A Test of Cameron's Class

What if Iran had done this?

But then, what if Iran had attacked an American naval intelligence ship, killed 34 crew members, wounded 171 others, and severely damaged the vessel? Next Tuesday, it will be 43 years since Israel did that. There has never been the slightest comeback. There has never even been a Congressional investigation. Anyone else who did that would not last 43 hours.

We know that George Osborne subscribes to the insatiably war-hungry "Israel First, America Second, Britain Third (If At All)" foreign policy that is the third point of the triangle of which the other two are the decadent social libertinism of the 1960s and the decadent economic libertinism of the 1980s. But David Cameron accordingly addresses Osborne as "Oik". Has Cameron, too, gone oik?

Like the closely connected, historically aberrant War Party in the United States, Israel was always going to be a key test for David Cameron: has he really dispensed with the sort of tasteless and trigger-happy new money that surrounded Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and instead restored a touch of class? We shall now see.

But why on earth should anyone take the IDF seriously again, after even its Special Forces have been disarmed by a band of student peaceniks and an elderly Holocaust survivor? That - yes, that - is the official line from the IDF.