I DON'T GIVE AN MP FOR A FIG

I’ve said it once and I will go on saying it until I am, non-politically speaking of course, blue in the face. The answer to our problems is to sack all the MPs and let their precious fig trees run the country.

No, I am serious. We are paying employees of the Ministry of Defence a £40 million bonus as a reward for incompetence so massive that front line soldiers are being rewarded with redundancy and we have a bath tub Navy and an Air Force which has been grounded into the dust. Croesus football clubs owe countless millions in unpaid tax which they will avoid paying by going into administration. Yet libraries and public lavatories are being closed and cripples are suffering benefit cuts.

If you look over the past two centuries, our international problems were all caused by the death of Palmerston. His successors, to put it mildly, couldn’t organise a drink fest in a brewery.

In Palmerston’s day Britons were the pin ups of the Arabian world. Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence were only two of the Westerners whose word was law among the sheiks of Araby. The Balfour Declaration and The Sykes Picot treaty between Britain and France to share between us the Ottoman Empire, at the same time as we were promising Arabs Home Rule, were not the height of diplomatic achievement. When the Arabs found out what the Allies planned for them, Hussein and Ibn Saud started their own kingdoms, Arab nationalism was founded in a literary club run by American missionaries in Beirut and Saud enlisted the fanatical Wahabi tribe to help him launch Saudi Arabia. The India Mutiny and today’s terrorists are Wahabi inspired.

The Second World War was made inevitable by the Versailles Peace Treaty which imposed crippling financial reparations on Germany that in turn allowed the rise of fascism. The atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima AFTER the Japanese had offered to surrender unconditionally to frighten the Russians but the Cold War which crippled both East and West was based on faulty intelligence. Stalin had neither the intention nor the means to make war.

So let’s leave it to the trees. We just have to find some way to teach them to read. Not lots of books. Just “The Last Mughal” by William Dalrymple, ”Indian Summer” by Alex von Tunzleman, “Alliance” by Jonathon Tenby, “Europe’s Last Summer” and “A Peace to End All Peace” by David Fromkin, “The Peace Makers” by Margaret MacMillan, and “The Balfour Doctrine” by Jonathan Schneer in which he reveals that Britain’s support for Zionism was not the result of an inevitable process. In fact, shortly after Balfour’s promise to the Jews, the British government offered the Ottoman Empire the opportunity to keep Palestine and to continue to fly the Turkish flag over it.

Add to these “Hero”, Alexander Korda’s biography of Lawrence of Arabia, “Desert Queen”, Jane Wallach’s biography of Gertrude Bell and “Arabia Deserta”, Charles Doughty’s curious tour of Arabia, and finally “America and the Imperialism of Ignorance” by Andrew Alexander.

This is the most recent of the above publications, in which Alexander writes: “If the world came close to nuclear Armageddon on half a dozen occasions, and expended so much blood and treasure for 40 years against a threat that was never real, this raises serious doubt about the integrity and basic intelligence of a whole succession of Western governments and the political institutions for which they make such high claims.

Alexander argues that communism never posed an existential threat to the security of the West. Stalin’s primary aim was the preservation of his regime, and his only objective in Eastern Europe was to create a defensive buffer against any German advance. Not only did he lack the resources, the plans or the will to conquer Western Europe: he actively opposed communist revolutions around the world. If Western Europe was safe from Soviet attack, the United States — thousands of miles further away — was even safer.

Also on my booklist is “Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt,War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream”

by Gregg Jones.

A review in the New York Times reads:

President William McKinley insisted that it was the Filipinos’ “liberty and not our power, their welfare and not our gain, we are seeking to enhance.” The American people, however, flush with victory, had started to dream of expansion, even empire, and pressure mounted on McKinley not just to free Spanish colonies but also to lay claim to them. By 1900, an election year, McKinley had begun to give in, arguing that “territory sometimes comes to us when we go to war in a holy cause.” Addressing a campaign crowd in Nebraska, he asked, “Shall we deny to ourselves what the rest of the world so freely and justly accords to us?” The answer, as he knew it would be, was an instantaneous and uproarious “No!”

On nearly every page, there is a scene that feels as if it could have taken place during the Bush and Obama administrations rather than those of McKinley and Roosevelt. American troops are greeted on foreign soil as saviors and then quickly despised as occupiers. The United States triumphantly declares a victorious end to the war, even as bitter fighting continues. Allegations of torture fill the newspapers, horrifying and transfixing the country.

To force information from a Filipino mayor believed to have been covertly helping insurgents, American soldiers resort to what they call the “water cure.” After tying the mayor’s hands behind his back and forcing him to lie beneath a large water tank, they pry his mouth open, hold it in place with a stick and then turn on the spigot. When his stomach is full to bursting, the soldiers begin pounding on it with their fists, stopping only after the water, now mixed with gastric juices, has poured from his mouth and nose.

The problem about politicians is that they mean well. Cameron presenting a policy reminds me of my hound Taz who will offer me a toy, stand back, look at me intently and then if I don’t accept, take it away and bring another toy for me to accept.

Cameron, like Taz, is at his most winning when he is taking care of us. He insists on revolutionising the NHS though the professionals don’t want the bill and 85 per cent of patients think the NHS is marvellous. More recently he is going to cure public drunkenness by going round cities, collecting all the fighting drunks and putting them in a room until they sober up. One room per drunk. But there will be more drunks than cells. They will fight each other because that is what fighting drunks do. Or perhaps he plans it as a means of raising revenue by having bets on survivors? I just hope enough survive to clean the blood off the wall. Believe me, I’ve known drunks who play the Eton Wall Game using people as balls.

From valued blog reader Sarah Thomas comes this proof that ours isn’t the only asylum run by its inmates.

Toys cannot hold protest because they are not citizens of Russia, officials rule

Siberian authorities ban protest by 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego people, 20 model soldiers, 15 soft toys and 10 toy cars

There hadn't been many – indeed any – rallies like it before in Russia.Last month saw dozens of toys, from teddy bears to Lego figurines, standing out in the snow of a Siberian city with banners complaining about corruption and electoral malpractice.

At the time, Russian authorities in Barnaul declared the protest "an unsanctioned public event".

Now a petition to hold another protest featuring 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego people, 20 model soldiers, 15 soft toys and 10 toy cars has been rejected because the toys have been deemed not to be "citizens of Russia".

The Guardian

Rupert Murdoch letter to News International staff 'full of legal errors'

submitted by blog reader Alastair McQueen:

Rupert Murdoch is not legally obliged to hand over evidence of wrongdoing in his newspapers to the police, contrary to claims he made in a letter to News International staff, a leading human rights lawyer has said.

Geoffrey Robertson, QC, has said that Murdoch's letter in relation to this issue "is full of errors, both of law and history".

He added that the media baron was "ill-advisedly and unethically throwing away the shield that parliament gave to journalists in 1984 so they could protect their sources".

"On the contrary, the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act defines confidential journalistic material as 'excluded material', which police cannot seize at all, other than in a few cases such as official secrets, when they have to get an order from a circuit judge."

The Guardian

Muslims Declare Jihad on Dogs in Europe

A Dutch Muslim politician has called for a ban on dogs in The Hague, the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Islamic legal tradition holds that dogs are "unclean" animals, and some say the call to ban them in Holland and elsewhere represents an attempted encroachment of Islamic Sharia law in Europe.

Happily we take a different view.

Dolphins are so intelligent that they should be thought of as ‘non-human persons’ and given their own bill of rights, it is claimed.

A coalition of scientists, philosophers and animal welfare groups have come up with a declaration of dolphin rights which they hope will one day be enshrined in law.

This would stop them being kept in zoos and water parks, and being attacked by fishermen.

Whales would also be elevated above other animals by the list of rules, leading to whalers being classed as murderers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference heard in Vancouver.

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

We should have kept India and given away the UK.

For the first time in 83 years I have been head hunted...Well, not exactly head. Amtex have recruited me to test pilot new products. Colostomy bags. I wish there was some part of my life that wasn’t pure farce.

Marie Colvin was a fine reporter and a serial heroine. She volunteered for death and took her life in her hands on a daily basis.

Rami al Sayed was the eye of the Syrian Revolution. He used his camera phone to film the appalling genocide in Homs. In doing so he founded the Syrian Pioneer, online streaming coverage of the revolution.

He and Colvin were both killed on the same day, doing their job. Colvin dominated the Media for days: al Sayed merited two paragraphs in my paper.

AN ENGLISHMAN'S ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE........HIS CASTLE

Broadly speaking I am in favour of euthanasia, which is just as well because any day now it’s going to be compulsory. A boy genius called David Halpern who heads the “Nudge Unit” at Number 10 (that is the Behavioural Insight Team which no prime minister can afford to be without) has found out what is wrong with society.

It is us, the Artful Dodderers who insist on living in the houses we have slaved all our lives to pay for; who retire at 65 when we could go on working until our dotage, or, better yet, death. Dave points out there are 25 million empty bedrooms in Britain and they could more usefully be used as squats for the feral young.

Dave....DAVE........DAVE. Hold your foot up......

It’s a marvellous idea but there are just two tiny flaws. Bigger houses cost more than small ones so it’s unlikely the young people will be able to afford them, especially if old people hang on to their jobs. Twenty per cent of the young are unemployed at the moment. It will be far greater if the job market is clogged by Ancient Persons. So the money you will save by this bold initiative will be swallowed up by the increase in the job seekers’ allowance.

Oh, and Dave whilst I have your attention... you are worrying whether to send ammunition and weapons to the Syrians because you cling to the foolish belief that the Arab Spring is a good idea. It isn’t. Have you noticed what has happened in Tunisia where dawn first broke? Sharia law in all its unpleasantness. The Muslim Brotherhood is poised to take over Egypt and the rest of liberated Arabia. In Libya the new dawn is shining on the torturers and terrorists...

What’s that you are saying? ... Yes, I know the Brotherhood are all excellent chaps, devoted to cricket and acts of kindness to minorities. That is the argument which landed London with Ken Livingstone and Liverpool with Derek “Degsy” Hatton. Both cities elected good chaps to run them but they were soon kicked out when their parties won power.

Beyond our glad desert horizon is a very nasty tribe call the Wahabis, who already rule Saudi Arabia, the country you may have noticed that is bank-rolling the Arab Spring; nurtured bin Laden and inspired the Mad Mullahs who are corrupting British Muslims.

NEWS VIEWS

Nothing bothers Hipkin but Paul, our other gardener, is upset that his daughters teachers are telling them that if Cameron does not support the Euro, war in Europe is inevitable. My own concern is that schools are employing teachers with such boundless ignorance of the world around them. Germany doesn’t need a war to run Europe; Italy, Spain or Greece could not afford a war; and Eastern Europe is united in its willingness to be occupied. It must also be said that none of the above has proved adept at winning wars in the past. Britain? Ask Obama

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Angela Ripoff is concerned that football commentators are paid forty times more than she is. My own concern is that she is paid anything at all. But surely the argument should not be that women broadcasters are paid too little but that ALL broadcasters are paid far too much. I speak from thirty years experience when I claim that broadcasting is easy. Don’t just take my word for it. One of the finest broadcasters today, Libby Purves, made the same point in her autobiography. She claims that if you can read and speak you can broadcast. If there is another talent it is the ability to disguise the fact that you are reading a script or an autocue. Those brilliant off- the-cuff half hour programmes by dazzling wits usually take at least two hours to record and the “off-the-cuff” witticisms are responses to questions they have known about for days. The chairman’s witty comments are all scripted.

I used to get £1,000 a week for broadcasting to 25 million people, largely unscripted, and for around twenty years I took part in a weekly quiz in which no one knew the answers. Since I worked for less than a day a week I have always thought I was vastly overpaid.

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The F.A., an acronym which aptly describes it, is insistent that it would prefer a Briton to manage the English team. Wouldn’t he feel lonely in a sport where so many of the participants hail from distant shores?

A number of Sun journalists have been charged with bribing policemen, never a very difficult thing to do in my newspaper days. They have been arrested on the back of information provided by the Sun. Presumably the evidence is documentary and likely to be expense claims. If those claims did not name the recipient it would be very strange. How come then that no policemen have been arrested?

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A Belgian Court has ruled that “Tin Tin in the Congo” did not breach anti-race laws and a children’s commissioner has insisted that boys should be allowed to wear skirts at school in the interests of equality. He said ‘gender variant issues’ contravene the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

That will come as a relief to my doctor’s public school in Perth where the kilt is part of the uniform. Oddly enough, it is the ruling of Tam Bailey, the Children’s Commissioner for Scotland.

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MPs have spent nearly half a million renting a dozen fig trees to brighten their offices. The Health Minister tells us the NHS needs virtually rebuilding but 84 per cent of patients (including me) think he is wrong and rate their experience as excellent and very good.

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The West bankrupted us all building up defences against Russia, Recently published documents, says commentator Andrew Alexander in his new book “America, and the Imperialism of Ignorance” prove that Stalin had no intention of invading anywhere beyond the countries which gave Russia a buffer against Germany. Perhaps it would be wiser to keep the fig trees and get rid of the wooden tops.

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Once again I am indebted to my chum Dai Woosnam for drawing my attention to this obituary in the Economist.

NOBODY who met Jonathan Keith “Jack” Idema could doubt his self- belief. It hit you as forcefully as his rocky good looks, his patriotism and his prickliness. But who was the self he believed in?

Was it Jonathan, the rather spoilt single child from Poughkeepsie, fond of fast cars and prone to collecting speeding tickets, who was inspired by John Wayne in “The Green Berets” to join the American special forces? Was it Keith, the ex-soldier who went into business selling paintball equipment and then military clothing, before being convicted of defrauding 59 companies and sentenced to six years in prison? Was it Jack, the tough guy who rocked out to Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11th attacks to do humanitarian stuff, capture Osama bin Laden and work undercover, he said, for the Pentagon? Or was it Black Jack, the swashbuckling captain of a tour boat in Mexico who, before he succumbed to AIDS, saw himself as Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean”, flew a pirate flag from a minaret, held constant orgies and liked to play the score of “Apocalypse Now” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”?

No doubt it was all these selves, and others too, for Mr Idema was a man of many parts, and his lack of self-doubt helped him both to ignore setbacks and to gain the confidence of those who should have seen through him. The real and the imaginary were as one to him, just as right and wrong were. And he moved in a world peopled by others with as many fantasies, as few scruples and plenty of motives for inventing tall stories.

Some of the stories made Mr Idema seem almost lovably heroic. He preserved genetic material from his dog, for example, so that he could later be cloned. Sarge was, after all, no ordinary dog but a Tibetan shepherd that would jump out of aircraft with his soldier master and help sniff out bombs (when not scuba diving). Other tales cast Mr Idema in a more Bond-like guise. Thus in 1991 he told the FBI that among the detritus of the Soviet Union he had discovered a Russian mafia gang bent on smuggling suitcase-sized nuclear weapons out of Lithuania; no details could be revealed, though, because the FBI was riddled with KGB agents.

He could be a victim, too. Was he not the object of a vendetta by the FBI? And had his story not been stolen by Steven Spielberg for George Clooney in “The Peacemaker”? He sued Mr Spielberg, and others who had crossed him: journalists, an aid worker, a colonel, even his father.

Then there was his discovery of an al-Qaeda plot to kill Bill Clinton at a summit in Malaysia (the president wisely stayed away) and two other planned assassinations in Afghanistan. He claimed, too, to have fought with the Northern Alliance, America’s anti-Taliban allies in Operation Enduring Freedom. He had also secured a video of al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists undergoing training, which he sold to CBS and several other broadcasters.

Oh, what a lovely war

Journalists were not alone in being conned by Mr Idema, especially after he formed Task Force Sabre 7, a freelance group of American and Afghan vigilantes-cum-fortune-hunters who operated with impunity for a while after the Americans had ousted the Taliban in 2001. Afghanistan at this time was an adventure playground for thuggish American ex-servicemen employed or masquerading as security guards. They hung around the Mustafa hotel, wearing wraparound sunglasses and camouflage fatigues, drove about in big Toyotas and carried a small arsenal of weapons. They were not so much the dogs of war as the coyotes, dingoes and hyenas. Mr Idema was one of them.

Some of these people operated with the complSome of these people operated with the complicity of the American authorities, who had contracted out so many of the tasks once performed by soldiers. No wonder that on three occasions in 2004 Mr Idema found it easy to con the NATO force into providing him with support for raids on compounds. He even conned the Americans into taking into custody a captured Afghan alleged to be a Taliban loyalist. He was nothing of the kind.

Far more serious was the private prison run by Mr Idema and his friends. When it was discovered, complete with torture chamber and eight captives, bound and hooded, some hanging by their feet, the Afghans said Mr Idema was trying to extract information that would lead to bounties. He said it had all been okayed by the Pentagon, even by Donald Rumsfeld. But he was tried nonetheless and given ten years. After three, spent in extraordinarily comfortable conditions in the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi jail, he was inexplicably pardoned by President Hamid Karzai.

By this time, though, Mr Idema was beginning to look less plausible, his luck less inexhaustible. His loyal wife, Viktoria Runningwolf, had been abandoned, along with the Ultimate Pet Resort that he had helped her set up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And his past, including 36 arrests (though no convictions) in the 1980s and 1990s, had come to light. He was still wanted in North Carolina for impersonating a policeman and, despite claims to “superblood”, he was to contract AIDS. His life ended in a haze of vodka and cocaine, the self-belief perhaps slightly dented, the self-delusion as strong as ever.

PUBLISHERS BE DAMNED

I could never find it in my heart to dislike Napoleon after I learned that he shot a publisher called Palme. Palme seemed an apposite name for a trade symbolised by the outstretched palm. It’s OK now because my two publishers are old friends, newspapermen I have known for years, and my royalties go to charities. My earlier publishers were monsters, almost without exception. Always excepting from this condemnation the lady publisher who reads this blog and is a pearl among women And as the thriving business in remaindered books shows, not very good at their jobs either..

Books have been the mainstay of my life. I have a book room in the garden and there are bookshelves in most rooms in the house. I completely understood a blind friend who said she still drew comfort from being surrounded by books, though she could no longer read them. I am comforted too, surrounded by them but I still prefer to read my Kindle.

That is even true of Dickens. I have an early limited edition of his works into which are bound first state engravings by Cruickshank and his other illustrators and the covers of the original part issues.

Nevertheless I am reading Edwin Drood on my Kindle. I have not much patience with people who say they prefer “bound” books because of the smell and the touch of the pages. I would hate to think people bought my books to sniff them.

Dickens is my favourite “classical “author. His novels are not just stories. They are slices of a life which seems to be already happening when you open the book and will continue after you close it. He is not very good writing about women but his portrayal of male characters is equal, in my view, to Shakespeare. His plots, of course, are far more original. Claire Tomalin, a self appointed guru of the poor man, doubts whether children have the attention span to tackle Dickens. What rubbish. Dickens wrote and published his novels in digestible instalments precisely to attract people with short attention spans. I prefer to think he was a greater authority on Dickens than either Tomalin or Simon Callow who have books of their own to peddle.

I am sure Tomalin hates e-books. Kindle ‘deniers’ are the sort of people who prefer magic lanterns to the cinema and enjoy driving vintage cars rather than new ones - much superior feats of engineering.

One of the advantages of my Kindle is that I have been able to download Jane Austen, Dickens, Montaigne, Herodotus, Homer and most poets free of charge and, until recently, even contemporary works were much cheaper. It costs so much less to produce them. But alas, the outstretched Palmes of today are itching and there is now little difference between the price of many e-books and paperbacks. Nice little earner for the publishers but there has been no increase in the royalties the authors get.

So I am for Kindle and am putting my books where my mouth is. I have three books coming out this year witn Bewrite Books and they will only be available as e-books.

Having said that, I still buy books I cannot get on Kindle. At the moment I am reading “Hemingway’s Boat” by Paul Hendrikson, the only half way decent biography of that great writer, and a delightful memoir, “With Hemingway; a year in Key West” by Arnold Samuelson, a fan who worked for him as a boat sitter.

It is a given in the book trade that for fifty years after their death authors disappear and I suspect one of the reasons is the warts-and-all quality of their post-mortem biographies. Eager relatives push to publish manuscripts they find in an author’s desk drawers; books that the author had abandoned because he realised they were rubbish. The more I read these biographies of Hemingway the less I liked the man. He came across as a bully, a drunk, a boaster, a false friend and worst of all as uber-butch.

He was all of those things. Any author is a kaleidoscope of personalities. It goes with the territory and has everything to do with his writing but if you call in a builder you don’t do it on the grounds of his social skills otherwise your house would fall down.

Hemingway’s public persona was, it turns out, a desperate attempt to hide his homosexuality. The clues were there. As an infant his batty mother dressed him in girl’s clothes, as a young man he accepted an Italian holiday paid for by a homosexual heir to the Palmolive fortune Every other journey he made became the raw material of his writing but when he returned from his Italian holiday he refused even to speak about it. His favourite son, Gigi, was a transsexual who died, a woman, in a Mexican gaol. “Hemingway’s Boat” is the only biography of him that reveals, sympathetically, this secret he tried so desperately to hide which explains so much.

Samuelson was a young would-be writer who crossed America from Minneapolis to Key West riding a box car in the hope that Hemingway would spare him a few moments to talk about writing. In the event Hemingway’s hospitality was far greater than Samuelson dreamed. He stayed with the family for nearly a year, was paid a dollar a day to guard Hemingway’s boat, Pilar, and travelled with Hemingway, his kids and his wife Pauline all over Cuba. In his book he passes on the advice about writing which he was given. Buy the book and there will be no need to waste time on writers’ courses. As a bonus you will learn a good deal about fishing and about the real Hemingway.

WE ARE ALL TERRORISTS NOW

From Reuters: "Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday. These extremists, sometimes known as ‘sovereign citizens’, believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.”

And the most epic line ever written: "The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard."

IF YOU CAN HELP SOMEBODY.......

London Olympic tickets (11 million, weighing 16 tons) will be printed by an American firm and then air-freighted 4,500 miles to the UK. Jenny Jones, London Assembly Green Party member, said: “It is the sort of decision that makes a joke of the greenest games promise. British businesses could deliver from just down the road.”

“Typical of our country. The yanks would never give them to us,” said Tony Hallet whose firm prints tickets for the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.

INNOCENT TILL PROVED GUILTY

It was right to sack England football Captain John Terry before he stands trial, commentators tell us, because Chris Huhne resigned from the Cabinet before his trial for perverting the course of justice.

????????

Terry was sacked. Huhne volunteered.

Who wants to be a million Sir

In my ideal world I would have been Regimental Sergeant Major in the Black Watch (RHR) or a grumpy classicist in a Cambridge college. I would never in my wildest dreams have been a banker. Indeed for most of my real life I have fought bank managers and I loathe money so deeply that I get rid of as much as I can as quickly as I can.

For all that, I cannot see why there was such a fuss over the bonus sought for the RBS Chief Executive. He was going to get a maximum of £2,000 in cash and a million shares, half of which will go to the taxman. If you are lumbered with devalued shares in a debt ridden and failing bank you are going to do your damnedest to make a success of it.

When I got £2,000 in merit money over the years I was with the Mirror I used to wonder if I got it because the Mirror secretly felt I was not being paid enough. In the event I worked hard because on the Mirror you got sacked if you didn’t. I venture to think that doesn’t happen to bankers. But who are we to complain at their behaviour? Tube workers have turned down a £500 bonus just for doing their job in the Olympic weeks. Not because they believe bonuses are immoral but because they do not believe it is enough when 500 Docklands Light Railway workers are to get up to £2,500 simply for agreeing to work without disruption during the Olympics. DLR staff will get £900 bonuses - and will also be guaranteed five hours of overtime a week, for which they will be paid 75 per cent above their normal shift rate. In my youth in Doncaster miners got an extra shift if they went to work on Mondays.

No wonder the thrifty German worker doesn’t want his hard-earned cash to be hurled at the spendthrift Greeks and Spaniards and the Irish, whose Chancellor Enda Kenny admitted, went mad and lost the run of themselves buying up all around them while he kept an eye on the purse strings and avoided the Gucci bags and the SUVs, the holiday homes in Turkey and the shopping trips to New York.

Clearly the German have not yet bought into Merkel’s plan for a new German empire but that may change. This week the Berlin opera was forced to abandon plans for a production on his birthday of Hitler’s favourite Wagner opera.Watch this space

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The evils of TV are under debate. Evils? I dread to think what retirement would have been like without it. I have been entranced this week by a series on the lost civilizations of Africa. As a child Africans were the painted savages who boiled missionaries and chased Tarzan. Only later did I learn about the “lost” civilisation of Benin with its bronzes which were equal to the Florentine masters and Benin, I now learn, was one of many.

The twin evils the human race is heir to have been inquisition and acquisition. It wasn’t curiosity killed the cat but it certainly helped and we pillaged the world with an enthusiasm that made a Santa Claus out of Autolycus, that snapper up of trifles.

Both vices led us to intrude disastrously into the lives of the indigenous people of Africa and the” New” World. Over centuries they had worked out a way of life in which they flourished. We brought the” benefits” of Western civilisation to them by trying to wipe them out. The subject people were quick learners. In Egypt this week five people were killed in riots protesting against a football riot that killed 75 people. In other parts of that basket case continent we have enabled deaths in tribal wars to escalate into millions by replacing the assegai with the Kalashnikov.

We killed uncounted American Indians by selling them blankets impregnated with killer diseases, introducing them to alcohol and resettling them in areas where their survival was impossible. The less said about the genocide of aboriginal people the better. Black chieftains introduced slavery by selling their own people, but only to satisfy western markets. How much better the world would have been if Columbus and Raleigh and Livingstone had stayed at home.

From our lofty perch we look down on the corruption of the countries to which we brought the fine qualities of which we British were so proud.

What shining examples we are. A Cabinet minister is charged with perverting the court of justice. Top civil servants have managed to avoid paying tax or insurance for years, but do not hold your breath waiting for them to be similarly charged.

If there is a Creator, we are told, you can tell what HE/SHE/IT thinks about money because of the people H/S/I gives it to. Has anyone watched a Nature documentary and failed to remark how beautiful the wild things are - and then looked in the mirror at the comic creation which is mankind?

I read this week about a treatise, “Divina Proportione” (1509), in which the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli echoed fashionable opinions of the day by declaring that our body measurements express “every ratio and proportion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of nature.” Not the first thought that springs to my mind. Apparently he got the idea from a Roman engineer Vitruvius who insisted that a temple could not be built properly “unless it conforms exactly to the principle relating to the members of a well-shaped man.”

All I can say is that he had never shopped in a Fenland supermarket.

NEVER SAY YOU WEREN’T WARNED

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote
themselves largesse from the public treasury.

From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates
promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result
that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by a dictatorship…

The average of the world’s greatest civilisations has been two
hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:-
From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great
courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependence; from dependence back to bondage.”

–Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813)– Recalled by Blog reader Peter Reece

Delighted to read this glowing review of my chum William P. Cross’s book in the New York Times;

“...................This account differs somewhat from that in a biography of Lady Almina that came out last year. William P. Cross’s “Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon” tells of a woman who traded her money for a prestigious but arid marriage, took lovers young and old (including her husband’s best man) and burned through Rothschild’s dowry, leaving her feckless son enraged and penniless when he finally inherited the estate. Lady Almina did, in fact, open her home to the wounded, and went on to open a series of tony nursing homes (and discreet abortion clinics) for the rich and famous. But the homes never paid for themselves, and she and her second husband, a military officer named Ian Dennistoun, whom she married a few months after Lord Carnarvon’s death, ended up in bankruptcy court. Almina died in greatly reduced circumstances in Bristol in 1969, at the age of 93.”

Budget? BODGET

People who pay cash in hand to tradesmen are “diddling” the economy and diverting money from hospitals and schools. So says, Dave Hartnett, the country’s most senior taxman.

Let’s see now. That is the man who let Tesco off millions and had a mountain of meals on Big Business that Red Rum couldn’t jump over.

Listen up, Dave. The Government owes £1 trillion. Used, presumably, to pay £9.3 billion for the Olympic Games (including £23 million for the opening ceremony which stars a procession of underpaid nurses), plus several millions a year for upkeep of the sites; £32 billion for the HS2 High Speed train; heaven knows how many billions in bonuses for the bosses of nationalised banks; £1 billion to shore up the Houses of Parliament against chronic subsidence, its moral subsidence remaining unchecked; £150 billion to replace lost revenue on London properties placed offshore; £7.6 million owed by foreigners who reneged on their NHS bills and more millions lost on overseas students who renege on university loans; £400 million aid to Pakistan to be spent on protecting women; and £32 million to demolish Middlesbrough Arts Centre that nobody wanted.

There could be 750,000 (one in five) fraudulent council and housing association tenancies in England, vastly outstripping the Government’s estimate of 50,000.The cost to the taxpayer could be as much as £13.5 billion a year.

MPs get a £5 million subsidy on meals and drinks. BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten wants management NOT to cut £15m from the budget of the BBC's 40 local radio stations. The BBC spent more than £11 million ferrying staff around Britain and putting them up in flats and hotels during the past two years as part of its efforts to move production outside London. The £2 billion move to Media City in Salford has resulted in only 16 new jobs, eight of them temporary.

We are not alone. “Free” Scotland faces a bill of £140 billion as the cost of independence.

That’s life in austerity UK but hold your foot up...

If we are borrowing so much, surely there is more than enough left to buy 85-year-old Our Gracious and her 90-year-old ailing husband a £60 million yacht? Just think of the peerages it would earn. By the same token, two thirds of councils have slashed their budgets for elderly care homes and a third of our old people cannot afford basic household items. Wouldn’t Our Gracious, who promised to dedicate Her Life to Her People, prefer it if we spent the £60 million on caring for poverty stricken and sick pensioners? Look after the “trillions”, Dave, and the “pennies” will look after themselves.

There will always be an England - which when you see how it has turned out is a pity. There won’t always be a Scotland, which would be no bad thing, but the greatest loss would be Great Britain.

Great Britain came about as a result of an ill advised Scottish overseas venture. In 1698 William Paterson tried to launch a Scottish Trading Colony in the Americas. Its failure bankrupted the Company of Scotland and the Scottish nation. At Queen Anne’s urging, England paid off the Scottish debt. The price was joining the Union as a junior partner. England did not want it because it meant accepting Scottish MPs and the Scots did not want it because they valued their independence. The Scots Establishment can hardly be blamed for trying to dissolve the partnership. Sensibly the Scots population still don’t want it, though on this side of the Border there is overwhelming support. It is the Establishment which opposes it.

Perhaps they fear the solution which Salmond really wants. An independence where Scotland gets the oil but England continues to pay the bills. The last things the SNP wants are the debts of the Royal Bank of Scotland, compulsory conversion to the Euro, ownership of the bankrupt ship yards. They are keeping the nuclear submarine base because we cannot afford to build another in England.

Much is made of Voltaire’s view that Edinburgh was the most civilised city in Europe. So it was, in the middle class drawing rooms of that city. The tartan myth was invented there, practically single-handedly by Walter Scott, a bankrupt novelist with delusions of grandeur. He invented the Highlands, though much of the area was aboriginal, living at a subsistence level which shocked Dr Johnson.

A more recent Boswell, Neil Oliver, a young man with long hair and a short memory, has recently dominated our TV screens with a history of Scotland. That is a contradiction in terms. The history of Scotland is a recital of betrayal of a subdued lower class by its leaders. The chiefs sold their clans to the English; the Jacobite revolution began the decimation of the Highlands which the Clearances completed. Prebble in his history of Culloden writes of the clansmen, many of them mere boys, who were forced to fight for far-from-bonnie Prince Charlie, a half Polish drunk and wife beater. In the Clearances what was left of the clansmen were exported to make room for sheep and sporting estates.

Good came out of Evil. It was those expatriate Scots who made the Empire work. A combination of Scottish industry and English luck was irresistible. But then, as now, as Sam Johnson pointed out, “The noblest prospect a Scotsman sees is the High Road that leads to England.”

They colonised the Inns of Court and Grub Street whilst the English filled the ranks of the Highland regiments. When I joined the Black Watch (RHR), a CSM, two corporals and a piper came from the same Manchester suburb as I did. Most Scotsmen went into Corps where they learned a useful trade. My Scottish relatives were horrified at my choice. A shrewd bunch, I doubt if they are members of the SNP.

I was interested to see that the gaffed Salmond wants to claim the Scottish regiments as his defence force. Fine by me. I am sick of seeing Jocks wasted in unnecessary wars but there is a slight problem. Any time now the MOD axe is going to fall on another highland regiment because they are having trouble recruiting and are seriously under strength. So much trouble in fact that they are now recruiting in Fiji and the ranks are filling with exotics from faraway places. They are still Jocks, of course, because when you join a highland regiment you join a family and they are “bonnie fechters”, witness the medals they win. Will Fiji, one wonders, get a vote in the Salmond ruffle?

DON'T BE ALARMED

can never work out whether my lawfully wedded is consciously funny or whether she provokes hilarity through some genetic mesalliance.

This week we have been setting the burglar alarm. Like most things she does, this begins with her unshakeable belief that all things are sensate and – worse - malevolently so.

Thus the burglar alarm has its eye on us. It waits to mock us if we put a foot wrong. It knows if we are trying to trick it by remaining in the house when it has been set. It is not enough for my lawfully wedded to set it, step outside and return. I have to put on my duffle coat, the dog has to put on its body warmer and we all have to troop outside. The alarm is set and gives of the self important bleep which tells the world that guard mounting is taking place. All well and good.

Well, no, it isn’t because it continues to bleep as we stand shivering on the garden path. It knows, in my lawfully wedded’s view, that we are attempting a subterfuge. It senses we are standing in a shivering knot on the other side of the front door and continues to bleep to warn us it knows exactly what we are up to and it is one too many to be so easily duped.

So we go in again and remove the dog’s lead, have a cup of tea and go to the lavatory. Over the day this becomes a ritual, much to the confusion of the dog who cannot work out why its daily walk has been shortened to two strides down the path. He whimpers uneasily. My lawfully wedded feels she must reassure with a lengthy explanation of what we are doing and why. None of which the dog understands, even when she repeats it. We go in and out so often we resemble the old couple in the weathervane.

A well ordered family at this point would summon “Tich”, our Italian electrician. No use. “Tich” is the son of a Sicilian POW whom centuries of Mafia domination have taught wariness. When he hears the sound of our alarm, by Pavlovian response he switches off his mobile and hides.

When we finally reach him he is totally baffled but he does tell us there is no need to leave the house to test the alarm. He says you just have to stay still. No problem because by this time I am frozen stiff.

What is particularly provoking is that the house is only rarely empty and then only for the length of a statutory dog walk, which is the only time I ever leave it.

Trips? Not on your life. My lawfully wedded joined my daughter on a visit to the da Vinci exhibition. I stayed at home and was not even safe there. As regular readers will know, I am too fat to fit into a scanner so that my inside is still a mystery to the medical profession.

My wife returned from her visit to Town triumphantly waving a copy of the Evening Standard which told how London hospitals are coping with the obese. They are sending them to London Zoo to put them through giant scanners which will take elephants. It is not very nice that when one’s lawfully wedded has home thoughts from abroad elephants spring to mind.

Holidays????? I assume you are joking since wherever one looks liners are overturning. It’s obvious why. They are built like me. There is not enough below the plumb line to keelhaul Tom Thumb and a great deal too much above the line just waiting to tip over.

In any case I hate cruises. The nearest I have been to one is an overnight voyage to Sweden. I had more fun in an army prison and a great deal more freedom. Cruise ships are S.S. Stalag Lufts with punishments like deck quoits and dancing.

Not that there is much fun at home what with the burglar alarm, the Olympic Games and the Diamond Jubilee. The London Olympics will be a health minefield according to the Lancet. We can look forward to stampedes, heatstroke and mass infections. We are all paying a fortune to get cholera.

Queen Victoria refused to pay the cost of her diamond jubilee in 1897. As Arthur Bigge, the Queen's private secretary, told the Treasury, "the Queen may abandon the whole celebration if she finds that the Privy Purse is likely to be called upon to again pay as in 1887."

He continued: “Her Majesty is not personally desirous of any festivities. They are going to take place solely because the nation evidently expects them. It would certainly be ungenerous to mulct the Queen for the cost."

As it was the Prince of Wales cut the Diamond Jubilee celebrations to just 10 days so he could go to "an important Newmarket week". The queen refused to offer bed and board to foreign royalty: they had to be put up by the public purse.

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Bigge wrote: "The Queen has spoken so very strongly to me about what Her Majesty had to pay 10 years ago for the last Jubilee and everything has gone so well that I shall indeed be sorry if Her Majesty is annoyed by a disagreeable finale to her efforts to please her subjects and the world at large."

In the end Parliament agreed to fund the whole party.

Oh that Our Majesty would take the same view. No such luck. An MP in pursuit of a knighthood has suggested we bribe her with a new Royal Yacht. It’s not the cost I worry about. I have turned down one invitation to party on the royal yacht when it visited Holyhead. A second refusal might block me forever from the Birthday Honours.

I wasn’t being anti-monarchical. Some years ago a dining club of which I was a member had a function on a liner in Liverpool where I was awakened from a post-prandial drunken slumber by a Lascar steward. Convinced we had sailed, I believed I had been white slaved, bound for the harem of some pederastic Eastern potentate. No foot of mine has touched a deck since.

I DON'T CARE TO WHOM GLASGOW BELONGS

I am not surprised that twice as many people in England and Wales than in Scotland would vote for Scottish Independence. Hell is being forced to listen to James Naughtie interviewing Alex Salmond about it. Independence? I would even give them the oil so long as they promised to march those particular blue bonnets back over the border. What is it about Salmond that reminds one of Harry Lauder and that endless line of unfunny Scottish comedians? He has an air of a man in a polystyrene kilt about to break out with “I Love a Lassie”.

Of far greater moment was the admission about the Olympic Park. The former Mayor of London, newt fancier Ken Livingstone, you will recall, valued the 500 acres including stadium, aquatic centre, press HQ and development land at two billion pounds. He promised the money would repay the Treasury and the National Lottery. A more expert valuation this week estimated its worth as less than £160 million, a 75 per cent drop. One developer warns that the park will need hundreds of millions of pounds, a huge drain on the taxpayer, for any regeneration scheme to work.

I do hope it was nothing I said.

Not the only money worry for Lord Coe. He must have congratulated himself for the wheeze of a 50 pence Olympic piece which carried an explanation of the offside rule in football. According to some experts, the explanation is wrong. The coin shows two players, one apparently offside and the other onside. Because of an intricacy to the rule introduced in 1995, both players could be considered onside, some say. Not so, insists Neil Wolfson, a referee and coin designer. I don’t know who is right but I question the PR sense of designing a coin with a subject that has been provoking boring arguments since the days football was played with pigs’ bladders by players who were overpaid at £11 a week.

Many of you share my concern about The Games. Blog reader Perry discloses that Olympic organisers have set out social media rules for the 70,000 Games Maker volunteers, including a ban on pictures or posts featuring backstage VIPs.

Old broadcasting chum Allan Barham writes: “In one radio comedy show of the time I remember a government minister going abroad and saying to another minister, ‘Don't worry, if anything goes wrong just hold a festival.’ I suppose holding a festival is a better distraction than holding another war.“

Not much cheaper, though.

My cousin Jean had an interesting story to tell about an earlier, more dignified Games:

“I am a volunteer at a local charity shop. Another volunteer's father, Harold Langley, trained at Sparkhill Harriers in Birmingham. He won a medal at Much Wenlock in 1923 (where a earlier Game was held), represented GB in the 1923 Olympics in Paris and was a judge at the 1948 Olympics. He was a true athlete. He was given a blazer depicting the emblem of the Games. He used to put his hand over the emblem because he was so modest, and certainly made no money from it.

“’His daughter has no children and she generously gave me his scrapbook and numerous photographs of his achievements and his races, including at Much Wenlock. I had relatives living in MW and my cousin's husband put me in touch with the secretary (an ex teacher) of the Society. They were over the moon with the photographs and the scrapbook is being revived professionally by an archivist. They have also received a grant to extend their museum and I imagine the town of 2,500 inhabitants will be awash with visitors in the summer. “

On Jean’s advice I bought “The British Olympics” and was not surprised to find this profitable spin off of the British Games was printed in Croatia.

The notion of the Games being a tradition handed down from Ancient Greek takes a bit of swallowing. Greece was overrun by the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century after a thousand years as part of the Roman Empire. Tourkokratia (Turkish Rule) lasted until 1821, by which time the entire Greek aristocracy who claimed ancient Hellenic ancestry had been wiped out.

Like most other things, the Games was a British invention that was taken over by foreigners intent on making a swift buck. The first British Olympics were held on Dover’s Hill in the Vale of Evesham in the 1620s and still continue to this day. The original competitions included shin kicking, single stick fighting, bear baiting and a tug of war. Like most wars they were caused by religion. Robert Dover who founded them was a lawyer and intended them as a fight between “puritans and pleasure seekers“. He was firmly on the pleasure seekers’ side. He even wore a suit of King James I’s cast-off clothing, borrowed from a friend who was groom of the bedchamber to the king.

The Olympic Games at Much Wenlock in Shropshire were a spin off organised in 1850 to “improve the morals of the working class”. Events included football and cricket matches and a race for old women with a prize of a pound of tea. The founder was a local doctor William Penny Brookes.

Among the early visitors was Pierre de Coubertin who went on to found the Olympics as we know them today. He admitted: “The Olympic Games which modern Greece has been unable to restore....is due not to a Hellene but to Dr W.P. Brookes.”

Why, one wonders, are we loading ourselves with debt, traffic jams and bomb attacks by importing a foreign version of an English original ?