Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 14 May 2015

The bombshell result jostled for prominence with statistics about Italian penis enlargement operations

On election day I was in Puglia in the ‘heel’ of Italy, where interest in British politics could hardly be lower. One local news website that I consulted appeared to give higher priority to the fact that Italian penis-enlargement operations had increased by 20 per cent during the past year than to the electoral bombshell in Britain. I was staying with friends in their beautifully restored house — a former olive-oil press — close to the sea and below the remarkable hilltop town of Ostuni, between Bari and Brindisi, known as ‘la città bianca’ for its white medieval walls and palaces. At dusk it seemed to glow as in a dream.

Puglia has a feel of greater antiquity than practically anywhere else in Italy, mainly because of its vast plantations of huge and ancient olive trees. With their enormous gnarled trunks they vaguely reminded me of the oak trees in Salcey Forest near to where I live in Northamptonshire. These, too, are hundreds of years old and look as if they might be immortal. It was in a house surrounded by such trees that we learnt of David Cameron’s shock election victory and of the SNP triumph in Scotland. We couldn’t follow the election on television, but we could keep up with developments on the internet and could listen live to the Today programme on Friday morning.

Britain’s political drama also seemed rather dreamlike from that distance, but by the weekend the Italian newspapers made clear it was real. There was an analysis in Corriere della Sera claiming it to be part of a shift to the right in politics across Europe; but mainly the Italian press seemed to use it as an excuse to promote its usual image of Britain as a quaint, class-ridden society full of weird traditions.

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