MAGA? Don’t you mean MACA?

It was touching, wasn’t it? Literally as well as metaphorically. You know, the joyous handclasps. Holding each other’s hands. All with smiles to underline the intimacy and good fellowship.

The scene was Tianjin in China. Present were the host, Xi Jinping, Chinese leader and the world’s most powerful autocrat. With him was Vladimir Putin, Russian leader and the world’s most brutal autocrat. Joining them was Narendra Modi, Indian leader as Prime Minister of the world’s biggest democracy and its second most powerful would-be autocrat.

Modi’s presence was the most remarkable. Less than three years ago, in December 2022, Chinese and Indian troops were attacking each other with, of all things, nail-studded clubs across their common border. Now, though, it’s all friendship and good cheer between the two nations.

Putin, Modi and Xi Jinping

Best of buddies. All thanks to Trump

In theory, this ought to please the world’s top would-be autocrat. Donald Trump’s always quick to trumpet – Trump-et? – his role as peacemaker. The man who’s going to bring peace to Ukraine or Gaza in a single day hasn’t yet found the right day on which to make that happen. To compensate, he might take some satisfaction from having promoted peace between those two Asian giants.

Sadly, though, it’s not clear to me that he brought them together intentionally. There may be people who regard Trump as a champion of subtle strategic thought. I’m afraid that I’m not one of them. He slapped tariffs of 25% on Indian exports to the US and then, when India persisted in buying Russian oil, doubled them to 50%. That drove Modi towards Xi Jinping, to see whether China could become a sufficiently significant trading partner to make up for some of the lost business with the US.

Was Trump motivated by an altruistic desire to improve Sino-Indian ties even at the cost of US relations with the subcontinent? As I say, some may believe he’s capable of such ingenuity. They may be right, but I can only say that I find it hard to believe.

To be honest, even the pretext for increasing the Indian tariffs is hard to swallow. I mean, Trump is always proclaiming his admiration for Russia and for Putin. I reckon he envies Putin and would like to imitate him in the US. Putin, of course, has no intention of imitating Trump. Still, given Trump’s apparent deference towards Putin – Trump regularly talks tough about his Russian opposite number, but Putin only has to meet him to twist him around his little finger again – it’s odd that Trump reckons his tariffs on India are about Modi buying Russian oil.  

The journalist John Sopel, now co-hosting the podcasts The News Agents and The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis, has a different explanation of Trump’s behaviour. India and Pakistan had their own border conflict between 7 and 10 May. It involved missile firing and air raids, so it was a tad more serious than the 2022 clash between Indian and Chinese border troops armed with clubs.

The incident eventually ran out of steam, with both sides apparently feeling they’d done enough damage and killed enough people to satisfy that strange beast, national honour. Trump though had rung the two sides and that, he has convinced himself, made him the engineer of peace between the two nations.

Pakistan, apparently keener than India on being obsequious towards Trump, nominated him for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. India, instead, argued that peace happened independently of Trump’s minimal efforts. Modi refused to back him for the Peace Prize.

Sopel’s suggestion? The different attitudes of the nations over the Nobel prize cost India its penalising tariffs, far higher than Pakistan’s. It seems hard to credit, doesn’t it? But should anything surprise us anymore when it comes to Trump?

Let’s not stop at India, though. Another nation that has had punitive tariffs inflicted on it is Brazil, the second biggest democracy in the Americas, and the nation that is making its previous would-be autocratic president answer for his illegal attempts to hold onto power. Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on it. Which is curious, since his general justification for tariffs is to hit back at nations with which the Americans are running a trade deficit. That is, nations so devious that they produce goods Americans are keener to buy than their own people are to buy US products.

Curiously, Brazil is one of the minority of nations with which the US has a trade surplus – it sells Brazil more than it buys from it.

Still, it doesn’t take long to find the real reason for the tariffs on Brazil. It’s precisely because it’s holding its ex-President to account. He tried to raise an insurrection to prevent his opponent, who’d beaten him in the election, driving him from office. Having tried the same trick himself, Trump clearly opposes any move to make the author of an attempted coup face retribution for his action. 

Hence the tariffs.

So where is Brazil turning for help? Why, to China.

Funnily enough, South Africa is doing the same. Trump has swallowed the entirely fictitious story of an anti-white genocide in that country (evidence isn’t a Trump requirement for anything he has chosen to believe). Ironically, while Trump is deporting as many migrants from the US as he can, he’s opened the door to one category of refugees – white South Africans. And he’s imposed 50% tariffs on South Africa too, driving them into Chinese arms alongside the others.

The original five members of the group of nations known as the BRICS were Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Isn’t that curious? Precisely China and the four nations now turning to it for help in the face of Trump’s aggression. What help China can provide is far from certain. But even if the help is limited, the realignment of the nations is clear and no doubt lasting.

In other words, Trump’s actions are powerfully assisting the Chinese playbook for world leadership. And that’s on top of moves to cut investment in such technologies as Electric Vehicles, leaving the field open to China to dominate.

So should MAGA continue to call itself MAGA at all or produce its nice red baseball caps proclaiming that ‘Trump was right about everything’?

Since he’s clearly not making America great again, maybe it’s time to change the movement’s name to MACA. That’s ‘Make America China’s Agent’. The caps could be marked ‘Xi Jinping’s getting it right’. 

At least that would be a lot more accurate.

A likeable rogue and a spy scandal

Maybe it’s the Christmas season, with all its nostalgia, but I seem to be having experience after experience reminding me of things long ago.

35 years ago, on 4 January, 1983, I started my first job in the private sector. I was greeted by the chairman and owner of the company, whom I shall call Nathan, a wonderful, warm-hearted bear of a man, tall and broad, effusive and generous. He had appointed me after telling me, at my interview, that I was ‘ideally unqualified’ for the position. That was enough to predispose me to like him.

I was, at that time, facing a bit of an emergency, part biological, part political. The politics were down to Maggie Thatcher, then Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party. Giving expression to the widespread xenophobia which would grow over 33 years to its full toxicity in the 2016 Brexit vote, she had brought in new legislation which made it more difficult to obtain British nationality.

What about the biology? Danielle, now my wife of 35 years – as you’ll discover, there is no coincidence behind that figure – was by then getting close to bursting with what would turn into the young man, today 35 – again, no coincidence – who is my son Michael. If he emerged before we were married, he would have no guarantee of British nationality, thanks to the iron lady: Danielle was (and is) French and Maggie wasn’t prepared to extend the precious gift of Britishness to the illegitimate child of a foreigner, even if born on British soil.

You may feel that being British didn’t really matter that much, since he would be French anyway. That’s true enough. But I have the Jew’s enthusiasm for multiple nationalities – you never know when you might need a bolthole – and I thought it would be good for the child to have two. Besides, there was a chance it would be a boy – we didn’t actually discover until he was born – and at that time young Frenchmen were still liable to military service at 18. The British bolthole would spare him that particularly useless experience.

Anyway, I quite liked the idea of my child inheriting my nationality.

‘I have to say this,’ I told Nathan, ‘and I hope it won’t give you a terrible impression of me, starting work one Tuesday and asking for leave on the next…’

I saw his face fall.

‘But I have to get married and our registry office doesn’t do weekend weddings.’

He threw himself back in his chair and roared with laughter.

‘David,’ he said when he’d got his breath back, ‘there are few excuses I could have accepted, but that’s one of them.’

He went on to tell me his definition of a bachelor, as a man who refuses to make the same mistake once, and returned later in the day with a cheque as a (generous) wedding present.

He was easy to like. Though something of a lovable rogue: the kind of man who spent money as though it was going out of fashion, even though the company was selling next to nothing. He was a maverick who tried to live by his own rules, even when they directly conflicted with economic law – or simply financial good sense.

Those days all came back to me recently when Danielle and I caught up with an old friend from back then. Naturally, we did some reminiscing though none of us had any news of Nathan, which is a pity. I wonder what he’s up to?

He was South African and (naturally, with a name like that) Jewish. Indeed, he would tell me later that the Apartheid regime in South Africa had put him under some pressure to become an officer in the army.

‘Well, they felt a Jewish officer might help them tone down the accusations of racism,’ he told me.

He refused. He saw no reason to provide the regime with a figleaf. He got out of the army as soon as his compulsory service was over, and went into publishing, ultimately in the company where I joined him.

That didn’t mean, however, that he did nothing for the regime. It wasn’t until after I left the company, just before it went under, that I learned how much he’d done.

It turns out that South African intelligence services – the Department of Information and the Bureau of State Security, infamous as BOSS – had a great need for a publisher or two. One of them was Nathan. Huge funds were put at his disposal and his partner’s to start buying into British publishing groups. The aim, ultimately, was to influence the editorial line of their magazines or newspapers into something more sympathetic to South Africa.

Enough money was spent to buy a large stake in a British publishing group, but never enough to take it over completely. The problem? The money was all clandestine and no one was keeping close enough tabs on how it was spent. Inevitably, it all ended in a corruption scandal.

The scandal breaks

Nathan probably embezzled none of the funds himself. Although he certainly lived the high life on them. And, frankly, if someone was ripping off BOSS, I really can’t imagine a victim I’d sympathise with less. At any rate, he was never charged. Lots of others were, in what came to be known as the ‘Muldergate’ scandal, after the then Information Minister Dr Connie Mulder. Heads rolled, including the State President John Voster’s, but Nathan’s wasn’t one of them.

Which I was pleased about. He was, after all, highly likeable. But, as the Muldergate story revealed, even more of a rogue than I’d guessed.

It was fun, in any case, remembering those times. After all, they brought me closer than I’ve ever been to a major spy scandal and the toppling of the head of a racist state. It was fun to reminisce about it all again.

Entitled racing and how to avoid it

It’s been years and years – around half a century in fact – since I spent any amount of time involved in sailing. And even then it was absolutely the bottom of the range in sailing – dinghies, with no deck, where your feet are a plank’s thickness away from the water. Nothing to do with yachts and large crews and state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology or anything like that.

Funnily enough, even a half century on, it’s left me with a yearning to have another go one of these days. I did like that feeling of being so close to the water and whipping along on its surface. I liked the playing with the sails and the tiller and feeling the boat react and race, and I’d be delighted to enjoy those sensations again.

But not yachts or large crews or any of that state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology sort of stuff. Oh, no.

Now there’s an organisation known as Internations that operates in a number of cities across Europe. It brings together locals and foreigners who enjoy meeting each other and maybe speaking a little of the others’ language. Usually it’s quite fun.

Danielle and I have joined the local branch, here in Valencia. She’s been to more events than I have, but I have to say that the ones I’ve attended have been good. So when she said ‘there’s an Internations event to watch a sailing race’, the association between an organisation I find fun and an activity for which I still have a hankering felt too good to pass up. So we went.

Now this wasn’t dinghy sailing. It was the ’52 Super Series Valencia Sailing Week’. The crews represented each of eleven nations. And it was absolutely one of those state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology competitions. At least, as far as I can tell, though I have to admit that to me most of the boats looked pretty much the same as each other.

Now, I’m not denying that there’s skill in this kind of sailing. My own experience of sailing those dinghies back in the sixties left me with a clear picture of just what lack of skill looks like, so I have a vague idea of what it must be like to sail with real intelligence and aptitude.

On the other hand, when I see the ludicrous figures people spend on their boats, I can’t help feeling that the cash register must weigh heavily on the outcome. At a different, much more recent epoch of my life I spent some time rowing and one of the things I like about that sport is that, in competition (and I was never at competition level) there are strict limits on what one can do to boats. They have to be at least so heavy, the hull has to be a certain shape, etc. So it isn’t the technology that determines winners, it’s entirely the skill and strength of the individual rower or crew.

It’s not like that in sailing. As far as I can tell. Though I admit that to my untrained eye, it looked as though the state-of-the-art technology stuff was all under water...

Anyway, when I got down to the port I was rather dreading being a spectator at a sport for which I was finding it hard to work up much enthusiasm. It felt too much like money racing money. But I needn’t have worried.

The meeting place was in a bar. Or a restaurant. It depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Most bars out here serve food and most restaurants serve drinks. 

It wasn’t obvious which bar was meant, since each successive email gave a different name from each of two alternatives. In one email it would be the Arribar, in another the Marina. Fortunately, those were the only two mentioned and they’re right next door to each other, so it wasn’t difficult to go to one for a while and then check out the other.

Eventually we found the group, and it was as with all Internations events. A lot of interesting people speaking any of four or five languages at different times (though predominantly English: Europe is becoming very English, even if England refuses to be European). We got chatting over drinks and it all went well, as it usually does at these gatherings.

Eventually, Danielle asked ‘what about the race? When do we see the boats?’

‘Oh, they’ve been coming in for the last hour or so,’ the organiser assured us, ‘I’ve seen a couple. But you’d have had to turn around to see them yourself.’

I asked how the race had been going. She didn’t know exactly, but said she’d been pleased to see that there was at least one female participant.

‘In the South African boat. One – only one, but still one – of the crew was a woman.’

‘Good for them,’ I said, ‘and how many were black?’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s true that while they may have taken a small step forward against sexism, they’ve taken none against racism. They were all blond.’

Then she smiled. ‘Good looking, though,’ she said and grinned at her husband.

An hour or so later we left the place. As we walked to the bus stop, we came past the line of boats all carefully docked and waiting the next day’s competition.

All lined up and raring to go for the next day’s racing
But they all look pretty much the same to the unpractised eye

We didn’t see any of the actual racing. But then, with a sport of wealth and privilege, maybe that was just what suited us best. We enjoyed the company of pleasant people from Internations, and left the entitled to race against the entitled. 

What links Soweto with Wembley; plus not letting evil prevail

What an iconic image the first multi-racial elections in South Africa left us. Do you remember the pictures of the queues snaking around the fields under the blazing sun for hours? Those who had been denied the right to vote turned out in millions to exercise it for the first time.

Voters queue to vote in the South African presidential election, 1994

Now I’ve lived a rather more restrained version of that experience myself.

There was a lot less sun. In fact, it was frankly cold, but this is an English May and you have to expect just about anything. It also didn’t take anything like as long: we waited an hour and a half, not the eight hours many South Africans had to hang around for back in 1994. But still, the queue was impressively long and gave a powerful sense of the commitment many feel to their rights.

The setting was a French school, oddly called the ‘Lycée Winston Churchill’, in Wembley, an outer suburb of North London, most famous as the home of the English national football stadium. The occasion: the second round of the French presidential election, pitting Emmanuel Macron against Marine le Pen.

As I hold French citizenship as well as British (a bit of a bolthole, that, against Brexit), I was entitled to vote. I went with my wife (French from birth) and another French friend.

We were there because we believe in the principle, often and probably incorrectly attributed to Edmund Burke, that “for evil to prevail, it is sufficient that good men do nothing”. Sitting on your hands is to do nothing. And a victory for the hard-right Le Pen would have given us a nasty object lesson in what it means to see evil prevail.

This makes it a little surprising that many on the left were calling for their supporters to abstain. They didn’t particularly like Macron so they preferred not to vote at all. It’s quite a common view – many on the left refused to back Hillary Clinton in the US, for example, and many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain believe that Labour has to retain him as leader because he’s “right” (or rather “left, therefore right”), which makes him preferable to someone who might actually win.

Sadly, we’ve seen the consequences of that kind of view. In the US, you get Trump. In Britain, you get May – not as dire as Trump, but she’s going to inflict a great deal of pain nonetheless.

Well, we wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t happen in France. So we travelled three-quarters of an hour each way and queued for an hour and a half to make sure there would be at least three more Macron votes in the count.

We queue to vote in the French presidential election, 2017

We did that with pride. It was good to be in that crowd. In the first round, French voters in Britain gave Le Pen just 2.9% as opposed to the 21.3% she notched up across all voters. Those who live in other countries are perhaps less keen on narrow nationalism, more open to others and to the free mixing of peoples. It felt good to be among them.

But it also felt good to be backing someone who could win an election. As he now has. In Britain, I’m campaigning for my local MP who faces a tough re-election challenge. I very much hope he’ll get back in, as he’s likeable as well as being honest, hard-working and competent. And, though it’s going to be a hard fight, he has a chance.

The same, sadly, can’t be said for our party leader. He doesn’t stand a chance in hell. That means it’s damage limitation all the way.

Macron, France's youngest president, will do less good than many will have hoped. He’ll even do some harm. Overall, he will surely disappoint, as Tony Blair did. But at least he can do some good, again just like Blair. After all, you can do nothing at all if you lose, however good your intentions. Macron and Blair won and if their achievements belie our hopes, at least they got into a position to achieve something.

In any case, the three of us in that Wembley queue will know one thing at any rate: that we can be counted among the good men (and women) who, by doing something and not sitting on our hands, prevented a far worse evil prevailing.

That’s it. I’m not putting teeth under my pillow any more

It’s enough to make me lose faith in fairies.

The Rugby World Cup’s been a strangely unsatisfactory competition, especially from the point of view of anyone English. Despite the tournament being held here, England failed even to get out of the pool stage and into the quarter finals. I’m always pleased when an English team sets a new record, but I wish it hadn’t become the first ever host nation to fail to qualify.

Still, one could as an Englishman switch one’s allegiance to one of the other Northern Hemisphere teams. Four of them had made it into the quarters, along with with four from the South: France, Ireland, Wales and Scotland joined Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina.

Of the four Southern teams, Argentina looked the weakest. It has been steadily improving for a couple of decades, but it’s only recently made it to the big time. On the other hand, among the European teams, the one that has performed the best in the last year or two was Ireland, which won the premier competition here, the Six Nations, in both 2014 and 2015.

As it happened, Ireland was playing Argentina, so that looked like about our best bet for getting one Northern team through to the semis.

South Africa looked vulnerable, beaten in their first match by Japan, a nation which looks like Argentina a decade or so ago: improving but still not a major side. Wales, one of the stronger European sides, might just beat them.

As for New Zealand and Australia, their performance had been spectacular throughout the competition. There was little chance of off-colour France beating the former, or Scotland, near the bottom of the Six Nations, beating the latter.

So what happened?

South Africa avoided the mistakes that cost them against Japan, and beat Wales.

New Zealand did a demolition job on the French, leaving them bloodied and bowed.

That took us to Ireland-Argentina, our best chance. Within thirteen minutes, Argentina were 17-0 up. Ireland fought back, but were well beaten in the end.

The only hope left was for Scotland to beat Australia. But Scotland is one of the weakest of the Six Nations. Australia have been magnificent throughout this tournament. Surely only a miracle could give Scotland the victory.

A miracle or a fairy tale. One of those great sports stories, beloved of Hollywood, where the unfavoured underdogs come good on the day and beat their fancied, powerful opponents.

Well, it nearly happened. With three minutes to go, Scotland was two points up. Then Australia was awarded a penalty, worth three points if successful. Which it was. So in the end Australia went through by a single point.

Scotland came so close to beating Australia
And making a fairy tale come true...

The fairy tale was not to be. 

It’s enough to shake my belief in the Walt Disney World. It’s enough to cast doubt on the existence of Father Christmas, even if you call him Santa Claus.

Anyway, the result is that we go into the last two weekends of the Rugby World Cup with not just the host nation eliminated, but the host hemisphere. The English often complain that we invent sports for the rest of the world to beat us: football (what everyone but the US call football, anyway), cricket, now rugby.

Indeed, as far as rugby’s concerned, it isn’t just the country of its invention that disappoints, it’s the whole continent.

South Africa, great memories, anxious times

It was one of the great holidays, the two weeks we spent in South Africa nearly a decade ago. 

It was wonderful pretty much from the beginning. We stopped for lunch an hour or so out from Johannesburg, at what had once been a mission station, and I was absolutely enchanted to see a Vervet monkey swing between two trees just low enough to grab part of my meal. 

Vervets. Cheeky enough to try to nick my meal
But I didn't like it that much, and liked them a lot more

The staff were profusely apologetic, but I was delighted: what else could possibly say so clearly, ‘you’re in Africa’?

That evening we were being fed from a ‘potjie’, the traditional cast iron pot in which a great stew is cooked over an outdoor fire, in our case being prepared by a congenial hostel owner who liked to feed his guests and tell them stories of the old days of the Transvaal

We were there at the right time of year. May’s the ‘cold season’ when tourists don’t turn up much, even the internal ones. We were able to ring the Kruger Park and get accommodation for the next day, in a glorious hut which, at 4:00 in the morning, had impalas lying outside our door, practically close enough to stroke.

Why were we up at 4:00 in the morning? Because we’d manage to enrol for a bush walk, which you usually needs you to book a year in advance.

These days, when I hardly ever seem to be away from the sounds of traffic, to be in a place of miles of plain rolling to the horizon and hear nothing but an occasional insect and a few birds, was nothing short of bliss. Add to that the herd of Kudu – antelopes with glorious twisted horns – through which we drove on the way back, the leopard we saw eying them up lustfully but without the slightest hope of tackling one, the giraffes, the zebras, the rhino, and the rest, and you can imagine how magical the whole thing was.

Kudu. Simply majestic

We even met a friendly Afrikaner couple who took us a little under their wing. But I was amused by his complaint about the lack of ice for a gin and tonic in the bar. The message was clear: the Blacks running the bar were simply not up to the job and things would not have been like that when... well, when things were run more effectively, by the right people.

Funnily enough, I didn’t even want a gin and tonic.

Danielle had shown the good sense to plan our journey economically, and we stayed not in hotels but in hostels – and what hostels! They were luxurious. And the great thing about a hostel is that you meet the other people staying there.

A few days after the Kruger Park, we met a Canadian woman travelling round the country on her own. She explained to us that she’d been walking back along a country road; a group of young black people had been walking in the same direction; sometimes they would overtake her, sometimes she would overtake them.

But then a middle-aged white couple stopped their SUV and offered her a lift.

‘No, thanks, I feel like walking,’ she told them.

‘I think you should get in,’ they said, casting meaningful glances at the group of black youths.

When she still refused, they shrugged and told her, ‘well, on your head be it,’ before driving off.

The Blacks had heard the exchange.

‘I’m sorry Whites can be so stupid,’ she said to them, apologetically.

‘No,’ they said, ‘we don’t think you’re stupid. We need you. So it doesn’t matter.’

Our own experience was like hers. Black people mostly avoided talking to us, giving Whites their space, but if we spoke first, they’d stop or even walk out of their way to have a conversation. One father had to break off a chat with me, to race down a country path and catch up with his rapidly receding family.

In Durban, Danielle and I tried to walk to the Indian market. We were stopped by a gloriously rainbow mixture of policemen at a tiny kerbside police station: one White, one Indian, one Black.

‘Stay on the waterfront,’ they said, ‘don’t try to walk to the market.’

By then, we were beginning to realise how near the surface the racism of the place lay. We were soon to discover how near the surface the violence bubbled too.

We met up again, in Johannesburg, the same Afrikaner couple we’d got to know in the Kruger Park. As they were driving us back from an excursion, we came across a screaming woman, bleeding copiously from a terrible gash on her arm. A few metres on, a man was walking away rapidly, carrying a blood stained knife. Both were black, neither was young.

‘What should we do?’ Danielle and I asked.

‘Nothing at all,’ was the simultaneous response, and we drove on.

Two Whites felt so threatened at the idea of even stopping to help a wounded Black, while the man who’d attacked her was still around, that they left an injured woman to sort herself out. They wouldn’t even ring for an ambulance.

It’s a glorious place, South Africa. I’ve been back, for work, on a couple of occasions, and I love the country. But it’s riven, from top to bottom, with shocking, vicious and sometimes blood-soaked tensions. And I’ve seen so many Whites who have retreated into gated communities with walls and barbed wire to keep the Blacks out, that I have little sense of progress towards bridging the divides.

In fact, a great many of the Whites I met were busy finding themselves some kind of link – any kind of link – to a European ancestor who could provide them passports as a get free ticket out of the place.

Nelson Mandela was the man who held the place together. He embodied the ideal of a rainbow nation. And now he’s gone.

I suspect South Africa will survive and will, ultimately, prosper.

But boy, has it got its work cut out for it.

He held the place together
Now South Africa needs to find another way