WEEKEND WIDDY
Random Thoughts and Musings
Welcome to Weekend Widdy which, as regular readers will know, is a collection of the type of short pieces which used to surround my main article on my old Daily Express page. It can come out anytime over the weekend but usually on a Sunday and it is free to all. However, when Widdy on Wednesday has not appeared, there is extra paid content in Weekend Widdy in order that paying subscribers may get full value as they keep this Substack going.
A reminder that I am also on Cameo and that I have a weekly article in GB News Online and, in rather more frivolous mode, a weekly column in Best magazine. Additionally I appear every Monday at 8.40 am on the Mike Graham broadcast and a clip of the latest appearance was included in Widdy on Wednesday.
Kemi Badenoch is said to be planning a reshuffle in order to prevent a defection to Reform. The idea is to promote the suspected defector so he, or in this case rumoured to be she, will instead stay with the beleaguered Tories. Whatever sort of logic is that? All that will happen is that the defector will defect from a more senior position and will therefore be a larger feather in Reform’s cap.
Nobody is going to put a political career in jeopardy, upset friends and party workers and join a Party with only a handful of MPs unless that politician feels very strongly about the direction that party is taking when contrasted with his or her own. People do not join Reform out of pique: they join it out of conviction. It is not the vague “broad church” which might stand for one thing one day and the next the exact opposite. Its message is consistent and unapologetic. Policy detail might indeed change but the direction of travel does not.
I once read a haunting book, Dresden - the Fire and the Darkness and from that haunting book came a haunting scene. In the aftermath of the atrocity, when the sound of planes and bombs had fallen away and the city was unnaturally still, there arose a howling which carried on through the next night as hundreds of dogs could not find their homes or owners. I am wondering if those eerie laments are echoing now in the Middle East where ex-pats are apparently abandoning their pets wholesale as they flee the Emirates.
The poor creatures are being left tied to lamp posts (so they cannot escape an attack by another animal or scavenge for food) loose on the streets at the mercy of traffic, outside animal shelters which are bursting at the seams or even taken to the vets to be put down. Behold a nation of animal lovers.
First, what is the more mindless panic really about? The Iranians have been targeting their attacks carefully on American installations, not carpet bombing the civilian populations of Dubai or Qatar. To be sure there is some risk and our nationals have been advised to leave but that can be done in an orderly fashion and surely the embassy or some charity can organise some temporary provision for animals so that responsible owners can reclaim them in due course. For that matter why are not the airlines a bit more helpful?
Obviously human life comes first and always must but that means when there is a direct choice not just when the choice is between panic and order. Where’s Pen Farthing when you need him?
Starmer has managed to blow up the Special Relationship, although reports are now coming in of phone conversations. This is “no Churchill” declares Trump rudely but accurately. It sure ain’t.
In the Summer of 1940 , when France reached an agreement with Hitler, Churchill realised that the Germans could commandeer the 4th largest Navy in the world. So he demanded that the French fleet sail to join the British or to the West Indies or to scuttle its own ships. The French refused, so the Brits shelled their ships, killing about 1,300 French sailors.
It was a horrible decision which tormented Churchill but he knew how to take a tough decision when he had to. Imagine Starmer on the horns of the same dilemma. He would have consulted all his law books, growing more and more nervous, and dithered until the decision was taken out of his hands by the Germans subsuming the fleet into their own. Then, when it was too late, he would have changed his mind.
Churchill endured defeat after defeat until he cried out “Have I not one single general capable of winning one single battle?” But he kept going — and going. Starmer slams into reverse at the first sign of trouble.
Churchill was gifted with great rhetoric. Starmer is pedestrian. Churchill stirred the spirit, Starmer induces sleep. If Trump has got nothing else right, he knows how to sum up our pusillanimous PM.
It is a difficult opinion to voice but I think that both Netanyahu, when fighting Hamas and Hezbollah, and Trump when fighting the Iranian regime must see it through to the end. It was our failure to do that in the First Gulf War which led almost inevitably to the Second. I fully understand why it was decided not to go on to Baghdad but that decision signalled to Saddam Hussein that we were not sufficiently serious to pursue the matter to the end and therefore he saw fit to unleash chemical weapons against the Kurds. Thereafter he postured about weapons of mass destruction and regularly frustrated the weapons inspectors.
Ceasefires have almost universal appeal but they do not always herald a long term solution. So the President is right to demand unconditional surrender and he must stick to it. Conditional victory rarely lasts.
Back to the special relationship, the King’s visit to the States should go ahead because it is about the only thing which will keep our senior ally happy. He loves our royalty, loves its pomp and show, loves its very quaintness. So Charles and Camilla must go and put right the damage Starmer has inflicted. They are pretty good at diplomacy and massaging egos and Trump rarely holds a grudge for long but if the government in its wisdom decides the visit should be pulled, then a bad situation will be made worse.
Meanwhile the Foreign Office is saying it is a matter for Buckingham Palace. Oh, no, it isn’t. State visits are always a matter for government so stop ducking and diving, Prime Minister and take a decision. After all, you can always reverse it ten minutes later which would not take anyone by surprise.
With all the worries about family voting, one would have thought that this was not exactly the time to introduce any further relaxation of the voting rules. The observations of family voting were from independent witnesses whose presence was permitted by the Electoral Commission itself. It was not the work of any political party but was a genuinely disinterested observation of a trend.
Yet incredibly that same Electoral Commission wants the government to allow a “vouching” of voters who do not have identity documents when they go to a polling station.It would mean that those without any valid forms of voter ID, perhaps illegal migrants or anybody at all with no right to vote, could cast their choice by simply getting someone else, who did have the correct correct identification, to vouch for them.
There can be no excuse for turning up to vote without the proper ID. By definition local polling stations are local so if you forget to bring it with you, you can nip home and get it either then or in the lunch hour or after work or whenever.
We need to tighten up the franchise, not loosen it and “vouching” doesn’t just ask to be abused: it sits up and begs for it.
The death of Ian Huntley, the Soham murderer, will have forced difficult memories on many people: the victims’ parents and wider families, neighbours who joined the hunt, the farmer who found the girls’ poor burned bodies, the police who had to deal with the aftermath, the jury who had to listen to the horrible details. The list goes on.
That list must also include his ageing mother, who gave permission for the life support to be turned off and who said quietly that it was better if he did not pull through. While the rest of the world remembers a monster, she will remember a happy little chap in romper suits and must surely ask what on earth could have happened.
We tend to forget murderers’ families but, where they are normal and kind and law-abiding, the effect is devastating. I attended the trial of David Amess’s killer and listened to the evidence about the perpetrator’s sister who fell into hysterics when he calmly rang her to tell her what he had done. For her normal life suddenly descended into unimaginable horror, which will never entirely leave her.
Denis Nilsen’s mother once said that she could never escape reminders of what her son had done. She recalled how she was enjoying a detective story on TV when one of the characters said “who do you think you are? Denis Nilsen?” She was so upset, she switched off.
The employees of Millwards, a small firm in Lancashire, never got over the discovery that two of their colleagues with whom they had shared greetings, conversation and the tea urn, were in fact the Moors Murderers. But how much worse must it have been for Brady’s and Hindley’s families? For the Gran who slept upstairs while the deeds were done downstairs? For the sister whose husband witnessed the last of the murders? For the mother whose second husband collapsed and died in the street amidst the stress of it all? They would all have had memories of childhood innocence, would all have loved the perpetrators in earlier stages of their lives.
I would have hanged Huntley but I pray for his poor Mum.
On which cheerful note, I will say goodnight and back again midweek!