Enough Cape Cod codswallop

This column appears in The Times today.

“Cape Cod is prime getaway for Gordon Brown,” reported the Cape Cod Times last week. This was a reasonable story for a local newspaper. Less explicable is citing the same information as a clue to foreign policy under Mr Brown.

“His adoration for Cape Cod, and its supposed Kennedyesque glamour, knows no bounds,” complains the New Statesman. The comment editor of this newspaper conversely concludes with satisfaction that Mr Brown may prove more pro-American even than Tony Blair. How so? “He holidays in America.”

The only reason to infer Mr Brown’s foreign policies from his holiday destination is lack of other evidence. Mr Brown is a co-architect of new Labour, but new Labour was never very interested in foreign policy. Its 1997 manifesto made no mention of the US at all.

Transatlantic relations have often been warmer under Labour than Conservative prime ministers. Recall Eden’s Suez debacle, Heath’s distance from the US over the Yom Kippur War, and the rifts caused by John Major’s quietist policies over Bosnia. Mr Blair’s Atlanticism stands in the historical mainstream of British social democracy, and Mr Brown’s identification with Mr Blair’s Iraq decisions has survived the White House’s mismanagement of the war.

But my best guess is that consistency between Mr Blair and Mr Brown will be more rhetorical than heartfelt. The Chancellor will emphasise humanitarian intervention, but by soft power and through multilateral institutions. His model will be the diplomacy of Bretton Woods rather than President Truman’s protracted and electorally risky military commitments. This would not in my view be sensible, but the Middle East more than Massachusetts will determine Brownian policy.

— In lapidary inscriptions, said Dr Johnson, a man is not on oath. Yet the writer Christopher Hitchens does see demerit in dissembling. Interviewed last week about the late Rev Jerry Falwell, Hitchens commented: “I think it’s a pity there isn’t a Hell for him to go to.”

Is there merit in the mild hypocrisy of not speaking ill of the recently deceased? Not in the case of public figures who influence policy or exercise office. After 9/11, Falwell held responsible not the theocratic fanatics who ordered and committed mass murder, but American feminists, homosexuals and civil libertarians. A toxic figure in life is not less so in posthumous influence.

— Jerry Falwell was not, after all, taken in the Rapture, when the elect will be lifted up. A fascinating new book, Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood, traces the development and decline of an equally compelling notion. If you anticipate the Tribulation and believe in intelligent design, it is difficult to dismiss the scriptural evidence that the world is flat. How otherwise to explain the reference in Job to “the ends of the earth”?