No10 disaster! Minister is caught telling us the truth

WHAT fun it is on the rare occasions when a Cabinet Minister tells the truth. It upsets all the right people. The Government squawks and flaps and tries to drown out the revelation with fresh lies. The semi-official political press starts babbling about how the culprit has made a ‘gaffe’, a word used by nobody else, meaning ‘embarrassing but honest statement’.

And the rest of us can enjoy it. So it is with Foreign Secretary Johnson’s attack on Saudi Arabia’s nasty, violent meddling in other countries, mainly responsible for turning Syria into a wasteland of ruins, full of corpses and weeping mourners.

He was careful – and correct – to level the same charge against the Iranian ayatollahs. But attacks on Iran are politically and diplomatically acceptable, and anyone can make them. Justified criticism of the Riyadh despotism is taboo because this country has crawled so deep into the pocket of Saudi Arabia that it cannot find its way out.

Actually, I understand why we need to grovel quite a bit to the Saudis. We are poor and they are rich. They have lots of oil and ours has almost run out. They buy our aircraft and our weapons, which most people prefer not to do.

So a certain amount of politeness and flattery are necessary. They can have as many Royal visits as they like, and I can put up with us flying flags at half-mast when Saudi royalty dies. Why not? We recently entertained the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Buckingham Palace.

We get a lot in return for such gestures. But in recent years, the Saudis have asked too much. We should never have agreed to support their attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.

It was a policy motivated by spite. It required Britain to back the Al Nusra front, a bloodthirsty gang of hate-filled fanatics. These are exactly the sort of people we warn against in our ‘anti-extremism’ programmes at home, and it is very hard to tell what separates them from Islamic State.

We have been reduced to pretending, to the laughter of all who know anything, that these merciless Christian-hating, churchdefiling sectarian brigands are ‘moderates’. Worse, by helping them to destabilise Syria we have created the biggest wave of Middle Eastern migration into Europe in history. Worse still, we picked the wrong side.

Russia, understanding the Middle East far better than we do, bet that Syria’s Assad would beat off the Saudi attack. And the battle of Aleppo has proved them right. Moscow’s prestige and influence in the Middle East is now at an all-time high. Ours is pitifully low.

Even now we don’t realise it. The head of MI6, who was a much more impressive figure when we didn’t know who he was than he is now we can actually see and hear him, made an unwise public appearance last week.

It seemed he had not read the papers or watched the news, as he used the occasion for an ill-timed and particularly ill-aimed attack on Russia. He wrongly blamed the Kremlin for turning Syria into a desert (that was the Saudis, egged on by us, the French, the Turks and the USA). He also attacked Russia for ‘alienating’ supposed moderates in the Middle East.

This from the Chief of Intelligence of the country which has done more to annoy open-minded, pro-Western people in the Middle East than practically anywhere else, from the overthrow in a squalid putsch of Iran’s beloved (and elected) leader Mossadegh, to the Suez, Iraq and Libya fiascos.

Perhaps his agents out there are still telling him what he wants to hear, rather than what is actually happening. Once, all this stuff was far-away and theoretical. But now that the people whose countries we have wrecked can find their way to Calais in their tens of thousands, it isn’t.

And that’s why I prefer Boris Johnson’s gaffes to official falsehoods. Those who refuse to admit the truth cannot protect this country against the many dangers which threaten it.

IT’S no good moaning now about the new plan to persecute soldiers for actions they undertook during the Northern Irish troubles, while IRA murderers go free. This is the ‘Peace Process’ you foolishly bought from the Blair creature back in 1998. It was a surrender, not a victory, and it is time we grasped that.