Rewriting history - by Richard... Thursday, September 30, 2010

Rewriting history - by Richard... Thursday, September 30, 2010

Two articles yesterday, one in The Daily Telegraph and the other in The Daily Mail trailed a new BBC documentary called Secret Iraq. A three-part documentary, showing at 9pm on Wednesdays, it purports to tell the "real" story of the Iraqi occupation and insurgency.

The Mail starts its report with the legend: Britain's withdrawal from Basra was a "defeat" which left the city "terrorised" by militias, according to a damning verdict by British and American generals. Yet, many will recall how much effort went into portraying this defeat as a "victory", with sundry generals all offering a carefully crafted concerted line, not least Gen Dannatt, with his infamous "we have achieved what we set out to achieve" speech.

Typically, though, in order to progress the narrative, the producers rely on the tired and wholly unreliable device of using "talking heads". And one of those heads is Gen Dannatt. This is not only lazy journalism, it runs the risk of misleading the watcher. Partisan players are being allowed to state positions which are partisan, yet the contributions are accepted without challenge, effectively as stated fact.

I will not comment a great deal more, holding the bulk of my fire until the series has ended. But I would note the comment in October 1941 of Sir Stephen Taylor, Director of the Ministry of Information's home intelligence division, when he was discussing the need for a working definition of morale.

In a highly relevant observation, he said that: "Morale must be measured not by what a person thinks and says but by what he does and how he does it." The same must apply to journalism and history. Events must not be measured by what the persons involved think and say about them (especially afterwards) but by what they did and how they did it at the time. Actions should speak louder than words.

By that yardstick, Dannatt – and many other actors – come out very differently than they would have you believe from their subsequent claims. Needless to say, though, I have a dog in the fight, with my book Ministry of Defeat. Despite this new narrative being better and more expensively resourced, I still prefer my version to what the BBC has so far offered.

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You too can have one - by Richard... Wednesday, September 29, 2010

I'm absolutely sure that you want one of those really eco-friendly Smart cars – you know, the ones that do 150,000 miles on a pint of petrol, accelerate from 0-25mph in thirty years and make a statement to all your friends and neighbours about how green you are.*

Well, you are in luck. The owner of the Smart car in the picture doesn't need his any more, so it's going at a knock down price. And if you have a little difficulty recognising it, it's the silver thing between the two trucks. Perhaps we could get Ed Miliband to drive it?


* Reliable sources here say it wasn't Smart car ... it was a Ford SUV. But hey! This is a propaganda war as well.

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Belgian minesweeping - by Richard...

Dated 1939, the caption to this photograph reads: "Member of Royal Dutch Navy demonstrates the Belgian version of how to defuse a sea mine."

And, for the intellectual equivalent, on Thursday 30 September we have Geoffrey Lean hosting an "Age of Energy" event at The Daily Telegraph offices, where you can pose your question to a panel of energy experts including Secretary of State; Chris Huhne, TV Presenter; Philippa Forrester, Shell Chairman; James Smith, Leading academic; Professor Gordon Mackerron and WWF Chief Executive; David Nussbaum.

Marginally, the winner of the Brain Trust goes to the Belgian, so the chances of you getting anything out of this event are a tad remote.

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I really do hope - by Richard...

... once again, that all those Hooray Henries who rooted for Cameron as defender of the armed forces are now having a good look at themselves as the implications of the strategic defence review begin to emerge.

You might have expected me to have followed the process in some depth, adding to the "great debate" from the experts and pundits as to which way our defence policy should go. The problem, though, is that there hasn't really been a great debate, not in any sense of there being a strategic review.

What this is about, and what it was always going to be about, is cost-cutting. The process then becomes a money-grab, with each of the Services fighting for its share of the loot and trying to protect its favourite "toys". Thus, the chances of us emerging with "leaner, fitter" armed forces are next to nil.

In fact, as we now see from Liam Fox's reaction, the financial top-slicing risks having a devastating effect on the forces' morale. So we have the defence secretary complaining: "Frankly, this process is looking less and less defensible as a proper SDSR and more like a 'super CSR'" (comprehensive spending review)".

But why is he so surprised? As long as there is a divorce between foreign policy and defence, as,we pointed our earlier, this was always going to be a "strategy-lite" review. That means that it could only be about spending.

It is there that the dereliction of our foreign secretary begins to be apparent. Throughout the entire review process, he should have been putting down markers on Britain's place in the world, aiming to shape the review and thus ensure that the foreign policy interest was paramount. Instead, he has been silent.

Looking back, we have not had a single speech of any weight or significance which might have been taken as a foreign office contribution to the strategic defence review. Then we get his interventionyesterday, when he elevates "climate change" to the top of the league.

Without any sense of surprise, we have noted the inability of the media to remark on the absence of foreign policy input to the defence review. It thus has to be unsurprising that it fails to note the perversion of policy and the absence of the foreign secretary from the debate.

Much earlier, my erstwhile co-editor confidently predicted that in William Hague we would have the worst foreign secretary in history, and so far she is stacking up to be right. But then, this is only to be expected from a man who is the right hand to a lightweight whose grasp of foreign policy seems to embrace a belief that we were a "junior partner" to the Americans in 1940.

Going right back to the beginning, the great concern about Cameron was always that he was a policy-lite leader. The concern turns out to have been fully justified. Now, with the chips down, we are seeing the effects of that inability to "do" policy - and it doesn't get any more serious than failures to craft foreign and defence policies.

Hague as worst foreign secretary, therefore, has to be seen in the context of his being a member of the worst government in living memory. After the last administration, that is going to take some doing, but it looks to be the only superlative that Cameron and his merry men (and women) will ever merit.

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A cold wind doth blow - by Richard...

Reported by the Scottish Daily Record and now picked up by The Daily Mail is the news that the Cairngorms in Scotland saw a coating of snow last weekend (pictured above). Temperatures in the Highland mountain range plummeted below freezing as a couple of inches of snow fell , despite it still being September. Now The Record is quite openly saying that the snow - before the end of offical British Summer Time - has sparked fears we could be facing another long, cold winter.

Nor is this – as you might expect – an isolated event. Other parts of Scotland also suffered their coldest September temperatures for nearly 30 years as double figures sank to below zero and frost appeared. Kinbrace in the Highlands was the chilliest place, recording a temperature of -4.4°C, while Loch Glascarnoch had its lowest September since 1993, at -2.6°C.

The paper quotes STV weatherman Sean, who has reviewed the current weather patterns and is saying: "At the moment it does look like there's a good possibility we'll have another cold, snowy winter."

It certainly does have that feel about it. Two hundred miles further south, where we run into winter without even the briefest Indian summer to fortify us, we have been resorting to central heating for the last three days. A certain weary cynicism thus overtakes as as we observe the shenanigans on the election of the Labour leader. Noting how it is that the winner if Ed Miliband, former energy and climate change secretary, it is he who shepherded the Climate Change Bill into law.

Despite tht fact that this legislation is set to cost us £18 billion a year, all to deal with the hypothetical effects of climate change, it is a testament to the detachment of the poltical classes that this has not harmed his political career.

But now bloweth the cold wind of reality. And despite the best efforts of the politicians and the media to keep it from the general public, the growing cost of Mr Miliband's extravagence is becoming more and more evident. Many a career is going to be destroyed by another bad winter. It would be so nice if Mr Miliband's was one of them.