Latest news with #Svengali
Gulf Today
6 days ago
- Business
- Gulf Today
Calling Cameron ‘man baby' for resigning over Brexit
We hardly need reminding that Brexit is barely living up to the ideal of the buccaneering 'global Britain' we were promised. Right now, it's more like a clown show. Leaving the European Union was the malign gift that keeps on giving. It has caused the social and economic damage we see around us, cramping living standards, public services, and even the defence of the realm for want of the prosperity we once took for granted. It has had a baleful effect on investment and growth, and left Britain a meaner, poorer, grubbier place. Indeed, it may well be said that Brexit broke Britain, and created a new wave of grievances for Nigel Farage to exploit. It's his Ponzi scheme. So won't someone spare a thought for those who got us into this mess? Those like Michael Gove, and his now-former wife Sarah Vine, who has written a memoir of her life as a Westminster Wag. Always a fluent writer, trenchant and not especially likeable, Vine makes it clear in the extracts published thus far that not only did Brexit break Britain, it also broke her and Gove's somewhat one-sided and demi-mercenary 'friendship' with David and Samantha Cameron. It doesn't seem to have done much good to the Goves' own relationship, either (albeit as only one of the many strains inherent in being a political couple). At any rate, Vine still despises Cameron. This is personal. Her illusions about the true nature of their friendship were shattered when she felt the 'abyss of class' between them. Gove was havering about which side to back in the EU referendum, torn between his genuine Euroscepticism (unlike Boris Johnson's) and the loyalty he felt to his party leader. Cameron, pink-faced and charming but always with the whiff of Flashman about him, barked at Vine to 'get her husband under control': 'Sarah, I'm fighting for my political life here.' But it's political contempt, too, that Vine feels, so she also charges David Cameron with cowardice — being a 'man baby' when he lost the Brexit referendum and immediately resigned as prime minister. As she puts it: 'What an impossible, irresponsible child, throwing his toys out of the pram because he hadn't got his own way. It felt a bit like he would sooner bring the country down than let Leave have its victory. Et tu, Pontius Pilate.' Fair? Certainly, it was childish. But in many ways, it feels like it no longer matters. Aside from a brief and, in the end, futile return as foreign secretary under Rishi Sunak, Cameron's political career was over the moment David Dimbleby declared 'We're out' on the television. Same for all of them. Gove is now an elder statesman, a peer and editor of The Spectator, and a one-time Svengali to Kemi Badenoch – but his party is in the toilet. A return to power for any of the people concerned looks about as likely as Elvis Presley being found alive on the moon. The chumocracy was as broken by Brexit as was Britain. Johnson, never that close to Gove, fell out with him shortly after the referendum vote, when Gove stabbed him in the front during the post-Cameron leadership election. Only George Osborne seems to have emerged from it all without serious PTSD. For what it's worth, it seems to me that Cameron did certainly break his promise to the British people — that whatever the result of the referendum, he would carry on as prime minister. But on that grim June morning when everything changed, that felt like a ridiculous idea. It was his referendum. It was his idea. Osborne had cautioned against it, and Gove might have preferred that it hadn't happened, because, in the end, it finished off his chances of ever getting the top job, and of his missus becoming Britain's 'first lady' as opposed to just First Lady of Fleet Street. It would have been impossible for Cameron to carry on and negotiate Brexit. Farage would have claimed he wasn't a 'true believer' (correct, obviously), and Cameron would never have been safe from Johnson's unquenchable ambition. Sean O'Grady, The Independent
NZ Herald
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Why Greta Garbo really disappeared – and her five films you have to see
In the process, though, she developed a crippling case of buyer's remorse. 'I want to be alone,' she remarked in Grand Hotel (1932) – the line that first became her most famous catchphrase, and then, seemingly, her life's motto. A 2025 documentary on Sky, Garbo: Where Did You Go?, tackles the identity crisis she went through in creating Greta Garbo, then turning her back on that very persona. She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in 1905, the third child of factory workers. Their flat was in Södermalm, known then as the 'slum' of Stockholm, and there were no expectations for Greta to amount to anything. She might not have done, if it weren't for a fascination with theatre at school, and the first job that got her noticed, as a department store's fashion model. The Svengali who propelled her to fame was the Finnish filmmaker Mauritz Stiller, then the second-most important figure in Sweden's burgeoning silent cinema (behind The Wind director Victor Sjöström). Garbo's relationship with Stiller was fraught, both professionally and romantically (both were bisexual). He plucked Garbo out of drama school and cast her in the romantic epic The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924) – not playing the lead, but in an emotionally demanding supporting role. Her screen presence proved so electric that a private viewing of the film enraptured Louis B Mayer, who brought her to Hollywood with Stiller and enlisted his second-in-command at MGM, Irving Thalberg, to sculpt her into the star she became. She was told to lose weight and get her teeth fixed – easily done. As Annette Talpert wrote in a book about Golden Age Hollywood glamour, 'Garbo's face was so well proportioned that, for years, plastic surgeons proclaimed it the hallmark of perfection.' From the start, though, she was unhappy with the roles MGM foisted upon her. According to Norma Shearer (Thalberg's wife), 'She didn't like playing the exotic, the sophisticated, the woman of the world.' After all, she was barely 20 when she got top-billing in such racy entertainments as The Temptress (1926) – a chaotically expensive romp, which saw Stiller replaced by another director – and Flesh and the Devil (1926), which paired her for the first of three times with a male megastar of the day, John Gilbert. Their scorching love scenes were much talked about, and gained scandalous voltage because everyone knew Garbo and Gilbert were entwined off-screen, too. By their third vehicle, A Woman of Affairs (1928), Garbo had replaced the silent doyenne Lillian Gish as Hollywood's top-grossing star. MGM's main worry was that Garbo's Swedish accent would be her undoing. In fact, though, she was among the few, lucky silent stars who survived the transition to sound with their marquee value only boosted. 'Garbo Talks!' trumpeted the ads for her first sound film, the stagey Eugene O'Neill adaptation Anna Christie (1930), which cashed in on that slogan to become, bizarrely, a major hit: she was playing a downtrodden Swedish ex-brothel-worker getting soused on a barge in Provincetown. Her first line sets the tone: 'Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby!' Critics rhapsodised about her command of English – fluent by now – and how ideally her speaking voice, a husky contralto, fitted her established persona. Indeed, she was so comfortable in this second tongue that Anna's Swedish accent needed beefing up in retakes. She'd score her first of three Best Actress Oscar nominations. These were Garbo's glory years – the years of Grand Hotel, of renegotiating her MGM contract, and insisting on the lavish period drama Queen Christina (1933) ('Garbo Returns!') as her next vehicle. She would flex her power in the industry for as long as it lasted. MGM wanted Charles Boyer or Laurence Olivier as her leading man. Over her dead body. She demanded they bring back her ex-lover Gilbert, even though his career was in serious decline, his fourth marriage a year off divorce, and his health succumbing to the terminal alcoholism that would cause his death in 1936. Playing Sweden's 17th-century monarch was the type of serious acting challenge Garbo most relished, letting her play a strong-willed woman of destiny in modishly masculine attire. Yet even this experience was dismaying. She fretted about how the film would be received in her native Sweden, paranoid about historical absurdities. 'Just imagine Christina abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard!' she wrote to a friend. Advertise with NZME. Garbo's aversion to publicity was already infamous. There's a picture of her in New York in 1938, surrounded by a pack of scribbling reporters. Her gaze, somewhere above their heads, is as trapped and tragic as many of her major characters. On her infrequent return trips to her beloved motherland, the situation was even worse – as a national icon, she ignited a frenzy of well-wishing curiosity. Achieving any kind of privacy was next to impossible. At the outset of her career, Garbo was content to be photographed in controlled circumstances, accepting this as a necessary aspect of stardom. But she couldn't deal with the stalking, scandal-mongering attentions of photojournalists out on the streets. While the term 'paparazzo' wasn't coined until La Dolce Vita (1960), the profession certainly pre-dated that. Indeed, the mass production of compact Leica cameras, which became all the rage for snooping freelancers, coincided with the very years that Garbo's stardom peaked. Nothing triggered demand for 'candid' Garbo snaps more than her obvious loathing for having her privacy invaded. Much like Diana, she faced relentless pursuit and harassment that was very real, and irrevocably soured her relationship with celebrity. The more she was labelled a 'recluse' – especially in her post-retirement years, when she became a US citizen and settled in New York City – the more value these stolen images of Garbo began to hold. If they fed into the myth – say, showing one hand held up to block the lens, and one displeased eye peering out – so much the better. There was no waning phase of Garbo's acting career. One of her brightest hits, Ernst Lubitsch's jaunty romcom Ninotchka, delighted everyone ('Garbo Laughs!'). If Ninotchka hadn't had the bad luck to come out in Hollywood's greatest year, 1939, she'd surely have won that elusive Oscar. (She lost to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind.) It would prove to be her penultimate film. The last one was George Cukor's poorly received Two-Faced Woman (1941), because a purported comeback in 1949 with The Duchess of Langeais amounted to nothing when she simply changed her mind. After that, she reverted as far as she could to being Greta Lovisa Gustafsson – albeit as a New Yorker, since the residents of Södermalm would never have left her alone. For all that the 'recluse' label was stamped upon her for the next half-century, Lorna Tucker's Sky documentary argues that this was largely a media fiction, and that Garbo's private life was more hedonistic and sillier than anyone knew at the time. Indeed, it was often happy. She had long affairs, including with the fashion designer Cecil Beaton and the playwright Mercedes de Acosta. She partied – privately – with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Truman Capote. She simply avoided the press, turned away from every camera she spotted, and walked the streets of Manhattan incognito in trench coats and broad-rimmed hats. 'I want to be left alone,' she once clarified about what she had really said in Grand Hotel – the suggestion being that she merely wanted to choose her company, and live in a protected bubble. The difference may be subtle, but it's everything. Greta Garbo's five essential films 1. Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) In this Best Picture-winning ensemble stunner, Garbo ruled the roost as the prima ballerina Gruzinskaya, whose career – ironically – is on the descent. She's the most famous permanent resident of Berlin's Grand Hotel, with fellow guests played by the likes of Joan Crawford, Wallace Berry and both Barrymores (John and Lionel), making this the starriest attraction the early talkies had yet seen. It also set the template for all films in which narratives converge around a single location, paving the way for the likes of Murder on the Orient Express and, naturally, The Grand Budapest Hotel. As an aloof diva who contemplates suicide, Garbo found a role which let her express the alienation of being so famous. 2. Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933) This was the role she simply could not be refused: after a sojourn home in Sweden, and the end of her original MGM contract, she demanded $250,000 per film, and chose this risky project to mark her return. Christina, Sweden's most celebrated female monarch, is perhaps Garbo's single most defining character, a monarch as steely as Elizabeth I for different reasons: her refusal to marry, secret conversion to Catholicism, and eventual decision to relinquish the throne. While Garbo was never happy with the love story – despite enlisting John Gilbert to help her through it – the pageantry is top-notch, and the final close-up of Christina facing her future on a ship's prow is immortal. Advertise with NZME. 3. Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935) This was very much Garbo in her peak 'tragic women of destiny' phase – outstripping her peer and close friend Katharine Hepburn, who was busy making a string of flops along similar lines. It was Garbo's second stab at playing Tolstoy's doomed adulteress: she had made a silent version called Love (1927), opposite Gilbert as Count Vronsky, which was a huge success. So was this, pairing her with the infallible Fredric March, but focusing more intently on her private anguish. It compresses 900-odd pages of plot into a tidy 95-minute frame – not one for purists, but alluringly moody, with striking use of steam, shadow and the train's rhythmic chuffing, all beckoning Anna to her fate. 4. Camille (George Cukor, 1936) Cukor may have directed Garbo in her swansong – which he later castigated as 'lousy' and 'most unfortunate' – but he also coaxed her most heart-piercing turn in this classic example of a 1930s 'women's picture'. Pedigree, again, was key: it was the umpteenth adaptation of the book and play La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. Garbo glowed as the courtesan heroine Marguerite Gautier, who falls for a low-born charmer (Robert Taylor) but is struck down by consumption before she can find true happiness. The star left no dry eyes with her coughing demise at the end, and was Oscar-nominated for a second time. 'Garbo Dies,' they might have quipped. 5. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) This was the three-sentence story idea that dramatist Melchior Lengyel pitched to MGM at a poolside meeting. 'Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad, after all.' Beyond the satire, it was a perfect chance to show off the funny side of Garbo that audiences had never seen – especially with Billy Wilder taking a hand in the script, and Lubitsch, a master of sophisticated comedy, calling the shots. The plot revolves around jewellery stolen during the Russian Revolution, until Garbo's frosty Soviet envoy Nina Yakushova melts, gloriously, under the attentions of Melvyn Douglas's suave Count Léon.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why Greta Garbo really disappeared – and her five films you have to see
No star has ever retired as successfully, completely, and without fuss as Greta Garbo. This Swedish-American icon of the silver screen didn't even make a formal announcement when she decided to hang up her hat. Still, it was an impressively clean break which lasted far longer than her stardom itself. Compared with today's celebrities, forever issuing self-conscious statements about scaling back their careers, Garbo's scorched-earth disappearance is a model, not of talking the talk, but walking the walk. Away. She was everywhere – and then, quite suddenly, nowhere. The year was 1941. Garbo was only 35, and her disillusionment with Hollywood's creative process would brook no more disagreements. All she had ever wanted to be was globally renowned as an actress. She had achieved that fivefold, becoming the most famous woman on the planet, not to mention known as the most beautiful – something like her era's Princess Diana, if we go by the relentless press coverage. In the process, though, she developed a crippling case of buyer's remorse. 'I want to be alone,' she remarked in Grand Hotel (1932) – the line that first became her most famous catchphrase, and then, seemingly, her life's motto. A 2025 documentary on Sky, Garbo: Where Did You Go?, tackles the identity crisis she went through in creating Greta Garbo, then turning her back on that very persona. She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in 1905, the third child of factory workers. Their flat was in Södermalm, known then as the 'slum' of Stockholm, and there were no expectations for Greta to amount to anything. She might not have done, if it weren't for a fascination with theatre at school, and the first job that got her noticed, as a department store's fashion model. The Svengali who propelled her to fame was the Finnish filmmaker Mauritz Stiller, then the second-most important figure in Sweden's burgeoning silent cinema (behind The Wind director Victor Sjöström). Garbo's relationship with Stiller was fraught, both professionally and romantically. (Both were bisexual.) He plucked Garbo out of drama school and cast her in the romantic epic The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924) – not playing the lead, but in an emotionally demanding supporting role. Her screen presence proved so electric that a private viewing of the film enraptured Louis B Mayer, who brought her to Hollywood with Stiller, and enlisted his second-in-command at MGM, Irving Thalberg, to sculpt her into the star she became. She was told to lose weight and get her teeth fixed – easily done. As Annette Talpert wrote in a book about Golden Age Hollywood glamour, 'Garbo's face was so well proportioned that for years plastic surgeons proclaimed it the hallmark of perfection.' From the start, though, she was unhappy with the roles MGM foisted upon her. According to Norma Shearer (Thalberg's wife), 'She didn't like playing the exotic, the sophisticated, the woman of the world.' After all, she was barely 20 when she got top-billing in such racy entertainments as The Temptress (1926) – a chaotically expensive romp, which saw Stiller replaced by another director – and Flesh and the Devil (1926), which paired her for the first of three times with a male megastar of the day, John Gilbert. Their scorching love scenes were much talked about, and gained scandalous voltage because everyone knew Garbo and Gilbert were entwined off-screen, too. By their third vehicle, A Woman of Affairs (1928), Garbo had replaced the silent doyenne Lillian Gish as Hollywood's top-grossing star. MGM's main worry was that Garbo's Swedish accent would be her undoing. In fact, though, she was among the few, lucky silent stars who survived the transition to sound with their marquee value only boosted. 'Garbo Talks!' trumpeted the ads for her first sound film, the stagey Eugene O'Neill adaptation Anna Christie (1930), which cashed in on that slogan to become, bizarrely, a major hit: she was playing a downtrodden Swedish ex-brothel-worker getting soused on a barge in Provincetown. Her first line sets the tone: 'Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby!' Critics rhapsodised about her command of English – fluent by now – and how ideally her speaking voice, a husky contralto, fit her established persona. Indeed, she was so comfortable in this second tongue that Anna's Swedish accent needed beefing up in retakes. She'd score her first of three Best Actress Oscar nominations. These were Garbo's glory years – the years of Grand Hotel, of renegotiating her MGM contract, and insisting on the lavish period drama Queen Christina (1933) ('Garbo Returns!') as her next vehicle. She would flex her power in the industry for as long as it lasted. MGM wanted Charles Boyer or Laurence Olivier as her leading man. Over her dead body. She demanded they bring back her ex-lover Gilbert, even though his career was in serious decline, his fourth marriage a year off divorce, and his health succumbing to the terminal alcoholism that would cause his death in 1936. Playing Sweden's 17th century monarch was the type of serious acting challenge Garbo most relished, letting her play a strong-willed woman of destiny in modishly masculine attire. And yet even this experience was dismaying. She fretted about how the film would be received in her native Sweden, paranoid about historical absurdities. 'Just imagine Christina abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard!' she wrote to a friend. Garbo's aversion to publicity was already infamous. There's a picture of her in New York in 1938, surrounded by a pack of scribbling reporters. Her gaze, somewhere above their heads, is as trapped and tragic as many of her major characters. On her infrequent return trips to her beloved motherland, the situation was even worse – as a national icon, she ignited a frenzy of well-wishing curiosity. Achieving any kind of privacy was next to impossible. At the outset of her career, Garbo was content to be photographed in controlled circumstances, accepting this as a necessary aspect of stardom. But she couldn't deal with the stalking, scandal-mongering attentions of photojournalists out on the streets. While the term 'paparazzo' wasn't coined until La Dolce Vita (1960), the profession certainly pre-dated that. Indeed, the mass production of compact Leica cameras, which became all the rage for snooping freelancers, coincided with the very years that Garbo's stardom peaked. Nothing triggered demand for 'candid' Garbo snaps more than her obvious loathing for having her privacy invaded. Much like Diana, she faced relentless pursuit and harassment that was very real, and irrevocably soured her relationship to celebrity. The more she was labelled a 'recluse' – especially in her post-retirement years, when she became a US citizen and settled in New York City – the more value these stolen images of Garbo began to hold. If they fed into the myth – say, showing one hand held up to block the lens, and one displeased eye peering out – so much the better. There was no waning phase of Garbo's acting career. One of her brightest hits, Ernst Lubitsch's jaunty romcom Ninotchka, delighted everyone ('Garbo Laughs!'). If Ninotchka hadn't had the bad luck to come out in Hollywood's greatest year, 1939, she'd surely have won that elusive Oscar. (She lost to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind.) It would prove her penultimate film. The last one was George Cukor's poorly received Two-Faced Woman (1941), because a purported comeback in 1949 with The Duchess of Langeais amounted to nothing when she simply changed her mind. After that, she reverted as far as she could to being Greta Lovisa Gustafsson – albeit as a New Yorker, since the residents of Södermalm would never have left her alone. For all that the 'recluse' label was stamped upon her for the next half-century, Lorna Tucker's Sky documentary argues that this was largely a media fiction, and that Garbo's private life was more hedonistic, and sillier, than anyone knew at the time. Indeed, it was often happy. She had long affairs, including with the fashion designer Cecil Beaton and the playwright Mercedes de Acosta. She partied – privately – with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Truman Capote. She simply avoided the press, turned away from every camera she spotted, and walked the streets of Manhattan incognito in trench coats and broad-rimmed hats. 'I want to be left alone,' she once clarified about what she had really said in Grand Hotel – the suggestion being that she merely wanted to choose her company, and live in a protected bubble. The difference may be subtle, but it's everything. Greta Garbo's five essential films 1. Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) In this Best Picture-winning ensemble stunner, Garbo ruled the roost as the prima ballerina Gruzinskaya, whose career – ironically – is on the descent. She's the most famous permanent resident of Berlin's Grand Hotel, with fellow guests played by the likes of Joan Crawford, Wallace Berry, and both Barrymores (John and Lionel), making this the starriest attraction the early talkies had yet seen. It also set the template for all films in which narratives converge around a single location, paving the way for the likes of Murder on the Orient Express and, naturally, The Grand Budapest Hotel. As an aloof diva who contemplates suicide, Garbo found a role which let her express the alienation of being so famous. Available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Sky 2. Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933) This was the role she simply could not be refused: after a sojourn home in Sweden, and the end of her original MGM contract, she demanded $250,000 per film, and chose this risky project to mark her return. Christina, Sweden's most celebrated female monarch, is perhaps Garbo's single most defining character, a monarch as steely as Elizabeth I for different reasons: her refusal to marry, secret conversion to Catholicism, and eventual decision to relinquish the throne. While Garbo was never happy with the love story – despite enlisting John Gilbert to help her through it – the pageantry is top-notch, and the final close-up of Christina facing her future on a ship's prow is immortal. Available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime 3. Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935) This was very much Garbo in her peak 'tragic women of destiny' phase – outstripping her peer and close friend Katharine Hepburn, who was busy making a string of flops along similar lines. It was Garbo's second stab at playing Tolstoy's doomed adulteress: she had made a silent version called Love (1927), opposite Gilbert as Count Vronsky, which was a huge success. So was this, pairing her with the infallible Fredric March, but focusing more intently on her private anguish. It compresses 900-odd pages of plot into a tidy 95-minute frame – not one for purists, but alluringly moody, with striking use of steam, shadow and the train's rhythmic chuffing, all beckoning Anna to her fate. Available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime 4. Camille (George Cukor, 1936) Cukor may have directed Garbo in her swansong – which he later castigated as 'lousy' and 'most unfortunate' – but he also coaxed her most heart-piercing turn in this classic example of a 1930s 'women's picture'. Pedigree, again, was key: it was the umpteenth adaptation of the book and play La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. Garbo glowed as the courtesan heroine Marguerite Gautier, who falls for a low-born charmer (Robert Taylor) but is struck down by consumption before she can find true happiness. The star left no dry eyes with her coughing demise at the end, and was Oscar-nominated for a second time. 'Garbo Dies,' they might have quipped. Available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime 5. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) This was the three-sentence story idea that dramatist Melchior Lengyel pitched to MGM at a poolside meeting. 'Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad, after all.' Beyond the satire, it was a perfect chance to show off the funny side of Garbo audiences had never seen – especially with Billy Wilder taking a hand in the script, and Lubitsch, a master of sophisticated comedy, calling the shots. The plot revolves around jewellery stolen during the Russian Revolution, until Garbo's frosty Soviet envoy Nina Yakushova melts, gloriously, under the attentions of Melvyn Douglas's suave Count Léon. Available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime
National Post
01-05-2025
- Business
- National Post
Terry Glavin: Mark Carney owes Jagmeet Singh a massive thank you for NDP implosion
It's a verdict that's rapidly embedding itself as the answer to the riddle of the Liberal party's revival from its vegetative state as recently as last December to this week's election-day comeback, only a handful of seats shy of a majority in the House of Commons: Party standard-bearer Mark Carney owes his triumph to Donald Trump. Article content Article content The notion is particularly popular in the United States. In Democratic party circles, especially, Canadians have lately become celebrated as plucky allies in the gallant resistance to their daft president's jingoistic threats to break all the rules of global neoliberalism, annexing Canada along with Greenland in the bargain. Article content There's definitely a case to be made for the proposition. Canadians are furious about all this, and a suave and worldly big-money asset manager should be presumed to possess a competence and dexterity that would definitely count as an advantage in the daunting work of muddling through the mercurial president's tariff-war belligerence. Then again, Carney's unique skill set would also lend itself well to the fashioning of elaborate masquerades of ad valorem equivalents, GATT Article 20 exemptions and other such resorts to the highly-specialized vocabulary of international trade pacts in order to camouflage a capitulation to the White House, or a suicidal deepening of economic dependence on China. You could dress these things up as masterstrokes of highbrow statesmanship. Article content Article content But never mind that. The Liberals successfully marketed Carney as a kind of Svengali, and a significant body of voters bought it, so fair play to the Liberals. Article content It's just that the presence of a dangerous president in the White House might not have been that much more significant in the scheme of things than the bizarre absence of someone else. Article content Article content You'd never know it, but until just last month, Canada's prime minister was Justin Trudeau. After Carney was formally anointed March 9 at the conclusion of the heavily ritualized Liberal leadership succession, Trudeau simply vanished from public view. He'd been prime minister for nearly a decade, and he was suddenly made invisible. Article content Article content Everyone appears to agree that the just concluded federal election was one of the weirdest and most momentous ever. Carney has called the election 'one of those hinge moments of history,' and it was. 'Existential' is a word that came up a lot. Article content We know Justin Trudeau still exists. On March 17, he posted a selfie on Instagram. He was buying kitchen utensils at a Canadian Tire store, apparently in Ottawa. The Globe and Mail has cited unnamed sources who say Trudeau is renting a house in Ottawa's Rockcliffe neighbourhood. That's all we've heard from him. Article content The peculiarity of this state of affairs can be explained by the Liberal party's understandable determination to induce a state of amnesia in the electorate, owing to the catastrophe of the Liberals' more than nine years in power and the galloping unpopularity of Trudeau himself. By the final days of 2024, the Liberals' approval ratings had been reduced to what pollster Angus Reid calculated at just 16 per cent.
The Independent
02-04-2025
- Business
- The Independent
There is now only a slim chance that a global recession can be averted
Most presidents of the United States seek to build. Donald Trump seeks only to do the opposite – ironically, given his history as a prominent property developer. In the circumstances, announcing a series of devastating differential "reciprocal" tariffs on the US's major trading partners in the charming environs of the White House Rose Garden seemed rather incongruous. Then again, as the true enormity of what is at hand became clear, the wind got up and there was a sense of a storm coming. That was far more fitting. His first days in office were marked by wild executive orders inflicted on the federal government and on the constitution of the United States. His whirlwind continues – although the defeat of a Trumpian judge in an election in Wisconsin is perhaps a small sign that the US is growing weary of the efforts of the president and his noisy Svengali, Elon Musk. In the name of what seems a futile search for peace in Ukraine, the president has also applied his nihilism to the US's traditional alliances, not least Nato, where he has chosen to abuse friends and allies while simultaneously flattering and appeasing Vladimir Putin. To astonishment, the US has told former partners, from Canada to Ukraine to Japan, that the US no longer has a strategic interest in their survival as independent sovereign states, and in any case no longer shares their values. Matters are now purely transactional. The international rules-based order that took eight decades to construct and won the Cold War has been comprehensively abandoned within 80 days of Mr Trump's inauguration, exceeding even the worst of fears. It is scarcely believable, but tragically true that the president seeks to annex Greenland and absorb Canada. The result has been to plunge the US and the world into a state of permanent crisis. Having tested the fabric of American political life and the international order, the president is now rapidly reaching the final stages in dismantling the post-war economic order, too. As with the military and diplomatic alliances that protected the US and its partners for so long, so too with the institutions and policies that helped propel the world to unprecedented progress and prosperity. Decades of painstaking work to grow international trade and establish a rules-based system eventually overseen by the World Trade Organisation are being undone by the stroke of a presidential Sharpie. It is a revolution, and it has already wrought chaos in financial markets and the corporate world. In the space of less than one hour, interspersed with the usual rambling digressions, Mr Trump visited enormous economic hardship on what he would call "friend and foe" alike. China, predictably, came in for the most vindictive treatment – a blanket tariff of 34 per cent, but the EU, scrambling to defend itself from Russia, has been whacked with a 20 per cent tax. The British, let off with a 10 per cent charge, need not feel too smug – the global trade slowdown this will trigger will hit the UK's feeble growth prospects hard. With his much-trumpeted 'Liberation Day' tariff announcement, Mr Trump seeks nothing less than the reversal of globalisation and the disruption of highly efficient integrated supply chains and markets in the name of a senseless zero-sum economic nationalism. All the lessons of history and practical economics are abandoned in the cause of crude protectionism – specifically mercantilism, in which politicians such as Mr Trump, rather than markets, determine what is made where and by whom. Mr Trump, a child of his times whose formative years were marked by the rise of German and Japanese industrial power, seeks to return the US to its status as a great manufacturing nation, even though other nations build cars and make steel better and more cheaply. It is a fundamentally atavistic vision of the US's economic future, and it will serve Americans badly. So far from being the disaster zone he so often describes, the US as a whole has never had it so good. Its economy has lately been growing strongly, and in most places living standards are high and rising. The problem has been the lack of care and attention given to the casualties of globalisation. Mr Trump blames foreigners – who else? – for the dislocations caused, and sincerely believes, absurdly, that the US can be self-sufficient in almost everything. Early on in his first term, he wrote 'TRADE IS BAD' on the top of a draft speech for an international economic summit. That simple and simplistic belief is the key to what is befalling the global economy now. America First is becoming America Only, which might be fine for Americans if it was true. But, unlike the world of real estate deals, trade need not be a zero-sum game. Just as the gradual easing of trade restrictions drove productivity and economic growth higher, so it is also the grim historical experience that no one wins trade wars, and they can lead to real wars. Tariffs will make Americans poorer, make businesses less competitive, and the retaliation by the EU, China and others will cut off valuable export markets, particularly for farmers and the oil industry. The import taxes cannot simultaneously yield the vast revenues predicted by Mr Trump – paid if goods are still imported in the same volumes – and restore US jobs, if there is no change in consumer behaviour and no switching of purchases to buy American, which means lower imports and tariff revenues. As things stand, it seems too late to try to reason with Mr Trump. The only hope is that out of chaos will emerge a new order and, through negotiations, the US and its major trading partners can end up with tariffs that are actually lower than before. Restraint is required if tit-for-tat tariffs are not to escalate to absurd and catastrophically damaging levels. There's a slim chance that a global trade recession can be avoided, and even that a new settlement can benefit all sides. At the conclusion of his remarks the president hinted that this initiative could be the beginning of a more benign process of tariff reduction. Certainly, something akin to the peace process that follows a real war will be needed to restore order.
