TOYS FOR THE BOYS

“DECEIVE BOYS WITH TOYS,” stated the great Spartan General Lysander Lysander, “but men with oaths.” He was presumably speaking before he went into battle and soundly whipped the Athenian democrats in 406 B.C. en route to taking control over a considerable amount of Asia Minor. Today’s brave political leaders, in keeping with what we expect of them as intellectuals, show total ignorance of what happened yesterday, and seem to be utterly aghast when events that were totally predictable take place.

GORDON BROWN TODAY STATED THAT THE SCALE and depth of the “serial” deception carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will “shock and anger the international community”. Worrying indeed, is Gordon Brown’s allegation that Iran has been “caught red-handed not telling the truth”, despite promises that it would not produce nuclear weapons. I had not been intending to make a comparison study out of my feelings, but I imagine I may spend a least a small part of my weekend weighing up whether I am more “shocked and angry” about our Iranian friends than I am about Gordon Brown’s own deception.

EQUALLY PERTINENT TO TOYS AND BOYS is the startling revelation that the gentlemen responsible for “outing” our “deceitful” politicians over their expenses scandal were driven to such drastic measures by seeing that our politicians were lining their pockets while “our boys in Afghanistan”, as they were today described in The Sun, did not have the right equipment to defend themselves, as the “armour” and “heavy machinery” sent over to them would be useless against roadside bombs. Do they know what Lysander was talking about now?

BORIS OPEN

“CHAGRIN” MAY NOT BE THE SUITED TERM for describing how much I feel upset, or, perhaps, disappointed, that the good leader of Russia, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, was not afforded greater power than his meted amount, given that he may have been able to almost single-handedly return relations among our nations to the days when decent chaps smuggled sparkling eggs back and forth and giggled about it in our underground dug-outs while wearing our extra-thick pyjamas.

SO MUCH WAS BORIS INTO this retro view of life experienced between the two great powers that when socially en pantoufles as a guest in the USA he got so drunk during a 1995 visit to Washington that his own Secret Service agents found him late at night a few hundred feet from the White House wearing only Soviet briefs and trying to call a taxi in search of a “pizza”, which, for those of my readers unfamiliar with the term, is an American foodstuff that involves eating with one’s hands without offending waiters.

WHENEVER ONE GOES ON INTERNATIONAL encounters and congresses without the company of one’s loved ones and personal cooking staff, as I sometimes have to do, it is easy to slip into less than sensible behaviour, and I will not stand up here and state that I am without transgression; but discipline, however difficult, must surely stand paramount: never have I felt like a “pizza”, and I will not eat with my hands unless someone is pointing a gun at my temple.

YELTSIN, ON THE OTHER HAND, apparently felt like one, and then managed to “give the slip” to the Russian agents looking after him in Blair House, which is where foreign guests of the US President stay when in Washington. Our own Gordon Brown, on his next trip to Blair House, might be fair advised to “do a Yeltsin” late at night, slipping off into the back alleys of Pennsylvania Avenue, never again to be seen (because our Secret Service agents will surely not look for him for long). Whether he goes in search of pizza, of peace or is just doing his countrymen a favour, a nation will gratefully mourn.

BACK TO BLACK

GOOD-NATURED TOM-FOOLERY INVOLVING insulting politicians, something which has been the lifeblood of independent news writing even in the days when this was done with charred embers on the walls of caves, as it is still done today in some parts of the world, is starting to attract the attention of some oversensitive members of our communities who think that any criticism of a member of a minority is a criticism of the minority as a whole rather than the member as an individual. This approach has seen its most recent outings in absurd claims that calling President Barack Obama a “liar” is racist.

OBAMA, OF COURSE, TAKES THIS in his stride. Ably performing on the Letterman show, he quite honestly stated, “We must remember that I was black before I was elected.” This was met with hearty applause and laughter from an American middle-class that still hasn’t come to terms with using the word “black”; a class that hypocritically wishes to think that “equality” is achieved by pretending we are all equal, but the members of which get really, really, oh-my-gosh irritated when they have to wait behind “black” people in the supermarkets.

THEY MAY GET OVER THIS. But it will be a lot harder to get over than when the same class of Americans found out that Richard “Tricky Dicky” Nixon was shafting them and cheating on them, or that Bill “Trousersnake” Clinton was shafting interns and cheating on his good lady wife Hillary. For some reason, perhaps the poet in me, I am reminded of the words to a song by Amy Winehouse, one of our greatest musical exponents of these difficult times.

THAT PETROL EMOTION

EXTREMELY LITTLE HAS BEEN MADE OF LATE as to the history around the issue of the so-called “Lockerbie” bombing, and one needs to look into the back copies of Private Eye magazine to see “proof” and “photocopies of documents” (the inverted commas are mine and are used for legal reasons) about the British, United States, Australian and German governments being aware that Pan Am flight 103 was about to be destroyed in mid-air and warning all embassy staff not to board it. No newspaper took the story up at the time.


NOW WITH THE RELEASE AND APPARENT COMING DEMISE of the terrorist-bomb-detonator-buyer Abdelbaset-al-Megrahi we will never know why our Western governments wanted this plane destroyed, but it is surely something far more sinister than issues of selling oil and favours over the counter or under it.

AT THE TIME OF THE EVENT, in 1988, the issue of Libyan terrorism or of any Muslim threat to our way of life was small beer compared to a mopping-up job that had been started yet not finished over questions relating to which governments would end up looking after the little children of Eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall came down, shortly after the Lockerbie disaster, in 1989.

THE IDEA THEN THAT THERE would, twenty years later, be 1,350 mosques in Britain, or that there would have been a third oil crisis, just as bad as the first one, started in the sixties by Colonel Khaddafi, was not on the list of conceivables. But now this is handy. As handy as it was to blame Libya for a bombing that obviously had nothing to do with them, it is now handy to let al-Megrahi go and cause an uproar about a “deal” having been done between Gordon “Gormless” Brown, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and any one of a series of Khaddafis to “hush up” the affair.

THE AFFAIR WAS HUSHED UP a long time ago, and the smokescreen of “feeling compassionate” about al-Megrahi, or dealing in oil futures, is stuff and nonsense.

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR

AS WE ARE APPARENTLY ABOUT to enter yet another of these turgid, pointless and expensive “G-something” meetings with our friends, colleagues and enemies throughout the world, this time in Pittsburgh, in the USA, the “people of Britain”, according to The Sun and Sky News, are itching to see whether our own leaders will agree to participating in the spectacle of a debate “live” on TV during which time they will, these organs suggest, outline their policies and “bare themselves” (sic) to the British public.

AS HAS BEEN MADE PATENTLY CLEAR in occasional statements I have produced in the past, I am all in favour of our politicians making utter fools of themselves in public, and think that every opportunity should be presented to them, even if this might mean being upstaged by David Frost, the eternal horror of interviewees.

ALBEIT TRUE THAT IN THE LAND OF THE HAMBURGER these debates are common, and result in much whooping and a-whomping in the hinterlands, and although they seem to take place with some regularity on the continent of Europe – certainly in Portugal, where I live – they can surely not be part of our process, unless we are to accept total corruption of our good, homely and wise traditions by the beast Europe, as we do not elect our prime minister in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Any schoolboy should know this, and should know that it is one of the things, like conkers, that make us different from our amusing European friends.

BUT A DEBATE ON TELEVISION WOULD WITHOUT DOUBT generate much-needed product-placement income for the BBC, or advertising revenue for the other channels, so I suggest that a decent option would be to see the future leader of our nation on TV debating with the person he thinks could be the future leader of our nation. In the manner of Dorian Gray, we could just have “Prince of Darkness” Peter Mandelson looking at himself in a mirror for 45 minutes.

TAKE ME TO YOUR READER

I WOULD NOT ARGUE WITH THOSE among my acquaintances who rather enviously think that my eight weeks’ holiday is far too long for the average gentleman to spend jollying about and cutting himself off from regular society, although I should point out that I often feel that the holiday period involves more stress and “work” – in both the physical and mental sense – than my own professions ever demand of me. It is reassuring, however, to return to my analyses of politicians and find that they are as interesting and colourful as ever.

IT IS NOT OFTEN THAT I FIND A NEED to praise one of our leaders for their honesty and decency even when they know that the truth may result in them losing votes, and thus I am thrilled to see that the next first lady of Japan, Mrs Miyuki Hatoyama, 66, has decided to come forward and reveal the truth about her visit to the planet Venus on a triangle-shaped UFO piloted by what she has termed “space aliens”, telling us that “It was a very beautiful place, and it was really green."

SCOFFING AS USUAL, NEVERTHELESS are the “intellectual” classes who seem to enjoy keeping the rest of us in the dark and pooh-poohing obvious facts. Such is the case of the astronomer Seth Shostack, a Caltech graduate who works at the SETI Institute, a world-renowned research group that seeks to explain "the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe." Shostack normally maintains an open mind, but has his doubts about Hatoyama’s claim, suggesting that it is “hard to have a pleasant trip to Venus” and saying he “seriously doubts” it is green.

SHOSTACK OBVIOUSLY HAS MISSED the point about what Mrs Hatoyama is stating. The events she has now shared with us happened 20 years ago, and she has revealed them on the same day that the Japanese government has announced its plans to reduce carbon emissions by 25%. Surely the message must be that if we are not careful we too will ruin our planet just like Venusians seem to have done – from pleasant rolling green countryside to 900º Centigrade in a mere twenty years.