The great Bill Gates conspiracy

We live in a time of conspiracy theories.

Of course, most times have had their conspiracy theories. The power of anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century spread rumours of an international plot of Jewish financiers to take over and run the world. There was even a remarkable document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, explaining how this was going to be carried out.

Unsurprisingly, the document turned out to be a forgery. Equally unsurprisingly, that didn’t stop the conspiracy theory being believed. It is of the essence of a conspiracy theory that once you’ve been bitten by one, nothing will shake your confidence in it. Not even discovering that a key element is false. And if evidence for it is lacking, that only demonstrates how dastardly devious the conspirators are, in hiding all trace of their nefarious activity.

In the same way, any evidence against the theory is obviously fake news, put about by members of the conspiracy to fool the ingenuous and naïve.

You see, it isn’t the people who believe the conspiracy theories who are gullible, for accepting as true allegations with no evidence to back them. The gullible ones are the rest of us, without the acuity to realise that absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence. To say nothing of our being so innocent as to accept the truth of obviously fabricated so-called evidence against the theory.

Well, not a theory. The truth. Or even the Truth, with an initial capital letter.

Melinda and Bill Gates

The target of today’s favoured conspiracy theory is, rather oddly, the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has put $300m into fighting Coronavirus. You might think that people threatened with infection by the virus might be grateful for the gesture. I’m sure most are.

He also warned in a 2015 Ted Talk, that the great threat to life in the next decades would be from a virus, not from war. You might think that people would admire him for his prescience. I’m sure most do.

But not the conspiracy theorists.

To them, this is just part of his smokescreen for his real agenda. He wants the pandemic to spread – indeed is responsible for that spread, which is why he knew about it so early – so that a vaccine, developed with his money, can be injected into people – and with it a microchip allowing the Gates foundation to establish control over the people vaccinated.

There are other even wilder accusations around, and if you want to catch up on them, you can do so here.

As Bill and Melinda Gates point out, “we are just giving money away, we write the cheque...” They don’t develop the vaccine. They certainly won’t be administering it to anyone.

Besides, there isn’t a vaccine yet, and there may never be. More to the point, to my knowledge, there is no chip capable of controlling a human being into whom it has been injected.

Why, there isn’t even any evidence that the virus was deliberately developed by anyone, let alone Bill Gates, as the conspiracy theorists keep claiming.

Now, I’m not saying that there are no conspiracies. There are. Indeed, it could be useful to look at a real one, to get a better idea of how it differs from the fake variety.

In March 2018, two characters travelling on Russian passports but in names it seems were not their own, showed up in Salisbury, in Southern England. They were there again the next day. They later claimed that they had been so impressed by the cathedral on their first visit that they decided to return from London at the first opportunity.

Not long after, a former Russian Intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter fell seriously ill, with poisoning by the agent Novichok, of which there are significant stocks in Russia. Skripal had been a double agent, revealing Russian secrets to Britain.

Traces of Novichok were later found in the hotel room in London used by the Russians. And they were later fairly reliably identified as being longstanding members of Russian military intelligence.

The Skripals both recovered from the poisoning, though they were dangerously ill for a time.

Now none of this meets the high standard of a criminal trial, which is proof beyond reasonable doubt (a great criterion, although it hasn’t always stopped innocent defendants being convicted). But Russia’s never going to admit to involvement in the case, or release the agents involved for interrogation and trial in Britain, so we’re not going to get the evidence for that kind of rigorous test.

But on the weaker test of balance of probabilities, it does feel to me as though someone in the Russian state ran a conspiracy to wipe out a man Russia views as a traitor.

Now this story is a wonderful illustration of what a real conspiracy looks like.

First of all, you find out about them. And not just in the form of loose, vague allegations, but with real and convincing, even if only partial, evidence.

But the second characteristic is even more striking. It’s incompetence. The Russian agents failed in their mission. Indeed, when two uninvolved British citizens found and handled the flask that had contained the Novichok, they both fell sick, and one of them died.

In other words, the agents missed their target but hit two people with whom they had no quarrel.

That’s the way most conspiracies go. Inept people within it deliberately or unintentionally let the secret out. And they generally don’t do very well.

That’s one of the things that strikes me most about conspiracy theorists. They massively overstate the intelligence of conspirators. They regard the plots as sinister because they think the plotters ingenious, when in reality they’re like the Skripal agents.

Well, all I can say to conspiracy theorists is, every time you think a brilliant conspiracy is being directed against you, remember the Skripal case. The Russian state’s pretty sophisticated. And look what a pig’s ear it made of that one.

Then think of Watergate. Or the Weapons of Mass Destruction myth for Iraq. Conspirators aren’t as smart as you imagine they are.

The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie once said that the man who dies rich, dies disgraced. And gave away his money.

If Bill Gates is following that example, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just congratulate him, rather than spin a web of unfounded and deeply implausible conspiracy allegations around him?

Release for some, jeopardy for others

We’re emerging here in Valencia. Slowly. With a little optimism.

We’ve moved into phase 2 of the Lockdown relaxation process. With some justification. According to the Health Ministry, Spain has just had two days without a single Coronavirus death anywhere. Friends of ours from a few doors down the street tell us that their daughter, a nurse in the major local hospital, is being redeployed to Oncology after a couple of months in intensive care. The ICU beds are empty at the moment.

The only jarring note is that the Ministry has also warned that there are signs of an increase in infections as the restrictions relax. We’re clearly not quite out of the woods yet. It’s going to be face masks and social distancing for a while yet. Maybe even rubber gloves.

Still, we needed to celebrate our entry into phase 2. And what better way to do it than to go back to the sea? Especially if we took advantage of the new regulations to go there with friends. So we drove to a lovely spot south of Valencia, El Saler, with Maria José and Santi, our near-neighbours and the parents of the no-longer-ICU nurse I mentioned before.

The beach at El Saler

The day started relatively grey, but that meant the temperature was ideal for walking, warm enough for tee shirts, cool enough to be comfortable. We started in an almost jungle-like nature reserve before heading for the beach where we could walk with our feet in the surf.

The Nature Reserve at El Saler

A forest dweller we met

The company was great, the place was glorious, and as we walked, so the clouds cleared and we finished the outing, back in the woods, with bright sunlight filtering through the tree cover.

Danielle and Maria José wandering into the sunlight

It was a fine way of celebrating our emergence into a freer life. And it lifted my mood which had been rather depressed by a Tweet I saw in the morning from Trisha Greenhalgh: “I’ve never been so scared. There. Is. No. Plan.”

When I first heard Trish Greenhalgh, she was giving a conference presentation of remarkable brilliance. So brilliant that I wrote a post about it at the time. She is one of the leading Public Health specialists in England and one of the most convincing experts on evidence-based medicine I’ve ever heard.

If she is worried about the government simply having no plan, it seems to me a lot of other people should be too.

There’s much to criticise the government for in Spain. It was painfully slow in recognising the seriousness of the crisis about to hit the country. As a result it did far too little to prepare for it and reacted far later than it should have. But when it awoke to what it had to do, it acted fast, decisively and effectively. The results are obvious, as we've been slowly emerging from lockdown for a month now, and have had two days without a death.

It won’t necessarily benefit the government. Its vote seems to be more or less holding up, but it certainly isn’t improving, and the Conservative opposition is progressing. Given how well the government’s performed, that hardly seems just, but politics is an unkind game.

Meanwhile, Britain has a government which, as Greenhalgh puts it, simply has. no. plan. It never has had a strategy, but has stumbled from crisis to crisis since the pandemic hit, making up policy on the hoof, inventing commitments out of thin air and then failing to honour them.

Now it’s relaxing a lockdown that was never as strict as Spain’s, and doing so far too early. Spain, with its slow start, long had a far worse record in deaths per million than the UK, but the gap is now so small that it looks as though Britain will move beyond Spain in a matter of days.

The hasty relaxation is happening only in England, I should say. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with better governments, are being more prudent. The fear, and it’s certainly Greenhalgh’s, is that the Cummings/Johnson English administration is opening the UK up to a second wave of infection. The population certainly doesn’t deserve that fate, but I fear that can only be fixed when it chooses itself a better government.

Meanwhile, over here we’re slowly moving towards a new normal. There’s no reason for complacency, so it involves a lot of use of face masks, of hand gel, even of gloves. But we can go out more, we can meet friends, we can even get our hair cut or go to the dentist.

The dentist, in fact, was the downside of our first day in Phase 2. After the visit to El Saler, I had to head into town – my first metro trip since March, with gloves and mask and an empty seat next to each seated passenger – to visit the dentist. Who proceeded to beat the daylights out of my jaw, far longer in my view than strictly necessary, since it never offered him the slightest resistance.

Still, it was a small price to pay for another step out of lockdown. I just hope it doesn’t lead to a surge of disease. As I hope there’s no new peak in England either. 

Let’s hope Greenhalgh’s fears prove unfounded.

Danielle and Maria José collecting seashells

The Spanish fighters again: liberation achieved. And denied.

When we last saw our gutsy Spanish Republican fighters in the French Foreign Legion, they were rather twiddling their thumbs in North Africa waiting for something to change.

Well they did eventually change. And in a big way.

Men of the Nueve with their halftrack Guadalajara

In 1943, the Americans landed in Morocco and, together with British forces, in Algeria. The local French military was still ostensibly supporting the Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain and serving under its orders, which meant Nazi orders. They put up a bit of a fight but soon caved, though not before some three thousand men had been killed and a lot more injured.

At that point, the local leadership, specifically the commander of the French forces, Admiral Darlan, suddenly realised they had always been lifelong democrats and switched to the Allied side. They required little in return, except being kept in office, which might have led to some friction with the Free French and in particular with de Gaulle.

Fortuitously, a young royalist decided the best way to secure the return of the rightful King to the French throne was to assassinate Darlan, which he duly did. It turned out he was wrong, as far as getting the King back was concerned, but he certainly removed a major irritation for de Gaulle.

Meanwhile the Allies, advancing from Morocco in the West and Algeria in the East, eventually drove the German army to defeat in Tunisia. The French, having switched sides, fought with the Allies, and that included the French Foreign Legion, who saw some tough battles, in which its Spanish Republican forces played a key role. And lost many men.

Not all the French forces had had to switch sides. Some soldiers had been with the Free French right from the start. In particular, one idealistic young officer had raised a small force in the French colonies south of the Sahara, marched it across the desert and joined the British effort against General Rommel in Libya.

Leclerc with his Armoured Division, during the liberation of France

His name was Leclerc (well, it was Philippe de Hautecloque, really, and Leclerc was just a nom de guerre which he’d adopted in the hope that it would deflect the attention of the authorities from his family back in occupied France). De Gaulle made him a major general and gave him the Second Armoured Division, the iconic Deuxième DB, to command. It was selected to be the only French unit to be included in the Allied landings in Normandy when they eventually came.

Unfortunately, he only had 4000 men and he needed 15,000. He set out to recruit new soldiers. One group from whom he found it easy to recruit were the Spaniards, who transferred in droves out of the Foreign Legion and into his Deuxième DB. Manuel Fernandez, whom I quoted yesterday, summed things up:

“The ideas of de Gaulle corresponded more to ours than those of the others who’d stayed with Pétain. The officers of the Legion considered us as red Spaniards, as revolutionaries… The senior officers would say to us, ‘you’re not in Spain here. You’re not going to make a revolution here.’ We’d keep quiet. The officers with de Gaulle, on the other hand, said ‘oh, did you fight in Spain? Good…’ The men the officers wanted were Spaniards. We had a certain experience, not just in Spain, but in the campaign in Tunisia too.”

Spanish recruits to the Deuxième DB
parading on the beach in Morocco

From the many Spaniards mobilised into Leclerc’s division, one company, the ninth, was almost exclusively Spanish: 146 out of 160 men. Commanded by a Frenchman, Raymond Dronne, and his number 2, the Spaniard Amado Granell, from Valencia, who had commanded a division in the Civil War, it passed into legend as ‘La Nueve’, ‘The Nine’.

The Deuxième DB landed in France in August 1944. The American high command had committed to allowing French troops to lead the Allies into the French capital.

On the 20^th, an insurrection broke out in Paris, with Resistance units taking action against the Nazi occupiers. De Gaulle asked for and obtained authority to press on to their support as quickly as possible. On the 24^th, Leclerc told Dronne and the Nueve “leave and go to Paris”. They left at 7:30 that evening and by 9:30 the company, supported by a squadron of tanks from the French 501^st armoured regiment, arrived at the Paris Town Hall. There, the first ‘French’ soldier to make contact with the Resistance forces that had taken control was Lieutenant Granell, the officer from Valencia who had held general rank in the Spanish Civil War.

The next day, as well as attacking several key points around the City, Spanish soldiers also accepted the surrender of the German Commander and took him into custody, before handing him over to French authorities.

The men who had fought so hard to keep Spain free, at least had the satisfaction of leading the liberation of France’s capital.

One of the halftracks in the parade down the Champs-Elysées
celebrating the liberation of Paris

The action in Paris wasn’t the Nueve’s last. They fought on through the rest of the war, even reaching Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s hilltop eerie, the Eagle’s Nest. By then though, only 16 of the 146 Spaniards of the combat were still fit for combat. They had lost 35 dead and 97 wounded.

Captain Dronne, their commander, said of them:

Some of them are experiencing a clear moral crisis due to the losses we've suffered and above all to the events in Spain.

The Spaniards who fought with the French had hoped that after overthrowing Fascism in Italy and principally in Germany, the Western Powers would turn their attention to Spain and finish it off there too. It wouldn’t happen.

The best slant to put on that decision is that the Western Powers had bled enough in the war and they didn’t want to fight another. That may be partly true. But Franco was no Hitler, the Army he led no Wehrmacht. Overthrowing his regime would not have required anything like the force or the losses that the battle against the Nazis had cost.

The less honourable explanation is that the West was already turning its attention against the Soviet Union. Far from wanting to take on Franco’s rather eccentric brand of Fascism – he was always more of a Franquist than a Fascist – they preferred to concentrate their efforts against Communism. In that fight, Franco could if anything be something of an ally, just as soon as he could be brought out of his pariah state. Which happened in the fifties, when the easing of measures against his regime was the price paid for stationing American forces in Spanish territory.

Ultimately the thousands of Spanish Republicans who fought and died for France and for the freedom of their own country, would be let down. “We weren’t fighting for a flag,” Manuel Fernandez would tell the 2017 documentary makers, “we were fighting for ideas”. They were fighting for freedom, in their country as well as France.

Well, they were cheated of that goal. But at the very least, we owe it to them to remember their sacrifices and their courage.

The lesson for me? Even in Europe, the Second World War didn’t start on 1 September 1939. It began on 17 July 1936, with the nationalist uprising against the Second Spanish Republic.

Nor should it have ended when it did. Once they’d finished off Hitler and Mussolini, the Western Powers should have seen off their ally Franco. Which means the war would not have ended in Europe on 8 May 1945.

But it did. With the work not quite done. Sadly.

The territorial imperative in practice

It’s curious the impact neighbours can have on your life.

Right now, I’m thinking of the neighbours at the front of our house, a pair of house martins, and one from next door, a Siamese cat.

The house martins I mentioned once before, when they turned up a few weeks ago and moved into the nest over our front door. It’s unlikely to be the same pair who were there last year, though one of the two of them may well have hatched there then. Since one of the things they’ve done is drive away a pair of larger house martins who clearly had their eye on the same nest, I can’t help suspecting that this is an ungrateful son or daughter taking over the parents’ place and kicking them out.

Kids, right? Think they’re owed a living.

My suspicions are reinforced by the fact that the female of the pair isn’t just smaller than the male, as they tend to be, but far smaller. Clearly a very young lady. Perhaps just a bit too sure of herself, a bit too convinced of her right to call the shots around the place.

We had a neighbour like that once. That was when we were living in Luton. She used to have parties that went on from about 10:00 at night until about noon the next day. We assumed that they were cocaine-fuelled, if only because I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to keep going that loudly for that long without some artificial stimulant to give them the energy.

The noise they made tended to follow a cyclical pattern. There’d be some silence when we’d think that we might perhaps be allowed to sleep. Then the voices would start up again, growing louder and louder as the revellers fell out with each other, until they were shouting abuse. That would sometimes culminate in the noise of breaking crockery, weeping, or loud lovemaking – well, sex, anyway - before returning to silence. Then rinse and repeat.

This was several years into the austerity programme of the Tory government, so the resource-starved police couldn’t do anything about the noise. One policewoman I was talking to did actually say, “Good God! I can hear her down the phone line!” That was through the intervening wall. 

The policewoman was sympathetic but couldn’t help.

I’m glad to say that the young lady who has moved in over our front door is far more attractive and far more well behaved than that neighbour from hell. But pretty or not, she and her partner are just as good at making their presence felt. Not, I’m glad to say, at night. During the day, though, if we have the gall to step outside, or merely open the front door, they like to share their views on the matter with us.

The house martin making her displeasure known to us
Small in size but highly communicative

Now, I had a limited education, and was never taught house martin. So when they go and perch on the phone line that crosses our yard and chatter away to each other, to any other passing house martins, and above all at us, I really can’t make out what precisely they’re saying. But I have no trouble with the gist. It’s “who the heck do you think you are, wandering around this place as though you own it?” I’m cleaning up the language here a bit, but I think they add a request roughly translatable as “go away” though I suspect expressed somewhat more forcibly. And who can blame them?

It’s clear that they regard the place as theirs and our irruption into it as a gross and unwarranted invasion of territory, bitterly to be deplored. And they tell us so. Loudly and at length.

Another creature that makes that kind of point indisputably clear is our assault poodle Toffee. She now weighs in at not a terribly long way off 4 kilos, making her a no doubt daunting presence to any passing creature the size of a squirrel or smaller. But like Queen Elizabeth I, she has the heart and stomach of a King, and she thinks foul scorn that anyone should dare to invade the borders of her realm.

That was made clear to me when I saw her, flat on the ground at the bottom of our garden, barking into the hedge while her tail flailed from side to side so fast that I swear, had we been able to attach a generator to it, we could have driven a dishwasher off it.

Toffee making her displeasure known to the Siamese
Small in size but not in heart

The object of her anger? The Siamese cat from next door.

The previous occupants of our house had no animals, so the Siamese clearly got used to wandering in and out of the garden as the whim took him. Toffee, though, has no intention of allowing such liberties. So there she was, barking her heart out to defend our territory. Sorry, correct that: her territory.

It really is an imperative, isn’t it? The protection of territory. Humans have that instinct too. It inflames anti-immigrant rhetoric: we don’t want him here, he’s foreign. Or, indeed, racist thinking: we don’t want him here, he’s different. Or the American or British hostility towards international institutions: we don’t want to be with them, we’re different.

Natural, I suppose. Though also a bit sad.

After all, aren’t we supposed to have bigger brains and more powerful intellects than house martins or poodles?

'Official Secrets' and getting the perspective right on Blair

“I think we were lied into an illegal war,” says Katharine Gun, excellently played by Keira Knightley in a film well worth watching, Official Secrets.

Back in 2003, Gun was working at Britain’s communications spying centre, GCHQ, when she was included in the distribution of an email from the States, asking for blackmail material against a number of UN Security Council delegates, to push them into backing a resolution authorising war on Iraq.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun about to take a life-altering step
Sadly, it didn’t stop the war

Gun, appalled that the resources of GCHQ were being used merely to provide cover for the UK and US governments, leaked the email. To keep the spoiler small, let me just say that the film includes a particularly telling exchange about her role.

“You work for the British government,” she’s told.

“No, not really,” she replies.

“No?”

“Governments change,” she explains. “I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.”

The film was an excellent way of spending a lockdown hour or two. It also brought back memories. Not particularly cheerful memories, accompanied as they were by a sense of disappointment and even betrayal.

Huge demos against the invasion, in London and around the world
Also couldn’t stop the war

Huge numbers, up to a million, had demonstrated in London against the war. Dubya Bush, US President, and Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, had flopped from one unconvincing source of authority for war to another. They claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but weapons inspectors on the ground had found none. Blair went for a United Nations resolution because British legal opinion said he needed one. When he couldn’t get that authorisation, he asked his Attorney General to provide a different opinion, which he duly did.

Dubya had clearly decided to go to war in Iraq however weak the justification, and Tony Blair had decided to go along with him, with or without authority.

They went in, toppled a deeply unsavoury dictator, but at huge cost: as well as six-figure casualties in the fighting, the war spurred the emergence of ISIS, leading in time to its blood-chilling dictatorship and many more years of war to break it.

No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And, when the legal advice offered to the government was finally published, it confirmed all our suspicions: the Attorney General had warned that invasion would be illegal and potentially lay Ministers open to prosecution as war criminals, unless a covering resolution was obtained from the UN. He only changed that view when it became clear the resolution had failed.

Nothing people could say or do would change anything. Not the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Not Katharine Gun laying her job and liberty on the line. Not even the law would restrict its behaviour: it was going to war even if the action was illegal.

It was all deeply depressing.

That’s why I find it ironic now to be labelled a ‘Blairite’, as I have been by many on the far Left of the Labour Party. Far from an enthusiast for Blair, I felt betrayed by his behaviour over Iraq. And there were other issues on which I felt his government behaved reprehensibly. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has left public sector bodies, in particular hospitals, still struggling today. Blair even repudiated one of his best initiatives, the Freedom of Information Act, when he realised it could be used to force him to reveal information he would rather hide.

No, I was never a Blairite. And today, the committed supporters of Blair are few indeed. But the difference, in assessing Blair, between those of us who refuse the label ‘Blairite’ but don’t belong to the hard Left, is that we’re not prepared to write off his governments’ achievements as though they never happened.

Among others, they include the major assault on child poverty. The minimum wage. The Human Rights Act. Devolution of powers to the nations of the UK. Freedom of Information. The Good Friday Agreement. Huge investment in the health service.

The latter is particularly topical, given that the health service is today struggling so pitifully to cope with Coronavirus. Had the investment started by Blair continued, instead of being reversed in the name of austerity, how much better-placed would the NHS have been to cope with the present pandemic?

Lives have been lost due to austerity. Thousands of lives. That’s worth bearing in mind when we assess the Blair legacy.

Without being a Blairite, I’m in no doubt that the governments he led were infinitely to be preferred to the one we have now. And, in arguing for a return to a Labour government, that’s something we need to proclaim loudly. Things would have been better without the last ten years of Tory government.

What’s more, he achieved far more than those who followed him as leader, and who lost power to the Tories or failed to win it back. He achieved far more than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. Whether their policies were good or bad, they were unable to enact any of them.

You can only do any good at all if you get into power. Which Blair powerfully demonstrated. And you don’t have to be a Blairite to understand that. 

I reject that label. But I also refuse to belittle the good he did among the harm.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a good way to spend a lockdown evening, you could do a lot worse than watch Official Secrets.

As the lockdown starts to fray

Necessary though it certainly is, the coronavirus lockdown starts to become painful after a time. Especially when the weather turns good.

One of my favourite places for walks
A nostalgic old photo. The place is out of bounds now

We live just three or four minutes’ walk from a stretch of woodland where, at one time, I took great pleasure going for walks, with or without the dogs. In these days of lockdown, however, it’s strictly forbidden to do so. Verboten. I look at it longingly as I take dogs past it – yes, Spain still allows us to walk dogs, though only a short distance from home – but I don’t dare go in.

Not everyone does the same. We’re into the fourth week of lockdown here, and we’ve noticed walkers sneaking in, some – oh horror! – even without dogs. Runners too. Even mountain bikers. The lockdown may just be starting to unravel.

When I say that I personally don’t go into the woods, I don’t mean that I never have. I did take to interpreting the ‘short distance from home’ condition on dog walks a little liberally. But one day I was caught by a forest ranger on one of the main paths through the woodland (oh, why didn’t I stick to the small paths?) and he told me, politely but oh-so-firmly, to stay out.

Well, get out first. Then stay out.

I’m British, with the Brit’s respect for the law. In case you’re from some less enlightened country and don’t know our customs, that means understanding that the crime isn’t actually committing it, it’s being caught. If you get away with it once then, hey, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll get away with it again, so you keep trying your luck.

But having been caught once, you don’t try again. A warning the first time? A lucky break. But the next time? That could mean a fine. And the prospect of that fine ratchets up the Brit’s famous respect for the law in me.

Anyway, the little breaches of the rules in our neck of the woods are pretty minor. If you want a real infraction, you just have to go down the coast a bit of a way from here, to the lovely seaside resort of Dénia. It seems 70 families have quietly moved in to their second homes there, no doubt in time for the Easter break.

Dénia and its many charms. Some, apparently, irresistible

That, naturally, is entirely against the lockdown regulations. It must have taken them quite a bit of ingenuity too, especially any coming from Madrid. The police are patrolling the motorways pretty intensively – there are even helicopters out – so they must have come by back roads, to dodge the checks.

They’re there now, anyway. One can imagine that it would be quite a task to chuck them all out and get them back to where they came from. With appealing pragmatism, the mayor has said they can stay, though possibly with a touch of vindictiveness, he’s added that they can’t go to the beach. But then, nor can anybody, so they’re hardly being discriminated against.

Police checking the authenticity of shopping

Much the best case I came across, though, was the little old lady who the police saw walking along a street. She was carrying a shopping bag with a loaf of bread sticking out of it. OK, fine, the cops thought, she’s been to the bakers. But then they saw her again a couple of hours later, again with her shopping bag and a loaf. Did she perhaps not get enough bread first time and have to pop out again? They let the matter pass.

But when they saw her a third time, with bag and loaf, they decided that this really was going over the top. They stopped her and took a look at the bread. 

You could have hammered nails with it, it was that hard.

Poor thing. All she wanted was to get out for a walk from time to time. I just hope the fine wasn’t too painful.

The lockdown’s necessary, as I said. But it can start to get on your nerves after a while. And it certainly feels, here in Spain, that it may just be beginning to fray a little at the edges.

Keir Starmer's challenge

Just twenty minutes before the results of the election for a new Labour leader were announced, I was still on tenterhooks. The signs had all been hopeful, but I’ve been disappointed by election results too often before. It was conceivable that the Party membership might have decided that the best person to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be another Corbynist.

After two general election defeats under Corbynist leadership, it seemed insane to try our luck at a third. But was a presumption of sanity justifiable?

I’m glad to say that ultimately it was. Despite my anxiety, the new leader was Keir Starmer, elected on the first ballot with 56.2% of the vote. A comprehensive victory and a solid mandate.

Keir Starmer (right)
with Jeremy Corbyn, whom he replaces as Labour leader

Starmer is a former of Director of Public Prosecutions, leading all public criminal prosecutions in England and Wales, a role he played with great effectiveness.

Before that he had been a defence barrister, notably defending the McLibel case, where McDonald’s threw all its weight as a major international corporation, into persecuting two individuals who had protested against them.

He was elected to Parliament in 2015. That meant being caught up at once in the string of crises that started with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, followed by the 2016 referendum that led to Brexit, general election defeats in 2017 and, crushingly, in 2019, and finally the Coronavirus pandemic. If Starmer had been hoping for a quiet life, he must have been badly disappointed.

He served in Corbyn’s team for three years, even though he’s no Corbynist. That’s a key quality: without being a member, he’s established that he can work with a wing of the party which, though reduced to a minority now, still holds massive sway amongst the membership.

Corbynists were keen to drive non-Corbynist MPs out of Parliament. It’s deeply unpleasant and damaging to the party, forced to focus in on itself and riven by factionalism. That’s why, though there are understandable calls within the new Labour majority to retaliate in kind, they need to be resisted.

No purges has to be the watchword, and I think Starmer is well-placed to issue it.

That isn’t only for ethical reasons. A pure, homogeneous party is far too narrow. The insistence by Corbynism on its own version of socialism has driven many out of the party. Much more seriously, it has driven voters away. As Phil Wilson, a former Labour MP who lost his seat in the December 2019 debacle, puts it:

There was no need for Corbynistas to listen to them [voters]; they needed to listen to the Corbynistas. Corbynistas knew what was best.

We need to reach out to voters. That means that we need to reach out to those who walked away from the Corbynist Labour Party, without losing those who stuck with it because of Corbyn. We need to embrace all wings of the party.

In other words, we need to rebuild Labour as a broad church. That means including the Corbynists. Ironically, the very expression ‘broad church’ was treated as practically obscene in Corbynist circles.

This is a paradox. Starmer has to rebuild the Labour Party with the Corbynists but in spite of the Corbynism. Why? Because it’s the hard Left, most recently represented by Corbynism, that has ensured that Labour has held power in only thirteen of the last forty years.

In my lifetime, I’ve twice lived through an experience I would have hoped not to live through even once. That’s Labour falling under the control of the hard Left. It happened first in the early 1980s. In the 1983 election, Labour won fewer seats in parliament than in any other election since 1935.

Making the Party electable again took fourteen years. The bulk of that work was done by a leader from the soft Left of the Party, Neil Kinnock. He had the misfortune of losing two elections himself, but at each of them he increased the tally of Labour MPs. That prepared for Tony Blair’s victory in 1997.

In 2015, Labour did it again. We let the hard Left take control. And, lo and behold, the result is that we’ve once more been reduced to the lowest number of Parliamentary seats since 1935. Worse even than 1983: 202 seats compared to 209.

Keir Starmer, like Neil Kinnock, is a man of the soft Left. He’s indicated his willingness to unite the party, claiming he would neither trash the achievements of the Blair Labour government nor those of the Corbyn period.

He has pledged to work with the government to combat the Coronavirus pandemic, but to oppose it actively when it does too little, or the wrong thing, or the right thing too late.

He seems to have all the right attributes. He could indeed rebuild the Party. Whether he can do it in time for the next election remains to be seen – Corbynism has left us low indeed. But he might.

What he, and the Party generally, must do, however, is learn from this experience as, apparently, we didn’t learn from the experience of 1983.

It’s important to keep the hard Left on board. They must be free to act as a ginger group, they must be able to influence policy, they deserve respect and cordiality.

But the hard Left must never be allowed to take sole control of the party again.

Once was an error. Twice was ridiculous. Three times would be suicidal.

The joy of the self-deprecating smile

There’s something exceptionally attractive about self-deprecating humour.

That’s true even if we sense that behind it is something of a disguised boast – you know, “look at how self-deprecating I can be”. Did you see the pictures of Boris Johnson hanging from a zip wire? What might have been seen as a PR disaster was something he worked for all it was worth. “Look what fun I am,” he seemed to be saying, “happy even if I look the buffoon. I’m obviously the kind of fine fellow you want running the country, because someone you can share a laugh with is bound to be on your side.”

Look what fun!

Despite such self-serving examples, self-deprecation remains welcome. That’s particularly so in a world dominated by figures that take themselves far too damned seriously and who are far too damned inclined, with little justification, to think themselves good at what they do.

Did that immediately bring to your mind an image of the present tenant of the White House? It should have.

A few weeks ago, Trump was swift to claim success for a visit he made to the Centers for Disease Control, as part of his then non-campaign against Coronavirus:

“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said: ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Trump fascinating his hosts at the CDC with his scientific insights

While I think it would have been great if he’d done pretty well anything rather than run for President, I’m far from convinced that medical or scientific research would have suited him. Let’s not forget that this was the man who thought that Coronavirus was like the flu, and now thinks he’d be doing well if he kept US deaths to within 100,000.

As for his ‘natural ability’, it clearly doesn’t extend to being able to laugh at himself. He leaves it to the rest of us to laugh at him, although our laughter’s never wholehearted – we laugh more at how bad the joke is than at the joke itself.

Fortunately, there are examples of Americans who are, or were, much better able to laugh at themselves.

William Seward

William Henry Seward was a remarkable American politician from the nineteenth century, a rival for the presidency to Abraham Lincoln though he ended up serving him, with outstanding loyalty and ability, as Secretary of State. As a young man, he was less than effective as a public speaker, something he needed to correct, not only for his later career in politics but even for his first choice of profession, as a lawyer.

This was brought home to him painfully when he joined a group of trainee lawyers in New York that would conduct mock trials in front an audience who would evaluate their performances. Time and again, despite all the effort he put into writing his quite brilliant briefs, he would find himself winning less applause than one of his friends who seemed able to outperform him with ease.

The friend pointed out that it was nothing to do with what Seward said, and all about how he said it. He suggested they swap briefs for the next competition, which they duly did.

Seward delivered his friend’s argument with all the skill he could muster, to only mediocre results. Then his friend delivered Seward’s own argument, and according to Seward himself, the applause could have been heard all the way down Broadway.

A useful lesson. And a pleasure to me that it was Seward himself who later had fun retelling the story.

It reminded me of an anecdote of my mother’s.

She found the atmosphere in Britain in 1940 deeply depressing. Life was becoming highly restricted, a little like today with Coronavirus. After the surrender of France and with Hitler apparently unstoppable on the Continent, the future looked bleak for the country. It was badly in need of something to raise its spirits.

In these circumstances, the writer, singer and actor Noel Coward stepped forward. He persuaded a group of friends to come together to put on a variety show at ‘Underneath the Arches’, a club that was, indeed, underneath the arches behind Charing Cross Station. I went there myself a few years back and, for all I know, it’s still there today.

Noel Coward.
Not always the best at delivering the great songs he wrote

For that show, Coward wrote all the songs but had them all performed by his friends, except or one, which he did himself. To his disappointment, while all the others were well received by audiences, his and only his song flopped night after night. Until he developed a cough and sore throat and had to ask someone else to step in for him.

Yes, you guessed it. His replacement sang the same song to huge success.

Noel Coward decided that his rather special style of singing wasn’t as widely appreciated as he had hoped. It was better for him to write the songs than perform them. A bitter lesson but a useful one, and a story he retold in his autobiography.

Self-deprecation at its best. The genuine kind. Such a refreshing change.

Coronavirus: fighting the war and facing an enemy together

So it’s going to be war.

Soldiers from the Spanish 'Military Emergency Unit' (UME)
deploy outside the main station in Valencia

The leaders of nation after nation have assured us that what we’re going into now is war against Coronavirus. Which neatly covers two of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, War and Pestilence. Coronavirus itself provides us with Death, but since shops are still being restocked at the moment, Famine hasn’t put in an appearance yet. Long may it stay that way.

Curiously, that was a remark made by one of Danielle’s aunts, who lived through the Second World War. 

“We have enough food, but otherwise, it’s just like back then,” she told Danielle.

War. Both my grandfathers had their lives profoundly affected by World War One. Both served, in different ways: my paternal grandfather in the artillery, my maternal grandfather in gaol, as a conscientious objector. Both displayed admirable courage and both paid a high price – my paternal grandfather carried shrapnel in his hand until the day he died.

My mother Leatrice, my grandfather Nat and, well, me (a while back)
Nat served two years in Dartmoor Prison as a pacifist

Leaders have taken to using the vocabulary of war too. Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of our adopted nation, Spain, declared the other day that “we shall leave no one behind”. It’s an encouraging thought, especially in the light of the idea that Boris Johnson was toying with in the UK, of letting people become infected to build ‘herd immunity’, though his experts calculated this might leave up to 500,000 dead.

Rather a lot not merely left behind, but left in the ground.

It’s ironic, too, that the US is dragging its feet over combating the epidemic. The notion of ‘leaving no one behind’ is one I associate with the US marines. Odd to see that nation having to be dragged into awareness of the threat, against a spirit of denial to which Trump clung as long as he could.

The Spanish Prime Minister’s commitment to leave no one behind reminded me of my parents’ description of life during World War 2. My father served in the air force, my mother was secretary to a Labour MP. She told me how moved, and how strengthened, she was, by a speech of Winston Churchill’s. It included the words:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

He made the speech in May 1940 at a time when the possibility of surrender was very much in the air. Hearing the Prime Minister declare that “we shall never surrender”, she said, stiffened her resolve and that of most of her compatriots. There were, of course, the profiteers and the black marketers, but overall the nation pulled together. A sense of solidarity for a time overcame extreme individualism.

My father Leonard, with his mother and his father, also Leonard
My father is in his RAF uniform for service in World War 2.
My grandfather served and was injured in World War 1.

The spirit of war. With grandparents who experienced World War One and parents who lived through World War Two, I had always expected as a child that I would, on reaching adulthood, have to face it myself. It’s been not just a pleasure but a relief that I never have.

Until now, at any rate. It’s a bit of a surprise, and not without a grain of excitement, to be facing my own war this late in my life. And, at least, it isn’t one in which man is being called on to kill man.

Which doesn’t mean it isn’t lethal. As with any war, we go in not knowing how many will die. We don’t even know whether we ourselves will make it through – any more than my father did. It took him a long time to understand how he survived when so many of his friends didn’t. 

This war, like any war, is a harrowing experience.

On the other hand, if we can recapture the spirit of solidarity, it won’t be entirely bleak. If we all pull together, if we show we can serve a common goal with at least patience and some courage, what a welcome change that will be in societies more divided than they have been for decades.

It strikes me that Italy, Spain, France and a number of other countries are beginning to get things right. Social distancing, unnatural and painful though it may seem for a species that thrives on social contact, is probably the best way to beat the epidemic.

We’re going into battle with an intelligent strategy. We’re going in together. We’re going to suffer losses, but may be uplifted by our sense of common purpose.

Because that too is part of war, probably the best part, as well as an essential ingredient of our top shared objective.

Beating this damn thing.