A POLICEMAN'S LOT IS A LOT MORE THAN HE DESERVES

Hipkin, my archetypal Fenman gardener, delivers papers round his village and has done so for many years. He has a been startled to be told by his employers that he must prove he is English by sending a copy of his birth certificate to their head office. As it turns out it is a legal requirement

The sad collapse of England is a rare example of a tragedy which is being transmuted into farce. A subject for Gilbert and Sullivan, rather than Macaulay. There was a time when our policemen were said, despite the evidence, to be wonderful. Now they are a gun happy mob whose incompetence astounds and are apparently above the law. They mowed down an innocent man who was carrying a chair leg amongst other unlikely targets. Man eating lions are tranquillised with blow darts: why not human beings?

We learn of misinformation from the Metropolitan Police to evade blame for the the tragedy of Tomlinson, a homeless alcoholic who was transformed in death, according to a relative, into a much loved member of a family. Not loved enough to be provided with a home, By coincidence, this happens at a time when we are recalling Hillsborough when South Yorkshire Police Force doctored evidence to evade responsibility.

Manchester police boast gun crime in the city dropped by 97 per cent when they arrested the leaders of one gang. Why were they not arrested years ago? Or indeed shot? Luckily for them, they carried guns and not chair legs.

Perhaps most frightening at all is the fact that planning a demonstration is an arrestable offence. One remembers Nazism and Fascism had similar laws.

But for a truly Gilbertian plot what better than the case of Commissioner Quick on-the--draw-of-his-pension? Parenthetically, have our security services not noticed that outside Downing Street stands a cameraman with a lens powerful enough to pick up typescript, an ability he demonstrated earlier when he photographed a cabinet minister's papers? Difficult to believe that this is accidental happy snapping rather than a nice little earner.

Act Two of this Gilbertian farce was the hurried raid on a number of Pakistani students who, according to some inspired leaks, were within days of blowing up a shopping centre and a night club. MOD should co-opt them. They were apparently going to bring this about without using explosives, of which none has been found.

I look forward to Act Three. The terrorist plot is now seen to be aspirational rather than actual. In other words, there wasn't one. In consequence, the students are likely to be deported rather than charged, but even this is problematic because if they were returned home THEY MIGHT BE TORTURED. If, as we were told, they planned to kill and maim hundreds of innocent shoppers that would be no bad thing. If they didn't, why are they being harassed at all?

I remain convinced that Wahabi dominated Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the enemy. Not Iraq and Afghanistan. At time like this it is worth remembering that MI5 and the whole secret service was the invention of a thriller writer, E.Phillips Openheim. Aided by a mad Press Baron, “Nutty” Northcliffe.

WORD OF THE CENTURY

Despite the daily breast slapping of our celebrity ambassadors I fear The Word of the Century is not 'Caring'. How about 'Massacre'?

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did their best to wipe out the native American, the Aborigine and the Maori but they lacked not only our expertise - they just didn’t have the technology.

We invented the flame gun, the atom bomb, germ warfare, bombing defenceless women and children from the air.........Oh, we are the devil’s golden boys.

There was no sense of race discrimination about us. We slaughtered Jews; Chinese and Russian peasants by the millions; street children in South America; anyone we could lay our hands on in the Balkans. Blacks almost anywhere. We weren’t fussy. If there were no outsiders handy, we slaughtered each other. We invented the death camp. We owe to that Icon of Peace, Mandela, the blazing necklace of a rubber tyre. In World War One when our soldiers were reluctant to shoot that stranger, the enemy......we shot them.

In the fifteenth century a woman called Christine the Pisan wrote a book called The Art of War. It was an instant bestseller. No prince planned a campaign without it. In it, she pleaded with them not to harm the peasants. She wrote: “They would full gladly always live in good peace and they seek no more. So ought they then ,as it seems to me, be free thereof....because their estate is not to meddle in war...and have no other office but, poor innocents, go to plough and work on the land and keep the beasts.”

Fugh. We will have no truck with that sort of rubbish in these enlightened times. “Bring me your hungry and your homeless......and I will wipe them out.”

No. Massacre is my nap selection, with anything to come on just plain evil.

BEST BOOK IN THE LAST TWENTY YEARS.

If there was a best novel in the past twenty years I must have missed it. In a recent poll that accolade went to Umberto Eco’s “Name of the Rose”. A good enough read, I grant you; dripping with meaning, though basically about a search for dirty books in a monastery. All gloom and, in the inevitable film, a spectacularly unshaven Sean Connery. Bond in bondage, desperate for flagellation. All shadows and sweaty monks. Monks and mayhem. A sort of Brother Cadfael in a Bolognese sauce. I would have thought “Birdsong” by Sebastian Faulks more worthy of the title. None, of course, comes anywhere near Howard Spring's “Fame is the Spur”.

I was happier about the choice of biography. Juang Chang’s merciless “Wild Swans” was much more successful than Eco in showing how evil man can be if he really puts his mind to it. Mandela’s biography, predictably, came second as it would have done even if no one had written one. Ackroyd’s “Dickens” came third..

I would have put it first, though, as Ackroyd justly remarked, Dickens’ best biography was in his novels. I thought the prologue the best thing ever written about him, though I seem to remember being embarrassed at Ackroyd’s conversations with his subject.

A later guide than I read would no doubt have placed his masterly transcription of the Canterbury Tales high in the list but I certainly won’t quarrel with the Book Guide’s choice of Ellerman’s Oscar Wilde. I prefer biography to fiction. Biography, indeed life, can be fanciful in ways that fiction wouldn’t dare.

John Julius Norwich’s account of murderous Byzantium, the bad empress Theodora, and chapter headings like “The Emperor who lost his nose”alone would entitle his three volumes on that Empire to a place at the top of the history list. He prefers he original three volume edition to the collecte edition from which as he crossly observed to me, all the jokes had been removed. JJ has ben described as the most intelligent man in London. How different he is in lightly wearing that scholarship to the dreadful and ubiquitous Stephen Fry who eagerly shares his vast accumulation of facts with us, I would also include in any list “The History of the Cavalry”, which was the work of JJ's cousin and my old friend the Marquess. of Anglesey and won him the Chesney Gold Medal, the highest accolade of a military historian.

But there I go making lists.

INTERVIEWING

I did my first published interview on VE Day in 1945 and since then scarcely a day has gone by when I haven't done at least one, for radio or for newspapers. Even my non-fiction books are extended interviews, either with people or other books.

But it took me forty years to become an interviewer. And then it was an accident. I fell asleep in the middle of an interview for a Radio 4 series.

Since nobody noticed, and the woman I was interviewing was a Russian Czarist princess with a fascinating story, I said nothing. And for the first and only time in my life the office was inundated with letters praising my interviewing technique. At last, they all said, an interviewer who isn’t for ever interrupting.

It flies in the face of received radio wisdom. On courses, young interviewers are told top keep answers short. Otherwise listeners get bored. This is rubbish.

At its best, an interview is the spur in the flank of a monologue. The interviewer is the jockey - a sort of horseman of the puckered lip. But if you can see him, even in your mind's eye, he has failed.

On Radio Wales, Vincent Kane in his prime was a superlative interviewer. He always left space for answers to his questions. So did a man called Gerry Monte. And there have been others. Like Michael Parkinson and, quirky though he was, Ray Gosling and (though not on Today) John Humphrys. But neither Paxman nor Naughtie qualify since both are desperate to show their own knowledge of a subject.

Now the interviewer is the star. His questions swirl like a matador's red cape as he taunts the bull in a suit of too bright lights.........I do sometimes wish they could fall asleep and give the other chap a chance.

We don't get many interviews. What we get are cross-talk acts between John Humphrys and various elephantine politicians; even crosser talk acts between Paxman’s eyebrows and ever more politicians. But they never seem to elicit any information.

Are the broadcast media right to concentrate almost exclusively on politics? I know it is cheap but I don't know anyone who listens enthralled. Am I wrong?

Perhaps I am also wrong in believing that interviewing should not be part of the entertainment industry, which it plainly is.

I would have thought that if satellite news bulletins and the barely live five proved anything they prove there isn’t enough news about - or news they can afford to get- to nourish a rolling news coverage. The reason the first popular papers included features was that there wasn’t enough news to fill a paper big enough for people to want to buy.

In the old days, BBC announcers would sometimes come on, announce the nine o'clock news and say “There is no news today. Good night!“

Isn’t news just another fix, anyway? We are used to getting it at stated times, like the six o'clock gin of happy memory; and we think we can't do without it.

Isn’t it even more depressing that we are now copying things like the Oompah Whimpering show where you manufacture news by bringing together stage villains or antagonists and inviting them to fight whilst the audience boos and cheers?

A READER WRITES

One of my oldest friends, Brian Hitchen CBE, ex paratrooper and former editor of the Sunday Express writes;

Very soon, you will see a great many people wearing Red every Friday. The reason?  Englishmen and women who support our troops used to be called the 'silent majority'. We are no longer silent, and are voicing our love for Country and home in record breaking numbers. We are not organized, boisterous or over-bearing. We get no liberal media coverage on TV, to reflect our message or our opinions. Many English people, like you, me and all our friends, simply want to recognize that the vast majority of  Britain supports our troops. Our idea of showing solidarity and support for our troops with dignity and respect starts this Friday and continues each and every Friday until the troops all come home, sending a deafening message that every Briton who supports our men and women afar will wear something red. By word of mouth, press, TV -- let's make Great Britain on every Friday a sea of red much like a homecoming football team. If every one of us who loves this country will share this with acquaintances, co-workers, friends, and family, it will not be long before Britain is covered in RED and it will let our troops know the once 'silent' majority is on their side more than ever, certainly more than the media lets on. The first thing a soldier says when asked 'What can we do to make things better for you?' is...'We need your support and your prayers'... Let's get the word out and lead with class and dignity, by example; and wear something red every Friday. ENDS

NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS

The Welsh were invented by an ancestor of mine, a Pictish chieftain called Cunnedda. Nothing very grand about that. He is only an ancestor by marriage and I share him with most north Walians. If they took the trouble, most Welsh people could claim similar nobility.

I think of myself as a professional alien; and aliens are the greatest patriots.

The Welsh Nationalist party Plaid Cymru was formed by a Liverpool-born graduate in English.Catherine the Great, who was called the Mother of Russia, was a German. Napoleon came from Corsica to be Emperor of France. Hitler, the Austrian painter, founded the German Third Reich. The first language of Bonnie Prince Charlie was Polish. Lloyd George was born in Manchester, two streets from my birthplace as it happens. The post-war IRA troubles began with the rule of Mac Stiofan, who was a Londoner. Indeed it was English influence that brought about its birth.

The distinguished historian Professor Gwyn A Williams in his elegant history "When Was Wales?" claimed the Welsh invented themselves.

They have been re-inventing themselves ever since.

Few Welshman do not believe that America was discovered by a Welsh prince called Madoc. There is no acceptable evidence that either he, or the tribe of Welsh Indians he discovered, ever existed. As the Professor pointed out in another book, the prince was invented as a political move by a Welsh civil servant at the court of Elizabeth the First.

The ancient laws of Hywel Dda are codified and published. There is less evidence of the existence of Prince Hywel Dda. The first publication of his laws was in Norman times and it has been suggested they were a cunning Welsh ploy to get round the Normans' oppressive game laws. A canine historian has pointed out the laws list six breeds of dog that did not exist before the 11th century. Yet no mention is made of the wolfhound or the Irish great hound which certainly DID exist.

The nouveau riche Normans, by the way, were so impressed by this Welsh ability they commissioned Geoffrey of Monmouth to invent them a respectable past. This Saatchi of the day not only gave them a family tree; he chopped it down and turned it into an Arthurian round table.

When everyone started to apologise to everyone else for the sins of history it put me in a strange position. In California, my late cousin Howard thought our family had a lot of apologising to do. Our Norman ancestor Ralf was descended from Vikings. Do we need to apologise to the French for what the Vikings did to them? Or to the Saxons whom we pillaged?

We never learned. Ralf was part of William the Conqueror’s 6,000-strong army which thrashed the Saxons. Once again, sorry, Saxons.

In 1315, it was said of our ancestor Sir John Skydemore that “the Welsh hate the said Sir John because he inflicted so much damage on them during the war in the late king’s time.” Apology to the Welsh?

In 1298 and 1301 Sir Walter Skydemore was summoned to war against the Scots. Forty-three years later Sir Walter Skydemore, a nephew, was a man at arms in Ireland; and two years after that he was in France in the retinue of Edward, Prince of Wales.

So that's the Scots and the Irish, and once again the French, who must believe we are picking on them.

It gets worse. Thomas Skidmore emigrated to America where he joined governor John Winthrop jnr in a new settlement at New London, Connecticut. Fought against Uncus and his tribe. He and his son took land from an Indian named Asharoken for two coats, four shirts, eleven ounces of powder and seven quarts of “likker”.

So Heap Sorry. Also apologies to African Americans for Joseph Skidmore who had slaves on his Long Island estate and left two, Tom and Ned, to his son Isaac.

Howard always hoped no apology was due to the first five groups since we married into all their races and would be apologising to ourselves. About the Indians. Howard’s grandfather’s first cousin Joel, through inheritance from his mother, became the last chief in the west of Long Island of the Canarsie Indians, who had been persecuted by the Mohawks because they had welcomed the Dutch.

Isaac later freed his next generation slaves Phyllis and Cain. Cain Skidmore, the freed slave, was head of a family in the 1810 census and five great uncles fought for the North in the Civil War.

Anyway, as Howard always said, “No one should be held responsible for his relatives’ transgressions. We have enough to do being responsible for our own.“

GOING FOR A SONG

Tony Blair is, we are told, a shoe in for President of Europe. I do not know why we are in it anyway. If Tony Twinkle-Tongue thinks Britain can become a suburb of Europe, he has never tried to buy a CD in that annoying land mass.

I tried. The last time I saw Paris, I also spotted a two volume CD “L’Ame des Poetes”, a collection of Aznavour, Becaud, Piaf, Greco, indeed all the great post-war chanteurs. Unfortunately the Ferret insisted I buy only one.

Buying even one wasn’t easy. The shop computer had gone down and the assistants weren’t selling anything to anyone. My suggestion that we did things the old fashioned way, where we gave them money and they gave us the CD, was received with Gallic contempt.

So we had lunch, which cost four times the price of both records, returned, bought one, came home, played it and brought Instant Paris into the drawing room.

I wrote, faxed, even e-mailed the Paris shop with an order for volume two. No response. In desperation I phoned the shop, only to be told it did not do mail order. So much for the Uncommon Market. The CDs were produced by EMI. I rang their London HQ and was told “L’Ame des Poetes” was cut by their French division and they were not allowed to import it to Britain.

Subsequently, I tried in one large record shop in Amsterdam and in another in Bruges. The notion of importing CDs across a border that wasn’t even supposed to exist appalled both. I did momentarily think I had struck lucky in Brussels where the girl in the record shop assured us she would have the CD at our home in Wales before we were. Despite another flurry of letters, faxes and e-mails, not a whimper.

A month later, I popped, in passing, into Cob Records in Porthmadog. “L’Ame des Poetes, Vol 2? No problem,” said the assistant. Nor was there. I am playing it as I write this.

COMMENT FROM THE TIMES

.”............These anti-Koranic perspectives will continue to predominate in the British Muslim community as it becomes more directly tied to ultra-conservative and extremist sects - such as the Wahhabi, Deobandi, Jamati Islami and the Tabligh Jamaat. These ideological radicals propagate a highly toxic caricature of Islam. They regard creed and culture as indistinguishable, refusing to grasp that Islam is a global religion, not a faith that is linked to one particular people or place.

Although Muslims have their own specific territorial cultural traditions, there is no such thing as an Islamic culture. Therefore the modern trend among British Muslims blindly to emulate Arab ethnic dress or grow beards or for women to wear the Wahhabi-sanctioned niqab or face masks has nothing to do with the Koran but everything to do with the primitive tribal mores and sexist practices of Arabia................”

Taj Harjey, Head of a progressive Muslim Organisation.

A TRAGEDY

The Spectator has managed to get rid of Paul Johnson, its only essayist. Now it is just a collection of op-eds.

OH BOY !!! OBAMA

In they flew like noisy rooks, the leaders of the governments of the world, twittering crossly as they settled in what must have been the ugliest tree on the planet. In their beaks these dark doves carried their plans for prosperity.

Their decision. Let's borrow from the Arabs and the Chinese, neither of whom we have given much cause to love the West. Living off the Chinese is an honourable Western tradition. The Americans have been doing it for years, as Gore Vidal was the first to point out. America's debt to China amounts to trillions. One can hardly blame the Chinese for hacking into our international computer systems. They are merely protecting their investment. One can only hope our new masters are better housekeepers than the West have been over the past two hundred years.

They are already showing the cane. An obvious fracture in the capitalist system has been the tax haven. The feeling was that the G20 would abolish them. Not so. The Chinese objected at the inclusion of Hong Kong and Macao - and that was enough.

And what of us? Once again the United Kingdom breaks records. Swarthy South Americans may live in Banana Republics: we are the first Banana Monarchy.

Harassed for three hundred years by money hungry Hanoverians, we now have the worst of both worlds. Politicians have elbowed their way to the trough. Amid the controversy over whether we should celebrate our Middle Eastern patron saint St George and risk offending his fellow Muslims, I am surprised no one has declared April 1 as our National Day. Clearly the entire Establishment looks on us as fools.

John Lyon, the present Commissioner for Standards, is the only watchdog we have: and to say the least he is pretty toothless. He does not have the tenacity of his predecessor Elizabeth Filkin, who was booted out of the job by that well known Speaker in unknown tongues, Michael Martin, after she had asked some vigorous questions about MPs' behaviour. At a time, it later turned out, that Martin's wife was charging us taxi fares for going shopping.

My own expenses when I was a working reporter were said by one news editor to be a demonstration of my creative powers. Another news editor told a reporter that in order to have spent the sum he was claiming he would “have had to stand on the running boards of two taxis, drinking champagne by the bottle whilst hurling gold coins at the heads of passers by.”

By the standard of today's legislators we were Selling Platers.

Take the fact that Britain is broke, and to paraphrase an old song, “There Will Never Be An England” ......again.

When I was broke, that was it. When the Government goes broke and has some bills to pay, it prints more money. If I had done that to pay the gas bill I would have got five years in prison. Nor did any bank manager at any time tell me that the way to get rid of my overdraft was to sign more cheques. Interestingly, Ma Brown, our grim Presbyterian Nanny, advised us to behave as we were taught as children. I would have thought, having listened to PMQ, THAT is exactly how we behave and is part of the problem. A little more grown up behaviour would be welcome.

He could try putting the cheques in the wrong envelopes. It does bring a stay of execution. It used to work for me with British Telecom and MANWEB. He might have saved a great deal if we had abandoned the G20 Summit. Though it says a great deal about the safety of the world when the President of the United States needs a bodyguard of 200.

I am not anti-American. Indeed when I served with the 8th United States Air Force on the Berlin Airlift some of my best friends were Americans; though of course I would not like them to have married my daughters.

The Yanks - as they liked to be called - were warm, witty and loyal; pathologically generous, though sadly sexually obsessed ....which I find the defining American characteristic.

This is, after all, the country that gave us the pin-up, the knickerless film heroine and Frank Sinatra. Not to mention AIDS and, during World War 2, a rapid increase in the incidence of social diseases.

What I am against is the Hollywoodisation of not only British culture, but their own. For America is a country where everyone wants to die and be reborn as John Wayne, that draft-dodging icon who sold his colleagues down the Red River during the McCarthy period.

Where New Labour is not aping generations of Conservatives, it is recreating the White House in our green and increasingly unpleasant land.

From America we have imported the tribal rhythms of Chubby Checkers and improved on them, if that is the word I want.

But this is the land that gave us the world’s finest entertainers, the moving picture - at its height, in my view, in the animated cartoon, and the spectacular musical; who gave us in Hemingway, an author who changed the language of literature and journalism; the great wits of the thirties, cool jazz and so much else.

Without American scholarship we wouldn't have Boswell’s journals. There is a library at Yale devoted to Walpole and indeed there are more of our literary artefacts stateside than there are here. But it's a notoriously long-winded scholarship, isn't it? And it has swamped our publishing industry. That can't be good.

We seem ashamed of our own culture. There was a lot of good in our Empire. The D’Oyly Carte was a unique British tradition, abandonded by the Arts Council. Pageantry is going. Even beef eating was illegal at one point. Why not a celebration of British culture whilst there still is one to celebrate?

What is the attraction of American culture? Copeland, the Algonquin wits, Norman Rockwell, the American musical film, Disney? Sure. But they are all pre-1950 and the dreadful Eisenhower. What is good about a culture that now is symbolised by an unwashed hippy with flowers and lice vying for posession of his hair, riding a Harley Davidson to the music of Chubby Checkers?

Ought we not to take a leaf out of the French book and enact laws to preserve the British way of life?

I read that Mandleson would be happy to lose British sovereignty. Clearly our culture means little to the Government.

TEN COMMANDMENTS

At the non-mystical level at which I can appreciate them, the Ten Commandments seem to me nothing more than bye-laws. Indeed I believe that we would only have to adhere to them to live civilised and happy lives. So why don't we?

Or at least the last six. I believe in a single creator because nothing else makes sense; but sculpture, swearing and keeping the sabbath are all, it seems to me, matters of personal decision.

However, if we did no murder, adultery , false witness bearing or coveting other men’s wives, life, though a great deal duller, would at least be peaceful.

One of the commandments contravenes race relations legislation. If someone took Moses to a tribunal for insisting there was only one god, Moses would lose. The graven image ban would close all the art galleries - and how could you swear an oath without taking the name in vain?

Are we to believe the Commandments were handed down from heaven or was that a device for making them binding on primitive desert tribes?

Perhaps religion itself is old fashioned. Rabbi Lionel Blue once dismissed the notion that God answers prayers as 'superstitious juju'.

And the famous controversy over the Immaculate Conception found many adherents to the belief there was no such thing as a miracle. Doesn't that turn the Ten Commandments into sociology?

CADS?

Gladstone claimed he had known eleven prime ministers and nine of of them were adulterers.

But can you imagine Mrs Gladstone being forced to go public on her pious husband’s nightly street patrols to save fallen women? “Save one for me” was the popular cry.

For my money, the so-called Clinton scandals were the non-stories of the year. Entirely manufactured by the American Press, with our uncreative media joining in the barking like starving street curs.

Belive me, as a member of that media for half a century, our eagerness to commit adultery would make Clinton appear monk-like.

Besides, we have our own Cads Cartel, which began with Palmerston and included Wellington. Surely, as the home life of our own dear Lloyd George demonstrates, powerful men have powerful urges.

Jefferson’s daughter brought a teenage slave girl to the White House. And it wasn't long before she was Jefferson's. Palmerston harnessed naked women in silken reins and drove them round the drawing room; Wellington gave his name to a number of old boots. Didn't make them less able. Indeed, Disraeli said that if people found out that in old age Palmerston had fathered a child they would never get him out of Downing Street. Clinton’s adultery united America behind him.

 

 

THE EVENING STANDARD HEADLINE THAT SAYS IT ALL:

One great capital city, 20 world leaders – and 40,000 holes in the road

C.

 

 

--

IT IS NOT THE FAULT OF THE AXE BUT THE TREE - Turkish proverb

 

 

Arab Nationalism is an oxymoron. It was born out of debates in a literary society formed in Beirut in the 19^th century by two American missionaries. As a result, nationalist “cells” of a few dozen Arab hotheads came into tentative being. Arabs could not stand each other. Once a desert Arab had fulfilled the laws of hospitality, even guests could be killed on sight. Sherrif Hussein of Mecca only threatened war against his overlords, the Ottoman Empire, when the Young Turks who took it over planned to build a railway to his kingdom of Mecca. This would have wiped out his main source of income: robbing pilgrims on their way to the Holy City.

 

It had been a central plank of British diplomacy endorsed by Palmerston that the Ottoman Empire was not to be touched. It was a valuable bulwark in the protection of India from Russia. Though ostensibly Turkish, most of the senior posts and the vast majority of Ottoman soldiers were Arab. In its ramshackle way, the Empire let the Arabs under its control happily kill one another as they had done from the days of Mohammed, himself no stranger to the slaughter of fellow Arabs.

 

Winston Churchill has been called a great war leader. Perhaps. But it is worth remembering he did write the definitive history of the war.

 

The historian Noble Frankland is less enthusiastic. He has pointed out Churchill thought that air support on a battlefield would add a complication without an advantage; that the Germans would be unable to break the French on the Western Front; that the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and, if they did, Singapore would remain invulnerable. He thought that neither submarines nor aircraft would pose a serious threat to battleships and that kites would be better than radar. He ordered the disastrous Norway campaign, sent the battleships Prince of Wales and the Repulse without air support to Singapore where they were sunk by the Japanese. He first ordered and then condemned the bombing of Dresden.

 

The decision that cast the longest shadow was his determination in World War 1 to invade the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in the massacre at Gallipoli and much of the mess in which we now find ourselves.

 

In his day, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia did not exist. As David Fromkin describes it in his magisterial A Peace to End All Peace, “Most of the Middle East rested, as it had for centuries, under the drowsy and negligent sway of the Ottoman Empire.”

 

The central British aim in the Middle East was to defeat Russian designs in Asia, the buffer that protected India and the route to Egypt. It was, said Queen Victoria, “a question of British or Russian supremacy in the world.”

 

Winston Churchill promoted the idea of invading the Ottoman Empire, and when the House of Commons rejected his urging, he confiscated, without authority, two Turkish battleships which were being built in British yards. The Turks began negotiations with Germany to protect themselves from invasion.

British diplomats in Turkey had resounding titles but were useless. The Ambassador of the Sublime Porte didn’t speak the local language and so had to rely on his interpreter, or Dragoman. The Sublime Porte ws the name of the gate of the office of the Grand Vizier from which the government took its name.

When the Young Turks took over the government no one knew anything about them. The Dragoman reported it was a Jewish conspiracy and that the Jews controlled the new Government. In fact there were only four Jews in the 288-man parliament. This mistaken belief had a disproportionate effect on future policy in the Middle East. It was amongst the reasons for the Balfour Doctrine which proposed a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, which the British had promised to the Arabs.

 

Much of the Arab policy was based on a hoax by a 24 year old deserter from the Ottoman Army, Lt Muhammad Sharif al Faruqi. Claiming to be a member of an Arab Secret Society with important information for the British Government, he was accepted without question by Gilbert Clayton, the Head of British Intelligence in Cairo. He told Hussein he had the ear of the British Foreign Office and the British diplomats that he was the secret representative of Hussein and the Arab Secret Societies. He urged the Allies to accept Hussein’s Damascus Protocol which gave the Arabs a homeland.

 

British diplomats threw themselves wholeheartedly into the business of making the Middle East an enemy. Firstly by promising Sherrif Hussein and Ibn Saud, who was creating  Saudi Arabia, new kingdoms if they  would help the Allies fight the Turks. Ibn Saud agred and employed the Wahabi, a warrior tribe, promising in return to adopt the Wahabi view of the Koran, a puritan regime which is responsible for to-day's milint muslims

 

Sir Charles Sykes, an expert on the Middle East, designed banners in black, white, green and red to symbolise the past glory of Muslim Arabs for Hussein and his Hejaz force. In 1918 Sykes was promoted and placed in charge of the Ottoman Theatre of War.

 

Whilst T.E. Lawrence, on behalf of the Government, was promising Hussein and his Arabs their own kingdom, Sykes and a French diplomat Francis Georges Picot signed an agreement which shared out Arabia between their two countries.

 

The Balfour Doctrine has an interesting history. It was heavily supported by Lloyd George, which was not surprising. Apart from his Cabinet office, he ran a lucrative firm of lawyers. One of the principal clients was the British Zionist party, whose cause he eagerly espoused.

 

His work for the Christian Zionists put the Welsh trickster in touch with Dr Chaim Weizmann, a chemist and lecturer at Manchester University. In his memoirs Lloyd George wrote that he supported the Balfour Doctrine out of gratitude. He wrote that when he was appointed Minister of Munitions he had discovered Britain was running out of nitrate, needed for its shells. Weizmann was able to create artificial nitrate which helped us win the war. It was true that Weizmann produced unlimited nitrate. The idea that Lloyd George supported the Balfour Doctrine out of gratitude was lie.

 

It is worth remembering that the much maligned T E Lawrence did warn that what is now Iraq should be divided into regions which acknowledged their bitter religious differences.

 

 

NUDGE, NUDGE

 

 

I have suspected it for sometime. Now, thanks to a fascinating book, ”Nudge”, by an American academic Richard Thaler, I know that is true.

 

Somewhere in the dark recesses of what used to be my mind an RSM lurks. Boots gleaming, badge twinkling, pace stick at the high port, he is i/c discipline and responsible for all my actions. Thanks to him, my inner activity lock is set at instant default. Whatever I think to do, be it gardening or tidying up my library, his nagging voice says “Oh, I shouldn’t bother”. And I don’t.

 

Thaler points out that Nudging is not new. He praises the airport authorities in Holland who had a small house fly painted on the urinals. What he describes as spillage has, in consequence, been reduced by eighty per cent. I take leave to inform him this is not new. In the days when there was still England, no Twyford’s urinal was unleashed on the public without a handsome reproduction of a bee on its surface for the use of the sportingly inclined gentleman.

 

Outwards nudging he calls choice architecture, and instances the way supermarkets lay out their store so that the customer is drawn to the items they are most anxious to sell. Doesn’t work with the RSM.

 

 

THERE WILL NEVER BE AN ENGLAND………………….

 

My ill-paid district nurse scrimped and saved to send her bright son to a fee paying grammar school. He justified her faith. He has projected ‘As’ in all subjects. He has been told not to apply for the LSE or Oxbridge. They are only taking children from underprivileged homes.

 

My district nurse points out that her family has been under privileged in order to educate her son

GATHERING OF THE HAMS

THe world leadersw are gathering like some monstrous boil.Their aims are staggering and, if they were realistic, the G20 summit would be worth the £50 million it will cost. But are they really going to hammer out an economic rescue package, plus establish a new regulatory framework for the global banking system, wipe out financial crime, work out a free trade deal and lift the Third World out of poverty all in one day?

 

As Ross Clark writes in the Spectator: ”It sounds less like a conference than Monty Python’s Proust Summarization Competition, in which contestants were given 15 seconds to précis A la recherche du temps perdu.

 

Narrowly missing All Fools Day, they will sit on April 2, among their broken toys, the spoilt children of the G20, replete with food too rich for them, wine fumes gathering in ghostly grapes in their little heads. Their work already mishandled by minions at pre-summit Summits. Waiting testily for Nanny Obama to tell them what to do with the gaily painted clockwork economy rendered useless by being overwound.

A friend who moved among statesmen marvelled at what second rate people they were. Two things are a constant puzzlement to me. Why do we send our fittest and best young men to be wiped out first in petulant wars and why we are content to be ruled by a class of people who think with their mouths and for whom, in the 21^st century, the Caveman Concept, warfare, is still the ultimate answer in an argument?

At Peace Conference after Peace Conference they eagerly grab at other people’s territories. Despite the evidence of Africa, India, Eire, and Iraq, they blithely create artificial countries that are seed beds of hatred. Italy and Belgium were hardly successful and there are many who have doubts about the United Kingdom. I have already agreed that on balance the US, Australia and New Zealand have been successful. But only, as I have argued, because they took the precaution of virtually wiping out the native populations.

Pakistan is the most obvious and its history instructive.

Christopher Beaumont was private secretary to the senior British judge, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission who was responsible for dividing the vast territories of British India into India and Pakistan, separating 400 million people along religious lines. A man who had never been to the Indian sub-Continent; who burned all his papers when he retired.

Beaumont, who later in life was a circuit judge in the UK, had a stark assessment of the role played by Britain in the last days of the Raj, which was the subject some years ago of a BBC documentary. He was quite clear about who was the main architect of that dismal disaster.

"The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame - though not the sole blame - for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished," he writes.

"The handover of power was done too quickly."

The central theme ever present in Beaumont's memoirs is that Mountbatten not only bent the rules when it came to Partition - he also bent the border in India's favour. Mountbatten was hardly impartial. His wife, the Vicereine, was having a torrid affair with Nehru, one of the main players on the other side. Nor did it help that Patel, Nehru and Ghandi, never the best of friends, developed a deep antipathy to each other, as Alex von Tunzlemann delicately phrases it in his excellent history of Partition, “Indian Summer”.

According to Beaumont, Mountbatten put pressure on Radcliffe to alter the boundary in India's favour.

On one occasion, he complains that he was "deftly excluded" from a lunch between the pair in which a substantial tract of Muslim-majority territory - which should have gone to Pakistan - was instead ceded to India.

Beaumont is most scathing about how Partition affected the Punjab, which was split between India and Pakistan.

"Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment.

"The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation.

"Thousands of people died or were uprooted from their homes in what was in effect a civil war.

"By the end of 1947 there were virtually no Hindus or Sikhs living in west Punjab - now part of Pakistan - and no Muslims in the Indian east.”

Beaumont argued that it was "irresponsible" of Lord Mountbatten to insist that the boundary was completed within a six-week deadline - despite his protests. It has been argued that Mountbatten was anxious to return to England for the wedding of his protégé Philip, labelled the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus, to Princess Elizabeth.

On Kashmir, Beaumont argues that it would have been "far more sensible" to have made the flash-point territory a separate country.

Post-Partition Ghandi admitted that mistakes were made. “We were too tired to carry on,” he said.

We can only be grateful that the silly plan of two silly men, Cudlipp and King, to put Mountbatten at the head of a revolution against Harold Wilson did not materialise.

 

NONE FOR THE ROAD

People should be protected from “passive drinking” in the same way they are protected from second-hand smoke. So said Britain’s top doctor, Sir Liam Donaldson. The Chief Medical Officer for England called for society to recognise the consequences of one person’s drinking on another’s well-being.

It is a matter of record that after a six-year research programme the World Health Organisation was forced to admit that they could find no evidence that passive smoking was harmful.

Professor Ian Gilmore, a liver specialist and president of the Royal College of
Physicians, said "all the evidence shows that price is one of the most important drivers of alcohol consumption and the amount of harm done."

This is one of the few subjects on which I speak with authority. In the days when I was capped for drinking for England, I continued to buy about a hundred quids worth of booze every week whether I had any money or not.

 

I might add that among the biggest soaks I knew were doctors and psychiatrists. But I won’t because that would be rude and anyway……………………………………..

 

GOD BLESS THE NHS;

Just been costing my NHS treatment. Home nursing twice a day for a month £2,400. Electric drain pump for a month £1,500. hospital and operation would I am told have been  another  £12,000

a pint of view

I am a product of the pub; the sum of perhaps a dozen cosy inns in England, Wales and Dublin. I was called to the bar to be educated in them, taught manners and the meaning of friendship. They have been my workplace, my university, and for much of my early manhood the nearest thing I had to a home.

 

My generation learned the etiquette of drinking from fathers who took us for a pre-lunch pint on Sundays. The central rule was that getting drunk was a sign of immaturity. The ability to hold drink was prized. There was no swearing in the presence of women. If you were bought a drink, you bought one back. There was no need for bouncers. Discipline was maintained by the customers themselves. The proper rate for drink consumption was a pint every fifteen minutes and the usual “session” lasted an hour. Anyone who drank from the bottle was to be avoided.

 

I was trained in the Red Lion and The Grove in Manchester, the Wellington in Doncaster, The Kings Head and Eight Bells in Chelsea, The Pearl Lounge in Dublin, The Bulls Head on Anglesey, The Bear and Billet, The Boot, The Beehive, The Swan in Chester - and a number of other public houses scattered about the country.

 

None in Scotland where drinking is a serious business, like so much else in that unhappy country, the New Puritania.

 

Why are wet blankets woven in bright tartan?

 

 Not content with creating a near dictatorship at home, Scotland has exported some of the worst politicians in history. To its own corrupt Establishment we owe the ban on hunting with hounds, the death of smoking in pubs. Now that Maelstrom of Misery is howling round the “Wee Hauf”. Or even more bizarre, a tax on chocolate drops.

 

The sad truth is that we are the product of our genes and the genes of the Celt are a rich harvest of melancholic addiction. My Scottish blood has made of me, as it has my son, my father, my grandfather and most of my uncles, a drunk. Even now when drink is no longer attractive I am still by nature a drunk. It ruined a career, a marriage and goodness knows how many friendships. For all that, I remember my roaring days with pleasure and no little regret. I still get incensed when, despite the fact the Government admitted that its “safe units” measurement of alcohol was bogus, it continues to trot out the same fictional warning.

 

My old drinking chum Bill Hagerty, Eisenhower’s spin doctor, reviewing a Michael Frayne book, loved this quote: “There is no-one (like a journalist of the old school) with that astonishing ability to drink until the floor tips and still write a thousand words on the shocking decline in standards of behaviour”

Pubs are not necessarily bad influences. I was reminded recently of that moment when they are at their best in this from The Long Goodbye. Terry Lennox tells Marlowe:

"I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar."

 

Alas, like England, the pub which nurtured me no longer exists. In its place I have The Computer which opens its welcoming Arms and offers many of the joys of the pub. Many rude things are said about this Wonder of Our Age. Like the local of yore, it has disadvantages which it shares with the pub.. Far too many jokes, the ever present danger of stumbling on a bore; though it must be said that, as in the pub, so on the screen: arcane knowledge is there for the searching

 

Like the pub, there is always someone ready to sell you something, to enlist you in lost causes and to provoke bright anger. There are programmes one would hesitate to enter as there were pubs. There are others, like You Tube, which provide the best of entertainment: Ella, Sinatra, Garland, Durante and all the jazz greats on the same programme.

 

A great joy of the pub was the conversation of like minds. Now I get a much higher quality via E-Mails. Surely the most intelligent form of communication yet devised. Made for those of us who think of the right thing to say several minutes after it is no longer possible to say it.

 

At the luxury end, pubs had copies of the daily papers. Every morning I have my cup of tea in bed, riffling through facsimile issues of The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent. Brought to my laptop among a thousand other English language titles by Pressdisplay.com.

 

Goodness knows how many trees I save.

 

I do most of my shopping at my desk. I have CDs of the great paintings of the world and a library of music.

 

My heart will always be leaning on a bar somewhere but my brain is more at home at my computer desk.

 

 

Seven weeks is more than enough time to waste on cancer and to find the same answer as Damon Runyon to the question of “Why Me?” It is “Why not?”

 

Yesterday the pump finished its healing work, the umbilical cord has been disconnected and I no longer feel like a heavily anchored Bionic Man, though I will always carry my own Ty Bach, the little house that used to stand at the end of every Welsh garden, though in winter the seat was kept in the kitchen fireplace for purposes of central heating.

 

 Next week I go for my final interview with the surgeon, who will no doubt tell me again that further operations are out of the question, even if I have lost four stone from my top weight. Since I celebrate eighty years of ducking and diving in May, it is not news that concerns me greatly. If cancer is a hell of a way to lose weight, there is no better indicator of where your loving friends are.

 

Thank you.

ACCENTUATING THE POSITIVE

 

There was probably no time in history when there were more books on quotations pouring from the publishers or fewer people who use them in ordinary conversation.

 

This may be because people are less well read now than they used to be or it may be that schools don’t insist on children memorising memorable remarks, speeches from Shakespeare or acres of poetry. Which I think is a pity.

 

Ruskin, if I may quote him, said that a room without pictures was a house without windows. I think much the same is true of quotations.

 

Quotations are the pictures we hang on the walls of conversation. At their best they say in a few words what would take the rest of us whole sentences to explain; in the way that a good picture encompasses far more than the room it takes.

 

However, quotations of a sort still play a major part in our lives. Difficult to think of a pop song which is much more than a list of quotable remarks. The Beatles, it seems to me, were particularly gifted in this direction. I believe in yesterday sums up my whole attitude to life.

 

So little of television is memorable that I cannot think of a single catchphrase from that medium; but radio used to provide them in handfuls. In the days of ITMA you could hold an entire conversation with lines from the show, such as “Don’t forget the diver”, “Can I do you now, sir?” and “I don’t mind if I do”.

 

The ability to do them in the right voice was a plus.

 

I met a girl called Elizabeth Knowles who was  the managing editor of a large team at the Oxford Press which has produced surely the first Dictionary of Literary Quotations. to begin with Ancient Egyptian aphorisms and end on the Internet. Four thousand entries in all.

 

It had a reading team of five people and I wonder; does their reading consist of other books of quotations or do they go the pit face? I ask because, with the possible exception of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary and Geoffrey Madden’s Notebooks, the same quotations seem to crop up again and again.

 

My favourite quotation in the whole book comes from Alan Bennett when he reported that looking in a diary for the birthdays of contemporary figures, he finds, on his own birthday, merely a notice it was the day the first launderette opened.

 

Celebrity comes in for a hammering too. See John Updike’s brilliant observation that it is a mask that eats the face.

 

Their view of themselves is revealing. Barbara Cartland believed that she was dictated to by God.

 

But other authors they think less of. Vidal on Hemingway: “No other culture could have produced him and not seen the joke“ isn’t even a good joke. It certainly wasn’t Cyril Connolly’s view. He credited Hemingway with the death of what he called Mandarin writing

Next to quotations, I love ghost stories. My favourite comes in John Evelyn’s seventeenth century diary. He says that when a ghost who appeared was asked if it was a good spirit or a bad spirit ”it disappeared with a most melodious twang”.

 

Aubrey’s friend was the theologian Sir Thomas Browne. He went so far as to say that if you didn’t believe in spirits you must be an atheist; because, after all, angels were spirits.

 

Goldie Hawn is no atheist. I read that she decided to marry her live-in lover when the ghost of her mother appeared in the bathroom and said it was high time they got married.

 

My mother was given different advice. On hr wedding day my grandmother told her: "I would rather be carrying you out feet first than see you marry that man."

 

The house I lived in Wales was haunted by a blacksmith in a top hat. And by a piper. A Scottish regiment, the Lovat Scouts, was stationed in the house during the war. Alas, I neither saw nor heard either.

 

But I did see the previous tenant of a cottage we had. He was a deceased rabbit catcher called Bob. And I saw him quite clearly just before breakfast one morning. I subsequently heard him quite often bumping into things. I found it comforting to have evidence that Heaven is licensed to purvey intoxicating liquors.

 

Few quotations are more apt that the one which inists that when an Englishman speaks another Engliushman holds hi in contempt. Not only the English

 

In Edinburgh my Morningside aunt used to shudder whenever she heard a Glaswegian accent; and Dubliners can be pretty scornful of people from the West of Ireland

 

It’s not just received pronunciation that sets people apart. It is smart to speak Estuary English, which is a semi cockney in which no word keeps its final letter and ‘H’ is non-existent.

 

In the Fifties I couldn’t get a job on the BBC in Manchester because of my Lancashire accent. Over the years, whisky and marrying above myself have refined it - only to find myself in a world where you can hardly hope for a job in broadcasting if you haven’t got a regional accent.

 

I do not know enough about America to know whether Americans have similar problems of class structure based on pronunciation, but I doubt it. I am sure, though, that even there some regional accents are more acceptable than others. They certainly are in other parts of the UK. In Wales this doesn’t apply because now there is a snob culture in language itself.

 

But I have been reading about an England where Brummie, Belfast and Glaswegian are socially unacceptable but Estuary English, Yorkshire, Received Pronunciation and refined Scots, Welsh and Irish are in.

I remember as a young man being in a smart rowing club at Kingston on Thames and being laughed at -literally -because I said I was going for a bath, rather than a ‘barth’. With hindsight, I suspect it was evidence of a tribe protecting itself from foreigners.

 

 

GULLIBLE TRAVAILS

 

It was a concept more suited to the pen of Jonathon Swift, the great 18^th century fantasist and inventor of societies.

 

The commentators (and oh for the days when newspapers stuck to the facts) warn that we face an invasion of the angry unemployed from Eastern Europe now we are closing down the factories we so magnanimously opened there to welcome them into the Greater Europe.

 

The notion that, after thousands of years of fighting each other and grabbing chunks of each other’s kingdoms, politicians, the most power crazed of communities, would settle down into one harmonious whole, hurling gold coins at each other and proffering the products of each country’s industry to grateful neighbours, is ludicrous.

 

There was just an indication of flaw in the plan when, rather than succour the world’s poor, the Community preferred to create vast wine lakes and mountains of cereals. One might have been warned when, consistently, year after year, the audit commission it had itself set up refused to pass the Community’s accounts. Scandal followed scandal. At one time or another most of the Heads of Departments have been caught with sticky fingers. The ruined face of the planet, bombed and shelled back into the Stone Age, did little for the Community’s reputation as a peacemaker. More money was wasted building two headquarters in adjoining countries, to end the squabbles about where it should be sited.

 

There were many advantages to the Community. Chiefly those enjoyed by the Community servants.

 

Since the purpose of bureaucracy is to increase power, the Community welcomed to its heart other communities, recent enemies made poor by the doctrines of Communism.

 

By this time most sensible people had begun to look on the EU as we do the weather. It’s a damned nuisance but there is nothing we can do about it.

 

The recent failure of the Capitalist system, through the incompetence and corruption of governments and financial communities, could have been the EU’s shining hour. Now was the time for the richer or wiser kingdoms to help its most recent lame followers.

 

The result: Gordon Brown, the Tartan |Messiah, proposed more vast sums be doled out to Latvia, Hungary and Romania, but flew off to America without saying where the money was to come from.

 

An EU Summit of 27 bad tempered leaders in Brussels meanwhile observed the collapse of the so called tiger economies but rejected a resolution to give an immediate hand-out of £170 billion.

It became obvious that the Western EU countries would rather prop up their own economies by feather bedding their own industries and closing down the outposts they had established beyond a suddenly restored Iron Curtain.

 

Feren Gyurcscany, the Hungarian leader, warned that “a significant crisis in Eastern Europe would trigger political tensions and immigration pressures’. He even quoted figures.

 

“There is a central European and Eastern European population of 350 million, of which 100 million are in the EU. A 10 per cent increase in unemployment would lead to at least five million people unemployed within the EU.”

 

It’s enough to make the Statue of Liberty blow out her lamp. Although, in fairness, most ordinary people would have warned that get-togethers only work in fine weather.

 

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