'I hereby vow to refuse to serve in a Boris Johnson Cabinet'

“Loneliness is the price of liberty!”

From The Proverbs of Kindness by Bachchoo

Would someone like Brinda Karat, whose name I use because we are long lost friends, express any opinion about who she backs for the leadership of the RSS? The parallel occurred to me when I was asked who I would back in the present contest for the leadership of the Tory Party.

The UK is choosing its next Prime Minister. The party in Westminster which has the most seats but not a majority, are choosing a new leader after forcing Theresa May out for failing to deliver Brexit, the break from the European Union. Do I back any of the candidates? Me? I wish they’d all go to hell in a handcart.

But in a country that is reputed as having the mother of parliaments and initiating the democratic process, copied from ancient Athens as a ruling principle, one ought to have an opinion, even though to modify what Mercutio said in Romeo and Juliet: “a plague on all their opinions and impossible posing.”

The Tory Party’s 313 MPs — the first electoral college — will eliminate candidates till two are left standing. Then the vote will be put to the franchise of 160, 000 of the voting membership of the Tory Party. They will choose between the two and so this 0.024 per cent fraction of the population of the United Kingdom will elect its next Prime Minister. And all the candidates who are standing say that they are doing this in the service of “democracy” because 51 per cent of people voted to leave the European Union in the discredited referendum of 2016 and they believe in democracy. Discredited? Yes, because the voters were told blatant lies about the constraints the EU imposed on Britain as a member and were beguiled by ridiculous claims of what the UK could do as a nation outside the European Union. Supporters of democracy? With 0.02424 per cent of the population appointing them? Laugh at the hypocrisy or cry?

No one outside the Tory Parliamentary Party and then the party members, many of them infiltrators from the neo-fascist movements of Britain, will have a say.

Among the contenders, and one who may be eliminated before this column is published, is Sajid “Uncle Tom” Javid. He is at present the home secretary in the outgoing government and wants to be the leader of the Tory Party. His claim to fame is that he is the son of a Pakistani immigrant bus driver and has made his way through education, through the British meritocratic system and through a career in banking to Parliament and to the Cabinet.

He is the member of a party whose other members openly support Donald Trump’s views and most of his international stances and whose leading members and fellow leadership candidates endorsed Mr Trump’s overtly racist attacks on Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.

If Uncle Tom Sajid were to get to the post of Prime Minister through this undemocratic process, I, gentle reader, would be happy.

The reason? When put to the mandate of the whole of Britain, which has a very strong current of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim feeling, he would lose and take the Tory Party into Opposition (most likely) or, one hopes, oblivion (highly unlikely).

But of course, dear Uncle Tom Sajid won’t win these present rounds. The clear frontrunner in this contest with a majority of the 313 Tory MPs choosing him is one Boris Johnson.

If he is elected Prime Minister I can, gentle reader, boast that he is the first PM of any country whom I know personally and who would recognise me by name if we encountered each other — God forbid.

I got to know him when he was editor of a right-wing weekly called the Spectator and when a biography I wrote of C.L.R. James was favourably reviewed in his magazine and I was subsequently, after correspondence with the reviewer, invited to the periodical’s parties.

Then something very strange occurred. The serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who had made my acquaintance, rang me from Paris where he lived after his release from Tihar, and asked me what “red mercury” was. He knew I had a physics educational background and I told him it was something the Russians claimed they had invented and produced which could trigger a nuclear bomb.

He told me after several calls and encounters that he had access to red mercury which he was selling to some Arab gentlemen he was meeting in Bahrain.

When the controversy about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or not, after the invasion of Iraq by the US and UK, commanded by Bush and Blair, broke out, I began to wonder.

I called Charles and asked him if the Arab gentlemen to whom he was selling red mercury could have been Iraqis. He said he didn’t know but he had recordings of the e-mails between them and perhaps of conversations they had had. I said he was sitting on a very hot international story if indeed they were Iraqis buying a nuclear trigger on behalf of Saddam Hussein.

I called the Spectator journalist I knew and he called Boris. They met Charles and me the next day and Charles relayed his story. Boris decided that if the story had substance it was too big for his weekly to handle and he called a senior journalist from the Daily Telegraph. I left the meeting at that point and heard that afternoon that Charles was demanding sums of money which the Telegraph were not willing to pay to even show them the evidence he said he had.

The story never saw the dark of print, or the light of day. I will, I hereby pledge to refuse to serve in a Boris Johnson Cabinet, when invited, even though he probably values a connection to serial killers.