"Curiouser and curiouser", said Alice.....

A vintage week in Looking-Glass World:

* Trafigura solemnly assures us that their abortive super-injunction against the 'Guardian' newspaper "was never intended to gag parliament or attack free speech";

* The head of MI5 declares that "the Security Service does not torture people, nor do we collude in torture or solicit others to torture people on our behalf”;

* Foreign Secretary David Miliband earnestly intones that if the details of what was actually done to Binyan Mohamed are revealed, the United States will cease to share intelligence with us "as surely as night follows day";

* 'Daily Mail' "star" columnist Jan Moir whines (through a non-apology issued by the paper's PR agency) that "I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my [disgustingly vicious] article [about Boyzone singer Stephen Gately's death] has homophobic and bigoted undertones."

Back to reality next week? Some hopes!

The biggest lie?

Whatever happened to Bush's boastful bragging that "We'll get bin Laden dead or alive"?

A possible explanation is this.

Blair and Browne [with an 'e']: lies and humbug

Have you noticed how haggard and shifty-eyed our Dear Leader is looking as he clings on to the doorposts of No 10 by his fingernails, draining the long drawn out wearisome last days of his premiership to the dregs with muted self-praise for his vaunted record, and subliminally telling us “you’ll be sorry when I’m gone”. [Shades of Nixon: "Soon you won't have me to kick around any more."] Our very own Archie Rice and Walter Mitty rolled into one!

Yesterday’s Labour Party “celebration” of his ten years in office looked more like a wake when I happened to see it on television. Not only was the hapless Bliarypoppins given a macabre bear-hug by John Prescott grinning ghoulishly with ill-concealed delight, he was surrounded by glum looking people wearing expressions more appropriate to a wake then a celebration. The PM’s exhortation to his Party to “make the next ten years as good as the last” had me rolling in the aisles. Is he really unaware of what his ‘legacy’ is going to be? Like Bloody Mary and Calais, IRAQ will be graven on the nation’s historical memorial to Blair, and will overshadow all else he is remembered by, however worthy some of his other achievements may have been.

Another, unexpected, item on the same news bulletin provided food for thought as to why our Tone is looking so subdued. The precipitate fall of the hitherto unknown [to me] Lord Browne from the pinnacle of BP because he told lies in court about his personal life raises the spectre of perjury charges for Blair and various members of his entourage if the ‘cash for peerages’ affair comes to court and they are called as witnesses. There are almost certain to be uncomfortable questions which it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to answer truthfully; and if they put a foot wrong, their growing band of political and personal enemies will pounce relentlessly. Blair is between a rock and a hard place over this one.

As for Lord Browne, it is extremely sad that such a thrusting paragon of big business expansionism should be brought low [and lose a fortune of £15 millions which may be peanuts to him but seems obscenely large to me] because he was ashamed to admit in court that a gay affair had a commercial aspect. However impeccable his business ethics, his rather strange personal slant on things seems to be that it’s perfectly OK, and admissible these days, to pick up someone in Battersea Park, but too disreputable to admit that you met them through a gay chatline.

What pathetic humbug! It would seem that even powerful figures like Lord Browne still feel obliged to dance to the hypocritical tune of the red-top press, whose warped attitude to sex is a national disgrace. On the one hand, the tabloid ratpack ceaselessly promote sex and peddle lust for all they are worth in salacious articles and titillating advertisements, and then switch in an instant without even pausing for breath from rabellaisian ‘phwoar, phwoar’ bar-room bragging to prudish tut-tutting over the sexual misdeeds of the great and the humble, baying for ever more draconian punishments for anyone whose private life has the misfortune to attract their spotlight.

The Lord Browne saga should be a salutary reminder to all the self-congratulatory gay activists who have recently been crowing that the work of gay liberation has been finally achieved, and that there is nothing more to be done on that score. The task of campaigners for more relaxed and commonsense attitudes to consenting sexual behaviour of all kinds will never be remotely near its end while ignorance, prejudice and punitive attitudes to peoples’ private behaviour abound as they still do. As has been well said, the British vice isn’t buggery – it’s humbuggery.