From the Isles of Scilly to Iona via the Essex marshes, 2019

St Peter Ad Muram, Bradwell Juxta Mare, Essex

Home in Bucharest, thank God.

I went to many beautiful places in a long journey around the British Isles (including the four great cities of the Empire, London, Glasgow, Dublin and Edinburgh) but I like Bucharest much more than any of them. It is so much more exciting here if you are a foreigner. Not necessarily if you a Bucharest native.

Instead of 17° Celsius in the Athens of the North and raining intermittently it's 34° in the Paris of the East, a.k.a. 93° Fahrenheit.

I should have blogged my journey but did not. So here is a potpourri.

The three best moments of a wonderful holiday: the oldest church in England built by St Cedd on the shore of the Essex marshes at Bradwell Juxta Mare in 654  (though this is disputed by a friend of mine who says he has discovered an older one); journeys by train, substitution bus and boats from Glasgow to Iona and back; and three Schubert liede in  concert in Edinburgh Episcopalian Cathedral sung by Danae Eleni. 

After those three, the next very best moments of my holiday were eating haggis for breakfast, seeing many old friends and making new ones. Then wonderful train rides, cathedrals, pretending to be a London clubman, seeing England from outside the window as a sort of foreigner.

Somerset Maughan said you can eat better in England than in any other country in the world, providing you eat breakfast three times a day. How very true this would be except that breakfast in Scotland is even better as it includes the same things as an English breakfast and also white sausage and haggis.

The joy of Great Britain is that outside London the country is still Enid Blyton. The industrial towns are no longer J.B. Priestley or George Orwell though. They have changed completely, for good and ill. 

Driving holidays are fun but long rail journeys are more fun. I so recommend the train from Paddington to Penzance. Get the 12.05 or 13.05 from Paddington and enjoy lunch on the last white tablecloth restaurant car in the UK. It’s full of single, middle-aged men ordering bottles of wine and a bit like a club table in a London club but jollier.

Exasperatingly, the restaurant car was full when I got there. I thought of waiting an hour at the station for the 13.05 but it seemed foolish to lose an hour of Exeter so I gave up on the idea. But I found myself sitting opposite Gerry who loved the lunches. He, like me, hadn’t got a place but as a frequent passenger he had pull with the waiters and got them to sell him some wine and sandwiches, something not normally allowed. We recreated the idea of lunch with two amusing young actresses.

The scenery on the journey from London to Glasgow if not as good as Cornwall was still very beautiful indeed, especially through the Lake District and Scotch Lowlands. I find night trains exciting and had intended till the last minute to take one to Glasgow but I shall not do so again in Great Britain. The scenery is far too good to miss and the day trains very fast.

I managed to make my way to Winchester, Chichester and Exeter cathedrals as well as St Alban’s, Southwark and Glasgow. I don’t count St Giles’, Edinburgh or the other Edinburgh cathedrals or the Catholic cathedral at Arundel (though it is beautiful). I saw Truro and Chelmsford from the train, but they don't count either, and St Paul's from the bus. 

Exeter and Winchester Cathedrals are miraculous. I loved the whole town of Winchester and was taken round the school by a Wykehamist friend. The Wykeham Arms is one of the best pubs in the world and they serve a very good steak pie. Meat pies are my great vice. They have rooms too and it looked nicer than the more upmarket place where we stayed.

Exeter is also a beautiful town breathing the spirit of a bygone religious, hierarchical, patriarchal age but was badly knocked about by the Luftwaffe and then by postwar architects. 

British buildings and English literature are a riposte to the ideas of our own age. That's why they want to pull down statues of heroic figures like Cecil Rhodes. It's a bit like the Protestants destroying stained glass when they took over Exeter, Winchester and the other cathedrals.

Things changed, of course, in England in the twenty years that I have been away. Everyone is much kinder and much more polite. 

When you say thank you in England people now tend to reply "No worries" even though I wasn't worried. That I found annoying. It sounds Australian and though I love Australians it is not English. Before I went away people generally said nothing in reply to 'Thank you', but they did say 'Thank you' incessantly.

Everyone is hypochondriac and this year gluten seemed to be everywhere, or rather its absence was. An Indian restaurant in Glasgow did not serve parathas because they contain gluten.

Exeter was full of middle aged and elderly men in short trousers even in banks, but men were less effete in Glasgow, though this could be because of the cold, rainy weather.

George Sq., Glasgow, seen from the Counting House public house

I loved Glasgow in the rain. Unlike other great Victorian cities Glasgow was not rebuilt in the era of those two monstrous figures Wilson and Heath. It breathes 19th century imperialism and masculine vigour, over which alas has been overlaid socialism and SNP populism.

A friend of mine described the experience of going to Glasgow to me as “Just get in the shower, turn on the cold, and rip up all your money. You could also punch yourself in the face if you really wanted the total experience. All you can do there is drink.” But I loved it despite the rain and cold.

Even Glasgow was polite and kind - it is no longer rough. Even the Gorbals has been gentrified, of course. 

I suppose I went to Glasgow vaguely because of C.R. Mackintosh but never bestirred myself to find his stuff or see the two famous museums. The eighteenth and nineteenth century East End held me fascinated.

The train to Oban stops. Dark brown waves, pebble beach, heather.

I reached Luton Airport the day after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. 

While he was massacring Theresa May's front bench with the callousness of a hired gun in a Quentin Tarentino film, England was having her hottest day in many years and the trains were therefore not running. 

I persuaded a family to share a taxi with me to St Alban's. 

The weather that first day in St Alban's was not only extremely hot but extraordinarily, unreally humid. I felt like I was in an expressionist painting. Perhaps The Scream. Fit for a Mexican cathedral, not one in Hertfordshire.

The pretty, buxom daughter had graduated that morning. It was a long journey and I very tentatively asked her about how divided people were about Brexit. She said that, as a student, she of course didn't know anyone who voted Leave. And no, she would never knowingly date someone who had done so.

I slightly avoided the subject of Brexit this holiday - I find it painful and imagine we all do - but when I asked people the pattern was that graduates were Remain and barmaids, shop assistants and tax drivers were Leave. The man who served me a glass of wine in El Vino's voted Remain, but he was the assistant manager and ambitious.

Graduates form part of a global class around the world, these days. Being rooted is not cool.

It's about being open minded and free spirited, but the generation in their early 20s do not seem open minded or free spirited to me. They seem astonishingly conformist. All people in their early 20s are conformist, I know, but these ones are worse than my generation.

I always thought, since I was a child, that the point of holidays was to look at churches but I tend to see them as things of overwhelming beauty rather than having a meaning. If I think about it though, the whole of my recent journey was studded with saints and martyrs starting with St Alban. 

St Alban was a British (not English) martyr, who gives his name to the place where he died. St Pancras was an Italian, or rather two Italians. 

"St Pancras was a young boy martyred in the reign of Diocletian. In England he is better known as a railway station." 

So said Sir John Betjeman. Here is the church in London that gave the station its name. The picture, like all the pictures in this post,  was taken by me. I spent a long time in Euston trying to buy a ticket to Glasgow and came across the famous church as I left.

Quotations

"Hypochondria is the only religious enthusiasm of our times", someone said in the 1990s. That was before Islam and Islamism caught our attention.

"Writers are the engineers of the soul", said Stalin.

"Friendship without the everyday becomes an allegory." Jules Romain. All Facebook friendships are allegories. So are friendships with people you haven't met for ten years. Friendship needs to be embodied.

"Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood."  Oscar Wilde

Nigel Lawson on leaving the EU without a deal

I am very behind with this blog. This is a letter in the Spectator of 1 August from Lord Lawson, who said privately 2 years ago that Brexit would be followed by economic problems for two or three years which is why he wanted an election in 2017.

Sir,
Last week’s lead article (‘Boris begins’, 27 July) suggested that if we leave without a deal, ‘the Johnson government will have another huge challenge on its hands — how to avert large-scale economic damage’. I have some experience of the conduct of economic policy, and I hope you will forgive me for saying that this is poppycock.

Leaving the EU without a trade deal will cause some short-term disruption, but the essence of good government is to do what is best for the medium and long term, whatever the short-term difficulties. And although the main purpose of Brexit is political — i.e. self-government — the economic consequences will be hugely positive, not least through regaining our regulatory autonomy. It should be clear to the meanest intelligence that if there were any economic case for EU membership, the EU (an overtly political project) would not be the world’s economic basket-case, which it is.

Nigel Lawson

London SW1

Things to come, or rather go

Before long in Western Europe cars will disappear from the centres of cities and cash will disappear completely.

Going up to town and down to Scotland

You always go up to London (or up to town, which is non U but was U In the 17th century) and down to everywhere else except when you matriculate at Oxford and Cambridge. This apparently confuses Americans.

What is the future for Remainers after Brexit?

It is astonishing how divided Great Britain still is about Brexit and how few people have changed their minds. I expected Leavers to have buyers' remorse. Sir John Curtice the great psephologist said a couple of days ago,

“If we are talking about Remain vs. Leave, the question that was asked three years ago, at the moment it is 52 percent Remain, 48 percent for Leave. The reason it is slightly pro-Remain is not because the Leave vote is markedly softer … rather those people who did not vote three years ago, if they express a view, are consistently in the polls two-to-one in favour of Remain. This is the crucial vote. The question is whether this group would turn out to vote or not.”

A much more important question is whether they will have the chance to vote on Brexit either in a second referendum or in a general election before Brexit.

Boris can prorogue Parliament and probably should until we leave automatically by the will of Parliament on 31 October- or he can just extend the recess.

But he might want to be defeated in a confidence vote and go to the people on fighting for the people versus MPs  - compare the Liberal 'Peers versus People' campaign in January 1910.

After Brexit what happens to Remain enthusiasts? Especially if Brexit goes reasonably well? I do not know but I do know that the idea of a borderless world, popular with young students and graduates though less so with the half the population who do not go to university, has to be defeated in patient argument. This is very much more important than Brexit. It is existential, to use that silly word.

Train travel

Lord Berners, the painter, would roll down the window of his train carriage and beckon passengers in, putting his hand into his mouth and dragging down his lower lip. He always had the carriage to himself. How I admire the upper classes.

Amber Rudd is apparently stupid as well as malign

The Times Diary today says that civil servants try to make their advice to ministers so simple that even the least intelligent can understand it after three readings. They called this the Amber Rudd test until she became Home Secretary when it was renamed the Priti Patel test.

But she is now Home Secretary.

So many dim women in politics (think Andrea Leadsom) of whom the dimmest is perhaps Theresa May.

Amber Rudd, who was given her seat in Parliament by David Cameron for diversity reasons, is very bad news indeed. Apart from anything else, and there is very much else, she wants reading extremist material online to be punishable by 15 years in clink.

She is in ardent feminist and even more ardent opportunist. She chaired the Commons group combating female genital mutilation but when she was Home Secretary no prosecutions happened. There has been one so far in British history. Even as a feminist she is a fraud.

Quotations

"A red plague is not gripping our land anymore which does not mean that there is not a new one that wants to control our souls, hearts and minds. Not Marxist, Bolshevik, but born of the same spirit, neo-Marxist. Not red, but rainbow." 

The Archbishop of Cracow, Marek Jedraszewski, condemning "LGBT ideology", in his sermon during Mass at St. Mary's Church marking the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising.

“We thought we could just stay reasonable having gotten rid of God’s scripture. And guess what, there’s no shred of truth to this at all. We tried it. We did. It turns out it was God and scripture that were holding the entire set of structures together. Not reason, tradition. You throw out Christianity and the Jewish contribution too with it, you throw out God and within two generations people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They can’t tell the difference between a foreigner and a citizen. They can’t tell the difference between this side of the border and the other side of the border. They can’t tell the difference between paying back your debts and simply borrowing forever. The only way to save this country, to bring it back to cohesion, the only way to bring it back to independence and health, the only way to do it is going to be to restore those traditions.”


Yoram Hazony, an Israeli and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, talking at the (pro-Trump) National Conservatism conference in Washington D.C. two weeks ago, which he helped organise.

"I was brought up by a Victorian grandmother. You were taught to work jolly hard, you were taught to improve yourself, you were taught self-reliance, you were taught to live within your income, you were taught that cleanliness was next to godliness. You were taught self-respect, you were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour, you were taught tremendous pride in your country, you were taught to be a good member of your community. All of these things are Victorian values. [...] They are also perennial values as well."

Margaret Thatcher being interviewed by Brian Walden in 1983

"She did see the country was on its knees when we took over – we were an industrial, political laughing stock. By the time she had lost office she had transformed the country – given it a modern economy – it was a quite remarkable achievement … It was great fun if you could stand the hassle because she kept this permanent revolutionary air going inside the government, which was great fun."

Kenneth Clarke, who said Britain would be a "rust bucket ruin" if Thatcher had not been able to rescue the country. He is right - Britain did seem in deep decay in the 1970s, even though the extent that this was true was exaggerated, and by 1990 this feeling had wholly gone. 

Thank God Theresa May did not dominate Britian for ten years

"Dean Clough Mills [in Halifax] hold a special place in British political history, too. The last time I was here was in May 2017, to see Theresa May launch the election manifesto that was supposed to deliver her a huge majority in parliament and crush those pesky Brexit saboteurs. It was only two and a bit years ago, but already it feels like another age. May at that time looked untouchable, riding high on a wave of public enthusiasm, destined to be prime minister for a decade or more and the architect of Britain’s post-Brexit future. Her strategists were plotting a Tory revival in the Labour heartlands, and the decision to launch their manifesto in an old Yorkshire mill was seen as an audacious move to park the tanks firmly on Labour’s lawn. Pundits hailed another masterstroke on the Tories’ inevitable march to victory. Then we opened the manifesto, and read what was actually inside."

Jack Blanchard in Politico today. What a catastrophe Michael Gove inflicted on his country by sabotaging Boris's bid to be Prime Minister three years ago and saddling us with Theresa May instead. She threw away so many bargaining cards in the Brexit negotiations - Juliet Samuel summarises them in a minute here.

But beyond Brexit she was no conservative - and in many ways Old Labour. 

Here is a useful cut-out-and-keep list of all the anti-conservative things she did or wanted to do. 

Can the Tories get rid of these ideas and sideline MPs who believe in them?

The trouble is that Boris is a social liberal - but thank God he hates the nanny state.

Mark Steyn on Boris Johnson

"As an aside, I see the newspaper Boris and I once worked for, The Daily Telegraph, now has a "Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging" - one Asif Sadiq, MBE - who writes earnest pieces with headlines like "Why Diversity is the Missing Piece of the Corporate Puzzle". The decline and decay of the post-Conrad Torygraph is one of the tragedies of the age. At the time UK Conservatives were cooing over the hollow David Cameron, a man so "conservative" he believed W H Smith should be banned from displaying Terry's Chocolate Oranges at the cash register because it was a health risk. Meanwhile, the Telegraph was so out of it that Charles Moore, our great editor, was talking up the Ulster Unionist David Trimble as the next Tory leader. Alas, the trendies had their way and, as I put it, the Conservatives opted not for the Orangeman but the Chocolate Orangeman. Boris is a social liberal posing as a Tory but the pose - "Mohammedans", "tank-topped bum-boys", etc - at least provides a brief rhetorical respite from the suffocating embrace of "diversity, inclusion and belonging". I'm with Sam Goldwyn: Include me out."

Cheers

I watched an old episode of Cheers in my hotel and it was hilarious. Especially Cliff the postman who says, when someone asks what is the secret of happiness, comfortable shoes.
Who is the greatest philosopher in history he asks. Frasier: 'Aristotle?' 'There you are. Sandals. The most comfortable footwear ever known. Confucius had thongs.'
Carla's answer is children which is true for almost everyone.
Everyone smokes cigars at the bar and everyone is white. Carla is the one woman. And the Reagan Thatcher era now seems a lost age, like watching Cary Grant or Leslie Howard. 

My sermon

Jesus did not advocate Caesar taking from the Samaritans to finance the welfare state or letting Canaanite refugees flood into Judea and make it majority non Jewish. He said: My kingdom is not of this world. He also said that not one jot and not one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, meaning that He considered sodomy a sin and supported the death penalty. Presumably for witches, inter alia. He did not condemn slavery and did not tell the centurion to become a pacifist. He fed the five thousand with fish so was no vegetarian.

Boris is or at least might be a Tory

Philip Stephens in the Financial Times accuses Boris Johnson of being a Tory. In so doing he explains why so many Tories and non-Tories, who are fed up to the back teeth with liberal sanctimony, love him. "Britain’s new prime minister sometimes strikes a pose as a metropolitan liberal. This week, aides have ensured his new ministerial line-up nods in the direction of diversity. At heart, he is a reactionary. With a worldview drawn from Rudyard Kipling’s paeans to English exceptionalism, he mourns the loss of empire, rails against the “nanny state”, and thinks the French should be eternally grateful for being rescued in two world wars. "

Even better, Boris Johnson's great hero turns out to be mine: his illustrious namesake, Dr Johnson. Both love giving offence. This, Boris suggested, is the reason we all love the Great Cham. ‘In a nation addicted to evasion and embarrassment, we treasure people who are rude, because we assume (rather primitively) that they are more likely to tell the truth.’ 

Boris cometh

I feel euphoric about the boy, though I know Boris is a social liberal and I do not care that much about the economic side of conservatism. Ronald Reagan set targets, chose good people and let them achieve the targets.  Boris will do the same.

Boris assumes his destiny

I confess I am very excited by the new British Prime Minister. He's the first one I have liked in my lifetime.  And he has started very well.

Boris should prorogue Parliament before the recess ends in September  until 1 November. That way no deal happens automatically unless the EU offers an acceptable deal.  That would shoot the Remainers' fox.

Despite what you read no ministers were fired by Boris Johnson. All ministers automatically resign when the Prime Minister does.

It shocks me that no political commentator pointer out what I thought every schoolboy knew.

Not appointing ministers is not the same as firing them so this is not a massacre like Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives. The ministers who resigned the day before Mrs May were playing amateur dramatics. They were resigning from her ministry not the new government.

But the last cabinet failed appallingly and needed to be replaced. 

Politicians are now part of the entertainment industry

Evelyn Waugh said Churchill was a radio personality who outlived his prime. 

Boris Johnson is a reality television star of genius, as is, of course, Donald Trump. 

Politics is now about entertainment, although eloquent speeches always were about entertainment, in the days when they were not beamed into your house.

Theresa May and Boris Johnson are caricatures of themselves, but Boris does it well

"Perhaps we all eventually turn into caricatures of ourselves. As time went on, May certainly appeared to. That childhood-learned sense of duty seemed to narrow to a resolve to cling on in office; the commitment to others, a conviction that the country needed her. The game was clearly up by mid-March, when MPs crushed the Withdrawal Agreement for the second time and a vote on extension was announced. The Conservatives’ poll ratings began to fold that week. These have not reached 40 per cent since.

"If you promise over 100 times that Britain will leave the EU on March 29, and it doesn’t; then say that you are not prepared to delay Brexit later than the end of June, but do; announce that it would be “unacceptable” for European elections to take place, but they happen; and if you denounce Jeremy Corbyn as a threat to the country, but then seek to work with him over Brexit, you will poison the well not only for yourself, but also for your party. Conservative MPs opted for Boris Johnson for simple, sole reason that they think he has the best chance of cleansing the waters."

I agree with this except that trying to do a deal with Labour was common sense and should have happened three years earlier. 

However, I see no redeeming feature in Mrs May.

Many of us become caricatures of ourselves. Boris deliberately crafted himself into a caricature to start with and it has served him very well indeed. 

It is not clear who said life is not about finding yourself but creating yourself. Mahler attributed it to Sir (St) Thomas More but I wonder if he said it. Whoever said it, Boris is an example of it working. 

But Boris is not an actor in the sense that Harold Macmillan was the 'old actor-manager' or even the sense in which Tony Blair is a very good actor. Everything with Boris is an act. Understand that and you understand everything.

An elderly socialist told me the best speaker he ever heard was the Tory leader Sir Austen Chamberlain,  but that was in the era of big public meetings. William Hague prepared himself to be a political leader in his precocious childhood in the 1970s and by 1997 that was out of date. Mr Anthony Blair had invented a new style of discourse for television. 

In the present era Prime Ministers and Presidents are becoming reality television stars. We want them to entertain us. Boris was born for this era. Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt were not. 

More Brexit

Think back five years: how bored we all were with the dull political consensus and how we wished for a change in the established order. Isn’t it great that we got what we wanted?
Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times today

At a seminar at King’s College, London shortly after the 2016 EU referendum, Takis Tridimas, a professor of European Law at King’s said that the result represented the most significant constitutional event in the UK since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, since it showed that on the issue of Europe, the sovereignty of the people trumped the sovereignty of Parliament. Of course, from a legal point of view, the referendum was merely advisory, but the government committed itself to respecting the result and the outcome was seen by the majority of MPs as decisive. Since June 2016, therefore, both government and parliament have been enacting a policy to which they are opposed. That is a situation unprecedented in our long constitutional history. Europe, therefore, has been responsible for the introduction of a new concept into the UK constitution, the sovereignty of the people. On this issue, the people have in effect become a third chamber of Parliament, issuing instructions to the other two. The sovereignty of Parliament is now being constrained not by Brussels, but by the people.
Vernon Bogdanor, February 27 2019 in his LSE blog.

John Ruskin: All good architecture is the expression of national life and character

All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.

John Ruskin's words in Traffic, an essay written under the influence of Carlyle, are a very harsh condemnation of modern Romania. The Communist buildings after the Stalin era are very bad, except for perhaps the ones that Ceausescu built along the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism but many  buildings built since the Revolution are equally ugly but in a  different way. Political analyst Sorin Ionita said the road from the airport to Bucharest resembles a Pakistani Las Vegas.

Ruskin's words are an equally harsh condemnation of Britain in the twenty-five years before Margaret Thatcher. Public and private architecture hugely improved after she took office, when architects stopped building things that accorded with their modernist principles and started building things purely to make money. Looking back, though I disliked her at the time, this is a persuasive proof that she changed the country deeply and for the better.