Don’t trust the German FDP, about to go into coalition, on Afghanistan. It is making welcome noises. But it is a party of both economic and social libertinism. People like that always believe in spreading it at the barrel of a gun. Sometimes they are open about this, sometimes they are not. Yet press any of them hard enough and you will get it out of them eventually.

Their position is also very militantly secular, as the FDP is entirely explicitly, coming as it does out of a specific German tradition of strident irreligion. So don’t trust, either, its apparent attitude when it backed the Pro Reli cause in Berlin, an unsuccessful referendum campaign to introduce there the compulsory religious instruction in schools that exists in the rest of the country. I think that the Pro Reli campaign was ill-conceived in certain specific ways. But of course I agree with the principle. The FDP affected to. Be not deceived. Merkel or no Merkel, the CDU still backed Pro Reli, mindful of its own name and heritage, and doubtless moved by the fact that global events have rather overtaken the decidedly anti-Christian and anti-democratic forces of capitalism and warmongering. The more Reli to inoculate people against those two, the better. But the FDP is fully signed up to the former, which of course means that, openly or otherwise, it is also fully signed up to the latter.

What is more, Pro Reli was also backed by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the SPD Leader who is about to leave government and be replaced by someone from the FDP. Anyone from the SPD who backs something like Pro Reli really does believe in it. He really is in the same tradition as Dixiecrats, or those Labour Council Chairmen over here to whom it would simply never occur to cancel the Christmas carol service, whatever might go on in a handful of London Boroughs to whose eccentric Labour Parties the Berlin SPD corresponds, as it does to the Democratic Party is the most secular parts of urban America. A contest between two at least nominally Pro Reli candidates, but one of whom was like that while the other was Angela Merkel, was really no contest at all. The good guy has lost. Which is bad. But which will be made even worse when his party’s replacement in coalition is the FDP.

And in that event, how much longer could the very, very Catholic Bavarian CSU associate with what still purported to be the CDU? Every cloud…