Author: Alexander Boot

How Dr Williams has acquired his reputation for intellectual depth has to be one of the Church’s great mysteries. If his interview to the Telegraph was designed to throw light on it, then the departing Archdruid of Canterbury has failed as miserably as he did in his day job.

Take his comments on the sharia law, which four years ago Dr Williams suggested ought to be recognised by British courts. In the interview, all he found to say on the subject was that he had ‘succeeded in confusing people.’ His Grace is too hard on himself: there was no confusion at all. His meaning was crystal-clear: he believed then, and appears to believe still, that Muslims must have the same legal latitude as Christians and Jews.

This is nonsensical any way one looks at it, starting with the way our civilisation is called. It’s Judaeo-Christian, not Judaeo-Christian-Islamist. Surely Dr Williams, the erudite intellectual, must be aware that our legal system is rooted in doctrines enunciated in the two Testaments, not in the Koran? Killing apostates, stoning adulterers and castrating women sits uncomfortably with our ethos, be that its religious or secular aspects. Sharia does agree with the English common law in many of its tenets. But one can say – and it’s something the primate of our established religion should have said – that when it does, it’s redundant, and when it doesn’t, it’s subversive. Meaningless waffle just isn’t good enough.

Then Dr Williams uttered a few platitudes about the government’s so-called economic austerity. It would be unrealistic to expect the Archbishop to display more nuanced thinking in this discipline than in his own, and he didn’t disappoint. His main concern isn’t about the country going to the dogs, but about the ‘massive anxiety’ caused by even token cuts in social spending. Some may use such cuts as an excuse not to be ‘thoughtful about minorities’, thereby exacting an awful ‘social cost’.

One can find a better grasp of the issues at hand in any village Coach And Horses. Has His Grace considered the social cost of the economy collapsing altogether, as it surely will if his beloved ‘hairy lefty’ policies aren’t reversed? I’d guess not. Such consideration would require real thought, and this is something that can overtax the cerebral wherewithal of someone inured to uttering sweet bien-pensant nothings over a lifetime.

The great controversy of Dr Williams’s tenure, one that’s threatening to split the Church down the middle, is sex, in both meanings of the word. Specifically, it’s the consecration of female bishops, which he supports, and homomarriage, which he claims he doesn’t. The Church His Grace has led since 2003 is about to be torn asunder by both abominations, and what does he have to say about it? Nothing on the first problem. And on the second? Dr Williams expressed his regrets that ‘We’ve not exactly been on the forefront of pressing for civic equality for homosexual people, and we were wrong about that.’

So what would have been the right thing for our prelates to do? Lead the gay-rights movement? March at the head of gay parades? Decorate every church with rainbow flags? That’s what being ‘on the forefront’ would have meant in practical terms, and that’s what the good Archbishop regrets not having done. Does he actually think that such deeds would be within the remit of the Church of England? Or, for that matter, of any Christian confession? The ‘hairy lefty’ probably does think so, and it’s good to observe a deep theological mind at work. No wonder the Church is in the doldrums.

Actually, as far as Dr Williams is concerned, it isn’t, not at all. Yes, Christianity is in decline, church attendance is going down, but we must look at the big picture. And there the rosy pigment is discernible: people’s non-denominational spirituality is increasing. On what evidence, Your Grace? Well, look at all the teddy bears and flowers people bring to the scene of accidents. The Archbishop forgot to mention the bottles of vodka left outside Amy Winehouse’s house after she overdosed, but what he did say is enough.

That is, it’s enough to draw a lamentable conclusion: the head of our Church doesn’t know the difference between true spirituality and cloying, tasteless, nauseating sentimentality. You know, the kind of stuff that can be so easily whipped into mass hysteria, if you remember Diana’s death.

Any priest who confuses the two should be unfrocked; any similarly ignorant prelate ought to be tarred, feathered and run out of town. But if Dr Williams thinks he should take credit for such pornographic displays, he’s probably right. Not direct credit, you understand – it’s just that, because of him and other ‘hairy lefties’ in the Church, it has failed to provide an effective counterweight to the disgusting pseudospirituality he seems to cherish in his heart.

Towards the end, Dr Williams hinted at some structural changes in the C of E, apparently involving job share in his former position. ‘Watch this space,’ he suggested with his usual neo-Gnostic aura emanating out of every pore. But we are watching this space, Your Grace. We’ve been doing it for a long time, with fear and trepidation. ‘What on earth,’ we wonder, ‘will this lot come up with next?’

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s face it: apart from the odd sex scandal or a drunk bishop mistaking someone else’s car for his own, our Anglican Church is rather dull. But do pray it’ll stay that way, if the alternative is the Russian kind of fun.

The other day, for example, the deacon Sergei Frunza drove onto a main road without looking. The OAP Valentina Pavlova barely managed to avoid a serious accident by hitting the brakes of her Volvo with all her waning strength. She then approached the cleric’s Hyundai to remonstrate.

But God’s servant was in no mood for sermons. He jumped out of his car and smote the old woman in the face with his fist clutching the car key, a technique he must have learned from our huggable hoodies. The pensioner fell to the ground, her mouth pumping blood. When her elder sister then tried to interfere, the reverend broke her nose with a mighty punch. He then got into his car and tried to do a runner, only to be blocked by outraged eye witnesses.

They then called the police, which excited the cleric no end. ‘I don’t give a **** who you call!’ he thundered like Joshua at Jericho. ‘Call the cops, call the FSB [secret police], they’ll do nothing to me!’ He read the future with the clarity of a prophet.

The police duly arrived and took the two women to hospital, where one had stitches put into her lip, the other had her nose set, and both were diagnosed with concussion. As his only punishment, Fr. Frunza was made to visit them and offer his apologies. ‘Well, sorry, this sort of thing happens,’ ran the mea culpa. ‘This is the way I am.’

The story would hardly be worth telling if it weren’t indicative of the symbiosis existing between the Russian Church and law enforcement, particularly of the KGB variety. Not only are the hierarchs of the Church, including the Patriarch, directly appointed by the KGB as a reward for decades of faithful service (to the KGB, that is, not to God), but even the lower tiers are largely – though not yet exclusively – staffed with thugs like Fr. Frunza.

Despairing of finding solace within the national church, many sincere believers join evangelical Protestant sects, such as Seventh-Day Adventism or Pentecostalism. Collectively, such sects now have more parishioners than the ROC, something that’s discouraged, to put it mildly, by its muscular sponsors.

Last week a Moscow Pentecostal church was robbed and practically destroyed by a gang led by police officers. The raiders broke in at midnight, and by 3 a.m. the church was reduced to rubble. All the sacred objects were stolen, along with expensive synthesisers and other electronic equipment, and the language used by the thugs wasn’t the kind one normally expects in a consecrated environment. Some of the visitors introduced themselves as court bailiffs, one as Elvis Presley, and the others withheld formal introductions altogether.

Col. Putin refrained from commenting on these, or other similar, incidents. Instead he delivered himself of a soliloquy on the Pussy Riot trial. These three young ladies are now serving two-year terms for violating the KGB-sponsored saintliness of the ROC, and Putin was irate. The Pussy Rioters, he explained with avuncular condescension and not without reason, were naughty – and had been long before their punk antics in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

In particular, the guardian of Russian morality drew his listeners’ attention to the public demonstration of sexual intercourse indulged in by one of the Rioters Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. The president was particularly, and one has to say justifiably, upset with the footage of the orgy that had made its way to the Internet.

Lest he may be accused of being too heavy-handed, Putin offered a humorous aside: ‘Those who like it say that group sex is better than individual because, as any other collective undertaking, it leaves room for shirking. This is everyone’s personal business, but uploading it on the net must be assessed from the legal point of view.’ Putin then referred to  the Rioters’ blasphemous act as a Walpurgisnacht and let it be known that the sanctity of the ROC is in good hands, his own.

Unlike Lenin, who routinely referred to Christianity as ‘necrophilia’ and a ‘foul obscenity’, the present national leader is happy to be seen as the godfather not only to the economy, but also to the Church. Then of course, as a career KGB officer, he has for the ROC hierarchy that particularly warm feeling one tends to reserve for colleagues. That’s why he won’t tolerate any criticism of the Church in the context of the Pussy Riot trial.

Putin feels foreigners, and especially Americans, should mind their own business, which is far from being good. After all, many American states still have the death penalty, ‘and only God our Lord should be allowed to deprive a man of his life. But that’s a separate, philosophical discussion,’ added the Christian neophyte. Indeed it is. And who’s better qualified to conduct it than a proud, unreconstructed member of the organisation responsible for murdering 60 million Russians?

Do you sometimes feel that life is a madhouse, and you’re an outsider looking in? If you don’t, read the Russian press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine yourself late at night, wearing dark clothes, a hood over your head. A stray pedestrian has just turned the corner… You wipe the sweat off your brow. It’s not a cop, only a pub crawler chucked out at last call. Here’s the house you’ve cased… You ease your trusted jemmy between the door and its frame, next to the lock. The jemmy moves side to side noiselessly, or does it? Even the slightest crackle of wood sounds like gun shots going off, about to wake the whole street up. Your heart stops, then restarts. Finally the door is prised open, you slide in, your rubber soles caressing the carpet…

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Bet you wouldn’t have the nerve to do anything like that – I know I wouldn’t. Neither would Judge Peter Bowers of Teesside Crown Court. Unlike you and me, however, he admires the bravery of a thug breaking into someone’s house. Driven by this noble emotion, yesterday he allowed the recidivist burglar and arsonist Richard Rochford to walk free.

You don’t believe me? Here are the Judge’s own laudatory words: ‘It takes a huge amount of  courage as far as I can see for someone to burgle somebody’s house. I wouldn’t have the nerve.’

Truer words have never been spoken. Burglary does take courage. Not as much as rape and certainly not as much as murder, but still quite a bit. And courage, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, must be rewarded not with custodial sentences but with medals. Distinguished Service Medal for burglary. Distinguished Service Cross for rape (aggravated). Victoria Cross for murder.

By passing a suspended sentence on the hero of our time, the good judge has done a disservice to all those brave, intrepid, selfless men who go out every night, jemmy in hand, to strike a blow for human courage. He should have put the serial criminal up for a decoration, pour encourager les autres.

Mr Rochford began to display his bravery at a precocious age. He was merely 10 when he first distinguished himself by breaking into a house. Still a young man, he has already done three years for arson – without receiving as much as a meagre commendation for it. And the four burglaries to which he admitted in Judge Bower’s court are only those for which the modest warrior was prepared to take credit. As there always are, left outside the brackets were no doubt dozens of other burglaries to which our unsung hero didn’t own up.

In addition to praising Rochford’s courage, Mr Bowers further reinforced his legal credentials by explaining he didn’t put the hero away because ‘prison very rarely does anybody any good.’ Admirers of Dostoyevsky, who came out of prison a new, deeper man, might disagree, but by and large the statement is correct. Prison rarely does much good to the prisoner. And you know why? Because that’s not what it’s there for.

Prison is punishment, not a self-improvement counselling service. Punishing a wicked act is its primary function, keeping a criminal off the streets the secondary one, with deterrence strictly tertiary. Rehabilitation, if it’s a desideratum at all, would appear way down on the list. But above all prison is an instrument of justice done and seen to be done. For a society in which justice is debauched won’t remain civilised for long. When a judge, the law personified, praises a burglar’s courage and sets him free, we know that our civilisation is on its last legs.

When Britain was indeed civilised, burglary was a hanging offence. In 1830 Lord Russell abolished the death penalty for house-breaking, which was the humane thing to do. But His Lordship would have thought twice about stepping on that slippery slope had he imagined for a second that less than 200 years later an abomination like Judge Bowers would crawl out of the woodwork.

This wasn’t an isolated event: Mr Bowers has form. In the past he let a recidivist with 80 crimes on his record walk free for a burglary committed four days after his release from prison. ‘I am quite sure you are capable of a lot better,’ he said to the criminal. I’m sure about that too. Given enough incentive, he’d be capable of murder.

On that occasion, the Judge told the court, ‘I must be getting soft in my old age.’ Soft in the head, more like it. This time he showed that he too has the courage of his convictions: ‘I might get pilloried for it,’ said Mr Bowers, referring to his latest miscarriage of justice.

You shouldn’t be pilloried, Your Honour. You should be struck off, preferably without a pension. As to the rest of us, we’re left to ponder the depth of the abyss into which we’re falling – pushed over the edge by the moral decrepitude of PC modernity. And in a less contemplative mood, we should all install extra locks and apply for a shotgun licence.

 

 

 

 

I don’t know if Dave’s sainted mother is still alive, but if so I doubt that even Mrs Cameron rates her boy’s chances in 2015 as odds-on. In all likelihood, he’ll be thrashed by the very people who created the mess he’s unqualified to clear up.

This means he ought to consider his options – as the old truism goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Obviously, Dave’s new job will have to be commensurate with his talents, and so far he has displayed but one: that of a cardsharp.

In my youth I knew a few of those, and even played against them without losing each time. In the process I learned to watch out for a few tricks, and it’s on the basis of that experience that I’m offering career advice to Dave.

He may not know it, but he already has all the necessary skills. Specifically, the bread-and-butter triple whammy of his future job included 1) stacking, 2) false shuffle and 3) false cut.

Picking up the cards off the table after the previous hand, the dealer would ‘stack’ the top part of the pack, making sure he himself would get four aces, or whatever else he desired. Then he’d shuffle the deck in such a way that the ‘stacked’ part remained on top and undisturbed. After an opponent’s cut, the dealer would perform the conjurer’s trick of keeping the ‘stack’ on top (I shan’t tell you how this was done, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for wanting to know). Job done; another fish is reeled in.

Observing Dave’s first cabinet reshuffle, I felt a twinge of nostalgia for my youth, misspent as it might have been. For Dave not only stacked the top part of his team, but also managed to keep it on top for all the shuffling, reshuffling and cuts.

The bottom of the pack was indeed shuffled properly – quite a few junior positions got filled with bright new faces. The newcomers will do the tactical day-to-day grind, and more power to them. But the strategic aces in the pack, department heads, have suffered little attrition.

Ken Clarke’s hush puppies and beer-stained tie were moved out of Justice, and the token conservative Chris Grayling moved in to mollify the restless backbenchers who still think themselves Tories. Perhaps now burglary will be reclassified as a vicious crime to punish rather than a psychological problem to treat. Also, there’s an outside chance that people who slam their door in a burglar’s face will no longer be arrested for using excessive force. All that is good stuff, but hardly the solution to our most pressing problems.

Then Jeremy Hart, whose transparently shifty smile disqualifies him as a cardsharp, has climbed up to Health, from his previous foothold as Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport. Now the very existence of that job is a telltale sign of state tyranny, something unthinkable when Britain was still a free country. Quick, who filled the culture post in Rockingham’s cabinet? Disraeli’s? Gladstone’s? See what I mean?

Jeremy’s last contribution to our cultural refinement was appointing Peter Bazalgette as chairman of the Arts Council. Sir Peter’s job application included such notable cultural achievements as Big Brother and Deal Or No Deal, so clearly such an individual deserves a broader canvas on which to scribble his obscene graffiti. If Jeremy applies the same personnel criteria to his new job, faith healers, shamans and other mountebanks will be performing heart surgery.

Hunt has already been, and Laws soon will be, promoted in spite of the scandals in which they were both involved. Dave knows he can rely on them – they’re unlikely to be caught by the wrist again.

Admittedly, by removing Baroness Warsi from the co-chairmanship of the Conservative Party, Dave left himself terribly exposed to amply justified criticism. After all, as we know, the most – only? – important feature of any cabinet is its faithful reflection of the country’s demographic makeup.

Baroness Warsi, for all her obvious incompetence, was therefore invaluable: she ticked two vital boxes by being both a woman and a Muslim. But, displaying the sleight of hand that’ll stand him in good stead after 2015, Dave merely shifted her sideways, immediately filled several junior positions with women and moved Teresa Villiers up to Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. No way Dave will be caught out, bright lad like him.

But his most outstanding achievement was to keep the stacked part of the pack on top. The economic cards remained in the sweaty clutch of George Osborne, Vince Cable and Danny Alexander. This means Dave is happy with the way his aces lie – he must be thinking the economy is doing so well that any change could only be for the worse.

Someone less adept at marking cards would think that replacing that unholy trinity with, say, David Davis, John Redwood and Stewart Jackson wouldn’t be a bad thing. And a real cynic would go so far as to suggest that we could do even better by picking three random names out of the phone directory, putting them into safe Tory seats (if there is any such thing) and elevating them to the jobs currently held by George, Vince and Danny. But Dave knows better.

I do wish him the best of luck in his future career. Dave won’t even need to buy a false moustache and a derringer to make the transition. His future is bright; ours isn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

In Prohibition America, disputes between the likes of Al Capone, John Dillinger or Baby Face Nelson were settled with Tommie guns. In Putin’s Russia, squabbles involving Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich or Oleg Deripaska are these days resolved by London’s High Court.

On balance, the old way is preferable for being stylistically pure. Since Al and Baby Face made their money outside the law, it would have been incongruous  for them to appeal to it when things went sour. So instead they’d slam those drum mags into their Tommies and settle it like men. The Russians, on the other hand, have decided to go legit for once in their lives.

You might say that there’s an important difference: American gangsters were universally acknowledged as such. By contrast the Russians pose as legitimate businessmen, and any speculation on their probity runs the risk of a libel suit. In Russia, of course, everybody knows what those ‘oligarchs’ really are, but in a civilised country one is innocent until proven guilty in court.

Hence the tremendous importance of the B v A trial: it proved beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Russian oligarchs are typologically closer to Al Capone than to Bill Gates. This is one finding that has escaped the attention of our press, yet it’s the only one that makes the trial interesting.

The press got most of the facts right, even though it didn’t understand them properly. In broad strokes, Berezovsky was a major beneficiary of the Yeltsyn regime. Capitalising on his closeness to the president’s daughter, he gained access to the perpetually drunk leader and became a billionaire by buying up state assets for a derisory fraction of their value.

Abramovich was Berezovsky’s junior partner when the latter branched out into the oil business. Together they took over oil companies, refineries, gas processing plants and pipelines. In parallel, they acquired the controlling interest in the Russian government by masterminding Yeltsyn’s return for a second term. With the president dissolving the last of his marbles in booze, it was Berezovsky and Abramovich who interviewed and de facto appointed candidates for government posts. They were also the ones who chose Putin as successor to Yeltsyn, hoping the lowly KGB lieutenant-colonel would be putty in their hands.

That hope turned out to be ill-founded, and Putin outflanked the ‘oligarchs’. Abramovich, the former street guttersnipe, cottoned on quickly and kissed the new godfather’s hand, figuratively speaking. Berezovsky, the former maths professor, was slow on the uptake, overplayed his political hand and was thrown out of Russia, having been blackmailed into selling his assets for a pittance, just a few billion here or there.

The pressure on him was exerted through his former partner Abramovich, now playing ball with Putin and therefore allowed to benefit from the fire sale, provided he remembered which side his bread was buttered. Both A and B ended up in London, the former with Putin’s blessing, the latter with his anathema.

Berezovsky wouldn’t take it lying down. He’d use his remaining billions to finance anti-Putin opposition in Russia, and also try to sue Abramovich for cheating him out of more billions. The first part of the counteroffensive proved forlorn, the second difficult.

Abramovich, securely shielded from the outside world by a platoon of cutthroat bodyguards, was out of reach for any summonses or writs. But fate was on Berezovsky’s side. On a fine 2007 day, he espied Abramovich in an Hermès boutique, pounced on him and after an unseemly scuffle managed to thrust the writ into his hand. The biggest civil case in Britain’s history was under way.

It concluded last Friday, with Judge Elizabeth Gloster calling Berezovsky ‘an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes.’ In contrast, Her Honour found Abramovich to be ‘a truthful, and on the whole reliable, witness.’ Well, Dame Elizabeth was right in that commitment to truth has never been Berezovsky’s most salient trait. How she found Abramovich to be any different is a mystery, but then the law is full of them.

Yet, if you believe our newspaper accounts, Her Honour could hardly have ruled in any other way. It was the plaintiff’s word against the defendant’s, and the burden of proof was on the former. No written contract existed, and, as Samuel Goldwyn once explained, an oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. But the press got it wrong: Berezovsky’s case wasn’t entirely based on his word.

The plaintiff produced one undisputed fact: Abramovich had indeed paid Berezovsky more than a billion dollars. The latter claimed that this represented his share of the profits in the oil companies he owned jointly with Abramovich. The defendant, on the other hand, had to claim that no such partnership existed and that…

Here’s the rub: what on earth could he claim? A billion-odd is a rather large sum. Surely it wasn’t a birthday gift? Hence the strategy of Berzovsky’s case, and the man could make a hell of a poker player even though he lost this hand.

Abramovich could only win the case and save himself $5 billion by claiming that the money represented something entirely different. But if it wasn’t a partner’s share of the profits, it had to be a payment for services rendered. And the only service Berezovsky could have rendered to Abramovich was to provide what in the Russian underworld is called krysha. Literally meaning ‘roof’, the word is used to denote that cornerstone of organised crime: protection.

For Abramovich to declare that he had paid all those zeroes for protection was tantamount to admitting that he had made his money Al Capone’s way, not Bill Gates’s. The Gateses and Bransons don’t need protection: they become rich by delivering products we want to buy. The only ‘businessmen’ who need protection are gangsters. So Abramovich’s choice was stark: he either had to insist he and Berezovsky are both legitimate businessmen and pay up – or admit they are both Mafiosi.

Berezovsky was hoping his adversary would balk at declaring himself a Russian answer to Scarface Capone. This was the plaintiff’s bluff, but it was called. Rather than parting with $5 billion, Abramovich for all intents and purposes admitted he had made his money under the protection of the mafiya.

The moment the word krysha crossed Her Honour’s lips, Berezovsky’s case was lost, even though it’s likely that this once he was indeed telling the truth. But in the absence of documented proof that that billion-odd he had received from Abramovich was anything other than krysha, only one ruling was possible. Dame Elizabeth did what any other judge would have done: she found for the defendant.

Case closed? Not quite. For Abramovich’s admission effectively means that his and Berezovsky’s (and by inference other Russian oligarchs’) fortunes aren’t rewards for successful entrepreneurship, but ill-gotten gains being laundered through Western banks. The Exchequer would be justified in impounding such assets and holding them until their exact provenance is ascertained.

Since Abramovich had to own up that his money had been made in ways that are illegal in Britain, the oligarchs’ assets could eventually be confiscated and applied against our national debt. Meanwhile, Abramovich and Berezovsky deserve our gratitude: they’ve added another word, krysha, to the English legal lexicon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And speaking of Romney’s team, his VP choice has added a whole new meaning to the term ‘running mate’. Paul Ryan has just admitted he shaved more than an hour off his best marathon result when claiming he had clocked in at ‘two-hours, fifty something’. Ryan’s actual time in the only marathon he ever ran, back in 1990, was 4:01 – far short of the professional-level performance he boasted.

In admitting his dishonesty, Ryan said he had ‘exaggerated’. This word comes from the Latin exaggerāre, which means ‘to magnify’. Considering he claimed a shorter and not longer than actual time, this Latinism isn’t quite precise. May I suggest a shorter Anglo-Saxon verb? You know, the one that starts with an ‘l’.

Admittedly, Ryan isn’t the first politician to use his phoney athleticism as a key to people’s hearts. The stratagem has served the likes of Mao and Putin well, so Romney’s boy finds himself in good, if not unimeachably democratic, company. 

 

 

Whether it’s up in Westminster or down the pub, the British are looking for the side to pick in the upcoming US presidential election. In doing so, they project their own politics onto the American scene.

Generally, those of conservative leanings tend to prefer Romney, although one doesn’t detect much enthusiasm either way. Coming across as more stolid than solid, the Republican candidate doesn’t inspire misty-eyed affection: if you loved George Bush Sr., you’ll like Romney. Still, for a conservative to support Obama would be tantamount to high treason, or at least that’s the consensus.

Yet knee-jerk support for the seemingly more conservative candidate is ill-justified this time. If I were still qualified to vote in US elections, I’d vote for Obama, much as I despise him, his policies, everything he stands for and the horse he rode in on (its name is Demagoguery).

As his piece in the Telegraph demonstrates, Daniel Hannan doesn’t see it that way, not this time around. Four years ago, he supported Obama, mainly because he ‘enjoyed his speeches’. Let me get this right. The world economy was collapsing on our heads, the Middle East was ready to explode into a global conflict, British soldiers were dying God knows for what, and yet supporting a transparent nonentity with the gift of the gab seemed like the proper thing to do.

America and the rest of us needed a man with a golden touch, not a silver tongue, and yet Hannan, supposedly a conservative, favoured the man slated to become the most socialist US president ever. And anyway, how anyone can enjoy Obama’s demagoguery escapes me. His speeches always have been and always will be long on rhetoric and short on content, but then he’s a politician, as, come to that, is Mr Hannan. There must be some professional kinship there that transcends reason.

So what has changed this time? Barack still has a nice turn of phrase on him; he’ll talk your ear off with all the right resonances and diligently rehearsed gesticulation. Why not support him again for this reason alone?

Hannan goes into a long litany of Obama’s economic failures, which isn’t really worth doing. Pointing out Barack’s inadequacy in that area is like lobbing a wheelchair-tennis player: too easy and hardly sporting. We all know Obama is incompetent. But what makes us think Romney will be less so?

By way of reply, Hannan reverses the ancient wisdom by suggesting that the devil you don’t know is better: ‘Whether Mitt Romney can eliminate the deficit is not clear. What is beyond doubt, though, is that Mr Obama cannot.’ America national debt as percentage of GDP is 25 percent greater than ours, her budget deficit stood at 8.7 percent last year, and yet there’s an off chance that Romney will avert a global collapse. And even if he doesn’t, he’s unlikely to do worse than Obama. What better reason to support him?

And then comes the crux of the argument: ‘From a British point of view, the choice should be straightforward,’ writes Hannan. Obama doesn’t like us, whereas ‘Mr Romney, by contrast, is an old-fashioned Republican when it comes to foreign policy: he knows who America’s friends are.’

I’d say he knows it at least as well as George W. Bush did, he of ‘Yo, Blair!’ fame. These days, American presidents take it for granted that Britain will go along with any hair-brained adventure, any pointless and potentially catastrophic military undertaking. They count on us not the way a man depends on a friend, but the way he relies on his Alsatian to bark at a stranger or, if need be, bite him.

Over the last couple of decades, US foreign policy (and Britain, after all, is foreign to the USA) has been variously influenced, shaped or – under Republican administrations – dominated by neoconservative philosophies and personages. 

Neoconservatism, it must be said, has nothing to do with conservatism – non-conservatism would be a more appropriate name for it. Unlike real conservatism it’s an eerie mishmash of Trotskyist temperament, infantile bellicosity, jingoism, expansionism masked by pseudo-messianic effluvia on exporting democracy to every tribal society on earth, Keynesian economics, Fabian socialism, welfarism and statism run riot. These are mixed together with a spoonful of vaguely conservative phrases purloined from the rightful owners to trick the neocons’ way to electoral support.

In an odd sort of way, neoconservatism plays into the hand of innate American activism: it’s not in the national psyche to believe that sometimes doing nothing is the best thing to do. ‘We must do something!’ was the Middle American battle cry after 9/11, which I prefer to call 11/9. George W. Bush, who at the time was still putting his family photographs on the Oval Office desk, is Middle America personified, so the cry resonated through his heart, skull and bone marrow. He! Had! To Do! Something!

The question was, what? And Bush relied on his foreign-policy advisers to answer it. Now those chaps were to a man either card-carrying, fully paid-up neocons themselves or at least hugely receptive to neocon ideas. That is to say they were ready to strike a blow for American supremacism, with democracy as the slogan inscribed on the banners of aggressive war. Islamist terrorism was for them not the tragedy it was for other Americans. It was a convenient pretext.

Over the next decade, America, with our help, succeeded in replacing every marginally friendly Middle Eastern regime with a madcap Islamist one, unsettling and radicalising the region, bringing it closer to an uncontrolled implosion and thereby creating a risk of global conflict. Thousands of Americans and their ‘friends’, Brits mostly, had to die to promote this neocon agenda, and, as Americans say, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now, if Bush’s foreign-policy entourage was mostly neocon, Romney’s is exclusively so. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict in which direction they are going to steer what passes for US foreign policy should Romney get elected. Nor does one have to be a seer to know that, when Americans say ‘Jump’, the only possible British response will be ‘How high?’

It’s entirely possible, nay likely, that a Romney administration would drag us into a war that may or may not have an invigorating effect on the US economy, but would definitely be ruinous for us.

So yes, Romney ‘knows who America’s friends are’. But does Hannan know who Britain’s friends are? On the evidence of his facile comments on the US election, one rather doubts it.    

 

 

Nick has come up with an amazingly stupid idea. But then we consider the source and stop being amazed.

Not only does Nick want to push through his ‘mansion tax’, designed to punish those people who have the temerity to live in nice houses, but he now wants them to pay an extra ‘rich tax’. Temporarily of course, don’t get him wrong, but then we know that taxes are always about as temporary as death.

Nick went to decent schools, so he must be reasonably numerate. But one wonders if he has done the sums in this instance.

I don’t know whom he includes in the rich category, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that he means millionaires. The UK has about 600,000 of them, those blood suckers who, according to the philosophy Nick espouses, or rather feels in his viscera, have exploited and stolen their way to wealth.

The idea of punishing them for their sharp practices certainly has much appeal, and if some non-exploitative doctors or inventors also get the chop in the process, well, it’s their hard luck. But putting the aesthetics of the matter aside for a second, let’s consider the practicalities. Will making the leeches cough up this ‘temporary’ tax really solve any problems?

The greatest problem the British economy has is Nick and his like-minded redistributors. It’s thanks to their unceasing efforts that we’ve run up a public debt in excess of a trillion pounds. That’s a rather large amount any way you look at it, but I suggest we consider it in purely arithmetic terms.

A trillion divided by the number of British millionaires yields the sum of £1.6 million and change. Now most asset millionaires don’t make anywhere near this amount in a year. For most it would take 10 years at least to gross that amount in total income. Asking them nicely to pay as much as that in extra tax would give them a good laugh or, depending on their cardiac health, a heart attack. In either case, no extra income will swell the Exchequer coffers.

Some richer millionaires would have to take up the slack and pay not £1.6 million but possibly £1.6 billion – on top of the taxes they are paying already. The cynic in me can’t help thinking that those fortunate individuals aren’t going to get down on their hands and knees, take their punishment and keep saying, ‘Thank you, sir, can I please have another.’ And the realist in me can absolutely guarantee that they’ll just up their sticks and go to some place where the likes of Nick are kept outside ranting distance of government.

If his bright idea is acted upon, the Exchequer will lose not just the extortionate amount Nick proposes to squeeze out of the ‘rich’, but indeed the considerable taxes they are paying already. This ought to be clear to a chap with an expensive education, as I’m sure it’s clear to Nick. But he and his party comrade Vince don’t really think that robbing the rich will help the poor, or indeed the economy at large. They don’t care a flying buck about the poor or the economy. What they want to do is send what Vince once aptly called ‘an important message’.

And what message would that be? That rather than rewarding success we want to punish it. That we don’t want anyone to succeed beyond a very modest level. That those who’ve become a success anyway should go and be successful somewhere else.

The effect on the economy will be nothing short of disastrous, but what does Nick care? He knows that envy, the sixth cardinal sin, drives many voters to support parties that make anti-rich noises. Aquinas explained how this works: ‘Charity rejoices in our neighbour’s good, while envy grieves over it’.

It’s to the envious, lazy, stupid and mean that Nick, Vince and their parteigenossen send their subversive messages. But, on the rebound, the noises also reach the industrious, enterprising and daring. These people don’t need an interpreter to understand the real meaning, and translate it into a call to action: Run with what’s left of your money, while you still have any money left.

The trouble is that such people don’t just make money for themselves. They also create wealth for others. And that’s precisely the burr under Nick’s blanket: God forbid more people will be able to take care of themselves without relying on the state’s largesse. Such people will have no reason whatsoever to vote for mentally and emotionally challenged politicians like Nick. And every reason not to.

 

Every day we hear news of immigrants from all sorts of unsavoury places living in million-pound houses on the taxpayer. One recent story involved Fulham, to which I self-servingly pay more attention than to any other London borough.

A Muslim family of five moved into a £1.5-million semi, to which, according to the mother, they ‘have every right’. It’s good to see that recent arrivals adapt so quickly to the language and ethos of their new land. The process however isn’t quite complete for they have yet to learn that rights are married to responsibilities. On past evidence, this, if it ever happens at all, takes longer.

As a demonstration of this lapse, the happy family have turned the house, which after all doesn’t belong to them, into a stinking pigsty complete with broken furniture, smashed appliances and other debris. The action then had to move outside, for movement inside the house was becoming difficult. The happy family began to throw what they no longer needed, along with the weekly accumulation of rubbish, out into the street, giving it that unmistakeable je ne sais quoi feel of a shanty town and threatening a suitable drop in property prices.

The residents’ sensibilities, both aesthetic and fiscal, were hurt, and they tried to bring the authorities in on the fun. Proving he still has a lot to learn about the local mores, a teenage scion of the family, his torso defiantly bared, was photographed extending his middle finger towards the camera. Give him another couple of years in the mansion, and the youngster will go native enough to use two fingers to communicate the same message.

That happened last week. Staying in rural France at the moment, I’ve lost track of the story, and so don’t know what happened next. But, in a parallel development, the other day our neighbours had to rush to the outskirts of Paris where they own a flat used as rental accommodation. Actually, that description is only half-right, for, while the furnished flat has indeed provided accommodation for a North African family, our friends have been unable to collect any rent.

All attempts to do so were met with unpleasant and menacing hostility, communicated in the kind of French that even unabridged dictionaries don’t contain. The owners then sought help from the local council, begging them to evict their non-paying guests. That, they were told, was a complete impossibility, for the poor family had nowhere else to go. Inured to the logic underlying the explanation, our friends used the mildest of equivocal language to suggest, nay to hint, that this wasn’t entirely their problem. It’s not ours either, yawned the council official and sent them on their way.

Suddenly last Saturday our friends got a call from their Paris neighbours, helpfully informing them that their tenants, or, to be more precise, guests, had brought a removal van in and were loading it with our friends’ furniture. No, not all of it, only the items they like. Those they don’t like they were smashing up, turning the normally quiet street into a bedlam.

Distressed, our friends called the police in Paris, only to find that, it being Saturday evening, the station was shut for the day. The next morning they did manage to reach a bailiff, who explained to them that they’d better familiarise themselves with the proper procedure for handling such cases. Procedure, Monsieurdame is all important, but no? Without procedure all would be un bordel, a word that originally meant a whorehouse but now also means a mess. With or without procedure, it’s our flat that’s being turned into un bordel, our neighbours tried to explain, in vain. All right, what’s the bloody procedure then? The procedure, Monsieurdame, explained the patient man, is for you to go to your local gendarmerie and file a complaint, filling all the appropriate forms.

Our friends rushed to the local gendarmerie, only five minutes of frantic driving away. Naturally, it was shut, that being Sunday. The matter had to be put off until normal office hours, for all normal Frenchmen, regardless of their affiliation with law enforcement, spend Sundays drinking, eating and gardening.

On Monday morning the family decided to heed Adam Smith’s prescription and divide labour. The husband rushed off to Paris to see how much of the flat was still salvageable, while the wife went to the gendarmerie when it opened at 9 am. After waiting for an hour or so, she was issued several kilos of forms to fill in. The saga is on-going, and God only knows how it’ll end, though by the looks of it He has given up on the outskirts of Paris.

It’s good to see that London and Paris are striking such powerful, well-coordinated blows for true European integration and harmonisation. We all, goose or gander, are going to be smeared with the same sauce of suicidal, bleeding-heart, bien-pensant policies, with the bureaucratic ingredient especially rancid.

Sooner or later, taxpayers are going to rise in revolt, taking the law, what’s left of it, into their own hands. Evictions will be effected not with procedure but with shotguns and cricket bats, with civil order the main casualty. It’s already suffering attrition all over Europe, and things aren’t getting any better.

Is there a lawyer in the audience? I need help, for I simply can’t work this out by myself.

A Polish builder, Damian Rzezovski, stabbed six people to death and yet was cleared of their murders. The court in St Helier, Jersey, found him guilty of manslaughter only. Why?

Why, apart from the fact that they were all in one place, did Rzezovski kill his wife, their two little children, his father-in-law, his wife’s friend and her little daughter? Simple. His wife had admitted to an affair with another man.

One might suggest that slaughtering her, along with five other people, three of them children, was a bit of an overreaction even to such a self-confessed offence against the Seventh Commandment. A civilised man either ignores his wife’s infidelity or divorces her. A somewhat less civilised one swears at her and tells her to keep her knickers up from now on. A brute slaps her. A savage kills her. So how would you describe someone who massacres not only her but also five other people?

One possible adjective would be ‘crazy’. Psychiatric problems may be so severe that the madman is no longer responsible for his actions. He loses the ability to distinguish right from wrong. So was Rzezovski insane? He wasn’t.

In fact his defence did try this on, by entering a plea of guilty of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility. But the Crown rejected the plea, and one would think that would settle the issue. Apparently it didn’t.

The court heard all sorts of testimony from every expert and his brother, to the effect that Rzezovski was depressed and heard voices, telling him to kill. If the latter was true, than he is a schizophrenic, who should be treated as a patient, not a criminal.

Yet obviously the diagnosis of schizophrenia wasn’t accepted by the court, for otherwise Rzezovski would have been found not responsible. The only possible verdict would have been to confine him to an institution for the criminally insane and keep him there until he recovered – or, if he never did, for ever. Since he was found guilty of manslaughter, we can forget about schizophrenia as either an explanation or an excuse.

As to depression, the term has suffered so much inflation by overuse that it has for all intents and purposes become desemanticised. ‘Depression’ is routinely used to describe something that used to be known as a lousy mood. Shrinks, first in America then everywhere else, have begun to dispense antidepressants like Smarties, rather than telling their patients to pull themselves together, have a stiff whisky and think nice thoughts.

Rzezovski is indeed being treated with diazepam, né Valium, but these days that means next to nothing. Doctors often prescribe such mild drugs just to make the patient stop whingeing, go home and get out of their hair. When a psychiatrist diagnoses real, clinical depression, he prescribes real, clinical antidepressants, not diazepam. Not being a doctor, and not having had the pleasure of meeting Mr Rzezovski, I can’t venture a guess as to his mental health. But it clearly wasn’t sufficiently bad to explain, much less justify, what he did.

In fact, the court obviously accepted the prosecutors’ argument that Rzeszowski wasn’t suffering an ‘abnormality of the mind’. Why is it just manslaughter then?

A few months before the tragic event, Rzeszowski had found his wife flirting with strangers on the Internet. When he demanded an explanation, he realised he should have been careful what he wished for: his wife told him she didn’t love him anymore. Pure and simple.

Rzeszowski’s first reaction to hearing the news was certainly within the normal range. He went out and had sex first with a trained professional, then with a willing amateur. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, Rzezovski must have said, or Polish words to that effect.

But then the spouses decided to patch up their differences and give the marriage another chance. In fact, they went back to Poland on holiday, hoping that their native land would act in the capacity of marriage counsellor.

Poland failed, for shortly after their return to Jersey, Mrs Rzeszowski admitted not only that she didn’t love Mr Rzeszowski but also that she quite liked someone else. It would have been natural for a simple and rather morose man to fly into a rage – but he didn’t. In fact, Rzeszowski waited almost two hours before two kitchen knives saw the light of day. And then he brutally murdered everyone in the house, accepting no pleas of innocence, diminished responsibility or temporary insanity.

When arrested, he told the court he wasn’t ‘that type of man’, which rather flew in the face of empirical evidence. He then vindicated the empirical evidence by admitting he could be that type of man when ‘drunk or upset’.

Now most people I know, including myself, are frequently upset and occasionally drunk. Yet no one I know has to the best of my knowledge ever allowed either of those conditions to progress to the point where they’d murder their spouses, in-laws, friends and children.

A man like Rzeszowski isn’t just unstable when ‘drunk or upset’. He is an evil murderer. As such he ought to be put down or, in the lamentable absence of the death penalty, found guilty of murder and put away for life, meaning life.

The verdict of merely manslaughter, accompanied by salvos of psychobabble resonating through the press, is a copout – even if it produces a long sentence. It’s on a par with the Norwegian court sentencing Breivik to three months for each of the 77 murders he committed.

A society that fails to punish evil decisively may soon succumb to it. A simple thought, this, but it’s amazing how many people it escapes.