24 hours in Slovenia

The railway journey from Zagreb to Split was very beautiful - winding through the beautiful Sava valley. It was much better than yesterday`s from Split to Zagreb. I avoided Slovenia for decades fearing it would be Alpine and Austrian but what is wrong with those things, really? It is full of castles, churches and mountains and seems to have been invented by the Brothers Grimm in a spare moment. You feel as if a great weight has been lifted from your shoulders when you are in a small country which your mother and sister have not heard of, but then you remember you are still in the EU.


I have never experienced deja vu but Ljubljana does remind me of something and I think it is Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland. Slovenia also reminds me of Bandrika.

Anyway, it's a wonderful treat visiting a new European country. I have no more new ones left except Denmark and Norway, which I do not intend to visit because they are clean, tidy, affluent, Protestant, Teutonic and socially liberal, whereas I am a socially conservative anarchist. Denmark and Norway sound as boring as get out, although Stockholm I did visit, because Sweden was once a great power and, as an imperialist, all former empires attract me. 

San Marino and Andorra do not count as European countries. Malta and Cyprus are islands and therefore not in Europe. And islands off the coasts of Africa and Asia respectively, come to that. But perhaps Mr. Putin will create some new European countries for me to visit.

I like Slovenia, despite myself. I accept by now that almost every city has been done up and gentrified and acts as plant for the tourist industry. I am not repelled by the new paint as I was when I visited Tallinn and Riga years ago; I came back rejoicing that it had not yet happened to Bucharest. 



Alain de Botton's insight about his native Switzerland comes to mind in relation to Slovenia - yes it is boring but boring is another word for peaceful. And it is only boring on the surface. Its Alpine charm hides the usual post-Communist mess. 

A crocodile of middle aged people marched past my hotel protesting in support of a former Prime Minister imprisoned for corruption. 

'Why do they do that?''Because they are stupid. They do this every day'.

It looks like Austria but it is much more exciting and the people much more human. It also has burek.

Estonians, Etonians and women in the cabinet

This is a good and much needed article by Jamie Delingpole on why Conservatives should avoid identity politics. Instead of which they are embracing them in a big way in the recent British cabinet reshuffle.

This drew a smile: 

"There are currently 256 male Conservative MPs and 48 female ones. If you're going to draw from the smaller talent pool just because it contains lots of breasts and vaginas and handbags why stop there? Paedophiles, for example. They're not nearly as well-represented as they were, apparently, in the glory days of 1970s politics."

No, promoting women become they are women is certainly not conservative but, on the other hand, conservatives - well, Tories, at least -  are not supposed to believe in meritocracy. Harold Macmillan, at any rate, certainly did not - he made the Duke of Devonshire Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office because 

'Cavendishes are always good with natives' 

and said

'Mr Attlee had 3 Etonians in his cabinet. I have six. Everything's twice as good under the Conservatives.'

He chose Lord Home to succeed him because he was an earl and complained, very wickedly, that Mrs Thatcher 

'has more Estonians than Etonians in her cabinet'. 

Behind a lot of Macmillan's jokes, especially the snobbish ones, one detects the bore who emptied the House when he was a backbencher and the sensitive middle-class intellectual who went to Eton, married well and hid his ambition and nerves with ham acting and a bottle of whisky a night. 



But no-one ever denied that he was a clever man and I like what he said when Mrs. Thatcher invited the Queen and all the living Prime Ministers to No. 10 to mark the 300th anniversary of the building of the house. As the photograph was being taken that appeared on all the front pages the next day, James Callaghan said,

I wonder what is the collective noun of Prime Ministers.

And Macmillan, who was 91, answered instantly,

A lack of principals.

Thankfully Bucharest still does not get very many visitors

I am delighted that Bucharest is near the bottom of cities (90th out of 132) ranked in order of number of foreign visitors, according to the recent MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index.

The Romanian capital is expected to receive at 928,028in 2014 , and they are expected to spend US$391 million. I have no idea how they know since we are only in June but they seem very exact. I wish there were fewer but there we are.

The passing of William Hague

William Hague is one of the most brilliant people in politics. When he led his party he swept the floor with Tony Blair at question time every week, though the electorate didn't care.  But when have we had a more disastrous Foreign Secretary? 

Herbert Morrison and Selwyn Lloyd were only undistinguished - Lord Halifax was much better -  Robin Cook was no good but he must be remembered with respect because he resigned over Iraq. Sir Edward Grey who took us to war in 1914? 

Mr. Hague should have been sent to the backbenches for what he did in Libya and wanted to do in Syria. But Mr Cameron was equally responsible and should have joined him.

If only Alan Watkins were still alive. Michael White, whom I always love, sums up Mr. Hague and the rest of the victims of the reshuffle here. I like this comment:

... I was in the Empress ballroom in Blackpool – everyone's favourite conference hall – when he precociously entered politics at 16 by lecturing Mrs T on how to govern when she won the coming election.

Personally, I still think he never recovered from that debut – as Judy Garland once told the Queen Mother about 'Somewhere over the Rainbow':

"Ma'am, that song ruined my life."

Constanța is being tarted up

I went to the seaside at the weekend by train as far as Constanța and came back the same way. This is much more civilised than car, especially with the new rolling stock they introduced last week. My return journey took a mere two hours unlike the three hours it used to take before the seven years it took them to rebuild the railway. 

A friend of mine who studied geology before becoming a successful businessman and who knows how they rebuilt the track said they hurried it for political reasons (they had originally promised that it would only take on year). He told me not to travel on that line in rainy weather. I pass on the warning.


The old port at Constanța is now full of restaurants. Who knew? There used to be just one terrible fish restaurant that Romanians always recommended.


This is an example of Covent Gardenisation that I guardedly approve, on the whole, though I always liked Constanța's loucheness. It was always a wicked place - one half expected to meet Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart in its broken streets - but the wickedness will remain even when they finish renovating Piata Ovidiu.


How exotic the mosque is, overlooking the port. How odd it is to think that England is now full of them. Romania's 20,000 Muslims, in the Dobrugea, which was part of Turkey until 1878, made me think Constanța Near Eastern when I first went there in 1999. Mine is the last generation of Englishmen that could forget that we have millions of Muslim fellow-countrymen - and we forgot it in the 1990s but not anymore


My taxi driver says that Mr Mazare, the 'controversial' mayor of Constanța, has done many good things and reels off a long list. Who guessed? One of the good things was to get EU funds to pay for the renovation of the old port.

A Constanțan waitress I once pursued was telling me about the smuggling mafias in the city and I naively asked her if Mr. Mazare knew about all the smuggling that went on. She said, with an innocent face,

'He has no idea.'

Back to Vama Veche

To my own surprise I decided to go to Vama Veche at the weekend and, not only that, I held to my decision.

I had a great time.

Vama Veche is where unconventional, open-minded people in a rather conventional, rather narrow-minded country go to let their hair down. In the 1980s it was simply a piece of empty beach between the last village in Romania, Doi Mai, and the Bulgarian border. it attracted nudists. Nudism was a way of asserting ones individuality in an oppressive totalitarian society.

It still is a place to escape convention and normalcy - if you want that go to Mamaia, which represents the polar opposite of what Vama is. When I got to Vama in 2000, though, my Romanian friends were complaining that there was no longer any point in going there because it was full of wooden buildings and had a concrete motel. But in those days 'the spirit of Vama' still existed.


I asked Beni who is one of the most famous Vama characters whether the spirit of Vama still survived. He said the spirit of Vama is what you make of it and this is true of course. For many Vama means beer, rock music, the famous bars on and near the beach - the most famous of all being Ştuf - even, it is rumoured, sex. It is also where a lot of young and youngish people, half of them students, some of them in their 50s and 60s, go to drink a very great deal. Much too much perhaps.


It is, I am pleased to say, not a place for people with children. Nor is it a place for television presenters, politicians or the rich. It is a place for camping or living in a caravan or slumming it in ricketty gerry-built digs. It is at once egalitarian and intellectual.


There is not much that is truly Romanian except the villages and the monasteries but Vama Veche is absolutely Romanian. It is the, in a strange way, the heart of Romania, libidinous and drunken though that heart can sometimes be at four o'clock in the morning.

Threnody

I remember coming across the word threnody and deciding it would find its way  into my Latin A Level paper. This is how A Grades are earnt. If only life were as easy as A Levels.

Was Oscar Wilde a child abuser?

I cannot quite understand why some people think of Oscar Wilde as a martyr. 

Certainly, what consenting adults do in bed should not be a crime. It's very difficult to understand why it ever was, though sodomy was a hanging offence in England until 1861 and decriminalising it between men in 1967 was unpopular with the general public. 

Lord Byron and his friends, homosexual or bisexual themselves, would visit convicted sodomites who awaited execution and jeer at them, according to something quoted in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England by Louis Crompton Faber. I hope this is not true. This story made me suspect that there is a connection between homosexuality and sadism. Other evidence suggests that Byron visited the prisoners from compassion.

By the way, Muslims who formed a political party in England to make sodomy once more a capital offence were arrested by the police last year, which does not seem quite right in a democracy. They were simply proposing a change in the law. 

Oscar Wilde was a wonderful and very lovable man and one should not be self-righteous, especially about sexual sins, but nor should he be, nor would he have wanted to be, admired for his tragic flaw, which led him to be unfaithful to his wife and to sleep with young prostitutes. They became rent boys because of poverty and, as I imagine happens to all prostitutes except at the expensive end, had their young lives gravely damaged. 

Wilde became a Catholic on his deathbed, in articulo mortis.

One of Wilde's rent-boys was 16 and a homosexual act with a boy under 18 was a crime until 1998 in England. On the other hand, after homosexuality was legalised in England in 1967 I don't think men were prosecuted because of 16 year-olds. 

But there were references at Wilde's trial to a boy who looked 14. 

The age of the boys was irrelevant in 1895 and we don't know if the boy was under 16. The chambermaid at the Savoy told Lord Queensberry's solicitors that she had seen a boy asleep in Wilde's bed aged, as far as she could tell, about fourteen, but later, in court, she said she thought the boy could have been older, could have been sixteen, eighteen or even nineteen. Who knows where the truth lies?

Had he or another prostitute been under sixteen, in our day Wilde would have been tried and convicted. The whole scandal would have been comparable to the conviction of Rolf Harris and would have been as big a scandal now as in 1895.

British society, which is obsessed by paedophilia, still has very odd double standards. If you are a famous, long dead playwright sodomising minors is alright.


Wilde's punishment (hard labour) was terribly sad, but he brought the prosecution on himself by perjuring himself, when he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for defamation after Queensberry called Wilde a 'somdomite' (sic). 

Wilde was given bail and Arthur Balfour and others gave him the opportunity to flee the country, but Wilde chose to serve his sentence. 

I feel very sorry for Wilde, who really was in that overused phrase a tragic figure, but since this, cruel and unjust as it was, was the law, there is no real reason why a man who was well connected should get off while working class men were punished. To think otherwise is outrageous.

 

In his biography Ellmann says this well-known picture is of Oscar Wilde in drag as Salome. It is not in fact Wilde but a mannish looking Hungarian actress who looked a lot like him.

Paedophilia is a word I dislike as it was invented by the child abusers themselves, but we are now stuck with it. Was Oscar Wilde a paedophile? No. Interference with young teenagers is not paedophilia, which means interfering with pre-pubescent children, and should not be confused with it, but is equally damaging. 

Abuse is more than a matter of the age of the victim though - the age and sex of the adult is also relevant. I do not think a girl of nineteen sleeping with a boy of fifteen child abuse. I have known two beautiful women of thirty who slept with underage boys - that was not abuse either. When middle aged men sleep with thirteen year-olds or fourteen year-olds it is abuse, even if they are rock stars and the girls are willing.

I know an Englishwoman who grew up in an orphanage. She told me that all the boys in the orphanage were buggered by social workers, but none of the girls were touched. She added that she was herself pretty and therefore knew whereof she spoke. 

Some argue that it seems child molesters are disproportionately male homosexuals - for example among Catholic priests. I can only say that I have known several women who were interfered with as young teenagers, with tragic consequences - one who was raped by her father and brother. She poignantly told me that she forgave her brother because boys can't help what they do when they read magazines, but could not forgive her father.

I remember the Comte de Tilly, in his wonderful memoirs, said that to start ones life by being raped was a very poor school for virtue, by which he meant chastity or sexual restraint. It is much worse than that, of course, and child abuse is a crime which affects the victims' children and their children and grandchildren.

What would Lord Curzon have said? A stick-in-the-mud reads the English newspapers

The Guardian is beyond parody, is its own parody. Here George Monbiot worries that extending life expectancy will favour the rich and not the poor. 

'Longevity science may divide us into treated and untreated.' 

It would make a dog laugh. Scientists are making strides to keep us all alive much longer and Mr. Monbiot thinks it might be unfair. 

Already, on this planet of finite resources, rich and poor are locked into unacknowledged conflict, as hyperconsumption reduces the planet's capacity to sustain life. Grain is used to produce meat rather than feed people directly; the safe operating space for humanity is narrowed by greenhouse gases, industrial pollutants, freshwater depletion and soil erosion. It's hard, after a while, to see how this could produce any outcome other than a direct competition for the means of life, which some must win and others must lose. Perhaps the rich must die so that the poor can live.

This continual worry about 'fairness', which dominated thought in the West thirty years ago, when I was at university, is a very powerful and morbid intellectual  paradigm and has given birth to a thousand bad things. We have to be conscious of it and argue against it. It is the not so distant cousin of egalitarianism, puritanism and socialism. It is one of the various things that has taken the place of the sacred in Western people's lives.

Then Messrs Hague and Osborne want a statue of the overhyped Gandhi in Parliament Square to go with Nelson Mandela. (Mandela was for years a Communist and was  always on the extreme left but at least Mandela was not England's enemy, if only because white South Africa had been given its independence from Britain before his time). By agitating for independence from Britain, which would have happened at some point in any case, Gandhi must take some of the blame for the bloodshed at partition, when up to a million people were killed in intercommunal violence. That puts the Amritsar massacre, which made Gandhi lose trust in Britain, into perspective. Like Ireland, India was only ever united under British rule and when the British left both countries partition was inevitable .

I prefer to think of Lord Curzon's attractive statue in Carlton House Terrace, which I know well. What would he think of Gandhi and Mandela outranking him? I imagine Curzon would say it was 'ghastly', said with his characteristic short Midlands 'a' sound. He considered the long 'a' middle class. (Gladstone, by the way, also used a short 'a' - we know this because of his famous assertion, 

All the world over I back the masses against the classes.

He clearly said 'classes' to rhyme with 'masses'.)

George Washington, a traitor who fought an unnecessary and unjust war against his king, is in Trafalgar Square, for some reason. I try to avert my eyes from him and instead look affectionately at the statue next to his, of King James II. New York is named after James II but New Yorkers do not seem to care about him. Cromwell, shamefully, stands in front of the Houses of Parliament across the road from Parliament Square, erected at Lord Rosebery's personal expense. The statue pleased the Nonconformists and made the Irish Catholics, rightly, furious.

Finally, yet another story of high-minded people being persecuted for refusing to provide their catering services for homosexual marriages. In this case, some brave bakers refused to make a cake saying, 

Support gay marriage. 

This is about free speech, about an Englishman's (in this case a Northern Irishman's) right to write what he likes (or not write what he does not like) on his cake. Freedom of speech, however, is not given much protection in the UK. It is another illustration, if one were needed, of the truth of A.J. Balfour's observation,

Society is constantly persecuting.

It is too late to say that the UK is, by law, a Christian country, and, anyway, it is not true: this incident took place in Northern Ireland, whereas it is only England and Scotland that have established churches and are therefore officially Christian. The Churches of Ireland and Wales were disestablished a long time ago. Still, until very recently, say the 1980s, Christianity was the basis of British public culture. Now, as far as the question of homosexuality is concerned, it is actually almost illegal to uphold what was until the late 1970s unquestioned Christian teaching in all the churches. This is a remarkable development that has been little remarked.

I never get tired of Romania, despite the shopping centres

Princess Eleonore of Schaumburg-Lippe, who is a delightful ornament to Bucharest life, has written a lovely story about the frustrations Westerners feel living in Romania. 

She is the best kind of foreigner, the kind that goes across country by bus, is as happy eating in a cheap dive as in a fancy place and mixes with everyone. She even wrote very charmingly about how she tried to integrate in Romania here. 

The worst kind of foreigner works in a big international company, mixes only with other foreigners, except for his colleagues and girlfriends, and lives in a gated compound. Another objectionable kind is the kind that has gone native in a bad way and mixes with Romanians all the time but the ones who have a lot of money and very murky business methods. 

Eleonore says all expats feel frustrated and have to leave to recharge, but I, who am here for 15 years, don't, despite the satanic malls which have sprouted all over the place like a horrible contagion. In fact I find going back to Western Europe rather depressing. An Englishman who has been in the construction business in Romania since the mid-1990s, whom I had not thitherto suspected of being a poet, told me

I don't know how it is with you, Paul, but whenever I go to England I go by TAROM to continue the Romanian experience for another three hours but, as I walk down the steps of the plane at Heathrow, I become depressed and I don't feel happy again till I walk up the steps to get on the plane back.

Back in those days, ten years ago, I completely agreed with him.  Romania changed and modernised enormously since then, though, while now, when I go home, after half a generation away, I feel like a Martian.

I remember Marc Cannizzo, here since 1993, when asked what he liked about Romania replied,

 'Everything'. 

I agreed with that. Another foreigner said he liked everything about Romania except the accounting system.  I agreed with that too. The grotesque accounting system, by the way, is not a Communist relic or a product of Romanian labyrinthine ingenuity, as you might think, but something copied from France after the revolution. After the Romanian revolution, not the French one. 

Every day every foreigner here is asked by several Romanians whether he likes it here, answers yes, very much, and is told he is crazy. And then, after two seconds, always, 

'Ah, yes, of course, the girls.'

Unless, that is, as in Eleonore's case, the foreigner is a woman.

This, you immediately understand as soon as you arrive, is a country with an incredibly low self-esteem. And this is why you get a certain amount of arrogant nationalism, because arrogance is a by-product of low self-esteem. I admit, though, that my theory does not explain why Hungarians really do consider themselves superior to their all their neighbours. 

Actually, you notice far less prickly national sensitivity here than in other Eastern European countries and when you do you are quite often talking to someone with personal problems about himself and his own life.

I do not say that age cannot wither nor custom stale Romania's infinite variety, because Romania isn't especially various, as countries go, - and certainly much less so than pluralistic, multicultural England. And passing years and the economic growth they bring are certainly withering many of the things I most like about Romania. I hate the shopping centres and cling to the alimentar, the local grocery shop, where in defiance of economics things are actually cheaper than at the supermarket. I don't like the way Bucharest markets, where everyone shopped when I came here in the 1990s, have dwindled, as people shun them for the hypermarkets. In any case, when, for some reason (so that some people could make money, I imagine) they were covered over the life went out of them, from my always aesthetic point of view. I miss the wonderful ecological fruit and vegetables that are being replaced by flavourless, brightly coloured imports, as the countryside dies. I don't like the clever boys in sports cars who think it cool to jump the lights and I certainly don't warm to the politicians. No, I do not warm to them at all. Still, I do love so much about this country, though now with the kind of love one feels for a wife rather than a girlfriend. It's a different love altogether, of course, from the love one feels for ones motherland.


I used to think that in Romania you either got to like constant problems or you went mad. But now I find there are not so many problems. Partly this is because life is much easier these days than it used to be and perhaps because I have now come ashore on the broad complacent shoals of middle age. For many many years I found it a constant delight being in Romania, but now I am used to it, it seems normal and, alas, the country has become much more normal. A bit boring in fact - for what is normal but another word for boring? - but then something happens to remind you of how special this place is.


In no other country in the world do people have such distrust and lack of respect for their countrymen, but I love Romanians, starting with the people who suffered under communism, the intellectuals, the people who try to preserve the good things about the past, the people who go on pilgrimages and love their country's medieval history (but that last item encompasses almost everyone here who can read and write, thanks to Communist history teaching). 

I am not undiscriminating. In fact, I love to discriminate. For example, I much prefer the people who holiday in Vama Veche or Doi Mai to those who like Mamaia. I like the people who hike in the mountains or go to the delta or to look at monasteries best of all. I was told when I first came here in 1998 that all nice Romanians are monarchists and I have found it to be true, with a very few exceptions. 


Romania's great quality is how human she is - which is another way of saying how old fashioned she is, because modernity is, of course, an essentially dehumanising process. What is human can never be boring or predictable.


People find in other people the things they are able to find, the things they have in themselves. They recreate other people in their own image. The same applies to countries too. When one goes abroad, whether to travel or to live, one is looking for a country in which one finds oneself, that reflects ones soul.

I am very lucky in having found in Romania almost exactly what I want.

Ilfov living standards are 105% of EU average

I just came from a meeting with Irish diplomat David Costello, who told me that the standard of living of Ilfov, the county that surrounds Bucharest, is an astonishing 105% of the E.U. average.

Foreign investors, he says, should not pay attention to the average wage statistics in Romania because they take into account the many millions of extremely poor people, the peasants who are impoverished subsistence farmers. David might have added that in any case in the countryside a real cash economy scarcely exists, neighbours barter things and few declare their incomes to the taxman.

David is busy setting up the Romanian-Irish Business Association which will open with a party in September. No doubt that will be good craich.

A new caliphate arises in the east

Finally, thirteen years after terrorists attacked the USA to restore the Caliphate, someone announces that he is Caliph. It all reads like a sequel to Greenmantle. I imagine thriller writers are busy trying to emulate non-fiction.

Can anyone declare himself Caliph? 

Is there a job description?

The Janissaries used to choose them, or rather used to choose the Ottoman Sultans. Many of these were half-Albanian as Albanian wives were esteemed for their beauty and I think an Albanian Caliph might be nice. Albania could do with a boost and an Albanian one would probably drink wine. And Albania hopes to join the EU. On the other hand, if being female and Christian were no bar, Queen Elizabeth II is said to be a descendant of Mahomet, by way of King Peter the Cruel of Portugal, though this is not certain.

Actually, what is happening in Syria and Iraq is another act in the tragedy. Nothing is funny about it or rather the humour is black. It drips with Gibbonian irony.

This very informative link says that the Ottoman Sultan's claim to be caliph was very slight and the Sultan only claimed to be Caliph as late as 1880.  I've read quite a lot of books about Ottoman history without realising this. The Mahdi and other Muslim leaders, despite their providential claims, bit the dust and few take seriously Mullah Omar's claim to be caliph, wherever he is.

This latest pretender seems like a true psychopath, who kills household pets for fun. As I write this it occurs to me to wonder what the press, had it existed in their day, would have made of the 'four righteous caliphs' who spread Mahometanism across the Middle East and North Africa after Mahomet's death. They were certainly Islamists and fanatics, without a doubt. They created the Muslim world. That is if we believe the traditional account. A few revisionist scholars have suggested that the empire came first and the religion later.

Inside the evil mind of Jimmy Savile

Oliver James wrote an interesting article in the Observer about what made Jimmy Savile the way he was. A good question that I have not seen asked but though the article is worth reading Dr. James's answers are not very convincing.


it reminds me of two female psychopaths whom I knew. Both were highly intelligent Romanian lawyers who wanted to get into politics. Both knew they were psychopaths, fantasised about violence but contented themselves by causing harm in legal, non-violent ways and one of them told me that in a relationship with a man 10% of the fun was sex and 90% came from working out how to cause him pain and harm him, preferably lastingly.

The recent research that I have read about suggests that it is still generally considered very likely that psychopathy is in large part caused genetically. Psychopaths' brains differ from the brains of normal people but this means nothing as the brain continues to grow and change in childhood. The psychopaths I knew certainly struck me as being utterly different from normal human beings in a way that suggested a genetic difference, but the same would be true of autists and other kinds of people too. In fact the only hard evidence would be if two identical twins were brought up in very different environments and both were or only one was a psychopath. 

What we do know is that since Hitler there is a huge disinclination to admit the importance of genetics  and therefore scientists, who are as frightened of being politically incorrect as everyone else, are inclined to downplay genetics too much. (Homosexuality is an exception to this rule, though - liberals want to believe homosexuality has a genetic cause.)


Oliver James' last sentence exposes the idiocy of liberalism:

The only way to have avoided a person of Savile's psychology would have been a society that puts the needs of every small child first. In that case, his relationship with his mother would be noticed and appropriate help provided.

Idiocy and worse than idiocy. The idea that the state can detect incipient psychopaths in the cradle is actually a terrifying one, truly worthy of Brave New World.


Click here for what I wrote about Savile as a psychopath when the scandal first burst.

Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson: we should not worry about the tabloids but about the police

There is an outbreak of one of those periodical fits of morality to which the English are prone because one prominent journalist in England  has been found guilty of telephone hacking and another famous one has been acquitted.

Of course telephone hacking is a crime - and I suppose it is moderately serious - but nothing like the monstrous thing people pretend. 

I was appalled that The News of the World hacked the Prince and Princess of Wales's lines all those years ago and printed what they heard, but no-one else in England cared about this - it was hacking the voicemail of the parents of a murdered child that incensed my countrymen and brought this out into the open.

A raft of journalists have recently been  arrested for corruption, not telephone hacking, under a nineteenth century law that has hardly ever been enforced. Journalists have been paying the police and public servants ever since there was a police and a press. Every media organisation has done this forever. The Telegraph did it to gain insider knowledge of the MPs' expenses scandal and everyone is pleased they did, except the MPs. 

The Met were anxious to pin something on Rupert Murdoch after Sir Paul Stephenson was forced to  resign as commissioner on account of the scandal. This is the reason Andy Coulson was indicted and is going to gaol.

The important conclusion to draw from this is that the press does not need regulating. Things like hacking are already illegal. The second important important conclusion to draw is that the police in England are very much driven by a desire to enhance their own image. This is why, after their appalling their inability to bring to book people like Jimmy Savile a flurry of ageing celebrities have been brought to trail for interfering with minors. Many of them have got off because of insufficient evidence but the conviction of Rolf Harris and Max Clifford makes this look less like a way of saving the police's face. It is clear that the police nowadays, to use a cliche, have their own agenda. We saw that with the police conspiracy to destroy the career of a  cabinet minister, Andrew Mitchell, by telling a pack of lies. 

The police force now seems highly politicised and very authoritarian. Britain is becoming a democratic police state (democratic in the sense that elections are unrigged but not in the sense that common law English freedoms are in good health).

Everything dances

“Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.” (Maya Angelou) 

This is very true. Except for me. 

I try to dance but give up when as inevitably happens someone takes me by the shoulders and tells me 'Paul, let me teach you how to dance'. 

I was also told by two people recently that I clap against the beat of the music. Both commented that they had never observed anyone do that before. It seems that I am aryhthmic.

I do not repine. It seems that I am different from everyone else in many ways. I speak, hold my pen and think in a way that is unlike other people. This I see is a huge privilege. Not being about to whistle or dance are of no importance in comparison.

The nicest compliment I ever received was from someone who told me I was 

'born in outer space and have never landed on earth'. 

But that was many years ago and Romania was the earth on which I have sort-of landed.

As for dancing, it has always been clear to me that life is a dance, not an algorythm, whatever that is, or a rational chain of logic. Politics is a dance and so is love, so is history. A dance to the music of time, in Poussin's words.

The bullring in Barcelona may become Europe's biggest mosque

The Emir of Qatar is said to have agreed to pay two billion pounds to convert Barcelona's bullring into a 40,000-capacity mosque, the biggest in Europe, by 2020, if the city council approves the project.  

The Islamic reconquest of Spain is to be by cheque book not sword. It is probably inevitable now, but it is very sad.

Gypsygate: the President's brother and the underworld

The Romanian presidency was created in 1992 to allow Ion Iliescu to dominate politics without the dictatorial powers of his predecessor, Nicolae Ceausescu. On paper, Romania’s president has only circumscribed powers (foreign policy, defence and the intelligence services are his domains) but because he is elected directly by the people, in the same way that the French president is, he has a great deal of political authority. 

Romanian politics is therefore eternally about the friction between the Prime Minister and the President who appoints him, even where they come from the same political camp. When they belong to different parties (the president is required to resign from his party on election to office, but it is a legal fiction that he is non-partisan) the friction becomes all-out war. At least, it has in the case of the current President Traian Basescu.

Twice this had led to his suspension from office, impeachment and a referendum on whether to dismiss him. In both cases Basescu hung on. Mr. Basescu is a political Houdini who won the presidency by a whisker when everyone expected him to lose in 2004 and held onto it after his rival declared victory five years later. He almost seems politically indestructible but he will leave the presidency for the last time at the end of this year. 

It may be that his political reputation of this most divisive of figures will be so tarnished by the latest scandal that he will be for his last few months a lame duck. But Mr. Basescu does not have a lame duck sort of personality. Nor is Romania a country that is easily shocked. The great historian Nicolae Iorga was not far wrong when he said 

‘In Romania it is impossible to lose your reputation’.

So it will probably prove with Traian Basescu.

It seems that the president’s brother Mircea was running a thriving business in Constanta, Romania’s notoriously corrupt port on the Black Sea, using his access to political power. At one time his telephone did not stop ringing but latterly he had not been doing so well. He has now been arrested for allegedly receiving €250,000 in order to influence the judges to release a convicted underworld figure, Sandu Anghel, a gypsy known to those in the circles in which he moves as ‘Bercea Mondial’. Anghel was convicted in May 2011 for attempting to kill his nephew, Ionut Anghel, known as ‘Mercedes’ after a family argument at Anghel's bar. Anghel's son Florin, known as 'Ambasador' was gaoled as an accomplice to the crime. Mircea Basescu does not deny receiving the money from Florin Angel – he was taped doing so – but says it was a repayment of a loan.

No-one seems surprised or shocked – Romanians expect this kind of thing from their politicians.

Mircea Basescu’s wife apologised publically to the president and the country for her and her husband’s inability to “live up to the level of the office and rank” they reached and explained that the reason that she and her husband were close friends with Anghel and his family was in an attempt to combat racial prejudice against gypsies. Mircea Basescu became godfather (a very close, familial role in Romania) in 2010 to Bercea Mondial’s granddaughter, a fact that was in the papers, along with a list of serious criminal allegations as long as your arm against Mr Anghel and members of his family.

Mircea Basescu looks as if he is a (very) Romanian version of a long tradition of embarrassing relatives of political leaders. One thinks, if one is old enough, of Billy Carter, as well as of Roger Clinton and Tony Blair’s father-in-law, Tony Booth. But it is not only in Romania that  family members profit from politicians. Sir Mark Thatcher made his career working for Middle Eastern businessmen because of who his mother was. Gordon Brown's brother, quite innocently, worked in public relations lobbying for nuclear power.

An audio-tape of Mircea Basescu accepting the alleged bribe came to light on a TV channel owned by Mr. Basescu’s great foe the controversial businessman Dan Voiculescu and has led the Prime Minister to demand the president’s resignation. In fact, there is no smoking gun, no evidence that the president did anything to help Anghel and the fact that Anghel remains behind bars is circumstantial evidence in the other direction. (I wouldn't give much for his chances of early release now.) However, the story is being used not just to wound or destroy the president – he will soon leave the political stage anyway - but to break the anti-corruption prosecutors who have succeeded in securing the conviction of a long list of very rich and powerful people for corruption including the former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase and many others. Anghel is said to have claimed to have bribed the new head of the anti-corruption agency DNA) herself. DNA is the organisation which is arresting and successfully prosecuting so many famous and powerful establishment figures.

Even if the story that the gypsies tell about bribing the president’s brother were to be proven true it would not reflect well on them, but this has not stopped the flamboyant Mayor of Constanta, Radu Mazare, from publicly thanking the gypsies for having saved Romania. As a token of his esteem he has allowed gypsy vendors who sell corn puffs on the seafront of Constanta to do so free of tax. Mr. Mazare, who has a lurid reputation, was himself recently arrested on charges of corruption.

This is the paradox of Traian Basescu’s presidency. Under his leadership a lot has been done to reduce corruption, a lot of powerful and famous people who were guilty have been sent to gaol, yet very few indeed of those people belonged to the President’s camp or the political parties he favours.

Traian Basescu has always been a very destructive rather than a creative politician. Many usually well-informed people I have spoken to say that he himself is no saint – in the Romanian expression ‘is not the church door’. My view is that the political parties are really all one party which exists largely to enrich the politicians and their clients. They are pockets in the same pair of trousers. However, Mr. Basescu’s inability to get on peaceably with much or most of the political class, or the shadowy ‘structures of power’ which took over Romania after 1989, is his great merit. Let us hope that creative destruction continues after he retires.

Ed Miliband is not a man

Somebody in England - I remember it was a woman - said recently that the trouble with Ed Miliband, the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, was that he did not yet entirely know who he was. I think this is right.

This, I think, is the quality I most look for in candidates when I interview them. It is closely linked to being 'a man' or 'a woman' - as opposed to not having grown up.

I remember I read once, and was greatly irked by it, that the world needs more grown-ups. It is, alas, true. I still love free spirits, as I did in my twenties, but to be a truly free spirit you must be a man or a woman, a grown-up. You might not understand yourself but you must know who you are. What you are determines what you do and is determined by what you have done.

The only other British politician, that I can remember, who was similarly unimpressive as a man (many were equally unimpressive as politicians) was Norman Lamont. Like Ed Miliband Norman Lamont was 'uncooked'. He always seemed like a student politician even when Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

Ed Miliband, though a former Cabinet minister, is a nerd and he is almost a jerk. 

Michael Dukakis may have been too. When John Major became Prime Minister a writer in the Guardian likened  him to Major Major in 'Catch 22' whose 

only impressive quality was his unimpressiveness - in a room full of unimpressive people Major Major stood out as less impressive than the rest.

But John Major seemed benign, whereas Ed Miliband does not. Someone on Twitter said

Ed Miliband is exactly the kind of nerd who, once he's in with the cool kids, would egg them on to stick the boot into someone weaker.

As I lived abroad for so many years, it is hard for me to comment on British politicians since 1997 but I heard the astonishing interview on the radio when Foreign Secretary David Miliband simply giggled when asked if he was trying to oust Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It may be that nerdiness and other bad qualities are in the Miliband genes. We know that their father was a bad 'un.

Antonescu made walking in the street in shirt sleeves a crime

Last night before going out for a delightful dinner with Dennis Deletant I reread part of his book on Marshal Antonescu, Hitler's Forgotten Ally. It's very good and I recommend it.

I had forgotten that Marshal Antonescu made walking in the street in shirt sleeves an offence punishable by imprisonment. Several people went to gaol for this. Part of me (the fascist part that was a little boy in the 1960s and disliked long hair and floral shirts) almost approves, but no, this was wrong.

On the other hand I shall always love Dr. Salazar for preventing Coca Cola from selling their revolting drink in Portugal. 

I can't help being pleased, too, that that bloodstained old brute General Franco refused to let Protestants build churches in Spain on the ground that they were heretics. 

A propos of Franco my views are nuanced. Unlike Salazar, Franco was a bad man, even if he did go to Mass every day, but his Republican enemies were worse. 

The Spanish Civil War was a test run for the same Communists who took power in Eastern Europe after 1945. More than 500 out of the fairly small total number of Romanian Communists fought on the Republican side, including Walter Roman, Petre Roman's father, and Petre Borilă. If you doubt that Franco was greatly superior to the Communists, compare how Franco left Spain in 1975 with how the Communists left Romania.

I miss Pope Benedict XVI but Pope Francis is evangelising the world

Were the mafiosi in a state of grace before the Pope excommunicated them? 

In any case, excommunication is a good idea. (Should the Pope excommunicate Father Hans Kung too? No, I say with deep regret, because that would send the wrong signal to the media.)

Did the Pope say it breaks his heart when he sees a Catholic driving a flash car? I'm quoting Julie Burchill. I found myself hoping it was true though I was not sure that this remark would be theologically sound. On reflection I think what she was thinking of was his disgust at Catholic prelates living luxuriously, with which I thoroughly agree, if they do.

The things the pope says may have much less substance than at first sight appears.  I am still spellbound with admiration and affection for Pope Benedict XVI and am well aware that many conservative Catholics are horrified by the new Pope for saying odd things ad lib when talking to random people - like 

Loneliness and youth unemployment are the two worst things in the world.

(What about sin?)

Still, what is absolutely certain is that he is having a wonderful success in getting the Church's message to large numbers of people who were always ardent anti-Catholics, of whom Julie Burchill is one. I have lost count at how many ardent atheists or anti-Catholics have burbled their admiration for him. So he is a Good thing, even though he seems to make things up on the hoof. 

I just wish he loved the Latin Mass more, in its modern or Tridentine form. 

I hate materialism but I am glad there are Catholic dukes and princes. Flash cars might be immoral. So, I often think, is living above the average wage, though I know a thousand moral theologians have explained that this is not so. On the other hand I still intend to get a Savile Row suit. I sense there is an inconsistency here.

Who are today's good writers?

Who are the good writers writing today whom I haven't heard of?

Jonathan Meades is probably a very good writer. He is only known to me from a television programme he made years ago about modern architecture where he visited a modern church and described its architectural style - it might have been Catholic or Protestant and was built in the universal modern style, meaning white, bare, and the unstained glass let in plenty of light. He said it embodied the idea of 

'God the unmighty, God the ever such a nice bloke'. 

I thought that was brilliant. It is at 1 minute, 56 seconds on this clip.

(By the way, there is no theological reason, as far as I know, why modern churches are not dark and gloomy. I think, to quote Iris Murdoch, that they let too much light in on mystery.)

Here in Romania there is a wonderful novelist called Mircea Cartarescu whom I heard on Monday say that the universe is one thing and we are all its eyes. He is a genius.

I am very out of touch because away from my country for fifteen years. When i was in England ideas were constantly being bounced off me. Here in Romania nothing of the sort happens because I am a foreigner in a country where I only half understand the language, even though I am fluent - and also because the internet takes up the time I once spent on books and on TV so I do not read much. Television which I haven't watched for at least ten years is terribly valuable -it keeps you in touch with reality. The internet does not, because the internet lets you choose what to read.

Mircea Eliade on the myth of Aryans

I am finally reading Mircea Eliade's short but brilliant essay 'The Fate of Romanian Culture ' and - as whenever I dip into Eliade - I am lost in wonder at his genius. I do not know if he is a reactionary or a modernist or both but I think I can learn much from his ideas about tradition.


I was also fascinated to read this from Eliade's diary about the origins of the stupid idea of Aryans.

stig wikander told us some fascinating things on the history of “aryanism” in europe. he found the origin of the idea of the superiority of the aryans in the anti-clericalism of jules michelet and edgar quinet. it is because they wanted to disparage christianity (directly or indirectly) that michelet and quinet exalted the vedas and “aryan wisdom”. their anti-semitism and that of their admirers was only a reflection of their anticlericalism. their aryanophilia was of a religious nature. the brother of the celebrated sanskritist eugène burnouf, emile, who was a professor at nantes, wrote a history of religions in which he demonstrated the important and the antiquity of the vedas. the book had an enormous influence. even mallarmè read it and affirmed that homer had ruined epic poetry. but what came before homer? he was asked. the vedas, answered mallarmè.
The aryanising anticlericalism had no connection with the political anti-semitism that arose later. the origins of this anti-semitic current are located in austria-hungary and in the germany of the second half of the nineteenth century.

This is so interesting. I suppose it vaguely supports my assumption (I am very ignorant about them) that the nineteenth century racists like Gobineau, who was a philo-Semite and a freethinker, were not conservatives but progressives. 

Eliade I believe took Gobineau seriously as a thinker, at least in an essay he wrote in 1930 - in which he took seriously later anti-semites like H.S. Chamberlain and even Alfred Rosenberg. There is more about this here but, as always on the net, one does not know whether what one reads is true.

Chamberlain and the Social Darwinians were very different indeed from liberals like Michelet but they were progressives of a sort and, like Marx, they were pseudo-scientists. Isaiah Berlin claimed De Maistre as the forefather of the fascists but the arch-reactionary De Maistre (another philo-Semite) would have abominated all the Nazis stood for and all Chamberlains's theories about Aryan superiority over Jews.

The Nazis were certainly not conservative. They were certainly not left-wing either, at least not for the reasons American conservatives assert that they were, assuming as the latter foolishly do that conservatism is about freedom and free market economics. They were, however, so it has always seemed to me, progressives, believers in modernity and change, in eugenics and science. As nationalists, even though Goebbels said in 1933 that 

'This is the end of 1789'

they were, in fact, heirs to the French Revolution.

Rod Liddle's Selfish Whining Monkeys

The changes in London since I lived there in the 1980s are not so enormous as I would expect - or perhaps I didn't see them. In Hatchard's, I bought Rod Liddle's new book 'Selfish Whining Monkeys' to see how someone my age saw things. I think Liddle is a writer of genius, but the book is very disappointing. I had no idea he could write badly. People who think him right-wing do not know him, of course, but his socialism is not the reason why the book fails. It is baggy and badly written, like sitting next to someone garrulous, foul-mouthed and pretty dull at a pub or, more likely, at a media party. It is sad because Liddle can write astonishingly well and does, week after week, in The Spectator.

It reminded me of what some reviewer said about Roger Scruton's book, 'England: an Elegy', another book I confidently expected to like but didn't, 

There is always a danger of confusing one's childhood with the universe.

In fact what interested me most about the book were not the politics or the modern social history but the reflections on being in your early fifties. 

In the book Rod Liddle carefully avoided the subject of immigration and race, on which his views raise eyebrows and hackles among some people, but this did not stop his book being the occasion for this wonderful interview where two very rational women try to sweep the floor with him and fail completely. 

The book also led to a character assassination review by a bad writer, Will Self, which also concentrated on opinions about race and immigration which are not in the book. The review in The Guardian was not insightful and not well-written but it garnered many eulogies for its literary skill on Twitter and this bemuses and depresses me. However, Rod Liddle had it coming to him by making heretical statements such as this article on the dangers of increasing numbers of Muslims in Europe.

The Guardian published this week an interview with Rod Liddle in which they asked him about all this. You can judge for yourself what you think. The interview elicited the following letter from a reader.

Is the non-bigoted Rod Liddle interviewed by Simon Hattenstone (Citizen Liddle, Weekend, 14 June) the same Rod Liddle who offered the following gems in the Sun's jingoistic supplement last week: "Obviously, the best thing about being English is not being French. Or Belgian. Can you imagine that? Waking up every morning to the realisation that you're Belgian? You'd go out of your mind." And: "Apparently, the Romanians are just as proud of being Romanian as we are of being English. I know, hard to imagine. But it's true."

Personally, I think Rod Liddle is a Good Thing, though I think he has written a rather bad book.

On the other hand the man from The Independent liked it.