‘WHAT fabulous times we live in now!’
Startling words that came at end of the most thought-provoking email I received last week. What? With four more years of Starmer? Surely not! Until I thought about it and decided that my correspondent was right. We’re living on the cusp of two epochs – we are riding the crest of a wave regardless of what Starmer does or doesn’t do.
Every morning, we wake up to something new. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissing vaccine advisors with conflicts of interest; postponing meetings of the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices indefinitely; issuing, what shouldn’t be but is, necessary guidance on the reality of gender, specifically declaring that there are only two genders and defining gendered terms, like ‘woman’; Attorney General Bondi releasing the first phase of the Epstein files and giving the FBI until Friday to deliver the remaining files to her department. One action after another.
The Trump/Musk/Vance idea machine is reverberating around the world. BP has ditched its plans to increase renewable energy to refocus on fossil fuels, in a move that cannot be unrelated.
As to truth bombing, what a spectacle they provided us with at the end of the week! I’m talking about what everyone is talking about, Friday’s Presidential dressing down for the ages. That started with Trump’s greeting to the still semi-combat-attired Zelenskyy, ‘oh you’re all dressed up for us!’. The Russian blogger Simplicius wrote, ‘Now that the play has run its course, failing to turn a profit, the “act” has grown old’, and we are ‘allowed a view under the costume.’ In fact, Zelenskyy turned out to have no clothes on at all.
I watched the whole thing, and it was riveting. Was it a premeditated ambush or were Trump and Vance simply infuriated by Zelenskyy’s ‘disrespect’ and disregard of the reality of his total dependence on America? A clearly furious Trump showed him the door and fired him from his acting job (as Elon Musk put it) telling reporters afterward that Zelenskyy ‘overplayed his hand’: We (America), he said, ‘are not going to keep fighting. We’re going to get the war done, or let them go and see what happens, let them fight it out.’
For short analysis of what led up to this Oval Office showdown, this is pretty good.
Small things do matter, like not wearing a suit. It can even change history. Take note young people – this may be the symbol of the new epoch. No more slouching.
What a contrast it was – refreshing even – with the unsavoury spectacle earlier in the week of EU leaders and the unflushable Boris Johnson tipping up to Kiev for the third anniversary of this war of attrition, fawning over the fake Churchill, promising him more billions of our taxpayer money to continue it. Musk calling for a USAID style audit on America’s lost Ukraine billions, you’d think would make them pause, but no. As I write, Zelenskyy is landing in Stansted and on his way to see Sir Keir ahead of an EU leader summit to further war plans without the US.
They really need to read Donna Edmunds on Starmer’s ‘grand plan’ and Paddy Benham-Crosswell on the desolate state of our armed forces to wake them up to the sheer folly of it all. Starmer seems yet to take note of Trump’s ironic comment that ‘Britain can take care of itself’, and understand what that means.
What planet is he on? He had such a blank look that I wondered who’s really pulling his strings. Peter Mandelson, much loved by the EU now reincarnated as our Ambassador to Washington, sat cosied up to Starmer all the way from Heathrow to JFK, whispering in his ear. Another unflushable with his fingers in every pie.
Was it he who cued Starmer to say that ‘we’ve had free speech in the United Kingdom for a very, very long time and it will last for a very, very long time’ in case he was challenged, knowing he would get away with it, because our stupid jingoistic MSM would love such spurious ‘combativeness’. This was indeed how they reported it:
Sky News: Sir Keir Starmer contradicts JD Vance over ‘infringements on free speech’ claim
The Mirror: Keir Starmer slaps down JD Vance
Politico: UK’s Starmer hits back at JD Vance
Expressions of outrage at Starmer’s sheer and unadulterated lying hypocrisy were notable for their absence. These immediately flooded X, giving one example of Starmer’s State tyranny after another.
Which brings me onto to the hopeless establishment ‘right wing’ of this country, people who, on the really important issues, invariably go quiet or lie low. Yes, they enjoy attacking the easy ‘woke’ targets, but, as a reader responding to my last week’s review (on ARC) put it, ‘it all comes across like a game. I saw little of this bravery during Covid Lockdowns, when it really mattered and there was a price to pay for not accepting the narrative’.
Which reminded me of the one man who did stand up when it mattered. Alone. Astonishingly Simon Dolan was the only man to get out there and challenge the illegality of Lockdown. What a contrast with the rest, who kept their heads down or took the opportunity to write books. People may have forgotten, but history will remember him. We are proud to have him writing for us.
The good news is however, as my correspondent says, that Trump and Vance have so obviously unsettled the established ‘right-wing’ crew in Britain; people who, for the main part, have always been Neo-Con free market liberal globalists ready to happily spend billions on wars in Ukraine and even on ‘Net Zero’ while ignoring critical issues at home. After fourteen years of ‘conservative’ rule there’s hardly a conservative amongst them. Not one JD Vance.
That, he percipiently pointed out, is going to be a potential problem for Reform too, ‘as a lot of their base are not like that (the liberal neocons), whereas the likes of Nigel, Tice and Zia – mainstream Tories from a few years back’, probably are. ‘The overturning and restoration needs to be much more radical and transformational than what they have in mind, i.e. than just replacing the Tories’. In that context Farage’s fence sitting tweet last night about the Oval Office showdown doesn’t bode well. ‘President Trump has stood by you and this is the way you repay him? You have no honor’, stormed one respondent. ‘Delete spat and insert ambush’, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, Alastair Campbell tweeted, ‘and I could have said it myself‘. So horribly true.
Yet the fact of ‘unsettling’ people is a start. So, despite, despite, despite, I’m still hanging in with the idea that we are indeed living in fabulous, if turbulent, times; and even if we have to suffer a more drawn-out death of the ‘long twentieth century’ than we anticipated on this side of the Atlantic.
Updated 22.50 March 1 2025
