After The Saville Row

Any trial would be billed and sold as the trial of eight hundred years, with the guilty verdicts read out as if they were the proclamation of the (potently never realised) 32-County Republic of 1916.

Only a Conservative Government could or would ever withdraw from Northern Ireland. Only the Heath Government has come close to doing so, in very marked contrast both to its Labour predecessor and to its Labour successor. And very close it came. Very close indeed. Margaret Thatcher, a Cabinet Minister throughout the Heath years, objected exactly as much as she did to the European Communities Act, to the abolition of the historic counties, and to all the rest of it. In other words, not at all. But then, her time was rather taken up with closing so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled. The tone of her own Premiership was set.

Cameron's problem is that no one in the Republic as presently constituted wants Northern Ireland, and all three major parties in the Republic are creatures, literal creations, of British intelligence, which has always been running the place by proxy since it was created, only ever as part of the deal to bring America into the First World War. Everyone knows this. If people do not like it, then there are other electoral options, one in particular. Those options are never taken by any number of voters worth mentioning. But then, where that one in particular is concerned, it has always been said that each of its branches had three members, of whom one was a British spy, another was a Police informer, and the third went to jail.

So that rules out the forty-year Conservative pursuit of a United Ireland outside the Commonwealth but inside both NATO and the EU, by happy coincidence the cause in which successive American Administrations have funded, armed and directed Irish Republican terrorism, up to and including the murders of Airey Neave MP and Robert Bradford MP. And up to and including the murder of the parliamentarian whom Attlee had made Viceroy of India, and to whom Wilson had wanted to give the new position of Secretary of State for Defence in 1964, but who had felt bound to decline because of his closeness to the Royal Family. So much for either Wilson the KGB agent (they would have been wasting their money) or Mountbatten the plotter to stage a coup against him. Still, these fantasies allow those who peddle them to imagine that they are in the know, so they are useful in their way, I suppose.

And events seem to have overtaken any possibility of accession to the euro, which Britain would have joined at the start if the 1997 Election had not made Gordon Brown Chancellor of the Exchequer. But there are other items on the agenda. From the party that abolished the sovereignty of Parliament, the ancient counties, the imperial system of weights and measures, the special character of Sunday, hundreds of grammar schools, O-levels in state schools, many Commonwealth ties, and a considerable number of regiments, now come repeated Prime Ministerial statements of indifference as to the constitutional status of Wales, a scheme to abolish an entire House of Parliament, and an offer to Argentina of a share of any Falklands oil revenue in return for nothing whatever.

Plus Liam Fox, otherwise known as Luke Coffey. Fox-Coffey regards as absolutely sacrosanct our actually American nuclear "deterrent", and our "ability to fight" endless additional versions of the pointless war in Afghanistan. But Fox-Coffey is heavily trailing the abolition of all three of the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Instead, we are to have something akin to the United States Marine Corps or the Israeli Defence Force. Although under the overall command of which of them, we do not yet know. Well, we never really do, do we? All we know is that our forces are always under the overall command of one or the other.

Why, to bring us back to Northern Ireland, Lord Trimble, Trustee of the Henry Jackson Society and recipient of the Conservative Whip, not to say member of the Privy Council, has been appointed to the Israelis' internal inquiry into the flotilla incident.