Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- So, insufficient support for the PSOE in parliament yesterday, as Spain's tribal politics were played out. All summed up by this headline in one of our local papers today:-
The national political fuck-up
- But good news on the economy.
- The Local brings you:-
- How to survive this week's heatwave, if you're not in the northern third of the country.
- Official Dos and Don'ts on this subject.
- Why Spain has Europe's lowest death rate.
- Possibly not for the first time and certainly not for the last, in a Galician city yesterday, a woman knocked over by a guy on an e-scooter as she emerged from her home. The man ran off. So, a new concept - the hit-and-run scooterist.
- In the biggest non-surprise of the century, the next prime minister of the UK will be Boris Johnson. Below is a nice article on him. Reading it, one wonders how long it will before the country has another PM . . . . But from which party?
- It's hotter in the UK today - above 30 - than here in Pontevedra, at 25
- Scotland: The wild, tartan-clad image is a fantasy dreamt up for tourists. I think some of us were already well aware of this. It could, of course, be said of several other 'nationalistic' countries. See the second article below.
- A Hamburg friend tells me that (angry?) people are dumping e-scooters into the sea. Because the batteries are dangerous, the police are having to waste time fishing them out .
- What happens when you upset the Chinese.
- Word of the Day: Mango
- This is how I found my car this morning:-
It's hard to believe any kid in my barrio did this. Maybe the mayor, after reading my guide to Pontevedra city.
ARTICLES
1. Boris Johnson’s need to be loved is his weakness: Rachel Sylvester, Times
Voters warm to him on the campaign trail but in No 10 the new PM will soon find that he can’t keep all his promises
Election campaigns are like the x-rays of a politician’s character and many of Boris Johnson’s flaws have been exposed in the Tory leadership contest. His temper, disloyalty and loose relationship with the truth have been on display as well as his undeniable charisma and natural ability as a campaigner. None of his frailties appears to have put off the majority of Tory party members who, barring an astonishing upset, will today make Mr Johnson their leader and our next prime minister.
That is when the real test begins. If the leadership contest was an x-ray, then running the country is the political equivalent of open-heart surgery. In Downing Street there is nowhere to hide and Mr Johnson will have to win over tens of millions of voters rather than tens of thousands of Tory activists if he is to survive.
The constitutional historian Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield describes Mr Johnson as the “unknown prime minister” who despite his celebrity is strangely elusive. “Margaret Thatcher used to say ‘one must have stars to steer by’,” he says. “Boris’s stars are still a mystery apart from his own, which is of course the brightest to him.”
Tony Blair talked of his “irreducible core”, although it took him several years to find it, and he found cabinet reshuffles “a ghastly business”. Gordon Brown had run out of ideas by the time he got to No 10 and Theresa May turned into a vacuum at the top. Sir John Major said yesterday that the new prime minister “must choose whether to be the spokesman for an ultra-Brexit faction or the servant of the nation he leads. He cannot be both and the choice he makes will define his premiership from the moment of its birth.”
Mr Johnson once joked that he had no convictions, except an old one for speeding. His preferred political strategy is to be “pro having [cake] and pro eating it”, which he won’t be able to sustain. During the leadership campaign he tried to keep as many people as possible happy by promising different things to different groups. In power, he will have to choose who to betray.
Within days, the disappointments will begin as he chooses his first cabinet. The many MPs who believe they are in line for top jobs in return for endorsing the Tory favourite cannot all be right. The balance of the ministerial team will set the tone for the new administration. As one ally puts it: “The plan is that Boris will be a good chairman of the board. If he has competent and experienced people who can run departments around him, then there’s a chance it can work.”
But a former cabinet minister, who has worked with him, predicts that Mr Johnson will struggle to be “first among equals”. The former colleague says: “Boris has always taken criticism to heart and I think he’ll find it very hard to deal with the bear pit of cabinet. It will be full of people trying to game the situation for their own self-interest. He needs to be loved; it’s in his nature. That gives him a slight vulnerability, which is one of the things that makes people warm to him. But, as prime minister, that strength becomes a fatal weakness.”
Controversial policy decisions will crowd in on the new Tory leader from day one. He must judge whether to lean towards America or stay aligned with the European Union in response to the Iran crisis, a diplomatic dilemma with wider ramifications for Britain’s place in the world.
He also urgently needs a Brexit plan. It is extraordinary that with only hours to go until he moves into No 10, Mr Johnson still appears to have no strategy for taking Britain out of the EU. There are in fact two competing factions in his camp: the moderates, led by Geoffrey Cox, the attorney-general, believe there is still a way to get a tweaked version of Theresa May’s deal through the House of Commons. As one supporter of this approach puts it: “If Boris gets a fair wind then he can resolve the European issue by putting some lipstick on the withdrawal agreement and then go back to being a One Nation Tory.”
Others, including Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Johnson’s campaign chairman, want to prepare unambiguously for a no-deal Brexit on Hallowe’en. There are mixed messages emerging from Mr Johnson’s team because the candidate himself has not decided between these contradictory routes. On the one hand, there are reports that Jean-Claude Juncker will be invited to Chequers for talks as early as this weekend; on the other, there are suggestions that the new prime minister intends to let the EU stew rather than going cap in hand to other European capitals seeking a compromise.
Mr Johnson’s rhetorical flourishes have only highlighted his inconsistencies. He promised, memorably, to deliver Brexit on October 31 “do or die” but also claimed that there was a “million-to-one” chance of leaving without a deal. Both cannot be true, but Mr Johnson is like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass who boasts that she can believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast”.
He has promised to strike a better deal than Mrs May, without the Northern Ireland backstop (something the EU has said it will never accept) and if he cannot do so then he has pledged to take Britain out without a deal (which MPs would reject). He has ruled out another EU referendum and said he will not hold a general election until Brexit is delivered, yet will be forced to do one of these if he does not get his way. He claims that he can “unite the party and then the country” but there is an enormous discrepancy between what the Tory membership and the wider electorate want. Rhetoric will soon clash with reality.
Sir Alan Duncan, who resigned as a minister yesterday, once claimed that one country’s foreign minister had referred to him as Mr Johnson’s “pooper scooper” because he had cleared up his mess so many times. As leader, he will not have that luxury. One MP who saw him recently says he seemed terrified at the thought of having to take responsibility for the consequences of his own actions. “Through his whole life Boris has had somebody who makes things OK. He’s always had a fixer but Brexit is unfixable. He knows he’s in trouble. I saw it in his eyes. He’s scared of failure and of being found out. He sold something that he knows he can’t deliver and now the facts are going to catch up with him. He can see the train coming down the track that’s going to destroy him.”
2. Why Scotland's wild, tartan-clad image is a fantasy dreamt up for tourists: William Cook
Summer is here, and Britain’s most beautiful city is a sea of tartan. Emerging from Waverley, Edinburgh’s magnificent railway station, the first thing you see (and hear) is a piper in Highland regalia. The gift shops along the Royal Mile are full of tartan knick-knacks, made for foreign tourists in search of the Scotland they’ve seen in the movies. If you come across these tourists, buying kilts in a vain attempt to ape their Scottish ancestors, be kind to them. Please don’t tell they’ve been seduced by a shrewd PR campaign.
Today, Scotland’s international image is wild and majestic – a phrase which provides the title for a fascinating new exhibition. Wild & Majestic – Romantic Visions of Scotland (at the National Museum of Scotland, here in Edinburgh) shows how Scotland was reinvented by the Georgians and the Victorians, and how tartan played a leading role in this Unionist makeover.
The exhibition begins with the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. It ends with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Between those two landmark dates, the public perception of Scotland was transformed. A land regarded (by the English) as remote, rebellious and unwelcoming was cleverly repackaged as the ultimate holiday destination.
Like a modern marketing campaign, this makeover used all of the creative arts to convey its central message – that Scotland was an unspoilt wilderness, a land of spectacular scenery inhabited by brave warriors and flame-haired maidens. Artists, writers and composers all contributed to this myth. Then as now, this ad campaign needed a robust brand identity which was instantly recognisable. The brand for this romantic relaunch was tartan.
Today tartan is ubiquitous, worn by everyone from punk rockers to the Royal Family. Schoolgirls wear tartan skirts. Dolls and teddy bears wear Highland dress. In 1746, however, tartan was the uniform of rebellion. Bonnie Prince Charlie had raised an army in the Highlands and marched all the way to Derby. His Jacobite troops had been clad in tartan, so after he fled to France, following his defeat at Culloden, Highland dress was banned.
If the government bans something it inevitably becomes more appealing. As the Jacobite threat receded, tartan acquired an edgy underground cachet. In 1782 the ban was lifted, and Highland dress became chic. Ironically the folk who made it fashionable weren’t rural Highlanders, whose dress it was, but urban Scottish Lowlanders, for whom tartan was entirely foreign, and who’d greeted the Jacobite revolt with the same horror as the English.
Tartan’s aesthetic rehabilitation was assured in 1822, when George IV came to Edinburgh. Today Royal visits to Scotland are routine, but this was the first time a British monarch had visited Scotland since the 17th Century. King George played along (he had his portrait painted wearing tartan) but the man who really drove this romantic reinvention was Walter Scott.
The start of the 19th century heralded the start of the Romantic Movement, in which idealistic writers turned against Britain’s growing urbanisation and industrialisation, and sought solace in a (largely imaginary) rural idyll, inhabited by knights in shining armour and damsels in distress. With its rugged scenery and its dramatic history, the Scottish Highlands was the ideal setting for these escapist stories. Scott’s historical novels were gobbled up by bourgeois Scots and Sassenachs, and when George IV came to Edinburgh, the novelist was hired to stage manage the event.
Scott staged a series of spectacular banquets, balls and cavalcades, and urged everyone who came along to wear tartan. No matter that Edinburgh was a bastion of the Scottish Enlightenment – a city of doctors, bankers, lawyers and academics, not Highland lairds and chieftains. No matter that most attendees were urban Lowlanders, for whom tartan was anathema. Like King George, these urbanites were happy to play along, and so the image stuck.
Walter Scott wasn’t the only writer responsible for this rebranding exercise. Burns and Byron also helped to repackage Scotland as a medieval nirvana. Significantly, all three of them were Lowland Scots.
It was during the Victorian era that Scotland’s romantic image was cemented, and the biggest driver of this process was Queen Victoria herself. She came to Scotland as a sightseer, to visit the sites in Scott’s novels, and found a holiday home at Balmoral. She liked it so much, she bought it. Her German husband Prince Albert rebuilt it in gothic style, adding a layer of Teutonic kitsch to this Caledonian pastiche. Scots Baronial became an architectural style, imitated by Scotland’s growing middle classes. Victoria dressed her servants in stylised Highland dress, the costume Scotsmen now wear to weddings. A century after Culloden, the tartanisation of Scottish culture was complete.
The irony was that this was an age of urbanisation. In Scotland as well as England, more and more people were moving from the countryside to growing cities like Glasgow, forsaking the landscape and the lifestyle idealised by Byron, Burns and Scott. Before Culloden and the Clearances, the Highlands wasn’t a wilderness. Much of it had been densely populated, by poor people scratching a living from the land, before they were driven off that land to make way for deer and grouse. This was a cultivated landscape, carefully designed for the benefit of wealthy tourists, epitomised by iconic artworks like Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen.
Over a century since the First World War brought down the curtain on this pampered epoque, that tourist fantasy of Scotland endures, encapsulated in modern movies like Braveheart. Like most enduring fantasies, it’s not entirely fiction. Yes, the landscapes are truly stunning, but many of the stories are fanciful, and the story of tartan is one of the most fanciful of all.
Yes, tartan was a Highland cloth, worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie and his rebel army, but their handmade tartans were only associated with general regions, rather than particular families or clans. It was industrialisation which made tartan accessible throughout Scotland, and around the world, when cheaper machine spun tartan hit the high street, and became a global brand.
So how did the close association between certain surnames and certain tartans arise? It seems they grew up as a result of modern market forces, rather than ancient allegiances. Consumers tended to choose local tartans, and these consumers often shared the same surnames. When outsiders asked shopkeepers which tartan to buy, these canny shopkeepers guided them towards the same tartans that their namesakes had bought before.
So is our romantic image of Scotland just a myth? Not entirely. Yes, the details are pretty suspect, but the underlying truth is sound. Scotland is one of the most beautiful countries in Europe, and it’s right on England’s doorstep. Even without the tartan trappings, it’s still a spectacular place. And in the end, who cares if tartan now means something else entirely from what it meant in 1746? All the best brands evolve, and tartan has evolved into something completely different, from rebel Highland garb to the logo of modern Scotland.
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