Donald Trump is our ally and Jeremy Corbyn should remember this on D-Day – Bernard Ingham
It is not just the braying mobs, orchestrated by Jeremy Corbyn and his Momentum apparatus, objecting to his State visit. These, sadly, have become par for the course.
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Hide AdWe cannot even provide a viable government, let alone a strong and stable one, to talk to him; just a pro-tem job while at the last count 12 Tory MPs ludicrously vie to be the next PM to meet him.
And Corbyn, not to mention that garrulous thespian Mr Speaker Bercow, and the geriatric Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Vince Cable, pathetically boycott the State dinner.
Trump must be wondering what has become of America’s oldest and strongest ally.
But what makes me truly ashamed is that the President is also here, as the elected representative of his people, to remember the liberation of Europe from Adolf Hitler and the carnage of D-Day.
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Hide AdAs a boy of 12, I remember reading about the bodies of American soldiers stacked high on Omaha Beach. It seems that some of us cannot even respect the heroic dead, assuming our modern education system has acquainted them with their sacrifice.
No one can be surprised that the forces of the hard Left are up to their normal tricks – disruption.
Yet I do not recall them trying to muck up the works during past State visits by, for example, that great de-stabiliser, Vladimir Putin (2003) or President Ceauscescu, the dictator of Romania before the fall of the Iron Curtain (1978).
Nor have they sought the downfall of assorted Middle Eastern potentates, even though their treatment of women is Neandearthal.
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Hide AdThey have also left alone such dictators as Robert Mugabe (1994) who, among other things, filled his coffers at the expense of his people.
This proves that the hard Left has not an ounce of objectivity, let alone sensitivity. Its only consistency is to excuse dictators.
This is not surprising since they believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat, providing the proles do as they are told by them.
My regular readers will know that I am not among Trump’s admirers. He is a very fallible human being whose greatest weaknesses are a limited brain and an exceptional susceptibility to flattery.
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Hide AdHe has carried his way of doing business into the White House and international diplomacy. Pitch your demands sky high and stick. This is why some suggest he would have made mincemeat of Messrs Juncker and Barnier in Brussels.
But it is a dangerous game and risks damaging the free world economically to the delight of only Russia (with whom he has not been entirely cleared of collusion in his election), China, North Korea and Iran.
Yet, unlike a lot of folk this week, I recognise that Trump is not all bad.
He senses that the EU is going wrong. He has told his European partners in Nato to do more to defend themselves from the growing threat from the Kremlin, and the Arabs to fight terrorism as well as the West. And he is giving such dangerous regimes as China, North Korea and Iran at least something to think about.
He is also, to repeat, the Americans’ choice of leader.
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Hide AdIt is true that he is expensive and stacking up ever more American debt, now $22 trillion. That is not in the interests of the American people – or us. Yet we now learn that contestants for the Tory leadership are promising £190bn of spending while we are still running a budget deficit.
In this case, irresponsibility is evidently catching.
His cack-handed endorsement of Boris Johnson will not necessarily carry our blond bombshell into No 10. Indeed, I suspect that Boris wishes the President would shut up about him.
And then Nigel Farage commands the headlines with a determination to “bust the system like Trump”. But Trump hasn’t bust the system. It is the system that is keeping America going while Trump sacks anyone who disagrees with him.
Nonetheless, common sense should tell us that we should welcome President Trump, not because we agree with him on everything, but because we don’t and so need to talk all the more regularly.
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Hide AdIf the pomp and circumstance of State visits can oil the wheels of discussion, we should be going out of our way to make the President feel at home, not in some hostile land.
If only we could leave State visits to the Queen and the Army’s booming salutes. I would not then feel so ashamed.