Helping Kamala

If anything illustrated the new government’s priority of factional over any overarching national interest, it was the dispatch of its party members to the United States to assist with the election campaign of the current Vice-President, Kamala Harris. They travelled not as merely private individuals, but as emissaries of the party of the Prime Minister.

Interference in foreign elections is wrong in itself, but the election result in the US hangs in the balance and therefore Donald Trump might win. So, the party should have paused before acting as it did. Mr Trump is not a forgetting or forgiving man, so the party’s activities might harm this country’s future relations with the United States – a country not without importance to us. Whatever party members’ opinion of Mr Trump, therefore, it was their duty, in their country’s interest, to keep them to themselves, at least in public.

This would have been obvious to any reasonably intelligent person. While I am not particularly impressed by the level of intelligence of the members of our government, they are all quite intelligent enough to understand this.

What explains the untimely dispatch of party members to assist Kamala Harris? I think it is moral grandiosity. Not only does the government not consult the national interest, but it regards the very concept of national interest as bad in itself. The government thinks, or feels, in terms of universal principles and is in thrall to what Thomas Sowell, the American economist and political philosopher, called ‘the vision of the Anointed’ that is to say the person or group of persons who have reached the final stages of moral enlightenment which they have an apostolic duty to spread.

The government is more concerned with the fate of the world than with the fate of Britain. Global warming, for example, is more real to it than the prospect of people going cold in its own country. Although it was elected with only twenty per cent of the votes of the eligible voters, that is to say something like 0.2 per cent of the world’s population, it is responsible to, and for, the welfare of the whole world.

Since it is clear that Kamala Harris would be better for the world than Donald Trump – no possible doubt enters its mind about that proposition – it is its duty to campaign on her behalf, and never mind the possible consequences for the country of which it is the government. If Mr Trump wins, at least it will have a clear conscience that it did all it could to bring the desirable result about: and the clear conscience of those with the vision of the Anointed is what counts.

Not for nothing is a human rights lawyer head of that morally grandiose government.