Whether or not the two events were connected, having raised eyebrows by appointing the deeply inappropriate Sayeeda Warsi as the Tories’ shadow minister for community cohesion (see my post here), David Cameron then went some way towards redeeming himself by challenging Gordon Brown three times at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday over the government’s refusal to outlaw Hizb ut Tahrir. The papers this morning were full of the fact that Cameron spectacularly wrong-footed Brown who was unable to cope with this question. But it was the substance of what Cameron said which was notable:

The Prime Minister said that we need evidence about Hizb ut-Tahrir. That organisation says that Jews should be killed wherever they are found. What more evidence do we need before we ban that organisation? It is poisoning the minds of young people. Two years ago, the Government said that it should be banned. I ask again: when will this be done?… But there has been a lapse of two years since the Government said that they would ban the organisation. People will find it hard to understand why an organisation that urges people to kill Jews has not been banned.

In the current desperate climate of denial, censorship and appeasement in Britain, this was a bold move indeed. Few are prepared to stand up in public and demand that Hizb ut Tahrir be banned, because few are prepared to acknowledge the lethal contribution it is making towards the recruitment to sedition and violence of so many of our young Muslims, who are intensely vulnerable to its seductive combination of intellectuality and austere religious purpose. Unfortunately, HuT also promulgates hatred of the west, an agenda to conquer it and a virulent and demented prejudice against the Jews. There’s a sample in this 1999 HuT leaflet; while in April 2002 it posted an article on its website entitled

And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out.

in which it described Jews as

cowards, the most severe in their love for life…covered with humiliation and misery forever

and said:

The Jews are a people of slander. They are a treacherous people who violate oaths and covenants. They lie and change words from their right places. They take the rights of people unjustly, and kill the Prophets and the innocent.

Stuff like this is clear evidence of racial hatred and incitement to murder. David Cameron was absolutely right to say that HuT should be banned for promoting such unlawful incitement. The tragedy for Britain is that examples of such moral clarity in the war we can no longer name have now become rarer than the prospect of a Brit winning Wimbledon.

Is plagiarism the sincerest form of flattery? Anyone who read my Daily Mail column on Monday and then read a letter in today’s Daily Telegraph from one J.Sewill, Birmingham, will have felt a pronounced sense of déjà vu.

It’ll be turning up in an A-level exam script next.

Those who eagerly follow the sayings of Inayat Bunglawala, the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain whose claimed ‘moderation’ has been repeatedly exposed as an aspiration that has yet to be realised (see here, here and here,) might be interested to hear him on last night’s BBC Radio Four Moral Maze declaring that he is committed to the Islamisation of Britain. Non-violently. So that’s all right.

On June 25, Anshel Pfeffer presciently and shrewdly wrote this in the Jerusalem Post about the deposed Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas:

Haniyeh’s hope is that by delivering Johnston safely, he will achieve a degree of legitimacy from the Western governments currently supporting Abu Mazen’s new government in Ramallah and also secure the friendship of one of the world’s major media organizations. Last week, Hamas was poised to attack the Dughmush compound but backed off when it realized that a dead Johnston would only make things much worse. But Haniyeh joining the ‘Free Alan’ campaign has already paid off for Hamas in the form o f unofficial contacts with the British government… Hamas is competing with Fatah for the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people, and trying to win approval from its Iranian paymasters, while simultaneously appealing for recognition from the ‘moderate’ Arab states. Without appearing to give in, it is trying to engage Israel and stop the Western nations from boosting Abu Mazen at its expense.

Today, Haniyeh must be rejoicing. Hamas has pulled off a propaganda coup which has worked out exactly as it intended, thanks in large measure to the willingness of the BBC to be thus used. Of course, the release of the BBC’s Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston from his four-month captivity at the hands of the Army of Islam is a great relief. But it comes with a terrible price tag — the strengthening of an organisation committed to the extermination of Israel, the mass murder of Jews and the overthrow and Islamisation of the free world. Only a few weeks ago, Hamas were the people binding the hands and feet of fellow Palestinians and hurling them off the tops of tall buildings. But today, by managing to extricate Johnston from the Army of Islam, they are posing as saviours of kidnap victims, honest brokers against the men of violence — people with whom the world may now think it can therefore do business. Thus Haniyeh exulted today that Johnston’s release

‘confirms [Hamas] is serious in imposing security and stability and maintaining law and order in this very dear part of our homeland’.

And Johnston has duly warmly praised Hamas for getting him out. On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0810) there was — all too predictably — virtually no questioning of this repositioning of Hamas as the good guys. There were a few references here and there to the propaganda game Hamas was playing, and a few delicately phrased references to the, ahem, conditions that would still have to be met before they could be admitted to the councils of the civilised world; but their record of murder and savagery was not mentioned, nor was their savagery of the past few weeks, nor was their agenda of extermination and Islamisation. And most notable of all in these particular circumstances, no mention whatsoever of the fact that Hamas, the rescuers of the kidnapped Alan Johnston, are themselves the kidnappers of Gilad Shalit, the 19 year-old Israeli soldier who was kidnapped from Israel a year ago and who, in a recent video, has said his health is deteriorating. The BBC has not even seen fit to mention him. Hamas says it can deliver law and order in Gaza. Oh yes? So when will these law-and-order enforcers release Gilad Shalit, whom they have unlawfully kidnapped and imprisoned? When will they stop trying to kill innocent Israelis through bombarding southern Israel with rockets?

The Hamas strategy is shrewd and clever, because it has correctly assessed that the decadent west will only too eagerly embrace its lies. It knows that the BBC is only too willing to be its friend. Already, TV and radio shows are ringing round to find studio guests who will ‘argue against the view that we should now recognise Hamas’. Appeasement is now well and truly out of the closet. Those who believe that fascism should be fought and defeated are now on the back foot.

And this Hamas coup is in turn but one part of a broader strategy. Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. All over the world, the Brotherhood is behind the pincer movement of jihad through terrorism and jihad through cultural capture. And manipulation is the name of the game it plays. It creates terrorist or insurrectionary pressure; it then poses as the ‘honest broker’ peacemaker; it thus turns its victims into its supplicants and can then turn the ratchet still further. It played this game in France, when the French government implored the Brotherhood imams to restore order in the wake of the Muslim riots in the banlieues (riots that it said were ‘nothing to do with Islam’). It has played it over Alan Johnston. And it is playing it in Britain and the US, where its proxies have been pushing hard for ‘engagement’ with the Brotherhood as an antidote to al Qaeda — and where, with the British and American political elite now in such moral, intellectual and political disarray, it is now succeeding.

We are losing.

Even the normally politically correct Andrew Marr has blanched at the current stampede to censor the truth about Islamist terrorism. In the Telegraph today, he writes:

On Start the Week on Monday, all the distinguished guests, including the philosopher John Gray and the historian Eric Hobsbawm, vehemently agreed that the word ‘Islamist’, which I have used at the top of this column, was wrong and dangerous. It implied a strong link to Islam, which was unfair. I thought the distinction between ‘Islamic’ and ‘Islamist’ was enough: but if we need a new and more accurate word for extremist Muslims, what is it?

Careful, Andrew. If you follow where this kind of thinking inescapably leads you, you may find those smart dinner-party invites start failing to land on your mat.

I had assumed that Sayeeda Warsi, newly appointed by David Cameron as the Tories’ shadow minister for Community Cohesion, was a Muslim committed to fighting rather than appeasing Islamist extremism. There was surely no way that, in today’s circumstances, Cameron could have appointed someone who was not. However shallow and opportunistic his repositioning strategy might be, he would surely be extremely careful to appoint someone who was absolutely beyond reproach as unequivocally opposed to both terrorism and extremism. How wrong can you be. The website conservative.home has just posted up a jaw-dropping revelation of Ms Warsi’s views. Here’s a taste:

Mrs. Warsi has been a fierce critic of British anti-terror policy, stating that anti-terrorism legislation had turned Britain into a ‘police state’. According to The Times, in a 2006 article for the Asian newspaper Awaaz, written while serving as vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, Warsi described the Government’s anti-terror proposals as ‘enough to tip any normal young man into the realms of a radicalized fanatic.’ She also wrote that ‘if terrorism is the use of violence against civilians, then where does that leave us in Iraq?’…

Warsi also dismissed the idea that pressure should be placed upon British Muslims to root out extremists within their midst, commenting that ‘when you say this is something that the Muslim community needs to weed out, or deal with, that is a very dangerous step to take.’… Sayeeda Warsi has been highly critical of the war in Iraq, and called upon former Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologise for the war, an extraordinary statement at a time when thousands of British soldiers are putting their lives on the line every day… In a January 2006 BBC Any Questions? debate, Warsi welcomed the election of Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hamas, a brutal movement officially proscribed as a terrorist group by the British Government. Hamas murdered 377 Israelis in 425 terrorist attacks between September 2000 and March 2004, including 52 suicide attacks. Despite Hamas’s track record, as part of the BBC panel Warsi told her audience:

‘I think what’s happened in the Middle East with the election of Hamas is actually an opportunity and I think that’s the way we’ve got to see it. When groups that practice violence are suddenly propelled into power through a democratic process they get responsibility and responsibility can be a tremendously taming factor. And I think that Hamas, when it realizes that it wants a safe and stable and prosperous Palestine for its people, will realize that the way to deal with that is through dialogue and democracy and not through violence… I actually think that Hamas has been given a mandate and I think it will now hopefully adopt a responsible position because that is the only way.’

…Warsi has also entered the fray over the highly sensitive issue of Kashmir and, according to the Press Association, suggested in a July 2005 BBC One Politics Show interview that new anti-terror laws should not prevent support among Britons for ‘freedom fighters’ in Kashmir. Comparing Islamic rebels in the disputed province with Nelson Mandela and the ANC, Warsi observed that:’We have a community in Britain, a Pakistani and Kashmiri community, who holds a very, very strong view about Kashmir and the scope of freedom-fighting in Kashmir. It would concern me if… the definition of terrorism was to cover maybe (the) legitimate freedom-fight in Kashmir.’ It should be noted that Britain currently outlaws no less than six Kashmiri terrorist organizations: Harakat Ul-Jihad-Ul Islami, Harakat-Ul-Mujahideen/Alami and Jundallah, Harakat Mujahideen, Jaish e Mohammed, Khuddam Ul-Islam and splinter group Jamaat Ul-Furquan, and Lashkar e Tayyaba. It is hard to see how such extreme views will actually enhance ‘community cohesion’ in Britain’s inner cities, and it is difficult to think of a more explosive issue than Kashmir in fomenting tensions between British citizens of Pakistani and Indian origin.

At such a time, when the country needs to show the most resolute stance possible against both Islamist terrorism and the religious fanaticism that drives it, it is absolutely fundamental that our politicians do not allow a single chink of light to show through this defence. David Cameron’s appointment of a person with such views to such a position at such a time is exceptionally worrying. The fact that such a revelation has surfaced on the Tories’ principal internet sounding board indicates the gravity of this — and all credit to conservative.home for having the courage to do it.

We now have a Labour government which is censoring all references to Muslims and Islam when talking about al Qaeda, and a Tory opposition which appears to believe that ‘community cohesion’ means declining to suggest to British Muslims that they should weed out the extremists in their midst.

Londonistan rules.

In the Telegraph today, a poisonous little paragraph was slipped into its terror attack coverage. Its Middle East correspondent Tim Butcher, whose reporting of Israel is unfailingly one-sided (guess which side) — and who, as I reported here, once described a Palestinian on Palestinian atrocity as ‘Old Testament-style brutality’ — had this to say about the father of the Jordanian terror suspect being held by the British police:

Mr Asha, who comes from the Jordanian population of Palestinians made refugees by the creation of Israel, worked for 20 years as an Arabic language teacher in Saudi Arabia. The Asha family originally come from Hebron, a town in the West Bank, part of the territory occupied by Israel.

But when Israel was formed in 1948, Hebron was not part of it, just as it is not part of Israel today. It lay outside Israel’s borders in the no-man’s land that was thereafter illegally occupied by Jordan until 1967, when the Israelis took and held the West Bank after the Six-Day War. So if the Asha family came from Hebron, they could not have been ‘made refugees by the creation of Israel’ because their home was outside Israel. They then seem to have moved to Jordan proper. So why does the Telegraph publish such a gratuitous lie?

People in Britain are shocked — shocked! — that medical doctors are suspected of involvement in the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on Britain over the past few days. The shock reflects the deep unreality of public discourse up till now. People have persisted in believing that Islamic terrorism could be explained by poverty, deprivation, alienation and so forth, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Now they are horrified that doctors, whose calling is to save life, can be bent on mass murder.

The capacity of the human mind to delude itself never ceases to amaze. How can such educated individuals be killers? people exclaim. Have such people really leaned nothing from history? Have they forgotten the Nazis, forgotten Dr Mengele, forgotten that the genocide of the Jews was carried out by people who delighted in Goethe and Mozart? Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s number two, is a paediatrician. Yet he is responsible for the deliberate mass murder of thousands of people.

On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0755 approx), the reformed Islamist extremist Hassan Butt patiently spelled out to presenter Jim Naughtie that Islamist terrorists carry out their acts of mass murder as an expression of religious faith and fervour. They do it, he said, ‘for the pleasure of God’. Far from being acts of despair, these terrible atrocities are acts of religious exultation.

If we don’t understand, even now, that what we are facing is a religious war, a jihad against the unbeliever and backsliding Muslims across the world we cannot possibly hope to defend ourselves against it. Yet while former Islamist extremists such as Hassan Butt and Ed Husain are urgently telling us the truth, Gordon Brown’s new administration is shutting its ears and embarking on a suicidally stupid and cowardly strategy. Astoundingly, it has decided to deny the religious element of this jihad altogether, to redefine Islamic terrorism as mere criminality and to ban all terms that call this horror by its proper name. From the Daily Express today, we learn:

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word ‘Muslim’ in ¬connection with the ¬terrorism crisis. The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase ‘war on ¬terror’ is to be dropped. The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more ‘consensual’ tone than existed under Tony Blair… Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language. ‘There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,’ the spokesman said. ‘It is important that the country remains united.’

For ‘consensual’, read bowdlerised, censored and dissimulatory; and for ‘united’, read defeated. This is a disastrous beginning to Brown’s premiership. The terrorism we face is a jihad carried out in the name of Islam, mandated by the principal religious authorities in the world of Islam and drawing on theological concepts in Islam. That doesn’t mean all Muslims go along with it; many do not, and many are indeed its victims. But to deny that it is a war which draws its authority from Islamic precepts is to deny the truth. That is why it is not enough for British Muslims to condemn these acts of terror. They have to acknowledge that what drives these acts is a part of the faith to which they subscribe — a part which they must renounce.

In the light of that, the Commons statement yesterday by the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith — whose performance had our terminally frivolous and ignorant media drooling in pleasure this morning — was an absolute disgrace. Clearly following instructions to avoid telling the truth in this new strategy of ‘consensual’ dissimulation, she conspicuously avoided talking about Muslims or Islam. Instead, she spoke — absurdly — about ‘communities’ and insisted that these terrorist outrages were merely ‘criminal’ acts. Exactly which ‘community leaders’ will she be talking to, one wonders, about the problem posed by these purely ‘criminal’ activities? Hindus? Chinese? Rastafarians?

Invited, moreover, to agree with a daft and worrying statement (by the chair of the supremely moderate Sufi Muslim Council) that ‘such actions have nothing to do with Islam’ she eagerly concurred, saying:

Any attempt to identify a murderous ideology with a great faith such as Islam is wrong, and needs to be denied.

Yes, the British Home Secretary has actually said that terrorist outrages committed by al Qaeda have nothing to do with Islam.

In the Telegraph, the Labour MP Denis MacShane — who has himself paid a political price for speaking the truth about Islamist extremism —rightly poured scorn on the Tory leader David Cameron for criticising those who used the word ‘Islamist’ to describe the ideological roots of the terrorist threat (yes, the Tories are also playing this suicidal game). But MacShane went on to claim that, by contrast,

There is a new determination in government to spell out hard truths.

On the contrary. Gordon Brown has talked about the need to ‘win hearts and minds’ in the community we cannot now name, just as the west did during the Cold War. Clearly, if Mr Brown had been in charge during the Cold War, we’d have lost it. For it is now plain that to him, winning the hearts and minds of British Muslims means endorsing and regurgitating their own false claim that Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, and suppressing the truth that what we are up against is religious fanaticism and a holy war in the name of Islam against the infidel west.

This is the way we lose that war. Britain’s friends and allies in the free world should be appalled.

A propos my post below, we in Britain should obviously all pay closer attention to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. On May 20 this year it wrote:

And if like Soros, you make several fortunes from international dealing, what and where is the best information found? The offices and committee rooms of the United Nations in New York and the World Bank Group in Washington. Hence, it was no surprise when, early this month, Soros announced that he was bringing into his organization an old friend who had filled a number of posts over the years, through which it was possible to have contributed to the collection of the Soros billions.

The posts involved deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, chief of Cabinet to the U.N. secretary-general and administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. Earlier posts included vice president for External Affairs at the World Bank and the bank’s director of External Affairs. In preparation for these elite appointments was a 10-year stint with an international consulting group that specialized in advice to reformist and socialist candidates for heads of state in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia.

Each and every one of these posts has been held by a good friend of George Soros, Sir Mark Malloch Brown.

In 2006, ostensibly for his services to Britain, Sir Brown was made a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George — a KCMG — by the queen of England….The son of a South African diplomat, Mark Brown was born and grew up in Zimbabwe (when it was known as Rhodesia), was educated in England at Marlborough College and took a history degree at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

He now lives with his wife, Patricia (‘Trish’ to George Soros and other friends), who is a vice chairman of Refugees International, and their four children in a five-bedroom house on a near-five-acre estate in Katonah, in upstate New York. The estate belongs to George Soros, who charges Mark $10,000 a month rent, some $5,000 less than a previous tenant.

‘Sir’ Mark querulously defends this rent by saying that he pays the utilities. As of now, Brown is ‘interacting’ with Yale University students and faculty at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization as a distinguished visiting fellow. Instead of concentrating on writing a book on globalization, he had been in Washington leading the charge against former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.

Brown told a large audience at World Bank headquarters that the bank’s ‘mission’ was ‘hugely at risk’ as long as Wolfowitz remained; by his very presence, the British knight also was saying: ‘Here I am, ethically pure, eminently qualified and ready — right now to become your leader.’
Too bad Brown has a short memory.

Last year, speaking of the United Nations, Mark Malloch Brown insisted, “Not a penny was lost from the organization.” This, after an audit through which it was shown that the United Nations had lost $7 million from overpayments; $61 million was found to have bypassed U.N. rules; $82 million was lost to mismanagement; and $110 million was rated as having “insufficient” justification. This adds up to $260 million out of a $1.6 billion budget.

Naturally, Brown also wants to forget the Oil-for-Food scandals, where he said that his boss at the United Nations, Kofi Annan, had been ‘fully exonerated.’ A totally untrue statement, Brown described calls for Annan’s resignation as ‘inappropriate political assassination.’

Among many other items in his life, which Brown would prefer no longer to be reminded of, is a speech he made at Pace University in 2005. Speaking of the United States, he said: ‘This ungainly giant of a nation that has led the world in advancing freedom, democracy and decency cannot quite accept membership in the global neighborhood association; that it must abide by others’ rules as well as its own.’ He noted that Washington already has set itself apart in its opposition to the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

It is being said that Sir Mark Malloch Brown, vice chairman to George Soros, will be asked to join the Cabinet of Gordon Brown when he becomes Britain’s next prime minister. ‘Sir’ Brown may have found another position that will help his partner, ‘the man who broke the Bank of England,’ just when the pound sterling has become interesting again.

Malloch Brown is indeed more than a friend to Soros. As the Financial Times reported last month:

Sir Mark Malloch Brown, who recently stepped down as deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, has been appointed vice-chairman of his friend George Soros’s hedge fund company. Sir Mark will also serve as vice-chairman of the billionaire philanthropist’s Open Society Institute, which promotes democracy and human rights, particularly in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The question remains. Why was Gordon Brown so keen to get this man into his government that he ennobled him, the time-honoured way of getting unelected favourites in through the back door? And what does this say about our new rock of Prime Ministerial granite, who is such a staunch friend of America, upholder of international integrity and defender of the free world?

So is Britain’s new Prime Minister Gordon Brown going to defend the free world or surrender it to its enemies? Will he cut through all the dissimulation and manipulation by jihadis and their western useful idiots and instead call the threat to the free world by its proper name? Will he ignore the ever-increasing defeatism and pressure for appeasement, or will he genuflect to the prevalent anti-Americanism and go along with the moral and intellectual inversion that supports genocidal aggressors and blames their victims? As the dust still settles today over the shape of his government, the signs are mixed and not a little alarming.

Simon McDonald, the UK’s former Ambassador to Israel, is a stalwart defender of Israel and is free of the Arabism that is the stock in trade of the Foreign Office. It is therefore a very positive sign that he is now Brown’s chief foreign policy adviser. However, the other signals are not so good. The new Foreign Secretary is David Miliband, who was reportedly opposed to war in Iraq and who attacked Israel’s action in Lebanon last year. He was reported to have joined other Cabinet colleagues in criticising Tony Blair for not breaking with President Bush by calling for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon — ie, Israel’s surrender to Iran. His appointment is thus a clear signal that Britain is now distancing itself from America. At such a terrifying time for the free world with Iran racing towards the bomb, to give such a signal that the western alliance is weakening amounts to a treasonable boost to the enemy.

More disturbing still is the arrival in Brown’s government of the former United Nations deputy Secretary-General, Sir Mark Malloch Brown, who has been granted a peerage in order to take up the post of minister for Africa, Asia and the UN. As we know, the UN’s corruption and the way it has been turned into a mouthpiece for some of the world’s greatest tyrannies make it an urgent candidate for root-and-branch reform. Yet Malloch Brown actually actually defended the UN over the oil-for-food scandal.

As I reported here, he also played a key and disreputable role in the Wolfowitz witch-hunt at the World Bank, blaming Wolfowitz’s anti-corruption drive for a loss of funding. He has blamed the Iraq war for disrupting aid to the world’s needy, by identifying such aid as serving Western interests rather than universal values. Yet according to this very important piece by Claudia Rosett in the Weekly Standard, the Wolfowitz affair conveniently distracted attention from a corruption scandal at the U.N. Development Program on Malloch Brown’s watch. UNDP officials were apparently up to their necks in corruption scams stretching from North Korea to Zimbabwe. And all this was going on while the UNDP was run by Malloch Brown. Rosett goes on:

Then there’s Mark Malloch Brown and the upmarket house he has been renting for years on the suburban New York estate of hedge fund tycoon George Soros–for whom Malloch Brown has now gone to work. Reporters queried Malloch Brown in 2005 about potential conflicts of interest in renting from Soros while running a UNDP that by his own admission was collaborating ‘extensively’ with Soros’s network of foundations. Malloch Brown’s response was not to provide documentation on what he claimed was an arm’s length arrangement. Instead, he denounced reporters for their ‘bile.’

Last year, persistent questioning by Matthew Russell Lee of the Inner City Press finally extracted from the UNDP the information that a book about its own history, commissioned in 2004 by Malloch Brown, had cost the organization $737,000 (including such items as salary and travel money for the author, and purchase of copies from the publisher). The book was a paean to the UNDP, and to Malloch Brown in particular, describing his reforms as a model ‘of efficiency and effectiveness.’

George Soros is, of course, the squillionaire funder of campaigns against George Bush and the Iraq war and the man who also backs the legalisation of drugs and thus the enslavement of millions. He now has his man in the heart of the British government. What on earth does Gordon Brown think he is doing?