It has been reported that the Italian government is trying to help out the international community by locating a pariah state with a good supply of sunglasses and a forgiving attitude to extra-marital sex where Muammar Gadaffi might be persuaded to seek exile. It is essential that the country should be one where a politician faces no risk of being brought to justice.
I am sure I can help on this. I have heard of such a place. And yet somehow the name eludes me… bah, my decaying brain…
The school bus pulls up to reveal our three children waving self-made Italian flags. It can mean only one thing. The official celebration of Italy’s 150th birthday is upon us. This being a thoroughly divided nation, it has of course been dubbed the Festival of Unity.
For months the children have been returning from school singing what must be one of the most improbable choruses of any national anthem: ‘Stringiamoci a coorte / Siamo pronti alla morte / Italia chiamo’ or ‘Let’s all stand together / We are ready to die / Italy has summoned us.’ They do this with their right hands over their hearts and big grins on their faces.
‘It’s absurd,’ observes the eight-year-old. ‘But then so is the British one.’ She has a point. Nonetheless she has learned all the verses, including arcane references to Scipio, the blood of the Poles and so on, and needs little prompting to sing the whole thing over and over.
Italy’s popular president Giorgio Napolitano leads the celebratory tour of Rome, including a visit to the monument to Italy’s hot-headed revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. Silvio Berlusconi is forced to accompany him and draws whistles and calls of ‘Resign’ and ‘Buffoon’.
This is tame compared with the last day of Carnival — the traditional party to consume all the stuff that cannot be consumed during Lent — in our nearby village of Cornetto. This year, instead of dressing up as cartoon characters, the men of the village regaled themselves as full-bosomed, heavily made-up prostitutes and arrived in a bunga-bunga car, groping anyone they could lay hands on. There then appeared a Berlusconi character, who set up a large table and proceeded to hand out Viagra to residents of the village before being violently and graphically humped by the bunga-bunga ladies.
All this went on, needless to say, while the children of the village were towed around, watching, in a toy train pulled by a tractor. Who says there is no hope for this country? ‘Siam’ pronti alla morte…‘
Meanwhile:
More leaked phone taps suggest that Silvio’s advice to Ruby was to pretend to be insane. While Silvio would pretend to have believed that she (Moroccan) was Mubarak’s granddaughter. The great thing is that in Italy you can actually say this kind of stuff in court. There is also more detail from Ruby’s first police interview in which the Silvio link came up.
The Liberal Democrats keep sending me emails complaining that opponents of voting reform in the UK are running outrageous and unethical advertisements. Perhaps it is just my naive faith in the average person, but it really doesn’t worry me if some inbred Tory eejit or some equally self-serving Nooo Labour eejit is suggesting that babies will die 
because of the alternative voting system (referred to ‘instant run-off’ in the US and ‘preferential voting’ in some other countries). Much more likely, the ads will have the same effect Winston Churchill engendered in the 1945 election when he said that a Labour victory would mean communism in Britain. People looked at Clem Attlee and thought: ‘I’m not so sure, Winnie.’ And they voted Labour.
The truth is that people get dangerous idiots in charge of them not because they are conned, but because they choose self-evidently dangerous idiots to be in charge of them. This explains why they vote for dangerous idiots again and again, the only mitigation being that the stupidity is much easier to spot than the danger. Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi are classic examples. What is interesting about them is not some supposed con, but why people repeatedly vote for a Tone or a Sil despite the mounting evidence that they are absolute plonkers, incapable of running their own lives, let alone anyone else’s. Anger, frustration, the hopelessness of the opposition, the different voter pattern of female electors (who always, I am sad to mention, vote disproportionately for reactionaries) — this is the stuff of psephological analysis, not some tripe about how clever advertising convinced us all to tick the wrong box.
So the political message is: state your case with maximum clarity to the maximum number of people. And what better opportunity to put this into practice than the AV referendum, which is surely an idea whose time has come. It is an almost-no-risk improvement to the voting system in a country where 35 percent of votes now go to parties other than the biggest two, compared with less than five percent after the Second World War. AV doesn’t favour small and silly parties. It keeps MPs answerable to geographic constituencies. Above all, it makes politics more competitive, which is why indolent and self serving people do not like the idea one bit. 
Martin Wolf in the FT (subscription needed) likes it, and though he is called Wolf, he is not exactly Wolfie out of Citizen Smith. Here’s the nub of what Wolf has written:
‘Why, then, might the switch to the alternative vote be justified? The answer is that over time the present system has become increasingly unrepresentative, to the point of threatening its legitimacy. We have, above all, seen a huge decline in the share of votes going to the two leading parties, from 97 per cent in 1951 to 65 per cent in 2010, a record postwar low. 
Under the current system, parties with less than 40 per cent of the votes are potentially able to win large majorities in the House of Commons. Thus, the House risks becoming so unrepresentative of the preferences of electors as to lose its legitimacy. Ultimately, that threatens the effectiveness of government, as well. Under the alternative vote, however, candidates would need to obtain the support of a majority of constituents. That is highly likely to increase the representation of currently under-represented voters.’
The case is so compelling that I write to the Liberal Democrats in Cambridge asking for 100 pro-AV badges and some pens to boot. Their web site says this stuff can be had for free, though I told them I was quite willing to pay for it. I have to be in the UK to attend a exclusive actors’ party on the roof of the National Theatre and there seems no better place to undertake some effective propaganda work. I will pin an AV badge on the lapel of Maureen Lipman, or someone even more famous…
Unfortunately, there is just one hitch. It being the Liberal party that backs the AV, they don’t get it together to send me the badges. You just know that if you had phoned Tory HQ and asked some random Sloane for 500 Shoot the Badgers stickers, they would have been sent round the same day. If the revolution goes pear shaped on 5 May, my liberal comrades, do not blame me.
More:
This wikipedia entry on the Alternative Vote system is helpful, and tells you all the places where the system is already employed.
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya… the list of north African countries to which Italian politicians may no longer be able to flee in exile gets longer every day. 
Bettino Craxi, the politician who ‘made’ Sivio Berlusconi, fled of course to Tunisia (here he is, all remorseful, on the beach). Italian spooks assisted the coup which brought the lately chased out Mr. Ben Ali to power.
Silvio himself might have been expected to skip off to his friend Muammar Gaddafi in Libya if things had gotten really nasty at home. But the way it is looking in Tripoli just now (here is some text from the first US tv crew in), there may be no north African option left. 
One feels for Silvio after all the effort expended smoothing the path of Gaddafi’s third son Saadi into Italian Serie A football, where he ‘played’ for four seasons and managed a cumulative half an hour on a first-team pitch. It is a wonder that Perugia, Udine and Sampdoria dared to leave him on the bench after his bodyguards in Libya had in 1996 killed eight opposing fans and wounded 39 for mocking this (please note) much underrated footballing prodigy.
Berlusconi has made multiple trips to Libya, including to Benghazi (search ‘Cooperation with Italy’) where the current rebellion started, but he likely won’t be going back soon. 
Gaddafi came to see Silvio in Italy several times, including just last August when he paid a modelling agency to supply him 200 nubile young women he could give a lecture to on the merits of (his version of) Islam. Muammar and Silvio were such a great team, but the former’s (liberal, London-educated) second son Saif going on telly and promising to keep shooting until the last bullet has put the relationship in a rather poor light.
I guess that in a worst case scenario Silvio can always go to Russia and see his best mate Vlad. But how would he keep his suntan up in Moscow? 
He could call in some of those unpaid holiday letting favours from Tony and Cherie (‘Flowers for me, Silvio?’) Blair, but he won’t get any more bronzed in north London. Surely there must be somewhere hot and dodgy left in the world where a man on the run can put his feet up? I know. Singapore!
Meanwhile: Stanley Ho, if you are watching, check this out. Perhaps you and Muammar should swap family management tips. Well, you both like ballroom dancing…
Why don’t I feel happier? In the past week, Arsenal beat the best soccer team in the world (Barcelona), I went skiing and a metre of snow conveniently fell from the sky, Berlusconi was scheduled for trial in April, and Berlusconi’s soccer team Milan lost to Spurs. Surely that is a pretty good week?
Milan are clearly rubbish, the snow-boarding was definitely excellent, and Arsenal have a slither of a chance of holding on to their advantage in the return leg at the Nou Camp. So the problem must be with Berlusconi’s trial. It is. The press coverage grates on me because of the drearily repeated notion that one desperate old fool is the sum of Italy’s problems (here is the FT with some typically superficial coverage, though you likely need a subscription).
In reality, the investigation into Berlusconi’s latest lies and idiocies is a tale of a system failing to change. Details of the investigation, including testimony and wire tap evidence, have been leaked by police/magistrates in the standard contravention of the law and due process. (Here is one of many leaks, translated into English in The Guardian)
You would have thought that just once those who represent the legal system could have said to themselves: ‘Why don’t we try doing things the correct way this time? After all, we are dealing with an elected prime minister, so it might be smart to be impeccably professional.’ But oh no. Not for this lot the quiet, calm comportment of the thoughtful professional. For this lot, it is showtime, freshly-ironed magistrates’ togas, newly-pressed carabinieri trousers, and the rest — all of which allows Berlusconi’s followers to nurture their persecution complex.
I am reminded of remarks made by one of China’s bravest and most sensible lawyers, Mo Shaoping, at a conference last year. Mo, who defended as best he could the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, offered his analysis of why the rule of law has been regressing in China in recent years. Strikingly, he said that one of the biggest problems is judges overstepping their role: ‘Originally [at the beginning of efforts to stregthen the rule of law in the 2000s], there was emphasis on judicial neutrality and passivity: the judiciary should be passive and neutral,‘ he remarked. ‘Now, the emphasis is on the active initiative of the judiciary. I myself consider this a step back.’ You are not alone, Mr Mo.
In vaguely related news:
The parents of Amanda Knox have been committed to trial for criminal libel for saying that their daughter was mistreated by police investigators. The trial, scheduled for July, will be the perfect opportunity for Perugia police and magistrates to produce THEIR TAPE-RECORDING of Knox’s illegal all-night interview. Then everyone can listen to what happened and make an informed judgement. Presumably the tape also includes the police explaining to Knox her right to have a lawyer present. (Note that The Guardian article behind the link is wrong that libel is only a criminal charge in Italy; it can be either criminal or civil — the police have opted for criminal. It is fair to say that criminal libel laws are typical of institutionally backward societies; such laws are opposed by all major writers’ and civil liberties groups that I am aware of.)
Sitting at home in Italy tonight, after a couple of glasses of red, I check the news. And suddenly I cannot quite remember who is refusing to give up a 30-year dictatorship and who is being fast-tracked to trial for paying an under-age prostitute. They all look the same.
Isn’t life a bitch? Just when you have good use for a few tens of billions of dollars to support a bit of old-fashioned modernisation in north Africa, it turns out you spent your whole budget for the next decade on a pointless war in Iraq. Dang, America’s Mr. Obama be kickin’ himself under the table.
It is the fifteenth day of protests in Egypt and the Arabs — despite much media conjecture to the contrary — show no sign of going home and being quiet. Cash-strapped Washington doesn’t know what to do. Hilary Clinton has said she would like the (ex-intelligence service boss) vice-president to run the country until scheduled elections in September. Obama’s special advisor on Egypt says that Mubarak must stay until the election. The crowd appears to be backing outlandish demands for a representative transitional government.
Cripes. ‘Representative’ in the country that is the intellectual birth-place of Islamic fundamentalism and al-Quaeda? ‘Transitional’ in the country that has ‘Remember Algeria’ written all over it in CIA spray paint? No wonder we backed a dictator and encouraged economic policies that consign Egyptians to poverty and to an 80 percent youth unemployment rate. Why can’t we just have the same deal again?
It is really very tedious how unprincipled foreign policy comes back to bite you in the arse, like some whacked out dog you once threw a bone to. Much more of this and the Arabs will start to resemble the Persians, who are still hung up on us getting rid of their silly Mr Mossadegh, who thought he could nationalise our oil companies.
I am not terribly well read on Arab history, particularly the modern stuff, but if I were to recommend a single, highly readable and well researched tome to put contemporary Egypt in perspective it would be The Looming Tower. The Guardian contains a brief history of the main Islamic opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood; it isn’t great and contains a very taciturn interview with a current MB leader, but it is readily available.
I make it five times that Stanley Ho has changed his mind over his inheritance… in the last week. It was ‘You can have it’, ‘No you can’t’, ‘Yes you can’, ‘No you can’t’, and yesterday, 31 January 2011, ‘Oh go on, take it and just leave me alone with my dogs.’ Today, glancing at the headlines, it seems he may have changed his mind again but, frankly, I can’t be bothered.
Instead, here is a bit of commentary on the three videos that have been released on YouTube by Stan’s lawyer (I have used the link posted by David Webb). Let’s meet Stanley at home:
Video 1. Stan opens with: ‘We must get back Lanceford [the holding company he held all his big stuff through]’, speaking like and doing a great facial imitation of the bad guy at the start of an episode of Flash Gordon. Then the lawyer, more on him anon, asks Stan about some further comment for the press to which Stan replies he’s game as ‘I want to make it [the story] very big.’ Stan is already laying into Pansy, the daughter who is seen as both the most capable in business and about whom the most malicious and serious gossip circulates (perhaps these two things go naturally together). Then comes the now-famous: ‘It is something like robbery’ quote. Stanley says he wants to go ahead with legal action. Note the furnishing of Stan’s time-warp mansion on the south-side of HK island. To the left you can just catch a glimpse of a hideous mock-baroque table. The staff, family and nurses sneaking by the camera are also good value. In the foreground is the mandatory Chinese tea flask (must admit I have been caught on film with one of those myself) and a glass of hot water. ‘I want a fair division among my family,’ says Stan, before appearing to be pained by some inconvenient fact inside his head (like he never organised a fair division?). At around three-and-a-half minutes you get a look at the always-on television, the electronic tombstone of the fading godfather. Stan’s ex partner Henry Fok was a big soccer fan, so at least with him you would get to take in the football. Another of Hong Kong’s octogenarian big boys is a closet Arsenal fan, and even has comfy sofas. Many are the mysteries of Confucianism… At the end Stan thanks the lawyer for having ‘blown up’ the whole affair in the space of a few days. The lawyer jokes about a huge fee to come. Or let’s say he laughs while talking about the huge fee to come; it may just be coincidence.
Video 2. Here Stan is trying to explain why he just withdrew legal proceedings and announced he had fired the lawyer. ‘The problem is Pansy,’ he starts. At this point I begin to become more interested in the lawyer than in Stanley. For one thing, you might argue that the lawyer is leading his client at the point at which he responds to Stanley: ‘To which I say: “So what?”’ The lawyer, Gordon Oldham, has a faded (south) Irish accent, though his profoundly undetailed official biography says only that he arrived ‘from the UK’ in Hong Kong 30 years ago. After Stan says Pansy is the problem, a woman, who for me has a stronger Irish accent, says off-camera: ‘But he [Stanley] is not afraid of her.’ What is going on here? My wildly speculative first thought is that there has long been a wee Irish mafia connected with the dogs and the horse-racing in Macau, but this is indeed wildly speculative. I must check further. The only thing I learn quickly from someone who knows Oldham quite well is that he is ‘a clever fellow’. Meanwhile in the video it is subsequently, I think, the Irish-accented woman off camera who butts in again to say to Stan: ‘Gordon will still represent you, ok?’ I think this is right, but then an ethnic Chinese woman I do not know moves across camera right to left saying ‘They made him, they made him [Stanley sign documents against his will]’. Stanley says he was forced during his television appearance to read ‘the plaque’ [cue card] organised by Pansy and Daisy. The video ends with the lawyer saying: ‘Are you telling me that I can now go ahead with filing and getting back your interests in Lanceford?’ To which Stan responds: ‘I suppose so…That’s what I want.’ The lawyer gesticulates everything to Stan as if he is an idiot. But Stan isn’t an idiot, even at the age of 89. After all, he is the one looking at the silly gweilo. Upshot of video 2. I think the lawyer has definitely got some questions to answer. I find it creepy the way he refers to Stan as Dr. Ho, using the title he never earned. Stan’s slaves, like Henry Fok’s (‘Dr. Ho’s office’, ‘Dr. Fok’s office’!) have long done this, but a self-respecting lawyer does not need to. I would also like to see the written consent from Stan to post this stuff to YouTube; it should have been put up with the postings.
Video 3. Roll on to January 30. Stan says Pansy says he can have his shares back, but it is ‘only words’. Third ‘wife’ Ina, who’s got a bunch of stock, doesn’t want to meet. (Ina was the ailing first wife’s nurse when Stanley got the hots for her. If you have ever seen the UK sit-com Are You Being Served you’ll have a picture in your head at this point.) Note that Stan here is saying he wants to get all the share scrip back and ‘then decide what to do’; do you remember the fair division promised in video 1, Stanley? Not much of interest here. It ends with Stan pointing out what a stand-up guy he has been.
Video 4. (Not yet released). Stan sits in his favourite cardigan looking into a full-length mirror intoning the mantra: ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has shagged the most among us all?’ From a pair of old speakers the voice of Michael Jackson responds: ‘You have Stanley, you have’, followed by a trademark yelp. At length Stanely picks up a hand-held mirror and quizzes it: ‘Mirror mirror in my hand, who’s the foxiest in the land?’. From another pair of speakers, the double-deep voice of Errol Brown (per his legendary BabyCham add) replies: ‘You da one, you da one Stan…’ This continues indefinitely.
A note on the lawyer, February 2:
The verdict from various people who know Gordon Oldham, personally and professionally, is that he is by no means the most amoral lawyer in Hong Kong (a warm breeze wafts across the Big Lychee as Ron Arculli, Stephen Cheong, Charles Lee and pals breathe a collective sigh of relief). Perhaps the mid-point of the opinions is one that calls him ‘aggressive and innovative and he doesn’t give a fuck about anything’. The others range from ‘decent guy’ to ‘slipperier than a donkey’s dick’ (the last, I would stress, is from a journalist who has only seen Oldham’s press performances). Anyhow, there does seem to be some consensus that posting Stan to YouTube without publishing his written consent and a full explanation of what is being done begs various question; as — and several people have said this pointedly — does the posting of edited interviews. You will notice there are plenty of cuts in the tapes. Can we have the full tapes please?
Mr Oldham has not responded to an email to the contact address given on his firm’s site yesterday. I will send another one.
Other points of interest: it seems that Oldham has not acted for Stan on other cases (at least ones I know about). Of course Stan, being a godfather, has almost as many lawyers as girlfriends, and so this is hardly surprising. But it does maintain one’s interest in knowing how Oldham got on the roster for this job. Finally, one who knows Oldham claims the accent is northern Irish, tho it sounded poshed up southern to me.
As to Stan’s choice of lawyer, I think it is good. There is an illustrious history of godfathers using gweilos to front for them when they need to do something very public. Remember all KS Li’s public relations problems at Hutchison in the 80s when he paid himelf a huge special dividend he had said he would not take? That was when he hired Simon Murray. Isn’t it great that everyone trusts white people? I think it’s fan-bloody-tastic.
If you would like a bit more compare and contrast (in the wake of Perugia versus Bristol, try Barack Obama and George Osborne in the sphere of economics. The former just gave a State of the Union speech (video or text in which he made a forthright case for America to expand fiscal expenditure in order to invest in infrastructure, in new commercial technology and in education. He grounded the case in the context of a rising geopolitical challenge from China (following the recent visit of Thunderbirds cameo Hu Jintao) and a US unemployment rate of 10 percent. He indicated the requisite funds ought to come from (in relative international terms) a less absurd fiscal subsidy for US oil companies and reduced tax breaks for the distinctly rich (following 40 years of decisions in their favour). Perhaps most important, he said all of this in the country which already has the world’s most competitive large industrial companies.
Over to Blighty. George Osborne, our to-the-manor-born Chancellor of the Exchequer, this week greeted the news that the British economy shrank in the fourth quarter with a promise not to entertain any expansion of investment. Instead, George’s plan for economic rejuvenation and job creation is to suck a boiled sweet and see what happens. Britain has fearfully few world-beating corporations outside of finance and legal and accountancy services (which largely serve the finance sector), but George can’t see a case for investment to nurture more of them. New world-beating corporations will arise from the vapours, according to the 101 neoclassical economics that George was spoon-fed at school and university. He says the Q4 shrinking economy was the result of bad weather, and one assumes he thinks the unemployment rate is the result of indolence and immobility among the lower classes.
Still, methinks it won’t much matter that George understands little about the world. The British government does need to cut recurrent expenditure after the excesses of Blair’s champagne socialism. Meanwhile, my bet is that George’s failure to make strategic investments in infrastructure and technology will be remedied later this year when Britain follows in Obama’s wake and increases capital spending. Where America leads, we follow. When was the last time that Britain influenced US policy? Keynes?
Worth reading: Robert Reich makes some good points about the pieces of the puzzle that Obama did not address in his SOTU speech in the FT (subscription likely needed): Reich, who was part of a government that as I remember did sfa, is a little too harsh: Obama did touch (lightly) on the income distribution question.
After writing this, I see that in the FT Martin Wolf seems to have reached the same conclusions about George.
Sorry to keep banging this drum… It occurs that the recent high-profile murder case in Bristol (a British city I know well having been an undergraduate there) points up the differences between British institutional behaviour since important reforms of the 1970s and1980s, and the wholly unreformed conduct of the police and judiciary in Italy.
The Bristol case involves the brutal murder of a young woman who lived in Clifton, the posh part of town. Joanna Yeates’s landlord, a retired teacher called Chris Jefferies, was interviewed (like many people) and changed his story about what he saw on the day of the murder. Jefferies is eccentric (a friend he taught many years ago provides independent corroboration of this) and he sports a classic mad professor hair-do. Police arrest him. They are constrained by the system to interview him in the presence of a lawyer and to tape record the interview. He does not admit to murder and they do not have the evidence to charge him. They release him on bail — suggesting they still think he is pretty weird — but there is nothing they can do. The police continue their work. More than a month after the murder, a completely different man, a 32-year-old neighbour, is arrested for the murder and on 25 January 2011 is remanded in custody. The police and judiciary reveal no further details and remind a frenzied and all too often irresponsbile press of the Contempt of Court Act and the fact that the publishing further details could prejudice the court case to come.
Compare Perugia. Here the issue is also the brutal murder of a young woman. Here there are also people around the case who appear suspicious — in this case the marijuana puffing students Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. The police get suspicious. But while the system in theory requires them to provide access to a lawyer and tape record interviews, in practice the accepted standards of the day are such that they interrogate Knox all night without either a lawyer or a tape recorder. They and the investigating magistrates (who join in the illegal interrogation) force a confession. At this point, the police and the magistrates stop doing their jobs and start leaking their case to the press, which fills acres of newsprint with lurid details about a weirdo murder conspiracy. Since there is no independent state prosecution service, the case is immediately ready for court. When the trial comes, the process is already thoroughly polluted, and only becomes more so in a system where jurors are not sequestered and where judges are present in camera to ‘assist‘ the jury as it decides a verdict.
My view is that England was almost this bad in the 1970s. Add another 10 years for the almost, and the Italian judicial system today is half a century behind England (which still has plenty of faults of its own).
Separately, on a totally unrelated but spooky note, thieves have stolen the decomposing body of Mike Bongiorno, about whom I blogged at his passing It is front page news in the Corriere della Sera (they have even translated some of it into English). When I raised the grave-snatching issue with a couple of locals in our preferred bar, the nonchalant response was that ‘It’s happened before’, with two specific cases cited. ‘The straightforward explanation is they’re looking for a ransom,’ said a middle-aged lady who wasn’t drinking alcohol. ‘Of course you can’t count anything out.’ Am I getting older, or is kidnapping stiffs something we should be less relaxed about?
Addendum, 24 February 2011. Here is another famous UK miscarriage of justice case from the 1970s — a complex, bitter-sweet one — that is back in the news.
