That Special Feeling

The Secretary for the Rest of the World, Margaret Beckett, took full advantage of the Lebanon crisis today in order to display to the world in no uncertain terms her ability to match her predecessor, Jack Straw, in terms of embodying the United Kingdom's abject self-abasement before the seductive brilliance of the Bush administration. At the peace conference in Rome, the US and its little helper scuppered the possibility of a united call for an immediate ceasefire, thus heroically preventing thirteen lesser nations and the UN secretary general from perverting the will of the international community. "We have to have a plan that will actually create conditions in which we can have a ceasefire that will be sustainable," Condoleezza Rice argued, on the time-honoured principle that wars should never be stopped while there is still something to negotiate about. "Even if you could get a ceasefire half an hour ago, you would probably be back in hostilities in a few days," Beckett added. Better no ceasefire at all than a temporary one.

Still, even this most special of special relationships does have its tiffs. Beckett broke off her dry-hump of Rice's shinbone long enough to be "not happy" that Prestwick airport in Scotland had been used as a stopover for aircraft ferrying laser-guided bombs (possibly the type that can precision-pinkmist a Hizbullah fighter from practically inside Israel's legal borders as long as it doesn't accidentally land on a civilian or a UN official along the way) from America to the Righteous State. Beckett has even threatened a "formal protest", and has "already let the United States know that this is an issue that appears to be seriously at fault". The issue, as one might expect, is purely bureaucratic: "Procedures for handling hazardous cargoes did not appear to have been followed, she said."