A Good Old English Coup

Talking about the 'establishment', Israel is not the only place where its workings have surfaced into full view. One must never underestimate the power of the establishment. It is a large tapeworm that occupies the intestine of government, and regards each general election as nothing more than a meal break.

The establishment is made up of people who, no matter how the wind blows, never get fired or voted out of office. They are the senior civil servants - known as government mandarins - senior news editors and anchors and of course the tenured academics of our enlightened society.

These are the people who can get a whispering campaign up to such a fever pitch, that it is capable of totally overwhelming the victim. Such a victim was Tony Blair, whose simple understanding of the difference between good and evil aligned him with George Bush as a partner in the war against Islamic fascism.

After months of incessant media baiting of Blair over Iraq and Bush, a plot was hatched last autumn to precipitate the mass resignation of key ministers and top civil servants in a bid to force Blair to stand down and hand over the reins to his chancellor Gordon Brown.

Blair was forced into naming the day he would finally stand down.

In the process, a sitting prime minister of the United Kingdom was forced out of office by powerful figures in an establishment that could not stomach a war against Al Qaeda and was embarrassed to have its country associated with a 'dumb cowboy' like Bush. But more than anything else, this was an establishment of appeasement. Folks who truly believe that by pulling out of Iraq, London's streets will be spared by Islamist bombers.

These people would have been content to leave Saddam in place tocontinue tossing live citizens into tree shredders. These 'not in our name' marchers would have been content to leave millions of Afghan women imprisoned in their homes and their daughters banned from school.

These 'peace in our timers' are the same 'old chaps' who were happy to play cricket and croquet on the lush green lawns of the England while millions of Jews were being incinerated next door. Including my own grandparents.

These are the people that brought down a sitting prime minister in no lesser a forum than Westminster: the mother of all parliaments.

And this was no ordinary prime minister they unseated. Blair was one of the most successful and popular leaders the country ever had, winning 3 successive elections to become the longest-serving Labor PM in British history.

All this conjures up memories of Julius Caesar who was 55 years old when he was stabbed to death by his colleagues in the Roman senate 2,000 years ago.

Tony Blair will be 55 on his next birthday.