By some coincidence, since I was asked about this at Edinburgh, A.N. Wilson has an excellent column in the Telegraph today connecting Dostoevsky's Devils/Demons/Possessed with Al Qaeda type terrorism. Now I happen to agree with him on this one, having said much the same in both Sacred Causes and Blood and Rage. A chap in the Edinburgh audience pointed out the huge differences in cultural context, and the non sequitur that Arabs don't read nineteenth century Russian novels. Obviously there are differences. BUT, most terrorists throughout recent history (the last century and a half) have been males aged 15-35. Leaving aside those who are actually criminal or psychopathic, they all practice altruistic, transformative violence in the service of some imaginary super-community or a 'big idea', which invariably they have half understood, or understood too well. I'm with Wilson on this one, and Dostoevsky too. The fact that Sir Simon Jenkins hates the great Russian novelist is also a major reason for thinking that he has something worth saying. If you want a real treat try Joseph Franks five volume life of the writer published by Princeton University Press- a spectacular example of great scholarship which has absorbed Franks since he packed up journalism in the 1940s.

I was sad to read today of the death of the art historian Michael Baxandall. One of the most memorable courses I took as an undergraduate was the Italian Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, taught, among others, by Sir Ernst Gombrich and Mr Baxandall. A lugubrious man with the manner of a bloodhound, Baxandall wrote such pioneering works as Giotto and the Orators; Painting and Social Experience in 15th century Italy; and The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. He has had his imitators (and plagiarists) but they lacked his culture, poise and restraint. The book on Social Experience made the most waves since he revealed the ways in which the skills of craftsmen and merchants leached into those of painters when it came to deciding how much gold or lapis lazulae to use. My own favourite, however is the book about the exquisite limewood sculptors, notably Tilman Riemenschneider and Veit Stoss. Apparently Mr Baxandall had been suffering from Parkinsons Disease for a long time. I will always remember the courtly way in which he and Gombrich and a couple of others gave me an hour long personal tutorial when the rest of the seminar got the date and time wrong and I was the only one to turn up. They could have walked out at the start, but they didn't, and I had a really fascinating afternoon. Gombrich was amused at what the managers of higher education would have thought of the staff:student ratio.

We were in Manchester Square on Sunday just to check out how much Standpoint spends on offices at Nr 11. No seriously, we went to the small Chardin and Boucher exhibition at the Wallace Collection to see Chardin's Man with House of Cards and Lady Drinking Tea. There are bits and pieces too about how tea drinking went from being medicinal (Mrs Chardin looks unwell in that picture) to being social. Well worth a detour if you have the misfortune to walk along Oxford Street.   

I'm off to Melbourne in ten days time, and then for a well-earned rest in Malaysia where I plan to indulge my love of fishing. The last time I tried this, off NSW, the Aussie macho men (my brother-in-law and his son) grew progressively sour as I hauled in 32lbs of fish. I seem to have spent the last few weeks reading about German depredations in Poland in September/October 1939- grim stuff like the one armed farmer who was shot because both hands didn't go up in response to "Haende Hoch"! Need a break and something else to read. My agent suggests I take a few Saul Bellow novels along since I've never read him, but then he would since he has Bellow's estate. Do commentators have any suggestions about reading material? I used to be a big fan of Carl Hiasen, Elmore Leonard, Andrew Vachs (one for Elberry to ponder)...........I've got Ron Suskind's latest book lined up, but that's a bit of a busman's holiday or is it coals to Newcastle (great place all Tories note). No, no Elberry, I can almost imagine recommendations so grim.....

Apart from an ungracious BMI hostess on the way up- or is it flight attendant- a really enjoyable trip north of the border. The sight of harvesting as we approached Edinburgh got the day off to a good start. Very clean city too. The audience couldn't have been nicer- serious, thoughtful and mainly Scots. Some very good questions too. Met a nice medic called Bernard Ineichem who said that he'd abandoned medicine in favour of ethics after reading my Death and Deliverance- we corresponded about fourteen years ago. The Powerpoint gizmos all worked exactly as they were supposed to. BA was much better on the return run- and what a great building Terminal 5 at Heathrow is. A great soaring place of steel and glass. 

Just in case there are any readers of my blog north of the border, I am speaking about terrorism tomorrow (Saturday) at 4pm in the Peppers Theatre at the Edinburgh Book Festival. The session is apparently sold out, but I daresay the intrepid will find a way in. I shall be trying out my newly learned Powerpoint skills. This should result in a Clusot style farce.

Recovering from the sight of Prince Charles's kilt and vivid blue socks on the front of the Telegraph, I turned to the Mail for more serious matters. An extraordinary piece about some LSE academic reporting for Policy Exchange says he recommends the wholesale abandonment of dead or dysfunctional northern cities, whose inhabitants should move to new towns to be built around London, Oxford and Cambridge. Places like Liverpool are beyond repair, and the regeneration money poured into them has been pointless, Dr So-and-So claims.

This rubbish has been swiftly condemned by leading Tories, coinciding as the publication does with David Cameron's forthcoming tour of northern cities. Do we really want the SE to be some super-rich Singapore detached from its English hinterland, with the middle bit suspended somewhere between us and a more dynamic Scotland? I thought the Tories were the party of Union. 

The other night I was gripped by a Channel 4 documentary about a couple of women who single-handedly campaigned for a rather beautiful bridge to be built linking Castleford in Yorkshire. This was to be the first step in regenerating an otherwise dying former mining town, whose river was filled with the usual detritus of shopping trolleys. After four years in which the local council, some other residents, and property developers put every obstacle in their way, the bridge was finally built. And what a magnificent thing it was too. A series of S shaped curves on V shaped steel struts with hardwood decking for a surface. People could sit and watch the fast flowing waters of the weir.

A friend suggested another way of reviving some of these places- especially those on the coast. The British Museum and other London galleries have basements heaving with unseen works of art. Why not circulate them to places whose rather modest holdings are pretty uninspiring?

Meanwhile,

The Tories rush to support accelerated Georgian membership of NATO seems to reflect the luxury of non-choice. In the real world, you either have Russian cooperation on Iranian sanctions, or you offend them over Georgia and you don't. The US, apart from Dick Cheney, understands that. Talk of 1938 seems misplaced. Chamberlain's problem was that he was unable to make choices, neither curbing Hitler, nor detaching Mussolini from the Axis, nor rearming at sufficient pace. Merely annoying someone without changing their behaviour is hopeless.

Since this is an intellectual magazine, although one that doesn't seem to do much science, I've added a permanent link to a lab at Berkeley which specialises in invisible technology. This is for those Standpoint readers who have always harboured the desire to walk into a bank unseen. The reality is not far off if Professor Xiang succeeds in creating reverse refraction materials.

George Kennan once said that 'Russia wants only enemies and vassals on its borders'. The Olympic Games have provided the distraction that the old Soviet Union used to find at Christmas, a bit like Hitler always invading places on Saturdays. The Russian FSB petrostate has been bullying Georgia for years, just as Georgia itself has been bullying Abkhazia and South Ossetia, many of whose inhabitants wish to be associated with Russia. The bigger picture is dominated by a Russian sense of bad faith. Earlier in the year I heard Richard Pipes speaking in Washington. As a former advisor to Ronald Reagan, and I believe the man who coined the phrase 'evil empire', Pipes is no softy. Yet he said that there had been a deal between Clinton and Yeltsin that the West would not expand NATO into Russia's self-proclaimed 'near abroad' and that it is the West which has acted in bad faith by at least toying with the idea of advancing it to Georgia and Ukraine on the grounds that Russia is no longer NATO's enemy. The Russians are also deeply suspicious of the anti-missile defence shield being created to protect us from Iran. Meanwhile Russia's armed forces demonstrate their customary finesse on various Georgian cities.

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the Al Qaeda bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Over 250 people died in these attacks, with more than 5,000 injured. Of these, three hundred have subsequently died in Kenya.

Four of those who carried out these atrocities were jailed for life in 2001, and two others are reported to be held in Guantanamo Bay. However, the plot's mastermind, a Comorean with Kenyan citizenship called Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, is still on the loose, despite a US$5million reward on his head. These people do not give up. After slipping back into Kenya, in late 2002 Fazul and his teams launched an attack on the Paradise Hotel, which is owned by Israelis and patronised by Israeli tourists, while using two Strela 2 surface to air missiles in a vain attempt to shoot down a passenger flight from Moi International Airport to Tel Aviv. Fifteen people died and eighty were injured in the Paradise Hotel attack. The terrorists slipped away to Somalia, whence many of them had come.

The second episode of the HBO/BBC mini series House of Saddam really got into its stride last night. Maybe because the main characters had been thoroughly established, or one got used to the idioms they were using. The main actor, Israeli Igal Naor, is incredibly watchable as Saddam, emitting the name Khomeini with a sound somewhere between coughing and expectoration. The bit where his poor wife dyed her hair blonde to emulate Saddam's new mistress was appalling. 'Do you like the new colour?' she asked. Silence around the massed table. 'No. It looks cheap' came the reply. I saw Mr Naor in the otherwise unremarkable 'Rendition' where he was brilliant, and sympathetic, as a police torturer in a country that looked like Morocco. He is at least as good an actor as the brilliant star of 'Downfall'. One can sense the Stalinist paranoia and suspicion with every flicker of his dark brown eyes.

Nasdaq reports that two Taliban "militants" blew themselves up placing explosives in a school in Pakistan's Swat valley. Elsewhere in the same location other schools (especially for girls) have also been bombed or burned down. That reality of these people will probably go unnoticed. They are people who blow up schools.

Today's Daily Mail has this fine appreciation of Solzhenitsyn by Stephen Glover http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1042458/STEPHEN-GLOVER-A-literar...

He was also discussed with informed respect by Simon Sebag Montefiore on last night's News Night. I believe this magazine will be publishing an appreciation by historian Robert Conquest.

Brilliant piece in today's Times by Magnus Linklater on 45 years old Tracey Emin's art of arrested development. See here because the link bit of  the blog doesn't work: MANAGEMENT! I can see the Scottish art gang seething at this one:

 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/magnus_linklater/article4466589.ece

She seems symptomatic of a culture in which the inside is being cosntantly turned outwards- literally since so much advertising seems concerned with bodily functions. That is mixed in with a solipsistic victim cult. Apropos which, do you know the one about Hitler? As the Russians blasted their way through central Berlin, he greeted the news that his brother-in-law was a traitor with 'Am I to be spared nothing?' I've met a few Tracey Emins over the years, usually the artist girl friends of a painter I know. Grim I can report. That this individual is lauded and used to represent MODERN BRITAIN is incredible, especially since Brown, G's personal tastes run to Patrick George, two of which also hang on our walls. Nice, green Suffolk landscapes actually since for 60 years he's just painted the area around his house, not his genitalia.

No I haven't established a cell, but I am seeing whether I know how to put images on my blog.

Under a US deal with Libya, 179 mainly Northern Irish victims of IRA bombs made with Libyan-supplied explosives are being excluded from a big compensation package that benefits only US victims of Libyan sponsored terrorism, including two Americans who were affected by bombs in Belfast and London, but excluding all the Brits in the six-years long class action. The deal mandates the explicit exclusion of any future claims by these victims in US courts. Nice to know the US courts are waging the global war on terror on civilisation's behalf.

The Wire's ring of authenticity grows by the day. Felicia Pearson, the actress who plays Snoop in 3 and 4, the female psychopath with a southern accent, has published her autobiography, called Grace after Midnight. Felicia entered this world as the 3lbs baby of an East Baltimore crack addict. Despite being small she became a full-time drug dealer, killing a woman in self-defence at age fifteen. After her release from Jessup State Penitentiary, she resumed the trade, until two senior dealers called Uncle and Father, were respectively killed and imprisoned for life. Her acting career began after she was talent spotted in a Baltimore bar by a member of the Wire's crew. Its a very heterodox cast alright since the main character is an Irish Old Etonian, while the top gangster Stringer Bell hales from Hackney. Heaven knows about the extras!

The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is being rightly seen as a major event, even by the BBC, which has conspicuously neglected the crimes of Communism. Its a long time since I read most of his novels- The First Circle and Lenin in Zurich perhaps being the best of them- but the opening of the Gulag Archipelago is fixed in my mind. Some hungry zeks are acting as labourers on an archaeological dig. They come across some frozen prehistoric fish. To the incredulity of the archaeologists, they light a fire and greedily devour what they have found. As usual his death has become an occasion for vacuous competitive speculation about whether or not he was as great a writer as Pushkin or Tolstoy. He was something else entirely, a remarkably brave man who by exposing a hellish criminal system, struck a major blow for freedom. I hope Russia gives him the state funeral he so richly deserves, even if the presiding dignatories are themselves former KGB.  

In a speech later today Michael Gove will bravely connect social issues (irresponsible fathers) with the wider 'culture', in this case lad's magazines called Nuts and Zoo which apparently go in for 'instant-hit hedonism' in a big way. This strikes me as an important development, since so far, politicians of all stripes have been so concerned to show they are hip that they don't dare criticise some of the ugly manifestations of our culture. One aspect of this- celebrity- has been brilliantly analysed by Peter Whittle in his Look at Me. But there are other things, large and small. I've been struck by the number of TV ads that make me slightly queasy. Not just those for stoll softeners and the like, but the Crunchy Nut Cornflake ad in which a driver tips milk into the carton and then downs the contents, with cornflakes and milk spilling over his or her clothes. This almost encourages the culture of scoffing food in public in a disgusting way. What's wrong with putting a bowl of Crunchy Nuts on a table in the traditional way? Anyway, its very encouraging that the Tories are making this connection at last. Perhaps they'll broaden the scope to anything that degrades and coarsens our culture?

Today's Washington Post has a thoughtful piece about the other candidate in the US presidential race. Apparently he strongly identifies with the 'romantic fatalism' of Robert Jordan, the American hero of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, who fights on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. I remember being impressed with that when I was about fifteen, but on the whole I've long since moved on in terms of taste. Theodore Roosevelt seems to be another big influence. Predictably McCain has a lot of thoughts about US foreign policy (his area of expertise), although the article highlighted such glaring inconsistencies as wishing to expel Russia from the G8 while hoping to secure her cooperation in arms control. What was more worrying was his lack of interest in economics, as reported by an advisor who had tried to explain some of the major problems afflicting the US. His inability to control his emotions was also disturbing, although Bill Clinton apparently had a ferocious temper too. Nor will classic Reaganites be impressed by his faith in the transformative power of big government. So over to camp super cool. The Sunday Telegraph has a witty piece that claims obese and unhealthy Americans feel uncomfortable with the very fit, very lean Obama, who goes to a gym three times a day even during his campaign. Apparently he looked in horror at some of the chow he was presented with in some of the more down home places he visited on the electoral trail. So there you have it as the polls seem to be closing the gap between the two candidates. Meanwhile the Observer throws more light on Miliband's mysterious achievement of getting into Corpus Christi with 3 B's and a D. Apparently attending Holland Park meant that he could claim to be from a deprived background- evidently the dons of Oxford thought Primrose Hill, where David and his Marxist professor father lived in an expensive house, was like the Pepys Estate in Deptford. So that's solved that then. As we Brits go on holiday with our recommended readings, perhaps we should all pack Pareto's Circulation of Elites?

An interesting report today says that the Spanish socialist government has decreed a number of measures to cope with the mounting cost of having to import 84% of its energy requirements. Motorists will be allowed to do only 50mph on motorways, and 25mph in towns and cities. Millions of bulbs are being removed from street lights, and air conditioning systems are being set at higher temperatures. So Spain is going to be dimmer ouside at night, and warmer inside all manner of public buildings, with people going about sedately in cars feeling like the inside of an oven. Knowing Spain a bit I can't see this taking off, and the public response has already been ridicule. As for here, the huge price hikes announced by energy companies has already had me stockpiling wood and taking vows to keep the central heating off until January. That's because its warm under the roof on the fourth floor of our house- although I may have to don layered winter-sports wear every time I venture down.

A robot, described as looking like the progeny of a monkey and an Imac, has made a bid to replace Gordon Brown while the latter is recovering from the drug of power in Southwold. Feeling, for this robot is sensate, that Brown is too frazzled to continue as Labour leader, Mr Heart Beat has used the Guardian as his pitch to lead the Labour party in the near future. He's young and he's raring to go. He's also so sensitive to Mr Brown's feelings that he didn't actually mention the PM in his rousing appeal to freshen up the party. Go Robo go!

Turkey sits on a great seismic fault line from the Sea of Marmara to Lake Van. It is also subject to pressures of a man-made kind. It seems likely that the Kurdish PKK was responsible for the double-tap bombings in Istanbul last night which left sixteen dead and over a hundred injured in a populous residential area. Al Qaeda tends to hit western or Jewish targets in Turkey including banks, consulates and synagogues. Meanwhile, Turkey launches cross-border raids into northern Iraq to destroy PKK camps. There was an air strike on Sunday. The government also recently arrested over eighty people who were allegedly plotting a coup. A cache of grenades was found. Secular-minded prosecutors are also challenging the constitutional legality of the Islamic Justice and Development Party in the courts, after a law allowed head scarves to be worn in universities. Although I believe that people should be allowed to wear what they like, having seen the silent pressures exerted in Egypt for women to cover up, I also sympathise with the many women in urban Turkey who don't wish to abandon practices that have existed for eighty years or to submit to an insidious process of public shaming through a disapproving look or glance. So it is in Turkey where you don't have to stray too far inland from the coastal cities to be in a very traditional world, where the men play chequers and the women are bent double under bundles of fire wood. If the courts find against the ruling party- for trying to introduce sharia through the back door- it will entail the bizarre spectacle of a democratically elected government being turfed out for pursuing an unconstitutional agenda apparently involving freedom of choice. What happens in Turkey really matters to us. It has been a staunch member of NATO since the 1950s, and has one of the few armies in the alliance that can really fight wars. It has been a respected ally of the West and Israel, where it is currently brokering peace agreements with Syria. A lot of Kurds and even more Turks live in western Europe.

Newspapers filled with the meltdown of this failed Labour government, which feels like it is running out of track as well as ideas. Malcolm Rifkind even manages to sympathise with ministers about to lose their Red Boxes and Range Rovers or whatever they go about in. Interesting piece by Denis MacShane on the end of Labour's 'Scottish years' although in deploring the absence of English born and bred ministers he somehow overlooks Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman, Ruth Kelly and James Purnell to name but three. Mr MacShane is evidently an idealist, since he thinks 'the unions in England could help Labour by exposing waste and bureaucracy'. Yeah, sure, especially since Labour is now virtually dependent on them since the money-men have walked away. The best piece of the day is also in the Sunday Telegraph, namely Iain Martin's analysis of what the Tories need to do next, assuming a Labour leadership change does not trigger a general election. They need, Martin says, 'to seal the deal' with more of the electorate, rather than just spectating as Labour disintegrates. Cameron is lucky, apparently he's even got his bike back, but now he needs to connect with the inner cities, Scotland and Wales, along with Northern Ireland, although the re-merger there with the UUP augurs well.

According to the BBC, Hefce, the acronym of the body that funds higher education, has banned the psychology department at Kingston University from its national survey of student opinion about their courses. Academics were found to have exerted pressure on the students to give positive ratings about their 'modules', in line with what the university administration called 'reputation management'. Students were told that if Kingston slid in this league table, employers would regard their degrees as worthless. So why not bump a 4 up to a 5? Having watched examiners' meetings where through mysterious forces every dullard gets a better sort of coconut at the end of a long day, I suspect that corruption of this sort is rife in British universities. Whether any future government will do anything about it is another matter since like the disability benefits scam, the expansion of higher education was another way of concealing unemployment. It has always perplexed me that whereas even major businesses come and go, not a single university in this country has ever undergone the same fate.

Spent the day vaguely puzzled by J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov's new biography of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD between Yagoda and Beria. The book dutifully goes through the archives to flesh out the little chap's career. He was five feet tall. Like Stalin, another shorty, Yezhov was an expert in personnel questions- HR as we call it nowadays. Rigging appointments was his thing; I've met a few Yezhov's in my time. In line with much academic stuff, the book sets up a straw man- the idea that Yezhov was 'a robot' obediently carrying out his master's wishes to kill people. No, claim the authors', in every successive post he had more or less limited 'agency' and scope to fulfil his own ambitions. Well, I'd never have guessed. This is supposed to get us out of the 'dead end' of seeing Yezhov as 'evil' or as a product of a 'totalitarian' system. Now I've read enough Soviet history to know that not a single proponent of either of these latter views would claim that Yezhov was a robot- they just don't think his limited scope for independent action is important enough to warrant a 200 page book. The authors' also want readers to empathise with Yezhov's world view, of 'us' and 'them', which they claim derives from an older peasant mentality just as much as from Bolshevik Manicheaism. They even trot out the line that Yezhov lived modestly (like Stalin) in contrast to his sybaritic predecessor, with his 3,000 pornographic photos, and his rapist successor. Now I wonder how such a book would go down if it said much the same about Himmler, Heydrich or Eichmann? Another thing it doesn't really get to grips with is that Yezhov killed tens of thousands of people solely by virtue of their nationality- beginning with around 40,000 ethnic Germans and going on to even larger numbers of Poles. In his two year rampage 1.5million people were arrested, of whom 700,000 were shot. Predictably the book mentions, but then doesn't discuss, the one thing that's revealing about 'Iron Fist'. Krushchev recalled that when he visited Yezhov in his NKVD HQ, the little chappie was inordinately proud of the blood stains spattered on his shirt from an interrogation he had just attended.

As a long-time devotee of The Shield my set of The Wire (series 1) has been lying around unopened. Maybe I felt disloyal to Azeveda, Dutch, Vic et al in watching it? We saw the whole thing this week. The acting is incredibly good (particularly the fatter cops and the two older hoods-in-chief) and the story-lines gripping. Nobody's humanity is neglected. I guess the most depressing thing about what it portrays is that crime is just a way of life, although I wondered about all the people in the 'projects' who managed to avoid it unless they get shot for doing their civic duty, and couldn't quite reconcile the enormous sums of money involved with the economists who claimed that most drug dealers live with their mothers.

What it also did, and which nothing made here rivals, is to make television indispensable, in this case to a discussion about crime and its causes. I doubt whether this is purely a matter of smaller resources, although the credits for the series seemed to involve a very large number of people. 

Getting up incredibly early this morning I had a chance to take a look at the New Statesman, a weekly I've never really read. There were lots of interesting pieces in it, notably an article by Oliver Letwin that claimed the Conservatives were now the party 'of the poor', although I think he probably meant 'for the poor'. He has some striking statistics: the number of working-age adults living in poverty rose last year by 700,000 and has risen overall since 1997. Pity the voters of Glasgow East won't get the message.

Elsewhere in the magazine there was a piece about falling divorce rates in the US. Although the evidence is only derived from Miami-Dade County in Florida, there has been an 18% fall this year. Apparently in bad times, the costs of divorce force people to stay hitched. You can't really share out the negative equity. By contrast, in Manhattan there are more divorces than ever. One divorce lawyer has seen his case load rise by 20% this year. Why? A trader the author mentions was having to hide the fact that his income had fallen by US$12 million lest his wife have to adjust her spending habits and divorce him. Evidently some are better at disguise than others.

The New Statesman has a dress correspondent. Now that's a good idea. To my horror she doesn't like polo shirts on men, regarding them as a lazy choice of non-dress just above a tee-shirt. Actually whenever I see holiday snaps with me wearing one that is ten years old I don't think they look good either. Can't see what she's got against chinos though. Perhaps Standpoint should hire its own dress correspondent?

Apropos of nothing the arrest in London of the Batman star for ALLEGED assault caught my eye. I bet there were amusing scenes in the custody suite. Name: 'Mr Bat'. Address: 'Gotham City'............ did he send for Cat Woman?

Last night some oafish hulk from Channel 4 tried to bully his way through an interview on BBC2 with Emily Maitlis and one of the eminent scientists who had been misrepresented by a Channel 4 documentary series the hulk had commissioned that sought to discredit the notion of climate change. All the tricks of the trade were on show. Little beady eyes tightened into a moue of indignation that he had been dragged into the spotlight. Talking over the other guest the C4 commissioning editor made the completely irrelevant claim that the BBC itself had been encouraged to be more "radical" in its approach to programming. This was all designed to distract from the shoddy ways in which interviews had been cut to distort what the scientists were saying. Like the modern political class there was no sense that this might warrant anybody's RESIGNATION, no, you just bluster your way through in the hope that nobody is really watching. The truth doesn't matter so long as it is 'radical'.

In today's Mail the excellent Quentin Letts takes advantage of the summer recess to draw attention to the venomous postings about Margaret Thatcher's (inevitable) demise on the Guardian website. This came about in response to the suggestion that Baroness Thatcher should have a state funeral, which on many grounds she undoubtedly should. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1037118/QUENTIN-LETTS-Rejoicing-death-Why-Left-hate-Lard-Thatcher.html for the disgusting details. I recently saw Tim Garton Ash at an event where responding to a mistake made by the chairman (who said Ash was from Cambridge rather than Oxford), Ash made the comment: 'At least he didn't say I am a Mail rather than Guardian columnist'. Perhaps Ash doesn't look through the sort of comments that are posted on the Guardian's website? Because most of them are so crass, ill-informed or malevolent that they don't compare with anything that appears on the sites of any other British newspaper. And there are hundreds and hundreds of them, suggesting that the public sector readership has plenty of time to spew forth its resentments. Its time the Tories dropped the conceit that they are the nasty party; there's plenty of nastiness all too evident on the other side.  

I've spent weeks now wrestling with the huge literature on appeasement. Not altogether surprised how an initial focus on individual character failings of the main actors in the memoirs of others who were sometimes the earliest rats off the ship has been replaced by a blander, structural analysis that stresses impersonal constraints. What I can't get is the ethical 'air' breathed by the main actors, who by their own account, and that of their critics, were moral men, Halifax nauseatingly so. Chamberlain is quite revealing since in his diaries/letters to Hilda and Ida he trots out trite childhood maxims: 'if at first you don;t succeed, try try again' and so forth. There's a lot of playing the game- though neither 'Master' Hitler nor 'Musso' played cricket- and Germany being sent to Coventry. The analogy has obviously cropped up time and again in Western foreign policy- Suez, Falklands, Iraq and now Iran- and Bush has been deploying it against Obama over troop reductions in Iraq. Maybe it works like this. Britain had to choose not to fight Germany, Italy and Japan simultaneously and prioritised the threats and her own capabilities. Nowadays, with three wars- Afghanistan, Iraq and global terrorism- can we afford another with Iran? Where is the contemporary alternative to the alternative Churchill proposed in the 1930s- that is of a Grand Alliance to protect victims of aggression- Czechoslovakia then, Israel now? Just a thought on the lessons of history.

Residents of St Tropez are threatening to blocade the town because of the incessant noise from private helicopters bearing footballers and film stars. We get a lot of this in Kennington, except they are police helicopters circling above (more annoying than swooping back and forth) looking for thieves and muggers. Once or twice we've had stun grenade explosions too, like when the local Rasta temple was raided last year. So I'm with the residents of St Tropez on this one. But here there is a solution. When the cricket is on in the Oval a stately, but utterly silent, mini airship futs across the sky, with less commotion than a small manual lawnmower. Why not have a few permanently positioned over south east London? After all, that's what the US military has planned for Third World cities. 

Although the Anglican communion seems to be collapsing around his ears- or perhaps just because this is happening- Rowan Williams has despatched a cringe-making communication to Muslim leaders apologising for Christianity's historic faults. The worst passages slip into the sociology professor's passive subjunctive that he favours. The point of this exercise is to discover common cause against secular modernity's darknesses. One might take it seriously if at any point the Archbishop expected a reciprocal admission of fault on the part of Muslim leaders, some of whom have knowingly preached hatred against the West, Christians and Jews. Various religious commentators have tried to elucidate the dilemmas Williams faces over the gay clergy/women bishop issues. It seems simple to me- he is stuck, like a rabbit in the headlights, between three of the mutually exclusive progressivisms he espouses- hopelessly imagining that these can be endlessly debated in the endless seminar he confuses with leadership, a notion virtually absent from the great democracy of British academia from which he comes and to which as Minette Marrin indicated in the first Standpoint he should return.

Obama's desire to pull troops from Iraq is getting more coverage than his desire to extend the war against Al Qaeda into Pakistan. While he can certainly use America's huge subsidies to Pakistan to pressure them into properly securing their nuclear arsenal, I don't think he has thought through the political implications of more US activity than there is already over the Afghan border. Apart from the unfortunate echoes of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War- where the solution always seemed to lie in yet another country- there is the technical problem of bombing the wrong people (perhaps some Pakistani Frontier Corps soldiers) not to speak of how the Pakistani population will react to overt US military intervention.  

Arrived at a nice Soho Chinese restaurant last night slightly before 7pm. My wife managed to get lost somewhere around Poland Street (I tried to guide her in by various local landmarks until I realised they were mostly identical lingerie shops and strip clubs) and the Appleyards were fashionably a little late. So I had a quarter of an hour to survey the street scene. Then there was a lot of urgent rushing up and down Berwick Street- where the market stalls had gone and council workers were disinfecting the gutters. Although I've lived in London most of my life, I've never seen a drug transaction done so openly. A young guy in a hood sold something from a small CD type bag to a gaunt couple. Next, a disturbed chap walking about without a shirt lifted a drain cover and rummaged around for cigarette butts. Anyway these vignettes set me up nicely for an excellent meal at Yuatcha where the waitresses look like they've strayed from a 1930s Fu Manchu film and say things like 'Did you enjoy your evening Sir' with an air of polite menace. By 10 when we left Soho was like bedlam with drunks careening around with the velocity of pin balls. The humidity raises the decibel levels since everyone hangs around outside bars and pubs.

And so to another scene of despair- Glasgow East. Bryan Appleyard ventured the thought that Labour might be the cause of the poverty that afflicts its voters. After all they've been in power there since the turn of the century or thereabouts. If they vote Labour they can console themselves with the thought they are REAL, OLD- actually they never get that far- LABOUR GRITTY PEOPLE. Since they are life's risk takers- boozing, smoking, the fried Mars bars- how come they don't vote Tory on the same basis as buying a Lottery ticket? Who knows? The Tories might then have to come up with something to deal with social problems that are a disgrace to this country and to the Party that has done nothing about them.

I can't seem to get my mind around something called Credit Default Swaps, which apparently are very much a part of the credit crunch. I tried to concentrate hard on a TV report that explained them, but at a crucial point I lost the thread of the explanation. Is it insuring mortgage default and then selling this on? Probably not. Any help from a passing hedge fund millionaire would be deeply appreciated, a sentence filled with ambiguities!

You know someone is worried when they trot out the such and such British institution is 'the envy of the world' line. In today's Telegraph this was the clincher used by BBC Director General Mark Thompson to justify his claim that some people would even welcome the license fee rising to £240 per annum: http//www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/12/do1204.xml&posted=true&_requestid=145119

Like most people there are (diminishing) bits and pieces of Radio 3 and 4 that I like although I can no longer find anything worth watching on BBC televison- least of all on the new digital channels that recycle old comedy, food and property porn shows. I am not a great fan of little missie actresses doing their turn in costume dramas- according to Thompson the highlight of the BBC's output.  If I watch anything at all it is commercial Channel 5. Thompson claims, melodramatically, that things like the Proms at the Albert Hall would 'go dark' if the BBC didn't cover them. This is like saying that if Sainsbury's vanished we would suddenly be unable to buy fruit and veg.

The problem with the BBC, as many commenters on the Telegraph puff have already noted, is that the BBC reflects such an Independent/Guardian institutional bias- with no countervailing voices at all- that most of us on the centre right are not prepared to subsidise it. If and when there is a conservative government, it should immediately exploit its mandate to redirect a substantial proportion of the license fee to independent providers so as to ensure genuine diversity and representation of the tastes and views of many people in this country. The diminished BBC should also be told that the BBC recruits from too narrow a pool- nice liberal middle class humanities graduates of the Left University- leaving whole swathes of the population (and their views) unrepresented. If that brings no change of institutional culture then the rest of the license fee can go in the next parliament. In recent weeks David Cameron has indicated that he understands that the big issues are mostly cultural- let's hope he understands that the BBC is to his forthcoming administration what the trades unions were to Mrs Thatcher's in the 1980s. While he's at it, his education secretary can take a long cool look at the Left University too. After that, we might even have something to quietly boast about.

Anyone who needs reminding of the horror of 7/7 could do worse than read Canadian journalist Peter Zimonjic's Into the Darkness. Apart from being a harrowing eye-witness account, it is also remarkable for the way in which the author develops several stories spread over three locations simultaneously.

Meanwhile, over in the parallel moral universe Islamists inhabit, the extended Pakistani family of bomber Shezad Tanweer have invited four hundred people to a village party in Chak 477 to 'celebrate him as a martyr'. One is not surprised that the Pakistani government allows this to happen. But that the event's organiser, a Mr Tahir Pervez- a property developer and the bomber's 42 year old uncle- is allowed to pass back and forth into this country without inhibition is testament to the spinelessness of the British authorities. Rather than simply messing him around for a bit at immigration, the government should issue a 'no-flight' ban before he even attempts to board an aircraft. They don't even need to give a reason since Mr Pervez is outside the clutches of the British human rights lawyers who would undertake a gadarene rush to represent him. Let's see what they do. Or don't we have such provisions in this country?

Unfortunately for legal reasons one cannot name 'U', an Algerian who is about to be released from six years in custody in this country. You can find out his name (although the one he habitually uses is not the one he was born with or used to enter Britain) by looking at US newspaper websites. U is a senior Al Qaeda operative, with links to Osama bin Laden. He has demonstrable connections with Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested en route to place bombs at LAX airport, and with the European cell that plotted to kill shoppers at Strasbourg's Christmas market. Unfortunately Mr Ressam withdrew testimony against U that was crucial to U's extradition to the US to face charges of conspiracy. Unfortunately too, the conclusion of the trial of the Strasbourg conspirators means that U can't be extradited either to Europe. That left Algeria where U was a senior figure in the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat that killed some 200,000 people in the 1990s. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that U, and other Algerians who have been repatriated to face justice, would be fairly treated, despite the efforts by well-known human rights lawyers to paint Algeria's judicial system in the darkest colours. The mechanisms it has put in place at British insistence strike this observer as pretty watertight. But no, not in the eyes of British judges who have overturned the SIAC ruling and freed U on bail. Rather thoughtfully, they've stipulated he can wander in his garden from 9am to 9pm at night. For weeks attention in this country has been focused on the issue of 42 days detention, which is designed to anticipate catastrophic circumstances, rather than for any case that the police have so far encountered. It is the legal equivalent of stockpiling vaccines. In fact, the real scandal is how our legal system positively connives at failing to deal with a major figure who was central to the original Al Qaeda organisation. We also seem to have no mechanisms for deporting a man who lied about his identity when he originally sought political asylum in the UK, and then attended military training camps in Afghanistan, before returning to recruit foreign fighters to go to Chechnya. The fact that the British media is prevented from even reporting U's name also tells you where the courts' misplaced sympathies also lie. The underlying reasons for this, and other scandals, are the persistence of the ideologue lawyers who take up the causes of U and his ilk, and a senior judiciary that regards common sense as equivalent to base mob instincts.

Hopping channels late at night last week I caught bits of Channel 4's knives and guns season. The sight of a spooky-eyed Cherie Booth QC cross-examining various police and social workers (indistinct categories I know) had me scurrying off to bed. In today's Sunday Times, Adrian Gill hits the button when he writes: 'Everybody seemed to be doing something about alienated nihilistic youth last week, but none of the channels thought to mention their own responsibility for the behaviour of kids. They don't because they don't believe they are responsible....The contradiction of the box is that it leaps to take credit as a style leader and weather-maker....but it never wants to accept that there is a connection between television's power of suggestion and behaviour outside the box'. This raises a broader question about the relationship between the 'broken society' and the wider 'culture', which no politicians are prepared to broach, lest they land on the wrong side of progressive opinion, or risk forfeiting the talismanic 'yoof' vote. That is why the culture portfolios are occupied by low ranking politicians who see them as a chance for good seats at an Amy Winehouse concert, or whose conception of culture is narrowed to the matter of how we fund it. What a pity they don't give the job to Adrian Gill, except that he probably wouldn't want it. 

General the Lord Guthrie has alerted people to the sorry story of how a man only known as Abdul has been treated since he served the British as an interpreter in Iraq. That is very dangerous work: 'They attacked my family, they kidnapped my son and they tortured my wife' Abdul has reported. The family left Iraq with nothing. As part of a £25 million resettlement scheme, Abdul and his family are currently housed in a run-down tower block on a Glasgow estate, surrounded by drunks and drug addicts. Lord Guthrie says 'I am a bit ashamed that a country like ours treats people.....just like this. I think we ought to treat them with respect, to make quite sure they're looked after properly'. That is the military way. This follows on from our grudging treatment of former Gurkhas, to whom we deny the levels of health and pension provision we give to British soldiers.

Meanwhile, Abu Qatada- a dangerous enemy of Western society- and various Algerians known only as 'G' or 'U' to protect their human rights, are being released from maximum security prisons and put up at vast expense in government safe houses. These are not scruffy tower blocks in Glasgow, but suburban detached houses with nice gardens, where the likes of 'G' or 'U' can get a bit of fresh air. Since Qatada comes with a family, tax payers are also presumably disbursing welfare payments at the same rate as Qatada, and his soul mate Abu Hamza, were receiving when they were at liberty to preach subversion.

Rather than addressing himself to how scandals like this have come about, the Lord Chief Justice (and soon to be President of a new Supreme Court) has elected- though he is not "elected" at all- to endorse the outrageous proposal of the Archbishop of Canterbury to allow sharia law to be used in family cases. He made this suggestion in a speech delivered in a mosque.

Any comments?

The new grouping of conservative Anglicans has decided to call itself Foca, that is the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Have things in the Church of England really reached such a low, under Rowan Williams's "leadership", that these rebels have to associate themselves with the Lutheran and Reformed Confessing churches which separated from the main Protestant churches in the early years of Nazism. Readers with a sense of history will recall that these brave souls were separating themselves from churches which had either been hijacked by the so-called 'German Christians' (a pro-Nazi sect of pastors and their followers) or bishops who otherwise attempted to introduce nationalist and racist heresies into the churches' teachings. This included ignoring the Old Testament, obliterating Jewish names from hymns, and trying to 'aryanise' Jesus. Has the "liberalisation"- and many of us know how hollow that process usually is- of the CoE reached such a pass that the bishops of Africa and the 'southern cone' feel obliged to identify with Bonhoeffer and Niemoeller? Usually Williams adopts the first person plural (we) to say 'we' are in such and such a state of mind (punitive) or might consider introducing sharia law. Suddenly, when his own authority is on the line (and over the horizon the question looms of who gets what part of the CoE's enormous material Establishment) he speaks with a 'clarity' that has hitherto routinely evaded him. Looking at the purposive faces at the Foca meeting in London, I have a feeling that the Archbishop's characteristic evasions and 'unclarities' are not going to see him through this one. 

Several worrying reports about the increasing Talibanisation of Pakistan. Peshawar, a city of three million people, is coming under the chill grip of the Taliban, who claim that they are bringing law and order to a city where the police are poorly paid and ineffective. What happens next is instructive: the criminals grow beards and spout holy phrases, in order to continue drug smuggling and kidnapping under Taliban protection. Decent businessmen hot foot it to Dubai to escape their extortions. Meanwhile in neighbouring Khyber tribal region, a gnarled former bus driver called Mangal Bagh, has given a rather lordly interview, in which he similarly claims to be restoring right morality at gunpoint. Across both the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North West Frontier Provinces, illegal Islamic Qazi courts are multiplying, partly because of the Jarndyce v Jarndyce sloth of the existing justice system. These are the fateful consequences of the deals Pervez Musharraf struck in 2006 (the Waziristan Accords) which sought to devolve responsibility for curbing terrorist activity on local tribal elders. The result has been that both the Taliban, sundry non-Taliban Islamist groups like that led by Mr Bagh, and their al Qaeda allies have gained a perch in these areas, where they have reinstalled a number of (smaller) training bases like they had in Afghanistan before 9/11. While elements of the US intelligence/military communities would like to increase strikes on these bases, this has to be counterbalanced with the destabilising effects on Pakistani domestic politics- although one wonders how more unstable things could become. According to recent reports in the New York Times, several ground operations to capture senior al Qaeda figures- with a view to getting a lock on bin Laden's location- have been called off lest they result in a mini Bay of Pigs. So the US uses unmanned aerial drones to kill the occasional senior figure- and inadvertently several Pakistani troops in the last strike. Our news is naturally dominated by the spike in British military casualties in Helmand- but surely the bigger story is what is happening on the Pakistani side of the Pashtun belt, and how anyone proposes to deal with it without ending up with another war.

Whenever I join those who express scepticism about the Northern Ireland Peace Process, I am invariably asked whether I'd prefer a reversion to the bombs going off in the province or on the mainland. Obviously not. But the price of peace seems to be toleration of continued paramilitary criminality, which mainly consists, apart from money-driven organised crime, of vigilante-style 'policing' of republican areas. That means a lot of youths having their arms and legs broken. Yesterday, however, a more sinister side of things was briefly re-aired in a Belfast court. I am referring, of course, to the acquittals of three men on trial in connection with the murder of Robert McCartney, about which there is detailed coverage in today's Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4228323.ece The judge had to dismiss the case primarily because there were no reliable witnesses or because all forensic evidence (and CCTV footage) had been obliterated from the scene of the crime. With one exception, witnesses had been "visited" by senior figures from Sinn Fein/IRA. Meanwhile, McCartney's sisters have been subjected to a three years campaign of intimidation which has left them depressed and frightened. One of them, Catherine McCartney, remarked 'everyone seems to be in on it. They all turn a blind eye when it suits'. Some of the sisters are thinking of emigrating- as far as Australia in one case. So far there has been silence from the government about this brazen perversion of the course of justice by Sinn Fein/IRA, and no comment at all from those who are so keen to export the 'example' of the Peace Process to Basques and Tamils.

And so to the Ten O’Clock News. Brown’s anniversary as PM. The polls are lousy, but you would not know it, since flashing up images of Brown and Cameron, the BBC managed to display Brown on 48% and Cameron on 28%- with no apology at any point for this major reversal of the reality (incidentally Cameron is on 46% at present). And so on to a review of what a Tory administration might do. There was not much flesh on the bones in the four reports by BBC luminaries, BUT, each segment contrived to use old fashioned black and white footage to insinuate that the Tories wished to take us back to the 1950s. We had a family fireside scene (circa 1950), whereas in reality the Tories are fully cognisant of changes in human relationships…….and then yuppies with their champagne (circa 1987) were contrasted with dole lines. The BBC’s political editor contrived to speak about ‘the men who may run Britain’ (showing Cameron, Osborne and Hague) as if there are no females in the shadow cabinet. A little later on Question Time, David Dimbleby was not exactly forensic in his questioning of Yvette Cooper, the motormouth Treasury spokesperson, about her and her husband Ed Balls’s curious mortage arrangements. By contrast, Dimbleby had been briefed, by the BBC Newsnight programme going out at that time on BBC2, about further revelations about Tory chairperson Caroline Spelman’s odd remumeration of her nanny, a story being worried to death by little Michael Crick, even though it concerns events ten years ago. A couple of weeks ago my wife sat next to a rare being- a conservative who works for the BBC. She volunteered that after the Nantwich by-election and Boris’s victory in London, the Lefties in the BBC had turned nasty and were really out to get the Tories. Last night’s none too concealed evidence of bias and malice confirmed this.