Among friends

The kind of Curmudge folk who turn out to hear a lecture from the Archdruid must be 90% Grauniad and Indie readers. In other words, he was among friends - even if many of them feel he's sold out on the gay issue. As visual confirmation of this, there were some people dotted around the audience clad in orange boiler suits, who'd evidently been on an anti-Gitmo demo earlier in the day. Nothing wrong with that in itself, you just have to wonder whether any of them has ever demonstrated against terrorism.

One telling little indicator of his natural rapport with this kind of audience. One of the questions pitched at him was whether Sharia was an instance of what he'd called 'terrible religion'. He agreed that some of the ways in which it is implemented are indeed terrible - as, for instance, in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, ally of the Evil Empire, so bash it as much as you like and collect a political brownie point. He could, of course, have cited other examples of terribleness - the Taliban, or Iran, maybe. But these are enemies of the E. E., not to mention Iran's role as sponsor of the heroic anti-Zionist resistance ('We are all Hezbollah', remember). No brownie points to be picked up there, so no name checks from the Archdruid.