Cicero's Songs

OK, so Tony Blair was a steaming pile of hypocrisy in office. So he was also pretty incompetent, leaving us with a constitutional settlement that could destroy the country and economic policies that brought us to the brink of national insolvency.  OK, so he left us with the inept and unworthy Gordon Brown as his hand picked successor. So he created a coterie of dishonest unelected "special advisors" - the so-called " sofa cabinet " and undermined the civil service, personalizing his regime in a way that was also essentially against our constitution. So he was a war monger . So he was a brazen liar. So how come JP Morgan appear to have paid him a lot more than the declared £2 million ? Surely the experience he picked up in office belongs to the country, not to him, and he should, as his predecessors did, have used that experience to benefit this country, particularly since he did so much damage to it while in office. But, if the rumours speak true, perh...

As the scale of the economic crisis for Britain sinks in, it is becoming ever clearer that there is no area of public or private expenditure that can escape scrutiny. No area, in fact, unless you are Harriet Harman where you instead try to create massive new costs by imposing a legal duty to implement the intellectually incoherent nonsense of Labour's Diversity Police. Meanwhile back on the real world, there is growing recognition that the Ministry of Defence has not escaped the decline into wasteful incoherence that has characterised the rest of government. The natural tendency of military bureaucrats to exceed even their civilian colleagues in the gold plating of projects has not been resisted by the incompetent Labour ministers, but now the time has come where some very painful decisions are going to be needed. British Military expenditure rose sharply as the country found itself brought into the American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even as the mission in Iraq has been di...

The latest release of public documents throws up the interesting story that Guy Mollet , the French Prime Minister of the time, suggested in 1956 that France and Britain form a Union . The idea of France joining the Commonwealth- then an organisation of far more substance than it has today- was taken seriously at the time in London. France under the Fourth Republic was yet to develop the robust nationalism that has been the hallmark of the Fifth Republic. It is interesting to speculate what kind of Europe we would see today, had France moved so decisively into the British camp, rather than, as it turned out, building the bridges to Germany that ultimately became the Franco-German motor. Arguably, a Franco-British deal would have simply reinforced the continuing bitterness against Germany, and perpetuated the divisions that caused the First and Second World Wars, Perhaps Germany would have quietly slipped into the Soviet orbit- a state of affairs that would have made a third world war ...

I met Robin Cook, the former British Foreign Secretary, a few times over the course of his life. The first time was while I was campaigning with Malcolm Bruce, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats in the 1992 election. During that campaign there were several set piece debates involving the four leaders, Malcolm, Ian Lang- the then Conservative Secretary of State- Donald Dewar for Labour and Alex Salmond of the SNP. Over the course of the campaign we grew quite friendly with "the opposition". Occasionally one or another of the leaders might be substituted, depending on commitments elsewhere, and indeed in Lanark, for a BBC hustings, Robin Cook turned up in place of Donald Dewar. Where Dewar was gregarious and warm, Cook was watchful, suspicious even. He sat alone in the green room checking out the "Racing Post" and gathering his thoughts. He struck me then as a solitary figure- quite unlike the cheerful and joke-cracking Dewar. Through the years that passed, ...