Afghanistan

‘Altogether Elsewhere.’ The title page of an unpublished travel book caught my eye during a recent clear-out. The author, Matthew Leeming, was a character who deserved to be famous but somehow never made it. He was imaginative, witty, fearless and greedy – wonderfully greedy. He inherited his father’s ceramics company and ran it for years with great success. He loved being rich. ‘Money,’ he used to say wistfully, ‘eases the pain of being alive.’ To pique women’s interest, he claimed to be off-limits. ‘I’m training for the Catholic priesthood,’ he confided He invented businesses out of thin air.

The seemingly endless debate about the hollowness of our armed forces has concentrated on size, technical capability and sustainability – never more so than in recent days when the UK’s unreadiness for war, or even to defend its own bases overseas, has been exposed. But there has been no mention of the moral component of fighting power (morale, spirit, will), which is the most important element of combat effectiveness. Napoleon is often quoted as saying that in war, ‘the moral is to the physical as three to one’, and history is littered with examples showing this to be true. The most recent was the evaporation, within days, of the Afghan army on which the US had spent around $20 billion. It was technically very capable but it lacked a willingness to fight.

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, addressed delegates at the Labour party conference in Liverpool who had been issued with little flags of the home nations to wave. He said Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, ‘doesn’t like Britain, doesn’t believe in Britain’. He had earlier put forward the difficult argument that Farage’s party was ‘racist’ in its migrant policy while Reform supporters were not racist but ‘frustrated’. Asked seven times whether there would be VAT rises, he repeated that ‘the manifesto stands’. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised to keep ‘taxes, inflation and interest rates as low as possible’. Ofgem raised the energy price cap by 2 per cent.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ The assertion is intentionally absurd. If every-one adopted their own idiosyncratic lexical definitions, language wouldn’t function, and we’d all blither unintelligibly in a Tower of Babel. But then, Humpty missed his calling as a British High Court judge. Sitting on the bench rather than a wall, the big egghead might never have had that great fall.

The United Kingdom’s immigration system is broken. Tens of thousands have entered the country who should not, and the bureaucracy which processes asylum cases is a creaking wreck. Those who do deserve a safe welcome are left in legal limbo for months, if not years. And yet the Home Office, which is responsible for this chaos, is not even the department in government with the most inefficient and unaccountable bureaucracy. That hard-fought distinction belongs to the Ministry of Defence, which combines profligacy in procurement with an inability to give armed forces families homes that meet even the most basic standards of decency.