The world is being rewritten as pulp fiction

It's like a very bad novel, isn't it? Donald Trump might be POTUS depending on what Julian Assange leaks, from the bedroom where he is effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

Not that the emails are having any effect so far. Partly because they are not written by or even to Hillary. Americans, and everyone else, are far too riveted by stories of Trump putting his hand up diverse skirts. Following on from the tape in which Trump boasts about groping fans.

I'm not even sure the groping is having that much effect either. Hillary is ahead in one poll by much the same 4% margin as she was before the tape was found. Another shows her way ahead, another even shows Trump leading. 

79% of Republicans are enthusiastic about their candidate, which compares with 81% of Democrats who enthuse about theirs. 

Mitt aroused much more enthusiasm than either of these two.

I don't blame anyone who thinks Trump is preferable to Hillary, but for me the groping, on top of all the man's other defects, was too much. 

Above all, because were Donald Trump to win he would make America seem ridiculous, a joke in bad taste. And that would reduce America's moral authority, soft power and dignity. It would thereby make the world even more dangerous.

And, yes, I know very well that he is the peace candidate and Hillary likely to start wars.

It's like Henry Kissinger said of the Iran-Iraq War.

What a shame they can't both lose.

(It was reported weeks ago, by the way, that Dr. Kissinger and George Schulz would jointly endorse Hillary, but instead they said that they will not endorse either candidate.)

I hope Trump loses narrowly and the GOP controls both House and Senate, meaning gridlock. I think gridlock is a very good thing. The fewer new laws that are made and the less power a president has the better. And I hope many of the ideas Donald Trump has expressed are taken up by a successful anti-globalist Republican candidate in four years' time.

Hillary may not have groped anyone (she seemed to look lecherously at Christina Aguilera's cleavage, but that's allowed), but we know from Assange that she did say, 

My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.

So I certainly do not blame those who are going to vote for Trump. 

H.H. Asquith could not safely be left alone with young girls, but he was a pretty good Prime Minister on the whole, though a Liberal. He also drank too much and gave us the word 'squiffy'. Trump is a teetotaler. Still I feel Trump just won't do.

Bucharest in autumn, by Octav Dragan

Liberation from global government

I am afraid Trump just won't do, but I do love these words from his latest speech. 

"Our great civilization, here in America and across the civilized world has come upon a moment of reckoning. We’ve seen it in the United Kingdom, where they voted to liberate themselves from global government and global trade deal, and global immigration deals that have destroyed their sovereignty and have destroyed many of those nations. But, the central base of world political power is right here in America, and it is our corrupt political establishment that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people. Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their immorality is absolutely unlimited."

Breasts are very powerful things. Discuss.

What a great general paper question for undergraduate historians that would make.

Off the top of my head, I'd mention Lola Montez (whose bust measured 50 inches) and the Bavarian revolution of 1848. 

Lola Montez was a courtesan and dancer, famous for her 'spider dance', which involved her being forced to disrobe because of a spider that crawled into her dress. Lola Montez was her stage name. She was an Irishwoman of good family and her real name was Marie Gilbert. She was a liberal (by the standards of Germany at the time) and, in the year in which she was King Ludwig's mistress and had a lot of power in Bavaria, she made an enemy of the Jesuits and the Church. Her unpopularity led to her royal lover losing his throne.

Had her bust been smaller, as someone said of Cleopatra's nose...

I was meant to be a historian.

I know about her bust from a curious 19th century medical book that I once dipped into. She approached the author, a doctor, to see if she could have her breasts reduced in size.

Of course tastes in beauty change. I think a character in a Noel Coward play said that when you see photographs of women who are well attested to have made entire trainfuls of men spontaneously stand up to look you find that they look like men themselves. I fail to see from photographs why many women were considered famous beauties, including Marie of Romania, who modestly said  that she was not necessarily the most beautiful woman in Europe but she was certainly the most beautiful queen.

There are some unflattering pictures of Lola but this one explains why the King of Bavaria was captivated.

Bob Dylan has just won the Nobel Literature Prize

Professor Christopher Ricks, whom I never went to hear at university, famously thought Dylan, whom I've never heard, a fine poet. Q.E.D.

I must listen to the man's music but he seems as worthy as Pearl Buck and much more so than Obama, who was given the peace prize before he'd done anything, just for not being George W. Bush. 

Scotland will remain in the UK, partly because of Brexit

The Scottish Nationalists can only have one more referendum. If they lose again it's over. 

Of course they can only hold a referendum if Westminster lets them. If the SNP fights an election with a referendum in its manifesto it would give it leverage over Westminster, but they very recently had a referendum, so not that much leverage.
 

Much more importantly, the Scottish Nationalists will not ask for a referendum unless they are sure they will win. And they will not, in the foreseeable future, have a chance of winning. 

Scots will not vote to leave because they would have to leave the UK without - at least at first and very possibly ever - joining the EU. 

They might have left the UK while the UK remained in the EU, but even then it would have been impossible for them to have negotiated with the EU until after independence. The EU would not waive that rule because Spain (thinking of Catalonia), Romania (Transylvania) and Belgium (Flanders) would not permit it. And if the EU waived its rules the UK would not permit it. A penny of public money spent on negotiating with the EU would be ultra vires.

Leaving the UK without joining the EU means Scotland having to pay her own bills. 

To be truly independent and not subsidised by either England and Wales or Europe would be something the Scots simply could not contemplate. If Scotland were an independent country now, Scots would have the biggest deficit of any OECD member state.

Had the Scots voted for independence they would have achieved it in August of this year. The SNP during the referendum campaign forecast that North Sea oil revenues would be almost £8 billion by 2015/16. In reality, they came to £60 million. 

Nor will Scots like having to adopt the euro and having another currency from England and Wales - to say nothing of tariff barriers. Or a border between England and Wales.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has just been playing games since the referendum result. It is shocking that very few journalists understand this.

Straight Talk About Christopher Columbus

Oscar Wilde said,

"America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up."

And,

"America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself."

Columbus Day is the day when American countries celebrate what used to be the discovery of America but is now the European discovery of America.

It was not a festival that I mark and so I missed it a few days ago, but this article by historian David Tucker in the Wall St. Journal on the subject of the European conquest of the Americas is very worth reading. He points out:

"... a rel­atively small num­ber of Spaniards were able to con­quer the Aztec em­pire in part be­cause many of the in­dige­nous peo­ple the Aztecs had con­quered—and of­ten sac­ri­ficed to their gods—hated the Aztecs and joined with the Span­ish to fight them."

Mexicans had long believed in a saviour who would come to them from the East and identified stout Cortez with this saviour. About this they were right. 

Hillary dozes through Al Gore

A true conservative

"If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones."Maurice Cowling, "The Present Position," Conservative Essays , Portillo ed., 1978.

I read Conservative Essays as a VIth Former with fascination and agreed with much of it but disliked a certain amount. This cumbrous sentence shocked me when I read it aged 18. I still don't believe in class war (though he was writing in the 1970s) but I do believe inequality and hierarchy are good and necessary things.

Maurice Cowling wrote in 1981 to the editors of the London Review of Books,

“Argument is not what it seems to me suitable to do with opinions. What one does with opinions—all one needs to do with them, having found that one has them—is to enjoy them, display them, use them, develop them, in order to cajole, press, bully, soothe, and sneer other people into sharing (or being affronted by) them. To argue them is, it seems to me, a very vulgar, debating-society sort of activity.”

How very much I wish I had gone to Peterhouse and been taught by him and by the great Edward Norman.

I am very certain that were he alive Cowling would be a strong supporter of Donald Trump.

Trump is a very odd man and his locker-room talk is disturbing and strange

A man is that creature with two feet and eight hands. (Jayne Mansfield)

Is the way Donald Trump talked about feeling up women fans normal locker-room talk? Not for all or most men, certainly, but for some?

I am not the best person to ask. I never go near a locker-room and prefer the company and friendship of women to that of men. However, of course crude talk about women is commonplace among many (by no means all) men. 

Donald Trump has tweeted:

"The very foul mouthed Sen. John McCain begged for my support during his primary (I gave, he won), then dropped me over locker room remarks!"

We remember that McCain called his wife a very rude word, without any cause, on tape. 

But the words are not the issue - groping strangers is. And it's a cumulative thing.

When, in my mid-twenties, a bunch of women friends invited me into the lavatory with them while they sat around chatting, I discovered that women are much cruder about men than vice versa. Confirming what my biology master said in the 45 minute talk which was the entire sex education my school provided.

"Gentlemen, you think you have dirty minds, but let me tell you: the mind of a 14 year-old gel is a sewer.'

Assuming Trump loses, what next for the American right?

Megyn Kelly, seen here worrying about how Donald Trump views women as sex objects.

I never liked Trump and I no longer think he will do. Many of Trump's ideas (perhaps we should call them attitudes) on the other hand I do like.

The real story of 2016 is the cultural revolution against internationalism in America and Europe. Assuming Trump loses (possibly in a landslide), he will have steered the Republicans in a new direction. Will he be the forerunner of a new politics and culture or simply make the GOP brand toxic?

The Guardian praises George Osborne as a most effective proponent of liberalism

"The most politically-effective proponents of the metropolitan liberal creed in the modern age – former Labour leader Tony Blair and Tory ex-chancellor George Osborne – are now relegated to making speeches and writing books."

From the Guardian editorial yesterday.  Rather a turn-around from the things they said about George Osborne until the summer.

At least Hillary is rather less likely to start a war than Lincoln or LBJ

The Atlantic, the august (and highly readable) American political magazine founded by the Boston Brahmin James Russell Lowell, has nominated three presidential candidates: Lincoln in 1860, LBJ in 1964 and now Hillary. 

I detest Hillary, but she is much the least disastrous of those three. She is very divisive ("the basket of deplorables", white privilege, etc.) but she will not take half of her country to war with the other half. 

She will not be nearly as left-wing as Johnson, though she will continue to add to the problems he created with his welfare state. 

She is more likely to involve the USA in wars than Donald Trump, but shouldn't be as warlike as The Atlantic's other two choices. 

At least, I hope not. George W. Bush looked like an isolationist when he came to office. The one thing you know about US Presidents is that they never behave in a way that can be predicted when they first win election.

When I was young I read the collected essays of James Russell Lowell. Life seemed eternal in those days. They were stodgy, as American nineteenth century writers usually were, except for Mark Twain. All I remember of them is his remark that enthusiasm, once allowed to become cold, can only be heated up as cant. 

That seems an apt description for the liberalism of Hillary Clinton. 

Why do we care more about preserving lions than indigenous cultures?

What will our children say after we let all the lions die?

That was the Guardian headline. 

I asked myself, 'What will they say after we let all the European nations die?'

But I know the Guardian wouldn't publish an article under such a headline. In fact, a conservative paper like the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail wouldn't.

The modern world and the liberalism that has ruled it since 1991 has given us unprecedented prosperity and peace for many, an amazing reduction in Third World poverty, huge medical advances, technological miracles, the internet, loss of rural life, secularism, the financial crash, unjust wars, abortion, sexual equality, non-judgmental sexual morals, many more democratic countries but grave restrictions on freedom in established democracies, and, most significant of all, waves of migration unprecedented for a thousand years.

If you think I exaggerate, figures for my own country show that almost a third of primary school children in England and Wales have 'an ethnic minority background'. More than a quarter of children born in England and Wales in 2015 were born to women born outside the UK. A third had at least one immigrant parent.

Similar things are happening in most European countries, except the ones in the former Communist bloc.

Mass immigration into Europe is powered by low birth rates in the developed world, but it would be happening without them. 

It began during the baby boom. Its deeper causes are huge pressures from the poor world and lack of will to refuse immigrants.

The people who run Europe think the end of predominantly ethnic states is inevitable, though they do not say so. People who don’t think so are silenced.

European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said in October last year, 

“Diversity is now in some parts of Europe seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges. But diversity is humanity's destiny. There is not going to be, even in the remotest places of this planet, a nation that will not see diversity in its future. That’s where humanity is heading. And those politicians trying to sell to their electorates a society that is exclusively composed of people from one culture, are trying to portray a future based on a past that never existed, therefore that future will never be.”

By 'diversity', which already exists in trumps in Western Europe, he meant the end of (ethnic) nation states. Europe as a collection of immigrant countries, like the USA.

Japan however takes another view. Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, said at the weekend, 

“As an issue of demography, I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees, we need to have more activities by women, by elderly people and we must raise (the) birthrate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants.”

Liberalism is by far the most influential stream of thought favouring immigration in modern Western Europe. Insofar as democratic socialists do so, it is partly because they are liberals too.

But the far left (and in the UK that includes Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, and the ‘Corbynistas’) have another aim, revolution. A revolution to get rid of their two enemies, conservatism and national pride, which they call false consciousness.

Every crisis presents the hard left with the opportunity for revolution and though the economic crisis of 2008 failed to be the crisis of capitalism to which they have looked forward since Stalin, they see mass migration of people from war zones in the Middle East and Asia as another chance.

The masses in the European colonies were identified by Lenin as the victims of capitalism and non-whites remain so in the left-wing imagination. Now immigrant masses can be the troops that overturn the system without bloodshed.

The soft left, the moderates and the Blairites don’t want revolution but they share this desire to use immigration to weaken small 'c' conservatism, which has the happy effect of adding millions of left-wing voters and clients to the electorate.

They don't see that immigrants are like salt. A reasonable amount is necessary for flavour. Too much spoils the soup.

Clearly, Theresa May has many strong reasons, philosophical and partisan, for wanting to reduce immigration sharply, and she wants to do so very badly, but she has failed to do so and will continue to fail. She will at most slow down the transformation of her country.

Please click on this wonderful article by Niall McCrae, The real hate crime is the Left’s loathing of Britain, in The Conservative Woman, about a Socialist Workers' Party (Trotskyite) meeting he attended. This is a quotation.

To the far Left, every crisis is an opportunity to bring down the established order. It did not happen after the global economic shock of 2008, but the migrant crisis presents much greater prospects of destruction. Immigrant masses are the storm-troopers, and no bullets need be fired for the system to be overturned. Meanwhile, the danger of terrorism is cast as a racist trope. 

Niall McCrae asked the speaker if there were an upper limit on the number of immigrants Britain should absorb and received no reply, from which he understood, rightly, that for Trotskyites there is not. 

Nor is there for Jeremy Corbyn. Nor for Greens, despite their concern for pressure on open spaces, nor for a lot of people who are not far left.

The Most Beautiful Sentences In Literature

Here is a collection in Buzzfeed of 51 Of The Most Beautiful Sentences In Literature, as nominated by readers. Most are American and recent.

None of them greatly impressed me, actually. These are better than the ones in the article in my opinion. Passing reader, please suggest more in the comment box below.

'O, help me heaven,' she prayed, `to be decorative and to do right'. Firbank

Life is sweet, brother, who would wish to die? A gypsy speaking to George Borrow

Life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Jorge Luis Borges

Hatred of Catholicism is the only genuinely religious emotion the English ever experience.

No man can please others who does not please himself. Frederic Harrison

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Daphne du Maurier

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety. Antony and Cleopatra

They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality. Sir Ranulph Crewe. The whole passage is here.

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodope! that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last. Walter Savage Landor

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,/ Wherein he puts alms for oblivion. Troilus and Cressida

I saw the new moon late yestreen
With the old moon in her arm;
And if we go to sea, master,
I fear we'll come to harm.

Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.

Frauke Petry: “refugees welcome” attitude has become a new religion

Frauke Petry, leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), is reported in Die Welt as saying welcoming refugees has become the a substitute religion.

She said that many Germans are so blinded by this over willingness to help everyone in the world that they cannot see that many of those they endeavour to help do not share German values in regard to minorities, religious freedom, or the rights of women.

Secular religion is exactly the right way to understand the phenomenon, a religion of solidarity, charity and human rights. Since the end of the Cold War and Communism, anti-racism and anti-discrimination has been a substitute religion all over the developed world. As Edward Norman said years ago, welfare considerations have taken the place of the sacred in the West. He accurately blamed 'neo-Puritanism' and said,

"When Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement."

When he wrote that back in the 1980s he imagined that the replacement for Christianity would be secularism. Now it looks as if secularism might be replaced by Islam.

Frauke Petry is married to, though recently separated from, a Lutheran pastor and religion may drive her as it did the East Germans who protested against Communism in 1989.

It is interesting how many powerful German politicians come from religious families and are, as far as one can gauge, motivated by a religious impulse. Chancellor Merkel grew up in East Germany as the daughter of a very left-wing Lutheran pastor and President Gauck was a pastor himself. I wish they saw that loving ones neighbour does not necessitate moving populations from Asia to Europe.

Today I have lived in Romania for 18 years

I just checked on a 1998 calendar. Today I have lived in Romania 18 years. The first two crawled past because every day was so strange. The last 16 flew. I am very grateful to live here, in this country that still enchants me, but wish the years would slow down.

Why am I happy to have spent so many years here? I wrote this article called 25 reasons why I love living in Romania, in no particular order which has received 107,000 clicks so far. 

110,000 now.

This is a picture by Octav Dragan of the street in the old town where I live. 



I don't think this was taken recently, as it's now full of huge potholes three years after the asphalt was resurfaced at great public expense. Thank God it's not too gentrified, though a club and a restaurant have appeared and, worst of all, at one point a Souvenir Shop. Dread words (I am becoming Wallace Arnold, I know.) Still gypsies still wander around the street in dressing gowns.

My head says Hillary will win and my intuition says Trump

For months my head has told me Hillary will win and my intuition said Trump.

Whoever wins, Donald Trump has dismantled the old ghastly Republican party of the early 21st century, which took votes from poor people and sent their sons to die in unnecessary wars. 

How wonderful that Mr Trump accused George W Bush of deliberate lying to justify invading Iraq and still won the nomination resoundingly.

But, in truth, Donald Trump destroyed nothing - the old Republican Party was a dead man standing. Had it not been, Trump would not have won the nomination or come close.

What was conservative about George W Bush? Nothing, except low taxes for the well-off. He spent like a sailor and was blase about legal and illegal immigrants. Worst of all for a

Things will change radically, but we do not yet know how

Things will change radically but we do not yet know how. Trump and Sanders are part of the change, Hillary not.

Things are changing around the developed world in ways in which it is impossible to understand. Donald Trump is a brilliant politician, or if you prefer, charlatan. (The two are not always distinct.) But he has achieved this amazing degree of success only because he represents and guides powerful forces, whose inchoate ideas he expresses or appears to express.

On the other hand, the people Donald Trump represents, middle class (which in the USA means lower-middle and working-class) white Americans, are a smaller and smaller part of the electorate each year, so this might be their last chance.

I think that this great change in thinking is very hopeful.

Interesting insights about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

"If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated."

Joshua Mitchell, Donald Trump Does Have Ideas—and We’d Better Pay Attention to Them


"Trump’s voters sense the system is rigged against them. This does not mean they blame blacks for their problems. Nor do they have any language for describing themselves as victims of racism. They may be deeply hurt or embarrassed by accusations of bigotry. Perhaps that is Hillary’s thinking in calling them a ‘basket of deplorables’. In an aspirational country where much of the middle class is downwardly mobile and taking its signals from television, people are terrified of exhibiting attitudes thought of as low-class. If Trump himself has recently been pitching for black support, starting in a church in Detroit in September, it may be less to win over black voters than to put his own white voters at ease."

Christopher Caldwell, Trump is right about America’s rigged system


“Most blacks don’t see Donald Trump as a Republican; they see him as blunt-talking

Solitude

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

Albert Einstein

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

Aldous Huxley

"Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine."
Honoré de Balzac  

Frenchmen of various colours

Austria's Freedom Party has been accused of racism for seeking to celebrate the lifting of the Turkish siege of Vienna 333 years ago. The Freedom Party said disingenuously that the event was purely educational, rather than an attempt to make a comparison between the Muslim invasion of Central Europe in the last 17th century and today's Muslim migrants.

Meanwhile a French National Front mayor, Robert Ménard, the Mayor of Béziers, will be taken to court by an anti-racist organisation for saying on television that being French means,

“in the words of Charles De Gaulle, being European, white and Catholic.”

Saying that Jews, Protestants and Muslims cannot be French is offensive, racist and certainly opposed to the principles of the French Revolution (principles I detest, by the way, but that's another story). I wonder if he really meant to say this or he 'misspoke'? Probably he wanted to get in the papers, and the Huguenot vote isn't important, but more and more Jews are supporting the FN. 

Ethnic Frenchmen are white, but they need not be Catholics and non-whites are French citizens too.

What is sad, however, is that in a free, democratic society elected politicians (and the rest of the population) are no longer free to say what they like, however reactionary,

People would hate Jesus much more than Mother Teresa

The Pope canonised Mother Teresa, now St Teresa of Calcutta, on Sunday, which produced an outpouring of loathing and hatred for the new saint in the social media and the English left-of-centre quality papers. 

This is nothing to what people would say about the Second  ... 

English journey

Robert Frost said home is where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in. I didn't have to go to England but went because Brexit made me realise not how much I love my country - I knew that very well every day - but how rarely I visited. 

And I like to go to politically exciting places like Iran, Pakistan and North Korea. This summer that meant the UK. 

And I still haven't written up my journey. Here's a start.

I arrived in England at midnight. I had bought a ticket with Easyjet from Nice to Luton and a room in a mediaeval hotel in St Albans. This was not a good idea as my plane was delayed over an hour and I was told I was lucky. Easyjet planes are often delayed three hours.

St Albans. The staff at the station, who had never heard of my hotel, the best known in the town, told me it was too far to walk, which it was not. I ordered a minicab from a dreamy and rather sweet Kashmiri with a beard that stretched almost to his waist. He told me there was a large Muslim community in the St Albans. He had been to Kashmir a number of times and felt equally Pakistani and British.

St Albans is one of the loveliest old towns in England. And a great place to stay if you visit England, as it is very close by train to London but very far away indeed, its buildings Georgian and earlier. It existed, of course, in Roman times, when St Alban was martyred.

Lunch in Inner Temple with two charming people mourning the referendum result and dinner with a friend whose life's work Brexit represented. She, like all the really passionately anti-EU people I know in Britain, is Jewish. I don't think this has any significance, except to disprove the idea that Jews are less patriotic than other people.

What fun Soho is, how beautiful and serious the women are. Morally serious, I mean, not unlaughing. The intelligent people in their late 20s are what make every city. The ones in London are very impressive, unarrogant, stylish but modest. 

England is the best country in the world and nowadays has lovelier women than Romania, although this is partly because the hot Romanian girls are now mostly in London (you, gentle female Romanian reader in Bucharest, are, of course, the exception).

Dinner the next night with a City friend, a former young fogey and strongly Brexit. He said, ruefully, 

Bismarckiana

The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches passes by.

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.

Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others' experience.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.

Man cannot control the current of events. He can only float with them and steer. 

A proletariat of graduates.

Talking to people in England about Brexit

I thought of going to Iran but in the end I decided that the most interesting place to go, since I like holidaying in political hotspots, was England – with a two day stop in Nice where eighty innocent people had been mowed down by a Tunisian immigrant a few days earlier.

And, of course, England is the most astonishingly beautiful country. It has the most beautiful countryside in Europe, even more beautiful than Romania’s. It has wonderful summer weather. Meaning temperate. I speak the language, better than my compatriots. And it has so many wonderful cathedrals and churches, albeit much damaged by the Reformation. And full of such nice people, much nicer than in the 1980s.

So, my first summer holiday in England after emigrating to Romania eighteen years ago.

But I wanted to know what people thought of Brexit. I arrived a month after the referendum, when people were almost getting used to the result. It almost felt old news except people were still in shock

What did I find?

My very inscientific survey. Most (not all) nice people were Brexit. The nice people who voted Remain tended to do so mostly from fear not enthusiasm, pragmatism not ideals.

Monaco is expensively cheap - Nice is nice - Vermiglia is heaven

I spent two days in Nice on my way to England to check out the reasons for the massacre there. There were several more killings by Muslims in Europe before and after I arrived.

Nice is enchanting, even though seaside resorts usually repel me, but I missed the opportunity to go to the public housing areas or talk to enough people about the massacre that had taken place so recently. Flowers piled up at the grandstand at a memorial for the dead. My waiter at the Hotel Negresco was traumatised by seeing children killed before his eyes as he served guests in the garden beside the Promenade des Anglais

What did I expect to learn?  It seemed the France of films, books and paintings. Some women in headscarves. Not very many. I was told Muslims do not live in a specific part of town. I should have found out more but I was on holiday and it was very hot.

Nice is cheap to get to and its gracious early nineteenth century architecture is exhilarating. A great, quick and very beautiful train ride takes you along wonderful coast to Monaco, Menton and Italy.

Monaco I had been warned is awful and it is dull and ugly, slightly like Durres in Albania, but with less interesting people. A friend who grew up in Monaco told me it was ruined in the 1960s by Arab money. Arabs in Monaco are rich, while those in the South of France are poor.

A nice, elderly British couple I met on the bus, who have lived there since 1968, told me that Monaco had been spoilt, too. Their children hated the place and escaped at the first opportunity.

The husband had captained Aristotle Onassis's yacht. Just so you know, Jackie Kennedy, whom they only met once, was pleasant but the wife didn’t understood why Onassis could have been interested in her after Callas.

By accident I wandered into what is a famous hotel, the Hotel De Paris, old mahogany and very rich people, where food in the bar is reasonably priced and, I am told, is wonderful. I didn't like the ambience on a sunny afternoon. As in Dubai, the action goes on in hotels. And in the Casino.

I had assumed Monaco was a relic of the Holy Roman Empire, like the long gone principality of Orange, but in fact it is the tiny rump of an Italian princely state that got lost. 

An old bound volume of the Cornhill Magazine of 1864, that I later picked up in a charity shop in England, filled me in on her history. Atrociously misgoverned and over-taxed by the House of Grimaldi, the little country rebelled against them and they were left with only the sliver around Monte Carlo, where dependants of the princely house lived. 

The rest of what had been Monaco joined France. The little rump of Monaco, since it was separated from Italy by the time Napoleon III took Savoy, as his payment for enabling Italian unification, remained independent. The Casino became its source of income.

My great anti-hero Sir Basil Zaharoff, who rose from being a fireman and, probably, thief in Constantinople to being the richest arms dealer in the world, later bought the Casino and effectively the little country. He paid the prince a salary. In the Great War, Zaharoff owned the largest arms manufacturing firms in Britain, France, Austria and Germany and was knighted for his efforts. 

Sydney Reilly on whom Ian Fleming modelled James Bond also loitered in Monte and it figures in many Edwardian detective stories, as well as the famous song, The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. I hoped it would have some charm left, but it didn't.

The old bits of the little town are Disneyfied and the whole place seems like Benidorm for money launderers. People watching is probably the best reason to go - if you want to see rich crooks and Romanian starlets. A rich Romanian friend complains that it is teems with politically connected Romanian gypsies. She nevertheless goes back and loves the place.

It has the attraction for East European rich that it is  a symbol, like cigars and cravats, of the Communist caricature of plutocracy. And the attraction of raw, semi-legal money, without class, has a sexual vibe for some women. It is very nouveau riche, cheaply expensive.

Materialistic Romanian girls are decorative. That is the point of them. And most have fled Romania but the species can still be found in Bucharest, often grown older and married to money. And people spotting is not my thing and a night time activity. 

I looked round the hideous nineteenth century cathedral, glanced at the outside of the palace and was relieved to get back to the station, my work done.  

And took the train - again a wonderful journey - to Ventimiglia, on the advice of a friend who said that, because of migrants massing at the border, the  train station there seems like a  Mogadishu slum. 

Not so. I saw only the few African street vendors who add unexpected colour to the scene in every Italian  town these days, like the black king in paintings of the Magi. I was told they stopped massing near the frontier a years ago, were somewhere in the woods and had rarely been seen. A couple of days later though the BBC published stories about the place becoming the new Calais.

Monaco is my sixty second country, unless you count Transnistria, which I don't, or South Africa where my plane picked up passengers. Counting countries, an increasingly common hobby these days, like all collecting, is a form of madness. It's a middle aged male thing. Specifically, as Wilhelm Stekel said, it is a sublimation of the desire to possess many women.

Sybille Bedford said rightly that France and Italy are the two classics of travel. They really are and from Nice both can be enjoyed. But it is Ventimiglia that I want to revisit not the elegance of the French riviera. Ventimiglia is quite wonderful, old, beautiful, unglobalised for now, not elegant, Italian. It has style, which means it is itself. Unlike Monte Carlo.

Monaco is expensively cheap - Nice is nice - Vermiglia is heaven

I spent two days in Nice on my way to England to check out the reasons for the massacre there. There were several more killings by Muslims in Europe before and after I arrived.

Nice is enchanting, even though seaside resorts usually repel me, but I missed the opportunity to go to the public housing areas or talk to enough people about the massacre that had taken place so recently. Flowers piled up at the grandstand at a memorial for the dead. My waiter at the Hotel Negresco was traumatised by seeing children killed before his eyes as he served guests in the garden beside the Promenade des Anglais

What did I expect to learn?  It seemed the France of films, books and paintings. Some women in headscarves. Not very many. I was told Muslims do not live in a specific part of town. I should have found out more but I was on holiday and it was very hot.

Nice is cheap to get to and its gracious early nineteenth century architecture is exhilarating. A great, quick and very beautiful train ride takes you along wonderful coast to Monaco, Menton and Italy.

Monaco I had been warned was awful and it is dull and ugly, slightly like Durres in Albania, but with less interesting people. A friend who grew up in Monaco told me it was

The plan is a Europe with open borders and without nation states

Ulrike Guérot the "Founder and Director of the European Democracy Lab", at the European School of Governance in Berlin, said in an interview in Deutsche Welle that 

the existence of nation states is in itself one of the biggest problems with the European project. 

She went on to say that Angela Merkel was right to let in the migrants, but did it the wrong way. She should have consulted the other EU countries first. The second point is true. 

According to Frau Guerot, the influx of migrants into Europe is not a problem caused by the EU, but this is not quite right. Were it not for Schengen, far fewer migrants would

Brexit was the right decision, but we are treading on other people’s dreams

I had dinner last night with a wonderful, young, idealistic Romanian lawyer who has been traumatised (really) by the decision of a country she loves to abandon the European project she passionately believes in. I didnt realise some young Romanians feel this way but they do and very many good people in Britain and Europe feel the same for the sort of reasons I respect - idealistic, noble ones.

Lots more British people worry about how it will affect the economy, which I very much understand.

But a fair few people in Britain on the left feel like Ed Vulliamy in this article in The Guardian (where else?). They hate Brexit because they don't like Britain and want it to stop being so British. This is also a strong reason why they are in favour of lots of immigrants Coming to the U.K.

"For me, departure from Europe was a given: in the tea leaves at a deep and mainstream cultural level beyond the slaughter at Heysel stadium and serial record of England’s football fans, or politicians’ Eurosceptic ranting. It was in the tarot cards of those bulimic, retarded royal occasions – jubilee, wedding, babies; in the sickly nostalgia of The King’s Speech; in the Olympic Games and Boris’s parachute – like Ukip on bad acid. Above all, over the crisis of wretched refugees and migrants, it howled from the pages of newspapers like the Sun, which has never lost an election and wasn’t going to lose this one... 

On the slipstream of empire, I’ve always thought – to the point of treason – of my British passport as a “burden of shame” as UB40 so eloquently put it, “a British subject, not proud of it”. Now, trying to cling on in “the continent”, it is just a downright embarrassment – not only a badge of shame, but also, worse in a way, of pointless, bellicose imbecility."

He is right about one thing - Brexit now feels like it was inevitable, although unlike him I did not expect it.

Some Romanians think our leaving the EU is 'selfish' and we should stay to make the EU a better institution, particularly for Romania's sake. Many (most?) Romanians seem to think Brexit is about racism directed towards East Europeans. The Romanian executive I had lunch with today thinks that, though he said he thought racism was normal. A few admire Britain's courage in leaving. 

In the late nineteenth century Romanian intellectuals looked to France as a source of ideals on which to model themselves, as Lucian Boia pointed out, whereas most Romanians liked the EU because it spends money spent on the country and because they prefer to be ruled by Westerners rather than their own politicians (they are right to do so). However things are changing and a number of Romanians in their twenties believe in European unity. Which makes good sense viewed from Bucharest.


It is not only British freedom that is a romantic idea. The EU has its poetry too. Unfortunately those beautiful ideals segue into ideas like this, expressed by a German Professor of International Relations who moulds the minds of young people at a British university.

I understand the term foreigner but I reject it as retrograde. I don't perceive myself as a foreigner, or any of the people I know. I reject the idea of countries and boundaries should be transcended as much as possible. The very nature of states or countries has changed dramatically. Borders limit human freedom, they are social constructs that need to change. From an IR point of view, the purpose of international institutions is to alter the behaviour of states so that they cooperate rather than purely pursue national interest because the latter results in conflict.....I see the EU as a vanguard promoting freedom of movement which in the future should encompass the world.

This is Romantic with a vengeance - the kind of ideas that the French Revolution produced in the minds of the sillier readers of Romantic poetry.

Just Eton boys, grown heavy

I've always loved these lines by Praed, although I did not go to Eton. I wonder if David Cameron does and find them consoling now.

In Parliament I fill my seat,
With many other noodles;
And lay my head in Jermyn Street,
And sip my hock at Boodles.
But often, when the cares of life
Have set my temples aching,
When visions haunt me of a wife,
When duns await my waking ...
I wish that I could run away
From House, and Court, and Levee,
Where bearded men appear today
Just Eton boys, grown heavy;
That I could bask in childhood’s sun,
And dance o’er childhood’s roses,
And find huge wealth in one pound one,
Vast wit in broken noses;
And play Sir Giles at Datchet Lane,
And call the milk-maids Houris;
That I could be a boy again,
A happy boy, at Drury’s.

Praed evidently enjoyed Eton despite the floggings. I tend more to side with Philip Larkin who said, 'When I was a child I thought I hated the human race, but when I grew up I realised it was only children I couldn't stand.' 

Of course I love children now that I am no longer at their mercy.

Does Nice massacre mean Trump has won? Probably

84 people have been killed in Nice by a lorry that late last night ploughed through crowds gathered for the Bastille Day celebrations. The killer is said, unsurprisingly, to have shouted 'Allahu Akbar' before being shot dead by police. It means Trump will probably win.


Will Marine Le Pen win too? I doubt that, because the other parties will combine to prevent it.

Who knew Nice and the South of France is (so said the BBC's Justin Webb on Radio 4) "a hotbed"? He paused and didn't say a hotbed of what, but it was clear from what he went on to say that he meant of Muslim extremism.

What terrible mistakes France and Europe have made.

Kissing hands - Theresa May becomes the Queen's 13th Prime Minister

Mrs. May kissed hands yesterday and undertook to form a ministry. I wonder what the Queen thinks of her.

The Queen couldn't bear Mrs. Thatcher and I very much doubt she liked Mr. Brown - he has no small talk. She beamed when Cameron kissed hands. Churchill was her favourite. 

At the audience after Mr. Reagan invaded Grenada Mrs Thatcher was not invited to sit down.

Of course Mr. Gladstone never was, not even when 80. As a special favour Dizzy was as he grew frailer. I wonder whether King Edward VII started asking his prime ministers to sit. His first Lord Salisbury, was 71 when Edward VII ascended the throne.

What a shame Prime Ministers now sit down. It's important to keep them in their place.

By the way Andrew Schrader tell me that "Privy Council meetings are still conducted with everyone standing, allegedly because Her Majesty likes them to be quick and businesslike and doesn't want all those privy counsellors lounging around thinking they have all the time in the world.."

The royal family mocked Mrs. Thatcher's deep curtseys but Churchill's bows were deep.

When Clare Short went to kiss hands on becoming a cabinet minister, her mobile telephone rang and she rummaged through her large bag, spewing the contents on the floor, before finding the telephone. As she did so it rang off. The Queen, in what Matthew Parris called the greatest moment in her reign, said sweetly, "I do hope it wasn't anyone important."

The middle class were not prepared

Overheard in the Athénée half an hour ago. (I hate calling it the Hilton.) 

'How are things in Britain?' 

'The middle classes are still in shock.' 

It is a pleasure to think most of the right of centre and left-wing middle classes have been defeated but in fact it is a bit illusory. 43% of graduates voted Leave. What saddens me is that the FCO will give us EU-lite, because the EU project is their life's mission. I increasingly feel that leaving the single market altogether might be best thing we could do. I also think it is increasingly obvious that leaving the EU is exactly what the British always wanted and the right thing to do. 'Let freedom ring'. 

And a victory for rootedness over citizens of the world. And a victory for people like Roger Scruton, Charles Moore, Douglas Murray and the people of England. We are many, they are not few but slightly fewer than us. It was a glorious victory.

How gracefully Farage conceded defeat a few minutes after 10 p.m. on referendum night after hearing the opinion poll results. Compare and contrast the behaviour of very many vocal Remain supporters, who want Parliament to ignore the result.

I sincerely hope I do not take pleasure in others' misfortunes but the agony of the Remain supporters has it's funny side. 

The world before 23rd June has gone forever

The world before 23rd June has gone forever.

Peter Oborne likens the referendum result to the Arab Spring. Curiously he means that in a good way.

What we do know is that the referendum will not be held again, despite the march in London today seeking exactly that. Two thirds of the population think it would be wrong, apart from any other consideration.

The FTSE 100 index of the UK's 100 largest public companies closed at a ten month high yesterday, while, strange to say, European stock markets were down. Early days, of course, but we are not yet eating grass and burning sticks for fire.

I recommend sociologist Frank Furedi's very good analysis here of what has been a culture war. It is very true that very many Remain voters simply do not know anyone who voted Leave. But it is a mistake to see the divide as a class one. (Not very many fewer graduates voted Leave as Remain, after all.) The divide is a cultural one. As Frank Furedi says:

Over the past 40 years, the political establishment and cultural elites have successfully dispossessed the others. They assumed a monopoly over what could and could not be said and stigmatised the norms and values associated with working-class culture as masculinist, xenophobic, racist, homophobic, backward, irredeemably outdated, and so on. The one area where the conflict of values remained unresolved was that of national sovereignty. And the rejection of the EU indicates that at least on the question of national sovereignty and democratic representation, the influence of elite cosmopolitan culture is insecure; indeed, it now stands exposed.

I see this in the Remainers I talk to. Some dislike a lot of things about Britain and Brexit summarises the things they don't like. It was this culture war which made me suppress my doubts and decide I wanted us to leave.

It is a cultural revolution. Also a political one and an economic one.

This is the mother of all crises, but is a equally a crisis for the whole EU. After the Austrian court's decision to rerun the Austrian presidential election I start to think this is like 1989. I can see the EU falling apart. Unless they rethink things fundamentally - but they just cannot do that, any more than the USSR could.

Clearly the UK needs a new leader. I didn't blog about the Shakespearean events of Thursday, but they started with Gove stabbing Boris in the front and continued with Boris falling on his sword. Gove is accused of betrayal. 

I am sure he is not Machiavellian, even though he certainly did for Boris and Cameron. People standing next to Gove do seem often to end up dead, but this is a qualification for the premiership.

If Gove destroyed Cameron and Boris what chance does Juncker stand with him.

However, his humility in not deciding to stand a week ago, but instead becoming Boris's adjutant will mean MPs and party members think him treacherous. 

"I did almost everything not be a candidate for the leadership of this party", he said in his speech announcing he was a candidate and I believe him. The Tory party doesn't.

I think both Boris and Gove come out of all this well. I think Gove converted Boris to Leave at a dinner party on February 16,  at which they and their wives sat down with the newspaper owner Evgeny Lebedev to discuss politics. By the end of the night Mr Gove had persuaded Boris, who like many people was undecided, to Leave.

I am perhaps naive but think neither have been Machiavellian and I love both, but Boris is not Prime Minister material.  Gove, by sabotaging him, did the country a great service. If his wife persuaded him to stand she did well. 

Some people fear we might end up ruled by Mrs. Gove, if her husband becomes Prime Minister. We could do worse, I suppose. Sam Cam destroyed Libya and made us accept 20,000 migrants. Some say Hillary persuaded Bill not to buy Osama from the Taliban. Time was when wives organised dinner parties and Fridays to Mondays at Chequers. 

Gove is, and it is vital that the next Prime Minister is, a Brexiter and has principles. 

I like him very much for saying “people in this country have had enough of experts”. We want to be ruled by elected politicians not experts. Experts created the EU, the Euro, tower blocks, comprehensive schools, the financial crisis of 2008 onwards.

Gove would make a fine Prime Minister. He believes in Brexit and in public service - and he cares more about class inequality than anyone on the Labour benches. But I think he may have lost the chance, which is tragic. 

Perhaps Andrea Leadsom is the Brexiter with the best chance, but though she had a great career in the City she does not have much political experience and has none of Gove's or Boris's eloquence.

Talking about elites, City types, professional men and CEOs are only a part of it. I imagine most hereditary peers voted Out, though, as few now sit in the House of Lords, there's no way of knowing.  I bet the Queen, who "purred down the phone" when David Cameron told her the Scots had voted to stay in the UK is purring once more.