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I was never a member of the Bullingdon Club.
It was - and if it lives on presumably still is – a very exclusive Oxford dining club only for very rich people who are also top people and therefore I was and always will be too far down the batting order ever to disturb their membership secretary who used to be a rather short chap with flaxen hair and the line of conversational introduction that went "had things turned out differently in the 80s (he meant the 1480s) I would have been king" which always struck me as being both arrogant and sad.
In case some of you have also never been members nor had it meet in your restaurant you should know that it had two defining features; one was the flashy waistcoats its members would wear and the other was that it never left the place it visited unwrecked but as a sign of its civility would always leave a cheque pinned to the curtains to cover redecoration or sometimes rebuilding.
This week’s newsletter comes to you from Poland or at least would have done had it been possible to make the computer connect to London just once. But in spite of the fact that Poland has now joined the club of rich European nations that is the EU, the line from Warsaw to Broadcasting House was however briefly last week snagged in the gun turret of an abandoned Soviet era tank and it is something Romano Prodi will have to turn his attention to if this enlargement thing is going to work.
I was in Warsaw because it was Great & Good time again - or was last week - and the World Economic Forum was there to think about things for a bit and invited me once again to help them though I have never really understood why it is that the G & G need the really quite small and all things considered mediocre to help them talk to themselves about themselves. Anyway I am still smarting from the debacle that was the journey home from Davos but I reason that a country that managed to sustain Communism for thirty five years and then organise a military coup, install martial law and keep the totalitarian thing up for a further seven years won't have lost all its aptitude for policing and therefore it is likely to make a better fist of things than the Swiss.
The G & G want to talk about EU enlargement and I know very little about that except for what I have read in the papers and according to them it seems that under it the populations of Bratislava, Cracow and Ljubljana etc. etc. will turn up in Ealing on Sunday morning expecting a free council house and scholarships to Eton. I know even less about the accession treaty that countries like Poland have signed but it is quite clear that Poland is ready to join the EU since the first thing you see when you leave the airport is a billboard advertising Tesco though the second thing you see is acre upon acre of apple blossom growing in smallholdings which have huts in them too big to be sheds and too small to be houses and which are populated by young women wielding billhooks. The other reason that it is ready is that they play Dido and Tracy Chapman on the wireless and the bus driver - who like every other middle aged man in Poland looks like Jeremy Bowen - sings along (or at least mouths!) the words.
I was right about the policing thing, though. The road from the airport is lined not only with billboards and blossom on the bough but with policemen all of whom look like cockroaches or teenage mutant ninja turtles or Russell Crowe in Gladiator though without the net thing. Every hundred yards on both sides is a van with five or six policemen in riot gear and every so often there is a tank and when we hit town it is rush hour which is just like the rush hour in London but without the rush and it is longer than an hour too because everyone in Warsaw has been given four days off and told to go somewhere else though not, as yet anyway, Ealing.
The Polish authorities really haven't lost their aptitude for this sort of thing and perhaps it was like this in 1981 but without the sunshine and with torture. Because in the centre of the city and in all the squares where Poles normally live and work and shop it is not normal at all and though there are lots of Polish people they are all policemen preparing for the Good Lord knows what and possibly also the Polish interior minister.
It is of course us that they are preparing for or rather any possible reaction to us in the form of unpleasantness. I feel a twinge of guilt especially when the bus arrives at the gilded compound that is the Sofitel Victoria – which is where the G & G will be talking to one another about one another – where there is a square the size of the Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona or perhaps even bigger. It is full of many hundreds of police cars and policemen as is the historic Saski Park next to it where there are also water cannon and armoured cars and pigeons gorging themselves on the chips that the policeman are unable to eat. On the edge of the park there is a very tall maypole in red and white though there is no sign yet of any morris dancers.
I am here to help the G & G talk to themselves about four things in particular: one, whether governments have a responsibility for healthcare; two, what Poland needs to do to ensure its economy will succeed in the enlarged EU; three, what to do about Russia; and four, whether Europe is losing its religion. I am sure the answers are yes, work quite hard, be very careful and no and will try those first.
The healthcare bit goes as well as can be expected and everyone seems to think that I have got the answer about right. The Polish economy bit takes the form of an interview for Polish TV and it is only when I have got the make-up on and the camera is pointing at me that I wonder if they are expecting me to do this in Polish which unless is it very like Ancient Greek I will not be able to do but am assured that my bit will be in English which raises the question about everyone else’s bits but it is fine and again I think I got the answer about right. The Russia bit over lunch is quite fun as it is chaired by an old friend I last saw in Cambridge at the King’s College Carol service in 1974 and again I think I got the answer about right though most people seemed to be talking about Ukraine which I didn’t think was the idea at all.
It is the bit on religion that runs into trouble and that might be because there was a bit of a misunderstanding since though I am interested in theology that is not the same as religion and it is quite possible to be excited by theories of causation in the Gospel of St John without being very religious at all. Plus one of the panel members who I had mugged up on for many hours – Bronislaw Geremek, one of the founders of Solidarnosc – was substituted at the last minute by someone I knew absolutely nothing about, Archbishop Jonah of Kaduna in Nigeria who is a delightful and exceptionally spiritual man but who I was fairly sure would be completely at sea with all my carefully planned questions on suppressed religion and the development of civil society in late 20th-century Gdansk.
It did not improve when the humanist on the panel who was of the female persuasion offered her hand to the exceptionally orthodox Chief Rabbi of the Russian Federation and there was a momentary kerfuffle and recalibration of value systems that got fogged in by apologies, counter apologies and subject changing.
We have ninety minutes for the discussion; two are taken up with panel introductions and one with the opening question which is addressed to the humanist who is from Slovenia. It goes like this:
"Is Europe still a Christian place, Alja?"
"Well, we have lots of pretty churches in Slovenia…."
Pause. There is going to be no more.
"Cesary; from the Polish point of view, does Europe still seem to be a Christian place?"
"No."
Pause. Ditto.
Cesary runs Poland's biggest insurance company and told me before the discussion that he thought he had been put on the wrong panel.
"Archbishop?"
"Well… I… had not… expected to be… asked so early on…"
Terrific. We’ve run out of things to say and there are still eighty six minutes to go and there is only one thing for it and that is to play the card I’d hoped to save until later and that is to turn to the Chief Rabbi and plead with him to tell some jokes and he is very sweet about it and it is a bit like Thought for the Day when Lionel Blue does it and we are all saved though not in the religious sense.
Whether we have progressed humankind by a millimetre in all of this I doubt but in any event I have no time to think about it because I have to buy presents for everyone and it is not easy unless it can be done by bartering with policemen and then all you would end up with are chips. The shops are closed because the streets are empty because the avenues and boulevards are blocked against cars and people alike with crash barriers shipped in from Lodz and Wroclaw and every so often they will part to allow through the car of the President of somewhere or the Prime Minister of somewhere else. To be on the safe side, all the shops and banks and showrooms have also boarded up their windows and that is not a bad idea because meetings of the G & G usually attract big groups of otherwise reasonable young men and women who want to smash capitalism and replace it with something nicer which usually means smashing everything whether capitalist or not and then going home for tea.
But one shop is open and I find a bottle of unfeasibly large gherkins for Sarah, a pair of General Jaruzelski ‘reactolite’ reading glasses for John and a likeness of Fr Wojtyla carved from a single beetroot for the saintly Ed and I wonder if the people of Warsaw thought that this would be the way that peace and prosperity and progress would come to them, their city being politely trashed for a weekend by the G & G I imagine that by today our hosts will have cleaned up the mess we will have left them and I hope they are not too dismayed and bewildered. Most of all though I do hope that one of the richer members of our club left a very, very large cheque pinned to the curtains.
Kevin
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