Night of the Jackal: VV Putin & Ukraine
Our position paper is available here or here.
Otherwise, here it is, in full:
[Shades of 1914.]Night of the Jackal: VV Putin & Ukraine
VV Putin - and it really is quite remarkably difficult not to write that as, ‘Putain’ - is not, personally or as leader of his kleptocratic, kakistocratic regime, bold by nature. Bullies and jackals are never bold: they crumble and scuttle when opposed with firmness. Vladimir Vladimirovich is not bold: he has been emboldened.
That he and his regime view Ukraine in the fashion in which the Pædophile Information Exchange viewed nine-year-olds, is no secret. That he has acted on his desires, has come as a surprise only to those who, after the manner of a Harman or a Hewitt in the 1970s, do not understand in what fashion predators are emboldened.
Blame can, in fact, be assigned.
Mr Wemyss, for one, warned, what time the House of Commons refused to back HM Government over Syria, 1 that the UK had entered thereby upon the future poetically foreseen by Larkin, in which the statues and war memorials looked almost the same, but the numen was fled. Ichabod: the glory has departed. And this was, and is, the more important because the government of the day in the United States was - and is - feckless and invertebrate. The spineless impotence of POTUS is a standing, and markedly unfunny, joke.
The invasion - and it is precisely that - of Ukraine by the regime and troops of the Mugabe of Moskva, is, as of this writing (2 March 2014), ongoing. And it is the direct consequence of Western weakness.
Let us consider, in this centenary year of the outbreak of the Great War, the echoes and overtones, and seek to find the theme in them.
Ukraine has, like Belgium a century prior, now called upon the other guaranteeing Powers to vindicate its integrity and sovereignty from a violation by one guaranteeing Power. No doubt, like Bethmann-Hollweg, Mr Putin regards these guarantees as ‘a scrap of paper’; and like a later German chancellor, is no doubt already - as after the rape of Georgia - preparing a Reichstag rant for his puppet Duma in which he announces that this time, this really was his ‘last territorial demand in Europe’....
It is quite true that Vlad the Invader’s excuses - quite cynically threadbare ones which he hardly expects the world to believe - for committing acts that subject him to Nuremberg penalties, sound very like those of Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War: the assertion of a right of extraterritorial protection over ethnic Russians, Russophils, and Russophones in neighbouring countries, is naturally reminiscent of the Sudeten crisis; and the alleged ‘provocations’ , attributed to Ukrainians, advanced as a casus belli, are markedly evocative of Op Himmler and Aktion Konserven, the fake attack upon the German radio transmitter by alleged Poles in 1939. All the same, in 1914 the Tsarist entanglement in the Balkans, notably with Servia, 2 arose from decades of Pan-Slavism and the Tsarist Russian claim to be the protector, worldwide, of all Slavs and all Orthodox, wherever these might dwell; and the utter balls being talked by the Kremlin of Ukrainian ‘provocations’ and ‘incursions’ to justify invasion and war, follow with despicable fidelity the lying script of the 1914 Wilhelmstrasse of the Second German Reich.
Deplorably, also, the intelligence arms, foreign offices, and governments of the Western democracies, along with the bien-pensant press, the Beltway media in the US, and the Obama’s Own Prætorian Press there, 3 failed utterly to anticipate the current crisis. Worse yet, they palliated the events that clearly signalled its imminence, not least by advancing once again the long-exploded claim that Russia ‘would not do this because it would be economically unwise’: the inanity maintained, fatally, by Norman Angell in and before 1914, which was disproved by the blood of millions. Millions whose blood had been wasted, in ponderable part, owing to Angell’s diabolic theorem, that had paralysed thought and prevented the prevention of war.
The vegetative state of diplomacy in and before 1914 notably failed to take account of Vegetius’ maxim, Si vis pacem, para bellum. Weakness, irresolution, and the failure to draw clear lines and maintain them - in fact, appeasement - was as much a feature of the years prior to 1914 as of those preceding 1939: and with the same result. That HM Government finds itself, in the centenary year of 1914, facing once again disunion (the attempt of a third-rate Tony Hancock impersonator to draw the Kinrick of Scots outwith the Union), austerity, retrenchment, and divided counsels, only to be confronted suddenly by the prospect of a European conflict, is simply appalling; and simply the result of its having forgotten the lessons of the past.
It was Barbara W Tuchman - no red-meat right-winger, she - who noted that a policy of drift, irresolution, and pussyfoot in international affairs did not keep, but rather positively jeopardised, the peace. History establishes this with its usual iron firmness.
Servia in 1914 was, unlike Ukraine, a failed state, and a state that was run as a private fiefdom by institutionalised terrorists, who, controlling military intelligence and the Staff, constituted - as the militarists in Japan in the 1930s constituted; as the ISI in Pakistan today constitute - an imperium in imperio. In the aftermath of the assassination of the Archduke at Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary was more nearly in the right than was Servia. The subsequent Balkan crisis could readily have been localised to the Balkans, as preceding Balkan crises had been in prior years, had HM Government been firm.
Colonel Alfred Redl had been the head of k.u.k. counter-intelligence in Vienna until shortly before the 1914 war. His opposite number in Russian service, then-Colonel Nikolai Batyushin, 4 ran him: for Redl, a closet case with a taste for high living and lots of dosh, was an arch-traitor who had delivered the entirety of Austria-Hungary’s plans and dispositions, its orders of battle and all, to Moscow, and fed Vienna absurd underestimates of Russian military strength. When the k.u.k. forces, as Group B, marched on Belgrade, they were bloodied as a result, for Moscow had provided all Redl’s intelligence to Servia. The parallels to the Snowden situation need hardly be underlined. And nevertheless, the 1914 war could have been localised - even had Russia yet intervened in support of Servia, and the French and Germans been drawn in in respective support of Russia and of Austria-Hungary - had HM Government been firm.
In 1914, Belgium’s integrity, sovereignty, and neutrality was - similarly to Ukraine’s integrity and sovereignty now - guaranteed by the Powers (including the Wilhelmine Reich). Even had the entire Continent been convulsed by a general war between the Entente and Central Powers, the war could have been prevented from becoming a world war had not Germany regarded this guarantee - of which, again, it was one of the guarantors - as a ‘scrap of paper’. And once again, even had the entire Continent been convulsed by a general war between the Entente and Central Powers, the war could have been prevented from becoming a world war had HM Government in London made its position clear.
Simply put, the world’s superpower in 1914, with a global reach and the backing of the Anglosphere it headed, which had kept and imposed a global peace for many generations, had it in its power at every step and stage on the road to a world war, to stop it or to localise it. In July 1914, had HM Government made it clear how far Vienna might go in dealing with Servia, the war could and should have been localised. Had HMG made it clear that Russian mobilisation should cause the United Kingdom and the British Empire to wash their hands of Moscow, France, if not Russia, should have acted so differently as to have stopped the spread of war. Had HMG made it clear that the first party to intervene in the Austro-Servian conflict should thereby cause Britain to side with the rival alliance, not even Berlin, in all likelihood, should have made a fatal misstep. And had HMG made it clear before, say, 1 August 1914 that any Power which violated Belgian neutrality thereby found itself in a state of war with the King-Emperor, it is difficult to imagine that even the Second Reich should have chanced its arm, gambling (as it did) that Britain should stay out.
Barack the First - to paraphrase Patrick Henry - may profit by that example.
This is an old story. The Peace of Amiens, and the antics of Charles James Fox and company, assured the resumption of the wars against Bonaparte. The failure to enforce the terms reached at Versailles and to reoccupy the Rhineland when challenged, made the Hitler War inevitable. Ms Glaspie’s failure to speak clearly, led Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. To paraphrase the old maxim, If you wish war, embrace pacifism. Or as Mr Pyle puts it, In this world, until the Second Coming, those who beat their swords into ploughshares end up doing the ploughing for those who kept their swords.
In 1914, the Cabinet were deep in the toils of Irish Home Rule, had a precarious working majority owing only to Irish support, and knew that if the Government fell, Home Rule should fall with it. Accordingly, despite an abyssal division within the Liberal Party and the Cabinet, they felt - Squiffy in particular felt - it imperative to make any conceivable concessions to his internal opponents, to keep the party and the Government together. (The greatest threat to any Prime Minister - always - does not face him across the Despatch Box, but rather sits beside him on his Front Bench.) Sadly, the faction Asquith was determined to assuage was the ‘peace at any price’ set of Radical Liberals, supported by CP Scott and the Manchester Guardian. 5 The chances missed on 28 July 1914, for example, to stop or localise the war, were due wholly to the doomed attempt to keep on side the peace-at-any-price faction. In a very real sense, the proximate cause of the Great War’s becoming what it was, the first world war, rests upon Morley and Runciman, Harcourt and Simon.
George Lansbury was a dear, sweet man, a patriot, a committed Christian, and an all-’round Good Egg. Cecil, with his ‘Peace Ballot’, was the same. The Labour pacifists of the 1930s, crying for disarmament, unilateral if necessary, and the Tory appeasers of that decade, are - however barking Hitler was - directly and proximately responsible for the Second World War.
Tyrants and adventurers, bullies and jackals, must not be appeased, for that emboldens them. They must be opposed and quite firmly and credibly threatened with consequences if they set one foot out of line, and that line must be clearly drawn: for that gives them pause. More than that, it prevents them gambling, and provoking a situation in which the only available responses are war, or futile protests.
VV Putin has chanced his arm, and it is the fault of Mrs Clinton, and Mr Obama, and Mr Miliband, and Mr Farage for that matter, and many others, including Republicans in the US Congress and Conservative backbenchers in the House. It must now - and much more laboriously, and after blood has been shed - be cut off at the shoulder. The man and his regime must be stopped, now; and, if not deposed, rendered harmless by a Carthaginian peace. 6 (Russia is not, as it fancies itself, the ‘Third Rome’; it is Carthage, Moloch and all. Ergo, delenda est.)
This does not yet mean war, and God forbid it ever should. It does mean extraordinary measures, requiring far more effort and money than should have been wanted to prevent the wretched situation’s arising. It wants the addition of Mr Putin and his entire regime to the Magnitsky List; the cancelling of the G-8 summit; the expulsion of Russia from the G-8; the suspension of all trade and talks; the isolation, diplomatic and economic, of the regime; the freezing or forfeiture of the regime’s assets and those of all who hold with it; 7 and, alas, as these things are porous, more. What that ‘more’ might be, it is not pleasant to say, not least because - not for the first time - it may mean making common cause with persons who, after the manner of the Taliban, then become the next threat with which we in the West must deal. Nevertheless, all options must now be on the table, from a new Stuxnet to arming the bloody Chechens; and all because a gang of fools encouraged the Putin regime, by the sheer supineness of ‘reset buttons’ and G-8 courtesies and appeasement, to try it on.
It had been so very easy to have avoided this. All it wanted was will and wisdom, firmness and attention to the immutable lessons of history. Alas, there are those who never learn - mostly on the Left - thereby dooming even those of us who have learnt, to repeat, bloodily, the old lesson. The gods of the copy-book headings, as Mr Kipling observed, are demanding and inexorable.
_____________________________________
1 Mr Wemyss also stated at the time, quite clearly, that either had there been appalling mismanagement by the Government through the Usual Channels, or that Mr Miliband, as Leader of HM Loyal Opposition, had done something peculiarly terrible. It is acknowledged that Mr Miliband had been given, on Privy Council terms, access to the Government’s intelligence and analyses. If he then reneged, for partisan political advantage, upon a commitment to back the Government, he ought to have been driven from his place and post, from any office of trust under the Crown, and from public life. This matter has never been satisfactorily resolved; and it is increasingly urgent that it be.
2 The name was given an upgrade to the less servile-sounding ‘Serbia’ once that failed state became, accidentally, the Gallant Ally of France and the United Kingdom, in 1914.
3 To the extent that these are not coterminous in any case.
4 Recently made the patron figure of the New Model KGB, the FSB, in place of Iron Feliks. There’s a straw in the wind for you.
5 The more things change....
6 Mr Wemyss very much hopes than any terms imposed upon Putin include a requirement that he always henceforward wear a shirt in public. No one wishes to see the old wrinkly’s decayed abs and sagging dugs. He is not a twilit werewolf of twenty summers, whatever he may think. (Although one does wonder, in light of his regular episodes of ‘gay panic’, if, in his boy service with the KGB, he wasn’t sometimes a raven-who-swallowed, a rent-boy for the Rodina. It’d explain a good deal.)
(Mr Pyle observes that he has passed this footnote on the rather Lutheran principle that the best ways of dealing with the devil are to mock him; throw a pot of ink - or pixels - at the bastard; or, as here, both.)
7 The deposed strongman of the Ukraine is said, by The Times, to have spent shocking amounts of dosh on lights and (how irremediably middle-class) fish-forks. Mr Wemyss cannot resist channelling Lord Jopling in observing that, Of course he was the sort who bought his furniture.
Otherwise, here it is, in full:
[Shades of 1914.]Night of the Jackal: VV Putin & Ukraine
VV Putin - and it really is quite remarkably difficult not to write that as, ‘Putain’ - is not, personally or as leader of his kleptocratic, kakistocratic regime, bold by nature. Bullies and jackals are never bold: they crumble and scuttle when opposed with firmness. Vladimir Vladimirovich is not bold: he has been emboldened.
That he and his regime view Ukraine in the fashion in which the Pædophile Information Exchange viewed nine-year-olds, is no secret. That he has acted on his desires, has come as a surprise only to those who, after the manner of a Harman or a Hewitt in the 1970s, do not understand in what fashion predators are emboldened.
Blame can, in fact, be assigned.
Mr Wemyss, for one, warned, what time the House of Commons refused to back HM Government over Syria, 1 that the UK had entered thereby upon the future poetically foreseen by Larkin, in which the statues and war memorials looked almost the same, but the numen was fled. Ichabod: the glory has departed. And this was, and is, the more important because the government of the day in the United States was - and is - feckless and invertebrate. The spineless impotence of POTUS is a standing, and markedly unfunny, joke.
The invasion - and it is precisely that - of Ukraine by the regime and troops of the Mugabe of Moskva, is, as of this writing (2 March 2014), ongoing. And it is the direct consequence of Western weakness.
Let us consider, in this centenary year of the outbreak of the Great War, the echoes and overtones, and seek to find the theme in them.
Ukraine has, like Belgium a century prior, now called upon the other guaranteeing Powers to vindicate its integrity and sovereignty from a violation by one guaranteeing Power. No doubt, like Bethmann-Hollweg, Mr Putin regards these guarantees as ‘a scrap of paper’; and like a later German chancellor, is no doubt already - as after the rape of Georgia - preparing a Reichstag rant for his puppet Duma in which he announces that this time, this really was his ‘last territorial demand in Europe’....
It is quite true that Vlad the Invader’s excuses - quite cynically threadbare ones which he hardly expects the world to believe - for committing acts that subject him to Nuremberg penalties, sound very like those of Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War: the assertion of a right of extraterritorial protection over ethnic Russians, Russophils, and Russophones in neighbouring countries, is naturally reminiscent of the Sudeten crisis; and the alleged ‘provocations’ , attributed to Ukrainians, advanced as a casus belli, are markedly evocative of Op Himmler and Aktion Konserven, the fake attack upon the German radio transmitter by alleged Poles in 1939. All the same, in 1914 the Tsarist entanglement in the Balkans, notably with Servia, 2 arose from decades of Pan-Slavism and the Tsarist Russian claim to be the protector, worldwide, of all Slavs and all Orthodox, wherever these might dwell; and the utter balls being talked by the Kremlin of Ukrainian ‘provocations’ and ‘incursions’ to justify invasion and war, follow with despicable fidelity the lying script of the 1914 Wilhelmstrasse of the Second German Reich.
Deplorably, also, the intelligence arms, foreign offices, and governments of the Western democracies, along with the bien-pensant press, the Beltway media in the US, and the Obama’s Own Prætorian Press there, 3 failed utterly to anticipate the current crisis. Worse yet, they palliated the events that clearly signalled its imminence, not least by advancing once again the long-exploded claim that Russia ‘would not do this because it would be economically unwise’: the inanity maintained, fatally, by Norman Angell in and before 1914, which was disproved by the blood of millions. Millions whose blood had been wasted, in ponderable part, owing to Angell’s diabolic theorem, that had paralysed thought and prevented the prevention of war.
The vegetative state of diplomacy in and before 1914 notably failed to take account of Vegetius’ maxim, Si vis pacem, para bellum. Weakness, irresolution, and the failure to draw clear lines and maintain them - in fact, appeasement - was as much a feature of the years prior to 1914 as of those preceding 1939: and with the same result. That HM Government finds itself, in the centenary year of 1914, facing once again disunion (the attempt of a third-rate Tony Hancock impersonator to draw the Kinrick of Scots outwith the Union), austerity, retrenchment, and divided counsels, only to be confronted suddenly by the prospect of a European conflict, is simply appalling; and simply the result of its having forgotten the lessons of the past.
It was Barbara W Tuchman - no red-meat right-winger, she - who noted that a policy of drift, irresolution, and pussyfoot in international affairs did not keep, but rather positively jeopardised, the peace. History establishes this with its usual iron firmness.
Servia in 1914 was, unlike Ukraine, a failed state, and a state that was run as a private fiefdom by institutionalised terrorists, who, controlling military intelligence and the Staff, constituted - as the militarists in Japan in the 1930s constituted; as the ISI in Pakistan today constitute - an imperium in imperio. In the aftermath of the assassination of the Archduke at Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary was more nearly in the right than was Servia. The subsequent Balkan crisis could readily have been localised to the Balkans, as preceding Balkan crises had been in prior years, had HM Government been firm.
Colonel Alfred Redl had been the head of k.u.k. counter-intelligence in Vienna until shortly before the 1914 war. His opposite number in Russian service, then-Colonel Nikolai Batyushin, 4 ran him: for Redl, a closet case with a taste for high living and lots of dosh, was an arch-traitor who had delivered the entirety of Austria-Hungary’s plans and dispositions, its orders of battle and all, to Moscow, and fed Vienna absurd underestimates of Russian military strength. When the k.u.k. forces, as Group B, marched on Belgrade, they were bloodied as a result, for Moscow had provided all Redl’s intelligence to Servia. The parallels to the Snowden situation need hardly be underlined. And nevertheless, the 1914 war could have been localised - even had Russia yet intervened in support of Servia, and the French and Germans been drawn in in respective support of Russia and of Austria-Hungary - had HM Government been firm.
In 1914, Belgium’s integrity, sovereignty, and neutrality was - similarly to Ukraine’s integrity and sovereignty now - guaranteed by the Powers (including the Wilhelmine Reich). Even had the entire Continent been convulsed by a general war between the Entente and Central Powers, the war could have been prevented from becoming a world war had not Germany regarded this guarantee - of which, again, it was one of the guarantors - as a ‘scrap of paper’. And once again, even had the entire Continent been convulsed by a general war between the Entente and Central Powers, the war could have been prevented from becoming a world war had HM Government in London made its position clear.
Simply put, the world’s superpower in 1914, with a global reach and the backing of the Anglosphere it headed, which had kept and imposed a global peace for many generations, had it in its power at every step and stage on the road to a world war, to stop it or to localise it. In July 1914, had HM Government made it clear how far Vienna might go in dealing with Servia, the war could and should have been localised. Had HMG made it clear that Russian mobilisation should cause the United Kingdom and the British Empire to wash their hands of Moscow, France, if not Russia, should have acted so differently as to have stopped the spread of war. Had HMG made it clear that the first party to intervene in the Austro-Servian conflict should thereby cause Britain to side with the rival alliance, not even Berlin, in all likelihood, should have made a fatal misstep. And had HMG made it clear before, say, 1 August 1914 that any Power which violated Belgian neutrality thereby found itself in a state of war with the King-Emperor, it is difficult to imagine that even the Second Reich should have chanced its arm, gambling (as it did) that Britain should stay out.
Barack the First - to paraphrase Patrick Henry - may profit by that example.
This is an old story. The Peace of Amiens, and the antics of Charles James Fox and company, assured the resumption of the wars against Bonaparte. The failure to enforce the terms reached at Versailles and to reoccupy the Rhineland when challenged, made the Hitler War inevitable. Ms Glaspie’s failure to speak clearly, led Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. To paraphrase the old maxim, If you wish war, embrace pacifism. Or as Mr Pyle puts it, In this world, until the Second Coming, those who beat their swords into ploughshares end up doing the ploughing for those who kept their swords.
In 1914, the Cabinet were deep in the toils of Irish Home Rule, had a precarious working majority owing only to Irish support, and knew that if the Government fell, Home Rule should fall with it. Accordingly, despite an abyssal division within the Liberal Party and the Cabinet, they felt - Squiffy in particular felt - it imperative to make any conceivable concessions to his internal opponents, to keep the party and the Government together. (The greatest threat to any Prime Minister - always - does not face him across the Despatch Box, but rather sits beside him on his Front Bench.) Sadly, the faction Asquith was determined to assuage was the ‘peace at any price’ set of Radical Liberals, supported by CP Scott and the Manchester Guardian. 5 The chances missed on 28 July 1914, for example, to stop or localise the war, were due wholly to the doomed attempt to keep on side the peace-at-any-price faction. In a very real sense, the proximate cause of the Great War’s becoming what it was, the first world war, rests upon Morley and Runciman, Harcourt and Simon.
George Lansbury was a dear, sweet man, a patriot, a committed Christian, and an all-’round Good Egg. Cecil, with his ‘Peace Ballot’, was the same. The Labour pacifists of the 1930s, crying for disarmament, unilateral if necessary, and the Tory appeasers of that decade, are - however barking Hitler was - directly and proximately responsible for the Second World War.
Tyrants and adventurers, bullies and jackals, must not be appeased, for that emboldens them. They must be opposed and quite firmly and credibly threatened with consequences if they set one foot out of line, and that line must be clearly drawn: for that gives them pause. More than that, it prevents them gambling, and provoking a situation in which the only available responses are war, or futile protests.
VV Putin has chanced his arm, and it is the fault of Mrs Clinton, and Mr Obama, and Mr Miliband, and Mr Farage for that matter, and many others, including Republicans in the US Congress and Conservative backbenchers in the House. It must now - and much more laboriously, and after blood has been shed - be cut off at the shoulder. The man and his regime must be stopped, now; and, if not deposed, rendered harmless by a Carthaginian peace. 6 (Russia is not, as it fancies itself, the ‘Third Rome’; it is Carthage, Moloch and all. Ergo, delenda est.)
This does not yet mean war, and God forbid it ever should. It does mean extraordinary measures, requiring far more effort and money than should have been wanted to prevent the wretched situation’s arising. It wants the addition of Mr Putin and his entire regime to the Magnitsky List; the cancelling of the G-8 summit; the expulsion of Russia from the G-8; the suspension of all trade and talks; the isolation, diplomatic and economic, of the regime; the freezing or forfeiture of the regime’s assets and those of all who hold with it; 7 and, alas, as these things are porous, more. What that ‘more’ might be, it is not pleasant to say, not least because - not for the first time - it may mean making common cause with persons who, after the manner of the Taliban, then become the next threat with which we in the West must deal. Nevertheless, all options must now be on the table, from a new Stuxnet to arming the bloody Chechens; and all because a gang of fools encouraged the Putin regime, by the sheer supineness of ‘reset buttons’ and G-8 courtesies and appeasement, to try it on.
It had been so very easy to have avoided this. All it wanted was will and wisdom, firmness and attention to the immutable lessons of history. Alas, there are those who never learn - mostly on the Left - thereby dooming even those of us who have learnt, to repeat, bloodily, the old lesson. The gods of the copy-book headings, as Mr Kipling observed, are demanding and inexorable.
_____________________________________
1 Mr Wemyss also stated at the time, quite clearly, that either had there been appalling mismanagement by the Government through the Usual Channels, or that Mr Miliband, as Leader of HM Loyal Opposition, had done something peculiarly terrible. It is acknowledged that Mr Miliband had been given, on Privy Council terms, access to the Government’s intelligence and analyses. If he then reneged, for partisan political advantage, upon a commitment to back the Government, he ought to have been driven from his place and post, from any office of trust under the Crown, and from public life. This matter has never been satisfactorily resolved; and it is increasingly urgent that it be.
2 The name was given an upgrade to the less servile-sounding ‘Serbia’ once that failed state became, accidentally, the Gallant Ally of France and the United Kingdom, in 1914.
3 To the extent that these are not coterminous in any case.
4 Recently made the patron figure of the New Model KGB, the FSB, in place of Iron Feliks. There’s a straw in the wind for you.
5 The more things change....
6 Mr Wemyss very much hopes than any terms imposed upon Putin include a requirement that he always henceforward wear a shirt in public. No one wishes to see the old wrinkly’s decayed abs and sagging dugs. He is not a twilit werewolf of twenty summers, whatever he may think. (Although one does wonder, in light of his regular episodes of ‘gay panic’, if, in his boy service with the KGB, he wasn’t sometimes a raven-who-swallowed, a rent-boy for the Rodina. It’d explain a good deal.)
(Mr Pyle observes that he has passed this footnote on the rather Lutheran principle that the best ways of dealing with the devil are to mock him; throw a pot of ink - or pixels - at the bastard; or, as here, both.)
7 The deposed strongman of the Ukraine is said, by The Times, to have spent shocking amounts of dosh on lights and (how irremediably middle-class) fish-forks. Mr Wemyss cannot resist channelling Lord Jopling in observing that, Of course he was the sort who bought his furniture.