THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP: Meghan, Harry, NATO, Islamism and other stories

For what we have received, may the Lord make us truly grateful

Oh dear. I think I’m having a ‘you read it here first’ moment. In June of last year, I posted at some length to warn that Meghan the Duchess of Sussex was trouble. She has that divisive streak of narcissism running through her celebrity DNA, and young Harry is I fear very much his mother’s son.

Heaven alone knows what her aim is for the longterm. I would guess that it is to set up some kind of rival succession, ready for the day when the British People feel they’ve had enough of Charles the Meddlesome. Don’t smile, please: I said she was another Mrs Simpson. She is now making that clear to the media….who are, of course, all she cares about.

Charles himself has now made it clear that Mr and Mrs Simpson, sorry, Sussex, cannot expect an endless supply of spondooliks from him if they withdraw any further from royal “life”. And a shoal of Palace aides (doubtless those who clashed with Meghan – that is, all of them) have pointed out that the couple’s version of their current incomes is off with the fairies.

The Queen is being described by Palace spinners as ‘disappointed’ that she wasn’t consulted about the Gingers’ intentions; this is Windsor-speak for ‘madder than a Grizzly with toothache’. For any bloke brought up to royalty, it was appalling bad manners. To a celeb, it would represent ‘establishing my identity’.

Hollywood and the Anglo-American LibLeft are (it goes without saying) united in their belief that Meghan has been the subject of racist snobbery, and is now fighting a laudable battle against privilege and sexism. For me, it represents merely another episode in the soap we know as the Special Relationship.

Talking of which, President Trump told the nation that Iranian ballistic missiles fired at US/UK military establishment in the early hours of Wednesday caused no casualties and limited damage. No doubt Jeremy Corbyn will soon congratulate the Iranian régime for its deliberate attempt to de-escalate the crisis by not killing anyone.

The Donald toned down his rhetoric a notch, and said he would increase the severity of the sanctions against Tehran. One suspects that the Europeans told him in short order to whistle Dixie on the subject of any silly ideas about further military action; equally, one suspects he ignored them. Trump and his “advisers” have so far shrunk from saying anything in public about concerns I understand they have about how Iran is getting round some of the existing sanctions. Such would not be good for NATO solidarity. But keep your eye on this one.

Meghan Markle, NATO, 7/7 and nowhere safe to go on holiday in North Africa…what else have our cousins to bequeathed to us? Well, there’s always financial disaster.

Just over seven years ago, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified to the US Senate that the threats to his bank were “dramatically rising interest rates and a global type of credit crisis”. This is a remarkably accurate description of exactly half the situation we have at the moment – viz, a global credit crisis at the sovereign, corporate, bourse and consumer levels. The reason we don’t have the other half of the nightmare is that the US Fed did a U-turn on its “normalisation of rates” policy six months ago, and the New York Fed has been damping down Repo loan rate spikes since last September.

But as I wrote last week, the staggering $425 billion poured into this mission over the last 120 days represents a charity one could easily brand as The Dimon Extinction Defence Fund.

Half a trillion bucks to save one institution. The leading global currency being diluted on a daily basis to bail out one bloke. Yet still the American MSM continuesto ignore it. It isn’t remotely baffling (the old media in 2020 view themselves as working for the Good of the Cause) but it certainly is disgraceful. Naturally, with election year upon us, the President isn’t about to do anything that might punch a hole in his “economic turnaround” fiction.

Democratic Party Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has had nothing to say about this massive increase in the Fed balance sheet since October 22nd last year – and even then, she restricted herself to bland vapours about “not relaxing regulatory legislation” in the light of the crisis.

This is a grave tactical error on Warren’s part, and also way behind the music: the problem is the growing sovereignty of the Fed. People around the Senator remain concerned about her ‘inability to connect’: without being shown to be right about the real nature of the Repo crisis and its repercussions, she has no chance of becoming President in November. Timing is everything: if she called this mess out, and identified Trump as part and parcel of it (which he is) Senator Warren might go down as someone who helped save Real America from the 3%.

This is, of course, what Donald Trump promised to do. But from Day 1, it’s been hard to divine whether he’s winning or losing on the mission.

American readers must not get the impression that I’m an Amerophobe: on the contrary, I like travelling in the US, I have strong links to Boston, and my niece is a senior banking bod on the West Coast. My experience of Main Street Americans has always been one of good manners, straight talking and common sense.

It’s the élite, corporate, political, celebrity and metrochic US that gives me the pip. They strike me as, almost universally, greedy, deranged, insufferably arch and both ignorant about (and patronising towards) the rest of the World. The hangers-on who subscribe to this group equally have all the sensitivity of a flying brick.

One of them turned up among Slogpost comments earlier this week to leave this delightful billet doux in relation to the Iranian question:

‘For more than 40 years Iran has been squawking Death to America, and killing Americans at every available opportunity. They more or less control Iraq and many of the terrorist organizations. So Obama sends them pallets of cash on a plane and 150 billion. What did they do with that??? Their people were no better off but the terrorists were, and still they killed americans, young men going home in bodybags. Trump will not stand for that, he is a patriot of the highest order loves his military and his country. If Iran is stupid enough to cause the death of one more American then it will not be boots on the ground that will take Iran out. 3 trillion Trump has spent building his military to use as a position of strength. It is not a brit or a european child of someone coming home in a coffin, but a constant drip of young american boys. Enough is enough.’

When you consider how many British lives – civil and military – have been lost in the cause of US neocon foreign policy, how much money the US collected for the IRA to bomb us for twenty years, and whether the UK Jihadists would’ve become such an abominably murderous cancer in our midst had we sat out the Iraqui wars….when you consider all that, it becomes obvious that the SR is a matter of give and take: we give, they take.

The postwar Marshall Plan sprayed money all over the Germans who bombed out cities…but did not see fit to cancel the cost of lendlease – which we finally paid offf in 2007. When outraged Islamists killed 57 innocent people in the 2005 London tube bombing, the reaction of the American military CinC in the metropolitan area was to order all US military personnel to leave the area. Not to help with the wounded or anything – just to getTF out.

In 2016, Barack Obama (a man who has long hated Britain) pitched up to tell us we’d go to the back of the queue if we voted to leave the EU.

The American élite unelected State in all its forms is a global nuisance, and a millstone around the neck of Britain. I can only, yet again, leave with this Slog Home Page visual: