Friendly Fire

Among the more effective tactics of Mr Churchill's great contemporary in undermining the hated Weimar democracy was the use of a small foundation of truth (Germany was unfairly saddled with sole blame for the Great War and subjected to unduly harsh peace terms) on which to construct a sprawling Luftschloß of paranoid patriotic self-pity (Germany had been undefeated in the Great War but the Jews and the Communists had stabbed the country in the back). While still Hitler's electoral inferior by some few parliamentary seats, the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange has adopted much the same form of argument, if argument is the word I want, with his assertion that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was provoked. Not content with telling the truth for once and thereby eliciting shrieks of indignation from Team Starmer, the National Johnson and the Rothermere Stürmer on Sunday, the strutting Caudillo went on to blather about a Molotov-Ribbentrop conspiracy between the Kremlin and his fellow far-rightists to protect Fishy Rishi's Conservative Party from the Falange's anticipated take-over. The Caudillo even protested that the Rothermere Stürmer on Sunday had said the thing which was not, and it is to be hoped that Reform UK plc will be able to afford the latest bill for re-glazing the glass-house and clearing up the pebbles. The Caudillo's major error, of course, was to misdirect the patriotic self-pity by suggesting that a hostile foreign might have some sort of legitimate grievance: a tactical gaffe which even the loser of Stalingrad somehow managed to avoid.