Sometimes you have to hand it to Jonathan Powell: no one is so brilliant at landing his bosses in the soup.
Sir Keir Starmer’s national security adviser was, a generation ago, the genius behind our involvement in the Iraq War.
He told our ambassador to ‘get up the a*** of the White House and stay there’. Now he has excelled himself by telling Sir Keir simultaneously to clamber inside the Sitzfleisch of the US and China. These two cunning plans exploded on the same day.
Downing Street awoke to news that Donald Trump had denounced the ‘great stupidity’ of Mr Powell’s Chagos Isles ruse. This came hours after the nasal knight boasted about his closeness to Trumpy. It took a heart of stone not to laugh.
Then, before Sir Keir’s breakfast of Quaaludes on toast could be cleared away, came Operation Kow-Tow.
The Government confirmed it was allowing China to build a London embassy roughly the size of Blenheim Palace, though with more dungeons
Mr Powell’s dabs were all over both these triumphs. Triumphs, that is, for our enemies. Or as our politicians call them, ‘adversaries’. They are frightened of ‘enemy’.
Mr Trump’s remarks torpedoed a twirly morning event at which the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, addressed peers and MPs.
Mr Johnson, a preppy sort of fellow, had come to ‘calm the waters’ of Anglo-American relations. But Mr Trump’s outburst had made those waters as pitchy as the Sea of Galilee in St Matthew, ch 8, vv 24-27.
An AI-generated image shared by Donald Trump on social media of him planting the US flag in Greenland
The Speakers of the Commons and Lords were on parade in fancy dress, as was a mace-holder and the Serjeant-at-Arms with sword.
Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle gave a long and blowy opening speech which managed to avoid mentioning Mr Trump and instead wished Mr Johnson’s football team, the LSU Tigers, ‘lots of lunch’. He meant ‘luck’.
Mr Johnson responded by saying that Sir Lindsay’s speeches were infamous – ‘just like Churchill and it goes on and on and on’. See? Some American politicians can do their rudeness subtly.
Mr Johnson, pink-eared and a little taut in the muzzle, was clearly embarrassed about his President’s eruptions. He repeatedly stressed that Britain was still a valued ally. Sweet of him to say so, even if untrue.
The rest of his speech was an eloquent plea to British and European elites to stop their ‘truly menacing scepticism towards history’. I am afraid he was heard with a certain amount of, well, scepticism. Trumpery rather does that to you.
At Davos, Switzerland, they were gathering for the annual shindig of snooty social democrats and rich technocrats.
Bigshots from the EU, an organisation which has done so much to erase national sovereignty, squawked about self-determination.
The governor of California told European leaders they were ‘pathetic’ and that Mr Trump was a T-Rex who would either eat them or mate with them. Gulp. Worse than Sophie’s Choice.
France’s president Macron was wearing dark glasses. Something had reportedly happened to one of his eyes. Bonecruncher Brigitte strikes again?
Back in the Commons, security minister Dan Jarvis was having a horrible time explaining the Chinese embassy decision. MPs just laughed at him.
Labour MPs stayed away in droves and the few who did turn up seemed pretty horrified. Mr Jarvis talked, as underlings of Jonathan Powell often will, about ‘sensible’ and ‘serious, grown-up people’. Really sensible people would run a mile from J. Powell.
The new embassy will be slap next to a tunnel carrying vital City communications cables.
A long-winded, peevish Mr Jarvis insisted that ‘a package of national security mitigations’ would stop the Chinese spying on us. No one suggested – so I will – that we use that tunnel to spy right back on them.
To complete a mad day, Russian foreign minister Sergei ‘Sunshine’ Lavrov vouchsafed a press conference at which, with a rigid face, he deplored colonialism.
He and Jonathan Powell should get together some time. Nothing would more quickly bring about Putin’s downfall.
