Salute to an unassuming woman

From time to time I come across a politician that it pains me not to be able to support. They display qualities of decency, moderation and good sense that excite my admiration, but like a young man gone astray, they get in with the wrong sort of people, and there you go: I can’t bring myself to vote for them.

For perfectly good reasons, such as nationality, I can’t vote in German elections, but if I could, it would certainly be for the Social Democrats. Next spring, I would cheerfully cast my vote for them, especially if they were led by Hannelore Kraft, currently Prime Minister of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine Westphalia. She’s made it absolutely clearly that she has no intention of swapping Düsseldorf, her state capital, for Berlin in a run for the Chancellorship, which I suppose means that there’s a chance, if applied to with sufficient enthusiasm by friends and supporters, that she’ll emerge as a candidate yet.

Hannelore: will she, won't she? She'd get in if she did.

I’d vote for her and the polls suggest she’d get in. But I’d still feel more than a little sorry for the outgoing Chancellor, Angela Merkel. 

She first won her way into my admiration by being utterly without charisma, the most overrated quality in a politician. It makes people fall for the entirely superficial features of a demagogue, who then gets the opportunity to do the appalling damage without anyone noticing until it’s too late. Take Ronald Reagan, who had charisma by the bagful, but who used his office to force through the bonfire of banking regulation which has led to the agonising crisis we’re going through today.

Yet Merkel, despite her lack of charisma, has charm. My favourite image of her is the dowdy figure celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by wandering into the crowd, shaking hands and sharing her joy with anybody who wanted to talk to her.

Angela mixing with the great and the humble.
Despite the weather

She also has a competence and a quiet confidence that I value far more in a leader than mere charisma. Generally, she has sailed a steady ship in her time as German Chancellor, and kept her country as the economic powerhouse of Europe in consequence.

Where she has shown less skill has been in her handling of the Eurozone crisis. Here she has suffered from the defects of her virtues: her steadiness and prudence transformed into wariness and obstinacy, so that when the situation required boldness and imagination, she chose over-cautious and blinkered devotion to retrenchment instead of investment.

In fact, she became a far more conservative figure than she had seemed in the past.

That led her to a major political error when she threw her weight behind Nicolas Sarkozy in his campaign to be re-elected President of France, and refused to meet his opponent, the eventual victor François Hollande. That compounded her error in economics, driving Greece, Spain and Italy deeper into recession by treating the policy of austerity as a rigid orthodoxy.

Since François Hollande’s election, however, she has begun to shift, principally under his prompting. Gradually she’s giving ground, she’s loosening the strings on the German purse, and giving the struggling economies of Southern Europe a better chance to emerge from their difficulties.

And that awakens my admiration for her again. Because she’s doing things that her successor would find extremely difficult.

With her hold on the Chancellorship is weakening, she must know she has only nine or ten months left to go. It looks as though she is going to use that time to implement policies she knows will be unpopular with the German people, who resent being expected to bankroll Europe. She’s taking hard decisions so the next government won’t have to.

If that’s what she’s doing, then it’s an act of extraordinary maturity in the exercise of power. Faced in Britain with a government rich in charisma but miserably lacking in either competence or compassion, I can’t help feeling Merkel’s qualities are infinitely preferable. And I think her legacy will be all the finer for them.

A voice to the voiceless

Curious how interesting conversation can be on Twitter despite the draconian limitations of its format.

Today an exchange with a fellow tweeter Diana Smith (@mulberrybush) introduced me to a remarkable video, Game's Over (@GamesOverFilm):




Ironically, Diane is based in Stafford where we used to live. A shame our paths didn’t cross at that time. Still, at least our 140-character exchanges are making up for it now.

What frightened me most about the government that took power in Britain in 2010 was not so much its delusions, its mendaciousness or even its incompetence, but its indifference to the plight of others.

‘Lack of compassion can quickly slip into cruelty, and this is going to be a cruel government,’ I told a friend who’d voted Tory.

‘Oh, come on,’ she replied, ‘you’re not giving them a chance. And how can they be worse than Gordon Brown?’

That comparison with Brown was striking. In trying to understand politics, I find myself increasingly using two sets of polar oppositions based on terms which might at first glance not seem that opposed: politician and statesman on the one hand, empathy and charisma on the other.

The essential task of a politician is to win office, and charisma helps enormously. David Cameron had bags of it, as did Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and they won the highest offices in their respective countries.

Gordon Brown, on the other hand, was a hopeless politician and short on charisma. He came across as boorish, churlish, uncouth. His defeat came in large part because voters chose charm over unsmiling competence.

For competence is what Brown had in spades. And he made up in empathy for what he lacked in charisma. He could understand the pain felt by people whose suffering he didn’t necessarily share.

The effect was striking. Within eighteen months of the most serious economic crisis the world had seen for a century, the Brown government had Britain back to growth with unemployment falling.

That’s statesmanship.

Cameron’s crew have taken us back into recession and sent unemployment climbing towards record heights, and it isn’t just incompetence. As Game's Over shows, the fundamental problem is that they don’t care.

Their charisma makes them articulate, even inspiring. Most of the people they are harming are tongue-tied or even voiceless.

A politics that matters, a politics that leads to justice will set as its key goal to give such people their voice. To speak for them when that’s necessary, but far better, to help them speak for themselves. For that we need statesmen not politicians and, while charisma will do no harm, what matters far more is empathy.

That’s why next week’s election in France is important. Sarkozy has panache  but no empathy and, as he’s shown over five years, precious little competence. His challenger, François Hollande, has made a virtue of his very ordinariness. What he has promised to do is to speak up for the powerless and he shows every sign of meaning it. 

Of course, like all leaders of the Centre-Left, he can disappoint too. He’s started talking about the need to limit immigration, a subject he’d studiously avoided previously. But then, you do have to get elected to do any good and, with 18% of the electorate voting for the far right, he presumably feels he owes them some concession.

Still, he’s ordinary and empathetic, and he’s up against charismatic and remorseless. And at the moment the polls are showing him on 55% to the incumbent’s 45%, with nearly a quarter of even the far right voters coming over to his side.

Maybe, just maybe, the French are showing us that our celebrity-obsessed societies are beginning to see through charisma and understand that a good politician can’t hold a candle to a real statesman.

We in Britain also have a leader of the opposition who’s having trouble connecting with the electorate, a Gordon Brown rather than a Nicolas Sarkozy. Though his Labour party sits on a comfortable lead over Cameron’s Tories, Ed Milliband is simply not setting the electorate alight. On the other hand, every time he speaks out he does so with increasing authority and he shows his ability to empathise with the marginalised, the underprivileged, the suffering.

A government led by such a man won’t be perfect, any more than a government led by Hollande would be, but it will at least aspire to social justice and decency. There’s no such aspiration today, as Game’s Over shows. A society which at least sets out to ensure none are excluded, all have a voice, is a better and healthier place for everyone to live, whether we are among today’s victims or not.

Mr Ordinary may win in France next Sunday. And if he does he will set an example for us on this side of the Channel.

One I hope we shall emulate at the earliest opportunity.

Rachida gets her claws out

One of my favourite politicians has to be the French Member of the European Parliament, Rachida Dati. Rachida is blessed with near film star good looks, and a pattern of behaviour that says film stars actually have nothing on her. That probably explains her perpetual air of being denied her proper due in life. 

How's that for winsome?

Formerly ‘keeper of the seals’ (Minister of Justice) she was so inept in the post that even Sarkozy, no slouch himself at incompetent government, had to fire her eventually. He instead posted her off to the European Parliament where she was overheard, in one of those glorious live mike incidents, complaining about how boring it was to be stuck in Strasbourg, a city where our family, presumably less demanding in our tastes, spent an excellent ten-year period.

She has now joined in the battle to return her erstwhile boss to the Elysée Palace for another five-year term. Recently the government launched a ‘Marshall Plan’ for the impoverished suburbs of France; the frontrunner to replace Sarkozy, the Socialist François Hollande, chose his words badly when he denounced the plan, suggesting that jobs and financial support were needed, not a reference to a ‘Marshall’ of whom the likely recipients of any aid would probably never have heard.

It might have been wiser of him not to appear to cast doubt on how much knowledge of history the people he was defending were likely to have. It does sound a little patronising from a member of France’s most highly-educated classes, someone who may be in the Socialist Party but is also a member of the nation’s elite.

Dati has waded into the fray denouncing Hollande for underestimating the education of the underprivilieged. ‘They go to school, Mr Hollande!’ she declaimed, ‘they follow the same history syllabus as your children, thank you very much.’ Clearly, she felt, no-one needed to be told who Marshall was.

Well, she may be right, but I did enjoy the fact that Agence France Presse, in its report on the spat, added a final paragraph: ‘The expression ‘Marshall Plan’ has been part of the political vocabulary for some years now. It refers to the plan put forward in 1947 by the American General George Marshall to provide economic assistance to European nations after the Second World War.’

And it wasn't just for the benefit of the underprivileged inhabitants of the tough suburbs that they wrote those words.

Allez les blancs

My wife Danielle, who is French – a point which is not entirely irrelevant to my theme today – reminds me that there’s a subject I have failed to address, much to the detriment of a blog that sets out to cover every theme that matters to mankind.

Danielle has been told by our good friend Yannick, equally French, that he was delighted by my failure to gloat over yesterday’s narrow but nonetheless famous  victory of the English rugby team over the French, in the Six Nations championship.

Now I know how to take a hint. At heart, Yannick is not in fact grateful for my silence. There is an etiquette in these matters. When your team beats your friend’s, there is an obligation to rub his nose in it a bit. If you don’t, you deprive him of the opportunity to do the same back to you when the tables are turned at some distant period in the future.

But I’m sorry, Yannick, I will not descend so low. There will be no hint of gloating from me. However fine the victory. And even though it took place in Paris. And even though France were unbeaten at home in the previous eleven matches. And had beaten England in every encounter since 2008.


Instead, Yannick, let me urge you to be philosophical. And if that doesn't work, at least indulge in a little Schadenfreude. You must be able to take satisfaction from the repeated shots we got of the face of Nicolas Sarkozy, in the crowd. He looked grim, didn’t he? You must admit that a lost international may be a price worth paying to see the usual fatuous smile wiped off those particular features.

In any case, it is not entirely in Yannick’s honour that I am writing this post. No, another and stranger incident strengthened my determination to respond to the reminder Danielle passed on from him.

Coming through St Pancras International station tonight, I happened to cross the path of Serge Betsen. He’s what’s known as a flanker in rugby and played a significant role in the French team until his retirement from the international game in 2008. Today, he plays at club level in England, for London Wasps. He was no doubt at St Pancras having caught the Eurostar back from Paris after yesterday’s superbly satisfying match.

Not that he shared my view of that outstanding game. I say that not as mere speculation, guessing that a former France player wouldn’t relish such a conclusive humiliation of his countrymen, but because I heard him express his dissatisfaction live and to camera, for the BBC. 


For reasons that escape me the BBC persist in using him as a commentator, despite the fact that his English can only be described, even in the most charitable terms, as inadequate to the task. Few sports commentators ever seem to rise far above the level of the banal; when they only have a vocabulary of 200 words, it becomes practically impossible.

Shame really. On the pitch he was fluent and graceful, though when he was wearing a French shirt, that was something I could frequently only admit through gritted teeth.

Serge Betsen at his best. How are the mighty fallen

I suppose the BBC stick with him because he plays in England. 


Incidentally, when the French talk about where a sportsman plays, they use the verb évoluer. In other words, they would say that Serge evolves in England.

Fortunately I have forbidden myself the slightest hint of gloating. Otherwise I might have said something ungenerous. I might have been tempted to write that on yesterday’s performance, it could do the entire French XV some good to evolve a little in England.


But that would have been unworthy of me.

What's to be so relaxed about?

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

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

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

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

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

Less impressive half of Merkozy

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

And there are the credit rating agencies.

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

And that means the credit ratings people.

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

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

And what qualifies those seven to make these decisions?

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

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

Mockery can unite us

What an edifying spectacle Europe presents for us these days!

David Cameron retains some residual popularity, in Britain, or at least England, though it stops dead at the White Cliffs of Dover.

Silvio Berlusconi is the butt of everyone’s humour, that being the only response possible, other than despair, at the idea that the fate of the Eurozone, so dependent on Italy, is in the hands of a man facing at least three separate trials on matters of fraud and moral turpitude.

No-one can stand Sarkozy, seen as a latter day Napoleon, minus the charm. To say nothing of the vision, courage, competence or ability.

Angela Merkel is running out of road. Even Barack Obama, celebrated to the point of notoriety for keeping his cool in all circumstances, seems to be losing patience with her.

As for George Papandreou, with his flip-flops between caving in to the pressure on Greece or resisting it, he has spent the last few days simply drifting inexorably towards the only solution on which his countrymen seem virtually unanimous: that he should go.

Now I’ve been a committed European for years, strongly in favour of turning the European Union into a single, federal state. 

Don’t the the present circumstances provide a powerful argument in favour of that position?

Surely, if only from the point of view of efficiency and cost effectiveness, it would make much more sense to have a single government for the whole of the Union? What on Earth is the point of having all those separate little chiefs to despise and drag through the mud? Why don’t we have just one?


Then we could channel our contempt at just one set of leaders and leave them to get on with getting up the noses of the Americans and Chinese on behalf of us all.

A convenient target for all our mockery?

Postscript – another train experience: This morning, sitting across the aisle from me, was a woman in her thirties dressed for power but with great taste and fine aesthetic sense.

As we pulled in to St Pancras station, she rose from her seat and from the luggage rack above her pulled an exquisitely tailored coat – one of those that swings through the air, like a cloak with sleeves. She wrapped it round herself in one graceful movement, hitting me on the side of my head and sweeping across my face in a way that would have sent my glasses flying to the ground had I been wearing them. Next came her handbag, large but finely designed, which she swung the other way – had I not ducked it would have taken me in the forehead. Finally, she floated gracefully down the carriage, as self-controlled and self-confident as ever, and completely oblivious to the injuries she had so nearly cause me.

At least, I hope she was oblivious. I can forgive the condescension which made her unaware of her impact, literally, on the people around her; I would find it more difficult to excuse her arrogance if in fact she knew what she’d done and chose to ignore it anyway. 

The Euro: dealing with teenagers

There are times when Europe offers the most wonderful political theatre, even against the background of the most solemn, painful difficulties. 


I’ve already talked about David Cameron being told to shut it by Sarkozy, providing a riveting display of the family-tension view of the political scene in Europe. Merkel and Sarkozy are the parents in this scenario, struggling to come to grips with most testing financial crisis the continent has seen for the best part of a century. Cameron’s in the role of the teenager with the baseball cap. 


‘Come on, Dad’, he’s saying, or perhaps ‘Daaaad’, ‘you’ve got to get this sorted, you’ve got to get the shed fixed up before the band comes to play in it at the weekend.’ You should never snap at a disturbed teenager, but surely we can sympathise when eventually harassed parents cracks and round on their whingeing offspring? 


‘Put a sock in it, son,’ Dad replies, ‘can’t you see we’ve got something slightly bigger to sort out here?’ 


But Merkel and Sarkozy have another troublesome boy. To their South, they have Berlusconi. He’s even worse than Dave because he thinks he’s funny. 


Isn’t it ghastly when a teenager starts trying to show off the wit he doesn’t have? You remember Silvio likening a German MEP to a concentration camp kapo? You only have to look at Silvio’s smile to know he thought he was being devastatingly hilarious. 


Then there was the time he kept Merkel waiting while he continued an apparently interminable mobile phone conversation. How stereotypical is that? 


Now the parents have actually put together a bit of a plan to get the family out of its hole. Will it work? It’s hard to say but it seems pretty clear that, without their latest measures, things would have been far worse, far sooner. 


Silvio’s comments? Yesterday he told us that the euro was a ‘strange’ currency because it can be ‘attacked on the markets.’ Does he mean unlike the lira, the pound or the franc? He’s the fourteen year-old who’s opted for the ‘Introduction to Economics’ course and hasn’t realised that reading the first half of chapter 1 doesn’t make him an expert. 


He also declared that the euro is a currency that ‘convinces no-one’. Now it must have been nice for all those people who laboured through all those hours of summit meetings to hear that from one of the major beneficiaries of their efforts. 


The parents have found a way that might help save the house. Dave is sulking in his room, playing his guitar with the amp turned up too high, refusing to contribute anything while still insisting on being fed. 


Silvio doesn’t think that saving the house makes much sense, because he doesn’t like the colour of the walls. Perhaps it’s no wonder that when Merkel and Sarkozy were asked at a press conference last week about the assurances Berlusconi had given them, they shared an ironic, and probably weary, smile before they tackled the effort of coming up with an answer. 

Merkel and Sarkozy struggling to stay serious-looking when
asked about the reliability of Berlusconi

That smile wasn’t well received in Italy. I can imagine that it caused even more pain than suffered by Cameron and his friends when he was told to shut up. 


But was it any the less deserved?

How to interest the public in the public interest

It is perhaps because politics tends to be so dull that we go to such lengths to remove all political content from it.

So its not the near-bankruptcy of Italy that puts us off Berlusconi, it’s his inclination to buy sexual favours from under-age girls. In Britain, what really interests us isn’t the fact that the (now former) Minister of Defence wanted to buy an aircraft carrier and leave it without aircraft, as an economy measure, it’s that he’s been flying his boyfriend – or perhaps his non-boyfriend – round the world with him, to make sure that they don’t even have to be separated by international summits.

Of course, the politicians have got smart to this as well. It’s been fascinating to watch what’s been happening in France. The opposition Socialist Party recently launched an exciting new initiative: a primary election to pick the candidate to stand against Sarkozy for the presidency next year (basically to select someone to take up the baton so lamentably dropped by Strauss-Kahn in a New York hotel room – more histories de cul as the French so colourfully express it).

‘Let’s consult the electorate,’ the Socialists claimed, and allowed anyone to vote, whether members of the party or not. So they presented the exercise as a major extension to democracy – but then they would, wouldn’t they? And I’m sure it was tremendously democratic. 

But there was a second benefit, too, which just goes to show that when you do things right, the gods smile on you. Because for months the media kept focusing on what the different candidates were seeing, about politics and – far more – about each other; they gave the Party conference much higher-profile coverage than usual; and, since the election, as is traditional in France, took place over two rounds, the Socialists had public interest up to near frenzy pitch not for just one Sunday, but for two in a row with the full week in between. What a great launch for François Hollande's drive for the Elysée Palace.

Now as an old and unredeemed marketing man, let me assure you that you just can’t buy that kind of publicity, even if you had the budget for it. All round Europe, other opposition parties must be green with envy. They’d give their eye-teeth to be treated that seriously by the media. It drove such minor matters as Sarkozy’s war in Libya or his eleventh-hour negotiations to try to save the euro right off the front pages.

Of course, he did his best to get back at them, reacting with precisely the kind of political initiative that one might expect: his wife produced the first child ever born to a sitting president in France. Good attempt, but sadly not enough by a long stroke. The French aren’t that impressed. After all, compared to a Socialist Party pulling off a marketing coup, it isn’t all that striking to learn that Sarko and Bruni knew how to produce a child. After all, they’d both done it before.

The happy expectant couple
But we knew she had it in her

And it’s all terribly sad, in a sense, because for the first time since I've heard of Sarkozy, he's just done something for which I can feel unqualified admiration. Yesterday he told David Cameron, Britain's Prime Minister and misfortune, that this might not be a bad time for him to stop moaning on about the Euro, which his country isn’t part of, and shut up.

Sarkozy telling anyone else to put a sock in it is all a bit pot and kettle, of course, but if the kettle really is black, who can reasonably criticise the pot for saying so?

Eastern food in a Western dish

I’m very grateful to Bob Patterson, a good friend though we’ve only ever met on line, for pointing out that the latest New Yorker contains an article focused on Luton, where I live. It’s not often that so august a journal turns its attention to this humble town (to be honest, it isn’t that common that it catches the eye even of far less worthy publications, such as the Sun or the Times). And when the prestigious journal is transatlantic, well the least I can do is take a look.

As it happens, the article – England, their England by Lauren Collins – is less about Luton than about the movement it spawned, the English Defence League, and the Moslem community of the town against which the EDL first directed its wrath. It also mentioned one of the more shameful acts of our present Prime Minister, who really does little quite as well as shamelessness, when he denounced multiculturalism at a speech he gave to a conference in Munich last February. He probably thought this was a bit of a vote-winner and a great way of aligning himself with the increasing Islamophobia around Europe, sparking minaret or Burka bans.

In what Collins rightly calls an ‘unseemly coincidence’, Cameron gave his speech just when the EDL was preparing to march through Luton, precisely to denounce multiculturalism.

Having seen some EDL members on a train to Luton, it’s not clear to me that they’re ready to grasp multiculturalism. I can understand why they’d be keen on mono-culturalism – it didn’t strike me that they had learned to cope with even that much – in fact the only culture they seemed to have any affinity to would be the kind you might find adorning a Petri dish in a lab somewhere. This lot took up a lot of space on the train, metaphorically but also physically. They had also taken steps to keep the level of blood in their alcohol streams within reasonable bounds, and they expressed themselves in a language of astonishing richness – every third word or so seemed to be concerned with procreation or bodily waste.

At first glance, it’s a little difficult to understand the bad press that multiculturalism has been getting all round Europe recently. After all, its basic proposition is that people of different faiths or races should be able to get on with each other without either forcing any of them to change fundamentally or spilling any of each other’s blood. I can’t quite see why that shouldn’t be rather a good thing. Being against it feels a bit like telling a new beauty queen that ‘actually, world peace isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

In any case, since last Friday in Norway it feels as though it’s Geert Wilders in Holland, Nicolas Sarkozy in France and, yes, David Cameron in England who need to do a bit of explaining. Anders Breivik has shown just how far you can go when you start getting really passionate about your opposition to multiculturalism. Not that any of those politicians would back the action he took – but they might like to reflect on whether their stance doesn’t give some kind of endorsement to the views he holds and encourages those who share their more extreme forms.

Where anti-multiculturalism can take us

As for me, well I’m just going to stick with my attachment to multiculturalism.

To me, multiculturalism is the woman I saw in London the other day, in black Moslem dress from head to – well, actually not quite to toe. The dress stopped just above the ankles so we could all admire the elegant pale blue leather and cork creations she was wearing on her feet, with their three inch heels. The Islamic extremist would denounce her for the display of flesh and fashion, the EDL for the headscarf. The multiculturalist just smiles at the contradictions.

To me, multiculturalism is the cricket team that occupies the best ground in Luton – ‘Luton Town and Indians’. ‘Indians’? Most of the ‘Indians’ in Luton actually have their roots in Pakistan. Did they play for the old ‘Luton Indians’ club? And some years ago it merged with Luton Town. For her article, Lauren Collins interviewed Abdul Kadeer Baksh, who leads the Luton Islamic Centre’s vigorous campaign against Moslem extremism. Responding to the EDL’s taunts he told her, ‘when they say we don’t integrate, they mean we don’t assimilate.’ Well, quite – and why should they assimilate? Surely I can cope with not being the same as my neighbour? To be honest, I’ve had neighbours I’d hate to resemble, but that doesn’t stop me living next door to them. ‘Luton Town and Indians’ – in that preservation of both names, don’t we have a wonderful illustration of integrations without assimilation?

And finally, to me multiculturalism is my wife going into a butcher’s in Bury Park, the ‘Indian’ area, to buy halal chicken last week. The butcher’s astonished response was ‘Why?’ And Danielle had the best possible answer: ‘because we have friends from Pakistan coming round for a meal.’ The friends wanted a typical European dish, so Danielle roasted chicken for them (though by its quality it was nothing like typical). Western cooking for Moslem friends required halal meat.

You know, Cameron, it wasn’t that hard. It didn’t require us to compromise any principles. And we all had a great time.

Remind me – just what is it that you, Wilders, Sarkozy – and Breivik – have against multiculturalism?