Afghanistan: The End Game?

The Army Game used to be a popular weekly comedy on British television. In the early 1960s the British Army wasn't striving to combat foreign insurgencies.

Unlike today. The cost of that effort in Afghanistan has registered 307 on the meter. The cost of dying, as David Cameron has already said, is likely to rise through the summer.

But for how much longer? Less than two years, thinks Professor Paul Rogers from Bradford University's Peace Studies department and a contributor to the Oxford Research Group independent think tank, which specialises in issues of national and international security.

He said: "I think the death of the 300th soldier will remind people of the continuing losses in Afghanistan. Sympathy for the Army across the country does not translate into support for the war. I think there is widespread dismay about why we are still there.

"There is some pretty serious re-thinking going on behind the scenes. The Strategic Defence Review of the whole armed services will look at Afghanistan. They cannot keep 9,000 to 10,000 troops there for another ten years.

"Scaling down is likely to happen all the faster because there is a new Government and, more significantly, because domestic politics in the United States dictates that American tropps have to be withdrawn before the 2012 presidential election. That's the plan; if it works, the British will happily go along with that.

"I meet quite a few soldiers, including squaddies. They will acknowledge that the rate of training of the Afghan Army is very slow and they do not trust the Afghan police - they're too corrupt.

"Although they see themselves as proving themselves to the country, because fighting is what an army is all about, there are mixed feelings about the future. Very sharp intelligence officers I have spoken with know they - the army - cannot win.

"The more troops that go in the more they are seen by locals as occupiers and resistance rockets. In the first four months of 2010 the number of roadside bombs doubled over the same period for 2009. For a larger percentage of Afghans they are occupiers.

"I will be very surprised to see the same number of troops out there in the next two years.

"Had a large peace-keeping force been put in place after the Americans defeated the Taliban in 2001, the situation in Afghanistan might have been different."

Prof., Rogers has consistently argued that the US made an error of judgement after 9/11. Instead of treating Al Qaida as a "trans-national force of criminals" and sending in small specialist forces to bring them back for trial as criminals, it treated Bin Laden's men as members of a terrorist army.

So it looks as though the fate of the British Army in Afghanistan depends upon the election strategy of President Barack Obama. Is that what is known as a 'special relationship'?

Richard North warned in Ministry of Defeat that the British, in a state of denial about Iraq, ran the risk of making the same military and political mistakes made in Afghanistan.

"This is a politicians' war - it has nothing to do with the people. The people did not ask the soldiers to 'invade' Afghanistan, know little about the country and are indifferent to the aims of this Government, even if they are aware of them," he said.

More than 1,800 NATO soliders have now been sent home in boxes, more than 1,000 of them Americans - hence the significance of the US presidential election.

Can anybody without a vested interested seriously doubt that what has happened to Defence Chief Jock Stirrup and now General Stanley McChrystal are but two moves on the chess board of Afghanistan towards the end game?

Cutting the Obvious

The first cut is the deepest, says the hit pop song. Angela Merkel has made the first swipe with her axe, announcing cuts of 80 billion euros in Germany by the year 2014.

Laugh that one off Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. The Germans expect the southern member states of the EU to be no less ruthless. They won't, of course. Where's there's a euro there's usually a wangle. Claiming for bogus olive oil production used to be a favourite scam. Probably still is.

Now Europe waits to see how good a head's man David Cameron is. He says everybody in the country is going to be affected.

Until events prove otherwise I shall take the Prime Minister at his word and assume that this means...

. Abolishing universal child benefits and winter fuel payments to pensioners. In future no British Government will pay women to have babies irrespective of social background, marital status, and record as a good citizen - ie not a screeching neighbourhood drunk or junkie. Universal benefits of every description will be means tested.

. Ending free drugs and needles for junkies. All junkies will be obliged to undertake supervised cold turkey until free of addiction. Ditto alcoholics.

. Cutting payments to quangos - about £43 billion - by at least half.

. Saving approximately £21 billion annually by giving Scotland independence and withdrawing its £13 billion subsidy - that will really give the Scots something to moan about. Similarly suspending the UK's annual payment to the EU of about £7 billion until the EU's books are signed off by auditors. Neil Kinnock, sorry, Lord Kinnock, should be able to advise David Cameron about that matter.

. Scrapping all payments for climate change projects immediately. That alone should tot up to something in the region of £18 billion a year.

. Slashing Overseas Aid Payments, which largely maintain the status quo because its not in the interest of government agencies to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

. Stripping out managerial layers from the NHS, education and social welfare.

. Reducing defence spending. The only way to prevent the boys at the Ministry of Defence wasting mega millions on expensive toys unsuitable for the type of warfare going on in Afghanistan.

. Slashing the numbers of councillors and MPs. Bradford Metropolitan District Council has 90 councillors and five MPs. The cost of the councillors alone is £1.8m a year and rising. All of them get a basic salary of £12,700. Others get extra responsibility allowances ranging from £12,500 to £35,000. Those who don't enjoy ERAs merely have to turn up twice a year to guarantee their money. Nice non-work if you can get it. As things stand this country is a satrapy of the Greater European Empire of the EU, therefore we don't need 650 MPs in the House of Commons as well as European Members of Parliament. Playacting at democracy costs us at least £4 billion a year, maybe a lot more. Get rid Mr Axeman. Public service is just that: providing the public with services they need. It is not a job creation scheme for graduates, political activists and women who think they have a right to a career rather than a desire to serve.

Of course, little or none of the above will actually happen. The Ugly Kingdom, the UK, can rest easy in the grease and gravy of its dependency. But I'm not bitter.

That Picture on the Labour Manifesto...

It conjures up the days of Flanders and Swann, before the Beeching cuts, when Britain was networked with state-owned railways and families could take a steam train into the country, find a sunlit hill, and look towards the future optimistically.

Richard North says it reminds him of railway posters of 50 years ago. It reminds me of the kind of Communist art, call it social unrealism, favoured by Joseph Stalin: bright, sunny landscapes with smiling peasants in collectively-owned rippling wheatfields; the strong arms of bronzed industrial workers; the excitement of electricity pylons.

Only, in the picture on the cover of Labour's manifesto the cosy Beatrix Potter fields are unmarked by either electricity pylons or wind turbines. There they stand: the ideal white nuclear family, without an iPhone between them: mum holding the baby, dad standing with son, gazing into what looks like a nuclear explosion of a sunrise. In the far distance the silhouette of a city on a hill. The caption is: A Future/ Fair for all.

Wait a minute...isn't this picture of an England on which the sun does not set reminiscent of the picture Winston Churchill painted in his Finest Hour speech of June 18, 1940, just before the Battle of Britain?

...If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world move forward into broad, sunlit uplands...

It's a picture of the future in the guise of the imagined past, how things used to be before Windrush docked, before Yorkshire's mill owners imported all that cheap labour from North West Pakistan, before the egregious European Union opened its borders and opened up Blair's Britain to the wondrous benefits of over-population, religious intolerance and cultural diversity.

It's a future devoid of the social anxieties of the present. In short it's a picture of Peter Pan's Never Never land, where no one grows old, needs emergency hospital treatment or the assistance of the police or social workers. A future where youngsters are not abused and killed, where families are functional, crime is low, the weather is always sunny and the trains run on time.

The subliminal message of this piece of kitsch is, of course:- if you, the voters, can withstand the blandishments of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, then we, the Labour Party and you, can look forward to a sunny future.

This must have been the sort of picture that the Ministry Health, under Enoch Powell, showed round the townships of Jamaica in the mid-1950s, when London was short of nurses and bus conductors. While I didn't expect Labour to be honest and publish a picture of a wasteland, nor did I expect them to treat the public like foreigners, although in one sense I suppose we are.

Even people unable to read can see through this picture. Just because they can't spell subliminal or discuss semiotics in their pilates class, they know when they are being sold a pup. Think of all the people who have come back from a shit holiday in Spain, having mistaken the picture on the holiday brochure for reality.

For Labour's dream to be reality Gordon Brown and his merry chairpersons would have to stop immigration, restore marriage as the only basis of family life, withdraw all planned spending on climate change schemes - wind farms, again - and abandon John Prescott's scheme to fill greenfield sites with 300,000 new homes.

The boy in that idyllic picture can grow up sure in the knowledge that he won't be called upon to get his legs blown off in some doubtful foreign war. The baby, assume it's a girl, in the interests of balance, won't grow up hiding her face under a veil.

A future, fair for all: if you can forget the Australian national anthem - Arise, Australia fair - it's almost a line from a party marching song.

A future fair for all

A future fair for all...

Rose Cottage

You will not see ivy clinging to brick walls,
nor the cross-hatching of trellises.
On summer evenings the aroma of honeysuckle
does not feather the abdomen.
Out of blueness that hurts irises and pupils,
helicopters hovering like humming birds and bees,
drop out of the desert,
bringing them back in twos and threes.
They are taken to Rose Cottage,
tagged, bagged, ready for inspection.
While far away in houses with trellises and ivy,
and honeysuckle redolent of memory and heart's ease,
families hedge the roads from dawn,
awaiting the arrival of dead sons.

Johnny Remember Me - Revisited

Gordon Brown is a jammy sod. On the day he finally commits political suicide, urging the credit-crunched West to cough up £60 billion A YEAR to help Third World countries with dubious climate change, news of this foolishness is virtually obliterated from broadcast news by the death of Michael Jackson.

As I write surgeons in Los Angeles are carving up the singer's body and poking about in his innards, looking for clues to explain why his heart arrested. The operation wouldn't look out of place on the video of Thriller.

In the past hour or so I've heard an awful lot of emotional tosh spoken about MJ, principally that he was the first black singer to put black singing/dancing on the world map. Er, anyone ever heard of Sammy Davies Junior? That man was a brilliant singer, dancer, musician, comedian and a reasonable movie actor.

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly did more for popular dance back in the 1940s and 1950s; they could sing and act as well. Mr Astaire gave it elegance, Mr Kelly gave it power and energy. They were, respectivly, the John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier of dance.

As for music, I would say that Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry were much more important historically and musically; they didn't just galvanise fellow black musicians, their influence was trans-Atlantic. Without them no Beatles, no Rolling Stones.

And don't forget a certain James Marshall Hendrix, former US paratrooper and the first Ziggy Stardust who played guitar left-hand and was, reportedly, well hung.

From 20 to about 30, Michael Jackson put out great songs and exciting dance videos. He was a thriller on stage and he knew it. Millions of people got a lot of happiness from his creativity. He had a lot of good people to help him to make the impact credited to him on MTV - Quincy Jones, Martin Scorsese. The increased budgets for his videos were commensurate with his rising fame - from $50,000 for the first to $7,000,000 for Scream. That helped too.

He was a considerable artist the best of whose work will live on. Right now, the dollar possibilities of his demise are being calculated. When Elvis Presley keeled over in 1977, he unwittingly resuscitated his career. He went from mortality to myth overnight, with the media cashing in every anniversary. It's an ill wind.

I wouldn't be surprised if negotiations are underway for the movie rights. Michael Jackson's albums will dance up the charts. Millions of greenbacks will change hands. And Elizabeth Taylor will make a public appearance to express her grief.

In death, Michael Jackson is going to be bigger business than ever. That is neither a jealous nor a cynical assessment. It is what happens in a world where celebrity and entertainment matter more to the media than truth and justice. His death is not a greater tragedy than the murder of Veronica Guerin and the killing of Neda Soltan in Iran.

But I do feel saddened. A shooting star has fallen. When people die, unless they were exceptionally wicked, the good they did far outweighs their human frailties. That's how it should be. I never thought Michael Jackson was a child abuser; but I did foresee that the court case brought against him following the television interview with Martin Bashir would bring him endless trouble.

This afternoon I saw Nick Moran's engrossing film Telstar - The Joe Meek Story. I came away with the Sermon on the Mount plagiarisation going through my head, 'Joe Meek will inherit the earth'. That man created two pieces of music that formed part of the soundtrack of my youth: Johnny Remember Me, and Telstar.

Until a few years ago I had no idea who Joe Meek was, let alone that he recorded those evocative, stirring sounds in rooms above a handbag shop on a North London high street. Three weeks after he killed himself in 1967, a French court released his royalties for Telstar. Like Michael Jackson, he died broke, in a certain amount of torment

At such times the best we can do is take Eric Cantona's advice in Ken Loach's fine film Looking For Eric. "Say non! From your balls!". Non to the bullshit, hypocrisy and sentimentality that inevitably follow the death of a star.

And Michael Jackson's legacy? His video Black and White should be played all over Tehran, throughout Iran, by the opposition to President Dinnerjacket and his turbanned jackasses. Now that would be something.

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Since posting this blog on Friday evening, I have seen, heard and read quite a lot about MJ, his life and music.

I would only like to add the following. James Brown should have been mentioned as an influence on the young Michael's idea of stage-craft. So should the BeeGees, perhaps. They created the disco dance music craze, with that distinctive style of falsetto singing, in the1970s.

The notion that MJ was a one-hit wonder with Thriller is an opinion, but an ill-judged one. Of all the songs I have heard repeatedly this weekend the ones that stand out for me are:- Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough; Billie Jean; Rock With You; Black and White; that rain song from Invincible; I Want You Back, from his time with the Jacksons; You Are Not Alone. I also like the Earth Song.

You'd have to be brain dead to fail to get a buzz from the opening riff of Black and White. I saw Slash from Guns 'n' Roses play it on stage with MJ. We have lift off.

Childhood is an adult idea. You only have a view of your own in retrospect. Children are too busy in their eternal present. I think MJ was happy enough as a child while he was performing, but if the story is true that his father and brothers ridiculed him about the size of his nose, no wonder he did something about it when he was rich enough to do so.

Children need to be loved, disciplined, encouraged and put right when they go wrong; one thing they don't need is ridicule. The humiliation that attends ridicule is never forgotten; it is felt as a physical hurt.

As for Michael Jackson's eccentricities, he wasn't the first famous public figure to act oddly.

Howard Hughes, multi-talented genius though he was, had a phobia about germs that got worse with age. William Gladstone chopped trees and consorted with prostitutes to offer them moral correction. Yorkshire textile magnate and philanthropist Sir Titus Salt had a partality for crows and liked to grow pineapples in his greenhouses. Michael Jackson had a pet monkey. Lord Byron had a pet bear. Alice Cooper loves playing golf.

The Obama Game

Listen: this is probably a waste of time, but not so long ago I used to be a journalist who counted for something. So I post this as a valedictory to the man who, in November 1989, predicted the end of Communism in former Czechoslovakia; who, the following year, sat in the office all night writing Margaret Thatcher's political obituary - against the-then editor's advice - a fortnight before she fell from power; and who, in March this year, wrote a newspaper blog declaring that Barack Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries although, at the time, she was strongly fancied to see him off.

I felt then that Americans were unlikely to endorse a Democratic Party dynasty of Clintons having taken a chance with a dynasty of Bushes, with Iraq as the price they were paying. And if Senator Obama came through victorious in the primaries what elemental force would be strong enough to withstand the wind of history blowing him towards the White House as the first black American President of the United States?

Since then, a lot of dire predictions have been aired. He would win the presidency but be assassinated before he lived long enough to take the Oath of Office in January. Or else he would survive to become the 44th and worst President since George Washington dusted off his wooden false teeth for his first presidential public engagement. I have no idea what President Obama will be like in office; I suspect that idealism will be tempered by pragmatism as the messy imperatives of the real world impinge upon paper policies. If I harbour hope for any particular thing, it is that he wriggles off the hook of the Green lobby and takes a cooler look at global warming whose apocalyptic apostles are the 21st century version of The Weathermen of the 1960s.

But I'm an Englishman who, unlike Sting, has never been to New York or any other town or city west of Donegal. And like the majority of my countrymen I am easily impressed by clean-cut looks, sharp suits and, above all, a big calm confident smile. Why? Because in the collective consciousness of the English these are all post-war attributes of abundance and success, and my generation is still marked by memories of post-war austerity, disillusionment and sense of loss. When Bill Clinton presented himself to a Labour Party conference as though he was a constituency party delegate from America, he had hard-faced arsy party delegates whooping with delight. He put them in good heart and cheered their sectarian spirits simply by looking so full of health and vitality. As a boy, I saw an American military marching band play a jazzed up version of the St Louis Blues as they swaggered and swanked along Brettenham Road in Walthamstow, East London. I had never seen or heard anything like it. The bands I saw at football matches were Metropolitan Police bands and they soberly stood in one spot, often in pouring rain, valiantly playing a medley of light operatta numbers. This was different. Here was life, here was hope, here were pride and magnificence swinging trombones from side to side in the backwater of E17. Americans were like fizzed up bottles of Coca-Cola. They seemed larger than life, fuller of life, than anyone else. Here, we grew up being told what we couldn't do. Our reflex was defensive. In America, it seemed, 'no' was not even a consideration.

So no matter what mistakes President Obama makes - short of World War Three - my feeling is that his election will give the world a much-needed boost of confidence and encouragement. If he turns out to be brave as well, we can only hope that fortune favours the in-coming President longer than it favoured the out-going one.

An Imperishable Power to Move Us All - revisited

The art of political speaking has changed. I won't repeat what I said on a previous blog on this subject, quoting at length from George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language. All of us are aware that political speeches have changed drastically. Here I present six examples over the past 75 years. The first four were made when speeches could actively make a difference.

On March 4, 1933, incoming US President Franklin D Roosevelt gave his inaugural address to the people of America at a time much like our own, a time of stock market collapses, a universal slump in trade, unemployment, uncertainty and a good deal of fear. I had never read this speech before, although I had heard its most often quoted phrase: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

You might like to know what immediately follows that. It's this: "- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Spot the cliche, the hand-me-down phrase. You cannot because there isn't one, not one in the whole speech. The nation waited for words of biblical import - as Americans tend to at times of crises - and the President reached down into his heart and soul and delivered them.

"The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubborness and their own incompetence...Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men..."

Restoring the "temple of civilisation" depended on the application of "social values more noble than mere monetary profit"...confidence was languishing because it could only thrive on "honour, on the sacredness of obligations, a faithful protection and an unselfish performance..."

After outlining how the US Government was to be the agent of change, President Roosevelt went on to say that self-respect would lead to respect for others in the field of "world policy". Society must move as an army, as one, with discipline and a sense of obligation. He concluded by asking for God's help.

Those of you who know more than I do about the ramifications of the New Deal might take issue with the President's ideas; but no one can doubt the heart-felt seriousness of this speech. Gordon Brown referred to its "imperishable power to move us all."

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On December 56, 1956, the House of Commons gathered to hear Aneurin Bevan respond to The Conservative Government's defence of its decision to send British forces to invade Egypt, following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt's President Nasser and the subsequent attack on Egypt by Israel, France and Britain.

I am not concerned here with the nuances of the whole debate, nor with the pros and cons of what became known as Suez. Mr Bevan's speech is the sole object of my attention. Again, I had never read it before.

In the course of his speech Mr Bevan gaily referred to "Freudian lapses" (by a Government Cabinet Minister), Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, "a long story of moral decline" and to "Marianne" - the female symbol of Paris. These references alone, delivered in everyday speech, without a conscious wish to show off, were indicative of the civility of the whole speech. This made the withering satire in it even more impressive. Mr Bevan flayed the Government without once losing his temper or resorting to the self-justifying wisdom of hindsight. His witty use of light irony on such a serious matter made Conservatives sit back and laugh.

He started off in a disarming fashion. "When a nation makes war upon another nation it should be quite clear why it does so. It should not keep changing the reasons as time goes on." He then enjoyed himself inspecting these reasons, one by one, doing so with an air of mounting incredulity, like a health inspector in an appalling kitchen.

The claim that Britain had gone in to deal with all the outstanding problems in the Middle East earned the comparison with Madame Bovary.

What of the claim that Britain had invaded to ensure that Israel withdrew her forces from Egypt? "We went into Egyptian territory in order to establish our moral right to make the Israelis clear out. That is a remarkable war aim is it not? But unfortunately we had to bomb the Egyptians first."

Mr Bevan saved up his most devestating riposte for the Government's fifth reason: to allow the United Nations to intervene in the Canal Zone. It was as if "Mussolini and Hitler had made war on the world in order to call the United Nations into being...If it were possible for bacteria to argue with each other, they would be able to say that of course their justification was the advancement of medical science."

Who today would be able to employ that Kafkaesque image in the certain knowledge that it would be understood by the public at large?

"There is not the slightest shadow of doubt that we have attempted to use methods which were bound to destroy the objectives we had, and, of course, this is what we have discovered...The Government resorted to epic weapons for squalid trivial ends, and that is why, all through this unhappy period, ministers, all of them, have spoken and argued and debated well below their proper form - because they have been synthetic villains. They are not really villains. They have only set off on a villainous course, and they cannot even use the language of villainy."

Some said afterwards that Mr Bevan's was the greatest speech they had ever heard in the House of Commons. It changed behaviour, including the voting intentions of some senior Conservatives. Ah, but that was a time when Parliament was truly sovereign, not merely a cog in the wheel of a gigantic European unicycle .

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There can hardly be a person of my generation (I was born in 1949) who cannot recall a single word or phrase of Dr Martin Luther King's mighty speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, on August 28, 1963. His final acclamation still gives me shivers and brings tears to my eyes: "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

The occasion demanded a memorable speech. A quarter of a million Americans, many of them Blacks from the South, had gathered to demonstrate peacably to the whole world the necessity of the Civil Rights campaign. It was also intended to send a message to the Government of President John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby, the US Attorney General.

What is immediately striking about Dr King's speech is his awareness of its purpose. "We've come here today to dramatise a shameful condition." And this is precisely what he shaped his speech to do, cleverly using the metaphor of wealth associated with the American Dream as a metaphor for justice - the "bank of justice".

Rhetorical devices are also employed for both structure and emphasis, for like the other two speeches this one was written in lively, literate paragraphs. "Now is the time," is used four times at the start to sound the note of urgency. "The swelling summer of discontent of the negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality..." Shakespeare's "winter of discontent" that opens Richard III has been given a twist.

"We can never be satisfied" is repeated four times. "...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream". The "valley of despair" is contrasted to "going up to the mountain". Then Dr King begins his peroration with "I have a dream..." This is repeated no fewer than eight times with gathering force until he hits his final inspiring note, using the seminal image of the old fight against slavery: "Let freedom ring..." He says this six times.

The force of this speech was not aimed solely at changing national policy; its deeper purpose was to emotionalise sterility and release men and women from the bondage of their bigotry.

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I saw Margaret Thatcher only once in real life; it was at the Conservative Party conference in 1979, at Blackpool I think it was, the year she won the first of her three General Elections. What struck me right away was how small she was, like Princess Margaret. Television cameras seemed to make the Prime Minister look more physically imposing than she really was.

By the time she came to make her speech to the party at the Brighton conference, on October 10, 1980, the mood in the country had changed sharply. Interest rates and inflation were rampant, unemployment had gone past two million, manufacturing had been decimated. The Government itself was divided between 'wets' and 'dries', the former believing that economic recovery should not be pursued at the expense of social disintegration. They wanted Mrs Thatcher to do a U-turn and soften her tough economic policy.

The Prime Minister's job was threefold: to rally the party faithful, to impose herself upon her MPs, especially those in the Cabinet, and to offer some assurance to the country at large that she was not going to bend with the winds of change. Her speech-writer Ronnie Miller gave her the perfect image for expressing her intent. "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning."

Admire it or deplore it, the one thing you cannot say about that turn of phrase is that it is not instantly memorable. "The lady's not for turning" itself is tongue-in-cheek, based, as I'm sure it is, on the title of some melodrama. Rather than spit fire and brimstone at her critics witthin the party, Mrs Thatcher rather wittily put them in their place.

This speech had to be sober and reflect the seriousness of the times. It does that. Again, this is a speech composed in literate paragraphs. "Prosperity comes not from grand conferences of accountants but by countless acts of personal self-confidence and self-reliance...The state drains society, not only of its wealth but of initiative, of energy, the will to improve and innovate as well as to preserve what is best..." She called for "wisdom and resolution".

While not uplifting like President Roosevelt's speech, nor scintillating like Mr Bevan's, nor soul-stirringly emotional like Dr King's, Mrs Thatcher's conference speech was without a single hackneyed phrase. It was cliche-free. And though written by another, it bore the stamp of Mrs Thatcher's personality as Prime Minister.

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Recently, I looked over a speech by David Cameron, a long speech of some 4,500 words. The subject of the speech was largely two-fold: to remind the public that Gordon Brown was responsible for creating the conditions of the current economic crisis by permitting unsound policies during his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer; secondly, to set out what a Conservative Government would do to make sure that such a crisis does not happen again.

I was unable to read through the speech with concentration because its format did not invite concentration. It was an ensemble of paragraphs of two or three lines, often a single line. Unlike the liquid in the bottle in Alice in Wonderland, this speech did not invite me to devour it, let alone digest it. Had I done so I doubt if my stature would have altered appreciably, nor my standing.

The passages that I did read, on the theme of Britain in crisis, startled me somewhat gleefully, I must admit, by the inconsistency of the imagery employed to get the message across. The crisis was referred to as a boxing match - Mr Cameron did not intend to "pull his punches". OK, I looked for the KO blow.

Instead I was told that the banking crisis was a problem with "deep roots", presumably implying some history going back a long way. Hmmm. Then I was surprised to learn that the state of the economy had become like a "merry-go-round" out of control, I believe. Try to imagine President Roosevelt using such an image.

From there Mr Cameron told me that the economy was "a house on fire". Then he implied it was like a foundering ship because the time had come to "man the pumps" - unless he was suggesting that we all don plimsolls and get a spot of exercise to cut down on obesity and, at the same time, reduce our carbon footprint. At the point where he referred to the state of the affairs as a house of cards, ready to come "tumbling down", I must admit I gave up.

Had I written a poem about the state of the nation and used the same language in such a shoddy manner I would have been taken to task by friends who expect better of me. Why, then, should the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition - a serious-minded and sincere man he would have us believe - why should he be allowed to get away with bad prose in an important speech? His intention was to blame Gordon Brown for the mess we are in; but couldn't he have followed the example of Aneurin Bevan and done it with a little wit and panache, offering us at least the relief of laughter? You may also ask why he didn't deliver it during an emergency debate in the House of Commons - but that's another matter.

Clearly this speech had been assembled to be delivered to achieve a particular effect. Later, I watched Mr Cameron deliver part of it on television. He looked and sounded plausible; mind you, the extract I saw contained none of the mixed metaphors and cliches decribed above.

This was a hybrid bicycle of a speech, designed to sound good rather than achieve anything practicable. I could imagine Mr Cameron after he delivered it, pushing it squeakily home, with the odd piece falling off with a thunk!

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This section was added the night after Barack Obama's acceptance speech as President-elect of the United States. The quotes from his speech are in keeping with the inspirational quality of the first four. Although high-flown, there are no mixed metaphors, no hand-me down cliches. Instead, the Senator has echoed words and phrases embedded in the collective cultural consciousness of America - from Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy and Sam Cooke.

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer...

"And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president too.

"And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

"To those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you...

"This is our time, to our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can."