Secretary’s
report – February 2004
I’m beginning to get worried. I keep these monthly ramblings in a separate
folder on my computer and the list has gone off the bottom of the screen
.... time for a new quill, I suspect. This comes hard on the heels of
our Annual General Meeting, prepared with the usual elaborate ritual.
“Oh, is it February again? I suppose we’d better have our AGM. And we
need a report.” Not telling who that was, but some will guess.
A couple of names on your Committee have changed, but I am delighted to
say that Rosemary Addington has again agreed to fulfil the role of chair.
Not sure whether that’s upright, arm or easy, but it certainly is no deck
chair position trying to keep our work moving ahead, and dealing with
the torrent of mail she receives. I see the filtered pile of mail once
month, and that impresses me. Glad also to have Noel Hamel in a position
as Vice Chair (look, I’m not even going to begin discussing what THAT
stands for) where we can play on his sense of responsibility and co-opt
his varied talents.
For me, a feature of our AGM last Wednesday was the impassioned way that
John Johnson launched into the Hutton report (I think he raised this under
Any Other Business, which is about where it belongs). I wish I’d recorded
John’s splendid assault on that monument to our system. For the record,
there was a strong buzz of “Quite right” round the room when he finished.
I watched the reports of the Hutton Inquiry regularly, and went along
to the dramatisation at the Tricycle Theatre. The impression was one of
care, balance, deliberation. How different from the report. It’s as though
you and four other people watch a car crash. Four of you see that the
car swerved across the traffic hitting a cyclist, mounted the pavement
and hit a group of pedestrians, killing one of them. The odd one out noticed
that one of the car’s rear lights had failed, and comments that the car
was in an illegal condition because of that.
Now, I look forward to what John will have to say when Lord Buttwash gets
round to examining how Mr Blair got such a cock-eyed view of the truth.
It was so cockeyed that he was able to persuade the Commons to vote for
a war, without having sound proof of the most crucial underlying assertions
(underlying is a good word, isn’t it? I wish we had more of it in our
government, but I fear it is more a case of Overlying).
My prediction is that the Buttwash inquiry will take us nicely up to the
next general election as it carries through a process of deep probing
investigation. It will stop two months before election day and the report
will be months in gestation. When it emerges it will say that everyone
involved was really, really sincere in their hatred of war and violence*,
deeply committed to finding the truth at all times and it was such a pity
that that sneaky rotter S Hussein (and he is or was a rotten bastard,
little doubt of that at least) was so sneaky that he was able to deceive
the hawk like vigilance of our finest intelligence and thus lead our Leader
into Error.
Huh.
*There’s a good adage used within Alcoholics Anonymous.
“We judged ourselves by our intentions. Others judged us by our actions.”
Useful, that!
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