Christopher Montgomery

You’ve got to love being right wing in Britain – why here it verges on being a semi-respectable position. We don’t have a New York Times to make us feel emotionally insecure about our belief system, and indeed, unlike both America and Canada for example, we even have a national Conservative party. All in all, … Continue reading “David Frum’s Guide to Mythology”

Question: what is the modern Tory definition of leadership? Answer: asking a question. This at least was how William Hague told it over the Euro. And I say this as someone who came to see a lot of merit in him by the end – this certainly was a man you could measure by the … Continue reading “What’s In A Question?”

It’s the double standards that gets me – no, cancel that, it’s the spineless me-tooism that’s really so revolting. I don’t ‘blame’ the United States for being the number one nation, still less for doing number one nation stuff, but what does get to me each time is the degree and direction of the self-deception … Continue reading “They’ll Come For Us Next”

Through stupidity, forgetfulness, poor geography and bad luck as much as anything, I found myself caught up in the ‘great’ anti-war march in London last week. Can’t say the crowd was anywhere near as congenial as the pro-Palestine lot earlier in the year, nor was the totty anything up to the level of the vast … Continue reading “Weary Lonesome Blues”

Like all sensible Tories there’s only one result I really wanted to see from the German federal election, and that, of course, was an SPD/Communist coalition. As of the time of writing, it looks as if Chancellor Schröder’s just going to scrap back in with the detestable, and slightly unsettling, Greens, but still, that’ll do. … Continue reading “Let’s Not Be Beastly To the Germans”

Tony Blair has let it be known that he’s willing to bear, quote (as they say), ‘the blood sacrifice’ the special relationship entails. Now we’re above the sort of knee-jerk pacifist liberal jerkwaddery that cries out, ‘hey, dude, it’s not you man who’ll do the bleeding’. In this instance, other than superciliousness, I don’t know … Continue reading “Iraq War II: This Time We Mean It”

In response, no doubt, to my instruction in this place last week to shape up, the advocates of starting a war with Iraq have been busy. In Britain, the charge was led by Sir John Keegan, who (to the point of parody) perorated with the conclusion that, were Churchill alive, he’d strike. It’s the season … Continue reading “Let’s Go To War With Iraq”

Despite having the money, the think tanks, and the media outlets, does it ever strike you what a pitiful ‘case’ the smack Iraq lot make for it? And add to that the small, but useful thing they have going for them – the fact that these somewhat tuneless praise-singers holler in support of American and … Continue reading “How Tony Blair Saved Britain”

In 1998 the UK government did perhaps the best thing it has done to date: it conducted a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) which was foreign policy, not resource led. Instead of defence policy being cobbled together in response to whatever scraps the Treasury affords the MoD, new Labour very sensibly intended that it should be … Continue reading “Moral Truncheons”

This agreeably short book received much uncritical praise from varieties of conservatives when first it was published in the United States. Its principal merit lay in the fact that it was taken to be another weapon with which the perpetrators of the 11th of September terrorism could be assailed. One might have thought that the … Continue reading “The Uses and Abuses of a Reasonable Man”