Glen Newey

Yesterday’s meeting between Benedict XVI and Baroness Warsi in Rome was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the pontiff to meet a great spiritual leader of our time, for which he seems to have been grateful. (At least Ratzo was elected. In the Tory chair’s one face-down with the electorate, in Dewsbury in 2005, she managed to bump up Labour’s majority against the national swing.) Meanwhile, back in Britain, another unelected leader has weighed into the church-and-state debate: the queen delivered a paean to the ‘under-appreciated’ Church of England in front of representatives of what the newspaper write-ups, dutifully following the church’s press release, called ‘the eight non-Christian religions’.

De mortuis nil nisi bunkum, as they say, and in this week of deaths it’s often been a job to tell the pearls from the balls. Unsurprisingly, the seldom missable Pyongyang Times has churned out snuff-guff prolifically of late, marking the dear leader Kim Jong Il’s passing ‘from a sudden attack of illness’, later amplified as myocardial infarction. The PRK has been convulsed by a spasm of grief, with North Korean telly screening continuous-loop footage of women rending their garments on a (stationary) escalator. Kim’s mortal coil lies in state like a beached dugong, in a glass case oddly reminiscent of Benedict XVI’s Popemobile. It’s rumoured that the corpse, like Kim Il Sung’s, will be whisked off to Moscow for embalming if Pyongyang can scrape together the dosh.

It’s an ill wind that blows no jobs. The recent storms in north Britain have spotlighted Scotland’s plans to grow into a wind economy in the years to come. Alex Salmond, as head of the SNP government, has pledged to meet all of Scotland’s electricity needs from ‘renewables’ by 2020, and that plan rests squarely on wind. Salmond enthuses about Scotland’s ‘unrivalled green energy resources’. One thing that everyone agrees on, even ignoring the first minister’s own contribution, is that Scotland has a lot of wind.

In every journalist, Marguerite Duras said, lies a moralist, and one knows what she meant. Moralism is the one trusty pleasure left to those whose knowledge is marred by their impotence. Modern societies and the internet create plenty of both, and so, predictably, tartuffery is the order of the day. Even bloggers – virtual hacks of no great moral pretensions – can sometimes get sucked in. It can be a challenge, faced with its seductions, to keep one’s feet planted firmly on the moral low ground. Duras might have found Paul McMullan a testing case for her dictum.