A life worth celebrating

It must have been a pretty formative experience for an eleven-year-old:

I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment ... frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings... So with this vision I ran and ran and ran

The running took the writer of these words to Paris. There, according to a French scholar, Pap Ndiaye, she made an unexpected discovery:

When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time…at the absence of institutional racism. There was no segregation … no lynching. (There was) the possibility to sit at a cafe and be served by a white waiter, the possibility to talk to white people, to (have a) romance with white people

Much later in her life, she took part in the 1963 March on Washington and spoke from the same platform that Martin Luther King used to make his ‘I have a dream’ speech. Among other things she told the quarter-million strong crowd:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

So there you have it – her name. Josephine. Josephine Baker, in fact, as she’s best known, from the surname of one of her husbands, though originally she was Josephine McDonald.

She was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1906. A singer and dancer, she got into the chorus line at a couple of New York shows before travelling to Paris in 1925 and getting a real break. She starred first in the ‘Revue Nègre’, the Black Review. The very title reveals that France was hardly free of racism. Baker danced near-naked there and in other reviews, including the Folies Bergères night club, playing to, but also poking fun at, stereotypical white views of black women. Still, at least the racism, as Ndiaye makes clear, didn’t expose her to violence or deny her service in restaurants and hotels.

Josephine Baker, 1930
She really did have a pet cheetah

In any case, those performances turned her into an international superstar and the first black woman to land a starring role in French films. ‘I became famous first in France in the twenties,’ she would say, and the country that made her feel safe and allowed her to shine became her home of choice. Her best-known song, ‘J’ai deux amours’, ‘I have two loves’, was dedicated to her love of her country and of Paris. She took out French nationality, renouncing her US citizenship to do so.

Nor was her relationship to her adopted country a one-way arrangement. During World War Two, she served France just as she’d benefited from it: she worked as a spy, passing information about troop movements and military preparations that she was able to gain thanks to her freedom to move, as an international celebrity, in some elite circles. When northern France was occupied, she moved to the southern, unoccupied area, living in a chateau where she stored weapons for the French resistance, provided shelter for its fighters and for Jews escaping persecution, and continued to collect and pass on any intelligence she could.

When that part of France fell too, she moved to North Africa, where she provided entertainment to troops at concerts to which she offered free entrance.

Her wartime service won her the Resistance Medal awarded by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre from the French military and the Légion d’Honneur, France’s top honour, awarded to her by Charles de Gaulle.

Baker in French Air Force Uniform, 1948

She also adopted twelve children from around the world, bringing them up in different religions, to prove that kids could live together harmoniously despite ethnic and religious differences.

She never gave up fighting for the rights of black people back in the United States, as her presence at the March on Washington shows. But she could never live there again, infuriated as she told the crowd that day at the contemptuous behaviour to which the colour of her skin exposed her. She fell on hard times at the end of her life, but was taken in by her friend Grace Kelly, the film star turned Princess Consort of Monaco.

She died in 1975 and was buried in Monaco. In 2021, she became only the sixth woman to be honoured by a tomb in the Panthéon in Paris, reserved for the greatest figures France produces. Her grave remains in Monaco, but a casket containing earth from places where she’d lived, including St Louis, Paris, the south of France and Monaco, was brought with full honours to the Panthéon, and a plaque set up to her.

Why am I writing all this today?

Because she was born on 3 June. So today I’ll raise a glass to what would have been her 119th birthday. And I thought I’d share that moment with you.

The thrills of Easter grandparenting

Ah, Easter, Easter. The great feast of the Christian year. When the followers of Christ eat chocolate to celebrate his sacrifice to redeem mankind from original sin.

As it happens, this year wasn’t just about chocolate. It seems that rocket ships are part of the Easter festivities too. As apparently are games played with Velcro rackets and Velcro balls that stick to them. At least, judging by what the grandkids found when they went looking in the woods for the gifts left for them there by the Easter Bunny (a curious figure for which, in my admittedly rather cursory reading of the New Testament, I’ve not found any scriptural basis).

Even the date on which said hunt in the woods took place was (how shall I put this?) a little unorthodox. I mean, there was a time when the dating of Easter was the kind of question over which accusations of heresy might fly, in circumstances when such accusations could prove seriously career limiting. Terminally career limiting. 

It seems this isn’t a problem in our times when entertaining grandkids of five (Matilda) and three (Elliott, though he was all but four). Church authorities all agree that, however controversial the actual date might be, Easter would always fall on a Sunday. In 2025, however, that was the day their parents would be taking Matilda and Elliott home. So instead we celebrated Easter Wednesday for which, to say the very least, there is no liturgical authority.

The kids had been with us for some days. We’d been to the woods several times, walking the dogs or just playing hide-and-seek. That’s a game they love, though I have to confess I’m still not convinced that Elliott has fully grasped the notion of ‘hiding’.

Matilda counting for hide-and-seek

Elliott still needs to do some work
on the notion of being ‘hidden’

While in the woods, whenever we reached the place where the Easter Bunny had done its work in previous years, Matilda would explain to me that ‘this is where we’ll be looking for the Easter Eggs’. Indeed, on the Tuesday she even explained to me that it was where we’d be looking for the eggs ‘tomorrow’.

Old traditionalist that I am, I patiently and, I hope, compassionately, explained, ‘no, it can’t be tomorrow. Don’t you mean Sunday?’

‘No, it’s tomorrow. Mummy and Mamama said so.’

Well, I wasn’t going to argue with a decision backed up with the authority of a mother and a Mamama (the usual name for grandmothers in Danielle’s native Alsace) and, indeed, it turned out that Matilda was right. The very next day, the annual mystery repeated itself. Mummy and Mamama disappeared into the woods and, coincidentally, it was during that brief disappearance that the Bunny did its work. They must have been keeping that busy rabbit under close observation because they phoned to tell me its work was done the very moment it was.

Out we went, the eager search party, ready to find treasure. And boy were expectations fulfilled. There was lots of chocolate, most of it apparently Swiss, another one of those curious coincidences because Danielle (Mamama) had been to Switzerland only the previous week. 

Matilda, Elliott and Mamama hunting for Easter eggs
Elliott’s holding the Easter rocket toy

It was there that we also found the rocket toy I mentioned before (in the photo, Elliott’s holding it upside down, a stance with which I imagine Elon Musk would seriously disagree). Not far away was the Velcro racket and ball set. 

The Hello Easter book

Also in the vicinity was an Easter book, with the proud title ‘Hello Easter’ in English, a thoughtful gesture by the Easter bunny, given that the hunt was taking place in Spain. As it happens, Elliott and Matilda are equally at home in Spanish, but we like to think of our family – their family – as being primarily English-speaking, so it was good of the bunny to provide the book in that language.

Max ‘helping’ with the Easter egg hunt

I was also pleased to see that Max, our Podenco dog, got into the mood of things, wandering around with the kids on their search. Although I can’t swear that this actually provided what you could strictly call help, at least in terms of finding eggs or toys, it was a great way of confirming the continued improvement of relations between him and the grandkids. You may remember that when he first joined us, his apparent disquiet with them, sometimes leading to rather sinister growling, had made us wonder whether we could keep him at all. It’s wonderful to see how well they’re all getting on now: Matilda and Elliott have taken to giving Max treats (just for the record, let me quickly add that they give them to Luci and Toffee, the toy poodles, too). They even like to keep Max supplied with food or water, a task they undertake with great dedication. That, you can imagine, is a sure way of winning a dog’s deep attachment.

Matilda providing Max with water

Elliott too has made a friend of Max

Just to wrap up their stay with us, we even took the kids to the beach the day before they left. It was April and a little cold for swimming. Elliott, however, was happy to wander into the water at least up to his knees, as long as he could keep a firm hold of Granddad’s hand. He also returned to his earlier pastime of trying to transfer sand from the beach to the sea as though, like Lewis Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter, he was inclined to weep ‘to see such quantities of sand’, and felt like them that ‘if this were only swept away, it would be grand’. 

Elliott happy to take to the water
as long as he had hold of a hand

Elliott transferring the beach to the sea

Matilda transferring water to the beach

What’s more, there was a good stiff breeze, and that provided plenty of fun, since we’d brought kites for both grandkids.

Let's go fly a kite: Matilda leads the way

All in all, I’d say, the day went well and provided a fitting conclusion to a highly successful visit.

Sheena (‘Mummy’) has also been
adopted by the dogs (Luci here)

Starmer and the writing on the wall

The trouble with having your back to the wall is that you can’t read the writing on it.

I’m not sure whether the British Primer Minister Keir Starmer and the rest of the Labour Party leadership has its back to the wall or not. Either way, it certainly has trouble reading the writing. For anyone with the eyes to see it, the message was written unambiguously on 1 May, when the far-right Reform UK party won a sweeping victory in local elections and, more worrying still, captured the previously safe Labour parliamentary seat of Runcorn and Helsby in a by-election. Although it won by only six votes, that overturned a previous Labour majority of nearly 15,000.

Keir Starmer (left) and Nigel Farage
Composite photo: Daily Mirror

And what was the message? That the Reform UK leader and demagogue Nigel Farage, a man who demonstrated in the Brexit referendum his happiness to use lies to gain his political objectives, can no longer be casually ruled out as a contender for the position of British Prime Minister. A ghastly prospect that has just taken a big step towards realisation.

Curiously, we’ve recently seen two other elections, one in Canada and the other in Australia, where disgust over the views of the US equivalent of Farage, President Donald Trump, led to huge swings towards parties of the centre left and secured their victories. The Canadian Liberal Party was languishing so low in the polls that commentators were beginning to write its obituary, but the Trump effect saw it sweep back and win a fourth successive term in office. 

The Australian Labor Party was little better off and expected to lose power, but again with the assistance of the aversion Trump has excited, it surged back into office with an increased majority.

Actually, with a landslide victory.

And what did Australian Labor present as a vision for the future? Quoted in the Guardian, Jim Chalmers,  Treasurer (Finance Minister) in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government, summed up the difference between the party’s first term and the one just starting:

The best way to think about the difference between our first term and the second term that we won last night [is the] first term was primarily inflation without forgetting productivity, the second term will be primarily productivity without forgetting inflation

There was also talk about housing and student debt.

And what did British Labour put front and centre in its reaction to its rather different election results? Immigration. It was going to crack down on people in Britain on student visas who applied for political asylum.

Now, I don’t know how serious a problem those students represent. But I suspect that in the scale of issues Britain faces, it probably doesn’t make the top ten. Does it really matter more than the state of the health service? The problem of homelessness or unaffordable housing? The cuts to social security? High prices? Overcrowded prisons? I haven’t even mentioned the problems in defence and international trade that our betrayal by Farage’s friend Trump has created. And there are many more.

So why did the government focus on immigration? Well, whipping up anti-immigration feeling is central to the campaigning stance of Reform UK. Labour is obsessed with winning back voters who have deserted it for Farage’s party. It has somehow managed to convince itself that persuading those voters to come back to the fold would be best achieved by showing it can treat immigrants with at least the same brutal severity as Farage promises.

Setting aside the dubious morality of rounding in this way on an often vulnerable community and scapegoating it for all our ills, there are some massive practical objections to this thinking.

The first is that far from being an evil, we desperately need immigrants. The whole world is suffering from falling birth rates. One answer, much loved by the far right natalists especially in the US, is to increase the number of children being born (and, incidentally, this would also help advance another prized goal of the far right: rolling back what gains there have been for women by having them return to their supposedly ‘natural’ role of rearing children rather than pursuing careers). 

The trouble with trying to increase birth rates is that it only generates economic benefits twenty years later, when the children reach adulthood. If you want to start filling labour market gaps immediately, you need immigrants. Far from being a problem for the receiving nations, immigration creates difficulties for the nations they leave, which are being drained of their young and dynamic people. It solves population shortages for the nations to which they move.

When it comes to politics rather than economics, harping on about immigration is dangerous. Opposing migrants is the Faragists’ big issue. By talking about it so much, we in Labour ensure that public attention remains focused on the theme that most favours Farage’s party. Churchill once said that a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the conversation. Turning that notion around, it’s clear that to combat fanaticism, we have to change the conversation. How about talking about housing, healthcare, productivity or growth instead?

In any case, if we’re trying to win back people from Reform UK, why on earth are we trying to do it by suggesting we’re not much different from them? Why would anyone wanting to attack immigration vote for the lite version, the imitation – Labour – when they can vote for the fully caffeinated version, the original – Reform UK?

Perhaps we can focus, like Australian Labor, on the reforms that would actually change the lives of our lost voters for the better. Increased productivity to grow the economy, generate more jobs and improve incomes. More housing to tackle homelessness and make house prices accessible. Rescue the health service. Fix education. Give us proper defence not reliant on Donald Trump.

That approach seems to be working for the Australians. And what we’re doing isn’t working for us. If you doubt it, just take a look at the Runcorn by-election result.

Let’s learn to read the writing on the wall.

Blackout

There’s no better way to understand how dependent we are on electricity than to spend half a day without any. That’s what happened on Monday, when the whole of the Iberian Peninsula – Spain, where we live, and Portugal – and part of France suddenly lost power. For several hours.

Monday 28 April 2025: Blackout in Spain, Portugal and part of France

There’s an unverified anecdote – you know, one of those stories which may not be true but ought to be – about Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century scientist, being asked what use electricity was. The story has him replying ‘what use is a baby?’

Well, electricity may have had merely a baby’s potential back then, but today it has the strength of a powerful adult, the kind on whom we’ve all learned to depend. 

When we came to replace our kitchen stove, Danielle, my wife, insisted on a hybrid, with two induction rings and one gas. That means we can still cook even during a power cut – or we can as long as we have matches, because in normal times the gas lights with an electrically generated spark. 

Fortunately, we had matches.

What, of course, we didn’t have was any connection to the internet. I had been due to play bridge online with a friend but, without power, I could neither play nor let him know I couldn’t play: my only means of phoning people depends on a mobile network, and it was down.

That’s on top of the obvious issues of lack of light (remedied with candles), lack of refrigeration (fortunately mitigated by the relatively short duration of the blackout) and lack of TV or other forms of entertainment that we’re used to enjoying (compensated by reading). 

Fortunately, since we didn’t have to go anywhere or get to the upper floors of tall buildings, we didn’t suffer the difficulties of so many who were caught in trains or even trapped in lifts. Nor were we stuck in massive jams on the roads and streets, made worse by the lack of traffic lights. The most we suffered was a little irritation, although some people – I think the total number is still in single figures – died as a result of using faulty medical equipment or generators.

There were people who were shouting about a national emergency (most of them members of the political persuasion that also felt inclined to condemn our moderate social democratic government for it). I think Gaza, or South Sudan, or immigrant communities, in the US are suffering emergencies. We suffered some inconvenience. 

Well, a bit more than an inconvenience for the ones who died, I admit, but for most of us, it wasn’t that bad.

I do have to confess that my first instinct was to think the problem must be the result of an attack. After all, it was daytime, warm enough to require little heating, not hot enough to require air conditioning, but all the same the entire nation’s power grid was knocked out. Surely that was sabotage. And, of course, I had a chief suspect: Vladimir Putin. That, inevitably, also led me to criticise his pal, the man responsible for so much going wrong in the world today, that fine Mr Trump.

As it happens, with Trump’s second first hundred days just coming up, it felt that plunging a few million people into darkness and confusion was in many ways a perfectly appropriate symbol of our times.

It turns out that the cause of the blackout probably wasn’t deliberate, but simply a technical malfunction. That means it’s fixable and the government is rightly insisting that the organisations responsible fix it. I hope that’s confirmed, because I find a fault a lot easier to come to terms with than an attack.

There are also a few things that we, as individuals, need to do. One of the funnier sights of the blackout was the people, ourselves included, who had to keep nipping out to their parked cars to listen to the radio, only working source of news. How many of us have any means of hearing the news these days that doesn’t depend on a connection to mains power? 

So I’m going to get a battery-operated radio. As well as battery-operated lights. Not perhaps at once, since there’s bound to be a spike in prices. But soon.

And, of course, I’m going to make sure we have plenty of matches.

Portrait of a thin-skinned man

When Oliver Cromwell visited the studio of the man who painted his portrait, Samuel Cooper, and saw how the artist had ‘enhanced’ his sitter’s looks, he instructed him that he wanted nothing of the kind, but his portrait as he really was, ‘warts and all’.

Cromwell had one thing in common with Donald Trump: he believed in rule by a strong man who wouldn’t put up with irritating opponents trying to prevent him doing what he’d convinced himself was right. He dismissed a parliament that got in his nerves, at gunpoint, and with the words, ‘It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately … In the name of God go’.

That’s as far as the resemblance extends, though. Cromwell, like Trump, believed himself superior to most of his opponents, but with the difference that in his case, and despite his many faults, above all his tendency to authoritarianism, he was generally right. Trump’s a mirror image: he regards himself as superior to most of his opponents but is generally wrong.

If I started with a story about portraiture, it’s because a teacup storm over a portrait reveals just how little Trump has to feel superior about. Indeed, his behaviour over a portrait of himself in the Colorado state capitol building has led to his being called an ‘insecure baby’, a judgement with which I’d only disagree because it seems unfair to babies. And to the insecure.

I’ll admit at once that I don’t think it’s a great portrait. It’s not even a good likeness of Trump. In reality he’s far uglier. But when I see him whingeing about what an awful painting it is, that he ‘would much prefer not having a picture than having this one’, that it’s ‘truly the worst’, it strikes me it’s not just inadequate as a likeness, it’s also far kinder to him than he deserves. 

He also blames the governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, whom he accuses of belonging to the ‘radical left’, for putting up the picture. He ‘should be ashamed of himself’, Trump bleats.

The truth is that Polis is on the right of the Democratic Party. Perhaps it’s because he’s openly gay that to Trump he seems radical. He was also elected governor after the painting was commissioned. In any case, it had nothing to do with anyone from the governor’s office. It was a group of Republican supporters of Trump who commissioned it. 

I never know with Trump if his trotting out untruths of this kind reflects his disinclination to say anything much that isn’t a lie, or whether it reflects his simple ignorance: he knows nothing about the real provenance of the portrait but likes to throw slurs around whether he knows anything about the matter or not.

Compare his behaviour with the requirement of Cromwell, a far greater man, to be painted ‘warts and all’.

Samuel Cooper’s ‘warts and all’ portrait of Cromwell
and the Colorado portrait of Trump that caused him to wail so loudly

A curious anecdote casts a different light on the same issue. A while ago, Trump said of the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, that she was a ‘very nice woman, very fine woman’. He even called her ‘tough’ which is high praise in Trump’s mouth.

Sheinbaum has rather set the bar for the world in managing Trump. She has rushed to do things that Trump would appreciate, many of them planned anyway, others not particularly useful, like rushing 10,000 soldiers to the border to try to stop Fentanyl smuggling. Given how Fentanyl gets smuggled in tiny quantities that are easy to hide, it’s not clear what a lot of troops are going to be able to do to stop it. In any case, Fentanyl flows into the US were slowing down before the troops went.

What’s more, she’s engaged in just the kind of gesture that touches Trump’s heart. For instance, she sent the White House a graphic showing a steady drop in Fentanyl quantities crossing the border, marked with the words ‘Since Donald J. Trump came into power’. Wonderful. The opposite effect of the Colorado portrait. It made Trump feel good about himself and that’s all he needs to feel good about the person flattering him.

Obviously, we don’t know how much this will help Mexico in the longer run. Tariffs may come crashing down on the country next week. Who knows? Trump’s unpredictable. But at least Sheinbaum’s managed to get him to be nice to her, and he’s pretty nasty to most of us outside the US. 

These stories tell us little about portraiture or about Mexico. They’re much more eloquent on Trump. He gets irate over an insignificant perceived slight but he’s malleable by a flatterer. 

And this is the man who’s going to Make America Great Again?

Grandparenting a philosopher and a budding secret agent

Last week, spent with the grandkids, was as much of an eye-opener as my time with them always is.

I enjoyed watching Elliott, now soon to turn four, working on his skills at hide and seek. It’s particularly amusing in the kids’ bedroom hiding from their dad, my son Nicky. Matilda is effective at this, as she crawls under the bed or into some such well-protected place. Elliott, on the other hand, just moves beyond bits of furniture but without hiding behind them. So the furniture becomes a series of obstacles to get to him but doesn’t prevent anyone seeing him. In fact, he’s in full view, if inconvenient to reach. 

Elliott hidden in plain sight
Perhaps a tad too visible?

This reveals one of two things. Maybe he needs to think a little harder about the notion of ‘hiding’, perhaps considering that it means moving to a place where you can’t be seen. On the other hand, however, he’s possibly revealing a remarkable sophistication in one so young and beginning to work on the paradoxical concept, particularly developed by secret agents, that there’s no better place to hide a thing, or oneself, than in plain sight. 

I admit, though, that if this is the case, it still means that he needs to refine his approach a little – perhaps hiding in plain sight doesn’t work all that well when you’re the only person visible and you’re hiding from your dad – but even so, I reckon that his willingness to handle such challenging notions at all, shows remarkable precocity.

The most striking aspect of my visit concerned none of this, however, but Matilda’s ever-deepening exploration of philosophy.

The outstanding sixteenth-century French philosopher Montaigne once wrote that to do philosophy is to learn to die. I mentioned before that the kids have become aware of death, even to the point of understanding that they too have an ultimate appointment with the grim reaper.

Matilda is coming to terms with all this. By no means with casual acceptance. In fact, she seems to share Dylan Thomas’s view, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.

‘Mummy,’ she recently told Sheena, ‘I’m mad at you because I didn’t want to be born, because I don’t want to die.’

Yes. It’s the great predicament of humanity, or any species that is aware of death. Even an otherwise rather inferior novel I recently read referred to it. A character announced that no one deserves to be born, but once born, no one deserves to die.

Ours is a cruel and incomprehensible destiny. 

    Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
    Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing 

wrote Edward Fitzgerald in his extremely loose but brilliant translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. 

Since our fate makes no sense, it’s up to us to try to find some sense in it. It seems that Matilda’s working on that too.

‘We’re born to get our turn at life,’ she recently announced, ‘and when we die, we let other people have their turn.’

Once we’d absorbed this pronouncement, she asked us whether we perhaps get another turn later. Sheena tried to provide some comfort by explaining that there are people who believe in reincarnation. I said nothing, because I don’t think there’s any comfort for what strikes me as the fundamental discomfort of being.

Fortunately, not every moment of the visit was quite that profound or challenging to the soul. I was mainly there to help get the kids to school, pick them up again and entertain them some of the time. This was to allow Sheena to visit her own family in Belfast without Nicky having to take a whole week off work.

Entertaining Elliott and Matilda:
enjoying the river made in the park by three weeks of rain,
where no river existed before

Entertaining the kids:
when all else failed, watching The Lion Guard for the nth time,
where n is a large positive integer

Entertaining the kids:
Daddy did his bit whenever he had the time

Now I have to say that I’m not a natural when it comes to looking after young kids. I tend to be impatient. I don’t always exercise the level of control I should. Elliott rather proved that point on this trip by ignoring my plea not to cross a road on his own. He ran across in front of a bunch of cars and then, having reached the other side, turned around and ran back. He emerged from the experience unhurt, I’m glad to say, and entirely unruffled, but I was left a nervous wreck.

Because none of this comes naturally to me, I find myself constantly trying to find ways to amuse the kids when I’m out with them. Take the walk to school, for instance. There’s a last steep climb up a hill to reach the school grounds. Each time we got there, I would push the kids up, or for variety, pull them up, making heavy weather of the exercise, panting loudly and stopping from time to time as if to get my breath back. This was deemed to be high comedy.

The last hill to school
Where a granddad to push or pull comes in useful

The best occasion, though, was the morning we walked to school with each of them holding one of my hands. This meant we formed a unit too wide for the pavement (OK, OK, transatlantic friends: the sidewalk). The solution, whenever we reached one of the (adult-)waist-high bollards that line the pavement, was that one child or the other (depending on which side of the street we were on) would pass to the outside of the bollard while I lifted our conjoined hands over the obstacle. This, it turns out, was highly enjoyable (I confess that even I found it fun). To enhance the enjoyment, I accompanied the action with a sound effect – ‘wheeee-yoop’ – each time. Both the action and the sound were well received.

Even better were the moments when we hit (in my case literally) a lamppost or signpost. I’d walk into it. Then we’d go through a pantomime of stepping backwards and working our way round the obstacle till we could walk on without letting go of our hands. This wasn’t just amusing, it was, apparently, hilarious.

‘It’s such fun going to school like this,’ Matilda told me.

I’m sure you can imagine what a joy it was to me, diffident as I am about my ability to look after the kids, to hear such high praise.

It leaves me quite optimistic. I tend to get on better with kids as they get older. If I can amuse them now, who knows what might not be possible later?

For the Ides of March: new Caesars and old

There’s a story about three outstanding figures from the past, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon, visiting Russia. Putin’s crowd is obviously delighted to receive such distinguished guests and lays on a phenomenal visit to all that Russia offers. In the evening, Putin asks all three what they thought.

‘With such an army,’ says Alexander, ‘I would indeed have conquered the world.’

‘With such logistics,’ says Caesar, ‘I could have ensured the Roman Empire lasted a thousand years.’

‘With such media,’ says Napoleon, ‘nobody would ever have heard of Waterloo.’

Originally, that story was told about the Soviet Union. But, hey, apart from the army being a lot less effective, not much has changed in Russia between Soviet times and Putin’s. And certainly, Napoleon would have had the same reaction today.

As it happens, it isn’t Napoleon or Alexander I want to focus on today, but Julius Caesar. Why? Because he was the bugbear of America’s founding fathers. 

There’s another story, this one more closely based on fact (note that I’m not admitting that my first story was fiction) about a dinner hosted by Thomas Jefferson and with his great rival, Alexander Hamilton, among the guests. Hamilton saw three portraits on Jefferson’s wall and asked who they were.

“They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced,” replied Jefferson, “Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke.” 

That’s two scientists and one of the great exponents of Enlightenment philosophy.

Hamilton supposedly retorted, “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Casar.”

That sounds clever and there are those who feel that it sums up the different attitudes of the two men. That, though, isn’t the view of the historian Jeffrey Rosen. It was listening to him in an interview on the New Yorker podcast The Political Scene that got me thinking about all this. Rosen quoted fellow historian Ron Chernow who reckons that Hamilton was joking. 

I think that’s right. 

Like most of the leaders of the early American republic, Hamilton was extremely concerned about the possibility of a wealthy man backed by the people setting himself up as a dictator, as Caesar did in Rome. For instance, John Adams writing to Thomas Jefferson in November 1813, disagrees on the virtues of an ‘artificial’ aristocracy – that is to say, one that wasn’t born into that station, but made itself wealthy and powerful by its own endeavours. He says:

this artificial Aristocracy can never last. The everlasting Envys, Jealousies, Rivalries and quarrells among them, their cruel rapacities upon the poor ignorant People their followers, compell these to sett up Caesar, a Demagogue to be a Monarch and Master, pour mettre chacun a sa place [to put everyone in their place]

As for Hamilton, the reality is that he was just as concerned about the rise of a strong man to power, in effect overthrowing the republican form of government to return to what would be, in all but name at least, another monarchy. He wrote as much to George Washington, in August 1792:

the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.

Why was the New Yorker talking to Jeffrey Rosen about these exchanges of views from 250 years ago? Well, I think the answer is obvious. ‘Flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion’. Isn’t that exactly what Donald Trump has been doing? 

History repeating itself?
As Karl Marx said, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce

He plays to the worst instincts of a great many people, convincing them that it’s legitimate to hold their basest views, and appropriate to express them, even to elect a government that will act on them.

He makes them jealous of others they see gaining more success, and convinces them it’s simply the injustice of a broken system that denies them the pleasures those others enjoy.

He makes them afraid of what ill-defined enemies may to do them, so that they turn to him to protect them from those threats.

And the aim of all this is to have them carry him to unfettered power, just as the man he apparently admires so sincerely, Vladimir Putin, did in Russia. 

Jeffrey Rosen argued that it was precisely to guard against this kind of usurpation of power that the founding fathers adopted a constitution that provided checks and balances on the executive branch. But those checks and balances only work if the counterbalancing powers exert their authority. Congress, however, now has a spineless majority in both houses that, by conviction or intimidation, will never challenge Trump. And the Supreme Court has yet to show whether it will stand up for its prerogatives – and Trump has still to demonstrate whether he’ll recognise their authority if they do.

The checks and balances are at best fragile now. The Caesar is there. All that remains to be decided is whether he’ll get away with making the final push that gives him the power he craves.

Why am I writing about this now?

Because today is the 15th of March. The Ides of March. So 2068 years ago today, the original Caesar was murdered in the forum of Rome.

Now don't think I’m advocating the same approach to solving the Trump problem. I’m absolutely not. Even setting ethical considerations aside, it worked out extremely badly for the people who tried that way of defending the republic back then. They found themselves in a civil war with Caesar’s supporters, who built a cult around the death of a man presented as a martyr. It was the followers of Caesar, enemies of the republic, who went on to win that war.

So assassination is no answer to the present problems in the US, in spite of Jefferson’s famous – or infamous – comment that ‘the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants’. There are at least three excellent reasons why this would be a lousy way to go:

1. Assassination is the tool of autocrats, as Putin has shown. We don’t defend  democracy by adopting autocratic means

2. We’d be turning the would-be Caesar into a martyr and the retaliation from his followers would be appalling

3. In the specific case of Trump, one of the best arguments for hoping against hope that he lives through his time in office (and let’s not rule out a third term yet) can be summed up in two initials and one name: J. D. Vance.

As a French senator, Claude Malhuret, rightly pointed out in a recent speech, the fate of the American people has to be decided by the concerted political action of the American people. If Americans want to avoid falling under the brutal power of a new Caesar, they must organise to prevent that fate. And that simple truth really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

After all, isn’t that exactly what the founding fathers had to do?