Nobody
is speaking out -- nobody. Blunkett is
daring them to do just that. It is Blind
Man's Bluff.
|
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.  As
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."  It
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. 
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. [Previous
Radical's Diary] | 
David Irving