Fag Ends

I hope that the Westboro Baptist Church goes through with its picket of Nelson Mandela's funeral, and that Fred Phelps is interviewed on television. My life will have been incomplete if they did not turn up to mine. I might even bequeath them the air fare.

Phelps is a former Civil Rights lawyer, and as recently as 1992 he took 30.8 per cent of the vote and placed second in the Democratic primary for Senator in Kansas, to run against Bob Dole. He was involved in Al Gore's 1988 Presidential campaign.

All right, Gore is not now where he was politically in 1988, either. But even so. At some point, quite late in life, something in Phelps's head seems to have flipped. Although he shows no sign of ever having given up his registration as a Democrat.

There is a book in this. Why I Am Still A Democrat, featuring the unexpurgated testimonies of each of Phelps, Richard Perle, and Lyndon LaRouche. It is just a pity that Larry McDonald is no longer with us in order to complete the quartet.

In Britain, of course, we have our own Perlie Queens. Imagine if the anti-apartheid movement were happening now. And imagine the reaction to it, especially to Labour participation in it, from Dan Hodges, or Oliver Kamm, or Harry's Place, or David Aaronovitch, or even, for all his other qualities, Nick Cohen?

It is just as well that Mandela was already free by 1994. Support for him would have been screamed down by Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and all of that crowd, some of whom Labour still employs in these parts, as unelectable Old Labour baggage.

Madiba himself credited the party's role in securing his release. All in all, it is just as well that that happened when it did, and no later.