Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- It's hardly a surprise that the 'gift' of a palace from the 'grateful' Galicians to the Gallego General Franco was based on fraud. The Spanish government is trying to get it back and might yet succeed.
- Pamplona: The runners at the San Fermin festival have staged a series of protests because they say the guide bulls('cabestros') have become so fast that they simply go flashing by them, reducing the chances of anyone being gored but also rendering the event too safe and dull. (I have to admit I thought the cabestros were cows but it looks like I'm wrong this, as they're defined as bueyes mansos by the Royal Academy. So, masculine. Which would have come out as buoys mangos, if I hadn't checked.)
- The mayor of Pamplona, says he's open to discussions about the role of the guide bulls, but he added:Safety comes first. Which, as I've said, is why running with the bulls is now less dangerous that venturing onto a zebra crossing in Pontevedra or walking a camino de Santiago.
- See the interesting article below on BJ's real identity. Possibly of more relevance/interest to Alfie Mittington than to most.
- Correctly, the author says that BJ he will stick to Brexit — until he doesn’t.
- See also the 2nd article below on a comparison between the UK's next PM and a dissolute 17th century English king
- Nice phrase. A unique form of online Tourettes.
- My Week: Donald Trump [*according to Hugo Rifkind]
I’m not angry. You’re angry. Actually I’m very calm. Like, the calmest. So calm. Too calm? “Mr President,” my White House staff often say to me, “are you literally sedated?” In meetings. It’s not drool. But how dare this Limey guy call me insecure? Who even is he? The moment I see it, I call my guy at the British embassy to find out. “Er, it’s me,” says the British ambassador. “The guy you’ve called.”
“Oh,” I say, and I hang up and try to remember if I know any other Brits.
The Queen loves me, but I didn’t get her number. Although right then the switchboard says there’s a call from Nigel Farage.
“Mr Brexit!” I say. “You been to the dentist yet? When you’re famous they let you do anything, but no need to make them sick.”
“Darroch should be sacked,” he says. “A disgrace. Totally unsuitable.”
“Is Darroch,” I ask, “the dentist?” Farage says Darroch is the ambassador. So that’s when I start tweeting.
Tuesday
The Brit cabinet says they have full confidence in the wacky ambassador! Sad! Even prime minister May, even though I tried to win her over yesterday by tweeting that she’d made a complete mess of everything. So I call her.
“Inept?” I say. “Me? Hah! So wrong!”
“Mais this is Emmanuel Macron,” says the voice at the other end. “You have accidentally called France.”
Actually it’s so typical of May to not be on that number. Such a nasty woman. And her ambassador is a very stupid guy who I’m not impressed with at all even though I don’t know who he is even though I met him 50 times and called him yesterday. Everybody says he should be replaced by somebody else. And by everybody I mean Nigel Farage. And by somebody else I also mean Nigel Farage. Teeth!
Wednesday
So he’s resigned. That Jeremy Hunt person said he didn’t have to, but there was no support from Joris Bohnson, who is a very good friend of mine.
So I call him.
“Look,” I say, “I didn’t mind his insults because I have a very thick skin. So thick. Leathery! But how come this guy lasted? Who was he sending these briefings to, anyway?”
“Er, me,” says Bohnson. “But I never read them. I swear.”
Seems fair. Briefings are the worst.
“You’re my guy,” I say, “I see that. Probably wouldn’t be in politics if it wasn’t for President Trump. Right?”
“Sort of,” says Bohnson.
“And your Brexit!” I say. “That definitely wouldn’t have happened without my victory!”
The Brit clears his throat. Then he says technically Brexit happened first.
“I think you’ll find,” I shrug, “that there are a lot of different opinions on that.”
“Right,” says Bohnson. “Super. Yup. Sure.”
Thursday
“Sir?” says Mike Pompeo, who is my secretary of state. “They’re saying you’ve damaged the special relationship.”
“It’s not damaged,” I say, “she just spends a lot of time in New York.”
Then Pompeo says the special relationship is with the UK, and I tell him that’s disgusting talk, because the Queen is 93. Although Meghan is hot, but nasty, and obsessed with me, I don’t know why she keeps bringing me up.
Fact is, I told Theresa May how she should deal with the Germans. “Sue them!” I said, and she said, “What for?” and I said, “Anything!” and she said, “But where?” and I said, “Maybe New Jersey?”
Although she decided to go her own way instead, and look how that turned out, she shoulda listened to me, I’m a smart guy, you ask anyone.
Friday
Farage calls again.
“Let me finish,” he says. “They’ll need a new ambassador. Somebody who understands Britain, but also has friends in the White House. But who? Gosh it’s a puzzle. Hmmm.”
“Tommy Robinson?” I say.
Farage sighs. Then he says he just hopes they appoint somebody with a proven track record of opposing the old Brussels mindset, and who really understands that Britain is now an independent country, beholden to nobody, that makes its own decisions.
“And do you think they will?” I yawn.
“Only if you tell them to,” says Farage.
Spanish
- Word of the Day: Cantamañanas
- I had a dinner for my elder daughter and her partner last night and invited 6 Spanish friends. At 7pm one of the latter did the Spanish thing of calling me to say, effectively, that she had something better to do, so wouldn't be coming. Which - as it happened - was actually a good thing, as I'd gone and invited one more person than I had chairs around the table.
- On this subject of dinners and Spanish practices, I have to apologise to my Porcos Bravos friends for giving the impression that none of them offered to help me clear up after last Saturday's curry lunch. They certainly did and I included them in the phrase I used in my Sunday post - though it does happen. But I should have been clearer on this.
My guide to the tricks of Boris Johnson’s trade: Matthew Parris The Times,
As a fellow columnist, I recognise his strengths and weaknesses — and they don’t all make for a good prime minister
For an experiment this weekend I shall try looking at our likely next prime minister in a sympathetic light. That’s not hard for me because by trade, temperament and career-long habit I am a Fleet Street columnist. So is Boris Johnson. As the child is father to the man, the columnist will prove father to the prime minister.
Even when, as an enfant terrible in Brussels, Mr Johnson called himself a reporter he was essentially a columnist. Then, as now when he bids to be a national leader, I understand him not through acquaintance as a colleague but in the way any dustman or dress designer knows another dustman or dress designer. We know each other through shared engagement in the same pursuit.
Unlike real journalists our focus is not on report; and though we use facts and undertake research our currency is opinion: our own. I hope we’re more than entertainers but we’re undoubtedly entertainers. I hope our art is more than performance but it is at least a performance art. We share with serious news reporters, however, one imperative: we must grab and keep our audience’s attention. We enjoy doing this as much as any circus clown does: it’s in our blood, part of our reason for existence.
There is communism; there is capitalism, Conservatism, Catholicism — and there is columnism. It’s a cast of mind. Its practitioners are a type. First, foremost and for ever, Boris will be a columnist. The reflections on his and my trade which follow should be read also as thoughts on Johnson himself.
Columnism is striking poses which (as any method actor will tell you) will only convince others if you yourself can temporarily inhabit the belief. You are counsel for the prosecution or defence of an idea, or dream, or fear, hatred, party or politician. You take a brief, elbow doubt and ambiguity aside, and go — joyously or ferociously but always (in the moment) with passion and conviction — full pelt. What columnism is not is making absolutely sure first that you’re right. To be frank, you sometimes rather doubt it.
Columnism is embracing a plan or project as a faithless man might embrace a woman: with an intensity no less sincere for being passing, ever-ready to flip the project or lady once their usefulness is past. It is hugging a set of principles fiercely to your breast while (should these principles not work out) keeping a wandering eye out for some spare ones down the back of the sofa.
You may have been surprised at reports that, when working for The Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson would shut himself into a room and swear and shout and throw things in a fist-pumping effort to work up real passion for whatever his next article would embrace or attack. It would not surprise me and many of my fellow-columnists. Less noisily perhaps, we often do the same. Adrenaline, confidence and, I’m afraid, a temporary suspension of disbelief, are among the tools of a columnist’s trade.
The drawbacks, however, should a columnist venture wider than column-writing, are as follows. Our instinct to consume time by drilling down into the complexities of what we propose tends to atrophy, while the instinct to leap to unconditional defence or attack, grows. It avails us little to dwell upon complications, drawbacks or ambiguities.
Further, our labours and therefore our minds incline to the short focus: the day’s or week’s deadline; the immediate impression we shall make; the sense of command we’re able to muster and display. Our real, personal attachment to the arguments we trumpet may or may not go deep; often it does, but we learn the habit of moving swiftly on; we’re less embarrassed than most mortals to discover (if we even notice) that we’ve completely reversed a position we previously took; and we’re not ashamed to over-simplify.
Finally, we must be a one-man band. It isn’t a defect in Johnson that he’s not clubbable. You can’t write well by committee. A committee can’t catch from the wind a hunch, an idea. Thrashing things out with other people blunts ideas, killing freshness and individuality. Team spirit does not come naturally to you unless the team works for, rather than with, you. Collegiality is stunted in opinion writers.
Not everything in the columnist’s toolkit, however, is antipathetical to the politician’s trade. Some skill in this art is essential for political success. A columnist learns early the usefulness of an easily grasped argument, the truth that every pudding must have a theme; and so must a good political leader. A columnist learns who the audience are and how to anticipate their responses; and so must a good political leader.
You also have to be a bit brave, prepared to take a flyer. Johnson is both those things. It’s wrong to call him cowardly in avoiding too much debate. Ducking something for which you are not equipped is calculation, not cowardice. Acts of sudden boldness are just as likely with this man — and as calculated.
And some of the best columnists possess what many effective political leaders possess, and Johnson possesses to a high degree: an attraction to great projects with which they can become personally associated.
As it happens I too was attracted to the Boris Island airport in the Thames estuary; on second thoughts and more careful research it was a crazy idea but it had wings. As it happens I liked his “green bridge” idea for the Thames in London; pretty silly really yet he clung to it (as I would have) for too long. As it happens I love the Boris-promoted cable-car over the Thames to North Greenwich, though unfortunately few need or use it.
And I admire the new double-deckers for London that Johnson commissioned; though the eye-watering expense, the useless air-conditioning and futility of their big idea, the open platform at the back which now has to be kept closed because we can’t afford bus conductors, tell another story. Like me and many columnists, Johnson tends to treat the word “details” as a pejorative term. Often we are wrong in that.
But sometimes we are right. Brexit has become columnist-Johnson’s new and biggest idea: his easily grasped, all-singing, all-dancing and shrewdly voter-motivating grand project. Detail be damned: he will stick to it — until he doesn’t. He will pursue this pet project with all the clarity and force that a maestro of Fleet Street commentary can command. And if it falls, he will desert it with all the caprice that courses through a columnist’s veins. Boris never forgets that today’s column lines the bottom of tomorrow’s budgie cage.
2. Priapic, emotional and desperate to unite the nation... Boris is truly the modern-day Charles II: David Starkey, eminent British historian.
The parallels between the 'Merry Monarch' Charles II and Boris the buffoon are extraordinary
The nation is in crisis. The leader of a narrow, puritanical, killjoy regime has just been driven from office. A parliament, equally unpopular and unrepresentative of public opinion, clings to power. Public opinion itself is bitterly divided, with a largely conservative countryside pitted against a self-assured, “progressive” urban elite that is convinced of its own righteousness. England and Scotland are pulling in different directions. Ireland is rebellious and unmanageable. Meanwhile, in France, a young, supremely confident ruler seizes power, determined to place the stamp of his personality on France and Europe as a whole.
Britain on the eve of Brexit now? Or Britain on the brink of the Restoration of 1660? Hard to choose. And, in any case, both were about to plump for a leader of remarkably similar style and personality: the Merry Monarch then or Boris the Buffoon now.
Granted they look different. Charles II was tall and swarthy with a mass of long, jet-black curls. Boris Johnson is tall and strapping too but almost albino pale with a mop of artfully ruffled flaxen hair. Otherwise the parallels are almost uncanny.
In particular, the fundamental, irrepressible, unapologetic priapism. Charles repopulated the aristocracy with his bastards; Boris has scattered his exotically named offspring – whether born in or out of wedlock – across many of the smarter postcodes of London.
At the moment, we are carefully pretending that it doesn’t matter. But of course it does. Not in the old-fashioned sense that personal morality is the same as public morality. It’s not. But, as every biographer knows, it is the fundamental clue to that central and elusive thing: character.
The facts were put most baldly and clearly by George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, in his brilliantly and beautifully written essay: “The Character of King Charles II”.
“It may be said that his inclinations to love were the effects of health and a good constitution, with as little of the seraphic part as man ever had, and though from that foundation men often raise their passions, I am apt to think his stayed as much as any man’s ever did in the lower region.”
In other words, Boris, like Charles, is led by his prick. Lest this seem too harsh, it should be added quickly that there are many worse things to be led by. Ambition for one. And entitlement for another. Boris has plenty of both of course. But the pleasure principle is dominant. And it is so despite the fact that Boris, like Charles before him, is highly intelligent. However, it is a lazy intelligence, unformed and untamed by the discipline of a proper education. Charles’s schooling finished at the age of twelve; Boris sailed through Eton and Oxford with only a single burst of serious application at the age of fifteen.
This means that Boris, like Charles, is an emotional and instinctive politician rather than an intellectual or reasoning one. His preference is to address problems with a shrug or a quip rather than reasoned argument.
He expects others to be as fond of the quiet life as he is and is rather surprised when they are not. Above all he cannot comprehend the harshness of the word principle, with its requirement of hard, uncomfortable choices. In short, as he once said, he is a devout believer “in having his cake and eating it”.
This is the Apostles’ Creed of the true hedonist. Or indeed of the “Compleat Cavalier”. It leads to an agreeable tendency to look on the bright side; an easy, hail-fellow-well-met populism; a contempt for pettifogging rules and regulations and a joyous life of half-full rather than half-empty.
And this is why, it cannot be said too loudly or too clearly, Boris is right now as Charles was right then.
In 1660 the nation was tired of Cromwell, the major generals and the suffocating, joyless Puritanism that had abolished may-poles and even Christmas itself. People wanted a king, a court and colour again.
Charles offered all that and more. He even claimed in the Declaration of Breda (rather like Boris with Brexit) to have a cunning plan that would square the circle and reconcile the religious positions of all men of goodwill.
Now in 2019 we are equally fed up of the whole grimy band of the Maybot, Spreadsheet Phil, Austerity, the Sugar Tax, Political Correctness Gone Mad and the Nanny State. And fed up most of all with our failure to leave the EU which, rightly or wrongly, has come to be seen as the source and symbol of all our discontents. Boris promises to get us out, to turn over a new leaf, and most of all to cheer us up.
The British, it has been famously said, prefer their politicians to be either Bishops or Bookies.
Boris is the bold, brash Bookie to Theresa May’s chronically overcautious Bishop. The nation, weary of a Bishop that’s bust and a caution that’s failed, longs for a flutter. Boris seems to offer the best odds. He’s worth a punt. But I wouldn’t bet my shirt on it or on him.
Because Boris, like Charles, has the weakness of his strengths. It is easy to believe in the possibility of deals and reconciliation – between Presbyterian and Anglican (Charles) or between Britain and the EU (Boris) – if, like Boris and Charles, you do not have strong feelings one way or another.
But unfortunately others do. The differences between the Puritan ministers on the one hand and the Anglican bishops on the other were deep-rooted and fundamental and shipwrecked Charles’s hopes of a comprehensive national church. And, alas for poor Boris, beliefs about the EU – whether of Brexiteers, or of Remainers, or of the Commission itself – have acquired a similar quasi-religious intensity and rigidity, with the finer points of the Four Freedoms of the Single Market assuming the status of the Thirty-Nine Articles or Holy Writ itself.
Rebuffed by both sides, Charles reacted with a corrosive, self-protecting cynicism and an even-handed, shameless duplicity. I expect Boris will do the same.
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