The British Establishment and the Deep State

We were supposed to believe, with thanks to the absurd Sir Kim Darroch, that Trump ditched "the Iranian nuclear deal" purely to "spite" Obama - in much the same way, presumably, as Obama pulled troops out of Iraq in order to spite George Dubya (before of course sending them back in again almost as soon as he'd been re-elected).

Unfortunately of course the story was bollocks! Sir Kim Darroch was a Deep State, British Establishment tit of the worst order. (What do we imagine he thinks about Brexit? Duh!) In reality Trump scotched the Iran treaty partly because it was crap (Obama signed off on it in spite of significant political opposition at home, partly because he could, partly to be a dick, but mainly because geopolitically he was backed into a corner after his cut-and-run policy in Iraq) and partly because he was under pressure from the neo-cons.

Because in truth there’s more to politics than just party politics, and the idea that the Israelis were just going to sit back and let the Iranians do anything and everything they liked in the region (now that Saddam’s gone, of course!) was only ever going to be a fantasy. And now that Israel has already kicked off its own “quiet” war with Iran, the Americans (and the British) are going to have to think hard and act quickly if they want to regain the initiative and stop the situation escalating.

One would of course like to be able to get excited about characters like Darroch, and Lord Geidt. And indeed about Rory Stewart, given his background! He’s got Special Forces, MI6, Deep State, ultra-Establishment, etc. written all over him. But...

One’s overwhelming sense is that beneath that nonchalant show of British phlegm the complacency is pretty much baked in. Stewart in particular comes across as simply another one of the overconfident narcissistic buffoons that Eton and Oxford between them seem to specialize in producing. Some are on the “Right”, some are on the Far Left, others are apolitical to the extent that they’re only really in politics for the sake of their wallets and their egos. Currently my feeling is that Rory is probably one of the latter, and whichever way one looks at him he’s utterly un-electable. I may be wrong, of course, but thankfully the Covid-1984 crisis has put his convoluted joke of a campaign to (fail to) be elected as Mayor of London out of the capital's misery.

And is Boris any better? The first big disappointment of the Boris era was his caving in to the old guard on Huawei. But then what were we expecting? Boris is not Trump. (And then again Trump isn’t really Trump - indeed, he’s a mostly vacuous media creation of a man who happens to be called Donald Trump, but perhaps that’s just by the by.) He was never going to face down the Establishment on this one, let alone stand up to the Deep State. (And of course Brexit got that little bit more complicated.) Even after life returns to "normal", the old problems are still going to be there - and with civil society having been so fundamentally weakened not so much by the Coronavirus itself as by the State’s response to it those old problems may very well be not just older but even worse. The British Government has never let a good crisis go to waste, and I can’t believe the Deep State ever will either.

Despite Brexit, Trump and Boris, the show will go on. And on! And on!