A stone on the site records that, like Gladstone's return of the Ionian Islands, a great act of magnanimity and symmetry has been performed by the islanders of the North Sea. Something like this was actually proposed by the Tory MP Thelma Cazalet in the Commons in 1944. The gesture then was intended to commemorate the moment when Britain and Greece had been sole partners in the fight against Nazi imperialism. That chance was missed, thanks to pettifogging in the Foreign Office, and the old, grudging repetitions were resumed. But now there's no excuse.
Nobody needs to give anything up.
Everybody can be a winner. It would be a shame, I think, churlishly to decline such an offer. But no doubt there will be those who want to go to the last ditch, grumbling in their warm beer that the next thing you know we'll be appeasing the Babylonians. This article is reproduced with kind permission of Christopher Hitchens and the Evening Standard, in which it appeared on 4 March 1998. By Isabel Hilton Back in the bright new dawn of the Labour government, when the nation was still creeping across the stage like the prisoners' chorus in Fidelio, blinking in the unaccustomed brightness of the day, a sudden, discordant note was struck.