Simon Heffer wants war with Mugabe, can't find map

Simon has decided that Mugabe must go and that British military intervention is the answer. Now, Mugabe is a disgusting, murderous genocidal madman and he has wrecked his once-decent country in an orgy of robbery and violence. However, the hard truth is that no vital British interest is threatened by that tyrant, any more than in is by the Burmese Junta. What reason is there for British soldiers' bodies to be returned flag-draped from Southern Africa? Especially as none of the surrounding African countries appears to be prepared to raise a finger to help the suffering people of Zimbabwe. That fact presents a very practical problem in any case, that Zimbabwe is land-locked and surrounded by friendly powers who would not assist an armed British intervention. Simon makes light of this though.

I know our Army is overstretched, but if we can get them into Afghanistan we can get them into Zimbabwe.

What on earth does this mean? Just because our soldiers can be deployed to one country it does not follow that they can be deployed to any other country. This is illogic to the point of idiocy. Maybe we should gently remind Simon that a soldier can physically only fight in one war at a time, and hold a whip-round to get him an atlas.

His other stoke of genius is to privatise the Bank of England, the argument running like this.

As for the Bank he heads, I'd go the whole hog with the independence lark, and privatise it. If the clearing banks are unhappy with the way the lender of last resort conducts itself, then let them run it. The dozen institutions that have the largest deposits with the Bank of England should be allowed to nominate their chairmen to form the court of directors, and one of them should be voted in as governor on a rolling three-year contract. Then, if anything goes wrong, the banks have only themselves to blame and the Government is, happily, taken out of the equation.

Perhaps someone should hold Simon's hand and explain that 'if anything goes wrong' with the banking system it is not just the clearing banks that suffer, it is their customers and just about every one else involved in the British economy as well. The idea that the government could wash their hands of the regulation of financial services is bonkers, and bear in mind it was only a couple of weeks ago that Simon was calling for bankers who didn't behave as he would have liked to be locked up. So, he has travelled the spectrum from extreme authoritarian to libertarian in the space of a few days. Consistency is not really his strong point.