Mundane Mutability, Expandable Strategicality

Daveybloke's Minister of Wogs, Frogs and Huns and special nuncio to Belize, Willem den Haag, has been quiet of late; presumably he has had more than enough to do in placating Lord Ashcroft over the Conservatives' failure to deliver Total Victory in May despite all the special help they received. Today den Haag was ejected onto the international stage amid a miasma of Blairite clichés about changing worlds, British interests and major reappraisals. With the usual degree of courage and honesty, den Haag blamed the previous Government for Britain's decline: "the latest figures show we export more to Ireland than we do to India, China and Russia put together", possibly because our manufacturing base has been in tatters for a quarter of a century or so while those who should be investing in new industries are invited to get rich quick by gambling in the City or having a wallow in the PFI money-pit. Now, I wonder whose government started all that? The name's on the tip of my tongue. Winston Churchill, perhaps? No, it's gone. Anyway, despite being intensely relaxed about the lack of representation in the British cabinet for anyone other than white male millionaires, den Haag also blames New Labour for the fact that Britain's presence among the Eurocrats is disproportionately small in terms of the our share of the continent's breeding capacity. "So the idea that the last government was serious about advancing Britain's influence in Europe turns out to be an unsustainable fiction"; while Conservative policy on Europe for the past couple of decades has been a judicious and constructive mix of tabloid xenophobia and civil war, culminating in Daveybloke's defection from the main centre-right bloc in order to join a motley gang of bigots and flat-earthers for whom Silvio Berlusconi is too much of a Socialist. Den Haag also "clarified" the issue of Afghanistan as it relates to Daveybloke's electioneering versus Liam Fox's publicly expressed wish not to be deprived of his toys; and he deigned to acknowledge the existence of India, Turkey and Indonesia, as well as that of Brazil, which is sufficiently close to Belize to be noticed on its own and just about big enough to be seen even by the man who failed to notice where Lord Ashcroft was paying his taxes.