I HAD an incendiary clash with colonel turned Tory politician Bob Stewart on my Talksport radio show last Friday. The Tory, a Colonel Blink type but a nice old buffer, appealing enough to the gin and Jag golf club 19th hole bores, is used, of course, to speaking but not being spoken to.
After his foolish drawl in support of deploying cocktail king Prince Harry to "Afghan" (as the prince thinks the country is named) I gave him a round of the guns. He didn't like it up 'im!
As he threatened - live on national radio - to hang up and vowed never to darken my door again, I kept up my bombardment, reminding him that I was not one of his subordinates and that now he is an MP he must get used to the fact that we common 5/8ths insist upon our two-pennyworth.
This is what I told him. Prince Harry should not be sent - as he's demanding - to "Afghan" for the following reasons.
The last time he "passed out" was drunk as a skunk in Boujis, the ritzy West End nightclub in which he spends much more time than on parade. It wouldn't be fair to separate a prince and his "sloe-comfortable-screw" for such a tour.
The last time he was there, he was caught on camera referring to "ragheads" and bore the legend "we do bad things to bad people" on his hat.
This has led to some bad feeling, and the local resistance fighters (who seem to have good contacts working among the foreign occupiers, sometimes alongside them as soldiers and policemen) would soon ascertain the prince's whereabouts and try to kill him.
While this would be just as much a cause for regret as the death of any in this conflict which has now lasted for longer than World Wars I and II combined, it could be even worse.
First, any other soldier in the prince's vicinity at any time would be, ipso-facto, at greater danger even than he might have been to begin with.
Second, if the Taliban could only just get their hands on the Queen's grandson and take him hostage, well, that would be their dream come true.
Such a situation could only end with the grisly bloody video-taped execution of the hostage - and a resultant war for 100 years between British public opinion and the Muslims - or an even bloodier Rambo-style raid to free him in which God-knows how many innocent people would be murdered and maimed.
Don't do it 'Arry, for Queen and country, don't do it.
I did give Colonel Blink another reason why it shouldn't happen and that was that the war would likely be over soon, and moreover it would be concluded on exactly the terms which have been available for a settlement at any time over the last 10 years.
Meaning that every one of our young men will have been sacrificed needlessly, and 10 times as many Afghans, too.
Pah, balderdash or some such upper-crust exclamation exploded over the airwaves from Colonel Bob.
This fight was to the finish, he seemed to say.
I wonder how he felt the next morning when he woke up to the news from "President" Karzai - voted by all reputable watchdogs as the head of the most corrupt government in the world - that the American government was now in peace talks with the Taliban to bring about an end to the war.
'Ard luck 'Arry. You'll just have to slaughter poor dumb animals instead. Never mind, not long until the glorious 12th - tally-ho!