So; another Bureau and plenary session week gets under way at the European Economic and Social Committee, the last of the year. Once again, the machine moves smoothly into action (though there are always a series of preparatory meetings in the previous week). First, the management board in the early morning, then the ‘morning mass’, our pre-session meeting, where all colleagues involved in the organisation of the Bureau and plenary session attend to ensure proper coordination. (The picture is of a screen in the meeting room.) And then, in the afternoon, at political level, the enlarged Presidency met, and all of these were, as always, productive and consensual meetings. We’ll have Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic in the Bureau tomorrow and the plenary session will see debates on the Polish Presidency, the awarding of the EESC’s civil society prize and a debate and declaration on the crisis on the eve of the European Council meeting. Another busy and dense week!

Back in the 1980s, when I was working for my PhD at the European University Institute in Fiesole, I would occasionally get to go to Fiorentina‘s Campo di Marte stadium. With the likes of blonde genius Giancarlo Antognoni playing, Pontello’s purple shirts were an attractive if mercurial team and it was in this period that they signed the Brazilian captain, Socrates, who had so impressed in the 1982 World Cup (where Brazil were put out 3-2 by Italy in a memorable quarter final where Paolo Rossi scored a hatrick), for the 1984/85 season. Socrates was something special. He was a doctor of medecine and he smoked (notoriously, including at half-time) and drank. For as much as the Florentines admired his footballing intelligence they were scandalised by his lack of attention to physical perfection. (He couldn’t understand why smoking on the team bus was such a big deal, for example.) We only saw flashes of his brilliance during his year in Florence (six goals in twenty-five appearances) and yet he was undoubtedly one of the greatest midfield players of all time. As Paolo Rossi aptly put it, despite his strength and brilliance, Socrates seemed like a player from another, amateur, era and now, sadly, he is gone.

Toft and Howard

This morning I went to the Warehouse Theatre to see how I am getting on. The ‘I’ in question is the actor John Howard, who will be performing three monologues around the illness and death of my father for the English Comedy Club this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. This morning he went through the pieces with the director, Conrad Toft, and I was both fascinated and deeply moved: fascinated, to see somebody take ‘my’ material and render it into a thoroughly convincing creative act, and moved because, thanks to John’s acting skills, the basic themes – the euphemisms around mortality, the relationship between father and son – come across very powerfully. To sit in on the process as a privileged spectator was a thoroughly absorbing experience. As I wrote in a previous piece, John Howard is much better at being me than I am!

To my mind, the best – and most authentic – illustration of how young political idealists become disillusioned by their political heroes is provided by George Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human – A Political Education, a convincing account of his journey through Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign to power. There is a line that sums it up in George Clooney’s intelligent The Ides of March, which we watched this evening; ‘he’s a politician; he’s bound to disappoint you sooner or later.’ Ryan Gosling turns in a brilliant performance as the Stephanopoulos-type idealistic campaign warrior losing his illusions, but he is able to play to the foil of the equally brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman as the grizzled campaign veteran who has long since realised that the only absolute virtue in politics is loyalty. Clooney cleverly directs, competently co-wrote the screenplay with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, author of the original stage play, Farragut North, and excellently acts the presidential hopeful, Governor Mike Morris. Full marks on all scores – at least for political anoraks like me. I think all budding politicians should watch this film before they launch themselves into the fray. Where are your lines in the sand and are you willing to move them? Where is your non-negotiable dividing line between idealism and realism? Can betrayal ever be morally right and, if so, under what circumstances? Maybe best to think about all of that before you start shinning up the greasy pole…

The last try but by no means the least!

This afternoon I eagerly watched the friendly rugby union match between Wales and Australia. There was a lot of pre-match hype because one of Wales’s favourite sons, Shane Williams, was winning his 87th and last cap for his nation. A rather nervy and drab first half saw the two teams at 6-3. A costly second-half sin-binning for Leigh Halfpenny led to a three-try bonanza for Australia, who went on to win the match by a comfortable 24 to 18 margin. Frustratingly, Shane Williams – the main reason I was watching – rarely sniffed the tryline throughout the match but then, in the 81st minute, into injury time, he scored a lovely try. It was a fairytale ending to a glittering and throughly entertaining career, as this link to ten of his tries graphically illustrates. His presence in a line-up always gave a thrill of anticipation. He will be missed on the international stage.

Sidney Lumet’s 1982 film, The Verdict, starring a masterly Paul Newman, is typically described as a ‘courtroom drama’ but, as with several of Newman’s best roles, it would be better, if more long-windedly, described as a discovery and affirmation of a man’s true self and inner moral being. Newman plays a washed-up, ambulance-chasing drunken lawyer, Frank Galvin, who is gifted a medical malpractice case where a readily-offered out-of-court settlement would at one fell sweep restore his legal reputation, set him up financially, free up the relatives of the victim of the malpractice and protect the good reputation of the surgeons involved. Something – a whim? an instinct? moral fibre? – prevents Galvin from accepting the offer and he opts instead for a battle against a well-paid team of lawyers and a biased judge. Notwithstanding the legal niceties, the jury heeds Galvin’s call to respect natural justice and finds in favour of his client, a young girl reduced to a vegetative state who can never be compensated. A strong cast (including James Mason and Charlotte Rampling) ensures convincing viewing, although the love interest is unsatisfactorily developed. The most telling phrase in the script for me was something along the lines of ‘A court does not guarantee justice but it provides the possibility for justice to be done.’ Perhaps that, in the end, is the flaw in this film. Experience would strongly suggest that, if they don’t necessarily win, corporate lawyers, with all the resources at their disposal, rarely lose – particularly not to drunken idealists.

In the Thalys train, on my way back to Brussels from Paris this evening, I witnessed a rather sad episode. Three young teenage boys from the banlieue got on to the train. Clearly, they were not typical Thalys clients and they were planning mischief; they were, in short, trouble on its way to happen. I could see all the passengers instinctively checking their wallets and watches as they passed by the three. When the train got underway the boys moved elsewhere and I forgot about them. But at Bruxelles Midi there was a lot of shouting and then I saw two burly men in red sweatshirts emblazoned with the legend ‘Securail’ marching two of the three boys off of the train. The third was wandering around on the platform, apparently waiting to be caught. ‘You idiots!’ I felt like telling the boys. ‘That was just so obvious! You were bound to get caught.’ But, then, when I looked closer, I realised that they had expected to get caught – indeed, had probably wanted to get caught. It was a rite of passage of some sort. They were so young (13? 14?) that I doubt whether, apart from the rough handling  that the red sweatshirts were clearly enjoying handing out, they suffered any sanction other than being returned to Paris. Nevertheless, the episode saddened me. Somehow, it reminded me of Rosselini’s urchin in Paisà.

Thanks to the hospitality of the European Economic and Social Committee’s Employees’ Group and its President, Georges Dassis (in the centre of the photograph), I spent all of today in an extraordinary meeting of the Group in Paris, at the headquarters of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council, devoted to the timely theme of the future of Europe. The morning’s keynote speaker was former European Commission President (and my former boss), Jacques Delors. His – characteristically incisive but uncharacteristically dark – analysis was followed by a panel discussion with representatives of the major French trades unions (Bernard Thibault, Secretary General of the CGT, Yves Veyrier, Confederal Secretary of the FO, Marcel Grignard, Deputy Secretary General of the CFDT, Philippe Louis, Confederal President of the CFTC) together with Giglielmo Epifani, President of the Bruno Trentin Assocation. In the afternoon we heard how a low-carbon industrial policy could help Europe out of the crisis, and the meeting was closed by: the President of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council, Jean-Paul Delevoye; the President of the European Economic and Social Committee, Staffan Nilsson; and the President of the Employees’ Group, Georges Dassis. It is impossible to summarise a day’s debate in a short post, so I’ll finish this with three short ‘soundbites’. First, Jacques Delors; ‘without memory there can be no future.’ Second, Staffan Nilsson; ‘if we don’t believe in our future why should anybody else?’ Third, Georges Dassis; ‘our leaders have a choice between a return to the past or a reaffirmation of the future.’

Oh dear. Just as Les Intouchables had restored faith in human nature yesterday evening, so Clint Eastwood’s 2008 Changeling comes along this evening and sends us back to square one. And, like Les Intouchables, the basic story line of Changeling is derived from a true story. A single mother’s son disappears. He is found. The police return him to his mother, but the mother insists the found boy is not her own. Angelina Jolie turns in a very powerful performance as the mother and, as in Mystic River, Eastwood lets the ghastly story tell itself at its own bitter-sweet pace. I suppose I am giving away things just a little if I say that there are modern-day echoes in the Madeleine McCann and Frederick West affairs. Indeed, if you subtract out the (LA) police corruption (1920s) from the story, you are left with a series of people struggling to believe the scarcely believable. Eastwood’s direction is good at putting this dilemma into relief. Who would you believe: an apparently hysterical grieving mother or an apparently stoical and rational police officer?  It’s a cautionary tale. The scene where a perfectly sane woman who questions the police is consigned to an asylum powerfully reminded me of a frightening scene I witnessed in communist eastern Europe where the most powerful impulse was always to avoid running foul of a system that would stop at nothing because it could, if it wished, do anything it liked with impunity. The moral of the plot of Changeling is, contrary to Ockham’s razor, that if you know something is true you should stick to your guns. But human credulity undermines the plot and hence also the moral.

This evening we saw the suddenly – and justifiably – popular feel good film Les Intouchables. On an impulse, Philippe (François Cluzet), a very wealthy aristocrat and quadriplegic since a hang gliding accident, employs Driss (Omar Sy), a fresh-out-of-prison angry young man from the banlieue, as his carer. Somehow the chemistry works and the two men bond – not least because Driss refuses to treat Philippe as anything other than an equal, which is precisely what Philippe wants and nobody else understands. The two men open up each others’ worlds – and that of Philippe’s pampered entourage – riffing off of each others’ senses of humour, whilst also exploring deeper themes such as love and art and parenthood. Thanks to deft directing from Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, the film avoids being mawkish or maudlin, but it is the acting of Cluzet (who can, after all, only move his head) and Sy that makes the story believable. Which is only as it should be since, as the title credits roll, we learn that the film is based on a true story and we even see, briefly, the real ‘Philippe’ and ‘Driss’. If you are feeling down about humanity, this is the film to see.