Quintin Jardine's blog

It will become a Kennedy moment for all Americans and for many others. Where were you when you heard of Osama bin Laden’s death? Me? I was checking the morning’s news headlines on my Blackberry, in my in-laws’ house, and the end of a celebratory family weekend, which I spent compiling Brownie points none of which can ever be cashed in, since I am male and fur us guys they are almost entirely symbolic and will get you about as far as the air miles attaching to the average Tesco shop.

I was surprised when I saw the headline, because hitherto I was convinced that he had been a smear on the wall of a cave in Tora Bora since the early days of the Afghan campaign. Did I punch the air when I heard? If I did then it wasn’t very hard, because I can’t find it in me to rejoice in any death, and because the execution was marred by the killing of bin Laden’s youngest wife. That said, I’m happy for my American friends, for whom the only kind of justice that was ever going to be possible, and a degree of closure, have finally come. I’m happy for them also, for the way in which their elected commander in chief conducted himself afterwards, and for his self-control in the period leading up to the operation.

I spent twenty minutes this morning watching the YouTube post of his address to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which he used the deadliest of all verbal weapons, humour, to wipe the floor with his opponents, past, present, and possibly future in the case of (The) Donald Trump, who will never be taken seriously as a political candidate until he comes clean and gets himself a proper haircut. (But maybe he’s too busy vandalising Aberdeenshire to have time for such trivia.) The President’s performance was all the more awesome when one realises that all the time he was up there, he knew that the Pakistan operation was imminent, and that the lives of his troops (not to mention his own political future) would be on the line.

Hail to the chief.