CHRONICLES of WASTED TIME

A young friend whose opinion I usually trust and respect reckons that I should persevere with Charlie Brooker. I watched most of one of his programmes once and feel no inclination to submit myself to a similar ordeal. Brooker is just another of those snidey types who, as his “celebrity” grows, will modulate his asperity to accommodate a broader following: I’m not wrong, am I? I don’t disagree with the thrust of his assaults on the media, just the tenor of them. He does it for notoriety, the sake of the joke and amour propre. I hold my own view because I believe that the media is a significant force in the world and needs to be regulated and curbed. He wants to be embraced by the media itself; I don’t. I am the true maverick; he’s just feinting. (Guess which of us is in work).

The commentocracy is stuffed with snidey types. Here is the two-pennyworth of Dominic Sandbrook – not an economist himself – uttered at the invitation of The Guardian on the G20 summit in London: “Somehow I doubt that the G20 will take its place among the great summits of history. Yes, it represents a personal high point for Gordon Brown, whose seriousness and statesmanship are never less than impressive – although it was not exactly hard to shine beside Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy and the increasingly empty pieties of St Barack. But will it make a difference to the worldwide recession? I don’t think so. A million dollars sounds like a lot, but in global terms it’s not nearly enough to make a difference. Despite all the hype, my gut feeling is that governments have far less influence over the business cycle than they like to think. I do wish though that Gordon had done away with the razzamatazz that accompanies these events. Did we really need the spectacle of the WAGs having dinner with Naomi Campbell?”

Sandbrook is allegedly a 35 year-old historian (though he looks fifteen years older). If his books are rated by future academics (rather than newspaper reviewers) alongside those of, say, GM Trevelyan, JH Plumb and AJP Taylor, I will eat my hat. In fact I will eat his hat. What irresistible solution to the global recession, I wonder, would Sandbrook offer the leaders of the world? Would he even have a coherent question to put to the Prime Minister? Oh, and wasn’t it a trillion dollars? Perhaps he wasn’t paying attention.

Meanwhile, the significant activities pursued by Mrs Sandbrook – if there is a Mrs Sandbrook – are not disclosed. Presumably Mr Sandbrook would prefer wives to sit quietly at the back and foreswear meals.

You can knock politicians all you like – and most of us do – but you can’t pretend that they don’t work hard. I don’t imagine Gordon Brown spent much of last week catching up with The Wire on BBC2 or even playing with his young children. In the week before the G20 began, he visited more countries than many of us do in a lifetime but I doubt he did much sightseeing or sampling the local cuisine. People like Brown and Obama have their lives mapped out for them by officials and only get time to kick back if they throw a wobbly and insist. In any case, you can’t powwow with all these world leaders and chair all these high-powered meetings without doing your homework and if you screw it up, you screw it up big time. The pressure is unimaginable. Then opposition members, most of whom have nothing more important to do than nurse their seats, jib because Brown wasn’t there for some vote that they thought important. I don’t suggest for one moment that government should not be accountable to parliament, but running the country, especially in a long-drawn-out crisis, really is a full-time job. No wonder ministers frequently make do on four or five hours’ sleep per night.

Most of us – journalists especially (and Brooker and Sandbrook are just jumped-up journalists) – don’t work all that hard. I know from thirty years on and off of being a journalist that most of them would never get anything done if they weren’t given deadlines to meet. I do not except myself. A friend and I, spending far too much time emailing each other, josh ourselves about “displacement activities”, anything rather than buckle down to the task in hand. This very blog is a sort of displacement activity, something to do instead of getting on. I have lists of things to do, some of them dating from last year, that still do not bear a single check mark. Then I find myself wondering what the hell I managed to get done last week. Where does the time go?

Chronicles of Wasted Time was the title of Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography. “St Mug”, as he was known to Private Eye magazine, was a founder member of the modern commentocracy, becoming a pundit on the box at a time when members of his class still found it difficult to take the medium seriously and reckoned that they only had a television “for the children”. At the time he published it, I thought the title a harsh and rather jaundiced self-criticism, especially coming from a man whose religious belief was in the process of becoming positively missionary. Now that I am only seven years shy of the age at which he wrote it, I sympathize more readily with what he felt. “The days dwindle down to a precious few”, as Maxwell Anderson hauntingly wrote in that most poignant of American standards September Song and the sense of options closing out becomes more palpable as one’s 60s advance. Let’s face it, at my age, I simply don’t have time to try again with Charlie Brooker.