FIEFDOM of the PRESS

In the vast fields of cant and humbug, few notions are cantier and more humbuggy than that mantra of holy writ “the freedom of the press”. It is trotted out at every verse end as a supposedly unanswerable Good Thing. But think about it for a moment: is it even remotely true that the press is free?

“The function of the press in society is to inform,” wrote the great American columnist AJ Liebling in 1947, “but its role is to make money”. And so it is. British newspapers like to characterise themselves as the fourth estate, the next power in the body politic after the peers, the bishops and the Commons. In truth, they constitute no such civic, disinterested thing: more accurately, they are the first snouts in the free market trough.

Like football teams, hotels, theatres, airlines and television companies, newspapers are speculative ventures available only to those with money to burn. They can be cash cows but they can also harmorrhage capital. Consequently, newspaper proprietors (like their coevals in the big, chancy project game) are apt to seek to avoid paying tax. Most owners of British newspapers live abroad for tax purposes. They have a vested interest in the editorial lines of their organs being angled in favour of politicians who may be expected to allow them to continue to benefit from tax loopholes.

Ed and Ralph Miliband

Their own survival as hobbies for non-doms is a powerful incentive for newspapers to back parties that preach low-tax, deregulated, small-government, liberal economies. For them, the left in general and regulation in particular are the sworn enemies. It follows that all notions associated with change in the balance of power and of benefit are anathema to most of the public sheets.

How can they claim to be a free press? Try to place a piece excoriating capitalism in The Daily Telegraph or an article advocating progressive social values in the Daily Express. Well, good luck with that. The greater part of the muster of national newspapers is called, for good reason, “the Tory press”.

The moniker can be misleading, though. Several titles have habitually given David Cameron a roughish ride because they consider him a trimmer and they oppose his positions on coalition, on Europe and on social issues, particularly same-sex marriage. Cameron is not Tory enough for them. Yet the News International papers, at their proprietor’s bidding, shifted away from the Tories when Tony Blair had practised sufficient bowing and scraping to Rupert Murdoch to convince the old rogue that his businesses had nothing to fear from a less principled – particularly on Europe – party leader than the then Tory prime minister, John Major.

Simply put, right wing and compliant political leaders get a kindly press; reformist, liberal or supposedly ‘weak’ leaders get hammered. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Jim Callaghan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, John Major, William Hague, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and now Ed Miliband became victims of wave after wave of black propaganda, though given a choice between Cameron and Miliband the papers obviously favour the former. Margaret Thatcher scampered up and down Fleet Street bestowing knighthoods and tax breaks to all and sundry and they loved her for it. Tony Blair, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard all were broadly supported.

But politics doesn’t especially shift copies, especially when (as now) the owners don’t care for any of the leaders. Consequently, all the papers have become more brutish about what they see as their right to cover anything and everything. In a telling television documentary, Michael Jackson and the Boy He Paid Off, made by Blast! Films for the BBC in 2004 (before the extended court case that cleared Jackson of abuse), two American views provided a chilling insight into the behaviour of UK hacks. “I think all of Fleet Street loaded up all their money and put it in a 747 and flew it to the United States to start the buying of information” said journalist Don Ray. And Ray Chandler, the uncle of the eponymous boy, reported that “it was mostly the British tabloids that would invade your privacy. Most of the press was pretty good. They stayed on the public street. But the Brits don’t seem to have much concern for that. So they’re definitely the most aggressive”.

It’s this right to report, however unwelcome to whomever, that the papers claim. “Freedom of the press” Liebling observed drily “is guaranteed only to those who own one”. And the freedoms that the monkeys of those owners claim are the freedoms to lie, to distort, to invade people’s privacy, to blackguard and traduce anyone they fancy to be fair game, preferably public figures who sell more copies but, if not, hitherto obscure people. The countervailing right – to be left alone – is not one that the press feel a need to champion.

Cutting edge journalism from the Mail

Not that I wish a return to the bad old days, when the only readers denied knowledge of Edward VIII’s determination to wed a divorced woman were those in his own country. Such a matter is a legitimate public concern. But people in the public eye ought to be able to lead their lives, even if reprehensibly in a moral sense, without papers buying the tittle-tattle of their intimates. Unbridled chequebook journalism makes privacy impossible for public people.

Whether a footballer committed adultery is of no interest to me and I genuinely wish it were of no interest to anyone else. Editors will throw up their hands in mock innocence and say that this salacious gossip is what the readers want.

Well, the press created the appetite for it in the first place. Now scurrility is an industry, presided over by its laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank king, Max Clifford. Whenever you see this PR man interviewed on location, you always glimpse a palatial home in the background. He has negotiated another silly-money fee from a tabloid and pocketed his handsome cut. No wonder those who have had sex with the famous are tempted to betray them. How poetic that the worm may have turned and Clifford himself be feeling the bite.

The treachery is much grubbier when perpetrated by a former employee, especially one with whom many moments of personal pain have been shared. If anybody embodies the debased spirit of the age, it is surely the former butler to the royal household, Paul Burrell. His comprehensive duplicity and flagrant lack of taste, judgment or modesty set a new low no doubt to be aped by others who, in another age, would have been dismissed as cads and bounders.

There is an exception to the right of public figures to keep their family and personal considerations private. When politicians parade their spouses and children in their election literature and on the stump, the electorate are entitled to be appraised if this happy image turns out to be a sham. Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion as Plutarch is so often quoted as having it (“I thought that my wife should not even come under suspicion” Plutarch has the Emperor say in The Life of Julius Cæsar). By making an electoral convenience of an image of a conventional home life, politicians do surrender any right to betray that home life with impunity.


Ralph Miliband served in the Royal Navy during the war and took part in the Normandy landings

Which brings me, sideways-on, to the business of the Daily Mail and Ralph Miliband, the late father of Ed and David. On September 28th, the Mail ran a piece, credited to an in-house hack called Geoffrey Levy, about the politics of Ralph Miliband. The piece was highly selective, calculatedly nasty and designed to affront Ed. It was just the sort of piece that alienates those who believe the paper to be a scurrilous, biased mouthpiece for the archetypal blowhard barfly who knows nothing but has a loud and definite opinion about everything. The Mail doesn’t care about that. It doesn’t seek such people as readers.

The article used terms like ‘determined’, ‘uncompromising’ and ‘cause’ as though they proved that Ralph Miliband was a dangerous fanatic, as though such terms could never attach themselves to the Mail’s character. Even his “quickly learning English” implied something sinister, rather than an example of the self-discipline that the paper would ordinarily expect of immigrants and refugees like Miliband.

The former Labour spin-doctor Damian McBride was quoted, not my own choice for a reliable source. Indeed, McBride was described as a degenerate, a curious way for a paper to treat a man after happily publishing extracts from his book for which Paul Dacre, the editor, paid a six-figure sum.

Trying to link Ralph’s Marxism to Ed, the piece singled out “giving councils draconian new powers to seize into public ownership land held by developers who fail to build on it”. As it happens, this dangerously revolutionary Miliband policy is also proposed by that notoriously unreconstructed Leninist Boris Johnson.

And of course the kind of IVth-form psychology that always has a place in tabloid smears was not forgotten: “One is entitled to wonder whether Ralph Miliband’s Marxism was actually fuelled by a giant-sized social chip on his shoulder as he lived in his adoptive country”. Ah yes, the Mail unerringly gets to the nub of it: envy of the sort of inherited wealth enjoyed by the Rothermeres through their ownership of the Mail produces an inferiority complex in those unfortunate enough to be anything other than stout-hearted, god-fearing Englishmen.

Paul Dacre, editor. His father Peter was eligible for call-up in the war but was excused thanks to his connections with Lord Beaverbrook. He loved this country, though

Much more calculated, nasty and offensive than anything in Levy’s paste-together were the headline (which Ed Miliband reasonably called “lurid”) and the standfirst put above the article: “The man who hated Britain: Red Ed’s pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country”. Paul Dacre knows what he’s doing. He knows that headlines are what stick in the memory. “The man who hated Britain” and its association with Ed Miliband will resound in the subconscious of many who see it. It of course carries a whiff of xenophobia, a stance that always plays well with the Mail’s readership, but the Jewish name of the author of the piece acts as a beard to cover that possibility.

Ed Miliband was inevitably faced with a dilemma. Rising to the bait risked projecting the story’s impact far beyond the readership of the paper. The matter of press regulation is about to come back into the public consciousness with the privy council due to pronounce on the proprietors’ proposal for continued self-regulation of the press on October 9th. Miliband has already made an enemy of News International over phone-hacking. The argument that he is a threat to “press freedom” is likely to be made far beyond the editorial offices of the Mail.

On the other hand, the Tory press and party like to try to characterise him as weak, even though he has made several moves that Cameron would not have dared to make. He went with his instinct and requested a right to reply in the paper, which took his piece but reprinted the offending article alongside it and ran an editorial (smacking of Dacre’s own hand) that began, in demeaning and puerile fashion: “Red Ed’s in a strop with the Mail” and went on to refer to “his tetchy and menacing response”, which account could only have been swallowed by readers who didn’t read the Miliband.

Alex Brummer, who wants an apology from the Labour Party

The paper also described its original piece as an “exposé of [Ralph Miliband’s] political philosophy” as if it had hitherto been some kind of secret that he was a Marxist. “As for the Falklands war,” continued the editorial, “our [sic] defence of British sovereignty so appalled him that it moved him to four-letter words of disgust”. Be assured that no such outrage has ever sullied the editorial floor of the Daily Mail.

Another absurd reference was to Miliband’s “attacks on us, repeated ad nauseam by a gleeful BBC”. To characterise Miliband’s measured response to a pre-emptive personal strike initiated by the paper as “attacks” is plain silly. As for the BBC, no chance to take a pop at that institution is ever turned down, even when, as here, there is no justification for it. The BBC’s coverage has bent over backwards to balance the Mail’s view with that of its opponents – who have emerged from all parts of the political spectrum – and it has returned to the story no more regularly than any other news outlet.

Last Friday, on the 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock news bulletins on BBC1, the Mail’s city editor, Alex Brummer, was put up to speak for the paper. That Brummer is the son of refugee Jewish immigrants and a former Guardian man did not escape notice. Here’s what Brummer had to say: “I think the Labour Party’s stepped over a line by turning its guns on us over a whole week. I mean, we addressed the problem, we gave Ed Miliband space in the paper to rebut the charges against him. He’s chosen now to turn it into a political argument. He’s using his own family to turn it into a political argument against our paper. I think we should be robust and resist that”. The final sentence was cut from the later broadcast.

The saying “what planet is he living on?” springs to mind. By Friday, the matter had only been news beyond the paper and Ed Miliband for four days, not “a whole week”, and the Labour Party has played less than a walk-on part. The paper’s “charges” were against Ralph, not Ed Miliband, and Ed rebutted only the lies about his father; David Cameron rapidly remarked that he would do the same. As for “using his own family”, this is just preposterous. Did Brummer miss the references to Miliband’s father in the offending article that kicked off the episode? That original piece said: “Like all left-wing thinkers, Ralph Miliband knew how to explain away awkward events”. It’s a skill Brummer might usefully acquire.

Here’s what I would say to Brummer. The Labour Party does actually punch very hard, not physically but using its skills as a political organisation which appeals to a huge number of people in this country. And this scares the press. They then say “I’m being bullied”. Oh for heaven’s sake, grow up, y’know. I just don’t have much sympathy.

The veteran Mail reporter Ann Leslie was also on the early BBC bulletin. I’m glad the Blair government gave her a damehood because she always sports so much slap that she looks like a pantomime dame – neither George Lacey nor Douglas Byng ever favoured such maquillage. Here’s what the dame had to say: “The Daily Mail does actually punch very hard, not physically but using its skills as a newspaper which appeals to a huge number of people in this country. And this scares the left. They then say ‘I’m being bullied’. Oh, for heaven’s sake, grow up,’ y’now. I just don’t have much sympathy”. For the record, the Mail’s circulation is a little over 1.5 million. The number who voted Labour in the 2010 general election was a little over 8.6 million.

Brummer wrote a piece for the Mail defending the paper against suggestions that its attack on the Milibands was anti-semitic. He referred to the “knee-jerk anti-Zionism shown by the left”. Brummer knows better than I do that there is anti-semitism, there is anti-the-existence-of-the-state-of-Israel, there is anti-Zionism and there is anti-the-(present)-government-of-Israel and that these four stances are very different from each other. There is plenty of anti-Netanyahu sentiment on the left, that’s for sure, and most of it is among Israelis. There is anti-Zionism in the sense that many on the left deplore Israel’s unique capacity to continue to break international law (over settlements) with total impunity. But to imply that there is inbred suspicion of or even hatred of the Jews on the left is as wicked a lie as to suggest that there is similar sentiment against Islam on the right.

Ann Leslie about to go on as Widow Twankey

On the other hand, it’s disingenuous of Brummer to pretend that there is no suggestion of xenophobia in the way the Mail has characterised Ralph Miliband and, by implication, his son. As the Milibands are Jews, that xenophobia by definition shades into antisemitism. The fact that Brummer and Levy and Melanie Phillips find a happy home on the paper doesn’t cancel out that ingredient in the Mail’s stance.

As it has panned out, the Mail emerges looking distinctly queasy from this encounter. It will not have bargained for two former Thatcher ministers fiercely attacking it and defending Ralph Miliband. The statements of Brummer and Leslie look a little wary and defensive. Paul Dacre has studiedly kept his head below the parapet and been mocked for it. Readers of the paper have taken to the internet in droves to complain and scorn.

In the paper’s editorial, there was a passing remark that the Mail is not Pravda. It was a heedless thing to say. Pravda means ‘truth’.

The FIRST CASUALTY of WAR

The Syrian government has declared variously that the missile attack on the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus early on Wednesday did not take place at all, that it took place but that no chemical weapons were involved, and that chemical weapons were indeed involved but that they were inflicted by rebel forces. These statements cannot all be correct. Is any of them true?

There can be no doubt that an attack did take place. Many civilians died; the opposition claims more than a thousand. That people did die is beyond argument. Also not disputed is that the area where they died is characterised by resistance to the government’s attempts to quell the civil unrest – let us not prejudge anything by calling it a civil war – for the last two years.

Dead Syrian children

Moreover, all the recorded evidence so far offered to the world shows people suffering in a way that is not commensurate with an attack by conventional weapons. The victims are not showing blast injuries. Their motor functions are affected, particularly the breathing instinct. The spread of this effect on humans is evidently much wider than any structural damage in the area. There can be no doubt that, whatever killed these people, it was not explosives.

Was it a chemical agent? Only an impartial examination at the site can determine this to general satisfaction. Whether such an examination is possible depends wholly on the Syrian government itself. If Assad denies the inspectors, we shall be entitled to draw a conclusion, as I will consider in a moment.

Meanwhile, I want to try to examine the government’s notion that the footage widely circulated across the world is, in some sense, a “fabrication”. Presumably that would mean that the convulsing children that we have seen are actors, that people are playing at being dead. Is this at all credible? I submit that it is not. Given the chaotic nature of what we see, it would require remarkable creativity to “stage” such chaos without any glitch that revealed deception. Is any of the material released at all questionable? If it were, wouldn’t someone have noticed by now?

Dead Syrian adults

So it seems pretty conclusive that these things are established: i) that there was an attack; ii) that many civilians died; iii) that some kind of non-blast weapon was responsible for the casualties.

Now we come to the bottom line for the Assad government: the attack was inflicted by the rebels themselves. Does this argument have any merit? Well, it is certainly possible to suggest a motive for the rebels: that they wish to blackguard the Assad regime and “shame” foreign governments into intervening on behalf of the insurrection. William Hague’s increasingly bullish statements since Wednesday morning suggest that, if that was the aim, it is having some traction, at least with the British government. Obama remains carefully non-committal.

But is it possible to stand up the argument that the rebels would inflict such a grotesque death on the families of its own people, even if the exercise could be held to have a chance of tipping the argument about intervention?

Hague: bullish

I am reminded of a Jewish friend with family in Israel who told me in all seriousness that, when Israeli planes attack the Gaza strip, Palestinians lay their small children on the roofs of their homes so that they are more likely to be killed and hence the Israelis can be accused of war crimes. Although she has a Cambridge degree and has worked in current affairs broadcasting all her adult life, she could not recognise black propaganda when it was offered. I gently pointed out the notorious precedent that the Nazis spread lies about the morality of the Jews in order to make them appear less than human and so more dispensable, but she wouldn’t make the connection. People are willing to believe anything, however far-fetched, if it reflects badly on their enemy.

If the Syrian rebels did this themselves, a lot of people would necessarily be in on the exercise. How could the rebels be sure that no one would expose the deception? Yet we still await the first report of any defector from the opposition’s cause, decrying the tactics of the rebels, whereas several highly-placed officials in the Assad regime have left the country in disgust. Moreover, it is known that the Syrian government has developed chemical weapons: that is not at issue. When would they deploy such weapons, then, if not in a situation that they themselves account a profound threat to the state? It is always possible that Syrian rebels have gained access to chemical weapons, but there is as yet no independent evidence of it.

The UN inspectors ought to have the expertise to determine whether chemical weapons are in opposition hands. They are presently in Syria but the government will not permit them to visit Ghouta. Why so? That there are inspectors in the country at all is only as a result of protracted negotiations. The government says it cannot guarantee the inspectors’ safety. The rebels have said they will ensure that the inspectors are safe in Ghouta. If the inspectors are prepared to go, what argument remains to Assad? We must conclude that he fears what they will discover. If he wants to stay credible, he needs to pre-empt that conclusion.

Obama: non-committal

If there were an international consensus that the Assad government used chemical weapons against its own people, that would change the game, if only in that (once hostilities cease, if they ever do) Assad could be brought before the international court to face charges of war crimes. But there is no such consensus. Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian foreign office spokesman, declared that a homemade rocket carrying unidentified chemical substances had been launched from an area controlled by the opposition.

“All this cannot but suggest that once again we are dealing with a pre-planned provocation,” his statement continued. “This is supported by the fact that the criminal act was committed near Damascus at the very moment when a mission of UN experts had successfully started their work of investigating allegations of the possible use of chemical weapons there ... Moscow considers important an objective and professional investigation into what happened. And we call on all those who have the possibility to influence armed extremists to make every effort to end provocations with chemical agents”.

Moscow mouthpiece Lukashevich

Of course, if the Russians want to argue that the occurrence of this “criminal act” at the time of the US inspectors’ visit argues for it being an attack by rebels, one might counter that it could just as well be a double bluff, that the Assad regime launched the attack fully intending to tell the inspectors that it must be the rebels’ action. If the rebels are capable of staging an atrocity to look like the work of the government, the reverse is just as feasible and even more likely to be doable.

Russia’s alliance with Syria ensures that the UN’s hands are tied in any attempt to approve some anti-Assad action through the security council. As with so many other international crises, the fact that certain powerful nations may wield a veto leaves the UN powerless and raises the stakes for those nations that would be prepared to make some intervention. I have argued before that the UN’s charter needs to be rewritten and, at the risk of exasperating my regular readers, I am now going to argue it again.

No substantial rewrite of the charter has occurred since it was first drawn up in 1945. The time has long past when the UN needs to be given power independent of individual member states, power greater than any individual member, indeed greater than the sum of individual members.

The veto has to be scrapped. No nation, neither China nor Russia nor the US, can be permitted to continue to block the business of the UN and to override the will of a majority of members. All nations should have the same stake in the global community.

Support for Assad

The UN needs to have the power – by which I mean the military power – to intervene in any breakdown of peaceful coexistence and to impose a cessation of hostilities. This might be between any two or more nations squaring up to each other – say, Israel and Lebanon or Azerbaijan and Armenia – or within a sovereign nation where the ruling party is fighting any kind of insurrection – Somalia or Colombia or Libya or Egypt. Where the UN deems it necessary, its troops would depose the government and take over the day-to-day management of the nation’s affairs. After all, whatever else you may believe about Assad, he has patently lost control of his nation. He is, to borrow Norman Lamont’s resonant words, “in office but not in power”.

How could the UN muster such power? I propose that each member nation be obliged to contribute to the UN’s peace-keeping forces the same level of funding, personnel and matériel that it commits to its own national defence. So if, for the sake of argument, the US’s total military budget were $800bn, it would be required to commit the same amount to the UN force. The Swiss government’s share of the UN force bill might be $4bn. In this way, the UN would be furnished with military might sufficient to overwhelm any conceivable national militia and its troops would be as international as possible. With a scheme like this in place, most nations would see both the necessity and the opportunity to scale down their domestic expenditure on what they term defence. That in itself would render the world a more stable place.

Such an imposition on all member states would profoundly alter the psychology of defence. The UN needs to establish as a baseline that any engagement in military combat is intolerable to the community of nations. As it is, the “just wars” are always those fought by a nation’s own troops. From the outside looking in, other nation’s wars are, at the very least, regrettable. More often they are indefensible. And, however righteous the combatants, all wars occasion atrocities on all sides. It is idle to pretend that other people’s wars are crueller and bloodier than those in which we take part.

But, I hear you object, you cannot ride roughshod over the sovereignty of individual nations. To that I say: the game has changed. Nations are no longer discrete entities whose disputes remain within their borders. Look at the flood of refugees from Syria into neighbouring countries. How can those countries, none of them wealthy, cope with the demands that Syria’s folly makes upon them? And why should they be required to do so? Furthermore, what is the cost to the planet of all this destruction visited upon it? Why should other nations be expected to clean up the mess of this – it needs to be stated – indulgence by the government and the citizenry of Syria?

The UN needs to be an organisation that holds as its core belief not only that waging war is destructive and regrettable but that waging war will not be tolerated by the community of nations, however wealthy and righteous and self-important the combatants might be. So my revamped UN would have the power – both judicially, by statute, and literally, by force of arms – to police the planet and snuff out any outbreak of hostilities within hours. All the members of the UN would have to agree to accept this awesome global authority and to isolate any nation in every practical manner until the UN deemed that its full membership of the community of nations had been earned again.

UN inspectors arrive in Damascus

If this dispensation had been in place, the hostilities in Syria would have been halted in the first week. Assad would have been obliged to resolve the contradictions in his nation or step down in favour of a temporary administration controlled by the UN that would have addressed the differences among the populace and set up fair and free elections. By the way, under my new model UN, every nation would be obliged to allow a comprehensive delegation from the UN to oversee and examine national elections and to declare whether they have been acceptable, the UN’s final judgment being paramount and not subject to appeal. Any head of state or indeed any individual candidate found to have transgressed would be barred from future office.

Imagine the different course of events in Egypt over the last two and a half years. Mubarak would have lost control of the country to a UN peace-keeping force. He might still have been tried and imprisoned by the courts. Free elections might still have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Had there been demonstrations against Morsi, they would have been permitted. But what was, by any objective measure, a military coup this summer would not have been allowed to take place. And so there would have been no massacre of protesters.

Well, you will say, none of the security council nations is going to surrender its veto, so this is a pipe-dream. I could simply snap back: ok, so what’s your solution that won’t simply make matters worse? At least I am making a concrete, constructive proposal that has yet to be tried and found wanting.

I am realistic, though. There is only one means by which what I propose could be achieved. Someone would have to run for the US presidency on a programme that included this proposal for the revamping of the UN. The chorus of abuse that would argue that this would be an abject surrender of American power and self-importance would need to be argued down. The candidate would have to win the argument and win the election and then embark on a long and hugely testing round of diplomacy to persuade sufficient of the other security council nations to agree. Yes, it’s a big ask. But what is the point of going into politics if it is not with the intention of changing the world?

MORGAN, an UNSUITABLE CASE for TREATMENT

Is there a more wan figure on the world’s political stage than that of Morgan Tsvangirai? He has known Robert Mugabe for more than thirty years, having begun his political rise in Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party when he was immediately marked for preferment. Now, I have never met Mr Mugabe and I only know of his career through the highly partial medium of the British media. But this much I know: that Mugabe is the wiliest African leader since Jomo Kenyatta and the least scrupulous since Idi Amin. If I know that, Tsvangirai must know it too.

Morgan no free man

How come, then, that he has allowed himself to be so comprehensively outmanoeuvred in the Zimbabwean elections held at the end of last month? Did he not guess that Mugabe would stop at nothing to defeat him in the presidential ballot that has overwhelmingly extended the old fox’s rule for another five years to add to the 33 years he has already enjoyed? Mugabe is 89 years old.

In the presidential ballot, Mugabe defeated Tsvangirai by nearly two-to-one. In the House of Assembly, ZANU-PF won three times as many seats as Tsvangirai’s MDC grouping and hence has a sufficient majority to introduce whatever constitutional changes that Mugabe fancies. For the MDC, the election was an utter disaster.

Mugabe: giving nothing away – absolutely nothing

Whistling in the dark, Tsvangirai now says that “the fraudulent and stolen election has plunged Zimbabwe into a constitutional, political and economic crisis. Instead of celebration, there is national mourning”. In fact, there is remarkably little evidence of either crisis or mourning. Zimbabweans know that Mugabe stole the election but they also know that there is precious little that they can do about it. The wider world deplores the myriad scandals and manipulations that accompanied the vote but Obama and Putin, Cameron and Merkel have much more pressing problems to face.

Tsvangirai says that the MDC will “boycott government institutions” and challenge the election result through the courts. Good luck with that. The unspecified government institutions will not notice (save that, without an MDC presence, it will be that much simpler to carry out Mugabe’s wishes) and the courts will doubtless find the evidence of ballot theft inconclusive – after all, the judges are all Mugabe appointees. So unless something very unexpected happens, the outside world will hear no more of Morgan Tsvangirai and probably very little of Zimbabwe until such time as Robert Mugabe passes peacefully in office and we discover whether he has arranged anything effective about the succession.

A stylish poster campaign

The absurdity of it all is that, for the past five years, Tsvangirai has been Zimbabwe’s prime minster, in office and in power in a coalition with ZANU-PF under Mugabe’s presidency. Was he asleep at the wheel? Did he not anticipate that Mugabe would strain every sinew to ensure that the coalition would be ended at the 2013 election? Could he not have taken pre-emptive action to guard the sanctity of the election? Suddenly to bleat after the event that it’s turned out to be unfair seems, at the very least, ineffectual.

Democracy Zimbabwe style: but what's in those boxes?

Mugabe allowed observers of the ballot only from friendly neighbouring nations and, hearing their complacent views of the conduct of the election, you realise that they would not have been much of a challenge to buy off. Tsvangirai should have insisted that a large UN team be allowed to monitor the election. Indeed, it ought to be a condition of continued membership of the UN that all member nations allow UN observers to attend national elections. There is no country – not even Britain or the United States – where some sharp electoral practice cannot be detected.

What is an open secret in Harare is that Tsvangirai has spent considerably more of his time as prime minister in chasing women than in shoring up his power base and planning to try to outflank his ruthless opponent. His first wife Susan was killed in a head-on car crash that Tsvangirai was the only Zimbabwean outside ZANU-PF not to blame on Mugabe’s intelligence officers. Perhaps he was glad to be rid of her. He very quickly ceased to behave like a mourning widower and he remarried last autumn, though his philandering has evidently not been scaled down since.

Getting spliced for a second time

The tragedy is that the coalition of MDC and ZANU-PF achieved a fair amount in repairing the damage caused by Mugabe’s heedless conduct of the national economy while unrestrained by coalition. Tsvangirai, having ensured a fair ballot, could have fought on his economic record. He might even have won. Instead, he survives only as an ineffectual footnote to one of the longest and most destructive reigns in modern African history.

LORDS TEMPORAL and TEMPORARY

The appointment of thirty new peers this week has raised once again the concurrent debates about the undemocratic nature of the upper house, the dubious nature of political preferment for favours bestowed, the habit of successive governments of packing the benches with their placemen and women, the stalled nature of Lords reform and the absurdity that the chamber is nowhere near sufficiently capacious to seat every member on those occasions when most of them wish to attend simultaneously (for instance, at the state opening of parliament).

It will be no matter of surprise to my regular readers if I inform them that I have a solution to these problems that is practical and, as befitting the thrust of this blog, commonsensical. Here is that solution.

The Lords host the state opening

There remains a great deal to be said for a public body to which useful members of society may be appointed and where such people may avail themselves of a public platform and indeed of a vote on matters that are important to them. Ed Miliband’s raising of Doreen Lawrence to the peerage has been widely hailed and is considered a valuable widening of the upper house’s constituency far beyond the narrow considerations of party advantage. Many more of the new additions, however, look like unmerited rewards for donations and for party line-toeing.

So let party leaders continue to raise worthy individuals to the peerage, though under much stricter conditions – I will return to those. Meanwhile, let all members of the upper house submit themselves to election in the following manner. Once every five years – preferably at a mid-point between general elections – let all members of the upper house (including the Law Lords and the Lords Spiritual, but with exceptions that I will explain) be listed on a website, each one illustrated with a standardised face-on portrait and each permitted a short statement (with a strict word limit) as to why she or he should remain in the house.

Their party allegiance (or crossbench or other status) would be listed, along with their full baronial title and, where appropriate, a name by which they are more widely known. Their attendance and voting records should also be listed. Those not required so to submit themselves would be those peers recruited since the previous Lords ballot, so that no one would be obliged to submit to a vote whose service had been of less than five years.

Doreen Lawrence, now a baroness

Voters would be allowed to place a vote against, say, up to twenty individuals on the list. Then the votes would be counted and the members whose names appeared among, say, the bottom one hundred of the list would lose their seats. The number being rejected could be adjusted until the composition of the house was more suitable, though the five-yearly vote ought still to eliminate a significant number of the least popular members. During the years between votes, party leaders would be permitted to appoint new members, but without exceeding the overall limit that has been agreed and – a crucial point, this one – without altering by a single member the balance of allegiance that was achieved in the previous vote.

To make the upper house an elective assembly in this unprecedented manner has many strong points. Peers would know that they do not enjoy a ticket for life and that they will need to be seen to be useful members. The elections would not be the costly affairs that conventional localised ballots cannot avoid being; indeed, there is no advantage to be had in making the lords a second chamber of constituency-representing delegates. People who would be ornaments to the house but who have no appetite for jumping through the cost, time, media and abuse hoops that conventional election campaigns impose will still be able to enter the house easily and through a merit that may not be perceived by a wide public (because of specialist expertise, for instance); five and more years in the Lords would allow them to make their mark if they are so minded and to earn continued membership.

The upper house full and in session

Voting via the internet is a practical solution to the lack of local campaigning and local ballot boxes, but of course it would have to be rigorously policed. Voters would need to register on the election site, though they ought then to be able to vote anonymously. Some mechanism would have to be set up to prevent multiple voting, not so much by large numbers of people as from the same computer.

So it would have to be contrived that no more than (say) twenty votes (for twenty different candidates) can be cast from one source. No doubt every computer at Tory Central Office would be used to cast twenty votes for Tory peers, but these votes would be counter-balanced by the votes cast from the other party HQs. In any case, it would be a fine judgment how to configure dozens of votes among, in the Tory party’s present case, nearly 230 candidates. The size of the field would help to neutralise attempts to pack the vote.

This solution would be cost-effective, democratic (certainly more democratic than the arrangements obtaining now) and useful in challenging peers to justify their sinecures. But it retains – and indeed enhances – those characteristics of the upper chamber that make it an important foil for the Commons. I commend this proposal to the house.

The AGE of UNREASON

Despite one hundred and fifty years of post-Darwinian scientific enquiry and discovery, vast numbers of the planet’s citizens are as bewitched as their ancestors ever were by the absurdities, fantasies and mendacities of supernatural superstition. I have argued before that the delusion that its sufferers call “faith” is the source of far greater suffering in the world – suffering through personal guilt and self-hatred, deprivation and oppression, persecution and mutilation, murder and genocide – than all the other abstractions – nationalism, tribalism, politics and ideology – put together. Paradoxically, the dominance of religious bigotry as a force for evil seems to grow ever stronger as the world becomes smaller and liberal education spreads further.

In an editorial of 1941 for Life magazine, the Time-Life publisher Henry Luce described his era as “the American century”. At different points in that time-frame, other candidates for the accolade briefly arose, but hindsight shows that Luce got it right: more than any other global player, the United States shaped the century. How will the present one be known? Already, there seem compelling arguments to dub it “the Muslim century”.

Luce talk

The millennium had barely begun when, “out of a clear blue sky”, the most profoundly world-shaking challenge was made to the confidence of American power, a challenge made specifically in the name of Islam. There are Muslim apologists who fend off the connection between the central tenets of Islam and the 9/11 atrocity, but they are confounded by the words of the Qur’an that I found and have quoted before: “Allah has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah; they kill and are killed; that is a promise binding upon Allah in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur’an” [from Arthur J Arberry’s translation for OUP, though I have changed his own term ‘God’ to ‘Allah’]. It is, of course, no accident that the book of the Qur’an from which this passage comes (which is called, in English, ‘Repentance’) is book number 9 and the verse number is 111.

Islam has been at the centre of the world’s flashpoints in the first 163 months of the present century. A prime mover in the spread of Muslim fundamentalism has been the Deobandi wing of Sunni Islam. Deobandis are devotees of Sharia law, the most proscriptive interpretation of the Qur’an. This wing of Islam is, in every sense, the most aggressive. If it has not already become the dominant force in the Muslim community in Britain, it will do so before you know it. The Taliban are adherents of Deobandi practice. The word “Taliban” means “students”.

Saddam nuisance

Western forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in an initially successful attempt to overthrow the Taliban whose activists had dominated the country for five years. The pretext was “to keep the streets of America and Britain safe”, but the notion that the Taliban (rather than al-Qaida) was responsible for terrorist attacks in the west was never remotely credible. In any case, as everyone knows but no politician will acknowledge, the Taliban will again be ruling Afghanistan within a maximum of three months after western troops have finally withdrawn.

The American and British governments muddied the water and overstretched their own resources by adding an irrelevant invasion of Iraq to their military commitments, for no better reason than that George W Bush wanted to complete what he took to be “unfinished business” left over by his father following the Gulf War of 1990-1. Anxious to establish his profile on the world stage, Tony Blair joined this vain exercise.

Assad sack

Ten years on, Iraq is riven by inter-faith strife. This week, there have been more than 250 casualties of car bombs in Baghdad, at least fifty of them fatalities and almost all of them Shias, which means that the bombers were certainly Sunni Muslims. If that sounds a lot, consider that there have been fifty times that number of fatalities in sectarian attacks in Iraq in the past three months. So much for the west’s legacy.

The Shia are also Muslims and they form the government in Iraq, where they make up the largest demographic (the most dominant Shia representation anywhere in the world is in Iran, where about two-fifths of the world’s Shias live). Shia and Sunni Muslims have been in conflict for many centuries. Do not expect reconciliation any time soon.

The renewed struggle between Iraqi Shia and Sunni is wholly a product of the western invasion. Saddam Hussein was a Ba’athist. The Ba’ath Party, though Islamic, is notably liberal – it may be surprising to note – and opposes Muslim fundamentalism and Sharia law. In some ways, Alawite Islam parallels Ba’athist Islam. Bashar al-Assad of Syria is an Alawite. Like Saddam, he has been more exercised by Arab nationalism than by Islamic orthodoxy. If he falls in Syria, there must be a strong possibility that some form of Islamic fundamentalism will succeed him in that benighted country. This is the dilemma that stays the hand of the international community under pressure to intervene in the brutal Syrian civil war. Unthinkably, intervention might produce a result that had worse consequences for the Syrians, for the Arab world and for the wider world even than the reign of Assad.

Gadd-out-of-here

After all, there is the precedent of Libya as well as that of Iraq. Muammar Gaddafi’s regime was again far more concerned with Arab nationalism than with Islam – Gaddafi was raised as a Bedouin Muslim. Islamist factions infiltrated the anti-government forces in Libya as they have done in Syria. The present prime minister of Libya, Ali Zeidan, is a Sunni Muslim.

Many new Islamist factions have appeared in Libya since the war and several of the militias formed to fight Gaddafi have declined to disband. It was an Islamist cadre that attacked the American consulate in Benghazi last September, killing several people including the ambassador. Abdelsalam al-Mosmary, a critic of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Libya, was assassinated just this week. Sporadic exchanges of fire and regular car bombs, particularly in Benghazi and Tripoli, continue to imperil the stability of Libya.

A Sunni outlook for Ali Zeidan

Through patient infiltration, al-Qaida has established itself in Pakistan, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, Mali, Nigeria, Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Turkey. It is al-Qaida that still represents the most effective and most ruthless armed expression of Islamic fundamentalism. President Obama has been assiduous in concentrating on pre-emptive strikes against al-Qaida – controversially, more in Pakistan than anywhere – rather than diluting this effort with speculative engagements elsewhere.

But terrorism, guerrilla warfare and the fomentation of uprisings against secularist regimes are not the only methods by which Islamic fundamentalism exerts its muscle. Sharia rule profoundly circumscribes personal freedoms that citizens of liberal democracies take for granted. The judiciary wholly or largely imposes Sharia law in Afghanistan (even without Taliban rule), Pakistan, Muslim parts of India, Bangladesh, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, Saudi, Qatar, much of the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Brunei, the Maldives, Muslim parts of Sri Lanka and Singapore and Indonesia, Sudan, Mauritania and for Muslims in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Gambia, Djibouti and Comoros.

The late Abdelsalam al-Mosmary

Restrictions imposed by Sharia apply to everyone, including visitors, as unguarded tourists are apt to discover. Visiting a Muslim country is like staying with vegans: they serve you vegan food but, when they visit you, they expect you to serve them vegan food. So Islamists in non-Muslim countries go on demonstrations carrying placards on the theme of “death to the infidel”, but any reciprocal tolerance is unthinkable. How long would you stay alive if you brandished a poster with the legend “Death to Islam” in downtown Khartoum, Riyadh, Mogadishu or Islamabad?

More than any other issue, it is sexuality that brings out the feudal in Sharia law and Islamic fundamentalism. Sharia strictly interprets the Qur’an, so anything in that text that already seems oppressive is made more so by its application. This comes from the section on ‘Women’: “Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that Allah has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for Allah’s guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them” [book 4 verse 38]. Needless to say, the courts will always favour a man’s testimony over that of his wife.

Sweet 16 at the UN

The world knows of the case of Malala Yousafzai, the Sunni Muslim who, at 15, was the object of an assassination attempt by the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley. Malala – her name means “grief-stricken” – had had the audacity to advocate full rights of education for girl pupils, an offence against Islamist views on the subjugation of women. Malala made a remarkable recovery and addressed a convocation of youth delegates at the UN on her sixteenth birthday. She has become a figurehead for women’s rights under Islam and was named by Time magazine in April as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”.

The brutal, iniquitous and unyielding nature of Sharia law is sufficient cause for opposing the spread of Islam in any of its guises. Hence the European Union’s continuing difficulty with the long-standing application to join made by Turkey, a nation that, while very nearly entirely sited in Asia, occupies a tiny area of southeastern Europe.

Though Turkey’s population is almost wholly Sunni Muslim, it is formally a secular nation. Several days of unrest in Istanbul in May were centred on the perception of encroaching Islamisation by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. Informing this perception was an attempt by Erdogan to reduce the power of the army, widely seen as a significant force for secularism (like the army in Egypt). Several other recent government restrictions were read as Islamist.

Erdogan – not best pleased

The wearing of the hijab has been banned for the entirety of Turkey’s modern existence, a lot longer than in France, where the wearing of the burqa was addiitionally made illegal in 2010. France has a rapidly growing problem with Islam, which now counts a tenth of the country’s population among its supporters. It has been estimated that Muslims could be powerful enough to determine the outcome of presidential elections within thirty years.

Wherever you look, even in Europe, there is evidence of the encroachment of Islam on the very different philosophies, cultures and traditions that have survived strife and oppression in the past. It may be that Islam, that most proscriptive and intolerant of dogmas, is stronger than the rest and will eventually hold sway across the world. It won’t be in my lifetime and perhaps not in yours either, but the need to stem the tide is urgent now.

BUT IN BATTALIONS

Spies spy. What else is new? Why – aside from whipped-up commercial reasons – has there been day after day of outrage and astonishment about this vacuous truism: that spies spy?

So the National Security Agency of the US has been spying on diplomats and ministers in Europe. Well, of course it has. So the Metropolitan Police put a placeman in the circle of the family of Stephen Lawrence. Well, of course they did. So GCHQ monitors the emails and phone calls of ordinary British citizens. Well, of course it does.

Everyone who can use surveillance or get access to insider knowledge or listen in on supposedly private transactions does so. Why would they not? But do not run away with the idea that there are good guys and bad guys in any of this. Various media outlets spy on what it characterises as wrong-doers so that they may ‘expose’ them. For a reporter to pose as something she is not in order to catch on camera a politician unguardedly bending or breaking the rules is nothing short of entrapment. Not so long ago, the police used to entrap gay men in public conveniences by luring them with so-called “pretty policemen”. Most enlightened people found such tactics abominable. Entrapment is spying plus.

Then there are the “whistle-blowers”, the insiders who expose their employers for what they consider immoral and/or illegal activities. Edward Snowden is thought to be still in international limbo near Moscow airport. As John Kerry rather cuttingly suggested: in his attempts to avoid a return to the States, Snowden is not exactly soliciting assistance from regimes celebrated for their tolerance of free speech and full disclosure. Julian Assange, holed up for a year in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, hails Snowden as a “hero”. Some of those who put up and then lost bail for Assange may be reluctant to do anything similar for Snowden.

Like Bradley Manning, Snowden voluntarily joined the organisation whose trust he has betrayed. He knows he is in breach of pretty grave laws in the States. There may be other – less spectacular, less attention-seeking, less potentially lucrative – ways of combating illegality at one’s place of work than leaking screeds of classified material and fleeing around the world.

In a long-gone age, people who discovered wrong-doing reported it to the authorities. They did not seek to become celebrity amateurs at muck-raking journalism. Ah, you may say, but what if the authorities themselves are corrupt? Well, you take precautions. You make sure that there is a Plan B that will be implemented if someone tries to secure your silence. Perhaps, in order to pre-empt your assassination, you reveal that not only do you know about your employer’s crime, but also this knowledge will be released if your own terms (perhaps your safety and/or your continued gainful employment) are not met.

The thing is, there isn’t much point in having security if it cannot indulge in comprehensive spying. I couldn’t give a diddly-shit if MI6 or the CIA or indeed Amazon or Google or my bank or the local police force reads all my emails and listens in to my phone calls. They’re welcome to their dreary rounds of surveillance duty. If as a result a bomb doesn’t go off on the next train I take, I may be permitted to be quite pleased, assuming that I would ever know how close I may have come to being blown to smithereens.

The KILLING of GARCIA TALKER

“We will have him round every night. We will serve fried chicken”. These dozen words have rocked the febrile world of golf to its proverbial foundations. Can you credit it?

Here’s how they came to be said. Every year, the European Tour (the organisation that manages those events in Europe at which the professionals play) hosts a dinner for players and officials. That this year’s dinner was held at Heathrow suggests that it is not the most elegant event in the social calendar.

Evidently there are speeches and rather less formal shenanigans at these dinners. For aught I know, they have fire-eating and pole-dancers. At any rate, the golfer Sergio Garcia had the mic this year and someone asked whether he would invite Tiger Woods over for a meal during the forthcoming US Open. The subtext to this question was not wholly without mischief because it is no secret that Garcia and Woods are not exactly bosom buddies.


A contrite Señor Garcia

Garcia’s off-the-cuff answer brought a hushed horror to the crowd. People rose from their half-eaten sorbets and left the room in search of smelling salts and brandy. For the next 24 hours, all flights due to land at Heathrow were diverted to Stansted. Tiger Woods is secluded at an exclusive retreat in Beverly Hills where profound shocks are given state-of-the-art treatment. Garcia has been banned from all professional and amateur golf courses for the rest of his life and has been obliged to take up crown-green bowls. The Queen has been informed.

Here’s what my statement would be if I were Garcia. “I love fried chicken. I cook it every week and everyone says mine is the best. Whenever I have a particularly favoured guest, I serve fried chicken. I am told that fried chicken is eaten by black people in the United States. I can tell you that it is also eaten by white people in the States. It is eaten by Europeans in Europe, by Asian people in Asia and by Africans and South Americans in, respectively, Africa and South America. It is nowhere an unusual dish, save perhaps in the Arctic and the Antarctic, where chickens are more difficult to keep.


Fried chicken: this is a Thai version

“At the dinner, I did not mention the fact that Tiger Woods is of mixed race. Indeed, the matter of race never entered the discussion until I was accused of racism. I deny racism. I will not apologise because I have no reason to apologise. If what I said in any way implied that Tiger Woods is of mixed race, so what? This is not a secret about him. It is not racist to say that someone is black or of mixed race. There is never any mention in the British media of Stephen Lawrence wherein he is not described as “the murdered black teenager”. Is that racist?

“Is it racist to suggest that the French drink champagne or that the Jews eat chopped liver? I am a Spaniard. Is it racist every time someone describes me as a Spanish golfer? Would it be thought racist if someone asked whether I would like paella on the European Tour dinner menu? And would it be racist even if I merely laughed and said ‘that’s fine’? I only ask because Tiger Woods has said “it’s long past time to move on and talk about golf”. I agree.


Tiger and Sergio nearly come to blows

“So who are these people who take it upon themselves to be offended on Woods’ behalf? Is any of them black or of mixed race? The management of the European Tour is hardly celebrated across the world as a model of interracial, non-sexist integration. Nor is any other part of the professional golf world. Should we not look at the fact that, after more than a decade and a half at the top of the game, Tiger Woods is still virtually the only top-100 player who is not white? Isn’t that a rather more pertinent question than arguing about whether an informal, unplanned remark gave offence to people whose own circumstances were in no way touched by it?

“If the authorities decide to take any punitive action against me, I shall take legal action against them. I shall also consult my lawyers if any sponsors try to vary my contracts with them. This is a non-issue blown up by the media and by self-important individuals anxious to jump on any bandwagon that permits them to air their own constantly-nurtured sense of outrage. It’s time people grew up”.

*************************************

My regular readers will have noted that the flow has slowed this year. This is largely because I am engaged in writing a book and also – and, as you may imagine, this is apt to interfere with the book-writing too – a new dog has joined our pack, a seven year-old rescue chocolate Labrador, name of Bear.


Bear

IRON in the SOUL

On a Wednesday in November 1990, I was sitting in my office at Greenford. We were on location shooting the Euston Films series Minder, of which I was then script editor. The phone rang, I picked up the receiver and a voice said two words. I needed no explanation of who the caller was, his voice being so familiar as the senior writer on the series, David Yallop. Nor did I need any more explanation than his two words: “She’s gone”.

Now she’s finally, definitively gone. She’s never coming back, though god knows she’s going to go on in legend. No national leader since World War II has cut quite so divisive a figure, not Francisco Franco nor Hugo Chavez nor Hendrik Verwoerd nor Mao Zedong nor Fidel Castro nor Alexander Dubcek nor Robert Mugabe nor Radovan Karadzic nor Charles de Gaulle nor Richard Nixon nor Idi Amin nor even her great chum Agusto Pinochet. Perhaps the only credible suggestion to trump her is Stalin.

That she should have contrived to become and remain so divisive sits amusingly with the famous quote she had readied for her first walk up Downing Street as newly elected Prime Minister in 1979: “I would just like to remember some words of St Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony, where there is error, may we bring truth, where there is doubt, may we bring faith, and where there is despair, may we bring hope’. And to all the British people – howsoever they voted –may I say this. Now that the election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country of which we're so proud to be a part. And finally, one last thing: in the words of Airey Neave whom we had hoped to bring here with us, ‘There is now work to be done’.” (Note the use of 'we' throughout. She was imperious and monarchical long before her bizarre announcement "we are a grandmother").


Millar

The quote was found and rewritten for her by her favourite speechwriter, Ronald Millar, whom she later knighted. Millar was a jobbing playwright and former actor, the products of whose day job have not stood the test of time. (His best-known works, the play Abelard and Heloise and the musical Robert and Elizabeth, both draw upon the inspirations of others). It’s intriguing that David Cameron also depends for speech material on an old-fashioned dramatist and former actor whose work is unlikely to last – Julian Fellowes.

Millar also came up with one of Thatcher’s most quoted lines: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning”. This is a gloss on the title of Christopher Fry’s verse play of 1948, The Lady’s Not for Burning, which was already forgotten by the time of Thatcher’s reference in 1980. Indeed, the PM herself had no more heard of it than she knew of the St Francis quote. And she delivered the line with no suggestion that she expected anyone to find it witty or smart; but then nobody claims that any sort of sense of humour was part of her make-up. That she didn’t have the smarts to see the bear-trap that she was digging for herself when she declared of her dependable deputy William Whitelaw “every Prime Minister needs a Willie” speaks volumes.

Thatcher’s unparalleled divisiveness derived from her uniquely uncompromising approach to government. She is routinely accounted, by enemy and ally alike, “a conviction politician”. An alternative gloss would be to call her blinkered. At any rate, she was the antithesis of the politician embodied by RA Butler in his summary of government as being “the art of the possible”. Thatcher never talked in those terms. She preferred such nostrums as “there is no alternative”. She judged Tories more severely than those of rival parties – “is he one of us?” – and she dismissed consensus-seeking Tories as ‘wets’. When Chris Patten, then Chairman of the Party under John Major’s leadership, lost his Bath seat at the 1992 general election, Thatcher did nothing to refute the widely circulated claim that the gathering for the results at the Thatcher home had cheered.



But though all other leaders of major British political parties in the modern era have consciously sought to build consensus and to appeal to the supposed centre ground of the electorate, Thatcher’s own triple electoral success evidently commends itself to subsequent party leaders. Thatcher was the first former leader of any party to be invited to take tea at Downing Street with, in succession, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. You might think that Blair would first welcome Jim Callaghan, that (after the latter’s death) he or Brown would invite Neil Kinnock or Michael Foot, but doubtless the fact that none of the three won a general election counted against them.

By the same token, Cameron might have first welcomed John Major, but I suppose by 2010 he was completely out of favour. Or he might have invited Michael Howard, the only one of his predecessors as opposition leader not to join the cabinet (and it was Howard who brought both Cameron and George Osborne onto the front bench). In fact, following the logic of Blair and Brown’s respective embrace of Thatcher, the obvious first guest for Cameron would have been Blair himself, in whose mould Cameron has consciously moulded himself and to whose pragmatic politics Cameron is rather closer than to Thatcherism.

Margaret Thatcher came to the leadership of the Conservative Party by means of a daring coup. She was part of a loose grouping in the party in the early 1970s that was disenchanted with Edward Heath who was seen as being ideologically weak, managerially inept and lamentably Europhiliac. Heath had lost both the general elections of 1974, conducted initially to answer the question “who governs Britain?” and to invite the response “the government, not the unions”. Not many – certainly not Heath himself – saw a decisive challenge coming from the far right of the party and especially not one to promote the candidature of Heath’s widely disparaged education secretary (“Margaret Thatcher, milk-snatcher”).



But Thatcher was seen to have the legs for it by a faction whose membership ebbed and flowed but who came to be dubbed by the press ‘the gang of four’, after the cabal that surrounded the widow of Chairman Mao. Its staunchest members were Airey Neave, Norman Tebbit, George Gardiner and Nigel Lawson. Thatcher’s own particular ideological guru was the Jewish intellectual baronet, Keith Joseph.

Some time in 1974 – I cannot recall when exactly but it might have been between the February and October elections – my mother visited me in London and took me to lunch at a splendid restaurant, L’épicure, which sadly no longer exists. Margaret Thatcher was at the adjoining table, dining à deux with a man whom we later were able to identify as Airey Neave. I wish now that we had eavesdropped more diligently. They must certainly have been plotting.

During Thatcher’s term as leader of the opposition, Neave was killed while driving out of the House of Commons car park – an IRA bomb had been planted on his car. The Thatcher circle was targeted more than any other establishment political grouping: the 1984 bomb at the Brighton Grand Hotel was intended to get her and might well have done; her old ally Ian Gow was killed in his own driveway. No British politician was more hated by Irish Republicans than Thatcher.

Trade unionists hated her too, none more than the miners, whose livelihood as well as power Thatcher intended to destroy. The British coal industry never recovered from the long-drawn-out and fiercely contested strike of 1984 and those parts of the country that formerly depended on mining are now among the most deprived.

Thatcher’s ogre-like reputation among mining communities gave rise to a song lyric that is more venomously disposed towards a politician than any other I know. It was written by Lee Hall (to music by Elton John) for the stage musical version of Billy Elliott and the chorus goes: “So merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher./
May God's love be with you.
/We all sing together in one breath:
/Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher./
We all celebrate today,/
'Cause it's one day closer to your death”. American tourists who flock to the show in London must be astounded to hear such a sentiment about a woman who they think of as an English heroine.

It’s clear that Thatcher never gave two hoots for any idea of rapprochement with miners or any other kind of blue-collar worker. Despite her Franciscan sentiment of 1979, she never sought or expected to be supported by the votes of people whose lives were alien to hers. Making an early television appearance as pensions minister, Thatcher was told by her interviewer that “it has been said that Britain is a fine place to live if you are neither very poor nor black”, to which she responded “well, what has that to do with me?” There is no evidence that she ever sought the vote of anyone very poor or non-white.



Another remark attributed to Thatcher is to the effect that “a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure”. The reliability of this quote is contested but it says a good deal about Thatcher that anyone would believe her capable of saying it.

Her absence of empathy with people who lacked the drive and ruthlessness that she herself embraced made her the most unpopular Prime Minister in history in the course of her third year in power, as unemployment rates reached unimagined heights. But the invasion of the Falklands changed all that. Thatcher was unbelievably fortunate to have such a cause fall into her lap and, despite such unforgiveable decisions as the gratuitous sinking of the Argentinian cruiser the General Belgrano with the loss of more than 300 lives, she reaped a colossal electoral advantage that sustained her until the second, post-Poll Tax collapse of support, this time fatally, in 1990 when, on Wednesday November 22nd, she bowed to the inevitable and announced that she would stand down. The lamentable legacy of the Falklands War was that leaders across the planet began to believe that waging war was the best means of reversing domestic unpopularity, a theory that Blair went on to test on five separate occasions. No doubt he still doesn’t understand why Iraq was not his own Port Stanley.

The most far-reaching and destructive effect of the Thatcher governments was the transformation of the nature of the British economy, with state assets sold off, financial regulation abolished and the “loads-a-money” mentality fostered. It’s hard now not to think of the 1980s rather than the 1930s as being the “low, dishonest decade” of Auden’s description.

Tragically, it seems unlikely that Labour will ever seek to reverse this transformation. However greedy the privatized utilities become, Labour is not about to take them back into state control, nor is it likely to find the gumption to bring the banks and the so-called financial services industry to heel. Ed Miliband’s party is as post-Thatcherite as Cameron’s is.

Indeed, there remains more residual resentment of Thatcherism in the not-entirely-moribund tradition of shire Tories than survives in any other part of the political forest. I cannot resist the feeling that Peter Carrington, Jim Prior and Michael Heseltine will all take some grim satisfaction in having seen her out. But I bet not even Denis Healey took pleasure from the demise of Michael Foot, the nearest Labour has ever come (and it’s not very near) to a conviction-politician leader comparable to Thatcher.

The BBC and ME: A LOVE-HATE THING Part IV

Wherein I conclude this account of my sentimental education in one of the most institutional of British institutions. We last glimpsed our protagonist leaving BBC employ for the final time. I cannot now recall with certainty but I guess I must still have been on contract when my production of Farrukh Dhondy’s four-parter, King of the Ghetto, went out. At any rate, I do remember being interviewed for Radio Times in my office at Threshold House on Shepherd’s Bush Green. It was, I feel sure, part of the reason why Jonathan Powell, the Head of Drama, pretended that the production schedule was a lot more comfortable than it turned out to be that he required the tapes for transmission almost as soon as editing was completed.

As I was on hand, I couldn’t resist popping down to the viewing room to see my old previewer chums on the Friday that Part 1 was screened for them. Most of the faces were familiar to me, not least that courtly old gent Herbie Kretzmer, long the previewer for the Daily Express, whose lyrics for Les Misérables had not quite yet made him a millionaire. There was a new kid on the block, though, the previewer for The Sunday Times, who spent the entire duration of the episode on the telephone. Perhaps understandably, he has never been my favourite journalist. His name was Mark Lawson.


Herbie Kretzmer: do you hear the people sing his lyrics?

King caused a certain amount of flurry, not least because Farrukh had been writing loosely fictionalized versions of real people. I knew nothing of the background to his fiction and – call me irresponsible if you like, but – I was happy not to know. After all, the BBC had committed to production long before it was in any sense my responsibility. My first duty was to get the thing done in time for the booked slots.

In several ways, I was on a hiding to nothing. For instance, we were going to need a number of extras for several scenes shot around Brick Lane. I tried the usual gambit of placing an announcement in the trade magazine, The Stage. The mag’s advertising manager sharply informed me that we could not seek to recruit Bengalis, however. This evidently was a breach of provisions under the Race Relations Act. All we could ask for were people who could play Bengali. Consequently, on the day, the extras that reported covered the waterfront: Indo-Pakistanis, Arabs, Orientals, Afro-Caribbeans, Turks, Greeks and Cypriots, Jews and Muslims, Latinos, indeed anyone who didn’t look obviously WASPy or Nordic. Hence our crowd scenes did not bear much scrutiny.

Another problem was that Farrukh had written some dialogue to be exchanged between Bengali characters but did not himself speak Bengali. I contacted the Bengali department of the BBC World Service and someone there expressed himself delighted to supply the translations, which he duly did. Come the shoot, however, our actors who were to say the lines decried the translations, saying that they sounded more like the Bengali equivalent of Shakespeare than the appropriate demotic. This put me and the director Roy Battersby in a quandary. None of the actors was actually Bengali so how reliable could they be? On the other hand, there was no time to mess about. We had to trust the actors not to create a further problem.


Mark Lawson: he was never young, even when he was young

Before the run of the serial was finished, a formal complaint had been lodged with the BBC by people reckoning to represent the Bengali community around Brick Lane and a small if noisy demonstration was mounted at the gates of Television Centre. Roy happened to be at the Centre that day – I suspect we were still editing episode 4 – and he quizzed the protesters closely.

Farrukh, Roy and I were summoned to a meeting with some Bengali representatives in the office of the then Controller of BBC2, who was none other than Graeme McDonald, the producer of the one-off drama Circle Line that launched my BBC career. Graeme was obliged to play it lofty and impartial. The Bengalis – clearly articulate young men with a particular axe to grind and no conceivable right to speak for “the whole” Bengali community – were angry and dismissive. The three of us decided not to get into too much detailed debate or to reveal the difficulties under which we had been labouring or to concede much of anything. I remember one young chap declaring “you have raped my language and culture” and I decided he would be a local councillor before too long. I imagine some formal record of the meeting was kept by the BBC but, as far as any practical consideration went, that was the end of the matter.


Bengalis marching in Brick Lane (though not, on this occasion, against the BBC)

Whether that – relatively modest – outburst of controversy had any bearing on my own standing at the BBC, I cannot tell. The press didn’t pick it up, mercifully. On balance, it seemed to me that I had done exactly what was required and got Jonathan out of an awkward scheduling hole. But I was never rewarded for it.

I had spent quite a lot of the mid-1980s looking for work. After King, I was again unemployed. I recall feeling that, as I turned 40, I was good and ready for a major post in television. Yet I couldn’t even get an interview as an assistant sub-editor on Radio Times, a publication for which I had written quite often as a freelance. Meanwhile, my contemporaries were taking over the top television jobs. Soon after my departure from the BBC, Jonathan Powell was appointed Controller BBC1 and, simultaneously, Alan Yentob became Controller BBC2. As another contemporary pointed out, they were both 40 and neither had a family. Well, nor did I.


Alan Yentob, also old when young

Over the years, I have applied for a large number of posts, many of them at the BBC. I usually managed at least to get an interview because my cv, if I may say so, is pretty interesting. I may not be a particularly dynamic interviewee. The only two times that I actually enquired what in particular had counted against me, I was told that the person who had won the post was “hungrier”. I couldn’t but feel that this was not much help. In both cases, the appointed person was quite a bit younger than me. I suspect that “hungry” in someone older can easily come over as “desperate”.

One BBC post I applied for required applicants to furnish a list of “contacts” in the industry. As a long-time journalist, I could make a list running into hundreds but I confined my submission to a few dozen, beginning with the then BBC Director-General (John Birt) whom I had known as far back as when he was a humble programme-maker, let alone an executive.

But it occurred to me that I needed to append a covering note to my submission. The BBC form required one to enter one’s full name, in my case William Stephen Gilbert. If someone checking out my contacts claim were to refer to me as William Gilbert, she would draw a total blank. Stephen Gilbert would trawl many more confirmations and W Stephen Gilbert one-hundred-percent success. But I might be unfortunate enough to find myself being checked out by the one person in the exercise to whom no version of the name meant a thing.

As it transpired, I never heard any more about that post, so I have no notion whether my application was dismissed as fanciful. Another attempt at securing work was even more disastrous. Someone had decided to create a new post, that of executive producer on the BBC2 magazine The Late Show. The programme already had an editor so it was difficult to see why it had any need for an additional manager.

I rang the information number given on the advertisement for the post, only to be told that the person who had the information was on leave and no one else there could help me. This seemed somewhat amateurish. I decided that I would be sure to press the query when I was interviewed and sent off my application. I was given an appointment for an interview at Kensington House, in those days the home of BBC arts programmes’ offices, to be conducted by the then Head of Arts Programming, Kim Evans (whom I had never met), and Mike Poole, The Late Show editor, whose path I had crossed several times, never especially to my own advantage.


Mike Poole, not always as genial as he photographs

My appointment was for 3:15 and I arrived by 3:00 and walked round the block a couple of times (one should never appear too keen) before presenting myself at reception comfortably before 3:10. A young woman came to collect me, explaining as she took me up to the interview room that unfortunately Kim and Mike would have to go to the studio shortly so it would necessarily be a rather brief encounter. I felt pretty miffed but what choice did I have?

The beginning was taken up with explanations about their need to finish by half-past and their none-too clear account of why an executive producer was suddenly required for the programme. I was asked one or two desultory questions and then dismissed, feeling sure that an appointment had been agreed before I had even entered the room. As the assistant accompanied me back to reception, she remarked that it was a pity that I had arrived “so late”.

What did she mean? Well, she said, my interview was supposed to be at 2:45. I had the letter in my pocket so I fished it out and showed her: 3:15, perfectly clearly. Suitably embarrassed, she rushed back to the interview room while I reflected that of course Evans and Poole would have spent an unlooked-for empty half-hour deciding which of the applicants deserved the post, discounting the last one who was “so late” and who anyway Poole doubtless didn’t much rate.

The assistant returned, all apologies. I could have castigated her for the corporate failure to have an explanation of the post available as promised and for screwing up the particulars of my own interview but what would be the point? I went home and tried to call Mike Poole – we didn’t have mobile phones in those days – but of course he was unavailable in the studio. I got a letter off to him, which should have reached him first thing next day – we didn’t have email either but we did have relatively early postal deliveries. But I knew that it was futile and, sure enough, he didn’t bother to reply. Nor did I receive notice that I hadn’t got the job. I never troubled to check out who did get it.

Screw-ups like this and other posts that I applied for without any response made me wonder if I was on some BBC blacklist. Perhaps my file was decorated with one of those infamous Christmas-tree symbols that every BBC watcher had heard tell of. I wrote to the appropriate executive asking whether this was the case and I received a long and discursive letter back, full of pain that I should think such a thing and assurance that no such let or hindrance applied to my prospects at the BBC. Nevertheless, as I have indicated, I have never again worked for the corporation.

I had intended to go on to some more general reflections about the state of the BBC but it feels as though I have maundered on long enough for this posting. In due course, I shall work up a more considered conclusion. Be patient.