Global politics - Upholding the integrity of elections

THIS may not be the best week for anyone who feels overwhelmed almost to the point of despair by the travails of this small Republic to look beyond these four green, damp fields in the hope that, elsewhere, better angels prevail.

Last weekend a former leader of the British Conservative Party, John Howard, suggested that Prime Minister Theresa May would be prepared to go to war to defend Britain’s imperial interests on the Rock of Gibraltar in the face of an EU commitment to prioritise neighbouring Spain’s interests in Brexit negotiations.

Mr Howard, once the butt of Ann Widdecombe’s infamous put-down — there is “something of the night about him” — compared Gibraltar to another remnant of empire and uninvited conquest, the Falklands. He suggested Ms May follow Margaret Thatcher’s example and send in the gunboats “to defend the freedom of another small group of British people against another Spanish-speaking country”. If someone once offered as a potential prime minister can be so patently unhinged, even if he spoke in jest, then it is almost possible to begin to understand the depth of the lunacy driving Brexit. But it gets worse.

US President Donald Trump has issued China with an ultimatum that unless it increases the pressure on North Korea to sideline its nuclear programme, then America will single-handedly move against Pyongyang. Mr Trump, whose grasp of foreign affairs may be even more tenuous than his grasp of America’s domestic reality, is scheduled to host the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, on Thursday and Friday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. They will discuss North Korea. Mr Trump’s guest may find the idea of an ultimatum novel to the point of being entertaining but the rest of us can only look on in dread, wondering if America’s system of checks and balances is capable of controlling the blowhard’s fantasies. Let us hope that it is.

Those two episodes might be examples of the grandstanding school of novice diplomacy but the warning from France’s polling watchdog over what it describes as a misleading Russian news report claiming that François Fillon, the scandal-hit conservative candidate, has regained the lead in the presidential race, is straight from the sinister tradition. It is an obvious attempt to destabilise the democratic process in France. It is also an attempt to facilitate the election of the hard right’s candidate, Marine Le Pen, who is committed to getting France to quit the EU, thereby weakening European solidarity and dividing those who might oppose Russia. It might be appealing to dismiss the accusation of election tampering as something from the vivid imagination of David Cornwell — John le Carré — but as the investigation into Russia’s role in Mr Trump’s election to the White House continues, it hardly seems far-fetched. The suggestion that two elections, one in a superpower and another in one of Europe’s most powerful countries, have been covertly influenced by Russia suggests the time has come to put in place measures to ensure integrity of our electoral process, especially as technology makes interference easier each and every election.