DUFF & NONSENSE!

Lord Grey of Fallodon

Apologies for the lack of posts for the last few days but I have been engrossed in, and entranced by, a book. One of my favourite periods of history is the Edwardian era and the run-up to WWI.  It's far enough away to be properly historical but close enough for me to feel the resonances.  In Britain it was an age of Big Men taking Big Decisions, and yet one of the biggest of them all is rarely mentioned except in passing.  It is indicative that the ambiguous Asquith, the mercurial Lloyd George and the rumbustious Churchill have been more than well-served by biographers over the last 100 years, but when it comes to Sir Edward Grey, the man in charge of our foreign policy for eleven years starting in 1905, he has only two, the last written in 1971(*).  Reading the latest one can see why.  Grey, in comparison to the flamboyant characters around him, lives up to, or perhaps, down to, his name.  A man of both public and private rectitude who abhorred publicity and only entered, and remained in, politics from a stern sense of duty.  One is tempted to typecast him as the very model of an English country gentleman.  He was from sound Northumberland stock, politically Whiggish, which took him into the Liberal party under Gladstone.  Apart from an intense affection for Wordsworth, his only real love was the Northumberland countryside and the birds and fish that inhabited it.  In this biography there is a particularly charming picture of him in old age, dressed in thick tweeds and country hat - with a robin perched on his head!  He hated the Victorian revolution that had scoured his beloved England but recognised the reality and the inevitability of it and worked as hard as he could to alleviate the conditions of the people who worked in it.

His appointment as Foreign Secretary came despite himself rather than because of any obvious qualifications.  For a start, Grey hardly ever traveled.  For him there was nothing better than his family house at Fallodon in Northumberland, and his beloved birds, his breeding ducks and his fishing.  As his biographer, Keith Robbins, puts it: Sharing neither the Teutonic proclivities of Haldane nor the Gallic delights of Campbell-Bannerman, he could judge the policies of continental powers unclouded by personal ties. Of course, his critics, then and now, used his insularity as a weapon against him, accusing him of naivety, or ignorance, or both.  Oddly, the post-war German historians refused to swallow the line that Grey was just a simple country gentleman and assumed that he was an arch-Machiavel.  Later German historians, at last acknowledging the truth that their brutal and stupid Prussian leadership were the main cause of WWI, have now placed Grey on a plinth as the very model of international political correctness.  The answer, of course, lies somewhere in the middle.

In reading anything concerned with the lead-up to August 1914 it is essential that one constantly reminds oneself that whilst we, with the benefit of hindsight, know that war was coming, none of the participants did at the time.  It is true that some of them at different times came to the conclusion that it was more rather than less likely - but none of them knew for certain.  When Grey took over at the Foreign Office in 1905 he was laying down the foreign policy for the British empire, an empire so huge that the sun never set on it ... and yet, and yet ... to read his biography is to realise that already it was creaking at the joints and that its strength was waning and that faced with a plethora of threats from a variety of sources it was not possible always to act alone or even to act at all.  Indeed, given that it might be deemed advantageous to severely biff country 'A', it had to be borne in mind that that would alarm country 'B' upon whom one was relying for support in dealing with country 'C', and so on, and on, and on.  The saying is that 'to rule is to choose' and nowhere is this more difficult to do than in the foreign office of a global power - as today our American cousins are being reminded - yet again.  Grey picked his way through this maze of equal and opposite forces never once losing sight of the main threat - Prussian-led Germany.  In this he stands well ahead of Churchill and Lloyd George, both of whom fought against the huge increase in naval estimates required to keep Britain ahead of Tirpitz's new fleet, until late in the day they too saw the light in the tunnel and realised it was an oncoming, out-of-control, Prussian express train!

Regular readers will know of my tendency towards hero-worship.  I try to keep it under control but I don't always succeed.  I have never attempted it in the case of Sir Edward Grey, and now that I have read this superb biography, I see absolutely no need for it.  In my opinion, Grey was a very great Englishman, a superb Foreign Secretary, an honorable politician and a true gentleman.  It is indicative of his modesty that despite his years on the stage of international affairs there is only one of his utterances that has gone down in history.  In August 1914, he looked out at the gas lights being turned down in the street outside his Foreign Office window and remarked with mordant but poetic accuracy: The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in ourlifetime.  Indeed, we had to wait until 1945 for that to happen.

(*) Sir Edward Grey: A Biography of Lord Grey of Fallodon by Keith Robbins, Cassell, 1971

A little gem of commonsense to cheer you all up

The boys from Cafe Hayek, as they do so often, came up with this piece of wisdom in plain language.  I'm feeling idle tonight so I reprint it without comment which would, in any case, be superfluous:

"Economist Joseph Schumpeter noted this fact in 1942: 'Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them.

It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to a rich man.

Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.'"

This Mars landing's all a hoax, innit?

I know this for an absolute fact because Sky News is showing an alleged (heh, they don't fool me!) photograph of a narrow piece of bare dirt with some vague patterning and filled with small rocks and stones. That is my back garden, people!  Obviously they have used that 'Googley-thingy' to  search the world for a suitable site likely to fool people into thinking they were looking at Mars and having ignored the Gobi desert as too civilised they chose my back garden instead.  Well, I always knew that moon landing was staged in a back-lot in Hollywood! 

A breath of fresh air in all the hot air

This, it seems to me is one of the wisest, most balanced essays you could read on the fraught topic of global warming caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  It is written by Freeman Dyson in the form of a review in the New York Review of Books.  It is eminently sane, measured and compelling, not least because it retains a sensible scepticism, summed up, as Dyson points out, in the ancient motto of the Royal Society, Nullius in Verba (Nobody's word is final), a piece of wisdom consistently ignored by the British 'scientific' panjandrums who chorus the government line and will brook no dissention.  I urge you all to read it.

This globalisation lark is going round the world!

I was delighted to find out that His Honour, Mr. Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of 'Noo Yawk', has been paying attention to this blog and noticed my suggestion of some months ago that London and the south of England should break away from the rest of the Kingdom in a sort of UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) so that all those City slickers could go on making oodles of moolah which we could hang on to instead of doing what we have to do today and send it by the trainload up to 'Jockland'.  In this week's Spectator he has taken my idea one stage further - well, they always think bigger, these Yanks - and suggested a 'special relationship' between London and 'Noo Yawk' based on the several shared characteristics of both cities, but especially their financial muscle which is likely to come under increasing threat from the Orient in the near future.  A splendid idea, in my opinion, and I gather that he and Boris are already on terms and about to take this idea further.

Normally, even the whispered mention of globalisation is the sort of thing that usually produces flecks of foam on the lips of any Leftie, so it was with some surprise that I read today of plans for the British trade union, UNITE, to enter merger talks with the United Steel Workers' Union (USW) of America which already has over a million affiliated workers in Cananda, too.  I have conducted a quick skim across the comrades' blogs but no mention is made.  I suppose it must be a case of, I say 'globalisation' and you say 'workers of the world unite'!

Of course, there is a rather crucial difference between the globalisation of big business and big unions.  The former bring work and jobs and thus increasing wealth to poor people in poor countries whilst the latter will, in true, traditional, 'closed shop' style, do everything in their power to keep tariffs up, wages up, prices up and above all, jobs for life at home.

Intellectuals! Don'cha' just lurve 'em?

Of course, I use the word 'intellectuals' in its very best and highest sense which excludes the phony-baloneys who masquerade under the title - no names, no pack drill!  What I like so much about the better sort of intellectual is the fact that they spend not just days and weeks but months and years, sometimes whole lifetimes, worrying about matters which have hitherto never given me a moment's concern, and indeed, which have never even occurred to me to contemplate in the first place.  Regular readers will groan and guess, correctly, that I am ploughing yet further into Michael Frayn's superb book, The Human Touch, which illustrates some of the more arcane areas of human thought.  Don't misunderstand, I am not in any way denigrating the mysterious nooks and crannies explored by scientists and philosophers, some of which are hugely important; just the opposite, I am confessing to my own third-rate standard which not only fails to provide me with the imagination to even begin to wonder but also my pathetic lack of the necessary mental application to think through these thorny problems.

For example, as provided by Frayn, "Why the marmalade?"  In the morning, faced with a piece of buttered toast requiring an extra flavour, why do I choose the marmalade over the honey, given that I like both?  This is one of those teasing questions which, once asked, cannot be avoided - not least because from now on every breakfast will be a reminder of it!  Frayn goes on to mention in a footnote (blast him because I can forsee yet another volume going on top of the tottering pile of 'books-to-be-read' in my study) the work of William James, a Victorian member of the advance guard of evolutionary psychologists, but one who endears himself to me by describing psychology as "a very nasty subject".  In one footnote Frayn draws attention to James's theory that a great deal of decision-making boils down to the fact that we can only ever deal with one thing at a time, in other words, our attention span is limited.  This is just as well because even coming to us one thing at a time, the images from 'out there' that constantly bombard us, each jostling for our attention, are already confusing enough.  If we were able to accept the 'signals' from all of them all of the time we would grind to a halt suffering with information overload.  Here is James in his own words:

"Millions of items of the outward order are present to my sense which never properly enter into my experience.  Why?  Because they have no interest for me.  My experience is what I agree to attend to.  Only those items which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.  Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground - intelligible perspective, in a world.  It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscrimination, impossible for us even to conceive."

The Principles of Psychology, 1890, vol I, p 402

Yes, yes, I hear you cry, but what about the bloody marmalade and the honey, how do you actually choose?  Don't know, sorry, haven't finished the chapter!

 

Tory disaster at the Crewe & Nantwich by-election

(NB: Typepad, in its, er, wisdom, has seen fit to change the entire typographical system under which my posts are written and of which, after several years, I had mastered approximately 50%. Attempting to understand this new system has thrown my seven brain cells into utter confusion and the end result may prove to be unreadable. This may, or may not, be "A Good Thing"!)

All of that, of course, comes under the heading of 'wishful thinking'.  The fact is that after the local elections, the London mayoral election and the Crewe by-election, 'Dim Dave' now has absolutely no incentive to propose, or even to think, anything radical. All that he needs to do is behave like one of those soppy, wet social workers and tell everyone that he feels their pain and, honestly, he will do something about it when clapped-out Labour is put out of its misery and a grateful people give him the top job.  Even so, there is one possibility, perhaps probability is more accurate, looming over the horizon to be filed under "Events, dear boy, events".  I refer to the disastrous economic tsunami that is rumbling with increasing speed towards us.  Today, Waitrose, the very essence of affluent(?) middle-class shopping, reported two weeks of falling sales.  That is the equivalent of the sea beginning to be sucked away from the beaches which presages a mighty wave crashing in on us at a later date.  When markets correct themselves, or, when they adjust themselves to new conditions (and I suspect the latter is very much more influential than the former as a cause of the current and future turbulence), it is always very painful for most people.  Nevertheless, it is, like a caning from the headmaster, good for us all in the long run - and please don't quote Keynes at me!  It will certainly be very painful for the politicians at Westminster who will have to come to terms with a state of affairs in which, effectively speaking, they are broke, skint, lacking even a pot to piss in. (Interestingly, there was also a report in today's news of a fairly large town in California declaring bankruptcy in order to save itself from its creditors!)  Such will be the situation here and if that well-known oxymoron, the public service unions, think they are hard done by today, they should prepare themselves for really hard times in the next 2 or 3 years.

Not the least of the corruption of British life that occurred under Blair and 'Broon' was the deliberate increase in the public sector employment numbers aimed at establishing a huge Labour-voting sector.  We are now paying not just for their salaries but also for their generous pensions. When people were feeling themselves to be fairly affluent they didn't really look too hard at 'this monstrous regiment' of un-civil servants but when they feel the pinch, when they see and feel the taxman's grip around their wallets they are going to rebel. A small trickle of international companies has already announced their departure for low-tax havens like Ireland, and that trickle presages an avalanche.  Thus, one of the 'Broon's' favourite milch-cows will disappear.  When the big City banks and dealing houses follow they will lay off tens of thousands of high-earning employees who will then cease to pay income tax and so yet another milch-cow will be off to the knacker's yard.  As unemployment rises across the country the demands on the welfare budget will be enormous - who will pay?

These "events", along with others yet to be apparent, will demand some very radical thinking from the Tories if they are handed the whole smelly mess in two year's time.  Are 'Dim Dave' and his smug, little coterie giving any thoughts to this hideous possibility.  I doubt it!

(This final paragraph has nothing to do with the post but is merely a passage of prose upon which I can experiment with different typefaces - see comments for discussion.)

Additional: Attempting, in my ham-fisted way, to offer you a choice of typefaces and font sizes, I appear to have wiped the opening paragraph of my wise and witty commentary on the Crewe by-election.  I am now so hacked off with the entire exercise that I really cannot be bothered to resurrect it. Personally, I blame 'Dearieme' for moaning about the blasted font size in the first place. Anyway, I'm off to bed in a bad temper!

Did you weep for the passing of Hypolimnus Pedderensis?

And if not, why not?  What do you mean, you've never heard of him - or her - or it?  Are your minds closed and your hearts made of stone?  I am referring to the well known, Lake Pedder earthworm who, alas and alack, passed into a state of extinction some time in the last ten years.  Truly may it be said, in Pythonese, that this earthworm has ceased to exist, this is an ex-earthworm! "Right! Fine! Er, sorry and all that! By the way, what's for dinner?" These may be just a sample of the thoughts that crossed your minds as I disclosed this distressing news, and I confess, I share them with you. 

But - you guessed there was a 'but' coming, didn't you? - if I replace the name of the Lake Pedder earthworm (R.I.P.) with that of the polar bear, then, oh, what a wailing and gnashing of teeth there would be.  Indeed these signs of grief are already to be seen and heard as the American Interior Department puts poor little polar bears on the endangered species list. Even my e-friend 'Fallen Monk', normally a good, tough, ol' Southern boy even if he is a total Leftie, has been caught wiping a surreptitious tear from his eye and blaming the whole thing on AGW/oil companies/the Bush administration (delete, or not, to taste).

Well, we now know the hard way that the American intelligence services are as arrogant and dim as our very own, home-grown versions, so I suppose it is hardly a great surprise if the American Interior Department claims to know more about Arctic polar bears than the Canadian government and the people who actually live there:

"The latest government survey of polar bears roaming the vast Arctic expanses of northern Quebec, Labrador and southern Baffin Island show the population of polar bears has jumped to 2,100 animals from around 800 in the mid-1980s.

As recently as three years ago, a less official count placed the number at 1,400.

The Inuit have always insisted the bears' demise was greatly exaggerated by scientists doing projections based on fly-over counts, but their input was usually dismissed as the ramblings of self-interested hunters.

As Nunavut government biologist Mitch Taylor observed in a front-page story in the Nunatsiaq News last month, "the Inuit were right. There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears."

Even so, "attention must be paid" and each of us must ask ourselves the heart-searching question; in a very real, deep and fundamental sense, do we care about the polar bears? Unhesitatingly, I can reply that I, personally, couldn't give a stuff!  If pressed, I would maintain my support for the seal population which appears to be the 3-course, lunch-of-preferment for polar bears.  Unfortunately, I have just remembered that in a previous post I took the seals to task for scoffing all the pretty little fishies; but there again, the pretty little fishies eat up all the little bugaboos in the water which is probably why the poor old Lake Pedder earthworm wriggles no more.

It's all very confusing but one thing I know for sure, the Lake Pedder earthworm could have done with a very much slicker PR company!

The sub-human in support of the inhuman

Forget, for a moment, the morals of the embryology Bill before parliament, instead, let us suppose that you are the chairmen of a huge international pharmaceutical company charged with the responsibility of deciding where to place finite funds for further research into stem cells.  You have one department from your research centre urging you to invest in embryonic stem cell (ESC) research, but simultaneously you have another department insisting that you support their efforts using adult stem cells (ASC).  Both parties make great claims for the future efficacy of their approach leaving you with an impossible decision, you might think, one that can only be resolved by the toss of a coin, or by a rather weak effort to placate both by splitting the money down the middle.  Suddenly you have an original thought, a rare occurrence  but the sort of thing that justifies your monumental salary, colossal bonuses and your pension for life; you point out to your two scientists that all this stem cell stuff has been going on for years so what progress have they made to date?  You remind them that there is only one pot of money!

The ASC man pipes up proudly that over the last decade or two adult stem cells have provided treatments or cures for over 70 different diseases and conditions, and they are already involved in over 1,300 human clinical trials.  You turn to the ESC man with an unspoken query on your face and all he can do is shuffle his papers and his feet and report that, no, they have not yet produced a cure or a treatment for anything and, no, neither are there any human clinical trials about to take place or even close to taking place - oh, but, honestly, he insists, there's lots and lots of potential ... (1)

Happily this is one meeting which can be quickly closed whilst attention can then be more 'profitably' turned to consideration of directors' bonuses next year. So, why, I ask, are those idiots in Westminster wasting their time and my money debating the issue?  Probably because so many of them appear to be the product of a fusion between a pig and an ox!

(1): http://www.fumento.com/biotech/payoff.html

Taki memories

Yes, I did spell that right, not 'tacky' but 'Taki', as in Taki Theodoracopulos, the Greek/American author of the High Life column in The Spectator for the last ... well, more years than either I, or he, apparently, wish to dwell upon. Taki is a notoriously tough writer who once nearly reduced the 'Graun' to tears, poor things.  But then he is a fairly tough character himself.  Alas, the details escape me now but there was a time, in Greece, I think, when he was threatened by some rather heavy criminal types and he let be known through private channels that if they even scratched the paint on his yacht he would unleash a 'nuclear' retaliation that would leave them, their families and their businesses in need of considerable repair.  No more was heard of the matter! 

He is usually described, accurately as he, himself, would proudly admit, as an international playboy.  Today, the very term 'playboy' has a dated, dusty, somewhat fin de siecle feel to it.  Perhaps, having recently celebrated his 70th birthday, he is conscious of the passage of years because he has written, for him, a rather moving and almost elegiac essay on les temps perdu.  In it he describes the 'Noo Yawk' brownstone he has used as a family home for over 30 years.  During that time he has seen, across the street, a baby son born to a young couple and watched on an intermittent basis over the years this little boy grow up, mature and leave home.  'Noo Yawk', being a big city, he never did find out the name of the family opposite or their son.  Like old men everywhere, including this neck of the Dorset/Somerset woods, he deplores the changes he sees around him.  I, to coin a ghastly phrase, 'feel his pain'!  When he talks of Times Square and 42nd Street, I feel I know them from those old black and white movies of my childhood, and from my addiction to pulp fiction so much of which is set in 'Noo Yawk'.  But then he becomes a little more cheerful when he tells us that the Upper East Side (I know it, I tell you, I know it, it's just that, well, I couldn't actually point to it on a map!) has remained unchanged.  Similarly:

"For those of us raised on movies of the 1930s and 1940s, Central Park West's beautiful beaux-arts and art-deco apartment towers were the backdrop to our vision of urban glamour.  Every time I walk by on my daily constitutional round the park, I look at the buildings and I think I can hear the witty badinage, the music of Cole Porter and faintly see Fred Astaire in his white tie and tails."

Yes, I can see it all - and the nearest I've ever been to it is the tip of Cornwall!

Follow my leader!

Following my courageous fight with a dead prawn - which won - I am happy to report my complete recovery and that what passes for normal(!) service here, at Duff & Nonsense, is once again resumed.

The other night I gave a talk on the Battle of Waterloo and yet again I was struck by how well that battle fitted the wise admonition of Benjamin Franklin: "A little neglect may breed mischief ... for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the [General] was lost"; or perhaps, my misquotation (sorry!) of Burns in the heading to my last post, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft a-gley".  Whatever, Bonaparte set in train great events over which he lost control and which then engulfed him to his everlasting rage and puzzlement.  Looking back with the perfect 20/20 vision of hindsight one can see clearly some of the errors of omission and commission that led to his defeat.  It leaves one pondering upon the imponderable of what, precisely and exactly, do 'great leaders' possess that persuades others to follow them into the greatest personal, political and military dangers.  I am tempted to use (or abuse!) that poor word 'courage', but that would be  an error.  Timid leaders, with strong reasons for their timidity emanating from their nation's weaknesses, can still claim the mantle of 'greatness' if their timidity saves their nation and avoids that much-admired (in some quarters) action - the futile gesture!  Thus, some of us (yes, alas, I include myself) might find it hard not sneer at the Belgians standing petrified before the oncoming headlights of Hitlerian Germany, whilst singing the praises of 'mad' Polish lancers charging on horse-back against panzers.  Thus, courage is a virtue but not all the time, and not everywhere.

Oh dear, what a long-winded, meandering way to state 'the bleedin' obvious'!  But I am provoked to these ruminations by the recent actions of our last two premiers.  Right or wrong, Mr. Blair, a man from whom I would hesitate to buy a second-hand car, suddenly broke with all his previously exposed characteristics of shiftiness and undeviating pursuit of whatever cause would ensure that his bottom would slide onto the prime ministerial chair, suddenly threw his weight, and his job, behind the invasion of Iraq.  Now, this took considerable political courage.  He risked his premiership and his reputation, and he took on not only the broad, apathetic weight of British public opinion which is always vaguely anti-American but his own party as well.  Indeed, it was this very sense of conviction from a man I had previously thought incapable of spelling the word which provided one of the reasons why I supported him.  Of course, he was utterly unscrupulous in the methods he deployed to achieve his aims and by dint of much lying and corruption (in the sense of politicising the intelligence services) he 'won' the day - my inverted commas around the word 'won' need no explanation!  My point is, that for the purposes of this discussion, whether he was right or wrong is immaterial, the fact is that he had a very clear idea of what he wanted to achieve and he went for it, and slowly, and reluctantly, first his party, then parliament, and finally, the country, followed.  I repeat, for the moment, forget the specific issue, just look at it as an exercise in political leadership.

Need I say that all of that stands in direct contrast with the political cowardice of his successor, formerly spoken of as one of the political giants of the era, 'a man with bottom', a 'big cat in the jungle', whose rages and tantrums shook the rafters in Downing Street for ten years, and who is now perceived to be a trembling pussycat who doesn't throw the furniture around anymore but, instead, hides under it?  In my lifetime I have never seen a 'big man' shrink with such rapidity until, somewhat like the Cheshire cat, nothing remains except the scowl!  I have no sympathy for the Labour party, which is itself decayed and corrupted from within judged by its conduct of the Crewe by-election, and needs a long period in exile to renew itself, but even so, it is a major party of the realm and the fearful man who leads it also leads my country.  A pusillanimous poltroon like Gordon Brown is not fit for that purpose - it is time the Labour party acted.

Do it, Labour, do it for England!

Best laid plans of mice and men ...

Well, the wedding was delightful but the wedding night, er, for me, that is, was dreadful.  I went to bed shivering and despite wearing my socks in bed and clutching my hands under my armpits I could not stop shivering and shaking and sweating.  I fear, once again, the dreaded revenge of the prawn.  I remember thinking as I picked up one large, juicy-looking crustacean that he had a somewhat beady eye - I should have been warned!  Anyway, the trip 'ooop North' for the funeral had to be cancelled which was not a great disappointment, I must confess, and instead the little 'Memsahib' drove me home where I took to my bed.  She is even more terrifying when she adopts her 'Nursey' role than she is normally!  I am feeling better already, but just a bit 'feak and weeble'!

Aways days

A rather incongruous  coincidence of social gatherings, a wedding in Sussex on Saturday followed by a funeral in Harrogate on Monday! So, for obvious reasons this Blog will 'rest easy' until my return.

Two brave, unknown, heroes

One of them, a Chinese, pops into my mind from time to time because once seen, never forgotten. The newsreel shots of him taken in 1989 turned him into an iconic figure and are probably available on YouTube if any of my more geekish readers can find it for me.  I refer, of course, to that young Chinese man who stepped out in front of a tank on its way to put down the Tiananmen Square demonstration.  I think the thing that sticks the image firmly in the memory is the incongruous plastic shopping bag he carried in one hand, for all the world as though he had just popped out to his local Tesco, or perhaps, the nearest Chinese take-away, and somehow all those tanks had really pissed him off!  Whenever I see some of our home-grown, wet, useless, Trot-lot pseudo-revolutionaries 'bravely' confronting sundry British 'Plods' whose boredom with whatever demo is going on is only exceeded by their delight at the overtime, I think of that unknown Chinese and understand a little better the difference between real courage and phony bravado.

I am not sure if my next hero is a man or a woman.  Worse still, I cannot confirm that this is true, I am relying on a friend who read it in the paper.  As we all know, that well-known Russian mafia Capo, Mr. Putin, has been, er, dallying with a rather attractive ice-skating lady (or perhaps she's a gymnast - possibly even a ballerina, although I doubt very much whether that thug is likely to be a balletomane.) Anyway, even the Russian papers have been enjoying a snide giggle or three, and as a result a Bill was hurried through the Russian parliament (my turn for a giggle) banning the media from reporting on the private lives of their, er, 'glorious leaders'.  This Bill was passed by several hundred to one, and my admiration for that 'one' knows no bounds.  He, or she, is an exceedingly courageous person.

If anyone has further and better particulars on either of the individuals concerned, I would be delighted to know more.  In the meantime, I salute them both.

'Et tu', Ed?

Interesting speculation by Fraser Nelson in this week's Spectator on the subject of whither Labour? and, perhaps more interesting, Labour with who?  I gave up this forecasting lark back in the early '60s when I boldly predicted to the 'scousers' in my barrack-room that this new group from Liverpool called the Beatles that they were wittering on about were one-hit wonders.  Er, yes, quite so!  Nelson points out, rather shrewdly, that there is a huge difference between the way in which 'Broon' was handed the job and the clunking, clanking Party machinery that will haul in his successor.  In particular, if Labour is routed at the next election the bloody axe will fall mainly on the New Labour Blairites who took seats off the Tories in the last decade, thus leaving the big decision in the hands of the increasingly militant unions, the Party membership (and you only have to read some of the Blogs to get their flavour) and the rump of Old Labour MPs.  In my view, that will leave Milliband jnr. well out of the running.

The not-so-dark horse, of course, is Ed Balls who perhaps isn't quite so keen these days to be known as  'Broon' s' anointed.  Politically, Balls is a loathsome man in my opinion - of course, personally he may be a loving husband and a doting father, although one might legitimately doubt the latter given the fact that to preserve his ideological purity he is prepared to sacrifice his children's future by leaving them to attend a broken state school which has been severely criticised by its inspectors.  His flagrant attack on the last tattered remnants of all that is best in our 'edukashun servis', such as the 'A'-level examinations, will win him plaudits with the hard Left.

However, as Nelson points out, there is one big unknown (amongst a host of smaller ones) and that is the question of how long will 'Dim Dave' last in the job?  Apparently some Labourites give him one term maximum before they are all back in 'business as usual' mode.  If that is so, then whoever takes over from 'Broon' will have timed it perfectly.  But - and it's a whopper of a 'but' - if  'Dim Dave' proves rather more dexterous and intelligent than hitherto assumed, then he could do a Blair and win three elections!  This would be a catastrophe for the new leader of 'Old' Labour.  Just look at how many interim leaders the Tories had to get through before they found one just in time to take the tide.  It would certainly spoil the prime ministerial plots and plans of Mr. and Mrs. Ed Balls, a thought to savour, I feel.

Happily there is yet another cheery prospect to look forward to if Labour is thrashed at the next election.  The vicious in-fighting between the Blairites and the Ideologues will keep me cackling away in my armchair, but the political WMD that will be chucked around between the differing factions within the Ideologues will have me falling out of it and onto the floor weeping with laughter.  You need only visit some of the Ideologue blogsites to enjoy a foretaste of the coming civil war.  It could be the Bolsheviks vs. the Mensheviks all over again, or perhaps the Judean Liberation Front vs. the Liberation Front for Judea is nearer the mark!  Such fun!

Julia M - the most dangerous blogger in the west!

I am delighted to tell you all that 'Julia M' (for Magnificent? Meticulous? Measured? Memorable?),  a frequent commenter here at Duff & Nonsense, has finally started her own blog.  I shall endeavour to add her to my links when my, er, you know, that thing in the brain ... oh, what's it called? ... don't tell me ... oh, yes, my memory kicks in and I can remember how to do it.  I do urge all my readers to pay her a visit, especially those of a left-wing disposition - as you all know, I am very much in favour of blood sports!  In argument, Julia has the ability to use a short, sharp stiletto where I tend to blunder on and on with a base-ball bat.  Spread the word, people!

A new logo for the Tories

All morning Sky News have been concentrating on Boris's front door, outside of which, stood an empty bottle of champagne with some flowers stuck in it.  It struck me as the perfect new logo for the Tories to replace that ghastly scribbled tree with its greenery-pokery image.  I'd vote for that!

In the meantime, Labourites, in a state of Shlock Horror, appear to have had their brains scrambled.  They keep blaming their disaster on 'Blairism'.  Now, I know that a week in politics is a long time, and that Labourites are not the brightest in the land by definition, but you would have thought they would remember that it was 'Blairism' that provided them with three victories on the trot.  Well, if they want rid of all their surplus 'Blairism', they could send it by DHL to Tory Central Office, they can't get enough of it!

A bad day for the Tories

'Hash Broon' appeared on the 'telly' this morning grinding out his usual cliches and platitudes.  I think he composes his statements with a hat full of words and simply picks them out randomly one at a time like Tristan Tzara the Dada-ist poet at the beginning of Stoppard's play "Travesties".  "Leadership", "lessons", "view", "decisions", "courageous", "leading", "right", "long term", "stability", "listening" and so on and on like a demented speak-your-weight machine.  Of course, the word which then hits the deck like a dud dollar is "courageous" which is what he ain't! He ducked an election for his party's leadership, he reared up in fright at the prospect of a general election, he cowered behind technicalities to avoid a vote on the European treaty and then sneaked in after hours with his coat collar turned up in order to sign it and finally he shuffled around the Olympic torch whilst trying simultaneously to bathe in its reflected glow whilst not wishing to handle the beastly thing.  What a pathetic disgrace he is!

'Cameroon' had to hide away the empty champagne bottles and the party-poppers before trying to look prime ministerial for the cameras.  He was sensible enough not to gloat too much and was wise to dampen Tory expectations.  However, I still suspect (I cannot know) that this may have been a bad day for the Tories, or perhaps to put it accurately, a bad day for us.  Last year, when 'Broon' was in his ascendancy and threatening a general election, 'Dim Dave' was 'frit' and in desperation some of his apparatchiks actually began to talk in almost Thatcherite terms.  Then 'Broon' imploded and with an almost audible sigh of relief the 'Cameroons' went back to mouthing platitudes. Now, I don't blame the Tories for keeping their powder dry by not laying out detailed policies as hostages to Labour fortune, but I have a sinking feeling that more of the same is all that the 'Cameroons' can and will come up with if they think they are a dead cert to win.  If so, they won't last long and, perish the thought, some one a lot nastier will come out of the woodwork to give us all the change we yearn for.