New Conservative Leadership
Insightful editorial in this week’s Spectator
How to breed poodles
Conservative MPs and candidates have spent the last four years campaigning against two connected evils of the Labour style of government. In innumerable speeches and press releases, they have stood up for local and national democracy, and against the tendency of the government to centralise power and to hand it over to quangocrats, bureaucrats and officials in Brussels. They have also launched countless philippics against Labour’s love of the target and the quota, and all manner of diktat from Whitehall.
Extradition of NatWest Three to the United States
Boris Johnson MP today lambasted Charles Clarke’s decision to press ahead with the extradition of the so-called Bermingham or NatWest three to the US, under the terms of the Extradition Treaty 2003, an infamy.
TV Licensing
I won’t pay to be abused by the BBC
I want to save myself the price of a stamp or a phone call today by writing an open letter to Mr Richard Goodbody, the regional manager of the Swindon enforcement division of the TV Licensing Authority. I have no reason to doubt that Mr Goodbody is a perfectly pleasant man in private life, but in his public capacity he is, in my view, a blithering nincompoop; and if my language is intemperate it is because Goodbody has just sent me one of the rudest and stupidest letters I have ever received.
Good Morning
Morning folks. Boris Johnson, your absconding blogger, reporting for duty.
A FEW RANDOM THOUGHTS
We went out to the cinema the other night, and all we could see was something
called the Interpreter, which imagined an assassination attempt on a Robert
Mugabe figure at the UN. It was interesting to see how Hollywood coped with this
theme, and how director Sydney Pollack tiptoed towards reality but funked it in
the end. We were told that the old dictator had once been a revolutionary hero,
feted in the west. We were shown the degradation of his regime, the corpses in
the football stadium. We were told that Nicole Kidman’s family had been killed
by a landmine, and we were given the tiniest of hints that it had been tough to
be a white inhabitant of this troubled country “in Africa’s south-central belt”.
But on the main point – the heart of the modern Zimbabwean tragedy – the film
was eloquently silent. Sydney Pollack did not have the nerve to address the
wholesale theft of white farmers’ land by Zanu-PF thugs. Why? Because the
vicious Mugabe land-grab is supported by most of black Africa; and even if
America makes ritual denunciations of Mugabe, it just would not have been
possible – or compatible with Hollywood’s PC values – for Pollack to make a film
upholding the right of white colonial settlers to their land. I’m not saying the
film was all bad: it was good to see a thriller about African politics. But it
was a cop-out.
DT column – French vote on new European Constitution
The no campaign is ahead in the polls in France, which votes on 29 May.
The European constitution means more irresistible and pernicious regulation, with more majority voting envisaged on questions of technology, education, social affairs … The French are being scarified by unscrupulous politicians with tales of a Tebbit-like constitution, full of free-market on-your-bikery
On the reason to vote no:
the last thing the French (or anyone) need is more detailed prescriptions from Brussels about the labour market or anything else
