Politics

What they really mean about Obama’s Wall Street speech is that it is tainted by the suspicion of an agreement that when he resigned, certain people would pay to hear him speak in return for favours given.

You can’t bribe a president in office or before he gets into office. You can’t bribe a prime minister, or a first minister, or any leader in a relatively open society. You can’t because sooner or later they will be found out. The money can be paid to an offshore account behind a wall of secrecy – but sooner or later it will be found out.

Or if it isn’t found out, then the tension of worrying that it might be found out will drain all the joy out of the money.

There is a simpler way. Just promise that when the president or the prime minister, etc., resigns – that he or she can give speeches at $10,000 a plate or whatever. And the speech can be deadly dull and not worth the cost of attending. But those who promised to attend will attend – and the money will be paid and nothing can be proved – and that is how people get away with it.

Not that anyone thinks Obama has done this – the problem is that he is tainted by the whiff of suspicion on those who wouldn’t think twice and perhaps haven’t thought twice about doing it.

Just a thought – but there’s a degree to which the UK general election on 8th June will be decided in the French Presidential election. If Macron wins, then it’s one up for Europe and the future of a united Europe.

And the Liberal Democrats in the UK can point to that and ask the British public to vote to reestablish Britain’s relationship with the EU.

But if Le Pen wins, then the Liberal Democrats are finished because no one in the UK will want to get back into bed with a Europe that includes an extreme right wing French President.

Jean-Francois Jalkh, Ms Le Pen’s stand-in as party leader of the Front National has had to step down because of holocaust-denying remarks he made in 2000.

The belief that is being talked about in the media is that it’s going to work against her. The belief is that people who might have voted for her will shy away because the real bared teeth behind the smile has been revealed. The belief is that people will shy away from voting for someone who is connected to, appointed, a man who is one step away from being a nazi.

Yes it’s hard to imagine the Le Pen did not know about the remarks that Jalkh made in 2000. She is, after all, the leader of a major political party – all these potentially embarrassing things are recorded, noted down, kept by the functionaries of the party so that they can rebut them or avoid embarrassment or whatever, aren’t they? Surely that is how it is? She cannot have been so inept as to let this slip past her and her party without notice? Surely?

So let’s suppose that she knew exactly what she was doing when she appointed Jalkh. Let’s suppose she knew the mention of the remarks he made would come out. Let’s be outlandish and even suppose she encouraged the remarks being made public.

Why? Well, maybe she wants to signal to those who worry that her party is going soft, that they can safely vote for her because underneath the smiles she and her party are still the same hardline extreme right wing party that they were under her father’s leadership.

Maybe.

In the Guardian today, The Russian Foreign Ministry is reported as follows on Boris Johnson’s cancellation of his talks with the Russians about events in Syria.

The Ministry said the cancellation showed a “fundamental misunderstanding or lack of knowledge of the events in Syria, Russia’s efforts to settle that crisis and the general objectives of diplomacy”.

“The decision to call off Johnson’s visit to Moscow confirms once again doubts in the presence of added value in speaking to the UK, which does not have its own position on the majority of present-day issues, nor does it have real influence on the course of international affairs, as it remains ‘in the shadow’ of its strategic partners. We do not feel that we need dialogue with London any more than it does.”

Russia’s embassy in London, meanwhile, said it was “deplorable” that Johnson felt unable to meet his counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. It tweeted mocking polls, including one that sought views on Donald Trump “as a wartime leader and Johnson as his lieutenant”.

Talking only about the narrow matter of the statement, and not talking about who has or has not carried out what attacks in Syria, it seems to me that Russia is acting like a jilted lover pretending the other party doesn’t mean anything to it, when in fact it does.

I mean, why spend so much time and so many words explaining how Britain is inconsequential? If it is inconsequential, a single short sentence would have sufficed – something like ‘No loss.’