Blind Squire Dave: Him with his foot in his mouth

A couple of years ago I found myself wandering through the Mala Strana region of Prague and thought I’d wander into the Museum of Sport and Physical Culture. Housed in a wonderful baroque building, it sounds a bit like a relic from the Stalinist era, and that’s probably what it is.

Back then it cost 3 koruna to get in; thats about 7 cents at today’s exchange rates. I had nothing smaller than a 50 and they had no change. I offered them the fifty but they wouldn't hear of it, and told me a place where I could go and get some change.

I decided that this was a bit too much hassle, but I was coming back that way later and I had some coins on me so I thought it would be worth a look. The museum staff thought I’d been the whole time looking for change and they didn't understand my English well enough to figure out that this wasn't the case. (I don't know any Czech).

So they treated me to a full guided tour of the museum. I learned a lot about the history of Czech sporting history, how Bohemia was one of the first countries in the world to have tennis courts and one of the first to play soccer as well.

Then the guide started telling me about Blind King John of Bohemia.

I knew as much as I really wanted to know about him already. I read about him in A Distant Mirror,

Barbara Tuchman’s magesterial account of the Fourteenth Century, and in an early Saul Bellow novel called the victim, where some New York Jews are showing off their knowledge of History.

Hmmm.

Blind King John was blind as a bat, and he used to work as a mercenary. There was plenty of work for mercenaries then, as there is now, as those awful English were doing what they still do best: going over to other countries and causing a ruckus. Blind King John hired himself out to the French, whose country the British spent over a hundred years trying to take over because of some dubious regal claim. If they were doing the same thing today they’d claim it was a war of liberation and would strenously deny any claims that the new admistration would be a puppet of the English Monarchy, but nowadays England has no issues with the rest of Europe, so the question is academic.

Back then, being blind wasn't the disadvantage that it would be in a warrior today. It’s hard to imagine a blind sniper getting work in Fallujah, though Americans are generally so loud that you can hear them coming. Mind you, if he was on the American side he’d have as much chance of finding the WMD as anyone else.

King John would ride into battle swinging a mace wildly around the place. He’d be impervious to the shower of arrows hailing down around him and the English warriors to whom his scalp became an increasingly desireable one as his repution grew.

The key, of course, was for his allies to push his horse into battle just before everyone else so that no-one would get caught in what today would called “friendly fire”.

I was reminded of this when I heard of comments David Blunkett made about some of his cabinet colleauges. Gordon Brown throws his weight around, Jack Straw left the home office in a state of chaos, John Prescott is very sensitive (sic) about the “Two Jags” label. It might have been a little bit better if some of those barbs would been better aimed at some of his manic critics on both sides of the political spectrum.

It’s tempting to suggest that Blunkett has got himself in a hole and should stop digging, except that as a visually challeged person he’s probably never had cause to dig a hole so the efficacy of the metaphor might be lost on him.

Accuse me of jumping on the Blunkett-bashing bandwagon if you will, but I disliked the man immensly even before it was revealed that he got someone else’s wife pregant then lied about it then tried to abuse his powers to get a visa for her nanny.

I thought that Bill Clinton was unfairly hounded but this was because he never made any secret of the fact that he was a philanderer and never claimed to support “Family Values”. Blunkett, in contrast, once rang up the BBC to complain that there was a naked person on TV. He was blind back then as well, but apparently he could sense the shock of other people in the room.

Knowing what teachers are like, it was a bit mean of Blair to make him to make him education secretary. I can’t imagine how many times he was told: “David, we know you can do better. Stop using your blindness as an excuse.”

He didn't find his real metier till he was appointed home secretary. I’ve always thought this was a weird term and always visualised the holders of this office sitting in the kitchen answering the phone and taking dication from the gas man. But then, our own “justice minister”’s title is becoming increasingly ironic as well.

Until recently, the guy who’s called “Defence secretary” was called “War minister”. Orwell must be laughing in his grave.

But I digress. When Blunkett was appointed as “home Secretary” he promised to make Jack Straw look liberal.

I notice Jack Straw is having his own problems with his optical modality lately, arguing that he shook hands with Robert Mugabe because it the room was badly lit. He was never asked to defend his meeting with the president of Indonesia, responsible for far more deaths in East Timor, though there weren't any white people among them.

To be fair to Blunkett, he hasn’t always lived up to this threat (“promise”, for Daily Mail readers). He actually liberalised marajauna laws, which Straw always resisted like some mild-mannered Canute trying to catch the dope smoke blowin in the wind. This reminds me of the blind guy in the Simpsons who needed medicinal marajauna to stop him becoming even more blind.

In other areas, Blunkett’s been just as illiberal as he said he’d be. He was appointed a few months before September 11th (of 2001) and like a dour Lanca shire Tireasias, he’s sensed acts of terror looming all the time ever since. He’s taken the lead of John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge by clamping down on what he dismissed as “Airy-Fairy civil liberties”. While Straw set his “sights” on trial by jury, which had existed in England when Blind King John was a twinkle in his daddy’s eye, Blunkett is trying to change trial format in “terrorist” cases so that “terrorists” can be convicted on “balance of probabilities” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt”, another cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon justice. And would you believe, most of the “terrorists” convicted in England since 9/11 are actually alleged members of the Real or continuity IRA, though it’s possible that his braille scriptwriter might have punched “mullet” instead of “mullah”.

But the most frightening thing he’s planned to do is to introduce identity cards. It’s possible that as a blind man who’s always had to be shepherded around that he can’t concieve of how important basic civil liberties like the ability to go anywhere you want without the government knowing where you are are to those of us lucky to be able to see. Criminals in Britain already have to wear electronic tags but forcing everyone to carry a biometric ID would rests on the assumption that everyone is a potential criminal, which is a bit of a kick in the teeth for the idea that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, another putative axiom of the British judicial system.

If Blunkett can’t “See” what an infringement of people’s basic rights this is, perhaps he should consider the cost, estimated at £13billion assuming the computer system never crashes. This is possibly enough money to cure everyone in the world who suffers from trachoma, a horrible disease that robs children in Africa and Asia of their sight; to liberate them from the small, dark world in which, like Blunkett, they live, at least in a physical sense.

But Blunkett is more interested in liberating British Muslims from the taunts of Secularists who claim that they all follow the word of a psychotic middle eastern goat-fucker literally. Under his proposed new Blasphemy laws, those insulting muslims could face a prison sentence of seven years, and as British jails are so over-crowded means they might have to share cells with the likes of Abu Hamza.

It’s interesting that this law is being proposed by a man who could never see what it’s like for like for a muslim child to be starved to death by sanctions or have their house reduced to rubble, but could probably feel the pain of those who’ve suffered discrimination.

I don’t think Blunkett should resign either because he’s blind or because he was shagging a rich-bitch publisher and acting like a whiney teenager from a song by Pulp or The Smiths when she gave him to heave-ho. I think he should get the sack because if he doesn’t it means that everything Tony Blair learnt in college about due process and the rights of the defendent were mere empty words.

Blind King John’s place in history was assured when Owen, the then Prince of Wales, killed him at the battle of Crecy and adopted his ich dien motto, which is still the Prince’s seal today, though Charles would never go into battle with anything more threathening than a fox. (soon he won’t even be able to do that, ha ha). But I’m hoping Blair will do the right thing for the right reason and make Blind Squire Dave a mere footnote in history.