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The American ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three consular officials were murdered in Beghazi. The diplomats didn’t deserve their tragic fate. The country that sent them did.

The asinine efforts by the US to introduce ‘democracy’ in the Middle East and indulge in ‘nation building’ have been backfiring on American and British soldiers for 10 years. Now it’s the diplomats’ turn.

In any country at any time, the murder of ambassadors has been treated as an instant casus belli. Even Genghis Khan’s boys would usually spare the population of any town they captured – unless their envoys had been killed there. Because the Mongols regarded such an act as unforgivable treachery, they would then slaughter everybody within the town walls: men, women, children, even domestic animals. In a less remote and more Western example, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered the First World War.

This time the US administration, speaking through Hilary Clinton, hastened to declare that nothing of the sort is on the cards. ‘This was an attack by a small and savage group, not the people and government of Libya,’ she said. That may be true. But then Ferdinand too was only murdered by Gavrilo Princip, not the people and government of Bosnia.

Actually, though undoubtedly savage, the group wasn’t all that small. The attack succeeded thanks to a coordinated diversion created by a hundreds-strong mob, screaming Islamist slogans, trying to scale the embassy walls and set the building on fire. The well-rehearsed protesters acted as beaters on a shoot: they drew the embassy staff out. Led by Mr Stevens, they tried to seek safety outside the compound and walked straight into the terrorists’ guns and rockets.

In parallel, there was widespread, precisely timed mob action in Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt and in Palestine. Frenzied crowds burned US flags, screaming sweet endearments, such as ‘Obama, Obama, we are here for the triumph of Islam’ and ‘We are all Osama.’

There was a ring of truth to these statements, and yet it’s unlikely that the Obama administration will take the murderers’ accomplices at their word. The official line, enunciated by Mrs Clinton, is that they aren’t ‘all Osama’. They’re rather lamentably misguided persons who haven’t yet realised they’re all democrats at heart.

Acting in the capacity of psychoanalyst, America is there to help the wild-eyed fanatics get in touch with their inner pro-democracy selves. Hiding in the innermost crevices of the murderers’ souls, their gentle, feminine egos will then emerge out of their inflamed innards and go to work for the good of the world.

One has to admit, with sadness, that 9/11 scrambled what passes for the brains of those in charge of US foreign policy. They simply don’t have the mental wherewithal to put the events of the last decade into the context of the previous 1,400 years of history. This has been marked by Islam’s ever-present, unrelenting hostility to the West and everything it holds dear. What has changed from time to time is ways in which this hostility was manifested.

These have depended mainly on the relative strength of the two adversaries, and also on the amount of passion they could bring to bear on the historical moment. When the pendulum swung the Muslims’ way, they conquered the southern half of Europe. A swing to the other end brought about the Crusades. And so it went, back and forth, for almost a millennium and a half.

It’s only to obtuse ignorance that one can ascribe the urge to convert Islam to Western pluralism. And when ignorance is fortified by proselytising activism, a catastrophe beckons. These are impossible premises from which a sensible policy could be worked out.

The only sane way for the West to handle the Muslim threat is to acknowledge that it is indeed a threat. The very nature of Islam runs against the grain of our religion, culture, philosophy, politics, general aspirations.

Islam demands docile obedience and precludes free enquiry. If the Muslims were allowed the same latitude we have in the West, Islam would instantly collapse as a social and political force. The Muslims are perfectly aware of this, which is why their world can’t be reformed, transformed or even mollified. It should be left to its own vices and devices.

But there ought to be an important proviso: we’ll leave them alone only if they reciprocate. If they choose instead to act out their murderous anti-Western fantasies, they must be punished for it, pure and simple. And if the punishment is to have any deterrent value, it ought to be suitably apocalyptic.

Thus military force shouldn’t be used to build nations, introduce democracy and encourage the Muslims to think along the lines of mum and apple pie. It must be used for punitive and educational purposes only. Spare the Tomahawks and spoil the Muslims, should be the guiding principle.

Forget about encouraging the mythical moderate elements within the Islamic world. The only suitable response to the murder of the US ambassador is to unleash hell on the country in which this crime was committed. The two US carrier groups parked in the Gulf, along with other forces, possess every tactical means to, say, reduce Beghazi to rubble.

Then a message must be sent to the Muslim orbi et urbi: Any hostile action against Western lives and property, inside or outside the Middle East, will automatically lead to the destruction of the entire infrastructure of the country implicated, no matter how obliquely, in such action.

The US will then no longer have to police the Middle East – it’ll police itself. A few massive raids would encourage its own law enforcement to arab-spring into action. Moreover, any collateral damage would be negligible compared to the decade of war stupidly waged by Americans, and to the more decades certain to follow.

That’s how governments led by statesmen would act. But Obama won’t let such trivialities distract him from the presidential campaign. Romney will of course try to make political capital out of  the incident, but, should he become president, he’ll immediately begin his own campaign for a second term. The foreign-policy part of it will be driven by the democracy-seekers and nation-builders in his entourage, so no clear understanding of the situation is likely to emerge.

Meanwhile, Americans and other Westerners, in or out of uniform, will continue to die. To quote Seneca, ‘None of it can be prevented; all of it can be despised.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This year marks the bicentenary of the 1812 war, and the other day three Americans, aged 14, 12 and 10, assured me they knew all about it.

Yet some gentle probing revealed that to them 1812 meant the conflict between the USA and Britain, not Russia’s victory over Napoleon. The youngsters were vague about which event inspired the celebrated Overture, and words like Borodino and Berezina drew blank stares.

This isn’t to imply criticism. At their age I hadn’t even heard about the first war, though I knew quite a bit about the second. My excuse is that I grew up in the wrong country, but then so did they.

The anniversary should remind us how imprecise a science history is. Ideology tends to obscure facts with fiction, and facts fade away. History becomes retrospective politics, with even the issue of who won a battle or a war often a matter of subjective opinion.

Thus Americans regard their 1812 as a moral victory in a second war of liberation. In fact, a tiny fragment of the British army, the bulk of which was otherwise engaged in the Iberian Peninsula, valiantly kept Canada from adding a few more stars to the American flag. Repelling American northward expansion may not have constituted a moral victory, but it certainly was a strategic one.

Today’s American schoolchildren study the war as an essential part of their history. British pupils, with some exceptions, have never even heard of it.

Russian children, by contrast, are inundated with information about their own 1812. Alas, much of it has been systematically falsified. This isn’t surprising for its principal source isn’t historical but literary. In this, 1812 resembles the Trojan War, and indeed Tolstoy’s War And Peace has been compared favourably to Homer’s Iliad, mostly by Count Leo himself.

Considering that the Napoleonic wars are about 22 centuries closer to our time, one would think that Russian history teachers shouldn’t have to rely on fiction. Sure enough, there’s no dearth of scholarly sources on 1812. But fiction is such an integral part of Russian historiography that a frankly jingoistic novelist is seen as a sufficiently reliable source.

Tolstoy describes all German officers fighting the Russian corner as pedantic bunglers and nincompoops. This took much fancy footwork, since that group included such internationally respected warriors as Wittgenstein, Bennigsen, Barclay de Tolly and Stein. But then Tolstoy even tags Napoleon as a military nonentity.

The writer glosses over the fact that three of the four supreme commanders of Russian armies during the Napoleonic wars were German (Barclay de Tolly, Wittgenstein, Bennigsen) and only Kutuzov was a simon-pure Russian. It was actually the German Scot Barclay, not the senile Commander-in-Chief Kutuzov, who was chiefly responsible for saving what was left of the army after the Russians’ defeat in the only major battle of the war.

Yet Tolstoy extols Kutuzov as a military genius, a sort of Antaeus deriving his strength from Russia’s saintly soil. Serious historians beg to differ.

In their eyes, Kutuzov’s do-nothing campaign could easily have ended in disaster. It was because of his passivity that the battle of Austerlitz had been lost, and as hostilities shifted into Russia proper Kutuzov lost at Borodino, surrendering Moscow as a result. Muscovites, probably led by their mayor, then set fire to the capital, leaving the French without supplies and quarters during a particularly inclement winter. That desperate act, unprecedented in modern war history, drove the French out, but this had nothing to do with Kutuzov.

Even then he missed the easiest of chances to finish off the French army in full flight, capture Napoleon and end the war a couple of years earlier. However, Tolstoy argues that even the Borodino battle, in which Russian casualties were 60 percent higher than French, was a victory because Napoleon lost the war in the end. That’s like saying that the French defeated Hitler in 1940 because de Gaulle triumphantly entered Paris in 1944.

Tolstoy lovingly describes how Kutuzov snored through the Military Council at which the momentous decision to surrender Moscow was taken. In some quarters such somnolence could have been regarded as criminal negligence, but Kutuzov could do no wrong according to Tolstoy.

What mattered to him was that, as an ethnic Russian, Kutuzov was in touch with the mysterious forces governing matters martial with no contribution from any human agency. It was irrelevant that at least 40 percent of all senior officers were of foreign origin, and even many of those regarded as native were indeed of Moldavian, Georgian, Lithuanian, Armenian, Tartar or other non-Slavic descent.

It’s Tolstoy’s fiction that has become canonised in history books. Any Russian pupil will tell you that Kutuzov was a giant among military pigmies, and Borodino was a Russian victory. Similarly, most commentators – amazingly even in the West – accept Tolstoy’s idealised portrayal of pitchfork-wielding peasants as real.

It’s true that Russia was saved not only by the fire of Moscow and -40 temperatures, for which Napoleon’s army was ill-prepared, but also by partisan warfare. But this wasn’t quite the spontaneous expression of the folk spirit of Tolstoy’s fancy. The idea for it had come from aristocratic officers, such as Denis Davydov (appearing as Denisov in War And Peace) and Alexander Figner. They were the ones who ran the guerrilla war, using regular cavalry units as the core of partisan forces.

At first Kutuzov fought their proposals tooth and nail, but then reluctantly sanctioned guerrilla action behind enemy lines. Perhaps he was persuaded by the success of such warfare in Spain. Or, more likely, he felt sleepy, as he did most of the time, and couldn’t be bothered to argue any longer.

For all that, the bicentenary of 1812 is eminently worth celebrating, even though Russia conceivably could have benefited more from losing. This may also be a good occasion for history to oust fiction, if such a thing is ever possible in Russia.

 

 

 

 

Ed Balls and Vince Cable have finally come out and admitted to a close relationship. No, not of the kind that would soon make them eligible for holy matrimony. Neither is that way inclined, and Vince is past the age of consent anyway. Their relationship is that of ideological brothers, with both dead set on getting ahead by turning Britain into Greece.

An undertaking of this magnitude is too big for one man, and the brothers know it. ‘I could work with Vince,’ said Ed, snuggling up closer to Cable on the sofa in the BBC studio. ‘Vince should be listened to on banking reform and on the economy.’

I agree. It is indeed an outrage that we haven’t listened to Vince attentively enough. Had we done so we’d know that his economic ideas are akin to those of an arsonist who pretends to be dousing a fire by pouring lighter fluid on it.

His notion of growth is the state spending more and taxing more. ‘I have not been embarrassed to call myself a person of the centre left,’ declared Vince with pride – and excessive modesty. I get terribly tangled up in all those political soubriquets, but if this is centre left, I’d like to know what hard left is. How, specifically, are Vince’s notions different from – take your pick: a) Scargill’s, b) Livingstone’s, c) Castro’s?

While Vince lacks the honesty to echo François Hollande’s admission that he hates the rich, every pronouncement he makes, every measure he proposes screams hatred and envy. This isn’t counterbalanced by any affection for the poor, unless tireless toil to multiply their number qualifies as such.

To Vince, taxation is for taxation’s sake, not for the sake of having more money to give to those who won’t work for it. He knows, for example, that the 50-percent tax bracket resulted in less government revenue, not more. No matter. The higher rate ‘sent an important message’, of the kind François has enunciated with such charming frankness.

Make no mistake about it: it’s our socialist policies, not some global force majeure, that have got our economy into its present state. A burgeoning welfare state is not only ruinous economically but also corrupting morally – which in turn exacerbates its deleterious effect on the economy. An economy bustling with industry and creative energy could perhaps absorb this abomination for a while and still keep the books balanced. An economy such as ours ends up running up a trillion-pound debt.

Apart from being a millstone around our neck, such a catastrophic debt negates the very democratic principles by which our politicians swear. Implicit in such principles is that a development of this magnitude should require consent from the people who are going to bear its brunt. These are mostly generations not yet born and therefore by definition not in a position to express their consent at the voting booth or otherwise.

Vince’s solution? More taxation, more spending, more borrowing, more money printing, more debt, more stifling of wealth production, more tape whose colour matches his politics. This criminally asinine ideology comfortably coexists in Vince’s breast with a knack for political intrigue that puts Machiavelli to shame.

If you listen to the Andrew Marr interview carefully, the love-in between Ed and Vince laid bare their joint strategy, and they aren’t even bright enough to keep it under wraps until it’s time to strike. Ed went Balls to the wall promoting Vince as Nick’s replacement at the head of the LibDems. Cable had ‘distinguished himself,’ went the message, and Ed would be ‘very surprised if Nick Clegg fights the next election.’

One would think that a prominent member of one party should keep his mouth shut on a possible leadership contest in another. Common tact would demand this, but then Ed is a politician, and a bullying leftie at that.

In response, Vince confirmed that his accession to party leadership is indeed the first leg of the joint Labour-LibDem strategy: ‘I am very happy with Nick, he will continue in the job,’ he said. If you are insufficiently fluent in political, allow me to translate. What Vince said means ‘I hate Nick with unmitigated passion and will do all I can to knife him in the back at the first opportunity.’

And the second leg? Ed was just as forthcoming as his new-found brother: ‘I am not somebody who is thinking to myself I want a [Labour-LibDem] coalition for the future. I want a Labour majority government elected in 2015.’ Of course he does. But should by some miracle the polls suggest that the ideal is unachievable, such a coalition would work nicely.

Vince then gave his ringing endorsement: ‘I have no ambitions.’ It takes truly refreshing effrontery for any politician, and especially for one as conniving and nakedly ambitious as Cable, to utter such words. However, he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, though he did say something he meant: ‘But I do have perfectly businesslike, amicable relationships with members of the Labour Party and other parties.’ And, ‘I’m happy to talk to Ed.’

No translation necessary this time. Vince has endorsed the possibility of a coalition with Labour, should it miraculously fail to score an outright victory in 2015. And if Labour does form the next government, Vince will probably be a member of it – a short walk across the aisle is all that’ll take, along with some prior groundwork behind the back of his current coalition partners.

Labour and LibDems are united in their visceral urge to take revenge on those who make themselves and others independent of the state. They are both likely to regard the subsequent collapse of the economy as acceptable collateral damage. The only possible obstacle on the way to their joining forces would be the personal hubris of the parties’ leaders. That’s why Ed and Vince went to such lengths to reassure themselves and their parties that an equitable accommodation can be found.

Job done. Shame about the country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Dr Williams has acquired his reputation for intellectual depth has to be one of the Church’s great mysteries. If his interview to the Telegraph was designed to throw light on it, then the departing Archdruid of Canterbury has failed as miserably as he did in his day job.

Take his comments on the sharia law, which four years ago Dr Williams suggested ought to be recognised by British courts. In the interview, all he found to say on the subject was that he had ‘succeeded in confusing people.’ His Grace is too hard on himself: there was no confusion at all. His meaning was crystal-clear: he believed then, and appears to believe still, that Muslims must have the same legal latitude as Christians and Jews.

This is nonsensical any way one looks at it, starting with the way our civilisation is called. It’s Judaeo-Christian, not Judaeo-Christian-Islamist. Surely Dr Williams, the erudite intellectual, must be aware that our legal system is rooted in doctrines enunciated in the two Testaments, not in the Koran? Killing apostates, stoning adulterers and castrating women sits uncomfortably with our ethos, be that its religious or secular aspects. Sharia does agree with the English common law in many of its tenets. But one can say – and it’s something the primate of our established religion should have said – that when it does, it’s redundant, and when it doesn’t, it’s subversive. Meaningless waffle just isn’t good enough.

Then Dr Williams uttered a few platitudes about the government’s so-called economic austerity. It would be unrealistic to expect the Archbishop to display more nuanced thinking in this discipline than in his own, and he didn’t disappoint. His main concern isn’t about the country going to the dogs, but about the ‘massive anxiety’ caused by even token cuts in social spending. Some may use such cuts as an excuse not to be ‘thoughtful about minorities’, thereby exacting an awful ‘social cost’.

One can find a better grasp of the issues at hand in any village Coach And Horses. Has His Grace considered the social cost of the economy collapsing altogether, as it surely will if his beloved ‘hairy lefty’ policies aren’t reversed? I’d guess not. Such consideration would require real thought, and this is something that can overtax the cerebral wherewithal of someone inured to uttering sweet bien-pensant nothings over a lifetime.

The great controversy of Dr Williams’s tenure, one that’s threatening to split the Church down the middle, is sex, in both meanings of the word. Specifically, it’s the consecration of female bishops, which he supports, and homomarriage, which he claims he doesn’t. The Church His Grace has led since 2003 is about to be torn asunder by both abominations, and what does he have to say about it? Nothing on the first problem. And on the second? Dr Williams expressed his regrets that ‘We’ve not exactly been on the forefront of pressing for civic equality for homosexual people, and we were wrong about that.’

So what would have been the right thing for our prelates to do? Lead the gay-rights movement? March at the head of gay parades? Decorate every church with rainbow flags? That’s what being ‘on the forefront’ would have meant in practical terms, and that’s what the good Archbishop regrets not having done. Does he actually think that such deeds would be within the remit of the Church of England? Or, for that matter, of any Christian confession? The ‘hairy lefty’ probably does think so, and it’s good to observe a deep theological mind at work. No wonder the Church is in the doldrums.

Actually, as far as Dr Williams is concerned, it isn’t, not at all. Yes, Christianity is in decline, church attendance is going down, but we must look at the big picture. And there the rosy pigment is discernible: people’s non-denominational spirituality is increasing. On what evidence, Your Grace? Well, look at all the teddy bears and flowers people bring to the scene of accidents. The Archbishop forgot to mention the bottles of vodka left outside Amy Winehouse’s house after she overdosed, but what he did say is enough.

That is, it’s enough to draw a lamentable conclusion: the head of our Church doesn’t know the difference between true spirituality and cloying, tasteless, nauseating sentimentality. You know, the kind of stuff that can be so easily whipped into mass hysteria, if you remember Diana’s death.

Any priest who confuses the two should be unfrocked; any similarly ignorant prelate ought to be tarred, feathered and run out of town. But if Dr Williams thinks he should take credit for such pornographic displays, he’s probably right. Not direct credit, you understand – it’s just that, because of him and other ‘hairy lefties’ in the Church, it has failed to provide an effective counterweight to the disgusting pseudospirituality he seems to cherish in his heart.

Towards the end, Dr Williams hinted at some structural changes in the C of E, apparently involving job share in his former position. ‘Watch this space,’ he suggested with his usual neo-Gnostic aura emanating out of every pore. But we are watching this space, Your Grace. We’ve been doing it for a long time, with fear and trepidation. ‘What on earth,’ we wonder, ‘will this lot come up with next?’

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s face it: apart from the odd sex scandal or a drunk bishop mistaking someone else’s car for his own, our Anglican Church is rather dull. But do pray it’ll stay that way, if the alternative is the Russian kind of fun.

The other day, for example, the deacon Sergei Frunza drove onto a main road without looking. The OAP Valentina Pavlova barely managed to avoid a serious accident by hitting the brakes of her Volvo with all her waning strength. She then approached the cleric’s Hyundai to remonstrate.

But God’s servant was in no mood for sermons. He jumped out of his car and smote the old woman in the face with his fist clutching the car key, a technique he must have learned from our huggable hoodies. The pensioner fell to the ground, her mouth pumping blood. When her elder sister then tried to interfere, the reverend broke her nose with a mighty punch. He then got into his car and tried to do a runner, only to be blocked by outraged eye witnesses.

They then called the police, which excited the cleric no end. ‘I don’t give a **** who you call!’ he thundered like Joshua at Jericho. ‘Call the cops, call the FSB [secret police], they’ll do nothing to me!’ He read the future with the clarity of a prophet.

The police duly arrived and took the two women to hospital, where one had stitches put into her lip, the other had her nose set, and both were diagnosed with concussion. As his only punishment, Fr. Frunza was made to visit them and offer his apologies. ‘Well, sorry, this sort of thing happens,’ ran the mea culpa. ‘This is the way I am.’

The story would hardly be worth telling if it weren’t indicative of the symbiosis existing between the Russian Church and law enforcement, particularly of the KGB variety. Not only are the hierarchs of the Church, including the Patriarch, directly appointed by the KGB as a reward for decades of faithful service (to the KGB, that is, not to God), but even the lower tiers are largely – though not yet exclusively – staffed with thugs like Fr. Frunza.

Despairing of finding solace within the national church, many sincere believers join evangelical Protestant sects, such as Seventh-Day Adventism or Pentecostalism. Collectively, such sects now have more parishioners than the ROC, something that’s discouraged, to put it mildly, by its muscular sponsors.

Last week a Moscow Pentecostal church was robbed and practically destroyed by a gang led by police officers. The raiders broke in at midnight, and by 3 a.m. the church was reduced to rubble. All the sacred objects were stolen, along with expensive synthesisers and other electronic equipment, and the language used by the thugs wasn’t the kind one normally expects in a consecrated environment. Some of the visitors introduced themselves as court bailiffs, one as Elvis Presley, and the others withheld formal introductions altogether.

Col. Putin refrained from commenting on these, or other similar, incidents. Instead he delivered himself of a soliloquy on the Pussy Riot trial. These three young ladies are now serving two-year terms for violating the KGB-sponsored saintliness of the ROC, and Putin was irate. The Pussy Rioters, he explained with avuncular condescension and not without reason, were naughty – and had been long before their punk antics in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

In particular, the guardian of Russian morality drew his listeners’ attention to the public demonstration of sexual intercourse indulged in by one of the Rioters Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. The president was particularly, and one has to say justifiably, upset with the footage of the orgy that had made its way to the Internet.

Lest he may be accused of being too heavy-handed, Putin offered a humorous aside: ‘Those who like it say that group sex is better than individual because, as any other collective undertaking, it leaves room for shirking. This is everyone’s personal business, but uploading it on the net must be assessed from the legal point of view.’ Putin then referred to  the Rioters’ blasphemous act as a Walpurgisnacht and let it be known that the sanctity of the ROC is in good hands, his own.

Unlike Lenin, who routinely referred to Christianity as ‘necrophilia’ and a ‘foul obscenity’, the present national leader is happy to be seen as the godfather not only to the economy, but also to the Church. Then of course, as a career KGB officer, he has for the ROC hierarchy that particularly warm feeling one tends to reserve for colleagues. That’s why he won’t tolerate any criticism of the Church in the context of the Pussy Riot trial.

Putin feels foreigners, and especially Americans, should mind their own business, which is far from being good. After all, many American states still have the death penalty, ‘and only God our Lord should be allowed to deprive a man of his life. But that’s a separate, philosophical discussion,’ added the Christian neophyte. Indeed it is. And who’s better qualified to conduct it than a proud, unreconstructed member of the organisation responsible for murdering 60 million Russians?

Do you sometimes feel that life is a madhouse, and you’re an outsider looking in? If you don’t, read the Russian press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine yourself late at night, wearing dark clothes, a hood over your head. A stray pedestrian has just turned the corner… You wipe the sweat off your brow. It’s not a cop, only a pub crawler chucked out at last call. Here’s the house you’ve cased… You ease your trusted jemmy between the door and its frame, next to the lock. The jemmy moves side to side noiselessly, or does it? Even the slightest crackle of wood sounds like gun shots going off, about to wake the whole street up. Your heart stops, then restarts. Finally the door is prised open, you slide in, your rubber soles caressing the carpet…

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Bet you wouldn’t have the nerve to do anything like that – I know I wouldn’t. Neither would Judge Peter Bowers of Teesside Crown Court. Unlike you and me, however, he admires the bravery of a thug breaking into someone’s house. Driven by this noble emotion, yesterday he allowed the recidivist burglar and arsonist Richard Rochford to walk free.

You don’t believe me? Here are the Judge’s own laudatory words: ‘It takes a huge amount of  courage as far as I can see for someone to burgle somebody’s house. I wouldn’t have the nerve.’

Truer words have never been spoken. Burglary does take courage. Not as much as rape and certainly not as much as murder, but still quite a bit. And courage, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, must be rewarded not with custodial sentences but with medals. Distinguished Service Medal for burglary. Distinguished Service Cross for rape (aggravated). Victoria Cross for murder.

By passing a suspended sentence on the hero of our time, the good judge has done a disservice to all those brave, intrepid, selfless men who go out every night, jemmy in hand, to strike a blow for human courage. He should have put the serial criminal up for a decoration, pour encourager les autres.

Mr Rochford began to display his bravery at a precocious age. He was merely 10 when he first distinguished himself by breaking into a house. Still a young man, he has already done three years for arson – without receiving as much as a meagre commendation for it. And the four burglaries to which he admitted in Judge Bower’s court are only those for which the modest warrior was prepared to take credit. As there always are, left outside the brackets were no doubt dozens of other burglaries to which our unsung hero didn’t own up.

In addition to praising Rochford’s courage, Mr Bowers further reinforced his legal credentials by explaining he didn’t put the hero away because ‘prison very rarely does anybody any good.’ Admirers of Dostoyevsky, who came out of prison a new, deeper man, might disagree, but by and large the statement is correct. Prison rarely does much good to the prisoner. And you know why? Because that’s not what it’s there for.

Prison is punishment, not a self-improvement counselling service. Punishing a wicked act is its primary function, keeping a criminal off the streets the secondary one, with deterrence strictly tertiary. Rehabilitation, if it’s a desideratum at all, would appear way down on the list. But above all prison is an instrument of justice done and seen to be done. For a society in which justice is debauched won’t remain civilised for long. When a judge, the law personified, praises a burglar’s courage and sets him free, we know that our civilisation is on its last legs.

When Britain was indeed civilised, burglary was a hanging offence. In 1830 Lord Russell abolished the death penalty for house-breaking, which was the humane thing to do. But His Lordship would have thought twice about stepping on that slippery slope had he imagined for a second that less than 200 years later an abomination like Judge Bowers would crawl out of the woodwork.

This wasn’t an isolated event: Mr Bowers has form. In the past he let a recidivist with 80 crimes on his record walk free for a burglary committed four days after his release from prison. ‘I am quite sure you are capable of a lot better,’ he said to the criminal. I’m sure about that too. Given enough incentive, he’d be capable of murder.

On that occasion, the Judge told the court, ‘I must be getting soft in my old age.’ Soft in the head, more like it. This time he showed that he too has the courage of his convictions: ‘I might get pilloried for it,’ said Mr Bowers, referring to his latest miscarriage of justice.

You shouldn’t be pilloried, Your Honour. You should be struck off, preferably without a pension. As to the rest of us, we’re left to ponder the depth of the abyss into which we’re falling – pushed over the edge by the moral decrepitude of PC modernity. And in a less contemplative mood, we should all install extra locks and apply for a shotgun licence.

 

 

 

 

I don’t know if Dave’s sainted mother is still alive, but if so I doubt that even Mrs Cameron rates her boy’s chances in 2015 as odds-on. In all likelihood, he’ll be thrashed by the very people who created the mess he’s unqualified to clear up.

This means he ought to consider his options – as the old truism goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Obviously, Dave’s new job will have to be commensurate with his talents, and so far he has displayed but one: that of a cardsharp.

In my youth I knew a few of those, and even played against them without losing each time. In the process I learned to watch out for a few tricks, and it’s on the basis of that experience that I’m offering career advice to Dave.

He may not know it, but he already has all the necessary skills. Specifically, the bread-and-butter triple whammy of his future job included 1) stacking, 2) false shuffle and 3) false cut.

Picking up the cards off the table after the previous hand, the dealer would ‘stack’ the top part of the pack, making sure he himself would get four aces, or whatever else he desired. Then he’d shuffle the deck in such a way that the ‘stacked’ part remained on top and undisturbed. After an opponent’s cut, the dealer would perform the conjurer’s trick of keeping the ‘stack’ on top (I shan’t tell you how this was done, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for wanting to know). Job done; another fish is reeled in.

Observing Dave’s first cabinet reshuffle, I felt a twinge of nostalgia for my youth, misspent as it might have been. For Dave not only stacked the top part of his team, but also managed to keep it on top for all the shuffling, reshuffling and cuts.

The bottom of the pack was indeed shuffled properly – quite a few junior positions got filled with bright new faces. The newcomers will do the tactical day-to-day grind, and more power to them. But the strategic aces in the pack, department heads, have suffered little attrition.

Ken Clarke’s hush puppies and beer-stained tie were moved out of Justice, and the token conservative Chris Grayling moved in to mollify the restless backbenchers who still think themselves Tories. Perhaps now burglary will be reclassified as a vicious crime to punish rather than a psychological problem to treat. Also, there’s an outside chance that people who slam their door in a burglar’s face will no longer be arrested for using excessive force. All that is good stuff, but hardly the solution to our most pressing problems.

Then Jeremy Hart, whose transparently shifty smile disqualifies him as a cardsharp, has climbed up to Health, from his previous foothold as Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport. Now the very existence of that job is a telltale sign of state tyranny, something unthinkable when Britain was still a free country. Quick, who filled the culture post in Rockingham’s cabinet? Disraeli’s? Gladstone’s? See what I mean?

Jeremy’s last contribution to our cultural refinement was appointing Peter Bazalgette as chairman of the Arts Council. Sir Peter’s job application included such notable cultural achievements as Big Brother and Deal Or No Deal, so clearly such an individual deserves a broader canvas on which to scribble his obscene graffiti. If Jeremy applies the same personnel criteria to his new job, faith healers, shamans and other mountebanks will be performing heart surgery.

Hunt has already been, and Laws soon will be, promoted in spite of the scandals in which they were both involved. Dave knows he can rely on them – they’re unlikely to be caught by the wrist again.

Admittedly, by removing Baroness Warsi from the co-chairmanship of the Conservative Party, Dave left himself terribly exposed to amply justified criticism. After all, as we know, the most – only? – important feature of any cabinet is its faithful reflection of the country’s demographic makeup.

Baroness Warsi, for all her obvious incompetence, was therefore invaluable: she ticked two vital boxes by being both a woman and a Muslim. But, displaying the sleight of hand that’ll stand him in good stead after 2015, Dave merely shifted her sideways, immediately filled several junior positions with women and moved Teresa Villiers up to Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. No way Dave will be caught out, bright lad like him.

But his most outstanding achievement was to keep the stacked part of the pack on top. The economic cards remained in the sweaty clutch of George Osborne, Vince Cable and Danny Alexander. This means Dave is happy with the way his aces lie – he must be thinking the economy is doing so well that any change could only be for the worse.

Someone less adept at marking cards would think that replacing that unholy trinity with, say, David Davis, John Redwood and Stewart Jackson wouldn’t be a bad thing. And a real cynic would go so far as to suggest that we could do even better by picking three random names out of the phone directory, putting them into safe Tory seats (if there is any such thing) and elevating them to the jobs currently held by George, Vince and Danny. But Dave knows better.

I do wish him the best of luck in his future career. Dave won’t even need to buy a false moustache and a derringer to make the transition. His future is bright; ours isn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

In Prohibition America, disputes between the likes of Al Capone, John Dillinger or Baby Face Nelson were settled with Tommie guns. In Putin’s Russia, squabbles involving Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich or Oleg Deripaska are these days resolved by London’s High Court.

On balance, the old way is preferable for being stylistically pure. Since Al and Baby Face made their money outside the law, it would have been incongruous  for them to appeal to it when things went sour. So instead they’d slam those drum mags into their Tommies and settle it like men. The Russians, on the other hand, have decided to go legit for once in their lives.

You might say that there’s an important difference: American gangsters were universally acknowledged as such. By contrast the Russians pose as legitimate businessmen, and any speculation on their probity runs the risk of a libel suit. In Russia, of course, everybody knows what those ‘oligarchs’ really are, but in a civilised country one is innocent until proven guilty in court.

Hence the tremendous importance of the B v A trial: it proved beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Russian oligarchs are typologically closer to Al Capone than to Bill Gates. This is one finding that has escaped the attention of our press, yet it’s the only one that makes the trial interesting.

The press got most of the facts right, even though it didn’t understand them properly. In broad strokes, Berezovsky was a major beneficiary of the Yeltsyn regime. Capitalising on his closeness to the president’s daughter, he gained access to the perpetually drunk leader and became a billionaire by buying up state assets for a derisory fraction of their value.

Abramovich was Berezovsky’s junior partner when the latter branched out into the oil business. Together they took over oil companies, refineries, gas processing plants and pipelines. In parallel, they acquired the controlling interest in the Russian government by masterminding Yeltsyn’s return for a second term. With the president dissolving the last of his marbles in booze, it was Berezovsky and Abramovich who interviewed and de facto appointed candidates for government posts. They were also the ones who chose Putin as successor to Yeltsyn, hoping the lowly KGB lieutenant-colonel would be putty in their hands.

That hope turned out to be ill-founded, and Putin outflanked the ‘oligarchs’. Abramovich, the former street guttersnipe, cottoned on quickly and kissed the new godfather’s hand, figuratively speaking. Berezovsky, the former maths professor, was slow on the uptake, overplayed his political hand and was thrown out of Russia, having been blackmailed into selling his assets for a pittance, just a few billion here or there.

The pressure on him was exerted through his former partner Abramovich, now playing ball with Putin and therefore allowed to benefit from the fire sale, provided he remembered which side his bread was buttered. Both A and B ended up in London, the former with Putin’s blessing, the latter with his anathema.

Berezovsky wouldn’t take it lying down. He’d use his remaining billions to finance anti-Putin opposition in Russia, and also try to sue Abramovich for cheating him out of more billions. The first part of the counteroffensive proved forlorn, the second difficult.

Abramovich, securely shielded from the outside world by a platoon of cutthroat bodyguards, was out of reach for any summonses or writs. But fate was on Berezovsky’s side. On a fine 2007 day, he espied Abramovich in an Hermès boutique, pounced on him and after an unseemly scuffle managed to thrust the writ into his hand. The biggest civil case in Britain’s history was under way.

It concluded last Friday, with Judge Elizabeth Gloster calling Berezovsky ‘an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes.’ In contrast, Her Honour found Abramovich to be ‘a truthful, and on the whole reliable, witness.’ Well, Dame Elizabeth was right in that commitment to truth has never been Berezovsky’s most salient trait. How she found Abramovich to be any different is a mystery, but then the law is full of them.

Yet, if you believe our newspaper accounts, Her Honour could hardly have ruled in any other way. It was the plaintiff’s word against the defendant’s, and the burden of proof was on the former. No written contract existed, and, as Samuel Goldwyn once explained, an oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. But the press got it wrong: Berezovsky’s case wasn’t entirely based on his word.

The plaintiff produced one undisputed fact: Abramovich had indeed paid Berezovsky more than a billion dollars. The latter claimed that this represented his share of the profits in the oil companies he owned jointly with Abramovich. The defendant, on the other hand, had to claim that no such partnership existed and that…

Here’s the rub: what on earth could he claim? A billion-odd is a rather large sum. Surely it wasn’t a birthday gift? Hence the strategy of Berzovsky’s case, and the man could make a hell of a poker player even though he lost this hand.

Abramovich could only win the case and save himself $5 billion by claiming that the money represented something entirely different. But if it wasn’t a partner’s share of the profits, it had to be a payment for services rendered. And the only service Berezovsky could have rendered to Abramovich was to provide what in the Russian underworld is called krysha. Literally meaning ‘roof’, the word is used to denote that cornerstone of organised crime: protection.

For Abramovich to declare that he had paid all those zeroes for protection was tantamount to admitting that he had made his money Al Capone’s way, not Bill Gates’s. The Gateses and Bransons don’t need protection: they become rich by delivering products we want to buy. The only ‘businessmen’ who need protection are gangsters. So Abramovich’s choice was stark: he either had to insist he and Berezovsky are both legitimate businessmen and pay up – or admit they are both Mafiosi.

Berezovsky was hoping his adversary would balk at declaring himself a Russian answer to Scarface Capone. This was the plaintiff’s bluff, but it was called. Rather than parting with $5 billion, Abramovich for all intents and purposes admitted he had made his money under the protection of the mafiya.

The moment the word krysha crossed Her Honour’s lips, Berezovsky’s case was lost, even though it’s likely that this once he was indeed telling the truth. But in the absence of documented proof that that billion-odd he had received from Abramovich was anything other than krysha, only one ruling was possible. Dame Elizabeth did what any other judge would have done: she found for the defendant.

Case closed? Not quite. For Abramovich’s admission effectively means that his and Berezovsky’s (and by inference other Russian oligarchs’) fortunes aren’t rewards for successful entrepreneurship, but ill-gotten gains being laundered through Western banks. The Exchequer would be justified in impounding such assets and holding them until their exact provenance is ascertained.

Since Abramovich had to own up that his money had been made in ways that are illegal in Britain, the oligarchs’ assets could eventually be confiscated and applied against our national debt. Meanwhile, Abramovich and Berezovsky deserve our gratitude: they’ve added another word, krysha, to the English legal lexicon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And speaking of Romney’s team, his VP choice has added a whole new meaning to the term ‘running mate’. Paul Ryan has just admitted he shaved more than an hour off his best marathon result when claiming he had clocked in at ‘two-hours, fifty something’. Ryan’s actual time in the only marathon he ever ran, back in 1990, was 4:01 – far short of the professional-level performance he boasted.

In admitting his dishonesty, Ryan said he had ‘exaggerated’. This word comes from the Latin exaggerāre, which means ‘to magnify’. Considering he claimed a shorter and not longer than actual time, this Latinism isn’t quite precise. May I suggest a shorter Anglo-Saxon verb? You know, the one that starts with an ‘l’.

Admittedly, Ryan isn’t the first politician to use his phoney athleticism as a key to people’s hearts. The stratagem has served the likes of Mao and Putin well, so Romney’s boy finds himself in good, if not unimeachably democratic, company. 

 

 

Whether it’s up in Westminster or down the pub, the British are looking for the side to pick in the upcoming US presidential election. In doing so, they project their own politics onto the American scene.

Generally, those of conservative leanings tend to prefer Romney, although one doesn’t detect much enthusiasm either way. Coming across as more stolid than solid, the Republican candidate doesn’t inspire misty-eyed affection: if you loved George Bush Sr., you’ll like Romney. Still, for a conservative to support Obama would be tantamount to high treason, or at least that’s the consensus.

Yet knee-jerk support for the seemingly more conservative candidate is ill-justified this time. If I were still qualified to vote in US elections, I’d vote for Obama, much as I despise him, his policies, everything he stands for and the horse he rode in on (its name is Demagoguery).

As his piece in the Telegraph demonstrates, Daniel Hannan doesn’t see it that way, not this time around. Four years ago, he supported Obama, mainly because he ‘enjoyed his speeches’. Let me get this right. The world economy was collapsing on our heads, the Middle East was ready to explode into a global conflict, British soldiers were dying God knows for what, and yet supporting a transparent nonentity with the gift of the gab seemed like the proper thing to do.

America and the rest of us needed a man with a golden touch, not a silver tongue, and yet Hannan, supposedly a conservative, favoured the man slated to become the most socialist US president ever. And anyway, how anyone can enjoy Obama’s demagoguery escapes me. His speeches always have been and always will be long on rhetoric and short on content, but then he’s a politician, as, come to that, is Mr Hannan. There must be some professional kinship there that transcends reason.

So what has changed this time? Barack still has a nice turn of phrase on him; he’ll talk your ear off with all the right resonances and diligently rehearsed gesticulation. Why not support him again for this reason alone?

Hannan goes into a long litany of Obama’s economic failures, which isn’t really worth doing. Pointing out Barack’s inadequacy in that area is like lobbing a wheelchair-tennis player: too easy and hardly sporting. We all know Obama is incompetent. But what makes us think Romney will be less so?

By way of reply, Hannan reverses the ancient wisdom by suggesting that the devil you don’t know is better: ‘Whether Mitt Romney can eliminate the deficit is not clear. What is beyond doubt, though, is that Mr Obama cannot.’ America national debt as percentage of GDP is 25 percent greater than ours, her budget deficit stood at 8.7 percent last year, and yet there’s an off chance that Romney will avert a global collapse. And even if he doesn’t, he’s unlikely to do worse than Obama. What better reason to support him?

And then comes the crux of the argument: ‘From a British point of view, the choice should be straightforward,’ writes Hannan. Obama doesn’t like us, whereas ‘Mr Romney, by contrast, is an old-fashioned Republican when it comes to foreign policy: he knows who America’s friends are.’

I’d say he knows it at least as well as George W. Bush did, he of ‘Yo, Blair!’ fame. These days, American presidents take it for granted that Britain will go along with any hair-brained adventure, any pointless and potentially catastrophic military undertaking. They count on us not the way a man depends on a friend, but the way he relies on his Alsatian to bark at a stranger or, if need be, bite him.

Over the last couple of decades, US foreign policy (and Britain, after all, is foreign to the USA) has been variously influenced, shaped or – under Republican administrations – dominated by neoconservative philosophies and personages. 

Neoconservatism, it must be said, has nothing to do with conservatism – non-conservatism would be a more appropriate name for it. Unlike real conservatism it’s an eerie mishmash of Trotskyist temperament, infantile bellicosity, jingoism, expansionism masked by pseudo-messianic effluvia on exporting democracy to every tribal society on earth, Keynesian economics, Fabian socialism, welfarism and statism run riot. These are mixed together with a spoonful of vaguely conservative phrases purloined from the rightful owners to trick the neocons’ way to electoral support.

In an odd sort of way, neoconservatism plays into the hand of innate American activism: it’s not in the national psyche to believe that sometimes doing nothing is the best thing to do. ‘We must do something!’ was the Middle American battle cry after 9/11, which I prefer to call 11/9. George W. Bush, who at the time was still putting his family photographs on the Oval Office desk, is Middle America personified, so the cry resonated through his heart, skull and bone marrow. He! Had! To Do! Something!

The question was, what? And Bush relied on his foreign-policy advisers to answer it. Now those chaps were to a man either card-carrying, fully paid-up neocons themselves or at least hugely receptive to neocon ideas. That is to say they were ready to strike a blow for American supremacism, with democracy as the slogan inscribed on the banners of aggressive war. Islamist terrorism was for them not the tragedy it was for other Americans. It was a convenient pretext.

Over the next decade, America, with our help, succeeded in replacing every marginally friendly Middle Eastern regime with a madcap Islamist one, unsettling and radicalising the region, bringing it closer to an uncontrolled implosion and thereby creating a risk of global conflict. Thousands of Americans and their ‘friends’, Brits mostly, had to die to promote this neocon agenda, and, as Americans say, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now, if Bush’s foreign-policy entourage was mostly neocon, Romney’s is exclusively so. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict in which direction they are going to steer what passes for US foreign policy should Romney get elected. Nor does one have to be a seer to know that, when Americans say ‘Jump’, the only possible British response will be ‘How high?’

It’s entirely possible, nay likely, that a Romney administration would drag us into a war that may or may not have an invigorating effect on the US economy, but would definitely be ruinous for us.

So yes, Romney ‘knows who America’s friends are’. But does Hannan know who Britain’s friends are? On the evidence of his facile comments on the US election, one rather doubts it.