Clinton's Coup

Her impending nomination as Secretary of State, even though she was exactly what the party rejected and her views were almost exactly what the country rejected (in foreign policy terms, entirely so), alongside the return of old hands such as Rahm Emanuel (who can't stand her personally, but that is by the by), is proof, as if proof were needed, that certain people are exceptionally good at one thing: staging a coup.

Over here, when John Smith died (and no, I am not suggesting that they had any hand in his death), these utterly unrepentant old Communists, Trotskyists and fellow-travellers, who had changed their means from economics to the culture wars but who had not changed their ends in the least, wasted no time whatever. Through media also stuffed with exactly such members of the 1968 generation, and knowing that a Labour victory was by then an absolute certainty (how that has been forgotten in the years since), they installed some malleable nonentity of whom only political anoraks had ever heard. And away they went.

Similarly, when Iain Duncan Smith had made the Tories the largest party in local government, united them on Europe, and taken them to parity and beyond in the opinion polls, all on a platform not to the coup-mongers' liking, they simply took to the airwaves and announced his deposition, watched and listened to impotently by mere MPs and the like. In his place, they put in, without any sort of contest, Michael Howard, a politician whose reputation has absolutely no relationship to his record.

Completely transformed, the Tories dutifully went down to what, by any historical standard, was a crushing defeat, before the whole coup-by-media thing was repeated in order to give the Leadership to another malleable nonentity of whom only political anoraks had ever heard, instead of the much stronger candidate favoured by such grass roots as there still were or are. That nonentity is openly planning to keep on James Purnell as Work and Pensions Secretary (although Purnell will retain the Labour Whip, because no one gives tuppence about that sort of thing any more, and there are now hardly any votes in the Commons, anyway), to make Andrew Adonis Education Secretary (likewise, although the Lords is a bit trickier, since a certain amount of real scrutiny does still go on there), and to give a peerage and Ministerial office to Geoff Mulgan, the old Trotskyist ex-Director of Demos, Blair's favourite think tank, and in point of fact a specific continuation of the dissolved Communist Party of Great Britain.

But it is in America that the standard for these things is set: the Trots who became Scoop Jackson hands, who became Reagan hands, who became Clinton hands, who in 2000 entered the White House behind the Great Simpleton, finally staging the full-blown putsch that they had been plotting and planning, right down to every tiny detail, for thirty years. Within a single generation, they had risen to the position from which they could stage a wholly voluntary and aggressive war against any country in the world, entirely of their own arbitrary choosing. As they have duly done.

And now, while they might not be getting Robert Kagan as Secretary of State and Randy Scheunemann as National Security Advisor, it hardly matters after all.

You have to hand it to them. They are good.