Diary: Snow in Manhattan, world cut off
It was as I sat in an aircraft at Heathrow, en route to New York, that I was asked to give Reaction’s readers a Northern Ireland perspective on Brexit. It was tempting, and as Wilde once said, the only way to deal with temptation is to yield to it. But then reality intruded. It’s still not easy to file from 40,000 feet, and the fact of the matter was that I had heard little or nothing from the DUP, or anybody else for that matter, before catching the ruinously expensive Heathrow Express.
Instead, I watched the movie Mission Impossible: Fallout, which, for reasons that were not clear, opened with Ethan Hunt, the Tom Cruise character, receiving his latest call to arms – should he choose to accept it – from a safehouse in … Belfast.
Two days later, I find myself in America viewing Britain’s difficulties from, as it were, the wrong end of the telescope. All the talk here is about issues much closer to home, including a surprise snow storm in the north east that resulted in the death of at least eight people and speculation that Donald Trump is preparing to bring the Mueller investigation into the President’s alleged collusion with Russia to a premature end.
No change there, then.
There is also much talk about the collusion between the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo and NY mayor Bill de Blasio, to bring the East Coast headquarters of the online retail giant Amazon to Long Island City, in the borough of Queens, at a cost to the taxpayer of $2.5 billion. Everyone wants Amazon to set down in New York, but no one outside of Wall Street can understand why a company worth an estimated one trillion dollars should have to be paid, and paid handsomely, by ordinary citizens, a majority of whom are already its customers.
Is this why Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, is the richest man in the world?
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My sister-in-law, a prominent attorney who worked closely with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, is clearly uneasy about the Amazon imbroglio, but finds Brexit completely inexplicable. Her husband, a writer and academic, says he would like to discuss the issue with me, but has not yet done so. I don’t blame him. My feeling is that their bewilderment, bordering on lack of interest, is shared by Americans generally, who have better things to do than explore the curious mindset of the British as they set about hoisting themselves on their own petard.
Tomorrow, I will be in Washington – Trump Central where I would be shocked to discover that the UK and EU feature much in the unending, and similarly wearisome, debate over where America goes from here.
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Back in France, which I left on Tuesday morning, the papers yesterday were full of Brexit. Today, the big issue is the trial of surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Le Monde did, however, provide a financial vignette on the impact of Britain’s pending EU departure on the fortunes – literally – of the City of London.
James Jackson and Sylvain Tessier, two bankers of French broker Oddo BHF, were travelling to London on Thursday to meet customers and asset managers. As the resignation of ministers from the British government followed one another in quick succession, the atmosphere became steadily more tense. “The customers are really worried,” said Jackson. “It’s an absolute disaster. What we are witnessing with Brexit is nothing less than a slow car crash.”
We can probably take that with a pinch of salt. If anything has been steady and reliable in the French response to the British crisis, it has been the determination of La Défence to extract as much benefit as possible from the crescendo of uncertainty.
In much the same vein, Le Figaro published an interview with Professor Kevin O’Rourke, an Irish-born Oxford academic, whose thesis on Brexit is “the decline of England’s ability to succeed by defying the laws of logic and gravity”.
So no surprise there either. The question is, though, is he right?
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Here in New York, where the snow ploughs have been hard at work throughout the night and city workers have been busy picking up branches of trees that broke off during the snowstorm, the big news out of London is not Brexit, but the likely fate of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, whom U.S. prosecutors are working to indict on charges of revealing state secrets. Believe me, these guys want him, and they will probably end up getting him.