How can it be that we’re two weeks on, and there’s still been no media witch hunt to identify the (I choose my words carefully) cretinous meathead who decided to threaten Ecuador with the storming of their London embassy if it didn’t expel Julian Assange?
Has there been a more shaming diplomatic fiasco for Britain in the past decade? Post-farce, this country stands revealed as in thrall to an undemocratic cabal, which quietly dominates every aspect of public life. I refer, of course, not to the agents of American military industrial hegemony, but to bastards even worse. That’s right. Lawyers.
On paper, the Foreign Office maintains both that William Hague sanctioned the threat, and that it wasn’t actually a threat at all. This is an explicable line for officialdom to take, and certainly sounds better than admitting the more probable truth, which is that he simply wasn’t paying that much attention to any of this Assange nonsense and nor was anybody else, because hadn’t you noticed, there’s a war on.
In the real world, though, you can bet the lawyers were in charge, and still don’t even really understand what they did wrong. ‘But the law says we can revoke embassy status!’ they’d protest, baffled to the end. ‘It’s the law! The law!’
Mixed up in this sentiment, I reckon, you’ll find absolutely everything that is wrong with modern Britain. A sweeping statement? So sue me. You can’t? Well, it doesn’t matter then, does it, which is my whole point. The problem here is a creeping legalese; an increasing, ingrained sense that the letter of the law trumps all, and a naked confusion upon discovering that it sometimes doesn’t. MPs’ expenses, health and safety, raging banker immorality, the reasons why our trains are so crap, the inability to get shot of Abu Qatada, the farce of school admissions — this is a game that anyone can play, feel free to add your own.
Through deference and laziness, we’ve traded the rule of law for the tyranny of laws. Our failsafe has become our excuse for not thinking. On a national level, the computer says ‘no’.
This is a peculiarly British disease. We blame Europe, as a general rule, but nowhere else seems to have had an immune system weakened enough to get so sick so fast. I’m in Germany right now, with my wife’s family. You want to see the playgrounds in Germany. You know all those barriers, warning signs and patches of squidgy concrete we have all over ours? There’s none of that at all. And they’re not lax about rules, the Germans, famously. What they lack, I think, is a legal culture which does their thinking for them. American playgrounds, now I think of it, are much the same. Europe has rules without the lawyers, America has lawyers without the rules. We have both. It’s a perfect storm of jobsworth dumb.
Domestically, this is bad enough. Once we start outsourcing our diplomacy to lawyers, we’re actively in crisis. When you have laws rather than common sense, morality or anything else, the temptation is not merely to rely on them, but to game them. Alarm bells should start ringing. Although, seeing as there’s no law that says they have to, they probably won’t.
I have seen lions. They are unequivocally lions. Somebody in Essex is a moron.
But here’s a funny coincidence. Last week, while the inhabitants of a St Osyth caravan park were peering at something (a cat? A dog? A squirrel?) which they wrongly believed to be a mysterious big cat, I was high on the banks of the Bodensee in southern Germany, staring down at the waterline, doing exactly the same thing. It was brown and beige, with a ringed tail and a flank spotted like a leopard’s.
‘It’s a wildcat!’ I trilled, excitedly.
‘It’s a cat,’ said my wife.
‘But it’s massive!’ I said.
‘It’s a massive cat,’ said my wife. ‘It probably lives next door.’
I didn’t want to believe her, and still don’t. Peculiar, the atavistic urge to believe in improbable big cats. In Britain, at least, there almost certainly aren’t any. Sightings happen relatively frequently, but actual big cats — or big cat corpses — turn up only rarely, and when they do they’re invariably revealed to have been on the loose for mere days or weeks. Sometimes I wonder if it’s simply because we’re so used to seeing domestic cats in a domestic setting, curled up on a sofa. But seen in the true outdoors — not in a garden, but rather in a field or in my case, against a lake — even Tiddles moves like the primordial jungle cat within.
And yet, and yet. Think how long it took for anybody to film a snow leopard. Plus, I always think of a story somebody told me when I lived in South Africa, about a normal leopard which suddenly turned up — much less improbably — in a township near Johannesburg. It was taking livestock and scaring people, they said, so the authorities dug some special leopard traps. And, as the story goes, caught eight.
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