Italian tactics and (a flawed) British strategy

As the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, heads to Rome for a spot of lunch with Matteo Renzi on Wednesday, I've been sounding out Italian journalists, academics and apparatchiks about what we can expect from Italy's PM and David Cameron's supposed New Best Friend, as the Great EU Junckernaut rumbles ominously on.

I came away with a number of interesting reflections on the likely Italian tactics and a few depressing observations about Britain's flawed strategy on this matter, carried out with spectacularly clunky diplomacy, as perceived from the outside.

Here is what everyone is certain will not happen: Herman and Matteo will not stroll towards a bank of microphones and announce that either Jean-Claude or David can pop open the Champagne.

Renzi may at times seem to walk on water (getting 40 pc of the vote in an election where established parties in the UK barely mustered 24, 23 and 7pc respectively does that to someone's image) but he is not a magician. He is a very shrewd politician with a couple of cards to play, a limited time window and a central positon on a well-lit stage to play them in. The magic dust of Renzi's friendship and the hard currency of his vote, should it come to that, are currently on sale.

Renzi needs a letting up of the EU's relentless focus on austerity, which has pulled Italy back from the financial brink but left it battling abysmal levels of unemployment. He needs the new European Commission to agree to a work programme where the words 'jobs and growth' are well in evidence, led by someone, no matter who, who's happy to say those words loud and often. Renzi is also in the market for a prestigious portfolio for Italy's commissioner, who could be either Enrico Letta or Massimo D'Alema.

Neither of these concessions are in Cameron's gift. So Renzi's priority will not be to form whatever blocking minority Cameron imagines can save the day but to correctly interpret and carry our Angela Merkel's preferred course of action, while taking care not to upset anyone else.

There is a lot riding on the Italian Presidency, which begins on July the 1st, in terms of the country's external prestige and Renzi does not want to begin his six months at the helm of Europe overseeing a huge, bitter and protracted falling out. If such falling out is inevitable, he certainly doesn't want to be on the 'minority' side of it.

Now for the British strategy, as perceived from across the channel and on the other side of the Alps.

The people I spoke to were bewildered by Cameron's "inexplicable" decision to play the man and not the ball. The European Parliament, which has the final vote in appointing the Commission, played a blinder on EU leaders by nominating its candidates ahead of an EU Election that for the first time gave it a consultative role on the selection of such candidate.

But the Parliament's winning candidate was only ever going to be the person chosen to lead Belgian-style talks with the political groups and establish if a majority in his/her favour could be found.

When Cameron begun issuing threats, using the prospect of Brexit to blackmail others, he paradoxically made Juncker's position more secure. Instead of being set on a mission that may very well have failed, delivering someone else at the helm of the Commission, the world's most famous Luxembourger is now involved in an existential fight for his own political survival.

A fight in which he can claim the highest principles of democracy to be on his side against Britain's bullying obstreperousness.

The Prime Minister must be extremely careful now not to lose the European campaign for genuine reform in a desperate effort to win a domestic PR battle.

Forget the war on Juncker. Let him get the mandate to negotiate and let's see what happens in the European Parliament. If he is indeed selected don't fight that tide: you will lose or expend vital political capital for not very much in return.

The real prize is a realistic, forward-looking mandate for the Commission Juncker might end up leading, around which there is quite a lot of encouraging consensus already.

In fact stop giving the impression that everything is a battle, where we lure allies to 'our side' at the expense of others. The truth is most other big EU nations love and hate Europe in different ways and for different reasons but are deeply enmeshed in Europe nonetheless not 'just as a market' but as a monetary union, a cultural exercise, a historical necessity.

They will not heed calls for reform that seem tailored to reducing Europe - its scope maybe, some of its powers yes, not its totemic symbolism. They will heed calls for reform that reflect common sense more than the narrow national self-interest of one nation.

This, by the way, does not mean that the gap between Britain's notion of Europe and everyone else's is unbridgeable.

Britain remains better off in an Union which might not entirely, all the time, reflect exactly all its visions and aspirations provided it offers a platform to pursue most of its visions and aspirations most of the time, amplifying its power, its voice and its reach in the world into the bargain. That's what everyone else gets out of it too.

It would be truly foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater because we didn't like the particular make of the bathtub.

Keep the f@*#king thing switched ON! Or: what technical incompetence will I annoy my nephew with?

In the wake of a parental visit last week-end very nearly marred by the reluctant and distressingly uneven use of an ancient and very EASY TO OPERATE mobile phone, I couldn't help but wonder: which totally banal yet 'indispensable as oxygen' technology will my inability to get my head around result in my nephew shouting (inside) in exasperation thirty years from now? Here are a few scenarios...

1 Replaceable organs.

Me - Where is it, I know I have it somewhere..
Mouse -Antie Paola...?
Me - Yes, in a second.
Mouse- Auntie Paola, what are you looking for now?
Me- Mutters to self - I had it right here! Then aloud: Nothing! Just a minute...
Mouse - It's your liver, isn't it?
Me- My ..my what? I'm insulted, insulted I say, that you could think a thing like that, besides..
Mouse -You've been at the gin again, haven't you, and you've forgotten to change your liver..
Me -I might, I meant to..very short measure...well it's none of your business anyhow but if you must know..
Mouse - Show me the control panel Auntie.
Me - Get off me, you know nothing, nothing! I used to change your nappies young man..
Mouse -You never changed a single one of my nappies, Auntie, mum still goes on about that..
Me- I used to feed you and burp you, and I will never accept, never, this tone of voice when.. Ohhhh
Mouse - Here we go (control panel clicks open). Weeeeelll, what do you know..
Me- Anxiously clutching a G&T -What is it? What is it, Mouse? Is it serious??
Mouse - We have been through this Auntie. DO NOT CALL ME MOUSE. I manage a WHOLE MOON OFF EUROPA. I shuttle to Mars weekly. Drop the pet name for god's sake.
ME - All right, all right!!! Young people are so touchy these days!
MOUSE- I am 43. But back to your ORGANigram: it would appear someone has installed two gallbladders..
ME - Ohhh, have they?
MOUSE -Yeeeees, they have forgotten the liver altogether and just plonked a second gallbladder in. Silly or what?
ME - Well, yes, that was silly, silly and dangerous! Someone should have a word with..someone and sort this out, it's an outrage (loud clonk) Ohh!
MOUSE -There you are: Livers, 1 Gallbladders, 1, Brains...
ME -Wait, wait, I had one here, I had it a minute ago, I swear. (Ominous swish-shplatt noise) Oh boy. These things sure are slippery, aren't they?

Next week: Teleportation.

Stay tuned.

And keep the f*@#ing thing switched ON!

Please help me combat the eight sign of ageing

My friends all know that the full length mirror simply loves my silhouette. 

I've long ago defeated any notion of cellulite with all the appropriate gels and spa treatments.  

As I was born bikini-ready and cleansing detoxes are already my idea of fun I feel vaguely left out from the ladies' mags' seasonal body-bashing and self-loading calls to action. 

In vain I scour my luminous visage for those pesky seven signs of ageing: perfection is a curse, I'm telling you!

But perhaps there is an area in my life (not of my body, god forbid) where I do show my years- an eight sign of ageing if you like, one that even the most expensive tub of lotion, made of gold dust and babies' souls, simply cannot reach.

And perhaps dear friends, some of the musical (if ugly) ones among you can come to the rescue.

I have stopped caring about, knowing about, buying and listening to new music. There, I said it. 

My musical taste was never considered exquisite by those (fat, dumpy, envious) in the know but I least I could name-check REM, say, when they came on the radio. 

Then, sometimes between the End of History and the start of Coldplay an iron curtain of mutual indifference descended between me and popular music as an art form (or even as background to the washing up).

What I would like to do is update my musical wardrobe with the equivalent of a styling service. 

Since all music shops have disappeared in the meantime and I would not know where to start online (and I don't dare lose the correct Radio 4 slot on the dial so listening to new stuff on the radio is not an option) I thought if I told my friends what I already like and feel comfortable in they might help me pick the newest models, so to speak.

So here we go, and please don't judge me (people with bat wings should not throw stones):

I like Bobby McFerrin, Cat power, Dire Straits, They Might Be Giants, 1000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant, The Police, Sting, KT Turnstall, Mattafix, Massive Attack, Nick Drake, Oasis, Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, Tanita Tikaram. I love reasonable jazz, you know, Miles Davies and stuff, plus stuff you can sing along to, Nina, Ella and all that.

I think the most recent CDs I downloaded were by Amy Whitehouse, Adele, Elbow, Mumford and Sons, Band of Horses, Jamie Cullum.

For Italian friends: I'm a singer-songwriter nut, on the DeGregori-Fossati-Conte wavelength with lashings of De Andre'. My most recent heroes are Lucio Quarantotto, Filippo Gatti, Samuele bersani, Cristina Dona'.

So there you have it, my disgracefully middle-of-the-road-in-my-slippers-carrying-antibacterial-spray list of faves. 

If you want to help, these are the rules:

1) I have no desire to have my horizons expanded.
2) mind blown - same as above.
3) If I haven't discovered a musical genre -or cared for it- in the past 45 years I think I can safely live without.
4) I basically want to listen to the same shit but newer, more up to date versions of it.

Can you help me? Can you suggest new shit for this ever young goddess to listen to?

Please leave your comments here or on my Facebook page. 

5) No classical music, obviously. I said NEW shit.

Language matters (Warning - Rant Level:9 Coherence Index: 3)

So. We are reliably informed that LOL is 25 years old. God knows who had something to laugh about in 1989; possibly the East Germans, though I don't quite see them creating iconic lingo just at that point. 

Then the other morning the Today programme devoted 10 minutes to the new use of the word 'beyond'. It is not just a preposition anymore; it is, if you were to believe the ancient, choked up presenter, a terrorist organisation affiliated to Al Qaida.

We seem obsessed by the inherent vulgarity of the evolving language, the ugly new words the kids use, the fate worse than death visited upon honourable old words tricked into a random new meaning.

All this is very exciting and all but let us not forget the more dangerous language manipulations that make fools of us all. 

In the novel 1984 Orwell imagined that in a modern dictatorship language itself would become propaganda.  Newspeak repressed rebellious thoughts by making them impossible to express, without having to deploy a single water cannon.

In the early 21st century Orwellian, "How to spend it", post-capitalist Eco-mageddon we live in, a grubby little fake-French quasi-Brasserie chain called Côte has introduced a form of commercial Newspeak for all its waiters. If you ask for tap water they will chirp, Stepford-like :"I will certainly bring you a bottle of our complementary water, madam."

Now Côte, where do I begin? Just because you've instructed waiters to decant tap water into, not a jug, but an imitation terracotta bottle you are not offering me a bottle of 'complimentary water' any more than you could say you are serving me in the glare of 'complementary electricity'. The air I'm breathing on your premises is not a gift from the Côte shareholders either. 

Before I've eaten a single morsel of their indifferent food I am made to feel like I'm being pampered and spoilt with free stuff.

Let me repeat this again: it's TAP WATER. You can bring it to me in vessels fashioned out of unicorn hair but it's still not complimentary - it's free and you are only giving it to me because its cost to you is compensated by the the bill I will pay you later. It's one of your costs of doing business. It helps me swallow your (non-complementary) rubber chicken.

Meanwhile, back at Ryanair HQ, the bright sparks in charge of 'humanising the brand', for so long synonymous with 'utter contempt for the people cheap enough to use us', have started with a thorough redesign of the website. The new model contains exactly the same tricks to entice you to purchase- entirely by mistake -insurance you don't need and luggage you don't want but in brighter colours and more vivid fonts. 

The final gift comes at the checkout where the price of the booking is described as 'discount price' if you pay by visa debit and no surcharge is levied, and 'normal price' when you pay with a credit card and the final tally jumps up by a few quid. 

Let me repeat this, because the bad faith is breathtaking. The £100 you have been looking at till a second earlier are described as a 'discount' if they remain £100 at the moment of paying. If they jump up to £105 that is considered the normal price (the previous quote of £100 being a joke price, or a tease presumably).

We are used to the oily and self-serving language of mature capitalism, of course: the machine message about your call being important to them, the whole canon of advertising bullshit. But this is a new mutation, people: language used not to lie but to manipulate you into a position of humble gratitude. 

Which brings me to Lord Rennard. How I do not know, but here we are. Remarkably the man has created a whole new semantic genre, we should call it 'The Rennard Non Apology Apology', which roughly translates into: "I'm, like, sorry - I guess-  if you were offended by stuff I didn't do, and everything, so my bad for any embarrassment you might be feeling."

The actual wording of the last bit is  "regret for any harm or embarrassment caused to them (the women who accused him of sexual harrassment) "  but see what he did there? Instead of feeling embarrassed (boy, I would) he seems to imply embarrassment caused by his behavior or its interpretation has somehow attached itself to his alleged victims. 

Gotta go now. I'm all out of rage. I'm 'beyond'. Literally.

The people's army of Ukip have spoken

Well done silent majority.

You couldn't bother your arse to vote could you?

Thanks to you, specimen like Janice 'Classy' Atkinson and even less appealing pals of Nigel's will be giving British taxpayers and their potential European allies the finger for the next 5 years.

This on the strength of a 9 pc share of the voting population, on a turnout that barely reaches 34 pc by standing precariously on its toes.

Hardly any votes at all when all is said and done.

I bet more people rate the latest Hollywood star 'Hot or not' in online polls any given week.

Democracy shows us one thing, and we should have learnt the lesson by now: politics is not reformed and shaped by those who refuse to vote in disgust for its shortcoming.

Politics just carries on without you, and usually takes a sharp turn towards totalitarianism of some kind. 

The Testament of Mary - what would history written by women read like?

I've just seen Colm Toibin's 'The Testament of Mary' on stage, with Fiona Shaw in the title role speaking, and roaming, alone on a sparse set for 80 mesmerising minutes.

I don't feel for a second that I can do the play justice with a few words on this blog. Even proper, professional reviewers from the Guardian and the Telegraph are almost left choking with admiration and wonder.

Shaw's performance alone is something I will probably never forget. She is one of those amazing actors (Mark Rylance also springs to mind, Kenneth Branagh used to be one) who could be reading out her shopping list and infuse it with enough rage, tenderness, sarcasm and despair that you'd be never again be able to look at a box of Rice Crispies, say, or a jar of Marmite, without a shudder of longing and regret.

Put Fiona Shaw in the role of a grieving, raging not-such-a-virgin-after-all-Mary, reviewing the events leading to her son's senseless death and her desolate exile, almost a hostage to eager myth-makers urging her to sign up to a particular version of the past, and you get a masterpiece.

The play asks (surprisingly current) timeless questions and does so with the energy, rage and resigned wit of everywoman, history's invisible protagonist, handmaiden of all that is, witness to all of it, in charge of none if it, anywhere, ever.

What if, the play teases us, history were written by women?  And what if the women allowed to write it didn't care about power and glory, about miracles and epoch changing events or at least did not use the metric men use to categorise their importance? 

What if they cared instead about their loved ones- particularly the children pushed out with great pain into the world and made of their very flesh and blood? What if their priority was see those children, ordinary or exceptional that they may be- in fact exceptional and unique only to them- to be allowed to live, to be and eventually to die, not for a god or a cause, a leader or an idea but because their time on earth was over? 

What if wars' accounts were recorded not by the generals or even the soldiers but by the mothers asked to swallow the latest cynical lie about their children's sacrifice being necessary, inevitable heroic? 

What if the costs were counted, not just the gains, the numbers left behind, not just the distance covered, the graves, not just the triumphal arches, the daring towers?

"He's changed the world!" Mary is told, time and again, about her son's life and his horrific death. "What, the whole world?" she quips, almost with a sneer. If it were possible to sneer resignedly, Fiona Shaw could convey it.

She is every Bosnian Serb pushing her toddlers onto of the last crowded coach out of the village under siege, her teenage sons already dead in a ditch; she is every Syrian woman who's trying to keep her starving family alive in Homs or Aleppo, her children bombed and gassed, her teenage sons heading for ambiguous martyrdom.  

She is the mother of all the Malalas who would be killed if a bullet hit them in the head, end of story, with no chance to speak out and to be heard. She is the great philosopher's daughter who spends her life fetching the water from the well, never asked what she thinks; she is the princess promised for marriage in infancy to some foreign chinless wonder so that two countries may briefly not be a war, or more easily gang up against a third.

She is the astronaut's wife, who never leaves the earth and lives with her gaze up in the sky; the wife of every soldier who comes back broken and traumatised, having killed and tortured in the name of democracy and freedom, having failed, once again, to save the world or to change it for the better, yes, even a little bit.

Just like Italy, but without the sun: the Berlusconification of British public life

Oops, I've done a silly! But I think I got away with it..

According to a recent YouGov Poll 57 pc of Ukip supporters would prefer to live in continental Europe if they could. Here is the link, go check for yourselves if this seems just too damn ironic for your head not to explode.
But the irony doens't stop there. In many ways Ukip's effect on the public discourse in the UK has brought a little, disfunctional, corner of the continent right on your doorstep. 
 You might still wish to move for the weather and the beaches, but there's no need to go anywhere to experience the dizzying Emperor's New Clothes, world-upside-down, day-is-night and 'everyone's at it', shameless 'whatever'-ness that dominates, for instance, Italian public life. 

I call it the Berlusconification of British media and politics.

Time was when my British husband, during our first few regular trips to my Italian home town, would marvel at the timid reporting of the brazen lies of the Berlusconi regime and the muted reaction of the rest of the political world.  

"I was misquoted", was Silvio's favourite refrain, when caught telling the umpteen porkie, wilfully forgetting that a televised clip  is not an off the record briefing. 

"But everyone heard him say x, didn't they???" my poor husband would ask, bewildered. Or: "Didn't you tell me that the magistrates investigating him have x on tape/ proof of y /testimonies of z?"
 
My family and I would smile indulgently at the crazy, earnest Englishman with his reverence for facts and reason, logic and consequences.

Berlusconi could promise specific things one day, then deny he ever said anything the next. A trial could find someone else guilty of accepting a bribe from him yet simultaneously clear him of corruption. He could court the Vatican and entertain teen-age lovers. When denial did not work the interpretation of the subject matter would be flipped on its head. You would do it too, if you could. Or: everyone else does it.

His explanations for political failures, disastrous policy outcomes and even, increasingly, the criminal implications of his own behaviour (corrupting judges, paying off members of the opposition ahead of confidence votes, ensuring the silence of loquacious escort girls with political candidatures and sinecures) where noted, like celestial events, but never challenged. "Silvio, what about x?" reporters would bleat. And after a five minute soliloquy there was never a supplementary question.

This is because somewhere along the journey between founding his own personal, private party,  Forza Italia, and becoming Prime Minister (the first of many times), Berlusconi stopped being a person, equal to every other citizen under the law, or a politician, expected to lead by example and to present an impeccable front - at the very least. 

Berlusconi, as any Italian commentator would tell you, with the cynical defeatism that characterises our chattering classes, was a phenomenon. And he was immensely popular. The two things fed into each other and merged into each other: you could not expect the same standards of factual truth or logic or causality to apply to him and his narrative. Plus, taking him on meant annoying his supporters and risking the wrath of his formidable economic, mediatic and financial network.

Now fast-forward to present-day Britain. When no one was looking Nigel Farage arrived seemingly from nowhere with his personal, private band of mavericks, to shake things up. Hopelessly underestimated at first, he then pivoted right into the 'phenomenon' territory. I don't even have to mention the 'immensely popular' bit. 

Having indulged Ukip's leader like he were a mix between stand up comedian, pub bore and old-fashioned family entertainer for the past handful of years, a reflexively anti-European, apathetic media has now woken from its nap and is trying to apply some scrutiny to the guy. But it's far too late. 

Farage is a phenomenon, and yes, immensely popular to boot. It is unwise to challenge him too closely; plus journalistic enquiry is a muscle that needs to be kept exercised - it's no use trying to flex it every five years. 

In the past couple of weeks Farage slithered through allegations of misuse of tax payers' money relatively unscathed and received phenomenal free advertising for his ridiculously over the top posters on all public and private channels. His ratings are up, people.

"But Nigel, aren't you sorry? But Nigel, aren't these posters racists?" Cue indignant or sardonic soliloquy. There is no cogent supplementary question, ever. The reporters following him around haven't a clue about the reality Nigel is bending, cannot tell fact from fiction and -frankly- are no longer paid to care. None of the media outlets employing them wants to annoy his supporters, many of whom are also viewers/readers. 

Cynical defeatism is now the default setting of the British chattering classes too. Explaning how Europe  (Nigel's totemic raison d'etre) works, exploring whether it is reformable and what we stand to gain or lose by staying or going, (validating or puncturing Nigel's arguments, in other words), is considered terribly earnest, unwise and frankly pointless too. 

So should Nigel, the phenomenon, sweep unchallenged into victory at the EU and local election, brace yourself for a sharp turn into Emperor's new Clothes, world-upside-down, night-is-day territory by the rest of the political class.

Mainstream parties will likely react to defeat by basing future policies and diplomatic efforts on Nigel's fantastical version of reality. Such policies, by definition, will not resolve imaginary problems nor address real ones. Such meaningless negotiations cannot result in meaningful deals.

All but the most blinkered or ideological of politicians and commentators will know this but it won't matter: they won't be able to afford to care about that. It will be Nigel's world - we'll be just living in it.