THE THIRTEENTH HOUR

In the Unquiet Grave Cyril Connolly wrote "...we are in fact within sight of achieving a world neurosis, a world in which atrophy of the instincts, abuse of the intellect and perversion of the heart will obliterate our knowledge of the purpose of life: humanity will choke on its own bile". He decided that the decline of religious sensibility and practice had led to a sharper awareness of the faults of others without any corresponding increase in self knowledge or belief in the power of redemption. It was all pretty bleak stuff, much of it self-critical. Is his insight still relevant?

Since the Second World War, when Connolly wrote these words, the decline of belief in the sacramental and transcendental has coincided with the decline of  "rational" and secular belief systems such as Marxism and Communism. Paradoxically, these also contained their own rubric of revelation and redemption, based on class consciousness and historical determinism. Alas, worship at the altar of Marx and Mao was shown to be an even greater act of credulity than kneeling before Our Lady of Lourdes. 

Worse, the evidence of moral bankruptcy and practical oppression was everywhere, and despite the best efforts of die-hard apologists like Eric Hobsbawm and Jean Paul Sartre, most could see the writing was on the wall, long before it actually fell in Berlin. There was a short-lived attempt at its intellectual resuscitation with the Euro-Communist movement of the 'seventies, but this dumped only the language of violent revolutionary action: the "discourse" of class struggle was (unpersuasively) retained. Progressives however, were undeterred by their further failure to beguile the proletariat in whose name it was spread. Now they would simply replace it with new precepts aimed at the bourgeoisie. And as the working  industrial masses were proving to be far too indifferent about the realisation of the promised utopia, the new vector of revolution would be the education system. The curriculum would be based on Post Modernism, a juju which questioned the whole concept of human understanding, and which was cunningly disguised as an evolution of "liberal" and "liberation" thought.

In December 2021, University College London may be only the most recent academic institution to officially substitute Post Modernist alchemy and the hocus pocus of dogmas such as "Critical Race Theory" for scholarship, but the latest nonsense (UCL's "Liberating the Curriculum") has a long pedigree that stretches back more than half a century. "Wokery" and the demand of students (and staff) for "safe spaces" where their pre-conceptions and "personal truths" can be protected (and officially promulgated) is merely an offshoot of the Post Modernist guff that gripped European and especially American campuses from the early 'eighties. If progressives couldn't defeat the oppressive "structure" without the help of an obviously unwilling proletariat, they'd undermine it by subverting the language and all other means of arriving at objective truth instead. As Francis Wheen has so hilariously described, progressives became the "new demolition merchants of reality". Not even the standards of objectivity of the scientific method were safe. Luce Irigary, one of the high priestesses of Po-Mo, famously declared with a straight face that the world could only be seen through the lens of "phallo-centrism" by which Einstein's formulae (such as E=MC squared) could be observed , quite plainly, as "sexed equations". Genuine political activists, who at least made an effort to understand and empathise with real injustices rather than those the Post Modernists merely claimed to expose, were appalled. As one observed, the Po-Mo shibboleths were the some of the "least lovable fads to hit American campuses since drinking-till-you-barf".

The juggernaut was however unstoppable and given further energy in places like the UK in the 'nineties with the decision to turbo charge the growth of  tertiary education and to reframe the purpose of universities. Now theses institutions are all about the mass provision of generic attainment awards (the University of Stafford even offers a BA in Pantomime) rather than intellectual training per se. On the contrary, no longer is enlightenment the priority but rather the protection of students from anything that makes them "feel uncomfortable", and the liberal use of "trigger warnings" to highlight content likely to be "challenging". Post Modernism has fully captured the social sciences, and now the arts and humanities are in the firing line with moves to "de-colonise" the syllabus, minimise the contribution of "pale old men", re-write history and re-order the western literary canon according to an approved template. This is not just a dose of healthy revisionism or the welcome use of previously neglected sources and witness, but the wholesale upending of historiography and literature and their re-casting in an approved or "appropriate" mould. Historians have been used to this creeping barrage of foolishness for years and are, arguably, better equipped to deal with it. But it has come as a huge shock to the literary establishment, with even the venerable Sir Tom Stoppard and the likes of Rose Tremain worrying whether their imaginations are "correct" or not.

If the result of this growing culture of irrationality and censorship was no more than the "no-platforming" of public figures like Professor Jordan Peterson, the discomfort of Sir Tom, the on-line bile poured over the head of JK Rowling for daring to assert the objective truths about sex and gender or the demarche of Doctor Kathleen Stock, hounded out of Sussex University for some heretical utterance against the new canon of imbecility, it would still be deplorable. Some such as Toby Young of the Free Speech Union optimistically hope that it will all blow over as the succeeding generation rebels against the po-faced blarney of their elders.

Yet the clear and present danger is that those brought up within an education system which placed an incrementally higher value on the celebration of nonsense; promoted the belief that children were best placed to work out their own truths about the world; eliminated the elements of intelligent discrimination from the educational process, and asserted that teachers were merely facilitators rather than guides on the increasingly banal journey, are themselves now in charge of our government, official class and public institutions. Nor does it stop there - leaders in private enterprises and publicly quoted corporations increasingly bend over themselves to promote these new dogmas lest a failure to do so compromise the value of their brand or the sensibilities of their workforces. The rooting out of real injustice (as opposed to "perceived" injustice) has absolutely nothing to do with it. 

The alleviation of poverty, the improvement of access to justice, the protection of minors, the dignity of the elderly and the elimination of genuine social discrimination are no longer priorities for our public institutions. Now it is all about the assertion of micro-minority rights; the corruption of the law to eliminate "offensive" speech; the routine cancellation of democratically decided priorities by the nebula of the ECHR; the erection of impersonal yet sacred totems ("Our NHS"), and a culture of mandatory diversity. None of these are designed to promote our common humanity and solidarity but rather to emphasise imaginary differences, entrench immutable ones, bamboozle the credulous and stir up as much conflict as possible. After all, people get paid a lot of money for all those inclusivity "audits", diversity "protocols" (quotas), the monitoring of "micro-aggressions" in the college and workplace and the chasing down of "non-crime hate speech".

The Covid pandemic has provided a thorough demonstration of how the forces of irrationality have gripped the official class. In its response to the emergency, the government is "following the science", a comfy sounding rubric that has absolved it of much of the heavy practical and intellectual effort that is needed to deal with issues other than the narrowly medical ones. But the "science" that the government is following is not of the type demonstrated by say, Sir James Dyson as he painstakingly tries to improve his hoover, or of the Astronomer Royal as he considers the effects of black holes. No, the official class has placed its faith in "model-dependent realism" where hypothesis is treated as fact. Worse, in basing its response on assumptions rather than observed instances, the government appears to have cut loose from the scientific method altogether.

Is this claim preposterous ? Yet what is a rational person to make of the revelation by Professor Medley of the SAGE modelling committee that its work was used to justify policy decisions rather than the other way around? In other words, when the government decides restrictions of our liberty, it asks for a model that supports that particular policy approach. Is this why even the least- worst- case "scenarios" presented by the likes of Professor Neil Ferguson have been seen to be consistently exaggerated? What other policies can one think of that currently employ such a heavy dose of specious "reasoning"? Well, the response of the official class to climate change springs to mind, and like the response to Covid, it is going to cost a simply prodigious amount of money to "follow the science".

Naturally, anyone who questions these methodologies is branded a "denier", a heretic or someone hooked by some "conspiracy theory". But the state, and the way in which it operates, is now out of control. "Emergency" measures are enacted with minimal levels of democratic oversight or none at all. In spite of the vaccination program, we are are still ordered to "protect" the health service. Yet, in the past twelve months the NHS has added more bodies than the entire strength of the British Army. At 1.85m personnel it is beyond the abilities of even a genius to lead, and is rapidly bringing the practice of healthcare in the UK to a halt. The official class has taken extended leave on full pay and the Welsh government is now threatening those who chose or need to work away from home with £1,000 fines. The BBC has decided that its public service duty is to terrify everyone into an apoplexy of fear and neurosis. There is hardly now even a pretence of giving a measured view in all the hyperbole about the "tsunami of cases" and an NHS, still, "at breaking point". Statistics are routinely deployed in a mis-leading way  and medical experts are asked to comment on decisions that are more properly political in nature. To the average executive in the corporation, to whom the great unwashed are just like the extras in Mrs Brown's Boys rather than the rounded Leonard Basts portrayed by EM Forster, no amount of rubbish is enough. Meanwhile the core of government seems to think that its curtailment of the liberty of citizens does not apply to itself and officials and civil servants behave as if public service, for which they are richly rewarded, is somehow discretionary.

It is the thirteenth hour. A Venn diagram of the circumstances preceding the religious wars of the seventeenth century and the twilight years of the autocracy before the 1917 revolution in Russia would show an intersection that roughly corresponds to political, cultural and economic conditions today. Culturally, there is a narrow and unrepresentative elite which is determined to force citizens to accept novel (and mostly irrational) precepts as orthodoxy. Government now intrudes into every area of people's lives and we have been co-opted to serve needs of the state and the bloated official class rather than the other way around. Citizens are now merely the instruments of increasingly capricious government policy rather than beneficiaries. Yet these policies come with an increasingly heavy cost of failure. It is also a time of rapid economic and technological change from which a narrow cohort of winners have benefited egregiously but in which the state and its organs have signally failed to provide large sections of the population with either the means or  incentive to gain stakes that would ensure solidarity and a sense of shared endeavour. Covid seems not to have humbled the apparat at all; indeed it has emboldened those who argue for an even bigger role for the state. Folk have had enough.

 

BLAIR & BROWN : THE NEW LABOUR REVOLUTION (BBC2)

The success or otherwise of literary adaptation to a different medium is a familiar trope of film and television criticism. Increasingly however, television is beginning to reverse the challenge: specifically, how on earth should a well known or presently established writer render a documentary in the format of a novel? Even before a pen could hit the page however, a problem would immediately present itself. Whilst there is no shortage of adaptations of the novels of Tolstoy, sadly the Tolstoy of War & Peace and Anna Karenina is no longer with us.

Which brings us to the BBC's five-parter about the New Labour project and the record of its most well-known protagonists in government. Critics (and cynics) have said the series -  which takes the form of a sequence of exquisitely edited post facto interviews with "insiders", spliced with original footage from the period  - offers little by way of new information. But the epic personal sweep of the tale, which was left in the hands of those interviewed rather than a narrator, made for absolutely compelling viewing. As well as the large supporting cast of those closest to the action at the time, there was also the extensive testimony of Blair and Brown themselves. The program did not merely  add rich colour to what we already knew (or thought we knew) but revealed the implications of that knowledge, so that by the end of the final instalment some viewers would have been left crying out not so much for an impartial observer as for a deus ex machina.

The commonplace interpretation of the Blair/Brown years as a decade of psychodrama does little justice to the large impact both had on the governance of the UK and its public culture. Not that the series shrank from an examination of the increasingly corrosive nature of this most famous of double acts in post war British history. Older if not wiser, Blair had lost little of his titanic self-regard which is so effectively disguised by an aura of beguilingly earnest plausibility. On the other side, a deeply un-mellowed Brown continued to bear out Thornton Wilder's observation in The Eighth Day that "Scotland is heavily populated with Saturns". Of the two, Blair was the more willing to cut the other some slack, whereas Brown was simply incapable of disguising his profound jealousy of a man he clearly considers his intellectual inferior, but who nonetheless bested him to the leadership of the Labour Party and won three elections in a row. Not even his own occupation of Number 10 has given Brown a more charitable perspective of his predecessor.

Blair's essential narcissism was corroborated even by some of his closest lieutenants: there was Alastair Campbell's incredulous recollection of his boss bounding in to declare "I've worked out how to do Ireland", and Jonathan Powell's calm memory of the Prime Minister's messiah complex, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Even the notionally impartial Cabinet Secretary Sir Richard Wilson struggled to reframe Blair's self obsession as "pushing the boundaries of his own achievement", and admitted that "there was a much bigger element of ego in Blair" than in his predecessor Margaret Thatcher. But Brown's insistent, virtue-signalling promotion of himself as the much sounder moral conscience of New Labour was simply bogus, while his failure to acknowledge Blair's electoral success as a pre-requisite of his own achievements was worse than churlish.

Yet to adopt another medium, if "Blair & Brown: the New Labour Revolution" worked very well as a series of miniatures, it lacked the depth of a portrait. There was little comment on the key events of those years (with the exception of the Iraq War) and certain instances (such as the UK's demurral to join the Euro) were presented simply as analogues of the growing mutual antagonism between Blairites and Brownites. Some episodes, such as the aftermath of the Good Friday agreement were just left hanging. The contributions were dominated by those of the "special" advisers and other unelected courtiers, all with their own little axes to grind and none accountable to any save the bosses who appointed them. By the end one almost felt sorry for Brown, at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, subjected to the importunate 24/7 yapping of "Spads", some of whom clearly thought their own tiny part in the big picture was on a par with the whole. Tellingly, there were very few contributions from the Cabinet colleagues of either man, nor any from church or other civic leaders. If Brown's policy of Tax credits were as transformative as he claimed, we only had his word and that of his claque for it, and the views of the ordinary citizen were conspicuous by their absence. What was clear however, was that Blair's determination "to achieve a radical transformation of the public realm" did not just founder on his own lack of attention to detail, but was actively thwarted by the socialist coterie with Brown at its centre, and which believed that the only things of worth to the citizenry were those that the state was prepared to give to them. The words "choice" and "aspiration" were emphatically not in the Brownite play-book.

Who could have captured these remarkable years in the form of a novel? Trollope might have wrestled unsuccessfully with the obvious shallowness of many of the protagonists, although He Knew He Was Right would have been an admirable title for Blair's memoirs.  Dickens might have done a better job, and would have captured the bathos and unintentional humour behind all the earnest high-mindedness. Anthony Powell would certainly have identified the Widmerpools, of which there were quite a few in the massively expanding political "class" of the period. They even had obligingly Powellish names like Benjamin Wegg-Prosser. But would Forster and Greene have coped with such a cast of characters, of whom far too many were convinced their motives were pure and their redemption in the bag? Instead, we have ended up with the turgid monologue of Alastair Campbell's diaries when what we really need is a Waugh, who surely would have skewered the many feet of clay on display and shown that the New Labour "project" was ultimately brought low by vanity and folly. 

But then again, Waugh was writing about grown-ups and for grown ups, and neither he nor the other leaders of the canon are any longer with us. By contrast, the BBC's "take" on the New Labour years seemed much more of a piece with the late teen passions and illusions of Young Adult Fiction. For in the terms of our political culture, there was much to suggest in the Beeb's series that the Blair and Brown years were entirely regressive. Through the sub-Blairite confection of the Cameron years, the culture has been steadily infantilised via Corbyn and May and is now in the hands of  Johnson, a man who gives a powerful impression of being someone who wishes that they had never had to grow up. As Harold Wilson said of Tony Benn, "He immatures with age", so the same could be said of the current state of British democracy. 

In that sense, "Blair & Brown: the New Labour Revolution" really did nail the zeitgeist.

FIRST, DO NO HARM

Does Her Majesty's Government deserve our sympathy? To anyone daft enough to tune into the "keynote address" recently given by the Chairman of the BMA to its annual conference, the answer has to be a resounding "Yes". Sporting a natty little gong which may have had medical significance, but was equally likely to have been one of those inconsequential chevalier de fromage medallions so beloved of "civic dignitaries" to puff up their self-importance, Dr Chaand Nagpaul delivered 25 minute's worth of unmitigated bile from which a listener would have deduced that if only the BMA had been running the show, the UK would have avoided the worst ravages of the Covid pandemic altogether.

No-one seemed to escape denunciation. Naturally, the government was flayed for its alleged uselessness, incompetence and U-turns, but Nagpaul even managed to stick the boot into the NHS (gasp) for failing to defend GPs from the accusation that some of them may, perhaps, have shirked just a tad on their duties during the crisis. Barely drawing breath, he also pilloried the General Medical Council for having the audacity, from time to time, to bring proceedings against BAME practitioners. Nagpaul pronounced himself "stunned" that the government simply doesn't get the structural racism that is, apparently, poisoning the medical profession. Perhaps Dr Nagpaul forgot to ask himself why, if the UK's healthcare arrangements are such nests of racial discrimination, nearly one quarter of serving GP's received their training outside the EEA or why nearly two thirds of new registrations to the GMC in 2019 qualified abroad. But what is the point of positive  outcomes in a healthcare crisis if they are delivered by a system based upon "oppression" or, even worse, by "private sector" providers? 

Can no-one be found to stand up to this divisive and mendacious man, or to his idiotic assertions, such as "No-one is safe until everyone is safe" ? Nagpaul is that public sector type to which elected governments give far too much consideration - a taxpayer subsidised, special-interest agitator who thinks problems can only be solved by adding to them, preferably with oodles of cash that can be directed at the producer interest rather than that of the patient.

Certainly the things that seem to exercise the BMA would appear to have little relevance to the healthcare needs of UK citizens. Once they had finished denouncing the lack of consideration given to the "suicidal" propensities of BAME medics (huh?) and Johnson's personal responsibility for deaths due to Covid, Nagpaul led his delegates, without a trace of irony, into a discussion about what is modishly called "Assisted Dying". By the slenderest of margins, the delegates voted by 49% to 48% that the BMA adopt a position of "neutrality" on whether or not the profession assists patients to commit suicide. We should perhaps be grateful that BMA members are at least trained in medicine if not in ethics or logic. How can doctors be professionally agnostic about such a matter of human life-and-death? And what about the  3% who abstained on this motion for abstention? Was it an acte gratuite of some new and obscure philosophy? Bizarrely, the lobby group Dignity in Dying hailed the vote as a "victory for common sense". It was anything but.

Members of the Palliative Care profession, who (unlike the practitioners represented by the BMA), rely upon charitable donations for nearly two thirds of their funding, could be forgiven for blowing a raspberry at this post-Modernist nonsense. Certainly a Macmillan nurse would appear to have a better grasp of how to deal sensitively and effectively with the sometime painful experience of that inescapable part of human existence than do the Confused.coms at the BMA. What ethical or medical problem is the Assisted Dying lobby trying to solve? Can it seriously believe that the patient/practitioner relationship will not be fundamentally altered by a move to Assisted Dying, with all its "protocols", flimsy "safeguards" and a new army of apparatchiks to oversee the whole "process"? At what part of your cancer diagnosis will you be asked to "consider" an assisted death or be offered "counselling" to "inform" your decision? And what about that cohort of nurses and palliative care experts who get both pleasure and professional pride from the comfort they can give to the afflicted? What dismal path will we be invited to walk in which a diagnosis of terminal illness takes on a whole new and frightening meaning? Will councils decline to offer funding to guests at respite homes or hospices on the grounds that they haven't yet properly considered topping themselves? (Please tick Box A. The security of your data is important to us).

Naturally, the Assisted Dying lobby scoffs at such doubts. No one will be put at risk, it says. This is about "dignity" and that most unanswerable of modern morals, "choice". No one will be forced or cajoled into sitting on the ejector seat. Palliative care will still have an "important" role (although not one that might commend itself to the bean counters in the NHS or other funders). This might sound all fine-and-dandy for a cancer riven investment banker or lawyer who is in charge of their mental faculties, with a loving family, and who has had a high life but a currently low tolerance of pain and "indignity". But it seems far less appealing to a poor widow with no grasp of the probabilities of her medical condition, stuck in her tenth floor flat, and with indifferent relatives who live miles away. No doubt she will be an incentive to the management consultants who will measure how speedily local Health Boards whizz around doing their suicide "counselling". (Whoops - she wasn't actually terminally ill. O well, we'll "take learnings" from her premature "choice to die"). To the system, the frightened widow will be just another instrument of our valueless and post-Christian polity.

On this, as on pretty much every other issue Dr Chaand deems important, the BMA needs to be told to put a sock in it.

 

WHEN THE HURLY BURLYS DONE

Action Stations. It may be the silly season, but we've got the largest military and civil evacuation since Saigon in 1975 and we've also got the BBC to explain what's going on and why. As the nation stared frowningly at its TV sets, the first things our intrepid correspondents had to get right were the scene of the action and who were the bad guys. The first bit should have been easy: Lyse Doucet, being the Beeb's Chief International Correspondent, would surely be on top of that. But Lyse has a voice like a Chinese person trying to speak with an Irish accent, which is putting it kindly. With a whine like finger nails being dragged down a blackboard, she averred from the top of her hotel in the distinctly un-dangerous Abu Dhabi that events were unfolding some place called Gor-bull, which might be in Glasgow. Back at the mother-ship, Mishal Husain essayed that it was in fact Garbool in Arfgarnystarn. Happily, the BBC has its own Arfgarn correspondent (of Pakistani heritage), who definitively pronounced it Karboole.

That settled, the next bit of key info was trickier to grasp: Lyse sounded as if the enemy were the Americans, a view later endorsed by some uneducated buffoon in our very own Foreign Office, where a "senior source" scoffed to the Times that the USA had been late for World Wars I and II and had cocked up everything else ever since. But who were these geezers in beards and tea towels from whom everyone seemed to be fleeing? Mishal thought it was an outfit called the Dallybun. Lyse said it was the Tallybun, but the Beeb's wallah in situ seemed surer it was the Dollybon, a word he repeated about twenty times in every piece to camera. 

Sadly however, the BBC no longer really likes to get close to the action to check the veracity of stories on the ground, where reporters such as Martin Bell  were once wounded by flying shrapnel in Bosnia and Martin Taylor was nearly lynched by an angry sectarian mob in Belfast. Nor are there authoritative correspondents like Charles Wheeler, David Lomax and Michael Cockerell back at base to explain lucidly and convincingly what on Earth it all means. Now the Beeb is about risk assessments, "threat level" protocols, security and diversity awareness training and Lyse giving her personal "take" on events from a very safe distance, her barnet ludicrously covered by an out-size helmet to protect it from the odd stray bullet fired high into the air by Dollybon celebrating miles away. Standing amidst the peaceful wreckage of helicopters disabled by the departing Americans, Lyse gravely told us that the US would have to live "for a very long time" with the "chaos" they had caused. Tomorrow, she said, 39 million Afghans would wake up in fear of the future. What, all of them? 

Yes, it's open season on the USA all right. The Brits are letting it be known that the Americans left them in the lurch, although it now appears that the UK's embassy staff bailed out before nearly anyone else, and had to be ordered back to their posts where they "heroically" went through the papers of the few refugees able to present them. Rory Stewart was grabbed by the media to give an opinion on the basis that he walked, rather quixotically,  across Afghanistan in 2002. Alas, Stewart's somewhat romanticised view of why the Afghans have been so badly let down by the West in 2021 does not seem to have been very much informed by the passage of the intervening years. An eloquent and empathetic man, he nevertheless gives the impression that our own governance would be massively improved if only we sat in a circle, cross legged in our jim- jams, silly hats on our heads, gossiping and drinking chai. Perhaps he thought that would work in London, where he briefly ran to be the capital's mayor. But it would be wrong to single Stewart out for wishful thinking. In the wake of the appalling suicide attack at Kabul airport, credence was given by the BBC to the hope that the Taliban might include some "moderates", as if cutting the hands off transgressors counts as being  liberal on the spectrum of psychopathy. Suddenly, everyone is an expert on the wise and ancient habits of Afghanistan and of a  people seemingly "abandoned". 

Who on Earth are we trying to kid? The ruthless invasion of Afghanistan by the USA in 2001 was a calculated and justifiable act of war, the response to the mass-murdering terrorist attack on New York and Washington on 9/11. Indeed for the first time the USA invoked the NATO charter, which held that an attack on one member was an attack on them all. The Americans must indeed be rueing the day that they didn't just leave it at that - a devastating punitive expedition followed by a swift withdrawal, but one which would have left no doubt about Western (or at least American) ferocity in defence of its legitimate security interests. 

The intervening years have taught the US quite a few things about the reliability of allies, not least when it extended the scope of its retribution by its questionable invasion of Iraq. But the attack on the regime of Saddam Hussein gave those allies the excuse to soft pedal on their far more justifiable involvement in Afghanistan. Over time, the US came to shoulder an incrementally heavier burden for both security and nation building in Afghanistan while their NATO and ISAF allies penny pinched and insisted on deployment to less challenging areas and tasks. Trump was the first to grasp that nettle, and now his successor has finished the job which (in hindsight) should have been done nineteen years ago.

Naturally, in choosing its own role, the UK managed to get the worst of all worlds. Castigated for its seemingly blind devotion to the US mission in both Asian theatres, London still contrived to deploy resources which were inadequate even for one area of operation, never mind both. By "going in", we merely got in the way and had to be bailed out in turn in both Southern Iraq and Helmand by the Americans. In Afghanistan,  the politicians and the brass thought that a large Brigade would do the trick, and for a while and with the overwhelming and sometime indiscriminate use of firepower, it did. But given that Afghanistan is nearly three times the size of the UK, sending in a Brigade was like sending in a platoon to subdue Wales. In such circumstances achieving basic security for the citizens, never mind nation building, was nigh impossible.

Europe has thrived comfortably under the blanket of security provided by the USA since the end of the Second World War. But like a lot of folk who have had too much of a good thing, Europeans have increasingly questioned the manner in which American support is provided, while failing to deliver it on their own account. Ingratitude and impotence have been reinforced by cultural disdain too. Look at those silly Yanks, we seem to say, with their Bible bashing, daft Presidents, obese citizens and the occasional deployment of automatic weapons by crazed nutters against school children. Being anti-American is so courant, and "progressives" can have their cake and eat it. How awful the US was to invade Afghanistan they say, and how awful they are now to leave it, thus depriving Afghan women of an exciting education in trans-genderism, or Kabul of its version of the Turner Prize. 

Quite sensibly, the USA has decided to cut the crap. 

COVID AND THE NHS - LET'S DO LUNCH

It's the weekend, so it must be time for another Lunch with the FT. A full page spread in the Life & Arts section, it is a weekly format that gives a house journalist a chance to break fancy bread with a politician, official or some other public figure or author whom often shares the FT's soft-left vision of the world. The participants get to chow down on things like "Heritage beets" "Iberian leaves" and "New England cod with shallot and caper infused almond milk jus". Sometimes they indulge themselves with a glass of Sancerre; but this being a serious paper, alcoholic drinks are frequently (and as ostentatiously) spurned. The bill for two invariably comes to an amount which folk might incur for a delicious banquet meal for six, with Cobra beer, in their local Bangladeshi restaurant.

At the end of July, it was the turn of the outgoing head of NHS England, Sir Simon Stevens, to be so honoured. Naturally, it wouldn't really have done for him to be seen expensively packing his pouch at some high-end restaurant with 5.3m citizens on NHS waiting lists, so lunch took place in the "gritty Elephant & Castle district of south London" at Kaieteur Kitchen Original, whose "ebullient Guyanese owner, Faye Gomes, greets Stevens as an old friend". The bill for an "array of subtly spiced dishes...served family style" and free drinks (the alcoholic content of which is unstated) came to £33.50. Bafflingly, the FT lady left a rather ungenerous $5 tip for poor Faye, presumably a note left over from the expense account of the FT's last scoff-fest in the USA.

But never mind. Sir Simon had good reason to be pleased as the UK  presently has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with over 70% of the adult population now fully inoculated against the disease. The combined efforts of virologists, pharmaceutical companies and Kate Bingham's tiny UK Vaccine Task Force may have discovered, developed, manufactured and procured vaccinations in double quick time, but it is Sir Simon's outfit that has done the jabbing. The situation in Scotland (where Nicola Sturgeon, by way of an explanation for her failure to hit the target of actual "jagging", has said that her program was merely to "offer" vaccination), is of course a little more nuanced.

Lunch with the FT is not really about the elucidation of important matters so much as the promotion of the interviewee. Sir Simon is shortly to join the ranks of their lordships in the Upper House, and if ever you want to speak to someone again for your paper, you don't ask them out to lunch only to give them a proper hosing down. But despite Sir Simon's "force of intellect and sinuous political skills", and the halo that has settled on the NHS, not even the FT could refrain from pointing out that the organisation "has missed performance targets by ever wider margins on his (7 year) watch". 

Happily, this will have been the only part of the article that will have caused a post-prandial burp from Sir Simon for he was hardly pressed at all on other matters such as the pandemic.  As to why the UK (as at the end of July 2021) had one of the highest mortality rates from Covid in the developed western world, despite having a "national" health service, Sir Simon essayed that it was probably because were are all too fat and  have an "obesogenic food environment". But he wasn't asked why the UK had nearly double the rate of deaths and infection rates per million as the Netherlands, which has an almost identical level of population density and similar issues with plumpness. Nor why the NHS forced the government to spend £15bn on PPE, £2bn worth of it unusable, and most of the rest now piled high and untouched in various warehouses. Nor why the NHS failed to exploit the pop-up Nightingale hospitals or the expensively requisitioned private sector bed space to ease the strain of the pandemic on the existing NHS estate. Nor why the NHS connived to discharge hundreds of infected elderly patients into un-protected care homes at the start of the pandemic. Nor why over 250,000 people have been on NHS waiting lists for over a year, and over 3,000 for more than two. Nor why GP referrals declined by nearly a third in 2020, despite the NHS being "open". Nor how the NHS is going to deal with any of this, beyond spending ever huger amounts of taxpayer money (to which Steven's refers as the post-Covid "dividend").

Hearing it from Sir Simon, the UK government led by David Cameron was jolly lucky to have secured his services back in 2014 at all, and clearly he is not a man given to much self - doubt, an important quality when speaking for an organisation which in all its parts employs over 1.5m people. Apparently, his "signature solution" for a service that has defied all attempts to make it more accountable, responsive and efficient, was the establishment of "integrated care systems". Naturally, Stevens did not offer any evidence that this approach (whatever it is) was working and certainly his claim to have successfully made the NHS more joined up will come as a surprise to that champion of medical vested interest, the BMA. Neither did he explain why the government now wants to remove the operational independence of the NHS to make it more responsive to ministers.

Nor have his claims resonated with Rachel Clarke, an NHS palliative care doctor given half a page in the Sunday Times on 25th July to explain why the NHS cannot "survive much longer". Hers was the usual and movingly manipulative story of the distress of those awaiting treatment or even attention, the anger of relatives and the "burn-out" of practitioners as they struggled to deliver the appropriate level of intervention in a service which is at the point of "bursting". Not even the lock-down of the entire population to Save the NHS has had much effect, according to Clarke. Instead, "the electorate drifts - eyes wide shut - into a de facto two-tier system in which the NHS provides a limited rump of core and emergency services while the rest is rationed to oblivion unless you can pay. Only someone lucky enough not to be, or to know, a patient can't see it (sic). The only question is how much we care." She may not have noticed it, but we arrived at the destination she describes a long time ago: the NHS is already a two - tier system with producer interests on one side and the patient on the other; care has always been "rationed"; the practice of triage in emergencies is routine, and we are all paying through the nose.

The gulf between the failed management consultancy leadership approach of Stevens and the evident collapse of morale of those at the coal face surely demands a re-evaluation of the strategy of the NHS, at the very least. Indeed, the evident crisis suggests that the whole purpose of an organisation struggling to meet unlimited and increasing demand "free at the point of use" needs to be re-examined, both philosophically as well as practically. Neither the strategy of Stevens (managerial sclerosis) nor the diagnosis of Clarke (the only real limit on the NHS is our compassion) have much if any credibility, and both have been serially undermined by the weight of experience. 

There is no other country on the planet, whatever the prevailing politics, that has chosen to replicate or even emulate "our" NHS. Yet Stevens has neither used his seven years of operational independence to reflect upon why this might be so, nor to bring forward credible solutions. Rather, he has sought to re-frame the problem, the better to disguise the lack of progress he and his colleagues, both professional and political, have made. The key thing now, he says, is to deliver "anticipatory" care rather than "reactive" or "episodic" care: today the mission of the NHS is (apparently) to keep people well over decades, especially those with multiple long term conditions. The way Stevens tells it, one could be forgiven for thinking that the lacunae at the heart of the care of the steadily increasing cohort of the elderly or the mentally unwell are things that have only just appeared on the NHS radar.

Yet two episodes will suffice to show the real nature of the challenge to the NHS. In the first, there is an 83 year old man, an overweight ex smoker with a heart condition and the onset of early stage dementia. The man (who lives on his own) was admitted to an Edinburgh hospital with Covid in the Spring. His dim recollection of puffing on a cigarette probably helped to save him as hospital staff managed the very tricky task of getting him on a ventilator. With this and other effective treatment, the man recovered from Covid. Three months later, he is still in hospital as his other ailments means he is in no fit state to be discharged into his home. He has become a "bed blocker".

The second is the episode portrayed by Doctor Clarke in her Times article. Here she recounts the abuse received from, of all people, an ambulance paramedic, who is beside himself with anxiety about his frail and elderly mother with metastatic cancer who has been discharged from hospital three times in a fortnight and whom he has discovered collapsed and dehydrated at her home. Quite understandably, he wants action this day, but the hospital has been "cleared" to make way for other patients. They do not know when she will be re-admitted.

These are real people, not spreadsheet items, yet neither of these tales is really about medical means and ends. Nor are they really about the different ways in which two hospitals, one Scottish, one English, choose to treat octogenarians. They are really about aims and expectations.

While there is an increasingly shrill and ongoing debate about the right to die, there has been virtually no public debate worth the name about the practice of keeping people alive long past their point of natural expiry with an increasing array of drugs. Nor has there been an acknowledgement that in an high expectation consumer society, where individuals want things dealt with NOW and to their complete satisfaction, offering something as critical as healthcare for free is simply unsustainable. It is no exaggeration to say that the current generation of healthcare consumers has been conditioned to expect not only immediate freedom from pain, but also freedom from the imminence of death, a conceit ludicrously encouraged by the demented attempts not only to supress Covid but also to eliminate it. 

The infantile veneration of a deeply flawed NHS has been one of the most depressing features of the Covid crisis. The citizenry has endured over 18 months of restrictions in order to shield the NHS, but we still being told that it is on the verge of collapse. This is a very heavy price to pay for an organisation which is apparently central to the social solidarity of the UK until someone actually has to use it, at which point it becomes a complete lottery. Yet Sir Simon is a smart enough operator to know that the witness of those like Doctor Clarke will, paradoxically, save him from too much embarrassment at any future enquiry into the UK's official handling of the pandemic. With the help of others like Sir Jeremy Farrar (who has landed his blow early in his highly selective book Spike), the lumpen apparat will attempt to shift most the blame onto the "choices" made by politicians. The rest of us will continue to suffer.

Boris may not get it yet, but the NHS is going to be to his party what Home Rule for Ireland was to the 19th century Liberals. It became an issue that eventually destroyed them. Before then, "global" Britain will also likely discover that when an "independent" country continues to pursue unique and unlimited policies which cost a lot of money, but which do not work, the global markets normally make it very expensive for it to continue. The NHS is a losing hand. It's time to throw it in.

 

    

HANOI

The plane drops very, very slowly towards Noi Bai. In the distance to the south is a largely indeterminate grey smudge, with the odd hint of a multi-storey building emerging through the haze. As we glide noisily towards the runway, there are what look to be a pair of enormous water-buffalo tethered by the side of a muddy looking paddy. But no: another 100 feet and the reality is two large piles of abandoned tractor tyres. A man looks up from his bicycle and in the next second he is gone as the aircraft comes down onto the rubber- scuffed surface. It is August 2007, and we are in Hanoi.

Vietnam has been an enduring fascination since childhood. The Common Room at my prep school got the daily papers which the older boys used to fillet immediately for the sports pages. Us juniors were left with the dull stuff which bore little relation to our daily lives. There were also the magazines: National Geographic, with its well thumbed pictures of naked natives in the Amazon Basin or Borneo jungle, Look And Learn and Time Life. In 1968, the latter was invariably horrific, the cover usually depicting badly wounded and mangled US and South Vietnamese soldiers piled up on the roofs of mud spattered APCs or on the oily decks of tanks. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, the "Summer of Flames", the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the riot - torn chaos of the US Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Those images ignited my interest in politics and history, with one picture in particular standing out. It soon became iconic of the war's terrible destruction and wastefulness; a photograph of a lifeless North Vietnamese soldier, his eyes open and face strangely calm, a body festooned with ammunition, and next to him amongst the detritus, his open and blood-spattered wallet showing the image of his sweet-heart back home. 

By the end of 1968, it was obvious that the US was losing. Mounting domestic opposition to the war was leading to serious disorders on the streets of America, inflamed by racial tension. So who were their implacable adversaries, communists to the Americans but "national liberators" to themselves? I could remember the pictures of Ho Chi Minh and the more shadowy Le Duan who directed the war from the North. And could anyone with an interest forget Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam's Comrade "No" who gave Henry Kissinger and the Americans such a run-around at the Paris peace talks? Yet despite the massive US preponderance of military might, the extraordinary willpower of these east Asian people  remorselessly ground away at American morale, in spite of their own terrible losses and the  destruction wreaked on their homeland. It was, said one American, a time of "destroying a village in order to save it".

Vietnam, re-unified in 1975, is still a communist state which has outlasted the Berlin Wall and the regime of the USSR which gave it support against the Americans. A reform program known as the Doi Moi has brought features of a free market place, and private ownership has hugely expanded to the benefit of the economy as a whole. But the Party is still paramount and the country remains highly militarised. I am nervously excited and have  many questions, although a lot are perhaps based on a defective memory of what happened nearly a generation ago.

We go into the airport building, our visas are briskly checked, some more dollars are handed over ("arrival tax") and then we are through. But then we are confronted by the first challenge to any traveller trying to cover a country in ten days - neither of our bags have arrived with us on the plane from Hong Kong. There are many other passengers in the same predicament, a lot of them French tourists, and soon there is a jostling and argumentative scrum around an official counter manned by Vietnamese in military fatigues. The French are getting pretty vexed but are met with curt remarks and impassive stares. We get to the head of our queue and I explain in my school-boy French that we are from Scotland, as if this will magically make things move faster. The almond eyes of the female officer widen just fractionally in interest and she explains in near faultless English that we should go into Hanoi and "wait".

We are met by Ky, our guide, and a small yet dignified gentleman of inscrutable demeanour who will be our driver. This is Mr Tranh. There is some polite sympathy about the luggage, or rather its absence. I am trying to give the impression that I am entirely relaxed about the situation, but Ali  knows I get agitated when parted from our "kit" and that I am seething underneath. For her, who is so calm, this could turn the trip into a major bummer, and she rubs my hand soothingly as Ky gives us the briefing. Our journey into town is accompanied by a swarming, hooting mass of bicycles, motor scooters and the famous cycle taxis.

We are staying at the Metropole Hotel, the social centre, really, of the old French colonial apparat in Vietnam. It is where Graham Green allegedly punched out The Quiet American, his somewhat prophetic work about American good intentions coming up against reality, on his war correspondent's typewriter. He had been there in the early 'Fifties before the Vietnamese ejected the French as they would later the Americans. The Hotel has been beautifully restored and we can see a nearby lake and the Hanoi Opera from our balcony. Our room is all glistening teak, gentle ceiling fans, charming lacquer and pottery decorations, abundant flowers and a bed for a lifetime of sleep.

We phone Ky at his apartment and can hear his children hollering and carrying on in the background. His wife has just escorted them on foot back from a school some miles away. Alas, although he has pulled out all the stops, there is no news about the likely arrival of our cases. I can tell he is genuinely embarrassed on our behalves, and that he is a good egg. He advises us to lay in some essentials from the local market a block away from the Metropole. Downstairs we run into the concierge Mr Nguyen (pronounced "Win"). He listens impassively to my tale of woe. "This happens all the time. Do not worry, Mr Cobb. Enjoy some food and drink - take a stroll". I know that there are no more commercial flights from Hong Kong that day, and am fretting that our "kit" may never catch up with us. But Mr Nguyen is already on the case, and barks some instructions down the telephone.

We head off to the market and buy fresh underclothes, some shirts and toiletries. We pass a few hours, drink some green tea and cheer up by munching our way through a bag of prickly pears and rambutans bought from a street stall.  Suddenly one of the cycle taxis is beside us, its owner all ingratiating smiles from a mouth of black teeth. His wizened colleague is similarly plucking. We are offered a "tour" and, too tired to resist, climb aboard. The journey takes less than ten minutes and we twice go around the block that we have already circled on foot before being dumped back at the steps at the Metropole. I am ordered to part with $30, which I know will be three day's wages in these parts. Their brazenness is almost charming, and too embarrassed to seek help from the hotel, I hand over the loot. The enterprising "bicycle thieves" head off with derisive gestures and laughs. The next day we will each have a cycle taxi to ourselves for a total of $15 all afternoon.

Mr Nguyen seems almost affronted by my further enquiry about the bags and I am politely but firmly reminded that the matter is in hand. We head to the bar, but despite the enormous care taken over its arrangement and decor, it is almost empty: even the stewards seem to have deserted their posts. We eat a delicious dinner next door, but again the whole atmosphere is quietly subdued. Absolutely stunning waitresses shimmer past in magnificent and embroidered silk ao dais, but they are somewhat humourless in their brisk efficiency. Too tired now for a night-cap, we head up the staircase to our room. Inside are our two cases.

The next day I am beside myself with gratitude: "Mr Nguyen, how on earth did you do it?". I offer a $50 tip, which the concierge accepts with a curt nod before secreting the note in an alcove under his counter, and suddenly I get an insight into why the Vietnamese won the war. Grief or gratitude, despair or delight, it's all the same; for Mr Nguyen, the most important thing was to get the job done. 

Ky arrives with Mr Tranh and we head off to see Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. This is a  mock Corinthian monstrosity at the side of an even vaster and unlovely square. The heat is absolutely stifling and Mr Tranh wordlessly passes around bottled water. The queue for what must be the most well inspected cadaver on the planet is astonishing and snakes up and down several rows. There must be well over two thousand people here, but it is the weekend and Ky explains that these scenes are no big deal - a visit to "uncle Ho" is all part of  leisure as much as ritual for many citizens. I can see too that there is no shade from the sun apart from a porch no more than twenty metres long at the very head of the line. Everyone is squashed together, but the atmosphere is entirely cheerful as Ky escorts us to the front. I make embarrassed eye contact with some of those we pass, but get only friendly smiles in return. I really am beginning to cheer up.

The noiseless and cool gloom inside is a relief, and we join a line moving at a slow and reverential pace. No one is permitted to linger. All around are youthful but severe looking guards, all armed to the teeth and wearing immaculate white cotton drill uniforms. As far as I can see, we are the only foreigners, and anxious about the correct deportment in front of the most famous, although admittedly dead, revolutionary in the world, I put my hands behind my back. This, it turns out, is a faux pas which I could easily have avoided by simply observing my fellow visitors, and we are immediately confronted by some very angry but silent gestures from one of the guards. I keep my arms by my side for the rest of my time in Vietnam.

We shuffle past the bier with its familiar figure. The wispy goatee is still in place, but Ho's skin is the colour of tallow and he wears an expressionless mask. Outside again, Ky meets us and he is diffident and charming. He is perhaps in his early thirties and has been a guide for five years. He is lucky he says: he, his wife and their two young children have a three roomed apartment in the centre of the city. He modestly agrees to share a photograph of his kids - they look delightful, smiling happily in their white school togs, a scarlet scarf wrapped around each of their necks. They are just about to become "young pioneers". Ky's father was a Captain in the North Vietnamese army, and was among one of the long columns of victorious communist troops waiting patiently outside Saigon for the last Americans to leave before entering the city on the final day of April in 1975.

We head up to Truch Bach, one of many lakes that pepper the urban landscape in Hanoi, and eat a simple lunch in a cafe overlooking the water. Floating on the surface are several pedalos in the shape of white swans and there are a lot of young couples meandering about the pavements. With accommodation at a premium, it is not easy to find some privacy. Ky points out the memorial to John McCain, nowadays a US senator, who was shot down in his A4 Skyhawk at the height of the war and crash landed into Truch Bach. He got a furious reaction: with both arms broken by his late ejection, he was hauled ashore and bayoneted before being dragged off to captivity at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton". 

Ali expresses surprise that the Vietnamese would commemorate a formerly hated adversary in this way. I ask how otherwise the Americans are regarded. Ky tells us that American visitors are incredibly respectful when visiting Vietnam and have poured a lot of private money into the country. They sponsor hospitals and cross-cultural events devoted to reconciliation. He himself sometimes escorted US veterans and is aware some of them have even met North Vietnamese veterans who were former foes. President Clinton normalised relations in 1995 and the Vietnamese now accept American contrition as the genuine article. They are the most popular visitors by far.

I mention the scrum of querulous French citizens at the airport and Ky gives a mirthless chuckle. Alas, the French do not seem as well reconciled to their defeat in 1954 as the Americans were to theirs two decades later. Ky says the French tourists occasionally behave as if they were still the colonial masters, perhaps emboldened by the fact that most Vietnamese of a certain age speak French and that it is still in official usage. I ask what second languages the children learn at school now, and he answers that Russian has been well-and-truly supplanted by English. Vietnam's relations with the USSR were complicated, he says. At one level, the Russians provided a lot of military hardware, money and advice. But they were somewhat bullying allies and the Vietnamese leadership came to resent having to ask their permission for the acts needed to secure "national liberation". Their fellow communists, the Chinese were even worse. Piqued by a Vietnamese reprisal attack on their client state Cambodia, which was then under the psychotic rule of the Khmer Rouge, China invaded Vietnam from the north in 1979. A huge army was sent to "punish" Hanoi. The bulk of the Vietnamese forces simply melted away until the Chinese, fearful that they were headed into an almighty ambush set by one of the most combat experienced armies on the planet, decided to withdraw. By contrast, the Vietnamese kicked out the murderous Khmer Rouge regime and fully occupied Cambodia until 1989.

Later we enjoy a leisurely cycle taxi tour around the "old quarter". The sky has darkened over, and the air is now more pleasantly humid. Many streets look dilapidated, but the bustle of activity is intense and unlike the young lovers at Truch Bach, there is no lounging around. Nobody pesters us and I have to admire my "driver's" stamina as he energetically peddles with the overweight carcass behind him. Ali knows of a co-operative where they make amazing and ornate hand-bags, and we take a detour that lasts a good hour. Everyone we meet is polite and dignified but not at all effusive: in fact their reserve is completely charming. We travel back to the Metropole with several new bags. 

On our final day we are taken to see Ho Chi Minh's house and the government compound where the politburo met to direct the war. There are few visitors and it is, really, a prosaic experience. There is Ho's bed and eating utensils and there is the bakelite telephone down which he delivered orders or some of his more gnomic apercus. We are evidently supposed to admire his simplicity and his devotion to the people ("peace loving workers everywhere"). But arguably he and his colleagues needlessly prolonged a war long after it was plain that they had won it. As one US diplomat remarked later, "We had to bomb them to accept our concessions".

I start to wander un-shepherded, and round the back of one of the camouflaged buildings I discover a crowd of North Vietnamese army veterans at a get-together. Many are loaded down with medals and there is a lot of chatter and laughter. This looks more like it. I advance with a complacent rictus of delight written all over my face, but before I can take another step I am grabbed by Ky. His face is absolutely aghast and he leads me gently but firmly away. He is embarrassed: I am embarrassed, and I scold myself . My interest in the war is no excuse for this over-familiar assault on some of those who actually had to fight it in the appalling conditions, but whom I don't know from Adam. I realise that Ky has probably saved me from a humiliating gaffe. Ali rolls her eyes and then gives me a kiss of commiseration. Mr Tranh bobs his head silently and enigmatically. We head off to find a beer.

The rest of the time is spent poking around some cultural sites, but really I would prefer to be discussing. We politely decline a visit to a "water puppet" show, which we know to be a bit of tourist kitsch disguised as local "culture" and opt for an excellent dinner at a nearby restaurant. We persuade Ky to make the arrangements and he agrees to join us, although declining on behalf of his wife. Once again, I realise that I have been insensitive - after all, it is late, he has a family to go to and we are just visitors. He really is a lovely bloke: dignified, intelligent, well-informed and attentive to our interests. But there is a sort of unspoken sadness about him, which I have noticed in the demeanour of a number of the folk whom we have come across. It seems the patriotism and endurance of the Vietnamese bears a price which is now hard-wired as a heavy burden in their very genes.

The next day, Ky sees us off for the flight to Hue. He has brought a small gift for Ali from his wife, and is wholly reluctant to take a tip which I am eventually forced to push in his pocket. Mr Tranh, who has not uttered until this point, then steps forward and says in perfect English "Goodbye Mr & Mrs Cobb. I hope you have enjoyed your time in my country. I would very much like to see Scotland one day. I hope you will come back" He gives a small knowing smile to Ky, a toothier one to us, and then they are gone. 

NATIONALISING PEOPLE

At various points in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the penny finally dropped among the political left in particular and progressives more generally that the advancement of humanity and the eradication of injustices were not going to be achieved by the collective ownership or central direction of the means of production and exchange. The free market, the enabling effects of technology and the targeted application of welfare provision demonstrated that the "capitalist model" could (and did) achieve a higher aggregate standard of living, notwithstanding the stubborn persistence of relative inequalities. Arguably, the very success of this model gave the left the freedom and the opportunity to apply its determinism to other parts of individual and collective human experience, aided and abetted by the march of the social sciences through the university campuses of the western hemisphere and into the world of personal life, cultural institutions and government.  If the utopians couldn't nationalise the means of production, they'd nationalise people instead. 

In the UK, the first sign of this Thermidorean reaction against the Chicago School revolution of Reagan and Thatcher came with the "New Labour" administration formed in 1997. Tony Blair's government was the first one with an explicitly moral purpose - after all, and as he told us, he was a "straight kinda guy." Not that this approach was in any sense anchored in the western Christian tradition. Indeed Blair's right hand crony, Alastair Campbell said "We don't do religion". But he didn't mean that in the way that the Founding Fathers meant when declaring a Republic with freedom of religion and also freedom from religion. Campbell meant that he and the government would be entirely happy if religion was excluded from the public realm altogether. 

The Blair Project also did away with or marginalised a number of the features of the constitutional arrangement of the UK which were deemed antithetical to it: hereditary peers, the Law Lords and Cabinet government. Not even the monarchy was immune from Blairite presumption. The centralisation that had been such a feature of the last Thatcher years was  retained and built upon. However, the biggest change was the acceleration of the process by which the proscriptive legal tradition of Europe was substituted for the more permissive legal culture of the Common Law and its Scottish variant. This was reinforced by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the adoption of which was a core part of the agenda of the political class gathered around Blair, who was himself a lawyer. 

Naturally, progressives were delighted. A construct that had stood the test of time for nearly a thousand years was going to be reconstituted with a thrillingly "modern" framework that had only been in place since the end of the Second World War, specifically to deal with the appalling historic grotesque of a murderous Nazi regime which had nonetheless been legitimised by German law. And who on Earth could object to that? Fundamental human rights were "in", the "oppressive" construct of an ancient, tested and accretive legal corpus cunningly disguised as "tradition" was on its way "out".

Yet applying Newton's Third Law, if individuals have fundamental rights, then the society composed of other individuals must have a duty to satisfy them if they are to be meaningful. Happily, these duties are (or were) determined by democratic consent expressed via the ballot box. Alas, this is not how things worked out once the legal establishment started to apply the ECHR to cases. In the new dispensation, "fundamental" human rights could and did trump all sorts of legal precedents, and matters which were understood to have been democratically decided.  Think of the endless argy-bargy around the deportation of illegal immigrants with a criminal record and the conflict between the democratic mandate to control immigration effectively and the emigres right to protection and a family life under the ECHR. 

It's no good blaming the judges, even though some critics have argued that there is some sort of pernicious process at work here, organised by the judicial elite. Think how Boris Johnson and his team tried to blame the judges for obstructing BREXIT, the better to cover the intellectual hole at the heart of their negotiations. The ineptitude and lack of intellectual confidence of successive Conservative governments has further emboldened the progressives. In the first place, fundamental rights have far greater elasticity than the precise boundaries set by law. Amorphous rights are much more in keeping with the Post Modernist contention that the meaning of something is whatever construction the individual choses to place upon it, and that objectivity and discrimination, whether in science, the arts, public culture and even family life, are all part of the "oppressive" and patriarchal super-structure that needs to be overthrown.

Secondly, and as Jonathan Sumption has pointed out, "Today, these (ECHR) rights are commonly invoked as a form of fundamental law designed to limit democratic choice. The mounting pressure to extend human rights into the area of positive rights...will ultimately marginalise the whole process of democratic consent". Sumption characterises this as a form of judicial capture, but in fact it has been driven by an increasingly narrow and intolerant political and cultural elite, supported by the organs of the state.

There is perhaps no better exemplar of Gramsci's "march through the culture" than Nicola Sturgeon's SNP. Unlike Irish nationalism in its earliest variant, the appeal of the Scottish nationalist movement is neither founded on cultural commemoration nor framed as an appeal to historic recollection. The collected and shared wisdom and experiences of the ages are seemingly irrelevant. It is instead a progressive project, geographically rather than culturally defined by what goes on north of the line between Eyemouth and Annan. It is also, for the purposes of beguiling us proles, presented as a moral program where Scottish nationalism is always wholesome, civic, "inclusive", "diverse" and "fair" but where English or British nationalism (such as it exists) is always and everywhere "bad" (or "inappropriate"). It is a narrative that is tacitly promoted day-in-and-day-out by a largely uncritical Scottish media that ought to know better.

Naturally, the assimilation of Post Modernist shibboleths (if such a thing does not sound too much like a contradiction in terms) has caused the SNP one or two problems. For example neither Sturgeon nor her Green Party collaborator Patrick Harvie seem to be sure about the definition of a woman. Progressives who don't have to bear the responsibility of framing laws where such matters are entirely relevant are however, delighted. Such confusion is all part of the counter-culture which denounces objectivity and elevates "personal truths" above all others. 

But if Sturgeon has mobilised the counter-culture to destabilise her enemies, she is also aware that one day, it may be turned against her. Some protection can be found in the use made of the language. "Fairness" is a lot more enigmatic and nicer sounding that "Re-distribution" or "Expropriation". The word "Inclusive" can happily be deployed to exclude the concept of merit or even capability. "Inappropriate" is a far less judgemental word than "Wrong" and removes the need for the speaker to state clearly what transgression has taken place, while keeping the supposed offender in their place.  

The biggest defences of all can and have been erected in the education system. Uneducated citizens are far easier to bamboozle if not actually control. But this does not mean that education can be denied. In the hands of the state, it can however be manipulated  to achieve whatever the government deems to be its social purpose. Thus the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence aims to produce certain behaviours in children and young adults rather than knowledge per se. The intention is to provide pupils with the information and "skills" which they need to be model (i.e. compliant) citizens in the new progressive utopia. 

Alas, the Curriculum has not worked out as intended and has, according to the OECD, failed to achieve even the minimum standards to which a developed economy and society should aspire, particularly in regard to its less well-off citizens. The small amount of mainstream media attention that was garnered by the OECD's damning findings was astonishing - the Times relegated it to page 16 of its Scottish edition. The seeming indifference allowed Shirley Anne Somerville brazenly to claim that the report vindicated the Curriculum as a "philosophy" of education, but even she could not deny some of its more spectacular failings. Yet there was no hint of contrition for all those children let down by more than a decade of failure. Nor has there yet been a convincing explanation as to why the report's findings were embargoed by the Scottish government until after the Holyrood elections.

Of course, the other way that the progressive state can nationalise people is to take them onto the public payroll as either employees or as dependents of welfarism.  As the loyalties of the claimant can always be swayed by a better offer from someone else, co-option by employment is best. On that score, the OECD report on the Curriculum for Excellence identified over 40 government agencies, quangos and advisory groups as well as 32 local authorities that were involved in the dog's breakfast that is Scottish education. Never mind the vested interests, think of all the salaries and perks that can be obtained from the blighting of a generation of the nation's youth.

The growth and intrusiveness of the state has been astonishing. One hundred years ago, when Britain also had an empire to administer, there was one civil servant for every 11,000 subjects. Today there is one for every 162, and that doesn't include the 300,000 employed by the "arms length bodies", some of which which have featured so prominently in the organisational shambles of Scottish education. The personal economics of public service are attractive : in 2019 the ONS concluded that, on average, the public servant enjoys a remuneration package worth nearly 10% more than someone with equivalent skills and demands in the private sector. All that, and job security too. Max Hastings may huff and puff about the state being priced out of the market for the filling of its upper echelons, but lower down where employee incapacity and even incompetence are also preserved by official deference to "fundamental human rights", the rewards are good. 

The Covid crisis has expanded the remit of the state exponentially. Liberty has been severely curtailed, a whole new and intrusive "bio-security" apparatus has been constructed at colossal public expense and Britain's national debt is now measured in trillions not billions. Naturally, the pandemic has allowed swathes of the public sector to take fully-paid downtime with pension rights preserved - never has inactivity been so lucrative for our public servants. In the mouths of both Sturgeon and Johnson, "Living with Covid" emphatically does not mean that the individual citizen should take personal responsibility for assessing the healthcare risks associated with the exercise of their liberty. It means getting used to the sporadic and capricious withdrawal of liberty in any situation which may be deemed a public health "emergency". Not even Kafka could have imagined a public body, which had been shielded by the very citizenry it was supposed to protect, getting a medal for "valour". But that is what has just happened to the NHS, awarded the George Cross. Only in British society does the Queen bee get the medal for the bravery and forbearance of her colony. 

When are people, increasingly enslaved by infantilism, going to wake up? 

 

THE GREAT LEVELLER

The press and media in general love bye-elections. They are easy to cover and provide acres of editorial. The Chesham & Amersham poll has been no exception, with pictures of the gurning but otherwise anonymous Liberal leader "smashing" a pile of kiddie's bricks as he demolished the "Blue Wall" (GEDDIT?). Coming so soon after the Tories' success in overturning a long-standing Labour majority in Hartlepool, the result was a useful corrective to Conservative hubris. In leafy Bucks, the Liberals had a personable candidate, mounted a ferocious campaign and capitalised on long standing grumbles about HS2 (the estimated cost of which has doubled to £90bn in 10 years) and the more recent proposals to change planning legislation in favour of mass building in green spaces.

Were any of these factors really decisive? After all, HS2 has been known about for a while and the Liberals are long-standing supporters. Equally, the tide has been running against Nimbyism for years and the Conservative manifesto made it clear the status quo was unsustainable. Yet the Tories won the seat comfortably in  the 2019 General Election. 

So which of the two bye-elections will be seen in retrospect to have been of the greatest significance? If the Tories win another Labour seat at the bye-election for Batley & Spen, it will reinforce the case for Hartlepool. Certainly the omens for this look good - the West Yorkshire seat is surrounded by others that went "Blue" in 2019 and Labour has already arguably reaped the benefit of the murder of the former MP Jo Cox, although this has not stopped them trying to milk the situation by having Cox's sister stand as their candidate. In the Bucks vote, the Labour candidate lost the party its deposit and Keir Starmer has been all at sea. Yet in future years, the "shock" result in the Home Counties may be seen as the turning point for Boris Johnson and for the governing classes more generally.

Arguably the catalyst for the Amersham result was neither HS2 nor the prospect of thousands of Barratt boxes going up in the already HS2 desecrated countryside. A strong case could be made for the PM's conference call to announce the postponement of the end of lockdown which was preceded by his scarcely less embarrassing performance at the G7 summit in Cornwall. Indeed that whole pointless bean-fest, with its gazillions of police and other self-important "security" gonzos was a perfect emblem for what is wrong with modern governance: the grotesque and expensive over-protection of "leaders"; the carefully "curated" PR photo shoots (complete with Boris's nth child, whose face we are not allowed to see for "safeguarding" reasons); the massive inconvenience of local residents (many of whom were denied access to their roads and homes); the staggering cost (such as lengthening the local runway so that Biden's ridiculous air armada could land); the conceit that "personal chemistry" can solve complex problems, and the utterly banal "communique" which was the sum total of their intellectual effort. One felt for HM in her widow's weeds who, not for the first time, must have wondered "Who are all these stupid people?". 

The attempted justification for yet further delay in the ending of increasingly pointless Covid restrictions was a truly shaming event, complete with misleading charts and a  failure  to answer truthfully the few questions that were allowed. Naturally the "Two Gentlemen of Corona" will take less flack than the PM, who once again demonstrated that he cannot be trusted. It is simply no longer possible to give Johnson nor his craven and inadequate ministers the benefit of the doubt - the PM plainly prefers to cuff it, and hopes that his dishevelled schtick will cover his (and their) complete lack of capacity. Whether it is Covid, immigration, education, the Northern Ireland protocol (a disastrous and asymmetric deal into which the establishment willingly entered, but now regrets) or public spending that is now out-of-control, the uselessness, intrusiveness and lack of accountability of the apparat and the low calibre of its political masters stands comparison with the regime of the last Tsar of Russia. The only mitigation is the vaccine program, the discovery of which was pure serendipity.

Meanwhile the scarcely believable costs of dealing with the pandemic continue to horrify. The £37bn (and counting) Test and Trace program is a proper scandal to which the BBC could usefully apply its so-called "Reality Checkers" that were deployed so liberally to try to discredit the Brexit process. Naturally, no such examination will be attempted given the level of the Beeb's complicity with the "bio-security" agenda of the government's advisors. Instead we are treated to  daily graphs of "infections" but  no details as to how effective is the "trace" part of the program, which requires people to self-isolate. The answer is probably "not much" given the speed of infection of the new "Delta" variant among the younger un- vaccinated cohort of the population. More effort has gone into educating us to accept a coy name for a mutation that appears to have developed in India, and which was allowed to take hold as HMG dithered about travel bans from the sub-continent earlier in the year . Yet the papers are full of letters from  doubly-vaccinated holiday travellers now being harassed by intrusive, random and expensive testing and quarantine "protocols". 

Naturally, there is an assumption that we will simply put up with all this nonsense and the now discretionary provision of public services, for which the practitioners still receive full pay. Yet hardly a day goes by without further evidence of the colossally expensive uselessness of the  governing and political class. The latest is an habitually gargantuan cock-up in the Ministry of Defence's procurement department, for which the commissioning service chiefs bear as much responsibility as their civilian contractors. The current horror is the Ajax "light tank", which at 42 tonnes is 80% of the weight of the WWII German monster, the Tiger II. Designed to be a (heavily) armoured personnel carrier, only 14 have been delivered so far at a cost of £3.2bn. They are in all shapes and sizes too, as the brass hats bicker as to what they actually need these piles of metal to do. Only recently has it been discovered that "the poor bloody infantry" who will have to use them tend to throw up if the things go at more than walking speed, such are the vibrations. Nearly 600 have been ordered and are, according to the CGS, a core part of the army's "modernisation". What a mess, but you can be sure that various MOD wallahs will still get their KCMG's.

In fairness, the government has at least resisted the £14bn tab that was estimated by the so-called "Education Catch-up Tsar", Sir Kevan Collins, as the cost for putting right nearly 18 months of disruption in the class-room. A full time apparatchik and former CEO of that exemplar of local authority probity, Tower Hamlets, Sir Kevan left in a huff when his builder's estimate was given the bums-rush. Having faced the fierce resistance of the teaching unions to any form of classroom teaching during the pandemic and the half hearted attempts to deliver distance learning in a "safe" way, the government was surely right in doubting whether such a sum would be properly or effectively spent by an unreformed and obstructive educational establishment. But equally, was not Sir Kevan given some proper and achievable objectives before he was allowed to come up with his hasty calculations?

But lest the Scottish government is inclined to crow, the embargoed OECD report on the "Curriculum for Excellence" (CFE) has just been released, now that the Holyrood elections are safely out of the way. To the baffling conundrum as to why such a significant proportion of Scottish children and young adults still leave school functionally illiterate and innumerate, the OECD cheerily states that the Curriculum offers "an inspiring and widely supported philosophy of education". Any one of these descriptions is open to serious challenge and in passages of masterly periphrasis the OECD goes on to describe the implementation of CFE as a complete dog's breakfast. Most damningly of all, it recommends as "next steps" that the CFE "focus on students and their learning progress". 20 years after the great "National Debate" on education, the product of that "debate" has yet to connect with those it is supposed to serve. Ms Sturgeon and her scarcely less able ministers should hang their heads in shame.

Perhaps the poor state of UK education at all levels from nursery to tertiary is the reason why the top of the public and, increasingly, the private sector is stuffed with so many flawed, privileged and entitled people who keep coming around again and again. From page 5 of the Sunday Times Business section grins Charlotte Hogg, 50 year old scion of the expenses-scamming, company destroying and moat clearing Hogg "dynasty". Very embarrassingly, Charlotte had to resign as a newly appointed deputy governor of the Bank of England in 2017 when she failed to disclose an obvious conflict of interest (her brother was a director of Barclays, which makes millions from the arbitrage of interest rates). She "forgot" to tell the Bank because, apparently, " I thought everybody knew, and I hadn't filled in that particular form". Such little details - life is so unfair isn't it? Even the Governor thought it was not really a resigning issue - after all the proles always lie on their mortgage applications don't they? But no matter, by mucking out the stables (she is an able horsewoman) and with the love of her family and friends, she was able to get through the whole "shattering experience" and is now a better leader. Soon after she was appointed head of VISA (Europe), on an undisclosed salary unlikely to be trifling. The  conceit that it is our expectations of our public officials rather than her arrogance which was responsible for her little faux pas is scarcely concealed.

Further down the page is a cheery shot of her with Baroness Dido Harding, both nattily attired in jockey silks for a charity horse race. Both are good pals, both served on the Court of the Bank of England and both are the products of a private education and upbringing where all vestiges of humility and self awareness are ruthlessly squeezed out. Fresh from nearly sinking a PLC (TalkTalk), Dido is busily working her way through the confetti spending of Test and Trace, the abject failure of which is already a matter of record, if only to the Parliamentary select committee. Yet such is her chutzpah and mis-placed self esteem, she has publicly put herself forward to succeed Sir Simon Stevens as head of NHS England, who has himself been rewarded  for failure with a place in the House of Lords.

Never mind "woke", when are people going to wake up? Across swathes of the public sector, the lack of capacity and moral probity is absolutely staggering. The Tories have been in power one way or another for over a decade, and as with Saint Nicola and her little Green helpers, has absolutely nothing of any long lasting value to show for it. Boris thinks he can still "level up", but even if the market lets him, the ambition will scarcely get us back to levels of well-being that were in place at the end of the last century. Hartlepool was the last gasp of  electors who have been serially legged over by politicians of both stripes but who still (amazingly) think that governments are there for the citizens and can spend their way to social justice. Chesham and Amersham shows that the honey moon is well and truly over and that revolutions in Great Britain inevitably start with the "gentry".

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

In 2010 whilst on the General Election campaign trail, Gordon Brown was memorably taken to task by a long time Labour supporter, Gillian Duffy, about his government's handling of public spending and immigration. Ms Duffy was not best pleased, and the 65 year old gave her view plainly but not rudely. What happened next probably contributed to Labour losing the election as Brown was caught on microphone crossly berating his aides for allowing such an interaction and calling Duffy "that bigoted woman". Those few seconds said more about the remoteness of the political class from those it is supposed to serve than a thousand BBC bulletins ever could or would.

Has the new leader of the Labour party, Sir Keir Starmer, just had his "Gillian Duffy" moment? Fruitily ticked off in Bath by the angry landlord of the Raven Tavern, Starmer allowed himself to be hustled away while his "security" manhandled the publican upon whose premises the Opposition leader had entered. Rod Humphris had every right to be agitated - unlike Gillian Duffy, he has a business that has been under the shadow of ruin for the past twelve months, a direct result of the government's response to the Covid pandemic. Starmer accused the businessman of being a Covid-denier and suggested that it was fine for private enterprises to be faced by possibly permanent closure because the public's safety "demanded" it. As Jonathan Sumption commented, "When democracy becomes a mechanism for mass coercion by governments, with the approval of the opposition, it is surely heading towards its end".  

It is perhaps unfair to single out Starmer for some of the more deranged aspects of the government's handling of the pandemic - he is not, after all, in power. But to the extent that he has been complicit in the government's treatment of citizens as mere tools of public policy, Sumption is surely on-the-money. 

The past year has shown the true awfulness of the way we are governed. A fantastic amount of resource has been mobilised, and deployed with almost wilful mediocrity and even incompetence; the BBC has been allowed to terrify everyone into compliance, and the citizenry has seen the biggest curtailment of its civil liberties since the 17th century. Parliamentary scrutiny has been negligible and the government has issued over 400 "statutory instruments", basically new orders (such as the £10,000 Covid fines), under the cover of old legislation. It has suited both the UK and devolved governments to pretend that all risks can be eliminated, and that personal privations and economic vandalism are the costs of the slightest chance that any one individual succumbs. It is not the "precautionary" principle, it is tyranny. Not just one, but several effective vaccines have been developed and delivered, yet still the nonsense continues. Indeed, public safety messaging has been ramped up and the government's policies have infantilised everyone. 

Anyone who has had direct experience of central or local government or of HMRC knows that public service attracts many types. Among the most common are those individuals who enjoy their moment of authority over their fellow citizens far too often than is good for them. Sadly, these exemplars are usually found at the point of contact with the public and there is a certain glee to be had by them for reporting that the "Computer says No" as a cover for their own lassitude and incompetence. Why does it take a lever-arch file load of correspondence to get your Council Tax band confirmed or for the correct tax code to be applied to your income? For the alert and educated it's just a lot of time wasting but others are seriously bamboozled and treated unjustly by these "processes", many of which assume a familiarity with on-line form-filling that would defeat Alan Turing.

The waste of public money is simply colossal. The figures are now so mind-bogglingly huge that the press can only get its head around the small change - as much ink has been spilt over the needless £2.6m revamp of the Number 10 "briefing" room as on the £37bn (and counting) cost of the Test and Trace program. Naturally, the press has majored on all those features that are nowadays almost constitutionally embedded in government procurement procedures: the appointment of well-connected but otherwise unqualified executives (Baroness Dido Harding) to oversee the inevitable fiasco; the lavish and unfocused use of expensive and unaccountable consultants to do those equally expensive executives' thinking for them ; the giving of contracts to mates and other hangers-on, and the seeming selection of the program's objectives out of a hat. 

The money is spent, the "targets" are missed and then some committee of under-informed MPs wonders aloud where the hell it all went wrong. In Harding's case, the parliamentarians made the classic (and usual) mistake of accepting her analysis at face value. She had failed to meet the targets she herself had set, ergo they concluded the thing was a disaster. But no-one questioned what she was trying to achieve in the first place. A mere half hour of careful consideration would have told Harding that the best use of all the money would actually have been to incentivise people to stay at home once notified of infection. Instead, she and her successor are still going for broke on repeated and seemingly purposeless national testing. The Uber driver or chippie who needs to earn a living is not going to self-isolate just because Dido's "App" goes "ping", unless he or she is paid to do so. Infections will continue to spread - but that is inevitable anyway, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of human behaviour knows.

Harding is of course entirely unrepentant. Given her associations, she can be sure of remaining in orbit no matter what calamity results from her stewardship of public money. As can the consultants who were paid £3,000 a day for two months for a team of 4 of them to produce a new "Anti-bullying protocol" for the London Ambulance Service at the height of the pandemic. It's not the consultants' fault : in today's public sector, the process IS the outcome. 

In the autumn of 2019 the Chancellor stood up and announced that the NHS budget for 2020/21 would be £145bn. So much for austerity, the health service had been in continuous receipt of real spending increases for over two decades, even after the surge to re-base funding during Blair's second term in office. The budget for 2021/22 is £230bn. Within that increase, a 2% increment for nurses on the average salary would cost £177m. That is less than a fifth of what Dido and her "team" spent on something called "prevalence testing" last year - basically sticking a swab up some Scouser's hooter three times a day and then sending it to some crazily bored and overworked lab assistant for "analysis". The English nurses have just been offered 1%.  Yet the NHS is still under-recruited for medical staff and the number of administrators continues to exceed the number of nurses across the UK by some margin. Even Sturgeon is not that stupid.

Sir Humphrey is surely  turning in his grave with embarrassment. But the real killer here is not the waste of money, the stupidity and the cock-ups: these have always been a feature of over-reaching and over-stretched governments. The new and deadly feature is the graft.

Sasha Swire's memoir of the Cameron years was one of 2020's publishing "sensations", complete with insights such as David Cameron wanting to push her into a bush near Polzeath and "shag" her. Sadly, the revelations were enough to shrink her and her MP hubby Hugo's social circle by quite a circumference. Anyone reading them however should be appalled, not by the actual behaviour so much as its sheer naffness. Cameron and chums come across as amiable, self-satisfied, shallow and vacuous: fine for a Joanna Trollope novel, but government? 

Dave went on to become a non-executive of the now defunct Greensill, in which capacity he held the prospect of "earning" £60m (!) if all went well. The denouement was hardly surprising - after all various ex-PM's have been embarrassed by their post-political-retirement associations with financial "corporations", even Thatcher. The new element  was that Greensill was already embedded in government courtesy of Cameron (before he left office) and the "much revered" then Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood. Lex Greensill had an ace wheeze to convert the mundane function of invoice factoring into a seriously lucrative business. In this case he was employed by HMG to pay their bills for a fee and the opportunity to arbitrage the difference between what the government owed and what the supplier was prepared to accept for prompt payment. What is amazing is how useless the apparat was/is at paying its bills; even more amazing when you consider its "Gilt" credit; absolutely astonishing when you consider this is an era when the Bank of England effectively prints the money the government spends at the point of disbursement.

You might wonder why the government needed to use factoring at all - indeed, one G Brown brought in a law against corporate late payment back in 1997/8. But Greensill leveraged his triple A rated government connection to persuade other credulous financiers to provide funds to his expanding empire of somewhat dodgier transactions, such as a steel company issuing invoices to itself to gain instant factored "credit".

O dear. Carillion had been using similar techniques to massage its cash flow when it too went pop, losing many their blameless livelihoods. Both Lex Greensill and Sir Jeremy Heywood had been at Morgan Stanley at the time when this useless and dangerous alchemy was dreamt up and was then later transferred seamlessly into the heart of government, complete with an office and business cards when Sir Jezza was Cabinet Secretary. The corporate advisers to Carillion? Why Morgan Stanley of course ! Happily, HMG is no incipient Carillion as the taxpayer ultimately picks up the tab - which is exactly what the chipper-looking Mr Greensill was always relying upon. Meanwhile, Dave's already slender reputation for anything other than affability is toast but Lady Heywood's circle is unlikely to scoff. After all it's not the widow's fault and she still gets an index linked pension.

The famous Anarchist Prince Kropotkin said that "Revolutionary government is a white Blackbird". But isn't that looking just a tad attractive right now?