So he got his birthday parade. The man-child for whom flattery and adulation are necessities on a par with air and water; the draft-dodger who now glories in being commander-in-chief; the self-styled strongman who cannot see that the enemies of the American forces made to march for their leader are daily exploiting what they see as Donald Trump’s multiple chronic weaknesses.
China’s Xi Jinping, who sat out the early salvoes of the tariff war, waited and waited, and eventually got the better of the self-styled greatest deal-maker on earth.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who revelled in the sight and sound of American leaders echoing his talking points, celebrated not just Trump’s return to office but also pro-Kremlin appointments to key positions, played along with talk of Ukraine ceasefires, then carried on bombing.
Kim Jong Un in North Korea, who managed to get first-term Trump to give him the credibility of a US presidential visit, and has since continued to cement his strength and develop his military, and who doubtless spent Saturday watching the US parade to see which ideas were stolen from Pyongyang’s long history of vanity exhibitions.
Now Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, not an enemy – far from it, given that US-Israeli relations have been so close for so long; yet also someone who has exploited the weakness of Trump in choosing this as the moment to launch an all-out onslaught on Iran’s nuclear programme, possibly with the aim of going for regime change thereafter.
Trump has variously wanted us to think… that only he could force Iran to make a deal (overlooking the fact that the Obama government already did, in July 2015, which he tore up); that only he could get Netanyahu to stop the killing in Gaza, and stay away from attacking Iran; and now, having failed to stop him, that he was up for this all along.
Obsessed with baubles, he has long coveted a Nobel peace prize, not least because Obama got one. Hence his constant bleating that none of the wars in which US troops were involved would have happened had he been president.
The promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. The miracle of peace he would bring to the Middle East, by turning Gaza into a beach resort. But no real plan for any of it. A social media post here, a Fox News interview there, living moment to moment, the line changing with the wind; leaving leaders who understand the value of the long term to outflank him and outwit him, knowing he is too vain ever to be able to see it.
No doubt some of the troops marching past Trump felt a swell of pride and, the MAGA supporters among them, love for their leader. I suspect just as many looked up and saw an emperor with no clothes, the Trump America’s enemies long saw coming. Meanwhile, there were plenty of empty seats, so plenty of scowling from the birthday boy, while all around the US, protests galore to remind us, lest we forget… Trump is not America.
“Les enfants l’adorent…” the word of a watchful steward, explaining how the organisers had been blown away by the success, among all ages, of the David Hockney exhibition in Paris. The exhibition-adoring children he was speaking of come mainly in the morning, organised school trips forming a fair chunk of the 7,000 people who are filing through the doors of the Louis Vuitton Foundation every day.
The exhibition is superb, not just because of Hockney’s talent and the vast portfolio on show, but also because it is so beautifully laid out. At a time when planes are falling out of the sky, war in the Middle East is spreading, and the White House reality TV show is becoming ever more corrupt, chaotic and violent, a few hours luxuriating in one man’s artistic genius provides happy, optimistic escapism.
However, being a political obsessive, political thoughts are never far from my mind, and as I ambled from gallery to gallery, two political observations kept coming… first, the soft power accrued for Britain by us having more than our share of the great creative figures of the modern age. There wasn’t a British flag in sight, but there didn’t need to be; everyone present knew or learned that this was the work of a very British artist they were admiring.
The second thought, less happily, was whether we as a country make enough of our arts and culture, and do enough to ensure that our children get access to, and benefit from, real immersion in all that the arts can do for them.
When Boris Johnson was prime minister, he was constantly boasting about Britain being “world-beating” at this, that and any other area for bullshit he could find. All bluster.
But when it comes to art, theatre, music, books, film, fashion, we really do have the makings of a world-beating cultural superpower. It’s why it was disappointing to see the culture department losing out in the spending review, just as it was disappointing to see our soft power hit by more Foreign Office cuts that will damage the work of the British Council and the BBC World Service.
With war so much in the news, hard power, in the form of increased defence spending, is rightly demanding more of national budgets. But hard and soft power are not an either-or. We need both, and culture and diplomacy are two soft power areas where we can do better than most.
I’m not sure David Hockney would have had that in mind when he was creating the 400-plus exhibits on show in Paris, but it was exactly what I thought as I watched a huge snake to the tills in the David Hockney 25 bookshop, and heard a Spanish couple talk about how they would like to go for a holiday in Yorkshire, to see if the landscapes were really as beautiful and inspiring as Hockney’s version of them. I told them they were, boasted that I briefly went to the same school as Hockney, Bradford Grammar, and went on my merry way.
We thought we were so clever, planning a detour to Paris en route south, with an overnight stay in Kent so we could get on the first shuttle, when hardly anyone else would be travelling. Er… why did nobody tell us about the Le Mans 24-hour race?
I follow most sports closely, but have never been into motorsport, unlike the thousands who were heading from Britain to France for the race, and whose sports cars created one of the longest, but most brightly coloured, passport queues since Brexit.
I could not have been happier that by the time the print version of last week’s The New World landed on the doorsteps of subscribers, my column was already out of date. My moan that no rugby league player or coach had never been awarded a knighthood, whereas football had had 17 and rugby union 11, was answered… arise Sir Billy Boston. Better late than never, though sad that the record-breaking Wigan winger had to wait till he was 90, and suffering from dementia, before his call to the palace to meet the King.
And while I am on rugby league, check out the website of Keighley Cougars, who are selling a “We Stand With Ukraine” kit – proceeds to Ukraine. This arose from an item on The Last Leg, when its presenter Adam Hills, who doubles as president of the Rugby League, did an item on the struggles Ukraine’s rugby league teams were having to keep going, with players killed, injured, or away on the front line.
