Grandparenting in the time of the kings

A few days before the New Year, Matilda and Elliott came to see us in our home in La Cañada, near Valencia. 

Well, they brought their parents too – at six and four, irritating rules concerning who’s allowed to do what on the highway meant they needed an adult to drive the car. Besides, it’s always good to have their parents nearby, so they can turn to them whenever they need a break from the company of their grandparents. 

Not that this often happens with Danielle, their Mamama. Nor with their uncle Michael, who was also with us. During a walk in the woods, he and Elliott had an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reverse roles in a shoulder carry.

Nice try. But not wholly successful

Winter visits naturally require respect for winter traditions. They arrived a couple of days after Christmas but, hey, what’s so special about one date rather than another? A Christmas tree, especially one with Christmas gifts underneath it, is just as wonderful on the 27th of December as on the 25th. And so it proved.

Just as enjoyable on the 27th as on the 25th

Another tradition we indulged in was the fine French winter dish of Raclette. This comes from Savoie, up in the Alps, so well suited to cold conditions. You grill slabs of the Savoyan cheese, Raclette, and then pour it over potatoes, to be eaten with pickles or ham. I like the underlying principle of this kind of meal which, like its cousin Fondue, has the diners doing some of the cooking. Besides, it’s a great dish – if you don’t know it, you should give it a try (come to think of it, even if you do know it, you should give it another try). But it’s even more fun with children happily learning to toast their cheese and use the special spatulas provided to scrape it onto their potatoes.

A dab hand at Raclette

Much less conventional but doubtless as much fun, was Mamama Danielle’s visit to the woods with the children to paint tree stumps. The idea is to colour the exposed surface of the stump, with enthusiasm and imagination, and demonstrate that in a woodland environment, not only will art imitate nature, nature and art also mix well.

 

Painting the forest

Nor did Danielle limit her activities with the children to painting. On the contrary, with their Dad Nicky, she took them to a bouncy castle paradise, where Matilda amazed everyone by her daring in tackling obstacles and slides even some adults feared to attempt. Elliott was never far behind her.

Matilda and Elliott: bouncy castle adventures

I too took the kids on an outing. This was to the next town, La Eliana. It has a playground that has long been a favourite of Matilda and Elliott’s, and it still attracts them. That’s despite the local council's apparent intent to wind it down, taking out pieces of equipment from time to time and not replacing them, so that it becomes increasingly denuded of sources of fun. That didn’t stop them enjoying themselves, however, even doing simple things like using bits of plastic they found lying around to decorate the sad site of a long-departed swing.

Art replacing boisterousness:
decorating the site of a long-gone piece of playground equipment

In any case, I’m not sure that it isn’t the travelling to get there and back that gives them their real fun, more than the playground itself. We go by metro and they love that. This time they made a new discovery: standing in the rubber-sided connection between carriages, which twists as the train goes around curves. Exciting stuff. At least as enjoyable as a vanished piece of playground apparatus.

Fun between the carriages

Then it was back to tradition. Mixed traditions, come to that. The great feast of the Christmas period here in Spain is the Feast of the Kings – los reyes – on the 6th of January, twelfth night. With unfaultable logic, that’s when Spaniards give children gifts, the idea being that the three kings in the Christian narrative brought gifts to the infant Jesus at that time. 

We had to take some liberties with the dates again, since the kids were going home with their parents in tow on 3 January. So we had the celebration a few days in advance. I can only say that the dating inaccuracy again did nothing to reduce the enthusiasm of the celebration.

With slightly less scriptural basis, the Spanish, like the French, celebrate the feast of the kings with a specific type of cake. In Spanish, it’s called a roscón de reyes (cake of the kings). In French, it’s a galette des rois (same). There’s a baker’s near us that makes the French variety rather well.

Roscón de reyes

Galette des rois

Danielle’s a good Frenchwoman at heart (well, as good as she can be: she’s from Alsace in the far east of France, on the border with Germany, and there’s some doubt about how good they are at being French, except as a way of not being German). She prefers the French version. Apparently, Elliott agrees, though Matilda would rather go for the Spanish variety. But in our house, our rules apply, and we had a French galette.

As the galette des rois protocol prescribes, the youngest person present (in this instance Elliott) sat under the table and called out the names of the people to receive each slice of cake as it was cut. That’s a way of ensuring that the slice with the little token in it – as often as not a figurine of one of the biblical kings – goes to someone selected entirely at random. This is important, I should point out, because the person who gets the token becomes the king or queen of the day and wears a fine cardboard crown, almost Trump-like in its golden glory. 

Whether we were quite as fair in the distribution of slices as these rules suggest I can’t claim with unqualified integrity. This year the crown went to Matilda, who duly became queen, just as last year, Elliott became king. 

He was less than enchanted with being usurped this year. He made clear his disapproval of this manifestly unfair choice (i.e. one that didn’t favour him) in the way that a four-year-old does best, though in his defence, he did that briefly before recovering his equanimity. Funnily enough, this is another common point with that fine President Trump, who also likes to express dissatisfaction with decisions that deny him what he feels is his entitlement (Nobel Peace Prizes come to mind). Unfortunately, unlike Elliott, Trump’s dissatisfaction comes backed up with serious armed force and powerful economic weapons. He also makes much more of a fuss and makes it for far longer.

Besides, in the grandkids’ case, Matilda had the generosity ultimately to give her crown to Elliott. Which is nothing like María Corina Machado handing over her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump. Matilda wasn’t expecting anything in return, so wasn't as disappointed as the Venezuelan opposition leader.

Elliott enjoying the crown

As for us, we all had a fine evening. Not spoiled even by the passing disagreement about the crown (Shakespeare was wrong: it’s the head that doesn’t wear the crown that doesn’t lie easy). And, even though Matilda might prefer a Spanish roscón, we all took great pleasure from our French-style, Spanish-baked galette.

All in all, it was a good visit, and a fine way to celebrate the season.

A Trump anniversary needs an Orwell reminder

It may not be the best literary diet for a twelve-year-old, to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World one week, and George Orwell’s 1984 the next. Not at least if he wants to retain an innocent, rose-tinted view of the world. I certainly didn’t when I raced through those two books, emerging somewhat shellshocked by the experience.

A mix not designed to encourage an adolescent

It was 1984 that hit me particularly hard. The book introduced the notion of ‘Big Brother’ to the world: Big Brother is a man, who might be no more than a propaganda fiction, presented as the leader of Oceania, the nation where the book’s protagonist Winston Smith lives. Big Brother’s face is on posters at every street corner or on screens in people’s houses. The slogan associated with the face was ‘Big Brother is watching you’, another phrase that has entered mainstream English.

The dystopia Orwell described saw the world divided into three blocs. He finished the book in 1948 (the title came from reversing the last two figures). That was just three years after the Second World War, which had been dominated by the Soviet Union fighting in alliance with the United States and the British Empire. At the end of the war, the Soviets had extended their control significantly westward, into Eastern and Central Europe. The British Empire was in decline, but both Britain itself and most of its former imperial holdings were closely bound to the United States.

A possible view of the world presented in Orwell’s 1984
Note who controls Greenland

It didn’t take a huge effort of imagination to conjure up the bloc Orwell called ‘Oceania’. It covers the Americas as a whole plus Britain and the whiter parts of its former empire. To defend itself against its rivals, it has become an authoritarian dictatorship, policing all thought, ostensibly because only such centralised power can defend against the other blocs.

The second of these, clearly based on the old Soviet Union and just as oppressive as the Soviet state and Oceania, is ‘Eurasia’. That’s Russia extended westward to the Atlantic and including all of continental Europe.

Meanwhile, in the Far East, a third bloc has emerged, covering China and Japan and their neighbours, called ‘Eastasia’. 

The three powers were in a constant state of war, in which Oceania allied with one or other against the third, but in a cynical but highly effective strategic move to guarantee their own survival, all three kept the fighting away from their homelands and concentrated mostly in Africa. There war would cause no damage at home while providing a distraction from domestic troubles.

Government in Oceania was provided through four ministries.

• Minipax, the Ministry of Peace, concerned with prosecuting war
• Miniplenty, the Ministry of Plenty, concerned with rationing 
• Minitrue, the Ministry of Truth, concerned with propaganda
• And Miniluv, the Ministry of Love, the most frightening of them all, concerned with crushing all possible dissent, though its secret police (the thought police – another phrase of Orwell’s that has entered the general language), its inquisitors and its torture chambers.

At the heart of the regime is the lie. It’s perhaps best summarised by its three slogans, picked out in giant lettering on the side of the ministry building:

WAR IS PEACE  

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The lie doesn’t concern only the present and future. Minitrue also brings the past into line with present concerns. So when Oceania ends an alliance with Eurasia to fight Eastasia, and instead allies with Eastasia to fight Eurasia, it’s important for history to record that this was always so. Winston Smith, who worked in the ministry, saw people quickly adapting to the new ‘truth’ that: 

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

At one point, Smith, who is increasingly at variance with the regime he serves and keeping a diary in which he illegally records his own opinions (behaviour officially classified as ‘thoughtcrime’), writes that he can understand how the system works, but not why. That will be made clear to him later by a senior member of the party:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

Of course, Orwell meant all this as a cautionary tale, a warning of how things might go if we weren’t careful to ensure they didn’t. As the actual year 1984 arrived, many of us felt some relief that, while there were clear trends towards the kind of authoritarianism Orwell had warned against, overall things weren’t too bad and democracy seemed reasonably secure.

Today, on the first anniversary of the start of Donald Trump’s second term as president, anxiety seems much more appropriate than relief.

He’s busy constructing himself an Oceania of his own. He’s produced an updated, though not improved, version of the Monroe doctrine, which he calls the Donroe doctrine, identifying the Americas as an exclusive domain of the US. He wants to add Greenland to it. Britain, as attached as ever to belief in a special relationship with the US even though it isn’t reciprocated by the Americans, may let itself be sucked in. After all, Brexit pulled the UK out of its association with its European neighbours, leaving it vulnerable to increased US domination.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin seems intent on building Eurasia. For the moment, it hasn’t gone as far or as fast as he might like, with only Ukraine invaded and proving a harder nut to crack than he’d hoped. But it’s clear that he’d be more than happy to move further westward just as soon as he can.

And the great winner in all the global posturing has been China, rapidly moving ahead of the US in key sectors such as green energy production, electric cars and, with increasing probability, even AI. At the same time, it’s growing its military power fast. Doesn’t that sound like a great core for a real Eastasia? 

Internally, the latter day Eurasia and Eastasia are both despotically authoritarian and oppressive regimes. Now Trump is emulating them. He’s sending masked armed men into US cities not sufficiently devoted to his worship. We’ve seen them opening fire on civilians without justification, causing them serious injury or even, in at least one instance, death. And, as in Winston Smith’s Minitrue, this is all backed up by a tissue of lies that presents an innocent victim as a terrorist, and anyone who dares oppose Trump as a criminal. 

Will there be military force deployed at polling stations in the November midterm elections, to intimidate possible opponents? Will they be seizing ballot results to ‘correct’ them to suit Trump? Will this be endorsed by Trump acolytes in an ever-increasing circle of compliant – or complicit – courts and media organisations?

Trump’s turning what Orwell meant as a cautionary tale into an instruction manual.

It feels to me as though we ought to pay a lot more attention to Orwell’s warnings. At last, some statesmen seem to be waking up. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, today warned that it’s time for European leaders to end their complicity with Trump. The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has called for the non-Orwellian powers to pull together to resist abuse by the superpowers of Russia, China and the US. And French President Emmanuel Macron has warned against the emergence of a world ‘where international law is trampled under foot’.

We need to hear a lot more leaders voicing that kind of message. And a lot more voters backing them, even if it implies new costs. Because the alternative would mean that Orwell only got the date wrong. Perhaps by as little as half a century.

If we’re not careful, 1984 from being a past date will become a future destiny.

Postscript

I need to put in a good word for 1984 (the year, not the book). That was when our youngest son was born. While he could sometimes drive us crazy, he brought us a lot of joy, a lot more often. It’s certain that Trump has brought us much more vexation and, for anyone but his billionaire paymasters, practically nobody any joy at all.

Nicky, our 1984 kid, asleep. A couple of years later

How a chat with a child led to a 43rd anniversary

Dinosaurs. Planets. Two subjects that have fascinated kids for at least a couple of generations. What’s surprising is how impactful a conversation about either can turn out to be.

In my case the subject was the planets. I was in France and a nine-year-old boy, by curious coincidence sharing my name, David, visited the house where I was staying. We got into a chat about the solar system, and I ended up drawing a diagram with him showing all the planets, right out to Pluto – this was 1980 and we hadn’t yet learned to exclude Pluto from the list of true planets. 

How we thought of the planets in 1980

Please don’t think that the illustration here is a faithful copy of the diagram we produced back then. That’s long since been lost. This is a ChatGPT-generated reproduction, and far more sophisticated than anything either of us could have drawn. ChatGPT is just far too skilled (at least at this kind of thing) to lower itself to our level.

Still, unimpressive though our drawing was, it seems it impressed David enough for him to go home and tell his mother, Danielle, all about this curious Englishman he’d met. Curious enough to make her feel she’d like to see what he was like.

Jumping forward a couple of years, Danielle had thrown in her lot – and David’s – with mine and we were all three living together in England. Nor were we going to be just three for long. There came a dramatic day when I rang Danielle – from a public call box to a landline, you understand, mobiles still being a long way off – to tell her about some incident in my day that I obviously thought so important that I told her about it before she could give me her news, though now it seems so inconsequential, particularly compared to what she had to tell me, that I’ve forgotten all about it.

‘Don’t you want to hear my news, then?’ she asked. ‘About the result of the test?’

Memory flooded back. She’d been due to have a pregnancy test that morning. With the memory came certainty, given the solemnity with which she mentioned the test, about what its result had been.

‘It was positive,’ Danielle confirmed.

That was the starting pistol for a race. Those were the days of the Thatcher government, which had recently changed the laws concerning British nationality. If we were married, and the child was born in Britain, he or she would automatically inherit my nationality as well as Danielle’s, though I’d been born abroad (in Rome, since you ask) and Danielle was French. Otherwise, it would be down to the Home Secretary’s discretion. And I didn't know how discreet he was.

There was less of a practical consequence if the child was a girl. If however it was a boy and he received only French nationality from his mother, he would – as the law then stood – have been liable for military service in France when he turned 18. At the time, that represented 12 months out of a young man’s life which struck me as an appalling waste of time. Since there was no compulsory military service in Britain, getting him British citizenship would free him of tiresome obligation.

Shall I confess that I also rather liked the idea of my child sharing my nationality? I already shared a name with the lad who would become my stepson and, later on, precisely over the military service issue, would share a nationality with him too. I preferred it that my other children should not be technically foreigners to me.

Now, you may be thinking, ‘what was the problem? All you had to do was get married, right?’

Sadly, it wasn’t that simple. Danielle still had a husband back in France. As it happens, he was willing to grant a divorce, and there was no technical problem with getting an English divorce to a French marriage. There was just a linguistic one: her then husband spoke no English and the divorce papers would include no French.

He tried to be helpful. He signed the papers the court sent him on every page, but not in the one place where he had to, in the signature space. Danielle had to explain to him exactly where he had to sign and the court sent them back. By then time was getting very tight indeed. 

In the final stages of the exercise, the judge called Danielle, David and me in to see him in chambers. He checked with David that he was happy with the custody arrangements (term time with us, holidays with his dad); he said he was. The judge then looked at Danielle’s distended belly and said, ‘I expect you’d like me to reduce the delay between decree nisi and decree absolute’. 

Usually there’s a six-week gap between nisi and absolute, the provisional judgement for a divorce, and the definitive one that allows remarriage.

The judge reduced the time to one week.

As a result, when I started a new job on 4 January 1983, I had a request to make of my new boss.

‘I apologise for having to ask for a day off on the very day I’m starting work.’

His face fell. I could see him thinking, ‘What kind of guy have I taken on here?’

‘We’re about to have a baby and the only day my local registry office can marry us is 11 January, next Tuesday.’

He gave a roar of laughter and threw himself back in his chair.

‘David,’ he said, ‘there are few excuses I could have accepted, but that’s definitely one of them.’

So on Tuesday 11 January 1983, Danielle and I were married. And just eighteen days later, Michael was born – safely a British citizen – to join Danielle, David and me. 

incidentally, by the time Michael was eighteen, obligatory military service in France had been replaced by attendance at a one-day ‘citizen’s day' workshop.

Yesterday was 11 January 2026. Danielle and I joined a bunch of people with whom Danielle used to go out dragon-boating (check it out – it’s the Chinese answer to canoeing and good for health). They were there for their annual get-together.

Our 43rd wedding anniversary became a subsidiary factor in the general good cheer.

Celebrating our 43rd

We promised them all invitations to our golden wedding anniversary. We just have to survive another seven years. We’ll give it our best shot.

In the meantime, isn’t it fun to see where a casual chat about the planets can lead?

You thought Jews and Muslims didn’t celebrate Christmas? Think again

Danielle’s Christmas tree:
a burst of a joy in an inter-ethnic household

Anyone who knew my mother would have to admit that she was firm in her opinions. Indeed, they might have found a far less complimentary term than ‘firm’ for her determination to get her way. She had many excellent qualities, above all an outstanding intelligence, but this trait of hers could cause a certain irritation. In particular, that was the case for us, her family, whenever Christmas rolled around.

This was a matter on which she was completely immovable. The family had to get together with her for a Christmas lunch every year, without fail. What’s more, Christmas lunch was something that had to be eaten on Christmas day, the 25th of December, come what may. 

I say ‘eaten’ and not ‘enjoyed’ because, in England at least, the opportunities to enjoy a meal on the 25th are strictly limited. Your options are restaurants that lay on a special meal for the day, where ‘special’ applies principally to the charge – the kind of price tag that requires the negotiation of a second mortgage – with the alternative a second-rate Chinese or Turkish restaurant, the only other kind of restaurant likely to be open on Christmas day in Oxford, where she lived. I should say in passing, that ‘second-rate’ is probably a tad overstated.

‘Why don’t we go out on Christmas Eve?’ I would sometimes plead with her, ‘there are so many more restaurants open.’

‘It wouldn’t feel like Christmas,’ she would reply.

It didn’t help to point out that many countries in continental Europe, including France where my wife Danielle comes from, have their main Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve.

‘Not in England,’ my mother would assure me.

So the 25th of December became indissolubly associated with driving a (relatively) long way to have a meal which it would be generous to describe as mediocre.

As often as not, that was in a Turkish restaurant which was, funnily enough, opposite the main synagogue. As we munched our way through our indifferent Mezes, the restaurant would gradually fill up with members of the city’s Jewish community, who would greet my mother warmly as they came in. Because this was the strange irony of this whole dismal ritual: my mother was Jewish. 

I’m glad to say that the Oxford community had welcomed her in with open arms, even though she didn’t practice the religion, and looked after her for the last decade or more of her life. But Jewish or not, she insisted on celebrating Christmas, and doggedly insisting on that happening on Christmas day. Nor, apparently, was she alone in being a Jew who went Turkish on Christmas Day, if the number of fellow Jews who turned up in that restaurant on that day was anything to go by.

I have to say that her mother, while far less fixated on a specific celebration on a specific date, had also been quite clear on the need to mark Christmas appropriately. She lived in the same house in suburban north London for the best part of six decades, and for much of that time she had a neighbour with whom each and every year she would exchange Christmas cards. The neighbour was at least nominally Christian but she and my rather lapsed Jewish grandmother stuck faithfully to a tradition of the society that surrounded them.

Leatrice, my mother, with Yetta, hers
Both Jews who celebrated Christmas

Danielle and I had a different striking illustration of this attitude when we lived in Luton, a town with a large Muslim population. Wondering through the neighbourhood of Bury Park, which some have called ‘Little Pakistan’, one 24th of December, we were surprised to see the queues outside the Halal butchers’ shops. Danielle, never backward in talking to people she doesn’t know, asked someone in one of the queues what they were waiting for.

‘Turkey, of course,’ she was told.

‘But you don’t celebrate Christmas, do you?’

The woman she was talking to shrugged.

‘Everyone around us is having a party. So why shouldn’t we?’

Bury Park in Luton

In the early days of Danielle’s life in England, she and I went to a conference in Colchester, in the eastern county of Essex, and gladly accepted a lift back to London from another attendee. He was Jewish, but he kindly offered – and we gratefully accepted to stop in three villages on the way so that we could visit their fine churches, an offer we gratefully accepted. I was delighted and impressed by how knowledgeable he was on all the fine details of Anglican practice, how the High Church differed from the Middle Church and it, in turn, was distinguished from the Low. In fact, it wasn’t just his knowledge that impressed me, but his ability to explain all those distinctions to a foreigner who’d recently moved to the country.

And then I got it. Anglicanism is the ‘Church of England’. And he and I were English. So that’s our church. Ours even if we belong to another faith or no faith at all. It’s like the England football team: it’s my team, though I don’t even like football. It’s the heritage of us as English, deeply rooted in our culture.

Christmas is just as much a part of that culture. Of course, to some it’s a religious festival, but they’re a small and diminishing minority. To most of us, like the Muslims in the queue for turkeys, it’s just a celebration. If you belong to the country that celebrates it, why shouldn’t you join in? You’re Jewish? You’re Muslim? You’re an atheist? What does that matter? You belong to a culture that celebrates Christmas, so join the party.

That’s why I keep wishing people ‘Merry Christmas’. It’s nothing to do with MAGA’s ugly assertion that the greeting has been brought back by the Trump coterie, to crush ‘season's greetings’, altogether too woke for them. If I still use the old expression, it’s simply because it reflects the traditions that moulded me.

Which was the same for my mother and grandmother.

So if I say ‘merry Christmas’ to you, please don’t take offence at my political incorrectness. That’s not what it’s about. Think of it instead as a tribute to two important people in my family history, and an acknowledgement of the culture that accommodated all three of us.

So, Merry Christmas to you all. And, of course, a happy New year. 

Selling souls for nothing

Here are words you wouldn’t expect the Prime Minister to utter: ‘migration represents 25% of our per capita GDP, 10% of our social security revenues and only 1% of our public expenditure’. 

Extraordinary, right? A full-throated defence of immigration. So different from the denunciations we’re more used to. 

Surprised? Doesn’t sound like Keir Starmer? Don’t worry, it isn’t. Those were the words of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. The words are admirable not just because they show so much more courage than Starmer ever does, but also because they’re right. Immigration isn’t a burden. It’s vital for the survival of Britain and Spain as nations offering their citizens a decent standard of living.

If you’re in your forties in Britain and would like a pension when you reach the appropriate age, stop and think that, according to the Office of National Statistics, by 2047 without immigration, the population will drop by nearly 10 million, and in a swiftly ageing society, the working-age population which pays for pensions, will fall by 6-7 million. You want a pension? Make sure immigrants keep showing up, because most of them are of working age and you need them working for you. 

No one in the Labour leadership is saying that.

Instead we get the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, making the regulations governing the treatment of asylum seekers even more severe than they already are. 

Let’s not forget that asylum seekers, less than 15% of total immigrants anyway, are mostly people fleeing some of the most awful circumstances on earth, including war, torture and rape. One of the nastier of the new proposals is to extend the time it takes for an asylum seeker to win the right to remain permanently in Britain, from five to twenty years. If at any time the government decides that the country from which the refugees fled is now safe again, they could be forced to return. That’s even if they have kids, who have been educated in Britain, who may speak English better than their parents’ language, who are in effect in all but the technical sense British.

When Mahmood was criticised in the Commons for her proposals, she replied with passion. It’s refreshing to see that kind of intensity, but a shame to see it so badly directed. She pointed out how deeply divisive the problem of immigration has become, and that she, unlike her white fellow MPs, was frequently the target of vicious racial slurs, as were many of her constituents. She shocked the Commons by repeating one of those slurs, and the language was so offensive that the Deputy Speaker called on her to apologise for it.

Well, she’s right. I also agree with Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Opposition – not something I say very often – who supported Mahmood on that point. She has also had to face racist insults.

What I can’t go along with is Mahmood’s conclusion that the answer is to make asylum seekers, some of the world’s most vulnerable people, pay for British divisiveness. Someone flings a racist insult at you, and you respond by adopting their policies? Isn’t that just rewarding their bigotry? Where’s the sense in that?

If you doubt that it’s what she’s doing, just look at who’s welcoming her proposals. Kemi Badenoch, though a victim of racist attack herself, is another hardliner against immigration and has pledged Conservative support for Mahmood’s measures. Nigel Farage, of the far-right Reform UK Party, invited Mahmood to become a member after hearing her proposals. Worse still, Tommy Robinson, a figure from the hardest of the hard right, a man who has served prison terms for his behaviour in support of his policies, a man endorsed by Elon Musk, welcomed Mahmood’s proposals and congratulated ‘patriots’ for having legitimised the views that made them possible. 

It happens so frequently. Faced with a surging, loudmouthed far right, the centre left caves and throws them red meat, in the hope of outflanking them and winning back their voters. ‘You want the vicious policies of the far right?’ they seem to be saying. ‘Don’t worry. We can implement them for you. Just keep voting for us.’

This is selling your soul to chase electoral gains. The worst of it? It’s not just immoral, it’s bad politics. It doesn’t work. In France, President Macron has tried to prove that he can be as hard on immigrants as the far-right National Rally led by Marine le Pen. What has the result been? The National Rally is closer to winning the presidency than it has ever been.

I recently heard the former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, being interviewed by Emily Maitlis. Sturgeon described the position perfectly:

If you basically say Nigel Farage is right then people are likely to vote for Nigel Farage, not you…

Maitlis herself brilliantly summed up the policy that Keir Starmer seems to be pursuing as:

‘Nigel Farage is right. Don’t vote for him.’

Left: Pedro Sánchez, courageous on immigration
Centre: Mette Frederiksen, architect of a failed model
Right: Shabana Mahmood, passionate to follow that model

The irony is that Labour has based Mahmood’s latest ideas on what people call ‘the Danish model’. That’s the equally harsh approach to asylum adopted by the current government in Denmark, run by Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, the equivalent of Britain’s Labour Party. On 18 November, Denmark held local and regional elections. The Social Democrats took a hammering across the country. They even lost the mayoralty of Copenhagen, for the first time since the first elections for the post in 1938.

And this is the model British Labour wants to follow?

Labour became established in Britain as a party of government in the 1920s. Its worst electoral result since then came in 1931, after its leader, Ramsay MacDonald, set up a coalition government with the Conservatives and split the party. At the 1931 election, the Labour Party that broke with MacDonald took 30.6% of the vote.

In more recent years, under the appalling leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour took 32.1% of the vote.

And according to the most recent YouGov poll, Labour today now stands at 19%. Far worse than in either of those two disastrous elections.

I don’t know what it takes to make Labourites who favour the latest proposals understand that they are morally wrong, economically damaging, and even politically counter-productive. Isn’t the evidence clear enough?

Of course, there is a crucial difference between the Danish and British experience. The Social Democrats lost Copenhagen to parties to their left. I wish I could at least be confident of something similar in Britain, where it looks as though Labour is far more likely to lose to the extreme right.

And what about Spain, the country I was talking about at the start? Well, the signs aren’t good. The traditional right is dropping in the polls. Sánchez’s Socialist Party is climbing. But the far right is also gaining ground. Sánchez has proved in the past that it’s unwise to write him off too soon, but it does look as though he’s likely to lose the next election to a coalition of the centre right and the hard right.

Still, if he does lose, at least he’ll go down fighting for a position that’s defensible morally and right in practice.

British Labour looks increasingly likely to lose to its opponents of the far right while defending the very positions they take.

The worst of all possible worlds.

MAGA? Don’t you mean MACA?

It was touching, wasn’t it? Literally as well as metaphorically. You know, the joyous handclasps. Holding each other’s hands. All with smiles to underline the intimacy and good fellowship.

The scene was Tianjin in China. Present were the host, Xi Jinping, Chinese leader and the world’s most powerful autocrat. With him was Vladimir Putin, Russian leader and the world’s most brutal autocrat. Joining them was Narendra Modi, Indian leader as Prime Minister of the world’s biggest democracy and its second most powerful would-be autocrat.

Modi’s presence was the most remarkable. Less than three years ago, in December 2022, Chinese and Indian troops were attacking each other with, of all things, nail-studded clubs across their common border. Now, though, it’s all friendship and good cheer between the two nations.

Putin, Modi and Xi Jinping

Best of buddies. All thanks to Trump

In theory, this ought to please the world’s top would-be autocrat. Donald Trump’s always quick to trumpet – Trump-et? – his role as peacemaker. The man who’s going to bring peace to Ukraine or Gaza in a single day hasn’t yet found the right day on which to make that happen. To compensate, he might take some satisfaction from having promoted peace between those two Asian giants.

Sadly, though, it’s not clear to me that he brought them together intentionally. There may be people who regard Trump as a champion of subtle strategic thought. I’m afraid that I’m not one of them. He slapped tariffs of 25% on Indian exports to the US and then, when India persisted in buying Russian oil, doubled them to 50%. That drove Modi towards Xi Jinping, to see whether China could become a sufficiently significant trading partner to make up for some of the lost business with the US.

Was Trump motivated by an altruistic desire to improve Sino-Indian ties even at the cost of US relations with the subcontinent? As I say, some may believe he’s capable of such ingenuity. They may be right, but I can only say that I find it hard to believe.

To be honest, even the pretext for increasing the Indian tariffs is hard to swallow. I mean, Trump is always proclaiming his admiration for Russia and for Putin. I reckon he envies Putin and would like to imitate him in the US. Putin, of course, has no intention of imitating Trump. Still, given Trump’s apparent deference towards Putin – Trump regularly talks tough about his Russian opposite number, but Putin only has to meet him to twist him around his little finger again – it’s odd that Trump reckons his tariffs on India are about Modi buying Russian oil.  

The journalist John Sopel, now co-hosting the podcasts The News Agents and The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis, has a different explanation of Trump’s behaviour. India and Pakistan had their own border conflict between 7 and 10 May. It involved missile firing and air raids, so it was a tad more serious than the 2022 clash between Indian and Chinese border troops armed with clubs.

The incident eventually ran out of steam, with both sides apparently feeling they’d done enough damage and killed enough people to satisfy that strange beast, national honour. Trump though had rung the two sides and that, he has convinced himself, made him the engineer of peace between the two nations.

Pakistan, apparently keener than India on being obsequious towards Trump, nominated him for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. India, instead, argued that peace happened independently of Trump’s minimal efforts. Modi refused to back him for the Peace Prize.

Sopel’s suggestion? The different attitudes of the nations over the Nobel prize cost India its penalising tariffs, far higher than Pakistan’s. It seems hard to credit, doesn’t it? But should anything surprise us anymore when it comes to Trump?

Let’s not stop at India, though. Another nation that has had punitive tariffs inflicted on it is Brazil, the second biggest democracy in the Americas, and the nation that is making its previous would-be autocratic president answer for his illegal attempts to hold onto power. Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on it. Which is curious, since his general justification for tariffs is to hit back at nations with which the Americans are running a trade deficit. That is, nations so devious that they produce goods Americans are keener to buy than their own people are to buy US products.

Curiously, Brazil is one of the minority of nations with which the US has a trade surplus – it sells Brazil more than it buys from it.

Still, it doesn’t take long to find the real reason for the tariffs on Brazil. It’s precisely because it’s holding its ex-President to account. He tried to raise an insurrection to prevent his opponent, who’d beaten him in the election, driving him from office. Having tried the same trick himself, Trump clearly opposes any move to make the author of an attempted coup face retribution for his action. 

Hence the tariffs.

So where is Brazil turning for help? Why, to China.

Funnily enough, South Africa is doing the same. Trump has swallowed the entirely fictitious story of an anti-white genocide in that country (evidence isn’t a Trump requirement for anything he has chosen to believe). Ironically, while Trump is deporting as many migrants from the US as he can, he’s opened the door to one category of refugees – white South Africans. And he’s imposed 50% tariffs on South Africa too, driving them into Chinese arms alongside the others.

The original five members of the group of nations known as the BRICS were Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Isn’t that curious? Precisely China and the four nations now turning to it for help in the face of Trump’s aggression. What help China can provide is far from certain. But even if the help is limited, the realignment of the nations is clear and no doubt lasting.

In other words, Trump’s actions are powerfully assisting the Chinese playbook for world leadership. And that’s on top of moves to cut investment in such technologies as Electric Vehicles, leaving the field open to China to dominate.

So should MAGA continue to call itself MAGA at all or produce its nice red baseball caps proclaiming that ‘Trump was right about everything’?

Since he’s clearly not making America great again, maybe it’s time to change the movement’s name to MACA. That’s ‘Make America China’s Agent’. The caps could be marked ‘Xi Jinping’s getting it right’. 

At least that would be a lot more accurate.

Summer grandparenting: penguins, fish and dragons

We’d been talking about penguins, Elliott and I, as one does when breakfasting with a four-year-old.

‘And you know,’ he solemnly announced, ‘they live near the North Pole.’

‘Near the pole,’ I agreed, but adding a gentle correction, ‘but the South Pole. There are no penguins near the North Pole.’

‘Oh, yes, there are.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I continued, as gently as I could.

‘Have you been to the North Pole?’ he countered.

He’d spotted the weakness in my argument.

‘No,’ I admitted, but then added, ‘Have you?’ 

I’d found the weakness in his.

‘Yes,’ he assured me, putting paid to my trivial objection, ‘for my birthday.’

Well, what could I say? It wasn’t, after all, completely inconceivable that his parents had taken Elliott to the Arctic for his birthday. Unlikely, it’s true, but not beyond the wildest of assumptions. After all, his parents like to make his birthdays special, and what could be more spectacular than a polar expedition as a celebration of turning four? And if he’d been there and seen penguins, I’d look pretty damn silly to be denying their existence, wouldn’t I? Empirical experience trumps learned belief. 

It’s true that discovering penguins in the Arctic would strike a serious blow to the beliefs of ornithologists, but why should we care for ornithology anyway? It’s all for the birds, I reckon.

This illuminating conversation took place at our home near Valencia, and during the third grandparenting session of the summer. 

First Matilda had come on her own. Well, perhaps I should say stayed with us on her own. I took a train to Madrid, collected her from her dad at the station, and travelled straight back to Valencia. At the end of the stay, her mother did the reverse, jumping on a train to Valencia’s main station, and travelling straight back with Matilda. It may sound like a painful waste of time, nearly four hours in trains with barely a pause at the destination, but Sheena and I agree that it’s a glorious way to get a rest and do a little reading.

Trains are the luxury form of travel of our era.

Less luxurious, it turns out, were the sleeping arrangements for Matilda. We’d decided to replace the old sofa bed which converted into two single beds for her and her brother. It wasn’t a particularly good sofa and, it turned out, it wasn’t a particularly good pair of beds either: it coped badly with three or four years’ use by young kids. That, I suspect, was at least in part due to its not being even adjacent to the top of the range from Ikea.

So we got a new one from further up the Ikea range. It’s a much better sofa. Sadly, as a bed it wasn’t half as successful. At least, not initially. It converts into a bed by lowering a hinged back to join the sofa seat, but of course it doesn’t join seamlessly. There’s a bit of a gap between the two, and Matilda made it clear that she was less than pleased with this new arrangement.

‘My old bed,’ she told us sadly, ‘was a winner.’

By contrast, the new one, with the gap down the middle, was a loser. 

The solution? A memory foam mattress that we lay across the bed to cover and neutralise the gap. And the reaction from Matilda? None at all. Which is excellent. No news is good news and no complaints means a satisfied granddaughter.

There are things that grandparents – well, grownups generally – say that they should perhaps learn to stop saying. I remember when I was a kid I loathed it when people asked me ‘shall I keep you here? Shall we send your parents home and you stay with me?’ I never knew what to reply to a suggestion that ludicrous.

Less ludicrous but perhaps not less futile are the questions that probe affection.

‘Who loves Matilda?’ Danielle asked.

‘Mamama and Granddad,’ Matilda immediately replied, correctly identifying Danielle and me, in that order.

‘And who loves Mamama and Granddad?’ Danielle pressed on, asking one more question than necessary and opening the door to a potentially regrettable response.

‘Elliott,’ said Matilda, providing one. 

Following her solo visit in June, Matilda was back the following month with the whole family. It was damn hot. But Elliott had no problem about pursuing the unconventional solution, demonstrating to us all what the elegant young man wears to breakfast in hot weather.

Elliott well-dressed for summer

He also showed us a fine way to spend the time in such conditions.

In the summer, just chill

Not that resting was an activity for him alone. He and his sister were both occasionally exhausted enough to need some recovery time.

Recovery time

What put them in this state was, above all, the pool. This was the summer for swimming. The pool we share with our neighbours offers two equal pleasures: meeting friends when they’re there, or ‘having the pool to ourselves’ as Matilda would put it, every time we arrived to find that they weren’t.

It's been a summer of rapid progress. In June, Matilda wasn’t yet ready to get rid of her aids – flotation vest or mask – but by July she was striking out without them and on this, the latest visit in August, when the two of them came with just their Dad, she’s been swimming full widths of the pool unaided. She’s even jumping in with complete confidence and without having anyone to hold her hand or catch her in the water. She hasn’t quite reached the stage of swimming a length – she still has to overcome her fear of the deep end – but that’ll come soon.

And just yesterday, as I write these words, Elliott too passed a new milestone. Without aids, he swam between his Dad and me, repeatedly. There are some small technical matters to overcome – like trying to get his body horizontal in the water instead of staying vertical with his nose just above the surface – but he was afloat and, most of the time, moving towards a goal.

They may not be quite ready to rival the fish, but they’re both on the way.

No wonder they got tired. But at least they could relax whenever they felt like it, watching their new favourite series, all about Vikings who tame dragons and have wonderful adventures with them. Truly relaxing, since each episode seems to follow exactly the same structure as every other – humans and dragons go somewhere that proves less safe than they think and find themselves battling with nasty villains, or the nasty villains come after them even when they stay at home – things go badly wrong until it looks as though disaster is unavoidable – and then, to our ever-repeated astonishment, things all work out just fine after all. Immensely enjoyable. 

Apparently.

So it’s been a summer of successful visits all around. With much to remember them by. Though, to be absolutely fair, I’m still not convinced that there are penguins at the North Pole.

I mean, I checked with ChatGPT which assures me there are none. But, hey, which is a more reliable source of information? Today’s halfbaked Artificial Intelligence or the natural intelligence of a four-year-old grandkid?

It’s a tossup, I’d say.

And another rite of passage:

Matilda dumping her milk teeth