John Lloyd

The British like to think of themselves as self-deprecating, and normally they’re right, even if much of that is a self-compliment. But now, with Britain winning more Olympic medals than it had since 1908, self-deprecation has been jettisoned. It ended the games on Sunday with the third-most gold medals after the U.S. and China, and the fourth-most medals overall, with Russia just ahead.

This was good for a midsize, broke country. As the third spot seemed increasingly like the final result through the last week, the Brits became increasingly delirious. BBC commentators, normally schooled in judicious and balanced commentary, were shouting their larynxes out as the medals rolled in: When Sir Chris Hoy, the cycling tyro, won his sixth gold medal in the keirin (speed-controlled) race last Wednesday, the “commentary” melted into a stream of hysterical liquid sound.

Yet if the British did very well in the games, the BBC did badly in what it is supposed to be best at: being fair, balanced, neutral and objective. Frankly, it went ape.

On BBC Radio Four’s Media Show, Roger Mosey, who headed the Olympic coverage, was asked why impartiality was nowhere to be found, and wasn’t that a problem? He protested that the news coverage was impartial, but added that “when you see Chris Hoy getting his sixth medal, it would be nuts for the national broadcaster not to be rooting for him.” He’s wrong about the coverage: When a Brit won gold, it was top of the news for hours, relegating the destruction of Aleppo (and everything else, including the slower destruction of the euro) to second place. And he was wrong about it being nuts, too.

There were some protests, but unfortunately often grouchy ones. Patrice de Beer, a former London correspondent for Le Monde, wrote last week of the “farcical jingoism” of the modern Olympics, asking rhetorically – “is it not the task of analysts to keep their heads cool when faced with a tidal wave of ‘sporting nationalism’? And to warn of the rude awakening … that will come when the games are over?” British commentator Nick Cohen made much the same point in Time: “Outsiders see a confident country. For this brief interlude we may believe it ourselves. But not for long.” Their point was that this was ugly chauvinism. But in predicting that it would all end in tears when reality returned, they came across as killjoys, Puritans eagerly anticipating the payment of the wages of sin, seeing the enthusiasm as a distraction from the necessary long brood on our deeper problems.

But a protest also came from another, astonishing source: the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson. He had clearly worried that the BBC had ceased to be a broadcaster and become a fan, and he told his senior executives so. The head of news, Helen Boaden, sent a memo to all journalists, noting that Thompson was “unhappy” and that he had “issued a directive that this needs to change … so you need to get cracking.” It’s often hard to read the BBC runes, but so careful was Boaden to emphasize it was his, not her, unhappiness, that it seemed likely she wasn’t entirely on board with her boss (who leaves soon and sees his once-great power draining from him).

It’s understandable that the British Broadcasting Corporation, most of whose income comes from the law-abiding majority who pay their £145.50 ($227.30) annual license fee, would find it hard to keep a balance as good news, a rarity in the UK this past year or more, kept emerging from London. It must seem especially so to the commentators who were in the stadiums and the halls where the events took place, infected by the delight of their compatriots. To do other than join in would seem to invite a lynching.

Yet the Corporation doesn’t usually go “nuts.” In a series of military engagements – when Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falklands in 1982, when Tripoli was bombed by U.S. planes based in the UK in 1986, when British planes bombed Belgrade in 1999 and when Britain joined the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003 – both Conservative and Labour governments saw BBC balance as unpatriotic. British servicemen and women were risking their lives, and the politicians cried that the national broadcaster was nuts to pretend neutrality. Not so, the management would doughtily respond: We must insist on our right to give both sides’ version of the conflict due weight.

The contrasting approach of the world’s greatest public broadcaster to its nation at war and to its nation at sport should give it, and all journalists, pause. Sporting triumphs merit objectivity much less than deadly warfare. We like to tell ourselves that we who work in free societies help keep these societies free by being independent of the state, by not wrapping ourselves in the national flag. But whether at the public broadcasters or in the larger private media sphere, we are prisoners not of the state, but of our customers. It’s a position more or less accepted by newspapers, but it’s true, too, of public broadcasters, even though they hate to believe it of themselves. For public broadcasters, when push comes to shove, journalism is at the service of national enthusiasm.

One kind of journalism escapes this: global journalism. It’s the kind done by the corporation that publishes this, Thomson Reuters; by its competitor, Bloomberg; by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune – and even, in its global garments, the BBC World Service and BBC World TV. These media speak to readers and viewers who wanted widely differing outcomes for the Olympics, and so the news is objective and the comment balanced. This isn’t a Thomson Reuters contributor enjoying a self-serving moment: The global players are prisoners too – of an audience that has no single national allegiance. Just as the BBC can’t escape the burden of being patriotic, so the global players can’t indulge in it.

I’m not tempted to be as much of a grump as de Beer and Cohen: If we have to have a hangover when we remember, once more, that we’re broke, so what? For a few crazy weeks we’ve had relief from the sore head we had. But I’m with Mark Thompson: As the 18th-century French statesman Talleyrand put it, “surtout pas trop de zèle” (above all, don’t go over the top). A measured tone is better. Indeed, if one were being cynical, one could argue that it’s actually (sneakily) more patriotic: It shows the Brits think it’s normal to be great.

And we the media have relearned an old, uncomfortable, lesson: When the piper really wants a tune, we play it.

The European crisis isn’t over until the First Lady pays, and the First Lady of Europe, Angela Merkel, cannot pay enough. She needs to erect a large enough firewall to ensure that the European Union’s weaker members do not, again, face financial disaster. That will not happen – which means the euro faces at least defections, and perhaps destruction.

The crisis had seemed to recede somewhat in early 2012, and the headline writers moved on. But it had only seemed to recede, and relaxation was premature. As Hugo Dixon of Reuters’ Breaking Views put it on Monday, “the risk is that, as the short-term funding pressure comes off, governments’ determination to push through unpopular reforms will flag. If that happens, the time that has been bought will be wasted – and, when crisis rears its ugly head again, the authorities won’t have the tools to fight it.”

But the underlying tension remains between high indebtedness in nearly all the EU countries and the need to pare back public spending without suffocating the economies. The flat, or negative, growth lines in the same countries that are indebted are likely to be made worse as demand falls and a malign cycle threatens.

Merkel commands the stage, but she is a constrained commander. She has an electorate and a parliament that has been reluctant to agree to more assistance to those whom many Germans see as architects of their own misfortune, not to be trusted to do anything other than load the burden on to the backs of hard-working Northerners.

In other parts of the Union, signs of strain now manifest themselves daily. In France, the leading candidates – President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist contender François Hollande – have turned inward and, in the words of a sharply worded Economist editorial, while “it is not unusual for politicians to ignore some ugly truths during elections … it is unusual, in recent times in Europe, to ignore them as completely as French politicians are doing.”

Sarkozy has transformed himself from responsible European statesman into an anti-immigrant, anti-free-trade superpatriot (and his ratings improved). Hollande, from the Socialist Party’s moderate wing, has likewise transformed, but into a “hater” of the rich. Both see strong contenders to their right and left: Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National has faltered recently – perhaps because Sarkozy has stolen some of her clothes – but she still polls at around 14 percent. And on the left, former Socialist minister Jean-Luc Mélenchon has swung hard-left, put together a group that includes the Communist Party, and seen his support rising in the latest poll, for LH2/Yahoo, up to 15 percent so far.

Britain is not in the euro but is deeply dependent on European resurgence. Its Conservative-Liberal coalition government finds itself faced with strikes by tanker drivers – men with a capacity for squeezing a nation’s windpipe – and plunging polls. Nor is anyone else enjoying support. All the main party leaders see their ratings deep into negative territory; and in a by-election last week, the renegade Labour MP George Galloway played for and won a heavily Muslim vote in the city of Bradford, destroying a long-held Labour majority.

Italy’s governing technocrats, led by Mario Monti, enjoyed a honeymoon even as they sketched out a program of cuts, but now enter a tougher time. The government wants to remove or at least dilute Article 18 of the labor code, which makes it hard for employers to fire workers. The unions have threatened strike action, and Monti, earlier this week, agreed to a compromise with political leaders – but no one knows if the unions will accept it. The Italian press agrees: The hard pounding on his government has begun.

Spain’s center-right government passed a budget last week that was described as “the most austere in democratic history,” with £27 billion worth of cuts. The day before it was passed, a general strike flared across the country, with 1 million protesters on the streets. The government itself fears that the depths of the cuts will stall any growth and that the huge unemployment, especially among the young, will become uncontrollable.

And now little Ireland, which had been the good girl of the euro class, taking its medicine without complaint, has turned. A group of parliamentarians called on their fellow citizens not to pay a recently levied flat-rate property tax – and were (presumably) gratified to see that, by the weekend deadline to register for the tax, half of the eligible population had not done so, signaling a taxpayers’ revolt. Thomas Pringle, one of the MPs, was quoted as saying that “if a law is unfair and unjust you have a right to oppose it.” Ireland, which had begun to recover early last year, has seen two quarters of negative growth, slipping the country into recession.

All of this is bad, but worse is the straining away from conventional politics. It takes different forms. The victorious George Galloway, the Bradford victor and a man of apparently indefatigable ability who can muster a ruthless populism, is less important (though not in his own eyes) than the contempt that seems to attend the harassed leaders of the British parties. Parties of the far right and left are significant in France and Greece. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom has, by contrast suffered a drop in popularity – but that seems to be because he has supported the center-right government, and thus tarnished himself in the eyes of voters impatient for radical action on immigration and crime. Italy’s main parties have been given a holiday from government and even from opposition; but they do not seem to be putting it to use to prepare themselves for hard choices when, as he has promised, Mr. Monti bows out early next year.

Yet only the mainstream parties can command and defuse this crisis. That is not because they have an automatic right to fill the political stage, but because no alternative that can plausibly present itself as better has emerged. The far left and right recycle their nostrums: the end of capitalism or the end of immigration. The Green Party, once a real force in some states, is back to minor status everywhere.

No force, conventional or novel, has yet been able to articulate and win assent for a manifest truth: that Europe’s centrality to world events, wealth and cultural dominance over long centuries are now much reduced, and the decades of growth that brought relative wealth and ease are over. We need not sink, but we have to paddle harder if we wish not to. This crisis is not gone if and when the continent’s finances are made less perilous. If and when that happens, the next mountain to climb is to discover a political and economic structure that can ensure renewed growth, if possible without further gross inequity and without further pollution (some trick!). The challenge of the emerging countries is not just to the cost of labor and the survival of industries: It is to the very understanding we in the West have of our world and our place in it.

The U.S. has sheltered Europe since the war. Europe outsourced most of its defense, and enjoyed – as did the rest of the world – trade, air, shipping and Internet pathways kept open by, in the end, U.S. power. Now, a raft of jeremiads, by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Kagan and Ian Bremmer, all out this year, point to a dangerous, much more anarchic world that would emerge if the global sheriff lacked the strength to take his boots off the desk and ride out. All of these see Europe as of little help, either unable or unwilling – or both – to shoulder a burden that now urgently needs sharing. The salvation of the euro, and of the Union, is of global import. It has yet to be ensured.

Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith … is in want of a yacht.

She had one, the Royal Yacht Britannia, which she loved very much. When the Labour government of Tony Blair said it was too expensive and decommissioned it soon after assuming office in 1997, she was seen to weep at the ceremony. Last year, Blair was reported as saying he regretted the decision, pressed upon him by the then-chancellor, Gordon Brown, and inherited from the previous, Conservative administration. It cost £11 million a year to run, and a necessary refit would have cost some £50 million. So it was put out to the nautical equivalent of pasture. It’s now on show at a dock in Leith, the port of Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, where it’s in much demand as a venue for “occasions.”

If in want of a yacht, Queen Elizabeth has never lacked for gallant courtiers. Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, earlier this month wrote to the prime minister suggesting that for her Diamond Jubilee, to be celebrated in June this year, she should be promised (the event is too near for her to be “given”) a replacement yacht, to express the love her subjects bear her. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, Gove clarified that he had not meant that the expense – which might be some £80 million to £100 million – should be borne from the public purse, but rather would be raised from her (presumably better-heeled) admirers. The prime minister said he was all for it, on that basis. The deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, made a not-too-bad joke, saying the world was divided into the “yachts and the have-yachts.”

This is a storm in a royal teacup, to be sure: The money may not be raised, the yacht never built. Already, a grand river pageant is planned for June 3, when the Diamond Jubilee will be celebrated with a four-day weekend holiday for all. The star of that show will be a luxury river boat, the Spirit of Chartwell, transformed by the film set designer Joseph Bennett into a gilded, garlanded royal barge. Bennett did the sets for the grandiose TV series Rome, so he may have had in mind the lines heralding Cleopatra’s watery arrival to meet her lover, the Roman general Antony, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
 Burn’d on the water.”

Is not the barge enough? It will cost £10 million, the cost to be met by private sponsorship and donations. Are there enough generous royalists left after that to put up some £80 million to £100 million for a yacht?

Even if there are, it’s a bad idea. Gove, a former journalist and one of the sharpest minds in the British Cabinet, has allowed his affection for the queen to nudge him into making a rare presentational mistake. The queen should not have a yacht — and it is the royalists who should be most concerned that she should not.

First, it puts her among the superrich. She is, indeed, very rich: Her fortune is estimated at just under £2 billion, which makes her the 19th wealthiest woman in the world and the second richest woman monarch (after Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, who tops £2 billion). But her style, her activities and above all her public relations have kept her removed from the yacht set – a set led by a near neighbor of hers, who lives a mile or so west of Buckingham Palace and who owns the Chelsea soccer team. Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse, the largest yacht in the world (557 feet) and the most expensive (nearly £1 billion) is one of four he has, the Eclipse having two swimming pools, two helicopter pads and a small submarine. Abramovich was embroiled till last week in an effort to strike down a suit against him from former fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He has just lost his bid to defeat the suit, and so the substantive case will go to a full trial in October. The sight of these two enormously wealthy men, whose riches were torn from an impoverished country, brawling over billions is at once fascinating and melancholy. The queen shouldn’t join that class.

Second, though her popularity is likely to reach such levels in this year that she will easily ride out any criticism, she will, at some time not too distant, hand over the crown, voluntarily or necessarily, to her son, Prince Charles. (Presuming the crown does not skip a generation and go her grandson, Prince William, who is so far a somewhat colorless man but whose elegant wife, Kate, is lionized by the press and has made no mistakes.) Prince Charles is no longer as unpopular as he was when his first wife, Princess Diana, died: but he’s not popular, either, and his occupancy of a super-yacht while he tells the world it must conserve energy or die will be a constant, legitimate source of a charge of hypocrisy.

Third, there are a host of better things on which to spend £100 million, especially in these dark days. Some pointers.

• A network of Queen Elizabeth II centers for the young, in which those finding it hard (if not impossible) to get work can go for counseling, work experience, volunteering at home and abroad, training, and networking. Assuming that the money comes from corporations and rich individuals, these could remain associated with the centers, forging links between the workless and workplaces; while the wealthy should be encouraged to experiment with ideas of how to provide broader perspectives to the unemployed than joyless leisure.

• The same for the aging: in this case, to propose ways in which the healthy elderly can continue to make contributions to society and their own well-being; to point to further education and other courses that engage the mind and body; and to encourage a spirit of solidarity and neighborliness. As with the centers for young people, other institutions work in the same area. But this would carry the prestige of the queen’s name and would have her patronage – which counts for much, especially among the older generations.

• A fund to help make the royal properties – principally Balmoral Castle in the Highlands of Scotland, Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Windsor Castle and above all Buckingham Palace in the center of London  itself – much more open to the public than they are now. The queen, or at least her successor, should take the initiative to considerably downsize the monarchy, moving the royal family to the still large Central London properties of Clarence House (where Prince Charles lives when in London) or St. James Palace (Princess Anne’s London home). To be sure, visiting heads of state will no longer be housed in Buckingham Palace: so what? Clarence House and St. James’ Palace have guest rooms. If there are entourage problems, some of the grandest hotels in the world — the Ritz,  Claridges, the Savoy – are not far away. Buckingham Palace should be a national resource: everything from a history lesson to a business tool (one of the ostensible reasons for the yacht).

The grandeur of the British royals will fade as Elizabeth goes. It’s best to recognize and plan for it now. A yacht, with a life of decades, will come to seem more and more inappropriate, and less and less attuned to a country where the issues of work, poverty and ignorance remain to be tackled and moderated. To assist in that work would be a legacy fit for a queen.

PHOTO: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth arrives for a Christmas Day service at St. Mary Magdalene Church on the Royal estate at Sandringham, Norfolk in east England, December 25, 2011.  REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett