Like The Roman?

Robert Jenrick clearly knows nothing about the Middle Ages, so he is no Enoch Powell, tragically never quite a Professor at Durham. Far from his having been banished after the Rivers of Blood speech, Powell remained highly prominent for the remaining 30 years of his life, always treated as the expert and allowed to set the terms anything up to 10 years after his prediction about “the whip hand” had been disproved. Bobby Simple is unlikely to enjoy such political longevity.

Nor did the immigration debate die with Powell. 27 years later, it continues as it always has. The “It’s not racist to want to talk about immigration” card assumes that anyone had ever suggested that it were. If there was ever a taboo against discussing immigration, then I must have been in a coma. Likewise if there was a taboo against criticising Islam. Jenrick, whose wife is an immigrant, would not appreciate Powell’s views on Islam, or on Zionism, or on Britain’s relationship with the United States. But then, as Powell said when informed that Margaret Thatcher professed have been influenced by his books on economics, “She couldn’t have understood them, then.”

Powell would have been utterly unsurprised at Donald Trump. What should Denmark demand of the United States in return for Greenland, and why? In all seriousness, though, Trump refuses to rule out military action either there or in Panama. MAGA was never peaceable. Among its roots is the American Republic’s founding claim to the whole of North America and at least to all British colonies in the Americas in 1776, extending in the nineteenth century to the whole of Central America and the Caribbean. At least. “The Gulf of America,” indeed.

The British Right always needs a Fatherland somewhere away from the National Health Service. At the moment, it is spoilt for choice. But if tariffs are a good thing in the United States that now lays active claim to nine Commonwealth Realms, to at least six British Overseas Territories, and to a huge territory of the King’s cousin, then why is the abolition of tariffs a good thing in the Argentina that still lays nothing if not vocal claim to the Falkland Islands? That is before we start about what Giorgia Meloni would make of the latest series of SAS Rogue Heroes. Or about the Austrian Drittes Lager. And as for Jean-Marie Le Pen, if you can find, frankly, any good to say about him, then you have no right to accuse Jeremy Corbyn or anyone else of anti-Semitism.