Arms and the Bloke

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, whose response to the recent crisis in South Ossetia was to demand that the aggressor be admitted to NATO in order to clear the path for World War III the next time Vladimir Putin threw a hissy-fit, has been defending Britain's poor unfortunate arms dealers. It appears that some nasty, uncharitable, small-societal folk have been intimating that Daveybloke's treating his chums in the weapons industry to a tour of the region where people are being shot and clubbed with guns and truncheons supplied by those very same chums might possibly be considered tactless; Daveybloke has responded in statesmanlike fashion by conjuring up the spectre of Saddam Hussein, the "thuggish bullying neighbour" who was armed by somebody or other during his nastiest years because he was doing such a spiffing job of being thuggish and bullying towards Iran. On the twentieth anniversary of Saddam Hussein doing what April Glaspie had told him he was allowed to do, Daveybloke was almost at pains to intimate that weapons sold by Britain were intended to protect the right of small countries to defend themselves against former allies, and not to deny ordinary citizens the right to demonstrate against the likes of Hosni Mubarak and the Reverend Blair's chum in Tripoli. Presumably Daveybloke had a word in a few chums' ears about marking the boxes more clearly. As a feverish climax to his attack of Realpolitik and Gove History, Daveybloke proclaimed the emirate of Kuwait a democracy.

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