What does a clueless granddad need?

In my experience nothing helps a clueless granddad as much as a bright granddaughter. Matilda may only be five but she’s bright enough to be a lot better informed than he is, and highly responsible with it. That’s responsible enough to take things in hand when her granddad gets them wrong.

Bright girl in bright surroundings,
on a visit to us earlier this month

My problem is that I hadn’t been to the grandkids’ place for several months. Not since August, in fact. I mean, I’ve seen them several times in between, but always at our place. Now, in January, I'm on my first visit since last summer to theirs, making it the first time I’ve been here since Elliott started attending the school where Matilda is already in her third year.

Now one of the chief responsibilities I take on when I visit is walking them to school each day. I fetch them after school too, but that’s less of a problem: heading home’s easy since I know where we’re going.

The trouble with going to school is that the arrangements for dropping off kids keep changing. That’s partly because the kids themselves get older, partly just because the school, in what I presume we have to regard as its wisdom, decides that previously perfectly workable systems need to be changed for something they feel, for no reason that I can fathom, would work better.

Also, when I say that I walk them to school, you should understand that I’m the one that always walks. When it’s chucking it down, we all walk, just because you can do that under an umbrella, which is hard on a bike. If the weather’s good, they cycle and I walk along behind them, getting out of breath on steeper climbs, either because they zap up them more quickly than I’m comfortable with, or because Elliott has decided that he’s had enough of pedalling uphill and wants me to push him.

Anyway, on Monday of this visit we decided that we could probably take bikes. It turned out to be a mistake. When I picked the kids up in the afternoon, I was told that cycling through such a downpour had left the authorities no choice but to change their trousers since the ones they’d arrived in were soaked. 

Still, we got to school safely and in one piece (each). I’d been given clear instructions about what to do with the bikes. I was pleased to see that Matilda stood by my side while I was locking them up, making sure I did it right. I was less pleased when she then vanished. No one had told me that she knew the way to her classroom and took pride in getting there unaccompanied. 

Then I had to deal with Elliott. That’s when I discovered that the kids didn’t enter their school building through the front door anymore. I mean, why would they? Why use what’s obviously an entrance door when you can fool the clueless granddad by going up that little path there, to the right of the building, leading to the playground behind it, and go in through the back door? I mean, why wouldn’t you go for that arrangement?

Well, I could see that the front door was locked. Then I saw Elliott going up the path to the right of the building. He turned around, and gave me one of his most charming smiles, waved and strode on confidently. Since I still hadn’t got my mind around the vanishing Matilda mystery, I waved back and kept looking for her.

It was only in the afternoon that I discovered what had happened. Matilda hadn’t gone straight to her classroom, which was just as well. She saw Elliott, took his hand and led him to his teacher herself, explaining – very maturely I’m sure – what had happened. The teacher apparently thanked her and took charge of Elliott, saving me my blushes. 

And leaving me both relieved and grateful.

P.S. That rain: 

Matilda and Elliott live in a village up in the hills above Madrid. At a good height, as it happens, 1000 metres above sea level. And that’s taught me one thing at least: whoever came up with the idea that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain had no idea what he was talking about. More clueless than Matilda and Elliott’s granddad.

The rain in Spain gets everywhere, it’s plain

P.P.S. The best or the worst? 

Elliott is someone whose views are firmly held. Which doesn’t mean they don’t change. On the contrary, they can swing violently, through 180 degrees depending on circumstances, actions (mostly mine) and mood (mostly his). I once listened to Ronnie Scott doing a standup session at his eponymous jazz club in London and he told us at one point that, while we may not be the best audience in the world, we were certainly the worst. Well, this week Elliott has solemnly informed me that I was the best granddad in the world and a surprisingly short time later, that I was the worst (well, strictly speaking, the baddest). I put this to the test at one point, asking him, ‘who’s the best granddad in the world?’. 

‘You,’ he replied unhesitatingly and with complete conviction.

‘And who’s the baddest granddad in the world?’ I went on.

‘You,’ he replied with as little hesitation and equal firmness.

Ah, well. I’ve never liked mediocrity. Being both the best and the baddest? That strikes me as a great improvement over being merely average.

Elliott, equally bright, and with good answers

Grotesque on Pennsylvania Avenue: Season 2 review

There’s no honour, they say, among thieves. Criminals, in other words, can’t be expected to be loyal even to each other. So I suppose it does Donald Trump some honour that, a convicted criminal himself, he’s declared that he’ll release the criminals convicted for attacking Congress on 6 January 2021.

This shouldn’t, however, trouble anyone who believes that Trump’s loyal only to himself. He believes those criminals acted out of loyalty to him and that’s the only kind of he really appreciates. So he responds with loyalty to them. 

As he moves back into the White House, we need to review one of the major criticisms he faced during the election campaign. It seems clear that he isn’t going to overthrow democracy, if by that we mean some kind of violent overthrow, like Benito Mussolini’s 1924 March on Rome in Italy, or Francisco Franco’s mutiny of 1936 and the three-year Civil War that followed in Spain.

Instead, following the recent fashion explored in Hungary and Turkey, the trick Trump’s likely to adopt is to keep chipping away at democracy until all its substance has been sucked out and the empty shell collapses. His allies have already started that process, with moves to undermine republican values.

You do it my way

The specialist in mediaeval history Jay Rubenstein talks about the 12th century English politician, John of Salisbury. Rubenstein tells us:

John wrote that a king is ‘a law unto himself’ but that at the same time he was ‘a servant of law.’

The thinking was that the king was the fount of all law and therefore could not be made subject to it but, precisely because of his privileged position on the law, he was its servant, the man charged with making sure it was preserved and obeyed. 

Since that time, Britain has moved a long way down the road towards democracy, and towards establishing an essential element of such a democracy, the rule of law. A great part of the process was limiting the power of monarchs. One king, Charles I, was even executed for trying to assert his power over Parliament. He was, indeed, condemned by a court which, he pointed out, was a legal contradiction in terms: courts sat by the king’s authority, so how could a court sit in judgment on the king?

Gradually, parliament took increasing power to itself, reducing the authority of the monarch. Even within parliament itself, the elected part, the House of Commons, increasingly dominated the House of Lords, which had initially been more powerful.

The process still has a way to go, however. As far as the rule of law is concerned, and the power of the monarch, there’s more work to do. As the jurist Catherine Barnard points out, even today ‘the monarch is immune from prosecution, even for parking offences’.

The British monarch’s immunity from prosecution is hard to reconcile with the democratic principles the country aspires towards. But that kind of thing would be even stranger to discover in a republic, like the United States, which fought a war to free itself from Britain and its attachment to that all that stuff.

That’s what made it so shocking when, on 1 July of last year, the US Supreme Court decided, by a majority made up entirely of Trump appointees, that Presidents have immunity from prosecution for any ‘official act’ carried out as part of their duties. That includes, for instance, acts relative to command of the military, to the execution of law, or control of the executive branch of government in general. What would happen if Trump used his entirely legal control of the military to illegally kill political opponents? Would he be covered by this immunity?

One result is that the federal cases pending against Donald Trump for criminal behaviour, for instance for inciting the insurrection on 6 January 2021, were dismissed. What would be the point of proceeding with them? They would be thrown out anyway, because of his immunity from prosecution.

In other words, the United States embraced, through that decision, an old principle of monarchical and not of republican government, turning back towards a long-outdated attitude from which Britain ought to have, but still hasn’t quite freed itself.

That’s no coup d’état. But it’s certainly a step towards hollowing out democracy.

The process didn’t stop there. The next stage has turned out grotesque to the point of appearing comic. In a grim way.

Back in 2020, at the end of his previous presidential term, Trump decided that the amount of data being collected on individual Americans by TikTok made it a potential threat to the US, because of its Chinese ownership. He issued an executive order to force it to sell to an American or close down.

This was a pretty dubious action to take for at least two reasons. The first is that if there’s one constitutional right Americans defend with almost as much passion as the right to own guns, it’s free speech. Now TikTok wasn’t being attacked for its contents. Even so, removing a vehicle for self-expression by a community now 170 million strong, does kind of feel like a limitation of free speech.

In addition, the use of the executive order is hardly democratic. It feels like a royal decree. It depends on the personal whim of the president.

The incoming Biden administration withdrew the order. Instead, it had Congress enact actual legislation to achieve the same goal. That was challenged in the courts and the case went right up to the Supreme Court, which decreed that it was legal.

The anti-TikTok legislation went into effect on 19 January 2025.

Trump should have been over the moon, right? What he’d tried to do by executive order had now been achieved by legislation endorsed by the Supreme Court. But strangely enough he wasn’t.

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, said the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Most aspects of Trump’s mind suggest littleness, but certainly not its consistency. He changes view like a kaleidoscope. He discovered in the election campaign that TikTok offered him a vehicle to communicate with young people. That’s something he found useful. Therefore his hostility towards TikTok for its role in allowing Chinese manipulation of personal data sank into secondary importance. 

You see? What serves Trump trumps anything else.

So now Trump is talking about simply not applying the law against TikTok. The Constitution explicitly requires the president to execute the law so he can’t choose not to. But hey, if he can’t be prosecuted for any official act as President, how can he be forced to apply a law he no longer finds convenient?

Let’s summarise. He tried to ban TikTok, by Executive Order, one of the more monarchical and least democratic of the powers available to US Presidents. Now he wants TikTok back and is willing to save it by ignoring the duty laid down for him by the constitution, and resorting to the tactic of simply not applying a law that doesn’t suit him – though it once did.

Confusing? Well, that’s the way Trumpworld always is.

So we have Trump planning to pick and choose between laws. That’s just the kind of thing a powerful monarch does. But not the President of a democratic republic.

See what I mean about chipping away at democracy? How long will the US be governed by truly democratic, republican principles? Or, to put it another way, how can such principles survive if the Trump people keep accumulating power in an increasingly monarchical presidency?