Thank God Peter Hain never held high office

Peter Hain, I see, has suggested that we come to a negotiated settlement with the Spanish government over Gibraltar, in order to stop them being spiteful by taxing those who move in and out of the territory, and harassing the locals. The remarkable thing about Hain is that he is wrong about almost everything; the worrying thing, in retrospect, is that he was, as a minister under Blair, responsible for giving in to foreign aggression wherever it raised its head. The minister responsible for national cowardice. Thank Christ really senior appointments eluded him.

Meanwhile I hope someone in our secret services is busily stirring up unrest over the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta; I’m visiting Morocco soon and am tempted to raise the Moroccan flag from Ceuta and see how the Spanish react. Spain is Africa’s European enclave, of course, and if the tectonic plates had any sense they would shift the entire country four or five miles to the south.