Israel, Ukraine, North Korea, Australia, HS2 and our ancestors

26 October 2024

I wonder how much of Israel’s murderously disproportionate response to Hamas’s unexpected attack last year was due to shame at the failure of their intelligence service to have anticipated it, and how much is due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to delay criminal charges for as long as possible?

Latest reports from the UN’s humanitarian office warn that Israel’s undiscriminating bombardment of northern Gaza is “rapidly exhausting all available means for [the Palestinians’] survival” there.  Coincidentally, Netanyahu is now planning to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians from operating in Gaza and West Bank and is covering his back by attacking and antagonising a lot of other countries in the region, with attacks like air-strikes on targets in Iran, so he’s got other strings to his bow if international pressure finally succeeds in getting him to back out of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Russia’s war on Ukraine continues without any obvious signs of a solution and is threatening the existence of NATO.  Vladimir Putin is increasingly isolated and unstable and he compensates with ruthlessness so it’s vital ‘the West’ presents a calm and united front but Keir Starmer seems to be havering over missiles and other military support for Ukraine.  

This isn’t helpful when another Donald Trump presidency in America seems terrifyingly possible: polls show so small a margin between the two candidates that the Washington Post and the LA Times (which traditionally give their editorial backing to one of the parties) aren’t supporting either of them.  Why?  Because both papers are owned by billionaires who don’t want a vindictive Trump to take revenge if he wins.

Both Russia and Ukraine are suffering from battle-fatigue and, according to the UN Population Fund, Ukraine’s population is now 25% less that it was when Russia invaded the country in 2022 due to war deaths, people fleeing as refugees to other countries and a reduction in birth rates.

North Korea is now planning to sending two units (12,000 troops, 3,000 of which are already being trained) to help Russia’s war efforts.  Kim Jung Il’s support for Russia may not be entirely thanks to his unbounded generosity but because he wants his army to have experience of killing foreign people, which they haven’t been able to do for a long time.  But it’ll give the braver ones a chance to defect …

More news came recently about the future of HS2 and I couldn’t resist the headline in one newspaper (not the Sun):  “Euston, we have a problem”.

The line is currently planned to terminate in the sunny uplands of Willesden Junction and the curiously named Old Oak Common but the Treasury is reconsidering whether the original plan to extend it to Euston should be resurrected.  Rail industry leaders have claimed this will make more money for the government from leasing out the line.

Opponents have pointed out the Euston is already one of the worst designed and most crowded stations in London and offers passengers almost the same rewards as changing trains at Birmingham New Street (anybody who’s ever done this with a heavy suitcase will know that ‘joyful’ is rarely the first word people use to describe the experience.)

More amusing was the rumpus caused in Australia when an indigenous senator heckled the king on his recent visit, saying Brits had stolen Aboriginal land.  Of course we did:  we did the same in North America and committed, or attempted, genocide elsewhere in what became the British Empire, from Africa to India.  America rebelled against Britain’s colonisation and, after a civil war, ultimately became the United States of America, though it’s difficult nowadays to understand what made them think they were ‘United’.

Other European countries also built their own empires and we all kidnapped people and used more than a thousand ships over many years to transport more than 12 million of them overseas;  those who survived the crossing then became slaves of the white occupiers.

I don’t feel any responsibility for what my ancestors did or didn’t do but I would be perfectly happy to offer my apologies and regrets for what was done by them, or with their knowledge, and admit to a feeling of embarrassment that we Europeans are so primitive that we thought ourselves superior to others.  Sadly, it’s not so far from what our own monarchs (and the brown-nosed ‘aristocracy’ who were appointed by monarchs) stole from our own peasant ancestors, including the land from which they had previously made a living.

Isn’t it curious that some ‘aristocratic’ families claim to be able to trace their roots back to William the Conker as if it’s a big deal, even though he was French;  how many people claim they’re descended from Harold, who was ‘English’ before W the C? 

Do the sums:  if we assume average families grow by four generations a century, 958 years ago we had over a trillion ancestors, far more than the population of the entire world (which is, even now, only 8.2 billion people).  This, of course, raises another interesting question which I won’t answer now but, if we also allow for the comparatively limited movements of people which means we’re less likely to be descended from Japanese emperors than we are from King Harold, the chances are we must all be able to trace our roots back to Harold (and William) so we’re all related and you, dear reader, are probably my 18^th cousin twice removed.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this.

One pleasure this week was to learn that scientists have discovered that a massive dust cloud in the centre of our own galaxy contains ethyl formate.  I actually knew that this chemical is contained in rum essence but apparently it can also smell like raspberries and, when combined with other chemicals, smells like horse pee.

If and when this dust cloud coalesces into a planet, its inhabitants will smell fruity, be permanently drunk and keep dashing off behind bushes.

UK parliamentary chaos, Russian killers and stupid politicians

24 February 2024

A crazy week but, for once, common sense overrode history.

The UK parliament’s proceedings are governed by a rule book (called Erskine May*) which allows minority parties to ‘lead’ business for a day and put forward ‘opposition day motions’.  So far so good.  Then you get to Catch 22 which says that only one amendment can be proposed and amendments proposed by the government override everybody else’s.  It’s like saying to a child “Today, we’ll do whatever you want to do, but only if I want to do it and, if I don’t, we’ll do what I want to do.”

This week, the Scottish National Party proposed that the UK call for an end to fighting in the Gaza / Israel war.  The Conservative and Labour parties both approved the principle but proposed minor, non-substantive, amendments to the wording.  Because the Conservatives currently form the government, the Labour amendment should have been cast aside but many MPs across the House had received personal threats in connection with the motion.

Keir Starmer, as leader of the opposition, put his concerns to Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House, who took what seems to me to be the very sensible decision to ignore bureaucratic precedents and allow both amendments to be discussed.

Cue uproar.  Rishi Sunak said parliament couldn’t allow extremists to intimidate it into changing the way it works (even, presumably, if it left some dead MPs at the side of the road) so a lot of Conservatives left the room and Labour’s amendment was passed. 

One government minister later admitted (unattributably) that “We’re not as angry as we’re pretending” but Hoyle subsequently apologised for breaking with tradition and there have been calls for his resignation;  on Thursday, 67 MPs had called for a vote of no confidence or, to put it another way, 583 MPs didn’t give a hoot.  Indeed, an MP on the right wing of the Conservatives, Mark Francois, spoke of the recent murder of his friend and fellow MP David Amess, and said “I will remember everything that the speaker did to help me and all of us when our great friend, my best friend, was murdered … Mr Speaker went the extra mile for all of us to help us all deal with that tragedy.”

Even Prince William, the heir to Britain’s throne, called on Wednesday for an end to the fighting in Gaza, an interesting comment from a family that tends to avoid saying anything that might be seen as political or contentious, even though some of them use homeopathy and others talk to trees.

The principle behind the motion was of course unarguably worthy, to bring an end to the killing in the Middle East, but for all the effect it would have on those doing the killing, it was like Violet Elizabeth Bott threatening “I’ll thcream and thcream and thcream till I’m thick”.

Why does this remind me of Liz Truss who still thinks she was right all along despite having introduced a budget that led to the instant collapse of financial markets and being forced out after just 7 weeks as prime minister.  In an opinion piece published by Fox News while she was in America last week, she even confessed her belief that “the left” are embedded in the UK’s administrative state and “the deep state” and says “I saw this for myself first hand as they sabotaged my efforts in Britain to cut taxes, reduce the size of government and restore democratic accountability.”

Is this a genuine belief that there’s a loony left conspiracy in a “deep state” (which is so useless it’s failed to bring down the government for 14 years) or just the paranoia of a failed leader who thought she was the only one in step?

This in turn makes me think of Vladimir Putin who has denied any implication in the death of Alexei Navalny, widely believed to have been murdered by Putin, a belief that’s helped by Russia’s refusal to release his body for two weeks while ‘chemical tests’ were carried out, which we all assume were to ensure that all traces of Novichok had disappeared from his body.  His widow, Yulia Navalnaya has vowed to continue her husband’s fight and a lot of pressure was brought on her by Putin’s gang to attend a solitary funeral as the only mourner, while they pointed at a coffin being lowered into the ground and said “He’s in there, say goodbye”.

Most western leaders have blamed Putin for his death although a former leader, Donald Trump, refused to comment in an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News.

Coincidentally, a Russian pilot who had defected from Russia to the Ukraine last year and taken refuge in Spain was shot dead there last week and Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, said: “This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse at the very moment when he planned his dirty and terrible crime.”  Oh well, that’s all right then.

More sad news came when three court of appeal judges ruled that the Home Secretary at the time, Sajid Javid, was not acting outwith his powers when he revoked Shamima Begum’s British citizenship.  But there’s still hope because they made it clear their decision was based solely on the extent of a Home Secretary’s powers, not on the facts of her case, and they admitted they’d not considered the credible claims that, when she was 15, Begum “was recruited, transferred and then harboured for the purpose of sexual exploitation” which breached the anti-slavery protection of British law introduced to protect people who have been groomed and trafficked.

Dominic Raab, once Foreign Secretary whose management style was bullying, isn’t standing again as an MP and has found a job in a company which has offered him a salary of £118,000 if he takes an expensive training course, declared in register of interests as ‘worth’ £20,000.  They’ve obviously got his weaknesses sussed – you can get a LOT of training for that much money.

*          First introduced 180 years ago by Thomas Erskine May, the 25^th edition was published in 2019, so it can be updated and changed.

Kindness, transphobia, dying in Alabama, love, money and repentance

10 February 2024

An impressive example of kindness and compassion was reported this week when Esther Ghey’s, Brianna’s mother, said she’d be open to meeting the mother of one of the teenage thugs who horrifically murdered her daughter to tell her she “does not blame her for what her child has done”. 

Brianna Ghey was an ‘out and proud’ transgender girl and the judge decided this was the “driving force” behind her “exceptionally brutal” killing.  The two murderers, whom I refuse to humanise with names, were given sentences of 22 and 20 years.

This kindness was disappointingly balanced by the unkindness and insensitivity which Rishi Sunak demonstrated at Prime Minister’s Questions last week when, even knowing that Brianna’s mother was in the gallery, he implicitly showed his transphobia and then refused to apologise.

My heart also goes out to Brianna herself, imagining what she must have suffered in the last few minutes of her life as she was repeatedly stabbed and bled to death.

Have we learned nothing since various prophets and leaders preached peace and understanding?  I have no more right to impose my views about, say, trans people on other people than they have to impose their views on me?  We can discuss our differences but failing to accept another’s views doesn’t justify a death sentence. 

You might remember that I wrote last September about the state of Alabama spending over an hour in 2022 trying to find a vein into which they could insert the needle full of poison that would kill Kenneth Smith.  (You have to be a very special sort of person to be prepared to do that.)

Well, they beat him in the end and killed Smith on 25 January using nitrogen gas, previously untested on humans but claimed by the state to be “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised”.  It took him 22 minutes to die, during which an eye-witness reported that he “writhed and convulsed on the gurney. He took deep breaths, his body shaking violently with his eyes rolling in the back of his head.”

Rev. Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, who was present during the execution, said prison officials in the room “were visibly surprised at how bad this thing went.”

When our older dog’s time had come, the vet gave her an injection and she fell asleep and died in less than a minute with no visible discomfort.  He said it was a mixture of a barbiturate and a diazepine and you’d think that, somewhere in Alabama, somebody would be clever enough to wonder if this would be a painless and fast way to kill a person.

I rather admire our new king who has broken tradition by announcing he’s had treatment for an enlarged prostate so as to encourage other men of a certain age to get theirs tested.  He’s also been found to have cancer, though its location and stage haven’t been released.  Wouldn’t it be great if people generally did admit to their medical problems, particularly with mental health, to reduce the social stigma sometimes attached to them and demonstrate just how many people are currently suffering in silence.

An incidental benefit of this might be to realise that your nearest and dearest has a shorter life expectancy than you’d hoped so we should all tell people today that we love them before it’s too late, even if they already know.

Keir Starmer seems almost as determined to undermine Labour’s chances at the next election as the Conservatives are.  His watering down a commitment to funding green energy has sadly overshadowed his commitment to allow everyone a right to equal pay.  I didn’t know that Conservatives believed black, Asian and minority ethnic workers and disabled people aren’t worth the same as white Brits so they can be paid less.  How disgusting is that!

A new government will also need money to repair what’s been broken by the Conservatives in the last 13 years, perhaps starting with the NHS, and that might mean previous pledges would have to be updated.

The Tories have become adept at sneaking tax increases under the counter while boasting about tax cuts.  For example, over the last few years, they’ve given local authorities more ‘autonomy’, or responsibility for providing local services, but failed to give them enough money to do this so all of us council tax payers have to pay more for them.

They’ve also taken money from us by increasing the age at which people can claim the state pension.  The UK pension age was 65, is now 66, is set to rise to 67 between 2026 and 2028 and possibly to 71 by 2041, not just because people are living longer but because nobody dared do the sums to show the chances that, when every child born in any year, they would claim a pension 65 (as it was) years later.  Why was this so difficult?  Because it was after the next general election and getting themselves re-elected was more important to politicians than the future of the country.

Sadly, one person who only qualified for his pension last year died in January.  I first discovered Erwin James when he regularly wrote his humane – and often very funny – articles in the Guardian about his life in prison.  After his release, he wrote about his shit childhood and the descent into crime that ultimately led to his receiving in 1984 a sentence of 14 years for murder when he gave himself up after he’d spent some years hiding in the Foreign Legion.   The sentence was later increased to 25 years and subsequently reduced to 20 for good behaviour – he was only lucky not to live in Alabama.

While he was incarcerated and still facing many years in prison, James discovered the joys of the education he’d never had, worked hard, was awarded an Open University degree in history and started writing.  On his release in 2004, he became a journalist and writer, and wrote about his life in ‘A Life Inside’ (2003), ‘The Home Stretch’ (2005) and ‘Redeemable’ (2016).

The world needs more people like James and fewer people like … (fill in the name(s) of your unfavouritest people here).

Stupidity, unBrexiting, Ig Nobel prizes and roadside smiles

16 September 2023

One wonders if political leaders are born stupid it or whether they acquire stupidity to get to the top.

Back in 2020, when he was in charge of the money, Rishi Sunak was asked for funding to rebuild seven hospitals which were structurally dangerous.  He blocked all but two of the requests, leaving five hospitals where the risk of “catastrophic” collapse had been assessed as “likely”.  Doesn’t he realise that, if things go wrong, most patients in private hospitals get transferred to the local NHS hospital which has emergency facilities?  Can’t you just imagine bleeding Sunak (sorry, haemorrhaging Sunak) waiting on a gurney in a corridor wondering if Chicken Little was right.

As I flitted past the TV last week while it was entertaining my wife with Prime Minister’s Questions, I thought how futile (and expensive) the whole charade is.  Keir Starmer asks specific questions which Sunak ignores, replying with some very selective – and utterly irrelevant – information about how wonderful the government is.

Then, on the following day, we heard the good news that Britain is at last being allowed to rejoin the EU Horizon programme for scientific collaboration (as an associate member) after a 5-year hiatus while Britain was setting up the patently nonsensical £14bn Pioneer programme which was supposed to make us a scientific “global superpower” all on our own, without any collaboration with experts across the water.

We’ve already seen a step back in the ‘Windsor accords’ over Northern Ireland which allow NI to effectively remain in both the EU and the UK markets (and NI now has the fastest growth rate of any UK region outside London).

Plans for a new ‘UKCA’, a UK-branded kitemark, have also been scrapped after businesses pointed out that stuff being exported to the EU would still need the EU-kitemark, the CE, and proposals to scrap 4,000 EU-inspired laws en masse have disappeared.

Some small steps towards recovering what the UK lost to Brexit.

I don’t know how GBNews has reported these about-turns but was interested to hear that some advertisers are boycotting the right-wing channel because it’s facing multiple investigations by OfCom.  Surely there must be advertisers that actually want to appeal to the sort of people that watch it?  Don’t we have free speech and reporting any more?

Actually, it seems we don’t since we also learnt this week from a former head of Sky News that Buckingham Palace censors news reports.  Live reporting is obviously uncensored but the Palace then forbids certain images from being repeated later.  At this point, my imagination starts to run loose.  What would they edit out?  Prince George yawning?  Camilla adjusting her knicker elastic?  Andrew groping a young woman?  Anything with Harry in it?

I was fascinated to hear that Kim Jon-Un travelled in an armoured train to meet Vladimir Putin.  What a brilliant way of keeping their Dear Leader safe – drone attacks would just bounce off it.  What about a drone destroying a bridge over a deep ravine immediately ahead of the speeding train?  Anybody think of that?

Seeing the northern lights is one of the things on my bucket list but those likely to be visible in Britain this week aren’t expected to be seen this far south.  Shame.  By the way, did you know that the colour of the lights depend on which gas molecules are hit by the particles hurtling into our atmosphere on the solar wind?  When they interact with oxygen, the light is green while, with nitrogen, the light is red.

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were announced this week and included Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist from Southampton University, who revealed that, while the 18th-century Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino use to lick rocks to identify the minerals them by taste, modern geologists wet rocks show the contrasts between different minerals more clearly.  Those of us who habitually pick up stones on the beach to admire them and lick dry ones to bring out their colours could have qualified for that award.

The award for medicine went to researchers who counted the number of hairs in each nostril of cadavers to see if people had the same number on each side.  Imagine what you say when you meet the king and he asks what you do:  “I open the noses of dead people to count the hairs in them”.

The literature prize went to researchers looking into why common words become meaningless when you write or speak them several times (try it:  write or say the word ‘moon’ repeatedly 30-40 times and see what happens.)  They described the feeling rather cleverly as ‘jamais vu’.

Our reactions to words are interesting.  For example, puns are often derided but clever ones can raise a smile, or a groan.  In Colorado, the Indian Hills Community Centre near the town of Morrison, has a sign by the roadside where a sign shows messages intended to make people smile.

Here’s an example that doesn’t need a pun:

THE BMI CHART

ON MY DOCTOR’S WALL

SAYS I’M TOO SHORT

And here’s one that does:

IN SEARCH OF

FRESH VEGETABLE PUNS.

LETTUCE KNOW

The creative force behind these signs is Vince Rozmiarek, a Colorado native and volunteer at the community centre.  It started as an April Fool five years ago but they were so surprised by the reaction that he now changes the signs once or twice a week.

“It is hard to keep coming up with material,” he says “but I do try.”

There are lots more on their website (and circulating on WhatsApp and the internet) but here’s one of my favourites:

WHAT I IF TOLD

YOU

YOU READ THE TOP

LINE WRONG

And, for more serious-minded readers, here’s a tip for people who clean their cars:  a dab of mayonnaise on a cloth apparently removes tar spots from cars.  I haven’t tried it and can’t vouch for it because my approach to cleaning cars is – much to the despair of our petrolhead son-in-law – similar to Joan Rivers’ view of housework:  “I hate housework:  you make the beds and do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.”

Billionaires, greed, sewage, Trump, fêtes, bells and trees

13 May 2023

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism is a book written by the independent senator Bernie Sanders, the great white hope of the American left.  In it he asserts that billionaires shouldn’t exist and, when questioned by Chris Wallace on HBO Max recently, he was asked: “Are you basically saying that once you get to $999m that the government should confiscate all the rest?”  His reply?  “Yeah, you may disagree with me but, fine, I think people can make it on $999m. I think that they can survive just fine.”

Why are there so few of us who are tempted to cheer when we hear this said publicly and have no desire to be billionaires ourselves?  I too believe everybody could scrape by on $999m (we manage well on a tiny fraction of that), and I think it’s sad that so few otherwise intelligent people agree.

So many company directors seem to over-value themselves that it’s become acceptable for them to take obscene amounts of money out of the company.  This week pig-in-chief seems to be Ken Murphy, boss of Tesco.  Last year, Tesco’s profits fell by 50% despite charging customers 7% more, and dividends paid to shareholders (the owners) were cut by 12%.  The company said it’s been an “incredibly tough year for customers” (but failed to add the management had done very nicely thank you.)

Now these figures are known and the value of customers’ Tesco points is being cut by a third Murphy’s likely to get at least 15% more next year, around £5m.

But are all the accusations of irresponsibility and greed beginning to shame them?

The chief executives of Yorkshire Water and Thames Water and the owner of South West Water have declined bonuses this year because of the publicity given to their practice of dumping unwanted sewage into rivers and onto beaches. 

And the Post Office has reluctantly admitted it was wrong to have paid large bonuses to its directors after it falsely charged more than 900 local post office operators with theft between 1991 and 2015 because the PO’s own Horizon computer systems didn’t work properly. 

Nick Read, the CEO has now agreed to return some (not all, naturally) of the bonus he got last year and Lisa Harrington, who chaired the committee that approved the bonuses, has resigned (sorry, in a fit of optimism, I misread that) apologised.

Back in America, Donald Trump has finally been proved a sexual predator even though the jury didn’t think there was enough evidence to convict him of rape.  Nevertheless, he was fined a punitive $5m, about $2m for the sexual abuse and close to $3m for defamation by branding E Jean Carroll a liar. 

Almost 40 other criminal charges against him are currently being investigated, from fraud to theft (fiddling his taxes), including an earlier outstanding claim from Carroll but the more criminal he’s shown to be, the more popular he seems to become.  Are convicted criminals allowed to serve as president over there?

Last weekend, my younger son came down from London with my daughter-in-law and grand-daughter (known by my wife as ‘the pocket rocket’) to avoid the coronation so I took them to the village celebrations. 

As so often happens at these things, we were joined by a retired couple and started talking.  They said they were “Russian British” who had both been university lecturers until they moved here 9 years ago.  He turned out to be interested in Russian science fiction which is part of one of my son’s specialist subjects.

She’d taught applied maths and IT so we talked about AI and quantum computing;  well, she did while I prompted her with suitable questions about how ‘spooky action at a distance’ and the complementarity of electrons might affect technology. 

On Wednesday Big Ben failed to sound at 1pm when the clock stopped and it was 1.47pm before the hands had been moved forward to the correct time. 

When I was even younger than I am now, our local church didn’t have bells but it did have some large loudspeakers in its spire and a gramophone down below where they’d play records of bells to attract the faithful to worship.  I’m not going to say where it was but if any of you were ever woken late one evening by the Everly Brothers’ boogie rock rendering of ‘Lucille’ played very loudly, I hope you enjoyed it.

Some interesting work is going on in a Utah forest of 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens.  Scientists are wondering if they are actually just a single organism and the ‘trees’ are the branches of a single interlinked root system.

This week also sees the publication of a new book, The Power of Trees, by the German forester Peter Wohlleben who also published The Hidden Life of Trees in 2015.  It describes trees’ ability to help cool the earth with the volume of water released from the leaves:  a single beech tree can ‘breathe out’ 500 litres of water a day.  This release of water also lowers the atmospheric pressure round the tree, drawing in air as a slight breeze.

In forests, the change in air pressure sucks in air from the oceans which then returns water to the trees as rain in a natural virtuous circle.  On Primrose Hill, the air under a single tree can be 2^o cooler than in the open park and the temperature in an ancient woodland can be 15^o cooler than in the centre of a city.  Next time you’re passing a tree, give it a pat and say “thank you”.

Tuesday’s Guardian reported that, in June 2022, the then Prince Charles and the then prime minister Boris Johnson had argued because the “… Prince of Wales had criticised the plan to deport people travelling across the Channel to Rwanda”.  I’ve travelled across the channel quite a lot but have never yet come ashore in Rwanda.

I have to explain this because I showed it to a friend who didn’t see the syntactical problem.  Mind you, this is the same friend who heard someone talking about contraception and decided the best type of oral contraception would be to say “NO” very loudly and, in case this didn’t work, he offered a few choice phrases that might convey the message more strongly.

Monarchs, politicians, Ukrainian talent, sewage and creative writing

6 May 2023

The coronation of King Charles III took place earlier today and no deaths were reported.  Years ago, it was thought he might be King George VII but he obviously changed his mind at some point (monarchs allowed to reign under any one of their given names – so David became Edward VIII and Bertie became George VI).  It was also thought that his environmental concerns might mean he and Camilla would cycle down from the palace, taking a short-cut across St James’s Park to avoid the crowds, but this too seems to have been overoptimistic and anyway it rained on their parade.

Charles has previously said that, while he remains “a committed Anglican”, the sovereign has a “duty to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space for faith itself and its practice through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds direct us as individuals.”  He added “By my most profound convictions … I hold myself bound to respect those who follow other spiritual paths, as well as those who seek to live their lives in accordance with secular ideals.”

What rather spoilt the day was the stupid suggestion that, all over the country, people should pledge allegiance to the King.  I know it wasn’t his idea but what a load of bollocks.  Shouldn’t he be pledging allegiance to us?

There were also some local elections this week in which the Conservatives were thrashed.  In some areas, local Conservative candidates had even preferred their commitment to the greater good of their party over their own personal ambitions (not) by standing for re-election as Independents because they thought they stood a better chance of holding on to their seats that way. 

I realise that, of course, they just wanted to carry on doing good things for their community and self-aggrandisement didn’t come into it but it does remind me of Saki’s description of somebody who was “one of those people who went round doing good to people;  you could tell them by their haunted looks.”

In the end, the Tories were gratifyingly humiliated but, of course, local elections are not reliable in forecasting the results of general elections.

While I’m talking about self-interest, I couldn’t help but notice that South West Water has just been fined £2.1m for a series of environmental offences across Devon and Cornwall which mean I can no longer swim safely in local rivers or on our beaches.  The problems were caused, according to the Environment Agency, by “numerous common deficiencies in the implementation of SWW’s management systems”.

Now we have to guess whether SWW’s management will pay the fine out of their own pockets because they were to blame or whether they’ll increase their salaries and the fine will be passed on to those of us who pay SWW for water and sewage disposal.  I wonder if they could be sued for breach of contract for not disposing of our sewage properly…

But to happier news.

A Northumberland couple, Sheilagh Matheson and Chris Roberts, offered accommodation last year to a Ukrainian mother and her two daughters.  Having heard they were a musical family, they offered the use of their honky-tonk pub piano but, a few days before they arrived, they were sent a video of Khrystyna Mykhailichenko, then 14, playing Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto (a very pretty work but beyond the reach of beginners).

Matheson realised they obviously needed a rather better piano so she asked around and has said “the musical fraternity in Northumberland, of which I am not part, were incredibly helpful. A couple contacted us and said, ‘We’ve got a Steinway upright that you can have.’  That was duly delivered.”

Khrystyna, now 17, has been awarded a full bursary for four years to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London and Sasha, her 12-year-old violinist sister, has a scholarship to become a weekly boarder at the Yehudi Menuhin School near Leatherhead in Surrey.

Another happy thing is that every one of us is supposed to have an unwritten novel inside us.  I’m not sure who said this but I don’t think I have, though I did wake up at 3 the other night with the outline for a great novel and repeated it to myself so I wouldn’t forget it, then went back to sleep and forgot it.

But there are other ways of writing that offer different challenges, and take much less time (something I consider an essential for anything I take on). For instance, a couple of years ago I took up a local challenge to write a 500-word story on the subject of ‘Memory’.  Keeping it that short was quite hard but I did it.  I naturally didn’t win the competition but I was quite proud of wot I’d writ.  Another even greater challenge is to write a story in 50 words.  Many years ago, I organised a competition within a branch of a charity I used to work with and the entries were remarkably good.  (I was hoping to include one of them here to show you what can be done in 50 words but I can’t find them.)

It’s not the quantity of words that matter, it’s the quality.  Did any of you ever see the show STOMP?  I saw it twice and loved it.  No words – it’s all mimed while complex rhythms are hammered out on radiators and kitchen sinks and scaffold tubes – and it’s very funny in places: quite brilliant.  If you ever get a chance, hie thee to the ticket office.

I also read recently of a performance by the Colin Currie quartet which involved 4 drummers, one in each corner of the auditorium, which also sounds quite an exciting concept.

Another interesting way to write within a given structure is to pick a line from … any existing song / poem / novel … and write a piece that leads up to and ends with the line(s) you’ve chosen.  Examples could be:

“Do you still see my silhouette, when your lashes start to close?”  (Graham Weber)

“She said to her father ‘No questions, no lies’;  she drove a T-bird with the top down, cold beer between her thighs.”  (Sam Baker)

“Last time I felt like this, I was in the wilderness, and the canyon was on fire.”  (Emmylou Harris)

It won’t make you rich – or even get published – but it’s a great way to spend wet Friday afternoons.

Another wonderful week, and a smile

29 October 2022

Our third prime minister in three months took office this week – Italy eat your heart out. A cartoon showed the king meeting Rishi Sunak and saying “One hears that your wife is richer than one’s mama”.

Most of the wealth he shares with his wife comes from her father’s business, Infosys, which was founded by her father in 1981.  While Sunak had to be shown recently how to use a contactless card, his in-laws live a very modest life.  N R Narayana Murthy and his wife Sudha have lived in the same flat for decades and he drives a small car.  The only reported difference in their lifestyles is that their flat is now filled with books and his commitment to philanthropy has come to the fore with his having said “The real power of money is in giving it away”.

No doubt his time at Winchester and Oxford will have cured Sunak of any such nonsense.

To everyone’s great relief, Boris Johnson withdrew from the leadership contest after apparently failing to get enough support, saying “ … in the course of the last days I have sadly come to the conclusion that this would simply not be the right thing to do.”  A new Johnson!   Concerned about “the right thing to do”!  Perhaps leopards do change their spots.  Perhaps pigs will fly.

The only bum note so far is Sunak’s reappointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary.  Six days earlier, she was fired from the post for multiple and serious breaches of the ministerial code on the security of market sensitive information.  Although Sunak told parliament she’d declared her error and repented, she actually fessed up only after the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, had challenged her about it.

But let’s give Sunak a clean sheet to start with and see how he deals with all the other problems he’s inherited. 

One of these is the controversial public order bill which will add to the restrictions introduced by the new police, crime sentencing and courts act.  Their combined effect will be to criminalise carrying a bike lock or superglue with intent, or making a loud noise, so heaven help anybody who sings as they cycle home from the DIY shop.

The right-wing has condemned some road-blocking demonstrations saying they delayed ambulances responding to emergencies, a claim the Ambulance Service has described as “farcical”.

It seems traditional Conservative values are still alive and kicking as Lee Anderson, a Tory MP, asked whether female representation in parliament would “increase or decrease” if Eddie Izzard were elected an MP and he told Talk TV he “would not follow him [sic] into the toilets”, presumably because he considers himself so devastatingly attractive that Izzard would be unable to keep her hands off him.  Izzard actually identifies as female and uses women’s lavatories, which means Anderson himself must habitually use ‘the Ladies’ if he’s worried about following Izzard in.

And in Jacob Rees-Mogg, the then business secretary, who saw the writing on the wall and resigned.  He then hopped up to the back benches and, when a fellow Conservative MP, Richard Graham, questioned the practicality of repealing and replacing more than 2,000 pieces of EU law within the next 14 months, accused him of refusing to accept Brexit, thereby totally missing the point. 

Rees-Mogg had been attempting to get the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill enacted;  this would require the replacement of more than 2,000 laws covering almost everything from holiday pay rights to environmental protections to aircraft safety.  Luckily, it seems Sunak is likely to de-prioritise the Bill.

(Lawyers behind the original concept of EU-retained law have described the new Bill as “anti-democratic” and “completely barking”.)

Northern Ireland of course doesn’t even have a government in Stormont at the moment because the Democratic Unionist Party still refuse to share power with Sinn Féin who won more seats than they did.  I wonder which parts of ‘democracy’ and ‘union’ they don’t understand.

Germany is planning to legalise cannabis for recreational use while some UK politicians (none of whom, I’m sure, ever use nicotine or drink alcohol) are trying to get it reclassified as a Class A drug.  Wouldn’t it be more sensible for medical scientists to take an objective look at all drugs, including ‘natural’ and ‘processed’ ones, that are available legally or illegally (or only on prescription) and come up with a rather more sensible classification than the sledgehammer approach of the politically motivated Class A/B/C system?

The new Bond Street station on the Elizabeth line in London finally opened on Monday, four years and an estimated £570m over the original budget of £110m.  And that’s just one station.  Then try not to think of HS2 and restricted increases in state benefits.

We also heard that Salman Rushdie has lost his sight in one eye and the use of one hand after being stabbed about 15 times in the neck and chest at a lecture in New York in the summer.  I read ‘Midnight’s Children’ and enjoyed the first half but found the second half very heavy going and haven’t read any of his other books since.  It had won the Booker prize in 1981 and has been lauded ever since, which just goes to show what a philistine I am, but not why anybody should stick a knife in him even if he did subsequently write ‘Satanic Verses’ – it’s just another book.  I wish him well. 

Some students at Penn State university in America are protesting because Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group Proud Boys was invited to speak at a college meeting last week.  My immediate reaction was that anybody should be allowed to speak even if you disagree with what they might say.  Then I thought of the benefits arising from Donald Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and wondered how open-minded I actually am, particularly since Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, is apparently considering reversing Trump’s ban. 

The number of people killed in clashes with police fell by more than half and the number of people resisting arrest fell by almost two thirds when police in the São Paulo state in Brazil were fitted with body cameras.  The far-right candidate who is the favourite to become São Paulo’s next governor, a Covid-denier, is talking about removing them to give the police more freedom of action.  Another idea for Trump here.

Did you know that, like lizards, some scorpions can shed their tails when attacked but, unlike lizards, their anuses are in their tails so they are doomed to die of constipation?  The researchers who discovered this were awarded the 2022 Ig Nobel prize in biology. 

And a smile.  The actor Bill Nighy is currently promoting ‘Living’ and, in one interview, said with dry self-deprecation that he’d gone alone to Paris when he was 17 “to write the great English short story”.  Well, it made me smile.

Another anointment, broken records, an underdressed climber and winning insults

23 October 2022

What a wonderful week for cynics – if you didn’t finish reading any day’s paper, you could put it out for recycling and go straight on to the next day’s paper because so much had changed again overnight.

What we tend to forget is that all MPs work for us as public servants and we pay their salaries and fiddled expenses.  They have no right to our respect, they need to earn it by doing what’s best for the country.  Which is not what they’re doing at the moment and why, when my wife called out “She’s gone!”, our cleaner punched the air and said “Yeah!”

By resigning, Truss can now claim two records by becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister ever and by reducing support for the Conservatives to the lowest level ever seen in the polls.  At least she had confirmed to parliament on the previous day that the triple lock on pensions would remain, although she failed to confirm disability benefits would also rise in line with inflation;  which just goes to show the priorities of a government that relies on the geriatric (sorry ‘grey’) vote and couldn’t care less about people with disabilities.

Until she resigned, the shortest-serving prime minister was George Canning whose sole term lasted 119 days in 1827 but he at least had the excuse that he died of TB.  (The BBC website originally reported that “Canning had served for 119 days after dying in 1827” but, sadly, somebody spotted the error and corrected it.)

With their recent repeated failures in choosing competent leaders, even the Tories must now be beginning to wonder if there’s a better way to choose them.  It’s a pity their rules don’t have an emergency clause to cover the loss of a leader within (say) three months.  This would cover the sudden death of a newly-elected leader and could allow the person who came second to take over as prime minister.  It would also help avoid yet another undignified scramble for power.

Actually, a general election would be the fairest way of finding one that a majority of the electorate actually wants but the Conservatives daren’t do this because they’ve made themselves so unpopular that they might disappear up their own ballot boxes.  What they are doing this time, with their usual blithe disregard for everybody, including party members, is abbreviating the process to leave only three possibles, each of whom will know only that almost 75% of their MPs didn’t want them and voted for somebody else. 

With their backs to the wall and all polls showing the Conservatives would be obliterated at a general election, this would seem the ideal time to change the electoral system from ‘first past the post’ to proportional representation.  A PR voting system would almost certainly give Conservatives more seats than the polls are suggesting they’d get at the moment and it would ensure fair representation of Tory (and other) voters for the foreseeable future.

However, they’re now so desperate that there’s even talk, apparently serious, of resurrecting the compulsively deceitful Boris Mimi MiToo Johnson, the man who fractured the Conservative party, dithered throughout his term, made stupid decisions, abandoned some 50,000 people in Afghanistan, was ultimately fired for having been caught breaking the law and whose conduct is still subject to another investigation.  So he’s scuttled back from a beach in the Dominican Republic with indecent haste to round up the loonies.

May it please all the gods anyone can think of, don’t let them be so stupid as to let Boris loose again.  

The health secretary Thérèse Coffey has admitted (as she puffed on a fat cigar) giving leftover antibiotics to a friend and has been accused by one doctor of “monumental stupidity”.  Even I remember that we’re told to complete the course so how come she had any spare?

The only saving grace they managed to find this week was when Jeremy Hunt, the latest Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked a reasonable question in parliament and just said “I don’t know but I’ll find out” before sitting down again.  What a brilliantly honest response, something even his greatest critics can surely accept as a point in his favour.  He’s not standing for PM but wouldn’t be nice if whoever gets the job feels able to show the same honesty?

Other news included Ghislaine Maxwell saying of Prince Andrew “I accept that this friendship could not survive my conviction. He is paying such a price for the association. I consider him a dear friend. I care about him.”  With friends like her, who needs enemies?

She then went on to complain about the service offered by her prison …

In South Korea, the Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi shinned up a wall without wearing the headscarf ‘required’ by Iran’s male theocracy (who are so insecure they think they’d lose ‘their’ women if other people could see how beautiful they are).  She said her not wearing a hijab was “unintentional” but, on her return to Tehran, she was hailed as a hero by people demonstrating against the arrest of Mahsa Amini for being improperly dressed and her subsequent death in custody.  Rekabi’s friends and supporters now fear for her safety and her brother has been summoned to an intelligence agency office. 

British protestors from the climate action group Just Stop Oil blocked a motorway and were attacked by Suella Braverman, who was still home secretary at the time, who said “I’m afraid it’s the Labour party, it’s the Lib Dems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, wokerati* – dare I say the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.”  The patronising berk then had to resign after she admitted sending classified material from her personal email account.

Truss had invented and condemned an “anti-growth coalition” that she thinks lives in North London and takes taxis and Boris Johnson dissed the “Islington remainers”* in an attempt (which seems to resonate with many on the right) to blame Brexit remainers for failing to accept the vote and causing the covid pandemic and the economic chaos that helped him onto the slippery slope to dismissal.  All the remainers we know regret the stupidity of Brexit but accept we have to live with it and try to find ways of minimising the economic and political problems it’s caused.

How sad that senior Tories have to stoop to pointless soundbites in their attempt to regain popularity.

A letter in the next day’s Guardian asked if King Charles III might have more prime ministers than his mother.

Now, to take our minds off the Westminster shitstorm, here’s a thought for you:  I (and probably you) have more than the average number of legs for a human.

*          In the interests of full disclosure, I must say I have never voted Conservative, I read the Guardian, I like tofu, I once lived part-time in Islington and I voted remain.

Celebrations for a Grey Day

8 October 2022

As the Conservative party self-destructs, let’s look at the odd bits of cheering news that have surfaced recently.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has calculated that the not-budget will give the richest households £2,290 more and the poorest £13 more, and Liz Truss has refused to raise the level at which we start to pay tax or to confirm benefits will be increased in line with inflation, thus making the poor poorer while the rich … er, no, hang on a minute, try again.

At the conference Truss wore a dress that appeared to be identical to the one worn by Emma Thompson in her role as Vivienne Rook, the fascist prime minister of the dystopian BBC drama ‘Years and Years’.  This comment has been criticised as an example of continuing misogyny in the media, except that the comment wasn’t about what she was wearing per se, it was about a comparison with a fictional fascist in a TV drama of which she might not even have been aware.

Anyway, The Woman in The Dress has reacted swiftly to allegations that one of her ministers was guilty of “serious misconduct” at last week’s Conservative party conference and has sacked him pending an investigation.  There’s a lesson for Boris Johnson there.

Encouraged, one suspects, by his lawyers, Elon Musk has U-turned again and reinstated his $44bn (£38bn) offer for Twitter.  Next, Musk will buy Tristan da Cunha, set it up as an international tax-avoidance state, build a rocket launching site and set up a company dedicated to denying the unreliability of Tesla cars.

Insulate Britain has gained a lot of media coverage with disruptive protests.  One of their spokespeople, Tracey Mallaghan, has said “I hate that to get media attention we have to disrupt lives.  But many people can see the sense in what we are asking for.”  One of my friends believes the demonstrators who blocked the M25 should be hanged drawn and quartered, regardless of the cause they were aiming to publicise;  others don’t.

George Kearsley Shaw (1751-1813), botanist and zoologist, founder of Linnean Society said: “The reasonable man [sic] adapts himself to the world;  the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”  (This argument could also, of course, be used to explain Truss’s apparent efforts to destroy the economy.)

For the first time in its history, the Royal College of Nurses, will ask its 300,000-strong membership if they want to strike, with the union encouraging them to vote yes.  If the strike goes ahead, the NHS will be severely disrupted this winter but which of us would deny their right to draw attention to how badly they (and the NHS as a whole) have been side-lined?

The day after Kwasi Kwarteng’s unfunded giveaways, the Bank of England stepped in to save a number of pension funds from going bust as the yields on long-term government bonds rocketed upwards.  What a good job we have a Bank of England and don’t just rely on the government.

The design of the new coins with the King’s head have been released and, as tradition demands, he faces in the opposite direction to his predecessor so we will have a King facing to the left.

In chess, there have been accusations that the 19-year-old, Hans Niemann has been cheating (he’s admitted to cheating in online games but denies cheating when playing in person) and one theory says anal beads were used.  Now I have to admit I don’t know what anal beads are or how they could help a chess player know which of 64,000 possible moves is the right one but I’m intrigued to know how anybody can sit still if something suddenly starts vibrating in their bum.

Since ‘we’ can remove the eye of a gnat with a missile fired from thousands of miles away and hit an asteroid with a multi-million dollar spacecraft travelling at 15,000 mph from millions of miles away, why can’t we find vaccinations that protect against cancer, circulatory problems, neurological conditions, mental health issues and indigestion here on earth?  Haven’t we got our priorities wrong?

Incidentally, what does 15,000 mph mean in space?  Speed is measured as relative to something else, like the ground over which a car is travelling.  So was this in relation to the asteroid it hit, or the earth (which was, by then, somewhere completely different) or alpha centauri?

Ondi Timoner, an American documentary film-maker, was shocked when her 92-year-old father Eli who had been paralyzed for 40 years by a stroke became bed-ridden and isolated by Covid and said he was “just waiting to die”.  With what was described as characteristic generosity and kindness, he gave his permission for her to record his last days and how his medically-assisted death affected his family. 

Ondi’s sister Rachel said of the film “I hope people get inspired to face the fact that they and everyone they love is going to die and if they have the courage to talk about it, and to plan for it a little bit, that they have a real chance to have a beautiful, good death.  And that that is a way for them to seize their lives.  It is a way for them to embrace their living.”  The film, ‘Last Flight Home’, is to be released in UK cinemas on 25 November. 

Vladimir Putin has said “We are working on the assumption that the situation in the new territories will stabilise”, thereby tacitly admitting the Russian losses caused by the Ukrainians’ fast and irresistible advance into occupied territory.  It reminded me of the Germans claiming in the (excellent) 1966 Czech film ‘Closely Observed Trains’:  “Our tactical retreat into Belgium has outpaced the Americans”.

In America, Joe Biden has pardoned thousands of people convicted of smoking a joint.  Nobody is actually in a federal prison for “simple possession” but the pardons correct the imbalance that has led to far fewer white smokers being convicted than people of colour despite skin colour not being an indicator of the prevalence of marijuana use.

And the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, has said he would “proudly support” legislation to overhaul rules for certifying presidential elections, bolstering a bipartisan effort to revise a 19th-century law and avoid any repeat of the January 6 insurrection, adding. “The chaos that came to a head on January 6 of last year certainly underscored the need for an update.”

In Iran, the mother of Nika Shahkarami, a 16-year-old who died after a demonstration over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had breached the strict Iranian dress code for women, has accused the authorities of trying to force her to lie and say her daughter killed herself.  Amini had been arrested by the morality police in Tehran.  The morality police???  George Orwell is turning in his grave.

TikTok’s latest craze (meme?) is for ‘brown noise’ is a sort of textured ‘white noise’ that relaxes people and turns off their thoughts.  A short trial didn’t work for me but I guess those of us who live with tinnitus are used to thinking over its endless interference.

A similar (but negative) effect on our senses is that, when we’re in REM/deep sleep, we don’t respond to smells, but they can influence whether our dreams are pleasant or less enjoyable.  Those of us who sleep near a recidivist farter (not me, I hasten to add, my wife would never dream of farting) should be duly grateful for this.

As people get richer and buy more ‘second homes’ in tourist areas and rent them out through Airbnb or to longer-term tenants, local communities crumble and house prices go up beyond the reach of the local people.  The Welsh government is planning to tackle this by raising discretionary council tax premiums for second homes by 300%, introducing a licensing scheme for holiday homes and generally tightening the regulations.  Vote Welsh!

Monarchies and republics

11 September 2022

The Queen died on Thursday. 

From the palace’s announcement at lunchtime that her doctors were concerned, it was obvious that her death was imminent but it was still a shock to hear the word when somebody reminded us that Prince William is now heir to the throne because his father is king.  We’ve known the queen for so long that the word ‘king’ gave me a jolt.

Charles had obviously had advance warning because he was in Scotland and able to get to Balmoral quickly so he was with her as she died which is, somehow, rather comforting.

Rumours that she only hung on for as long as she did to receive Boris Johnson’s resignation are likely to be the product of a warped mind.

She certainly hung on for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations so as not to spoil the event for everybody else, and to confirm Liz Truss as the new prime minister;  48 hours before she died, she got up and dressed and stood to welcome Truss with her usual beaming smile, despite what one doctor thought was a bruise left by a canula on the back of her hand.

The initial tributes were predictably sombre with Truss and Keir Starmer appearing to have agreed that the former would cover the boring platitudes while the latter gave a much more human and impressive eulogy.  It was then open house for other MPs to pay their own tributes.  Boris Johnson spoke very well, showing that he can actually talk without erring and umming when he’s done his homework, and Theresa May amazed everybody by making the chamber laugh with a personal anecdote of an encounter with the Queen. 

Other tributes poured in from around the world, including a touching message from Vladimir Putin in a letter whose contents were released by the Kremlin.

My mother used to say the Queen had one of those faces that made her look severe when she was actually just relaxed but she had the most wonderful smile (and laugh) and, had she not been a monarch who took her job very seriously, she’d just have been described as a nice person, which is surely the highest praise anyone can give.

A number of people writing about the Queen’s sense of fun have mentioned the American tourists taking a selfie of themselves with her protection officer, her having tea with Paddington Bear and being parachuted into the Olympic games (it was apparently her idea to greet Daniel Craig as “Mr Bond”).  My favourite story about her came from someone I knew when I worked for one of her son’s charities.  As he’d walked into the room to see the Queen, he tripped over a corgi and was mortified but the Queen said “Don’t worry, it’s his own fault for being the same colour as the carpet”.  What a graceful way of putting someone at ease.

I’ve never had any strong views about the different arguments for monarchies or republics.  I was an admirer of the Queen but the times they are a-changin’.  In the last few days, we’ve been shown ceremonies that have never been publicly seen before.  The pomp of the public parades was certainly impressive but they are for show.  Any power the monarch has is exercised behind closed doors and tends to influence the beginning or the end of parliamentary decisions, but they do have some real power.

One assumes that a British republic would impose similar limitations on the powers of the president so the basic choice could perhaps be reduced to a simple question about whether one has greater faith in nepotism or elections.

In companies, nepotism has proved almost without exception a singularly inefficient way of choosing the next boss but this may be because there is competition and you know my belief that anybody who actually wants to be in a position of power is, by definition, unfit for purpose.

Now we’ve given up regicide and importing foreigners, there’s a fixed hierarchy within the royal family which determines who’s going to be the next monarch so there’s no competition, or choice.  For example, if 58,496,132 Brits all suddenly die, I’ll be king. 

This makes the system dependant on who gets born when but they’re brought up for it from when they first grimace and cover their ears as a bunch of planes thunder overhead so they know what’s expected of them, and that stability is essential.

Presidents are elected for fixed terms more or less democratically and they are part of a political process so their actions and popularity depend on the mood of the moment which is often (always?) influenced by or linked to events outside the country concerned over which neither the presidents nor their governments have any control. 

Even presidents who elect themselves for a life-term in the job rarely die in post and there can be political – and all too often violent – disturbances when they step down or are removed.  A president should have the internal and international respect – and the humility – of somebody like Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, but there aren’t enough of those to go round.

The advantage of British hereditary monarchs is that they are above politics and can provide an impartial sounding board for the leader of whichever party was disliked least in a general election.

The other problem with presidents is how to choose them.  We live with a broken electoral system that allows small minorities of voters to form governments and even smaller minorities to be completely unrepresented in parliament.

As I write this, I realise I’m talking myself towards being a monarchist, but only faute de mieux.  We’ve been lucky enough to have had an incomparable monarch in E2R.  Let’s hope C3R does as well.

So why don’t we make all royals subject to the same laws and taxes as the rest of us, let them stay in power and see how it goes.