Among His Early Triumphs

Worshippers in the cult of the sainted Sir Anthony of the Most Servile Confabulation of the Stocking-Top will be yet further exalted by the revelation that their icon viewed the first Gulf War in a characteristically pragmatic light. Newly declassified papers show that the great man regarded his predecessor's wog-bombing of Iraq (assisted, as ever, by Britain's special American chums) as a commercial venture for which the return would be a payday for British arms dealers. Nine years after the saving of plucky little Kuwait from ally-turned-mad-dog Saddam Hussein, Whitehall was still whining that our fellow kingdom was buying too little of the artillery that former administrations would have been blithely flogging off to Iraq. The usual campaign of smarmy salesmanship brought a poetically Atlanticist result: having weathered several abject months of Blairite diplomacy, both in writing and in the Presence itself, the Kuwaitis decided to buy their artillery from the Americans.