ПРЕЗИДЕНТСКИЙ KOMПPOMAT

QUITE CORRECTLY, THE RUSSIAN EMBASSY in London has recently pointed out that intelligence agents, or “spooks”, as the newspapers are calling them, are never “ex”. However, why the Russians should see fit to make this clear is astonishing to those of us in the know, and merely serves to reinforce my opinion that, sadly, the majority of the population seem to believe that espionage is about as real as an episode of Scooby-Doo.

WHEN JOHN LE CARRÉ published The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963 it was heralded as a novel that brought realism to the spy genre, showing spymasters as rather tedious, ordinary men and women who would be more at home playing with model trains than in hotels playing with supermodels.

THUS THE SCANDAL LEADING up to the inauguration of Mr Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America appears merely to be something thrown in by bitter losers in America in order to muddy the waters and leave doubts in the minds of fools as to the true nature of Trump's intentions and desires.

HAPPILY, TO THE RESCUE in this unfortunate affair over Russian spying on the USA, we have the always trusted opinion of Vladimir "Ras" Putin, someone who himself has risen to the highest heights per aspera rather than per Iovem. Christopher Steele, the British "ex" spy who revealed the latest calumny about Trump has produced "an obvious fake", according to Putin, with his foreign minister calling Steele a "swindler".

SWINDLER OR NOT, we know very little about Steele, or even the document mysteriously slipped to Senator John McCain, except that Steele went to Cambridge, was President of the Cambridge Union Debating Society, was recruited by MI6 on leaving university, speaks Russian, and now resides abroad, all of which seem to confirm his untrustworthiness and probable nature as a double agent, or at least a shady character, given his education.

PUTIN FURTHER EXPLAINS that Mr Trump would never have fallen for a honey trap, as he was used to being in the company of beautiful women, having been the organiser of beauty contests for many years. Thus, continues Putin "I can hardly imagine he rushed to the hotel to meet our girls of lower social responsibility (sometimes translated as "loose morals") -- even though they (our prostitutes) are the best in the world, of course."

ONE MUST ADMIRE PUTIN'S PATRIOTISM, as well as the extremely liberal nature of the Russian people and the institutions in which they trust. In my opinion it will be many years before a president of the United States of America will feel confident enough in the open-mindedness of his people to state to the gathered international press that American prostitutes are the best in the world. 

HOWEVER, TRUMP'S SILENCE ON THE MATTER has sparked some discomfort among some of the sex workers (sic) of America, in particular Dennis Huff, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in the state of Nevada, where prostitution is legal. According to Huff, “Comparing our girls to Russian girls is ridiculous because American prostitutes take pride in their work." In not defending American escort girls, Trump may be reminded of the "Hookers for Hillary" campaign that probably explained his poor result in Nevada.

NEW YEAR RESOLUTION

MY NEW YEAR'S MESSAGE for 2017 is being written in the unlikely location of the Blue Hotel, in Nove Mesto, Bratislava, where I have come to spend a few days experiencing what my younger son calls “proper snow” and my good lady wife calls a “nightmare”, albeit an opportunity to invest in hats and boots.

PRIOR TO BRATISLAVA were several days spent in Austria, including Christmas in a blizzard at the Alpenlounge in Seebruge on the Nordkette Mountain, Innsbruck, and a few days in Vienna, where we were able to compare how Viennese imperial opulence stands up to Parisian republican decadence nowadays.

AS FAR AS BEING IMPRESSIVE goes, Vienna comes out on top every time, with the Julius Meinl gourmet coffee store being perhaps the jewel in the crown of its tasteful demonstration of wealth, and this was our last experience of Vienna before retiring to bed and then coming to Bratislava by train the following day.

THE ENSUING STARK CONTRAST was deliberately engineered in order for us to be able to compare the height of free-capitalist imperialist overkill, shown most famously in the racist tones of the logo of the Julius Meinl store, with the presumed grim poverty of probably the poorest capital city of the old Soviet bloc, vestiges of the influence of which I expected to find here and there.

THE RAILWAY STATION was the first evidence of what I was expecting, showing that you can bring a country in out of the cold, but you can’t bring the cold out of the country. Brutalism and reinforced concrete were still an ever-present on the skyline, competing with absurd mushroomings of blingy building complexes. All in all, however, downtown Bratislava was extremely pleasant, hip and efficient. Hot and cold running water and Dyson dryers everywhere.

THE TV SOUNDTRACK TO THIS SHORT BREAK was the America v Russia affair over Obama’s foolhardy decision to expel thirty-five Russian diplomats whom US intelligence had decided were responsible for cyber hacking and altering the result of the recent US presidential elections, followed by Vladimir Putin’s equally foolish decision to invite all of the children of American diplomats in Moscow to a New Year’s Eve party at the Kremlin. One of them will regret their actions forever, when the Kremlin staff have to smack some precocious brat about the face for “doing a wedgy” or whatever it is that American children find amusing during the ten minutes per day away from their gadgets.

MOST OBSERVERS ARE AWARE of the particular nasty game being played by the spiteful outgoing president, yet I am intrigued by the language used to justify this mass expulsion. These ladies and gentlemen have been accused of, and are being punished for “getting involved in American democracy”.

MY OWN ADVICE HAS ALWAYS BEEN that democracy should be avoided at all costs, so no doubt Obama has a point, but if the Democrats are so keen to revert to Cold War tactics to punish Russia for “getting involved in democracy” then it will be somewhat curious to see how 2017 plays out in the USA. The many people who claim that Donald Trump has no regard for democratic rights will surely be pleased.

KICK OUT THE JAMS

IN THE AGE OF THE SOUNDBITE, politicians over recent years seemed to have clubbed together, somewhat in the same manner as football players, in order to use the same type of language when talking about issue, as if fearful of saying the wrong thing had led them to stick to tried and trusted vocabulary and expressions in their search for linguistic safety.

OF COURSE IN THE CASE of footballers, using "over the moon" and "sick as a parrot", this became something of a cruel joke, when it was patently obvious that subjecting someone who had minutes previously scored the winning goal in a cup final to an interview on television for which he was clearly linguistically unprepared would only result in ridicule.

YET ONE WOULD NATURALLY expect higher things in terms of lexicon from our leaders, many of whom, including politicians on the left of the spectrum, went to our best schools and universities. 

UNFORTUNATELY FOR MANY OF THESE POLITICIANS, going to a "good" school may not be the best preparation for being able to maintain a grip on the reality of the country one is supposed to be governing, and thus being hopelessly out of touch with the so-called 'common man' has paradoxically become more the norm as parliamentary democracy has advanced in the West, resulting, some might say, in the phenomena that have led to triumphs for Trump, Farage and Brexit recently, and to the rise of Le Pen in France and the coming demise of Merkel in Germany next year. 

THE DIFFICULTY APPEARS TO REVOLVE around the curious emotion of empathy. Happily, our politicians in the UK have never stooped to the embarrassingly gooey depths of American politicians, as witnessed by both Clintons on campaign repeatedly stating "I feel your pain" in order to gain votes -- a remarkable strategy coming from two millionaire lawyers when talking to unemployed black families on minimum state benefits, but one which at least worked for Bill.

AND IT IS THE NOTION OF WORK that has inspired this latest missive. In purely linguistic terms, it is difficult for politicians in a country ridden by class discrimination to know how to address what used to be called the "working classes", and naturally it is even harder to be able to relate to them when one knows nothing about how they live, where they work and how much they earn, what they buy with this money, what they wear and eat, where and how they relax and what they want and enjoy.

THUS ENORMOUS GAFFES occasionally appear, such as Gordon Brown's stating that he used to watch "The Eastenders", and promised ever pensioner in Britain an extra 75 pence a week in their pensions. What he imagined one could buy with this money to liven up one's week is anyone's guess, but it clearly showed he had no idea how much a cup of tea and jam roly-poly cost in a local cafe. 

OVER RECENT YEARS OUR SPIN DOCTORS have tried to come up with new terms for the people they would rather never meet but who are essential for an election victory. Having abandoned “the working classes” (and more than just linguistically) they have turned to “hard-working families”, which was replaced shortly afterwards by “hard-working people”, itself ditched before the last election as it was deemed that middle-class office workers felt guiltily insulted.

NOW THERESA MAY’S TEAM has come up with a new term to take the place of the rather unfortunate but self-appointed term “strugglers”. These are those who are in work but finding life difficult; i.e., those for whom the “living wage” (a new expression for the old “working wage” is not even as comfortable as the laughably optimistic “minimum wage”. Thus we have the “Just About Managing” or “The Jams”

WHILE SOME OF THOSE WHO ARE IN TOUCH with popular culture may be reminded of the “pop” group The Jams, and their exciting album What the Fuck is Going On?, others may recall the band The Jam, the most vociferously anti-Thatcher and anti-Conservative musical ensemble since the beginning of rock music. Yet others will no doubt be reminded of the iconic album by Detroit group MC5, Kick out the Jams, no doubt something the Conservatives would be pleased to do given the chance. And no doubt something that will lead to this new term being dropped by the government before any future elections.

(My photo shows our Prime Minister wearing leather trousers from Turkey, for which she is paying 75 pence per week to Littlewood's online catalogue.)

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that by now the pollsters -- those that haven't been fired, that is -- would have come up with more intelligent ways of informing us about the likely results of the elections after their miserable performances predicting the outcome of the UK referendum on Europe and of the general elections in 2015 in the UK, when not one single polling team came up with the right analysis of the future.

IF I WERE A SUSPICIOUS PERSON I might even consider that the pollsters -- in the main liberally-educated graduates from decent upper middle class homes with parents who probably went on protest marches against nuclear bombs in the sixties -- have been more interested in projecting the way people ought to vote in their opinion rather than stating what people are really telling them.

THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS EVENT in this wishful-thinking-about-the-electorate is what happened over the cover of Newsweek magazine, which prepared and shipped out an edition (shown below) "celebrating" (sic) Hillary Clinton's victory. Interviewed by Dermot Murnaghan of Sky News earlier today, Jim Impoco, the editor-in-chief of Newsweek, held up an issue of the magazine live on air and threatened to burn it. Murnaghan wisely advised against this, suggesting a fire hazard, but the fact is that the issue is probably worth a few hundred dollars after newsagents across the USA and the UK received (and sold) it on Wednesday morning.

IMPOCO SENSIBLY ADDED that "this cover just shows that we are stupid." In a gleeful moment of me being allowed to mix up a few metaphors, it might be seen as unhelpful for me to add that the stupidity Impoco correctly admits includes the fact that his publication not only jumped the gun over the results of the presidential election, but also backed the wrong horse.

BUT THEY WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN so stupid had they listened to the only poll that made any sense to me. This was conducted by the company run by the British Lord Ashcroft, who had the good sense to ask people the most important question during the "run up" (sic) to this election, which was "Have you told your close family and friends who you are going to vote for?"

A REMARKABLE FIFTEEN PERCENT of people stated that they had not revealed their choices; this is particularly remarkable in the USA -- not a country in which the population is renowned for its dress sense -- where many people are happy to saunter around in training suits and baseball caps, often with political slogans or the names of sports teams written on them, and have bumper stickers on their enormous vehicles bearing such unnecessary statements as "No to Gun Control" or "Republican and Proud".

THUS AN INTELLIGENT READING OF THIS PERCENTAGE (i.e., one carried out by me) would lead one to believe that at least half of this 15% must be women who are going to vote Trump but are ashamed to tell their mothers/daughters/girl friends etc. As well as probably half of the other 7%, in all making nearly ten percent of the electorate.

NO WORKING CLASS MAN WOULD BE ASHAMED to tell his co-workers in the factory that he was going to vote Trump. And all of the screaming harridans who were going to vote for Secretary Mrs Clinton would have been proud of the fact and probably would have regularly shouted about this to their family and their female friends in the dorm, barrio, hood, leafy suburb or golf course, where they would meet up for discussions about Rousseau, eat burritos or burgers, drink mint juleps or enjoy charity bridge tournaments. 

THEREFORE, IN MY ANALYSIS, TRUMP would win about ten percent more of the electorate than the polls showed. Almost exactly what happened, and indeed what I saw on the TV screen when I woke up at seven on Wednesday morning; almost exactly what happened when I stayed up all night to watch the result of the UK referendum, and almost exactly what happened in the last general election in Britain. Unfortunately, living outside of the UK, I cannot bet money on the results. The odds were appealing.

COME ROMANIANS, COME

IF NOTHING ELSE, MY YEARS AT UNIVERSITY taught me to avoid politics and politicians like the plague. My father, in his infinite wisdom, had already primed me on many occasions about those people in life who were, in his (perfectly correct) opinion, "odd".

HE PERSUADED ME NOT TO JOIN the Scouts when he quietly sowed the seeds of doubt in my mind about scoutmasters with his gentle question, "David, do you think it is normal for a grown man to give up his weekends to go about wearing short trousers and camping with ten-year-old boys when he could be at home spending time with his wife?"

WHEN I TURNED EIGHTEEN he gave me his opinion about voting: "Just think, before you vote, 'Why would anyone want me to vote for them?'" To this day I have not come up with a sensible answer to this question other than that these people want my money and power over me without having to work in a proper job. Thus I have never voted in any capacity in my life.

AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON the main candidates for elections seemed to be foaming-at-the-mouth socialists who were deranged enough to believe that being chosen for a committee that basically was only responsible for selecting what music to play at the Friday night disco was one step towards smashing the major banking institutions, eliminating religion, ending poverty in the third world and forming world governments made up almost exclusively of black homosexual invalids.

AT KINGS COLLEGE LONDON the candidates at the hustings were usually decent, middle-class people who seemed genuine enough, but when I got to know some of them better I found that one, in my first year, still collected Action Man equipment at the age of 19, another had a passion for watching weather maps on TV and another collected Thomas the Tank Engine toys. Heaven knows what other perversions were waiting to appear in their future lives.

AT MAGDALEN COLLEGE OXFORD things were more straightforward. One chap, when I asked him why I should vote for him for a position on the Student Union Board had a refreshingly honest reply. "If you vote for me," he pointed out, "you will feel you are a part of a democratic process. If no one votes for me I shall simply tell my father to put me on the Board." This gentleman is currently a member of the House of Lords.

ALL IN ALL, MOST OF THESE people were odd. Which brings me to Keith "Vazeline" Vaz. Of course it is not "odd" for politicians to keep money given to them to give to charities. Of course it is not "odd" for married politicians with children to pay to have sex with young male prostitutes. Of course it is not odd for these politicians to openly text these prostitutes about how much "rogering" they will give them and how horny they are feeling. Of course it is not odd for politicians to defend one thing in public and do something else in private. Such as purchasing and supplying illegal drugs. Of course not.

HOWEVER, WHAT IS EXTREMELY ODD is for a politician to be so utterly stupid as Mr Vaz is. He has already barely managed to wriggle his way out of a series of scandals involving bribes, financial misdemeanour and selling of influence, and -- error of all errors -- has been critical of press freedom. Oddness is embodied in the fact that an experienced politician like Mr Vaz should believe that he could get away with all this behaviour without the press wanting to take an interest. 

EVERYONE LIKES A GOOD STORY, and Mr Vaz recently left, as they sometimes say, the book open on the dining room table, when he made the mistake of telling his Polish rent boys that he was interested in having sex with a Romanian lad. Vaz, in the texts he wrote and which were published by the Daily Mirror today, seemed particularly excited about the fact that the (non-existent) Romanian boy was "intact" and possibly didn't speak English but was ready for a bit of "rough" in return for drugs and money.

THIS ASPECT OF THE EVENT played into the hands of the press and into mine. For it was Mr Vaz who, on the morning of January 1st 2014, the first day that Romanians could come to the UK legally, went to Luton airport to personally meet the first Romanians off the plane from Tirgu Mures and to welcome them to "our country". I watched the press conference live at the time. "We want Romanians to come," said Mr Vaz. "They will be a valuable contribution to us all." Indeed.

(My pictures show a somewhat shifty Mr Vaz, at Luton Airport at 7.30 in the morning meeting the first Romanian off the plane, then a friend of his, and then buying them breakfast.)

WHAT LIES BENEATH

I MUST CONFESS I AM MILDLY AMUSED by the advice given by the British Government security services at MI6 before the visit of Prime Minister Theresa May and her officials to Hangzhou in China for the G20 summit meeting.

IT SHOULD NOT BE NECESSARY to warn today's politicians about the dangers of spying, and particularly of "honey trapping" when powerful diplomats and top-notch businessmen are gathered for talks in countries where the local populations are desperate to escape the regimes under which they live, and where a few hundred pounds, which any gentleman would have in his wallet for minor expenses between meals, would allow a local to live like royalty for a few years.

THE DISASTROUS VISIT TO CHINA by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008 involved one of his close advisors being "spiked", "honeyed" and "fleeced", to use the jargon known to us who have worked for the security services, an incident which disgraced the whole mission, and particularly the government security team.

WHEN, AS A YOUNG MAN, I was involved in work for the British Government security services, we were always told to undress under the bed sheets so as not to be photographed by hidden cameras when staying in hotels. Although I was not "in field" in China, but in Portugal, I was still advised to carry a bed sheet with me to any public toilet and cover myself in it completely when using the sit-down lavatory.

I SHOULD STATE THAT IN PORTUGAL in the late nineteen-seventies this was also useful as a protection against mosquitoes, and that I grew to look forward to those moments of complete isolation from reality.

AS FOR UNDRESSING UNDER THE SHEETS, I may also state that there were some positives to this practice other than avoiding being photographed by cameras hidden in the air conditioning unit, radio alarm clock, wall-bracketed TV set or the more obvious smoke detector. I used to take a good deal of erotic pleasure in taking my clothes off in this manner, particularly when in the company of a beautiful young girl, an inept "spy" with no talent whatsoever for dissimulation and who was doing the same thing next to me.

THE OFFICIAL ADVICE TO THERESA MAY and her team is to "undress under the bedclothes" if one is "uncomfortable about being seen naked". I saw a photograph of the British G20 team earlier today, and either there are a lot of deluded people (albeit true that most politicians are deluded about their own worth and value) on this diplomatic mission, or there will be a lot of people undressing under the sheets.

NO PRIME MINISTER OF THE UK has ever been what one might call "my cup of tea", and if I were in close proximity with the present one I would be more than pleased to have her undress under the sheets, hopefully after having removed her kitten heels and left her corset in the bathroom beforehand. Someone should advise two members of her team that major blackmail may ensue if anyone gets a photo of their false teeth in a cup of water by the bed or of their hairpieces hanging on the bedstead.

GORDON BROWN'S DIPLOMAT was "fleeced", but at least this was after he had had the aplomb to take a seventeen-year-old prostitute to his hotel room; getting "fleeced" because someone has a photo of you bald and toothless when you portray yourself as dynamic and a possible candidate for the highest office is something a little smuttier.

EURODISNEYLAND

THE SOI-DISANT EUROPEAN COMMISSION was already a bunch of fools and madmen when it was headed by the absurd fascist clown José Manuel Barroso, with his arrogant ideas about saving the planet by banning 100 watt light bulbs and giving every washing machine and fridge an "eco" rating certificate which we now know was all a pack of lies.

BARROSO'S "CULTURAL PROJECT" for Europe was supposed to end up with us all being a sort of European version of the United States. However, although I know that Barroso is a limited person on the intellectual level, I find it difficult to believe that anyone with a smattering of intelligence could imagine that a literally fantastic system like this could work, with honest, hard-working clean Lutherans living on the same level as toothless ruffians who spend most waking hours lounging around semi-naked in cemented gardens outside houses without proper furniture inside.

WE REGULARLY HEAR ABOUT THE EU being "the world's biggest market" and how Britain will miss out on the possibility of trade. Yet of the 300 million people in the Union only about 40 million are prepared or able to spend cash on goods; the Puritans in the north, in Holland, Denmark, Sweden and northern Germany are generally afraid of being ostentatious with their money as they think they will go to Hell if they do.

THE EASTERN EUROPEANS, when they don't bury their money in the garden or put it in plastic bags and sink it into the well in the yard, waste it on building houses that they never finish; the Spanish, Italians, Greeks and Portuguese are perfectly happy to be ostentatious, and thus we have people who do not have enough money to change their underwear on a regular basis putting down deposits on expensive cars and houses which will be repossessed after a few months.

SO MUCH FOR THE MARKET over the last ten years. But Jean-Claude Juncker has taken this cultural megalomania to new heights in publishing a medal table which shows that the "nation" which won most medals at the Olympics was in fact the European Union.

OF COURSE THIS WOULD be perfectly legitimate if there were such a thing as a European Union team -- which the Eurocrats probably have wet dreams about -- but there isn't. How Juncker believes he can make a medal table grouping together nations which actually competed against each other at the games is beyond me. But so is so much about the fantasy land that is the European Union.