BoJo's British coup

Let’s be absolutely clear: the decision to prorogue parliament was taken by Boris Johnson, but it was issued in the name of the Queen. Why? Because Johnson was exercising a royal prerogative.

You thought the British monarchy was just a matter of pageantry and ceremonial? Think again. It is no longer the monarch who rules, but many of the powers of monarchs persist and are exercised by the government. That allows ministers, in particular the Prime Minister, to rule almost arbitrarily at times, and to dismiss any kind of scrutiny by elected representatives.

In a fuller democracy, such behaviour by the executive would not be tolerated. It would be thwarted by a powerful judiciary. By the equivalent of Parliament, in fact. But in monarchical Britain, Parliament can still be overruled, and that’s what Johnson has done. He’s issued a diktat – well, strictly, got the queen to issue a diktat for him – and anyone we actually voted for is out of the picture, apart from those, handpicked by him, who are in his government.

Boris Johnson: author of a very British coup

There’s nothing unusual about this, historically. A man – it almost always is a man – who wants power untrammelled by constitutional niceties, starts on his road to autocracy by a coup d’état against a parliamentary body he finds vexatious.

Julius Caesar took on the Roman Senate. He came unstuck personally, murdered by a group of aristocratic senators, but in the civil war that followed, his successors won the imperial power in Rome that had eluded him.

In Britain, Charles I was no more successful than Caesar in breaking the power of parliament, and he too paid with his life, but again at the cost of a civil war.

Napoleon came to power in a France drained by tyranny, misgovernment and war, and secured his own rule by emasculating parliamentary authority. That meant he could exercise arbitrary and unconstrained power. The consequence was even more deaths in war leading to ultimate crushing defeat.

When Hitler managed to get MPs elected to the Germany parliament, they infamously showed their contempt for the institution of which they were members by turning their backs on the speaker. In short order, the Nazis had reduced parliament to a speaking shop only, wholly docile to Hitler’s rule.

Why do they get support when these would-be autocrats go down that road? After all, the people suffered terribly in every one of the cases I’ve mentioned and, as a general rule, things ended pretty badly, above all for them.

There is a naïve belief among many citizens, even in a democracy, that elected representatives are all lying, corrupt, power-hungry and ineffective. They look instead to a strong man who will sweep all these timeservers and timewasters out of the way and get things done. The things that everyone – by which they mean everyone who thinks like them – know to be necessary and which are being held up by the corrupt opportunists who occupy parliamentary seats.

That, after all, is exactly what has happened with Boris Johnson. Parliament has been unable to legislate Brexit. It hasn’t been able to do so because it is divided within itself, but that is a true reflection of the state of the nation. However, for some voters, the failure of parliament to reach a decision is a simply a failure of parliaments, and it’s time to move on, to find the man free of the corruption and personal ambition which parliamentarians serve, and have him deliver the Brexit the people voted for.

The irony is that the strong man in this particular instance is the most corrupt and lying of them all. But so were Hitler or Caesar. What BoJo’s supporters are looking for is strength, and none of the rest really matters. BoJo provides the strong smack of authority they crave.

The other irony is that in reality, no one voted for a hard Brexit. It wasn’t an option on the ballot paper. And the people who are clamouring most loudly for it will be among the hardest hit by it. But again, none of this concerns them. They see stalemate now, they see action from the strong man, and that’s what they admire.

People will tell me that BoJo’s nothing like the historical characters I mentioned. Certainly, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, he’s not making a bid for indefinite and unlimited power. But make no mistake about it, what he has done today is a coup d’état. He has seized personal power, monarchical power, for himself by eliminating the possibility of parliamentary scrutiny of his actions or opposition to them.

The coup d’état is temporary. It’s due to end on 14 October when parliament will be allowed, by grace of Boris, to convene again. And should take immediate action to cut back on the royal prerogative powers the executive exercises.

Or will it reconvene? Another lesson of history is that once autocrats have tasted such power, they find it hard to give up. And Brexit is going to lead to difficult times ahead, in which a strong man is going to be seen as still more necessary.

Will normal service resume on 14 October? I hope so. But do I think it’s guaranteed? I most certainly don’t.

Cairo curiosities

It’s been a merely surface-scratching whirlwind of a visit, but after slightly under forty-eight hours in Cairo, and a little more than twelve hours before I leave, I feel I can give a bit of a balance sheet of my first contact with Egypt.

The Sphinx, the the Pyramid of Cheops

The truly unique and third most memorable thing was the collection of pyramids and the Sphinx out at Giza. We went twice, once by night when the light and sound show turned out to be far less cheesy and much more pleasant than I’d snobbishly assumed, and once by day to get a clear sense of the scale of the monuments. It is powerfully moving to stand before the great pyramid of Cheops and think that it has been there, regally looking down on the passing ages, for over twice the time that separates us from the launching of the Roman Empire.

‘From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us,’ Napoleon is said to have told his soldiers in Egypt. And even he was out by three centuries.

There are also those wonderful mysterious tales about the great pyramid. I don’t remember them exactly, but it’s something like if you multiply the height of the pyramid in metres by the square root of five, a number someone who knows about these things tells me is terribly significant, though I can’t exactly put my finger on why, you get pretty close to the distance in miles between Luton and Paris. Well, within 5% anyway.

Now, some sceptics may think this is arises by mere chance. But is that really likely?

The second most memorable thing about my brief stay in this city is the traffic. Like the United States where there is a gun for every human, Cairo feels like there’s a car for every inhabitant, and they all get out on the roads all the time, at any time of day. It seems that the use of the horn is a key element in the assertion of identity, which means that I get woken up by it even in my hotel room on the ninth floor with its double glazing.

Traffic regulations are also clearly a kind of general guideline towards which drivers make an occasional small gesture of reverence. Take the Uber driver who got us to the pyramids this morning. He carefully entered the destination into Google but nonetheless managed to miss the ramp up on to the bridge he needed to take across the Nile. So he decided the best thing to do was to reverse back up the main road, against the dense flow of fast-moving traffic. He nearly made it too, only cheated in the last few metres by finding his way blocked by a police car.

So he went straight on towards the next exit from the main road, meaning to leave and return on the other side. But again he missed the turning. This time, he had less far to reverse and there was no police car. So we made it, a little later than planned and with frayed nerves, but none the worse for wear. Physically at least.

I shall remember this experience each time I’m caught in traffic in London and amazed by some of the awful driving around me. At least I now know that things can be far worse.

The most memorable experience was the visit we made for professional rather than tourist reasons.

This was a hospital, possibly Egypt’s most prestigious. It delivers care to children with cancer. Like hospices, where terminally ill patients go, its mission might lead you to expect it to be a dismal place. But, like a hospice, which after all focuses on making sure patients enjoy the best possible life for as long as they can, it needs to be a pleasant, quiet and cheerful place.

Certainly, the Cairo Children’s Cancer hospital achieves all that. Patients have their own rooms – no multi-bed wards or even bays as is common in most British hospitals – and throughout the place, bright, joyful colours predominate, even in the chemotherapy suite. There’s an art therapy room, decorated with children’s paintings and pottery, and where they can also be taught music. The accent is on the need to build the morale of the patients, to help them fight the disease.

The hospital is private and lives by donations on the one hand and, to a far smaller extent, by selling some services. However, for the main target group, children with cancer, the care is entirely free. Many of the patients are from poor backgrounds; they pay nothing for the treatment they receive, and parents are sometimes even helped financially to be able to visit their children if they’re kept in as inpatients.

It’s an inspiring and encouraging place and a joy to visit.

Even the origins of its name had me smiling. It’s called hospital ‘57357’. I often wondered where that came from – it sounds slightly Stalinist, like the name of a labour camp, or at least rather boringly nerdish, like some geographical coordinates.

In fact, the founders had terrible difficult choosing a name. At the end of a long an fruitless day of debates, they were looking at a table covered with documents. One was from the hospital’s bank.

Its bank account number was 57357.

‘If we use the bank account number as its name, at least benefactors won’t have any doubt where to send their contribution,’ they decided.

The Cairo Paediatric Oncology Hospital, 57357

And so the hospital was named. A fine place, delivering a great service. And an atmosphere as joyful as the origin of is name is amusing.

Trump playing Napoleon? It could end in tears

Is it to be war, then?

Not, thank God, the shooting kind. But something almost as damaging. The enlightened Trump seems to have decided that the best way of dealing with the economic problems of the United States is a trade war with his allies. He’s poised to impose tariffs on imports from his two neighbours, Mexico and Canada, and on the world’s biggest trading bloc the European Union, which still includes Britain for now.

Trump: a latter-day Napoleon?
Without quite the genius...

By coincidence, I’ve just finished reading a biography of Napoleon, recommended to me by a French friend because, though written by an Englishman, it provides a superbly balanced view of the man. Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon the Great is well worth reading, whichever side of the Channel your sympathies lie, since its meticulous research and lucid analysis punctures a lot of myths, of Napoleon as either the greatest of leaders or as a tyrannical monster.

As the Napoleonic wars progressed, both sides attempted to use economic weapons against the other. Britain, then undisputed master of the seas, used the Royal Navy to blockade the ports of France and the nations it had occupied, and even went so far as to wage war against the United States to try to enforce its embargo.

Equally, Napoleon tried to impose the Continental System on France and its occupied territories, to keep out all British trade. He was prepared to go so far as to invade Russia to impose respect of the embargo, a move which would lead to the catastrophic retreat from Moscow and ultimately the loss of his throne.

Describing the impact of these two competing trade boycotts, Roberts writes:

The year 1811 saw the start of a continental economic crisis that lasted two years and that also engulfed Britain, which was beset by bad harvests, wage cuts … and food shortages. Mulhouse in eastern France saw two-thirds of its workforce of 60,000 unemployed, and over 20,000 were unemployed in Lyons. Napoleon needed to stimulate economic growth, but his [adoption of eighteenth-century economic views], which rejected the idea of competition and free exchange as positive phenomena, sent him back to attempting to enforce ever more strictly the Continental System, even if it might eventually mean fighting Russia again…

By 1812 Napoleon believed that the Continental System was working, and cited the bankruptcies of various London banks and commercial enterprises to support this…

The system was, indeed, causing considerable harm to Britain’s economy.

Napoleon was not wrong in assuming that Britain was suffering very seriously as a result of his Continental System… Trade declined rapidly… the bad harvests of 1811 and 1812 led to food shortages and inflation, and war expenditure increased budget deficits from £16 million in 1810 to £27 million in 1812. Some 17 per cent of Liverpool’s population was unemployed during the winter of 1811/12, and the militia had to be deployed against potential rioters … across the Midlands and North of England, with ringleaders sentenced to transportation to Australia, or even in some cases death.

The parallels are striking, aren’t they? We can be sure that Trump will be as convinced as Napoleon that his trade measures are working. But the only certain consequence they’ll have is hardship on all sides – the eighteenth-century rejection of ‘the idea of competition and free exchange as positive phenomena’ is a dangerous illusion, a truth that both Trump supporters in the US and Brexiters in Britain would do well to learn.

The big difference is that, though he came badly unstuck at the end, Napoleon was a political genius as well as a military one. Even if we bend over backwards to be generous towards him, it’s hard to classify Trump as a genius of any kind. Indeed, I find it hard to believe that he has the mental capacity to learn the lessons of Napoleon’s final failure.

Retreat from Moscow
Crushing, immensely costly defeat - not least in lives

Because ultimately, Napoleon’s attempt to impose his system took him to war with Russia, leading to a crushing defeat and his downfall. That Trump suffers the same fate as Napoleon may seem highly desirable. However, Napoleon led an army of 500,000 into Russia and returned with just 50,000. Let’s hope that this isn’t the kind of price we pay for Trump’s failure to learn that adventures with trade weapons are as dangerous as the adventures with firearms he seems so keen to defend in the US.

Especially as the damage done by any such disaster in the twenty-first century is likely to be far greater than even on the retreat from Moscow in the nineteenth.

The debt Britain owes Gina Miller

The trouble with populists is that they’re always in a hurry.

When they’ve seen that something needs to be done, they want to do it now. They don’t want to have to waste time with the niceties of consensus building and scrutiny – they take so long and delay necessary action. You can see it with Trump in the States: he wants to reintroduce torture as a weapon of policy, and wants to do it quickly, by means of an executive order.

The Guardian quotes Steve Kleinman, retired air force colonel and chairman of the research advisory committee to the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG):

“If the US was to make it once again the policy of the country to coerce, and to detain at length in an extrajudicial fashion, the costs would be beyond substantial, they’d be potentially existential. We’ve seen how [torture] promotes violent extremism, how it degrades alliances. We’ve seen how it only serves to provide information that policymakers want to support [desired policies], not what they need,” Kleinman said.

“A lot of these people who weigh in heavily on interrogation have no idea how little they know, [and do so] because of what they see on television,” said Kleinman, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the HIG.

But populists are in a hurry. They don’t want to have to stop to take such annoying and delaying objections into account.

It was always so. Julius Caesar marched on Rome because it was time to do away with the corrupt and inefficient republic. Napoleon launched a coup d’état because it was time to restore order to France and let her be great again. The war clique in Japan in the 1930s did away with the opposition to its rule because it knew it was time for the Empire to astonish the world with its military prowess.

Sadly, a little opposition might have avoided outcomes far worse than the problems they were trying to fix. Caesar’s actions replaced a rotten republic by an Empire which again and again became a bloodthirsty tyranny. Napoleon led France to momentary glory then utter failure, on the retreat from Moscow and the field of Waterloo. Japanese militarists won spectacular victories throughout 1942 and then were forced step by step to the loss of all they had gained and the destruction of much of what they had at home.

Now, one of the things about populists is that they’re often popular. They can frequently put together a popular majority (not Trump, as it happens, but he did win the election despite that). As democrats, we’re obliged to go along with the majority view (or the electoral win, at any rate, in the case of Trump).

But the lesson of those cases is that even when they have popular support, and they’re in a hurry, we should not on any account slacken in our scrutiny of the measures they propose.

In Britain, a popular majority decided in June of last year that Britain should leave the European Union. It was a misguided decision, as the country will discover over the next decade or two. But the decision has been taken and I see little or no chance of its being reversed. Britain will leave the EU.

The process starts with triggering what is known as Article 50. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, decided that she would do so. After all, the people had spoken. As Prime Minister, she could take that step using prerogative authority, a hangover of truly monarchical power, now exercised by ministers rather than the crown.

Gina Miller: staunch champion of British constitutional rights

Any true democrat must therefore be immensely grateful to Gina Miller. She launched a case, later joined by a number of other plaintiffs, demanding that the government should not act without the authority of parliament. She won the case and the government’s appeal against that judgement has now been rejected by the Supreme Court.

By a majority of 8 to 3, the Court ruled that leaving the EU would have a major impact on British laws, and only Parliament can make, change or revoke laws.

The effect on the Brexit process will be nil. Parliament will certainly approve the triggering of article 50. Britain will still take the senseless and self-destructive step of leaving the EU. But at least we have established that government, on major, law-making matters, can’t simply by-pass our elected representatives. It must win their consent to such steps.

That may be slow and dull. It’s horribly frustrating for the hurried populists and their supporters. But, as the examples of Caesar, Napoleon and the Japanese Empire demonstrate, the alternative is far worse.

Trump seems likely to prove the point again over the next few years.

Gina Miller has suffered horrible abuse in social media and the press. Any Brit that cares about the constitutional settlement of the country, and believes that any idea, good or bad, ought to be subject to scrutiny, should be deeply grateful to her.

Thanks, Gina. The personal cost to you has been immense, I know. I salute your courage and principled determination.

Curious bicentenary

Two hundred years ago on Monday of this week, 15 June 1815, which back then happened to be a Thursday, the Duchess of Richmond held a ball in Brussels.

As well as guests of other nationalities, many elegant British visitors to that city attended. They had come to the Low Countries in the wake of the Duke of Wellington’s army, or they had fled there from Paris, where they had been celebrating the fall of his nemesis, Napoleon, the previous year – right up to the time that the Emperor had reappeared in France and effortlessly eased his way back into power, less than three months earlier.

The ball was a glittering affair, but with a painful ending. When disturbing news reached Wellington, he asked the Duke of Richmond whether he had a map. Soon after, Wellington, staring at the map, exclaimed “Napoleon has humbugged me, by God; he has gained twenty-four hours' march on me.”

One of the guests at the ball, Katherine Arden, wrote that “on our arrival at the ball we were told that the troops had orders to march at three in the morning, and that every officer must join his regiment by that time, as the French were advancing… Those who had brothers and sons to be engaged openly gave way to their grief, as the last parting of many took place at this most terrible ball.”

Napoleon had sent forces to a crossroads, appropriately named Quatre Bras (four arms). Control of the crossroads meant he could move either east towards the Prussian forces under Marshall Blücher, or towards the Anglo-Allied forces under Wellington. The latter, still trying to protect his right wing, had made no move to defend the crossroads, but fortunately some of his Dutch troops had taken it on themselves to take up positions there.

As a result, when Napoleon’s Marshall Ney reached the crossroads he found them held, however lightly, and decided to postpone an attack until the morning. But the allied side reinforced their position overnight.

As a result, when day broke on the Friday, two hundred years ago from Tuesday 16 June of this year, the first fighting was more nearly balanced than might have been expected. Technically, the day was a victory for the allies, since the French left the field. However, Wellington realised that the position was untenable and pulled back to positions he’d scouted previously, along the ridge of Mont St Jean, not far from the town of Waterloo.

British infantry at Quatre Bras
in the “square” defensive formation against cavalry

In the meantime, Napoleon had engaged Blücher and his Prussians at Ligny. This time the victory was technically French, since the Prussians withdrew from the field, one of the reasons Wellington felt obliged to retreat from Quatre Bras. But the Prussians retreated in good order, more than ready to fight again. One of the strengths of the Prussians was the training of their staff officers. It made the Prussian Army devastatingly efficient, the main reason why, despite its defeat, it could reorganise and move towards Waterloo within 48 hours.

By contrast, poor French staff work sent Napoleon’s marshall Grouchy, to “follow” the Prussians, whatever “following” meant.

Two hundred years ago from our Wednesday 17 June, the Saturday of that week, Wellington prepared his positions at Waterloo. He complained that he had “an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced Staff.” But, in the small hours of the next day – he was up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. – he sent a crucial letter to Blücher, assuring him that if he could send one army corps in support, he, Wellington, would stand and fight at Waterloo.

Blücher’s number 2, Gneisenau, was far from convinced that they should trust Wellington. But Blücher insisted they send three corps.

Two hundred years ago from Thursday 18 June, the Sunday of that week – there was no respect for the Sabbath – Wellington commanded 68,000 men, only 25,000 of them British (many of them actually Irish), 20,000 from the King’s possessions in Germany (the British King was also Elector of Hannover), a further 6000 Germans in the King’s German Legion (exiles fighting in the British Army) and 17,000 Dutch-Belgians.

Facing them were 73,000 French commanded by Napoleon himself. He took a leisurely approach to the day, breakfasting well, assuring his officers that the Prussians would need at least two days to reorganise, and once more ordering Grouchy to keep pressing them from the rear.

The ground at Waterloo was sodden, and Napoleon waited some hours for it to dry under the sun. Oddly, no one seems to know exactly when the battle began. The first shots were probably fired at the end of the morning or soon after noon. But the battle made up in ferocity for the delay in its start, and within a few hours Wellington was under acute pressure: at about 4:30, a farm at the centre of his line, la Haye Sainte, fell to the French and his position was fatally weakened.

He desperately needed the Prussians to arrive, but as he told the story, “the time they occupied in approaching seemed interminable. Both they and my watch seemed to have stuck fast.”

However, at much the same time as la Haye Sainte fell, the Prussians were already joining the action. The small numerical advantage of the French was wiped out by the arrival of these 50,000 fresh men. And Grouchy, trying to follow his orders, never showed up with his 33,000.

Prussian troops investing the village of Plancenoit
Just in time, from Wellington's point of view

Less than a week later, Napoleon abdicated for the second and final time. Reactionary regimes were established in France, Prussia, Russia and Austria. The fall of Napoleon is strangely ambivalent: he was a military dictator who had undone whatever gains the French revolution had made, and even went so far as to try to reintroduce slavery; on the other hand, with him out of the way, the cause of social progress in Europe was set back for decades, including in Britain. 

Militarily, Britain pulled off a brilliant piece of spin, painting Waterloo as a national victory, although only just over one in five soldiers on the allied side was British and the majority were German.

Britain became the pre-eminent world power for the best part of a century, but that disguised a much more dangerous truth shown by Waterloo: the rise of Germany, under Prussian leadership, as far and away the most effective military force in Europe.

Waterloo. Quite a day. With strange and complex results.

Enjoy the bicentenary!

We don't have to let the elite roll back our achievements, but if we don't stop them, they will

“Very well, alone!” exclaims the lone Tommy, standing on a rock amid raging seas and shaking his fist at a stormy sky with warplanes heading towards him. David Low’s cartoon of June 1940 captures the spirit of dogged defiance in Britain at that time, when France had surrendered to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union was allied to the aggressor, and the United States, while well-inclined towards Britain, was firmly attached to its neutrality.

Britain wasn’t really alone. It had what was then still the Empire behind it, with its vast resources of wealth and manpower. Indeed, even Low himself was a New Zealander. But Britain was alone in resisting Germany in Europe.

Curiously, Britain defying Germany mirrored what had happened in Germany itself 134 years earlier. Then the aggressively expansionist power had been France, under its Emperor Napoleon. A series of devastating victories had crushed all German resistance, ended the Holy Roman Empire and left only one power, Prussia, still standing out despite – or in part because of – having lost a large proportion of its territory and population to the invader.

Rather like Britain in 1940, Prussia wasn’t strictly alone. Britain continued to be a thorn in Napoleon’s side, maintaining dominance at sea and using it to blockade the Continent of Europe (no wonder, with such a tradition, that Britain is a truculent member of the EU today). But Prussia was alone on the Continent to refuse to bow down at last to Napoleon.

It’s been fascinating to listen to Neil MacGregor of the British Museum discussing how Prussia reacted. It did away with ostentation and luxury in dress. Ladies were urged to hand over their gold, and receive in return – iron jewellery, worn with pride as a sign of patriotic spirit.

Iron is a common metal, used in industry and labour generally. It isn’t noble.

The Prussian King also decided to do away with all military decorations, and replace them with the single Iron Cross. As well as being likewise made of that common metal, it had another vital and new characteristic: unlike previous decorations, it wasn’t limited to officers, but could be won by any soldier, irrespective of rank.

The old, egalitarian Iron Cross
Before the Nazis got hold of it

So the response to invasion and defeat was retrenchment, economy and egalitarianism.

That spirit saw Prussia through to a complete turnaround in its fortunes, defeating France with support from Russia, which as in 1941 switched sides after its ostensible ally attacked it, and then from other Germans that came rallying to the Prussian cause. Prussia led the successful campaigns on the Continent, with Britain, winning victories in the Iberian Peninsula, little more than the hero of a sideshow.

Even during the final struggle, after Napoleon escaped from his first exile to return and terrorise Europe again, it was Germans, the bulk of them Prussians, that secured his final defeat: Prussian troops came to the rescue of Wellington who was battling it out with the French army, at the head of a British, Dutch and German force, at Waterloo.

And then? Once the war was over, all the egalitarianism went right out of the window. Why, even the Iron Cross was discontinued, not to be re-introduced until the 1870s. The old reactionary crowned heads of Europe took up their previous positions and began to rule in the traditional way, crushing all liberal, democratic opposition.

Sad, isn’t it? The egalitarian spirit was great when the country needed everyone to join in and kick out the French. But once the job was done, it was dropped, and back went the masses to their old subordination by the self-proclaimed elite.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen to Britain after it stood alone against the Nazis. In 1945, it elected a great reforming Labour government which ensured there were profound changes in the structure of society to protect those most in need of it.

No, in Britain we did things differently. It took 65 years before we found ourselves ruled by people who want to undo all the measures that had been taken in favour of those who made the victory possible. That’s happening now, with a vengeance. And in the wings is another party, UKIP, as intent as the Tories on taking us back to the 1930s, and which is in any case the natural heir of the British Union of Fascists which made so much noise in the country at that time.

I suppose it’s progress of a kind. Reaction that reversed social advances in a few years in Germany took as long in Britain as it takes a newborn to reach pension age.

There’s one other big difference. We elected the government that’s doing the damage to us. And we can still, if we choose, make sure that it can’t finish its job.

That the Prussian people couldn’t do, back in 1815. But we can. In elections in 2015.

They order these things ... differently in France

Every few months, when our stocks of wine are growing perilously low, Danielle (occasionally with me in tow) heads off for a day trip to Calais to stock up again.

French wines still offer unrivalled variety and impressive quality, and it’s advantageous to buy them in France. As a mid-week day-return crossing is stupidly cheap, it becomes a bit of a no-brainer, down here in the South East, where the run to the coast is easy (apart from the traffic).

Danielle took the ferry yesterday with our friend Moira. It all went swimmingly (it didn’t involve any swimming) until they came to travel back. There were high winds in the Channel, though for once that had nothing to do with our worthy ConDem ministers whipping up yet another storm of hot air. 

The boat was delayed by an hour.

Now during our ten year residence in France, we were occasionally struck by the slightly different attitude towards service in the country from what’s regarded as the norm (not, by any means, always achieved) in the Anglo-Saxon world. France has a wonderful system of employee protection in place, a system which in principle excites my envy – I’m after all a salaried employee myself – but occasionally it does make things rather more oriented towards producers than consumers.

‘Is there anywhere we can get a bite to eat?’ Danielle and Moira asked, ‘while we wait for the boat?’

It turns out that each of the blocks that contained the toilets also had a coffee vending machine that served quite reasonably priced hot water the colour of mud, and in some cases another that served overcharged crisps.

‘What about a proper meal?’

That was only available from one of the designated cafés, or the restaurant in a building right down at the end of the harbour area. Ten or fifteen minutes walk away. But Danielle and Moira decided it was worth the slog.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ called the official they’d been questioning, ‘don’t forget your tickets and passports. You can’t get back here without them.’

‘It’s a passenger restaurant and it isn’t accessible from the passenger area?’

He gave a Gallic shrug.

‘Certainly it’s accessible. But not without papers.’

They set off. They tried a couple of the cafés which turned out to be just small counters in the usual toilet blocks, without exception shut with their steel shutters firmly, forbiddingly down.

Cafés with a less than inviting aspect

So they kept going to the restaurant.

Which was massive and well-appointed. Probably room for 150 clients. With not a single one present, though several hundred passengers were waiting for their boat. 

A restaurant to kept with pride.
Though presumably hardly at a profit, for customers or owners

It even had a games area, which suffered from none of the problems of noise or overcrowding so common in such facilities. 

Anyone for pool? Apparently not

Amazingly, the place was, however, staffed. By a waitress who was somewhat less than rushed off her feet though she might have been if some of the other waiting passengers had been there.

‘Do you have petits pains au chocolat?’ Danielle asked. That’s pretty much a standard in any café/restaurant associated with travel.

‘We have only cakes,’ they were told.

Some other customers – would-be customers – struggled in. They looked through the menu, deciphering the odd spellings. Corn was shown as ‘mais’ in French, which actually means ‘but’ (the correct word is ‘maïs’), and had been translated into English, with complete though baffling accuracy, as ‘but’. 

'But' on the menu. But nothing the customers wanted to eat

Unsurprisingly, the English clients weren’t particularly attracted to the idea of making a meal of a conjunction (I suppose only astrologers do that sort of thing). None of the other items that caught their fancy was available, so they ordered drinks instead of food.

‘Could we have some ice?’ they asked.

‘No ice,’ they were told.

Put off by their experience, they pulled some food out of their bags and started to eat it.

‘What are you thinking of?’ The waitress came down on them like an avenging angel. ‘You cannot make the picnic here. This is a restaurant.’

They looked at her, astonished. It couldn’t serve them a meal from its menu, or even ice for their drinks, but it was still in some sense of the word, a restaurant? But there was no arguing and the irate waitress marched them off the premises.

She explained to Danielle that it was the Calais Chamber of Commerce that was holding back the development of the port area as a business. Which rather suggests that the word ‘commerce’, like ‘restaurant’, means something different there from what we’ve come to expect on this side of the Channel.

At least it explains why Napoleon thought that England was a nation of shopkeepers. Certainly, if the port of Calais is anything to go by, the contrast with France is pretty stark.

Who'd be a teacher? At least, in a nation of shopkeepers?

It was Napoleon who said that England was a nation of shopkeepers.

He wasn’t being complimentary. It seems unfair to hardworking shopkeepers, but a nation made up of them? Nah. An idea we’d treat with scorn. 

That even includes many of the English. Which is odd, because when it comes down to it, it isn’t commerce that attracts most contempt from a large part of the English public. It's the public sector.

Take teachers, for instance. Those long holidays – they’re clearly underworked. And at the end of their career, the most valued teachers may be on nearly two and half times median earnings, so they’re clearly overpaid. And they’re all infected with a sad, sixties-hippy radicalism, that somehow contrives to be ineffective but also dangerous – don’t they teach arithmetic by phonetics, and leave all the important battles out of geography?

On the other hand, you can go a long way if you stick to commerce. Consider Tony Hayward. He was Chief Executive of BP and being paid a little over a million a year (only a little over: £45,000 over the million mark, not even two median salaries).

Tony Hayward. Role model of the leader who steps up,
accepts the buck and takes the bullet 

Of course, he couldn’t possibly have got by on that amount, so shares and bonuses eked out his basic to a more comfortable £4 million. It’s not a bad salary; I’m sure teachers would regard it as reasonably generous. 

It’s not just handed out to any old guy, though: you have to be supremely competent and prepared to take responsibility if things go wrong. So when the BP Gulf oil spill took place in 2010, it fell to him to describe the incident as ‘relatively tiny’, an inspired choice of words for what turned out to be the worst ever man-made marine oil disaster.

Faced with a lot of ill-spirited criticism from the States, Hayward followed up with the heartfelt, ‘I want my life back.’ Well, who wouldn’t?

Still, responsibility is a demanding master. Hayward had to give up his job and lower his sights. Like a teacher who has been disciplined, his career was shot. These days, he holds a couple of corporate directorships (Corus Group and Tata Steel), has merged a company into Turkish oil firm Gemel Energy to pursue opportunities in Northern Iraq, and is interim chairman at Glencore International, the world’s twelfth largest company. The rumours have it that the position may become permanent.

You can imagine that he may well be struggling to get his income anywhere seriously into the seven-figure range. What teacher would want to face that fate?

And Hayward isn’t alone in showing how we value most highly those who serve the public most gladly. As long as they do it the world of commerce.

Sam Laidlaw is the Chief Executive of the energy conglomerate Centrica. He takes, or to use the courteous if misleading term, earns, well under £5m a year.

Well, not that far under.

It’s only reasonable to expect some pretty remarkable stuff from the guy, and boy did he deliver this week: 10% increases in energy prices from the old British Gas, now a Centrica subsidiary. That’s just over three times the rate of inflation.

Sam Laidlaw.
Also understands that high rewards come with an obligation to serve

To be able to pull off that kind of stunt and keep a straight face takes the kind of talent you just can’t buy. Well, actually, you can buy it and Centrica have. And it clearly doesn’t come cheap.

You have to remember that Laidlaw achieved this stunning success in a highly competitive environment. Six companies control 98% of the market. Imagine just how difficult it is, with six suppliers, to rig things so as to allow all the companies to make the same excessive price increases and pull in the same obscene levels of profits.

In this nation of shopkeepers, Laidlaw’s is the kind of talent that’s really appreciated.

It’s not the same everywhere. In Finland, for instance, teaching is seen as one of the most desirable professions. Only if your degree is among the top 10% will you be considered for appointment to teaching, and even then you need a minimum of a Master’s degree.

Curiously, pay isn’t all that much higher than in England. At the top of the scale, allowing adjusted for purchasing power, Finland’s only about 4% above England. Sounds like the only really substantial difference is in the public perception of teaching and its prestige.

The impact, however, seems significant. Finland comes top of evaluation after evaluation of educational systems. The OECD, as I mentioned recently, finds that England is right down there among the also-rans when it comes to literacy and numeracy levels. 

England’s answer to this kind of difficulty? Under the current Education Secretary, Michael Gove, it is to launch ‘free schools’, free of irritating constraints like having to use qualified staff as teachers. Finland succeeds and demands a Master’s degree as a minimum; England fails and is pioneering unqualified teaching.

You want to understand our admiration for men like Hayward and Laidlaw, our contempt for the profession of teaching? Perhaps you need look no further than the OECD’s findings. I like the American expression, ‘go figure’, but the OECD found levels of numeracy which suggests that those who most need to do the figuring probably can’t. 

Lack of education feeds the undermining of education. And that perpetuates the forelock-tugging to our elite of high-earning mediocrities.

Too many electors cling to their comfort zone, content to live in a nation of shopkeepers. When what they really need is to build a land of talent. For which it would be a good start to learn a lesson from Finland.

True Glory

In among all the talk about war, or possibly no war, between Syria and the West in recent weeks, I’ve taken to thinking again about what it is that truly gives a nation its glory. And, quite frankly, I have to conclude that whatever it may be do in the arts, the sciences, the law or government, what really matters is its achievements in war. A victory or two give a country the fillip it needs, however badly it may be failing elsewhere.

That’s a factor not to be discounted in all the debate about firing cruise missiles.

No nation is immune to this kind of thinking, and least of all my own, Britain. Oh yes, our fine military tradition is the backbone of our sense of ourselves. And in among all our great successes on the battlefield, none is so glorious, none puts such a spring in our step, as the great, historic victory Britain won at Waterloo.

Wellington, glorious leader leading a glorious action.
Or was he?

‘The tale is in every Englishman’s mouth,’ writes William Thackeray in that superb novel Vanity Fair, and points out that we ‘are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action.’

Of course. It was such an unambiguous victory, and so unambiguously British.

Though, to be fair, there are some who are a little less sure of that than others. 

‘There was a bit of a German element, too, wasn’t there?’ these wet blankets point out.

Ah, yes. The Prussians. But they were just johnny-come-lately’s, showing up at the end of the day, when the best of the fighting was all but over. They made sure of a victory that the British Army had already won.

Well, up to a point. The French had wasting several hours trying to capture the forward position Wellington had established at the chateau of Hougoumont, on the right of his line. That position did indeed hold out against sustained infantry assault, and then a terrible series of cavalry attacks. It never fell.

See? Heroic work by the glorious British under the genius Wellington.

Again, up to a point. The French got a bit smarter late in the afternoon. They pulled their infantry and cavalry together and launched them, not at Wellington’s right, but at his centre, another defended forward position in the farm at La Haye Sainte. And this time they succeeded: the farm fell and with that French gain, Wellington’s hold on the middle of his line became precarious.

Wellington had been in touch with the Prussian marshal Blücher since the small hours of the morning, and was expecting him to arrive on his left. So he’d only sparsely manned that part of the line. With his right heavily committed around Hougoumont he now had little force with which to shore up his centre.

In the end it didn’t matter much. By the early evening, the Prussians were fairly pouring onto the field, and Napoleon had to detach forces to deal with them. Wellington got out of jail free. 

Maybe that’s why the British general described the battle as ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw...’

Even so, he’d done well up to that point. And that was an unequivocally British success. Wasn’t it?

Perhaps not unequivocally, exactly. 

The idea of coalitions to fight wars isn’t new. Wellington headed one. Waterloo being in Belgium, then part of a combined Dutch-Belgian kingdom, Wellington’s 68,000-strong army included 17,000 – a quarter – from the Low Countries.

Still, that leaves 51,000 Brits, doesn’t it?

The King of Britain was at that time also Elector of Hanover. In Germany. 11,000 soldiers under Wellington were Hanoverian. And, as it happened, 6000 more were from Brunswick, along with 3000 from Nassau. Also both in Germany.

So actually only 31,000 of the soldiers were from the British Army. And, funnily enough, during the long years of Napoleonic occupation of Germany, other Hanoverians had escaped and made it to England, where they formed the King’s German Legion, 6000 of whom were in the specifically British contingent of Wellington’s army.

So even on Wellington’s side, only 25,000 soldiers were actually British. Slightly more, 26,000, were German. Which along with the 50,000 Prussians who rather turned the tide on the day, meant there were 76,000 Germans fighting the French – just over three times as many as there were British.

Still, we all need something to put a spring in our step. And if Waterloo does it for us Brits, why not?

Though personally, to be honest, I prefer to take something else from that epoch-making event, summed up in two other comments of Wellington’s. 

The first summed up his reaction to the dead strewn over the field of Waterloo: ‘nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ 

A dismal place, a battlefield. 

There’s talk today about negotiations starting at last between the two sides in the Syrian civil war. That's nothing like as exciting as a missile strike, nothing like as dramatic in outcome, nothing like certain of success. But perhaps by killing fewer people, it might be marginally less miserable than yet another battlefield, lost or won.

And Wellington’s other comment? 

‘I hope to God I have fought my last battle.’

There’s little hope that we have fired our last cruise missile. But maybe we ought to take heed of the sentiment behind the glorious general’s heartfelt wish, and be slightly less inclined to reach for the missile as a first resort rather than a last.

That would be a different kind of glory. But it might have more substance to it.

14 July, a time of celebration. Maybe tinged with foreboding

There are falsehoods that communicate great truths.

It is almost certainly untrue that Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, when told that the people of Paris had no bread, replied ‘qu’ils mangent de la brioche’ (which we usually translate as ‘let them eat cake’, though brioche works much better as just the kind of thing a well-bred queen might choose to partake of with her friends over a coffee in the morning).

She probably didn’t say ‘let them eat cake’. 

But she was hardly a benchmark for empathy

However untrue, the story reflects an attitude of mind that pervaded the French society of which Marie-Antoinette was such a jewel. Noblewomen, who wouldn’t have shown an ankle to a man of their own class, found it easy to bath in front of their servants, female or male, because domestics were barely human and it didn’t matter if they saw the ladies naked. 

Of the three estates, clergy, nobles and ‘third estate’ (commoners), only the third paid tax. And with the government desperately in debt, the burden of tax grew unbearable until in the end the long-delayed explosion took place. The people of France took to the streets and rounded on its masters and tormentors.

That’s the event celebrated in France today, 14 July, when the Paris mob sacked the notorious Bastille prison and released the handful of prisoners it contained while butchering its governor. The butchery continued and intensified for several years, degenerating into a reign of terror in which many of its revolutionaries were themselves sent to the guillotine. Ultimately, a reaction set in, leading to the execution in their turn of the terror leaders Robespierre and St Just themselves.

The reactionary governments struggled to achieve stability in the face of military action from abroad. Inevitably, France strove fiercely to build itself the army it needed for its defence and, attack being the best form of defence, to take the war to her enemies. Out of this effort there emerged a military strong man, Napoleon, who eventually took power in his own name, and the revolution that had been launched against the despotic power of a king and nobility, produced an Empire led by a single autocrat dependent on a war machine and in constant pursuit of a new military adventure to fund the one before.

In the end, the revolution took Europe through twenty years of war with military deaths of around 2.5 to 3.5 million and civilian deaths, even more difficult to calculate, of 750,000 to 3 million. A long and bloody agony, and all because the old regime in France couldn’t find a way to adapt to modern circumstances and the need to look after its people.

Doesn’t bode well for Syria and Egypt today, does it? Regimes that won’t give up power, that won’t meet any of the aspirations of their peoples, that ultimately rely on the brute power of the military to hold on to what they have.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take 20 years and a conflagration embracing the whole of that sad and troubled region. Particularly as it’s the powder keg of the world.

But if you happen to catch a glimpse of the parade down the Champs Elysées, and of the fireworks displays all round France, just remember: the events being celebrated had their roots in the refusal of power to accommodate its people. And, over two centuries later, we’re still struggling to find a way to do that.

Happy Bastille Day.

Such fun.
Though it's probably best not to think too hard about what lies behind it

A curious question, but irrelevant. Or perhaps not?

It may not be a burning issue of our times, but I’ve often wondered who won the Battle of Waterloo. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: I subscribe to the consensus view that Napoleon lost it. The question is whether it was won by the Duke of Wellington’s British and Allied army, a view much favoured in this country, or by Marshal Blücher and his Prussians, a view which is of course merely vile, self-serving propaganda.

Meeting of the victors: but which of them clinched it?

Putting it another way, ‘could Wellington have won without Blücher or did the Prussians make all the difference?’

It’s been interesting to read Andrew Roberts’ book Napoleon and Wellington and get a new insight on the question.

Here’s the sequence of events.

On 16 June 1815 the French fought Wellington’s forces at Quatre Bras (indecisive) and the Prussians at Ligny (French victory on points). 

Funnily enough, at Ligny Napoleon revealed the problem that was to beset him throughout this, his last, campaign: a series of monumental errors of judgement. In this instance he sent one of his generals, d’Erlon, marching with his infantry between Quatre Bras and Ligny and then back again, with the result that in the end those forces took no part in either battle. The presence of d’Erlon at Ligny might have made Napoleon’s victory decisive, knocking Blücher’s army right out of the campaign; as it was the Prussians were able to retreat and regroup.

In the course of the battle, Blücher himself was unhorsed and then ridden down by French cavalry, leaving him concussed. This was crucial: Blücher, who was a little mad, was a staunch Anglophile and committed to supporting Wellington, but while he was out of action, command devolved onto his number 2, Gneisenau, who was an Anglophobe and, oddly enough, not mad at all. Gneisenau regarded the British – strictly the English – as disloyal schemers, a view it’s hard to believe anyone could hold of my fine people.

Now what surprises me is that Gneisenau didn’t take the opportunity to get well out of the way, retreating eastward towards Prussia. Instead, he went North which meant he could stay in contact with Wellington. When Blücher came round he fully endorsed Gneisenau’s line of retreat and again assured Wellington that he could count on Prussian support. 

Wellington, in the meantime, had pulled back to an area known as Mont St Jean. Later, after it had taken place, he gave the battle he fought there the name of the nearby village of Waterloo. 

He’d already reconnoitred the place and decided that if he was going to have to fight, he'd want to fight there. There are dips in the ground where he could adopt his favourite tactic, of having the bulk of his men lie down on the ‘reverse slope’, i.e. behind the ridge of a hill, where they were relatively safe from cannon fire. They would suddenly emerge just as attacking enemy troops were approaching the top. This meant that having spent an unbearably tense time charging uphill at an apparently empty line, they would find themselves faced at the last moment by a lot of men with guns. I imagine that must have been dispiriting.

Wellington had also obeyed his other ruling principle: he’d made sure that he had clear lines of retreat towards the coast. That had always been his style: he would sometimes retreat even after victories, preferring to protect his men than expose them unnecessarily, not out of any particular love of them (he often called them the scum of the Earth) but because he knew Britain would be parsimonious about sending him many more.

The fact that he took such care over his lines of retreat was one of the reasons Gneisenau trusted him so little. He expected him to decamp for the Channel ports and England if ever things turned bad, and he was probably right, though Wellington was probably not being disloyal so much as judicious. 

So when the 17^th of June dawned, Wellington was in position on Mont Saint Jean, with his retreat to the coast fully planned and ready to go at a moment’s notice. But he didn’t retreat. He stayed in place all day and didn’t budge. That in turn meant that on the 18^th, he was ready for Napoleon. 

The battle started at 11:30 and by 1:30 the Prussians were already arriving on the field, drawing away Napoleon’s reserves to the point that, though he could give Wellington a very bad time for four hours, he was never able to land a decisive blow. At 5:30, the battle swung against the French. At 7:00 the British-Allied forces began their advance; already being squeezed by the Prussians, the French Army broke and fled. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now the interesting point is that Wellington stayed put on the 17^th when he could have gone. Roberts argues, and I’m sure he’s right, that he did that precisely because he knew that the Prussians would turn up. Had they cleared off, so would he. But because he knew they were coming, he stayed put, ready to fight the battle. 

In other words, the question ‘could he have won without the Prussians’ is irrelevant. Because he wouldn’t have fought the battle at all without the Prussians. A prudent general, it was only the absolute certainty of being able to count on them that made him take on Napoleon at all. 

Interesting if, like me, you’ve been irked at not knowing who won the battle. Of course, you might say that's hardly a key question for today, and I admitted as much myself at the start.  

But then again, is it really so completely irrelevant? We Europeans do after all face another burning issue today, the saving of the Euro. The French and the British seem to be at each other’s throats again. And, once more, it all turns on whether the Germans are going to throw their considerable weight into the fray on time.