz Truss and her Secretary of State for Defence want to increase defence spending. Why?
How can the UK possibly afford it and Carbon Zero?
Norman Tebbit on the BBC
'The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate members of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.'
Today is the feast of Pope St John XXIII
Sunday 9 October 2022
King Carol II was an habitué at Pasajul Englez, when it was an expensive brothel
Bucharest has two famous 19th century passageways, running off Calea Victoriei eastwards, Pasajul Victioriei and Pasajul Vilacrosse. I walk down both often. The latter is now full of bars and fun. It has a third one, much more secret, called Pasajul Englez.
The jeweller Joseph Resch, whose shop was nearby, built a narrow house opposite what became the National Theatre, where Novotel is. The facade of Novotel is a copy of the facade of the National Theatre, which was destroyed by German bombs in 1944 (not British bombs, as I long thought). The house was bought in 1885 and transformed into first hughes Hotel, then the English Hotel. The English Passage, which connects Calea Victoriei with Strada Academiei, was built then, the hotel bedrooms lining the narrow passage.
The writer Mateiu Caragiale writes about Pasjul Englez in his Rakes of the Old Court, a book that is on my coffee table waiting to be read.
I found this description on an interesting site, with much curious information about Calea Victoriei. I do not know when this was written- not in the last many years. It reminds me of Lawrence Durrell.
Is Liz Truss going to survive? What the Sunday papers say
Tim Shipman in the Times says Grant Shapps and Michael Gove are trying to organise the defenestration of Liz Truss. Very, very stupid of her not to give them positions in her cabinet. She is displaying the vindictiveness and lack of intelligence of Theresa May.
According to Mr Shipman, rumours have reached the whips of Michael Gove privately saying the biggest names should “get the old gang back together”.
"One MP said: “Michael thinks Boris and Rishi should come together and get the show back on the road.” It is unclear how this might work, given that Sunak resigned from Johnson’s government and Johnson sacked Gove as an act of revenge for his betrayal in 2016."
This is not accurate. Mr. Johnson didn't fire him because of his betrayal in 2016 but his betrayal in July this year, when he (and plenty of others) told him he had to resign.
Mr Shipman says a former Downing Street aide told him, “Penny [Mordaunt]is full on manoeuvres. She told someone directly that she was restarting her campaign.”
Felicity Cloake, 'Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey'
"Looking at Victorian recipes and menus, everything from mushroom curry to fried sole was fair game. The quintessential ‘English’ breakfast is basically a 20th-century creation.”
Imagine there's no countries
Ray Bradbury saw it all coming
"They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1950 and '60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”
The Martian Chronicles, 1950.
Thursday 6 October 2022
People don't understand appeasement or 1938 or the horrors of war
I know I quote this over and over again. It keeps being topical.
"In 1938 Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939 Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better – to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?"
A.J.P. Taylor got the numbers wrong when he asked this question.
In fact, just between 5.6 and 5.8 million Poles died and 345,000 Czechoslovakians.In the news
“I have had many other adventures since. Yet this was the first and most important one. It set the tone for my whole life. It taught me that non-conformity in thought and deed is the only vital life. The individual is more important than the mass. Any single person can change history. MPs are the lest effectual of citizens. Political parties are for sheep-minds. Heresy is Godliness." Ian Hamilton who stole the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey in 1950 and who died on Monday.
“I realised that in every situation, whether I was right or wrong, I had to be strong. I had to be able to answer back.” Vladimir Putin in 2012, reflecting on fights as a schoolboy, quoted in today's Times.
Archbishop Carey wanted the UK to accept Christian but not Muslim refugees from Syria
“Some will not like me saying this, but in recent years there has been too much Muslim mass immigration to Europe. This has resulted in ghettos of Muslim communities living parallel lives to mainstream society, following their own customs and even their own laws.” Retired Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey in the Sunday Telegraph in September 2015.
"This is a remark of such astonishingly pompous fatuity that it’s easy to believe the poor man is still archbishop of Canterbury – as he clearly does himself. How fortunate for the church, and indeed for English Christianity, that he is wrong, and that he has at last sunk to his proper level in society, as a man who has opinions for money in a newspaper." Andrew Brown in the Guardian.
Wednesday 5 October 2022
Tuesday 4 October 2022
Liz Truss is a disaster for Brexit
And she has been Prime Minister less than four weeks, half of that time taken up by mourning the Queen.
Ed Conway in the Sunday Times on the British Government's loss of credibility.
'Once upon a time, Britain’s credibility came from its economic might and its management of the gold standard. Today, it probably derives from boring institutions that went out of fashion years ago: the Bank of England and its boring inflation target, the Treasury and its boring mandarins, the rule of law, a history of creditworthiness, long-dated bonds and boring fiscal rules, as well as bodies such as the OBR. I say “probably” because there is no definitive formula. But somehow this cocktail of components exerts a magical effect upon Britain’s currency and its bond prices, making them worth more than the sum of their parts.
'The best example of this dates back to May 6, 1997, the day Gordon Brown, chancellor at the time, gave the Bank of England independence to set interest rates. In one fell swoop, Britain’s cost of borrowing fell by half a percentage point. That might not sound like much, but it was a financial boost that in hindsight helps explain a decent chunk of Britain’s prosperity ever since. Those lower borrowing costs helped businesses and households invest even more in the coming years. It was a credibility windfall.
'...In practice, it was probably a bit of everything: the scale of the giveaway, the sidelining of the OBR, the firing of experienced Treasury boss Sir Tom Scholar and badmouthing of the Bank of England, the vague promise of more tax cuts over the weekend. Somehow this new government achieved in a few days something that none of its predecessors managed in decades: it inadvertently dismantled the credibility buffer helping to keep the markets aloft.'
The new useless British government did not just lose credibility in the markets but with Parliament and with electors.
Liz Truss, as we suspected, is another Theresa May, albeit one who likes freedom not regulation.
She is as much wedded to Carbon Zero and huge pointless increases in defence expenditure as Boris Johnson, just as keen for Ukraine to continue the war with Russia, just as obedient an American vassal, but unlike him she cannot sell.
She humiliated herself and her country when she met Lavrov (against her officials' advice) and thought Rostov-on-Don was in the Ukraine.
She humiliated herself and her country again last week.
Isabel Oakshott said it is sexist to say that she is thick (which is odd and Miss Oakshott has called other women politicians stupid). Most politicians of both sexes are, as Lord Skidelsky said, inhumanly stupid and Liz Truss is certainly no exception, something else she has in common with Theresa May.
It is a disgrace that her MPs, who knew what she was like and did not vote for her, put up with having La Truss foisted on them by Tory party members.
They should rebel, just as Labour MPs should have got rid of Corbyn. But the House of Commons has lost its self-belief like every British institution from the monarchy downwards.
It would be sexist to speak of a lack of virility.
Half of British university students believe that those with conservative views are reluctant to express them at their university
Sunday 2 October 2022
Who sabotaged the Nordstream pipeline?
This is Fred Weir today on Facebook, posting this article about America's sabotage of a Siberian oil pipeline in 1982.
It's just a long-standing fact that the US has never liked Germany's dependence on Russian energy, and even 4 decades ago was willing to resort to sabotage to undermine it. There are probably several actors with a strong interest in making Germany's divorce from the Russian gas pipe permanent and irreversible, but I don't have the sense that Russia is one of them. I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure, but I wouldn't be inclined to accept anyone's sanctimonious talking points at face value. I personally tend to resonate with the credo of the great Claud Cockburn, who was fond of saying "I never believe anything until it's been officially denied."
Saturday 1 October 2022
In Moscow, the generals are talking about a hundred years' war
That's worse than Edward Luttwak's prediction of another Seven Years' War, which reminds me that someone supposedly wrote a play in which a character comes on stage and says, 'The Seven Years' War has broken out'.
Why is big business Woke? A good explanation.
This 55 second clip about Woke is very illuminating -'Just call it fascism' says Jordan Peterson at the end.
I don't know who spoke for the first 50 seconds.
Giorgia Meloni champions the traditional family, Christianity and the traditional ideas of two sexes rather than many genders, something rare in Western Europe. None of the candidates for leadership of the British Conservative party and therefore British Prime Minister did so. She blames Woke on international financiers and multinational businesses who want to replace traditions with consumerism. This may seem unlikely but big business has become socially liberal and the clip gives a plausible explanation for why.I really don't understand why people think Jordan Peterson is right-wing. He's not. He's not really political at all or wasn't when he first became a cause celebre. His ideas are the common sense of writers from ancient Greece onwards, as anyone who spent his youth reading old books knows.
But perhaps common sense is now right-wing.
New Zealand PM tells UN expressing bad ideas about the climate etc is a weapon of war
“After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?”