‘For the sake of this… message of peace… this farrago of superlative nonsense… all business… is to be impeded and suspended; trade and commercial enterprise… are to be further harassed and handicapped… And why? For this reason and no other. To gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry.’ Those were the famous words of Lord Randolph Churchill in 1886, attacking Gladstone (then aged 76). The subject was Irish Home Rule, but I have shorn the quotation of all its Irish-specific points to reapply it. Most leaders of the most controversial powerful countries in the world today – Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and probably the men who really run Iran – are over 70. Trump, 80, still desperate to be linked with peace despite his repeated bombings of Iran and his complicity in Russian attacks on Ukraine (‘Russia has been fine on Ukraine’), now wants to get together with Putin, 74, and Xi, 73, for a summit on denuclearisation. I have nothing against the over-70s, being about to join their number myself, but I suggest that most of the above, and specifically those big three old men in a hurry for yet more conquest, power and ‘peace’ in their unusual definitions of the word, have delighted us long enough. I would much rather they did not meet to produce ‘a farrago of superlative nonsense’ about a future they will not experience.
As the ‘peace’-loving Donald increases the immiseration of Ukrainians and winter draws near, sympathisers over here are looking for small ways to help them deal with the terrible strain. One is getting going in Odessa, still a largely peaceful city when I visited earlier in the war, but now a constant target. There the tireless Rose Cecil is helping the VseSylni Charitable Foundation, which already has a clinic there, treating over a thousand patients last year. Its new initiative is a Coffee and Van Service which will run short ‘field missions’, mostly to defenders and veterans, who want psychological help. Some will not/cannot talk about the almost unspeakable but many will do so if the opportunity is not too formal or distant. The five-strong team consists of psychologists, a physiotherapist and co-ordinators. Donations will fund the van’s conversion and equipment and its first mission: vsesylni.com/.
More attention should be paid to the capitulation by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, to Palantir, the big-data analytics company. He had tried to get Palantir out of a Metropolitan Police contract because the company ‘does not align with London’s values’. A court case loomed and it appears Lord Khan realised that the legal ‘discovery’ process would produce thousands of his office’s emails, including many from his then communications officer, Sarah Brown, who is now director of strategic communications for Andy Burnham in 10 Downing Street. These might have revealed that the stuff about ‘London’s values’ was simply an anti-Israel obsession (Palantir has contracts with Israel and announced it stood with Israel after the 7 October 2023 massacres), driven by political imperatives and contrary to public procurement rules. If the government is not careful, something similar will happen shortly over the renewal of Palantir’s contract with the NHS to improve its data for subjects like waiting times. Again, the unspoken agenda is not about improving the health of British citizens, but about doing down Israel.
Despite the anti-Israel mania, Israel’s friends should not imitate the cancellation tactics of the Islamist left. Take the demands for Jonathan Powell to resign as National Security Adviser because of the opinions of his wife, Sarah Helm. (I may be biased because I have known Sarah Helm slightly since her Cambridge days, when she wore dashing red trousers.) Her opinions are highly critical of Israel; some of them much worse, minimising 7 October and supporting Hamas, but she lives by writing and her long-standing views are publicly known, as is the fact that she has been married to Powell for nearly 20 years. If Powell were a permanent civil servant or the director-general of the BBC, his wife should definitely not tweet her own thoughts, because impartiality would be his stock-in-trade. For that reason, I once criticised the wife of the then president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, for tweeting against Brexit. But Powell ceased to be a neutral civil servant in 1997 when he became Tony Blair’s chief of staff as a political appointee. Later, he worked in the private sector. When he took his current role, Mrs Powell’s views were well known. They are embarrassing, but Powell is well capable of navigating that. Besides, he is also much better qualified than other British officials, most of whom are anti-Israel, de-skilled and sadly ignorant. My criticism of him is that he thinks the Good Friday Agreement, in which he played an important part, is the template for other conflicts, such as the Middle East. Actually, its essence, which is to suck up to the extremists and dump the moderates, is a mistake. But that is nothing to do with his wife.
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