The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: Sinn Fein leaders invited to wedding of top Blair aide: ThePost.ie.

Apparently, having snubbed him daily for 10 years, Gordon Brown congratulated Jonathan Powell, as he left Downing Street at the end of the Blair era, on his achievements in Northern Ireland. Powell was Blair’s runner to the IRA/Sinn Fein terrorists throughout the peace process.

I will not join those in the media condemning him for suggesting the West should enter into negotiations with Al Qaida, as Blair did with IRA/Sinn Fein. Of course we must do so at some point and, as he told Andrew Marr, merely to talk is not to surrender. However, I was sickened to watch him tell New Labour’s arch-sycophant that he had become friends with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. His job may have required him to deal with them, but how could any decent human befriend them?

Perhaps the best published comment about him (in an otherwise unctuous Guardian profile) refers snidely to his ancestor; one of the four knights who killed Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

Educated at King’s School, Canterbury, within a stone’s throw of the
cathedral where his ancestor Hugh de Moreville gave an early taste of
the family’s devotion to contentious public service, Powell has none of
the stuffiness of traditional Oxbridge diplomats.

On friendly terms with traitors and murderers? Yes, but not at all stuffy. Well, that’s OK then.