Poor leadership from the top brass?

Military leaders failed to calculate the magnitude of the conflict in Afghanistan, the former head of the British army has told the BBC. Gen Sir Peter Wall said they thought they had a “reasonable force” for their limited objectives, but he now admits they got it wrong. The commander in Helmand in 2006, Brig Ed Butler, said troops were “underprepared and under-resourced”.

Peter Oborne in the Telegraph dots the i’s and crosses the t’s in a savage indictment of the UK’s political and military leadership.

British forces were ill-equipped, underprepared and, at the most senior strategic level, atrociously led. The men themselves were nevertheless brave as lions. The conflict in Helmand will be remembered for centuries as a shining example of astonishing heroism combined with pointless sacrifice

Reading Oborne’s article will make you angry – and frustrated. In essence good men and women were killed and maimed so that politicians and senior officers could grandstand at meetings in Westminster and Washington. The politicians (are you listening Mr Blair?) are now either waxing fat with lucrative speaking engagements around the world or are still in Parliament trying to sell themselves as the next government. I guess that also many of the senior officers slipped seamlessly into cosy and well paid consultancy positions in the UK armaments industry…perish the thought that better kit might  be available off the shelf elsewhere.

Metaphorically thoughts of Admiral Byng might well come to mind – and not just for senior officers….

You really have to smile….Tories, Labour and Lib Dems get millions from wealthy donors, have hundreds of salaried staff, use PR firms, advertising agencies, focus groups and pollsters to finetune carefully crafted propaganda campaigns all backed up by their palace guards in the media and the impact is….zilch…

UKIP (no big donors, minimal staff) get a former BBC dj, well past his sell by date to write, sing and record a calypso, a musical genre briefly popular circa 1955 and the whole thing goes VIRAL!!!!!!!

What’s more the lyrics spell out the main threads of UKIP policy while the chorus plops Nigel Farage directly outside No. 10 Downing Street….

The lefty smellysocks on Twitter go mental and the Telegraph and Guardian sneer at full throttle and the usual suspects cry RACIST…

Media elite annoyed – TICK

Lefty Race Card operatives head’s exploding – TICK

Massive publicity for UKIP – TICK

Boost for UKIP funds via downloads – TICK

Yup…all the right boxes ticked – Farage does it again….they’re playing Snap, he’s playing three dimensional chess.

BTW…don’t tell anyone but it’s reached number seven in the download charts…..lol…

Jo Swinson, the Minister for Women, who became a LibDem MP five years after leaving university (she worked in Marketing and PR) made a sneer at “Call The Midwife” and old fashioned views of mothering at the recent LibDem Conference

‘The very idea of men caring for small children or mothers forging successful careers is anathema to many Tories, who’d apparently rather have a Call the Midwife version of parenting. At least we recognise that women might want both a fulfilling job and family life.

It’s odd that Ms Swinson should have used CTM as a term of disparagement. The BBC series is one of the most popular programmes of the last twenty years, regularly gathering 10 million viewers per episode. It is gritty and does focus on serious social issues but part of the appeal is also in the characters of the midwives themselves and their relationships. By today’s standards they are very prim and proper and,astonishingly, there is no sex….a bit of kissing and cuddling and that’s all.

You wonder if part of the appeal of the programme is embedded in the absence of sex as an obsessive topic. There was, of course, plenty of sex going on in the 1950s but it was generally considered a very private matter..a quaint old fashioned view for many of our media elite but possibly those values still appear attractive to many

The respect and love shown for the Queen in her Jubilee year, the popularity of the Great British Bake Off….could it be that the Jo Swinsons of our world are missing the point a little?

The top brass at the Telegraph obviously felt that they were publishing too many positive reports and comments about UKIP so they rang up their ace travel hack Tom Rowley and ordered him to get up to Clacton and write a bit of a sneer piece about the natives (y’know, mocking their ignorance and parochialism) to undermine UKIP’s candidate Douglas Carswell in the forthcoming by election.

“…after all, Tom, they’re not real people over there. Unlike we clever Telegraph types they don’t live in Somerset rectories or go to dinner parties in Notting Hill…normally we wouldn’t bother with such a bunch of losers…but with all this UKIP/Farage/Carswell nonsense they do seem to be getting ideas above their station. David says that Samantha is telling him he needs to be a bit tougher on them as she’s damned if a crowd of has beens and pensioners from a crumbling seaside town will edge her out of Downing Street….without all that publicity how can she market those bags?…..Anyway, Tory HQ is putting the squeeze on us so if you want more of those gigs in New York, Austria or Barbados you’ll get to the Essex coast pronto – or you might end up in Monrovia reporting on cut price hotels next to hospitals…don’t worry, we won’t allow any comments, they only come from the readers and what the hell do they know..”

Naturally Tom rushed to Clacton

Eileen Mattacks, at least, was hearing all the right things. Across the road from a shop selling all manner of mobility scooters, the elderly voter embraced Mr. Carswell. “For years I voted Conservative but I don’t think they’ve done the job properly,” she said. Despite her Huguenot surname, she, too, is concerned about immigration. “We are only a small island,” she said. “And we’ve got too many here.”

“Well done, Tom – you hit all the right buttons…just the sort of copy the Telegraph wants. Mrs. Mattacks just doesn’t realise that here in London we simply couldn’t survive without cheap baristas, nannies, builders and gardeners from the outside world…why, I don’t expect she even knows what a barista is…”

At the weekend I joined up with over fifty UKIP members who popped into Rochester to do a leaflet drop for Mark Reckless who resigned as the local MP a few days ago because he had left the Tory Party and joined UKIP. Being a man of honour he felt he needed to seek the permission of Rochester’s voters  to either endorse or reject him under his new colours so he has provoked a by-election. He didn’t have to do so – over the last few years several MPs have crossed the floor to other parties and refused to budge from Westminster.

Not so Mr Reckless – and it’s a brave move. Rochester has been fairly low down on the UKIP target list so it will be a tough fight (though early signs are promising for UKIP). Furthermore both David Cameron and Boris Johnson (perhaps regressing to their Bullingdon Club coarseness) went quite public with disparaging remarks more suited to midnight at a freshers ball than the halls of political discourse.

I came across a local gentleman who appeared to stand foursquare behind Cameron on this matter. He returned our leaflet accusing Mr Reckless of being a “traitor” to the Conservative Party. I pointed out that, since he was submitting himself to the will of the electors of Rochester there could be no accusation of treason since, in a democracy, there exists a loyalty that must always overide any party subscription – loyalty to one’s own fellow citizens.

That is why I went down to Rochester  – to support a brave and honest politician….a rare breed in our current political climate, I fear.