Ireland: a softness in the air and a kindness in the hearts

Living in the province of Valencia in Spain gives us a lot of joy. The only serious downside, and it might be a lot more serious in coming years, is the impact of climate change. Summer temperatures climb well into the thirties (Celsius) and the rain just stops. Reservoir levels are dangerously low. Going out, say with the dogs, is uncomfortable – for them as much as for us – except in the early morning or just before dark in the evening.

I know that people like that fine Mr Trump in the US (for whom I wish nothing less than more fuel for his complaints about the electoral system) deny that anything like global warming is happening, but for people like us who are living it, we have a slightly less complacent outlook on our climate.

So it was with some joy that we headed for Ireland a couple of weeks ago. I remember a friend from the English Lake District talking to me about someone who complained to him about the rain.

‘It’s called the Lake District,’ he’d replied, ‘where do you think the lakes come from?’

Ireland is called the Emerald Isle. It doesn’t take long to work out where the green comes from. It was a tremendous relief to us to live in temperatures in the high teens and to see some rain, though of course when it came to locals, we found that we’d simply exchanged one set of complaints for another.

At home, people were saying to us, ‘oh, the heat today! Roll on September. I expect no relief before then.’

In Ireland, I overhead someone talking to her friends saying, ‘I keep waiting for the summer, and it never comes.’

Sunlight and clouds, mountains and sea, in Donegal

Well, it was good to get away from the summer for a while. Perhaps not for too long. I have to admit that grey skies and frequent showers quickly pall on me, reminding me much too much of my youth in England. But I have to confess it was good not to have that oppressive heat weighing me down, or indeed it was even good to remember what it’s like to feel cold, despite a light sweater and jacket (waterproof jacket, of course).

All this culminated in Enniskillen. 

We spent most of our time in Donegal, which has the wonderful distinction of including the most northerly part of Ireland, without being in Northern Ireland. It’s in the Republic. But, often called ‘the forgotten county’, it’s remote from Dublin and most routes to and from it cross the territory of Northern Ireland, which lies within the United Kingdom. That of course is a consequence of the partition of Ireland I talked about earlier this month, a partition agreed at a peace conference in London at which the Irish delegation had been led by Michael Collins. After agreeing to the treaty, he said that he’d just signed his death warrant – as indeed he had.

Enniskillen is in Northern Ireland, and it was on our route back from Donegal to Dublin Airport. I wanted to see it because I’d heard it was a lovely city, on an island between two lakes, or perhaps two sections of the same lake, Lough Erne. Years ago I heard that it never rains in Enniskillen, you just get a ‘softness in the air’.

Well, when we got there, with two friends from Valencia, Concha and Manolo, we found that the air had become immensely soft indeed. So soft that we were soaked within minutes of getting out of our cars. So soaked that Danielle and I both had to change at Dublin airport to avoid flying home in damp clothes and shoes.

That reminded of the words of Winston Churchill, who as a government minister had helped craft the agreement that partitioned Ireland. A year later the tensions between Protestants committed to the Union with Britain and Catholics seeking a united, independent Ireland, had surfaced again, specifically about who should get two of the counties of the North of the island. Churchill talked about how ‘we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again’.

Well, Enniskillen is in County Fermanagh. And I was delighted to be able to take a photo of one of its steeples in the rain. Looking suitably dreary, though it probably wouldn't have, had there been a little sun.

A dreary steeple in Enniskillen, Fermanagh

Fortunately, not everything we experienced in Enniskillen was dreary. On the contrary. When we parked our cars, we found that the pay machines for the car park didn’t allow payment by credit card. A man walking past asked us whether we needed change.

‘It seems we do, and we don’t have any pounds,’ we told him.

Without our asking him for anything, and refusing our offer of euros in return, he reached into his pocket and pulled out two pound coins, enough for our car and our friends’ to stay as long in Enniskillen as we could stand it in the rain. 

You don’t often find someone spontaneously, and enthusiastically, offering money, for nothing in return, to complete strangers. In fact, it’s only happened to me once before. Just ten days earlier, in Donegal, where we were trying to pay for a car park and bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have a euro coin.

‘Do you need a euro coin?’ asked a passing woman, thrusting one into our hands.

Well, the Irish weather may be less than ideal, but the people are great. I remember once, as a much younger man, asking for change for a two-franc coin in Geneva – change, not a gift – and being refused, including by a man who told me that he worked for a living (which I hadn’t doubted in the first place). Spontaneous generosity instead of hard words? Not hard to decide which is preferable.

It was particularly poignant to see such warmth on both sides of a border that has caused such suffering and so much death. The people seem to be one, with only the border to divide them. Ah, the power of religion, to set up such barriers between personalities that have so much in common.

And, to be honest, even if it rains a bit more than I’d like, after a couple of months of roasting summer, the Irish cool and wet were, I admit, a great relief, just as the kindness was a joy.

Time for more women leaders?

Two impressive performances have left me wondering whether we need more women at the top of politics. Not just because equality of rights is desirable, which it is, but also because they seem to be doing a lot better than most of the men.

That’s not all women leaders. Theresa May was convinced that she was right and, impervious to all calls to change course, steered her government straight onto the rocks. And Margaret Thatcher set a new benchmark in the kind of sociopathic government that has no compassion for the victims of the suffering it inflicts. No. Some women leaders are admirable, others anything but.

The two women who impressed me this week did so because the greatest measure of a politician’s worth is how they react to a crisis, and they have risen strongly to the challenge Coronavirus presents.

Neither of them is Jacinda Ardern. As I’ve written before, Ardern may be the most outstanding leader the world has today. My only regret is that, in New Zealand, she leads a country of just 5 million people. Imagine if she were leading the country of 330 million, currently mismanaged by the overgrown toddler in the White House?

So here are the two other women I feel are handling things well.

One was Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister. I was impressed by her quiet, firm and yet encouraging way of delivering bad news. She tweeted:

I know lockdown gets tougher as we head into the weekend, and the weather gets better (even by Scottish standards). But it really matters that we stick with it – we’re seeing some progress but it will be quickly reversed if we ease up. So PLEASE, #StayHome – it will save lives.

A little humour helps communicate a message – we all know the (not entirely undeserved) reputation of the weather in Scotland. As for the message itself, it’s firm but optimistic. It’s what one expects from a true leader.

She reminds me of a particularly potent speech by Churchill. He made it after the British victory at the battle of El Alamein, significant because it was the first time the German army had been defeated on land in World War 2, but still minor because the North African theatre was something of a sideshow compared to the titanic clashes that were taking place in Russia.

Churchill knew how to present the success in a way that was encouraging without exaggerating its importance:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Isn’t that what Sturgeon was saying? The lockdown’s getting tougher, but we’re seeing progress. It isn’t time to relax, but there’s reason for hope.

Merkel, Ardern, Sturgeon
Good to have more of them

Funnily enough, the other woman leader who impressed me used words even closer to Churchill’s. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, told her Parliament:

We are not in the final phase of the pandemic, but still at the beginning. Let us not now gamble away our achievements and run the risk of a setback.

Now there’s a tough statement. Germany’s not even at the end of the beginning, but still at the beginning itself. I’m sure she’s right. I wish some of the men we have leading major nations were prepared to be as open about where we stand.

Donald Trump, for instance, keeps trying to undermine the lockdown restrictions, even supporting demonstrators who (rashly) turn out to protest against them. We know that he believes he needs the economy humming again if he is to have a chance of re-election in November, and to achieve that, he seems willing to sacrifice more lives. That’s despite the US already having more Covid-19 deaths than any other, country in part because of his delays in launching counter-measures.

In the UK, Boris Johnson also worked hard to undermine social-distancing steps. On 3 March, he boasted that he was still shaking hands, even in the hospital he’d just visited where CVid-19 patients were being treated. Providing a useful demonstration of how irresponsible that was, he fell sick with the virus himself. Since he refuses to hand over to someone else even temporarily, but hasn’t been able to work for the last three weeks, the UK is now facing this crisis with no one to exercise the authority of a Prime Minister.

Not that I’m calling on him to hand over to a woman. That might mean the present Home Secretary, Priti Patel. If anyone could make Maggie Thatcher look like an exemplar of gentleness and empathy, it would be Patel.

Thatcher, May, Patel
No need for any more of them

No, not all female leaders are admirable. Just as not all male leaders are as lamentable as Bush or Boris: Sánchez in Spain or Conte in Italy, among others, have shown guts and determination in dealing with the virus, even if they were late getting started. But the women have been more uniformly impressive.

I’m not alone in noticing this. Jon Henley and Eleanor Ainge Roy in the Guardian, for instance, point out that only some of the male leaders, but all of the women, have handled the epidemic well.

That sounds like a lesson we ought to learn.

Please, Daddy, leave me my Corbyn blindfold. It's so comfortable

It has been obvious since the earliest days of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, that his supporters have been wearing rose-tinted spectacles.

Indeed, it is their very inability to imagine any kind of flaw in their hero that marks them out as forming not so much a political current within the Labour Party, as a veritable Cult. Members have urged me to “have faith” in the leader or to “believe” in his vision for the future. That’s the very language of religion, and it leaves no place for the rational, questioning thought essential in politics.

Keir Starmer (l) and Jeremy Corbyn
Colleagues but not mutual admirers

Given that Corbynism was a Cult, it was obvious that when Jeremy led us to inevitable defeat, his worshippers would quickly set out to find explanations that cleared him of all responsibility.

In passing, I should say that the sheer scale of he defeat surprised me. I hoped right to the end that, even when defeated, we might at least deny Boris Johnson a majority. I knew that would take a miracle, but I kept hoping. It struck me as much more probable that Boris would emerge with a majority of up to 40. In fact, his majority was 80, while Labour was reduced to just 202 parliamentary seats, our worst result since 1935.

That will certainly see the Conservatives safely through to the next election and, quite probably, to the one after. Only twice, in single general elections, has Labour gained the more than 124 seats it would need for even a bare majority next time. Once, in the landslide it won under Attlee after the Second World War, it did so after a period in government as Churchill’s coalition partners; just once has it done it from Opposition, in 1997 under Tony Blair.

Labour has a mountain to climb from the pits where Corbynism has consigned it.

If the scale of our defeat was greater than I expected, I have also been surprised by the sheer relentlessness of the Corbynists in pursuing their alibis. The preferred line at first was that much-loved whipping boy, the media. Vicious, biased coverage of the election in particular, and Corbyn’s leadership more generally, had undermined Labour and handed Boris Johnson his victory.

But that was only one of many ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuses. Today another seems to be gaining ground. It is that it was Labour’s endorsement of a second Brexit referendum that lost if for us. The argument goes like this:

• Labour did ‘very well’ at the 2017 election. I’ve put ‘very well’ in quotes because one Corbynist said exactly that to me today. Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t know, Labour lost in 2017, so ‘very well’ doesn’t seem terribly accurate. ‘Less badly than expected’ I will, however, allow.
• In 2019, Labour went to the country with the same leader and broadly the same manifesto, and it lost massively.
• The only thing that had changed in between was that Labour had endorsed the Second Referendum position. So that’s what caused the rout.

QED

Unsurprisingly, the argument does, however, omit to mention one or two other key factors. The stance on the referendum wasn’t the only change between the two elections. Here is a small selection of others:

• Corbyn had become better known to the electorate. The more they knew him, the less voters trusted him. By the time of the election, he was the most unpopular Opposition Leader since records began.
• The 2017 election had been flattering to Corbyn because Theresa May, then Prime Minister, turned out to be by far the weakest campaigner I had ever seen at the head of the Conservative Party. By the time of the 2019 election, she had been dumped.
• Boris Johnson, her successor, was utterly unscrupulous, entirely deceitful and ruthlessly effective in campaign mode and, as many of us forecast, ran circles around Corbyn.

So why are the Corbynists coming out with this line about its all being down to the Second Referendum stance?

It may not be unrelated to the fact that Keir Starmer has now emerged as at least the initial frontrunner to replace Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. He has a large lead in a poll of Labour members over his nearest rival, the Corbynist candidate. He is, of course, one of the chief architects of the endorsement of a Second Referendum

Naturally it suits Corbynists to paint him as the villain of the piece.

But it isn’t just to favour their candidate that they do this. It’s also because it is another piece in the Denial Wall they’re building around their Corbyn Dreamland. It was that nasty Keir that snatched our defeat from the jaws of victory. The Cult guru remains as flawless as ever.

We’ve seen that this belief takes some wilful blindness to inconvenient facts. That wilfulness is forcing me to revise my view that they wear rose-tinted glasses. It’s beginning to look to me as though they’re wearing a blindfold.

One that’s made of velvet, of course. It’s beautifully comfortable. Which is why they dread the idea of being forced to take it off.

You need an open mind, but can enjoy a good couple of hours with Darkest Hour

Gary Oldman gives an outstanding performance as Churchill in Darkest Hour. He looks just enough like Churchill to make him believable. On the other hand, he looks absolutely nothing like Gary Oldman, which is remarkable.

Gary Oldman: captures Churchill and doesn’t look like himself at all

Darkest Hour is directed by Joe Wright and written by Anthony McCarten and they do a fine job of it. It focuses on the terrible first weeks after Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister, when German troops invaded Belgium and the Netherlands, then France, and most of the British professional army ended up pinned to the Channel at Dunkirk.

Many political and military leaders believed the army lost, which would spell almost certain defeat. Even within Churchill’s own Conservative Party, key figures were calling for a negotiated settlement with Hitler. Not least were Neville Chamberlain, who had led the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, and his ally Halifax. A key early scene shows Chamberlain, forced to step down as Prime Minister after losing the confidence of Parliament, waiting with the King for Churchill to arrive to be appointed in his place.

GEORGE VI Why not Halifax? I favour Halifax.

CHAMBERLAIN I wanted Halifax. The Lords wanted Halifax. Halifax wanted Halifax.

GEORGE VI Then – then why have I been forced to send for Churchill?

CHAMBERLAIN Because he’s the only member of our party who has the support of the Opposition.

GEORGE VI His record is a litany of catastrophe. Gallipoli, 25,000 dead. The India Policy. Russian Civil War. The Gold Standard. The… the… the Abdication. And now this Norway ‘adventure’. What, eighteen hundred men?

CHAMBERLAIN One aircraft carrier, two cruisers, seven destroyers and a submarine.

GEORGE VI Winston lacks judgement.

CHAMBERLAIN He was right about Hitler.

GEORGE VI Even a stopped clock is right twice a day

One, and by no means the least reason for quoting that passage, is the last line. The film is peppered with wit and that alone makes it worth watching. Indeed, the script makes excellent use of words, as is only appropriate, given that it is about words – even including a judgement by Chamberlain near the end that, with his “we shall never surrender” speech, Churchill has mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.

The extract also underlines the widespread distrust of Churchill. It wasn’t just Gallipoli, an initiative that many historians might have succeeded had it been conducted with greater speed and secrecy, but turned out a massive failure. It was, as the King suggests a string of fiascos that tarnished his reputation.

The distrust wasn’t just about his perceived incompetence. If Chamberlain and Halifax favoured opening peace discussions with Hitler, they had little time for Churchill’s determination to keep fighting by whatever means possible. They receive in stony silence his first speech as Prime Minister to Parliament, where he declares that:

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat

and makes clear his intention is to keep fighting to final victory.

These were not sentiments that would endear him to those who were looking for a negotiated peace. Most of the film’s action concentrates on the conflict between those people and Churchill and his followers – though, to be honest, only one follower, Anthony Eden, makes more than a cameo appearance and even he seems sceptical at the depths of the crisis. Nor do we see anything like enough of Attlee, who staunchly backed Churchill in reality.

Indeed, Joe Wright gives him only a minor role, and has Churchill make only two comments about him, both derogatory. The well-known “sheep in sheep’s clothing” taunt is one. The other when Churchill is in the toilet and is told the Privy Seal (Attlee) has come to see him.

Tell the Lord Privy Seal - tell him I’m sealed in the Privy - and I can only deal with one shit at a time!

I couldn’t help laughing at a clever line, but it’s part of the films failure to show that Churchill, for all his banter, had a high opinion of Attlee. I know that because I recently finished John Bew’s masterful biography of Attlee, Citizen Clem. It describes, for instance, how Less than a month before the period of the film, Attlee made a speech declaring there could be no negotiation with Hitler, who simply had to be rounded up.

There are hints, of course, about Attlee’s significance, not least in the conversation between Chamberlain and the King I quoted before. Chamberlain declares that Churchill was the only candidate the Opposition would accept. It’s a point Bew makes forcefully: it was Attlee, as leader of the Opposition who made it possible for Churchill to become Prime Minister at all. But Wright doesn’t go anything like far enough. Although Attlee sat in the War Cabinet, Darkest Hour has him intervene only once, and only to exclaim that sending the small British garrison at Calais to try to divert the German advance on Dunkirk, was “suicide”.

Again, Bew makes clear that Attlee was a far more determined warrior than that would suggest. He took responsibility for collecting chemical weapons for the war effort, for instance, and made it clear after the war that had it come to the point where they had to be used, he would not have hesitated. We might not like that stance, today, but it certainly shows that Attlee was no less resolute than Churchill was. It’s a shame that the film suggests that he wasn’t.

Indeed, it’s unfortunate that the film seems intent on portraying Churchill as alone in backing the harder course. He had far more support than that implies. But perhaps Wright felt that the drama would be enhanced by showing him as a lone clarion voice for what was right – my regret is that historical accuracy was sacrificed for it.

Still, the film is wonderfully entertaining and often insightful. Kristin Scott Thomas was excellent as Clementine Churchill, caring for her husband and encouraging him, giving him the strength for the fight. I was also delighted to see that Admiral Ramsay appeared in the film – he’s long been a hero of mine, the man who came back from retirement to organise the Dunkirk evacuation of the bulk of the British Army, and then turned into one of the war’s greatest experts in logistics, with the D-day landings in Normandy as his greatest challenge and achievement.

There are flaws, though, apart from the treatment of Attlee and the depiction of Churchill as a lone hero. There are mawkish moments: George VI becoming a convert and coming around to steel the Prime Minister for the fight ahead; a tear-jerking moment when Churchill takes a tube ride and uses the opportunity to conduct an informal focus group among his (working and lower middle class) fellow passengers, which teaches him that the people think like he does. Apart from the corniness of an event that I’m sure never happened, if you know London at all well, you know no such conversation could take place in a single-stop journey to Westminster.

But these are just minor criticisms. As long as you go in with a mind forearmed against some historical distortions, you can enjoy Darkest Hour as a film that eloquently reveals a great deal about a crucial time. And which provides a great evening’s entertainment.

Anglos of the World Unite!

Donald Trump approaches the end of his first hundred days with no achievements to boast for them. He tried to undo Obamacare and failed (fortunately). There’s no sign of the improvement in employment or earnings he promised for the poor. He has, however, managed to indulge in some mean-spirited xenophobia with his travel bans. Now he’s running the risk of shutting down the government of the US altogether because he can’t raise the funds to build his wall along the Mexican border. That’s because he has apparently failed in his stated aim to get Mexico to pay for it. The wall is, of course, another measure against the dreaded foreigner.

And yet his supporters remain firmly wedded to him: 81% of Republicans in a recent poll say they are mainly excited and optimistic about his presidency.

Meanwhile in Britain, it becomes increasingly clear that Brexit is going to deliver few if any of the benefits expected of it. Already inflation is edging upwards and, with austerity policies keeping earnings down, that means living standards are being squeezed. Well, squeezed for the poor: the wealthy have seen their incomes and wealth grow impressively since the 2008 crash. In society generally, growth is slowing except in the opening of food banks, for which the demand keeps trending upwards. In spite of all that, much of the population seems convinced that all that matters is to control immigration, to keep out the foreigner.

That desire apparently sustains continued support for Brexit, though it’s far from certain that leaving the European Union will even lead to a reduction in immigration.

Meanwhile, Australia has won itself quite a reputation for its handling of illegal immigrants and refugees, holding many of them in detention centres, some outside its own territory and administered by a private-sector company. Conditions in some of these camps have led to serious controversy, with allegations of beatings, insults and sexual assaults. One of the most controversial, in Papua New Guinea, is slated to close. Meanwhile, attempts to get information out about the centres are blocked by the Australian government.

It seems that Australia too dislikes foreigners.

The Manus Processing Centre on Papua New Guinea
slated to close, but leaving an image to awaken sad memories

It has now been reported that there is debate within the British Conservative Party about withdrawing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention has nothing to do with the EU. British lawyers played a leading role in its drafting and it was enthusiastically endorsed by Winston Churchill. It predominantly guarantees rights to citizens but, because it can be used by foreigners, sometimes unappealing ones like the Islamist cleric Abu Qatada, many British citizens would like the country to withdraw.

They’d rather see their own rights curtailed in order to deny them to foreigners.

The French talk about the “Anglo-Saxon” world, embracing such countries as the US, UK and Australia. They believe the Anglos have a culture distinct from their own. It’s hard not to feel they have a point. After all, France seems set on barring the far right from its Presidency, while many in the English-speaking world are intent on declining further into xenophobia and the protection of privilege at the cost of rights.

It feels to me as though the Anglo-Saxon world needs a new slogan. I have a modest proposal. How about:

“Anglos of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your rights. You have an elite to feed.”

Catchy, isn’t it?

Anniversary of a naval battle. And an arms race

It was an arms race with no winners but plenty of losers.

One hundred years ago today, the British Royal Navy, supported by Australian and Canadian ships, came to blows with the German Empire’s High Seas Fleet in the North Sea. The moment is being marked by ceremonies around Britain today, commemorating what in this country at least is called the Battle of Jutland.

On the British side, it cost a little over 6000 lives, on the German just over 2500.

Its outcome? At best a stalemate. Getting on for 9000 lives for minimal achievement.The German fleet never challenged the Royal Navy again, and it was prevented gaining access to the Atlantic. It wasn’t, however, destroyed as a fighting force and the British had to keep it bottled up for the rest of the First World War.

HMS Invincible discovering she was sadly vincible

The battle was the culmination of a naval arms race between the two powers. Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain had wielded the most powerful naval force in the world; the emerging power, Germany, wanted to close the gap and come up to at least 2/3 of British strength. In the first decade or so of the twentieth century, there was a frenzy to build more ships, embodied by no one so fully as by German Admiral Tirpitz and eventually the man who became First Lord of the Admiralty in Britain, Winston Churchill. The excitement even infected the wider population – “we want eight and we won’t wait” was a popular slogan in Britain, referring to the number of Dreadnoughts, the newest and deadliest battleships, the country felt the Royal Navy should have.

In the end, the cost of the race was ruinous. And the results, as both sides discovered a century ago today, was inconclusive. An arms race cost a fortune and produced little, though at least it gave employment to shipyard workers. One can’t help feeling they might have been better employed elsewhere.

Roll on a hundred years, and isn’t “make America great again” the expression of just the same desires as “we want eight and we won’t wait”?

What’s changed is that, if we thought the naval arms race was unaffordable, today’s equivalent is far more costly still. When it comes to nuclear weapons, and all the other toys the military want with them – drones and the latest generations of aircraft and ships , the prices have become nothing short of eye-watering.

What stays strictly the same, however, is that if ever they came to be used, the result would be just as inconclusive. Many losers, no winners. And, sadly, if the showdown turned nuclear, there’d be far more dead than 9000.

With little likelihood of anyone being around to celebrate the centenary.

The bulldog spirit: is it a match for a disrupted train?

The British are at their best in adversity, we are constantly assured.

Or, at least, we assure ourselves.

That, we all reckon, was the Dunkirk spirit. When things are as bad as they can be, the dogged British character comes to the surface and sees us through: little boats depart from the Channel ports and bring the troops back from under the mouths of the German guns. Powerful stuff. Even though, as Churchill pointed out, “wars are not won by evacuations.” However well executed.

The doggedness was at its most truly admirable during the Blitz. London and other cities weathered the bombs. The population refused to be panicked or even cowed.

On a much smaller scale, within my own lifetime, Londoners just kept living their lives right through the IRA campaign of the 1980s. Incidentally, the memories of that time always leave me smiling when I hear Americans denouncing terrorism as the most heinous of crimes – the IRA was kept going with funds from the US, and there was plenty of self-righteous resistance from across the Atlantic whenever the British authorities tried to extradite a known terrorist.

Funny how being attacked yourself changes your viewpoint – it somehow relativises everything, even in a country that likes to despise moral relativism.

On a far smaller scale still, I had the opportunity to watch the British soul in adversity the other night when my train home was delayed two hours, on a forty-minute journey. The cause was a suicide on the line ahead.

First of all, it was curious to see how our attitudes – my own included – altered towards the suicide. At first, I felt bad about his death. What drove him to such despair? What a lamentable fate.

That was good for half an hour. The compassion started to wear thin after that, so by the time we reached the hour mark, nerves were being rubbed thin. None of us said it in so many words, but from our comments, more and more of us were beginning to harbour feelings along the lines of “inconsiderate bastard. Why didn’t he choose some other method? Or at least, top himself outside the rush hour?”

The ice had, by then, been broken between us. The reserve that keeps British train travellers firmly locked in their own concerns, focused on their phone or their tablet, had dissolved, and the conversation had become general. Ah, yes, I thought to myself, now we shall see that grand old thing, the British sense of humour, or at least British stoicism, sustaining us in our hour of need.

“What a shambles,” someone remarked.

“They’re all complete incompetents,” replied another. 

“Look at their Twitter feed!” added a third, pointing at his phone, “it reckons there may be delays on lines out of St Pancras. Might be? What a shower. Why don’t they do something about it instead of making fatuous comments?”

Right. So that was the shape of things. Patience growing a little threadbare.

I wasn’t quite sure what anyone felt the executives of Thameslink trains should have done. Foreseen the suicide and warned us before we caught the train? Cancelled all the trains? I could imagine how well that would have gone down. Perhaps they should have parked the inconsolable guy on a siding somewhere, and maybe offered to shoot him themselves, in a decent and humane manner, somewhere no services would have been disrupted?

We were in the foremost carriage. One passenger started shouting through the door to the driver’s compartment, demanding information about what was happening.

“Other trains keep shooting past us. Why didn’t you tell us this was going to happen and let us get another train?”

The driver came out and looked at him, completely nonplussed.

“I told you whatever I could, as soon as I got told myself. How could I have known it was going to be this bad?”

“It’s hopeless,” replied the passenger, apparently building up quite a head of anger, “you’ve told us nothing useful. You’ve just left us sitting here without information.”

“You want me to tell you each time I’m at a red light?”

Red light at night. No passenger's delight
But not a lot anyone can do about it

A few minutes later, when we stopped again in the middle of nowhere, he cranked up the public address system again.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced helpfully, “we are stopped at a red signal. I don’t know how long we’ll be here.”

The passenger who’d been complaining cursed under his breath.

Another train went whizzing by on the track next to ours, making that wonderful and inspiring sound we all associate with railway travel at its best.

“Look, look!” cried several passengers, “it’s happening again. Other trains keep going past. Practically empty.”

I’m not quite sure what they wanted the driver to do. Flag the other train down? Hitch our train to it? Or just decide to ignore the red signal?

Eventually we got to my station and I left the train. I paused to wish the remaining passengers good luck. There were a few wry smiles, but mostly just groans.

Alas. Not quite so phlegmatic, these particular Brits, as their reputation suggests. Not quite so undaunted in adversity. Hardy the spirit of the Blitz.

How have the mighty fallen.

Under attack, France unites in resistance around the Marseillaise

No words in response to the Friday the thirteenth attacks in Paris have struck me as much as the message “je suis en terrasse” – I’m on a [café or restaurant] terrace. 

As a way of expressing defiance to the terrorists who attacked, among other places, a café and a restaurant, they can’t be bettered: they say, “we’re not going to be put off, we’re going to go on living the life we choose, despite your vile actions and your threats.”

French defiance: your acts won't drive me away from the life I choose

It’s relatively unusual, since this particular attack hasn’t produced much in the way of universally appealing slogans. Nothing so striking as “Je suis Charlie” after the murders at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo or the first use of a phrase of this kind, “Nous sommes tous Américains”, we are all Americans, the day after 9/11. There has been one fine visual image, the peace symbol with the Eiffel Tower at its centre. It has power and elegance, but hasn’t had the impact one might expect.

A great symbol, but it hasn't taken of like “Je suis Charlie”

In the absence of overarching visual symbols, there’s an audible one that keeps recurring and really does incarnate French attitudes towards their aggressors: the singing of the Marseillaise.

The French are lucky in possessing a stirring anthem. One that it’s hard not to hear without wanting to sing it. Why, some of the best bits of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture are built around the Marseillaise. That’s ironic, since he wrote the piece to communicate quite the reverse message – the triumph of Russia over Napoleonic France. Sadly, the national anthem of Russia, as it appears in the same piece of music, is as dirge-like as our own anthem, here in Britain.

There was a bit of a scandal in Britain some weeks ago over the then newly-elected leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, failing to sing the anthem at a memorial service. He could never have said it, but I wish he’d replied that he found nothing sufficiently inspiring in that dreary tune to make him want to sing it.

I mean, compare God save the Queen with The Star Spangled Banner. All we Brits ask for is to be allowed to have the Queen reigning over for us for ages, to a stodgy tune. I prefer Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which England fans sing at rugby matches. On the other hand, given the recent performance of the team, something dirge-like is probably, and sadly, more appropriate.

The Americans, in contrast to the Brits, celebrate the continued resistance of their gallant forces to the overwhelming aggression of their dastardly (and, as it happens, British) foes.

The French call on their compatriots to rise up against the blood-soaked flag of tyranny. In passing, I have to admit that the Marseillaise also calls for the furrows of French fields to be irrigated with “impure blood”, which could lead to all sorts of racist notions of what kind of blood is pure – notions that have sadly played a role in the debate since the ISIS attacks. That’s going to be discussed repeatedly in the coming months and years, as we argue over the difference between the small numbers of Muslims behaving viciously, and the entire Muslim community.

That can wait, however. For now, let’s focus on the way the Marseillaise acts as a bond between Frenchmen in adversity.

Fans were being evacuated from the Stade de France, filing through the tunnels to the exits, spontaneously began to sing the anthem. The same scene occurred several times on the following days: the Marseillaise being sung by people gathering to mark the event. Again, on Friday evening a man, in an apartment near the Bataclan concert hall, started to sing it as the time of the attacks came round, one week on. Passers-by took it up in the street.

All this reminded me of a Frenchman I heard interviewed on the radio some years ago. As a young man, in 1940, following the disaster of the French defeat in May of that year, he was one of the handful who immediately responded to de Gaulle’s call to form a resistance to the Nazi occupation. He managed to make his way to London and eventually to the building the Churchill government had made available to de Gaulle for his headquarters. There was, as yet, no accommodation for the young volunteers and so he spent the first night with several dozen others, sleeping rough on the floors of the offices.

The young men were of many backgrounds and viewpoints – poor or wealthy, Catholic, Republican or Communist – thrown together in their sleeping bags on the hard floor. The one thing they had in common was that they were French, and they were determined to start on the long, hard and uncertain road which would take their nation back from humiliation to pride.

So, spontaneously, like the football fans in the tunnel at the Stade de France, or the Parisians near the Bataclan, in the lonely dark, they began softly to sing the Marseillaise. Which so fully expressed what united them, and their will to fight back.

Harking back to that time, and the spirit of resistance it generated, is perhaps the best way for the French to react to what happened in the ISIS attacks. Maybe it’s appropriate that the Marseillaise should be the principal symbol of their response.