My Top Five Jean Reno Films

Okay, here's a question for you all: what country does Jean Reno come from?

Well, yes, he is French now, but he was actually born in Morocco of Spanish parents and only moved to France when he was seventeen.

I bet you didn't know that.

Number 5: The Big Blue


A triumph of style over substance, Luc Besson's film does require you to be in the mood for long, arty underwater shots set to music.

I first watched it at the solar powered cinema at the Big Green Gathering where the charitable donations of itinerant dope peddler had got me into a suitably sublime frame of mind. Watched with a clear head it's a tad boring, but it does manage to make free diving seem interesting, rather than just weird and masochistic.

Reno though is great. When he makes his first appearance, out of a battered, old Fiat 500, he still manages to look cooler than 99% of other actors in flashier cars.

Number 4: Nikita


I love Nikita, but it only gets number 4 because this is a Jean Reno top 5 and not an Anne Parillaud top 5.

Reno only has a cameo as 'Victor: The Cleaner", but what a cameo. The US remake was competently done and featured Harvey Keitel in the same role. Nothing wrong with Keitel's performance, but Reno blows him out of the water easily.

And it's got Anne Parillaud in it - but I think I've already said that.



Number 3: Les Visiteurs

Reno plays Godefroy de Papincourt, a Don Quixote-esq knight thrown through time into the twentieth century. Accompanied by his Baldrick-like squire Jacquouille (which means something very rude in French) they blunder through modern France.

The American remake set the story in medieval England and the contemporary USA, which misses most of the point of the original film, where the Revolution has turned society upside down so Jacquouille's descendant now has Godefroy's castle.

Acting honours go, after Reno, to Valérie Lemercier who plays Godefroy's medieval princess bride and her modern descendant, still regal and demur despite being married to a boorish, bourgeois dentist.

There aren't many good French comedies, but this is one. In fact, this might be the only one.

Number 2: Roseanne's Grave


You've probably never heard of it, but this is a lovely little romantic comedy.

Not that you'd guess the genre from the theme; Reno's wife (Mercedes Ruehl) is dying of a heart condition and Reno is determined that she'll get the last plot in the cemetery. That means keeping everybody else alive, not an easy job when his village includes smokers, dangerous drivers, an elderly patient on a life support machine and an escaped kidnapper with a hit man after them.

Despite all this we actually end up with a happy ending, and a great joke ("Is the Mayor of New York still Italian?" "Why would anybody want to stop being Italian?"). A great little film.

Number 1: Léon

But what we really want to see is not Reno playing a romantic Everyman, but a ruthless killer.

Victor's cameo in Nikita was so good we clearly hadn't seen the last of him, so resurrected and renamed he returns as Léon. Characterised by a woolly hat, shades and a pet plant (and not a lot else) Reno's hit man loner teams up with a young Natalie Portman and shoots lots of people whilst Gary Oldman's OTT drug addict cop tries to get him.

It's a basic shoot-'em-up thriller, complete with the obligatory obliteration of a SWAT team (see Terminator II, Speed, etc), it's Reno who makes it all worth watching.

A character-led hit-man movie, this is probably the most violent film I've ever seen in an Art House cinema, which just goes to show how thoroughly confusing Jean Reno films can be.

Egypt: What Will The Army Do?

As the drama in Egypt unfolds, the key question is - what will the army do?

Usually in discussing Africa the answer would be simple: they'd do what the President said unless it involved fighting another army with guns, in which case they'd run a mile.

Egypt though is a bit different. They are a real army and if it hadn't been their bad luck to fight the Israel in most of their wars they'd have an excellent reputation. As Nasser said, in one of his wittier moments, the problem was that there were a quarter of a million Jews in the Israeli army and none in the Egyptian.

However their success in the early stages of the 1973 Yom Kippur war stands out as the only success in conventional warfare of a Arab army against Israel. They took the IDF (and many of their own soldiers) completely by surprise with their attack across the Suez canal, neatly removing the sand banks that Israel had erected with fire hoses. They then used their newly aquired Soviet anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight off the Israeli counter attacks. Israel has never revealed how many planes it lost in the war, and pundits speculate up to half their air force was shot down.

If their Syrian allies hadn't been obliterates in the Golan Heights they might be there still. Unfortunately the Egyptians had to launch an unplanned attack into the Sinai desert to rescue Syria. Defeat was inevitable when peace eventually broke out the Egyptian army was virtually surrounded and on its last legs.

In the years since then the army, although struggling with mass illiteracy in its ranks like most African armies, has become more professional. They meet the Yanks every couple of years to play war games, but hopefully haven't picked up too many bad habits from them.

So far the army seems to be playing a straight bat, dispersing the pro-Mubarak thugs and leaving the other demonstrators alone. So far, so good.

Whether or not a country with the grinding economic problems that Egypt has really needs half a million men in uniform is a good questions, but at the moment it seems that the Egyptian army is that very rare thing in Africa: an army that is more of a threat to the nations enemies than its own people.

Spies, Lies and Police Intelligence

Firstly I would like to make it completely clear that I have never slept with the undercover-police-agent-formerly-known-as-Mark-Stone. (Unless there is the possibility of compensation, in which case I may reconsider my position.)

As far as I know our paths never crossed as my time as a wandering direct Action Anarchist Type Person came to an end before his began. Although it's now ancient history, my experience of the Police at the time does shed some light on his activities.

It's a tail of spies, Special Branch, Special Forces, informers, a major intelligence cock up and there's a joke about half way down.

Whilst camped out in the Bollin Valley under what is now the Second Runway of Manchester Airport we met the police in various guises. As the border between Cheshire and Greater Manchester ran through the camps, officers from both forces policed us.

The Cheshire bobbies all looked like Dixon of Dock Green, rotund and red faced they were always cheerful until they took a dislike to you. Then you were arrested first and they decided what they were going to charge you with later.

Greater Manchester by contrast sent their Tactical Support group to keep an eye on us. Dressed like Storm Trooper from Star Wars and with attitudes to match, they were never-the-less generally fair and we soon came to a good working relationship. For example, people on the camp who really shouldn't have been there because of their drug or mental health problems were allowed to leave without harassment or fear of arrest.

Co-ordination of the policing effort was done by the airport's police force. Trained to deal with terrorists, they can usually be seen totting sub machine guns inside the perimeter fence.

To smooth things over they appointed a veteran copper as Police liaison officer. Alan Jones was his name and he was easily the most sorted copper I've ever met. He was proud of the fact he's held his marksman's license for longer than any other officer at the airport, and his common sense and down-to-earth attitude greatly helped to make the protest as peaceful as it was.

An example is that shortly after the camps were set up the Police started making statements that they were worried the camps could be used by terrorists to attack the airport. Initially we put this down to the usual negative propaganda. however Alan Jones showed us a diagram in a secret document. It showed a hole in the ground about two metres square and was marked 'IRA mortar pit'. He then pointed to a similar sized hole we'd dug in our camp that was screened from view by a bender.

Barely able to keep straight faces we explained that he was pointing to our latrine and once he'd confirmed for himself it was for motions and not munitions we heard no more about this.

It was from Alan that we learnt of the arrival of Special Branch on the scene. He'd returned to his office one day and found people he'd never seen before in his office and rooting through his papers, which is never a good way to introduce yourself to a Police Officer.

Alan said he expressed surprise when Branch told him who they were after. By now he knew who the important people were in our non-hierarchical protest, and none of them were on the list.

He never told me who was under surveillance, but it was easy enough to figure out, especially when the house in the nearby village of Mobberley was raided one night after some of them had stayed their. True to form the Special Branch were after political people, with their targets being left wingers who'd attached themselves to our protest. They were nice people on the whole, but they had violent backgrounds and rather quaint views of starting the revolution with symbolic acts of aggression against the state. Two of them tried this later and got a year in jail, so it was fair enough for Special Branch to be after them and not us. They were not peaceful protesters and our cause was diminished by association with theirs.

With the violent elements identified and the rest of us practically adopting Alan's one of our own the protest looked like it was going to be completely peaceful. But then it all went wrong.

In one of the other camps a protesters was asked to leave after he was found to be having a sexual relationship with a fifteen year old girl. He evidently didn't take this very well and appears to have then gone to every journalist he could find with a story of how we'd booby-trapped the woods and that a horrible fate awaited the first Policeman to come and get us. Thanks to the presence of Swampy in the camp Cliff Richard the press had been crawling through the woods for weeks without coming to any harm so, with the exception of those much respected papers The Daily Express and the Manchester Evening News the hacks had generally treated his story with the contempt he deserved.

Unfortunately he also went to the Police. Alan Jones appears to have known about this,and to have told his superiors the story was plainly b*llocks, but that didn't stop what happened next.

We knew exactly when he eviction was going to start a couple of days in advance. thanks to a boycott by the British climbing community of involvement in the eviction of environmental protesters, a group of Sheffield climbers had the monopoly on getting crusties out of trees. One of their regulars shared a house with a more principled climber, and before every eviction he rang he protesters to warn them. Unfortunately they usually didn't believe him, but we did and so everyone was ready when the cry of alarm went up from Zion Tree camp.

By this time we all knew how this worked. Police or bailiffs or security guards or all three would raid the camp arresting anyone who wasn't up a tree, down a tunnel or 'locked on' to something solid. Then things calmed down a bit until the specialists arrived.

This time though, things were different. There was no wall of yellow high visibility vests, instead it was a group of no more than ten men in black, who ripped down tents, and bundled people off in quick-cuffs. John Fraser-Williams, a free-lance journalist in the camp, didn't react quickly enough and received a truncheon on the ear.

Warned in advance, everyone who had a tunnel or a tree house to get to was safely in place, but this didn't stop these people. Our tunnels all featured heavy duty iron doors made by a wandering blacksmith called, for want of a better name, John the Blacksmith. Behind each door was positioned a protester attached to a concrete block with a bicycle D-lock to prevent the Forces of Darkness using brute force and ignorance to get in.

However that's what the Zion Tree tunnel received and Jon, the young man in the doorway, was lucky to escape serious injury as sledge hammers stoved in his tunnel door, narrowly missing him.

I was patrolling the perimeter of our adjoining camp at the time. Having checked it wasn't us getting hit I made my way to the bridge over the Bollin that connected us to Zion Tree. My torch picked out two figures and I immediately apologised and turned off the light, thinking these were protesters out on some nefarious 'pixie mission'. Then I realised that the thing being sabotaged was our bridge. Hang on a minute I thought, and turned on the torch again. Two men in black boiler suits and balaclavas stared back at me, now fortunately separated by a partially destroyed bridge. "F*** off" said one of them, and as they were bigger and more aggressive than me, I did.

As swiftly as they had arrived, the Men in Black disappeared again. The people they'd picked up were dumped by the side of the road shocked, bruised, in Fraser-William's case bleeding, but suspiciously not under arrest.

Circumstantial evidence suggests to me that they were the SAS, called in to deal with the alleged booby traps. They had walked through a pitch dark forest without being noticed, had been wielding sledgehammers and had not arrested anyone.

Other Men in Black had appeared before, including the group that beat up my friend Jonathon, but these were probably just security guards who'd removed their high visibility vests. These guys were more highly trained and whilst any army unit could have supplied troops with the right skills, only the SAS has troops on call to help the Police, so I suspect these guys were from the SAS's on-call counter-terrorism unit out on what, for them, was probably a pleasant morning's training.

The press coverage of this was scathing of the Police and as a liaison chappy myself I was summoned to the office Kevin Hart, Gold Commander for the day, to be given the soft soap on why the police had done nothing wrong. Apparently every officer on duty that morning had had his truncheon inspected (ooh-err Madam) and there was no trace of blood which, if true, suggests the Men in Black were Special Forces. John Fraser-Williams, it was suggested, was a journalist out to get a good story who had, if not actually faked his injury, at least gored it up a bit for the cameras.

If that took a bit of believing, at least the Police learnt from their mistake and the rest of the evictions went very peacefully, with bailiffs and protesters sharing sandwiches and cigarettes at designated breaks from the action. Surveillance there was a plenty, from Thames Valley officers trying to work their way through the backlog of warrants from the Newbury Bypass campaign, to the green suited Brays private detectives, who were a regular feature of protests in the 1990s, but it was all open and peaceful.

Well mostly open, for there is a coda which makes the intelligence cock up even more mysterious. In our camp was a guy who'd been a security guard at the Newbury. He'd changed sides, he said , after witnessing the heroics of a lone protester who'd single handedly disabled a convoy of police vans and coaches carrying security guards by leaping out from the woods, throwing himself under a coach, slashing the compressed air pipe to the brakes (which makes them lock on) and then legging it.

He didn't do much, but he built his own tree house and was evicted by climbers with everyone else. However when fellow tree squatters arrived at the station to be banged up shortly afterwards he'd mysteriously been released. Equally suspicious his twigloo had turned out to be full of climbing gear nicked from fellow campers.

Who exactly he was and what he was doing is unclear. 'Mark Stone' was well financed and got the nickname 'Flash', this chap appeared to be permanently skint. 'Stone' got involved at the heart of everything, our spy did almost nothing except smoke roll ups. He appeared to have no political views at all, liked fast cars, and admitted to still being in the employ of a security company and working at music festivals. He'd also infiltrated the most primitive, laid back and least secretive camp on the site. He was very little use to us and you wonder if he was any use to the Police. Perhaps he was an early test model of 'Mark Stone', a primitive archetype, not fully operational yet?

That Police were infiltrating Earth First! at that time was also confirmed later that summer in a wet field in Wales. The Earth First! camp in 1997 was possibly the high water mark of the movement, and the camp just south of Glasgow was buzzed by helicopters and circled by Police cars. The Scottish bobbies went out of their way to tell us how much nicer they were than English cops, and generally they were. So I do apologise for the rude words that people spelt out with their bodies when the helicopter flew over. Don't blame the others - it was my idea.

The camp ended on a bit of a downer with the EF!ers not willing to take part in the planned mass action unless they were told what it was. The action was to be an attempt to shut down a nuclear power station, and the organisers rightly didn't want the plan to leak out. However the trust necessary for this sort of action wasn't there. had this been Greenpeace it would have happened, and so I pretty much decided then that that was were I should be and two years later I was in a Police cell with the Executive Director.

However for those of us scattered to the four winds by the end of the Manchester Airport action the camp was a chance for us to meet up. As we left we promised to meet again, and seeing a black board with a notice chalked up about a camp in Bangor in a few weeks time, we decided that the Welsh coast in August sounded fun.

I should add that at this time my telephone at home developed a strange fault which meant it rang as soon as you hung up on a call, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence.

Anyway I arrived at Brewery Fields in Bangor, where there were plans for a nice housing estate, to find only Welsh rain and a circling Police helicopter. I pitched camp and next day I eventually found the six other drowned rats who had turned up. The 'mass protest' it turned out, had been organised by a local campaigner who'd been to the gathering and being too shy to talk or give a workshop, had chalked up his proposed protest instead. Still he'd got us, and a Police helicopter, so it wasn't a total loss. The rain even stopped after three days.

It was also proof of plain clothes officers visiting the camp. Not a big surprise really, it wasn't exactly high security. You didn't even have to pay if you looked poor enough.

So that's my rather rambling story.

It's not as good as Mark's, but if the Daily Mail had paid me more it would have been a lot better.

Should an Eco-warrior like Avatar?

Having refused to succumb to the hype and see it in the cinema, it's taken me a year to watch Avatar, but thanks to a cheap one month trial with Sky Movies I've finally managed to see it.

I doubt I'll watch it again.

However as the bad guys have giant bulldozers and hate trees it does suggest it should be the sort of film eco-warriors ought to like, but then the same was said of Steven Seagal's On Deadly Ground, and that was just a load of juvenile rubbish.

However Avatar is certainly a phenomena, so it deserves analysis. Millions of otherwise sane people paid good money to view it and, although they mainly went for the special effects, they certainly didn't complain too much about a plot that seemingly takes to pieces the culture they come from and spits it back at them.

Appearances though can be deceptive, and Avatar I suspect is not what it at first appears.

Firstly it's not that contemporary. Despite the reference to Shock and Awe, we're not in the War on Terror here, we're in Vietnam. We have a jungle, we have helicopters, we have a mad colonel, we have something resembling napalm. Nobody says "Charlie don't surf", but pretty much all the other cliches are there.

Secondly it's not that liberal. Sigourney Weaver's character makes the case for a rational study of the forest but she is brushed aside, first by the Na'vi and then by the military to eventually, like the Headmaster in If, die pointlessly for her trouble. Liberals are clearly loosers.

Instead the Na'vi befriend Sully, an ex-marine who can shoot, fight and perform outlandish macho stunts with the best of them, and eventually leads The People to a Battle of Omdurman style slaughter in the best Hollywood tradition.

I originally called it Aliens meets Fern Gully, but really it's Apocalypse Now meets Dances With Wolves (or rather A Man Called Horse, the film that kick started the genre).

Not that we can blame America too much for this. Imperial England always preferred natives primitive and warlike to the cultured and peaceful. Scottish Highlanders, Zulus and Afghans have of course very interesting cultures, but the Victorians saw them as simple warriors who, despite their intransigence, were far preferable to the peaceful but complex Irishman, Hausa or Hindu.

This is of course a highly reactionary view, and one with a few disturbing parallels that Cameron probably didn't intend.

The corporation with it's giant bulldozers and utter disregard for anything except money is clearly meant to represent Capitalism. However Cameron also appears to lump in science and anything resembling human society as the 'bad stuff' that must be opposed.

The idea that the excesses of Neoliberalism can only be tamed by a rejection of science and a return to a simpler society is one that attracts a few on the fringes of the environment movement, but they generally steer clear of fetishising the violence of the archetypal warrior. New Agers and Primitivists are usually peaceful people.

However the Neoconservative movement in America, of which George W Bush was the puppet, were heavily into the idea. True, they hated trees as much as anyone, but they want to replace reason with the Bible and loved wars. They also idealise a make-believe past, in their case a 1950s America of the white, the straight and the middle class, which is just as anachronistic in the modern world as the society of Na'vi.

Looking further back you can even see similarities to the Nazis, who banned 'Jewish' science, hated Capitalists , dabbled in magic, idolised ancient pagan warriors and supposedly loved their native oak forests.

The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.

So should eco-warriors like Avatar?

Err, no.

The special effects are good though.

p.s. in case anyone things I'm the sort of boring old git who hates all modern films I should add I watched District 9 last week and loved it!

The Day Hitler Ran Away

Halloween 1914 was a horrible time. Military historians call it The First Battle of Ypres, but that dry name does little to convey the horrors that were taking place in Flanders. The German name for the battle, Kindermord bei Ypern ("The Massacre of the Innocents") speaks much more eloquently. However if events had taken a very slightly different turn that Samhain the world may have been spared worse horrors to come.

The First World War was fought with offensive weapons from the nineteenth century - the bayonet and the cavalry sword, and defensive weapons from the twentieth - quick-firing artillery and machine guns. It was fought between industrial nations who, with steam technology and miles of railways, could support armies of millions in the field all year round. The result were battles longer and bloodier than before or since.

In October 1914 no trenches had yet been dug, and at the northern edge of the line British and German soldiers fought each other in the open in what became known as the Race To The Sea. As each side tried to outflank the other, a series of bloody and confused battles took place.

On 31st October the Germans attacked and destroyed the 1st Battalion of the South Wales Borders guarding the town of Gheluvelt. By a twist of fate this was the same infantry battalion that had been wiped out nearly 36 years earlier by the Zulus at the battle of Isandhlwana.

The victorious Germans, consisting of the 16th, 244th and 245th Bavarian Regiments had broken through the British line and could have turned the battle. Instead they settled down for a rest in the grounds of the Chateau and a bit of looting in the village.

British Generals of the Great War don't have a terrific reputation, but one who definitely wasn't a Colonel Bogey was Brigadier General Charles FitzClarence. He'd already won a Victoria Cross serving with Baden-Powell in Mafeking and he was about to make a valiant attempt to win another one.


Rounding up the only men he could find, the 2nd Battalion of the Worcester Regiment, he launched a counter attack. He was outnumbered, and German artillery killed or injured a quarter of his men before the attack started, but surprise and pluck carried the day and the Bavarians were routed. The gap was plugged and the day saved.


The Germans had had their chance and blown it. It was to be four long and bloody years before they got another. Fitzclarence though was not there then. Eleven days after the Battle of Gheluvelt he was shot dead whilst leading another counterattack.

The victory restored the status quo, allowed a fixed front line to form and paved the way to four years of murderous and intransigent trench warfare. Perhaps it might have been better if Fitzclarence had been a coward and a duffer, as the war might well have ended up being over by Christmas. But the what ifs of the battle extend well beyond this, and concern the fate of a certain private in the 16th Bavarian Regiment.

On 8th October 1914 Adolf Hitler (seated rather appropriately on the extreme right in the picture) took his oath to the King of Bavaria and went straight off to the front. His job was as a messenger, carrying messages to and from headquarters. Tradition has him braving shell fire at the front, but new research suggests that most of the time he was several miles back with the top brass. He probably also used the telephone as often as his own feet.

Never-the-less the 16th was his regiment and, unless he had been posted somewhere else, we would expect him to be with it. Historians can't definitely place him on the battlefield (the Wikipedia entry is tellingly blank) but he wasn't wounded and there's no record of him being anywhere else. I suspect Hitler's own silence on the matter is revealing. A vain man, if he'd had an excuse not to be associated with the defeat, he'd surely have told someone.

19,530 German's died in the First Battle of Ypres. That one of them wasn't Hitler is surely one of fate's bitterest ironies. Fitzclarence not only saved the First World War for Britain, he also came close to preventing the Second.

But if Hitler was present when his regiment turned tail and ran for their lives, what effect did it have on him? "Who knows?" is probably the best answer, but as this is a blog and not a text book, I'll have a punt.

As most people know, at the end of May 1940 the British Expeditionary Force was trapped in Dunkirk. The German tanks halted allowing the Royal Navy evacuated them by sea. Why?

First this was a act of omission not commission. The Panzers had arrived at the edge of the town with no infantry support. To advance further before they arrived would have been to risk heavy casualties and Field Marshal von Rundstedt's decision, which Hitler endorsed, was tactically a sensible one.

Strategically though, it was a major blunder. Destroying the BEF, Britain's only serious soldiers, would have been worth any losses. Von Rundstudt should have been ordered to press the attack.

The most likely explanation is that the Germans didn't think the Brits were going anywhere. They had their minds on other things and were happy to let the Luftwaffe bomb the Tommies into submission.

But could the ghosts of Gheluvelt had come back to haunt Hitler?

A week before the Dunkirk evacuation began, a British armoured counter attack at Arras had unsettled General Rommel, smashing much of his Division and almost breaking through.

Did this incident bring back bad memories for the Fuhrer?

Did Hitler fear what might happen if he pressed the BEF too hard?

Did he perhaps see the ghosts of his former comrades fleeing from Chateau at Gheluvelt?

My Top 5 Literary Dads

This list turned out to be harder list than I thought.

I never realised until I thought about it how many fools, tyrants and just plain absent Dads there are around. Really, we do get a pretty bum deal from the great writers.

King Lear as a Model Parent? Get away. Heathcliff as your Dad? Sign junior up for an ASBO and counselling ASAP. The father in Swallows and Amazons? His sole contribution to the books is to respond to his children's requests to go sailing with "If not duffers, won't drown. If duffers, better off drowned." I doubt event then you could pass that off as a thorough risk assessment.

So here we go with my top (pretty much only) five fathers in literature.

No.5 Odysseus in the Odyssey


Lets be frank, as a father Odysseus has a few shortcomings. To miss your son's birthday once is sometimes inevitable for a working Dad. But to miss the first 20 is going a bit far, especially when you've spent the best part of the last decade hanging around with nymphs and doing drugs.

When he does get home Odysseus does go a bit OTT as well, murdering all the house guests and stringing up most of the servants. However these things happen in military families, so I'm told.

However at least he gets there in the end, which is what counts I suppose.

4. Prospero in The Tempest


Prospero stands as a literary reminder of the virtues, and pitfalls, of home schooling.

Although I suspect Ariel did all the cooking, and Caliban all the nappies, Prospero does seem to have given little Miranda a fairly decent grounding in most of the necessary skills in life, although he does seem to have neglected one rather important area.

Not that this would have mattered if he hadn't ensured that a ship load of lusty Italian sailors would wash up on their little island, probably with their shirts sticking to their chests.

Perhaps not the best way to teach your daughter the facts of life, but what teenage girl would really object?

3. Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mocking Bird


Shakespeare may have written "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers", but he may have made an exception for Atticus.

The epitome of upright virtue, who shields his children from the worst of the racist society he lives in, whilst ensuring they have the values to challenge it, Atticus is also a dead shot with a rifle, which must come in useful at Fun Fairs.

However for all his liberal values, you suspect it was the late Mrs Finch who got her hands dirty when Jem and Scout were little.

The worst that can be said against him is that his example has caused many otherwise harmless young men to take up careers in Law. Personally I'm with Shakespeare.

2. Mr Bennett from Pride and Prejudice


Having children means having to put your hell raising years behind you - or at least postpone them until they go off to university. It's therefore vitally important for a Dad to be able to entertain himself close to home, and Mr Bennett, the philosopher with a fondness for books and nature, does just that.

Laughing at his sillier children, he is never-the-less a best friend to his brighter ones. In a time when parents were supposed to be ogres, Mr Bennett was an early practitioner of the theories of Dr Spock, allowing his daughters the freedom to learn from their own mistakes.

Alas, like many hippy parents, his values didn't entirely rub off on his off-spring, and his second daughter eventually choose to marry the man with the largest country estate in Derbyshire.

1. The Father in The Road


In a blasted future in which the death of Nature is equated to the death of God, the unnamed man and his son travelling through a Nuclear Winter (or whatever) are clearly going nowhere geographically, but spiritually it's another matter. The man has the map, but the boy has the moral compass.

George Monbiot believes the power of this book is that it shows that although we can survive without civilisation, we cannot survive without a biosphere, and if nothing else it certainly makes you value the cornucopia that is your fridge.

But surgically remove from the story the Mad Max elements, and it is still powerful stuff. As a father, how do you cope with the idea that one day you won't be around to look after your children in a cruel and dangerous world? Can you really claim to be one of the 'good guys' when the way your food gets to the table may not be terribly moral?

Finally, how as parents do we deal with passing on to our children a world which is in considerably worse shape than the one we inherited? Difficult, but important questions.

Military Intelligence Blunders and Climate Change Denial: Lessons to Learn

1. "Well, don't worry about it."
The Failure of Imagination.

Early in the morning of the 7th September 1941 a technician monitoring a radar on the northern tip of Hawaii noticed some unexplained blips. As a good soldier he reported it to the Duty Officer, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler. "Well, don't worry about it," the officer replied. Forty minutes later bombs were raining down on Pearl Harbour, most of the US Pacific Fleet was on fire or underwater and over 2000 people dead.

The attack has become synonymous for the failure of military intelligence. Famously an oxymoron, intelligence failures are generally responsible for worst disasters in military history, from Lord Chelmsford going off to chase phantom Zulus and leaving his camp at Isandhlwana poorly defended, to the USA blundering into Vietnam thinking they were only facing a few foreign infiltrators.

But if failure to spot the warning signs in war can lead to the deaths of thousands, being ambushed by Climate Change could lead to the deaths of millions, and we are being bigger Muppets than the unfortunate Lieutenant Kermit.

Military intelligence failures don't just happen because someone is being dense, they happen because one bunch of people has outsmarted another, and this is a lesson that those of us who want to do something about Climate Change, especially scientists, often forget.

Figuring out relativity was easy by comparison, as there was no Cavorite industry hacking Einstein's emails and claiming it was all down to Ether. Darwin met a bit of resistance on Evolution, but it took the Creationist nearly a hundred years come up with Intelligent Design, by which time the science was settled.

But back to 1941. Tyler wasn't to blame, he was on his second day in the job and nobody had told him anything, but the authorities in Honolulu most definitely were. Tensions were rising and intercepted radio messages told the Americans an attack was coming. The response though was just to bunch the aeroplanes more closely together on the tarmac.

This may sound daft, but it meant they could be more easily guarded by sentries. This was because the only attack the commanders could imagine was a sabotage by secret agents. That the entire Japanese Fleet would silently steam half way across the Pacific to bomb them was something they just couldn't envisage. It didn't matter that the Royal Navy had pulled a similar trick on the Italians the year before, in their world this sort of thing was unimaginable.

And that I suspect is where most people are with Climate Change. It is too big to imagine. The blips on the radar screen are getting bigger, but we'd rather not worry about it.


2. "I'm not worried because he's not worried"
The Denial Loop

Egypt's surprise attack across the Suez Canal in October 1973 was one of the great coup's of all time. The Egyptians crossed the canal by surprise, dug in, and fought off counter-attacks by the hitherto invincible Israeli Army. Only an intemperate advance brought on by the collapse of their Syrian allies prevented the first Arab victory in war over Israel.

Egypt had been planning the operation for six years, and had ran exercise after exercise, sometimes mobilising of thousands of civilians as well as tens of thousands of soldiers. The result was that when the actual assault came, even the Egyptian soldiers involved were taken by surprise, not believing it was the real thing until they were actually ordered to put their boats into the water.

But it still shouldn't have worked. Against them was the combined intelligence might of MOSSAD and the CIA. Israel had the agents on the ground and the Americans had the spy planes and satellites. Together they should have seen it coming.

What went wrong instead was that each agency looked at the other and, seeing no reaction, assumed they knew something they didn't. MOSSAD didn't panic because the CIA didn't panic, and the CIA didn't panic because MOSSAD didn't panic, and so on.

Campaigners trying to convince a sceptical public know the problem only too well. If Climate Change was a real threat the government would do something about it, says Joe Public. Whilst in the corridors of power the green lobbyists are told that the government would love to do something to limited our fossil fuel consumption, only the public won't allow them to you see......


3. "I'm not lying, he is"
Bluff and counter bluff.

If you want to point to where it all went wrong for America in Vietnam most historians will point you to the Tet Offensive in February 1968. For three years Westmoreland and the military had been telling the public that the war was as good as won. Then suddenly there were thousands of guys in black pyjamas running around South Vietnam's major cities and blowing things up. No matter that by the end of the week most of them were dead, the damage had been done.

The shock the American public felt after Tet was similar to that felt by scientists and activists after Climategate. Despite the well documented funding of dubious Climate Change denying lobby groups by the fossil fuel industry, and not withstanding the rather obvious fact that lots of rich people are going to loose a lot of money if we give up on fossil fuels, when a few stolen emails are quoted out of context a surprisingly large number of otherwise sensible people choose to believe that there really is a scientific conspiracy. Why? Are people really that stupid?

The CIA aren't stupid, and although they get a lot of the blame for Vietnam, mostly they did a good job. The agency base in Saigon had been telling Washington for years that this was a full blown insurgency and not just a bit of cross border raiding, but the top brass at Langley hadn't believed them, and by the start of 1968 they were signally back to America that something big was in the pipeline.

Something big was indeed brewing; a major offensive involving attacks in every major southern city. Insurgencies by their very nature are secret, but the Vietnamese knew they couldn't keep something this size secret, so instead they went for an elaborate bluff.

The spot they chose was Khe Sanh, a US marine base on the border. It was no threat to the Viet Cong, who could easily bypass it, but at the end of 1967 the Vietnamese started moving large forces up to Khe Sanh. At the same time they planted documents which said the plans for a national offensive were just a bluff and that Khe Sanh was the real objective.

The trick worked better than they could have expected. France had quit Vietnam fifteen years earlier when their outpost at Dien Bien Phu fell, and President Johnson was terrified of a similar debacle. Ignoring the numerous intelligence reports which suggested Khe Sanh was the bluff, he ordered a model of the base constructed in the White House basement. So whilst he was busy watching a struggle for a few square metres of worthless jungle, the Viet Cong overran huge chunks of South Vietnam.

Poor old Johnson. He wasn't a bad bloke, and the chants of "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" really hurt him. But in the end the demonstrators were right and he was wrong. The Americans were taken by surprise, lots of people died, and it was all pointless from then on.

But the world of bluff and double bluff can be confusing, and in the end, like Johnson, we can just end up seeing what we're most afraid of and not what's really out there.

Why did so many people fall for Climategate? Maybe they don't like clever clogs, maybe they like idea that a lot of self-righteous beardy people have got it wrong, or maybe they just like their cars and foreign holidays. Either way the deniers found that the easiest way to protect an extremely plausible conspiracy is to suggest an utterly implausible one.


4. "None so blind as those who don't wish to see."
When all else fails, ignore the inconvenient facts.

General Montgomery had a brilliant plan, one that would definitely end the war by Christmas. It involved a desperate race to reach a bridge captured by paratroopers before they were overrun by the Germans. True, the relief force would be advancing down a single road where one German with a panzerfaust could hold up the entire army, and true, to date the only race Monty had looked likely to win was onto a pedestal, but it might just work.

The Dutch resistance weren't so sure and brought back worrying reports of German tanks refitting in the woods. They were ignored. Major Urquhart, the intelligence officer, wasn't too impressed either and kept producing aeriel photographs of said panzers in the woods. He was sent on sick leave. Nothing was to stop the master plan.

The result was heroic, but pointless.

But it was a really good plan, and that's the problem. If only our climate wasn't so sensitive to pesky carbon molecules, then we could build paradise. Whether it's Social Democracy 2.0, the cutthroat world of the Neoliberals or even a Marxist workers paradise, it all depends on using cheap energy with no consequences.

There are no easy answer to stupidity, and the only solution to bad intelligence is better intelligence.

Perhaps though we could take heart from the biggest military intelligence disaster of this decade; the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. We couldn't stop the war, but at least most of us saw through the deceit. You can fool all of the military all of the time, but you can only fool all of the people some of the time.