I must admit that I am surprised that John Terry has been forced to resign as England’s soccer captain for having an extra-marital affair with the former girlfriend of an ex-teammate. I can see that Terry’s wife has reason to object. But once the England management go down this path, they may find they have very few players of sufficient moral stature to aspire to the captaincy. The newly-appointed captain, Rio Ferdinand, has also had his sex life featured in lurid newspaper stories (and videos) - and has served a suspension for missing a drugs test. What’s the big difference, other than the passage of time - and the fact that Terry is married?

My hunch that Terry’s sin is fairly common was re-enforced by reading the papers on my flight to Mexico. It was the “News of The World” which was once nicknamed “the news of the screws”. But even the august Times had no shortage of adultery stories. There was the Terry tale. And there was a “news in brief” recording that “Four Wisconsin women involved in glueing a cheating husband’s penis to his stomach in a revenge plot were each given a year’s probation.” (So arguably Terry got off quite lightly?)

Next to the Wisconsin story was a report on the travails of the South African president Jacob Zuma, who has just fathered his twentieth child. Despite having three wives and a fiance, Zuma’s latest was conceived with yet another woman. I saw Zuma questioned about his polygamy at Davos and he faced down his critics without embarrassment. But this latest episode has actually forced him to apologise. So what are we to conclude? Polygamy good, adultery bad? Nineteen children fine; twenty children way over the top? Continue reading "From John Terry to Jacob Zuma"

I am in the departure lounge at Heathrow, waiting for my flight to Mexico City. This will be my first visit to Mexico since I went on an unusually arduous honeymoon in 1991, which involved rather more long-distance coach journeys than was probably wise. This time, no coaches.

It is interesting to be flying British Airways on the day that the company announced record losses for the first nine months of the year. I scanned the faces of the check-in staff for signs of demoralisation, or the “couldn’t care less” attitude that might be a sign that the threatened strike is indeed in the offing. But they were admirably poker-faced and professional. And indeed some - including the FT - are arguing that the latest quarterly results are good news since they show that sharp cost-cutting has returned the airline to profit over the last three months, although not over the year as a whole. Continue reading "British Airways as a metaphor for Britain"

People who worry a lot about global warming sometimes talk about tipping points - a moment when catastrophic climate change becomes irreversible. But I am beginning to wonder whether the climate-change debate is not in danger of reaching a tipping point in the other direction - the moment when it becomes impossible for the global warming lobby to win the political argument for serious action.

Arguably, the fiasco of the Copenhagen summit has already demonstrated that it will be all but impossible to achieve a proper global agreement. But at Copenhagen, all the major governments were at least committed to the idea that “something needs to be done”. I wonder how long that consensus will last.

In recent weeks, there has been a drip-drip of stories eating away at the official consensus about global warming. There was the furore about the e-mails from within the University of East Anglia climate unit. Then the revelation that the much-cited scare about the imminent disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers was just that - a scare. Now there is mounting pressure on the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri to resign in response. There is no doubt that Pachauri has mishandled the fall-out from all this - sounding arrogant, high-handed and panicky by turns. Still, if he goes, it will be a really serious blow to the global-warming consensus, since his resignation will be seized upon by every climate-sceptic in the world, as sweet vindication. This article by Walter Russel Mead gives, I think, a good sense of the direction of the debate in America.

I spent the morning at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, for the launch of their annual report on the global military balance. I found the briefing really fascinating, which could be a dangerous sign that I am now on the official register of “international affairs bores” and should be forced into early retirement.

The briefing offered by the IISS experts ranged fascinatingly over a variety of topics from the Iranian nuclear programme, to Russia’s new military doctrine and the links (or lack of them) between al-Qaeda and Iran.

But the thing I found most interesting was the confirmation that cyber-security is the hot issue of the day. John Chipman, the head of the IISS, says the institute is about to launch a special study of cyber-security which raises all sorts of fascinating issues about hard power, about the responsibilities of states and about international law. What if a country’s infrastructure could be destroyed as effectively by a cyber-attack, as by an invasion of tanks? How do you defend against that? How do you identify the culprits? And what does international law have to say about the issue - might we have to revise our definitions of what constitutes an act of war? Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they willl have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age.

Since the end of the cold war, discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos have followed a reliable pattern. Everybody agreed that globalisation was a jolly good thing – but it was the delegates from the US and Europe who shaped the debate. It was informally accepted that the flow of ideas – as well as investment and jobs – was from west to east.

The global financial crisis has changed all that. At this year’s Davos, the western delegates seemed depressed, defensive or even mildly deranged in the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president. After listening to Mr Sarkozy’s passionate attack on financial capitalism, one Russian participant was overheard saying that he had found the experience pleasantly nostalgic. He remembered hearing many similar speeches in the Soviet Union.

Read the rest of this article and leave comments on this column here.

The State Department is making the best of President Obama’s decision to skip a planned US-EU summit in Madrid later this spring. It’s not to be understood as a snub, you understand - the president hugely values and respects the Europeans. And the Spanish. He adores Madrid and he thinks the EU is completely fab and really, really important. He’s just a bit busy. Maybe another time.

There is no doubt that the Spanish government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU (You thought it had been abolished? Fooled you!), will treat this as a bitter blow. The Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Zapatero was royally snubbed by George W. Bush and so it was really important to him to underline that he has a great relationship with the sainted Obama. One European foreign minister who I encountered in Davos told me that the Americans were about to pull out of the US-EU summit and added, with a smirk that suggested a worrying lack of EU solidarity - “When the Spanish hear, it will be like a nuclear bomb has gone off in Madrid.”

The Spanish are not the only Europeans feeling snubbed by Obama. The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, was enraged when - on a recent trip to Washington - Obama failed to schedule a lunch with him, and the Commission president was fobbed off with Joe Biden. Back in Brussels, Barroso was heard to rage - “Bush never treated us like this.” When the Europeans are getting nostalgic for George W. Bush, you know that their noses are seriously out of joint. Continue reading "Obama disses Europe"

The FT is running a live blog commentary of Tony Blair at the Chilcot Inquiry  - see it here

It is snowing in Davos. I don’t know why that should surprise me. It is a ski resort, after all. The locals - who apparently do not simply disappear when the World Economic Forum leaves town - are pleased, since it means there will be plenty of snow on the slopes for the school half-term. But for some delegates, the snow seems to be a bit of a downer - adding to the discomfort of Davos. I saw one South African delegate struggling into his heavy coat and gloves and moaning, “this is torture.” The Chinese, however, are pleased. A senior Chinese official claims that there is an old Chinese saying that - “Heavy snow means there will be a good harvest.” This was slightly more interesting than his claim that the nations of the world “have common but differentiated responsibilities” over climate change.

I have spent much of the day in meetings of the Davos “International Media Council” which brings together a group of journalists from all over the world for off-the-record briefings with important people. This is all very flattering - but also slightly frustrating, since I am not allowed to report what they say.

One of the briefings was given by David Cameron. As a British citizen, I was interested to see what a small group of foreign columnists and editors made of the man who is likely to be our next prime minister. Generally, they seemed to be favourably impressed. The Americans were simply astonished to find a conservative who was willing to discuss the idea of tax rises in a calm fashion - and who took “liberal” positions on the environment and gay-rights. “The last time we had conservative leaders like that in the US”, said one, “Eisenhower was in power.” Continue reading "Snowed under with David Cameron"