Baghdad, Iraq.
Hot and sickly in that hospital room, as the surgeon used a saw to cut a man's leg off at the calf. There was no foot, just a raw stump with some pure white bone. That was from a previous amputation that hadn't gone far enough. More of the leg had to go.
The body on the chopping block was Nepalese, one of the army of private security contractors working this city. Unlike the American mercenaries, or those from South Africa, Britian etc, these men from Nepal are well mannered, polite and efficient. They don't behave like mad-dog killers or thrill seekers, and they're not war profiteers. They are workers, doing a job, earning a modest living and trying to avoid trouble.
He had been standing outside the fortress US embassy in the Green Zone when a truck ran over his foot. The crush wound turned poisonous and the only way of stopping it spread was to start sawing.
He was twitching with the pain as the doctors tied off his thigh with a tourniquet. He didn't cry but, beneath an oxygen mask, he choked and coughed and called for his ancestors to give him strength, before passing out under the anaesthetic.
His story: from a poor village in Nepal's mountains, he paid some mafia type to get him to Kuwait, and into a job as a guard in Iraq earning $1,200 a month. Loans were taken out, family debts incurred. The move was an investment, one that has now failed. Money will have to be repaid to people who always collect. If he cannot get a prosthetic leg, he will not work again and, almost certainly, if that happens, no one will help him.
He lay in bed before the second part of the amputation with that bleak future staring at him. He said, flatly and matter-of-factly: "I might as well be dead".
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Sunday, August 22, 2004
His Masters Voice
HIS MASTERS VOICE
Walk through security, past police in jumpsuits. Wander up the path, crossing the road – Downing Street – to the opposite side. A young blonde woman is pushing a baby in a pram.
Knock on the black door, Number 10. It opens. Inside, to stand around with a bunch of other lowly political hacks. Mainly ill tempered and ill dressed. In the entrance hall two of them get in an argument about who will ask what question, when.
Tedious, waiting. Listening to the protestors from Cyprus, yelling through a bull-horn from way across the other side of Whitehall. Everyone in the Prime Ministerial Offices can hear that shit they shout. Probably they don’t listen though, and who can blame them.
The carpet is probably good, and so probably is the interior décor and the paintings and the rest. We wait a while, having our un-precious time wasted. Missing deadlines, racking up more minutes heading for another 12 hour day.
No illusions here, waiting for the Press People to come and fetch us like obedient dogs. David Hill, the PM’s communications chief, eventually does.
More walking, down a corridor. Hot rooms. Into the cabinet. One of the most famous offices in the world. Which used to be used by the government to make decisions and discuss policy. Before Tony Blair ripped that up and set it afire in exchange for informal, un-minuted chats with advisors on wars and such like.
Sit-down in one of the cabinet seats. Wait a bit, then Tony Blair walks in. Dressed in a pink shirt or perhaps white and dark pink tie with stripes. Look and act of a man just finished fucking a beautiful woman. He’s just smoothed through a Commons debate on Iraq, beating Michael Howard and the ineffectual Charles Kennedy. Like the drums they are.
Even though everyone but the Prime Minister is right, he owns that chamber. He owns the debate. He makes the rest look like play politicians. He wins without trying. And he’s been in his job at the top of Labour for a decade. Running the show for almost as long as I can remember.
Now he sits there in the big chair, in the PM’s chair, in the Cabinet Office, 10 Downing Street. He is easy ugly satisfaction. He is pally. He's a real pal.
He asks on or off-the-record? and answers his own stupid question because we’re too shoddy to merit faux secret briefings. We ain’t gonna get: “between me and you reporters looking for a story, I fucking hate Brown and I knew there were no weapons and just didn’t care a damn”.
And then it starts, predictable enough. Strong economy, record education health police investment. Government’s record stands in testament to its very self and the man him very self. Stability, crime fighting, breaking a leg to beat anti-social behaviour. Asylum seekers to be locked up, asylum seekers are being tackled, numbers are falling.
A proud record.
None prouder than Iraq. He calls it “The Iraq Thing”, the thing is war. Defeated a dictator. “I’m proud to have dealt with barbarous dictators.” You misunderstand the Butler report if you think it damning or critical of the government, of the security services. Are wrong if: you concentrate on the fact there were weapons of mass destruction and was an immediate threat, right up until the time they never really were and we knew as much.
The Prime Minister will tell you the crucial part of the Butler report. He’ll be kind enough to draw your attention to what matters. What matters is: Butler says there was good faith. He says the threat from Iraq was real. He says Tony was right. And I’m certain he believes it to the core of his soul. He doesn’t understand what everyone else is so worked up about. That could be a sign of insanity.
And Tony says muslim voters, if they are thinking about not supporting him, should go and talk to muslim Iraqis. Hop a flight there, hope it aint shot down on the approach to Baghdad International.
He makes the suggestion because he adds one and one and gets not two. Muslim Iraqis hate Saddam, we got rid of Saddam. Muslim Iraqis like us. The Prime Ministerial logic, which fails not in the comfort of the Westminster residence but which sounds hollow in obscene heat and lawlessness of the new frontier in the war on everything. It sounds clean and cool and clear and it utterly absurd looking down a cheap AK-47 barrel.
And Tony says the big thing is Palestine, and that’s why it’s so important we keep up our efforts on that front. The PM hopes to have some better news on that front in the Autumn. (He does not elaborate and no one asks him to because that is not our job, to push him on factual issues which are of no interest to our editors. We know the game and are under instructions).
He talks for 45 minutes, near enough, that talisman period which will always remind of but one thing.
No hard questions are asked, and if they were he’d not answer the fuckers. His home.
After, all hacks are allowed to have their picture taken, sitting next to him. Like Santa in a grotto. Like schoolkids with a pop star.
I got little dignity, but just enough to refuse a picture. I go walking down the hall instead, and out the front door, and Number 10 is behind me and the evening is hot and very gray everywhere. I carry messages to you all from your Prime Minister.
He says: “Its been a tough time because sorting out Iraq is important and I just hope people understand that whatever their feelings about the war that Iraq and the world is a better place without Saddam in charge of Iraq and I think that is clear even now despite all the reports and everything we’ve been though and the best evidence of that is to talk to the people in Iraq who will be very clear about that.”
He says: “All I say about the Iraq thing which I think is maybe I haven’t said to people enough is that whatever we did was going to be difficult. If we had walked away from Iraq and left Saddam in charge that would also have been difficult people shouldn’t be under any doubt about that. I don’t mean difficult just in terms of the rupture of the American alliance and so on, I mean difficult in the sense that Saddam left there with us walking away would have been far bolder and far stronger in what he was doing.”
We don’t think back to the pre-invasion days, when diplomats were saying the problem with a massive military build-up in the region is that it develops its own momentum. Makes war inevitable. Leaves the US, the UK no way to back-down on war and save face. Tony Blair admits it now, but times have changed and memory has too and no one gives a fuck about details anymore because we’ve had too much and anyway it’s all split milk now, all that misery and those fucking falsehoods.
And anyway, the summer holidays are here.
Walk through security, past police in jumpsuits. Wander up the path, crossing the road – Downing Street – to the opposite side. A young blonde woman is pushing a baby in a pram.
Knock on the black door, Number 10. It opens. Inside, to stand around with a bunch of other lowly political hacks. Mainly ill tempered and ill dressed. In the entrance hall two of them get in an argument about who will ask what question, when.
Tedious, waiting. Listening to the protestors from Cyprus, yelling through a bull-horn from way across the other side of Whitehall. Everyone in the Prime Ministerial Offices can hear that shit they shout. Probably they don’t listen though, and who can blame them.
The carpet is probably good, and so probably is the interior décor and the paintings and the rest. We wait a while, having our un-precious time wasted. Missing deadlines, racking up more minutes heading for another 12 hour day.
No illusions here, waiting for the Press People to come and fetch us like obedient dogs. David Hill, the PM’s communications chief, eventually does.
More walking, down a corridor. Hot rooms. Into the cabinet. One of the most famous offices in the world. Which used to be used by the government to make decisions and discuss policy. Before Tony Blair ripped that up and set it afire in exchange for informal, un-minuted chats with advisors on wars and such like.
Sit-down in one of the cabinet seats. Wait a bit, then Tony Blair walks in. Dressed in a pink shirt or perhaps white and dark pink tie with stripes. Look and act of a man just finished fucking a beautiful woman. He’s just smoothed through a Commons debate on Iraq, beating Michael Howard and the ineffectual Charles Kennedy. Like the drums they are.
Even though everyone but the Prime Minister is right, he owns that chamber. He owns the debate. He makes the rest look like play politicians. He wins without trying. And he’s been in his job at the top of Labour for a decade. Running the show for almost as long as I can remember.
Now he sits there in the big chair, in the PM’s chair, in the Cabinet Office, 10 Downing Street. He is easy ugly satisfaction. He is pally. He's a real pal.
He asks on or off-the-record? and answers his own stupid question because we’re too shoddy to merit faux secret briefings. We ain’t gonna get: “between me and you reporters looking for a story, I fucking hate Brown and I knew there were no weapons and just didn’t care a damn”.
And then it starts, predictable enough. Strong economy, record education health police investment. Government’s record stands in testament to its very self and the man him very self. Stability, crime fighting, breaking a leg to beat anti-social behaviour. Asylum seekers to be locked up, asylum seekers are being tackled, numbers are falling.
A proud record.
None prouder than Iraq. He calls it “The Iraq Thing”, the thing is war. Defeated a dictator. “I’m proud to have dealt with barbarous dictators.” You misunderstand the Butler report if you think it damning or critical of the government, of the security services. Are wrong if: you concentrate on the fact there were weapons of mass destruction and was an immediate threat, right up until the time they never really were and we knew as much.
The Prime Minister will tell you the crucial part of the Butler report. He’ll be kind enough to draw your attention to what matters. What matters is: Butler says there was good faith. He says the threat from Iraq was real. He says Tony was right. And I’m certain he believes it to the core of his soul. He doesn’t understand what everyone else is so worked up about. That could be a sign of insanity.
And Tony says muslim voters, if they are thinking about not supporting him, should go and talk to muslim Iraqis. Hop a flight there, hope it aint shot down on the approach to Baghdad International.
He makes the suggestion because he adds one and one and gets not two. Muslim Iraqis hate Saddam, we got rid of Saddam. Muslim Iraqis like us. The Prime Ministerial logic, which fails not in the comfort of the Westminster residence but which sounds hollow in obscene heat and lawlessness of the new frontier in the war on everything. It sounds clean and cool and clear and it utterly absurd looking down a cheap AK-47 barrel.
And Tony says the big thing is Palestine, and that’s why it’s so important we keep up our efforts on that front. The PM hopes to have some better news on that front in the Autumn. (He does not elaborate and no one asks him to because that is not our job, to push him on factual issues which are of no interest to our editors. We know the game and are under instructions).
He talks for 45 minutes, near enough, that talisman period which will always remind of but one thing.
No hard questions are asked, and if they were he’d not answer the fuckers. His home.
After, all hacks are allowed to have their picture taken, sitting next to him. Like Santa in a grotto. Like schoolkids with a pop star.
I got little dignity, but just enough to refuse a picture. I go walking down the hall instead, and out the front door, and Number 10 is behind me and the evening is hot and very gray everywhere. I carry messages to you all from your Prime Minister.
He says: “Its been a tough time because sorting out Iraq is important and I just hope people understand that whatever their feelings about the war that Iraq and the world is a better place without Saddam in charge of Iraq and I think that is clear even now despite all the reports and everything we’ve been though and the best evidence of that is to talk to the people in Iraq who will be very clear about that.”
He says: “All I say about the Iraq thing which I think is maybe I haven’t said to people enough is that whatever we did was going to be difficult. If we had walked away from Iraq and left Saddam in charge that would also have been difficult people shouldn’t be under any doubt about that. I don’t mean difficult just in terms of the rupture of the American alliance and so on, I mean difficult in the sense that Saddam left there with us walking away would have been far bolder and far stronger in what he was doing.”
We don’t think back to the pre-invasion days, when diplomats were saying the problem with a massive military build-up in the region is that it develops its own momentum. Makes war inevitable. Leaves the US, the UK no way to back-down on war and save face. Tony Blair admits it now, but times have changed and memory has too and no one gives a fuck about details anymore because we’ve had too much and anyway it’s all split milk now, all that misery and those fucking falsehoods.
And anyway, the summer holidays are here.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Spot The Happy Ending
Prologue
Fine days these, as summer comes to its end. Still heat in the sun, high clouds and blue in the sky. Sit in the park to fall asleep listening to the cricket. In the evening the widow open, hearing night come in over the city on the breeze. Life at war.
Mortared sleep
In recent days the conversation has reached a conclusion: that what we are waiting for is more bloodshed. Hope worn so thin that death is a solution. If enough people die, maybe that will stop the killing. If the drip-drip-drip of far away murder becomes a torrent, and comes closer to home, maybe the logic of the situation will change. Will be forcibly shifted of its axis and onto something different. An end to the downward spiral if more used bodybags are being shipped back to the US, to the UK.
The logic is foul and ugly, and almost certainly wrong.
At Christmas, things looked grim enough. Sleeping one night, fitfully, cold in a tent, on a US military base north of Samara, in liberated Iraq. Two mortar rounds came over the wire and exploded close enough to rouse us and the 4th Infantry soldiers. Nothing more happened. The Americans smoked cigarettes and we all talked a while in the freezing blackness and went back to bed. Most places you turned in that country someone was shooting or shelling or rocketing. People had stories they shouldn't have to tell. Dead and mutilated Iraqis, dead and mutilated Americans. RPGs, bombing and such. Fuckit, its war, why not? Handful of eyes for a handful of eyes.
We talked then of the shitpile everyone was stuck in for the unforeseeable future, for years and years. Everyone wanted to wake up and find it was a dream gone bad. Cling to the thin, unrealistic hope maybe the people who run The War could get their act together, maybe it wasn't too late.
But it was already turning into a long fucking dream and it's getting no shorter. Hard to escape the feeling now that this shadow has spread in ways that are becoming less and less controllable. The problem is, the problem was maybe too big in the best of lights and was anyway allowed to fester in the darkness.
Everyone wants to leaf through their Sun Tzu and see what's said about the art of war. And to paraphrase, it says don't fuck up. It says prepare carefully. It says know your enemy. It says, the most successful wars are the ones anticipated and avoided. Not deliberately sought by politicians and fought by their lights.
Months have passed, the damned seasons have changed, and today in the newspaper there was:
12 dead Nepalese cooks and cleaners. Eleven shot in the back with an automatic rifle, one beheaded with slow painful cuts of a hand-knife.
Two French journalists captured and threatened with death by the Islamic Army of Iraq - which has already killed an Italian journalist and some Pakistani hostages.
Whatever the hell is happening in Najaf, the on-going foul comedy of truce and war which has most recently left all the Shia fighters in the city, still armed, still an army, still run by another cursed religious leader. Still there to be crushed by the new Iraqi interim government and its CIA leader who is independent of the US and only works for Iraq's interests.
Whatever the hell is happening in Fallujah, Ramardi and Samara. Places which aint reported on because no fucker dares go there now they are to dangerous for the US and official Iraqi forces, and journalists who value their lives.
No one wants to say civil war, but Iraqis are fighting Iraqis again and still, in Najaf and elsewhere. Sun Tzu doesn't say if it looks like shit, smells like shit and tastes like shit it's shit. But he knew it as true.
And today there was:
Suicide bombings in Isreal, the grimmest kind of hostage crisis in a Russian school, close to Chechnya. On-going investigations into the bombing of to Russian planes. Murders thought to be carried out by Black Widows. (Women who kill, not through religious motivation, but to avenge the murders of their husbands, fathers or brothers by the Russians as part of the Chechen war - a mess so bloody, underhand, ruthless and shot through with ruined lives Iraq pales alongside. Vladimir Putin says the war is won and simultaneously calls it a war on terror. Like its American cousin, it's a shitpool largely of Russia's own making and only partly about terrorism.)
EPILOGUE
All so hard to understand, with the schools still on holiday and the football season back and girls or boys to chase and money to be made and days to get through or friends to see or pasts to forget.. The normal beat of life. Most people in this world don't live a life like mine or yours, that's all. It's easiest to see if you wake at 5am and see the morning there cold and hard and grey, the day ahead impossible and too much for too many.
We only talk about how fucked up everything is because anything else sounds like a lie and makes us laugh as you can when the gun is pointing at someone else's head. The mortars are still falling but not on me.
Fine days these, as summer comes to its end. Still heat in the sun, high clouds and blue in the sky. Sit in the park to fall asleep listening to the cricket. In the evening the widow open, hearing night come in over the city on the breeze. Life at war.
Mortared sleep
In recent days the conversation has reached a conclusion: that what we are waiting for is more bloodshed. Hope worn so thin that death is a solution. If enough people die, maybe that will stop the killing. If the drip-drip-drip of far away murder becomes a torrent, and comes closer to home, maybe the logic of the situation will change. Will be forcibly shifted of its axis and onto something different. An end to the downward spiral if more used bodybags are being shipped back to the US, to the UK.
The logic is foul and ugly, and almost certainly wrong.
At Christmas, things looked grim enough. Sleeping one night, fitfully, cold in a tent, on a US military base north of Samara, in liberated Iraq. Two mortar rounds came over the wire and exploded close enough to rouse us and the 4th Infantry soldiers. Nothing more happened. The Americans smoked cigarettes and we all talked a while in the freezing blackness and went back to bed. Most places you turned in that country someone was shooting or shelling or rocketing. People had stories they shouldn't have to tell. Dead and mutilated Iraqis, dead and mutilated Americans. RPGs, bombing and such. Fuckit, its war, why not? Handful of eyes for a handful of eyes.
We talked then of the shitpile everyone was stuck in for the unforeseeable future, for years and years. Everyone wanted to wake up and find it was a dream gone bad. Cling to the thin, unrealistic hope maybe the people who run The War could get their act together, maybe it wasn't too late.
But it was already turning into a long fucking dream and it's getting no shorter. Hard to escape the feeling now that this shadow has spread in ways that are becoming less and less controllable. The problem is, the problem was maybe too big in the best of lights and was anyway allowed to fester in the darkness.
Everyone wants to leaf through their Sun Tzu and see what's said about the art of war. And to paraphrase, it says don't fuck up. It says prepare carefully. It says know your enemy. It says, the most successful wars are the ones anticipated and avoided. Not deliberately sought by politicians and fought by their lights.
Months have passed, the damned seasons have changed, and today in the newspaper there was:
12 dead Nepalese cooks and cleaners. Eleven shot in the back with an automatic rifle, one beheaded with slow painful cuts of a hand-knife.
Two French journalists captured and threatened with death by the Islamic Army of Iraq - which has already killed an Italian journalist and some Pakistani hostages.
Whatever the hell is happening in Najaf, the on-going foul comedy of truce and war which has most recently left all the Shia fighters in the city, still armed, still an army, still run by another cursed religious leader. Still there to be crushed by the new Iraqi interim government and its CIA leader who is independent of the US and only works for Iraq's interests.
Whatever the hell is happening in Fallujah, Ramardi and Samara. Places which aint reported on because no fucker dares go there now they are to dangerous for the US and official Iraqi forces, and journalists who value their lives.
No one wants to say civil war, but Iraqis are fighting Iraqis again and still, in Najaf and elsewhere. Sun Tzu doesn't say if it looks like shit, smells like shit and tastes like shit it's shit. But he knew it as true.
And today there was:
Suicide bombings in Isreal, the grimmest kind of hostage crisis in a Russian school, close to Chechnya. On-going investigations into the bombing of to Russian planes. Murders thought to be carried out by Black Widows. (Women who kill, not through religious motivation, but to avenge the murders of their husbands, fathers or brothers by the Russians as part of the Chechen war - a mess so bloody, underhand, ruthless and shot through with ruined lives Iraq pales alongside. Vladimir Putin says the war is won and simultaneously calls it a war on terror. Like its American cousin, it's a shitpool largely of Russia's own making and only partly about terrorism.)
EPILOGUE
All so hard to understand, with the schools still on holiday and the football season back and girls or boys to chase and money to be made and days to get through or friends to see or pasts to forget.. The normal beat of life. Most people in this world don't live a life like mine or yours, that's all. It's easiest to see if you wake at 5am and see the morning there cold and hard and grey, the day ahead impossible and too much for too many.
We only talk about how fucked up everything is because anything else sounds like a lie and makes us laugh as you can when the gun is pointing at someone else's head. The mortars are still falling but not on me.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
The Rules
PROLOGUE
What we are dealing with this Monday morning is a man named Tom Kelly.
He’s the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, and he’s standing in front of the assembled journalists of the Westminster lobby, telling them something. An on-the-record briefing.
What he’s doing is, he’s feeding them a line of shit.
THE RULES
And the line of shit tastes like this -
A reporter asks if the Prime Minister thinks invading Iraq in the way he did has made terrorist attacks against British targets more likely. In other words, has a war that killed (so far) more than 10,000 Muslim civilians, pissed off a lot of Muslims and made the extreme minority want to kill some of us.
The honest answer is; “Yes, naturally.”
Tom Kelley doesn’t say this. He says: “I’m not going to get into scoring the threat on a scale of one-to-ten, but the threat level was high before Iraq and it remains high”.
Then he tells everyone something they know; that terrorists attacked before Iraq.
What he means is; Iraq has nothing to do with this.
He wants to destroy any suggestion that our actions generate reactions – equal or otherwise.
Tom Kelley – on behalf of the PM – wants to rewite the rules of physics because they have become unhelpful. He wants to share his special knowledge that black is, in fact, yellow. A spokesman for an existential ruler.
Remember it’s Monday morning, March 15th. News of the Spanish election result broke overnight and it’s clear as hell is hot that the Spaniards have done something major; they’ve kicked out a government they think has been lying to them.
They’ve kicked out a government as a direct result of our war on terror.
And they’ve kicked out a government they think has caused them the grimmest kind of trouble. A government that has played its part in putting 200 corpses on the streets of their capital city.
Instead of some kind of hysterical, idiotic, patriotic reaction – instead of lurching around in blind self-righteous rage – the Spanish have thought it through and come up with a different answer.
They’ve decided invading Iraq is a cause of the terrorist mass murder in Madrid.
The Westminster Lobby is interested in this. Because if the logic is followed, if the same rationality were to kick in here, Tony Blair will lose the next election.
He’d be fucked.
That’s why the line must be locked down. That’s why Tom Kelley refuses to comment on what has happened in Spain, saying it is a matter for the Spanish people. The British government saying it doesn’t like to get involved in the politics of other nations.
If you look at it, there’s so much crap, it’s heartbreaking. What we are dealing with is Jack Straw denying the attacks on the British Embassy in Turkey were really attacks on British interests. What we are dealing with is Tony Blair telling us it’s okay if we disagree with his political decisions, just as long as we don’t think he’s a fundamentalist maniac.
And what we have is a Prime Minister who WILL win the next election. Because we are not the Spanish and we don’t want to ask why. That’s a pile of shit we’ll leave for another generation to feed on.
What we are dealing with this Monday morning is a man named Tom Kelly.
He’s the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, and he’s standing in front of the assembled journalists of the Westminster lobby, telling them something. An on-the-record briefing.
What he’s doing is, he’s feeding them a line of shit.
THE RULES
And the line of shit tastes like this -
A reporter asks if the Prime Minister thinks invading Iraq in the way he did has made terrorist attacks against British targets more likely. In other words, has a war that killed (so far) more than 10,000 Muslim civilians, pissed off a lot of Muslims and made the extreme minority want to kill some of us.
The honest answer is; “Yes, naturally.”
Tom Kelley doesn’t say this. He says: “I’m not going to get into scoring the threat on a scale of one-to-ten, but the threat level was high before Iraq and it remains high”.
Then he tells everyone something they know; that terrorists attacked before Iraq.
What he means is; Iraq has nothing to do with this.
He wants to destroy any suggestion that our actions generate reactions – equal or otherwise.
Tom Kelley – on behalf of the PM – wants to rewite the rules of physics because they have become unhelpful. He wants to share his special knowledge that black is, in fact, yellow. A spokesman for an existential ruler.
Remember it’s Monday morning, March 15th. News of the Spanish election result broke overnight and it’s clear as hell is hot that the Spaniards have done something major; they’ve kicked out a government they think has been lying to them.
They’ve kicked out a government as a direct result of our war on terror.
And they’ve kicked out a government they think has caused them the grimmest kind of trouble. A government that has played its part in putting 200 corpses on the streets of their capital city.
Instead of some kind of hysterical, idiotic, patriotic reaction – instead of lurching around in blind self-righteous rage – the Spanish have thought it through and come up with a different answer.
They’ve decided invading Iraq is a cause of the terrorist mass murder in Madrid.
The Westminster Lobby is interested in this. Because if the logic is followed, if the same rationality were to kick in here, Tony Blair will lose the next election.
He’d be fucked.
That’s why the line must be locked down. That’s why Tom Kelley refuses to comment on what has happened in Spain, saying it is a matter for the Spanish people. The British government saying it doesn’t like to get involved in the politics of other nations.
If you look at it, there’s so much crap, it’s heartbreaking. What we are dealing with is Jack Straw denying the attacks on the British Embassy in Turkey were really attacks on British interests. What we are dealing with is Tony Blair telling us it’s okay if we disagree with his political decisions, just as long as we don’t think he’s a fundamentalist maniac.
And what we have is a Prime Minister who WILL win the next election. Because we are not the Spanish and we don’t want to ask why. That’s a pile of shit we’ll leave for another generation to feed on.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Find The Lost Thread
Prologue
That boredom, the apathy, those mean fucking hatreds. That whiskey, those headaches.
The long fork, badly hidden in the hand of the girl as she climbed into bed alongside you, swearing she had nothing. Swearing there was nothing to worry about.
Running away that same cold night, through the streets of London, happy to have escaped alive and be alone again.
Days reading, doing very little. Rising desperation and rot.
That dangerous mix you’re lucky to get though.
Find the lost thread
What has gone past since the last time? I’m not certain, but I think it was the Tory conference. I think I was going to write about that, back in October or whenever it happened. I can’t be sure but I’d guess nothing came of the intention.
Yep, I think it was the Conservative Party conference, up in Blackpool that sapped my spirit and left me with only enough strength to Get Through, not a drop more.
Then long days of nothing new. Talk of Blair versus Brown, soon eclipsed by the on-going, endless public suicide of the Tories. Iain Duncan Smith, now gone and forgotten and never once missed even by those who knew him. Just another bald man with bad posture and no sense of right and wrong.
I was standing in the longest corridor in London, the committee floor in the Commons, when the coup happened. Votes cast and so soon Michael Howard smoothed in as a replacement. Op-Eds about resurrection of yesterday’s man. Return of Thatcher’s Vampire.
No one I see really knows how it happened or why it didn’t happen sooner. It was exciting for a while - all the talk of plots which never were - and then fast became tedium.
I interviewed one of the key players just after his man had become King and all I learned is that I was taller, he was better dressed, richer and most probably unpleasant.
That, and the fact even when these Conservatives were publicly standing firm behind their crippled drowning General, in secret they were deciding what to do when he fell from sight a final time.
Contingency planning, something any sensible politician does to secure their future and the future of their senseless parties. The King is almost dead and needs a push to get there. Long live the King.
Now a changed mood in the Commons. Blair up against a better man. The pall that hung over Duncan Smith evaporating and life returning, slowly and horribly to the halls and chambers. Higher stakes in the real game.
Mr Prime Minister getting kicked around a bit. Looking foolish more often, vapourous more often. The New Labour Prime Minister outflanked to the left by his right-wing opposition on asylum. Shows how far he has moved from the days of Labour. To feed the growing unease in the backbench ranks that all is not well, that their man is not the man they hoped he’d be but the man they feared he was.
Then George W Bush flew over my head in a Marine helicopter, the first night of his state visit. Heading towards Tower Bridge. Powerful engines, black silhouettes against a black sky.
He was asked live on TV if he thought so many across the world hate America because its government and their forces have for years been killing sons and daughters and fathers and mothers and others. And he said in answer “I love freedom”. He paused a little first. He smiled his secret smile.
Anti-war protestors in London, sending out the clear message they are as helpless, hopeless and two-faced as the rest of us. They could have marched right into Downing Street and made their point, or at least acted angry. But they marched past instead, pulled down a statue they’d put up then drank and went home. Stop Bush. Well, too late Honey. The lid is off.
With bombs in Turkey and the animal stupid comments of a foreign secretary who stumbled through the debris not looking for a cause and found not a cause so made one up which pleased him and helped none of us.
Is it legal under international law for Iraqi fighters to kill American troops occupying their country? Are you allowed to fight against an invasion?
I stood on some waste ground in Baghdad during the war, early in the morning. Talked to a man from I think US 82nd Airborne. Maybe 101st Airborne. He’d fought up from the south and was happy speaking about blowing shit up. There was a rocket launcher on his jeep he said would set fire to that house, right over there.
He pointed. The place was ricked with bullet holes. A southern kid, could be Alabama. He thought the Iraqis were fucking cowards ‘cause they didn’t put up much of a fight as the Americans mooched on through to glorious peace and famous victory.
He told me; “These people don’t do nothin’, If some army came rolling into Arkansas or California, I don’t care who they are, I’ll fight them till I’m dead or they’re dead. No one could invade America ‘cause we wouldn’t have it.”
EPILOGUE
Now all the talk is top-up fees and will that defeat Blair. This is uncharted territory for his government, facing genuine possibility of public, unavoidable humiliation.
Or has he only staked so much on the outcome of this because he know’s he’ll win – because he knows even Old Labour prefer New Labour to New old Tories? Probably, and that will be that.
Anyone who thinks our Prime Minister will lose is wrong. They’ve just forgotten Blair KNOWS he’ll go to heaven. And I know he’s right, at least if God is anything like I imagine Him to be.
That boredom, the apathy, those mean fucking hatreds. That whiskey, those headaches.
The long fork, badly hidden in the hand of the girl as she climbed into bed alongside you, swearing she had nothing. Swearing there was nothing to worry about.
Running away that same cold night, through the streets of London, happy to have escaped alive and be alone again.
Days reading, doing very little. Rising desperation and rot.
That dangerous mix you’re lucky to get though.
Find the lost thread
What has gone past since the last time? I’m not certain, but I think it was the Tory conference. I think I was going to write about that, back in October or whenever it happened. I can’t be sure but I’d guess nothing came of the intention.
Yep, I think it was the Conservative Party conference, up in Blackpool that sapped my spirit and left me with only enough strength to Get Through, not a drop more.
Then long days of nothing new. Talk of Blair versus Brown, soon eclipsed by the on-going, endless public suicide of the Tories. Iain Duncan Smith, now gone and forgotten and never once missed even by those who knew him. Just another bald man with bad posture and no sense of right and wrong.
I was standing in the longest corridor in London, the committee floor in the Commons, when the coup happened. Votes cast and so soon Michael Howard smoothed in as a replacement. Op-Eds about resurrection of yesterday’s man. Return of Thatcher’s Vampire.
No one I see really knows how it happened or why it didn’t happen sooner. It was exciting for a while - all the talk of plots which never were - and then fast became tedium.
I interviewed one of the key players just after his man had become King and all I learned is that I was taller, he was better dressed, richer and most probably unpleasant.
That, and the fact even when these Conservatives were publicly standing firm behind their crippled drowning General, in secret they were deciding what to do when he fell from sight a final time.
Contingency planning, something any sensible politician does to secure their future and the future of their senseless parties. The King is almost dead and needs a push to get there. Long live the King.
Now a changed mood in the Commons. Blair up against a better man. The pall that hung over Duncan Smith evaporating and life returning, slowly and horribly to the halls and chambers. Higher stakes in the real game.
Mr Prime Minister getting kicked around a bit. Looking foolish more often, vapourous more often. The New Labour Prime Minister outflanked to the left by his right-wing opposition on asylum. Shows how far he has moved from the days of Labour. To feed the growing unease in the backbench ranks that all is not well, that their man is not the man they hoped he’d be but the man they feared he was.
Then George W Bush flew over my head in a Marine helicopter, the first night of his state visit. Heading towards Tower Bridge. Powerful engines, black silhouettes against a black sky.
He was asked live on TV if he thought so many across the world hate America because its government and their forces have for years been killing sons and daughters and fathers and mothers and others. And he said in answer “I love freedom”. He paused a little first. He smiled his secret smile.
Anti-war protestors in London, sending out the clear message they are as helpless, hopeless and two-faced as the rest of us. They could have marched right into Downing Street and made their point, or at least acted angry. But they marched past instead, pulled down a statue they’d put up then drank and went home. Stop Bush. Well, too late Honey. The lid is off.
With bombs in Turkey and the animal stupid comments of a foreign secretary who stumbled through the debris not looking for a cause and found not a cause so made one up which pleased him and helped none of us.
Is it legal under international law for Iraqi fighters to kill American troops occupying their country? Are you allowed to fight against an invasion?
I stood on some waste ground in Baghdad during the war, early in the morning. Talked to a man from I think US 82nd Airborne. Maybe 101st Airborne. He’d fought up from the south and was happy speaking about blowing shit up. There was a rocket launcher on his jeep he said would set fire to that house, right over there.
He pointed. The place was ricked with bullet holes. A southern kid, could be Alabama. He thought the Iraqis were fucking cowards ‘cause they didn’t put up much of a fight as the Americans mooched on through to glorious peace and famous victory.
He told me; “These people don’t do nothin’, If some army came rolling into Arkansas or California, I don’t care who they are, I’ll fight them till I’m dead or they’re dead. No one could invade America ‘cause we wouldn’t have it.”
EPILOGUE
Now all the talk is top-up fees and will that defeat Blair. This is uncharted territory for his government, facing genuine possibility of public, unavoidable humiliation.
Or has he only staked so much on the outcome of this because he know’s he’ll win – because he knows even Old Labour prefer New Labour to New old Tories? Probably, and that will be that.
Anyone who thinks our Prime Minister will lose is wrong. They’ve just forgotten Blair KNOWS he’ll go to heaven. And I know he’s right, at least if God is anything like I imagine Him to be.
Monday, October 06, 2003
Slide
Prologue
The voice on the radio said Israel had launched an attack on a base deep inside Syrian territory. There were no more details. Nothing about the time, methods. What was hit, if anyone was killed. It was 11am and no one knew anything. I knew only enough to feel light-headed with worry.
I really had something else on my mind. I was trying to work out if I was in love with a girl I know and had seen again for the first time in a long time, beautiful and honest in a red dress. But there´s no place for those thoughts.
Things that were already worse just took a turn for the worse. We are all headfirst on the downslope and it´s getting steeper.
Slide
I thought ´the war is on´ and drove home to see what CNN and the BBC had to say. To get some idea of how hard and fast this was going to come. But few details there either, just matter-of-fact reports that it was a ´terrorist´ training camp destroyed, that Israel had the right to defend itself. Reminders of the previous night´s mass murder by a suicide bomber. I watched for a while but soon realised I was learning nothing.
I spoke to a police officer who said they were told by anti-terrorist special branch officers that the families of Palestinian militants were paid $1million by Saddam Hussein as a way of encouraging attacks on Israel. I knew the numbers were wrong but I didn´t argue with him. He´s a heavy drinker and I didn´t want to waste my time and end up in a fight I´d lose. I wandered off.
And then I was on the road, driving north for hours to Blackpool and the hotel room that will be my home for the next week. For the Tory party conference.
Five hours on the road. A stop on the motorway services and an uncomfortable hour of sleep in the afternoon, curled up in the warmth of the car. Outside, this raining autumn day, breath condensing in the air. Dark when I arrived in town, to be hit by a foul wind coming straight in off the Irish Sea.
There was nothing else to do but sit around and talk to other journalists about politics. The kind of introverted discussion that quickly reached a conclusion that the Conservative party is routed, doomed and failing ever more deeply. Iain Duncan Smith a mockery, hollow and fragile. But no one else there to replace him even though the party knows he is condemning them to the wilderness.
Iain Duncan Smith, a man so right wing even the dominantly right-wing British public can´t stand him.
Besides, the Labour government has made moderate conservatism its own. The actual Conservative party rendered obsolete.
The polls said it clearly. As the conference opened, with Duncan Smith voicing absurdities like "we´re heading for government", Sky news showed 14 per cent of their survey group thought he´d make the best PM. Blair was rated top by 35 per cent. But the real nightmare for the Tories; Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, was thought best by 22 per cent.
That morning´s Independent newspaper carried a front page poll; results indicating a majority now saw the Lib Dems as the main opposition to Labour.
I muttered to one Westminster hack - one of the genuine reporters with an interest in what is actually happening rather than meeting his masters´ agenda - about the Conservatives being nothing more than a regional pressure group, rather than a national political party. I think Blair said something like that the week before. Anyway, the hack agreed.
Sunday, and Robin Cook´s diary appeared in the Times. Revelations that Tony Blair knew Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Knew it posed no threat to British interests but carried on all the same with the war.
Claims the Prime Minister misled parliament - among the most serious charges you can level at a PM and certainly a resignation matter - by not admitting all he knew.
Another heavy blow to a government that should have lost every shred of credibility over its conduct. Over the lies and the almighty mess that is getting ever messier in the Middle East.
But Sky News poll said it clearly: Iraq is the most important political issue to five per cent of voters. 57 per cent say Iain Duncan Smith is not the best person to lead the Tories. Only 15 per cent say the Tories are in a better state than they were in 1997 when they were swamped in an historic and unexpected Labour landslide.
Epilogue
The wind is so strong it´s hard to walk. The most powerful storm I remember. I mentioned it to the night watchman at the hotel. "It´s always like this in the autumn. And it is conference. It´s always like this at conference. It´ll get worse."
I realised then that God is merciful. Politicians in town, politicians certainly among the worst in the country. And He had thrown up a storm to meet them. Cruel seas, stinging rain, battering wind.
But it could have been so much worse. A just God, a God of vengeance would have waited for everyone to arrive, and destroyed the whole fucking town in a hail of fire and venom.
And then He would have rested, happy in His work.
The voice on the radio said Israel had launched an attack on a base deep inside Syrian territory. There were no more details. Nothing about the time, methods. What was hit, if anyone was killed. It was 11am and no one knew anything. I knew only enough to feel light-headed with worry.
I really had something else on my mind. I was trying to work out if I was in love with a girl I know and had seen again for the first time in a long time, beautiful and honest in a red dress. But there´s no place for those thoughts.
Things that were already worse just took a turn for the worse. We are all headfirst on the downslope and it´s getting steeper.
Slide
I thought ´the war is on´ and drove home to see what CNN and the BBC had to say. To get some idea of how hard and fast this was going to come. But few details there either, just matter-of-fact reports that it was a ´terrorist´ training camp destroyed, that Israel had the right to defend itself. Reminders of the previous night´s mass murder by a suicide bomber. I watched for a while but soon realised I was learning nothing.
I spoke to a police officer who said they were told by anti-terrorist special branch officers that the families of Palestinian militants were paid $1million by Saddam Hussein as a way of encouraging attacks on Israel. I knew the numbers were wrong but I didn´t argue with him. He´s a heavy drinker and I didn´t want to waste my time and end up in a fight I´d lose. I wandered off.
And then I was on the road, driving north for hours to Blackpool and the hotel room that will be my home for the next week. For the Tory party conference.
Five hours on the road. A stop on the motorway services and an uncomfortable hour of sleep in the afternoon, curled up in the warmth of the car. Outside, this raining autumn day, breath condensing in the air. Dark when I arrived in town, to be hit by a foul wind coming straight in off the Irish Sea.
There was nothing else to do but sit around and talk to other journalists about politics. The kind of introverted discussion that quickly reached a conclusion that the Conservative party is routed, doomed and failing ever more deeply. Iain Duncan Smith a mockery, hollow and fragile. But no one else there to replace him even though the party knows he is condemning them to the wilderness.
Iain Duncan Smith, a man so right wing even the dominantly right-wing British public can´t stand him.
Besides, the Labour government has made moderate conservatism its own. The actual Conservative party rendered obsolete.
The polls said it clearly. As the conference opened, with Duncan Smith voicing absurdities like "we´re heading for government", Sky news showed 14 per cent of their survey group thought he´d make the best PM. Blair was rated top by 35 per cent. But the real nightmare for the Tories; Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, was thought best by 22 per cent.
That morning´s Independent newspaper carried a front page poll; results indicating a majority now saw the Lib Dems as the main opposition to Labour.
I muttered to one Westminster hack - one of the genuine reporters with an interest in what is actually happening rather than meeting his masters´ agenda - about the Conservatives being nothing more than a regional pressure group, rather than a national political party. I think Blair said something like that the week before. Anyway, the hack agreed.
Sunday, and Robin Cook´s diary appeared in the Times. Revelations that Tony Blair knew Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Knew it posed no threat to British interests but carried on all the same with the war.
Claims the Prime Minister misled parliament - among the most serious charges you can level at a PM and certainly a resignation matter - by not admitting all he knew.
Another heavy blow to a government that should have lost every shred of credibility over its conduct. Over the lies and the almighty mess that is getting ever messier in the Middle East.
But Sky News poll said it clearly: Iraq is the most important political issue to five per cent of voters. 57 per cent say Iain Duncan Smith is not the best person to lead the Tories. Only 15 per cent say the Tories are in a better state than they were in 1997 when they were swamped in an historic and unexpected Labour landslide.
Epilogue
The wind is so strong it´s hard to walk. The most powerful storm I remember. I mentioned it to the night watchman at the hotel. "It´s always like this in the autumn. And it is conference. It´s always like this at conference. It´ll get worse."
I realised then that God is merciful. Politicians in town, politicians certainly among the worst in the country. And He had thrown up a storm to meet them. Cruel seas, stinging rain, battering wind.
But it could have been so much worse. A just God, a God of vengeance would have waited for everyone to arrive, and destroyed the whole fucking town in a hail of fire and venom.
And then He would have rested, happy in His work.
Saturday, October 04, 2003
Sinking
PROLOGUE
He’d made that "no reverse gear" speech and then walked out of the international centre in Bournemouth. His wife was with him and they both waved at the fans, for the cameras. He was smiling and I tried to notice whether he looked like a lying criminal, but really he was too far away for anything like that. His suit was well cut.
And there was a blonde. I don’t know who she was, but she was tall and slim and beautiful. She shook hands with Tony Blair and then followed him up the hill. I can´t think what she was doing there, dressed in white.
I asked some people who she was, but no one seemed to know. I decided I´d just made her up.
SINK IT
It’s difficult to know what to say. I feel like I haven’t eaten or slept for days. I can feel my body deteriorating. The Labour Party conference is nearly over, but not nearly enough.
Nothing fits together or makes any sense. I have some notes, scrawled in different places, sometimes on the newspapers that lay all over the floor in my nasty little hotel room. The room with a TV that doesn’t work properly. With the banging doors, stale air and no heating.
The notes were obviously written by an agitated person. The handwriting is mine:
“We must try only to escape with our lives. Armoured cars, heavy weaponry, cut-throats, police with guns. No reason, just action.
Some form of survival is the best we can hope for now. Women and children last. Leave the wounded, and anyone who won´t give you money, behind.”
“Royal Navy sink Argentine ship during Falklands war. International waters, illegal attack. Many dead. 1983. Tory MP Alan Clark said ‘So what does it matter where it was when it was hit? We could have sunk it if it’d been tied up on the quayside in a neutral port and everyone would still have been delighted.”
“Man arrested at Labour Party conference after trying to perform citizens arrest on Blair for war crimes.”
“Poll shows majority believe Blair lied over Iraq but also want him to stay in office.”
"Blair says ´trust me´."
There are more notes in my flip pad, things I wrote while watching the Rt Hon Tony Blair give his tear-jerking speech to the party.
I remember there was a big screen listing the greatest achievements of his government. Money for this and that and legislation and reform and low inflation and more shit jobs for more people than ever before. No mention of the five wars in six years. No mention of Iraq. He claims it is a country freed from the tyranny of an evil dictator, a real threat to the world erased. A population liberated. A proud achievement. Why isn´t it on the list?
The notes, in no particular order;
"Too much clapping, no one capable of thought is also capable of banging their hands together so long, adjusting their style for to lessen the pain. Stupid people walked again and again into a wall. A bad sign. Do they believe this shit? Did I really hear them clapping for ID cards? Did I hear them clapping for a war that killed thousands?"
"Scripted emotion, worked out in minute detail over weeks. A sales pitch. Rhetorical tricks. A card sharp using a letter from the mother of a dead boy as his ace."
"Another warning sign; this man is capable of manipulating the emotions of his audience, a very dangerous thing, worse than breathing out poison. Just how dangerous is he?"
"No apology for the war. The war is clapped. I´ve never seen people applauding a war before. It´s a strange thing to see and says something about the morality of the tribe. Implications I don´t want to think of."
"Promise to change, promise to listen to the people. But knowing he wants things and will do what is necessary to get it. Listen and then agree."
"Woman spectator says ´it´s quite humbling really. I bet she clapped the ID cards, the war, and stifled a sob at the death bit. Like a good film. Trash. Poor value unless you´re a fool, in which case you deserve what you´re getting."
"What happened in this hall today is unspeakable. I would prefer not to have seen it."
That was all a few days ago now, and I´ve already forgotten the details of the speech. It was never something to remember, surely not even for the faithful. Just lots of dressed-up emptiness. People won´t talk about that ´no reverse gear´ moment at the 2003 conference. They won´t remember what they were wearing. They won´t even remember where they were when they heard it. It is already disappeared words.
And that means it was a speech that defined an era - a Prime Minister who misled his nation into war and who refused to apologise even when exposed by the evidence. And a party - a country - that not only forgave him his sins, but applauded them.
It defined a era in which a man of no particular ideology or substance can be presented - and accepted - as a man of vision and depth. It defined an era in which a Prime Minister says ´trust me´ and people take him at his word. It defined an era in which murder is acceptable as long as it´s committed somewhere far away.
Most of all it proved that, in an era in which we all have access to more factual information than ever before - more chance to see the truth - the overwhelming majority either ignore it totally or accept it but hold no one to account.
EPILOGUE
Tony Blair will be the Prime Minister for a long time yet. A sex scandal or massive recession would bring him down, but there is no prospect of the former and the latter is just another maybe that´s worth him gambling on avoiding.
Where will he take us? How close will we follow the US, and where are they heading? Bush is starting to face questions at home about dead GIs, multi-billion dollar bills and the absence of WMD. Will this put him off Syria and Korea and God only knows where else?
But Tony Blair is here to stay. He is a leader for times like this. The perfect man for a country that gets all it deserves. No more, no less.
I think I imagined the blonde to help me cope. Day dreaming of an angel.
He’d made that "no reverse gear" speech and then walked out of the international centre in Bournemouth. His wife was with him and they both waved at the fans, for the cameras. He was smiling and I tried to notice whether he looked like a lying criminal, but really he was too far away for anything like that. His suit was well cut.
And there was a blonde. I don’t know who she was, but she was tall and slim and beautiful. She shook hands with Tony Blair and then followed him up the hill. I can´t think what she was doing there, dressed in white.
I asked some people who she was, but no one seemed to know. I decided I´d just made her up.
SINK IT
It’s difficult to know what to say. I feel like I haven’t eaten or slept for days. I can feel my body deteriorating. The Labour Party conference is nearly over, but not nearly enough.
Nothing fits together or makes any sense. I have some notes, scrawled in different places, sometimes on the newspapers that lay all over the floor in my nasty little hotel room. The room with a TV that doesn’t work properly. With the banging doors, stale air and no heating.
The notes were obviously written by an agitated person. The handwriting is mine:
“We must try only to escape with our lives. Armoured cars, heavy weaponry, cut-throats, police with guns. No reason, just action.
Some form of survival is the best we can hope for now. Women and children last. Leave the wounded, and anyone who won´t give you money, behind.”
“Royal Navy sink Argentine ship during Falklands war. International waters, illegal attack. Many dead. 1983. Tory MP Alan Clark said ‘So what does it matter where it was when it was hit? We could have sunk it if it’d been tied up on the quayside in a neutral port and everyone would still have been delighted.”
“Man arrested at Labour Party conference after trying to perform citizens arrest on Blair for war crimes.”
“Poll shows majority believe Blair lied over Iraq but also want him to stay in office.”
"Blair says ´trust me´."
There are more notes in my flip pad, things I wrote while watching the Rt Hon Tony Blair give his tear-jerking speech to the party.
I remember there was a big screen listing the greatest achievements of his government. Money for this and that and legislation and reform and low inflation and more shit jobs for more people than ever before. No mention of the five wars in six years. No mention of Iraq. He claims it is a country freed from the tyranny of an evil dictator, a real threat to the world erased. A population liberated. A proud achievement. Why isn´t it on the list?
The notes, in no particular order;
"Too much clapping, no one capable of thought is also capable of banging their hands together so long, adjusting their style for to lessen the pain. Stupid people walked again and again into a wall. A bad sign. Do they believe this shit? Did I really hear them clapping for ID cards? Did I hear them clapping for a war that killed thousands?"
"Scripted emotion, worked out in minute detail over weeks. A sales pitch. Rhetorical tricks. A card sharp using a letter from the mother of a dead boy as his ace."
"Another warning sign; this man is capable of manipulating the emotions of his audience, a very dangerous thing, worse than breathing out poison. Just how dangerous is he?"
"No apology for the war. The war is clapped. I´ve never seen people applauding a war before. It´s a strange thing to see and says something about the morality of the tribe. Implications I don´t want to think of."
"Promise to change, promise to listen to the people. But knowing he wants things and will do what is necessary to get it. Listen and then agree."
"Woman spectator says ´it´s quite humbling really. I bet she clapped the ID cards, the war, and stifled a sob at the death bit. Like a good film. Trash. Poor value unless you´re a fool, in which case you deserve what you´re getting."
"What happened in this hall today is unspeakable. I would prefer not to have seen it."
That was all a few days ago now, and I´ve already forgotten the details of the speech. It was never something to remember, surely not even for the faithful. Just lots of dressed-up emptiness. People won´t talk about that ´no reverse gear´ moment at the 2003 conference. They won´t remember what they were wearing. They won´t even remember where they were when they heard it. It is already disappeared words.
And that means it was a speech that defined an era - a Prime Minister who misled his nation into war and who refused to apologise even when exposed by the evidence. And a party - a country - that not only forgave him his sins, but applauded them.
It defined a era in which a man of no particular ideology or substance can be presented - and accepted - as a man of vision and depth. It defined an era in which a Prime Minister says ´trust me´ and people take him at his word. It defined an era in which murder is acceptable as long as it´s committed somewhere far away.
Most of all it proved that, in an era in which we all have access to more factual information than ever before - more chance to see the truth - the overwhelming majority either ignore it totally or accept it but hold no one to account.
EPILOGUE
Tony Blair will be the Prime Minister for a long time yet. A sex scandal or massive recession would bring him down, but there is no prospect of the former and the latter is just another maybe that´s worth him gambling on avoiding.
Where will he take us? How close will we follow the US, and where are they heading? Bush is starting to face questions at home about dead GIs, multi-billion dollar bills and the absence of WMD. Will this put him off Syria and Korea and God only knows where else?
But Tony Blair is here to stay. He is a leader for times like this. The perfect man for a country that gets all it deserves. No more, no less.
I think I imagined the blonde to help me cope. Day dreaming of an angel.
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Slogan
Prologue
Yesterday, more than anything and more than ever, I hated politics. The dumb rhetoric. The stupid tribal loyalties. The over eager selling. The absurd simplification of everything to meaninglessness. The knowing what´s best for everyone else, even when they´re telling you to stop because it hurts.
And worst of all - the very worst, the most burningly arsehole thing about it all - the empty slogans.
Hatred
Yesterday I despised the very thought of ´progress´. The belief that somehow things can ´get better´ by design made me sick and angry.
It was the kind of frightening clarity and dumb hatred a person can only experience at a party conference, totally surrounded by Minions. Minions; there to hear themselves talk about themselves and how right they are.
Forget talks of splits and infighting, that´s all a minor sideshow, something to do to pass spare time.
The main event is a gruesome orgy of self-gratification and tedious repetition. Designed to kill thought. More damaging to brain cells than any cocktail of drink, drugs and heavy blows to the skull.
There is enough crude propaganda here to make any clear headed person want to flee, or at least scream for mercy. The full scale of it is hard to convey. Self-congratulation. Dense jargon. Dense people. Badges. Those idiot fucking slogans.
I´m at the Labour Party conference ("Labour means fairness", "a future fair for everyone" continue ad nauseam), but that is only part of the story. Yeah, power makes them automatically worse and more threatening to our collective well-being than the other parties, in the way a cop with a gun is potentially more lethal than one with a Billy club.
But the same basic truths held at the Liberal Democrat conference. And, even though I´m a professional and like to reserve judgment until I see it with my own eyes, I´m sure the Tory effort in Blackpool next week will be the most horrific of a horrifing bunch.
The Lib Dems and Tories may both be fringe parties with minor followings, but you must still be afraid, especially at conference: a Billy club hurts bad enough if you aim for the right body parts and get the timing on with a nice, hard swing. You don´t need a gun, it´s just faster and makes the killer feel cleaner.
Those damned slogans. The posters. The free pens. The willfull blindness to failure and falsehood.
Yesterday, I knew why so few people bother to vote. And I realised – suffocating there beneath the tide of minions - that apathy was the solution not the problem.
Listen to a politician - of any party - and they´ll bemoan falling voter participation in elections. I used to see their point but now I´ve been to the sixth circle of this hell and I realise they are naturally deluded. It is clear to me now that it must always be assumed that a policitian is wrong unless they can prove beyond all reasonable doubt they are right.
That´s the level of certainty you need to convict someone in a criminal court, and it should apply to these people. Few would ever pass the test.
Caring Conservatives - Radical Reform - Progressive government
So, it is as instinctive for a politician to call for more people to take part in elections as it is for a businessman to argue for more profit. Or maybe a better way of putting it is to say; it´s as natural as the Pope arguing you ought to worship God, but have to go through him as a middle-man.
Politicians make trouble, then other politicians come to clear it away, breaking something else in the process. Making another problem for themselves - as a breed - to solve. Eventually you just forget the first damn thing was caused by one of these people and you let them sell you the high priced solution to the problem they created.
The gardener is weeding and planting weeds at the same time. A nice way to earn a living, but it makes him a bastard all the same.
Self-interest. Self-preservation. Ignorance. Greed. Expedience. Half-truths. Obfruscation. The populist appeal.
Smiles. Waves. Handshakes.
Baby Kissing. Power
Epilogue
Yesterday I hated politics, but the feeling passes. The knowledge of hating it stays, but the unbearable feeling of disgust leaves. A self-defence mechanism.
But apathy is still the only answer. Total political apathy across the entire population would starve the fire of oxygen.
I don´t know what that would leave, or what would fill the vacuum, but it must be worth a try. And maybe we´ll all soon get a look. Apathy is the future.
Yesterday, more than anything and more than ever, I hated politics. The dumb rhetoric. The stupid tribal loyalties. The over eager selling. The absurd simplification of everything to meaninglessness. The knowing what´s best for everyone else, even when they´re telling you to stop because it hurts.
And worst of all - the very worst, the most burningly arsehole thing about it all - the empty slogans.
Hatred
Yesterday I despised the very thought of ´progress´. The belief that somehow things can ´get better´ by design made me sick and angry.
It was the kind of frightening clarity and dumb hatred a person can only experience at a party conference, totally surrounded by Minions. Minions; there to hear themselves talk about themselves and how right they are.
Forget talks of splits and infighting, that´s all a minor sideshow, something to do to pass spare time.
The main event is a gruesome orgy of self-gratification and tedious repetition. Designed to kill thought. More damaging to brain cells than any cocktail of drink, drugs and heavy blows to the skull.
There is enough crude propaganda here to make any clear headed person want to flee, or at least scream for mercy. The full scale of it is hard to convey. Self-congratulation. Dense jargon. Dense people. Badges. Those idiot fucking slogans.
I´m at the Labour Party conference ("Labour means fairness", "a future fair for everyone" continue ad nauseam), but that is only part of the story. Yeah, power makes them automatically worse and more threatening to our collective well-being than the other parties, in the way a cop with a gun is potentially more lethal than one with a Billy club.
But the same basic truths held at the Liberal Democrat conference. And, even though I´m a professional and like to reserve judgment until I see it with my own eyes, I´m sure the Tory effort in Blackpool next week will be the most horrific of a horrifing bunch.
The Lib Dems and Tories may both be fringe parties with minor followings, but you must still be afraid, especially at conference: a Billy club hurts bad enough if you aim for the right body parts and get the timing on with a nice, hard swing. You don´t need a gun, it´s just faster and makes the killer feel cleaner.
Those damned slogans. The posters. The free pens. The willfull blindness to failure and falsehood.
Yesterday, I knew why so few people bother to vote. And I realised – suffocating there beneath the tide of minions - that apathy was the solution not the problem.
Listen to a politician - of any party - and they´ll bemoan falling voter participation in elections. I used to see their point but now I´ve been to the sixth circle of this hell and I realise they are naturally deluded. It is clear to me now that it must always be assumed that a policitian is wrong unless they can prove beyond all reasonable doubt they are right.
That´s the level of certainty you need to convict someone in a criminal court, and it should apply to these people. Few would ever pass the test.
Caring Conservatives - Radical Reform - Progressive government
So, it is as instinctive for a politician to call for more people to take part in elections as it is for a businessman to argue for more profit. Or maybe a better way of putting it is to say; it´s as natural as the Pope arguing you ought to worship God, but have to go through him as a middle-man.
Politicians make trouble, then other politicians come to clear it away, breaking something else in the process. Making another problem for themselves - as a breed - to solve. Eventually you just forget the first damn thing was caused by one of these people and you let them sell you the high priced solution to the problem they created.
The gardener is weeding and planting weeds at the same time. A nice way to earn a living, but it makes him a bastard all the same.
Self-interest. Self-preservation. Ignorance. Greed. Expedience. Half-truths. Obfruscation. The populist appeal.
Smiles. Waves. Handshakes.
Baby Kissing. Power
Epilogue
Yesterday I hated politics, but the feeling passes. The knowledge of hating it stays, but the unbearable feeling of disgust leaves. A self-defence mechanism.
But apathy is still the only answer. Total political apathy across the entire population would starve the fire of oxygen.
I don´t know what that would leave, or what would fill the vacuum, but it must be worth a try. And maybe we´ll all soon get a look. Apathy is the future.
Saturday, September 27, 2003
Lost In The Week
Prologue
At 6.45am the sky was red over the city. An eerie glow behind clouds low over the towers of Westminster. Under different circumstances it would be impressive and beautiful. But these are bad times and my nerves are not strong enough to deal with the skies of armageddon so early in the morning.
Security is everybody's concern.
How many days ago was it that a police officer on a motorbike put his hand up in my face to stop me crossing the road; to stop me getting in the way of the fast black car he was escorting through the red lights?
Who was in the back of that thing? Why the hurry? What made him so special that he couldn't wait for the lights to change? It knocked me into a foul mood, and all I could think is that he must have the kind of bad conscience that gives a man reason to fear for his life. What bad things had the bastard done? What had he done to put someone else in a mood to pill his blood?
Maybe he's innocent, but I doubt it.
And how many days ago was it that I sat in the Foreign Press Association for the morning briefing by the PM's spokesman (one of his unofficial, official people this time; both official spokesmen were probably away preparing themselves to face-down accusations of backstabbing and character assassination at the Hutton inquiry)?
I only remember that day because something terrible happened in Iraq but the Lobby journalists were doing their job and muttering about another 1.25 pence on a litre of petrol Asking whether Tony Blair had taken a step too far into setting up a European Security Force (the unofficial spokesman insisted nothing had changed from the previous position which the government had already made clear).
And would Stephen Byers be brought back to replace defence secretary Geoff Hoon - who was still in his job but according to that day's Mirror newspaper was as good as buried (the spokesman - actually a woman and an apparently pleasant one who deals patiently with often absurd questions - said; "That's a matter for the Prime Minister to decide, certainly not for me")?
And is Alistair Campbell to be referred to as the 'former' communications director or the 'outgoing' communications director ("he's serving out his notice but I have to check the exact position," the unofficial spokeswoman said)?
It was a nice autumn morning in London that day, with a fine cool wind and leaves coming down from the trees. The FPA is in a big old building once occupied by Gladstone - a former Prime Minister and one of the Big figures of British history.
Yes, London was very pretty and I walked happy back to the House of Commons with other reporters, not talking to them, just listening. We wandered past one of those big monuments to futile death that are everywhere in this city. Marne 1914. Ypres 1914. I wanted coffee and was hungry. It was the beginning of this week.
Since then;
Bush gave his speech at the UN, a half-smile on his lips like he knew everyone was sore at him but couldn't do a fucking thing about it. A smirk of utter power. I'm certain he threatened the chamber, dared it to side with the 'freedom-haters'.
As much as the actual things he said, it was that which made me stare at the TV, watching with a growing sense of dumb horror. I picked up a pad and pen and scrawled down some quotes. I've still got the notes but I don't want to look at them. I remember walking away with the certain feeling that the doom-spiral we are locked in will carry on for a long, long time.
It was the cliches about them and us, good and evil etc etc. If the rhetoric is to be believed, the shitty mess in Iraq has not been a lesson learned, and that is a real source of misery for any right thinking person. Especially when Bush started talking about Syria and weapons programmes and pre-emptive strikes.
Since then;
I went to Brighton - a town I hate more than any other - and sat though Charles Kennedy's conference speech. It was mainly boring but did hit one nail on the head. He quoted Tony Blair from a speech to Labour MPs after their 1997 election victory. The new Prime Minister had said: "We are not the masters. The people are the masters. We are the people's servants. Forget that and the people will soon show that what the electorate give, the electorate can take away."
Kennedy contrasted that with the recent Hutton revelations and said those "good instincts and great ideals" had been "tarnished" under a government "corrupted" by power. If you put aside the fact it's all just political point scoring by a different gang trying to get hold of that same power, his analysis does cut close to the centre of things.
Since then;
I was dragged to a Socialist Workers Party meeting in Croydon where I heard a potted history of Iraq and denunciations of "Yankee Imperialist Dogs" (really, that's an accurate quote; it was even said in a strongly accented English. The woman who said it eventually stormed out of the fast-food curry place basement where the meeting was held; one of the other people there had suggested it might make the best of a bad situation if the UN put peacekeepers into Iraq and she disagreed. So incensed she stood up and ran for the stairs. I wanted to do the same, but for different reasons).
Since then;
More people dead in Iraq. More stories about the US going soft on Israel over the non-existent 'road-map'. Alistair Campbell and the 'fucked-over' diaries at Hutton.
Since then (today in fact);
Papers running stories of President Bush's visit to Buckingham Palace in November, with attached speculation about whether Blair has the guts to send The Man into the House of Commons. That would be the customary accolade, only it would be very embarrassing to the Big Team for the free world to see its leader (oh yes) on television being booed by MPs who happen to think he's a fucking ignorant bastard, responsible for mass murder and gross human right violations.
All of which leads to this Friday night, with its cool air and fat gobs of rain. Listening to the people walk by on the street outside. To the planes in holding positions for Heathrow.
Sitting here and desperately trying not to speculate about what will happen at the Labour Party conference which starts on Sunday. Will Labour rebels be able to get a debate on Iraq or will the fixers block it, and stop us seeing just how unhappy Labour people are over the lies that led us to war?
I want to see a vote. I need to know what people in the party think about this. Most I know who vote red pride themselves on a sense of probity that I'm pretty sure this government has violated in the most savage and explicit way. I really just wanna see how many of these people have drawn their moral line, and how many people have bent it. How many have joined their glorious leader on the slide?
And I want to see the security. In Brighton, it was non-existent and that was nice. I like to be able to come and go as I please without someone treating me like a criminal or killer. In the Houses of Parliament now there are signs everywhere warning you to wear your security pass. It generates a fine atmosphere of mistrust appropriate to what goes on in the place. I'm sure security'll be harder for the conference in Bournemouth because more than anything else, the Prime Minister is good at making vicious enemies for himself and those he governs.
Epilogue
The sky was red and horrible to behold, but I realise now the end of days will not come under flaming air. It'll happen with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen or in an un-minuted, informal meeting between pals in a corridor somewhere close to this place.
Death is a well-dressed man, with a great sense of self-importance and moral purpose, but utterly lacking in moral balance. He doesn't kill you. He has people to do that for him.
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Cackling
Prologue
Frost in the air and I’m on the morning train to Brighton. To sit there through a Liberal Democrat conference speech on pensions. The prospects of any one of us getting to that stage seem slim, getting ever slimmer. It’ll be hard to concentrate today, I can see that much.
Cackling
The office was quiet at just gone 8am yesterday, just me on the phone to the one decent contact I have in government. And he was cackling, just couldn’t stop the laughter. I’ve never heard a grown man giggle in that way. It was fascinating and horrible. The sound of a person close to coming off the rails.
“He beat them all, that’s the thing, he beat them all. They never had a chance. Alistair has won,” he said. No attempt to suppress the glee. It’s one of the things that makes me trust him - in terms of believing he believes the things he tells me, which is the best you can hope for. I don’t think he acts too much. He cackles. He knows I’m not gonna name him. He knows I know we both know the rules in this.
“Alistair beat them all and made himself a fortune. He is simply the best there is. You can say what you want, but he’s the best there is.”
Alistair Campbell. Outgoing director of communications to Tony Blair. One of the chosen men who has brought us to where we all now find ourselves.
The previous day he’d been up before the Hutton inquiry, his second appearance, and he’d dealt with everyone in the sternest sense.
The morning’s papers were covered with extracts from the extracts of his ‘unpublished, not for publication’ diaries. I always start the day going through all the papers. The FT comes first for largely superstitious reasons; on it’s pink front page “GH and I agreed it would fuck Gilligan”. All the other papers had similar, The Times splashed with it in the headline, blanking out to f*** for reasons of decency. As if the truth wasn’t indecent enough to require some kind of censorship for the good of public health and morality.
“Fuck Gilligan”. That’s why I had a cackling man on the other end of the phone.
“Alistair won. He saved Blair, he pushed the blame onto himself and Hoon, he’s beaten the BBC and he’d made himself a fortune! All in a days work. You’ve got to admire that.”
And when you consider the rules of this game, it is hard not to. One rule only; win at all costs and it seems Campbell had. That’s what my man was telling me and I had no reason not to think he had a point.
Campbell is still utterly loyal to the Prime Minister and he had to make sure the PM came though this in the clear – at least technically, at least in so far as official hand washing is concerned. It looks like that will now happen.
Blair said he took full responsibility for everything when he appeared before Hutton, which you could take to mean he put his hand up to what parts of the apparent suicide were made up of the pressures Kelly felt himself buckling under.
But the Prime Minister didn’t mean it that way, and Hutton will not take it like that. It was a leadership gesture, not something he actually meant. He said it meaning it was the damned fault of the fucking MoD. But he held up his hands without quibbling; such courage and dignity in the mire! A true leader of men, happy to bear the weight of his fallen soldiers.
But then A[listair] C[ampbell] appears with his diaries and it turns out that AC and G[eoff] H[oon] wanted Dr Kelly’s name out in the open to fuck-over Gilligan. But Tony Blair worked to hold them back.
Disregard the fact, for the moment, that his name came out anyway, meaning the PM eventually overcame his inhibitions and let the attack dogs of the leash. Yes, ignore that and the Rt Hon Tony Blair looks even better.
No, despite the mud and sticks, it’s hard to see Blair being buried by Lord Hutton when he finally reports on the death of Kelly and the on-going, painful death of something bigger.
Blair is technically in the clear, from a certain perspective; because his spy chief says Downing Street did not sex-up the dossier. Because he tired to avoid naming the now dead Kelly.
AC has done all he can to save his master, painting a flattering portrait.
On the phone, the cackling continued.
And AC did it by sucking all the blame onto himself and defence secretary Hoon. But really it is Hoon that counts. Campbell had no friends in the media anyway, so now couldn’t give a shit about what they say on him. He’s quitting the damn No 10 communications job. He’s out.
No, blaming himself was really, politically, blaming Hoon. Hoon, the ex-lawyer who had sat in the law court that same morning, fought a lawyers fight. He left the Royal Courts of Justice before Campbell appeared, before Campbell buried him alive.
The diaries said it in black and white, despite the absurd government disclaimer that the record they contained was not AC’s ‘considered’ judgement, just his ‘immediate’ reaction to events at the end of each day.
Hoon wanted to force Kelly’s name into the open, believing it would fuck Gilligan over. Gangster talk in a gangsters’ world. Naturally, this was only a partial success and helped prompt the chain of events which has seen the reputation of this government, all governments, all politicians, all spies and all journalists, dragged beautifully through the slime.
Yes, AC buried GH, I’m certain of that.
And AC, who fought the BBC like his life depended on it, has managed, in a stupid and massively destructive manner, to get half of a kind of apology from the broadcaster over the whole Gilligan story.
Still cackling.
AC’s notoriety is also now assured, together with a huge personal financial fortune. That appearance in court, those diaries, will be sold for a massive sum of money, probably more than you and I will ever earn in our lifetimes. And the sexing-up stuff pinned on him has dropped away in the battle and now hangs on JIC chairman John Scarlett.
Checkmate Campbell. That’s what the cackling man seemed to be saying.I said: “Absolutely. There is no question, Campbell is a genius. At least twice as smart as the people he’s up against. None of them had a chance.”
Down the phone the voice said: “You’ve got to love him. I love him.”
The conversation ended.
EPILOGUE
There is only one problem with saying Campbell has won, which in a way he clearly has: it falls down because the Hutton inquiry has given us an incredibly damaging picture of a morally corrupt government which at base doesn’t give a shit about people in this country or abroad. Dead or alive, it’s all the same.
And the reason we know this is because Alistair Campbell decided to take on the BBC. Some fairly trivial points of accuracy were on his side. But the whole truth never was.
He helped make the New Labour party, which has dug the filthy shell-hole in which we now sit. And he has started to pull in the soil on top of us all, his friend and master Tony Blair included. Suffocation coming on.
Live by the sword, die by it, like the cliché says.
But worse for the govt. Not so much cause for cackling.
Frost in the air and I’m on the morning train to Brighton. To sit there through a Liberal Democrat conference speech on pensions. The prospects of any one of us getting to that stage seem slim, getting ever slimmer. It’ll be hard to concentrate today, I can see that much.
Cackling
The office was quiet at just gone 8am yesterday, just me on the phone to the one decent contact I have in government. And he was cackling, just couldn’t stop the laughter. I’ve never heard a grown man giggle in that way. It was fascinating and horrible. The sound of a person close to coming off the rails.
“He beat them all, that’s the thing, he beat them all. They never had a chance. Alistair has won,” he said. No attempt to suppress the glee. It’s one of the things that makes me trust him - in terms of believing he believes the things he tells me, which is the best you can hope for. I don’t think he acts too much. He cackles. He knows I’m not gonna name him. He knows I know we both know the rules in this.
“Alistair beat them all and made himself a fortune. He is simply the best there is. You can say what you want, but he’s the best there is.”
Alistair Campbell. Outgoing director of communications to Tony Blair. One of the chosen men who has brought us to where we all now find ourselves.
The previous day he’d been up before the Hutton inquiry, his second appearance, and he’d dealt with everyone in the sternest sense.
The morning’s papers were covered with extracts from the extracts of his ‘unpublished, not for publication’ diaries. I always start the day going through all the papers. The FT comes first for largely superstitious reasons; on it’s pink front page “GH and I agreed it would fuck Gilligan”. All the other papers had similar, The Times splashed with it in the headline, blanking out to f*** for reasons of decency. As if the truth wasn’t indecent enough to require some kind of censorship for the good of public health and morality.
“Fuck Gilligan”. That’s why I had a cackling man on the other end of the phone.
“Alistair won. He saved Blair, he pushed the blame onto himself and Hoon, he’s beaten the BBC and he’d made himself a fortune! All in a days work. You’ve got to admire that.”
And when you consider the rules of this game, it is hard not to. One rule only; win at all costs and it seems Campbell had. That’s what my man was telling me and I had no reason not to think he had a point.
Campbell is still utterly loyal to the Prime Minister and he had to make sure the PM came though this in the clear – at least technically, at least in so far as official hand washing is concerned. It looks like that will now happen.
Blair said he took full responsibility for everything when he appeared before Hutton, which you could take to mean he put his hand up to what parts of the apparent suicide were made up of the pressures Kelly felt himself buckling under.
But the Prime Minister didn’t mean it that way, and Hutton will not take it like that. It was a leadership gesture, not something he actually meant. He said it meaning it was the damned fault of the fucking MoD. But he held up his hands without quibbling; such courage and dignity in the mire! A true leader of men, happy to bear the weight of his fallen soldiers.
But then A[listair] C[ampbell] appears with his diaries and it turns out that AC and G[eoff] H[oon] wanted Dr Kelly’s name out in the open to fuck-over Gilligan. But Tony Blair worked to hold them back.
Disregard the fact, for the moment, that his name came out anyway, meaning the PM eventually overcame his inhibitions and let the attack dogs of the leash. Yes, ignore that and the Rt Hon Tony Blair looks even better.
No, despite the mud and sticks, it’s hard to see Blair being buried by Lord Hutton when he finally reports on the death of Kelly and the on-going, painful death of something bigger.
Blair is technically in the clear, from a certain perspective; because his spy chief says Downing Street did not sex-up the dossier. Because he tired to avoid naming the now dead Kelly.
AC has done all he can to save his master, painting a flattering portrait.
On the phone, the cackling continued.
And AC did it by sucking all the blame onto himself and defence secretary Hoon. But really it is Hoon that counts. Campbell had no friends in the media anyway, so now couldn’t give a shit about what they say on him. He’s quitting the damn No 10 communications job. He’s out.
No, blaming himself was really, politically, blaming Hoon. Hoon, the ex-lawyer who had sat in the law court that same morning, fought a lawyers fight. He left the Royal Courts of Justice before Campbell appeared, before Campbell buried him alive.
The diaries said it in black and white, despite the absurd government disclaimer that the record they contained was not AC’s ‘considered’ judgement, just his ‘immediate’ reaction to events at the end of each day.
Hoon wanted to force Kelly’s name into the open, believing it would fuck Gilligan over. Gangster talk in a gangsters’ world. Naturally, this was only a partial success and helped prompt the chain of events which has seen the reputation of this government, all governments, all politicians, all spies and all journalists, dragged beautifully through the slime.
Yes, AC buried GH, I’m certain of that.
And AC, who fought the BBC like his life depended on it, has managed, in a stupid and massively destructive manner, to get half of a kind of apology from the broadcaster over the whole Gilligan story.
Still cackling.
AC’s notoriety is also now assured, together with a huge personal financial fortune. That appearance in court, those diaries, will be sold for a massive sum of money, probably more than you and I will ever earn in our lifetimes. And the sexing-up stuff pinned on him has dropped away in the battle and now hangs on JIC chairman John Scarlett.
Checkmate Campbell. That’s what the cackling man seemed to be saying.I said: “Absolutely. There is no question, Campbell is a genius. At least twice as smart as the people he’s up against. None of them had a chance.”
Down the phone the voice said: “You’ve got to love him. I love him.”
The conversation ended.
EPILOGUE
There is only one problem with saying Campbell has won, which in a way he clearly has: it falls down because the Hutton inquiry has given us an incredibly damaging picture of a morally corrupt government which at base doesn’t give a shit about people in this country or abroad. Dead or alive, it’s all the same.
And the reason we know this is because Alistair Campbell decided to take on the BBC. Some fairly trivial points of accuracy were on his side. But the whole truth never was.
He helped make the New Labour party, which has dug the filthy shell-hole in which we now sit. And he has started to pull in the soil on top of us all, his friend and master Tony Blair included. Suffocation coming on.
Live by the sword, die by it, like the cliché says.
But worse for the govt. Not so much cause for cackling.
Friday, September 19, 2003
Brent East
Prologue
The odds were poison. Labour had a 13,000 majority in the London seat of Brent East. The Tories came a distant second and Lib Dems were nowhere. Labour owned that bit of the inner city.
In the early hours of this morning, Brent East fell to Sarah Teather of the Liberal Democrats with a 1,000 majority.
Defeat
Sitting here now, I´m trying to make sense of it. A piece of prime Labour real estate belongs to the Liberals. The analysis must be simple; thousands of people just said ´no more´.
For such a huge majority to be overturned is a VERY bad result for the government. They came, they saw, they were trampled into the dirt. I spoke to some Labour people yesterday as the polls opened, and they were sure the seat would hold. Maybe a reduced majority - say, one thousand at worst - but still theirs. Still a seat for them in parliament, still an MP for their team.
They threw some pretty big people into that place for the campaign, plenty of cabinet ministers, although not the man himself. They even got Ken Livingstone to back their candidate, Robert Evans, and say he was an anti-war, anti-new labour kind of man – ‘vote for me, I’m not really Labour’.
But not good enough.
The Lib Dems, desperately trying to sell themselves as the real party of opposition and as a real credible alternative to Labour, actually won.
It was quickly explained away and justified. First Labour; they insisted it was a typical by-election thing, voters delivering a strong message to the government, safe in the knowledge it would not results in that government being removed from office. A warning shot, mid-term blues.
And Labour people were soon on the airwaves insisting lessons would be learned, although that’s an obvious lie because at the same time Tony Blair was insisting retreat from his various agendas of reform and military occupation would be political suicide.
Then the Conservatives explained their terrible night away (they used to hold Brent local council) by saying they never expected to win in a traditionally left wing seat. Worth nothing perhaps to note it’s a traditionally left wing seat because it contains an incredible mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds. Not rich, either, which must deliver some kind of message to the Tories, at least if they want to listen.
And the Lib Dems, high on their crushing victory. Charles Kennedy assured us this was the START of something NEW and BIG for LIBERAL DEMOCRACY.
All arguments with some merit, but none crack the real nut. The real story is the miserable turnout, which is as damning to the government as the Lib Dem victory. In fact, it’s a painful for all the parties.
Less than 40 per cent voted, and the story from that seems clear: no one wants anything to do with politics in this country.
It´s so fucking tainted that ordinary folk - barbers and cab divers and check-out girls and whores and pickpockets - are too disgusted to bother with it.
Disgusted, and bored by the whole alienating process of picking some bastard who will lie to you and heap misery on top of your already miserable life.
Needless to say, not all politicians are like this. There are some good ones and it’s up to you to decide who these rare people are. Only one thing is clear. There are not enough of them and they will NEVER become Prime Minister.
Never.
Which means the real choice in British political democracy is the choice between a .45 revolver or sawn-off 410 for a suicide. The details will be different but brains still paint the wall.
EPILOGUE
The other day over the press announcement system in the press rooms, it was announced that the “Prime Ministers Statement is now available in the lower gallery”.
For a fraction of a second no one knew what the disembodied voice was talking about.
Someone said: “Maybe he’s decided to resign.” We all carried on chipping out our lousy stories.
The odds were poison. Labour had a 13,000 majority in the London seat of Brent East. The Tories came a distant second and Lib Dems were nowhere. Labour owned that bit of the inner city.
In the early hours of this morning, Brent East fell to Sarah Teather of the Liberal Democrats with a 1,000 majority.
Defeat
Sitting here now, I´m trying to make sense of it. A piece of prime Labour real estate belongs to the Liberals. The analysis must be simple; thousands of people just said ´no more´.
For such a huge majority to be overturned is a VERY bad result for the government. They came, they saw, they were trampled into the dirt. I spoke to some Labour people yesterday as the polls opened, and they were sure the seat would hold. Maybe a reduced majority - say, one thousand at worst - but still theirs. Still a seat for them in parliament, still an MP for their team.
They threw some pretty big people into that place for the campaign, plenty of cabinet ministers, although not the man himself. They even got Ken Livingstone to back their candidate, Robert Evans, and say he was an anti-war, anti-new labour kind of man – ‘vote for me, I’m not really Labour’.
But not good enough.
The Lib Dems, desperately trying to sell themselves as the real party of opposition and as a real credible alternative to Labour, actually won.
It was quickly explained away and justified. First Labour; they insisted it was a typical by-election thing, voters delivering a strong message to the government, safe in the knowledge it would not results in that government being removed from office. A warning shot, mid-term blues.
And Labour people were soon on the airwaves insisting lessons would be learned, although that’s an obvious lie because at the same time Tony Blair was insisting retreat from his various agendas of reform and military occupation would be political suicide.
Then the Conservatives explained their terrible night away (they used to hold Brent local council) by saying they never expected to win in a traditionally left wing seat. Worth nothing perhaps to note it’s a traditionally left wing seat because it contains an incredible mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds. Not rich, either, which must deliver some kind of message to the Tories, at least if they want to listen.
And the Lib Dems, high on their crushing victory. Charles Kennedy assured us this was the START of something NEW and BIG for LIBERAL DEMOCRACY.
All arguments with some merit, but none crack the real nut. The real story is the miserable turnout, which is as damning to the government as the Lib Dem victory. In fact, it’s a painful for all the parties.
Less than 40 per cent voted, and the story from that seems clear: no one wants anything to do with politics in this country.
It´s so fucking tainted that ordinary folk - barbers and cab divers and check-out girls and whores and pickpockets - are too disgusted to bother with it.
Disgusted, and bored by the whole alienating process of picking some bastard who will lie to you and heap misery on top of your already miserable life.
Needless to say, not all politicians are like this. There are some good ones and it’s up to you to decide who these rare people are. Only one thing is clear. There are not enough of them and they will NEVER become Prime Minister.
Never.
Which means the real choice in British political democracy is the choice between a .45 revolver or sawn-off 410 for a suicide. The details will be different but brains still paint the wall.
EPILOGUE
The other day over the press announcement system in the press rooms, it was announced that the “Prime Ministers Statement is now available in the lower gallery”.
For a fraction of a second no one knew what the disembodied voice was talking about.
Someone said: “Maybe he’s decided to resign.” We all carried on chipping out our lousy stories.
Thursday, September 18, 2003
The Glorious Dead
Prologue
Too sad to move this day. The usual nasty headache behind my eyes. I need to find a corner to hide in, away from all this.
The glorious dead
Westminster is no place to be if you're inclined to take life seriously.
Everywhere you look, armed thugs in uniform. Men happy by the power their trigger finger gives them, your life a breath away.
Police on every doorway. For our security and our peace of mind, you understand. For the terrorists. Violence ready to deal violently with the violent. It's the only thing these people understand. This is endless war.
Police standing along Whitehall as the weather turns; sky darkening too early, wind picking up. A storm on the way, rushing in from everywhere.
Outside Downing Street SW1 a war memorial in the middle of the busy road. Chiselled into stone 'The Glorious Dead'. If the Prime Minister ever walked out of his front door, to the end of the road and turned right, he'd be standing in front of it. But he doesn't leave his fortress like that. Security. Anything could happen if he went out into the world he runs, the one the rest of us live and die in.
Sirens and shouting and crushing mean expressions on every face. Women's calves stretched in high heels. Expensive shirts across middle-age spread. People trying to kill themselves on fast motorcycles in the traffic.
A Bentley convertible waiting at the lights, inside two men who robbed someone of hundreds of thousands of pounds and never even thought they'd done wrong.
Kids in school blazers and caps. Guy walking with arm wrapped around his girl. Bright coloured training shoes. CCTV cameras.
People get old in front of your eyes, turning grey and starting to die as you watch them walk by. This city.
I read though the papers in the press canteen mid-morning. Opposite, a journalist phoned some copy over to his paper just ahead of his 11am deadline. He ripped it straight from yesterday's Evening Standard, pretending like he got it from some 'source'.
He told them: "Blair is confident inspectors will uncover proof of Iraq's WMD programmes before the end of the month. The Prime Minister told aides he expects to be vindicated soon."
Then he lit a cigarette and smoked as if he'd earned it.
I had to have coffee with a press officer in the afternoon; Labour, for an MP. Nice enough, but another true believer in The Project. She thinks her team will win the Brent East by-election tonight but everyone knows that's wrong.
I talk half-hearted and don't pay much attention. Nor does she and that's all there is to it. Everyone wants to be a big player and not have to deal with the inconsequential.
Throughout the day news snaps on the wire:
10.32am - "Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix accused the US and UK today of 'over interpretting' information about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction."
1.32pm - "Detectives were today investigating allegations that three paratroopers gang-raped a teenage girl before taking photographs of the attack on their mobile phones."
2.16pm - "The British National Party is hoping to take a second council seat in a Stoke-on-Trent by-election."
3.34pm - "Eight American soldiers were reported to have been killed in an ambush in the Iraqi town of Khaldiyah today."
4.38pm - "The best friend of glamour model Jodie Marsh was murdered on her 22nd birthday by her boyfriend, the Old Bailey was told today."
4.50pm - "President George Bush today led hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from the path of Hurricane Isabel as it bore down on America's East coast."
And everywhere are statues of our illustrious leaders. The Great Men of the Past. In the blind eyes of each you look in vain for how many people they killed, but there is nothing. No answers. No one wants to remember that. The real past is something that disappears even as people swear they're thinking about it.
On a doorstep outside the first barricade that separates Downing Street from reality, a crazy skinhead sitting down, muttering over and over "we don't want you Blair looking for our interests. Get out."
Not shouting, just talking over to himself, rocking back and forth on his heels.
A tourist wondering why he can't walk up to the door of No 10, like he did years ago when he visited London. "It's a different world now, things have changed," the cop tells him. And maybe heís right.
Or maybe he's just an arsehole with shit-for-brains.
Epilogue
The dead, so often slaughtered so freely, and always in such glorious circumstances.
Too sad to move this day. The usual nasty headache behind my eyes. I need to find a corner to hide in, away from all this.
The glorious dead
Westminster is no place to be if you're inclined to take life seriously.
Everywhere you look, armed thugs in uniform. Men happy by the power their trigger finger gives them, your life a breath away.
Police on every doorway. For our security and our peace of mind, you understand. For the terrorists. Violence ready to deal violently with the violent. It's the only thing these people understand. This is endless war.
Police standing along Whitehall as the weather turns; sky darkening too early, wind picking up. A storm on the way, rushing in from everywhere.
Outside Downing Street SW1 a war memorial in the middle of the busy road. Chiselled into stone 'The Glorious Dead'. If the Prime Minister ever walked out of his front door, to the end of the road and turned right, he'd be standing in front of it. But he doesn't leave his fortress like that. Security. Anything could happen if he went out into the world he runs, the one the rest of us live and die in.
Sirens and shouting and crushing mean expressions on every face. Women's calves stretched in high heels. Expensive shirts across middle-age spread. People trying to kill themselves on fast motorcycles in the traffic.
A Bentley convertible waiting at the lights, inside two men who robbed someone of hundreds of thousands of pounds and never even thought they'd done wrong.
Kids in school blazers and caps. Guy walking with arm wrapped around his girl. Bright coloured training shoes. CCTV cameras.
People get old in front of your eyes, turning grey and starting to die as you watch them walk by. This city.
I read though the papers in the press canteen mid-morning. Opposite, a journalist phoned some copy over to his paper just ahead of his 11am deadline. He ripped it straight from yesterday's Evening Standard, pretending like he got it from some 'source'.
He told them: "Blair is confident inspectors will uncover proof of Iraq's WMD programmes before the end of the month. The Prime Minister told aides he expects to be vindicated soon."
Then he lit a cigarette and smoked as if he'd earned it.
I had to have coffee with a press officer in the afternoon; Labour, for an MP. Nice enough, but another true believer in The Project. She thinks her team will win the Brent East by-election tonight but everyone knows that's wrong.
I talk half-hearted and don't pay much attention. Nor does she and that's all there is to it. Everyone wants to be a big player and not have to deal with the inconsequential.
Throughout the day news snaps on the wire:
10.32am - "Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix accused the US and UK today of 'over interpretting' information about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction."
1.32pm - "Detectives were today investigating allegations that three paratroopers gang-raped a teenage girl before taking photographs of the attack on their mobile phones."
2.16pm - "The British National Party is hoping to take a second council seat in a Stoke-on-Trent by-election."
3.34pm - "Eight American soldiers were reported to have been killed in an ambush in the Iraqi town of Khaldiyah today."
4.38pm - "The best friend of glamour model Jodie Marsh was murdered on her 22nd birthday by her boyfriend, the Old Bailey was told today."
4.50pm - "President George Bush today led hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from the path of Hurricane Isabel as it bore down on America's East coast."
And everywhere are statues of our illustrious leaders. The Great Men of the Past. In the blind eyes of each you look in vain for how many people they killed, but there is nothing. No answers. No one wants to remember that. The real past is something that disappears even as people swear they're thinking about it.
On a doorstep outside the first barricade that separates Downing Street from reality, a crazy skinhead sitting down, muttering over and over "we don't want you Blair looking for our interests. Get out."
Not shouting, just talking over to himself, rocking back and forth on his heels.
A tourist wondering why he can't walk up to the door of No 10, like he did years ago when he visited London. "It's a different world now, things have changed," the cop tells him. And maybe heís right.
Or maybe he's just an arsehole with shit-for-brains.
Epilogue
The dead, so often slaughtered so freely, and always in such glorious circumstances.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Disgust
Prologue
There is nothing amusing about this place. What happens here, at the centre, is too ugly and serious for that.
Even the people who smile are probably just thinking about robbing a child or cutting a puppy’s throat, just to see what it sounds like.
Complete degeneration
As if there was any doubt, it’s now clear only grim realities are left. There is no reason for optimism. There are no grounds for faith.
Man does not have a better nature and he does not have a conscience.
Proof enough came from the Prime Minster today. He made it clear that even the lowest expectations are too high for him. Think he’s gone low, well, fuck, he’s the Prime Minster – a talented man – and he can go lower if he wants. He makes the laws, after all.
Noon. Tony Blair at the dispatch box for PMQs, surrounded by the empty-headed fools so few people actually bother to vote for. They sit, wasting time, grunting.
Most of the questions were stupid, which is only to be expected. But there was one clear and true ray of light.
Blair was asked why he didn´t bother to tell the public that our intelligence services had said Iraq posed no nuclear threat to the country.
He was asked why he said we were 45 minutes from chemical doom but did not bother to not tell us all that his experts had warned him terrorism would INCREASE if the invasion of Iraq went ahead.
The question came from Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Doubtless a man with faults at the head of a faulty party. Regardless, that’s not the issue here. The thing that matters is the Prime Minister’s answer.
This man we are supposed to trust and respect. This man who commands legions. This man with his finger on the button.
Blair´s answer was to say that foreign policy would be terrible if the Lib Dems were ever elected. Really, that’s what he said. I know because I saw it once and then I watched it again, in dumb horror, on the news. It was on the TV.
It’s hard to believe he had the guts to give such an idiots response to a serious question in public. It was the dirtiest kind of infectious filth.
The Prime Minister took us into a war that has left at least 8,000 people dead, by pretending our country faced an immediate, massive risk, when in fact he KNEW going to war would increase the chances we would be brutally killed or maimed in our own country.
None of this is good enough. He´s the Prime Minister, for fuck´s sake - people are dying for fuck´s sake, hundred of bodies rotting in the heat - and he comes out with that kind of shit. There was no more comeback. PMQs is an absurd theatre and has nothing to do with questioning the head of government or holding him to account. It’s just a game.
EPILOGUE
Even a revolution wouldn’t bring an end to this misery. It’s cockroaches that survive the nuclear attack. Just another reason to give up.
There is nothing amusing about this place. What happens here, at the centre, is too ugly and serious for that.
Even the people who smile are probably just thinking about robbing a child or cutting a puppy’s throat, just to see what it sounds like.
Complete degeneration
As if there was any doubt, it’s now clear only grim realities are left. There is no reason for optimism. There are no grounds for faith.
Man does not have a better nature and he does not have a conscience.
Proof enough came from the Prime Minster today. He made it clear that even the lowest expectations are too high for him. Think he’s gone low, well, fuck, he’s the Prime Minster – a talented man – and he can go lower if he wants. He makes the laws, after all.
Noon. Tony Blair at the dispatch box for PMQs, surrounded by the empty-headed fools so few people actually bother to vote for. They sit, wasting time, grunting.
Most of the questions were stupid, which is only to be expected. But there was one clear and true ray of light.
Blair was asked why he didn´t bother to tell the public that our intelligence services had said Iraq posed no nuclear threat to the country.
He was asked why he said we were 45 minutes from chemical doom but did not bother to not tell us all that his experts had warned him terrorism would INCREASE if the invasion of Iraq went ahead.
The question came from Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Doubtless a man with faults at the head of a faulty party. Regardless, that’s not the issue here. The thing that matters is the Prime Minister’s answer.
This man we are supposed to trust and respect. This man who commands legions. This man with his finger on the button.
Blair´s answer was to say that foreign policy would be terrible if the Lib Dems were ever elected. Really, that’s what he said. I know because I saw it once and then I watched it again, in dumb horror, on the news. It was on the TV.
It’s hard to believe he had the guts to give such an idiots response to a serious question in public. It was the dirtiest kind of infectious filth.
The Prime Minister took us into a war that has left at least 8,000 people dead, by pretending our country faced an immediate, massive risk, when in fact he KNEW going to war would increase the chances we would be brutally killed or maimed in our own country.
None of this is good enough. He´s the Prime Minister, for fuck´s sake - people are dying for fuck´s sake, hundred of bodies rotting in the heat - and he comes out with that kind of shit. There was no more comeback. PMQs is an absurd theatre and has nothing to do with questioning the head of government or holding him to account. It’s just a game.
EPILOGUE
Even a revolution wouldn’t bring an end to this misery. It’s cockroaches that survive the nuclear attack. Just another reason to give up.
Monday, September 15, 2003
Making Enemies
Prologue
In this city, beautiful women are ghosts. They pass by quickly, instantly lost to you for the rest of time. The loneliness is easier if you end the heartbreak before it really takes hold: force the thought into a corner and suffocate the fucking thing.
Wander up the road alone, head down and fading fast. Another unconscious body caught in an ebbing tide, brutal and ugly but still alive. What the hell, this is war after all.
Long walk off a short cliff
It's hard to believe Michael Meacher can have changed all that much since he was a member of the government. He was never really one of them, one of the real players chosen by Blair to help with the righteous and urgent task of digging our collective grave.
No, a wealthy man who sued a newspaper for calling him middle-class is not really the stuff of inner-circle leadership. Someone capable of that pointless act has to be innocent of the vicious animal instincts of a politician who goes ALL the way. Instead it suggests a man dealing with abstract intellectual argument, someone who doesn’t really have a handle on the media consequences of his actions. A PR fool; a very rare thing in Westminster and Whitehall.
But Meacher was close enough to get a seat at the big table, Anthony Blair's choice for environment minister: Meacher was closer to the center than most full-time pro politicians get even in drunken dreams. He had made it.
Back then he was a well-dressed 60-something-year-old with a keen interesting most things. Graying hair, glasses, a wine-drinkers nose.
And an unusual reputation for integrity. Criticism was generally fond and not really personal in the shiv-to-the-ribs sense.
Mainly he was seen as too of intellect. Not quite amenable enough to the greasy compromises of real politics, the small betrayals that allow this place to limp, humpbacked and grimacing, through another day. He was too abstract, wanting too often the politically impractical.
Today he is the same well-dressed 60-something-year-old with a keen interest in most things. Graying hair, glasses. The same disregard for real politick.
But two things are different now. More blood vessels have burst across that nose and the skin beneath his eyes.
And politically, he is teetering on the brink of the deep pit reserved for the damned, a pack of vengeful trolls promising to pull out his heart unless he jumps right in. Stuck between two devils and a thousand deep-cold seas.
If only he had suffocated that thought, the one that led him to this shit position! Aborted the hateful thing before it grew strength, before it picked up its own momentum, question leading to question, further into the labyrinth. Stop at the entrance, for the love of God!
The sign is clear and shrieks in neon letters ‘abandon hope all passing through this cursed door’.
Meacher, fool, goes for a peek and then wanders in. Graying hair, glasses. Too of intellect. Somehow blind to how this will play in papers worldwide as it spreads as fire across those newswires.
I mean; people dived out of windows for christsakes, substituting living hell for certain death because it was faster, less painful.
I mean; hundreds of police and fire fighters ran into those collapsing buildings that fine September morning, only to come out months later after millions of tonnes of concrete and steel had finally been moved from on top of their incinerated remains.
I mean; it happened on the TV, a plane smashes into a tower of the World Trade Centre in New York. And then another one hits the second tower. Close to three thousand people murdered.
In the mainstream world there are no doubts, not really. It soon turns out the attacks were the work of terrorists bent on destroying freedom and civilisation. Such attacks on the most powerful country in the world, its only superpower, could not go unavenged. Gloves would be pulled off.
And so it came, the terrorist leaders were in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was attacked, an evil regime replaced, the world a better place for it. A blow for the forces of good against the forces of the devil, Amen.
Then another war, this time in Iraq. Bad men bound up in terrorism, part of an axis of evil, weapons of mass destruction. Mustard Gas, VX. Thousands of innocent, civilised people less than an hour from horrible lingering deaths, burned lungs, coughing blood, bodies in spasm. Ballistic missiles, insanity, real-and-present dangers. Must be dealt with before another attack is launched on the civilised world. People on our side die but the battle for freedom continues and, etc etc.
I mean; almost 3,000 people died on that day in September 2001. Each one an unwitting, innocent - and above all, American - hero who must not be defamed.
It's a simple horror story for our times, something to remind us of frail morality. Something we can all be scared of. A daily dose of fear and a simple equation even a fool can understand; no room for gray. With good and against evil, with us or against us. Friend or foe.
But not everyone accepted this; the free thinkers, the conspiracy theorists, those who sometimes get bored with paddling in the shallows and go for a plunge in the dark depths.
People started asking questions about things which don't seem to add up: about how three hijacked planes can go missing for so long in US airspace, the most protected airspace in the world; about how unarmed, incompetent amateur pilots can fly these planes into a major landmark and the Pentagon, heart of the US defence establishment; about how US intelligence services knew something like this was possible but utterly failed to do anything to stop it.
And there are more, smaller, technical arguments about US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking of a missile, not a plane, hitting the Pentagon, about plane timetables and CCTV footage, about a dead ‘terrorist’ pilot being alive and well and working on an airline in the Middle East, about intact passports being quickly found at the scene of all that utter devastation.
Most of this stuff was reported in the media; the same mainstream media derided by so many of these free-thinkers, conspiracy theorists and deep-water swimmers as too complacent and compliant to the interests of the Right People. Michael Meacher’s problem is that he is one of those deep-divers. He read this stuff in the news. He read too much. It's something he does, keeping things that interest him in a big archive, painstakingly catalogued and filed.
So he knew of a document called Rebuilding America's Defences, written in September 2000 by a group calling itself Project for the New American Century.
Sinister name, wide-reaching sinister vision and powerful people; a toxic mix. Behind the document; Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and others.
It contains references to a ‘worldwide command and control system’ to see off threats from dangerous regimes (Syria, N Korea, Iran). It contains comments about 'A new and catastrophic event like a new Pearl Harbour’ as likely to speed up plans for continued and increased US dominance.
And Meacher knew there are questions to ask about unchecked visa applications to the US. He knew a 1999 US intel report spoke of al-Qaida suicide bombers crashing a plane full of high explosives into American targets.
He knew no fighter planes were scrambled for intercept from the base closest to the Washington, with those that did get up missing intercepts with the doomed airliners by a matter of minutes. He knew ex-Federal crime prosecutor John Loftus had said it was impossible for the CIA or FBI to claim it was incompetence which allowed the attackers to hit their targets.
And as an environment minister he knew about supply and demand of oil and gas supplies.
So this respectable, mainstream politician starts putting various bits-and-pieces together and decides there is something being widely ignored in all of this: a clear and proud US plan for global supremacy coupled with a devastating incident that 'changes the world' and provides the direct justification for a blank-cheque, open-ended 'war on terror'.
Justification for attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq. Justification for Bush to talk repeatedly of “a new kind of war” of “not waiting for further attacks on our citizens. We are striking our enemies before they can strike us again”.
September 11 2001 “offered an extremely convenient pretext” to put US domination plans “into action”, Meacher decided. In an article which appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, September 6, he wrote of events surrounding the attacks of two years earlier as a 'political smokescreen'.
He stated: “The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the 'global war on terror' has all the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.”
Meacher is not a conspiracy theorist. He is inclined to believe it was a monumental fuck-up that led to the attackers success. But he likes tidiness and would prefer to see the i's dotted and the t's crossed. He wants to see further investigation, even if only to end fears of conspiracy.
He also accepted the overwhelming likelihood such investigation will never occur. In the absence of that, he just wanted to say what he thought the evidence showed; that Sept 11 is being used as a convenient justification for various US policies which actually do not relate to the event itself.
Many others have said the same thing; it is not a new argument. What was new about is that this time it was coming from the pen of a man who used to be in government, a man who voted FOR the war in Iraq and who still thinks that war is morally justified because Saddam Hussein was a corrupt mass-murderer who best understood violence and HAD to be dealt with using armored brigades and aircraft carrier groups.
Meacher was respected. From the Big table. A success story, although one fallen to the fringes of the game having resigned from the government and facing the potential, easy insignificance of the backbenches. But then he decided to make his unease public.
That day, if you believe many people in Westminster, Meacher put a gun to the head of his credible political career and pulled the trigger twice. Then one more time, just to make sure it was dead.
The man himself didn't really know what reaction there had been. He realized after the article was published that it could undermine his work on opposing GM crops by damaging his mainstream credibility.
That article was his long walk off a short cliff. It was his failure to understand that for your own grim survival in this war, it can be better to not to ask too many questions about the wrong things. Thoughts may enter your head, but some of them need to be annihilated quickly. Choked in a dark alley, for your own comfort and convenience.
Right or wrong, Michael Meacher will now forever be known in t he world media as the man who said America 'deliberately allowed' Sept 11 to happen, even though he didn't say that.
But this is war, so who cares a damn about details, right?
Epilogue
None of this takes us any further forward. No revelations in these words. What was the goddamned point? More time wasted, nothing proved except that the easiest thing is to do what's expected of you; eat shit and smile. Everyone knows that anyway.
In this city, beautiful women are ghosts. They pass by quickly, instantly lost to you for the rest of time. The loneliness is easier if you end the heartbreak before it really takes hold: force the thought into a corner and suffocate the fucking thing.
Wander up the road alone, head down and fading fast. Another unconscious body caught in an ebbing tide, brutal and ugly but still alive. What the hell, this is war after all.
Long walk off a short cliff
It's hard to believe Michael Meacher can have changed all that much since he was a member of the government. He was never really one of them, one of the real players chosen by Blair to help with the righteous and urgent task of digging our collective grave.
No, a wealthy man who sued a newspaper for calling him middle-class is not really the stuff of inner-circle leadership. Someone capable of that pointless act has to be innocent of the vicious animal instincts of a politician who goes ALL the way. Instead it suggests a man dealing with abstract intellectual argument, someone who doesn’t really have a handle on the media consequences of his actions. A PR fool; a very rare thing in Westminster and Whitehall.
But Meacher was close enough to get a seat at the big table, Anthony Blair's choice for environment minister: Meacher was closer to the center than most full-time pro politicians get even in drunken dreams. He had made it.Back then he was a well-dressed 60-something-year-old with a keen interesting most things. Graying hair, glasses, a wine-drinkers nose.
And an unusual reputation for integrity. Criticism was generally fond and not really personal in the shiv-to-the-ribs sense.
Mainly he was seen as too of intellect. Not quite amenable enough to the greasy compromises of real politics, the small betrayals that allow this place to limp, humpbacked and grimacing, through another day. He was too abstract, wanting too often the politically impractical.
Today he is the same well-dressed 60-something-year-old with a keen interest in most things. Graying hair, glasses. The same disregard for real politick.
But two things are different now. More blood vessels have burst across that nose and the skin beneath his eyes.
And politically, he is teetering on the brink of the deep pit reserved for the damned, a pack of vengeful trolls promising to pull out his heart unless he jumps right in. Stuck between two devils and a thousand deep-cold seas.
If only he had suffocated that thought, the one that led him to this shit position! Aborted the hateful thing before it grew strength, before it picked up its own momentum, question leading to question, further into the labyrinth. Stop at the entrance, for the love of God!
The sign is clear and shrieks in neon letters ‘abandon hope all passing through this cursed door’.
Meacher, fool, goes for a peek and then wanders in. Graying hair, glasses. Too of intellect. Somehow blind to how this will play in papers worldwide as it spreads as fire across those newswires.
I mean; people dived out of windows for christsakes, substituting living hell for certain death because it was faster, less painful.
I mean; hundreds of police and fire fighters ran into those collapsing buildings that fine September morning, only to come out months later after millions of tonnes of concrete and steel had finally been moved from on top of their incinerated remains.
I mean; it happened on the TV, a plane smashes into a tower of the World Trade Centre in New York. And then another one hits the second tower. Close to three thousand people murdered.
In the mainstream world there are no doubts, not really. It soon turns out the attacks were the work of terrorists bent on destroying freedom and civilisation. Such attacks on the most powerful country in the world, its only superpower, could not go unavenged. Gloves would be pulled off.
And so it came, the terrorist leaders were in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was attacked, an evil regime replaced, the world a better place for it. A blow for the forces of good against the forces of the devil, Amen.
Then another war, this time in Iraq. Bad men bound up in terrorism, part of an axis of evil, weapons of mass destruction. Mustard Gas, VX. Thousands of innocent, civilised people less than an hour from horrible lingering deaths, burned lungs, coughing blood, bodies in spasm. Ballistic missiles, insanity, real-and-present dangers. Must be dealt with before another attack is launched on the civilised world. People on our side die but the battle for freedom continues and, etc etc.
I mean; almost 3,000 people died on that day in September 2001. Each one an unwitting, innocent - and above all, American - hero who must not be defamed.
It's a simple horror story for our times, something to remind us of frail morality. Something we can all be scared of. A daily dose of fear and a simple equation even a fool can understand; no room for gray. With good and against evil, with us or against us. Friend or foe.
But not everyone accepted this; the free thinkers, the conspiracy theorists, those who sometimes get bored with paddling in the shallows and go for a plunge in the dark depths.
People started asking questions about things which don't seem to add up: about how three hijacked planes can go missing for so long in US airspace, the most protected airspace in the world; about how unarmed, incompetent amateur pilots can fly these planes into a major landmark and the Pentagon, heart of the US defence establishment; about how US intelligence services knew something like this was possible but utterly failed to do anything to stop it.
And there are more, smaller, technical arguments about US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking of a missile, not a plane, hitting the Pentagon, about plane timetables and CCTV footage, about a dead ‘terrorist’ pilot being alive and well and working on an airline in the Middle East, about intact passports being quickly found at the scene of all that utter devastation.
Most of this stuff was reported in the media; the same mainstream media derided by so many of these free-thinkers, conspiracy theorists and deep-water swimmers as too complacent and compliant to the interests of the Right People. Michael Meacher’s problem is that he is one of those deep-divers. He read this stuff in the news. He read too much. It's something he does, keeping things that interest him in a big archive, painstakingly catalogued and filed.
So he knew of a document called Rebuilding America's Defences, written in September 2000 by a group calling itself Project for the New American Century.
Sinister name, wide-reaching sinister vision and powerful people; a toxic mix. Behind the document; Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and others.
It contains references to a ‘worldwide command and control system’ to see off threats from dangerous regimes (Syria, N Korea, Iran). It contains comments about 'A new and catastrophic event like a new Pearl Harbour’ as likely to speed up plans for continued and increased US dominance.
And Meacher knew there are questions to ask about unchecked visa applications to the US. He knew a 1999 US intel report spoke of al-Qaida suicide bombers crashing a plane full of high explosives into American targets.
He knew no fighter planes were scrambled for intercept from the base closest to the Washington, with those that did get up missing intercepts with the doomed airliners by a matter of minutes. He knew ex-Federal crime prosecutor John Loftus had said it was impossible for the CIA or FBI to claim it was incompetence which allowed the attackers to hit their targets.
And as an environment minister he knew about supply and demand of oil and gas supplies.
So this respectable, mainstream politician starts putting various bits-and-pieces together and decides there is something being widely ignored in all of this: a clear and proud US plan for global supremacy coupled with a devastating incident that 'changes the world' and provides the direct justification for a blank-cheque, open-ended 'war on terror'.
Justification for attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq. Justification for Bush to talk repeatedly of “a new kind of war” of “not waiting for further attacks on our citizens. We are striking our enemies before they can strike us again”.
September 11 2001 “offered an extremely convenient pretext” to put US domination plans “into action”, Meacher decided. In an article which appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, September 6, he wrote of events surrounding the attacks of two years earlier as a 'political smokescreen'.
He stated: “The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the 'global war on terror' has all the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.”
Meacher is not a conspiracy theorist. He is inclined to believe it was a monumental fuck-up that led to the attackers success. But he likes tidiness and would prefer to see the i's dotted and the t's crossed. He wants to see further investigation, even if only to end fears of conspiracy.
He also accepted the overwhelming likelihood such investigation will never occur. In the absence of that, he just wanted to say what he thought the evidence showed; that Sept 11 is being used as a convenient justification for various US policies which actually do not relate to the event itself.
Many others have said the same thing; it is not a new argument. What was new about is that this time it was coming from the pen of a man who used to be in government, a man who voted FOR the war in Iraq and who still thinks that war is morally justified because Saddam Hussein was a corrupt mass-murderer who best understood violence and HAD to be dealt with using armored brigades and aircraft carrier groups.
Meacher was respected. From the Big table. A success story, although one fallen to the fringes of the game having resigned from the government and facing the potential, easy insignificance of the backbenches. But then he decided to make his unease public.
That day, if you believe many people in Westminster, Meacher put a gun to the head of his credible political career and pulled the trigger twice. Then one more time, just to make sure it was dead.
The man himself didn't really know what reaction there had been. He realized after the article was published that it could undermine his work on opposing GM crops by damaging his mainstream credibility.
That article was his long walk off a short cliff. It was his failure to understand that for your own grim survival in this war, it can be better to not to ask too many questions about the wrong things. Thoughts may enter your head, but some of them need to be annihilated quickly. Choked in a dark alley, for your own comfort and convenience.
Right or wrong, Michael Meacher will now forever be known in t he world media as the man who said America 'deliberately allowed' Sept 11 to happen, even though he didn't say that.
But this is war, so who cares a damn about details, right?
Epilogue
None of this takes us any further forward. No revelations in these words. What was the goddamned point? More time wasted, nothing proved except that the easiest thing is to do what's expected of you; eat shit and smile. Everyone knows that anyway.
Monday, September 01, 2003
Bored Then Cleavage
PROLOGUE
Sitting in a media talk for five bored, desperate journalists by three bored, make-work press officers.
The Woman:
The briefing finished fast but not fast enough and it was turgid, except for the woman.
Nothing in their words really. Just reams of crap about how schools are getting better despite all evidence to the contrary.
But in the interests of Truth, what happened was; she wore a tight green jumper with plunging neckline. Cropped above the waistline of her tight black trousers.
A press officer from the Department for Education and Skills. Pretty with pulled back brown hair, long in a pony tail.
That jumper, opal, dipping sharply in a long v-neck.
Such a contrast to the two men in suits – one with too many bad teeth, the other an on-going confidence crisis – who followed her along.
She leaned forward as she spoke, exposed smooth white curved skin.
For the sake of my self-respect and her personal dignity, I looked her carefully in the eye. But in the interests of journalism and noting all the facts, I made all necessary observations. Purely professional.
The other lobby reporters present were less circumspect, letches all. A blow to feminism. Some of them are shameless, really. I was ashamed to know what they were thinking. I think she knew too. I’m sure she did.
I tried to concentrate, and managed enough to ask how I could explain away to the great unwashed the fact teachers are being laid off; and timetables cut; and classes made bigger; and etc.
She gave me some nice enough lines. A young press officer, not wanting to get out of her depth, perhaps only partly understanding there is NO depth in the Lobby. One reporter, bored, got up and walked away.
She said, to paraphrase slightly: “no crisis, all media lies,” before adding in a slight contradiction: “there are some ‘issues’ [that is; problems, in Whitehall speak] but we are working to stop them being ‘issues’ this year.”
Which cleared that up. She was young – mid to late 20s – and slim but curvy.
Epilogue:
At the end of the briefing I smiled at her, she smiled back, and that little piece of human contact cheered a day immeasurably. A day which had started with feelings of utter disgust at the whole world, from God on down.
Sitting in a media talk for five bored, desperate journalists by three bored, make-work press officers.
The Woman:
The briefing finished fast but not fast enough and it was turgid, except for the woman.
Nothing in their words really. Just reams of crap about how schools are getting better despite all evidence to the contrary.
But in the interests of Truth, what happened was; she wore a tight green jumper with plunging neckline. Cropped above the waistline of her tight black trousers.
A press officer from the Department for Education and Skills. Pretty with pulled back brown hair, long in a pony tail.
That jumper, opal, dipping sharply in a long v-neck.
Such a contrast to the two men in suits – one with too many bad teeth, the other an on-going confidence crisis – who followed her along.
She leaned forward as she spoke, exposed smooth white curved skin.
For the sake of my self-respect and her personal dignity, I looked her carefully in the eye. But in the interests of journalism and noting all the facts, I made all necessary observations. Purely professional.
The other lobby reporters present were less circumspect, letches all. A blow to feminism. Some of them are shameless, really. I was ashamed to know what they were thinking. I think she knew too. I’m sure she did.
I tried to concentrate, and managed enough to ask how I could explain away to the great unwashed the fact teachers are being laid off; and timetables cut; and classes made bigger; and etc.
She gave me some nice enough lines. A young press officer, not wanting to get out of her depth, perhaps only partly understanding there is NO depth in the Lobby. One reporter, bored, got up and walked away.
She said, to paraphrase slightly: “no crisis, all media lies,” before adding in a slight contradiction: “there are some ‘issues’ [that is; problems, in Whitehall speak] but we are working to stop them being ‘issues’ this year.”
Which cleared that up. She was young – mid to late 20s – and slim but curvy.
Epilogue:
At the end of the briefing I smiled at her, she smiled back, and that little piece of human contact cheered a day immeasurably. A day which had started with feelings of utter disgust at the whole world, from God on down.
Friday, August 29, 2003
The Hounds Of Hell
PROLOGUE
Dark outside. Powercut wiped-out London. Much talk of 'chaos' and ‘terror’. There is fear in the air but it's about more than a disrupted tube-ride.
Just lights from the passing cars. Rain falling, the sounds it makes under tyres on wet roads. The sky is beautiful. Heavy deep grey clouds.
But everywhere, unease. It’s not the electricity thing. The bad feelings run deeper than that.
I´m stuck in the office, with little hope of getting out soon. Power cut means a long time before the tube runs. Busses too busy to even think of. Too much time to think. I could be here for the night.
The best thing about being in The Central Office is that there is Power. Electricity. Must ensure the news can get out, no matter what happens in this city.
This bunker is as close to the centre of the world and immoral immortality as a mortal fool will ever get.
The lights are on, so are both TVs. I flip between Sky, C4, BBC24, CNN. Seeing what´s up, what everyone made of the day. Of Blair. To find out why there is no such thing as paranoia.
HOUNDS OF HELL
I´ve decided no shit will stick. Not to Blair anyway, not in the obvious sense of the term. Maybe just a smell in the air to follow him around. Something left on his shoes and clothes, but not his skin, not in his teeth.
There is no way to blame him for Kelly´s death. That was Kelly´s responsibility, I´m almost certain of that. Naming him had nothing to do with it: the Press would have hunted him down like a lame animal regardless. But that´s not the point.
The government DIDN’T have to make him public. Blair wanted to because he thought it would get him off the rusting knife he is impaled on. They figured, made public, Kelly would deny the comments he DID make on the faked-up threat. But even that is just side-salad, incidental to the nut of the issue.
Closer to it is the fact Downing Street DID forceably exaggerate the issue of Iraq. It got boring, unremarkable and old stuff from the intelligence services, which failed to make their grade. They were told to come up with better; told how to really SELL the idea that we could all be killed in short-order by a homicidal maniac with his finger on the button.
But as Blair said, even the re-written, hyper, version of the dossier was cleared by the Joint Intelligence Committee. Scarlett said as much, although lots of what he said made no sense.
He claimed there were indications WMD could be launched in 20 minutes. Why did that one stay out of the dossier? Because it´s all just detail and didn´t matter to the thrust of the argument. Three-quarters of an hour is good enough for the headlines. And maybe 20 minutes would have made more incredulous WMD experts come out sooner and say it was all obvious lies, undermining the government BEFORE it got the war. No, 45 minutes was a safer bet but, as the government has learned, just not quite safe enough. If they’d said doom was “24 hours away”, the Kelly story would never have broken and all the cheese eaters would watch their televisions and think they were happy.
What must be remembered when dealing with these people is that NONE of what they at the Hutton Inquiry has been said under oath. So of course Blair can say he was “personally” involved in making sure Kelly’s name got out, despite claiming at the time of his death that he had no involvement whatsoever.
The same principle holds for Scarlett, and then some. The man is a spy so would probably argue he can lie in any court, under any oath, to any man or woman, if he deems it is in the national interest. His licence-to-kill the truth; killing aforethought is murder and illegal, but not always, not if it´s for The Man; not if you´ve got permission from The Right people who sign the checks and see we all sleep safe at night. Oh no.
You get closer to the centre of the whole Hutton issue when you realise the idea behind the dossier rewrite was to SELL the idea of a war. Very specifically.
Not, as Blair claims, to sell the idea of a real threat which could be dealt with by the United Nations. That was never the question and he knows it, even though he´ll pretend not to. The Prime Minister even admitted as much by making clear there was no intention to publish the dossier, but then he had a phone conversation with the United States President in which they decided on a strategy over Iraq.
And that strategy was regime change. Bush never claimed otherwise, at least not to begin with. Bush was never going to be mollified by the UN, by inspections. He said REGIME CHANGE and that is what there was going to be. There was never a chance for the peaceful overthrow of that sorry country’s foul leaders.
So the hyped dossier was a war sales trick, and a big seller. But, as noted, the trick was cleared by the spies.
Which leads to the real fucking nut. Who are these people, who do they work for? Why does anyone listen to them when espionage is their business? When, like the CIA, they have a track record of deceit and failure?
How can it be a defense for the man Britain elected Prime Minister to say that, ´well there may be no real weapons of mass destruction threatening our troops in Cyprus, threatening you and your children and your dog and its fleas, BUT I was told there was deadly danger by some utterly disreputable men with an agenda and no real sources at all.´
That is his argument, and it cannot be accepted as good enough.
It comes down to him in effect admitting there has been a ´mistake´ -and clearly there has - but that is was someone else’s fault.
It comes down to him saying he was a fool for believing fools. But he KNEW they were fools and helped them be MORE FOOLISH. He helped convince them of something they themselves were unsure of. And then he let them convince him right back because, like Bush, he is a man with a mission.
He believes he is Right. Certainly. No room for doubt. No second thoughts. No sneaking suspicions. Just the Sole Truth. The Big Answer.
Which brings us all back to the start, somehow. Blair is not guilty, I can see and hear that much. But he´s also guilty as hell, that´s for sure. That’s what all the shit puddled at his feet tells us, the stuff that doesn’t quite stick but that he walks on and in.
But does any of this even matter? Saddam was a killer, a genocidal monster. He should have been dealt with and that´s what´s happened. That is one of Blair´s Absolute Beliefs. That the END makes the RATIONALE nothing more than a matter of nuance and friendly debate.
Saddam had to go. That’s the bottom-line and that happened. Why fight among ourselves about our degree of Rightness?
The trouble with this argument, despite its elements of truth, is that it is wrong. If Hussein was bad enough to deal with in a violent and dishonest way, why not do so years ago, instead of letting him kill more innocents and then deciding to take action, instead of sanctions and extended misery for the Iraqis?
And if he needed to be dealt with, does that not require - for the sake of legitimacy in the very country being simultaneously freed AND occupied - a genuine international mandate?
I´m certain Iraqis and so many more people would be less pissed off if there had been a genuine UN solution, even if that meant war, which it certainly could have IF the issue had been truly about weapons and he had defied the inspectors. This UN war would have included a post-war plan and cash-on-the-line for reconstruction.
But it was not about weapons. It was about international chancers looking for legit reasons to do what they wanted in the face of good sense.
The whole Hutton inquiry is packed with details and confusing. Static everywhere, static and commentary and agendas and fools. Too much context, too much background.
But anyone with sense must get a feeling of unease from the whole thing. That´s because it´s a long walk through a dark night. It´s walking through a midnight graveyard: you know in your bones something isn’t right, you suspect foul play somewhere.
Only it won´t be the ghost you fear that gets you - there´s no such thing as evil spirits, after all. The trouble is, while you´re distracted with irrational thoughts, you´ll stop paying attention to what really matters. Oh yes: The trouble is, you´ll fall in a hole some bastard dug on purpose, but how can anyone prove the spade-man was out to get you.
You’ll fall in his hole, break your legs and lie unconscious to die a lingering death from exposure, your body eaten by the stray cats and worms before it´s even cold, before anyone even notices you never got home.
We´re all wandering alone through that fucking mundane hell-hole now, but we´ll all end up in The Pit together. We´re stuck in the grip of the grimmest days. Not in the belly of the beast, but fast on our way.So, the bell strikes as Big Ben hits 9pm. Some lights returned to outside. My headache is back. And my legs ache.
POSTSCRIPT;
The next morning now. Cold light of day and the electric is back. But the darkness is still everywhere.
Dark outside. Powercut wiped-out London. Much talk of 'chaos' and ‘terror’. There is fear in the air but it's about more than a disrupted tube-ride.
Just lights from the passing cars. Rain falling, the sounds it makes under tyres on wet roads. The sky is beautiful. Heavy deep grey clouds.
But everywhere, unease. It’s not the electricity thing. The bad feelings run deeper than that.
I´m stuck in the office, with little hope of getting out soon. Power cut means a long time before the tube runs. Busses too busy to even think of. Too much time to think. I could be here for the night.
The best thing about being in The Central Office is that there is Power. Electricity. Must ensure the news can get out, no matter what happens in this city.
This bunker is as close to the centre of the world and immoral immortality as a mortal fool will ever get.
The lights are on, so are both TVs. I flip between Sky, C4, BBC24, CNN. Seeing what´s up, what everyone made of the day. Of Blair. To find out why there is no such thing as paranoia.
HOUNDS OF HELL
I´ve decided no shit will stick. Not to Blair anyway, not in the obvious sense of the term. Maybe just a smell in the air to follow him around. Something left on his shoes and clothes, but not his skin, not in his teeth.
There is no way to blame him for Kelly´s death. That was Kelly´s responsibility, I´m almost certain of that. Naming him had nothing to do with it: the Press would have hunted him down like a lame animal regardless. But that´s not the point.
The government DIDN’T have to make him public. Blair wanted to because he thought it would get him off the rusting knife he is impaled on. They figured, made public, Kelly would deny the comments he DID make on the faked-up threat. But even that is just side-salad, incidental to the nut of the issue.
Closer to it is the fact Downing Street DID forceably exaggerate the issue of Iraq. It got boring, unremarkable and old stuff from the intelligence services, which failed to make their grade. They were told to come up with better; told how to really SELL the idea that we could all be killed in short-order by a homicidal maniac with his finger on the button.
But as Blair said, even the re-written, hyper, version of the dossier was cleared by the Joint Intelligence Committee. Scarlett said as much, although lots of what he said made no sense.
He claimed there were indications WMD could be launched in 20 minutes. Why did that one stay out of the dossier? Because it´s all just detail and didn´t matter to the thrust of the argument. Three-quarters of an hour is good enough for the headlines. And maybe 20 minutes would have made more incredulous WMD experts come out sooner and say it was all obvious lies, undermining the government BEFORE it got the war. No, 45 minutes was a safer bet but, as the government has learned, just not quite safe enough. If they’d said doom was “24 hours away”, the Kelly story would never have broken and all the cheese eaters would watch their televisions and think they were happy.
What must be remembered when dealing with these people is that NONE of what they at the Hutton Inquiry has been said under oath. So of course Blair can say he was “personally” involved in making sure Kelly’s name got out, despite claiming at the time of his death that he had no involvement whatsoever.
The same principle holds for Scarlett, and then some. The man is a spy so would probably argue he can lie in any court, under any oath, to any man or woman, if he deems it is in the national interest. His licence-to-kill the truth; killing aforethought is murder and illegal, but not always, not if it´s for The Man; not if you´ve got permission from The Right people who sign the checks and see we all sleep safe at night. Oh no.
You get closer to the centre of the whole Hutton issue when you realise the idea behind the dossier rewrite was to SELL the idea of a war. Very specifically.
Not, as Blair claims, to sell the idea of a real threat which could be dealt with by the United Nations. That was never the question and he knows it, even though he´ll pretend not to. The Prime Minister even admitted as much by making clear there was no intention to publish the dossier, but then he had a phone conversation with the United States President in which they decided on a strategy over Iraq.
And that strategy was regime change. Bush never claimed otherwise, at least not to begin with. Bush was never going to be mollified by the UN, by inspections. He said REGIME CHANGE and that is what there was going to be. There was never a chance for the peaceful overthrow of that sorry country’s foul leaders.
So the hyped dossier was a war sales trick, and a big seller. But, as noted, the trick was cleared by the spies.
Which leads to the real fucking nut. Who are these people, who do they work for? Why does anyone listen to them when espionage is their business? When, like the CIA, they have a track record of deceit and failure?
How can it be a defense for the man Britain elected Prime Minister to say that, ´well there may be no real weapons of mass destruction threatening our troops in Cyprus, threatening you and your children and your dog and its fleas, BUT I was told there was deadly danger by some utterly disreputable men with an agenda and no real sources at all.´
That is his argument, and it cannot be accepted as good enough.
It comes down to him in effect admitting there has been a ´mistake´ -and clearly there has - but that is was someone else’s fault.
It comes down to him saying he was a fool for believing fools. But he KNEW they were fools and helped them be MORE FOOLISH. He helped convince them of something they themselves were unsure of. And then he let them convince him right back because, like Bush, he is a man with a mission.
He believes he is Right. Certainly. No room for doubt. No second thoughts. No sneaking suspicions. Just the Sole Truth. The Big Answer.
Which brings us all back to the start, somehow. Blair is not guilty, I can see and hear that much. But he´s also guilty as hell, that´s for sure. That’s what all the shit puddled at his feet tells us, the stuff that doesn’t quite stick but that he walks on and in.
But does any of this even matter? Saddam was a killer, a genocidal monster. He should have been dealt with and that´s what´s happened. That is one of Blair´s Absolute Beliefs. That the END makes the RATIONALE nothing more than a matter of nuance and friendly debate.
Saddam had to go. That’s the bottom-line and that happened. Why fight among ourselves about our degree of Rightness?
The trouble with this argument, despite its elements of truth, is that it is wrong. If Hussein was bad enough to deal with in a violent and dishonest way, why not do so years ago, instead of letting him kill more innocents and then deciding to take action, instead of sanctions and extended misery for the Iraqis?
And if he needed to be dealt with, does that not require - for the sake of legitimacy in the very country being simultaneously freed AND occupied - a genuine international mandate?
I´m certain Iraqis and so many more people would be less pissed off if there had been a genuine UN solution, even if that meant war, which it certainly could have IF the issue had been truly about weapons and he had defied the inspectors. This UN war would have included a post-war plan and cash-on-the-line for reconstruction.
But it was not about weapons. It was about international chancers looking for legit reasons to do what they wanted in the face of good sense.
The whole Hutton inquiry is packed with details and confusing. Static everywhere, static and commentary and agendas and fools. Too much context, too much background.
But anyone with sense must get a feeling of unease from the whole thing. That´s because it´s a long walk through a dark night. It´s walking through a midnight graveyard: you know in your bones something isn’t right, you suspect foul play somewhere.
Only it won´t be the ghost you fear that gets you - there´s no such thing as evil spirits, after all. The trouble is, while you´re distracted with irrational thoughts, you´ll stop paying attention to what really matters. Oh yes: The trouble is, you´ll fall in a hole some bastard dug on purpose, but how can anyone prove the spade-man was out to get you.
You’ll fall in his hole, break your legs and lie unconscious to die a lingering death from exposure, your body eaten by the stray cats and worms before it´s even cold, before anyone even notices you never got home.
We´re all wandering alone through that fucking mundane hell-hole now, but we´ll all end up in The Pit together. We´re stuck in the grip of the grimmest days. Not in the belly of the beast, but fast on our way.So, the bell strikes as Big Ben hits 9pm. Some lights returned to outside. My headache is back. And my legs ache.
POSTSCRIPT;
The next morning now. Cold light of day and the electric is back. But the darkness is still everywhere.
Monday, February 03, 2003
Reasons For Fear
Prologue
It’s quiet in Westminster, the Palace wasting away until life returns with the new parliamentary session on September 7.
But some interesting things have belched to the surface; another part of the on-going asylum/immigrantion “clamp-down” announced and, separately, changes to the government’s slick press relations machine to “end spin”.
And the Hutton inquiry grinds on.
With them all come more reasons to be fearful.
Nails hammered into innocence
Something isn’t right here, at the centre. Where the rot is. Where things go round in circles, where the crazed and starving dog eats its own legs, enjoying every bite as it bleeds to death.
Much being made by the Home Office of new plans to make immigrants pass a test, proving they are British enough to deserve a passport and the right to vote. Things ALL people born in this country get automatically, rights fundamental to the democracy we are so proud of, so found of exporting - courtesy of the British Army - to certain corrupt Middle Eastern dictatorships.
Supporting the whole idea, Home Secretary David Blunkett. The man who also wants immigrants pledge allegiance to the Queen in order to become a British citizen: something NO person born in this country has to do, not through FEAR it would spark a republican revolution, but because it would just be too stupid to even consider. Everyone knows the Queen and her family will go to hell, THAT much is in the Bible.
At the launch of this whole messy ‘test’ affair, an announcement of what ‘Britishness’ by Sir Bernard Crick, Chairman of the Life in the United Kingdom group.
It ran: "To be British means respecting the institutions, values, beliefs and traditions that bind us all together in peace and legal order. It is vital that new citizens are also equipped to be active citizens with a course of practical learning and an understanding of UK society and civic structures.”
At the same time, the same government which both gobbles-up and produces this sort of offal, makes its end of spin announcement and admits it has shown no respect for the institutions, legal order or values it expects immigrants to revere.
Admits, that is, in the sense of changing something it has been doing which is utterly corrupt and wrong without accepting that has been the case, without apologising. Rather the begrudging acceptance of a corporate crook who’s been caught in the act, guilty as sin, but who knows nothing will happen as long as he makes a show of changing his ways.
So, the PM has agreed no Press Officer should have powers to order civil servants to do things. Alistair Campbell DID have these powers, and this has now been changed, clear acknowledgement the whole thing stank, and did for years.
An unelected, highly-paid political public relations man with the power to tell ‘politically impartial’ public servants what to do. Oh yes: to be British means respecting the institutions, values, beliefs and traditions that bind us all together.
Maybe this kind of legalised filth IS truly British – in fact I’m sure of it – but it hardly seems fair to make immigrants change into snakes. How can you force someone to respect these kinds of institutions, values and beliefs?
Postscript
And so the Hutton Inquiry grinds on, uncovering more evidence of the shit at the foundations of British politics: hearing from anonymous MoD sources that people in the department were unhappy with ALL of the WMD dossier, unhappy with the exaggerations, unhappy with the way suspicions about Iraq’s weapons were turned into hard-fact by linguistic sleight of hand.
Miraculous transformations pushed for by a man named Alistair Campbell, a political press officer who CHAIRED the ‘impartial’ and sober intelligence committee whose job it was to accurately and fairly present the truth about Iraq’s weapons, such as they were. A committee which instead pushed through an agenda for war on behalf of the Prime Minister’s spokesman on behalf of the Prime Minister. Respect the institutions and values.
They'll walk on your face, even if you try to stop them, and laugh as they go.
Will that be included in the immigrants test?
It’s quiet in Westminster, the Palace wasting away until life returns with the new parliamentary session on September 7.
But some interesting things have belched to the surface; another part of the on-going asylum/immigrantion “clamp-down” announced and, separately, changes to the government’s slick press relations machine to “end spin”.
And the Hutton inquiry grinds on.
With them all come more reasons to be fearful.
Nails hammered into innocence
Something isn’t right here, at the centre. Where the rot is. Where things go round in circles, where the crazed and starving dog eats its own legs, enjoying every bite as it bleeds to death.
Much being made by the Home Office of new plans to make immigrants pass a test, proving they are British enough to deserve a passport and the right to vote. Things ALL people born in this country get automatically, rights fundamental to the democracy we are so proud of, so found of exporting - courtesy of the British Army - to certain corrupt Middle Eastern dictatorships.
Supporting the whole idea, Home Secretary David Blunkett. The man who also wants immigrants pledge allegiance to the Queen in order to become a British citizen: something NO person born in this country has to do, not through FEAR it would spark a republican revolution, but because it would just be too stupid to even consider. Everyone knows the Queen and her family will go to hell, THAT much is in the Bible.
At the launch of this whole messy ‘test’ affair, an announcement of what ‘Britishness’ by Sir Bernard Crick, Chairman of the Life in the United Kingdom group.
It ran: "To be British means respecting the institutions, values, beliefs and traditions that bind us all together in peace and legal order. It is vital that new citizens are also equipped to be active citizens with a course of practical learning and an understanding of UK society and civic structures.”
At the same time, the same government which both gobbles-up and produces this sort of offal, makes its end of spin announcement and admits it has shown no respect for the institutions, legal order or values it expects immigrants to revere.
Admits, that is, in the sense of changing something it has been doing which is utterly corrupt and wrong without accepting that has been the case, without apologising. Rather the begrudging acceptance of a corporate crook who’s been caught in the act, guilty as sin, but who knows nothing will happen as long as he makes a show of changing his ways.
So, the PM has agreed no Press Officer should have powers to order civil servants to do things. Alistair Campbell DID have these powers, and this has now been changed, clear acknowledgement the whole thing stank, and did for years.
An unelected, highly-paid political public relations man with the power to tell ‘politically impartial’ public servants what to do. Oh yes: to be British means respecting the institutions, values, beliefs and traditions that bind us all together.
Maybe this kind of legalised filth IS truly British – in fact I’m sure of it – but it hardly seems fair to make immigrants change into snakes. How can you force someone to respect these kinds of institutions, values and beliefs?
Postscript
And so the Hutton Inquiry grinds on, uncovering more evidence of the shit at the foundations of British politics: hearing from anonymous MoD sources that people in the department were unhappy with ALL of the WMD dossier, unhappy with the exaggerations, unhappy with the way suspicions about Iraq’s weapons were turned into hard-fact by linguistic sleight of hand.
Miraculous transformations pushed for by a man named Alistair Campbell, a political press officer who CHAIRED the ‘impartial’ and sober intelligence committee whose job it was to accurately and fairly present the truth about Iraq’s weapons, such as they were. A committee which instead pushed through an agenda for war on behalf of the Prime Minister’s spokesman on behalf of the Prime Minister. Respect the institutions and values.
They'll walk on your face, even if you try to stop them, and laugh as they go.
Will that be included in the immigrants test?
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