Category: Blog

“Hi, Tim’s my name, contact’s my game.

“Me friends call me Yo-Yo, on account I help me mates unwind, djahmean?

“You look like a proper gentleman, mate. Lots of energy, sunny smile, like in solar, am I wrong? And a well handsome bloke you are too, nice whistle.

“Looks like you need some company, am I wrong? What, you already have a company? So how about some company for your company, djahmean?

“So what’s your pleasure then? Women, men, other? I know’em all, mate. In Westminster, Notting Hill, Islington – you name’em, I know’em. Just ask around in Whitehall – they’ll tell you everyone knows Tim and Tim knows everyone, djahmean?

“What you after then? Right you are, mate. I hear you: someone top-heavy, well keen, knows how to pull your strings like, am I wrong? Oh you mean not pull your strings but pull strings for you? Not a problem. You crack the whip, I make the trip. I’m your Yo-Yo, mate. They don’t call me that for nothing.

“Where you staying, mate? Know it, nice place that, well posh. Well, me contact will meet you in the lobby, how’s that for you? Cost you, but then a nice gentleman like you isn’t short of a bob or two.

“How much? Well, that depends, mate. A quick flowjob will cost you seven bags, me old china. You understand? It’s London, mate. Bag of sand, grand. Way we talk here.

“What’s a flowjob? Just told you, seven bags. Oh what is it? It’s like me contact is pulling a train and there’s lots of blokes in a queue. You want to get to the top, that’s quick flow. You get ahead of other blokes, the rest is down to you, djamean? Quick flowjob, we call it.

“Then there’s half-and-half, cost you another three bags. It’s like you make contact, I twist an arm, make sure you get done like you never been done before, like.

“Another five bags, and you get full English, djamean? We call it round-the-world. You get done not just here in London but everywhere you go. Get you on the map, mate. China, Africa, you name it. The sun never sets, me old china. Like in solar.

“So it’s a deal then? Me contact meet you in your lobby, fifteen bags, all in. Half now, half when you get done.

“No, no cheques, mate. Got to be bangers. You know, bangers ‘n mash, cash… Ta, mate.

“Let’s have a drink on it. Oi, dahlin! Giz a couple of Mahatmas, love. That’s brandy to you, guv. You know, Mahatma Gandhi… Yeah, it’s London, mate. Way we talk here”

Throughout this conversation, taking place in a booth next to mine, I was trying to steal a peak at the man delivering this soliloquy. But he was well hidden from view by the back of his seat.

I finished my drink and headed for the exit, not daring to look over my shoulder. One never knows with these chaps – they catch you staring, they may turn violent.

I walked out and shielded my eyes from the bright sun shining across the Thames. What a lovely place Westminster is, I thought. Full of good people always ready to help a stranger. 

 

 

 

 

The Chinese mind tends to uniformity, which is partly why Chinese bodies are so often clad in uniforms.

Back in the old days the uniforms were either military khaki, patterned after the Soviet model, or paramilitary blue of Identikit design. The impression was eerie: it was as if the whole nation was cut to the same stencil.

These days those Chinese one encounters outside China have discovered the joy of Dior and Ferragamo, along with other Western delights, such as public drunkenness. So much more upsetting it was to see President Xi Jinping pose with President Obama this morning.

Both men were wearing identical dark suits, accessorised with white open-collared shirts and plastic smiles. My first thought was that perhaps the Chinese commie ‘prevert’, to use the preferred American locution, had imposed his taste for sartorial uniformity on the running dog of American imperialism.

That misconception was, however, dispelled by the next bit of Sky News footage starring Obama as chairman of a cabinet meeting later the same day. Every man at the table was wearing exactly the same clothes as the participants of the US-China summit: dark suits with open-collared white shirts.

Now call me an old fogie or something worse, but as a matter of general principle I don’t think suits should be worn without a tie. A blazer, yes; a tweed jacket, possibly; a suit, no.

However, as a matter of particular principle, a tall, reedy Italian under 30 can look quite dashing in a dark suit with an open-collared shirt. An Englishman or an American who could pass for an Italian, and who’s also young, tall and reedy, may sometimes pull it off without looking stupid, but seldom.

Middle-aged men dressed that way look frankly pathetic, especially if they aren’t Italian, and the chaps around Obama’s table probably employ image consultants who told them this very thing. Like they tell them never to wear a white shirt on camera (glare), never to appear in a hat (wimpish) and always to eschew umbrellas (ditto) unless it’s a real downpour, in which case they shouldn’t be outdoors anyway.

Yet in this instance the ministers ignored their consultants’ advice. They chose to look ridiculous – and what’s worse, identically ridiculous. It’s as if the Chinese affection for uniforms had rubbed off on Obama and from him on his subordinates.

Why, I wondered. And then I remembered: yesterday was Friday. On that day all American office workers pledge allegiance to the great, if rather recent, American institution: the Dress-Down Day.

Every Friday chaps who throughout the week have to suffer the imposition of the traditional dress code, are told to come to work in jeans, trainers and checked shirts. In the southern reaches of the US of A, trainers may be replaced with cowboy boots and Western shirts may make an appearance. In either case, all employees must wear the prescribed uniform on pain of mockery, ostracism and eventual sacking.

Even men who grow up wearing suits and feel awkward in denim must toe the line – or else. Similarly, even men who’ve received an expensive education and therefore can express themselves with proper grammar and extensive vocabulary are expected to use solecisms and malapropisms, even – especially! – if they know those for what they are.

By the same token even politicians educated at Andover and the Ivy League are expected to converse in folksy asides and the odd swear word, along with locutions like ‘there’s lotsa folks out there who’s hurtin’ right now.’ Old Dubya spoke that way naturally, or rather did a darn good job pretending he did.

He desperately needed  the ‘folks’ to forget that his senator grandfather was named Prescott, rather than say Bubba or Billy Bob, that his president father couldn’t for the life of him do the populist bit, that they like him went to Yale – and all three belonged to the quasi-Masonic Scull and Bones society.

A politico is just about allowed to be posh in America, but only if the ‘folks’ see that he’s tryin’ to do his goddamnest to be just like’em. They know he’s dissembling, and he knows they know, but the game has to be played by certain rules, with every ritual observed.

This is the US equivalent of Tony studiously dropping his aitches when speaking to some audiences and reclaiming them when addressing others. Or Dave calling himself Dave, using words like ‘chillaxing’ and wearing casual clothes whenever there’s a TV crew in the vicinity. Dave of course also underscores his modern, populist, with-it credentials by wearing the odd black suit with no tie, and he’s not even Italian.

Being half-black, Obama is allowed more leeway than, say, Dubya was, and he don’t even have to sound like no Texan roustabout, Californian grape-picker or Brooklyn trader. He can actually wear his Ivy League education on his sleeve – provided that the sleeve doesn’t look like it comes from anywhere in Europe, especially, God forbid, Savile Row.

But there are limits. Obama may do posh, but it has to be ‘merican posh. That means no long words within the folks’ earshot, no disdain for the folks’ taste in music (Country and Western is OK, jazz just about OK, classical ain’t – unless it’s Aaron Copland or John Philip Sousa) and hotdammit no tie on a Friday. OK, no jeans if it happens to be a state occasion, but definitely no tie.

What’s distressing is that we’re picking up American things here, like baseball caps, verbs made out of nouns, Coke and KFC – and the Dress-Down Day. Thus Dave, who spent his student days drinking Bollie with or without Stollie, now has to feign affection for the Ye Olde English pint – especially when a lens can be espied anywhere within a mile.

Somehow, though, we balk at such American habits as enterprise, hard work and short holidays. But hey, a chap has to draw the line somewhere, what?

Between the 14^th and 18^th centuries the English changed the way they pronounced  their vowels and hence spelled their words.

The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen called this upheaval the Great Vowel Shift and described it in detail. This achievement earned him countless curses by every subsequent student of English who, like me, had to spend his hormonally active years learning the convoluted zigzags by which every vowel moved from Middle to Modern English.

A much more significant language revolution is under way now, yet taxonomists have so far failed even to find a name for it. I propose to fill this void by describing it as the Great Meaning Shift (GMS), and I hope posterity will treat me more kindly than it has so far treated Jespersen.

Admittedly English words have always been able to change their meaning over time. For example ‘skirt’ and ‘shirt’ used to denote parts of the same garment, and ‘bride’ used to mean ‘cook’, which these days would be wrong not only semantically but also factually.

But what’s going on now is different. Words don’t just change but reverse their meaning – and they do so not gradually but instantly.

Yesterday I observed that in Davespeak the words ‘legal tax avoidance’ now mean their exact opposite: ‘illegal tax evasion.’

But that’s small beer compared to many other terms. ‘Tolerance’, for example, now stands for ‘intolerance’. Specifically ‘religious tolerance’ means intolerance to any public manifestation of the Christian faith and a virtual ban on the display of even discreet Christian symbols. And by ‘intolerance’ I mean not just tacit disapproval but aggressive action, like sacking stewardesses who wear a cross or nurses who pray for their patients.

Or take the word ‘liberal’. In America it denotes an utterly illiberal individual who’s in favour of as much state power as is achievable this side of concentration camps. Alas, across the pond our own Liberal Democratic party does nothing to restore the word to its original meaning.

The EU is among the most active agents of the GMS. According to those Brussels linguists, ‘pooling’ means ‘abandoning’, as in sovereignty. ‘Integration’ means ‘disintegration’, as in nation states. ‘Bailout’ means de facto colonisation. And, as we’re finding out, ‘free trade’ stands for ‘trade war’, while a ‘free-trade zone’ in reality means a ‘protectionist bloc’.

EU fanatics will talk your ear off about freedom of trade being the principal reason for their beloved political setup. To the accompaniment of that deafening bleating the EU introduces one protectionist measure after another.

Some, such as those aimed at destroying the British finance industry and thereby our whole economy, don’t provoke retaliation in kind. But countries retaining more gonadal fortitude than a Britain led by Dave and Nick don’t mind going to trade war if sufficiently provoked.

Back in the 90s the US and the EU were engaged in a trade shootout over B & B (as in beef and bananas). Now the Chinese have responded to EU anti-dumping tariffs on solar panels by imposing a levy on European wine.

This measure is likely to have the same effect on say France, as the Franco-German taxes on financial transactions will have on the City of London. In both instances the blow will fall on the country’s key industry.

The Chinese warned they had ‘many other cards to play’, clearly referring to slapping a customs duty on the import of German cars – another attack by a key market on a key industry.

The EU has been for years accusing China of not being a free market, with government subsidies for financial services and raw materials cited as the most blatant offences. The accusations are of course true, but the words ‘kettle’, ‘teapot’ and ‘black’ immediately spring to mind.

What about all sorts of European banks, including our own? Didn’t they receive a bit of a leg-up, just as their customers were finding themselves on the receiving end of a leg-over? Of course they did.

And what about the EU’s cherished Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)? You know, the subsidy that amounts to a third of the EU budget, the one that pays the French to grow and harvest their wine, while paying the Italians to grow and not to harvest their vegetables?

Of course you know it – after all, you contribute your share to the billions paid into CAP by British consumers.

 It’s interesting to note that the Chinese are ready to take the EU at its own word. Doesn’t the EU claim it’s a tightly knit unit in which different components are all fused into one, a sort of de facto United States of Europe?

Fine, say the Chinese. So if Germany moves to protect her solar-panel industry, we’ll retaliate against those French clarets and Burgundies. In other words, any protectionist action by one EU member can trigger off a massive trade war against all.

In such a war Britain can find herself among the collateral damage, a bit like an innocent bystander hit by a stray bullet in a Mafia shootout. This is something we can ill-afford, considering that China is almost as a big a market for us as the EU itself.

This is as good a reason as any for us to show this abomination a clean pair of heels. Then we’ll be able to remind the world what free trade really means – after all, Britain practically invented the concept. As a result the UK would become much more and the GMS considerably less. Worth having, if you ask me.

The title of the American film to which I’m obliquely referring, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, shows what happens when people are encouraged to express themselves outside any intellectual or linguistic discipline.

This opening of the sluice gates is supposed to make our language bigger by letting in a rush of verbal creativity. In fact it makes it smaller all the time – in this instance by fusing the Past Indefinite and Past Participle of the verb ‘to shrink’ into one illiterate locution.

Though regrettable, this is innocent enough. Much more pernicious are efforts to reduce the language in a deliberate attempt to trick the public into accepting ill-advised government action.

Such is the case with Dave’s pathetic attempts to obliterate any semantic, and therefore legal, differences between ‘tax avoidance’ and ‘tax evasion’. Until Dave assumed the role of a Latter Day Dr Johnson, the semantic distinction between the two had been clear-cut.

‘Tax avoidance’ meant variously creative legal attempts to shield from the clutches of Inland Revenue some of the income that it would otherwise claim. The government itself kindly set up quite a few tax-avoidance schemes, such as some pension contributions, ISAs, some bonds and so forth.

Such generosity on the part of our politicians is only partly explicable by their innate munificence. At least some of the motivation had to come from its congenital desire to keep our money within their expropriatory reach. Thus the first prime-ministerial action of Dave’s role model Tony was to raid pension funds to the tune of five billion pounds.

The unease modern states clearly feel about money in people’s pockets makes the people feel uneasy about taxation. No one doubts the need for fair taxes, but ‘fair’ is the operative word.

It’s manifestly unfair for the state to rob people of half of what they earn during their lifetime – and then rob them again after death by taxing the already taxed money they leave their families. It’s also unfair for the state to double-tax people’s earnings by charging 20 percent on top of the price we pay for what we buy.

Moreover, ways in which the state spends the money it extracts, or rather extorts, from us makes all taxation both unfair and detrimental to our society’s health. For the state uses our tax money chiefly to bribe into voting the right way those who won’t work and therefore don’t pay any tax.

It also uses our money to import vast numbers of grateful voters from culturally alien areas. This hits two birds with one stone, first by creating a whole class beholden to the present government and second by diluting the capacity of the rest to resist.

Therefore taxpayers try to augment the government-controlled shelters by others, legally provided by foreign governments and also by some British territories and crown dependencies. Such activities are collectively known as ‘tax avoidance schemes’, and their legality has until now been as universally accepted as the state’s extortionate taxation has been universally despised.

‘Tax evasion’, on the other hand, is an illegal failure to pay tax. Since the way we’re taxed is grossly unjust, most people will refer to evasion as malum prohibitum rather than malum in se. But one way or the other, malum it undoubtedly is.

The difference between avoidance and evasion is clear, and it’s this difference that our amateur lexicographer Dave first sought to blur and now seeks to obliterate.

His motives are obvious. Like any socialist ‘leader’, he’s incapable of devising and implementing policies that would stimulate growth, thereby expanding the tax base and increasing tax revenues.

Coming much more naturally to him and his ilk is the urge to squeeze as much as possible out of the already suffocating taxpayers – this though any half-competent economist knows that excessive taxation has exactly the opposite effect to the one professed. It frustrates workers, discourages them from trying to earn more, shrinks the tax base and thus reduces the state’s income.

Yet all their pronouncements notwithstanding, modern governments aren’t about the economy. They’re about increasing their power, and fleecing taxpayers serves this end famously: by controlling people’s money the state controls their lives, at least their physical lives.

Therefore in the apiary Dave keeps in his bonnet the bee of tax ‘evasion’, now supposed to include avoidance as well, buzzes right next to his compulsion to destroy what’s left of the institution of marriage.

To tackle what he calls ‘the scourge of tax evasion’ he has summoned every official who was likely to honour such a summons to blackmail them into docility. Specifically, next month he’ll demand that 10 territories commonly known as tax havens sign up to greater ‘tax transparency’. In other words, he wants them to spy for Inland Revenue, thereby betraying their investors and destroying their own principal livelihood.

Dave will also make this thorny issue a priority of the G8 summit he’s hosting in Northern Ireland on 17 and 18 June. This stands to reason: given the booming state of the world economy, what other priorities can there be?

Dave, one suspects, will find greater sympathy among his likeminded spivs in the G8 than in the territories that survive by providing discreet financial services. Russia is the only G8 member whose dedication to money laundering easily matches Dave’s passion for confiscatory taxation, but the Russians know they’ll find a way no matter what the summit decides.

At the same time Dave has reassured the 10 territories in his trademark mendacious way: “I respect your right to be lower tax jurisdictions. I believe passionately in lower taxes as a vital driver of growth and prosperity for all.

”Dave believes in lower taxes about as passionately as Kim Jong-un believes in democracy, Ahmadinejad in religious tolerance and Boris Johnson in marital fidelity. As passionately, actually, as he believes in using words in their time-honoured meaning.

It’s always rewarding for a writer to see his contributions triggering off wide public debate. In that spirit I’d like to thank all the readers whose intellectual curiosity was piqued by my latest piece.

Among other things, I speculated on the identity of the senior member(s) of the Wilson cabinet who supposedly chased Shirley Williams, then at her most nubile, around office furniture. According to Shirley, the prize they pursued was ‘worse than groping’ – which is to say non-consensual sex, a crime barely short of mass murder on the modern moral scale.

It’s good to see that readers have treated this attempt at forensic enquiry with the seriousness it merited. Some respondents were kind enough to offer their own suggestions, and this is exactly the type of active participation that raises an enquiry to a new high – or, depending on one’s point of view, lowers it to a new low.

One reader offered this observation: “It wouldn’t have been Crosland: he promised he would only f*** the grammar schools.”

Deeply shocked by the use of an expletive, even one masked by asterisks, I was about to fire off an indignant reply when I realised that my correspondent was loosely quoting Antony Crosland himself, Shirley’s predecessor as Education Secretary.

The problem therefore lies not in the turn of phrase but in the looseness of the quote. This is what Crosland actually said: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.” Lucky Scotland, is all one can say.

Therefore, taken literally, his statement doesn’t suggest that he himself wished to perpetrate a sex act on the grammar schools. Quite the contrary: the intensifying modifier ‘f***ing’ conveys the notion of grammar schools being an active rather than passive partner in sexual congress.

Mr Crosland therefore never treated grammar schools as sex objects, and he certainly never foreswore expanding his amorous horizons beyond this offensive educational institution. In fact, he was known at the time as quite a ladies’ man, which supposedly could make him a prime suspect in the crime of running those laps around the filing cabinets.

However, if we eschew primitive literalism and consider the net effect of Crosland’s and Williams’s attack on grammar schools, then – as a figure of speech – we would perhaps be justified in agreeing with my correspondent’s suggestions, while still sternly rebuking him for his choice of words.

Expanding the metaphor, we can perhaps imagine a threesome involving grammar schools flanked on either side by our two protagonists. However, threesomes usually presuppose three willing participants, which young Shirley self-admittedly wasn’t, and neither were the grammar schools.   

“Barbara Castle?” asks another correspondent. Implicit in this suggestion is the libellous insinuation that the two women practised what at the time was known as perversion and which, by the mercy of God, has been progressively updated to mean an alternative and equally (more?) valid lifestyle choice.

I’ll have my correspondent know that both ladies were happily married… well, married in any case. Of course, he might object that this ipso facto doesn’t preclude certain Sapphic tendencies, as the example of our greatest, or at least most progressive, writer of all time Virginia Woolf shows. However, the Barbara theory is defeated on two counts.

First, Mrs Williams, as she then was, states unequivocally that she was pursued by a senior cabinet colleague. Yet though Mrs Cartland, as she then was, did occupy a number of ministerial posts, none of them put her in a position of institutional seniority vis-à-vis Shirley. Second, since the two women were evenly matched physically, Shirley could have had a sporting chance of fighting Barbara off, rather than embarking on an obstacle race around the office.

Thanking this correspondent for his offering, I can move on to the next reader whose suggestion shows a great deal of imagination, lamentably compromised by his cavalier treatment of political correctness. “My money,” he writes, “is on David Blunkett.”

This is outrageous, especially for those familiar with the key personages of British politics. The author of this comment is referring to Mr Blunkett’s… impairment? Challenge? Handicap? As a lifelong stickler for politically inoffensive language, I’m stuck for the proper word to describe the fact that David Blunkett is blind from birth and consequently feels the urge to walk his dog at all times.

Referring to this impairment-challenge-handicap offends every fibre of my PC soul, and the offence is exacerbated by the implicit suggestion that one had to be sightless to fall for Mrs Williams’s charms. Here I have to admit that I myself may have encouraged such a reference by my ungallant comment that Mrs Williams’s photographs don’t explain the fervour of her multiple pursuers.

Now I’m man enough to admit I was wrong in trying to impose on my readers my own aesthetic preferences. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and I think my correspondent should apologise to Baroness Williams, as she now is. To set an example, I too apologise for suggesting in a personal e-mail to this writer that Shirley would have bitten David’s dog.

He must also admit to a rather slipshod treatment of historical facts. For Mr Blunkett, a considerably younger man, only entered Parliament in 1987. His ministerial career did overlap with Shirley’s in the early noughties, but she was LibDem then, rather than Labour, and therefore not Mr Blunkett’s junior colleague. Moreover, at the time she was rather past the age of consent or especially of withdrawing consent by racing around desks.

None of this is meant to discourage a free exchange of opinion on this site. On the contrary, how else can we arrive at the truth if not by approaching serious issues from every possible angle?  

Shirley Williams has come out, all guns blazing, her CV nailed to the mast, in defence of Lord Rennard, former LibDem chief executive.

Several women have accused Lord Rennard of sexual harassment, specifically of going further than ‘placing a hand on my knee,’ as one victim described the transgression. The press doesn’t report how much further, but then such details no longer matter in the general scheme of things.

It could have been placing a hand higher than a knee, it could have been rape – these days it could even be complimenting a woman on her appearance. Such misdeeds aren’t just committed against persons; they’re committed against the ethos, so the degree of severity is immaterial.

It still matters to some extent in a court of law although, given the prevailing trend, it’s hard to tell for how much longer such differentiation will persevere. But in any trial by media no extenuating circumstances are admissible. There the defendant is guilty as charged simply because he is charged.

Baroness Williams wouldn’t take it lying down, as it were. She sprang to Lord Rennard’s defence by claiming that, as Education Secretary in Wilson’s government back in the 1970s, she was regularly chased around the filing cabinets by ‘senior figures’, who were after a prize ‘worse than groping’.

She didn’t name any names, which leaves room for conjecture. Assuming that those in inferior positions wouldn’t have dared impose themselves on a senior colleague, one can limit the guessing game to a handful of players, of whom, according to the Baroness, ‘there was more than one.’ Wilson? Callaghan? One wishes old Shirley weren’t so discreet.

Running around office furniture she protested against such unwanted attentions, only to be told in no uncertain terms that ‘politics isn’t a soft business.’ By the sound of it, the business was very hard indeed. The Baroness omits any reference to the possible success or failure of any ‘senior figure’ in catching up with her, but then she’s entitled to her privacy.

Without in any way wishing to sound discourteous, Shirley’s photos from that period give little indication of what exactly could have inflamed her colleagues’ passions to such an extent, but then politicians aren’t known for their taste. Shirley could breathe and she had a pulse – what more did they need?

All this is fascinating stuff, though it’s not immediately clear how any of it is relevant. Surely attempted rape in the past (presumably that’s what ‘worse than groping’ means) can’t be used as justification for a similar transgression at present (‘worse than placing a hand on my knee’)? Either sexual harassment is wicked or it isn’t. If it isn’t, why are we talking about it at all? And if it is, then it’s like any other crime, where numerous similar incidents throughout history in no way excuse the one under current indictment.

Nor is it relevant to the matter at hand that, according to Baroness Williams, Lord Rennard is ‘a very fine man’. When it comes to this sort of thing, many a finer man has had his superlative traits overridden by momentary passions. Character references don’t cut much ice even in court, never mind in a trial by media.

Baroness William’s defence of Lord Rennard is pathetically weak, but then logic was never her major strength. Witness the fanatical zeal with which she pursued, when not being chased around filing cabinets, the destruction of grammar schools and their replacement with the idiot factories of comprehensives.

One wonders if there is a direct link between Shirley’s suffering at the hands of ‘senior figures’ and her desire to dumb down the whole nation. In common with other Leftie politicians she must have seen herself as a victim of the establishment – without realising that she herself was the establishment.

This pervasive culture of resentment had to extend to the very people in whose name the likes of the Baroness perpetrate their outrages. After all, the people stubbornly refused to revolt against the very establishment that pursued young Shirley around the House of Commons. What better revenge could she have exacted than creating an educational system that makes it possible for people to vote the likes of Tony Blair or Dave Cameron into power?

I don’t know if this exercise in cracker-barrel psychology makes any sense. Probably not. But then nothing else about our leaders does either. Shirley’s defence of Lord Rennard, for example, is silly. And one would be frustrated trying to detect a flicker of reason in her defence of comprehensive schools:

‘I have never in any way regretted them and I still believe strongly in them. The problem was that in many places they were heavily skimmed because people kept grammar schools in place beside them.’

Let me see if I get this right. Comprehensives failed because a few real schools were still around, and people could see the difference. Had every grammar school been demolished, rather than merely 99 percent of them, no one would have known any better.

Such is Shirley Williams’s revenge on Britain. She and her libidinous likeminded colleagues made sure few voters can any longer recognise their pronouncements for what they are: utter rubbish. Old Shirley has done to the country what those ‘senior figures’ tried to do to her.

Far be it from me to suggest that all the problems of the Middle East would be instantly solved if Tony Blair were banned from visiting the region and indeed talking about it. But it would be a good start.

First a little historical background. When Tony was our PM he played lickspittle to George ‘Yo, Blair!’ Bush, who in turn was the dummy to neocon ventriloquists. In committing Britain to the harebrained attack on Iraq, Tony was thus in effect a dummy’s dummy.

That idiotic, criminal action, accompanied by the usual complement of lies, pushed the button on a delayed-action bomb in the region. Actually, the action wasn’t as delayed as all that: within a mere 10 years several secular governments collapsed, the Middle East was aflame, the rest of the world was brought to the brink of a major conflagration, the only civilised country in the neighbourhood was put in grave danger – graver even than anything Israel has had to face for the last 65 years.

One would think that the only comment Tony, one of the principal instigators of the calamity, could possibly make would be mea culpa. Now he’s a Catholic he must have heard the words that one time he attended mass with Cherie.

So do we hear an apology from him? Do we hell. All we hear is inane, illiterate bleating and yelps for attacking the last secular government standing, that of Syria’s Assad.  

The latest outpouring came through The Mail’s good offices, and I have to thank Tony for making my job much easier. In common with many intellectually challenged individuals, he’ll hoist himself with his own petard given a chance to talk. All I have to do is add a few parenthetical comments.

“Syria is in a state of accelerating disintegration. President Assad is brutally pulverising communities hostile to his regime. At least 80,000 have died.”

[How many of them have been murdered by Assad’s opponents? You know, those chaps who eat people’s internal organs on camera? Without this information the body count is meaningless.]

“The Syrian opposition is made up of many groups. The fighters are increasingly the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra. They are winning support, and arms and money from outside the country.”

[So does Tony want to stop this support? Au contraire, as he’d have said during his dish-washing career in Paris. He wants to give them more ‘arms and money from outside the country’. And if that doesn’t do the trick, he wants us to attack Syria. Why?]

Because “we are at the beginning of this tragedy. Its capacity to destabilise the region is clear.”

[A startling admission, that. We started ‘this tragedy’, so we might as well make it worse.]

“To the South in Egypt and across North Africa, Muslim Brotherhood parties are in power…”

[Quite. And Tony has just admitted it’s partly his fault. So what’s he going to do about it?]

“When I return to Jerusalem soon, it will be my 100th visit to the Middle East since leaving office, working to build a Palestinian state.”

[The logic is unassailable. Because ‘Muslim Brotherhood parties’ are in control elsewhere, they should be given yet another state, this one wholly their own.]

“But are we really going to examine it and find no common thread, nothing that joins these dots, no sense of an ideology driving or at least exacerbating it all?”

[Not at all, Tone. We’ve found it. It’s called Islam, the only major religion that has the murder of infidels and apostates built into its scriptural makeup. What do you say to that?]

“There is not a problem with Islam. For those of us who have studied it, there is no doubt about its true and peaceful nature. There is not a problem with Muslims in general.”

[‘Those of us who have studied’ Islam, which Tony manifetsly hasn’t, have seen 107 Koran verses like these: “Slay [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…” (2:91), “Take them and kill them wherever ye find them” (4:91), “Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush” (9:5), “…If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them…” (4:89). Just how peaceful is its nature, Tone?]

“Of course there are Christian extremists and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu ones.” [True. These chaps are as capable as the Muslims of flying planes into buildings, attacking our allies and beheading Westerners who disagree with them. It’s sheer luck that so far they’ve refrained from doing so.]

“On the other [hand there] are the modern-minded, those who hated the old oppression by corrupt dictators and who hate the new oppression by religious fanatics. They are potentially the majority, but unfortunately they are badly organised.”

[Majorities are always badly organised, Tone. It’s fire-eating activists like you who do the damage. The Muslim world has always had to choose between the two forms of oppression, that’s the nature of the beast. We should offer tacit support to the beast that’s less likely to bite us – those same ‘corrupt dictators’ you agitate against.]

“The better idea is a modern view of religion and its place in society and politics. There has to be respect and equality between people of different faiths.”

[Splendid idea. There’s a problem though: there’s no such thing as ‘religion’. There are only different religions, of which some encourage people to erect tall buildings and some to fly planes into them. It would be unrealistic to expect Tony to think before mouthing bien-pensant twaddle, but the rest of us should realise that promoting ‘equality between people of different faiths’ can have only one practical effect: weakening the builders and strengthening the flyers.]

“We have to start with how to educate children about faith, here and abroad. That is why I started a foundation whose specific purpose is to educate children of different faiths across the world to learn about each other and live with each other.”

[But Mohammed was extremely well-educated about Christianity – he did spend several years studying it at Nestorian monasteries (in Syria, as it happens). That hasn’t prevented his followers from feeling ever so slightly hostile towards every religion other than their own.]

Give it a rest, Tone. Really, the best thing you can do at this stage is shut up. That’ll be your greatest contribution to peace in the Middle East. And to the cause of fighting nausea among normal people who have the misfortune of glancing at your articles.

 

 

Lord Mandelson seems to be irresistibly attracted to Russian oligarchs. By attraction I don’t mean the kind of love that dare not speak its name, God forbid.

No, the affection consuming Lord Mandelson in this instance is selfless, disinterested and typically requited love of money. A man of strong will, he’s always able to control his scruples about the provenance of the lucre for which he lusts so powerfully.

This commendable self-control has got Peter Mandelson into all sorts of trouble on all sorts of occasions. Several times (I’ve lost count) he was kicked out of Blair’s cabinet when well-documented doubts were cast on the probity of some of his dealings.

On the last occasion Mandelson said ‘plague on both your Houses’ to Parliament and decamped for a much more lucrative post as EU Trade Commissioner. It was in that capacity that he struck a close friendship with Russia’s aluminium king Oleg Deripaska – perhaps the richest in the line of the so-called oligarchs.

Since aluminium is one of Russia’s major exports, and Europe its biggest recipient, Deripaska’s interest in cultivating the Commissioner’s affection isn’t one of those mysteries for which Russia is so widely known. Peter’s reciprocity, I’m sure, was based on the Good-Samaritan urge to help a fellow man to make a few more billion.

To that end Peter accepted Oleg’s lavish hospitality on the latter’s yacht and, to give the affair a bipartisan feel, George Osborne tagged along. Other than a weakness for good food and drink, perhaps he was contemplating the possibility of converting to Russian Orthodoxy, to follow in the footsteps of his brother who has converted to Islam. Deripaska could be counted on to put in a good word with the Patriarch – he must know him from all those Kremlin piss-ups.

Or else George was preparing a fallback position for the time he’s no longer in government. A directorship in Deripaska’s holding company perhaps? Why on earth not? If a former Chancellor of Germany can shill for Gazprom, why not George doing the same for his new bosom friend Oleg? No reason at all.

That however is conjecture. What is fact is that Peter Mandelson has just been appointed non-resident director of Russia’s biggest publicly listed conglomerate Sistema, 62 percent of which is owned by Vladimir Evtushenkov, yet another oligarch.

It’s a marriage made in heaven – both sides stand to gain, neither has anything to lose. Peter’s gain is transparent: he’ll get $325,000 a year plus a cut of any increase in Sistema’s mammoth value.

What Evtushenkov gets out of the deal is less immediately clear, but we can try a reasonable guess. Mandelson’s connections in British and especially European circles must be valuable to a chap with a Russian name but a pan-European heart.

You see, in addition to his multifarious business interests, Evtushenkov holds the post of Honorary Consul of the Duchy of Luxembourg in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Urals. One can understand his affection for the Duchy, a pleasantly picturesque area at the heart of Europe. Coincidentally, it’s also a money laundry compared to which Cyprus is a baby’s playpen, but surely Evtushenkov’s interest in it has nothing to do with that. Neither does Mandelson’s, I hasten to add.

All this is perfectly aboveboard. It’s also fair: Peter has been offering his political advice free of charge to any party willing to listen. It stands to reason that now he’ll be paid for his business advice, springing from his acumen and vast experience.

One just hopes he’ll watch his step: another scandal just may besmirch his already off-white reputation beyond repair. And Peter should never leave behind his long spoon when supping with the devil of Russian oligarchy. Those chaps play for keeps, and London has proved it’s not such a safe haven after all.

As a tireless campaigner for even interspecies marriages (mammals only – I’m a conservative after all), and also as a part-time resident of France, I’m ecstatic about the historic event to take place in Montpelier on Wednesday.

Vincent Austin and Bruno Boileau will become wife/husband and husband/wife, with the socialist mayor officiating at the ceremony.

Alas, my wedding invitation got lost in the post, so I can’t share with you some of the important details. Such as, is it Vincent or Bruno who’ll be the blushing bride? I had to double-designate both, but that’s ignorance speaking.

The photographs don’t throw light on the matter. Vincent is taller, so one would think that for the purposes of the glorious occasion he’ll be the bridegroom. He’s also 10 years older, which would traditionally cast him in the role of husband, even though the couple’s parents have made it clear that this once they won’t necessarily stand on tradition.

However, Vincent also looks somewhat more effeminate, which may suggest that he’ll be the bride and it’ll be Bruno carrying him across the threshold of the bridal suite, not vice versa. Or perhaps they’ll just hold hands and tiptoe into the room together.

And speaking of vice, you might think I’m being unnecessarily inquisitive and pedantic, but as a veteran attendee of many weddings, including a few of my own, I know that details can make or break the festivities.

For example, I hope the happy couple won’t forgo the traditional nuptial attire. Vincent will look gorgeous in a white dress, with the train carried by the bridesmaids (of any of the three sexes). Fleur d’oranger and a gossamer veil are also a must, what with France being a conservative country.

At the same time Bruno will look dashing in a pink morning coat and red-striped, tight-fitting trousers. I’ll leave up to him the choice of a flower for his buttonhole, but a pansy would match the coat to perfection.

We all know how music can add grandeur to any ceremony, and in this instance especially so, given the ground-breaking nature of the event. It’s not up to me to make suggestions but, fancying myself a connoisseur, I shall anyway.

The choice, I’m convinced, should reflect both the traditional union being entered into and also the slightly – every so slightly! almost imperceptibly! – modern spin on the tradition. To that end, nothing would accompany the event better than Tom Robinson’s immortal classic Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay – performed on a Baroque pipe organ. I mean, aren’t you tired of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March?

And speaking of organs – no, I’m not going to say anything salacious, you pervert. Who do you think I am? I was going to talk about a few concerns voiced by France’s organs of law enforcement.

You see, there’s a very distinct possibility that some of the uninvited guests may be throwing at the newlyweds things other than rice and confetti. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, but Molotov cocktail isn’t a drink with which to raise a toast to the happy couple.

To prevent such outrages, it’s predicted that les flics will outnumber the guests about three to one – especially since François Hollande has blessed the happy couple by warning that he wouldn’t tolerate any terrorist acts. (François is beautiful when he’s angry, by the way.)

Admittedly, the presence of so many policemen may diminish the solemnity of the wedding, but the least they can do to maintain stylistic integrity would be to attach pansies to their batons, pistols and Taser guns.

I do hope the ceremony will go without a hitch. And I’m proud of the French legal system, whose speed of action puts ours to shame. After all, Vincent and Bruno will tie the knot just days after such unions were given a green, or rather rainbow-coloured, light. None of this toing and froing that’s delaying the onset of happiness in Britain.

Are you listening, your Lordships? Are you taking notes? I do hope you are – and I know you’ll vote the right way when the equal-happiness bill goes through your House.

 

 

 

 

 

The EU’s decision to drop the embargo on the sale of weapons to Syria, or more precisely to those lovely chaps fighting for democracy, is yet another instalment in the ongoing saga of folly.

Characteristically, the cause of arming the chaps who like to dine on human organs was championed by European leaders with an enthusiasm whose ardour was in inverse proportion to their fortunes at home.

Thus Angela Merkel, who retains a realistic hope of winning the next election, was luke-warm on the idea. Conversely, Hollande, whose own popularity with his voters has just dropped below Heinrich Himmler’s, was all gung-ho – as was Dave, who’s loathed by his own party cordially and by the others institutionally.

Instigating or escalating an armed conflict is a time-honoured way for modern governments to get out of trouble, either political or economic. Thus it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that these ‘leaders’, along with Obama, see the current conflict as a way of reversing their own and their countries’ fortunes.

Nor is it impossible to imagine that the conflict’s spilling over to the whole region is exactly the development they seek – the more the merrier.

Russia too has a stake in the area, which she demonstrated by agreeing to deliver S-300 AA missiles to Syria. This decision lacks novelty appeal, for the missiles are part of the $1-billion-plus military contracts Russia has with Assad, her long-term client. Apart from the traditional compulsion of rubbing the West the wrong way, Putin has strategic interests involved as well: Russia’s naval facility at Tartus is her sole Mediterranean base.

By relatively new-fangled contrast, the West’s interests in Syria are almost entirely ideological, springing from the neocon domination of foreign policy in the USA and increasingly here.

Acting as the crusading arm of the American self-worshipping religion, the neocons agitate for war whenever this can be plausibly sold to the public. In this instance, they instigated and continue to scream for America’s blatant aggression against sovereign Middle Eastern states.

This is justified by incessant references to the dangers of Islamism, Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism. If the neocons really believe this, they are silly and ignorant. If they don’t and still say it, they’re devious. In all likelihood, they’re both.

As always, wrong ideas lead to wrong actions – such as the last decade of the West’s doomed attempts to refashion the Middle East in its own image. For the warmongers operate under a PC discipline that prevents them from seeing whence the danger really comes. That is, not from Islamism but from Islam.

The God of PC demands that we regard all religions as equal, and if one is to be denied an equal status it can only be Christianity. Yet Islam is an inherently and doctrinally aggressive creed that has been waging war on the West for the last 1,400 years. The actual physical manifestations of the conflict have been intermittent, as they always are in such prolonged confrontations. The 100 Years’ War, for example, didn’t feature 100 years of non-stop fighting – there were flare-ups followed by lulls. At the moment we’re living through a period of peak passions in the Islamic world.

Obviously not every Muslim is a terrorist or even a West-hater. My guess is that most aren’t. But by the same token, no revolution in modern history was perpetrated by ‘the people’ as such – it was always carried out by a small cadre of a radical elite, typically intellectuals.

‘The people’ not only never promoted those revolutions actively, but they often withdrew even their tacit support. This goes for the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American and French ones of the eighteenth or the Russian and German ones of the twentieth.

Most Muslims may or may not sympathise with the radical elite acting in their name, but in either case they play no active role in the atrocities it commits. That, however, doesn’t exculpate Islam any more than the relatively small numbers of Bolshevik or Nazi revolutionaries exculpated their cannibalistic ideologies.

As a result of the West’s profound failure to assess the situation properly, it’s committing one gross folly upon another – all in the name of democracy, that bull’s head sitting on top of the neocon totem pole. All any group of wild-eyed murderers has to do to rate the West’s support is to declare its undying love for democracy.

It’s hard not to notice that throughout the so-called liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and the current anti-Assad strife, such protestations happily co-existed with Islamist radicalism of the most fire-eating kind. By giving benevolently equal treatment to Islam and decrying Islamism, the West is actively complicit in strengthening the former by empowering the latter.

If, on the other hand, our leaders had enough brains and historical nous to realise how the pitta crumbles, they’d let the warring Islamic sects, the Sunni and the Shiite, get on with it. The more they fight one another, regardless of the slogans they inscribe on their green banners, the weaker Islam becomes – and the more secure we’ll feel.

As it is, the West has used the most radical Islamic elements to unseat the most secular, and therefore least Islamic, governments in the Middle East, those of Iraq, Egypt, Libya – with Syria soon to follow. That all the deposed governments were utterly disgusting doesn’t mask the stupidity of assuming that their ousters are any better.

In fact, we’ll soon find out that they’re much worse. Meanwhile, congratulations to Messrs Cameron and Hollande for their political victory. Or, to be more precise, for their defeat of sanity.