'SigInt' at work: A rare and fascinating glimpse through the keyhole at GCHQ is provided by Charles Moore in The Telegraph and I urge you all to read it. Ever since the WWI days of 'Room 40' at the Admiralty, signals intelligence has proved over and over again to be the leading source in providing hard and timely intelligence. The outgoing boss of GCHQ sounds like a good man and I just hope they find someone equally efficient to take over from him. Anyway, keep up the good work, boys and girls, we all depend on you - and I really do mean 'depend'!
Farage vs. Carswell: The more astute observers of the political scene are already forecasting a divorce and the 'honeymoon' has barely begun. In essence the problem is simple - UKIP is a single issue party and it's members are, in the acronym invented by the late, great Bernard Levin, a bunch of 'sifs' - single issue fanatics. They share a detestation of our links with the EU but beyond that there is a big, foggy hinterland in which they all stumble about trying to find their own route forward. Thus, Mr. Carswell, a small 'c', conservative, free market libertarian believes immigration is, on the whole 'A Good Thing' where-as Mr.Farage, his erstwhile leader, thinks it is 'A Good Thing', too, but only because it provides him with a platform to rail against it and thus collect the votes of the unwary. Outside of immigration and the EU, the two are synonymous in the minds of your average 'Kipper', I suspect that were you to lock three of them in a cupboard they would emerge with six different manifestos!
No, no, no, no! Now, they - yes, it's always that mysterious 'they' - want to make it a criminal offense for a third party to publish intimate photos that you either took yourself or allowed someone else to take and which, anyway, you sent to them. Well, sorry and all that, you may now look a complete idiot for taking the photos in the first place but that is because, 'in a very real sense', you are a complete idiot! However, your idiocy is not something that I wish our policemen and courts to waste even more of their mostly wasted working lives on, there is plenty of real criminality out there to be sorted and most of which they can barely cope with in the short time they have available between tea-breaks!
More rumbles later . . .
