Blair, brave?
From Correlli Barnett
Sir: I wish there were something I could do to help poor deluded William Shawcross (‘The West must be the strong horse’, 30 December). He seems to be just about the only man in England other than our deranged Prime Minister and his ministerial stooges still to refuse to accept that the intervention in Iraq has resulted in a disaster. Moreover, Shawcross’s prescriptions for redeeming the disaster are sheer fantasy. For example, he writes, ‘There should be thousands more US soldiers embedded with the Iraqi army. The same goes, on a smaller scale, for the British.’ But where are these soldiers to come from? Already the commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching American and British manpower to the very limit, if not beyond. Shawcross also tells us that it is ‘shocking that we have only trained a handful of Iraqi officers in Britain. There should be hundreds training here all the time.’ But where does he think the training centres and the training teams are to be found, without impinging on the training of Britain’s own forces?
Shawcross reckons that we should not withdraw from Iraq until after the national elections due in January 2009. How many British servicemen and women is he prepared to see die or be maimed in the next two years?
But perhaps the strongest proof of Shawcross’s derangement is his statement that Tony Blair ‘has been phenomenally brave over Iraq’. For ‘phenomenally brave’ read ‘guilty of catastrophic misjudgment’, for that is the overwhelming consensus of informed opinion (including retired and serving senior officers and diplomats). And in regard to Blair’s dealings with George W. Bush from early 2002 onwards, it would be more accurate to describe him as a moral coward.
Correlli Barnett
Norwich
Unfair on More
From Julian Brazier MP
Sir: Rod Liddle’s article on William Tyndale (‘We are what the English Bible has made us’, 16/23 December) is as unfair to Thomas More as it is unbalanced in praising Tyndale. More did indeed bitterly oppose Tyndale and his tyrannical doctrine: ‘The king is in this world, without law and may at his lust do right and wrong….’ More vehemently defended the Rule of Law, as well as opposing papal interference in English secular matters, and royal interference in religious ones.
Ironically, Liddle claims, ‘Without William Tyndale it is doubtful if there would have been a William Shakespeare.’ Yet Shakespeare based one of his earliest plays, Richard III, on a book of More’s and later collaborated with five other writers to produce an eponymous play lauding More. Suppressed by the Elizabethan censors, it has been recently revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Samuel Johnson’s History of the English Language devotes twice as much space to More’s poetry as to Chaucer’s.
Liddle portrays More as a bloodthirsty, narrow-minded bigot. Yet for many years More showed religious tolerance, and pressed for an English translation of the Bible and reform of clerical abuses. Then, in 1525, some 70,000 German peasants were massacred by their princes, actively egged on by Luther’s sermons: ‘stab, smite and slay all you can …you cannot meet a rebel with reason….’ It was only then that both More and Erasmus called for armed action against Luther and heresy. Eventually More signed six death warrants of Protestant leaders, as Lord Chancellor. They were for brave men, but it was a short list indeed compared to the effusion of blood (Protestant and Catholic) once Henry implemented Tyndale’s doctrine.
Beleaguered by Henry VIII and his allies, More refused an extraordinary invitation from the Emperor of Austria, Charles V, to take the reins of Europe’s mediaeval superpower. Determined to remain in England to the end, he instead turned his back on power, wealth and a loving family, and died for his beliefs. The Illustrated Book of Patriotism quotes his remark at his execution, ‘Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’ Thus began the image of the quintessential Englishman who goes to his death with a smile.
The Anglican clergyman Jonathan Swift saw no comparison between More and Tyndale; for him, More was the only modern figure to compare with the greatest of the Ancients.
Julian Brazier MP
House of Commons , London SW1
British bad service
From Laurence Hughes
Sir: I concur with Rian Malan in his article ‘British banks make me glad to be South African’ (16/23 December). Banks here are no longer user-friendly unless you take the trouble to go into your branch, and there are other aspects of the quality of life in the UK which have also deteriorated in a similar way. Previously we had a charming little post office at the bottom of our road. I now have to walk to the nearest branch in Aldwych, and when I get there there’s a long queue. The local post office in Umhlanga Rocks in South Africa, however, has almost doubled its staff in recent years, which means it can provide more jobs and a better service.
Laurence Hughes
Clifford’s Inn, London EC4
George and the Romanovs
From C.D.C. Armstrong
Sir: Simon Hoggart in his review of the Channel 4 documentary Three Kings at War (Arts, 16/23 December) writes that George V reneged on a promise to provide political asylum to Nicholas II, ‘fearing the Romanovs would foment Bolshevism here’. What the documentary did not make clear was that the original proposal to invite the Tsar and the Imperial Family to Britain was made while they were in the custody not of the Bolsheviks but of the provisional government, which Lenin displaced late in 1917. When the Romanovs were imprisoned in Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks, plans were made (though not executed) by British intelligence to rescue them — plans which the documentary dealt with at some length.
George V may have been guilty of a lack of prescience but he cannot in this case be convicted of heartlessness or stupidity.
Colin Armstrong
Belfast
Comments