What's to be so relaxed about?

It’s sometimes worrying how easily one can be sucked into a superficially plausible view to which normally one wouldn’t give any house room at all.

For instance, like rather a lot of other people I’ve tended to go along with the idea that it’s no bad thing that Greece and Italy now have ‘technocratic’ governments. I’m not quite sure why I should be relaxed about this idea, because ‘technocratic’ only seems to be a synonym for ‘unelected’. I like to think of myself as a bit of a democrat, so how can I reconcile myself to this obvious travesty of accountability?

And yet when I saw an Italian being interviewed on the streets on that heady day when Berlusconi finally fell, and heard him say ‘now, we just need to get things sorted out, there’ll be time for elections later’ I caught myself nodding and agreeing. But what happens to the principle of one citizen one vote?

In the cases of Greece and Italy we seem to have reduced it to 15 or so non-citizens, one vote.

On the one hand, we have Merkozy, one half of which at least has the merit of being relatively civilised, though the other half is just a would-be Napoleon who worries all the time about his physical stature, presumably because any other kind is beyond him. He has all the qualities that won Berlusconi the general admiration he so richly deserves, as well as the career exit he had done so much to earn himself and which, we can but hope, Sarko might soon emulate.

Less impressive half of Merkozy

Then there are two or three international financiers, the heads of the European Central Bank, the IMF, whatever.

And there are the credit rating agencies.

Because let’s not forget that one of the main drivers behind government policy and government changes recently is the need to satisfy the ‘markets’. 

And that means the credit ratings people.

Have you noticed  how people talk about them as though they were impersonal? I heard it last week. ‘Standard and Poor’s are considering downgrading France’s debt.’ Standard and Poor’s? They make it sound like an oracle of some kind, a handing down of tablets of timeless truth from the Lord himself on top of a mountain in a desert.

Just bear in mind that S&P’s is basically twelve guys in suits sat round a table in a board room in New York and voting  - yes, voting – about whether Italy or Iceland or the US itself deserves needs ticking off. If seven decide to reduce the grading, a bunch – which can mean some hundreds hundreds of thousands – of people lose their jobs or their pensions or their savings.

And what qualifies those seven to make these decisions?

They’re accountants. Or economists. Or they’ve spent some years in – wait for it – financial services.

Feeling relaxed about seeing them calling the political shots can’t be right. Surely? 

We shall not see his like again. Or won't we?

It has taken until today, we hope his last day in office, for me to understand something that had been bothering me about Silvio Berlusconi: something about him seemed strangely familiar, but I couldn't place it. 

What was it that I was reminded of whenever I saw him?

Then this evening, as I watched film of him being driven away from the Parliament in Rome and bestowing on us that smile with all the charm we’ve come to expect from him, it suddenly struck me: he reminded me of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland.

Judge for yourself.

The Cheshire Cat as seen by John Tenniel

Berlusconi demonstrating his charm.
Spooky, isn't it?

Obviously, the resemblance between the two characters isn’t total. The Cheshire Cat did have a certain air of mystery about him, whereas the only mystery about Berlusconi is how he managed to maintain his hold over the Italian people for so long. And the Cheshire Cat, though he could often be deeply irritating, did have some redeeming features.

The similarities, though, are striking. And one of them is a matter of concern: the Cheshire Cat would gradually disappear with the smile going last, and Berlusconi is doing the same; the Cheshire Cat would then reappear unannounced at inconvenient times, and Berlusconi has shown a tendency to do that too; so the frightening thought is, could he pull the trick off again? 

I find myself looking around for a wooden stake.

Still, let’s stay positive. For now he’s on his way, and for that let us be properly grateful. It’ll be wonderful to see the Cavaliere’s back – if only so that we don’t have to see that smile.

Bus travel broadens the mind

Misquotations are by definition incorrect, but they’re not always wrong.

A wonderful example is the severe statement attributed to Maggie Thatcher, ‘a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure.’ Though it now looks as though she never spoke those words, it perfectly sums up the arrogance she often showed, her tendency to mistake prejudice for judgement, and her conviction of the superiority of ‘her people’ – even though those people never accepted her as one of their own and they turned on her ruthlessly as soon as they decided that she no longer served their purposes.

It's a judgement that makes me a total failure, of course. To confess the full extent of my ignominy, not only do I frequently use buses, I actually like them.

In the first place, I’d always choose a bus if the alternative is London Underground, which as well as being overcrowded and short of seats, inevitably suffers from all the unpleasantness that goes with the word ‘underground’ itself.

Buses also have actual positive merits to recommend them. For instance, the number 10 which carries me so often between my railway station and my office has recently taken on surprising value as a symbol of international relations. It is operated by the RATP – the Paris transport network. That’s has significance I can only describe as millenarian – I can’t think of a similar French invasion of English daily life since William of Normandy landed at Hastings in 1066.


Ah, ça alors! Zese French, zey are debarking
chez nous again. And on my bus too

You can also meet interesting people on buses. I recently found myself sitting at the front of the upper deck of my number 10, across the aisle from a father travelling with his eight-year old daughter. They were talking what to my ear sounded like Dutch but not in any accent that I associate with Holland. Danielle tells me that Dutch is just ‘homity-homity-homity’ and they didn’t sound remotely like that. And I was impressed by the daughter who was reading adverts off other buses or roadside hoardings and translating them to her father. When I asked where they were from, they gave me what I suppose was the obvious answer: Belgium.


Extraordinary place, Belgium. They haven’t had a government for months, but I was there in March and everything’s running just fine: the trains, the restaurants, the shops. That reminded me of the previous occasion I’d had that kind of experience, in Italy, in 1979. When I arrived, the country had been without a government for four months; when I left, it had been without a government for six months. That didn’t prevent my enjoying some magical times in the glorious Alpine town of Aosta, where I spent many an evening listening to a Mexican friend describing in a Spanish I only half understood the mythical background of his country, while we sipped pink wine in the pink central square filled with the pink light of the setting sun.

You see? You can even get quite lyrical without a government. Perhaps, given where Italy is today in its Berlusconi-fied state, it’s positively easier without a government.

Curiously, Danielle and I had a not dissimilar experience in the last few days, in Madrid. Spain provides the ‘S’ of that dismal acronym PIIGS, the nations including Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Greece, whose financial difficulties are most threatening the financial stability of Europe. And in Spain the sun still shines, the olives are as succulent, the beer is as cold and the churros as delicious and calorific as ever. Which makes me think that the country hasn’t really lurched from doing fabulously well, generating over-optimistic exuberance among commentators, to doing catastrophically badly, inspiring their doom-laden horror – it has gone from doing well to doing less well.

The problem is the commentators. A small change is enough to plunge them from excessive hopes to unjustified gloom. The sad thing is that governments listen to the commentators, so some day if one of the credit agencies decides to downgrade Spain’s credit rating, there might be real problems. But will the rating reflect the financial difficulties, or will the rating cause them?

But back to Belgium. Another frequently repeated saying, again with a lot of truth in it, is that the King of the Belgians is actually the only Belgian. The others are all Flemish or Walloon, with a handful of Germans thrown in for good measure.

As the father on the bus explained to me, at school he found himself obliged to learn Flemish – Dutch without the homity-homity – French and German, to cover the official languages of the Belgian state (it’s not a nation).

‘But then,’ he told me, ‘I discovered that as an IT specialist, I wasn’t going to get anywhere without English, so I had to learn that too. And then I worked in South America, so I learned Spanish. And of course, I’ve also had to master computer languages.’

I wanted to ask him to say something in C++ or T-SQL, but I was nearly at my stop. So I wished them well and left, full of admiration at their linguistic abilities – particularly the daughter’s. I wonder how many of our eight-year olds would be able to translate advertising out of a foreign language?

The experience also confirmed my view that bus travel is a wonderful way to set in motion all sorts of interesting trains of thought . As I hope I’ve shown.

That makes it a pretty remarkable mode of transport, whatever Mrs T. might have said on the subject.

Or, alternatively, never said.

The heavens scowled, the earth trembled, the rating fell

Generally, nothing’s duller than talking about the weather, but if you’re Casca in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar it seems you can inject a certain drama into it.

I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th' ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threatening clouds,
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.

It has a bit more of a ring to it than ‘a depression in the Rome region is leading to gale force winds, electric storms and heavy precipitation.’ Of course, in Italy the weather forecast may still be delivered in Casca's breathless tones, since the media are dominated by a would-be autocrat just as when Caesar was at the height of his power, but elsewhere we expect something duller.

Casca, behind the throne, prepares to produce a
severe depresson for Caesar

From our 21st-century vantage point we smile a little at the superstitious element in Casca's words despite the glory of the poetry. With the conscious superiority of our oh-so-scientific outlook, we know that the climate has nothing to do with the wrath of the gods. We’ve put that kind of childishness well behind us.

Or have we? On Monday Standard and Poor downgraded the credit rating of the United States and panic broke out on stock and currency markets around the world. ‘A shot across the bows of the US government’ is how commentator after commentator referred to it. Personally, I’d think very carefully about firing a shot across the bows of the US government, or indeed anywhere near it. You might get a hell of a lot more back than you'd bargained for.

In any case, what I found most interesting was the way the event was described. ‘The S&P rating has been reduced’ is the way it’s presented, but what they actually mean is that ‘the crowd of accountants and economists at S&P have reduced the rating.’ This isn’t some objective scientific phenomenon, it’s a company, 8500 strong, that tries to guess the way the financial world is trending. I hope I’m not alone in finding it worrying that their guesses can have such consequences on the real livelihood of 300 million Americans and, quite soon afterwards, on the other five and a half billion of us around the world.

Let’s not forget the immortal words of Leo McGarry in The West Wing: ‘economists were put on Earth to make astrologers look good.’

Let’s also not forget that this was the same Standard and Poor who brilliantly downgraded Lehman Brothers from A+ to A in June of 2008. A-rated Lehman’s went bust in September of the same year.

Let’s finally not forget that they get paid for their ratings by the companies they rate. Might this have an impact on the ratings they produce? I leave it to you to wonder.

Despite all this, we behave as though S&P have the significance of a major force of nature, an earthquake, a tsunami.

Seems to me about as sensible as Casca seeing the rage of the gods in the weather. And much less well expressed.

It's official: no more beastliness in politics

That new age of civility everyone's talking about these days, seems already to have dawned, over here in England.

The heart-rending events in Tucson show how things can degenerate when an atmosphere of hate prevails. What a relief it is to find that on this side of the Atlantic we live by higher standards.

On Thursday, a by-election was held in the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency, which covers part of Greater Manchester and some glorious countryside up into the Pennine Hills (we don’t do mountains in England). Less enviably, Saddleworth also provided the setting for the notorious Moors Murders.



The moors at Saddleworth: a pretty setting for ugly deeds

 Labour had held the parliamentary seat at the General Election in May, but by a wafer-thin majority of 103 over the Liberal Democrats. This time they extended that majority to 3500 and the Conservatives came a distant third.

It was a bad result for the coalition government of Conservatives and Lib Dems, but all I'm going to say about my sorrow over their discomfiture is that they are most deserving people. For now, what interests me more than the outcome is the reason the election was held at all.

It seems that when Phil Woolas, then the sitting MP, clung on to the seat in May, he did so at least in part by accusing his opponent of being a supporter of Moslem extremism. Or was it being in league with the devil? It doesn’t really matter, because these days the accusations are pretty much interchangeable.

Anyway, a court convened to consider the matter, and decided that Woolas had indeed made the allegation, that it was untrue, and that it may have materially affected the outcome. The court banned him from holding elective office for three years and ordered the election to be re-run. It was the first time for 99 years that a member of parliament had been forced out in this way.

Isn’t it great how the courts have their fingers on the pulse of daily life? Consider the judges (for there were more than one, of course, for so weighty a matter). You can picture them, can't you, spluttering with indignation in the privacy of their chambers?

‘Good Lord,’ says one, ‘this young popinjay has been positively beastly about his opponent.’

‘And what he said wasn’t even true,’ replies the other, scarcely able to contain his consternation.

Perhaps they both made some kind of propitious sign to ward off evil influences.

Because they're right, aren't they? We just can’t have politicians being nasty to other politicians. And getting away with saying things which don’t meet the highest standards of respect for accuracy.

What sort of world would we be living in if they could get away with that kind of behaviour?

Next week: Silvio Berlusconi mounts a campaign to raise moral standards in public life and Vladimir Putin offers a series of lectures on the benefits of democracy.

Rubies are a knight’s best friend

This column has often been cynical about the behaviour of people in government. I feel it’s time to set the record straight by at last doing a piece about virtue in high places.

Loyalty is a deeply attractive quality, isn’t it? It becomes all the more striking when it is displayed towards a person who belongs to a group that suffers painful discrimination in today’s society. In Europe, few are subject to so much difficulty as immigrants from outside the European Union, especially those who come from Africa including its Northern countries, whose treatment reflects serious undertones of racism.

Indeed, if they are from the North of the continent, it is likely that the problems they suffer will be further intensified by the terrible Islamophobia that infects so many of our nations. The worst of it is that such people, particularly if they are women, suffer additional degradation by being sucked into the sex trade or at least into its fringes.

Protecting someone exposed to all these hardships is therefore particularly commendable. It is even more admirable if the person offering that protection has the power to give it real effect. If, say, he holds the highest elected position in his country and therefore has such influence that a simple station commander in the police can hardly deny a request from him.

So we must be moved by the sight of such a politician using his influence to secure the release of a seventeen-year old Moroccan belly dancer from police custody. If the police commander in question later goes on to a position in government, that may be a completely unrelated occurrence and, even if it weren’t, how can we cavil at a reward for contributing to an act of generosity?

Now it’s true that the belly dancer in question, who rejoices in the name of Ruby (and is sometimes referred to as 'Ruby rubacuoure', Ruby the heart stealer), might have revealed embarrassing information about her protector, had she ever appeared in court. That he had some advantage to gain from the transaction does not lessen the kindness of the gesture.

So let us offer all the admiration he deserves to Silvio Berlusconi for obtaining the liberation of Ruby the belly dancer. One understands now why he is referred to as ‘il Cavaliere’, the knight. Can anyone question his chivalry today? He clearly laid his job and his political career on the line for her.

Now it is up to the Italian people and opposition politicians, joined by his erstwhile allies, to help complete his gesture by ensuring that this act of sacrifice is taken to its conclusion.

The Italians

In a couple of weeks I’m due to sit an exam for a position as a translator for the EU. I have mixed feelings about the prospect. I’ve done translation work for years, but almost entirely out of French. The EU requires at least two languages of member states. Now German, alongside French, would probably open more doors, but Italian, the language of my country of birth, just comes more naturally to me. I had to offer it, if only so as to play to my strongest suit.

That leaves me with two problems to overcome.

The first is my approach to translation itself. My philosophy is to ask ‘what would a mother-tongue English speaker have said in the circumstances?’ This has proved an interesting task on occasions, as I’ve tried to express myself as an Anglophone psychiatrist or histopathologist might. This has led to exciting challenges since I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a histopathologist.

Now some people really like this approach (I once had a French computer scientist I’d translated telling me ‘I really like my written English style’). Others think it’s a real cheek on my part. They want their words, expressed their way, as far as English allows. I was turned down for a translator’s job on the grounds that my translations were too literary, which I think means that they weren’t literal enough (amusing distinction since both words have the same root).

The second problem is that it’s been years since I’ve translated out of Italian. Perhaps that doesn’t matter a lot. The crucial language is the target. I have sometimes worked into French, a language I thought I’d mastered, but the results were frankly sad. To adapt my principle of translation, I was expressing myself in French just as a mother-tongue English speaker would.

The source language you just need to understand. So what I have to do is get myself working and thinking in Italian a bit more – not something I’ve ever completely stopped doing, as I regard La Repubblica as one of the best newspapers out there, on a par with The Guardian. Of course, Berlusconi can’t stand La Repubblica which counts for an awful lot in my book.

Still, I think I need to read a lot more Italian over the next two weeks. In a Waterstone’s the other day, I saw a couple of books of Italian short stories with English facing translation. Ideal: good Italian writing with good translations from which I can clear up any vocabulary problems I may have, as well as pick up some clever translation hints (or will they be too literary?)

Anyway, I’ve been reading these stories with fascination. I’ve just been through three that were set in the years leading up to the Second World War or during the War itself. One by Elio Vittorini describes how he became a writer during the Fascist period. When his first novel appeared – the Fascists were less effective censors than the Nazis – he was hauled up in front of the Milan committee and threatened with expulsion from the Party, to which he replied that unfortunately they couldn’t expel him, since he’d already been expelled by the Fascists in Florence. The Florentine lot had made him pay a lot of money, to bring his subscriptions to the party up to date, since he hadn’t paid any since being forced to join while at school. Once he was paid up, they expelled him.

In Milan the Fascist leader ended up apologising to him, and pointing out that since he couldn’t expel him, there was no further action he could take.

Much sadder was the story by Mario Rigoni-Stern about fighting in Russia on 26 January 1943. Ten years to the day before my birth, making the story all the more poignant for me. It was curious to read a first-person narrative from someone who’d been fighting alongside the Germans, but the real impact was the ending: ‘That was January 26th, 1943. I parted with my dearest friends that day.’

I have to say that I would have translated ‘I miei piú cari amici mi hanno lasciato in quel giorno’ as ‘My dearest friends left me that day’, which is odd, because I’m preferring the literal to the literary, or perhaps saying they’re the same in this instance. Just me thinking I know best again, I suppose. Could cost me marks in the test.

Finally, I read a story by Beppe Fenoglio about a partisan group taking on a Fascist detachment. It wonderfully evokes the infinitely frustrating, and frightening, experience of fighting a much bigger and far better armed enemy, where landing any blow is a victory.

That reminded me of one of the finest moments in the Italian partisan war, the liberation of Genoa. The city showed extraordinary courage throughout the war. Towards the end, the Germans laid mines throughout the port so that they could blow it up when they left. The dockworkers would watch them during the day and sneak back at night, at peril of their lives, to remove the mines.

As for the partisans themselves, they were growing in numbers and confidence in the hills nearby. Eventually, they invested the city with such dynamism that on occasions they seized German artillery positions and turned the guns on the fleeing enemy.

The Allies made it to the City a few days after the partisans had liberated it. The American General commanding the troops met a British agent from the Special Operations Executive who had been fighting with the partisans. The American asked him to interpret for him.

They met the Mayor and the General asked the Englishman to say that he was proud to have been able to liberate the city which he was delighted to hand back to the Mayor’s civilian control. When the Englishman hesitated, the American asked him ‘what’s the matter? Can’t you translate that?’

Just at that moment there was a noise from the street outside, and they went over to the window. Winding down the middle of the road, between ranks of jeering Italian civilians, was an apparently endless column of German prisoners guarded by a handful of partisans. The men in the Mayor’s office watched for a few moments and the General turned to the Englishman.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘I understand your problem now. Tell him I congratulate him on having liberated his city and I’m proud to count myself among his allies.’

A happy ending. Not one I expect in two weeks time. I’ll be chasing one of 20 posts from a field of 200 candidates or more, the vast majority of whom will certainly be at least as well qualified as I am.

At least the process will have got me reading some interesting material that I wouldn’t otherwise have come across, and reminding me how much I like Italy and the Italians. Despite all that Berlusconi does to spoil their charm.

I think therefore I am, and Berlusconi can ignore his rivals

It’s funny how things that happen today can evoke half-remembered memories from decades ago.

For instance, when I was a student I spent a lot of time grappling with Descartes and his idea of mind-matter dualism. This overthrew the earlier view that the universe contained a colossal number of substances, so that fire was of a wholly different substance from water or wood or earth and so on. Descartes only had two: matter and mind. The essence of matter was extension, in other words the capacity to occupy space. The essence of mind was thought. So there you had it. Clear. Simple. Coherent.

The problem is that between these two, Descartes did tend to give the precedence to mind over matter. ‘I think therefore I am’ has got to be the most famous statement in all philosophy, and it does rather suggest that existence depends on thought.

Now lots of people weren’t convinced about that. John Locke, for instance, and Voltaire after him, felt sure that there were times when they really weren’t thinking, but that didn’t mean they stopped existing. My personal experience seems to confirm their view. I know lots of people who exist rather a lot – rather more, I often feel, than absolutely necessary for the comfort of those around them – and hardly ever think at all.

Despite all that, it’s amazing how often we seem to drift back into the habit of putting mind ahead of matter.

I was struck by that most forcibly when I was reading about the recent happenings in Italy concerning the man who has to be world’s most extraordinary politician. The Prime Minister, Sivio Berlusconi has had a bit of a spat with his old best friend Gianfranco Fini, the former-neo-fascist-reinvented-as-liberal-conservative, and it’s not clear the government will survive the crisis (though this being Italy, I fear it might). The beauty is that Berlusconi’s reacting by apparently simply dissing his opponents as though they were barely worth taking seriously.

‘We don’t mind,’ he seems to be saying, ‘so they don’t matter.’

OK, so it’s a different take on the question of mind-matter dualism and the assertion of primacy of the mind. Even so, it's  a bit evocative of all that stuff, isn't it?

I wonder whether Berlusconi is aware of his debt to Descartes. Of course, that would mean he’d have to know who Descartes was.

So perhaps not, then.

Aw, shucks. Obama don't like us any more

There was a curious piece in my favourite newspaper The Guardian (perhaps I should say joint favourite, since I have a soft spot for the scourge of Berlusconi, La Repubblica). It seems that journalist Simon Tisdall is concerned about Obama’s attitude towards Europe: ‘Obama’s coolness towards Europe worries his Nato partners’.

Perhaps it’s too cheap a crack to say ‘hold on: weren’t we supposed to think his coolness was the thing we liked about him in the first place?’, so I’ll resist the temptation.

In any case, Tisdall’s complaint does feel a bit like something from the ‘he’s-stopped-going-round-with-me-at-break’ school of international diplomacy. Who cares what Obama thinks of us? Well, apart from Brown and Sarkozy of course, snubbed when they wanted private meetings with him – but then why care about them either? In any case, if being liked is the issue, we have so much liking for him over here that we hardly need Obama to contribute any of his own. On the other hand, we might start liking him rather less if he doesn’t start delivering soon.

Bring in a climate change deal that sticks, sort out the mess in Afghanistan and avoid getting us into war with Iran, and he can call us tea-drinkers with bad teeth, cheese-eating surrender monkeys and square-headed cabbage eaters for all I care. And if he sorts out those brutal little bullies in Israel, why, he’ll have earned a Nobel Peace Prize into the bargain.

Fail to deal with those things, and as far as I’m concerned he’s just another loudmouthed American blundering around doing more harm than good. Not that he’ll care if we think that of him. He’ll be blissfully indifferent to our opinion, good or bad. A healthy attitude. One that we should emulate.