Political magnanimity can be as effective as it's attractive

Imagine that you’re lost in a dark wood at night. You come into a clearing in which there are a pink Elephant, an honest politician and Boris Johnson. Who should you ask for directions?

The answer is, of course, Boris Johnson. He may be an inveterate liar, but the other two are figments of the imagination.

My favourite politician of all time, and any country, is ‘Honest Abe’, Abraham Lincoln.

He was mostly pretty honest, though that didn’t stop him resorting to downright skulduggery where he deemed it necessary. Have you seen the film Lincoln? If not, you should make a point of watching it.

Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens
thundering in the House of Representatives

At one point, Thaddeus Stevens, played with tremendous verve by Tommy Lee Jones, talks about the campaign to pass the thirteenth amendment, the one that bans slavery, as the means to ensure that “the Constitution's first and only mention of slavery is its absolute prohibition”.

He later describes it as “the greatest measure of the nineteenth century, passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America”.

That pretty well sums things up: Lincoln, the purest man in America, got the amendment passed by bribery, pressure, bullying, basically any tactics necessary. But it was perhaps his finest achievement.

Dishonesty, it seems, is sometimes highly effective.

“Honest Abe” may not have been any more honest than he needed to be. What he certainly was, on the other hand, was generous. Or perhaps the right word is magnanimous. And, interestingly, it served him well that he had that rare quality.

In 1854, he stood for the US Senate. At the time, Senators weren’t elected by popular vote but by the legislatures of the individual states. Lincoln seemed well-placed in his home state of Illinois and, indeed, on the second ballot he received 47 votes out of the 51 he needed to win. His Democratic opponent had 48 and five votes went to an anti-slavery Democrat named Lyman Trumbull, whose campaign manager was a certain Norman Judd.

Seven ballots later, Lincoln realised he would never get Trumbull’s votes. The only way to stop a mainstream Democrat victory was for him to throw his 47 to the man who had five, eccentric though that might seem. He decided to do just that, and Trumbull was elected.

It’s sometimes hard to remember just how obscure Lincoln was before he became President. In 1854, his only role in national politics had been a single term in the House of Representatives. Most of the time, he was a ‘prairie lawyer’, ‘riding circuit’ around Illinois. This meant travelling with a judge and a pack of lawyers to deliver justice in all the little towns of an as yet lightly populated state.

He was good at the work, and popular, but this kind of work was never going to win him any kind of national stature.

It came as a welcome surprise to be invited, soon after the Trumbull debacle, to join a team of lawyers in a major patent infringement case, the so-called ‘reaper case’. The trial was slated to be held in Chicago, so the defence team wanted a local, Illinois lawyer to join them and Lincoln was chosen.

That was a break for him. The other side was led by a former Attorney General, a man against whom it would be a real challenge to measure himself.

Then the trial was transferred to Cincinnati, Ohio. Which meant that the team could call on the man they’d wanted to use in the first place, a successful lawyer called Edwin Stanton. No one, however, told Lincoln he’d been dropped. He kept working on the case and built up a powerful brief to deliver in court.

When he showed up in Cincinnati, however, Edwin Stanton asked one of the other lawyers, “why did you bring that damned long-armed ape here?” They never spent an evening with him, although he stayed for the whole of the trial, watching the arguments in court. Stanton didn’t even look at the papers Lincoln had prepared.

At the end of the trial, when asked what he was going to do next, Lincoln said he was heading home “to study law”. He explained that he was fine for ‘rough-and-tumble’ cases:

… but these college-trained men are coming West. They have all the advantages of a life-long training in the law… Soon they will be in Illinois… and when they appear I will be ready.

He received a cheque for his part in the case but sent it back on the basis that he’d made no contribution. However, his fee had been agreed in advance, so the cheque was returned to him. This time he cashed it.

Abraham Lincoln, outstanding President

These stories only receive their full meaning when we look at their sequels.

In 1860, Lincoln ran for the presidency. The decision to hold the Republican Party nominating convention in Chicago, on Lincoln’s home turf, was key to his success, as was the excellent organisation of the campaign on the ground. In both of these, a vital role was played by – Norman Judd. The man for whose candidate, Lyman Trumbull, Lincoln had made way in 1854.

Then, in 1862, Lincoln was looking for a new Secretary of War for his Cabinet. Numerous candidates were proposed, but the one he chose was – Edwin Stanton. The man who’d referred to him seven years earlier as a “long-armed ape”.

Stanton was excellent in the role. He was also by Lincoln’s bed as the murdered President died.

Some claim Stanton said, “now he belongs to angels.” Fairly trite, in my view.

Others claim his words were “now he belongs to the ages”.

The latter is my preferred version. It seems to do justice to an outstanding statesman. A man made all the greater for his magnanimity, an even more precious quality than honesty.

And, in Lincoln’s case, a highly effective one.

The joy of the self-deprecating smile

There’s something exceptionally attractive about self-deprecating humour.

That’s true even if we sense that behind it is something of a disguised boast – you know, “look at how self-deprecating I can be”. Did you see the pictures of Boris Johnson hanging from a zip wire? What might have been seen as a PR disaster was something he worked for all it was worth. “Look what fun I am,” he seemed to be saying, “happy even if I look the buffoon. I’m obviously the kind of fine fellow you want running the country, because someone you can share a laugh with is bound to be on your side.”

Look what fun!

Despite such self-serving examples, self-deprecation remains welcome. That’s particularly so in a world dominated by figures that take themselves far too damned seriously and who are far too damned inclined, with little justification, to think themselves good at what they do.

Did that immediately bring to your mind an image of the present tenant of the White House? It should have.

A few weeks ago, Trump was swift to claim success for a visit he made to the Centers for Disease Control, as part of his then non-campaign against Coronavirus:

“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said: ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Trump fascinating his hosts at the CDC with his scientific insights

While I think it would have been great if he’d done pretty well anything rather than run for President, I’m far from convinced that medical or scientific research would have suited him. Let’s not forget that this was the man who thought that Coronavirus was like the flu, and now thinks he’d be doing well if he kept US deaths to within 100,000.

As for his ‘natural ability’, it clearly doesn’t extend to being able to laugh at himself. He leaves it to the rest of us to laugh at him, although our laughter’s never wholehearted – we laugh more at how bad the joke is than at the joke itself.

Fortunately, there are examples of Americans who are, or were, much better able to laugh at themselves.

William Seward

William Henry Seward was a remarkable American politician from the nineteenth century, a rival for the presidency to Abraham Lincoln though he ended up serving him, with outstanding loyalty and ability, as Secretary of State. As a young man, he was less than effective as a public speaker, something he needed to correct, not only for his later career in politics but even for his first choice of profession, as a lawyer.

This was brought home to him painfully when he joined a group of trainee lawyers in New York that would conduct mock trials in front an audience who would evaluate their performances. Time and again, despite all the effort he put into writing his quite brilliant briefs, he would find himself winning less applause than one of his friends who seemed able to outperform him with ease.

The friend pointed out that it was nothing to do with what Seward said, and all about how he said it. He suggested they swap briefs for the next competition, which they duly did.

Seward delivered his friend’s argument with all the skill he could muster, to only mediocre results. Then his friend delivered Seward’s own argument, and according to Seward himself, the applause could have been heard all the way down Broadway.

A useful lesson. And a pleasure to me that it was Seward himself who later had fun retelling the story.

It reminded me of an anecdote of my mother’s.

She found the atmosphere in Britain in 1940 deeply depressing. Life was becoming highly restricted, a little like today with Coronavirus. After the surrender of France and with Hitler apparently unstoppable on the Continent, the future looked bleak for the country. It was badly in need of something to raise its spirits.

In these circumstances, the writer, singer and actor Noel Coward stepped forward. He persuaded a group of friends to come together to put on a variety show at ‘Underneath the Arches’, a club that was, indeed, underneath the arches behind Charing Cross Station. I went there myself a few years back and, for all I know, it’s still there today.

Noel Coward.
Not always the best at delivering the great songs he wrote

For that show, Coward wrote all the songs but had them all performed by his friends, except or one, which he did himself. To his disappointment, while all the others were well received by audiences, his and only his song flopped night after night. Until he developed a cough and sore throat and had to ask someone else to step in for him.

Yes, you guessed it. His replacement sang the same song to huge success.

Noel Coward decided that his rather special style of singing wasn’t as widely appreciated as he had hoped. It was better for him to write the songs than perform them. A bitter lesson but a useful one, and a story he retold in his autobiography.

Self-deprecation at its best. The genuine kind. Such a refreshing change.

Happy 2017

1861 was a lousy year for the United States.

It started with southern States tumbling over each other to get out of the Union. Then in April civil war broke out. That was followed in July by the inexplicable conversion of the major Union victory at the First Battle of Bull Run into a catastrophic Union defeat (though it should be said that the notions of ‘major’ and ‘catastrophic’ would have to be significantly revised later in the war).

It’s no surprise, then, that on 31 December diarist George Templeton Strong wrote:

Poor old 1861, just going. It has been a gloomy year of trouble and disaster. I should be glad of its departure were it not that 1862 is likely to be no better.

155 years on, I feel we can safely echo Strong’s words. Particularly as 1862 turned out not only to be no better than 1861 but was, in fact, considerably worse. A feat 2017 is likely to repeat with respect to 2016.

The year just ended was one where many people, tired of the consensus that has predominated since the Second World War, decided that building bridges was no longer the way to go and we should have some new walls instead.

In June, the British people voted to turn the Channel once more into a moat rather than a mere waterway. Those who knew the sixties and seventies will remember the troubled times in which a former imperial power struggled to find a new vocation. By joining what became the European Union, Britain seemed to find one: no longer merely a diminishing force in the world, it would be a major contributor to the emergence of the Continent as a world power.

In deciding to leave, it has chosen to go back to the time of its decline. Those were the days when Britain was regarded as the sick man of Europe, plagued by poor productivity and constant strikes, where only the wealthy could enjoy a good restaurant meal or a holiday abroad. The nation steadily sank through the economic league table, with Italy at one point celebrating il sorpasso, the moment when its economy overtook the UK’s.

The EU turned that around, but it also opened the doors to immigration from Continental Europe. Those arrivals continue to play a vital role across the British economy, in the health service, transport, farming and catering. Such, however, is today’s fear of the outsider that most voters preferred to give up on the benefits of EU membership in the hope of controlling immigration. Ironically, the hope is likely to prove vain. The loss of benefit, however, will be real.

The American vote, however, was far more significant than Britain’s. It’s sad, though constitutional, that the victor took nearly 3 million fewer votes than his adversary. Donald Trump’s lack of a popular mandate is, however, going to have no impact on the way he exercises power in a democracy.

He’s the wall-builder extraordinary. Not that the one he promised, along the Mexican border, is likely to be built. Even if it is, he’s already made clear that much of it will be fence. But that’s part of his style: he feels he can make any promise he wants, without being bound to deliver – presumably, he has convinced himself that his intentions are pure and, in our post-truth society, honouring his word matters less than getting into a position in which he can mould it as he feels it needs.

His principal concern seems to be to make a friend of Vladimir Putin and an enemy of China. Whatever he does with physical walls, he has a metaphorical one in mind which will include Russia on his side and China firmly on the outside.

Aleppo: handiwork of Trump's pal Putin and his mate Assad

Putin has shown himself to be a strongman and supporter of strongmen, such as Assad in Syria or his new-found friend in Turkey, Erdogan. It’s telling that Trump wants to be associated with that club, perhaps because he also rather likes the homophobic, patriarchal and autocratic views it represents. If so, the US is going to become a considerable less pleasant place to be if you’re gay or a woman (how long will abortion remain a right?) and a great deal more unpleasant for African Americans, Hispanics or Muslims.

Meanwhile, we’d better hope that his attitude towards China represents another promise he has no intention of keeping. If he sticks to the collision course he’s plotted so far, the Trump presidency risks being not just bad but terminal.

Oh, well. George Templeton Strong survived 1862. He got through the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. He saw the US reunited and prospering. We too may need to keep our nerve and nurse our patience and wait for better days to emerge in the future.

It happened for Strong, so it could happen for us.

In the meantime – happy New Year!

Brexit: some of the people apparently fooled all of the time. And happy with it

“No one in this world,” H L Mencken claimed, “so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Mencken wasn’t particularly charitable and the judgement is harsh, but the Brexit vote and its consequences do seem to confirm his point. Or at least Lincoln’s view that you can fool some of the people, all of the time.

The pro-EU campaign was unfortunately led by a number of the weakest politicians we’ve had in Britain for decades: David Cameron and George Osborne for the Tories, Jeremy Corbyn for Labour. The first two came up with dire predictions of what would happen after a Brexit vote, which have naturally not been fulfilled – we’re still in the EU, for Pete’s sake, how could a disaster have happened already? And even when things start to slip, nothing happens that fast in economics. Even the crash of 2007-2008 took pretty much a year to develop fully.

As for Corbyn, he said practically nothing throughout the entire campaign, which at least has the merit of making him immune from being disproved by events.

On the other side of the fence, there were Labour figures such as Gisela Stuart MP, campaigning with the anti-immigrant lobby though she’s German-born herself, renegade Labourites like David Owen who split Labour in the eighties, the hard right like Nigel Farage of UKIP or nearly-as-hard right of the Conservative Party, such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (the latter so disloyal, to rebels and loyalists alike, that not even the Tories can stomach him in government any longer).

As the devil has the best songs, so the Brexiters had the best campaign. They travelled up and down the country in a battle bus emblazoned with slogans pledging that Brexit would save “£350 million a week” that could be used for the NHS.

Economical with the truth, effective for the campaign
The battle bus with the £350m claim

The figure was a lie and plenty of people pointed it out. But the lie took hold and many voters believed it and passed it on. Fool me once, they say, shame on you. The Leave campaigners certainly fooled enough people once to feel that shame, but clearly don’t: in fact, lying served them so well that they’re using the tactic again.

The campaign has morphed into “Change Britain” but the usual suspects are back: Gove, Johnson, Stuart and Owen are heading the organisation once more. What are they saying about that £350 million pledge?

It’s brilliant! They’re saying absolutely nothing at all. Dead silence. To admit it was a con trick would be out of the question and I didn’t expect it. But simply to pretend it never happened is pure George Orwell.

Instead they’re now offering to fund agriculture, poorer regions of the UK, scientific research and the universities out of savings generated by Brexit. In other words, to replace the funding that the EU currently provides and which we’d continue to receive if we didn’t leave.

There can be only one judgement of that pledge: it’s worth exactly the same as the one they made before. There’s zero chance of its ever being honoured. That’s not a problem, though: these are promises not intended to be fulfilled. They’re only intended to suck in the gullible again. And just watch: the gullible will lap them up.

Fool me twice, they say, shame on me. Plenty should feel that shame but just like the con artists themselves, they’ll know no shame. Because they don’t even know they’re being fooled.

Some of the people, you see. All of the time.

A good book prompts a trip down memory lane

What could be better than a book that offers a quick burst of pleasurable nostalgia? Especially if it’s a good book.

It was years and years ago – perhaps as many as fifteen – that I first travelled to Toronto. It was February and I’d been given to understand that the winter was cruel in that part of the world, with eight-foot snow drifts and most of the life of the city taking place underground. Imagine my delight when I turned up to blue skies and balmy temperatures, with only small traces of snow still lying around. Why, I even went for a walk along Lake Ontario (OK, not in shirtsleeves) and I think the word to describe it is charming.

Funnily, I’ve been back once more since, again in February, and again to the same weather. So I enjoy informing Canadian friends of the pleasure I’ve had enjoying the mild winters of Ontario.

At that time, Borders had opened few I any bookshops in England – certainly I hadn’t come across any. Later of course they mushroomed, all replete with their inbuilt Starbucks, offering a satisfying experience of being able to browse huge numbers of books and then have a coffee. Satisfying, that experience, but not sufficiently to resist the competition of Amazon – order the book from the comfort of your own couch, make your own latte and avoid all the hassle of traffic and finding a parking spot. So like mushrooms they opened, and like mushrooms they vanished, without even filling an omelette.

Since it was all new to me, I took great pleasure in spending a couple of hours in a huge Borders (with coffee, of course) in central Toronto. And inevitably bought three or four books. But considerations of economy, and luggage weight, made me put back on the shelf one that had attracted my attention.

Inevitably, once I was home, I decided that of all the books I’d looked at, that was the one I should have taken.

Now roll forward a few years, to January 2006. Danielle and I visited New Orleans, just five months after the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. Our hotel room was up high, and everywhere we looked we could see blue sheets on roofs that had been stripped of their tiles. The streets smelled distinctly of mould, like a damp cellar that’s been neglected too long. And everywhere one could feel the shortage of people – restaurants all had signs up, “looking for cooks – se busca cocineros” or similar.

New Orleans, returned to life

There was also, however, an atmosphere of staunch resistance. The city had been struck. But it was going to re-emerge, and do so with all the beauty and charm for which it is famed.

A little way from the centre, we found a pleasant bookshop. Not a huge affair like the one in Toronto, but something much more comfortable and human in scale. It suddenly occurred to me that they might have that book I’d failed to buy.

There were two women in their thirties running the shop. All bookshops, at one time, seemed to be run by two, sometimes three, women aged something between 30 and 60. They were always polite, friendly and fiendishly well-informed.

“I was looking for a book,” I started, always an intelligent way to open a question in a bookshop, “and I don’t remember what it was called, but it seemed to be contrasting the lives of Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall… I’m sorry, I know that’s pretty vague…”

“Do you mean James F. Simon’s What kind of nation?” asked the thirtyish woman, in her glasses and cardigan (did I say they always wore glasses and cardigans?) “I think we have it in stock.”

She marched me over to the other side of the shop and knelt at a low bookshelf.

“Yes, here it is,” she told me as she handed over a copy of the very book I was after.

Now, last month I finished listening to, rather than reading – I’m into audio books these days: they’re great when walking a dog or vacuuming a floor – Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney which, like the earlier book, compares a president with a Supreme Court Chief Justice. It’s an interesting formula, because we tend to know a little about Presidents, but usually next to nothing about judges. And yet they can fundamentally mould the direction of a nation.

That was certainly true of John Marshall, a last minute appointment by the last Federalist President John Adams before he handed over to his nemesis (but also friend – yes, it’s a great story) Thomas Jefferson. By naming Marshall, Adams hoped to leave some Federalist influence to reign in the Republican Jefferson, whom he regarded as dangerously radical. Marshall made a great many key judgements, not least one of his first, which established that the Supreme Court could carry out judicial review – specify, in fact, whether a law was actually legal – a pretty key power.

So it made for a good book. But so was Lincoln and Taney. Lincoln was, of course, the President who won the Civil War and outlawed Slavery. On the way to that happy outcome, he encountered one of the most significant, but infamous decisions of the Supreme Court, made by Roger Taney: the judgement of the Dred Scott case buttressed slavery and, worse still, authorised the principle that blacks in the US could never be citizens and ““…had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Strong stuff, and well handled by the author. Who turned out to be James F. Simon.

I should have guessed, of course, since the formula was so similar. And Simon has the rare distinction of being both a fine historian and a lawyer. So this approach works particularly well for him.

Both books were a pleasure.

But the greatest pleasure of all was to be reminded of the conditions in which I first discovered their author. In the pleasant winter weather of Toronto. And the charm of a stricken city that was quickly emerging from its pain – with intelligence, grace and elegance.

Art and the assassin. if only by association

The art of portraiture at first glance sounds monumentally dull.

Some worthy but undistinguished family with more money than aesthetic sense pays a painter to do them in oils, orders up a nice tree background, and smiles for the easel. They end up looking just as banal and dull as they probably were.

But that’s less true if the artist isn’t just painting to commission. And above all if he has real talent. As, for instance, if he’s John Singer Sargent. 

Well used to be, since John Singer Sargent’s been late for a while now.

Sargent’s remarkable ability emerges clearly from the exhibition of his works at the National Portrait Gallery, which deserves all the praise the Guardian gave it. Take, for example, the time when he was commissioned to do the portrait of a well-off lady, and then, struck by the looks of her son, asked to do his too. The result, his painting of W. Graham Robertson, is one of the most striking in the show.

W. Graham Robertson
in a picture made by the coat

The young man – he was 28 at the time though to me he looks younger – wasn’t particularly happy about posing in an overcoat in the summer. Yes, even in England, the weather can turn hot. Or at any rate, too warm for an overcoat. Sargent, however, replied “but the coat is the picture.” Certainly the coat makes the picture, and it makes it dramatically well.

Talking of drama, one of my favourite paintings was of one of the great Shakespearean actors of his time, Edwin Booth. This portrait too has a story. Booth complained that Sargent wasn’t producing a good likeness; the painter erased the head and started again. The result is powerfully effective: a look full of brooding intensity but also, with the pose, the theatricality of the actor.

The great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth
Unfortunate in having a notorious younger brother

But that particular painting had a far greater effect still on me. Because Edwin Booth was not only a star in his own right. He came from a family of great actors. The weakest of them was his youngest brother, known more for his extraordinary good looks than for his ability on stage. Those looks led to his briefly being known as the youngest star in the world. His limited talent, however, could not sustain him on the heights for long.

So ultimately he could not rival his brother, the man in Sargent’s portrait, in fame. He did, however, overtake him, even overshadow him, in infamy.

For John Wilkes Booth, resplendent in looks but little else, was the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.

It was a chilling experience to stand in front of the portrait of his far more talented elder brother, and admire its execution.

It’s only a shame that when his brother dabbled in execution, he too succeeded.

Let them live, however vile

Nearly two thousand years ago, a group of aristocrats decided to defend the privileges that they and their ancestors had enjoyed for centuries, by striking down the military leader who seemed intent on putting an end to them.

On 15 March 44 BC, they mobbed Julius Caesar in the Roman forum and stabbed him to death. The assassination sealed their own destruction in the civil war that followed, along with the end of the republic they had been so keen to defend. For self-fulfilling prophecy, to say nothing of own-goals, the assassination of Julius Caesar is right up there with the all-time greats.

Just under a century and a half ago, a mediocre actor achieved far greater fame than he ever could on stage, by bursting into Abraham Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre and shooting him in the head. To crown his act, John Wilkes Booth shouted ‘sic semper tyrannis’, the words Brutus is said to have proclaimed after killing Caesar, to signal that all tyrants would die. 

John Wilkes Booth.
May not have been much of an actor, but I wish he'd stuck to it.

As it happens, anyone less like a tyrant than Lincoln would be hard to imagine: his consummate skill was in persuading, cajoling or indeed buying (as the recent film Lincoln showed) enough support to compromise his way to success.

How might things have been, in the counter-factual hypothesis that Lincoln had survived? We can’t know, of course, but I guess that we might not have had to wait until Franklin Roosevelt to see a president re-elected to a third or fourth term of office. What effect that might have had on Lincoln and his commitment to good government and democratic principle it’s hard to say.

More significant would have been the effect on post-civil war reconstruction. My suspicion is that the reintegration of the southern States would have been quicker and more complete, and on the basis of a more rigorous equality among races. The fourteenth amendment freeing slaves was passed in 1865; a century later, their descendants were still battling – in many cases literally – for their civil rights. A lot of bloodshed might have been avoided.

So those were two successful assassinations that were wholly unsuccessful in achieving any useful aim.

On the other hand, there have been assassinations successfully avoided. For instance, late in the Second World War, the British Special Operations Executive launched a plan to murder Hitler. Who opposed these action men, the blowers-up of bridges, the killers of officials in occupied territory? The more established agents of conventional intelligence with their cooler heads. Why? They believed any replacement would run German military power more effectively than Hitler, lengthening the war and making victory less sure.

SOE: Bravest of the brave, but a little misguided over Hitler?

Why am I dealing with such morbid issues? Blame my youngest son Nicky who criticised me for talking too much about the natural death of Maggie Thatcher, having promised to stay silent on the subject. He insisted that I spend some time on violent political deaths, to make up for my inconsistency. 

As an inhabitant of Madrid, he’s particularly well placed to make that demand. I first got to know Spain well in the early nineties. Already then, I had trouble remembering that the country had been under the thumb of a thoroughly vile dictator, though he had died less than twenty years earlier. Indeed, in between, there had been the 1981 attempt by Antonio Tejero, latter-day John Wilkes Booth, to seize power by an armed attack on parliament. Friends in Barcelona described that terrible night in 1981, as they drove about the city to track each other down and try to decide what to do: to wait, to fight, to fly? But then in the small hours, the King finally broke his silence, and called out the army to put down the few rebel units, which it duly did, and the coup was over.

Antonio Tejero: misguided, wrong and thankfully a complete failure

So Spain was a strong enough democracy to resist even an armed attack.

Now would it have been the same had Franco been assassinated? That’s another counter-factual, but again I have little doubt over the broad outlines: Franco would have become a martyr, the far right would have been revived,  crushing repression would have been imposed and many opposition figures murdered or worse. I’m not at all sure that Spain would have been a democracy even today.

Killing an individual leader, however evil or incompetent, seems seldom to produce the desired result. Sometimes, as in the case of Hitler or Franco, it’s best to learn some patience and wait: the effect seems far more profound and longer-lasting.

That’s a lesson the West would do well to learn. There was such celebration over the execution of Saddam Hussein, but might he not have been dead by now anyway? Would things have been much worse? Or rather, when we look around the bloody, Iranian-dominated state Iraq has become, might they not have been a great deal better?

A house divided: can Europe save a troublesome island from self-sought isolation?

Are you looking forward to watching the film Lincoln as much as I am?

Lincoln: Europe would do well to heed his words

A remarkable figure in world history, the 16th US President he had quite a way with words. Do you remember ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’? He was thinking about his own nation, about to be riven by a bitter civil war. In it he led the ‘North’ (really the northern and western states) against the deep south that was trying to secede from a Union he was determined to preserve. 

Curiously, though, they were not the first to threaten secession. Even before the United States were twenty years old, there were secessionist rumblings in the States of the North East. Wealthy traders saw their livings and privileges threatened by the more radical southerners, with their greater commitment to republican and democratic principles (yes, even though they held slaves...) and their anti-monarchist and anti-British sentiments.

Though their privileges set the New England elite against more modest layers in society, the classes were united in their dislike of ‘aliens’ arriving on their shores with strange and possibly dangerous ideas.

These days the ‘house divided’ is no longer American but European. Once more the early hostility is coming from the North, and again it is fuelled by both wealthy businessmen concerned with their bottom line and by a more popular, xenopobic current that feels threatened by anything foreign. But in Europe it isn’t multiple states moving towards the exit, but just one: Britain.

It is led by a government devoid of ideas and unable to develop a set of policies that make sense even in their own terms; it is, for instance, poised to lead the country into an unprecedented triple-dip recession (three recessions with no sustained growth in between). That clueless government is positioning itself as the spokesman for the anti-European current in society.

Certainly, it speaks for the wealthy frightened of having to help the less fortunate states of the south of the Eurozone: leading Conservative ministers come from that milieu. They are, on the other hand, finding it difficult to represent the wider circles from the middle or working classes worried about immigration. The result is that they’re being increasingly outflanked to the right by UKIP, the UK Independence Party. This makes ministers speak ever more stridently against Europe, though they don’t seem to be wining back any support.

Despite the name, UKIP is not a group specifically concerned with independence, but a traditional party of the far right: recently it has been speaking out against gay marriage and, though it claims to be concerned about uncontrolled population growth, it focuses on immigration (adding about 100,000 a year) as opposed to the birth rate (700,000).

Meanwhile the government stance is provoking increasingly hard responses from other EU nations. Leaders are warning David Cameron that they would far rather see Britain stay in the Union, but if it comes to it, they will not go overboard to hang on to us, or not at the price of making radical changes to Treaty arrangements with which the other 26 members can live, just to accommodate him.

Even Angela Merkel, seen by Cameron as his closest ally, and who’d indicated that she was willing to see Treaty renegotiation, is now backing off the idea. To make matters worse, the US, through the person of Philip Gordon at the State Department, has warned Britain that pulling out of the EU would weaken our position in the world.

As it naturally would. This is no longer a world in which a middling-size nation can expect to be heard. The US, China and India already pack a far more powerful punch than Britain, and soon they’ll be joined by Brazil and Russia. Europe as a whole can hold its own in such company, but an island on the fringe of the continent won’t long last as a major economy, whatever UKIP claims. As Philip Gordon made clear, hoping that the US will bale it out is a pipe dream.

Meanwhile, the anti-European rhetoric keeps ratcheting up. There is opposition, for example, to the European Arrest Warrant as being an unwarranted incursion into our affairs. However, when Jeremy Forrest, who despite being a maths teacher clearly preferred to think with his genitals rather than his brain, cleared off to France with a fifteen year-old girl from his school, it was a European Arrest Warrant that got him swiftly back to Britain to face trial.

But the anti-European vitriol overwhelms such reasonable considerations, making Europe a house divided. Fortunately, unlike the US, no-one on the Continent is going to use force to keep Britain inside the Union if it ultimately shows itself no smarter than Mr Forrest, and absconds like he did. No, the other EU nations will wave us sadly goodbye, and turn back to strengthening a house once more united.

While Britain will be stuck on the sidelines trying to persuade others to take us as seriously as we take ourselves.

Ah, for a European Lincoln to save us from our own worst instincts. Sadly, there seems little prospect of finding one soon. Instead we just have to make do with what I suspect will be a fine film about the original instead. 

Let’s hope that the story of a giant will help console us for the petty manoeuvrings of the pygmies who surround us today.

Hitler: on mature reflection, not a bundle of laughs

I often think about how it might have been to get to know some of the larger-than-life figures from history.

There are some I would really like to have met. I can’t help feeling that an evening with Abraham Lincoln would have been as enjoyable as it would have been memorable – that extraordinary intellect, the subtlety of his thought, all laced with acute wit. He may have pushed the powers of his office to the limits of the US Constitution – some would say rather beyond them, for instance when he suspended habeas corpus – but I feel no sense that he was serving some kind of hidden agenda of self-aggrandisement, but that he really was striving for his openly proclaimed aims: preserving the Union and later on, freeing the slaves.

But what about some of the monsters? What about Hitler, say? I’ve always felt that it would be galling to discover that behind the vile public persona there lurked a man of charm and kindness displayed only to his personal entourage. So it was a relief to discover that, unlike Lincoln, he would probably not have been congenial company over a light-hearted dinner.

Another of the figures who did so much to make Europe in the twentieth century the ‘dark continent’, as the historian Mark Mazower called it in an outstanding study, was Stalin. One of his more inspired statements was ‘the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic’. So we can probably learn as much or more about Hitler’s personality from the death of a single woman than from his attempted extermination of 12 million Jews.

The woman in question was Angelika ‘Geli’ Raubal. She was Hitler’s half niece. Her mother became his housekeeper at the end of the 1920s and she moved into Hitler's house. For two years, Hitler kept her in a state of virtual captivity, wanting her always accompanied by one of his acolytes if she was out and, according to some claims, keeping her under lock and key when she was indoors while he was away. Finally, on 19 September 1931, her body was found dead in her room, which was locked from the inside; she had been shot with Hitler’s personal pistol – the one that nearly 14 years later he would turn on himself.

Geli was 18 when she died.

The odd thing was that Hitler never left his pistol at home. All the staff had been given the previous evening off, except for one who was deaf. There was, of course, no autopsy and no proper investigation. There’s also a rumour that she had somehow contrived to have an affair – or a brief fling, which seems more plausible in the circumstances – with one of Hitler’s rivals in the Nazi leadership, Gregor Strasser, and had told him that Hitler had some odd sexual habits and problems of impotence.

Strasser himself was murdered in 1934 in the wake of the Night of the Long Knives that wiped out so many of Hitler’s rivals.

The priest who officiated at Geli’s funeral later told a French newspaper that he had given her a Catholic funeral, from which he suggested it was easy to draw a conclusion concerning the likelihood that she had committed suicide. But that seems of academic interest only: whether she was murdered or was driven to suicide, her death does rather suggest that Hitler’s persona was about as endearing in private as it was in public. Which I suppose is comforting in its way: when I first learned of Geli’s story it shocked me but confirmed the impression I had received from photos of him in a supposedly relaxed setting: uniformed as ever, unbending, ungracious, unappealing.  

So, while I think it would have been fun to spend a few hours in Abe’s company, when it comes to Adolf, I think I’d prefer to say ‘nein, danke’.

Simpering instead of smiling, and an uptight uniform. Where's the appeal?

PS. The rudimentary examination of Geli’s body on 19 September 1931 suggested she had died the day before, which makes it the eightieth anniversary of her death as I write these words. A strange coincidence: I had no intention of marking the occasion any more than anyone else will – I just happened to think of all this because I’m beginning to read one of Ian Kershaw’s books on the Nazi leader – if you’re interested in the subject and don’t know his work, I strongly recommend it.

Not so modern times

One of the documents I’ve been translating recently speaks highly of an idea from a book published in 1943, declaring that it ‘prefigures’ a ‘modern concept’ in medicine.

Is it just me or is there a whiff of condescension here? A sense that we, modern people, have established some universal and deathless truths and it's just extraordinary how people from the past managed to get an inkling of the vision that only we, with our greater insight and the benefit of a few more years, have the capacity to encompass fully? 

There seem to be two fundamental delusions at work here.

The first is that the passage of time is synonymous with progress. In some respects it is, of course, but there are plenty of instances where things are a lot patchier than that. You want an example? Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush were both Republican Presidents of the United States. Call that progress?

The second is that what is ‘modern’ is also in some sense ‘conclusive’, the final word on any matter, the benchmark against which any other pronouncement must be measured. In other words, the modern view is the one that wraps it up and is proof to any further challenge or modification.

This is the thinking behind such terms as ‘Modern Art’. Even ‘postmodernism’ which contains the delightful paradox that to be really modern you have to move beyond it, nonetheless sets the ‘modern’ as its point of reference.

When I was still a child being dragged around art galleries – sorry, having my horizons expanded by being exposed to new aesthetic stimuli – I’d be amazed by, say, the Impressionists: wonderful paintings but so obviously not modern, not of our time. Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières was already eighty years old when I first saw it.  Modern art was something else.

Seurat: on older style of painting. But not by much

But time, as it inexorably does, rolled on. Take an iconic work of Modern Art, Matisse’s two Dance paintings: they’re over a century old now. Further in the past from us today than Seurat’s bathers were from me as a child.

Matisse: still modern a century on?

I’ve often wondered how we’d ever deal with this. At some stage, we need to decide that we really can’t keep calling these paintings ‘Modern’. New York’s ‘Museum of Modern Art’ is going to have to change name or shift its collection to, say, the Metropolitan to make place for something rather newer.

And as for us, the general public, we’re going to have to rethink how we use the word. We’ve got to stop thinking of it as a kind of culmination point and realise that it’s just a transition. Just like every previous moment of modernity. ‘Novelty, novelty,’ says Garance in Les Enfants du Paradis, ‘there’s nothing older in the world than novelty.’

Some day people may look back on our modern times with amusement at our quaintness, mixed perhaps with slightly condescending admiration.

‘They prefigured some quite modern ideas,’ they might say. ‘I mean – you can see the stirrings of awareness that wealth shouldn’t grant impunity from the law. And some voices were raised against corruption in public office. Who would have thought it, before the adoption of modern ideas?’