At the End of the Day

The last post before this one was delayed by ten minutes. The reason is straightforward, but hard to credit: in using the French extension cable in our house here – to ensure I could blog on a table as opposed to my lap – I managed to connect the extension to itself.

That is to say, instead of plugging the multiple-socket thingy to the mains, I put the plug into one of its own sockets.

If you’ve got most of your wits about you, it’s quite hard to achieve that level of incompetence. But as the years pass, the amount of wits about you tend to be associated with the company one keeps, rather than oneself. We had two younger friends around for lunch today, and there is no doubt that most of the wit was theirs rather than mine. It was hugely enjoyable, and I was able to play surrogate dotty grandad to their kids. However, one notices among even small infants that their reaction to one’s observations is a disturbing mixture of  puzzlement and sympathy.

Anyway, the result was a message saying my pc was about to hiber

The ‘nate’ part was lost in a swirl of black as the computer went to sleep. I lost half the post, and no matter how many recovery methods I called upon, the loss was irretrievable.

So it came as something of a shock to me soon thereafter to stumble upon a CD review, and realise that – although the film is now 47 years old – I can still remember whole chunks of Dr Strangelove by heart.

Convinced that the Soviet Union is weakening US resolve by fluoridating its water supply, a US air force commander (Sterling Hayden) issues World War III combat instructions to a US nuclear bomber – to the effect that the US has been the subject of a surprise nuclear attack by the Russians. The pilot (a masterly vignette from Slim Pickens) is gung-ho to drop the bomb on Moscow.  The film tracks Pickens’ duel with the USSR’s air defences alongside attempts by frantic US generals and politicians to negotiate their way out of Armageddon.

Dr Strangelove was probably Peter Sellers’ finest hour – not counting Being There, his swansong. He plays three roles – an RAF twit trying to talk Sterling Hayden into giving him the return to base code for the Slim Pickens plane; a US President wrestling with the Soviet leader (“Dimitry”) on the one hand, and hawkish General George C Scott on the other; and the deranged Nazi rocket scentist Strangelove, a man who dreams of virgins in a subterranean paradise after WWIII…but can’t quite stop his arm from saluting his lost and much-beloved Fuhrer.

About as black as film noir gets, Dr Strangelove still looks good today. It has managed to carry forward a sense of that time: an epoch when we had the Cuban Missile crisis, Aldermaston marchers keen to ban the bomb, and a generation about to grow up into sexual cynics who must live for today, because we’d probably all be blown to smithereens at any moment. But my abiding memories of the movie are Sellers’ as the urbane RAF Johnny nervously watching Sterling Hayden unravel, George C Scott telling the President that “Screw gettin’ ‘em back Mister President, we can catch these Goddamn Commies with their pants down”, and Sellers’ Presidential riposte, “Thank you General, but I have no desire to go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Ay-dolf Hitler”.

I will check all plugs, lights, oven hobs and locks carefully tonight to ensure I haven’t done anything daft before I retire to bed. But I will at least sleep sound in the knowledge that, whatever any Islamist loony might do in the next 24 hours, he’s unlikely to take the whole world with him. In 1964, such an outcome was all too possible.

 

 

 

STRAUSS-KAHN: Some good, some bad, some ugly

The Strauss-Kahns  confer with their lawyer Ben Brafman

The more The Slog digs into the Strauss-Kahn case, the murkier it gets

Whatever his peccadilloes and saving graces, Dominic Strauss-Kahn has clearly decided to fight ugly bigotry with ugly bruisers. And they don’t come any uglier than his defence attorney Ben Brafman. Brafman counts mobster Vincent ‘Vinny Gorgeous’ Basciano, ex-Bonanno family head, among his clients and friends. He also has the best record in US legal history of unlikely acquittals against all the odds.

Like so much that surrounds DSK’s lifestyle and contacts, Brafman is a curious mixture of good and bad. Hugely talented, feared by every DA’s office in America – but a man whose whole professional life begs questions – he’s half top lawyer, half spin doctor. Having told DSK he should lose weight in time for his trial (a stroke of genius in its own right) Ben Brafman now has half the investigative agencies in America engaged in the task of digging any and all dirt on Nafissatou Diallo. And if it comes to it, be in no doubt that he will show her no mercy.

A good piece of sleuthing by the Daily Mail has solved the mystery of why the Sofitel rape-accusing maid obtained asylum in the US: it seems the entry visa was on compassionate grounds, in that her daughter had serious pelvic injuries following a road accident in Guinea – injuries that only US surgeons could cure. The facts stack up, and so I for one am happy to accept that and move on.

But the rest of the Mail interview with her ‘brother’ is vomit-inducing, a continuation of the Mother Theresa image spin – and the death of her husband is still unexplained. This seems odd, as a natural but tragic death could also add to her sympathy vote. And we still await the rationale for the DA’s AIDs denial, given her apartment is exclusively reserved for HIV+ women. The sanctimonious tone of the Mail article (“we have chosen not to reveal her name”) is also classic hypocritical Dacre bollocks: not only is there no reason at all now not to name her, I understand the family wouldn’t talk to the paper without a written legal assurance to that effect.

Dominic Strauss-Kahn also has a new apartment, and – as we’ve seen already – Murdoch’s New York Post is following every fetish and fart with avid interest. The Post’s latest ‘scoop’ is that DSK hasn’t hired any female cleaners for the flat; this follows hot on the heels of Newscorp’s world exclusive about what a lousy tipper the former IMF head is.

Nothing is ever too banal or beastly for Rupert’s papers to print, but in grubbing around in the Strauss-Kahn’s trash cans, they seem to have missed a couple of points.

First up, DSK’s younger brother Marc-Olivier Strauss-Kahn is more than just ‘a director at Banque de France’. Second, sources close to the Brafman team assert strongly that the maid Nafissatou Diallo seduced him, they had sex – and then she demanded money. The line being taken by these sources is that – as Brafman alluded in his letter to DA Cyrus Vance last week – the lady is not the burkha-wearing innocent painted by her family.

My view is that there is compelling evidence about that in both directions. Stay tuned.

LIBYA: Jacob zooms in as video ‘confirms’ UK presence on the ground

Alleged SAS presence (top left)

South African President Jacob Zuma laid down his beloved machine gun yesterday, and had a crack at brokering a peace deal in Libya. But while he was flying north to meet Gadaffi the Mad, Al Jazeera released video footage showing half a dozen UK soldiers active on Libyan soil….in direct contravention of the UN resolution. Nobody was surprised.

It makes you wonder how long it took Muhammar Gadaffi/Gaddafi/Q’adaffi/Ghadaffei’s diplomats scouring the world before they came up with someone not actually asking the Libyan dictator to go, or bombing his country. But finally, a week after asking for a truce, they settled on AIDs denier and multiply corrupt South African leader Jacob Zuma. Yesterday, the deluded paranoid finally shook hands with the murderous psychopath, as the world tried to work out which one was which.

What the world couldn’t discern afterwards was what, if anything, had been achieved – apart from some good publicity for Zuma in South Africa’s pro-Government news media. Zuma’s entourage announced that yes, Gadaffi wanted a truce and no, he wasn’t going to step down. The credibility of the African Union had been tested again….and found wanting.

Trying to be kind as ever, the BBC noted that ‘no announcement of progress towards a peaceful resolution’ had been forthcoming. ‘The African Union is a joke’ would’ve been much more to the point, but woe betide anyone in the West who critiques an African State before Opposition Parties have been banned, and opponents start disappearing – only to reappear some time later in the freezer.

Anyway, diplomatically we have a stalemate…and yet again, reports of it being ‘all over bar the shouting’ are beginning to look premature.

Predictably, the Beeb wouldn’t touch the day’s biggest story with a bargepole: the broadcasting of a video on Al Jazeera purporting to show six SAS blokes on the ground, with guns, and doing stuff – as opposed to in the air, with bombs, dropping them. Mark Thompson’s lads aren’t going to wade into those muddy waters, but it’ll be interesting to see what the UN makes of it.

Those of us old enough to remember when South East Asia was called Indo-China have seen this so many times before: legacy-seeking politicos up for a fight against third-rate opposition, and gung-ho top brass assuring them that the nig-nogs* always run away from gunfire. It starts with security agents, then military advisers, and is followed by bombers, and finally crack units – before somebody says, “Why are we there?”

Glory-hunters Cameron and Sarkozy are now left, like so many before them, wondering what to do next.

* Before the Guardianista hate-threads start arriving, could I just point out that this is an ironic use of the derogatory phrases Western military have for Africans and Asians. Arabs can be Gippos or nig-nogs, but most nig-nogs are negroid. Moving eastwards, there are then wogs, geeks and finally the chinks. Nobody is rude about the Japanese any more since their Tsunami disaster, but they used to be Japs (UK) or Nips (US). None of this makes me a racist.

At the End of the Day

We are living in the age of the Whopper

Over the last twenty years, we’ve had some astonishing cases of truth economy. The most famous for a long time was Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual intercourse with that woman” – a vastly preferable version of events, from his point of view, to one he might have given, viz, “She gave me a blow job, and I pleasured her with a cigar”. Less well known but equally brazen was Tony Blair’s denial of having lied to the House of Commons about the WOMD dossier – and Alistair Campbell’s evidence to the Chilcot Committee in relation to the Attorney General.

But on the whole in these cases, the liars gave a version of private events with minimal witnesses – or told whoppers knowing full well that the Thirty Year Rule would hide the fib. Of late, however, it seems to me that denial of criminal involvement has entered a new stage wherein in all disbelief has to be suspended in order to take it seriously.

Being a smart Essex boy who is nevertheless too clever for his own good, Newscorp’s Andy Coulson felt so secure in his judgment of public apathy and Cameron’s naivety, he decided to tell a lie of such mind-boggling incredibility that every journalist in every news medium in every country on the planet would know he was lying. Having declared that, as the editor of a leading tabloid renowned for his anally retentive thoroughness in checking the source of stories, he had no knowledge at all of the illegal celebrity phones-hacking going on all around him, he got away with it for five years. Technically, he still is getting away with it – although I’d imagine that even he now knows the game is up. But what’s more, when the New York Times doubted his account – with witness statements – Coulson hit the paper with a bulldog of a writ. This is brass neck to write home about.

It comes of course from arrogance – which in turn comes from access to power so apparently great, it leaves a person exempt from all and any laws. The same is true today of Sepp Blatter’s exoneration from graft charges by a FIFA internal enquiry. Blatter’s insistence that he knew nothing at all about the corrupt success of Qater’s 2022 World Cup bid – this from a man who has run FIFA like a personal fiefdom since 1998 – is so tooth-rattlingly daft, it is the equivalent of Coulson saying he’d never heard of Rupert Murdoch.

Luckily for the rest of us, once the solids finally do hit the propeller-blades, there is no honour among thieves. This morning, the equally unpleasant FIFA trougher Jack Warner has released an email suggesting that there was no way Sepp Blatter could have been unaware of the Qatar bung. And a little bird tells me that the Wapping liars are having one helluva job treading a careful line between giving their Guilty Men vast amounts of spondoolicks….and suddenly finding they’ve turned Queen’s evidence in order to get a lighter sentence.

The explanation everyone in New York awaits with baited breath is Ben Brafman’s version, on behalf of his client Dominic Strauss-Kahn, as to how DSK allegedly wound up on top of Nafissatou Diallo. The ‘slipped on a bar of soap’ defence  has already been used by a cartoonist in the French press, so the Strauss-Kahn legal team needs another one. The alternatives on offer are (a) it was a Fed set-up using Diallo as the jail-bait (b) DSK had already ordered a hooker, and mistook the maid for that person, or (c) it was consensual sex.

Oddly enough, although the last is by far the least believable, most of the smart money in the Apple is on that one. New Yorkers perhaps sense that this is the Zeitgeist: the more chutzpah in the defence, the more bonkers the fib, the better it will play.

That’s as maybe, but my instinct tells me they’re wrong. There remain three very big unanswered questions in this case: first, the yarn about Strauss-Kahn ‘fleeing justice in a hurry’ appears to be complete bollocks; second, the maid was in the suite cleaning the room of a guy she knew was about to check out – why? Nobody does that; and above all else – as Ben Brafman publicly hinted last week – there are some irregularities surrounding Diallo. Why was she given political asylum? Why was she living in an apartment reserved for HIV positive women?  Was her husband shot dead by New York cops…and if so, why?

It is this mast, I suspect, to which Ben Brafman will nail his colours – viz, undermining the credibility of the witness….perhaps via that route to suggest consensual sex as part of a set-up, perhaps in order to suggest she is a neurotic fantasist who made the whole thing up.

This last possibility occurred to me early on. Her claim not to know who DSK was is right up there with the best that any Coulson or Blatter could come up with: as the bloke’s picture was plastered all over the walls of every floor in the Sofitel, we need to ask ourselves why Nafissatou, alone among her work colleagues, had no idea that Dominic Strauss-Kahn was the boss of the IMF. And why, with the alleged perpetrator under lock, key and leg-tag, she still needs 24/7 NYPD protection.

Just as with the other cases I’ve outlined here, there is a mega-lie at the centre of this one. The difference this time is that, as the case still lies in the future, nobody is certain whether the mendacity lies with DSK or the NYPD. For me, they both fit the frame – very powerful and convinced of immunity from prosecution – so it’s anyone’s guess. But it promises to be fun finding out.

——————————-

Mark Daley told a hearing at Kensington Town Hall in London: “I have had complaints that people are doing some very unpleasant things, including having sex”. Good for a laugh and all that, but Daley was talking about stuff going on in Guy Pelly’s very exclusive club where – according to the Mail and the Telegraph – anything goes. No surprise, therefore, that Harry Windsor was to be found there, along with his cousin Beatrice.

The Mail’s boat-people who shipped out to the Barclaygraph four years ago have a bit of a thing about the less well-behaved Windsors. I don’t doubt that any kid inheriting the genes of Sarah Ferguson and Princess Diana is going to behave like a dingbat on occasions; but the Telegraph’s obsession with rubbishing the Yorks in general and Harry in particular raises eyebrows here and there.

Tongues have been wagging over the last year or so about what the next stage of Hackgate is likely to be – once the Murdoch criminality has spread to the Sunday Times and The Sun. Former Mailites at the Torygraph are, I’m told, concerned that they might well be the tumbril’s next clients on their way to the Akers guillotine. The subject of their concern, it is alleged, is hacking the Royals.

We shall see.

 

Current economic model collapsing. Business as usual.

The Devil is very much in the detail of our economic problems

As the British Chambers of Commerce downgraded their UK economic forecast, both Mervyn King and Ben Bernanke came under new pressure to raise interest rates. In Greece meanwhile, the Athens Government will effectively have to agree to being ‘taken over’ by a consortium of the EU and foreign sovereign lenders as the quid pro quo for giving them further bailout monies. Top of the agenda for intrusive action is creditors moving in to forcibly sell Greek assets.

This week will also be a crucial one for Italian and Spanish bond auctions, both countries needing to get the money away and show demand for their debt. And there are signs that the Obamites are already engaging in ‘expectation management’ about upcoming growth and unemployment statistics.

But for the fat cats in the black hats, things go on the same as ever: grabbing, cheating, lying, controlling and influencing.

Chief executives of FTSE 100 companies saw their median earnings rise by a third to £3.5m last year. Not surprisingly, this evoked widespread cries about top wally rewards being out of line with share prices and employees’ pay. The median increase – the midpoint between the top and bottom earners – was more than treble the 9% rise in the FTSE 100 index over the period, according to a survey conducted jointly by MM&K and Manifest.

The findings came as ordinary earners endured the longest wage-squeezefor ninety years. Average earnings grew less than 2% last year, about half the rate of inflation. But FTSE 100 CEO average earnings were 120 times that of the average employee, a multiple that has risen from 45 times since 1998.

With no performance-related argument to fall back on at all, there truly are neither commercial nor moral grounds to support such greed. Like the Whitehall Sir Humphries who voted themselves huge pension benefits without reference to a single elected representative, these folks are taking the piss.

But they’re not alone. Abbott Laboratories’ anti-cholesterol drug Niaspan secured a US FDA  patent in 1997. The chaps at Abbott have been selling shedloads of the drug ever since, and today it’s in the  global drug sales Top 50. In 2009, global revenue came to $717million, and last year it was over $900m in sales value.

The drug is, however, useless. It doesn’t work, and it never has.

The US National Institute of Health has just announced the results of a 5-year study of Niaspan’s clinical performance. NIH official Jeffrey Probstfield M.D. told the media last week (my italics) that, “The lack of effect on cardiovascular events is unexpected – and in striking contrast to previous trials and observational studies”. 

It is often thus with pharmcos. Sales trials and results are sort of accepted, but then looks of offended innocence are offered to the FDA when such ‘results’ are contradicted later and/or elsewhere. I wonder if Bin Laden’s hideaway – Abbotabad – was named after this company.

And so we wend our merry way back to the banks….where else? Like Newscorp, Goldman Sachs places a huge premium on having total control of a high level of influence upon the political process. Goldman announced late last week that it had hired Senator Judd Gregg as an adviser to the bank. The New Hampshire Republican will “provide strategic advice to the firm and its clients, and assist in business development initiatives across our global franchise,” said the firm in a somewhat triumphalist statement. And just in case you were wondering which lever-puller was behind this hiring, Lloyd Blankfein added, “Judd Gregg’s experience and insight will contribute significantly to our firm, and our continuing focus on supporting economic growth”.

That must represent the broadest definition of ‘economic growth’ outside of France. Anyway, in the wake of the 2008 global crisis (at the very least partly down to the excesses of Wall Street firms such as Goldman) Gregg was an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s effort to tighten oversight of the financial industry. He was also a staunch defender of Goldman during the heated congressional debate over the $700 billion bank bailout. You remember that one, surely? It was the episode in which Hank Paulson got on his knees to beg for the money in order to stop the sky falling in. The money was then used for another purpose entirely (underwriting corporate mergers) but spookily, the sky remained intact. Only last year, Gregg said that Democrats were ‘over-reacting’ to civil charges filed against Goldman for securities fraud.

“I hope that I can bring to Goldman Sachs some ideas and perspectives that will help the firm continue to be a leader in supporting its clients in their pursuit of the capital, credit and advice they need to be successful,” Gregg promised. Seems to me he’s just spent the last three years delivering that promise free of charge anyway.

Could it be (some scurrilous muck-rakers are asking) that former Senator Gregg had a retirement stipend in mind when he gave Goldman Sachs all that undying loyalty? Nah – course he didn’t. A US Senator bought by a defence, tobacco, oilco, pharmco or banking concern? It’s unthinkable.

————————————-

There is, in most Western societies, a tendency amongst the skilled majority to go along with an elite earning obscene amounts of money – if they’re doing pretty well too. There is even a shrugging indifference to wealth discrepancies if – despite one’s standard of living falling a bit – there are still some arrogant pricks getting Bollinger delivered on draught to their £140M  mansions in Chelsea Harbour.You might still believe that such folks are essential.

But when adversely affected by varietal bad tidings, sooner or later even the most reality telly-fixated morons are going to get a bit uppity about other incompetent twerps living the high life at their expense.

Losing your job, not being able to afford to buy a property, not being able to afford the rent, inability to get a mortgage, having the house repossessed, and watching the value of pension, house and salary plummet. All or most of these going on at the same time is unlikely to evoke a Christian response. When your own country goes to the wall and suddenly finds itself swarming with high-rolling alien lenders (many of whom helped cause the problem in the first place)….well, that’s the point at which even the most mild-mannered citizen snaps.

 

EXCLUSIVE: Brafman tells Strauss-Kahn, “Lose weight”

DSK…trying to be diminutive

In New York, fat cats are bad news. It’s the thin end of the wedge for Dominic

In a major tip of the hat to the way New Yorkers judge folks, The Slog understands that Dominic Strauss-Kahn’s legal representative Ben Brafman has instructed his client to lose a load of weight. A source close to the issue tells me, “Brafman is a shrewd cookie. Being obese in smart New York is close to having infectious leprosy. Even a person taking up half a block thinks being a fat celebrity is bad news. If you’re on trial for allegedly pinning a Muslim woman to the floor, being a fat cat isn’t the way to win over the jury”.

Two other locals in turn felt the advice made sense. “Going into the Courtroom thin would be good,” says one, “It says to the jury that the accused is suffering big-time. Look, this is exactly what Goering did at Nuremburg”.

In truth, Goering lost weight because the Allies took his anxiolitic drugs away from him. Also, he was found guilty. At which point, he took a cyanide pill hidden up his backside. This last is renowned as a way to lose weight bigtime. But those small issues aside, this is I suppose exactly the sort of cosmetic advice that makes Ben Brafman more than your common-or-garden conveyancing solicitor.

Meanwhile, Murdoch’s New York Post is getting increasingly desperate in its attempts to blacken the cheese-eating-surrender-Frog-bigshot’s character. The latest revelation is that DSK is cheap. The Post story is picked up by The New York Magazine: confirming that Strauss-Kahn is keen to take Brafman’s weight-loss strategy, the paper notes that ‘We may never know exactly what’s going on inside his head, but we do know he’s eating Lean Cuisine, and he’s a bad tipper: he took in a six-bag grocery order that included healthy fare like boneless, skinless chicken breast, Lean Cuisine meals and Crystal Light. “They never tip,” said Danny Cotto after dropping off a box from Espresso Coffee….’

Rumours that Mr Cotto will be called by the DA as a witness are entirely unfounded.

The French rarely tip. First off, they believe only in tipping for performing above and beyond the call of duty: they see tipping a guy for doing his job as stupid – a view with which I tend to agree. And second, most Gallic restaurants say clearly on the menu, ‘La service est compris’. Waving dollars around simply isn’t part of their culture.

Either way, one wonders what Brafman’s next piece of spin counsel might be. Mince into the dock each morning? Develop an Irish accent? The possibilities are endless.

Related: Why DSK will struggle to get a fair trial in New York City.  DA sets sights on making DSK a gender-criminal.

At the End of the Day

Blatter, eye on the main chance, eye off the ball

Sometimes, an event occurs to make one wonder at the brass neck of those involved in it. I say sometimes, but these days what I tend to mean is, ‘far too often’.

Sepp Blatter has run a corrupt FIFA for nigh on fourteen years. Following last week’s BBC Panorama expose, Blatter had just the one opponent, Mohamed Bin Hammam, for yet another re-election. The Panorama evidence against Caribbean representative Jack Warner was so obvious, FIFA had to do something. Bin Hammam, in turn, had been shown grinning innanely at charges of massive payoffs in his favour.

So the FIFA ethics committee has decided there is a case to answer against Bin Hammam and Warner. But Blatter himself has been cleared of all charges.

FIFA’s ethics committee consists entirely of men placed by (and thus loyal to) Sepp Blatter. In one stroke they have made their mentor the only election candidate, and tainted his only opponent….who withdrew from the contest this morning.

Secretary general of FIFA Jerome Valcke told the BBC, “I don’t see what is wrong with this election with Mr Sepp Blatter. I think the most important thing is a commitment from all the members of the FFA ExCo with the president to support a change within FIFA, and in his last mandate make sure that Fifa is stronger and cleaner than it was.”

Quite why the man who made this outfit so grubby in the first place should be seen as a cleaning agent is completely beyond me. But that’s the nature of graft today: not only is there no shame, there is an unwritten assumption that both soccer fans and the media are completely stupid.

The huge disappointment for me in all this is Michel Platini. One of the greats of French total football in the 198os, his entry into FIFA seemed to me to be the dawning of  a better age. But the Frenchman is content to sit there and watch those around him rip world football off, in the certain knowledge that, if he doesn’t rock the boat, he will get the nod on Blatter’s job in four years time. Given the extent of blatantly decadent greed in the upper echelons of FIFA, Platini should have the guts to say “Enough is enough”, and blow the whistle on his boss.

What Newscorp executives get up to given half a chance, No. 47,309

What ailes Murdoch  intimate Roger?

Roger Ailes has been running Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News since God was a girl. According to The New York Magazine, he is also effectively ‘the head of the Republican Party, having employed five prospective presidential candidates and done perhaps more than anyone to alter the balance of power in the national media in favor of the Republicans’. Yes, it’s another episode of How Murdoch Really runs Everything.

But Ailes has of late landed himself in a bit of hot water.

The small-town newspapers in New York’s Hudson Valley that Fox News chief Roger Ailes owns with his wife Elizabeth are in a staff revolt after employees caught Ailes spying on them…and using Newscorp’s security chaps to do it.

Whatever else people may think about Roger Ailes, there is broad agreement on the fact that he is decidedly odd. The spying fest followed years of strange memos and calls between his papers’ editor and Ailes, who once asked him to personally stop a break-in at their home, and implied that, after Roger’s death, he’d be expected to replace him in their marriage.

In late March, Ailes confronted the three staffers and accused them of badmouthing him and Elizabeth during their lunch breaks. One of the employees, Joe Lindsley, had noticed a black Lincoln Navigator following him, according to several sources familiar with the incident. The gumshoe was a bad choice, as the newspaperman knew him socially; the Lincoln driver soon confessed that, although a Newscorp security man, he was following his friend at Ailes’s direction. As Ailes owns the papers personally, Uncle Roop may want to know why News Corporation shareholders were paying for security guards to follow Roger’s perceived enemies.

All told, a dozen full-time and freelance staffers have left the Ailes’ Putnam County papers in the last 10 months. In addition to the aforementioned instances of surveillance, several former employees told website The Gawker that they had reason to suspect that their e-mail was being read and that rooms in the News and Recorder offices were bugged—Ailes, who is notoriously obsessed with his personal security, has the building thoroughly wired with video cameras. As if to underscore the message that the Aileses are all-seeing, the single unisex bathroom in the papers’ headquarters features portraits of Elizabeth and Roger on the walls. Big Brother and his wife are there, as it were, to watch the employees defaecate.

Ah well, it makes a change from hacking mobiles.

Unloved and not winning the top prizes: why Manchester United and Sir Alex Ferguson should part company.

“Goaoooooool!”

Messianic Barca murder United as Slogette watches match through the medium of masochism

In an act of impetuous insanity that would’ve been impossible without her father’s genes to guide her, my elder daughter dragged her husband off to Barcelona on Friday night, the better to watch the Champions’ League Final in a bar filled with 2,000 fanatical Barca supporters. My son-in-law – who likes football, and yet inexplicably follows Spurs – kept himself to himself during the game (a wise move) but when United’s Wayne Rooney swept in the equaliser against Barcelona after 32 minutes, the fact that his wife was the only ManU fan in the bar became instantly apparent.

As young people do in such circumstances, my daughter texted me excitedly. I knew she was in Spain, because my wife spotted this development on Facebook. It’s the only thing that makes the site indispensable, because otherwise you’d never get any news about your children ever again. Anyway, Barca went on to win easily 3-1, and so the crazy product of my loins was left another sixty-one minutes in which to earn the wages of foolhardy ways.

I suppose as a United supporter, I should be unhappy this morning, but I’m not. This is down to having wonderful weather, a tree full of perfectly ripe cherries to go at, and the certainty that I devoted 93 minutes last night to watching the beautiful game being, for once, absolutely beautiful. I think it possible that there will never again be a team as great as the current Barcelona outfit: they have that tremendous skill and inventive attacking ability that is hard to find outside Spain, Portugal, Brazil or Argentina. But above all, they have Lionel Messi. The man is a genius – and astonishingly, seems to be quite nice. But he is up there with Pele and Best when it comes to understanding that even individual brilliance works better in a team crammed with talent. Diego Maradonna never grasped this, which is why he needed the Hand of God to score some of his more important goals.

For the first ten minutes of the match, Manchester United gave a display in which they beat Barcelona at their own short-passing game and added an element of harassment that clearly knocked the Spanish side off balance. In the eleventh minute, Barcelona worked out what was going on and returned it in kind – the only difference being that they knew what they were doing. They put United under unbearable pressure, and then scored a wonderfully simple goal. The English champions had never looked like doing this.

For the next six minutes, I had the awful feeling that my half-serious prediction of 6-0 might be coming true, but then Mr X who cannot be named for legal reasons played a perfectly executed one-two with our Wayne, and the Scouse potato-head swept the ball in – showing that he too is a genius, just much less intelligent than Messi. (Mr X, by the way, was offside).

The unflappable confidence of Barcelona was pretty clear from then on, and my memory of the rest of the game was Messi giving a masterclass in entertainment, while United made brilliant tackles to foil him…..but seemed to be going backwards an awful lot. Messi’s goal when it came was the picador at his most merciless, idiotically described by ITV’s pundit for the night as “one that Van der Sar should’ve gathered”. That’s the trouble with your Dutch goalkeepers, they don’t have X-ray vision. David Villa wrapped it up with a third soon afterwards – which in a way was a shame, as it ruined the game as a competitive spectacle, leaving United the thankless task of chasing after the ball while the Spanish short-first-time-pass game made them dizzier and dizzier. As a born Redeye, I have to admit it could easily have been 7-1, had the Catalans decided to move up a gear.

I am now going to suggest something that will earn me huge amounts of vitriol from the MUFC website, but it must be said. I think Sir Alex should call it a day, and give someone younger the  job. There are two important reasons why I offer this sagesse.

The first is that Fergie has spent a glittering career trying to build a European-style (as in, continental style) team capable of matching those players unfortunate enough to be in the eurozone at their own game. On the whole – in a domestic game dominated by foreign players – this has made for an unbeatable formula. Even with only two European Cups, Sir Alex is still the most successful manager of all time, because he has achieved his astonishing silverware record at a competitive level, and under the sort of pressure, that Bob Paisley couldn’t have imagined. But Ferguson’s time has passed: the club now needs fresh thinking.

Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that English club sides (what the Salmondellas do is their affair) have spent too long now learning off foreign sides. It’s time they feared us for being different, not just as good as them. And the long, pinpoint-accuracy through ball has always been one of the most exciting aspects of the British game.

There’s a simple reason why it’s effective and enjoyable: footballs travel faster than players, and leave defenders flat-footed facing the wrong way. The associated skill of feinting one way and then delivering a defence-splitting pass in another direction is what gets real fans of the game off their seats and roaring for more. Picking up such passes from John White built Jimmy Greaves’s career.

Another hugely neglected feature of our game is the burst of speed followed by an angled cross into the penalty area. Defenders are automatically forced to look sideways at who’s entering the penalty area, whereas the tall opponent is building up momentum for the header or volley to come. It is an impossible move to defend.

No doubt younger fans reading this are thinking ‘daft old fart’, but I’ve played the game at a reasonable level, and despite the contemporary pundit’s drivel about channels and width, football remains what it always was: a very simple game requiring dedication to skill enhancement, fitness and swashbuckling adventure. It is often forgotten now, but the first British side to lift the European Cup was not Manchester United, but Celtic. They beat the Italian champions in the 1967 Final by playing exactly the game I’ve just described. Get hold of the video if you can: it’s a fabulous display of Total Football.

These ideas are not ‘old-fashioned’. They are the ideas made flesh in the skills of Bobby Charlton, a man whose precision long-distance passing had to be witnessed to be believed. Such principles made the Dutch national side, and especially Johann Cruyff, the most entertaining players in soccer history during the 1970s -  the era when Ajax won everything, and only poor refereeing robbed the Dutch of a World Cup triumph against Germany. They were also the principles behind Argentina’s greatest side: for all I knocked him earlier on, Diego Maradonna was the most ambitiously adventurous player of all time: nobody has ever matched his self-belief apart from George Best.

The second reason Sir Alex should go is equally important: while everyone envies and thus dislikes the most successful club at any one time, most British supporters hate United. That’s the only word I can find to use. Before the game, I’d spent a delightful three-hour lunch with smart folks who aren’t that interested in footie; but when the subject of the Final came up, faces grimaced, and the host said, “Anyone but Manyoo”.

If you’ve been steeped in the United culture for more than half a century, this kind of visceral loathing of the Club is not part of the script. It is, by far, the thing that saddens me most about the team I will support until the day I die. In the 1950s and 1960s, the understated dignity of Matt Busby, the popularity of the original ‘Babes’, the 1958 Munich tragedy – and then the undeniable talent of Best, Law, Charlton, Crerand and Stepney – all combined to make MUFC the most loved club in the world. Outside the UK, they probably still are. But at home in Blighty, there is a spitting intensity about the way in which footie fans from elsewhere express their dislike of United.

I think Ferguson is in large part responsible for this. A manager almost devoid of fairness and objectivity while discussing his team is not unusual (Wenger at Arsenal is even worse) but there’s a mind-games bully inside Sir Alex which comes out very easily….and all too noticeably. His audio slip at last week’s press conference (about banning a journalist who asked a question about Giggs’s private life) was nothing short of disgraceful. On being beaten by a German side two seasons ago, after the game Ferguson remarked, “Aye well – they got our lad sent off and then beat ten men – typical bloody Germans”. Even if he thought it, he should not have said it.

Last but not least, Fergie’s incessant abuse of referees sets a terrible example to young kids about on-the-field discipline, and gives Sir Alex the air of an Essex yob storming into school to beat up the teacher who dared to tell off his hopelessly wayward son. I know perfectly well that Ferguson is an expert on French wine, speaks pretty good French, and knows his horses better than many a jockey. And last night, his embrace of the Barca coach at the end of the game did display some genuine dignity. But the civilised side of Sir Alex Ferguson is far too infrequently seen.

Such a view will be thought ‘naive’ by many, but it isn’t: principles and culture in football are everything when it comes to on the pitch performance – but soccer clubs and their stars are extremely influential on the culture beyond the professional game. I blog about footie only rarely, and when I do it is usually to take the mickey out of contemporary coaching-bollocks, or to describe football as Part of Our Problem. I love my club, and I’d like the neutrals to, at the very least, admire it. But most of all, I’d like our sportsmen to learn how to behave in public. (And yes Ryan, in private too).

On a closing note, did anyone see the Audi spot in the break immediately before the match kicked off? It was a very good rather than great piece of creative work, but the brilliant ‘stroke’ of dominating the most expensive slot of the evening was media-buying at its most daring and brilliant. It put me in mind of Mike Yershon at CDP, the man who went to the Colletts creative department and said “How would you like to make a 3-minute car commercial?” From this came the Fiat Strada robots film – a hugely successful launch vehicle for perhaps the worst Italian car ever made.

This too was swashbucking advertising that breaks moulds and does the unexpected. One of the many pioneers of this approach was Frank Lowe. Frank is and always has been a United fanatic. Somehow, that figures.

The way we lap up Obama’s soft soap makes me fear for our liberties.

Is anyone wise enough any more to resist the soft blandishments of The Strong One?

I wonder if, like me, you watched the audience in front of President Obama as he addressed Parliament the other day. All of them were staring up adoringly, as if watching a political colossus – rather than a shallow, idea-free politician who has used his Presidency unwisely…..and to little effect.

An American friend much younger than me said – when I first spotted Obama’s star quality in 2007 – “this guy can charm the ass off a Goddamned elephant”, and he was right. Barack Obama had and has star quality thanks to his looks, build, immaculate dress-sense, and amazing gift for oratory. But I have always seen him as the black Blair – perfect in form, and devoid of content. He told us towards the end of his stay that we were the best and closest of America’s allies. He said the same thing to the French last year. And tonight (Saturday) he has said the same thing to the Poles.

Somebody else was trying to tell me earlier this year that US Presidents had been forever thus, naming JFK as “the example par excellence”. I am not a Kennedy revisionist: I don’t think it matters that JFK was hopeless as a Congressional persuader, and had the sort of sexual appetite to make Strauss-Kahn look like a monk. He gave people hope – and had the guts to back it up with something solid. He got elected through his father’s contacts and money, but told Joe Kennedy he wouldn’t pay any ‘debts’ (in the form of favours) the old man owed bosses and gangsters in key areas like Chicago. These two things almost certainly got him killed, but for my generation, JFK was, truly, an inspiration.

Barack Obama is simply a politician’s politician -  a minnow compared to Kennedy.

Just as advertising men are suckers for their own craft, so too are politicians. Our political class will never learn that first of all, US politicos are nothing like ordinary Americans…who are, outside corporate life, much nicer; and second – with specific reference to Obama – US diplomacy is riddled with mendacity and double-cross.
We fall for this ‘unique bond’ drivel about the Special Relationship every time; but on this occasion it was all the more pernicious for having been ‘moved on’ by the message controllers beforehand: the word ‘essential’ instead of ‘special’ (as yet another idiotic description of something mythical) was mentioned 37 times in 18 minutes on the BBCNews station live coverage…further proof again, I’m afraid, that the arm-biter at the top of that organisation has no spine – and precious little insight.
There never was any beef in Obama’s sandwich; and this is one of two things he shares with Cameron. The other is a completely unfeeling cynicism about the truth. Dave’s dealings with Newscorp, and his obvious bias towards all things Murdoch, are the same in essence as Obama’s use of the Bin Laden raid: devious, constantly searching for personal advantage, and peppered with carefully manufactured lies.

All that said, for the British, President Obama is a relatively benign influence, in that he doesn’t care a fig about us. Also I see no sign at all of any pathological need to retain power in the way that I always did with Dick Nixon. But some dubious, authoritarian people are going to come along over the next few years, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that not only would a large proportion of the UK electorate welcome them with open arms – purely because they say, “I have the answer” – an awful lot of lobby fodder and Whitehall pond life would also be more than delighted to help make the New Order work.

It’s an obvious thing to say I know, but people of our age-group are dying off. Sure, a larger minority than usual are going to live into their late eighties and nineties, but few if any will have the energy, interest, credibility, bravery or memory by then to explain why The Strong One is nearly always a very bad idea. Our teachers were far too busy organising Under Twelve Progressive Rockers Against Heightism to bother teaching them much in the way of modern history – let alone the lessons that accrue from it. To be blunt, kids today know Hitler killed a lot of people in the Holocaust, but they have almost no idea how easily Adolf came to power, and how he created a totalitarian State without bending a single law in the Weimar Constitution. In Britain, we don’t even have a Constitution. I think it is a condemnation of contemporary culture that we need one – but boy, do we ever need one.

“A majority would never support such a person,” people tell me all the time; but this too betrays their ignorance. The highest vote in a proper multi-Party election the Nazis ever got in Germany was 32.7%. If you control a huge army of thugs, build a shiny new infrastructure, solve inflation, and get rid of an unpopular minority, that two-thirds who never supported you soon come around to your way of thinking. Reverse a heinous Treaty and get most of the Reich’s land back, and you’re the hero-Fuhrer. Start humiliating your enemies, and you’re a God. So people disappear during the night – who cares? Life is good….don’t make trouble.

“The internet has made such total control impossible,” is another denialist assertion – but the facts support the opposite view. Yesterday, Iran announced it will build its own internet and shut out all others. China already does this. Google and Verizon have already ensured that strata of ‘performance quality’ will soon be introduced onto the Web. The opportunity for censorship in that context is almost too obvious to point out. The Russians are miles ahead in the race to perfect ways of blagging into and if necessary jamming all forms of internet communication. Every last ISP selling telecoms online already works in cooperation with GCHQ. This isn’t conspiracy paranoia – read Jacqui Smith’s last statement to the House before her husband’s porn penchant brought her down: having first denied that such action in concert was under construction, she later reversed her position entirely.

Far from making totalitarianism impossible, digital technology has made Orwell’s nightmare an easily attainable reality. The East German Stasi kept a whole nation under surveillance without any of this technology; the British State could get it up and running tomorrow – literally. Every site we visit, every email we write is already watched 24/7 by marketing and business. How else do you think that the site ads you see on your browser just happen to reflect the things you’re interested in?

Had such a situation arisen in, say, 1960 – when the Cold War was at its height, people remembered the Gestapo, and Orwell’s 1984 was a famous book being made into TV plays and films – the outcry would have been universal, the demand for the whole edifice to be deconstructed irresistible. In 2011, the response is, “Yeh – whatever”.

I get mail and comment-threads all the time suggesting that New Labour in particular deliberately connived at this situation, but I can’t accept that: we have arrived at this dangerous point (with the coming econo-fiscal disaster an obvious catalyst) because middle-class Labour’s high-IQ/high ignorance/high five idiots were too stupid to grasp the obvious consequences of generous welfare + risible education – and too intolerant to accept that they just might be badly misguided in their patronising views about ‘ordinary hard-working families’. I think there is some anecdotal evidence to support the idea that by keeping immigration up and maintaining dependence poverty, Labour’s more evil strategists really did see themselves as ‘defending and building share’ of the votes market. But the movement as a whole is far too dull, argumentative and pedestrian to accept (let alone put into action) such a clever conspiracy. We are where we are in this hole because of near-ubiquitous incompetence, not planned social engineering.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that The Strong One couldn’t come from Labour’s ranks. Harriet Harman is the most  obvious candidate, if only because she has form when it comes to (a) openly saying she’d change any law at any time to get a post-dated conviction (b) targeting hate-sectors like bankers and white, older males, and (c) being so clearly bigoted and at least part way round the twist in her gender views. But Hattie herself knows she is unelectable – hence her support for Ed Miliband, as the great hope for becoming a sort of surrogate mother, hatching mad schemes and ‘equality’ quotients on Harmperson’s behalf.

To give Ed the only due he’ll ever get from me, he isn’t The Strong One. He’s more what you’d call The Wrong One. But James Purnell (former Labour Welfare reformer) occasionally shows a disturbing combination of belief, limitless ambition, radical ideas and ruthlessness.

The point is – looking at Boris Johnson and others on the Tory side, and even Speaker John Bercow – there are plenty of power freaks in the Commons who would make no bones about their strength in a crisis…..and show no mercy to liberal democracy. The only thing that could stop such a person would be discernment of the threat by voters, the media and the elite. On the basis of Obama’s rapturous reception this week, I am forced to conclude that none of the members of that triumvirate could offer even the semblance of such judgment.

Champions’ League final: there is no such thing as destiny in football, only ‘on the night’.

The Slog delves into the psychopathology of the footie fan

Soccer supporters are, like footballers themselves, notoriously superstitious. Today is a big day for me: the team I’ve supported since 1955 is playing in the Champions’ League Final at Wembley. And already I don’t like the portents.

For one thing, our opponents (the ‘we’ by the way is Manchester United, our opponents Barcelona) are bending over backwards to tell the press how much United have improved since Barca gave us a football lesson in the 2008 final. They fear and respect us, they say. This is all part of the psyching out – or ‘kidology’ as we used to call it – designed to render my team complacent and puffed up with hubris. This always makes me certain the opposition will stick two goals up us in the first ten minutes.

Looking at the media this morning, my sense of foreboding is getting worse. This is Ferguson’s hour of destiny, they allege. Rooney has matured into the man who can beat Barcelona, say others. Worst of all, David Pleat is tipping us to win – an absolutely terrible sign.

Given that Barca still have the genius Messi in their side – and we no longer have the flawed showboater Ronaldo – I’m at a loss as to why this should be Fergie’s finest hour. If Rooney is now mature, I’d hate to see the media’s idea of an infantile adult. And David Pleat….dear me, he’s always wrong.

If you are a fan of a club (and at 63 I still am, although I fell out of love with the way the sport’s run years ago) life consists of never-ending doubts. Miss three chances in the first ten minutes, and every supporter thinks, ‘I hate it when they do that’. Hit the post a couple of times, and every mind in the Stadium asserts to itself, ‘Oh blimey, it’s going to be one of those days’.

But above all, every supporter can remember those instances when the media build a team up to be something it isn’t. The newspapers perform this ritual on the England team before every World Cup, the strategy being failsafe: if the national side wins, the paper says ‘You read it here first’; and if they lose, more copies will be sold by proclaiming the coach to be a blinkered idiot, and the players a bunch of overpaid Nancies. (The tabloids, at this stage, usually do a truly awful piece of photo-montage showing the manager as some kind of vegetable – a turnip for example, or perhaps a rotten tomato).

When United were just starting to reshape the club after the Munich disaster, in 1962 they played ‘Super’ Spurs in the FA Cup semi-final. ‘UNITED CAN DO IT’ proclaimed the Manchester Evening News. It took Jimmy Greaves just ninety seconds to prove that we couldn’t, and Danny Blanchflower another ten minutes to place a perfect free-kick on Cliff Jones’ head for the second goal. Both these were hallmark Tottenham moves at the time, but if something is done to perfection, it’s very hard to stop it. Watch Messi pick up the ball a few yards outside the penalty area today: he will do a one-two with a colleague, accelerate and then slot the ball in the far corner with surgical accuracy. Defenders can see this coming a mile off, but when executed with skill, there’s not a lot they can do about it.

All this is beginning to sound as if I’ve already written the Reds off, but that is to misunderstand the innate pessimism of the intelligent fan. By 7.45pm tonight, they will once again be my team, capable of beating anyone on their day, and certain to triumph over much-fancied rivals. A few gently glugged Kronenbourgs will have acted as a catalyst in this confidence-building process, but you will go a long way to find any club supporter who gets up that morning and spends the whole day in unshakeable certainty about the coming triumph that evening. You’ll find a lot of ManU fans who will get out of bed and start glugging Kronos to dull the terror of expectation, but that’s the subject of another article entirely.

The bottom line is this: every fan hates the team going into a big game as the favourites. For from this pinnacle of optimism there is only confirmation of the form book on the upside. The downside is a plunge down the mountain of hype and into the slough of despair below. (As United learned only too well during the FA Cup semi-final against local rivals Manchester City earlier this season). And damn me, the media are starting to make United sound like the favourites. Hence the kidology from the Barca mind-gamers: this is exactly what they want.

So bear with me for a few minutes while I change the quantum future in this short paragraph. I think there is every possibility that Wayne Rooney will kick the ref within the first ten minutes, and be sent off. I confidently expect Ryan Giggs to run off the field in tears after half an hour of the Spanish fans taunting him about injunctions. Sir Alex Ferguson will make at least one disastrous team selection in defence, and the unlucky man will put through his own goal shortly after the interval. Vidic will chop down Messi in the penalty area, and the victim will convert the resultant spot-kick with arrogant aplomb. The final score will be 6-0 to Barcelona.

There – that’s much better. I can face the day with confidence at last.

——————————————-

A short footnote: Calling all BBC-haters. Thanks almost entirely to a devastating Panorama expose last Tuesday, Sepp Blatter and all the other bent crooks at FIFA look as if they’re about to be cleared out.

I wonder if a Murdoch TV station would ever have conducted such a documentary….knowing that having FIFA onside is absolutely crucial to Newscorp’s survival as a business. Somehow, I think not.

Why is the beneficent G8 giving our money to unidentified arab objectives?

The G8 is chucking bad money after a good it perceives, but cannot quantify

In the greater scheme of things (and like you, I no longer have the foggiest idea what that is) $20 billion is not that much money. As sovereign debt these days is measured in trillions – the 2008 bank bailout alone cost $23 trillion – giving  a fraction of that to support Arab democracy doesn’t seem overly generous. My problem with the G8 casually handing over this sum is that it is a sign of, at best, not paying attention – and at worst, incipient madness.

Starting from the basics, ‘Arab democracy’ is one of the more obvious oxymorons in the world of geopolitics. I will never truly understand why the UN in general and Americans in particular refuse to bone up on the Arabist mentality….and how the overlaying of Islam upon that outlook was an answer to a behavioural problem, not a stepping stone to democracy. The Arab world in general accepts few if any of the precepts associated with Western democracy. Indeed, the tradition of giving the electoral franchise to women and the poor is entirely absent from Arab history. In the Middle East, liberty as a political aim is widely assumed to be a recipe for anarchy. The concept of gender equality is utterly alien to Arab culture, and largely dismissed by practising Muslims in the Arab region: women are chattels to be bought, sold, and – if in any way unfaithful to men – stoned. Last but not least, the Euro-American commitment to tolerance of all things not anti-social is viewed by the Arab mind as a form of weakness bordering on insanity.

While that last paragraph might read like a stream of generalised racism, it is nothing more than a reflection of the overwhelming body of evidence to support it. Not one single Arab culture, empire or Government in history has ever switched from autocracy to democracy of its own volition. Ironically, the laughably titled ‘Arab Spring’ is in and of itself a classic example of that history brought up to date.

So now we must ask ourselves, “Who exactly are we giving this money to?” And even the most cursory examination of the G8 donation brands it as the ultimate piece of glib, sub-prime charity. Somewhere in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, Arab extremists are wetting themselves laughing at this quite extraordinarily stupid and patronising gift.

The mistake the G8 is making – with our money, let it be said – is to confuse Arab nationalism and Islamist resurgence with libertarian democracy. At first sight this may seem like a near-impossible mistake to make; but to be fair to those who rarely see beyond the red carpet, overthrowing autocrats (with a great deal of bravery being displayed by the ordinary citizen) is normally the overture to at least an aspiration to creating democratic institutions.

In truth, the Arab rebels across five countries have impressed the West by demanding ‘freedom’. But this is a freedom to overturn those leaders who fail to deliver – not the freedom for all religions and views to be expressed without restraint. The naked greed of the elite at the expense of ordinary people (and the rising price of foodstuffs) are what did for the deposed despots. With better spin and less commodity speculation, the North African uprisings would never have happened.

Even taking these things into account, the persistence displayed by Putin in supplying arms to dissidents in one shape or another was an equally important catalyst for revolution. The fact that, in Libya, this has now blown up in Machoski Man’s face doesn’t change the reality: ask the Israelis, who have complained over and over again to the Russian Federation about the policy….and confiscated shipments as and when they discovered them.

The one remaining ally Israel had among the Arabs – Egypt – has turned almost immediately towards Iran in its first few months. It is hard to find anything more to say about this beyond asking the question, “Why would anyone but a congenital idiot think Arabist revolutions are likely to embrace a warmer attitude towards Israel?” But then, for years I have wondered what it is that so appalls Western liberals about democratic Israel.

The UK has been braindead in its aid policies for the last thirty years – a dereliction of duty that culminated last year in giving money to Islamic Pakistan so that it might the more easily develop a deliverable atomic bomb. But for the educated historians in our midst, the best parallel I can offer would be giving $20 billion to the Weimar Republic for recognising the democratic ‘right’ of Hitler’s Nazis to be in the 1933 Von Papen Cabinet. The West was mad to ignore the threat of National Socialism. It is incalculably more bonkers to be giving aid to unspecified and misunderstood Arab revolutionaries.

Related: Why we shouldn’t be in Libya