What Goes Around

There is nothing new about Western cultivation of Islamic political movements, peaceful and otherwise, against Arab and other nationalisms. For example, just as we did it all the time in India, so we, in the form of British intelligence, actually created the Muslim Brotherhood in order to agitate against Egyptian independence.

The Brotherhood retains the excellent Foreign Office connections that it has always enjoyed, as well as a certain Anglophilia, and a grassroots disaffection with the central party's having changed direction to recant the public ownership and the wealth redistribution for which it used to campaign, and to support Mubarak's land reform reversals.

The Brothers are still restraining the Salafi by occupying what would otherwise be their space, just as Britain always intended that they would.

This is Britain's moment. If not, then such are the historic ties and the widespread proficiency in English, that we should expect each of our cities to contain several, and each of our large towns to contain one, of those Coptic churches. One tenth of the Egyptian population would have decamped to the most obvious alternative country from their point of view.

One quarter of the Egyptian Parliament should be elected on a constituency basis, one quarter elected on a proportional basis, forty-five per cent (an equal number of men and women) nominated by the General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, and five per cent (an equal number of men and women) nominated by the Coptic Patriarch.

No legislation could be introduced unless sponsored by at least one MP from each of those four categories, nor could it be enacted without the approval of all four of the General Guide, the Patriarch, and the first and second-placed candidates in a direct Presidential election, termed the President and the Vice-President but enjoying exactly equal powers. Why not?

Commonwealth membership would then beckon. Especially for a country which even still has a currency called the pound.