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In June, 1959, Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel, then Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, got frightfully pissed on a club crawl in Soho, as one did in those days.

One drink led to another, and before you knew it Lord Home climbed on top of a table and went into a dance. Later he didn’t remember much of his choreographic exertions, so the exact tune and the dance steps remained shrouded in mystery.

However, both the song and the steps must have been rather energetic, for Lord Home fell off the table and broke his foot.

Later he hastened to reassure his colleagues and the local Tory organisation that no impropriety normally associated with Soho clubs was involved. In fact Lord Home was dancing not with naked strippers but with his wife Baroness Home who probably was dressed, at least partly.

Commenting on the mishap, Lord Home stuck to the bare bones: “I was dancing on a table in a bar in Soho when I fell off and broke my foot. My wife Elizabeth was with me – but thankfully she’s a far better dancer so didn’t fall off.”

No suggestion was put forth by anyone involved that the Baroness’s knack for dancing atop furniture could be parlayed into a lucrative career in that part of London.

Perhaps it was understood that a Soho couch dancer would be an inappropriate spouse for a Tory minister. Or else it was Lord Home himself who put his broken foot down (“A chap has to draw the line somewhere, what-what?”).

Instead everyone had a good laugh. For example a Tory councillor from Lord Home’s county said, “We found it hilarious and gave him plenty of stick. The imagination runs wild when you hear it was when he was dancing on a table at a bar in Soho.”

Another local activist also saw the hilarity: “Alec definitely has a fun side. Obviously we’re sad to hear he has broken his foot but we will be giving him some stick about how he did it. We’ll have to try and get him a buggy or wheelchair so he can do his usual tour of everything.”

In short, a good time was had by all – especially since Lord Home pressed on with his duties, courageously refusing to cancel his forthcoming tour of North Africa. “He’s a real trooper,” commented a ministerial colleague.

Do you believe this story? Of course you don’t – it’s too preposterous for words. No one in his right mind would believe for a second that the somewhat limited but utterly proper Alec-Douglas Home, the future PM, could have found himself in such a risible bind.

Well, you’re right. You shouldn’t believe the story because I’ve made it up.

Actually, I didn’t make up the events and the comments on them as such – I merely shifted them back to the 1950s from the time they actually happened, which was a couple of days ago.

I’ve also changed the participants’ names. So for Elizabeth read Margaret, and for Lord Home read Mark Harper, our current Immigration Minister.

Suddenly the story becomes eminently believable, doesn’t it? What would have been unthinkable for Alec Douglas-Home or any other contemporaneous minister, is par for the course for today’s politicians, Tory or otherwise.

If a modern PM can get so drunk that he leaves his children behind in a pub, why can’t a junior minister get pissed and make an obscene spectacle of himself in a public place? Or why can’t another MP be arrested for picking a fight in another public place?

No reason at all. We don’t really expect our leaders to have a modicum of dignity, do we? Of course not.

We expect them to be like regular blokes, but without the common sense many real regular blokes have to have to make their way in the dog-eat-dog world.

Our rulers needed no common sense to get into politics and they need none to stay in it. They needed all sorts of other qualities, which in no way preclude vulgar behaviour in the after hours.

Dignity? Honour? Respect for the office? Really, only a hopeless stick in the mud would expect today’s politicians to possess any of these, especially when ‘chillaxing’.

So I hope you’ll join me in wishing Mark a speedy recovery and success on his official visit to Algiers. I’m sure the Muslims will appreciate his fine qualities and idea of fun even more than we do.

 

  

 

 

 

 

The other day I listened to something or other on YouTube, and a link to Chopin’s Fourth Ballade performed by the Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili came up.

The link was accompanied by a close-up publicity photo of the musician: sloe bedroom eyes, sensual semi-open lips suggesting a delight that’s still illegal in Alabama, naked shoulders hinting at the similarly nude rest of her body regrettably out of shot…

Let me see where my wife is… Good, she isn’t looking over my shoulder, so I can admit to you that the picture got me excited in ways one doesn’t normally associate with Chopin’s Fourth Ballade or for that matter any other classical composition this side of Wagner or perhaps Ravel’s Bolero.

Searching for a more traditional musical rapture I clicked on the actual clip and alas found it anticlimactic, as it were. Khatia’s playing, though competent, is as undeniably so-what as her voluptuous figure undeniably isn’t. (Yes, I know the photograph I mentioned doesn’t show much of her figure apart from the luscious shoulders but, the prurient side of my nature piqued, I did a bit of a web crawl.)

Just for the hell of it I looked at the publicity shots of other currently active female musicians, such as Yuja Wang, Joanna MacGregor, Nicola Bendetti, Alison Balsom (nicknamed ‘crumpet with a trumpet’, her promos more often suggest ‘a strumpet with a trumpet’ instead), Anne-Sophie Mutter and a few others.

They didn’t disappoint the Peeping Tom lurking under my aging surface. Just about all the photographs showed the ladies in various stages of undress, in bed, lying in suggestive poses on top of the piano, playing in frocks (if any) open to the coccyx in the back and/or to the navel up front.

This is one thing these musicians have in common. The other is that none of them is all that good at her day job and some, such as Wang, are truly awful. Yet this doesn’t really matter either to them or to the public or, most important, to those who form the public tastes by writing about music and musicians.

Thus, for example, a tabloid pundit expressing his heartfelt regret that Nicola Benedetti “won’t be posing for the lads’ mags anytime soon. Pity, because she looks fit as a fiddle…” Geddit? She’s a violinist, which is to say fiddler – well, you do get it.

“But Nicola doesn’t always take the bonniest photo,” continues the writer, “she’s beaky in pics sometimes, which is weird because in the flesh she’s an absolute knock-out.

“The classical musician is wearing skinny jeans which show off her long legs. She’s also busty with a washboard flat tummy, tottering around 5ft 10in in her Dune platform wedges.”

How well does she play the violin though? No one cares. Not even critics writing for our broadsheets, who don’t mind talking about musicians in terms normally reserved for pole dancers. Thus for instance runs a review of a piano recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall, one of London’s top concert venues:

“She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand… [but] there’s more to her than meets the eye.”

The male reader is clearly expected to get a stiffie trying to imagine what that might be. To help his imagination along, the piece is accompanied by a photo of the young lady in question reclining on her instrument in a pre-coital position with an unmistakable ‘come and get it’ expression on her face. The ‘monochrome’ piano is actually bright-red, a colour usually found not in concert halls but in dens of iniquity.

Nowhere does the review mention the fact obvious to anyone with any taste for musical performance: the girl is so bad that she should indeed be playing in a brothel, rather than on the concert platform.

Can you, in the wildest flight of fancy, imagine a reviewer talking in such terms about sublime women artists of the past, such as Myra Hess, Maria Yudina, Maria Grinberg, Clara Haskil, Marcelle Meyer, Marguerite Long, Kathleen Ferrier? Can you see any of them allowing themselves to be photographed in the style of  “lads’ mags”?

I can’t, which raises the inevitable question: what exactly has changed in the last say 70 years? The short answer is, just about everything.

Concert organisers and impresarios, who used to be in the business because they loved music first and wanted to make a living second, now care about nothing but money. Critics, who used to have discernment and taste, now have nothing but greed and lust for popularity. The public… well, don’t get me started on that.  

The circle is vicious: because tasteless ignoramuses use every available medium to build up musical nonentities, nonentities is all we get. And because the musical nonentities have no artistic qualities to write about, the writing nonentities have to concentrate on the more jutting attractions, using a vocabulary typically found in “lads’ mags”.

The adage “sex sells” used to be applied first to B-movies, then to B-novels, and now to real music. From “sex sells” it’s but a short distance to “only sex sells”. This distance has already been travelled – and we are all being sold short.

 

 

To misname a British chancellor once may be regarded as a misfortune; to do so twice looks like carelessness; to do so three times bespeaks contempt.

With humble apologies to Oscar Wilde, this paraphrase does describe the situation adequately. For it was exactly three times in a short speech that President Obama referred to George Osborne as Jeffrey, thus confusing him with the popular soul singer.

Though acknowledging one’s own ignorance is never easy, I’m man enough to admit that until the incident Jeffrey Osborne had not exactly been popular with me. In fact I had never heard of him, which is both a necessary and sufficient definition of a celebrity.

In a further exercise of humility I have to accept that my musical tastes have no far-reaching geopolitical significance. However what may have such a significance is that in Obama’s world a pop singer clearly figures more prominently than the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Her Majesty’s minister second in rank only to the PM.

Do you suppose that was Obama’s subtle hint that even Jeffrey Osborne could make a better chancellor than George? If so, I’d be in perfect sympathy with the implication, but alas the real reasons for such forgetfulness are probably less praiseworthy.

Say what you will of the previous generation of British politicians, but one can’t recall American presidents referring to our chancellors as Henry Macmillan, John Callaghan, Rob Jenkins or George Howe.

Somehow foreign visitors to our shores tended to remember the Christian names of their counterparts. If they don’t do so now, it’s because they don’t feel such names are worth remembering, nor Britain worth respecting.

Hence American presidents won’t take a bow to the Queen, which in Britain is regarded as a violation of elementary etiquette. Fair enough, Americans stand proud in the world and feel no need to observe quaint foreign customs, especially those of no democratic provenance.

Yet all recent American presidents, and certainly Obama, go out of their way to observe Islamic or Far Eastern greeting rituals. Never mind that they look silly doing so – some customs can’t be flouted on pain of being accused of cultural insensitivity.

True enough, Britain’s standing in the world isn’t what it was at the time of Will Churchill, Hank Macmillan or even Mary Thatcher. Yet it’s still marginally higher than Burma’s, which doesn’t prevent Obama from holding his palms together in front of his chest and taking a bow when meeting a Burmese politician.

The relationship between our two countries may be special, but not in the usually implied sense of mutual admiration and respect. What’s special about it is that America has replaced Britain as the world’s leading empire – and a long lifetime after this flip-flop occurred Americans still have the urge to rub British noses in it.

Britain, on the other hand, shows every sign of the Stockholm syndrome by falling in rather obsequious love with her vanquishers. Hence the urgent need to play poodle to America under all circumstances, and certainly whenever the Americans get the urge to laser-guide some democracy onto a recalcitrant land.

The arrangement isn’t exactly reciprocal for Americans feel no corresponding obligation whenever Britain goes to war. Hence Eisenhower preventing Franco-British victory at Suez or Reagan refusing to cooperate with Britain during the Falklands War (America eventually did help with some satellite intelligence, but only because Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger acted on his own initiative).

Quite the opposite: Americans, or rather American politicians go out of their way to treat senior British officials in a rather offhand manner. Hence George W. Bush with his ‘Yo, Blair!’ or Obama tucking Dave into bed in a fatherly fashion. It’s not just Dave but Britain that’s well and truly tucked up.

The present slight could well be deliberate: a show of disdain for Europeans in general and Britain in particular is mandatory for any American politician. It’s worth several electoral brownie points for someone like Obama to be seen by the folks Stateside as a real ‘merican who can treat them foreigners like skivvies.

Perhaps the next step ought to be for Barack Hussein to assign to British politicians his own names, those he can remember. You know, the way aristocrats of yesteryear used to call every new butler James regardless of what his real name was.

May I suggest Elvis for the Prime Minister, Ray for the Chancellor and Chuck for the Foreign Secretary? Or perhaps Moe, Larry and Curly, as in the Three Stooges, would be an even better mnemonic.

That way the message will come across loud and clear, as will the true nature of the special relationship. 

 

 

 

 

Chanel’s Creative Director Karl Lagerfeld does, and he won’t accept his age (77) gracefully. More power to him – he gives hope to all the old fogies among us.

The fashion guru (tsar? mogul? – one can get terribly confused by today’s vocabulary) proves that age is no obstacle to romance and even to marriage. Yet one’s palms, about ready to come together in thunderous applause, stop midway when one realises that the person the guru/tsar/mogul wishes to marry isn’t, well, exactly a person.

It’s his beloved one-year-old Siamese cat Choupette. Those of you who may unfashionably think that such nuptial plans are a tad perverse must be reassured that Choupette is female. Yet even if she were a tom, one is no longer supposed to be judgemental about such matters. Love comes in all shapes and sizes and we must welcome them all.

In fact, Karl is a traditional gent who believes it’s a man’s duty to pamper and look after his beloved – no newfangled egalitarian notions for him.

He refers to the current love of his life as ‘his most valuable possession’, which is a charmingly dated approach to romance. And he’s as good as his word: Choupette has a large staff assigned exclusively to her.

This includes three ladies-in-waiting who record for posterity (and for Karl) everything Choupette does during the day. Since cats’ activities tend not to be overly varied, the recording duties can’t be too onerous. Just copy the words ‘sleep’, ‘eat’, ‘urinate’ and ‘defecate’, paste them into the text as appropriate – any modern 10-year-old could do it.

Obviously such a refined creature as Choupette deserves her own chef assisted by several sous-chefs. Together they develop daily menus of delicacies and serve them to their (and presumably Karl’s) mistress, as she reclines on a velvet cushion.

Like most modern celebrities, Choupette is a regular jetsetter. She has her own plane and follows Karl to all sorts of exotic locations.

A creature of her time, she also maintains a blog on Twitter which boasts 27,000 subscribers. “I’m Choupette Lagerfeld,” she identifies herself. “I’m a well-known beauty who won’t eat off the floor. I have a staff of servants who satisfy my every whim,” she boasts.

One may harbour a sneaky suspicion that Chaupette’s blog is ghost-written, but then how many celebrities do their own writing? In fact writing your own stuff is positively infra dig.

“I never thought I could fall so deeply in love with a cat,” comments Lagerfeld, but then love often does arrive unexpectedly.

The old-fashioned gentleman that Karl is, one wonders if he believes in sex before marriage. He probably does – even old fogies have to make concessions to their time. Not to worry: Karl can base his sexual practices on ample theoretical support.

For example, Peter Singer, Princeton professor of bioethics (whatever that means) allowed in 2001 that humans and animals can have “mutually satisfying” sexual relations.

“We are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes,” explained the good professor on the basis of frank self-assessment. Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”

Even earlier, in 1991, the Dutch professor Midas Dekkers wrote an academic treatise Dearest Pet: On Bestiality which adds a whole new meaning to the concepts of heavy petting and indeed of Midas touch. Bestiality now rests on a firm scientific foundation.

According to these scholars, sex has no ethical aspect at all – it’s all about feeling, love, passion, that sort of thing. By inference, no object of such romantic emotions can possibly bring them into disrepute, and they are all worthy of being sanctified by marriage.

Unfortunately for Lagerfeld, his country of residence, France, has so far only travelled that road halfway: it still balks at allowing interspecies marriage. But exponents of the thin-end-of-the-wedge theory know that another expansion of marital bliss can’t be too far in the future. A few more years of Hollande’s government in France (and Dave’s in Britain) will guarantee the ultimate emancipation of love.

And why on earth not? If we are nothing but ‘great apes’, better than some, worse than others, why shouldn’t we be allowed to marry animals?

We may be more intelligent, but the Singers of this world have a ready argument. Only some of us are more intelligent than say chimps. What about brain-damaged or severely retarded people? Those in a coma? Some of them are no brighter than Choupette, so there goes the intelligence argument right out of the window.

When a philosophy allows such warped arguments to be made plausibly, the philosophy itself is warped. The exclusivity of man was asserted in the founding document of the West (Gen 1: 27, to quote chapter and verse), and it’s only by tossing this document aside that all sorts of degenerate variants of marriage become possible.

But this document has indeed been tossed aside, and insisting on it as the basis of our civilisation seems rather churlish. So fine, we are nothing but apes, and where does it say that apes can’t marry cats?

Thus I hope you’ll join me in wishing Karl and Choupette every happiness in the world. Incidentally, does anyone know the cat for ‘I do’?

Serena isn’t just about to smash the record of the number of Grand Slams won by any tennis player, male or female.

She is also smashing many of the notions PC people hold so dear. First, she declared in a documentary that ‘I only date black men.’ How un-PC is that?

Surely it doesn’t take any particular nasal sensitivity to detect a whiff of racism there somewhere. Just picture say Caroline Wozniacki issuing a positive counterpart to Serena’s negative: “I wouldn’t date a black man.” Can you imagine the ensuing uproar?

We are all supposed to be colour-blind, are we not? A person is supposed to choose her dates on the basis of the other person’s sterling human qualities, such as intelligence, wit, kindness, general inclination towards political correctness and the liberal worldview.

At a weak moment, we may allow that appearance sometimes has something to do with the choice. But skin colour? Surely not. Nothing short of discriminatory, if you ask any person of the PC persuasion.

If Serena had fewer millions to her name, and could express herself with a wider vocabulary, she would have found a more PC way to say the same thing.

For example, she could have identified a Nubian god as her aesthetic ideal for a man. That way she would have avoided a black mark against her name and possibly diminished every PC person’s desire to scrutinise each subsequent word she utters.

To Serena’s credit she doesn’t always practise what she preaches. Thus the World Number 1 has allegedly dated the impeccably white Bulgarian Georg Dimitrov, who’s currently involved with World Number 3 Maria Sharapova. If I were Victoria Azarenka, the World Number 2, I’d be miffed about being skipped in this cavalier fashion, but perhaps her turn is yet to come.

Serena’s present beau, her French coach Patrick Muratoglu, is clearly white, though his Turkish name could partially offset that genetic imperfection. Also, under Patrick’s tutelage, and he’s one of the world’s top coaches, Serena has reclaimed her Number 1 spot, which could have endeared Patrick to her beyond a purely professional respect.

Anyway, Serena’s amorous record has partly redeemed her prior offence against PC morality – Serena may not be colour-blind in her pronouncements but at least she’s free of racial discrimination in her love life.

She was therefore seen as deserving the benefit of the doubt, a generosity that Serena has now flagrantly abused.

In an interview to Rolling Stone she made a few comments on a currently popular court case, and the PC world is up in arms.

The case involves a typical modern love story: girl meets boy (or two boys, as the case may be and in this instance is); girl gets blind drunk; boys take girl somewhere and have sex with her; girl wakes up the morning after naked and remembering nothing of the night before; girl’s memory is refreshed by the amateur film boys have placed in social media; girl screams rape; boys are convicted.

Dante and his Beatrice this ain’t, and neither is it Petrarch and his Laura, but tempora mutantur, as those chaps might have said. Serena’s problem was that she didn’t realise exactly how much the times have changed.

Asked to comment on the conviction, she told Rolling Stone, “I’m not blaming the girl, but … she’s 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn’t remember? It could have been much worse. She’s lucky.

“She shouldn’t have put herself in that position,” added Serena, and she should have known better than to make a perfectly sensible statement like that. For in the PC house sensibility goes right out of the window.

“Does this mean a rape victim has only herself to blame?!?” screamed the Internet. “Does wearing a short skirt mean it’s OK to rape a woman?!?” “Did she egg them on?” “So what if she went along? She’s still a rape victim!” And so on, ad nauseum.

Hold on, lads. Serena didn’t say any of that. All she said was that in our time of accelerated growth a 16-year-old girl should know better than to get so drunk with boys that she doesn’t know what she’s doing and to whom.

Do we disagree with that? Do we think it’s perfectly all right for a girl to act this way? Especially in a bar in Ohio, where 16 isn’t a legal drinking age? Do we not think women should act in a sensible way and practise essential urban precautions?

Because that’s all Serena actually said, and she was absolutely correct. The trouble is that she wasn’t politically correct, and it’s not long before issuing such statements will put the wretch in the dock next to the defendants.

For the time being, Twitter and no doubt Serena’s sponsors screamed bloody murder, and Serena issued a grovelling apology: “For someone to be raped, and at only 16, is such a horrible tragedy. I am deeply sorry for what was written in the Rolling Stone article.” The second sentence is a complete non sequitur to the first, but that doesn’t matter.

It’s the thought that counts. Or rather absence of same, which is what the PC ethos demands. This is one match Serena can never win – one match that common sense is guaranteed to lose.

 

 

The incident involving Nigella Lawson and her husband, the art mogul Charles Saatchi, has justly attracted much attention in the press, pushing the G8 conference off the front pages.

Apparently, the couple were having dinner in the street terrace of Scott’s, the Mayfair fish restaurant. The meal was intimate: just Charles, Nigella and the several hundred passers-by who pretended not to stare, eavesdrop or take pictures.

Yet stare, eavesdrop and take pictures they did, thereby preserving for posterity the images of Charles trying to desecrate the Goddess by choking her.

Charles later explained that this was just a ‘playful tiff’, and he only accepted a police caution not to have this thing ‘hanging over us for months’. Nigella wept and, according to some accounts, has subsequently left home.

For those of you who have been living on Mars for the last few years, Nigella’s claim to divinity is based on her TV cookery show in which she tries, with variable success, to blend two of life’s greatest pleasures: food and sex.

I recall one programme in which Nigella explained why she was cutting that particular piece of meat into large chunks.

‘Some people,’ she pouted at the camera lasciviously, ‘say their mouths can’t accommodate large pieces.’ Lips pursed, eyelashes flapping, eyes doing their best to suggest sexual adventure beyond anything Kama Sutra authors could see in their wettest dreams.

‘Well, my mouth,’ Nigella half-whispered, winking lewdly, ‘can accommodate anything.’

The accent on ‘anything’, along with the gurning and the throaty gasps accompanying it, should have ensured that the show could only be aired after the 9 pm watershed, but didn’t.

One can see how this sort of thing could have upset Charles. Few men would like their wives to make such thinly veiled references to the intimatemost details of their nocturnal life, especially those hinting at a practice still outlawed in some American states.

I assume that this was indeed what provoked Charles into grabbing Nigella by the throat in a public place. Or rather I had assumed that until a sound recording of the incident found its way into my possession. I shall now let you read the transcript (expletives deleted), on condition that this stays between us.

Art Mogul (AM): Are you out of your ******* mind?!? You’re going to publish what?!?

Domestic Goddess (DG): You heard me, you **** of Baghdad.

AM: Yes, I ******* well did, and I can’t believe my ******* ears! What did you say that title’s going to be?

DG: ‘My frolics with Charlie: Nigella’s recipes for tasty, spicy, strong-flavoured sex.’

AM: Why in ****’s name would you want to do a thing like that?

DG: I have my reasons. Actually two million of them. That’s how many US dollars I’ll get in advance.

AM: In advance of ******* what?!? Making me the laughingstock of London? What did you say the chapter titles are going to be?

DG: Well, they’ll all refer to, well, stuff like positions, techniques – all in the best of possible taste, as it were…

AM: Let me see – you have them written down, haven’t you… Right… Section title, ‘That’s the way ah-ah-ah-ah Charles likes it…’ It doesn’t even scan!

DG: Well, I wasn’t in advertising.

AM: Too ******* right you weren’t! Now let’s see… Chapter 1. ‘Double Nelson’. Chapter Two: ‘Two-handed squeeze’. Chapter Three: ‘Head hold’. Chapter Four: ‘Sitting duck’. Chapter Five: ‘White swallow’. Chapter Six: ‘More power to Charlie’s elbow’… Are you ******* nuts?!?

DG: That’s what the punters want. Mick the PR man says it’ll go down well, as it were.

AM: Oh yeah?

DG: Yeah.

AM: Says who?

DG: Says I.

AM: So go **** yourself!

DG: Same to you, Charlie, with bells on. I’m an autonomous person. You can’t tell me what to do and what not to do. Mick says it’s time to spice up my melons, as it were. You understand brand building, don’t you Charlie?

AM: So what are you going to do next? Cook barearsed naked on camera?

DG: If that’s what I and Mick decide to do, then I’ll do it. You can’t stop me, you male chauvinist pig…

AM: Oh yes I can, you ******* ****!!!

DG: Oh yeah? So what’re you going to do about it?

AM: I’ll ******* show you…

DG: Arghhhhh…

Here the recording of the playful tiff ends, and you must agree it throws some new light on the incident.

As a lifelong feminist, I sympathise with Nigella unreservedly. Her success, past, present and especially – given her publishing plans – future shows how a woman can stand tall with pride, upholding her dignity in a male-dominated world.

Nigella’s upcoming book will strike an important blow (as she’ll no doubt put it) for women’s equality and honour.

As to Mr Saatchi, he should realise the public has a right to know, well, just about everything. Miss Lawson is a celebrity and her duty to her panting viewers is to stay that way – even if it means bending over backwards.

As it were.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s no wonder Putin and Johnson have formed an alliance against Dave. The two men have so much in common, it’s eerie:

Both have Russian names.

Both used to belong to exclusive clubs, Boris to the Bullingdon, Vlad to the KGB.

Both are estranged from their wives, one de jure, the other de facto.

Both have a roving eye for the ladies (persistent rumours in Russia suggest that Vlad’s horizons are even somewhat broader than that, but we must go by facts, not hearsay).

Both have fathered children on the side, though Vlad only allegedly so.

Both are driven by powerful political ambitions, though in Boris’s case these aren’t yet fully realised.

Both like to have their pictures taken when practising their favourite sport, Boris cycling, Vlad swimming or beating people up.

Both have a way with words, though unlike Vlad Boris keeps obscenities strictly for private consumption.

Both think it idiotic to arm Syrian rebels.

Both cite the same culinary reason for this point of view: the rebels are the kind of people who prefer human organs to pork.

Both have other reasons as well, those they don’t air publicly: Vlad sells billions’ worth of weaponry to Assad and gets a warm-water naval base in return; Boris wants to make his old Bullingdon mate Dave look even more stupid than God originally made him.

Both take their own routes to this point of view, driven as they are by different motives. Be that as it may…

Both are right.

That is where the similarities between the two men end. For Boris may be all sorts of things: buffoonish,  frivolous, unscrupulous, opportunistic, shallow. But one thing he isn’t, or at least one would like to hope so, is evil.

Vlad on the other hand is an evil man in charge of an evil state. Therefore any aims he pursues can only be evil. Yet if we take their opposition to Dave’s current hobby horse at face value, then both are indeed right.

And Dave, he of the open-collared shirt fame, is terribly, stupidly, criminally wrong.

He doesn’t realise, or at least makes a good show of pretending he doesn’t realise, that the Syrian rebels, whatever their internal differences, are united in a common purpose: replacing Assad’s wicked but secular state with an Islamist one that would be even more wicked.

Moreover, given the aggressive proselytism coded into the Muslim DNA, such a state would not just be wicked internally – it would present a deadly threat to the whole region and therefore the world.

Dave’s view? “We should be on the side of Syrians who want a democratic and peaceful future for their country and one without the man who is using chemical weapons against them.”

First, the evidence of Assad using such weapons is flimsy at best, and the intelligence on which this evidence is based comes from the same people who knew for sure that Saddam was aiming nuclear weapons at Philadelphia.

Second, call me a moral relativist but I rather prefer a Syrian chieftain using chemical weapons against Islamist fanatics to one who, being such a fanatic himself, wouldn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons against Israel – or us.

Third, I question the existence of Syrians, or any other Muslims, who are ravenous for democracy, Western style. If they indeed feel the urge to be just like us, they’ve managed to control it admirably for 1,400 years.

Moreover, at different periods throughout this time span and with variable success, they’ve tried to impose their ways on us – by the only method that comes naturally to Islam: violence accompanied by hysterical shrieks of ‘Allahu akbar!’

It is in this historical context that any action in the Middle East should be viewed by any Western leader. However, when instead of leaders we have spivs like Dave, then reality is replaced by cloud-cuckoo-land phantoms. Such as Syrian democracy-seekers who only ever eat human hearts because the West refuses to supply them with halal meat.

In fairness to Dave, he isn’t the only intellectually challenged chap among our politicians. For example, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, said today that “only one in 20 opposition fighters are linked to al Qaeda.”

One would like to see the scientifically conducted polls on the basis of which Sir Malcolm has come up with such a precise calculation.

But do let’s accept this comment as fact, however improbable. The problem with this comment isn’t that it’s improbable but that it’s completely and utterly irrelevant.

The Syrian insurgency unites all sorts of Islamist groups in an ad hoc alliance aimed at turning Syria into an Islamist state. Some of those groups are linked to al Qaeda, some to other criminal gangs, some are freelance. But such differences pale by comparison to the similarities: they’re all wild-eyed fanatics and mortal enemies to the West.

Even worse, they are unpredictable. If the West knew more or less where it stood with chaps like Mubarak, Saddam, Assad and even Gaddafi, all we know about these chaps – apart from their supposed adoration of one-man-one-vote democracy – is that they hate us.

We don’t have a clue how they’ll manifest such feelings once they find themselves in power. However, if the history of the region is anything to go by, the old adage about the devil you know is amply vindicated there: every new ruler tends to be worse than his predecessor.

Playing poodle to US foreign policy largely inspired by neocon propaganda is wrong morally, intellectually, strategically and tactically. That means such a role is custom-made for Dave and his ilk.

Perhaps Boris can talk his new friend Vlad into emigrating and seeking a seat on the Tory back benches, where another anti-Dave outburst is brewing. Provided of course Vlad promises to kick his habit of having his opponents ‘whacked’. Even Dave.

 

 

 

 

The cheers are of course for the Muslim cleric Hassan Rouhani who has won the Iranian presidency without the hassle of a runoff.

His victory is being hailed around the world as a triumph of moderation, for Rouhani has this commendable quality in spades.

The question is: exactly what does moderation mean in this context?

You see, my moderation may be your radicalism, his license and their fascism.

Far be it from me to suggest that everything is relative, but some things definitely are. Such as moderation, especially – and I hope you won’t report me for religious intolerance – when it’s ascribed to a Muslim cleric.

You see, since the 1979 Islamic revolution Iran has been generally regarded as rather immoderate even by Muslim standards.By comparison, the Shah with his torturing secret police began to look like a humanitarian trying to get in touch with his feminine side. At least he drank decent wines and never threatened to develop nuclear weapons and blow up half the world.

Alas, his commitment to universal suffrage was less highly pronounced than in America, the only country other than the erstwhile Soviet Union that knows exactly how the world should govern itself.

The Shah didn’t meet such exacting standards and was ousted with American – how shall I put it so as not to offend my American readers? – acquiescence. He was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini who didn’t mind government by consent, provided he was the one who consented.

Since then the Ayatollah, first Khomeini, then after his death in 1989, Sayyed Ali Khamenei, has held the title of Supreme Leader.

Now ‘Supreme’ is by definition a superlative, and in this instance the word doesn’t lie. So a note to the Americans: it’s democracy, chaps, but not as you know it. The Ayatollah decides who’s allowed to stand for the presidency of the Islamic republic and, by a multitude of variously subtle mechanisms, who’s allowed to win.

Thus Rouhani is an appointee of his rival for this year’s Best Dressed List – Supreme Leader, the Shiite cleric to end all Shiite clerics. In this type of democracy, it doesn’t really matter who wins. It’s all the same Shiite.

Exactly how moderate is Rouhani anyway? Does his moderation soar as high as that practised in moderate Kuwait, America’s protégé?

Let’s see. A 37-year-old Kuwaiti woman Houda al-Ajimi, has just been sentenced to 11 years in prison for a tweet. Her crime was suggesting that the current emir of Kuwait, sheik Sabah al-Ahmad al-Djabir al-Sabah (presumably his friends just call him Al) isn’t exactly perfect.

Now I’ve heard of censoring the Internet, but this is ridiculous. Actually it isn’t. Kuwait’s moderate constitution specifically states that Al is ‘immune and inviolable’. Untouchable, in other words.

So the al-woman has only herself to blame: she broke a law of her moderate land. You know what I mean by relative moderation?

As a pious Muslim, and a cleric to boot, Hassan the Moderate has to be committed to such things as the murder of apostates. One has to think that he would kill them moderately, say by a quick bullet rather than slow torture, but still.

His Holy Book also says that if a Jew hides behind a tree, not only the Jew must be extricated and killed, but also the tree must be chopped down. Perhaps as a moderate Hassan will leave the tree standing.

What I’m trying to suggest in this flippant way unbefitting such a solemn occasion is that the finely nuanced demarcation between moderate and immoderate Muslims is sometimes hard to discern.

Well, for me anyway. And I’m proud to live in a country whose leader (not quite Supreme, but as near as damn) has no such problems.

Dave has stated that he knows exactly who among the Syrian rebels are at heart democracy-seekers opposed to Assad’s tyranny and who are Al Qaeda militants. The former merit aid, including our weapons in their arsenals; the latter merit opprobrium, including American drones on their heads.

Dave must have a nose of bloodhound sensitivity to smell the fine shades in the stench emanated by the rebels. Or else he has iron-clad intelligence at his disposal, which also tells him with dead certainty that Assad is using Sarin gas to sort out the opposition.

Personally, when evaluating such data, I’d consider its source, which is the same one that assured us that Saddam was stockpiling WMD. But Dave is a trusting soul. He believes in the goodness of man, even those men who publicly cut out and consume their enemies’ internal organs.

I’m not suggesting that Hassan Rouhani’s dietary habits are similar to those of the moderate elements in the Syrian opposition. I just hope that his ‘moderation’ isn’t yet another canard being shoved down our throats to justify our governments’ craven spinelessness in the face of Iran’s nuclear threat.

Anyway, he can prove his moderate credentials by dismantling his country’s nuclear facilities and allowing international experts to verify that he has done so.

Five gets you ten he won’t. So let’s hope that the nuclear bombs Iran may acquire in short order will be of only a moderate yield.

Yesterday I mentioned a Russian columnist’s mistake in stating that there are no drink-driving laws in the West, only dangerous-driving ones.

On her part it’s an error; on mine it’s wishful thinking. But it’s not my thinking that matters here but the government’s, and we proceed from entirely different premises.

I assume that traffic laws should make driving safer, more sensible and less troublesome. HMG assumes that drivers must be punished for the temerity of using such an un-PC mode of transportation.

If in the process of administering punishment the state can extort more money from the populace, then so much the better. After all, as my friend at the local garage put it, explaining why he had to charge me a £100 VAT on a set of tyres, “We have all those immigrants to pay for.” He used a modifier before ‘immigrants’, but decorum prohibits reproducing it here.

What’s the purpose of a drink-driving law, automatically banning motorists for at least a year if they exceed the allowable blood-alcohol limit by even a minuscule amount?

Presumably, it’s to save lives, and a worthy goal it is too. Then the assumption is that even a bloke like me, who has driven about 750,000 miles in his life (quite a few of them over the limit), becomes dangerous after drinking a couple of glasses of wine.

That, even though I’ve never been convicted of dangerous driving, never caused an accident and was last done for speeding 25 years ago. (The traffic cop didn’t accept the excuse that I was distracted by Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations.)

Now what’s this assumption based on? That alcohol slows one’s reactions and therefore response time. True, it does. But what if my reaction time when tipsy is still shorter than that of a stone-sober 75-year-old granny?

Moreover, what if I’m demonstrably aware of my temporary impairment and therefore drive much more carefully than I do normally, meaning that my reaction time is less likely to be tested after dinner than before?

The government will say that statistically driving over the limit is more likely to cause an accident. Again, true. But that means that a banned motorist has been punished not because he has committed an offence but because he’s statistically more likely to do so.

Let me ask the lawyers among you: does this not constitute preventive arrest? If so, then why limit the concept to drinking? I hope you won’t think me a racist if I mention that statistically a black unemployed person is more likely to commit a crime than an employed white one. Does this mean that the former should be subjected to preventive arrest? Of course not.

You might say that driving over the alcohol limit is a crime in itself. Which gets me back to the original question: why should it be?

If the purpose of this law is to save lives, rather than for the state to put its foot down, fleecing people in the process, then this can be achieved much better by other means.

For example, by treating alcohol as an aggravating circumstance in any traffic violation, especially those resulting in injury and death: a driver killing someone while over the limit could be charged with homicide and put away for 15 years. Don’t you think this would be a stronger deterrent than a year’s ban?

Ditto, dangerous driving. Treat it as a felony if there’s booze involved, and you’d be amazed how many people would be separating the bottle and the throttle. Many more than now, I’d suggest.

Incidentally, in France and elsewhere on the continent the alcohol limit is half ours but, and this is critical, they don’t ban you on first offence. Moreover, as I can testify on personal experience, in the countryside, where the car is the only mode of transportation, there are hardly ever any spot checks.

If the cops got bolshie about it, social life in rural France would effectively die. So they are sensible about a solid citizen drinking a glass or two of bubbly before dinner, half a bottle of Burgundy with it, and perhaps a cognac afterwards. Provided of course he doesn’t do anything stupid. C’est la vie, n’est ce pas?

Now what about the proposed law, punishing driving in the middle lane of a motorway with a £100 fine? I’d call it idiotic if it weren’t dictated by a perfectly rational desire to squeeze more money out of taxpayers.

First, the traffic in the left lane usually moves under the speed limit. And a good job too, considering that many of those slow coaches are indeed coaches, juggernauts and other lorries. So what are we supposed to do? Inhale diesel fumes belched out of an HGV for 50 miles or an hour, whichever comes first?

No, if we want to drive at the legal speed limit, what the government wants us to do is cut in and out of traffic, changing lanes all the time. Any driver will tell you that this is a factor of danger – there’s a risk involved every time you change lanes on a motorway. So it’s not our safety that the state is concerned about – it’s its own arbitrary power and depleting finances.

And speaking of the legal speed limit on motorways, why is ours so low? Why are people allowed to drive at 81 mph in France, 74.5 mph in Italy but only 70 mph in Britain?

Take it from someone who does at least 12,000 miles on continental motorways every year, we’re much better and safer drivers than either the French or the Italians. Or if you don’t want to take it from me, take it from accident statistics – they’ll tell you the same thing.

Hand on heart now, do you always observe the 70 mph limit? Ever? Most people don’t, which means most people are law-breakers.

I’d suggest that a state that criminalises most people with its silly laws is in itself criminal, or at least tyrannical. But I won’t: it pains me too much to think that HMG may be more tyrannical than the government of a revolutionary republic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This isn’t to suggest that the dynamic duo are having a relationship unbefitting world leaders. Nor is this to imply that Angie is in any way implicated in Putin’s recent divorce.

It’s just that Frau (formerly Comrade) Merkel wants Col. (also formerly Comrade) Putin to repeal the recent Russian law banning the propaganda of homosexuality among children.

According to Angie’s spokesman, the law means that homosexuals “may ultimately be subjected to discrimination”. “We do not abandon the hope,” he continued, “that the Russian state… will repeal this law. It runs contrary to the spirit of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

So according to the Convention there’s nothing wrong with propaganda of homosexuality among children? Mind you, there’s plenty wrong with the Convention, but this is off my topic today.

My topic is the response of the Russian ‘opposition’ media to this law. There are quite a few good writers in these media, and they have some things in common.

First, they all detest Putin, which is good. He is indeed detestable and his state, created and run by an elite made up of KGB and mafia types, even more so.

Second, they all look to the West in search of a model Russia should follow instead, which is problematic. Nor is this problem particularly new.

Bad things are always easier to pick up than good, and ever since Peter I Russian ‘Westernisers’ have been learning all the wrong things from the West – partly because they caught it at a bad time, namely during the Enlightenment.

Thus the Russians violently rejected the West’s formative religion, its respect for the law, accountable government and individual dignity. Instead they imported revolutionary afflatus, ignorance of philosophy, rampant atheism and vague liberal phraseology designed to conceal the underlying subversiveness. Planted on the traditional Russian soil, these seeds sprouted to luxuriant growth in 1917, with well-publicised results.

Such selective borrowing was partly due to the Russians’ endemic ignorance of the West, what with reliable sources of information having been systematically suppressed. This ignorance still perseveres, and it’s the third characteristic shared by today’s journalists in general, and ‘opposition’ journalists in particular.

This is revealed even through inconsequential details, such as reaction to drink-driving laws. When the Duma debated criminalising any amount of blood alcohol, one of the best-informed Russian journalists, Yulia Latynina, attacked the government citing the West as an example of lenience.

In the West, she wrote, there’s no law against drink-driving; there’s only one against dangerous driving. It’s clear that Miss Latynina hasn’t clocked in many miles on European roads. Otherwise she’d know that spot-checking is routine everywhere.

The Russians also don’t realise that the Leftie, touchy-feely, PC ethos doesn’t run unopposed in the West. The West to them is a homogeneous entity enviably committed to such lovely Western things as political correctness, multi-culti national suicide, homomarriage and so forth.

Few of their anti-Putin pundits are capable of enunciating the conservative position on such matters (Latynina is one of the few, by the way). They uncritically pick up the views sanctified by American and EU Lefties and, for lack of indigenous vocabulary, express such views in Guardian language at best.

Thus they’ve picked up the non-word ‘homophobic’, which they apply to the current legislation. Rather than campaigning for the rule of just law, which would severely punish and thereby prevent violent attacks on homosexuals (endemic in Russia), they support allowing homosexual propaganda among children simply because Putin opposes it.

The Russian Orthodox Church could have offered advice here but, having over the last century turned itself into a KGB stooge, it has lost whatever little credibility it ever had with the Russian intelligentsia. The ROC hierarchy is seen as being in cahoots in Putin, which of course it is. Instead the Russians look to the West for guidance – and get it from the likes of Matthew Parris and Polly Toynbee.

Yet a real Christian Church could provide a coherent position on this matter. Christianity regards homosexuality as a mortal sin, pure and simple. However, it’s neither the only nor the worst such sin. For example, breaking any of the Ten Commandments, regrettably including adultery, is even worse.

Any sin can be forgiven if sincerely repented – hence the Christian concept ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’, which goes back to St Augustine’s ‘Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum’. The problem with homosexual propaganda is that it spreads the diktat that homosexuality isn’t a sin at all, that it’s as normal as sex between a man and a woman.

Allowing and encouraging such propaganda, Western-style, is a reliable symptom of all-pervasive decadence known to be deadly to society. It sends the same message to West-haters as raised hands send in battle: we surrender.

Russian journalists, lamentably including those who seek to be on the side of the angels, don’t understand any of this. Nor can they rely on any tradition of indigenous conservative thought or any filtering mechanism they can apply to the West, dividing the righteous wheat from the Leftie chaff.

Hence their arguments on most political subjects, including this one, tend to be exceptionally primitive and unsound. Thus one influential pundit, who spent years in a Soviet camp, says there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality (and therefore its propaganda) because “at least 1,500 species of animals do it.”

Fair enough. But do let’s decide to what extent we want to be guided in our behaviour by examples set by animals. For instance dogs eat faeces, drink from puddles and chase cats – are we going to emulate them? Lions kill other lions’ cubs to prevent dynastic competition – are we going to do it too?

The exclusivity of man is the founding principle of our civilisation – too bad Putin’s opponents don’t know this. Nor do they seem to be aware that it’s not just “communists, Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists” who find anything wrong with rampant homosexuality and its propaganda.

It would also be useful for them to realise that just because “70 percent of female bats practise oral sex” it doesn’t follow that governments should condone marriages based on such or similar practices.

Even banning polygamy, an injunction that’s still in force in the West (for how long?) is to the columnist in question tantamount to Nazism. After all, Muslims allow it, all religions and ‘cultures’ are equal, ergo on what grounds do we ban polygamy?

On the grounds of traditional Western morality, one could suggest. Alas, Russian ‘liberal’ pundits would neither understand nor accept this reply. With opponents like these, it’s hardly surprising that Putin’s tyranny is enjoying a free ride in Russia.