FLORENCE

One of the most awe inspiring of contemporary sights must be the gigantic throng of pilgrims swirling around the Kaaba in Mecca at the climax of the Haj. The image of thousands of white robed devotees gyrating en masse to the seemingly centrifugal force exerted by the black-shrouded "House of God" gives potency to the idea that while the Christian life has been increasingly marginalised by secular society, the Muslim one is both dynamic and thriving. Between 2.5 and 3 million souls visit this most Islamic of Saudi cities every year and the regime gains much of its authority from its stewardship of the site.

Florence is a mid-sized city of some 350,000 souls situated in a depression of the hilly Tuscan countryside astride the banks of the River Arno. It is the home of some of the greatest treasures of the Renaissance and the Christian iconography of the many paintings, buildings, public spaces, statues and sacred objects is overwhelming. Florence is visited by 11m outsiders every year. Yet you will search the western media in vain for any sign of its modern cultural relevance beyond the demands of the selfie-stick waving tourist and the regular eruptions of passengers from the gigantic cruise liners moored at the nearby port of Livorno. Click "Florence" and you will be bombarded with sites offering accommodation, recommendations of the best boutique hotels, AI generated lists of the busy places to see and offers of tours. You may also find the occasional sniffy article by some aficionado who bemoans the lack of Tuscan authenticity in the food served at the myriad of bars, trattorias, osterias and restaurants.

Yet the management of tourism in Florence is impressive and the visitor, at least to this casual observer, does not seem to be overwhelmed. The crowd swirling around the Baptistery next to the Duomo conjures images of the pilgrims at the Kaaba, but it lacks suffocating religious intensity and is good humoured despite the crush. Notwithstanding,  care is shown to worshippers who wish to pray undisturbed under the vast Brunelleschi dome. Likewise, the famous queues outside the Uffizi Gallery are managed with aplomb and good manners and the general feeling is a sense of civilised democracy in action. The feeding and watering of such an invading horde is also extraordinary and there is an eatery virtually every forty yards. Some are outstanding and good value besides. Escape from the crowds is also pretty easy and you don't have to travel miles outside the city to do so. Ten minutes from the Duomo is the Priory of San Marco with its frescoes by Fra' Angelico, including his famous Annunciation painted in 1442. It was here too that the populist friar Savonarola had his monkish cell. If you are into architectural bombast, there are the Medici mausoleum and tombs at the Cappella dei Principi. Other treasures can been seen completely unimpeded at the Duomo Museum including the magnificent bronze doors of the Baptistery, Giotto's Madonna and statues by Pisano and Donatello. The Boboli gardens on a Sunday lunchtime are delightful, with stunning views of the mediaeval town from the Belvedere. 

The sense of history is profound. The republican reign of Lorenzo di Medici, (the "Magnificent") coincided with what is arguably the peak of the Italian Renaissance and, less well recognised, the beginning of the decline of the Mediterranean world as the central point of focus for the Christian west. Constantinople had been captured by the Ottomans in 1453 and within months of Lorenzo's death in 1492, Columbus had set off on his voyage to the New World. Within 50 years of this longitudinal shift of focus, mastery of the seas and of its trade had passed from Venice and Genoa to the Portuguese and Spanish. In the east, Suleyman the Magnificent took Ottoman power and influence to its zenith.

And Britain? In Scotland, the monarchical state enjoyed an unusual period of peace and stability under James IV and the social organisation of the nation advanced - education was made compulsory. By comparison, all that the rest of the cold windswept archipelago had to show for itself was the beginnings of a centralised and rapacious state under Henry VII. Of culture and art, there is almost no trace, all swept away under the tyranny of his son as he sulked on the fringes of a Europe dominated by far more powerful monarchs than he. In the so-called Northern Renaissance Britain is marked for its almost total absence, save the exquisite selfies painted by Holbein for "notables" newly enriched by the plundering of the English church.

The dominance of the Medici (as well as four popes, they produced two queens of France) was founded on their extraordinary banking wealth. Both they and their rivals and collaborators threw up enormous palaces -  the one built by the Pitti is yet the only eyesore in Florence - and used their great fortunes for public utilities and patronage of the arts. These Renaissance families have their analogues in the fabulously wealthy "dynasties" of the computer-driven age. Yet whereas the Musks, Ellisons, Bezos's and Cooks have become part of an overweening hemispheric elite and increasingly detached from the mastery of their own technical skills, the Renaissance in Italy is marked by excellence throughout. While Jeff Bezos thought the best use of his money was to fire his pneumatically enhanced girlfriend into space, the Medici honed their financial techniques. They also patronised Botticelli, Perugino, Da Vinci, Donatello and Cellini for the edification of God and their fellow citizens. If they themselves appeared in any of the paintings (such as Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi), it is as supplicants before the infant Jesus or the Crucifix. It is hard to find much humility in Silicon Valley.

In an increasingly de-Christianised age, it should not be a surprise that any link between man and the transcendental, no matter how gorgeously realised in art, should be marginalised. If Renaissance Florence means anything to our incrementally ill-educated, "relativist" and philistine establishment, it is as an example of a culture tainted by superstition, excessive and "unearned" wealth or as a destination for gap-year gals on their way to Christies by way of the Courtauld. In such a context, the fascination of western progressives and the political left with the Muslim world seems ironic. The minutely detailed anathemas and prescriptions of a seventh century Arabian cleric would seem to have little relevance to the modern Godless state. Yet with its frisson of Communist obedience to the party, the harsh collective discipline inherent to Islam can easily be admired by the left. Progressives can congratulate themselves too on being able to patronise a mediaeval minority culture at home without having to think too hard about what happens in jurisdictions aboard where Islam holds sway. Would it be possible to see Greta Thunberg or Sally Rooney out of a burka? The thought never crosses the progressive mind. 

Secularists like to think it is their values rather than religious ones which have made us a tolerant and sophisticated society. This is typical of those who believe their own conception of morality marks a sort of year zero. But the reason most of the Western hemisphere lives in a civilised democratic society is because of Christian values, not despite them. The Medici may have made a lot of money, but they clearly understood their ultimate redemption lay in the risen Christ. 

The crucial insight of the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson was that culture is the product of religion, not the other way around. It was a view his better-known contemporary T S Eliot was happy to endorse. Rather than as a precursor to the Enlightenment, the Renaissance marked a lifting of people towards the Christian spirit with a notably humanist overtone - now sole obedience to God was abbreviated by openness to the spiritual appetites of fellow human beings who were ill-equipped to receive God's grace through the medium of dry clerical theology. 

If you seek the evidence of this, go to Florence. It's a reminder of how lucky we are.

 

ANGELA PASSES "GO"

O dear: those blasted rules of the game have once again upended a British government. Depending on your point of view, the Rt. Hon. Angela Rayner - erstwhile Deputy Prime Minister - has been unjustly ambushed by vexatious tax regulations which no sane person could possibly be expected to understand. Further, she is a working class lass who has suffered every disadvantage imaginable, yet who has climbed to the top of the greasy pole to occupy a senior place in the British state. Her somewhat convoluted housing arrangements reflect no more than the concern of a busy and  loving mother trying to do her best for her disabled 17 year old son. Her supporters, of which there are many - even among the columnists of the Daily Telegraph -  say her predicament is a victory for snobs, sexists and misogynists everywhere.

The other more straightforward narrative is that she is a gobby chav from Stockport with no discernible talent beyond a skill for self-projection - she has even described herself as a "mouthy" northerner. The lady has lived dangerously, involved herself again in some complicated and dubious property transactions and has now been found out. Her defenestration is therefore fully merited.

Either way, there cannot be a dry eye in the house. For l'affaire d'Ange contains all the classic and farcically embarrassing ingredients of scandal, incompetence and bad faith which mark ministerial resignations in the modern British state. First there is the toe curling revelation which is swiftly denied. Further revelations of dodgy dealing come to light and the miscreant doubles down while getting supportive parts of the media to spread diversionary chaff. In the next scene, a po-faced House of Commons (or the press in this case) is assured "all the relevant rules were followed". The Prime Minister then expresses his (or her) full confidence, at which point the denouement writes itself. Usually, there is a referral to whichever panjandrum it is whose role that month is to remind ministers how to behave. What normally follows is a lengthy interval while the duty apparatchik sucks his pencil and which allows anyone still awake to speculate and for those hacks who were asleep when the story originally broke to pour scorn on their competitors. At last the cast returns to the stage for the final act. The obscure civil servant produces a carefully worded note of regret, the minister writes some weaselly words of resignation and then falls on their sword. The Prime Minister sheds some crocodile tears of his (or her) own and the press goes back to speculating who is now "up" and who "down". The curtain falls and the proles disperse peacefully, having enjoyed a good laugh at the expense of their "betters". 

Angela Rayner is not the first minister to conflate public duty with private interest. But she is surely the first to have the brass neck to plead mitigation that she was only trying to protect her family barely a year after she was involved in another property caper which attracted the interest of the police. The truth is surely more grubby: it seems she arbitraged her son's trust to fund the purchase of a second property for herself; took the barest minimum of conveyancing advice while ignoring the suggestions she take proper tax guidance; claimed the new dwelling was her primary residence for tax purposes and then tried to "regularise" her affairs only once she had been found out. Not only did she act in bad faith, but she also displayed the most astonishing incompetence. Worse, her inverted snob of a boss tried to defend her by effectively saying her disadvantaged background somehow entitled her to be held to a more lenient standard. You could almost hear Attlee, Bevin, Tawney, Callaghan and even Michael Foot turning in their graves.

Alas, the office of the independent commissioner for "standards" came to the only conclusion that could be supported by the evidence. In a classic civil-service formulation, Sir Laurie Magnus opined that while our Ange's latest tour round the Monopoly board was  an example of "integrity", it was also (sadly) one of carelessness. Those damned and blasted rules. The poor lass who left school at sixteen; who lived in a paper bag (or some such nonsense) and had a fatherless child at seventeen; who doled it out to the toffs and became a darling of the Left - well, he almost sighed with regret, she had "broken the ministerial code". Exit Angela.

How have we allowed ourselves to be ruled by such utter berks? If democracy is supposed to confer some moral as well as electoral authority, how come government ministers and officials need to be told constantly what does and does not constitute ethical behaviour? Is it too much to ask that they be acquainted with what is right and wrong, not just with what they think they can get away with? When personal chicanery is accompanied by incompetence in office, then the chips must surely be down. By any measure, Sir Keir's tenure of Number 10 has been a shambles: unintelligent ministers making decisions way beyond their intellectual ability; a slavish devotion to ever more convoluted process rather than outcomes; a complete lack of leadership when problems occur and the supine acceptance of incompetence and mediocrity until looming disaster prompts a moving of the deck chairs. This Labour government has the lot.

Sir Keir will surely have cause to regret Sir Magnus's letter. Replete with the usual bromides of the Whitehall mandarinate, it has merely anaesthetised Rayner rather than buried her under the ton of housing rubble which she deserves. As erstwhile housing minister, even she should appreciate the irony. She can also breath easy - politics is now all about the game played at Westminster rather than the public good. A sense of shame or an awareness of personal ignorance are no longer pre-requisites for holders of public office We can be sure of her re-incarnation in all its gobby glory as she passes "Go" yet again.