In a palace of tits, he is one of the biggest!

I would always hesitate before picking a fight with an ex-SAS man but Andrew Robathan MP is an exception.  This particular tit also happens to be a Tory defence minister and given his military background he should at least have had the wit and intelligence to bow his head in respect to the memory of men who, arguably, fought in one of the most ferocious campaigns of the entire war - the arctic convoys to Russia.

 

But according to the report in The Daily Mail, this Tory tit replied to a question from a fellow Tory asking for urgent action to be taken to mint a medal for the last few survivors of the Arctic Convoy Campaign by insisting this country did not "'throw around' honours like the Libyan tyrant and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein".  Someone should remind this arrogant prick that even the bloody Russians gave our chaps medals for their service, and quite right, too, considering:

More than 3,000 UK sailors, who faced treacherous seas where temperatures plunged as low as -60c, died to keep the Soviet Union supplied and fighting on the Eastern Front.

I believe your survival chance was about a minute if you found yourself in the water, and 85 merchant vessels and 16 Royal Navy ships went down during the campaign.  There are only about 200 living veterans left, and this prize tit, no doubt reading a brief provided for him by some ignoramus in the Civil Service with a Third Class degree in Flower Arranging went on to say:

The intention post-war was not to cover everybody in medals. Medals in the UK mean something.  ‘Authoritarian regimes and dictators often throw around a lot of medals.  One can look, for instance, at North Korean generals who are covered in medal ribbon, or Gaddafi, or Saddam Hussein.  We have taken the view in this country, traditionally, that medals will only be awarded for campaigns that show risk and rigour.

"Campaigns that show risk and rigour"!  You unbelievable, pig-ignorant, sanctimonious prat, there was never a campaign in WWII that showed more "risk and rigour" than running convoys into Archangel.  No wonder the Tories are known as the 'Stupid Party'!

 

Comments

[dearieme]

"No wonder the Tories are known as the 'Stupid Party'": that's because they were so named before the Labour Party was invented. Obviously.

[David Duff]

Not always obvious to me, DM! Especially these days with the self-confessed 'heir to Blair' running things.

[Whyaxye]

I heard a survivor talking about this campaign on Radio 4's "PM" programme a couple of months back. He was an undemonstrative man, but described just about the worst conditions that it is possible for a human being to be in. Dante couldn't do it justice.

Robathan adds insult to injury by talking in these terms. His SAS record shows his courage in one respect, but I wonder whether he is brave enough to apologise? To be fair, he probably knows that he should.

[David Duff]

Yes, 'W', he has offered an apology of the "I didn't really mean etc, etc" but the only effective apology would be to order the immediate award of this campaign medal to the survivors.

[A K Haart]

Good post - skewer the swine. My father was in the Royal Navy during the war and although I know he served some time in the North Atlantic, it's a part of his war he hardly ever spoke of.

[David Duff]

I'm not surprised. It must have been like dealing with unexploded bombs - non-stop - for every minute as you chugged along at the speed of the slowest vessel never knowing when some U-boat was lining you up.

I remember as a boy waiting in my mother's office in the early '50s and meeting a sales rep who called on her. He was, I guess from his head, face and arms, totally hairless. Apparently he had served on a merchant ship on the Archangel run and every hair on his body fell off due to the strain.

Mind you, the U-boat crews were even worse off. I believe they had the highest casualty rates amongst any branch of any service in the European war.

[Tim Newman]

It's worth reading Alastair MacClean's HMS Ulysses for a superb fictional account of the North Arctic convoys. It was that book which dissuaded me from a career in the Navy.

That, and on an open day in Portsmouth I discovered the Royal Navy ships were outdated, badly designed, deathtraps which could be sunk by small-arms fire.

[David Duff]

Hello, Tim, good to hear from you. So, instead of serving in HMS Death Trap where you might have earned a medal, you went into the oil drilling business and ended up spending your life in some of the shitiest shit-pots of the world! Still, you earned 'loadsa' money. Good choice, in my view.