British army

Like it or not, and many in high places will loathe it, what we may now call The Blackman Affair is not going to go away. It will be recalled as a shambles and a glaring miscarriage of justice. Also remembered will be the ferocious, self-serving and vindictive role of the establishment in permitting this injustice to occur. Posterity will say that a Royal Marine sergeant on an exhausting assignment in Northern Helmand, Afghanistan, in the late summer of 2011, shot and killed a Taliban terrorist who, though undoubtedly dying and wholly unsaveable, was not yet quite dead.

My favourite quote of all time comes from John Stuart Mill: ‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

I once went mad in Africa and it was no fun at all. I was snorkelling off the coast of Zanzibar and I dived a little too deep, and something in the middle of my head went click. And then I came up and fell on to a boat that took me back to the paradise sands, and when I got there I couldn’t walk straight and everything started to fall apart. In fairness, that might not have been madness. That might have just been a problem with my inner ear. At the time, though, it was all bundled together. I’d been sub-Saharan for about nine months by this point, living cheap in the Cape and writing a novel. Three weeks earlier, we had packed up our belongings and caught a flight to Dar es Salaam, with a plan to drift back south over the next few months on buses filled with chickens.

Each year Anjem Choudary earns more in benefits than a soldier does starting off in our armed forces. This is a fact I never tire of pointing out – especially to Anjem’s face whenever we have the misfortune to meet. The follow-on point, which I think also worth continuing to make, is that there is something suicidal about a society that rewards its enemies better than it does its defenders. Choudary and his family rake in around £25,000 each year  and - as you can see from this newly-released video above  – we taxpayers now get even more for our money than we had previously thought.