CRAIG BROWN: Here is the second part of the serialisation of his new book, a collection of his best columns, book reviews and parodies, which started in yesterday s Daily Mail.
SOMETIMES in politics, not being someone else is more important than being yourself. The most glaring example of this can be seen across the Atlantic, where President Joe Biden is on course to slip seamlessly into the history books as a forgettable President. There have been many before him – men who have been there, sailed the ship without hitting any large rocks but, ultimately, done nothing terribly memorable. President Biden’s job is not to be President Biden – it is to not be President Trump. That is the essential requirement of the post, and he will most likely perform it perfectly competently for four years while he keeps his chair in the Oval Office warm for his successor, presumably Vice President Kamala Harris.
Adel Abdel Bary is back among us. He has been given, one might say, a second chance to be a good citizen. Or a fresh opportunity to wreak havoc.
Championed by the Hard Left and Amnesty International as a ‘respected human rights lawyer’ and ‘prisoner of conscience’, and granted political asylum by a complacent Tory administration which cosied up to Islamists, the Egyptian lawyer had made his home in a fashionable corner of West London where he and his wife raised six children on benefits provided by the munificent British state.
That he has not been seen there for some time is down to one reason a rather uncomfortable one for those who painted him as a hero. Bary has only recently been released from a 25-year prison sentence in America for his role in one of the world’s worst terrorist atrocities. And back to Britain he has come.