Hi Friends,
Those of us who have been following the kidnapping saga of BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston must be elated by this wonderful turn of events.
For once a kidnapping in the Middle-east does not end with the sordid beheading on some radical Islamic website.
Now I can edit out from my blog the logo for Johnston’s release. The tenacious campaign for Johnston's release was initiated by BBC and it included 200000 signatures ( mine included) and I had already commented how impressed I was for efforts that BBC had gone to secure his release. I am sure public pressure had some effect on Hamas and the kidnappers.
Hamas scores propaganda coup
It is obvious that Hamas now has added credibility. After all with its open split with Fatah ( and Hamas' sacking from the government) , Hamas was the sole de-facto government in Gaza and there is no one else to share the limelight ( and steal the thunder) in this event.
How significant is it that Hamas chose to engineer this release now:
1. In the early days of Gordon Brown’s stewardship of the British government. No matter what Brown says about there being no change in foreign affair posture with regards to Hamas, the British public must feel that Hamas is not as evil and unpredictable as they were made to believe.
2. Before Blair really could settle in as M-E envoy of the “Quartet” (ie USA/ EU/ Russia/ UN). This prevents Blair ( who is deemed too closely allied to Bush’s camp) from claiming any credit.
The next publicity coup for Hamas must surely be the release of Israeli soldier Corporal Gilad Shalit.
I think with Gilad's freedom, even Israel’s attitude could be softened towards Hamas and then there may actually be a glimmer of hope for some lasting peace.
The only problem is, what sweetener can Hamas offer for the neo-con’s of Washington? Might these neo-con's be tempted to throw in a spanner in the works?
My guess is that all of us will just have to wait for the next US president before we see some significant engagement from the US.
So,the lesson to learn here is that …
We are all pawns in the game of life.
Cheers
Dr.Huang Shoou Chyuan
1. BBC's Alan Johnston is released (BBC News 4 July 07)
BBC correspondent Alan Johnston has been released by kidnappers in the Gaza Strip after 114 days in captivity.
Mr Johnston, 45, was handed over to armed men in Gaza City. He said his ordeal was like "being buried alive" but it was "fantastic" to be free.
Speaking live from Jerusalem later, he thanked those who had supported him, and vowed to return to "obscurity".
Rallies worldwide had called for Mr Johnston's release. An online petition was signed by some 200,000 people.
Mr Johnston's father Graham said he and his wife were "overjoyed" at their son's release.
"It's been 114 days of a living nightmare," he said.
Gordon Brown, in his first prime minister's questions session in the UK parliament, said: "The whole country will welcome the news that Alan Johnston, a fearless journalist whose voice was silenced for too long, is now free."
Mr Brown acknowledged the "crucial" role played by Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in securing Mr Johnston's release.
Read here for full report
2.BBCNews 4 July 07
There is no doubt that Hamas has scored a major propaganda victory with the release of the BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston.
The issue now is whether it can convert that victory into progress towards getting itself accepted as a recognised representative of the Palestinians internationally.
Currently, the outside world is concentrating its support on the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party which controls the West Bank.
It was no accident that Alan Johnston was taken to the home of the Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniya, who was sacked as Palestinian prime minister by Mr Abbas.
Read here for full report
Showing posts with label United Kingdom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United Kingdom. Show all posts
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Sunday, June 24, 2007
How is the ex?
Hi Friends,
I hope none of the ruling elite reads the piece below.
If they did, they would really feel smug about themselves and the policies of astronomical ministers’ salaries as well as keeping retiring senior ministers on the payroll instead of letting them out to pasture or getting them to ride into the sunset!
Tony Blair, soon to be unemployed, will be trying to find meaning in his life after mid-week.
Regardless of whether he gets to be a reconciler of the 3 major ancient faiths or just a Middle-east envoy trying to find the middle ground for Israel and Palestine, he will feel a voluminous void in his life that is hard to fill.
I’ll give his memoir a miss. Too many current events to occupy myself with already without having to plough through the ramblings of a “has-been” whilst really donating to his retirement fund.
Nothing personal. Actually I think I like Tony.
Presentable, articulate and a loyal friend- especially to the Americans.
Some people thought he made a great pet- a poodle.
Cheers
Dr.Huang Shoou Chyuan
How to be ex-Prime Minister
By Michael Cockerell (BBC News 25th June 07)
Political documentary maker
When Tony Blair leaves Number 10 on Wednesday he will be much better off than Winston Churchill was when he became an ex-prime minister in 1945 - after winning the war and losing the general election.
"My grandfather was effectively bankrupt by the end of the war," says the great man's grandson - also called Winston Churchill.
Churchill was forced to put his home, Chartwell in Kent, on the market.
"Lord Camrose, the then proprietor of the Daily Telegraph was outraged," says young Winston.
"And he corralled 10 wealthy well-wishers and they each ponied up the princely sum of £5,000.
"So for £55,000 - which was a lot of money in those days - they bought Chartwell on the understanding that my grandparents would live there until the end of their days and then it would be presented to the nation."
'Cut off'
In contrast to Churchill, Blair will receive a severance package from the state worth some £300,000 a year.
Thanks to some astute lobbying by other ex-PMs, Blair will get a car, a police driver and round-the-clock special branch protection.
He will also receive an immediate prime-ministerial pension of almost £64,000 a year as well as a further £84,000 to run his office - on top of what he makes as an MP.
But how will Blair cope with life in the ex-prime ministers' club, after what his predecessor John Major describes as the longest farewell tour since Dame Nelly Melba?
One of Blair's closest advisers inside Number 10 told me: "Tony still doesn't know what is going to hit him.
"The thing he will miss most of all is being cut off from top-grade information.
"He will no longer receive secret intelligence reports and papers and briefings which tell him what is really going on - both in Britain and the rest of the world."
When I put this to John Major - a rueful smile of recognition came over his face.
He produced an answer worthy of Donald Rumsfeld: "People ask you questions and you're about to answer and you think to yourself, 'hang on, I'm about to express an opinion on this and I haven't seen the papers. I don't know what it is that the prime minister knows that I no longer know'.
"So here am I about to say that I think he should have handled this differently, but he may know something that I once would have known that nobody else knows."
'Disorientating experience'
Blair will also face the practical problems of adapting to the loss of the life-support system provided by Number 10.
"When you stop being prime minister it's a very disorienting experience, because you go in such a short period of time from having everything arranged for you to being on your own," says Lord Powell, who was Margaret Thatcher's right-hand man for seven years when she was prime minister.
"You don't have an up-to-date telephone book of your own because of course Number 10 had all your telephone numbers. Code numbers have probably changed since you came in.
"I remember being rung up by Margaret Thatcher a week or two after she left Number 10 and being told on a Sunday she had a plumbing problem. And I said 'oh dear, better get a plumber in'. And a long silence. 'How do I do that?' 'Well', I said, 'try the Yellow Pages'. And that's the way we had to go. I ended up ringing the plumber in the Yellow Pages."
The biggest question of all is how to fill the suddenly empty days.
The former Tory cabinet minister, Ken Clarke, who as an MP since 1970 has watched five prime ministers come and go says: "Like a departing captain of industry, Tony will want the next big job in the career.
"In his case I think it will be trying to govern the world and advise all the other political leaders how to run things. And he'll find that difficult, because you are very ex as an ex-prime minister."
Blair's meeting with the Pope on Saturday is one key to what he plans to do.
According to one of Blair's closest advisers: "Tony is obsessed with the idea of becoming a roving envoy who would seek to reconcile the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam."
Blair sought Papal endorsement for his plans to set up an inter-faith foundation - headed by himself.
And there are also strong hopes in the White House of Blair becoming a Middle East peace negotiator on behalf of the West.
Ken Clarke scoffs at these ideas: "Not that Tony would ask for my advice, but if he did I would say, 'forget about reconciling the faiths. You have disqualified yourself from that in a very big way'."
Memoirs goldmine
Blair's former press secretary Alastair Campbell is unsurprisingly more sanguine.
"There are all sorts of things Tony will do in the future," he says.
"He is 54 - while Gladstone and Churchill were in their 80s when they left office. And if you look at someone like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and you see what they have achieved since leaving office - Tony's going to want some of that: to still be involved and focus on the big international stuff - like climate change and Africa."
But Blair is also sitting on a goldmine - his memoirs. Campbell has long described his own diaries as his pension. Blair's will be worth many times more.
I asked Campbell's literary agent, Ed Victor, the New Yorker who's now the top London literary agent to the superstars, how much he thought Blair would get.
"£5m - plus or minus," replied Victor.
"And he should sell his memoirs immediately he steps down. Ronald Reagan did the deal the day after he left office, and that was very smart. Thatcher waited and I think she got less money as a result."
Blair will also have to decide on whether to stay involved in domestic politics or whether he will sign a peace treaty with Gordon Brown.
"An ex-prime minister's a rather unusual fish in politics," says John Major.
"If they say nothing, what are they doing there? If they say something, there's every chance it will be construed as an oblique attack on your successor. So it is extremely difficult to have a role that isn't capable of severe misinterpretation."
"I certainly don't think Tony will be hanging around, backseat driving on Gordon," says Alastair Campbell.
One sure way that Blair can make big bucks outside politics is by following his wife's footsteps on the American lecture circuit.
Although the rapture that once greeted him after 9/11 has waned, Blair remains the most popular and recognisable British public figure there since Lady Thatcher. He would wow US lecture audiences.
"And the lecture circuit has another purpose for you as an ex-prime minister.
When you have been used to public adulation, at least appearing before wildly enthusiastic audiences of hundreds of Americans in Tuscaloosa or elsewhere, still has a nice role in your life.
"It makes you think you are still admired and wanted - and psychologically it's a great compensation for the loss of office."
"I think Tony Blair would make a minimum of $150,000 (£75,000) per lecture in America: all expenses paid, flown there first class, put up in a nice suite," says Ed Victor.
"If he does 10 a year - say one a month - he will be making huge, huge money."
Finding happiness
But can all the money in the world make up for the loss of the most political drug of all - power?
"I don't know whether you can be happy after being prime minister, but I can tell you that I don't believe Margaret Thatcher has not had a happy day in her life since she ceased being prime minister," says Charles Powell.
It may take you a very long time to adjust fully to no longer being the most powerful person in the land.
For the one thing all members of the ex-prime ministers' club have in common is that they have lost the most exciting job that they will ever have.
Ken Clarke sums it up: "I think almost all of them, if you said that, by some amazing miracle, you could go back tomorrow and you could be prime minister again and take on all that hassle, and all that strain, and all that criticism, and all those crises, they'd all have jumped at it and gone straight back straight away."
How to be ex-Prime Minister, Michael Cockerell's TV documentary, will be shown on BBC Four on Sunday at 2100BST.
I hope none of the ruling elite reads the piece below.
If they did, they would really feel smug about themselves and the policies of astronomical ministers’ salaries as well as keeping retiring senior ministers on the payroll instead of letting them out to pasture or getting them to ride into the sunset!
Tony Blair, soon to be unemployed, will be trying to find meaning in his life after mid-week.
Regardless of whether he gets to be a reconciler of the 3 major ancient faiths or just a Middle-east envoy trying to find the middle ground for Israel and Palestine, he will feel a voluminous void in his life that is hard to fill.
I’ll give his memoir a miss. Too many current events to occupy myself with already without having to plough through the ramblings of a “has-been” whilst really donating to his retirement fund.
Nothing personal. Actually I think I like Tony.
Presentable, articulate and a loyal friend- especially to the Americans.
Some people thought he made a great pet- a poodle.
Cheers
Dr.Huang Shoou Chyuan
How to be ex-Prime Minister
By Michael Cockerell (BBC News 25th June 07)
Political documentary maker
When Tony Blair leaves Number 10 on Wednesday he will be much better off than Winston Churchill was when he became an ex-prime minister in 1945 - after winning the war and losing the general election.
"My grandfather was effectively bankrupt by the end of the war," says the great man's grandson - also called Winston Churchill.
Churchill was forced to put his home, Chartwell in Kent, on the market.
"Lord Camrose, the then proprietor of the Daily Telegraph was outraged," says young Winston.
"And he corralled 10 wealthy well-wishers and they each ponied up the princely sum of £5,000.
"So for £55,000 - which was a lot of money in those days - they bought Chartwell on the understanding that my grandparents would live there until the end of their days and then it would be presented to the nation."
'Cut off'
In contrast to Churchill, Blair will receive a severance package from the state worth some £300,000 a year.
Thanks to some astute lobbying by other ex-PMs, Blair will get a car, a police driver and round-the-clock special branch protection.
He will also receive an immediate prime-ministerial pension of almost £64,000 a year as well as a further £84,000 to run his office - on top of what he makes as an MP.
But how will Blair cope with life in the ex-prime ministers' club, after what his predecessor John Major describes as the longest farewell tour since Dame Nelly Melba?
One of Blair's closest advisers inside Number 10 told me: "Tony still doesn't know what is going to hit him.
"The thing he will miss most of all is being cut off from top-grade information.
"He will no longer receive secret intelligence reports and papers and briefings which tell him what is really going on - both in Britain and the rest of the world."
When I put this to John Major - a rueful smile of recognition came over his face.
He produced an answer worthy of Donald Rumsfeld: "People ask you questions and you're about to answer and you think to yourself, 'hang on, I'm about to express an opinion on this and I haven't seen the papers. I don't know what it is that the prime minister knows that I no longer know'.
"So here am I about to say that I think he should have handled this differently, but he may know something that I once would have known that nobody else knows."
'Disorientating experience'
Blair will also face the practical problems of adapting to the loss of the life-support system provided by Number 10.
"When you stop being prime minister it's a very disorienting experience, because you go in such a short period of time from having everything arranged for you to being on your own," says Lord Powell, who was Margaret Thatcher's right-hand man for seven years when she was prime minister.
"You don't have an up-to-date telephone book of your own because of course Number 10 had all your telephone numbers. Code numbers have probably changed since you came in.
"I remember being rung up by Margaret Thatcher a week or two after she left Number 10 and being told on a Sunday she had a plumbing problem. And I said 'oh dear, better get a plumber in'. And a long silence. 'How do I do that?' 'Well', I said, 'try the Yellow Pages'. And that's the way we had to go. I ended up ringing the plumber in the Yellow Pages."
The biggest question of all is how to fill the suddenly empty days.
The former Tory cabinet minister, Ken Clarke, who as an MP since 1970 has watched five prime ministers come and go says: "Like a departing captain of industry, Tony will want the next big job in the career.
"In his case I think it will be trying to govern the world and advise all the other political leaders how to run things. And he'll find that difficult, because you are very ex as an ex-prime minister."
Blair's meeting with the Pope on Saturday is one key to what he plans to do.
According to one of Blair's closest advisers: "Tony is obsessed with the idea of becoming a roving envoy who would seek to reconcile the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam."
Blair sought Papal endorsement for his plans to set up an inter-faith foundation - headed by himself.
And there are also strong hopes in the White House of Blair becoming a Middle East peace negotiator on behalf of the West.
Ken Clarke scoffs at these ideas: "Not that Tony would ask for my advice, but if he did I would say, 'forget about reconciling the faiths. You have disqualified yourself from that in a very big way'."
Memoirs goldmine
Blair's former press secretary Alastair Campbell is unsurprisingly more sanguine.
"There are all sorts of things Tony will do in the future," he says.
"He is 54 - while Gladstone and Churchill were in their 80s when they left office. And if you look at someone like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and you see what they have achieved since leaving office - Tony's going to want some of that: to still be involved and focus on the big international stuff - like climate change and Africa."
But Blair is also sitting on a goldmine - his memoirs. Campbell has long described his own diaries as his pension. Blair's will be worth many times more.
I asked Campbell's literary agent, Ed Victor, the New Yorker who's now the top London literary agent to the superstars, how much he thought Blair would get.
"£5m - plus or minus," replied Victor.
"And he should sell his memoirs immediately he steps down. Ronald Reagan did the deal the day after he left office, and that was very smart. Thatcher waited and I think she got less money as a result."
Blair will also have to decide on whether to stay involved in domestic politics or whether he will sign a peace treaty with Gordon Brown.
"An ex-prime minister's a rather unusual fish in politics," says John Major.
"If they say nothing, what are they doing there? If they say something, there's every chance it will be construed as an oblique attack on your successor. So it is extremely difficult to have a role that isn't capable of severe misinterpretation."
"I certainly don't think Tony will be hanging around, backseat driving on Gordon," says Alastair Campbell.
One sure way that Blair can make big bucks outside politics is by following his wife's footsteps on the American lecture circuit.
Although the rapture that once greeted him after 9/11 has waned, Blair remains the most popular and recognisable British public figure there since Lady Thatcher. He would wow US lecture audiences.
"And the lecture circuit has another purpose for you as an ex-prime minister.
When you have been used to public adulation, at least appearing before wildly enthusiastic audiences of hundreds of Americans in Tuscaloosa or elsewhere, still has a nice role in your life.
"It makes you think you are still admired and wanted - and psychologically it's a great compensation for the loss of office."
"I think Tony Blair would make a minimum of $150,000 (£75,000) per lecture in America: all expenses paid, flown there first class, put up in a nice suite," says Ed Victor.
"If he does 10 a year - say one a month - he will be making huge, huge money."
Finding happiness
But can all the money in the world make up for the loss of the most political drug of all - power?
"I don't know whether you can be happy after being prime minister, but I can tell you that I don't believe Margaret Thatcher has not had a happy day in her life since she ceased being prime minister," says Charles Powell.
It may take you a very long time to adjust fully to no longer being the most powerful person in the land.
For the one thing all members of the ex-prime ministers' club have in common is that they have lost the most exciting job that they will ever have.
Ken Clarke sums it up: "I think almost all of them, if you said that, by some amazing miracle, you could go back tomorrow and you could be prime minister again and take on all that hassle, and all that strain, and all that criticism, and all those crises, they'd all have jumped at it and gone straight back straight away."
How to be ex-Prime Minister, Michael Cockerell's TV documentary, will be shown on BBC Four on Sunday at 2100BST.
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