This yellow cake uranium is proof itself that Iraq was the right decision, Hattie, you treacherous hagwitch

Dave was backed by the big money Illuminati. Ed won because the big unions decided that genug was genug in the face of overwhelming evidence, if any more were needed, that New Labour meant old Conservative, with the added ingredient of unquestioning Atlanticism – hence The Economist’s ringing endorsement – unthinking globalisation – ditto the FT’s Martin Wolf’s enthusiasm – lickspittle obeisance to Big Usury. The shrieks of protest from the Guardianistas at the very idea that ANYONE could think that ANYTHING associated with THE UNIONS had any merit whatsoever underlines just how far English politics have drifted to the centre right.

Ed Miliband and his brother, Schnorbits, in happier times

I’m not convinced about Ed, who looks too much like Bernie Winters and sounds too adenoidal to be taken seriously. Though his speech to Conference was workmanlike and it was brave to admit that the murderous and incompetent invasion of  Iraq was ‘a mistake’, he is still an uninspiring figure who went to the same primary school as Boris Johnson, Oxford and, after all, comes from the same gene pool as Banana Boy. He is a devoted environmentalist, however, who seems genuinely committed to repositioning Labour as an alternative to the muddy centre-right – perfect for attracting disillusioned Lib-Dems and securing at least a coalition when the current government implodes as the (partly necessary) cuts cause widespread misery and introduce the possibility, if not the actuality, of civil unrest.

Still, it’s not all bad news. Banana Boy has taken his bat home, after having been caught on camera castigating the awful Harriet Harman for applauding brother Ed’s apology over Iraq (‘why are you clapping? You voted to go to war’). David Milliband’s wife was apparently ‘furious’ that David didn’t get the job (why should we care?) and we shouldn’t forget that he waged a snide and, at times, decidedly unfraternal campaign against Ed, whom, by contrast, kept his dignity.

So, the verdict of Thus, for what it’s worth, is good riddance to Banana Boy and good luck to Ed, who will need it. None of the candidates were up to much, but then again, the government itself isn’t exactly stellar. Ed needs to distance himself from the Blairites, the Brownites, especially Ed Balls, and learn to be constructively confrontational. The middle classes aren’t the only game in town, and though Ed is one of them, his best chance is to concede the need for deficit reduction but ruthlessly expose ideologically-motivated policies which the Tories are finding it increasingly difficult to resist putting into play.

John J Kelly

The UK Labour Party leadership election machine

As I was picking up dog mess on Hampstead Heath recently – my own dog’s mess, I hasten to add – my thoughts naturally turned to ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson and the current Labour Party leadership crisis. The image of this creature selling his interminable, self-serving, platitudinous and badly-written account of the rise and fall of New Labour in a cheap TV commercial makes whippet turds look positively enticing.

Others have commented at length on the iniquity and hypocrisy of Mandelson’s admission that he knew Brown was a sociopathic, authoritarian blobby sack of neuroses with no right, sanction or business to be running a whelk stall, much less a country, yet he urged the party and the country to vote for him all the same. Mandelson quotes Blair’s opinion that Brown was ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ and does little to disagree with this kind assessment of the co-architect of the ‘Project.’ On these grounds alone the twice-sacked, expenses-happy, oligarch-friendly Blair mongerer should be picked up on the Heath and incinerated along with the rest of the mess.

Mandelson’s artless display shows his unashamed addiction to perfidy and intrigue. More Gollum than Machiavelli, he is unquestionably playing a leading role in the farcical ‘campaign’ to ‘elect’ a new leader of the Opposition. My guess, despite protestations to the contrary, is that he’s behind Banana Boy David Miliband. For that reason alone, whoever has the power should vote for brother Ed.

In passing, Thus predicted Mandelson’s resurgence as kingmaker , with no enthusiasm, back in April 2009. Before he completes the job of completely destroying Labour, we should perhaps reflect on whether this was what he and Blair planned all along. There is no other plausible excuse for his actions.

John J Kelly

Gordon Brown (the ugly one on the left) congratulates Colonel Gaddafi, thinking he is Sarah Boyle, winner of Britain's Got Talent

Over the past three days, as the Lockerbie ‘terrorist’ release turns into a full-blown international incident, we have heard not one word, or even a Twitter, from the man who saved the wurreld (and its banks). This is highly unusual; Gordon and his wife Sarah Twittered from Inverkilliecrankie, or wherever they are on holiday, catching crabs and burying each other in the sand, when the ungrateful Evil Empire dissed the NHS. This time it’s serious. Somebody gave Gordon’s independent-minded fellow Jocks a pass to give Abdulbasset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for the Lockerbie bombing, a get out of gaol free card on the spurious pretext that he had less than three months to live.

Let’s leave aside the mountain of evidence that al Megrahi and Libya probably didn’t do it. He was threatening to appeal, a process which would have certainly opened the UK and US to wide and embarrassing scrutiny of their highly circumstantial fingering of Libya, then THE axis of the axis of evil, now everybody’s best friend and a bulwark against terror. Blame switched from Syria, the HQ of the PFLP- GQ terrorist cell allegedly paid by Iran to carry out the bombing as revenge for the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 six months earlier (1988) by the USS Vincennes, killing 290 civilians, when Syria joined the Bush 1 and Thatcher ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the first Gulf War. Let’s ignore Scottish due process which dictates that a terminally ill prisoner should be released on compassionate grounds to die in dignity. Let’s ignore the oft-repeated fact that post-devolution, Scotland makes its own decisions in law. Let’s try and pretend that Britain isn’t the 51st US state, even if the antics of the past few years have understandably left the opposite impression.

Let’s try and focus on the facts. Last Friday UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband furiously demanded that BBC news presenter John Humphrys retract the ‘slur’ that the FCO had anything to do with it. Today’s Sunday Times revealed that Ivan Lewis, UK Foreign Minister responsible for Libya, ‘is said to have written to the Scottish government, encouraging officials to send home’ al-Megrahi. Ten days ago ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson, Business Secretary and de facto ruler of Great Britain, admitted discussing the subject a couple of weeks ago with Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saif at the Rothschild villa in Corfu. Today, after a mysterious prostate operation (in sympathy with al Megrahi or the result of some other sort of probe?) Mandelson broke his own uncharacteristic silence to declare it ‘offensive to claim’ that this meeting was connected to the release of the Libyan or to trade deals, despite the fact that Saif-al-Islam Gaddafi had emphatically declared the opposite. Colonel Gaddafi, meanwhile, has effusively thanked just about everybody in the UK:

Sarkozy is pissed off because he thought he was welcoming Michael Jackson to the G20 Summit. All Gaddafi had to offer was unlimited supplies of oil, gas and cash, though he performed a passable moonwalk.

“To my friends in Scotland, the Scottish National Party, and Scottish prime minister, and the foreign secretary, I praise their courage for having proved their independence in decision making despite the unacceptable and unreasonable measures that they faced. Nevertheless they took this courageously right and humanitarian decision.” And I say to my friend Brown, the Prime Minister of Britain, his Government, the Queen of Britain, Elizabeth, and Prince Andrew, who all contributed to encouraging the Scottish Government to take this historic and courageous decision, despite the obstacles.” (Reuters).

Barack Obama came slowly out of the traps to declare the decision ‘highly objectionable.’ Despite the fact that the release of al Megrahi was ‘on the agenda at every meeting between Blair and Libyan officials’ it was highly OK for St Tony to broker a return of Libya to the international coalition of the hypocrites in 2004 when we realised we were running out of oil and there was rather a lot of it there, not to mention a strongman capable of bullying the bejasus out of many of the the other whackjobs in Africa, especially Sudan, and Mahgreb Middle East. Despite the fact that we knew more than a week before it happened that this release was on the cards, FBI Head, Robert Mueller, sent a hissy letter expressing outrage and astonishment to Kenny MacAskill, Scottish Justice Minister, clearly intended for public consumption (printed in full in The Times). Various neocons (and David Cameron) have postured their horror at the release of this convicted terrorist and outrage at his hero’s welcome in Tripoli as though this was a bolt from the blue.

Exclusive: what they found when they operated on Mandy's prostate - a banana AND a Miliband.

Those are the facts. Here’s some outrageous speculation. Gordon Brown desperately needs sovereign funds. Mandelson told him that this was a small step to take and that nobody would bother once the dust had settled, and anyway, his new friend (and UK homeowner) Gaddafi jr had assured him the return of al Megrahi would pass off quietly. Scotland, an oil and gas economy, was promised lucrative oil supply contracts and plentiful exports of Dundee rock, Irn Bru, tartan and sporrans. The US agreed to turn a blind eye on the condition that Gaddafi refrained from dancing the Highland Fling. Besides, it’s a big bonus if al Megrahi dies without making an appeal – the dirty secrets surrounding massive CIA manipulation of witnesses and evidence, including the possibility that Pan Am Flight 103 was carrying US secret service contraband die with him. Mandelson wins either way: if Brown is discomfited and if the Scottish National Party is put in the hole, his task of bullying the Labour Party is strengthened (Labour desperately needs seats in Scotland in the upcoming General Election). The inconvenient truth is that Colonel Gaddafi is a loony and his son appears to be a blowhard, so the whole yellow ribbon homecoming was unfortunate, but you can’t win them all. Champagne all round at Chateau Rothschild, Corfu branch. Another dinner guest has provided immense entertainment value on the international stage.

John J Kelly

Gordon's got a hard hat and two pairs of brown trousers, more than the army had when they were sent into Basra.

In the past week the clueless yet relentlessly authoritarian UK government scaled new heights of ineptitude and plumbed new depths of contempt for public sensibilities. Announcing the long-awaited Iraq War enquiry on a timetable that would ensure its publication only after the next election is one thing. Appointing five government/Whitehall stooges to hold said enquiry, at least two of whom were responsible for the policy and strategy which led to Britain’s involvement in the war in the first place is another. Claiming on national radio, as did Blairite Foreign Secretary, ‘banana boy’ Miliband, that ‘every secret service in the world’ thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that ‘if you’re looking for a conspiracy, you won’t find one’ gives a further clue to the ‘outcome’ of the enquiry. Announcing that this epic search for truth would be held in secret on the twisted logic that this would ensure that those questioned would feel more inclined to tell the truth on the precondition that nobody would be held accountable sums up the depths of degradation into which the current government has sunk our ‘democratic’ system. Had enough yet? Well think again, there’s more.

The familiar excuse that the enquiry needed to be held in camera ‘in the interests of national security’ was a spin too far for the men in black glasses and the men in nylon khaki. It is an open secret that the spooks felt hard done by at being blamed for the amateurish and deeply mendacious ‘dodgy dossier,’ lifted from a PhD student’s C grade essay and allegedly sexed up by Alastair Campbell, which Blair brandished as his ultimate casus belli. (Had they been involved, the document would at least have been spellchecked).

Every security service in the world thought this was Yellow Cake Uranium when in fact it was a deadly weapon of my image destruction.

Though Austin Powers (aka John Scarlett) was the source of the Yellow Cake Nigerian uranium nonsense which Bush used as part of his ultimate casus belli, this appears to have been a combination of wishful thinking and routine incompetence, rather than politically-motivated mischief. ‘In the interests of national security,’ we might never know whether the sources and judgment of the UK security services were corrupted (think Mossad) and its advice overridden (think Blair/Campbell) in the haste to rush to war and support the carpet bombing of tens of thousands of civilians and cause an insurgency which took the death toll to more than 100,000, not to mention the turkey shoot of over 22,000 Iraqi soldiers in the first glorious ‘victory week’ of an engagement which has lasted far longer than WW2 and Vietnam.

The British army, justifiably angry at having held their tongues after holding Basra for five years with cheap equipment, clown cars, mail order uniforms and armour that wouldn’t pass muster at a girl guide’s paintball party, then ridiculed by the US for leaving the place in a mess – ie. with lots of Iraqis left alive – also declared themselves off side. With (Sir) John Chilcot, a dab hand with the Persil, cf the Butler Report, at the helm, Professor (Sir) Lawrence Freedman (co-author of Blair’s 1999 Chicago ‘Humanitarian Intervention‘ speech and alleged architect of the government strategy on engagement in Iraq) riding shotgun and three other sockpuppets to make up the numbers, there was little chance of a fair hearing. Faced by a mutiny led by General (Sir) Richard Dannatt and dark, professionally deceitful Oxbridge twats turning against their lords and masters, the government executed a partial U-Turn (which could yet become a full one).

How, or why, did they ever think they could get away with another cover-up? God told them to do it. In today’s Observer, it is alleged – and predictably denied by this Pinocchio government – that Brown was asked by Tony Blair (through Mandelson, one presumes) to hold the enquiry in secret, for fear that he (Blair) would be tried in the court of public opinion. Well, yes he would, should and well might be, except that a more appropriate and less biased place might be the International Criminal Court at the Hague, where the tribunal would not be stacked with Blairite cronies.

Meanwhile, Thus has thought long and hard as to how to drag the truth of the situation out of Blair and his fellow alleged war criminals. Since it was also revealed this week, in the first of a series of leaks designed to soften the impact if and when they are later confirmed, that while Blair had not authorised the use of torture by UK forces or agencies, he had not stood in the way of other countries who chose to use it, we have our answer! Hold the enquiry in Morocco. Transport can be arranged. After a professional application of waterboarding, a spot of Binham Mohamed on the Old Man, electric shock therapy and constant repetitive exposure to loud music – may we suggest ‘Things Can only Get Better? (Thus passim) – we won’t need any high fallutin’ experts to tell us who did what and when. After all, as any Blairite will tell you, torture works. It formed the basis of much of the intelligence gathering behind the War on Terror, after all.

]]> http://thusmagazine.com/2009/06/we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk-mr-blair/feed/ 0 http://thusmagazine.com/2009/03/torture-scandal-reveals-a-fatal-flaw-in-the-uk-us-special-relationship/ http://thusmagazine.com/2009/03/torture-scandal-reveals-a-fatal-flaw-in-the-uk-us-special-relationship/#comments Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:36:27 +0000 John Kelly http://thusmagazine.com/?p=2583 “British policy fails because we behave too much like an ineffective old Jeeves, even when Bertie Wooster has gone berserk.” By Timothy Garton Ash.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, responded to my article about possible British complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed (Thus passim) with a reader’s letter in the Guardian, disputing its accuracy. It concluded: ‘These are serious issues which deserve to be discussed seriously. But let us do so on the basis of the facts’. Yesterday another letter appeared in the Guardian, this time from one of Mohamed’s lawyers, offering some compelling detail to contest the Foreign Secretary’s central claim that ‘it is factually wrong to say that we tried to conceal potentially exculpatory material from Mr Mohamed’s defence counsel’. So plainly the facts are disputed. Tempting though it is to plunge into tangled thickets of claim and counter-claim, we must not lose sight of the wood for the trees.

'We are fortunate to have the best security and intelligence services in the world' - Gordon Brown

One big, wood-size question is precisely how we establish those facts in public, especially given that some of them derive from intelligence shared with the British government by the United States. A second is: how can we avoid this ever happening again? Gordon Brown announced on 19 March 2009 that there will be new guidelines for British security and intelligence operatives interviewing detainees abroad. We must wait to see them, but the remit is not wide enough. The principle must surely be that any British operative is obliged, on pain of their career and possible prosecution, to whistleblow if he or she receives any intelligence reports that suggest someone is being tortured under the auspices (direct or indirect) of the US, or of anyone else. And the agency should immediately cease all further cooperation on that particular case, and related ones. Such fundamental human rights trump even that holy-of-holies of British foreign policy, intelligence-sharing with the US. Or is anyone prepared to say: better to stand by while a man is tortured rather than imperil our intelligence-sharing with the US?

Is that wise, Sir?

At the heart of all this is the absolute priority that the British government gives to the supposed ‘special relationship’ with the US, and the way in which British leaders and officials approach it. Take, for example, the story which the Foreign Office has told me with some emphasis over the last week. It is that, soon after David Miliband arrived at the Foreign Office in summer 2007, he wrote to the US secretary of state asking that the British residents incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay be released and returned to Britain. Thereafter, Foreign Office officials worked to make that happen, and secured the release of three of them, but not Mohamed. When Pentagon prosecutors defiantly went ahead to prosecute Mohamed, against a raft of good advice, the issue of potentially exculpatory US intelligence reports in the British government’s possession became acute. The British officials worked hard to get those documents released from US sources to Mohamed’s defence counsel in the US. All along they believed private diplomacy would be more effective than public confrontation. Finally, the charges were dropped and Mohamed was set free – though only after damning judgements of the British High Court and a change of administration in Washington.

In short: we, the British, were the good guys: the Americans were the bad guys. Or rather, some Americans, since characteristically the British government got itself entangled in Washington’s dysfunctional inter-agency process, getting caught in the cross-fire between, say, the State Department and the Pentagon. Taking this account on its own terms, let us accept that, at least from the early summer of 2008, the British Foreign Office made strenuous efforts to achieve the fair treatment and eventual release of Binyam Mohamed. Even if we accept that, what is the deeper lesson of the larger story to which this is only a coda?Here, in miniature, is a classic example of that whole British approach to our relationship with the United States which I call the Jeeves school of diplomacy. Impeccable manners; a discreet smile; always perfect loyalty in public; but privately murmuring insistently ‘is that wise, Sir?’ And back home in  Jeeves’ own club, frequented – as devotees of P G Wodehouse will recall – only by gentlemen’s gentlemen (ie. butlers), you tut-tut about the foolish conduct of the masters.

This has, in some measure, been a British approach for more than sixty years, ever since hegemony passed across the Atlantic. (Jeeves was himself a master once.) But it has been a national strategy with ever diminishing returns, and it has no remedy in the event that his master, Bertie Wooster, goes berserk. What does Jeeves do when Wooster starts torturing people in a back room, or getting a Moroccan butcher to do the penis-slashing for him? What if Wooster embarks on what you believe is a dangerous and mistaken war? From everything we know so far, the British Jeeves’ answer was to murmur by turns ‘might I assist you, Sir?’ and ‘is that wise, Sir?’ That was the approach not just on particular horrors like extraordinary rendition but also on the Iraq war and the whole misbegotten concept of the ‘Global War on Terror’. For all along, the Foreign Office, and much of the British government, knew better, knew that this was not wise or right, and would privately tell you so.

The claim was that this policy best served the British national interest, Britain’s national security and the safety of its citizens. Maybe Tony Blair believed that at the time. Yet a clinching argument was always, as Robin Cook recorded Blair telling a Cabinet meeting in the run-up to the Iraq war, ‘I tell you that we must steer close to America. I we don’t we will lose our influence to shape what they do.’ What influence, Jeeves? What of any significance did you actually change in Bush’s disastrous, law-abusing foreign policy? Not only did this whole strategy end up harming those British national interests, security and reputation in the world that it was supposed to sustain. It was not even good for the United States. We would have been a better friend to the United States if we had spoken up publicly to protest, never even countenanced extraordinary rendition, not gone along into Iraq, and instead – as Obama now advocates – stuck with Afghanistan and more intelligent, civilised, legal and durable ways to combat the real terrorist threats we face.

Not only Britain but the United States, indeed the world, would be in better shape today, if Britain had not continued to play this demeaning part of the faithful retainer who will put up with anything. A true, valued friend is the one who tells you when are doing something stupid or wrong, not a sycophant. This subservient British fetishisation of the Special Relationship, with intelligence-sharing at its heart, ends up weakening even the special relationship. Poor, stupid, self-deluding old Jeeves.

A version of this article appeared in the Guardian, 19th March 2009.

By Timothy Garton Ash

Short memories

The evidence, so far as we have been allowed to see it, suggests four things. First, Binyam Mohamed, a British resident travelling on a doctored British passport, was detained without trial for nearly seven years, at the behest of the US authorities, in prisons in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and for some of that time he was tortured. Second, British security service officials were directly involved in interrogating Mohamed in Pakistan and subsequently supplied questions that were passed by the CIA to his Moroccan torturers. Third, only last year British and American officials worked together to delay, if not prevent, documents that pointed to such mistreatment being supplied in a timely fashion to Mohamed’s defence lawyers, at a time when the Bush administration was poised to put him on trial before a so-called Military Commission on charges carrying a possible death sentence. Fourth, the British government is even now dragging its feet about initiating the criminal investigation, overseen by the Director of Public Prosecutions, which would be the only fitting response to such a grave sequence of events and set of documented allegations. So, here’s the charge-sheet in shorthand summary: American-authorised torture; British complicity; an American-British attempt to withhold evidence; and now the predictable temptation to cover up. Most of this story emerges not from hearsay or journalistic digging, but from the patient work of British lawyers and judges, scrupulously documented in the copious records and stately prose of the High Court. It’s not easy bedtime reading, but the authority is unimpeachable and the detail riveting.

Let's cosh the truth out of him with this yellow cake uranium

Take the four points in turn. I defy anyone to read Binyam Mohamed’s account of having his penis repeatedly cut by a Moroccan torturer’s scalpel and not feel slightly sick. ‘Oh, but we only have his word for it,’ a hard-nosed doubter might say. Yet even in the publicly available court records there are clear indications that British and American security operatives had few illusions about the way he was being treated, starting already in Pakistan – and that precisely this is documented more fully in records and testimony still kept secret. To find the treatment of Mohamed over these seven years utterly shocking and shameful, you do not need to believe that he was harmless. Yes, he seems to have been just a pretty mixed-up young guy, led astray by some version of Islamism. So were the London bombers. If we are to take the High Court’s judgment as our gold standard, then we must also note its view that Mohamed was ‘a serious potential threat to the national security of the United Kingdom’.

But that, in the British government’s own repeatedly stated view, does not justify torture. Centuries of common law and our more recently embraced international obligations unite on this: torture is never justified. Never. The strong impression that Britain became complicit in Mohamed’s torture derives particularly from the testimony of a British Security Service (MI5) officer identified only as ‘Witness B’, who interviewed Mohamed – in what Witness B surreally describes as ‘very cordial circumstances’ – in Pakistan some five weeks after his arrest in spring 2002. The High Court finds that he and others in M15, ‘including persons more senior to Witness B’ must have read reports (still kept secret) about the circumstances of Mohamed’s illegal detention and treatment in Pakistan. Whether or not it was Witness B who produced the threatening remark – worthy of that great British playwright of menace, Harold Pinter – that Mohamed would need more sugar in his tea ‘where you’re going’ (Witness B denies it), the High Court finds that MI5 continued to ‘facilitate’ interviews by and on behalf of the US, knowing full well that Mohamed was being interrogated in a third country. Now Article 4.1. of the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture says that every signatory state must ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law and ‘the same shall apply … to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.’ Did this not amount to complicity? Then there was the British government’s withholding of information that could have enabled Mohamed to argue in his defence, before the American Military Commission, that the confessions he did make were exacted under duress. The High Court is eloquent on this, quoting an English common law judgement from 1783 that ‘a confession forced from the mind by the flattery of hope or by the torture of fear comes in so questionable a shape when it is to be considered as the evidence of guilt, that no credit ought to be given to it; and therefore it is rejected’. The Foreign Secretary (Miliband) argued that Mohamed could not be offered the only available means to this ancient redress because it would threaten national security. Subsequently, he argued that some of this information could not be made public, because the US government had said to do so would endanger British-American intelligence-sharing – that sacred heart of Britain’s alleged Special Relationship with Washington. Then it turned out the Foreign Office had asked the US government to say that. Last October, all the papers from the court hearings, open and closed, were given by the country’s interior minister to the Attorney-General. If she thinks that there might be a case for criminal prosecution against Witness B, or anyone else, she must either start a criminal investigation herself or hand it over to the Director of Public Prosecutions. More than four months later, nothing has happened. Why? Well, perhaps she has just been busy. But there remains, in the British system, this latent conflict of interest which the High Court summarises thus, in its stately prose: ‘the Attorney General is a Minister of the Crown and thus a member of the Executive branch of the state whose officials are alleged to have facilitated cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or torture’. What is more, Witness B has testified on oath that his actions were authorised by ‘senior management’ and deemed proper and appropriate ‘as far as the Security Service was concerned, and, I believe, Government’. The Government, that is, of which the Attorney General is a member. Even if Witness B were prepared to be the fall guy (and it doesn’t sound like it), any serious criminal investigation would have to enquire into the chain of command, which presumably went up through the head of MI5 to the then chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, now head of the foreign intelligence service, MI6, and perhaps higher still, to the then prime minister Tony Blair. In these circumstances, and given all that we already know from the High Court, any decision other than to hand this over to the Director of Public Prosecutions will inevitably be interpreted as a political cover-up. Until we have got to the very bottom of this dark well, using the unrestricted searchlight of the law, any lectures that the British government tries to deliver to others on respect for human rights will be dismissed as rank hypocrisy.

A version of this article also appeared in the Guardian.

By John J. Kelly

In a move unprecedented in Europe since Martin Luther said the Pope wasn’t a Catholic, German Finance Minister Peter Steinbrueck called Gordon Brown’s “crass Keynesianism” breathtaking – but not in a good way. Following the rude absence of Mrs Merkel, the German Chancellor who couldn’t be bothered to turn up to Gordon’s Coalition of the Borrowers last Monday (Thus passim) another Hun, this time Steffen Kampeter, wee-weed on the recovery plans by stating that Brown’s audacious Micawber Plan (Thus Passim) showed a “failure of Labour Policy.” Sarkozy, meanwhile, dapper Neo-Liberal French footie friend of Gordon, is erring on the side of financial incaution. The issues are well summarised here in a Bloomberg Special Report.

I hold in my hand a message from the German Chancellor

Conservative Shadow Chancellor George Osborne – who nobody cares about anyway after his boating misadventures – piped up that “there is a growing international consensus that Brown’s borrowing binge will make the recession worse, the recovery more difficult and burden future generations with a mountain of debt.” Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband – who nobody cared about after he failed to unseat Brown and was pictured with a banana last October but is now rehabilitated as Mandelson’s hopfrog – said on the BBC Today Programme that it was all a German internal spat (unrelated to Eton footwear). Mrs Merkel was behind Brown’s Micawber Plan to urge Europe to splurge a quarter trillion Euros on tax cuts and public spending, funded, presumably, from the Planet Zanussi. He didn’t say just how far behind it she was, though.

Exactly what part of Schadenfreude don't you understand, Herr Bleistift Schwanz?

Mrs Merkel announced earlier that no big decisions would be taken about the level of state intervention in the German banking crisis until January, estimated subvention at around Eur 32 billion over two years and ruled out tax cuts. The world money markets, clearly in awe of Brown even if the Valkyrie was resisting his charm, signalled their ringing endorsement. Sterling plunged to a record low against the Euro, which was hailed as a triumph by the madly spinning Miliband who declared that a weak pound would help exports. True, if the UK had anything left to export apart from bankrupt Woolworths Pick ‘n Mix boiled sweets and old MFI furniture (THUS passim). It will be very bad for UK imports of just about everything else, but crucially of energy, denominated in dollars, which the UK, like everyone else, sort of needs in order to keep the lights on and the printing presses rolling at the Royal Mint.

It's Mr Micawber again, vying for EU Finance Minister's post

European insiders recall that during his time as UK Chancellor, Brown’s modus operandi was to turn up at EU Finance Meetings, read a prepared speech then take off his headphones and ignore the debate as he got on with his homework. He’d put on the phones for the closing speech and exit, assuming consensus around the UK position. This endearing trait has not been forgotten. Brown, meanwhile, reiterated this week that he had no intention of considering Britain’s entry into the European currency, a peculiar message from the self-appointed leader of Europe’s latter day Marshall Plan. As a worrying postscript, BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston reported that HBOS, which the UK government bailed out in September, has incurred an extra £3 billion in losses against unsecured loans in the past three months. Santander, Spanish owner of Bradford and Bingley and Abbey, two more UK financial sector strugglers, also announced huge job cuts in the UK as of January.

Meanwhile the UK credit card companies, who are gleefully charging an average of 14.9% interest on purchases and 23.9% on cash advances, and who are mainly owned by the banks, ruled out passing on Bank of England interest rate cuts to their customers, though they did say they would give distressed borrowers 100 yards head start before sending the attack dogs after them. Stick to your guns, Missus Merkel. Alles is far from Klaar. We really don’t want another Weimar. Look what happened last time.