BBC or Better Be Careful what you wish for

“Democracy,” wrote the American journalist and wit HL Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

There are times when some on the left seem convinced that they know what they want, and getting it good and hard might refocus their minds. Not that I’d like it to happen: we’d all suffer if they did.

What makes me say this is the internet meme I keep seeing, with a picture of Peter Falk as Columbo, making his trademark comment: “Excuse me sir… just one more thing” and then asking the (apparently) killer question, “why does the BBC never quiz the Tories about doubling the national debt to £1.9 trillion?”

Back in 2010, the Tories had promised that their austerity programme was a necessary evil to reduce the national debt. It is indeed ironic, at the very least, that after nearly a decade of the evil, the debt, far from being reduced, has doubled. So why doesn’t the BBC quiz the Tories about this sad state of affairs?

The BBC is primarily a news organisation. The doubled debt may be deplorable, but it isn’t news. It isn’t because nobody is quizzing the Tories about it. Not Labour, for instance. If Labour took up the issue in the current general election campaign, it would become newsworthy.

Why doesn’t Labour do that?

Because it would face a counter-attack demanding to know how it intends to reduce the debt. Since Labour is more concerned with some urgent spending commitments – on the NHS, Education and the Police, among many others – the last thing it wants to do is to paint itself into a corner as committed to debt-cutting.

The truth is that the national debt is not an issue in the election campaign. The NHS is. Education. The Police. Housing and homelessness. Workers’ rights. The issues, in fact, on which Labour is quizzing the Tories and on which the BBC also should.

That the BBC were planning to make life difficult for Boris Johnson on such matters is reflected in Johnson’s apparent reluctance to be interviewed by Andrew Neill. Jeremy Corbyn was badly mauled by Neill. Boris would doubtless prefer to be called gutless for ducking the same experience than run that risk. Not honourable or courageous, but wily.

If he doesn’t face the same inquisition as Corbyn did, that’s not the BBC’s fault. It’s Boris showing how deviously he plays the political game.

But back to the national debt. Let’s be clear: for instance, it would be wrong to think that the BBC doesn’t talk about it at all. It took me about three minutes to find a recent piece on the subject. It included a graph showing how the debt has climbed. It’s true that it shows £1.8tn rather than 1.9, but that seems to be down to its reasoning in terms of ‘net’ national debt. Don’t ask me what the difference is – at best I’d be guessing.

The BBC on rising national debt, in a piece from 6 November

It’s true, though, that the national debt isn’t front and centre of the BBC’s news coverage. We don’t get news bulletins telling us that “with the national debt at £1.9tn, double the level when the Tories came to power, rescue workers are still struggling to rescue survivors or recover bodies from the earthquakes in Albania”.

A TV channel that behaved in that way wouldn’t be providing news, it would be peddling propaganda. That’s the way things are in the US.

There’s nothing wrong with propaganda, as long as it doesn’t pretend to be news. This blog is propaganda, for a specific point of view (mine). If you don’t like it, that’s fine. There are plenty of others to choose from – the Skwawkbox on the left, for instance, or Guido Fawkes (or the Daily Mail) on the right. What those channels have in common is a lack of journalistic standards. We publish what we believe to be true, or in some cases would like to be true, without verification or evaluation.

If you’re more comfortable with reading material that confirms what you believe, stick to the propaganda. But I think we’d all do far better to have independent organisations publishing seriously checked material, which we can interpret as we wish. As C P Scott, the iconic editor of the Guardian put it, “Comment is free but facts are sacred”. I’d like to have my facts served up to me as accurately as possible. Then I’ll make up my mind.

The BBC doesn’t always get things right. But it does one hell of a lot better than most. For that, I’m hugely grateful.

By way of contrast, take a look at Hungary. It has just announced that it’s pulling out of the Eurovision competition. In itself, that’s hardly world-shattering. What makes the decision importance is its motivation: it’s undoubtedly because the Hungarian authorities see Eurovision as “too gay”. The Hungarian government is increasingly homophobic. There’s little doubt that’s why the nation has pulled out of the competition.

But the decision isn’t the government’s to take. It’s up to MTVA, the national TV network. The problem is, MTVA does what the government tells it to do.

See? What happens when you start demanding that your national broadcaster serves one side more than it currently is? There’s no guarantee it’ll support yours.

Knocking the BBC in Britain doesn’t necessarily serve the cause of the left. It’s far more likely to assist the hard right, which is just as critical of the organisation and far more powerful.

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it a lot harder than you wanted. And there may be nobody out there to cover your denunciations when that happens.

The Torture Chamber that wasn't

What was that strange place, we wondered, each time we passed it in our walks through the local woods?

One of the gates. With a Levantina car parked inside it

A high wall surrounded the whole plot of land. It was pierced in two places by tall wrought-iron gates, decorated with representations of fruit or leaves, and in one case, topped by an impressive coat of arms. The iron was rusty, though, and the grounds were overgrown. There was just one building inside and, despite its fearsome defences, with close-mesh bars at all the windows, and the high mast of aerials and satellite dishes at the top, it looked distinctly uninhabited.

Inside one of the gates, adorned with a sign proclaiming that the place was protected by Levantina security company, stood several cars from that company.

My first thought was that it was the estate of some minor noble of earlier times, now abandoned and left to go to rack and ruin.

“Old nobility?” scoffed Danielle. “The gates are set in simple cement-block gateposts. Whoever spent a fortune on the gates spent nothing on the frame he mounted them in. And it certainly isn’t old.”

Danielle inspecting the estate through the main gate
Note the heraldic decorations. And the concrete gateposts
You can just see Toffee on her back legs, also looking inside
Meanwhile Luci’s wondering why they’re bothering

I had to admit she was right. There was nothing ancient, venerable or even aristocratic in the plain concrete pillars on either side of the gate. How could I have been so naïve? After all, even the one building we could see was just a concrete blockhouse. Too big to be a gatehouse, and not close to a gate anyway, it was far too small and unsightly to be some kind of baronial hall.

The blockhouse. Note the aerial and satellite dishes
And the wire

The most striking feature of the place was its security. The wall came with an iron-bar fence, and further in, there was the line of barbed wire. I’ve already said that the building looked like a blockhouse, dour, featureless, undecorated.

But there were no watch towers, no guards, no manicured parade ground. So not a prison camp or anything like that. Going past with a group of friends, we debated other possibilities.

Could it be a drug lord’s highly secure location for storing his product? It’s true that it looks too much the part, but might that not be brilliantly devious double-camouflage? Make it look too much like a drug lord’s hideaway, and no policeman would ever suspect that it could be one.

“Too obvious,” they’d all say, and go and look somewhere else.

That didn’t feel too plausible. I preferred the theory that it was a top-secret site operated by the Spanish intelligence service. Underneath that apparently uninhabited blockhouse, there were deep basements equipped with sophisticated torture devices where, even as we spoke, orange-suited prisoners suspected of criminal subversion were screaming out their confessions to crimes of which they were entirely innocent.

That seemed possible until we considered that any self-respecting Spanish spook would want to be based in Madrid. The woods of La Vallesa somewhere outside Valencia? Much too far from the metropolitan delights that make life bearable to the senior servants of the Spanish state.

The mystery all ended the day we turned up and found a Levantina car outside the gates, with its driver at the wheel. He was pleasant, polite and friendly.

“The place belonged to some guy who was crazy about security,” he explained, “and his son, who inherited it, can’t sell it. It suits us, though, as a place to keep our cars. So we rent it as a car park.”

A Levantina Seguridad car

A security guards’ car park? What a let-down.

No minor noble entertaining his superiors to lavish dinners in the hope of an appointment further up the aristocratic ladder.

No drug lord bawling out an indolent underling who has yet again failed to liquidate an upstart competitor on a Valencia street corner.

No sadistic inquisitor pointing out that the electric dial setting has to be kept below five if his powerless victim’s survival is to be guaranteed, and then cackling insanely as he turns it up to six.

Just a car park.

“The mystery’s gone,” Danielle pointed out to me as we walked past recently. She was right. It had. Fortunately, the beauty of the woods around are more than enough to compensate.

Otherwise, how would I cope with the loss of my fantasies?

Yesterday: you don't have to be a Beatles fan, but it helps

Let me start with a confession. I was never all that keen on the Beatles when they were actually making music and releasing records. It was my sons, in their teenage years, that woke me to up to the fact that their music was worth listening to. So I’m something of a latter-day fan.

As Yesterday points out, it’s a sadder world where they’ve never existed

Still, as the Christians say, “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance”. Though I’m not convinced that the realms of Beatles fandom will be particularly shaken by my joining them.

As a new convert (well, relatively new: my boys’ teenage years were twenty years ago now), I was enthralled by the premise of the film Yesterday. 

Early on, an inexplicable blackout takes place across the globe, and when the lights come back on, we are in a world in which the Beatles have never existed. The very names of the band or its members evoke no memories and are, indeed, completely meaningless to those who hear them.

Except that Jack Malik, excellently played by Himesh Patel who not only acts but sings the part with skill, has been knocked off his bike and been taken to hospital unconscious during the blackout. When he comes to, he has lost no memories whatever. When his friends buy him a superb new guitar, he decides that it deserves a great song, so he plays Yesterday for them.

They are moved nearly to tears. They wonder when he wrote it. And when he explains that it’s a Beatles song, they have no idea what he’s talking about.

Malik playing Yesterday to his friends, including Ellie Appleton
To them, it’s the first time they’ve heard the son

Why did they buy him a guitar in the first place? Because he’s a struggling musician doing occasional gigs in pubs or, at best, the underpopulated side tent of a festival. In fact, he’s had so little success that he’s decided to give up on music, much to the disappointment of his manager and one true fan, Ellie Appleton, intelligently played by Lily James.

Until now… For after the blackout, he knows a whole collection of songs that are completely new to his audiences. Knockout, excellent songs. So he starts to sing them, and then to record them. Soon, he’s discovered and finds himself on the way to international stardom, all on the back of Beatles song he presents as his own.

Critics have found much to run down in the film. It’s true that the plot isn’t wholly original. It’s true that we never hear the whole of a Beatles song. It’s true too that the story is often sentimental. But sentiment well handled, and it is in this film, can be moving rather than cloying. When it comes to the songs, there’s no reason why an audience should expect to hear them all, or hear them in their entirety – we’d do nothing but listen to the songs if that were what the film did.

As for originality, that strikes me as an overrated quality.

What matters isn’t how new your material is, it’s what you do with it. And Yesterday handles it gloriously. Again and again, one can predict exactly where the film is going and then, in a fine twist, it doesn’t go there, even if overall it reaches the point you might expect.

It contains well-constructed characters, performed by fine actors, including a monster of a music-industry woman whose shocking amorality is a constant source of humour. Why, it even contains Ed Sheeran playing himself in a lovely self-mocking portrayal of a real music star, if not so great a one as the Beatles.

Himesh Patel as Jack Malik with Ed Sheeran as Ed Sheeran

Besides, there are some excellent touches. It isn’t just the Beatles that are missing from the post-blackout world – some other major items from our world don’t make it. And there’s a clever theme about whether Malik really is the only person in the world who remembers the Beatles, a theme which leads to another good plot twist.

Overall, Yesterday provides a couple of hours of excellent entertainment. It’s well worth seeing. In addition, as I can now admit with enthusiasm, it includes some excellent music.

Retirement: an olive bough but not a bed of roses

Retirement, I had been led to believe, was a period of life in which one rested a while and recovered from the exhaustion of working life.

That, it seems, is not so. It’s just the opportunity to replace one form of work by another. Or, in my case, numerous others.

To be honest, and I think it’s probably best to be reasonably honest since I’m not leader of the Conservative Party (a role so much in the stratospheric elite that such bourgeois considerations as truthfulness simply don’t apply), to be honest, as I say, some of these tasks should soon come to an end. They involve such chores as submitting requests for pensions, which in turn require documents to be hunted down, copied, occasionally authenticated by a lawyer, and posted and all sorts of other exciting and life-enhancing bureaucratic tasks.

Picking olives in November

Others, however, are only just starting. One such was, it appears, the harvesting of olives. Not that we have an olive tree or anything. But Danielle and I went out walking the woods a couple of weeks ago and came across a rather sad and lonely olive tree which clearly didn’t belong to anyone, so we picked the olives.

It was an eye-opening experience for me. I tried one of the olives I picked, since I like olives, only to discover that it was horribly inedible. It seems it takes weeks of processing to turn them into the kind of delicious appetiser that I enjoy so much. Off the tree, they are neither delicious or appetising.

You may have already known that but I didn’t. Among other things, retirement seems to be turning into quite a steep apprenticeship in things I never previously realised I needed to know.

This all happened on 9 November. And one of the more attractive aspects of the experience is that we could be out there in light clothes. In fact, I was in shirt sleeves, Danielle in even shorter sleeves. Just this weekend we were out on the beach. Not actually swimming, you understand, although there were some swimmers there – one of them claimed to keep swimming right through the winter, so I dismiss his judgement of the temperature as having any kind of rational basis at all – but we did paddle a little. And it certainly felt warm.

November beach walk

So it’s been a bit of a shock to discover in the time since then that the temperature in Valencia really can fall. It can even become wintry. That’s particularly clear if you’ve mistimed overdue work on your radiators.

The radiators in question needed work because they had been removed from the walls when the painters were in this summer. They’d put them back up but radiators apparently need various technical things done to them, involving things like air (which I believe needs to be removed) and pressure (which needs to be raised). Clearly, this is something that, as a retired person, I should now be learning to do myself, but I’m glad to say Danielle was sensible enough to book an appointment for a plumber to come and see to it.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t be there until this morning, and this morning, when I took the dogs out, there was actually frost on the grass. Yes. Really. Proper frost.

Central heating is just one of those things most of us take for granted these days. Well, I can assure you that nothing teaches you not to take it for granted quite so much as not having any when the conditions turn frosty. Why, yesterday we had to go so far as to open the windows to let in some warm air.

It’s good to have central heating again. I promise not to take it for granted again. I truly appreciate what a blessing it really is.

In fact – it’s time for me to get rid of this jumper and be back in shirtsleeves. As though ready to go olive picking again.

Canny canines and humble humans

It’s always good to have family come to visit.

The poodles like it too. Each in her own way. When my son Michael and our daughter-out-law Raquel first turned up, Toffee went wild with delight. She recognised them at once, despite not having seen them for months, and she was ecstatic at seeing them again. She danced around them and kept trying to leap up and lick their faces which, considering she barely comes to their knees, was an ambitious endeavour.

Luci in front, Toffee behind, in the woods near our house

Luci was more circumspect. She barked at them as she does at all strangers who have the gall to enter her house, at least until they’ve spent twenty minutes there and she gets used to their presence. But her heart wasn’t really in the barking on this occasion. It was obvious she too was impressed by the rapture being displayed by Toffee and must have been asking herself, “if she’s that enthusiastic about them, perhaps I shouldn’t be too concerned. Especially as they don’t seem completely unfamiliar to me.”

Things quickly settled down and everybody got used to everybody else. In fact, they were particularly affectionate to Raquel, with the unerring instinct of any animal to make straight for the one person who is allergic to them. I can only congratulate Raquel on how obvious she made it to them that she returned that affection, and simply coped with the asthma and general discomfort they inflicted on her.

She’s had to head home, but Michael stayed with us. In fact, he took charge of the place while we were out, and kindly even gave the dogs a walk. And not just along the patch of green at the back of the house, but into the nearby woods which are one of the major attractions to living here.

Funnily enough, while Danielle is able to inspire them with enthusiasm for a walk in those woods, and they’re always keen if a whole group of us accompanies them, if it’s just me or just Michael, the dogs seem reluctant to go very far. Take them off the lead too soon, and there’s a risk they’ll make a beeline for home.

It’s not something that I’ve worked out. Maybe they like being out with a group because it feels like a genuine pack, whereas just three of us leave them feeling far too isolated. Unless Danielle is one of those present, since she has about her that air of quiet mastery that inspires confidence in all around, canine or human.

My technique is to keep them on the lead for rather longer than Danielle does. I release them only when it’s clear to them that we’re having the walk whether they like it or not. I have to say that they give every sign of enjoying themselves for the rest of the walk, although I notice that they only really get out in front of me when we’ve turned unmistakably for home. Maybe just because they’d rather get safely back to Danielle as quickly as possible.

Michael used all these traits to good effect when he took them out alone. He doesn’t know the woods particularly well. He therefore kept the dogs on their leads for a while and systematically went the opposite way from where they were trying to pull him. Once he’d decided that they’d gone far enough, he took them off their leads and simply followed them back, getting safely out of the woods.

“At path intersections, they’d stop and look at me to decide where to go,” he told me, “but since they always stopped at the entrance of the path they obviously wanted to take, I simply went that way.”

The technique apparently worked splendidly. They got home without difficulties, having all had a pleasant and relaxing walk.

Which just goes to show how effective it was for all concerned that, having established his leadership, Michael could then let his followers have their own way. Lead then listen? That sounds like a message it would be good to apply more frequently, even outside the limited sphere of dog walking.

Good dishes from traditional ingredients: the bingeworthy Jack Ryan series

In cooking, we mostly use the same ingredients and the genius, if we have any, is to make something better from them than others do. Or than we did last time.

Some particularly smart chefs, of course, sometimes find a new ingredient, perhaps a new spice, that brings a different and previously unimagined flavour to a dish. But mostly, what distinguishes them is that they do things better than others with the same raw materials.

What’s true of clever cooking can also be true of clever film-making. That’s the case of the Jack Ryan series, the Amazon creation of which the second season was released on Prime at the beginning of the month.

John Krasinski (right) as Jack Ryan, with
Wendell Pierce as his nominal boss, actually sidekick, James Greer

The ingredients are the standard ones of the genre – the spy action movie. Men whose real talents are underestimated by their superiors and are bound to a desk though, as we shall soon discover, they’re unbeatable in the (violent) field, exquisitely skilful with a gun and their ability to outfox the wiliest of opponents. The wiliest of opponents up to their devious and nefarious best to inflict terrible damage on the good guys (generally the US) on behalf of some very bad guys (vicious jihadists or corrupt South American autocrats). Good guys who, with a handful of people or even a single good guy, can take on practically an army of bad guys, wiping them all out at no more than a scratch or a couple of injuries to their side.

‘Injuries’ being a relative term, in any case, as on the side of the good guys even a bullet wound is insufficient to keep them out of action for more than few hours.

Above all, and this is particularly a specialty of American films of this type, there are traitors everywhere. Take that guy who rescues the protagonist from a pit of alligators (I speak metaphorically here: this is no spoiler). Expect to discover later that he’s in the pay of the other side and will hand that same protagonist over for torture and (possibly) execution by his vile accomplices at a critical point in the twisting plot.

So there’s nothing new in the Jack Ryan universe. What the series relies on is ingenuity in how the old ingredients are put together. And that, to my astonishment, both seasons do spectacularly well. It means the stories are compelling, the action fast-paced and engaging, even the suspense is gripping – however old the devices, somehow I found myself wondering how things were going to turn out, even though a different part of my brain was telling me I already knew.

Like a good meal made from traditional ingredients, the cookery for Jack Ryan works well. It produces highly palatable dishes, well worth trying. They teach nothing, they offer no insights, but they’re highly enjoyable.

What’s more, the second series is as much fun as the first.

If you have access to Prime and you like a quickfire, amusing and tense yarn, you could do a lot worse than spend two or three evenings bingeing on this series.

Elections in Spain, and the lessons for the Elections in Britain

Be careful what you wish for.

That seems to be the main lesson from the results of the General Election in my adopted country Spain, on 10 November. A lesson that some people in UK politics might do well to learn. If it isn’t too late already.

Seats won in the Spanish Parliament
The PSOE have the most but are even further from a majority

Take the socialists, or PSOE. 

Its leader, Pedro Sánchez, had been acting Prime Minister since the previous election in April. He headed the biggest party in Parliament, with 123 seats, but that was still well short of the magic number for a majority, 176. He tried to cobble together an agreement with other groups, principally working with a party to his left, Unidas Podemos, but the negotiations repeatedly failed. Both sides blamed the other, and there seems little point in trying to assign responsibility now.

Sánchez decided that he had no choice but to go the country again. He may have been right. After failing to negotiate himself a coalition, he may indeed have had no other option. But far from growing his parliamentary presence to 140, as he had hoped, a position from which he might have had a better chance of building a majority, he ended up losing three seats, leaving him on just 120.

A message for Boris Johnson: merely calling an election doesn’t guarantee that you’ll emerge with the wins you hoped for. Besides, sometimes hung parliaments happen because the electorate is split and unable to endorse one party or another. Then politicians have to find ways to work together.

As for Unidas Podemos, it too paid the price for failing to reach an agreement to govern. Its 42 seats were reduced to 35. A breakaway party from Podemos, Más País, won three seats, so even taken together, these left-wing groupings are down four. If the discussions between Sánchez and the Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias were tough before, they’re going to be a lot tougher now.

The great losers of the night, however, were the centrist grouping, Ciudadanos, Citizens. They couldn’t quite make up their mind about what they stood for, which may be a cautionary tale for Corbynists: if you equivocate, you’ll be punished.

They proclaimed they would not under any conditions join a Sánchez-led coalition, though they claimed to be in the centre and therefore open to working with either side. At the time, they had 57 MPs and could have had a role in leading the country. It was a clear statement that they wanted no part in government, and voters can’t see much point in electing parties that don’t want to govern. 

Besides, there is in Spain a question as central as Brexit is in Britain, which is Catalan separatism. They chose to take a hard position against the separatists, moving them away from the centre ground to positions more closely associated with the far right. Voters prepared to vote for far-right views will generally prefer a far-right party. That they did on this occasion, reducing Ciudadanos from 57 seats to just ten.

Perhaps another lesson for Corbynists flirting with pro-Brexit positions.

The day after his election debacle, the leader of Ciudadanos resigned.

May yet another lesson for Corbynism, and more particularly, for Corbyn.

So who were the great winners of the day?

The traditional right, the equivalent of British Conservatives, the Partido Popular or Popular Party, turns out to be rather more popular than at its disastrous low in April, when it won just 66 seats. This time it took take 88.

But the biggest winner of all was the far right, Vox. It only entered parliament for the first time in April, with 24 seats, far more than they should ever have won, but still containable.

This time, they’ve taken 52. More than twice as many as last time.

And what’s that all down to?

Why, the massive error of Ciudadanos in wanting to be a centrist party and then lurching rightwards, and the failure of the centre left and left to find common ground. They preferred to remain pure in support of their principles than to compromise and enter government. The result was that the far right gained.

In Britain, the situation isn’t entirely similar. There is a party of the far right, but it’s losing momentum as the Conservatives become the voice of the far right themselves, losing their moderate MPs on the way. There is no separate party like Unidas Podemos, instead a faction of the Labour Party, the Corbyn tendency, has taken control of the party.

Even so, there’s much to learn for Britain from the Spanish experience.

• Refusal to compromise doesn’t always yield the results you want.
• Accommodating the far right lets it devour you
• Equivocate and the voters will punish you
• Sometimes you just have to live with hung parliaments, because voters themselves are divided

A former boss of mine used to say that the trouble with having your back to the wall is that you can’t read the writing on it. The writing from Spain strikes me as fairly powerful. But politicians in Britain, with their backs to the election wall, may no longer have the time to read it.

As the dust settles on 13 December, the day after the British general election, we shall see whether they, like the Spanish, are going to have to learn their lesson the hard way. And, sadly, voters with them.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years on

Authoritarianism seems fashionable these days, and liberalism rather on the back foot. So it’s good to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of a moment which seemed to offer real grounds for optimism: the fall of the Berlin wall.

The Berlin Wall with the death strip

Some years before, I travelled for the first time to Berlin, and spent most of the time in the East, which was then in a different country from the West. I kept a diary for the trip, and here’s what I wrote on my arrival on 3 July 1982.

I was in Tegel by about 7:00 and took the U-Bahn [the underground] through to Friedrichstrasse: there are 3 unused stops before Friedrichstrasse after one has passed under the border… the stations are dimly lit, deserted apart from a single armed guard who nods to the U-Bahn driver as he passes through.

East Germany felt far more foreign than anywhere else I’d visited. Even the Western half of Germany seemed much more like home. It was more silent, with streets more deserted, and more heavily policed than I’d ever seen elsewhere.

I felt alien and depressed in East Berlin… The buildings are imposing, rather too imposing – cold, unwelcoming, inhuman… I wandered down Unter den Linden: it’s magnificent… but the whole is empty at night, forlorn, lifeless. At the end is the Brandenburg Gate, flying the East German flag, while over to the right the West German banner flies above the old Reichstag. The wall runs along in between, and I didn’t dare approach too closely… the place was swarming with guards.

The visit became less painful when I had got to know a few people. On 17 July, a new friend, Friedrich, took me on a trip out of East Berlin to a concert in an old monastery in the countryside.

Off to Kloster Chorin in the morning – the S-Bahn [overground train] … passes at one point between the inner and outer walls, and one has a clear view of the Grenzgebiet [border zone] with the watch towers, tank traps and barbed wire.

As a Westerner myself, I was allowed out to West Berlin whenever I chose, a privilege only available to East Germans once they drew their pensions. On the far side of that wall, I saw the crosses to the people who’d made the attempt, and failed, to cross that death strip.

In the evening after the concert, Friedrich took me around to a flat where a group were enjoying a pleasant evening. The advantage of being in someone’s flat is that everyone could speak openly. One of the older people told me that he felt the lack of personal incentive in the East German economy was doing it terrible damage.

He also told me about a Russian friend who had served in the Soviet army in Berln at the end of the Second World War. It took a lot of effort with the bureaucracy, but in the end he was able to invite him to his place. But throughout his visit, the Russian and his wife spent their time glued to the TV, watching the western news, which Berliners could receive.

It’s fashionable today to decry the ‘mainstream media’ or ‘MSM’ in the West, but when you’ve had to live in a regime where nothing is broadcast other than propaganda, the ‘MSM’ is like a drink to a man dying of thirst.

There’s no doubt that the regime went in for some serious torturing and executing, but I naturally saw none of that. To me, what it seemed mostly to be was stultifying, stifling every creative or individualistic urge of its citizens. They had food, they had shelter, they had healthcare, they had education, but they longed for the freedom their TVs showed their fellow Germans just a few hundred metres away enjoying.

As I travelled home, I wrote up my general impressions of the country:

… if someone like Friedrich is at all typical, then the East German is learning to live with the regime, getting on as best he can within the rules, bending or twisting them as far as possible – ‘Trick’ is a catchword in the DDR. This, in a sense, is a form of reconciliation to the regime, but in another sense it shows that there is also no love of it, that the people distance themselves from it morally. There is no support for it. As Sprössig [a doctor I met] points out, if a free election could be held tomorrow, 80% would vote the SED [the ruling party] out of power. When asked, he reckoned much the same majority would vote for reunion with West Germany.

Neither of us could see it coming, but the process that would lead to reunification was just over seven years away. That was the fall of the ugliest symptom of the regime that I saw while I was there: the Berlin Wall. On 9 November 1989, 30 years ago today, it was finally breached. It had only lasted a little over 28. It’s been gone longer than it was in place.

That’s a matter for celebration. A reminder that we can put the autocrats back in their boxes. Something we badly need to do again today.

Why? Because no achievement for freedom is ever secure for all time. To protect it requires sustained, repeated effort.

Indeed, one comment I made on my visit has proved completely mistaken

… what an effect [German reunification] would have: Strauss [then leader of the CDU’s sister party, the CSU] and the CDU [Christian Democrats, the German Conservatives] in general would have nothing to cheer about, the newly absorbed people would vote very solidly for the SPD [the Social Democrats]

It seemed to me that a people that had got used to free comprehensive healthcare and education and the basic necessities of existence, would never line up with the right. How wrong I was. It’s in the old East Germany that the far right today is strongest. It seems that being a victim of oppression doesn’t necessarily mean that you refuse to join the oppressors yourself later.

We can enjoy the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the wall. But there are no laurels to rest on. Above all, we need to discover its spirit again.

Mistakes commemorated, whether a revolution's or my own

Ah, the seventh of November. A bit of a special day. For me and for Russia

It’s the anniversary of the October Revolution.

Lenin addressing the crowd during the October Revolution
A moment that didn't lead to quite what was hoped
But that isn't the only mistake its anniversary brings to my mind

“The October Revolution?” I hear you cry, “In November?”

Indeed. One of the reactionary aspects of the Russian Tsarist regime, overthrown by the Bolsheviks in that great revolution, was that it had stuck with the old Julian calendar long after practically everyone it dealt with had moved to the Gregorian.

The Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar who launched it, didn’t get the leap years quite right. The result was that as the centuries rolled by, the calendar year got further and further out of step with the actual movement of the earth around the sun (or, as modern science has it, the movement of the earth and the sun around each other). The time it takes for the earth to go around the sun (or, as modern science has it, etc.) isn’t exactly 365 days, but more like 365.256 and then a bit. That extra fraction eventually begins to add up.

So the Gregorian calendar adds an extra day every four years, in leap years, but then adds the additional refinement of not making century years leap years except, as a further refinement still, if the century year is a millennium year. 1900 wasn’t a leap year but 2000 was.

That keeps the years pretty closely aligned with the earth’s movement.

But the Gregorian calendar was launched in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. Well, the Protestants and the Orthodox were a bit wary of anything papal, so they didn’t immediately switch with the Catholic nations. That meant that Britain, for instance, was ten days behind most of Europe in the seventeenth century, leading to such charming little discoveries as the coincidence of the deaths of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, and William Shakespeare on the same date, 23 April 1616, but ten days apart.

It’s a lovely coincidence only slightly tainted by the fact that scholars today claim that Cervantes died on 22 April and the 23rd was the day he was buried. Still, why spoil a great little story just for the sake of the truth? After all, few of our political leaders these days do.

So you can see where this is heading. The revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power happened on 25 October 1917 in Russia. Pretty much everywhere else it was 7 November. That is the date that the event is now commemorated.

Why’s it so special to me? Well, not because of the revolution. Once I thought it was a pretty remarkable event, opening the doors to a better future for the victims of oppression everywhere. Not any more.

These days, it seems to me that the Russian revolution was tainted in its very roots. Not by the violence to which it led. The revolution itself involved little violence, and it was only because of the attempted counter-revolution against it that a bloody civil war broke out.

No, the problem was that it was led by people who knew they were right. They were expressing the force of history, which is at least as magnificent and all-powerful as the force of divinity, for those who believe in that idea. So anyone who stood in their way, wasn’t just a critic or an adversary, he was a traitor to a fundamental force that was unstoppably moulding human destiny. To sweep him away wasn’t merely justified, it was obligatory. If that involved a little torture, some forced confessions and an execution, well you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

The result was a regime that lasted over 70 years and killed more people than Hitler’s, mostly because it had so much longer to do so. That means the anniversary of the seizure of power is hardly a matter to celebrate.

Instead the reason I smile each year the date comes round is in memory of a deeply frustrating afternoon I spent in the library of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific academy, in London. I was researching a French scientist who had spent some time in London and, specifically, at the Royal Society in the early eighteenth century.

What I couldn’t cope with was that a letter of his announcing his departure from Paris was dated after another announcing his arrival in London.

Yep. I was being pretty dumb. I knew all about the problem of the Julian calendar in Britain and the Gregorian on the Continent. And yet I spent several hours racking my brain to try to understand how Maupertuis could have written a letter from Paris after his arrival in London. How I kicked myself when the solution to the conundrum came to me at last in a flash, as I remembered the difference in calendars...

7 November reminds me each year how badly I too can fail. Making it a salutary lesson in the importance of humility. Among the faults people attribute to me, and they are legion, excessive humility is not one that is often mentioned.

So the lesson is invaluable.

Boris, Trump and tripping the lie fantastic

There was a time when voters valued honesty in politicians. Not that they expected ever to find any. There’s an old joke about a man lost in a wood and stumbling into a clearing, in which he sees a blind old woman, a pink elephant and an honest politician. So who does he ask to show him the way?

The answer is, of course, the blind old woman, as the other two are just figments of the imagination.

Boris and the great lie

But even if we didn’t expect honesty from them, we kept up a vaguely optimistic pursuit of the honest politician, or maintained the notion as some kind of ideal towards which we might aspire.

Not any more, it appears. In Donald Trump, we have a US president who, if we really push our generosity, may feel is not an actual liar, in the sense that he may not always be deliberately stating as a truth something he knows not to be true. It may rather be that he suffers from a pathological inability to tell the truth from anything he happens to want to believe. Or, worse still, happens to want his voters to believe.

He may simply be lying, but it may actually be that he thinks that his wanting to believe something is true, makes it true.

North Korea hasn’t actually disarmed at all? So what? The disarmament deal that Trump proclaimed after his first meeting with Kim Jong Il is the best disarmament deal there ever was.

All that nonsense about Trump putting pressure on Ukraine to dig up dirt on his opponent? All made up. The fact that a transcript of the call exists, and it confirms the allegation, is neither here nor there. It never happened.

Isn’t a great achievement that China is paying for the tariffs Trump has put on its exports to the US? The miserable line about tariffs being paid by the population of the importing country, not the exporting one, is just an inconvenient factoid. An unattractive notion, and therefore untrue.

But in Britain too we have our version of Trump. Like Trump in the US, Boris holds the highest elective office in Britain. Unlike Trump, I think he has sufficient knowledge and intellectual horsepower to know when a statement is actually false. So when he utters a falsehood, he is undoubtedly lying.

And he seems to lie as naturally, as casually, as automatically as he breathes.

Perhaps the most embarrassing instance came when he visited Whipps Cross hospital in North London. When the father of a child who had been admitted to the appallingly understaffed and overstretched emergency department accused him of only being there for a photo opportunity, Boris replied that there were no press present. That was despite the fact that, as the father pointed out, the press were clearly visible just a few steps away. 

Omar Salem points out the photographers at Whipps Cross
whose presence Boris had just denied

The father, Omar Salem, is a Labour activist. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he’s a father, his child was seriously ill, and the staff were hopelessly overstretched. It seems that Boris’s first instinct is to lie, even when it’s obvious that he’s going to be caught out almost immediately.

There were so many other instances. Another was the decision of the Daily Telegraph to apologise for an article Boris published in the paper, forecasting that a post-Brexit Britain would overtake Germany as an economy within a few decades. It seems his argument was based on an analysis he’d ready which simply didn’t bear it out.

Perhaps the most notorious deceit ever was the one Boris associated himself with during the Brexit referendum campaign, that leaving the EU would free £350 million a week to invest in the NHS (the National Health Service). It was particularly barefaced, because it deliberately overstated the contributions the UK made to the EU, ignored the subsidies it received back from it, and left out of account the additional costs associated with Brexit and the revenue loss it was likely to entail.

A far wilier campaigner than Theresa May, his immediate predecessor, far being put off by his terrible track record in this field, Boris has boldly taken the battle to his Labour opponents, precisely on the grounds of the NHS. That takes courage for a Conservative, because this is traditionally Labour’s strong ground. But Boris is promising to spend more on the health service, to employ more clinicians, even to build more hospitals.

In other words, Boris is promising to address the very scandals that the distraught father tackled him over at Whipps Cross.

And yet Conservative Central Office has instructed candidates to sign no pledges on the NHS (or indeed on climate policy). So Boris is making the promises but preparing the ground for reneging on them. As he did over Brexit, when he promised to deliver it by 31 October, “do or die” – he didn’t do, but he didn’t die either.

What’s most surprising about this trail of blatant lies and broken promises is, in an election as wide open as any I’ve seen, with four major parties contesting nationally, as well as the SNP massively powerful in Scotland, Boris continues to lead the polls. At nearly 40%, his standing is weak, but way ahead of anyone else’s.

Above all, what that 40% means is that, for two voters out of five, honesty in a politician is simply not an important consideration. They see it as perfectly legitimate to vote for him anyway.

Sadly, 40% is enough to win in a wide-open field.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but in Britain, you only need to fool 40% on election day to get to do what you want for the next five years.

Poignancy

All Saints Day. The day after Halloween. You could tell here in Madrid, if only because some of the people we saw had clearly not finished celebrating from the night before.

Halloween revellers in the Madrid metro
Heading home late the morning after

We were in Madrid because that’s where my company’s offices are. My ex-company. That ‘ex’ is the reason I had to visit the office at all. Because, while an event that should have happened on Halloween didn’t, one that shouldn’t have, did.

31 October was the latest date that Britain was to leave the EU. This was absolutely clear. To Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, it was a matter of ‘do or die’. Indeed, he said he would rather die in a ditch than accept that he had to get a further extension to the Brexit timetable.

But he didn’t do Brexit by the deadline he set. Nor did he die. A ditch? No trace of one in his existence yet. It’s enough to make one wonder whether one can entirely trust his word. Many tell me that you know that Boris is lying by the fact that he’s breathing. However, as my American friends can no doubt testify, you just don’t get pathological liars leading major nations.

Do you?

So no Brexit. Or at least not yet.

On the other hand, the event that wasn’t supposed to happen was my brusque and involuntary departure from the company. Halloween was the day of my latest redundancy. But at least, on this occasion, I’m going out on a high. This was undoubtedly the best job I’ve had, with the best boss and the best team. What’s more, a great many people with whom the team worked have written to say how much they’re going to miss us. My quarrel isn’t with anyone I know but only with people who haven’t the faintest idea about what the team was doing. Just a pity that, despite knowing so little, they were the ones taking the decisions.

Good memories accompany my departure, and contacts I hope will endure, with former colleagues who are also good friends.

We took advantage of our presence in Madrid to see our sons and their partners and, in particular, our new granddaughter Matilda.

Matilda appreciating life

It was on our way to one of those visits that I was struck by a statue near the metro station we were using. It’s dedicated to the “Atocha lawyers”. They were members of a group involved in the defence of workers’ rights in the early years of democracy, after the death of the dictator Franco. On 24 January 1977, far right terrorists attacked them, leaving five dead and four injured.

Monument to the Atocha Lawyers

The main targets of the attackers were trades union leaders from the Communist Party, at that time still banned. Ironically, its legalisation was accelerated by the attack. That’s the response we should all have to terrorism: when our rights are attacked, we should respond by strengthening of those rights. That’s not always the case: since the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in England, the momentum for Brexit, which she loathed, has if anything increased.

The statue in Madrid is a moving reminder of how costly it can sometimes be to defend rights. And how important.

Equally touching was a pair of paintings I saw in one of my favourite galleries, the Thyssen-Bornemisza. The first was a portrait of Quappi in a Pink Jumper, full of affection but also of forceful personality. 

Powerful, intriguing portrait by Beckmann
Quappi in a Pink Jumper

I hadn’t previously come across the painter, Max Beckmann. He was German, but he died in the US, and the painting was dated 1932-1934. Which places it in just the time Hitler was coming to power.

Max Beckmann in one of his many self-portraits

Later, I looked him up. When Hitler denounced ‘degenerate art’ in 1937, many of Beckmann’s canvasses were seized and some were included in the degenerate art exhibition of that year. He fled with his wife to Amsterdam, where he somehow managed to survive the war and German occupation, in the course of which the attempt was made to force him into the German Army, even though he was 60.

In 1948, they left Europe for the US where he renewed a successful career not just as an artist, but as a teacher. Far too short a career, as longstanding heart disease killed him 1950 at the age of 66 (my own age, so I can testify that it’s far too young to die).

According to his widow, he had been on his way to see one of his paintings in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

And who was that widow? Why, the Quappi of the painting. It seems that the affection it radiates isn’t simply art. It reflects a real sentiment.

Degenerate art? How could the failed painter Hitler have any idea of what was good or what wasn’t? And what a disgraceful abuse of power it was to oppress men like Beckmann, as it was to murder the Atocha lawyers.

The US gained by Germany’s attempt to crush Beckmann. As the Spanish Communist Party benefited from the right-wing attempt on some of its leaders. A lesson worth remembering at a time when many in America, or Britain, seem indifferent to the value of tolerating opposing views to one’s own.

My Halloween trip was full of poignant moments. Leaving a much-loved job. Seeing some much-loved family members. And admiring two works of art dedicated to the protection of much-loved freedoms.