The last week has seen two very different styles of leadership on the Right of politics. At the Republican Convention in sunny Cleveland we saw a serious conservative, Donald Trump, take America by storm. Senator Cruz, his erstwhile opponent, was booed off the stage, and rightly so.
The Convention set the stage for a Republican win in November. For once I agree with the notorious liberal Michael Moore, who is predicting that Trumpy will win and win big. I respectfully agree.
Donald Trump has been underestimated by liberals, Democrats, the mainstream media and assorted riff-raff from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission since day one. He has been subjected to the most vicious personal attacks, to which he has responded with remarkable grace, a desperate effort to stop him by the pro-German, anti-American rump in the Republican Party and media hysteria.
He has beaten off all these attacks and is now the Republican nominee for President of the United States. As I expected and predicted he has started to look and sound more presidential now that the internal party battle is over and we have entered the presidential race proper. If and when he wins the general election in November, which I expect he will, he will look and sound more presidential still.
He has chosen a capable and personable running mate in Governor Pence of Indiana, with executive experience, whereas Hillary Clinton has chosen a boring has-been heavily implicated in the sordid Virginia Tech cover-up. That was the one where the North Koreans staged a massacre of innocent college kids and the muppets in the media blamed it on a lone gunman. Yeah, and Rudolf Hess came up with the idea of flying to Scotland the night before.
Trumpy has also appointed Governor Christie to run his provisional transition team. That was a sign of serious intent. Donald Trump isn’t in this race for the beer. He’s in it to win, and unlike VoteLeave in Britain he’s thinking about what comes after he’s won.
Like Governor Pence, who is well-liked in this country, Governor Christie has practical experience of government and can be trusted to run things, except traffic, no offense intended.
I suspect that Governor Christie could probably even do a better job of running the England cricket team than Alistair Cook – as I write the whole of England is wondering why he failed to enforce the follow-on today at Manchester in the Second Test Match against Pakistan.
As I have been saying for months, Donald Trump is not the vain egotist his idiot critics maintain. He LISTENS. More to the point he knows what he doesn’t know and appoints serious individuals to advise him. Look at the way he danced round the Republican establishment over the Convention rule-book. There were no end of silly plots to entice delegates away from him. They all came to nought.
The contrast with Theresa May
The contrast with the lack of conservative leadership in Britain could not be greater. Unlike Donald Trump, Theresa May is not a conservative. She’s a devious, centrist, machine politician, no offense intended.
More to the point she and her supporters have nothing but contempt for the party faithful and the concept of democracy. Her ‘campaign’ was a campaign in name only. It was all about manipulating the contest so that there wouldn’t be one. It’s been called a coronation, but she’s not a queen.
The other great controversy on this side of the pond, apart from Cook’s failure to enforce the follow-on at Old Trafford, is Brexit. Theresa May campaigned for the losing side. She’s a loser, in other words. She doesn’t understand the arguments for Brexit and stood apart from the intellectual debate on the EU. I never saw her at a Bruges Group meeting, e.g., in fact I’ve never ever even met her.
She understands that Britain is leaving the EU, but is committed to keeping Britain in the so-called ‘single market’, i.e. the European Economic Area. It doesn’t matter to her that the electorate has rejected the ‘Norway’ option – she’s not interested in pursuing policies which are democratically legitimate, unless they happen to keep her in power.
Word is now spreading rapidly amongst the rank and file in the constituencies that Mrs May wants to betray Brexit – I had an article on the front page of the respected Eurofacts newsletter last week, e.g. It’s been a reliable source of information for Brexiteers for over two decades.
The mood in the Tory Party appears to be to give Theresa May’s government a 100 day honeymoon and go with the plan to use Article 50, however misconceived. If we haven’t repealed the European Communities Act 1972, used Article 127 of the European Economic Area Agreement to pull out of the wretched thing and served notice of withdrawal from the EU under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union by then they will be trouble.
Since the EEA is part of Reichsminister Funk’s masterplan for the German economic domination of post-war Europe, I am sure that the late Reichsleiter Martin Bormann would have approved of the government’s European policy, indistinguishable from Chamberlain’s. I refer to the Reichleiter as ‘late’ as he snuffed it in the 1980s, I gather, i.e. he is late, but he died a bit later than the German Government and the New York Times would have us believe.
The good news is that a number of Tory MPs are seriously considering millionaire Arron Banks’s proposal to set up a new Brexit Party, combining the United Kingdom Independence Party and Tory and Labour Eurosceptics, and anybody else who’s sensible and want to join. Theresa May is playing with the future of the Tory Party with her plan to betray Brexit.
Arron Banks is the nice millionaire who was behind LeaveEU, the main Brexit campaign. Being effective it didn’t get the official nod, of course, but it did the heavy lifting in the referendum campaign. VoteLeave, the official lot, were useless and couldn’t run a whelk stall.
Nice und Munich
Surprising as it may seem, not everyone in the French government and police is stupid. After the outrageous Islamic terror attack in Nice, the police started looking for the other members of the cell. This confused the media, who were all geared up to go with the usual, brainless, ‘lone gunman’ nonsense.
Then we had the shocking events in Munich, when a German/Iranian terrorist was instructed to take out any Arab youngsters he could find. Being Iranian he no doubt did not take much persuading to go out and murder a few Arabs – there has never been much love lost between the Persians and the Arabs.
According to Berlin, the Iranian then shot himself. Since this is the official position of the German Government we needn’t take it too seriously – the German Government also said in August 1939 that Germany had no plans to invade Poland, even as her generals were busy studying Polish road maps. Given that Munich is just around the corner from the HQ of the DVD in Dachau it is a reasonable surmise that the DVD ordered the attack, possibly as a distraction from the French investigation into Nice.
Dachau would have been shocked by the French investigation and might even have feared that it would lead back to the German black agency in Paris. The problem for the Krauts was that police complicity in the Nice attack was so obvious, blind Freddy could see it. We could even be seeing the first ever serious police investigation into a terrorist atrocity in Western Europe.
If you’re asked to carry out a terrorist attack by the DVD, you will find that you have a shooter, or a team of shooters, shadowing you. They will take you out if you decide after all not to shoot up a few Arab kids out enjoying a tasty and nutritious meal at Macdonalds and order a cheeseburger and fries instead. Even if you skip the burger and fries and murder a few customers you’re likely to find that you get taken out anyway, making it easier for the media to present you as a ‘lone wolf’.
Current Reading
My reading this week is The Rise of the Fourth Reich, by Thomas Marrs (New York: Harper, 2008). It’s an interesting read, and well-researched, with useful notes. Marrs writes in good faith, much of what he says dovetails with other authors and my own research and it’s an important contribution to the literature on post-war history.
There’s some really interesting stuff on Richard Nixon, that nice man Henry Kissinger’s early years and the notorious ‘von’ Dulles brothers. However, with respect, Marrs makes the same flawed basic assumptions as many other historians of the 20th century. He assumes that Lenin and Trotsky were communists, e.g., as opposed to German agents masquerading as communists.
He also views Martin Bormann as a Nazi. This is as silly as viewing Theresa May as a conservative. Just because a politician espouses a particular political philosophy in public, or holds a particular party membership card, it does not mean that this reflects their true views. They may be intelligence assets, or they may be espousing their views under blackmail pressure, or they may have been bought and paid for.
I do not mean to give offense, or be disrespectful to the memory of the late Reichsleiter, by mentioning Martin Bormann and Theresa May in the same paragraph. I am sure that Martin was a much more charming person than Theresa. He was certainly more intelligent. Lenin, who was no more a communist than my late Aunt Agnes, would probably have described Theresa as a “useful idiot”. Superbly house-trained, she will espouse any old nonsense, provided that it comes from the Civil Service.
Movie Review: A View to a Kill (1985, dir. John Glen)
Resuming my regular reviews of the 007 movies (it was difficult to review them from prison!), the next in the series was A View to a Kill, poignantly the last to feature the great Canadian actress Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny. It’s always been a favourite of mine, partly due to the wonderful soundtrack and partly due to the appearance of Patrick Macnee, (Steed, from the Avengers TV series). Macnee, a fine actor, plays Sir Godfrey Tibbett.
The by-play between Sir Roger Moore and Patrick Macnee, who should have been knighted but wasn’t, is huge fun. Christopher Walken plays the really mean, psychotic baddie, Zorin. If you will forgive the pun, he plays a mean psychotic. Zorin could be a senior officer of the DVD, or a Cabinet Office official, he’s such a psychopath.
Willoughby Gray, as the mad German scientist Dr Mortner, is so good you would think Cubby Broccoli had borrowed him from the Germans for a few months. Yes there were evil, mad German doctors like Dr Mortner. I’ve always liked the bit where he gets blown up.
That of course is in the spectacular finale over the Golden Great Bridge. The effects look a bit dated, but trust me, they were state of the art in 1985.
The car chase in Paris is a hoot, as is the madcap chase of the fire-truck through the streets of San Francisco. Maud Adams makes a difficult to spot appearance – she was visiting Roger Moore and seems to have been filmed by accident. Dolph Lundgren wasn’t included by accident, but you almost need to know he’s in the movie in order to spot him.
It’s not the best of the Bonds by a long chalk, and Roger Moore was probably getting a little bit old to play the part. He was almost as old in 1985 as I am now! I like it mainly for personal reasons, and it was not a critical success. It was however well-made, deserved its commercial success and wasn’t a bad finale for those two great 007 stalwarts Lois Maxwell and Roger Moore.
Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.
Read Articles from Michael Shrimpton;
ATTENTION READERS
We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully InformedIn fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.
About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
Comments are closed.