Oh my Lord, the bliss of arriving in Iceland… 10 degrees Celsius, light drizzle falling, so leaving the airport I held out my hands and my tongue to welcome the raindrops, after so long. In recent weeks, first in France, then in London, temperatures have been close to unbearable. They don’t just feel abnormal, but really dangerous.
Yet still, Donald Trump continues to worship fossil fuels, his Reform UK cheerleaders still parrot their clever, clever (they think) slogan, “Net Stupid Zero,” and there are persistent reports the new UK prime minister wants to do a bit more drill, baby, drill too, even as renewables become cheaper, and the North Sea presents more opportunities in wind than it does in oil.
Meanwhile, wildfires in Spain and France have spread fear and terror, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their homes, with firefighters admitting in some places that they cannot contain the fire, and will just have to wait for it to burn itself out. Both countries have had to mobilise the military to help, as if they don’t have enough on their hands already.
We have seen lesser versions of the same phenomenon in England and Scotland. Things are even worse, terrifyingly so, in Canada, prompting Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum to send help, and Trump to complain about the smoke crossing into the US, and threaten more tariffs.
Who would have thought it? You can’t close the borders to the damage done when you have closed your mind to the reality of the climate crisis.
And if you want to see a spectacular example of failing to join the dots, check out the social media post of Elon Musk’s latest UK puppet, Rupert Lowe – a picture of a barren-looking field with the caption: “A terrible harvest. British farmers need certainty from government, and we are certainly not getting it.”
A terrible harvest? Growing food insecurity? I wonder if climate denialism had anything to do with that, Rupe?
Dan Jørgensen, the EU climate commissioner, worked in a London hotel as a young man, and said his idea of an English summer back in his youth was that the rain was a little warmer. Today, any rain would do, not least to stop my mood darkening as soon as I leave the house, and wonder if ever filthier pavements are to become another sign of the great British summer.
Have you ever wondered how Lionel Messi’s life, and so football, might have been different had he been born in Luxembourg or San Marino? It’s the George Best question. A great player, but from a country, in Best’s case Northern Ireland, that despite his greatness was never going to succeed on the international stage.
Had Messi been Luxembourgeois (I only chose Luxembourg because I find that name so interesting), I am sure he would have ended up at a big club, won Leagues, Cups, Champions Leagues. But would we ever have seen him at a World Cup? Doubtful.
You can have the same phenomenon in politics. Oh, that Donald Trump had been born in Liechtenstein. We can be confident he would never have considered a political career – unlikely to make an extra £2.2bn a year running that place, tax haven or not.
I had the Messi thought after sitting down for a few hours to chat with Iceland’s prime minister, Kristrún Frostadóttir. She leads a country of just 400,000 people. But I am pretty sure she could more than hold her own with the leaders and challenges of far bigger countries.
She is young – still in her 30s – good-looking, whip-smart, well read, has a terrific sense of humour, great people skills, answers straight questions with straight answers, and thinks deeply about the issues all leaders are wrestling with.
She is also left of centre in a country that historically has elected mainly right-of-centre governments, and on the fringes of a Europe electing mainly right-of-centre governments too. Any left-of-centre leader struggling to win the fight for social democracy in their own, larger countries would do well to listen to this week’s Rest Is Politics LEADING to hear how she does it.
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That being said, the referendum she is fighting right now, on whether Iceland should reopen EU accession negotiations, is going to be tough. Very, very close, say the polls, an impression confirmed by my conversations with locals.
Inevitably, people will draw comparisons with our referendum in 2016. But it feels different.
In the Brexit referendum, a lot of people voted LEAVE because they felt their lives weren’t great, and they wanted someone to blame. In Iceland, I had more the feeling that they felt their lives were pretty good, and why did anyone want to mess around with that? The YES campaign has until August 29 to provide the answers.
Though I was only there for two days, I learned lots of interesting things about Iceland. They have no McDonald’s, which raises their standing in my estimation. They also have no army (which feels strange given the possibility that the Arctic may well be a future arena of war between the big powers).
Their language, closely related to Old Norse, has more than 100 words for wind. Can Peter Trudgill not get a column out of this? On the political front, they have one of the world’s oldest parliaments. They had the first female elected president in the world. They had the first openly gay prime minister in the world, also a woman.
The three parties in the governing coalition are led by women. Two opposition parties are led by women. The president is a woman. The chief of police is a woman. The bishop is a woman. Björk is a woman.
You might think 1989’s place in history is provided by the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was also the year that Iceland lifted a long-standing prohibition on… beer! They now have an annual beer day, Bjórdagurinn, though customers in the pub in which I watched the World Cup final seemed to think every day was beer day.
I also enjoyed getting to grips with their naming strategy. So the prime minister is called Frostadóttir, because she is the daughter – dóttir – of a father called Frosti. The father of Iceland’s ex-Burnley winger Jóhann Berg Guðmundsson was called Guðmundur. If I were Icelandic, I would be called Alastair Donaldsson, my children would be called Rory Alastairson, Calum Alastairson and Grace Alastairdóttir. Love it.
They are mildly obsessed with golf, with 60 golf courses, playable for just four months of the year. Among their museums, they have one dedicated to sorcery and witchcraft, and another – the Icelandic Phallological Museum – dedicated to penises, of humans and other species.
What a place. I will be back!
I can’t top Matt Kelly’s “Kevin Keegan was my babysitter” tribute to the footballing legend in the last issue. But I can say he was the co-star in Tony Blair’s best ever photo-op. My team was worried that the planned head tennis session in 1995 would be an embarrassment to my old boss. Keegan knew better.
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“Can he throw and catch a ball?” he asked me the night before.
“Yes.”
“If I threw a ball at him slowly, would he be able to head it?”
“Sure.”
“Well, don’t worry. If he gets his head on it and sends it in my direction, I will land it back on his head.”
So it proved. Twenty-seven headers between them, and suddenly the world thought Tony Blair was a great footballer. He wasn’t. Keegan was. And a great man too.
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