Enduring Partnership?

"For centuries, the relationship between our two nations has been one of collaboration, cooperation and enduring partnership. It is a uniquely close bond," Keir Starmer congratulates Donald Trump. Which centuries were those? The United States still designated Britain a potential hostile power even after the First World War, and every year until that War the Royal Navy updated its plans for war with the United States. The CIA wanted to relocate the population of the Falkland Islands to Scotland unless they became citizens of Argentina, which today became again a key American hemispheric ally with its claim to those Islands unaltered. Javier Milei was not only at the Inauguration, but he was even at the private church service beforehand.

As was Boris Johnson, but he is a newspaper columnist who was briefly Prime Minister before the one before last. Specifically, he was the Prime Minister of Net Zero. He was a very big spender long before Covid-19. He even lifted the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, making him the most pro-immigration Prime Minister ever, since Liz Truss never got into her stride. Johnson was closer to Stonewall than any Prime Minister before or since. The lockdowns were Johnson's. The Northern Ireland Protocol was Johnson's. The war in Ukraine was Johnson's. If Truss objected to any of this, then, to say the least, she never resigned. Britain began its singular level of commitment to Ukraine while she was Foreign Secretary. Such is the company that Trump is keeping this time.

The Inauguration featured all the old faces, many with new ones. And it featured the original lyrics of the fifth verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which are sometimes sanitised. Glory, glory, hallelujah! But where was Imam Husham Al-Husainy? Those saying that no British Minister would escape a judicial review if he tried to issue royal pardons in the way that Joe Biden had issued Presidential ones and Trump would be doing so, the President is not a Minister. No one could judicially review the King. In any case, there was no judicial review of the royal pardons that Michael Howard arranged for John Haase and Paul Bennett, associates of his drug-dealing cousin, Simon Bakerman.

Trump should pardon Julian Assange after Judge Penrose Foss recently ordered the Crown Prosecution Service to explain how and why it had destroyed key files in his case. You will never guess who was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time. Trump should also release all of the American files on Assange. He should do these things not only, but not least, because Starmer had sent his staff to campaign for Kamala Harris. The Democratic Party is Labour's sister party exactly as the Awami League is. Make of that sentence what you will.

Today, assured of minimal coverage, the Democrats' and the Awami League's British sister party "postponed" 18 hospital building projects because they were "unaffordable", presumably by comparison with £300 billion over 100 years to Ukraine. A uniquely close bond, indeed. Yet for 20 years, it has been laughable and contemptible that anyone who had pretended to believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was still permitted in public life. It is now laughable and contemptible that anyone who had opposed a ceasefire in Gaza was still so permitted. And the same will very soon apply, if it did not already, to anyone who had failed to recognise the inevitable conclusion of the war in Ukraine.