Goodbye To All That

Osama bin Laden ... Muammar Gaddafi ... Kim Jong-il ... George Papandreou ... Rebekah Brooks: 2011 was a bad year for people with difficult-to-spell names.

Of course, recent years have in general been bad for people with difficult-to-spell names, although the majority of them would seem superficially to have had a better year than usual, thanks in no small part to the Arab Spring which brought peace, love and understanding to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Libya.

The troubled history of Iraq culminated in the triumphant withdrawal of U. S. Forces and would certainly have been marked by mass public celebration had the crowds not been forced to disperse to make way for ambulances. Even now, as Sordel scowls in a corner typing out his inexcusably jaundiced nut-binding of 2011, the power-sharing government in Baghdad is celebrating several minutes of successful cooperation as President Nuri-Kamal al-Maliki's Shiite faction seeks Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi on charges of running a death squad.

One way or another, 2012 looks to be another memorable year for people with difficult-to-spell names.

Elsewhere, people with difficult-to-spell names agreed to merge them in an effort to dodge the jinx hanging over their heads. Hence 'Merkozy': a different making-of-the-beast-with-two-backs than Shakespeare can have anticipated, yet one equally likely to result in someone being smothered under a bolster before morning. Still, no one said that France and Germany have actually to be at war with one another to be mutually ruinous; it just helped.

Comedy Moment of the Year (for those who can see past the oddly pedestrian circumstance of a bride being upstaged by her sister's bottom at the Wedding of the Century) was the U.S. playing "Mister, can we have our ball back?" with their RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone and Iran. What's next? Asking for their bullets back from Pakistan?

Anyway, Sordel looks forward to 2012 with one lingering concern. If education continues on the path it is currently following, all names will become generally more difficult to spell. As trends go, it's not exactly encouraging.

Some Idiot Went To War And All I Got Was This Lousy Tee-Shirt

Like most of Britain's citizens, Sordel is content to fight his wars on the Home Front. I am not entirely convinced, however, that our Prime Minister should be allowed to do the same.

It used to be inferred from his sullen silence on the subject that Gordon Brown was no supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. War, one felt, was incompatible with a man for whom prudence had become not so much a watchword as the nervous tic of a genteel Tourette. The mongering of war sits uncomfortably alongside fiscal responsibility, which is why many voters may have assumed that Brown would draw a line under the adventuring of his predecessor and quietly withdraw our troops from theatres of war with the discretion of an impresario closing a West End flop.

How wrong we all were.

Brown, it is true, is no wartime leader. One cannot imagine Churchill, or Thatcher, or Blair, presiding over a country at war without the occasionally morale-raising speech, the shake of the flag, the salute to the forces. Brown acts, however, like someone for whom war is conducted far away by strange and distant relatives.

It is an impression that can only have been fostered by Blair's own remoteness. One imagines Tony to have been like as a small boy at boarding school writing reluctant postcards to a disciplinarian and slightly mad aunt. "UN nice, food okay, send more money." "Thank you for the seedcake, dug out a rabbit hole on Saturday, send more money." "Met the president, going to war, send more money."

Sat at home with this collection of haikuesque epistles, the dismal Gordon could only have thought of statesmanship as something that happened to other people in distant lands. Mrs. Brown's little boy - admitted to Edinburgh University by the age of sixteen when most of his peers would have been getting their prefect badges and first serious girlfriends - continued along the sad little road upon which his feet had long ago been set.

No war for Gordon. No prefect badge for Gordon. Gordon excused school sport on account of a nasty injury incurred during rugby.

The result is a man gazing uncomprehendingly at war through a window-pane. When a crisis occurs for which he feels himself prepared (if, for example, someone is needed to pass billions of pounds across the table to the banking fraternity) Brown is the man for the job.

But war is something to which he takes no principled exception and to which he can make not the least practical contribution.

Helicopters? The brass might have more luck asking for seedcake.