Jewish Chronicle, 8 August 2008

In the world of diplomacy, things are often not what they seem. When it comes to the crisis over Iran, there is even more cause to be sceptical. Disinformation in such a stand-off is routine.

That’s not to say there is any doubt about Iran’s race to develop nuclear weapons. The regime is gloating at having faced down the international community’s deadline for halting uranium enrichment.

Recently, the Kuwaiti paper Al-Siyassa reported yet another ominous development: Iran is constructing a secret nuclear reactor in the al Zarqan region in order to avoid international oversight.

A nuclear Iran would threaten the existence of Israel and hold the rest of the world to ransom. Yet from all the signals coming out of Washington and Jerusalem, it seems that the Bush administration has decided not to confront Iran but to appease it.

Recent signs that this is so include its decision to station diplomats in Iran for the first time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979; its support for an Iranian stooge as president of Lebanon; and the procession of Israeli defence bigwigs flying to Washington to beg the Americans to support an Israeli strike on Iran.

Who knows? Maybe all these signals are but bluff and counter-bluff. But from the anguished noises coming out of Israel, I doubt that the US still agrees that a nuclear Iran is an unconscionable prospect. The Bush doctrine is dead and has been supplanted by its antithesis. Everyone is talking appeasement rather than pre-emption. Israel — which may conclude that it has no alternative but to attack Iran — appears to be left swinging in the wind.

The wider tragedy may be that a priceless opportunity for a realignment of the entire region is being squandered. The greatest fear of the Arab states is Iran’s growing power. But for the Arabs, if their mortal enemy isn’t defeated, they adopt the next best course — to make deals with it.

When they concluded that America would not attack Iran — as they had hoped it would — they started cosying up to it instead. This should not be mistaken for friendship. On the contrary, they hate and fear Iran and are constantly looking for ways out of the scorpion’s embrace.

That is why across the political spectrum in Israel there has been such interest in a possible agreement between Israel and Syria (which with Ehud Olmert’s fall now may be deader that the Monty Python parrot). Wise heads scoffed that this was merely a cynical ploy by Syria to gain brownie points from the West. And maybe that was so.

But the alternative view was that Syria was desperate to escape the clutches of Iran and so could have been peeled away into a deal with Israel — if it thought that the West would not tolerate a nuclear Iran. Other Arab states feeling similarly threatened might have (discreetly) followed suit.

If such a realignment was ever a possibility, that slim chance has now been scuppered by the Bush appeasement doctrine. This has given Iran its most precious asset — time — and reinforced its confidence that the West is weak and is being outmanoeuvred at every turn. And the Arab states have drawn their own conclusion.

Of course, the whole world is waiting to see what the new American president will do. But in the meantime, what is so disturbing about Britain is the absence of concern over the threat posed by Iran to Israel, the rest of the world or its own people.

Partly, it is because the British find Ahmadinejad too absurd to take the threat of such a messianic apocalypticist seriously. Partly, it is because having convinced themselves that ‘Bush/Blair lied, people died’, they refuse to believe any intelligence assessment of a threat to the West.

More terrible still, so effective has been the delegitimisation of Israel by the British intelligentsia and the media that a disturbing number of people in Britain are now quite indifferent to the prospect of Israel’s destruction.

Beyond that horrible fact lies the astounding indifference of progressive opinion to the persecution of the Iranian people at the hands of this tyrannical regime. Dissidents are being tortured and murdered. Homosexuals are being hanged. Women are being stoned to death. Bloggers are being threatened with mutilation or death.

So where is the outcry from British progressives? Where are the demonstrations, the leading articles, the savage newspaper columns? Where is the campaign to boycott Iranian institutions or commerce? Where is the support for Iranian dissidents and opposition parties?

Is there silence because the civilised, pro-Western, pro-Israel Iranian people do not fit the template of third world oppression?

War should only ever be a last resort. The dreadful fact about Iran, however, is that we have never begun to exhaust other possibilities but instead have shamefully looked the other way.

Literary Review, August 2008

Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain by Peter Whittle (The Social Affairs Unit 93pp £10)

In this short but insightful book, Peter Whittle pinpoints one of the most conspicuous but shallowly perceived phenomena of our times. The cult of celebrity is in itself hardly news. We live in a time when fame has arguably eclipsed even money — with which it is so often paired — as the most desirable attribute to be pursued.

Once-serious newspapers now devote acres of space to the activities of TV or rock stars. The lives and homes of celebrities are exhaustively opened up to us through Hello! and OK! magazines. So desperate are ordinary people to achieve their fifteen minutes of fame that they queue up to be publicly humiliated on cruel and voyeuristic TV game shows. Reality TV both constructs celebrity out of the mundane and ruthlessly cuts the famous down to size.

What Peter Whittle has grasped, however, is that modern celebrity is not characterised, as it was in previous times, by the idea of ‘them and us’, the sense of a curtain being lifted on a world ordinary people don’t share and which draws its glamour precisely from its inaccessibility.

On the contrary, the current obsession with fame actually represents a deeply narcissistic obsession with the self. What we worship most of all in the media are the first two letters of that word. Celebrities represent a star-studded mirror which mesmerises us because we imagine that in it we can see ourselves.

This is because the modern cult of fame derives from a culture in which the individual has become the centre of the universe: the sun around which everyone and everything else must revolve. With external authority now considered an affront to the self along with the religious doctrines that imposed it, morality and culture have been systematically privatised and relativised so that no one’s values or lifestyle can trump those of anyone else. Every individual is thus a hero to himself.

If everyone is special, however, it follows that no one is special. So people can achieve fame even if they have no particular talent or have achieved nothing of distinction. They can be famous simply for being famous. Indeed, our super-egalitarian culture tells us that elitism is a bad thing; the very idea of a hierarchy of values offends our most cherished belief that no one can be judged inferior to anyone else.

So since we can no longer look up, instead we look down. Entertainers such as the stars of Little Britain are feted for representing the dismal and degraded; the more dysfunctional the life of the celebrity — Amy Winehouse springs to mind — the more she is adored. With so many of us living wrecked or chaotic lives, it comforts us to see people who, despite similar problems, manage to be fashionable, wealthy or successful.

Princess Diana was of course the most conspicuous example of this trend — someone who embodied and seemed to transcend difficulties with which we could identify, on the basis of a life that we confidently imagined we knew as intimately as our own. But of course we didn’t. All we know of such a life is the image the celebrity herself — or the media — has constructed for us. Our subscription to celebrity culture is our entry ticket to Planet Virtual Reality.

As Whittle observes, it is children who think that the world revolves around them — and our culture ensures that they never leave that solipsistic state. The education system’s obsessive wish that everything children are taught has to be ‘relevant’ to their lives means that rather than leading children to understand the world around them, it merely confirms in them what they already know. So they cannot grow outwards and upwards to proper adulthood.

At the same time, they are treated as premature adults by a grown-up world that will not discipline them on the basis that they must make their own ‘choices’ about how to behave and ensures that they never fail at anything in case this destroys their ’self-esteem’.

They grow up into an adult world that is deeply infantilised. Everything is all about ‘me’. The therapy culture is devoted to getting in touch with the child within in order to actualise the repressed self. Everyone is obsessed with remaining perpetually young, at least as far as face-lifted, Botoxed appearance is concerned.

Private emotion has been replaced by mass exhibitionism, in order to make public statements about what nice people we are. But the public displays of grief following the deaths of famous strangers actually express sentimentality and false emotion: you can’t grieve for someone you don’t know, and to think that you do means you don’t know what real grief or love or emotion actually are.

This leads straight on to indifference, or worse, towards other people. Another of Whittle’s insights is that much contemporary antisocial behaviour is designed to put on a show. ‘Look at me misbehaving’ says the drunken yob. Any remonstration with the youth putting his feet up on the train seat produces outrage, and even violence, since the remonstrator is at fault for daring to encroach on the miscreant’s personal space.

One further question arises from this book — which is why fame is so important to us. It’s hard not to conclude that, although (or because) we have made ourselves the centre of the universe, our lives are hollow and empty. We seek validation from others for our lives. ‘Look at me’, we say, ‘and then I will know I am worthy; only then will I know I exist.’

Daily Mail, 4 August 2008

Did Tony Blair ever really go away?

When David Miliband launched his not-so-coded attempt to unseat Gordon Brown with his explosive article in the Guardian last week, people wondered whether the Foreign Secretary was acting alone or was backed by other revolting Blairites.

We now have the answer to that question. Yesterday, a memo written by Tony Blair piling ordure on Brown’s premiership surfaced in the Mail on Sunday. Reportedly written just after last year’s party conferences, it has been leaked now for one reason alone: to aid David Miliband’s lunge for power.

Miliband was always the former Prime Minister’s favourite political son — the anointed heir to the Blairite dynasty.

Now, amid reports that Blair has been holding regular talks with Miliband, another of his leading acolytes, Stephen Byers, has also popped up to denounce Brown’s policies as inadequate for the challenges facing Labour.

While we don’t know who made the Blair missive available, its publication sensationally ups the stakes. This is a Blairite plot.

Revenge, it might be said, is a dish best served in a cold memorandum. It was Brown who orchestrated the destabilisation campaign against Blair which forced him out of Number Ten.

Now it’s payback time for the beleaguered Prime Minister with a dose of his own brutal medicine from the Blairites — and with the opinion polls suggesting that the Government would leap ten points if Blair were still in charge. Ouch.

But as I wrote here last week, anyone who thinks that Miliband — or any other leader, for that matter — will solve Labour’s problems must be living in la-la-land.

It’s not just that the current shenanigans bring the words ‘ferrets’ and ’sack’ strongly to mind. It’s that not only Gordon Brown but the Labour Government itself is in freefall. Voters want to be shot of the whole damn lot of them.

They also won’t forgive a party that inflicts upon them not one but two replacement Prime Ministers. But if the new leader were to call a quick election, the party would be slaughtered.

What’s more, the polls also suggest that under David Miliband, Labour would do even worse than under Gordon Brown. For what Miliband lacks is the single most important thing that won Blair three elections in a row — charisma.

The point of similarity between them, however, is that both have the disconcerting capacity to believe absolutely in their own spin, however absurd it may be.

Thus Miliband could write with a straight face that there was no social breakdown in Britain, that education standards were rising and that the NHS had been brought back from the brink.

The leaked memo, meanwhile, has graphically revealed Blair’s own monumental self-delusion. In his eagerness to blame Brown, he refuses to acknowledge his own role in the Government’s current difficulties.

He accuses Brown of junking the Blairite policy agenda. But it’s that agenda which has given us filthy hospital wards, mass illiteracy among schoolchildren and an epidemic of violent crime.

True, domestic policy was tightly controlled from the Treasury by Gordon Brown. But who allowed the Chancellor free rein to muck up the public services in this way? One T. Blair.

True, Brown undermined Blairite initiatives such as welfare reform. But Blair let him get away with it.

Throughout all the years in which the Chancellor was reportedly undermining the Prime Minister, Blair refused to sack him. Instead he was happy to share the credit for the good times, basking in the general adulation for the ‘most brilliant Chancellor in Labour’s history’.

Blair rounded on Brown in public only when the New Labour project they ran together went belly-up.

Chancellor Brown was Blair’s creation. Now the former Prime Minister is compounding his own lack of courage by turning on the man who has been able to plunge the Labour Government into today’s crisis only because Blair allowed him to reach that position.

The memo says Brown’s mistake was to ‘diss’ Blair’s record, to blame the culture of spin and proclaim a new honesty in politics. On the contrary — Brown’s terrible error was to continue Blair’s record of spin and dishonesty.

If anything did for Brown, it was this crumbling of his reputation as a rock of Caledonian moral integrity — such as breaking his manifesto promise of a referendum on the EU constitution, and then denying that it was a constitution at all.

Yes, Brown has signalled that he wants to bring home British troops from Iraq sooner than his predecessor planned. Personally, I share Blair’s concern about this. But it is absurd to believe that the electorate disapproves — or even factors it into the charge sheet against the Prime Minister.

The fact is that Iraq contributed hugely to Blair’s own political demise. The memo says ‘DC (David Cameron) was in trouble long before TB left’. Very true. But TB was also in trouble long before TB left.

Blair claims he had kept Cameron ‘confused’ by sticking to New Labour policies, whereas the Tory leader had been ‘empowered’ by Brown’s short-term tactics — such as mimicking the Tory proposal to raise the inheritance tax threshold.

But the Tory inheritance tax plan had nothing to do with Brown’s tactics. It came out of the blue at last year’s Tory conference.

It was that proposal which single-handedly transformed Tory fortunes. At that point, it dawned on the Cameroons that there were more votes in reaching out to the hard-pressed silent majority than in mimicking Blairite gesture politics.

Yet despite all this, Blair has the gall to accuse Brown of ‘hubris and vacuity’! Pots and kettles, anyone?

If, however, one stands back from this hand-to-hand fighting to take a longer view, the real problem becomes clear - - that the illusion on which the Government rested has fallen apart.

New Labour was based on a sleight of hand designed to paper over the intellectual crisis of the Left. With the fall of socialism, Left-wing ideology went out of the window. State control of the economic levers of power belonged with the dinosaurs.

The only thing that mattered — in Blair’s famous phrase — was ‘what works’. So with no one believing in anything any more, the ethic of public service was swept aside by the tricks of the trade of management consultancy.

Thus was born the target culture. Professionalism — based on independence, trust and responsibility — was superseded by armies of regulators. The red flag was replaced by red tape.

The paradox was that this explosion of bureaucracy meant even more control from the centre — imposed and policed by Chancellor Brown, who used it to further his own agenda of social engineering.

Unsurprisingly, such incoherence caused the public sector progressively to seize up altogether. It also meant that Labour had no unity of purpose. The only thing keeping it together was Blair’s genius at winning elections.

Effectively, Blair propped up Labour’s corpse and passed it off as a living entity. If the party now turns inwards upon itself — and the revolt appears to be gathering pace — those mouldy bones may finally disintegrate altogether.

It may well be that Labour cannot win the next election with Gordon Brown as leader. But if it commits regicide then, just like the Tories after they deposed Mrs Thatcher, Labour will unleash an internal war which may keep it out of power for a generation — or longer.

New Labour has turned into a bed of nails. But along with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Labour Party made it — and now it must lie on it.

Daily Mail, 28 July 2008

Labour is in turmoil. The Scottish National Party’s by-election victory in Glasgow East, hitherto the third safest Labour seat in Scotland and one of the most solid in the country, has produced feverish talk that a leadership challenge to Gordon Brown is now a certainty.

The piranha pool otherwise known as the Parliamentary Labour Party is now a blur of thrashing predators, some raising their jaws from the bloodied waters only to declare, as did Harriet Harman yesterday, that there are no plots against the Prime Minister and Labour is just getting on with governing the country.

Well, that would be a first. It’s the fact that Labour is so patently failing to govern the country which makes all the speculation over who will replace Mr Brown largely beside the point.

For Labour’s meltdown is not principally the result of his premiership. It is more that an entire flock of political chickens — some of which Mr Brown himself helped release as Chancellor — have now come home to roost.

What we are looking at is the implosion of the New Labour project itself.

In typically weasel fashion, ministers are blaming the Government’s unpopularity on the economic downturn. Certainly, rises in food and fuel prices have played a large part — although it is clearly preposterous for ministers to pretend that Britain’s economic woes have nothing to do with them.

But this is by no means the whole story. In Glasgow East there was the particular issue of Scottish nationalism.

When the Labour Government introduced devolution, people said this would put rocket fuel behind the push for Scottish independence. Ministers scornfully brushed this aside.

Was Scotland not their very own fiefdom and power base? Now they have the answer to such arrogance.

With consummate skill Alex Salmond, the SNP leader of the Scottish Parliament, has exploited resentment and grievances north of the border to ratchet up the cause of an independent Scotland.

The collapse of Labour both nationally and locally into incompetence and sleaze has fuelled a perception among the Scots that, with the SNP appearing to offer a clean and competent alternative, there is no need for them to put up with useless Labour any more.

It is, however, exceedingly unlikely that the electors of Glasgow East were voting for Scottish independence. They were simply turning their backs on the Labour Party which had so badly let them down.

If any group of people represents the very core of what Labour is supposed to be about, it is surely the inhabitants of Glasgow East which contains some of the poorest areas in the entire country.

But their wretched circumstances are in large measure due to Labour policies which have kept them dependent upon the state and in a poverty which is as much moral and spiritual as well as economic.

Why should such people continue to vote for a party which gives them no hope? Why should they put up any more with politicians who had taken them for granted for so long? At least the SNP bothered to knock on their doors and inquire whether they might vote for it.

Although the previous MP, David Marshall, resigned on health grounds, the talking point in the constituency was the unproven claim that he had wrongly used his Commons expenses to pay members of his family.

Whatever the truth of that, the fact is that Labour nationally has been embroiled in one financial scandal after another, making deals with its super-rich cronies and with MPs’ snouts firmly in the trough at public expense.

It is such behaviour by a party that so sanctimoniously takes the moral high ground, along with its arrogance and endemic incompetence, that has turned so many against it in such profound and irredeemable disgust.

In short, the rotten borough of Glasgow East was a technicolour microcosm of the moral and political bankruptcy of the entire New Labour project. And that is hardly likely to be addressed by the removal of Mr Brown.

True, his premiership has been disastrous. He has no fresh vision for the country except a resumption of class war.

But, in truth, the wheels visibly came off this government under Tony Blair when, many months before he finally departed from Downing Street, his closest advisers peeled away one by one saying in despair that the New Labour project had failed.

We see the evidence all around us in astounding rates of illiteracy, filthy hospitals, chronic public transport and rising violent crime.

We have seen billions of pounds wasted through public maladministration and we have been insulted year in, year out by the same old excuses and evasions.

In short, we know that both New Labour and Old Labour have failed. The game is up. We want a new start, proper leadership, a fresh vision. We are unlikely to get these from yet another Labour leader.

The big question, however, is: who will deliver them?

It was, of course, the wretchedness of the Easterhouse area in Glasgow East that impelled Iain Duncan Smith to formulate his own vision of social justice based on an end to state dependency and the restoration of individual responsibility.

The Tory leadership has embraced many of his ideas. But on the really big things, it is still not delivering a clear alternative to the Left-wing programme it once thought it had to go along with to gain power.

What are the Tories saying, for example, about the fundamental onslaught upon the integrity and identity of the United Kingdom posed by both devolution and our membership of the EU, which aims to reduce nations to regions controlled from the centre by the super-state of Euroland? They are silent.

What are they saying about Labour’s ruinous levels of public spending? Pledging to match them.

What are they saying about the obsession with global warming which has produced ruinous policies on land use which have pushed up the cost of food? They share it.

Far from providing a clear and principled alternative, the new model Tories still defer too much to fashionable opinion; are still terrified of offending that opinion — particularly in the BBC; and are still following rather than leading.

That’s why, although they are clearly benefiting from the collapse of belief in the Government, they have yet to ensure that voters believe in them instead. Looking in vain for a clear alternative, voters conclude that ‘they’re all as bad as each other’.

The result is a profound disaffection with the whole of mainstream politics. That provides fringe parties with their golden opportunity — which is why in Scotland the SNP is doing so spectacularly well.

But this is a really dangerous situation. For the belief that ‘no one in the mainstream speaks for me’ gives rise to the kind of extremist politics that turns one section of the community against another.

The nationalist protest vote that is increasingly troublesome north of the border may take even more unsavoury tribal shape in England.

Every so often, a deep shift in the political climate takes place. It happened in 1979 with the rise of Margaret Thatcher; it happened in 1997 with the rise of Tony Blair; it’s happening again now.

The problem is that, while people know what has fallen, they are not sure what if anything has risen in its place.

It is a vacuum which spells danger, not just for the beleaguered Mr Brown but for us all.

Daily Mail, 24 July 2008

There’s been nothing like it since Beatlemania. As the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama arrives in Britain tomorrow on the last leg of his world tour, Obamania seems to be sweeping across the Atlantic and carrying all before it.

In giant rallies across the U.S., Obama induces hysteria among his adoring multitude, with women fainting from the effects of his soaring oratory and rock-star charisma.

On both sides of the Atlantic the media are swooning over him. Like Berlin and Paris, he is expected to receive a rapturous reception here.

Labour MPs are urging Gordon Brown to emulate him, while a third of Tory MPs are said to support him rather than his Republican opponent, John McCain.

The U.S. election may not take place until November, but in Europe Obama has already won by a landslide.

Nor does he do anything to disabuse people of the view that he is ‘the One’. He is going to win the war in Iraq. He’s going to break the deadlock in the Middle East.

In the U.S., he declared his presidency would be seen as ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal’.

Doubtless as the water recedes he will walk on it. His tour is supposed to be merely a fact-finding exercise for an election candidate — but it is being treated as a cross between a coronation and the Second Coming.

So at the risk of being a party pooper, may I pose the question: might not a junior senator with less than four years’ experience on Capitol Hill be advised to show just a smidgen of humility?

Significantly, on his first foreign foray he has achieved the feat of upsetting one of his country’s key allies, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel.

She took a decidedly dim view of his intention to hold an electioneering rally today at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate — traditionally used as a backdrop only for non-partisan speeches of global significance. Faced with this rebuff, Obama chose the city’s Victory Column as an alternative venue.

How darkly ironic that the column was moved to its present position by Adolf Hitler as a symbol of Germany’s superiority and its victories against Denmark, Austria and France. Oh, dear. Is this what Obama means by ‘change we can believe in’?

Of course, in many respects the enthusiasm for this charismatic man is understandable.

Obama preaches a seductive message of change for an America which is terminally disaffected with President Bush — not just over the Iraq war, but over the handling of such catastrophes as Hurricane Katrina and, above all, the dive in the U.S. economy.

All this spells failure, depression and cynicism. Obama by contrast embodies success, optimism and idealism.

Sprinkled with glitter like a latter-day JFK, he is seen as the representative of a new kind of politics that repudiates the sordid failures of the past.

Americans are, after all, the most optimistic of people. They just don’t do doom and gloom. So a politician who tells them ‘Yes we can’, and says he stands for ‘the audacity of hope’ gets them whooping and hollering for more.

But such Obamania should worry us all, for it is based on emotion and, where the Democrat candidate is concerned, the normal faculties of judgment appear to have been suspended.

Important questions about Obama’s judgment, consistency and honesty are not being asked, let alone answered.

He has got away with the fact that for 20 years he belonged to a church which preaches black power racism against white people.

He disavowed his long-time mentor, pastor Jeremiah Wright, only when his extreme views could no longer be ignored — despite the fact that Wright is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the black power Nation of Islam.

The media brush all this aside as ‘personal details’ which are of no interest to voters. But if, say, John McCain’s pastor and mentor had turned out to support the Ku Klux Klan and his church was found to be sympathetic to its philosophy, his candidacy would have been defenestrated and rightly so.

Equally troubling is the way Obama has flip-flopped on issue after issue. From his brief Senate voting record, he appears to be the most Left-wing presidential candidate America has ever had.

Yet once he clinched the nomination, he repositioned himself as a Centrist to win the election.

So while once he was for a ban on handguns, he is now against it. Once for safeguards on wiretaps, he is now against them.

Once he was for a fixed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq — but now that the acclaimed U.S. commander General Petraeus has said this would be deeply unwise, Obama claims he proposes no ‘rigid’ adherence to a timetable. This is just more of the same old politics of dissembling.

And yet this is the man — so similar to the early Blair — who is supposed to represent an end to opportunism, replaced by the politics of integrity.

What is even more disturbing, however, is that these matters are being brushed aside or ignored –because so many people want desperately to believe in him.

Such a suspension of disbelief calls to mind someone else closer to home: Princess Diana, who also inspired hysterical adoration because she, too, became an icon of idealism — challenging the established order.

A deeply attractive figure, she seemed to embody hope for a better universe by appealing to emotion rather than reason.

Love, as embodied by ‘the queen of people’s hearts’, was held to be the key to a better, kinder, gentler world. There was even a sense that her mere touch was sufficient to heal the afflicted.

It was, of course, all pure fantasy. People had fallen for a carefully spun image which bore little relation to the manipulative and unstable woman who was the real Diana, but which spoke to something deep inside them.

So it is with Obama. Americans’ natural optimism makes them want to believe that, as a black man with a Muslim background (another thing he has cleverly obfuscated), he can heal all wounds, including the U.S.’s history of racism, and bring peace to the world just by being who he is.

They see in his attractiveness a flattering reflection of themselves. He doesn’t embarrass them; he makes them feel proud.

He is not a Texas oilman who can’t string a sentence together: he has oratorical skills to die for.

He is not old, frail and nondescript like McCain, but young, vigorous and attractive. He is, in short, everything they want America — and themselves — to be.

His very incoherence over policy, the fact we don’t know what he really believes in, enables people to project onto him their hopes and desires. He is the perfect fantasy politician. He is America’s very own Princess Obama.

But, of course, the belief that a handsome prince can magic away the troubles of the world is infantile. The idea that there is a new kind of sanitised politics by which problems can be solved without having to make hard choices is a dangerous delusion.

To be fair, there are signs that light may be beginning to dawn in America. Despite — or perhaps because of — the saturation media coverage of Obama’s world tour, his poll numbers are showing no bounce.

This may be because people are beginning to see the media manipulation, with Obama refusing to answer journalists’ questions and participating only in ‘faked’ interviews by the military in Iraq.

While America may be wising up, however, Britain is about to have its Princess Obama moment. Get out the smelling salts and prepare to swoon.

Daily Mail, 21 July 2008

Repercussions from the school tests fiasco are steadily rippling outwards like eddies from a burst sewage pipe.

As a result of the shambles of this year’s SATs, school league tables have been rendered worthless. Ofsted’s school inspections which rely on such results are now in jeopardy.

And secondary schools whose confidence in these tests has collapsed are proposing to test 11 year-old entrants all over again to discover which sets to put them in for different subjects.

This last development is particularly unfortunate. Not only do such children face yet another set of tests through no failure of their own; they are bearing the brunt of the collapse of a testing regime whose original purpose was to find out not about pupil achievement but the performance of their teachers.

Clearly, such is the chaos that these SATs cannot be relied upon to assess anything at all. Some schools are reporting that whole batches of results are still missing. Thousands of pupils may have been awarded no marks at all after they were incorrectly recorded as having been absent for their tests.

The American company administering the SATs, ETS Europe, has now set up emergency marking centres in Leeds and Manchester hotels to clear the backlog of unmarked scripts.

There are reports that, in its panic, the company has even hired hotel bar staff to carry out unidentified tasks in the marking process.

If it really has been getting individuals who are pulling pints to red-pencil these tests, this might explain why some papers look as if they’ve been marked by people with less education than a seven-year-old.

Some were unable to add up the marks accurately. Some awarded children with special needs the same grades as children who had already passed the entrance test for grammar school.

In one case, a pupil whose writing was riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes received a higher mark than a pupil who accurately used sophisticated language and vocabulary.

In any half-way responsible government, one would expect the minister in charge of testing to take the rap for this catastrophic breakdown of the system under his control. Not this minister. The Schools Secretary Ed Balls says he’s furious about what’s happened — as if it’s nothing to do with him.

‘I’ve operated this at arm’s length’, he blustered. ‘I’m not the person who on a daily basis has been dealing with this.’

Oh, please! He has been personally dealing with this — or rather, failing to deal with it — since at least last March.

That was when the head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Ken Boston, warned Mr Balls of potential ‘problems with the computer systems to be used in marking the SATs, but said there were ‘mitigation plans’ to ensure the integrity of the results.

Despite the fact that Mr Balls asked to be kept informed, it seems that he did not see the red lights that were then clearly flashing.

Even when the director of the new school tests regulatory body Ofqual, Katherine Tattersall, told Mr Balls of her own concerns about the reliability of the SATs results, he told her that he wanted her instead to prioritise the implementation of his two favoured projects: testing children by ability level rather than age, and the new 18-plus diplomas.

In other words, he didn’t think the SATs were important. He was interested only in pushing tests which artificially inflate results by giving older children tests designed for younger ages, and persecuting the middle classes through the attempt to destroy A-levels.

The small question of the proper administration of school tests affecting the futures of thousands of children was clearly far too insignificant a matter to merit the attention of such a lofty political intellect.

The inevitable shambles first became apparent as soon as the SATs were taken two months ago, with hundreds of complaints of confusion over training, delayed contracts and jammed helplines.

In at least some subjects vetting standards were scrapped so that all examiners passed muster no matter how accurate their marking. As a result, many markers walked out in disgust.

When in May Mr Balls was questioned in the Commons by the LibDems and Tories about these reports, he said he would ‘keep the matter closely under review’ and take ‘an active watching brief on the issue’.

What this actually meant was that he had done nothing about the warnings he had been given.

At every stage this has been a story of almost unbelievable incompetence, buckpassing and political arrogance. According to Ken Boston, ETS Europe was hired because it had ‘the highest rating’ on the things that mattered. But this company had a long history of incompetence.

It has been responsible for wrongly failing 40,000 American teachers, resulting in a multi-million dollar compensation payout; it had been heavily criticised for failures in graduate examinations across the U.S.; and its computer errors had awarded students the wrong marks.

All this had been reported in the American press. It is not remotely credible that Whitehall didn’t know about it.

What’s much more likely is that ETS Europe was awarded the SATs contract because, in Boston’s words, it offered ‘value for money’. In other words, it was test regulation on the cheap. Now this debacle has put rocket fuel behind the demand made by teachers from the moment the SATs were introduced — that they should be scrapped and all testing of pupils done instead by the teachers themselves.

This, of course, would destroy the whole principle of professional accountability that the SATs were supposed to establish. But in truth, they have been pretty useless because they have been systematically fiddled — either by individual teachers cheating, or by pass-marks being lowered the second it looked as if children wouldn’t reach them in sufficient numbers. The result is that their standards are both risible and meaningless.

Such chicanery is inevitable because it’s not just teachers but ministers themselves who are being tested on their promise to improve education. So — lo and behold — such tests will always show that standards are rising, even when the opposite is the case.

The outcome has been that, while children have been subjected to an ever more expanding battery of tests, their qualifications have become progressively devalued. As measurable achievement has been ostensibly going up, the amount pupils actually know has been going steadily down.

There are, in fact, no such managerial quick fixes to our profound education crisis, which derives from the deep-seated belief that children must dictate the terms of their education with teachers taking a back seat.

The idea that knowledge must give way to ‘creativity’, and that what children find out for themselves is of greater value than anything teachers can tell them, is what has created the vicious and self-fulfilling culture of low educational expectations and achievement.

To superimpose SAT tests on such a fundamental negation of education and hope that it will rescue the situation is clearly an absurd delusion. The Schools Secretary, however, isn’t interested, obsessed as he is instead with pursuing his very own class war.

On this MAT — the Ministerial Assessment Test — the once star-pupil Balls, E. should be marked down as ‘failed’.

Daily Mail, 14 July 2008

So, Russia and China have vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution to impose international sanctions on key members of Zimbabwe’s government. The British government’s entire diplomatic strategy on Zimbabwe has thus ignominiously collapsed.

This is a particular humiliation for Gordon Brown after he thought he had persuaded all the G8 countries — including Russia –to back punitive measures against the Mugabe regime.

Our Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, says he is ‘very disappointed’. Is he really that wet behind the ears? Just what did he expect?

Apart from what this denouement tells us about our worsening relations with Russia, it has long been clear that the UN is the very last place to look for action against despotism, terror or tyranny.

For sure, Zimbabwe presents clear enough cause for UN action. The sanctions were proposed after Mugabe was ‘re-elected’ as Zimbabwe’s president in a travesty of a poll in which extreme violence forced the opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, to withdraw.

This, in turn, took place against a background of systematic intimidation, torture and mass murder of Zimbabwe’s terrorised population by Mugabe’s henchmen.

The opposition says 113 of its activists have been killed since March. Last weekend, another of its officials, Gift Mutsvungunu, was found dead in a suburb of Harare. His body had been partly burned and his eyes gouged out.

Russia said, however, that there was no need for sanctions, which it described as an attempt to meddle in the affairs of a member state which presented no threat to international peace and security.

But Zimbabwe’s terror regime presents a real threat to regional peace and security. And, in any case, there is a moral requirement to act. If the UN doesn’t take action to prevent uncontrollable barbarism by one of its member states, then what in heaven’s name is the point of having the UN at all?

Of course, Russia and China are simply motivated by brazen cynicism and self-interest. Not only are they increasingly flexing their muscles, they also don’t want the UN poking its nose into their own human rights abuses.

Mr Miliband was hoping that outsourcing the problem of Zimbabwe to the UN would relieve Britain of the task of doing something about a country for whose terrible fate, after all, Britain bears a historic responsibility.

The slap in the face he has received in response is all the more stinging because of the particular place the UN enjoys in the pantheon of ‘progressive’ politics.

Western progressives have come to believe that the nation state is responsible for all the ills of the world, from prejudice to nationalism and war. The only legitimate institutions are therefore trans-national ones which purport to represent the brotherhood of man.

So trans-national bodies and doctrines, such as the UN, EU, International Criminal Court or European human rights law, trump our own national institutions and laws.

The UN was established after World War II with the most noble of aims, to ensure that the world never again allowed the horrors of Nazism to happen. But like all attempts to create Utopia, this produced instead a monster.

For the world consists of many wicked regimes. As more and more countries joined the UN, its moral mission was turned on its head so that, by 2003, only 75 UN members were free democracies.

The result is a UN characterised by endemic incompetence, corruption and worse. It has repeatedly failed to prevent atrocities.

It did nothing to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994; it stood by while more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in Srebrenica the following year; and it sat on its hands for 20 years while Muslim militias committed genocide in Southern Sudan and wiped out some two million souls.

One mission was dispatched to examine the killings in Darfur. When it returned with a report criticising the Sudanese government, the UN’s grotesquely misnamed Human Rights Council refused to endorse it or accept its recommendations.

The UN Development Programme has been authoritatively accused of fraud and corruption. Saddam Hussein not only siphoned off some $10 billion from the UN’s oil-for-food programme, but the UN official overseeing that programme was allegedly on the huge list of those receiving kickbacks — as was the son of the former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.

A classified UN report detailed 150 allegations that UN peacekeepers and staff sexually attacked and exploited war refugees in the Congo in exchange for food. Similar allegations of sexual misconduct by UN staff stretch back at least a decade to operations in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

The UN persistently ignores global abuses and supports their perpetrators instead. Astoundingly, it has passed not one resolution against despotic regimes such as China, Russia or Cuba.

It has approved not one resolution against the Arab and Muslim state sponsors of terrorism. Instead, it displayed its contempt for the rule of law and the value of human life by actually endorsing terrorism when, in 1982, it affirmed the legitimacy of actions against foreign domination ‘by all available means including armed struggle’.

While thus ignoring or endorsing Arab and Muslim terror, it passes an unending stream of resolutions against Israel, the principal victim of such terror — but the only country subjected to an investigatory mandate that examines the actions of only one side.

Days before 9/11, the UN’s ‘anti-racist’ conference in Durban turned into a grotesque hate-fest against Israel and Jews. Now it is planning a second such conference next year in Geneva — preparations for which are being led by Libya and Iran, which denies the Holocaust and repeatedly announces it intends to wipe Israel off the map.

Despite the fact that the UN’s Human Rights Council was supposed to end the abuses perpetrated by its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, the continued domination of this Council by oppressive states means it is still acting to suppress human rights.

Hence its recent outrageous decision to ban altogether any criticism of Islamic sharia law, which is responsible for such abuses as women being stoned to death for adultery or young men being hanged for being gay.

With the support of China, Russia and Cuba, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference — which represents the 57 Islamic states — forced through a measure which requires the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression to report anyone who speaks out against sharia law, on the grounds that such criticism represents religious discrimination.

This Orwellian diktat is but the latest evidence that, far from upholding freedom and human rights against their abuse, the UN is simply a club of tyranny.

Yet, grotesquely, it is regarded as the supreme arbiter of international affairs, without whose imprimatur it is illegitimate to act. The fear is that without it the world will descend into anarchy. But the dismal truth is that the UN is the principal engine for the perpetuation of chaos, terror, misery and injustice across the world.

It is high time we abolished this obscene institution and created instead a United Democratic Nations to promote freedom and justice.

The vote on Zimbabwe has implications going way beyond Africa. It is but the latest wake-up call about the UN — and ignoring it means that the world’s ostensible concern for Zimbabwe and all such abuses are nothing other than crocodile tears.

Dail Mail, 8 July 2008

Three years after the London Tube and bus bombings, it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation. Some people will think this is mere hyperbole. However, that’s the problem. Britain still doesn’t grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation.

The former is understood; the latter is generally not acknowledged or is even denied, and those who call attention to it are pilloried as either ‘ Islamophobes’ or alarmists who have taken up residence on Planet Paranoia.

Certainly, the police and security service have been foiling plot after plot and are bringing to court a steady stream of Islamist radicals –an improvement without doubt from three years ago. And so, particularly within the British elite, people think that things are broadly under control.

They fail to realise that the attempt to take over our culture is even more deadly to this society than terrorism. They are simply blind to the ruthless way in which the Islamists are exploiting our chronic muddle of well-meaning tolerance and political correctness (backed up by the threat of more violence) to put Islam on a special — indeed, unique — footing within Britain.

As a result, the steady Islamisation of British public life is either being ignored or even tacitly encouraged by a political, security and judicial establishment that is failing to identify the stealthy and mind-bending game that is being played.

The official counter-radicalisation programme illustrates the problem. The Government wants to tackle radicalisation within Britain’s Muslim community by winning hearts and minds within that community. Its strategy is based on isolating the extremists and encouraging the moderates.

The problem, however, is that it doesn’t understand what Muslim extremism is. Believing that Islamic terrorism is motivated by an ideology which has ‘hijacked’ and distorted Islam, it will not acknowledge the extremism within mainstream Islam itself.

The reason so many older British Muslims are traditionally moderate is that they were brought up in the Asian subcontinent under a tamed form of Islam, deriving from centuries of colonial rule, which glossed over much of the teaching of the religion.

The Government believes that Islamic radicalism can be countered by teaching authentic Islam to Muslims. But since Islamic radicalism is based upon those very authentic religious precepts, this will undoubtedly have the effect of radicalising people who otherwise would never have thought in this way.

The Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) was set up to put into effect the Government’s aim of ensuring moderation in the mosques. This was always unlikely, given that members of Islamist groupings were on the steering committee. Although MINAB’s chairman, Manazir Ahsan, presents himself as a reformer, he is the director of the Islamic Foundation, which follows the writings of Maulana Maududi — who preached an end to the sovereignty and supremacy of unbelievers who should be made to live in a state of subordination to Islam.

Similarly, Dr Ataullah Siddiqui, the Government’s chief adviser on Islamic Studies, is a senior member of the Islamic Foundation. A report he wrote for the Government last year, Islam at Universities in England, which was publicly welcomed by the Prime Minister, urged that among other special privileges for Muslims, they should be allowed to teach Islamic subjects in British universities and that non-Muslims should be banned from doing so.

In any event, the universities are steadily being Islamised, with academic objectivity in the teaching of Islam and Middle East studies being set aside in favour of indoctrination and propaganda.

A report by Professor Anthony Glees due to be published in the autumn will argue that extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centres linked to British universities and backed by multimillion-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organisations.

He says: ‘Britain’s universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems. This must, by the Government’s own logic, hugely increase the risk of terrorism.’

Even more terrifying is the increasing Islamisation of the police. It has been reported that up to eight police officers and civilian staff working in the Metropolitan Police and other forces are suspected of links to extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, with some even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. One suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq.

No less disturbing is the fact that the police are intentionally bringing Islamists into the force in the utterly misguided belief (shared by many in the security service) that they can help counter Islamic radicalism.

Commander Robert Lambert, who until this year ran the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit, observed that terrorism could not be fought by contact with moderate Muslims but through partnerships with Salafists (Sunni extremists who believe in Islamic supremacy over the secular state) — one of whom was actually an officer in his own police department.

Commander Lambert believed that this would enable the police to understand the way extremists thought before they committed any acts of terror.

But it surely goes without saying that an officer who is committed to the overthrow of the West, and its replacement by an Islamic society poses a security risk of the first order. For a police counter-terrorism specialist to be promoting this situation beggars belief.

Deeply alarmed sources have furthermore told me that, in the overriding concern by police forces to hire more ethnic minority officers, they have junked vetting criteria — particularly when it comes to hiring Police Community Support Officers, who after two years can become fully fledged police officers with no further vetting required. The result, say these sources, is that the security of police operations is potentially compromised.

Moreover, there have been disturbing examples of the police protecting Islamic extremism. In 2007, the Channel Four Dispatches programme uncovered evidence of incitement to murder of homosexuals, the killing of British soldiers and hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques.

But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the West Midlands Police first tried to prosecute the programme makers and then accused them of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion — a libel for which the police and the Crown Prosecution Service were subsequently forced to apologise.

A report by the Centre for Social Cohesion on honour killings and similar violence revealed that several women’s groups, particularly in the Midlands and northern England, say they are often reluctant to go to the police with women who have run away from home to escape violence, because they cannot trust Asian police officers not to betray the girls to their abusing families.

In February, Christian evangelists Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham were handing out Bible extracts in Alum Rock, Birmingham. They were stopped by a Muslim Police Community Support Officer, threatened with arrest if they carried on preaching in ‘a Muslim area’, and warned that they might get beaten up if they came back.

What on earth is happening when, in the heart of England, a British police support officer, employed by the British state to enforce the law of England, aggressively prevents Christians from preaching the established faith of England on the grounds that this is now a ‘hate crime’?

When the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that Britain was developing Muslim nogo areas, he was denounced as Islamophobic.

The Establishment queued up to say they didn’t recognise the Britain he was describing. But British public life is progressively being Islamised, with Muslim radicals in areas with large concentrations of Muslims increasingly intimidating non-Muslims.

After a vicar in East London, Canon Michael Ainsworth, was beaten up by three Muslims in his own churchyard in March, it was revealed that there had been many attacks on churches in the area by such youths, who on one occasion shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque.’

Yet last month, one of the youths in the Ainsworth attack walked free after a judge accepted his claim that the attack was not religiously motivated.

Sharia law is steadily encroaching into British institutions. Last week, Lord Phillips, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said it could play a role in some parts of the legal system. This followed comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury who declared that Muslim families should be able to choose between English and Islamic law in marital and family issues.

But the fact is that Britain is already developing a parallel sharia jurisdiction in such matters, with a blind eye being turned to such practices as forced marriage, cousin marriage, female genital mutilation and polygamy; indeed, welfare benefits are now given to the multiple wives of Muslim men.

Meanwhile, the courts still appear to be bending over backwards to appease Muslim radicalism. Last month, a judge freed from prison Abu Qatada, the most important Al Qaeda operative in Europe and the lynchpin of numerous European terror attacks, who was being held pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial.

His release on bail — into a kind of house arrest — followed an Appeal Court ruling that he could not be deported to Jordan because any prosecution there might have been obtained as a result of a witness being tortured — a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Why do the British authorities appear to go out of their way to thwart efforts to fight and defeat jihadi terror? While Islamists are being appeased, the Christian church is being discriminated against. The Bishop of Rochester said that the decline of Christian values was destroying Britishness and had created a ‘moral vacuum’ which radical Islam was filling

In reply to this cri de coeur from a civilisation under siege, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, maintained it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and homegrown terrorism.

But Islamism will be repulsed only if Britain once again regains the confidence of its own culture, heritage and traditions. And these are based on Christianity.

Ms Blears’s lamentable comment graphically illustrates the problem. While the ordinary people of Britain are increasingly aghast at the way their country is being transformed by Islamism, the political, judicial, security and intellectual elites are busy denying the nature of the danger and making it far, far worse through a combination of extreme ignorance, arrogance and sheer funk.

The Islamists launched their jihad against the West because they perceived it was so weak and confused it would not possess the wherewithal to defend itself. When it comes to Britain, they never spoke a truer word.

This is an abridged version of a new foreword to an updated edition of ‘Londonistan‘
by Melanie Phillips, published in the UK by Gibson Square.

Daily Mail, 7 July 2008

The resignation of Ray Lewis as the Mayor of London’s crime adviser is quite simply a tragedy, with profound implications far beyond the insular world of the capital’s party politics.

Here is a man who has literally saved lives. Among the boys whose behaviour he has transformed through his Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy in East London are those who, without any doubt, would otherwise have gone on to kill or be killed.

Yet Mr Lewis has suddenly been accused of a slew of torrid offences including financial irregularities, physical abuse and sexually inappropriate behaviour. At present, we don’t know the truth about these murky allegations. Mr Lewis has already robustly denied the more lurid claims, but perhaps some of them are true.

Maybe all those who have supported him in the past — ranging from the Tories’ social justice guru Iain Duncan Smith to Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone’s (now disgraced) race adviser who described his approach as ‘brilliant’ — are thus shown up to be naive and credulous dupes.

If so, then I am one of them. I visited the Eastside Academy in July 2005, months before David Cameron used it for his first official photo-op as the new Tory leader. I saw for myself the impressive work Ray Lewis was doing.

He took black boys from shattered family backgrounds who were on the way to criminal careers and turned them into high-achieving model citizens.

These were the toughest boys in the neighbourhood. They had fought, bullied, smashed up their schools and set fire to them, barricaded teachers into the classrooms and been in accelerating trouble with the law. Yet when they left Eastside virtually all of them went to college and lived law-abiding lives.

Ray Lewis achieved this by plugging the crucial gap in their lives that virtually no teacher or social worker or probation officer can fill. He was simply the father figure they so desperately needed but who was missing from their own fractured families.

He was a tough, stern, authoritative, totally uncompromising black man — all factors crucial to gaining their respect.

All he achieved was through the force of his personality. The boys did what he told them to do, not because he hit them but because his disapproval was shattering to them.

He loved and believed in those boys, he gave them a sense of unlimited aspiration and he drove them very hard. And because they both feared his tongue and admired him, they responded by transforming themselves.

He made them conform to strict rules of discipline; there were military-style roll calls, they were instructed to make eye contact with their tutors and to walk in straight lines with no deviations and no talking. The importance of such ‘tough love’ to boys who possessed not even the most elementary social skills, let alone self- discipline or respect for authority, cannot be exaggerated.

He had no time at all for sloppy teaching practices, nor the usual excuses for bad behaviour such as ‘poor self-esteem’. His work was the most graphic rebuke possible to all those involved in making excuses for juvenile criminality.

As a result, he made serious enemies on the Left, who regarded him as some kind of fascist. On the local Newham council various councillors and officials badmouthed Eastside as a ‘boot camp’ and gave him only minimal funding.

This was simply because just about everything he stood for was a monumental rebuke to everything they stood for, and to the personal and social damage over which they so complacently presided.

Now at last the Left have finally brought him down. How they must be gloating at this apparent proof that inside every traditionalist disciplinarian lurks a hypocritical humbug.

As a result, the very continuation of Eastside itself is in jeopardy. Its closure would be a tragedy not just for Ray Lewis but for our entire society.

We are in the middle of an epidemic of violent crime. In the last few days, 16-yearold Shakilus Townsend was murdered in South London by a gang armed with baseball bats and a knife — the 18th teenager to meet a violent death in London this year.

Only days before, 16-year- old Ben Kinsella was knifed to death in North London, while the bodies of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez were found riddled with knife wounds after a fire at a flat in south-east London.

Ray Lewis is one of the very few who know how to turn this situation round. Whatever he may have done in the past, he has probably done more good for society through his work at Eastside than all his accusers put together.

And that achievement has arisen out of his character — including his undoubted failings. For failings he certainly has. He is abrasive, disorganised, hopeless at papermeanour-work, imprecise in his use of language and cavalier with the niceties of bureaucracy.

That certainly might explain his confused and often contradictory attempts to defend himself against the allegations that have emerged in the past week. But on the basis of what we know so far, it does not make him guilty of the more lurid claims of sexual and financial impropriety.

Indeed, there remain many peculiarities about the specifics.

Questions arise, in particular, about the behaviour of the Church of England, whose hitherto buried file on Mr Lewis detonated the affair when it mysteriously came to light.

It appears that Mr Lewis, an Anglican priest, was banned from preaching after what the Bishop of Chelmsford said was ‘a serious misde-Yet the bishop’s chaplain said Mr Lewis had been banned because ‘things had been alleged against him’. Didn’t the church find out whether they were true?

It says it alerted Mayor Johnson to them shortly after Mr Lewis’s appointment. But this turns out to have consisted merely of a) an exchange between Boris and the Bishop of Barking at a football match, which Boris says he can’t remember and, b) a passing reference in a letter to the fact that Mr Lewis ‘did not have permission to exercise his priesthood in the diocese’.

Was this really an adequate way to bring such serious charges to light? Nor did the church appear to tell the Home Office about them when Mr Lewis was appointed as a junior prison governor, nor did it inform the Eastside trustees.

The fact is that for now, the allegations remain just that. The police found no cause to proceed against Mr Lewis on any complaints that were referred to them.

What is unarguable is that he claimed to be a magistrate when he is not. By his own account, he was merely told that his application to serve on the bench was going through. That was very wrong, of course, and it is why Boris had to ditch him.

Maybe worse will eventually be proved against him. But while this whole sorry episode may demonstrate that Mr Lewis was ill-suited to political life, it should not negate his achievements in turning jail fodder into model citizens. The fact is, we simply cannot afford to lose the work he was doing with the young.

Whatever his personal failings turn out to be, it would be social suicide if his approach to delinquent youths was also discredited. Even if Ray Lewis is to be taken out of the picture, we need more people like him to continue what he started.

Our crime problem will not be solved by the dead hand of state bureaucracy but by individuals who don’t conform. Using such people means taking a risk. Sometimes that risk blows up in our face. But if we are ever to give hope to our troubled young and restore order to our society, it’s one we surely have to take.

Jewish Chronicle, 4 July 2008

Last May, the Paris Appeal Court delivered one of the most momentous of all libel judgments. It declared that a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, was entitled to say that television footage by the France 2 TV station purporting to show the killing of 12 year-old Palestinian Mohammed al Dura by Israeli troops in November 2000 was a staged piece of theatre and that the boy had not been killed at all.

This ruling could hardly have been more significant given the iconic nature of that footage and the evidence behind the court’s decision. For the image of Mohammed al Dura clinging to his father moments before he was apparently shot dead by Israeli soldiers at a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim junction fuelled the intifada, which began in earnest at that point, and led directly to countless terrorist deaths around the world.

Hitherto, public doubts about this event had been confined to whether the boy had been killed by Israeli or Palestinian bullets. But the court saw hitherto untransmitted footage of that Gaza demonstration. This showed clearly that, far from being under continuous fire, not one Palestinian appeared to be harmed at all; indeed, the demonstration was conducted in a carnival atmosphere.

Most astonishing of all, after the reporter on the film, France 2’s veteran Israel correspondent Charles Enderlin, pronounced that the child now slumped on the ground had been killed not only were Mohammed and his father unmarked by any wounds, not only was there no blood at the scene, but the allegedly dead child moved his arm.

To date, not one British media outlet has reported this case (apart from my own piece in this month’s Standpoint magazine). In France, minimal press coverage pooh-poohing the ruling has been accompanied by a petition signed by 300 journalists in support of Enderlin. None of them appears to have seen the courtroom evidence. Enderlin, a national institution, has many powerful friends.

The media silence is not surprising. For those images of the ‘dead’ Mohammed al Dura perpetrated against Israel the ancient anti-Jewish libel of deliberate child killing. This was done by the media, which levelled a charge which anyone looking at the evidence can see was patently absurd. As the Paris judge wrote, there were ‘inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions’ between Enderlin’s commentary and the images he was describing.

But for the media to admit this is to concede that Israel has been grievously wronged by Palestinian lies. It will not acknowledge this, because that would open up the possibility that Israel might be the victim of Palestinian lies transmitted by the western media as a matter of course.

Some have even said ‘So what if this child wasn’t actually killed? It doesn’t alter the fact that Israel murders Palestinian children!’ Thus a blood libel inoculates individuals against truth and reason.

There is however a further twist to this extraordinary story. Charles Enderlin, who claimed that the boy was killed by the Israelis on the basis of what he was told by his Palestinian cameraman Talal abu Rahma, himself holds Israeli citizenship. Not only that, when he did his own army service he actually served as a press spokesman for the IDF.

Indeed, the IDF trusted him so much that when he reported his sensational scoop it accepted responsibility for killing the child –without even asking the commander on the ground. It was only later that it conducted an inquiry and discovered that logistically it was impossible for its soldiers to have killed him.

So why did Enderlin – who is now spraying around allegations that Karsenty is the tool of ‘right-wingers’ — transmit this lethal falsehood? According to some who know him well, Enderlin believes that anything is justified if it helps force Israel to end its ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories. And ‘anything’, it seems, included transmitting the fiction of the killing of Mohammed al Dura.

This murderous corruption of journalism by France 2 was further exacerbated by the supine response of the Israel government. For seven years, it deliberately ignored the evidence of its own expert, Nahum Shahaf, that the boy had not been killed at all. It said nothing because it thought that it would not be believed, and so it would be counter-productive to focus more attention upon the affair.

During this period its own spokesman Danny Seaman did say that the killing was a fabrication – but was slapped down by the government and his remarks disowned. Meanwhile France 2 has continued to operate inside Israel with no government comeback.

The whole disturbing affair has been in short an object lesson in how the western media acts as the tool of psychological warfare waged by the enemies of civilisation, leading to the murder of countless innocents and the demonisation of a country under siege.