A couple of notes for the various subjects of the Crown around The Corner:

1) Iran’s British hostages

I keep getting e-mails from Americans who want to know where’s the outrage re the seized servicemen. I think Her Majesty’s Government in London is playing it cool because of a bizarrely resilient century-old paranoia among Iranians about British machinations in Persia. It’s an awful long time since the Brits helped bring down Mossadeq, but there remain a weird number of people who are convinced that, whenever anything bad happens in Iran, it’s because the Queen has held some Spectre-like meeting in a secret room in Buckingham Palace and personally ordered it. (I’d be interested to hear Michael Ledeen on that line.) Mr Blair and Co have compelling reasons for keeping things low-key. That said, the lack of public outrage in Britain is very striking.

2) Last night’s Quebec election

The Liberals were reduced to Quebec’s first minority government since the 19th century, a new if somewhat goofy “conservative” party is the Official Opposition, and the Parti Quebecois – the separatists – were pushed into third place and below 30% for the first time since 1970. On the last point, I was struck by the politically correct torpor of much of the post-mortems : reams of analysis without any discussion of whether the PQ leader’s homosexuality had been a liability. Andre Boisclair was a fetching young gay who admitted to doing coke – not back in his student days (as David Cameron did) but while he was a government minister (which is certainly what it would take for me to get through Quebec cabinet meetings). But the minute the gay cokehead became party leader all the papers (French and English) wrote that this demonstrated how Quebecers were the coolest, most relaxed, most progressive folks in North America. Maybe on the island of Montreal, but not in the rural hinterlands, where Quebecers are prone to all the various “phobias” that so distress the liberal mind. I was struck by the number of lifelong separatists who simply resented being subject to Queer Eye For The Separatist Guy and, even by the standards of the ever lamer bluff of Quebec “nationalism”, couldn’t buy the idea of a gay hedonist as their founding father. There’s something a bit feeble about the media’s refusal even to discuss this except through vague evasive allusions to the difficulty M Boisclair had “connecting” with Quebec voters.

3) The Australian Taliban pleads guilty

For years, David Hicks’ detention in Guantanamo has made him the pin-up boy of the Aussie left. It’s not just that he’s now confessed his guilt, but that, as Tim Blair notes , his physical condition is the exact opposite of how it’s been reported: instead of being pale, gaunt, sunken-cheeked and hollow-eyed, he’s put on weight and has a glowing tan as healthy as his lawyer’s. I don’t know whether Mr Hicks was among the prisoners Rich and I glimpsed on our trip to Gitmo last year, but the Afghans I saw were certainly on the plump side by the standards of most wiry Pushtun warriors. There are arguments to be made about whether this is the right form of detention for those captured, but the accusation of widespread ill-treatment and abuse is absurd and refuted by the physical condition of almost everyone there.