A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men – Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro….

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned – and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men
...continue From the “yes, but…” files]]> Perhaps it is merely a case of grabbing whoever is conveniently to hand. Or perhaps not:

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men – Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro….

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned – and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men – Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned – and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

Of course, the only way to prevent this kind of thing happening again is for the French to change their misguided and interventionist domestic policies.

[P.S. Why were they speaking in English, I wonder?]

Ferdinand Mount believes a ‘classless’ delusion grips Britain. Not only is the class divide wider than ever, but in a compelling new book he explores how the rich are treating the poor with an unprecedented contempt

I must confess that this intro led me to read this article with a predisposition for contempt for that premise myself. And indeed, I found much of what Mount had to say about class attitudes in Britain debatable to
...continue The true cost of the political class]]> In the most recent edition of the Sunday Times1, there was an interesting article by Ferdinand Mount called Uppers and Downers which had the tagline:

Ferdinand Mount believes a ‘classless’ delusion grips Britain. Not only is the class divide wider than ever, but in a compelling new book he explores how the rich are treating the poor with an unprecedented contempt

I must confess that this intro led me to read this article with a predisposition for contempt for that premise myself. And indeed, I found much of what Mount had to say about class attitudes in Britain debatable to put it mildly. However the central thesis, something not hinted at in the introduction, was indeed compelling: that many social problems today in the UK are a direct consequence of the destruction of working class culture, and this was caused by, as Mount puts it:

Worse than all of this is the fact that in the past I have worked for a Conservative government, and not just any government but the administration led by Margaret Thatcher, which its passionate opponents still believe did more to deepen class divisions than any other government since the war. I was, for a time, the head of her policy unit. How can someone like me pretend to know what life was and is like for the worst-off of my fellow countrymen?

My answer is that it is People Like Us who are largely responsible for the present state of the lower classes in Britain. It is our misunderstandings, meddlings and manipulations that have transformed a British working class that was the envy and amazement of foreign observers in the 19th century into a so-called underclass that is often the subject of baffled despair today, both at home and abroad. We did the damage, or most of it. It is the least we can do to try to understand what we have done and help to undo it where we can.

For me this is truly the key but it is not a consequence of the ‘Conservative’ or ‘Labour’ varient of intrusive regulatory statism (for in 2004, who really thinks there is a huge material difference between them?) but of regulatory interventionist statism in all its progressive democratic forms. I shall certainly read Mount’s new book Mind the Gap, though if the pre-release blurb is true that the book asks…

[T]he author pursues an oft-times illusive answer to the fundamental question: How can oppressive inequality in Britain be wiped out once and for all?

…which begs the question does ‘oppressive inequality’ (a) actually exist in Britain, and (b) it is anyone’s business to ‘wipe it out’. If that is in fact what the book is about then I expect I shall be putting a pretty nasty book review up here on Samizdata.net in the not too distant future.

For me the core issue here however is that as Mount indicates, it was indeed the political class, people like him, who bear the responsibility for destroying a significant section of civil society and replacing it with a state-centred dependency and entitlement culture of de-socialised barbarians.

Thus the question that really needs answering it not how do ‘we’ solve this problem but rather how to dis-aggrandise the entire class of people from left to right who caused the problem in the first place. I cannot tell without first reading Ferdinand Mount’s book but perhaps he has realised that there is indeed what Sean Gabb calls an ‘enemy class’… and much to his chagrin, the term ‘People Like Us’ indicates Mount has realised that he is a member of it.

1 Due to the benighted archiving policy of The Times making articles unreadable to viewers overseas, we do not generally link to Times articles

I mean, with an actual live human being, and not just in his own head.

Well at least his reasons are hard to fault. Why? Because so many musicians are backing Kerry and…

If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading
...continue Now this is funny!]]> Alice Cooper, that paragon of conservative values and restraint is… backing George Bush! Methinks the more wingnut elements of the Republican Party will probably have rather mixed feeling about that particular endorsement.

Well at least his reasons are hard to fault. Why? Because so many musicians are backing Kerry and…

If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal. Besides, when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn’t already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that’s a good reason right there to vote for Bush.

Not quite enough to get me swooning for Dubya, but damn, one can find strangely compelling wisdom in the most unlikely places.

Fortunately not everyone is fooled.

One of the worst things about Australian elections is the placards that political parties insist on hanging on street poles. At no other time of the year are any other organisation permitted to do this, but political parties do like their perks; inflicting an eyesore I call it.

I am not going to vote – I
...continue Election time Down Under]]> The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, has called an election for October 9. So we get to choose once again between a fuzzy right-wing statism, or a ‘Blair wannabe’ statism. You will excuse me if I do not get ferociously excited about this choice.

One of the worst things about Australian elections is the placards that political parties insist on hanging on street poles. At no other time of the year are any other organisation permitted to do this, but political parties do like their perks; inflicting an eyesore I call it.

I am not going to vote – I will defy the State, and not vote. That is an offence which will cost me a parking ticket fine. It is actually also illegal for me to advocate not voting to other people as well.

As to who will win, I think the ‘Blair Wannabe’ Party will win; I wrote about this back in June and nothing has happened since to make me change my mind. In the great scheme of things, this is a small matter but it will consume the local media and blogs here for the next six weeks.

A claim on the dust jacket states:”The King James Bible is the greatest work of prose ever written,” and the message of the book, while not repeating it, is an elaboration of this claim; Nicolson, though not quite a believer or an unbeliever, is obviously besotted with the King James Bible, often called The Authorised Version, though it was never officially authorised by King or Parliament. It is now rarely to be found in the pews and on the lecterns of most
...continue The greatest work of prose ever written?]]> Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
HarperCollins Publishers 2003

A claim on the dust jacket states:”The King James Bible is the greatest work of prose ever written,” and the message of the book, while not repeating it, is an elaboration of this claim; Nicolson, though not quite a believer or an unbeliever, is obviously besotted with the King James Bible, often called The Authorised Version, though it was never officially authorised by King or Parliament. It is now rarely to be found in the pews and on the lecterns of most churches, and hardly ever heard in public worship, where its language, already deliberately archaic even in its predecessors, has also been discarded and God, just like everyone else, is addressed as ‘you’. If Christians are a minority in the English- speaking world, then KJB readers and users are a minority within a minority. Does this matter? The Centenary of its publication in 1611 is approaching and is unlikely to be celebrated, or commemorated by as much as a postage stamp, the excuse being that this would be ‘controversial’ or ‘divisive’, in the way that 1588, 1688, 1603, 1605, and 1707 were or will be. Adam Nicolson has written a fine book, of interest to all of us brought up on the King James Bible, quotations from which resonate in the memory, even when not at once identifiable, while those from all other subsequent translations set the teeth on edge. Here we are told part of the story – for most of it is lost – of how this seminal work was produced.

Why lost? The Translators (then and now capitalised), organized into six ‘companies’ of nine men, left few clues as to their working methods, their deliberations, discussions or disagreements and the manuscript sent to the printers has disappeared, possibly burnt in the Great Fire of London in 1666 (p. 225). Just as the whole scaffolding to build a great edifice is taken down and dispersed, so notes and drafts of the great translation ended up in the wastepaper basket, with some intriguing exceptions, and the fifty workers (four short of what there should have been) got on with their lives afterwards, leaving no memoirs, let alone diaries, of what it was like to have been on the project and not dreaming they had written the world’s bestseller, the Bible to dominate the English-speaking world for four centuries and help shape the English language. Only a few, fascinating scraps remain. Like the copy of the Bishops’ Bible (the text the Translators were supposed to revise) which the Bodleian bought from one of them (or someone) for 13/4 (pre-decimal for 2/3 of a pound), with his suggested emendations for the new translation marked in it. Or John Bois, the rather humble, impoverished but very learned Translator, who took notes of the revisers-translators’ discussions of the complete work and whose notebook has somehow survived – everything in it written in Latin, bar Greek, of course. This leads Nicolson to speculate whether the discussions were carried out in Latin. It is almost certain that had not King James desired it, ‘his’ Bible would not have been produced, and England, and Scotland too, would have made do with one of the versions already extant, either the ‘official’, Elizabethan Bishops’ Bible of 1568 or the Geneva Bible of the late 1550s, favourite of the Puritans and heavily annotated politically – and subversively so in the opinion of the King, a good reason for replacing it; he banned its printing in England in 1616, though it continued to be produced on the Continent. It is fair to say that this was not his only reason. After he came to the throne he made a real attempt to promote peace and unity in his kingdoms. He ended the war with Spain, which had dragged on irrelevantly, but was unable to unite Scotland with England into a single Kingdom with one Parliament (the English objected). He also attempted -he was, after all, its Head – to reconcile the two factions within the Church of England, though this meant retaining the penal laws against Roman Catholics, now, however, less strictly enforced. The King was used to the Puritan faction; he had been up against its like all his life in Scotland, where he was certainly not the head of the Church, with its lack of bishops, its Presbyterianism and its Calvinism. The reconciliation was only partially successful; bishops were non-negotiable (“No bishops… no king”), and hard-line opponents were excluded from the start from the Hampton Court Conference, designed to bring concord.

Indeed, with the king bringing out all the disagreements, to some extent fudged by Elizabeth, the Conference was a stormy affair and seemed to make things worse. But his wish to have a new version of the Bible prevailed, and even though Bancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury had been an opponent of the idea, he took charge of the operation to bring it about, perhaps to ensure the Puritan element was excluded. Even so, men with Puritan leanings were included amongst the Translators.

Bancroft’s instructions are still extant; a copy of the first of its two pages is printed as an end paper (why not the other?) and Nicolson discusses each fifteen of their headings. As for the translation itself, the Bible, including the Apocrypha, was divided up into six sections for the six ‘companies’ of nine to translate – and there, for the next four years, the information largely runs out. The first instruction directs that the translation should be founded on the Bishops’ Bible, for it had been far from the intention of anyone for almost the last eighty years to make a translation de novo. The Bishops’ Bible was descended, through the Great Bible commissioned by Henry VIII in 1539, back through Coverdale to Tyndale, who might have translated the whole Bible if he had not been caught and burnt in Flanders. In fact, the translators looked at all the versions that had been produced, including (without acknowledgement) the one produced by the English Catholics in Rheims and Douai in 1609. This backward gaze was to invite an archaic style and there is every reason to believe that this was accepted as desirable, and the Gothic font of the early editions deliberate.

Departing from Tyndale’s spare, vernacular style, the Jacobean verges on the rhetorical and orotund, or, as Nicolson prefers to put it, majestical. But can one, if brought up on it, subject it to any sort of literary criticism? Nicolson emphasises very much the reverence for the original texts, translated with far less freedom than was countenanced in rendering the secular classics into English, where even the translator’s own views might be allowed to obtrude. Yet this did not mean literalness, or always using the same English word for the original one in different contexts.

Perhaps from lack of information about the procedures and meetings and discussions that the Translators must have endured, Nicolson instead describes some of them, in order to give us an insight into their characters and ways of thinking. It would have been nice to have had more portraits; those he has included are most interesting. Unfortunately, none of the eleven men in the painting reproduced on the back of the dust jacket is identified (though one is plainly Robert Cecil) in a picture entitled “The Somerset House Conference, 1604″, a Conference not mentioned in the book and possibly a mistake for the one at Hampton Court. This is entirely in keeping with the cavalier and slipshod way dust jacket pictures are generally presented by publishers. In this fine, but anonymous work, all have turned to face the painter except two who sit opposite each other, in mild confrontation, the only ones with their right hands just resting on the rich table covering, meticulously painted. Were the two sides ‘Establishment’ (obviously on the right, with Robert Cecil at the front, notepad and inkstand in front of him) and ‘Puritans’? And why was this picture not included in the book itself?

All fifty Translators (there were a few drop-outs from the projected fifty four)are listed by their ‘companies’ at the end of the book. Most had comfortable ecclesiastical positions; eight were or became bishops, eight were heads and twelve were professors of university colleges; others had, or were given, prebenderies or vicarages. The actual funding of the project is uncertain, but it seems to have been understood that the actual Translators did the work as part of the duties implicit in their positions. The printer could be expected to make a profit from his work, having paid £3,500 for the privilege, but in fact he went bankrupt. James’s chief minister, Cecil, probably eased the matter of expenses; he was excellent with what would now be called ‘stealth taxes’, but James was almost equally prodigal with what he secured.

The Translator Nicolson obviously found most interesting is Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, later successively Bishop of Ely, Chichester and Winchester, whose manifold and often contradictory qualities are listed like a threnody from page 26 to 27; at once sensitive, even saintly, and yet callous, he could regularly spend five hours every morning in prayer (and in tears), but sneer at a stubborn Puritan, incarcerated in a filthy dungeon, who would later be executed, obviously with his approval (p. 92). Known for the wonderful prose of his sermons (see p. 191, for the passage borrowed by T.S. Eliot), he was just the man to make the new Bible “shine as gold more brightly, being rubbed and polished”, as the Preface to the finished work, The Translators to the Reader, probably written by Miles Smith, puts it. For the Translators were careful not to impugn any previous translation, probably one reason why all were revisions. Nicolson suggests that Andrewes may have revised the bulk of the first twelve books of the Bible: “Most of our company are negligent”, he wrote dismissively, and Nicolson produces some evidence to back this (p. 192).

The only lay Translator was Sir Henry Savile (price of knighthood: £1000) who was lucky to survive his complicity in the Earl of Essex’s rebellion at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. He was very much a Renaissance Man and, as such, unscrupulous as well as learned (he produced, with help, the definitive edition of St Chrysostom, at enormous cost, which did not sell well), with an eye for a good billet – Eton, despite the fact that the Provost was supposed to be a cleric – and at the same time an unreliable patron, as John Bois, the Latin note-taker mentioned above, found out. By another quirk of survival, we know more about Bois than of most of the other Translators, for a close friend wrote a memoir of this absent-minded husband, devoted father and financially careless brilliant scholar, and Nicolson uses it to illuminate one niche of the environment in which the translations took place (pp. 203-215).

Early in 1609 all the nine sections were brought together for revision by twelve unnamed scholars, meeting in the new Stationers’ Hall, for whom Bois was the note-taker. There is evidence, though from a later source, that the whole Bible was read through: “one read the translation, the rest holding in their hands some Bible, either of the learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian, etc. If they found any fault, they spoke up; if not, he read on (p. 209).” Nothing could make clearer that the sound was as important as the sense. Perhaps this procedure also accounts for the fact that two years passed before a complete manuscript was ready for the printer.

It might be expected that after all the care taken in its production – “three hundred and fifty scholar-years” Nicolson estimates – it would be a great publishing success, but this was not the case. Only after the Restoration in 1660, almost fifty years later, did it come to take its place as the only Bible in English that all Protestants read. Even the Translators were too accustomed to the Geneva Bible: Andrewes’ sermons are sprinkled with quotations from it and Smith (or whoever wrote its Preface) did not quote from the Bible he was presenting to the Reader, but from the Geneva, though in mitigation it may be said that he would not have a copy of the new text readily available. Likewise, a generation later, Archbishop Laud, scourge of the Puritans, used the same Geneva Bible they favoured. There seems to have been no definitive first edition and careless printing ensured that editions were produced littered with misprints, the most notorious being the ‘Wicked Bible’ where the Seventh Commandment enjoins “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

Nicolson obviously has little time for subsequent translations, but, though he gives examples from both earlier and later versions to point the KJB’s superiority, he has to admit that Jacobean scholarship was sometimes inadequate, particularly for tackling the knotty prose of St Paul, and that superior original manuscripts than those used have since come to light, or were even available at the time. Oddly, he stigmatises the Revised Version, produced in 1885, claiming that “it introduced a string of Jacobethanisms which had not been in the 1611 text”, though the words he lists are all well-represented in Cruden’s Concordance of the KJB, published in 1737.

The Bible, however translated, has not made a successful transition from a religious to a literary work, though there have been several attempts using the KJB, with titles such as The Reader’s Bible and The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature. Though probably unknown today, Arthur Mee’s lavishly illustrated Children’s Bible, is a fine example of editing, pruning the KJB’s 775,000 words down to 250,000. Nor is it likely that the Bible could be taught as an example of Eng. Lit. without there being a demand that other religious works should be admitted for ‘balance’, though probably nothing would be able to compete with it for narrative interest and comprehensibility.

Other books I can recommend on this topic are In the beginning: The story of the King James Bible by Alister McGrath; The Making of The English Bible by Benson Bobrick; and David Daniell’s massive The Bible in English.

There has been a lively discussion in the comments section of Johnathan Pearce’s article here on Samizdata.net When libertarians disagree. It
...continue Making the world a better place?]]>

The problem I see with the libertarian pro-war position is that libertarians don’t have recourse to the most powerful argument for the war: that it made the world a better place. Non-libertarians can yammer on about freeing poor Iraqis who were crushed under the thumb of Saddam Hussein, and that’s definitely a benefit. But Libertarians don’t believe it is OK to steal money via taxes and spend it on other people. Hence they can’t use this argument.
- Patri Friedman

There has been a lively discussion in the comments section of Johnathan Pearce’s article here on Samizdata.net When libertarians disagree. It has thrown up so many interesting points that I felt a new article on the issues might be a good idea. It is pleasure to see so much intelligent discussion of strongly held views without the acrimony and name-calling that so often characterises debate on the internet.

We have a problem that the label ‘libertarian’ sometimes it does not really inform as to what a person thinks, something which September 11th 2001 brought starkly into view, and I am not just referring to the more absurd uses of the term. For example a frequent commenter here on Samizdata.net, Paul Coulam, is a prominent libertarian and anarchist, well known in pro-liberty circles in London. He is also a friend of mine and has been known to get plastered at Samizdata.net blogger bashes. I too am fairly well known in the same circles and describe myself as a ‘minarchist’, or social individualist or ‘classical liberal’ or a… libertarian. I see Paul as a ‘fellow traveller’ of mine but clearly we have fairly major disagreements of where we would like to end up. We just agree on the direction we need to move from where we are now. I regard the state as probably indispensable, albeit a vastly smaller state than we have now, whereas Paul sees no state as the final destination.

In my view the minarchist ‘classical liberal’ view to which I subscribe means the only legitimate state functions which can be funded via some form of coercive taxation are those which can only realistically be carried out by a state, and which are essential to the survival of several liberty. The military seems a fairly clear cut example of that to me (with the proviso I would like to see the state military as only ‘first amongst many’) and possibly a very limited number of other roles, such as (maybe) a centre for disease control function to prevent plagues, and some form of superior court function.

So once you get over that core issue of small state or no state (no small feat), the rest is arguing over magnitude (also not a trivial issue), rather that whether or not you even have a military funded by some form of coercive action: that also means ‘how you use that miltary’ is an argument over degree rather than existence. In short I see the difference between a ‘libertarian’ (or whatever) of my non-anarchist ilk, and sundry types of non-libertarian statist as being one of the degree to which the state is allowed to accumulate coercive power. Certainly some libertarians fall at the trap labelled ‘magnitude’ as they cannot bring themselves to see the moral or sometimes even practical differences between the USA and Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. As I want a ‘vastly better state’ rather than ‘no state’, and as I also regard the process of getting a vastly better state involves holding ‘the state’ and its borders in considerably less regard, the idea of using’ less bad states’ to overthrow ‘much worse states’ does not really pose a great moral dilemma for me, particularly in the here and now of 2004.

I am not suggesting wars and struggles between states are a generally Good Thing but at the ends of the continuum, the moral and practical calculus does not seem that hard to me. Sure, the justification ‘it makes the world a better place’ is used by left and right statists all the time for all manner of things and sometimes they are even correct… but for me the test is ‘but would the world be an even better place if the state had got out of the way and left private individuals to sort things out?’ On that test, the state fails pretty consistently, which is why my ‘ideal state’ is one where it is permitted to act in only those very few core functions where private non-coercively funded action cannot do what must be done for the survival of life and liberty.

So yes, I supported war by the bloated regulatory nation-states of the USA and UK (and others) against Ba’athist Iraq and doubly so against the hideous national socialist regime in Belgrade, whose works I saw first hand in Croatia and Bosnia (a process that not only inoculated me against the Murray Rothbard virus once I was exposed to it years later but also left me with an abiding hatred for ethnic nationalism, a fondness for 338 Lapua and ‘smile reflex’ whenever I see an F-16). My view is that it is only a matter of practical consideration whether or not one should be shooting at tyrants and their servants and using other people’s money to do that. My friend Paul is not a pacifist so I am sure we would agree that ideally tyrants should be overthrown locally and, ideally, for profit: where we depart is over when it needs to be done on the taxpayers dime.

Left to their own devices, tyrants accumulate to themselves the means to spread tyranny and so the notion that offensive war against a tyrant is morally wrong seems bizarre to me, particularly as I am not too hung up on the whole national borders thing when it comes to spreading liberty. The utilitarian consideration of ‘are they too strong to just attack’ is rather important of course, which is why I rather like the idea of attacking North Korea before they get nuclear weapons.

Why? Because it makes the world a better place.

Well, I was ROFLMAO when I read this:

TORY leader Michael Howard has been barred from the White House and told he will never meet President George Bush, it emerged last night.

The bombshell ban was slapped on Mr Howard after he called for Tony
...continue The friend of my enemy is my enemy]]> I recall, shortly after I first got myself on-line, frequently seeing the phrase ‘ROFLMAO’ appear on various chat rooms and fora. I had not a clue what this term meant but, after a little judicious detective work, I discovered that is was an acronym for the phrase ‘Rolling On the Floor Laughing My Arse Off’.

Well, I was ROFLMAO when I read this:

TORY leader Michael Howard has been barred from the White House and told he will never meet President George Bush, it emerged last night.

The bombshell ban was slapped on Mr Howard after he called for Tony Blair to quit over the Iraq War….

What particularly upset the White House was Mr Howard’s comment: “If I were Prime Minister I would seriously be considering my position.”

They were also angered when the Tory leader accused the PM of “serious dereliction of duty”.

Mr Rove, who speaks with the President’s full authority, said: “You can forget about meeting the President full stop. Don’t bother coming, you are not meeting him….”

And it has deeply damaged the decades-long alliance between the Republicans and the Conservative Party.

Senior US Right-wingers blame Mr Howard for undermining the coalition in Iraq and say they are privately rooting for a Labour victory in the next election.

A Tory source said: “They see Tony Blair as a true ally against terror and the Tories as a bunch of w*****s.”

Wherever would they get that idea??!!

Although the cause of this spat is laid at the door of Mr Howard’s apparent equivocation over Iraq, I get the feeling that the real friction lies elsewhere. Strange as it may sound, I have been reading what sound like reasonably reliable reports in the UK press about squadrons of young British Conservative activists hot-footing it off to the USA to work in the Presidential election campaign…for the Democrats!.

In the interests of accuracy, I think it ought to be said that this is far more about the Tories trying to pull some sort of rug from under ‘Teflon Tony’ than establishing any sort of link with either the US Democrat Party or Mr Kerry. But in any event, it is still a deeply ill-judged political blunder. The article alludes to an ‘alliance’ between US Republicans and British Conservatives and while I think that ‘alliance’ is too strong a term, there certainly has been a traditional affinity between these two centre-right Anglo-Saxon political tribes.

That being the case, one wonders what these jet-setting young Tories were hoping to achieve by throwing their lot in with Mr Kerry? There is nothing to suggest that a President Kerry would somehow undermine Tony Blair. If the Tories cannot make a dent in him at home, then how are they going to land any meaningful punches on him via Washington? And if they imagine that they are going to be the subject of any outreach by either the US Democrats of the Guardian-reading classes at home then all I can say is that they are even stupider than they look (and they look fairly stupid).

In short, the British Tories have managed to alienate one of their few powerful friends for no gain whatsoever and, since I assume that the leadership either gave their blessing to these transatlantic jaunts or, at the very least, turned a blind eye, then it merely reinforces my view that the British Conservatve Party is in the hands of buffoons and political pygmies.

I understand that the streets of New York will be plagues this week by throngs of the Great American Unwashed wearing ‘George Bush=Hitler’ T-shirts. I do not imagine that any such items of radical apparel will be making an appearance at the next Tory Party convention. However, I do wonder if would get any sales with a ‘Michael Howard = Chief Wiggum’ version?