My Log 765 October 12 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 200: Peaky Blinders, that nonpareil of British gangster series, makes its reappearance on this side of the Atlantic, and I have seen enough to heartily recommend series five; with a little nod to my 200th chronicle

I guess I should pause a moment before embarking in this landmark Chronicle 200, the latest in a  series intended to celebrate my entry into my Tenth Decade of life. I should warn my readers that although they can take the number of my Chronicles seriously, the other number, Log 765 is just strictly something notional that I use to help me keep track of the saved Chronicles, a number that otherwise has  no real meaning in itself.

I began this blog, as it is now called, in 1996, just as a place to sound off on, and from the first I determined I would never spend or make any money out of it. I have stuck at least to that determination --- not that anyone has ever offered me any sort of remuneration, and so, come to think of it, perhaps  knowing how unlikely it is that any one would offer to put money into Boyce’sPaper, that is probably why I made such a noble declaration to myself about abstaining from monetary reward. Just another well-meant but basically ill-conceived attempt to give myself some airs and graces.  A hypocrite to the manner born!

I have no idea how many pieces I have written since 1996. If one took a notional daily column as the maximum, I would have written more than 8,000, but I know that an average would probably be more likely to lie somewhere between two or three a week, because, after all, I have had longish periods when I have never written anything. But three a week, on average would have produced some 186 Chronicles, rather than 200, and I do have to admit my pace has been quicker since I invented the Chronicles as an excuse to keep me going.

Okay, enough of that.

Last night I had the ineffable pleasure of resuming my viewing of Peaky Blinders that inimitable British serial about underworld life in Birmingham: it began at the end of World War I, with a poor, sharper-than-a-needle-family which arose from the Romany culture, whose characteristics  they continued to adhere to as they got into the struggle to take over management of all the small-time, gang-related crookery offered by the recently industrialized city of Birmingham, for many years a city that attracted to itself large numbers of drifting impoverished people who, once they had got a foothold in the city, were constantly on the lookout for avenues towards what might be loosely called self-improvement.

From the beginning it was a family affair, starting with the father, and then the sons, their spouses or girl friends,  some of their aunts and uncles--- one in particular, Aunt Polly, who became the treasurer of he outfit --- in all, a tight-knit group of people on rhe make.

When Winston Churchill as Home Minister discovered that a consignment of arms intended for Libya had gone missing from Belfast, he sent over to Birmingham from Belfast a chief inspector of police, played by Sam Neill, to clean up the place. Thus, young Tommy Shelby, who had rapidly grown to leadership of the gang, was in the eye of the authorities at the highest level right from the beginning. Episode 1 ends on the day the gang was set to take over a rival gang’s betting pitches at the Worcester races. In other words, they were in a small way, but growing.

In the second series set in 1921 and 1922, we observe the gang expanding from its Birmingham home towards both the north and the south --- the series begins and ends at Epsom Downs on Derby Day. (I can add a little reminder here of the traditional nature of British life, because when I started my assignment as London correspondent of The Montreal Star in 1960, four decades later, thr first story I wrote was about Derby Day, still with its firm grip on the British upper class imagination.  Nothing like kicking off a new job with a good cliché!).

In series three they are going international, largely at the instance of Aunt Polly, who hires a Russian painter to paint her. And series four, the last we have been allowed to see over here until this week, covers the period of the 1926 general .strike, and it ends with the unlikely elevation of Tommy to Parliament as a rabble-rousng Labour member. All I need say about series five, which I am almost halfway through watching, is that it begins on October 29, 1929, the day on which the stock market crashed in New York, and ends on December 7 1930, with a rally by the fascist leader Oswald Mosley, where Tommy makes clear he wants nothing to do with him.  I can reveal, since it comes at the very beginning of this series, that the crash has wiped out the formal weallh accumulated over the years by the Peaky Blinders gang, leaving Tommy wondering why his younger brother did not follow his advice, given a few days before, to sell. Tommy’s revenge, as we have seen at pivotal moments during his career, is usually swift and brutal.

The series picks up one of the favourite themes of the whole tale, which is that many younger members are born into the clan, but not all take to it kindly to their method of doing business, and Tommy’s powers of persuasion are many, to enlist them as loyal, but usually inadequate members of the team.  This is shown by the recalcitrant behaviour of Tommy’s youngest, who, when summoned to do what he is told, utters the devastating rejoinder, “You kill horses, and you kill people. They all say that at  school.” He had got the information about the dead horse because Tommy had spoken about it in the Romany language which the kid had picked up enough of to enable him to put two and two together. In other words, a smart little kid, once Tommy can get him straightened out.

Well, good luck Peaky Blinders fans. It’s looking good after the first two of the six episodes in the new series.

My Log 764 October 8 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 199: On the vexed question of stereotypes; my recent concentration on Japan, one of the most stereotyped of nations; but stereotypes can be amusing….

 I have been thinking a lot about stereotypes lately, probably because so much of my attention has been concentrated on Japan, where the World Rugby Cup is being played. Japan is possibly the one place in the world above all others that is known by western stereotypes. As I was growing up in the 1930s, the stereotype being sold to us was of the Yellow Peril, poised somewhere above us in the North Pacific, ready  to  swoop down on us at any time; Unfortunately, this turned out to be a stereotype made to order --- for Japan did obediently swoop down towards us with their fanatic militarism. They never quite reached as far as us,  but they made  quick work of the British possessions throughout the Pacific, and made it as far as Darwin, Australia’s northernmost outpost, which they attacked a couple of times, and the image of Japan transmitted by their behaviour during the war was of a cruelty almost beyond anything known from previous wars.

With the end of the war, and the makeover of Japan into an obedient American satrap --- another stereotype, this obedience --- the stereotype changed dramatically. Suddenly, the Japanese, on whom the world’s single most unholy attack had been launched, not once but twice, by our virtuous side, suddenly, along came this new Japan, with its array of high quality goods replacing the tripe they used to sell when just building up their industries before the war, suddenly this was a new Japan, friendly, cured, mysterious of course in many ways, but capable of many of the finest feelings known to human kind.

I will never forget the surprise I felt when I next ran up against some modern Japanese in 1978, when I happened  to be passing through Vancouver airport on my way to China, and I found myself suddenly surrounded by some recently-disembarked Japanese tourists. Clearly the old stereotypes no longer applied to these spectacularly dressed strangers in Western-style suits and dresses, the young women in tight sweaters and jeans, their chests emblazoned with cheeky messages like “Come and get me,” or “Ready and waiting,”  the young men resplendent in tight white suits. Where on earth did these  new-style Japanese come from?

By this time I should have been warned, because I had already had the experience of visiting that Germany, with its race of aggressive militarists I had always been taught to hate, only to find that when I talked to people of my own age in the camping grounds, I discovered to my astonishment that they were just like me.

Later I had the experience of defying the stereotypes when I drove down from Winnipeg, in a third-hand Austin A30, about the smallest car on the road in the 1950s, towards Mexico. All along the way, people we spoke to warned us against going in such a car into Mexico, a country well-known to be full of bandits, as the Americans described it, ready to pounce on the unwary traveller at any moment.  It was hardly a surprise when we discovered that the bandits were mostly siting along the roadside sleeping under those great straw hats they wore, and that whenever we had occasion to try to talk to them, we found them wonderfully friendly and responsive.

Of course we clung to some stereotypes ourselves. I remember as we were returning north from Mexico City we stopped off one night in Mazatlan, one of the major ports of the Mexican Pacific coast. We stayed overnight in the Hotel La Siesta, whose neon-lit sign across the front needed a bit of work. A few letters had given out so that it was showing only   HOT L  A SI  S. The next morning, as we sat outside our bedroom on the upstairs balcony looking into a courtyard, watching  the languorous movements of the maids as they went about their work in the most leisurely fashion, accompanied by ceaseless talk and laughter among them, it was more or less inevitable that the hotel became for us, The Hotel Hot Lassies, forever emblazoned in our memories by that name. And the Mexican chambermaids immediately recalled as Hot Lassies --- our own stereotype, ready-made.

It was almost fifty years before we found ourselves driving north again along the Pacific highway, and there, sure enough, stood the Hotel La Siesta, this time with all letters working. We simply had to stop, take a room in spite of the price having moved up beyond our reach (but just for the one night, for old time’s sake).  While there  we visited the memorable restaurant that had fed us such a beautiful meal on our first visit. By this time the restaurant had the unforgettable name of El Shrimp Bucket. We had not realised the first time around that Mazatlan is the central Pacific port for Mexico’s shrimping fleet, so the shrimps served were almost right out of the ocean. Although Mazatlan was still the same sleepy Pacific coastal town it had always been, we discovered that the whole region had grown ten times in population, with the erection along the coast of the so-called malecon  or boardwalk around which were gathered a huge collection of high-rise luxury hotels, each one with their fancy price. We moved into a cheaper hotel halfway between the old town and the new, but our delay was simply to enable us to return to El Shrimp Bucket where they prepared the most delicious shrimp dishes we had ever eaten or ever expect to eat. Unfortunately for any of my readers who may have developed a secret desire to sample these wonderful dishes, the Internet tells me El Shrimp Bucket was open in May of this year, but a later aficionado said he had to return several times  before he could be convinced that the restaurant had closed, definitively, closed for good.  But the memory of those delicious dishes will be with me as long as my memory lasts.

Meantime, back in Japan, my favoured All Blacks team, always anxious to be liked, pulled off a big one when, obeying the stereotype, they paraded around the ground and bowed to the huge audience, as an expression of respect for their culture.

After the next game they earned more respect still when they approached the team from Canada that they had just beaten to a pulp, to invite them to visit their dressing room so they could get to know them a bit.  For me, that was a big one: an act of good sportsmanship, without which it isn’t even worth playing these silly games.

Stereotypes can sometimes produce amusing, and heart-warming,  results. I will never forget the occasion on which I was flying from Melbourne, Australia to Rome, by an Alitalia plane that was fully booked. The gate was crammed with Italians whose families had somehow made it through all discouragements so that they could farewell family members, and friends. All were talking, and, being Italians, the noise they made was overwhelming, Eventually, sitting alone, among this cacophony, I was surprised that a hush descended on this crowd as an announcement was made, first in English then Italian. ”We are ready to board the passengers now. We will board by row numbers….   Those with seats in rows… Rows number 52 to 62, please make your way to the gate…”

The rest of the message was lost under a huge explosion of noise as every person,  passengers and family members alike,  rose as one man to rush forward to the gate, where they overwhelmed the attendants, and began, waving tickets and boarding passes, to press up against the still-closed door, shouting and yelling, all of them, the more so as they discovered it was not their turn  and were rejected.

These Italians!  You gotta love ‘em.

Right?

Ah, wot the hell! wot the hell. C’est toujours gai, la vie, toujours gai, no?

My Log 763 Sept 30 2019; Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 198; I wake up to a beautiful sunrise over Montreal; some reflections on bitter conservative forces in society that have always gotten my goat; I hope we are not about to elect them here

I woke up at 4.20 this morning, read for an hour or so and then got up to check on what time today’s Rugby World Cup game was to be played. I had in mind to write something about my childhood, and memories thereof, but the first thing I saw on the day was the spectacle of the southern sky, blazing red as the dawn came up, backlighting the tall buildings of the Montreal skyline, a spectacular sight. With my childhood upbringing in mind I couldn't help but reflect on how different was this sight of the big North American city, from that small place where I grew up. In those days, New .Zealand was a country of small towns: I lived in the fifth biggest town in the country, whose population was only 26,000, and which did not boast a single  building taller than, say three stories. A far cry from the modern big city that always seems impelled to reach out both across the land, and up into the sky, vainly trying to touch the heavens.

But before I get on to my subject for the day, I simply have to mention what I read about at 4.20 am. It was an article in  the most recent issue of The Guardian Weekly, from London, about a campaign against so-called illegal immigrants to Britain initiated by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary in the government of David Cameron, that was so horrible as to be scarcely believable.  She had vans going around in six London boroughs with considerable immigrant populations, emblazoned with a message: “In the UK illegally?  Go home, or face arrest.” The notices were illustrated with a picture of handcuffs and the number of recent immigration arrests (“106 arrests last week in your area”) and a notice along the bottom: “We can help you to return home voluntarily without fear of arrest or detention.”

The article dealt with the inhumanity and injustice visited on what has become known as the Windrush generation, named for a shipload of West Indians who were imported into Britain with their families to fill jobs that could not be filled with British-born. These people were never offered any documents asserting their right to be in Britain, although they were all British subjects, and were therefore sitting ducks when, almost half a century later,  public sentiment turned against immigrants ---  especially, one might observe, coloured immigrants --- and whose children were targeted for deportation in the most heartless and brutal manner conceivable.  

The article tells one detailed story, among several others,  of a woman who was four when she arrived with her Grenadian  parents in 1968, and was 48 when, worn to a frazzle by her fruitless effort to get the government to accept the 75 proofs she had gathered of her lifetime of residence in the country,  she gave up and accepted “voluntary” repatriation to a country she had never known, where she arrived without money, had no contacts, and little prospect of getting work. Her life was completely ruined by the experience of being so chosen and persecuted, and even the eventual repatriation to Britain that she was granted, and some of which was paid for  by the British government, did not make things any easier for her: once again, she had to start to rebuild her life at an age where such a thing for a woman in her circumstances was almost impossible.

Okay, that’s the cheerful story with which I started my day.

The article was written by a journalist called Amelia Gentleman, who had spent several years uncovering this horror-story, a job that was made rather  touchy for her in that she was married to Jo Johnson,  celebrated brother of Boris Johnson, who was at the time a minister in the Conservative government. It was her articles that eventually forced the government to take notice of the injustice so callously visited on these Windrush survivors,

What I originally set out to write 671 words ago was stimulated by my having seen the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, as she appeared on Stephen Colbert’s Late show. He was trying to get her to say something undiplomatic about Donald Trump, because she was present when he addressed the General Assembly the day before, at which time there was a whiff of laughter when he spoke. He remarked that he did nt expect that response. “Did you join in the laughter?” Colbert asked.

“Are you trying to create a diplomatic incident?” she asked. She said the audience had laughed at Trump a second time, and that time, as Trump claimed, they could be said to be laughing with him.

“And the first time?” persisted Colbert.

“The first time was like a gentle murmur among themselves,” she said, laughing.

“Did you join in?” asked Colbert. “I was observing,” she laughed..

What set me off to write something about Ardern was that I saw the exchange on a New Zealand newspaper outlet, and it was followed by a large number of reader responses. Many of them were of a grouchy, grumpy variety that I remembered vividly from my childhood,  “What’s she doing over there, gallivanting about,” was the tone. “She spends more time doing that than working hard to make life better for New Zealanders.”

I have the impression from what I have read recently that she has had to confront that sort of criticism ever since she was chosen to be the Prime Minister. And it was the grouchy tone of these responses that seemed so familiar to me.  I was 17 when I became a newspaper reporter in my own small town. I was a supporter of the Labour Party and its government at the time, and I came to abhor the ultra-conservative National Party opposition whose policies had gotten New Zealand into the desperate position from which a Labour government was needed to pull the country back up by its bootlaces.  

I worked in journalism in New Zealand fore almost three years before leaving the country for good, and during that time, in fact during all of the years until I was 22, I never remember any New Zealand newspaper of the time expressing any favourable opinion of the Labour government.

I remember just after I first left home to move to a slightly bigger city, Dunedin, (80,000 population, the fourth city in the country) that I took a room in a boarding house kept by a dreadful woman who had a virulent hatred of the Labour Party, the Labour government, and anything that could be in any way associated with Labour and its works, however loosely.  She tended to greet my arrival in the house by holding up some headline or other from a newspaper, showing another proof of the imbecility of Labour and its ministers.

It was not lost on me that the government she was talking about was one that had been elected in 1935, and was re-elected every three years  until 1949, having during all those years presided over an extremely well-managed economy, maintained at full employment with a successful export programme for the nation’s wool, butter and cheese, and one that, with its generous social programmes kept New Zealanders healthy and strong, and well enough educated to have chosen to keep them in power in spite of the unrelenting media campaign against them.

The first Labour Party Prime Minister was an Australian  working class man, Michael Joseph Savage, an unremitting socialist, who had been a labourer, ditchdigger and held a variety of other jobs until getting involved in the union movement, after which he had drifted into, first, municipal, and later national, politics.  He was deeply revered among the ordinary people of New Zealand: for many years, pictures of him adorned the walls of thousands of the homes of ordinary New Zealanders, alongside,  often, pictures of Queen Victoria.  He was the Prime Minister when the British government declared war on Germany. He issued a statement virtually from his death bed, declaring unequivocal support for the war:

“…we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go; where she stands, we stand. We are only a small and young nation, but we march with a union of hearts and souls to a common destiny^.”

My wife often told a story that encapsulates the feeling people had for Savage. In the middle of rhe great depression she was given a watch as an unimaginable birthday present by her Maori grandmother, “Don’t thank me, dear,” her grandmother said, “thank Michael Joseph Savage.”

That my distaste for these bitter conservatives who so much out my back up during my brief adulthood in New Zealand, was not displaced was confirmed for me when I returned to New Zealand to live after 25 years. It happened that the leader of the National Party was elected Prime Minister just after I arrived with my family in 1975.

Every speech Robert Muldoon made was full of what sounded to me like dreadful ideas, every one of which I abhorred. I leave it to Wikipedia to explain the results:

“(Muldoon)’s  tenure as Prime Minister was plagued by an economic pattern of stagnation, high inflation, growing unemployment, and high external debts and borrowing. Economic policies of the Muldoon Government included national superannuation, wage and price freezes, industrial incentives, and the Think Big industrial projects. In foreign policy, Muldoon adopted an anti-Soviet stance and re-emphasised New Zealand's defence commitments to the United States and Australia under the ANZUS pact. His refusal to stop a Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand divided the country and led to unprecedented civil disorder in 1981.”

That is why I so disliked the negative conservatism that, during my boyhood, I always felt was waiting to pounce on the country and ruin it. I had the impression during the 18 months I was able to stay in New Zealand, that every time Muldoon opened his mouth to utter some banal idiocy, the greater was the applause showered on him by the reactionary electors who voted him into power.

Ah well, wot the hell, wot the hell?

My Log 762 Sept 27 2019; Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 197: The great protest march: a moving spectacle; but the presence of Trudeau in it was an anomaly: how much so is explained in a new book by Martin Lukacs

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It was extremely moving this afternoon to stand and watch this vast crowd,  the biggest I have ever seen in my long life, young people for the most part, but young and old joined in a single cause, file by in an eloquent, peaceful act of civil protest against the inaction that has marked the political response to the gathering emergency of the human-induced warming of the climate.

  The moving aspect of this experience was somehow heightened when one considered that it was all stimulated by this tiny slip of a girl, Greta Thunberg, who emerged as a 15-year-old from  her shaky status as a sufferer from a combination of Asperger syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and selective mutism, to stand each day with a sign before the Swedish Riksdag or Parliament, carrying a sign  saying School Strike for Climate.

Organizers estimated today’s crowd in Montreal at 500,000 --- far outstripping the 60,000 people I remember gathering in Trafalgar Square, London,  in the 1960s in favour of another great cause, their Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Although that campaign had gathered huge public support, had even won to its side  the British Labour Party after an intense and astonishing debate, all that meant nothing to the politicians, who blissfully ignored the democratic decision, with the result that the major powers still are brandishing nuclear weapons at each other, and one could not help but wonder today if a similar fate may not befall this impressive display of public uneasiness about climate warming.

Ms. Thunberg, perhaps because her physical disabilities require that she speak only when she has something to say, is an extremely impressive speaker, riveting as she delivers her forceful message with her blunt, powerful delivery, a message that is simple in the extreme: listen to the science, she tells the politicians, act on the science.

She seems to be too serious a young woman to peddle in ironies, but if she were, she might have jibbed at  the presence in this great protest march against the inactivity of political leaders,  of Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who she had, politely, in a brief interview before the march, told in her blunt fashion, that he was not doing enough. Trudeau, being a man whose brand is to be always on both sides at once, told her that he agreed with her.

  It happens that I have just read a new book on Trudeau, which, if it gets to be read by enough people, might well finish him off as our Prime Minister. It is called The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent, by Martin Lukacs, published by Black Rose Books of Montreal, 295 pps, $24.50.

Lukacs is a capable writer and researcher who approaches his subject from a frankly socialist perspective, from which viewpoint --- this is nothing new!--- all political parties fall far short of what one might hope.  For those of us --- I number myself among this coterie of malcontents --- who have always remained resistant to the siren song of the Liberal party of Canada, Lukacs’ recital of its strengths and weaknesses will come as well-trodden ground. He establishes Trudeau as the not altogether gifted son of a Liberal Prime Minister, good-looking, fairly eloquent on his feet, with an almost pathetic wish to please, infinitely pliable about what to believe in, but underneath the glossy-exterior that has been so skilfully sold to the world, he is a tough operator who does not react well to opposition, especially from within his own party, and whose links with the makers and shakers of the Canadian economy --- in other words, as we call them nowadays, the one percenters---are well established, and virtually unshakeable. The author must have had in mind to write this book for several years, for he recounts many occasions on which he has sneaked into events that were essentially closed to all but adherents to the status quo that the Liberal party has always been so skilful at protecting. Events like weapons fairs, or private party shindigs bringing together the top men from the Party with the leaders of the corporations from which the Liberals essentially get their orders on how to run Canada.

The picture thus presented of the Liberal Party is fascinating, paying, as it does, obeisance to their skill at maintaining themselves on top of the Canadian political heap through the shrewd manipulation of their intense contacts with the lords of Big Business.

But the picture of Trudeau himself is nothing like so pleasing: he seems to be a man skilled at saying one thing, and doing another. The most obvious examples of this are in his climate and environmental policies in which he brazenly pretends to be following contradictory policies that have so far proven to be irreconcilable, to such an extent that among some of North America’s leading environmentalists Trudeau is regarded as the King of Hypocrites. 

 His management of his subordinates, as illustrated by his ruthless --- but fruitless ---  hounding of his former Justice Minister to vary a scheduled prosecution for bribery against the Quebec engineering giant SNC Lavalin, reveals  a different face from that of the smiling optimist. Some other stories I had not heard before indicate that  this willingness to accommodate Big Business was shared by those who became closest to him when he became the top gun.  For example,  there is a very revealing tale about his friend and mentor, Gerry Butts, when, as head of the World Wildlife Fund Canada, he presided over a determined effort to reveal the unsuitability of the Alberta Tar Sands as a source of future oil supplies. One of his subordinates realized that everything pertaining to this campaign had suddenly been expunged from their WWF web site, without explanation, except that eventually he discovered that  the future  mover and shaker in the future Prime Minister’s office had succumbed to determined lobbying  by the oil interests to stop their accursed campaigning, so that they could get busy developing the Tar Sands.  No sooner said than done, old boy.

A good deal of space is given to the close relationship of the Liberal government with the Business Council of Canada, or whatever it is now called --- they keep changing its name, but its function remains the same  ---the lobbying arm for all the country’s top CEOs. For years this was headed by a man called Thomas d’Aquino; now it is headed by former Liberal minister John Manley. It is one of the most influential groups in the country, regularly consulted by government  about all matters of interest to business, and usually given the task of re-writing, whenever necessary, the rules for competition in Canada. Labour interests, who could be said to have at least an equal, if not perhaps a greater interest, in the rules of business, are never consulted. ( I remember an occasion when a film I made about the aluminum multinational, Alcan, was screened on TVO, the Ontario government's outlet, that in a panel discussion following the film D’Aquino, one of the guests, was almost frothing at the mouth in rage when I said we had not asked for the company’s permission to make the film: how disgusting to spend public money from the NFB budget, on such an enterprise!)

I remember years ago  on my blog I would drop in a paragraph occasionally to the effect that neither the minister of natural resources, Anne McLellan, nor John Manley was fit to be a minister, because they were, respectively in the pockets of the oil industry and the business interests, and were both tame ministers.  Both of these turn up in Lukacs book as prominent advisers to the current government.

Lukacs recounts  occasionally heart-rending stories, as for instance when our Foreign Minister, Christia Freeland -- another I classify as not fit to be a minister ---  had to fight back tears when the Prime Minister of Walloon in Belgium refused to endorse Canada’s trade treaty with the European Union. This was one of the many treaties the Liberals had signed, including the infamous NAFTA,  that extended to all multinational corporations the right to sue Canada if any legislation --- for example an environmental regulation --- might be considered likely to affect the bottom line profits of the company.  This rank betrayal of the national interest is the sort of management of the economy that for years has made Canadians with a slightly nationalist bent tear out their hair. But to ministers like Freeland, such betrayals  are regarded as triumphs of diplomacy.

The book is made up of many such horror-stories. It ends with Mr. Lukacs expressing his disappointment that the NDP, his favored party, should have proven such a pushover for the values of neoliberalism, that when they eventually get into power, or close to it, their policies are virtually indistinguishable from those of the Liberals.

It strikes me that this is likely to be a more or less permanent condition, since Canadians, although more progressive in their politics than our neighbours to the south, are still, at their centre, a relatively conservative people, unwilling, it seems, to embark on any course that might be described as too radical.

The Trudeau Formula, from this perspective, is an essential, but not a comforting, read.  It convinces me that I don’t like Trudeau, but leaves me confronted with the dilemma: his likely replacement as Prime Minister, should he lose the current election, seems to be fifty times worse.

Woe is me! Woe is us! And my mantra --- wot the hell, wot the hell? --- is no comfort.