Christopher Booker’s notebook
The Sunday Telegraph (Excerpts) – If anything sent “the wrong message to our young people”, it was the Iranian video showing the casual, shambolic way in which our boarding party came over the side of a dhow they had been inspecting. Everything about this affair showed a complete collapse of professional discipline, which brought shame on the Navy. But if the result has been to land our Government and the Foreign Office in an unholy mess, it must also be said they have asked for it.
Two weeks ago I reported the latest extraordinary instance of how, for 10 years, the Foreign Office has been trying to appease the Iranian regime. As Jack Straw has admitted, it was at Teheran’s behest that the Foreign Office put the leading Iranian dissident movement, the PMOI, on the EU’s list of proscribed terrorist organisations. When in December this was ruled by the European Court of Justice to be both wholly inappropriate and illegal, our Government again led the way in insisting that the Council of Ministers should simply put up two fingers to the court’s ruling and to EU law.
The kidnapping of our sailors is merely another example of that age-old rule that appeasing tyrants does not buy them off, it only buys their contempt. From its own sorry record, no one should be more aware of this than the Foreign Office. But, as we know, the only lesson we learn from history is that no one ever learns the lessons of history.
