Rule the waves? Not any more we don't

I have no idea how he would have come across on the GMTV sofa, but sometimes I think all our political problems could be solved if the man being lined up to be our next Foreign Secretary was not Lord Mandelson but Lord Palmerston.

There are any number of reasons to wish we had Palmerston at the helm. Perhaps the only British Foreign Secretary to dye his sideburns and father a child in his sixties after ravishing a housemaid on a billiard table, he is worth venerating not just for his sheer animal spirits but for the direct line he took on Abroad -- as the Greeks discovered when they allowed an anti-Semitic mob to run riot in the 1840s.

Don Pacifico, a merchant of Portugese-Jewish descent, was the victim of that particular frenzy of hatred. His house was torched by a crowd who had been fed the usual stuff about how the Jews controlled politics, finance, the banks, the press, etc, and, while this bonfire of prejudice was set aflame, the authorities stood idly by, protesting that it was none of their business. There is indeed nothing new under the sun.

But one thing was different then from now. The reaction of our Foreign Office. Don Pacifico was a British citizen by virtue of having been born in Gibraltar. So our diplomats asked that he be compensated for his loss, and dispatched gunboats to blockade Piraeus harbour until the cash, and the apology, were forthcoming. When Palmerston was accused of over-reacting, by the Victorian equivalents of John Simpson and Alan Rusbridger, he did what any self-respecting British minister should do when attacked for jingoism; he responded in Latin. Civis Romanus sum, he explained, was the proudest boast any citizen of the ancient world could make; it was a declaration of allegiance that entitled the individual to the full protection of the Empire's resources if their liberty was compromised. By the same token, Palmerston insisted, any British citizen whose freedoms were curtailed while in another jurisdiction was entitled to the full protection of the British state. And on such a guarantee the health of liberty everywhere depended.

Which is why it is so very troubling that when two British citizens were recently kidnapped by Somali pirates in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a British vessel, carrying trained naval personnel, which could have run those kidnappers to ground and made an example of them, chose instead to do nothing. What makes the indignity all the greater is that this humiliation comes when the memory of other impotent British sailors, captured without a struggle by Iranian revolutionary guards, and distraught because their iPods had been taken away, is still fresh in the world's mind.

The history of liberty's advance across the globe is the history, in many ways, of the Royal Navy. Whether it was putting down the slave trade or helping the nations of Latin America to break free from imperial dominion, settling Napoleon's hash at Trafalgar or safeguarding Britain as a launchpad for liberation after 1940, we have been a force for good for centuries thanks to our men of war. But where is the political leadership in any Western government that grasps this? The whole spirit of the Navy is summed up in the doctrine: engage the enemy more closely. But freedom's enemies are rejoicing at the moment, because our foreign ministers are more concerned with navel-gazing than naval doctrine. While they've been worrying about the struggle between Balkenende and Van Rompuy, who's been concerned about the battle between barbarism and liberty?

Keep it brief

Still, in Herman Van Rompuy's favour, he is a published poet. His favoured form, the haiku, depends for its effect on both precision of meaning and economy of language. Which is why any politician who can come anywhere near composing one deserves special praise.

There have been other politician poets of recent memory. Quintin Hogg and Enoch Powell wrote verse. In Powell's case he produced poems modelled on those of the tortured gay classicist, A. E. Housman, which suggest that Powell was perhaps the only reader of Housman's work to find his tone too warm. Indeed, one of Powell's poems begins, "I hate the ugly, hate the old, I hate the lame and weak . . ." If Enoch had been trying to become a Tory candidate today I somehow don't think he would have made it on to the A-list . . .

Rose-tainted

In all the coverage of Sir Stuart Rose's departure from Marks & Spencer and the arrival of Marc Bolland one crucial factor has been overlooked. It was on Sir Stuart's watch that woollen socks disappeared from M&S shelves. No amount of individual syrup sponges can make up for that crime against the spirit of St Michael.

I'm grateful to the many readers who've let me know about mail order firms that still supply proper hosiery but what I really want is a restoration of the proper order of things. M&S refusing to stock proper woolly socks is like Britannia declining to rule the waves. Only possible when the wrong people are in charge.