Author: Alexander Boot

In 1930 the RAF pilot Douglas Bader crashed and lost both legs. In spite of that he fought during Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe, scoring 20 victories. To this day Bader is held up as a paragon of courage.

Not that bravery is no longer needed. In fact, our soldiers dying in Afghanistan show that heroism never goes out of fashion.

However, the definition of heroism has been stretched to become lamentably loose. Nor is it so much the likes of Bader who are these days supposed to embody this virtue.

Instead it’s the 19-year-old Olympic diver Tom Daley whose death-defying bravery is being praised high and wide. Daley neither fought in Afghanistan nor entered a burning house to pull his granny out. He didn’t even use his primary skill to dive off a bridge to save a drowning child.

What’s drawing the effusive accolades is Tom’s YouTube video in which he heroically admits that he’s ‘dating’ another man. His female admirers needn’t despair though, for young Tom leaves the door open, if only ajar. “I still fancy girls,” he allows generously.

However, he has finally found happiness with ‘a guy’, which came as ‘a big surprise’ to him. It has to be said that the surprise is rather less earth-shattering to anyone who has ever seen Mr Daley or heard him talk, but that’s beside the point.

Truly emetic are the effusive panegyrics all over the press, praising Daley for his ‘courage’, ‘bravery’, ‘heroism’ and a thesaurus full of other synonyms for gallantry. Those RAF pilots have been overshadowed by a 5-minute video that has now received close to 5,000,000 hits.

By far the most intellectually unsound and morally reprehensible praise came from Matthew Parris, the acknowledged master of the genre. Granted, this hack is eminently capable of uttering rubbish on any subject. However, when he feels personally involved he outdoes even himself.

Writing in The Times, Mr Parris admits to having watched the video “with a mixture of admiration and envy”. The admiration part is self-explanatory, this is what courage is supposed to elicit. The envy comes from the retrospective regret that Mr Parris himself had to wait until a more mature age before admitting the rather self-evident fact that he too is what used to be called a ‘confirmed bachelor’.

Tom Daley’s coming out apparently confers some belated courage-tinted glamour on Mr Parris himself. He wastes no time in enlisting Tom as an ally in their common battle against “the forces of intolerance”.

These forces are as devious as they are ghastly: “they have switched the grounds of their attack… from ‘How dare you?’ to ‘Who cares?’

“After centuries of saying… it’s a mortal sin… the forces of intolerance now realise they’ve lost that battle. But they haven’t stopped hating, and their new cry is this: ‘Why don’t you just shut up about it?’”

The hating bit is indeed a problem, but not to worry. Paranoid delusions can these days be controlled with medication, so there’s hope for Mr Parris yet.

As to the putative question, I must admit it has crossed my mind as well. Nobody really cares and, at least in the rarefied atmosphere of Mr Parris’s life, few ever have.

He himself admits it: “The Foreign Office never asked. MI6 never asked. The Conservative Research Department never asked. Derbyshire Conservatives… never asked. London Weekend Television never asked.”

They didn’t ask because they didn’t care, not because Mr Parris’s sexuality was ever hard to guess. People only began to care when homosexuals began to wear their proclivity on the sleeve as a badge of honour, insisting that society accept them on their own terms. This occasionally encourages people to remind them that, as it ever was, homosexuality is indeed a sin, though far from the worst one.

Adultery, for example, is a worse sin than homosexuality, and every believer I know hates it. However, I have yet to meet anyone who hates either adulterers or homosexuals – indeed having such strong feelings may consign one to a life of resentful solitude.

“Hate the sin, love the sinner”, is how St Augustine put it. In the ethos in which this word has any meaning at all it’s assumed that God will forgive any sin if sincerely repented.

It’s only when the sinner doesn’t repent and moreover insists that there’s no such thing as sin that decent people become uneasy. But such nuances escape the likes of Matthew Parris. ‘Sin’ for them is merely a figure of speech used to mock anything disliked by ‘the forces of intolerance’.   

“So ‘parade’ it – and damn the consequences. Daley has found the courage to do that. I wish I had,” concludes Mr Parris.

Notice the reference to ‘full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes’? One wonders what sort of torpedoes Mr Parris fears might sink Daley. It’s not as if diving were a sport like rugby, where machismo is an essential part of the package.

Greg Louganis, the greatest diver ever, had four gold Olympic medals to his name, compared to Tom’s solitary bronze. Yet Greg not only heroically declared his homosexuality 18 years ago but also owned up to having courageously become HIV-positive.

This hasn’t prevented him from having a profitable career, publishing several successful books and appearing regularly on TV. Earlier this year he outdid Tom’s heroism by marrying another man.

Neither is Tom’s courage going to lose him lucrative sponsorships with Adidas and Nestle. It won’t scupper his TV reality show Splash – in fact his heroism, purely by chance I’m sure, coincided with the launch of its new series.

So yes, I do wish he – and especially Matthew Parris – ‘shut up about it’. That would enable them to save words like courage and heroism for situations where they truly belong.

 

 

 

 

 

How can that be, I hear you ask. After all, didn’t France narrowly beat Britain to the legalisation of same-sex marriage? How much more tolerant can a country be, this side of legalising interspecies marriage, necrophilia and political conservatism?

Moreover, France still has François Hollande as her president, and if that isn’t proof positive of unbounded, nay suicidal, tolerance, then what is?

Add to this the country’s good-natured acceptance of German domination, otherwise known as European federalism, and what further evidence of tolerance can one possibly want?

All these are perfectly legitimate questions, and you’re right – France, along with just about every other Western country, could rival Sodom and Gomorrah for upholding the world’s highest virtue, as identified by mankind in the last few years.

So it’s not tolerance as such that France’s National Assembly is about to criminalise but ‘houses of tolerance’ (maisons de tolérance), so called since the time of Napoleon. These are otherwise known as maisons closes, bordels or, in English, brothels.

And it’s not just brothels. It will become illegal to offer money for sex altogether, though apparently not to receive such payment. That deprives this time-honoured transaction of its bilateral nature, making one wonder how a payee can exist without a payer. But then I don’t claim any expertise in making sense of French (or any other) law.

The law first introduced years ago and last refined by Sarkozy in 2003 only banned solicitation (racolage), including passive solicitation (racolage passif). This was defined rather broadly, encompassing for instance such egregious offences as wearing revealing clothes in public.

One has to compliment the French, however, for enforcing this law with characteristic Gallic laxity. This is evident to anyone who has ever sat in a Paris café on a balmy summer evening, watched female newscasters on French TV or seen Mme Sarkozy on a night out with her fellow pop stars.

I’m not suggesting that any French woman, or certainly Mme Sarkozy, sporting a neckline plunging to her navel is out to turn tricks. All I’m saying is that such laws leave too much room for subjective interpretation to be taken seriously.

London, for example, is full of Russian girls, most of them on student visas, who all seem to have legs at least a foot longer than I remember from my time in Moscow. These young beauties live high on the hog by choosing exclusively the kind of boyfriends who can buy them £100,000 pieces of jewellery, £15,000 handbags and £1,000 bottles of bubbly.

The potential suitors are vetted for their fiscal suitability and discarded if they don’t qualify – or after they’ve been squeezed dry or at least drier.

Usually no folding stuff changes hands, so legality is scrupulously observed. As to the morality of it, I’m not sure how this sort of thing is superior to a French girl charging €300 for an hour of her time (I’m guessing at the actual amount, as I hope you and my wife realise).

Actually, a ‘French girl’ is a double figure of speech. About 90 percent of France’s 40,000 prostitutes are of foreign origin, mostly African and Eastern European.

And 15 percent of them are, well, not girls. Thus the proportion of male prostitutes is roughly 10 times the proportion of homosexuals in the male population, suggesting that homosexuals either have a more loving nature than straights or else are less discriminate in how they express it.

Now that we’ve entered the realm of numbers, Germany has 400,000 prostitutes, 10 times the number of France. When the Germans become more sexually permissive than the French, you know it’s the end of the world.

Actually, if I were to ban prostitution anywhere, it would in Germany, Holland and other Protestant countries where it’s practised in a particularly sleazy way. France, on the other hand, has always added a touch of naughty elegance to that ancient institution, as anyone can agree who has admired canvases by Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and Picasso, or especially Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour.

Miss Deneuve, incidentally, leads other French celebrities in vociferous protests against the upcoming law. Personally, I’m not an enthusiastic supporter of prostitution, but I’d be tempted to shift my principled stance if all putes looked like Catherine Deneuve in that film.

There’s an English angle to French brothels, for they have been anointed by royal emanations. Edward VII was a regular and enthusiastic patron of Parisian maisons de tolérance, especially le Chabanais. It was there that the versatile monarch developed his ingenious multi-tier ‘love seat’, making an immortal contribution to French culture in general and furniture design in particular.

All in all, it’s hard to feel enthusiastic about any law that’s so ill-defined, unenforceable and counterproductive. Nor can one expect that French authorities will be able to put an end to an activity that has been thriving at least since the time of ancient Babylon.

My advice to French prostitutes would be to make mockery of this law by following the example of  those Russian ‘students’ in London. Eschew cash, accept a €500 case of champagne instead, flog it at a discount and Bob’s your uncle. Or rather your john.

 

 

 

 

Apart from the obvious, if sometimes overlooked, benefit of the Ukraine lending itself to the abbreviation UK, what’s not to like about such a halftime substitution? Just think about it:

1) Britain would be better off economically, politically and socially.

2) The Ukraine would cock a snook at the Russians.

3) Putin’s imperial ambitions would be given a reality check.

4) Moving from the Scylla of Russia’s tender care to the Charybdis of the EU’s largesse, the Ukraine wouldn’t be better off. But neither would she be worse off, for the simple reason that she’s already at rock bottom.

5) Finally, the EU would be saddled with another sponger compared to which Greece would look like a self-sufficient economic giant. It’s doubtful that this abominable concoction could add the extra weight of 45 million impoverished inhabitants without its knees finally buckling. That would be wonderful news to those who agree with Point 1.

Ukrainians seem to feel the same way, which is why 500,000 of them staged a rally in Kiev, outscoring every other similar action in the country’s history. What drove them out to the barricades they instantly erected was President Yanukovych’s decision to push the country eastwards, towards Russia, rather than westwards, towards the EU.

Proffesor [sic] Yanukovych looked out of the window at the sea of fur hats filling the capital’s streets and heaved a sigh of wistful nostalgia for his romantic youth. His spelling might not have been any better in those days, but he made a comfortable living by ripping just such hats off the heads of men doing their business in public lavatories.

Oh to be young again. Life was so simple then, everything clear-cut, no room for equivocation. Grab the hat and run, secure in the knowledge that the victim’s trousers around his ankles would give the future proffesor [sic] a safe head start.

No such safety now – damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Yanukovych sighed again and declared that his heart and soul went to the protesters.

He then ordered his police, spearheaded by their special troops Berkut (golden eagle to you), to disperse the demonstrators using truncheons, tear gas, stun grenades and whatever else came in handy.

The idea was to turn Kiev into a battlefield, thus giving the good proffesor [sic] grounds for introducing a state of emergency and possibly seeking Russia’s help. And in case the protesters wouldn’t come out and play, Yanukovych produced a masterstroke.

The man has clearly added subtlety to his youthful directness. To prove this, the proffesor [sic] implanted a core of agents provocateur (titushki in Ukrainian) among the demonstrators. Armed with iron rods, rubber truncheons and Molotov cocktails, the titushki added the needed frisson to the proceedings.

So far the score is about even: 160 or so policemen have ended up in hospital, along with roughly the same number of demonstrators, including 30 journalists. 

To keep things fair, Berkut thugs have been discouraging out-of-towners from joining the fun. They blocked several roads with their lorries, thus keeping at bay Kiev-bound motorcades from the west.

Not to discriminate, they also prevented a large group of Europhiles from boarding the train at Dnepropetrovsk, southeast of Kiev. About 200 people were savagely beaten up at the station, others got the message.

The proffesor [sic] knew another declaration was in order. “I deeply condemn those who caused the clashes leading to human suffering,” he said in a bout of self-criticism.

This self-deprecation failed to win the hearts of West Ukrainians who tend to feel about the Russians the way a tree feels about dogs, and for pretty much the same reasons. Their capital Lviv (formerly Lvov, formerly Lemberg) is today paralysed by a general strike.

At the same time a group of Sebastopol councilmen sent a tearful petition to Putin, begging him to send Russian troops to the Ukraine. To be fair, Sebastopol’s link with the Ukraine is tenuous, owing more to Khrushchev’s gerrymandering than to any historical or cultural commonality. But officially it is in the Ukraine, which gives Putin a legal reason at least to consider the heart-rending plea.

The petitioners see Russian troops as the only possible defence “of the country, the Crimea’s Russian population and other regions of the Ukraine… from the US army and NATO aggressors.” Clearly they know something we don’t about US military strategy.

EU diplomats have reacted to the situation with somewhat less forceful threats, specifically those centred around trade sanctions against the Ukraine. Such actions wouldn’t unduly inconvenience Europeans, what with the unidirectional nature of this trade: the EU gives money to the Ukraine, the latter smiles seductively and promises to surrender her body to the EU’s passionate embrace.

If the EU project were about the economy, Jose Manuel and Rumpy-Pumpy would be ecstatic about averting an economic coup de grâce. But it isn’t: the project has been purely ideological from the very start.

This being the case, they grieve while still harbouring hopes that the situation in the Ukraine will become so messy that Putin will decide the mess isn’t worth the candle. “You want the Ukraine, you have her, see if I care,” they hope he’ll hiss.

My sentiments exactly, for reasons 1-5 above. However, one fears that even if the Ukraine is allowed to join the EU, the UK won’t be allowed to leave it. In that case the Ukrainian mess will become ours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, a police helicopter crashed into a Glasgow pub on Friday, burying a number of people under the rubble and killing eight.

Then, in a parallel catastrophic development, the Church of Ireland consecrated its first woman bishop on Saturday.

While mourning the victims of the Glasgow tragedy, we may still rest assured that this is a one-off incident. To the best of my knowledge, no police helicopter has ever flown into a pub before, and one can confidently predict that this is unlikely to happen again.

Alas, the same can’t be said about the Dublin tragedy. Anglican churches around the world have consecrated 26 other women bishops, or will shortly do so. And what with the High Anglican end of the Synod having removed its objections, the Church of England will soon find itself on the receiving end of the same disaster as well.

Stretching the parallel even further, practically to breaking point, pub crawlers anywhere are unlikely to abandon their chosen pastime, assuming correctly that the odds are in their favour.

Conversely, it’s not immediately obvious how orthodox Christians can in all conscience remain in the Anglican Church. It’s not that they would be leaving the Church – it’s that the Church has left them.

The Church’s back won’t stay in one piece after the thudding, crashing impact of this last straw. If it does, this will only go to show how little the English value Christian doctrine.

As it is, Anglo-Catholics have to travel miles in search of a congregation eschewing crass translations of liturgical texts in favour of the ineffably beautiful and uplifting KJB and the Prayer Book.

As it is, many of the 39 Anglican articles are unacceptable to any orthodox Christian for being downright Calvinist.

As it is, orthodox Anglicans can’t pick up a newspaper without reeling from yet another blow delivered to their sensibilities, be it female vicars blessing same-sex couples, cathedrals kindly offering their premises as sites of raves, prelates mouthing bien pensant PC drivel or other prelates referring to the Incarnation and the Resurrection as figures of speech.

As it is, one finds it hard to see how the Church of England, what with its three different sub-divisions at odds with one another, can legitimately be described as a true Church rather than so many separate congregations with few visible ecclesiastical links among them.

What has happened now is a blatant declaration of contempt for 2,000 years of Christian tradition. And the declarers can’t even claim, as Luther and Calvin did, that they are being guided by the Holy Spirit.

They openly and proudly admit that their sole guide is our soulless, atheist, anomic modernity with its kaleidoscopically changing fads. “The Church has to adapt to the times,” is how they put it. They may be confusing the Church with the retail industry or perhaps high fashion.

If they believe, as one suspects few of them do, that the Church stands for the eternal truth, then it mustn’t by definition adapt itself to secular toing and froing. Quite the opposite, it must repeat ad infinitum that the secular world should adapt itself to the eternal truth, as taught by the Church.

Protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio projectionem (protection entails allegiance, allegiance entails protection) is an ancient legal principle. One could suggest that it applies not only to states but also to Churches.

By insisting on debauching its theology to comply with secular pressures, the Anglican Church no longer offers protection to its orthodox communicants. It thereby forfeits its claim to their allegiance.

As they leave in droves, many will do so tearfully. The sublime poetry of the Authorised Version will still ring in their minds, the intimate grandeur of Anglican hymns will still sound in their hearts. They won’t be closing the door behind them because they want to. They’ll be doing so because they have to. Or rather because they’ve been shown the door.

Some will flock to Ordinariate churches, the few there are. But even assuming that more will be created to avoid a stampede, this can only be a stopgap measure, lasting one generation at best.

The illusion of becoming Catholic while somehow remaining partly Anglican is comforting, but it’s an illusion nonetheless. Small lexical differences will soon be overridden by the practically identical liturgies of Anglo- and Roman Catholicism, and youngsters will see little point in the Ordinariate as they grow up.

It’s really there to smooth the transition for older people, those who were baptised in the Church of England all those years ago and who have now been discarded by it. But even as they try to cling on to fragments of the Anglican rite, they will no doubt embrace Catholicism unequivocally and unreservedly.

They will be guided by Matthew 10: 14, stubbornly remembered in the lovely King James Version: “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.”

The victims of the Glasgow disaster, RIP. Anglo-Catholicism, ditto.

Haunted by nighttime images of europhobic ‘bastards’, Sir John is still fighting the battles of yesteryear.

With an in-out referendum wafting through the air, Sir John doesn’t like the smell of it. Britain, he warns, would pay a “severe price” for leaving.

Well, Britain is used to paying through the nose, not least thanks to the Black Wednesday fiasco of 1992 engineered by Mr Major (as he then was) when he led HMG.

Then his passionate affection for pan-European bureaucracy dragged Britain into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, as a prelude to joining the single currency. Money markets, however, wouldn’t wear it and Britain had to retreat, tail between her legs, shedding pounds every step of the way.

These days even the likes of Vince Cable realise what all sane people knew in 1992, that joining the single currency would have been catastrophic. We have money markets to thank for yanking Britain away from the precipice into which her PM was trying to push her.

The cost of Sir John’s panoramic vision is variously estimated at between £3.2 and £27 billion, with the actual number probably splitting the difference. Hence no one can question his expertise when it comes to paying a “severe price”.

In this instance the price wouldn’t just be denominated in currency, explains Sir John. Britain would be relegated to the lower leagues because “no nation can be great if it is inward looking and small minded”.

This is true, provided we don’t define such abominable traits the way Sir John seems to define them, as the desire to keep, or in this case regain, national sovereignty. Otherwise we run the risk of saying that Britain was “inward-looking and small-minded” when refusing to join continental Europe in 1940 and replace the pound with the single-currency Reichsmark. The RAF Fighter Command must have been full of eurosceptic “bastards”.

If Britain takes the suicidal step out of the EU, she’ll suffer the fate of Norway, something that according to Sir John would presumably be even worse than Black Wednesday. He calculates that, though refusing full membership, Norway is still paying 80 percent of its cost – without being able to influence EU decisions.

Sir John forgot to mention that Norway is subject to just one third of the regulations imposed on full EU members, but a man no longer in his first flush of youth can’t be expected to remember such trivial details.

By joining the EU, rather than merely the European Economic Area (EEA) she did join, Norway would no doubt be able to pull herself out of her present economic mire. As it is, she’s languishing at a per capita GDP of merely twice the EU average – who’s to say it couldn’t be higher still? Certainly not Sir John.

Norway’s GDP is growing at 2.75 percent a year (0.1 percent in the eurozone) – no doubt the growth would accelerate. Her unemployment stands at a whopping 3.25 percent (12.1 percent in the eurozone) – it would definitely go down to zero.

If I were Sir John, I wouldn’t mention Norway too insistently – this doesn’t conspicuously strengthen his case. However it’s true that Britain can’t follow Norway’s example blindly.

Even if we did do so and joined the EEA, our membership fee would go down to about $2 billion a year, from the current whole hog of £11 billion plus, not counting the cost of complying with asinine EU regulations. But Britain wouldn’t have to pay the EU a penny if she stayed out of the EEA altogether.

Instead, we could negotiate separate bilateral trade agreements with each EU member state – or with the EU at large when it finally becomes a single state de jure and not just de facto.

“In a world of seven billion people, our island would be moving further apart from our closest and largest trading partners, at the very time when they, themselves, are drawing closer together,” laments Sir John.

First, contrary to what Sir John may think, it’s possible to trade with other states without joining them in a political, or indeed economic, union. The wheels of trade ought to be greased not by ideology but by mutual benefit.

Considering that the EU enjoys a healthy (or unhealthy, depending on your perspective) trade surplus with Britain, her interests would be ill-served by taking a bolshie anti-British stance. And even if it did so, we could retaliate by countering their protectionism with our own, hurting them more than they could hurt us.

It could be made clear in no uncertain terms that, for example, any aggressive legislation aimed against the City of London would lead to countermeasures against German cars and French agricultural products (and I’m man enough to admit that I drive the former and drink the latter). I’m sure that Frau Merkel can do the sums, even if Sir John can’t.

Second, when trade in services is taken into account, over half of UK exports already go outside the EU, and the trend is towards an accelerating growth in this area.

Sales of British goods to the world’s fast-growing countries increased by more than 11 per cent over the last year. At the same time, British exports to the 26 European Union nations fell by 1.5 per cent. This even though our Asia-bound goods are counted as EU trade if they have an en route stopover at Rotterdam or Hamburg.

Even assuming that Germany and France can keep the EU afloat by continuing to trump economics with politics (and this is an unsafe assumption), the EU is not nearly as attractive a trade partner as, say, China, India, the USA and the Commonwealth.

As Prime Minister, Sir John has had his 15 minutes of fame or, to be more precise, infamy. As a private subject of Her Majesty, he should retreat into dignified silence – even if this means keeping to himself his yearning to become an EU citizen instead.

Yet again I’ve been blessed with a rare scoop: the transcript of an upcoming cookery programme, pre-recorded but not yet aired and in fact still unedited. I hope you’ll appreciate it as much as I did.

“You’ve heard me say, well, you’ve heard me say lots of naughty things. For example, once I described food as a narcotic, didn’t I?

“I stand by this description. Food can get you as high as Gstaad, where I go every winter… It can give you a heavenly rush, it can make you feel and act brazenly sexy… Darren, keep that bloody camera off my arse for Christ’s sake! What are you trying to do, get us all sacked?..

“As a young, well, younger girl I had a crush on my maths teacher, a gloriously dishy and tasty man… as it were. And I remember him saying that if A equals B, then B equals A.

“So if food is a narcotic then a narcotic can be food, and today we’ll explore this proposition, probing deep, hard and long, just the way I like it…

“My American friends, well, those Americans who have become my amici by paying me oodles and oodles of their delicious dollars, like their hash browns.

“I hope I’m not taking too deep a plunge, and all plunges must be deep, if I suggest that it’s only a piccolissimo step from hash browns to hash brownies.

“This is my first recipe today, and when you’re feeling a bit low on an overcast winter giorno, this will get you sky high.

“Like any sexy food designed to lift spirits and skirts… Darren, there’s no need to get that low, these morons are getting the message anyway… my hash brownies must start with fresh, organically grown ingredients.

“Mine come from this heavenly emporium, by appointment only, in the darling car park behind King’s Cross, just a few minutes by limousine from Chelsea…

“Darren, keep it on the ingredients, not my cleavage, for crying out loud!.. How much of this delicious spice do you need? Well, figure – some figures are stimulatingly voluptuous, wouldn’t you say? – on half a gram per gram of brownie. A hundred or so should get you duplex-high.

“Since this orgasmic ingredient isn’t soluble in water, you must mix it with alcohol, a 100-year-old Armagnac for preference… just so… and as you fold in the brandy, place your Meissen bowl on a gentle heat… not too furious or you’ll crack it… but then gentle and hot do go together… Keep it on my hands, Darren, you bloody oligophrenic retard, not my tits! This is a bloody cookery programme, not soft porn! We’ll do the tit shot later…

“There, now that you have the mixture perfectly homogeneous and orgiastic, you can mould it into any shapes, including some naughty ones… like so… Does this remind you of anything? M-m-m-m, makes one want to lick one’s finger… just so, oh yes…

“And this is it – bake at medium temperature for twenty minutes until the brownies are al dente crisp and enjoy in the company of friends, ideally those who play eclectic instruments professionally… Did I say eclectic? I meant electric, but then being a girl I sometimes get things wrong…

“My second ricetta today is for those nasty giorni when things really get up your nose… or rather when things getting up your nose don’t have enough of the desired effect…

“You remember I once said that my mouth can accommodate anything? Well, so can my nose… Darren, you bloody nincompoop, that’s not where my nose is… But sometimes your nasal cavity is best used just to inhale yummy flavours, not act as a receptacle. There are many other receptacles after all…

“Anyway, the only utensils you need for this drop-dead dish, and I only mean this figuratively as I hope you understand, is this slightly wanton and lascivious ménage à trois of spoon, fire and smoking pipe…

“This scrumptious powder comes from the same King’s Cross emporium I mentioned earlier, ask for Sergei and tell him I’ve sent you…

“Put about a gram of it on the spoon… I still use the silver one I was born with in my bocca… just so…

“Now flick your solid-gold Dunhill lighter and gently heat the underside of the antique Tiffany spoon until this delectable powder forms fine crystals… Mix the crystallised dish with a little flavourful ether, put it in your pipe, light it up and inhale the orgiastic smoke, taking care not to exhale for as long as possible… M-m-m-m… de-lish!

“Enjoy this heavenly repast with your friends and especially your children, it really brings families together… Come, darling, try this…

“Now if this won’t get your evening to a new high, I don’t know what will…

“Well, it’s basta for tonight. Grazie mille for your attenzione. Darren, do you still have that stock close-up of me in the shower? Well, cut to that and fade out, you proletario stupido, do I have to think of everything?”

 

 

That His Holiness knows little about economics, and understands even less, shouldn’t be held against him. It’s not his field after all.

Alas, he insists on making resonant statements on economics that are as weak on intellectual content as they are strong on ideological bias. Reading his 224-page manifesto, one has to acknowledge sadly that his bias is Marxist, which is to say demonstrably unsound and potentially harmful.

If His Holiness isn’t careful this may backfire on his theology as well. After all, Christ himself accepted economic inequality: “For ye have the poor with you always…” Since then it has been understood that the Church’s mission isn’t to eliminate such inequality but to teach Christians that it’s trivial compared with the ultimate equality of all before God.

The Pope attacks “rampant capitalism” as the cause of inequality and therefore social unrest. Those who believe that economic growth will trickle down to enrich the poor are “naïve”, he writes. I’d call them observant.

It has escaped the pontiff’s attention that it’s precisely “economic growth encouraged by a free market” that has ever succeeded in making sure people aren’t deprived of what Dr Johnson called the necessaries: food, shelter, clothes and what have you. Comparing, say, West to East Germany or South to North Korea as trial cases in which cultural differences don’t come into play, the Pope could see that free markets not only make some filthy rich but also prevent most from being dirt poor.

Conversely, the more diligently are egalitarian principles applied to an economy, the more likely it is to spread real poverty, the kind defined not as some having less than others but as most having nothing at all. Attempts to force ‘equality’ on people have invariably made them equal only in a bread queue, concentration camp or executioner’s cellar.

Our poor, munching junk food in front of their flat-screen TVs, are unimaginably wealthy by the standards of most people living in countries pursuing economic egalitarianism – or any of those where markets don’t operate vigorously.

Rather than seeing societies in terms of hierarchies based on ranks (similar to the Catholic Church actually), the Pope clearly sees them the way Marx did, as battlefields on which two hostile classes fight it out until one of them is dead.

“Without equal opportunities,” His Holiness writes, “the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode.” This is nonsensical, as the briefest of looks at any current conflict will confirm.

And how does he propose to equalise opportunities? Suppose a rich man can afford to send his son to a good school, rather than to an idiot-spewing, ambition-stifling comprehensive, while a poor man can’t.

Leaving aside the fact that free schools have become so describable precisely because of the destructive impulse injected into society by egalitarians, the only way to level the playing field would be to dispossess the rich man – and ideally to shoot him pour encourager les autres.

This has been gleefully tried in half the world, with the inevitable outcome of a murderous tyrant squeezing his bulk into the seat vacated by the rich man. If the Pope has a different plan in mind, I’d like to hear it. Meanwhile suffice it to say that five millennia of recorded history have failed to produce one.

“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets… by attacking the structural causes of inequality,” continues Pope Francis, “no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.”

And there I was, thinking it was atheism, destroying our civilisation and bringing out the worst in human nature, already compromised by the Fall. His Holiness effectively, if one hopes unwittingly, joins Marxists in promoting envy as the principal social dynamic. Rather than telling people to thank God for whatever they have, he encourages them to cast a covetous eye at those who have more.

Anyway, exactly where in the world does he find the absolute autonomy of markets? All Western governments are busily destroying even their relative autonomy. In but a handful of countries the public sector, largely dedicated to promoting egalitarianism so dear to the Pope’s heart, already accounts for half the economy, give or take ten percent.

This undermines the markets, creating the worst poverty problem, not to mention a moral one: a vast increase in the number of the relatively poor living off state handouts. (Thus Burke: “the moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.”)

The Pope’s native country obviously didn’t imbue him with respect for free markets. Neither does he realise that the only way of promoting his egalitarian agenda is to make private property insecure. Yet secure property is a necessary, though not sufficient, remedy against tyranny.

His Holiness would serve the faithful much better if he told them that their lives should be guided by spiritual, not material concerns. Modern economies, he could say, place an unprecedented array of consumer goods at their disposal.

Some have access to more, some to less, but all have within their grasp what historically can only be seen as fairytale cornucopia. Therein lies the opportunity to have a materially easy life; but therein also lies the danger of leading a spiritually impoverished one.

Variously ingenious trinkets will never fill a spiritual vacuum, but that doesn’t mean that pursuing material comfort is wrong. What’s wrong is to do so at the expense of what really matters in life, thus creating a spiritual vacuum.

The life of the spirit won’t be jeopardised by either poverty or wealth – but it can be obliterated by a single-minded devotion to wealth, or for that matter by a single-minded (also destructive and doomed) devotion to ‘equality’.

Perhaps His Holiness could have quoted Aquinas: “There is not necessarily greater perfection where there is greater poverty; and indeed the highest perfection is sometimes wedded to great wealth…”

It’s St Thomas rather than Karl Marx who could provide a more reliable inspiration for a pontiff commenting on the economics of modern life. Marxist drivel is best left to the experts, such as EU officials or our own Ed Miliband. 

It’s the Church’s intrusion into secular affairs that partly caused the Reformation. Doing the same thing from a vulgar Marxist perspective can cause something much worse.

Iran cheers, Israel cringes, and the rest of us, those without an immediate stake in the matter, applaud Barack Obama and John Kerry for striking the deal of the century. Geneva has put Munich to shame.

The Geneva treaty makes a long-awaited step towards securing eternal peace not only in the Middle East but also in the rest of the world. After 14 centuries of conflict it appears that Islam and Christendom (as it used to be) have finally buried their hatchet.

Sorry to be using clichés, but I’m too overcome with emotion to look for less hackneyed phrases. In addition to joy and jubilation I feel a great deal of pride.

For I count myself fortunate in having been granted access to the actual text of the treaty, rather than the watered-down version released to the media. What is pleasing to see is that the whole world-saving process was free of ideological rancour, one way or the other.

Instead the text is drafted in a business-like manner, akin to parents specifying exactly how many brownie points children will receive for promising not to be naughty again and refraining from torturing that poor cat. The agreement has an eye-pleasing binary symmetry of Good Deed/Payment.

But judge for yourself. Here are selected excerpts from the text, as vouchsafed to me personally by a source that, in the good tradition of journalism, must remain unnamed (I’ll give you the faintest of clues though: his middle name is Hussein).

DEED: Iran promises not to enrich any more uranium to weapon-grade quality this month. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran crosses her heart (in a manner of speaking) and promises to die, and please don’t stick a drone in her eye, swearing not to make too many nuclear warheads out of the uranium she has already enriched to weapon-grade quality. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iranian officials undertake not to make any more facetious suggestions that the Saudi national anthem should be called On the Sunni Side of the Street. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran promises not to attach any nuclear warheads to her rockets for at least two (2) months. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: After this, Iran swears on Mohammed’s memory not to fire aforementioned rockets at any country other than Israel, and preferably not even at her unless the urge to do so becomes irresistible. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran undertakes not to publish a cookery book titled Eating Shi’ite or, if she does so anyway, not to distribute it in Anglophone countries. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran promises not to support Hezbollah, at least not so that the whole bloody world knows about it. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran shall withdraw all, or at least most, copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, especially in the English translation, from both bookshops in the south-western part of Tehran. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran shall refrain from blowing up any public transport in any Western capital before or during Christmas. PAYMENT: $1 billion, and Dave, you can bloody well chip in on this one.

DEED: Iran undertakes not to enter President Hassan Rouhani into the GQ Best-Dressed contest this year, leaving the field clear for Dame Edna. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: If Iran must launch a nuclear missile at Tel Aviv, and let the world know that the US Administration and President Obama personally are unequivocally opposed to any such action, Iran shall refrain from doing so on Barack’s watch. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Even though John Kerry is half-Jewish, Iran promises not to call him ‘Jewboy’ ever again, and certainly not in any diplomatic situation. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran shall scale down her uranium-enrichment activities, discontinuing them altogether when she has produced enough nuclear warheads for her purposes. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran shall not support the ‘good guys’ (however defined) in Syria after they have won a decisive victory, and not in any demonstrative fashion until then. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

DEED: Iran undertakes not to use the billions earned so far to buy any nuclear warheads from the Russians or the Chinese, especially if she becomes capable of manufacturing her own. PAYMENT: $1 billion.

I’ve only highlighted the most salient points of this historic agreement that undoubtedly makes the world a safer place, and Iran a richer country.

I hope you’ll join me in extending heartiest congratulations to Barack ‘Just-Call-Me-Hussein’ Obama and John ‘No-Towelhead-Calls-Me-Jewboy-And-Gets-Away-With-it’ Kerry for this triumph of diplomacy. If Metternich, Talleyrand and Neville Chamberlain were alive, they’d be doffing their hats.

However, I’d cancel that Eilat holiday if I were you, Red Sea or no Red Sea. Just to be on the safe side.

 

 

 

If it’s true that, as Plato believed, music is the moral law, then Ed has to be among the world’s most immoral men.

He also has to be successful, as an invitation to appear on Desert Island Discs testifies. When one goes there, one has arrived.

For the uninitiated, the guest on this programme is asked to pick eight pieces of music he’d take with him to a desert island. The length of the sojourn isn’t specified, so the respondents have to assume they’ll be listening to their choices till they die.

In the old days, politicians didn’t hesitate to expose themselves to ridicule by choosing classical music only or predominantly, thereby confessing to being hopelessly out of touch with the electorate.

The late Enoch Powell, for example, was the last cultured politician we had. Actually his culture got him in a spot of trouble when he quoted Virgil’s remark about ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’ in the context of unrestricted immigration of cultural aliens to Britain.

The less erudite but more garrulous press immediately accused the well-read Tory not only of racism but also of somehow being complicit in the conspiracy to shed said rivers of blood.

Enoch’s DID choices provided more ammunition for his detractors: four of the eight pieces he chose were by Wagner. Now it’s my personal conviction that inordinate affection for Wagner is a reliable clinical symptom of madness. And even if a man isn’t mad to begin with, spending his life listening to nothing but Wagner would surely push him over the edge.

But at least Powell was honest about his tastes, quaint as they may have been. As today’s lot have neither his erudition nor his honesty, they use the opportunity to score political points.

The game-changing point that must be scored by any aspiring politician is one awarded for being a Man of the People. This means that no more than one classical selection is acceptable, and ideally none.

A Tory can just about get away with one (a hummable Mendelssohn song in Dave’s case), provided it’s not too posh. A Labour man can’t afford such elitism if he’s to retain any hope of high office.

In neither case do such political limitations impose a hardship. For whatever social background today’s leaders come from, culturally they’re as savage as your average White Lightning drinker. (You probably don’t know what that is, which speaks highly of you.)

So for them choosing popular tunes isn’t only expedient but also natural. What matters isn’t that they choose such tunes, but what tunes they choose.

Ed’s first choice was the South African national anthem. He’s prepared to listen all his life to these rousing words: “Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo, Yizwa imithandazo yethu, Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo.” Is he going to sing along? One wonders.

His multi-culti credentials secure, Ed had to reaffirm his commitment to his own country (and her established religion), which commitment on the part of Ed’s family has at times been questioned. Thus he chose Jerusalem, the Anglican hymn in which William Blake promises to build said Jerusalem “in England’s green and pleasant land”.

On general principle, one rather doubts that this air strikes a familiar chord in Ed’s soul because he spent his childhood singing it on Sundays. I’m guessing here, but it’s just possible that Ed was restating his belief in responsible environmentalism, specifically the part of it sustained by green and unpleasant taxes.

Ed’s sensitive side is manifested by his choice of Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond. Obviously he went over the stock of British soupy songs and found them wanting. Good to see such discernment in our next prime minister. A note to Ed: make sure voters understand that the ‘hands reaching out and touching you’ aren’t your own.

Then there’s Je Ne Regrette Rien by Edith Piaf, which in this instance is designed to vent Ed’s innermost feelings to his Labour supporters. To wit: I don’t regret stabbing my own brother in the back and stealing the party leadership from him – and who are you calling Cain, you crypto-Tory you?

To communicate his populism or, what would be worse, his actual tastes, Ed also selected three pop pieces. Since I’ve heard of neither the songs nor their authors, I’ll refrain from comment – other than complimenting Ed on his political acumen and rebuking him for his underdeveloped musical sense.

But the last selection is perhaps the most telling: Ballad of Joe Hill sung by Paul Robeson. In case you’re unfamiliar with Paul Robeson, he was a black basso profundo.

The Times has also identified him as an American ‘civil rights activist’, which he was – in the same sense in which Pol Pot was a fighter for Khmer freedom.

Robeson was Stalin’s personal friend and a member of the American Communist Party, denied a US passport at a time Stalinism was frowned upon. In other words, he was an active supporter and promulgator of the regime that murdered millions of its own people and was trying to do the same to the rest of the world.

Does Ed think this is what being a ‘civil rights activist’ means? He may well do – they don’t call him Red Ed for nothing. In all likelihood, however, he was appealing to his core supporters, the unrepentant communists in the Labour ranks.

I for one would love to see Ed actually marooned on a desert island and doomed to listen to his selections. Alas, I fear he’ll be moving to Downing Street instead.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour (La Vie d’Adèlein the original French) is a film so objectionable on so many levels that it’s no wonder it won Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Nor is it particularly surprising that film critics in all our papers are issuing girlish gasps of delight, especially those who aren’t themselves girls.

We have no film critics any longer, just film buffs incapable of considering a piece of celluloid as a work of art living in a broad cultural and aesthetic context.

The American critic John Simon was the last one capable of doing so, but he’s too old now. It’s a pity for he’d pan Blue Is the Warmest Colour.

Today’s lot don’t: for them it’s a masterpiece, an artistic triumph transcending cinema. Hardly any Anglophone critic has given the film fewer than five stars, and a temptation must have been strong to extend the rating scale just this once.

After all, not only is the film unremittingly graphic, homosexual and French, but it also touches upon things like the primacy of existence over essence. Characteristically, the concept is ascribed to Jean-Paul Sartre, with no apology made to Aristotle and the subsequent 2,500 years of thought. But then everyone knows that there’s no philosophy other than French and Jean-Paul is its prophet. Really, the French should stop teaching philosophy in school or at least keep it out of their flicks.

The film chronicles a protracted lesbian affair between Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a teenage schoolgirl, and Emma (Léa Seydoux), an older art student.

Both actresses really are superb, but it takes more than good acting to make a good film. The director Abdellatif Kechiche makes this point with practically every frame.

The age difference between the lovers would make Emma a criminal in Britain: when the two girls first engage in sexual acrobatics, Adèle is only about 15.

In France, however, 15 is the age of consent, which puts Emma on the right side of prison and the sex offender list. There are of course moral issues involved, but these days even implying that there just may be something wrong with homosexuality is so passé (not to mention borderline illegal) that the thought wouldn’t even cross my mind.

More important, the thought didn’t cross Kechiche’s mind and he treats the relationship as any old love story in which the participants’ sex is irrelevant. In an early scene, before Adèle has even gone further than a couple of saliva-swapping kisses, her classmates do abuse her as a ‘lesbo’, but Kechiche’s camera dismisses them as feral brutes.

Much has been written about the graphic consummation scene lasting 10 minutes or thereabouts. Some critics cite seven minutes, some eight, and I didn’t have a stopwatch handy. To their credit, some did mention that the scene is too long and really quite risible. I can testify that last night many viewers did laugh out loud watching the girls turning the old 69 into more like 4761 (69 squared).

Kechiche shot the scene with three cameras, which enabled him to film the whole romp in one continuous take. Normally, the actresses would have done only a little reciprocal munching before a break to set up new camera angles.

This would have taken 15 minutes or so, giving the girls enough time to catch their breath and brush their teeth. This way they had to go at it for a full 10 minutes each take, and there were lots of takes. That scene alone took 10 days to shoot, and I’m amazed the actresses weren’t left with incurable lockjaw.

According to Léa Seydoux, they weren’t actually doing it for real: both actresses were fitted with fake vaginas moulded into their own. This was the only compromise Kechiche conceded to what he doubtless sees as uncompromising realism, what a strict moralist would see as pornography and what I see as shocking artistic ineptitude.

Any serious artist would have delivered the necessary message in 30 seconds – this would have been not only better film but also better eroticism. It’s not only the devil but also art that’s in the detail, but Kechiche’s idea of detail is to show a freely flowing gallon of snot in a lovingly lingering close-up.

In fact, I’m surprised snot didn’t get a billing in the credits, there’s so much of it gushing throughout the three-hour film. Any kind man would have given Adèle some pseudoephedrine early in the first reel, but one can understand Kechiche’s reluctance to do so. Without a steady flow of mucus his bag of artistic tricks would have been well-nigh empty.

Rarely does one see a director so thoroughly devoid of any sense of balance, structure and rhythm. One gets the impression the film, which took almost six months to shoot, went so far over budget that there was no money left for a decent editor.

Any half-competent cutter would have treated the film as three hours of raw footage, a sort of first draft. He’d then cut it down to a lean 90 minutes, accentuating the relevant, plot-developing, character-defying details and downplaying the rest.

As it is, we’re left with three hours of one tedious close-up of running noses after another. Every scene goes on until the viewer (well, this viewer) is utterly bored and mildly nauseated. Every scene is treated as equally important, which to a man of taste would mean that none of them is important at all.

This, and not just the graphic sex scenes, is what makes Blue Is the Warmest Colour truly pornographic. Add to this the pseudo-philosophical pretentiousness that has become the hallmark of so many French films, and one can understand the admiring gasps of our critics.

The poor sods really don’t know better – and why would they? Where could they find the requisite taste and judgment in a culture that makes I’m a celebrity… get me out of here its towering achievement? Don’t answer it.