Let Them Eat Crap

You obviously will know about the horsey in the national diet if you are British, on the assumption that you have not been away on Mars for the past few weeks.  For the rest of the world, those who are blissfully ignorant of these shores, let me just say that the British public, or the poorer part of it, was being fed horse meat pretending to be beef. 

Shocking! Shocking!  Mind you, I’m not convinced that those who buy tripe (possibly?) like Findus’ or Tesco’s deep frozen lasagne really know or care what they are eating, so long as it has a meaty taste.  Then there are the burgers.  Lord alone knows what’s in those.  Actually, we do know – udders, guts, sexual parts, all rendered down; revolting enough, even when it is not horse. 

There was a readers’ poll in the Daily Telegraph recently arising from the horse meat scandal. The question was simple: do you think it acceptable to eat horse meat or not?  I voted no, because I would no more eat horse than I would eat cat or rat.  Rat, yes, this is something I will come on to in a bit or a bite.  The result of the poll - revealed after one had voted - was almost neck and neck, the antis winning by a mere nose.  So, whether or not the pros actually eat horse burgers they do not think there is anything wrong in principle here.

Oh, but there is.  First of all the issue is about honesty.  I know one virtually has to have a PhD now to make sense of the labelling on food products, but at the most basic level people have a right to know if they are eating beef or dog meat.  If they have a preference for dog that’s fine, just as long as they understand what it is they are buying.  I say dog, knowing full well that the Telegraph poll would have produced a far clearer result if that had been the product in question, though there are some places in the world where dog is considered tasty and nutritious. 

The real issue, the issue that is beyond the comprehension of the unimaginative, is that of adulteration; of the corruption of food, a corruption born of the drive to feed the masses with the cheapest product available.  “Let them eat cake”, Marie Antoinette is falsely alleged to have said.  But that is positively benign compared with the “Let them eat crap” of the modern food Tsars.

The adulteration of food was big issue in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in England and the United States.  The problem got worse with industrialisation, when cheap food was a necessary corollary of low wages.  In the States it got so bad that the New York Evening Post published a parody of a well-known nursery rhyme;

Mary had a little lamb,
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown,
And now it's labeled chicken.

Upton Sinclair caught the mood in The Jungle, a novel published in 1906, which described the dreadful conditions in the meat packing industry.  But sick lamb pretending to be chicken was not enough for him; oh, no.  He went that step further, claiming that the workers who had the misfortune to fall into the rendering tanks were ground up and sold with the rest as Durham’s Pure Beef Lard! 

We have come a long way since then, with legislation and inspection aimed at reducing corruption (meat) and corruption (human).  No we have not.  If anything the situation is getting worse.  Corruption, in one form or another, is the name of a pretty dirty game; and when it comes to meat things can get an awful lot dirtier.  It’s not really that long since England was beset by the BSE crisis, when it was discovered that rendered meat products was being fed to cattle, with disastrous human results.  We learned from that that we clearly learned nothing.  For now horse is in the stakes and the steaks.

Keep your eye on that horse; keep your eye on the one named Profit, the odds on favourite; for that is what it’s all about.  We have enough pasture in England to produce all of the lamb and beef we need, with pork and chicken not far behind.  But we have become a link in a longer and longer international food chain.  The more extended it gets the greater the opportunity for criminal intervention.  Writing in the New Statesman (Meat Market, 22 February), Colin Tudge rightly asked “If crooks along the tortuous food chain can add horse to our meat products, why not dog, or rat, or cat?”  Yes, why not?  He raises some additional pertinent questions;

Given that the world trade in bushmeat is now vast, why not add bush fat of baboon?  What’s to keep out the meat that has been assigned for pet food?  Why not meat that has been condemned?  What guarantees can be given? 

None, it would appear, though we have had a Food Standards Agency in England for the past twelve years, a guarantor that clearly guarantees nothing.  Then there are the supermarket chains like Findus and Tesco, who have singularly failed to investigate their suppliers.  Then there are the politicians, who assure us that our meat is ‘safe’ when they know full well that, as a member of the European Union, we as a country have no proper control over the product that comes from the Continent.  Horse meat today; cat or rat tomorrow. 

I think there is a strong element of cynicism here.  As I say, the horse to watch is Profit.  The poor - and it is the poor - are the principle victims of our two for one deep frozen food culture.  In the wake of the horse fiasco, super market chiefs are saying that their products are likely to become more expensive, that the days of cheap food are over.  This suggests to me that they already knew that there was something fishy, make that horsey, about the stuff they were selling, that or they simply did not ask too many pertinent questions.  Get ‘beef’ from Mexico or Bulgaria rather than local suppliers – why not?  It’s cheap and goes very well in burgers and lasagne.

This is a story, as Tudge says, that might turn nastier yet.  The world food chain is out of control, or falling in to the control of unscrupulous profiteers, pirates of all sorts, the sort of people who only care about Profit, the one horse they do not want to see fall.  Inevitably the scandal will settle down as cosmetic changes are made, as politicians issue further assurances and standards are supposedly raised, as the public’s fickle attention turns to some other tale of woe.  Those who have become veggies, fearful of eating horse, will return to meat.  The pendulum will swing the other way in this best of all possible worlds.  At least until it is discovered that the benighted public have been eating something a lot less benign than horse.  In the meantime I would strongly urge you to avoid Durham’s Pure Beef Lard. 

Tim Yeo is NOT a Corrupt Bastard

Do you ever wonder about political corruption, about those who use positions of power to advance their own venal interests?  I imagine it’s an issue that concerns most people, the declining standards of honesty in public life.  It’s always been with us, of course, but there was a time when it took effort to uncover dishonesty and the abuse of office. 

Now the corrupt are able to drape their dealings quite openly in some fashionable theory or other, avoiding all conflict of interest and crisis of conscience.  How convenient when one no longer has to justify one’s financial wheeler-dealing; how convenient when enrichment is aided by theory and by fashion. 

Just think of Timothy Yeo.  For those unfamiliar with the British political constellation, he is one of the stars in the Tory firmament, presently among the luminaries of our tree-hugging Coalition government, out to save the planet, regardless of the cost.  Oh, but no cost to Yeo; just the contrary; it’s rather a nice little earner. Rather conveniently for him, and for his bank balance, he is the Chairman of the Commons Select Committee, a powerful and influential voice.  

Green policies and wind farms are a jolly good thing, he thinks.  Is there any surprise here?  He earns £65,000 ($98,500) as a Member of Parliament, not a lot, you may very well agree, not a lot for a man like Yeo.  Not to worry: this was supplemented last year by those who appreciate the true value of the Yeo factor.  It was supplemented, to be exact, by an extra £136,000 ($206,000), enabling the poor man to live in a manner to which he clearly has become accustomed.  This, I should add, for a minimum of work.  More, really, for his windy presence. 

So who are these Yeo philanthropists, you ask?  Would it surprise you to know that they are all green?  Oh, not green in judgement, just green in interest, keen in ensuring that environmental friendliness remains one of the great political and policy stalwarts of the day.  For as Tim gets rich they get richer - ‘green’ companies like AFC Energy, Eco City Vehicles and TMO Renewables. 

On his paymaster’s behalf – sorry...in the interests of all of us, at least for those who are not green with envy, Yeo has moved an amendment to the present Energy Bill that will add even tighter targets on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted by generating power.  A holy green alliance has been formed.  Alongside Yeo and his shadowy backers (where does their money come from?  Who are the investors) there are the usual suspects, the usual variety of nauseating green lobby groups, Socialist and Liberal MPs and others who are likely to ensure that the amendment is adopted.  The irony of making the rich richer and the poor poorer seems to have escaped the Parliamentary Labour Party.  Yeo’s amendment will mean ever higher energy bills, energy beyond the means of many of the elderly, many more of how will die in future of hypothermia.  I urge you, do not grow old in our brave new energy world.  Oh, but the greater cause of Yeo is such a noble end, worth a few casualties along the way

Two years ago I wrote an article on the spread of wind farms (Whistle down the wind, 31, May 2011) in which I made the following points;

Wind farms, who does not hate the sight of wind-farms? I certainly do. You may think they are necessary as a source of clean and renewable power. If you do I urge you to think again, think of the implications of these hideous blots on the landscape for the landscape. As foreign investors rush in to capitalise on British wind - and the wind of British politicians - just remember that it would take require a farm the size of Greater London to generate as much energy as a single coal-fired power station, assuming a never ending windy day. 

Oh, but think of the money to be made; think of the money being made, for example, by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, effectively bribed by developers to stop them complaining about the killing of eagles by wind turbines. Then there are the bats, of course, the damage these things cause to them; but who cares about the bats? You should care about yourself, though, enough to make sure that you live nowhere near these monstrous carbuncles, because the noise generated has caused health problems for those who do. The difficulty here is that, as the contagion spreads, it will be difficult for any of us to escape them. 

And all this for what, all this disruption, all this stupidity for what? We see our land destroyed, we see the economy weakened, jobs lost or exported elsewhere; we see an ever greater burden of taxation for what?   

Well now I know – it’s all for the benefit of Yeo!  Speak out as much as you want; it will make no practical difference.  Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University has spoken out, saying that even without the amendment the long-term consequences of the Bill will be horrible (his word).  “It’s a recipe for deindustrialisation”, he added.  “Either we get rid of this obsession, or we give our future to the rest of the world.  The question is whether we are serious about our economic future or not.”

Tim Yeo is serious about his own economic future, just as he is serious about keeping wind farms away from his own immediate neighbourhood.  The rest can go hang, which a great many may very well do in future, when the alternative is a slow death by cold. 

Let me amend the ending of my previous article.  As you sit in your blacked-out and freezing home, listening to the sound of the roaring wind farms, comfort yourself by thinking of Yeo’s profits.  Shame on you for thinking this man, with all of his noble intentions, is a greedy, corrupt, pocket-lining bastard.  Same on you for thinking that the Energy Bill is a fraud, verging on treason against this country.  Shame on you for thinking that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Labour Party are deluded, self-serving and pathetic morons.  Shame on you for thinking that the investors in the ‘green’ energy firms might very well be Chinese.  The future, you see, is Green...backs.  Oh, and the future is for pigs.  

Publish and be Damned

The law is an ass, an idiot, so said Charles Dickens’ Mister Bumble the Beadle in Oliver Twist.  I think we can maybe refine that just a little: it’s not the law that is an ass and an idiot but Lord Justice Leveson, who last week produced his report recommending, as anticipated, statutory regulation of the press. 

His conclusion has been welcomed by other asses, not least of whom is Nick Clegg, the Limp Dumb Deputy Prime Minister, a man who could play Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with no need for the ears. 

David Cameron, now twisting on the horns of yet another dilemma, only has himself to blame for his discomfort.  There was no need, as I have said, for this expensive farce in the first place. Breaches of the law by journalists in News International should have been dealt with as breaches of the law, nothing more.  Instead we have this stupid lawyer and his equally stupid acolytes mounting a challenge to press freedom, a freedom upon which all others might be said to hang. 

What irony there is here.  Our democracy is dying anyway, hurried along to extinction by the European politburo in Brussels.  Now if Leveson has his way we can forget about Milton and Wilkes and Orwell; we can forget about all those who defended a free press as an essential adjutant to free speech.  State regulation is the beginning of the end. 

It’s gratifying to see that not all in the present government are as terminally stupid as the insufferable Corporal Clegg.  William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, warned Cameron that statutory press regulation would be warmly welcomed by Vladimir Putin and other petty tyrants around the globe.  According to one insider, Hague said that “…Britain demonstrating that we have a free press is part of our ability to say that we believe in democracy…if we announced statutory regulation this would be used by the Russians to justify all sorts of behaviour.  It is a fundamental part of British foreign policy to have a free press.”

It’s a point of view echoed by Jethro Goko of the Daily News, Zimbabwe’s biggest independent newspaper.  He said that the rest of the world looked to Britain as a model of press freedom and that the phone hacking scandal should not be used as an excuse for government interference.  If Leveson has his way it will be “manna from heaven” for the likes of Robert Mugabe and his kind.  Goko should know.  His own paper was shut down for seven years and only publishes now under state licence.

Here the Spectator, my favourite political weekly, has openly announced in the latest issue that it will not cooperate with any regulatory structure mandated by the state.  Fraser Nelson, the editor, writes that the publication will not attend meetings, pay fines or heed menaces. 

“To do so would be to betray everything The Spectator has stood for since 1828.”  So far as he is concerned Leveson is a no-brainer.  “…our archives [show] how we have been implacably opposed to the principle of state regulation of the press – not because it protects the press, but because it protects the public.” He added that the magazine has a long history of standing up to politicians who want to restrict freedom of speech.

When I think of Leveson I think of one of those antediluvian fossils, the old judges who sit on the bench regularly having to seek enlightenment as lawyers present their cases because there is some aspect of modern life that they do not understand, from Wi-Fi to iPhones.  Leveson does not understand the internet.  A mere twelve of his almost two thousand page tome is devoted to its place in modern life. 

His is a scheme that is effectively twenty years or so out of date, completely ignoring the fact that more and more people get their news from the net, not from newspapers.  The Sun pointed out the absurdity here, saying that it and other papers could be stopped from publishing stories and pictures already seen by millions online. 

A gagged press is a dead press.  With circulation already in sharp decline I’m guessing that in twenty years or so we will no longer have published newspapers, the so-called ‘qualities’ like the Guardian being the first dinosaurs into Jurassic extinction.  Let its ridiculous editor reflect on that as defends Leveson’s attempt to “ensure decent standards.” 

Publish and be damned.  Be damned to state control of the press; be damned to Lord Leveson

Follow the Politics

In a recent discussion on the resignation of David Petraeus as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) I made the following observation;

Honestly, in this day and age, I’m surprised at such big fuss over something as minor as sexual indiscretion. But always, always follow the politics. I have a hunch that there is more to this story; that Caesar, not just Caesar’s wife, should be above suspicion. 

Well, then, there is indeed more to the story, and yes, it touches more on politics than personal morality.  The story of Petraeus, his biographer and inamorata and the third woman would be difficult to make up, even in the most farcical sex farce.  The toing and froing between the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also looks ridiculous, intelligence work that might have been conceived in the mind of Inspector Clouseau.  The whole thing would be risible in the extreme if it was not for the tragedy; if it was not the horror of Benghazi.

During the recent presidential campaign not enough was made of the murder of the American ambassador and three others in Libya; not enough was made of the present administration’s intelligence failures.  There are those who still wish to hide the inconvenient truths.  The suggestion – one I find wholly convincing -  is that Petraeus was effectively forced out of office because of potentially damaging revelations he might have made before today’s Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. 

What happened in Benghazi in September must count as one of the most serious breaches of security in recent American history.  The mother of Sean Smith, one of the diplomats killed alongside Ambassador Chris Stevens, said recently that that President Obama had effectively “murdered her son.”  And so he did, by simple negligence.  Obama’s reaction was ‘not very optimal’, to use his own peculiar and tortured English.

Consider the facts.  First the fuss over The Innocence of Muslims was no more than a silly smokescreen.  There was evidence that the attack on the embassy was planned well in advance by Al Qaeda, a 9/11 celebratory bash.  The administration had received hundreds of warnings but did nothing to improve security.  Contrast that with the British, who closed their own consulate after the failed assassination of Ambassador Dominic Asquith earlier in the summer. 

Quite apart from anything that Petraeus might have revealed about the Benghazi fiasco, as a political animal he was suspect, a horse of a Republican colour.  Con Coughlin says in the Telegraph that the general’s friends suspect that his political enemies in the administration simply used his sexual indiscretions as a convenient way of ejecting him from the CIA.  It certainly looks like it, the speed of the whole thing adding to the suspicion. 

Do you believe, does anyone believe, that if Petraeus had been an ‘insider’, if he had been ‘one of us’ these inconvenient facts would ever have come to light?  Even if they had, some kind of effort would have been made to stop the ship sinking.  After all, the Democrats are used to sexual scandals; they know how to manage sexual scandals, even so far as the Oval Office.

There are indeed serious questions as to why Petraeus gave a brief to the House Intelligence Committee that contradicted those of the agency he headed over the events in Libya.  Victoria Toensing of Fox News has written;

For some reason DCI Petraeus backed the Obama unsupported theory that the video made the attackers do it rather than his own Chief of Station’s assessment that it was a planned military attack. Why do the shifting stories and misplaced theory of cause matter?  Because if an administration pushes a political agenda that applauds the killing of Bin Laden as the ultimate act for eradicating the radical Islamic threat, then that same administration ignores its Ambassador’s urgent pleas for more security for fear it will appear Bin Laden’s demise was not the answer to that threat.  Our country’s chief spy is supposed to know which theory is held up by the evidence.

Indeed.  But now he has been silenced.  The guilty may never be put on the spot.  The mystery remains and the questions, the real questions, may never be answered.  Forget the sex.  Follow the politics, always follow the politics.  

Don't Cry For Me Ecuador

But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.'
'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'

We all went a bit mad here last week. Suffering from post-Olympics depression, we had to have a new show, and we did. It’s called Julian of Leaks, or Don’t Cry for Me Ecuador. It features in a starring role Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, a man who makes Narcissus look like a rather retiring and positively self-effacing sort of chap.

Anyway, there he was, Mister WikiLeaks, addressing a rag-tag army, Evita-style, from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London’s Knightsbridge district, where he has been holed up for the past two month, poor man. Well, anyone forced to throw themselves on Ecuadorian hospitality surely deserves to be pitied.

He was ‘forced’ to take ‘political asylum’ there because of a ‘witch hunt’ being carried out against him; because he fears that some massive international conspiracy is at work, set to spirit him away to the United States.

There is only one thing wrong with this scenario: Washington has not asked for his extradition. Sweden has, something he neglected to mention to the swooning multitudes across the street. He is wanted not because he is “making a stand for justice”, as he put it, but to answer charges of rape and sexual assault. He spent a good bit of the past two years fighting extradition in the British courts. It was only when his case failed that he jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Why Ecuador? I really don’t know. I suppose the reason might be that this banana republic – are there bananas? – is a bastion of truth, justice, human rights and panama hats. Or it might be that Rafael Correa, its leftist president, is almost as childish a narcissist as Assange himself, a little man who wants to cut a figure on a bigger stage, preaching from the balcony of his ridiculous little fiefdom.

I have a question for you. When is rape not rape? Representative Todd Akin knows. He knows all about legitimate and illegitimate rape. Yes, shocking, shocking for all shades of progressive opinion, for whom rape is rape is rape, for whom no means no means no. Unless, of course, the alleged rapist happens to be a hero of the nursery left, as Rod Liddle wrote in a Spectator blog; unless the alleged rapist happens to be Saint Julian of Leaks.

George Galloway is Britain’s leading left-wing ayatollah, a political crazy man by most normal standards. As the leader of Respect, a party without respect, he leapt to the defence of the Divine Julian. It wasn’t rape at all, he said. He simply had sex with a woman while she was asleep, not bothering to bother with a condom. It was merely a case of “bad sexual etiquette.” In other words, there is no need to ask before an insertion. Respect indeed. All I can say is that any woman who might care to spend the night as a guest in Chez Galloway best keep awake, just to avoid the risk of ‘bad sexual etiquette.’

Galloway has since tweeted that “it’s about WikiLeaks, stupid.” Stupid I may be, but so far as I can see it’s nothing of the kind. It’s about a man full of self-serving and abstract notions of truth and justice while believing himself to be above all such petty considerations as law and due legal process.

Actually, it seems obvious that Assange, for all his protestations, is more afraid of Swedish than American retribution. Oh, but you see, it’s easy to beguile the stupid crowd with talk of injustice and witch hunts, with nebulous conspiracies of all sorts, though there are perfectly sound reasons why he should also face charges in the United States, theft being high among them.

America is an easy target. It would not do at all to talk of the “dark forces” at work in Sweden, the “Saudi Arabia of feminism”, a “nest of revolutionary feminism”, pronouncements the leaky one has made in the past. Sweden, you see, is the sort of place that clearly has rather old fashioned notions of what constitutes good sexual etiquette.

Assange is fleeing from Swedish justice. Quite right, too. Sweden is notorious for its lack of democratic accountability, its biased system of law and its atrocious abuse of human rights. Then there is Correa’s Ecuador, the victim of another campaign of spite and misinformation. It’s simply not true that the country has no culture of human rights and freedom, not true that dissidents are jailed on trumped up charges, not true that journalists are arrested and TV stations shut down for daring to criticise El Presidente. Assange really would be at home there.

The show goes on, unfortunately, one of the more deadening West End productions. Personally I rather hope that the police spirit the star away while he is still asleep, sending him on his way to Sweden. After all, it’s not really extradition if he’s sleeping, merely a case of bad political etiquette.

Storm in a Fondue

Here we are: it's the opening of Act IV in the drama of Ana! I got back yesterday from a wonderful skiing holiday in Val-d'Isère, right in the heart of French Savoy. I’ve been before; I was there two seasons ago, and I’m pleased to say that things remain much the same as they were. The skiing was good, the company was good and New Year was wild!

Actually, it’s not really the skiing I want to talk about; it’s something else altogether, a storm in a fondue. We spent one day at the nearby resort of Val Thorens. It was here that Aidan Burley, a Conservative Member of Parliament, attended a Nazi-themed stag party last month in the excellent ( I know: I've been!) Restaurant La Fondue in the centre of town.

One of the party, addressed by the rest as Himmler, wore a black SS uniform, which it turns out was hired by Burley himself. Various toasts were drunk to the Third Reich and Nazi ideology. The fall-out was sadly predictable: Burley was sacked from his post as Parliamentary aid to the Transport Secretary by David Cameron, the Prime Minister. In France, where it is illegal to wear Nazi uniforms, a preliminary investigation into the incident has been opened.

What is there to be said? For a figure in public life to be involved in this sort of thing clearly shows that he’s a bit of an idiot, one who has now wrecked a promising political career. But what a fuss about nothing. It was a stag party; people do the stupidest things; and when men are stupid they are really stupid. If anything it shows that the symbols of Nazism themselves have become a bit of a joke, dress for comic party antics, by appointment to Prince Harry!

Burley was there certainly but he wasn’t dressed like a Nazi, unlike the Labour's Ed Balls, now the Shadow Chancellor, who donned German uniform when he was a student. And this is a man who actually served in government!

It’s the hypocrisy that gets me most, the double standards. There was a long and pompous, blah de blah article by Martin Bright on the Spectator’s Coffee House Blog, of all places, having a go at Burley and “boorish Tory oafs” in general. In the course of this he makes a point of waving his own left-wing credentials when he was at Cambridge during the 1980s, the Thatcher years.

Yes, a time, I feel sure, when Che Guevara, Trotsky and Marx stared out from the walls of thousands of dirty bedsits, these avatars of an ideology and political practice in every way as abhorrent as fascism. More abhorrent, if the calculus of death plays any part in the assessment of such things. One respondent to the Bright article makes the same point;

Isn't this just another boring article illustrating the left's enduring fetish about Nazis? The Nazi Party and its acolytes were utterly destroyed over 65 years ago and its leading lights were killed or imprisoned. Either way Nazism was totally discredited as a creed while the architects of the left's monstrous (and in many ways greater) crimes suffered no such fate. Yet in the best traditions of Joseph Mccarthy, the UK left would have you believe that there are closet Nazis everywhere....in, under and on the bed. It's utter self-serving b******s which enables them to shift attention from the crimes committed by the left.

Nazism did not survive the Second World War, shovelled into the dustbin of history. Marxism did, mutating in a thousand forms, still trendily present in Labour and other socialist parties. There was never a proper summing up, no truth and reconciliation committee. Red flags and stars can still be displayed; swastikas can’t. Stalin is the fashion in Moscow and Mao in Beijing; Hitler the fashion nowhere. But when some overgrown schoolboy is seen in the company of Hilarious Himmler - oh, my, the horror, the horror. It’s springtime for Hitler and Germany.

Happy New Year. :-)

Don’t be vague; say goodbye to Hague

William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, is going through a ‘little local difficulty.’ Though married, there have been persistent rumours on the internet that he has a gay past, fuelled by the fact that he shared a room with a male aide half his age during the general election campaign earlier this year.

This suggests to me one thing and only one thing: that for a senior politician he is extraordinarily naïve, a bear of very little judgement, a bit of a liability given the responsibilities his office carries. Perhaps, on reflection, it suggests something else: that there was nothing in the least untoward in his sleeping arrangements; that he is definitely not homosexual. If he was he and the aide, who has since resigned, would surely have been a lot more discrete. Surely, they would?

But there are other things I have to say here, other things I’ve been reflecting on after reading the coverage of this story in the weekend press. What I am about to write makes me far from comfortable, because I would rather not do or say anything that would in an any way compromise the government of David Cameron. Read on at your peril but let me rush to my conclusion by saying that I think Hague, now aged forty-nine, is in the grips of a mid-life crisis, except in his case it began when he was sixteen, a crisis that raises serious questions about his state of mind and his capacity for high office. It’s now an open question whether he is fit to continue as Foreign Secretary.

To begin with I care nothing at all about his sexual preferences. While the rumours must be hurtful for Ffion, his wife, he can sleep with Men, Martians or Moonies if he pleases: it would not make a bit of difference to me so long as it had no bearing on the conduct of his public office (well, OK, I might worry slightly about the Moonies.)

Also I should say that I quite admire Hague as an intellectual and a writer. He is as passionate about the political history of the eighteenth century as I am about that of the seventeenth, and has written commendable biographies of William Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce. I just wish to God that he had grown up, showed as much maturity in public life as he does in the life of the mind.

Now none of this matters. His whole career has been called into question less by the internet rumours - all so much stupid and malicious fluff - more by his public rebuttal of these rumours, rebuttals in which he made some deeply personal and wholly unnecessary revelations about his marriage. His wife, he said in his official statement, has suffered numerous miscarriages in their frustrated attempts to have a child. I could make no sense of this at all. Yes, I felt sorry for them, but what on earth was the relevance of this information?

Writing in The Telegraph on Saturday Simon Heffer immediately sent the point into sharp relief: the wholly gratuitous statement about her miscarriages was an abominable abuse of her in the interests of his political career. More than that, the sub-text was blatantly clear – I’m just another one of the lads; I can get a woman pregnant heaps of times; I’m no homo.

Yes, I’m sorry, it’s appallingly distasteful, but it’s evidence of his mindset and his insecurity. This is the same man, a middle-aged, baseball-cap wearing perpetual teenager, clearly uncomfortable with his baldness, who claimed, when he was leader of the Tory Party, that he drank fourteen pints of beer a day as a teenager. I’m William Hague, I am; I’m one of the blocks; I can drink fourteen pints a day; I can get women pregnant; I’m from oop north.

This is the key, that and the fact that he has been trying to live down a nerdish appearance at the Conservative Party conference when he was sixteen. In the same edition of The Telegraph Damian Thompson, a contemporary of Hague’s at Oxford, described him in his student days as a ‘professional northerner’, one of the wisecracking Yorkshire lads who could even charm baby-eating members of the Socialist Workers Party.

There was no irony here; the article was sympathetic and supportive, but Thompson has given away more than intended about Hague and his self-perception. What on earth is a ‘professional northerner’? Is there a qualification, perhaps? I’ve never heard anyone described as a ‘professional southerner’, so it’s clearly no more than a badge of condescension, one that Hague seemingly wears with a degree of pride, fourteen pints a day and on and on. Forgive me; I’m just a sharp-talking professional Surrey girl with a sauce of London spice, fourteen Pimm’s a day, don’t you know.

The whole thing is such a massive joke, a joke made by Hague about Hague, a joke at his expense. The rumours were nothing; his sexuality is nothing; his statement and his conduct are everything. Yes, it began as a little local difficulty but he has allowed it to spread rapidly. I no longer believe that England’s foreign relations are safe in this man’s hands, both because of the weakness of his character and the weakness of his judgement, compounded by his personal vanities and insecurities.

William, take your baseball cap and your naff wrap-round shades and go. Depart; I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Toxic Gags

Had you ever heard of ‘super injunctions’? I confess I had not until I heard Ian Hislop talk about them on Have I Got News for You. In essence this is a gagging order that even prevents a newspaper saying that it has been gagged or making any kind of reference to the gagging device

The issue arose when a ship belonging to an international oil trading company by the name of Trafigura deliberately dumped toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. Thousands of local people were affected, a number dying in consequence of the resulting pollution. This loathsome company originally claimed that the wastes was non-toxic, knowing full well that it was. After years of stalling and legal threats it eventually agrred to pay compensation to over thirty-one thousand people.

In an attempt at ‘reputation management’ Trafigura employed a firm of London solicitors by the name of Carter-Ruck, specialists in the law of lible. These people immediately started to throw their weight around, going to the high court to get an injunction preventing The Guardian from further reporting on the Ivory Coast story. But this was no ordinary injunction; this was a ‘super-injunction’, the law not being done or seen to be done, but the law in secret preventing reporting of a secret, preventing reporting of itself in action. Lost? Yes, I know; not even Kafka could make this up.

Worse than that, when the Labour MP Paul Farrelly raised a question over super injunctions with Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, the paper was even prevented from reporting that. Private Eye, which Hislop edits, took the bold step of highlighting the issue anyway in cryptic language designed to intrigue. Bloggers caught on and the whole thing exploded, a fantastic own goal by Carter-Ruck, now referred to in the latest issue of the satirical magazine by another name altogether. Can you guess what? :-)) No matter, instead of ‘managing’ their client’s reputation they have exposed a story that might otherwise have escaped scrutiny.

But there is more here. This whole process, the revelation that judges are willing to grant secret injunctions has uncovered a serious threat to not just to press freedom but to the proper operation of parliamentary democracy itself. Secret injunctions take us back to the days of John Wilkes, to the days of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’, when those reporting the business of Parliament could be imprisoned. Looking at it from a historical perspective it may be even worse; for the super injunction might very well be in breach of the 1689 Bill of Rights, one of the great milestones of English constitutional history.

The arrogance of these Carter-Fu.., sorry Carter-Ruck people goes still further: they tried to prevent Parliament itself debating the question of super-injunctions by arguing that it was sub-judice. Jon Bercow, in allowing the debate to go ahead, cited the need to defend freedom of speech in Parliament. The said letter was circulated to all MPs. Paul Farrelly, the man who raised the question in the first place, said;

Carter-Ruck have got a real nerve. Firstly they tried and failed to suppress news that they had obtained a gagging order against the Guardian. Then they tried to ask the Speaker to gag parliament itself. This affair has shown that privileges preventing press freedom are sometimes as only as strong as their assertion. The Speaker and parliament must stand up to people like Carter-Ruck who aggressively encroach on these freedoms.

There were some choice contributions in the debate, including that by Denis MacShane;

In past years, people who sought to gag parliament or were held to have behaved inappropriately in relation to parliament were brought before the Bar of the House and in some cases sent to prison. Do we not need to see Carter-Ruck’s partners before the Bar of the House to apologise publicly for this attempt to suborn parliamentary democracy?

Peter Bottomley, the Tory Mp, said that the order should never have been granted and that he intends to report Carter-Ruck to the Law Society. The Lord Chief Justice himself has turned on super injunctions and the attempt to restrict freedom of expression in Parliament, which he described as a fundamental principle. One can only hope that this will give some of the cowardly judges a little more backbone when faced with such invidious requests in future from the Carter-Rucks of this world.

In response Adam Tudor, a partner in the said firm, issued a press release saying that neither his company nor Trafigura had attempted to stifle or restrict debate in Parliament or the reporting of debate, another lie exposed by Private Eye. Ian Hislop and Liberty!

Sex Tourism and Nepotism-a French Farce

France is a foreign country: they do scandal better there. Well, they do. :-))Nicolas Sarkozy, the Mighty Midget, came to power promising to restore faith in the political process by creating a government above reproach. But this is France, a country were scandal and politics have always walked hand-in-hand; life just would not be the same without this partnership. Now we have the revelations of Frédéric Mitterrand, the culture minister, that he paid ‘boys’ for sex in brothels in Thailand as well as France.

Was this uncovered by some tabloid journalist? No, it’s an open admission by Mitterrand himself in a work he published four years ago under the title of La mauvaise vie (A Bad Life). Would you like a quote from his book? Well, have one anyway;

The profusion of very attractive and immediately available boys puts me in a state of desire that I no longer need restrain or hide.

This book, praised at the time for its ‘honesty’, acquired a fresh meaning in the light of Mitterrand’s statement on television last month that the arrest of Roman Polanski was “absolutely appalling.” Marine le Pen, daughter of the Front national leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, quoted the above section on television, saying it was proof that the minister was a pedophile and a sex tourist.

Mitterrand immediately assured a shocked nation that his sexual partners were not underage, at least distancing himself from the film-maker in that particular regard. He is not a paedophile but he is, by his own admission, a ‘sex tourist’, a practice he went on hypocritically to condemn. Even in our debased government I cannot imagine a minister surviving such an admission, but survive Mitterrand has, an insight, perhaps, to the Midget’s own hypocrisy in declaring that he would restore morality to French public life.

If a sex scandal wasn’t enough we have a touch of nepotism entering into the political picture. This week it was announced that Jean Sarkozy, the President’s twenty-three year old son, an undergraduate law student, has been put forward as a possible candidate to become chairman of the development corporation for La Défense, the plush business district to the west of Paris. If successful he will replace Patrick Devedjian, a sixty-five year old government minister. Nice work if you can get it and as he is the President’s son he surely will!

Do the French still read Moliere? If not perhaps Sarkozy Senior should be reminded of a simple truth: it is the public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all. :-))

Blackwashed, or how stupid does one have to be to be a member of the British Parliament?

Do you know the answer? I most certainly don’t. Is there a specific qualification in stupidity, a standard one has to attain before being considered for elevation to our benighted legislature? Is it the fault of the party machine, the leadership, or is it a local problem, attributable to constituency associations? Oh, there are so many questions and no answers.

I suppose we have come to live with their stupidity, to accept it as yet another irksome fact of life. But what I object to is when Members of Parliament assume that the rest of us are as stupid as they are. How else does one explain the whole expenses mess, the outrageous claims made on the taxpayer, in the first place? I suppose they thought they had got away with that, assuming that we would never find out that they were making criminally fraudulent claims for non-existent mortgages, as well as for kit-kats, porno, church collections and duck houses. But now they have compounded the offence by their new commitment to ‘openness’, publishing their claims online. Indeed, they are so ‘open’ that most of the details, the kind of information that would enable one to make the appropriate links, have been blacked out, or redacted, to use the favoured jargon word.

I suppose whoever is responsible for this was mindful of the words of Joker Brown, ‘The Best Man for the Job’, when he said that “Transparency to the public is the foundation of properly policing this system.” Black, it seems, is the new transparency. To have learned nothing and to have forgotten everything: now, that really is the measure of true stupidity!

Speaking of transparency isn’t it wonderful that the ‘Best Man for the Job’ decided that the Iraq inquiry should be held in secret? After all, what better way to get people to trust the objectivity of the final report on the lies, half-truths and dissimulation that took us into England’s worst foreign policy disaster since Suez? Oh, but it seems that he has already had second thoughts on that particular point, at least in the limited and half-hearted way that we have come to expect from this wretched man. Better the full truth than yet another whitewash…or should that be blackwash? :-))

Barracks for MPs-Flipping the Bird!

I read in today’s Telegraph that the most popular solution among voters to the scandal of MPs' expenses, to the problem of ‘flipping’ and second homes, is to insist that they all live in state-provided accommodation blocks: barracks, in other words! This was disclosed by Sir Christopher Kelly, chairing the Committee on Standards in Public Life, charged with looking in to the whole sordid business.

Yes, I quite agree, with security for the dear souls provided by perimeter fences and searchlights. What better solution?

Anyway, it delights me to report that Shady Shahid Malik, recently readmitted to the Government of the Living Dead as Communities Minister, is to be subject to further investigations over allegations that he broke the House of Commons rules on expenses. The cause has been taken up by John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, after a complaint was lodged by a member of the public. Apparently Shady, while claiming £6000 in expenses for his main constituency office in Dewsbury, was also claiming an extra £200 a month for ‘additional office space’ in the three years between 2005 and 2008. And where was this ‘additional office space’? Why, it was the downstairs of his Dewsbury house!

This is a foreign country; we do things differently here. No, we don’t take to the streets like the people of Iran. Our revolutions, when they come, are quiet and inexorable, but no less compelling, no less dramatic.

Watt Tyler, Where Are You Now?

Yes, you’re tired of the expenses scandal; I’m tired of the expenses scandal; we are all tired of the expenses scandal, but we must not allow this issue to die by a process of lethargy and exhaustion. That’s what Joker Brown, ‘The Best Man for the Job’, is relying upon. One would have thought, though, that he would have acted with a little more skill and political acumen in playing the game of time and opinion, but these are qualities the man clearly does not have.

The one thing that may have been to his credit is to get on top of the whole fiasco in the way that David Cameron has, even though his own MPs expenses claims are, for the most part, far more outrageous than those of the Labour benches. But he did not; it got on top of him.

Now, only two days after he emerged from his ‘vote of affirmation’, refreshed and renewed, he has reappointed Shahid Malik to the government. Malik stepped down last month as justice minister after revelations about his creative-and lucrative-living arrangements. Shady Shahid claimed a minimal rent for a three-bedroom house as his main home while designating his London property as his second home, allowing him to make off with an impressive £66,827 in three years, the maximum allowable. He also claimed £65 for a court summons for non-payment of council tax. My, what fools we mortals are!

Now Shady has been ‘cleared’ of wrong doing by Sir Philip Mawer, the Joker’s adviser on ministerial conduct. What wonderful news, one bright light on a dismal episode! Well, yes, it might be, except the Joker is refusing to allow Sir Philip’s report to be published. Is there anything this man can do right, anything at all?

Let me finish with two letters from today’s copy of the Telegraph which made me smile;

SIR, We know have the absurd situation of an unelected Prime Minister being nursemaided by a twice-disgraced former MP who, as an unelected peer, sits at the Cabinet table alongside other peers, one of whom, the new Minister for Europe, comes straight from Brussels. Cromwell would be apoplectic and so should we the electorate.

SIR, I am becoming increasingly frustrated by MPs, including Gordon Brown, telling me that, despite what I might feel or think, what I actually want is for them to continue the fight against the recession on my behalf, because I know they are the best people for the job. This wholesale nationalisation of public opinion is becoming very annoying.

Watt Tyler, where are you now we have need of you? Alas, all we have is Jack Straw. :-))

Two Cheers for the Telegraph, or the Ducks say Fuck!

I think The Telegraph has done a splendid job in exposing the sheer carnality of our beloved Members of Parliament despite what the absurd and muddle-headed Archbishop of Canterbury says. I read today in The Sunday Telegraph that Derek Conway, one of the most venal of the lot, claimed for office expenses on his family home in Northumberland, some three hundred miles away from his constituency! And, oh, yes, Sir Peter Viggers, who claimed £1,600 for a floating house for his duck pond, says that the ducks have shunned the blasted thing, which is now in storage. In other words, the ducks said fuck! He should hear what people on the street are saying; so should they all.

The Scandal of Parliamentary Expenses

Night after night this is appearing on the news; the gross corruption surrounding the issue of expenses claimed by members of the British parliament, anything from the cost of watching pornography to having a moat cleaned; yes, a moat! I’m a history student; my period of special interest is seventeenth century England, the period that saw civil war engulf the country, between Parliament on the one side and the King on the other. Parliament won. If the situation were repeated I simply cannot conceive of anyone taking the side of this ghastly parliament and the ghastly Labour government. So, to Gordon Brown and his minions I will repeat the words of Oliver Cromwell when he dismissed the Rump Parliament in 1653;

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!