Break a Clegg
For Bismarck, politics was the art of the possible, while Napoleon would always ask of any general, “But is he lucky?” Put the two together and we can see politics as a game somewhere between chess and poker. Any politician has to gamble and take risks. He needs judgment, he needs nerve, but he also needs luck. READ MORE >>
Dublin Down
Shootout in the U.K. Corral
What the Chilean Miners and a Dead Scotswoman Tell Us About the Future of American Power
When a story about survival and life wipes another story about disaster and death off the news channels and front pages, it should be a cause for joy. The fate of the Chilean miners terrified, excited, and finally exhilarated billions of people like nothing else I can remember for years. It was the ultimate human-interest story, the happy ending beyond Hollywood’s most frantic dreams. READ MORE >>
Eleven Days That Shook the World
As Angela Lyne’s train slowly crosses France towards the Channel in the dying days of August 1939, she thinks of the way politics had been “tediously on every tongue” among the idle rich at Cannes. “The French and Italians whom she met had said war was impossible; they said it with assurance before the Russian pact, with double assurance after it. The English said there would be war, but not immediately. Only the Americans knew what was coming, and exactly when.” READ MORE >>
What Was David Cameron Thinking?
I Like Turkey, but It's Not Going to Join the European Union
For a brief season, Henry Hopkinson was a Tory politician of the second rank, who might have risen higher if he hadn’t famously misspoken in 1954. As a junior minister at the Colonial Office, he said in the House of Commons that Cyprus would never be granted independence. This dogged him for the rest of his life. “Never say never,” Churchill supposedly said, and Hopkinson was dropped from the government not long afterwards, quite soon departing for the House of Lords under the disguise of Lord Colyton, just before, as it happened, Cyprus became independent. READ MORE >>
Tory Story
Turkey Is Not Going to Join the E.U.
Turkey is not going to join the European Union. Bald or candid statements are usually unwise, or “impolitic,” which is why politicians tend to avoid them, knowing that they may be falsified by events. But some can be made with absolute confidence, and here is one of them. READ MORE >>
Continental Rift
Just over 45 years ago, I set foot in the United States for the first time. If you had sat the old Oxford scholarship exam in December and, in Simon Gray’s deathless definition of the pedagogical process, displayed a fluent fraudulence that the examiners could not expose without revealing their own fraudulence, you were able to take the next nine months off before going up as a freshman in October. READ MORE >>
