YULETIDE CHEER

MY TRADITIONAL END OF YEAR wishes of health and happiness to all men and women is being written this year in the poker room of the Inatel Palace Hotel in Termas de São Pedro do Sul, a charming little natural hot water spa town in the northwest of Portugal. For the interregnum between Christmas and New Year I have decided to spend a few days here in the company of my good lady wife, enabling us to lazy about the town during the day, eating in excellent restaurants where two people can eat a three course meal with wine for less than thirty of the dreaded Euros.

OTHERWISE WE SPEND OUR TIME standing about near the geysers and bubbling waterholes that abound, sniffing at the sulphur-choked fumes and drinking the rotten-egg tasting water which forces its way up through solid rock from miles below the ground. All of this in the name of health.

AND UPON WHICH MATTER I imagine I should rectify my initial statement. When I wrote “all men and women” I did not, naturally mean all of them. We may eliminate practically all of the European Parliament, most politicians as a whole, bankers, insurance brokers and salespeople, estate agents, ecologists, global warming bores and the devil’s own triumvirate of Humpty Rumpuy, Joseph Stalin Barroso and the hideous Merkozy couple.

INDEED, BEING WHERE I AM NOW, surrounded by the smell of the scalding lava of the underworld and the fire and brimstone that produces these curing waters (although, admittedly, the smell does not reach the games room of the hotel) reminds me of where these fiendish criminals all belong.

PASSOS HIS SELL BY DATE

THE FACT THAT a Prime Minister feels that he can come on television and advise his people to emigrate might appear unreal for most people in the civilised world. Yet it was this that Portuguese Prime Minister Passos Coelho, the charming, soft-spoken and unaccountably inept leader of the governing coalition made up of previously proven incompetents, felt he could do yesterday. In advising 15,000 unemployed teachers to go abroad he admitted that he, his government, and his country, was rubbish.

GET OUT OF PORTUGAL, was not exactly the statement made by Pedro Passos Coelho, but one can easily see how this could solve his worrisome economic issues. Portugal owes enormous amounts of money to abroad; most people are buying houses made of cardboard at 30-year mortgages; hardly any of the young people can find a “proper” job; and we wait and watch while the plughole sucks the Euro into the bubbling mire of a future in which there are more beggars sitting on the streets outside the sliding doors to supermarkets than teachers. Perhaps Portugal could send them to foreign parts.

CLEGG’S REVISED HISTORY OF ENGLAND

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, we hear from Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, the very long novel by James Joyce, Ireland’s favourite writer and sexual pervert. The sentiment, however, may be better situated in the mouths and minds of Nick Clegg’s political advisers. Our leaders usually make horrendous mistakes when they attempt to square today’s events with those in history; this is because they – Boris Johnson excepted – have little or no knowledge of the matter.

WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL one took history and geography lessons, although I believe there has been an attempt to “fuse” these subjects into one, a government policy which I imagine to have been disastrous, and of which I see that Mr Clegg must be a result.

IN STATING THAT DAVID CAMERON’S recent bit of harmless badinage with “Fifi” Sarkozy over the signing or not of some useless bits of paper involving Germans and the lebensraum countries has brought Anglo-French relations to “their lowest point in history”, I am afraid that Mr Clegg more than reveals his educational lacking.

THE LOWEST POINT IN ANGLO-FRENCH history is a tad difficult to point out on a chart. One may start by stating that over the last 1,000 years in which we both have been recognisable as nations we have mainly been at war of one sort or another. For six hundred years after 1066 (and all that) this war was about what was de facto England and de facto France; this medieval discussion continues in the halls of St Pancras Station in London and in every seaside ferry port at this moment.

BUT SURELY CLEGG must know of Waterloo? If only from listening to the ABBA vinyl records that he surely must have in his living room, half a dozen classics nestling against the little table upon which rests his TV “set”, including records by Phil Collins, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Julio Iglesias and Shirley Bassey, all standing against the non-offensive, “light cream with flecks of brown” wallpaper which was on offer at the local DIY store.

OR ABOUT AGINCOURT, TRAFALGAR, POITIERS and Calais? La Corunna, Vigo or Grijó. Perhaps, being a victim of the new form of combining geography and history, Clegg only sees the fact that Belgium is linked to Holland, is linked to Germany, is linked to Poland, et caetera, in the same way that the toe-bone is linked to the foot-bone, is linked to the leg bone, is linked to the arse-bone, presumably.

SAVE THE WORLD

NOT A GREAT DEAL HAS BEEN HEARD of late from the good people who make it their business to trot the globe and tell us that we are doing untold ill to our planet by merely being here and depositing what they call our “carbon footprint” on whatever it is that they deem should not be carbon-footprinted.

INDEED, GIVEN THAT OUR VERY OWN Prince Charles, darling spokesperson of the “speak to your vegetables and they will be good to you” brigade, has had myriad things to do of late and thus has not been forcing his vegetable philosophy down our necks too much, the eco-warriors have had little to do in the light of the press being more concerned with the fact that the world economy is about to be deflated up its own anal cavity.

THIS IS DISTRESSING NEWS for yoga “teachers”, vegetable “healers”, sparkling stone “readers” – all of whom discover that their clients were really-not-what-you-might-call-a-hundred-percent convinced of the curative powers of the “let’s all face the sun and say ‘Hello’” approach to health, now that money for sending Jeremy and Jemimah to private school is at the top of the list.

BUT OUR STOLID AND SOLID defenders dither not. And such determination has resulted, as we all now know, in the “ten minutes that saved the planet”, recently voted at the United Nations summit on climate change in Durban. The event had taken place over six days, involving delegates from 194 countries, all of them, as well as their wives, mistresses and sundry children and hangers-on (in the case of some of the Asian and African and Arabian delegates) struggling to come up with a way to save the world from utter destruction, which they did in the countdown of mere minutes to the end of the conference before a positive vote was agreed upon, saving my life and your lives.

WE ARE NOW ASSURED, after this summer meeting in South Africa, that the agreements suggested at the last meeting in Bali, as well as the one in Cancun, Mexico, may be carried forward to the next meeting in some other splendid resort capable of housing 977 delegates as well as their entourages so that they may discuss how to reduce our carbon footprints even more.

YET WHAT, PEOPLE MAY ASK, are the resolutions that will save us so? What is it that will make me feel safe about my grandchildren’s futures? What will 190-odd world leaders sign to make sure we don’t end up a burnt ruin like those things we see on the Discovery Channel.

NEVER FEAR: HERE is that resolution which, so I am told – and for which you are paying – will guarantee the future “on this planet” for eons to come: “All United Nations parties commit to a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force that will be decided in 2015 and come into force in 2020.”

Photo: Delegates at Durban celebrating the fact they have saved the world

LAST MIND STANDING

“PARTING”, JULIET INFORMS US in Shakespeare’s The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo, and Juliet, “is such sweet sorrow.” The meaning behind this pithy remark by a love struck Juliet, perched on her little balcony and watching Romeo slipping down the ivy to land on his arse among the rhododendrons, was that when parting we know that we will come back together soon – “the morrow”, claims Juliet – and be happily reunited.

I AM NOT SURE THAT this was forefront in David “Bulldog” Cameron’s mind when he came back from a meeting with the leaders of our brothers and sisters in the European Union with a smirk on his face, as, like many others, I suspect that this is not simply the beginning of the United Kingdom leaving the hated European Union for good (as Cameron would secretly adore to see happen), but – and before this – the start of a partial break up of the Union itself.

CAMERON’S ACTION WAS A SCANDAL on Friday in the eyes of most of the European press, and was violently condemned today in the European Parliament by Joseph Stalin Barroso and a few other members, notably the French and Belgians. Nicolas “Fifi” Sarkozy was, of course, the first person to issue outright condemnation, early on Friday afternoon.

SINCE THEN, HOWEVER, WISE analysts may have noticed certain changes in tone in the statements being issued by other European countries. All of the 26 member states besides Britain immediately agreed to everything on the table on Friday afternoon and so all appeared to be hunky-dory in Euroland. Yet subsequent developments have included Merkel suggesting on Friday evening that she “perfectly understood” Cameron’s position, and Ireland (yesterday) stating that, thinking matters over since the weekend, any change in the treaty would probably have to go to a referendum. This was followed by both Holland and the Czech Republic stating the same thing.

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, then, is perhaps best not the best way to describe the “union” part of the European Union. More cold water has been brought to the bath by the bizarrely-named French presidential candidate François Hollande, who, despite his European-friendly name, has stated that if he is elected next year instead of Fifi he will not respect the treaty. Basically the only keen countries to have the treaty accepted by all are the three countries who have gone down the toilet already.

SO THERE WE HAVE IT. Everyone understands that the details of the treaty make it impossible to effect and the proposed “sanctions” are not even explained; and even the apparently most diehard defenders of its principles seem to be “only joking”. Cameron was thus wise to steer clear of it if only to avoid having to call a referendum. Everyone in Britain knows what the result would be, so it was better for him to make the decision himself and at least look like he has stomach for a fight and is not the “plonker” he was called in parliament yesterday.

FRÈRE JACQUES

NOW THAT JACQUES DELORS, the fiendish individual responsible for “masterminding” the whole unimaginably disastrous shebang that is the European Union and the single currency, has, at the wise old age of 86, admitted that the Euro project (and I quote ipsissima verba) was “doomed from the start”, we can perhaps start looking forward to Europe breaking up into the original countries with their own cute little customs and habits and strange currencies like the Schilling, the Florin, the Peseta and the Liebfraumilch, among others.

DELORS, LIKE MANY LEADERS before him, obviously decided to get the troubling matters off his conscience before dying, certain in the knowledge that if there is a heaven, and if French people are allowed into it, its dwellers will not be happy about his European financial policy.

M DELORS’ FAILINGS HOWEVER pale into insignificance when compared with the outrageous proposals put forward this very hour by Europe’s top comic duo, Mr and Mrs Merkozy.

GAME-CHANGING EVENTS OVER my own lifetime, moments that significantly altered the way we live our lives, have been few and far between, as most of the meaty stuff of the XX century took place before 1959, when I was only a glimmer in my father’s eye, and even the landing on the moon, ten years later (if we believe that it really took place) turned out to be as dull as dishwater.

IT MAY REMAIN TO BE SEEN whether the joint statement by cuddly Merkel and toothless Sarkozy this afternoon can be turned into law and policy; and whether this foreshadows, as many have stated, the European super-state run by Germany. Merkel’s threat that there will be “punishment” for Euroland states that do not keep their budget deficits below 3%, and Sarkozy’s suggestion that everyone will have to “work harder” and “pull together” is obviously just a load of Euroblather.

THE NEW EUROPEAN TREATY VOICED at today’s conference, however, may be a completely different kettle of fish if Germany and France ever elect anyone who is prepared to show some teeth. What they are promoting with this “Fiskalunion” is the right of Germany, with its French poodle following behind, to move into a country and take over its economic, fiscal and financial matters whenever they deem this fit. Dictators do not even need tanks and jackboots nowadays. Dormez vous, Jacques? Sonnez les matines.

THE BONZO DOG DOO-DAH EURO BAND

NANCY MITFORD MAY NOT HAVE BEEN TOTALLY correct when she merrily stated in The Pursuit of Love that “Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends”, but there may have been a like sentiment jangling and rattling about the empty head of our glorious leader David Cameron as he gloomily jaunted off for a meeting with Napoleon Sarkozy this morning.

CAMERON’S MEETING WITH recent father Sarkozy, now being referred to in his own smooche-cul sycophantic press as a “poodle” to Angela Merkel’s dubious Rottweiler – and thus henceforth referred to in Sunday Morning as “Fifi” Sarkozy – may prove that despair is perhaps not a word strong enough to describe how a decent chap may feel when observing our bone-headed leaders in Europe trying to sort out what is one of the most ludicrous ventures of recent times.

EXASPERATION MAY COME TO MIND as a more fitting manner of terming what some foreign fiends imagined, thirty years ago, to be a good idea: this being that solid, decent chaps who work hard and are in the top ten of the recently-published index on perceived corruption can possibly be on a par with Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and the unpronounceable entities from formerly communist Europe who have now wheedled their way into the European Union.

THE STRUCTURAL FUNDS granted to the “poorer” countries of the EU were intended to improve the standards of living of those living in these “poorer countries”. It now appears that the Germans and their cohort countries have understood that giving money to the governments of these soi-disant poorer countries means just that. None of this money would ever have reached the actual “poor” people – should they indeed be deserving of such an epithet.

“GIVING MONEY TO AFRICA”, as we sometimes hear old hippies and vegetarian lesbians who knit their own dildos state to be a good thing, never in fact means that the money will go to Africa, but rather to local nabobs who have taken charge of the countries that used to be ruled by stiff-moustached chaps who saw fair play as part of the wicket upon which humanity was built, but who now just pocket the cash with a broad grin as if to say “keep on giving, folks, because we need it”, and then spending the money received (at a rate of 1:19) on luxury items in Europe.

GERMANY AND FRANCE are examples of countries in which, historically, it has never been clearly understood that charity either (a) is relatively good or (b) is useless, unless it is accompanied by discipline and education. It might be a little late to explain to these people that ALL of the money given to southern European countries and Ireland as “structural improvement funds” was squandered, stored in offshore accounts or simply used by farmers to put snooker tables in their garages, useless swimming pools in their front lawns and garish pebbledash on the façades of their gaudy, cobbled-together houses.

EVEN THE PORTUGUESE STATE ITSELF, through the myriad robbers who have been members of the government over the last fifteen years, have stolen from both the European Union and the Portuguese people in the manner of taking “European” money to carry out “necessary” projects in Portugal, such as road infrastructures or dams, and either not completing them or having them built using illegal immigrant labour, with the State paying a fraction of the cost calculated by the EU and pocketing the excess, whacking it out with their friends in the engineering companies.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE that the European Union does not know what is going on with the money it spends on these ghost projects (most of them never get completed), particularly as our good leader, Joseph Stalin Barroso, was firmly involved in this money divvying when he was the head of the Portuguese Social Democrat PSD Party, which, along with the even more bloodsucking Portuguese Socialist Party, have spent the last hand-rubbing years whooping in delight at the ignorance, naiveté and general softness of “Europe”; some Portuguese members of parliament among them have scooped over 80 million Euros in “bonuses” for granting contracts. (Names can be supplied)

NEXT WEEK WE HAVE ANOTHER “Last Chance Saloon” meeting of European leaders (now reduced to Napoleon and Merkel). Whatever they come up with should be seen within the light of what serious analysts have been stating, and what those “in the know” have known for a while. Either we pump in so much money to the southern European countries that even the most corrupt politician among the most corrupt of the corrupt will feel happy and will spend the money from Europe on whatever he is supposed to or the whole thing will collapse. So what?

TASCHENGELD ANGELA

CUDDLY ANGELA MERKEL does her best on her understandably rare TV appearances to look like that sort of youngish grandmother figure that we are happy to see when Christmas comes around and we don’t mind sending a postcard to when we are on holiday, with messages like “I’m in Slovetiaskinstiopia with some friends from college, Gran. I loved the socks you knitted me.”

THE DEEP MESSAGE of being nice to our Grandma is usually, as all of us will admit when pushed to be honest, the hope that at some stage “Gran” will come up with the goods and stick her liver-spotted hand under the mattress and give us the cash that she has been holding back and hiding from the “real" world.

THUS IT MAY HAVE BEEN for the citizens of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and possibly soon Spain and France, all behaving like nice little children and taking their little presents of little Euros in their little hands and doing what grandmas always tell their little grandchildren to do as they come up with their tiresome warnings of “When that’s gone there’s no more”, or “Don’t spend it all in one go.”

SOMETIMES GRANDMAS foolishly ask their adolescent grandchildren things like “And what are you going to spend it on?” perhaps knowing that the youngsters will lie to them. But I suppose that is all part of the limited fun of being a geriatric; pretending that you have some say in the way the world is run when you have obviously lost the plot.

THIS PANTOMIME IS NOT FOR GROWN UP David “Davy Boy” Cameron, who went yesterday to visit Grandma Merkel rather more like the sulky teenager who isn’t prepared to put up with listening to stories about the “old days”, “during the war”, “when I was your age” and as someone who is definitely not going to wear those ridiculous sweaters that Merkel knits and expects all of us in Europe to wear.

CAMERON APPEARED TO TELL MERKEL to sharpen up her act, that the other grandchildren are a useless band of lying malcontents who are frittering away her money on bubblegum, sherbet fountains and dandelion and burdock-flavoured boiled sweets and that none of them is ever going to amount to much unless she either cuts off the pocket money or spends it seriously in order to send them to a proper school to learn how to get a proper job.

MERKEL, LIKE GRANDMOTHERS everywhere, bless them, pretended she was deaf, and then went off into the kitchen mumbling something to herself about “I’ve got something somewhere for you, David, but I’m not sure where I’ve put it, or what it is ” and rummaging about in cupboards. Cameron, of course, is a nice boy, and he will keep on visiting his grandmother, but it looks like he’ll stop sending those postcards for a while.

NOW THAT IT'S OVER

HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR CHARLES V, the first and most magnificent of the great anointed European leaders, and thus in many ways the direct precursor of our very own Herman von Rumpuy, who is also Flemish, knew full well that even though he ruled from the Atlantic Ocean to the frontiers of Russia and from the North Sea to the Adriatic there was an enormous cultural gap between the peoples he crushed under his gout-ridden foot.

“TO GOD I SPEAK SPANISH, to women Italian, to my men French and to my horse German,” he is reported to have said sometime in the 1550s, although I cannot personally imagine why nor to whom he may have made the statement, nor – somewhat more interestingly – in what language he may have been speaking (although one imagines it was neither German nor Spanish).

AMONG OUR POPULAR MODERN LEADERS, many of whom have been elected, like Sarkozy and Berlusconi, or anointed, like Humpty von Rumpuy and Joseph “Man of Iron” Barroso, one wonders whether awareness of these cultural differences is as acute as it appears to have been 450 years ago for the hapless Charles V. We know that Berlusconi speaks Italian to “his” women and that Sarkozy may speak Italian to one of them and presumably French to at least one other woman; common sense suggests that Angela Merkel talks to everyone as if she were an equine quadruped herself; all the Greek leaders speak Greek, naturally; and Humpty von Dumpty talks Double Dutch whenever anyone is prepared to listen to him.

WHICH LEAVES US WITH BARROSO. If anyone is in any doubt about what the good Mr Barroso speaks then one should consider his words yesterday upon hearing the “rumours” in almost all of the British newspapers that the Euro was about to collapse and either disappear into history or be restricted to only the Benelux countries, Germany, France and Finland. "It is not a solution to divide, the solution is to integrate. We have to create a stronger European Union," the EU Commission President said.

AND SO THERE WE HAVE THE ANSWER. As we see what used to be called the “Catholic countries” of Southern Europe transferring their savings to British banks and into pounds Sterling at a rate hitherto unimagined, we can now conclude what language it is that Mr Barroso speaks: Gibberish.

HEIL HITLER

THE GREATEST AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL of all time, Gore Vidal, “tells it as it is”, in his American Presidency, about the history of democracy in the thirteen colonies and the various bits of farmland, swamp, backwoods, impassible rock, desert and volcanoes they have picked up throughout their history in forming what is known as the USA today. Very few publications, and hardly any DVDs, have caused such distress among those who have witnessed a showing, particularly in relation to Gore Vidal’s stunning claims that the presidents of the USA have always had to be racists.

ONE WONDERS HOW GORE VIDAL equates his theories with the election of Barack Hussein Obama, in whom he harboured hope, but has now decided he is an inexperienced lightweight who has been put over upon by the military and the sharp minds in Washington.

ONE OF GORE VIDAL’S MOST OUTRAGEOUS statements, made in the written medium and more impressively at a conference in Lisbon in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in June 1999, and in response to a question from the audience about American presidents, was that Lincoln was “worse than Stalin”. Gasps were heard in the audience, and women fainted, although this may have been due to the poor air-conditioning.

I WAS AT THAT CONFERENCE and I believe I was among the very few people who understood what the greatest political analyst of our times really meant. While some people fell back into the comfort of thinking, “Oh, Gore Vidal is 74 now, and he’s really lost his marbles” and similar such assumptions, it was clear that he meant that in the transition from the United States of America being a loosely connected group of like-minded sovereign states who had voluntarily entered into a union for protection against a common enemy (Britain) but who had remained separate in habits, beliefs, mores and laws, Lincoln was the first to come along and tell them all that they had to bow down to Washington. And worse: there was the US Government invasion of lands west of the Nueces and the Rockies and subsequent forcing of them to become US. This was nothing short of tyranny, as these areas had already been constituted as free territories.

IN A DIRECT SEQUENCE OF THIS LINE of modern dictators, the Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol-Pot etcetera stroll, we should, in all conscience, add the latest modern dictator determined to eliminate freedom. Yesterday’s sad “encouragement” of George Papandreou to “change his mind” about his announced democratic referendum, and what now looks like a “persuading” of the idea that it might be better for him to “step down”, has everything of the policies of Stalin.

JOSÉ MANUEL BARROSO’S APPEARANCE on dozens of European TV channels last night might be a public relations event intended to “help us Europeans understand the situation”, as was stated, but surely no one in their right mind should be unaware of the fact that this is a man who is in a position to tell freely elected governments of European countries what to do or he will crush them.

BARROSO AND VON RUMPEY-PUMPY make “Uncle Joe” Stalin look like a good guy. These two criminals are in charge of 340 million people; probably 250 million of them would choose to be out of the EU if they could, but Joseph “Stalin” Barroso and Herman von Hitler-Rumpey would never contemplate such a thing as choice.

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE

GREECE, ONE OFTEN HEARS, IS THE CRADLE of democracy. Of course, the democracy involved in the time of those clever chaps like Socrates, as described in I.F. Stone’s wonderful The Trial of Socrates or in The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto, was not exactly a democracy as we know it today, in which important people who have managed to get themselves elected into power tell us what we should be doing despite the fact that they promised to do what we told them to do if we elected them.

THE ATHENIAN SYSTEM, in its primitive innocence, was based on referenda, an approach some may see as rather frightening, as giving the people the right to decide on issues that, after all, and let’s face it, they don’t really fully grasp, is tantamount to madness.

NOWHERE IS THIS DISDAIN for popular power more evident than in the European Union, where the mere mention of hated words such as “choice”, “vote”, “elections” and – heaven forbid! – “referendum” sends our unelected leader José Manuel Barroso, and Herman Von Rumpey-Pumpey, his idiot cohort at the head of the Union, into paroxysms of fear.

THUS WHEN George Papandreou, the now fed-up Prime Minister of Greece, decided to ask for a referendum on whether to accept the plan for salvation of Greece’s economy cobbled together over months of Eurocratic wrangling, lunches, dinners, late evening discussions in hotels, strolls around parks in Brussels, free admission to the opening of the new Tin-Tin movie on Sunday last, these people must have spluttered into their complementary cocktails.

INDEED, AS, FOR EUROPEAN EUROCRATS, this is the last straw. We have already seen the Republic of Ireland daring not to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon through a NO vote in a referendum, and they had to be sorted out by having the Irish Parliament overturning this lunacy after a major injection of money from Europe, paid for by every single tax-paying human being in the Union; then we saw the temerity of Slovakia, refusing to back a package of financial aid to Greece, after which the European Parliament basically threatened to throw Slovakia out if its parliament didn’t do what the Eurocrats thought it should do.

NOW WE HAVE THE ULTIMATE threat to the European Union: a Prime Minister of a sovereign nation asking his own population whether they approve of a measure made at committee tables in Brussels. This cannot be allowed. It would be the end of the free lunches and drinks as we know them in Brussels. The last straw indeed; but it must not be allowed to be the last straw in the Manhattan cocktail. So Gorgeous George will have to go. Watch this space.

ODE ON A GRECIAN EARN

“WHAT’S A GREEK URN?” WAS OFTEN the introductory line to a sequence of jokes by Eric Morcambe and Ernie Wise, the most successful comic duo in the history of British stage entertainment, with the reply and punch-line, usually given by Eric, being, “About a hundred Drachma a week.” Or thereabouts. The origin of the pun was a pastiche of a Plautus play in which a character in ancient Rome, having been plunged into the depths of poverty due to reckless overspending announces, in order to save himself from being sold into slavery, “I’ve got a Greek urn.” (i.e. something valuable). There were variations on the joke involving a “Chinese urn”.

GRECIAN 2000 was the brand name of a company which started out in the late nineteen-sixties in Britain and the USA attempting to sell hair dye for men on a market where most men were still afraid of wearing after-shave lest their male friends call them “nancy-boy”, “nonce”, “ponce”, “fruit”, “fairy”, “shirt-lifter” or “brown-hatter” to quote some of the popular slang expressions used to refer to ‘suspected’ homosexuals in the caveman days of the sixties. The TV advert involved a downcast gentleman, greying at the temples, suddenly transformed into a dapper man-about-town wearing flared trousers, seersucker shirt with elephant-ear lapels and sporting lamb-chop sideburns disco-dancing the night away under a mosaic mirror ball as if he had been given his youth back.

BOTH OF THESE ICONIC TV EPISODES that live still in the memory of those of us who truly enjoy classic TV serve to remind us of the fact that there has always been something slightly off the mark about Greekness. Shakespeare’s joke in Julius Caesar, later assimilated into the language, that “it’s all Greek to me” has stood above “double Dutch” in meaning ‘erudite or clever nonsense’. It actually means “I can’t make head nor tail out of it”, which refers to the fact that it has no value as a coin.

THE USE OF THE TERM “GRECIAN VORTEX” by The Daily Telegraph to describe the calamitous state of Portugal, spiraling into a lack of money due to the government cutting away at the finances of the middle-classes, who traditionally keep the economy alive, thus, according to the same newspaper, guaranteeing complete and utter economic and financial collapse within eighteen months, is a more recent spin on the use of adjectives referring to our Hellenic neighbours and friends. Curiously, almost all of the terms tend to be negative.

ALL OF WHICH SUGGESTS THAT letting Greece into the Euro, or even the Eypo, was something of a mistake. But at least for the moment, after the latest frivolous meeting of our glorious leaders in Brussels, the plan is to forgive half of the Greek debt not by asking tax payers, but rather ‘institutional lenders’ “to take a haircut” and write off what they are owed. I have seen some of these institutional lenders’ leaders on TV over the last couple of days, and I am not surprised to see that many of them are bald and/or grey-haired. Further haircuts might be difficult for them, and Grecian 2000 is of no use at all in the long term. I wonder how long it will be before some of them are asking “What’s a Greek earn?”

THE MODERN WORLD EXPLAINED

AS A POLITICAL COMMENTATOR of some repute, people often come up to me and ask me “David, what on earth is going on in the world?” Sometimes this takes place at dinner parties, on one occasion recently before I had even unwrapped the wine I had brought as a present for the host’s wife. On other occasions I am accosted by students in the corridors of the august institutions in which I teach, begging “Professor, please help us understand modern politics”:

THE “DINNER PARTY PEOPLE” who ask the questions are often those who have not bothered to watch television for the last thirty years and often fall asleep listening to classical music on the radio, and so missed the collapse of the Berlin Wall as well as the death of Irving Berlin; my students are often those who are floating through their student days on a sort of grey, acrid-smelling cloud.

FOR OBVIOUS REASONS I FIND it somewhat difficult to explain the rather confusing elements of the modern world to these sets of people, and so, in yet another of my spontaneous and totally cost-free services provided to the people of the world, whether they be Gin-drinking socialites or blurry-eyed students, here is the “modern world” in a nutshell.

ELECTIONS TOMORROW IN TUNISIA, coupled with tomorrow’s likely decision by the Finance Ministers of the European Union to “end financial sovereignty” by member states, along with Britain’s Conservative and LibDem Government’s refusal to allow a democratic withdrawal from the hated European Empire of Brussels suggest that the balance of power has somewhat changed since the late 80s.

MY MAP SHOWS THE CURRENT STATE OF PLAY. I hope everyone joins me in wishing all these new nations the very best and jolly good luck in getting on with whatever it is that they have been arguing over and/or fighting about getting on with for the last twenty years or so. As an Englishman I can only say, hand on heart, “God speed you, chaps!”

(My map shows Poundland, the Great European Disaster, the three Eurovision Unions (Baltic, Muslim and Balkan), the Arab-Speaking Democrats and the parts unknown.)

ZENGA ZENGA

IN A DEMOCRACY IT IS EXTREMELY rare for any of our leaders to lose control and come up with threatening rants when they feel their positions are undermined, and although one might have expected this of former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was liable to fly off the handle at a moment’s notice, very few people must have expected such heavy-handed, ham-fisted tactics by mild-mannered model pupil David “Dave” Cameron.

ALAS! THE PRESSURES OF POWER have led Cameron to confront his back-benchers over a proposed revolt on Monday if he does not comply with his election promise to allow Parliament to have a chance to introduce legislation for a referendum on Britain’s position in Europe.

HOLDING CAMERON’S FEET TO THE FIRE are now 50 Conservative MP, involving many Parliamentary Private Secretaries who would rather resign than face up to their electors during surgery, or – more threateningly – lose their seats to one of the members of Nigel Farage’s marauding band of UKIP candidates snapping at their heels.

CAMERON HAS THREATENED to sack the rebels and has also promised that the whips will be out on Monday. In my opinion he should perhaps think about the fate of another famous former leader who only months ago told his own rebels that he would hunt them down from room to room, house to house, alley to alley.

PORTUGAL. THE MAN

PORTUGAL HAS OFT BEEN mentioned of late under the same breath as Greece in the sense that it is doomed to failure in the short and long term due to the fact over the last twenty years it has been receiving money from kindly, good-hearted Germans who thought that their goodness would be repaid by Portuguese leaders applying it in the best interests of the Portuguese people.

ALAS! THE GERMANS MUST NOW CRY, having discovered that all of this money has been frittered away on beach houses, megalomaniac projects such as the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1998, the 2004 European Soccer Nations’ Cup Finals, bridges which take no one anywhere, motorways which stop short of their destinations and have turned into pot-holed death-traps in a matter of months, and on good old-fashioned pocket-lining for the élite of the Socialist and Social Democrat parties who have taken turns in sharing out the loot among themselves and their friends in the civil engineering companies responsible for building the crumbling, mould-infested heritage of rubble that is modern Portugal.

MORE RECENTLY, OF COURSE, as the bottom has fallen out of the easy money market, those busybodies at the IMF, European Union and European Central Bank have reined in the cash and called upon the Portuguese government to tighten up controls.

THE NEW LEADER OF PORTUGAL, Mr Passos Coelho, is slightly different to the stereotype Prime Minister of recent years in that, rather than looking like an insurance salesman, sales representative for Marks and Spencer, fish, priest or minor character in a Quentin Tarantino film (to list the last five Portuguese PMs), he could easily be an understudy for Roger Moore in a James Bond movie of the 1980s. In those bits of the movie where Roger Moore got punched, kicked, soaked in water or slapped about a bit by a Russian female, Passos Coelho would step in and do the job to perfection.

ANOTHER ASPECT IN WHICH he has differed from his predecessors of the last twelve years or so is that rather than doing nothing and allowing the Portuguese economy to go down the toilet, his approach, as announced yesterday, is to do something to make the economy go even further down the toilet, with his bog-brush style economic and financial measures for 2012 guaranteed to make whatever was left of a country clinging on to hope to feel the flush of the chain and be swept into the sewers.

PORTUGAL. THE MAN, the pop group of my title, is a psychedelic trash metal group originally from Wasilla, Alaska, but who have come closer to reality by moving to Portland, Oregon. Somewhat like the Portuguese politicians of the last twenty or so years (in my experience), they know very little about the reality of Portugal.

THE FANTASTIC DR FOX

THE REISSUE OF THE 2009 movie of the same name is proving something of a success in British theatres, and is once again providing some difficulty in its interpretation. Is it suitable for children? Should it be X-rated? As a service for my readers, I have decided to provide the essential plot details and cast, and one may thus judge for oneself.

FANTASTIC DR. FOX IS A 2009 AMERICAN stop-motion animated film based on the Roald Dahl novel of the same name. The story is about a defence secretary who steals money every day from taxpayers and spends it on, among other people, his best friend, a mysterious creature who enjoys dancing with Dr Fox and using his friendship to meet wealthy farmers and foreign politicians who buy weapons from him.

THE TAXPAYERS BECOME FED UP WITH DR FOX, as do the journalists, led by Rat and Weasel, who write stories about him, but they do not try to kill him straight away, nor expose his strange behaviour with his best friend, as they are afraid they will be accused of hacking into Dr Fox’s phone or digging into his home.

DR FOX REALISES THAT HIS LIFE, WIFE and happiness are in danger, and so he outwits his enemies and goes to live with his family in a hole underground. The Foxes become accustomed to living in the sewers with others. Dr Fox gives up his old life and opens a supermarket, where he now is free to dance with his friend, and sometimes his wife.

Cast in full:

Liam Fox as Mr. F.F. Fox

Adam Werritty as “Best Friend”

The Invisible Woman as Mrs. Felicity Fox

George “Bushy Bush” Bush as David Cameron

Mickey Mouse as George Osborne

Rupert Murdoch as Rat

Kelvin McKenzie as Weasel

Yoda as William Hague (aka “Squirrel”)

OLD SPECKLED HEN

UNBELIEVABLY FOR THE BRITISH PRESS the long knives are not really out for loveable, cuddly Dr Liam Fox, our good Defence Secretary who has, we now know, been dashing about the world doing business in our interests always in the company of his “best friend” Adam Werrity, paid for by the British taxpayer. The fact that happily married Fox has taken his best friend with him on 80 trips abroad on official United Kingdom government business over the last couple of years, when Werrity has nothing to do with politics, does not even seem to warrant innuendo.

NOT ONE NEWSPAPER OR COMMENTATOR, other than the brash, outspoken Jeff Randall, who stated yesterday on Sky News, “I don’t spend that much time with my wife, and I am happily married”, seems to want to come to the conclusions that are obvious, and which are (as no one else will print them): Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox is cheating the UK public out of money; Dr Liam Fox is unfairly giving an advantage to a friend (if Werrity actually has a vested interest in following the defence secretary about the world buying and selling arms to third world countries); and Dr Liam Fox’s wife needs to get a grip on her husband, as “my best friend” is a primary school expression.

WHEN FOX STOOD UP AND STATED IN PARLIAMENT that he goes abroad and “naturally” takes his “best friend” with him, but he won’t be doing it in the future, no one screamed at him to resign. What, I wonder, is going on?

I COULDN’T CARE LESS ABOUT Dr Fox, who is obviously about to go down the toilet politically and probably domestically, but I am intrigued as to why neither our press, always keen to sniff out a scandal, nor our opposition politicians, have delivered the goods on the doctor.

BACK TO BUSINESS

MY UNUSUALLY LONG ABSENCE from writing has coincided with an equally unusual period of otioseness punctuated by yet another enforced trek across Europe by land which contained all of the upsetting details as outlined in Sunday Morning of June 2010 (We’ll Always Have Paris and The Smell of the Continent), except this time with the family in tow and with a ferry from Dover to Calais to boot.

FORTUNATELY, THE TRIP IS NOW little more than a memory; that is, it is a recurring nightmare, containing scenes reminiscent of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner series, but taking place in France at railway stations, quaysides and cafés and with dialogue by Harold Pinter. For those who are ignorant of the series – or indeed of France – a crash course in how to complicate life à la française follows: (this takes place in the impeccable French spoken by my good lady wife and I, although my youngest son’s serious interest in the language was halted after he learnt that “Oui oui” was French for “yes”).

EXT/INT – FERRY RECEPTION OFFICE, CALAIS. DAY

Three passengers (GENTLEMAN, BEAUTIFUL WOMAN and YOUNG BOY) dragging luggage enter the brightly-lit reception office having alighted from the P&O cross channel ferry boat we see in the background. The GENTLEMAN approaches an information office to speak to a UNIFORMED FRENCH OFFICIAL.

GENTLEMAN

Good morning. Where do we get the advertised free shuttle bus to Calais-Fréthun to get the High Speed Train to Paris, please?

OFFICIAL

The bus doesn’t run anymore.

GENTLEMAN

I see. So where can we get a taxi?

OFFICIAL

There are no taxis here. Everyone used to get the free bus, so the taxis stopped coming and the local council removed the taxi rank sign. Now they are not allowed to come here.

GENTLEMAN

I see. So how can I get a taxi, please?

OFFICIAL

I don’t know. Maybe you should phone.

GENTLEMAN

Indeed. Might you know a number?

OFFICIAL

Yes. (Long pause while OFFICIAL picks nose)

GENTLEMAN (Preparing mobile phone)

And could you perhaps give it to me?

OFFICIAL

You cannot use a mobile phone at a frontier station.

GENTLEMAN

Of course. Well could you perhaps phone for a taxi for me? I’ll give you the money.

OFFICIAL

We cannot accept money.

The GENTLEMAN is joined by the BEAUTIFUL WOMAN at the information desk. In the background the YOUNG BOY is enjoying himself skipping about in circles dragging his luggage, unaware of the drama taking place.

BEAUTIFUL WOMAN (to GENTLEMAN)

What is the problem, honey?

GENTLEMAN

We are in France.

BEAUTIFUL WOMAN (To OFFICIAL)

Can you phone a taxi, please?

OFFICIAL

Oui, oui, madame! Why did you not ask?

Similar content was repeated over the next couple of days. Back to Europe.

NOMENCLATURE CULTURE

BOTH THE PRINTED AND VISUAL MEDIA have had to reconsider their terminology in relation to the recent riots on more than one occasion over the last week. While it at one moment seemed sensible to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to use the term “British riots” or later the “UK riots” (perhaps to show that they had not yet spread to the Channel Isles or the Isle of Man), instructions have now been given to call them “English riots”, as there is, as yet, no widespread destruction in the Celtic sphere.

FURTHER HESITATION INVOLVES describing who these “rioters” are. Easy opinion falls heavily on “disaffected lower classes”, the “unemployed underclass”, “discriminated immigrant communities” and the like, but the arrest and conviction statistics are proving otherwise, driving newspaper headline-writers crazy.

WHAT DOES ONE CALL a group of rioters that includes a primary school teacher, a graphic designer, a female university student and the child of a millionaire? All of whom are in their early or mid-twenties? Are these more newsworthy than the numbers of unemployed and inarticulate white and black children from social housing estates? And if, like the BNP British National Party, we wish to use the term “immigrants”, should we point out that no Chinese are involved, even though almost every major city in the UK has a large Chinese community, and Liverpool has had one since the late XIX century.

CUDDLY ALEX SALMOND the leader of Scotland, has been particularly keen to insist on the term “English riots”, given that, as he stated yesterday: Scotland has a “different society”, adding it was unfair of broadcasters to describe the lawlessness as “UK riots” because it was an English phenomenon and Scotland has “no history of this sort of disorder”.

POLITICIANS NEVER STUDY HISTORY, so perhaps I should draw Salmond’s attention to the worst riots in British history, in Edinburgh, from 1811 to 1812. The account also serves to remind those who talk about old-fashioned values that the XVII and XVIII centuries were violent beyond anything we can imagine nowadays.

IN 1812 YOUNG THUGS, PICKPOCKETS AND THIEVES bearing knives and sticks stormed through Edinburgh looking for easy victims to attack. Dozens of children from organized gangs in the suburbs attacked, robbed and beat up passers-by “for no apparent reason”. They stole hundreds of pounds from individuals and shops, and magistrates and judges struggled to deal with the workload in court. Local newspapers and citizens groups offered huge rewards for the capture of the gang leaders, and sixty-eight arrests were made, including boys as young as 12.

THREE BOYS WERE HANGED and five were sent to Australia. Dozens were given minor punishments. The general view at the time was that there was a lack of moral values in these young people, that they had easy access to alcohol, that the upper classes, who were usually just as immoral and drunk, should provide a good example, and that more of the sheriff’s men on the streets would solve the problem. In an unconnected incident, British Prime Minister Spenser Perceval was assassinated in the House of Commons.

My picture shows Scots parliamentarians at the European summit meeting early this year.

THE SECRET POLICEMEN’S NO BALLS

THERE ARE THOSE WHO FIND A KIND of symmetry between the Toxteth, Brixton, Handsworth and Bristol riots of the early nineteen eighties and the riots raging throughout the UK at the moment. The initial similarity resides, as is obvious, in the fact that the supposed “trigger” was overbearing behaviour by the local police force, or police “service”, as we are requested to term bobbies nowadays.

COMPARISONS CONTINUE with the fact that both sets of civil disturbances have led gentlemen on the tip of the political dipstick to suggest that all of this shop-looting, school-, hospital-, and library-burning, as well as assaulting of innocent passers-by, who have been mugged even when bleeding and crying (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gex_ya4-Oo London Riots – Scum Steal from Injured Boy) is caused by the fact that these otherwise innocent youths have been unable to find work and are upset about the increase in VAT and the fact that their mothers’ benefits will be or have been cut, thus forcing them into a life of crime and to steal their Adidas or Nike trainers, replica basketball shirts, bottles of Vodka, Sony PlayStation 3 games and Blackberries.

BUT THE TRUE MIRROR IMAGE found here has to do with the timing of political attitudes towards our societies. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected after promising to change the distress in the UK caused by years of an over-spending Labour government. Thatcher’s policies meant: (a) cuts in education; (b) cuts in local transport facilities; and (c) cuts in the National Health Service.

IF WE REMOVE “THATCHER” and replace it with “Cameron” (and 2010) in the above paragraph, nothing has changed. (Thatcher was later actually removed by her own party and I would not bet against the same happening to the useless boy Cameron sometime next year.) However, another similarity is more pertinent to what is happening. Both Conservative leaders promised to be “tough on crime”, and both of them immediately followed election with a ban on police overtime pay, a reduction in basic pay and perks and a threat to reduce the size of the police force (as I insist on calling it), in Cameron’s case intending to reduce the 6,000-strong London Metropolitan Police Service by 2,000 officers in September. No wonder the police just stood around and watched in July 1981 and August 2011. That’s what they don’t get paid to do. Thatcher, of course, went back on her threat after the riots.

ROLL ON COWBOY

FOLLOWING ON FROM MY PREVIOUS POST, the imagination shown by some killers in the USA has definitely reached new heights today in (where else?) the Lone Star State of Texas. Deep in the heart, indeed, of North Texas, in Grand Prairie, a gunman opened fire, killing six people and wounding at least three others, before turning the gun on himself.

ACCORDING TO THE SPOKESMAN for the Grand Prairie Police Department, Mr John Brimmer, "This was a domestic situation that went south in a hurry." The shooting took place at Forum Roller World roller rink, which had been rented out for a private birthday party at which only family and friends were present.

I'M IN LOVE WITH A FAIRYTALE

UNLIKE IN THE USA, where occasionally someone packs a few firearms and “shoots up” a diner, restaurant, high school gymnasium, drive-in movie forecourt or, if they are really adventurous, a Ferris wheel or rollercoaster in an amusement park, we do not have a great tradition of such antics in Europe, and much less so in Norway, a country about which hardly anyone to whom I have spoken over the last few days has the slightest clue apart from a restaurant owner friend of mine who used to work on ferry boats going from Hull, in England, to “somewhere in Norway”, as he put it.

THUS THE RECENT EVENTS in Oslo and on Utoya island have come as a dual shock for all of us: A massacre? and Where?

IT WAS ONLY THIS SPRING that I read and then heard with some amazement a statement from a lady minister in the Norwegian parliament who, somewhat gloatingly, told the wider world (it was a slow news day) that Norwegian police stations had started closing at four o’clock in the afternoon as there was “nothing for the police to do” and so they could go “home to their families for early dinner”.

I SUSPECT THAT MANY POLICEMEN in Norway will be spending less time with their loved ones eating the famous Norwegian delicacy of boiled potatoes in salt water over the coming weeks and months. And perhaps they might have spent their time a little better in the past trawling through the websites that we are now discovering have existed in some numbers containing diatribes and tirades against the socialist government’s policy of altering the make-up of Norwegian society over the last five years through all-inclusive multiculturalism and multiracialism, an attitude guaranteed to anger the multitude of right wing nutters who inhabit Norway and secretly long for the SS, the Abwehr and the Gestapo Quislingism to return to their great white nation.

THE TERM “RIGHT WING NUTTER”, along with “lone wolf”, “wayward lunatic”, as well as others, are being bandied about so often by the written and visual media that it is clear there is a plan afoot to make us all – particularly the immigrant communities in traditionally closed countries – feel safe in our beds.

AT LEAST IN THE USA these events are perpetrated (perpetuated, according to Hillary Clinton just now) by maniacs in the traditional sense, who usually have the decorum to blow their own heads off after killing their teacher, the owner of the cinema which isn’t showing the latest Harry Potter movie or the ex-boyfriend who called them “spotty”, thus saving many tax dollars in expensive trials.

YET OUR NORWEGIAN ASSASSIN has made it clear that he wishes to go to court, admitting that he killed all these people but he has broken no laws and that he will make a statement to the public on Monday. The words “copycat” and “lone wolf” in the same sentence suggest flippancy on my part and on that of journalists abroad; yet Anders Behring Breivik hadn’t and hasn’t flipped: no lunatic leaves a 1500 page manifesto on the Internet, in English, Norwegian and Latin. The Norwegian – and more importantly the British – police should be busy trying to find out how many thousands of “nutters” are downloading his writings.

IN NORWAY IT IS NOT JUST boyish, insipid Eurovision hero Alexander Rybak who is in love with a fairytale beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed girlie from Norwegian mythology. At least he only bothered the wider world with his irritating voice and scratchy violin.