Category Archives: Misc
A meeting with a Czech ‘friend’
I am glad I caught the BBC’s John Simpson’s fascinating recollection this morning of his avoidance of an attempted honey pot trap by the communist Czech intelligence service during the Cold War. It brought back memories of a somewhat more mundane encounter I had many years later , thankfully devoid of any attempted sexual subversion, and involving a very different, and genuinely friendly kind of spy of the same nationality. It took place during a weekend conference at Oxford’s St Antony’s College, attended by an assortment of academics, …
The Post, the FT, and turning 65
As birthday presents go, I couldn’t have asked for a more timely and worthwhile one than a visit to my favourite London cinema the Clapham Picture House, ‘en famille’ to watch The Post. At one level it was a trip down memory lane , to my rights of passage in journalism, reporting to newsroom bosses (always male) in rolled up sleeves, and feeling part of an enterprise that began immersed in typewriter clatter and reels of telex tape, messenger boys running to deliver urgent copy before proceeding to Linotype machines, …
The Catalan Conundrum
As someone who for personal and professional reasons includes regular visits to Catalonia as part of his year, it is with some relief that I have managed to experience the region over Christmas and into the New Year in relative peace, and among friends from a wide political spectrum. But then those of us familiar with the local scene have grown accustomed to valleys of relative calm prior to resurgent peaks of crisis, a veritable political helter-skelter which baffles most ordinary mortals struggling to catch up. Currently we are …
Messi & Catalonia
So eat your hat all you illuminated Catalan nationalists who thought Lionel Messi would be your standard bearer all the way to independence and beyond. FC Barcelona had tried its best to keep details on his thoughts on the matter from public scrutiny-but the truth is now out. As reported in the Spanish and Catalan media the Argentine’s latest contract with the club has a specific clause stating that player will be free to leave the club in the event of Catalan independence having Barca excluded from any major European …
Duelists in El Clasico
If there was an enduring image of today’s El Clasico it is that of Lionel Messi celebrating his penalty. He spreads out his legs, pumps his chest out and raises head and arms to the fans like Moses displaying the most important commandment. That the stadium, happened to be Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu and the fans in teir vast majority home-grown and visceral tribal opponents of FC Barcelona made the gesture defiant in itself. What made it cheeky was that it broke with Messi’s usually more modest grsture to his …
Tomorrow’s unmissable El Clasico
Doubt it not – today’s El Clasico – Real Madrid ‘s Spanish league encounter with FC Barcelona is already much more than a football game. With the star studded teams in two of the best clubs led by the two best players in the world-Messi and Ronaldo- and followed by billions of viewers around the world , this is anticipated as one of the great unmissable sporting spectacles of the year. But this historically politically charged occasion between two great rivals is likely to be played with added drama and …
Catalonia’s Democratic Deficit
Nothing quite like a Catalan regional election to show the world what a huge democratic deficit prevails in that part of Spain. High on my list of failed characters is Carlos Puigdemont, a man who would have been disciplined and almost certainly sacked as a senior executive of any transparent business or the leader of any truly democratic party, but resurrects because he stands for a movement that believes only in its own narrow nationalist interests and has projected himself, quiet falsely, as the martyr of a noble cause. …
The Catalan Tragedy
The Catalonian UDI declared by pro-independence members of the Catalan parliament who command a slim majority of regional deputies, would be a farce if it were not so tragic. Don’t be taken in by anti-system youths euphorically waving Catalan Independence flags and emotional memories of Franco’s repression and comments about this ‘day of liberation.’ Spain has had forty years of democracy. It is not run by a dictatorship. It believes in the rule of law and has every right to defend it. The UDI was declared with scant regard …
Modern Spain’s Unchartered Territory
The phrase Direct Rule has a certain resonance for a British and US media sensitised by the not so distant memories of Northern Ireland where the British government sent in the army to try and maintain law and order at the height of the Troubles. Its use to describe the next stage of the Catalan crisis may be convenient short hand but it is not a phrase that the jurisprudential Spanish prime-minister Mariano Rajoy has opted to use. Instead the phrase has been Article 155, as incomprehensible on a first …
The Catalan Show
Last night’s prime time show in the Catalan parliament served as a reminder of the seemingly dangerously uncompromising nature of the current Spanish crisis, even if it seems to have temporarily pulled back from the brink. If there were highlights from recent episodes of this seemingly enduring melodrama to be drawn from previous episodes I would identify the following: The unnerving site in early September of a small majority –less than the two-thirds required by the Catalan Statutes of Autonomy- of pro-independence deputies in the Catalan parliament bulldozing …
