Tom Daley

Tom Daley

Michael Henderson in The Spectator writes:

Poor Tom Daley. The cherubic diver, who dazzled as a 14-year-old at the Peking Olympics, turning the heads of Chinese girls like spinning jennies, seems to have banged his head on the board once too often. He won friends everywhere with his easy manner and Colgate smile. The boy next door, people thought, who ran errands for neighbours and lit candles on feast days. But it gets them all in the end, celebrity. He’s gone bonkers.

Daley is now 31 and based in California, where he claims to have found a contentment which eluded him in his sporting endeavours, despite grabbing a gold medal at Tokyo five years ago. The pup from Devon has become a transatlantic crasher. He was on our screens recently in Celebrity Traitors, rolling a jaundiced eye to belittle a rival, and will no doubt roll a few more in the weeks ahead, when he presents Game of Wool on Channel 4.

Game of Wool, it takes some believing, is a knitting contest in a ‘Yarn Barn’. Just the thing to cheer us all up on Sunday evenings after evensong: needles clacking, knees knocking, hearts pounding, tears flowing. We’ve come a long way from all those third-division comics and pub singers at the London Palladium. This is what the ageing starlet told the Radio Times: ‘It’s amazing what you can achieve in such a short time with just two needles or a crochet hook, and the benefits you get from knitting and crochet are just unparalleled.’

Hark at him! ‘Unparalleled benefits’! Clearly climbing a mountain, sailing a boat and learning an instrument – pursuits that stretch bodies and minds – are for lesser folk.

He’s quite a visionary, Tom. ‘It’s the thing that allows me to get away from everything and be creative.’ A knitter, he believes, is always ‘in the moment’, and this has led him on – however did you guess? – ‘a knitting journey’, all the way from Dartmoor to Bel Air.

Even by the standards of the Radio Times, a central pillar of the BBC’s re-education temple, this is gold. To underline their support for this gay icon there’s an extraordinary photograph of him posing in a two-piece outfit that resembles a cross between David Bowie in 1973 and a flowering cherry tree. Daley, looking misty-eyed, like Voltaire at Ferney, grips the hem of his garment like a fast bowler about to release an outswinger.

tomdaley, I MADE TRUNKS! 😏🧶🙌🏻

When you have been ordained as a sleb, courtiers will perform more contortions than a diver leaping from the top board. Take the Traitors schemozzle, when he responded to Kate Garraway’s innocent use of ‘flabbergasted’ by inviting viewers to mock the lady. The gesture did him few favours, because viewers know it is a useful word. For those of a certain age it brings to mind an outraged Frankie Howerd and ‘never has my flabber been so gasted’. Maybe, being half-American, with a husband who works in movies, he’s forgotten how we talk.

When it comes to current affairs, it might be wiser if Daley didn’t talk at all. ‘It’s certainly a scary time for minorities in the US. It does feel as if there’s a regression in people’s opinions and thoughts.’ This is the approved, progressive view, which is why his phizzog is plastered all over the front of the Radio Times.

In another tame interview, with Zoe Williams, one of the Guardian’s privately educated performing fleas, he gives this ball another kick. He and husband Dustin might not live in the United States for ever. ‘We’ll see what happens with democracy.’

Should they ever decide to leave California, where nobody has yet been shoved off a roof for being homosexual, or publicly flogged for committing certain acts in private, they may find a refuge in many lands that honour same-sex couples. Queers for Palestine, those enthusiastic marchers, would be only too willing to assist their relocation. Owen Jones might pocket a finder’s fee.

Daley is of course an athlete so there’s plenty of talk about empowerment and wake-up calls. Do these people, one wonders again, travel anywhere without an alarm clock chiming the hours? Whether you live in Wiveliscombe or Venice Beach, it’s boilerplate stuff passed off as the wisdom of sages.

‘Every time you unravel your knitting, you’re not starting from scratch, you’re starting from experience.’ Another chap, long ago, wrote some songs about innocence and experience. If the fool would persist in his folly, he wrote, he would become wise. So there’s plenty of time for Daley, the man-child, to find out. Meanwhile he has wool in his hands, and wool in his brain.

Tom Daley at the 2008 Olympics

Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see. 

[J E Powell]

@jimmycarr Jimmy Carr's First Date Advice! | #jimmycarr #jimmycarrjokes #darkjokes #standupcomedy #darkhumour ♬ original sound - Jimmy Carr

Germany prepares for war... again!

The Germans are preparing for war. But at the moment it's being taken for granted that not everyone is going to be in favour of it. In fact it ought to go without saying that Germany is currently the most antiwar country in the whole of the western world. And it has to be said that that's despite some pretty stiff competition.

The problem of course is that war is inevitable. For all the magical thinking of western elites (including both the Biden and Trump Administrations in America), Putin's conquest of Ukraine is currently continuing largely unimpeded by anything other than his own troops' incompetence.

And so of course there's going to be war at some point whether the demos like it or not. And thus it's interesting to observe, in the face of such an obvious "democratic deficit", the means that a supposedly democratic government will be forced to deploy against its own voters.

As Lisa Haseldine describes exercise Red Storm Bravo (itself a rehearsal for Operation Deutschland) in The Spectator

The first day’s main event was moving a military convoy through the centre of the city after dark. As the sun set over Hamburg’s port, I watched the heavily armed soldiers march towards a fleet of about 70 military vehicles, lined up three abreast. Some were small armoured vehicles, others enormous Rheinmetall-branded trucks, several with machine-gun turrets that would later be manned as the convoy sped through the city. Many soldiers wore balaclavas to prevent them being identified, according to our Bundeswehr escort. 

... 

At two points along the route, the convoy was stopped by pretend protests: at the first, army reservists in civvies waved banners and chanted at the convoy to ‘turn back’; at the second, ‘protestors’ staged a sit-in, with signs saying ‘glue’ around the necks of some to denote those who would have stuck themselves to the ground. The point was for the riot police to practise removing them. Groups of three took turns: a grab at the protester's head from behind and a knee to the back, one arm twisted around, then the other, allowing the police to peel them off the ground and carry them away.

So far, so German!

The "interesting" question of course is to what extent countries with longer and, er, perhaps "deeper" traditions of "liberal" democracy will follow suit. Can one really imagine English police, let alone the Army, cracking down on "democratic" protesters in London or Marchwood?

We'll wait and see.

Jordan james

How important is Britain really?

How important is Britain really? In the Real World, that is? On what used to be called "the world stage"  - although to be fair even that doesn't sound like quite such an important place as it did?

That surely is the question one has to ask when one sees our creepy little twerp of a Prime Minister desperately trying to insert himself into the Donald's shot as the great man is announcing Peace In Our Time in the Middle East. And if something's so cringe that even Jeremy Kyle thinks it's cringe, you know - or at least you ought to know - that you've crossed a line.

On the one hand, of course, you've got UK education secretary Bridget Phillipson insisting without a jot of evidence that our great country indeed 'played a key role behind the scenes' in shaping Trump's peace deal between Israel and Hamas over Gaza. On the other hand, you've got, er, the US ambassador to Israel saying quite clearly 'I assure you she's delusional."

And then of course you have the uncomfortable reality: peace could have been achieved a good deal earlier, if only Britain and America had worked together, with the latter keeping a close eye on Netanyahu whilst the former put in the diplomatic legwork to get the Arab states to condemn and isolate Hamas.

Of course, the isolation and surrender of Hamas eventually happened. The Israelis bombed Iran. Then Britain and America helped them bomb Iran. Then the Israelis bombed Qatar. Then the Qataris decided that supporting Hamas wasn't quite such a good idea. Then Hamas surrendered.*

But in the meantime Britain, along with Canada and of course France, had done the exact opposite of what was wanted by deciding to "recognise" a "Palestinian state". And apart from because it pandered to their increasingly substantial domestic national socialist Moslem minorities, it wasn't at all clear why.

It is of course possible that it depends whom you ask. Anyone in the Real World, such as poor dear Marco Rubio, will tell you that the Moslem Occupied Governments' decision to reward Hamas by giving their cause diplomatic support did no good whatsoever. But from the point of view of reliably loopy Blairites such as Jonathan Powell it was all part of a cunning plan that couldn't fail.

The plan is, of course, a "peace plan". It's modelled on Powell's other great success, which was of course his plan for "peace" in Ireland. (How's that working out? Oh, yes!) And unfortunately the likes of Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are clearly sold on the idea of having a sovereign state governed by Hamas. (How would that work out? Oh, yes!)

The fact that Powell and his cronies (and Blair himself is hovering stage left, if reports are to be believed) wouldn't recognise an enemy of western civilisation - whether it be Arab nationalism or Chinese communism - if it were goosestepping up Whitehall is not unimportant. And yet because he has a serious face and a posh accent the Yanks have yet again fallen for the British shtick. "Don't worry, my dear fellow. We know how to handle these people."

The "British", bear in mind, are the supposed colonial experts who almost lost Iraq, just as by now we've all but lost the Chagos Islands, just as we lost most of the rest of the Empire in the 1960s, just as back in the day we lost a handful of colonies on the east coast of North America.

So why exactly Trump & Co are currently seeking and accepting our advice over "peace" in the Middle East raises some very nasty possibilities indeed.

*And pace Douglas Murray, that is essentially what they've done.