Escaped tiger kills man in Tbilisi

It was announced yesterday that all the big cats that escaped from Tbilisi zoo were found dead except one jaguar, but in fact the authorities had miscounted. One tiger hid in a warehouse, escaped the citywide police search and survived to kill a man this morning. 

One thinks of Hilaire Belloc's Jim and Stanley Holloway's Albert (they were eaten by lions, not tigers) but this is very sad. The full story is here.

My story in my blog on Sunday about lions and tigers, wolves and a hippopotamus wandering the streets of Tbilisi is no longer funny. It never was funny, as at least sixteen people died in the flood. Nevertheless I was making people laugh last night at a dinner party telling them about the lethargic hippo wandering the flooded streets after receiving several darts intended to make him fall asleep. 

It is a terrible story but, without wishing to show lack of respect for the dead man's loved ones, it also reminds me of this story by Graham Greene.

Things I read over the last few days

So? If I die, then I die! The loss to the world won’t be great. Yes, and I’m fairly bored with myself already. I am like a man who is yawning at a ball, whose reason for not going home to bed is only that his carriage hasn’t arrived yet. But the carriage is ready . . . farewell!
I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: Why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? . . .
There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul . . .
But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the baits of passion, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life.

Lermontov

In life, you have to rely on the past and that's called history.


Donald Trump [reported in the Economist this week] 

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

Bertrand Russell - is this true?

Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.

Bertrand Russell - I hope we all agree on that.

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

Seneca

It's odd how they name storms, but they don't name calms. There's a gentle breeze this morning. I think I'll call him Doug.

Dorothy Williams. My mother was outraged when I told her that they had stopped giving hurricanes only girls' names. I am too, even though I think it happened in 1978.

Do not marry a man unless you would be proud to have a son exactly like him.

Elissa Philips

Listen carefully to how a person speaks about other people to you.This is how they will speak about you to other people!

Elissa Philips

I look forward to the day when the Westminster Parliament is just a Council Chamber in Europe.

Kenneth Clarke, British Chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent of Minister of Finance), in the International Currency Review, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn 1996. This is why Kenneth Clarke wants Great Britain to remain in the European Union

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

Storm and floods free big game to wander the inundated streets of Tbilisi

Never let it be said that this blog is late with the news.

Tbilisi is possibly my favourite city in the world. A freak storm last night led the River Mtkvari to flood, left 12 dead, twice that number reported missing and cut the two halves of the city off from each other. 

The Tbilisi zoo was in the path of the flood. The zoo's walls fell down and the cages were broken. Three zoo workers rushed to the zoo but were drowned as they struggled to save and contain the animals. Lions, tigers, bears, wolves and a hippopotamus escaped from their enclosures. 

The report I read stated:

Last night the escaped hippopotamus made its way to what was once one the main interstate hub of the city, known as Hero’s Square. The waters have rendered the entire highway system unusable. After taking several tranquiliser darts, the hippopotamus continued to walk lethargically around the area, even eating leaves from a tree with the darts still in its neck. It was then escorted back to the zoo.

Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church has said that the Tbilisi Zoo was “founded on sin”, having been built by the Communists with the proceeds of valuables looted from the church, and this is the reason for the flood. 

I don't know about you, but I like it very much when clerics blame natural disasters on sin, even when I am thoroughly unconvinced. Too many British clergy, Anglicans but also some Catholics too, prefer to talk about global warming, rather than sin or divine wrath.

More rains are expected tonight. 

How well or badly were slaves treated in the American South?

I have stumbled on a reference to the Slave Narratives, the cumulative result of two years of in depth interviews surveying over 2,000 former slaves by the Works Project Administration under Franklin D Roosevelt. The historian Robert Fogel said that between 60 to 80 percent of the interviewees had only positive things to say about their masters and their life during slave days. I'd like to know much more about the subject. 

I remember my surprise, studying US history in my first term at university in 1980 (sooo recently), expecting historians to write about slavery in something like the spirit of 'Gone With The Wind', and finding that, though 1930s US historians did so, (I read and learnt much from Ulrich Phillips) 1970s historians compared slavery to Auschwitz and blamed slavery for black criminality and broken families more than a century later. 

Historians always write about their own age when they try to understand the past.
There were strong zeitgeist reasons for emphasising the ugliness of slavery in the 1970s, as nowadays, and strong zeitgeist reasons in the 1930s for doing the opposite. Those who espouse the spirit of the age are eventually widowed, but for Americans (and not only them) the time when they can be dispassionate about race is a long way off.

I am reading War and Peace at the moment and seeing that Russian serfs were apt to be beaten and punished (although not sold) as much as American slaves. Over a third of Russians were serfs until Tsar Alexander II liberated them in 1861. Yet we hear little of the Russian serfs or other European serfs. We hear little of the serfs and gypsy slaves in what is now Romania or of the vast numbers of slaves in the Muslim world. Slavery in America and the European colonies are at the forefront of our attention because of the colour issue, which so concerns everyone in our age.

I wrote in this post about how the former Governor-General of Jamaica, Sir Howard Cooke, who died last year, a black man, was thankful that slavery rescued Jamaicans from

Africa's black night

and gave them the benefits of British civilisation. My post links to a very interesting interview with Sir Howard Cooke, who was a truer British patriot than many or most British people, including the BNP and the fascists.

Here are some quotations from the WPA interviews with (very elderly) former slaves:

“I liked being a slave, our white folks . . . were good to us. . . . I had rather be a slave. . . . . I wish I wuz still in slavery.” 

“When I was three or four years old my mother was whipped to death by the mistress with a cowhide whip.”

“I’s heard dat some white folks wuz mean to der niggers, but our Old Masta and Miss wasn’t.”

“Give me freedom, or give me death.”

“I seed slavery from all sides. I’se seed ’em git sick and die an’ buried. I’se seed ’em sole [sold] away from der loved ones. I’se seed ’em whipped by de overseers, an’ brung in by de patrol riders. I’se seed ’em cared fo’ well wid plenty ter eat an’ clo’se ter keep ’em warm, an’ wid good cabins ter live in.”

“My white folks was good to me. I had a heep better time when I growed up than folks does now. . . . Shucks I was a heep better off.”

“Our white folks wuz rich folks. Dey live in a big white house wid roun’ posts in front. Dey give us plenty to eat and wear but dey beat on us a plenty. . . . Den one day . . . dem Yankee mens tole us de guvment would give us some land and a mule or some hosses to work wid, but we never did git nothing from dem. We wuked hard for whut we got. We wuz mighty proud of our freedom – but times is a lot harder now dan it wuz in dem times. Now we can’t git ’nough to eat and dere’s nobody to look atter us, but de white folks whut takes pity on us, and heps us sometimes. Times is gittin’ harder it seems to me.”

“After the white folks eat in the dining room, all us cullud folks eat in the kitchen, allus a plenty, which is more than we has now. Times was good then, I members back to it sometimes now, when I is glad jes’ to get a piece of bread. . . . Oh the sweet taters we did have! . . . great big winter cabbages. . . . [and] so many sides an’ hams of meat.”

Asking how well or badly slaves were treated touches a raw nerve with modern Americans. Most Europeans were serfs in the middle ages and long after in many countries. But for Americans slavery is a very emotional issue.

This is because of the collective American nervous breakdown over race and Americans' collective need to see their country as a shining city on a hill. This Protestant sense of being a chosen people, which derives from 18th century English ideas about England, is tiresome but admirable and a great source of America's moral strength - along with religiosity, patriotism, lack of irony and the American inability to be embarrassed. Slavery and the elimination of the indigenous Americans is a problem for people who believe in America's divine mission to purify the world. (So is the invasion of Mexico and a few other things, come to that.)

I am not an apologist for slavery and am proud that Great Britain abolished it in 1833. I think Dr Johnson was the greatest Englishman after Shakespeare and I love him for saying, before the American rebellion,

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Quite so. But slavery and things as bad as slavery unfortunately still exist.

What things do we accept for which our descendants will condemn us? 

Abortion? I hope so.

Falling birth-rates in European countries?

Child labour?

In the last fifty years blacks have largely stopped working in farms in the American South and Hispanic immigrants have taken their places. Children as young as twelve work legally and children as young as seven work illegally on farms, including the tobacco farms of North Carolina and Virginia, where they endanger their health picking tobacco that ends up in the factories of Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, Lorillard, Reynolds and other big producers.

Children work in tobacco farms in Malawi picking tobacco for wages of less than $10 a month. The more you look into things you find slavery and things fairly close to slavery are easily to be found, hidden in full sight.

Things I read this week

In life, you have to rely on the past and that's called history.


Donald Trump [reported in the Economist this week] 

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

Bertrand Russell - is this true?

Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.

Bertrand Russell - I hope we all agree on that.

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

Seneca

It's odd how they name storms, but they don't name calms. There's a gentle breeze this morning. I think I'll call him Doug.

Dorothy Williams. My mother was outraged when I told her that they had stopped giving hurricanes only girls' names. I am too, even though I think it happened in 1978.

Do not marry a man unless you would be proud to have a son exactly like him.

Elissa Philips

Listen carefully to how a person speaks about other people to you.This is how they will speak about you to other people!

Elissa Philips

I look forward to the day when the Westminster Parliament is just a Council Chamber in Europe.

Kenneth Clarke, British Chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent of Minister of Finance), in the International Currency Review, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn 1996. This is why Kenneth Clarke wants Great Britain to remain in the European Union

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

Ron Moody has left us

I am so sorry that Ron Moody has died. As a boy, I saw him in his one man show at the Palace Theatre, Westcliff-on-Sea, the super theatre 400 yards from our house. He was unforgettably good as Fagin in Oliver, but most of all I loved him in The Twelve Chairs, Mel Brooks' second and best film. Here he is beating up Mel Brooks.

He made his name in the stage version of Oliver, but left it after a year and turned down the offer to reprise the role of Fagin on Broadway.

I didn't want to go. I was very patriotic.

Fortunately, he did reprise the role in the later film version, for which he will always be remembered.

BBC television offered him the role of the third incarnation of Doctor Who but he turned that down too, a decision he later bitterly regretted. The part went to Jon Pertwee, but Moody would have been better.

According to the Telegraph obituary, he said,

I have failed all my life, and I’m not ashamed of it. After all, what’s so good about success? It is unhealthy. It creates a completely false sense of values

Alastair Sim unsuccessfully sued him in 1959 in the High Court, claiming Moody had imitated Sim’s famous voice to sell baked beans. Sim claimed that as a result, when he dined out, he would be asked if he wanted Heinz baked beans. Fifteen years later they performed together in a West End play. What terms they were on while doing so the history does not relate.

He was diffident with women and lived with his mother, sister, brother-in-law and three nephews till he married at the age of 61. His wife survives him, with their six children.

It's interesting that he decided to marry late in life, because that is something that, playing Fagin, he had considered doing in his famous song, Reviewing the Situation.

Victor Ponta and the deep state

Yesterday the Romanian Chamber of Deputies, as expected, voted not to lift Prime Minister Victor Ponta's immunity from criminal prosecution. 

Mr. Ponta, leader of the Social Democrats (PSD) has a skin as thick as a lizard's, that quality politicians most need. His unexpected defeat by a large margin in the Romanian presidential election last November meant most people expected him not to last long as Prime Minister. But he's still there. Now Mr. Ponta intends to carry on, despite being charged with 17 offences by the Anti-Corruption Authority (DNA). He pointed out that corruption allegations have been made by the DNA against leading opposition politicians too.

Klaus Iohannis, Romania's ethnic German President, had demanded that the Prime Minister resign for the sake of the country but I wonder whether the President really wants Victor Ponta to go. Romanian presidents have to pretend to sever all party ties when they take office but none do and Mr. Iohannis wants his 'former' party the Liberals to come to power. If I were in the President's place, I think I should prefer Mr. Ponta to remain, with the accusations hanging over his head like a sword of Damocles. If Mr. Ponta is still Prime Minister when next year's Parliamentary elections take place I imagine he has small chances of leading his party to victory. 

There is, I suppose a chance that enough PSD legislators will switch sides to enable an early election, but the legislators have paid large amounts of money to their parties for their seats and are very reluctant to pay again sooner than is necessary. Politics is very 18th century here, though Romanian politicians have much less Latin and Greek than the Whigs and Tories of Georgian England. A lot of them aren't even much good at the fiendish complexities of Romanian grammar, which is as complicated as most things in Romania.

The PSD is not really a national party. It is a confederation of local county machines, each controlled by so-called 'barons', popularly believed to be thoroughly corrupt. The party leader is leader so long as he can offer the barons a chance of winning elections and the fruits of office, particularly in the form of contracts. The PSD's only purpose is to win elections but it seems pretty bad at doing so. Mr. Ponta cannot offer them much chance of winning the 2016 election. 

If President Iohannis truly wants Mr Ponta to go I presume he will agree with the grandees in the PSD to replace Mr Ponta with someone else from the governing coalition. This would be good for the country but also good for the PSD, who thereby would be rid of an electoral liability. On the other hand, if President Iohannis wants to help the Liberals then he would favour creating a coalition from the opposition parties or leaving Mr Ponta in place.

As the Guardian in London picked up today, after interviewing Mr. Ponta (you could be forgiven for missing it if you only read the Romanian press) Mr. Ponta's immunity from prosecution only covers him for prosecution for conflict of interest while in office, not for forgery, money-laundering and tax evasion back in 2007 and 2008, the bulk of the DNA's charges. He can still therefore be prosecuted.

Ion Cristoiu, the political commentator, argues that the money with which the Liberal party paid for the demonstrations against Victor Ponta (demonstrators are often paid to demonstrate in Romania) is money that came from bribes paid in the EADS and Microsoft scandals. In fact, bribery in Romanian politics has two aspects: bribery to enrich politicians and bribery to pay the costs of running political parties. The public does not understand this distinction and in most cases politicians who receive money in bribes give some to their party and rake off some for themselves, so the distinction is unclear.

I think the young prosecutors of the DNA are doing very well indeed the job for which they are paid and uncovering corruption. They are engaged in cleaning the Augean stables. The secret service, an organisation which had immense power under Communism and still does, is the source of the information which leads the DNA to bring its charges. The secret service is, naturally, very secretive, highly political (they report to the president not the Government, an enormous source of power for the former) and pragmatic, not idealistic. 

The anti-corruption revolution which has led to so many politicians of all parties being accused of corruption and in many cases being imprisoned thus has a dual aspect. It is a very welcome sweeping out of a corrupt political class. It is also an assault on some politicians by an institution which is part of, perhaps is the centre of, what is called in Romania 'the structure of power' - the deep state that rules the country from behind the scenes.

But anyone who doubts that the DNA is a force for good should look at the other big news. Ovidiu Tender, one of the richest and most powerful men in Romania, has been sent to prison for twelve years and seven months and ordered to pay back EUR 41 million to the state. An associate has received a longer sentence. Someone else has received a lengthy term for huge corruption in the rail sector. 

The Mayor of Bucharest's personal adviser was arrested on Thursday for corruption. And so it goes.

It's only work if somebody makes you do it

It's only work if somebody makes you do it.

Calvin and Hobbes

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

Dr. Johnson

I only know of two very real ills in life, remorse and sickness.

Prince Andrey to Pierre in Tolstoy's War and Peace

There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art and knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

No man can please others who does not please himself.

Frederic Harrison.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. 

Noël Coward. This is very true about politics in our day.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

David Hume 

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

Gore Vidal

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Christopher Morley

Not heav'n itself upon the past has power
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Horace, translated by Dryden

More than 100,000 Romanian immigrants registered to work in the UK last year

The number of Romanians who registered to work in Britain in 2014, after work restrictions were lifted more than trebled to over 150,000 people, according to figures released this week.

I had previously seen a lot of reports that far fewer Romanians emigrated to the UK in 2014 than feared by the British tabloid newspapers. Months ago, the Guardian reported that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK rose from 205,000 in September 2013 to 252,000 in September 2014, an increase of 47,000, which was much the same as the rise of 45,000 in the corresponding period in 2012-13. In other words, nothing to see, move along. UKIP was accused of scaremongering but it seems UKIP, who had no means of knowing what the figures would be, were perfectly realistic. Although people accused the Daily Mail of misleading its readers, it was Guardian readers who may have been misled.

Many Romanians are offended that some people in England would like to limit Romanian immigration, which puzzles me, as Romanians and other East Europeans have a strong sense of national identity themselves. I have heard very many Romanians complain about the number of immigrants in the UK and that they think London too cosmopolitan. I have also heard Romanians complain about the behaviour of Romanian gypsies in England and say it's unfair that the English confuse gypsies with Romanians, just because the gypsies happen to be Romanian citizens. (For Romanians ethnicity counts much more than citizenship). 

But attempts to restrict Romanian immigrants hurt Romanian pride and feeds into their painful national inferiority complex.

Incidentally, I know a Romanian woman acquaintance who moved to London about five years ago and who chatting on email told me 

“I saw Romanian gypsies being disgusting around London and felt ill- like puking. So dirty and uncivilized! Defecating near Marble Arch! I felt pure disgust! I am not religious but I pray God that Britain does not open the gates to them.”

I don't share her attitude towards poor Romanian working class immigrants - she also complained about "sluttish Romanian waitresses" - but I find it odd that Romanians, who mostly hate gypsies, now complain about discrimination. I suppose it's the intellectual fashion.

Personally, for years, I always thought the only thing I didn't like about Romania was the fact that it wasn't the Hermit Kingdom it had been under Communism and there were such large numbers of people, like me, from Western Europe here, though most of us do good.

Most Romanian immigrants in England also do a lot of good, in my opinion, in England, although a small minority of Romanian citizens are responsible for worryingly high crime figures, to which Rod Liddle has drawn attention. But though Romanians are, mostly, very good immigrants, when governments decide immigration policy what is important, or should be, are numbers and national identity. 

Of course, in this case, governments do not decide and the EU does instead. And, thanks to the EU, Romanians' right to work in the UK is very secure.

Meanwhile, Romania is dying. Her birth rate is too low to maintain the population, the abortion rate is very high, though much lower than it was, millions have left and millions more want to. Romania will shortly have to consider whether to import immigrants in large numbers and if so from where to take them.

What will Victor Ponta do next?

It seems timely, since he has been accused of seventeen counts of corruption, to republish the article on Victor Ponta that I wrote shortly after he lost the presidential election last November. Like the commentators in the press, I didn't expected Victor Ponta still to be in office seven months later, despite his party's parliamentary majority and despite the fact that there is no reason in principle why losing the presidency should means he loses the premiership. There is a strong reason in principle why plagiarising his doctoral thesis means he should have stood down, but he didn't, so I do not expect him to resign now unless, or rather until, forced to do so.


19th November, 2014: What will Victor Ponta do next?

What will happen in Romania next, after the surprise election of Klaus Iohannis (his name is really Johannis) as President?

What will happen to Victor Ponta, who lost the presidency to almost everyone’s surprise?

Nothing, for the time being. He will continue being Prime Minister, despite the change of president. It is the Government not the president that rules Romania. Like his mentor Adrian Nastase, who was the PSD candidate for the presidency ten years ago (and who is now out on parole), Victor Ponta never wanted to be president and wanted to continue as prime minister. So everything is peachy. Except it’s not.

Victor Ponta though a clever man is not leader of the Social Democrat party (PSD) or Prime Minister because of his own strength of personality or sheer stature. He is not what in British politics is called a big beast of the jungle. Only two Romanian politicians really qualify for that description: Ion Iliescu, who overthrew Ceausescu and had him shot, and Traian Basescu. Victor Ponta, by contrast, was chosen as a young (too young to have been a communist) and telegenic front man for the PSD.

For those who do not follow Romanian politics, I should explain that the PSD is not a political party in the sense understood in Western Europe. It is the continuation of the old Communist Party by other means and without the left-wing ideology. It is not monolithic or genuinely national but is a federation of parties organised in each Romanian county. Each country organisation is in effect a business, a conspiracy or, if we are to call spades spades, a criminal network. Mr. Ponta is leader as long as he can balance the competing interests of the leaders of the party in the countries (the so called ‘barons’) and offer them a chance of winning the 2016 parliamentary election.

Mr. Ponta said that any PSD candidate for the presidency would get 40% of the votes. It was up to him to get another 10%. The fact that Mr. Ponta won only 45% of the votes and therefore lost the presidency does not mean he cannot lead his party to victory in 2016. The way he lost Sunday’s election probably does. 

Victor Ponta fought a very old-fashioned campaign that seemed to be tailored to the unsophisticated, nationalistic Romanian electorate of the early 1990s, offering pension increases and public works. Playing the racial and religious cards against his German Protestant opponent is what everyone would expect him to do, though it seems to have been ineffective. No one was surprised by his shameless campaign to bribe electors with public money.  Electoral fraud which may have stolen up to 900,000 votes has not made a big impact here, through it certainly should have done. But the sight of very long queues of Romanians outside embassies and consulates, queueing all day in the cold, in many cases never to be allowed to vote, were crucial for winning the election for Mr. Iohannis and will permanently tarnish Mr. Ponta’s image. And these things happened not only on Sunday but in the first round of the election two weeks before. They happened because the diaspora is overwhelmingly opposed to the PSD. Those people were not queueing all day to vote for Victor Ponta. Mr. Ponta defended the way in which voting took place abroad on television in his debates with Mr. Iohannis. The contempt for the viewing public was unmistakable.

Remember that Mr. Ponta was discovered to have plagiarised his doctoral thesis. Then there are lurid, melodramatic allegations on the net about his connection with a young prosecutor who committed suicide back in 2002, while investigating Adrian Nastase. If I held stocks in Mr. Ponta I should sell them. That is what the barons are thinking too.

Anti-corruption revolution in Romania may be about to overthrow the government

Laura Codruta Kovesi, the young prosecutor who heads Romania’s National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA), yesterday staged her most dramatic coup. She charged the Social Democrat Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, with seventeen offences including money laundering, forgery, embezzlement and tax evasion. Forgery is a much more serious matter than plagiarising ones doctoral thesis. If found guilty, the Prime Minister faces gaol and the DNA are painstaking people, whose allegations rarely fail to stick in court.

The study of Romanian politics since the 1989 revolution properly belongs not to historians or political scientists but to criminologists. Bribery, blackmail, spying and prostitution have been the pillars on which post-1989 Romanian politics rested. Romanians know that and, if some trusting people didn’t, the revelations of the last six months will have convinced them. 

Miss Kovesi is the Joan of Arc of Romania, doing battle with the, often very high-profile, corrupt politicians and officials whose stranglehold on public and business life in Romania everyone thought was impossible to break. Not entirely but largely due to her a remarkable revolution is taking place in Romania. A real revolution, comparable to the one in December 1989 that was stolen by the Communists. 

Four party leaders have been put in prison and very many other famous politicians and businessmen. Arrest follows arrest. So many of the country’s most famous and powerful men and a few women have been investigated, arrested, found guilty and sent to gaol that even people who follow the news avidly find they can’t remember who’s in gaol and who’s in Parliament. 

The Microsoft scandal, in which large numbers of politicians allegedly took sometimes huge kickbacks for contracts at hugely inflated prices, implicates so many people that it reads like a Who’s Who of Romania, a sort of arriviste-criminal-Romanian version of the Almanac de Gotha. 

In the second half of last year a great number of leading names were arrested. When I asked people why I was told it was because Laura Kovesi, who became head of the DNA in 2013 and electrified the organization, was rushing to finger as many people as she could while President Traian Basescu was still in office. Everyone expected that Victor Ponta of would replace him and would prevent the DNA continuing its work. Instead, unexpectedly, he lost to Klaus Iohannis. 

After that, the DNA went into overdrive, making one high-profile arrest after another. I ask well-informed Romanians in all walks of life why this is happening suddenly and everyone gives me the same answer: 

I don’t know.

Mr. Iohannis had become president pledging to clean up the political class but, without his doing anything, it seems like the political class is about to be swept away, swept in many richly-deserved cases into prison.

Victor Ponta’s party, the PSD, is home to more of the people incriminated by the DNA than the other parties. One reason is because it is the largest, one because it is notoriously corrupt, one might be because the other parties have more swing with the secret service that provides the DNA with evidence, but this, though possible, seems inherently unlikely. 

Whatever the reason, Mr. Ponta has up to yesterday given the DNA his support and ensured that the parliamentary immunity of most PSD members of parliament implicated in crimes has been lifted. In February he assured the Economist that those accused of corruption would not be permitted to enjoy parliamentary immunity. Now he is relying on parliamentary immunity himself. 

In the case of Elena Udrea, a political opponent of both the ruling party and the main opposition party, parliament met on Saturday to lift her immunity. She was taken off in handcuffs to a prison cell which, the press said, she shared with several others including a porno actress and a rat. Handcuffing well-known politicians, who are unlikely to run from the police to make a getaway, is one of the operatic things about Romanian politics. We shall see if Mr. Ponta is led off in handcuffs to a prison cell. His predecessor Adrian Nastase was, twice. 

Parliamentary immunity was lifted for most PSD politicians but not for two or three and not for Dan Sova, the Minister of Transport. The struggle to lift Mr. Sova’s immunity has been the big political story here for some time and thereby hangs our tale. 

Mr. Sova and Mr. Ponta, who are both lawyers, go back a long way, but Mr. Sova didn’t keep his immunity because Victor Ponta has a soft spot for his old confrere. Mr. Ponta does not have soft spots for people. He’s not that kind of man. It's true that both men come from Oltenia and regional loyalties are important in Romania's semi-tribal society (think Saddam Hussein trusting people from Tikrit). Still, that was not a reason. It was much more likely that Mr. Sova was protected because he knew things. 

Yesterday the DNA suggested what those things might be and accused him of making payments to Mr. Ponta back in 2008 against receipts, but without Mr. Ponta having done any work in return. Money-laundering, in other words. According to the DNA, in 2011 he and Mr. Sova then forged documents purporting to show that Mr. Ponta had done some work in exchange for the money. 

As soon as the DNA made its accusations and summoned Mr Ponta to answer questions, President  Iohannis asked Mr. Ponta to step down. The Prime Minister has refused. The President could suspend the Prime Minister from office (he cannot dismiss him) but has chosen not to do so. We’ll see how long this stand-off lasts. If Mr. Ponta resigns the President chooses his successor and the President  is from the opposition Liberal Party, so the Social Democrats are supporting the Prime Minister faute de mieux.

Mr. Ponta once compared the DNA to the Securitate, Nicolae Ceausescu's feared secret police. That was years before he lent the DNA his insincere support. Yesterday, he said that only Parliament could depose him. He was eerily reminiscent of Mr. Ceausescu saying at his trial, twenty-five years ago,

I do not answer, I will only answer questions before the Grand National Assembly. I do not recognise this court. The charges are incorrect.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, as Marx said of the French revolution of 1848. Victor Ponta will not die before a firing squad, like Mr. Ceausescu, but his political life is probably up. 

I said that after he lost the presidential election last November, but this time I am right. I think.

Viktor Orban: There is no way back from a multicultural Europe

Hungarians whom I trust, who are apolitical and not left-wing, tell me Viktor Orban the Prime Minister is a disaster for Hungary: corrupt and authoritarian. I assume they are right. However, bad people can say and do things that are very good and good people can do the reverse. It happens every day.

Viktor Orban has just refused to take an allocation of asylum seekers and said this, which is very true. I wish all European leaders were saying it.

There is no way back from a multicultural Europe. Neither to a Christian Europe, nor to a world of national cultures.

No doubt he is saying these things to win votes from Jobbik, a party further to the right than his, but he is stating the obvious, saying something which is the most important thing to be said about our age and something I never hear said. As always, people accept lies from politicians but are outraged by the truth.

After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, everyone was horrified by the murders but few people drew the conclusion that (Muslim) immigration into Europe ought to be curtailed. Mr. Orban then was in trouble for saying:

We don't want to see significantly sized minorities with different cultural characteristics and backgrounds among us. We want to keep Hungary as Hungary.

Though this is something that Churchill and De Gaulle would strongly have agreed with, in respect of England and France.

The sad truth is that Europe, as a whole, must refuse to accept asylum seekers and instead pay for them to go elsewhere. Asylum seekers and migrants represent an invasion of Europe. 

The next question is how to persuade women to have more children and for this society needs to be rethought. While we have hideously expensive mortgages and people spend their lives working long hours to pay them women will not be able to afford children or stopping work. This housing shortage is exacerbated by immigration, of course.

Careers advice from Noel Coward

Thousands of people have talent. I might as well congratulate you for having eyes in your head. The one and only thing that counts is: Do you have staying power?

Work is more fun than fun.

Work hard, do the best you can, don't ever lose faith in yourself and take no notice of what other people say about you.

Thoughts, not mine

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him. Schopenhauer 

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. Einstein

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. Isaac Asimov 

Thought is crude, matter unimaginably subtle. Aldous Huxley (A conservative insight.)

As people are walking all the time, in the same spot, a path appears. John Locke

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring. Wittgenstein 

There is no great genius without some touch of madness. Seneca

I have met Frenchmen, Germans and Russians and even heard thanks to Montesquieu that there are Persians but I never met Man. De Maistre

You gotta have a body. Jayne Mansfield 

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy. Laurence Olivier

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. Noël Coward. This is so true about politics.

All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said, has its origin in the Spirit. Saint Thomas Aquinas 

I shall/I will

I spend my life stumbling over the I will/I shall rule, getting it wrong, correcting myself. Do others?

I have a nagging suspicion that no one else gives a damn.

Is it really a rule? Some, such as Oliver Kamm, the sworn enemy of most rules, say not. For him what is said in practice is right in principle and, of course, he has good arguments for that position, which is essentially philosophical, not grammatical. All opinions are essentially philosophical and, as Nietzsche told us, all philosophy is disguised psychology. 

William James said

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments

and this is true of the history of grammar too. Politics and philosophy are a means of self expression and so are both grammar and opinions about grammar.

This blogger agrees that the I will/I shall rule is bogus. So does the Economist, a paper I usually disagree with. Apparently it dates from 1653, which seems long ago enough to have made it a rule, but it would be easier if it were not one. I am beginning to have doubts.

The Oxford English Dictionary states the traditional rule

that shall is used with first person pronouns (i.e. I and we) to form the future tense, while will is used with second and third person forms (i.e. you, he, she, it, they). For example:

I shall be late.They will not have enough food.

However, when it comes to expressing a strong determination to do something, the roles are reversed: will is used with the first person, and shall with the second and third. For example:

I will not tolerate such behaviour. You shall go to the ball!

But goes on to say the two words are in practice interchangeable.

Can I relax and forget this putative rule? 

I bought a second-hand grammar at university while an undergraduate, not having been taught grammar, except I suppose at primary school, and I taught myself the rules, including the rule on 'that' and 'which'. I have completely forgotten that rule now, but I do remember that I found I had always instinctively used 'that' and 'which' correctly. This is not the case with 'will' and 'shall', which might mean the rule is now in desuetude. 

However, for emotional reasons, I do not want to admit this. Old laws are good laws. Usually.

The reason why I am blogging about this at all was my shock at getting an out of office message, from a British Ambassador, educated at Cambridge, a good middle-class university, saying

I will not be in the office until Tuesday.

I suppose, as I was shocked, on Mr. Kamm's principle that how people use language is how people should use language, my being shocked is self-validating and the rule must still exist. Is this logical? I am not completely sure.

I imagine that there are various definitions of a lake but I think that a lake is a body of water that is called a lake. I was told, when there, that the Sea of Galilee is a not a sea but a lake, but by my definition it is not a lake. I think the rule with rules is similar. A rule is something many people for a long time have considered a rule.  

It might, however, not be a good rule or a useful one. It might be one more honoured in the breach than in the observance or widely ignored. 

There might be rules that only apply on formal occasions, just as there are rules of protocol that only apply on formal occasions, occasions such as when one ends letters, 

I remain, sir, your faithful servant.

Or does no-one do that any longer? I see that in the Prince of Wales's correspondence, that the courts, at the Guardian's behest, disgracefully forced to be published, Andy Burnham, who wants to be elected leader of the Labour Party, ends his letters to the Prince 

I have the honour to remain, Sir, your Royal Highness’s most humble and obedient servant.

Some people think that for a socialist to end a letter thus is risible, but I don't at all. I think it's correct, good manners, as 'Andy''s civil servants no doubt advised him.

In any case, with grammar as with protocol (are the two the same thing?), it's important to know the rules in order to know when and whether to break them.

Curzoniana

Lord Curzon when Viceroy of India

The Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, the Viceroy of India and British Foreign Secretary, though I am drawn to him, was certainly never an idol of mine. His feet of clay were always far too visible, his prose style too pedestrian and he lacked courage, but he did have a huge amount of self-conscious glamour and, to an incomparable degree, rollicking, zestful pomposity. If only he were British Foreign Secretary now (or Viceroy of India, come to that) things would seem much more comforting.

After all, as Carlyle said,

The past is attractive because it is drained of fear.

I just came across this piece of Curzoniana which I had forgotten. It's a squib written by diplomat Sir Ian Malcolm in 1919 when Curzon deputised for the Foreign Secretary, A.J. Balfour, who was away helping to make the Second World War inevitable at the Paris Peace Conference. Curzon became Foreign Secretary the following year. 

It is quoted in ' Superior Person ' (1969), the unrivalled raconteur Kenneth Rose's biography of Curzon. He must have seemed very attractive by the time Rose wrote (when George Brown was Foreign Secretary) but extravagant spending on offices did not die out with Curzon. Curzon seems to have anticipated Lord Chancellor 'Derry' Irvine's grandiosity, in the days when his former pupil Mr. Blair was Prime Minister.

" I am acting M.F.A. [ Minister of Foreign Affairs]
Please remember what I say
Or you'll live to rue the day.
C. of K.

I must have a spacious room,
Not this loathsome living tomb
Filled with ghosts who've met their doom
How they loom.

Bring me chairs and sofas new,
They should be of Royal Blue
Such as I'm accustomed to,
Entre nous.

Buy me Persian carpets meet
For Imperial Downing Street,
Where on Wednesdays I greet
The Elite.

Golden pen nibs I demand
Jewelled pencils at my hand;
Lacquer fire-screens; not japanned,
These are banned.

I regret I cannot pass
Inkstands made of brass and glass:
Get me one of Chrysophraz
From Shiraz.

And this paper ! Well, I'm blest:
Neither monogram nor crest:
In my family interest
I protest.

For remember, if you can,
That, although a warming-pan,
I am still a Christian
Nobleman.

Malcolm was a Scot and warming-pan is a Scotch slang word that can mean a wench who keeps a bed warm or a fart. I wonder if these verses are in the Oxford Book of Light Verse (my copy is in storage) or other anthologies. They deserve to be.

Time for me to retell a favourite story which I came across in Viscount D' Abernon's memoirs. The British Ambassador in Athens wrote to Curzon, during the Greco-Turkish War in the early 1920s, saying 

'Order has broken down to such an extent that even the monks of Mount Athos are violating their vows.'

So, at least, he dictated, but the typist typed 'cows' instead of 'vows'. Curzon wrote in the margin: 

'Better send a papal bull'.

Despite this capital pun, I don't think he was a very funny man or could laugh at himself, which is the test. Curzon's sense of humour could be very laboured. He was famously lampooned in the 'Balliol Rhyme' about him written when he was an undergraduate:

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,

I am a most superior person.

My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,

I dine at Blenheim twice a week

In reply, he wrote a very laboured riposte that starts:

Charms and a man I sing, to wit - a most superior person

Myself, who bears the fitting name of George Nathaniel Curzon.

From which 'tis clear that even when in swaddling bands I lay low,

There floated round my head a sort of apostolic halo. 

and continues in similar vein for seven unfunny stanzas.

Curzon was a man who inspired doggerel. His affair with the novelist Mrs. Glyn led her to write her bestselling novel Three Weeks and a torrid scene which took place on a tiger skin rug, which in turn inspired this.

Would you like to sin

With Elinor Glyn

On a tiger skin?

Or would you prefer

To err

With her

On some other fur?

Smoking and genocide

The Turkish Sultan Murad IV (1612-1640) took anti-smoking fanaticism to the extreme of personally beheading smokers in the streets. The smoker's body would be left to lie in the street and his estate would be confiscated.

Freedom is an idea that is deeply out of fashion in Europe, though anti-smoking laws do not go nearly so far as Murad IV's. Turkey today is probably freer and less free than Europe. It's illegal to say in Turkey that the Armenians were deliberately killed in an act of genocide and illegal in France to say the opposite. The Armenians were deliberately killed, but the restriction on free speech in respect of historical judgments is exactly the same in both countries.

As Brendan O'Neil said recently,

Some people say Turkey isn’t fit to become a full member of Europe because it’s too authoritarian. On the contrary, Turkey’s willingness to punish and fine and imprison people for speechcrimes shows that it has all the necessary credentials to be European in the 21st century.

The freedom to give offence is the most important freedom of all

All other freedoms flow from freedom of speech, which is simply another way of saying the freedom to offend. The freedom to say inoffensive things isn't freedom.

A very few exceptions, for obscenity mostly. 

On the whole, years ago I liked it that blasphemy against the Christian God was illegal in England, but that law was in desuetude for years and has been repealed. Perhaps I was being inconsistent. The purpose of the law, of course, was to prevent offence being given to Almighty God, not His creatures.

Someone on Twitter called Godfrey Elfwick @GodfreyElfwick (Demisexual genderqueer Muslim atheist, Literal good guy, Itinerant jongleur) just now tweeted this.

Satire has it's place in any discussion but when satire mocks and ridicules others it becomes hate-satire

I thought he was serious because he so accurately reflects the spirit of our age. In fact he is a satirist, the one whom the very PC BBC World Service invited on after he said Starwars was racist and homophobic. Details here.

Even niceness can be tyrannical. In fact the harm being done by nice people in the Western world is incalculable.

Time is our home, not our country

Here is an interesting interview, in an English-language Swedish paper, with

Hans Rosling, Sweden's own globetrotting celebrity statistician

who

frets over what he labels “irrational nationalism”: people’s tendency to ascribe achievements or values with a particular national identity.

“The whole idea that it’s a place we belong to – that place is so important, that the nation is so important – is a dangerous concept...

“It makes people think that the sheer luck of the place where they happen to exist makes them different as human beings."

Discussions of what constitutes “Swedishness”, therefore, leave Rosling uneasy. 

“We don’t live in Sweden. Time is our home,” he proclaims, citing the title of a 1991 play by Swedish playwright Lars Norén.

“We live in this time. Time is more important than place. Our values are not place-based, they are time-based.”

He is right that values certainly do not a nation make. As de Maistre put it, 

'A nation is not made of ink'. 

It is made of blood, of history, is based on culture and genetics and especially religion, even if most people do not believe in religion. At least nations in the European sense of the word. In the New World 'nation' means something different.

Hans Rosling's ideas are not in the least unusual. Lord ('Chris') Patten the British Conservative politician, who hopes Turkish membership of the EU will give Europe new purpose, might agree with him. 

Peter Sutherland, the Irish former EU commissioner and former head of GATT told a sub-committee of the British House of Lords Home Affairs Committee that

"The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others. And that's precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.

Hans Rosling's view of post-national Sweden can be usefully contrasted with that of the blogger Fjordman who writes here in a very Swiftian tone about the place. Everyone should read his essay. His describes a Sweden going to hell in a handcart. 

I hope Swedes' Viking blood reasserts itself one day. Perhaps some 'irrational nationalism' would do no harm.