30 Tuesday March 15 2022 | the times
Comment
final whistle blew. It was at this point,
while his team-mates jogged off the
pitch to general applause, that I was
stunned to see Sam sprint to the other
end of the pitch, pick up his distraught
opposite number from the mud, and
walk off with his arm round his
shoulders, telling him that he’d played
well and that he, Sam, had once let
in six, so it was really no big deal.
Grown men on the touchline cried,
and even the ref said to me, “that was
beautiful — where has he
learnt that?” And I had
to be honest: it can
only have been the
television.Vive grandpapa
B
onjour comrades,
est-ce que vous
avez seen le
news about
“France’s Jeremy
Corbyn” dans le
Sunday Times?
C’est vrai. Je merd
you not. Le hard-
gauchiste Jean-Luc
Mélenchon, qui
advocates un top
tax rate de 90 per
cent and autre
crazy socialist stuff,
has been hoovering
up le vote populaire
and has un vrai
chance of beatinghis rivals on the hard droite, Marine
Le Pen et Éric Zemmour, and
making le presidential run-off contre
Emmanuel Macron.
Selon le Sunday Times, this
Mélenchon est un ami de Corbyn,
qui shares his anti-Nato stance and
admiration pour les héros de la
revolution Latin-Americain, comme
Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Pele et
Lionel Messi.
C’est top news pour les dreary
politics de la France. Voilà le vrai
Grandpapa Magique! Peut-être, il a
trouvé finalement l’arbre de la
monnaie. Mais j’espére qu’il ne
wears pas les jackets bruns, ou les
naff sailing caps, parce que les
Français won’t stand for that.
Although le main chose is to avoir
un chanson catchy pour les
cool rallies et music
festivals. Altogether
maintenant: “Oh-la-la,
Je-re-my Cor-byn!”Rich humour
I
heard on
Friday the sad
news
that my friend
Leon Morgan,
the world’s nicest
man, had died at the
age of 82. Not only
was he the world’s nicest
man, but he was also the source
of my father’s favourite joke,M
y son Sam is an okay
footballer. He plays in
goal for Regent’s Park
under-9s, is not afraid
of the ball and is brave
diving at feet. The only negative side
is the calling for throw-ins that are
visibly not ours and the going to
ground when he’s fouled and rolling
around like he’s been shot. He gets
that from the professionals on
television, I have always told myself,
and is living proof of how those
ghastly overpaid poseurs are
corrupting youngsters. But then at
the weekend, I got a new angle on it.
Sam and his boys were 2-0 up
against Kentish Town but under
constant attack and desperate for a
third goal to seal the match, when
the opposition keeper slipped and let
a back-pass through his legs for the
softest of goals. The poor kid started
to cry, naturally enough, and was still
in bits when Regent’s Park pressed
forward again and made it 4-0 as the
Iran is brazenly playing the West for suckers
By caving in to the nuclear demands of the Islamic republic, Biden has surrendered to fanatics
ramping up its attacks on American
and allied interests. This rapidly
brought more US concessions. But
the Iranians view compromise as a
signal of imminent surrender. So
these concessions produced ever
more brazen attacks.
America’s genuflection to Tehran
surely helped in turn to embolden
Putin. If the US was so desperate to
surrender to a regime with American
blood on its hands, Putin must have
thought, it wasn’t going to stop him.
This week, missiles were fired at a
new US consulate under
construction in Arbil, the capital of
Iraqi Kurdistan. Significantly, Iran
claimed responsibility. The fact that
it cast aside its habitual use of
deniable proxies illustrated its
contempt for American weakness.
This lethal feedback loop of
western fearfulness and emboldened
enemies explains “asymmetric
warfare,” through which states like
Russia and Iran that are militarily
and economically weaker than the
West nevertheless have it by the
throat. Asymmetric warfare also
means that “mutually assured
destruction”, the theory of
deterrence underpinning western
policy, no longer works. For while
the West flinches from using nuclear
weapons, not to mention chemical or
biological, its fanatical foes might
well do so.
The nascent Iran deal shows that
the West has learnt nothing. By
ignoring the swords it has helped
fashion from its own ploughshares, it
tells itself it occupies the moral high
ground. But as a result, it condemns
millions of innocents to pay the
ultimate price.which Iran repeatedly threatens to
annihilate, among certain members
of the Biden administration. Its
Iranian envoy, Robert Malley, has a
history of profound hostility to Israel
and has reportedly been making the
running in the Geneva talks.
But the main reason, embodied by
the secretary of state Antony
Blinken, is surely the dominant
western liberal dogma that war never
solves anything, and that the
appropriate response to aggression is
negotiation and compromise. As
Blinken’s team have reportedly said,
better a nuclear Iran than military
confrontation. And as for Iran’s
intended extermination of Israel, “the
world would never let that happen”.
Well, try telling that to Ukraine.
The Obama-Bidenites believe that
if Iran is embraced by the world
community it will modify its terrorist
ways. This is the second great
western fallacy, that all world leaders
are governed by self-interest.
Charmed by urbane Iranians, the
West has ignored the fact that the
regime is dominated by the Shia
“Twelver” sect which believes that
bringing about an apocalypse will
cause the Shia messiah, the “Twelfth
Imam,” to descend to Earth.
With a messianic agenda of the
end of days, the fanatics in Tehran
don’t care if a very large number of
Iranians are killed in battle or die of
privation. Similarly, Putin’s fantasy of
recreating imperial Russia means he
doesn’t care if a very large number of
Russians are killed in battle or die of
privation. The cause is everything.
As a result, both Iran and Russia
have played the West for suckers. In
recent months, Tehran has beenW
hile the West noisily
flagellates itself for
having cosied up to
Vladimir Putin and
failed to recognise
the threat he posed until too late,
America is trying to capitulate to
Iran. This act of surrender was
scheduled for last week. Ironically, it
has stalled because Russia has
thrown a spanner in the works.
In talks in Geneva, the US has
been trying to revive the 2015
agreement with Iran brokered by
Barack Obama. This enabled Iran to
build nuclear weapons legitimately
after 15 years, though Israel feared it
would be sooner. Meanwhile,
sanctions were lifted, allowing
billions of dollars to fund Tehran’s
regional power grabs, terrorist
activities and attacks on America
and its allies.
Donald Trump took the US out of
the deal and renewed those
sanctions; the Biden administration
is desperate to lift them again.
Astoundingly, leaks suggest that it
has agreed to give the Iranian regime
everything it wants and more. Naftali
Bennett, the Israeli prime minister,
suggested the new deal may only be
in place for two-and-a-half years.
Even within that time, Iran could
receive tens of billions of dollars to
ramp up its its war on the West, and
see sanctions lifted against a swathe
of its terrorist operatives and proxies.
This was set to be announced
when Russia, which is critical to Iran
acceding to the deal, suddenly
demanded exemption from US
sanctions to allow Moscow to trade
with Tehran. Putin was using
America’s keenness to lift sanctions
against Iran as a weapon to
blackmail America into lifting its
sanctions against Russia. So while
the US believes sanctions are the
way to stop Putin, it thinks lifting
sanctions is the way to stop Iran.
The question is why the Biden
administration is so desperate to
surrender to a regime which has
waged war against the US and itsallies for four decades, and whose
ballistic missiles that the US is now
facilitating will be pointing at
America and Europe. Iran has
launched countless attacks against
US and western interests. Many
American, British and other allied
soldiers were killed in Iraq by
Iranian roadside bombs. Yet the
West has never fought back. Now
the US is intent upon total
capitulation. Why?
There are several possible reasons.
Obama, several of whose officials are
now Biden staffers, wanted to “even
up” the rival Shia and Sunni Islamic
camps in the region and thus create
a balance of power.
There’s also malice against Israel,America’s genuf lection
to Tehran helped in
turn to embolden Putin
which is not bad for a lawyer.
It was in the 1990s, around the
time that Hans and Gad Rausing
were first topping the Sunday Times
Rich List, and Tetrapak was best
known for those impossible-to-open
milk box cartons that always ended
up exploding and covering you in
milk, when Leon says to my dad,
his great pal, who’s reading the list
out from the paper, “so how much
are these packaging fellows worth,
Al?” and my dad goes “Four billion
quid, apparently”. “Gosh,” says
Leon, “imagine how rich they’d be if
it worked.”The invisible woman
I
had never heard of Joanna
Scanlan, winner of this year’s
leading actress Bafta, so I scanned
the extensive photographic coverage
in the Monday papers to see what
she looked like.
But I couldn’t find her. There was
Emma Watson in a sexy dress, and
Lady Gaga and Benedict
Cumberbatch in black tie, and
guests and contenders like Sienna
Miller and Emilia Jones and Zawe
Ashton, all looking dazzling in
couture with their sleek bits and bobs
hanging out all over the place. But
there was no sign of Scanlan, the
actual winner. It was a mystery. Until
I googled her and discovered that
Joanna is... 60. Of course. Silly me.
That explains it.Giles Coren Notebook
A touching
moment that
even beat
winning 4-0
No law should imply
you’re better off
dead than disabled
Kevin Shinkwin
I
recently completed a consent
form for major surgery. There
was no tick box asking if I
wanted to be helped to die. The
assumption was that, my
disability notwithstanding, I wanted
to live. Tomorrow’s amendment to
the Health and Care Bill threatens
that consensus.
The insidious assumption that it is
better to be dead than disabled
increasingly permeates our debates.
This amendment would enable it to
inform our law. Its implications scare
me to death. The amendment would
compel the government to table
legislation that would “permit
terminally ill, mentally competent
adults legally to end their own lives
with medical assistance”. Doctors
would be expected to give us lethal
drugs for suicide; they would go from
saving people’s lives to helping to
take them.
The government is opposing the
precedent this amendment would set.
From a constitutional perspective, it
is a highly irregular attempt to seize
control of the legislative agenda. I am
opposing it because such a change inthe law will inevitably risk a scenario
where people with disabilities and
those with progressive conditions feel
they are a burden, sensing pressure
from doctors and, in some cases
family, that they should consider an
assisted suicide — a duty to die.
As the charity Not Dead Yet UK
has said, there is a real risk that “such
loss of hope, which forces some to see
death as their only option, is easily
misinterpreted in a society that
continues to see and treat disabled
people as second-class citizens”. No
wonder UN human rights experts are
concerned by a “growing trend to
enact legislation enabling access to
medically assisted dying based largely
on having a disability or disabling
conditions, including in old age”.
No one should underestimate the
power differential in the doctor-
patient relationship when one is ill.
We are vulnerable to influence and
hypersensitive to every nuance and
inference. How easy it is to be told it
is in “your best interests” not to be
treated when actually the subtext is
that it would be in everyone else’s
interests if you were dead.
This dangerous amendment poses
unacceptable risks to people when
vulnerable, as I was very recently.
Disabled people’s lives are not worth
less. We want real choices in care and
treatment, and when we seem to be
dying, we want good palliative care,
not to be nudged towards taking lethal
drugs. However well-intentioned,
this amendment must be defeated.Lord Shinkwin is a Conservative peerPeople with progressive
conditions can feel
that they are a burden
Melanie
Phillipsas he
hadpa
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