Porter’s Pensées

Was I wrong? Being a congenital pessimist, I love being proved wrong. The Manchester atrocity seems not to be playing into the Conservatives’ hands as I – and many others – presumed it would (https://bernardjporter.com/2017/05/23/manchester-and-may/).

Of course they’re still plugging Corbyn’s supposed ‘support for the IRA’ in the 1970s, misleadingly to say the least; and pretending that his argument, that British foreign policy bears some of the blame for enabling the spread of terrorism, is the equivalent of saying that the Mancunians ‘deserved what they got’. But it doesn’t seem to be getting through. The Tories are vulnerable here too: for their own links with Sinn Fein (i.e. talking with them), and for Theresa May’s drastic reduction of police numbers while Home Secretary over the last seven years. Added to which her public appearances and recent notorious ‘U-turns’ have not exactly burnished the image she is trying to project, of ‘strength and stability’. We can see why May is so reluctant to participate in genuine debates.

On the other side, Jeremy Corbyn is coming over as more stable, at least: calm, rational and empathetic under appalling pressure, for example from the vicious, almost unhinged Jeremy Paxman on TV last night; and displaying many of the qualities, like the ability to listen and think on his feet, which should make him a better ‘Brexit’ negotiator than the blinkered and hostile May. At the very least this should chip away at the size of the majority that May still looks like winning in the election – though I’d love to be proved wrong here too.

But maybe that would be the best outcome of all. Another small majority would deprive her of the overwhelming ‘mandate’ she called this election in order to win, which would re-open the question of whether it was really necessary in the first place – many people anyway resented having another election foisted on them so soon; would do nothing to strengthen her hand either in the Brexit negotiations or in Parliament; might greatly encourage Labour and the surviving ‘Remainers’; and – best of all – would force her and her team to conduct those negotiations, which would have the effect of heaping the blame on her head when it all went belly-up.

Is this all part of a cunning plot? Even many Tory Brexiteers never really wanted Brexit, but only to be seen to have been on the populist side when that cause lost. Everyone at the time remarked how shocked Boris Johnson looked afterwards. Brexiteers like Michael Gove must have been quite relieved when May sacked him from her cabinet. Boris might have been wise to crawl away too: but what ambitious self-publicist could possibly resist the lure of the Foreign Office? Maybe May is trying to lose this election in order to avoid the poisoned chalice of the EU talks. It looks a bit like ‘Pass the Parcel’. – But of course not. That’s too conspiratorial for my scholarly taste; and too clever, surely, for May.

We have ‘crises’ galore in Britain just now: not only terrorism, but also housing, social care, British Airways and the underfunded NHS. I’ve been a minor victim of the last of these, having had to wait 18 weeks for my surgery to be scheduled. This week, at long last, it has come up. That is, if there’s not another nationwide computer breakdown, or a terrorist bomb at the hospital.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. They say it’s ‘routine’, but there is a sentence in the bumpf they give you, warning that you might die – though I imagine that’s only for legal reasons: ‘you can’t sue us. We did warn him’. And the nurse at the hospital told me ‘we haven’t lost one yet’, which should be reassuring. Friends who’ve had the same op tell me I’ll be in pain. I rather wish they hadn’t. ‘But it’s best to be prepared’, they say. Oh no it isn’t.

I also don’t know how it’s going to affect my activities afterwards. I have Kajsa and other friends to look after my physical needs, and a great pile of books and DVDs to go through while I’m in bed. I probably won’t be blogging much, though I’ll still be following things on my laptop – especially of course the General Election, held exactly a week later. It would be nice to come out of the anaesthetic to be told that Jeremy had overtaken Theresa in the polls; so long as I don’t burst my stitches in my joy.

This Thursday is Der Tag. I might fit in another post before the op, but can’t guarantee it. And there probably won’t be many for a while afterwards. If after a couple of weeks nothing is posted here, you can probably assume I’ve pegged out. That will be a shame; but in the words of Emmanuel Barthélemy, a French refugee and notorious atheist, publicly hanged for a gruesome murder in 1855, spoken from the scaffold: ‘at least now I’ll find out if I was right’. (That strikes me as class!) It’s a pity I won’t be able to blog about it posthumously. (Do they have wi-fi up – or down – there?) That will be frustrating. I may try haunting…

One golden rule of opposition in a democratic society is: don’t criticise your own side when your country is at war. That’s not because your criticisms may be unjustified, but because, at a time of war-fever, they are liable to bring on to your head the charge of ‘treachery’. Here, Jeremy Corbyn could, perhaps, learn from history; and from one historical event in particular.

The South African War of 1899-1902, of Britain against the ‘Boer’ or Dutch-origin farmer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in South Africa, was undoubtedly an unjust war, provoked by the British on a flimsy pretext, probably to get their hands on the Transvaal’s gold and diamonds (though it’s more complicated than that), and after they had deliberately scotched any chances of a peaceful solution to their quarrel. As a result many people in Britain opposed the war – how many it’s hard to say; the din created by the ‘jingos’ made it difficult to hear their small, soft voices – and said so. JA Hobson, the originator of the ‘capitalist theory of imperialism’, was one. He and most other opponents of the war were not defenders of the Boers, who, to be honest, were a reactionary set of religious-fundamentalist racists who had only very recently and reluctantly given up black slavery; but took the stand they did because they believed the war had been forced on the Boers under a false pretext.

So far, not very similar to our present situation vis-à-vis Islamicist terrorism. But there is one parallel. The name given to these people who opposed the Boer war, and which has stuck to them – books have been written about them, including my own Critics of Empire, 1968 – was ‘the pro-Boers’. It was a propaganda device, designed to associate the critics with the military enemies of the Queen, and so to smear them as ‘unpatriotic’. The obloquy that followed was intense. They were stoned and beaten up. The newly-minted Daily Mail started up a campaign against them, deliberately falsifying the facts of the war, incidentally, along the way. A ‘khaki election’ was held, prematurely, to exploit the jingoism, which the government won. Many so-called ‘pro-Boers’ ducked down behind the ramparts until the storm had blown over – as it did. (Two prominent pro-Boers even became Prime Ministers later on.) But it was nasty while it lasted.

The similarities with our ‘war against terror’ are not exact, but are clear to see. Our present ‘khaki election’ is one. But the main one is the way in which Jeremy Corbyn is being portrayed, in the Mail and other papers, and quite explicitly, as being pro-terrorist – those IRA ‘links’ – in just the same fashion as the opponents of that earlier conflict were painted as pro-Boer, in order to make him out to be a traitor.

It was in the face of this that Corbyn decided to publicly vent, in a speech this morning, the case that Islamicist terrorism is partly the unintended result of past British and American military intervention in the Middle East. This is an interpretation which is well-known and accepted in American intelligence circles, where it’s known as ‘blowback’; and which has been applied specifically to current terrorist atrocities in Europe and America by no less than a former Director of MI5 (Eliza Manningham-Buller). It’s a reasonable argument, just as the pro-Boers’ case against the South African War was; and should undoubtedly be regarded as one of the mix of factors that brought this terrorist onslaught upon us. It will be corroborated by future historians, who will by that time be thankfully immune from the Mail; and would be seen as perfectly fair in calmer times.

The problem, however, is that these aren’t calmer times. The blood of innocent children still stains the streets and squares of Manchester. In this context Corbyn’s legitimate desire to understand and explain Islamicist terrorism, with a view to preventing it in the future, is too easily interpreted as excusing or defending it, by politicians and newspapers that want to get at him anyway, and see this as having resonance among voters in our ‘khaki election’. Already – before he had actually delivered his speech, but obviously on the basis of hints passed to the press – it was being said that he was effectively blaming the victims for their own deaths; which of course is outrageous, but could be something that will resonate.

Personally I would have advised, on the basis of my scholarly ‘Boer War’ experience, and my innate caution, that he didn’t pursue this line just yet. There are other ways of implicitly criticising the government; for example, by homing in on Theresa May’s slashing of police numbers by 20,000 when she was Home Secretary, which an ex-Manchester police chief at the time warned quite explicitly would undermine their counter-terrorism capabilities. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irm2VZMDEvo. It’s quite uncannily prescient.) Corbyn had already pledged a Labour Government to reverse this in his party’s Manifesto (p.76), so he can’t be accused of opportunism. He would get away with this. It would make him look if anything more ‘strong and stable’ than the prime minister. It would meet the Conservatives on their own chosen ground. But raking up his old pacifism and anti-Americanism by pursuing the ‘blowback’ idea at this moment would, I thought, have the opposite effect. It would fit nicely into the narrative that had been carefully constructed for him already by the Right-wing press. ‘No; back off’, I was thinking last night. With the result that I watched his actual speech, broadcast an hour or so ago on television, with some trepidation.

I’m still a little trepidatious(?). The speech, I thought, was excellent: serious, dignified, well-argued, rightly condemnatory of the terrorists, justly complimentary towards the people of Manchester and their local emergency services, emphasising their togetherness and solidarity as a socialist is particularly entitled to do, dismissing Islamophobia and other sources of division, and yes, picking up the point about police ‘cuts’ (‘austerity should stop at the hospital entrance and the door of the police station’), but without any more overt reference to Home Secretary May. So he couldn’t be accused of ‘playing politics’. The point about British foreign policy was made, but in a nuanced way, which obviously didn’t lift any of the blame for Monday’s atrocity from the shoulders of the terrorists. It should convince an awful lot of voters that their country would be safe in his hands. But that’s only if they are allowed to see it or read it, without its being reduced, edited and then glossed by their newspapers or TV commentators. There’s the rub.

If the speech does succeed in getting through and around these obstacles, and boosts or at least doesn’t undermine Corbyn’s new image as a defender of the people, my caution and trepidation will have been unnecessary. I’ll have been proved wrong. (I won’t mind that.) May’s lead over Corbyn in the last polls before the Manchester event had already been slashed from about 20 points to five. That’s what had put the spring in my step as I came away from his rally on Monday; only to be reduced to the deepest despondency as I caught the news from Manchester. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2017/05/23/manchester-and-may/.) We’ll see shortly how the press treats him after today’s speech, and what effect that has on the polls. If he succeeds in maintaining his popular momentum, or even increasing it, on the back of this brave gamble, it will be a triumph for the rational pro-Boer spirit that has always been there in the Labour movement. It could also – if he wins the election- trigger a remarkable and much-needed revolution in our political affairs. He’d be a people’s hero, against all the odds. – But I mustn’t allow myself to hope.

One positive aspect of the terrible carnage in Manchester on Monday is the sympathy it has brought Britain from (nearly) all corners of the earth, as do atrocities everywhere (how we loved America after 9/11!); and the admiration expressed in the foreign press for the Mancunians’ reaction to it. This seems to have exemplified the best side of ‘multiculturalism’, so often derided on the Right; with everyone of all cultures and conditions rushing to help – Moslem taxi drivers offering free rides away from the scene of the incident, for example – and the universal theme being ‘togetherness’. This, at least, is welcome, after the stick the British have been getting in the European press over Brexit and the popular racism and hatred that that unleashed.

I’m told that this is the overwhelming theme of the extensive and sympathetic reports of the Manchester bombing carried in the Swedish press, with my source (Kajsa) giving it as her impression that it has transformed the image of Britain there. It’s a dreadful price to pay, and the admiration might not last long: it may depend on whether and how the Tories ‘use’ this event for electoral purposes. (Dagens Nyheter is discussing that, too.) After all, the outpouring of love for the USA after the Twin Towers didn’t long outlive George W Bush’s response to it. But it’s something to cling on to for now.

There is of course an alternative pattern of response to these horrors. Let’s hope our government models itself on the Norwegians’ after Utøya, rather than the Americans’ after 9/11. I’m not too confident of that, under our current – and probably future – authoritarian prime minister.

A hammer is strong and stable, but it can’t negotiate for toffee. I can’t understand why anyone should vote for Theresa May on the grounds that she would be good at negotiating our exit from the European Union. She clearly doesn’t like meeting people, and when she does, for example in interviews, simply repeats pre-prepared sound-bites robotically, without ever answering the questions put to her. ‘What would you do about the NHS?’ ‘What I believe is that this country needs strong and stable leadership.’ ‘And about the Irish border?’ ‘What I believe is ….’ and so on. ‘Why did you change your mind on social care?’ ‘I didn’t. I’m strong and stable.’ Meeting foreign prime ministers, she invariably puts their backs up. That’s clearly all part of being ‘strong and stable’. She doesn’t seem to be able to think on her feet. Or even to think much at all. Surely an international negotiator should be cleverer, more receptive and nimbler than that? Not just ‘strong and stable’. That’s why diplomats are such notoriously wily beasts. They have to be.

But then she might, of course, leave all the negotiating to her chief diplomat, and court jester, Foreign Secretary Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. There has never in British history been a Foreign minister quite like him. (And I’ve studied a lot of them, right back to Castlereagh.) If he’s a hammer, he’s one of those cheap Wickes ones where the head can fly off. Does anyone think that he would do any better? No-one in Europe gets on with either him or May. I don’t know whether they would with Jeremy; but he and his shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry must be far more reliable pairs of hands.

Let me now say something snobbish. May went to Oxford to read Geography. I don’t know about Oxford, but at Cambridge there was a clear intellectual hierarchy of subjects to study. Classics and Natural Sciences were at the top. History was rather lower. But Geography was definitely at the bottom. In fact I’m not sure whether one could ‘read’ Geography at Cambridge at all. Back in my schooldays it was for the dum-dums (the ‘Lower Sixth Modern’). – Enough said. Sorry, Geographers.

I’m not all that impressed by elite university education in any case. That’s despite having had one. But – Geography?! She must have felt the ignominy.

Here we go. Armed soldiers – not just police – in the streets. Entirely unprecedented, I think, in (mainland) British history. (But then, as we know, Theresa May doesn’t read history.) We’ve always resiled against being policed by the military. That’s why the civilian police were invented in the first place. Doesn’t she know that? Clearly not, if she doesn’t know her history. And it’s surely unnecessary, except as a way of (a) reassuring the general populace, or (b) emphasizing how ‘strong and stable’ our current prime minister is. Even if Jeremy weren’t currently being smeared with past IRA sympathies – vide my last post – he couldn’t compete with that. The terrorists and the authoritarian Right have won. Soldiers in the streets are the visible signs of that.

Yet the real lesson of the Manchester bomb should be to back up Corbyn’s basic message about peace and co-operation. The murderer was one man, with maybe someone to help him make the bomb. A handful, anyway. Among the many, Mancunians distinguished themselves by their refusal to be cowed, and by rushing to the help of the victims: hotels offering free accommodation, Moslem taxi drivers giving free rides, even the homeless lending a hand: https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/23/homeless-man-helps-victims-after-manchester-attack/22105626/. This is ‘community’, even perhaps ‘socialism’, in action. And there is an argument, at least, that this kind of approach, at a government level, would do more to curb terrorism than any amount of ‘strength and stability’. The soldiers might even prove provocative. But people will be too angry and vengeful to see this, in the short term at least. These feelings are natural. But wrong.

And in the very short term we have our General Election coming up, which is almost bound to be affected by the Manchester atrocity, or rather, by the government’s reaction to it. What a stroke of luck for Theresa! And of bad luck for the Left. Though of course we mustn’t say that, in view of the much worse luck suffered by the poor bloodied and bereaved victims of this cruel religious psychopath. That would be ‘making political capital’ out of a human tragedy. As if the political Right wasn’t doing just that…

But still – why soldiers, for goodness’ sake? I suppose it’s because they’re running thin of police officers, after all the cuts. But whose fault was that? See this: it’s very telling. https://www.thecanary.co/2017/05/25/31-seconds-footage-come-back-haunt-theresa-may-manchester-bombing-video/.

What a difference a couple of hours can make. I came home from the Corbyn rally in Hull yesterday evening quite pumped up, as one does from these warm shows of solidarity. Yes, I know it’s all false; but the crowd was huge, and Corbyn’s speech excellent, even inspiring. (Neither made it on to national television.) Theresa May’s ‘U-turn’ on social care that day, and a dire performance under scrutiny from Andrew Neil on TV, seemed to have knocked her back significantly, with Labour catching up in the opinion polls. For the first time I felt we had the dreadful woman, if not quite on the ropes yet, at least staggering towards them. There was a spring in my step as I downed my post-rally pint at the pub, and made for my taxi.

Then came the news from Manchester. I know I should have my mind filled now only with deep sympathy for the poor victims of this diabolical attack, instead of thinking, as I did with at least part of my mind, of its political consequences; but I fear that those could be dire, and will favour May. That after all is what terrorists – if that’s what the Manchester bomber was: we don’t yet know for sure – aim for: to provoke a political reaction, and so more oppression of them, in order to illustrate their oppressors’ Islamophobia (in this case), and so justify their cause. It’s disheartening how often governments fall into this trap. (Vide Bush Jr., and Donald Trump.)

May has been making a great pitch in this campaign – almost her only pitch – of being ‘strong and stable’, by contrast with the supposedly weak Jeremy Corbyn. Her prat-falls yesterday somewhat undermined this image – opponents started replacing her mantra with ‘weak and wobbly’; but the original one will have stuck in people’s minds – it is bound to have done, it has been repeated so robotically – to emerge again in any situation in which ‘strength’ would appear to be called upon. That’s what Manchester may have done

The ground had been well prepared beforehand. For a few days now the tabloid press has been filled with accusations against Corbyn going back to the 1970s, that he was in favour of IRA terrorism. (Of course he wasn’t; only equally condemning of atrocities on the other side, and broadly sympathetic to the cause of Irish unity.) Yesterday the Sun came out with a huge front-page headline, with reference to this IRA business: ‘BLOOD ON HIS HANDS’. Today the same paper directly and ‘specifically’ attributes the Manchester killings to Corbyn’s and McDonnell’s – these ‘snivelling IRA fanboys’ – ‘sucking up to the IRA’. May’s reputation for ‘strength’ seemed to be disintegrating; so the way to shore it up was to emphasise Corbyn’s contrasting ‘weakness’, and indeed treachery. (May had just accused him, in a speech, of ‘not loving Britain’.) Terrorism requires ‘strength’ to combat it. (It doesn’t.) May’s rhetoric, whatever the reality, may persuade the electorate that only she can ‘stand up against’ it. So, having got May on the run, as I was daring to think at the rally yesterday, our hopes are shattered, at a blow.

The Manchester bomb was almost too convenient for her. There is obviously room here for conspiracy theories to ferment, darkly. Was it a ‘false flag’ operation, by a Tory or MI5 agent provocateur? Such things have happened, though usually on a lesser scale. Did the Tories and the Sun have some precognition of the Manchester Arena atrocity? If so, did they deliberately let it play out, instead of scotching it? I prefer to believe that May has simply been lucky, at a terrible cost to those poor Mancunians. But then I’m always anxious, as you may have noticed, not to be labeled a ‘conspiracy nutter’.

To cheer us all up, here’s a pic I took at the rally. Don’t show the Daily Mail.

In the olden days we in Britain used to vote for constituency MPs, each one appointed to serve his local community; who would then coalesce into parties, with the largest of them – or largest coalition – forming a government, and with a leader chosen from among them. The leader would become ‘prime minister’, and select his other ministers, formed into a cabinet, to govern the country collectively. Later on the parties were formalised, which meant that their leaders were known beforehand. That was the order of things in Britain. It was how it had been done for centuries, even under monarchical rule. When monarchical rule ended, it was by keeping the king or queen as a mere figurehead but reducing his or her powers, and elevating parliament above him (or her). That’s what ‘parliamentary democracy’ means.

It was totally different from the way the monarch was got rid of over on the other side of the pond. In the newly-independent USA s/he was replaced with a President, with similar powers to the old King, with the crucial difference that he (always a man, up to now) was elected directly, and side-by-side with the other arms of government. That’s what the American President is today: an elected King. The USA has not really moved on from the 18^th century.

This explains the differences between our two electoral systems, with the British supposedly voting for a local MP first, and a party second, and the Prime Minister emerging out of that process; whereas in America the head of state is elected directly, side-by-side with Congressmen/women and the like. That’s why the American system turns so much on the personalities of the rival candidates. In Britain it shouldn’t do; but for years commentators have been noting how ‘presidential’ we have become.

That’s a pity. If we had been presidential in 1945, we would have got Churchill rather than Attlee, and so (probably) no welfare state. If America were parliamentary today, it certainly wouldn’t have been landed with Trump, or not for long. And if Britain were truer to her old ‘parliamentary’ traditions today, Corbyn would undoubtedly stand a better chance in the coming general election, and May probably none.

However the General Election turns out, it looks as though we are indeed due for a return to the 1960s and ’70s. If Corbyn’s programme looks like the moderate Wilsonian social democracy of those years, May’s is starting to resemble the response of Conservative leaders like Macmillan to that – Tory paternalism, accepting the welfareist consensus of the times.

The key sentence in May’s speech on Thursday was the one in which she declared that Conservatives ‘do not believe in untrammelled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism’. That is an enormous ideological U-turn for her party. It’s what most Conservatives would have said in Macmillan’s and Heath’s time, and going back, in fact, to Benjamin Disraeli, and before then to Edmund Burke; in other words to the most venerable tradition of Toryism, before Thatcherite economic liberalism took its dreadful hold. There had of course been Thatcherites before Thatcher – Edward Heath showed signs of the infection early on – and there were always some Tories keen on keeping the lower orders down simply out of mean-mindedness, without any particular ideology behind it; but the general direction of Conservative thought and policy before 1979 was generally softer than that.

Thatcher’s arrival on the scene revolutionized the party. Personally I don’t think this was Thatcher’s contribution alone; rather she was being swept along by an international tide of High Capitalism and neo-liberalism. But the effect was the same. The Tory party was captured by free market fundamentalists. Those who protested were dismissed by Thatcher as the ‘Wets’. There aren’t many of those around now, apart perhaps for Kenneth Clarke. (I could vote for him.) This set in motion a period of free market fundamentalism, culminating in ‘austerity’ and the truly awful George Osborne, which could be seen as turning its back on the deepest historical traditions of the Conservative party, and, indeed, on the nature of ‘conservatism’ – taken literally, with a small ‘c’ – itself. What could be less ‘conservative’ than a radical revolution? And of course it did no good at all to the British economy, as it was supposed to, but instead left it more vulnerable to international takeovers and bank collapses, and rendered society more unequal and divided than for many years. We’re seeing that now.

The implication of May’s U-turn is that the past thirty-eight years – roughly a generation – have been an unfortunate blip, or interruption, or backsliding, in the trajectory of British Conservatism. Historically, therefore (my field), she’s quite right to protest that she’s aiming to revive ‘true Conservatism’ again.

Whether she is able to, in the light of the phalanx of neo-liberals who entered her party after 1979, is another question. Already there are murmurings in the ranks against what are seen as her ‘anti-market’ views. It’s also, of course, permissible to doubt her sincerity in this regard, and her ability to return completely to the paternalistic socialism of Macmillan’s time. And – thirdly – it’s valid to resile against certain of her characteristics as a ‘leader’; in particular her authoritarianism, her opportunism (changing her mind over ‘Europe’), her aggressive stance towards the people she is going to have to negotiate with in Europe, and the hostages to fortune her party manifesto has left lying around: like clobbering pensioners, taking the food out of the mouths of schoolchildren, and the ‘death tax’. Voters will probably notice these more than her grand ideological conversion. I hope so, because they may, just conceivably, do her electoral harm. If they stopped a landslide Tory victory, that could be enough. We’ll see.

Out of the two ‘1970s’ we’re being offered in this election I’ll certainly be voting for the Wilsonian one – as I did in the 1970s. That’s Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. The prospect of a ‘hard Brexit’ Britain, which May seems to be promising, depresses and even scares me. But we must give her some credit, at least, for getting her Conservative History right.

At last the Swedish authorities have dropped their grotesque ‘rape’ charges (or intended charges) against Julian Assange: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39973864. About time too. Presumably this means that the Swedish extradition request to Britain – which was problematical quite irrespective of the veracity of the accusations (see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/04/26/assange-latest/) – lapses too, and he can come out of the South American embassy he has sought asylum in since 2012, and resume a normal (or what for him passes as normal) life. It also means that the Swedish legal system is no longer in danger of being justly derided the world over, as it would have been if Assange had ever gone to trial. I suspect that this – embarrassment – is one of the reasons the charges have been dropped.

There are only, so far, two doubts. (The news has only broken in the last few minutes, so details are obscure as yet.) Firstly he was, as I understand it, also sought for examination on other, lesser sex charges. Have those been withdrawn too, and are they extraditable? Secondly, the USA still wants him over there to face charges of treason (for leaking secret documents). Trump has made it plain that he’s even keener to get him than Obama was (http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/20/politics/julian-assange-wikileaks-us-charges/). Is it conceivable that Theresa May, in order to cuddle up more with the Donald, would accede to an extradition request from there? (Corbyn obviously wouldn’t.)

(I’ve blogged on this many times before. Word-search ‘Assange’.)