Morning music
On this day a year ago
Tweets and thoughts about Russia, Ukraine, and NATO expansion since the 1990s
I remember Bill Bradley from when I lived in New Jersey in the early 1990s. One of those “best President (or Prime Minister) who never made it” figures, like (in the UK) Rab Butler, Enoch Powell etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bradley.
On the main question here, the Russia-Ukraine situation, we see above a number of figures from, inter alia, the U.S. State Department, the CIA, the British Foreign Office, not to mention the American, Australian and other political establishments, all warning against NATO expansionism and against stoking Ukrainian political and military aggressiveness.
Few of those political and diplomatic figures can be, plausibly, written off as “Russian shills” and the like, as we see all too often written on Twitter and elsewhere, as the unthinking “I stand with Ukraine” mob bay for anything up to and even including nuclear war with Russia.
The disastrous policy of actively supporting the Jew-Zionist kleptocracy in Kiev headed (or figureheaded) by Zelensky is bad enough in itself (and is soon going to result in recession and/or stagflation in the UK and the EU) but, worse than that, may develop into a military situation between NATO and Russia which may then slip or slide into a nuclear conflict which would devastate the UK, much of Europe, the industrialized parts of Russia, and the cities of the USA.
Other tweets seen
I may not like moneygrubbing expenses cheat and Bilderberger, Ed Balls, and the same goes (double) for his venal, hypocritical, “refugees welcome” (but not in her own several homes) wife, Yvette Cooper, but it has to be said that Balls is a trained economist, and did criticize at the time the ludicrously wrongheaded “austerity” nonsense put forward by the part-Jews David Cameron-Levita and George Osborne from 2010-2015, a policy which has run Britain threadbare.
Ukrainian “refugees”
I recently posted on the blog this Daily Mail account from a no doubt well-meaning Jewish woman in the UK who signed up for the Government scheme to host Ukrainian “refugees”: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11182855/Why-Im-glad-Ukrainian-refugee.html.
A salutary tale, and one which I have just reread, this time also reading many of the readers’ comments. Some had had similar experiences.
I was reminded, reading all that, of an experience of my own.
Over twenty years ago (how time flies in this world when one is no longer young), I was invited, with my wife, to the wedding of a friend, and former teacher at a language school where I had been a part-time student in the early 1980s.
I have mentioned Ig [Ignat] Avsey a couple of times in the past on this blog. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/09/ignat-avsey-obituary
I had become very friendly in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Ig, a noted translator of Dostoyevsky; Ig was divorced (from decades before) and lived in a semi-detached house with a large garden, in North Finchley (London outskirts).
Ig worked at a language school near Warren Street, in Central London, an institute where most of the Russian-language faculty were exiles of one sort or another. He himself had been born in Latvia between the world wars; when he was 14, his family fled to Germany, at the end of WW2, and as the Red Army advanced from the East. They had then settled in the UK.
I sometimes enjoyed a drink, and occasionally a curry in Drummond Street (also near Warren Street), with Ig and one or other of his friends, such as “Uncle John”, a divorced fellow whose wife, Alla from Leningrad, was another language teacher of mine at one time, or with Guy Churchill, a pleasant retiree and one-time SAS soldier (during the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s), who had the odd habit (never seen before or since) of breaking the filter tips off his cigarettes before smoking them.
Ig was rather eccentric, and sometimes did things which were very surreal, as when he took me, for no obvious reason, to have tea with the writer, Doris Lessing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing], at a cafe-bar near the language school. A strange, awkward, rather Kafkaesque experience.
It never occurred to me that Ig, not far off retirement age, might remarry and so compromise his bachelor life of Russo-Soviet culture, beer, and collecting railway clocks (several were in the main room of his house). I was therefore surprised to be invited to his wedding, at a Register Office somewhere on the extension of Edgware Road, far up that road, maybe near Brent Cross (I cannot now exactly recall).
My wife and I attended the short ceremony, and met the bride. She was Russian but had been resident in Latvia, where Ig had met her (not sure where or how; possibly at a bus stop or the like). She was supposedly mid-twenties (my wife thought older), and looked a bit lost amid Ig’s rather grey-haired friends, who included a couple of occasional teachers of mine at that language school, one being a one-time Army linguist (and keeper of goats), another being Gerald Brooke, who had spent 4 years in prison near Moscow before being swapped for the Krogers: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Brooke; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Cohen_(spy); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lona_Cohen.
That was the wedding. Some time later, Ig asked me to take his new wife to lunch at Lincoln’s Inn. She was friendly, pleasant, and told me that she had a law degree from Latvia, maybe Riga.
Scroll forward. My wife and I took on the lease of a large country house, one of the largest in North Cornwall.
We invited Ig and his wife to stay for the weekend. They arrived, but right from the start there was something wrong. For one thing, in a cold autumn, Ig’s wife came in a short dress, no coat, no gloves, perhaps unaware of how cold a large English country house can be, despite large fuel bills (one January, I spent nearly £700 on oil alone; plus coal and firewood. £700, in one month, 20 years ago).
Ig’s wife was actually quite rude from the start, not at all friendly to my wife, treated her like a serf, did not offer any help or whatever (we had the big house, but not any domestic staff as such), and just seemed to be sulking constantly. We assumed that the ill-matched couple had had a spat on the way down.
Anyway, after a weekend which —without going into great detail— tested my wife’s patience to the hilt, and when the pair were almost ready to go home, my wife thought to take some extra towels to their room (the house had originally had 26 bedrooms). She saw that Ig’s new wife’s suitcase was open on the bed; on top of the contents, a silk scarf belong to my wife, from Hermes. Ig’s wife had actually stolen the silk scarf (and other items, including bottles of scent) and placed them in her suitcase. The item were retrieved, and a diplomatic way found to raise the matter with the guest/thief.
Not an entirely successful weekend.
After that, I received calls from Ig’s Russian friends, begging me to think of a way to “save him from that stupid girl, who knows nothing but films and fashion“.
In fact, Ig did try to divorce her, after he overheard her talking to her mother in Riga, and the pair plotting to divorce him and so get half of his quite valuable house. In the end, the divorce never happened, despite preliminary court hearings.
Ig was prevailed upon to change his mind and, looking at that Guardian obit, they seem to have remained married until his death some 11 years later. I hope that the woman was not unkind to Ig in his last years, because he was a good fellow, but I never saw him after the disastrous weekend, and only spoke to him a couple of times when (maybe at her instigation) he wanted to bring her down again to Cornwall. I could not put my wife through that sort of nonsense again, though.
I presume that that woman got his house, I believe worth (in 2013) about £800,000 (and I suppose worth twice that much now), and other financial benefits.
However, not all Russians, Ukrainians etc can be tarred with the same brush. For example, I knew one girl (from Kiev) who was offered marriage by a British diplomat (who became an ambassador only about 2 years later) but refused him.
Many Russians (and, no doubt, Ukrainians too) are very fine people, but they come from a very different cultural and social background than English people. History has been harsh in those regions, and attitudes are fashioned out of such history.
Liz Truss Cabinet
Mirabile dictu! I agree with James O’Brien on something…
The main surprise is that Nadine Dorries is not there, it being rumoured that she is about to be elevated to the Lords. Well, why not? After all, a woman (Michelle Mone) who faked a “success story” about her insolvent bra company is there, as are several absurd black women, one of whom is only there because her son was killed in a scuffle with white yobs at a bus stop. Just a few examples of the deadheads in the House of Lords (Oona King is another one).
I was just looking at the new Cabinet: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62796077. Jesus Christ…
Incidentally, the blog has had thousands of hits in the past few days, one of the most popular posts being my 2019 (with updates since then) assessment of the new Health Secretary, Therese Coffey: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/09/16/deadhead-mps-an-occasional-series-the-therese-coffey-story/.
More tweets
In principle, correct, but there is no mechanism, as we have seen in recent years, for the public to be able to dispense with even the most ridiculous Prime Minister, until given an opportunity at a general election.
Another humiliation for Britain, having this ridiculous creature as Foreign Secretary, complete with his “degree” in Hospitality Management from West London Poly.
Like several other Conservative Party MPs, Cleverly started a company when he was trying to launch a political career, so that it would look good on his CV. A number of such companies are more or less fakes, designed to pad out otherwise unimpressive CVs. In Cleverly’s case, his company turned over less than £551 in 2008, its supposed first full year of operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cleverly#Early_life_and_education. Its net assets were around £1,000: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/06424833/filing-history.
In fact, apart from a couple of years as a sales manager, Cleverly seems not to have had a job for much of his life, unless you include his Territorial Army officer activity. He was never commissioned into the Regular Army, by reason of a supposed leg injury (unspecified); nor is it known whether he dropped out of Sandhurst or other training institution.
A couple more bits of news about the new Cabinet
That little pissant Robert Jenrick, a total puppet of the Jew-Zionist/Israel lobby, has been appointed a Minister of State despite his very “questionable” links to Jew property speculators.
Jewish wife; children brought up as if full-Jew. Completely in the Zionist pocket.
Sacked as a Secretary of State previously, so in effect a demotion.
The other news is that ex-officer Johnny Mercer, who seemed like a rare breath of fresh air in the Commons at first (but who, disappointingly, turned out to be a moneygrubber, at least from what I have read), has been kicked out of Government, and his wife, seeing the extra salary etc disappearing up the chimney, is livid.
I suppose that Mercer was hoping against hope to be appointed at some later stage as Defence Secretary, though his “bring it on!” rhetoric about nuclear war with Russia hardly inspired confidence in his judgment.
As for Mercer’s wife, Felicity, of whom I knew nothing until today, I award her 9 out of 10 for honesty, 1 out of 10 for diplomacy, and another 9 out of 10 for making my day more amusing.
Late tweets
You see that sort of thing all the time on Twitter— a cavalcade of talking heads, supposed “comedians”, sports talking heads etc, all paying lip-service to the BBC which, in most cases, pays them. Sickening homage to patronage.
Look at that Sweet bastard (whoever he is). Begging for state censorship.
Louise Mensch. A blast from the past, now just a washed-up, divorced Twitter twit who, after I was —both wrongfully and unlawfully— disbarred in 2016, actually tweeted directly to me, threatening (ignorantly) to have me disbarred in New York as well. Never heard anything more about it.
Louise Mensch was, inter alia, a drug abuser, and admitted that her drug abuse “messed up her head“. A rock “music” “groupie” at one time long ago (when at University), who became, at least metaphorically, an Israel- lobby “groupie” later.
Politically, completely irrelevant.
Late music
“And peace will defeat war“…
Ian Robert Millard 
The wife of your Russian friend turned out to be a horrible bitch. I am very sorry for what you and your wife had to endure.
Regarding that stupid British do-gooder (aren’t they all?) who wrote to the Daily Mail, she still thinks she did “the right thing”!
How stupid and brainwashed she must be!
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Claudius:
If a woman and child (English) knocked on her door, or were even referred to her somehow, she would probably either not help them at all, or would maybe try to refer them to the local council etc, but the “Ukraine” propaganda is almost as pervasive now as the “Covid” rubbish of 2020-2022. People lose all sense of proportion and/or reality.
As to my now-deceased friend’s young(er) wife, it was so obvious to his real friends, both English and Russian, that the young woman was marrying him only for a passport and a meal ticket, but “there’s no fool like an old fool”, arguably. As I wrote, she would have got his house when he died and, no doubt, an income from his pension etc, plus the actually rather modest royalties from his translations, notably “The Karamazov Brothers” (his preferred translation), published by Penguin Classics. I have no idea what she did after his death, but probably sold the house, then probably bought a flat in Chelsea or somewhere, and had plenty left over.
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That photo of a bunch of clowns representing Liz Truss’ cabinet was brilliant!!! 😂😂😂
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It is but, sadly, it is all too accurate. Having Cleverly as Foreign Secretary would be deeply dispiriting and scary at the best of times but with the situation in the Ukraine it is positively petrifying.
Not just this country but the world needs Britain’s Foreign Secretary to have an IQ level at a reasonable level instead we and the globe have him!
And some thought Truss as Britain’s voice on the world stage was a piss take! As Ronald Reagan once famously said, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”🙄🙄🙄🙄
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I understand you but for those who follow Ian’s blog and others who are clear-thinking people it was obvious that Liz Truss’ cabinet would be awful as it is a continuation of “Boris the Idiot”. Basically is “more of the same”.
PS: I read the Wikipedia article about Nadine Dorries, she does not seem to be so awful or incompetent as some people say, but I am sure she is not bright either. Why do some people dislike her so much? Question from an ignorant foreigner (LOL)
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Having a half-trained, half-negro like Mr James Cleverly who those with good estimations of other’s abilities know as James Thickerly as Her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary is the worst Tory insult to this country yet and would only be bettered by a non Brit as PM or as Defence Secretary (Mr Wallace had better watch out!🙄🙄🙄)
It is an unmitigated DISGRACE seeing as that formerly prestigious position confers upon its holder having the ability to represent this country on the world stage.
Think of all the people who have held that post: Lord Palmerston who was probably this country’s best one ever, Lord Halifax/Edward Fox under Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, David Owen, Douglas Hurd, Lord Carrington, Robin Cook Jeremy Hunt, even Margaret Beckett.
Sadly, the formerly most prestigious Ministry of the British government will never live this stain upon its reputation down now.😠😢😢😢😥
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So his business experience is less than stellar shall we say! Jeremy Hunt set-up his own business too and it has been very succesful. He sold it for millions. Hunt was the richest member of Cameron’s cabinet.
Yes, Jeremy Hunt did have an excellent start in life being the son of a Royal Navy admiral/commander and having attended one of Britain’s most prestigious ancient public schools of Charterhouse but setting-up your own business and selling it for 30 million or so still takes some doing.
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I didn’t agree with Cameron much but I did approve of one thing he said which was that Jeremy Hunt should not be a backbencher and should be in cabinet.
Hunt is a pretty able and talented politician and, frankly, it is a waste for him to be on the backbenches. No wonder then that he has appeared to have been snubbed by Boris Idiot and now Truss.
Truss appears to have surrounded herself with sycophants and people on her wing of the party. In politics you normally need to build/maintain party unity by involving people from all parts of it.
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John:
I know that I tend to be (justly) critical of all System politicians, but I have never seen a Cabinet like this one, even in the past 10 years. Stunningly poor.
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If Nadine Dorries is elevated to the Lords then there will be a by-election in her seat of Mid Bedfordshire. I expect that will be won by the Liberal Democrats to add to the three gains they have already made in Tory safe seats. Of course, it may go Labour as they are in second place but those types of safe Conservative seats usually prefer the Lib Dems as Labour whilst in second place are just too far behind and the Liberal Democrats are better able to pick-up Tory protest votes.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11189985/Former-BBC-journalist-rector-Edinburgh-University-slammed-racism.html No comment necessary! 😂
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