Old, unhappy, far off things

Sixty-five years ago this month the Daily Express published a particularly horrific picture on its front page.  Under the heading Hanged Britons: Picture that will shock the world, it showed two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who had been murdered by Irgun paramilitaries in the Mandate of Palestine.  The sergeants had been kidnapped and killed in reprisal for the execution of three members of the Jewish underground organisation in what was becoming an increasingly ugly guerrilla war. 

There had been other terrorist incidents in the course of the conflict, but what became known as “the sergeant’s affair” was different.  The sheer ugliness of the event – the bodies were also bobby trapped – brought the conflict home to the people of Britain, causing the most widespread anti-Semitic rioting the country had ever seen, notwithstanding the fact that the killings had been condemned by British Jewish leaders.

By the end of the August holiday weekend there had been serious anti-Jewish rioting in Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool, with more minor disturbances in Bristol, Hull, Warrington and London.  Although there were no fatalities a number of people were beaten up and property destroyed, including a wooden synagogue in West Derby.  In Eccles, John Regan, himself a former sergeant, harangued a crowd of some seven hundred people, saying “Hitler was right.  Exterminate every Jew – every man, woman and child.  What are you afraid of?  There’s only a handful of police.”

Serious stuff, but in the end it all proved to be so much hot air, not just Regan’s incitement, for which he was charged and fined, but the whole violent wave.  Even obvious fascist politicians like Jeffrey Hamm, formerly of the British Union of Fascists and now in charge of the League of Ex-Servicemen, could not make any lasting political capital out of the incident.  The Express, which had triggered the violence with its sensational front page lead, backed off in shock, calling for calm and describing the attacks on innocent shopkeepers as a national disgrace.

That short hot summer has left almost no memory.  It’s a pity, really, because as history the whole episode is really quite intriguing.  Although superficially caused by an event far from these shores, it revealed much more about problems and difficulties far closer to home: the problems of austerity Britain. 

George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published two years after the sergeants’ incident, is supposedly about a dystopian future.  In actual fact it was much more about a dystopian present, as people reading it at the time would have recognised.  The drab London he depicts in the novel was not some imaginative construct but a living reality.  Like so many other British cities, it had not fully recovered from the war.  Vacant lots and bomb sites were everywhere.  With a housing shortage came a serious problem of homelessness. 

The war, and its financial legacy, also had had a profound effect on the economy. Some foodstuffs, like butter, meat were still rationed. Confectionary had come off ration in 1949, but distribution had to be brought back under state control because demand was simply too great. Shortages meant that people took to producing their own food in back gardens and allotments. Income tax was at an extraordinarily high level, more than twice what it is today. Bureaucratic red tape was a major feature of everyday life, also brilliantly reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the 'social comedies' being produced by Ealing Studios, movies like Whisky Galore and Passport to Pimlico.

The war had been won; the peace was clearly being lost.  Food shortages and serious unemployment were compounded by a fuel shortage in the bitter winter of 1946-47, when coal was rationed in a coal-rich country.  Unhappy and bewildered, people looked for scapegoats, turning to the greatest scapegoats of all – the Jews.  Rationing created a vigorous black market which, by common perception, was controlled by the Jews. It’s not that surprising that so many ordinary people were taken in by this, especially as Ernest Bevan, foreign minister in the Labour government of the day, made anti-Semitic remarks, including one to the effect that the Jews of Europe were “pushing to the front of the queue.”

Cities like Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, where the rioting was worse, also happened to be the places most affected by unemployment and general deprivation.  What began there as anti-Jewish riots soon turned into a looting free for all.  But the whole thing passed just as quickly as it had emerged.  The hooliganism had been based on personal frustration not on any deep rooted anti-Jewish hostility.  It was too soon after the Holocaust, details of which were still being revealed, for anti-Semitism to become a credible cause.  1947, as Lionel Trilling said in an article on the subject (New Statesman, 28 May), was the end of a chapter, not the beginning. 

The following year the state of Israel was formed and the sergeants’ affair, and the riots, forgotten.  It left one painful and unnoticed irony: Clifford Martin was Jewish.  

Charming without Charming

I’m a hard-nosed romantic; let me get that out of the way to begin.  I love fairy tales and tradition; I love ruined castles and haunted halls; I love witches and princesses; I love elves and goblins; I love all sorts of enchantments.  I loved Brave, a brave account of a brave old world, a world caught half way between night and a dream.  It’s an animated feature made by Pixar Studios, the same people who made Toy Story, one of my favourite childhood experiences. 

I used to love animated features.  It’s a long time since I’ve seen one, though.  The last I think was Ratatouille, also by Pixar, which I saw some years ago on a flight back from Hong Kong.  I went to see Brave, set in a mythical medieval Scotland, because I’m not long back from the country, because it was recommended here and elsewhere, because there is something crystalline and whimsical about my present mood.  I’m so glad I did because I was captivated; I was charmed and I was enchanted.  I was carried along by a will-o’-the-wisp. 

It concerns one Princess Merida, feisty, fun-loving girl of wholly independent mind, her flaming red hair as shocking and untameable as her flaming red spirit.  She takes up archery, much to the disapproval of her mother, who expects Merida to do what princesses do, which is to look decorative until such time as Prince Charming puts in an inevitable appearance. 

The only problem is that Merida does not want to get married; the time is not right; she has too much life yet to live; she wants to make her own choices; she wants to discover her own fate, her own destiny.  She most certainly does not want to marry any of the three geeks supplied by the clans who arrive at her father’s castle.  But refusal means war. 

Brave derives much of its energy from the tension between Queen Elinor, voiced by Emma Thompson, and Merida, opposite polar strengths, compatibly incompatible.  In fact they are the only strong figures in a land headed by the amiable but ineffectual King Fergus (Billy Connolly).  Merida herself is given colour and substance by Kelly Macdonald, speaking in a beautiful, melodious Scottish accent. Oh, those lilting intonations; those voluptuous vowel sounds! 

Macdonald was in Trainspotting, a bleak, ugly film set in a bleak, heroin-soaked Scotland, a movie I absolutely hated based on a novel by Irvine Welsh, a talentless poseur I absolutely despise.  There is no comparison, of course there is no comparison, between the depressing hyper-realism of the first and the transporting beauty of the second, but I would far, far rather have the fairytale.  “Legends are lessons”, the Queen tells Merida, “they rhyme with truth.”  Indeed, they do; and there are some truths better than other truths. 

So, here we have Merida, the rebellious teenager, who, in an attempt to escape an artificial fate, goes of in pursuit of will-o’-the-wisp and a real fate, her fate, her destiny, whatever it may be.  Merida, Merida, burning bright, in the forests of the night.  In the forests of the night she meets a woodcarver (Julie Walters), who is a woodcarver when she is not being a witch!  Alas, she disappears far too early from the movie. 

After promising to buy all her carvings – this is a witch with business acumen – Merida obtains a bewitched cake which, as she intends, will change her mother’s mind.  It doesn’t; it changes her into a bear!  This presents an additional family problem because Fergus had his leg torn off by a monstrous Ursa Major called Mor’du when Merida was a child. 

It’s now a race to reverse the curse, a race in which the mother discovers the daughter and the daughter the mother.  I’m not going to spoil the tale with spoilers, just in case there are any girls and boys in the audience.  Just remember that legends are lessons that do rhyme with truth, and that daughters and mothers often do come to understand one another; that there is no difficulty that cannot be surmounted by love. 

Oh, how I would have loved a Merida when I was growing up, someone I could really identity with, a princess who is not a wallflower; a princess who knows her mind and has a mind to share.  This is a visually and morally luscious experience without, I’m delighted to say, the advent of Prince Charming.  No, it’s just charming.  This is a heart-warming, poignant and funny modern fairy tale for imaginative, sentimental and funny modern girls.  Girls like me.  

Obama's Bust

In responding to my recent BrooWaha article on Obama’s incapacity for high office (Don’t Mess with Mr In-Between, 26 July) one contributor made the following observation about Mitt Romney’s supposed London Olympic gaff during his recent foreign tour:

…Mr. Romney goes to London on his first foreign visit as a presidential candidate and he insults our greatest ally. He went on a soft-ball tour and screwed it up. He showed he's not even qualified to be a foreign service officer never mind the president of the U.S.

This is a subject I intend to return to, a Michigan Yankee in the Court of Queen Elizabeth, but first I really want to focus on the subject of political gaffs, not Romney’s supposed faux pas, but that of the Man in the White House, who, when it comes to this sort of thing, for once makes his opponent look like a rank amateur.

I read recently that Americans still love Sir Winston Churchill just as much as we do in the land of his birth. The Morgan Museum and Library in New York is presently running an exhibition entitled Churchill: the Power of Words. It’s caused quite a stir in Midtown, with more than 30,000 people visiting in the first six weeks, some fifty percent in excess of the curators’ expectations.

America’s fascination with Britain’s greatest ever wartime leader, the only man ever to be accorded honorary American citizenship while still alive, is really not that surprising. After all, quite apart from the citizenship, he was half-American by ancestry. Jennie Jerome, his mother, was born in Brooklyn. His story is an American story, if one step removed.

There is one man who does not admire Churchill. There is one man skilled in undiplomatic skills. There is one man who, in his conceit and arrogance, was prepared to offer a gratuitous insult to America’s most consistent ally. That man is Obama, so far as I am concerned the most un-American American ever to occupy the White House.

No sooner did he take command in 2009 than he ordered Jacob Epstein’s bust of Churchill removed from the Oval Office. Previously loaned by the British government to President George W. Bush, officials offered to let the new President hang on to it for another four years. Thanks but no thanks, was the response. At a time when British soldiers were fighting and dying alongside their American comrades in Afghanistan it was an act of breathtaking insensitivity, a clear and direct snub.

Reacting in anger to Mitt Romney’s recent announcement that he intends to restore the exiled Sir Winston if elected in November, officials said that the bust was still in place, that it had never been removed, that it was all an urban myth. Dan Peffer, White House Communications Director, attacked Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor, for daring to suggest that Sir Winston had gone AWOL.

“This is 100 per cent false” he declared, “The bust is still in the White House.” Unfortunately for him Krauthammer was 100 per cent correct; the bust is not in the White House but in the residence of Sir Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador, as embassy officials confirmed. Peffer at once had to eat crow, issuing a grovelling apology on the White House blog. The whole thing has become something of a pantomime along the 'oh, no, it isn’t, oh, yes, it is' lines, an American, sorry, Obama farce at its most farcical.

We are becoming used to Obama’s clumsiness and numbing insensitivity. He’s on record as referring to “Polish death camps” during the Second World War, causing huge offence to the Poles. Meeting David Cameron, the British Prime Minister earlier this year he promised stop pressing for negotiations between London and Buenos Aires on the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, only to go back on his word and join with Argentina on calls for a ‘negotiated settlement.’ The feelings of the people who actually live in these islands is clearly a matter of no importance.

Enough of Obama. Let me get back to the Churchill show. Among the exhibits are his notes for a speech he made in the House of Commons on September 11, 1940. The Blitz had just begun, German bombers pounding the city night after night in the months to come. “Adolf Hitler”, Churchill said, “hopes by killing a large number of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise the people of this mighty imperial city…Little does he know the spirit of the British nation”.

Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular have not failed to notice the significance of the date and the significance of message about the futility of terrorism; the message about the strength, the spirit and the determination of a great city and a great nation. Most understand Churchill, even if their President does not.

Mean City

Conquered City by Victor Serge is the second novel that I’ve read set in the Civil War that followed the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia.  The first was The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov which I admired for its clarity, its biting satire and its sheer brilliance.  It’s set in and around Kiev in the Ukraine at a particularly troubled and uncertain time in history, just as Serge's book is set in and around Saint Petersburg - then called Petrograd – during the same troubled months. 

Conquered City is a slightly different order of literary experience.  It has flashes of brilliance, though the overall effect is uneven.  At some points it’s clear, at others opaque; at some points satirical, at others laudatory. I do admire Serge, but in a different way; I admire him above all for his honesty and for his integrity which carries this work – the first book of his I’ve ever read – from the mundane realms of propaganda into a far higher aesthetic level. 

The thing is Serge was a true believer, a professional revolutionary who identified with the Revolution.  To that extent he believed that the suffering he describes which such lucidity in Conquered City could be overcome; that a floor was being constructed on which the future would dance. 

But he was also an idealist, not a quality particularly prized among hard-nosed Bolshevik cadres, the sort of man uncomfortable with self-serving cynicism and the betrayals of expediency.  He was the sort of man, in other words, who was incapable of settling down to the rigours of Stalinism. 

But there is more here.  Serge, it seems to me, was not the type of individual who could ever have made a home in any kind of Russia, least of all the one forged by the Bolshevik Revolution, no matter if the flavour was Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin.  Indeed I begin to wonder if the author really understood the true character of the history he lived through and the ideology he embraced, a dangerous step, I know, on the basis of a single reading of a single novel. 

Perhaps I’m not being quite fair; there is startling prescience along with the idealism.  I recall having an argument over the precise point in Animal Farm where the degeneracy started.  Most see Orwell’s novel as a parable against Stalinism. My interpretation is different.  The moral rot clearly sets in before the rise of Napoleon/Stalin; the moral rot sets in when the pigs take the windfall apples for themselves.  In Serge’s beleaguered city the goods that are available are not evenly distributed, something he is acutely aware of.  The workers starve; or rather they are fed on the fine words of Bolshevik apparatchiks, who claim the sausage and bread for themselves.

And then there is this passage on page 47, a parable of bureaucracy, the rope that was to strangle all hopes that the events of 1917 may have raised;

These were not the same outrages, but they had just cost the lives of forty soldiers who had frozen to death near Dno while the overcoats being sent to them were held up in a railroad station because the shipping order hadn’t been filled out according to regulations. 

Overall Serge has an admiral precision with words.  He manages to convey so much with great economy of expression.  I thought this passage close to the beginning particularly impressive:

…Comrade Ryzhik, was sleeping in his boots on the same divan where, eighteen months earlier, an old epicurean of the race of the Ruriks amused himself by staring full of enchantment and despair at naked girls in this elegant Louis XV room.  Now this epicurean was lying somewhere else, who knew where, naked, with a bristly beard, and a hole clean through his head, on an artillery range under two feet of trampled earth, four feet of snow, and the nameless weight of eternity. 

It’s history in an instant; it’s about time, near and distant; it’s about personal loss and decay; it’s about change and it’s about irrelevance, not just the irrelevance of the past but the irrelevance of a possible future.  What does fate have waiting for Comrade Ryzhik? 

As a novel Conquered City is a bit like a painting, impressionist and expressionist at one and the same time.  There is no central focus.  Rather we move from episode to episode, looking at developments from within and without, caught in the currents and cross-currents of events, dipping in and out of the lives of others, lives within lives, marionettes on the stage of history.  “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it”, some lines I remember from Doctor Zhivago.  There is no personal life in Serge’s Petrograd; history, and the CHEKA, the first manifestation of the Soviet secret police, are killing it in starvation and terror.  Perfection cannot be shaped by ugliness and squalor. 

This is an honest novel.  Serge’s virtue would almost certainly have led to his death in Stalin’s Great Terror, the sum of all of the little terrors that had gone before, but for his international reputation.  Already a persona non grata, he was allowed to leave Russia before the real horror began.  As it was he was pursued to the end of his days by the agents of a Revolution that had corrupted beyond recall.  There are other novels of Serge’s I’ve still to read, better perhaps, so Conquered City may not stand as his final testament.  It’s a commendable one, notwithstanding. 

We conquered everything and everything slipped out of our grasp.  We have conquered bread and there is famine.  We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house.  We have proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons, an iron discipline – yes, to pour our human weakness into brazen moulds in order to accomplish what is perhaps beyond our strength – and we are the bringers of dictatorship.  We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is “fraternity and death” in reality.  We have founded the Republic of Labour, and the factories are dying, grass is growing in their yards.  We wanted each to give according to his needs; and here we are, privileged in the middle of generalised misery, since we are less hungry than others!  

Olympus to the Olympics

Summer has made an overdue appearance and of all places in Scotland!  The last few days have been jolly decent, warm and sunny.  I came up to Edinburgh chiefly for the Catherine the Great exhibition but I also arranged with some friends to walk part of the West Highland Way over the weekend.  And we did, not the whole thing, which can take several days, leaving from just north of Glasgow, but from Bridge of Orchy to Fort William and then back south by train.  It’s by far the most interesting part of the route. 

I’ve walked the Way before, in whole and in part.  When the weather is good the walking is very, very good and when it is bad it is horrid!  I once crossed Rannoch Moor in the wind and the rain, not a pleasant experience, I assure you.  But Rannoch Moor itself, when one can see and appreciate it properly, is really lovely, a wilderness but a beautiful one, the colours changing all the time as the clouds speed across the heather.  I managed to see some red deer, though quite a distance away. 

Out of Rannoch and on to the King’s House Hotel for a welcome supper and even more welcome drinks.  We stayed here overnight, as I have on several occasions in the past.  I love the place. It’s by no means luxurious but the inn, one of the oldest in Scotland, is bags full of atmosphere.  Our fellow guests were walkers and climbers, people who really know how to have a good time! 

I did have a good time, unlike poor Dorothy Wordsworth, the sister of the poet, who came this way in 1803, later recording her disapproval in her Journal;

Never did I see such a miserable, such wretched place, – long rooms with ranges of beds, no other furniture except benches, or perhaps one or two crazy chairs, the floors far dirtier than an ordinary house could be if it were never washed. With length of time the fire was kindled and after another hour of waiting, supper came, a shoulder of mutton so hard that it was impossible to chew the little flesh that might have been scraped off the bone. 

The only thing that could have made her stay any worse would have been a visit from the Wicked Witch of the West!  All I can say is that a lot has changed since Dorothy’s day.  The food was good with – thank goodness – not a trace of mutton on the varied menu. 

So, up we got reasonably early on Saturday morning for the onward trek to Kinlochleven.  The first stage took us to the eastern entrance to Glencoe, one of the most beautiful and sombre settings in the whole of the Highlands, a dark and brooding nature looking into a dark and brooding history.  We didn’t go in to the Glen itself, there wasn’t enough time.  Instead it was straight up the Devil’s Staircase, a zigzag path cutting its way up the hillside. Given that name by British soldiers, it forms part of an old military road network created by General Wade in the early eighteenth century in the aftermath of the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. 

Incidentally, if you ever stay in Glencoe I would recommend the old Clachaig Inn, just as bags full of atmosphere as the King's House.  There is a sign on the door saying No Hawkers or Campbells, a nod in the direction of the infamous Massacre of February, 1692, when part of the local branch of Clan Donald was murdered in the night by soldiers from the Earl of Argyll’s Regiment of Foot.  This was actually a formation in the British Army acting under orders, but the event has traditionally been placed in the context of more ancient clan rivalries.  For all the sad history it really is a lovely spot.  I can assure you that the interdict on Campbells is not taken seriously.  I should know; my boyfriend is one! 

What a remarkable view there is from the top of the Devil’s Staircase, making the climb so worthwhile, with open vistas across mountains, valleys and hills in all directions.  Here, sitting on the heather, we had our picnic lunch.  I lunched and was lunched upon, with clouds of midges descending to feast.  How on earth do they manage when I’m not here?!  The midge, if you don’t know, is a Scottish cousin of the mosquito, all the more ferocious because they are pack hunters and a lot less diffident in their relentless attacks. 

The climb to the top of the Devil’s Staircase was enjoyable; the descent to Kinlochleven the very devil.  The path is mostly loose scree, lots of broken rock fragments, which becomes really wearing on the legs after a bit.  Kinlochleven is a pleasant village right at the head of Loch Leven, a salt water lake which cuts well in from the coast.  Here we stayed overnight in the old Mamore Hunting Lodge, with me too bushed to do much more than eat and sleep. 

The road goes ever onwards.  After breakfast we ascended above Kinlochleven, then directly along the path all the way to Fort William.  I refreshed my water bottle once above the line of habitation, pure, cold water from a stream flowing down from the hill above, the drink of the gods, water like you’ve never tasted in your life, cold and sweet, not at all like the kind of thing sold in supermarkets. 

Fort William is a charming little town with one of the best fish restaurants in Scotland but, alas, we had no time to stand and stare and eat out; it was on to the train and back to a wet Edinburgh afternoon.  And so here I am, refreshed, tired and exhilarated.  Oh, and in a much better mood than Dorothy Wordsworth. Tomorrow morning I leave for London, the place from whence I came, down from Olympus into the Olympics.  My mood is set to change for the worse!  

Great Catherine

Her name was Sophia Frederica Augusta.  She was a minor eighteenth century German princess of the minor eighteenth century duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst.  In the normal course of things she would have married a minor German prince, lived a minor German life and passed into history, minor and unnoticed.  But destiny had another path and another name for Sophia.  She became Ekaterina.  She became Catherine, Empress of all the Russias, known as ‘the Great’ even in her own lifetime.   

Catherine is one of those figures in history who has an enduring fascination for me.  I’m in Edinburgh at the present.  I came here specifically to visit the recently opened Catherine the Great – An Enlightened Empress exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland.  Marking the 250th anniversary of the coup d’état which placed her on the throne of Russia, it tells Catherine’s story through a collection of letters, diaries, jewellery, paintings, sculptures and dresses. 

Most of the items come from the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, including a recently restored giant coronation portrait, on show for the first time since the Revolution of 1917 which destroyed the Romanov dynasty.  The whole thing is a marvel, from the paintings, the porcelain, the grand dinner services and the intimate cameos.  It’s a story of Russia in peace and in war, a story of a Russia made even greater by a cultured, humane and civilized princess who took her adopted home to her heart. 

Catherine came to Russia to marry the Grand Duke Peter, the nephew of the reigning Empress Elizabeth.  If things had gone well she may have lived largely in her husband’s shadows and the shadows of history, like most other imperial consorts.  But they did not go well.  Peter and his new Grand Duchess developed a mutual loathing for one another, each taking a variety of lovers. 

Catherine was later to claim that her son Paul I, who succeeded her in 1796, was not the child of Peter but of Sergei Saltykov, one of her many paramours.  It’s almost certainly untrue.  Paul in character and attitude bore a striking resemblance to Peter, and was to fall from power for much the same reasons.  The two portraits on display in Edinburgh also show a remarkable physical similarity between father and son.

In the course of researching Catherine I came across an old movie called The Scarlett Empress, a 1934 historical drama directed by Josef von Sternberg, with Marlene Dietrich in the title role.  She’s really very good in the part, managing to catch the child-like simplicity of the young princess at one point and the scheming femme fatale at the next.  The movie has a marvellous Gothic cum expressionist quality.  The gargoyle thrones and the skeleton table decoration are really quite something.  The history, though, is as grotesque as the gargoyles, with Peter played as an inanely grinning imbecile by Sam Jaffe.

Peter III was, in truth, a competent and reforming emperor, but he managed to alienate just about everyone of significance in Russia, not just his wife.  With the support of the army and the leading Orthodox clergy, Catherine overthrew her husband in the coup of June 1762, after he had only been on the throne for a few months.  She went on to rule in her own right as Catherine II, while Peter was murdered. 

A black beginning did not presage a black reign; just the contrary.  Catherine was to prove herself the most cultured and civilized ruler ever to sit on the throne of Russia, the friend and correspondent of such luminaries of the Enlightenment as Denis Diderot and Voltaire.  I knew about this.  What I did not know is that she also had reason to be grateful to Charles James Fox, that old Whig bore.  His bust is one of the items on display! 

In the course of her reign, until the onset of the French Revolution introduced a note of caution, Catherine was instrumental in the pursuit of social and economic reform.  She was a great patron of the arts and sciences, encouraging all sorts of new enterprises.   In 1763 she founded Russia’s first College of Medicine.  Russia’s army and navy were hugely expanded, bringing success in war, particularly in successive conflicts with the Ottoman Turks.  Power, majesty and art; it was all a reflection of her glory. 

I loved it all; I spent over two hours in close examination of all sorts of marvellous things, walking in the footsteps of a remarkable woman, Matruschka, a petty German who became a great Russian.  I thought of her and her lovers, particularly of Prince Grigory Potemkin, the great passion of her life, shown here in portrait and sculpture.  

I loved Catherine’s formal paintings, pure expressions of power and majesty. But it was another kind of depiction altogether that wholly beguiled me.  Painted by Vladimir Borovikovsky, it shows Catherine, informally dressed, walking with her dog in the parkland of Tsarskoye Selo, a country gentlewoman, unremarkably remarkable.   The other remarkable painting is that entitled Catherine II in Travelling Costume by Mikhail Shibanov, formally accepted by the Empress though it is unflattering portrait, showing her as an old woman. 

Quite apart from being Russia’s most successful ruler, Catherine was an avid collector of all sorts of objets d’art.  The Edinburgh showcase was but a small cross-section of her collection, antiques and sculpture as well as painting.  And all that sumptuous table ware, porcelain, ceramics, jewels, gold and silver! 

It was such a pleasure also to see some of the court costumes and regimental dresses that the Empress herself wore.  When I was in Moscow I saw the boots that Peter the Great made for himself on display in the Kremlin Armoury Museum.  He was a giant of a man, reflected in his footwear.  Catherine was of more modest stature, reflected in her own costumes.  But as I stood and watched, knowing that she had been there, I still felt myself in the presence of one of history’s giants.  If Russians knew how to read, she once said, they would write me off.  Russians know how to read; they will never write Catherine off.  Such a thing is impossible.  

Beyond the Economics of the Madhouse

Both the Economist and the Spectator this week have discovered a banal but obvious truth: that there is pain in Spain, yea, even so far as the word itself.  It’s not true, though, that the pain in Spain falls mainly in the plain; the pain falls everywhere, mountain and plain alike.  The pain is the euro. 

The euro crisis is a rolling comedy of false hopes and deeper errors.  And I’ll tell you this much – you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.  Writing in the Spectator, Daniel Hannan, one of my favourite observers on the European farce, rightly points out that that the troubled economies of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus amount together to less than 5% of the Community’s economy.  Greece, in other words, was a sideshow. 

Spain is different; Spain is the main act.  Here the banks are massively exposed.  Not only would a crash swamp the whole of the European economy but a rescue package would drink deep, ‘twoud drink the cup and all.  Drawing again on my Shakespearean well, it may be the point where German taxpayers cry hold, enough! 

There is a form of madness here that I find almost impossible to comprehend. Economics and finance, I freely and wholeheartedly confess, are well beyond my comfort zone.  But at least I can understand the basics, which is more than Spanish politicians seem able to do.  Here is a truth I cannot make any simpler: Spain’s present economic woes are all down to the euro. 

Before the great crash of 2008 the country was running a surplus.  The national debt had been reduced to 42% of Gross Domestic Product.  This is where the real lunacy comes.  With the economy beginning to overheat one sure way of taking the pressure off is by raising interest rates.  But the Spanish could not do that because they were locked into the asylum of the euro.  Spanish governments thus had to apply the interest rates set by the European Central Bank (ECB), low even for the north, catastrophic for the south. 

Again as Hannan points out, in the decade prior to 2008 Spain actually manage to run a negative interest rate.   There it was - money for the taking, and how it was taken.  If you have been to Spain recently you can’t possibly have missed the results, a property crash that makes Ireland’s look like a picnic, unsold, half-completed developments everywhere, waste on a massive scale.  The banks did well, though, hugely over fulfilling their bad debts quota. 

So Spain is drowning because of cheap credit.  What’s the solution according to the gnomes of Brussels?  Why, more cheap credit. Mariano Rayoy, the country’s prime minister, was given a £100million loan to prop up the country’s troubled banks, a great ‘triumph' by his insane lights.  It was a ‘triumph’ alright for every household in Spain, which found they were now carrying an extra debt burden of £15000.  There has to be another solution.  Yes there is – another bailout.  The petrol dump is on fire.  Hurry; pour in more petrol. 

Now do you really want to see something scary?  Well, it’s this.  The Spanish government has to borrow at 7% to prop up banks that can borrow from the ECB at 1%, so they can lend the money back to the Spanish government at 7% so it can bail them out.  Confused?  Yes, I am too.  The expressions vicious circle and downward spiral might have been invented to explain such a crazy scenario. 

For Spain, though its politicians are blind to the truth, Europe is the problem, not the solution.  The prognosis, as the Economist reports, is bleak.  The economy is in serious recession, the public sector is cutting spending and the private sector is reluctant to invest.  Unemployment is among the highest in the Continent, with one person in every four out of work.  High unemployment, falling demand and low investment impacts on tax receipts, which in turn impacts on Spain’s ability to meet its debt repayment targets.  Weak banks, more bailouts, more and more austerity; down and down the spiral goes.  Wilkins Micawber would understand: the result is indeed misery. 

Then this really is the economics of the madhouse?  No, it’s far too insane for that.