“ A country controls its borders and should be able to kick out those who govern it. The arrogant European Commission is an affront to democracy.” Iain Martin in The Times today.

Same old, same old. We are back in the Free trade and tariff debate of the mid 19th Century. The world moved on over the decades, sadly in Europe having to endure two ghastly Wars before Churchill’s maxim that Jaw Jaw was better than War War eventually won.

If you want open borders for trade as, for example, Margaret Thatcher enthusiastically did, those borders have to be open otherwise as well. The greatest triumph of European unity was the negotiation of the Four Freedoms – something that the United Kingdom was very much party to.

To call the European Commission “arrogant” is just ignorant abuse. The Commission is empowered by a democratically elected Parliament. What it does it is authorised by that Parliament to do it. And if a member state objects it generally has a right of veto.

Churchill argued for unity – he had seen twice in his lifetime what raw nationalism could do. International cooperation is infinitely preferable to go-if-alone faux-patriotism with all its dangers of grandiose flag-waving self-regard.

Cooperation requires compromise, and rules. We are in the world of the “greater good” here. Not everything in a Treaty such as Maastricht could be equally beneficial to all its signatories. But overall the benefits for all, jointly and severally, outweighed the downsides for some. And Britain even negotiated opt outs that gave it a preferential position.

The acid test of any proposed action is to compare it with what others in a similar position do. Of the then 28 nations of the European Union Britain was the only nation to leave, indeed the only nation to contemplate it. The world has moved on from closed borders and closed minds. Except in this sceptered isle. Here Little England triumphed over Global Britain and sadly it won’t be rolled back in my lifetime.

Tin-pot regimes always indulge in vulgar and extravagant symbolism. Criticise Idi Amin for his viciousness and genocidal tendencies but you have to admit that he could put on a show. The more extravagant a dictator’s uniform the more vicious his crimes. When the British Empire ruled across the globe we always had lots of events to demonstrate our power. An elephant could have a good career in India just being part of parades.

As we have entered the stage of terminal decline to tin-pottery more and more flags have been unfurled. They even wanted to brand the “Oxford” vaccine with a union flag for a while until it was realised both that its British component was limited – and that it wasn’t as good as the alternatives.

So the new yacht is just bombast – a childish salute to the past which, it seems, HMQ wants no part of. Can’t see Charles fancying it much either. Not his thing at all. Can you imagine a serious nation wanting to preen around on a boat thinking it would “host trade fairs, ministerial summits and diplomatic talks”. They’d hire the function rooms at the nearest Hilton Hotel instead.

This is tax-payers money (there’s no other sort) and could be better spent – not least on overseas aid where the budget has been decimated. Will you tell the African hospital denied funding that if they go to the harbour than can see a British yacht setting out its stall – like Del Boy in Peckham.

“Be clear: we could have saved many lives by effecting a more complete shut-down of the economy while sealing ourselves off from the world but we chose (arguably rightly) not to do that.” Matthew Parris in “The Times” today.

“Arguably rightly”? Well that’s an argument I’d like to see. But I won’t, of course, because it’s nonsense. This is not 20/20 hindsight. At the time some other countries were doing just that. Locking down more comprehensively and much earlier. And Britain? Off to Cheltenham races in our tens of thousands.

The insouciance of Boris Johnson shaking hands and arguing in favour of “taking it on the chin” killed people. Not a few – but in droves. Including nearly him we were told. The mad men and women of the Barmy Right were denying the extent of the threat. And Johnson listened to the Hannans and the Hartley-Brewers and delayed.

What we witnessed was a clash between populism and science. In Johnson’s pecking order of influences on decision-making “Will it be popular” is on its own at the top. “Doing the unpopular thing” is nowhere in his list of options. And if it has to be done he’ll let the experts take the rap. Then there’s the blame culture. If it all goes wrong Macavity wasn’t there.

Cummings in his committee appearance told us nothing we didn’t know or strongly suspect. There was a “If they die, they die” attitude seen at its most venal in the Care Home saga. Was that “arguably right”? I don’t think so. It was mostly the little people and the old who died. Boris was one of the very few of the not yet geriatric rich and famous who suffered. Odd that.

Populism is extraordinarily effective because people believe what they want to believe. It’s like drink or comfort food. We know it’s dodgy but we still do it. That’s why so much snake oil has been sold over the years and why malignant ideologues often survive in power as long as they do. Stalin and Franco died in office, and quietly in bed. And Boris Johnson is still in office. Another Teflon man.

We don’t expect balance from James Forsyth (the Times today) or from The Spectator and the Hard Right think tank world he inhabits. In the shadows to the vast majority of the population these people, largely unelected, do more than pull the puppet’s strings – they provide cover for him to shelter in. Dominic Cummings was for some time part of the conspiracy. Now he is a Trotsky type figure – once at the centre now in exile. He’d do well to look out for pickaxes.

Students of history know that revolution doesn’t require people actually to take to the streets, just to vote when you need them. To get the vote in image management is much more important than policy. This doesn’t mean you don’t need ideology-driven policy. It’s there in spades, but you don’t need to use it when attacking the Red Wall.

If image management requires lies and cover-up so be it. You don’t need conventionally able people even in the highest offices of State, just those that are compliant. There are not only no dissidents in the Cabinet – there are none in Parliament nor the Conservative Party at large either. You don’t have to be very good – just very loyal.

One trick is to get the opposition to descend to abuse. Every cry of “Fascist dictatorship” reinforces the governing cabal’s power rather than threatening it. But, ironically, painting opponents as extremists is part of the Rightist strategy. Remember the attacks on Corbyn as a “Marxist” spread, of course, by the lickspittle media that has been a crucial element in the Making of Johnson.

Keeping it simple is the key. Issues as complex as Britain’s role in Europe or the management of the Pandemic cannot be reduced to binary you would think – but the evidence of the last five years challenges that. If there’s opposition bulldoze it – after you’ve prepared the ground first by lying of course. The battle between Johnson and Cummings? The same ! Only one winner. Take cover Dom, and stay clear of Mexico City.

Writing in The Times today Culture (sic) Secretary Oliver Dowden, predictably, uses the “British Values” banality to tell the BBC what it should do. This is yet another bit of flag- waving idiocy from a Government that daily proves Dr Johnson’s truism that patriotism is the last recourse of the scoundrel.

That there are “values” at the heart of a civilised society – any civilised society – is of course true. That any nation, let alone Britain, has a unique value set which sets it apart is highly questionable.

In reality if we check the United Kingdom against a template of generic values it has, for some time , fallen short – woefully so in many cases. Take overseas aid. If a value of a rich country is generosity to those in need Britain’s swingeing cuts to its international development budget are shameful. A modern British Value seems to be to do not what is generous but what is popular. Whatever positive values we may once have had are absent in today’s “Broken Britain”.

Another value that we seem to have discarded is the understanding that no country is an island entire in itself. Brexit was the apotheosis of this. Aside from the self harm it was a profoundly selfish and arrogant act. The arrogance was the presumption that we know best – better than twenty-seven other nations whose values are to work together cooperatively rather than drive themselves apart.

Across British society privilege and advantage set the rich apart – in healthcare, education and employment opportunities the more money you have the better the services you can buy. “Levelling up” is a chimera. Social division is a venal British Value that these days our leaders entrench rather than attack. To those that have more is given – the allocation of Government contracts and Honours to cronies shows that a British Value today is moral corruption.

If honesty in action and in reporting are worthwhile national values we fall woefully short on both. We have the gruesome double whammy of a lying government and lying media. How can you hold your leaders to account when fawning mendacity and bias is inculcated in much of the media?

How we are as a nation is as much a reflection of our past as our present. One of the key elements of our past was a predilection for cultural destruction. It is sometimes forgotten that our imperial adventures killed off first nation cultures and supplanted them with our own. Aboriginal societies – from native Americans to first nation Australians – were marginalised, infected and eventually destroyed by we Brits and some of us, Dowden included, have the audacity to boast about it !

A commitment to democracy, a drive to have equality of opportunity, an acknowledgment that we don’t have a monopoly of wisdom or morality in our past or present are values I would endorse. A fair society cannot be an institutionally divided one. But above all a society that aspires to set standards for others needs to be open and international not closed and inward looking. We fall so far short that we are now at best a laughing-stock at worst deserving of contempt.

An anthropologist can probably advise what Jesus might have looked like given what we do know about his origins and parentage. No doubt they have. One thing is sure and that is all the portrayals of Jesus, his mother and his disciples are wrong, comprehensively so in most cases. Is there anything more preposterous than the many Madonna and Child portraits, for example?

Does it all matter? If you have the faith to buy the whole New Testament Christian story then you won’t be much bothered by the visual fairy tales which purport to illustrate it. But the imagery is so ingrained in the belief system of Christianity that to eliminate it because it is self evidently false is inconceivable . Is anyone going to go to the Vatican and tell the Pope to take down his pictures?

Islam generally prohibits the portrayal of Mohammed or Allah in art. So a muslim’s view of God or the prophet (PBUH) resides in his or her own mind. The portrayals of God and Jesus Christians have been used to for a millennium or more are totally dominated by the white western culture that produced them. There is no such problem in Islam.

Religious teaching ought not to need visual symbols. But those of us who are faithless often marvel at the monuments to faith that previous generations left us. I will join the believers in admiring the art of a Pieta even though the imagery is at best an illusion and at worst a lie. I will wander in awe around a thousand year old cathedral likewise. Art transcends belief.

Art is subjective. I was at school in Cambridge in the 1960s and visited Kings College Chapel many times. When Rubens “The Adoration of the Magi” was later installed I visited the Chapel again and marvelled at it. That it is fiction didn’t trouble me then and it doesn’t trouble me now. I can’t quite explain this. There is something profoundly spiritual about great religious buildings and Art that transcends faith. Even more so historical accuracy.

“What country, friends, is this?” says Viola in “Twelfth Night” as she escapes the shipwreck and drags herself onto an unknown shore. The metaphor for Britain in 2021 is apposite in a way unimaginable a few short years ago.

Yesterday the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Priti Patel, joined the National Crime Agency in an operation to apprehend alleged people smugglers in East London. She did so in a specially made uniform with “Home Secretary” visible on a label on the jacket.

To say that Ms Patel’s self-promoting stunt is unprecedented goes without saying as does, unfortunately, that it’s pretty much par for the course in Boris Johnson’s Government which, when it is not lying through its teeth, trivialises everything it touches.

Johnson is a showman – a sort of Archie Rice on the stage of a dying Music Hall telling the same old jokes. There is no depth to Archie just pathos. As the “The Entertainer” progresses you see that Archie gradually realises that he is a fraud – something that the audience has realised much earlier. I’m not sure that Johnson has noticed yet.

So “What country friends is this?” misgoverned by low grade actors on a stage once bestrode by giants or, if not that, by those who gave a credible, respectable performance. Can you imagine a previous Home Secretary so delighting in her decisions that she insinuates herself in the action ? Ms Patel has in the past expressed support for the Death Penalty – as here in a performance of gruesome gormlessness. No doubt if she secured the return of hanging she’d be up there on the scaffold arranging the noose.

It’s the old substance versus show debate. During the Second World War Churchill got the balance right. Yes he couldn’t resist landing on a Normandy beach not long after D Day. But that bit of showing off was reasonable, even inspired, in the context of his courageous leadership in times of extraordinary stress.

Leadership is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. It may be fuelled by “Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself” as in Macbeth. Here the Peter Principle is relevant. Ambition is not in itself a bad thing of course only when it “o’erleaps itself”. The Peter Principle holds that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. Macbeth could not reach his goals by fair means, so he resorted to foul ones. Boris Johnson could never have become Prime Minister without dissembling and lying.

The Cabinet of Fools, presided over by our failing Music Hall performer, is a vivid illustration of the Peter Principle pretty much without exception. Priti Patel the most obvious and disturbing example. Her dressing up looks like “Spitting Image” – it is certainly comic until you realise that this is not for laughs, it’s for real.

To adapt L.P. Hartley we can say that the “present is a foreign country – they do things differently here.” What country it is I’ve frankly absolutely no idea. I don’t recall being shipwrecked here and I struggle even to recognise it at times.

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

There is a splendid article in The Times today by David Aaronovitch about the threat to a woman’s right to choose an abortion in the United States. To those of my early baby boomer generation this is sad as well as shocking. More evidence that the liberal foundations we thought we’d help build 50 years ago are wobbling.

As students in the 1960s we protested against a number of iniquities and eventually won, or thought we had. The Vietnam War. The Death Penalty. Civil Rights. Gay Rights. Apartheid. Abortion reform. I don’t think that I took to the streets on all of them, but on some I did.

Then a little later I was an activist in favour of unity in Europe. By 1975 I had joined Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins in campaigning in favour of Britain taking a definitive and final decision to be an active member of the European Community. We won that one as well. For me the model in all this was Tony Crosland who had argued that the “Future of Socialism” lay in Social Reform and internationalism not nationalism and ideology driven public ownership.

Jenkins was to be the political leader par excellence for this liberal and social democratic revolution. The reforms, including on Europe, I mention here seemed final at the time. Opponents of change didn’t go away – we even had more debates on capital punishment in parliament for a while after abolition. But the ground seemed to have shifted and there was no turning back. But reaction and bigotry never goes away it seems.

Abortion has not gone away as a battleground. The decision we took to respect a woman’s freedom of choice is under threat again. 😱

Cancel culture” is a trite and unhelpful descriptor suggesting that there is an organised movement to deny the past. Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden used the phrase recently in his faux-patriotic “I am proud of my country’s history” article in The Times. It was pure populist bombast.

Like “Woke” the “Cancel Culture” phrase is used only abusively in an insulting context. It is largely meaningless because of its all-pervasive generality. The question is not “should the views of “X” (insert name of polemicist of your choice) be heard” but “ Is it legal to express these views in public”.

The film “Denial” about Holocaust denier David Irving was a masterpiece as a depiction of the strengths and weaknesses of Freedom of Speech. What Irving had said and written was in Britain not illegal. He had the legal right to express these views abhorrent though they were. Some other countries make Holocaust Denial a crime, we choose not to. Irving was peddling lies, but what if someone you don’t like is peddling truths or has opinions you’re uncomfortable with ?

Back to Mr Dowden. It’s pretty clear that he thinks it’s improper to tell uncomfortable truths. So if we tell the truth about one of the horrors of Empire, like Amritsar, there is like to be a call for “balance”. Otherwise we are unpatriotic. There is no contentious subject today where someone won’t lie about it. Truth has many faces, but surely freedom of speech should illuminate it. Banning debate turns the lights off.

Laura Freeman writes engagingly about the life choices of Generation Z in The Times today. As someone who is comfortably more than twice the age of the author I am unapologetically part of the Baby Boomer lucky generation. Once vaccination had sorted the risk of polio and other nasties in the early 1950s my prospects for a long life were good. My schooling was sufficiently good for me to be the first in my family to get a degree and employment opportunities were, if not unlimited, not that restricted.

So then it came down to ambition. It never occurred to me to try and be rich, I did want to be fulfilled though. A 40 year career with a multinational did the fulfilment bit. The money was good along the way – not “fat cat” good but there were never wolves at the door.

My motivation all along was job satisfaction. On one occasion I chose a job that was technically a demotion because it was so interesting. On another I chose a very challenging assignment overseas where I would have to work in a language I didn’t speak. Foolhardy ? Maybe a bit. Fulfilling? You bet !

I mostly worked 40 hour weeks, though as an ex-pat from time to time this was difficult. I never quite got the need for a good work/life balance – if you enjoy your job why would you worry if it impinges upon your non work life a bit? I always needed to be stretched and rarely repeated myself. A new challenge was always available it seemed.

I was never a head honcho at the highest level. I didn’t have that ambition and nor did I have the the drive for power and wealth that many who “made it” did have. Yes I was lucky that my more modest achievements matched my modest ambition. And that I was well paid to do jobs I always enjoyed. Never once did I look for nor accept a job I didn’t want to do – even if the promotion would move me a step up the ladder.

My career is not a model for anyone and I was lucky that my opportunities were not limited by my slightly perverse approach. It may not be the same today – it probably isn’t. But employing organisations should not assume that we are all motivated primarily by the need for ever more wealth and power.