Gideon Rachman caused me to laugh out loud on a crowded Northern Line tube train earlier this morning, causing startled glances from my fellow passengers. His column this week is a reflection on the thrill of political power – a subject, he noted, that he gained some insight into recently when
I had lunch with a friend who had helped to handle a national emergency in Britain, working from the emergency bunker known as Cobra – which sits beneath the Cabinet Office near Downing Street. “What was it like?” I asked him. “Brilliant,” he replied. “There are all these video screens and generals and admirals sitting around in uniform. You have to say things like: ‘It is 3.45pm and I am now bringing to a close this meeting of Cobra emergency command.’”
Is my friend uniquely juvenile? I suspect not – just unusually honest. He certainly believed that all the other officials around the table were delighting in the little rituals of crisis management. “I guarantee that everybody around that table had an erection within five minutes,” he mused.
Extrapolating slightly, my friend developed what you might call “the erection theory of British foreign policy”. His argument was that British government’s bias towards the “special relationship” with the US, in preference to the European Union, has something to do with the thrilling nature of American power. “If you fly into Camp David on a helicopter,” he assured me, “it’s instant arousal. But if you have to go to a European summit in Brussels, its so depressing you’re impotent for a week.”
Of course, the obvious question is: who was Gideon’s excitable lunchtime interlocutor? Well, we know that:
(a) It’s a man;
(b) He must presumably have been chairing, rather than merely attending, the COBRA meeting, if it was his job to adjourn the meeting (which means that he was representing the lead department – see the helpful COBRA diagram on page 47 of Charlie Edwards’ last Demos pamphlet on national security) ;
(c) It’s someone who’s been to Camp David, by helicopter; and
(d) It’s presumably someone who works in foreign policy, given that he’s lunching with the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist.
Answers on a postcard…
