Blogoir: April

An elegant posting by Tim Worstall on how far the UK Lib Dems are 'really' Left or Right:

... the OB Lib Dems are most certainly not of the left. They’re of the right: do what is necessary to get the economy right, use markets wherever possible, get the economics of taxation correct and then, if desired, start redistributing. As opposed to this “left” desire to not use markets, ignore the economics of taxation and use the structure and restrictions on the economy to get to the desired economy.

This isn’t, I agree, how left and right is usually seen. But it is a very strong distinction in British politics. Those who are left by results (including me) and those who are left by processes...

There again, maybe the Lib Dems are 'framing'themselves to be 'left by results' (and accordingly pro-market by process) whereas in fact they are neurotic etatists in instinct and substance?

In some baffling way British democracy has shrivelled towards the point where it's all a sort of X-Factor event - some or other pretty boy sings well on the night and bingo, he wins. Regardless of anything substantial.

Tim:

Now all we’ve got to do is wean the Lib Dems off their insane infatuation with the EU and we’re home and dry.

Hmm.

The Lib Dem manifesto under the your world heading is a somewhat surreal text, burbling on about 'runaway climate change' which will be tackled in the UK in part by ... YES ... a new bus scrappage scheme.

Sigh.

Is hosted by Trixy.

Mainly dwelling on volcanic eruptions - and the fine dust of tedium settling on the UK as the general election campaign proceeds.

With the state funeral of President Kaczynski completed, attention now will turn to the cause of the crash at Smolensk airport.

Not before a surprisingly weak article by Denis Dutton and Adam Chmielewski appears at Open Democracy:

The air-crash which decapitated Poland’s state elite may owe something to reckless behaviour, official negligence - and the flaws of modern democracy itself

The judgment must be that Polish officialdom has not learned the lesson of this recent tragedy. Indeed, there is a suggestion of grave irresponsibility surrounding this ill-fated trip. The fact that so many people of senior rank were loaded onto a single plane created evident risks and ignored the procedural rule that the president should not travel with others who occupy high state positions...

Polish politicians, as do those in most democratic countries, live in mortal fear of the media and the opposition. For years some of them have mumbled about the necessity of upgrading the government’s air-fleet; but no decision was made, for fear of the response that state officials wish to enjoy the luxuries of new planes at the expense of impoverished taxpayers...

We share the grief of this terrible event. But we also feel angry that a democratic state might have done such damage to itself through the irresponsibility or recklessness of its own officials.

Here is the comment I posted there:

[T]here are many subtle ways in which this accident might have been caused, which operate on a level which do not justify such bold conclusions as " reckless behaviour, official negligence - and the flaws of modern democracy itself".

Thus perhaps the pilot made an unaccountable mistake of fact - he eg misread the aircraft dials and acted accordingly. Or he made a mistake of judgement - eg he read the equipment accurately but made a wrong conclusion. Or as he approached the airport, the scale of the fog a few kilometres ahead on the ground was not evident; he acted properly with the level of information available to him

Or something perhaps was lost momentarily in translation or interpretation of ground crew instructions/suggestions (the crew communicated with the ground in Russian, not the usual English).

Plus there may have been psychological factors in play. President Kaczynski will not have wanted to hear Russian suggestions that the plane divert to Minsk, occasioning a tedious car journey and very late (and therefore humiliating) arrival at Katyn. Did he order the pilot to take an undue risk? Or did the pilot not need to be ordered, preferring not to pose the question and risk a row?

And maybe, all things considered, the risky course would have been safe had it not been for one extra tall tree which happened to be in the flight-path? Had the plane taken a chance yet landed normally, this article would not have been written.

My point is that a huge amount of what we all do, governments included, often comes down to very fine judgements which are tricky to analyse accurately afterwards when things go wrong.

Buying a new expensive aircraft for official civilian travel (and not eg an extra F-16) may or may not be a good decision. But what if a brand new plane had crashed like this one because accumulated micro-decisions combined with abrupt localised thick fog and one very tall tree? Remember the excellent Airbus which crashed over Siberia because the pilot let his child play with the controls?

Are such tragedies really symptomatic of 'deeper' problems? Or just part of the natural way we manage risk at all levels every day everywhere, a consequence of which is that now and again some really bad things happen?

Would striving to prevent every possible accident (as per the ruinous 'precautionary principle') instead create new, different disasters?

Other good comments there too.

It is not clear to me why it takes so long to acquire then publish the data from the Black Box. Some facts are oozing out in an unsatisfactory way.

The Polish/Russian media are saying that the Box did not show that the President urged the pilots to attempt a risky landing, and that there were audible screams in the final seconds. There are suggestions that 'intimate' exchanges from the voice recorder will not be published.

President Kaczynski for sure would have been deeply unimpressed with any suggestion that the plane divert to Minsk or Moscow because of adverse weather conditions.

He would have known that following the successful Katyn commemoration featuring Polish and Russian PMs Tusk and Putin, his separate commemorative event risked being spoiled by media tittering over his 'foggy' foreign policy or somesuch.

Plus he might well have suspected that the Russians somehow were exaggerating the weather conditions if only for the pleasure of seeing him make a long and tedious and embarrassing drive to Katyn.

So were those sentiments or something similar conveyed to the aircrew? Or did they know that and not need to ask the President for a view.

One way or the other, does it matter?

Had the pilot taken a calculated risk of some sort and landed safely, we never would have known.

My own guess is that it was a combination of the absence of normal air traffic control facilities, the fact that conversations were proceeding in Russian, the difficult weather, and maybe (ultimately) some sort of pilot misreading of the altimeter data which brought the aircraft down.

The faster the full data set is made public, the better.

President Lech Kaczynski and Maria Kaczynska have been buried with the highest Polish honours in Cracow.

Some memories of people whom I knew on the doomed flight to Smolensk.

Such as former young communist Jerzy Smajdzinski who adapted well to democracy and rose to become Poland Defence Minister. I recall him chuckling over lunch with another former hardened Leftist, UK Defence Secretary John Reid, as they mused on their shared youthful fascination with Gramsci-style dialectics and their current senior roles in the NATO alliance. He was to run as centre left candidate in the 2010 Polish Presidential elections.

And Janusz Kochanowski, Polish Ombudsman, who supported a senior UK mediation event at the Royal Castle in Warsaw and had many distinguished British connections.

Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last Polish President-in-Exile, who was honoured by HM The Queen during the State Visit to London of President Kwasniewski in 2004. 

Grazyna Gesicka, one of the impressive group of PiS women MPs and a huge expert on EU processes, who joined me at the Residence in Warsaw for lunch to brief me on the mysteries of how Poland planned to try to spend its European Union funds.

Mariusz Handzlik, an unfailingly cheerful and positive senior member of the President's office, who worked closely with the Embassy on many visits and policy issues - at one of my final lunches at the Residence in Warsaw I tried to explain to him what Gordon Brown's move to No 10 might mean for UK/Polish relations. Our mutual friend Ryan Bromley has set up a website in his memory.

Stas Komorowski, previously one of the best Ambassadors in London. After years of battling he regained his family home on the edge of Warsaw which had been confiscated by the communists (to do that he had to buy new dwellings for the families living there), and he and his wife Ewa hosted a beautiful annual garden party there. He was a strong, principled and effective negotiator for Polish interests at the MFA then Defence Ministry.

Izabela Tomaszewska, the ever-correct, friendly and courteous woman who led Maria Kazcynska's office.

And, of course, Lech and Maria Kaczynski themselves.

Maria Kaczynska was charming, modest, very private and sincere. She came to the Residence in June 2007 for one of our last diplomatic receptions, an exhibition of portraits by Basia Hamilton:

Finally, Lech Kaczynski.

One of his main policy themes as President was the idea that modern Europe and the EU had evolved without Poland playing its rightful part in defining modern European consciousness - thanks to Yalta, Poland had been locked up and held back. So Europe just had to adjust itself to the new reality that Poland was rejoining the European mainstream - and determined to assert its rights. He made these points on various occasions with wit but determination to EU Ambassadors.

I accompanied the President to London and Scotland on an official visit to the UK, and saw him in action publicly and privately. He made a strong impression with his grasp of detail and phenomenal memory. His speech in London covered a large number of policy points about Poland and Europe, and included all sorts of sub-paragraphs and sub-sub-paragraphs as he picked his way through numerous subtle arguments - all with scarcely a note.

During that 2006 visit the UK media picked up on the 'feckless Poles' slip by his Polish interpreter; the President crossly blamed the British press for not translating his words accurately.

My wife and I returned to Warsaw from Scotland with the President and Mrs Kaczynska on the President's plane - presumably the one which crashed at Smolensk.

I was in Geneva on manoeuvres with ADRg Ambassadors and poised to return to the UK when we heard about the volcano dust problem.

So we took a train from Geneva to Paris, stayed overnight in a modest but very helpful Paris hotel, then went by train to Caen and by ferry to Portsmouth.

I staggered home at 0100 hours last night after a 17-hour journey. Exhausted but unbowed.

Points to note:

• it is difficult if not impossible through Avis or the other major car rental people to hire a car eg in Paris and drop it off in London. Annoying
• the Eurostar website is a pain in the neck, when it tells you repeatedly that there are seats available, only to tell you that there are not seats available after you have wasted time making attempted specific bookings
• French trains are very good, when they are not on strike
• French train websites are impenetrable
• Brittany Ferries are good - efficient website
• Arrangements for getting off Brittany ferries in Portsmouth are not so good. Too long waiting for buses to get us to the terminal, then too few immigration control officials to get stressed passengers through quickly
• French food is terrific but costs a bomb if you are converting sterling into Euros

Luckily I had my trusty copy of Atlas Shrugged to re-read. At 1000 pages it was just the thing for this gruesome experience. Buy it now if you have never read it:

My name sporadically pops up on a trashy Maltese site Taste Your Own Medicine set up specifically to lambast Daphne Caruana Galizia.

My attempt to post a comment of clarification on this site has (as far as I can tell) failed:

Dear TYOM,

          I see that I am mentioned here.

I have commented at Daphne Galizia's site only because my name was mentioned there. I have written to two Malta newspapers. Neither (I think) have published my corrections about their inaccurate words.

 

As alas I don't read Maltese, I do not follow what your site is saying about me. Excuse my doubts about its accuracy. If you want to ask questions about my Training work for Maltese officials, please do. I will welcome confirmation that my answers  will be published fully and accurately.

 

Regards,

 

Charles Crawford

England

I also have sent comments to the Maltastar and the Malta Independent websites, none of which (I think) have appeared.

Plus Daphne herself on several occasions has quoted great chunks from my blog but without the usual blogging courtesy of giving her readers the link to my original work. See eg here. 

What's going on? Is this normal Maltese media behaviour?

Maybe I should sue Malta under the European Convention of Human Rights to stop local media outlets traducing me but giving me no respectable right of reply?

Views?

Michael Dembinski counts the days:

From Poland regaining independence at the end of World War I to the Poland's invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - 7,615 days ...

From Poland regaining democracy to the Smolensk air crash - 7,615 days.

As fire and brimstone pour down on the UK as the ultimate woeful symbol of this Labour government, I am limping back across the continent after my flight home from Geneva was cancelled yesterday.

Next stop - an attempt to get to Caen and board a ferry.

I may be some time.

Things do not get much more frabjous than this: 

Tim Worstall puts us (and the Guardian) out of our confused misery with a simple lesson in Greek debt.

He explains that two factors are in play:

• How much debt one has
• When one has to pay it back

Imagine you have a number of credit card debts and loans. Some payments are due now. Some are due far down the road.

You might decide to borrow more money or somehow 'reschedule' your looming debts to deal with immediate repayments, hoping that that manoeuvre will buy you time to sort yourself out and afford later debt repayments.

Sounds like a plan. How it works in practice depends on the various interest rates available for your new loans.

Hence Greece's feverish attempts to stay afloat now as supported by the EU may merely be making things look better in the short term but cause even more misery not too far ahead:

Greece’s problem is that it cannot really issue bonds at anything like an interest rate it wishes to pay. Which means, as This Time is Different shows, that as earlier bond and note issues mature they’re refinancing them with bills (and some notes) and thus reducing the average maturity of the entire debt.

Which means again that in the next few years there will be even more that they’ve got to refinance. Not just the bonds and notes maturing next year and the year after but also all those bills they’ve issued this year as well.

Remember the Horror of Compound Interest - and Compound Stupidity?

Last September at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire a solemn ceremony was held to dedicate a new Polish Armed Forces Memorial in honour of Poles who fell defending their country and freedom in World War Two.

Three Poles who played a prominent part in that ceremony were killed in the Smolensk air crash, namely former President-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, former Polish Ambassador to London Stas Komorowski and Father Bronek Gostomski.

On 16 April (Friday) at 1230 Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of Staffordshire, Mr James Hawley, is to lead a wreath laying ceremony at the National Memorial Arboretum to honour the crash victims.  He will be joined by senior representatives of the Polish community and civic dignitaries from across the region.

Be there if you can.

I have written extensively on this site about what the Katyn Massaces represents for Poland, for Russia, for Europe - and for civilisation. Type Katyn into the site's Search function and get the links.

See for example this extract from my final FCO telegram, sent to London from Warsaw as I drove towards the border for the last time as Ambassador:

The days trickle into months and years. It all gets ... difficult. Complicated. Memories fade.

Thus people who slyly presided over or benefited from the communist system are feted as modern European social democrats. Jewish, Polish and other victims of communism who had their property stolen or heroically refused to cooperate appeal to European institutions for justice, and often leave empty-handed. We prosecute elderly Nazis for their crimes. Elderly Communists go free...

... Do Al Qaeda and Hamas look at how Stalin got away with mass murder at Katyn, and think that by being viciously determined enough they can do the same? Do they expect the sheer intensity of their hatred of our pluralism to overwhelm our readiness to defend it? That they too can bring us to Submit?

How might we measure if they are succeeding?

The sheer scale of the Katyn murders ordered personally by Stalin with the endorsement of the top Soviet leadership - and carried out single-mindedly by world champion killer Vasili Blokhin - is hard to grasp.

Look at the numbers.

Some 22,000 Polish prisoners were murdered at Katyn and other sites in 1940. Assume (conservatively) that each Pole had a friends and family circle of (say) 100 people. That means that 2,200,000 Poles knew someone killed at Katyn, which in turn means that almost every Polish family either lost a friend or relative at Katyn or knew someone who did.

This latest tragedy is on a far smaller scale. But given the public roles and seniority of so many people involved, the numbers rise fast here too.

If (conservatively) each crash victim knew professionally or privately 500 people, 45,000 people will feel directly touched by the disaster. Again, most Poles either will know someone killed in the crash, or know someone who knows someone who knows someone who died.

Hence Poland's national grief, all the more intense since it evokes all those appalling memories of Katyn itself.

Returning to Katyn.

Let's do our best and try to have some sympathy for today's Russian leaders. They preside over a huge, rich country, run into the ground by seventy years of stupid collectivist brutality. Most Russians feel pride in the titanic sacrifices made by their parents and grandparents in the Second World War.

How to put Katyn in some sort of modern honest context without calling into question so many other aspects of Stalin's rule and perhaps risking calling into question the sprawling Russian state itself?

A key issue is opening the archives once and for all, if only to reveal the precise chains of command and ascertain which Soviet officials and secret police personnel actually did the killings.

President Yeltsin made big strides in that direction. See this fascinating article by a Russian historian and Katyn expert Natalia Lebedeva on the work done in Russia to explain it all.

Poland of course insists that there are many issues still left unclear, and more papers to be published.

Part of Russia's official defensiveness on this question has centred on categorising the massacre. It obviously was a war crime, if not the war crime. Natalia Lebedeva:

One of these later books was “The Katyn Syndrome” (“The Katyn Syndrome in Soviet-Polish and Russian-Polish Relations” in Russian), co-authored by Anatoly Yablokov, the prosecutor in charge of the Soviet, and then Russian, Katyn investigation from August 1990 to June 1994.

His group classified the Katyn execution as a crime against peace, a war crime and a crime against humanity, in accordance with Clauses A, B and C of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal for the Nuremberg Trials.

However, the Military Prosecutor’s Office later reversed the ruling, calling the tragedy an “abuse of power that resulted in grave consequences,” if we are to believe the press. I consider this definition inadequate and have openly expressed my disagreement, including in my book, “Katyn: A Crime Against Humanity.”

Should that be conceded by Moscow? Would that open the way to legal action, claims for reparations, clamour about other Soviet WW2 excesses, and so on?

In recent years Russian leader Putin has played hardball on Katyn and Russian/Polish relations, partly in response to unrelenting (and unsubtle) public pressure on the question by President Kaczynski.

Probably the culmination of this approach was Putin's 'Letter to Poles' sent last year on the eve of the commemorations in Gdansk of the start of World War Two, which I analysed here:

The people of Russia, whose destiny was crippled by the totalitarian regime, fully understand the sensitiveness of Poles about Katyn where thousands of Polish servicemen lie. Together we must keep alive the memory of the victims of this crime.

Message:  be very grateful, sensitive Poland, for our liberating you, even though we murdered and imprisoned thousands of Poles to do so. And let's remember the victims of the Katyn crime. But let's not talk about the criminals who committed it.

Katyn and Mednoye memorials, just as the tragic fate of the Russian soldiers taken prisoners in Poland during the 1920 war, should become symbols of common grief and mutual pardon.

Message:  you have your massacre victims, Poland - we have ours. No double standards. OK?

Yet in recent weeks, perhaps because Putin saw Lech Kaczynski's poor ratings and wanted to send a signal to his less strident Polish political rivals in Poland's Presidential election year, the Moscow tone had softened. Putin and Polish PM Donald Tusk together stood at a commemorative event only last week.

Now the scale and horror of the Smolensk plane crash has pushed Russia's relations with Poland in a quite new direction.

While Internet conspiracy theorists on all sides are raving away, most Poles seem impressed by and grateful for the way the Russians have been managing the disaster, not least in extending great generosity to Polish families travelling to Russia for the grim task of identifying bodies.

President Medvedev has sent a powerful message of condolence to the people of Poland promising the closest cooperation with the Polish authorities in establishing the cause of the crash.

And the human sympathy and solidarity shown by Putin himself when he and PM Tusk laid wreaths at the crash site has made a powerful impression in Poland: 

Perhaps most remarkably, Russian TV has now shown the harrowing film Katyn by Andrzej Wajda twice, bringing home to millions of Russians for the first time the scale of this Stalinist villainy and violence.

Is all this disinterested sympathy by the Russian elite?

Of course not. The Russian side have perhaps been just a bit too quick (even insensitive?) publicly to put all blame for the crash on the Polish pilots, as if to stake out up front an immoveable position that neither the ageing Soviet-era Presidential aircraft nor any Russian factors on the ground played any contributory part.

Plus, more generally, the moving images of tough Russian Putin comforting a distressed Polish Tusk suit the Russians' view of themselves as the Father of All Slavs. They send out strong signals of pan-Slavic solidarity which (in effect) offer an important rival vision to European integration on the EU's terms (led by Germany) alone.

So be it.

Huge historic 'open' themes in Polish/Russian relations go back centuries. They need such symbolic gestures of public and personal solidarity and reconciliation if they are to be shifted in a less confrontational direction.

Moscow looks to doing a magnificent job - both the countries concerned and Europe as a whole will benefit if that is carried through into a joint and uncontested official assessment of the cause of the crash, which in turn could open the way to a Big New Start.

Or something gets contested about the crash, bitter disagreements and recriminations break out - and it all spirals the other way.

I'll be optimistic this time. Lech Kaczynski would have wanted that upward path, as long as it was done properly and respectfully.

A somewhat reshaped version of my earlier appreciation of Lech Kaczynski has been published at National Review Online in the USA.

Here it is:

Conservative? For sure. But not snooty, paternalistic conservatives. Rather, their conservatism was based on rock-hard core beliefs and unshakable private integrity.

Yet it was not a free-market conservatism: They liked a strong state, and fretted in almost left-wing ways about the Polish underclass. They were uneasy with tycoons and capitalists; they suspected (presciently?) that too much easy money sloshing around would do more harm than good...

This is a well turned article in the Guardian about Poland's sorrow, marred only by dismal errors in two Polish names.

The Kaczynski family home is in Zoliborz, not Zoliborcz. The rz on the end of Zoliborz is not the 'ch' sound on the end of the non-existent Zoliborcz. It's the difference between the way the Emglish words leisure and lecher are spoken.

And the Kaczynskis' priest who also died in the crash was Father Indrzejczyk, not Indrzejczakm.

Part of the human drama of the Polish aircrash lies in the fact that President Lech Kaczynski had a twin brother Jaroslaw, who shared with him all the tumultous ups and downs of their political and private life.

Jaroslaw never married, and lived with the twins' now elderly mother Jadwiga. It was a strikingly close family. Many political issues would be hammered out by the twins round her kitchen table.

It turns out that Jaroslaw too was to have been part of the doomed delegation flying to Katyn for this 70th anniversary commemoration of the massacre of thousands of Poles on Stalin's orders. Yet in the end he decided to stay at home because their mother had been seriously ill in hospital, a development affecting the timing of a possible announcement by Lech to run for President.

In Jaroslaw's place on the plane went the twins' long-time friend and senior party ally Zbigniew Wasserman. 

It is almost too painful to write about what Jaroslaw Kaczynski has been through in the past two days.

First, to hear the news. Then to fly to Russia to identify the mutilated remains of his twin brother.

Then to return to Warsaw to greet the President's coffin.

And, perhaps worst of all, to have to decide how best to break the news to their mother who has not yet been told about the crash, for fear that the shock would kill her in her frail state.

Plus, beyind the inconceivable inner family anguish, to have to think soon about far-reaching political decisions for his shattered PiS party, which has lost so many younger bright hopes (including rising women stars) in the disaster. How best to carry on their life's work - if at all?

Here is Jaroslaw and the President's daughter Marta at the ceremony for the arrival of Lech's coffin. The picture speaks for itself. 

Here from the Polish Interior Ministry's website is the official list of victims of the Smolensk disaster, excluding the crew.

Look at this unbearably poignant series of photographs from Poland's main tabloid Fakt, which like the rest of the Polish media is doing a magnificent job.

I have highlighted those nineteen whom I had the privilege to know, some very well, as HM Ambassador in Poland. I also will have met others: 

Here (below) is the text of my appreciation of the life and times of Lech and Maria Kaczynski, now up at Radio Free Europe.

Welcome Steyn Online readers.

* * * * *

I attended a smart Warsaw dinner party in 2006, not long after the Kaczynski twins and their Law and Justice party (PiS) had triumphed in the 2005 Polish parliamentary and Presidential elections. The assembled Poles, distinguished Warsaw intellectuals, united in noisy disgust. The Kaczynskis were portrayed as belonging to that part of the political spectrum which ranges from pathological extremists to the far side of the Antichrist. Poland was hurtling down the road to ruin, even dictatorship.

Feverish attacks on the Kaczynski phenomenon from many Poles (including Solidarity period colleagues) quickly turned into an international liberal media ‘narrative’ drawn from a pick ‘n mix list of disobliging adjectives which is surfacing in some obituary analysis: extreme, nationalist, homophobic, anti-German, anti-European, ultra-Catholic, xenophobic, reactionary, divisive, populist, right-wing.

The worst adjective the patronising Warsaw elite threw at the Kaczynskis was something much more subtly Polish: they were so provincial. They were not ‘one of us’ – too petty and pedantic, too truculent, too self-righteous, too wrapped up in Poland’s own myths, too worried about all those uneducated primitive Poles out there. In short, much too Polish – but in the wrong way.

In my four years in Warsaw from numerous meetings with the Kaczynski family including their mother Jadwiga Kaczynska I drew my own, very different conclusions. They came across as smart, amusing, private but determined and far-sighted Polish patriots who had ‘attitudes’ rather than specific policies.

The Kaczynskis' overriding ambition was for Poland to be strong. (This might sound a curious goal for non-Poles, but remember that since 1795 Poland has been substantively free and independent for only 40 years.) The Kaczynskis looked uncompromisingly at what they saw as key weaknesses in Poland as it had had emerged from its bleak modern history. They identified three themes.

Communism’s Corrupt Legacy

One was the dire moral and institutional legacy of communism. Poles’ heroic heave to end Soviet rule had come with a huge cost. Poles had spied on and betrayed other Poles. Key state institutions had been penetrated by people on the Moscow payroll. Far too many people had prospered dishonestly since communism ended. New foreign investment flooding into Poland was welcome, but it brought too many temptations to cut corners.

Above all, key Solidarity leaders including Lech Walesa himself had pulled punches when communism ended, allowing numerous communist villains to sneak away from their crimes only to return in expensive new suits, whistling nonchalantly as new European ‘social democrats’. It was this argument which so infuriated former Solidarity personalities – how dare the Kaczynskis call into question Poland’s (and Solidarity’s) supreme moral triumph in ending communism peacefully? Heresy.

In my view Lech Kaczynski wanted to win the 2005 Presidential election primarily to see his view of this recent history vindicated, rather than with any clear plans to do much about it. In particular there was no generalised throwing open of the communist archives – some commentators close to the Kaczynskis told me that key Solidarity people and many senior Catholic Church leaders had to be protected from devastating revelations of betrayal or private indiscretions.

As the post-communist Left reeled under one scandal after another, Lech Kaczynski campaigned against corruption at all levels of the state (with sly swipes at unwholesome ‘foreign’ influences), first as Justice Minister in 2000-2001 and then as Mayor of Warsaw.

As Mayor he set a new style. Official processes were meticulously if not painfully respected. Unspectacular but steady improvements were made. Corruption scandals faded away. This unassuming if not boring style went down well with the public.

And, yes, Mayor Kaczynski banned two gay parades. Not so much because he was against homosexuality (decriminalised in Poland decades before the United Kingdom got round to it), but rather because he thought that that sort of thing was just unseemly. The fact that many German and other foreign gay rights activists wanted to use the parades to challenge his authority made him more defiant.

Political Instability

The Kaczynskis also fretted over political instability itself; they did not want Poland slipping back into the ruinous feuding of the 1930s. By 2000 the dozens of political parties which had contested early post-communist elections had been reduced to some ten groupings. However, a quarter or more of Polish voters flirted with overtly populist leaders of a ‘Red-Brown’ inclination. Many were marginalised Poles from families displaced from Ukraine in World War Two and now somehow ‘rootless’ in poor rural areas.

After the Kaczynski PiS party (to their own surprise) became the largest party in the 2005 Parliamentary elections, the twins hit upon a strategy which scandalised many middle-class Poles: they formed a government with these populists, the Self-Defence and Polish Families parties led by Andrzej Lepper and Roman Giertych respectively.

This ridiculous government wobbled along for a year or so then collapsed, prompting the 2007 elections. The main centre right party Citizens Platform swept to power. Far from banging a ‘right wing’ free market drum, PiS talked about ‘social justice’ and strong state support for the less fortunate. PiS sucked in votes from different parts of the left spectrum. Self-Defence and Polish Families were crushed. The former communists struggled to get into double figures.

The result of the Kaczynskis’ crafty machinations has been a spectacular success for Poland and for Europe. Only four political groupings are now in Parliament, all committed to EU membership and modernising pro-Western policies. Polish politics, decision-making and institutions are notably more stable – Poland’s current fine run of economic success while the rest of Europe is faltering is no coincidence.

Poland and Europe

Finally, Lech Kaczynski wanted Poland to be strong in Europe. But he also wanted Western Europe to grasp that while it had prospered after World War Two, Poland had been left at Yalta to rot under Russian/Soviet rule. He insisted that the values of ‘modern Europe’ had been formed without Poland’s rightful participation, so Poland did not see itself as automatically bound by them. Yes, Poland would join the European Union. But it had not thrown off communist Moscow to submit to petty-bureaucratic Brussels.

Thus Poland’s tenacious negotiating positions over the 2005 EU Budget deal and the Lisbon Treaty. Other EU capitals saw the Kaczynskis as blustering amateurs who would quickly fold. I warned London that the Kaczynskis would be stubborn and skilful negotiators, and privately advised Tony Blair how to work with them.

Lech Kaczynski duly played on Angela Merkel’s desperation to get EU voting reweighted in Germany’s favour and extracted a remarkable concession, namely that Poland’s excellent voting weight under the Nice Treaty extend until late 2014. This gives Poland a stronger hand in the 2012/13 EU Budget negotiations. Kaczynski also steered Poland’s Eurozone membership issue into the long grass – again, a perspicacious outcome which has done Poland no harm.

Lech Kaczynski’s Legacy

Lech Kaczynski reminds me of Bill Buckley’s famous ambition for US conservatives, to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop!" His weakness was turning his fiercely held attitudes into policies. Far too often, especially in foreign policy pronouncements, he came across as heaving large lumps of Attitude into the river of current affairs, making an impressive splash but doing nothing to stop the water simply running past again.

Attitudes and policies come and go. For now let’s remember and respect what Lech and Maria Kaczynski did over more than 30 years to build a strong, honest Poland.

Yesterday on BBC and CNN I was asked whether Poland would slump into political instability, so many top people being lost in this disaster. I replied, “of course not”.

Poland is in deep sorrow, yet coping firmly and democratically with this calamity. Lech Kaczynski helped make that happen – a towering moral and political achievement, for Poland and for Europe.

* * * * *

The plaque for Sir Christopher Wren in St Paul's Cathedral says this:

si monumentum requiris, circumspice (if you seek his monument, look around you)

The same goes for Lech Kaczynski in his fine and honourable journey from child film star to law studies through internment and Solidarnosc, and then to his final years as Poland's third democratically elected leader.

I have just heard the appalling news about the crash near Smolensk of the plane carrying President Kaczynski and a senior delegation en route to Katyn.

As well as the President and his wife Maria it looks as if former President-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, head of the Institute of National Memory Janusz Kurtyk, head of the Polish National Bank Sławomir Skrzypek and dozens of other significant Polish personalities have perished as the plane tried to land in thick fog.

The Russians have moved fast to open an official investigation. The plane itself was the official President's jet, a Soviet-era designed Tu-154.

I knew many people on board. Beyond awful.

Lech Kaczynski was a man who fought long and hard to bring his country modern constitutional democracy. Interned by the Communists for his work for the Solidarity trade union, he worked closely with - then fell out with - Lech Walesa.

In the 1990s he held various prominent decisions before making his name denouncing corruption as Justice Minister in the Buzek government from 2000-2001. He then did well as Mayor of Warsaw and was elected President of Poland in 2005.

I met him on many occasions before and after he became President. My wife and I also much enjoyed the company of his wife Maria.

This is not the moment to write some wider thoughts about what the Kaczynski family represented. No doubt it will not take long before sneers about his supposed narrow-minded anti-gay Catholic reactionary anti-EU attitudes creep forth.

Suffice to say that Lech Kaczynski was not that. He was a highly intelligent, principled Polish statesman, who above all emphasised the central importance in public life of honesty, the law and democratic constitutionality . 

My own deepest condolences to his daughter Marta, his brother Jaroslaw and to his mother whom I had the honour to host in 2006 at the Residence in Warsaw on our Remembrance Day. She played her part in Poland's struggle for freedom in WW2. How tragic for her that one of her beloved twin sons has been lost today. 

Bored by the UK election campaign already? Missing meaning in your life? Or just nothing much to do tomorrow?

Pop over to Toronto for a gathering on the subject of Srebrenica: Myth, Manipulation, Historic Truth at St Sava church hall, 203 River Street. 3pm.

There you can expect to hear a range of speakers argue variously that the Srebrenica massacre didn't happen, and/or that if it did happen it was only a miserably small and irrelevant massacre, and/or and that the West/Moslems/UN/Holbrooke were 'really' reposnsible for it.

Check out this stunning thought from the Srebrenica Research Group:

Loath as we all are to disagree with Guido, on the issue of how fast votes are counted after elections he is Wrong and Iain Dale is Right.

In the FCO I have followed politics in communist Yugoslavia (no voting), apartheid South Africa (no voting for most people), Yeltsin's Russia (early democracy, pretty good voting), post-war Bosnia (internationally organised and incomprehensible voting), post-Milosevic Serbia (more or less normal voting) and finally Poland (normal voting).

My conclusion?

That the UK system - vote on Thursday, know the results by Friday morning, removal van comes to No 10 (or not ) on Friday afternoon, new government formed over weekend, PM visits HM The Queen to launch the new government early following week - is one of the great wonders of Civilisation.

It builds on the enthusiasm and energy of the election process to get counting done quickly and honestly, leading to an astonishing, fast handover of power - and responsibility.

National business is done expeditiously and accurately. The contrast with what happens almost everywhere else is remarkable.

Once delays in counting appear, things can go awry. Apart from blatant new opportunities for cheating (votes mysteriously get 'lost' overnight) the public are left wondering what happened to their votes.

Popular momentum for Change gets diluted. The strong sense that one party has Lost and another has Won is eroded. This sends all the wrong psychological signals in a functioning democracy.

Look at what happened in Bosnia in the 1996 elections, the first after Dayton. There were non-trivial concerns that the counting was manipulated over the best part of two weeks to ensure that Izetbegovic (Bosniac) was proclaimed to have won the most votes - a victory for Krajisnik (Serb) would have been a massive humiliation for the Clinton administration. This sort of thing is utterly demoralising for the population as a whole.

Another classic example of attempted post-election manipulation was Serbia in 2000 (emphasis added):

In mid-2000 Milosevic had called elections in Serbia. We knew what he planned: win or lose, he would proclaim victory and carry on regardless. Working with the Otpor student group we and the Americans helped ensure that networks of computers were set up to get the real results out as fast as possible.