Boris got it done. Or did he?

He got it done!

Boris showing the way forward. And the subtle approach he took

Boris got Brexit done. 31 January, 2020, Brexit Day, is a date to remember. It’s the day that Boris Johnson ended Britain’s 47-year membership of the EU.

Well, ‘done’ is perhaps a bit of an overstatement. It’s one thing for the husband to leave the house, suitcase in hand. It’s quite another to finalise the divorce arrangements, divide the property and start paying the alimony.

What makes it worse is that the lovely young thing from accounting for whom the husband precipitated the split may not turn out to be quite so accommodating as at first he convinced himself. She may, indeed, to be at least as demanding as the wife he left. Not perhaps a problem if you’re Rupert Murdoch, with the resources to meet pretty much any demand from a string of wives. Not so hot if you’re a middle-ranking executive whose income will have trouble stretching to cover both alimony and the mortgage on a luxury new apartment.

That’s when the new-found freedom starts to look a little expensively purchased.

Britain’s in that position. It’s walked out, head held high, nose in the air, daring the deserted spouse to do its worst. But far from being done, the really difficult part of Brexit starts now. The lawyers, in this case negotiators, are getting in on the act, and sharpening the knives.

Brexiters have always claimed that Britain would, somehow, be in the driving seat. It would dictate terms to the remaining 27 EU members, who would fall over themselves in their eagerness to sign a trade deal, on terms favourable to Britain, at the earliest opportunity.

Equally, the rest of the world would be beating a path to Britain’s door to do the same. In the lead would be the US, with Trump enthusiastic, anxious even, to provide his friend Boris with an agreement which might go so far as to sacrifice some US interests, such is his determination to see Boris right.

Meanwhile, the Faragists of the Left, or Lexiters as they call themselves (left-wing Brexiters), claim that leaving the EU is going to free up the country to look after its workers and its poor the way they’d like. Once away from the devious, conspiratorial capitalist club that is the EU, Britain will be free to usher its people into a sunlit, socialist upland.

Maybe all that will happen. If so, I will hold up my hand and admit I got things wrong. My fear is that Brexiters have been deluding themselves that the country is in the position of Rupert Murdoch when, in reality, it’s like the middle-ranking executive. And the US isn’t the demure assistant from accounting, anxious to do her new man’s bidding, she’s the former actress and model used to having all the best in life brought to her and thrown at her feet by admirers who are all but worshippers.

The EU 27 have already warned Britain that they see themselves calling the shots. A hugely favourable deal is on offer, but only on certain conditions: the UK must accept that it will be on a level playing field with the rest of Europe. That means maintaining the same standards concerning quality, state aid and workers’ rights. In other words, it means behaving as an EU member, with no say over the regulations it has to follow.

As for the US, it too is going to have its demands. Great deal, on condition that Britain accepts US food standards, drug prices and commerce regulations generally. Brexiters promised that Britain would be taking back control. It seems to me that, in reality, it will be a rule taker.

As for the socialist uplands, the results of the December general election show that this is at best a remote dream. The Conservatives are firmly in power now, and with a majority that may well see them through the next election too. Paradoxically, the Faragists of the Left blame Brexit for this, though it leaves them as keen as ever on Brexit itself.

I could, as I said, be wrong about all of this. That would be a huge relief. But I think that’s the task on Brexiters now: their job is to prove that they can deliver on their promises. And Lexiters have to show how they plan to guarantee better rights and living standards for the underprivileged they claim to represent.

The night of 31 January will be a time of celebration for them. They have the weekend to recover. Then the real work starts.

Let’s hope the hangover won’t be too awful. Because, sadly, it won’t just be Brexiters who suffer it. Sadly, I fear the rest of us will be paying the price of their self-indulgence too.

Great cooking: often best at home

It can be great to eat out in restaurants. The ambiance, the wine, the company. Sometimes the food.

But only sometimes. Because often food is far better cooked at home.

Now I say that after decades of enjoying the outstanding cooking produced by my wife Danielle. She amazes me, regularly, not just with her main dishes but also with those other accessory dishes, as it were, that enhance mealtimes.

For instance, for my birthday, she produced a favourite cake of mine, a marble cake. While, at the same time, also making yet another batch of outstanding marmalade.

Danielle's marmalade and her marble cake

Marble cake and Marmalade. Why, her cooking even alliterated.

The marmalade took some planning. The Valencian province is full of oranges – honestly, groves everywhere, right up to the start of the mountains – but few are the bitter ones, for which Seville is famous, and which alone guarantee proper orange marmalade. What’s more, even among those producers who have the bitter variety, an even smaller proportion grow their fruit organically. Since marmalade generally has peel in it, you need organic fruit if you don’t want to be eating large quantities of chemicals.

Fortunately, Danielle found a supplier in the fine old Roman city of Sagunto, up the coast, who delivered us 10 kilos of bitter, organically grown oranges, for this year’s marmalade production. She’s now converted all ten kilos into three varieties: straight marmalade, marmalade with ginger or marmalade with vanilla. All excellent.

But it’s not just Danielle’s cooking I’m thinking of. Our neighbour Isabel is quickly turning into a close friend. Her sister is a keen maker of the quince jelly known in Spain as membrillo, and excellent it is too. It goes extremely well with cheese, but I’m more than happy to eat it as it comes.

Membrillo: quince jelly, great with cheese, great on its own

Then there’s Paco. We met him through his wife Begonia. We met her through our dogs, who made friend with hers, in the Turia river park in Valencia. She looks after our dogs if we go away and can’t take them with us. It’s a task she takes on with delight, threatening us on each occasion not to give them back when we return.

Paella is a great favourite of mine, and Valencia is the homeland of that glorious dish. But the Valencian version isn’t made with seafood. You can get that other version in Valencia too, but the traditional paella Valenciana is made with chicken, rabbit and snails. I’m not a huge fan of snails as a delicacy but, hey, in a great paella I can handle them too.

We’ve had some great paellas here, including in the Albufera area, a huge area of flooded land south of the city, where most of the rice is grown. But no one has made a paella as good as Paco’s. Just moist enough, full of flavour, practically addictive. The invitation to share one with him was a culinary highlight.

Paco's paella Valenciana: exactly as it should be

Nor is all the home-made food we enjoy so much Spanish. Danielle has discovered, online of course, that in the town next to ours lives an Indian woman who, as she puts it, from time to time decides to make some delicacies that she offers for sale. Most recently, it was samosas. Boy were they good.

Our excellent local samosas, vegetarian and meat-filled

I’ve even got in on the act myself. Years ago, probably decades, I made a brief visit to Marseille, in southern France. The purpose of the visit has completely slipped my memory. It was something to do with business, but for the life of me I can’t remember who had invited me or why. What I shall never forget was the lunch I had. It was the first time I’d eaten fish ‘au gros sel’. The fish is entirely encased in coarse salt and then cooked in the oven.

To my astonishment, it’s anything but salty. On the contrary, the salt forms a crust over the fish. You crack the crust to get at the fish, and the skin just peels off, leaving the flesh, perfectly cooked but still deliciously moist. It’s a wonderful way to cook certain types of fish, particularly sea fish.

A week ago, I talked about Danielle’s purchase of sea bream, and a restaurateur’s advice to cook it in just that way, encased in coarse salt. Decades on from my first, and only, experience of that dish, but still remembering how appetising it was, I decided it was time to have a go.

With the restaurateur’s instructions clear in my mind, I had a go. And, wow, it was like being right back in Marseille all that time ago. The same flavours, the same consistency, the same pleasure.

Sea bream cooked in coarse salt
A lot better than it looks...

Yet another illustration of the principle that, however good restaurants may be, often the best place to eat is at home.

Your own or someone else’s.

How Italian sardines kept the left's wall solid

A triumph for the left it maybe wasn’t. But a colossal setback for the hard, populist right it certainly was. And that’s the next best thing.

Demonstration in Rome by the Sardines movement
Mobilising against Salvini and showing him the door in Emilia-Romagna

Matteo Salvini is the leader of the populist, right-wing Italian party, the League. Until last year, he was deputy Prime Minister in a coalition, but then he pushed his luck too far. He brought down the government in the hope of precipitating an election he looked set to win, but his coalition partners switched to working with Democratic Party (Partito Democratico, PD), roughly equivalent to British Labour, though substantially more centrist.

Salvini is on record committing that he would “defend the natural family founded on the union between a man and a woman”. He also declared that he was “sick of seeing immigrants in the hotels and Italians sleeping in cars”. Or again, “The problem with Islam is that it's a law, not a religion, and it's incompatible with our values, our rights, and our freedoms.

On Sunday, elections were held in Emilia-Romagna, the region around Bologna, in north-central Italy, a longtime bastion of the left. It is rather like the “red wall” on which Labour counted for decades in the North of England, and which suffered such heavy losses at the election in December: seats fell to the Tories that had been Labour since they were first created.

Curiously, the PD uses rather similar language. But it’s in a position to apply it in very different circumstances: after the results came in, they could declare that “the wall held”.

The governor of the region was re-elected, and with a small but absolute majority. Stefano Bonaccini took 51.4% of the vote, his nearest rival 43.6%.

Salvini had spent much of his time in recent months campaigning around Emilia-Romagna. He claimed he was about to ‘liberate’ the region. But after the elections, Bonaccini could reply that the region had already had its liberation, 75 years ago, at the end of the Second World War – since when, in one form or another, the left has been in unbroken power there.

To what does he owe his success?

To start with, the PD is no party of the hard left, and Bonaccini is certainly no Corbyn. He’s a moderate leftist who can attract voters from the centre, rather than frightening them into the arms of the right. That’s important when you’re trying to protect you wall from a determined onslaught by the hard right.

But something special came out of the campaign in Emilia-Romagna. It led to the emergence of the kind of mass, popular movement that Corbynism inspired. Known as the ‘sardines’, from their ability to fill public squares to capacity at their rallies, they generated a huge momentum for the left – or at least against the right – that had been the exclusive preserve of right-wing populism in the past.

That combination, a moderate leader who could draw votes from the centre, with a groundswell of popular support from below, proved unstoppable in Emilia-Romagna. Even more encouraging, in December the sardines brought together a rally of 100,000, in Rome, a long way from the region where the movement was born. It may begin to make itself felt at national level now.

It’s far too early to be thinking of victory over a vicious, far-right movement in Italy. The national government, where the PD is in an unstable coalition with the bizarre and declining 5-star movement, could fall and let Salvini in. But the result on Sunday does at least give a glimmer of hope that he can be kept out.

And there’s a lesson for other countries too. Combine electability in the leader with a dynamic, mass movement and you can get the far right on the run. That’s the elusive formula we need to find in the US, in the EU, in the UK.

In Britain, in particular, it means that we too have a historic chance. If we replace Corbyn by an electable leader of the Labour Party, and Keith Starmer, the front runner for the moment, seems to be just that; if that leader can then retain and sustain the movement that Corbynism built; then we too can in time drive out the hard-right government Corbyn let in last December.

The movement doesn’t have to chant “Oh, Keir Starmer”, like it used to chant “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”. There was something repellent about that cultish behaviour. Instead, it just needs to be as effective as the Sardines have been in Italy.

And working for a leader who can command real electoral support

More on the life of Immigrants in Valencia: cleaning the woods, revelling with the ‘Chinese’

It has been quite a learning experience, since we became immigrants in Spain and moved to a house near woodland. 

I had no idea how much work it takes to keep it clean and tidy. We’d been out once before, with a bunch of volunteers, picking up litter. On Saturday, we were in the La Vallesa woods near where we live, shifting branches and small trees.

Tidying up the woods at La Vallesa

Professionals had been in before us, with their chainsaws, thinning and pruning. Now we were doing the grunt work of shifting the branches down to paths where they could easily be reached by trucks with equipment to turn them into chips, to be fed back into the ground. Which sounds like a good plan.

Taking some of the trees out lets the others grow more strongly, with less competition for the scarce resources in this not hugely fertile soil. Then, using the felled branches to provide further feed, strengthens them still further. Besides, and this is one of the main aims, the organisers reckon that thinning the woods reduces the danger of disastrous fires. These woods have had plenty of them, even if nothing on the scale of Australia, but then that’s just the fate we’re trying to avoid.

The relatively small fire at La Vallesa in 2014

As has been the case every time we’ve joined a group around here in Valencia, the people we met were immensely welcoming and friendly. One of the organisations, of the six behind the initiative (which naturally meant six, mercifully brief, speeches at the beginning, as each had to have its say), one was an association providing mental health support for young people. Some of their users were there, and it was a great pleasure to see how much they enjoyed being out with the group and doing work that was so useful.

Some were helping us, but others were with the group of children who'd come with their parents and who were planting other trees, oaks and chestnuts, in the hope of introducing a little more diversity in the woods. 

That was the start of the day. In the evening, we went to see the celebration of the Chinese New Year in Valencia city itself. There’s quite a large Chinese community in the region, including a small but growing Chinatown with some excellent restaurants and shops, and an area out by the airport where Chinese companies line up along the road with their warehouses.

The Chinese New Year parade
working its way through the Valencia Chinatown

Still, the parade was by no means exclusively Chinese. I wouldn’t even say that Chinese people were in the majority. But the celebrations involved letting off firecrackers and fireworks around a parade which included at least a dozen groups of drummers, hammering their drums with tremendous energy and enthusiasm. Nothing could possibly appeal to Valencians more. Their great festival each year involves wandering the streets and letting off firecrackers, in two varieties: one that sounds like machinegun fire, and the other like heavy artillery.

The streets in which they do that are decorated with large sculptures in highly inflammable material. So, if it’s inflammable, what do you reckon they do with it? Yep, that’s right. On the last night they set fire to them, while filling the sky with fireworks and the ground, naturally, with yet more crackers.

A sculpture burning at the Valencia ‘Fallas’

With that background, Valencians were bound to take to the Chinese New Year with unbounded enthusiasm. As we discovered when we stood in the crowd in the little Chinatown to watch the parade go by. “Let’s get ourselves some Chinese costumes,” they must have said, “join an appropriate association and go out to beat our drums.” And they did just that, with obvious and infectious joy.

Valencian drummers in Chinese costume, enjoying the parade

A fun way to spend a day, in the woods in the morning, at the parade in the evening.

Afterthought

There were a few, very few, face masks being worn by people in the crowd at the Chinatown parade. I’m not quite sure what they were trying to protect themselves against. Did they think that merely being at a Chinese New Year event would expose them to coronavirus?

At any rate, I’m glad to say that, to my knowledge, there wasn’t a single case of infection from Wuhan at the celebrations in Valencia.

Thinking of choosing the hard left? You'll end up with the hard right

According to a leftie who keeps on at me on Twitter, the problem for Labour is that the 2019 election merely represents a continuation of its decline over many years now, with the 2015 result an anomalous blip in that downward trend.

Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn: architects of Labour misfortunes

That stance got me interested in taking a longer-term view of British politics. So I looked at percentages of the popular vote in eleven elections over the forty years between 1979 and 2019. Clearly, the relative strengths of the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, would be of interest. It struck me, though, that it might also be useful to set them in the context of the overall landscape of parties of the broad right (the Conservatives, but also the hard right parties of today or their earlier embodiments, Brexit Party, UKIP, the British National Party) or of the broad left (Labour, the LibDems and their earlier forms, the Alliance or Liberals, the Greens or Ecology Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru).

How the left (broadly) performs against the right
compared with Labour alone

What emerges is a curious picture. The ‘left’, in this broad definition (orange line), consistently outperformed the ‘right’ (black line) except in 2015. That surge for the right was principally down to UKIP’s 12.6%; the Conservative result was still an anaemic 36.8%.

With either proportional representation or some arrangement between the constituents of the ‘left’, the ‘right’ would have had a majority of the popular vote for only two years out of the last forty.

Now popular votes don’t necessarily translate into Parliamentary majorities. But if big enough, they can deliver victory, and the ‘left’ tends to be significantly ahead of the ‘right’ most of the time. That suggests that if Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens could have pulled together, the Tories would have been out of power for most of the last 40 years, instead of in power for 27 of them.

Interestingly, Labour alone (red line) only outpolled the combined right for three elections – unsurprisingly, the three when Blair was leader and in government. The leftie on Twitter, and others of his ilk there or on FaceBook, are also constantly assuring me that Blair was the lowest of the low and worthy of nothing but contempt. However, if we’re interested in keeping the Tories out of power, it’s worth remembering that he was the only leader in four decades able to ensure that Labour could do that on its own.

For the rest of the time, it would have had to work in partnership with others to oust the Tories. That’s clear from the second graph comparing Labour’s performance (red line) directly with the Tories’ (blue line). Again, only under Blair did Labour outperform the Tories. Otherwise, we’re consistently behind.

Labour performance alone against the Conservatives

Interestingly, the worst results are not under Corbyn. The worst of all, naturally, is 1983. Then Labour was led by Michael Foot, although Tony Benn, the deputy leader, was the main architect of our overwhelming defeat.

Since then, our lowest percentages of the popular vote came in 2010 and 2015. The Tories, however, were down then too, winning by small margins. Looking instead at the gap between Labour and the Tories, the worst elections of all were 1983 and 2019, Benn’s and Corbyn’s. Indeed, it is Corbyn’s greatest achievement to have gifted the Tories their second-highest vote share in that forty-year period. The only higher result was Maggie Thatcher’s first win in 1979.

The significance is that her victory was the first in a series. Johnson’s was the fourth in a row for the Tories, and the first time since the nineteenth century that any party has increased its Parliamentary representation in a fourth election victory.

Corbynists always said that Jeremy would do something remarkable. He has. Although I’m not sure this is what they meant.

This takes us to the nub of the problem for the hard left. One told me recently that whatever we learned from the 2019 election, we should not on any account ‘abandon the programme’. For Corbynites, no compromise is possible on Corbynist policies. That makes any hope of collaboration with other parties impossible. And that, as the last eleven elections demonstrate, means that the right would continue to outperform us.

Above all, with the kind of programme championed by Corbynites now or Bennites in 1983, we ensure not just a Tory win, but a colossal one. Why does this happen? Because Bennites and Corbynites want Labour to mirror their views, not those of the electorate. And the electorate has no time for their policies.

In the current leadership election, we need to choose a leader who reverses that. We need a leader who listens to the voters and goes to them with a programme that they can endorse, even though that means compromise, even giving up on some cherished policies. That way we can win back Labour voters. And if, in addition, we can compromise enough to attract other parties to our banner, why, we could kick the Tories out for a generation.

The alternative is to choose Bennite or Corbynite orthodoxy.

And we know what that gets us: the likes of Maggie or Boris.

Tragic Trenches, Brilliant Banter, Blazing Bonfire

The woods behind our house are one of my greatest sources of pleasure from living where we are in Spain. And I’m finding myself fascinated by my reading about the Spanish Civil War, when a struggling and democratic Spanish Republic was overthrown by a Fascist dictatorship that lasted nearly forty years. Finally, Danielle and I have developed a love for the sport of Nordic walking, where one goes stalking along with a stick in each hand, like skiing without skis or, come to that, snow, and watch walkers unencumbered by sticks go streaking past us.

What better pastime could there be than an activity that combines all three?

Our Nordic Walking group met in our village, La Cañada, the other day. Wonderfully convenient. We went striding through my favourite woods, to a spot adorned with the melancholy remnants of low cement constructions linked by trenches. We’d seen them before without identifying them for what they were: the final line of defence before Valencia of the beleaguered Spanish government, facing the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco.

Blockhouses and linking trenches
from the final line in Valencia's defeated struggle against Fascism

That terrible, literally last-ditch defence never took place. The decisive battle of the war, which lasted for nearly four months between July and November 1938, took place far away, on the river Ebro. The Fascist forces, with their Italian and German support, won a decisive victory and inflicted huge losses on the Republic. So when it came for Franco to move on Valencia, the fighting was all but over and the city surrendered without a last stand.

It was poignant to see those final, desperate defences that in the end proved futile, especially given what we know came next.

Fortunately, from there we headed for a place with far more cheerful associations: the ‘Three Oaks’ (‘Tres Robles’) restaurant in our village, La Cañada. We were served a fine paella, of the Valencian variety (with meat, not seafood), Valencia being the home and origin of that great dish. The company was good, the conversation lively and the atmosphere entertaining.

The Nordic Walking group in the Tres Robles

I particularly like the restaurateur himself. Danielle had bought some fish from the fine local fishmonger, one of the assets of La Cañada, and asked the restaurateur whether he would keep it in his fridge for us while we lunched.

This he agreed to do though, when I came to ask for it back, he carefully explained that, under Spanish law, anything left in a restaurant owner’s position for over an hour without being claimed back, was legally his. Since this is precisely the kind of banter I enjoy, I told him that I naturally assumed he’d already eaten the fish, or at any rate served it to his clients. At that point, he confided in me that he had not, since we were foreigners, and needed to be treated with unusual kindness.

Instead, he told me how I ought to cook it: in coarse salt. That’s something I’m keen to try next time, though on this occasion Danielle had already chosen the recipe and the ingredients for a traditional Spanish sea bream dish. Which was delicious. 

The restaurateur wished us every enjoyment of the fish, but on one condition: that we send the bones to Puigdemont.

For those who may not be following the debate over Catalan independence from Spain too closely, Carles (to give his name in its Catalan form) Puigdemont is the former president of the Catalan region (or nation, as campaigners for independence would describe it). He is currently living in exile in Belgium, since he faces trial and, given what has happened to those of his collaborators who weren’t lucky enough to get out, probably a long prison sentence if he returns.

In Valencia, the Catalan separatists are not much admired. In fact, I might go so far as to say they’re roundly loathed. Resented too.

“They view us as Southern Catalonia,” they tell me.

Indeed, it only surprises me that the restaurateur wanted Puigdemont sent so much as fish bones.

Puigdemont's share of our excellent sea bream

In the evening, we headed for a different village, up in the local mountains. It’s called Olocau, so the fact that I accept its existence proves conclusively that I am no Olocau denier.

They were due to celebrate the feast of Saint Anthony with a bonfire and fireworks on the main square. Actually, we’d earlier seen the wood piled up ready for lighting, and it was clear that what was going to happen there was going to be about as much like what I think of as a bonfire, as the Battle of the Ebro was like a bar brawl.

Which is why we went to see how it turned out.

We were there early and spent a while wandering around the village. Many of the houses have huge main doors, the kind you could drive a carriage through or at least a horse and cart, as I’m sure many used to in the past. You know, the kind of door which has a human-sized one set into it. As we wandered around in the night, we found several of them open, allowing us to see in to the brightly lit interiors. At several, we asked if we could take photos.

To our amazement, one family suggested we come inside to admire the tiled walls, the wooden beams, the homely fireplace and, in particular, the cellar with its oak wine barrels, the last trace of the occupation of the present owner’s father as a wine maker. The barrels are now empty.

“All but one,” he explained, “we top it up every year with the same wine from the same grape and enjoy it greatly.”

The Olocau house we visited
With a family member in one picture, and barrels in another

It struck me as typical of this region, with its warm-hearted openness to us immigrants, that they invited us into their home in this way. It made for an attractive end to a great day.

Spectacularly topped by the bonfire and fireworks. Which were just as dramatic as we were expecting.

Fireworks and the bonfire in Olocau

Two Popes, two Soldiers, two films to make a point of seeing

Historically, having two popes at the same time has tended to be a matter of conflict and bitterness. It happened between 1378 and 1417, when two men – and from 1410 three – all claimed to be the legitimate Pope and excommunicated the others.

So it’s curious to be living in a period in which there are, once more, two Popes at the same time. On this occasion, there is little bitterness and no conflict.

Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Bergoglio, Anthony Hopkins as Benedict XVI

Perhaps Netflix felt that it was in the keeping of the spirit of Christmas to release its film The Two Popes in the run up to that great Christian festival. It is based around the moment in 2013 when the then Pope Benedict XVI is replaced, although still alive, by Pope Francis. It wasn’t the first time a Pope had resigned but it was the first in six centuries.

The film starts earlier, with Cardinal Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, deciding to travel to visit Pope Benedict in Rome to press his resignation as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Strangely, he has no sooner bought his air ticket than Begoglio receives a summons from Benedict to come and see him. This neatly sets an atmosphere in which we feel that forces beyond the mere will of man are at work.

The key sequence of the film is a series of discussions between the two men in which they confront their views on the nature and role of the Catholic Church. Do you know the comedy series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister? If not, you should watch an episode or two (if you only see one, make it A Victory for Democracy, from season 1 of Yes, Prime Minister). The curious aspect of the series is that they are principally concerned with the relationship between three middle-aged, white men; there is no sex and no violence; but they produce some of the funniest and most effective TV comedy I have ever seen.

There is considerably less comedy in The Two Popes (though it has some wonderful funny moments). Like Yes, Prime Minister, however, it focuses on old, white men, brilliantly played by two outstanding Welsh actors, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, who swap reflections on themselves and their lives in a strangely gripping piece of cinema.

At the core is whether Benedict even has the right to step down, and whether Bergoglio can take over. The problem with Bergoglio is that he played a most unclear role in the dirty war in Argentina, when a military dictatorship was ruthlessly cracking down on its opponents. Torture and assassination were among its weapons of choice, and in failing to stand by two priests, Bergoglio may even have been complicit in their mistreatment. He repeatedly presents himself as a sinner, and he is chiefly thinking of this murky period in his past. But does that sin rule him out from becoming Pope or, on the contrary, make him all the more qualified to lead a Church whose main purpose is to deal with men and their sins?

It’s a fascinating film using a beautifully light touch to deal with some of the deepest questions that confront humanity.

If you have the time, it would also be worth reading the tie-in book for the film. Also called The Two Popes, it is by Anthony McCarten who wrote the film’s screenplay. It gives a more factual account of the events behind the film, making it clear, for instance, that the great conversation between the two central characters, vital for the drama of the film and truthfully conveying the conflicts between them and also within them, never actually happened.

Geroge MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman set out on their epic mission

Another great film recently released is 1917. It is brilliantly directed by Sam Mendes and based at least in part on a fragment he heard from his grandfather. It tells the story of two young soldiers given a challenging assignment in the British sector of the First World War Western Front, to carry a message across territory recently vacated by German forces (or possibly not) to a unit which, without it, might launch an assault that would lead to its destruction in a carefully prepared German trap.

Sam Mendes uses long takes, giving the impression that the film has been shot in a single take, to drive the action forward with sustained intensity. It recounts just twenty-four hours of time. That’s the ‘unity of time’ of classical theatre, and it has a powerful focusing effect on the action. That is accentuated by the unrelenting concentration on the messengers, excellently played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, in their race against the clock.

It isn’t by any means a standard First World War film. There is violence, but it is limited and certainly not gratuitous. Much of the action takes place outside the trenches, and even when inside, it is mostly travelling along them, the journey being the central action of the film as a whole. Above all, it is a classic epic, of a mission undertaken against terrible obstacles. As well as having many powerfully poignant moments, it is breathlessly compelling from beginning to end.

Two fine films. And one fine book. All worth the time they take.

The Rebecca trap

Momentum is a faction inside the British Labour Party, with its own officers and policy lines which it works to get the whole of Labour to adopt.

It has just issued a document to all its members, to ‘consult’ them on which candidates to back in the forthcoming elections for Labour leader and deputy leader. It did have a recommendation to make, so essentially the invitation was to make a completely free choice from among the available candidates, just so long as they choose Rebecca Long-Bailey for leader and Angela Rayner for deputy.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbyn continuity candidate for Labour leader

There was little surprise in Momentum’s ‘recommendations’, the euphemism we like to use for instructions. Long-Bailey is the continuity candidate, the one who can be most counted on to follow in the steps of the current leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Momentum was essentially set up to back Corbyn as leader of Labour.

Just in case you haven’t been following British politics closely in recent months, Mr Corbyn is the man who took Labour to defeat in a general election in 2017, and to disastrous defeat in 2019. With the full support of Momentum and its members on both occasions. Support which shows no sign of flagging, it should be added, as they scrabble around finding others to blame for the loss.

One of the major scapegoats Momentum has identified is the Media. Mostly Tory, it’s true that the media generally gave him a torrid time. It has to be said that Corbyn fed the media plenty of ammunition to use against him. Probably the most serious was his failure to take a clear position on the question that has most troubled Britain for the last four years, Brexit. He has equivocated, trying to appeal to each side and losing the trust of both, as the election results showed.

This kind of behaviour has allowed the media outlets ill-disposed towards him to run story after story alleging that he was unprincipled, gutless and untrustworthy.

The last thing we need is a continuity candidate who continues that kind of performance. So it’s sad to discover that even before she became a candidate for the leadership, Rebecca Long-Bailey has been engaging in what, at best, we can only call a little embellishing of her track record. Embellishment it has proved frighteningly easy to trash.

In 2014, she claimed that she had “been working as a solicitor with the NHS in Manchester for 10 years” when she had only been qualified for just over six years.

In her leaflet for the 2015 election, she stated that, “I studied law and became a solicitor for the NHS to help defend our health service”. Now, the words don’t actually say that she was employed by the NHS, but don’t they seem to suggest that? And when she claimed to have been helping to “defend our health service”, doesn’t that sound as though she had been going into battle to keep our hospitals and doctors’ surgeries going and public?

The reality is that she was working for a legal firm in Manchester and did some commercial work for the NHS as client. She was drawing up documents for NHS contracts and NHS estates. A courtroom champion of our great national institution? That she wasn’t.

To some extent I don’t particularly care about her distortions. MPs are as capable of being petty and grasping as all the rest of us. In business, I’ve dealt with people who lied on their CVs. It’s reprehensible but not that unusual.

I suppose it’s rather harder to stomach from members of the Corbyn faction who are always claiming to be so much more honest than the rest of us. Frankly, though, the hypocrisy may be unattractive, but I can live with it too.

No, the real problem is that these falsifications were so easy to disprove. And the right-wing press is moving in already. The Sunday Times has already run an exposé. Imagine if Long-Bailey actually became leader. What a meal they’d make of her!

Besides, if she engages in such shallow and easily discovered deceptions now, what would she do as leader? Would she, like Corbyn, keep feeding the Tory press the material they want? Would she too forfeit any trust the electorate might feel towards her and go down to yet another massive loss, pointing to bad press as her excuse?

And what of Momentum? What are they up to?

• Have they not yet had enough of backing losers?
• Have they developed a taste for seeing Labour routed and the Tories running the show?
• Have they decided they prefer having someone they can control in the top job than to win an election and have to deliver the socialist policies they’re happier just to talk about?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. All I can see is that they’re cheerfully trying to walk their followers into the Rebecca trap, eyes wide shut. And I just hope that there are enough Labour members with their feet on the ground to say, “no thanks, not that trap, not again”.

The unrepentant Corbynite

There’s a story that US President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk, “the buck stops here”. It seems it isn’t entirely true. A friend gave him the sign and he put it up for a while, but later removed it. 

I don’t know whether getting rid of it was symbolic of anything.

The notion’s a good one, though. It says that ultimate responsibility for what an organisation does, in this case the US government, lies with the person at the top. They can claim credit for much that goes right but the counterpart is that they have to take the blame for most of what goes wrong.

Not so, it seems, within the Jeremy Corbyn faction of the Labour Party.

Corbyn facing his electoral debacle: getting ready to move into denial mode

You know those doomsday cults that regularly announce the ending of the world? They usually give a date for when it’s going to happen and even a time of day. Then it doesn’t happen (so far, at least) and they usually come up with some excuse for why it didn’t: another reading is possible of the relevant Biblical text, or maybe more than one date is possible and we’ve simply moved on from one of them to the next, or whatever.

Anything, at any rate, rather than admit they were talking cattle excrement.

What’s true of a religious cult is true, apparently, of this political one as well.

Corbynists have been assuring us for years that Corbyn was set for a win in the forthcoming general election, possibly even a big win, and the consequence would be a radical transformation of British society in a socialist direction. Those of us who were a little more sceptical were invited to go forth and multiply, and courteously described as red Tories or even – and I’m told by one of them that this is the most damning political insult available today – Blairites.

This is curious because, if the mission of the Labour Party is to speak for the voiceless in British society, to protect the interest of workers, of the unemployed, of the sick, the very young, the very old, the poorest and neediest, then Tony Blair actually did them some good. He did so by simple dint of actually getting into office, where he could lead a government that hugely improved the health service, for instance, and took a lot of children out of poverty.

Corbyn, on the other hand, by failing twice to win an election, has done no good for any of those people. Indeed, by gifting the Conservatives a victory in an election that was eminently winnable, positively helped to inflict more damage on them.

I say this, by the way, as a Labour Party member who did not back Blair to be leader and would certainly not back him now. I simply state facts: Blair achieved more for those Labour is intended to protect than Corbyn ever did or, now, ever will.

Still, facts apparently don’t need to stand in the way of a good argument. And Corbyn has assured us that he won the argument in the election campaign. Just not the election itself.

Make of that what you can.

Ah, well. There’s some satisfaction, I suppose, when things turn out as you expect. That’s true even if people live down to expectations rather than up to them.

I’ve listened to and read Corbynists for four years now. I’ve been told again and again that he’s hugely popular, as can be seen from the young people chanting “oh, Jeremy” at his rallies. I’ve seen carefully constructed arguments for optimism whose authors point to the numbers of young people, supposedly pro-Corbyn, registering to vote, while old people, often anti-Corbyn, leave the electoral register (for the cemetery); they point to the number of women who have seen their pension entitlement pushed back and can therefore be counted to rally to the Guru; they point to the popularity in the polls of individual policies proposed by Corbyn and ignore his massive unpopularity in those same polls.

Why, I’ve seen analyses even in the last few months, showing that all these factors point to an electoral win for Labour, even perhaps a landslide.

The fervour of Corbynists’ beliefs left me fully dreading their reaction to the long-predicted electoral debacle of 12 December. I sadly expected the worst of them: denial of any responsibility and a feverish pursuit of scapegoats to blame instead. 

Unfortunately, the unrepentant Corbynites have entirely lived down to my expectations of them. The buck, for them, certainly didn’t stop with the man at the top. It might have been more decent of them to show a little humility now that their doomed project has failed so dismally. They might have admitted their errors, if only to ensure that they don’t repeat them. They might have stopped talking down to the rest of us, as though events had fully vindicated their baseless beliefs instead of refuting them so comprehensively.

It would have been more decent. But it isn’t going to happen.

A hard-won government in Spain can teach us a lot

It’s been a long haul, but Spain at last has a confirmed government again.

That matters to me particularly because we now live in Spain, land of our Brexit exile. Others, though, might also find much of relevance in the difficult road that got us here, littered as it was with obstacles, many of them self-inflicted.

Pedro Sánchez addresses the Cortes

Let’s start with the positives.

Spain has its first coalition government since the end of the Franco dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in 1978. That brings it into line with most countries in Europe, where government always requires negotiation between parties and compromise to reach an agreement that commands broad support. It’s not the case in Britain, of course, where Members of Parliament are still elected by simple majorities in individual constituencies. As a result, parties with minority support nationally can command a huge majority in Parliament. As is the case today.

I’m not sure that this leads to better government.

Pedro Sánchez, now the confirmed Prime Minister of Spain after holding the role in an acting capacity since last April, and leader of the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), has agreed a joint programme for progressive government with Pablo Iglesias, of the anti-austerity, harder-left Unidas Podemos Party (UP). That has kept the right well away from power, even though the far-right Vox now has a major parliamentary presence.

You read that right. A joint programme for progressive government. And the hard right out of power.

How many, in Britain, the United States, Poland, Hungary, Turkey or Brazil would give their eye teeth to have such a government? And how many, particularly in Britain, the United States, Poland, Turkey or Brazil would like to see the far right well away from government?

So, now the negatives. 

The Spanish left nearly didn’t pull the trick off, and its worst enemy was itself. As in Britain and the United States especially.

That joint programme between PSOE and UP was something that could have been agreed months ago. Say, straight after the General Election in April, which left the PSOE as the biggest single party in the Spanish Parliament – the Cortes – with 123 seats, while UP had 42. PSOE was up significantly, while UP had lost seats, but at least between them, they had 165 MPs, just 11 short of the 176 needed for a majority in the 350-seat Cortes.

They couldn’t reach agreement. After six months of negotiation, new elections had to be called in November. Both parties lost seats, three in the case of the PSOE, though it was still the biggest party in Parliament, while UP lost seven. Now their task had become far harder, since they’re now 21 behind the magic number for a majority.

Far worse still was the surge in support for the quasi-fascist Vox, which shot up from 24 to 52 seats to become the third biggest parliamentary presence.

The PSOE-UP failure to compromise before the November election meant that when they finally did, the two parties of the left were working from a weaker position, and against a far more vigorous opposition. Note and learn, British Labourites or American Democrats: you risk it all when you decide to dig your heels in and refuse to budge on principle. Insisting on doing it all may leave you unable to do anything at all. The price of intransigence can be a Trump or Boris government.

Sánchez has at least avoided that fate, but by the tightest of margins. He couldn’t win his investiture on Sunday (yes, Spanish MPs can work on Sundays) when an absolute majority was required, in the first vote; on Tuesday however, with the bar lowered to requiring simply more Yes votes than Noes, he squeaked through, by just two votes with eighteen abstentions.

Those abstentions were won through hard negotiation. Sánchez had to make agreements with eight parties, covering 313 different commitments, to secure those abstaining votes. Not all those commitments are compatible with each other. Government, with so much to deliver to keep minor parties at least neutral, and up against such a powerful right, isn’t going to be easy.

This is particularly true in the specific circumstances of Spain. Some of the commitments Sánchez has had to make concern the status of Catalonia and its desire for independence. That’s something he can’t grant and retain his support in the rest of Spain; it’s going to be challenging to give the Catalans enough, short of independence, to keep Tuesday’s abstainers in line.

With a powerful and ferocious right-wing Opposition, he and Iglesias are going to have torrid time implementing their programme. It’s going to be enthralling to watch. I’m at least glad they have the opportunity to try – after the crushing defeat of the British left in December, being able to do as much as Sánchez can in Spain seems a distant dream.

There were some good moments in the investiture debate.

One of the most moving was the standing ovation offered to Aina Vidal, who turned up to vote despite undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer.

Aina Vidal stands to acknowledge the ovation for her presence

Another was Sánchez’s reference to one of the iconic figures of the Second Spanish Republic, the one overthrown by Franco. Manuel Azaña told his compatriots, “we are all children of the same sun and tributaries of the same river”.

In Britain and the US, I can’t help feeling that we’re all children of the same deeply disrupted climate system, and tributaries to the same traffic jams.

Maybe the Spanish example can help us towards a more encouraging future.

Letrice in Beirut, or how we like to turn a bad situation into something far worse

It was Paris on the Mediterranean. It was sea-bathing in November, it was visiting Roman ruins in a blouse, it was sitting with colleagues on a sunny café terrace when at home everyone was indoors or wrapped in coats and scarves. It was no wonder her visit to Beirut left my mother, Leatrice, with indelible memories that she was still sharing with me 70 years later, not long before she died.

Leatrice in Baalbek or at the beach
She was a pretty 24-year old, but maybe already a little uptight...

It was 1948. A single trip abroad as a child had been followed by the thirties in London, then the air raid warnings and the bombs of the war, then the harsh winter of 1946, the bomb sites on every street, the rationing, the general gloom of the past-war years.

Leatrice, as I’ve mentioned before, got out just as soon as she could. In 1948, she was working as a typist for UNESCO in Paris. It organised a conference in Beirut and, to be a success in those pre-Word processing days, a conference had to have a legion of low paid assistants along, to record the words of the important or self-important, and to produce the documents without which no one would believe they’d actually been doing very much.

For Leatrice, it was a sheer joy to be there, to see the sights, to go for a swim, to visit the ruins at Baalbek, to enjoy the pavement life. I was reminded of that when going through another bundle of old photos, as part of a task that is probably going to take most of my retirement even if I have a long one, and came across more pictures of that trip.

What made the pictures all the more poignant was that I was looking at them just as I’d learned that Donald Trump, in what passes for wisdom in that orange head of his, had decided that the best action he could take in response to new threats from Iran, was to launch a drone-borne missile strike to assassinate the senior Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Now Soleimani was a ruthless autocrat and his hands are stained with the blood of thousands killed in combat or simply murdered in cold blood. The world is absolutely is arguably better off without him in it. But the same could be said of Saddam Hussein: we’re better off freed of him, or at least we would have been, had what followed in his wake not been far worse. Indeed, one of the most toxic consequences of bringing down Saddam was the rise of Soleimani.

It seems we don’t like learning from our mistakes (or, for those like Trump, perhaps we’re unable to learn), and keep thinking that a quick fix – the invasion of Iraq, the murder of Soleimani – is likely to deliver a long-term solution.

The reality, of course, is that Iran will avenge the death. It may do so directly itself, or it may use a proxy force, perhaps in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia once more, perhaps in Syria attacking Israel, or indeed perhaps through its client militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Whichever option they eventually select, it’s going to make the Middle East a still more tragic region than it already is.

Especially as whatever action they take, there will almost certainly be further retaliation from the US or its clients in Israel or Saudi Arabia. So things will ratchet up. Which, you may remember, is rather how things went after the invasion of Iraq.

Looking at my mother’s Beirut photos reminds me how far we’ve come.

Clockwise: the venue for the UNESCO conference;
Leatrice third from left at a pavement café; a street scene; the seafront.

Leatrice agreed with the description of Beirut as ‘Paris on the Mediterranean’. She regarded it as a sliver of paradise. But that was before the US and Russia, Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, to say nothing of its own internal conflicts, started interfering the life out of it.

I’d like to say that they’ve turned a paradise into a purgatory, except that purgatory is supposed to be where souls are purged ready to enter heaven. Sometimes, the Middle East looks more like a soul condemned to hell, from which there is no hope of escape. Certainly, none while its destiny is being set by Trump or Soleimani, Netanyahu or Assad, Putin or Mohammad bin Salman.