Jimmy Burns's Blog, page 34

Good sense prevails at The Garrick

So the  Garrick Club, my beloved and enduring watering hole and eaterie will not ban ladies from its totemic central table, after all. Thank God,  reason has prevailed.

Due to unavoidable work commitments, I was sadly unable  to attend last night's special meeting of members which voted against a  motion that endeavoured to get round  the Equalities Bill, by making the table 'members only', thus excluding women who are guests but not full members .

Women guests have been granted gradual access to previously restricted  areas of the club in recent years, including the central staircase, and have contributed to making the Garrick all the more convivial, and entertaining.  It has meant some members less inclined to use the Club like a public schoolboy den or an officers' mess.

And yet what makes the Garrick so special is its eclectic mix of interesting male members and I  am glad to hear that last night's meeting was generally good humoured and civil with opposing views given generous air time..

I am told that the restrict-women brigade lead orator – a well known 'silk'-slightly let the side down, failing to make proper use of his microphone and losing the order of his notes.

By contrast the defence of the Club's current policy of allowing women guests to the main table was amusingly put by a member of the acting profession, assuming a fictitious Lordly role,  as noble and engaging as Garrick himself.

Journalists:get your own house in order

There are sectors of the British media that take to exposing the alleged sins of the world with unashamed gusto. From parliamentary expenses to Vince Cable's ministerial gaffe, not to mention the countless invasions into the privacy of other individuals – often in apparent violation of what or may not judged contempt of court.

The media are less comfortable when their own less reputable actions become the focus and target of attention. The Murdoch stable can thus not be best pleased with the growing controversy over the alleged hacking of phones – just one weapon in the armoury that tabloid hacks have used over the years.

Any future public enquiry into the hacking saga may perhaps throw up other uncomfortable insights into dubious journalistic modi operandi such as the close relationship some journalists have with certain police officers or the unspoken slush funds made available to buy stories.

But I doubt though that we shall see an enquiry into the biased way that some newspapers have tended to address matters of religion, not least the affairs of the Catholic Church. We saw a clear example of such bias in the run-up to Pope Benedict's visit to the UK and in the sometimes distorted coverage of what the Vatican has to say about from anything from condoms to sexual abuse. Perhaps an inquiry is just what's needed.

Vince Cable's Gaffe

With most cabinet ministers  now heading to their Christmas hideaways, it will be interesting to see to what extent the Telegraph stories of subversive Liberal Democrats  within the coalition has the life-span of an unpopular  panto or has , as they put it in the world of newspaper hacks,  'legs' i.e. endurance.

In a sense the damage has already been done on two fronts. Firstly if has left Vince Cable as a lame duck cabinet minister- his reputation for speaking out on matters others fear to tread fatally compromised by the way he has meekly  accepted a very public reprimand from the prime-minister and his party chief. The decent thing would have been to have the courage of his convictions, confirm that he meant what he said, and tender his resignation. An air of hypocrisy now hovers over the coalition which claims to be more principled than Labour.

Secondly the Telegraph story-or series of stories- are interesting for the way they were obtained. Not by frank discussion between politicians and journalists, on or off the record, but by two journalists pretending to be someone else i.e. constituents.

I leave it up to others to comment on what politics the Torygraph, sorry I meant Telegraph is playing at, and whose interests is it really serving by 'exposing'  the Liberal Democrats as a bunch of untrustworthy opportunists, with a radical tick. But the stories themselves and the contrived methodology behind them reflects badly on the relationship between MP's and  'lobby' journalists based in Westminster, and the extent to which it manages to get to grips with what ministers really do think and feel. These are stories which should have been bylined by political correspondents weeks ago.

Snow Prayer

So you haven't been able to buy presents , quite on the industrial  scale of previous years, or you might have missed an extra  day or two at work, or the car you were driving is now abandoned on some minor road somewhere between Bath  and Oxford, or your flight to some place in the sun has been grounded, and you've slept your last night , not in  a manger, but on the hard floor of a crowded terminal.

Well I can't remember the last time I woke, as I did today without the sound of a low-flying 747 breaking over my rooftop, or the early cacophony of hooting from those driving towards the City or the shattering echoes of metal on metal and the machine gun expletives from the builders.

Not since childhood  have I walked a park so bereft of workers, the muffled silence of London broken only by the soft crackle of the snow, breaking beneath my feet, one's whole surrounding a fairytale scene of copper light and trees, black dancing shadows against the pure white. The park was empty but for one or two arctic adventurers like myself, making their way through the playing fields filled with snowmen and boulders, the remnants of yesterday's games during which everyone had become children for a while.

There was an almost full moon last night and a bright star continued to shine until the dawn broke. This morning it seemed time and nature had been preserved- the lake frozen, trees shrouded in iced webs, yesterday's tracks clearly marked. Even our nearest council tower block seemed blessed. Encircled by white, it reflected the morning sun, like a block of gold, left by Kings.

Irish Diary

I was in Dublin last weekend, talking about my latest book Papa Spy at the Cervantes Institute, in an event jointly organised , and charmingly so, by the Hispanic  department at Trinity College with a helping hand from former FT colleague Manchester-based Alice Owen, who works as a free-lance publicist. There was a great turn-out of new fans and old friends, led by author and former Irish Times journalist Paddy Woodworth, who knows a fair bit about Spanish culture and history and generously agreed to be 'in conversation' with me.

Of the promo gigs |I have done over the last few months, this one was the one that elicited the warmest welcome and proved the most worthwhile. My hosts showed themselves pleasantly surprised and grateful that I had made the effort to include Dublin on a staggered tour that has focused on England, Spain, and the east coast of the US. They reciprocated by ensuring a good turn-out. Local bookshops made a herculean effort, despite the snow-provoked chaos in distribution, to stock copies not just of Papa Spy, but also two other books of mine, Barca and Hand of God. A lovely and energetic local rep from my publishers helped things along.  I was put up at the Trinity Capital, a wonderfully esoteric, chill-out hotel on the site of a former British army recruiting office where you go to sleep and wake in a state of glowing well being. This was Ireland and its people at their  Celtic best.

Over at the nearby Cervantes Institute, my Irish audience was genuinely interested in my book. Espionage, deception, dirty tricks, Catholicism, and wartime neutrality are themes that form part as much of their history, as it does that of Spain in WW2 where my father, the spook of the title, lived and worked and eventually married my Spanish mother, with some help along the way from an Irishman.

It was an honour to have the journalist and historian Andrew Lycett  among my guests. The biographer of the newspaper baron and wartime propaganda chief Brendan Bracken, has studied closely the inner working s of the wartime British Ministry of Information. Lycett pointed out that Bracken had always thought it a good idea to have as many foreign correspondents as possible reporting on wartime England as part of the Allied propaganda effort. So did my father, the British embassy's MoI recruit, although one or two or the Spanish journalists he sent to England were suspected of being Nazi agents, as the head of MI6's Iberian section Kim Philby was the first to point out. When questioned o this by Paddy Woodworth, I pointed out that Philby hated my father for being pro-Francoist and a Catholic. Philby was also a Soviet spy. Of this there can be no doubt.

Lycett however insisted  that it was not true, as he suggests in his biography (and I report in Papa Spy) , that Walter Starkie, the Irish Trinity College professor , had met with Bracken in Dublin on the eve of war and may have provided some interesting information about those Irish opposed to the Allied war effort.

I was on firmer ground, talking with Paddy Woodworth about Starkie's close links with my father as wartime head of the British Council in Madrid. The Spaniards nicknamed Burns and Starkie, Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively, on account of their wartime adventures and contrasting physiques. While my father tried his best as an amateur spy and propagandist, earning a reputation as a womaniser along the way, Starkie proved a courageous, if somewhat eccentric British agent. Starkie liked playing Irish jigs, flamenco, and Spanish wine when not doing his bit for King   & Country. The Irishman helped Jewish refugees and POW's escape through Gibraltar and Lisbon, and organised    a propaganda tour by the actor Lesley Howard, another British agent. Starkie was as virulently opposed to Irish neutrality, as he was passionately in favour of keeping Franco 'on side' during the war.

After engaging with my audience on Starkie, I moved on briefly to the subject of declassified documents held by Ireland's Department of External Affairs. One showed that an IRA man who was held in prison by Franco after fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War subsequently joined the German secret service and went back to Ireland in a U-boat. "British propaganda!" someone from the audience cried. I thought it best to move on.

Later that evening, a group of Trinity College Hispanic academics kindly invited me to dine at a nearby Italian restaurant. Other Dublin friends joined in for some genial crack. Inevitably there was talk of how the cuts were already hitting departments at Trinity, just like almost everything else in Ireland.  I shared anecdotal evidence of a new Diaspora: English hospitals are once again filled with Irish nurses. It was the first of a series of conversations I was to have over the next 48 hours during which the common denominator was one of a sense of deepening crisis, only salvaged by that very Irish sense that they had been in a far worse place before, and survived.

Over a late night drink at the Trinity Inn, Paddy Woodworth asked me a question that he had held over from the talk. How could I reconcile my father's 'cradle Catholicism' with his evident lack of chastity in later life? I didn't really have an answer beyond appealing to some modern theological justification of the Godliness that can lie behind varying expressions of sexual love. Paddy, brought up as a Protestant, has, like so many other Irish men and women-regardless of their faith- been both shocked and angered by the sexual abuse scandal of his the Catholic Church in Ireland.  I left him somewhat mystified by the suggestion that the mystery of transubstantiation   made it impossible for me to explain, still less defend, my enduring faith, rationally.

By contrast there were no shortage of Irish friends trying to make sense of the political and economic mess which their country finds itself in. Over a lunch of soup and coffee at the cafeteria of Dublin's National Gallery, I caught up with the actor Ardal O'Hanlon. We had not seen each other since working together some three years ago on a TV documentary he wrote and starred in on the rivalry between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. Ardal is a Barca fan and said he had much enjoyed taking his young son to the Nou Camp on his first time visit a few months earlier.

Ardal had just completed a hectic stand-up comedy tour of the UK. We had met on the flight over from Heathrow, he looking rather worse for wear than I did. He blamed it on a charity show he had put on the previous evening to help pay for poor Irish citizens based in England who wish to go home and visit their families.

Like most comedians, Ardal is an intensely private person off stage, both thoughtful and intelligent although he admits only to having to go beyond himself on stage. As he told me, on his recent tour he treaded carefully on the issue of sexual abuse, trying to ensure that his gags never descended into hurtful bad taste. He did some political gags, but kept these to a minimum. While refusing to be tagged as political –both his father and grandfather were deeply involved in the politics of the Irish state-Ardal  is a keen observer of the ordinary daily grind of life and allowed himself to be drawn on commenting on his country's 'crisis'. He told me that he didn't believe believe in the coming of a Second Republic.  Nor does he want it. If Ireland were to have a socialist revolution, he would be the first to pack his bags and head across the water. Ardal would like to believe that things are not as bad as people say. Instead he tells me he would be happy enough if Ireland simply went back to being what it had become, when he went to university, some twenty years back, PreCeltic Tiger, a small but growing economy in Europe.

Looked at in this way, the crisis is not insurmountable. While a majority of Irish people will probably never be as rich as a few Irishman became in recent years, there will not be another famine, nor will there be another Easter uprising or Civil War. What is needed is some well managed inward investment, and a world recovery-led export drive. But it's is a big IF.  Two friends familiar with Ireland's financial sector I met separately questioned whether the current IMF-led austerity budget had a hope in hell of sticking with a general election just round the corner which will see the total humiliation of the governing partners, and a resurgence of socialist politics, south of the border, as most radically epitomised in the polling booth and on the street, by Sinn Fein. These same friends however argued, interestingly enough, that the crisis in the South makes it more difficult for the nationalist agenda to make progress in the North.

Back in  Dublin city centre,  the tourist shops still sell Leprechauns  with their bags filled with coins and the legend, 'The Luck of the Irish'. Local bookshops still give prominence to books on Irish politics and history, from pop-ups on the Easter Rising to heavier tomes on the IRA. And in the National Gallery,  one of the most striking paintings I saw on the morning I met Ardal O'Hanlon, is one by one of Ireland's  leading 20th century artists showing a group of Irish peasants stripping off their clothes as they are preached to by their priest at a Holy Well. It was painted a time when the Irish poor did anything their Church told them. That is no longer guaranteed these days.

These images lingered with me as I made my way to the Shelbourne Hotel to meet another old friend. Dublin's best known Hotel, like the country's best known bank, has been taken over by the state to save it from bankruptcy. In the run-up to Christmas, it was packed with party goers, from North and south of the border, its legendary bar, still the watering hole it has always been for those wishing to flirt, or share information.

 My friend was an old source from FT days- well versed in the politics of Ireland-north and south and insightful. He suggested that the Irish regulatory authorities were trying their best to put the house in order after the wreck provoked by the rotten apples, but it was an uphill task for a country that has seemingly surrendered   control over its own destiny in a situation of political uncertainty.  Ireland's  best hope was in forming an alliance with Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece and negotiating better terms from the rest of the world.

Two days in a capital city as small and intimate as Dublin can be revealing and I am not just talking here about the visible signs of accelerating poverty on the streets. Most people I talked to were of the opinion that that things could not go on as they are, without something breaking. The question no one could answer with any certainty was exactly when or how things might break and what would come after.   It took the people of Dublin thirty years to decide what to replace Nelson's Column with, after it had been blown by the IRA. An elected Irish government opted eventually for a modern spire symbolising hope in the future. One gets a feeling that things will unravel not just in Ireland but elsewhere in Europe in a much shorter time than that. I'm talking months not years. The Irish deserve all the luck in the world.

Football's Globe Trotters?

FC Barcelona are making their Spanish League wins look so easy that they are in danger of becoming football's equivalent of the Harlem Globe Trotters.

For those of you unfamiliar with the HBT, they are the legendary basketball team that became just so skilful and so much better than any of their rivals that at one point they decided just to focus on exhibition matches- with a bit of theatrics thrown in- as there was  no point in pretending there was any competition capable of beating them. They became very successful, attracting a huge global following, and making a lot of money.

There is a sense in which FC Barcelona are already playing exhibition matches. For all its history, the noble Basque club Real Sociedad proved a weak opponent, as did Real Madrid on its recent visit to the  Nou  Camp. But Real Madrid have been playing much better against other teams, and the kind of opposition Barca have been facing not just in La Liga but in the early rounds of the Champions League, have barely put them to the test. It is in the coming weeks, when the race for La Liga hots up, and enter the final stages of the Champions league, that Barca will need to prove definitely that it is the best football team since the Real Madrid of the Golden years in the 1950's.

That Barca is playing extraordinary collective, one-touch, flowing football, the game at its most beautiful, poetry in motion etc etc.- is not in doubt. The question is how long will it go on winning, will it keep ahead of Real Madrid, and is Barca destined for Wembley next spring and another, historic  European title?

These questions are important because victory or humiliatiion  in the coming months will dictate the level of tolerance among Barca fans for the controversial strategy being pursued by Sandro  Rosell, FC Barcelona's recently elected new president.

Having accused Joan Laporta, his predecessor of financial mismanagement and dealing with dictators, Rosell has signed a lucrative sponsorship deal with Qatar, an absolute monarchy which served as one of the main launching sites for the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003. While not as repressive or corrupt as Uzbekistan, Qatar's current Emir and his cronies have not exactly an unblemished human rights record. Last June Amnesty criticised Qatar for its lack of freedom of expression, its discrimination against women, and its violence against domestic workers.

But then what has motivated the Qatar deal is money pure and simple. It is one of the biggest sponsorship deals in the history of sport involving a country that has been picked by that bastion of democracy FIFA to host a future World Cup.

The official word from the Rosell camp is that the deal is more than this, just as Barca is 'more than a club'. It is important to remember, we are told, that UNICEF will remain prominent on the players' shirts so that the club maintains a moral compass after all. It is also pointed out that deal will  make it easier to pay off the debts left by Laporta, and to afford buying Cesc Fabregas from Arsenal, if not this season, next.

Rosell is trying to  transform Barca into a less politicised but more financialy stable and lucrative  brand while trying to retain those elements that set it apart from other football clubs, and make it one of the  most popular, if not most popular sporting institutions world.  Essential, among those elements, is Pep Guardiola and the Barca players. Let's see of they can go on playing the way they do, and winning, however tough, and real, the opposition.

My Book of the Month is Giles Tremlett's Catherine of Aragon

Catherine of Aragon is not a name that slips easily off the lips of most English schoolboys, unless they've been educated as Catholics, still a minority breed. Few early students of English history have failed to memorise where she was in the Tudor pecking order: 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, and survived. ' Oh yes, Catherine was the one who was divorced first.

Of Henry V111's eight wives, it is Catherine who has endured in the collective memory of the English people, arguably for the wrong reasons. Catherine was mythified as a grey, pious figure that not only made life impossible for a popular, courageous, and dashing King, but also conspired against him. She became a target of xenophobic typecasting that grew with the Reformation and still permeates schoolboy texts to this day. Catherine was portrayed  as a intruding foreigner, worse still a untrustworthy Spaniard, posing a dark threat to English values-whatever they are-, as much part of the Black Legend, as the Inquisition and the Armada.

Today Catherine of Aragon would be barely remembered in London were it not for a plaque near Southwark Bridge stating that it was there that she slept a night on first arriving in the capital. One can only imagine that it was so, for the house that stands there today was built more than a century after she died, and was occupied by Christopher Wren. Only in Peterborough Cathedral where Catherine is surely buried, is she   commemorated each year on the 29th January, the day of her death, in a poorly publicised ecumenical service that nonetheless draws devotees from around the world.

Catherine of Aragon deserves better than that. She was the daughter of the great Spanish royals, Ferdinand and Isabella, and lived most of her life in England, serving first as Princess of Wales to the young Prince Arthur and,  following his death,  as Queen and first wife of Henry V111, becoming a  key protagonist during a  particular tumultuous  period of  European history.

Briefly as Queen Regent , when Henry was away in France, she saw off an invasion from the Scot. Then for much of her reign, she  helped  preside  over a delicate balance of power elsewhere in Europe , maintaining  links with her powerful cousin the Holy Roman Emperor Charles Vth, and , to her dying day,  resisting calling in the powerful Spanish imperial army to her rescue. She proved a loyal wife, dutiful ruler, and a compassionate Queen.

When she was defending herself against her husband's unilateral divorce proceedings, she knelt at his feet and asked his permission to appeal to the Pope.  She ran extensive programmes for the poor and befriended and learnt from some of the great Renaissance thinkers – Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives (although Tremlett suggests that More stuck up more for his Faith than for Catherine when confronted by Henry's wrath). In fact Catherine was a hugely educated and self-assured woman before she set foot on English shores. Her tragic flaw was her failure to produce a male heir for her husband Henry. To this day the jury is out on whether her refusal to grant him a divorce was a supreme moral act by a courageous woman, or simply a stubborn blindness to where her royal duties really lay. Thomas Cromwell quipped that had it not been for sex Catherine would have defied all history's heroes. Shakespeare was kinder, declaring her the  most noble of all earthly Queens.

Some of this and much more is contained in Giles Tremlett's entertaining biography. It is a real page turner, written in a hugely accessible style, filled with character, and clearly the result of some diligent research, not least among early Spanish hand-written Spanish manuscripts.

Nonetheless this does not aspire to be an academic work, nor does it bring us major new revelations. But it deserves to succeed in drawing  a broader  audience towards  a subject that has been misunderstood in the past. Tremlett's is popular history verging on the novelistic, written with a sensitivity for matters Catholic  (although Tremlett is not religious). Antonia Fraser meets Bernard Cornwell. Far from  frivolous, this biography has colour, pace,  incident, and a fascinating dramatis personae, led by Catherine and Henry themselves and their coterie of servants and hangers-on, along with astute if partisan observers in the guise of Charles V's intelligent ambassador and Bishop  John Fisher who were among those who stuck up for the Queen.It  tells a story that seems, in parts, to be disarmingly relevant to more recent times we have lived through.

Tremlett's opening chapter is clearly written with an eye for the mass market. It includes a graphic account of what Catherine and Arthur may or may not have got up on their on their wedding night before unraveling the dynastic chaos that is provoked by a British Royal -Arthur's younger brother Henry-caught between wife and mistress. Sex is not just something dreamed up by TV producers to spice up the recent series on the Tudors. It is central to the central human drama that provoked Henry's historic schism with Rome and has haunted the British royal family to this day.

And yet Tremlett is no tabloid hack. He is a widely respected Madrid correspondent of the Guardian  whose last book, The Ghosts of Spain, reported and analysed the legacy of dictatorship and complexities of modern Spain in a series of brilliant essays. He now , paradoxically, writes about a Spanish Queen that was much admired by Franco

 Tremlett's biography  vividly brings alive scenes and characters of a more remote period of history, brilliantly contrasting the magical palace of the Alhambra where Catherine  spent her early years, with  the increasingly oppressive state  that encircled her in her final days  in England , threatening to eradicate the pervading Catholic character of the nation at the time.

Amidst the courtroom intrigue, there are spinners and plotters aplenty, but the diplomatic reports of  Catherine's increasing popularity among ordinary English men and women seen convincing enough. Indeed Tremlett's portrait of Catherine is generally a  sympathetic one, although well short of hagiographic. The People's Queen is fair and just but suffers from false  pregnancies and other symptoms of neurosis. Tremlett suggest that Catherone may have lied on occasions, and suffered a minor crisis of conscience on her death bed.

On balance she is portrayed as a far more selfless person than her husband. Beneath the veneer of a King anxious to ensure an orderly succession lies an egoistic bounder who treats his wives and mistresses equally badly, and is similarly cruel to his daughter Mary. No wonder Mary Tudor became so bloody.

Catherine of Aragon is not a name that slips easily off the lips of most English schoolboys, unless they've been educated as Catholics, still a minority breed. Few early students of English history have failed to memorise where she was in the Tudor pecking order: 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, and survived. ' Oh yes, Catherine was the one who was divorced first.

Of Henry V111's eight wives, it is Catherine who has endured in the collective memory of the English people, arguably for the wrong reasons. Catherine was mythified as a grey, pious figure that not only made life impossible for a popular, courageous, and dashing King, but also conspired against him. She became a target of xenophobic typecasting that grew with the Reformation and still permeates schoolboy texts to this day. Catherine was portrayed not as a Queen, still less a woman in her own right, but as a foreigner, worse still a Spaniard, posing a dark threat to English values-whatever they are-, as much part of the Black Legend, as the Inquisition and the Armada.

Today Catherine of Aragon would be barely remembered in London were it not for a plaque near Southwark Bridge stating that it was there that she slept a night on first arriving in the capital. One can only imagine that it was so, for the house that stands there today was built more than a century after she died, and was occupied by Christopher Wren. Only in Peterborough Cathedral where Catherine is surely buried, is she   commemorated each year on the 29th January, the day of her death, in a poorly publicised ecumenical service that nonetheless draws devotees from around the world.

Catherine of Aragon deserves better than that. She was the daughter of the great Spanish royals, Ferdinand and Isabella, lived most of her life in England, serving first as Princess of Wales to the young Prince Arthur and,  following his death,  as Queen and first wife of Henry V111, becoming a  key protagonist during a  particular tumultuous  period of  European history.

Briefly as Queen Regent , when Henry was away in France, she saw off an invasion from the Scot. Then for much of her reign, she  helped  preside  over a delicate balance of power elsewhere in Europe , maintaining  links with her powerful cousin the Holy Roman Emperor Charles Vth, and , to her dying day,  resisting calling in the powerful Spanish imperial army to her rescue. She proved a loyal wife, dutiful ruler, and a compassionate Queen.

When she was defending herself against her husband's unilateral divorce proceedings, she knelt at his feet and asked his permission to appeal to the Pope.  She ran extensive programmes for the poor and befriended and learnt from some of the great Renaissance thinkers – Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives (although Tremlett suggests that More stuck up more for his Faith than for Catherine when confronted by Henry's wrath). In fact Catherine was a hugely educated and self-assured woman before she set foot on English shores. Her tragic flaw was her failure to produce a male heir for her husband Henry. To this day the jury is out on whether her refusal to grant him a divorce was a supreme moral act by a courageous woman, or simply a stubborn blindness to where her royal duties really lay. Thomas Cromwell quipped that had it not been for sex Catherine would have defied all history's heroes. Shakespeare was kinder, declaring her the  most noble of all earthly Queens.

Some of this and much more is contained in Giles Tremlett's entertaining biography. It is a real page turner, written in a hugely accessible style, filled with character, and clearly the result of some diligent research, not least among early Spanish hand-written Spanish manuscripts.

Nonetheless this does not aspire to be an academic work, nor to bring us major new revelations. Rather it aims to draw a broader  audience towards  a subject that has been misunderstood in the past. Tremlett's is popular history verging on the novelistic, written with a a sensitivity for matters Catholic  (although Tremlett is not religious). Antonia Fraser meets Bernard Cornwell. Far from  frivolous, this biography has colour, pace,  incident, and a fascinating dramatis personae, led by Catherine and Henry themselves and their coterie of servants and hangers-on, along with astute if partisan observers in the guise of Charles V's intelligent ambassador and Bishop  John Fisher who were among those who stuck up for the Queen.It  tells a story that seems, in parts, to be disarmingly relevant to more recent times we have lived through.

Tremlett's opening chapter is clearly written with an eye for the mass market. It includes a graphic account of what Catherine and Arthur may or may not have got up on their on their wedding night before unraveling the dynastic chaos that is provoked by a British Royal caught between wife and mistress. Sex is not just something dreamed up by TV producers to spice up the recent series on the Tudors. It is central to the central human drama that provoked Henry's historic schism with Rome and has haunted the British royal family to this day.

And yet Tremlett is no tabloid hack. He is a widely respected Madrid correspondent of the Guardian  whose last book, The Ghosts of Spain, reported and analysed the legacy of dictatorship and complexities of modern Spain in a series of brilliant essays. He now , paradoxically, writes about a Spanish Queen that was much admired by Franco

 Tremlett's biography  vividly brings alive scenes and characters of a more remote period of history, brilliantly contrasting the magical palace of the Alhambra where Catherine  spent her early years, and the increasingly oppressive state  that encircled her in her final days  in England , threatening to eradicate the pervading Catholic character of the nation at the time.

Amidst the courtroom intrigue, there are spinners and plotters aplenty, but the diplomatic reports of  Catherine's increasing popularity among ordinary English men and women seen convincing enough. Indeed Tremlett's portait of Catherine is generally a  sympathetic one, although well short of hagiographic. The People's Queen is fair and just but suffers from false  pregnancies and other symptoms of neurosis. Tremlett suggest that Catherone may have lied on occasions, and suffered a minor crisis of conscience on her death bed.

On balance she is portrayed as a far more selfless person than her husband. Beneath the veneer of a King anxious to ensure an orderly succession lies an egoistic bounder who treats his wives and mistresses equally badly, and is similarly cruel to his daughter Mary. No wonder Mary Tudor became so bloody.

 

 

 

 

 

A night to remember

Now and again one has the luck to be present in a football stadium where something very special and historic is in the air. To be at the Nou Camp on Monday night was  to have the privilege  of witnessing the best team in the world playing its best, football  at its most sublime, surrounded by the warm glow of 98,000 cules  joined together in collective ecstasy.

Barca's  5-0 thrashing of Real Madrid was a magnificent achievement played with a style and team ethos that was a perfect symphony of  the one-touch, flowing , all-for-one-and-all-for one game that Pep Guardiola has developed almost to a point of perfection.

Guardiola was right not to claim this as a personal victory. This is a team whose character has been moulded by the experience of former managers, and the example of earlier players as well as the brilliance of current stars. Guardiola himself was once a player in Johan Cruyff's 'dream team'  which marked new parameters in Spanish football and set it on its road to European and World Cup glory.

Such is  the skill and coordination  of  the team that Guardiola now manages that there were times on Monday when despite the rain and the cold the Barca players passed the ball for up to two minutes, with Xavi  and Iniesta  pirouetting in a beautiful festival of dance .

This was a night when Messi  played the length and breadth of the field, quick passes one moment, lightening penetration the other, the ball stuck to his feet, creative, selfless but ever menacing, a 'complete' player in every sense.

And then there was Pujol playing his rocks off, and Abidal and Alves, as versatile in defence and in attack, and Pique, Busquets, Pedro, and Villa all perfectly tuned into the collective endeavour that left Madrid chasing shadows  and looking ragged. And let's not forget Valdes who saved Real Madrid's only serious shot at goal.

This was a night when the myth of the 'special one' was severely dented. Mourinho suffered the biggest and most humiliating  defeat of his career, his pre-match mind-games and strategy unable to deliver any serious challenge when it came to the moment of reckoning.

I don't know what image was more telling of Madrid's  collective impotence, its loss of honour, pride, and value. There was Mourinho, looking  reduced in gesture and attitude,  seemingly unable to dictate or alter events,  resigned to seeing out most of the match on the bench. There was Ronaldo, unable to do anything of any significance for himself, let alone his team mates. And finally there was the terrible site of Ramos hacking Messi and then hitting out at Pujol, before getting his deserved red card.

This was a night when Barca reminded us just what a critical factor they were in ending Spain's many years of underachievement as a national squad. Some of the  comradeship of La Roja was undermined in an ugly brawl between several of its individual components.

And yet this was a game that will endure in one's memory not for its instants of thuggery  but for its pervading sense of poetry in motion that enthralled us for 90 minutes and had us dancing in the streets in celebration late into the night.

Football for the couch

 

My wife had to suffer me as a couch potato on Saturday night  as I switched on my satellite TV and watched first Almeria vs  Barca   followed by Real Madrid vs, Athletic  de Bilbao. It hurts me to tell you  that having briefly sacrificed my marriage, I temporarily fell asleep in the first match, and temporarily switched to  a movie while watching the second.

Why? Well, the first match was not a match  in its true sense at all, not a  friendly, not an exhibition, not a competition. It was a parody, verging on farce. It was as if eleven amateurs and a  bogus coach had been conscripted from a beach game and told to play Barca for ninety minutes, not as players but as extras for a movie.  Almeria  showed an extraordinary unwillingness to tackle, let alone devise any effective counter-offensive. Its  players seemed to lack any motivation, inspiration, skill, imagination-their system petrified, their strategy difficult to justify. Faced with such a total lack of serious opposition, Barca's goals seemed unreal, as if played out on some  imaginary turf, against ghosts, or on some training ground without a coach present.  Pity, because some of them should have been goals to remember and an 0-8 victory should be recorded in the history books for different reasons.

In general terms, Almeria proved a very poor test for Barca ahead of much tougher opposition, in Greece on Wednesday, and at the Classico  next Monday. Over at the Bernabeu, by contrast there was a tough contest- a real game of football- with Real Madrid showing touches of real mastery and Bilbao both strong in mind and body  and skilful. Lllorente was an ever present threat. But it was a match which , for all its excitement,  had elements that simply annoyed me like the increasingly narcissistic Ronaldo play acting, and the banned Mourinho taking an increasing direct hand in conducting the team, via his assistant.  But far worse  was the sight of  the inflated chorus of  the Ultra Sur element, chanting Mourinho's name and their Spanish  flags  in a way would seem to make the consensual, respectful  spirit of last summer's World Cup campaign a distant memory.

This  was a  week in which  El Buitre told us that Mourinho has the full backing of Real Madrid because he was a winner, and Charly Reixach warned that Mourinho might get a worse welcome from local fans on his return to  the Camp Nou than Figo did. I am going to the Classico , but plan to eat my ham in a good bocadillo , while still hoping , against the odds, that we shall see some good, fair and decent football. I leave Pep Guardiola  with one piece of advice: don't allow yourself to be provoked by Mourinho and keep your dignity. The world loves you more as a person and a coach than they do Mourinho- and a majority of global viewers will want to see Barca at its best, and winning like your best poem in motion.

My Maradona talk

See you at Canning House, 2 Belgrave Square, London SW1 at 6.30 this evening:"Maradona: A Very Argentine Myth".