Can someone just remind me about this Special Relationship business. I know it’s very wonderful and important, and I know the whole country will be sitting on the edge of their sofas and dabbing their eyes, as they watch Dubya and Tony make their glistering-toothed expressions of fiefdom and fealty in Washington today.

But can someone explain, just one more time, what we get out of it? Here we are, giving our blood and treasure in support of an entirely US-inspired plan to conquer Iraq. We send the Black Watch. We lose British lives. We earn the barely veiled scorn of much of the world, for seeming to be the poodles of Uncle Sam.

Continue reading Special relationship or one-way street? →

Boris Johnson says that the end of Yasser Arafat – the man who brought so much suffering to his own people – could be the opportunity for lasting peace

Continue reading The beginning of hope in the Middle East →

In a hotly contested field, the most dismal awakening of my life took place yesterday morning, alone, hungover, in a hotel bedroom in Tel Aviv, when I found that the television was still burbling from the night before and that Don King, the infamous boxing promoter with the conviction for assault and the Van der Graaf Generator hair was on screen announcing to an appalled planet that the American people had awarded a second term of office to the cross-eyed Texan warmonger George Dubya Bush.

If ever there was a moment for burying your head in the many superfluous hotel pillows, and issuing a groan of self-pity, this was it.

Not four more years of a man so serially incompetent that he only narrowly escaped selfassassination by pretzel, and also managed to introduce American torturers to Iraqi jails. Who on earth, I moaned, can conceivably have supported this maniac with his monochrome Manichaean rhetoric that has done so much to encourage the nasty strain of anti-Americanism that now afflicts so much of the world?

Who did it? Who were the idiots who backed him, I whimpered, in that weak pre-breakfast state.

And then I remembered. I backed him, come to think of it. In fact, not only did I want Bush to win, but we threw the entire weight of The Spectator behind him. We wrote a magnificent leading article in which we recounted these well-known weaknesses of Dubya, and then set them beside the weaknesses of John Kerry: his air of Herman Munster gloom, his flip-floppiness over Iraq, his greater hostility to free trade, his love of higher taxes. We then closed our eyes and, in a tumultuous final paragraph, we exhorted the people of America to vote for Bush, as marginally the less undistinguished of two undistinguished alternatives.

It is well known that Spectator editorials can have an explosive effect, even among populations not normally thought of as avid readers. It may even be that we tipped the scales in Ohio, and there will always be part of my heart that suspects it was the Spec wot won it for Dubya.

But not all readers will be satisfied by this account, and will be wondering what other factors saved the President. A certain amount of mild tosh will be written this morning about the “lessons” for the Tories from the Republican victory, and the way British Conservatives need to become more like their hot-dang Bible-bashing church-going American cousins, and how we need to emulate the family values of the vast suburban flyover country that voted for Bush.

I am not certain that these qualities, however admirable, can be easily implanted into the brains of suburban Brits; but in any case, the championing of such attitudes was not the most important cause of the Bush triumph.

Continue reading Bush owes Blair – and must deliver →

The Euro parliament is no longer a joke for bored hacks
By Boris Johnson

It was a pretty chastening experience to be an MP yesterday, and not just for your columnist, but for all 659 of us. There we were, shuffling through the green-carpeted lobbies in the time-honoured way, trailing our fingers on the warm worn oak, bowing to the tellers, bending together in the forgivable halitosis of intimate conspiracy. Time after time, we gathered to vote on the Domestic Violence Etc Bill (Lords) Report stage, expressing the will of the people according to our ancient system. And what did the world care? Not a fig.

Where was the action, the news, the story? It was hundreds of miles away in the upstart parliament of Strasbourg, the restaurant-rich Alsatian city. In Westminster, we beavered away in Gormenghast-like oblivion. In Strasbourg, they had excitement; they had drama; they had the noisy tectonic grindings of the new constitutional geology. What a scene it must have been for the immense army of journalists, lobbyists and poules de luxe who follow the Euro parliament’s caravanserai from Brussels to Strasbourg. What gasps there must have been in the space-age bars and galleries, where they sit sipping their cremant d’Alsace. First a British political party, UKIP, went into spasm, with momentous consequences for the forthcoming general election. It is hard to know what verb to use of Kilroy’s resignation of the UKIP whip. Did he flounce out? Did he stalk out? Did he blow a gasket? It does not matter.

Continue reading Daily Telegraph column out today (Euro Parliament) →

I’m sorry I caused offence to Liverpool

I can’t remember what words Paul Bigley used to describe me yesterday afternoon, on the line to a BBC studio, but I think he said I was “a self-centred, pompous twit”. He wanted to say how much he disliked my appearance, my voice, my mannerisms, and how much he wished I would just disappear.

No matter how big your ego, there is something crushing in being so addressed, not just because I have never met Paul Bigley, but also because he has just suffered an appalling bereavement, and is the object of national sympathy.

How do you feel? they all asked, when I left the studio. Do you feel bad? asked the girls and lads with the cameras and the notebooks.

Continue reading Apologetic in Liverpool →

*Bloggers* I am greatly heartened by your support. Here is my column:

To call it genius, frankly, is putting it mildly. When the nation sank back on the sofa last Saturday afternoon, and everyone rubbed the eye that had been accidentally punched by his neighbour’s gesticulation, and when the screams of delight had died away, we were left to contemplate the mental processes by which David Beckham, 29, was able to slot that second goal into the back of the Welsh net.

The rest of the animal kingdom must bow before him, because there is nothing else like it in nature. No dolphin jumping for a ball; no monkey hurling a nut; no archer fish catching a fly with his sputum dart – no other species can solve such a complicated, three-dimensional problem with such speed, and, of our own species, Beckham is the supreme exponent.

He was five or six yards outside the penalty box to the left; Welsh defenders were lunging at him, and yet – in a trice – he had sized up exactly how to strike that laminated sphere so that it moved in a gorgeous, uninterruptible parabola, describing the entire hypotenuse of the box, and arriving with such speed in the top right hand square foot of the goal that it left the keeper’s fingers flapping as uselessly as a dying butterfly.

Any biologist would be bound to concede that this was the human brain at its finest and most efficient.

He would also have to say, however, that there seem to be different types of cleverness; because if Beckham is in some ways cleverer than the cleverest rat or squirrel, he seems in other respects to be a few apples short of a picnic.

Continue reading Unbend the truth like Beckham, Tony →

Bloggers: here is my latest.

Boris

Safety phobia isn’t funny – it can be fatal

You should have seen the way we all laughed yesterday at the conker story.

You know the conker thing: the way some head teacher, probably a Lib Dem, decided to forbid his pupils from playing conkers without first fortifying themselves with safety goggles. Goggles for conkers! Ha ha ha. Ho ho ho.

Everyone in the Bournemouth amphitheatre threw back their chins and howled.

What will they think of next, eh? It’s political correctness gawn mad, I tell yer; and then everyone wiped their eyes, and sobered up, and prepared for the next question – a serious question, we assumed.

And that, I thought, is the problem. We have become so used to this kind of thing, the health and safety fetish, that we kind of bleep it out. Children not allowed to take eggboxes to handicraft classes in school for fear of salmonella.

Ha ha ha. Risk assessments to be carried out before every school trip. Tee hee hee.

Of course, it is mad that a teacher has to go to the proposed destination (the Science Museum), scout it out for paedophiles, highly polished floors and other hazards, and then file a report on these dangers and keep it on the school premises.

Of course, we know that such madnesses are reduplicating at a terrifying rate; and yet somehow they are so numerous, and so mad, that the wells of our indignation are running dry. We treat it as a joke, when the modern obsession of risk is sometimes very far from a joke.

Continue reading Comments from the Party Conference →

Boris wanted this piece he wrote for the Guardian to be put up on the website

Naming and shaming | Are terrorists manipulating our media? | Come over to our side, Polly | Keep out of the royal houses

It is a great honour to be standing in for the esteemed Roy Greenslade. It is also a great pleasure, since I intend to take advantage of his absence by giving Roy – and others – a gentle kicking. It must by now be obvious to anyone who has read the Butler report, and the final chapter of Greg Dyke’s memoirs, Inside Story, that there took place, in 2003, a grave injustice.

A BBC radio reporter had a scoop. As anyone who has produced such a thing will know, these are hard to come by, hard to spot for what they are, and hard to get right first time; and yet he did. Andrew Gilligan revealed that there was alarm in the world of spooks at the way No 10 had embellished data about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, in particular, the so-called 45-minute claim. He also revealed that Alastair Campbell was involved in these embellishments.

You can read the full article in The Guardian

Continue reading I name the guilty ones →