Alienating one of our few friends ` nice work, David Miliband

The Sunday Times
January 25, 2009

Rod Liddle

Is David Miliband Britain’s worst-ever foreign secretary, or do you
suppose his awfulness and incompetence were eclipsed by Lord Halifax?
It’s a close call. In the extraordinarily tense year of 1938 Halifax
was dispatched to an important meeting in Germany where, on arriving at
the Berchtesgaden, he mistook a beaming Adolf Hitler for the doorman.

Relations between the two countries were never quite the same after
that. You would think that the moustache might have been a giveaway,
that someone could have warned his lordship in advance, `Listen, mate,
anyone you see with a Charlie Chaplin moustache, an extravagant
side-parting and looking a bit overwrought ` just don’t tip him or give
him your hat, okay?’

Earlier Lord Halifax had been sent to India to keep everything nice and
calm and, on arrival, decided that this annoying little brown man in a
white dhoti who kept cropping up everywhere was quite inconsequential,
not really to be bothered with. That would be Mahatma Gandhi, then.
Perhaps he mistook Gandhi for a hatstand.

The journey of Halifax to high office ` landed gentry, Eton, Cambridge,
causes second world war ` is different from that of Miliband. Although
neither of them did much in the way of work before he became a
politi
cian, if we’re honest. Both were, in their different ways, born
to the task of making Britain look completely ridiculous abroad.

Miliband had form even before he annoyed one of the few allies Britain
has left in the world ` India. On a visit there last week he insisted
that the government sort out the problem of Kashmir, the failure to do
so being a direct cause of the murderous attacks in Mumbai, which left
195 people dead, by the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The Indians, who know a bit more about the problem than Banana Boy
Dave, begged to differ.

It is a little as if some Indian politician had arrived in London a day
or two after the 7/7 bombings and said, well, Britain, serves you right
` you shouldn’t have invaded Iraq, should you? I wonder how we would
have responded to that. It smacked of a certain ` how can I put this? `
insensitivity, ignorance, gaucheness and, more to the point, arrogance.

The Times of India reported that Miliband’s `tactlessness has even
surprised people in the British administration’ and his comments were
immediately and rightly rebuffed by the Indian government, which sent a
letter to our prime minister which began: `Why in Vishnu’s name did you
send this smug wonk with the weird hair to see us? He can’t even hold a
banana properly.’ Well, it probably didn’t say quite that, but you get
the gist.

By the way, the terrorists who carried out the atrocities in Mumbai
were a jihadist group with typically psychopathic aims which stretch
well beyond Kashmir. And as it was a British administration which
created the problem of Kashmir in the first place, the comments of
Miliband seem doubly insensitive.

Miliband has also now conceded that he `regrets’ the `war against
terror’. This seems to me an odd admission for someone who voted no
fewer than five times in favour of its first manifestation, the illegal
invasion of Iraq, unless it is accompanied by a personal apology and
mea culpa, which it wasn’t. I cannot remember him attacking the war
against terror before 2007, either. You cannot be a member of an
administration which has energetically prosecuted this relentless
aggression and suddenly decide that it was wrong all along, unless you
humbly apologise and resign from office (not necessarily in that
order). You are left with the suspicion that Miliband simply finds it
expedient to disown the war on terror, there now being a certain shift
in emphasis emanating from Washington DC.

The foreign secretary was also fabulously weak in his comments about
Robert Mugabe, hopelessly misjudged a challenge to the prime minister
last summer, and has extreme difficulties dealing with soft fruit.
Weak, tactless, arrogant, hypocritical and ill-informed. Hell, I think
poor old Lord Halifax has lost his position.

+ Is three years old too young an age to get a child started on
cigarettes? Or should the conscientious parent at least wait until the
kid can form a coherent sentence? Kelly Marie Pocock was up in court
last week for having allowed her toddler son to enjoy the occasional
snout in his bedroom, but was commended for having attended parenting
classes and got off with a suspended sentence. She is now going on
another course to make herself `more mature’. I assume the course will
involve having her brain sucked out through a straw and replaced with
something more sentient, ie, Dairylea processed cheese triangles.

I was 15 when my mum caught me smoking. She came home unexpectedly
early so, panic-stricken, I dropped the cigarette on the floor and
tried to look all innocent. She sat down and asked me numerous
questions about my day at school and then said: `Why are you smoking
cigarettes, Rod? They’re a waste of money.’ I protested with great
vigour. Why on earth should you think that I smoke? And she replied:
`Well, for one thing your fingers are stained brown with nicotine. And
your clothes smell of tobacco. And the clincher, son ` if you look to
your left, you will see that the magazine rack is on fire.’

How can we make him disappear?

It’s nice to read about someone who is happy with their lot, contented,
at one with the world and so on. So let me direct you to Paul Daniels’s
blog and allow you to soak up the Middlesbrough magician’s unimprovable
self-satisfaction. This week he has been writing from `paradise’ ` aka
the Caribbean, where he is on holiday with his wife Debbie McGee. He
spends his time walking on the beach, ogling Debbie (he’s posted a
close-up of her breasts) and commenting on grave matters. Such as
Prince Harry calling someone a Paki. Bloke was a Paki, after all, he
says. Paul shyly reveals he attended a bash out there for charidee with
Russ Abbot and a bloke from the Moody Blues. Check it out at
pauldaniels.co.uk. You’ll like it. Though not a lot.

Check out the new line in hypocrisy

I’ve spent the last week worrying if I am one of the customers the
Waitrose staff have been writing about on their public internet message
board. Am I the `mad ugly pikey skank’, or the `dirty old loon’, whom,
one storeworker asserted, you can smell approaching from several aisles
away? Even on a good day, I could pass for either, I suppose.

It is all most hurtful. In future I shall shop at Lidl or Asda, the
better to blend in with all the other mad, stinking, pikey skanks.

Have you noticed, incidentally, that most of the supermarkets have gone
back to handing out the free plastic carrier bags without looking at
0Ayou as if you’ve just clubbed a baby seal to death? That little bit of
self-serving `environmental responsibility’ lasted rather less long
than the cold snap we’ve recently been enduring.

+ `The nightmare is over,’ said Jon Snow on Channel 4 News, referring
not to colleague Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s desperate attempts to read the
news without being swallowed whole by his own smugness, but to the
occasion of George W Bush leaving office.

I suppose Jon thought that he was speaking for all of us; this is the
way with our liberal media elite ` they do not think that they are
remotely biased, merely that they are the sole guardians of the
unvarnished truth. Bush was a nightmare ` everyone agrees, from that
nice Armenian chap who works in our local delicatessen to the BBC and
The Guardian. That is everyone, isn’t it?