in his size. We went into Afghanistan to get bin Laden and our mission there is more important than ever, now that we killed him, quite a while ago, in Pakistan. The US is to open direct peace talks with the Taliban after more than a decade of war. Good to see the US has only waited twelve years and the loss thousands of lives before resorting to ‘speaking’ to them. The meeting will take place at the Taliban’s new office in Doha – I like the fact they’re opening new branches, so long as it doesn’t get like Starbucks where you’ve got a Taliban on every high street. I wonder why they need an office – perhaps they’re branching out and are going to start dealing with both insurgencies and van hire. I bet it’ll be another call centre – we’ll be plagued by the Taliban ringing up to ask if we need replacement windows or do we want to wait until after the car bombing? There was outrage when burnt Korans were found at a NATO base in Afghanistan. They’d only been partially burnt. That’s because the book on how to maintain a bonfire had been burnt the week before, on a bonfire of books about codes of conduct in sensitive areas. US soldiers don’t understand why the word of the Koran should be precious, as most of the Christian beliefs they hold bear no relation to the literal word of the Bible. It’s thought Afghan soldiers were passing pencilled notes to each other inside the books they take with them to battle. US soldiers could never do that; it’s hard to get pencil to show up on a cum-stained computer game. It’s been said that because some people have burnt Bibles it’s OK for troops to burn Korans. I’ll take that as giving me permission to restart my culling of Britain’s bouncers. The books were burnt because stuff was written in the margins that the soldiers didn’t understand. A translator is only $4 an hour, but they thought they’d take advantage of the spoils of war and splash out on a whole can of kerosene. Can you believe it’s over ten years since we brought freedom to the Iraqi people? The freedom to choose exactly who shoots and tortures them. Tony Blair says he’s given up trying to tell people his decision to go to war was right. Instead he tells them it was ‘complex and difficult’. In the way that lying is often more complex and difficult than telling the truth. An angry protester breached security at the Leveson Inquiry to call Tony Blair a ‘war criminal’. Blair could easily stop people thinking of him as a war criminal. He just needs to have sex with a goat. • • • So, Abu Qatada has finally gone. Mrs Qatada should move in with Mrs Hamza. As both their husbands are now inside that would basically give us an Islamic fundamentalist version of Birds of a Feather . . . Dorien comes round boasting that she’s shagging the gardener and gets stoned to death. We’d all watch that. Abu Qatada seemed to vary between being free and occasionally going back to jail, where either he would stay, be released or, ultimately, be deported. To truly get to grips with the twists and turns in that story what I did was every time Theresa May began to speak I’d just gently hum the tune of the hokey cokey. I’d time it so she finished as I got to the ‘in/out’ bit, and then when I’d shake it all about I’d pretend I was being electrocuted by the Jordanian secret service. Jordan, of course, gave assurances that Abu Qatada would be treated like any other citizen and be entitled to a full trial by firing squad. When your arch-enemy is a court of human rights it might be time to take a deep breath and think for a moment what that makes you. Abu Qatada was considered a threat because he spouts ridiculous, hate-filled tirades; if he were white he’d be presenting a phone-in on talkSPORT. To give you an idea how dangerous this man is it’s believed he’s radicalised almost as many Muslims as Tony Blair. As an extra security measure he was apparently given a dodgy compass