Oscar Wilde, André Gide and sex with underage boys

I have a huge admiration and much affection for Oscar Wilde, but I get annoyed when he is treated as a hero because of his sex life. There is nothing remotely heroic about it. 

I asked in this blog a long time ago, in a post that gets lots of clicks, if he were a child molester. He had relations with boys under the age of 18, which was illegal in England till twenty years ago and one boy was mentioned at his trial who looked fourteen. 

I recently accidentally came across this book review from 1997, which suggests that Wilde procured young boys for Lord Alfred Douglas and Andre Gide and had relations with them himself. I quote.

''Wilde lost his virginity to Robbie Ross when the latter was a year below the current age of consent [in England in 1997] , and the boys Wilde wined and dined were frequently younger than that - as when he became involved with a 16-year-old who had been smuggled into London from Bruges to be installed in the Albermarle Hotel. According to Oscar Browning, the pederastic Victorian public-school master, "on Saturday, the boy slept with Douglas; on Sunday he slept with Oscar. On Monday he slept with a woman at Douglas's expense."

Romanian women write about immigrants in England

Jaywick Sands is a very poor coastal town in Essex, inhabited mostly by people who once lived in the East End of London. The majority were Leave voters and are part of Clacton, a constituency I know very well, which had a UKIP MP.

A Romanian woman, Alexandra Bulat, who is a PhD Candidate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), in University College London, writing a dissertation on the attitudes of British people to EU migration, went to visit and speak to people there. Her report is here.

A much more revealing and interesting discussion about multiracial Britain, by a young Romanian woman living and blogging in East London, is here. Google Translate will translate it if your Romanian is rusty.

The Clacton by-election in 2014, that Douglas Carswell precipitated after leaving the Conservatives and won for UKIP,  led Conservative journalist Matthew Parris to make a day trip and write about it for the Times. 

What he wrote tells you everything you need to know about why Leave won the referendum two years later. He spoke for the Conservative 'Modernisers' like David Cameron and George Osborne when he said this.

I met nothing but helpfulness there. Clacton-on-Sea is a friendly resort trying not to die, inhabited by friendly people trying not to die. 

The moment Max Hastings realised Remain had lost the Brexit referendum

'The moment I despaired of the Remain cause during the 2016 referendum campaign came when, in a conversation with George Osborne, I urged him to hold out some scintilla of hope to the many people distressed by immigration levels. “I think we should leave that to Ukip”, he said primly. But what about raising the possibility of revisiting the ECHR? The chancellor responded that to fly any such kite “would set a very poor example to countries such as Belarus”. I came home and transferred my little all into US dollars.'

From today's Daily Telegraph. 

Things I learnt from Robert Tombs' 'The English and Their History'

Victory at Agincourt and the consequent capture of Rouen caused dancing in the streets of London.

Scott coined the phrase Wars of the Roses. They lasted thirty years but there were only a few weeks of intense conflict. Life went on as normal.

The English in the 15th century were richer and safer than many countries in the 20th century. I don't find this surprising, though Dr. Tombs thinks it shocking.

The Tudor monarchs called themselves Plantagenets, never Tudors. It was David Hume who first called them Tudors. 

Henry VIII attempted to reconquer France and got within fifty miles of Paris, unaware that the Hundred Years' War had long ended.

Robert Tombs was in his thirties and handsome when he supervised me but now he looks old. What can have happened?


Wikipedia confirms my fears. He is now 69.

Sir Hugh Dowding: 'All the unemployables of Europe will invade us and succeed where Hitler failed' if we join EEC

Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who won the Battle of Britain, claimed in 1961 in a letter to Lord Beaverbrook which is shortly to be auctioned, that 'all the unemployables' of Europe would 'invade' Britain if the country were to join the European Economic Community, which posed a 'terrible menace' that would 'succeed where Hitler failed'

At last some very good news about Brexit

If Robert Peston is to be believed, and he usually is, Michel Barnier agrees with David Davis, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the European Research Group that only a Canadian type deal is possible.

This has always been my choice though I could live with a temporary Norway deal or leaving in an orderly way without a deal.

"So as pretty much every Tory MP who is not on May’s payroll will tell you, Chequers is dead.

"Which means that if May too isn’t to find her career as PM terminated along with it, she may have to resurrect Davis’s Canada plus - which, funnily enough, was her preferred plan, outlined at Lancaster House, at the start of 2017."

I don't think what happens to Theresa May matters very much to anyone except lobby correspondents, not even to her, as she must leave office when we leave the EU, whatever happens. The Canada option would at least save some of her reputation by saving Britain's bacon. 

Olly Robbins must be sent to govern the Falkland Islands for the rest of his career.

Francis Fukuyama discussing Samuel Huntington

Indeed, if we unpack the psychology of identity, we see that much of what is labeled religious extremism is actually not driven by religious belief per se, if by that one means personal piety and individual commitment to a particular doctrine. Many of the young European Muslims who left the countries of their birth to fight for the Islamic State in Syria were trapped between two cultures, the traditional one defined by the piety of their parents, and the secular Western one in which they were brought up. This identity confusion could easily be answered by a radical Islamist who presented an ideology that answered the question, “Who am I?”, and connected that individual to a larger community of Muslims around the world.
In a less violent manner, many of the Muslim women who have taken to wearing the hijab are doing so not because they have suddenly become so much more pious; the hijab rather is a marker of identity that tells those around them that they are proud and unafraid to be seen as Muslim. 

From an article entitled 'Huntington’s Legacy' arguing that identity politics is a more important fact in the world than traditional cultures.

Angela Merkel thinks Europe owes Africa 'a great debt'

I just discovered that Angela Merkel said in January of this year at the Davos conference that co-operation with Africa was 

“very very important first because we Europeans owe a great debt to the continent of Africa from colonial times and secondly because we have a profound interest in positive development in Africa.”

It is true that there were very shameful moments in the brief history of German colonisation of Africa, as well as terrible things that happened in French Africa and in the Congo Free State while it was the private property of King Leopold II of the Belgians, but it is obvious that Africans have on balance benefited vastly from their interaction with white people. Apart from such boons as Christianity, order, literacy, Western literature, art and music, the rule of law, roads and railways and planes and cars, they benefit from all the improvements in science and medicine of the last few hundred years. 

We Europeans do not have a debt to Africa. 

We do have a moral duty to help Africa become richer and the best way to achieve this is by free trade. The EU by dumping  has helped keep Africa poor. 

But research shows that the more prosperous Africans become the more they try to enter Europe and share the much better state of things in Europe. They have more money to make the journey and know more about living standards in Europe.

If by a 

'profound interest in positive development in Africa'

Mrs. Merkel means that economic growth is in Europe's interest to prevent pressure on Europe's southern border she could not be more mistaken.

Colonialism

I heard a Congolese historian on the anniversary of independence tell a shocked BBC man that all the good things in the Congo were due to the Belgians.

'But you accept that the Belgians did not act from altruistic motives?' 

'I don't care what their motives were.'

From the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy's Guide to Good Practice

Things people said to me while I was in Great Britain

I avoided talking about Brexit or Theresa May, two subjects that everyone finds painful and done to death, but I seem to have talked a lot of politics. 

A Russian expert, who sympathises with Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia, told me that Putin is the least bad leader Russia has ever had. I mentioned Czar Alexander II and later thought of Stolypin. Still, my friend might be right.

I shared a table in a pub in Fort William with a young Swedish woman prison officer who had just completed  the West Highland Way, which lasts 96 miles from the outskirts of Glasgow, camping on the way. It sounded fun, if one stayed at B and B's. I asked her how many of the prisoners in her prison (all convicted of drug related crimes) were from ethnic minorities and she said about half.

York Minster on a cool, rainy Sunday in August

Will the passing of John McCain mark the end of American interventionism?

The Wall Street Journal:

The death of John McCain will leave Congress without perhaps its loudest voice in support of the robust internationalism that has defined the country’s security relations since World War II.

This is an interesting non-eulogy of John McCain, who died on Saturday, by Tom Woods.

McCain’s preferred foreign policy has yielded death, displacement, and regional chaos on a massive scale, not to mention a huge shot in the arm to the very Islamic radicalism he assured us he was fighting against.

He thinks the media falling over themselves to mourn McCain 'Orwellian'  and compares McCain the Establishment figure with Pat Buchanan, a true maverick.

Durham cathedral, castle and church

The priest yesterday in Durham had a Northern accent and moved swiftly from the words in the Gospel about the Real Presence to the problem of rich people eating the poor. He said St Paul's instruction to wives to submit to husbands was 'awful' and he had been tempted to omit these words from the Gospel reading altogether. He explained that St Paul had expected the imminent second coming and not bothered to preach in favour of sexual equality.

I was at St Cuthbert's Church, a pretty church which is one of the oldest Catholic churches in England, built in 1827. It has a beautiful altarpiece but it saddened me that Catholics celebrate Mass here and not in Durham Cathedral, a contender with Wells and Salisbury for being the most beautiful cathedral in the country. 

Durham Catholics form a community that has survived the Reformation. In 1569 Durham was the centre of the Rising of the North by the Catholic Percys and Nevilles, Earls of

The glories of our blood and state

George Mikes said how old it makes you feel when people who owe you money become boulevards. Simon Milton, in my year at university and a Union star, certainly never borrowed money from me and I knew him only slightly, but he has been a sculpture in Piccadilly for years. I remember him winning a balloon debate as Amy Carter, which shows how unimaginably long ago it was.

Scotland the brave

I ate haggis three times in a day and a half in Scotland and shall eat black pudding for the third time in 48 hours. Apart from offal the other themes of my Scotch travels are rain and overcast skies which are forecast to last for another week. And noble prospects, to quote Boswell.

I apologise to readers who want my insights into the violence in Bucharest. I am too far away but I am sure that once more the gendarmes are to blame at least for much of it. I wish it were only in Romania that the police are responsible for  violence against peaceful protesters but it happens even in England. 

Jeremy Warner in today's Daily Telegraph

The great tragedy of Turkey’s latest economic crisis is that it has come just too late to influence the outcome of recent elections, and that, far from dethroning a corrupt and incompetent autocrat, it might, despite the inevitable years of economic hardship that now lie ahead, even bolster his position, irretrievably turning the country Eastwards and away from the Western, secular traditions of modern day Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Erdogan is fast shaping up to be the Mediterranean’s next Nasser, further destabilising a region already wracked by economic/tribal/religious rivalry and war. It would only require him to seize the US nuclear base at Incirlik, as Gamal Abdel Nasser did the Suez canal, to complete the picture.

'How Matteo Salvini pulled Italy to the far right'

The Guardian regularly publishes a long essay as 'The Long Read'. Today it published an interesting discussion of Matteo Salvini of the League and the new Italian government from which I gleaned these two pieces of information:


The number of immigrants in Italy rose from 2.5 million in 2007 to 5 million in 2017. 

Last year 664,000 Italians died and 464,000 were born, of whom 100,000 had a foreign mother or father.

I also learnt that the Italian Families Minister caused a scandal by saying there was no such thing as a gay family and suggesting that laws against hate speech should be repealed. This alerts any Guardian readers who think that the League might have a point about illegal immigrants that the League is evil.

Of course the League is not far right at all. Far right means Sir Oswald Mosley not Enoch Powell, Franco not Poujade, fascists like Mussolini and people who want a dictatorship, not democrats who want to slow or stop immigration and care more about this issue than economics.

The Guardian article has as its premise the idea that economics is what politics is mostly about and talk of immigration is a distraction. But isn't the nation more important to normal people than economics? 

Plenty of things are more important to the left than economic growth, of course, which is why left-wing governments always run out of money and fail.

The real battle is not between the League and the left but the League, which opposes islamification and homosexual civil partnerships, and the Church, which does the same. 

The article does not mention that a Catholic magazine very close to the Vatican, 'The Christian Family', described Salvini as the devil. One priest called him the Anti-Christ.

The former bishop of Caserta, Raffaele Nogaro, said recently

“Morally and as a man of faith I would be willing to turn all churches into mosques if it were useful to the cause and if it helped to save the lives of poor and unhappy men and women, because Christ did not come to earth to build churches but to help men regardless of race, religion, or nationality.”

Liberals and ethnic groups

Daniel Hannan‏ Verified account@DanielJHannan 41 minutes ago

The alt-right and the woke Left are not opposites when it comes to race. They both define people by ethnic identity. The real anti-racists are the classical liberals who see everyone as an individual.

Daniel Hannan, Thatcherite and Brexiteer, says that he is a Whig not a Tory. He has that in common with left-wing Tories like Ian Gilmour, David Cameron and probably Harold Macmillan, whose father was a Liberal Unionist and who married the daughter of a Whig duke.

Everyone is an individual and of infinite importance to the economy of the universe, and this is liberalism's great insight, but an individual does not come into the world a blank sheet of paper. It is a great fault of liberalism to misunderstand or ignore the great importance of the many factors which form individuals and societies, especially traditions, cultures, ethnic groups and religions. 

Daniel Hannon gave a talk a year or so about the Anglosphere and was, so I read somewhere on Facebook, visibly upset when asked whether countries in the Anglosphere would still be Anglo if most people in those countries were descended from people from outside the British Isles or even from outside Europe. He got very cross and said he strongly believed that descent was irrelevant and that culture was independent of descent or lineage.  

This is liberalism rather than Toryism.

How to get on in our globalised world and the lion in Sir Edwin Landseer's drawing room

The late Marquis of Bath and friend

I shall be in London shortly, a city I so love, and may have to show some teenagers around, so I read this article in the Daily Telegraph entitled

Six educational London days out, as chosen by a teacher.

It was moderately interesting, though I understood a quite different thing about Landseer's lions at the foot of Nelson's Column, which the writer says were modelled on cats and are anatomically impossible.

“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy."

“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” Margaret Thatcher

“Britain is something more than a European country; it’s a link between many countries in many continents. I do not believe that Britain can federate with continental Europe.” Clement Attlee in 1952, quoted by Daniel Hannan

Sir Roger Scruton

"A community that has survived its gods has three options. It can find some secular path to the ethical life. Or it can fake the higher emotions, while living without them. Or it can give up pretending and so collapse, as Burke put it, into the 'dust and powder of individuality."


"We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work."

"The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer

Romanians with net worth over $50 million in 2017

I post this simply to show how very rich Romanians compare with the super-rich elsewhere.


US: 38,500

China: 13,940

Japan: 9,960

Germany: 8,070

Canada: 5,500

France: 5,240 

UK: 4,580

Italy: 3,150

India: 2,920

Russia: 2,620

South Korea: 2,610

Brazil: 2,390

Saudi: 1,540

Mexico: 570

Romania: 240

(Knight Frank’s Wealth Report)

Quotations

Alastair Campbell‏Verified account @campbellclaret 49m49 minutes ago

Climate change denial should be a crime.

I assumed this was a fake but Alistair Campbell, Blair's PR adviser REALLY said this. Just now. 

"The French have not recovered from Sartre and perhaps never will. For they have had to live with an intellectual establishment that has consistently repudiated the two things that hold the country together: Christianity and the idea of France." Sir Roger Scruton, The Power of Negative Thinking.

Søren Kierkegaard

You cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you. 

If I have ventured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven't ventured at all, who helps me then?

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.

Quotations

"By understanding many things, I have accomplished nothing." The last words of Grotius.

Progressives are fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson's dictum on the necessity of a revolution every twenty years. They may be about to finally have one.
Cathy Barry Willinge

Honestly, the solutions to life's problems are simple...get your heart and mind right with God through Jesus Christ, use your strength to contend for Him, get married before you have kids, have kids though, stay married and treat others well.
The less you think of yourself the better oFf you will be, because you be crazy and you know it.

Jennifer Lokken 

BBC News: Eddie Ndopu is “unapologetically brilliant, black, queer and disabled....I want to be the first wheelchair user in space"

Sir Roger Scruton quotations

"The accumulated evidence of human nature tells us the only improvement that lies within our control is the improvement of ourselves"


"People are drawn to religion by their consciousness of consciousness, by an awareness of a light shining in the centre of their being"


"Love is not the answer, but the question, the thing that sets us searching for meaning in a world from which meaning has retreated"

Trump is doing a Nixon in China in reverse - two must-read articles published today

I read two very striking articles about Donald Trump today that you should read too.

I agree completely with this article, by Jon Basil Utley, the publisher of The American Conservative, who asks what the reason is for either Europe or America to spend huge sums on Nato. There is none. Russia is not going to invade any Nato country.

He correctly says, as I have known since 1989, that the the big threat to the world comes from nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. In 1989 I imagined the terrorists using them to blackmail governments. Now I know that if the Islamists get them they will use them. The Pakistani bomb particularly worries me. More than an Iranian bomb.

He makes another good point:

For all the Democratic and Big Media attacks on Trump for supposedly caving in to Putin, he gave Putin nothing.

Anna Sándor de Kénos, friend of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, has died

'With the death of Anna Sándor de Kénos, the last living link to the Transylvania and Hungary of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water has gone.'

Here is the Daily Telegraph obituary.

Civilisation and barbarians - but which are which?

"The luckless American who happens to be born a conservative...either folds up his heart and withers in a corner - in remote places you sometimes find such a solitary gaunt idealist - or else he flies to Oxford or Florence or Montmarte to save his soul - or perhaps not to save it." George Santayana

"The cultural elites are drawn more and more towards identity politics, but they regard their national identity as no big deal. Those sections of the elite that are charged with

Why care if the British government doesn’t mind ISIS murderers being executed?

Why do the BBC and the papers care that the British government doesn’t mind if British ISIS murderers are executed in the USA? I thought we had a Tory government, at least theoretically. 

I have never even been in favour of hanging, but why on earth should we stop the Americans executing people? It's one of their old-fashioned customs, like using Fahrenheit and going to church.

I believe in human rights strongly, if human rights mean freedom (they don’t). I therefore

Back to an outpost of civilisation

On Saturday I went back to Pacuiul lui Soare with Mihai once more and a visiting friend. This time the sand was not as hot as coals, or hot at all, the river was not warm and instead of being alone on the island we were one of five or six groups. The motorway from Bucharest to the coast has been completed. The  road in which Mihai and I sunk into the mud is now closed off and the track we used, though shorter and dryer, is much worse, not a road at all. It would have been quicker to walk than drive down it.

I recommend, gentle reader, that you do as we did on a hot Saturday a few months after Mihai and I first visited the island, when we left Bucharest early for the almost desert island with what my father would have called a nice bunch of fellows and girls and a picnic, from which wine was not absent.

This is what I wrote after my first visit.


For Romanians Bulgaria used to be just a place you had to go through to get to Greece or Turkey, although now it is a holiday destination in its own right, but for Bulgarians Romania is a place you don't have to go to at all.

Chaplain dismissed for Benediction to atone for gay pride event

Father Mark Morris, Catholic chaplain at Glasgow Caledonian University, formerly Glasgow Poly, has been relieved from his duties by the University after he announced in his parish newsletter that he would pray the Rosary and hold Benediction at his parish church (unconnected with his role at the university) in reparation for what the newsletter called

 “the gross offence to God that is Pride Glasgow.”

He did this in response to a request from a parishioner.

The University Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Pamela Gillies, who is co-author of You, Me and HIV: Making Sense of Safer Sex for Those with Learning Difficulties, issued this statement:

Kissinger: Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era

Henry Kissinger makes interesting, though elliptical and "halting" remarks about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in an interview in the Financial Times, which you might or might not find locked behind the paywall. It opened for me the first time but not when I tried to reread it.

On Donald Trump:

“I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”

Dr. Kissinger wanted an American-Russian summit but not one like the one that took place this week.

Neo-con jihadis

Paul Gottfried explains here that of course neo-cons are imperialists. He uses the word imperialism as if it were a bad thing, when in its time British imperialism did a huge amount of good, as well as some bad things. The neo-cons had idealistic motives for wanting to export their values to the world but unlike the great Clive of India, who was not idealistic at all, their legacy is disastrous. 

Vladimir Putin is a bad man, as was Peter the Great. Putin's bloodless invasion of the Crimea and the bloody proxy wars he wages in Eastern Ukraine are completely unjustified, but his perception that he is combating US and EU imperialism is accurate enough. 

Seen on Facebook: time is the new currency

This guy last night...he said time was the new currency. It is more precious than money, or material things. Giving people your time is love. What do you think? I think I agree.


Someone once said the broad difference between Americans and Europeans is the first like stuff and the second like time.

Europeans are not the men their grandfathers were

Roy Greenslade hypocrisy

Annoying left-wing journalist Roy Greenslade has long one of my bêtes noires, but I did not know until now that he was sympathetic to the political arm of the murderous I.R.A. 

Ruth Dudley Edwards comments on Roy Greenslade's article in today's Guardian:

So Roy Greenslade, one-time writer for An Phoblacht [Sinn Fein's official magazine] (under a pseudonym) and longtime friend of such IRA luminaries as Pat Doherty and John Downey - the alleged Hyde Park bomber - is worried for democracy because of Donald Trump. He ends his column quoting the worries about post-Brexit human rights expressed by Martina Anderson MEP, who served time for being an IRA bomber and is proud of ex-colleagues who murdered in the name of Irish unity. I notice he appears to have stopped disclosing his An Phoblacht connections which he did only because of protests to his new editor.

Bath Club

The old Bath Club in Dover St., in St. James's, owned a Canaletto. A member once told a waiter he had heard they had a good Canaletto and could he bring him a bottle. The waiter went away and returned to say tactfully that there were no more bottles left.

How popular are Trump, Merkel, May, Macron, Trudeau and the Italian governing coalition?

Polls can be terribly unreliable, but are always interesting.


36% of Germans find Putin more likable than Trump. 70% find Putin less frightening.

71% of Russians have an unfavorable view of Trump.

77% of Britons did so before his visit, though 51% thought him right to make his views clear on Brexit.

However, Trump is doing much better in the polls in his home country than Mrs. May or Messrs. Macron and Trudeau in theirs. He is one point behind Mrs. Merkel.

Donald Trump - 47%. 

Theresa May - 25%. 

Macron - two recent polls put him on 32% and 34%.

Angela Merkel 48%. 

Justin Trudeau 34%.

Five Stars/League coalition government in Italy 60%.

Postcard from 1793 contrasting British and French Liberty

Donald Trump is accused of lying, but it is his truthfulness that really angers people

I had been looking forward to President (that STILL sounds odd) Trump's visit to Great Britain for months. Everyone has, I imagine, except Theresa May and her colleagues.

He sometimes disappoints, but his visit to Britain has already proven to be a virtuoso performance. He is what the world badly needs, a troll of genius. 

But it is not about 'the great cause of cheering us all up', though he does cheer up many conservatives. It is about changing the world.

Because the world exists in people's minds and is shaped by discourse. President Trump's great achievement has been to change the previously narrow limits on permissible discourse, the previously very cramped Overton window.

John O'Sullivan Retweeted

Theresa May's Chequers plan is "the biggest loss of British sovereignty since Britain's accession to the EU in 1973"
- Sir Ivan Rogers, UK ex-ambassador to EU, and very stauch remainer.


Andrew Lilico
I'm a Johnsonian (Frank) more than a Johnsonian (Boris), but I've followed Boris since his Telegraph days in Brussels. The evidence is clear: He was always tempted by Brexit & when the referendum made it politically possible, he chose Leave and helped win it. Genuinely, thanks.

Trump's visit to Britain is going to be richly comic.Think Evelyn Waugh. I cannot wait.

'Donald Trump has said it is for the British people to decide if Theresa May should stay on as Prime Minister and suggested he will meet Boris Johnson during his visit to the UK.
'Speaking on the White House lawn, the US President said that Mr Johnson is "a great friend of mine" and said that the UK is in "turmoil". He suggested that his meeting with Vladimir Putin will be "easier" than his meeting with Mrs May.
'He said: "I have Nato, I have the UK which is in somewhat turmoil, and I have Putin. Frankly Putin may be the easiest of all. Who would think, who would think.

The EU will decide Britain's fate and Theresa May will not be forced to quit

“If you want to succeed in politics,” Lloyd George is said to have observed, “you must keep your conscience well under control."

David Davis should have resigned on Friday after the twelve hour cabinet meeting decided in favour of a soft Brexit. Still he did resign, after thinking about it all weekend, and his decision deserves respect. 

He does not want to bring down Theresa May. He could have brought her down in the twenty-four hours after the election result last year but chose not to, out of loyalty and because he had advised her to call an election. Though he did not advise her to campaign for seven weeks in a dispiritingly robotic and mindless way, repeating over and over the meaningless mantra 'Strong and stable' as her advisers had instructed her to do.

His delay means Boris Johnson's resignation is not about principle but about maintaining his position as leader of the Brexiteers, or rather of those backbench Brexiteers that do not agree with Michael Gove that what the cabinet decided on is the best we can get.

Boris Johnson's problem is that after being very rude about the proposals in the meeting he then surprised colleagues by pledging to back it with enthusiasm. One cabinet minister said:

The Queen's first Foreign Secretary was Anthony Eden, whom she later knighted

Today, 66 years after Eden kissed hands as Foreign Secretary, the Queen appointed Jeremy Hunt to replace Boris Johnson.



5 April 1955 was decided upon as the date when Churchill would finally tender his resignation to the Queen, to be succeeded as Prime Minister by Eden. The evening before, Churchill hosted a farewell dinner, attended by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, at 10 Downing Street. After the dinner, his long-serving secretary John 'Jock'  Colville found the Prime Minister sitting on his bed in evening dress, wearing the Garter and staring into space. Colville asked him softly what he was thinking about. Colville imagined he was looking back over his 55 years in politics, but instead Churchill said, “I don’t believe Anthony can do it.”

Theresa May humiliated in cabinet

Liberal Democrat David Laws was a member of the 2010-15 coalition cabinet and often attended cabinet. In his diary he recounts an incident in 2012 when the cabinet discussed Chinese visas.


“This soon turned out to be a full-frontal attack on the home secretary. Theresa May remained very quiet, seething with anger, while the chancellor, sitting right next to her on her left, launched his scathing attack.

“Cameron got visibly angry and began to go through all the points on the chancellor’s list, one by one. Theresa stuttered and stumbled and looked desperately through her briefing notes for the answers that she needed — but without finding any. Other ministers looked embarrassed at seeing the home secretary squirm so badly.”

"Senior cabinet ministers aren’t usually humiliated in this way, and I doubt Theresa May will forget this.”
This is an extract from David Laws' memoirs. We very easily imagine Theresa May squirming. She is not nearly as clever as Messrs. Cameron and Osborne, was a hopeless Home Secretary and is now an incompetent Prime Minister.  She cannot say anything interesting. Was there ever a Prime Minister with less verve or originality?

Exactly

“The referendum was a vote of confidence in our institutions, even though it was a vote of no confidence in the people running them.”

Robert Tombs

I so love a good political crisis - and especially this one

If it's the Chequers deal, Brexit doesn't mean Brexit. Jacob Rees-Mogg

Tom Newton Dunn‏Verified account @tnewtondunn More

Should Boris follow you out? David Davis: “People can only make these decisions of principle by themselves”. No pressure then. @BBCr4today

Andrew Neil‏Verified account @afneil More

John Barron MP asks key question which PM dodges. Regulatory alignment with EU means any free trade deals with 3rd parties means imports from 3rd parties would have to conform with EU rules.

1. Tim Stanley‏Verified account @timothy_stanley 18h18 hours ago
   

   Bet when the histories are written we'll find it wasn't just the customs plan - which is not *that* awful - but the way it was pushed onto the Cabinet that triggered this. Contrast the 1976 IMF loan crisis. TWO MONTHS of Cabinet meetings. All ideas exhausted. Respect shown.
2. Paulvew added,

   
   

   Tim StanleyVerified account @timothy_stanley

   Re-upping this: my verdict on May's customs plan. Unlike Davis, I think it's okay. Like Davis, I fear the concessions to come. And after the last 48 hrs I'm even less certain the government is capable of getting everything Britain needs from the EU http://timothystanley.co.uk/blog/theresa-mays-brexit-customs-plan-not-a-betrayal-but-a-weak-hand-to-play …

I bet Mr Trump will stir Theresa May's pot

Mr Trump is coming to the UK on Friday 13 July. I so hope he stirs the Brexit pot and trolls Theresa May, offering us a free trade deal if they scrap her plan. I bet he does. Those two can't stand one another.

She deserves it, after the way she reprimanded him for retweeting three video clips of violent Muslims, that came from a tiny right-wing party called Britain First. Nothing was said about the alarming contents of the clips themselves and no-one disputed the things portrayed in them happened. But as ever the story suddenly was about Islamophobia.

I almost (but not quite) feel sorry for Mrs May who, after learning of her Foreign Secretary's resignation, on top of Mr. Davis's at midnight, and then defending her policy in the House all afternoon, goes off to meet the new Austrian Prime Minister.

In the House, the cameras kept panning to Liam Fox, who looked unhappy throughout and did not nod as the Prime Minister spoke. Will he resign next?

Boris Johnson resigns but his delay may be fatal for him

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson's resignation came as a big surprise to me though it should not have done.

Nor should David Davis's resignation at midnight last night.

Mr. Davis's resignation left Boris without credibility, but so does the report that he promised at dinner with the cabinet on Friday evening, after its 12 hour meeting at which Boris's Brexiteer faction lost badly, to defend Theresa May's cabinet's Brexit position wholeheartedly.

Mr. Davis seemed to invite the Foreign Secretary to resign when he was asked about him in an interview on Radio 4 this morning. David Davis put him in a very difficult position indeed, whether intentionally or not. A resignation by Boris Johnson and other cabinet ministers on Friday evening would have been much easier for Boris Johnson. Donald Davis has resigned on a matter of principle and honour. Boris's resignation is a ruse and he is damaged goods.

The problem for the Tories and all parties in Britain is structural. It takes months to elect a new leader and the people worst qualified to make a decision - party members - get to do so. That's why, appalling though she is, it's hard to see the party dropping its incompetent and ill starred leader.

But what matters now to me that somehow in this scrum the ball might be, to use a rugby expression, fumbled and Britain ends up not leaving the EU at all. And to cap it all being ruled by a Trotskyite far left populist government.

The Queen's first Foreign Secretary in 1952 was Anthony Eden, whom she later knighted. Now she will appoint another.

I thought this tweet gets it right.

Damian Thompson@holysmoke This is what happens when you hang on to a Prime Minister who is easily as selfish and unprincipled as Boris. The room-temperature IQ doesn’t help, either.

The day the dream died

There is an Indian proverb that says a woman conquers a man by her stillness.

Two women leaders of very different calibres, Angela Merkel, who is a very successful national leader, and Theresa May who is certainly not, illustrate the effectiveness of stillness and slowness in getting them what they want. Each made disastrous mistakes from which they cannot recover when they made uncharacteristically sudden and unheralded decisions (to let in limitless migrants and call the 2017 snap election).

The British cabinet's very long delayed decision about what deal they want with the EU means adopting something rather like the arrangement Norway has with the EU. This enables Norway to escape the common fisheries policy but means she obeys laws she does not help to make. Norway also has to pay vast amounts to trade with the EU and permit free movement by citizens of EU countries, things the British Government hopes optimistically to avoid.  

The very powerful senior civil servants of the Treasury, which is the centre of power in the British government, as I always feared and expected, have persuaded the

A 'Duty to Hate Britain'

A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country.

I hope I write well but on the subject of migrants I cannot write better than Douglas Murray, Deputy Editor of the Spectator and a prophet. He is almost the only prophetic voice in modern England, which is in her greatest danger for centuries. On the subject of immigration the media and almost every other public figure there deal in lies and cowardly evasions. 

I really do recommend you read his masterful account of the career of tube bomber Ahmed Hassan who came close to murdering a lot of people in London in September. Some brief quotations:

At Brooklands College in July 2017, Ahmed Hassan was awarded a prize as "student of the year". He used the £20 Amazon voucher he received to purchase the first of the ingredients he needed to build his bomb...

At every stage, the British state helped Hassan in every way it could. It took in a person who had no right to be in the country -- who indeed had entered the

Macron fights Orban for Europe's soul

Emanuel Macron is the most important and significant politician in the world right now and sees his career as a Manichean struggle of liberalism against the forces of what he considers darkness. 

He is right and his success or failure will have huge consequences. 

Ben Judah reports that he sees his term as an existential battle against populism in Europe trying to breakup the European Union and sees Brexit in this light. 

This makes sense, but is not good news for the wretched British government. Nor for the Hungarian government, though they seem to know what they are doing.

On June 18, France ambassador in Budapest, Éric Fournier, send a report to the Quai d'Orsay which was leaked to Mediapart on Friday. In it Fournier said Viktor Orban is not  a populist or an extremist. These things, he said, were press inventions.

The Declaration of Independence is hate speech

The Liberty County Vindicator, a local newspaper in a small town in Texas, was uploading the Declaration of Independence in parts to their Facebook page when the tenth instalment was disallowed by Facebook as “hate speech”. It was the part where the Declaration says of poor, benign King George III:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

The real meaning of the Statue of Liberty

BBC news item this morning:

The woman who climbed up on the Statue of Liberty and sat on the monument's base is in detention, police say.
Tourists were evacuated from Liberty Island in New York Harbour on Wednesday during a three-hour stand-off with local and federal authorities.

Four quotations

“Remember, together with the Chinese we comprise a quarter of the world’s population.” Enver Hoxha, quoted by Simon Heffer in the latest issue of the Sunday Telegraph.

“Of course the UK is one state to the EU’s 27, but in economic terms our departure is equivalent to the 19 smallest members heading for the exit.” Henry Newman