The Spectator: Iceland has good and bad news about the coronavirus

In Iceland — a small country of 360,000 people with a strong healthcare system — coronavirus testing has been accompanied by population screening. Yet even with the hardline approach taken here involving early quarantining, self-isolation and infection tracing, infections have rapidly become widespread. There is no doubt that the virus’s spread has been just as far and wide in other European countries, where the number of tests is fewer and the follow-up, in many cases, much more lax.

So what can we learn from Iceland’s approach? The testing conducted by the National Health Service in Iceland along with further screening has already yielded some interesting results. Researchers at DeCode genetics have found 40 mutations of the coronavirus in Iceland alone; one individual had been infected by two variants at the same time. This is both good and bad news: the theory is that such mutations will make the virus more contagious but potentially less dangerous to those that are affected. Screening also indicates that children seem much less likely to catch the virus, but this may be influenced by the fact that children generally have mild symptoms. [...]

So have European countries really learnt anything from the experience of other places where the virus has started to wane in its severity? Too few lessons have been taken, it would seem. Graphs showing the spread of the virus in South Korea compared to Western European countries paint a startling picture. While the spread leveled off early after a significant outbreak in South Korea, European countries have continued to experience exponential growth. Other Far East countries such as Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and indeed China have also appeared to have considerable success in limiting the spread of the virus.

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The Spectator: All by herself: Theresa May and the politics of isolation Inbox x

Her current policy — to threaten to walk away from talks if the EU doesn’t accept her Chequers plan — is not taken seriously in Brussels. EU leaders can see that the UK is hopelessly unprepared for no deal, and reason that she’d be stopped by her cabinet, parliament or both if she tried it. May’s colleagues worry that she is in denial, and so they are making their own plans. One of those intimately involved in the government’s contingency planning tells me, ‘No deal cannot be our only Plan B.’ [...]

Even the handful who still defend Chequers in private, as well as in public, admit that things are now more difficult. One cabinet minister concedes that the EU’s approach at Salzburg was a ‘very successful negotiating tactic’. Another cabinet member says the Chequers plan has done its job: to show the government had made an effort, in good faith, to negotiate as close an economic relationship with the EU as possible. ‘You’ve got to be able to say to the Remainers that we tried.’

There are some in the cabinet who still loathe Brexit and regard Chequers as the UK’s opening offer. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, is expected to push to stay in the customs union and makes no attempt to disguise his concerns about Brexit. In cabinet meetings this week, he complained that a restaurant in his Surrey constituency can’t hire enough staff to wait all the tables — proof, he said, that the UK needed low-skilled immigration. But as one exasperated cabinet minister put it to me afterwards, it didn’t seem to have occurred to the Chancellor that maybe the restaurant should just pay its staff more. And that the balance of power between workers and low-wage businesses might be precisely why so many voted for Brexit in the first place.

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The Spectator: Britain has lost control of the Brexit talks

Perhaps most worryingly, the idea that Northern Ireland could remain permanently in the customs union — which Theresa May once said ‘no British prime minister could ever concede’ — remains on the table. This brings about the prospect of an internal border within the UK in the Irish Sea — a situation which ministers know will prove unacceptable to a very large proportion of Northern Irish residents, not least among them the DUP, on whose votes the government relies for support. If the government does fall on a confidence vote before the projected date of the next election, in 2022, its demise may well be traceable to this week. [...]

Michel Barnier has been criticised for his obstinacy and his lack of imagination in solving issues such as the Irish border. It is true that his constant stonewalling of suggestions put forward by Britain shows the EU in bad light and is a reminder of the freedoms we might enjoy outside the bloc. His tone has been needlessly caustic, and he has seemed to take the Brexit talks as an audition for succeeding Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission. But his stubbornness is working: putting Britain on the back foot, forever struggling to defend itself. The government’s failure to come up with proposals has left a vacuum in which the EU is suggesting them for us. [...]

Also, the member states’ power over the European Commission is waning. In Britain, the EU is often thought about as a single entity — and one that in the end will do whatever Germany says. But Angela Merkel is struggling to exert control over her own government, let alone the continent. Juncker and Barnier see an EU that does not take its orders from member states, but draws (or claims to draw) its own democratic legitimacy from the European Parliament. The EU member states have an interest in a good deal with Britain. But the European Commission — the apparatus in Brussels — has an interest in Britain being seen to be worse off after leaving the EU. The Commission would also receive 80 per cent of the tariff revenue from UK exports to the EU, making ‘no deal’ more appealing to Brussels than to member states.

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The Spectator: Pope is planning to retire, say allies – but only once he’s appointed enough liberal cardinals

Allies of Pope Francis are saying that he’s planning to follow the example of Benedict XVI and retire. But he’ll only do so once he’s appointed enough liberal cardinals to make sure that the next conclave doesn’t elected a conservative who will interpret Catholic doctrine more strictly than he does.

This, at least, is what allies of the Pope have been telling colleagues – claiming that they’ve heard it from the pontiff himself. (Francis himself is a notorious chatterbox and so are some of the cardinals close to him.)

The Pope, now 80, apparently wants to hold three more consistories at which he will bestow the red hat on bishops who share his vision of reform (whatever that may be: the details are still sketchy, four years in).

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The Spectator: Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great was more radical than most leaders today (3 October 2015)

After Frederick’s accession in 1740, he became, in his turn, the tormentor of the family. Although he did not imprison his wife like George I, he repeatedly humiliated ‘this incorrigibly sour subspecies of the female sex’, as he called her. They barely met. His nephew and heir, the future Frederick William II, wrote of him in 1780: ‘That animal is a right scourge of God, spat out of Hell on to earth by God’s wrath.

After his accession, in Blanning’s words Frederick ‘came out’. He spent most of his time far from prying eyes in Potsdam, south- west of Berlin, and enjoyed ‘intimate relations’ with young officers, as well as his first valet Fredersdorf. The king called him ‘du’ and he acted as an unofficial prime minister. Frederick commissioned a fresco of Ganymede and filled his parks with statues of Antinous or pairs of male lovers. His poems ‘The Orgasm’ and ‘Palladion’, the first written for his handsome Italian favourite Count Algarotti, praise ‘glorious heroes, responding both actively and passively to their lithe and obliging friends’.

Blanning emphasises the luxury and grandeur of the court of Prussia. Berlin had one of the largest city palaces in Europe and was surrounded by at least 20 country palaces for the monarch and the ruling family — many more than Vienna. Frederick II extended Charlottenburg, built Sans Souci, and the 638-room Neues Palais in Potsdam and bought a new palace in Breslau, capital of Silesia, in which he installed a throne room. On campaign he shared his troops’ hardships: they loved him. In peacetime, he amassed magnificent collections of pictures, sculptures, jewelled rings and snuff boxes. Frederick’s greenhouses were as luxurious as his gilded rococo bedrooms and music rooms. He built the Berlin opera and founded the Berlin porcelain factory. [...]

Like the recent books of John Röhl on Wilhelm II and Jonathan Steinberg on Bismarck, Blanning shows that Prussia had a court society and culture — a ‘deep state’ not always visible on the surface. If more diaries and memoirs, such as those of Count Lehndorff and Hildegard von Spitzemberg, or the journalism of Alfred Kerr (father of the children’s author Judith Kerr) were translated, they would help us understand the driving force of the country which, before the self-inflicted cataclysm of 1914, was the powerhouse of Europe.

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The Spectator: Putin’s next move

A Russian invasion of Estonia and-Latvia would be complete in as little as 36 hours, according to a study by the Rand Corporation for the Pentagon. Russian tanks would be rumbling through Tallinn and Riga before Nato could so much as convene an emergency meeting to invoke Article 5 of its charter for mutual defence. The Rand study showed that it would take more than a week for Nato to get its tanks to the Baltics from Germany in response. By then it would all be over.So Nato has decided to send four battalions of troops to the Baltics, including one from Britain — exactly the kind of reinforcement that General Shirreff wants. The Baltic states have welcomed this. [...]

James Carden, a former adviser to a US presidential commission on Russia, agrees. ‘We have a habit of leading on these people who are along the periphery of Russia. Do the Baltics really think that we’ll get into a nuclear exchange if Russia runs over their borders? We won’t. We’re not going to go to war for them. De Gaulle knew this as far back as the 1960s, that the US would not trade New York for Paris in a-nuclear war.’ But he doubted that Russia really-wanted the Baltics back: it was just sending a-message to the West. [...]

Putin, then, may have adopted Richard Nixon’s ‘madman theory’ — the attempt to scare a potential enemy into thinking you might just go to war, might even drop the big one, if pushed. Others in the Russian federation are playing their part — it sometimes seems as if the whole country has been gripped by world war three hysteria. The state-controlled TV channel NTV took its cameras into a nuclear bunker, telling-viewers: ‘Everyone should know where the nearest bomb shelter is.’ The chairman of the Duma’s defence committee even appeared on television in his old uniform as commander of the country’s airborne troops and promised to fly to the US on a military-transport plane if ordered to by President Putin. ‘We need to stop apologising to the Westerners,’ he said.

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