Manipulation of the News Movement

 

When the media manipulator Kamal Ahmed was sacked during a restructuring by the BBC, Mushroom shed a few crocodile tears.  Ahmed’s shameful manipulation of trade data during the Brexit debacle was allowed to stand despite a lengthy exchange between Mushroom and the know-alls at the BBC so ever serve you right.  By ditching Ahmed the BBC was dangerously exposed since the BBC News Board was left marooned without a BAME representative.  Presumably, the BBC argued, without a minority ethnic representative, the quality of news would be deleteriously affected?  Although, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t noticed much difference in the BBC news output as a result so, with Ahmed gone, it looks like win-win.

Unfortunately, Ahmed seems to have fallen on his feet and has co-founded a new platform called the “News Movement.”  Apparently, News Movement is intended to deliver “trustworthy and objective” information, through “high impact” stories which hold “the powerful” to account.  Deciding what is important, which of the powerful to target how to make an impact should be right up Ahmed’s editorial street.

Green Road to Ruin

 

The government said it would cut carbon emissions by 78 per cent from their 1990 level by 2035, instead of 2050 as previously intended. I wonder whether the PM has been inspired by Princess Nut Nuts and her coterie? Anyway, it’s a great idea, and who could possibly object to a policy of saving the planet except for one important detail: who pays?  I am sure our Government will get round to telling us what it will cost, not just the impact on our outgoings but on our future way of life. Perhaps we shall be treated to a solemn announcement from the spanking new, and now, apparently, unnecessary Downing Street media centre?  When we are let into the secret and the political machine has measured the reaction, I suspect an element of electoral pragmatism will be injected into further climate virtue gestures.  Meantime, they may care to start with a scan of Roger Scruton’s superb Green Philosophy subtitled, how to think seriously about the planet.  Scruton argues, convincingly, that top-down solutions to climate problems are destined to fail.  It is public spirit that will carry us forward:

“But whence comes public spirit? It comes from patriotism, from love of country, from a sense of belonging and of a shared and inherited home. It comes from believing that this problem is our problem, and therefore my problem, as a member of the group. That belief disappears when anonymous bureaucracies confiscate our risks, and pretend that they can regulate them to extinction.”

But telling people what is good for them seems fashionable these days, just look at the incessant diatribe from the Archewell Foundation, “uplifting communities.”  Come to think of it, whoever is driving the headlong rush to green virtue may already be finding the Downing Street policy straitjacket too constraining and might and feel, like Megan and Harry, that they should strike out on their own.  How about “The Greenswill Foundation” as a megaphone?

 

 

HRH The Duke of Edinburgh

 

I only met him by accident, in the early years of this century at the Royal Aeronautical Society in Hamilton Place.  I had attended an early evening lecture and, afterwards, the corporate sponsor had extended generous hospitality to the participants.  A big crowd lingered after the event, wine flowed freely and the noise level rose accordingly.  During conversation with some colleagues, I caught sight of an old friend at a distance and, after due interval, shouted my excuses to my colleagues and made my way through the throng towards my old friend.  Arriving at my friend’s circle I was immediately conscious that the company was trying to tell me something, but nobody said anything.  Glancing round for a clue, the person on my right who had a decent space on his left into which I had just inserted myself, became strikingly familiar.  I remember beginning to blurt out an apology for my impertinence but HRH would have none of it – he called upon my friend to introduce me and then continued the joyful banter as though nothing had happened.  What a charming man he was!

Clear-Eyed View of Defence

 

Oh dear, I spent a 35-year career in the Royal Air Force being encouraged by my Army colleagues to believe that warfighting capabilities such as boots on the ground, concentration of force, overwhelming firepower and mobility were key to winning battles.  I now understand that such shibboleths were merely “shields for sentimentality.”  I am trying to take the Defence Secretary’s advice to remain “clear-eyed” and hope, for all our sakes, that the novel defence proposals work when needed.

The sad truth, which has been apparent for some time, is that the UK could not field and support a fighting division.  That's it - time to pull down the shutters.

Courage Under Fire

 

When Sir Humphrey Appleby praised Jim Hacker’s policy as “courageous” he meant that the Minister was proceeding without regard to the political consequences of his actions. Not the present danger of going over the top against a hail of opposition bullets but rather the enemies his actions would make amongst his own ranks, his rivals ever eager to exploit a political aberration. Perhaps that is what President Biden had in mind when he praised the Duchess of Sussex's “courage" in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, the nearest thing to divine sovereignty in the USA. After all, there is nothing brave in stabbing an unarmed old lady in the back.

 

 

Antisocial Distancing

 

Despite the Covid rules for keeping one’s distance I expect life in the average Royal Air Force Officers’ Mess has continued as usual.  In my sheltered time as a bachelor inmate, one found that the Dining Room was fully furnished with large rectangular oak tables set for breakfast – perhaps 6 or 8 place settings at each.  Whilst the staff would have preferred to serve and clear one table at a time, the usual preference of the Officers on entering the room at the start of the day was to choose an unoccupied table.  Here, in silent isolation, there would be room to spread the morning newspaper and tiresome early-morning conversation could be avoided.  I understand that in some Army Regiments, diners at breakfast might wear their hat to indicate to brother Officers that they did not wish to be disturbed.  And who could imagine a gentleman inconveniencing another Officer in the Ante Room by deliberately taking an adjacent armchair?

Rejoice!

 

The curse of Mushroom appears to have struck my old adversary, the news manipulator Kamal Ahmed.  Ahmed is a BAME news executive which, Mushroom has heard, is fashionably treated as if it were a wildlife protected species.  Astonishing, then, that the BBC, of all organisations, has dispensed with his professional services.  The BBC, shock and outrage, has contravened its own diversity rules.  Several BBC news presenters, we are told, have “raised concerns” - but not about the woke sausage machine of BBC "stories" Ahmed leaves behind, we may be sure.