Author: Alexander Boot

Everyone in Europe laughs at everyone else. Some, like the French and the Dutch, laugh at Belgians. The Russians laugh at Georgians. The Hungarians laugh at Romanians. The Spanish laugh at their Portuguese neighbours, and vice versa. Everybody laughs at Germans.

None of them, however, has the moral right to such mirth because they never pay the requisite price: laughing at themselves. The French, for example, take themselves extremely seriously, much as they love to have fun at everyone else’s expense.

For example, the French commentary on the Wimbledon final between Federer and Murray was one continuous giggle. Guy Forget and the other chap were laughing at everything: Murray’s facial expressions, his falls, Federer’s wife, British flag-waving fans, London weather, you name it. Yet their acute sense of humour was nowhere in evidence in the earlier rounds, when French players still remained in the draw. Then gravity was ousting levity, along, incidentally, with surnames. It was Jo-Wilfried this, Gilles that, Julien the other. Lopsided and scurrilous humour gave way to earnest and heart-felt affection.

The English and the Jews are the only people who deserve the right to laugh at others because they’re all too ready to laugh at themselves. As far as I know, Annie Harrison isn’t Jewish, but she’s definitely English, and in her new book The Oddball English she elevates the traditional English art to a height seldom scaled this side of P.G. Wodehouse and Noel Coward.

Her every line reminds us that humour can caress, not just cut. She laughs and we laugh with her, for once secure in the knowledge that no one is getting hurt. That’s not to say that Harrison’s humour lacks bite. It has plenty of it, but her teeth draw juice, not blood. Add to this her hawk-like eye, perfect aural pitch, a rare talent for social observation, inexhaustible imagination, and the book becomes irresistible.

But judge for yourself. When was the last time you laughed, and nodded agreement non-stop as if suffering from Parkinson’s, when reading a long list of anything? Well, let me tell you, Harrison could rewrite a phone directory in a way that would have you rolling on the floor.

Here are a few items from her very long list of those that sum up English aristocrats: ‘Golly gosh! frightfully posh; land-owning, fagging, shagging, debagging; the English summer season is quite exhausting; costly divorce, spring water bottled at source; Guards’ Polo, Savile Row, Ferragamo, Tally Ho!; po-faced, taxman-chased, showing hoi-polloi distaste; Sunday Times Rich List, in the Bullingdon Club getting pissed; old boys’ network, classical concert in one’s park’ – tell me where to stop.

English working class is described in the same vein: ‘Coronation Street, Heat, mechanically-reclaimed meat; England football team, slot machines, salad cream, lottery dreams; daytime TV, Page 3, Wii, KFC, WWE, QVC, OMG; The Royle Family, large plasma screen LG; mushy peas, where’s the rent money?; plastic front doors, soccer scores; bargain booze, white shoes, tattoos, stretch limo; cash for gold, Cheryl Cole, the dole; out on the razz with the lads; single mums, fairground fun, Blue Nun, The Sun; community hall, sod all; tool bags, WAGs, packet of fags; Blackpool, Margate, ‘It’s sorted, mate’; allotment shed, white sliced bread…’

Lest you might think that those in the middle were spared, rest assured – they weren’t: ‘Earl Grey, Coldplay, skiing in Verbier, latte, yay!; BUPA, brunch, credit crunch, meet for lunch; organic, balsamic, colonic; Prada bag (quality fake), cup cakes; Waitrose, Apple, Kindle, pension funds that dwindle; cashmere sweater, composter, Air Miles collector; ‘Do sign the guest book before you go’; antibacterial hand cleanse, having black friends; free range, climate change?; Rick Stein, large glass of wine, Jeremy Vine…’

And it’s not just the long lists one wishes were even longer. The book has sections on English food, sarcasm, xenophobia, speakin’ wiv a London accent – it’s England herself, in a couple of hundred pages. I bet Annie Harrison had a lot of fun writing this book – but not nearly as much as you’ll have reading it.

The Oddball English is for the time being only available on Kindle. By Harrison’s own criteria, this would make her middle class. By my criteria, people who can write so well can’t be pigeonholed within any social group; they’re always classless. This calls for another list, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps, but it would be very short indeed.

 

 

As the chairman, secretary and sole member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I feel duty-bound to defend Western culture whenever it’s under attack. After all, were it destroyed completely, people might take issue with the very notion of multiculturalism, which all progressive people cherish in their heart.

Charles Martel, you’ll recall, was a Frankish general who in 732 defeated the Moors at Tours. He thus made sure Europe still has more churches than mosques, though, if the present trend continues, this won’t last long.

Under the leadership of Martel’s grandson Charlemagne, the Franks, soon to become French or German, then went on to create the greatest architecture the world has ever seen, and masses of it. Later, to make sure that no ghastly foreigners would destroy their invaluable contribution to Western culture, they did it themselves.

The French revolution got the wrecking ball rolling but, popular misapprehension notwithstanding, it wasn’t solely responsible. Destruction proceeded apace throughout the 19^th century, as assorted republics and monarchies alternated at kaleidoscopic speed. All in all, Régine Pernaud, France’s leading mediaevalist, estimates that about 80 percent of Romanesque (what the French characteristically call Gallo-Roman) and Gothic buildings were lost during that period.

The 20^th century added its own penny’s worth first in 1914-1918, when the German descendants of the Franks shelled the very same cathedrals their ancestors had built, and then in 1940-1944, when Anglo-American bombers tried to finish the job. It’s testimony to the genius of France that what little of great architecture remained is still more than any other country possesses, possibly more than they all have together.

People tend to cherish the culture they regard as their own. When it comes to someone else’s culture, however, their attitude often ranges from cavalier to hateful. Thus you probably feel more reverence towards a Rembrandt portrait of Titus than towards a Japanese watercolour of a kimono-clad girl, with some hieroglyphics running down the side – this even if you don’t realise that these are often menus of services available at a brothel.

Conversely, barbarians, and I use the word in its original sense of ‘outsiders’, won’t think twice before pulling down a Romanesque church or converting a Gothic one into a bicycle parking area, as they did in Maastricht (of the Treaty fame). Such barbarians may not be outlanders, though they often are. What they are outsiders to isn’t necessarily Western countries but Western culture.

This gets us back to France, where hostility to Western culture has been state policy for two centuries. Western culture is synonymous with Christian culture, and that part has bothered French governments for quite some time. As far as the state is concerned, all those 12^th-century churches can be reduced to rubble – la laïcité, separation of church and state, in effect means the state attacking the church, with the increasingly indifferent populace nonchalantly shrugging their shoulders in the background.

Not everyone is indifferent though. There have always been individuals desperately trying to preserve what they could. Prosper Mérimée springs to mind, the writer now chiefly remembered for his Carmen rather than for his much more valuable service to the West. In his capacity of inspector-general of historical monuments Mérimée saved a number of valuable churches and other buildings, including the great 12^th-century basilica at Vézelay, now housing the relics of Mary Magdalene.

Yet most of those doing their best for the West remain anonymous outside their immediate areas. These are people who buy a ruined townhouse (hôtel particulier) or country castle (château) and dedicate their lives to rebuilding, restoring and refurnishing them to their past grandeur. They not so much own the buildings as are owned by them: theirs are lives of loving labour and self-sacrifice. Such people don’t just love their dwellings – they love the only culture that could have made such stone masterpieces possible.

The state doesn’t share such sentiments, choosing instead to act as the dog in a manger. It won’t do anything to save the buildings itself, and it would prevent others from doing so. Never mind that at the time they were bought the buildings were worthless ruins. After a lifetime of self-sacrificial dedication their owners have turned  them into valuable properties, and this sort of thing can’t go unpunished in a socialist state.

It has to be remembered that all French governments are socialist because all their main parties are. Hollande’s socialism comes neat, Sarkozy’s watered down with non-socialist verbiage and Le Pen’s diluted with nationalism. Yet socialism is the common ingredient, and desire to tax the rich into penury the common urge. Hence the extortionist taxes driving people out of the houses they saved from extinction.

More than 43,000 French historical monuments are in private hands, but the hands become either tied by taxes or enfeebled by age. Witness the Château de Sauvan, a replica of Versaille’s Petit Trianon. Designated as an historical monument in 1957, the building is owned by two brothers Allibert, who bought it as a ruin. Since then they’ve not only spent most of their family fortune on restoring the structure, but have also tried to reacquire the original furnishings. Paintings, tapestries, furniture all came back home to stay, the brothers thought, for ever.

Now old men, they’re no longer capable of the physical exertion involved in keeping the castle in good repair. Realising this, they offered the château to the local council, free of charge. The council, however, disdainfully turned down the generous offer: ‘With our restricted budgets, it would be difficult for us to take charge of this monument,’ said their representative. ‘Of course,’ commented one of the brothers. ‘But they do have the money to pay those layabouts [he used a much ruder word] who play petanque and drink pastis all day.’

Desperate to save their lives’ work, the brothers are about to sell the château to Japanese businessmen who have been harassing them for 20 years. As they predictably don’t share the brothers’ love of the underlying culture, the Japanese plan to do their version of asset stripping by selling off everything of value: tapestries, chandeliers, paintings, furniture. Only the bare walls will remain, God only knows for how long. Perhaps the new owners may find a more profitable use for the 15-hectare property than letting it surround the old building. A business park might be a good idea, unless a supermarket would promise higher returns.

This isn’t an isolated case: most properties costing over €4 million, and 85 percent of those over €10 million, are being bought by the Japanese, Arabs, Russians, Chinese and Africans. Not all the buyers are cultural barbarians, but it’s a safe assumption that most are. In the very least, their hearts don’t go aflutter at the sight of a beautiful old house. They may like it but they won’t appreciate it. Thus what would be vandalism to a Frenchman or an Englishman may to them mean a sound business practice or else an innocent bit of interior decoration.

The state doesn’t mind. For example, having repossessed four hôtels particuliers in the centre of Paris, the government has started a bidding war between the Russians and the Chinese, hoping to squeeze €250 million out of them. ‘The French can’t afford the roughly €850,000 in taxes alone,’ comments the government spokesman. ‘And those who can wouldn’t be living in France any longer.’

Obviously, reducing, or doing away with, the tax isn’t an option. It’s much better to have a Russian mafioso convert the historical monuments into monuments to bad taste and venality. Now you don’t think this couldn’t happen at home, do you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What has happened to men? British men in particular? Since when do men weep publicly from either joy or sadness? One can understand, just, a lachrymose display following the death of a loved one. But losing a tennis match? I say that’s pathetic – and if you’re a thoroughly modern person you’ll probably say I’m a fossil, a kind of throwback.

If so, the throw isn’t very far back. Santana and Laver, Becker and McEnroe, even our own Tim Henman – can you imagine any of them weeping at the end of a tennis match? Yet there they all were, either watching the 2012 Wimbledon Finals from the Royal Box or doing the commentary.

‘It’s good to show your emotions,’ wrote Becker this morning. No, it isn’t good, Boris. It’s wimpish and vulgar. And if it’s so good, how come you never shed a tear on the tennis court? After all, major finals are highly charged affairs, and not every emotion can be released by knocking the felt off the ball. Some residue will remain after the last ball clipped the line, and it’ll be pushing against whatever control valve the player has in his emotional makeup. Yet it’s easier to imagine Laver or McEnroe playing on high heels than sobbing at an award ceremony.

It’s all part of the same transsexualism that’s been thrust down our throats not so much by feminism but by a society all too ready to welcome any perversion, provided it’s couched in PC cant. Self-control, a much admired quality of men everywhere this side of Russia and a defining, possibly the defining, quality of British men, is now seen as uncool gender stereotyping. It’s all right for men to weep at the slightest provocation; it’s fine for women to brawl in pubs. We’re no longer men and women. We’re all androgynous persons now, and proud of it.

Suddenly Andy Murray, a good, though not great, tennis player and generally a rather unpleasant young man, has endeared himself to the nation by sobbing like a little girl confined to her room for nicking chocolates from the pantry. ‘Didn’t know he had it in him,’ is the typical approving commentary all over the press. Well, if you didn’t you haven’t been following tennis closely. Murray wept just as energetically after losing to Federer in the 2010 Australian Open final. ‘I can cry like Roger,’ he croaked on that occasion, ‘too bad I can’t win like him.’

The poor chap doesn’t even realise that there’s a causal relationship between the two. Federer is a player of rare, possibly unmatched talent. Emotional incontinence that he pioneered in the men’s game possibly takes 10 percent away from his performance, but the remaining 90 percent is still enough to win serial Grand Slams, 17 of them and counting. So getting in touch with his feminine self in public doesn’t cost him money or ranking points. It is of course girlish, but then what do you expect from a man who claims his favourite pastime, when he isn’t playing tennis, is shopping? 

Our new darling isn’t like that. He needs every ounce of self-control to have a chance against the Federers, Nadals and Djokoviches of this world when they are playing at their best. If he had a better grip on his bubbling emotions he wouldn’t have missed two easy passes on pivotal points yesterday. Nor would he have blown his bread-and-butter backhand down the line on break point at four-all in the second set. Had he landed it on the line, rather than over it, he would have probably won the second set and with it, in all likelihood, the match. He still would have wept afterwards of course, as the public expects nowadays. But the tears would have been different.

Ice-cold nerves and unflinching grit are required for Murray to overcome his technical inferiority to the top three players. Amazingly, none of the commentators today, all of whom have forgotten more about tennis than I’ll ever know, talk about Murray’s tennis deficiencies. Yet even any decent club player will notice them. For example, Murray clearly doesn’t have much wrist snap on his forehand, which doesn’t let him put enough topspin on low, short balls. On many key points yesterday, Federer, who’s as wise as he’s physically gifted, chipped the ball low and short to Murray’s forehand, collecting a point every time.

Instead of enlightening hackers like me on such things, most commentators have chosen to praise Murray for wearing his heart on his sleeve. Yet such exposure to our culturally polluted air will quickly cake the heart in filth.

Perhaps gender stereotypes formed over millennia aren’t such a bad thing after all. It’s just possible that we’d all be better off if women behaved like women, and men like men. And stiff upper lip is an essential characteristic of a man, Andy. Stiff upper lap isn’t enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lately, many changes to our driving codes have been mooted. However, few people realise that all such changes, good or bad, ape continental practices, especially French ones. I don’t know whether the inspiration has come from the EU, but it might as well have done.

I welcome one proposed change: increasing the motorway speed limit to 80 mph, just as it is in France. Actually, the French limit is 130 kph, which is 81 miles, but I suppose the EU will allow us to round it off as a courtesy.

Car haters oppose the greater speed limit, paradoxically citing France as an example of the carnage supposedly caused by fast driving. True enough, depending on which statistic you look at, the death toll on French roads is two to three times higher than ours. But French drivers don’t kill one another because they drive fast; they do so because they drive badly.

Tailgating at high speeds, failure to adjust speed to road, weather and traffic conditions, poor concentration, stubborn refusal to give way, ill-considered overtaking, eagerness to die defending their right of way and, in general, being French are the real reasons. And of course let’s not forget the rule of la priorité à droite, which is clearly designed as a way of keeping population growth under control.

According to this rule, anyone on your right has right of way – even if you drive on a major road, and he comes in from a side alley. Just imagine: you drive at 60 mph, whistling a merry tune, when an old codger, twice as old as his rusty 1963 Renault, comes across your way from a dirt track slowly but deliberately. You brake, swerve, scream nique ta mere! and, if you’re lucky, manage to live another day, just. The old boy meanwhile continues on his way at the same snail’s pace, unaware that his eventful life was almost cut short. He never even looked your way, and nor did he hear your shouted obscenity.

This rule has been rescinded on many roads, but people like the hypothetical codger typically haven’t cottoned on. French country folk are extremely conservative, which is good, and rather obtuse, which is less good. Where we are, most locals still quote prices in old francs, which went out of circulation back in the early sixties. That gives English visitors a nasty shock when they are told that a room at a modest B&B will cost them several million. So watch out: as far as the French countryside is concerned, la priorité à droite will remain in place everywhere for at least another 50 years.

So far our government has managed heroically to resist introducing this homicidal rule here. I suppose it’ll come in when they decide that we’ve driven on the left long enough and switch to the Napoleonic right-hand system. That’ll possibly happen when we abandon the English Common Law for the Napoleonic Code, which probably means not for a couple of years.

What will come in much sooner is the change in MOT frequency, which again will be harmonised with the appalling French model. As you know, in Britain a car must undergo the MOT at three years of age, and then every year thereafter. In France it’s respectively four and two years, and this is what we’ll have soon. Our motor organisations, including the AA, are screaming themselves hoarse in opposition to this measure. They show, irrefutable statistics in hand, that the lower MOT frequency is a major contributing factor to the greater death toll on the continent in general and particularly in France.

I haven’t studied statistical data as diligently as the AA has, but empirical observation suggests that half the cars in rural France aren’t road-worthy. Even reasonably new vehicles are suspect, which isn’t surprising. A six-year-old car in Britain would have had at least three MOTs; the same car in France would have had one, or not even that if the driver knows the local gendarme. As a result, one is regularly stuck on French rural roads behind cars sounding like a Singer treadle and laying behind them a black smokescreen behind which they hide their bald tyres about to come off.

On top of it all, the French have just introduced another innovation, which one hopes we won’t import in a hurry. As of last week, all drivers are supposed to carry their own breathalysers – and use them before getting behind the wheel after a glass of rouge.

Now this DIY policing is a hell of a good idea, except that it doesn’t go far enough. Having breathalysed himself, and found himself over the limit, the driver should then arrest himself, beat himself up should he resist himself, then lock himself up until he has coughed up the required fine and endorsed his own licence.

Fines for such egregious crimes as drinking two glasses of wine instead of the permitted one can be quite high in France, running into high four digits. But mercifully the flics accept all major credit cards, so there’s no reason for the self-arresting driver not to take his own plastic. To that end, drivers should be forced to carry their own credit-card terminals, but for some unfathomable reason this measure hasn’t been proposed yet.

So on Monday I’ll have to buy a breathalyser at our village pharmacy, provided it’s open, which it seldom is. There are two machines on offer: one costing €3, which doesn’t work but is sufficient to satisfy the requirement, and a digital one costing €100. You won’t get any prizes for guessing which one I’m going to get.   

 

 

The Iron Duke led 118,000 soldiers into the Battle of Waterloo. He did manage to squeak by in that one, but it was a close-run thing. How much easier the fighting would have been, and how much more certain its outcome, had he followed the logic of our inimitable Coalition.

Its objective, as encapsulated by Defence Secretary Philip Hammond, is to ‘create a more flexible and agile army’, ‘a forward-looking, modern fighting machine’ ‘ready to face the future’. Since no one can possibly accuse Mr Hammond and his colleagues of deliberately undermining our security by reckless penny-pinching, he obviously thinks that this will make the army better. To this laudable end the Coalition will cut our number of soldiers on active duty by 20 percent, to 82,000 men and – I hasten to add for fear of being yet again called an MCP – women.

Comparing this number to those boasted by such formidable powers as Nepal (95,723), Philippines (120,000) and Angola (107,000), one could be forgiven for experiencing a slight sense of trepidation. But that only goes to show how little one understands long-term military strategy.

The key words in Hammond’s strategic initiative are ‘flexible and agile’. You can’t deny that the smaller the army, the more flexible and agile it would be. Just imagine the logistics involved in moving our army around if we had as many soldiers as, say, Colombia (285,220) or, God forbid, Greece (177,600). Why, by the time such a force could be loaded into planes and flown across the world, the bandits would be not just at 4 o’clock but all over the dial.

Think how easy it would be if our army had just enough soldiers to fill one transport plane, let’s say 200 lightly armed men – and, needless to say, women. Give them each a rifle, a couple of hand grenades, maybe a knife, and off they go, defending the realm in a war on evil.

This bit of logical inference shows that Mr Hammond is dissembling: the proposed cut is but an intermediate step. An army of 82,000 will still be much too cumbersome. It’ll be short of both flexibility and agility, those two strategic desiderata that must be pursued before all else. I’d say about 200 men (and women) must be the ultimate load for our ‘forward-looking, modern fighting machine’.

The question arises: exactly what does this machine look forward to? What sort of military challenges does our Coalition, so ably fronted by Mr Hammond, see before us? What sort of dangers will our lean, mean fighting machine protect us from?

After all, an army is but a tool designed for a certain job. No nation can afford to keep a huge standing force that’ll never be needed – and, conversely, no nation can be so stupid as to leave itself hopelessly exposed by reducing its army down to a level where it won’t be able to do the jobs likely to arise. Since we’ve already established that the Coalition, with its implacable logic, is able to drive strategic thought forward, clearly our future army will be up to all future threats.

Here the proposed size of our army can be profitably compared with that of Great Britain’s police (about 160,000 officers on active duty, all told). This comparison will reveal the true depth of HMG’s thinking: the danger Britain faces from her own citizens and a few visitors to her shores has to be twice as great as anything Iran, Russia, China, and Argentina can throw our way. Their army strengths are, respectively, 523,000; 1,027,000; 2,285,000; 77,000, but that’s fine: we have the Argies outgunned, and none of the others has threatened war this month.

I ought to be the last man to argue against Mr Hammond’s dazzling strategic insights. The other day someone did nick a pair of sunglasses (£15 at Peter Jones) from my car, and the Chinese have never hurt me in any way, so the Coalition’s strategy has been vindicated already. Still, while patting our ministers on the back, we ought to mute our congratulations somewhat, by a decibel or two.

What if – and I know this sounds unduly alarmist – we do have to fight a war? Considering all commitments already in place, we’ll now be able to field a force equal to about half an infantry division (8,000 or so). Considering our superior training and equipment, we could probably handle Cyprus (10,005), and that’s a comforting thought. But what if – that dread phrase again – we have to take on Dominican Republic fielding its entire army of 49,910? Best not to think about it.

I hope this has helped you determine exactly where, according to our government, we belong in the pecking order of nations. Well, at least you can get this nice warm feeling from knowing that, while leaving Britain defenceless, HMG is gently pushing its welfare spending ever so closer to a trillion quid. Good to know where our priorities lie.

The Duke of Wellington, please ring your office. There’s an important message from your successors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who says God is just? If God exists, and it’s a big if, as far as today’s churches are concerned, he’s a misogynist, a racist and an elitist. As such, he has no place in today’s progressive world – unless he mends his ways.

One group that set out to keep the deity on the straight and narrow is called Darc (Women Deans, Archdeacons and Residentiary Canons). These venerable Anglican ladies take exception to the way the House of Bishops has handled the hot potato of female bishops and their inexorable consecration.

It’s not that the Bishops have opposed the measure, God (if he exists) forbid. It’s just that they had the temerity to suggest that, if some parishes demur, they can ask for a male bishop as a late-game substitute.

Darc are aghast, and quite right too. Their problem, I think, is that they aren’t resolute enough in their just opposition to this clause, which one, for lack of a newer term, can only call fascist:

‘We the undersigned wish to express our deep dismay at the introduction of Clause 5(1)(c), which has serious implications for the way the Church understands itself and undermines women so profoundly that we are now unable to support the Measure.’

While complimenting the venerable ladies for their reverential use of initial capitals, one has to rebuke them for their timidity. After all, women have been ‘undermined’ by various confessions for two thousand years now, and they only demand equality? The way to undo the oppression is to introduce what the Americans call ‘affirmative action’. That means giving women not just equal but preferential treatment and also to reassess some of the manifestly false assumptions of misogynistic apostles.

The Rev Celia Thomson, Canon of Gloucester Cathedral and Darc convenor, asks, somewhat rhetorically, ‘Do we really want to be… responsible for putting through legislation that discriminates against women?’ We most certainly don’t. And, to prevent this outrage, someone has to act in the capacity of Martina Luther and Joanna Calvin.

This is a man-sized job, and I’m the man for it. So here they are, the key points of a manifesto behind which Darc and all womankind can close ranks:

1) Referring to God as a ‘he’ is gender stereotyping if I’ve ever heard it. As a minimum, we must acknowledge that God was androgynous, neither a man nor a woman. But to undo all those millennia of discrimination, we must then accept that he is actually a she. And so she will remain until such time when misogyny has been expunged without a trace.

2) If depicting God as a male is discrimination, depicting him as a white male is racism. Both wrongs must be put right. Therefore, each Anglican service should begin with the assertion ‘God is a woman and she is black.’ The old-fashioned ‘in the name of…’ is hereby shelved until further notice, or, by way of concession to tradition, modified to say, ‘In the name of the Mum, the child and their mode of transgender communication.’

3) The Lord’s Prayer is hereby renamed The Lady’s Prayer. The key changes, apart from the modernisation of the language to a point where all feminists can understand it, should be ‘Our Mother who may or may not be in heaven’, ‘Your queendom will come’ and ‘The queendom is all yours, m’am.’

4) God the Mum may or may not have had a son, but that doesn’t mean she had no other children. In all likelihood Jesus Christ wasn’t so much a man as a composite representation of them all, boys and girls. Applying the same principle of ‘affirmative action’, it must therefore be assumed that Jesus was a woman. He must henceforth be referred to as ‘Daughter of God’.

5) Following the general directional vector of our education, the language of scripture must be reduced to the lowest common denominator, to make it accessible to all persons, including feminists. For the purposes of this exercise, the idiom popularised by Ali G may be employed most profitably. For example, the question Pontius Pilate posed to the Daughter of God must now read, ‘Is you da gov’nor of da front-wheel massive?’

Hope this has been helpful. All Darcs are cordially invited to come to me if they need any further help. I’ll always be happy to oblige – as Deity the Mum, the Daughter and the Mode of Transgender Communication is my witness.

 

 

 

 

Dave has a problem with the thorny referendum issue, and his highly paid advisers seem unable to help him. However, acting in the spirit of Christian charity, I’m ready to offer a solution free of charge.

Here’s Dave’s stumbling block in a nutshell: ‘The problem with an in/out referendum is it only gives people those two choices – you can either stay in or you can get.’ Who says our politicians are incapable of making astute observations? Dave’s spot on in this one.

Once a problem has been clearly stated, the solution offers itself. Two choices not enough? Let’s have some more then, nothing could be easier. For example, here’s my starter for 10, or rather 10 for a start:

1) In 2) Out, 3) Both in and out, 4) Neither in nor out, 5) More in than out, 6) More out than in, 7) Sometimes in, sometimes out, 8) Out, as long as everyone thinks we’re in, 9) In, as long as everyone thinks we’re out, 10) All or none of the above, as long as Dave remains Prime Minister

Given such a multiple/generous choice, the British can’t fail to give their resounding yes/no/maybe answer. Moreover, promising a referendum along those lines is a guaranteed vote getter. On the one hand, Dave would have kept his ironclad promise of holding/not holding a referendum on Europe. On the other hand, not only will the British have much flexibility in choosing the option they like best/dislike least, but Dave will have even more flexibility to tabulate and/or interpret the results in ways that are most beneficial for Britain/Dave. That’s one problem solved.

The other one doesn’t really qualify as a problem, it’s so easy: the timing. If the above questionnaire, my beloved brainchild, is accepted, Dave can safely and immediately promise to hold a referendum. No problem there. The promise can be worded in this familiar, reassuringly populist and therefore comforting way: ‘Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye…’

As to the timing of it, the issue shouldn’t even come up. Of course it should be 2015, but, contrary to the current ill-considered plan, the referendum should be held not before the election but instead of it – a staggeringly clever idea implicit in Option 10 above. A vote for any option from 1 to 10 will be automatically construed as a vote of confidence for Dave personally and whichever party he chooses to attach himself to at the time. Whatever his party, he’s clearly the right man for the job – as he himself defines it:

‘My job is to make sure we secure all the safeguards that we need so that our role in the EU, our access to the single market, our say in the single market is comprehensively safeguarded.’

Of course this definition seems to imply that, without Dave, Britain wouldn’t have access to the single market or, by inference, to any other. Britain would thus find herself in the desperate position of China, the USA, Japan, Korea, Brazil and all those other ostracised countries desperately seeking entrance to the European market, only to be turned away at the door. About time they learned that in order to trade with the EU they have to be its fully paid-up member. Otherwise, no dice.

The Treaty of Rome wasn’t built in a day. Dave knows that the task of subjugating Britain to the Fourth Reich and thereby ensuring that the EU will continue to agree to take our money will take some time: ‘But this is going to be something that is going to evolve over a whole series of years as the countries realise what has to be done and as we fight for the safeguards and the position that we need.’ Spiffily put, as befits an old Etonian.

How long is a piece of string? How long is a series of years? Trust you to ask such questions. Don’t you listen? The series is exactly 2.5 years long, taking us to the next election. Then Dave will form a majority government, call it Britische Gau and tell the LibDems to go suck un oeuf. Job done.

If you think I’m belittling a grave problem with my levity, I’m sorry. But levity/suicide are the only possible reactions to the drivel coming out of our PM’s mouth. He clearly thinks we take him seriously, which must mean he knows something we don’t: that we are all stupid/deaf/mute/indifferent/children [choose one or any combination thereof]. Surely he can’t possibly believe that grown-ups in full command of their faculties can fall for his porkies?

The British should have neither to ‘cede more powers to Brussels’ nor to have ‘powers… going in the other direction’, which is how Dave sees our most cherished aspirations. I’ve got news for him: We, and therefore our country, have sovereign powers we’ve consented to vest into our Queen, her ministers and Parliament. Brussels, Peking, Moscow, Washington or any other foreign city isn’t entitled to any of such powers: they are all ours. To hear the first minister of Her Majesty’s government run off at the mouth in this nonsensical fashion ought to make every British subject cry havoc and let slip…

Alas, we have no dogs to let slip, never mind the dogs of war. Nor do we have a voice. Nor, before long, will we have a country to call our own. To prevent this, there’s only one justified option in relation to the EU: out/out. The same goes for Dave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wimbledon is drawing to a close, and so it’s time to break lances over the issue of prize money. Specifically, over the perennial stumbling block of the women getting the same prize money as the men. Should they or shouldn’t they?

Wielding a lance for the con side this year is Gilles Simon, world No. 13. His jousting opponents are Maria Sharapova, world No. 1, and Serena Williams, probably still the world’s best player.

The contest proves yet again that equal pay for equal work has replaced most Biblical commandments as a principle to live by. Equal pay, sure, we can all understand that, no problem there. In some fields, however, the difficulty starts with the definition of what exactly constitutes equal work.

For example, two persons, regardless of their sex, design bridges at the same engineering company. One, however, is responsible for high-profile structures spanning rivers in the centre of great cities. The other designer specialises in farmland bridges over irrigation canals. Should they be paid the same? No sane person would answer in the affirmative. Even without looking at the company’s balance sheet, it’s clear that the first designer generates infinitely more revenue than the second. So he should be paid more. Fair’s fair.

In those few sports where women and men compete against one another (chess springs to mind), the issue doesn’t arise: whoever wins gets a fatter cheque. The problem is, men and women don’t compete in the same tennis tournaments, and no one who has ever hit a tennis ball in anger thinks they should. For if they did, it would be more like a slaughterhouse than a sporting event: the women wouldn’t get a game.

John McEnroe was once asked how the sexes would fare against each other. In his younger days Mac was known to handle the odd hot potato, but this one was clearly burning his mouth. He tried to evade the answer, but the reporter persisted – he knew good copy when he saw it. Finally, the erstwhile brat relented: ‘Any full-time male player,’ he admitted sheepishly, ‘including veterans, juniors and American college players would beat any woman on the tour.’ Mac was talking about well over 1,000 players, yet most experts would admit off the record that his estimate was too generous. For example, a good British county player, even if he has a day job, would probably beat either Maria or Serena.

Does that mean women should get less money? Not by itself it doesn’t. It’s an unfortunate physiological fact that men are stronger, faster and leaner than women. That’s why their best speed over 100m is 10 percent faster than women’s, that’s why they can bench-press much higher weights. And that’s why they can hit the tennis ball harder and get to it more quickly, other things being equal.

Unfortunately, other things aren’t equal. For, even assuming their biological inequality, there’s no reason under the Wimbledon sun why women can’t develop the same technique as men, why they can’t hit all the same shots, albeit a bit slower.

That, alas, isn’t the case. For example, neither Maria nor Serena can volley as well as a good male club player can. Neither of them can hit a decent sliced backhand. Both have a lot of double faults because neither can kick a second serve, again a shot in the repertoire of any good male player. Even more damagingly, neither can really construct a point with any intelligent foresight. All they ever do is whack flattish backcourt drives accompanied by orgasmic, borderline feral, shrieks. The point ends when one of those piledrivers hits the net or back fence. Another shriek, this time of a frustrated caged animal. Next point; more of the same.

At least, even though Sharapova is still too slow, these particular ladies have clearly put in enough time off the court, turning themselves into athletes. Most of their colleagues haven’t; all the men in the Wimbledon 128 have. No biological excuse works here: women in athletics, rowing, cycling and just about any other sport this side of curling show that a woman can become a real athlete. Yet some years ago, the Dutch Wimbledon winner Richard Krajicek described most female players as ‘fat pigs’. Gentlemen don’t talk about ladies that way, but a brief scan of the women competing this year will reveal more spare tyres than one would find at an average Michelin dealership.

Thus they don’t work as hard as the men off the court, either to develop their bodies or to hone their shots. Nor do they work as hard on it: the average duration of a women’s match in any Grand Slam event is less than half of the men’s. Add to this the infinitely longer hours that the men put in on the running track, practice courts and in the gym, and we realise that their hourly pay is perhaps a third of the women’s.

Did Simon mention any of this? He didn’t. He realised that none of this would matter from the commercial standpoint, if only women generated higher ticket sales and TV revenues. His point was that they don’t. And even though Gilles didn’t quote any numbers, they do confirm his remark: equally ranked male players draw much higher crowds and TV audiences than their female counterparts.

‘Maria’s way hotter than he is,’ said Williams, and Sharapova agreed: ‘I’m sure there are a few more people that watch my matches than his,’ she said. If they do, it’s not for tennis reasons: most spectators at tennis matches are themselves players, and they use the occasions as free lessons. Simon may not be the most exciting player, but he’s one of the most intelligent. Hackers like me can learn a lot from watching the way he thinks through a rally. What can we learn from Sharapova? We already know how to whack the ball and pray it’ll go in. And we can scream with the best of them.

If you ever watch tennis, which match would you rather see, Nadal vs. Federer (world Nos 2 and 3) or Azarenka vs. Radwanska (ditto)? Thought so. Or replace either man with Djokovic or either woman with Sharapova – your answer, provided it’s honest, will be the same. Unless, of course, you’re a sucker for the combination of long legs and short skirts.

The fact is that since the retirement of Justin Henin, the happy exception to the drab rule, watching women play tennis has all the excitement of a curling, or gurning, contest. Calling what they do equal work for which they are entitled to equal pay can only make sense at a feminist rally.

‘We fought for years [to get equal pay],’ declares Williams. The same effort should have gone into developing a professional volley, then perhaps she would be justified in her pronouncements. Meanwhile, someone ought to start a campaign for the men getting equal hourly wages with the women. Who knows, the PC brigade may prove less than invincible. 

 

 

 

If Le Monde were a British newspaper, it would be to the left of The Guardian and ever so slightly to the right of the communist Morning Star. In France, as she has always been, it’s mainstream. And in France, as she is now, EU’s second-in-command, Le Monde is the transmitter of marching orders.

So, before you march, sit up and listen: Europe must have a new ‘social contract’ resting ‘on three pillars: social democracy, most notably collective bargaining; economic government in the service of sustainable growth and full employment; and, above all, economic and social justice based on the politics of redistribution and social protection.’

Now the term ‘social contract’ was already nonsensical in 1762, when Rousseau coined it, and it hasn’t improved with age. A valid contract of any kind presupposes the possibility of enforcement by a third party. Since this doesn’t exist in a ‘social contract’, it’s one party, in this case the state, imposing its will on the other, in this case the individual. And that’s precisely how Rousseau explained it in Du Contrat Social:

‘The state should be capable of transforming every individual into part of the greater whole from which he, in a manner, gets his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it. [It should be able] to take from the man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him and incapable of being made use of without the help of others. The more completely these inherited resources are annihilated, the greater and more lasting are those that he acquires.’

That’s the good thing about totalitarians: they say what they mean. The bad thing is that people usually don’t take them at their word until it’s too late.

Now the above passage from Le Monde is a pseudo-political translation from Rousseau’s pseudo-philosophical. Let’s try to translate both into English.

1. ‘Social democracy’ is a meaningless oxymoron. No sizeable social group can be democratic – it’ll inexorably arrange itself along hierarchical lines. There is such a thing as political democracy, but that’s not what social democracy means. It means socialist democracy, wherein the adjective is everything and the noun is next to nothing. And socialism, if you strip the word of its mendacious shell, means the state riding roughshod over the individual. ‘C’est tout,’ as they say at Le Monde.

2. ‘Economic government’ means single government for the whole EU, including us. That particular buggy can only be driven by Germany, with France, as she forlornly hopes, riding shotgun. 

3. ‘Collective bargaining’ in this context means unbridled power of the unions, something that is a huge contributing factor in France’s economic troubles. Applied to Britain as a EU member, it means that what was done by Margaret Thatcher will be undone by the single European state. And even our home-grown lefties grudgingly admit that in pinning back the unions’ ears, if nothing else, Lady Thatcher was right.

4. ‘Sustainable growth’, in its present usage, requires no translation. Everyone knows it means promiscuous and ever-growing state spending, which is to say something that is mostly responsible for our present economic disasters.

5. ‘Full employment’ means exactly the same thing. The only way a state, national or supranational, can guarantee this is by creating more and more public jobs for those who can’t find private ones. Result? Total, nay totalitarian, state power, otherwise known as socialism, otherwise known as social democracy (see above).

6. ‘Economic and social justice based on the politics of redistribution and social protection’ means taxing all hardworking people into poverty, ideally turning them, along with the laggards, into wards of the state.

Conspicuous by their absence in Le Monde’s dictum are words like liberty, consent, equity, justice. (Justice does appear, but it’s neutered and rendered meaningless by the modifier ‘social’.) Nor does one detect any opt-out clause: thou shalt accept Points 1-6 as they are or else. Or else what? I’ll leave that to your imagination.

In other words, using this utterly objectionable rag as its mouthpiece, the EU has issued the blueprint for its brave new world. Only it’s neither brave nor particularly new. We’ve already seen it all, during Russia’s attempt to unite the workers of the world and Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.

Then Messrs Lenin and Hitler kindly issued ample advance warnings, both in their books and their speeches. There was thunder in their pronouncements, for everyone to hear. And everyone heard – but no one listened: ‘It’s just idle talk, old boy, what? Campaign rhetoric, that’s all it is. These chaps are really like us, deep down…’ We all know what happened next.

Now yet again the bastards are screaming off the rooftops. Are you listening?

 

 

 

 

Whenever we’re in France, once a week or so we drive past two villages called Orgy and Anus. Spelled this way, the first name doesn’t mean what it does in English, but Anus is just that in French.

We have friends living there, and I envy them their self-confidence: I’m not sure I’d be happy telling people that up in Anus is where I spend half my time. But our friends don’t seem to have that problem.

Anyway, every time we pass by those villages I crack what my wife alternately calls infantile or puerile jokes. Usually I suggest that the places should be twinned either with Sodom or else with Dorking (if you ever lived in the States, you’ll understand this last one; otherwise, you’re better off not understanding it).

But this morning, for the first time in 12 years, I kept silent all the way past Orgy, and Penelope was worried that this lapse of bad taste may have been caused by some terminal medical problem. In fact, I was having dirty thoughts about, or rather caused by, Jilly Cooper.

Please don’t misunderstand: now that Mrs Cooper is past the age of consent, I wasn’t lusting after her. It’s just that some of her comments inspired thoughts on sex, for in passing literary judgement on a new porn sensation Jilly has scaled the heights of tastelessness she never quite managed to reach even in her fiction – and not for any lack of trying.

Mrs Cooper praised the valuable service the book Fifty Shades of Grey has done our society: ‘Porn was terribly out of fashion before that book came out… I am delighted that it’s giving a new lease of life to the genre.’

‘Women,’ according to her, ‘don’t want to have sex any more’ as they are ‘suffering from low libidos’. Could’ve fooled me.

Walking past an overcrowded London pub or night club in the evening, I’m often regaled with the sight of young couples (sometimes triples or quadruples) indulging in what they call ‘snogging’ and what in the past was called ‘heavy petting’. Usually they stop just short of what in Mrs Cooper’s favourite genre is called ‘full pen’, but if there’s a park nearby, its benches do see the sort of action she thinks ought to be described in excruciating detail for our delectation.

‘Ours is now a terribly undersexed society,’ complains Jilly, a problem that she believes could be remedied by a wider spread of pornography. Well, all knowledge is comparative, if you believe Aristotle. Our society at large may indeed be undersexed as compared to Sodom, though perhaps not to Dorking. Yet any Victorian or Edwardian, resurrected to find himself in today’s Britain, would probably feel Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing on today’s London or Cardiff.

Our cities are full of drunk, practically unclad girls trying to pick up men in ways that make normal people blush. A man screaming ‘Fancy a shag?’ at a female passer-by could be arrested for sexual harassment. Reaching for a strange woman’s genitals or even buttocks in a public place could in some quarters be classified as assault. Yet this kind of behaviour, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, is increasingly becoming the norm for our ‘undersexed’ women ‘suffering from low libidos’. You may think I’m exaggerating, but that only proves you don’t live in Britain. Those who do wouldn’t contest my observation.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Mrs Cooper is correct in her diagnosis, and British women don’t do sex any longer. A Freudian could perhaps suggest that their public spectacles are merely overcompensation for a serious amorous deficit in their lives. If that’s indeed the disease, is pornography really the treatment?

By Jilly’s own admission, Fifty Shades of Grey is ‘quite poorly written’. It’s almost embarrassing to have to make this point to a professional writer, but all porn is poorly written by definition. If it’s well-written, it isn’t porn. Great poets, from Aretino to Pushkin, have written erotic verse. Great writers, from Rabelais to Joyce, have written erotic novels. Great film-makers, from Fellini to Bergman, have shot sex scenes. All of them pursued artistic ends, and no one other than a tasteless prude would describe their work as pornographic.

What Jilly’s geriatric heart yearns for is something else. She wants our women to be sexually aroused by words like ‘glistening’, ‘throbbing’ and ‘thrusting’ jammed densely into every other sentence. I’ve got news for Mrs Cooper: they won’t be. And if, as a result of some congenital psychiatric defect, they are the kind of women who would find such trash stimulating, then they’re better off deprived of it. Who knows, they might get frisky and procreate as a result, producing others in their own image.

It would be tedious to go into the multiple ways in which society suffers from a surfeit of porn assaulting our senses at very corner. My problem with it is mainly aesthetic – nothing so crude ought to be in the public domain. That someone would think there isn’t enough porn should make one question his mental health. Or her mental health, in this case.