SEPARATING the TWEET from the CHAFF

Three weeks ago, I disdained the social networking website Twitter, as I had done ever since I first heard tell of it. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in sensing that all it amounted to was Stephen Fry announcing that he was cutting his toenails in the bath and Victoria Beckham luxuriating in the ability to put 129 exclamation marks behind the words “Bin shoppin”.

Then a friend told me that she had plugged my blog posting about the Alternative Vote. And where had she plugged it? On Twitter. I didn’t think much about it until I detected a striking spike in my blog visitor numbers. I hastened to investigate Twitter. I soon saw that it was for me.

My less dismissive notion of the site before I looked at it was still one that again I suspect that I was not alone in entertaining. People posted comments of up to 140 characters and their followers read them and were duly grateful. I couldn’t imagine that there would be many, the crumbs from whose tables I would be anxious to hoover up. Who would I follow?

On the other hand, I have plenty of practice at the brief, snappy letter to The Guardian and, though those tired of seeing my moniker on the letters page of that paper (and sometimes others) may find it hard to credit, only a portion of the letters I send actually makes it to print. But everything I tweet will survive. Naturally, none of my regular blog readers would dream of musing that perhaps I have occasionally been given to overwriting, that the editor’s blue pencil might sometimes be wanting on my postings. But 140 words is a good length, generous enough to make a succinct point.

I looked at my friend’s tweets. She rarely uses the full 140 characters. She frequently “retweets” the remarks of others and evidently never fails to retweet any compliment she receives. And there are nearly 1,700 fellow tweeters following her, which means that everything she tweets gets deposited in the in-box (called a timeline) of each of those followers, including her retweets and her responses to twitters who have tweeted her. Well, she has a certain public profile. I’m not unduly surprised. It seems quite a lot, though.

I know that Barack Obama tweets – the first head of state, I believe, to do it – so I put him in the search box and there was his timeline. He has nearly 7.5million followers and, more amazingly, he follows nearly 700,000 other tweeters. Of course his tweets are anodyne and you’d think that someone does them for him, save that he’s obviously a congenital fiddler with gadgets and they do sound like him. I bet he doesn’t read the incoming tweets, though. Even if all those he follows only tweet once each day, he wouldn’t be able to read them and govern the country as well.

So, with some slight misgivings, I signed on as a tweeter. It seems there were 200million tweeters worldwide so now there are 200million and one. My misgivings almost entirely concerned the little that I needed yet another displacement activity. Putting those aside, I took to it as a duck to orange. You can say anything you like as long as it isn’t offensively disobliging in the way that people generally understand that to mean – impugning individuals, giving gratuitous offence to groupings, that kind of thing. But no one minds if you say “fuck”.

If you are lucky enough, as I was, to have someone welcoming you in and recommending her followers to have a look at you, you soon have a list of followers of your own. Inside the first day, I had an MP whom I have never met following me. What’s more, she had not been connected to me by my friend. I had started putting people who interested me in the search engine, sampling their timelines and electing to follow those who I thought would not be wasting my time. One of those was that MP. I wondered if she automatically reciprocates by following those who follow her, but no, her following numbers are lower than her follower numbers.

I committed myself to following a select band of public figures whom I like and friends who, as I discovered, already tweet. And I started to frame my own tweets. Long story short, it became my latest obsession. Any damn fool thing that popped into my head became a tweet. In a little over two weeks, I have perpetrated more than 150 tweets. Of course I like to think that some few of them might divert somebody. But in truth few of them have been retweeted yet.

One’s list of followers grows slowly. Some of them are people who can only have fallen in one’s way by chance, people in small-town America with whom one has nothing in common. These seem to be the ones most likely to fall off one’s list pretty soon. But a local newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas is still loyal, to what end I cannot guess. Also I’m touched that a number of Guardian journalists have picked up on me, and the letters page of that paper too.

I have not been promiscuous in my own following. Some tweeters only use their tweets as links to longer information elsewhere so unless you want to follow up these links there’s little point in continuing with them. Some tweet in a style of rambling incoherence. Some only ever appear to be in simultaneous conversation with others and the half of some of the conversations conducted by the person you follow drops onto your timeline but not the other half (you can access the other half if you wish).

I find the best tweeters are those who offer wry, pithy, unexpected and honed observations about the world in general rather than the narrower world in which they sit. Julian Clary was the first tweeter I felt really drawn towards. His one-liners have a delightfully old-fashioned air about them, like a rather camper version of Alan Bennett (who sadly doesn’t tweet; nor does Victoria Wood). I also fell over the humorist David Schneider and soon added him to my list. He tweets perpetually and widely, rather too often to offer links but often enough just for the sake of being witty, which is certainly reason enough for me. One of his was: "Obama announces he will stand for election on the slogan 'Yes We Haven't'".

I did look at the timeline of Stephen Fry’s legendary tweets but he seemed another in perpetual conversation so I didn’t click on his follow button. I confess that I was looking for an excuse not to. But it’s hard to predict which of those you admire will turn out to be ideal tweeters and which hopeless. It’s nifty that each person you elect to follow gets an email to introduce you but, if you decide to stop following, Twitter is discreet about it. I notice that my follower numbers go up and down and I’m convinced that the drop-outs are all strangers but I can’t be sure.

A lot of politics gets aired on Twitter though not of course if you don’t look for it. I’m sure a lot of sport does too but I assiduously avoid it. Many political tweeters exist only to point you towards articles and if you’re not reading them you may as well cull the supplier. I had hopes of Tony Benn but he, like many tweeters, did a couple a while ago and then got sidetracked and forgot about it. Ming Campbell’s tweet list is the same. Busy politicos are apt not to have time to tweet much or their tweets are done for them, like a sort of on-line diary. The most engaging tweeting politician I have so far found is Chris Bryant. He always has plenty to say, obviously gets a kick out of issuing bulletins and smart remarks and, being in opposition and not in the Shadow cabinet, has a bit more leisure for it than, say, Ed Balls.

Of course, at a holiday time like the present, people’s opportunity and appetite for tweeting will be variously compromised. Nobody wants to seem like they’re not out enjoying themselves. My partner and I are fortunate enough to live somewhere where we can have lots of fun and I hope that I have communicated some of that in my more domestic tweets.

But, as may be apparent, I am in the early stages of an infatuation. It will settle, I am sure, especially as I have a slew of work to get stuck into starting this weekend (we freelancers know nothing of bank holidays).

Incidentally, it turned out that the swell of visitors to this blog was not entirely or even especially caused by my friend’s tweet about it. Very curiously, a lot of the visits concerned a posting a fortnight earlier, the one about the nuclear plant damage at Fukushima. By the time that fortnight had passed, a great many internet searchers, especially ones in the far east, were finding their way to my blog and evidently reading or at any rate scanning the piece. This was unexpected, gratifying and rather alarming in the sense that it gave me a grave sense of responsibility for the accuracy and wisdom of what I had written. I hope I survived the scrutiny. Certainly no one is reading my tweets for my views on the advisability or otherwise of nuclear energy.

To access my tweets, click on the Twitter icon above on the right hand side of the page. Oh, and if you scroll down to the very bottom of this page, you'll find my most recent tweets there.

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A note about another site. If you paste this url into your address box:

http://www.storycellaronline.com/

you will find a new and satisfying site called The Story Cellar. You can run around it and explore for free, sampling the very varied short stories that it features. Then, for the modest fee of £15 per year (via PayPal), you can download whichever story catches your eye and follow up with another brand new short story each month. As an introductory bonus, a story from the out-of-copyright past may be chosen too.

Now there are many reasons why this is a beguiling place to go and not only because one of the stories is by moi (did you see that coming?). I shall be submitting others to the site soon and, as you will see, you can too.

Hope it engages you.

TAKE THIS WOMAN

Thirty years ago, I was reviewing television for the weekly trade magazine Broadcast. My benign editor, Pattie Williams, gave me carte blanche to cover whatever I wanted and to arrange the material how it suited me. I soon fell into a pattern of pulling together all the recent dramas in one column, the last few weeks’ documentaries in another, then various current affairs programmes and so on.

The one area I rarely wrote about was outside broadcasts. It is in the nature of OBs that the subject matter is rarely initiated by the television companies. Almost always, OB cameras are present at an event that would be taking place whether the cameras were there or not, most commonly sporting fixtures. Sport anyway makes my teeth hurt – though we’ll sit through quite a bit of BBC2’s coverage of the Masters from Augusta tomorrow and Sunday nights. But in all but the rarest case, OBs are not very interesting televisually, that is to say qua television.

What was supposed to be the beginning of a "fairy tale"

I always tried to write about television in a way that focussed on the medium itself. Hence, when covering those programmes that originated in television – drama, dockos, sitcom and so on – I attended greatly to the distinctions between various directors and producers. I wrote quite as much of how one sees as about what one sees. In sum, what I was really writing about was the medium and its programme-making rather than (as so many critics, supremely Clive James, did) the world seen through the television window. I felt that I was treating my subject rather as a good book critic writes about literature and the writing of books rather than the details of plot in a novel or the niceties of argument deployed in non-fiction.

As the wedding of HRH the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer loomed, Pattie asked me gently if I planned to write about the coverage. I didn’t need to ponder before I said no and she accepted that with good grace. (I may misremember but I have a feeling that she commissioned someone else to write a one-off piece, to accompany rather than to supplant my own column).

Lady Diana rides into unreality television

A large public event like a royal wedding or a state funeral allows little scope for creative thought on the part of broadcasters unless the Palace itself decides to tinker with the format. So, for the editor in charge of coverage, the line producer and the director(s), it is far more of a logistical than an artistic exercise. Hungry newspapers try to build stories out of which celebs have been dragged in to give their precious views (anyone remotely famous who sounds English but hasn’t already been signed up by an American network for this month’s royal wedding has clearly missed a trick). But in truth there is very little mileage in the story of what television companies plan for their respective broadcasts, save for stuff about the cost.

Quite apart from the event’s lack of interest in purely televisual terms, I found no personal interest in it. My line at the time of the 1981 hullabaloo was: “I’m a Socialist, a republican, a humanist and a homosexual. What is there for me in a royal wedding?”

Royal couple-to-be: pretext for a marketing frenzy

There have been a few of these things in my time. Six months to the day after my birth, HRH Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN. Few of the groom’s relatives attended. All of his sisters were married to Germans so they were not invited so soon after the war. Most of the nation followed the event on the wireless. Those few who owned television sets will have seen a sprinkling of live shots from outside Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. Later in the evening, a compilation of swiftly developed and edited film of the procession was broadcast.

It was not until the coronation of Princess Elizabeth as Queen in 1952 that the BBC had the resources to mount full coverage of the day’s events, including shots inside the Abbey. It was this transmission that established the medium as something everyone wanted to follow. A million sets were sold in the UK that year.

Royal wedding 1947 style

As well as the Prince of Wales, four of Her Majesty’s other relatives have elected to marry on television – and all but one of them (the now widowed Princess Alexandra) to divorce (not on television). The Queen’s youngest child, the Earl of Wessex, had a quiet ceremony at St George’s Chapel, Windsor and also remains wed.

I sat through the televised marriage of Princess Margaret to the trendy photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960. We had the day off school and my mother, a great royalist, decreed that watching was mandatory. The thing about it that has stayed with me most vividly is a remark by that swishy old queen Norman Hartnell about his design for the bride’s gown: “All the work is under the dress”. That seemed to me then and still seems a perfect evocation of the art that conceals art.

Serial wedder Henry VIII

Otherwise, I have avoided these atavistic marathons of non-television in which the merest platitude is uttered and then repeated as if a pearl of boundless price. In The Guardian the other day, various writers who think themselves wits were listing the supposedly subversive events that they plan to attend on the day that HRH Prince William plights his troth with Miss Catherine Middleton. How absurd. It’s like refusing to step into a church to look at the impressive Norman architecture because you’re an atheist. If you’re going to attend an anti-street party, you may as well go to a real one. To the question “what are you doing on April 29th?", my answer would be: “I’ve no idea, it’s three weeks away”.

At the Charles’n’Di do, the most interesting nugget was the lack of an invitation issued to the bride’s step-grandmother, that great, quivering pink blancmange of a romantic novelist, Barbara Cartland. No doubt someone advised of the likelihood that she would upstage most of the royal family, if not the Queen Mum herself. That of course would have made it worth a few moments of dipping into.

At the end of my Broadcast review of other (now forgotten) programming, I explained in a brief paragraph why I would not be covering the royal wedding. I ended by observing that “the wedding without Barbara Cartland will be like Hamlet without the Player Queen”. I thought this was a rather adroit witticism that would be repeated widely but it never was. I put that down to the narrow circulation of the magazine. Probably now it will go viral (whatever that means).

Player Queen

I’LL GET MY COAT

Our lane expires in a T-junction with a main road. Before the coming of motorways, this road was the main arterial route to London. Despite the parallel motorway section a few miles to the north, which opened forty years ago this year, the old A road remains busy; indeed its use has discernibly increased in the thirteen years that we have lived here. Just by the turn into our lane is a sign signalling the end of the speed restriction that obtains through the village strung further along the main road. But few drivers restrain themselves until they reach that sign; they put their foot down as soon as they have cleared the identifiable shops. The road seems especially like a racetrack around teatime.

Late yesterday afternoon, a man sauntered down the lane, crossed the main road and weaved through the gateway opposite the end of the lane. This gateway is a sort of fixed kissing gate that allows access to pedestrians and their dogs but thwarts cyclists, prams, wheelchairs and anything of comparable or greater un-manoeuvrability. Beyond it, a small housing estate spreads across a greensward and beyond that is a corner shop, which was the man’s objective.

Having fulfilled his errand, he retraced his steps. As he approached the weave gate, he saw that a cat was ambling ahead of him towards the gateway. It slowed, stopped, sat on its haunches under the lowest bar of the gate and looked around laconically at the man. The man stopped too. He evidently was calculating that to approach the gate might alarm the cat into running ahead. A narrow pathway skirts the road on the gate side (there is none on the far side) but the cat could hardly be relied upon to turn onto that pathway. Cats are more apt to spring forwards and hope for the best.

Rather than be responsible for the cat being squished by a vehicle, the man set off to his right. Between the main road and the little-used ring road around the small estate runs a hedgerow, grown up around a wire fence and punctuated with horse chestnuts. The man paced a few dozens yards until he came to a gap in the hedge where the wire had long been beaten down to allow access. There was still plenty of low growth in the gap and he stepped gingerly for he knew that the stings of nettles, which easily penetrate ankle socks, are especially potent at this time of year.

He then took an extended step towards the roadside pathway but, as he did so, his trailing foot caught in something unyielding – a branch of ivy perhaps or a trailing length of fence wire – and he sprawled forwards. The momentum of the step that he had been in the process of attempting carried him across the pathway and he landed face down half in the road itself. His sudden fall gave no time for the approaching driver to brake or swerve and the vehicle passed over his head, killing him instantly.

I was that man. Apart (clearly) from the last sentence, my account of the incident is as accurate as I am capable of making it. As I fell forwards towards the road, I distinctly thought: “I am going to die now”. As I hit the road, I turned my head towards the oncoming traffic but, amazingly, there was none. I scrambled up. Vehicles passed on the other side of the road – one car tooted at me but I couldn’t tell how to read the toot. Then the traffic stream resumed on the near side including, almost immediately, two juggernauts. Just a few seconds either way would have sealed my fate.

Becoming aware that my left wrist and left knee were both fairly painful and that the left knee of my jeans was slightly torn, I walked slowly and carefully back up the pathway until I was opposite our lane. The cat was nowhere to be seen and, thankfully, was not a flattened mess on the road. I was already thinking about my Dad who died trying to cross a busy road, a victim of his own impatience and the speed of a driver who was fined £120 for his pains. I waited until it was clearly no sort of gamble to cross over.

My partner persuaded me to apply a pack of frozen peas (which we keep for such eventualities) to my knee and to my wrist. The cold diminishes the swelling. It was not until the next day (today) that I noticed that my watch, which has always kept impeccable time, was running ten minutes slow, evidently a product of the knock it must have received. It, like its owner, is lucky not to have been smashed beyond repair.

In the colour magazine of the Saturday edition of The Guardian, called ‘Weekend’, there is a regular questionnaire feature called ‘Q&A’, an exercise based on the so-called ‘Proust Questionnaire’ in Vanity Fair. One of the standing questions is: “What is the closest you’ve come to death?” I always think it’s an absurd question (although, of course, I find all the questions absurd). We walk constantly in death’s shadow. At the edge of a road (or a garden pond or a high window or a river or a cliff), we can be literally one step from oblivion. We are but a bottle of pills or a kitchen knife away. The heart attack, the brain haemorrhage, the murderer or the accident could strike at any moment. Or, like Phil Silvers and Ian Richardson and Sheridan Morley, we could just drift into sleep and never return: merciful for us, horrible for our close ones.

Linda Grant catches this very well in her novel The Clothes on Their Backs: "You take a misstep, you turn your head the wrong way when you cross the road, you gargle with bleach instead of mouthwash, it's just ridiculous the doors that are slightly ajar between life and death. Life's extreme fragility is all around us, as if we are perpetually walking on floors of cracked glass" [p 48, Virago 2008].

Four weeks ago today, there was an incident outside a local community centre. Two men old enough to know better got into an altercation. The older knocked the younger down. In falling, he cracked his skull on the pavement and, as he lay there stunned, he suffered a fatal heart attack. The attacker was detained by the police and later released on bail. The local paper, as the media are apt to do, used the lurid phrase “murder probe”. Clearly, though, manslaughter will be the charge if any is preferred.

The man who died was the local builder, universally known as Micky the Brickie. Round our way, he would have met with few opportunities to work with bricks because almost everything, even the new builds, is fashioned from stone. He might better have been known as Jason the Mason, but Micky was his actual name – he was not of the generation to be called Jason, being only six years younger than me. As the police held onto the body, his family could not bury him for three weeks, plenty of time for everyone to discuss the case. For Micky was indeed known to everybody and, I should have thought, liked by everybody. He was always full of fun and a great talker, with the down side common to that condition that he wasn’t much of a listener. But you forgave him anything because he was instinctively generous. Ours is one of scores of local houses containing some perfectly chosen item or material rescued for recycling and gladly handed over, offers of payment waved away. My partner accounted Micky’s great quality “generosity of spirit” and I think that gets it exactly.

Micky’s death genuinely shocked people because it was sudden and, as his widow remarked, “so unnecessary”. What she was alluding to has subsequently become clearer. It seems that the man who knocked Micky down and who is out on bail was her first husband. This has brought a noisome overtone of soap opera into what had seemed a small but affecting tragedy.

We do walk always in the shadow of death. In the bath this morning, I found myself reminiscing about a trip to Scotland with two pals from university. One of them, John, was an experienced climber. He had scaled several of the major peaks and had lost several friends to the enthusiasm, one of whom (his best friend) fell to his death while roped to John, leaving the survivor the melancholy (and dangerous) task of climbing down into a crevasse to retrieve the body. John was a lovely guy, a big golden bear of a man with a melodious Barnsley accent.

In Scotland, John contemplated the other two of us – Neil, a level-headed geologist, and me, capable sometimes of behaving sensibly – and decided that we could safely drive to Glencoe and go for a clamber. It wasn’t a proper climb but it was strenuous work. We then walked the length of a ridge high above the glen. I no longer recall our route – it’s more than forty years ago – and whether it can have been the legendary Aonach Eagach I somehow doubt, but it was certainly a testing scramble and it took several hours.

At one point the ridge grew very narrow, a row of jagged rocks with a 200-foot drop on either side. Radiating calm, John led the way and we gamely followed, me bringing up the rear. I suddenly managed to trap one leg under the other thigh and was stuck, perched on a sliver of rock and with no space in which to improvise. It occurred me that I was in genuine peril. I saw the others were moving on so I hollered. Neil turned, saw my predicament and started to panic. This, it turned out, was a lifesaver because it forced me to be ice-cool and logical. I lay back, gripped the rock beneath me with both hands, arched my back and lifted my thigh so that I could pull the other leg clear. Then I managed to raise myself to a crouch and inch along until I was on a wider part of the ridge. I saw John’s grinning face up ahead. “All right?” he called. We continued our ridge walk without mishap.

John, I remember, used to fret about my smoking, which was beginning to get heavy. “You know, I’ll be very cross with you if you make yourself ill with cigarettes” he told me one day. After he graduated, he went back to the north and married a woman whom he’d met on the same occasion that Neil and I met her. A few years later, he had surgery for a brain tumour. He and Sue came to London and met up with old pals including me. John showed off the huge scar on his skull that he generally kept covered under a woolly hat. I never saw him again. He died of a recurrence of the tumour. He was 33.

This week, it will be 29 years since I gave up smoking for good. Another friend grew stern with me one day concerning my drinking habits. I was getting through rather too much at the time. He warned me that it might undermine my health. It’s more than 15 years since he died, in his mid-40s from Aids. I don’t make this or any other observation in this posting to, as it were, “score points”. Some of us make our end inevitable by dedicated application: George Best to alcohol, Simon Gray to cigarettes. But for most, the end either comes as the culmination of illness or suddenly with little or no foreshadowing.

As one grows older, inevitably, the proximity of death nudges one more often. It brings no certainties, though, save when it comes wrapped in incurable disease. In his 90s, John Gielgud agreed to a television interview with Jeremy Paxman. In his forthright way, Paxman pressed the great man on his attitude to and preparedness for death. Sir John was visibly distressed to be obliged to contemplate the subject. I wanted him to point out that there was nothing to say that he would not outlive Paxman and that, unless the BBC kept the programme untransmitted until after his death, it was a certainty that some of those watching the interview would pass before Sir John did. And I remember a wonderfully feisty comeback from Katharine Hepburn when asked somewhat imperiously by her interviewer, Barbara Walters: “do you actually own a skirt?” “I’ll wear one to your funeral” Kate shot back. I like to think I too can take that attitude to the grim reaper.

ALL VERY …

There are elections in the UK on May 5th. As usual, some (but not all) local councils in England will be contested but this year there are other far-reaching ballots: for the whole of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies, plus a referendum across the UK on the voting system for the Westminster parliament, to which members are elected from Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland as well as England.

The referendum issue concerns whether to change from the present First Past the Post system (FPTP) to an Alternative Vote system (AV). FPTP is beguilingly simple. The candidate with the largest total of votes in the constituency is declared the winner. It makes no never mind if that candidate’s majority over the runner-up is just one vote, or if the percentage of the total votes cast that is gained by the winner is lower than – even, considerably lower than – 50 percent.



There are several possible alternative ways of awarding and counting the votes on the ballot paper but the one the electorate is being offered as an alternative to FPTP works like this. If the voter wishes to do so – and it wouldn’t be compulsory as it is, for instance, in Australia – she may write a number 1 (instead of the traditional X) against the candidate she most favours to be the MP, a 2 against the candidate among the rest whom she least abominates and so on for as far down the ballot paper as she can stomach.

When the ballot papers are checked, all the number 1 scores (plus the Xs) are added up. If one candidate has scored more than 50 percent, that is the result. In the – more usual – event of no candidate reaching half of the vote, the candidate with the lowest first preference votes is eliminated but the second preference votes on the ballots that put him first are added to the other candidates’ totals as if they were also first preference votes. In other words, from the second count onwards, second, third and so on votes on the eliminated papers have the same weight as first preference. When the result of this topping-up of votes pushes one of the candidates over 50 percent, that candidate is declared the winner. As will be apparent, this might not be the candidate who led the field at the first count.

Movie director Agnès Varda

This referendum is the Liberal Democrats’ main – some would say only – fig leaf with which to cover their shame at propping up a coalition government implementing policies almost all of which the Lib Dems opposed at the general election last year. The party has been complaining for decades that FPTP is “unfair”, that it denies them representation in the Commons commensurate with the level of votes that they receive in the ballot boxes. What they have long proposed is a more elaborate version of AV – known as AV-plus – which weights the transferred votes rather than simply counting them as equal with first preference votes.

In the dying days of his government, Gordon Brown suddenly became a convert to electoral reform, seeing it as a carrot for the Lib Dems in the event of a hung parliament, whereby the two supposedly left-of-centre parties might find an accommodation. What he proposed was AV.

Television actor Anthony Valentine

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who personally had a famously good election campaign (how long ago the mantra “I agree with Nick” now seems), was scathing. Just a fortnight before the general election, he told The Independent: “AV is a baby step in the right direction – only because nothing can be worse than the status quo. If we want to change British politics once and for all, we have got to have a quite simple system in which everyone's votes count. We think AV-plus is a feasible way to proceed. At least it is proportional – and it retains a constituency link. The Labour Party assumes that changes to the electoral system are like crumbs for the Liberal Democrats from the Labour table. I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour Party”.

Instead, of course, he has settled for the same miserable little compromise but thrashed out by the Conservative Party. He has had to go with a referendum on AV, not AV-plus, and if he loses it his party will be on what might prove to be a terminal warpath.

Cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov

Both the coalition and the opposition have agreed to allow the campaign to be a matter of conscience for individual MPs. David Cameron is opposed to AV as are William Hague, Ken Clarke, John Redwood, Margaret Beckett, Malcolm Rifkind, Keith Vaz, Caroline Flint, Michael Fallon, Dennis Skinner and the BNP among others. Ed Miliband is in favour, as are Douglas Alexander, Sadiq Khan, Hilary Benn, John Denham, Jon Cruddas, Alex Salmond and UKIP. It is pretty hard to find a high profile Tory in favour. That very fact might boost the vote for AV.

Ed Miliband’s support for AV is understandable. Last summer’s Labour leadership election was conducted under an AV-plus system. Second preference votes were successively transferred until one candidate topped 50 percent. That candidate was Miliband. His brother David led every round of voting until the last one that clinched it for Ed. What’s more, the votes were divided into three “colleges” – MPs, party members organised by constituency and unions. It was the vote of the unions that made the difference for Ed in his narrow victory. Many Labour members believe that a truer measure of party sentiment would have elected David rather than Ed. Happily for Ed – and indeed for Labour – those members have largely suppressed that belief though it will undoubtedly resurface if Ed’s leadership hits trouble. Still, it may not be entirely surprising that the largest concentration of pro-AV sentiment in the Commons resides in the shadow cabinet.

Arthur Vickers VC

The Electoral Reform Society has put out several leaflets and set out the case for AV on its website. Having read the material, I find that it has propelled me pretty firmly into the No camp, which is not at all what the ERS wanted. But so many of its arguments are bankrupt or plain stupid. “All too often” it says “the ‘winners’ in our FPTP elections are opposed by a majority of voters. AV addresses that fundamental problem ensuring that an election winner has genuine support”.

It’s absurd to suggest that FPTP winners don’t enjoy “genuine” support. How else would they manage to amass more votes than any other single candidate in the first place? And it’s no less ridiculous to propose that AV “addresses” the “problem” that such winners “are opposed by a majority of voters”. AV is only a different method of reading the result of the vote. It still produces a winner. If I want Labour to win the seat where I vote and Labour comes last (as it traditionally does in our constituency), how have I gained anything under AV? I still don’t get the MP I want. So the ERS is fantasising when it declares that “AV would remove the frustration many voters feel that they currently have no vote at all”.

Movie star Alida Valli

AV might provide more data from which its apologists could argue that the winner in some mysterious way enjoys “majority” support but as FPTP doesn’t furnish such data about voters it cannot be assumed that every vote not cast would have been a vote registering more or less support. (The ERS claims that FPTP is “taken as a statement of equal contempt for all the other [candidates]” to which I would reply “only by you is it taken that way”.)

What’s more, the proportion of the ballot papers still eligible to be counted might well be considerably below 50 percent by the time of the final run-off between the two surviving candidates so to characterise the eventual winner as recording more than 50 percent of the vote would be utterly misleading because the size of the vote still being counted will have shrunk. At the same time, the winner under AV will win on a figure consisting of many votes that have been counted several times. The voter who happens to have voted in an order of preference precisely the reverse of the majority will find each one of her votes being added to a candidate’s total.

The ERS claims that AV removes the need for “tactical voting” which traditionally means, for example (as I have done in the past) voting Lib Dem because, though I would most like Labour to win, I would least like the Tories to win. But bestowing second and third (and maybe more) preference votes is also tactical voting – indeed, it is more complex, ticklish and unpredictable tactical voting.

This Derbyshire constituency can sell the AV campaign: it's Amber Valley

The No campaign has used some water-muddying arguments of its own, claiming for instance that voting under AV requires “higher maths”. Mind you, this is less far-fetched than this ERS proposal, that “the logic’s familiar enough to anyone who’s ever asked a friend to pop down to the shops for a coke and said ‘if they’re out of that I’ll have a lemonade’.” In fact an AV ballot paper would, by that sort of analogy, require the instruction to continue “ … or a Tizer or an Irn-bru – though don’t get a lemonade if they’ve got an Irn-bru, but I’d rather have a lemonade than a Tizer, although thinking about I’d rather have an Irn-bru than a coke unless they’ve got Pepsi. But what I really want is a pork pie. Perhaps I’d better come with you”.

The one thing the ERS can hope that no one will dispute is its asseveration that “voters are tired of Punch and Judy politics”. Fair enough. But who imagines for a single second that AV will consign such ding-dongs to history? Get real.

I have studied the ERS FAQs leaflet but can find no answer to this question. Let’s say that there are five candidates in my constituency at the next general election. I’ll call them Bevan, Grimond, Pankhurst, Stalin and Thatcher. And let’s say that I number my votes in the same order in which they appear alphabetically on the ballot, so Bevan gets my ‘1’ and Thatcher gets my ‘5’. Now, suppose Bevan comes bottom of the poll and is eliminated. In the next count, my vote will be transferred to Grimond. But suppose Grimond goes out in the second count. Will my third vote he given to Pankhurst or is my ballot paper now exhausted? And say instead Grimond goes out in the first round and then Bevan in the second. Does my third place Pankhurst vote still count then too and is it the equal of someone else’s first vote for Pankhurst? If I award only two votes, first for Bevan and second for Thatcher and Bevan goes out on the first count and Thatcher survives to the run off with Stalin, will my Thatcher vote count in the second, the third and the final counts, so counting three times whereas my Bevan vote only counted once, even though he was my favourite? How is this a more just system?

In narrow party political terms, it looks as though the referendum result will be bad for the coalition whichever it is. A No win will cut off at the knees Lib Dem support for continuing the coalition. This was the prize for which they agreed to share power and they haven’t won it. A Yes win will hugely irritate the Tory backbenches, many of whom fear that they are in danger of losing their seats under AV – the Lib Dems still come second in far more Tory-held seats than in Labour-held ones. They will grumble that Cameron didn’t do enough to ensure a No victory and that the Yes win implies that Ed Miliband is making big inroads into Cameron’s wavering personal popularity. So either way, the referendum can be an own-goal for the government. Maybe on my referendum ballot paper I shall put a 1 by No and a 2 by Yes.

A LASS UNPARALLELED

Here are two stories about Elizabeth Taylor. (How hard it is really to think of her as Dame Elizabeth; much harder than Dame Julie Andrews, Dame Shirley Bassey or Dame Dorothy Tutin, all honoured in the same millennial list). Both these anecdotes date from my own school days. Do bear with me; they are indeed eventually about Elizabeth Taylor.

They knew how to do posters in the '60s

At my (all-male) school, there was an annual tradition called The School Show, a raucous entertainment put together by the boys to celebrate the end of the year. By the time my chum Tony and I were in the VIth Form, we had become the leading lights of the school’s Dramatic Society as well as its chief exponents of the latest trends in the arts/entertainment nexus, in particular the anti-establishment climate of the early 1960s that expressed itself in satire. So it naturally fell to us to put together the School Show.

During our brainstorming sessions that purportedly led to the writing of the script, it occurred to us that we had an amusing combination available to us. One of the younger boys in the DramSoc was called Philip Harrison. He was a sweet-natured, charming and rather self-effacing boy, slight and pallid but determined. He needed some courage to go on the stage, which he did whenever he could, because he was afflicted with a lisp which inevitably drew some unsympathetically pointed responses from schoolboy audiences.

Burton & Taylor dominated the magazines of the day

Then there was a lovely guy from our own year, one of nature’s carpenters and tinkerers who therefore had, almost since his arrival at the school, been the DramSoc’s stage manager of choice. He was called Tony Burton. Short, chunky and rather attractively introspective, he couldn’t act to save his life, nor wished to do so.

Finally, there was Fryer’s House. All the school’s houses had their particular character and Fryer’s – certainly for the whole of my time at the school – was the home of psychopaths. When I had first arrived, puny and bespectacled, I had been singled out by Fryer’s gangs for menaces. Being heedless, mouthy and capable of being quite funny, I usually escaped these confrontations with my life (or at least all my teeth) but the fact that I amused them no doubt prolonged the life of these rather worrying features of each day.

One of the ringleaders of our year’s generation of Fryer’s psychos was a flabby, noisy, paradoxically rather likeable slob called Taylor. With some trepidation, my pal Tony and I approached Taylor and asked whether he wouldn’t mind making his stage debut prancing about in drag consisting of swimming trunks, an improvised bra and various bits of wispy tulle. Naturally, he agreed at once. Securing the other two was then the work of a moment and so, as the climax of the School Show, we were able to announce a mighty exclusive: Taylor, Burton and Harrison in scenes from Cleopatra.

Taylor with Rex Harrison as Caesar in Cleopatra

Our script, which owed a great deal to the style of the wireless comedies to which we were then devoted, particularly Round the Horne and Beyond Our Ken, was a killer combination of witty, silly, surreal and extremely vulgar. Though we didn’t consider it at the time (maybe Tony did but I certainly didn’t), we could well have been setting out to illustrate the prediction that Shakespeare has the serpent of Old Nile make in Antony and Cleopatra: “the quick comedians/Extemporally will stage us, and present/Our Alexandrian revels; Antony/Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see/Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’ in the posture of a whore” [Act V scene ii). Our own Taylor was more roaring than squeaking but otherwise Cleopatra’s nightmare came true on our school stage. Needless to add, it brought the house down.

Rehearsing the closing number of the School Show: Taylor wears the horizontal stripes, Harrison is to his right

I hope that Harrison, Burton and especially Taylor have found in the memory of this nobly entertaining escapade an occasional anecdote to set their respective tables on a roar. For it to have been quite the hit it was, our model (the disastrous movie Cleopatra, of course) needed to be what it was – indeed quite as silly, surreal and vulgar, if nothing like as witty as our own version – and that it was so is in no small measure due to the barely disguised disdain that was clearly held back in Elizabeth Taylor’s performance only by her sulphurous passion for her leading man.

Which brings me to my second yarn. Chief among the thespian successes that Tony and I enjoyed on the school stage was the time when, celebrating our well-established double act as witty intellectuals, we gave respectively our Faustus and Mephistopheles in a production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. When, shortly after, the Oxford University Drama Society announced the great coup of securing former member Richard Burton to play Faustus in their otherwise student production, we naturally booked our seats.

The pivotal moment in the play, when Helen of Troy walks across the stage, is always a directorial headache, as Kit Marlowe must have known and relished when creating it. The most recent Stratford revival before the OUDS version had opted for a totally naked Helen, still a sensational gambit in the early (pre-Hair) 1960s. Our own director cast the prettiest boy in the school. Neither of these solutions quite achieved Marlowe's required frisson.

The Burtons on the Oxford Playhouse stage in Dr Faustus

OUDS, with its star's help, was able to summon real magic in having Burton's wife appear as the legendary beauty. Imagine: the first stage appearance anywhere in the world of the most famous movie star in the world. Only Cassius Clay, Chairman Mao and the Beatles could then rival Elizabeth Taylor’s universal fame. And – surely unprecedented on any occasion – she never uttered a word.

At lunchtime on the day of the performance for which we had booked, Tony and I sloped along to the Randolph for an appetiser. Just as we got to the entrance, a limo drew up and out stepped the Burtons, breezy, chatty and self-absorbed. We duly followed them into the hotel. While her moment as Helen was truly heart-stopping, it is the memory of Dame Elizabeth's derrière, encased in figure-hugging canary yellow slacks, that will stay with me most vividly for the rest of my life.

Taylor in her Helen costume for the later movie of Dr Faustus

I have sent this second tale to the obits page of The Guardian but I suspect that they are not going to use it. A pity. I think it evokes rather neatly the particular combination of appeals that made Taylor so celebrated. She was a stunning presence, game for any challenge and absolutely conscious of her own worth. But withal, she had the woozy, sloppy, blowsy heart of a barmaid. No wonder so many gay men were her friends.

Andrea Teuber as Mephistopheles with Helen and Faustus

That’s why George Stevens' A Place in the Sun is her abiding memorial and such a remarkable movie, so un-Hollywood, more like a great French or Italian masterpiece. Loosely based on Dreiser’s huge novel, An American Tragedy, it pits Taylor against Shelley Winters for the hand of Montgomery Clift. That both Taylor and Winters seemed, throughout their respective careers, forever poised on the lip of metamorphosing into a Mediterranean fishwife (Winters was about to acquire an Italian husband) explains something of the movie’s tensions. Taylor, as usual (though not in Virginia Woolf or The Taming of the Shrew) is poised between the important dignity of tragedy and the absurd bawdy of comedy. So is Winters. Squeezed between the two is Clift, ever the wracked, self-conscious (and gay) poet. It’s mesmerizing.

Winters, Clift in A Place in the Sun

LIBYA – RATION the RHETORIC

Yesterday, on the eighth anniversary of the Commons vote in favour of the illegal invasion of Iraq, David Cameron laid before parliament the rationale for the United Nations’ resolution to impose a so-called no-fly zone on Libya. From the moral high ground on which Cameron plants his feet, the issue is so very simple. Gaddafi is a bad man and he must be taught a lesson. Primary schoolchildren could articulate the position just as persuasively. It is what I call The Bogie Man Theory of History, or, as the Americans would call it, The Boogey Man Theory.

Not that there is any significant opposition to this in the House. It has been observed before (though I am unable to verify an attribution) that “when the House is united, it is invariably wrong”. Yesterday confirmed that sentiment. Nick Clegg, whose party opposed the Iraq invasion, sat doing the gravely nodding dog act beside his coalition leader. Ed Miliband rushed to sound as resolute and determinedly courageous as Cameron, as if anybody gives a tuppenny damn what the British Labour Party says about the issue. You cannot expect sense from Labour on matters of British imperialism. I can never forget that, just a fortnight after describing himself as “an inveterate peacemonger”, Michael Foot (of all people) was unconditionally supporting Margaret Thatcher’s adventure in the south Atlantic, an exercise that, by itself, almost certainly kept the Tories in power (and so Labour out of office) for the following fifteen years.

Cameron in the Gulf States last month

Britain cannot stand idly by, is Miliband’s argument, while Gaddafi massacres his own people. Well, I want to ask: why not? What do the ambassadors of, for the sake of argument, Hungary, Barbados, Venezuela, Laos and Gabon have to say about the implied criticism that they are indeed perfectly happy to stand idly by? Why does Britain have to be the one who takes it upon herself to punish the bogie man of the sands? Apart from being the most extensive supplier in history of armaments to the country, Britain has no particular historical links with Libya, certainly none comparable to those of Italy, of which Libya was a colony for most of the first half of last century. Yet Silvio Berlusconi’s input into the no-fly zone argument is not widely recorded. Perhaps he has been too busy entertaining under-age women this week (as every other week).

Gaddafi cultivates the Ruritanian look

Throughout the thrilling people’s revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak earlier this year, we heard daily about how wonderful is the Egyptian army. So why didn’t the UN put pressure on Egypt to send its fabled troops over the border to repel Gaddafi? Other member states of the Arab League – Jordan, Kuwait and Morocco, for instance – have disciplined military strength. It makes considerably more geopolitical sense for Arab nations physically to lead the campaign to bring Gaddafi to heel.

Cameron, basking in evidently widespread approval for having played a supposedly canny hand with both the UN and the US, assures that he is not “grandstanding” on this matter. Of course he is. Cameron veers between invoking the “moral” argument that Miliband articulated and reassuring his political base that it is “in Britain’s interests” to lead the world’s reaction to Gaddafi’s rush towards civil war. These interests begin and end with the international supply and cost of oil. At least when he concedes that much, Cameron is approaching a soupçon of candour.

The argument about morality is bankrupt. When, on the BBC News last night, Nick Robinson asked the PM about his position on Bahrain, Cameron waved it away: different problem, different dynamic, different order of morality. Here’s a significant difference: picking a fight with the Saudi forces now called into the Bahraini kingdom to put down the rebellion is much more challenging than picking a fight with Gaddafi’s raggle-taggle air force of conscripted peasants and Saharan mercenaries. Clearly, the military might of a consortium consisting of Britain, France and – in the second wave perhaps – the USA is not going to have much trouble wiping out Libya’s military might.

Gaddafi visiting Berlusconi in Rome, 2009

Or is it? The invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan figured it would be the work of a few weeks at most. Libya might be as straightforward to quell as Serbia or it might not. Gaddafi has not lasted this long in power without being a wily and tough operator. The ceasefire announced yesterday by his foreign minister, the wonderfully named Mussa Kussa, is certainly a sham. But it has already had the desired effect. It has wrong-footed the west and sent governments into a further huddle. There will be more of this.

So Britain has embarked on another military interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign nation with consequences just as unknowable as they always are. The hubris – of the very interference, of the self-aggrandisement, of the cloak of proclaimed morality, of the certainty of military superiority – is breathtaking.

And then, seeing as no one seems yet to have asked, I ask it: who pays? Simple. We do. Today’s Daily Telegraph, while busy lining up Cameron for canonisation as a war leader, gaily trumpets on its front page that “some families will have £3,500 wiped off their annual incomes next month because of tax increases and cuts to benefits”. Oh good. How much less pain they will feel to know that this loss of income will now be largely spent on an utterly unpredictable big-willy experiment in the North African desert. How can a government that is in the throes of undermining – in some cases fundamentally undermining – every public enterprise in Britain gaily decide to throw money at a totally unnecessary interference in a foreign civil war?

Intimates no more – Sarkozy and Gaddafi in 2007

Well, you may say, what would you do? Just sit back and let Gaddafi massacre his brave populace? I am not a politician, nor about to be one. I don’t have to have a foolproof bill of fare ready to execute tomorrow. Nor do I have to accept the convention of starting from here. I do have a long-term proposal that, had it been put into effect when I first proposed it five years ago, might have avoided the situation that we now face. Here it is.

We must give the United Nations actual power and that of course means power greater than that of any one member. The UN charter, still almost exactly as written in 1945, needs substantial revision. The permanent members of the Security Council must agree to surrender their veto, the prerogative of the bully over the powerless. No member can be allowed exemption.

The veto means that the UN has no muscle to flex against the US or China or the other elite nations. Which of them will volunteer to forego a veto? It would need a visionary party leader or presidential candidate to carry the case with his own electorate, so as to take a mandate to the other Security Council members; a diplomat of rare persuasive power, who implicitly understands the global gain of a truly powerful UN, to convert even one of the holders of the veto. But someone needs to attempt it. What is political power for if not to change the world?

Tony Blair enjoys a quick two-step with his good pal

The point of this exercise is to create a UN capable of credibly policing the behaviour of all member states. UN peacekeeping forces, made up of recruits from any and every member state, handsomely rewarded by all the members in proportion to their GDP, must be the only troops permitted to move freely across the territories of the disputing nations. And this should apply to internal, tribal and internecine strife as well as that between separate nations. Meanwhile, the remit of the UN’s International Court of Justice needs to be widened so as not to depend on the consent of those states that are party to a dispute, another tough sell.

The UN should assume the power to order the immediate cessation of hostilities between member states. Waging war must be against the UN’s bedrock principles. Any member visiting warfare on another should be suspended forthwith from UN membership. In practice this must mean that all other member states, including those sympathetic to the miscreant’s cause, suspend all trade and other dealings with the suspended member. A blanket economic freeze would soon encourage a government to halt hostilities. The UN must then have the resources to assume control of negotiation of a settlement between the disputatious nations. Warfare must be a gambit that is made impracticable because it makes each of the warring nations an international pariah. If both sides are taken out of benefit of UN membership, the issue of ‘blame’ is largely futile. The UN negotiators can then begin with a level playing field.

Libyan rebels on the Benghazi road

The UN’s power to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs would be a more complex matter than preventing state-to-state confrontation. The UN’s remit should be truly global and therefore probably cannot be automatically parochial. Matters such as the suppression of a particular tribal or religious grouping within a nation state would have to be confronted on a case-by-case basis. But a case like that of Libya or indeed Bahrain is not so complex as to be beyond a newly-constituted UN to resolve. Moreover, the UN could hold sway over issues other than warfare. It could wield its power, no longer fettered by national vetoes, to impose restrictions on the activities that contribute so catastrophically to the destruction of the environment. But that is a road down which to travel on another occasion.

In the absence of a UN rebuilt along the lines that I propose, we have another potential disaster taking shape in a country that can ill afford to be ravaged by years of war. Today‘s self-satisfied certainties in London and in Paris and, more cautiously, in Washington, may well look rather less confident tomorrow or a week or a month hence. We shall see. But at this particular moment, I feel like invoking an angry cry of just eight years ago: Not In My Name.

NUCLEAR and PRESENT DANGER

Like most everybody, I could write what I know about nuclear power and nuclear fuel on the back of a postage stamp. What I do know – or think I know – is that last Friday’s earthquake off the coast of northern Japan and the tsunami that followed, catastrophic as both were, are in danger of being dwarfed by the incident developing at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Nobody seems to know whether this incident is containable. Worse still, nobody seems to have much faith in the candour of either the nuclear authorities or the government in Japan. We are told not to panic but the incident worsens by the hour.

Another explosion at the Fukushima plant

Contemplating this unfolding disaster, a whole string of questions suggest themselves to me, questions that I see no prospect of being answered. Perhaps if enough of us ask such questions in enough forums around the world, some answers might emerge.

To begin, I ask: why are the Japanese guardians of nuclear power evidently improvising their responses to the incident? Were there no well-worked and well-rehearsed drills in place to deal with every conceivable eventuality? If so, why are these responses failing to produce the desired results? If no repair and containment routines were in fact ready, why not?

Where tectonic plates meet are earthquake fault lines; this map also sites significant volcanoes

It is certainly the case that the incidence of earthquakes is almost impossible to predict, as such events do not signal their imminence. But the locations of potential earthquakes is well known and well charted. For instance, everyone knows that one day “the big one” will befall San Francisco, and people live and work in that city knowing that this is the context of their choice. But knowing where earthquakes are liable to strike ought to determine precisely where not to build nuclear plants – oughtn’t it? So, given that almost the entire landmass of Japan is on an earthquake line, why were any nuclear plants ever built there?

Sites of the world's present nuclear plants

An evacuation zone has been established for some days around the Fukushima site, with a further caution zone beyond that. The people have been evacuated but what about the animals, particularly those kept in various capacities for food? What about the land on which food is – and presumably will in future be – grown? When wind conditions are such that it seems likely that radioactive dust will be blown out to sea, the consensus seems to be that this is a relief. How come? Do waves not bring such contamination back to shore? Will not radioactive particles enter the food chain that derives from the sea? Are the Japanese, of all people, going to give up seafood for some determined or indeterminate period?

If natural upheavals can breach the defences of nuclear plants, what about unnatural attacks upon them? How safe are nuclear plants anywhere from damage or even destruction by suicide bomber or some other kind of terrorist assault?

Sites of 33 "serious" nuclear incidents over the last 60 years

If significant numbers of Japanese citizens are contaminated by radiation, what recompense will they receive? The victims of vast and horrific disasters at Bhopal and Chernobyl were largely left to bear the brunt of the damage without any degree of appropriate compensation. The Japanese are, I imagine, better able than were the poor peasants of Madya Pradesh and what is now Ukraine (but, at the time of Chernobyl was part of the USSR) to ensure that an injury attributable to preventable catastrophe will be paid for, and paid for handsomely. Lloyds of London, already braced for the claims that will follow the earthquake and tsunami, may have a lot more paying out to face yet.

Finally, is nuclear worth the risk? That is perhaps the biggest question of all. I am not holding my breath.

The big one

PS: Tonight, BBC4 was scheduled to show a new programme called The End of the World: A Horizon Guide to Armageddon. The word Horizon in the title refers to the science-based strand that used to appear on BBC2 but, in this dumbed-down culture, is only entrusted these days with occasional specials on a channel that nobody watches. The programme has been pulled, however. I have no doubt that the reason for its postponement is the nuclear problem at Fukushima. Surely, now is precisely the moment to broadcast it.

The MOAT in HIS OWN EYE

At the weekend, The Sunday Times carried a report that the House of Lords Appointments Commission, the functions of which include vetting nominations for the peerage, rejected David Cameron’s submission of his old cabinet colleague Douglas Hogg. Intriguingly – though the paper did not mention this – the commission numbers among its members Cameron’s former mentor and his predecessor as Tory leader, Michael Howard, now Lord Howard of Lympne.

The ostensible explanation for the commission’s decision thus to embarrass the PM was the role that Hogg played in the great scandal over the expenses of MPs in 2009, uncovered and published as a long-running saga by The Daily Telegraph. The particular item among Hogg’s expenses that caught the imagination of the media was his claim for the cost of cleaning the moat that encircles his 50-acre country estate of Kettlethorpe Hall in unfashionable Lincolnshire, the county that also gave birth to Margaret Thatcher.

Douglas Hogg, evidently a flat-cap commoner

Hogg hotly disputed that he had been assisted from the public purse for this item though he found himself unable to confirm that it had been “positively excluded” from his paperwork. Like many of his fellow accused, he reckoned that all his claims had been fully cleared by the parliamentary fees office. On the other hand, by any non-partisan measure, Hogg would be thought rather unfortunate to have been made out as something of a poster boy for the expenses scandal. The site TheyWorkForYou, which monitors all kinds of parliamentary activity, ranked Hogg 617th of 647 members in the cost to the public of his time in parliament.

It was the very grandeur of a home with a moat that caused the trouble, reviving the image of Tory privilege and disconnection from the public that Cameron had sought to play down, especially since finding that he had thoughtlessly appointed fourteen Old Etonians to his front bench while in opposition – both Cameron and Hogg were themselves schooled at Eton College, as indeed were all the Hoggs from way back.

Kettlethorpe Hall, where the snouts go in the trough

Douglas Hogg is the present head of a true political dynasty. The Hoggs have been active in Tory politics, particularly where it intersects with the administration of justice, for the better part of two centuries. But unless one or other of his children, now both around 30, goes into public life, that long connection will be severed. I cannot trace what the junior generation does for a living, if anything,

Douglas Hogg’s great-grandfather was the first of the line to join the titled classes. He was James Hogg (1790-1876), characteristically a Tory lawyer, and he was awarded a baronetcy in 1848. Baronetcies are a curious form of aristocratic life. The only hereditary title that did not entitle the holder to sit in the House of Lords, a baronetcy does confer on its holder the courtesy title of Sir and that honorific ranks above a commoner’s knighthood. Sir George Young, the present Leader of the House, is a baronet – his proper title is Sir George Young, Bart. ‘Bart’ is considered old-fashioned in some quarters and ‘Bt’ preferred. Young is always named with his ‘sir’ but some baronets discard its use.

Among well-known baronets past and present, some of whom went or go by ‘sir’ and some not, were and are: Thomas Beecham, Ranulph Fiennes, Tam Dalyell, Jonathan Porritt, Adam Nicholson, Oswald Mosley, Ferdinand Mount, Keith Joseph and the actor John Standing. Standing’s mother, the actress Kay Hammond, was the daughter of the British-born Hollywood actor Guy Standing. The latter was knighted for his service to Anglo-American relations at the end of World War I and was always billed as Sir Guy but his title was not a baronetcy. John Standing, using his maternal grandfather’s surname for professional purposes, inherited the baronetcy of Lyon (formally he is Sir John Lyon) from his father, but not the old family seat of Bletchley Park, which was sold after his grandmother’s death and soon after became the now legendary home of the Government Code and Cypher School that cracked the German Enigma code.

Quintin Hogg o'the Poly

But back to Hogg heaven. Sir James, the 1st Baronet, though evidently much occupied with legal affairs in one of Britain’s largest and most important colonies, India, as well as twice sitting as an MP, managed to sire fourteen children on his wife. His eldest son, the 2nd Baronet (also James), was born in Calcutta and he too sat as an MP before being sent to the Lords as the 1st Baron Magheramorne.

But Sir James’ seventh son is both of more interest and, happily, sits in the line that leads to Douglas. Quintin Hogg (1845-1903) was a leading educational reformer who founded the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, one of the earliest such institutions. I used to visit it often in the 1960s and ’70s because it housed one of the small independent cinemas then devoted to subtitled movies, the Cameo Poly. The Poly itself still exists (though not the cinema), but for two decades it has been more grandly known as the University of Westminster, of which the Regent Street complex is the hub.

Hogg’s work on the Poly and his continuing financial support of it won him a fine reputation. An improving statue of him, seated over a book with two boys, still stands on a traffic island in Portland Place, just up from both the Poly site and the entrance to BBC Broadcasting House. Surprisingly, though, Hogg received no recognition for his philanthropy from either the monarch or Downing Street.

Douglas, 1st Viscount Hailsham

His son Douglas, however, added a further title to the extended family’s coats of arms. After a successful career as a silk, he served as Attorney General and twice as Lord Chancellor and was raised to the peerage as 1st Viscount Hailsham. Hailsham was the grandfather of the present Hogg. In between comes a fascinating character and one who twice bore the title Lord Hailsham but in differing ways.

Named after his distinguished grandfather, Quintin Hogg (1907-2001) was in style very much the Boris Johnson (another old Etonian) of his day – happy to appear a bit of an ebullient, unguarded buffoon but withal a pretty shrewd operator, which ability allowed him to enjoy a long and colourful career in Tory politics. Having followed the traditional route of attending Eton College and being called to the bar – though, more unusually, Quintin went up to Oxford and was quite a scholar – he fought a famous be-election at Oxford City.

Young Quintin Hogg

It was September 1938 and the great issue of the day was the so-called appeasement of Hitler’s policies of German aggrandizement. Hogg supported the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain who, a fortnight after the by-election, signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler, the famous “piece of paper”. Both the Labour and Liberal candidates stood down at Oxford in favour of an Independent Progressive opposed to appeasement. His slogan was “a vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler”. Hogg won but he broke with Chamberlain the following year and joined the Churchill faction. He saw action in the war and managed to save his seat in the 1945 Labour landslide. But when his father died in 1950, Hogg succeeded to the Hailsham viscountcy and was obliged to stand down from the Commons.

Through the 1950s, Hailsham tended to his law practice, only returning to the public eye when Harold Macmillan appointed him chairman of the Tory party. This role suited his theatrical antics – he once memorably clanged a large handbell from the platform at the party conference – and gave him a stage that he exploited to the full. He was also good value on television, an increasingly influential showcase for political characters.

Hailsham in his famous appearance in Dr No, recreated by society photographer Denis Healey

Macmillan abruptly stood down as party leader and Prime Minister just before the Conservative party conference of 1963. There was no clear successor – RA Butler, who had already twice missed the boat by a whisker, was once again thought too liberal. In a widely discussed address to the conference, Hailsham threw his hat into the ring, declaring that “I will renounce my peerage”. I can still picture the emotion on his face, a mix of determination, sorrow and, I rather think, acted humility. There had of course been many Tory PMs in the distant past who had blithely governed from a seat in the Lords but in 20th century Britain this was no longer an option. But to give up a title was an unprecedented move for a Tory. Tony Benn had paved the way, renouncing the title of Viscount Stansgate that had come to him on the death of his father, so that he could stand for a Commons seat as, in those days, Anthony Wedgwood Benn.

Quintin Hogg duly became a commoner again. The title of Viscount Hailsham did not die in his renunciation. Upon his death, it sprang to life again on the shoulders of the present Douglas. But in the meantime, the Blair government had removed from hereditary peers their entitlement to sit in the Lords and so Quintin’s son continued to style himself Mr Hogg and stayed in the Commons until the 2010 general election.

Quintin’s grand gesture proved futile. Macmillan’s successor, the last Tory leader to “emerge” from a stitch-up among party grandees at the Carlton Club, was, in a bitter irony, another member of the peerage. The Earl of Home, an archetypal old school Tory aristocrat and denizen of the huntin‘, shootin‘ and fishin‘ set, had been Chamberlain’s aide at Munich. Several leading Tories were appalled at the continuance of a profoundly undemocratic method of leader-appointing and both Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell refused to serve under Home.

Obliged to renounce his own title, the new PM, to be known as Sir Alec Douglas Home, found himself in the unique position of having to begin his premiership by fighting a by-election in order to enter the House of Commons. Hogg too had to face the electors and re-entered the Commons at the end of 1963 as MP for St Marylebone.

The Tories lost office the following year and Home stood down. His successor as party leader, Edward Heath, was the first Tory leader to be elected by the party to that office. When Heath eventually became PM in 1970, he sent Hogg back to the Lords to replicate his father’s role of Lord Chancellor, in which task he served again in Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations. Hogg was now called Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone and his title was a life peerage merely.

Quintin Hailsham as Lord Chancellor

Hailsham died three days after his 94th birthday. Twice widowed, once divorced, three times Lord Chancellor, twice a peer and ever an unpredictable, irascible and rather lovable character, he clearly overshadowed his son, as charismatic fathers are apt to do.

Douglas Hogg’s only cabinet post was as Agriculture, Fisheries and Food minister in John Major’s second government. He was widely thought to have made a poor job of handling the crisis over BSE, popularly known as Mad Cow Disease. In one of the last public gestures against the Tories before Labour’s 1997 landslide, a farmer drove from Anglesey to Lincolnshire to dump three tonnes of pigshit at the door of Kettlethorpe Hall.

Baroness Hogg

Indeed, Douglas’s wife Sarah may well be thought the more distinguished of the couple. Another scion of a line of Tory politicians. Sarah’s father was John Boyd-Carpenter who served in the Churchill, Eden and Macmillan cabinets. Journalist (she and I were simultaneously on The Independent), broadcaster, company director, committee woman and sometime Fellow of Eton College, she ran the number 10 policy unit when John Major was PM and is now a member of the house of peers in her own right as Baroness Hogg of Kettlethorpe. On this last score, I wonder if her husband is jealous.