Monday 25 June 2012

"He’ll Know My Message"

Peter Hitchens writes:

Some days ago I mentioned that Alastair Campbell’s diaries contained two really interesting pieces of information. I dealt with the first, which was the awkward fact (awkward, anyway, for tribal Tories whose own leaders can’t be trusted with national independence) that Gordon Brown  and Ed Balls  (against whom tribal Tories harbour a raging, irrational hatred that drives facts and logic from their minds, and is probably explained by a deep need to forget that they once voted New Labour, and an even deeper need to hide from themselves the horrible truth about Mr Slippery) saved Sterling from Anthony Blair (who, by the way,  is  now loose once again,  re-entering British politics and musing on the eventual abolition of the Pound as if the events of the last two years had never happened).

What was the second interesting thing? It was this, that on the eve of the Iraq adventure, George W. Bush got it into his head  (mistakenly, as it happened) that the Tory party might use the Commons vote on war to destroy Anthony Blair. And, having reached this wrong conclusion, he then made a Corleone-style threat which ought to make any free-born Briton’s blood either boil, or run cold – you choose which.

Here it is, extracted from a Mail on Sunday story, the only paper that made a substantial reference to it, I think:

George Bush threatened to topple former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith if he failed to back Tony Blair over the Iraq War, Alastair Campbell has claimed.

Mr Campbell, who was No  10’s director of communications at the time, said the US President made the extraordinary threat during frantic diplomatic exchanges in the final hours before war in March 2003….

…Mr Campbell’s account of the run-up to war, contained in the final volume of his Downing Street diaries, reveals the fears in Mr Blair’s own Cabinet that Britain was being ‘bumped’ into war by a US administration that was determined to bypass the United Nations.

He details an exchange on March 12 in which Mr Blair told Mr Bush that he was struggling to win political support for the war and ‘there was a danger the Tories would see this as their chance to get rid of him’.

Mr Campbell wrote: ‘Bush said they would make it clear to the Tories that if they moved to get rid of TB “we will get rid of them.” ’

Mr Campbell did not explain how an American President would contrive to remove a British Opposition leader.

He also claimed that Mr Bush misnamed Mr Duncan Smith, writing: ‘He said he wouldn’t speak to “Iain Duncan Baker” himself – TB didn’t correct him – “but he’ll know my message.” ’

‘He’ll know my message’, has the ring of ‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse’, to me. Of course the event has its deeply comic side.  Firstly, it would be rather hard for the President to get a message to someone whose name he couldn’t even get right. One shudders to think of some innocent businessman in Tooting called Duncan Baker waking with a shudder to find a horse’s head bleeding in his bed, with a baffling message saying  ‘You leave my friend Andrew Blair alone’ stapled to its ear.

It is hard to think of two more inept politicians than George W. Bush and The Quiet Man (who once noisily heckled me during BBC Question Time). Though IDS is actually quite likeable, and has some sterling qualities, he was the victim of circumstance,  who became leader of the Tory Party in a terrible year because everyone else was too cunning to take the impossible job. He was then more or less annihilated by a horrendous alliance of media bullies and Tory ‘modernisers’ in an episode that was painful to watch, which was one of the most significant moments in modern British politics and which is discussed in detail in my book The Cameron Delusion.

I have never met President Bush the Second. But I know people who have, and I struggle to believe the claims by his defenders that deep down he was brighter and more thoughtful than he appeared. He was as bad as he looked.

But isn’t the fact that he offered to destroy a party leader in a supposedly independent (and friendly) country, to protect his friend in Downing Street rather a big story? The MoS thought so, but it is widely unknown, like many other interesting events and facts. Once again, the strange nature of what is, and what is not, news is exposed. His really happened, which is more than can be said of all the current Tory policy initiatives from 'O' levels to Welfare Reform. They will never happen.

Personally, it fits very well with my own experience of the true nature of the Anglo-American Unspecial Relationship, which I have discussed here in the past, in the light of Bill Clinton’s decision to back the provisional IRA against the British government. Un unwise official from the West Wing told me, without meaning to, that the White House regarded Britain as fundamentally no different from Serbia.

This is why I shudder at US behaviour in Syria. It is, once you have stripped away the rhetoric,  interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. And if, one day, our sovereign nation, Britain,  asserted its independence, might we, too find ourselves under attack first from international interventionist TV stations telling lies about us,  then from a rabble of ‘activists’ who had mysteriously acquired arms and whose faults would be ignored or overlooked, then from ‘NATO’ airpower and special forces, intervening to ‘protect’ these ‘activists’ from the ‘repression’ of our government, which would be referred to by everyone as a ‘regime’? A ’No Fly Zone’ over East Anglia, to protect pro-EU ‘activists’, anyone?

In a way it has already happened in miniature in Northern Ireland. Most Americans (and many continental Europeans)  believed propaganda lies about what was happening there. The USA gave its backing to the ‘activists’ of the IRA. And we surrendered to pressure, stopped ‘killing our own people’ , as the British Army’s actions against the IRA would no doubt nowadays be described. Then we withdrew from the disputed territory (though most people haven’t yet realised that this is what has happened).  In a way we were lucky that 24-hour TV and liberal interventionism were in their infancy in the 1980s, or NATO might have bombed London in support of the IRA. We would also never have been able to retake the Falklands.

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