Out and about with Denis MacShane

This sounds like an edifying and amusing evening, doesn't it readers?

Earlybird Aaro update

Thoughts on the Berlin wall, or possibly Cuba - it's a hell of a mess, this one. We must let Ukraine into NATO because cough, mumble, Douglas Hurd.

I think another version of the sofa rule can be coined, by the way; whenever a Decent columnist starts to mention Douglas Hurd, he's likely to be bullshitting pretty hard. Talking about Douglas Hurd is meant to be a refutation of realism in international relations, but nobody knows why.

More to come ...

(conoisseurs will note that Aaro is likely to pick up a lecture from Oliver Kamm for the following:

According to Sir Christopher, what turned the 1919 Treaty of Versailles into a Second World War-creating catastrophe, was the idealism of the League of Nations, not the absurdly short-term, self-interested nature of the Allied war reparations and the territorial demands made on the defeated powers.

OK, recall, believes that the problem with the Treaty of Versailles was that it wasn't draconian enough, didn't humiliate the Germans enough and in general was too timid in pushing a bumptious and imperial Anglosphere agenda on Europe. Strangely, Oliver not only believes this to be the case, but believes it to be the consensus view, and so widely shared that only fools, incompetents and cranks think any different. (a reasonable summary which gives fair airtime to both the Niall Ferguson view and the more orthodox one is here)

A night at the theatre

And so, our man Aaro comes down on the side of Kamm[1] and MacShane rather than Pollard, over the question of Michael Kaminski, is he a bastard or not. I confess to neither having done nor planning to do the research to work out who's right (as far as I can tell, he's not very good on second world war atrocities, but in favour of bombing Gaza, hence the cognitive dissonance), but here you go.

Notable for me in that one way of summarising the difference between Aaro and your average Decent (by which I mean Nick Cohen) is that Aaro goes to see a play and writes about how he was influenced by the play, and Nick goes to see a play and fulminates about how the play should have been influenced by him. Etc etc.

And apparently if David Cameron went to see a play about Poland, he'd realise … something about the European Parliament and John Redwood, apparently. Strikes me there's a bit of faux-naivete here - Aaro knows that the Tory Party is massively divided on Europe and knows that Cameron's plan is to paper over the cracks in the belief that British voters don't really care about the European Parliament (proof: they don't vote for it). So why's he pretending that there's some dilemma or issue here?

It does strike me that a cruel man might summarise this piece as Dave warning Dave that Nazism is all too often the first step on the road to Euroscepticism.

"For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time" - De Quincey.

Update Unorphaning footnote [1], I note that Oliver K is still trying to pretend that Martin Bell's candidacy in the 1997 Tatton election was more independent than it was. The Spiked! reviewer is correct to say that "In doing so, [Bell] helped, along with his friends in the liberal media, to reframe politics in terms of sleaze, elevating the non-political issue of personal conduct over politics proper". While it's impossible to read Bell's mind as to his own particular motivations, he consulted with Alastair Campbell and William LeBreton before deciding to stand (and probably would not have done so if those two functionaries hadn't been able to deliver their local parties), and was provided with significant help by Labour Party worker Alan Olive. And the reason why this help was provided was that Labour and the LibDems wanted to keep the "sleaze" issue high profile during the 1997 election campaign. Oliver was of course quite famously involved in his uncle's campaign, which is why he tries to pretend that it wasn't a stunt, or that it wasn't a piece of Labour Party press strategy. But it was; in many ways a laudable one because it got rid of Neil Hamilton, but I have always found OK's attempts to rewrite the record on this one a bit irksome.

(Spiked! is also something of a thorn in the flesh of the Decent campaign against Mr Justice Eady, as its existence might prick a few consciences - spiked! was formed by the staff of Living Marxism, a quite odious RCP publication which was deservedly sued into bankruptcy by Ed Vulliamy, over issues relating to Bosnia. Few Decents of the tendence Nick Cohen like to be reminded of this entirely sensible use of the libel laws to silence etc etc).

Quiet around here ...

Sorry for the prolonged silence readers. This is due to a number of factors, chief among them busyness, but also the marked decline and fall of Decency in the Obama era - it is much more difficult to prioritise the starting of big arguments with the Decent Left when one doesn't think that they're remotely capable of pushing the world any closer to war.

This isn't to say that Watching Aaro is wholly without point and I hope to have a few bits and pieces up over the next week in a more philosophical Aarological vein. But in general, expect posting to be significantly lighter in the immediate future.

By way of light relief, check this out. What is it with Ed Husain, and well-intentioned political adventures that always seem to end up with him suddenly realising that all of his new mates are a bunch of wild-eyed ideologues? Is he collecting material for a sequel to The Islamist? Either way, there's a sort of Zelig-like situation comedy in this.

Beaten by Littlejohn

As noted by our ever vigilant commenter Organic Cheeseboard, our man David Aaronovitch (along with Johann Hari) was beaten by Richard Littlejohn in the Comment Awards.

Now, I'm no fan of our Dave, but all I can say is - what an excellent way to pre-emptively flush any credibility said awards may have earned in future. Must have been given for services to knee-jerk, smug, insular reaction. You're better off without it, Dave.

Singh Wins Right To Appeal

We discuss Nick's views on libel here so the story Simon Singh Wins Leave To Appeal In Bca Libel Case seems moot. This was all over Twitter this morning, but Google News throws up only the Index on Censorship post.

In a scathing rebuttal of Mr Justice Eady’s previous judgement in the case, Lord Justice Laws said Eady had risked swinging the balance of rights too far in favour of the right to reputation and against the right to free expression. Mr Justice Laws described Eady’s judgement, centred on Singh’s use of the word “bogus” in an article published by the Guardian newspaper, as “legally erroneous”.

We will hear more on this very soon, probably in the Observer on Sunday. I am not a lawyer, so readers can speculate away on their own.

Paul Farrelly MP

Paul Farrelly is a mate of Nick Cohen (and Martin Bright) from their days working at the Observer, isn't he? I merely ask.

Duly Noted

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that they're not out to get you

old saying

Yes.

I did think of knocking out a post in solidarity (pah!) with Dave Osler, but Jonathan's comment (link above) in reply to Richard Harris a bit earlier does need to be noted here.

Shorter me: although I now find Nick Cohen incoherent and emotional all the time, and although he's prone to ruin his credibility with feats of mind reading[1], this doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong all the time. He was right about New Labour fairly early and he may well be right about Mr Justice Eady.

Anyway, good luck to Dave Osler. And kudos to Iain Dale (also IMO hard to like, but like Nick, in the right occasionally).

[1] See for example his Roman Polanski piece: [t]he magazine's dazed New York lawyers...