Policing as it should be done

It was great, for the young foreign couple in Valencia, to see an ad on a local website for a second-hand kitchen island. It was exactly what they’d been looking for. All they had to do was pay the money and collect the piece of furniture.

Alas, that turned out to be less easy than they’d imagined. The thing had been firmly glued together. There was no way to take it apart without breaking it. So they couldn’t carry down the five flights of stairs in disassembled pieces. It would have to be carried down bodily, as a whole

They tried the lift. But it didn’t matter which way they turned the piece of furniture. It was two centimetres too big. The lift doors wouldn’t close.

So they started on the massive job of manhandling it down the stairs.

Unfortunately, their progress wasn’t unobserved. A neighbour decided they must be burglars, stealing the prized possessions of the family on the fifth floor. No sooner had he had the thought than he acted on it. The police were summoned.

They arrived as the couple had finally reached the second floor. She was done in. She couldn’t have carried the colossal piece of furniture down another floor if her life had depended on it. When the police arrived, she made no attempt at all to resist what was coming next.

What was coming, however, surprised her. The police took a look at her, exhausted on the landing, and her husband, drenched in sweat and gasping to get his breath back, and decided no one less like a pair of burglars could possibly be imagined.

“Wait here,” they said, an injunction which, in their weary state, they had no trouble at all obeying.

The police climbed up the stairs to the apartment of the man who’d phoned them.

“What on earth do you mean by wasting police time in this way?” they asked him when he opened the door.

With a few neatly constructed sentences they expressed to him the extent of their displeasure at being summoned to deal with people who were clearly not engaged in any kind of criminal endeavour, but carrying out an entirely legal and understandable task. Then they returned to the second floor.

There they metaphorically rolled up their sleeves and helped the couple get the kitchen island down to the ground floor and loaded into their car.

Local police in Valencia
They can be tough but they can also be helpful

Our own experience in Madrid a few weeks ago was similar. Danielle had her purse filched from the backpack. We flagged down a police car to report the theft and, not only did they take a note of the event, they offered us a lift to a police station where the city has someone on duty to help tourists make their statements about crimes they’d suffered.

This contrasted to an experience I had as a student when I was stopped while heading home from a film-showing in college. I was carrying the three canisters of film for, if I remember, The Battleship Potemkin.

It was midnight. The cops had seen a young man with a heavy rucksack. There had been a lot of breakins recently. They were clearly just doing their job when they stopped me and I didn’t resent it at all.

What I did resent, on the other hand, is that once they’d established my bona fides, including my address – another ten minutes’ walk up the street where they’d stopped me and were interrogating me in the back of their van – they asked me to get out and drove off – straight past my front door.

To this day, I’ve never understood why they didn’t at least run me up the road in the van. What skin would it have been off their noses? And they knew how heavy my bag was.

Two styles of policing. And I know which I prefer.

When the little kid tries to play in the big boys’ playground

Early in August, the Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned the Spanish Ambassador to protest at the seizing of the oil tanker Grace 1 in Spanish waters. The embarrassed Spanish diplomat had to explain that while he, and his government, agreed that the incident had occurred in their waters, Britain claimed them for itself and when it sent Marines to take control of the vessel, it did so without consulting Spain.

Britain seizes the Grace 1.
The act of a might imperial power

It was an action worthy of an Imperial power. Britain, after all, only claims jurisdiction over those waters through its possession of Gibraltar. That’s a rock the size of a (very) small mountain, attached to the Spanish mainland and nearly 2500 kilometres from London. Britain took possession of it in the early days of its imperial expansion and only by right of war, since it was handed over by the Treaty of Utrecht which concluded the War of Spanish Succession.

Why on Earth was Britain involved in a war about the Spanish succession? You may well ask. Especially as most of the fighting took place in Germany anyway. Please don’t expect logic in any of this.

So the anomalous possession of a piece of obviously Spanish territory gave Britain the right, or so it felt, to seize an Iranian oil tanker. It did so on the grounds that the tanker was breaching sanctions against Syria, contrary to decisions of the European Union. That’s ironic since Britain is hell-bent on leaving the European Union, but that clearly didn’t stop certain people thinking that EU law provided useful cover for doing what they wanted to do in the first place.

In passing, it’s actually questionable whether EU law really did. Carl Bildt, former Swedish Prime Minister and an expert on these questions, told the Guardian:

The legality of the UK seizure of a tanker heading for Syria with oil from Iran intrigues me. One refers to EU sanctions against Syria, but Iran is not a member of the EU. And the EU as a principle doesn’t impose its sanctions on others. That’s what the US does.

Spain claimed that, in reality, Britain was merely reacting to a demand from the US. Since the Americans have since made an attempt to seize the ship through the Gibraltar courts, it’s hard not to believe that this might, indeed, have been the case. It was US policy, rather than British, that led to the ship’s seizure.

So we have the curious spectacle of high-handed, possibly illegal, imperial action being taken by Britain. And yet it did so as no more than the poodle of the United States, a true imperial power where Britain, once a great power, is today a bit player in the game of global politics.

We didn’t have to wait long to have that proved to us. On 19 July, the Iranians seized the British tanker Stena Impero in the Strait of Hormuz. Britain was powerless – literally – to act. It had a warship in the region, but far too far away to intervene. And in its much reduced state, it could only choose to send one more ship. Britannia once ruled the waves, but no more. Today it can’t provide military protection for its merchant navy.

Iran seizes the Stena Impero
Tit for tat, calling the bluff on British powerlessness

It no longer has the force to play the stooge for Trump’s US, let alone play with the big boys in its own right.

It might be wiser, you might think, for it learn the lesson and stop throwing its limited weight around. Indeed, it might be wiser if it stopped pretending that it was big enough to play on the world stage with the real powers of the world. The US is up there in the top tier, but even Iran is a major regional power. Britain? A minor power on the edge of Europe.

Which is why leaving our union with 27 nations in Europe is such a self-destructive move. We’ve demonstrated we can’t stand alone. But some old-Empire nostalgists are going to force us to try anyway.

The postscript to the Grace 1 story shows the only piece of wisdom in this whole sorry tale.

Gibraltar may be a quirk of history, at least insofar as belonging to Britain is concerned. But Gibraltarians have their heads screwed on properly. They voted massively against Brexit. And now the courts, followed by the territory’s first Minister Fabian Picardo, have shown the guts to stand up to the Americans. The court would not support the US claim to impound the ship. And the First Minister has released it.

Now that really is taking back control, the slogan of the Brexiters. However, it happened in opposition to US demands. Which we’ll certainly be far less able to resist once we leave the protection of the EU.

What Brexiters wish for and what they get may be entirely different things.

Men of destiny, don’t you just love them?

A man of destiny, bearing the divine summons, to lead us to the uplands
And, lucky Brits, we can choose either Jezza or BoJo

Right now in Britain, the big question is what to do with the clear majority in parliament against a hard Brexit, almost certainly reflecting a similar majority in the country at large.

I say ‘almost certainly’ since no one knows for sure. That’s because there’s such resistance to the notion of asking the electorate again whether, after three years of this chaos, they really still want to go ahead with Brexit at all.

Funnily enough, the people most against asking that question are the Brexiters. It’s almost as though they feared they might get an answer they didn’t like. It has to be said that they’re the ones always saying we should respect the will of the people, so it’s a little curious that they don’t want to check what that will is.

For those of us who think it was a mistake to set out down this road in the first place, our last chance to do something about it is to stop our new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, taking us directly to the no-deal Brexit he’s threatening. One of the imaginative ways to achieve that is to bring down the government – it has a majority of one in the House of Commons, so it could be done – and replace it with a government of national unity.

The problem is that the political opposition in Britain is split between a tiny minority that believes that the only person who could lead such a government is the current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the vast majority who think that he’d be hopeless. Especially hopeless at stopping Brexit because most of us suspect that at heart he remains a Brexiter himself.

Unfortunately, the tiny minority that supports him currently runs the Labour Party, which is the major party of Opposition. That doesn’t do much for the prospects of building a unity government.

Corbyn won’t stand aside. He claims this is because he’s a genuine socialist, while everyone else is just a lackey of capitalism, so what Britain truly needs right now is a government led by him. Unfortunately, some of us, perhaps rather cynically, believe that what really motivates him is that after 32 years spent on the backbenches of parliament, with never any prospect of his holding anything like power, he’s suddenly seen that he might be able to take the highest office in the land. Before, the only future he could see was a few more years as a protest politician no one very much had heard of and then retirement with a few million pounds and a generous pension, but now he can see Downing Street. The bug has bitten him. He feels it’s his right, now. He feels entitled.

In that respect, he strongly resembles his opposite number, Johnson. Of course, Johnson has much more experience of feeling entitled, having attended England’s most prestigious private school, Eton, before going to Oxford where he was a leading light in the Bullingdon Club. That was a group of super-wealthy students that made a habit of trashing restaurants or other students’ rooms, safe in the knowledge that one or other of the ‘daddies’ would be around the next day to pay for the damage.

With a background like that, what else could he imagine than that he was entitled to the greatest consideration the country could give him, and had only to wait for it to fall into his lap? Since the premiership now has, he must feel entirely vindicated in that belief.

Corbyn has less reason than Johnson to feel such things are his birthright. I imagine that he feels he’s earned it. That only means that Johnson believes he has a right to Downing Street despite having been a less than impressive Mayor of London and a downright catastrophic Foreign Secretary, whereas Corbyn, who’s never been anything very much, thinks he’s earned the same right by dint of doing nothing of great significance for a very long time (he’s 70).

Talking to his supporters, it’s clear that they, and Corbyn himself, think that he’s a man of destiny. Were they not mostly atheists, they’d probably see him as a man chosen by God to lead the British – his (God’s) chosen people – to the sunlit uplands. Since these are people whose roots are in the forties, seen as the golden age of the Labour Party, the uplands are presumably those of that time, when everyone was happy, healthy and rich. As so well chronicled in George Orwell’s novels.

It has to be said that Boris thinks exactly the same of himself. He too is the man of destiny who will lead the British to their sunlit uplands, although in his case, his nostalgia is for the days of Empire, back in Victorian times, when everyone was happy, healthy and rich. As so well chronicled in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Both men of destiny. Both ready to lead us to those fabled uplands. Guided by an inspiration nothing short of divine.

Just not from the same God.

When Memory Lane took me to Never Land

It must, I suspect, be my age that keeps driving me back down Memory Lane.

On my trip to London this week, I stayed in a hotel in Kensington. West Kensington, I should add, not the really fashionable bit. But even so, I wandered down a few charming Mews or around squares lush with leaves and with their private park in the middle, and saw how privilege is still doing just fine in Britain, Brexit or no Brexit, recession or no recession.

Quiet elegance in Kensington
How the other 1% live

The hotel was also within walking distance of Hyde Park. This is the biggest park in London, although technically only one end of it is actually Hyde Park: all the western bit is called Kensington Gardens. For a walker wandering around it, however, it all feels like one colossal extent of glorious greenery, with its fountains and even its lake, the Serpentine. Except that when Hyde Park gives way to Kensington Gardens, the lake changes name too, just to confuse visitors. It becomes the Long Water.

The Long Water. Looking towards the Serpentine

It occurred to me that I really didn’t know Hyde Park at all well. Mostly I only go there for demonstrations, and then only to the far eastern end. Then I trail along the side of the park and through the streets of London with a million or two others, doing our damnedest to stop damn fool acts like the Iraq War or Brexit. Quite why we bother isn’t clear to me, since we hardly achieved our aim on those occasions.

This time I went for two or three walks in the park and made a point of acquainting myself with some of the bits I’d never been to, or not been to for a long time. I went to see the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, dedicated as the name implies to the memory of the person the French persist in referring to as “Leddi Di”. It looked like a fairly impressive playground but not that different from ones I’d seen elsewhere. Euro Disney it certainly wasn’t.

The Diana Pricess of Wales Memorial Fountain was also pleasant, but hardly breathtaking. And, because the designers had clearly decided not to let go of the theme once they’d got hold of it, they’re linked by a Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Path which is probably the best of the three, but only because a long path through fine parkland is always attractive.

None of these things, however, were my real objective in going to the park. I wanted to go, or rather go back, to the Peter Pan statue. Somewhere deep in my somewhat misty memory was a recollection of my parents taking my brother and me there when I was about eight, and telling me on the way that it was absolutely marvellous and evocative of the whole world of Never Land.

I couldn’t remember whether, once I’d stood before the statue, I’d felt any of that magic, and I wanted to get back to see what feelings it would awake in me.

You can imagine, I wanted to see whether I’d experience a sense of poignancy, of nostalgia, of the lost wonder of childhood, particularly as the parents who’d taken us to see Pan have both since gone to their graves. My wife always laughs at the way that I can spring a tear over a rom com. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to indulge all my mawkish sentimentalism to the full.

Finally, I got there. And stood before the pleasant little statue, bits of which, like any bronze sculpture, had been rubbed by thousands of hands to gleam yellow. And what did it evoke in me?

Peter Pan. Rediscovered at last

Well, to be honest, nothing at all. No tingle of nostalgia. No pricking of the eyelids at long-distant recollections of childhood.

In fact, I couldn’t remember the anything about my previous visit to it at all.

Lives overheard

One of the benefits of there being so many mobile phones around, is that you hear all sorts of tantalising titbits of conversation as you walk along the streets of a city.

In London the other day I caught:

“So you’re saying the watch I picked up wasn’t yours?”

Now, what could that be about? Did his friend send him back to the office to collect the watch he’d left on a desk, and he’d taken someone else’s, meaning he now had two colleagues lamenting the loss of a timepiece?

Or it could be worse than that. Maybe he went back to the café where his friend had left his watch, saw one, collected it and shot back out thinking he was doing his friend a favour, only to discover that he’d taken the watch of an innocent customer who’d only just removed the watch from his wrist to rest it. That customer had since reported the theft to the police, providing them with an excellent description of the culprit, further reinforced by crystal-clear security camera footage.

I did hear a siren approaching as I went past, so I moved away quickly rather than witness the arrest of an unfortunate individual, guilty only of good if misdirected intentions.

Only to walk around the corner and hear a young woman, striding up Exhibition Road, proclaiming loudly:

“You can throw me under a tube.”

For those possibly not familiar with London, the tube is the underground railway that criss-crosses the city. To be thrown under one would not be a life-enhancing experience.

The usual expression is ‘throw me under a bus’...

...but under a tube would be more certainly terminal

So what terrible catastrophe had overtaken her? Had she been denied promotion by a scheming colleague who had secured a post, by rights hers, and whom she was now challenging to finish her life altogether, since he had already irreparably damaged her career prospects?

Or was she talking to her now ex-boyfriend, who had dumped her for her sister, heaping humiliation on top of harm? Bereft even of family support, since she had already been abandoned by her parents for her terrible choice of lover, she had now been betrayed by her own sibling.

Indeed, she might have been talking to the very sister. No wonder she felt that being thrown under a train would be a perfectly reasonable next step in the progression of disasters afflicting her.

But I think the finest titbit I overhead came from an anxious young man saying:

“You mean, he saw me leaving this morning?”

Well, I could construct some plausible circumstances that might lead to that kind of statement. But is it worth it? I’m sure you can find your own easily enough. And they probably wouldn’t be very different from any conjecture I might come up with.

Ubiquitous mobile phones? At least they add spice to a stroll through London. And a little exercise for the imagination.

Do we need more spies? And more traitors?

Treason is a terrible offence. Why, even after the British abolished the death penalty for murder, one of the few offences for which it was retained was high treason. That was the case until the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law finally did away with capital punishment altogether. But I suspect most of us still think of betrayal as one of the basest of crimes.

Perhaps the most notorious of British traitors, and the most fascinating, is Kim Philby. For the best part of thirty years, he was an agent of the Soviet Union's KGB, who was deeply embedded inside Britain’s own secret intelligence service, MI6. Any information of importance known to MI6 was immediately known to the KGB too. Since James Jesus Angleton, then a rising star of the CIA, was in the habit of confiding pretty much everything he knew to Philby, that meant that most of the CIA’s secrets were also being shared with the KGB.

Some of the missions Philby betrayed inspire little sympathy in me. 

For instance, I have no time for joint MI6 and CIA operations which sent young Albanian men being to their home country, to carry out actions that would be most generously described as sabotage, more harshly as terrorism, in order to weaken the Communist regime and ultimately foment an uprising against it. On the other hand, I find it somewhat nauseating that every single one of those missions was betrayed by Philby. Possibly 200 of these young men were captured and put to death, often in the most atrocious way. Even worse, the number rises to some 2000 when you include the friends and relatives, and even the unfortunates who happened to share the same surname as a captive, who suffered the same fate.

What Philby did was by no means pretty. But there’s no doubt that he showed a lot of guts and ingenuity, with which he turned MI6 inside out, and made some of the most senior figures in the CIA look pretty silly too. It’s a remarkable story, extremely well told by Ben MacIntyre in his book A Spy Among Friends. The title neatly expresses the thinking that put Philby above suspicion among people, his friends from childhood, who ran the secret service and regarded him as ‘one of us’.

Oleg Gordievsky in 1994
Photo from The Times

MI6 wasn’t, however, without its riposte to the KGB for Philby. In his latest book, The Spy and the Traitor, Ben MacIntyre tells another story, rather less well-known than Philby’s but fully as compelling. In Oleg Gordievsky, MI6 recruited its own double agent, deep within the KGB – he ended up with the rank of colonel – who was Philby’s mirror image, ostensibly serving the KGB, in reality betraying its secrets to British intelligence.

The book is well worth reading, an excellent tale of intrigue, peril, betrayal and loyalty. But one of the most interesting stories it tells is of the visit by Mikahil Gorbachev, then the newly appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, to Britain in 1984. It was one of the most successful, and above all cordial, visits by a Soviet leader to the West. Maggie Thatcher, then British Prime Minister, declared that Gorbachev was someone with whom the West “could do business”.

At the time, Gordievsky, by then a well-established MI6 agent, was head of the political intelligence department in the KGB station (rezidentura) in London. This put him in a pivotal position for the visit. As MacIntyre explains:

As head of political intelligence in the rezidentura, he would be responsible for briefing Moscow on what Gorbachev should expect; as a British agent, he would also be briefing MI6 on Russian preparations for the visit. Uniquely in intelligence history, a spy was in a position to shape, even choreograph, a meeting between two world leaders, by spying for, and reporting to, both sides.

Ben MacIntyre and his excellent book on Gordievsky

The same man was briefing both the British and the Soviets. And far from leading to the collapse of the talks, it ensured their success. Unlike Philby, Gordievsky betrayed no one to his death. But in this operation, as in several others that were nearly as significant, he did a great deal more than Philby to advance the cause the Soviet agent claimed to serve: making the world a safer place. And yet Gordievsky was just as assuredly committing treason.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Perhaps the greatest danger to world peace is state secrecy. And one of the best ways of countering that danger is to have talented spies betraying those secrets, effectively and repeatedly.

Treason is a terrible crime. But, paradoxically, maybe we need rather more spies keeping everyone informed of what everyone else is doing. 

And rather more traitors, not fewer.

The mystery of the vanishing Vermouth

Vermouth, I always thought, was rather a banal mixer, used with gin, and predominantly by people in spy movies saying pretentious things like ‘shaken not stirred’. Or, as a spoof film we recently saw had it, ‘pour a stiff gin and show it to a bottle of Martini but so it can’t see the label, and without even taking the top off’.

In fact, I didn’t make much of a distinction between Vermouth in general and Martini in particular. And since I associated it with large quantities of gin, far from my favourite tipple, I really didn’t think that much of it.

It turns out that in our new home city, Valencia, Vermouth is a matter of local pride. Not the kind produced by Martini, though. Here, many bars and restaurants pride themselves on producing their own home-made variety. It’s made of reinforced wines in which various spices and herbs have been allowed to steep. It’s sweet, too, so if, unlike me with my every-so-slightly excessive weight, you have no sweet tooth, then you may not like Valencian Vermouth as much as I do. But I reckon it’s still worth trying.

Huevos Alto Turia, our local organic shop
It has an enticing feel to it

Around the corner from us is an organic food shop which does great local produce. You know – all sorts of nuts and seeds and special breads and free-range eggs. They – I don’t know why I say ‘they’ since it’s very much a one-woman show – she will also order bottles of a local Vermouth from a friendly supplier. Tell her in the morning and she’ll have them by the evening at the latest.

I told her yesterday, because her Vermouth is one I particularly enjoy. But I left it overnight before I went to collect the three bottles I’d asked her for.

“They were here just an hour and a half after you asked for them,” she told me with a note of unmistakeable pride in her voice.

I thanked her and paid for the bottles, then loaded them into the rucksack I’d brought for the purpose. Back home, I dumped the rucksack on a chair by the dining table and took two bottle out to transfer to the storage room where we keep such things. Then I went back to the dining table and noticed, to my horror, that the rucksack was empty.

The rucksack. And just two bottles

What could have happened?

Danielle was recently robbed in Madrid. She was wearing one of those rucksack-style handbags and two young women had come up close behind her, whipped the rucksack open and grabbed her purse. We noticed them in time to stop them taking anything else, but the purse was gone, never to be heard of again.

Had the same thing happened to me?

Valencia always strikes me as a relatively safe place, with little crime. But that’s not the same as no crime. Perhaps I hadn’t been careful enough about zipping up the rucksack and someone, sneaking up behind me, had seen the single bottle in its compartment and got it out without my noticing.

Then again, I might have left it in the shop.

I shot back there and asked whether I’d left a bottle behind.

“No,” she said, “you took all three with you. I saw you pack them.”

She looked at me, concerned.

“Perhaps you took the other bottle out without really paying attention and you just don’t remember doing so?”

That must have been it, I thought. It was certainly true to character. I thanked her again – I didn’t want her to think I was accusing her of anything – and headed back home. But, no, I’d put away just two bottles, not three.

I went back to the dining table. There was a rucksack on it, completely empty. No third bottle.

And then I remembered that I’d put the rucksack I’d had with me on a chair by the dining table, not on the table itself. I took a look at that chair. And there, indeed, was a different rucksack. And, yes, it wasn’t empty.

I’ll leave you to complete the story from that point. All I’m going to add is that I was quite glad to discover that I was out of eggs, so I could go back to the shop and explain that really, truly, sincerely I had nothing to accuse her of. I did indeed have all three bottles. It was my absent-mindedness that had ever let me doubt it, nothing to do with her.

She seemed quite relieved.

As was I.