Every crop of e-mails these days includes new (or, often, old) George W. Bush jokes, amusing Bush pictures (the one with the lens-capped binoculars is the best of recent examples), and the addresses of disgracefully funny Bush web sites. One remembers jokes about the laziness and intellectual limitations of Ronald Reagan when in the White House, the reputed inability of Gerald Ford to chew gum simultaneously with performing some other (generally bowdlerised) activity, and even about the misfortunes of George W.’s father (a disastrous dinner in Tokyo comes to mind). But I don’t recall quite so much scorn and disrespect being heaped on a previous incumbent President, at any rate in my lifetime (and I made my début only one year after the end of the reigns of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover), compared with that now being visited on George W. I don’t know to what extent he frightens either the terrorists, Saddam Hussein or his fellow-Americans, but by God, he frightens me.
It’s hard to avoid mention of the firemen’s strike and all its nostalgic echoes. On the face of it, the whole thing demonstrates the extreme difficulty of negotiating a durable settlement of a dispute when those conducting the negotiations don’t have the power to make binding commitments because the ultimate decision is in the hands of the central government which, being neither the employer nor the union, plays no direct part in the negotiations. Both sides in those negotiations seem to have conducted them with surprising incompetence, with the union sticking doggedly to demands which the lowliest rookie fire-fighter must have known were obviously unachievable, while resolutely resisting proposals for manifestly essential reforms to their arcane working practices; and the employers making random but sweeping concessions in the middle of the night, just hours before the second and longer strike was about to start, and then demanding in a telephone call to the Deputy Prime Minister in the small hours of the morning that the government pick up the unquantified bill for an agreement which the unfortunate Mr Prescott hadn’t even seen. To cap it all, the union thereupon decided to go ahead, a couple of hours later, with the strike, instead of suspending it until ministers had had a chance to read the proposed agreement, do the sums to determine the implications for the taxpayer, discuss it with the employers and perhaps with the union, and come to a decision. To blame the government for this chapter of blunders does seem "a bit rich", as MPs say when their adversaries advance some impertinent proposition. But the government seems to be in a phase where nothing is going right and they get the blame for everything.
It’s been another bad time for the royal family, despite the successes of Jubilee year. The ever-fascinating, ever-provocative Princess Diana has come back to haunt them with a vengeance. Almost everyone clearly believed, unshakably, that the fact that the Queen suddenly "remembered" What The Butler Said during their epic 3-hour (or 1-1/2 hour, depending whom you believe) vertical conversation, just a few hours before the butler was due to go into the witness box and spill the squalid beans on the royals, might just possibly have been intended to put an end to the trial and keep the beans safely unspilled under the carpet (squishy), in which case it would have been a highly improper use of royal status to interfere with the course of justice, although pretty clearly not actually to pervert it. Now the faithful but haunted-looking Sir M. Peat says it wasn’t like that at all: HM only realised the significance of the butler’s words to her when she read in the newspaper that the police had withdrawn their allegations that Burrell had been selling Diana’s undies and postcards in the US and discovered that they didn’t after all have pictures of Burrell wearing Diana’s off-the-shoulder ball gowns. Nor, according to Peat, did she realise that by getting Prince Charles to tell Peat to tell the cops that yes, Burrell had indeed mentioned that he was keeping the royal thongs and bras in a safe place, she was going to be bringing the trial to a jolting and permanent halt. One of several mysteries lurking in all this is what prompted the police to tell the royals that they had this apparently lethal evidence against the butler, then to discover that they hadn’t after all, and then to forget to mention to the royals that they hadn’t. Perhaps Sir M. Peat’s curious mandate to hold an enquiry into his own (and others’) conduct in the affair will throw light on this strange behaviour on the part of the Bill, although I wouldn’t bet on it.
The lawyers all seem to expect the Law Lords to decide this week that the Home Secretary’s power to extend the tariff set by the trial judge and the Lord Chief Justice in the case of anyone sentenced to a mandatory term of imprisonment for life (i.e. chiefly murderers) is contrary to the Human Rights Convention and Act. Sadly, this comes just too late to benefit Myra Hindley (see the preambular postscript now added to my piece on that scandalous case). But it will also be interesting to see whether their Lordships go on to pronounce illegal the continued detention of those several lifers already serving sentences beyond the tariffs recommended by the judges because a Home Secretary has extended it: in which case a number of murderers will have to be promptly released; or whether they will content themselves with pronouncing the relevant laws conferring this power on the Home Secretary to be incompatible with the Human Rights Act, and leave it to Parliament to do something about the conflict—in which case the lifers in question, although by implication illegally detained, may have quite a long wait before they can be released. Either way, the Home Secretary’s setting of a 50-year tariff for a recently convicted child murderer just a few days before the Law Lords’ decision on his power to do so looks more like gesture politics to appease the Sun newspaper than a quasi-judicial act. How shaming that a politician, subject to the pressures of the tabloids and party politics, should ever have been allowed to overrule the considered judgements of the trial judges and Lord Chief Justices, the former having heard all the evidence in the case and being better placed than anyone else to assess the scale of the retribution required by society and the probability of the relevant criminal being able to be released safely once the demands of retribution and deterrence have been satisfied! Ministers and parliament have every right to lay down through legislation the broad scale of punishments appropriate to different kinds of crime, but there should plainly be no place in our system for politicians to be involved in deciding the length of any particular sentence (other than by advising the Crown on the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of pardon, often meaning in reality an admission that the person concerned was wrongly convicted in the first place).
I’m sorry that this is the first new entry in Ephems for several weeks. I have several cogent excuses but you won’t be interested in them. What does need some comment now (once again) is Iraq . Tony Blair clearly earned many starred Brownie points for his role in helping Colin Powell to drag President Bush back from the brink of a unilateral attack on Iraq outside the UN framework and devoid of any legitimacy in international law. The Blair flight to Washington in September, quickly followed by Bush’s commitment to go down the UN path and seek a tough Security Council resolution to get the weapons inspectors back, with a warning of serious consequences if Iraq failed to comply, caused a global sigh of provisional relief. But Bush and his attendant flock of ageing hawks have continued to threaten the UN with a US-led attack on Iraq if the Security Council fails to live up to what the White House regards as its responsibilities in the event of Iraqi non-compliance. Tony Blair and his familiar, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, are playing it safe by emphasizing the UK’s and the US’s commitment to working within the UN framework, but Straw in particular (and his predecessor Robin Cook in a recent radio discussion programme) still refuse to rule out UK backing for a US attack if the Security Council fails to authorise the use of force when invited to do so. Perhaps these muted but unmistakably war-like cries are a bluff designed to keep up the pressure on the UN to do its stuff: most Security Council member countries may well feel that if there’s going to be a war against Iraq anyway, a war authorised by and still nominally under the control of the Council would be the lesser evil. Or perhaps—a possibility that I haven’t seen mentioned by the pundits—UK ministers, including especially Messrs Blair and Straw, have at the back of their minds the precedent set by NATO’s attack on Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, wholly lacking in Security Council authorisation, plainly illegal under international law (as well as being unnecessary and unsuccessful), but defended at the time by its prime movers, Madeleine Albright and Robin Cook and their chiefs, Clinton and Blair, as being legitimate on the pretext of a trumped-up and newly-minted "principle" of the right of humanitarian intervention. It was also defended by the even more imaginative plea that NATO was entitled to go ahead with its attack on Serbia without UN authority because if the US and UK had tabled a resolution in the Security Council seeking authority for the military action, Russia would have vetoed it (a bizarre justification indeed). Anyway, for Washington or London now to admit that an attack on Iraq without UN authority would be illegal would entail an implied admission that NATO’s attack on Serbia in 1999 was also illegal, which would be much more embarrassing for Blair, Straw and Cook, who were fully engaged in the Kosovo affair, than for Bush and company, who weren’t. Perhaps the UK law officers have reminded UK ministers of this potential booby-trap. It all goes to show that these well-intentioned but misguided adventures outside the bounds of international law have malign longer-term consequences long after the details of each particular episode have been forgotten.
