Wee Eck vs. the Strasserites?

The Murdoch Press are having a lovely time over Alex Salmond’s acquittal. One doesn’t doubt for a moment that they were expecting the bastard to go down. After all, if the #MeToo generation could get Harvey Weinstein, why not one of our own? And since Salmond is a Far-Left loon, an anti-English hatemonger and a Russian stooge, not to mention a grotesque oaf to boot, I’m quite sure The Times's editorial team were rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of him, er, eating porridge for a while.

So what went wrong?

As usual, the answer is almost certainly Conspiracy. And then the real question is of course What sort?

Salmond is himself no slouch when it comes to coughing up conspiracy theories and pointed accusations. Back in 2015 he fingered both the BBC and the “metropolitan” press for their coverage of his referendum campaign to destroy the UK. (One can understand why a politician who hates Britain with every fibre of his being wouldn’t be too fond of the British Broadcasting Corporation - even though to all extents and purposes they’re really just British in name only.) This time though he’s going to go all in to get back at conspirators within his own party.

So, there’s going to be an inquiry, and he’s going to write a book. And his allies within the Party are rallying behind him. Nicola Sturgeon, who for most English people has always appeared to be little more than the Janette Tough (aka “Wee Jimmy Krankie”) to Salmond’s Ian, has declined to comment, but one can imagine that whether she wants to or not she’ll end up being cast on the side of the gruesome tartan fembots who, for reasons so far known only to themselves, have lined up (and apparently colluded with each other in doing so) to denounce Wee Eck for his wicked ways.

The internal politics of the SNP are of course impenetrable to outsiders, not to mention quite irrelevant to the vast majority of British subjects. Life’s too short to go into them in any depth. Suffice it then to refer to Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” And I suppose one should add that when the motive is primarily ideological, sectarian or nationalistic (and the SNP is all three) the struggle is only going to be even more vicious. (My own feeling is that this is indeed a battle between the Scots Nazis’ “woke” and “nationalist” wings. Basically they’re Scotland’s Strasserites and Hitlerites du jour, and if not an actual Night of the Long Knives then at least some sort of reckoning is definitely on its way.)

Not to be out done, of course, The Times have come up with their own conspiracy theory, which as ever involves none other than dear old Vladimir Putin. (Who else?) Because not content with gassing civilians in Syria, rigging the US presidential elections and threatening the peace and security of western Europe, he’s now apparently taken time out to try and destroy the Scottish National Party. ‘Analysts say that President Putin’s regime has strategic reasons to put pro-EU and pro-Nato Scottish nationalists in its sights.’ What-ever!

For what it’s worth, one can easily imagine the Far Left of the Far Left of Scots nationalism objecting to Wee Eck’s having a chat-show on Russian telly. And the objection would be essentially the same as their objection to Julian Assange after he helped get Trump elected. “Putin is nath-ty. Putin is Hitler. Putin betrayed the Revolution by being nationalistic. Orange Man Bad! Russia Evil! Alex Salmond Too Sexy!”

Well, it’s something to think about. With luck it will at least be entertaining, at least once we’re all allowed out of our hovels again and back into the so-called “real” world.

A Patriotic Swimmer

Doctor Who: The Cartmel Legacy

It's been said recently (and with some justification!) that the recent rebooting of Doctor Who's backstory in Auntie's latest (and wokest yet) series of her sometime top show was little more than an attempt to revive the old so-called "Cartmel Masterplan". And yes, there is a very obvious sense in which as the current 21st-century version of Doctor Who flags with viewers (albeit not so much with the critics) it is not just making the same mistakes as its 20th-century predecessor (i.e. alienating its core audience, being too on-the-nose with its leftist politics, changing but not in a good way, etc.) but also reaching for the same solutions (i.e. trying to inject a bit more magic into the mythos, not to mention some morally questionable attempts at "darkness" and ham-fisted stabs at social realism).

So how long actually is a generation? It's an important enough question in Doctor Who, and the Doctor's own answer of "twenty-five years" (in Four to Doomsday, if you don't believe me) is one that for a long time I've used subconsciously as a rule of thumb. Looking back over Doctor Who at the (finally!) respectable age of fifty, it was startling quite how easily the division between "old" Who and "new" Who became a generational one. What was startling about it though was quite how old "new" Who really was.

The truth of course is that far from being a twenty-first century phenomenon, the "new" version of Doctor Who that we know today in the shape of the post-2005 TV-series was very clearly conceived in the last few years of the pre-1989 one. Though it may come as a shock to some, the "modern" version of Doctor Who is to a large extent the Sylv McCoy/Andrew Cartmel-version (or, to put it yet another way, the Cartmel/Ben Aaronovitch/Marc Platt-version). Or at any rate it was up until Peter Capaldi's ill-advised passing on of the torch to the Lady Doctor, but then since I have never watched Jodie Whittaker's take on the Time Lord (and have no desire to either) I'll let that slide.

To put it another way, to a large extent it was Sylvester McCoy's Doctor who was the turning-point - the half-way house between the Edwardian Doctor of old and the hip, cool, "modern" space Gandalf we know today, between the TV-plays of yesterday that used to go out in time for tea and the slick mini feature films that nowadays get broadcast in the early-evening slot. He's an oddly mid-Atlantic figure too, stuck halfway between the nonchalant tea-and-crumpets Britishness of the first half-a-dozen Doctors and the gun-toting, finger-wagging Americanism of the 2000s bunch.

Indeed, even things that we now think of as being standard, such as the Doctor speaking really quickly and being vaguely manic, were inventions of the McCoy era. Before Sophie Aldred, the female companion was there to look pretty and to scream. Ace was genuinely the first one who didn't. The broad, subtle story-arc as a concept never really existed before Fenric*, but in the RTD and Moffat eras it was part of the very fabric of the show. And perhaps most importantly there emerged the idea of the Doctor as not just a mythological hero - or at any rate as a Merlin/Odin figure - but as a comic-book superhero-type one at that.

The character of the Doctor has of course always been evolving. William Hartnell gave us the serious scientist/aloof sage with the mischievous inner child, and in fact in doing so laid down most of the groundwork for his successors. Patrick Troughton added the idea that the Doctor was funny. Jon Pertwee added the action man (in part because, thanks to budget cuts, the male companion character had by his time been ditched by the producers). Tom Baker cobbled on the idea that the Doctor should be slightly crazy. Peter Davison's Doctor saw an ill-advised attempt to strip away the Doctor's darker, alien side and make him "nicer", and Colin Baker's saw an even more cack-handed attempt to make him "nastier" again. But it was Sylvester McCoy, who carefully and deliberately modeled himself on the Troughton Doctor but with aspects of Hartnell and Tom Baker thrown in for good measure, who went on to redefine the role of the Doctor was that of the actual protagonist.

He didn't do it alone, of course, and in fact he did it much less than the modern Whovian race memory relates. Just as popular mythology remembers William Hartnell's Doctor as "grumpy" and "crotchety" (when in fact he was perfectly likable in a surprisingly childlike, giggly sort of way), and just as according to media cliches we all watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa (when in fact we watched it with our noses pressed against the screen, drinking in every magical moment), so it's become an established assumption that in every story of the Seventh Doctor's era the Doctor knows everything that's going on from the outset and he's always playing some sinister psychological chess-match at his companions' expense. In reality, of course, the manipulative Seventh Doctor only really arrived on the scene in Remembrance of the Daleks, which worked well enough for him to re-emerge in Silver Nemesis - albeit belatedly, as it's inferred that in that story he's really only following through on a plot that he originally set up in his second incarnation. After that, with the one genuine exception of Fenric, all of the Sylvester McCoy stories proceed in pretty much the same way Doctor Who stories always used to: by and large, the Doctor and Ace arrive in the middle of a mysterious situation and then set about investigating and sorting things out. There are a couple of Seventh Doctor stories such as Dragonfire and The Happiness Patrol where the Doctor has heard about strange things going on somewhere and wants to find out more. Ghost Light even slightly deconstructs this in that when the TARDIS materialises at Gabriel Chase the Doctor knows where they are but hasn't told Ace, but then by the end of 'Part One' Ace has found out where they are, and then thereafter until the story's climax she actually knows more than the Doctor does. But the fundamental dramatic principle remains the same.

Despite these quibbles though, the point stands that before 1988 the Doctor was always very much the catalyst in his adventures, as he had originally been intended to be by Sydney Newman back in 1963. From 1988 onward though he started actively to take charge of the stories. Looking back, that was a big change, and it was Cartmel and his team who did it. And so when confronting the Daleks in 1963 (in 1988), the Cybermen in 1988 (same year), and Fenric in 1943 (in 1989), the Doctor was very much the man with a plan, leading the action from the word go in a way that he never had before, not just with a trick up his sleeve but with a veritable "masterplan" that he would only allow the viewer (and, by extension, his companion) to see bit by bit. He set out to defeat his enemies from the start, and when he did so he showed an uncompromising ruthlessness that had never been seen before.

It would have been unthinkable for any Doctor before McCoy, for example, to win the day by blowing up an entire planet (Thals and all, by implication!), let alone deliberately† committing genocide - much less follow this up by talking his arch-enemy into committing suicide, or go on intentionally to break his companion's faith in him. But since 2005 the writers have been quite comfortable with the idea of the Doctor being bad-ass, not to mention functioning on a higher, more epic moral scale than his human companions. Back in the 1970s it was the Doctor who acted as a civilising nay "moralising" influence on his companions††, but by the late 1980s, although ostensibly the Doctor disapproved of Ace's constant resorts to violence, as often as not it was he who would call on her firepower to blow up Daleks, spaceships and even an archaeological dig when the greater good required it. By the time the Tennant Doctor was finally reunited with UNIT it was taken as standard practice for the Doctor to turn children into warriors.

In many ways then Russell T Davies himself just picked up where the authors of the Cartmel Masterplan left off, and this should of course come as no surprise. The reason why Davies's Ninth Doctor seems so much more like the Seventh Doctor than like any of his predecessors is probably because Davies had already written for Doctor Who for the Seventh Doctor (in his otherwise forgettable novel Damaged Goods). Sophie Aldred herself notes in the commentary on the DVD release of Survival that the tower blocks and council estates in 'Part Three' of that story directly influenced the setting of Rose sixteen years later. More importantly, Rose is very much Spearhead from Space for the post-Fenric generation: the Doctor knows exactly who the enemy is before he even appears on screen (it's the Nestene Consciousness) and exactly how he's going to defeat it (with a magic trick he's had up his sleeve the whole time, in a manner that would become all too familiar during Rusty Davies's tenure on the show).

So what caused the change? In my opinion the real pivot was surely Cartmel and his gang's new awareness of science-fiction lore generally and their interest in American comic-books in particular. Before Cartmel, most of the sci-fi stories in Doctor Who were determinedly British, whether they were fantasy versions of the the British Empire (Frontier in Space, and in fact all stories about the Earth "empire") or the Second World War (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) or pompous little disquisitions on anti-colonialism (The Sensorites, The Mutants, Kinda, etc.). Knock-off versions of Alien tended to be the exception (Dragonfire) rather than the rule. And with the notable exception of Chris Boucher's dual homage to Asimov's robots and Frank Herbert's Dune in Robots of Death, American science-fiction rarely got a look-in.

But then the comic-book geeks arrived and changed everything. The Time War was something of a hackneyed cliche long before the TV-series came back. Indeed the first Doctor Who time war in real life (and for all we know in the Whoniverse itself) appeared in one of the "back-up" comic-strips in Doctor Who Weekly - written, as it happens, by a little known scribbler geek called Alan Moore. More to the point though, it was the Time War that helped to complete the final transformation of the Doctor into the comic-book superhero that Cartmel and chums had seemingly wanted him to be all along. From the Ka Faraq Gatri to Time's Champion to the Destroyer of Worlds (etc. etc.), by the time David Tennant's Doctor eventually took his long overdue bow we had surely had too much of a Good Thing.Yes, it's exciting for the Doctor to have a "darker side". But the real Doctor is the eternal child rebel and runaway. He's not effing Superman.

One's hope towards the end of the Moffat era was that what with Auntie's inevitable budget cuts the Capaldi Doctor might end up being a bit more old school than maybe some of the Internet's Tennant-fanciers were used to. My view at the time in fact was that if you want the Doctor to be a geeky, swaggering, sarcastic teenage heart-throb then it's probably Peter Parker you should be fantasising about rather than a thousand-year-old Gallifreyan. After a generation's worth of comic-book exploits it was time for the Doctor to grow up a bit - and go back to being a children's character again. Alas, it wasn't to be! Capaldi's attempt at playing the Doctor as a lovable curmudgeon was arguably more successful than Colin Baker's, but those who predicted that, just as Rose was the new Spearhead from Space and Tennant was the new Tom (etc.), Capaldi would inherit Colin's short straw as the "screw-up" Doctor, ended up being more right than they could possibly have known. There was in the end something of an inevitability about Whittaker's bringing NuWho full circle (to coin a phrase) and pulling in the worst viewing figures since Battlefield 'Part One'.

For what it's worth, I suspect Whittaker will be the last TV Doctor we'll be seeing for some time, and any plans Auntie has for a brown-skinned version of David Tennant (which actually wouldn't be the worst idea in the universe) will come to nothing. After that, bar a possible 60th anniversary reunion special, it's unlikely there'll be much Doctor Who on British telly ever again.

And if anyone asks they'll blame Boris.

*The nearest attempt at a "subtle" story-arc before Fenric was of course Season 18's "entropy theme", though in practice it was a bit too subtle and the idea didn't catch on. Stories that just happen to segue into each other (all the stories between Planet of the Spiders and Planet of Evil, say) don't really count as arcs (much as one would love to make a pun about The Arc in Space), nor indeed do clumsy attempts to turn whole seasons into long-running serials (Seasons 16 and 23 being the prime offenders).
†The Trial of a Time Lord notwithstanding!
††The Doctor's infamous attempt to murder a sick cave man in 'The Forest of Fear' notwithstanding!

Biafra and All That

One of those incidents that seems to have survived only on Wikipedia (and, I suppose, on its various imitators and copycats) is the strange affair of the “Harry letters”. This was one of Mad Polly Toynbee’s early claims to fame. Whilst she was working for Amnesty International she coughed up what she intended to be a scandal about the Hard-Left Wilson Government's supporting Amnesty International by giving them public money.

So far, so dodgy, one might think. And yet of course Mad Polly, who has never been one not to ignore real wrongdoings when imaginary ones will do, got completely the wrong end of the stick. She complained that Wilson’s people were actually bribing Amnesty to ignore “politically sensitive” parts of the world such as Nigeria and, er, Southern Rhodesia.

The problem with this particular conspiracy theory alas was simply cui bono? Yes, Wilson’s government was one of the most notoriously corrupt in British history. (Quite how corrupt we only really found out with his Resignation Honours.) And yes, one can easily imagine they’d have wanted to divert attention from their support for Nigeria's military dictatorship, not to mention (later on) their illegal interventions in the Biafran civil war. But Rhodesia? Really?

Where the conspiracy theory breaks down is the thought that there might have been a ha'penny worth of difference between Amnesty International and Harold Wilson’s administration about anything at all ever. Biafra was fighting for independence from Nigeria and supported by Rhodesia, as well as by Israel, France, and what by then was left of the Catholic Church. Britain supported Nigeria because duh!

And the idea that Harold Wilson or Amnesty International could ever have supported Rhodesia can only even have been the most paranoid of paranoiac fantasies. (No, in fifty years the British Far Left really hasn't changed much.)

Theories about The Prisoner: Drama vs. Allegory

Why did No 6 resign?

• He found out about the Village, or at least that he was working for the sorts of people who ran the Village. He perceived either that the British secret state - perhaps even the entire British Establishment itself - had become so morally decadent (or had been so subverted) that it was no longer behaving constitutionally. It may even have been infiltrated by a malign agency or agencies unknown. In any event, No 6 felt in conscience he could no longer work for these despotic and amoral "new masters" (quite possibly some sort of X-Files-type shadowy one-world government sort of conspiracy!), so he resigned.
• He did not necessarily know about the Village, but he knew what sorts of things were going on there.
• It's possible that he did already know about the Village in principle, possibly even because he helped to devise it, only late finding out how his plan was actually being implemented - or perhaps, rather, abused.
• He found out that he was No 1 - or at least that his superiors were doing what they were doing at least partly in his name as Britain's number one spy. He no longer wanted to be a leading light in such operations.
• He may even have resigned in the hope of avoiding being sent to the Village (or somewhere like it) himself - though he would probably have been aware of what a vain hope this was. During the scene of his actual abduction, there is more than a hint of Stoic resignation in those blue eyes as he realises he's being gassed. Besides, his "beach holiday" doesn't seem like the sort of holiday he would really have enjoyed (being more of a skiing man), so it's possible that he didn't actually expect to get that far - though it's also possible that the beach holiday really was just an old professional cover he intended to use. (He doesn't actually deny the possibility in A.B.C., merely that he did not intend to "sell out".)
• Patrick McGoohan resigned - from Danger Man. Lew Grade asked him why. Though McGoohan never seems to have said so in so many words, clearly Danger Man was for him too idealised a version of the morally questionable reality of covert surveillance, subversion and guerrilla warfare that all modern governments perpetrate, both internationally and domestically!

Why do the No 2s keep asking No 6 why he resigned?

The original purpose of the Village was simply to protect the data of retired secret agents. If they just wanted to prevent No 6's information from falling into the wrong hands though, the No 2s would simply have killed him, but they didn't. They want to extract the information he has first. In order to do this they will destroy his individuality if necessary (or perhaps even if it's not necessary). In the "allegory" of The Prisoner, according to McGoohan, this was the actual point of the Village - to destroy the individual.

• At first the No 2s think No 6 resigned because he discovered something valuable and they want to know what that was. 
• Later on it becomes clear (e.g. in 'The Chimes of Big Ben') that they hope that if he answers just one simple question (i.e. about his resignation) he'll crack and tell them everything else he knows as well.
• It's also possible that they suspect and fear that he has discovered too much about their own operations - perhaps even the identity of No 1 himself.
• The No 2s themselves almost certainly don't know who No 1 is. This can perhaps be inferred from the evasive answers that many No 2s give about No 1. It is also stated implicitly in 'Hammer into Anvil' and explicitly in 'Fall Out'. In 'Free For All', when No 6 and No 2 are discussing the consequences of being elected No 2, the older man states, 'Number One will no longer be a mystery to you, if you know what I mean.' This sounds like an implicit admission that he doesn't believe there really is a No 1, except in a philosophical sense (e.g. No 1 is some sort of version of God in the Village's quasi-Masonic cult of "government power" - perhaps even Rover himself, which is not impossible, given that Rover is in one sense the supreme symbol of power in the Village. Indeed, at one point at that story's climax No 2's toughs actually seem to be worshipping Rover in some sort of inner sanctum within the Green Dome). For some of the No 2s then, No 1 is a "noble myth", though it's possible that there are others who know that the idea that No 1 is a noble myth is itself a lie. Some of the No 2s may indeed want to know more, so for some of them breaking No 6 to discover whether he knows who No 1 is - or at least whether he knows more about the Village and the powers behind it than they do - is a matter of personal concern to them, as well as of personal honour.
• It's even possible that some of them know (or suspect) that he is No 1 and wish to break him in order to replace him. (This may actually have happened by the time of 'Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling' and apparently has happened by the time of 'Fall Out', in which No 1 seems to be No 6's doppelgänger Curtis.)

Who is No 1?

• The original answer (and the only acceptable answer) to 'Who is No 1?' is of course that No 1 is No 6. He is the most important person in the Village, after all, and certainly its most important prisoner. It's not necessarily clear though whether or not he knows that he is No 1.
• The question is of course No 6's equivalent of 'Why did you resign?', the implication being that if he can get them to answer one of his questions then he will have turned the tables on them decisively. 
• He probably either knows the answer or suspects it even as he's asking the question. The difference though is that the No 2s themselves don't know who No 1 is. Whatever they may suspect, they only know that No 6 is important, not that he is No 1.
• It would be most satisfying to imagine that 'Who is No 1?' and 'Why did you resign?' actually have the same answer. Originally the idea was that No 6 had devised the idea of the Village but then resigned when he discovered how/that his idea had been realised. The Prisoner therefore is No 1 and he resigned because he is No 1 and had a change of heart about the Village and what was being done there - or at least he had a change of heart about his job once he realised the sorts of things that were being done by the people he was working for (i.e. the sorts of things that were going on in the Village). Having been the best agent in the service he became its most implacable opponent.
• If he knows that he is No 1 but knows that they don't know, then the question is really little more than a taunt.
• If he knows that he is No 1 and doesn't know that they don't know, then the question is presumably a genuine attempt to discover if any of them knows that he is.
• It's just possible that despite having resigned he, or rather someone posing as him, is still recognised as No 1; and so, in a classic game of bluff and double bluff, whereas the No 2s' objective is to discover whether he realises this, his intention is to discover how it is that the Village continues to function even though he himself is now a prisoner.
• It's just possible that the impostor who has replaced him as No 1 - the figure unmasked by No 6 in 'Fall Out' - is No 6's doppelgänger Curtis, who was not killed by Rover in 'The Schizoid Man' but only stunned. (Does Rover ever actually kill anyone?) It's also possible that Curtis was revived after 'The Schizoid Man' in much the same way as No 2 is in 'Fall Out'. Despite being brain-damaged by his trauma, he was given No 6/the true No 1's place at the "controls" of the Village.
• Implicitly there's not just a No 1. Above and beyond (or, indeed, below) the Village, there's also a No 0 - who is quite possibly the Butler, who still controls No 6 (but more subtly) even after he has left the Village.
• Another good candidate for No 0 is of course Rover - not just the supreme symbol of power in the Village but also the "reset", who returns escapees and thus returns everything to the status quo ante each time they attempt to escape.

Patrick McGoohan, who plays No 6, came up with the idea of the Village based around Portmeirion, which had been one of the locations for Danger Man. According to McGoohan though, No 1 is No 6's self. By implication then, No 1 = No 6, '1' is 'I' and '6' is 'me': one is the self as seen by oneself (the Prisoner himself) and the other is the self as seen by society (the Village). The Prisoner is his own worst enemy because he constantly "looks out for number one". McGoohan also made the point that you can't rebel against society all the time, otherwise you'd go crazy. So No 6 wants to escape from the Village because he rejects society. (He may even deny that there is such a thing as society.) But, as a member of society (i.e. as a number), he cannot escape it, even if he appears to have escaped and,for a time, to have shrugged off its label.

To a certain extent it's necessary to "retroject" this fable's moral onto some episodes, but it works remarkably well. The Prisoner cannot escape the Village because one cannot escape society, and even if one can escape society one cannot truly achieve the individuality of pure subjectivity without either going mad or accepting, to some extent, that one must also be an object of others' actions, observations and labels. One will always be numbered by other people, and even as oneself one must have a number - even if that number is, indeed, 'One'.

It follows though that in all probability each and every individual is No 1, and that anyone else who pulled off No 1's ape mask would see his own face. In as far as he has objective reality, No 1 is a faceless, protean being who represents the dark, utterly selfish, animal side of each man's nature. He can be unmasked and confronted, but he cannot be caught or restrained, let alone imprioned. It's quite likely that he is in charge not only of the Village but also of the world itself: the Village has its nukes, just as the outside world does. As such it it quite likely that he is the Lord of This World that Christ warns of in the Gospels - the Antichrist, Satan himself.

McGoohan: 'I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself.' 

...  

Audience member: 'Do you think there's going a strong popular reaction against "progress" in the future?' 

McGoohan: 'No!'

Ronnie Braithwait

Happy Commonwealth Day!

The St Gallen Mafia

No, sorry, I just don't believe in the "St Gallen Mafia" conspiracy theory. They failed to get Martini elected in 2005, when Martini himself told them to support Ratzinger in order to stop Bergoglio. Austen Ivereigh of course claims that they then had a change of heart, and that the three of them who were left (three out of 115!) conspired to get Bergoglio elected in 2013. But how likely is this really?

Indeed is there any real evidence for this outside of the tittle-tattle collected by Ivereigh and Bergoglio's other liberal boomer boosters? Alas, not really! Ivereigh claimed in the first edition of his silly book that just before the 2013 conclave the three of them got Bergoglio's consent to campaign for him, but he was then forced to retract this allegation for the second edition. And is there any real reason even to think it, given that no one (apart from the St Gallen group, supposedly!) even thought of Bergoglio as a "liberal" before he became Pope? Certainly he was not considered liberal by his fellow Jesuits in Argentina, with whom he was deeply unpopular. At a time when "liberation theology" was booming in South America, Bergoglio was seen as something of a "conservative" JPII sycophant.

And for what it's worth I don't believe in the "British coup" theory either. (Again, would we really do such a thing? Did some just think it would be funny to have an Argie as Pope? "Haw-haw! That'll annoy The Sun.") On the face of it, yes, one can easily imagine Pope Bergoglio being elected as Dave and Nick's puppet as much as Obama's. After all, Britain is at best Washington's poodle and at worst Mini-Me to Uncle Sam's Dr Evil, so there's a certain thematic logic to it. In one sense the ultimate success of the "liberal" proddy British Establishment would be to have a Pope elected who was a liberal protestant in all but name.

And yet! And yet! For one thing, once again, the source! This is Ma Pepinster, the elderly schoolgirl who for no readily apparent reason is still writing for Britain's most oleaginously pro-Establishment "Catholic" periodical. And secondly, once again... just think about it. These are the same British Establishment lickspittles who are diehards for the EU on the grounds that internationally Britain is now a post-imperial pipsqueak. They're the sorts of Catholics who would despise the Commonwealth of Nations as an embarrassing relic of a bygone age (even though in practice they would approve of much that it does). Surely the idea that our own James Bond helped to get Pope Francis elected is one sycophantic conspiracy fantasy too far even for them?

In fact easily the best summing up of the "political" situation in the Church I've read in some time comes courtesy of someone called Shane Schaetzel on his blog here. The Catholic Church is "split" (although not technically, and for crude financial reasons it probably isn't going to be any time soon either) between American neocons and German liberals. The former are trying to keep the JPII "conservative" vision of Vatican II alive. The latter are basically in hoc to the German secular state thanks to its "church tax". What's more, they don't really believe in anything anyway and they don't see why anyone else should either. (And more to the point they don't want them to!) The way the whole "Pope Francis" phenomenon fits into it is so straightforward there just isn't space for conspiracy theories about Jesuits, conspiracy theories about the St Gallen mafia, conspiracy theories about the British Embassy in Rome, or even conspiracy theories about Communists, Freemasons and Jews, etc.

Because the simple truth is that when Ratzinger resigned the papacy he was seen as being old and weak. He'd wanted it for himself, for his vision, for his "reform of the Reform" and his "hermeneutic of continuity". And he'd failed. The Cardinals wanted another JPII. The American neocons at any rate remembered "their" Pope as a tough guy who used to stand up to one sort of son-of-a-bitch (i.e. the "atheistic" Commies) and pal around with the other sort (i.e. Galtieri*, Tudjman, Saddam, etc.). They wanted a strong man, they thought Bergoglio would be it, and even if Ratzinger wasn't seen as an old, weak has-been (and I suspect he was), the remorseless logic of the conclave was simply that Bergoglio was next in line. Besides, he was Sodano's golden boy, Sodano had been Galtieri's golden boy, and so as far as JPII's groupies were concerned Bergoglio could do no wrong. (See George Weigel, especially!) And so once again it was the Yanks wot won it - led of course by American Establishment Cardinal par excellence (see here and here) the Archbishop of New York (where else?) Cardinal Dolan.

Buyer's remorse has of course since set in fast, but the simple and obvious truth remains. When future church historians finally start to write up the fate of the glorious new Americanised Catholic Church that emerged after Vatican II, the answer will simply be that they did it to themselves.

*We now know exactly whose side he was on.

Morning Routine - American Psycho (1/12) Movie CLIP (2000) HD

Political Assassinations and Secret History

Auntie's recent series about Mrs T was as usual interesting as much for what it left out as for what it included. The convoluted but essential history of the Labour Party's vicissitudes in the 1980s was almost entirely neglected. The Falklands and the Belgrano were skated over briefly and the yomp to Port Stanley was barely mentioned. But most intriguing, given that the Brighton bomb was covered in some detail, was the absence of any assassinations.

Airey Neave in fact got several mentions from the time when he was Mrs Thatcher's campaign manager. But his assassination by the INLA was entirely ignored. And Ian Gow, who was similarly assassinated by the Provisional IRA, didn't so much as see the light of day.

On the one hand yes there's the BBC's commitment to the "peace" process. Mention Fenian violence and you'll get complaints. And on top of that there's Auntie's perennial implicit anti-Catholic bias, which in the case of Neave and Gow works in a particularly interesting way. Because Neave and Gow were almost certainly targeted specifically because they were "Catholics" (or rather, in Gow's case, an "Anglo-Catholic"). So even less reason than usual to mention them? Possibly!

But what about the Beeb's similarly perennial anti-Right bias? It may seem odd to complain about that Tory favourite old chestnut when considering a series that was for the most part admirably objective and even-handed. But one can't escape a lingering uneasy feeling that they wouldn't have wanted to make Neave and Gow into martyrs. Partly this will be because they wouldn't want people to know how right-wing they really were. The Far Left have always wanted people to think Mrs T was on the Right of the Party, when in reality she was always in its liberal pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-Rhodesia and anti-Apartheid "centre". And the libertarians conversely now want to claim her as one of their own. Either way, remind people that an Ulster integrationist and a pro-Rhodesian anti-abolitionist were amongst the Lady's closest political allies and you'll get more than just complaints.

Somewhere in the middle though is of course just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the role of political violence in a liberal democratic order. Neave and Gow were murdered for political reasons and, however unpalatable the truth may be, yes, political murders can work. Mrs T's career could have been quite different if Neave had lived. And Gow's death helped to isolate her in the Cabinet as her enemies within her own party plotted her downfall. It just shouldn't be surprising that a "liberal" Establishment doesn't like to imagine that even as recently as the 1980s we still lived in that sort of world.