Carrying the fight
Sir: Your leading article (Military matters, 17 July) suggests that aircraft carriers are vulnerable to missile and suicide attack. I am not sure where you have sought your military advice, but those who think along these lines usually know very little about carriers.
We should reflect on carriers’ invulnerability, not their vulnerability. The last time that a British serviceman was killed as a result of enemy action in an RN aircraft carrier was in 1945. The contrast with our deployed operating bases in Afghanistan and Iraq could not be more stark. Recently, an RAF Regiment Officer told me of an occasion in 2008 where the British base at Basra was mortared over 60 times in one hour; this was not an isolated event.
If we judge that future threats to our armed forces are more likely to come from non-state actors, the invulnerability of aircraft carriers can only improve. They are hard to find, and even harder to attack. Provided they are handled intelligently, only state actors can threaten them and, as our experience in the Falklands war showed, even they find it difficult.
As we reflect on Afghanistan and Iraq, we may come to question whether it is wise to conduct ‘open-heart surgery’ with large bodies of western boots in the lands of Islam. And if we chose to move to interventions that are more ‘key hole’ in nature, aircraft carriers would play a central role, at much reduced political cost and with much reduced expenditures of blood and treasure — no bad thing in an age of austerity.
Commodore Steven Jermy
Cornwall
Second third man
Sir: Lord Mandelson’s bold assertion of being a ‘good role model’ for gay politicians (‘What Mandy didn’t say’, 17 July) inevitably brings to mind a famous remark by Winston Churchill about an earlier gay Socialist peer, Tom Driberg, MP for Barking until 1974, when he became Baron Bradwell. Driberg, declared Churchill, with just a touch of asperity, was ‘the sort of person who gives sodomy a bad name’.
Be that as it may, wasn’t it odd of Mandy to choose The Third Man as title for his life-enhancing memoirs? Those who remember Carol Reed’s classic movie will know that the eponymous hero was hardly a nice guy. As played by Orson Welles, he was a petty crook who made his living amid the ruins of post-’45 Vienna. His scam was flogging watered-down penicillin, from which thousands of infants died of meningitis. Having betrayed his chums, Harry Lime died memorably, shot by his best friend Golly in the sewers of Vienna.
That might indeed seem a fitting resting place for the last government served by Peter Mandelson; but who in the contemporary context could be cast in the modern role of the honourable, but dim-witted Golly — one of the Eds, Balls or Miliband? Though doubtless our Tony would have been happy to have pulled the trigger, had he but known of the memoir with which the new ‘Third Man’ was going to delight us all?
Alistair Horne
Turville, Oxfordshire
Story with legs
Sir: The excellent article on Paul the octopus (‘Are octopuses just like us?’ 17 July) served to emphasise what I, as a biologist, have always said: the degree of simplicity or stupidity assigned to an animal is merely a measure of the degree of our own ignorance or arrogance about them.
Graham Mogford
By email
Bleeping mad
Sir: In response to Alex Murray’s ‘My Gatwick hell’ (17 July), last summer I was ‘bleeped’ by the so-called metal-detecting device at that airport. I was wearing no metal other than my wedding and engagement rings. Still I was stopped and I was asked to take off my cotton sun hat. I did not make the silly mistake of joking about bombs but politely enquired why the machine had singled me out. The reply was that the beeper goes off at random, picking out roughly one in ten passengers regardless of any metal they might be wearing.
I do wonder how effective this method of security might be.
Julia Pickles
London SW1
Grim down south
Sir: Rod Liddle is right to say that few of us northerners, deranged or otherwise, can afford a train ticket to London (‘A seething pit of northern madness’, 17 July).
This being the case, it must mean that the thousands in the ‘sobbing queues along the Mall… stupid, illiterate, ill-educated…’ must have been southerners.
Ella Hatfield
Skipton
Sir: It could be argued that Rod Liddle (one of the best of the current generation of columnists) insults those of us in the North.
I note that he failed to mention that he comes from the area himself. There are many of us here who agree absolutely with his comments.
Denis Edkins
Redcar
Man of the hour
Sir: Kate Chisholm is not imagining it (Radio, 17 July); there was a short-lived male equivalent of Woman’s Hour during the mid-1990s. It was called The Locker Room and was presented by the singer and broadcaster Tom Robinson. Should its Radio 5 Live successor, Men’s Hour, not be called Man’s Hour?
John O’Byrne
Dublin
Back to the grind
Sir: Revd Jeffrey James (Letters, 17 July) may well be right about Revd Dr Jeffrey John’s views on permanence, fidelity and stability in homosexual relationships (his views on Grindr are still to be published, I believe). However, the point remains: those who chose to grind away will, in all likelihood, know nothing and care less about permanence, fidelity and stability in human relationships.
Graham Elliott
Manston, Kent
Comments