jamescalumcampbell

As the 80^th anniversary of VE day looms this coming Thursday, I cannot help but reflect on my father’s experience of the occasion. He was a pilot in Coastal Command, stationed at the time in Accra in West Africa.  He told me of a general sense of euphoria on the RAF station when the news of the surrender of Nazi Germany came through.  People at the airfield said, “Give us a show, James!”  Whether or not he performed a few victory loops I don’t know.  He fully expected to be posted somewhere in the Far East to continue the war with Japan.  But in due course, the atomic bombs were “cast” – Churchill’s word – and the Second World War came to an abrupt end.  

Sometimes I look over his RAF log books, which I cherish.  They cover the period from 1941 to 1945.  In 1939 he was a constable in the City of Glasgow Police, aged 21.  When the war broke out, two of his brothers, my uncles, were enlisted in the army and navy respectively.  I suppose he might have stayed on in the police, a reserved occupation, but I think he sensed a duty to follow in the footsteps of his brothers.  Then in 1941 the Germans bombed Clydebank.  I think – well, I know – the scale of the destruction had a profound effect on him, and he volunteered for the RAF.

There followed a rapid induction in London, a treacherous voyage across the Atlantic (on deck on Sunday morning service the troops sang “For those in peril on the seas” with great fervour), and a train across Canada to Saskatchewan, there to be trained as a pilot. 

Initially it didn’t go well.  I think his flying instructor was a bully.  Now I know a little about this because, 30 years later, I was a cadet pilot in the University of Glasgow and Strathclyde Air Squadron (UGSAS).  So I know a little about the traditional teaching methods of the RAF which were, basically, that if you fouled up, you received a “bollocking”.  Ab initio, my father received a lot of “bollocking” until he said to his instructor – and I give him great credit for this, I honour him for this – “If you continue to berate me like this, you will not get the best out of me.”  I think the instructor cut him some slack, and my father won his wings.

The ethos of the RAF of that time is well captured in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain.  I was in UGSAS, and the RAF Volunteer Reserve, between 1970 – 72.  One of our instructors in Glasgow flew Spitfires for that film.  Whenever I see the film, I instantly recognise the then RAF’s “sink or swim” attitude.  That poor guy who forgot to drop his undercart when landing, who is given a devastating flying lesson by Robert Shaw, on how to survive a dog-fight, and who eventually is gone for a burton… well, couldn’t they have done better by him? 

The most intriguing part of my father’s RAF log books is the record of his trip back to Europe from Canada, where he had been engaged monitoring submarine manoeuvres in the north Atlantic.  He flew from Montreal to Bluie West One, in Greenland, thence to Keflavik, in Iceland, thence to Prestwick, in Scotland.  He was now ten miles from his family home.  He requested permission to visit my grandmother. This was denied.  But he went anyway, so I suppose in a technical sense he was a deserter.  But he never got into trouble.  From Prestwick, he was posted to England for a time, thence to Africa, where his war eventually ended.   

As a youngster I knew that sooner or later I would learn to fly.  Of course I was intrigued by my father’s wartime activities.  He had a great pal who had been a POW in Stalag Luft III, and having seen the 1963 film The Great Escape, I wanted to ask him all about people like Bushell, Bader, Tuck and so on.  His only comment was, “Frightful fellows.”  My father took me aside and gently suggested I not enquire further.  Some people didn’t like to talk about the war.

When I went to New Zealand in the 1980s I resumed my flying activities and was amazed at the easy-going attitude of my Kiwi instructors.  No more bollocking.  I flew hundreds of hours, the length and breadth of the country, in many aircraft types.  Around 1992 I did a twin engine rating in a Beechcraft Duchess.  Most of the training involves coping with a single engine failure after take-off.  You lose power and directional control, and in the heat of the moment it can be difficult to figure out what is actually happening.  Experienced pilots have shut down the wrong engine in error.  So you train to get the appropriate response into the muscle memory.  I was on the phone one night to my father in Scotland and I told him I was finding it difficult.  Without any hesitation he intoned the pilot’s mantra, “Dead leg – dead engine – identify – verify – feather.”  He hadn’t flown an aircraft since 1945.

On their next visit to NZ, I took my parents flying.  We flew from Auckland down to Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty to visit friends of mine who ran a Kiwi fruit orchard in Omokoroa.  I remember after take-off I handed control over to my father.  I think I may have used the North American expression, “Your aeroplane”.  For me it was a very moving experience.  And I thought, “Gosh!  You can fly!”

To the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem, serendipitously, on the day of Pope Francis’ funeral.  Maybe that coincidence added a further layer of solemnity to the occasion, as well as suggesting a possible reason as to why the auditorium was filled virtually to capacity.  The programme, overall, had a funereal theme.  We began with Beethoven’s rarely heard Op 118, Elegischer Gesang, Elegiac Song, composed in 1814 for string quartet and a small group of voices.  We heard a scaled-up version performed by the strings of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the RSNO Chorus.  The piece was composed in memory of one Eleanor, the wife of Beethoven’s friend and benefactor Baron Johann Baptiste Pasqualati.  Eleanor had died in childbirth, in 1811, aged 24.    

Sanft, wie du lebtest,

hast du vollendet,

zu helig für den Schmerz! 

Gently as you lived

Have you ended,

More holy for the pain!      

Extraordinary to hear some undiscovered Beethoven.  With its hushed opening, we immediately entered Beethoven’s world.  It was as if the great man himself were present in the room.

Conductor Patrick Hahn then directed Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, with soloist Carolin Widmann.  The ensemble had recorded the Berg, along with Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, earlier in the week, and they were now going to make a live recording, presumably for the RSNO archive, so Maestro Hahn politely asked us to unwrap our cough sweets now.  The audience was very attentive, so no retakes were required. 

The Berg is a serial piece, based on a 12-note tone row and heavily influenced of course by Schoenberg.  But I think of it rather as late romantic, and very lyrical.  I don’t think, on the occasion, that this performance entirely came off.  The soloist made a beautiful but not a big sound, which was occasionally drowned out by the orchestral forces, and similar imbalances within the orchestral tutti concealed the melodic line. 

Ha!  Everyone’s a critic.

But Mozart’s Requiem was wonderful.  Some of the music is severe, and austere.  The clarinets and bassoons which introduce the Requiem aeternam are so doleful.  The use of trombones renders an added solemnity, in the Tuba mirum, and in subsequently reiterated and rapidly moving passages for trombone trio, brilliantly played.  It is a well-loved piece, no doubt made famous by the film Amadeus.  It comes with its mythology – the mysterious commission, conveyed by a masked stranger; an ailing Mozart dictating passages of music on his death bed; the contribution of the amanuensis Süssmayr.  Wonderful music, wonderfully performed.

It just shows you; if you put on beautiful music, you can fill the hall.  Of course filling the hall, bums on seats, is a serious preoccupation for impresarios.  It always has been.  Looking at the prospectus for the 2025-26 season, you can tell that the RSNO are trying to reach out to a wider audience.  RSNO at the movies – Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Gladiator etc.  And in the recently published brochure for the forthcoming BBC London Proms, there’s something about The Traitors, and Claudia Winkleman.  I have no idea what that’s about.  But then I haven’t turned my telly on for about six weeks. 

The debate about “standards” in music has been going for a long time.  The classical repertoire versus “dumbing down”.  Even in Mozart’s time, some people thought The Magic Flute was a pot-boiler, and a bit naff.  Of a lovely spring afternoon on Thursday I sat with some friends in a very beautiful garden under the flightpath out of Glasgow airport, and we discussed whether it is better to keep classical music classical, or to try to attract a wider, and possibly younger, audience, with “gaming” music and so on.  Predictably, I inclined to the purists’ camp.  When I first saw the BBC Proms brochure I felt a bit impatient with it, though with the serenity of retrospection I can see some wonderful music is in there.  Similarly, the RSNO prospectus is very clever – a combination of the familiar and the new. 

But in fact the problem in programme planning is not really a matter of mainstream versus dumbing down.  The problem actually resides within the purists’ camp itself.  The repertoire is in fact quite limited, limited, if you will, by flavours of the month.  Current flavours of the month across the classical world are undoubtedly Mahler, and Shostakovich.  The current RSNO season ends with an all-Shostakovich programme, and the new season opener is Mahler 7.  The Proms are doing Mahler’s 2, 3, 5, and 7, as well as Das klagende Lied, and one of the Rückert Lieder.  Shostakovich is appearing eight times throughout the season.  Now don’t get me wrong; I admire Mahler and Shostakovich; I just don’t want to hear them every day of the week.  Other composers are available.  For example Arnold Bax, a great hero of mine, does not appear at all in either brochure for the Proms or the RSNO.  There is, in fact, a huge repertoire of beautiful music out there that we never hear.    

Why not? 

Do I detect the baleful influence of managerial pseudoscience?  I have a horrible notion that programme planning may have been taken over by focus groups, strategic planners, audience researchers, and a variety of other “influencers”.  People who know what will “sell”.  Life has become so transactional. 

With respect to music on the BBC, I would suggest Auntie might take some advice from what in this context might seem an unlikely source.  Have you heard Amol Rajan’s interview with the footballer and pundit Gary Lineker?  I recommend it.  Two very smart cookies, and nobody on the back foot.  Lineker famously got suspended (I think a kinder expression was used – he temporarily “stepped back”) when he allegedly breached the BBC’s impartiality rules for voicing political opinions.  He advised the BBC not to pay any attention to the furore; just ignore it, and it will go away.  Besides, even-handedness is not always a virtue.  If somebody says it’s raining, and somebody says it’s dry, you don’t need to give them equal air time.  Just look out the f****** window.  I suppose the analogy is a bit of a stretcher, but in music, you don’t need to research what the audience taste is.  Just play music that is beautiful, and beautifully played, inspirational, and deep.  And people will fill the hall.               

“Servus James!” said my local shopkeeper, who occasionally likes to slip into German.  “Wie geht’s?”  (Hello, how are you?)

“Prima!  Ausgezeichnet!  Lebend den Traum!”  (Champion, top notch, living the dream!)

But I sincerely hope I’m not living out my dreams.  That might be more like lebend den Alptraum.  Living the nightmare.  My dreams, at least the ones I can recall, are not to be envied.  I once tried to delve into them by reading Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, but I abandoned the book when I came up against Freud’s assertion that dreams are basically wish-fulfilments.  Well, if that were so, I must be of a peculiarly masochistic disposition. 

I have recurring dreams, a phenomenon of which Freud said he had no personal experience.  For a lengthy period I had a dream about being back at school.  I find myself in a school corridor (I’m not sure if corridor is the right word, rather loggia, these passages being open to the elements and therefore supposedly protective against tuberculosis), late for class, struggling to interpret a copy of my timetable.  You know the sort of thing – maths, French, double English…  I am in school uniform.  As the dream recurred this became more and more bizarre, and certainly contributed part of the general sense of angst.  A man in his 40s, in school uniform.  This dream visits me less often now (or perhaps it is I who, like a ghost, revisit the old alma mater), but it still occasionally returns, and I wake to wonder, why have I gone back to school?  Surely it must be to carry out some task.  There is something I should have done when I was here, that I did not do.  I have returned to complete unfinished business.  What business?  What can it be?  What challenge did I not face up to?

But this scenario has largely been replaced by something frankly much more disturbing.  Now in my dream, I am back at work, as a doctor.  Always, the dream takes place in hospital, never in general practice in the community.  Again, I am in a corridor, flitting between units, simultaneously grappling in my mind with a particularly difficult and thorny problem of medical diagnosis or management.  I stay in the corridor, shirking the problem, avoiding the encounter, full of a sense of skulking guilt at my malingering, and wondering how long I can get away with this lack of activity, before I am found out.

I wake in a cold sweat.  What can it possibly mean?  Clearly these two recurring scenarios have common themes.  They are anxiety dreams.  Underlying them is a strong sense of Impostor Syndrome.  They don’t seem to serve any useful physiological, psychological or spiritual purpose, nor to exhibit any positive adaptive value.  I wonder if they don’t perhaps evince a mild form of post- traumatic stress disorder.  I say mild, because I can well imagine that army veterans who have experienced at first hand the horrors of war can, and do, suffer intolerably.  I count myself fortunate that when I rise in the morning all the shady apparitions dissolve. 

The real world and the dream world are as different as night and day.  In the morning, I let it all go.  I’m not attracted to researches in the unconscious.  I think I incline to the stiff upper lip ethos of the late Duke of Edinburgh, and just get on with it.  I have a deep distrust of the medical profession.  It isn’t okay to say you’re not okay.  I wouldn’t dream of undergoing psychoanalysis.  What a can of worms that would open up.  A Pandora’s Box.  So I just keep smiling.  With respect to PTSD, in time of war, Winston advised his officers, if you can’t smile, grin.  If you can’t grin, keep away until you can.  He wouldn’t have recognised the term PTSD.  He might have recognised shell shock, which is at least better nomenclature than cowardice.

I’m told I smile a lot.  I’ve even been reprimanded for it.  “Why are you always smiling?” asked Hobsbaum, my Senior Honours English Lang & Lit tutor, a lifetime ago.  I said, “It’s a way of telling people you wish them no harm.”

“Humph.”

I even received a one-on-one tutorial from a consultant orthopaedic surgeon – who else? – on how to be intimidating to colleagues, in order to get your way.  “And don’t smile!”

What a load of tosh.  Didn’t Our Lord tell us to be the light of the world?      

Sometimes I adopt a Calvinistic attitude towards my dreams.  Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree…  They are my version of the grotesque portrait in the attic.  Surely I have wasted my substance in wild and riotous living.  Yet why should I be tormented by memories of my erstwhile efforts to help people?                 

Yet I count myself fortunate that, for the most part, these nocturnal disturbances to not extend into the wakeful day.  By the time I reach the village shop to collect my newspapers, I am entirely euthymic, and ready to indulge in some light-hearted banter. 

“Servus James!  Wie geht’s?”

“Prima!  Ausgezeichnet!  Lebend den Traum!”

On Saturday evening, appropriately enough on the eve of Palm Sunday, I attended a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, given by the Dunedin Consort, directed by John Butt, in the New Auditorium of Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.  It occurred to me that the last time I encountered this huge masterpiece at close quarters, I was actually playing my viola in the orchestra, in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh.  Herrick Bunney conducted; the composer Kenneth Leighton was at the harpsichord, and the evangelist was none other than the great Peter Pears.  What a privilege to be a part of that.

The Dunedin Consort were magnificent.  The forces were quite small: two orchestras to left and right of the director, each comprising four violins, a viola, a cello (or viola da gamba), double bass, two flutes, and two oboes.  Additionally there was an organ placed centrally opposite the director, who conducted also from the organ.  The choir was made up entirely of eight soloists: two sopranos, a mezzo, a countertenor, two tenors, and two bass-baritones.  In addition, during Part 1, the RSNO Youth Chorus made contributions from a gallery above the orchestra, and the ensemble was completed by an unobtrusive – but remarkably expressive – sign language interpreter.  The work was sung in German.

It’s a lengthy work; we started at 7.00 pm, had a short break half-way, and it was after 10.00 when we finished.  Yet it passed in a flash.  The orchestra took much time, and devoted a great deal of close attention, to tuning up, but once they got going there was nae hingin’ aboot, and the rapidity of the events depicted enhanced the sense of intense drama.  Of course the music is utterly inspired, and very beautiful, but there’s no denying an atmosphere of austerity (these plangent oboes!) and a sense of impending and inevitable tragedy in the unfolding of the story, bookended by the great choruses Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen, and Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder. 

Much of the Matthew Passion concerns fickleness, and human frailty.  Peter disowns Jesus three times, and when the cock crows, he is consumed with shame, and grief.  Erbame dich, Mein Gott, um meiner Zähren willen!  Judas betrays Jesus, but when he sees him condemned to death, he is filled with remorse, and tries to return the blood money, thirty pieces of silver.  The chief priests couldn’t care less.  Judas promptly goes out and hangs himself.  Pontius Pilate knows Jesus is without fault.  His wife tells him to have nothing to do with condemning an innocent man.  He offers to free either Jesus or Barabbas, a murderer.  The mob want Barabbas.  So what, asks Pilate, should I do with Jesus? 

Laß ihn kreuzigen!

The crowd is most fickle of all, the same crowd who welcomed Jesus, seated on a donkey, to the streets of Jerusalem, strewn with palm leaves.  I have a notion that Bach had some compassion for Peter, and Judas, and Pilate, but that he really didn’t care for the crowd.  Their protestations become even more baleful in the St John Passion.

Pilate is cornered.  He washes his hands of the matter.  There’s no going back.  The end is inevitable.  Thank goodness Bach offers us some respite in that most beautiful of bass arias, Mache dich mein Herze, rein. 

It’s impossible to hear this great unfolding drama without putting it in the context of the world as it is today.  President Putin appears to be gearing up for a Spring Offensive.  A Russian missile attack killed at least 34 civilians in Sumy, Ukraine, on Palm Sunday.  The Polish Foreign Minister has said that Russia is mocking the USA’s attempts to broker peace.  President Zelenskyy has invited President Trump to Ukraine, to see the destruction for himself.  I have a notion – though I’d like to be proved wrong – that he won’t take up the offer, because what he would see would not fit with his own “narrative”.  In this respect he is like Pilate, who said “What is truth?” – but would not wait for an answer.  Meanwhile Israel has bombed the last functioning hospital in Gaza.  Trump is waging a trade war with China, whose effects will pretty soon be felt by everyman, and woman, in “Main St”, across the world. 

As a species, we don’t seem to be able to get past war, of one kind or another, so-called “discretionary” war, as an instrument of policy.  We don’t seem to want to find a better way of all getting along together.  This is why the Matthew remains so relevant.  And whenever I hear the latest bad news from the Middle East, I always think of the profoundly unsettling opening – these plangent oboes again – to the St John.  But that’s another Passion.            

Nuclear War, a Scenario

Annie Jacobsen

Transworld Publishers, Penguin Random House, 2024

You’ve got to read this book.  You’ve just got to.  I read it in two days, not because it brought me happiness, or peace and joy; not because it changed my life, or altered my world view; not even because it was a page turner – although clearly it was.  Its compulsion rather resided in its authenticity.  The book was so carefully researched, referenced, and annotated, that it was hard to keep in mind that the scenario was imagined and not real. 

Spoiler alert: if you want to read the book without this trailer, stop now.  But make sure you buy the book and read it. 

Annie Jacobsen conjures a scenario in which North Korea, with all its paranoia, and its known long range ballistic missile capacity, launches a surprise attack on the United States.  Three missiles are launched.  One burns up on re-entry.  The other two hit their targets – a nuclear power station in California, and the Pentagon, in Arlington County Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington DC.  In the short time that it takes for these missiles to traverse the globe, the US detects their approach, and advises the president, who authorises a counterattack on Pyongyang. 

But here’s the rub.  The retaliatory missiles must cross Russian soil.  And in all the blind panic and confusion of war, the US fails in its attempts to inform Russia that they themselves are not under attack.  Now Russia is confronted with the threat which faced the US barely thirty minutes previously.  Apparently, the US has launched a full scale attack in their direction.  Ergo, they respond, with an all-out attack upon the US. 

It does not end well.  The word Armageddon comes to mind.  And “nuclear winter”.  This is what will happen if things get out of hand.  

Annie Jacobsen based her scenario on a lengthy series of conversations with people in the US military who have spent their professional lives in defence.  (Should that read “defense”?)  So in a sense all of the putative scenarios are real; something like each of them has already occurred.  She doesn’t pull her punches.  The sheer hellishness of a nuclear apocalypse is graphically depicted.  When I read some truly gruesome descriptions, I thought, this is a bit over the top.  But no.  I understand why Annie Jacobsen is spelling it out.  She wants people, she wants us, to understand what the reality of nuclear warfare would mean. 

One of the most upsetting, perhaps the most upsetting, description in the book is not of a conjured scenario, but actually of something which really did occur, at Omega Site, in the Los Alamos woods, in May 1946.  A physicist, one Louis Slotin, was working on a plutonium bomb core.  Slotin accidentally dropped a nuclear sphere, which went critical.  There was a quick flash of blue light, and a wave of intense heat.  Nine days later, Slotin died from acute radiation poisoning.  The description of his gradual physical deterioration is so gruesome that I almost wished I had been spared the graphic detail, but I can quite see why Annie Jacobsen opted to spell it out.  It is peculiar that one can read, in an apparent state of equanimity, of the demise of billions of people; but that it is the description of the demise of one single individual that turns out to be so upsetting.  She drives her central thesis home: the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction” is, truly, mad. 

The core idea of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is that a nuclear attack will instantly result in nuclear retaliation.  The system is “locked and loaded”.  Annie Jacobsen’s book shows how frighteningly dangerous the nuclear stand-off is.   

Some people might argue that there is nothing to be gained by being frightened to death.  Henry Kissinger, with the crackling voice of an oracular cicada, said as much when the 1983 film, The Day After, starring Jason Robards, was broadcast by ABC, and caused widespread panic, much as had Orson Welles’ 1938 radio drama of his (near) namesake’s The War of the Worlds.  On its first showing, The Day After was watched by over 100,000,000 people.  What is the point, asked Kissinger, of putting everybody into a state of blind panic?  But in this regard I side with Nikita Khrushchev, whose remarks are recorded on the frontispiece of another book well worth reading, Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly, a New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Allen lane, 2021):

Of course, I was scared. It would have been insane not to be scared, I was frightened about what could happen to my country and all the countries that would be devastated by a nuclear war.  If being frightened meant that I helped avert such insanity, then I’m glad I was frightened.  One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by danger of nuclear war.

That still rings true today.  There is a fearful complacency apparent in the attitude of our politicians, who champion the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.  They say it has kept us safe for 80 years.  Maybe, but if Mr Putin chose to deploy a “tactical” nuclear weapon above Kiev, how would we respond?  It’s a question politicians dodge.  Because of the deterrent, it won’t happen.  Yes, but what if it did happen?  It won’t.  When Putin says, “I’m not bluffing”, he’s bluffing.  Thus is a problem kicked into the long grass.

How are we going to rid the world of these hellish contraptions?  Annie Jacobsen doesn’t tell us.  Perhaps that’s her next book.  I hope so.  We need our best minds to grapple with this issue, not to pretend that it is not a real and present danger.  The Prime Minister is currently much exercised about a TV drama, Adolescence, all about toxic masculinity.  He wants it to be aired in schools.  In a similar vein, I think Transworld Publishers should send copies of Annie Jacobsen’s book to every member of the Cabinet.   

I wonder what Sir Keir has written, in his letter of last resort, to the submariners aboard Trident.  In the event that BBC Radio 4 stops broadcasting, I hope he has advised them to deactivate and shut down all the missiles, and sail to a friendly port, if they can find one.  After all, if the UK has ceased to exist, it will prove that the nuclear deterrent doesn’t work, and has never worked.  So I sincerely hope that Trident is a bluff.  But if it is, it’s a hellish expensive one.              

BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House opened with a gag yesterday at 9.00 am.  After the pips, I heard the tranquil sound of waves lapping on a seashore, followed by a delightful Eric Coates melody.

A sleepy lagoon,

A tropical moon,

And two on an island…

Desert Island Discs!  It must be 10 o’clock.  Of course!  The clocks sprang forward last night.  For a moment I was discombobulated.  But it was only a typical Paddy O’Connell gag.  Paddy being Paddy.  I had to laugh. 

I’m a bit allergic to change.  Now that we’re back on British Summertime, I wish we could just stay put, as I prefer light in the evening to light in the morning.  There is an argument that early morning light in winter is better, and safer, for commuters, particularly school pupils.  But, especially in this age of working from home, can’t we be a little more flexible, and alter our habits, rather than the clocks?  Winter is surely a time to hunker down.  I’d be happy to stay indoors in the dark, with my oil lamp, mending my fishing nets.

But talking of change, I was more concerned about the announcement ten minutes before the 9 o’clock pips, rendered in Neil Nunes’ sonorous tones following Sunday Worship, that next up was to be the last A Point of View, ever.  A Point of View is, was, a continuation and evolution of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America, and had therefore been on the go since 1946.  Alistair will be turning in his grave!  (Except, of course, that not only was he cremated, but his bones were first purloined in a bizarre and macabre Burke and Hare act of malicious larceny.  But that’s another story.)

So I listened to the last A Point of View, given by Howard Jacobson.  Appositely, it was a reflection on the art of composing, and expressing, on air, a point of view, a reflection on the nature of the essay form.  Jacobson is a fine essayist.  Like his fellow presenters, Michael Morpurgo, and Will Self, he can be acerbic.  Perhaps it is a kind of Point of View house style.  Anyway, it came to an end, to be followed by Tweet of the Day, which has already been reduced to Tweet of the Week.  I thought, surely A Point of View won’t go quietly.  There will be audience “push-back” on Feedback.  I’m quite good at anticipating what will turn up on Feedback. When Emma Barnett got really aggressive with the conservative politician Robert Jenrick the other day on the Today programme, I thought, you’ve crossed the line, Emma.  You’ll be on Feedback.  Sure enough.   

With respect to A Point of View, Feedback got its retaliation in early, and invited a “controller” in to justify the axing of the programme, even before the audience had time to complain, on the grounds that the topic would end up on Feedback come what may. 

I can’t say I was convinced by the controller’s justification for ending A Point of View.  Apparently there are plenty more equivalent formats on the airwaves.  (Are there?)  And cost is, as ever, a consideration.  (Is it?  Sticking a leading writer in front of a microphone doesn’t strike me as being a particularly expensive exercise.  They said the same thing about Tweet of the Day.  Maybe the birds, like divas, were charging exorbitant fees.  Didn’t Lord Reith try to stop Beatrice Harrison accompanying a nightingale in her garden with her cello?  Reith thought the nightingale would be a prima donna and refuse to perform.)

I don’t object to change, per se.  But sometimes I think the BBC rejects that which is tried and trusted, in favour of the hip, the trendy.  It’s a managerial trait.  I once heard a hospital manager say, without a trace of irony, “If it works, break it.”  Moreover, it strikes me that there could even be something sinister about cancelling a programme with the title A Point of View.  The clue is in the name.  The public space has become fearful of opinion, particularly of the lone voice, of dissent.  We see this in the way universities have clamped down on offering a platform to people whose opinions diverge from received groupthink.  Their opinions are “egregious” in the literal sense – e grex – removed from the herd.  Why would you take the trouble to give the “oxygen of publicity” to somebody who might well stir things up, when you could more easily put on another game show?     

Is the BBC dumbing down?  As the essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele had their character Sir Roger De Coverley remark, much can be said on both sides.  On the one hand, I find the trailers, particularly for drama, excruciating.  Then there is the relentless deployment of musical wallpaper behind discourse.  David Dimbleby is currently trailing a forthcoming series about free market economics, Invisible Hands, to a background of musical dross.  The controllers are terrified of dead air.  Much radio comedy is too smug, complacent and self-satisfied to be truly funny.  And some programmes are definitely tired.  Any Questions is frankly boring and tedious because the politicians don’t want to say anything controversial.  They don’t want to be e grex.  And besides, curator Alex Forsyth says it all for them, all the pros and cons.  But nothing strange or startling.  What else?  Shouldn’t Friday night is music night be on Radio 2 and not Radio 3?  Or am I a musical snob?

On the other hand, Radio 3 did more or less devote Sunday entirely to the music of Pierre Boulez, the 100^th anniversary of whose birth we are celebrating, which just about stretched me to breaking point.  And there are still plenty of good programmes.  They seem to me to be characterised by simplicity of form, and directness of subject matter.  Michael Rosen’s Word of Mouth is a programme about linguistics.  Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed is about the Social Sciences.  Last Word is quite simply a series of obituaries.  Tim Harford’s More or Less is about statistics and is a triumph in making interesting a subject which could quite easily sound very dry.  But in this day and age of fake news, political propaganda, and blatant lies, its fact checking has become indispensable.

Equally indispensable is Michael Barclay’s Private Passions.  Michael Barclay is simply the best interviewer currently broadcasting and, in a rare example of bucking the trend and going against the tide, Private Passions has been expanded from 60 to 90 minutes in length.  There is yet hope.  Call it musical snobbery (again), but it is superior to Desert Island Discs.

Then again, that’s just my point of view.      

A tremendous row has kicked off about Heathrow’s “outage” on Friday, following a fire at an electricity substation.  The airport closed for most of the day, on grounds of safety, saying that the essential problem was not with the airport per se, but with the national grid.  Other substations were available, said the grid.  Yes, said the airport, but it takes too long to switch over.  Shouldn’t there be a contingency plan? – asked the politicians.  Shouldn’t there be resilience?  Meanwhile something like 1300 flights were cancelled, leaving a quarter of a million people stranded, not just at Heathrow, but all over the world.  Incoming airborne passengers had to be diverted to Glasgow, Lyon, Paris and so on.  Even when normal service was resumed, all the aircraft and all the pilots were in the wrong place.  There will be an inquiry; it will report within six weeks – a short time frame, always a sign that people are seriously narked.  Lessons will be learnt.

But are we asking the right question?  The question, as it is currently posed, is this: how can we ensure in future that we keep the airport running at capacity, even when faced with a rare adverse event?  But I would rather ask: why is it, when we are obliged to have some time out, that we get so upset?  Even a cursory examination of the status quo reveals that it is highly ridiculous.  Let us suppose that Heathrow has a quiet time, if not exactly a curfew, during the wee small hours.  Let us say that 1300 aircraft take off, and another 1300 land, during an 18 hour day.  So there are about 72 takes-offs, and 72 landings, every hour, or one take-off, and one landing, every 50 seconds.  In other words, given that there are 2 runways, there is yet another aircraft rolling down each runway, every 50 seconds, all day.  And they want to build another runway, not to relieve congestion, but to increase capacity, and the aircraft numbers even further. 

Madness.

One is reminded of an ancient music hall turn, in which a juggler sets about spinning plates on a series of poles, and then runs himself to exhaustion in order to refresh the angular momentum of each plate as its spin decays.  The audience takes a kind of sadistic pleasure in watching the juggler attempt to reach each plate as it wobbles at a perilously lopsided angle.  Not just aviation, but much of human activity resembles this madcap frenetic rush to keep the show on the road, in pursuit of the postmodern holy grails of “growth”, and “productivity”.  Our hospitals run at 110% capacity.  So do our prisons.  Our GP practices are oversubscribed and run a fortnight behind time.  Our hospital clinics run 18 weeks behind time, if we are lucky.  Elective surgeries can be years in arrears.  But fear not.  Artificial Intelligence will sort it all out.  International trade runs on a “just in time” basis such that, should a ship get stuck in the Suez Canal, fruit, meat and vegetables lie rotting on wharfs, all over the world.  Our economy is like a marauding tiger wreaking havoc across the environment.  We sit on its back holding on for dear life, in terror that if we fall off, we will be gobbled up.   

I like airports, but I have never liked Heathrow.  It is vast, faceless, and impersonal.  It seems to emphasise the gap between rich and poor.  The VIP lounges are invisible and unattainable.  Policemen armed with submachine guns eye you coldly on terminal concourses. 

By contrast, I’m very fond of Auckland, domestic and international.  It lies to the south of the city, its lengthy single runway running more or less east to west.  If you are coming in from the north or north west, as most of the traffic from Australia or Asia does, and if the local wind is a westerly, you reach top of descent roughly as you make landfall at Cape Reinga, bring back the power as you cross Kaipara Harbour, and level out on a downwind leg over the Waitemata Harbour to the east of the city, the iconic silhouette of Rangitoto on your port wing.  Then a base leg over the sprawling southern city suburbs, to take up finals roughly abeam McLaughlins Mountain, one of Auckland’s 48 volcanoes.  Then you track straight down Puhinui Road, the piano keys of runway 23 on your nose, the Manukau Harbour beyond, and Manukau Heads on the horizon.  It must be one of the most beautiful approaches in the world.

The atmosphere in the Control Tower is one of calm.  Most of the international traffic comes in in the early morning, and thereafter the airport is pretty quiet.  I like to think that the Kiwis have got their priorities right.  They are laid back, cheerful, self-sufficient, and resilient.  They live in a very beautiful country, and they have a tremendous respect for the environment.  In that respect, I am convinced that New Zealand culture is predominantly Maori.   

Yet, although I still visit relatively frequently, I haven’t lived there for a quarter of a century, and I have a notion that in the interim, NZ has become a little more preoccupied with money, and its acquisition.  House prices have sky-rocketed in Auckland, and the gap between rich and poor, once relatively narrow, has widened.  It has become a little bit more like the rest of the world.

The last time I was there, I flew Emirates, Glasgow – Dubai – Auckland, in 2020.  The leg from Dubai to Auckland is the longest passenger flight in the world, at 17 hours 15 minutes.  I made the return journey, arriving home on March 8^th, just as the whole world locked down.

Heathrow is the busiest airport in Europe, and the second busiest in the world.  The busiest airport in the world is Dubai, and as I transited through, I remember the interminable taxi from the terminal gate to the holding point, past the serried ranks of seemingly hundreds of Airbus A380s.  I remember thinking, “We can’t go on like this.”

Back in Scotland, during the first wave of the pandemic, the skies overhead went silent, the roads were quiet, and all I could hear as I walked in my local area was birdsong.  We all said that we must remember this golden silence, and that we mustn’t go back to our bad old ways.

Hah!                             

In this topsy-turvy world in which we now live, in which the old-fashioned “rules-based” order we have taken for granted for the last 80 years has suddenly been called in question, I have a notion that the Commonwealth is about to fall back into favour.  For a time there it looked to be a busted flush.  Melbourne didn’t want to host the Commonwealth Games in 2026.  The Australians had far more important priorities, and far better things to spend the Australian dollar on.  The Games were dismissed out of hand.  Then with respect to 2030, Alberta didn’t want them either.  Good old Glasgow has taken the 2026 Games on, on a reduced scale, as if to help out.  Maybe the notion abroad, and indeed at home, was that the Commonwealth had had its day, and with the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, and with more Commonwealth members tending towards Republicanism, it was high time to let it go.  What was it anyway, other than the rag-butt end of a decayed empire?   

And then Trump proposed that Canada become the 51^st US state.  At first people thought that he was just joking.  Just Donald being Donald.  He referred to Justin Trudeau, erstwhile Canadian Prime Minister, as “Governor Trudeau”.  Perhaps he thought he was the Governor-General, an incumbent of the post once occupied by John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, when FDR was in the White House.  He expressed a sense of indifference to the business and commercial opportunities the acquisition of Canada might afford the US.  “We don’t really need it.”  But wouldn’t the map look beautiful if that big straight line from Washington to Maine (or at least as far as the Great Lakes) were removed?  He was a bit vague about the historical origins of the US-Canada border.  Apparently it was drawn, quite arbitrarily, “many, many decades ago”. 

Meanwhile he slapped 25% tariffs on Canadian imports.  This angered Canadians, who are replying in kind.  They have assumed an assertive posture, “elbows up”, to utilise a metaphor from the ice hockey rink.  All of this coincided with the resignation of Trudeau as PM, to be succeeded by Mark Carney, best known on this side of the Pond as Governor of the Bank of England between 2013 and 2020.  Trudeau and Carney’s Liberal Party have been trailing in the polls.  A general election must be called by October, and it was until now widely anticipated that the Conservatives would get in. 

But all that has changed.  Canada has been galvanised and energised by a threat on its border, and many people, of whatever political persuasion, are thinking that Mark Carney might just be the man for the job.  Cometh the hour, cometh the man.  You can see why.  He is in almost every way the absolute antithesis to Trump.  He is clever (as opposed to wily), experienced, thoughtful, and, so far as one can tell, wise.  He has thought deeply about the unacceptable face of capitalism, the way the unfettered market has eroded society, and he has explored these issues in depth in his book Value(s), Building a Better World for All (William Collins, 2021).  The President of the United States, by contrast, knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Carney is a master of detail.  He is already comfortable on the world’s stage.  On a personal level, he is courteous, and charming, even when he can be robust.  And he looks the part.  So maybe he’ll call a snap election.  Of course it’s always a risk.  But then not calling one is equally risky.  Remember Gordon Brown.  He didn’t, was accused of dithering, and when the election eventually came round, he lost it. 

I thought of the Commonwealth when I heard Mark Carney swear an oath of allegiance to King Charles III.  Had he sworn that same oath before the US presidential inauguration on January 20^th it might have sounded rather archaic and formulaic, but in the event it sounded quite significant, a reassertion of historic ties of mutual affection, and like-mindedness.  Similarly, Australia has offered to join a “coalition of the willing”. 

Wab Kinew, Premier of Manitoba, does a wonderful take-off of Trump.  He signed an “executive order”.  “This is a wonderful order, a beautiful order, banning American booze.”  The Canadian historian Professor Margaret MacMillan, O.M., is more sober.  She recognises in Trump a dangerous, existential threat to Canada.  Trump has “left the rails”.

It seems to me that there are two widespread misconceptions about the President of the United States.  The first is that everything he does is premeditated.  He assumes an outlandish posture, or passes an outlandish remark, in order to bring about a specific outcome.  So he withdraws military and economic aid from Ukraine, and intelligence, and satellite imagery, so that Europe will step up and fulfil its obligations.  See.  He’s a really astute guy.  Personally I think he’s making it all up as he goes along.  He can bring about peace in a day.  It’s all done on the back of a fag packet, or more likely a golfer’s score card. 

The second misconception is that his bark is worse than his bite; that he’s really a sweetie, soft and cuddly.  But that notorious reception of President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office has put paid to that. 

Prime Minister Carney is due in the UK today.  Later he will visit Paris.  Normally the first foreign visit of a Canadian premier would be to the White House, but times are not normal.  Here, the Leader of the Free World is due to meet with the Canadian Head of State.  So while Mark Carney will talk to the king, and to Sir Keir Starmer, and to M. Macron, Trump will talk to Putin.  Sooner or later, these two parallel universes will collide.  It won’t be pretty.     

I have a letter in The Herald today, complete and unabridged.  The headline is the editor’s, and I was happy with it. 

Don’t appease Donald Trump

Dear Sir,

Most European countries are of the opinion that it is a bad idea to attempt to appease President Putin.  I wonder if Europe should take the same attitude towards President Trump. 

Since March 4, 2025, when Trump reneged on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum offering security to Ukraine (Putin having done the same in 2014), we can state unequivocally that the President of the United States is no longer the Leader of the Free World.  His overtures to Putin are eerily reminiscent of the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Hitler and Stalin, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 24/8/39, containing a secret protocol carving up huge tracts of Eastern Europe, including Poland and the Baltic States.  Hitler invaded Poland on 1/9/39, and Stalin ordered the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17/9/39, because he was “concerned” about the welfare of ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians. 

With Trump’s ambitions to acquire Canada and Greenland (“one way or another”), The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (in George Orwell’s 1984) is shown to be extraordinarily prescient:

“The splitting-up of the world into three great super-states was an event that could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century.  With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being.  The third, Eastasia… comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.”      

Lech Walesa, former President of Poland, has written to Trump expressing his fear and disgust on witnessing the now notorious 10 minute car crash of a meeting in the Oval Office last Friday.  He was reminded of the interrogations he had to endure at the hands of the Security Services, or in the communist courts, during the Soviet era.  I think that’s why these 10 minutes, witnessed across the world, have caused such widespread revulsion.  It is evident that the current US Administration cannot endure hearing somebody who speaks the truth to power. 

Trump is a bully.  Churchill’s words concerning another bully are as apposite to today as are the words of Orwell:

“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.  But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” 

Yours sincerely…

Meanwhile President Zelenskyy has headed for Saudi Arabia for further talks with the US, in an attempt to achieve peace in Ukraine.  The week ahead, therefore, is critical.  Will the talks be conciliatory, or will they be a repeat of the car crash in the Oval Office on February 28^th?  I must say it does not augur well.  This last week, in addition to withdrawing funding, the US denied Ukraine intelligence, and satellite imagery.  Predictably, Russia increased its bombardment.  President Trump said that anybody in Putin’s shoes would have done the same.  Russia’s war aims, essentially the obliteration of Ukraine as a sovereign state, apparently remain unchanged.  At the negotiating table, nothing is being asked of Russia, and everything of Ukraine.  I can’t see Russia countenancing the presence of a NATO peacekeeping force on Ukrainian soil.  When I heard a quote from President Zelesnkyy, that he was willing to work “under the strong leadership of President Trump”, I got the strong sense that he was being leaned on.  According to the BBC, he is being “coerced” (the BBC’s word) by Europe, because Europe is not ready to fill the gap if the US ducks out.  Europe is desperately trying to keep the Donald on side.  Good luck with that. 

It’s a strange situation, in which the US is browbeating a country to end a war in which they are not involved, and in which they now apparently have no interest.  Well, leave them to it.  We should hold our nerve.  Europe has a bigger population than America, and is a bigger land mass.  Canada is on-side.  So is Australia.

So, now that the President of the United States is no longer the leader of the free world, I wonder who to nominate for the role?

I will stick my neck out and say, Mark Carney.                

Any Questions, the flagship BBC radio 4 political debate programme, came on Friday to Dunblane Cathedral.  I went along.  It occurred to me that following a week of sensational politics (and this was even before President Zelenskyy was “entertained” in the Oval Office), it might be an interesting show.  In the event, to be honest, I regretted going.  Dunblane Cathedral is very familiar to me because, as it so happens, I attend weekly, one might say “religiously”.  I sat in my usual pew, about two thirds of the way to the back.  Big, as it turned out, mistake.  Couldn’t hear a thing.  Well, slight exaggeration, I could pick out most of it if I strained to listen.  But was it worth the effort?  You would have thought that BBC radio, whose modus operandi intimately involves sound, would have been able to render the panel audible to the audience in the cathedral as well as at home.  Not so.  But you know, I don’t think the BBC were that bothered.  Their end product comes over the air waves, and they were quite indifferent to the experience within the hall.  And it wasn’t just me.  I glanced across the aisle to another listener who I noticed had taken to reading the bible.  This reminded me of a line in Darkest Hour, a film about the political build up to Dunkirk, when Churchill telephones a general in the middle of the night, essentially to kick off Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force.   “Am I interrupting you?”  “No, I was merely reading my bible.”

But actually, I don’t really want to discuss the acoustics of Dunblane Cathedral, rather to use the programme as a springboard to further discussion of its content.  As it so happened, a couple of hours before the programme went on air, President Zelenskyy had the meeting in the Oval Office with President Trump, which turned so sour.  I had heard some of the “chat”, when it was breaking news, and frankly was completely appalled.  So when Douglas Alexander, Labour MP for Lothian east and the UK Government’s minister for trade policy and economic security, voiced support for Zelenskyy, I was happy to applaud.  But I promised myself to delve into the whole debacle.

Accordingly, I found on the internet a recording of the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting, and I watched it in its entirety.  It has been widely characterised as a complete disaster, but if you watch it, most of it is completely normal.  It’s about 50 minutes long, and the first 40 minutes – well, I wouldn’t exactly say it was a love-in – but it was perfectly civil.  Granted there wasn’t much of a meeting of minds.  President Zelenskyy wanted President Trump to understand that Putin is a terrorist and a killer.  Where Sir Keir Starmer had shown Trump a letter from King Charles, Zelenskyy showed Trump pictures of Russian war atrocities.  President Trump wanted to focus on a US-Ukraine trade deal involving rare earth minerals, and he had nothing at all to say about security guarantees. 

And then something extraordinary happened.  The mood changed.  All of a sudden, it turned on a dime.  Why?  There was a kind of harbinger, when a reporter on the floor asked Zelenskyy, “Why don’t you wear a suit?”  It might have been a light-heated jibe, but it wasn’t.  Ever since the conflict started, Zelenskyy has dressed in a trade-mark black outfit, basically a uniform.  To his credit, Zelnseskyy made light of it.  “When we have victory, I will wear a costume.  A suit like yours, maybe better, but maybe less expensive.”  Airy persiflage, no doubt – perhaps reminiscent of  Zelenskyy’s previous career as a comedian – but I remembered that when Admiral Sir Roger Keyes attended the Norway Debate in the House of Commons on May 7^th and 8^th, 1940, to strongly criticise Chamberlain’s government, he was dressed in the full uniform of an admiral of the fleet.  Nobody questioned his dress code.  The government fell on May 10^th.

After the suit question, it all went downhill. The vice-president, J. D. Vance, made some comments about reaching a deal, and then President Zelenskyy said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

Zelenskyy outlined a brief history of the last 10 years and all the agreements that Putin had reneged upon, and essentially asked, how can you make a deal with somebody like that?    

J. D. Vance didn’t like that, and he resorted to an argument ad hominem.  Apparently Zelenskyy was being disrespectful to the office of the presidency.  Allegedly throughout the meeting, he had never said “thank you”.  Actually it was the first thing that he said.  Zelenskyy was never anything but respectful.  Not once did he say anything intemperate. But he did say that a cease fire with Russia would be useless unless it was backed up by some kind of established security assurances.   

Yet apparently he needed to show more gratitude.  At this stage I started to see the meeting as a series of vignettes from various Hollywood movies.  In A Few Good Men, a legal drama involving a Court Martial concerning an incident at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Tom Cruise’s character, a young lawyer, is asked by the commanding officer of the base, Jack Nicholson, to show more respect.  The look of incredulity on Zelenskyy’s face mirrored exactly that of Tom Cruise. 

And I thought of the film Die Hard.  There is a character in Die Hard, one Harry Ellis, who thinks he can broker a quick deal between Alan Rickman’s villain, one Gruber, and Bruce Willis’ maverick cop, John McClane.  I can solve this problem, easy, right now.  Capiche?   McClane tells him on the phone that with respect to Gruber, Ellis has no idea what sort of man he is dealing with.  The outcome is not good.         

Zelenskyy asked Vance if he had ever been to Ukraine.  He hadn’t.  But he had seen pictures.  According to him, guided tours of Ukraine for politicians were some kind of propaganda ruse.  Zelenskyy invited him to visit.  I don’t think Vance will take him up.  An invite to the Oval Office is apparently a great honour, but an invite to Ukraine is hardly worth the time of day.  Vance got quite heated.  Zelenskyy said, “There’s no need to raise your voice.”

Then Trump took it up, as if he felt the need to outperform his vice-president.  “He’s not raising his voice.”  Then he raised his voice.  Some people think that this whole thing was a mugging, that all along Trump and Vance were going to stick the boot in.  I don’t know.  I tend to think Trump genuinely lost his temper.  There was a lot of finger pointing.  Apparently Zelenskyy has no cards.  Zelenskyy:  “This isn’t a game of cards.”  Trump: “You’re are at war.”  Zelenskyy, “I know.”

But I wondered, why are they doing all this in front of the cameras?  I suppose they must think it will appeal to the electorate.  If that is so, God help America.       

I greatly admired President Zelenskyy, alone in the lions’ den, having to defend himself in a foreign language (in which he is now remarkably fluent), and not kow-towing to a bunch of bullies.  For that is what they are.  You don’t invite somebody into your house, point fingers at them, shout them down, and then throw them out. 

Any Questions re-aired on Saturday afternoon, and I listened to some of it to make sure I’d heard most of the salient points.  Then I listened to Any Answers, the phone-in programme dealing with issues raised, complete.  Interestingly, and unusually, the entire programme was given over to the debate about the car crash press conference in the Oval Office.  In her preamble to the programme, Anita Anand asked us, “Did you sleep well last night?”  Actually I hadn’t.  I got home from Any Questions depressed to my boots, and stayed awake half the night.

It’s a fast moving story.  On Saturday, Zelenskyy flew to London, where the PM greeted him most warmly at the door to No. 10.  Then he flew to Sandringham to meet the King. It crossed my mind that that might have been a royal initiative, but of course we will never know.  On Sunday, a broad European church foregathered in Lancaster House, and there was general consensus for continued support for Ukraine, as well as some preliminary initiatives on how to forge a peace.  President Macron has an idea for a truce.  Was President Zelenskyy aware of it?  Zelenskyy: “I am aware of everything.”    

Also on the airwaves has been considerable emphasis on the need to re-engage with the USA.  It is said that endeavours to arrange another meeting of Trump and Zelenskyy started almost as soon as the car-crash broke up.  There has been a suggestion that Zelenskyy needs to “eat humble pie” and “apologise”.

I have a notion that Zelenskyy, God bless him, does not do humble pie.  Meretricious, concupiscent sycophancy is not his style.  Nor has he anything to apologise for.  All he did was speak truth to power.  There has been much speculation about how Starmer should “play” Trump.  Should he be “diplomatic”, or should he be “combative”?  

Neither.  He should merely, politely, speak the truth, exactly as Zelenskyy did.  If that results in Sir Keir being harangued, and then ejected from the Oval office, then so be it.  At least you know where you stand.  I think we should be grateful to President Zelenskyy for showing us the true colours of the current US administration.  They are interested in power, and the acquisition of wealth.  It is highly significant that in a recent UN vote, on a European-drafted resolution on the 3^rd anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, condemning Moscow’s actions and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the USA voted against the motion, thus siding with Russia, Belarus, and North Korea. They live in a world of “strong men”, and “spheres of influence”.  George Orwell saw it all coming.  In 1984, they were dubbed Air Strip One, Eurasia, and Eastasia.  This is the world which threatens us. 

But there’s still time.  Europe can step up to the mark.  Capiche.