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Posted Monday, December 6, 2004

Nobody is speaking out -- nobody. Blunkett is daring them to do just that. It is Blind Man's Bluff.

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December 5, 2004 (Sunday)
London (England)

TODAY JESSICA is eleven. Happy memories of the dramas of eleven years ago. This day last year I was driving up the Pacific West Coast on a speaking tour. How time accelerates towards the end.

A progress report to M. in Nevada:

"Work on the books is progressing. Printing is complete of the Nuremberg text and jacket, we are awaiting a few missing photos before the picture section is done. I have been carrying out a major program scanning old photos for the four or five books we are doing next. I found in my files a dozen photos that belong to the Radio Times Hulton Getty Library, which we (my publisher and I) had on loan from them for The Destruction of Dresden in 1962; I have returned them yesterday with an apology note, and a prayer that there are no late fees due for the forty-two years intervening!

These things happen. My lady assistant in Chicago has prepared the text of Rommel for the next reprint, and that arrived a few days ago on disc; and all the Rommel photos from the picture archives in Germany to whom I sold them twenty years ago. It is an organizing job, and there are always a few pieces of the puzzle missing at the end. That is what delays things.

That's the news from this cold side of the world, my friend, and I hope you and yours are well. Today my little girl is eleven (Jessica), and there is much excitement, and anticipation that her mother may be well enough to come upstairs today. She was up for an hour yesterday evening."

At midday Jessica is in tears, as the birthday party is off, as her mother is too unwell. I tell her that is ridiculous, I will take her. . . What a misfortune.

At 4:30 pm, off we go to the party in Queensway, at the Ice Rink. Not quite the Hell on Earth that B. had described; very full of cheerful, laughing and shouting teenagers of all ages. I read a newspaper quietly in a corner, as directed, occasionally checking that all eight young party guests are present and correct.

They have booked a bowling lane, and are all at it for two full hours. All very neo-American; the last time I visited one of these establishments was at Pismo Beach, on July 4, 1976; which little Californian village has, like me, changed meanwhile.

I realize that this is one of life's to-be-remembered moments, and my eyes fill with tears as I watch my little girl at play with her friends. She remarks that eleven already seems so very different from ten. I shall never forget Josephine, but the Lord has blessed me with a beautiful youngest daughter too. Afterwards Jessica takes charge and parades her guests along Queensway to a Pizza Hut for a meal (two of them have informed her that their parents have forbidden McDonald's, with which sentiment I heartily agree).

I stand guard on the sidewalk outside, whiling away the half hour by estimating the numbers of native English walking past me: fewer than five percent, I conclude, but Queensway is something of a tourist area after all.

 

A HUNDRED thousand "new Europeans", largely Poles, Czechs, and Yugoslavs but not a few Baltic elements as well, have flooded into London since immigration laws were relaxed in the spring. It occurs to me that Mr Sanctimonious Blair or his men may have deliberately left the gate open to the Eastern Europeans, who are largely White, in the hope of redressing London's catastrophic ethnic and religious imbalance. But that would smack too much of a Festigung des englischen Volkstums, and Blair is no Heinrich Himmler.

What a strange bunch of physical freaks now peoples Labour's front bench in Parliament. In German they have a saying, Wer nichts wird, wird Wirt. And those who can't make it to innkeeper, stumble off on political careers instead.

Blair, with his permanently wide-open porcellain grin is not the least repellent. The fat, but popular, slack jawed, gum-chewing deputy prime minister John Prescott is less obnoxious, if we disregard his strange plans for regional parliaments -- i.e. an amoeba-like multiplication of politicians spreading out across the country, like the pond scum that they are. Then there is Mr Lugubrious Straw, who went to the same school as I, though years later -- I think Jack was the only Jewish boy there, though he has since disavowed his religion.

Gordon BrownAs for the pasty-faced Chancellor, Gordon Brown (left) I have remarked before on his weird facial tics; unlike Peter Hain with his constant Permatan (whom the newspapers first observed many years ago at the graveside of a baby-killing terrorist in South Africa, paying his respects), Brown has an unhealthy prison pallor that would make even the long-term inmates of Pentonville look fit. What an odd phenomenon is his grimacing whenever he thinks he is unobserved -- and there are now more closed-circuit cameras surveilling the Parliamentary chamber than there are in Oxford-street.

 

ODDEST of all is Britain's blind Home Secretary David Blunkett -- and I have once before commented on how inopportune it is to enslave ones government to political correctness to the extent of appointing not just a colour-blind man to control the country's immigration and police departments, but a totally blind one at that. It involuntarily reminds me of the journalist who gushed to Ray Charles that it must be awful to be born blind, and the singer replied, "Ma'am, it coulda been wuss. I coulda been born Black too."

David BlunkettIt now turns out that Blunkett (right) is not only the least attractive of the freaks on Labour's Front Bench (and that is saying something), but that like many such characters he has morals which would propel even an alley cat meeowling down the greasiest walkway to escape him.

According to the media -- and why should we disbelieve them? -- Blunkett has displayed a sexual activity which would be admirable in different circumstances. It calls to mind the fable of the blind hooker ("You had to hand it to her.")

Here is a summary of this seedy telenovela so far: Home Secretary Blunkett wrecked the long term "romantic liaison" of one member of his departmental staff -- the man's fiancée was another departmental staff member whom Blunkett then bedded -- two or three years ago; the rival made no secret of his contempt for the Blunkett, whose department gave the man a well paid instant promotion, at taxpayer expense, which incidentally and entirely fortuitously (the last four words being inserted to placate the libel lawyers) took care of that noise-problem.

Then along came a pudgy but not unattractive American woman in her mid-forties, one Kimberley Quinn, publisher of London's The Spectator magazine, into whom he launched his person in a similarly sticky affair. She was not so easily bought off.

I am not going to comment on the fact that one of our country's oldest and most established political magazines should have fallen, like our political leadership, into trans-Atlantic hands with all the decorum in certain matters which that engenders -- damn, I just commented on it.

But I do have views on their tawdry liaison, which she ended unilaterally some time back. It left her with two new children fathered (The Right Honourable Mr David Blunkett loudly claims, though only for legal rather than malicious reasons) by him. At the start of their affair, it is to be noted, Ms Quinn was just married to millionaire businessman Stephen Quinn, and still is; whose restraint throughout seems heroic if not ridiculous.

How has the House reacted to these extraordinary events? Where are the role models who are supposed to be guiding the British? Where are the family values upon which great statesmen pontificate? Nobody is speaking out -- nobody. Blunkett is daring them to do just that. It is Blind Man's Bluff.

Where indeed is the Archbishop of Canterbury, now so urgently needed to speak a quiet admonition to our public statesmen as to how they arrange their private lives? And where stands Mr Sanctimonious Blair? He squirms in private, publicly puts a consoling arm round Blunkett's shoulder, and says he supports him to the hilt.

One wonders what secrets about the unofficial romantic enterprises of our beloved prime minister the staff of David Blunkett may have stashed away, J Edgar Hoover-like, for just such an eventuality as this.


IT SEEMS to us historians not so long ago that Ministers of the Crown voluntarily resigned over such allegations even when totally untrue. Now they wallow in them, cooling the blood in the glorious mud; they are like the wartime mudlarks in Portsmouth Dockyard, or hippopotamusses at bath time.

Crichel Down! Does not the name of that British air ministry land-scandal (around 1947) still ring hauntingly down the corridors of Whitehall? A minister (Sir Thomas Dugdale, I believe) resigned, even though personally not at fault, in order to uphold the integrity and reputation of government and high office.

Now here is the second highest man in the country, the Home Secretary, who traditionally stands next in line for the highest office, exposed as a serial adulterer, and everybody has known about it for years, it turns out. Yes, he himself is unmarried, but an adulterer is also he who invades and destroys the marriage of another.

The House and the great editors of the Press remain hushed in awe. Nobody wants to cast the first stone. The Blind are leading the Blind, and by the nose in this case. They pick on his lesser felonies -- which include allegedly using his influence to expedite the issue of an American passport for one of his whore's other sons, and influencing the Home Office to grant permanent residency to her coloured Philippine servant (who incidentally does not pay any taxes in the UK: her employer with great foresight set up this humble Philippine woman as a limited company, and no tax was charged on the "dividends" paid to her).

Blunkett at first waffled that yes, he had been shown the visa application, but had done no more than "cast an eye over it" for Ms Quinn. Hello-oa! Blunkett's second defence, when that collapsed, is that yes, her accelerated residency permit was indeed rushed through in nineteen days instead of twelve months or more -- but only because he had coincidentally instructed that there should be a general rushing-through of all such applications.

Is that not much worse? To do a favour for his mistress, he opens the floodgates to Third World immigration into an England already protesting that enough is too much. A fine gatekeeper we have hired there.

One of the other pleasures of living part of the year in Florida is watching Miami's Cuban-style politics. City Hall is now in danger of being upstaged by Downing-street.

 cake

AT eleven pm there is a loud ring at the doorbell. On the door TV I see two young ladies holding a lighted candle. Carol singers, this early! I ignore the bell, Scrooge-like.

The ringing becomes more insistent, and I buzz them in. They are the manageress and waitress from the restaurant across the street, and they are carrying a cake with a lighted candle. "Happy Birthday," is written across the top. I wake Jessica, and they sing to our family's little sleepy-head. Unrehearsed and uncommanded, it brings to an end a perfect day.

 

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© Focal Point 2004 F DISmall David Irving