Tony Blair

IN an astonishing assault on Tony Blair’s Iraqi policy, a leading Labour party official in Camden told Radio 4 listeners on Saturday that the British and US troops in Iraq were the “true terrorists”.
Pulling no punches, Ben Cosin, secretary of the Hampstead and Highgate Labour branch, went even further – he compared the US troops to the Nazis and the British to Mussolini’s fascists.
Cosin was taking part in the programme Any Listeners which gives listeners a chance to comment on points made earlier by the panel on Any Questions.
Even though Cosin has become known as a vitriolic critic of Tony Blair’s Iraq policy, his frank, no-holds-barred three minute contribution must have surprised party comrades.
“But this is typical of the man,” a branch member told me.
“He’s very articulate, very knowledgeable and is not afraid to speak his mind on the Iraq war which he has very strong views on.

“While other members in our branch may not go along with all his views, the recent meetings have been very critical of Tony Blair.”
Commenting on the radio panel’s comments on the Iraq war, Mr Cosin said: “The two terrorists are the Anglo-American occupying forces and the coalition of the bribed, many of which are now fortunately falling off – Hungarians, Poles, etc.
“I would liken the situation much more to the Spanish Civil War. Many foreign civilians in their private capacity were proud to go and help the cause of the people of Spain and people are still proud of that.
“I liken the Americans of course to the Nazis and the British to Mussolini’s Fascists. These are the true foreign occupying forces and the true terrorists, and it seems to me that the Iraqi resistance and their gallant allies from abroad are the true democrats.”

Maggie Cosin

In reply to a question by Jonathan Dimbleby as to whether the Iraqi prime minister Allawi had any legitimacy, Mr Cosin said: “Absolutely none. He is a puppet regardless of his allegedly deplorable history.”
Mr McGeogh (a journalist) in the Sydney Morning Herald made claims that he personally murdered six alleged terrorist suspects without a trial… (he has) a deplorable history as a Baathist thug… he’s a paid retainer of the Americans in their aggressive policy against Iraq over many years.
“He’s now their puppet, he was put in by them, his government, in spite of pathetic claims in resolution 1546. He’s in no way sovereign whatsoever. He does obviously what they say.
“He’s in no position whatsoever to do anything else.”
After Jonathan Dimbleby asked whether he wanted the foreign troops to withdraw immediately and “leave it to the Iraqis”, Mr Cosin replied: “Forthwith, leave it to the Iraqis to settle their own future. They have to live with each other. Any election, any state that occurs under the overwhelming presence of 150-170,000 heavily armed troops under the direct or indirect control of George Bush and Tony Blair – that’s no sort of democratic mandate whatsoever. It’s merely papering over a puppet regime. It happened in Vietnam…”
Cosin’s wife Maggie is a senior Camden Labour councillor who is an aide to a Labour MP, known to be on the right of the party.
Broadly, he stands in the centre of the party, sympathetic to most of Tony Blair’s policies. But he has never held back from speaking his mind about the Iraq war at branch meetings.
When I rang him at his Highgate home, he said two people had rung him to congratulate him about the programme.
He compared the bombing of Fullajah to the Nazi onslaught on the defenceless city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s, a tragedy that inspired a famous painting by Picasso.
“How can they be doing this to Fallujah?” he asked.
He said he used the internet a lot to follow events in Iraq, and recommended an anti-war body called Voices in the Wilderness.
A loyal party member for decades, it is unlikely Cosin would leave the Labour Party even though he is so much in conflict with its war policy. The idea sometime ago would have appeared to be unthinkable.
But does that still remain the case, I wonder.

Margot James

We’re all council now says Margot

WELL-HEELED residents of the Edwardian marvel that is Bloomsbury’s Bedford Court mansion block were struggling to come to terms with an apparent loss of status last Monday morning.
According to leaflets distributed throughout the Court by Margot James, the Conservatives prospective Parliamentary candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, the building had been annexed by Camden Council and turned into a council block over night.
“Fed up with the council not consulting with tenants?” asks Ms James.
According to our man inside Bedford Court – where flats regularly sell for £1 million – residents were only “mildly insulted and not in the state of high dudgeon they might have been”.

Another boost this week for Booker prize winning writer Alan Hollinghurst. His novel, The Line of Beauty, has now been short-listed for this year’s Whitbread Book of the Year Award.
It is rare that those who triumph with the Booker’s £50,000 prize subsequently carry off the Whitbread’s £25,000 too. But the Whitbread judges, who include former Cabinet minister Lord Hattersley and Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, describe The Line of Beauty as “devastatingly funny, exquisitely written”.
Hollinghurst, who lives in Tanza Road, Hampstead, has up against him Louis de Bernieres new novel, Birds Without Wings, Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.
He is currently teaching as a visiting professor at Princeton, in America, and refuses to be drawn on his Whitbread chances. He is more bemused at the moment to discover that his nickname when he worked at the Times Literary Supplement was allegedly Basso Profundo, because of his deep, dark brown voice.
The TLS itself has denied the claim, which has been made in British newspapers and has reached even Australia and America. “I was never aware of being called Basso Profundo, and generally I think people do find out about such nick-names,” Hollinghurst told me. “Also, it’s not true!
“A basso profundo is an immensely deep voice, and I am – as far as I can hear myself – more of a bass-baritone.”

A rhyme for peace time

TERRY Jones, of Monty Python fame, seemed an anomalous name on the line-up Thursday’s Poets for Peace event at Conway Hall. As he sat in the audience for the first half, watching the likes of Jean Breeze, Adrian Mitchell (pictured here with Terry Jones) and Peter Porter recite the protest poetry for which they are rightly famous, I wondered what he might have up his sleeve.
Impatience got the better of me, and I grabbed him in the interval for a sneak preview. “Me? A poet?” he said, laughing at the thought. “I’m just reading some silly things I jotted down a few years ago.”
Noting that the money raised that night went to the aid of children wounded and orphaned by the war in Iraq, his wonderfully nonsensical tale of his shirt eloping to the woods with his trousers seemed the perfect choice in its childlike sensibility.
Earlier Adrian Mitchell had given a seething rendition of his poem “To whom it may concern”. He elongated its bitter refrain of “Tell me lies about Vietnam” to include Iraq and Afghanistan, and his fury that he should be still reciting this lyric years down the line left him quite red in the face.
I caught up with him backstage, concerned that, with George Bush reinstated in the White House only the day before, four more years of poetic vitriol might not be too good for his health. He reassured me that everything was in balance: “For every one I write for Bush,” he explained, “I write four more for my granddaughter.”

Fizz for a physicist

THE sublime Professor Joseph Rotblat (pictured), surprised me on Monday when I rang his West Hampstead home to congratulate him on reaching his 96th birthday
The famous physicist, Nobel Peace Prize winner and nuclear disarmer, had already spent his birthday on Thursday taking a stroll in the autumn sun in the grounds of Kenwood before settling down at the restaurant with his friends for a champagne breakfast.
But he surprised me when he told me, a little casually, that he was flying to Rome on Tuesday to take part in a meeting of ‘peace laureates’ which would progress until the end of the week.
Recently, he suffered a stroke that affected his balance and eyesight. “I had to walk on two sticks for a bit, then one stick – now I can manage without any,” he said. What a remarkable man!