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.