We have no business in Afghanistan, which we publicly intend to leave by a named date in order to hand over to precisely the people whom we went in to fight, as we were always going to have to do eventually, since we were always going to leave eventually, whereas they, having nowhere else to go, were never going to leave.
Our Forces should bring themselves home in such a way that Cameron, Clegg, Hammond and the rest would only find out when they switched on their televisions and saw the triumphant marching through the cheering, flag-waving crowds.
Without a shot's needing to be fired, our rotten and decadent, blood-thirsty but battle-cowardly Political Class would be brought crashing to the ground.
Now that really would be the defence of this Realm, and the honouring the Military Covenant from the Forces' side.
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Please explain what sort of "way" would allow the flag waving and cheering crowds to know, but not the PM Et al?
ReplyDeleteThey would turn out spontaneously when they saw it or heard it. Happened routinely in the past, no matter how distant, and happens routinely even in the most under-developed parts of the world. Alternatively, military intelligence could organise the initial momentum for these things while perfectly easily keeping the knowledge away from politicians. But that almost certainly would not be necessary.
ReplyDeleteSenior politicians live a cocoon. They know nothing unless someone tells them. Nowt. The forces could organise this in their sleep.
ReplyDeleteAnd they should.
ReplyDeleteA walk in the park. We had everything place for a full-blown coup in the 70s, and the politicians in those days had infinitely more connection to real life than the ones today have.
ReplyDeleteQuite. A formidable lot, the Armed Forces.
ReplyDeleteAs for the 1970s coup plot, though, the utterly posh world of MI6 and the upper echelons of MI5 was absolutely riddled with them right up until the bitter end, to the point that it had become a standing joke even among the general public. Everyone knew that the KGB’s main recruitment ground was not the patriotic, socially conservative trade union movement or anything like that, but Oxbridge in general and Cambridge in particular, and only the public school rather than the grammar school circles even there.
The perfectly preposterous idea that Harold Wilson, of all people, and for heaven’s sake even Ted Short and George Thomas in the more recent versions, were somehow Soviet sleeper agents continues to serve what has always been its purpose, that of pure distraction from what ought to be the blindingly obvious.
And Mountbatten, the Prime Minister in waiting was, like many of his age and class, especially men, more or less a Labour supporter. Attlee had appointed Mountbatten as Viceroy of India, and Mountbatten had also been Wilson’s first choice for the new position of Secretary of State for Defence, which he felt obliged to decline only because of his closeness to the Royal Family, no small part of why he had been asked in the first place.
But the coup plotters will of course have known all of this, making the whole thing vastly more complicated than is generally supposed.
By "them" in 6 and at the top of 5, I assume that you mean Soviet agents. You are right, of course. You know that you are. You would be frighteningly well-informed to anyone who could not read these things properly. To those of us who can, you are most reassuringly well-informed, a true and important asset at perhaps our very best university and beyond.
ReplyDeleteWho ever did know what Harold Wilson was up to? But while the KGB was taking over MI6, the posh end of MI5, much of the Conservative candidates' list, and even the running of the Royal Art Collection, its enemies were plotting to install Wilson's link man to the Palace as Prime Minister if he himself had been deposed, presumably by the KGB.
ReplyDeleteA much more interesting story than the usual version of events, and one which rings much truer. One hardly knows which is more absurd, the notion of Wilson as a Soviet sleeper, or the notion of Mountbatten as the front man for the Far Right.
Peter Wright should have taken to writing fiction decades before he did in Spycatcher, since he clearly had a gift for it and he died a rich man. Ever noticed how well his version of events has been used to serve the anti-monarchist cause in Australia?
ReplyDeleteThankfully, we now have you to set the record straight. The real plan had been for Wilson and the rest of what someone on another thread today contemptuously calls Labour's "Catholics, countrymen, lay preachers, Freemasons and gong collectors" to keep the Commies at bay from the NUM to the NUS to the Courtauld Institute.
But if that failed, to install Mountbatten, Attlee's and Wilson's favourite prince, until things could be put back to normal. "There was never any incongruity about the presence of middle or upper-class people in the Labour Party, and not least among Labour MPs. Nor about their having come from, and far from cast off, either Liberal or Tory backgrounds. Especially in Labour’s early years, those backgrounds routinely included activism, and indeed parliamentary service, on behalf of either of those parties." David Lindsay, Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, p.68.
Who could tell this true story? Who else but an ornament of the high tables of Durham?
"Without a shot's needing to be fired,"
ReplyDeleteWas this not what a former defence secretary said many years ago? John Reid, I believe? How wrong can anyone be?
But Britain is not Afghanistan. That is my point.
ReplyDelete