Uncle Len and Auntie Suella
Lessons on how to think badly
Even good talk shows have a lot of time to fill and since talk is all they have, they need a vast supply of heads to fill the space with talking. A few years back I decided I didn't want to play this role if I could avoid it, but occasionally a friend is the presenter or the researcher sounds so desperate, that I give in. Last week I was asked to go on Newsnight to talk about demonstrations and the law, but I am not a legal expert and thought they’d be better off without me running my mouth on something that someone else would know far more about. Others have different rules.
This is a preamble to talking about what was said when the ex-leader of the Unite union, Len McCluskey - whose only current occupation appears to be jointly editing a book of right-on poetry with Jeremy Corbyn - appeared on the Andrew Marr programme on LBC to talk about Gaza. But why? Does McCluskey know much about Gaza? Is he able to reflect usefully upon what is likely to happen there? Nope. I can only imagine it was because he could be relied upon to criticise Keir Starmer’s stance and thus stir the Labour pot and give a new (if irrelevant) dimension to a story that doesn't need it.
The danger of this kind of casting didn’t take long to reveal itself. When asked Uncle Len allowed that what Hamas had done was on October 7th was “despicable”. However there was hardly time for a full stop after “despicable” before he added, “Let me pose something to you”. And so came the biggest BUT of all. What Len wanted to “pose” was this:
Mossad is the most sophisticated security organisation in the world much more so than MI5, MI6, CIA. Are we really led to believe that they didn't know this was happening?
Simultaneously Len is an expert on the sophistication of MI5, MI6 and the CIA, and sufficiently confident in his knowledge to know that Mossad is better than the lot of them and that it is tantamount to impossible that the agency did not know in detail of the forthcoming Hamas attack. And that it decided not to prevent it. This is the only reading of McCluskey’s words that make sense. Incidentally if McCluskey had heard of the actual agency tasked with internal security, Shin Bet, he wasn’t letting on.
Cui bloody bono
So McCluskey’s “pose” was that the Israeli secret service permitted the Hamas attack. In that sense the Israelis brought the slaughter of October 7th upon themselves for nefarious reasons - probably to give themselves an excuse to invade Gaza and have their wicked way with it. Or, as one brain-dead tweeter put it to me, “cui bono?” Seriously? 1400 dead, babies shot, 200 abducted and cui bloody bono? Those Jews, eh, Len?
I’d like to think that after that performance McCluskey will be freely expressing himself on an outfit like Novara Media where he can be interviewed by Rivkah Brown, rather than being given the chance to air his anti-semitc conspiracy theories on a station like LBC. But I am afraid LBC actually tweeted out a clip of his comment without any rebuttal.
Guys, that’s when YOU become the problem.