Nick Cohen: Writing from London

From Standpoint.
Contemplating with his customary scorn the artists who had embraced the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wondered what it would take to break their attachment to a cause that would eventually murder many of them — and kill Trotsky too, although he was yet to know it. “As regards a fellow-traveller,” he said, “the question always comes up — how far will he go?” Would the barbarism of the dictatorship of the proletariat persuade him to “change at one of the stations on to the train going the other way”? Or would he stay on for the rest of the ride?

As Trotsky implied, fellow-travelling with communism was not always akin to endorsing the creed. Communists accepted crimes committed in the name of the revolution without hesitation. The fellow-traveller looked away from communism’s victims and invited others to do the same. Communists damned “bourgeois democracy”. It disillusioned communism’s fellow-travellers, too, but not enough to persuade them to give up on democratic politics completely and join the revolution. They wished the Soviet Union well and found its experiments on the human race bracing. But in the words of David Caute, the best historian of fellow-travelling, their support was a “commitment at a distance”.
The reception given to Tariq Ramadan when he arrived in New York in April showed that today a type of fellow-travelling with radical Islam has spread from Europe to America. From the applause he drew, it seemed to me that no one involved would be changing trains for a while.

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In the Observer today I look at the media’s hatred of Tony Blair, which is building up in the advance of the release of his autobiography. The most distasteful manifestation of the mania is the conspiracy theory that Blair covered up the “murder” of David Kelly and maybe….

These ravings are not only coming from the Mail and Norman Baker, the conspiracy-loving Liberal Democrat MP, but from the Mirror, which ought to know better.
Carry on

‘Who killed David Kelly?” To the uninitiated looking for a thrill this silly season, the answer is clear. In the Mirror and the Mail, high-pitched voices from left and right say that at the very least his death was covered up by Tony Blair, a man they loathe so fervently they cannot even praise him for donating the proceeds of his autobiography to a veterans’ charity. From the demented centre-ground of British politics comes Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP, who by some extraordinary oversight is now a government minister. He has produced a book claiming Kelly was murdered by mysterious Iraqi forces.

To those who followed the affair in 2003, however, there ought to be no mystery. The reason for Kelly’s death is a secret in plain view, which few can acknowledge because it chills the warm feelings of self-righteousness which Tony Blair’s enemies enjoy.

Kelly was the BBC’s source. The BBC betrayed him.

Allow me to drag up this ancient history because the reaction to it sheds light on the hysteria around Blair’s autobiography, which is only going to get worse in the run-up to its publication.

Read on

To my mind it is obvious that Labour is in a great deal of trouble, and that the only candidate who can get them out of it is David Miliband. More than half of the electorate voted for the Conservatives and Liberals in the 2010 election. To win some of them back Labour is going to have to start winning arguments in those swathes of southern and central England where supporting Labour is now a minority interest on a par with water divining or train spotting. David Miliband strikes me as an intelligent politician who can appeal to moderates. Moreover, he is the only candidate who you could imagine as prime minister. Choosing him seems so obvious a step to take as to be no choice at all.
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To my mind, the silliest headline of the 2000s appeared in the Times of 5 May 2006. Some academic had decided that what job you had, how much money you earned and who your parents were did not matter a damn in go-ahead Britain. Snobbery was dead. Meritocracy was here to stay. The Times ran this welcome news under the title: “We are all middle class now as social barriers fall away.” No one will take this nonsense seriously, I thought as I tossed the paper aside. But I reckoned without David Cameron.
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Reporters do not always treat subs well. On occasion, when pushed beyond endurance by the cutting of our best lines, or a puritan purge of all our gags, we tell the old joke about the plane carrying a sub and a reporter crashing in the Sahara. For three days they walk through the burning heat until finally they collapse, skin burning, throats parched, at the base of a huge sand dune. ‘Let us just climb to the top of the dune,’ croaks the reporter.

‘I can’t,’ says the sub, ‘let us curl up here and die’.

‘No!’ says the reporter, ‘we must make one last effort.’ And somehow they haul their dehydrated bodies, two steps forward, one step back, to the top to see…a beautiful blue oasis on the other side.

They stumble down to the lake. It is not a mirage. The reporter plunges his cupped, blistered hands into the cool water of life. Only to see the sub unzip his trousers and piss in it.

“What the hell to you think you are doing,” he bellows.

“I’m making it better,” the sub replies.
Carry on reading

Jews get the blame in every great crisis, and it was inevitable that conspiracy theorists would blame them for the foreign policy crisis of the early 21st century.

What distinguishes our time, however, is that elements within western liberalism now adopt the position once associated with European reaction. I noticed that there was much grumbling in Standpoint’s letters column after the editor pointed out that the supposedly leftist and supposedly serious London Review of Books had been promoting anti-Semitism rather than say the Spectator or Mail as one would have expected in the 1930s. However loudly readers complained, they could not deny that the LRB had been the first to offer its “enlightened” readers the conspiracy theory of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that the “Israel Lobby” had taken America into the second Iraq War. “For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel,” the authors intoned. “Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical.”

carry on reading

When PR men want to sell journalists a line, their favourite opening gambit is gross sycophancy. “Hey, I lurve your work,” they smarm. “It’s great to meet ya, you’ve been doing wonderful stuff.” Reporters know they are lying. We suspect they have never read a damn word we have written. But we remain in danger of being flattered by their shameless eagerness to please into turning off our bullshit detectors.

Never forget the only job David Cameron had outside politics was as a PR man buttering-up contacts on behalf of the TV station Carlton, whose disappearance raised the quality of British television overnight. “In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative,” said the Telegraph’s veteran business reporter Jeff Randall, who dealt with him regularly. “I wouldn’t trust him with my daughter’s pocket money.”

Under Cameron the Foreign Office has become the marketing department of Great Britain Inc. He has decided that Simon Fraser, permanent secretary at the Department for Business, should be the next head of the diplomatic service and run it on commercial lines. He envisages a future when corporate hotshots and CBI bureaucrats can become Her Britannic Majesty’s ambassadors to far-flung lands the better to cut deals with the natives. Labour’s ethical dimension to foreign policy, such as it was, is history. Cameron tours the world not as statesman or democratic leader but as Britain’s head of PR, whose job is to suck up to potential customers until they buy a nuclear reactor or Hawk jet. If alert listeners catch a direct falsehood in his sales patter, aides are on hand to explain that he “misspoke” or was misunderstood.
Carry on reading