I had thought that delirium might have caused me to imagine that India had told Britain to stop sending it aid at the same time as awarding a £13billion contract for fighter aircraft to the French. But, no – turns out it really happened! (I presume the French won the contract because they produce better fighter planes rather than because they have no qualms about offering corrupt foreigners eye-wateringly enormous bungs.)When tax-payers object to their hard–earned money being pissed away on countries rich enough to own an arsenal of nuclear weapons and run their own space programme (something the UK can’t afford), we’re supposed to be mollified by government nods and winks to the effect that it’s “all about trade”. Seems we have qualms about electronically transferring bribes directly into the Swiss bank accounts of seedy crooks, so we send mountains of wedge packed tightly into suitcases with “AID – know what I mean?” stamped on the lid alongside the letters “HMG” and the universally recognised symbol of a thumb being rubbed in a circular motion against the index and middle fingers of the same hand.
There are some dishonest but utterly necessary government actions that are so unpalatable, so incapable of being morally justified, that they have to be done in secret, and then vehemently denied afterwards. These include bribing foreign governments to award juicy contracts to British companies. Another example would be the assassination of foreign politicians, security personnel and scientists working for regimes who present a threat to us and our allies (not that our deeply ethical position on so many fronts has left us with many of those, these days).
Imagine how much simpler life would have been – and how many fewer people would have died - if only Saddam Hussein had been disposed off in the mid-1990s, like the piece of squalid, sub-human rubbish he was. Now, because Western security services have (one presumes) neither the permission, the funding, nor the expertise to scrape "President" Ahmadinejad off the world’s boot-heel, we have the bizarre situation where most of the developed nations are sitting with their eyes tight shut and their fingers crossed, waiting to hear that Israel has bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities to smithereens, or taken out all the key scientists involved in the project in a series of Jason Bourne-style drive-by motorcycle shootings. When one of these actions occurs (as one of them will – after all, Israel is facing total annihilation rather than mere inconvenience), the governments of the West will all rush to the nearest microphone to condemn Israel’s actions in the strongest possible terms - while in private respectfully donning yarmulkes and singing celebratory verses from Hava Nagilah and drunkenly bellowing, "Say what you like about Jews - but they don't half get the bloody job done!".
I get nervous when my government comes over all moral regarding foreign affairs. We elected these jokers to protect us from foreign enemies and to make sure that the likes of France don’t screw us out of major foreign contracts. If that requires the payment of bribes and the occasional assassination, please, don’t be shy – JFDI, deny it to the rest of the world, and then feel perfectly free to lie through your teeth to us. Guardian-readers, BBC employees, teachers, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Muslim spokesmen and Nick Clegg will be ever so upset – I guarantee the rest of us (including a majority of Iranians) will sing the "Eton Boating Song" and vote for you next time round.
While we’re on the subject – why does the Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, still have a job? And why hasn’t the government announced that all aid to India is to be stopped (while quietly shifting £280million into the accounts of a new secret government department to be called MOBA - the Ministry of Bungs and Assassinations - or a new quango to be known as OfBung)?
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