I'm not a fan of the BBC, but the David Attenborough wild life series being shown at the moment is terrific. True, its full of ominous melting world stuff, which ruined the lonesome polar bears episode, but last night's programme about Grizzly Bears catching spawning salmon was incredible. Underwater photography revealed the bears rather tentative little feet and the fact that they don't like getting their ears wet. They sort of kicked the salmon up from the river bed until they could get a grip on them. The shots of bears lined up on a falls waiting for the exhausted salmon to fly through the air were extraordinary. Imagine seeing your first meal in six months flying past your jaws by a matter of inches!

This detailed investigation by CNN into the inner workings of a Belgium based Al Qaeda linked cell with connections to the Heathrow liquid bomb plotters is worth reading to the very end. The defence lawyer's argument that one of the suspects talked tough on a jihadist website to 're-seduce' an old flame sounds depressingly plausible- revealing as much about her as him.

Meanwhile, any joy I felt yesterday about the- possible deportation of Abu Qatada - had been dispelled by the news in today's papers that he and his comrades are claiming compensation for false imprisonment, which it seems, they are likely to get.

Of course, it is really the lawyers representing them who are, so to speak, taking the piss, or rather the massed lawyers in our Parliament who inflicted such a system on this country. If the law changed, the lawyers and judges would have to implement it. 

An editorial in today's Times briefly indicated that none of this farce need have happened since many of our European partners- who also signed into the European Human Rights Convention, such as France, simply deported their detainees anyway. Why is France, the country that pioneered human rights, and which has a powerful legal profession, somehow able to avoid this nonsense?

So its all true -

we are sharing roof space with murderers.

The National Review has an excellent piece on the Chavez regime in Venezuela. He's the chap the British Left seem to regard as a bit of a card who gives cheap oil to London pensioners. I don't see anything amusing in throwing tear gas into opposition television studios, or licensing attacks on synagogues.

The Law Lords have finally granted the Home Secretary leave to deport Abu Quatada to Jordan (see Daily Mail). He was granted asylum here fifteen years ago after arriving on a false passport, repaying our hospitality by becoming Bin Laden's top man in Europe. Oh and he and his family cost us £50,000 a year in welfare payments when the government doesn't manage to keep him in prison.

But don't hold your breath. Even as the Lords delivered their judgement, Qatada's human rights lawyers were preparing an appeal to the Court of European Rights, which will enable him to cling on the British door frame for another couple of years.

I watched the C4 News report on Somali jihadists so I missed the parallel Panorama on how British counter-terrorism policy may be taking a more hawkish turn. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Actually, the C4 news item had its own moments.

I had not realised there are 250,000 Somalis in this country, although I am now interested in how Ealing's "Mogadishu Mile" came about. I knew about Woolwich, but Ealing? The programme was triggered by news that an Oxford Brookes University dropout had killed himself, and a couple of dozen Ethiopian peace keepers, in a suicide bomb attack at home (home being Somalia rather than Ealing). There he was, jabbing his bony finger in his suicide video testament, a vision I will always associate with these times. 

Several speakers rather breezily assured us that it was unlikely that the 60 or 70 Somalis going on jihad 'at home' might be redirected to blow us up in Britain. This line was picked up by Jon Snow in the studio discussion afterwards. Actually, there is no reason why Somalis should be less prone to do what Anglo-Pakistani jihadists have done already if someone 'at home' decides they should commit atrocities here.

The Panorama programme showed several self-styled clerics insisting that God's law trumped man's laws, and that democracy was anti-Islamic too. They had nasty things to say about gays too, which really got the BBC's man's goat. His programme unpicked the various strands of the government's counter-terrorism policy: PREVENT, CONTEST, PURSUE, while mentioning how much money individual so-called community leaders rake in for devising de-radicalisation programmes or theological denunciations of violent interpretations of jihad. A £100,000 here, £180,000 there.......of our money, on top of the £100,000s councils already spill out for things like translations of official documents, surely a task the 'communities' could pay for themselves?

Meanwhile, later at night Newsnight surpassed itself by devoting two reports to telling us how nice Iran and Venezuela's rulers really are. The fact that Chavez has appointed himself president until about 2030 didn't seem to unduly distress Gavin Esler, while Fatty Simpson (all nostagia for when he'd covered the Shah's overthrow) admired little Iranian boys' funky hair........until a secret policeman told him the Islamic Revolution's anniversary was no laughing matter.

The subject of funerals came up yesterday, as it does, over lunch with some old friends, as we searched each other's faces for the young people we were. We went through the usual stuff about crypts and sea burials, until the teenage boyfriend of the elder daughter of the house said that last year his father had died. They had put his ashes in a firework. Apparently you can buy a special sort of rocket. I'd never heard of this, but I think it's rather marvellous.

Today's Times gives us a glimpse into something I have long felt was coming: robot warriors, one of the few commercial fields I would have thought was a good investment for those with any money left. The West's reluctance to take large numbers of military casualties will surely mean the advent of robot soldiers as well as driverless vehicles and more pilotless aircraft.

One obvious advantage, that goes unmentioned in this article, is that robots have no emotions and hence are unlikely to engage in the rage/revenge killings that usually occur after a unit has taken casualties. Presumably robots will also be able to calculate a non-lethal shot than a human who is trained to hit the largest target area in the chest? Advanced artillery systems already calculate potential collateral damage and lock down so as to make them inoperable if the levels are too high. Anyway, this is the future, and it may work.

If you can't face the acres of 'does my bum look big in this' by the middle aged, middle class, mummy contingent that now rules our Sunday papers, try this which was forwarded to me by the excellent Elberry. Scruton on top form. Oblivious to whether Brown is up or down we're off to lunch with old friends.

One of my favourite political commentators, Iain Martin, explains why the game is up for this Labour government.

He's right about their reluctance to appear on programmes like Any Questions or Question Time. Last night, the normally fluent Liam Byrne was thrown off stride by Dimbleby and never recovered, despite the Tory spokesperson being well this side of hopeless. The studio audiences are also starting to laugh at whatever government ministers say, always a very bad sign, as is their reduction to nothing more than mere ambition, which was all I saw in Byrne's smirking face.

The Wall Street Journal has the text of a speech by Senator Joe Lieberman on Afghanistan. See also the longer piece by Frederick Kagan from National Review. As and when I find articles making the contrary case I'll post them.

I have a very limited interest in or knowledge of opera, never being able to work with music on, and without three or four hours to listen in the evenings. Of course one should make time. I have really enjoyed performances of, say, Handel's Alcina, Berlioz Les Troyens, or Wagner's Parsifal when the opportunity has arisen, and want to see the Flying Dutchman this spring. After a splendid lunch yesterday in the Chinese restaurant on the tenth floor of Kensington's Royal Garden Hotel (must have fantastic views of the park at night) I nipped into a shop on St Martin's Lane and bought my first Donnizetti opera. I'm going to work my way through nineteenth century Italian opera composers this year. If any opera buffs are reading this, I'd love to be told things about the music I don't know. Which is not very much.

Today's Mail has an interesting piece on a new German book about women under the Nazis.

When I was younger there used to be a sort of obligatory 'women's corner' in each book of essays on Nazism; mea culpa since I once commissioned Jill Stephenson to write such a piece. I included a lot of material about nurses and doctors in my Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900-45. I guess both Downfall and The Reader has made the subject topical.

This book seems to raise a lot of interesting questions, although it should be noted that men were just as susceptible to mass hysteria as women. I hadn't realised that the Einsatzgruppen took along their own 'Schreibkraefte' and must check that out. Surely men could type?

The Dutch Foreign Minister has complained to Boy Miliband about the Home Secretary's 'noteworthy' decision to deny entry tomorrow to Geert Wilders after one Muslim Labour peer warned about mob disorder in the precincts of Westminster. 

Apparently antagonising a country with which we have close historical and cultural ties is OK, if such a gesture appeases the Muslim minority, who are trying to shape our licensed discourse (through libel actions and threats of violence) as well as our banking, legal system, and foreign policy.

I hope Britain's human rights lawyers will rush to take up Mr Wilders's case with the alacrity with which they seek to repatriate suspected terrorists and failed asylum seekers from Guantanamo Bay, or have sought to frustrate the extradition of Abu Hamza to the US. Somehow I suspect this is not going to happen.

While we are about incitement to inter-communal hatred, I would have thought that this week's manipulative Panorama about Gaza was a pretty good example of the phenomenon, certainly judging from the comments made about it to me by various Muslim shopkeepers who saw it, all of whom duly took away the impression of Jews as child-murderers.

 

Last night's FILE ON FOUR managed to appal my wife and I as we were having our supper. The Egyptian government was upbraided for turning a blind eye to the suppression of Hamas by Israel, with nice Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen being wheeled out for the BBC prosecution. The idea, put forward by a very articulate Cairo Foreign Ministry spokeman, that the 80 million people of the Nilotic republic might not want the chaos evident in Gaza was not even considered. What exactly is the investment of the BBC in Hamas, whose ideology (and modus operandi) would appear to fly in the face of the 'values' the BBC enforces here in Britain? The night before we had Abu Bowen emoting on Panorama, juxtaposing a very nice Palestinian family (or what was left of it) with an Israeli minister who had clearly been selected for his lack of charm. I wonder whether this sort of emotional manipulation works as well as the BBC thinks it does, especially on anyone who saw the excellent C4 documentary about the reign of terror Hamas operates in Hamastan.

I don't normally pay any attention to Ed Balls, but something he insinuated in the Telegraph caught my eye. He didn't need to explicitly mention Facism (rise of) since the BBC and trades unions have done that for him. Their ears are permanently glued to the ground to detect the jackboots coming- all part of their pathological fear of the working classes who routinely defect direct from Labour to the BNP.

As an historian I also wondered about how the Depression "caused" Fascism. If my memory serves, the Fascists were founded in Milan in 1919, and were in power in Rome by 1922, long before the Depression. The mutilated victory in 1918 and the gestural antics of the Communists had rather a lot to to with this. Likewise, it was defeat in WW1, and the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s, which shattered the German political system, propelling middle class voters towards the Nazis. Rather a lot of studies have shown that the unemployed did not tend to vote for them when they voted at all. Something does not quite ring true with what Balls is insinuating.

Of course there is a perfectly respectable alternative to this fag end Labour government, and the (non-existent "threat" of Fascism). It is called the Conservative Party. They should be going to great lengths to expose how Labour is trying to re-oxygenate itself by conjuring Fascist shadows on the wall, a tactic I have heard from Blears, Blunkett, and now Balls, which suggests it is being cynically orchestrated.

I also wonder why no one seems willing to concede that "Fascists" can undergo the same sort of political evolutions that Communists have undergone in the last forty years? Are they uniquely stuck in a time warp? Just on logical grounds I find that implausible- although I am sure there are those who study it. I'd be curious to know.

A comment piece in today's Times exemplifies much of what's wrong about the current trans-Atlantic "debate" about Afghanistan.

The author, a former army officer with experience a long time ago in Northern Ireland, goes through the usual routine about how that analogy is inappropriate (agreed, so what does he bring to the table?) before settling down to discuss NATO's presence in purely military terms. Factors like national will are assumed in a manner I find irritating, just as I find it incredible that Brown will roll over to send the extra troops the US requires without a proper debate.

Elsewhere I noticed a piece in the FT by Anatol Lieven which recommended we withdraw, leaving special forces to aid bombers to destroy any incipient signs of al Qaeda opening pre-9/11 style training camps. Of course, that strategy would have our human rights regiment up in arms the moment some innocent civilian was killed. We've already had Patrick "Holy Joe" Mercer (another ex-soldier with NI experience) protesting when a US drone apparently zapped Rashid Rauf, a (fugitive) British citizen who's human rights were transgressed. Oh dearie me. 

"Debate" across the ocean is not much better. A recent article I read recommends sending leaders of the Anbar Awakening to Afghanistan to try to create something similar there. Otherwise, there is a lot of muttering about the inadequacies of the Karzai government, and the length of time it has taken to recruit even 70,000 men to the Afghan National Army. The Iraqi National Army has recruited half a million men over the same period. The Russians, and their clients in the Stans, are cutting up rough about alternative supply routes since the Taliban succeeded in interdicting the Khyber Pass road.

We are told that Afghanistan will require a 30 to 50 year committment, which takes it way beyond my lifetime, or that of any politician currently on the scene. One might have thought this was a golden opportunity, or rather a matter of urgent necessity, for the Conservatives to have a wide-ranging debate about what the West's options really are, bearing in mind that "Afpak" is one of the main sources of the terrorism we have seen already.

Of course, we won't see such a debate because the Tory 'securocrats' are locked into the same mindset as the author of the Times piece. I don't know what an alternative policy might look like, given that the Islamist problem spans the Afpak border. But if I was the one of those who for the next 30 to 50 years had to get up in the Commons to record the names of the dead, I'd be looking into this more imaginatively than seems to be happening at present. I'd start off by involving all the neighbours, for without the involvement of Iran and India, as well as Pakistan, this is going to be a supra-generational nightmare.

I wonder whether our Prime Minister believes what he says after reading this on the BBC's news website. This is clearly not a slip of the tongue like the saving the world stuff, but an example of British boosterism at its worst.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown encouraged the casino conditions that are now 'angering' him. He is not 'leading the world' on this one- if he was, he'd be doing what the US does, which is have the FBI trawl through the affairs of some of these bankers in the likelihood of discovering some irregularity which would land them in Chokey for a very long time. That would concentrate their minds powerfully. As for the bankers, their veiled threat to move elsewhere is risible since there are no jobs for any of them, except possibly in the Far East.

Apparently Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claims a lot of money (more than the national average wage) for lodging three or four nights a week with her sister in London. Very nobly she's contributing to the household budget. This is causing a fuss among pesky journalists who don't quite see things her way.

I have some solutions. She can either stay here for half the price, and I'll chuck in some free tutorials on terrorism with the boiled eggs, or, she can double up with the policemen guarding one of her Cabinet colleagues who sit in a quite spacious garage. That way she gets a bed and protection in one, and gets to learn about policing from the 'coal face'.

A friend used a word I had never heard of: "disintermediated".

Apparently a lot of middle men are going to find themselves superfluous to requirements, which is what disintermediate means.

It reminds me of the Daleks. Instead of 'exterminate', 'exterminate' substitute 'disintermediate', 'disintermediate' and you'll see what I mean.

Tim Marshall of Sky has an interesting counterfactual about why the baying mob denouncing Israel- especially the infantilised mob that teaches or studies in our so-called "world class" universities - don't seem to have noticed the parallel anti-terrorist operation in Sri Lanka.

This does not seem to excite their imagination in quite the same way; perhaps because beneath that anger about dying Palestinian children- so helpfully rushed up to Hamas cameramen - lie deep seated collective myths about Jews as child-murderers? A thousand years or more of 'acculturation' probably leaves all sorts of undetectable effects. Discuss. I also wonder whether fear plays its part, the fear that underlay the 'realism' of appeasement in the 1930s? If only those pesky Jews in Israel and their vociferous supporters in the West would disappear, then those fundamentally peace-loving Muslims would leave us alone and all would be well? Frederick Raphael calls this the unfinished business of the Holocaust syndrome.

One way the West can immediately correct this- as recommended in today's Observer, my paper of choice nowadays - is for NATO to issue nuclear guarantees to several of the Sunni states which may feel inclined to proliferate if Iran succeeds, as I feel it will, in acquiring a nuclear weapon. China and Russia, the author suggests, could guarantee them too. There seems little point in seeking tougher sanctions - which Germany and Russia will flout under their newfound Rapallo spirit of gaseous understanding - if there is also no big stick hovering in the background. Such a guarantee would show Tehran we really mean business and are not afraid to countenance Iran's complete annihilation, as opposed to whatever pin pricks the Israeli air force might deal to its bomb programme. You won't hear many protests around the Arab world about that. Mr Ahmadinejad may view the apocalypse with equanimity; the savvier clerics will protect the Revolution at his expense.

As I indicated a day or two ago, something is not straight about the story Miliband is telling about US intelligence, British courts, and Binyam Mohammed. Coverage in today's papers is pretty weak, especially apologias written by Miliband's mates, except for this piece in the Sunday Telegraph.

The authors might have mentioned that CIA field operatives routinely take out legal indemnity insurance, which I suspect is not the case with their colleagues here. So far.

Presumably the lawyers trying to get Mr Mohammed back into the UK- despite his being a failed Ethiopian asylum clainmant who was picked up in Pakistan using a fake passport - are also the ones lobbying Baroness Scotland to investigate this can of worms?

And how did we arrive at a position where the greatest external threat to our closest ally comes from the Islamists we have allowed to multiply in our midst? That's the real scandal that needs to be addressed.

Now and again I come across something that is really superb. Christopher  Bayly and Tim Harper's Forgotten Armies. Britain's Asian Empire & The War with Japan is dense, evocative, rich....in fact everything the wrapper says it is. Its about all the peoples stuck in the middle of retreating colonialists and advancing Japanese, but the places, Rangoon, Mandalay, Singapore etc are incredibly well described too. I've also been surprised by John Nunneley and Kazuo Tamayama Tales of Japanese Soldiers. A wounded British colonel 'beckons' them to shoot him, he dies 'serene'.

The boy Foreign Secretary and the liberal judges seem not to have got their story straight about the US government pressurising our courts not to reveal intelligence materials that allegedly derive from torture.

The reality is easy to imagine. Call from King Charles Street to Virginia: 'Langley, we have a problem' /'Yeh?'/'Some human rights lawyers and judges are poking into our intelligence agencies being complicit in torture, could you help us out here by saying you refuse to put your intelligence material in the public domain?' /'Why?' 'Because if you don't we'll deny you access to data on all those Anglo-Pakistanis who, as you know, ARE THE MAIN TERRORIST THREAT TO THE USA'. That's the reality I suspect Miliband doesn't want discussed in open court, not all this blather about the US pressuring the British.

Today's Mail editorial encapsulates everything I think about the BBC. There are also two excellent comment pieces by Stephen Glover and Melanie Phillips in the same paper today.

Carol Thatcher interviewed me about twenty years ago for some local radio station. She was nice, jolly, unpretentious, and I noted, rather sad. Maybe she wasn't having a great day. I've never seen her since. 

The BBC offends me virtually every day with its bumptious presenters; unfunny comedians; and ingrained Left-wing current affairs/news bias. Worse, we have to pay £130 a year to have this travesty of everything we believe in, simply in order to own a TV set on which we mainly watch Channel 5. I loath its awful low grade smugness- exemplified by the ubiquity of the likes of Shami Chakrabati, Helena Kennedy, Philippe Sands et al- and the relentless references on its arts programming to award-winning, prize-winning (load of crap).

Of all the things to get worked up about, Thatcher using the expression 'gollywog' comes low down on my list. High on it, by contrast, would be anyone exploiting a private conversation to snitch on someone with a view to ruining their livelihood, something I last saw in the film 'Lives of Others' although I'm familiar with the practice from academe where it is used all the time. Listening to a member of the BBC nomeklatura on Radio 4 this morning, justifying Thatcher being sacked, the penny really dropped about the "culture" of this awful organisation.

As the BBC yet again becomes its own story, I hope the Conservatives will have the guts to take this over mighty subject not only down, but cut into small saleable pieces, when they replace this fag-end Labour government in the foreseeable future. The fact that I like Jazz Record Requests, or that others claim to enjoy Gardeners' World, is neither here nor there- I'll gladly pay a small subscription to hear the former. 

A long lunch with Freddie Raphael, mainly devoted to discussing The Reader. His conversation sparkles, switching from French and Latin back into English in various accents. I have a sore throat from too much shouting at the TV, so his rapier flashed at a frog that could merely croak. He combines deep learning, especially about the Classics, with a great sense of humour- rich tales of Hollywood. Sometimes life feels great- strolling down to Hyde Park with him after a four hour pow wow was one of those moments.

In Blood and Rage I wrote about the motives of (captured) female suicide bombers in Palestine. They included women who had been groomed so as to nullify some perceived slur on their honour, including a woman who was encouraged to kill herself by her husband after he had divorced her and moved a younger replacement into the family home. Today's Times has a truly shocking report from Iraq about some harridan who has persuaded rape victims to blow themselves up, including some who's rape she organised. I am generally against the death penalty, but in her case I think I'd make an exception.

Intellectually fortified by an excellent STANDPOINT team dinner, which included a sustained clash between Lord Lawson and Sir Tom Stoppard about global warming, I've decided to rise above Russian pagans and recipes for thrush stew this morning: 

My friend Simon Heffer has a marvellous piece in today's Telegraph about Cameron's speech at Davos. As Simon says there's something depressing about trying to board the fashionable anti-capitalist bandwagon. We've seen the major alternatives and they don't work.

Of course we've been here before. My book Earthly Powers has a long chapter on attempts by Christian industrialists in the nineteenth century to knock the very sharp edges off the industrial revolution in the form of highly localised Owenite experiments, albeit devoid of the totalitarian featues of New Lanark. Many, though not all, were Social Catholics, inspired by the teachings of Leo XIII. I'm not sure how any of that could be adapted to a globalised economy involving a host of political philosophies and creeds (or none) but re-visiting it might be worthwhile.

At the risk of lowering the tone, this item in the Mail caught my attention. Knowing Australia quite well, I still can't quite imagine what the laconic comment of the customs officers might have been. Can you? Don't they have aubergines and pigeons down under?

In one of his interviews, the affable Adam Smith reading Chinese premier Wen Jinbao remarked that China and Britain are not encumbered by "any historical baggage". While I ponder the accuracy of that observation -Cultural Revolution anyone - I wonder what readers think are the policy implications, either for this holed-below-the-waterline government or that of David Cameron which will succeed it? What's the use of allies who disavow any great power ambitions like China or India vis a vis the US which has no such inhibitions about its global status?  

"Mississippi Will", a name redolent of roadkill, but in reality a man of great refinement, has provided a most helpful link for any Brits starving as a light snowfall (its hardly 1962) appears to have paralysed the country. For the second day the post has not arrived. Suddenly the depredations of our cats seem useful- providing as they do ingredients for the Roman receipe for stuffed doormice. I was going to comment on Wen Jibao's visit - the FT had an insightful interview with him yesterday - but I've got to figure out German-Japanese relations in 1941 instead.

By some happy coincidence the heavy snowfall coincides with a long chapter I am writing on the Eastern Front in WW2. Gingerly marching to buy the FT this morning I narrowly avoided falling over because of iced footprints......its not cold outside, unlike December 1941 in Russia when it fell to -40. The diaries and letters of General Heinrici frequently allude to his breath freezing or the fact that it was painful to breath at all.

Of course, too much is made of the impact of General Winter in 1941-45. After all, the Soviets were just as badly affected by it as the Germans and their allies, as one can see from their rather indifferent counter-offensives between January-June 1942. The Germans made no provision for winter kit  because they imagined they would have pulled out most of their troops by October, leaving 60 divisions stationed in Russia along with air fleets to pummel Russian industry in the Urals. By the time they realised how bad things would get, they couldn't spare 255 trains to move warmer clothing, although they found space to deport German Jews. Still, Hitler intervened and told the troops to take the fur hats, scarves and felt boots from Russian POWs, three million of whom then froze to death.

Difficult to decide about the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Some 18 million men served in the armed forces in the Nazi era. Estimates of criminal activity range from 5% to 60-80%, a disparity that is impossible to bridge with some judicious compromise. Also, in the East, the vast majority of troops (say 3 million) were at the front from which civilians were expelled, with only 100,000 men policing rear areas roughly the size of India. Anyway. There are icicles on the window and a crow is sitting on a branch with the turrets of Surrey Cricket Ground in the background, which I will have to imagine are the domes of the Kremlin.

My fellow Standpoint advisory board member Frank Field has a characteristically clear-eyed piece in today's Mail on Sunday. What he says about the composition of the workforce at the 2012 Olympics is particularly troubling.

Meanwhile, amidst all the junk circulars for builders, minicabs, pizzas and takeaways, something useful has at last arrived. A Professor Elhadj Bafode is offering us OCCULT SCIENCES AND THE MOST POWERFUL SPELL. Luckily, I'm not doing exams, and don't face any court cases, except possibly a bit of libel trouble, or have problems with immigration. However, further down the list of problems he can solve, Professor Bafode says 'I will protect you from all Jealous ENEMIES, WITCHCRAFT (Black Magic) and an BAD OBSTACLES that are blocking your success'. There are some people who should be very afraid. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. The Professor's style is catching......reminiscent as it is of African dictators like Daniel Arap Moi.

A brilliant piece in today's Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/janice_turner/article5622048.ece

on the demonstrations against Total's strange resort to Italian and Portuguese workers in Lincolnshire when there are self-evidently lots of skilled engineers available in a county where unemployment has risen 47% in a year.

Predictably, last night's Channel 4 News insinuated that the BNP were involved, whereas what they filmed was a van decorated with BNP slogans (ie the one used by our prime minister) opportunitically roving around the general vicinity of the demostrations. If British workers demonstrate, they must be fascists, seemed to be the juvenile reasoning.

The Left clearly intends to run with this one. Last night I heard David Blunkett on Any Questions burbling on about Germany in the 1930s in answer to a question about this country's extreme economic plight. Voters will have a choice, he claimed, between moderate Social Democrats and Nazis at the next election, at which point the excellent Simon Heffer pointed out that they might also vote for moderate Conservatives. The Left has always had a cynical interest in ramping up the threat of 'Fascism' and we are seeing it happen now.

This item in today's Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4392789/Hospital-calls-in-exorcist-after-ghost-spotted.html

caught my eye, especially the bit about passing through the walls of the morgue. Brrrrr. Spooky. How do they know it is the ghost of a Roman soldier rather than an 18th century highwayman?  

Went to a brilliant talk at PolicyExchange at lunchtime by Gilles Kepel, the SciencePo Franco-Czech expert on the Jihadis. Take my word for it; his books are amazingly good. He argued that the British are now beginning to see the light, ie abandoning multi-culti and becoming more like the French, who since 1996 have suffered no major terrorist incident. He delicately hinted that imperial Britain as historians "Collydine and Co" have reinvented it has systemic identity problems that do not exist in France 'une et indivisible', notwithstanding the Corsicans and Basques about who he made some droll remarks that might get him killed.  

Among the striking observations he made were that the Deobandists we have here imported an inherited besieged mentality from having lived in majority Hindu India before partition which they have transposed on to us; that no Arab woman in France wants to marry another Arab, whereas in Britain the Pakistanis go home to find their brides; and among French Muslims there is no equivalent to the 400,000 Anglo-Pakistanis who go 'home' each year. Who in their right mind would go home to Algeria? An Algerian friend of mine who does immediately arms himself when he visits his family, some of whom have been killed by either the jihadis or the police in the ongoing dirty war. Kepel also dismissed the idea that mini caliphates are being formed in the troubled Banlieus- its all about needing 'respect' and jobs to replace those in the car plants. He ended by urging greater Anglo-French cooperation in dealing with this problem; let's hope the Home and Foreign Office people he's seeing today and tomorrow are listening.

In addition to criminal gangs, Islamists and seperatists, Russia's security services face a new challenge: pagan terrorists.

Several people have been charged with the murder of ten foreigners and multiple bomb attacks on both Metro stations and MacDonalds. The culprits are called Rodnoverie, that is devotees of pre-Orthodox Slavic religions. They are too young to remember Communism, or its suppression of the Russian Orthodox Church, which they regard as the historic oppressor of the country's true ancient religion. 

They have a heavy metal band, called "Arkona", what else, and sacred texts, The Book of Veles, although the original- written on wooden planks -allegedly disappeared in the Second World War. I've heard that Elberry actually has them propped up between those ancient Egyptian figures in his garden.

Now as it happens, in 1979 I went to Kap Arkona, on the island of Ruegen off what was then the DDR. After a false start, which involved inadvertently boarding a 5am troop train returning to Mother Russia, which certainly perplexed the policemen who checked my passport, I finally reached my destination, although a hyper-nervous taxi driver dropped me off some miles from the cliffs. Perhaps he thought I was going to jump off? 

My mission was to see the remains of the temple of Svantovit, a major Slavic deity, for I was doing a PhD in medieval Prussian history at the time. I tried to explain that to a couple of bemused Volksarmee soldiers happily jamming the TV reception from Denmark. Anyway, not much to see at Kap Arkona and I contrived to spend the night in a bus shelter waiting for the first bus back. Incidentally. according to the chronicles I read at the time, the priests who tended Svantovit's temple had to hold their breath as they swept it out. That's all I can remember after a thirty years interval. Good luck to the FSB with this one.

Yesterday I caught a couple of the items that dealt with the crisis at the BBC. On Panorama, the comedian Frank Skinner skilfully narrowed the debate to one about how much swearing there should be on publicly funded TV. Attempts by Charles Moore to broaden the debate to the connection between the coarsening of TV and the 'broken society' were not pursued.

Later, Janet Daley and Greg Dyke joined Paxman to discuss the BBC again. The discussion followed a slot where creepy Michael Crick did a relatively straight report on allegations of sleeze in the Lords- I imagined how he would have treated four Tories had they been in the same position as the Labour peers. Again the discussion revolved around Ross, rather than the liberal-left bias throughout much of the Corporation's output. That, rather than the infantilism of Ross, is why - to Paxman's evident perplexity - 'many people don't like the BBC'. Or rather, its why many of us object to paying for it through a poll-tax.

 

I've never liked the series 24, and not only because I find the improvised plots pretty tedious. I'm glad the series not so implicit justification for torturing terrorist suspects on the spurious grounds of "two minutes to midnight" has been criticised by someone who really knows the score:

 http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=89172

The only case I know of where a suspect really did have life threatening information- a German kidnapper- was threatened with torture by a detective, who in the event, hardly laid a finger on him. The man gave up the information; his victim was already dead.

Only two clerics, one Catholic, the other Protestant, could come up with this http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/24/ira-loyalist-killers-compensation plan to compensate the families of all 'victims' of violence in Northern Ireland with a flat £12,000. They would include the relatives of Shankill Road butcher, Lenny Murphy, about whom I wrote in Blood and Rage , as well as IRA man Thomas Begley who contrived to blow himself up in the course of murdering nine people in a fish shop at the same location. This outrageous scheme apparently appeals to Brown and Co as a way of drawing a line under such disgraces as the Savile Commission, a lawyers racket which to date has cost the tax payer £200 million, without any report in the offing. Northern Ireland has long been a fathomless drain into which British and EU tax payers have paid fortunes. Time tto say the party's over.

Today's New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/business/worldbusiness/22pound.html?_r=1&ref=business splashes with the woes of Reykjavic-on-Thames as (Londonistan) is now known. All no doubt true, but there is an obvious upside:

Since the NYT is presumably favourite reading for the new administration, they will keenly appreciate why we can't afford to take Guantanamo Bay terrorists off their hands- as suggested by lawyer Clive Stafford Smith in today's Telegraph- and why we will not be contributing more troops to any forthcoming Afghan surge. Let them turn to the Germans, who apparently manage their economy better than our governing crowd, especially since the Defense Department has been grumbling about the performance of the Brits in Iraq.

Today's International Herald Tribune has a number of thoughtful pieces. The Arab summit meeting in Kuwait of 22 member states was to have dealt with the many problems that plague 333 million people in the Arab world: illiteracy, poor schools and universities, backward public transport; problems with water supplies and food shortages. The article was too kind to mention endemic corruption. Instead, they are currently bickering about the Palestinians and Israel while 'the Arab ship is sinking'.

Problems in the region include vast numbers of young 'hittistes', that is youths propping up walls rather than working. The Lebanese PM calculates that they will all need to create 50 million new jobs in the next two decades just to keep unemployment at current levels. Schools are poor and the universities don't even figure in international research tables. Scientific research is virtually moribund, whatever past glories people harp on about. Nothing is coordinated either- energy, customs, transport. The combined manufacturing output is less than that of Nokia in Finland.

For all the talk of sovereign wealth funds, the Arabs have collectively taken a US$2.5 trillion hit so far from the banking crisis. Because of the collapse of the oil price, 60% of development plans have been cancelled, with grave implications for social stability. Crazy alternatives, like the polderised homes for footballers and their wives in Dubai, are proving hard to sell.

All that should have occupied the assembled leaders in Kuwait this week. Instead, they are rowing about their stances towards Hamas and Israel. The real need there- for some sort of Marshall Plan investment plan in Gaza and the West Bank- will also go by the board. And meanwhile, every western government will be turning to alternative energy sources to do with even less of their cheap oil.

 

Last week Foreign Secretary David Miliband belatedly jumped on the bandwagon of deprecating the idea of a global Islamist terrorist insurgency. He claimed that ETa, Sinn-Fein IRA, the Baader-Meinhof and Red Brigades were all distinct, regardless of superficial examples of cooperation (which also included the PFLP/PLO which he forgot to mention). This was supposed to justify talking to terrorist groups with local grievances so as to separate them from the global anti-western jihadists, which means Hamas or Laskar-i-Toiba.

Leaving aside the former's general subscription to Marxist-Leninism, Miliband would appear to have jumped on the wrong bus.

A line that caught my eye in President Obama's speech earlier today was:

'Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred'.

What's the betting Miliband gets back on message before Brown and his team have their first encounter with the new president, to whom I wish all the luck he is going to need.

 

Further to my post about Lloyds Bank being fined a record sum in the US for falsifying payment details originating in Iran, The Weekly Standard has an interesting report about British companies and Iran's illegal arms procurement endeavours http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/012wjphk.asp?pg=2

Again this highlights the emptiness of Brown's rhetoric during his time as chancellor to have been effective in dealing with the financing of rogue regimes and terrorists. Since we are party to the same sanctions against Iran, what penalties will Lloyds and others be receiving in this country? Answer: none. And has Sir Victor Blank spoken about this subject yet?

My favourite business journalist, Jeff Randall, has a very sharp piece on this country's economic woes in today's Telegraph, which is very funny about Yvette Cooper, who was given a hard time by Philip Hammond and Vince Cable on TV last night. Even that Labour robot seemed unsteady on her brief:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeffrandall/4249260/In-the-theatre-of-sound-bites-all-that-matters-is-scoring-points.html

Watching Brown and Darling droning on yesterday, as RBS shares plunged to 11p, the most frightening thing was the unfathomable levels of debt these banks have racked up, and the open-endedness of the liabilities of the tax payer to bale them out. Talk of insuring against toxic debt raised the prospect of the problem spreading from the banking to the insurance sector. I suppose its a sign of the times that I tried to phone a friend yesterday to find out what bankruptcy has meant for Iceland and Ireland- and hence for us, surely the next in line, as the pound plunges down.

Today's Guardian has this brief piece http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/19/gaza-hamas-ceasefire which suggests that, given the chance to speak freely, many Gazans blame Hamas for the devastation they have experienced.

Yet on last night's ITV news, there was a masked figure, cradling his AK-47, wagging that finger and enjoining the 'cowardly' Israelis to come back and fight mano a mano. He should be careful for what he wishes.

The Mail on Sunday has an important story http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1120831/Muslim-civil-servant-suspended-killing-British-troops-justified-blog.html about a civil servant in the Treasury whose personal blog seems to say very different things from the dozens of 'moderate' Muslim bodies he is involved with. Nice work if you can get it. A couple of questions come to mind, apart from the issue of treason which several Mail readers mention in their comments on the piece.

What due diligence is being exercised before someone like this is viewed as an appropriate interlocutor for British government agencies concerned with 'radicalisation'- for surely his views are pretty 'radical' in themselves? And what role did he (or his Islamic Civil Servants Association) play in inclining the Treasury towards licensing the introduction of sharia banking in the UK? Why do we have Islamic Civil Service associations anyway?

There is also a further worrying issue. The government seems to be reverting to the default position of the "covenant of security", under which provided extremists didn't cause trouble here, they were free to agitate against our allies abroad. We know where that led: Londonistan. Now the line seems to be that its perfectly alright to express the most violent attitudes to Israel, provided this doesn't spill over into violence on our streets. Fear of that seems to have spread to the police, with one leading Muslim police officer being allowed by his superiors to take part in demonstrations against Israeli actions in Gaza.

I will be following very closely whether the suspension of this individual results in his being fired, with the removal of all pension rights.

 

An appropriate read for this chilly weather has been Robert Edwards's White Death about the Soviet invasion of Finland in December 1939. The Finns fought them to a draw in a campaign of 105 days, in conditions where it was sometimes -38 degrees, before having to cede vast tracts of territory under the Treaty of Moscow.

I liked the cut of Carl Gustav Mannerheim; a sort of Finnish Ataturk in a white fur hat rather than a fez, who masterminded 200,000 Finns holding back a Red horde of 1.2 million. Elsewhere I noted, in a very compelling book of documents Yale UP has produced on Katyn, that the Soviets may have been so keen to create space for incoming Finnish POWs that they decided to shoot the Poles they already had in similar circumstances. Or Stalin was peeved that General Sikorski had volunteered Poles for an Anglo-French intervention that never came.

Another brilliant book was a biography of the Polish SOE agent Christine Granville who had a distinguished war in Poland, the Balkans and France.

The book gives a great sense of cosmopolitan dislocation: she never owned a house and inhabited cafes rather than cook. Indeed she turned down the legacy of a house in London after the war.   

After the war she worked as a stewardess on liners going to South Africa. A semi-schizophrenic fellow steward developed an obsession with her, so much so, that one night he stabbed her to death in a London hotel laundry store. He was hanged. 

Every evening when we are about to cook, the murderous duo who enjoy Savoy Hotel conditions in our house drag in a fieldmouse, frog or bird. I have had enough of trying to cook while one of these poor things are chased, tossed and killed for an hour, with Mrs B telling me 'to kill it'. I can't bring myself to polish off a crippled mouse, let alone a finch or similar small bird. Its not as if they are starving- rather just malicious.

Now there is a solution: www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1114922/Robo-cat-The-purrfect-pet-allergy-prone-owner.html

The duo are now on notice that unless they stop, I'm going to replace them with one of these, which seem to have all the advantages and none of the downsides of the real thing. 

I haven't seen any coverage in the local press of the following http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090110/tbs-lloyds-s-to-pay-us-fine-of-350-mln-d-8cc5291.html story about LloydsTSB plc. I thought the former Chancellor turned Prime Minister was a bit of whizz in stopping financial flows that might end up in the hands of terrorists or the world's lunatic regimes. Evidently not.

Conservative leader David Cameron has proposed http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/4225580/Cameron-plans-first-term-boundary-review-to-slash-10-per-cent-of-Commons.html a ten per cent cut........in the number of MPs. Does anyone know how many MPs there are in other European parliaments or the US Congress? While he's about it, he might think about how to reduce the gross over-representation of lawyers so that problems are not considered solely from their narrow point of view. Incidentally he's clearly got good taste in books since in addition to Blood & Rage which the Mail identified on his shelves yesterday, I can spy the spines of both Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes behind his head.

The highpoint of a dinner party last night was when our hostess, a distinguished picture restorer, showed us what some old masters look like under ultra-violet light- extremely blotchy roughly describes it. I'll never quite look at the pictures in a gallery the same way again, aware of what must have gone on underneath.

Most of the weekend spent reading a jaunty but incredibly tedious book on 'six legged soldiers', that it the use of insects in warfare. The author, an entomologist in Wyoming, seemed to have difficulty distinguishing the catapulting of bee hives and wasp nests (practiced from antiquity down to the VietCong using scorpions to protect tunnels) from the decimation of most modern armies by diseases before the introduction of silk underwear, DDT, and delousing. Anyway, at various times the book had me scratching my arms and legs, and I had a vivid dream about spiders on Saturday, after reading the chapter on insect cyborgs which can go up and down walls. I wonder whether there are other books which trigger such a physical response as distinct from being, say, depressing (most of my oeuvre) or frightening (Conan Doyle)?

After an angry, inevitably, celebrity-studded rally in Trafalgar Square, groups of Jews descended on Brick Lane to assault anyone visibly identified as a Muslim. Some burst into a curry house and attacked the diners, tugging at their beards while shouting Oi Vey. A rabbi is rumoured to have tried to strangle a waiter with a rolled up prayer shawl. Outside one of the many mosques in the area, the Jews chanted 'Death to the Earabs' (in emulation of the Palestinian supporter's 'Death to the Juices' (sic) placard I saw last week).

Elsewhere, irate Jews rioted outside the Iranian and Syrian embassies, blaming them for the rocket attacks in Gaza, while mysterious Jewish websites published lists of prominent Muslims who they threatened to kill. In Bradford an imam was dragged from his car and beaten up by two men on a day trip from Stamford Hill.

Meanwhile, a group of well-known Jews published a letter in the newspapers warning the British government that if it didn't adjust its pro-Arab foreign policy, there would be a corresponding radicalisation of the British Jewish community who might resume terrorist attacks on public transport.

Faced with such concerted manifestations of hysterical anger, the police decided to arrest any Muslims provocatively sporting a Palestinian keffiyah. Tantalised by Jewish violence, the BBC sent several admiring reporters to tell their story to a wider public, giving a new spin to the saw 'Jews means News'. My God how they must have suffered to be this angry, threatening Muslims with something ominously called a 'Holocaust'. Grovelling interviews were conducted with Israeli spokesmen because of their remote connection with these wild-eyed Anglo-Jews. The IDF became heroes over night.....

All of which is only as incredible as what we are witnessing now here in London.

  

With snow swirling around outside our house, a 'research story' from academia may amuse www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/4108867/Stonehenge-was-giant-concert-venue.html.

A prof called Rupert, who does a bit of DJaying on the side, asserts that Stonehenge was a prehistoric rock concert venue. There doesn't seem to be anything other than comparative acoustic evidence for this assertion, but never mind. Try mentally populating Avebury or Stonehenge with Bono, Geldof and Annie Lennox look alikes. What causes would they have espoused? So much 'research' seems like recyclable column inch filler. Do these people get grants?

Speaking of Avebury, we once stayed in a delightful B&B on the Kennet run by a retired Marines officer. At breakfast our fellow guests, a sleek Californian couple who had 'retired' in their forties, announced that they were witches who had come for the Solstice. Try that conversational gambit over a boiled egg and toast.

Our central heating system broke down yesterday. It was so cold that even the fire I lit never seemed to emit enough heat. Since I was reading a rather good biography of General Wavell, I toughed it out in the spirit of those times. After returning from the Ballet, my wife called British Gas with whom we have a HomeServe agreement. Apparently they could only come on Tuesday (tomorrow) because they were inundated with calls from "arthritic octogenarians" and "you don't sound like one". Flatterers. Would it make a difference if I had gout? A cold? Flu? BUT, for an extra £3 a month payment, we could ensure the 'same day' service we thought we were paying for anyway. Welcome to Rip Off Britain 2009.

Sky News, which I increasingly watch rather than any other, showed IDF footage of a bomb hitting a mosque in Gaza. The commentary drew attention to a series of secondary explosions, indicating that the mosque was a weapons dump. Over on the BBC 10 o'clock news, Jeremy Al Bowen, as he is known in some quarters, showed the same footage, choosing to ignore the IDF claim about the secondary explosions and thus giving the impression that Israel egregiously bombs places of worship. The BBC also prefers to show a handful of demonstrations against Israel (and no doubt will do the same when the usual suspects gather in London today) rather than reporting the grave divisions in Arab responses to the crisis. There being no mention of Egyptian or Saudi condemnations of Hamas rocket attacks.

Over the years I've come to really like Jools Holland's New Year bash- last year he had Sea Sick Steve (Bryan Appleyard still has my CDs by the way so I haven't heard him in a while) and this year Martha and the Vandelas, Duffy, and a girl called Tin Tin who were all great. The distant reverberations of the riverside firework display added bass notes. If any one still has any money, you should also head to Ronnie Scott's to see Ray Gelato- a Louis Prima like saxophonist and singer who looks uncannily like Robert De Niro in Casino. That will give you the needed uplift to face 2009: Mister Policeman Don't Touch Da Bananas. And yes I remained sober so this morning I'm full of beans.

My resolution is to do more gardening this year- both in our tiny outside yard, and on the third floor terrace. According to a wonderful book we were given called London's Secret Gardens, tree ferns are good for height and shade.

Anyway, a Happy New Year to all Standpoint readers and subscribers!

The eyes of the world are currently focused on Gaza. Although many commentators have linked Israeli military activity to the forthcoming elections, few have remarked that Palestinian elections are also scheduled. The reckless decision of Hamas to call off its ceasefire and continue firing rockets at Israel may be part of an attempt to compensate for its woeful misgovernment in Gaza, conditions which would normally send voters back to Fatah.

Meanwhile, this news from Pakistan http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081229/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan_valley_of_fear/ is is equally worrying since the Swat Valley is only 100 miles from Islamabad.

 

Much as I love Australia, it does have more things that can kill you than anywhere else. I've never been tempted to swim there for reasons all too apparent in this story from today's Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/28/australia-sharks-attacks although my wife has happily swum at Byron Bay. I liked the sound of Mr Guest- clearly a philosophical sort of chap, until he was eaten that is.

I'd like to wish readers a very happy Christmas and may 2009 be better than most people say its going to be. Who needed Whitards anyway when there is the marvellous Algerian Coffee Store on Old Compton Street (which does mail order for those who don't live in London).

Having recommended Sharia law, and then the views of Karl Marx on the reification of mere things, one might have thought we could get to the end of the year without hearing from the Archbishop of Canterbury. He has grabbed a few headlines, again, through oblique reference (it is ever thus) to a letter which the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth wrote in 1931 to the German Centre Party chancellor Heinrich Bruening. This consisted of the usual thin theological opacities against making a fetish of economic policy- in Bruening's case the stringent measures he took to get Germany through the Depression.

Now Bruening was a complex figure- a former WW1 machinegunner and highly educated economist. Those who apologise for the reckless welfare spending indulged in by earlier Weimar governments tend to call him the 'Hunger Chancellor' who made things so bad that people turned to Hitler. They overlook the role of the period of hyper-inflation in 1923 in impoverishing huge numbers of middle class Germans who then switched their political allegiances in the late 1920s away from the two liberal parties and the conservatives. Others lament the fact that Bruening came a hundred yards from the finish line of his marathon. Still other historians, Henry Ashby Turner in the van, lament that one of his successors General Schleicher did not have the guts to impose a temporary military dictatorship.

I can't see the point of Williams conjuring up poor old Bruening (who died in 1970 after years of UK and US exile) except to get headlines by vaguely intimating the threat of Nazism. That is absurd, for reasons I gave in a piece in the Sunday Telegraph last month. What exactly is the Archbishop saying about the two sets of economic "solutions"- spend our way out and get taxed later or control the Behemoth of public spending Brown has encouraged- being offered by Labour and the Conservatives? He doesn't seem to realise that there are a lot of views about Bruening, or what would have been most likely to avert the January 1933 outcome. 

Not content with this nonsense, the Archbishop then complacently floated the idea of dis-Establishing the Church of England, only to row back from the thought in the next sentence. However obsessed nowadays with gays and the like, the CoE is actually one of the few entities that give this country (England) a common cultural identity. Oh and he appears to like his ghastly old Stalinist namesake Raymond Williams too. How cosily Left-wing he always sounds.

As has often been said, Williams is a typical academic. In other words he chucks ideas around in a completely irresponsible fashion, without any regard for their wider political consequences. Some say he has written a marvellous book on Dostoevsky- what a pity he entirely lacks that great writer's capacity to examine the false gods of the age.  

Following on from my post about libel tourism, the Washington Post has an excellent piece http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/20/AR2008122002096.html about another unremarked scandal involving British lawyers and judges- namely their obstruction of attempts to extradite terrorist suspects to the US (and France).

A good report in today's Guardian Media section on the scandal of libel tourism http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/18/mps-demand-reform-of-libel-laws. and how a small group of MPs plan to terminate this. We should all wish them well in this endeavour, although the sheer number of lawyers in our legislature may well become an obstacle.

On a related matter, I was encouraged by the way in which members of the Mumbai Bar are refusing to act on behalf of the sole surviving terrorist; in contrast to the gadarene rush of British lawyers to defend British jihadists and their penumbra of apologists. Apparently the lawyers of India still have moral compasses and responsibility towards the wider public interest.

I am not sure what to make of the British pilot who on reaching a fog bound Paris after taking off three hours late from a fog bound Cardiff decided to turn homeward since he was not qualified to make low visibility landings. Apparently this was what legally speaking he was obliged to do. Had I been one of the passengers- many with kids going to Disneyworld- I would have had to be given placidol to calm down.....but, what if the plane had crashed on arrival? I did wonder how many other pilots are flying around with incomplete qualifications to do this or that, or can't fly in, say, rain or thunderstorms. On a related matter, which pilot accent do posters think is most reassuring? We once flew into the Shenandoah Valley in a very small plane during a thunderstorm. The turbulence swayed the thing sideways as well as up and down. Pre-9/11 the cockpit door was open where the pilots were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee. Ever since this near death experience I've always found American accented pilots very reassuring. Ditto Malaysians for reasons I cannot explain. Others say a British accent has the same effect.

Various commentators have been mystified by the healers (actually one- Bilal Abdullah for his accomplice was an aeronautical engineer) turned killers who tried to murder clubbers in London and passengers at Glasgow airport. There is a very good piece about the plot by Stephen McGinty in today's Scotman newspaper. In fact, many terrorists have been medics- George Habash and Wadid Hadad come to mind- since the days of the Russian populists turned nihilists. It has often been said that frustrated altruism turns to violence and combines with a training that encourages emotional detachment. Others, notably the Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta, have noted the affinity between certain rules-based applied sciences to religious fundamentalism. And indeed I've met a few engineers and mathematicians who are Evangelical Christians of a dogmatic kind.

What most struck me was that Dr Abdullah claimed he was motivated by the carnage of Iraq. We can discount his claims that he merely wanted to frighten the British with a bit of fire and smoke. Of course there is no meaningful connection between events in Iraq and the murderous desire to kill two lots of people attending a company cocktail party and an 18th birthday party in a West End club. Except of course if some deep cultural hatred and resentment was at work in Abdullah's mind towards a society that had given him (and his colleagues) the only real chances they had in their lives.

We loved Just What Happened- a week in the life of a Hollywood producer juggling two projects and two ex-wives. There are many good movies about the motion picture industry- think The Player- but this was really funny in a low key sort of way. Among the producer protagonist's problems were a louche British director (think Keith Richards with pretension) refusing to cut the end of a film in which a dog is shot after the test audience is horrified, and Bruce Willis refusing to lose weight or shave off a preposterous beard. Terrific.

Earlier in the day we went to the National Gallery's Renaissance Portraits show. There are some splendid major works, like Jan van Eyck's self portrait, two Titian popes, and a Raphael picture of two male friends- but I loved the bust of Niccolo Strozzi by Mino da Fiesole, a Durer drawing of a fat friend, Pontormo's bravura drawing of himself in his underwear, which is a perspectival masterpiece, and the two or three portraits by Lorenzo Lotto who I had not heard of. The exhibition seems incredibly well-planned and visitor-friendly. Easily the best show I've seen all year. And Elberry, have you lost a little dragon by the way, as its chained up next to a fetching lady in one of the pictures.  

The reports on the fourteen people picked up by Belgian police before the EU summit are sketchy. Some of the men concerned seem to have returned from jihadist training in Afghanistan/Pakistan and one had been 'green lit' for a suicide mission.

One is the second husband of Malika al Aroud, a Belgian citizen of Tunisian extraction. After a youth spent in miniskirts and taking drugs, Aroud became a born-again fundamentalist, nowadays only her brown eyes peep out from under the full black garb.

She met her first husband Abdessater Dahmans who took her to Afghanistan where he joined Al Qaeda. The point about Dahmans is that he was one of the two westernised assassins posing as a TV crew who murdered Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud on 9 September 2001. This was designed to preemptively remove the one ally the US would have used after 9/11. Afterwards, bin Laden sent her US$500 to settle a debt he owed the late Dahman, together with a tape of the latter's last message to a wife who was not let in on the plot. Aroud is a very dangerous individual. Clearly we need to know much more about the jihadis in Belgium- just a short train ride away nowadays. I'll update this one.

Apparently the Moon is going to seem huge tonight due to a perigree- the opposite of apogee I gather. Nice word that perigree. It will be 28,000 kms closer. I once saw a very low lying Moon that was the colour of a blood orange over Blackheath. Perhaps Elberry was up to his old tricks?

Meanwhile, why is cleaning the oven the worst household chore? Polishing brass candlesticks is fun. I hate that feeling of my arms disappearing into the dark dirt. I've just made it worse by snapping off a shelf support- the mere prospect of dealing with the grime having made me get physical. Since I face the wrath of Mrs B, who has yet to notice that I cracked the ceramic tooth brush mug last week, it was up and down six flights of stairs to peer into the grime for the exact model number to give to Neff........grrrrrr. More to the point, I have never found so-called self-cleaning ovens any use. I tried one on a big oven we had in California and the thing looked like a pigeon had exploded after I had finished. Does anyone have a SENSIBLE idea of how to clean an oven other than calling a firm that does nothing else? And while we are dealing with the practical- what about rings from cold glasses on a Cuban mahogany table? I dimly remember a TV programme in which retired butlers knew all this stuff. Help me Jeeves.

Today's Times has a report buried on p. 67 about the conclusions of the Business and Enterprise Select Committee about this country's bleak energy future. Because of chronic underinvestment for a decade or more the generating network is so 'decrepit' that we will lose a third of capacity in the next twelve years. Worse, we have gas storage facilities for 13 days as opposed to Germany (99) and France (122). The lack of storage impacts on our ability to neutralise extreme volatility in prices. Meanwhile Gazprom are quietly buying up interests in Algeria- our only alternative source of liquified gas. You wonder what this government has been doing. Squandering more and more money on a broken welfare system that it should have reformed along the lines proposed by Frank Field a decade ago, while failing to ensure that we won't face a situation where the lights go out.  

The UN investigation into the assassination of Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri seems to be coming to conclusion and the report is said to be due early next year. The former German lead investigator had to leave Beirut in a hurry after he was notified of two concurrent plots to murder him, and various witnesses seem to have disappeared. But the Canadian in charge now is a steely man.

The report is likely to place the blame on Assad's brothers, Syrian intelligence officers, and a couple of collaborating Lebanese generals. But will justice be done? The US is keen to lure Syria away from Iran, the test being a peace deal with Israel for which the price will be return of the Golan Heights. Syria may be allowed a continuing influence on its neighbour. Israel itself is said to be keener on keeping Assad and the Alawite sectaries in power than in whoever the majority Sunnis might elect to replace them. Odd to be ruled by a sect that is hereditary rather than based on conversion or proselysation. This is why some suspect that a Libyan/Lockerbie compromise may result in which some low level Syrian operatives are handed over and sentenced in Holland, while the chief culprits get off. Anyway, a fascinating clash of justice and realpolitik which will leave a lot of Druze and Christians unhappy.

The Latvian security service has discovered a novel way of dissuading those who spread gloomy news about the state of the country's economy. The Sunday Times reports that a 32 year old economist was arrested and questioned for two days after questioning the stability of Latvia's 26 banks. A musician who cracked a joke about the strength of Lats was also arrested. This policy would appeal to my wife who shudders every time Robert 'Crack of Doom' Peston bobs up on screen. With MPs being arrested, I suppose anything is possible.

Meanwhile, I've bought myself a hat. A rather nice brown trilby. Fascinating to see the hatter's shop, and how it was steamed into shape with a half-open electric kettle. I've never worn hats, but reckon that at 53 I can get away with it, provided it is raining/snowing so much that visibility (and self-consciousness) are reduced to zero.

The leader of a middle eastern country much in the news at the moment is better known, to the cognoscenti, for acquiring the world's largest collection of the cards tarts leave in telephone boxes. That he never apparently called any of them- as far as one knows- may or may not be significant.

And yes, since some may have wondered, I've been incredibly busy juggling work on my new book, with updating Blood and Rage to incorporate something on Mumbai.

 

This story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30kristof.html?_r=1 in the New York Times concerns one of the thousands of women who have had acid thrown in their faces in several South Asian Muslim countries after divorcing (or otherwise offending) their husbands.

 

Nine counter-terrorism police arrived at the Kent home of Tory shadow immigration minister Damian Green and arrested him. This decent and intelligent man was held for nine hours in a London police station, and questioned about leaked Home Office documents connected with such immigration scandals as illegals being employed as 'licensed' security guards.

This is on a day when it is emerging that Anglo-Pakistani Islamists were among those captured by Indian police in Mumbai. I have a piece in the Mail today on the attacks. You'd think the British police had more urgent tasks- regarding the involvement, yet again, of British citizens in terrorism- than poking around in the affairs of an MP whose role is to examine government policy on behalf of the public. Perhaps they could follow up stories in India Express about one of the masterminds of the 2007 Mumbai railway attacks being in Birmingham?

Senior Tories are talking about Stalinism, and comparing the arrest with the practices of Robert Mugabe. They are right. And the public should back them in finding out how high up the order to arrest Green goes. If any Home Office minister was involved- and Ken Clarke and David Davies think it likely- then this is one outrage too far.

In the new trading circumstances I've been receiving emails from department stores I rarely enter, offering 20% discounts with the VAT reduction factored in. An enterprising wine merchant even rang the other night offering special discounts. My wife tells me there are discount vouchers galore on the internet should one need a new handbag. Since massive consumer debt is at the heart of this government's irresponsible handling of the economy, i.e the poor being bombarded with credit cards, blank cheques, and huge loans for a decade or more, I shall be avoiding all shops, as a solo protest against what amounts to a cynical attempt to make the national party carry on- both the party 'party' and a government that thinks it is perpetual. Speaking of protests, I wholeheartedly endorse Charles Moore's decision to donate his BBC license 'fee' to Help the Aged. The quicker we are rid of that awful, bloated, complacent organisation the better. On a related matter, today's TLS has a brilliant piece by George Walden on boosterism in modern British culture, while discerning Frederick Raphael has picked Blood & Rage as one of his books of the year.

Reviews of Frederick Spotts' new book on artists and writers in Vichy France remind me of how much has been written already about what Cocteau, Coco Chanel, Maurice Chevalier or Picasso did or did not do in Paris under the Germans. I suppose the lure of celebrity accounts for much of this interest, since I can't imagine book after book devoted to left-wing railwaymen. Interestingly, while the latter frequently sabotaged trains carrying compulsory labourers to Germany under the STO programme, not one of the eighty-five trains used to deport Jews suffered such upsets. Anyway, my bigger point is whether we do, or should, expect higher ethical standards from artists, entertainers, musicians and writers? This question makes a nice change from the stuff about Brand and Ross.

A big rush last night to get into a packed showing of 'Burn After Reading' the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen. Its a black comedy whose thread is a fitness centre employee, Linda Litzke's (actress Frances McDormand) obsession with having having plastic surgery. This intersects with the firing, because of alcoholism, of one Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) from the CIA. He explodes at the man sacking him: You're a Mormon. Next to you we all have a drinking problem!'. His wife's divorce lawyers mislay a disk with his pathetic attempt at a memoir, which the 'Hardbodies Fitness Center woman and her vacuous colleague (Brad Pitt) think is a top secret document which they can use to exort a finder's reward. They then try to sell it to extremely perplexed members of the Russian embassy, who dismiss the information as 'drivel', a nice comment on Cox's entire career. Cox's wife (a paediatrician who loathes children) is having an affair with a serial lothario, brilliantly played by George Clooney, who also alights on Linda through a computer dating agency. He claims to be a Federal Marshal, although he has never fired a gun in his career. The scene where he shows Linda the sex machine he has built for his wife is terribly funny, as is his priapist's constant urge to go jogging to work off his surplus sexual energy. The extortion bid goes wrong- somehow George Clooney ends up shooting the Brad Pitt character by accident- and Cox himself goes completely mad. He is eventually shot by the CIA after he has taken an axe to the boss of the gym who has fallen in love with his employee and been persuaded to snoop in Cox's former home. The Clooney character's wife (the chilly author of children's books) is also having affairs and duly divorces him. The film is extremely funny, with Cox stupefied that such morons could be trying to extort money from him for intelligence he can't believe exists. The CIA bosses- one brilliantly played by JK Simmons- assume something fishy is going on, and dispose of bodies along the way just in case. And they end up paying for the plastic surgery so the consumer wins out in the end. Cox's paralysed and mute father is a former State Department official who silently observes Cox's breakdown and his complaint that everywhere has been taken over by bureaucrats. So do the classical monuments of Washington DC through which the action passes. There is probably a serious point being made here, but the film is really an almost perfect farce in which the plot makes little sense at all.   

Piracy is making the headlines and I have a piece on the latest incident in today's Mail following on from my article in the current Standpoint. The latest news is that an Indian Navy ship. the INS Tabar, has sunk a Somali pirate mother ship after the pirates fired on her. This should be adopted as a universal rule of engagement by all warships in those waters. The UN Security Council should also urgently support a US and French motion enabling naval vessels to enter Somali territorial waters to pursue and stamp these people out. Time to show extortion does not pay.

I've just re-read, The Silence of the Sea, a novella written in 1944 by the French author and illustrator Jean Bruller under the pseudonym Vercors. It consists of a monologue delivered by the fireside to an unwilling old man, the narrator, and his niece, upon whom a young German officer Werner von Ebressac, has been billeted. He's lame, handsome, francophile, and a composer in his former life. The monologues, about how wonderful France is, elicit no response from the old man and his niece. The words themselves are like an imperialist assault, akin to a bore failing to pause for breath. Eventually, after a trip to Paris where he encounters old student friends turned soldiers who have gone raving mad in their desire to destroy France's spirit, Ebressac has a sort of breakdown and requests a transfer to the 'hell' of the Russian front. The silence is a metaphor for the silence into which all decent writers slipped during the occupation- in Buller's case by becoming Vercors. All of 47 pages his book is amazingly well crafted, and tells one more about life under occupation than many longer books.

As a lurophile, which I hope is the fancy term for cat lover, I was heartened by the news that one George was reunited after thirteen years with his Californian owners thanks to someone having the his chip scanned. The owners said he hadn't changed much, and still delighted in bounding at light flickering on the walls. Here we have a different problem. Our resident hunter-killer duo, Stanley and Flo, have taken to raiding a primary school's ecological pond and dragging frogs into our house, as well as any stray mice, and on one grim occasion, a live bird. The mouse that stood on its hind legs while 'Clyde' Stanley coldly gazed down at him, waiting for 'Bonnie' to polish it off, was especially affecting so I rescued it and desposited it outside.

Bright winter sunshine on this day of national remembrance. I shall be thinking about three uncles who died in the Great War and who are buried at Tyne Cot and Knightsbridge Cemetery at Mesnil Menart. Harper Collins have just brought out a beautiful book on Lutyens and war memorials by the way. Do I detect a subtle shift away from the 1960s tendency to regard the First World War as pointless as epitomised in 'Oh What a Lovely War'? Imagine a Germany as powerful as it was after Brest Litovsk and how long an armed truce with that vast entity would have lasted. We probably would not have had Hitler's war, but war with the 'restless Reich' there would probably have been. Anyway, you can read my thoughts on the long-term consequences of the war in the last of the pamphlet series the  Guardian is running this week. I think it appears on Saturday.

Others are celebrating the 150th anniversary of gin and tonic, favoured drink of many of my American acquaintances. Apparently the Indian tonic did away with the Hogarthian tawdriness of gin (lane), indeed it made it seem medicinal because of the (insignificant) dosage of quinine. While I like Indian tonic water, and sometimes drink it on a hot day, my feeling about gin was influenced by descriptions of it as vaguely oily and unpleasant in Orwell's 1984. Now I know there are many fine London gins, but I've never been able to shake my dislike of it. That probably accounts for my cheery disposition since it is allegedly a mood depressant.

Very wet Sunday afternoon so to the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Mankind as meat is the gist of it, a bit like walking into an abattoir. I used to like his work a lot, and there is still much to admire in his handling of colour and paint or the way he defines a sinister sort of space. Some of the paintings of animals are brilliant, notably 'Man with Dog (and drain)' and some pictures of baboons. I also liked the room which combined photos of his studio- which give a new meaning to the phrase that a room 'looks like a bomb went off'- with some of the images he collected (a lot from the Algerian War) and his comparatively rare drawings and sketches. But I felt that there was some falling-off in the last few decades of his life as the pictures became too slick, as if they were intended to blend with the decoration in rich peoples' homes. The gold frames confirmed this impression of value added. Nor could I see that his many studies of popes did much to improve on the Velasquez originals. At the end I wondered whether the shock effect of Bacon's work had been muted by the ubiquity of bodily functions, post mortems, and graphic sex in our popular culture. Pictures that resulted in complaints under obscenity laws (the one of two figures wrestling in grass) in the 1950s wouldn't raise a WI member's eyebrow today. Anyway, for those nostalgic for a certain louche London life in the 1950s this is the show to see- quite possibly no one has painted the physical impact of a long night in a bar to such effect. Too bad so many of his sitters didn't last the same distance as the artist despite his penchant for paying the dustmen to beat him up: 'We've come about the bins Mr Francis' being a story told by an artist friend of mine who knew him. 

Today's Guardian has a brilliant review of 'Hunger', the latest British film to sentimentalise the murderers of Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein. See here http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/nov/03/hunger-bobby-sands. No need to see the movie after reading this outstanding piece. I'd recommend Gomorrah instead. It is the polar opposite of every Hollywood gangster movie. The public housing is unbelievably squalid, the countryside polluted with toxic waste dumped on behalf of northern industrialists, and even haut couture is not free of the Commora's attentions. The fate of the Chinese sweat shop owner who tries to sneak into the trade is chillingly instructive. Although the Commora make 500,000 Euros a day just from drugs, none of the bosses in the film lead enviable lives. They are huge thugs with gold chains and fake tans, living in shabby flats and unremarkable suburban homes. One of them has the sort of artificial voice box of someone with throat cancer. At the end of the movie the makers noted that 4,000 people have been murdered in Naples by these criminals. That's more than the death toll from the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I suspect that the Provos more properly resemble the men shown in this film than they do the haloed characters of every British movie about the Troubles. Great that Gomorrah is tipped to win the best foreign film Oscar. Perhaps Hollywood will think again before it sentimentalises Irish murderers too.

Thanks to intelligence operations which apparently commenced in September, there was no US election commentary from Osama bin Laden. Websites used by Al Qaeda to broadcast his pronouncements were chased out of a succession of countries.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has an interesting essay on Stuart Levey's War as they call it, a Treasury Department official who like Charlie Wilson has single-handedly brought pressure to bear on banks, insurance and shipping companies trading with Iran. The method involves warning them of a catastrophic 'reputational crisis'. It seems to be working, whether in Dubai (the equivalent for Teheran of Hong Kong to China) or Switzerland. Even the Chinese have quietly stopped financial dealings with Iran. All those glitzy villas on the palm banks will remain unoccupied if the owners are likely to be scrutinised by the US Treasury. Although, predictably, various dubious Iranian banking entities continue to operate in the City of London, as Fran Abrahams reported on an outstanding BBC 'Financial World Tonight' report some months back.

Now if, as seems likely, US military measures against Iran are not under serious consideration, it is incumbent on all those who advocate robust diplomacy (and that means the Europeans) to ensure that sanctions are accelerated, particularly in the fields of oil and gas whose fruits Ahmadinejad has been spending on his electoral clientele as if there is no tomorrow. The 'its good to talk' approach is no solution (the Iranians have run rings round the IAEA and the three EU stooges, and have outfoxed five successive US presidents); there have to be fixed time limits on no-condition talks, followed by stringent sanctions that will deepen Iran's economic crisis. These have to be targetted at the estimated 80% of the economy which is in the hands of the military and Revolutionary Guards. Not only is Ahmadinejad evidently under some physical or mental strain, but one of his key ministerial appointments has been rejected by parliament for claiming an Oxford honorary degree he never had. Apparently the whole government may collapse in the wake of this crisis on the grounds that if a certain number of new ministers is reached it has to be subject to reapproval by the clerics under the peculiar dual-control constitution.

Meanwhile, New Zealand newspapers report postive developments in Indonesia where the men responsible for the two Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005 are about to face firing squads. As I have long advocated, the West needs to broaden its focus on the Muslim world out towards relatively moderate nations with huge populations. 

Pierre Claudel's Il y a longtemps que je l'aime is built around marvellous performances by Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein. Its about two sisters, the older a doctor who has completed a fifteen years stretch for killing her incurably ill son, and who returns to a family that has renounced her. The relationship between the sisters, and the two adopted Vietnamese children of the younger one, and how the film depicts middle class life in provincial Nancy, are very well achieved.

Over at New Culture Forum, Peter Whittle has some good suggestions about what a Tory government should do with the BBC. They follow a couple of excellent pieces by Charles Moore and Bruce Anderson in the Telegraph on Saturday and Sunday. Oddly enough, one of the programmes I despise most, Late Review on BB2, came up trumps on Friday night. Four American guests proved more sophisticated than Kirsty Walk could handle, used as she is to the usual third-rate British leftist stagers. Regardless of their nominal political affiliations, the Americans dismissed Matt Frei's warm up package on the 'culture wars' (which Wark absurdly claimed commenced with the election of George Booooosh) as naive and unsophisticated, and then proceeded to balanced discussions of culture and politics. At the end, one of the smartest of the four squeezed in the thought that European audiences might now realise that not all Americans are morons. Brilliant stuff.

 

The Royal Academy Byzantine show (reviewed in the latest Standpoint by Michael Prodger) is really worth a visit, even though it was packed and the objects are small and far away within glass cases- a problem if your eyesight is not good. I thought the ceramics and textiles were the most fascinating exhibits, though there is a splendid bejewelled icon of St Michael clutching a little gold sword too.

FOur o'clock and the BBC is still deliberating over the 'preliminary report' about remarks made by Ross on the answering machine.........ACTION THIS DAY as Churchill had it is evidently an alien concept to these people.

A British man has been ordered by his landlords to take down the Halloween decorations outside his house because they are scaring too many people.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1081614/Man-ordered-Halloween-decorations-scary.html. The second set of pictures are very, very amusing. That trick or treat stuff wends its way here tomorrow. Neighbouring children tend to cut the external phone line if you don't hand over sweets- all vaguely reminding me of that excellent film Straw Dogs. Having armed police just outside doesn't seem to deter them.

Amusing to see the non-debate on last night's Newsnight about the Brand/Ross affair. No BBC executives dared show up. There was no room either for any of the BBC's many critics. Instead there were three 'comedians' who all agreed on the BBC's continuing need to dare. I suppose that's the clever line to take if you hope they might commission a new show or a new series of Dead Ringers. Attempts were made by some bland suit on this morning's Today programme to blame everything on The Mail. More amusingly, the BBC is using footage of two different audiences going into radio shows to insinuate that Britain is 'divided' over this 'controversy' along generational lines. It isn't. We know plenty of thirty-somethings who think Brand and Ross are disgusting and disgustingly overpaid too. I can only conclude that the BBC bosses think we are all idiots who do not spot these multiple sleights of hand. Abusive telephone messages (especially to seventy year olds) are, methinks, a criminal offense.

Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove did us all a great service last week by drawing attention to the BBC's introductory laudations to 'our greatest living historian' Eric Hobsbawm as he claimed that all his prognostications had come true. He's the ghastly academic Stalinist who has inched his way up the Ruritanian ladder to a Companionship of Honour by giving the general impression (though not physically in 1936 in Spain) of right-on sentiments as well as books that seem remarkably dexterous on Chile, China or Venezuela for any one who knows nothing about them. Being the father of Sarah Brown's former business partner probably helped with that one. Last year I had the misfortune of being seated at a table opposite the professor at a dinner in honour of my friend Niall Ferguson. Hobby and I contrived not to exchange so much as a glance or a word as I eagerly scanned his face for evidence of the Reaper and recalled another dinner where some brave soul shouted out 'free Pinochet, jail Hobsbawm'. Had I been told of this seating plan, I'd have avoided the entire evening. The BBC's enthusiasm for Hobby is all the more bizarre since it was on a BBC programme, years ago, that he assented to interviewer Michael Ignatieff's proposition that had the 'noble dream' (lie) worked out in the Soviet Union, the deaths of twenty million people would have been justified in the end. Let's hope Michael Gove is equally attentive to the Marxisant clients and clones Hobby has helped place up and down British academia, who then go on to corrupt the sort of people recruited by the BBC.  

I don't know about commenters on this blog, but I resent the use of the compulsory license poll tax to pay huge sums for these two to behave in the most asinine manner. Are they simply monsters who the bosses of the BBC are afraid of, or worse, do their antics reflect the mindset of BBC management? I don't listen to BBC Radio 2, but I'd be interested in hearing from those who do.

I suppose I'd better add to the remarkable publicity a gathering of French medievalists has attracted because of their controversial 'revisions' of the collective (British) memory of Agincourt. One of their claims seems pretty uncontroversial- namely that there were more English (and Welsh) troops than the French, who's numbers were inflated to the absurd figure of 150,000 by English chroniclers. Agincourt was turned into a fine WW2 propaganda film, modelled, I recall on Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky which was made in the late 1930s. This is not the first time that the British 'few' have faced 'fewer' opponents after historians have gone into the matter. The air war historian Richard Overy has long demonstrated that in the Battle of Britain, the RAF had significantly more fighter pilots than the Luftwaffe, partly because of volunteers from the Dominions, Ireland and USA, but also significant numbers of Czech, Polish and French exiles. There was also no significant difference in the numbers of aircraft on each side, although the British produced more fighters. You can also see how figures for how many of x or y were shot down are flexible, once you've read any first-hand memoir by a WW2 fighter pilot. They are not sure if they hit the enemy or whether it was a comrade, and they don't really know in many cases whether the plane went down or limped home. I hadn't realised that it only took fourteen seconds pressing the button to empty the eight machine guns and/or canon, on a Hurricane or Spitfire. And all at 300mph too.

The other aspect of the medievalists conference -namely of accusing the British of 'war crimes'- is more dubious. This is part of the on-going 'legalisation' of the past, with which comes the compensation culture. Now I am sure, or rather fairly sure, that there were codes of conduct on medieval battlefields, where, if memory serves, the object was to capture high value targets for future exchange by ransom. But codes ain't laws, and they were only observed by one class on medieval battlefields. The Prescott's of this world (welshmen in this case) simply slit the knight's throats after they were prone. The fact of the matter is that for thousands of years warfare was a Hobbesian affair, and it serves no purpose to re-impose standards of conduct derived from the Hague Conventions on Land Warfare on societies which had no inkling of such things.

 

 

The crusading investigative magistrate, Judge Baltasar Garzon, is at it again. Readers will recall that he tried to extradite General Pinochet in 1998 and prosecuted the Argentinian navy officer Adolfo Scilingo. He has done sterling work against Eta and al Qaeda too.

A couple of weeks ago, Garzon commenced criminal proceedings in relation to Franco-era executions in Spain itself, and has ordered the exhumation of 19 mass graves, one of which contains the remains of Federico Garcia Lorca. This is part of a wider attempt by the socialist government of Zapatero (who's grandfather was shot too in the Civil War) to 'revise' the policy of tactical amnesia that smoothed the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975. That deal worked until now, and was essential in securing army and police agreement to the transition.

Every single Spanish person I discussed this with in Madrid earlier this week thought this was a disastrous course of action. No significant figure responsible for Francoist atrocities is alive- although Garzon is insisting that the Interior Ministry prove that some 35 generals and ministers are actually dead. Lorca's family queered the judge's pitch by saying they would prefer the poet's grave to remain undisturbed.

Although it is not being honestly reported here, Spain is facing massive economic problems, not least after the construction boom turned to bust, and because huge Latin American investments are turning sour. Worse, from Zapatero's point of view, Sarkozy has refused to invite him to major economic summits. These investigations are a cynical and spiteful attempt to distract attention from this looming crisis.

In addition to being a Leftist show pony in the manner of Michael Mansfield QC, Garzon is also blatantly biased. One of the TV interviewers I met on Wednesday was a Basque girl who's great grandfather, the playwright Munoz Seca, was shot by firing squad in 1936. The person who ordered his execution was the then Communist leader, Santiago Carrillo, who (born in 1915) is still alive, having transformed himself from Stalinist to Eurocommunist, and now to Social Democrat. Nuria Ferrer told me that when she was asked to interview him, she refused, saying she 'would have spat in his face'.

These investigations may help Garzon in his quest for the limelight and to resume a political career that broke off when he was a junior minister in a former socialist administration. Many Spanish people of all persuasions wonder whether reviving the fears and hatreds of the Civil War is a price worth paying.

The new film, and Stefan Aust's book, are contributing to the de-romanticisation of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Of course, romanticisation of the self was the essence of their problem, as it ultimately is of most of the world's terrorists past and present.

Apparently the Iranians have just tried to beat the record for the world's largest sandwich by stuffing 2000lbs of turkey into a thing 5,000 feet long. Unfortunately before the Guiness Records people could verify its dimensions, some Tehran citizens scoffed the whole thing. Meanwhile game has made a welcome reappearance. We've already had grouse and some delicious partridges and will be moving on to pheasant next weekend. People say its healthy food- but does that include the bread sauce or breadcrumbs marinated in blood? Yesterday I managed to buy Swiss Chard instead of cavallo nero for a pasta dish that caught my eye in a Rick Stein cookery book. Oh well it won't be my problem....see below: 

Next week I'll be in Madrid where I'm promoting Sangre Y Rabia for four days. My Spanish publishers Taurus always cram a lot in to the schedule, but they've left ample time for what I regard as some of the best restaurants in Europe, especially the cellar like place next to the Cortes. Apparently I'm going be on a chat show run by my war correspondent buddy Hermann Tersch, a living legend of a man......will report how it all goes. 

I urge you to read this http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/10/17/do... remarkable piece by George Walden. He puts his finger on the malaise of the times.

On the Today programme the Mail's Quentin Letts was getting a bit of stick for being nasty to Mandelson, although I don't recall his parliamentary sketch being especially vicious. They wheeled out a lesser sketch writer who had just written an appreciative piece of His Lordship, marginally less sickmaking than one that appeared by an old friend of Mandelson's in the Telegraph. As it happens, I think Quentin Letts is easily the best parliamentary sketch writer around, and the only one who makes both of us laugh out loud every time. Its a bit like reading Wind in the Willows set in a swamp. Meanwhile, newspapers fill with Mandelson's doings on a yacht owned by a Russian billionaire, about whose affairs the former EU Commissioner was handling a complaint from Czech and Italian businessmen. Having conceded he may have had a drink on the boat, Mandelson revised this to a week-long stay. Go for it Quentin! And shame on those writing the puff pieces for Mandelson.

I've been reading a lot of books with the title May this to June that 1940 by the veteran US-Hungarian historian John Lukacs. After a while they all seem samey, with too much speculation about Churchill and Hitler's respective intentions. However, he did turn up one thing that was fascinating, namely that in mid-July 1940 Churchill thought that Hitler might not try to invade England at all, and would instead turn eastwards, which is precisely what Hitler thought of doing at the time so as to bring Britain to its knees in a roundabout way with a 'five months' campaign in Russia. The other interesting exercise has been reading Churchill's speeches in the monumental Robert Rhodes James (six volumes) edition, where sentences that stand out in posterity are virtually lost in the original. I was surprised to see how the 'never in the history of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few' is almost unremarkable in the lengthy original overview of the conflict in which what was then pinprick bombing of Germany gets more space. Anyway a typical historian's day, unless you are Andrew Roberts, and get to go to a lot of parties.  

Canadian newspaoers report that in Kandahar, for which their troops have responsibility, the Taliban have switched tactics from IEDs to assassinations. Specifically they have killed the official responsible for widows and orphans, and the city's charismatic female police chief. The explicit goal is to rub out anyone connected to foreigners or anyone with any degree of intelligence, triggering a local brain drain. This will leave a residue of mindless helots who may be more biddable to their message. The Germans and Soviets tried this in occupied Poland. Meanwhile according to the Croissant website, in Pakistan's Baluchistan, three girls and their mother and aunt, have been shot and buried alive at the insistence of a tribal jurga cum sharia court for having the temerity to choose spouses (in the three girls case) other than their cousins, the complicity of the mother and aunt guaranteeing their deaths too.

Before I come back to Afghanistan in a later post, I can't resist mentioning the film Gomorrah which is brilliant. Naples is probably my favourite European city, although I have a weakness for Madrid, about which more later this month. One of the more memorable experiences was the decision to avoid the two young muggers who were sizing up my wife's handbag in the old town by taking a turn down a narrow alley. We kept looking up at the windowless buidlings on either side until the sound of shingle-like crunching beneath our feet led us to look down at a carpet of crushed syringes. We had wandered into what I believe addicts used to call a 'shooting gallery'. Luckily I'm more a combat boot than a sandals man even in hot climates. Depending on your view of my character, you can either imagine me carrying Mrs B or encouraging her to recall those childhood ballet lessons where you dance on your toes. Anyway, everyone I know who has been to Naples has been mugged or robbed or had their car stolen, but its a great place, with a fantastic archaeological museum- the two bronze warriors, the black runners with white eyes, and the Pompeian murals stand out- and light on the bay that I am already yearning for as winter comes. Try the Hotel Vesuvio on the quay if you want real style. A good view of the rubbish.

Comment pages are filling- for example today's FT- with opinion pieces about whether or not the West should get out of Afghanistan. Rather than inflicting my views on anyone, what do commenters think should be done?  

In a sinister sign of the times, the FT reports that the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act has been used by the Treasury to freeze £4billion of Icelandic assets in this country, so as to exert pressure on Iceland's government to compensate savers in the failed Landsbanki. Are they going to sequester Hamleys and House of Fraser? It is as yet undetermined whether such knowing investors as local government authorities, who are rumoured to have put millions into such accounts, will be compensated too. Why individuals should wish to put money in Icelandic accounts is their affair, but it is unforgiveable for councils, which presumably have advice about the strength of any given economy, should have recklessly done the same with public money. Before we allow the government to venture down the road of legislation anticipating large scale terrorist outrages, we should be looking at how to contain the damage done to our liberties by the legislation already passed, which inlcudes councils using anti-terrorist laws to snoop on welfare fraudsters and people who do not observe recycling laws. Meanwhile, those nice Russians are offering Iceland £3billion to help them out of the mess. Iceland, I recall, was a founder member of NATO.

 

Because of other pressing concerns I haven't been following every twist of the current economic nightmare. However, today is explained by an excellent piece by the Independent's City and Business Editor, Jeremy Warner: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/jeremy-warner/jeremy-warners-outlook-treasury-fiddles-as-markets-crash-953716.html which also puts the blame squarely on this awful government's past mistakes (1998 Banking Act) and dithering in the present. This view is in no way influenced by JW being my oldest friend- he just writes authoritatively and interestingly about these subjects in a paper that manages great business coverage with paltry resources. Mine's a large one Jeremy. 

Elsewhere, on the Daily Beast, Andrew Neil points out that instead of benefiting governments which pretend to be competent, the present mess will result in a tidal-wave sized backlash by voters against every incumbent government, especially if they try the 'global forces' line rather than accepting local responsibility. New Labour can crow about the putsch that is behind them (remember David 'big beast' Miliband anyone?) but most people have already tuned out from the faces they have had enough of. What a pity so many people are going to be ruined by the time the electorate gets a say in the matter.

The BBC did its best to put a negative spin on the Conservative Party conference, with 'Newsnight's' Michael Crick reduced to filming dustbins brimming with empty champagne bottles so as to insinuate a Brideshead culture. No cameras were present, of course, at the 3am booze up in Manchester, where Labour pre-empted Ruth Kelly's resignation, and nor did little Crick go sniffing around the bins like some rat in a cheap suit. The programme ended with some end-of-the-pier light entertainment, with a silly competition to rank post-war prime ministers. The trouble is, the light entertainment has become indistinguishable from the programme's reporting and interviewing style- 'oh no he won't, oh yes he will'.....last night we had three Liverpudlians on 'KULTCHUR' including some priceless lines from singer Holly Johnson about why he found Sibelius and Wagner difficult. The level of discussion was what might find in the staff room of a primary school........

The BBC is also celebrating the PM's masterstroke of recalling Mandelson from Brussels. Heaven knows, they'll need him. They couldn't quite find the right form  of words to welcome back Margaret Beckett from her sojourn with the Elgin marbles in the BM.....Now she's a real heavyweight. Watching one of the allegedly brighter members of the Brown government discussing future economic strategy, he said: 'When we find one (a policy), it will be proactive'. That may be my candidate for epitaph on Labour's grave.

The estimable Barnabas Fund usually concerns itself with Christians persecuted in non-Christian lands. However, it now draws attention to a disturbing story from the West Drayton Removal Centre (UK). 28 years old Moftah Abdulghani who fled Libya after converting to Christianity, is awaiting the outcome of an appeal after the failure of his application for asylum here. Last weekend he was almost beaten to death by Somali and Yemeni Muslim detainees after they observed him leaving the Centre's makeshift church. He has now been moved to another detention centre where he is being kept in isolation to prevent similar attacks. His attackers should be put on the first planes out of here, assuming they will not face criminal prosecution.

Meanwhile, its farewell to the pc Pc Sir Ian Blair, and hello again to Peter Mandelson. Peregrine Worsthorne once recalled sitting next to Sir Ian at an Oxbridge dinner. It took half an hour to realise he was not some third-rate sociology professor rather than Britain's top policeman. The alacrity with which Livingstone rushed out to defend Sir Ian suggests that Boris Johnson was right to give the top cop the heave-ho, assuming he wasn't about to be suspended anyway in the wake of Sir Ronnie Flanagan's report on his business dealings. The mayor is elected by us Londoners and of course he should have a major say in who is in charge of the Met if he feels that the Commissioner is too distracted by multiple investigations to do his job. As for Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's defence that he has important national responsibilities for counter-terrorism, that job should be hived off and given to someone else with sole responsibility for that problem. Last night Michael Heseltine made mince meat of her on Question Time over this very issue. Mandelson's return is part of Brown's attempt to refocus the cabinet on the economic crisis. Give him a few months to settle in and his main talent, for compulsive plotting, will be darkly in evidence.

Its the anniversary of the Munich agreements. And I'm reading Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal written over three months in late 1938:

"But once again

The crisis is put off and things look better

And we feel negotiation is not vain- Save my skin and damn my conscience.

And negotiation wins,

If you can call it winning,

And here we are- just as before- safe in our skins;

Glory to God for Munich.

And stocks go up and wrecks

Are salved and politicians' reputations

Go up like Jack-on-the Beanstalk; only the Czechs

Go down and without fighting".

Meanwhile he listened to the sound of wood being chopped as the trees were cleared on Primrose Hill for anti-aircraft guns and the royal parks chiselled with trenches to use as bomb shelters. The newspapers are so filled with economic disaster (although the Mail has a nice ten ways to cheer yourself up thing this morning) that I have taken refuge in what must have felt like a real crisis....

Terrific essay  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/09/29/080929crat_atlarge_menand in the New Yorker about Lionel Trilling, with such lines as 'he resented being understood under the aspect of anything so insufficiently nuanced as a category'. And 'I have one of the great reputations in the academic world; this thought makes me retch'. After a dispute about a dissertation, he unilaterally refused to teach graduate students again. God knows I know how he felt. Why are US magazines able to turn out such good pieces as this essay?

Elsewhere, Nick Cohen has a revealing piece in the Observer about the Nixonian-Stalinists of New Labour, plotting nastinesses over too many drinks. Sounds like the Beavor's Retreat bar at the LSE where sundry malicious drunks used to congregate to plot, many of them happily carried off by cyrrhosis in the interim.

Finally, I hugely admire the Dutch publisher-owner of Gibson Square, whose fine list includes Nick Cohen, Melanie Phillips and George Walden. Incredible then that three Islamists should have tried to burn his house down because he took on a controversial novel, which, DISGRACEFULLY, was rejected by Random House, after an academic in Texas not only queered the author's pitch with a report, BUT ALERTED UNSPECIFIED MUSLIMS about the book's contents- see today's Observer which, to its credit, doesn't irresponsibly print the poor Dutchman's address. As in the Danish cartoons affair, it is the role of such middle managers of global Islamist outrage which is really sinister, but one scarcely imagines them working as profs at the University of Texas. I hope the alumni and donors there take a very, very keen interest in this chain of events, the one means of checking academic license.

Churches in the vicinity of Wall Street are reporting an increase in besuited visitors to lunchtime services. According to the Reverend Mark Bozzuti-Jones of Trinity Church, 'the economic crisis is a reminder that we cannot put our faith in riches, that we cannot put our faith in money'. He is also getting requests for help to pay the rent. 'People are just sitting there, praying or crying and definitely exhausted'. The churches are mounting workshops called 'Coping with stress' or 'Navigating career transitions'. The Wall Street Synagogue is also dealing with former employees of AIG. It was founded in 1929 as it happens. I wonder if the many churches in the City of London are experiencing a similar upturn?

Meanwhile, the archbishop of Canterbury has adopted the Marx was right line. He can always be relied upon to follow the left-liberal herd, and he has. Now leaving aside (!) the fact that Marx was responsible for a political ideology that killed 80 million in the last century, I am not going to be as uncharitable about beardie weirdie as I usually am. All he has drawn attention to is Marx's insight into the reification of things, which he rightly says is synonymous with idolatry. In this case, money becomes real, and the people ghosts. I don't actually object to religious leaders commenting on our moral condition- if they are there to do anything, it is just that. The problem with beardie is that his 'political' interventions are so of a type- unlike the far finer commentaries of Jonathan Sacks, to my mind the most impressive religious figure in contemporary Britain.  

I'm in Copenhagen tonight and tomorrow if any Danes are reading this. I'll report back on developments in Denmark on Friday.

Apparently Waitrose is hoping to stem the tide of those middle class shoppers departing for Aldi and Asda by introducing the cheaper cuts of meat not widely seen since the 1950s. Pigs trotters are going to be big, at about 90p a go, along with bath chaps and oxtail. We may even witness a revival of tripe- that ghastly thing I remember the smell of bubbling in milk and onions from that decade, although I have since eatern a heavily spiced version in Palo Alto. Some enterprising person has also decided to reprint the century old Workhouse Cookbook, with its recipes for GRUEL, which will be handy for those of us who have read about it, but are unsure of what it consists of. Now while I can just about stomach a kidney or two, and like calves liver, and at a pinch, oxtail, I have always drawn the line at brains, cheeks and trotters. Am I missing something here? And why stop with the 1950s? Surely powdered eggs and spam might be even cheaper? Personally I'm keen on soups, chiefly so I can slurp them up in Churchillian fashion, exclaiming 'good soup General' as the great man himself did on every occasion according to the marvellous diaries of Alan Brooke. Mrs B has long since found this joke tiresome. Soups don't cost much to make and you use a lot of vegetables. Meanwhile our doughty PM and his Chancellor are off around the world organising the fightback against a financial crisis Darling equates with the war on terrorism- a term the government has actually proscribed. The fearless duo are going to set the world's financial system to rights. I don't think so. For this sits oddly with US plans for a giant assumption of toxic debt, including that of British banks with substantial US operations, as well as Deutsche and UBS. I haven't forgotten either an excellent BBC4 radio programme by Fran Abrahams, about how despite all the talk of curbing financial activity in London connected with terrorism, very little has actually been done to stop this place being a souk where the jihadists can get their money and get away with it. Do pigs need trotters to fly?

Among the things that make one ashamed to be British- Russell Brand for example- the mean-spirited treatment of the Gurkas ranks pretty high. The Daily Mail has been campaigning on their behalf, with a corruscating piece by Stephen Glover the other day. Despite the fact that 45,000 of these extraordinary men have died, and another 150,000 been wounded fighting for this country, the government (and presumably it is the dysfunctional MOD) is equivocating about allowing two thousand of them to reside in this country or to receive medical care for what are often serious injuries. In a typical piece of New Labour lawyer reasoning, the government claims that 2,000 of these men should be denied such rights because the Gurkas HQ, down to 1997, was in Hong Kong, and that therefore they have no 'significant' ties with Britain. Some of them don't even get the pension which is already one sixth of what a British soldier receives. I would have thought that charging a Japanese machinegun nest was a 'significant' display of affection for the country that recruited them. Gordon Brown has ghost authored a few compilations called 'Courage'. His government's disgusting treatment of the Gurkas shows that this is just a PR stunt, and that it does not really care about our armed forces. There are many reasons to seek the ouster of this failed government, but in this household its eagerness to take in every passing Somali or francophone West African, while refusing entry to these brave Nepalese, has become the clincher. Whatever one thinks of Liam Fox, he would not behave so dishonourably. The costs of such a measure would be a fraction of the vast sums Labour has squandered to keep its north-east client base happy by sustaining Northern Rock.

An elderly Nigerian Islamic preacher, Mr Mohammedu Bello Abubakar, has been arrested in Bida and charged with with 'unlawful marriages'. He has 86 wives who have produced more than 170 children. He claims he has always treated the wives equally. A sharia court will endeavour to get the number of wives down to four or he will be evicted from his home. Now the possibilities for me to make some sexist blunder are endless, so I will merely confine myself to Mr Abubakar's likely problems. Does he buy airport duty free size bars of chocolate to ensure that all 86 get their rightful triangle of Toblerone? Trips to the shops must look like an army on the march. The children alone would constitute dozens of football teams, in fact he could have his own mini-league. Mr Elberry can provide us with other possible scenarios from the Abubakar bed room - a real case of desperate housewives-since conjugal rights must be a problem given the wizened frame of the preacher and adultery is a capital offence. Oh what fun we are going to have if sharia creeps further in here.

Half past five and a grey blanket of cloud is squeezing the light out of central London. The leaves on a huge chesnut tree outside are absolutely still and seem especially jagged today. My imperfect hearing can just distinguish between the muffled roar of aircraft coming down to Heathrow and the hum of rush hour traffic. Feels as if a storm is on the way since there is no bird song. What further financial horrors will be on the news tonight? How many more young bankers will do the cardboard box walk tomorrow? You see- I have humanity!

I couldn't bring myself to wade through all the stuff about Brown and Labour in the Sunday papers. How long does this nonsense have to go on before we, the voters facing dire economic conditions, get a chance to choose another government? Why is this man still prime minister? The amiable Alan Johnson has long been my choice, but apparently he ruled himself out on Desert Island Discs, on the grounds that the top slot was above his capabilities. He seems relaxed in himself.

Apart from Nick Cohen's column and John Ware's revelations about GCHQ and the Omagh bombing, I was stunned by a brief life style interview with our Chancellor. Apparently he scoots back to his native Edinburgh every weekend, so as to climb hills and listen to Pink Floyd.........nothing wrong with Edinburgh or hills of course, though most of us grew out of Pink Floyd after Dark Side of the Moon. What struck me was the dread and gloom Darling expressed towards having to work in LONDON, a place he obviously does not like. I wonder how pervasive this feeling is in a cabinet packed with Scots. Surely the bonnie banks beckon?

The Saturday Telegraph had a good piece about the creators of The Wire, one of who is a detective turned teacher. When it comes to dishing out honours, I hope the brilliant Hackney born actor who plays Stringer Bell is recognised, rather than the usual crowd of showbiz hasbeens and lovies.

 

I strongly recommend Ron Suskind's The Way of the World, published by Harper Collins and Simon Schuster this month. In addition to its extraordinary revelations about, for example, how the CIA's own Germany station chief encouraged the German intelligence service to deny the CIA access to the Iraqi defector 'Curveball', a key source about WMD, presumably at the instigation of the Vice President, it has remarkable things to say about the flow of moral energy, and how human contact and giving without hope of receiving may do more to defeat terrorism than many of the current blunt strategies. Since Suskind's earlier One Per Cent Doctrine was one of the best books about life on what Cheney called the 'dark side' after 9/11, it is a major achievement on his part to have bettered that. Its a beautifully constructed book too, which like the film Babel, weaves together apparently unrelated stories from across our so interconnected world. 

The Evening Standard diary had a gem of an item last night about Lauren Booth, Cherie Blair's sister. Ms Booth, who is apparently a little bit famous for having much to say, described Gaza, where she went to protest the Palestinian cause, as like a concentration camp, its population starved like the people in Darfur. The piece is accompanied by a photograph of the ample Ms Booth at the check out desk of a supermarket brimming with food. The location? Gaza City. Ms Booth did not see fit to mention the reign of terror Hamas is responsible for in the strip- that is people beaten up by police for praying outside politicised mosques, or Palestinian journalists attacked for not towing the Hamas line.

Anyway, enough of her, I have a big essay in today's Mail about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. I wouldn't recommended calling the cell phone number.

Apparently our little twerp Foreign Secretary was taken aback by the tone of Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, in a recent telephone conversation. According to a Foreign Office spokeman, 'it was all effing this, and effing that. It was not what you would call diplomatic language. It was rather shocking'. Precisely, Mr Lavrov, former head of Russia's UN representation, told the callow Miliband 'who are you to fucking lecture me?' I warmed immediately to Mr Lavrov for telling one Labour minister what the rest of them shouldl be told every time they nanny on about drinking, lagging pipes or smoking.

The highlight, for me, of the Melbourne Writers' Festival was a session on small magazines, with Philip Gourevich, the talented editor of Paris Review, and the editors of The Monthly and Griffith Review, both of which are full of fascinating pieces- including a great essay about Don Bradman and the early cult of celebrity. Philip has a new book out called Standard Operating Procedure which shows how the Abu Ghraib photos do not quite tell the story those who use them think they are telling. I also did an hour live radio conversation with Orlando Figes on the subject of Evil Regimes, and then a separate thing on cultures of terrorism in a huge theatre. Anyway, the real highlights of my trip were reading Geoffrey Blainey's History of Australia- a beautifully written and witty book which invites European readers to ponder a continent in which most of us lived in, say, Denmark or Sweden, and the rest of it was virtually empty. He's an incredibly talented historian who is a delight to read. I much preferred Melbourne to Sydney. It seemed very Victorian, with great museums about the Victoria gold rush, Melbourne gaol- where Ned Kelly was hanged- and the wineries of the Yarra valley. Oakridge was especially good. Or was it Oakreach? Hard to say after a few glasses of Sauvignon. And trams too in the inner city grid which you just hop on and off at will. Skulling seems big there, with teenage girls from private schools being shouted at by their attractively fit mistresses through megaphones. Then there was the wild life in a great nature reserve, where we saw rather handsome dingos, a Tasmanian Devil- a vicious little black piglet-like marsupial with powerful red jaws- Death Adders and Taipans (the latter really lethal). The closest I came to fish was in the city aquarium- some rather comatose sharks and sting rays looped overhead. Finally read Saul Bellow's Seize the Day on the flight to Kuala Lumpur. He's a very physiognomic writer, whose use of external descriptions of the characters reminded me of Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God about the Bloomsbury artistes. A rest amidst the tropical paradise of Tanjung Rhu on Langkawi, opposite the Malay/Thai border, which Douglas Murray had recommended to me. My wife was very taken feeding two mynah birds who adopted us as a food source for their offspring hidden in a palm tree, and swam epically in sea like tepid bath water. Now the wild life got serious, with spectacular sea eagles, a school of dolphins, some rather grave looking monkeys in the mangrove swamps, and several species of lizard. I had the odd experience of being invited by a small boy on a fish farm to tickle the undercarriage (including his eyes and mouth) of a stingray. Being a workaholic I couldn't quite tear myself away from the main Malaysian story of 69 sailors who Somali pirates have captive after hijacking two ships laden with palm oil and petrochemicals in the Gulf of Aden. Kuala Lumpur is the world's centre for monitoring piracy, although the pirates who afflicted the tri-states in the Malacca Straits mostly drowned in the tsunami which also wrecked their boats. Apparently the current Somali malefactors are ex-marines and unemployed fishermen as well as the gangs of warlords: all manifestations of a collapsed state. They demand about US$1 million to release a ship. The episode has got me thinking about the mainly Malaysian, Filipino and Pakistani crews who work these routes- apparently the hostages are starving since the pirates made off with the food. The insurance premiums have shot up a hundredfold. Odd to encounter a lot of elderly Dutch people who have decided to live as pensioners in Malaysia rather than pay tax on their pensions in Holland. And finally, this jetlagged account, would not be complete without mention of the best Chinese food I have had in years at Wonderworld Seafood Restaurant outside Kuah. The tall northern Chinese owner/chef delighted in his craft, preferring this down home place to his air conditioned tourist haven. It seemed to be doing roaring trade- probably because Ramadan meant most restaurants were closed. Funny to hear Malaysians use Muslim as a synonym for Malay- not so funny to read about politicians calling Indians and Chinese 'squatters'. I read the Straits Times each day- trying to figure out the nuances of the local politics from a style of journalism that is much more elliptical than our own, except when it comes to charging opposition politicians with sodomy. Coherence may resume after I've slept a bit. Oh, and I did try trolling for barracuda, but the water was so churned up by monsoon storms that my lures and the fish never connected.

Best thing in the papers today is this Observer interview http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/23/fiction9 with Alaa Al Aswany, the dentist who write The Yacoubian Building. Apparently he still ministers to 8,000 workers in a Cairo cement factory, while writing novels of astonishing power, including his forthcoming Chicago. A committed democrat, Al Aswany was banned from the premiere of the film of Yacoubian Building. If you haven't read him then you should. All the big themes of our times are there, but treated in a subtle way, rather than forced down one's throat.

Elsewhere the ever reliable Alastair Palmer has a sound piece on M15's behavioural science unit's report on the backgrounds of terrorists in Britain. Pretty anodyne stuff when I read about it in last week's Guardian. The fact that the Guardian leader found so much to endorse was also an immediate cause for concern.

Birthday Boy Bryan Appleyard has a good piece on time capsules in the Sunday Times. He caught me at a low moment which was why I suggested bottled human tears- of joy and sorrow, some bullets and a piece of barbed wire. If he asked today, it would be even worse.

 

Brave Peter Whittle has a fascinating piece in the September Standpoint about the general breakdown of civility he observes on our streets or on public transport. Brave because he decided to see what happens when one protests some manifestation of anti-social behaviour. He is not an especially big man, although for all I know, the gentlemanly Peter might be capable of unleashing Joe 'Vinnie' Pesci levels of psychotic violence.....one thing I noticed this morning en route to the tube in my forlorn effort to return some books to the London Library which was closed, was that in quick succession two men, one thirtyish, the other over sixty, simply coughed and spat on the pavement. This was not in Soho's Chinatown where such conduct is apparently normal, and both culprits were white males rather than Chinese. What sort of a place had Britain become? Or was it ever thus, before the Second World War? I can dimly remember some pubs having spittoons and sawdust on the floor, but then maybe this is a figment of my imagination. Aren't there a few pubs called the Spit and Sawdust? In Westerns cowboys seemed to spit out chewing tobacco a lot. Anyway, another worrying habit. Elsewhere in the magazine I was startled as Miriam Gross recalled having her breast poked by some office lecher when she started at the Observer books desk. Knowing Miriam slightly, that must have been one self-confident fellow. Our editor also has a justified go at the literary London smart-alecs who decided to piss on Solzhenitsyn when the man was hardly cold. Another good reason for avoiding all literary parties this coming winter.

Le Figaro has extensive coverage here  http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2008/08/20/01003-20080820DIAWWW00370-afghanistan-la-visite-de-nicolas-sarkozy-aux-troupes.php of President Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to Afghanistan to commemorate the ten French troops (our allies) killed in a Taliban ambush last week. The President was accompanied by his foreign and defence ministers. They also visited some of the twenty one wounded- although the ten most seriously injured men had already been flown to France. It was the worst loss France has suffered since a battle in the Cote d'Ivoire four years ago. The President's emotional intelligence is strikingly at variance from what we have come not to expect from Gordon Brown or his pathetic Defence Minister Des Browne. I suspect a prime minister Cameron will be better at rising to such grim occasions.

Jeffrey Imms has written an interesting article about how wise it is, or is not, to maintain that some jihadist conflicts are merely local and hence containable to the region concerned. He mentions the Philippines, where in the last thirty years, 120,000 people have been killed in the south, including thirty-nine dead two days ago, some of who were hacke to death with machetes. A lot of the trouble occurs on Mindanao, which is 63% Christian, but where the government licensed an Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Despite being 98% funded by non-Muslims elsewhere on the islands, this has its own separate government, which is, predictably, seeking to assimilate new cities and territories. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front also wants to impose sharia across the whole of Mindanao. The US ambassador to Manila is a strong proponent of talks with the MILF, prepared to turn a blind eye to the global and local supremacist aspects of their project. Imms makes a striking analogy. What would happen if one were to claim that white supremacisty activity in Alabama was different and separate from such activities in Michigan, Mississippi or Montana and that therefore one could talk to one group rather than the other? Moreover, your own government also decreed that the term "white supremacism" was off limits since it might offend the communities concerned, while academics claimed that the occasional bombing of a black church was a reflection of the poor job opportunities such whites experienced and the provocation blacks gave by singing Gospel music too loudly? The added twist here is that unlike white supremacists, Islamic supremacists are actively seeking to convert rather than merely cow or intimidate other communities. Any one who thinks the way forward is to disaggregate or re-localise such conflicts should at least take a look at Imms's article as a necessary corrective. And what a shame that our archbishop of Canterbury never seems to talk about such issues, rather than trying to leave the door ajar to the onset of patches of sharia law here!

By some coincidence, since I was asked about this at Edinburgh, A.N. Wilson has an excellent column in the Telegraph today connecting Dostoevsky's Devils/Demons/Possessed with Al Qaeda type terrorism. Now I happen to agree with him on this one, having said much the same in both Sacred Causes and Blood and Rage. A chap in the Edinburgh audience pointed out the huge differences in cultural context, and the non sequitur that Arabs don't read nineteenth century Russian novels. Obviously there are differences. BUT, most terrorists throughout recent history (the last century and a half) have been males aged 15-35. Leaving aside those who are actually criminal or psychopathic, they all practice altruistic, transformative violence in the service of some imaginary super-community or a 'big idea', which invariably they have half understood, or understood too well. I'm with Wilson on this one, and Dostoevsky too. The fact that Sir Simon Jenkins hates the great Russian novelist is also a major reason for thinking that he has something worth saying. If you want a real treat try Joseph Franks five volume life of the writer published by Princeton University Press- a spectacular example of great scholarship which has absorbed Franks since he packed up journalism in the 1940s.

I was sad to read today of the death of the art historian Michael Baxandall. One of the most memorable courses I took as an undergraduate was the Italian Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, taught, among others, by Sir Ernst Gombrich and Mr Baxandall. A lugubrious man with the manner of a bloodhound, Baxandall wrote such pioneering works as Giotto and the Orators; Painting and Social Experience in 15th century Italy; and The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. He has had his imitators (and plagiarists) but they lacked his culture, poise and restraint. The book on Social Experience made the most waves since he revealed the ways in which the skills of craftsmen and merchants leached into those of painters when it came to deciding how much gold or lapis lazulae to use. My own favourite, however is the book about the exquisite limewood sculptors, notably Tilman Riemenschneider and Veit Stoss. Apparently Mr Baxandall had been suffering from Parkinsons Disease for a long time. I will always remember the courtly way in which he and Gombrich and a couple of others gave me an hour long personal tutorial when the rest of the seminar got the date and time wrong and I was the only one to turn up. They could have walked out at the start, but they didn't, and I had a really fascinating afternoon. Gombrich was amused at what the managers of higher education would have thought of the staff:student ratio.

We were in Manchester Square on Sunday just to check out how much Standpoint spends on offices at Nr 11. No seriously, we went to the small Chardin and Boucher exhibition at the Wallace Collection to see Chardin's Man with House of Cards and Lady Drinking Tea. There are bits and pieces too about how tea drinking went from being medicinal (Mrs Chardin looks unwell in that picture) to being social. Well worth a detour if you have the misfortune to walk along Oxford Street.   

I'm off to Melbourne in ten days time, and then for a well-earned rest in Malaysia where I plan to indulge my love of fishing. The last time I tried this, off NSW, the Aussie macho men (my brother-in-law and his son) grew progressively sour as I hauled in 32lbs of fish. I seem to have spent the last few weeks reading about German depredations in Poland in September/October 1939- grim stuff like the one armed farmer who was shot because both hands didn't go up in response to "Haende Hoch"! Need a break and something else to read. My agent suggests I take a few Saul Bellow novels along since I've never read him, but then he would since he has Bellow's estate. Do commentators have any suggestions about reading material? I used to be a big fan of Carl Hiasen, Elmore Leonard, Andrew Vachs (one for Elberry to ponder)...........I've got Ron Suskind's latest book lined up, but that's a bit of a busman's holiday or is it coals to Newcastle (great place all Tories note). No, no Elberry, I can almost imagine recommendations so grim.....

Apart from an ungracious BMI hostess on the way up- or is it flight attendant- a really enjoyable trip north of the border. The sight of harvesting as we approached Edinburgh got the day off to a good start. Very clean city too. The audience couldn't have been nicer- serious, thoughtful and mainly Scots. Some very good questions too. Met a nice medic called Bernard Ineichem who said that he'd abandoned medicine in favour of ethics after reading my Death and Deliverance- we corresponded about fourteen years ago. The Powerpoint gizmos all worked exactly as they were supposed to. BA was much better on the return run- and what a great building Terminal 5 at Heathrow is. A great soaring place of steel and glass. 

Just in case there are any readers of my blog north of the border, I am speaking about terrorism tomorrow (Saturday) at 4pm in the Peppers Theatre at the Edinburgh Book Festival. The session is apparently sold out, but I daresay the intrepid will find a way in. I shall be trying out my newly learned Powerpoint skills. This should result in a Clusot style farce.

Recovering from the sight of Prince Charles's kilt and vivid blue socks on the front of the Telegraph, I turned to the Mail for more serious matters. An extraordinary piece about some LSE academic reporting for Policy Exchange says he recommends the wholesale abandonment of dead or dysfunctional northern cities, whose inhabitants should move to new towns to be built around London, Oxford and Cambridge. Places like Liverpool are beyond repair, and the regeneration money poured into them has been pointless, Dr So-and-So claims.

This rubbish has been swiftly condemned by leading Tories, coinciding as the publication does with David Cameron's forthcoming tour of northern cities. Do we really want the SE to be some super-rich Singapore detached from its English hinterland, with the middle bit suspended somewhere between us and a more dynamic Scotland? I thought the Tories were the party of Union. 

The other night I was gripped by a Channel 4 documentary about a couple of women who single-handedly campaigned for a rather beautiful bridge to be built linking Castleford in Yorkshire. This was to be the first step in regenerating an otherwise dying former mining town, whose river was filled with the usual detritus of shopping trolleys. After four years in which the local council, some other residents, and property developers put every obstacle in their way, the bridge was finally built. And what a magnificent thing it was too. A series of S shaped curves on V shaped steel struts with hardwood decking for a surface. People could sit and watch the fast flowing waters of the weir.

A friend suggested another way of reviving some of these places- especially those on the coast. The British Museum and other London galleries have basements heaving with unseen works of art. Why not circulate them to places whose rather modest holdings are pretty uninspiring?

Meanwhile,

The Tories rush to support accelerated Georgian membership of NATO seems to reflect the luxury of non-choice. In the real world, you either have Russian cooperation on Iranian sanctions, or you offend them over Georgia and you don't. The US, apart from Dick Cheney, understands that. Talk of 1938 seems misplaced. Chamberlain's problem was that he was unable to make choices, neither curbing Hitler, nor detaching Mussolini from the Axis, nor rearming at sufficient pace. Merely annoying someone without changing their behaviour is hopeless.

Since this is an intellectual magazine, although one that doesn't seem to do much science, I've added a permanent link to a lab at Berkeley which specialises in invisible technology. This is for those Standpoint readers who have always harboured the desire to walk into a bank unseen. The reality is not far off if Professor Xiang succeeds in creating reverse refraction materials.

George Kennan once said that 'Russia wants only enemies and vassals on its borders'. The Olympic Games have provided the distraction that the old Soviet Union used to find at Christmas, a bit like Hitler always invading places on Saturdays. The Russian FSB petrostate has been bullying Georgia for years, just as Georgia itself has been bullying Abkhazia and South Ossetia, many of whose inhabitants wish to be associated with Russia. The bigger picture is dominated by a Russian sense of bad faith. Earlier in the year I heard Richard Pipes speaking in Washington. As a former advisor to Ronald Reagan, and I believe the man who coined the phrase 'evil empire', Pipes is no softy. Yet he said that there had been a deal between Clinton and Yeltsin that the West would not expand NATO into Russia's self-proclaimed 'near abroad' and that it is the West which has acted in bad faith by at least toying with the idea of advancing it to Georgia and Ukraine on the grounds that Russia is no longer NATO's enemy. The Russians are also deeply suspicious of the anti-missile defence shield being created to protect us from Iran. Meanwhile Russia's armed forces demonstrate their customary finesse on various Georgian cities.

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the Al Qaeda bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Over 250 people died in these attacks, with more than 5,000 injured. Of these, three hundred have subsequently died in Kenya.

Four of those who carried out these atrocities were jailed for life in 2001, and two others are reported to be held in Guantanamo Bay. However, the plot's mastermind, a Comorean with Kenyan citizenship called Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, is still on the loose, despite a US$5million reward on his head. These people do not give up. After slipping back into Kenya, in late 2002 Fazul and his teams launched an attack on the Paradise Hotel, which is owned by Israelis and patronised by Israeli tourists, while using two Strela 2 surface to air missiles in a vain attempt to shoot down a passenger flight from Moi International Airport to Tel Aviv. Fifteen people died and eighty were injured in the Paradise Hotel attack. The terrorists slipped away to Somalia, whence many of them had come.

The second episode of the HBO/BBC mini series House of Saddam really got into its stride last night. Maybe because the main characters had been thoroughly established, or one got used to the idioms they were using. The main actor, Israeli Igal Naor, is incredibly watchable as Saddam, emitting the name Khomeini with a sound somewhere between coughing and expectoration. The bit where his poor wife dyed her hair blonde to emulate Saddam's new mistress was appalling. 'Do you like the new colour?' she asked. Silence around the massed table. 'No. It looks cheap' came the reply. I saw Mr Naor in the otherwise unremarkable 'Rendition' where he was brilliant, and sympathetic, as a police torturer in a country that looked like Morocco. He is at least as good an actor as the brilliant star of 'Downfall'. One can sense the Stalinist paranoia and suspicion with every flicker of his dark brown eyes.

Nasdaq reports that two Taliban "militants" blew themselves up placing explosives in a school in Pakistan's Swat valley. Elsewhere in the same location other schools (especially for girls) have also been bombed or burned down. That reality of these people will probably go unnoticed. They are people who blow up schools.

Today's Daily Mail has this fine appreciation of Solzhenitsyn by Stephen Glover http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1042458/STEPHEN-GLOVER-A-literar...

He was also discussed with informed respect by Simon Sebag Montefiore on last night's News Night. I believe this magazine will be publishing an appreciation by historian Robert Conquest.

Brilliant piece in today's Times by Magnus Linklater on 45 years old Tracey Emin's art of arrested development. See here because the link bit of  the blog doesn't work: MANAGEMENT! I can see the Scottish art gang seething at this one:

 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/magnus_linklater/article4466589.ece

She seems symptomatic of a culture in which the inside is being cosntantly turned outwards- literally since so much advertising seems concerned with bodily functions. That is mixed in with a solipsistic victim cult. Apropos which, do you know the one about Hitler? As the Russians blasted their way through central Berlin, he greeted the news that his brother-in-law was a traitor with 'Am I to be spared nothing?' I've met a few Tracey Emins over the years, usually the artist girl friends of a painter I know. Grim I can report. That this individual is lauded and used to represent MODERN BRITAIN is incredible, especially since Brown, G's personal tastes run to Patrick George, two of which also hang on our walls. Nice, green Suffolk landscapes actually since for 60 years he's just painted the area around his house, not his genitalia.

No I haven't established a cell, but I am seeing whether I know how to put images on my blog.

Under a US deal with Libya, 179 mainly Northern Irish victims of IRA bombs made with Libyan-supplied explosives are being excluded from a big compensation package that benefits only US victims of Libyan sponsored terrorism, including two Americans who were affected by bombs in Belfast and London, but excluding all the Brits in the six-years long class action. The deal mandates the explicit exclusion of any future claims by these victims in US courts. Nice to know the US courts are waging the global war on terror on civilisation's behalf.

The Wire's ring of authenticity grows by the day. Felicia Pearson, the actress who plays Snoop in 3 and 4, the female psychopath with a southern accent, has published her autobiography, called Grace after Midnight. Felicia entered this world as the 3lbs baby of an East Baltimore crack addict. Despite being small she became a full-time drug dealer, killing a woman in self-defence at age fifteen. After her release from Jessup State Penitentiary, she resumed the trade, until two senior dealers called Uncle and Father, were respectively killed and imprisoned for life. Her acting career began after she was talent spotted in a Baltimore bar by a member of the Wire's crew. Its a very heterodox cast alright since the main character is an Irish Old Etonian, while the top gangster Stringer Bell hales from Hackney. Heaven knows about the extras!

The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is being rightly seen as a major event, even by the BBC, which has conspicuously neglected the crimes of Communism. Its a long time since I read most of his novels- The First Circle and Lenin in Zurich perhaps being the best of them- but the opening of the Gulag Archipelago is fixed in my mind. Some hungry zeks are acting as labourers on an archaeological dig. They come across some frozen prehistoric fish. To the incredulity of the archaeologists, they light a fire and greedily devour what they have found. As usual his death has become an occasion for vacuous competitive speculation about whether or not he was as great a writer as Pushkin or Tolstoy. He was something else entirely, a remarkably brave man who by exposing a hellish criminal system, struck a major blow for freedom. I hope Russia gives him the state funeral he so richly deserves, even if the presiding dignatories are themselves former KGB.  

In a speech later today Michael Gove will bravely connect social issues (irresponsible fathers) with the wider 'culture', in this case lad's magazines called Nuts and Zoo which apparently go in for 'instant-hit hedonism' in a big way. This strikes me as an important development, since so far, politicians of all stripes have been so concerned to show they are hip that they don't dare criticise some of the ugly manifestations of our culture. One aspect of this- celebrity- has been brilliantly analysed by Peter Whittle in his Look at Me. But there are other things, large and small. I've been struck by the number of TV ads that make me slightly queasy. Not just those for stoll softeners and the like, but the Crunchy Nut Cornflake ad in which a driver tips milk into the carton and then downs the contents, with cornflakes and milk spilling over his or her clothes. This almost encourages the culture of scoffing food in public in a disgusting way. What's wrong with putting a bowl of Crunchy Nuts on a table in the traditional way? Anyway, its very encouraging that the Tories are making this connection at last. Perhaps they'll broaden the scope to anything that degrades and coarsens our culture?

Today's Washington Post has a thoughtful piece about the other candidate in the US presidential race. Apparently he strongly identifies with the 'romantic fatalism' of Robert Jordan, the American hero of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, who fights on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. I remember being impressed with that when I was about fifteen, but on the whole I've long since moved on in terms of taste. Theodore Roosevelt seems to be another big influence. Predictably McCain has a lot of thoughts about US foreign policy (his area of expertise), although the article highlighted such glaring inconsistencies as wishing to expel Russia from the G8 while hoping to secure her cooperation in arms control. What was more worrying was his lack of interest in economics, as reported by an advisor who had tried to explain some of the major problems afflicting the US. His inability to control his emotions was also disturbing, although Bill Clinton apparently had a ferocious temper too. Nor will classic Reaganites be impressed by his faith in the transformative power of big government. So over to camp super cool. The Sunday Telegraph has a witty piece that claims obese and unhealthy Americans feel uncomfortable with the very fit, very lean Obama, who goes to a gym three times a day even during his campaign. Apparently he looked in horror at some of the chow he was presented with in some of the more down home places he visited on the electoral trail. So there you have it as the polls seem to be closing the gap between the two candidates. Meanwhile the Observer throws more light on Miliband's mysterious achievement of getting into Corpus Christi with 3 B's and a D. Apparently attending Holland Park meant that he could claim to be from a deprived background- evidently the dons of Oxford thought Primrose Hill, where David and his Marxist professor father lived in an expensive house, was like the Pepys Estate in Deptford. So that's solved that then. As we Brits go on holiday with our recommended readings, perhaps we should all pack Pareto's Circulation of Elites?

An interesting report today says that the Spanish socialist government has decreed a number of measures to cope with the mounting cost of having to import 84% of its energy requirements. Motorists will be allowed to do only 50mph on motorways, and 25mph in towns and cities. Millions of bulbs are being removed from street lights, and air conditioning systems are being set at higher temperatures. So Spain is going to be dimmer ouside at night, and warmer inside all manner of public buildings, with people going about sedately in cars feeling like the inside of an oven. Knowing Spain a bit I can't see this taking off, and the public response has already been ridicule. As for here, the huge price hikes announced by energy companies has already had me stockpiling wood and taking vows to keep the central heating off until January. That's because its warm under the roof on the fourth floor of our house- although I may have to don layered winter-sports wear every time I venture down.

A robot, described as looking like the progeny of a monkey and an Imac, has made a bid to replace Gordon Brown while the latter is recovering from the drug of power in Southwold. Feeling, for this robot is sensate, that Brown is too frazzled to continue as Labour leader, Mr Heart Beat has used the Guardian as his pitch to lead the Labour party in the near future. He's young and he's raring to go. He's also so sensitive to Mr Brown's feelings that he didn't actually mention the PM in his rousing appeal to freshen up the party. Go Robo go!

Turkey sits on a great seismic fault line from the Sea of Marmara to Lake Van. It is also subject to pressures of a man-made kind. It seems likely that the Kurdish PKK was responsible for the double-tap bombings in Istanbul last night which left sixteen dead and over a hundred injured in a populous residential area. Al Qaeda tends to hit western or Jewish targets in Turkey including banks, consulates and synagogues. Meanwhile, Turkey launches cross-border raids into northern Iraq to destroy PKK camps. There was an air strike on Sunday. The government also recently arrested over eighty people who were allegedly plotting a coup. A cache of grenades was found. Secular-minded prosecutors are also challenging the constitutional legality of the Islamic Justice and Development Party in the courts, after a law allowed head scarves to be worn in universities. Although I believe that people should be allowed to wear what they like, having seen the silent pressures exerted in Egypt for women to cover up, I also sympathise with the many women in urban Turkey who don't wish to abandon practices that have existed for eighty years or to submit to an insidious process of public shaming through a disapproving look or glance. So it is in Turkey where you don't have to stray too far inland from the coastal cities to be in a very traditional world, where the men play chequers and the women are bent double under bundles of fire wood. If the courts find against the ruling party- for trying to introduce sharia through the back door- it will entail the bizarre spectacle of a democratically elected government being turfed out for pursuing an unconstitutional agenda apparently involving freedom of choice. What happens in Turkey really matters to us. It has been a staunch member of NATO since the 1950s, and has one of the few armies in the alliance that can really fight wars. It has been a respected ally of the West and Israel, where it is currently brokering peace agreements with Syria. A lot of Kurds and even more Turks live in western Europe.

Newspapers filled with the meltdown of this failed Labour government, which feels like it is running out of track as well as ideas. Malcolm Rifkind even manages to sympathise with ministers about to lose their Red Boxes and Range Rovers or whatever they go about in. Interesting piece by Denis MacShane on the end of Labour's 'Scottish years' although in deploring the absence of English born and bred ministers he somehow overlooks Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman, Ruth Kelly and James Purnell to name but three. Mr MacShane is evidently an idealist, since he thinks 'the unions in England could help Labour by exposing waste and bureaucracy'. Yeah, sure, especially since Labour is now virtually dependent on them since the money-men have walked away. The best piece of the day is also in the Sunday Telegraph, namely Iain Martin's analysis of what the Tories need to do next, assuming a Labour leadership change does not trigger a general election. They need, Martin says, 'to seal the deal' with more of the electorate, rather than just spectating as Labour disintegrates. Cameron is lucky, apparently he's even got his bike back, but now he needs to connect with the inner cities, Scotland and Wales, along with Northern Ireland, although the re-merger there with the UUP augurs well.

According to the BBC, Hefce, the acronym of the body that funds higher education, has banned the psychology department at Kingston University from its national survey of student opinion about their courses. Academics were found to have exerted pressure on the students to give positive ratings about their 'modules', in line with what the university administration called 'reputation management'. Students were told that if Kingston slid in this league table, employers would regard their degrees as worthless. So why not bump a 4 up to a 5? Having watched examiners' meetings where through mysterious forces every dullard gets a better sort of coconut at the end of a long day, I suspect that corruption of this sort is rife in British universities. Whether any future government will do anything about it is another matter since like the disability benefits scam, the expansion of higher education was another way of concealing unemployment. It has always perplexed me that whereas even major businesses come and go, not a single university in this country has ever undergone the same fate.

Spent the day vaguely puzzled by J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov's new biography of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD between Yagoda and Beria. The book dutifully goes through the archives to flesh out the little chap's career. He was five feet tall. Like Stalin, another shorty, Yezhov was an expert in personnel questions- HR as we call it nowadays. Rigging appointments was his thing; I've met a few Yezhov's in my time. In line with much academic stuff, the book sets up a straw man- the idea that Yezhov was 'a robot' obediently carrying out his master's wishes to kill people. No, claim the authors', in every successive post he had more or less limited 'agency' and scope to fulfil his own ambitions. Well, I'd never have guessed. This is supposed to get us out of the 'dead end' of seeing Yezhov as 'evil' or as a product of a 'totalitarian' system. Now I've read enough Soviet history to know that not a single proponent of either of these latter views would claim that Yezhov was a robot- they just don't think his limited scope for independent action is important enough to warrant a 200 page book. The authors' also want readers to empathise with Yezhov's world view, of 'us' and 'them', which they claim derives from an older peasant mentality just as much as from Bolshevik Manicheaism. They even trot out the line that Yezhov lived modestly (like Stalin) in contrast to his sybaritic predecessor, with his 3,000 pornographic photos, and his rapist successor. Now I wonder how such a book would go down if it said much the same about Himmler, Heydrich or Eichmann? Another thing it doesn't really get to grips with is that Yezhov killed tens of thousands of people solely by virtue of their nationality- beginning with around 40,000 ethnic Germans and going on to even larger numbers of Poles. In his two year rampage 1.5million people were arrested, of whom 700,000 were shot. Predictably the book mentions, but then doesn't discuss, the one thing that's revealing about 'Iron Fist'. Krushchev recalled that when he visited Yezhov in his NKVD HQ, the little chappie was inordinately proud of the blood stains spattered on his shirt from an interrogation he had just attended.

As a long-time devotee of The Shield my set of The Wire (series 1) has been lying around unopened. Maybe I felt disloyal to Azeveda, Dutch, Vic et al in watching it? We saw the whole thing this week. The acting is incredibly good (particularly the fatter cops and the two older hoods-in-chief) and the story-lines gripping. Nobody's humanity is neglected. I guess the most depressing thing about what it portrays is that crime is just a way of life, although I wondered about all the people in the 'projects' who managed to avoid it unless they get shot for doing their civic duty, and couldn't quite reconcile the enormous sums of money involved with the economists who claimed that most drug dealers live with their mothers.

What it also did, and which nothing made here rivals, is to make television indispensable, in this case to a discussion about crime and its causes. I doubt whether this is purely a matter of smaller resources, although the credits for the series seemed to involve a very large number of people. 

Getting up incredibly early this morning I had a chance to take a look at the New Statesman, a weekly I've never really read. There were lots of interesting pieces in it, notably an article by Oliver Letwin that claimed the Conservatives were now the party 'of the poor', although I think he probably meant 'for the poor'. He has some striking statistics: the number of working-age adults living in poverty rose last year by 700,000 and has risen overall since 1997. Pity the voters of Glasgow East won't get the message.

Elsewhere in the magazine there was a piece about falling divorce rates in the US. Although the evidence is only derived from Miami-Dade County in Florida, there has been an 18% fall this year. Apparently in bad times, the costs of divorce force people to stay hitched. You can't really share out the negative equity. By contrast, in Manhattan there are more divorces than ever. One divorce lawyer has seen his case load rise by 20% this year. Why? A trader the author mentions was having to hide the fact that his income had fallen by US$12 million lest his wife have to adjust her spending habits and divorce him. Evidently some are better at disguise than others.

The New Statesman has a dress correspondent. Now that's a good idea. To my horror she doesn't like polo shirts on men, regarding them as a lazy choice of non-dress just above a tee-shirt. Actually whenever I see holiday snaps with me wearing one that is ten years old I don't think they look good either. Can't see what she's got against chinos though. Perhaps Standpoint should hire its own dress correspondent?

Apropos of nothing the arrest in London of the Batman star for ALLEGED assault caught my eye. I bet there were amusing scenes in the custody suite. Name: 'Mr Bat'. Address: 'Gotham City'............ did he send for Cat Woman?

Last night some oafish hulk from Channel 4 tried to bully his way through an interview on BBC2 with Emily Maitlis and one of the eminent scientists who had been misrepresented by a Channel 4 documentary series the hulk had commissioned that sought to discredit the notion of climate change. All the tricks of the trade were on show. Little beady eyes tightened into a moue of indignation that he had been dragged into the spotlight. Talking over the other guest the C4 commissioning editor made the completely irrelevant claim that the BBC itself had been encouraged to be more "radical" in its approach to programming. This was all designed to distract from the shoddy ways in which interviews had been cut to distort what the scientists were saying. Like the modern political class there was no sense that this might warrant anybody's RESIGNATION, no, you just bluster your way through in the hope that nobody is really watching. The truth doesn't matter so long as it is 'radical'.

In today's Mail the excellent Quentin Letts takes advantage of the summer recess to draw attention to the venomous postings about Margaret Thatcher's (inevitable) demise on the Guardian website. This came about in response to the suggestion that Baroness Thatcher should have a state funeral, which on many grounds she undoubtedly should. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1037118/QUENTIN-LETTS-Rejoicing-death-Why-Left-hate-Lard-Thatcher.html for the disgusting details. I recently saw Tim Garton Ash at an event where responding to a mistake made by the chairman (who said Ash was from Cambridge rather than Oxford), Ash made the comment: 'At least he didn't say I am a Mail rather than Guardian columnist'. Perhaps Ash doesn't look through the sort of comments that are posted on the Guardian's website? Because most of them are so crass, ill-informed or malevolent that they don't compare with anything that appears on the sites of any other British newspaper. And there are hundreds and hundreds of them, suggesting that the public sector readership has plenty of time to spew forth its resentments. Its time the Tories dropped the conceit that they are the nasty party; there's plenty of nastiness all too evident on the other side.  

I've spent weeks now wrestling with the huge literature on appeasement. Not altogether surprised how an initial focus on individual character failings of the main actors in the memoirs of others who were sometimes the earliest rats off the ship has been replaced by a blander, structural analysis that stresses impersonal constraints. What I can't get is the ethical 'air' breathed by the main actors, who by their own account, and that of their critics, were moral men, Halifax nauseatingly so. Chamberlain is quite revealing since in his diaries/letters to Hilda and Ida he trots out trite childhood maxims: 'if at first you don;t succeed, try try again' and so forth. There's a lot of playing the game- though neither 'Master' Hitler nor 'Musso' played cricket- and Germany being sent to Coventry. The analogy has obviously cropped up time and again in Western foreign policy- Suez, Falklands, Iraq and now Iran- and Bush has been deploying it against Obama over troop reductions in Iraq. Maybe it works like this. Britain had to choose not to fight Germany, Italy and Japan simultaneously and prioritised the threats and her own capabilities. Nowadays, with three wars- Afghanistan, Iraq and global terrorism- can we afford another with Iran? Where is the contemporary alternative to the alternative Churchill proposed in the 1930s- that is of a Grand Alliance to protect victims of aggression- Czechoslovakia then, Israel now? Just a thought on the lessons of history.

Residents of St Tropez are threatening to blocade the town because of the incessant noise from private helicopters bearing footballers and film stars. We get a lot of this in Kennington, except they are police helicopters circling above (more annoying than swooping back and forth) looking for thieves and muggers. Once or twice we've had stun grenade explosions too, like when the local Rasta temple was raided last year. So I'm with the residents of St Tropez on this one. But here there is a solution. When the cricket is on in the Oval a stately, but utterly silent, mini airship futs across the sky, with less commotion than a small manual lawnmower. Why not have a few permanently positioned over south east London? After all, that's what the US military has planned for Third World cities. 

Although the Anglican communion seems to be collapsing around his ears- or perhaps just because this is happening- Rowan Williams has despatched a cringe-making communication to Muslim leaders apologising for Christianity's historic faults. The worst passages slip into the sociology professor's passive subjunctive that he favours. The point of this exercise is to discover common cause against secular modernity's darknesses. One might take it seriously if at any point the Archbishop expected a reciprocal admission of fault on the part of Muslim leaders, some of whom have knowingly preached hatred against the West, Christians and Jews. Various religious commentators have tried to elucidate the dilemmas Williams faces over the gay clergy/women bishop issues. It seems simple to me- he is stuck, like a rabbit in the headlights, between three of the mutually exclusive progressivisms he espouses- hopelessly imagining that these can be endlessly debated in the endless seminar he confuses with leadership, a notion virtually absent from the great democracy of British academia from which he comes and to which as Minette Marrin indicated in the first Standpoint he should return.

Obama's desire to pull troops from Iraq is getting more coverage than his desire to extend the war against Al Qaeda into Pakistan. While he can certainly use America's huge subsidies to Pakistan to pressure them into properly securing their nuclear arsenal, I don't think he has thought through the political implications of more US activity than there is already over the Afghan border. Apart from the unfortunate echoes of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War- where the solution always seemed to lie in yet another country- there is the technical problem of bombing the wrong people (perhaps some Pakistani Frontier Corps soldiers) not to speak of how the Pakistani population will react to overt US military intervention.  

Arrived at a nice Soho Chinese restaurant last night slightly before 7pm. My wife managed to get lost somewhere around Poland Street (I tried to guide her in by various local landmarks until I realised they were mostly identical lingerie shops and strip clubs) and the Appleyards were fashionably a little late. So I had a quarter of an hour to survey the street scene. Then there was a lot of urgent rushing up and down Berwick Street- where the market stalls had gone and council workers were disinfecting the gutters. Although I've lived in London most of my life, I've never seen a drug transaction done so openly. A young guy in a hood sold something from a small CD type bag to a gaunt couple. Next, a disturbed chap walking about without a shirt lifted a drain cover and rummaged around for cigarette butts. Anyway these vignettes set me up nicely for an excellent meal at Yuatcha where the waitresses look like they've strayed from a 1930s Fu Manchu film and say things like 'Did you enjoy your evening Sir' with an air of polite menace. By 10 when we left Soho was like bedlam with drunks careening around with the velocity of pin balls. The humidity raises the decibel levels since everyone hangs around outside bars and pubs.

And so to another scene of despair- Glasgow East. Bryan Appleyard ventured the thought that Labour might be the cause of the poverty that afflicts its voters. After all they've been in power there since the turn of the century or thereabouts. If they vote Labour they can console themselves with the thought they are REAL, OLD- actually they never get that far- LABOUR GRITTY PEOPLE. Since they are life's risk takers- boozing, smoking, the fried Mars bars- how come they don't vote Tory on the same basis as buying a Lottery ticket? Who knows? The Tories might then have to come up with something to deal with social problems that are a disgrace to this country and to the Party that has done nothing about them.

I can't seem to get my mind around something called Credit Default Swaps, which apparently are very much a part of the credit crunch. I tried to concentrate hard on a TV report that explained them, but at a crucial point I lost the thread of the explanation. Is it insuring mortgage default and then selling this on? Probably not. Any help from a passing hedge fund millionaire would be deeply appreciated, a sentence filled with ambiguities!

You know someone is worried when they trot out the such and such British institution is 'the envy of the world' line. In today's Telegraph this was the clincher used by BBC Director General Mark Thompson to justify his claim that some people would even welcome the license fee rising to £240 per annum: http//www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/12/do1204.xml&posted=true&_requestid=145119

Like most people there are (diminishing) bits and pieces of Radio 3 and 4 that I like although I can no longer find anything worth watching on BBC televison- least of all on the new digital channels that recycle old comedy, food and property porn shows. I am not a great fan of little missie actresses doing their turn in costume dramas- according to Thompson the highlight of the BBC's output.  If I watch anything at all it is commercial Channel 5. Thompson claims, melodramatically, that things like the Proms at the Albert Hall would 'go dark' if the BBC didn't cover them. This is like saying that if Sainsbury's vanished we would suddenly be unable to buy fruit and veg.

The problem with the BBC, as many commenters on the Telegraph puff have already noted, is that the BBC reflects such an Independent/Guardian institutional bias- with no countervailing voices at all- that most of us on the centre right are not prepared to subsidise it. If and when there is a conservative government, it should immediately exploit its mandate to redirect a substantial proportion of the license fee to independent providers so as to ensure genuine diversity and representation of the tastes and views of many people in this country. The diminished BBC should also be told that the BBC recruits from too narrow a pool- nice liberal middle class humanities graduates of the Left University- leaving whole swathes of the population (and their views) unrepresented. If that brings no change of institutional culture then the rest of the license fee can go in the next parliament. In recent weeks David Cameron has indicated that he understands that the big issues are mostly cultural- let's hope he understands that the BBC is to his forthcoming administration what the trades unions were to Mrs Thatcher's in the 1980s. While he's at it, his education secretary can take a long cool look at the Left University too. After that, we might even have something to quietly boast about.

Anyone who needs reminding of the horror of 7/7 could do worse than read Canadian journalist Peter Zimonjic's Into the Darkness. Apart from being a harrowing eye-witness account, it is also remarkable for the way in which the author develops several stories spread over three locations simultaneously.

Meanwhile, over in the parallel moral universe Islamists inhabit, the extended Pakistani family of bomber Shezad Tanweer have invited four hundred people to a village party in Chak 477 to 'celebrate him as a martyr'. One is not surprised that the Pakistani government allows this to happen. But that the event's organiser, a Mr Tahir Pervez- a property developer and the bomber's 42 year old uncle- is allowed to pass back and forth into this country without inhibition is testament to the spinelessness of the British authorities. Rather than simply messing him around for a bit at immigration, the government should issue a 'no-flight' ban before he even attempts to board an aircraft. They don't even need to give a reason since Mr Pervez is outside the clutches of the British human rights lawyers who would undertake a gadarene rush to represent him. Let's see what they do. Or don't we have such provisions in this country?

Unfortunately for legal reasons one cannot name 'U', an Algerian who is about to be released from six years in custody in this country. You can find out his name (although the one he habitually uses is not the one he was born with or used to enter Britain) by looking at US newspaper websites. U is a senior Al Qaeda operative, with links to Osama bin Laden. He has demonstrable connections with Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested en route to place bombs at LAX airport, and with the European cell that plotted to kill shoppers at Strasbourg's Christmas market. Unfortunately Mr Ressam withdrew testimony against U that was crucial to U's extradition to the US to face charges of conspiracy. Unfortunately too, the conclusion of the trial of the Strasbourg conspirators means that U can't be extradited either to Europe. That left Algeria where U was a senior figure in the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat that killed some 200,000 people in the 1990s. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that U, and other Algerians who have been repatriated to face justice, would be fairly treated, despite the efforts by well-known human rights lawyers to paint Algeria's judicial system in the darkest colours. The mechanisms it has put in place at British insistence strike this observer as pretty watertight. But no, not in the eyes of British judges who have overturned the SIAC ruling and freed U on bail. Rather thoughtfully, they've stipulated he can wander in his garden from 9am to 9pm at night. For weeks attention in this country has been focused on the issue of 42 days detention, which is designed to anticipate catastrophic circumstances, rather than for any case that the police have so far encountered. It is the legal equivalent of stockpiling vaccines. In fact, the real scandal is how our legal system positively connives at failing to deal with a major figure who was central to the original Al Qaeda organisation. We also seem to have no mechanisms for deporting a man who lied about his identity when he originally sought political asylum in the UK, and then attended military training camps in Afghanistan, before returning to recruit foreign fighters to go to Chechnya. The fact that the British media is prevented from even reporting U's name also tells you where the courts' misplaced sympathies also lie. The underlying reasons for this, and other scandals, are the persistence of the ideologue lawyers who take up the causes of U and his ilk, and a senior judiciary that regards common sense as equivalent to base mob instincts.

Hopping channels late at night last week I caught bits of Channel 4's knives and guns season. The sight of a spooky-eyed Cherie Booth QC cross-examining various police and social workers (indistinct categories I know) had me scurrying off to bed. In today's Sunday Times, Adrian Gill hits the button when he writes: 'Everybody seemed to be doing something about alienated nihilistic youth last week, but none of the channels thought to mention their own responsibility for the behaviour of kids. They don't because they don't believe they are responsible....The contradiction of the box is that it leaps to take credit as a style leader and weather-maker....but it never wants to accept that there is a connection between television's power of suggestion and behaviour outside the box'. This raises a broader question about the relationship between the 'broken society' and the wider 'culture', which no politicians are prepared to broach, lest they land on the wrong side of progressive opinion, or risk forfeiting the talismanic 'yoof' vote. That is why the culture portfolios are occupied by low ranking politicians who see them as a chance for good seats at an Amy Winehouse concert, or whose conception of culture is narrowed to the matter of how we fund it. What a pity they don't give the job to Adrian Gill, except that he probably wouldn't want it. 

General the Lord Guthrie has alerted people to the sorry story of how a man only known as Abdul has been treated since he served the British as an interpreter in Iraq. That is very dangerous work: 'They attacked my family, they kidnapped my son and they tortured my wife' Abdul has reported. The family left Iraq with nothing. As part of a £25 million resettlement scheme, Abdul and his family are currently housed in a run-down tower block on a Glasgow estate, surrounded by drunks and drug addicts. Lord Guthrie says 'I am a bit ashamed that a country like ours treats people.....just like this. I think we ought to treat them with respect, to make quite sure they're looked after properly'. That is the military way. This follows on from our grudging treatment of former Gurkhas, to whom we deny the levels of health and pension provision we give to British soldiers.

Meanwhile, Abu Qatada- a dangerous enemy of Western society- and various Algerians known only as 'G' or 'U' to protect their human rights, are being released from maximum security prisons and put up at vast expense in government safe houses. These are not scruffy tower blocks in Glasgow, but suburban detached houses with nice gardens, where the likes of 'G' or 'U' can get a bit of fresh air. Since Qatada comes with a family, tax payers are also presumably disbursing welfare payments at the same rate as Qatada, and his soul mate Abu Hamza, were receiving when they were at liberty to preach subversion.

Rather than addressing himself to how scandals like this have come about, the Lord Chief Justice (and soon to be President of a new Supreme Court) has elected- though he is not "elected" at all- to endorse the outrageous proposal of the Archbishop of Canterbury to allow sharia law to be used in family cases. He made this suggestion in a speech delivered in a mosque.

Any comments?

The new grouping of conservative Anglicans has decided to call itself Foca, that is the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Have things in the Church of England really reached such a low, under Rowan Williams's "leadership", that these rebels have to associate themselves with the Lutheran and Reformed Confessing churches which separated from the main Protestant churches in the early years of Nazism. Readers with a sense of history will recall that these brave souls were separating themselves from churches which had either been hijacked by the so-called 'German Christians' (a pro-Nazi sect of pastors and their followers) or bishops who otherwise attempted to introduce nationalist and racist heresies into the churches' teachings. This included ignoring the Old Testament, obliterating Jewish names from hymns, and trying to 'aryanise' Jesus. Has the "liberalisation"- and many of us know how hollow that process usually is- of the CoE reached such a pass that the bishops of Africa and the 'southern cone' feel obliged to identify with Bonhoeffer and Niemoeller? Usually Williams adopts the first person plural (we) to say 'we' are in such and such a state of mind (punitive) or might consider introducing sharia law. Suddenly, when his own authority is on the line (and over the horizon the question looms of who gets what part of the CoE's enormous material Establishment) he speaks with a 'clarity' that has hitherto routinely evaded him. Looking at the purposive faces at the Foca meeting in London, I have a feeling that the Archbishop's characteristic evasions and 'unclarities' are not going to see him through this one. 

Several worrying reports about the increasing Talibanisation of Pakistan. Peshawar, a city of three million people, is coming under the chill grip of the Taliban, who claim that they are bringing law and order to a city where the police are poorly paid and ineffective. What happens next is instructive: the criminals grow beards and spout holy phrases, in order to continue drug smuggling and kidnapping under Taliban protection. Decent businessmen hot foot it to Dubai to escape their extortions. Meanwhile in neighbouring Khyber tribal region, a gnarled former bus driver called Mangal Bagh, has given a rather lordly interview, in which he similarly claims to be restoring right morality at gunpoint. Across both the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North West Frontier Provinces, illegal Islamic Qazi courts are multiplying, partly because of the Jarndyce v Jarndyce sloth of the existing justice system. These are the fateful consequences of the deals Pervez Musharraf struck in 2006 (the Waziristan Accords) which sought to devolve responsibility for curbing terrorist activity on local tribal elders. The result has been that both the Taliban, sundry non-Taliban Islamist groups like that led by Mr Bagh, and their al Qaeda allies have gained a perch in these areas, where they have reinstalled a number of (smaller) training bases like they had in Afghanistan before 9/11. While elements of the US intelligence/military communities would like to increase strikes on these bases, this has to be counterbalanced with the destabilising effects on Pakistani domestic politics- although one wonders how more unstable things could become. According to recent reports in the New York Times, several ground operations to capture senior al Qaeda figures- with a view to getting a lock on bin Laden's location- have been called off lest they result in a mini Bay of Pigs. So the US uses unmanned aerial drones to kill the occasional senior figure- and inadvertently several Pakistani troops in the last strike. Our news is naturally dominated by the spike in British military casualties in Helmand- but surely the bigger story is what is happening on the Pakistani side of the Pashtun belt, and how anyone proposes to deal with it without ending up with another war.

Whenever I join those who express scepticism about the Northern Ireland Peace Process, I am invariably asked whether I'd prefer a reversion to the bombs going off in the province or on the mainland. Obviously not. But the price of peace seems to be toleration of continued paramilitary criminality, which mainly consists, apart from money-driven organised crime, of vigilante-style 'policing' of republican areas. That means a lot of youths having their arms and legs broken. Yesterday, however, a more sinister side of things was briefly re-aired in a Belfast court. I am referring, of course, to the acquittals of three men on trial in connection with the murder of Robert McCartney, about which there is detailed coverage in today's Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4228323.ece The judge had to dismiss the case primarily because there were no reliable witnesses or because all forensic evidence (and CCTV footage) had been obliterated from the scene of the crime. With one exception, witnesses had been "visited" by senior figures from Sinn Fein/IRA. Meanwhile, McCartney's sisters have been subjected to a three years campaign of intimidation which has left them depressed and frightened. One of them, Catherine McCartney, remarked 'everyone seems to be in on it. They all turn a blind eye when it suits'. Some of the sisters are thinking of emigrating- as far as Australia in one case. So far there has been silence from the government about this brazen perversion of the course of justice by Sinn Fein/IRA, and no comment at all from those who are so keen to export the 'example' of the Peace Process to Basques and Tamils.

And so to the Ten O’Clock News. Brown’s anniversary as PM. The polls are lousy, but you would not know it, since flashing up images of Brown and Cameron, the BBC managed to display Brown on 48% and Cameron on 28%- with no apology at any point for this major reversal of the reality (incidentally Cameron is on 46% at present). And so on to a review of what a Tory administration might do. There was not much flesh on the bones in the four reports by BBC luminaries, BUT, each segment contrived to use old fashioned black and white footage to insinuate that the Tories wished to take us back to the 1950s. We had a family fireside scene (circa 1950), whereas in reality the Tories are fully cognisant of changes in human relationships…….and then yuppies with their champagne (circa 1987) were contrasted with dole lines. The BBC’s political editor contrived to speak about ‘the men who may run Britain’ (showing Cameron, Osborne and Hague) as if there are no females in the shadow cabinet. A little later on Question Time, David Dimbleby was not exactly forensic in his questioning of Yvette Cooper, the motormouth Treasury spokesperson, about her and her husband Ed Balls’s curious mortage arrangements. By contrast, Dimbleby had been briefed, by the BBC Newsnight programme going out at that time on BBC2, about further revelations about Tory chairperson Caroline Spelman’s odd remumeration of her nanny, a story being worried to death by little Michael Crick, even though it concerns events ten years ago. A couple of weeks ago my wife sat next to a rare being- a conservative who works for the BBC. She volunteered that after the Nantwich by-election and Boris’s victory in London, the Lefties in the BBC had turned nasty and were really out to get the Tories. Last night’s none too concealed evidence of bias and malice confirmed this.