To Rome - by broomstick?

My Italian colleague Paola has asked me to meet a friend, who is also a business contact, at a hospital in Rome.

That was an easy decision. Rome is where I was born and one of my favourite cities. I agreed without hesitation. On the other hand finding a time all three of us could make proved significantly more difficult. In the end, we settled on Monday 7 January. But, since my confidence in the ability of airlines to run to schedule is strictly limited, I decided to fly in the day before, 6 January, and told Paola so.

‘Ah,’ she replied, ‘will you be coming by broomstick?’

At first, the allusion struck me as obscure. Or possibly offensive. Was she referring to my age? To my looks? To my inclination to transform perfectly innocent people into field mice and feed them to the cat?

On the other hand, I get on well with Paola. Perhaps she meant it in a more complimentary way. Was she referring to my wisdom? My constant willingness to help out the virtuous needy? My ability to find a positive way through any dilemma, however difficult?

But then I remembered the Befana.

The Befana’s on her way.
And so am I. Though probably by plane. And without the gifts

She’s a witch who pops into children’s houses, with gifts and sweets for the good ones and lumps of coal for the others. It has to be said that as a general rule, Italians being Italians and doting on children, kids are pretty automatically deemed to have been good. 

The Befana shows up in time for Twelfth Night, on 6 January. Strictly speaking, that means she makes the trip on the 5th, but the kids enjoy the presents on the following day. Even so, it’s clear Paola was assimilating my arrival to the Befana’s.

That’s really quite flattering. It suggests my visit is welcome. Which is preferable to the alternative.

Interestingly, the myth says that one of the things the Befana does is sweep the floor before she heads off again. That may be a metaphor for clearing away all the problems and the bad events of the previous year, so that we can start the new one with a clean slate. Curious, isn’t it? Is that the source of the association of witches with broomsticks? Of course, generally we think of witches as travelling on their broomsticks, rather than using them to sweep stuff away.

It has to be said that the idea of brooms for sweeping, rather than flying, is at least rather more plausible. Though I’m not sure whether, in a story about witches, plausibility really comes into it.

In any case, and I hope this won’t come as a major disappointment to Paola, I’m not travelling by broomstick but by British Airways. My hope is that BA will make the trip less cold. Quicker and more reliable would be good too, but I don’t want to ask for too much.

The other thing is that I shan’t be bearing gifts. Just a presentation of a hospital information tool, which may be useful – I hope it will be – but rather lacks the allure of presents from a witch. And there’ll certainly be nothing there that’s good to eat.

Oh, well. It looks as though my friend Paola may have to swallow quite a bit of disappointment. I just hope she can take some comfort from the fact that I won’t, at least, be bringing her a lump of coal. Unless she decides that my presentation is worth no more than that.

Oh, the pressure, the pressure.

Half a loaf may be better than none, but a sourdough loaf's better than either

Preserving and developing its skills is vital for any society.

Back in the European middle ages, there was quite a structure for doing that. Young people, sometimes as young as 10, could bind themselves to a master craftsman in order to learn the elements of the trade. The master took the apprentice into his house (mostly it was his rather than hers, though some trades, such as seamstresses, included women) and had his cheap assistance for a period of some seven years in return for little more than board and lodging.

The apprenticeship ensured that the set of skills of one generation was transmitted to the next.

Apprentice bakers at work. A while back

On completion of this period of learning, the new craftsman typically became a journeyman. I used to think that journeymen were so-called because they journeyed from master to master. In reality, the name comes from the French word for day, ‘journée’, as journeymen could charge by the day for their work (it has to be said that it was also the word ‘journée’ that gave English the word journey, since the day was the unit for measuring a voyage).

However, it was not uncommon for journeymen to journey. Often they travelled for three years, as ‘wandering journeymen’. This was the way new technology spread. The journeyman might travel to a master who had some smart new technique, and learn it by working with him for a while. On his return, he would bring the new skills with him and, if he became a master, he’d pass them on to the next generation.

Incidentally, to become a master, a journeyman was generally required to produce a sample of his skill, to persuade the existing masters that he was worthy of being admitted to their number. That sample was called a ‘masterpiece’. It’s a glorious misuse of the term to apply it, as we do, to an outstanding work by an established master of a trade or, more commonly, an art – a masterpiece wasn’t an outstanding work by a master, but the final examination piece for admission to master’s status.

Overall, it was a pretty intelligently designed system. It meant craft skills could pass from generation to generation, and improvements to them would spread across society. It has, in part at least, survived right up to our days.

That made me delighted to learn that my wife, Danielle, was undertaking an apprenticeship. She recently became an enthusiastic convert to sourdough bread. And, as generally happens when she discovers a type of food that appeals to her, she has focused attention and energy on learning to produce it herself.

Jo's loaves for sale. Jo on the left

That made it all the more welcome when she found a local baker, Jo Bottrill, making a huge range of sourdough loaves, which she sells through Jo’s loaves. At first, Danielle was merely a client. Then Jo gave Danielle some starter dough, to get her going. Since then we’ve had more and more varieties of sourdough bread, and we haven’t bought a loaf from a shop for weeks.

Which led to the latest stage in Danelle’s journey into the sourdough world. She volunteered to work a day a week with Jo as an unpaid apprentice. And that’s what she’s been doing since last week.

So Danielle is a new recruit to a wonderful, time-tested system for ensuring that we maintain and extend our skills. And she’s using the system to keep us provided with excellent bread in a variety of forms. Win-win, I call it.

Danielle's latest load,
ready to come out of the Dutch oven, in our English oven

On the other hand, back then apprentices could start as young as 10, and not generally over 15. Does Danielle fit in that range? Not quite.

But hey, what’s half century between friends? Especially when really important skills are at stake. And some excellent loaves.

Labour languishing where once it soared

They’re funny old things, opinion polls. A bit discredited, in Britain. At the 2017 general election, they pointed towards a sizeable Conservative win, which would have justified Theresa May’s calling of an early General Election. She’d hoped to increase her small majority in the House of Commons. In the event, she did far worse than the polls suggested and lost her majority altogether.

That left egg on the faces of the pollsters, Theresa May, and those, including me, who felt that Jeremy Corbyn would lead Labour to a defeat of historic proportions.

Indeed, Corbyn supporters never tire of telling the rest of us that under his leadership, Labour achieved the biggest increase in its popular vote since World War 2. Which is true. It’s also true, however, that he still lost the popular vote to May and emerged with far fewer MPs. His supporters are less inclined to mention that, though it’s also true.

Given how much better their man performed than the polls predicted, they now like to dismiss unfavourable polls as fake news. Curiously, that doesn’t stop them triumphing on those occasions when a poll, even a single, isolated one, shows a Labour lead – not a frequent occurrence these days. I suppose its very rarity makes it all the more welcome to those frantic to prove that Corbyn is proving effective.

Well, the polls may indeed be only a poor guide to what will actually happen in an election. But between elections, we have no other indication of the state of the parties. And in the past, they’ve often proved more accurate than in 2017.

For instance, most of us in Labour went into the 1997 general election confident, though not complacent, about winning. The confidence was justified by the massive win, and it was based on excellent poll standings. Take a look at the graph. It shows the standing of the two main parties, as an average of the previous fifteen polls, from the moment where there are fifteen onwards.

How Labour fared in the polls in the runup to victory, and now

The lower pair of lines shows how, in the first seventeen months following the 1992 election, Labour had gone from trailing the Conservatives to establishing a healthy lead over them. The lead tightened in the actual election but Labour still won a landslide victory.

They were helped by the fact that the Conservatives were massively split, above all over Europe. The then Prime Minister, John Major, even called his anti-EU colleagues ‘bastards’. It has to be said that he was also rather a colourless figure, short of charisma or even any manifest talent for his office.

Today, the Conservatives are led by a colourless, uncharismatic leader with no manifest talent for her office. Her party is even more split than Major’s over the issue of Europe. Moreover, some of the most outspoken among her Brexiter critics, notably Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, have set a new benchmark in bastardy.

Now look at the upper pair of lines, covering the seventeen months since the 2017 election. Unlike 1992, Labour under Corbyn started with a lead over the Tories, which seems to have dissipated. Now the two main parties are essentially level-pegging, and Labour may well be a little behind, though the difference is well within the margin of error for any opinion poll.

Things can change, of course, as they did in the 2017 election. But there is one big difference: back in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn was still a fresh face, a break from the old style of politics represented by establishment figures who were beginning to look well past their sell-by date. Since then, Corbyn has become far better known. He’s tried to steer a careful course between Brexiters and anti-Brexiters, committing to neither side, in order to avoid offending Labour voters from either. Unfortunately, that is very much the old-style, tired electoral game, where it matters more to count votes than to defend principles. His is a stance which rather takes the sheen off his appeal as a fresh, more principled figure and leaves him, instead, looking just as stale as his predecessors.

That might not matter if the approach were working. But the polls suggest it isn’t.

A big last-minute surge? Well, it can’t be ruled out. But given the image Corbyn projects today, I think it would be reckless to count on it.

Back in 1993, we’d already had fourteen years of Tory rule. But John Smith had taken the Labour Party to a position where, for the first time, our poll standing meant we could look forward to a forthcoming election with some optimism.

That is emphatically not the case today. At the moment, it looks as though Labour might win enough seats to form a minority government, as May leads now. Or it might lose again.

Opinion polls may not be reliable, but we have no other measure of where we stand. And the picture they paint today is far from pretty.

Corbyn supporters, and Corbyn himself, are calling for an early general election. Maybe they ought to be more careful what they wish for.

Jews: what goes around comes around.

Do you remember the jingle ‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’?

I learned that at school. It was much later that I realised that 1492 was also the year in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain took other major steps, at least as significant as the decision to send an Italian sailor on his expedition westward – an expedition on which he left with no idea where he was going and came back with no idea of where he’d been.

It was in 1492 that Spain decided to rid itself of its Jews. 

Jews leaving Spain after August 1492

And 1492 saw Christians complete their reconquest of Spain from the Muslims.

My mother, who always enjoyed history, used to say that the decline of Spain as a great power dated from those times.

By moving against the Jews, Spain deprived itself of its most skilful financiers and traders. That’s no anti-Semitic slur: there is nothing inherent in Jews that makes them good with money, and few Jews were involved in high finance anyway. The law prohibited Jews owning land, forcing them into other professions such as finance, and some became very good at it.

Meanwhile, the most advanced and effective agriculture in Spain was carried out by the Muslim landowners of the south. Moving against them would carry a terrible price for the country. Like the financiers, they were outstanding wealth creators – literally feeding the nation – and it made no economic sense to drive them away.

Paradoxically, at the very moment that Spain was launching the exploration of the Americas which would turn it into a world power, it was ridding itself of the skills it needed to support itself in that position.

This kind of self-harm is what happens when nations deprive themselves of the skills that communities seen as ‘other’ bring with them. The converse is also true: when a nation drives those communities out, their neighbours benefit and move ahead of them. In 1685, France repealed the Edict of Nantes that tolerated Protestantism. Over the next thirty years, other countries such as Britain, Holland and Prussia took advantage of the flood of refugees, many of them skilled artisans – weavers, cabinet makers, clock makers – who fled with skills that enriched their hosts while their loss weakened France.

By 1720, some 11% of the population of Berlin was French-speaking. And the nation whose capital it was, Prussia, was on the way to becoming a European Great Power, one that would, indeed, overtake France in the next century.

Building bridges to take people in enriches a nation where expelling them, or building walls to keep them out, only impoverishes it. A lesson American fans of Trump need to learn. Or British fans of Brexit.

Curiously, over five centuries on Spain has made an effort to learn that lesson. A Spanish law of 2014 offered citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from the Sephardi Jews the nation threw out after 1492. They don’t have to give up their existing citizenship if they have one. They have to pass a language test and a test of culture, but they don’t even have to live in Spain.

Why, they don’t even have to be practising Jews.

The government that enacted this legislation presented it as an attempt to redress the error of 1492. I don’t know whether it does or not, but I feel it’s a remarkable aspiration. One to be admired.

Oddly, I only found out about it through the New York Times. That’s the paper that Donald Trump likes to refer to as ‘the failing New York Times’, though it seems to be flourishing. Perhaps it thrives on his criticisms.

The paper had picked up the story because a number of the Jews who had to get out of Spain decided to follow in the steps of Columbus, to the New World. That way, they remained in Spanish territory though they left Spain.

A number arrived in Mexico and some moved into the northernmost territory of that country, including New Mexico. Which was absorbed and made into a state by the US following its war on Mexico in the 1840s.

It seems that the Mexican authorities kept excellent records. So did the state of New Mexico. Consequently, a number of US citizens from that State are now well placed to prove that they are indeed descended from the persecuted Jews of Spain. With antisemitism on the rise in America, that curious Spanish law offers some Jews a potential bolthole – not one they intend to take, but one that it’s good to have available, just in case.

Through Columbus, 1492 opened up a new land of refuge. Through a law of the same year, made by the sponsors of his expedition, many Jews needed a land to which they could flee. And, in a beautifully cyclical movement – you know, what goes around, comes around – some of their descendants, now less safe in the land where their ancestors sought refugees can now claim citizenship of the land that that persecuted those same ancestors.

One thing hasn’t changed over the centuries. Nations still build walls and persecute minorities. Even it means shooting themselves in the foot.

And we don’t like learning lessons from history.

Deadly anniversary and cautionary tale

While in Zagreb a little while ago, my wife Danielle and I visited the Croatian Gallery of Naïve Art. There I came across painters I didn’t know but many of whose paintings took my breath away. There were some extraordinary scenes, perhaps above all a string of magnificent landscapes, though there were also intriguing depictions of quite different scenes.

Ivan Lacković, Long Winter: a curious, haunting impact

What struck me most was a surprising painting entitled ‘Guyana 78’ by one of the leading painters in this Naïve movement, Josip Generalić.

Bodies litter the ground, a cross in among them symbolising that they died in the name of a distorted Christianity. There are children among them. In the background, two apes look on, displaying a truer Christian spirit as they apparently share a banana, uncomprehending of the weird human spectacle below them.

Josip Generalić, Guyana 78

The reference is to the mass suicide – or, more properly, the massacre – at the People's Temple Agricultural Project, usually called Jonestown after its founder, Jim Jones, leader of a cult that professed both Socialistic and Christian thinking. The killings took place on 18 November 1978, forty years ago today.

Danielle pointed me to the story of a survivor published by the BBC this morning. It made harrowing reading. The cult members practised mass suicide, taking supposedly poison-laced drinks, only to be told that it was innocuous. Until, one day, it wasn't.

That was after a visit to Jonestown by an inspection delegation led by a US Congressman, Leo Ryan. As it was leaving, members of the cult attacked the delegation, killing five including the Congressman. Jim Jones issued a new  command for mass suicide, but this time for real. He warned that following the murders, Guyanese authorities would attack the cult and take the children. Some 300 children were among the 900 who died.

It was the worst deliberate killing of US civilians before 9/11. An extraordinary, horrific event, worthy of the artistic talent of a Generalić.

Bodies strewn across the ground at Jamestown

It isn’t, however, just the coincidence of seeing the painting so soon before the anniversary that prompted me to write about it here. It’s more because the kind of mindset that drove the Jamestown massacre seems to be growing once more. It’s cult thinking, where a single person is identified as a Messiah, the source of all authority, whose views are not to be questioned however contrary they may be to all evidence. He, and he alone, is to be the source of truth.

These leaders demanding total, unquestioning loyalty, are growing in numbers in nation after nation. Look around yourself and see whether you can’t see some of them emerging near you – or already in power.

They don’t necessarily take their demands for unqualified obedience quite as far as Jim Jones did. But their demand for total commitment is often destructive. And there are many ways people can be persuaded to commit collective suicide.

Some just take longer than at Jamestown.

Hotel Health Shock

Hotels: they felt so glamorous when I first started a job which meant I sometimes had to stay away from home overnight. 35 years on, some of the sheen has come off that existence. To be honest, the sheen had already faded about two years on. Now it’s something of a routine with strictly limited excitement levels.

These days, the first thing I do when I get to a hotel room is to check for certain basic amenities. Is there a desk big enough to be able to do some work on it? A closely related matter is whether there are power sockets that will fit one of the plugs, or adaptors, I’m using. I was in a hotel the other day which had deliberately removed the sockets from the room I was in, leaving just round holes in the wall with noting to plug anything in to. Seriously? They can’t afford the electricity I need to keep my PC charged?

Not that it saved them that electricity. I simply unplugged a lamp and used its socket instead. Serve them right, I feel.

The other thing I check is whether there’s a bath or only a shower. Sometimes, particularly after a stressful meeting or a long journey – and there are plenty of trips which combine both – it’s a pleasure to be able to lie down in a bath full of hot water instead of merely standing under a shower.

Luxury: a bath as well as the shower
Though that doesn't mean you have to use it

Not that I feel obliged to do that, even if the room does have a bath. You see? That’s how unpredictable and exciting I like to make my life.

Curiously, the other day I was in a hotel room with a bath at a time when I felt like one. So I ran the water and jumped. It was early in the morning and the hotel, unfortunately, had no coffee-making facilities – another thing I look out for, as an essential ingredient to starting the day on a slightly more civilised footing.

I noticed that my legs seemed to be itching, but half asleep as I was, it was only on emerging from the bath that I noticed that they were bright red. A terrible rash extended all the way up both of them, and reappeared from my waist till just under my chest.

It may be because I’ve spent so long working with healthcare professionals, or maybe just because some kind of inherent laziness makes me unwilling to go, but I hate consulting doctors.

‘Oh, no,’ I thought, ‘if this doesn’t clear up I may have to go and see my GP. And I wonder what it is, anyway? Did I eat something odd last night?’

Two colleagues had been with me at dinner the night before. I wondered whether they were suffering from the same worrying condition. I could have rung to ask, but at 6:30 in the morning I suspected they might not appreciate it.

So I let it pass. I happened to have some hand cream with me. That struck me as about as effective a medication as anything else I was likely to be able to find quickly. So I rubbed it in. Then I tried to stop worrying and get on with life.

It was with great relief, therefore, when I happened to check again twenty minutes later, that I discovered that the rash seemed spontaneously, almost miraculously, to have cleared up. Entirely. Not a trace was left.

It was only then that I remembered that I’d had a little trouble with the taps in the bath. There was one for pressure, another for temperature. It was the second that I’d found myself having to adjust a lot – too cool, too hot, not hot enough, you know how these things go – and it occurred to me that, actually, yes, in the end the water had been rather hotter than I normally like to have it.

Maybe that was all my skin was trying to tell me. ‘Hey, pal! What are you thinking of? Plunging me into water this bloody scalding, excuse my French?’ And then turning all red from annoyance. Just to get me anxious.

A useful lesson to learn. I need to be careful about taking a bath coffee-less. Early in the morning.

It seems it can be a rash undertaking.

Cities of an emerging nation

Curious country, Italy. It’s where I was born. And it’s taken a while to become a country at all, though it does seem to be emerging as one now.

One of my college lecturers told us that immediately after the Second World War, only 50% of the population was bilingual in dialect and Italian. The other 50% was monolingual in dialect.

Today, however, although I don’t spend much time in the deep South, it’s my impression that wherever you go people are fluent in Italian, which has emerged as truly a national language. That’s why I feel that the country is becoming, at last, a real nation.

Even so, some of the great divisions continue to exist. As if to prove the point, after travelling to Turin on Sunday, on Monday I went to Bolzano – or Bozen. Why two names? Because it’s in the Alto Adige, way up in the Alps, but that’s also called the Südtirol, the south Tyrol. The Tyrolean Tyrol is, of course, an Austrian province.

In other words, the Alto Adige – Südtirol is a traditionally German-speaking region which was once part of Austria. There are, indeed, still local movements calling for the province to leave Italy and rejoin Austria.

Bolzano, or Bozen, flies the Italian flag alongside the region's
And has the sense to feel proud of being in the EU, too

Even so, when I was there, I heard Italian spoken in the street at least as often as German, and I’ve not yet met anyone up there who can’t speak Italian if they need to. Moreover, as in other parts of Italy, the national flag flies proudly alongside the region’s and that of the EU on public buildings.

Still, Italian unity remains slightly out of step with local emotions. There are Milanese who are clear that Africa starts at Rome. For my part, I’m convinced that Austria starts at Milan.

Perhaps I should declare an interest: I was born in Rome.

In any case, so far am I from disliking Milan that it was with great pleasure that I arrived there on Tuesday evening. It’s a spacious city, with great avenues and fine buildings, the new alongside the old testifying to the continued dynamism of the place. A dynamism reflected in the people themselves: there are crowds on the streets, laughing, chatting and enjoying themselves. It is truly a joy to visit.

It’s just that, like Austria, the city seems to lay a little too much stress, for my liking, on order and efficiency. And some of those structures are rather more imposing than completely charming. At least to my taste. I feel that some buildings in Milan or Vienna weigh rather heavily on the Earth. They’re more impressive than elegant.

Rome isn’t quite as clean as one might like, the streets aren’t quite as free of potholes as one might hope, and the atmosphere is just a little more chaotic than an Austrian, say, might wish.

It’s also pretty corrupt. That has nothing to do with whichever party’s in power. Every party that ever secures the governance of Rome can be sure to have scandal pour down on its head within a couple of years or so. And, to my knowledge, always with justification.

But, boy, does Rome have soul. And charm, too. Taking the edge off the awe.

I realise that I may be alone in regarding Milan as Austrian. You may, in fact, find it slightly odd, because I view Bozen, which some residents want to make Austrian, as turning increasingly into Italian Bolzano. And, I have to admit, it isn’t just because a city’s in the North of Italy that I strikes me as Austrian. That’s the discovery I’ve made in Turin, a city that seduces me more every time I go there.

One of the many arcades in Turin

It’s a city of gateways and arcades. And along the arcades are cafés, restaurants and shops, each rivalling the next for charm and elegance. Where Milan seems focused on modernity and a pressurised existence, Turin preserves an older, quieter, more relaxed and, above all, more lived-in style. Lived-in, I should add, by people who know what it is to live pleasantly and in comfort.

One of the many gateways

And it has its amusing paradoxes too. Though it belongs to a country which has long been a Republic, it clings on at least in name to its royal past – after all, this was where the kings of Italy came from when the country still had kings. For instance, I had a wonderful cappuccino in the ‘Cafeteria del Re’, the King’s Cafeteria, complete with the symbol of a crown.

The king's cafeteria
Attractive place. Good coffee too

It’s not clear to me that a King would ever have frequented anything quite as common as a café, especially one that calls itself a cafeteria, but hey, something that’s royal in name only, with no king in sight, it’s precisely as royal as I like things to be. But then I’m a republican, as well as a democrat, a statement I hope will cause some confusion among my American friends.

Anyway, I was happy to be back in that fine city and confirm yet again that there is real charm in the north of Italy. A different kind of soul, more discreet and self-possessed than Rome’s, but soul nonetheless. It’s lovely. Perhaps my second favourite Italian city – Venice and Florence naturally being in a class of their own.

The taxi driver who brought me in from the airport told me that Turin was the most French city in Italy. Perhaps that explains my preference. Because France is the country of my second citizenship, whose passport I’m proud to hold.

And, I have to admit, I prefer it to Austria…

Remembering on Armistice Day

A telling anniversary: a century ago, the guns of the Western Front of the First at last fell silent.

We mourn 20 million dead and 21 million wounded on this anniversary. Well, quite a lot of us do, though I note that President Donald Trump only does so if the rain holds off. A fair-weather mourner I suppose we’d have to call him.

That multitude of dead included four I’ve mentioned before: George Edwin Ellison, Augustin Trébuchon, George Lawrence Price and Henry Gunther.

They were, respectively, the last British soldier killed, the last Frenchman, the last Canadian (and last Commonwealth soldier) and, finally, the last American. Indeed, Gunther is generally believed to be the last soldier on any side killed in that war: he died on 11 November 1918 charging a position held by Germans who were shouting at the attackers to stop, since the Armistice would come into effect a minute later.

Maybe it was all down to poorer communications than today, but it seems an extraordinary waste that five hours were allowed to elapse between the signing of the Armistice agreement at 5:10 am and its start at 11:00, however ringing a tone that ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ may be.

American soldiers celebrating the end of the fighting

As well as Ellison, Trébuchon, Price and Gunther, the time gap cost going on for 3000 lives. Which pretty much sums up the futility of the whole war.

Clearly, I know too little about the life of David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister of the time. I learned from the ‘Guardian’ that he, like US President Woodrow Wilson, argued that imposing excessively hard conditions on Germany would only mean that ‘we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years.’

Harsh conditions were imposed, and indeed the whole thing had to be done again not 25 but 21 years later. With the additional spice of totalitarianism and a Holocaust.

I’m not quite sure what my relatives were doing on Armistice Day in 1918.

One grandfather may have been working with other members of his unit to dismantle an artillery emplacement, preparatory to heading home and demobilisation. He would be taking shrapnel with him, embedded in his hand, as well as the memory of falling victim to a gas attack.

His brother, on the other hand, would soon leave for Russia, to continue fighting, this time with the small British contingent supporting White Russian forces battling the newly-installed Bolsheviks. His experience provides a vivid illustration of the fact that fighting in Europe didn’t end on 11 November, it merely ended on the Western Front.

That great uncle of mine had joined up, illegally, at the age of 15. His mother wrote to his colonel to demand that her son, far too young to serve, be sent home. The reply came from a junior officer informing her that Private Beeson had assured him he was nineteen, so they wouldn’t be sending him back.

Next time you meet a fifteen-year old boy, try to picture him in uniform with a weapon he’s been trained to use to kill people.

As for my other grandfather, he must have been thinking that he’d be released from prison quite soon. He’d been sent there because he refused to fight, but with the war over he could get back to ordinary life, his career as a lithographer and even to finding a possible wife with whom he could start a family.

She, however, would not at that stage have been a potential life partner for him. She was already engaged. However, many of the men returning from the war barely had time to feel relief at having survived the carnage before they were caught up in one of the world’s worst epidemics, Spanish influenza. He’d survived the shelling and the gas, but my grandmother’s fiancé succumbed to the flu. So in the end she married my grandfather instead. Leading to several lives, including my own, which wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.

Like many others, they picked up the threads of a civilian existence. That meant facing different problems: finding jobs, finding housing, educating families. Barely over ten years later, with the great crash of 1929, that became a great deal harder. And ten years after that, each in their own way, my grandparents were doing it, as Lloyd George said, all over again.

An experience worth remembering as we celebrate the centenary of that Armistice. The war it ended wasn’t the war to end all wars. Just the beginning of a lot more problems that persist to today. And between then and now, there have been plenty more wars.

Which is perhaps the most important thing to remember on Armistice day.


Postscript: the First World War was by no means the first world war. Arguably, that would have been the Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in America) of 1756-1763: it pitted European powers against each other, but alongside combat in their own Continent, it was fought in the Americas, West Africa, India and the Philippines, as well as at sea in many parts of the globe. That seems to fit any sensible definition of a world war, doesn’t it?

A night of shattered glass

Eighty years ago, Nazi Germany took a fateful step towards the ‘final solution’ to the so-called ‘Jewish question’. Mobs of stormtroopers and civilians launched a night of violence against Jewish property and citizens. It was the turning point when legal harassment of Jews gave way to naked violence.

The pogrom was a response to the murder in Paris of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Ironically, he was a non-Nazi who was under investigation by the authorities for disloyalty. He was shot on 7 November 1938 by a Jewish refugee of Polish roots, Herschel Grynszpan, whose family had been expelled from Germany to Poland. Vom Rath died on 9 November.

Coincidentally, 9 November 1938 was being celebrated in Nazi circles, including by Hitler himself, as the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch on 8-9 November 1923. That was Hitler’s first attempt to seize power and led to a shamefully weak response: he was briefly jailed before being released to take up again his drive for power which succeeded ten years later. A sad indictment of the failure of authorities to take appropriate action against right-wing insurgents, and an object lesson of what the consequences can be.

When the news of Vom Rath’s death reached the party, Hitler left without giving his planned speech. His propaganda chief Goebbels gave it for him, and then announced that if demonstrations broke out, they would not be hampered. That was an instruction to turn for revenge against the Jewish community.

A gutted Jewish shop int he aftermath of Kristallnacht

During the night of 9-10 November 1938, some 7500 Jewish businesses had their shopfronts destroyed. The shards of glass on the pavements gave the attack its name, ‘Kristallnacht’, crystal night. Jewish homes were looted, more than 7000 businesses were attacked and in many cases destroyed, and 1400 synagogues suffered the same fate. The number of immediate Jewish deaths may not have been exceptionally high – perhaps a few hundred including those who died in the following days – but 30,000 were arrested and dumped in concentration camps.

Police stood by and watched but didn’t intervene to stop the violence. Firemen attended but only prevented flames extending to neighbouring buildings when Jewish premises were set on fire.

A synagogue burns

A lot of property was destroyed, which infuriated another leading Nazi, Hermann Göring. In his view, that property should have been seized. He decided it was time to bring anti-Jewish action under more disciplined control. At a meeting with Nazi leaders on 12 November, he announced that he had ‘received a letter written on the Führer’s orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another...’ To make clear that he really meant one way rather than any other, he demanded that the appropriate agencies ‘take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy’.

From the elimination of Jews from the economy, the Nazi regime slipped almost inevitably towards the elimination of Jews altogether. The decision was taken in the end at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, and in consequence the final solution – in other words, extermination – went into effect.

The notion of a ‘Jewish Question’ strikes me as a strange one. The only question that ought to be asked about Jews is to antisemites: ‘what’s your problem with Jews?’ Similar questions could be asked of other groups: ‘what’s your problem with gays?’ or ‘what’s your problem with Muslims?’

In other words, the problem isn’t with the people targeted but with the people doing the targeting. And, sadly, there are far more of them around than there should be after the experience of the Second World War.

Despite my own Jewish roots, I’ve experienced no overt antisemitism. Until a year or two ago, I argued that antisemitism, certainly in Europe or the Americas, had shrunk until it was limited to a tiny number of fringe groups.. Islamophobia or homophobia struck me as far more widespread and far more acute.

Today, I’m changing that view. We’ve had scandals about antisemitism in various organisations – including, sadly, my own party – and a failure to take action against it. Not acting on time is dangerous, as the case of Hitler after the Beer Hall putsch showed. The sores are festering, the disease is spreading. Nothing has made that clearer than the murder of eleven Jews in a gun attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Islamophobia and homophobia remain bigger problems. But maybe we can learn to oppose both of those and antisemitism as well. And what better time could there be for revitalising our commitment to the cause than the anniversary of Kristallnacht?

At the source of the movement

It’s easy to miss important things if you don’t take care.

This week, I nearly left Leipzig without visiting the Saint Nicholas church. When I first went past, it wasn’t open, and I decided that it probably wasn’t worth trying again later. But, in the end, my wandering around the city centre brought me back near the church, so I popped in after all.

The St Nikolai Church in Leipzig

I’m glad I did. Not just because the church has a lovely interior, which it does: the building is far older but the inside is eighteenth-century, like a more elaborate version of London’s Saint Martin in the Fields – soaring but beautifully understated elegance. But even more attractive was the role the church played in the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 1989.

The former nation of East Germany referred to itself as the ‘German Democratic Republic’ or GDR. It viewed itself as democratic because its leaders simply knew they were doing the right thing by the people. It didn’t matter that most of the people didn’t agree. Naturally, if you’re doing the right thing, there’s no need to tolerate any dissent, because opposition must, by definition, be wrong. Sadly, that’s an attitude that seems increasingly common in the West too these days.

After four decades of this rule, the people of the GDR were sick to death of the lack of opportunity their tiny country offered them, coupled with the near impossibility of ever leaving it, surrounded as it was by prison-like fences. The paradoxes bloomed. A friend I met when I visited East Germany in 1982, told me he’d suffered the wrath of the authorities for having Western magazines in his possession. His penalty was to interrupt his university of studies for a year and work as a carpenter instead – in a regime that trumpeted the nobility of manual labour, actually having to do some was regarded as a punishment. More serious offences could lead to far worse consequences: an illegal attempt to leave could even cost you your life.

Strangely, however, the one institution the state never fully brought to heel was the Church. That led to frustrated Leipzig citizens attending services every Monday in the Saint Nicholas Church, to take part in ‘peace prayers’. Week after week growing numbers attended, eventually spilling into the streets. As the Church itself admits, the vast majority of the people clamouring to get in to the services weren’t Christians. They were just thirsting for the right to express a democratic disagreement with the self-styled democrats who ruled them.

And they did it without violence: the Monday meetings truly were peace prayers.

Christian Führer speaking to one of the Monday meetings
A movement without a leader that brought down an autocratic regime

Eventually, the movement grew so large that it took the streets. During my visit, a taxi driver reminded me of the time that the ring road around the city was blocked by crowds 100,000 strong. And in other cities, people followed the example Leipzig had set, increasing the pressure on the leaders until, eventually, they could take it no more. When the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that he would not deploy Soviet troops to put down the popular movement, the Party’s press secretary went on TV to announce that, after 28 years as a blood-soaked tool of authoritarianism, the Berlin Wall would finally open.

Asked when this would happen, the spokesman checked his notes, realised he hadn’t been briefed on a date, and answered, ‘well, now, I suppose’.

From both sides, thousands descended on the checkpoints demanding that the guards open the gates. They checked out the spokesman’s words themselves and, having confirmed he’d really spoken them, they lifted the barriers and the crowds surged through. Some climbed on to the wall, an act that would have been met with gunfire just hours earlier, and with sledgehammers, or pickaxes, or even just chisels, began to chip away at a hated symbol of oppression.

And I might have missed a visit to the place where this all started…

The wall has now been down for longer than it was up. Saxony, the German province of which Leipzig is the biggest city, had been celebrated down the centuries as a centre of elegance and beauty. It is again today. I was enchanted by the arcades and covered passaged linking streets in the centre, the soaring spires and older buildings alongside glorious new structures – I fell at once for the University building – where everything fits despite the contrasts of period and style.

The new University building
Leipzigers have kept their sense of style

I had to smile when I saw the ubiquitous trams. It reminded me of another East German friend, this time in the city of Erfurt, where the trams were of Czech design and too big for the streets. They were damaging the historic buildings by just rumbling past.

‘They’re Dubček’s revenge,’ he told me, referring to shameful moment when East German troops had joined Soviet forces in invading what was then Czechoslovakia to overthrow the liberal, reforming government that Alexander Dubček had formed.

It was also he who told me about the East German rulers' attempts to win hearts and minds in the population. The kids, he said, were bombarded with propaganda from the day they started school. And it worked, he reckoned, right up to the day that they got their first taste of Western chocolate. Suddenly, the contrast of life in East and West swung dangerously to favour the West.

Rather less amusing was his account of his own life. It was one of those things that I should have realised but hadn’t: people like him had been born into a democracy and then, like all of Germany, seen it strangled by Nazi totalitarianism. However, unlike the West, the citizens of the East had seen no return to democracy after the war but four more decades of authoritarian rule. Nothing like as awful as the Nazis, but no democracy all the same. A depressing fate.

Memorial to the Bamberger family whose confectionery business had stood
on this Leipzig street corner, until it fell to the antisemitic Kristallnacht attacks
A reminder that things were even worse before the GDR

Still, at least those days are behind the East Germans now. It struck me how much things have changed as I travelled to Leipzig. Back in 1982, I would have had to apply for specific police authorisation to go there. Today, I just needed a ticket. And had I wanted to invite someone from Leipzig to come back to the West with me, he too would only have had to pay his fare.

Not everything’s better, though. On top of the reputation for elegance, and then for defying power in the name of freedom, Saxony is now building a new reputation as the centre of the far right in Germany – outside Leipzig, it’s true, remains attached to its liberalism. But in the countryside intolerance and xenophobia have grown, as among Trump circles in the States or Brexit supporters in Britain.

It may be time to get those peace prayers going again in the St Nicholas Church.

Dread anniversary

Amidst all the centenary anniversaries for the First World War, 4 November is one of the more dismal. And one not to be missed.

Picture a young man choosing to join the British army in 1915. In December 1916, as a second lieutenant, he goes with his men to France to experience both the slaughter of action and the sapping horror of the conditions. He suffers concussion by falling into a shell hole; later, he’s blown up by a mortar and spends several days hiding in a hole with the dead body of a friend a few feet away.

He wrote to his mother, ‘for twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes where at any moment a shell might put us out.’

In the summer of 1917, he was diagnosed with shell shock and sent for treatment to Edinburgh. There he met one of the outstanding war poets, Siegfried Sassoon. Was it the meeting with Sassoon or some other cause that turned him, without warning, into one of the finest poets in the English language, and certainly the greatest composer of war poems? For thirteen months, he wrote and wrote, always basing himself on the horrors he met himself: a man gassed, with ‘white eyes writhing in his face’; a sentry blown by a shell from a ladder, crying ‘oh sir, my eyes – I'm blind – I'm blind, I'm blind!’; the search in no-man's land for a man overcome by exhaustion, with its bleak view of the outcome of war, ‘shame of success, and sorrow of defeats’.

Sassoon returned to the front but a serious wound brought him back to England on permanent sick leave. His younger friend may have felt that this put him under an obligation to rejoin the fighting, because a poet should be there to continue chronicling the war – ‘I shall be better able to cry my outcry, playing my part’. By now, he was convinced the war was something that had to be stopped – ‘nations trek from progress’. No one was pressuring him to go and he might have remained in England for the rest of the war. Sassoon tried to dissuade him from going back and even threatened to come himself and wound him in the leg to prevent it. But that only meant that he went without telling his friend.

He was back in the fighting in July 1918. In October, he distinguished himself so conspicuously that he was awarded the Military Cross. The citation read:

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.

To him, this was a validation of his chosen role: he was a soldier as well as a poet and his denunciations of the war were no reflection of unwillingness to expose himself to danger.

The Sambre-Oise canal in November 1918

Then came 4 November. He led a raiding party crossing the Sambre-Oise canal. It came under heavy fire and, with many of the party, he too was killed.

He’d been preparing an edition of his poems for publication, and had begun to draft a preface. In it, he urged his reader not to mistake his intention:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

November the fourth. One week before the Armistice that ended the war. One week too soon to save one of the most remarkable poets the English language has produced: Wilfred Owen.

A young man heading to war. And becoming a poet

Sassoon found Strange Meetings Owen’s best poem. Certainly, it’s among my favourites. It ends:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...

What we can learn from the Tories: professionalism

You don’t have to support the Conservatives to learn a thing or two from them.

After all, in amongst the many things they do badly – being decent, principled or equitable spring to mind – there’s one thing they do exceptionally well. That’s winning and holding on to power. That were in government, mostly alone but sometimes in coalition, for two-thirds of the last century, and they look set, barring accidents, to overtake Labour quite soon in this one.

It wasn’t always so. Between 1846 and 1874, the Conservatives never formed a majority government. But that was the time of one of the most exceptional men every to lead that Party, Benjamin Disraeli.

He had to fight antisemitism and the taint of being on the liberal wing of his Party, but he presided over the conversion of the eighteenth-century Tories into the modern Conservatives with their election-winning machine.

In particular, he played a major role in redefining the role of a party in opposition. Disraeli believed that the goal of the party out of government was to take office at the earliest opportunity. Granting the government easy victories, by voting with it, only made the task harder. The opposition had to oppose.

Getting that lesson across wasn’t easy.

Part of the problem, writes Richard Aldous in the Lion and the Unicorn, his brilliant account of the battles between Disraeli and Gladstone, was Disraeli’s innovation. Rank-and-file Tories in mid-century did more than most to justify the Conservatives’ earlier reputation as the ‘stupid party’. What they failed to grasp, or at least appreciate, was Disraeli’s original approach to opposition. He was perhaps the first political leader to demand that the foremost role of the opposition was to oppose. This may seem obvious now, but it was a novel approach in Victorian Britain. Even his most recent predecessors, Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel, had maintained a gentlemanly and statesmanlike detachment in the House, challenging legislation only if they really thought ill of it.

We’re under no obligation to stick with a tradition simply because it is a tradition – Voltaire once wrote that what we call a tradition is just an abuse that we’ve maintained for centuries. On the other hand, if a particular approach works, and the Tories’ record shows how well theirs does, we abandon it at our peril.

Indeed, it should be in the kitbag of any professional politician.

Some people have suggested that I’ve been unfairly critical of John McDonnell this week. He’s the Shadow Chancellor, in other words the opposition politician directly focused on financial policy. And my annoyance was caused by his decision not to oppose the government over tax cuts designed to overwhelmingly benefit the rich rather than the poor.

McDonnell is from the left of the Labour Party. He’s a self-proclaimed socialist. This kind of regressive tax ought to be anathema to him.

But, in any case, simply applying the Disraeli maxim that the opposition’s role is to oppose – as Aldous says, ‘this may seem obvious now’ – meant he had to oppose these cuts.

If her were in the same league, McDonnell (right)
could learn a thing or two from Disraeli

The only argument I’ve seen for his not doing so is that the measures would benefit some people who need the support, even though it would deliver far more to people who need it much less. Opposing the cuts would have led to headlines such as ‘Labour: taking money out of the pockets of headteachers and doctors’.

This is a remarkable position to take. Even an amateur commentator on politics knows that the right-wing press will always publish headlines attacking Labour. Try to accommodate Conservative editors? They’ll just change line of attack whereas you’ll have abandoned a principle. A professional should know that.

McDonnell’s failure to oppose the cuts merely attracted derision from the government front bench. He gave Liz Truss, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, a glorious opportunity to mock him, as Heather Stewart pointed out in the Guardian:

”… even the shadow chancellor has welcomed our tax cuts”. She joked that it’s a “shame his party don’t agree with him … you can almost hear Momentum sharpening their pitchforks”.

She added: “I want him to know that all is not lost. Shadow chancellor, you have friends on this side of the House and there is space for you on our front bench. You might have to sit on the home secretary’s knee.”

In attempting to dodge a bad headline, McDonnell opened himself up to ridicule. 

Guess which is more damaging in politics.

Some have asked me what I might have done better. My first answer is that I’m not a politician but, as a literary critic once said on being attacked for not being able to write a book himself, I may not be able to cook but I know when a meal is good. And the one McDonnell cooked certainly isn’t.

My second answer is that I know that I’m an amateur with no experience of executive responsibility in a major party. I know my limitations and I have no illusions about being able to act as Shadow Chancellor, a position to which no one would elect me in any case.

Unfortunately, McDonnell and his party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have as little experience of executive authority as I do. The difference is that they don’t realise it. They don’t admit that they too are amateurs trying to play a game in which Disraeli showed the need for professionalism.

And, boy, does it show.