The Falklands war had little to do with love of country and everything to do with Thatcher's whipping-up of nationalism of the worst kind, not least because she needed a war to distract from her failings at home, especially with regard to unemployment and inflation. She could have thanked the Falklands dead for her next election victory. Yet another facet of her hateful side.

It's a shame that Bonzo's post about how doggedly human the Supreme Court judges are by referring (in his own sweet way, of course) to their likely shenanigans in their bathtubs, because it had exactly that grain of truth about how their loftiness is false. It reminded me, though admittedly tangentially only, of a piece written by Nicholas Humphrey in 1982, reflecting on Nye Bevan's remark about "not wanting to go naked into the conference chamber." Yertis (as we say in Pastyland):


In 1957 at the Labour Party's debate on disarmament, Aneurin Bevan declared that he was not prepared to 'go naked into the conference chamber'. It is a phrase which has been echoed by Tory and Labour defence spokesmen alike; something similar was said at the Liberal Party conference in September 1981. But what was it that Bevan had to hide? Bevan came into the world naked, and naked he left it. Why should he have been afraid to go naked into the conference chamber to discuss matters of global life and death ? What he had to hide, as much from himself as from his adversaries, was nothing less than his humanity. Of course, by the rules of the game he had to hide it. For no naked human being, conscious of his own essential ordinariness, the chairseat pressing against his buttocks, his toes wriggling beneath the conference table, his penis hanging limply a few feet from Mr Andropov's, could possibly play the game of international politics and barter like a god with the lives of millions of his fellow men. No naked human being could threaten to press the nuclear button. So I come to my proposal. Our leaders must be given no choice but to go naked into the conference chamber. At the United Nations General Assembly, at the Geneva disarmament negotiations, at the next summit in Moscow or in Washington, there shall be a notice pinned to the door: 'Reality gate. Human beings only beyond this point. NO CLOTHES.' And then, as the erstwhile iron maiden takes her place beside the erstwhile bionic commissar, it may dawn on them that neither she nor he is made of iron or steel, but rather of a warmer, softer and much more magical material, flesh and blood. Perhaps as Mr Andropov looks at his navel and realises that he, like the rest of us, was once joined from there to a proud and aching mother, as Mrs Thatcher feels the table-cloth tickling her belly, they will start to laugh at their pretensions to be superhuman rulers of the lives of others. If they do not actually make love they will, at least, barely be capable of making war.