The man who invented the breathalyser more than 50 years ago was called Robert Borkenstein, a former policeman who had risen from the ranks to become head of the Department of Forensic Studies at Indiana University. He was very proud of his achievement. ‘If we can make life better simply by controlling alcohol, that’s a very small price to pay,’ he once said. ‘My whole life’s work has been spent trying to make life better for people.’ Well, he didn’t make it better for me. I lost my driving licence in September last year after failing a breath test in Buckinghamshire. Having a flat tyre on my way home from a Sunday birthday celebration, I pulled into a lay-by on a country road and dozed off at the wheel while awaiting the arrival of the AA. A passing member of the public — perhaps a good citizen fearing I was dead, or perhaps not — called the police. As a result I was 11 months off the road. I have been driving again now for a couple of months, but the price you pay for failing a breath test far exceeds that prescribed by the law. The cost of car insurance, if it’s granted you at all, is liable to rise dramatically; and, scandalously in my view, even the charge for applying for a new driving licence is substantially higher if the reason you lost the previous one had to do with alcohol.
One doesn’t expect sympathy for failing the breath test. It is an offence that attracts almost universal opprobrium and usually has the word ‘shame’ attached to it in tabloid headlines. But some perspective is required. Britain has fewer road deaths by number of cars than any of the 27 countries in the European Union, apart from Malta. And for its 3,000 deaths a year drink-driving takes more than its fair share of the blame, because unlike other causes of accidents — road rage, for example, or falling asleep at the wheel — it is the only one that the law can do anything to deter. In any case, there comes a point at which measures to promote road safety become so overbearing that they spread gloom and despondency throughout the land, and maybe have the opposite of their intended effect. To what extent, for example, do they contribute to the road rage at which Britain comes second in the world only to South Africa (where it’s so serious that some cars have built-in flame-throwers as a defence against it)? There is a road sign I once saw on a road in India in the foothills of the Himalayas: ‘Drinking whisky, driving risky.’ That may sound a little too nonchalant for most people, but it’s actually no more or less than the truth.
One unexpected side effect of my failing the breath test was the removal of my shotgun licence. In vain did I point out to the firearms officer in Northamptonshire, where I live, that I had never been drunk in charge of my shotgun, while most of England’s country gentry were habitually sozzled while out shooting (bullshots in mid-morning, Bloody Marys before lunch, much wine with the meal, port afterwards, and some nauseous sweet liqueur for the cold trudge home at dusk) but were never threatened with having their shotguns taken away.
The decision to deprive me of mine was probably for my own protection rather than anybody else’s, since the authorities must know that the treatment meted out to drink-drive offenders (including, in my case, hours in a police cell with shoes removed and only hard-porn magazines to read) might easily weaken the will to live. Even after I got my driving licence back, the Northamptonshire police refused to restore my shotgun, saying I would have to wait for it until next February. I don’t care, as a matter of fact, since I have all but given up shooting; but if I were a serious shot, it would have meant a second shooting season lost. A trifle vindictive, perhaps?
Ever since Henry Kissinger didn’t say what he was supposed to have said — ‘If I want to call Europe, whom do I call?’ — the United States has remained the strongest advocate of a federal Europe. It seems blindingly obvious to Americans that a united Europe, speaking with a single voice, would have far more power than 27 squabbling nation states, and it is beyond their comprehension that this is not regarded in Europe as a desirable objective. How could we allow little worries about national sovereignty to stand in the way of glory on the world stage? At a conference on US–Europe relations in London last weekend, the former senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bill Bradley, was the latest prominent American to lament Europe’s failure to unite. He seemed to assume that we would share his gloom over the fading prospects for European federalism. Little did he realise that the appointment of two nonentities to preside over the European Union has been received with widespread rejoicing because it means there will be no supranational figure in Europe that someone like Kissinger would find it worth talking to.
The conference, at University College London, was held under the auspices of the New York Review of Books, whose founding editor, Robert Silvers, has presided over the magazine for 47 years and celebrates his 80th birthday next month. A large dinner was held in his honour at UCL on Saturday. Silvers is a great editor, but in Britain he would probably have been ousted by now. There is far more ageism in Britain than in America, and what is pathetic is that the British are ageist because they think it is an American thing to be.
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