Donald Jenkins

With the change in my lifestyle, interests and job that occurred last year, and also the decision to switch to English after three years of blogging in French, the time has come to draw the process to a logical conclusion and make donaldjenkins.net my only home on the web.

Mr Obama’s position on capital punishment has shifted, from opposition in 1996 to support in limited circumstances. Yet he will, I believe, push for criminal justice reform. He can also indirectly influence death penalty decisions through his nominations to the Supreme Court, where Justices Stevens—a liberal on the death penalty despite being a Republican appointee—and Ginsburg may well need to be replaced. I can only hope that the debate on the issue will continue to result in “standards of decency”, which have already shifted sufficiently to provoke debate on the constitutionality of lethal injection and put an end to the practice of executing minors, evolving further in the direction of complete abolition.

It is pretty standard, nowadays, to denigrate Nancy Mitford as frivolous and out of touch, but I’ve always had a sneaking liking for someone who was easily the loveliest of the Mitford sisters. Conventional modern Britain has obviously lost sight of a lot of the values that underly her books and are no longer valued in a country where Mr. Blair and the late Princess of Wales are held up as role-models. A lot of these contemporary prejudices have to do, of course, with her choice of vocabulary, well-illustrated, I think, in the above sentence that manages to refer to both loos and writing-paper. But there is more to Nancy Mitford than that. Two factors stand out in my own personal experience: her fondness for France—despite remaining British to the core—and the genuine detachment with which she viewed the social structures in which she grew up. She understood them perfectly, yet was aware of their absurdities. And, on balance, she probably believed they were best left untouched.