Eloquent silence of the curious Mr Corbyn

It seems a crisis is stalking Britain. 

It’s the top story on bulletin after bulletin of the BBC. It’s the lead in many papers.

Migrants are crossing the Channel to Britain in small boats. At considerable risk to themselves, in a sea lane with some of the heaviest traffic in the world. Though the issue that seems to preoccupy people most is the way the migrants are undermining the borders that, as the Brexit vote showed, Britain is so keen to control.

The invading hordes have now reached the total of 239 people over two months. To give a proper sense of the dire scale of this incursion, the Greeks have had 500 people arrive by boat in the last week alone. Even in Britain, the Home Office reports that there have been 7444 applications for asylum in the last quarter.

Migrants in open boats in the Channel

It seems that 120 people a month coming over the Channel strike more fear in the British breast than nearly 2500 arriving by other means. Are Britons that terrified of boats? Or, at least, the xenophobes amongst us?

Not that everyone takes such an attitude.

The Bishop of Dover, Trevor Willmott, for instance commented:

It is crucial that we all remember that we are dealing with human beings here. Across the nation, we have been celebrating the season of hope and goodwill as we remember Christ’s birth – let’s not forget so soon that every person is precious.

Nor are such sentiments limited to Churchmen or even the British. John Kelly, soon to be Donald Trump’s former Chief of Staff, recently pointed out:

Illegal immigrants, overwhelmingly, are not bad people… I have nothing but compassion for them, the young kids.

Not everyone is so generous or tolerant. Here are comments from a couple of politicians. One commented that the government waxed lyrical:

… about control of our borders and being tough on security, but cannot seem to get a grip on criminal smugglers operating a few hundred miles of coastline. We cannot allow this to continue on our doorstep.

Another invited the Home Secretary to visit Dover where the migrants arrive:

I hope Sajid Javid will come and visit Dover and see how things are here at the Dover front line, look to creating a modern Dover patrol force, with the French, to make sure that any craft found in the Channel, whichever side of the line they are, are helped back safely and soundly to the French coast.

What I find most interesting about both those statements is that either could have been made by a Conservative. In fact, only the second one was – the Tory MP for Dover, Charlie Elphicke, speaking to the BBC, apparently feels the situation is grave enough to warrant military terms, such as ‘front line’.

The other is from a tweet by Diane Abbott, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary. I tend to think of her as a close ally of the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, though she has established quite a track record as a maverick so she may have been flying off the handle a bit here on her own initiative.

In fact, it would be good to know what Corbyn himself thinks of this manufactured ‘crisis’. But, curiously, he’s staying completely silent. Although maybe that’s not as curious as one might think: he’s done this before.

Over Brexit, he managed to stay quiet on his true position until shortly before Christmas. His admirers claim that this was a clever ploy: he knew that Labour voters were split in their view of the EU. By not committing himself either way, he could hang onto the support of both groups. The stance was hardly honest or courageous, qualities his admirers claim for him, but they felt it was judicious.

As the debate enters its final stretch, he was inevitably going to have to come clean, however. This he did in a Guardian interview where he claimed that 40% of Labour voters were Brexiters. He then declared that if elected Prime Minister, he would continue the pursuit of Brexit, putting him on the side of the 40% – and I think that number’s inflated – instead of  lining up with the 60% – and I think the true figure’s higher – which you might think would have been smarter.

In any case, his refusal to take sides had simply fed the widespread suspicion that he was in fact a Brexiter. A suspicion his interview with the Guardian confirmed.

The odd thing about Corbyn is that, whatever his faults, he’s strong on speaking out for the vulnerable and underprivileged. The homeless for instance. So why hasn’t he spoken out for the people risking their lives crossing the Channel in small boats, at night, in winter? Why instead do we only have a statement from his Home Affairs spokesperson, who seems to want to reduce the issue principally to a matter of security and law enforcement?

This is where things become ugly.

A great many of the people he wants to court over Brexit only voted against EU membership out of xenophobia. They don’t like foreigners. They blame the EU for immigration and they want it curbed.

Given his track record over Brexit, and how he likes to use silence as a tactic, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Corbyn is keeping quiet now, to avoid offending Labour supporters who hold far right-wing views on race and immigration.

Jeremy Corbyn: you may like or dislike what he says
But it's when he goes quiet that he’s at his shadiest 

Sadly, it’s not going to be any more effective than his stance on Brexit was. And it’s ironic that a man who claims to be of the Left is appeasing the views of the hard Right. It also shows he’s learned nothing from the history of the 1930s. Throwing raw meat to the xenophobes doesn’t appease them. They only come back for more.

Much more.

A likeable rogue and a spy scandal

Maybe it’s the Christmas season, with all its nostalgia, but I seem to be having experience after experience reminding me of things long ago.

35 years ago, on 4 January, 1983, I started my first job in the private sector. I was greeted by the chairman and owner of the company, whom I shall call Nathan, a wonderful, warm-hearted bear of a man, tall and broad, effusive and generous. He had appointed me after telling me, at my interview, that I was ‘ideally unqualified’ for the position. That was enough to predispose me to like him.

I was, at that time, facing a bit of an emergency, part biological, part political. The politics were down to Maggie Thatcher, then Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party. Giving expression to the widespread xenophobia which would grow over 33 years to its full toxicity in the 2016 Brexit vote, she had brought in new legislation which made it more difficult to obtain British nationality.

What about the biology? Danielle, now my wife of 35 years – as you’ll discover, there is no coincidence behind that figure – was by then getting close to bursting with what would turn into the young man, today 35 – again, no coincidence – who is my son Michael. If he emerged before we were married, he would have no guarantee of British nationality, thanks to the iron lady: Danielle was (and is) French and Maggie wasn’t prepared to extend the precious gift of Britishness to the illegitimate child of a foreigner, even if born on British soil.

You may feel that being British didn’t really matter that much, since he would be French anyway. That’s true enough. But I have the Jew’s enthusiasm for multiple nationalities – you never know when you might need a bolthole – and I thought it would be good for the child to have two. Besides, there was a chance it would be a boy – we didn’t actually discover until he was born – and at that time young Frenchmen were still liable to military service at 18. The British bolthole would spare him that particularly useless experience.

Anyway, I quite liked the idea of my child inheriting my nationality.

‘I have to say this,’ I told Nathan, ‘and I hope it won’t give you a terrible impression of me, starting work one Tuesday and asking for leave on the next…’

I saw his face fall.

‘But I have to get married and our registry office doesn’t do weekend weddings.’

He threw himself back in his chair and roared with laughter.

‘David,’ he said when he’d got his breath back, ‘there are few excuses I could have accepted, but that’s one of them.’

He went on to tell me his definition of a bachelor, as a man who refuses to make the same mistake once, and returned later in the day with a cheque as a (generous) wedding present.

He was easy to like. Though something of a lovable rogue: the kind of man who spent money as though it was going out of fashion, even though the company was selling next to nothing. He was a maverick who tried to live by his own rules, even when they directly conflicted with economic law – or simply financial good sense.

Those days all came back to me recently when Danielle and I caught up with an old friend from back then. Naturally, we did some reminiscing though none of us had any news of Nathan, which is a pity. I wonder what he’s up to?

He was South African and (naturally, with a name like that) Jewish. Indeed, he would tell me later that the Apartheid regime in South Africa had put him under some pressure to become an officer in the army.

‘Well, they felt a Jewish officer might help them tone down the accusations of racism,’ he told me.

He refused. He saw no reason to provide the regime with a figleaf. He got out of the army as soon as his compulsory service was over, and went into publishing, ultimately in the company where I joined him.

That didn’t mean, however, that he did nothing for the regime. It wasn’t until after I left the company, just before it went under, that I learned how much he’d done.

It turns out that South African intelligence services – the Department of Information and the Bureau of State Security, infamous as BOSS – had a great need for a publisher or two. One of them was Nathan. Huge funds were put at his disposal and his partner’s to start buying into British publishing groups. The aim, ultimately, was to influence the editorial line of their magazines or newspapers into something more sympathetic to South Africa.

Enough money was spent to buy a large stake in a British publishing group, but never enough to take it over completely. The problem? The money was all clandestine and no one was keeping close enough tabs on how it was spent. Inevitably, it all ended in a corruption scandal.

The scandal breaks

Nathan probably embezzled none of the funds himself. Although he certainly lived the high life on them. And, frankly, if someone was ripping off BOSS, I really can’t imagine a victim I’d sympathise with less. At any rate, he was never charged. Lots of others were, in what came to be known as the ‘Muldergate’ scandal, after the then Information Minister Dr Connie Mulder. Heads rolled, including the State President John Voster’s, but Nathan’s wasn’t one of them.

Which I was pleased about. He was, after all, highly likeable. But, as the Muldergate story revealed, even more of a rogue than I’d guessed.

It was fun, in any case, remembering those times. After all, they brought me closer than I’ve ever been to a major spy scandal and the toppling of the head of a racist state. It was fun to reminisce about it all again.

Hospitals: the burning question

There was a time – back in the early 1990s – when I used to make frequent visits to Arrowe Park Hospital in the Wirral. 

That’s the peninsula opposite Liverpool.

Arrowe Park Hospital
Scene of many a visit of mine back in the early 1990s

The company I worked for back then had supplied the hospital with a remarkable system to support healthcare staff. To this day, it remains the most powerful Hospital Information Support System or HISS, as we called them then, that I’ve ever come across. Healthcare staff could quickly, reliably and accurately, enter requests for tests or treatments, record test results or the delivery of treatment, or simply consult a patient’s record. It was a great system, and I would take pride showing groups around the hospital to see it in use. Many of the groups came from abroad.

Often, the then Chief Executive, Frank Burns, would meet the group and give a brief, and usually witty, talk. In one remark has always stuck with me, he told a group:

“The problem that keeps me awake at night isn’t a patient falling off an operating table. It isn’t a patient receiving the wrong blood in a transfusion. It’s car parking.”

It’s not hard to see why. There’s only so much car parking space. So who gets priority? Staff without whom no patient would be treated? Patients without whom there’d be no point having the staff? Visitors to patients without whom they’d recover so much more slowly?

And, at a time when hospital budgets are under terrible pressure, do you charge or do you not? And if you do, how much do you charge?

That last point reminds me of another hospital that I’ve visited quite a few times, the Royal Free in Hampstead, north London. I’ve mostly been there for work, but also for personal reasons: it’s where my grandmother died, for instance.

On one work visit, I was shocked by the charge being made for the car park. I couldn’t resist mentioning it to one of the people I saw in the hospital. I didn’t mention it until after we’d dealt with the business, of course; it seemed imprudent to raise the matter until I’d got to know him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t take it badly. Which, as it happens, he didn’t.

“Ah,” he said, “the costs are exactly the same as on Hampstead High Street.”

The High Street is only a few minutes’ walk away.

“The used to be much cheaper,” he went on, “but people kept parking here and then heading up to the High Street to do their shopping. We had to introduce the charge to stop them doing that.”

It’s not that simple a question, you see, hospital car parking charges. There needs to be some way to make sure that limited parking spaces aren’t being abused for purposes other than visiting the hospital or going in to work.

Obviously, a system could be put in place to allow people to pay less, or nothing at all, if they’re patients or visitors to patients. But that costs money and takes staff time. And neither of those are in abundant supply in the British NHS today.

All that becomes particularly relevant today because hospital parking charges are the latest scandal to hit the news. And it seems dead easy: there should be no charge in England as is already the case in Wales and in most of Scotland.

But, as the Royal Free proves, that’s not that simple. After all, we really don’t want to offer Hampstead shoppers an inexpensive parking opportunity so they can do their shopping more cheaply. After all, with some of the most expensive properties in London, Hampstead isn’t a district for the poor or underprivileged.

The Royal Free Hospital
Too close to Hampstead High Street to provide free parking

No wonder Frank Burns was kept awake by hospital car parking. Rather than any of the other issues you’d expect to be troubling a busy Chief Executive.

A leading Liberal: my part in his ascent

It must have been 1985.

One of the issues of the day was whether American cruise missiles should be stationed at Greenham Common, ostensibly a Royal Air Force base, in reality entirely under the control of the US. By then, the base had been under siege from a women’s camp for three years, to protest the stationing of cruise missiles, potentially nuclear armed.

The women’s camp was a curious phenomenon. A year or two earlier, Danielle and I visited it with our eldest son, then around ten. She wanted to stay the night but the women at the first gate we visited had to gather in conclave to vote on whether he could stay or not. Was he a boy or a man? A man, you see, couldn’t possibly stay. Obviously, there was no question of my being allowed to.

I didn’t point out that neither age nor gender would be respected by a nuclear exchange if one happened, that I would be just as dead as they would, and that I took as dim a view of that prospect as they did. But I certainly thought it.

At the time we were living in Witney, in Oxfordshire. It had an active peace group. It may have been my unsatisfactory experience at Greenham that spurred me to get involved with the group for a little while. Only a little while, because I was soon going to have to move to another town following the first of three redundancies that have peppered my career (I was also fired on a separate occasion for extreme tactlessness). On this occasion, the redundancy was caused by the company going broke. A year or two later, I rang the ex-owner and asked him how he was doing.

‘I’m managing to keep my nose just below water,’ he assured me, ‘it doesn’t hurt as long as I don’t try to breathe.’

In the short time I could work with the Witney Peace Group, I became heavily involved in organising a public meeting to be addressed by the leaders of the three main British parties. This didn’t go down well with the local Labour Party, an organisation that has difficulties enough in a constituency where Conservative majorities tend to be over 20,000. Since Witney Labour had been a key player in setting up the Peace Group, they understandably resented this interloper turning up and providing a platform for the Tories and Liberal Democrats.

Oddly, far being put off by their anger, it clearly impressed me by its firm stand on principle, because I joined the Labour within weeks of moving from Witney.

In the meantime, Witney Labour somewhat grudgingly agreed to go along with the public meeting. It was, in the end, quite a success. A couple of hundred people showed up. They heard three speakers.

Olive Gibbs during her stint as Lord Mayor
Charm. Humour. Passion

Olive Gibbs spoke for Labour. A former Lord Mayor of Oxford – just ten miles away – one particular action of hers had particularly impressed me: she adopted a Japanese orphan soon after the end of the Second World War, at a time when Japanese people in general were not particularly popular in the West. Of course, it was the war waged between Japan and the West that had produced the most orphans.

Olive spoke with extraordinary passion, as she always did. She came across as highly principled but also hugely likeable – and admirable.

For the Conservatives, we had Ray Mawby, MP for Banbury. He was an obscure politician and rather deservedly so. That makes it appropriate that I can’t remember a word he said. Indeed, the only really significant fact that I know about him is that, after his death, it was revealed that he’d spied for a long time for Czechoslovakia when it was under Communist control. I suppose that only further confirms my long-held belief that, with their powerful state and rigid application of inhumane law, the Communists were a lot closer to Conservative thinking than some imagine.

Ray Mawby.
Conservative MP. And Communist Spy

And then there was the Liberal.

I saw him before I realised I had. Driving home from work in Oxford, I saw a car drawn up on the roadside. A fit and good-looking man was changing a tyre while a sylph-like and attractive woman was leaning against the car, as though her role was purely decorative and she was good at it.

It was only when he showed up at the house of our friends the Wilskers – whom I’ve mentioned before – that I realised that the person I’d seen was the rising star of what was then the Liberal Party, Paddy Ashdown, MP for Yeovil. Ex-military, ex-diplomat, ex-spy. A great background to talk about cruise missiles.

The Wilskers didn’t particularly like mirrors, so they didn’t have one in the house. That created a problem for Ashdown, after he’d washed the grime of the tyre-change off. It was amusing to watch him trying to find a window in which he could see his reflection. He wanted to comb his hair and check his tie. Which was ironic, because as soon as he started to speak at the meeting, he took off his jacket, loosened his tie and tousled his hair.

Paddy Ashdown
Pyrotechnics as a speaker. Highly entertaining

But that was his style. Excellent contact with the audience. He smiled where Olive had been earnest and Mawby simply solemn. He sparkled and amused and entertained. It was pure pyrotechnics and it was extraordinary.

As it happens, I don’t remember what he actually said, but I do remember how he said it. It was impressive and the impression has stayed with me. That’s how you deliver a political message if you want to take your audience with you. Well, that or Olive’s way. Her way was just as remarkable.

It nearly didn’t happen. Paddy Ashdown tried to get out of the meeting so that he could go on the TV programme Any Questions which wanted him for that evening; I was grateful to him for having turned them down – as I imagine he was grateful to the programme for inviting him back the following week.

Four years later, the Liberals merged with the Social Democrats to become today’s Liberal Democrats, and Ashdown became their first leader. I’m not convinced that his appearance at the Witney Peace Group public meeting did much to help him on his way. But, hey, who knows?

As for the sylph-like woman who couldn’t change a tyre, she would shortly be named as the other figure in a scandal that would engulf Ashdown and earn him the nickname Pantsdown. Which stuck with him until his death a couple of days ago. Apparently, at the height of the scandal, his voicemail message invited callers to leave a message ‘after the high moral tone’.

Well, I didn’t really know him. But I enjoyed the brief contact between his life and mine. And I was sorry to hear that his had ended.

Travel: places make it. And people even more

Travel, they say, broadens the mind. I suppose it does that because it exposes you to different experiences. And to different people.

For instance, my team was recently asked to send someone to work in India. That’s not our territory. But we were happy to help and one of my colleagues went. It was a week of hard work but he found it rewarding. On his return, he remarked ‘it’s the first time I’ve taken a three-and-a-half hour flight and left the plane in the same country I took off from.’

Obviously, there are other places where it can happen. Russia. China. The United States where, even without including Alaska or Hawaii, you can get even longer flights: for instance, 6 hours 35 minutes from Miami to Seattle.

But in our little countries of Western Europe and the Mediterranean basin, it’s unlikely. Though for a moment I thought it had happened a while back. I’d caught a plane home from Spain. As we landed, a cabin attendant welcomed us ‘to Madrid’.

But then she was Spanish and perhaps anxious to get home, which may have caused the slip. Flying two and a half hours from Madrid only to find ourselves back there would have been a little surprising. Though the French air traffic controllers were doing their best, by indulging in their traditional pastime around major holidays, of going on strike.

That trip wasn’t only significant for its geographical aspects. It was also a fine example of travel bringing me into contact with other people. Two of them, in this instance. On the train home from the airport.

The first was Sandeep. It was 10:00 at night and he’d been working since 8:00 that morning, though he was clearly using the word ‘work’ in a loose sense. He was obviously, as he later confirmed, in a well-lubricated state. Indeed, he was carrying a wine bottle only half full, and a couple of plastic glasses, one of which contained part of the other half.

‘Are you taking this train to Bedford?’ he asked me.

It struck me as an odd formulation of the question. But I had a straightforward answer, so I gave it.

‘No,’ I said, ‘to Luton.’

He had a brief moment of anxiety before asking the obvious follow-up.

‘But does the train go to Bedford?’

‘I hope so,’ I told him helpfully, ‘or I’m on the wrong train.’

That answer seemed to satisfy him because he sank onto a chair across the aisle from me.

‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘I’m a bit pissed and I couldn’t work out which train I needed to take. Glass of wine?’

I managed to resist the temptation of warm white wine out of a plastic glass and we got into conversation. Which meant that he talked to me – or at me – while I nodded at appropriate points. I even tried to say the odd word to encourage him, but he needed no encouragement and talked right through any remarks of mine.

The second person was Ryan. At first he walked up and down the carriage several times, I assume to see if he could find any congenial company, and eventually decided that there was nothing better on offer than us.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘this sounds like a good on-going conversation.’

Clearly, he had the same notion as Sandeep of what constituted a conversation.

‘Mind if I join you?’ he went on, sitting down without waiting for a response, and picking up Sandeep’s wine bottle which he examined critically. He didn’t seem to share my reticence over absorbing its contents, so went on without pausing to another question, ‘mind if I have a drop of your wine?’

Sandeep clearly felt he was not being allowed to play his role of host as fully as he liked, so rather than sitting back and letting Ryan help himself, he poured him a generous plastic glass full. A clearly hospitable man, I decided, since he had presumably only brought the second plastic glass to entertain such guests as Ryan.

‘Good Lord! Not that much!’ said Ryan, but he raised his glass to our health, accompanying the gesture with a beaming smile, so I suspect he wasn’t as unhappy about the quantity as his words suggested.

‘I’m a bit pissed,’ he added, rather unnecessarily.

Travel companions: Ryan (left) and Sandeep

At this point, Sandeep managed to regain control of proceedings. He regaled us all the way to St Alban’s, where Ryan left, with a convoluted tale of how he’d forgotten his phone in a tube train the night before. I won’t bore you with the details, but just cut to the finish: he’d left it next to a colleague who had, fortunately, spotted it and brought it back for him the following day, even though he was officially on leave and the round trip took him three hours. What I’ve told you in less than a sentence, Sandeep managed to make last the full twenty-five minutes to St Alban’s.

After Ryan left, Sandeep decided to tell me a little about himself. He’d spent five years as a software developer on contracts, earning £580 a day.

‘Work it out,’ he said.

I had. He’d been making nearly £12,000 a month. As much in two months as the median annual income of British employees. But then he’d decided that he’d had enough of the existence and had taken a job as an employee again, cutting his earnings by two-thirds. He’d recently been promoted to lead a team, and was finding the stress difficult to handle. Could it be the team that had taken him drinking, what with Christmas so close? And the stress that had him hitting the bottle so hard?

But there was an issue that was bothering me. He was clearly of Indian extraction and drinking. Since I’m a complete stranger to tact, I asked him, ‘You’re not a Muslim, are you?’

‘No,’ he said, and then with a little pride, ‘I’m a Sikh.’

He explained that he’d used his years on high earnings to buy property.

‘Three houses and an off-licence,’ he told me. ‘The off-licence is for my Dad. He’s retired but he’s a shopkeeper at heart – he was one for years and he hates not having a shop to look after. So now he runs the offie.’

And the other three houses? Rented, naturally. It’s something that quite a few members of the Indian community seem to do: get into property quickly. A smart move. I don’t know what may happen post-Brexit, but housing does seem to be an excellent investment, one that holds its value far better than most.

‘My Dad owns nineteen houses,’ Sandeep added. Leaving me wondering why I hadn’t bought a couple more when I’d had a chance. Too late now, alas.

Interesting, anyway. As curious as long flights that leave you in the same country. A conversation that opened my eyes to other ways of doing things, and therefore broadened my mind.

Besides, he was likeable, Sandeep. Fun to be with. I’ll raise a glass to him over the holidays. One actually made of glass. And the white wine in it will be chilled.

The memory of an entertaining encounter will make it taste all the better.

Suicide in the bathroom. Or possibly not

I’d barely come out of the bathroom after brushing my teeth when I heard a slight clattering sound from behind me. Nothing loud, mind, but distinctly the noise of something falling.

‘What was that?’ asked Danielle.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, ‘just my toothbrush falling into the washbasin.’

She looked at me at quizzically.

‘It may have been a suicide attempt,’ I added, blasé in my indifference to tragedy.

Alas, poor toothbrush. And yet tragedy was avoided.

I wandered back into the bathroom. There, indeed, at the bottom of the basin, lay my toothbrush.

‘No harm done,’ I told Danielle, after a cursory examination. Well, the drop was only a few centimetres. Hardly fatal, even to a toothbrush.

‘I may have been more of a cry for help,’ I added after longer reflection.

I have to say I understand where the toothbrush was coming from. I mean, I’d hate it if I had to do its job. It stands around all day. Often, I don’t even leave it on its charger, so it can’t even get a little of that innocent buzz. Then it has to work inside my mouth, and usually at a time when it’s as unappealing as it ever is. 

I can imagine the toothbrush saying to itself, ‘oh no! Back into that mouth when it’s at its least clean. All those furred-up teeth. The atmosphere of garlic compounded with coffee. Always the same. Outside upper – brush. Inside upper – brush. Inside lower – brush. Outside lower – brush. Mind-numbingly repetitive And he inflicts that routine on me twice a day, day after day, without any trace of pity.’

I can imagine the toothbrush wanting to end it all. Or at least attract some sympathetic attention to is dire destiny. It’s a dismal existence.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just projecting my own sentiments onto it. After all, it was designed for that one job and no other. And it does it well. Maybe when it sees me approaching to brush my teeth, it has a sudden surge of excitement, like our dogs when they see us coming their way with the leads.

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ it may be crying internally, ‘I was born for this! Show me those teeth, as grungy as possible, that I can make them shine again.’

Am I misinterpreting its feelings and assuming it shares mine? Because there are certain tasks I find almost unbearable in their dullness. And one of them is brushing my teeth. My toothbrush kindly tells me when I’ve spent half a minute on each area of my teeth – you know, upper outer, upper inner etc. And gives me a longer buzz when two minutes are up, at which point I stop with joy and alacrity. Just two minutes. And yet each time I start, the process ahead seems to stretch before me like some kind of endless purgatory.

It’s the same with refuelling the car. Freezing with the nozzle in the tank – somehow I always forget to put a coat on beforehand, and once I’ve started I refuse to interrupt the process to fetch one – I stand watching the dials spinning around, with the price dial gallingly spinning more quickly than the litres and, like brushing my teeth, it’s a brief task that looks endless at the beginning.

The same is true of having to get on a bus after leaving an aircraft, rather than walking up a jetway straight into the terminal. I find it maddening even though I know the walk will be shorter at the other end. Standing in queues is deadly too, especially at post offices, airports or, worse still, supermarket checkouts. What is it with those people who only seem to remember after they’ve lovingly packed away their purchases, that they actually have to purchase them? And therefore really, really have to find their purse or wallet?

So maybe it is just my feeling of tedium at the toothbrushing task that makes me suspect attempted suicide by my toothbrush. Or at least, an attempted cry for help. Maybe it’s nothing of the sort, and the toothbrush is proud of its work, as we all are when we do a job well, as it undoubtedly does. Even my dentist says so.

It’s possible, I suppose. But that notion does leave a key question unanswered, doesn’t it?

Why did it fling itself off the rim of the washbasin the other night?

Mould events. Or watch them pass you by.

With hindsight, William Yale, the main US intelligence agent in the Middle East during World War 1, would criticise the reaction of his President, Woodrow Wilson, to major events. The winner isn’t:

…he who waits to act at some dramatic crisis, but he who consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events. President Wilson and his advisors never seemed to realise this simple truism.

I couldn’t help smiling as I read those words, in Scott Anderson’s excellent book Lawrence in Arabia, since they struck such a bell. Last week, the British Prime Minister Theresa May had to pull a vote in the House of Commons on the Brexit deal she’d spent two years negotiating with the European Union, because it was obvious she was going to lose and lose massively. She wasn’t so much in retreat as in precipitous flight.

Theresa May in the House of Commons
Admitting defeat, in her very attempt to dodge it,
by pulling the Brexit deal vote

Such a government rout would normally present an Opposition with a golden opportunity, to make a bid for office itself. Many of us were, therefore, surprised that Jeremy Corbyn, who as leader of the Labour Party also leads the official opposition, declined to take the obvious next step and propose a vote of no confidence in the government. He said he wanted to wait for the ‘appropriate moment’ to do so.

That seems to mean waiting until the Democratic Unionist Party, with ten MPs, turned its back on Theresa May and committed to vote with the no confidence motion. In other words, he wanted to wait until he could be sure of winning.

Let’s step back over forty years, to 5 April 1976, when Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson as Labour leader and Prime Minister.

With the promised support of the then-Liberal Party (today the Liberal Democrats), Callaghan enjoyed a majority in the House of Commons. He was fairly secure against a no-confidence motion. Besides, a new Prime Minister – you might think he deserved a bit of a honeymoon.

Thatcher gave him just two months.

On 9 June 1976, she brought a no confidence motion against his government.

With his majority, Callaghan could, of course, see it off. She lost by 290 votes against 309. Close, but still a defeat. Many might have dismissed her, feeling that she’d overreached and failed, proving poor judgement.

But that wasn’t the lesson she learned from the experience. Instead, a little over nine months later, on 23 March 1977 she tried again, and was beaten again. Indeed, this time, the margin was even bigger: 298 to 322.

What was she playing at? Let’s be clear: I found Thatcher a bigoted, ruthless, often cruel Prime Minister. But she was an effective politician. Those two failed attacks issued a clear statement of intent: she was going to harry Callaghan and keep on harrying him until she beat him. She was saying, not just to MPs but to the electorate as a whole, that she was serious about taking the top office herself. That displayed qualities much admired by voters: toughness, guts and tenacity.

Finally, in 1978 the Liberals withdrew their support for Callaghan’s government. That’s the equivalent of what Corbyn’s waiting for from the DUP: the withdrawal of support by a small but crucial partner. So Thatcher came back to the attack again. She brought her third no-confidence motion on 28 March 1979. And this time she pulled off the trick, beating him in what became a famous photo finish: 311 votes to 310. Just one vote. And it was enough to bring down his government.

A general election was held in May, which the Conservatives comprehensively won, and Thatcher was in office for eleven years. The Tories, indeed, through her and her successor John Major, were in power for eighteen.

The only no confidence motion she won was in 1979. And even then, there was no guarantee of victory. After all, she scraped through by just one vote. By the Corbyn definition, that made it only barely an ‘appropriate moment’. But she pressed ahead anyway, as she had twice before in the previous three years, though the moments then were so inappropriate that she lost.

The defeats didn’t stop her. Because she moulded events rather than waiting for them to turn favourable to her. Like her or dislike her – and I don’t like her at all – she was undeniably one of those who, in William Yale’s words, ‘consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events’. The reward was eighteen years of rule by her party.

Corbyn’s waiting for events to come to his rescue.

Where Thatcher got stuck in, as a player in the game, and flourished, he’s sitting on the sidelines. Inviting history to sideline him.

Just a step, from innovation to obsolescence

My first attempt to get a degree, in the early 1970s, wasn’t an edifying picture of progress through study. But it wasn’t entirely without educational value. It’s just it wasn’t the value that had been planned for the course I was supposed to be following, but wasn’t, as I invested my efforts elsewhere.

The institution kind enough to tolerate my presence for a few years back then was King’s College, London. One of the best ventures I engaged in while there was the publication for a little while of a satirical journal. It gave a slightly radical, highly irreverent and self-consciously humorous take on events in the college.

It was called ‘Something’. As in ‘something is stirring in King’s’. Ingenious, right? Well, amusing to students, at least.

Our best headline ever referred to one of my fellow students as a ‘debutante whore’. She took it well, as it happened – I think there was a certain cachet in appearing in the paper for as long as it lasted – but I certainly would not use such a term for any woman today. To be honest, I wouldn’t have used it then either: it was a typo. I’d been typing the beginning of a sentence, ‘the debutante whose…’, and hit an ‘r’ instead of an ‘s’.

Something’s best writer was a student with a splendidy biting pen. I wish I could remember his name. When he saw what I’d written, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, that’s good! Excellent’. I hadn’t the heart to admit that I’d simply made an error – praise from him was invaluable – so I let it stand.

A typo. An error while typing. For these were the days when we still typed text. On actual typewriters. And the typewriters we used weren’t even the fancy IBM ones with a golfball onto which the letters had been cast, where a mere touch of a key on the electric keyboard drove the letter powerfully onto the page. No, these were the old ones, where the power with which you hit the key determined the firmness of the impression on the paper.

And hitting them hard mattered. Because we weren’t typing onto paper but onto what we called ‘skins’ though the proper term was ‘stencils’. You had to keep the typewriter ribbon – which carried the ink – out of the way so that the keys, unpadded, hit the skin directly and cut the shape of the letter into it. What you ended up with was a foolscap stencil – a bit bigger than A4 which hadn’t yet been introduced in England – with letter-shaped holes cut into it. We’d then load it onto a machine which drove ink through it onto a page. Or rather, several hundred pages.

In other words, it was a duplicator, a quick and cheap way of producing a large number of copies of a single document, before photocopiers were available.

A Gestetner machine with skin in place and ready to duplicate

It was a cheap process but not free. Though it was free to us, only because we impudently helped ourselves to the college’s stencils, ink and paper, and with no authority whatever used their duplicators – one each, from the two great companies that produced them, Roneo and Gestetner. I later discovered that the college principal, Sir John Hackett, scholar and soldier, found Something quite amusing and had told the authorities not to stop us abusing their generosity, as long as we stayed within reasonable limits.

What’s the point of this story?

Well, within a few years, photocopiers appeared in every office and, indeed, college and the idea of typing onto skins and running sheets of paper through a duplicator went completely out of fashion. Roneo was bought by Vickers Engineering and then Alcatel in France; Gestetner was taken over by Ricoh from Japan. Duplicators are now museum pieces.

A few years later, having a little mended my ways and actually got a degree (in a different subject and at a different college), I found myself working in the field which is still mine 35 years later: information services for healthcare. And quite soon I was putting up a business case to my superiors to buy a fax machine. More and more NHS organisations were using them and, rather than wait for us to get documents to them by post, they regularly asked us to fax them through.

It was a battle, but the pressure was growing, measured above all by people using commercial fax services and charging the company for them. Before long we had our first fax machine. It was exciting: we were at the cutting edge of technology, a bit like when I first learned to use a duplicator.

And why do I tell that story? Because earlier this week I saw a newspaper article – that is, an article I read on line but on a newpaper’s website, though it wasn’t actually printed on news-paper – announcing that the NHS was phasing out its fax machines. I saw the technology introduced, now I’m watching it go again.

Some years after the campaign for faxes, I was working for another company which was resisting the generalised use of laptop computers. The cost of equipping all the staff was just too high. But, grudgingly and with bad grace,  eventually the pressure was too high and we were all issued with laptops. The same sort of story as with the fax machines a decade earlier.

Today, turn up in a new job and the first thing that happens is that you’re issued with a laptop computer. A phone as well, as it happens – but I don’t have the space here to go into that innovation too.

There was a time, in the middle ages, when children could learn their trade from their parents. Tools had changed so little between generations that the skills were still good. Technology outlived its users. Not today. Within my own career, I've seen a technology appear, be superseded, and vanish again.

Will the same happen to my laptop? Am I already witnessing its decline into the mists of history that have swallowed the Roneo and Gestetner duplicator, and the NHS fax machine? Who knows?

Exciting times. If Something still existed, I could have written a story on the subject.

J'accuse revisited for our time

When he saw all the books his friend Roman Polanski had on the subject, the author Robert Harris asked the film maker, ‘have you ever considered doing a film on the Dreyfus Affair?’

That was back in 2012. According to Harris, Polanski told him that he’d wanted to for a long time but had never found the right way it. Inspired, Harris, author of major bestsellers such as Fatherland and Enigma, set to work at once.

The Dreyfus affair tore France in two in the late 1890s. On the one hand, there were the ‘anti-Dreyfusards’ who were convinced that a young officer, Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of espionage and drummed out of the French Army before being exiled to Devil’s Island off South America, where he was held in conditions close to torture, deserved his fate.

On the other hand, were the ‘Dreyfusards’ who believed that the conviction of Dreyfus was based on rigged evidence. Ultimately, they felt, it reflected the fear of a solid, Catholic and often royalist establishment that hated the changes that were being forced on French society and identified their source as the sinister figure of the ‘outsider’ – men such as Dreyfus, an ambitious Jew from a family that had the gall to be prosperous.

An excellent novel and an excellent history

The brilliant perception of Harris in writing a superb and compelling novel – An Officer and a Spy – was to frame it as a thriller and present the story not through the eyes of Dreyfus, but those of Georges Picquart.

Why a thriller? Harris tracks the painful process of establishing who had really been selling military secrets to the Germans. And still was, since one of the consequences of Dreyfus’s conviction was that the real spy was left free to continue his treasonable work. These are the elements of a great thriller, and Harris wrote a fine one while sticking closely to well-documented and closely researched historical evidence.

Why Picquart? He may not have been an anti-Semite but he certainly wasn’t particularly fond of Jews. But what he had was a powerful sense of justice and of his duty. An army officer, he was transferred into intelligence where he was tasked with tying up the loose ends of the framing of Dreyfus. But, unfortunately for his superiors, who went right up into the government, the closer he looked at the case, the more convinced he became that Dreyfus was innocent and a Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was the real culprit.

Picquart was subjected to pressure to the point of persecution. His liberty and even his life were threatened. But he battled on and ultimately Dreyfus was released while Esterhazy escaped into exile in England. He spent the rest of his life in Harpenden, just seven miles from where I live now. Though that’s not why we moved here.

As well as his novel, Harris also delivered a script to his friend in 2013. Polanski was delighted. Though the action was to be set in Paris, the financial conditions were better for making the film in Poland, so the director headed there in 2014 to start planning the film.

Sadly, as you know, Polanski has problems of his own, chiefly with the law back in the US over having sex with a thirteen-year old, in the scandal that led some to suggest he make a film to be called Close Encounters with the Third Grade. Once Polanski had travelled from France to Poland, the US authorities could launch extradition proceedings against him, which they promptly did. Eventually, the proceedings failed, but in the meantime the film project had suffered serious delay.

In the meantime, France had introduced new tax incentives for film makers. After further delays to wait for certain actors to be available, filming started in Paris this year and the film is due for release in 2019. Polanski changed the title to J’accuse, the famous headline printed above an open letter novelist Emile Zola wrote denouncing the case against Dreyfus.

The celebrated headline over Zola's open letter to the
 French President, denouncing the anti-Dreyfusard conspiracy

The film might prove topical. After all, roll on nearly twelve decades from the Dreyfus affair and we find, in Britain, a nation just as irreconcilably divided over a major question of the times. Brexit has shattered British society from top to bottom and neither camp can see any merit in the other.

But because there is division, does this mean the truth is somewhere in between, in the middle ground between Brexiters and Remainers? Some might think so. But, in the Dreyfus case, was justice somewhere in the middle ground between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards?

The answer’s obvious. Dreyfus was not guilty of the charges against him. His treatment was indefensible. It even gave cover to the real criminal, Esterhazy.

There isn’t a half-way house, the sides are irreconcilable. You can’t release Dreyfus and keep him in prison. You can’t play a key role in Europe and turn your back on it.

Worse still, as we look back on the affair now, it’s clear the anti-Dreyfusards were driven by the worst of motives. They hated the Jew, the man whose presence in their army questioned their primal beliefs about the nature of France. They saw those who came to Dreyfus’s defence as despicable, because they put belief in the rights of man over the authority of the establishment and the grandeur of France. And they were happy to spread and believe lies to support their stance.

In the same way, Brexit has been based on lies deliberately spread and willingly believed. Brexiters are driven by hostility to outsiders, to those who arrive from abroad and work harder and often with more talent than they do. They must know, because after two years of debate it’s hard to deny the evidence, that there is no form of Brexit that will not leave Britain economically worse off than staying in the EU. But Brexiters are prepared to pay that price for the sake of ‘taking back control’, sometimes and revealingly expressed as ‘taking back control over our borders’, in other words making sure they can keep out people who look different or speak differently from them.

If only it were their economic wellbeing they were sacrificing to this goal. We live in a world in which the greatest powers are run by autocrats – Russia has had the authoritarian Putin in power for a generation, China’s Xi Jinping is turning increasingly dictatorial in a nation which is emerging as the great power of our century, and the United States has elected a narcissistic adolescent president once and may do so again.

What counterweight is there? Only Europe which, beset by populists and xenophobes, is struggling to maintain an oasis of democracy and human rights. And that’s the aspiration that Brexiters are setting out to undermine.

It’s not hard to imagine a film maker and a writer twelve decades from now turning their attention to the Brexit debacle. I think they’ll have little doubt that, like the anti-Dreyfusards, the Brexit camp got things desperately wrong because they were driven by base motives. Remainers, like Dreyfusards, fought a long battle for a more generous, more open and more equitable society.

At least, I can imagine that conversation if there is still a space in the world next century where liberal thinking is possible. Which I very much hope. Though I don’t think anyone can guarantee it.

Mighty. Glorious. Useless

In my previous post, I wrote about the crass ineptitude of leaders – in this case military leaders – who sent nearly quarter of a million young men to their deaths in the Gallipoli campaign. That figure, incidentally, only covers the men over whom they had authority. There were nearly 50,000 French casualties too. Meanwhile, the casualties on the Turkish side, for which the men who launched the landings were indirectly responsible, were even higher.

Since writing that post, I’ve been on a trip in the course of which I found myself with a couple of hours to spare in Stockholm. I took the opportunity to visit a museum dedicated by the Swedes to another monument to incompetence.

This is the Vasa museum. The Vasa was a magnificent, heavily armed battleship launched by the Swedish navy in 1628. Note that I wrote ‘magnificent’ but not ‘state-of-the-art’. The museum exhibit frequently repeats and heavily stresses the words ‘the power and the glory’. This ship was designed to express power and glory, specifically of the Swedish king of the time, Gustavus Adolphus.

I have a strange personal relationship to that monarch. When I was about ten, my history teacher spent some time teaching my class about the Thirty Years’ War. At the end, he held a kind of impromptu, verbal test in which he ran through the story again and would interrupt the narration every now and then to ask the class a question. You know, things like ‘who led the Austrian forces at that battle?’ or ‘which King issued that decree?’ Eager to please, I kept leaping in with the answer ‘Gustavus Adolphus’ and was wrong every time. It may have been that I just liked the name. Eventually, the teacher asked a question which he actually addressed, by name, to me.

‘Louis the thirteenth,’ I said.

He flung up his hands in despair.

‘No,’ he cried, ‘Gustavus Adolphus.’

Sweden’s policy of strict neutrality in foreign wars now has a three-century pedigree and has served the country well, judging by its prosperity. A lesson more warlike nations would do well to remember. Glory may be glorious but it puts no bread in anyone’s basket.

Back then, though, like Britain or the United States today, Sweden still hadn’t learned that lesson. Gustavus Adolphus wanted other nations, notably (just then) the contemptible Poles, under (horror of horrors) a Catholic King who (to make this worse) was also his cousin. His shiny new ship was just what he needed. It would dominate the Baltic and have that ghastly cousin Sigismund III of Poland-Lithuania quaking in his boots.

Looking down the length of the Vasa

To make the point all the more clearly, it had a particular magnificent sterncastle. That’s the bit at the back. Stepped decks, soaring upwards, full of splendour, adorned with statues carved from wood and brightly painted, the structure could also be used as a fighting platform for riflemen in close combat. Along with the ship’s main armament of 48 cannon, it must have given the ship a daunting presence.

Sadly, it also had bit of a minor drawback. Perhaps, as the event would prove, not that minor. The height of the sterncastle made the ship just a tad unstable.

Just a bit more than a tad, to be strictly truthful. Indeed, after its splendid launch, setting out to show the Poles and any friends they might have a thing or two, it managed to get just 1.4 kilometres down the channel towards the Baltic. There, in the words of the exhibition documentation, it ran into trouble when it first met a wind stronger than a slight breeze.

Not to sugarcoat it too much, it turned over. And promptly sank.

A fair bit of power. Lots of glory. But absolutely no use to anyone.

Ornate and elaborate:
nothing stern about the Vasa's stern

Well, that’s not quite true. It lay at the bottom of the harbour for nearly three and a half centuries, at which point the Swedes brought it back up to the surface and set about restoration work. The waters and silt at the bottom had clearly been kind to the ship, because – again according to the museum – 95% of the structure of the ship now on display is original.

There it stands ready to impress anyone with an hour or so to spare. Tall, graceful, a fine monument to power and glory. And a fair measure of futility.

Impress and amuse, perhaps, would be more accurate.