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Our enemies are right to mock us

Theodore Dalrymple

Wednesday, 11th April 2007

Indignity has been heaped upon indignity. Let us disregard for a moment the tremendous propaganda success that Iran achieved by parading 15 sailors and marines of a supposedly, though self-deludingly, great power whom they captured without a shot being fired, and who within a very short time appeared to be behaving like humble penitents. Any counter-propaganda was bound to be ineffective, even in the home country, because the government has so comprehensively lost its right to be believed on any subject whatever, even when, by accident as it were, it tells the truth.

What happened when the 15 sailors and marines returned home was even more humiliating.

The sub-death-of-Diana hysteria which gripped the tabloids was bad enough. The picture on the front page of the Daily Mirror, of Faye Turney reunited with her daughter with the caption of MUMMY! MUMMY! was enough to make any inveterate enemy of this country laugh with pleasurable — and justified — contempt. President Ahmadinejad was quite right all along (though he didn’t quite put it this way): if you’re going to go all soppy and weak at the knees over the fate of a young mother, and demand special consideration for her, you shouldn’t send her to a war zone. It is well-known that war zones are bad for young mothers.

But this was not the end of the humiliation, or even the worst of it. The decision to allow the former captives to sell their story, followed swiftly by the withdrawal of that permission, gave a correct impression of the uttermost disarray and incompetence in the highest circles. There could, I suppose, be arguments in favour of allowing the captives to sell their stories, though not in my opinion strong ones; and there are arguments against allowing them to do so; but even someone as talented as Alastair Campbell would find it difficult to present what actually happened as a triumph of principle.

The whole debacle was a natural consequence of the profound social and psychological changes that have overtaken Britain in the last few decades, of which Mr Blair is both a symptom and an accelerating cause. When moral grandiosity meets lack of character, no good can result: for the grandiose are always found out by reality, and are left squirming.

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