Enjoying a little justice done

Would you like a little good news? After all, there’s not that much of it around. We ought to make the most of what there is. 

A man from a village not far from where we live in the Valencian Region of Spain, Xirivella (over to you to find out how to pronounce, bearing in mind that it’s not the same in Castilian Spanish and in Valencian), has just been awarded a small compensation payment. Just 4000 euros, as it happens. It would only take four months to earn that on the minimum wage in Spain. 

The man is Antoni Ruiz. And the compensation was for the time he spent in gaol in the dying days of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. That time was 94 days, not that much less than the four months a minimum-wage earner would take to earn the same amount. But Ruiz declares himself more than satisfied with the decision, because monetary and symbolic values are different, and in his case, it’s the symbol that matters far more than the money.

What was the crime for which he was imprisoned?

Well, it wasn’t anything most of us today would regard as a crime at all. In fact, it was something most of us today would regard as a human right.

It was for being gay.

I’ve argued before that Franco wasn’t really a true Fascist. He was much more of a Francoist, an obsessive narcissist who believed that he had a God-given entitlement to power, and a divine mission to rescue his country. Rather like, say, Donald Trump. Franco just happened to share a lot of his views with Fascists. Again, rather like Donald Trump, come to think of it.

Fascists, rather like their greatest enemies, Communists, are totalitarians. What puts the ‘total’ in ‘totalitarianism’ is the sense that everyone, absolutely everyone, should believe the same things the totalitarian does. What’s more, those beliefs apply just as much in the private as the public sphere. And the totalitarian has the right to pursue you right into your private life to make sure that you’re complying, using police with practically unlimited powers, the Gestapo, the KGB or, in Franco’s case, the armed police or ‘Greys’, from the colour of their uniforms.

A friend of mine, who was an adolescent at the end of the dictatorship, has told me about how he and his friends would behave when they met up in public places, perhaps for a little underage drinking. Unlike their opposite numbers in the democracies, who otherwise behaved the same way, they’d have to post one or two of their group to keep an eye out for the ‘Grises’, so they could all vanish into different side streets if they ever showed up. Being caught wasn’t funny.

Poor old Ruiz made the mistake of coming out, at 17, to his family. 

A nun who found out demonstrated her commitment to the gospel of love that is central to Christianity, by denouncing him to the police. They came hammering on his door at 6:00 in the morning and carted him off into custody. 

He admits he didn’t spend long in custody. In a regime which in its early days was entirely capable of shooting people it regarded as opponents, or condemning them to thirty-year gaol sentences, and which was still shooting people just months before Franco’s death, I suppose Ruiz was lucky things were no worse. Even so, it was, as he says, a ‘bad time’, which he spent surrounded by common criminals, even serious ones, including murderers. 

He lived that way, let’s not forget, as a man innocent of any genuine crime.

To see the Spanish state compensating him, even if it’s nearly half a century on, is a welcome sight. Particularly at a time when there are plenty of sad indications that the pendulum is swinging back the other way in many countries.

For instance, when Fascism fell in Italy in 1945, one of its servants, Giogio Almirante, set up the Italian Social Movement to keep the Duce’s mission going. Decades on, following many mergers and splits and changes of name, one of its inheritor organisations is Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia). Those, by the way, are the first words of the Italian national anthem, and the name is yet another example of that infuriating habit the far right has, of grabbing for itself the symbols of a nation to which many people belong without necessarily agreeing with them.

Homophobes' rogue gallery:
Franco, Mussolini, Meloni

The present leader of that party is Giorgia Meloni. Back in 2019, she declared:

Yes to the natural family, no to LGBT lobbies! Yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology!

You see what I mean about totalitarian? An appeal to the ‘natural family’ is a call to maintain the ban on gay marriage in Italy. But legalising gay marriage doesn’t make it obligatory. No one is saying that allowing gays to marry need affect in any way the lives of other, straight, people.

All the ban does is damage gay people. But that’s what totalitarianism does. It punishes difference, forcing others to comply with the majority view.

What makes this so sad and so topical is that Giorgia Meloni is likely to be Italy’s Prime Minister in a few weeks. That will strengthen the homophobic axis in Europe that already includes such nations as Hungary and Poland.

Ah, well. I said that good news was a bit of a rare commodity at the moment. So let’s celebrate the long-delayed recognition of the injustice Antoni Ruiz suffered. 

And hope he gets some fun spending his 4000 euros.

Downhill with the Tories

There’s a special kind of novel or film that I always think of as a ‘descent into hell’. It’s where a central character, or group of characters, is confronted by a series of decisions, each of which is more desperate than the one before, and each of which instead of rescuing them only sucks them more deeply into whatever fate they’re rushing towards, all the faster the harder they try to escape it. 

You know the kind I mean? 

I feel that’s where Britain is these days.

Look at our last four Prime Ministers: David Cameron; Teresa May; Boris Johnson; and now, not quite on the stage, but waiting to sweep onto it, Liz Truss.

Britain’s road to Hell is paved with Tory Prime Ministers

Talk about a downward slope. Another way of looking at that sequence is to add a few adjectives: Cameron, lazy and incompetent; May incompetent and uninspiring; Johnson, lazy, incompetent and corrupt; Truss, incompetent, ruthless and entirely disconnected from reality. I keep thinking “surely the Tories can’t come up with anyone worse than this character” and then, somehow, they do. It only leaves me wondering how bad the Prime Minister they foist on us has to be before Tory voters start to ask themselves, “are we actually voting for the right party?”

This got me thinking of a story I’ve always liked. It’s about Cornet George Joyce. 

Think way, way back, to the middle of the seventeenth century. England in those days had a ruler as hopeless and detached from reality as Liz Truss is today. He was King Charles I. With the same mentality as Cameron and Johnson, he believed it was quite simply his entitlement to have power, his and his alone, because he was king by divine right, having been chosen by God. And what greater entitlement is there than that?  

Today the God is Mammon, but the thinking's the same.

When King Charles started throwing his weight around, he quickly found himself up against his Parliamentarians, who were perfectly happy with monarchy, but preferred to think of Kings as leaders, working in partnership with Parliament. Things degenerated so far that Civil War broke out, the first of three of them, because why settle for one civil war if you can have a whole trio?

After he’d lost the first of those wars, Charles fell into the hands of Parliament who took him prisoner. Which doesn’t mean he was thrown into some noisome jail or anything. He was held at Holdenby (pronounced Home-bi) House which, as the name suggests, was a desirable residence offering fine living in the pleasant countryside of Northamptonshire. To give you an idea, these days it advertises itself as the ideal wedding venue.

Now, one of the things that had annoyed people about the King, was that he insisted that they all worship as Anglicans. This was a time when the faith you belonged to mattered much more than today, and the King knew that the only faith that had got things right was Anglicanism.

Most people also believed that God decided the outcome of important ventures, in particular wars. The victor had God on his side, they felt. Which was a bit awkward for the King, since he’d lost. I imagine he just put it down to God punishing him for some bad behaviour or other, and that all he needed to do was be better and try harder to win next time around. Hence the Second Civil War which wasn’t far off.

Parliament, of course, was over the moon. They’d won. So God was obviously on their side. Which was only as most Members of Parliament expected, since Parliament was dominated by Presbyterians, and they were just as convinced that they had it right as Charles was about Anglicans.

What’s more, they were as keen as he was to impose a single religion on everyone. They only disagreed on the flavour of Protestantism that everyone ought to adopt (Catholicism was right out of the question, of course). They just knew it was time for everyone to be Presbyterian and, as experience in Scotland and Massachusetts would also show, Presbyterians were firm believers in freedom of religion, just as long as they were the only ones enjoying it.

Now, here’s the problem.

While God may have chosen the victorious side, the instrument for that victory had been the Army. Probably the best army England ever produced. That’s the New Model Army that Parliament had somehow magicked out of nothing.

The thing about the New Model Army is that it included men of many different sects. Protestants, sure, but many different kinds of Protestants. Not all Anglicans, as the King favoured, nor all Presbyterians, as preferred by Parliament. There were Quakers there. Baptists. Anabaptists. And lots of others.

They’d done the fighting, they reckoned, and saw no reason why Parliament should trample on their religious rights. The leaders of the New Model Army began to think it was time to flex their own muscles a bit. In particular, they decided that, in the power play then starting, it might be better to have the captive king under their control rather than Parliament’s.

George Joyce
Later, when the former Cornet had made it to Colonel

That’s where Cornet George Joyce made his brief irruption onto the stage of history.

It was he who turned up at Holdenby House, tasked by the New Model Army to explain to the King that, with all due respect and everything, it was felt that it would be good to move him to a new place of custody where he could be looked after to the far higher standards provided by the Army rather than Parliament. 

A Cornet was the lowest rank of officer in the cavalry. No king, and least of all a king so sure of his own unrivalled authority, took orders from a Cornet.

“Where’s your commission?” asked the King.

Cornet Joyce looked over his shoulder, at the 500 cavalrymen behind him. “You need more commissions than that?”, he seemed to be saying.

Charles went along with him quietly.

Now, I don’t like military dictatorship, and the role of the New Model Army came far too close to military dictatorship for my taste. I also don’t like bullying and pointing 500 armed men at one man strikes me as pretty much a textbook case of bullying. But the Cornet and his cavalrymen were bullying a king, a man imbued by his own sense of entitlement and fully capable of behaving brutally towards anyone he perceived as an obstacle to his will.

Think Boris Johnson with a crown.

Got that nightmarish picture?

If bullying can ever be justified at all, it strikes me that it could hardly be directed at a more deserving character. More deserving, that is, than Charles I or any of Cameron, May, Johnson or Truss. Choose whichever you want. You won’t have picked anyone undeserving.

I’d love to see Cornet Joyce return in our days, to conduct these four gently to the exit, and Johnson at least, to the entrance of a gaol.

Why, Joyce could even repeat the words of his ultimate big boss in the Army, Oliver Cromwell, to some equally useless politicians of his own day:

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Ah, well. One can always dream.

When Jews win the debates. But not the politics

Wall painting of a great Jewish scholar
Rabbi Moshe ben Rahman, ‘Ramban’

There’s a story about a Pope who decided that he wanted to turn Italy into a uniformly Christian, by which he meant Catholic, nation. He warned the Jews that they were going to have to convert or leave and gave them just three days to do it.

The Jewish community was, naturally, appalled.

“At least give us a chance to debate the issue with you,” they argued, “to see if we can make a case against our being forced to leave or convert.”

The Pope decided this was a reasonable demand and agreed to the debate.

Unfortunately, though the rabbi the Jewish community selected was the wisest scholar it had in Italy, he spoke neither Italian nor Latin. The Pope spoke neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. So it was decided they would conduct their debate in silence.

The great day dawned and it was the Pope who opened the debate. 

First, he held up three fingers.

The Rabbi replied by holding up one and wagging it. 

The Pope waved his hands around in a great circle.

The Rabbi pointed at the ground.

The Pope pulled out a chalice of communion wine and a wafer.

The Rabbi pulled out an apple.

“I concede,” cried the Pope, “he is too strong for me. He wins. The Jews may stay in Italy without converting.”

That evening, the Cardinals asked the Pope to explain what had happened.

“First I held up three fingers to show the great power of the doctrine of the Trinity. But he replied by waving one finger to admonish me and say that God is one and indivisible and the same for both our faiths. 

“Next, I moved my arms around to say that the Lord sees all we do. But he pointed to the ground to say that he stands with us as well as seeing us, all his creatures, Jew as much as Christian.

“Finally, I brought out the wine and wafer to signify Christ’s sacrifice to redeem all mankind. But he showed an apple to denote original sin and to say that we are all equally tainted and our sight clouded by it, so only the Lord can guide us through this vale of tears. And I conceded, since he had an answer to everything I advanced.”

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Jewish community had visited the Rabbi to ask him what he thought had happened.

“Well,” he said, “first he held up three fingers to say we had just three days to comply. And I shook one at him to say there was no way we were doing that.

“Then he moved his hands around to say he wanted us all gone. And I pointed to the ground to say we were staying right here.”

“And then what happened?” asked a community leader.

“Why, then we both got our lunch out.”

I suppose that’s a moderately funny joke. But I find the story of a real debate, one that happened, much more fun. Though, also, rather sadder.

We live near Valencia in Spain and all around the city we see the motif of a bat, including on the coat of arms of the Valencia football team. This commemorates an almost certainly mythical incident in the career of King James I of Aragon. He’s still venerated, at least among people who venerate the triumph of the Catholic Church, as the liberator of Valencia from the Moors.

The Moors had given Valencia great wealth, superb irrigation systems and some wonderful culture. Have you visited the town of Anna and its Arab palace with its extraordinary Moorish decorations? It demonstrates that liberation is a questionable term in this context.

It seems that at one point in his campaign, James I was asleep in his tent, when a flock of bats (do they come in flocks?) flew through it. That woke him up, as it would me. This was a good thing, though, because it meant he was awake and ready to respond a few minutes later when the Arabs launched a surprise attack on his camp.

Hence the bat motif.

The Valencia Football Club logo
complete with James I’s bat

Still, that’s not what matters about James I here.

From the 20th to the 24th of July 1263, James I organised what came to be known as the Disputation of Barcelona. The initiative came from a Dominican Friar, Pablo Christiani, a Jew who’d converted to Christianity. He claimed he could prove the truth of Christianity from references to Jewish texts and asked to debate the matter with a leading Jewish scholar to make his case.

The Superior of Christiani’s order was also the King’s confessor, so he was able to get the debate set up.

Against him was an outstanding Jewish scholar, Moshe ben Nahman, also called Ramban or Nahmanides.

Christiani argued that there were Talmudic texts that predicted the arrival of the Messiah, and that their predictions fitted the story of Jesus. Clearly, Jesus must have been the Messiah they were expecting. But Ramban replied that the sages who’d written those texts lived after Jesus had died. If they had believed he was the Messiah, and written their texts with him in mind, how could they possibly have remained Jews? They would surely have converted to Christianity. The fact that they didn’t, proved that they did not identify Jesus as the Messiah.

Much more powerful still is what he said about the nature of the Messiah. His arrival was to herald the start of a period of peace and justice. Could anyone looking around the world since Christ’s time believe that such an age had started? What’s worse, among the people disturbing any hope of peace and justice, the Christians themselves were the most warlike of all.

James was so impressed by Ramban’s arguments that he awarded him 300 gold coins. He even attended a Jewish service in the Major Synagogue of Barcelona, an unprecedented event anywhere in Europe in the Middle Ages. The real victory of the Rabbi in a real debate with a Christian scholar strikes me as far more amusing than the joke I started with.

Now for the sad bit. The Dominicans didn’t give up. They claimed that they’d won the debate and, when Ramban published a transcript of the debate with a record of his conversation with the King, they moved to have him expelled. James I gave way and Ramban was forced into exile. 

He’d had the best arguments, but the army was with the Dominicans.

Christiani went on trying to force Jews to convert, with little success. But he did persuade the Pope to order the censorship of the Talmud, the central text of Jewish law and theology. Even in James I’s realm, passages of the Talmud deemed offensive to Christianity would be cut out.

As for Ramban, he was forced to leave his native country. But at least he was able to travel to what was then Palestine. Once there, he founded a Synagogue in Jerusalem. Called the Ramban Synagogue, it’s still functioning to this day.

Which feels like a bit of a victory. After all, what monument records the doings of Pablo Christiani?

The Ramban Synagogue in Jerusalem

Assumption of birthdays

August is usually hot up here in the Northern hemisphere, and this year global warming is making it worse (are there really still people around who deny that?). So it’s a boon to have a holiday in the middle of the month.

That’s something the Catholics got right. Countries where they determine holidays get the 15th of August off. A fine tradition to celebrate a key moment.

It’s the feast of the Assumption. That’s when Mary, mother of Jesus, is said to have been ‘assumed’ – taken into – heaven. The Catholic Church has never resolved the fundamental quandary behind this event, one I’m sure gives you just as many sleepless nights as it gives me. That’s whether Mary died first and her soul rose to heaven, or she was taken into paradise bodily while alive. A harrowing conundrum.

In any case, 15 August has always had a significance that matters more to me than the Assumption. It’s the birthday of Yetta, my maternal grandmother. 

Yetta was my favourite grandmother. That’s not because I disliked my paternal one, Eleanor, but because we saw her little so I barely knew her. Eleanor was the daughter of a Serb and an Englishwoman, which strikes me as attractively exotic, but I know little else about her heritage. As for her life events, only a couple of anecdotes spring to mind.

She once visited my grandfather, her husband, in hospital after he’d been wounded in the First World War. For reasons that were never made clear to me, perhaps because they weren’t clear to anyone else, she was convinced that he’d lost a leg. I’d love to have witnessed the scene when, having given up on persuading her by rational argument, he threw back the bed clothes on his hospital bed to show her two legs, safely in place and encased in pyjamas.

Eleanor with my father during WW2
with an unidentified third companion

The other story I liked dates from May 1940. My father was the only one of her family with her as she prepared to flee her house in Brussels before the city fell to the advancing Nazi armies. He’d loaded their cases into a taxi outside their house. Impatient to get going, he was calling for her to get a move on since they were making for the last train to leave Brussels towards the West and relative safety before the Germans showed up.

Eleanor came dashing down the path, but suddenly stopped. 

“Just a second,” she called, and went back into the house. A moment later she came back out dragging a dustbin behind her. 

It doesn’t do, even as you turn into a refugee, to leave a rubbish bin unemptied in your house, now does it?

Yetta as an adolescent

I got to know Yetta far better. I remember the end of one of the many visits we made to her, when my brother and I were young. She’d just kissed us and our parents goodbye and, from the car that was taking us to airport, I saw her at her sink, washing up, with tears running down her face. I think that sight remains one of my most touching and persistent memories.

Another comes whenever I make scrambled eggs. It’s associated with a sense of guilt. For many years in my childhood, I disliked scrambled eggs. I have no idea why. These childish dislikes often have no rational grounds, do they?

One evening she made scrambled eggs for me and I discovered, to my surprise, that I liked them for once. And said so. Later, my parents called me in for a serious talk.

“Do you really like her scrambled eggs more than ours?”

Well, I didn’t. I told them that hers were a bit like stirred-up omelette. All that had changed was that, for no good reason I could think of, my tastes had changed. I now liked scrambled eggs, even hers. But not particularly hers as opposed to my parents’.

Even as I said that I felt a terrible pang of guilt. My grandmother had made an effort to please me, and she was proud it had worked. Even though she didn’t know what I was saying to my parents, it felt disloyal, a betrayal of the bond between us. And I felt uneasy about it.

Oh, well. This 15 August, I took a biscuit in her memory. It was only in her memory because we keep them in a cut-glass jar inherited from her, in which she used to keep water biscuits. Unfortunately, the top makes a sort of ringing sound when you lift it off the jar. She would always hear it if I tried to sneak myself a biscuit.

“Put it back,” she’d call from the kitchen, “lunch will be ready in a few minutes and I don’t want you spoiling your appetite.”

That made it poignant to take a biscuit on what would have been her 122nd birthday, had she not stopped when she was 91. I wish she’d been around to tell me to put the biscuit back in the jar. But at least I had memories to enjoy.

Not just memories, however. Because this time of year has stopped just being associated with my grandmother. Now it’s the time of birthdays from the extremes in my family. My grandmother’s and my granddaughter Matilda’s. Hers is on the 18th, making her three this year. 119 years younger that Yetta. And four generations on.

It’s a key time. She leaves the pre-infant school where she’s been for two school years – yep, they start young here in Spain – and moves into a big school, in relative terms, a full-fledged infant school. I’m excited to know how that’ll work out. There’ll be new kids to meet (though friends will also come with her) and new teachers. 

It’s going to be interesting to see how she copes with the language. As I’ve mentioned before, she’s learning two – English and Spanish – which makes things slower overall. But I was fascinated to learn from my wife Danielle that she now has it clear in her mind that they are two separate languages.

“In English!” she insisted on one occasion while Danielle was visiting her a couple of weeks ago. 

Matilda on her way to Belfast
with her brother Elliott in the background

Well, she’s surrounded by English right now. English with an accent I particularly like. She’s visiting the other side of her family, in Belfast. She’s even been getting to know some of the joys of Northern Ireland, including a trip down to County Down, where the dark Mourne, as the song says, sweeps down to the sea. And the Giant Causeway in County Antrim, where legend has it a Scottish giant and an Irish one nearly came to blows.

A good place to enjoy a third birthday.

Later she and her brother, with parents in tow, will be coming to see us too. So we can celebrate her birthday ourselves. And, if celebrating a birthday is good, celebrating it twice has to be even better.

Ah, the Feast of the Assumption. It’s a good time of year for me. Though more for the family than for the Assumption itself.

Leadership? Brown nosing? Which works better?

Three years into retirement, I’m getting a clearer perspective on certain received principles people like to tell you about work. One of them is the virtue of speaking truth to power. The other is the value of skill in leadership.

Telling truth to power is something we’re all supposed to admire. I’d strongly advise anyone building a career to express boundless admiration for it. When it comes to doing it, however, my equally strong advice is to be a lot more circumspect.

Why? Because in my experience the last thing power wants to hear is the truth. Tell power it’s doing the right thing with great skill, and it’ll love you for it. But tell it it’s off course and doing things wrong? I carry the scars of one firing and four redundancies for doing that.

Brown nosing, as I prefer to call flattery, works far better. If you do it well, at least. I remember a colleague announcing that he had to leave a meeting of ours, only for me to see him later ingratiating himself with some senior executives. Unfortunately, turning up like that amongst the powerful, like a bad penny, doesn’t always work. It can make you seem just a tad too needy. Indeed, to my colleague’s shock his efforts didn’t deliver the promotion he was after. 

Bowing to power often works better than telling it truth

Meanwhile, his reluctance to stick around with the team he was supposed to be leading had won him no friends there either. Failure to lead left him with no one following him. Which is like a line in the The West Wing about a leader with no followers simply being a man out for a stroll.

A man wandering aimlessly. Alone. Achieving nothing.

One of my favourite stories from material I’ve been reading for my History of England podcast was about the first Queen Elizabeth.

She had no children. That meant that her closest heir was King James VI of Scotland, the great-great-grandson of Henry VII of England, who was her grandfather. Which makes him a second cousin twice removed. Distant, but the closest relative she had.

A peaceful and smooth transition from one ruler to the next is pretty important for a country. That’s something good leaders know, unlike the other kind, such as Donald Trump. However, a smooth transition means deciding who’s next, and that was a problem in Elizabeth I’s time.

Just talking about the possibility of the monarch dying was ‘compassing the sovereign’s death’, and that was high treason. Back then, a lot of offences were associated with punishments that were lousy for your health. High treason was terminally bad for it. Why, even James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, found that out when Elizabeth, her dear first cousin once removed, ordered her beheading. 

Elizabeth’s refusal to make a will didn’t help. You know, something like, “yeah, give it to my ghastly cousin Mary’s brat, you know, whoever he is, James V or James VI, up there in Scotland”. But, no, there wasn’t even that. She didn’t like the idea of naming an heir, because she reckoned everyone would then “look to the rising rather than the setting sun”.

Sir Robert Cecil was her Chief minister. He was a highly capable leader, just like his dad, William Cecil, who’d held the job before him. He decided to screw all this compassing business, and get in touch with the Scottish king anyway, though in a hush-hush way, without attracting suspicious eyes.

Funnily enough, it’s likely Elizabeth knew, but said nothing. After all, she understood the importance of a smooth succession too. She might not be prepared to envisage her own death, but probably felt somebody ought to be preparing for it, and who better than Robert Cecil? 

Another problem was that once the monarch died, all the ministers immediately lost their jobs. Cecil would no longer have any authority. He’d be a private individual without official standing.

He came up with a great work-around. He discovered an old tradition that allowed a ‘Grand Council’ to summon Parliament in the absence of the Monarch, normally alone in having the authority to do that.

What was this Great Council? Cecil said it was the Privy Council, the body he chaired and which was made up of the Ministers who’d lose their jobs when Elizabeth died, plus some of leading nobles. So the Privy Councillors would stand down, but immediately reappear in the Grand Council with near royal authority. 

And who was going to dare to tell him no? 

Elizabeth died at 3:00 in the morning of the 24th of March 1603. 

Cecil summoned the ‘Great Council’ immediately. When it assembled, he took the Chair. The leading noble present, the Earl of Northumberland, challenged him. I imagine an exchange along the following lines:

“Why are you chairing this meeting, pal? This isn’t the Privy Council.”

“Err, right,” says Cecil nervously, “you want to take over?” 

Northumberland thinks a bit.

“Naah,” he says, “you’re good. Stay where you are.”

See? Leadership. If you’ve got it, and if you’ve managed to get into a position where you can use it, it works.

By 6:00, a proclamation, virtually identical to one that Cecil had drafted earlier, was read out at the gate of Whitehall Palace. It announced the death of Elizabeth, and that James would succeed her.

The new King himself, in Edinburgh, knew nothing about all this. There were no phones. No telegraph. No WhatsApp.

Now we get to some fine brown nosing.

Cecil had made it clear that no one was to go and tell the new King until he, Cecil, was good and ready. He ordered the palace gates locked. However, a certain Robert Carey had stationed horses all along the road from London to Edinburgh, ready to carry him there with the news, at top speed. 

You can imagine that this must have represented quite an investment. Not one Carey wanted to write off.

Fortunately for him, he had a brother on the Council. The brother ordered the gate opened and Carey rode out. He did well. Leaving before dawn on the 24th of March, he arrived in Edinburgh after nightfall on the 26th, nearly 600 km away, extraordinarily good going on horseback. 

The King was so pleased with Carey’s news that he made him a gentleman of the bedchamber. Carey, of course, was delighted with his reward.

The reward didn’t last long. Cecil wasn’t pleased his orders had been ignored. He rescinded Carey’s appointment. 

Carey did fine in the end, though. He eventually became Earl of Monmouth. Brown nosing can work in time, and he’d browned his on a quite epic scale.

Just like my ex-colleague. He eventually got promotion. Without having shown much capacity for leadership, or indeed even being very good at brown nosing.

Presumably, he found a boss more like King James, one of England’s more hopeless monarchs, than like Robert Cecil, one its more competent ministers. James came to be known as the wisest fool in Christendom. Sadly, fools are a hell of a sight more common, even in leading positions, than skilled leaders.

Which is the moral of this story.

Great escapes

There was a hill ringed by wooded parkland and crowned by a castle, looking out over the deep blue of the Mediterranean. There was an old town with quiet streets, narrow and wandering enough to be picturesque, but not so narrow that they weren’t filled with sunlight. There was a restaurant serving excellent food at a terrace which was neither inside nor outside, but in a tall arcade, keeping it cool as well as light-filled and airy.

Those are my memories of Denia, in the Spanish province of Alicante. Sights of charm. A wonderful meal. An atmosphere of peace and pleasure.

In the old town in Denia

But, it seems, plenty of others have found it charming, and not all were particularly savoury. That’s what makes the subject worth writing about, so I was happy to accept the recommendation of our great friend, Ana Cervera, to dedicate a blog post to it. That suggestion turned out to be just as interesting as the last one she made.

Let’s start with ‘The Tungsten King’, Johannes Bernhardt.

Tungsten is a rare metal used in armaments production. Spain has quite a lot of the stuff. Bernhardt was a businessman who organised shipments of the metal to his native Germany. When the Spanish army mutinied against the legitimate government in 1936, he acted as an intermediary between one of the rebel Generals, Franco, and Hitler. Within days he was travelling in a three-man delegation to see Hitler and obtain his support for rebels. 

Flying to ask Hitler to help the Spanish rebels
Bernhardt (second from the left) is carrying Franco's letter

He told Hitler that “world Judaism and Freemasonry have decided to turn Spain into a Soviet Republic”. 

Hitler poured in aid, starting with planes to carry Franco’s troops from North Africa to Spain to join the mutiny. Along with Italy under the Fascist dictator Mussolini, Hitler provided major and crucial support to the rebels, while the democracies stood by doing nothing and only the Soviet Union provided some help, at a high price, and with serious strings attached. 

Bernhardt had served with distinction in the First World War. That, but above all his role in assisting trade between Spain and Germany – in which he made a fortune – won him the rank of General in the German military. And not in any old service either, like say the army. Oh, no. Bernhardt was a General in the SS.

Bernhardt moved his family to what came to be known as ‘the house of the German’ in Denia at the end of the thirties. He moved there himself after the defeat of the Nazis. Later, when when the Allies began to push Franco to give up people on their ‘Black List’ of 104 Nazi war criminals, one of them Bernhardt, he lost his nerve. Although none of the people on the list were ever handed over, he decided in 1953 to move to Argentina, where the then Dictator, Juan Perón (the one married to Evita, famed in the musical called after her), was as accommodating towards former Nazis as Franco himself. Bernhardt lived there in comfort until his death in 1980. 

Anton Galler, clean-living young fellow,
if you don't count murdering civilians

Then there was SS Captain Anton Galler who organised the 1944 assassination of 560 Italian civilians in the town of Stazzema. Men and women were killed, and at least 107 children, the youngest 20 days old. Well, perhaps not the youngest: after one of the eight pregnant women had been murdered, the killers cut her womb open so the baby could be killed separately.

In 1955 SS Major Gerhard Bremer also moved to Denia. He decided that it was time the sleepy little fishing port developed a tourist business. He built an estate of bungalows which could be rented to visitors, most of them from Germany, and built a thriving business around it. There are some who still remember with gratitude the employment he brought to the town.

Gerhard Bremer
with a couple of nice Aryan girls to go with his SS flashes

Less talked about are his parties, where the municipal band would turn up to perform, and he would emerge in full SS uniform, accompanied by his wife in traditional Bavarian dress. The parties lasted from 1971 to 1980, so well after the transition of Spain back to democracy, and Bremer himself lived there until his death in 1989. No one ever held him to account for the eighteen Canadian prisoners of war his unit murdered in the days following the Normandy landings.

The Denia municipal brass band
playing at one of Gerhard Bremer’s parties

Nor were Bremer’s parties the only ones thrown by the fugitives. Yearly on 20 April, local Nazis would meet in a restaurant to celebrate Hitler’s birthday.  That custom continued until the end of the 1980s. 

Let’s not miss out the most picturesque of these characters. That’s Otto Skorzeny, another SS Major, also known as ‘Scarface’. That’s because he carried a deep scar down his left cheek, the result not of an accident, but of a bizarre student pastime of sabre duels designed to leave such wounds, as a proof of virility.

Otto Skorzeny, complete with scar and little friend

He became famous during World War 2 for having overseen the rescue of Mussolini after Italy’s surrender, before the dictator could be handed to the Allies. He also ran an operation to lead men wearing Allied uniform behind enemy lines, with a view to murdering Eisenhower and other leading officers. He was dubbed the most dangerous man in Europe by the Allies.

After escaping Allied captivity, Skorzeny showed up in Denia too. And later got out, because one of the things the Denia Germans did well, was to organise escape lines for Nazi refugees who needed to move somewhere still safer. Skorzeny chose Argentina – yep, that was something of a destination of choice during Perón’s time. There he became a bodyguard to that much-sung Evita. Which leaves me thinking, “don’t cry for her, Argentina”.

Franco’s Spain, Perón’s Argentina. Hardly examples of what we might think of as exemplary conduct, right? But then, what about the Western Allies themselves?

With a great deal of help from the Soviet Union, they defeated Germany and Italy, the two major Fascist powers of the three in Europe at the time. Then, however, they stopped, leaving the junior partner in that club, Spain, untouched. Many exiles from the overthrown Spanish Republic had hoped that the Allies might indeed not stop with those two, but press on to Madrid (and maybe Lisbon) to cleanse the Continent of the whole lamentable bunch.

But, just as they didn’t intervene to stop Franco seizing power, they didn’t oust him later. And why? Because even before the World War was over, the Western Allies were preparing to take on the next enemy, ironically the very ally they’d relied on so heavily, the Soviet Union. Franco had stayed out of World War 2, apart from sending a division of volunteers to fight the Russians (which was OK in the Western powers’ book, even if the Russians were allies just then), and had never fought the Allies themselves (which deserved top marks). So Franco may have been a bastard, but he was their bastard. They had a cold war to fight against the new enemy, the Soviet Union, and if he was prepared to help, they were happy for him to stay.

As for the Spanish, well, terribly sad that they had to put up with 40 years of Fascist dictatorship, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Collateral damage and all that, don’t you know.

That meant that a load of war criminals got away without being prosecuted. Well, we don’t live in an ideal world. Compromises sometimes have to be made. We need to be pragmatic, even though that sometimes involves us in doing things that, viewed in a harsh light, might admittedly seem distasteful.

In any case, take a look at what happened to old Scarface, Otto Skorzeny. Not only did the Western Allies do nothing to bother him too much (he died of cancer in 1975). Far more astonishingly still, Mossad, the Israeli secret service, has publicly admitted that it recruited him for operations against German scientists working for the Egyptian military.

Curious, isn’t it? If even the Jewish state is prepared to collaborate with an ex-SS officer and former holder of the ‘most dangerous man in Europe’ prize, just how far has pragmatism gone? And what more can we sensibly say? 

A visit full of reminiscences that went out with a floral bang

Can flowers do anything with a bang? I mean, they seem fundamentally gentle to me. Still, I suppose if you make a battle of them, a bang would be the least you might expect.

What’s certain is that a Battle of the Flowers meant that the visit to us of our friends Sarah with Jake ended with a bang.

It had been, I like to think, a pretty good visit. Not particularly thanks to me, I admit, since I wasn’t much of a host, but fortunately my wife Danielle made up for my shortcomings. She was ably assisted by her first son, my stepson, coincidentally (and confusingly) a David like me, whose visit overlapped with Jake and Sarah’s. Danielle and David ensured there was plenty on the visitors’ agenda, specifically enough to keep Jake, who is eight, amused. I just tagged along from time to time.

We all had fun 
including Sarah and Jake 

In fact, I think my biggest contribution was having Jake join me on walks with our two dogs in the woods. Jake has a cat but no dog. Getting better acquainted with our pair of poodles gave him a lot of pleasure and walking either of them on a lead became something he was most unhappy to miss out on. I’m glad to say, he missed out on it very seldom.

That was an important change. Jake had met our two dogs years ago, when he had a tendency, like most toddlers, to squeal out his delight in things. He’d squealed while playing with Toffee, who’s scared of few people, and scares still fewer. Luci, however, has a far more nervous disposition and reacted to the squeals as though they were screams. There was a baring of teeth and some ferocious growling (for a dog that small, she does ferocious quite well). Luci had to be shut up in a bedroom, to her disgust – in her own house! Imagine – while Jake came to terms with the realisation that, through no fault of his, an animal had turned threatening towards him.

Well, neither had forgotten the other. You could see it when they met again. And yet there was a tentative rapprochement right from the outset. A mood of “time to let bygones be bygones, wouldn’t you say?”. It wasn’t long before Luci was lying on the couch next to Jake and he was stroking her. After all, not everyone strokes her as much as she’d like, and Jake’s willingness had turned her view of him right around.

Otherwise, by far the largest part of Jake’s holiday seemed to involve water. That’s where David really came into his own. We have access to a community pool and I think that, left to his own devices, Jake would have stayed in it until he was as wrinkled as a prune. What’s more, Valencia’s on the Mediterranean. So he had a choice of swimming in the pool or in the sea. As often as not, he chose both, one after the other. His enjoyment was all the greater for David's company, while David was with us.

It’s good to see a young lad enjoying himself. In Jake’s case, it was all the more satisfying because over three decades ago, Sarah had been an invaluable help to me when, for several Saturdays, I’d given Danielle a little time off by taking our two boys out for a few hours and leaving her in peace at home. Sarah, then a teenager, often accompanied us, making the trips all the more fun for everyone.

This was the tail end of the time when there were tax benefits for British companies offering employees a car and free fuel, even for personal purposes. That meant that, financially at least, I didn’t much care how far we drove. Sarah reminded me during this visit that I once took them to York, a three-hour run for us, each way. 

The excursion I remember best, however, was to somewhere much closer to home, Hampstead in North London. We had lunch in one of the historic Hampstead pubs, the Spaniard’s Inn, which was as much fun as it was picturesque. 

An American couple joined us at our table. During a pleasant conversation, they asked a few questions which rather suggested they thought Sarah was the mother of my kids. That left me speechless. To be the mother of the elder, Michael, she would have had to have him at twelve. Since I was present at Michael’s birth, as I was at Nicky’s, I can assure you this was not the case.

Sarah and I chatted about that moment while she was here with us.

“We set them right, didn’t we?” I asked her.

“No, I don’t think we did,” she answered. “We just left them trying to puzzle things out for themselves. They may have gone home thinking of Britain as a barbaric place where child brides are popping kids into the world at an age where many girls haven’t even reached puberty.”

But the day contained another event with a far less satisfactory outcome. After lunch, we visited Kenwood, which is nearby. It’s a glorious parkland estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath, itself a wonderful piece of country around which London has grown.

There’s a stately house in the middle of the Kenwood estate that is now an art museum, and there are sculptures scattered around the lawns. Michael decided to climb on one of them. A Henry Moore. When he got down, Nicky clamoured to climb up in turn. But in the meantime, I’d woken up to what was happening and decided that, no, kids shouldn’t be climbing on priceless sculptures. I stopped him. Not unreasonably, he complained loudly and fervently about the unfairness. If his brother could climb up, why couldn’t he?

The Henry Moor Sculpture at Kenwood

I’m not sure he’s forgiven me yet. I know I haven’t forgiven myself. I’d allowed a belated sense of aesthetic concern to trump my desire to behave fairly towards the two boys. Today, in hindsight, I think I made the wrong choice. Equity should have had priority over art.

Anyway, sharing the reminiscences with Sarah only added to the pleasure of chatting with her when they were with us.

On the final day, we wrapped their visit with what I can only describe as a fine display of floral battling.

Danielle and I have decided that we’re too old to see all the fiestas in the Valencian region in the time we still have on Earth. I’m probably exaggerating, but it sometimes feels to me that there’s another one every single day.

A float from the Battle of the Flowers procession
The tennis rackets, it turned out, were defensive weapons.
Excellent against incoming marigolds

For the Battle of the Flowers, people don traditional dress and sit on floats or open carriages drawn around a procession space by horses. I’m sure that the participants are chosen without distinction of age or gender, so it’s surely simple coincidence that most of them are young, female and pretty. 

Once the procession’s over, the participants and audience pelt each other with marigolds, baskets of which have been thoughtfully prepared for the purpose. Apparently, some 1.5 million of them.

There are Valencian fiestas where people fling tomatoes at each other, which strikes me as a waste of food and a disaster for clothes. There are others in which they throw firecrackers at each other, which is just plain annoying, bordering on dangerous. Flowers seem a fine alternative.

A float under fire - from orange marigolds -
and returning fire - in kind

Besides, I like the idea of a floral battle. Given the ones involving heavy artillery and armour in Ukraine, it strikes me as a hugely preferable alternative.

We all had fun, especially as after the main event, anybody could descend on the procession area and join in the flinging of the marigolds. That was something Jake did with great enthusiasm. I’m only glad that I gave him as good as I got. I may even have hit him at least as often as he hit me. 

Of course, he might claim that he actually had the edge over me and scored more marigold hits than he suffered.

Either way, we had fun. And it was a good way to close their stay with us.

Out with a bang, as I said.

Never underestimate the power of stupidity

A major force in human affairs

Plus ça change, the French say, plus c’est la même chose. Which translates roughly as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. 

There’s something comforting in knowing that a feeling of mine has previously been voiced by others. Especially if they’re remarkable people. And even more if they’re well qualified to make the judgement.

“The stupid old Tory Party”. Now, though I don’t disagree with it, that’s not my judgement of that fine British institution, the Conservative or Tory Party. It’s the view of a man who’d spent nineteen years as a Tory minister. Whatever else you can say about him, he knew what he was talking about.

Nor was he an obscure nonentity. He went on to be Foreign Secretary three times, Home Secretary once and Prime Minister for two terms 

He was Lord Palmerston. When he expressed that view of the Tories, he was firmly associated with the Liberal wing of the Party. He was two years from resignation and four years from re-emerging for his first tenure as Foreign Secretary in a government led by the other main party, the Whigs. They later merged into the Liberal Party in which he completed his career and achieved his greatest success. 

He’d clearly learned from experience. He knew he had to move on once he realised that the Tory Party was dominated by those who hankered for the times of a Prime Minister who’d been dead a quarter of a century, William Pitt the Younger:

… those ignorant country gentlemen who drown in port the little senses which nature bestowed upon them & bawl out the memory & praises of Pitt, while they are opposing all the measures & principles which he held most important it is by these that the progress of the government in every improvement which they are attempting is thwarted & impeded.

He had the courage to admit his error and join the other side, where he might do some good.

Sadly, today the Tory Party seems immersed again in nostalgia, this time for the times of Thatcher. It doesn’t just impede and thwart every progressive move but actually reverses them where possible, as in the catastrophe that is Brexit. Not just the Party but even its supporters seem incapable of admitting their error over Brexit, and it’s only by admitting a mistake that you can start out on the path towards putting it right. Why, even the opposition Labour Party has come up with the extraordinary slogan of ‘making Brexit work’, which is like promising to make the best of a cholera outbreak. 

Nor is the stupidity Palmerston identified limited to Britain.

Here, where I now live in Spain, I see a similar saddening inclination to look backwards towards a past, sanctified by nostalgia, so that the horror of the man then in power is forgotten in longing for his authoritative – or rather authoritarian – government. A party embodying the values of the old dictator Franco is exerting far more pressure on the traditional conservative party than is healthy for the country.

That’s particularly depressing because I find this warm-hearted nation a joy to live in. The Spanish are easy to like. And it’s astonishingly easy to make friends here.

That makes it extraordinary to read the words of an Englishman who came here to fight Franco, to try to preserve legitimate, democratic rule against an authoritarian rebellion. He proclaimed:

I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!

George Orwell put his life on the line to fight for the liberty of a people whose generosity overwhelmed him:

… I defy anyone to be thrown as I was among the Spanish working class … and not be struck by their essential decency; above all, their straightforwardness and generosity. A Spaniard’s generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing. If you ask him for a cigarette he will force the whole packet upon you. 

He continued, in Homage to Catalonia:

And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circumstances. 

He saw this in a group of men on leave from the front line:

They were talking excitedly about their experiences and were full of enthusiasm for some French troops who had been next to them at Huesca. The French were very brave, they said; adding enthusiastically: ‘Más valientes que nosotros’—’Braver than we are!’ ... An Englishman would cut his hand off sooner than say a thing like that.

Well, despite that generosity and decency, they were defeated, as the rest of the democratic world stood by and did nothing for them. And today there’s a depressing inclination to see good in their brutal conquerors. The ones who ran a forty-year dictatorship after their victory.

Ah, well. Palmerston spotted the stupidity in the British Tory Party, but even if it is the Tories’ most enduring characteristic, they clearly have no monopoly on it. And, it seems, it extends far beyond Britain.

Palmerston’s words date from 1826. It’s sad that nearly two centuries on, stupidity remains as much a power in society as ever. As our own experiences show.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Bureaucracy and its welcome imperfections

There’s something strangely instructive about dealing with bureaucracy. 

After many decades of careful observation, I’ve decided that the behaviour of bureaucrats is best thought of as being based on a kind of universal memo sent out to them all. That memo may not have a physical existence. It may be something virtual, or even spiritual, but its role is crucial in informing the training and moulding of the bureaucratic soul, not just at the start but throughout a career.

Key tool of the perfect bureaucrat

Now, the really good bureaucrats naturally read that memo and absorb its contents into their daily lives. Fortunately, for the sanity of the rest of us, there are plenty of bureaucrats who, out of common humanity, either decide not to read the memo, or decide to ignore it wholly or in part.

An Englishman I once knew in France, a self-employed businessman, decided he wanted to buy an apartment for his parents. He was successful but not to the point where he could simply pay cash for it. Fortunately, given his income, negotiating a mortgage was easy and went through smoothly right up to the very last stage of the process. Picture him actually sitting in the bank, pen in hand, ready to sign the final document that would release the funds.

“Now, the last thing I need,” said the bank employee, “is a set of payslips for the last three months.”

My friend looked at him aghast.

“But… I’m self-employed… I don’t get payslips.”

There was a long discussion, in which the bank employee explained the rules, which required the three payslips, and he explained how little sense that made. But it was no good. The great memo in the sky includes an injunction to pronounce the word ‘no’ in a tone which hints at the swish of a falling guillotine blade.

My friend had heard that sound.

He left the bank disconsolate and uncertain how to proceed. But then he saw, just up the street, a stationery shop (not to be confused with a stationary shop, though this one was both). Suddenly he saw the solution.

He popped in.

“Do you sell payslip pads?” he asked.

“Of course, sir. What kind would you like?”

Twenty minutes later he was back in the bank with three payslips hastily completed in his name.

The employee was all smiles.

“Three monthly payslips! Just what we needed! This is perfect.”

I call this the “tick-box deviation from perfect bureaucracy”. Once the bureaucrat has ticked all the boxes on his mental form, he sees no reason not to say ‘yes’, however imperatively the memo is telling him the answer’s always ‘no’.

There are bureaucrats that are far less perfect even than that bank employee. In France, you’re legally required to register a permanent move to a new part of the country. After we moved from the Paris region to Strasbourg, I rather let things slip and failed to register for over three months. 

Even so, everything went swimmingly at the interview. The pleasant young woman entered information on her computer as I provided it, and the paperwork advanced satisfactorily towards completion. But then I decided to ask a question.

There’s an old principle applied by lawyers: never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer. But I sadly lack legal training.

“How long does one actually have to complete this registration process after a move?” I asked, “Is it three or six months?”

“It’s a week,” she replied a little coldly, but dissipated the drop in temperature by adding, “but have I asked you when you moved to Strasbourg?”

She hadn’t. And she didn’t. We completed the registration process smoothly and without difficulty.

This is the deviation from bureaucratic perfection that I call “human empathy”.

All this came back to me when I had my most recent exchange with the authorities here in Valencia.

My time working in France entitles me to a French pension. The authorities ask me to send in a form annually, signed and stamped by our local authority, attesting to the fact that I’m still alive.

I turned up at the relevant office with the form and with my passport, plus several other documents, on the grounds that the general first response in any contact with Spanish bureaucracy is that you haven’t brought enough paperwork with you. So I try to carry lots. This is the same philosophy that made me want to carry an umbrella whenever I went out during my time in England, on the basis that it only rained when I didn’t have one. I reckon the tactic would have worked, had I not always lost the umbrella, which meant I always got soaked on the return trip home.

I did make a mistake on this occasion, which was turning up at around 12:30. The offices open at 8:00 and I do know that it’s best to be there as close to that time as possible. Certainly, as the woman who was keeping us waiting at the door announced, it’s best to show up before the time of almuerzo.

Now, in most of Spain, almuerzo just means lunch. But not in Valencia. Here they have breakfast – desayuno – early, especially if they have to be at the office at 8:00. That means that they’re hungry by about 11:00. Almuerzo is the meal they have then. That keeps them going until comida, which actually means ‘food’, but in this context means ‘lunch’.

Lunch is important not just for its nutritional qualities. It also defines the morning. As a naïve Englishman, I tend to think that 12:00 midday, or ‘noon’, marks a transition in the day: the period after noon we think of as the afternoon.

Not so in Spain. Morning lasts until lunchtime.

The offices I was visiting are open in the ‘morning’, so they close at lunchtime, which is, naturally, a bit after 2:00, so they can get home by 2:30, which is when they have their comida. 

This all gives Valencian bureaucrats a motivation for being doubly strict in their application of the bureaucracy memo. Those mealtimes are sacred. Nothing can infringe on them. It’s like Americans with guns, though less harmful.

“Yes, we’re open and working, but we can see from the number of people waiting that we can only just get through those cases and still get away soon after 2:00.”

She didn’t have to explain why getting away soon after 2:00 was so important. After all, these were fellow Valencians she was talking to. She was alluding to an idea that they had all absorbed with their mother’s milk.

It didn’t stop them complaining and asking whether she couldn’t just squeeze them in, after all. But she was adamant.

When I saw a gap, I went up to her to ask whether I ought to return the next day. A lot earlier. Clear not just of the comida hour, but even of the time for almuerzo.

“For a proof of life certificate?” she asked. And then, almost as though talking to herself, “that only needs a signature and a stamp.”

She made up her mind.

“Come this way,” she said. At a counter she explained to a colleague what I needed, and I handed over the form for completion and my passport (none of the other documents turned out to be necessary, but I’m sure that’s only because I had brought them with me, as my metaphorical umbrella).

“Wait here,” I was told.

Five minutes later, out came the colleague, with my form signed and stamped. I was effusive in my thanks.

“De nada,” I was told, nothing to thank me for, the reply I got from the other employees I tried to thank as I left.

This I call the Mediterranean-warmth deviation from bureaucratic perfection.

And, boy, I was happy to encounter it.