The Spectator's Notes | 10 September 2005

At the weekend, I was in Frederick the Great’s palace at Potsdam, attending a conference inspired by the indefatigable George Weidenfeld. As the elections approach, excitement is beginning to mount that Germany might be run by a woman for the first time. Angela Merkel must be irritated by the comparisons with Mrs Thatcher, because they disadvantage her both with people who hate the Iron Lady and with those who love her. Mrs Merkel is divorced, consensual, down-played, not very smartly dressed. But the coming of a woman on the public scene is always interesting because it still provokes reactions which are odder than the people who have them realise. Last week Chancellor Schröder’s wife Doris attacked Mrs Merkel, alleging that her childlessness made her incapable of understanding modern women. Despite having been married four times, Schröder himself is childless (his wife’s children are somebody else’s), but this is not held against him. Actually, Mrs Merkel’s lack of children makes her almost typical of Germany’s extraordinarily unreproductive indigenous population. One expert has calculated that, by 2020, 65–70 per cent of those over 60 in Germany will have no grandchildren. The German fear of Turkish entry into the European Union (which half-tacitly dominates this election) has everything to do with these numbers.

To my alarm, I realised that I first attended conferences of this ‘Whither Europe?’ variety more than 20 years ago. They have since taken me to lovely places — Granada, Venice, Versailles, Oxford — and introduced me to interesting people, but their agenda has been rather dismayingly similar. Potsdam brought home how much their tone has at last changed. At the first such occasion I attended (Cambridge in, I think, 1984)