The Exile

Here's a rum do: the Exile was getting some serious hits from some very interesting quarters over the weekend. The House of Commons, all three political parties and several newspapers all showed up on the hit counter. This has never happened before and the Exile would like to welcome them, one and all, to the site.

What were they reading here? Some good, class based analysis from a Scargellite socialist? Nope, what they wanted to read was this post about a brainless bit of Tory fluff who comes over as good to fuck, but good for fuck all else.

What the Hell - welcome one and all.

Tony Blair seems to be trying to ensure that his view of the way that the world should be ordered becomes the great power view. He argues that "progressive pre-emption" should be the order of the day, and to help this along the United Nations' Security Council should be expanded to 25 members, none of whom would have a power of veto. He further believes that the post of Secretary General should be far more powerful than at present.

This has been taken as a sign that Blair wants the post for himself, but a more likely explanation is that he sees himself as the father figure of a new, globalist order, where it would be much easier to obtain the Security Council's "consent for future military aggressions".

It looks to this writer like a recipe for disaster. If Blair got his way the U.N. would probably split, with the bulk of the Third World going off, possibly with Russia and China in tow, to form a new international body that had the concept of state sovereignty at its root. The globalists would be left with Western Europe, Australia and North America: hardly a decent blueprint for peace on earth and goodwill towards men.

Little Green Soccer Balls now has a posting on this theme. True to type they are trying to muddy the waters by claiming that the Absent Without Leave (AWOL) figures are the same as usual. That may be the case, but we are not talking about AWOL, are we? The matter under debate is desertion, and that is not the same thing. When a soldier goes AWOL he intends to return; when he deserts he doesn't.

The desertion rate has climbed dramatically since the war against Iraq began. The only people who are interested in the AWOL figures are those who want to confuse the gullible. Still, a good try, lads, and it's just a pity for you that some of us can spot old wank when we see it.

Various hand shandyist types are now engaging in some pretty frantic wrist movements over the latest massacre in Iraq. Basically, the Americans did as imperialists have done throughout history: they retaliated for the death of one of theirs by killing some natives; in this case about 24 innocent Iraqis.

Let's start from the beginning, shall we, lads? Massacres are what guerrilla warfare is all about. They serve two basic functions:

1. If committed by the imperialists, they provide a useful recruiting tool for the insurgents. There is nothing like a little bit of slaughter to get the guerrilla ranks swelling up. The Americans can send their recruiting sergeants around the poor districts back home, but the best recruiter that the guerrillas have is a bit of Fallujah or Haditha every few weeks. Luckily for them the Americans have been eager to oblige, eh lads?

In fact, so important is the odd imperialist massacre that guerrillas have been known to provoke them in the past. This is because they tend to leave the folks back home disgusted with the war and increases the clamour for an end to it all. Yes, lads, a massacre like Haditha not only leads to more insurgents it also leads to a stronger anti-war movement in imperialism's heartland: two for the price of one you might say.

2. Guerrillas carry out atrocities as well. For the guerrilla the aim is to force people to choose sides. The worst problem that any insurgency has is the folk who want to remain neutral. Which way will they go? Will they choose us or them? Will they betray the guerrillas? Far better to just stonk them - some will side with the guerrillas, anyway, and at least you know where you are with the rest.

Looking to the future, the Exile reckons that direct imperialist atrocities will decline as the death squads take over, a la Central America in the 1980s. The insurgents will continue bombing seven colours of shit out of anything that looks dodgy to them, and the whole country will come to resemble a charnel house.

Unlike Central America, this one won't work. The guerrillas will continue culling Americans, and the folks back home will continue to sicken of the whole adventure. They will start to believe that the Iraqis are ungrateful for all America's sacrifice and shit like that. It's bollocks of course, but that is what they will say. Then they will demand that America leave the natives to their own devices.

That is the thing about guerrilla war. The guerrillas either win by breaking the imperialist's economy, or they so sicken the enemy that he brings his troops home. Either way the guerrilla battle flag then flies over the ruble of the main city, and in this case the main city is called Baghdad.

You, and warmongers like you, then get to feel like dog shit.

Guido Fawkes managed to get one bit of gossip slightly wrong when he claimed that the "Totty count includes Louise "Barking" Bagshawe," for one safe Tory seat. She may very well be up for the Conservative nomination, but her nickname at Oxford was "Barker" and not "Barking".

A scurrilous and no doubt unfounded Oxford rumour has it that Louise Bagshawe's favourite sexual position was doggie style, and that she would complain if her partner decided he wanted it some other way. For this reason she was known as "Barker" throughout the university, and the name stuck afterwards. The denizens of the Oxford Union bar would occasionally shout "woof-woof" when she came in to hack them, or make low growling noises in their throats. The story goes that she never twigged what they were on about.

After she began writing a union drunk did a textual analysis of her first handful of books. Sure enough the sex is doggie style.

Barker was involved in a Yahoo! discussion group about three years ago, and managed to drive quite a few other people out of it with her strident pro-Americanism.

Basically, she had lived in the USA for that long that she had gone native and had become a cheerleader for Bush and the GOP. She was given to calling opponents of the war against Iraq "liberals," which was rather funny when you consider that her main tormenter was a Monday Club hanger and flogger.

She claimed that she was as American as she was British; something which the punters in whatever constituency that selects her may wish to know.

She further claimed that the American soldiers who were killed in the war's early days - the ones displayed on TV - were the victims of a war crime, even though it was obvious to the former army officers on the site that they had been killed in action.

Viewed overall, Barker came over as a person who was not much interested in debate. On the other hand she could just be an old fashioned girl who believes in America, George W. Bush and taking it like a bitch.

Update: Guido has changed his posting and now gives the correct monicker.

A few days ago I commented on a smear operation that was being run against Iran. The wheeze involved persuading the credulous that Iran was planning to force Jews, Zoroastrians and Christians to wear a distinctive strip of cloth to set them apart form the rest of the population. The story was a load of old wank from the word go, but it was getting picked up by various organs in the way that a black propaganda piece should.

Then it all began to fall apart and now the National Post, the paper that started it all, has been forced to retract the story. Why did the tale come unravelled? Largely thanks to the bloggers who saw it, laughed and then collectively wiped their arses on it.

Juan Cole posted an essay on the 20th. So did I come to that, but whereas I just smelled a rat, Dr. Cole actually produced some evidence of the creature's existence. By the 24th Justin Raimundo had researched the smear and rolled out a nut-cracking article that must have left any warmonger who read it clutching his knackers and howling for mercy.

Between those two dates just about everyone else piled in the give the 'mongers a good kicking, so can we conclude that the good guys have won one? Yes, but with one caveat. The caveat is that a lot of knuckle-draggers will have the story lodged somewhere or other in their skulls. Thus if and when the USA does go to war with Iran, they will dredge up this tale and nod their heads in agreement with the lunacy.

The war party are letting rip with one lie after another. Some of the lies will stick in the skulls of sufficient people to allow a war to begin - that seems to be the plan.

Can we counter every porkie that these creatures tell? Probably not. . . That is why the left should just fall back on the old adage that when the bosses tell you that the sun is shining, you grab your umbrella. We just work on the assumption that they lie as a matter of course, and that way we are never caught out.

This is a good laugh. Tony Blair flew into Baghdad and claimed that the "Iraqi people [are] able to take charge of their own destiny and write the next chapter of Iraqi history themselves".

He is quite right, for once, as the Iraqis have divied up the government ministries into warring fiefdoms where death-squads rule the streets. Baghdad itself is so dangerous for the occupiers that Blair couldn't spend the night there: he had to be whisked in and out by helicopter, such is the fear of the guerrilla forces.

The Americans have given up any hope of defeating the Iraqis and are now floating the idea of containment to try and prevent them from taking over. The idea is to retreat to the new superbases, but how they do that and still remain able to maintain their day to day control over the puppet forces is anyone's guess. If they can answer that question, the aim would probably be to hold Baghdad and the oil lines. The guerrillas would have the rest.

The usual gang that could be expected to support the West's aims, the local middle class, are fleeing the country as fast as they can. They were about the only hope for a secular, capitalist Iraq, and and that hope visibly fades with each aircraft that takes off from Baghdad airport. Soon the country will be left to the nationalist guerrillas in its Sunni heartland and feuding militias in the Shia zone.

The Iraqis are certainly taking charge of their own destiny, and they will not establish the state that Blair wants.

Something is going wrong when a Scargillite socialist has to explain to the Conservative Party just what is going wrong with their world. The Tories have now lost three elections in a row. Their local election results were good, but not brilliant, and the the polling figures show them stuck behind Nu-Labour. Can the party recover? For that to happen the Tories need to get back to the past as quickly as possible.

For most of the twentieth century the Conservatives represented the interests of the English upper middle-class, the A/Bs as the advertisers call them. With that bedrock of support they could then appeal to other groups, based on whatever pragmatic policies seemed right at the time. Of course those policies could never run counter to the interests of the upper middle-classes, but that still left plenty of scope for political gaming.

Thus when the Liberals became the temperance party in the late nineteenth century, the Tories were quite happily to recruit in the pubs. Until the middle of the last century the Tory vote in Scotland and parts of Northern England was an Orange vote. The Orange drum was never banged as loudly in Manchester as it was in Glasgow, but a Protestant Mancunian was as likely to vote Conservative as he was to support Manchester City. For their part the Catholics voted Labour and cheered on Manchester United. Finally, the 1950s Tory governments used to taunt Labour that they, the Tories, had built more council houses than had the previous Attlee government.

This policy of pragmatic opportunism helped ensure that the Tories remained as the natural party of government. During their rare periods in opposition the Tories could cheerfully oppose most of what the government of the day proposed. Once the swings and roundabouts of politics brought them back into government again, they would accept those bits of recent legislation that seemed either popular or necessary and jetison the rest. Then they carried on governing.

Two things happened to ruin this cosy arrangement. The first was the introduction of party democracy to the Tory Party. It probably seemed like a good idea to dispose of the magic circle of party grandees that had previously chosen the leader, but this system of informal consultation had kept the party firmly in responsible hands. Once it had gone, then sooner or later the party would fall into the paws of its rank and file, the suburban lower middle-class.

The election of Margaret Thatcher may very well have owed more to a desire in the parliamentary party to see the back of Edward Heath, but it did lead directly to something that the Tories had never had before: an overt ideology. That is not to say that the party did not believe in anything prior to 1979, but what it didn't do was put forward any type of ideology that could be used to test a government's policies against. The Thatcherite ideology, basically a Whiggish mix of low taxation and limited government, was guaranteed to appeal to the party's membership, but it has been the bane of the Conservatives ever since. Whatever policy the leadership comes up with is now bound to run up against a group within the party who will claim that the policy runs counter to the ideology. In the past the Tories could sit back and watch as the Labour Party tore itself to pieces from time to time as a result of some ideological battle: now the Conservatives are doing exactly the same thing.

Secondly, by the late twentieth century the Tories were rapidly becoming the Nasty Party; the party of rancid people who thought that chaining female prisoners up when they were about to give birth was a good idea. Via policies like this, and through the personalities of the people who defended those policies, the impression was given that the Tories were, frankly, not the type of people that anyone else wanted near them.

During the Thatcher years, the Tories were driven into extinction in Scotland, Wales and most of Northern England. Most of that was due to their anti-industrial agenda, but that does not account for their failure to recover after Thatcher was driven from office. That failure, a failure that has now covered almost a decade, to say nothing of four Conservative leaders, probably owes more to the nasty taste that modern Toryism has left in the British people's mouths.

To make matters worse, the party's leadership has decided that modern Conservatism needs to reflect the face of modern Britain; thus the recently issued A-List of favoured parliamentary candidates is made up of a strange gang of minor personalities, very un-Tory women and plain weirdos.

This looks set to create a new bout of civil war as those who have found themselves out in the cold seek to reverse this decision. The fact that the losers are as unappealing as the winners doesn't seem to have entered anyone's head.

The end result of all this ideological infighting is that the Tory Party has been reduced to a Southern English regional party. To make matters worse, they no longer represent the metropolitan elite, instead they are seen as the voice of the "narrow-minded, crass and insensitive" denizens of the new towns and nasty suburbs.

So what is the modest proposal? Namely that the Tories stop bothering about representing the changing face of modern Britain and select candidates who basically appeal to enough British people so that a Tory government can be formed. This would probably mean ample-bottomed, middle-aged, white businessmen and professionals. Men who have gravitas and who have made it, or, more probably, have inherited it. The Tories should stop looking for people who want to become somebody by entering the House of Commons in other words. The proper place for those people is as county councillors and party workers. They can spend their lives drawing up motions for the party conference that will never be acted upon, and good luck to them.

Secondly, the Tories should stop emulating the other parties and should drop their overt ideology. They would be far better advised to go back to the past and simply oppose the government's actions. They need to look for divisions in the government ranks that they can exploit - hardly a difficult task in 2006 one would have thought.

Will they have the wit to do this? That question must remain hanging in the air for the time being.

Neil Clark seems to have got involved in an interesting little spat with the former warmonger, Johann Hari. Neil wrote Hari on an unrelated matter and got this reply from the ex-'monger:

Yuck. I really have no interest in engaging with you on any level. You believe the state should kill its own citizens in peacetime using the death penalty, so please don't offer me any lectures on anything, ever.

Now, Hari's nonsense actually raises one interesting point: why can't a socialist also believe in capital punishment?

The point is that socialism is about collectivising the economy and nothing more. We socialists may debate how this is to come about, should argue about whether old style nationalisation is better than a system of co-operatives, but that is the only debate that should take place within socialism.

Other matters need to be debated, but not within the socialist movement. Cuba is a socialist country that uses capital punishment. I wish that they didn't, but that is not the point: the point is that socialists can believe in old rope.

For that matter, Cuba used to forbid the entry of homosexualists into the Communist Party, and the German Democratic Republic used to use electro-shock aversion therapy on them. One may say that this is wrong - alternatively one can believe that it is a good idea - but it is impossible to say that it is anti-socialist. The GDR was a fully collectivised economy and Cuba still is.

Let the socialists get back to debating what they should be debating: how and in what form should the economy be collectivised and run. The rest can be ignored.

HBO is to screen a documentary shot entirely at the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad's Green Zone. It is the main casualty station for troops wounded in Iraq. By all accounts it makes harrowing viewing.

The Bush regime has so far managed to keep this war off the television news. There has been little shown of dead and wounded Americans and even the coffins arriving home have been mostly screened from public sight. Of course, lots of images are available on the web, but it is unlikely that the average knuckle-dragging couch potato will have the wit to look for them.

Now that 60% of Americans have decided that the war was a mistake, we can expect more films like this. The media follows public opinion, it does not shape it.

Nevertheless, documentaries like this are of use because they might encourage the public to start demanding that American troops be withdrawn form Iraq. The opposition to the war may be strong, but it is still formless in the USA. If Baghdad ER helps that opposition to take shape, then it will have served some good.

The Americans are going to use National Guard troops to try and stem the flow of illegal migrants into the USA from Mexico. The Mexican government has threatened to sue the Americans if any migrant is arrested by those troops.

This idea seems very, very dubious. The Mexican government has a legitimate interest in seeking to protect its citizens, but how the Americans defend their border is a matter for them. Mexico refused to support the American war against Iraq by citing the principle of non-interference in other countries' sovereign affairs: now the Mexicans are threatening to break that principle by telling the USA how to behave within its own borders.

Furthermore, the Mexican record on the country's southern border is hardly one that will stand too close an inspection. Mexican troops are used to guard the border with Guatemala and there are constant allegations of robbery, rape and other assaults committed by those security forces on migrants from the south. The last thing Mexico wants - but probably deserves to get - is a CNN television crew inspecting that southern border.

May has become the third bloodiest month for Tony Blair in Iraq with seven soldiers already dead. The British are based in the South in an area that we were told was friendly to imperialism. It was nothing of the sort, rather it had a Shia population that loathed the previous regime and wanted to see it gone. Now that it has, the collection of mullahs, warlords and tribal chieftains who moved in to fill the vacuum want the British out of their way.

No doubt the warmongers will be screaming that this marks a lack of gratitude on their part, but as anyone who has a level of awareness slightly above that of a lobotomised goldfish will know, gratitude is the behaviour of dogs. So buy a nice doggie, my little warmongering friends. Feed and water it regularly and take it for walkies. The mut will be so grateful that it will follow you everywhere and be your one true pal.

Men are not the same. The British have served their purpose and now the new rulers of Southern Iraq want them out.

The Blairite response is to take 30 Sea King helicopters that have been mothballed for years and bring them back into service. The army is complaining that their slow speed will make them "sitting ducks" for any kid with an RPG-7 rocket launcher.

It is quite possible that the Iraqis will decide that the British are an easier target to take out than the Americans. If Britain could be removed from Iraq, then the whole of America's ground supply lines and overland escape route will be in their hands. It would be the end of the Iraq adventure.

The problem is that it would also be the end of a big chunk of the British army. Get the troops out now!

It now looks as if the Nu-Labour Party is gearing up for a bloody Civil War. Peter Mandelson, the former cabinet minister, who was appointed by Tony Blair to a cushy £150,000 sinecure by Tony Blair in 2004, has become the chief strategist for a group of Blair's ultra loyalists. It is being mooted that John Reid will mount a challenge to Gordon Brown when Blair finally decides to call it a day. However, the presence of Mandelson in the lineup might suggest that Blair actually fancies retreating to a bunker and daring his challengers to come and get him.

It could be that the Blair strategy is to actually force a civil war in the hope that it will destroy the party. Thus Blair would be in a position to offer his support to a new left-Tory, Liberal Democrat and Blairite residuum alliance. His aim would probably not be to act as David Lloyd-George did at the end of the Great War - it's doubful if he would want to head a largely Tory administration - rather it would be to get rid of both the traditional right on the Tory backbenches as well as the old left from the Labour Party.

If this is the aim then Mandelson is just the right creature to bring it about. He is loathed by Brown because 12 years ago Mandelson first offered his support to Brown in that leadership contest, only to desert him in favour of Blair.

The Blairites were trying to temp Brown with the offer off a 12-month programme, followed by a handover, but that sort of deal was cut in 2003 and Blair then renaged on it. Brown is unlikely to be suckered twice, and the entry of Mandelson into the ring suggests that Blair knows this.

The next move is Gordon Brown's. If he does not fight, then the leadership could pass to a Blairite. If he does move now, Blair will probably try to destroy the party as he leaves it.

Following on from the Mark Oaten lunacy, word is emerging of the slightly more normal predelictions of another Lib-Dem MP.

This bloke liked to visit a shagging shop in Paddington where he would pay one of the trollops to do a dump in her knickers. These he would then carefully fold and take away in his briefcase.

I accept that normal is a relative concept, especially since we are talking about the Lib-Dems, but at least this man's not a poof. Does anybody know his name?

Update, 4.30am:

A reply has been received from my Lib-Dem source in London. Alas he is unable to answer the question, pleading in his own defence that Lib-Dem scandals come so thick and fast that keeping count is an impossiblity.

However, the e-mail does go on to relate this juicy bit of tittle-tattle:

Today is Mothers' Day in Mexico. Although it is not an official public holiday most places will either be shut or running a skeleton service. Mexicans like a good excuse not to show up to work and taking mum out to lunch is as good a reason as any.

So, every eating house will be full of these enormous clans who seem to compete with each other in their purchases of large, vulgar floral arangements. Come late afternoon and the men will start opening bottles back at their shacks to drink a toast to mumsie. By evening those same will all be pissed out of their skulls, but that's Mexico for you.

For the other 364 days of the year the women will be treated as brood mares and skivies, but on this one day they get to forget all that.

Simon Heffer has drawn an interesting parallel between R.A. (Rab) Butler in 1963 and Gordon Brown today. Basically, as Heffer reminds us, Harold MacMillan wanted to hand over the Prime Minister's office to Alec Douglas Home, a move that was opposed by Enoch Powell and Iain Macleod both of whom supported Butler's candidacy.

Heffer does not mention the fact that Butler, Powell and Macleod all agreed that none of them would serve under Home, and that this fact was conveyed to Macmillan before he went and tendered his resignation to The Queen. Macmillan understood just how brittle Butler's mettle was, and called the bluff by recomending that Her majesty send for Home. Once this was done Butler agreed to serve in the government headed by Alec Douglas Home and the whole plot to install him as Prime Minister fell apart.

The whole affair leads to one of the great questions of mid-20th century British politics: would the Tories under Butler have lost the 1964 General Election to Harold Wilson's Labour Party? Wilson only won by a whisker, and his campaign was helped by having a remote, diffident figure like Home as his opponent.

The point is that Butler showed that when the chips were down he didn't have the bottle to fight and Brown is doing the same thing now. As Heffer says, if he had told Tony Blair to take his hook or resigned on the spot, then Blair would either be out of office now or the party would have a bruising leadership battle on its hands. Such a battle would almost certainly lead to a Brown victory, given the desire in the Labour Party to have any leader but Blair.

Heffer goes on to describe Brown's behaviour as "undignified, mincing, cowardly, indeed downright unmanly. . .". That strikes this writer as a bit below the belt, and is clearly a reference to Brown's alleged homosexualist tendencies. However, those allegations were pretty well refuted when the full list of Brown's conquests - including one rather lovely Romanian princess - were revealed. Besides, even if Brown was a poof, he still looks like a Labour leader, as opposed to the git at present installed who comes over as one of Mark Oaten's rent boys.

The problem is that although Brown is a NuLab man, he still has some roots in the Labour tradition. The unions and the party's rank & file - such as it is - can expect to be able to talk to him seriously. That is not true of the Blairites that pretty boy Tony has just promoted. The longer Blair remains in office the more chance they have of seeing one of their number elected as party leader.

If Gordon Brown wants to be sure of leading the party and country, then he had better move quickly. Otherwise Lady History will dismiss him just as she dismisses Rab Butler.

A Sussex farmer named David Lucas has found himself a nice little side earner: he makes gallows for export. Most punters are in Africa, and he produces a single gallows, of the type that used to stand in every English market town, and a gallows that can accomodate five or six customers at a time and which sits on a trailer. The cost is £12,000 for the former and £100,000 for the latter.

All his gallows are made out of "best English oak" and are guaranteed not to have any spring in them: that news must surely be of great comfort to the condemned as they prepare to tread the early morning air.

Needless to say the usual crowd of rent a gobs are mithering about his activities, and European Union regulations may put an end to this export trade at the end of July. For the record, so long as the UK does not bring back capital punishment, this writer sees no reason why condemned prisoners in other countries should have to suffer the indignity of being crapped on inferior equipment that may leave them bouncing up and down like yo-yos.

Every now and again something gets published in the press that is so monumental in its stupidity that the reader is left gasping in amazement. An example would be this load of old tosh that purports to analyse why married men put it about so much. It could only have been written by a woman. . .

The first part is so-so in its conclusion that we do it because we can, but the second part is pure off the wall lunacy. The writer seems to be saying that older men who shag their students, secretaries or whatever, are going through a kind of infantile phase in which they want to get caught. I really don't think that I have ever read anything quite so silly in my life. . .

When I was a young man - between about the ages of 15 and 30, say, I tended to go out with women much older than myself. I can remember that at the ripe old age of 19 I was going around with a 32 year old for instance. Why did I do this? Because it made for easier shags, that's why. I did not have to go through the "of course I will love you forever" bollocks that was so common in those dim and distant days.

These days - and I'm now in my 50th year - I know that whenever a young woman chases me it is invariably because she is after something other than my nice stiff cock. That's fine as well, because she gets a leg up and I get a leg over. What on Earth is the problem with that? Of course, once the little darlings find out that I haven't got two brass farthings to rub together they quickly drop me like a hot brick, but that's fine as well. The important thing is to separate them from their panties before that happens.

Of course sometimes these transient affairs can turn into something else, but that is rare and most men are not foolish enough to believe that this is the norm rather than the exception. In all the years that I have lived in Mexico, the only affair that I have had that lasted longer than a week or so was one that started when I was 41 and the woman was 19. I will call her "M" and she was a part of my life for over five years. I still miss her in fact, but what the Hell, shit happens.

In general, men regard sex as a bodily function rather like going to the lavatory. A good shag is nicer than a good shit, but it's still a part of the bodily functions table and not to be confused with emotions. Funnily enough, a failure to understand this is probably why women don't understand prostitution. They think that men are paying for sex: actually, men pay so that after the sex is over the woman leaves and the man does not have to talk to her.

That leads us to the second bit of silliness that this writer has penned, namely the notion that men in England are somehow worried that their evening's lucious little squeeze is actually looking to get pregnant by them. Again, this little girl has clearly misunderstood the male mentality. If some bird is daft enough to get knocked up then that it is because she wants it to happen. It is of no concern to the man who has probably forgotten her existence by the time the tests results come through.

It's hard to believe that folk get paid good brass for writing this nonsense, isn't it?

Mark Oaten, the Liberal-Democrat MP with the shit eating grin has explained why he swung over to fudge mashery. Basically it all boils down to a failure to get into university, losing his hair and having too much work. A workload that was so heavy, in fact, that he decided to increase it by running for the leadership of the Liberal-Democrats.

O-Kay. . . So he's a balding thicko who wants us to believe that overwork rather than ambition drove him to run for the leadership. He also tries to convince us that it was this thinning on top that led him astray, rather than a simple desire for a tight arsehole. The Exile is not convinced that this story is a goer, but then again The Exile is not an arse bandit who is trying to save face.

All that aside, a certain charity is called for with regards to Mark Oaten, and it is to be hoped that people will stop dumping on him all the time now that his version of events has been made known.

Update, 3.00am:

The dust has now settled on Friday's cabinet reshuffle and a few things are becoming clearer. The first is that the most likely reason why John Prescott has kept his cabinet seat is that he is also deputy leader of the Labour Party. Had Tony Blair dropped him then he might have resigned, thus precipitating a deputy leadership election. This is the last thing that Blair needs right now, so that might explain why 2 shags gets to keep his cabinet seat.

Secondly, his reshuffle can be seen as a two-fingered gesture to Gordon Brown to try his luck if he thinks he's tasty enough. It is unlikely that Brown will have the bottle to take Blair on directly, and it looks as if this is what Blair is relying on.


Clearly the party would be damaged by this six months' battle and that is what Blair seems to be relying on. That and the cowardice of Gordon Brown.

While England was voting on Thursday, the Mexican town of San Salvador Atenco was being taken back under full state control after almost five years of near revolutionary autonomy.

The town which is located in the State of Mexico, just north of Mexico City, first came to fame in 2002 when the locals fought the riot police for three days to stop the proposed new Mexico City airport being built. It faded from the news after that, but the peasant groups that had forced the federal government to back down then turfed out the local political bosses and basically ran the place themselves.

The peasants came under the control of Ignacio del Valle and are called los Macheteros - literaly the machete men - and the name was taken to honour the machetes that all Mexican peasants use to cut their corn.

The ostensible reason for the initial riot on Wednesday was the arrest of some unlicensed flower sellers, but that is little more than a polite fiction. Most street sellers are unlicensed, and are protected either by bribes to the cops or by virtue of their membership of some mafia-type body that has links to the local politicions.

A more likely explanation for the riot was that Roberto Madrazo, the presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had used the town as an example of government weakness. Mexico State is controlled by the PRI, so it was easy to set up the provocation in the hope that the locals fell into the trap. They did, and several local policemen were taken hostage. The following morning, Thursday, over 3,000 state and federal riot police were sent into Atenco to bring it to heel.

According to Mexican reports when two police hostages managed to escape, the marauding riot squads gave them a battering as well, seemingly believing that they were locals. Secondly, the reports indicate that once Ignacio del Valle had been captured, all organised resistence ended. Still, it left one dead and dozens injured, and del Valle's daughter, America, managed to get out of the town and is reported to be seeking support in Mexico City. Parts of the capital were blocked by demonstrators on Friday, so the girl may be doing her job.

Atenco is an isolated, inbred sort of place and just a generation ago its links to the outside world consisted of the mail and any information that was actually carried by people entering or leaving the place. Today, it has telephone lines and many small shops also earn a bit of extra cash by allowing people to send and receive faxes. It is unlikely that many people have the internet in their homes, but every small Mexican town has its fair shair of internet cafes. Finally, the mobile phone has become ubiquitous even in Mexico. Put simply, people are in touch with one another.

As I argued in the final part of my essay on urban guerrilla warfare, it is this ability to communicate that is allowing urban peoples to resist in a way that they could not a generation ago. It is reported that America del Valle has taken shlter in a Zapatista run safe house in Mexico City. The Zapatistas are based in the south of the country, but have a sort of presence in the capital. Furthermore, other groups that have no connection to the farmers of Atenco are reported to be mobilising in the town's support.

Basically, modern communications allows every group that has a grudge against almost every state to speak to each other. Their final aims may be inimical to one another, but that does not help a modern state to control them. The best that the Mexicans could come up with was old fashioned brutality: the whole operation was shown on television and that only encourages more people to rally in opposition to the state's actions.

Jack Straw has beeen removed from the Foreign Office, a move that should trouble those of us who are opposed to war against Iran. He has been replaced by Margaret Beckett, a Blair loyalist.

John Prescott keeps his cabinet seat, but has no ministerial responsibilities. Quite a few eyebrows have been raised about this, with the BBC suggesting that it is his price for shouldering some of the blame for the election night disaster. A more likely explanation is that 2 shags is the only one left at higher levels of the government who can actually talk to the unions and what's left of the party's rank and file.

Charles Clarke is out!

The polls closed a few minutes ago in Britain's local elections. A clear picture of the results will take about six hours.

If NuLab loses around 100-150 seats they will be able to breath a sigh of relief. A disaster would be in the 200-300 range, however, some reports suggest that they could lose anything up to 400 councillors.

Update, 5 May 2006, 2.30pm:

With all the results in, Labour has lost 18 councils and 319 councillors. The Tories have gained 11 councils and 316 new seats overall. The Lib-Dems have 1 new council and are up 2 new councillors.

April's Warmonger of the Month was easy to choose as the runner up and winner are one and the same sad-arsed loser. What made the contest difficult was deciding the order in which the postings should be presented.

Bad though his load of old wank was, it does tend to pale besides his winning entry which came from the 7th April:

Every now and then you read something that rocks you back on your heels and leaves you feeling tired, sad and very old. The Daily Telegraph has just done that with an article about NuLab's woes. The key paragraph that hit me with such force is this one:

A Cambridge don, quoting an old man he had met in Hackney recently, put it to me