You can always be wrong about such things. But as Senators Clinton and Obama square up for their next crucial primary, in Indiana on Tuesday the two US Democrats go into the next Tuesday (6 May), I would not mind betting that the key moment in their duel has passed – and it has worked in Hillary Clinton’s favour.
This key moment was the latest outpouring from Rev Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s reckless, limelight-loving pastor. He decided to air a variant on the well-worn canard, according to which the US administration deliberately released the Aids virus with the intention of decimating the black population. Rev Wright’s version was that the government had lied about doing this.
Mark Leonard, who was among the first of the new wave of British think-tankers, is not the world’s most elegant writer, and certainly not the world’s most compelling speaker. But he has a genius for coining a phrase – “Cool Britannia” will go down in history as his formulation – and an irritating knack of catching the spirit of the next age. His first book was called “Why Europe will run the 21st Century”. The title of the new one is “What does China think?” It is a book that should be read, and kept handy, by anyone with the slightest interest in foreign affairs.
As a London voter, I have now received my polling card, a map of where to find the polling station and details of its impressively long opening hours. The information also contains the disappointing detail that the votes will not be counted until the Friday. No point in staying up then.
What I have not so far received, or even seen, however, is any information about where to see the candidates in action, separately or together; nothing about any hustings that might be held, nothing about any public rallies. You won’t find it on any of the main candidates’ websites (so far as I can find), nothing on a website called Londonelects.org.uk, which presents itself as a source of neutral information for voters. I phoned them and now understand that it is not their job to keep details of hustings etc, which is apparently a matter for the parties and their candidates.
There’s something wrong with the reporting of the Scarlett Keeling case, and it’s hard to pinpoint quite what. I suspect an element of tiptoeing around reality.
As someone without children, I can be accused of being over-harsh on those who have. I am, for instance, among those who criticised the McCanns for leaving three small children locked in a flat which could not – contrary to what the parents said - be easily seen from the restaurant where they ate each evening. Relatives and colleagues divided over whether they had done, or would ever do, the same. But if the McCanns can be criticised, then what about Scarlett’s mother?
Commenting on Gazprom’s decision to cut Gas supplies to Ukraine, David Clark, Chair of The Russia Foundation said:
"The decision to cut gas supplies to Ukraine is an inauspicious beginning to Dmitry Medvedev’s term as President of Russia. Although he has not yet taken office, he remains Chairman of Gazprom and is therefore directly responsible for this decision."
It is only three days since Russia’s election, and this is just the latest emailed circular from think-tanks and others about the “Medvedev presidency” and how, by reducing gas supplies to Ukraine or dispatching detachments of the militant youth group, Nashi, to demonstrate outside the US embassy or the Kommersant newspaper, Medvedev is starting as he means to go on. The barely hidden subtext here is that Medvedev, even if he is his own man, will be just as tough for the West to deal with as his predecessor and patron, Putin.
This reflects either uninformed thinking or deliberate pre-judgement.
The last instalment of the Russia Notebook written by our correspondent Mary Dejevsky, as she travels through Russia to report on the forthcoming Russian elections.
03/03 - NEW LAWS: A lot of new legislation is passed by the Duma and reported in the Russian press but not beyond. One of the more interesting changes passed in recent days applies to the dismissal of staff in the judiciary. As reported, it will make firing members of court staff, and particularly judges, much more difficult than it is now. The legislation lists very specific misdemeanours for which judges may be dismissed and provides for an open tribunal at which the evidence has to be produced. It will be illegal for a judge to be removed under any other circumstances.
The move is a clear attempt to prevent those with political clout or money from getting rid of judges who will not guarantee them the verdict they want. What is called 'telephone justice' - whereby someone in power at whatever level calls up the judge and instructs on the judgment required - is recognised as a serious problem in Russian courts.
The latest instalment of the Russia Notebook written by our correspondent Mary Dejevsky, as she travels through Russia to report on the forthcoming Russian elections.
02/03 - The election: Let me offer a few random observations from covering the election.
1. At the polling stations, i went to there was a concerted effort to encourage people to enjoy the experience! A dancing troop from the southern Kuban' region turned up at one. There were balloons, and the snack bars were open. i don't really see anything sinister in this. Some of it is a throwback to soviet times. But then the food at the snack bars was free or rare delicacies that were never on open sale. The tea and biscuits at polling station no. 1321 were nothing special. And I don't imagine that people went to vote in the expectation of a free concert.
The latest instalment of the Russia Notebook written by our correspondent Mary Dejevsky, as she travels through Russia to report on the forthcoming Russian elections.
1/03- SPRING: Today is the first day of spring in the formalistic Russian calendar, but it would be an exaggeration to say that there was a great difference in temperature between 29 February and 1 March. In St Petersburg, some more wet snow fell and there was a biting wind. Despite this, beneath the fur hats there was a perceptible change of mood. The ice on the canals was thawing, and pairs of ducks were a-courting. That's probably as good as the first day of spring gets this close to the Arctic Circle.
The latest instalment of the Russia Notebook written by our correspondent Mary Dejevsky, as she travels through Russia to report on the forthcoming Russian elections.
27/02 - More on Voronezh: The city is rebranding itself. For decades it has traded on its heroism as the last front in Russia before Stalingrad. A slew of monuments were erected in Brezhnev's time, when the war was recruited to boost the regime's patriotic credentials as living standards started to decline. Until very recently that was how the city chose to present itself to the outside world. The war monuments are still there, but a whole new brand has been reintroduced: Voronezh as the site of Peter the Great's first shipyard (before St Petersburg). The new city centre shopping centre is called Peter the Great's arcade, and has a big statue of the Tsar in the atrium. Lithographs and bas reliefs of Peter in his shipyard are multiplying in public place.
The latest instalment of the Russia Notebook written by our correspondent Mary Dejevsky, as she travels through Russia to report on the forthcoming Russian elections.
26/02 - To Voronezh, 500km south of Moscow, where I spent a year as a British Council exchange student in the dark days of Brezhnev. By plane - my apologies to Ben Chu, and other principled rail travellers - because this was a novelty. When I was a student here, foreigners were not allowed to travel here by air because the planes went from an airport outside Moscow that was closed to foreigners; also because foreigners might catch a glimpse of Voronezh's 'secret' nuclear power station on the way down. So I've paid my dues to the overnight train in both directions; it stops and starts, making it impossible to sleep. It was a mere hour on the plane, in crystal clear weather, with limitless views across the snowy fields and forests - and it was quite an eco-friendly Swedish turbo-prop.
This is the second instalment of the Russian Notebook written by our correspondent Mary Dejevsky, as she travels through Russia to report on the forthcoming Russian elections.
25/2 - What used to be called Soviet, and then Russian, army day was celebrated throughout Russia at the weekend. It is now called day of the defenders of the homeland. This year it seemed decidedly low-key, perhaps so as not to inflame passions about the merits of the day for or against, to avoid having the mothers against the draft on the street protesting, or old communists (who wanted to have a march, but were refused).
This is the first installment of the Russian Notebook written by our correspondent Mary Dejevsky, as she travels through Russia to report on the forthcmoing Russian elections.
24/02: Domodedovo airport has been under what seems perpetual repair and rebuilding for more than 10 years. Heathrow terminal 5 has nothing on the general dirt and disruption. Two new glass and metal wings are slowly covering the wooden skeleton. But the walkways are alternately sodden or icy. Cars and pedestrians mix erratically. Once upon a time this was the orderly international airport. Each time I come it seems to have been reabsorbed a little more into the general Russian morass. The girls at the newspaper kiosk were much more interested in the new delivery of soft toys (pink bears and grey elephants) than they were in my efforts to pay for a clutch of papers.
There is a train from here into central Moscow. It is called the Aeroexpress, and it takes 40 minutes, non-stop, which is shorter than it would be by car, given Moscow's appalling traffic.
The idea that it is “too stressful” for pupils to take an oral exam in a foreign language is plain silly. All right, so you might want to learn French to read Baudelaire in the original, or Russian to get to grips with Dostoevsky, but communication is a rather large element of language learning. If, after a year or two of study, you can’t string together enough words to take part in the sort of – elementary – conversation required of GSCE and A level, you have to question the competence of the teachers.
Thank you to everyone who joined the argument about Putin and "the new arms race".
A couple more points:
1. A GEORGIAN DEATH Initial reports – and headlines - about the death at his Surrey mansion of Badri Patarkatsishvili, the failed Georgian presidential candidate, suggested that his prime claim to fame (and risk of death) was as an opponent of Putin. Therefore – you were invited to conclude – Badri P was a new Litvinenko and the Russian state assassin had struck again. Why?
Even if Badri P had been killed – the post mortem says he most likely suffered a heart attack – his chief opponents were not in Russia, but in Georgia. He led a coup against the President, Mikhail Saakashvili, before Christmas, precipitating street protests and a crisis that was resolved by early elections. In most reports this crucial information followed the description of him as a Putin foe.
2. MISSILES V GAS SUPPLIES You probably read that Russia has threatened to turn its missiles towards Ukraine if Ukraine ever accepts US interceptors on its territory (of which, by the way, there is not the slightest sign). These reports appeared on the same day (and in many news outlets pre-empted) the far more significant news that Russia and Ukraine had settled their dispute over gas supplies and agreed a framework for future energy relations.
The agreement means that Russia and Ukraine from now on deal directly with each other over energy supplies. Ukraine will pay its debt, and a peculiar intermediary company that became part of the diplomatic deal to end the nasty switch-off two years ago is dispensed with. All this is to the good. It entailed concessions by Russia, which will have to wait for some of its money, while keeping the gas flowing to Ukraine. Putin needs to appear strong before his domestic audience. This may be why he spoke on the same occasion about – entirely hypothetical – missiles.
There can be different interpretations of Vladimir Putin’s talk of a new arms race last week. But a speech given by the country’s most senior security official at the weekend was an unambiguous attempt to play “good cop” to Putin’s “bad cop”.
Sergei Ivanov, defence minister until he was promoted to first deputy prime minister last year, told an international audience in Munich that his country had no intention of establishing new military blocs or behaving in a confrontational manner and would concentrate for the foreseeable future on improving the living standards of ordinary Russians.
Why is anything that Putin says interpreted in the most negative light possible?
The reason why Putin says that 'a new phase in the arms race is unfolding' is because this is how Russia sees US proposals to site anti-missile installations in poland and the czech republic. As Putin argues, Russia gave up forward positions at the end of the cold war - not that it had much choice; it had no means to continue stretching its military power that far - but the US and Nato have not done anything similar. It should also be noted that Nato has been somewhat reticent about the US plans to station its missile interceptors in europe (because it is divided over it). The US has been pursuing agreements bilaterally with the countries concerned, outside the framework of Nato - which the European members of Nato should be concerned about.
It is more than ten years since Tony Blair, when leader of the Opposition, asked whether it was beyond the wit of Government and health administrators to deal with the problem of mixed wards. Now Lord Darzi, health minister, surgeon and author of a review on the NHS, says that the goal was never to create single-sex wards, as this was not “achievable”. “The only way we’re going to have single-sex wards within the NHS,” he told the Lords yesterday, “is to build the whole of the NHS into single rooms. That is an aspiration that cannot be met.”
I have no idea why the late Inspector Gary Weddell killed his wife, then his mother-in-law and finally himself, just as he was about to go on trial. I have a rather better idea why he was granted the £200,000 bail four months ago that allowed him his final fateful spree - as, I am sure, do you. His brother is a barrister.
So the best-paid doctors in Europe (ours) are whingeing about not being allowed to wear wristwatches – one of several measures that may help stop the spread of MRSA and other superbugs in hospitals. When and why did they start wearing wristwatches in the first place? Are they so keen to show off their Rolexes?
How right Janet-Street Porter is to lament the passing of frugality as a virtue. In condemning the way government discourages saving and encourages debt, her only fault was uncharacteristic timidity. If living on credit has become a way of life, so be it. I am less pessimistic as she is about the ability of most people – though not all – to keep their dependency within bounds. What to my mind is unacceptable – and verging on the immoral – is the response of the Exchequer and the Bank of England. Rather than raising interest rates to discourage borrowing and make the reckless pay the cost of living beyond their means, they are penalising all savers - just as they have penalised all taxpayers with the bail-out of Northern Rock. So concerned are they to keep the economy humming, and stave off defaults, that they are prolonging the supply of cheap credit – and making us, the savers, pay for it. Not only are the interest rates on our savings falling, those savings themselves will be progressively eroded by inflation. Where are the economic monetarists of the Eighties when we need them?
After several days when an open slanging match threatened over the loan of paintings from Russian galleries for an exhibition at the Royal Academy next month, good sense seems to have prevailed. The British have stopped linking Russia’s qualms about the safety of the pictures with the many outstanding diplomatic disputes, and the Russians seem to have accepted the Culture Secretary’s word that legislation guaranteeing immunity from impounding for pictures on government loan will come into force early.
In this case, the sensibilities of cultural officials on both sides seem to have trumped the sabre-rattling of the politicians. On the British side, James Purnell’s intervention followed only hours after a fierce entry from the foreign secretary, David Miliband, on his blog, warning of the consequences if Russia carried out its threat to close the British Council’s offices outside Moscow. Are the Russians receiving mixed messages from London?
BETTER NEWS FROM RUSSIA 5
The troubles of the British Council, by the way, are a bit more complicated than they seem. It is easy to present the story as the nasty Russians victimising the innocent, peace-loving, culture-spreading, English-language teaching British Council. And all because we expelled a few diplomats last summer.
In fact, a cloud has hung over British Council activities in Russia since it farmed out its English-language teaching and started charging for it. So far as the Russians were concerned, this put these offices in a different category from the cultural representation it had been before, and made it liable to Russian tax. If relations had been generally good, this might not have mattered. The Russians might have turned a blind eye. With relations generally bad, however, it mattered quite a lot – and made the British Council vulnerable in a way it would otherwise not have been.
Anyone hear Lin Homer, chief executive of the wondrously named Border and Immigration Agency, spinning her way out of the row about the non-deportation of foreign offenders on Friday? She was at it (at length) on the BBC Today programme, and then again on Radio Five Live an hour or so later. What she was mellifluously saying was: 1. that the words about officials not being interested in deporting prisoners whose prison sentences were of less than a year’s duration had been taken ‘out of context’, and 2. that ministers and agency officials would understand perfectly the intended meaning, (as opposed to us ordinary mortals who had got completely the wrong end of the stick).
Well, I bet officials would understand whatever it was in the intended light. But what Ms Homer failed to do – and what neither interviewer asked her – was to quote the exact words of the offending memo. She should not have been allowed to get off so easily.
The Observer outlined ways in which innovative thinking was being applied to increasing election turn-out in Britain and the United States. The report said that one of the more original ideas was to have a £1m lottery that everyone who cast a vote would automatically be entered into. The same report cited offers of free food or free X-rays or medical check-ups in some US polling districts. Strange that all this was reported in a generally positive light. Imagine if it had been in Russia, where pop music and snacks were denounced as part of a cynical effort by the Kremlin to get the vote out for President Putin’s party, United Russia.
BETTER NEWS FROM RUSSIA (2)
On Friday (7 December), United Russia announced that Boris Gryzlov, the senior party member in Parliament (the Duma) would again be the party’s nominee for Speaker, confounding forecasts in some quarters that Putin’s position as titular leader of the party would guarantee him a Duma seat, leadership of the parliamentary group, and continued power once he left the Kremlin – if ever he did. It hasn’t happened.
BETTER NEWS FROM RUSSIA (3)
On Monday (10 December), United Russia and two smaller parties announced that their nominee for President in the March election would be Dmitri Medvedev, a first deputy prime minister and head of the energy conglomerate, Gazprom. Putin is reported to have endorsed this choice.
Hamish McRae observes that the initial reaction of the Bank of England to the US sub-prime mortgage crisis "perhaps to a greater extent than the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, was to stress moral hazard". He then notes, almost in passing, that "none of the top three people in the Bank are bankers", and that "now a more balanced response seems to be evolving".
He could have elaborated. Not only is none of the top three people bankers, but only one – for better or worse – is even an economist. Two are former civil servants, one of whom hardly distinguished himself, at least in his last posts. With the Bank of England now supposedly independent of politics, it is surely more important than ever to have an astute and experienced banker in at least one of the top two posts. What price is the country paying for having a bunch of amateurs in charge of monetary policy?
The Australian High Commission followed the example of several other diplomatic representations in London by opening up for live domestic television coverage of its election results. The time difference meant that a civilised breakfast time in London was just when the bulk of the results from Saturday’s voting would be coming through. An exciting time was had by all, over orange-juice, champagne and croissants, as we waited to see how humiliating a defeat John Howard had suffered, whether he would lose his own seat as well as his government majority (yes, to both), and how he and the victor, former diplomat, Kevin Rudd, would handle the turnaround - with commendable civility, as it turned out.
On Friday evening, I was off to the opening event of the BBC World Service’s 75th anniversary, billed as the “first ever Reith global debate”, essentially a discussion around the subject of free speech, with three truly global eminences: Jeffrey Sachs, now of Columbia University, Onora O’Neill of Cambridge University, and Wole Soyinka - of the world! Not exactly a bad line-up.
There had, though, clearly been a little advance grumbling on the part of some old BBC World Service hands (of whom I am proud to be one) about why this event was being held in the BBC radio theatre at Broadcasting House - a gorgeous art deco theatre, brought up to the latest, glorious, acoustic standard - rather than in what we would call our alma mater, Bush House.
Sunday night and another of those treats the BBC Parliament channel serves up for us policy-wonks on the quiet. A whole evening devoted to re-runs of contemporary programming on the 1967 devaluation of the pound (The pound in your pocket). The television footage, of course, was in black and white, and the interviewing a little more gentlemanly than it would be today, and the absence of women - on either side of the microphones - was striking.
I am under absolutely no illusion about the deplorable state of many homes for disabled children in Bulgaria and the documentary-maker, Kate Blewett, deserves every accolade for exposing it in her documentary to be broadcast on Sunday evening. In his piece, Dominic Lawson accepts that disabled children might have been treated similarly in Britain a century ago. He also asks what the European Commission thinks about the fact that such conditions pertain in an EU country.
Football, as you may be aware, is not my natural journalistic habitat, but Steven Gerrard’s warning about the number of foreign players joining English clubs has resonance far beyond football.
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