Up to London to collect my PhD from the London School of Economics. It is Dr Taki from now on, and Jeremy Clarke can eat his heart out. If he’d stay out of pubs and do some research instead, he, too, might one day get a PhD. Like Dr Gaddafi and Dr Taki. Actually, my paper was on the environmentally friendly method of converting Gaddafis into waste. The ceremony did not last long. Less time than it took me to write my thesis on how to convert a Gaddafi into s***.
Still, Professor David Held pronounced that I ‘cut an impressive figure, have a calm, articulate manner, and make many intelligent and perceptive points’. He also said that I was ‘genuinely popular’. What makes me laugh about the infamous PhD is that one only has to listen to Saif to realise that he never plagiarised anything. His ghost-writer did. Saif Gaddafi, like the rest of his family, cannot string a proper sentence together in English and never will.
That aside, the LSE is not the only institution totally to make a fool of itself by taking Gaddafi blood money. The press has been full of reports about the Rothschild and Mandelson connection to the ghastly Saif, but it was Fiat, the Italian automaker, that first brought the murderer in from the cold back in 1979. I remember being on Gianni Agnelli’s boat off Corfu sometime in May or June of that year, when the deal was finalised: 5 per cent of Fiat for 400 million greenbacks. To be sure, the 5 per cent was bought back after a while, but Gaddafi still owns 7 per cent of Juventus, the Torino football giant, and I’d hate to think what else in Italy.
Uncle Sam, who pretends to be appalled by European greed in cosying up to the bloody dictator, speaks with forked tongue. Both the heads of multibillion-dollar investment funds, Blackstone and Carlyle, Stephen Schwarzman and David Rubenstein respectively, attended the wedding of Mustafa Zarti, a close friend of Saif and the real power behind the Libyan Investment Authority and its $70 billion assets. What I find bizarre is how amateurish and unprofessional the Libyan sovereign wealth fund is, with a lack of investment expertise and bureaucratic inertia ruling the day. Zarti is a real horror, but both Schwarzman and Rubenstein bent and kissed his ring in Tripoli back in 2009, and brown-nosed the vile Zarti in the best Tony Blair manner.
Mind you, the Libyan army is no better. With 2,200 tanks, 2,000 armoured vehicles, 375 fighter aircraft and 50,000 regular soldiers it is still unable to wipe out a ragtag resistance with only light firepower and some captured RPGs. Some 42 years in power and 42 years of threatening the West, and the pox-ridden, phony-medalled Gaddafi can only posture. (While in the UK 200 of his cops are being trained as I write.)
Some of you may remember that as long ago as three weeks Dr Taki suggested that the protestors would prevail only with Western help — not boots on the ground, but with stealth US airpower. Iraq and Afghanistan, however, have made any overt intervention impossible. So much for the Bush and Blair doctrine. I’ll take Nero and Caligula over those two incompetents any day.
And, speaking of incompetence, I have just finished a biography of P.K. van der Byl, the Rhodesian minister of defence under the great Ian Smith. PK was reviled by the British and Western press like no other. Douglas Hurd to this day refuses to admit his part in the deliberate act of policy to bring into power in Rhodesia the most radical government that it possibly could.
The author is Hannes Wessels, who paints a sympathetic portrait of a statesman I always admired, one who knew what murder, evil and corruption Mugabe was to unleash once in power. Yet Mugabe is allowed to visit Rome and Brussels, and his bodyguards beat up gay protestors with impunity. The only thing left is for the LSE to award the murderer a PhD.
Which brings me to the last time I missed a Speccie column. I had a hell of a streak going, never having missed a column in decades, when one was spiked by the then deputy editor — not my fiancée — for describing a certain Jeffrey Epstein as a child molester and sexual pervert. This must have been just as Epstein was being investigated, four or five years ago. I knew all about Epstein. He started out as a bum-boy for someone very rich whose name I won’t mention as he’s married and not a bad sort. Epstein was his catamite but picked up business tricks in no time. We know the rest ad nauseam.
What makes me laugh about the media is how original they are. Every time they mention Prince Andrew they follow up with ‘There is no suggestion….’ Who do they think they’re kidding? The libel lawyers, actually. Ghislaine Maxwell pimped for Epstein since day one, and Bill Clinton and others of his ilk put pressure on a small town judge not to throw the book at him. He should have got ten years, but did less than one in actual custody. It’s awful, almost as awful as Dr Taki’s — as I then was not — column being spiked for calling a child molester a pervert. If only my fiancée had been deputy editor then I’d still have my record intact.
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