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George Robertson today picked up a peerage. He will take up his appointment as Secretary General of Nato as Lord Robertson of Port Ellen.
Baron George is being rewarded for his loyal service as bag-carrier to Tony Blair and Robin Cook during the Kosovo crisis. His "elevation" has also allowed the Labour party to call a byelection for his Hamilton constituency on September 23. That's bang in the middle of the Scottish National Party's annual conference. Two cheap shots for the price of one, you might say.
Robertson is not a bad man. He's not even a bad Defence Secretary. He makes all the right noises about new flexibility in defence planning, and closer cooperation in Europe. But that he should be honoured and promoted after playing a leading support role in this year's calamitous events is a scandal.
It's also richly ironic that by the time he gets his knees under the Nato desk, the alliance could well be embroiled in the worst crisis of its 50 years. The current situation in Kosovo - a situation which Robertson did so much to bring about - is as scary as it has ever been.
The province is in a state of chaos. It has no effective government, and precious little security. The ethnic Albanians who were restored to their homes under the guns of K-For have all but completed their own grubby, bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing. Fewer than ten per cent of the Serbian population remains to be terrorised out of the province.
In the latest development, Albanian protesters backed by the armed thugs of the Kosovo Liberation Army are physically preventing the entry of Russian K-For troops to the town of Orahovac, where 2000 terrified Serbs have been flimsily protected by German and Dutch soldiers. The Serbs desperately want a Russian presence in the town; the Albanians vehemently oppose it. The confrontation is already ugly, and could soon become bloody.
Indeed, the whole of Kosovo is a petrol-bomb waiting for a match. Soldiers of a dozen different nationalities are milling around, powerless in the face of criminality and terrorism, and undermined by the failure of Nato's political leadership to give them proper support. The force is undermanned, and has no coherent strategic objective. There is no back-up police force, no effective administration, and no let-up in violence and intimidation. The Nato politicians mouth platitudes about multi-ethnic harmony, while the soldiers unearth mass graves and the murder gangs carry on their daily work.
All of this is the responsibility of the nitwits who believed they could bomb Belgrade into behaving nicely. For 78 days, the Serbian racists had a free hand to create their version of hell in Kosovo. Now it is the turn of the Albanian racists. Their campaign may be smaller in scale, but it looks like achieving more permanent results. Kosovo is being ethnically cleansed, Nato's soldiers are in appalling danger, and George Robertson gets to wear an ermine-trimmed robe.
What a sick joke.