Maurice O'Brien: 'Beware of Greeks bearing advice'

Published 14 Mar 2013 09:30 0 Comments

FOR a country boasting an aircraft carrier without planes, a tank regiment without tanks and paratroops without parachutes it's truly bizarre how Wee Willy Hague keeps meddling in other people's wars.

We've not yet extricated ourselves from the slippery clutches of treacherous Karzai of Kabul and Willy's already sending lorries and lolly to Homs while RAF transport planes (and costly aviation fuel) we never knew we had are hopping in and out of Mali. Not forgetting, of course, that he and Dave have yet to kick over the traces of their 'triumphant' Arab Spring, the aftermath of which will soon resemble several versions of post Bush-Blair Iraqi nightmare.

What is it that turns limp-wristed twerps into latter day Captain Mainwarings? Envy perhaps of military men like Hugo Chavez. Certainly they'd have sacrificed much for the kind of adoration heaped on Chavez last week by the BBC which stopped narrowly short of canonisation and replacing regular programming with non-stop solemn music.

Somebody who dubbed Dubya a devil and a donkey can't be all bad, but let's not forget that Chav wasn't exactly slow in banging up anyone who didn't see eye to eye with his brand of pink socialism and he did keep some fairly rum company, ranging from Ken Livingstone to that benevolent Iranian democrat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The latter may ultimately regret this association after Tehran's equivalent of the Church of England Synod got itself in a right two and eight over his "deviant" behaviour at the funeral, when he was snapped giving a sympathetic but fundamentally strictly forbidden cuddle to Hugo's grieving mama. Should exile beckon, with police surveillance and dawn raids on journalists now routine, Mahmoud will be a big fan of Ken Clarke's secret courts. Having become a cross between Craggy Island's Father Jack and a badly folded tent, Westminster's Ayatollah seems determined to force this 'liberal' measure through, even though he's no longer Justice Minister and despite the fact that its technical name, 'closed material procedures', sounds like a warning to keep one's flies zipped!

Clarke's the natural antidote to Theresa May and Chris Grayling, albeit their threats over the Human Rights Act and the Romanian underworld are surely doomed unless Dave revokes the Lisbon Treaty, and we know that, having pretended he might, he won't!

Still, there's one saying this week guaranteed to unsettle the most ardent Europhile, especially the one in Chris Huhne's cell. Never trust a Greek economist!

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This article appeared in Bracknell News 14 Mar 13

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