Thick Tory Prime Ministers and their Futile Foreign Secretaries.

Watching the incompetent Foreign Secretary, William Hague, yesterday (for whose resignation this blog has been calling for many moons, most recently on 24th February, linked here), I find myself recalling an earlier, pig-headed, bullying and treacherous British Conservative PM, Edward Heath (version 1.0 if you may, making Cameron after Major verion 3.0) and his ludicrous Foreign Secretary side-kick, whose name has now escaped me, in recalling their farcial attempt to gain extra oil supplies from the Shah of Iran, during an Arab oil embargo, when the government had stupidly and with almost perfectly botched  timing, picked a fight with the coal miner's. (More background in this pdf Firing Line interview with William F Buckley Jr).

I was working in the oil supply industry at the time, so knew many of the details, and therefore, also incidentally, exempt from the three day working week. Our operatives faced heavy fines or even jail sentences, if customers were provided any oil deliveries in excess of the percentage allocations then in force. Heath, (having already ensured the eventual economic destruction of his nation, due to his treacherous signing up to the secret provisions of the ever closer union that is today the EU), sent his Foreign Secretary off to Teheran to beg the Shah for extra crude oil supplies. They were successful, ( who knows at what pointless cost for the Shah was soon to be toppled), but instead of arranging the necessary tankers and shipping the oil to the UK, as any simpleton would have realised would be necessary (to circumvent the international arrangements in force to mitigate the shortages [no need for Lisbon Treaty "solidarity" garbage in those happy days]) they merely assigned the new oil mostly to BP but also to Shell if I recall, who then had to add the quantities to their allocated worldwide sales base, thus providing the UK only a tiny percentage of the volumes begged from the Shah.

Horrifying is it not to note, that some forty odd years later; the Foreign Office is still staffed by numbskulls fully prepared to carry out the most ludicrous policy dictats from Tory thick-headed, non-entities temporarily resident in Downing Street and Carlton Gardens?