Just for fun

Two of my favourite entertainers, Dean Martin and Victor Borge.

Is there a Belgian Prime Minister?

This is not a question that many people spend sleepless nights over, least of all Belgians. However, it seems to have come up a couple of times recently. Yesterday I and other people on a forum were asked how many British people knew who the Belgian Prime Minister was. I replied that nobody knew that as they mostly did not have one but continued in yet another political crisis. Then there was a response from a blog reader to my posting about the State of the Union Address. He said that there were several other Presidents in the EU, including that of the Council of the European Union, which is still a rotating position currently held by Belgium. Therefore, said President was the Belgian Prime Minister, Yves Leterme. To be fair, the reader did admit that he had looked it up. Well, we would all have to look it up.

All the same, I think that is out of date. You have to get up early to get out of bed as Groucho Marx said in the famous auction scene in The Cocoanuts and the same is true for Belgian politics. It would appear from this Wikipedia entry that Yves Leterme was, indeed, the Belgian Prime Minister but resigned in April. This BBC story appears to confirm that: the resignation was accepted by the King on April 26. On the other hand, the King also asked him to stay on in a caretaker capacity, something that seems to happen rather a lot to Belgian politicians.

So what are we to make of this story from Bloomberg?

Elio Di Rupo, the French-speaking Socialist party leader in Belgium, will continue talks aimed at forming a new national government after King Albert II refused to let him give up the mission.

Di Rupo said today that Flemish nationalists and Christian Democrats did not agree to a compromise over finances and regional powers aimed at forming a seven-party national government. Di Rupo then met with the Belgian king at the palace in suburban Brussels.

“Mr. Di Rupo asked the king to be relieved of his mission,” an e-mailed statement from the royal palace said. “The king refused and asked him to continue his mission.” Di Rupo accepted, the statement said.

We should not forget that there was another inconclusive election in June and they are still searching for that elusive government. So there we are: you pays your money and you takes your choice. In the meantime: who is the President of the Council of the European Union?

State of the Union Address

Unlike the United States, the European Union has two Presidents - there is Commission President Barroso and there is Council President Van Rompuy and both of them consider themselves to be Presidents of the EU. There's glory for you.

Commission President Barroso is about to score against the other guy - he intends to give a State of the Union Address to the European Parliament on Tuesday. As Honor Mahoney says on EUObserver

The address, given its name and the EU’s pretensions to be a heavyweight international player, attracts comparisons with the annual speech by US presidents at the beginning of each year. President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address had about 48 million TV viewers in the US and millions more globally. This reflects two things. First that a lot of what the US does affects the rest of the world. And, second, that US citizens and much of the rest of the world have a strong emotional engagement with the US and its president – be it positive or negative.

There is something else: the United States is a country and its people feel it to be so. Its President, whatever one may think of him personally, was elected according to the US Constitution that had been decided on in an accountable fashion. Would that make any difference in people's attitudes? Just asking.

Nothing new under the sun

Well, not as far as the EU is concerned. Whatever the latest news that sends the media, various bloggers and other so-called commentators and eurosceptics into a spin is usually the next stage of a long process. So it is with the news or rumours that one of the aircraft carriers will be shared with the French. Yes, folks, we have been here a very long time though I recall being shocked how few people recognized the importance of the St Malo meeting between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac.

Anyway, the Boss sums up the whole grisly tale on EUReferendum, which means that I do not have to. Heh!

Let me make something clear

Enough of fascinating discussions about detective stories; let us move on to more important matters such as the Foreign Secretary's escapade. Let me make it very clear that I, too, have heard the rumours about his sexuality and have been utterly uninterested in them. They are of little import compared to the many examples of his incompetence first as Shadow Foreign Secretary and now the real thing.

Readers of this blog are reasonably aware of the fact that I am not one of William Hague's admirers. (See here, here and here.) There are earlier postings on EUReferendum. Mr Hague has shown himself to be out of his depth from the moment he became Shadow Foreign Secretary: he has no understanding of the European Union, its structure or Britain's position in it; his one mantra seems to be the need to move away from the American alliance and to line up with all the anti-Israeli forces; he has no understanding of China or India or, for that matter, any other important player in the world; he is, therefore, as was clear from that speech of his, going to dance to the FCO's tune. How else is one to understand the need, as the first initiative, for "a joint taskforce with the United Arab Emirates as part of our efforts to elevate links with the countries of the Gulf". I sense the fine italianate hand of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office behind that as well as Mr Hague's ignorant though billed as tough pronouncements about Gaza.

No question about it, the man needs a Special Adviser (known affectionately as SpAd). He also needs a researcher, a good atlas and globe and time to read various papers produced by people who understand international affairs. The question is, does he need three SpAds? And is a twenty-five year old ex-driver with a second class degree from the University of Durham and no experience whatsoever a person who should be a SpAd in receipt of a handsome salary from the public purse?

According to the Guardian, the FCO thought it was a wonderful idea. Well they would, wouldn't they? After all, little Chris Myers was not going to interfere with their agenda.

A Foreign Office spokesperson also jumped to Myers's defence over suggestions that his second-class degree from Durham and relatively little experience in foreign affairs did not qualify him for the job. "Mr Myers has experience of parliamentary matters in the north, where William has done a lot of work in recent times. He is a qualified lawyer and is very close to the new Conservative MPs," she said.

"He is advising … on the UK's overseas territories, such as the Falklands, human rights, Africa, embassies, the UK Border Agency, and parliamentary relations."

That claim raised new questions as the suggestion that Myers was working on international affairs was at odds with an earlier justification Foreign Office sources gave for appointing a third adviser – that as first secretary of state Hague has additional responsibilities and needed additional support.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what this whole messy story is about: the doubtful use of public money and hypocrisy from Mr Hague and his office. The proliferation of SpAds was one of the big sticks with which the Opposition used to bash, quite rightly, the Labour Government. A twenty-five year old young lady who had worked hard in the Foreign Secretary's constituency, had she been appointed to that position, would also have aroused a certain amount of interest.

The story is now over: Christopher Myers has gone and William Hague has made a tearful moving speech about his family life and the troubles he and Ffion have had in trying to have a baby. One's heart does go out to any couple who have had to go through several miscarriages. Of course, one hopes that eventually their attempts will be successful but the fact remains that, at the very least, Mr Hague has shown bad judgement over this unnecessary hullaballoo.

Of cabbages and kings

Well, actually, of detective stories and other suchlike matters. I have just spent four days away from cyberspace and feel all the better for it. Unfortunately, duty called and I returned. There are several stories I need to write about such as the forthcoming State of the Union Address by one of the EU Presidents (we have two and the Americans have one, nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!) and the fact that American authors are now protected from British libel tourism as Rachel's Law has been signed by the President. Plus there are at least two really stupid articles by supposed experts, one British, one American, about the EU that need to be mildly fisked.

Tish-tush. I shall write about detective stories. One of the books I read in this interval was an early Ellery Queen, entitled The Greek Coffin Mystery, which, I was assured by such experts as Julian Symons, was one of Queen's best.

The Ellery Queen phenomenon is quite complicated. Created by two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, Ellery Queen is the author as well as the hero of a number of detective novels, being in his capacity as a hero, the son of New York Police Inspector Richard Queen of extraordinary obtuseness who allows and, indeed, encourages his son to spend his time interfering in police investigation on no grounds whatsoever. Then there was Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, probably the most influential publication of that kind in the entire history of detective story writing, which launched many a career and published many an excellent story. And much more.

The Greek Coffin Mystery is, in fact, a very bad book. It is not absolutely terrible, as somebody pointed out to me, but it is bad. It is very long at 300 pages, which includes the introduction and the challenge to the reader about three quarters of the way through, aspects that were dropped in later novels. There is also the amusing idea of making the one word chapter titles into an acrostic that spells, yes, you guessed it: The Greek Coffin Mystery By Ellery Queen.

The plot is preposterous by anybody's standards though not as bad as those ghastly locked-room mysteries that John Dickson Carr alias Carter Dickson churned out by the dozen. The language is so full of adjectives that reading begins to resemble swimming through treacle. Above all, there is Ellery Queen, young, self-important, drawling, full of quotations and unnecessary foreign sentences and generally objectionable. The authors' inspiration was the ghastly Philo Vance who, as Ogden Nash so appositely said, "needs a kick in the pance". (Though there is one thing to be said for Mr Vance: he was played by William Powell in a number of films. I believe I actually saw one.)

In between retrieving the book from whichever corner of the room I had chucked it, I spent some time wondering why the dandyish, know-all, drawling detectives were so much more tolerable in their English version than in the American. However irritating Lord Peter Wimsey is in the early novels, or the young John Appleby or, even, the young Roderick Alleyn before he meets Agatha Troy and becomes more or less human are, they cannot compare with Vance or Queen. These two make one feel positively murderous oneself.

Of course, I am biased, when it comes to Wimsey in that I hear the mellifluous tones of the incomparable Ian Carmichael (as seen above with Mark Eden who plays Detective Inspector, later Chief Detective Inspector Parker who also becomes Wimsey's brother-in-law in Clouds of Witness).

As it happens, I do know that Edward Petherbridge has also played Wimsey very successfully. In fact, I saw him on stage in Busman's Honeymoon and very good he was, too. Only one thing was wrong - he was not Ian Carmichael. Allowing for that, why are Ellery Queen and Philo Vance so utterly irritating to the point when one wants them to be wrong? (In fact, Queen is wrong in his first solution in The Greek Coffin Mystery and the authors have a great deal of fun with him. He is supposed to have learnt his lesson from that but, in actual fact, he remains as unbearable as before with the added problem of never telling anybody anything until he has it all worked out.)

So why are the Americans more irritating? The obvious answer must be that these are imitations. What on earth are New England Americans doing drawling and droppin' their gs? Why is Ellery Queen always sighing wearily? He is in his mid-twenties even if his father is described endlessly as being old, having old eyes, old knees, old hands. Just how old is he, for goodness sake?

There is also the feelin' that these American johnnies are just pretendin' to know things, don't you know. Don't know why there should be this feelin' in the thingummy about them; after all Harvard is as good a place as dear old Oxford, so why does one assume that the young Appleby (he becomes quite responsible and respectable later on) actually knows all about Greek epigrams whereas Ellery Queen probably spends his time reading a dictionary of quotations?

But the most remarkable aspect of those irritating young asses (well, relatively young) Wimsey, Appleby and Alleyn (I have to admit to being unable to stomach Albert Campion at any price) is that they do change and develop over the span of the novels. They all acquire spouses who are all strong-minded women with careers. Even Campion marries Amanda Flitton, who is an aeronautical engineer. There are families and the characters grown and mature. Very curious that, as detective stories are not given to developments of character as a rule.

I am now going through Dorothy L. Sayers' novels in order so, at least, one good thing has come out of my reading that egregious Ellery Queen adventure. I do not intend to read any more of them.

Speaking rights at the UN

Lady Ashton, now known as Catherine Ashton the High Panjandrum of the EU Common Foreign Policy will definitely have speaking rights at the UN so there will no longer be the embarrassment of the EU's point of view being delivered by the representative of the rotating presidency, which, at the moment, is Belgium. What the good lady will say is, of course, a matter of some doubt. After all, it is not as if the EU actually had a policy.

That, however, does not matter. The EU is proceeding along its usual path: building up structures in the hopes that content will follow. So far, this has not worked with foreign policy, that being the last thing most governments will give up. This may be a small step in terms of real policy but a big step in terms of the Monnet method.