The decision to award an honorary knighthood to Senator Edward Kennedy shows Britain at its most masochistic, New Labour at its most cynical and - if he accepts it - Kennedy at his most hypocritical.
To bestow such a distinction on a man who has spent almost all his adult life profoundly opposed to the United Kingdom's best interests also makes a mockery of the honours system.
Ever since Patrick Kennedy (Ted's Irish great-grandfather) set foot on Noddle Island, Boston, on April 21, 1849, the family has nursed a deep resentment against the country that they blame for forcing them out of County Wexford during the Great Potato Famine.
Ted Kennedy's father, Joe, who had made his money from bootlegging in the Prohibition era, became American ambassador to London from 1938 to 1940. As the U.S. envoy, he was an unrelenting appeaser and as unhelpful to Britain as it was possible to be in those perilous days, believing that Adolf Hitler was going to win the war.
Derided as a coward and known as 'Jittery Joe' for panicking when bombs were falling, his term as ambassador ended abruptly, along with his political ambitions, during the Blitz in November 1940 when he remarked: 'Democracy is finished in England.' Within a month he was forced to resign.
Over all matters concerning Ireland, the Kennedys have taken a pro-Nationalist line that has been deeply antagonistic to the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is why it is absurd for Gordon Brown to make this award, in the words of its official citation, 'for services to U.S.-UK relations and to Northern Ireland'.
For it is no exaggeration to say that Ted Kennedy did his damnedest to poison U.S.-UK relations over Ulster during the long decades in which he has castigated successive British governments. Rather than expressing any genuine commitment to peace in Northern Ireland, he would always play exclusively to his own Catholic-Irish voters in Massachusetts, whom he has represented in the Senate for more than 46 years.
Although he was always careful to use weasel words to condemn violence on both sides, it was always for Britain and the Ulster Protestants that he reserved his most withering rebukes. For the Queen to be obliged to honour this man is nothing less than an obscenity.
Let us look more closely at his record in relation to Ulster. In 1971, Kennedy likened the British presence there to the American invasion of Vietnam - a despicable analogy at a time when U.S. troops were using the poisonous chemical Agent Orange and napalm against the Vietcong.
He went on to state that the Protestants of Ulster 'should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain'. The fact that they had been in Ulster for 360 years - three times as long as the Kennedys had been in America - clearly passed him by. It was not until St Patrick's Day 1977 that Ted acknowledged that the Protestants might be allowed to remain in their homeland.
In 1978, he successfully pressured President Jimmy Carter's administration not to allow the U.S. to sell arms to the Royal Ulster Constabulary - sanctions which effectively equated Britain's Ulster police force with repressive dictatorial regimes in Africa and Asia.
It was no coincidence that he raised the flag of Irish nationalism whenever his Senate seat came up for re-election. His call for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in 1980 was condemned as ignorant grandstanding by the great Irish statesman Conor Cruise O'Brien, but it went down well in the Irish pubs in Boston where money was raised for the shamelessly pro-IRA fundraising organisation Noraid.
True to form, Kennedy blamed British 'insensitivity' for the 1981 hunger strikes led by the terrorist Bobby Sands in Belfast's Maze prison, rather than the IRA for the continuing murderous strife in Northern Ireland.
We can only be thankful in Britain that Ted Kennedy narrowly missed being elected as Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1980, for he might have won the White House.
His chances were wrecked by those still unanswered questions about the death by drowning 11 years earlier of 29-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, a pretty political assistant, in a car driven by Kennedy.
It is important to go back to that horrific incident - and to Kennedy's despicable behaviour on the night - to explain why his character alone ought to disqualify him from any British honour, irrespective of his shameful support for the terrorist IRA.
At 12.45am on July 18, 1969, and with Mary Jo in his car, Kennedy - who had been drinking and partying - drove off the Dike Bridge connecting Martha's Vineyard (where the Kennedys had their holiday retreat on America's East coast) with Chappaquiddick Island.
He managed to extricate himself, walk back to his motel, complain to the manager about a noisy party, take a shower, sleep the night, chat to a friend the next morning, order two newspapers, meet his lawyers and finally report the accident to the police at 9.45am.
By then, however, his car had been spotted and Mary Jo's corpse had been found by a fire department diver, Captain John Farrar, at 8.45am.
She had not drowned, but had survived in an air pocket inside the car, only to asphyxiate when the oxygen finally ran out several hours later. The brutal fact is that had Kennedy alerted the police earlier, Mary Jo might be alive today.
She was given no autopsy and Kennedy was not charged with drink-driving, but merely given a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident. To this day, Kennedy has not apologised to Mary Jo's family, and, of course, the tragedy did not for a moment affect his future rampant drinking and womanising.
Many questions about what happened at Chappaquiddick remain unanswered, for Kennedy - who was expelled from Harvard for cheating in his exams - has given contradictory explanations to some questions and refused to answer others.
Yet this is the man Labour intends to award the same honour as has previously been given to true American 'greats' such as Ronald Reagan, 'Stormin' ' Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, Caspar Weinberger, Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton and several other equally distinguished military, diplomatic and religious figures.
Without the tragedy of his brothers' assassinations, and the magic of his family name, Ted Kennedy would be nothing.
'If your name was simply Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy,' one Democratic rival for his Senate seat told him, 'your candidacy would be a joke.'
Now, Labour, which is supposed to abhor nepotism, is about to reward the most egregious example of nepotism in America today. That Kennedy is suffering from a brain tumour is very sad, but surely it is no reason to honour him.
Labour argues that Ted Kennedy aided, and was a great supporter of, the Northern Irish peace process and, therefore, deserves this honour - but, once again, let us look at his record.
It is true that he lobbied President Clinton hard in 1996 to award Gerry Adams an American visa (Adams promptly used his subsequent U.S. visit to raise money for Sinn Fein) and later to get him invited to the White House. But it is quite wrong to suggest, as the American historian Arthur Schlesinger does, that these initiatives 'led to the IRA ceasefire and the Good Friday accords'.
These, in fact, only came about as a result of the IRA's political and military leadership recognising that they had been defeated on the ground by 1996-98. All that these American invitations afforded Adams, apart from flattering his ego, was to lend Sinn Fein an utterly spurious respectability on the world stage.
Only after 9/11 - when Americans discovered on their own soil how loathsome terrorism truly is, and how far from a noble romantic struggle - did Kennedy cynically distance himself from Adams and fellow Sinn Fein stalwart Martin McGuinness, refusing to meet them in 2005 after the IRA brutally murdered Robert McCartney in a Belfast bar in January that year.
This was not a point of principle so much as a political realignment. Anyone who has seen Ted Kennedy at work in politics - as I did when I was a Senatorial speechwriter 25 years ago - will recognise that he is a master of points of order, 'poison-pill amendments', tactical manoeuvres and deft political re-positionings.
It was this same self-interest and political nous that led Kennedy to support Barack Obama early on in his Presidency campaign, for which Obama has thanked him profusely.
Now, Gordon Brown wishes to ingratiate himself to the President by giving a knighthood to Obama's political ally, using the Northern Ireland peace process as the excuse even though it is utterly inappropriate.
This knighthood is nothing less than a disgrace to the honours system.
Andrew Roberts in the Mail
