Deeper Still and Deeper

As the euro crisis moves downward in ever tighter circles I recall a piece I wrote a year and a half ago for the Daily Telegraph readers’ blog site.  Reading reports in the Sunday press I thought I would have another look at it.  It’s astonishing how little has changed; astonishing that grown-up people with grown-up minds could ever have embraced this madness in the first place.  How ill-led we are, how deceived; how unworthy are those in positions of power, who have neither prescience nor judgement. 

Anyway, judge the relevance for yourself.  The original article was headed Moussaka Money, published on 16 February, 2011. 

The Greek crisis is a superb demonstration of the intellectual absurdity and institutional vanity at the core of the whole European maze.  The important thing here is that we are dealing with a political as much as an economic crisis, perhaps more of a political crisis. We are dealing more specifically with blindness, blindness and hubris caused by a combination of self-delusion and self-interest.

The euro itself, the single European currency zone, was always about prestige, a desire for the grand gesture.  Looking at it in hard economic terms who would ever have agreed to allow the Greeks, or the Spanish, or the Irish to join the club? All it would take is for these fragile economies to come under sustained pressure for questions to be asked about the operation of a whole euro zone, combining rich and poor and supposedly treating them as equal partners.  

The Greeks, the poor cousins, were effectively given a Euro credit card, and they used it, without caution or reservation.  The Germans were paying, yes, but they also benefited with a massive trade surplus, another source of imbalance.  Angela is resisting a bail-out; she has to, if only for the sake of form and political credibility.  Sarko does want a bail out, but that comes at a price; there has be convergence across Europe. Athens, as I said previously, is facing a new Macedonian hegemony, a new dependency in all but name. 

The Germans in particular are heading for the perfect storm; they have too much of their economic self-interest invested in the euro-zone to allow it to collapse altogether, but they are horrified of the consequences of countries like Greece riding on the prosperity of the old D-mark, abandoned with considerable reluctance.

We know the Eurocrats are not fond of votes.  After all, they have a tendency to go the wrong way.  But the Germans are least fond of a particular kind of vote than any other European nation, so much so that referendums are actually banned by law because of the use they were put to by the nasty Nazis.  Just as well for the Eurocrats, I suppose, because the Germans would never have abandoned the D-mark if they had been given a choice on the matter eleven years ago.  

At the time the opponents of the euro ran a campaign warning of the dangers of being linked up with the ‘spaghetti money’ of southern Europe.  So, poor old Angela finds herself in an impossible position.  Pressures at home force her to talk tough.  Auntie Angela does not come to the Greeks bearing gifts, no, she waves her Aryan finger and talks austerity.  But this is tomorrow and now we know just how much the Greeks have been spending, as if there was, well, no tomorrow.  

Yes, what a mess this is.  If the Greeks get a handout - as they almost certainly will - the markets will turn on the next most vulnerable, the other partners in the union of the Piigs (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).  The contradictions, there from the outset, are being revealed one by one.  

Angela is a high-wire artist, a gambler as much as those who speculate on the currency markets, who speculate against the euro.  She is playing for time, her fingers crossed behind her back, hoping that austerity in Athens is enough.  And if it is not? Well, then we will perhaps be talking about moussaka money. 

Somewhere East of Eden

Are we free or are we simply the playthings of fate?  Can we ever be free or does or life follow a predetermined pattern?  Are we cause or are we effect?  The supposed conflict between free will and fate is a problem as old as philosophy itself.  It’s a problem that has engaged so many minds, those far greater than my own.  It’s a problem, it would be wise to conclude, that has no solution and will never have a solution, a sort of dialectical chicken and egg. 

But there is a third way of looking at the issue.  It seems to me that the age old problem of fate and free will is based on a wholly false dichotomy.  Free will is what we have in the immediacy of our circumstances; we have choices to make for good or ill which, in turn, impact on fate. 

Fate or karma, if you prefer, consists of the wider variables, the things that we cannot control, those things determined by the actions of God, of history and of other people.  But we are not marionettes; we do not perform an invariable dance.  Life, rather, is an unscripted play.  You and I and everyone else has a part, though it is not predetermined.  You are only a puppet if you think you are a puppet. 

Take the example of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, a brilliant dissertation on the interplay of fate and freewill.  Hamlet’s father has been murdered.  He has been chosen, by fate and by circumstances, as the instrument of vengeance.  But the whole tragedy then focuses on the tension between this fate and Hamlet’s doubts and uncertainties.  He fights against fate “O, cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”  He even considers suicide as a way of avoiding fate – “To be or not to be.”  Contrast him with his erstwhile friend Laertes, a pure instrument of fate.  It is he who, in the end, propels Hamlet into action, a fusion of free will and fate in a given set of circumstances. 

Shakespeare is good on these issues but John Milton in some ways is even better.  There is God in Paradise Lost contemplating the fall of man, a perfect illustration of the clash between fate and freedom, and, it might be said, the limits of divine power;

So will fall
He and his faithless progeny. Whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate! He had of Me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

There is God, angry at his own creation, angry that freedom means freedom, contemplating a Fall that has yet to happen!  Ah, free will, where would God be without it?  After all; it serves as a perfect alibi.  Yes we are free, free to struggle with fate, free to struggle with an allotted role, free to travel to the Land of Nod, somewhere east of Eden. It’s a perfect definition of the human condition itself.  I for one cannot think of any better.  

A King for All Seasons

Writing in the present edition of the Spectator William Cook says the Germany is rediscovering a once taboo part of its heritage (From Prussia with Love, 26 May).  It’s reflection on a new exhibition being held in the Neues Palace in Potsdam.  Under the title of Friederisiko, this celebrates the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frederick the Great, Prussia’s greatest and most delightfully paradoxical monarch. 

The suggestion is that that the rebirth, and rebranding, of Frederick is somehow a recent phenomena.  It’s actually nothing of the kind.  In an article I wrote last year (Praising Prussia, 9 March) I touched on the fact even in the old communist German Democratic Republic Frederick was resurrected from the crypt in its twilight years.  It was all part of an attempt to root the decrepit pseudo-state in German history.  An equestrian statue of the king, previously removed from central Berlin in the 1950s, rode right back to prominence in the 1980s.

It’s difficult not to admire a monarch who managed successfully to be all things to all people; who could be admired by Adolf Hitler and Erich Honecker; who could be an avatar for the Third Reich and the Communist Reich.  This was a man, moreover, whose sexuality, for all his military militancy, was as ambiguous as that of England’s Edward II. 

It’s not just Frederick who is undergoing a renaissance in the new Germany.  The old state of Prussia, formally abolished by the Allies in 1945, is also being reappraised with fresh enthusiasm.  Of course this is not the militaristic Prussia, the imperial Prussia, the very thing that Frederick would have been most proud of, but a gentle, cultured and artistic Prussia, the antithesis of the commonly accepted stereotype. This is the Prussia of the Piccolo not the Pickelhaube.  This is not the Frederick of the Seven Years War but the amateur musician and composer, the friend of poets and thinkers, Plato’s philosopher king at his finest. 

Friederisiko is scheduled to run until 28 October.  The chief focus, as I say, is not on his martial but his cultural exploits.  After all, here was a king as much at home in the salon as the battlefield; here was a King who could hobnob with men like Goethe and Voltaire.  The exhibition apparently makes much of his tolerance and philo-Semitism. “All religions are equal”, he said, “Everyone must find salvation in their own way.” 

We invariably recreate the past and past heroes in our own image.  The Potsdam Frederick is most certainly not Hitler or Honecker’s Frederick; he is far too laid back and arty for that!  But it’s comforting to note that he has not been completely divested of his Prussian starkness.  He is the Frederick for this season, for Angela Merkel’s season. He has become, as Cook suggests, a symbol for the current campaign to save the euro, a Spartan figure whose grim asceticism fits perfectly with Auntie Angela’s austerity programme. 

The king himself is buried in the grounds of the nearby Sanssouci Palace.  Apparently those who come in tribute place not flowers on his grave but potatoes!  Yes, that’s right, because it was Frederick who brought the spud to Prussia, a functional symbol for a functional king. 

Alles oder nichts – all or nothing – was Old Fritz’s battle cry, even so far as potatoes.  Personally I’m more than happy for Germany to reclaim him as the philosopher king and gentle aesthete.  But so far as the euro is concerned it may be as well to look to the warrior king, and not to the Battle of Rossbach but to Kunersdorf.  The House of Brandenburg may be a miracle, but the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg is one of those things in history that is unlikely to occur twice.  

The Eye of the People

Last week the Chinese National Bureau of Corruption Prevention issued a statement saying that 72.7 per cent of the population was satisfied with progress the government was making on tackling corruption, an endemic problem in the country. It caused a virtual tsunami. People went on line in their thousands, creative in their derision of a figure that doubtless sprung fully armed from the head of some bureaucrat or other. One individual said “Public opinion poll? Did they conduct it inside the Politburo? Poor old public opinion – raped once again.”

I say ‘said’ but the comment was actually tweeted, except it wasn’t tweeted because Twitter isn’t allowed in China! No, but people do have access to a microblogging service called Weibo.com (weibo simply means microblog). It’s hosted by Sina, a state-controlled internet service provider which regularly censors content, but Chinese bloggers are amazingly versatile, getting around restrictions in all sorts of imaginative ways.

In a country where the people have rarely had a voice at all Sina Weibo is a remarkable development. Let a hundred flowers bloom, it might be said, to drag up one ghost from the Chinese past, except that’s a huge underestimate. In all there are some 300million microbloggers in China, people who greet official statements - traditionally received in silence or reverence or else - with cynical derision. When the Beijing Daily recently demanded that Gary Locke, the US ambassador, declare his personal assets, the bloggers responded by saying that the real scrutiny should be on the assets of the country’s own elites.

Chinese officialdom has never been subject to such detailed and critical attention. Traditionally information is power and the flow of information has been tightly controlled. Not any longer. Quoted in the London Times, Zhan Jiang, professor of journalism at the Beijing Foreign Studies Service, said of Weibo that it “Has given a voice to 300 million Chinese and that has never happened before. It has taken on the role of spreading information when news is breaking and that is a big challenge to the government and media.”

It certainly is, when one considers that the most popular bloggers have followings far in excess of even mass circulation newspapers. Attempted cover-ups have been blown wide open by a rapid flow of information. The most recent example of this was a fatal train crash in Wenzhou, news of which officials attempted to bury. Exposure on Weibo forced a change of tactics.

Superficially Weibo is like Twitter. The latter has a 140-letter limit, just as the former has a 140-character limit. Ah, but you see, that makes all the difference in the microblogging world! For in Chinese, as the Times reported, every character is a word. Also in the absence of prepositions users can say much more in a single post than on Twitter. Yu Jianrong, an academic noted for his exposure of child trafficking, has in excess of 1.3million followers. This is one recent communication of his;

On May 16, 1966, the Chinese Communist Party started the Cultural Revolution which caused 10 years’ turmoil. I suggest that we mark the day as a “Day of Reflection”. My reflection is that blind belief in an organisation or leader cannot bring real democracy or the rule of law. Without democracy that people can take part in, everyone may turn violent.

Now, who would ever have believed the expression of such sentiment possible in a land where the repellent Mao Zedong still stares balefully down on Tiananmen Square?

The whole phenomena, this virtual democracy wall, might very well be pulled down, though some believe that things have gone too far for that. Uncomfortable as it is for the communist authorities, it actually provides greater intelligence on the mood around the country than they ever had in the past.

There are forms of censorship, certainly, and clear dangers in modes of expression that become too free. After all, the service only allows real name users, so there is no hiding. But, notwithstanding the risks, the authorities are still subject to forms of scrutiny and ridicule previously unknown.

The Weibo users are also highly creative in getting around official gags. When particular words are blocked by the censors, euphemisms appear within moments. No sooner was an interdict placed on naming premier Wen Jiabao that he reappeared in the far less dignified form as ‘Tellytubbie.’

I do not think that democracy will come to China any time soon. But the old days of silence, deference and intimidation are being overwhelmed by politically meaningful chatter.

Strasbourg Flips the Bird

I flip the bird right back!  

Is the lottery a disappointment to you?  You’ve played for an age, for years, perhaps, and those big bucks are always just beyond your reach.  Ah, but, you see, luck is such a fickle and elusive thing.  Rather than waste your money on its uncertain embrace you might very well be on to a surer bet if you have yourself sent to prison, there to demand the right to vote. 

I know; it’s only a 50-50 chance; a chance that you may end up with a right that you don’t really want, a chance to send powerless placemen to our powerless Parliament.  But, there again, there is always the possibility that the worm will turn; that David Cameron will reject the latest diktat from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and, in accordance with the will of Parliament, refuse to extend the franchise to jail birds.  In that case millions and millions in compensation is in the offing!

Yesterday the ECHR confirmed its earlier ruling that it was a breach of the human rights of paedophiles, arsonists, rapists, murderers and other criminals to deny them the right to vote, this in the face of an overwhelming vote by MPs last year to maintain the 140-year ban. 

Once again this alien court has challenged the sovereignty of Parliament, the sovereignty of this nation. It raises all sorts of issues over the nature of democracy itself, when a decision made by our elected representatives can be dismissed in such a cavalier fashion by unelected judges. 

Ah, cavalier; now there’s word, recalling past battles over parliamentary sovereignty. Charles I once entered the chamber of the House of Commons, a breach of all established protocol, in an attempt to arrest some of his most trenchant critics.  But all his birds, as he observed at the time, had flown.  Now this rabble of Strasburg judges has, in a similar sense, shown their contempt for Parliament, entering the chamber metaphorically speaking, only to give the honourable members the bird. 

In remarking on the latest development, Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, once a member of our benighted coalition’s own human rights commission, said that 'The principal issue is not whether prisoners are allowed to vote but whether the rules are set by a directly elected parliament or a group of European judges.”

David Cameron once said that the very idea of prisoners voting made him ‘physically ill.’  Yes, that’s fine; there are a lot of things that seem to upset the poor man’s constitution, the usual remedy for which is a liberal dose of words and no action.  The Tory back benchers, Cavaliers ironically following the path of the Roundheads in 1642, have made it clear that they will not give up the fight. 

But Cameron is no John Hampden, no John Pym and certainly no Oliver Cromwell.   I don’t even think he is in the mould of Prince Rupert.  Rather, in his present state of Babylonian Coalition captivity, he reminds me of nothing more than a damsel in distress, waving forlornly from the top of the Tower.  Priti Patel, a Tory backbencher, said: “The public will be demanding that the Prime Minister now stands up for British interests and refuses to give convicted prisoners the right to vote.”  Well they might demand but I rather think the poor dear may very well end up drowning, not waving.

Yes, the whole thing appears risible and the temptation is to dismiss the ECHR with amused contempt.  But it's worth stressing the constitutional seriousness of the whole thing, worth stressing the ignorance of these absurd judges, their ignorance of our history, our traditions and our institutions.  Their challenge to parliamentary sovereignty is serious enough to warrant a new Grand Remonstrance.  Charles I was not a quarter so tyrannical or stupid.

In the meantime franchise lottery tickets are selling well, with some 2500 inmates having already lodged claims.  It’s a reasonably safe bet.  I rather think Cameron hath no stomach to this fight.  Let him depart. His passport shall be made, and crowns for convoy put into his purse …and he can take Clegg, Cable, gay marriage, House of Lords reform, windmills and all the rest of the fashionable nonsense with him.  Maybe then we will get a genuine Conservative Prime Minister and not this supine heir to Blair and poodle to Clegg.  

The Protocols of New Labour

My recent observation that I thought the Labour Party a conspiracy against the people of this country caused a minor ripple on Twitter.  I’m inspired, inspired to make the indictment even heavier by reviving a piece I wrote a couple of years ago. 

What follows is an imaginary document (it is, isn’t it?), an agenda for Britain by the Labour Party, based, of course, on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, another infamous forgery about a supposed conspiracy. The difference is that the elements, the substantive elements, are all drawn from real history, past happenings and, from the date of the document, coming events. What about the conspiracy element? Well, I leave that for you to decide. :-)

Dismantling Britain

London, sometime in the winter of 1996.

Comrades, let me summarise the main points of our discussion and the elements of our agreed strategy. There has to be an election in the coming year, so we must be ready with the most effective programme possible. Also, comrades, none of this will go into our published manifesto. Let me remind you that you are all pledged to absolute secrecy.

Past Achievements

1.1 Ever since it was founded at the beginning of this century our Labour Party has been pledged to the destruction of Britain and the British way of life. We have approached this task in various ways. Before the Second World War our governments were too weak, too dependent on the good will of the then Liberal Party, to do any real damage. Something might possibly have come out from the partial victory of 1929 if it had not been for the treason of Ramsay Macdonald, joining in the National Government with the terrible Tories. For the nation is something we hate. The pacifism we supported certainly went a long way towards ensuring the country was not ready for war in 1939, but not nearly far enough.

1.2 We had a great victory in 1945 and made much of it under the guidance of Comrades Atlee and Bevan. The best way to ensure that the country would be ill-prepared for the future, for competition with the other capitalist states, was to start spending money it did not have on welfare programmes that it could not afford. How stupid our enemies were not to recognise how clever we were in building a Welfare State in a bankrupt country! How much more we could have achieved if Comrade Atlee had not lost his nerve and went for a general election in 1951. The Tories managed to reverse some of our damage, though we still made real gains on the road to ruin, massive public spending based on an economy that depended in a large part on dying and antiquated industries. Our comrades in the Trade Unions offered us valuable support here.

1.3 Our next period in office from 1964 to 1970 also saw positive achievements. Some comrades made useful and lasting contacts with the comrade communists in the Soviet Union as part of our secret foreign policy programme. Information was exchanged and deals done. Comrade Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union performed some valuable services here, both as a paid-up agent of the KGB and as a sponsor of new MPs in trade union rotten boroughs. Comrades Blair and Brown were eventually to benefit from this union sponsorship. Comrade Wilson, our Prime Minister, pretended to be renewing the economy and reforming ‘outmoded’ trade union practices; but the economy just got weaker and the unions stronger.

1.4. More good work was done in our next period of government from 1974 to 1979, especially in the creation of ruinous levels of inflation, helped along by deals with the trade union dons. But things were still not moving fast enough; Britain was proving more resilient than we expected. Then came the disaster of 1979; then came Margaret Thatcher, the devil incarnate, who set about ruing all of our best achievements. We came close, but not close enough. We have to try harder, accelerate our programme in such a way that no future Thatcher will be able to reverse our work.

Future Strategy

We are now prepared for government, for victory in the election of 1997. These are the chief elements we must work on.

a. Devolution. Scotland and Wales must be given a parliament, in the case of the former, and an assembly, in the case of the latter. It was a mistake, comrades, to oppose devolution in the past, for this is the best way of beginning the end of Britain and the best way of isolating England. Don’t worry, comrades; in the short term we will still have the support of the bloc Labour vote from Scotland and Wales at Westminster, though English Tories will have no input into the affairs of these nations. A brilliant tactic. In the long term it will not matter what happens in England or what the English think for, you see, there will be no more England, which leads on to the second main feature of our master plan.

b. Europe. We shall accelerate the death of Parliament in England by giving away more and more powers to the European Union. We shall pretend to be opposed to any major political changes in Europe, changes of a constitutional nature, while advancing these as fast as we can. One element here is to pretend to allow the people to have a say in such matters and then, when our goals are within reach, change our minds. This approach might be used just prior to a future election. Westminster shall become increasingly irrelevant in peoples lives; England shall become increasingly irrelevant. Indeed, our third major strategy will make it difficult for people in future even to define Englishness.

c. Mass Immigration. We will open the doors. We will allow everyone in, whether there is economic cause or not, diluting the native English stock in a new multi-cultural utopia. We shall denounce all words of caution as racist, thus silencing debate. When we are finished it will be impossible to reverse the trend. This may very well lead to new forms of extremism in our old heartlands, as voters feel more and more alienated, a danger, yes, but such a process will help us forward by leading to the further fragmentation of England.

d. The Economy. Comrade Brown, whom Comrade Blair intends to appoint as Chancellor of the Exchequer, has excellent plans for laying the foundations of economic ruin by deregulating the banking sector - killing capitalism by its own devices - and by building a credit-fuelled boom, which will take the nation deeper and deeper into unsupportable levels of debt, public debt and private debt.

Summary

It is our earnest hope comrades that we win not just the coming election but the election after that and the election after that. It is our hope that we win and win. After twelve years or so people will no longer recognise this country, recognise it for what it once was. But I repeat, comrades, secrecy must be maintained. Only by that will the Elders of Labour emerge triumphant. Triumphant indeed.

A Rattling Good Yarn

It began with a ship wreck.  The year is 1120.  The vessel in question is the White Ship, leaving France for England, setting sail in the dark on a late November night.  All on board were in a party mood, including, according to some accounts, the crew.  The wine and ale has been flowing with liberality.  No sooner had the vessel left harbour than it hit a submerged rock.  All but one of the passengers and crew died.

Norman England might be said to have died that night also; for the drowned included William Adelin.  The grandson of William the Conqueror, he was the only surviving legitimate son and heir of Henry I.  Henry, who was to rule for another fifteen years after the tragedy, had no choice but to leave the throne to his daughter, Matilda, a kind of forlorn hope in a militant male-dominated world.  And so it proved.  No sooner had the king died than the throne was seized by Stephen of Blois, Matilda's cousin, ushering in a long period of civil war, known subsequently as the Anarchy. 

It ushered in much more; it ushered in the devil’s brood.  It ushered in the best of kings and the worst of kings.  It ushered in the Plantagenets.  Reputedly descended from a daughter of Satan, they were set to become England’s longest reigning dynasty.  There is a story worth telling. It’s a story told with enthusiasm, insight and panache by Dan Jones in the recently published The Plantagenets: the Kings Who Made England. 

The sinking of the White Ship is one important marker; the other is Matilda’s marriage in 1128 to one Geoffrey of Anjou. It was a marriage made in hell, or at least Matilda might have thought so.  A widow of twenty six, previously married to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, she now found herself bound to a red-headed teenager of fourteen, a marriage arranged by her father for the sake of the peace.  Geoffrey, son of the count of Anjou, had taken to sporting a sprig of yellow broom as his personal emblem- the planta genista in Latin -, hence the name of the ensuing dynasty. 

Matilda and Geoffrey were never to rule England, an honour that fell to their son, who succeeded Stephen in 1154 as Henry II.  Red in hair and red in passion, Henry set the pattern to come.  There was war, bloodshed, brutality and massacre aplenty; but there was also innovation, consolidation and development.  It was under Henry and his successors that England began to take shape as a nation, not a mere appendage of a French-speaking continental power. 

Jones is a story-teller of considerable skill.  In six hundred or so pages he simply carries one along in a strong narrative and chronological vessel, the sort of thing that was once dismissed as, well, just a tad passé by the high priests of the historical profession. 

The focus is very much on the politics and the personalities of power. When his kings are good they are very, very good and when they are bad they…have red hot pokers thrust into their bowels.  Actually, the supposed gruesome death of Edward II is one of the myths that the author hits on the head with a hammer that might very well have been borrowed from Edward I, hitherto busy hammering the Scots. 

The measure of ‘good’ here really needs to be refined.  Good means effective.  It does not mean as in good as in good; anything but, if you take my meaning.  For Jones the effective include Henry II, Richard I, Edward I and Edward III.  The bad, or rather the ineffectual, are King John (isn’t he on every list of great historical baddies?), Henry III, Edward II and Richard II. 

The former – the good -were to stamp their mark on England, through war, law making and administration.  The latter – the bad - also stamped their mark, possibly in some even more lasting ways.  John, by being bad, brought about some good, albeit unwillingly, some lasting innovations in the common law of the land, including the provisions of Magna Carta, the most important of all. 

Indeed it might also be said that it was his incompetence as a soldier that began the process of making England England, rather than greater Normandy or the jewel in the crown of the Angevin Empire.  It was thanks to John that the Channel began to serve in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.

King John was not a good man, and no good friends had he.  He stayed in every afternoon…but no one came to tea.  Dan Jones certainly did not.  He serves him up as he has been traditionally served up - an all round rotter.  This personally is where I take my leave, seeing John more as the victim of monkish chroniclers.  He was a man who could certainly sin with the best of the Plantagenets, but whose reign saw some important innovations in administration and government.  In this regard I’m a revisionist, not a traditionalist like Jones, who draws up a heavy charge sheet spread over some sixty pages, a catalogue of crime and personal failure that Matthew Paris, the medieval chronicler and character assassin, would doubtless applaud. 

As for the effective ones, John’s grandson Edward I, in his restless imperial ambitions, was to poison relations between England and Scotland for centuries.  Before that we have the example of Richard I, who cared little for England, other than as a mortgageable asset, to be used in financing the pursuit of a crusading chimera. 

The author and I can at least agree on one thing: we both admire Edward III, whom I described in a recent English Standard article as the real father of the English nation.  Although his ambitions in France were fruitless his time saw great innovations in both military and parliamentary affairs.  It was a time that saw the beginning of the end of the old England of humble peasants and hungry barons, never the twain to meet. 

It’s in his account of the ‘black’ fourteenth century that Jones is at his best, in his treatment of the highs of Edward III and the lows of Richard II, his grandson.  His handling of the reign of the latter, the first gentleman of England, is particularly good, hardly surprising in that he previously published a commendable account of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. 

Some might think – I did think – that his tale ends rather abruptly in 1399 with the deposition of Richard II. After all, in the Lancaster and York phases, the story of the Plantagenets continues down to the death of Richard III at Bosworth in 1485.  But I suppose this, a period that covers the final dramatic stages of the Hundred Years War and the ensuing Wars of the Roses, would be a mighty postscript in an already lengthy book.  It’s aimed at the popular market and the popular market might baulk at a work heading fast towards a thousand pages or more! 

The publishers have managed to stamp the book with the imprimatur of some impressive heavyweights, including David Starkey and Simon Sebag-Montefiore. These things always seem slightly over the top to me - clearly solicited in advance rather than drawn from a published review - , almost hysterical in their approbation.  The latter, for example, describes The Plantagenets as ‘outstanding’, a judgement echoed by Helen Castor, the best-selling author of She Wolves.  (It must be so: it says so on the cover!) 

It’s good, yes; it’s thrilling, yes; it’s a bit of a royal roller-coaster, yes.  But, really, is it ‘outstanding’?  Well, possibly, in some regards, but are we not suffering from a tendency to exaggeration and hyperbole here?  When every other new publication is described as ‘outstanding’ it tends to jade things somewhat.  Besides, does the book really need this kind of scaffolding?  I don’t think so, not when it serves its purpose, a sprightly filly galloping along nicely in a rattling good yarn.