On March 6, 1942, the Daily Mirror published a brilliant Philip Zec cartoon featuring a British seaman clinging to the wreckage of a ship blown apart by a German torpedo.
The caption read: ‘The price of petrol has been increased by one penny – Official.’
Zec had intended the cartoon to support the case for rationing during the war, given the sacrifice made by our servicemen and women, military and merchant.
The hard-hitting caption was written by the incomparable William Connor, aka Cassandra, the eternal doyen of newspaper columnists.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill went potty, accusing Connor of undermining the war effort and falsely accusing the oil companies of profiteering. There were questions in the House, with MPs effectively accusing Zec and Cassandra of treason for undermining Forces morale.
It was cobblers, of course, and journalism at its finest. As I’ve always maintained, it’s the job of columnists and cartoonists to sit at the back and throw bottles, not seek a seat at the top table.
Today, however, ‘the price of petrol has been increased by one penny’ is part of Labour’s excuse for not joining America and Israel’s righteous war on Iran.
Never mind the fact that Rachel From Complaints is cheerfully raking in millions in extra tax revenues every day from the worldwide rise in oil prices, while pretending the cost-of-living crisis is all down to Donald Trump.
When the U.S. President jibes that Starmer is no Churchill he isn’t far wide of the mark, writes Richard Littlejohn
A Philip Zec cartoon shows a seaman on the wreckage of a ship blown apart by a torpedo with the caption: ‘The price of petrol has been increased by one penny – Official.’
When the U.S. President jibes that Starmer is no Churchill he isn’t far wide of the mark. And not because of the inflated cost of unleaded. Our current government’s craven objections to the bombing of Tehran revolve around ‘international law’ and, let’s call it what it is, cowardice.
Churchill would have had no compunction in siding with Washington over Iran. OK, so Trump is widely considered to be a gobby narcissist, sans filter. But as Randy Newman observed about the admittedly completely bonkers former Georgia governor Lester Maddox: He may be a fool but he’s our fool.
So-called ‘sophisticates’ with their alleged ‘White House sources’ may peddle the lie that Trump started this war on a whim.
But what would you do if intelligence supplied by Washington’s answer to our own Funny People told you Tehran was only a couple of weeks away from enriching enough uranium to build a nuclear bomb?
We’re not talking here about some Mickey Mouse nonsense downloaded off the internet by Alastair Campbell, to justify the Iraq war. If Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and the CIA insist the Mad Mullahs are five minutes away from wreaking Armageddon, who would you believe?
Precisely. Me, too. And again to quote Randy Newman: Let’s drop the big one and see what happens. Boom goes Mashhad, boom Tehran!
Maybe now that NCP has gone bankrupt here they could turn what’s left of Iran into a car park. We should have done it years ago.
The genocidal lunatics who run the Iranian regime are the scum of the earth. They murder their own people in their tens of thousands, sponsor global terror and are determined to eradicate Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.
Frankly, I don’t care what you think of Trump and his cartoon, gung-ho, tattooed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Every bomb they drop on Iran is doing the world a favour. Stone Age works for me. I’d have steamed in after the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980. If the cost is a few bob on a gallon of four-star, it’s well worth it.
And yet. I seem to be in something of a minority here. The view from the bridge appears to be that the Iranians are the good guys in all of this and Trump is Dr Strangelove.
Yesterday’s Six O’Clock News on the BBC was a classic of its kind. As the smoke was still rising from the rubble of Tehran, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s ‘impartial’ diplomatic editor, announced that Iran had won the war. This risible piece of gormless propaganda was followed by a dopey bird with an equally ridiculous BBC job title declaring that Hezbollah (the provisional wing of Hamas and Tehran) were retaliating against Israeli ‘aggression’.
Do they actually believe the absurd parcel of Bolognaise they peddle? Almost certainly. Bowen is one of the most puffed-up, preposterous men I’ve ever met.
I can remember doing a gig at a Question Time-style evening at a North London synagogue – organised by a Jewish friend of mine – to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the nation of Israel. I was asked if the BBC was biased against Israel. My generous answer was: yes, but they don’t realise it. They never meet anyone who thinks differently from them. Their anti-Israel bias is as natural as breathing.
Another guest that night was Bowen, who turned up half an hour late pleading how important he was. He walked out after my remarks, refusing to shake my hand, presumably heading off to take dictation from Hamas, as usual.
Now he’s flogging the line that Iran are the real winners because they’ve got a ‘toll booth’ in the Strait of Hormuz, charging oil tankers a couple of million shekels or whatever for safe passage. Apparently, this proves that the U.S. has ‘lost’. I’ll let you in on a secret. There’s a toll booth near me at a pinch point on Hampstead Lane in North London, opposite the Spaniards pub, next to that stately home where we saw Madness a couple of years back.
It hasn’t been used for, I dunno, call it 400 years. The Yanks could take it out in a heartbeat, just as they could vaporise whatever this week’s Khomenei/Khamenei/Karma Karma Chameleon cares to erect in Hormuz.
Think that toll booth on the turnpike where they shot up Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. If they can blow up the Chicken Man in Philly last night and blow up his house, too, they’re not going to have much bother sending the next Iranian Supreme Leader to meet his 72 virgins.
Keir Starmer meets aircrew members stationed at King Fahd Airbase in Taif, Saudi Arabia, on the first leg of his Gulf tour
Plus, while we’re at it, have you noticed how everyone is now a Middle East expert, just as they are all authorities on tennis when Wimbledon comes round? Or golf experts during the Masters this week?
Try playing ‘off-ramp’ bingo, or ‘exit-strategy’ Top Trumps right now. Most of these so-called ‘experts’ have no idea what they’re talking about. Does anyone believe Churchill had an ‘off-ramp’ in 1940? As boxer Mike Tyson once observed, sagely, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Here’s the deal. This war has been going for about three weeks, not six years. Iran has been virtually obliterated, but is still standing on one leg.
How can anyone declare victory or defeat after three weeks? In WWII, we hadn’t even got to Dunkirk, let alone evacuated the beaches. Everything today is condensed into social media bytes. Four Iranian blokes burning an Israeli flag on the internet doesn’t amount to a victory.
Oh, and by the way, what the hell was Surkeir doing swanning round Saudi Arabia like Churchill at Yalta?
He’s utterly irrelevant in all this, his vacuity, stupidity, opportunism and failure to support either our military or our relationship with the U.S. exposed horribly for all the world to see. Britain has been humiliated as a serious power, conspicuous by our absence.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, petrol has gone up 40p a kilogram or whatever they sell it in these days. Rachel’s raking it in like a pig in wossname, before doling it out to the Benefits Street mob.
I’ve just looked again at that Zec cartoon. The sailor could have been my old man, who was sunk by a torpedo on his first voyage out of port in World War II. He was a radio operator and it was his job to send the distress signal.
Dad ended up living and working in the U.S. My guess is that he would have loathed everything about Trump. But he’d also have known the Ayatollahs were the new Nazis and would have supported the war on Iran – even if it did mean another penny on petrol.
