The Most Important US Election in a Generation – and for Britain Too

THE TELEGRAPH: No one has enjoyed Barack Obama walking away from the world stage as much as Vladimir Putin

Exactly a year from today – how could we forget? – the United States of America will elect its 45th President. Sometimes it is hard to believe the 44th, Barack Obama, is still extant. He does a better impersonation of a nonentity that any president in living memory, quite an accomplishment when one recalls Jimmy Carter.

I covered Obama’s 2008 campaign and watched with dismay as America, wounded and humiliated by the pratfalls and absurdities of the George W Bush years, fell for the smooth, stage-managed articulacy of the vacuum that Obama, even then, was. His record of unachievement should have come as no surprise.

Our Prime Minister says our future lies in Europe, so we may think it of little consequence that Mr Obama has detached America so much from the rest of the world, and that the so-called special relationship between Britain and the United States is, for now, little more than a figment of the imagination. If you seek a monument to US foreign policy look no further than the intervention of Russia in the mess in Syria and Iraq; a mess Mr Obama may not have caused, but which he has contrived to do absolutely nothing to resolve.

Given the unintended consequences of American foreign policy under George W Bush it is tempting to rejoice that America is so disengaged from international relations. But there is such a thing as a world balance of power, and America, by its inertia and (whether it admits it or not) perceived isolationism has altered it. Vladimir Putin now prevails, which, given the true state of Russian power, is preposterous and shameful: and the most pre-medieval variant of Islam imaginable stalks what we once thought of as Western civilisation. » | Simon Heffer | Saturday, November 7, 2015

Impeach Tony Blair: As Iraq Burns, Parliament Should Put This Deluded Liar On Trial, Writes Simon Heffer

Tony Blair appeared a self-serving fantasist with blood on his
hands when he was interviewed on Sky News

MAIL ONLINE: With allies of Al Qaeda running amok in Iraq and heading for Baghdad, the disastrous legacy of Britain's entanglement there with the invasion of 2003 becomes ever more blindingly obvious.

Obvious to everyone, that is, except the man who ordered it.

Seven years after leaving office, and 11 years after British troops flooded across the southern border, Tony Blair continues to cause outrage and bewilderment over Iraq.

Noting the eruption of the jihad there, Mr Blair professes that ‘we have to liberate ourselves from the notion that “we” have caused this. We haven't.'

Only a handful of American neo-conservatives, most of them discredited and seeking to protect their reputations, too, would agree with him. To most people, he appears a self-serving fantasist with blood on his hands.

Saddam Hussein was evil and vicious. However, the mixture of repression and corruption with which he governed meant Iraq was spared the Sunni-on-Shia violence that is tearing the country apart now, threatening the entire region and, with it, the security and prosperity of the West.

Some would question Mr Blair's sanity. Indeed, a former close friend, the novelist Robert Harris, did so only recently, suggesting he had a ‘messiah complex'.

It takes a rare politician to admit any error, let alone one based on a lie — the sexed-up ‘dodgy dossier' Mr Blair put before Parliament in March 2003 to support his contention that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction — which cost the lives of 173 British servicemen and six servicewomen. Read on and comment » | Simon Heffer | Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Tony Blair Is A 'Tragic' Narcissist With A Messiah Complex, Says Former Confidant And Author Robert Harris »

David Cameron's Obsession with Image and Spin Is Failing the Country
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The public is paying dearly for the Prime Minister's cult of personality, argues Simon Heffer.

David Cameron is obsessed with spin. Photo: The Daily Telegraph
That the public mood lightened last week when the BBC went on strike, and we were spared for a day or two endless earnest reports and analyses of the activities of our pygmy politicians, should hardly be a surprise. What perhaps requires further thought, both by politicians and those of us who report or analyse their doings, is whether there is generally just too much of it out there for anybody's good.

We know that in a democracy information (preferably truthful) is essential. I, like many of my colleagues, came into journalism precisely to throw bricks through windows. The Fourth Estate has a role, without doubt, in fulfilling the import of that pompous phrase "holding politicians to account". But since so much of what the politicians tell journalists is either only half the truth or, at times, none of the truth at all, some of us do start to wonder why we bother. I rarely sit down on a Tuesday without the thought crossing my mind that it would be better all round if I were to write a column about the cultural importance of Ealing films, or a defence of Wagner, or a philippic against much contemporary architecture. I do not doubt many of you would agree. Yet again, however, this week there is a subject, related to what I have just said, that requires all our attention.

The Prime Minister has put no fewer than 26 people on the public payroll, on short-term contracts, without advertising their posts. Most of these people are trusties, and the most prominent of them are in the business of managing Mr Cameron's image: and, in one case, Mrs Cameron's. One of them is his photographer. Another is described as being his "web guru", a man whose contribution to the lexicon of conservative thought so far has been to seek to "pimp your party" and to throw a fund-raising event that was "so hip it hurts", whatever the hell that means. The Prime Minister also has his own film-maker. There is also someone being paid £50,000 a year working for something called the "behavioural insight team" in the Cabinet Office. She, and they, must have their work cut out. I believe there are even some young people who advise on policy, and we must judge the quality of their contribution to our governance by its results.

It is reported that a senior civil servant warned Mr Cameron of the injudiciousness of appointing at least some of these people at all, and especially in this way, at a time of stringency in the public sector. The act has also been interpreted as a means of Mr Cameron getting around his own much-trumpeted policy of reducing the number of special advisers in government. But the real issue here is one of image, and image management. We knew that Mr Cameron was obsessed with this when in opposition, usually to the exclusion of developing any policies or principles. Many of the people hired in this compromising way were in charge of massaging the Cameron image before he entered Downing Street. Nicky Woodhouse, the film-maker, did his saccharine and nauseating "WebCameron", by which the public who cared to watch were deceived into believing they were witnessing real slices of Cameron family life. Read on and comment >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, November 09, 2010

This article hits the nail right on the head. We, the electorate, are sick and tired of our vain politicians who think far too little of the 'little people' and far too much of themselves. David Cameron is an exemplar par excellence of such a politician. One can see his vanity in his face. In short: He loves himself. And he is using these spin creatures to try and make the rest of us love him equally as much. The strategy will fail. The electorate has had quite enough of spin during the Blair years. Look where that got us!

How nice it would be to be governed by real politicians. Winnie was the complete opposite of Cameron: Churchill thought little about his appearance, but a hell of a lot about the country.

Thank you so much for this insightful article. It was a pleasure to read it. – © Mark [This comment can also be read here]

Barack Obama Is Doomed – Enter Mrs Clinton
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Despite the efforts of the US media to support St Barack, the Americans are having none of it, writes Simon Heffer.

Four days after the elections, the rage continues. If giving the Democrats a hiding was supposed to soothe the electorate, something has gone wrong. It – or rather the Democrat reaction to it – appears simply to have made things worse.

To the rest of the world, it might have seemed that President Obama’s press conference after the defeat was an admission of personal failure. But it wasn’t: what went wrong was the economy’s fault, he argued – and, by extension, it was the fault of the electorate for not seeing that. Despite the best efforts of the Leftist-dominated media here to support St Barack, the people are having none of it. The result is that his failure to go down on his knees and repent of his big-state, high-spending, pro-bureaucracy, unemployment-boosting policies has left the punters even more choleric than they were already. If he really does want to be a one-term president, he’s going exactly the right way about it.

The anger was further stoked by the President’s decision to leave yesterday on a long trip to India and the Far East. Although it is being sold here as some sort of trade mission – though he is likely to find that whatever America might want to sell in that region, the locals can make it just as well and at a small fraction of the cost – his departure is viewed as an escape from the line of fire.

He is also being heavily criticised for going to a country with a recent history of terrorist outrages, necessitating a security operation that is adding a further large chunk to his country’s national debt. As well as his taking 500 staff, 13 aircraft and four helicopters have already flown in a fleet of cars and communications equipment, and no fewer than 34 US warships are said to be hovering off the coast. Some of his critics here were already drawing comparisons with the court of Louis XVI just before the French Revolution, and this hasn’t helped. Read on and comment >>> Simon Heffer | Friday, November 05, 2010

Out of Touch and Out of Favour: The Future Looks Bleak for Barack Obama
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: America has taken stock of Mr Obama’s presidency – and it doesn’t like what it sees, says Simon Heffer.

The extent of the kicking the Democratic party has received in the mid-term elections will be clear by the time you read this. America has been concentrating in recent days not on who would win – that seemed obvious – but on how big the Republican gains would be among the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, the 36 Senate seats, the 37 governorships and the 6,118 seats in state legislatures being contested. There is a more striking consideration, however: why has the Obama phenomenon imploded with the force it has, just two years after the President’s stunning triumph? For it is so mighty a fall that it is something of an achievement.

In recent days both the President and his rather clumsy Vice-President, Joe Biden, have been touring America trying to get the Democratic vote out. They do not appear to have been very successful. Two years ago, hundreds of thousands of people turned up for great outdoor rallies for candidate Obama. When he went to Cleveland, Ohio, on Sunday the indoor sports stadium he spoke in was a little over half-full. The media here are full of former Democratic voters voicing different degrees of disappointment with him. The greatest criticism is about his failure to improve the economy; the second greatest is about his apparent inability to modify foreign policy. In this lies the truth of what the difficulty is: a fundamental failure to manage expectations.

On the morning after Mr Obama’s election two years ago, I watched on television an Illinois woman weeping with relief at the outcome, on the grounds that her house would not now be foreclosed upon. She made it clear where she got this idea from: the Democrats had promised prosperity and, she believed, to protect the homes of those facing foreclosure on their loans. I hope that woman still has the same roof over her head, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The wild economic promises and the failure to damp down some of the inferences drawn from them have proved disastrous for the Democrats’, and the President’s, reputation and credibility.

Many states are going broke. Nevada, home of the Senate leader Harry Reid, is $3 billion in the red. The combined level of their debt is $134 billion. That is a drop in the ocean compared with America’s total debt, which is around $15 trillion, a figure incomprehensible to most people. Unemployment nationally has risen from 7.7 per cent two years ago to 9.6 per cent today. The President’s own economic advisers said it would peak at 8 per cent and Mr Biden recklessly said it would fall month-on-month. Last month, 96,000 more people joined the dole queues. Unemployment has risen disproportionately among young people, black people and the white working class, precisely the groups who supported Mr Obama two years ago. The President has a particular problem in northern rust-belt states where he was supported heavily in 2008 because he represented the last hope. He and Mr Biden have been again and again to the states around the Great Lakes trying to maintain that support. There, as elsewhere, they appear to have failed. There is no real anger against them, though: just a fog of disappointment. Read on and comment >>> Simon Heffer | Wednesday, November 03, 2010

David Cameron and the Euro Millions Roll-over
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: What has happened in the past couple of days is an affirmation of business as usual, writes Simon Heffer.

Business as usual for Mr Cameron. Photo: The Daily Telegraph
Since Lady Thatcher left office it has been easy to predict the outcome of EU summit meetings. A prime minister talks tough beforehand – especially in election campaigns – about defending British interests. Yet when he arrives it is a matter of moments before he is on his knees, doing exactly as he is bidden by our masters in Brussels.

Dave is no exception, and nor did I expect him to be. It is not just that he reminds us more of Ted Heath every day. It is that he is a natural appeaser, a man born to take the line of least resistance. He is also in bed with serious Leftists and federalists posing as Liberal Democrats, whose enthusiasm for the European project, and indeed for the disastrous notion of a single currency, remains undimmed. And it is part of Dave’s own project to realign his party on the centre-Left, which means, in the end, he will always do what he is told by Brussels. Read on and comment >>> Simon Heffer | Friday, October 29, 2010

The RAF Can Be Trimmed but to Cut the Navy and Army Is Insane
THE TELEGRAPH: The modern world is looking very dangerous – we need defence more than an overseas aid budget, says Simon Heffer.

As the Trades Union Congress seeks to lose Labour the next election even more heavily than it lost the last one, by promising general strikes and a mindless and bankrupting commitment to spending money Britain hasn't got, we should not lose sight of one point: that there are, indeed, certain cuts that would be most unwise. I think of one in particular, discussed in our pages yesterday by the former head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt: the precipitate, reckless and little-short-of-insane cuts being planned for our Armed Forces.

The TUC and its satraps in the Labour Party pretend to oppose cuts because of the impact they would have on "public services". What they really mean is on "the jobs of our members". Many public services, notably in quangos, local government and even the untouchable National Health Service, harbour tens of thousands of members of the Brownite client state who are about as socially useful as a phial of arsenic. This is even true of defence, but only up to a point. It should, and must, be cut less than any other department. Most of the public would hardly register any difference in other public services if they had 25 per cent of their flab cut out of them. If it went from defence, our security would be imperilled for a generation. Sir Richard has made the case for restraint admirably; but forgive me if I add some further thoughts.

The Ministry of Defence has, to an extent, asked for this. It has about 85,000 civil servants, roughly the same as the total complements of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force put together. One of the first places to start a clear-out is there. Such numbers of pen-pushers are unsustainable. Drastic reductions in this establishment are no doubt tabled for the meeting of the defence review now rescheduled for next week (it was to be on Friday but for the death of the Prime Minister's father). So they should be. As for the rest, as Sir Richard has outlined this week, it all depends on what we conceive the potential threats to the realm to be in the 10 or 15 years ahead. It also depends – and here we get to the love that dare not speak its name – what conception we choose to have of ourselves as a nation, and of our place in the world, over the next decade or two.

The question of threat is real rather than imagined. The world is more dangerous now than at any time since the early 1960s, when a vodka-powered Khruschev was up against the inexperienced Kennedy, and we waited for nuclear war to break out. We have chosen through Nato to align ourselves with other nations committed to the continuation of what we might loosely call Western civilisation. Inevitably, other nations regard this either as a standing affront to them or, in one or two cases, possibly even a target. Suppose either Israel attacks Iran or Iran attacks Israel. Forget the so-called special relationship, and forget conceptions of our place in the world. Where would our national interest lie in the event of such a terrible conflict being initiated, whoever the initiator, and irrespective of what America or Europe may think? Have our diplomats, not least our rather preoccupied Foreign Secretary, deemed and defined what our national interest now is? For it would be too late to do so once we have inadequate martial force to back it up. Would we be happy to sit and watch America and Islam fight a war without having the resources to exert influence – with either side – ourselves? Would we be happy to have our existing, meagre part reduced to nothing? For that is what is at stake. Read on and comment >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, September 14, 2010

If President Obama Carries On Like This, He Will Turn Into a Lame Duck
THE TELEGRAPH: The president hasn't grown into the job - all that's needed to beat him is a serious Republican, says Simon Heffer in New York.

The shock about coming to America after an absence of four months is how, in that time, respect for and confidence in President Obama has slumped. It wasn't good in March; now the effect of what one blogger has called his apparent "impotence" has taken hold. It is not clear what Mr Obama actually does. He isn't engaged with the economy; he certainly isn't engaged with foreign policy; he has abandoned hope of a climate change bill this year (and probably for ever); he has seen his health care bill into law, but America awaits news of how it will be implemented; he is under attack for a casual approach to illegal immigration, notably from the Mexican narco-state. He has only just girded himself to go campaigning for his party in the mid-term elections. Last Sunday was the 100-days-to-go mark, and the talk in politics here is of little else. Joe Biden, the vice-president, has been nominated as "campaigner in chief". Why? What is the President doing?

He appears to be reading the newspapers and the blogs and watching television. Last week, a twisted opponent put out a selectively edited video of a black Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, apparently admitting discriminating against a white farmer. Mrs Sherrod had done nothing of the sort – either the discrimination or, therefore, the admission of it – but was immediately sacked, for fear that Fox News was about to broadcast the video. This outrageous act was followed by an even more outrageous apology by the president the next day – outrageous in that Mrs Sherrod was not immediately given back her job. In the White House there were, we are told, great mutual congratulations (to start with) that swift action had stopped this becoming "a story". Well, it's a story now, not least because it exemplifies the incompetence and disconnection of the administration. Mrs Sherrod's husband was a leading civil rights activist and her father was murdered by white racists in 1965, so there is a resonance to this story that is causing discomfort.

This immediate proof of mismanagement adds to the cumulative feeling on so many other fronts that Mr Obama and his team simply don't understand governance. Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America's debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky. Continue reading and comment >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, July 27, 2010

David Cameron Has Had This Coming to Him
THE TELEGRAPH: Dave Cameron abandoned conservatism five years ago because he believed it would get his party elected. It didn't.

Dave had to fight a widely despised Prime Minister leading a Government incompetent and destructive on a scale unseen in living memory. Seldom has there been a softer target; but seldom has one been missed so unnecessarily. With just 36 per cent of the vote, the Tories stood almost still since 2005. They are now on their knees to their other enemy, the Lib Dems.

Gordon Brown, predicted to cause his party's greatest defeat since 1918, was instead still in office and giving an entirely accurate constitutional lecture to the nation. So low were expectations of him that he looks as though he has done remarkably well. He remains Prime Minister. It is his duty to carry on the Queen's government. Like Baldwin, defeated in 1923, he can stay until he meets parliament with a Queen's Speech. Unless forced out by his party, he need not resign yet. Dave cannot even try to form a government while there is an incumbent prime minister. And there will be an incumbent prime minister until Mr Brown is convinced that the combined forces of the Lib Dems and Tories can defeat him on a motion of confidence or a Loyal Address.

It should not have come to this. As I rang round Tory MPs some were incandescent at the conduct not just of the campaign, but of the whole anti-core vote strategy that has alienated many natural Tory voters. George Osborne, both as campaign co-ordinator and also as an inept shadow chancellor, was quickly selected as the scapegoat. But let us not forget that the roots of this problem go back to 2005. The party has chosen to mimic and validate the policies of its opponents, with the result that the public found little to choose between the main parties. This was exemplified in the television debates, in which the leaders fell over themselves to agree not only with any contention put to them by the public, but even with each other. >>> Simon Heffer | Friday, May 07, 2010

Labour Has Taken 13 Years of Diabolical Liberties with Britain
THE TELEGRAPH: Individualism and autonomy used to be prized – now they are held in contempt, argues Simon Heffer

A danger of the Government's having made such a mess of the economy is that one risks forgetting all the other horrors for which it is responsible. Between now and the election I shall make a point of discussing some of these other factors that an intelligent voter should want to consider before casting his or her ballot. Despite stiff competition from matters like Europe, immigration, law and order and the near-destruction of our education system, one is perhaps worse than all the others: the insidious and at times quite terrifying assault on our civil liberties.

I have been prompted to think more about this after reading a new book by one of Cambridge University's most impressive young political philosophers, Ben Colburn. In Autonomy and Liberalism (Routledge, £70), Dr Colburn seeks "an understanding of what a liberal political philosophy is committed to". In this country, "liberal" is still just a term of approbation. Mrs Thatcher was a 19th century liberal. I have always considered myself a Gladstonian liberal. However, in America the word is used by people whose politics are broadly the same as Mrs Thatcher's and mine as a term of abuse. Perhaps the difference is that we think of liberalism in predominantly economic terms and the Americans think of it as defining something social.

This creates what Dr Colburn calls "a cacophony" surrounding the term, and in his book he seeks to restore order. To his mind, individual autonomy is central to the liberal political philosophy. Although a political philosopher, Dr Colburn takes a view of autonomy that verges upon the spiritual: "What is distinctive and valuable about human life is our capacity to decide for ourselves what is valuable in life, and to shape our lives in accordance with that decision".

There has, he argues later in his book, to be equality of access to autonomy; and he points out that autonomy is not a term interchangeable with freedom, and demonstrates how increased freedom may actually restrict the autonomy of some individuals simply because they do not have the knowledge or the means to handle it. These are rarified points, worthy of a political philosopher, but perhaps not with an immediate practical application to our politics. However, it is precisely this sort of philosophical underpinning that has been absent from so much policy during the past 13 years, and which has caused unnecessary restrictions to our autonomy: and, in the process, created a state that is becoming progressively more and more authoritarian, and therefore unpleasant, to live in. >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The End of the Road for Barack Obama?
THE TELEGRAPH: Barack Obama seems unable to face up to America's problems, writes Simon Heffer in New York.

The once mighty Detroit seems on the verge of being abandoned. Photo: The Telegraph
It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.

Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth – a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable – and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands. The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama's own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent. One senior black politician – a Democrat and a supporter of the President – told me of the wrath in his community that a black president appeared to be unable to solve the economic problem among his own people. Cities in the east such as Newark and Baltimore now have drug-dealing as their principal commercial activity: The Wire is only just fictional.

Last Thursday the House of Representatives passed a jobs Bill, costing $15 billion, which would give tax breaks to firms hiring new staff and, through state sponsorship of construction projects, create thousands of jobs too. The Senate is trying to approve a Bill that would provide a further $150 billion of tax incentives to employers. Yet there is a sense of desperation in the Administration, a sense that nothing can be as efficacious at the moment as a sticking plaster. Edward B Montgomery, deputy labour secretary in the Clinton administration, now spends his time on day trips to decaying towns that used to have a car industry, not so much advising them on how to do something else as facilitating those communities' access to federal funds. For a land without a welfare state, America starts to do an effective impersonation of a country with one. This massive state spending gives rise to accusations by Republicans, and people too angry even to be Republicans, that America is now controlled by "Leftists" and being turned into a socialist state. "Obama's big problem," a senior Democrat told me, "is that four times as many people watch Fox News as watch CNN." >>> Simon Heffer | Monday, March 08, 2010

When It Comes to Europe, David Cameron Is Howling in the Night
THE TELEGRAPH: The other 26 EU countries are not about to exhume the corpse of national sovereignty, says Simon Heffer.

Politicians find it hard to be honest with the public because the truth always hurts, and disaffects, a large portion of the electorate. The fraudulent debate being conducted about our economy, and how to revive it, is the result of this; and so, too, is the problem the Conservative Party has about Europe. That problem is back, mutating into a civil war, and it is going to get much worse.

It is curious that David Miliband should find it preferable to be the leader of the opposition of a glorified county council than to be the leading proconsul of an imperial power: he seems not to have accurately appraised the full reach of the superstate created by the Treaty of Lisbon. David Cameron, by contrast, seems to have worked that out, which is why he was so fervently opposed to the treaty's being enacted.

I do not doubt his sincere dislike of the treaty. Lisbon countermands any idea of a British democracy. That our Prime Minister should have signed it was a constitutional outrage. But Mr Cameron's inevitable decision to abandon his "cast iron" promise to have a referendum was handled extremely foolishly. He should have done it sooner rather than appear to have strung people along. I do not know whether he is obtuse or simply dishonest. I do not know at which point he realised that there would not continue to be a separate entity called the Treaty of Lisbon from which, by repealing an Act of Parliament, he could have Britain resile at any time. I do not know when he worked out that it was going to be consolidated into the governing treaty of the European Union. I do not know whether he has realised that the only referendum it is feasible for him to call, should he have the power to do so, is one that asks the public whether they wish Britain to stay in the EU, or to get out.

I do not like to impugn anyone's motives – even when he is Leader of the Opposition – but the mess Mr Cameron made last week in this desperate attempt to distract attention from his humiliating
U-turn does raise further questions. In setting out his new policy towards Europe, he seemed to show a continued unrealism about the institution with which he is dealing. >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi in Exile: 'I Can't Sit and Say Nothing as Iran Suffers'
THE TELEGRAPH: Crown Prince of Iran tells Simon Heffer he is ready to help bring change to his country but says the West needs to increase pressure on the Tehran regime.

Reza Pahlavi, son of the ex-Shah of Iran. Photo: The Telegraph
Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran, and to his most devoted followers His Imperial Majesty the Shah, has been following the turbulent events of his country closer than perhaps any exile in the past five or six months.

I met him this week in a hotel room in Washington DC, near where he lives. While we talked over mineral water and fish and chips he pulled out his BlackBerry to see the latest news of the street protests in Tehran.

The repression of his fellow Iranians by the Ahmadinejad regime, still in place after the rigged elections of the summer, angers him profoundly.

"When I think that today we Iranians have to be represented by these people, warmongering, terrorist-sponsoring, Holocaust denying – can I possibly sit here and say nothing? I don't want anything in return. I do it because it is my duty," he says.

In exile since his father was deposed in 1979, the Prince, 49, remains the figurehead for the three or four million strong Iranian diaspora. Since the elections he has stepped up calls for civil disobedience by Iranians, and for external support for that. His many conduits of information from Iran tell him the regime is fragmenting, and he eagerly awaits a tipping point.

"The end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, of military juntas in South America, of the former Soviet Union – all of it came at the hands of the people of those nations themselves," he says. "None of this could have happened without foreign support – but that is not the same as an occupying army that comes in and changes a regime – I don't see how that can ever be legitimate."

The unhappy experience of foreign intervention in Iraq has further convinced him of the importance of avoiding it in Iran.

"Change must come to Iran by civil disobedience and non-violence. I stress that. We can't have change at any cost. It is ultimately a question of the sovereignty of that nation, and what happens must be the will of the people. But how do we determine that? There is an absence of public debate. There is an absence of the ballot box." >>> Simon Heffer | Saturday, November 07, 2009

Critique du livre : Iran : l’heure du choix – Entretiens avec Michel Taubmann >>> Mark Alexander | Thursday, September 03, 2009

It's Barack Obama's First Anniversary - But There's Precious Little to Celebrate
The President appears thin-skinned, immature and inexperienced. – Simon Heffer
THE TELEGRAPH: The US President's performance has dismayed even his biggest admirers, writes Simon Heffer.

Things remain very bad in America under Barack Obama. Photo: The Telegraph
A year ago, almost to the minute, I was here in New York, watching television reports of the aftermath of the election of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States of America. I recall the sight of a lachrymose woman from the Midwest, standing outside her run-down house as the sun rose, giving thanks for her deliverance: not from George W Bush, but from the threat of foreclosure. I have no idea whether this poor woman kept the roof over her head; all I know is, if she did, it would have been no thanks to Mr Obama.

On the anniversary of his election, he is busy with unpleasant confrontations with reality. As my colleague Toby Harnden reported so graphically last week, the honeymoon is over. Never in American politics has someone come to power on such a bubble of expectation; never, inevitably, has the pricking of that bubble caused such shock. America may just have come out of recession, but things remain bad. Ten per cent of the workforce is unemployed: here in New York, perhaps the most dynamic and prosperous city on the planet, the figure is even higher.

The rhetoric that bore Mr Obama to office proved equal to electoral success, but not to economic management. Moreover, Mr Obama's most coveted legislative aim, the creation of a sort of national health service, remains elusive. The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper here of serious money, has just savaged the Bill as perhaps the worst inflicted on the American people since the era of Roosevelt. Its projected cost – $1.055 trillion over 10 years – is regarded as madness when America has a level of debt so astronomical that it (just) exceeds, per capita, that of Britain; and few outside a hard core of Obama devotees see it delivering what is needed, where it is needed.

Internationally, the lustre has worn off, too. Mr Obama might have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but the less said about that the better. The award was apparently decided in February, days after he entered the Oval Office. He gave up his missile defence system in eastern Europe: we all imagined the Russians would give something in return, but we are still waiting. More recently, he went to Copenhagen to try to secure the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, and failed. While this did little more than provide amusement to many, it damaged him in America, and outraged his true believers: perhaps the emperor had a small wardrobe after all.

Now he is immersed in a deliberative exercise about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. As is the lot of politicians, he will be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. What the dilemma illustrates is that governing is not so easy as it might once have seemed; that you cannot please all of the people all of the time, so there is little point trying; and that the expertise of the Obama campaign in managing image is useless when managing a country. Tony Blair, had they asked, could have told him that. For all the difficulties of America's imperial burden, it is the domestic, and particularly the economic, front that Mr Obama and his colleagues are finding hardest to defend. … >>> Simon Heffer, in New York | Tuesday, November 04, 2009

The Weak Leadership of Gordon Brown and David Cameron Is a Damaging Disease – and It's Catching
THE TELEGRAPH: As the day of reckoning looms, Labour has lost any concept of the national interest, says Simon Heffer.

We know that the British public holds the political class in more contempt than ever, and it did not take the expenses scandal to reach that pass. Turnout has slumped over the past three general elections. The rise of the BNP, Ukip and the Greens displays the search for alternatives to three main parties that are seen as institutionalised in their careerist, self-serving approach to politics. With another election due within nine months, our democracy looks unattractive.

Even so, the Prime Minister contrives day after day to make things worse: and his cronies and fellow ministers contrive to follow and support him in this decline of reputation and standards. Not since 1992, and the debacle of Black Wednesday, can one remember a time when the credibility of a government collapsed so rapidly and so utterly during a long summer recess as over the past three weeks. Had the Westminster village been full, one wonders whether Mr Brown would at last have met his downfall.

The mess of the release of the Libyan bomber, the cesspit of who said what to whom, when and in what context, has exposed a government without scruple, principle or much intelligence, and has confirmed that it is in a state of near-complete incoherence. There is no surer mark of a government in meltdown than that it loses the ability to lie properly. Last week David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, went on the wireless to say that the Government had not wanted the Libyan bomber to die in jail. On Monday Ed Balls, the increasingly unlovely Schools Secretary, told John Humphrys on the Today programme that no one in the Government wanted the bomber's release. In that contest, incidentally, one instinctively knows whom to believe.

It is an obvious point, but one had better make it none the less: this is about leadership. Often, in his career as Chancellor, Mr Brown did his Macavity act. It was easy, if unedifying, for him. The economy was (so he claimed) going well. The embarrassments for the Government were elsewhere – party funding, the NHS, constitutional reform, and above all our involvement in foreign wars. So although one tended to expect the second most important man in the administration to have a view on these questions, and to be there in support of the Prime Minister when the knives were unsheathed, one was inevitably disappointed. Soon, one came no longer to expect it. Moral cowardice and not the moral compass became the defining feature of Mr Brown.

None the less, his party elected him nemine contradicente as leader, and he became Prime Minister; and, without any surprise at all, he proceeded to demonstrate a disappointing consistency. There has been one subtle shift: whereas in the past the silence was interminable, now (perhaps in recognition of the higher duties of a prime minister) it is broken two or three weeks into a crisis, with a stumbling assertion of sentiments that may or may not be honestly held. We have seen this in the Libyan episode. Such a procedure makes the Prime Minister look weak, ineffectual, in a corner. In the interim the media will have savaged him. His colleagues, pressed by the likes of Mr Humphrys in broadcast interviews, will to some extent have gone freelance. Their advisers, briefing the press, will also have gone freelance, quite probably in a different direction. >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Simon Heffer: You Had to Be There to Grasp the Scale of Margaret Thatcher's Revolution
THE TELEGRAPH: As a first-time voter in 1979, Simon Heffer recalls the euphoria that greeted a new dawn for Britain.

Margaret Thatcher brought the country back to life in 1979. Photo: Google Images
We are victims of our upbringing. Anyone coming to political consciousness as I did in the 1970s will understand why Mrs Thatcher happened, whether we support what she did or not. I have always struggled to see what there was not to support. The country in which I spent my teens was a catastrophe. Socialists of all stamps – and I mean Heath as well as Callaghan and Wilson – had impoverished it and stunted the ambition of our people. When I hear those in their 20s or early 30s trot out the received line on the person they call "Thatcher", I think: if you were not there, and you have not taken the trouble to explore in depth what life was like for those of us who were, you cannot properly understand.

The six or seven years before she won her revolutionary victory in May 1979 formed a litany of failure and embarrassment. Once Heath lost control of the economy, after he allowed the money supply to grow at 30 per cent in 1972-73 (with the predictable 27 per cent inflation by 1975), only a revolution was going to solve the problem. Heath went out in March 1974 sounding the note that would resound through Britain for the following five years: that elected government, having forced a confrontation with the largely undemocratic forces of trades unionism, would (pending further developments) always take second place to it. It was that even more than the inflation that brought Britain to its knees two-and-a-half years into Labour's rule. >>> By Simon Heffer | Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Simon Heffer: The Home Secretary Is a Walking Disaster
THE TELEGRAPH: The preposterous Jacqui Smith is a disgrace to the office of Home Secretary.

The indescribable Jacqui Smith. Photo courtesy of The Telegraph
I know that people like me are supposed to write newspaper columns because we have a certain command of the English tongue. However, there are times when even the most experienced of us is forced to struggle. How, after all, can one describe Jacqui Smith, our Home Secretary? The adjectives come thick and fast, but all seem insufficient to describe this ambulant catastrophe. Preposterous, corrupt, dim, incompetent, sleazy, incapable: none of them is quite the job.

Miss Smith began by looking corrupt, when it was revealed that she was occupying a room at her sister's house and charging for it as her main residence. She then looked sleazy, dim and preposterous when it emerged that her husband, incarcerated at what was allegedly her second residence, was watching porn films and charging them to the taxpayer. Incompetence and incapability can now be added to the charge sheet following her role in the raiding of the office of Damian Green, a Conservative MP and the party's immigration spokesman: and perhaps one other adjective too – disgraceful. >>> By Simon Heffer | Saturday, April 18, 2009

Gordon Brown's Behaviour Is Simply Immoral
THE TELEGRAPH: We are still recovering from his inane observations of earlier this year on the usefulness of sharia in Britain and the rabble he leads as Primate of All England could not be a clearer advertisement of his talents. But we must give him this: what he said about the immorality of the Prime Minister spending (or, more accurately, attempting to spend) this country out of a recession was absolutely right.

It is time we stopped suspending disbelief and took account of two things. First, if the current economic miseries are a global problem, why are things so much worse here than anywhere else? Why is sterling taking a more or less unique hit on the world's currency markets? The answer is simple: it is that the fundamentals of our economy are so much worse than almost everyone else's, and that is because of the mess Mr Brown has made of running it, in one capacity or another, for the last 12 years.

Then we need to suspend disbelief about how we best get out of this mess. Why, when Mr Brown created it, should he be trusted to extricate us from it? Isn't that a little like suggesting al-Qaeda rebuild the World Trade Center? Isn't it quite clear that the best thing for Britain is to have these charlatans removed from power as swiftly as possible, even if it means replacing them with the Disney characters of the Tory front bench? >>> By Simon Heffer | Friday, December 19, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback & Hardback) – Free delivery >>>

Simon Heffer on Enoch Powell
THE TELEGRAPH: Sunday is the 40th anniversary of perhaps the most significant speech made in British politics since the Second World War: Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech.

It is also, therefore, near to the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest lies in British politics since the Second World War: that this remarkably accurate prediction of the dangers of enforced multiculturalism has "prevented" a rational debate on immigration, since anyone who seeks to engage in it will be branded as a "racist".

It would be a comfort if this position were merely ignorant. It isn't. Powell is used by the Left - and that includes many people in the Conservative Party - as a cynical excuse to conceal their own failures in imposing proper immigration controls and maintaining social cohesion.

They start by saying Powell was a racist, which is also a deliberate lie. They then say that anyone who mentions immigration will now be tarred with that brush, which must therefore be a lie as well. This is convenient for those who have betrayed the people of this country by imposing an immigrant community so large upon it that it struggles to integrate - and, indeed, who have betrayed many of those immigrants too. Yet it won't wash.

Long before Powell made his speech - which ought to be issued to every home in the land, since I rarely hear it quoted anything other than completely inaccurately - there was a code of silence about immigration. Long before we knew the term "political correctness", it was viewed as simply impolite to raise the subject. Enoch Powell: The Great Lie Survives >>> By Simon Heffer | April 19, 2008

THE TELEGRAPH:
’Rivers of Blood’: Enoch Powell’s Speech in Full

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback - UK)

Sharia Courts? Get Off Your Knees, Archbishop
THE TELEGRAPH: Clergymen inevitably spend much time on their knees. They are supposed to be there in prayer. However, as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has demonstrated, the Church of England, in particular, loves to genuflect not just to God, but to any threat to the culture of which we all thought it was a central part.

Although we are a secular society - and I stress I write this as an unbeliever myself - the culture of our nation is fundamentally Christian. It cannot but be so when our head of state is also Supreme Governor of the established Church. No one chose that our society should be this way: it is how it has evolved. It has evolved through general consent, under a rule of law, and (for the last 200 years at any rate) via the democratic process. And, as a result, our culture and way of life are accepted to be a sensible basis for our all living together reasonably contentedly.

Why, then, has this idiotic man suggested that some elements of Islam's sharia law should be recognised in Britain? There is no call for it among the majority of Britons, who are quite satisfied with us all being subject to the same laws, and certainly no call for it among his flock. He is doing it for the traditional, British liberal reason: he seeks to capitulate to anyone who offers to challenge the status quo.

All appeasement of those who threaten a settlement - whether it be political, religious, cultural, legal or a mixture of all four - is dangerous and stupid. It is the thin end of the wedge to the overthrow of that settlement. The archbishop argues that Muslims should not be forced to choose between their culture and their country of adoption. I'm sorry, but that is precisely what they - and anybody from any different culture who comes here - must do. Sharia courts? Get off your knees, Archbishop >>> By Simon Heffer

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)