The Gaurdina covers the announcement that our Foreign Secretary was aware in January of the coup plot in Equatorial Guinea. This, of course, was the one that involved well-known mercenaries and Mark Thatcher. The Conservatives are now pushing hard on this on the grounds that this was “unlawful”. It may just be poor writing, but I find it hard to understand exactly what Jack Straw is accused of. He knew it was going to happen? Isn’t that his job? I’d have thought that the diplomatic and secret services’ main purpose was to find out what was going to happen. It seems a little bizarre for the Conservatives – officially against human rights and such woolly liberal/militarist grandiose nonsense – to argue that the government should as a matter of principle save dictators accused of cannibalism.
Mind you, these are odd times for Conservatives. Not only are they discovering that a rightwing US administration doesn’t necessarily agree with them, but even the editor of the Daily Telegraph no longer sees God in the party leader. Personally, Martin Newlands’ change of course at the Telegraph is good news. In the last few years, itb hasn’t so much been a conservative newspaper as a neo-con comic. This is the paper that predicted that Iain Duncan Smith would be prime minister. That it can now say bad things about The Party is all good. Neither Tories nor the rest of us are served by several newspapers who claim to be independent but take a role in internal party politics. Michael Howard did better than he thought by sending Boris Johnson to grovel in Liverpool. It was obviously silly that the head Tory could order an editor about. It was equally silly that the same editor could be a prospective Tory minister , while his paper was meant to be entirely separate from the party. Johnson is now gone from the front bench for other reasons. The Telegraph is dragging itself back towards newspapership from its neocon burst.
By the way, I don’t care about anything else about Boris Johnson.