Richard Gott - arsehole emeritus

"Richard Gott", reads his byline, "worked for many years at the Guardian as a leader-writer, foreign correspondent and as the features editor". Indeed he did - but even the Guardian, where he was known as "Pol Pott", could not stomach him any longer after the Soviet defector Oleg Gordiesky revealed in 1994 that Gott had been a KGB agent. Gott said that he and his partner had thought it "a laugh" to take "Moscow gold".

A long-time fellatist of the Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro, and more recently of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan Castro wannabe, Gott has tied himself in knots over the past few years, trying to reconcile his revolutionary fantasies with reality. At the end of his 2004 book Cuba: a New History he announced that Castro's last revolutionary gift to Cuba was to make it "safe for capitalism". In the same hilarious vein, he has now written an article in CiF containing the following gem:

For President Raúl Castro to sack half a million state employees, and then allow [!] his brother Fidel to hint to an American reporter from The Atlantic that the country's economic model is not working, suggests that there is certainly something significant in the pipeline.

No shit, Sherlock. It would be far more significant if Fidel needed permission from Raúl to do or say whatever he pleased. The Castros own Cuba, and Fidel will be the Chairman of the Board until the day he dies.

But this is not the end of the revolutionary dream, nor is it a simple rectification of policy, of which there have been many over the years. It is, more importantly, the start of a major new programme, long-awaited. How it should be ideologically defined remains to be seen.

Does this even need commentary? The "revolutionary dream" has been an unqualified nightmare for all Cubans except the senior members of the DGI (Cuba's mini-KGB), the military and the Communist party.

If after 51 years of totalitarian dictatorship even Fidel has been forced to admit the total failure of his regime, isn't it about time Richard Gott also admitted that his whole life has been a waste of time?