ABSTRACT
The Ridley affair and the leaked Chequers memorandum on the German national character have revealed the existence of a Fawlty Towers tendency within the cabinet, so called after the episode in the tv series in which John Cleese/Basil Fawlty compulsively reminds his perfectly well-behaved German customers about the last war. Its new democratic political system had few supporters. Reunification, the dream of German nationalism, is being achieved peacefully and democratically with the blessing of both superpowers. It is understood in Paris and Bonn where the wait-and-see attitude of the British is rejected in favour of a more concrete support for Gorbachev. Great Britain, though one should say England, lags far behind, worrying about its past and its future, its foreign policy in disarray, its special relationship with the USA a music-hall joke, its European policy non-existent.
