The WORLD MUST BE PEOPLED … MUSTN’T IT?
On Monday night, Channel 4 showed a programme, laughingly called a documentary, entitled Life After People. Though it pulled down a good deal of opinion, most of it seemingly of scientific repute, it was more like an apocalyptic Hollywood vision without any actors. There couldn't be actors. As the title indicates, the programme posited a world beyond humanity.
The narration offered no rationale for a people-less world and so the entire exercise was built upon sand. The first concern of the story, chronologically, was the fate of animals. The survival of domestic pets was understandably – if unrealistically gently – addressed. Most mysteriously, the cities of the world appeared to be overrun by escaped zoo animals too. How did they escape? We were not told, any more than we learned how so many dogs got out to roam when you know that, in the endless absence of its owner, almost every dog would starve to death shut in a building. The exotic animals in city settings allowed for interesting computer-generated juxtapositions and these heralded the primary concern of the programme, which was to get to the computer simulations of great landmarks degenerating and eventually toppling. If we saw Brooklyn Bridge collapse once, we saw it six times. It wasn’t so much a science-based documentary, more a video game.
Now what kind of Armageddon will it be that wipes out humans and only humans and leaves all the buildings standing? Not a nuclear war, obviously. Not a global biological incident. Not even a viral epidemic: after all, it’s hard to imagine a virus that only affected humans yet could not be contained either medically or physically. The reason that bubonic plague took hold is the same reason that avian flu was so scary: it’s spread by uncontrollable creatures and it can jump species. A virus that jumps species will mutate sufficiently to infect at least all mammals, if not cockroaches, the most likely survivors of any catastrophe.
The day after the Channel 4 programme, BBC News reported the extent of the global threat to animals. “A third of the world's animal species have become extinct in the last three decades, figures show” the BBC website announced, a claim also made by Roger Harrabin in the report. I’m as pessimistic as anybody about the future prospects for those creatures with which we share the planet but this estimate seems way over the top. What “figures” are these that show such a thing? Harrabin cited only one creature “thought to have become extinct this year”, the Yangtze River dolphin, a rather specialized, limited example, you would think. If a third of species have gone since 1978, wouldn’t some of them be familiar, wouldn’t we have heard about them? The lion, the emu, the bullfrog, the haddock?
Of course, all life on earth, all evidence that there was ever life on earth will eventually be swept away when the sun explodes or fizzles out or the planet gets hit by a rogue meteor. Shakespeare knew this, long before all but some old tortoise somewhere was alive and he had Prospero describe it:
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep" [The Tempest Act IV, Scene 1]
The makers of Life After People, Americans who allowed Channel 4 to part-anglicize their work, might pay a little more attention to the giants of literature and a little less to CGI geeks.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
HOW MANY TEARS CAN YOU CRY?
I happened upon BBC1’s Breakfast yesterday morning – something I usually avoid but my partner has it on in preference to the rival fare – and who should be on the studio sofa but Bobby Vee. Ah, young Robert Thomas Velline of Fargo, North Dakota. Not so young any more: 65 in fact. Not cute any more either, indeed rather odd looking, but having had something extremely expensive done to his hair, of which he flourished rather more than when my friend and I saw him at the Albert Hall in 1985. The British tour, of which that gig was the climax, featured other rock and pop legends including Ricky Nelson whose stock had been low for some years. His career thereby revived, Nelson toured the southern States later that year and died (while apparently freebasing cocaine) in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve.
Vee’s career began because of a famous plane crash, the one that killed Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and, most significantly, Buddy Holly. The stars were flying to Fargo to play a gig and 15 year-old Vee (an authentic Holly fan) and his outfit (called The Shadows: yes, really) volunteered to stand in when news of the crash broke. It will be fifty years since that event next February.
Buddy Holly was five minutes before my time. Vee and his contemporaries were the big sellers when I first bought singles. They had a very short span. Sian Williams on Breakfast hazarded that “the mid-‘60s” was his main period but by the mid-‘60s Vee and his contemporaries were dead meat, swept away by the Beatles and the British invasion and the American groups who flowered at the same time. Just as Vee began as a Holly clone, his career went down the pan pathetically imitating the mop-tops: I bet there are very few who, like me, can muster a bit of Vee’s rip-off of ‘She Loves You’, carefully entitled ‘She’s Sorry”.
Months of pestering finally brought me my own record player for my 14th birthday in 1961, which was Vee’s annus mirabilis. A Brill Building product, he was lucky enough to be assigned several songs by the cream of Brill songwriters. Lyricist Gerry Goffin and composer Jack Keller wrote ‘Run to Him’, a simple up-and-downhill stroll (compare Cliff Richard’s later and very similar ‘The Next Time’) and hence enormously addictive. Even better, Goffin wrote with his wife Carole King ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’, one of the dozen or so greatest pop singles of all time with its brilliantly bouncy harmonic tensions and that genius discord in the accompaniment near the end. Vee told Sian Williams that he’d sung this imperishable hit at his daughter’s wedding “because it was so appropriate”. I’m afraid he’s not a very interesting man. And the choice was only appropriate at the most superficial level. ‘Take Good Care’ is not about losing your baby daughter but losing your baby doll.
This was the defining feature of Vee and his contemporaries. The great majority of them were young, white, American males of a boyish appearance. And, on single after single, they sang about how horribly women treated them. The tears shed in the singles of Gene Pitney, Del Shannon, the Everly Brothers, James Darren and the very unboyish Roy Orbison would have floated the US fleet. Self-pity was the order of the day. These chaps were utterly unmanned by their women and frankly presented their predicament as terminally woeful. Quite why this parade of tearful wimps connected to the 1961 Zeitgeist is pretty hard to figure. It was the first year of the Kennedy presidency: you’d think American youth would have their tails up.
There were other young male singers who indulged less frequently in lachrymosity. Bobby Darin, as old as Orbison and in the charts since 1958, was generally upbeat, but a self-penned B side, ‘Not for Me’ (not to be confused with the Gershwins’ wry and rueful ‘But Not for Me’), is as bitter an outburst as pop music has ever devised, reinforced by an astounding burst of Rachmaninovesque piano flourish right in the middle. Neil Sedaka – never hip or fashionable but a singer/songwriter of the highest class – could even make his partner Howard Greenfield’s most pleading lyric, ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’, into a sunnily clap-along number (and another contender for all-time great pop single).
But the prevailing mood was doomy and tragic. “I’m a-walkin’ in the rain,” sang Del Shannon in ‘Runaway’, just about the biggest selling disc of 1961. “Tears are fallin’ and I feel the pain”. Was it the girls who were buying these singles and feeling that they had the boys over a barrel?
Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this curious sub-genre of pop came in the following year. Johnny Burnette, the most country-inflected of the pop idols of the early 1960s, was generally celebratory about women in his singles: ‘Dreamin’, ‘You’re Sixteen’, ‘Girls’. But ‘Clown Shoes’ is a buttock-clenching tale of the public humiliation of a boy by a girl, quoting her with a kind of self-lacerating relish as she presents the gift that constitutes the song's title: “I bought these specially/For all your friends to see … In these you’ll look real smart/Because they match your heart”. The soaring melody and lush string backing only add to the small-town melodrama foregrounded in the yarn. It was written by one James Marcus Smith, who was later better known for the outlandish performing persona he adopted as PJ Proby. One of Smith’s Proby singles was called ‘I Apologize” and he should have done so for his complete lack of probity as the trouser-splitting Proby. But ‘Clown Shoes’ is a perverse work of genius.
At least Proby is a survivor, like Bobby Vee and Neil Sedaka. Several of the performers who sang of such heartache died prematurely: Burnette at 30, Darin at 37, Shannon, a suicide, and Orbison – whose life was marked by personal tragedy – before they were 60.
Gene Pitney suffered a fatal heart attack a couple of years back at 66. He died the classic showbiz death, alone in a provincial hotel room. Pitney was a songwriter before he was a singer – he wrote Ricky Nelson’s biggest British hit, the catchy, optimistic ‘Hello Mary Lou’ – but as a singer he favoured tragic material penned by others. His biggest hit in Britain was 1964’s ‘I’m Gonna Be Strong’, written by another great husband-and-wife team from the Brill Building, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. This song, built simply on a relentlessly rising figure, belies its own title with the lyric’s climax: “And you’ll never know, darling,/After you’ve kissed me goodbye,/How I’ll break down and cry”, the last word sustained over a succession of notes that rises into the stratosphere. Its opening musical phrase is identical to that of Chris Farlowe’s biggest hit two years later, Jagger & Richards’ ‘Out of Time’ (Pitney knew and worked with the Stones). Both songs deserve support as all-time-great-pop-single contestants, along with Colin Blunstone’s revival of the crushed boy threnody in ‘I Don’t Believe in Miracles’ of 1972. But Farlowe’s hit is the opposite of self-pitying, a disdainful dismissal of a “poor, old-fashioned baby”.
Of course Farlowe’s generation of heroes of popular music had their own share of casualties, as well as the odd song that wallowed in the fickleness and faithlessness of women. But I doubt that any other period of popular culture has ever announced itself as quite so sorry for itself or quite so sexually insecure.
I happened upon BBC1’s Breakfast yesterday morning – something I usually avoid but my partner has it on in preference to the rival fare – and who should be on the studio sofa but Bobby Vee. Ah, young Robert Thomas Velline of Fargo, North Dakota. Not so young any more: 65 in fact. Not cute any more either, indeed rather odd looking, but having had something extremely expensive done to his hair, of which he flourished rather more than when my friend and I saw him at the Albert Hall in 1985. The British tour, of which that gig was the climax, featured other rock and pop legends including Ricky Nelson whose stock had been low for some years. His career thereby revived, Nelson toured the southern States later that year and died (while apparently freebasing cocaine) in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve.
Vee’s career began because of a famous plane crash, the one that killed Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and, most significantly, Buddy Holly. The stars were flying to Fargo to play a gig and 15 year-old Vee (an authentic Holly fan) and his outfit (called The Shadows: yes, really) volunteered to stand in when news of the crash broke. It will be fifty years since that event next February.
Buddy Holly was five minutes before my time. Vee and his contemporaries were the big sellers when I first bought singles. They had a very short span. Sian Williams on Breakfast hazarded that “the mid-‘60s” was his main period but by the mid-‘60s Vee and his contemporaries were dead meat, swept away by the Beatles and the British invasion and the American groups who flowered at the same time. Just as Vee began as a Holly clone, his career went down the pan pathetically imitating the mop-tops: I bet there are very few who, like me, can muster a bit of Vee’s rip-off of ‘She Loves You’, carefully entitled ‘She’s Sorry”.
Months of pestering finally brought me my own record player for my 14th birthday in 1961, which was Vee’s annus mirabilis. A Brill Building product, he was lucky enough to be assigned several songs by the cream of Brill songwriters. Lyricist Gerry Goffin and composer Jack Keller wrote ‘Run to Him’, a simple up-and-downhill stroll (compare Cliff Richard’s later and very similar ‘The Next Time’) and hence enormously addictive. Even better, Goffin wrote with his wife Carole King ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’, one of the dozen or so greatest pop singles of all time with its brilliantly bouncy harmonic tensions and that genius discord in the accompaniment near the end. Vee told Sian Williams that he’d sung this imperishable hit at his daughter’s wedding “because it was so appropriate”. I’m afraid he’s not a very interesting man. And the choice was only appropriate at the most superficial level. ‘Take Good Care’ is not about losing your baby daughter but losing your baby doll.
This was the defining feature of Vee and his contemporaries. The great majority of them were young, white, American males of a boyish appearance. And, on single after single, they sang about how horribly women treated them. The tears shed in the singles of Gene Pitney, Del Shannon, the Everly Brothers, James Darren and the very unboyish Roy Orbison would have floated the US fleet. Self-pity was the order of the day. These chaps were utterly unmanned by their women and frankly presented their predicament as terminally woeful. Quite why this parade of tearful wimps connected to the 1961 Zeitgeist is pretty hard to figure. It was the first year of the Kennedy presidency: you’d think American youth would have their tails up.
There were other young male singers who indulged less frequently in lachrymosity. Bobby Darin, as old as Orbison and in the charts since 1958, was generally upbeat, but a self-penned B side, ‘Not for Me’ (not to be confused with the Gershwins’ wry and rueful ‘But Not for Me’), is as bitter an outburst as pop music has ever devised, reinforced by an astounding burst of Rachmaninovesque piano flourish right in the middle. Neil Sedaka – never hip or fashionable but a singer/songwriter of the highest class – could even make his partner Howard Greenfield’s most pleading lyric, ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’, into a sunnily clap-along number (and another contender for all-time great pop single).
But the prevailing mood was doomy and tragic. “I’m a-walkin’ in the rain,” sang Del Shannon in ‘Runaway’, just about the biggest selling disc of 1961. “Tears are fallin’ and I feel the pain”. Was it the girls who were buying these singles and feeling that they had the boys over a barrel?
Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this curious sub-genre of pop came in the following year. Johnny Burnette, the most country-inflected of the pop idols of the early 1960s, was generally celebratory about women in his singles: ‘Dreamin’, ‘You’re Sixteen’, ‘Girls’. But ‘Clown Shoes’ is a buttock-clenching tale of the public humiliation of a boy by a girl, quoting her with a kind of self-lacerating relish as she presents the gift that constitutes the song's title: “I bought these specially/For all your friends to see … In these you’ll look real smart/Because they match your heart”. The soaring melody and lush string backing only add to the small-town melodrama foregrounded in the yarn. It was written by one James Marcus Smith, who was later better known for the outlandish performing persona he adopted as PJ Proby. One of Smith’s Proby singles was called ‘I Apologize” and he should have done so for his complete lack of probity as the trouser-splitting Proby. But ‘Clown Shoes’ is a perverse work of genius.
At least Proby is a survivor, like Bobby Vee and Neil Sedaka. Several of the performers who sang of such heartache died prematurely: Burnette at 30, Darin at 37, Shannon, a suicide, and Orbison – whose life was marked by personal tragedy – before they were 60.
Gene Pitney suffered a fatal heart attack a couple of years back at 66. He died the classic showbiz death, alone in a provincial hotel room. Pitney was a songwriter before he was a singer – he wrote Ricky Nelson’s biggest British hit, the catchy, optimistic ‘Hello Mary Lou’ – but as a singer he favoured tragic material penned by others. His biggest hit in Britain was 1964’s ‘I’m Gonna Be Strong’, written by another great husband-and-wife team from the Brill Building, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. This song, built simply on a relentlessly rising figure, belies its own title with the lyric’s climax: “And you’ll never know, darling,/After you’ve kissed me goodbye,/How I’ll break down and cry”, the last word sustained over a succession of notes that rises into the stratosphere. Its opening musical phrase is identical to that of Chris Farlowe’s biggest hit two years later, Jagger & Richards’ ‘Out of Time’ (Pitney knew and worked with the Stones). Both songs deserve support as all-time-great-pop-single contestants, along with Colin Blunstone’s revival of the crushed boy threnody in ‘I Don’t Believe in Miracles’ of 1972. But Farlowe’s hit is the opposite of self-pitying, a disdainful dismissal of a “poor, old-fashioned baby”.
Of course Farlowe’s generation of heroes of popular music had their own share of casualties, as well as the odd song that wallowed in the fickleness and faithlessness of women. But I doubt that any other period of popular culture has ever announced itself as quite so sorry for itself or quite so sexually insecure.
Friday, May 09, 2008
MYANMARTYRS
Once again, the rest of the world stands aghast, wringing its hands and doing nothing, while a gigantic, avoidable tragedy unfolds within the borders of a nation led by dictators. Just as Robert Mugabe waits out the slow-motion fixing of the presidential run-off election that, through repression and intimidation, will ensure that he stays in office until his death, so the tin-pot Hitlers who run Myanmar (Burma) turn away the world’s proffered assistance and instead concentrate on a make-believe referendum to fix the nation’s constitution in the junta’s favour.
A week after Cyclone Nargis devastated the Irrawaddy delta, killing tens of thousands of people, tens of thousands more have still not received the most basic aid. Trapped by floodwater full of bloated corpses and by the collapse of the transport infrastructure, these survivors will not remain survivors for much longer. They will swell the casualty numbers, slain by starvation, disease and the hubris of the military.
Emergency rations, clean water and shelter stand by at the country’s borders. The aid workers may not cross the borders because they have not been issued with the ‘necessary’ visas. The office that issues the visas has today closed for a three-day holiday. (What a nice idea: I hear the Bay of Bengal can be lovely at this time of year).
The regime has suggested that it is happy to accept aid from anywhere but in reality is only allowing representatives from China, Russia and India (nations it considers relatively friendly) to convey equipment and supplies. It pretends that parcels of aid handed out by ministers and petty officials in small, thumpingly staged ceremonies demonstrates that the problem is in hand. Just as Mugabe is indifferent to the suffering of his people – may indeed be in clinical denial about it – so the Burmese dictatorship kabal is oblivious to conditions that its members will never see at first hand.
That the UN cannot summon the will to intervene is a scandal. UN forces should simply enter Myanmar as an advance guard to clear the way for the aid workers. Any resistance from the half-million-strong military should be quelled with whatever force is deemed necessary. If the regime tries to turn this compassionate invasion into a war, the junta should be bombed out of their offices and palaces – in a poor country, it is not difficult to identify where the rich live and they all live at the expense of the poor. Any members of the government who are seized can be brought before the international courts of justice in due course. The same action ought to have been taken in Zimbabwe by now.
“Oh, but …” you may cry “… this is a sovereign nation. You can’t just go in and throw your weight about”. Oh, but you can. Iraq is the very useful precedent. However illegal was the invasion of that nation in 2003, no government or statesman has been called to account. The humanitarian motive for invading Myanmar is rather more noble and pressing than the protection of American oil interests that was the true motive for the attack on Baghdad. Let the UN go into both Myanmar and Zimbabwe in the name of humanity and democracy everywhere and bring down these scoundrels and save the people of these nations from, respectively, oppression, poverty and disease and (in the other case) oppression, poverty and disease.
Once again, the rest of the world stands aghast, wringing its hands and doing nothing, while a gigantic, avoidable tragedy unfolds within the borders of a nation led by dictators. Just as Robert Mugabe waits out the slow-motion fixing of the presidential run-off election that, through repression and intimidation, will ensure that he stays in office until his death, so the tin-pot Hitlers who run Myanmar (Burma) turn away the world’s proffered assistance and instead concentrate on a make-believe referendum to fix the nation’s constitution in the junta’s favour.
A week after Cyclone Nargis devastated the Irrawaddy delta, killing tens of thousands of people, tens of thousands more have still not received the most basic aid. Trapped by floodwater full of bloated corpses and by the collapse of the transport infrastructure, these survivors will not remain survivors for much longer. They will swell the casualty numbers, slain by starvation, disease and the hubris of the military.
Emergency rations, clean water and shelter stand by at the country’s borders. The aid workers may not cross the borders because they have not been issued with the ‘necessary’ visas. The office that issues the visas has today closed for a three-day holiday. (What a nice idea: I hear the Bay of Bengal can be lovely at this time of year).
The regime has suggested that it is happy to accept aid from anywhere but in reality is only allowing representatives from China, Russia and India (nations it considers relatively friendly) to convey equipment and supplies. It pretends that parcels of aid handed out by ministers and petty officials in small, thumpingly staged ceremonies demonstrates that the problem is in hand. Just as Mugabe is indifferent to the suffering of his people – may indeed be in clinical denial about it – so the Burmese dictatorship kabal is oblivious to conditions that its members will never see at first hand.
That the UN cannot summon the will to intervene is a scandal. UN forces should simply enter Myanmar as an advance guard to clear the way for the aid workers. Any resistance from the half-million-strong military should be quelled with whatever force is deemed necessary. If the regime tries to turn this compassionate invasion into a war, the junta should be bombed out of their offices and palaces – in a poor country, it is not difficult to identify where the rich live and they all live at the expense of the poor. Any members of the government who are seized can be brought before the international courts of justice in due course. The same action ought to have been taken in Zimbabwe by now.
“Oh, but …” you may cry “… this is a sovereign nation. You can’t just go in and throw your weight about”. Oh, but you can. Iraq is the very useful precedent. However illegal was the invasion of that nation in 2003, no government or statesman has been called to account. The humanitarian motive for invading Myanmar is rather more noble and pressing than the protection of American oil interests that was the true motive for the attack on Baghdad. Let the UN go into both Myanmar and Zimbabwe in the name of humanity and democracy everywhere and bring down these scoundrels and save the people of these nations from, respectively, oppression, poverty and disease and (in the other case) oppression, poverty and disease.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
BORIS DAY as CALAMITY GAIN
Boris Johnson is the most preposterous figure in professional politics since Sir Gerald Nabarro. Yet the citizens of London have elected him mayor by a comfortable margin in preference to Ken Livingstone, one of the wiliest and most accomplished politicians this side of Bill Clinton. Have Londoners taken leave of their senses? Do they hate Gordon Brown’s government so profoundly that they are prepared to sacrifice a consummate operator for an indisciplined twit?
Nothing in politics is ever simple, except when it is. There can be little doubt that Livingstone, along with hundreds of humble local councillors across the land, has paid the price for the government’s ham-fistedness over the last six months. BBC commentators keep issuing what they call “a health warning” against extrapolating calculations about the state of play at Westminster from the local election figures but there can be little doubt that, with some notable exceptions (Wales, Liverpool), voters are more concerned to “send a message” to Downing Street than to reward or punish local councillors of whose work they are at best very dimly aware.
Time and again, the national coverage (again, the BBC especially) has been apologetic – perhaps with no great sincerity – for giving time to the race for mayor. No need for apology in my book. Ken Livingstone was certainly the only mayoral figure in Britain to whom I could put a name and I surely am not unique. Livingstone always had a national profile, as Johnson does. So does Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate who came in a very distant third. I doubt that any of the parties – certainly not the Tories and Labour – will ever run a London candidate who does not already have name recognition. It’s a chicken and egg thing, but I suspect that the London mayoral race will always be followed nationally and that the candidates will reflect that following.
Livingstone certainly made a contribution to his own demise. His cavalier way with public funds is hardly unique among public servants or peculiar to one or other party. His embrace of Islam would have been sufficient by itself to prevent me from voting for him (though I would never have voted for Johnson). But he has also been subjected to a sustained and vitriolic attack by Associated Newspapers (the Mail group), concentrated in the Evening Standard, the capital’s only surviving citywide paper that is not a free sheet. Moreover, there was a disgraceful television hatchet job by a man who, strangely enough, is evidently the political editor of the New Statesman. The poisons from such biased and unproven coverage were bound to have some effect. Belatedly, The Guardian tried to drum up a head of steam against Johnson but I suspect it was largely preaching to the converted.
Previously sound voters appear to have turned out for Johnson. One old friend expressed “hatred” for Livingstone, founded, she admitted, on his accusation that a Standard journalist was behaving like a concentration camp guard. I frankly don’t understand the argument that, because the journalist declared to Livingstone that he was Jewish, the then mayor should have withdrawn the remark. He wasn’t being gratuitously anti-semitic, he was making a point about people who justify their behaviour by claiming that they’re only doing their job.
The reporter door-stepped Livingstone as he returned from a party. No doubt Livingstone was not wholly sober. He spoke unguardedly to a pushy reporter from a paper he had every reason to despise and mistrust. Who can blame him? As one was who a member of the National Union of Journalists for thirty years, I say without a qualm that journalists are, by and large, the scum of the earth. Livingstone made a slighting remark about a reporter. His Jewishness was neither here nor there. Indeed, Livingstone could have argued, reasonably enough, that, being Jewish, the reporter ought to have been all the more reluctant than any gentile to use the doing-my-job justification. I am sure that Livingstone is anti-Zionist but then so is every Jew that I know.
Boris Johnson, on the other hand, is avowedly and gratuitously racist, sexist, homophobic and a snob. What kind of a signal does that send to the world? Yet people who blithely deplored Italians voting Silvio Berlusconi back into office last week went out and voted for Johnson this week. Another reason my friend gave for voting against Livingstone was that she remembered covering the Poulson/T Dan Smith scandal in Newcastle some 35 years ago and reckoned that being too long in office is corrupting. I’m not wholly persuaded by this. It seems a slightly less daffy version of the reason my Auntie Freda gave for voting Tory back in 1970: “I think it’s their turn”. I remembering thinking at the time: “it’s got nothing to do with being their turn and everything to do with you being a Tory”. Five’ll get you ten she couldn’t bring herself to vote Labour in 1964, even out of that professed sense of fair play.
If you’re going to argue that parties in power lose touch with their roots and their reality, you’re arguing for changing your own politics on a regular basis, merely so that you can vote the other lot in after a suitable interval. That makes no sense to me. I think Blair was the worst prime minister of my lifetime and that Brown has been a crushing disappointment. After an adulthood of voting Labour, usually for somebody who didn’t get returned to parliament, I voted Liberal Democrat in 2001 and 2005, not because I thought it was Charlie Kennedy's "turn" but because I thought Blair was a warmonger. I can’t imagine that I will feel moved to vote Labour in 2009 or 2010, though of course a lot may change in the meantime. But I sure as hell won’t vote Tory. As things stand, there is no party I feel I can comfortably vote for.
Among the things that will have changed by 2009 or 2010 will be that London will have had a year or two of Boris Johnson as mayor. It’s an understandable expectation that he will screw up big time and that he will hence prove to be an embarrassment to David Cameron, presently basking in the success of gambling his own reputation on Johnson’s success. But as I said before, nothing in politics is ever simple. Nor is it predictable. Johnson will know that it will all fall apart in his hands if he doesn’t prove to be an expert manager and an instinctive delegator. He will give himself his best chance by surrounding himself with able people and no doubt the Tory Party will not only help him with that but want a big say in his choices. In that sense, the likeliest outcome of Johnson’s mayoralty may just be that he falls out in a big way with the party machine.
Boris Johnson is the most preposterous figure in professional politics since Sir Gerald Nabarro. Yet the citizens of London have elected him mayor by a comfortable margin in preference to Ken Livingstone, one of the wiliest and most accomplished politicians this side of Bill Clinton. Have Londoners taken leave of their senses? Do they hate Gordon Brown’s government so profoundly that they are prepared to sacrifice a consummate operator for an indisciplined twit?
Nothing in politics is ever simple, except when it is. There can be little doubt that Livingstone, along with hundreds of humble local councillors across the land, has paid the price for the government’s ham-fistedness over the last six months. BBC commentators keep issuing what they call “a health warning” against extrapolating calculations about the state of play at Westminster from the local election figures but there can be little doubt that, with some notable exceptions (Wales, Liverpool), voters are more concerned to “send a message” to Downing Street than to reward or punish local councillors of whose work they are at best very dimly aware.
Time and again, the national coverage (again, the BBC especially) has been apologetic – perhaps with no great sincerity – for giving time to the race for mayor. No need for apology in my book. Ken Livingstone was certainly the only mayoral figure in Britain to whom I could put a name and I surely am not unique. Livingstone always had a national profile, as Johnson does. So does Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate who came in a very distant third. I doubt that any of the parties – certainly not the Tories and Labour – will ever run a London candidate who does not already have name recognition. It’s a chicken and egg thing, but I suspect that the London mayoral race will always be followed nationally and that the candidates will reflect that following.
Livingstone certainly made a contribution to his own demise. His cavalier way with public funds is hardly unique among public servants or peculiar to one or other party. His embrace of Islam would have been sufficient by itself to prevent me from voting for him (though I would never have voted for Johnson). But he has also been subjected to a sustained and vitriolic attack by Associated Newspapers (the Mail group), concentrated in the Evening Standard, the capital’s only surviving citywide paper that is not a free sheet. Moreover, there was a disgraceful television hatchet job by a man who, strangely enough, is evidently the political editor of the New Statesman. The poisons from such biased and unproven coverage were bound to have some effect. Belatedly, The Guardian tried to drum up a head of steam against Johnson but I suspect it was largely preaching to the converted.
Previously sound voters appear to have turned out for Johnson. One old friend expressed “hatred” for Livingstone, founded, she admitted, on his accusation that a Standard journalist was behaving like a concentration camp guard. I frankly don’t understand the argument that, because the journalist declared to Livingstone that he was Jewish, the then mayor should have withdrawn the remark. He wasn’t being gratuitously anti-semitic, he was making a point about people who justify their behaviour by claiming that they’re only doing their job.
The reporter door-stepped Livingstone as he returned from a party. No doubt Livingstone was not wholly sober. He spoke unguardedly to a pushy reporter from a paper he had every reason to despise and mistrust. Who can blame him? As one was who a member of the National Union of Journalists for thirty years, I say without a qualm that journalists are, by and large, the scum of the earth. Livingstone made a slighting remark about a reporter. His Jewishness was neither here nor there. Indeed, Livingstone could have argued, reasonably enough, that, being Jewish, the reporter ought to have been all the more reluctant than any gentile to use the doing-my-job justification. I am sure that Livingstone is anti-Zionist but then so is every Jew that I know.
Boris Johnson, on the other hand, is avowedly and gratuitously racist, sexist, homophobic and a snob. What kind of a signal does that send to the world? Yet people who blithely deplored Italians voting Silvio Berlusconi back into office last week went out and voted for Johnson this week. Another reason my friend gave for voting against Livingstone was that she remembered covering the Poulson/T Dan Smith scandal in Newcastle some 35 years ago and reckoned that being too long in office is corrupting. I’m not wholly persuaded by this. It seems a slightly less daffy version of the reason my Auntie Freda gave for voting Tory back in 1970: “I think it’s their turn”. I remembering thinking at the time: “it’s got nothing to do with being their turn and everything to do with you being a Tory”. Five’ll get you ten she couldn’t bring herself to vote Labour in 1964, even out of that professed sense of fair play.
If you’re going to argue that parties in power lose touch with their roots and their reality, you’re arguing for changing your own politics on a regular basis, merely so that you can vote the other lot in after a suitable interval. That makes no sense to me. I think Blair was the worst prime minister of my lifetime and that Brown has been a crushing disappointment. After an adulthood of voting Labour, usually for somebody who didn’t get returned to parliament, I voted Liberal Democrat in 2001 and 2005, not because I thought it was Charlie Kennedy's "turn" but because I thought Blair was a warmonger. I can’t imagine that I will feel moved to vote Labour in 2009 or 2010, though of course a lot may change in the meantime. But I sure as hell won’t vote Tory. As things stand, there is no party I feel I can comfortably vote for.
Among the things that will have changed by 2009 or 2010 will be that London will have had a year or two of Boris Johnson as mayor. It’s an understandable expectation that he will screw up big time and that he will hence prove to be an embarrassment to David Cameron, presently basking in the success of gambling his own reputation on Johnson’s success. But as I said before, nothing in politics is ever simple. Nor is it predictable. Johnson will know that it will all fall apart in his hands if he doesn’t prove to be an expert manager and an instinctive delegator. He will give himself his best chance by surrounding himself with able people and no doubt the Tory Party will not only help him with that but want a big say in his choices. In that sense, the likeliest outcome of Johnson’s mayoralty may just be that he falls out in a big way with the party machine.
Friday, April 18, 2008
BROWN STUDY
The Olympic torch passed through India yesterday, occasioning further protests and ever-elaborating security for this supposed symbol of sportsmanship and global friendship. What an absurd spectacle it is. And what a fistful of conflicting questions it raises.
In the first place, what nation on earth could hold the Games and confidently anticipate no protest? Is there any whose present standing on the matter of human rights or recent record of benevolence towards its fellow regimes would render it acceptable to one and all? Imagine if the 2008 Olympics were due to be held in the USA. There would be massive protests across the globe. I feel sure I would join them. And what about the London Olympics in four years’ time? Will they pass off without a squeak? I doubt it.
My own squeak can barely be heard but I have always been bitterly opposed to the grotesque spectacle coming here at all. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when the whole nation, let alone Londoners, finds itself paying for the Games in one way or another for decades to come. That is even assuming that the event does not turn out to be a Terminal 5-type humiliation. And don’t get me started on capitalism’s plundering of sport, rendering it the happiest of hunting grounds for cheats, asset strippers, druggies, gambling sharks, self-promoters and celebrity leaches. Oh, and politicians.
The obvious resolution of this problem is to establish a permanent home for the Games. History points to Greece but that nation cannot be guaranteed to keep itself uncontroversial (remember The Colonels). Instead a custom-built site might be set up in some newly-created autonomous city-state, comparable to Monaco or the Vatican. Perhaps it might be funded through and its administration be placed under the purview of the UN or a reconstituted UN (but to that matter I will return).
Unrealistic people complain angrily that governments such as Britain’s stand idly by while China oppresses Tibet. Not many people – publicly, at least – advocate nuking Beijing. What else can be done? Gordon Brown, some argue, should denounce the Chinese government. What this would achieve, apart from giving the Prime Minister a self-image as a stern and principled moralist, is hard to imagine. Britain is anyway in a uniquely delicate position in face of China’s unpopularity because she is the next host of the Games. Any trouble we make now can be revisited upon us a hundredfold in 2012. Significantly, Brown “received” the torch in Downing Street the other day but didn’t actually touch it. He’s trying to keep all sides happy. I’ve argued before that he would do best to establish a strong relationship with Beijing and then gradually assume the role of candid friend. Maybe that is what he is indeed trying to do.
Zimbabwe is a very different proposition. It is not a nuclear power, it is not a member of the Security Council, it is not in the running to stage any kind of global event and it holds precious little interest for international capital. It has a long-established leader – whose road to power was eased, if you can remember that far back, as almost her first act when Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street – who has grown arrogant and detached in his ivory tower. Zimbabweans are a peaceful and docile people. They have watched more bemused than angry as their standard of living has slithered back to medieval times. They know that Mugabe’s raggle-taggle army can inflict much misery upon them but they lack the gumption to spawn a resistance. Had he been president of many another country in Africa, Mugabe would have been assassinated long ago. He is hardly the best protected of the world’s leaders.
The Ealing farce of Zimbabwe’s elections ought to have fomented revolution within the country and angry protests beyond at both street and diplomatic level but everyone seems to have been stunned into indifference. The Olympic torch has provoked more pandemonium than the crass illegality practised by Mugabe. The increasingly ineffectual South African President, Thabo Mbeki, pretends that little is amiss. Not until Gordon Brown’s forthright if hardly elegant address to the Security Council on Wednesday has anyone done much more than wring their hands.
The UN is the proper forum to deal with this affront to democracy. UN troops should go into Zimbabwe, arrest Mugabe and put him on trial before the International Court of Justice. But the UN doesn’t do things like that, for all the disapproval of Harare expressed by the new Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. (Thank goodness Tony Blair didn’t get that job, by the way. It would be a shame for the UN to break the habit of its lifetime and appoint a Secretary-General with a dull name).
The UN is in dire need of an overhaul. I argued in my book Common Sense that “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? 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.
“Whether the UN should have the power to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs is a more complex matter. The UN’s remit should be truly global and therefore probably cannot be parochial. Matters such as the suppression of a particular tribal or religious grouping within a nation state might be confronted on a case-by-case basis. But 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” [see link in right hand column].
I stand by this analysis. But I would add a further recommendation to the UN’s new powers. It should have the authority, guaranteed unanimously by all member states, to monitor and if necessary oversee and even take charge of every member nation’s national elections. This would apply just as urgently to the US, France, Italy and Australia (to name recently voting nations where democracy is supposed to be transparent) as to Zimbabwe, Russia, Pakistan and everywhere else where political corruption is endemic. No nation is immune. Vote-rigging has occurred in Britain, don’t forget.
But Gordon Brown is clearly not the visionary to cajole the other veto nations into advocating a reconstituted UN. I doubt that Hilary Clinton or John McCain is either. Maybe Barack Obama is our best hope for such bold thinking. Brown is fundamentally a systems man rather than a visionary (I argue in a letter that The Guardian may publish later today that he puts me in mind of John Birt at the BBC, which may be the unkindest thing said about him in the present round of Brown-bashing, unkinder even than Vincent Cable’s devastating remark last autumn about Stalin metamorphosing into Mr Bean).
I had thought that Tony Blair was the worst prime minister in my lifetime, the first to induce me to abandon my adulthood habit of voting Labour in 2001 and again in 2005. But I fear Brown may be yet worse. At least Blair had the imagination to take on board some of what the voters yearned for. Brown seems perfectly oblivious to anyone but his trusted advisors who, like Robert Mugabe’s, tell him what he wants to hear. Nothing about his demeanour suggests that he has the capacity to learn and change. It doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn if he was upstaged by the Pope in the US this week – whatever the hell “upstaged” means when the star of the Holy See visits one of the most supernaturally-inclined nations on earth for the first time. Nobody scoffing at Brown’s lack of a rapturous reception is living in the real world. But in the real world, the policy on the 10p tax rate may well ensure that Brown is upstaged by David Cameron in a year or two’s time. And then it will be the Old Etonian Blairalike who gets to play guest of honour at the 2012 Olympics.
The Olympic torch passed through India yesterday, occasioning further protests and ever-elaborating security for this supposed symbol of sportsmanship and global friendship. What an absurd spectacle it is. And what a fistful of conflicting questions it raises.
In the first place, what nation on earth could hold the Games and confidently anticipate no protest? Is there any whose present standing on the matter of human rights or recent record of benevolence towards its fellow regimes would render it acceptable to one and all? Imagine if the 2008 Olympics were due to be held in the USA. There would be massive protests across the globe. I feel sure I would join them. And what about the London Olympics in four years’ time? Will they pass off without a squeak? I doubt it.
My own squeak can barely be heard but I have always been bitterly opposed to the grotesque spectacle coming here at all. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when the whole nation, let alone Londoners, finds itself paying for the Games in one way or another for decades to come. That is even assuming that the event does not turn out to be a Terminal 5-type humiliation. And don’t get me started on capitalism’s plundering of sport, rendering it the happiest of hunting grounds for cheats, asset strippers, druggies, gambling sharks, self-promoters and celebrity leaches. Oh, and politicians.
The obvious resolution of this problem is to establish a permanent home for the Games. History points to Greece but that nation cannot be guaranteed to keep itself uncontroversial (remember The Colonels). Instead a custom-built site might be set up in some newly-created autonomous city-state, comparable to Monaco or the Vatican. Perhaps it might be funded through and its administration be placed under the purview of the UN or a reconstituted UN (but to that matter I will return).
Unrealistic people complain angrily that governments such as Britain’s stand idly by while China oppresses Tibet. Not many people – publicly, at least – advocate nuking Beijing. What else can be done? Gordon Brown, some argue, should denounce the Chinese government. What this would achieve, apart from giving the Prime Minister a self-image as a stern and principled moralist, is hard to imagine. Britain is anyway in a uniquely delicate position in face of China’s unpopularity because she is the next host of the Games. Any trouble we make now can be revisited upon us a hundredfold in 2012. Significantly, Brown “received” the torch in Downing Street the other day but didn’t actually touch it. He’s trying to keep all sides happy. I’ve argued before that he would do best to establish a strong relationship with Beijing and then gradually assume the role of candid friend. Maybe that is what he is indeed trying to do.
Zimbabwe is a very different proposition. It is not a nuclear power, it is not a member of the Security Council, it is not in the running to stage any kind of global event and it holds precious little interest for international capital. It has a long-established leader – whose road to power was eased, if you can remember that far back, as almost her first act when Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street – who has grown arrogant and detached in his ivory tower. Zimbabweans are a peaceful and docile people. They have watched more bemused than angry as their standard of living has slithered back to medieval times. They know that Mugabe’s raggle-taggle army can inflict much misery upon them but they lack the gumption to spawn a resistance. Had he been president of many another country in Africa, Mugabe would have been assassinated long ago. He is hardly the best protected of the world’s leaders.
The Ealing farce of Zimbabwe’s elections ought to have fomented revolution within the country and angry protests beyond at both street and diplomatic level but everyone seems to have been stunned into indifference. The Olympic torch has provoked more pandemonium than the crass illegality practised by Mugabe. The increasingly ineffectual South African President, Thabo Mbeki, pretends that little is amiss. Not until Gordon Brown’s forthright if hardly elegant address to the Security Council on Wednesday has anyone done much more than wring their hands.
The UN is the proper forum to deal with this affront to democracy. UN troops should go into Zimbabwe, arrest Mugabe and put him on trial before the International Court of Justice. But the UN doesn’t do things like that, for all the disapproval of Harare expressed by the new Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. (Thank goodness Tony Blair didn’t get that job, by the way. It would be a shame for the UN to break the habit of its lifetime and appoint a Secretary-General with a dull name).
The UN is in dire need of an overhaul. I argued in my book Common Sense that “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? 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.
“Whether the UN should have the power to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs is a more complex matter. The UN’s remit should be truly global and therefore probably cannot be parochial. Matters such as the suppression of a particular tribal or religious grouping within a nation state might be confronted on a case-by-case basis. But 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” [see link in right hand column].
I stand by this analysis. But I would add a further recommendation to the UN’s new powers. It should have the authority, guaranteed unanimously by all member states, to monitor and if necessary oversee and even take charge of every member nation’s national elections. This would apply just as urgently to the US, France, Italy and Australia (to name recently voting nations where democracy is supposed to be transparent) as to Zimbabwe, Russia, Pakistan and everywhere else where political corruption is endemic. No nation is immune. Vote-rigging has occurred in Britain, don’t forget.
But Gordon Brown is clearly not the visionary to cajole the other veto nations into advocating a reconstituted UN. I doubt that Hilary Clinton or John McCain is either. Maybe Barack Obama is our best hope for such bold thinking. Brown is fundamentally a systems man rather than a visionary (I argue in a letter that The Guardian may publish later today that he puts me in mind of John Birt at the BBC, which may be the unkindest thing said about him in the present round of Brown-bashing, unkinder even than Vincent Cable’s devastating remark last autumn about Stalin metamorphosing into Mr Bean).
I had thought that Tony Blair was the worst prime minister in my lifetime, the first to induce me to abandon my adulthood habit of voting Labour in 2001 and again in 2005. But I fear Brown may be yet worse. At least Blair had the imagination to take on board some of what the voters yearned for. Brown seems perfectly oblivious to anyone but his trusted advisors who, like Robert Mugabe’s, tell him what he wants to hear. Nothing about his demeanour suggests that he has the capacity to learn and change. It doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn if he was upstaged by the Pope in the US this week – whatever the hell “upstaged” means when the star of the Holy See visits one of the most supernaturally-inclined nations on earth for the first time. Nobody scoffing at Brown’s lack of a rapturous reception is living in the real world. But in the real world, the policy on the 10p tax rate may well ensure that Brown is upstaged by David Cameron in a year or two’s time. And then it will be the Old Etonian Blairalike who gets to play guest of honour at the 2012 Olympics.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The BEST-REGULATED FAMILIES
Two great television drama serials have just ended their runs. The Sopranos, the New Jersey mob family saga, came to a formal conclusion after six seasons last week on Channel 4 (though it had already run on the satellite channel E4; see below). Shameless, the story of the Gallaghers and their successive neighbours on the fictional Chatsworth Estate in Manchester, finished its fifth run on Channel 4 this week and, while it gave every indication that all was wrapped up and that there was no more to say, a sixth series is evidently already in pre-production. I’m not sure if they shouldn’t call it a day while the going is still good.
In the British show’s finale, the remarkable parallels with The Sopranos were reinforced, quite possibly unconsciously. As Tony Soprano had done in a previous run, the flawed paterfamilias Frank Gallagher suffered a grievous accidental wound that left his survival in doubt. And he too experienced a strange vision of himself in different circumstances while comatose.
Frank and Tony are, along with Homer Simpson, the medium’s greatest modern depictions of family men. Flawed as they are, their characters compel attention and even – or do I mean “especially”? – empathy. All three (though only vocally in Homer’s case) owe a great deal to the acting as well as to the writing and original conception. All have developed in subtle, subterranean ways while staying essentially the same. That’s because they were conceived in a fully rounded state.
It’s the essential difference between, on the one hand, one-off drama and finite serials (what the Americans call mini-series) and, on the other, series (discrete stories about recurring characters) and continuing serials (soap operas and long-time open-ended dramas like the two under consideration). In the former form, a character needs to go on a journey of some kind and to be changed by it. In the latter, a character who is to stay the distance needs to be anchored in stable situations and characteristics. The Simpsons is an oddity here in that it appears to be built like a serial and yet the characters, being cartoons, don’t age and so it functions like a series (which means that in practice you can watch episodes in any order).
Shameless and The Sopranos (The Simpsons too, to a lesser extent) caught the imagination of a large public, I believe, because they both had as their macro-subject the most important and pervasive theme of the early years of this century: the need to take responsibility for what you do. This was never so true as in the last episode of Shameless. Monica, about to give birth, refuses to go to hospital because Frank has promised to accompany her and she believes it is his responsibility as the father to do so. Frank is in fact unable to be there because of the aforementioned accident, thrown from his barstool by an earth tremor, the publican and his wife washing their hands of his fate. Ian, Monica’s gay son by a man other than Frank, manages to be there for her and Frank, learning this and also influenced by his dream, finally embraces him as his own.
Meanwhile, Ian's half-brother Carl, rushing to the hospital, leaves his toddler niece with a girl he barely knows (but fancies) and then has to calculate how to handle the toddler’s mother’s murderous family when the girl absconds with the kid. All ends happily in the sort of expression of communality that, from time to time, Shameless has shamelessly but not over-sentimentally indulged, before a final outrageous joke. This run has contained some of its finest episodes along with some developments that teetered on the edge of being contrived and convenient. But I do feel, until the sixth (inevitably) proves me wrong, that five series have covered it.
How The Sopranos would end was the subject of endless speculation and then endless discussion. No show with such a reputation could possibly just peg out. Would it be a blood bath? Would there be a stunning twist? In fact, it ended at a family diner with daughter Meadow running late and Tony looking up, partly in expectation, partly in apprehension, every time something jangled on the soundtrack. In the last shot, we heard the street door thrown open and saw Tony look up, his face unreadable. We cut hard to black and bottomless silence and this was held long enough for one to begin to fear a break in transmission. Then the credits rolled in silence, though of course the linkman broke in with some irrelevant remark (actually, half the Shameless end-credits also passed in silence but mercifully without interruption; perhaps someone had spoken to Presentation).
Some viewers seem to have felt cheated out of a clear-cut resolution because the end of The Sopranos was, to them, ambiguous. In my view, it’s simple-minded to demand to know “what happened next”. The answer of course is “nothing: that was the end”. What it conveyed, at least to this viewer, was that Tony Soprano would spend the rest of his days looking up in expectation and apprehension every time an intrusive sound caught his attention. And that’s no life. As the credits rolled, I realized that I was rigid with tension. The exemplary editing of that last sequence had created a palpable sense of dread which, concentrated onto Tony’s face in the last shot, ought to have conveyed to all viewers what it conveyed to me.
The last season contained some magnificent episodes, none more than the agonizing scene in which Tony’s son AJ tried to take his own life and Tony, belatedly understanding what was going down, struggled to save him. The intertwining threads on the home stretch plotted Tony’s angry and reluctant withdrawal from analysis – where we started back in 1999 – against the long-awaited showdown with Phil Leotardo’s New York mob (caused by disagreements over asbestos waste: “waste management” was the job description Tony gave to his analyst at the outset) and the aforementioned crisis in AJ’s young life.
Season Six was shown in the States in two bunches with a gap of some months in between. Given how long British viewers had to wait for the beginning of the season, it seemed unnecessary to replicate the mid-season gap on either E4 or Channel 4. I would have watched on E4 where the first episode was screened twice but the second episode’s same-week repeat never materialized (it was listed in Radio Times) and, as I had not seen what would have been the first transmission, I decided to be extremely patient and await the C4 re-run, knowing that friends who were fellow fans would be months ahead of me.
This disruption of series runs is becoming epidemic in British television. ITV launched its new American-made mini-series Pushing Daisies last Saturday but today we learn that the second episode has been summarily dropped. ITV only has eight weeks of slots available before beginning its vitally important coverage of a football tournament that features no British teams. Pushing Daisies has the temerity to run to nine episodes, which ITV would of course have known when it made its Saturday night dispensations.
Naturally you would assume that if any episode had to be delayed it would be the last one. But you would be wrong to make the assumption that contemporary schedulers give a tuppenny damn about the audience. The second episode has been dropped from the schedules altogether. Given that the first episode did not perform as strongly as ITV would have required, the chances are not only that the second episode will never be shown (despite ITV’s vague undertaking to fit it in “in the autumn”) but that the show will anyway be moved out of its prime time slot in short order. In that case, it would have been possible for the nine-part run to be shown in sequence (after all, ITV has four channels to play with) but by then the hiatus will have already occurred. Broadcasters seem not to care whether they alienate their suppliers, never mind the pesky audience. I suspect that there will soon come a time when we will be looking back on the fact that British television showed the likes of The Sopranos and Shameless in any form as the last vestige of a last golden age of broadcasting.
Two great television drama serials have just ended their runs. The Sopranos, the New Jersey mob family saga, came to a formal conclusion after six seasons last week on Channel 4 (though it had already run on the satellite channel E4; see below). Shameless, the story of the Gallaghers and their successive neighbours on the fictional Chatsworth Estate in Manchester, finished its fifth run on Channel 4 this week and, while it gave every indication that all was wrapped up and that there was no more to say, a sixth series is evidently already in pre-production. I’m not sure if they shouldn’t call it a day while the going is still good.
In the British show’s finale, the remarkable parallels with The Sopranos were reinforced, quite possibly unconsciously. As Tony Soprano had done in a previous run, the flawed paterfamilias Frank Gallagher suffered a grievous accidental wound that left his survival in doubt. And he too experienced a strange vision of himself in different circumstances while comatose.
Frank and Tony are, along with Homer Simpson, the medium’s greatest modern depictions of family men. Flawed as they are, their characters compel attention and even – or do I mean “especially”? – empathy. All three (though only vocally in Homer’s case) owe a great deal to the acting as well as to the writing and original conception. All have developed in subtle, subterranean ways while staying essentially the same. That’s because they were conceived in a fully rounded state.
It’s the essential difference between, on the one hand, one-off drama and finite serials (what the Americans call mini-series) and, on the other, series (discrete stories about recurring characters) and continuing serials (soap operas and long-time open-ended dramas like the two under consideration). In the former form, a character needs to go on a journey of some kind and to be changed by it. In the latter, a character who is to stay the distance needs to be anchored in stable situations and characteristics. The Simpsons is an oddity here in that it appears to be built like a serial and yet the characters, being cartoons, don’t age and so it functions like a series (which means that in practice you can watch episodes in any order).
Shameless and The Sopranos (The Simpsons too, to a lesser extent) caught the imagination of a large public, I believe, because they both had as their macro-subject the most important and pervasive theme of the early years of this century: the need to take responsibility for what you do. This was never so true as in the last episode of Shameless. Monica, about to give birth, refuses to go to hospital because Frank has promised to accompany her and she believes it is his responsibility as the father to do so. Frank is in fact unable to be there because of the aforementioned accident, thrown from his barstool by an earth tremor, the publican and his wife washing their hands of his fate. Ian, Monica’s gay son by a man other than Frank, manages to be there for her and Frank, learning this and also influenced by his dream, finally embraces him as his own.
Meanwhile, Ian's half-brother Carl, rushing to the hospital, leaves his toddler niece with a girl he barely knows (but fancies) and then has to calculate how to handle the toddler’s mother’s murderous family when the girl absconds with the kid. All ends happily in the sort of expression of communality that, from time to time, Shameless has shamelessly but not over-sentimentally indulged, before a final outrageous joke. This run has contained some of its finest episodes along with some developments that teetered on the edge of being contrived and convenient. But I do feel, until the sixth (inevitably) proves me wrong, that five series have covered it.
How The Sopranos would end was the subject of endless speculation and then endless discussion. No show with such a reputation could possibly just peg out. Would it be a blood bath? Would there be a stunning twist? In fact, it ended at a family diner with daughter Meadow running late and Tony looking up, partly in expectation, partly in apprehension, every time something jangled on the soundtrack. In the last shot, we heard the street door thrown open and saw Tony look up, his face unreadable. We cut hard to black and bottomless silence and this was held long enough for one to begin to fear a break in transmission. Then the credits rolled in silence, though of course the linkman broke in with some irrelevant remark (actually, half the Shameless end-credits also passed in silence but mercifully without interruption; perhaps someone had spoken to Presentation).
Some viewers seem to have felt cheated out of a clear-cut resolution because the end of The Sopranos was, to them, ambiguous. In my view, it’s simple-minded to demand to know “what happened next”. The answer of course is “nothing: that was the end”. What it conveyed, at least to this viewer, was that Tony Soprano would spend the rest of his days looking up in expectation and apprehension every time an intrusive sound caught his attention. And that’s no life. As the credits rolled, I realized that I was rigid with tension. The exemplary editing of that last sequence had created a palpable sense of dread which, concentrated onto Tony’s face in the last shot, ought to have conveyed to all viewers what it conveyed to me.
The last season contained some magnificent episodes, none more than the agonizing scene in which Tony’s son AJ tried to take his own life and Tony, belatedly understanding what was going down, struggled to save him. The intertwining threads on the home stretch plotted Tony’s angry and reluctant withdrawal from analysis – where we started back in 1999 – against the long-awaited showdown with Phil Leotardo’s New York mob (caused by disagreements over asbestos waste: “waste management” was the job description Tony gave to his analyst at the outset) and the aforementioned crisis in AJ’s young life.
Season Six was shown in the States in two bunches with a gap of some months in between. Given how long British viewers had to wait for the beginning of the season, it seemed unnecessary to replicate the mid-season gap on either E4 or Channel 4. I would have watched on E4 where the first episode was screened twice but the second episode’s same-week repeat never materialized (it was listed in Radio Times) and, as I had not seen what would have been the first transmission, I decided to be extremely patient and await the C4 re-run, knowing that friends who were fellow fans would be months ahead of me.
This disruption of series runs is becoming epidemic in British television. ITV launched its new American-made mini-series Pushing Daisies last Saturday but today we learn that the second episode has been summarily dropped. ITV only has eight weeks of slots available before beginning its vitally important coverage of a football tournament that features no British teams. Pushing Daisies has the temerity to run to nine episodes, which ITV would of course have known when it made its Saturday night dispensations.
Naturally you would assume that if any episode had to be delayed it would be the last one. But you would be wrong to make the assumption that contemporary schedulers give a tuppenny damn about the audience. The second episode has been dropped from the schedules altogether. Given that the first episode did not perform as strongly as ITV would have required, the chances are not only that the second episode will never be shown (despite ITV’s vague undertaking to fit it in “in the autumn”) but that the show will anyway be moved out of its prime time slot in short order. In that case, it would have been possible for the nine-part run to be shown in sequence (after all, ITV has four channels to play with) but by then the hiatus will have already occurred. Broadcasters seem not to care whether they alienate their suppliers, never mind the pesky audience. I suspect that there will soon come a time when we will be looking back on the fact that British television showed the likes of The Sopranos and Shameless in any form as the last vestige of a last golden age of broadcasting.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
WHO’s COUNTING?
The weekly questionnaire in the Saturday Weekend magazine that comes with The Guardian includes, as one of its standard questions, “How often do you have sex?” It always strikes me as a preposterous impertinence to ask – my answer would be “Do you really think I keep count?” – but respondents generally answer it reasonably seriously, though few of them allow themselves to be precisely tied down. (Last week, Graydon Carter’s answer was “With other people, you mean?” but then, to the semi-literate question “Which words or phrases do you most overuse?”, he replied “Oh, really it’s not that big”, which is the witticism of a 16 year-old).
The Guardian compounded the offence this morning – or rather, looking at the clock, yesterday morning – with a cover feature on its daily magazine G2 under the heading “So, how many people have you slept with?” This was illustrated with agency photographs of individuals photo-shopped to appear to be holding up placards with numbers scrawled on them ranging from 0 to 35. Inside were an article and various quotes attributed to vox pops taken largely in London, Manchester and Sheffield. The hook on which this important sociological investigation was hung was a rather incoherent exchange between Piers Morgan and Nicholas Clegg in the magazine GQ wherein the Liberal-Democrat leader confirmed his reputation for unguarded remarks by answering “No more than 30 … a lot less than that” to Morgan’s harassment based on the question “How many women would actually know for a fact you’re good in bed?”
The “a lot less than that” part of the answer seems to have been discarded in the fallout from the interview. A pastily unattractive man, I would have said, with the look of a time-serving estate agent about him, Clegg is evidently thought rather a sport in some quarters, especially as he was married at 24. He’s now irrevocably marked as a 30-lovers man, as if somehow this makes him a more interesting politician. Mind you, this isn’t hard. So far, Clegg has seemed the least diverting leader of his party, certainly since World War II. He’d have to claim a lot more achievement than this to interest me.
Indeed, as a gay man I find the whole subject perfectly bewildering, like a report from another planet. To begin with, the numbers we’re talking about seem beyond comprehension until you note that there’s a big assumption lurking in the phraseology: “good in bed”, “slept with”. Of course, gay men have a huge proportion of their sexual encounters without recourse to a bed. On the al fresco cruising grounds, in the bath houses and disco or bar back rooms, in the public lavatories and across the furniture or on the floor in grabbed moments in houses, offices, hotels, shops and every other kind of meeting place, gay men couple (and more) on the wing. You don’t have to pursue that kind of sex for long before you rack up rather higher numbers than 30.
Back in the mid-1970s, before there was a big commercial gay scene but also before the spread of Aids, one of my gay friends was asked by a doctor at a clap clinic if he was promiscuous. You don’t hear that word much any more but back then it was bandied about, it carried an implied moral judgment and it was one of the sticks with which to beat gay men. My friend reasonably replied: “It depends what you mean by promiscuous”. The doctor gave her objective, professional assessment as an expert in sexually transmitted diseases: “we consider a gay man promiscuous if he has ten or more different sexual partners every week”. Now that’s going it some. Any active gay man, especially when young and blessed with stamina and full of his oats, will have sex with ten or more men one week in a while. If, in those years before London and other British towns became so gay-friendly, he was occasionally slipping off to Amsterdam or San Francisco or Berlin, he’d certainly see a lot of action in a short time. But every week? That suggests a certain application. You’re into four figures within two years,
That gay men have always had a lot of sex is clearly the case. When the big gay discotheques opened in the late ‘70s, I used to stand gazing at the hundreds of men bopping away and savour the atmosphere of supercharged sexuality and think how lucky we were. Straight men going to a straight disco looking to get laid would mostly go home dissatisfied. Even if the men to women ratio was as favourable as 60:40, the proportion of that 40 percent who were available would be low and the competition for their affections fierce. At a gay disco, everybody was a potential partner. No wonder straight men hated us.
There are certainly heterosexual men who pursue sex for its own sake the way most gay men do and, the evidence seems to suggest, far fewer women do, and do it far less. Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret, notoriously claimed to need to get laid at least three times daily and to have pleasured more than 10,000 women. But by all accounts the Labour politician Tom Driberg, whose appetite was certainly the equal of Simenon’s, had no trouble finding on a daily basis men who were happy to be fellated through several decades before homosexuality was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967.
The argument that men over-egg the pudding of their sex lives because they like to seem to be cock of the run and women downplay their experiences because they don’t want to appear too easy clearly has merit. Gay men, I can report with confidence, are blissfully happy to remain outside that sort of tension. Sure there are gay men – lesbians too, though I would never claim to speak for them – who prefer to be chaste or monogamous or modest, for whatever reason, all of them good ones except for fear of what people will say. But I can’t remember the last gay man I spoke to who was in any discernible degree competitive about his supposed conquests. To just about any gay man, the question “how many men would actually know for a fact you’re good in bed?’ simply wouldn’t compute.
The weekly questionnaire in the Saturday Weekend magazine that comes with The Guardian includes, as one of its standard questions, “How often do you have sex?” It always strikes me as a preposterous impertinence to ask – my answer would be “Do you really think I keep count?” – but respondents generally answer it reasonably seriously, though few of them allow themselves to be precisely tied down. (Last week, Graydon Carter’s answer was “With other people, you mean?” but then, to the semi-literate question “Which words or phrases do you most overuse?”, he replied “Oh, really it’s not that big”, which is the witticism of a 16 year-old).
The Guardian compounded the offence this morning – or rather, looking at the clock, yesterday morning – with a cover feature on its daily magazine G2 under the heading “So, how many people have you slept with?” This was illustrated with agency photographs of individuals photo-shopped to appear to be holding up placards with numbers scrawled on them ranging from 0 to 35. Inside were an article and various quotes attributed to vox pops taken largely in London, Manchester and Sheffield. The hook on which this important sociological investigation was hung was a rather incoherent exchange between Piers Morgan and Nicholas Clegg in the magazine GQ wherein the Liberal-Democrat leader confirmed his reputation for unguarded remarks by answering “No more than 30 … a lot less than that” to Morgan’s harassment based on the question “How many women would actually know for a fact you’re good in bed?”
The “a lot less than that” part of the answer seems to have been discarded in the fallout from the interview. A pastily unattractive man, I would have said, with the look of a time-serving estate agent about him, Clegg is evidently thought rather a sport in some quarters, especially as he was married at 24. He’s now irrevocably marked as a 30-lovers man, as if somehow this makes him a more interesting politician. Mind you, this isn’t hard. So far, Clegg has seemed the least diverting leader of his party, certainly since World War II. He’d have to claim a lot more achievement than this to interest me.
Indeed, as a gay man I find the whole subject perfectly bewildering, like a report from another planet. To begin with, the numbers we’re talking about seem beyond comprehension until you note that there’s a big assumption lurking in the phraseology: “good in bed”, “slept with”. Of course, gay men have a huge proportion of their sexual encounters without recourse to a bed. On the al fresco cruising grounds, in the bath houses and disco or bar back rooms, in the public lavatories and across the furniture or on the floor in grabbed moments in houses, offices, hotels, shops and every other kind of meeting place, gay men couple (and more) on the wing. You don’t have to pursue that kind of sex for long before you rack up rather higher numbers than 30.
Back in the mid-1970s, before there was a big commercial gay scene but also before the spread of Aids, one of my gay friends was asked by a doctor at a clap clinic if he was promiscuous. You don’t hear that word much any more but back then it was bandied about, it carried an implied moral judgment and it was one of the sticks with which to beat gay men. My friend reasonably replied: “It depends what you mean by promiscuous”. The doctor gave her objective, professional assessment as an expert in sexually transmitted diseases: “we consider a gay man promiscuous if he has ten or more different sexual partners every week”. Now that’s going it some. Any active gay man, especially when young and blessed with stamina and full of his oats, will have sex with ten or more men one week in a while. If, in those years before London and other British towns became so gay-friendly, he was occasionally slipping off to Amsterdam or San Francisco or Berlin, he’d certainly see a lot of action in a short time. But every week? That suggests a certain application. You’re into four figures within two years,
That gay men have always had a lot of sex is clearly the case. When the big gay discotheques opened in the late ‘70s, I used to stand gazing at the hundreds of men bopping away and savour the atmosphere of supercharged sexuality and think how lucky we were. Straight men going to a straight disco looking to get laid would mostly go home dissatisfied. Even if the men to women ratio was as favourable as 60:40, the proportion of that 40 percent who were available would be low and the competition for their affections fierce. At a gay disco, everybody was a potential partner. No wonder straight men hated us.
There are certainly heterosexual men who pursue sex for its own sake the way most gay men do and, the evidence seems to suggest, far fewer women do, and do it far less. Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret, notoriously claimed to need to get laid at least three times daily and to have pleasured more than 10,000 women. But by all accounts the Labour politician Tom Driberg, whose appetite was certainly the equal of Simenon’s, had no trouble finding on a daily basis men who were happy to be fellated through several decades before homosexuality was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967.
The argument that men over-egg the pudding of their sex lives because they like to seem to be cock of the run and women downplay their experiences because they don’t want to appear too easy clearly has merit. Gay men, I can report with confidence, are blissfully happy to remain outside that sort of tension. Sure there are gay men – lesbians too, though I would never claim to speak for them – who prefer to be chaste or monogamous or modest, for whatever reason, all of them good ones except for fear of what people will say. But I can’t remember the last gay man I spoke to who was in any discernible degree competitive about his supposed conquests. To just about any gay man, the question “how many men would actually know for a fact you’re good in bed?’ simply wouldn’t compute.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
The CAN-DO TEACHERS
To the lay observer – I’m so lay, I don’t even have kids of my own to concern me – this year’s conference of the National Union of Teachers seems to have been hearteningly assertive. Delegates voted on a number of propositions that, in past decades, would have had the Tory press foaming at the mouth even more than it did this week. That press reports frequently misrepresent what the teachers discussed and voted upon is only to be expected.
One course of action they certainly did determine to pursue was the withdrawal of labour if their pay claim is not recognized and if their working conditions are not attended to. Those who taught me half a century ago would be amazed at the kind of aggression, brutality, presumption and indifference that teachers routinely suffer in classrooms today right across the education system. Indeed, the ignorance and captiousness of parents, who are apt to support their darlings against the wisdom of the teachers, has become one of the worst aspects of trying to instil basic skills into unsocialized kids who rule the roost at home.
In a day or two, we shall know whether a union-wide ballot has won support for a one-day strike on April 24th, the first walkout by teachers since 1986. The NUT wants a ten per cent pay increase, the government has offered 2.45 per cent, with further rises of 2.3 per cent next year and the year after. The NUT says that this is effectively below the inflation rate and hence a pay cut in real terms. They have a point.
I have always deplored the line taken by successive governments that key workers should never go on strike. If they’re so key, pay them properly. Don’t oblige them to give up their vocation and leave the profession because they can’t afford to get on the housing ladder or care for their own kids. Don’t tell them it’s immoral or illegal for them to down tools and then take advantage of the power you’ve taken from them by keeping them underpaid. Teachers, nurses, paramedics, police officers, prison warders, social workers and military service personnel should be paid just as well as city slickers and sports and television so-called celebrities, than whom they are considerably more valuable. These keys workers should make common cause. A general strike of public sector workers would not only bring down the government, it would put future governments on notice that pay for public service is a national scandal that has to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
Of course, teachers do not necessarily offer a warm embrace to every kind of fellow toiler. Much was made of a supposed vote at the NUT conference to ban military recruitment in schools. That wasn’t of course what the NUT motion stated. The majority was for supporting any teacher declining to join in recruitment “based on misleading propaganda”, a proposition so unexceptionable it was hardly worth debating. Needless to say, the chasm between what is understood by the notion of “misleading propaganda” and what the Ministry of Defence calls “raising awareness” may be traversed by a squad of semiological foot soldiers simply marking time. One man’s lie is another’s truth. Perhaps the answer is for every school visit by a military spokesperson to be accompanied by a pacifist or some other sceptic articulate enough to ask the warrior the pertinent questions about training, bullying, Deepcut barracks, initiation ceremonies, military justice, equipment, conditions while on active service and aftercare for those injured and/or traumatized.
Another NUT vote was to be on the proposition that faith schools be abolished but the item sadly fell off the agenda. What a good motion, though. General Secretary Steve Sinnott said that abolition was not the union’s policy but that he favoured a limit. I favour total abolition. Teaching is about opening minds. Supernatural superstition is about closing them. If you are “instructed” in the Bible or the Q’ran or the Talmud every day, you’re not receiving a rounded education.
The conference did debate religion in schools. It did not, as some newspapers suggested, vote to throw open every British school to every mad mullah who wants to recruit suicide bombers. The NUT broadly favours a notion of teachers from different religions visiting schools to explain what their faith has to offer. A spokesman from the National Secular Society warned, reasonably enough, that “it will be the zealots who will be imposing their will on everyone else”. I would propose a makeweight for such visits similar to the one I proposed for the military, a voice to articulate the rational objections to supernatural fantasies that schoolkids generally do not have the knowledge or confidence to challenge.
The growing militancy of the teachers is a good indication that they are beginning to express their own worth again in the face of being taken for granted by the government and the press. Government is always about priorities and possibilities. If it’s possible for the government to afford to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s possible to afford to pay public service workers a living wage. Yup, it’s really that simple.
To the lay observer – I’m so lay, I don’t even have kids of my own to concern me – this year’s conference of the National Union of Teachers seems to have been hearteningly assertive. Delegates voted on a number of propositions that, in past decades, would have had the Tory press foaming at the mouth even more than it did this week. That press reports frequently misrepresent what the teachers discussed and voted upon is only to be expected.
One course of action they certainly did determine to pursue was the withdrawal of labour if their pay claim is not recognized and if their working conditions are not attended to. Those who taught me half a century ago would be amazed at the kind of aggression, brutality, presumption and indifference that teachers routinely suffer in classrooms today right across the education system. Indeed, the ignorance and captiousness of parents, who are apt to support their darlings against the wisdom of the teachers, has become one of the worst aspects of trying to instil basic skills into unsocialized kids who rule the roost at home.
In a day or two, we shall know whether a union-wide ballot has won support for a one-day strike on April 24th, the first walkout by teachers since 1986. The NUT wants a ten per cent pay increase, the government has offered 2.45 per cent, with further rises of 2.3 per cent next year and the year after. The NUT says that this is effectively below the inflation rate and hence a pay cut in real terms. They have a point.
I have always deplored the line taken by successive governments that key workers should never go on strike. If they’re so key, pay them properly. Don’t oblige them to give up their vocation and leave the profession because they can’t afford to get on the housing ladder or care for their own kids. Don’t tell them it’s immoral or illegal for them to down tools and then take advantage of the power you’ve taken from them by keeping them underpaid. Teachers, nurses, paramedics, police officers, prison warders, social workers and military service personnel should be paid just as well as city slickers and sports and television so-called celebrities, than whom they are considerably more valuable. These keys workers should make common cause. A general strike of public sector workers would not only bring down the government, it would put future governments on notice that pay for public service is a national scandal that has to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
Of course, teachers do not necessarily offer a warm embrace to every kind of fellow toiler. Much was made of a supposed vote at the NUT conference to ban military recruitment in schools. That wasn’t of course what the NUT motion stated. The majority was for supporting any teacher declining to join in recruitment “based on misleading propaganda”, a proposition so unexceptionable it was hardly worth debating. Needless to say, the chasm between what is understood by the notion of “misleading propaganda” and what the Ministry of Defence calls “raising awareness” may be traversed by a squad of semiological foot soldiers simply marking time. One man’s lie is another’s truth. Perhaps the answer is for every school visit by a military spokesperson to be accompanied by a pacifist or some other sceptic articulate enough to ask the warrior the pertinent questions about training, bullying, Deepcut barracks, initiation ceremonies, military justice, equipment, conditions while on active service and aftercare for those injured and/or traumatized.
Another NUT vote was to be on the proposition that faith schools be abolished but the item sadly fell off the agenda. What a good motion, though. General Secretary Steve Sinnott said that abolition was not the union’s policy but that he favoured a limit. I favour total abolition. Teaching is about opening minds. Supernatural superstition is about closing them. If you are “instructed” in the Bible or the Q’ran or the Talmud every day, you’re not receiving a rounded education.
The conference did debate religion in schools. It did not, as some newspapers suggested, vote to throw open every British school to every mad mullah who wants to recruit suicide bombers. The NUT broadly favours a notion of teachers from different religions visiting schools to explain what their faith has to offer. A spokesman from the National Secular Society warned, reasonably enough, that “it will be the zealots who will be imposing their will on everyone else”. I would propose a makeweight for such visits similar to the one I proposed for the military, a voice to articulate the rational objections to supernatural fantasies that schoolkids generally do not have the knowledge or confidence to challenge.
The growing militancy of the teachers is a good indication that they are beginning to express their own worth again in the face of being taken for granted by the government and the press. Government is always about priorities and possibilities. If it’s possible for the government to afford to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s possible to afford to pay public service workers a living wage. Yup, it’s really that simple.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The WASTELAND
I thought at the time that there could never be a regime in a democracy more mendacious, more underhand and more impervious to reality or criticism that the Nixon White House but once again on Monday the Bush II White House topped it.
Acknowledging that the death toll of American personnel (including eight civilians) in Iraq since the invasion five years and a week ago has now reached 4,000, President Bush declared: “One day people will look back at this moment in history and say ‘Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve, because they laid the foundations for peace for generations to come’.” To anyone with a scintilla of sensitivity, the obvious rejoinder is the famous line of Tacitus: “They have made a wasteland and called it peace”.
That Bush spends his every waking hour in denial has been clear since he began actively running for the presidency in 1999. Yet he has astute advisors around him – Condoleeza Rice stood at his side when he made his latest vapid claim – and, if they wished to make it clear that it wasn’t them who told him to say that, they could brief him with some harmless observation (one that could be seen to be erroneous even by unreconstructed neocons) which would only redound on him and not on them. It is surely the case that Bush is exhaustively coached every time he is unleashed on the press and, through them, the public; the impression he often gives of a man who doesn’t quite understand the points he is making confirms that.
The back-up material that the White House releases on occasions like this is equally expressive of an administration that does not listen to what it says. The latest roll call, observed Bush’s press secretary Dana Perino, was “a sober moment”. Even if the President were not himself a recovered alcoholic, the phrase is unfortunate. Government is not a game, it’s not for fun. All of Bush’s business should be sober and conducted in a sober frame of mind, whether it be his policy on stem cell research or his plans to try to prevent the world sliding into recession.
Perino went on: “President Bush believes that every life is precious and he spends time every day thinking about those who’ve lost their lives on the battlefield”. No he doesn’t. Nobody does that, not even somebody who is (unlike Bush) genuinely devout as a matter of life-long conviction and upbringing. My late parents loomed immeasurably larger in my life than any serviceman or woman whom he has never met does in Bush’s and yet weeks go by without my giving either of them a thought. Nonetheless, my feelings about them run no less deep. If Bush makes some kind of religiose daily routine of contemplating the deaths of American warriors, then its very ritual nature robs it of substance. In any case, what about the lives lost other than on a battlefield? Are they of no account just because most of them were not American? And if he genuinely and literally thinks that “every life is precious”, why did he confirm more death sentences when Governor of Texas than any other gubernatorial American in the nation’s history?
“He gets a report about every single soldier who passes away” went on Perino, resorting to craven euphemism. “And he always pauses a moment to think about them and to offer a prayer for their loved ones”. The making of empty gestures is bad enough: to have these gestures described as if they are meaningful is treating us like boobies.
And there’s more from Perino: “The President has said the hardest thing a commander-in-chief will do is send young men and women into combat and he’s grieved for every lost American life, from the very first several years ago to those lost today”. Dana Perino may be a bright girl but she has the look of one chosen for her looks (it’s an enjoyable irony that toothsomeness has become a liability for women who want to excel in a career where you need to be taken seriously). Given that most of those who heard or read her will know precisely which year it was that the first American lives were lost fighting in Iraq, the looseness of “several years ago” is pretty insulting. But it is difficult to credit that sending unknown cannon fodder to war is so darned hard when the only comprehensible reason for Bush not to bring them all home right now is his unwillingness to lose face. Indeed, the White House has been putting it about that the expectation of troop withdrawals this summer is too optimistic. This is also perfectly understandable. As Bush clearly cannot resolve the Iraq quagmire before leaving office, he may as well drive his troops deeper into the Iraqi sand so that his successor has a worse mess to clear up. Bush may be calculating that, as happened to LBJ after JFK over Vietnam, the blame for the calamity of Iraq may in time be transferred to President Obama, McCain or H Clinton. Add ‘cynical’ to mendacious, underhand and impervious to reality or criticism.
I thought at the time that there could never be a regime in a democracy more mendacious, more underhand and more impervious to reality or criticism that the Nixon White House but once again on Monday the Bush II White House topped it.
Acknowledging that the death toll of American personnel (including eight civilians) in Iraq since the invasion five years and a week ago has now reached 4,000, President Bush declared: “One day people will look back at this moment in history and say ‘Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve, because they laid the foundations for peace for generations to come’.” To anyone with a scintilla of sensitivity, the obvious rejoinder is the famous line of Tacitus: “They have made a wasteland and called it peace”.
That Bush spends his every waking hour in denial has been clear since he began actively running for the presidency in 1999. Yet he has astute advisors around him – Condoleeza Rice stood at his side when he made his latest vapid claim – and, if they wished to make it clear that it wasn’t them who told him to say that, they could brief him with some harmless observation (one that could be seen to be erroneous even by unreconstructed neocons) which would only redound on him and not on them. It is surely the case that Bush is exhaustively coached every time he is unleashed on the press and, through them, the public; the impression he often gives of a man who doesn’t quite understand the points he is making confirms that.
The back-up material that the White House releases on occasions like this is equally expressive of an administration that does not listen to what it says. The latest roll call, observed Bush’s press secretary Dana Perino, was “a sober moment”. Even if the President were not himself a recovered alcoholic, the phrase is unfortunate. Government is not a game, it’s not for fun. All of Bush’s business should be sober and conducted in a sober frame of mind, whether it be his policy on stem cell research or his plans to try to prevent the world sliding into recession.
Perino went on: “President Bush believes that every life is precious and he spends time every day thinking about those who’ve lost their lives on the battlefield”. No he doesn’t. Nobody does that, not even somebody who is (unlike Bush) genuinely devout as a matter of life-long conviction and upbringing. My late parents loomed immeasurably larger in my life than any serviceman or woman whom he has never met does in Bush’s and yet weeks go by without my giving either of them a thought. Nonetheless, my feelings about them run no less deep. If Bush makes some kind of religiose daily routine of contemplating the deaths of American warriors, then its very ritual nature robs it of substance. In any case, what about the lives lost other than on a battlefield? Are they of no account just because most of them were not American? And if he genuinely and literally thinks that “every life is precious”, why did he confirm more death sentences when Governor of Texas than any other gubernatorial American in the nation’s history?
“He gets a report about every single soldier who passes away” went on Perino, resorting to craven euphemism. “And he always pauses a moment to think about them and to offer a prayer for their loved ones”. The making of empty gestures is bad enough: to have these gestures described as if they are meaningful is treating us like boobies.
And there’s more from Perino: “The President has said the hardest thing a commander-in-chief will do is send young men and women into combat and he’s grieved for every lost American life, from the very first several years ago to those lost today”. Dana Perino may be a bright girl but she has the look of one chosen for her looks (it’s an enjoyable irony that toothsomeness has become a liability for women who want to excel in a career where you need to be taken seriously). Given that most of those who heard or read her will know precisely which year it was that the first American lives were lost fighting in Iraq, the looseness of “several years ago” is pretty insulting. But it is difficult to credit that sending unknown cannon fodder to war is so darned hard when the only comprehensible reason for Bush not to bring them all home right now is his unwillingness to lose face. Indeed, the White House has been putting it about that the expectation of troop withdrawals this summer is too optimistic. This is also perfectly understandable. As Bush clearly cannot resolve the Iraq quagmire before leaving office, he may as well drive his troops deeper into the Iraqi sand so that his successor has a worse mess to clear up. Bush may be calculating that, as happened to LBJ after JFK over Vietnam, the blame for the calamity of Iraq may in time be transferred to President Obama, McCain or H Clinton. Add ‘cynical’ to mendacious, underhand and impervious to reality or criticism.
Monday, March 17, 2008
A HAIR DO and a SHAVE
Up in town recently, I took the opportunity to catch up with some movies and shows. A friend rather unexpectedly proposed that we see Hairspray in its stage musical manifestation and with a certain becoming reluctance I agreed to escort her, despite the show’s cast being led by two of my least favourite performers, Michael Ball and Mel Smith.
It all turned out a little differently from expected. First, my friend got poorly and cried off, allowing me to buy a reduced price day seat in the front row, a vantage point she certainly would not have tolerated. I got to the theatre at 9.30am and found only four queueing ahead of me but within ten minutes there must have been 30 behind me. I had the distinct impression that everyone within earshot was seeing the show for the tenth time.
Second, Mr Smith has already left the cast, even though it only opened four months ago. I think playing a few weeks just for the reviews is poor stuff. His place as Wilbur Turnblad has been taken by Ian Talbot, a perfectly unexceptionable pro of the old school. Third, Mr Ball gives the performance of his life. His abiding sin, vanity, is not appropriate to the role of Edna Turnblad, the heroine’s mother, which, since John Waters’ original non-musical movie of 1988, has always been played by a man (the late drag artiste Divine originally; Harvey Fierstein and a succession of others including George Wendt of Cheers fame in the Broadway musical; John Travolta in the movie of this second version of the material). Ball wears plentiful padding for the role but the arm flab and the multiple chins are entirely his own. He’ll need to take himself in hand when the run is over. Not much room for vanity there.
It would be a rare curmudgeon who was not charmed by this confection. I suspect that, had you been in a position to glance my way at pretty much any point during the proceedings, you would have caught me with a silly grin on my face. It is wholly good-natured and energetic and the musical score, utterly unmemorable, serves its purpose and offends none. The company is a good mix of handy types and they still play it as if it is the gypsy matinee in the first week of previews.
Mel Smith apart, every lead has won an award. Leanne Jones, the proudly tubby juvenile, Tracy, picked up the Olivier and a brief 6.00 O'Clock News profile a day or two after she won my heart. The yummy boy who, against the cliché, falls for her is Ben James-Ellis who, before he was obliged by Equity to assume the James part of his name, was the sole contestant in last year’s Any Dream Will Do to display any sex appeal (as my regular reader will recall).
The only number that disappointed me was Edna and Wilbur’s sentimental affirmation of their marriage, ‘Timeless to Me’, a perfectly decent little song but the occasion of a deal of ad-libbing and corpsing, led by Michael Ball. The audience falls on this kind of low-grade stuff with hysterical delight – I thought the two women behind me were going to have seizures – believing (I suppose) that it is real and uncontrolled rather than rehearsed and calculated. Think about it: is it likely that this song would suddenly make the performers break up just tonight when they’ve been singing it for four months? Wake up do. I sensed that I was the only person in the audience who didn’t buy this, just as I felt sure I was the only one who recognised John Waters as the voice on the on-stage radio (a little hommage, perhaps, to Mel Brooks and his momentary run-on during the early performances of The Producers on Broadway). But all in all this was a fine, old-fashioned Grand Night Out and the Shaftesbury, premature funeral parlour to more musicals than all the other West End houses put together, must be delighted to play host to one of its rare hits.
A considerably more substantial and significant musical is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and I steeled myself to see Tim Burton’s movie version, hopeful that Sondheim’s evident satisfaction with it and Burton’s proven track record of taking Grand Guignol seriously would militate against the indignities that so often befall musical plays when they go kicking and screaming before the cameras. The first thing to say is that a miraculous amount of the score is in place, rather more than is customary in filmed musicals. This was a nice surprise: the promotion has slyly downplayed that Sweeney Todd is a musical at all (it’s promoted purely as a Johnny Depp vehicle) and a couple of reviews I read suggested that some musical violence might have been done.
Not a bit of it. The movie looks sensational, like a mix of daguerreotype and animated Victorian woodcut, all silver and sepia with the blood picked out and a pair of sequences in bright colours, one a romanticised memory, the other a no less rosy projection. The acting is first rate. Depp can do no wrong in my book and his handling of the songs is masterly. His voice is nothing special but he completely understands the dynamic of sung drama and the way to handle a lyric, giving him the ability to act a singing role comparable to, for instance, Rosalind Russell in the movie of Gypsy. Depp’s gift for varieties of British accent is well known and for this one he has clearly listened to Paul Whitehouse and other brands of London speech.
Helena Bonham Carter’s career has clambered up to a much higher plane since she fell in with Burton and, while every Mrs Lovett I have seen on the stage (seven or eight now) was better cast and better able to find the level of the character’s comedy, she keeps pace with Depp. The only number that defeats the pair of them is ‘A Little Priest’. Neither has the requisite sense of comedy or feel for burlesque to convey the rollicking satire of this brilliant conceit and Burton stages it in a dismayingly literal fashion.
Alan Rickman is suitably malevolent as the cruel judge on whom Todd seeks his revenge, Timothy Spall runs through his familiar bag of tricks as the beadle, Sacha Baron Cohen is triumphant as the charlatan Pirelli and young Edward Sanders (a born Artful Dodger) has prodigious aplomb and musicality as Tobias. The juve leads are on the pallid side: Jamie Campbell Bower sings well as Anthony but looks disturbingly like a twelve year-old girl; Jayne Wisener’s Joanna has already fallen out of my memory but the character is anyway a cipher, for all that she is the subject of one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs ever written.
Keeping up the blood level, I also saw There Will Be Blood. Now that’s a movie. It’s a rural Citizen Kane and Daniel Day-Lewis is clearly channelling Welles as well as, for the surface detail, John Huston. His performance is nothing short of a miracle. It’s in the interstices, the throw-away moments, the quietness of what he does that, paradoxically perhaps, the genius of the work is most apparent. All of it is palpably lived by Day-Lewis. You never see the mechanics of it or catch him acting and yet it’s huge and authentically Victorian – gracious and courtly and watchful as well as brutal and hubristic and animal. He makes you care about this man even while you fear what he will do. This is one of the great monstres sacrés of cinema and one of the five or six greatest feats of screen acting you will ever see.
What I wasn’t prepared for is that, while the story undoubtedly and inevitably turns bloody, the blood it promises is much more in the sense of kin. This is very much a saga of family, of father and son, of brother and brother though, as is apparent from the outset, these kinships are all false. Indeed, my own reading of the identical twins Paul and Eli is that they are to be seen not as two people but as manifestations of a single split personality; the review in Sight & Sound declares that “the film ultimately refutes” this possibility but I don’t agree. As the saying goes, we never see them together.
I also caught Juno, a wholly fresh and seductive tale of a 16 year-old’s dramas. I was reminded of Jon Stewart’s funny line at the Oscars: “great movies this year but they’re so grim. Thank God for teenage pregnancy”. Diablo Cody’s screenplay richly deserved its awards – this was very much a movie whose success was founded on a sparky script – and Ellen Page’s preternaturally self-possessed Juno was absolutely riveting to watch, enough to make the young Lauren Bacall look like Margaret O’Brien.
I wanted to see No Country for Old Men, being a big fan of, on the one hand, Cormac McCarthy’s novels and, on the other, the Coen Brothers’ movies, but couldn’t fit it in. My host at the house where I was staying, who is in his 70s, said he couldn’t understand most of the dialogue and referred to it as No Country for Deaf Men. With him and his wife, I did see The Kite Runner at their local independent movie house but this was the least of my viewings. Its plot resembles that of Atonement which, for all that I know many detest it, is a far more achieved and honest movie and doesn’t conclude that the answer to the world’s problems is to come and live in the US of A, after a preposterous resolution of a kidnap in Afghanistan suggesting that anybody can be Rambo and get away with it. By and large, local movie-makers do a much more convincing job than western ones who visit and expect to get it in one, even if they are working (as in this case) from a native story.
Elsewhere in the theatre, I went to a matinee of The Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. This is the most accessible of Edward Bond’s works and the first to reach the West End: it’s amusing that it should surface in this most conservative of houses and play an audience of grey heads all, it must be said, listening intently and largely appreciatively. It helps to have someone as accomplished as Eileen Atkins leading the cast. I have also seen Judi Dench as Mrs Rafi and Coral Browne who was its first player – as they say these days, she “created” the role – but I think Dame Eileen is the best. She understands at what level this is a comedy (I’ve never thought that comedy, for all her reputation for fun and larks, is Dame Judi’s forte) but never loses sight of the political underpinnings. David Haig began a bit broadly for my taste as her protagonist, the well-named Hatch, but he settled to it and handled the descent into madness with great skill. Jonathan Kent has become a fine director with a gift for clarity and self-effacement and for blending a company of talents who look unlikely to cohere.
I saw two plays in what we used to call fringe theatres, largely because I have a four-handed play in the market now and venues of this size and kind are the most likely to look upon my work kindly. Neither play was remotely world-shaking and one was simply awful so I shall get depressed if my effort is not thought worthy to be mounted in such company.
Up in town recently, I took the opportunity to catch up with some movies and shows. A friend rather unexpectedly proposed that we see Hairspray in its stage musical manifestation and with a certain becoming reluctance I agreed to escort her, despite the show’s cast being led by two of my least favourite performers, Michael Ball and Mel Smith.
It all turned out a little differently from expected. First, my friend got poorly and cried off, allowing me to buy a reduced price day seat in the front row, a vantage point she certainly would not have tolerated. I got to the theatre at 9.30am and found only four queueing ahead of me but within ten minutes there must have been 30 behind me. I had the distinct impression that everyone within earshot was seeing the show for the tenth time.
Second, Mr Smith has already left the cast, even though it only opened four months ago. I think playing a few weeks just for the reviews is poor stuff. His place as Wilbur Turnblad has been taken by Ian Talbot, a perfectly unexceptionable pro of the old school. Third, Mr Ball gives the performance of his life. His abiding sin, vanity, is not appropriate to the role of Edna Turnblad, the heroine’s mother, which, since John Waters’ original non-musical movie of 1988, has always been played by a man (the late drag artiste Divine originally; Harvey Fierstein and a succession of others including George Wendt of Cheers fame in the Broadway musical; John Travolta in the movie of this second version of the material). Ball wears plentiful padding for the role but the arm flab and the multiple chins are entirely his own. He’ll need to take himself in hand when the run is over. Not much room for vanity there.
It would be a rare curmudgeon who was not charmed by this confection. I suspect that, had you been in a position to glance my way at pretty much any point during the proceedings, you would have caught me with a silly grin on my face. It is wholly good-natured and energetic and the musical score, utterly unmemorable, serves its purpose and offends none. The company is a good mix of handy types and they still play it as if it is the gypsy matinee in the first week of previews.
Mel Smith apart, every lead has won an award. Leanne Jones, the proudly tubby juvenile, Tracy, picked up the Olivier and a brief 6.00 O'Clock News profile a day or two after she won my heart. The yummy boy who, against the cliché, falls for her is Ben James-Ellis who, before he was obliged by Equity to assume the James part of his name, was the sole contestant in last year’s Any Dream Will Do to display any sex appeal (as my regular reader will recall).
The only number that disappointed me was Edna and Wilbur’s sentimental affirmation of their marriage, ‘Timeless to Me’, a perfectly decent little song but the occasion of a deal of ad-libbing and corpsing, led by Michael Ball. The audience falls on this kind of low-grade stuff with hysterical delight – I thought the two women behind me were going to have seizures – believing (I suppose) that it is real and uncontrolled rather than rehearsed and calculated. Think about it: is it likely that this song would suddenly make the performers break up just tonight when they’ve been singing it for four months? Wake up do. I sensed that I was the only person in the audience who didn’t buy this, just as I felt sure I was the only one who recognised John Waters as the voice on the on-stage radio (a little hommage, perhaps, to Mel Brooks and his momentary run-on during the early performances of The Producers on Broadway). But all in all this was a fine, old-fashioned Grand Night Out and the Shaftesbury, premature funeral parlour to more musicals than all the other West End houses put together, must be delighted to play host to one of its rare hits.
A considerably more substantial and significant musical is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and I steeled myself to see Tim Burton’s movie version, hopeful that Sondheim’s evident satisfaction with it and Burton’s proven track record of taking Grand Guignol seriously would militate against the indignities that so often befall musical plays when they go kicking and screaming before the cameras. The first thing to say is that a miraculous amount of the score is in place, rather more than is customary in filmed musicals. This was a nice surprise: the promotion has slyly downplayed that Sweeney Todd is a musical at all (it’s promoted purely as a Johnny Depp vehicle) and a couple of reviews I read suggested that some musical violence might have been done.
Not a bit of it. The movie looks sensational, like a mix of daguerreotype and animated Victorian woodcut, all silver and sepia with the blood picked out and a pair of sequences in bright colours, one a romanticised memory, the other a no less rosy projection. The acting is first rate. Depp can do no wrong in my book and his handling of the songs is masterly. His voice is nothing special but he completely understands the dynamic of sung drama and the way to handle a lyric, giving him the ability to act a singing role comparable to, for instance, Rosalind Russell in the movie of Gypsy. Depp’s gift for varieties of British accent is well known and for this one he has clearly listened to Paul Whitehouse and other brands of London speech.
Helena Bonham Carter’s career has clambered up to a much higher plane since she fell in with Burton and, while every Mrs Lovett I have seen on the stage (seven or eight now) was better cast and better able to find the level of the character’s comedy, she keeps pace with Depp. The only number that defeats the pair of them is ‘A Little Priest’. Neither has the requisite sense of comedy or feel for burlesque to convey the rollicking satire of this brilliant conceit and Burton stages it in a dismayingly literal fashion.
Alan Rickman is suitably malevolent as the cruel judge on whom Todd seeks his revenge, Timothy Spall runs through his familiar bag of tricks as the beadle, Sacha Baron Cohen is triumphant as the charlatan Pirelli and young Edward Sanders (a born Artful Dodger) has prodigious aplomb and musicality as Tobias. The juve leads are on the pallid side: Jamie Campbell Bower sings well as Anthony but looks disturbingly like a twelve year-old girl; Jayne Wisener’s Joanna has already fallen out of my memory but the character is anyway a cipher, for all that she is the subject of one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs ever written.
Keeping up the blood level, I also saw There Will Be Blood. Now that’s a movie. It’s a rural Citizen Kane and Daniel Day-Lewis is clearly channelling Welles as well as, for the surface detail, John Huston. His performance is nothing short of a miracle. It’s in the interstices, the throw-away moments, the quietness of what he does that, paradoxically perhaps, the genius of the work is most apparent. All of it is palpably lived by Day-Lewis. You never see the mechanics of it or catch him acting and yet it’s huge and authentically Victorian – gracious and courtly and watchful as well as brutal and hubristic and animal. He makes you care about this man even while you fear what he will do. This is one of the great monstres sacrés of cinema and one of the five or six greatest feats of screen acting you will ever see.
What I wasn’t prepared for is that, while the story undoubtedly and inevitably turns bloody, the blood it promises is much more in the sense of kin. This is very much a saga of family, of father and son, of brother and brother though, as is apparent from the outset, these kinships are all false. Indeed, my own reading of the identical twins Paul and Eli is that they are to be seen not as two people but as manifestations of a single split personality; the review in Sight & Sound declares that “the film ultimately refutes” this possibility but I don’t agree. As the saying goes, we never see them together.
I also caught Juno, a wholly fresh and seductive tale of a 16 year-old’s dramas. I was reminded of Jon Stewart’s funny line at the Oscars: “great movies this year but they’re so grim. Thank God for teenage pregnancy”. Diablo Cody’s screenplay richly deserved its awards – this was very much a movie whose success was founded on a sparky script – and Ellen Page’s preternaturally self-possessed Juno was absolutely riveting to watch, enough to make the young Lauren Bacall look like Margaret O’Brien.
I wanted to see No Country for Old Men, being a big fan of, on the one hand, Cormac McCarthy’s novels and, on the other, the Coen Brothers’ movies, but couldn’t fit it in. My host at the house where I was staying, who is in his 70s, said he couldn’t understand most of the dialogue and referred to it as No Country for Deaf Men. With him and his wife, I did see The Kite Runner at their local independent movie house but this was the least of my viewings. Its plot resembles that of Atonement which, for all that I know many detest it, is a far more achieved and honest movie and doesn’t conclude that the answer to the world’s problems is to come and live in the US of A, after a preposterous resolution of a kidnap in Afghanistan suggesting that anybody can be Rambo and get away with it. By and large, local movie-makers do a much more convincing job than western ones who visit and expect to get it in one, even if they are working (as in this case) from a native story.
Elsewhere in the theatre, I went to a matinee of The Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. This is the most accessible of Edward Bond’s works and the first to reach the West End: it’s amusing that it should surface in this most conservative of houses and play an audience of grey heads all, it must be said, listening intently and largely appreciatively. It helps to have someone as accomplished as Eileen Atkins leading the cast. I have also seen Judi Dench as Mrs Rafi and Coral Browne who was its first player – as they say these days, she “created” the role – but I think Dame Eileen is the best. She understands at what level this is a comedy (I’ve never thought that comedy, for all her reputation for fun and larks, is Dame Judi’s forte) but never loses sight of the political underpinnings. David Haig began a bit broadly for my taste as her protagonist, the well-named Hatch, but he settled to it and handled the descent into madness with great skill. Jonathan Kent has become a fine director with a gift for clarity and self-effacement and for blending a company of talents who look unlikely to cohere.
I saw two plays in what we used to call fringe theatres, largely because I have a four-handed play in the market now and venues of this size and kind are the most likely to look upon my work kindly. Neither play was remotely world-shaking and one was simply awful so I shall get depressed if my effort is not thought worthy to be mounted in such company.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
A BALLOT with YOUR NAME ON IT
The trouble with democracy, of course, is that it empowers all the idiots. The democratic ideal, so beloved of such great political visionaries as … um … George W Bush, is apt to deliver governments representing such movements as, for instance, Hamas, leaving the pro-democrats fulminating against what they perceive as anti-democratic governments elected by democracy.
At the end of last week, ballots were organised in ten Labour and Liberal Democrat-held constituencies across England to test the demand for a nationwide referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty. There is some doubt as to the reliability of this as a test of public opinion. The ballots were the work of a campaign called I Want a Referendum, a somewhat parti pris convenor for a vote on the desirability or otherwise of a referendum. There was not much evidence of campaigning done in these constituencies, save by the pro-referendum party. There was certainly a variable shortfall in the number of ballot papers issued in the various constituencies, so that a significant proportion of the electorate was actually disenfranchised.
The organisers didn’t let a little thing like an obvious lack of democracy prevent them from claiming that 88 per cent of those who voted did so in favour of a referendum. How far such a figure is verifiable is swathed in mist. The result is hardly more credible than that in favour of Vladimir Putin’s puppet, Dmitri Medvedev, in the Russian presidential elections. Why would a man whom the electorate knows not at all win a landslide? Simply because a not-so-benevolent despot told the people to vote for him.
Just as it would be interesting to know if one per cent of the Russians who voted for Medvedev have the remotest idea of what he stands for (other than Putin by another name), so I would love to know how many of those who voted for a referendum in Britain have read the Lisbon treaty or know what is the constitutional status of referendums. Come to that, I wonder how many of the objectors have the 2005 party manifestoes to hand. “You promised a referendum” is a mantra that may not survive close examination. Proposing to have a referendum or saying that it is your intention to have one is not a promise. Any parent knows that “you promised” is a cry that generates more heat than light.
The suspicion remains – it’s a big suspicion and you know just what it is but it rarely gets mentioned – that large numbers of Britons don’t want to be in Europe at all. They cannot marshal any sort of coherent argument as to why they don’t. It’s a mixture of xenophobia, nostalgia and fantasy. They think if we leave we’ll somehow be more prosperous, less regulation-ridden and better able to refuse entry to economic migrants and asylum seekers. Some of them think it will mean fewer Pakistanis and West Indians “taking the social”, but the people who think that are even more stupid than those who think leaving Europe would be a smart move.
The I Want a Referendum party is of course merely a front for the I Want to Leave the EU party. They are a mix of little Englanders, UKIP and BNP supporters, free-lance racists and general malcontents. They have no programme for Britain outside Europe because they haven’t thought that far; they don’t actually think, they just resent. Somebody representing I Want a Referendum should be obliged to explain objectively just what the economic and social consequences of leaving the Union would be. The electorate is entitled to know in which lower division an unaligned Britain is going to find itself as the global power arrangement reshapes. I suspect Russia will eventually find an accommodation with the EU and perhaps even join it; maybe Israel too. The world will divide into the USA, the EU, China, India and Islam with Britain either along with Australasia and the Far East in a somewhat compromised outer circle or down in the basement with Africa and South America. The Union-quitters had better have a convincing argument to say I am wrong.
Of course, the pro-Europeans have only themselves to blame. Britain has always been the least communitaire member of the EU. The other members must be fed up to the back teeth with our constant requirement of special considerations, vetoes and waivers. What is more, the Europhiles have never made any effort to share the European ideal with the home electorate, rather as though they feel the matter is too complex and sophisticated for the short attention span of hoi polloi. From Macmillan and Heath to Blair and Brown via Roy Jenkins and George Thompson, British politicians have never deigned to attempt to expound their desire for membership. With newspaper proprietors who have never lived in Europe ranged against them, all newspapers reluctant to give more than token space to what is perceived as an unpopular and dull subject and dissent in their own parties (all parties), they have retreated to a state of superior indifference to question or objection.
The pro-Europeans understandably don’t want a referendum that they will certainly lose. They will not lose it because any measurable proportion of the electorate has coherent objections to the Lisbon treaty but because Europe has never been sold or even explained to the electorate. Personally, I would very much appreciate a clear and coherent statement of what Europe wants to achieve and why Britain benefits from being part of that desire but we look for such reassurance in vain. Gordon Brown seems no more likely to give us that than did any of his predecessors. Or perhaps the rather farcical ten-constituency vote will turn out to put some long-needed backbone into the European apologists.
The trouble with democracy, of course, is that it empowers all the idiots. The democratic ideal, so beloved of such great political visionaries as … um … George W Bush, is apt to deliver governments representing such movements as, for instance, Hamas, leaving the pro-democrats fulminating against what they perceive as anti-democratic governments elected by democracy.
At the end of last week, ballots were organised in ten Labour and Liberal Democrat-held constituencies across England to test the demand for a nationwide referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty. There is some doubt as to the reliability of this as a test of public opinion. The ballots were the work of a campaign called I Want a Referendum, a somewhat parti pris convenor for a vote on the desirability or otherwise of a referendum. There was not much evidence of campaigning done in these constituencies, save by the pro-referendum party. There was certainly a variable shortfall in the number of ballot papers issued in the various constituencies, so that a significant proportion of the electorate was actually disenfranchised.
The organisers didn’t let a little thing like an obvious lack of democracy prevent them from claiming that 88 per cent of those who voted did so in favour of a referendum. How far such a figure is verifiable is swathed in mist. The result is hardly more credible than that in favour of Vladimir Putin’s puppet, Dmitri Medvedev, in the Russian presidential elections. Why would a man whom the electorate knows not at all win a landslide? Simply because a not-so-benevolent despot told the people to vote for him.
Just as it would be interesting to know if one per cent of the Russians who voted for Medvedev have the remotest idea of what he stands for (other than Putin by another name), so I would love to know how many of those who voted for a referendum in Britain have read the Lisbon treaty or know what is the constitutional status of referendums. Come to that, I wonder how many of the objectors have the 2005 party manifestoes to hand. “You promised a referendum” is a mantra that may not survive close examination. Proposing to have a referendum or saying that it is your intention to have one is not a promise. Any parent knows that “you promised” is a cry that generates more heat than light.
The suspicion remains – it’s a big suspicion and you know just what it is but it rarely gets mentioned – that large numbers of Britons don’t want to be in Europe at all. They cannot marshal any sort of coherent argument as to why they don’t. It’s a mixture of xenophobia, nostalgia and fantasy. They think if we leave we’ll somehow be more prosperous, less regulation-ridden and better able to refuse entry to economic migrants and asylum seekers. Some of them think it will mean fewer Pakistanis and West Indians “taking the social”, but the people who think that are even more stupid than those who think leaving Europe would be a smart move.
The I Want a Referendum party is of course merely a front for the I Want to Leave the EU party. They are a mix of little Englanders, UKIP and BNP supporters, free-lance racists and general malcontents. They have no programme for Britain outside Europe because they haven’t thought that far; they don’t actually think, they just resent. Somebody representing I Want a Referendum should be obliged to explain objectively just what the economic and social consequences of leaving the Union would be. The electorate is entitled to know in which lower division an unaligned Britain is going to find itself as the global power arrangement reshapes. I suspect Russia will eventually find an accommodation with the EU and perhaps even join it; maybe Israel too. The world will divide into the USA, the EU, China, India and Islam with Britain either along with Australasia and the Far East in a somewhat compromised outer circle or down in the basement with Africa and South America. The Union-quitters had better have a convincing argument to say I am wrong.
Of course, the pro-Europeans have only themselves to blame. Britain has always been the least communitaire member of the EU. The other members must be fed up to the back teeth with our constant requirement of special considerations, vetoes and waivers. What is more, the Europhiles have never made any effort to share the European ideal with the home electorate, rather as though they feel the matter is too complex and sophisticated for the short attention span of hoi polloi. From Macmillan and Heath to Blair and Brown via Roy Jenkins and George Thompson, British politicians have never deigned to attempt to expound their desire for membership. With newspaper proprietors who have never lived in Europe ranged against them, all newspapers reluctant to give more than token space to what is perceived as an unpopular and dull subject and dissent in their own parties (all parties), they have retreated to a state of superior indifference to question or objection.
The pro-Europeans understandably don’t want a referendum that they will certainly lose. They will not lose it because any measurable proportion of the electorate has coherent objections to the Lisbon treaty but because Europe has never been sold or even explained to the electorate. Personally, I would very much appreciate a clear and coherent statement of what Europe wants to achieve and why Britain benefits from being part of that desire but we look for such reassurance in vain. Gordon Brown seems no more likely to give us that than did any of his predecessors. Or perhaps the rather farcical ten-constituency vote will turn out to put some long-needed backbone into the European apologists.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
SOME SHALL HAVE PRIZES
As this year’s Oscar ceremony unfolded, the most striking aspect of the award bestowing was the absence of American actors. Not a single home-grown player took home a statuette. While the long-time hot favourites won both the men’s awards (Daniel Day-Lewis, the expat Brit who took up Irish citizenship, and Spaniard Javier Bardem), the women’s titles were snaffled in late surges by, respectively, Marion Cotillard from France and Tilda Swinton from England. The early favourites whom these women by-passed, Julie Christie and Cate Blanchett, are also non-Americans. Christie, who lives much of the year in California, is English, Blanchett (though she sounds it less and less; cf Nicole Kidman) is Australian.
This clean sweep for Europe is not unprecedented. In 1964, two unmistakeable Anglo-Saxons, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, won the top awards and two pan-Europeans, Peter Ustinov and Lila Kedrova, won the supporting equivalents. This was the only other year in which no American won an acting honour. Perhaps even more significantly, none of the ’64 winners was playing New World whereas, of the ’08 winners, only Cotillard is not passing for some kind of American (Bardem’s character is an unidentifiable resident of the melting-pot and even Christie was playing a Canadian).
The traffic is certainly two-way: Johnny Depp was nominated for the latest in his swelling repertoire of brilliantly accurate, British-accented characters and Viggo Mortensen was up too for his superb turn in Eastern Promises, the London-set thriller stuffed with Russian characters, not one of whom is played by a Russian. The Other Boleyn Girl, just released here, has American Boleyn girls to set alongside the Australian Henry VIII, father to Elizabeth I, whom Blanchett seems to have made her own. But American Equity could reasonably argue that, Edith Piaf aside, the other roles to win their players Oscars this year could (should?) have been cast from the local membership. The primary argument against that position would be that no one would wish to deny Day-Lewis, the pre-eminent movie actor of the day, any role he fancies taking. As fellow nominee George Clooney so graciously put it, before the result was known, he raises every actor’s game every time he appears.
Cotillard was the first actress to win not performing in English; the male precedent for this phenomenon was set by Roberto Benigni ten years ago. The Academy Awards have never made much pretence of representing world cinema and, though they have always willingly embraced mainstream British film-making, they have remained overwhelmingly Hollywood-orientated. What has always been true of Hollywood, however, as indeed of America at large, is that it is an ever-open refuge for foreigners and expatriates.
The very first Best Actor award in 1928 went to the great Emil Jannings, a recent recruit from Germany’s rich silent movie tradition and a Swiss by birth. For the first time, two years later, neither acting award went to an American (the supporting awards were not launched until 1936): they were the first Brit to win, George Arliss, who had been acting in the States for donkey’s years, and the first Canadian, Norma Shearer, who enjoyed the inestimable advantage of being married to the studio boss, Irving Thalberg. Charles Laughton was the next Englishman to conquer Hollywood and the first to do so in an entirely British vehicle, playing the aforementioned Henry VIII. But he too was established in the States by then, having broken through on Broadway two years earlier and then made several American movies. The Private Life of Henry VIII was, in fact, one of the rare occasions when he returned to Britain to work and, 17 years later, he took American citizenship.
The first European actress to win the top award was German-born Luise Rainer, also the first star to win two Oscars back-to-back (1936, 1937). The fabulous Rainer, once married to Clifford Odets, retired to London in the late 1940s where she still shines at 98. 1939 is often cited as Hollywood’s annus mirabilis when more great movies were made than in any other year, yet it was also the first time that both top acting awards went to Britons, Robert Donat and Vivien Leigh, the latter of course playing a quintessential American, Scarlett O’Hara. 1947 was the first year that Brits won both the awards for men: Ronald Colman and Edmund Gwenn. 1958 was the first time two Brits won for the same movie: David Niven and Wendy Hiller in Separate Tables.
In 1963, when Margaret Rutherford was best supporting actress for The VIPs, three of her four rivals were also Britons and all in Tom Jones (which won Best Film and Director but no acting honours; Albert Finney and Hugh Griffith were also nominated). Beginning in 1989, a run of three British men won the best actor award: Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and Anthony Hopkins. Day-Lewis thus joins the select few actors to have been Best Actor twice; and he’s the first non-American. Several British women have won two awards.
But is there some kind of crisis in American acting? I doubt it. Despite the perennial British domination of the Tony Awards for New York theatre, only Jennifer Ehle won last time round. In the Emmies, another grateful hunting ground for our side, Dame Helen Mirren and Ricky Gervais are current holders and the much-honoured Australian Judy Davis joins them; the rest are Americans. I suspect anyway that the years of international success for British television production are drawing to a close.
Europe and Australasia (with very occasional forays from elsewhere) will continue to breed Oscar-winning actors, not to mention directors and writers and, even more so, technicians. That the American cinematographer Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood beat the Englishman Roger Deakins for No Country for Old Men was not wholly a surprise and nowhere near a travesty: Deakins will come again. But that Freddie Francis was among the annual Oscar obituaries (the director Claude Whatham wasn’t) is a reminder of how highly English cinematographers (as he was described) are rated in Los Angeles, even though he was also a noted Hammer horror director. While the Yanks continue to imagine that we embody a nebulous quality that they would so dearly like to possess – “class” – I suspect that the Brits especially and foreigners in general will be welcome on the Hollywood shoots for many years yet.
As this year’s Oscar ceremony unfolded, the most striking aspect of the award bestowing was the absence of American actors. Not a single home-grown player took home a statuette. While the long-time hot favourites won both the men’s awards (Daniel Day-Lewis, the expat Brit who took up Irish citizenship, and Spaniard Javier Bardem), the women’s titles were snaffled in late surges by, respectively, Marion Cotillard from France and Tilda Swinton from England. The early favourites whom these women by-passed, Julie Christie and Cate Blanchett, are also non-Americans. Christie, who lives much of the year in California, is English, Blanchett (though she sounds it less and less; cf Nicole Kidman) is Australian.
This clean sweep for Europe is not unprecedented. In 1964, two unmistakeable Anglo-Saxons, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, won the top awards and two pan-Europeans, Peter Ustinov and Lila Kedrova, won the supporting equivalents. This was the only other year in which no American won an acting honour. Perhaps even more significantly, none of the ’64 winners was playing New World whereas, of the ’08 winners, only Cotillard is not passing for some kind of American (Bardem’s character is an unidentifiable resident of the melting-pot and even Christie was playing a Canadian).
The traffic is certainly two-way: Johnny Depp was nominated for the latest in his swelling repertoire of brilliantly accurate, British-accented characters and Viggo Mortensen was up too for his superb turn in Eastern Promises, the London-set thriller stuffed with Russian characters, not one of whom is played by a Russian. The Other Boleyn Girl, just released here, has American Boleyn girls to set alongside the Australian Henry VIII, father to Elizabeth I, whom Blanchett seems to have made her own. But American Equity could reasonably argue that, Edith Piaf aside, the other roles to win their players Oscars this year could (should?) have been cast from the local membership. The primary argument against that position would be that no one would wish to deny Day-Lewis, the pre-eminent movie actor of the day, any role he fancies taking. As fellow nominee George Clooney so graciously put it, before the result was known, he raises every actor’s game every time he appears.
Cotillard was the first actress to win not performing in English; the male precedent for this phenomenon was set by Roberto Benigni ten years ago. The Academy Awards have never made much pretence of representing world cinema and, though they have always willingly embraced mainstream British film-making, they have remained overwhelmingly Hollywood-orientated. What has always been true of Hollywood, however, as indeed of America at large, is that it is an ever-open refuge for foreigners and expatriates.
The very first Best Actor award in 1928 went to the great Emil Jannings, a recent recruit from Germany’s rich silent movie tradition and a Swiss by birth. For the first time, two years later, neither acting award went to an American (the supporting awards were not launched until 1936): they were the first Brit to win, George Arliss, who had been acting in the States for donkey’s years, and the first Canadian, Norma Shearer, who enjoyed the inestimable advantage of being married to the studio boss, Irving Thalberg. Charles Laughton was the next Englishman to conquer Hollywood and the first to do so in an entirely British vehicle, playing the aforementioned Henry VIII. But he too was established in the States by then, having broken through on Broadway two years earlier and then made several American movies. The Private Life of Henry VIII was, in fact, one of the rare occasions when he returned to Britain to work and, 17 years later, he took American citizenship.
The first European actress to win the top award was German-born Luise Rainer, also the first star to win two Oscars back-to-back (1936, 1937). The fabulous Rainer, once married to Clifford Odets, retired to London in the late 1940s where she still shines at 98. 1939 is often cited as Hollywood’s annus mirabilis when more great movies were made than in any other year, yet it was also the first time that both top acting awards went to Britons, Robert Donat and Vivien Leigh, the latter of course playing a quintessential American, Scarlett O’Hara. 1947 was the first year that Brits won both the awards for men: Ronald Colman and Edmund Gwenn. 1958 was the first time two Brits won for the same movie: David Niven and Wendy Hiller in Separate Tables.
In 1963, when Margaret Rutherford was best supporting actress for The VIPs, three of her four rivals were also Britons and all in Tom Jones (which won Best Film and Director but no acting honours; Albert Finney and Hugh Griffith were also nominated). Beginning in 1989, a run of three British men won the best actor award: Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and Anthony Hopkins. Day-Lewis thus joins the select few actors to have been Best Actor twice; and he’s the first non-American. Several British women have won two awards.
But is there some kind of crisis in American acting? I doubt it. Despite the perennial British domination of the Tony Awards for New York theatre, only Jennifer Ehle won last time round. In the Emmies, another grateful hunting ground for our side, Dame Helen Mirren and Ricky Gervais are current holders and the much-honoured Australian Judy Davis joins them; the rest are Americans. I suspect anyway that the years of international success for British television production are drawing to a close.
Europe and Australasia (with very occasional forays from elsewhere) will continue to breed Oscar-winning actors, not to mention directors and writers and, even more so, technicians. That the American cinematographer Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood beat the Englishman Roger Deakins for No Country for Old Men was not wholly a surprise and nowhere near a travesty: Deakins will come again. But that Freddie Francis was among the annual Oscar obituaries (the director Claude Whatham wasn’t) is a reminder of how highly English cinematographers (as he was described) are rated in Los Angeles, even though he was also a noted Hammer horror director. While the Yanks continue to imagine that we embody a nebulous quality that they would so dearly like to possess – “class” – I suspect that the Brits especially and foreigners in general will be welcome on the Hollywood shoots for many years yet.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
HARRODS COLLUDING HAUL
I have a confession to make – or, as they say nowadays, I want to ’fess up. I was part of the conspiracy to kill the Princess of Wales. Yes, me. Little me. Shocked you, didn’t I. Of course, I wasn’t in it on my own. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a conspiracy. Jade Goody was in it too. And Britney Spears. And Michael Winner. And oh, Derek Conway, you know, the MP who put his ne’er-do-well sons on the parliamentary payroll. And Sir Elton John. And Wayne Sleep. And John Travolta. And Gianni Versace. And Diana Dors, Diana Ross, Dame Diana Rigg, Lady Diana Mosley, Lady Diana Cooper, Diana Vreeland, Diana Krall, Diana Wynyard, all of whom deeply resented the way the Princess annexed a name they had hitherto considered to indicate themselves. Resented enough to kill. Oh, and Guy Fawkes. And the Count of Monte Cristo. And Alice in Wonderland.
Of course, we all resent even more the failure of that wise and astute observer of the scene, Mohamed Al Fayed, to drop our names in court. After all, he dropped so many. I think he should have played it like Bette Midler did in her stage show at a time when many revelations were emerging about the late American president. She pointed melodramatically to herself: “Hey, guess what, I have a secret to impart. I slept with Jack Kennedy”. And then, raking the audience with both hands, she shrieked: “And you know what? They slept with Jack Kennedy”.
What I admired so much about Mr Al Fayed’s testimony was the forensic detail into which he went in his evidence of this truly astounding conspiracy. A lesser man would have taken advantage of the freedom that a law court permits to make accusations without fear of slander. Mr Al Fayed could so easily have taken that low road. Instead he went into astonishing detail.
For instance, his revelation that the Duke of Edinburgh is a German Nazi whose actual name is Frankenstein clearly changes our very conception of the Royal Family. We had always understood His Royal Highness to be of Greek nationality. Perhaps after all it is the Queen who is the Greek. Her consort probably hails from the Schwarzwald area of south-west Germany that borders Switzerland (Dr Victor Frankenstein was, after all, Swiss by birth; also of course – which may be news to Mr Al Fayed – he was fictional). I hope the Harrods boss will endeavour to confirm these origins, perhaps by means of his charming spokesman, the famously coiffed Michael Cole.
Where Mr Al Fayed rashly overplayed his hand was in speaking out on the street outside the high court. He told a journalist he was “an idiot” which is surely not likely to provoke legal action (the greater difficulty would be to ascertain that a journalist was not an idiot). But he further accused him of being “part of the conspiracy” before he was hustled away by his minders. It would be the worst of luck for the Harrods boss if he happened to fling this accusation at the one man in Britain who was not in fact in on the conspiracy, In that case, I hope the journalist is public-spirited enough to sue Mr Al Fayed for slander. Then the great conspiracy can finally be tested properly in court and Mr Al Fayed can at last have the opportunity of laying out his compelling evidence for the public to marvel at, an opportunity so grievously denied him by the terms of the inquest.
Should the case go against him, Mr Al Fayed may of course refuse to pay the substantial compensation to the reporter that the court would certainly levy. And then he would be liable to go to jail. Mr Al Fayed might then take the route of Mr Pickwick and elect to be incarcerated as a matter of principle. This might prove to be a mistake. Notoriously, Mr Al Fayed is not a British citizen. Indeed, there is a widely but doubtless scurrilously held view that Mr Al Fayed’s conspiracy theories all stem from the persistent refusal of the British authorities to award him citizenship. I wonder if Mr Al Fayed is sufficiently familiar with the regimes commonly pursued in the jails of Egypt to wish to serve his sentence in one of them.
Perhaps the most incredible aspect of this whole fantastical episode is Mr Al Fayed’s announcement that he will accept the findings of the inquest. We would do well to remember that this is one Mohamed who is not a prophet.
I have a confession to make – or, as they say nowadays, I want to ’fess up. I was part of the conspiracy to kill the Princess of Wales. Yes, me. Little me. Shocked you, didn’t I. Of course, I wasn’t in it on my own. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a conspiracy. Jade Goody was in it too. And Britney Spears. And Michael Winner. And oh, Derek Conway, you know, the MP who put his ne’er-do-well sons on the parliamentary payroll. And Sir Elton John. And Wayne Sleep. And John Travolta. And Gianni Versace. And Diana Dors, Diana Ross, Dame Diana Rigg, Lady Diana Mosley, Lady Diana Cooper, Diana Vreeland, Diana Krall, Diana Wynyard, all of whom deeply resented the way the Princess annexed a name they had hitherto considered to indicate themselves. Resented enough to kill. Oh, and Guy Fawkes. And the Count of Monte Cristo. And Alice in Wonderland.
Of course, we all resent even more the failure of that wise and astute observer of the scene, Mohamed Al Fayed, to drop our names in court. After all, he dropped so many. I think he should have played it like Bette Midler did in her stage show at a time when many revelations were emerging about the late American president. She pointed melodramatically to herself: “Hey, guess what, I have a secret to impart. I slept with Jack Kennedy”. And then, raking the audience with both hands, she shrieked: “And you know what? They slept with Jack Kennedy”.
What I admired so much about Mr Al Fayed’s testimony was the forensic detail into which he went in his evidence of this truly astounding conspiracy. A lesser man would have taken advantage of the freedom that a law court permits to make accusations without fear of slander. Mr Al Fayed could so easily have taken that low road. Instead he went into astonishing detail.
For instance, his revelation that the Duke of Edinburgh is a German Nazi whose actual name is Frankenstein clearly changes our very conception of the Royal Family. We had always understood His Royal Highness to be of Greek nationality. Perhaps after all it is the Queen who is the Greek. Her consort probably hails from the Schwarzwald area of south-west Germany that borders Switzerland (Dr Victor Frankenstein was, after all, Swiss by birth; also of course – which may be news to Mr Al Fayed – he was fictional). I hope the Harrods boss will endeavour to confirm these origins, perhaps by means of his charming spokesman, the famously coiffed Michael Cole.
Where Mr Al Fayed rashly overplayed his hand was in speaking out on the street outside the high court. He told a journalist he was “an idiot” which is surely not likely to provoke legal action (the greater difficulty would be to ascertain that a journalist was not an idiot). But he further accused him of being “part of the conspiracy” before he was hustled away by his minders. It would be the worst of luck for the Harrods boss if he happened to fling this accusation at the one man in Britain who was not in fact in on the conspiracy, In that case, I hope the journalist is public-spirited enough to sue Mr Al Fayed for slander. Then the great conspiracy can finally be tested properly in court and Mr Al Fayed can at last have the opportunity of laying out his compelling evidence for the public to marvel at, an opportunity so grievously denied him by the terms of the inquest.
Should the case go against him, Mr Al Fayed may of course refuse to pay the substantial compensation to the reporter that the court would certainly levy. And then he would be liable to go to jail. Mr Al Fayed might then take the route of Mr Pickwick and elect to be incarcerated as a matter of principle. This might prove to be a mistake. Notoriously, Mr Al Fayed is not a British citizen. Indeed, there is a widely but doubtless scurrilously held view that Mr Al Fayed’s conspiracy theories all stem from the persistent refusal of the British authorities to award him citizenship. I wonder if Mr Al Fayed is sufficiently familiar with the regimes commonly pursued in the jails of Egypt to wish to serve his sentence in one of them.
Perhaps the most incredible aspect of this whole fantastical episode is Mr Al Fayed’s announcement that he will accept the findings of the inquest. We would do well to remember that this is one Mohamed who is not a prophet.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
ROWAN and BARACK and ALL the GANG
My regular reader may perhaps be surprised to have found no comment here yet on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s outrage. (For the record, he tentatively advanced the notion that certain disputes in the Muslim community in Britain might be settled by specially convened courts operating under Islamic Sharia law). It seems an obvious one for me to write about, he or she would hazard (and not be far off the mark). I confess I have not “privileged” (as they say) my own blog on this matter. Upon listening to His Grace’s interview on The World at One (which preceded the formal address in which he formally unveiled his thinking on Sharia law), I did something that I have never done before which was to email a comment to the programme. For a few hours, I believed that my comment had been sucked into cyberspace. There were apparently no comments at all posted within three hours of the programme – all were timed later – and many of them were trivial and even rude. I wrote to the website asking why I should have bothered to email. Impressively, I received a prompt reply from no less a personage than the deputy editor of The World at One (who certainly must have more pressing duties to which to attend) and was able quickly to verify his assurance that my comment was after all there in all its glory. (Needless to say, I sent him a grateful and admiring response). The BBC had by then received upwards of 17,000 emails. Just processing them must require a dedicated team.
I was also an early joiner of the thread that inevitably spun out to inordinate length on the Richard Dawkins website. On-line newspapers and every other kind of forum have been humming with this matter. Cantab has unleashed a vast hornets’ nest and very, very few of those roused are buzzing in his support. The (pretty feeble) consensus among his few apologists appears to be that his view has been misunderstood, misinterpreted or taken out of context. It is true that there is a large amount of personal abuse in the reaction, not least in the tabloids. I tried to give Dr Williams some credit in my postings. He is, after all, about as liberal a leader as the Anglican church can boast in my lifetime (since Michael Ramsey, anyway) and, if this storm ensures that his successor is a flint-faced fundamentalist, the church and wider public life in Britain will be the poorer for it.
The argument that I put forward in my postings which I have yet to see in any others is this: I rather suspect that Rowan Williams is fundamentally a decent and caring man (and far from stupid) but he doesn't appear to comprehend the aspiration of Islam to control the whole planet. Here's a refinement of his proposal that would leave him with less egg in his beard and, at the same time, would demonstrate vividly where Islam stands. Let the Archbishop propose that all Islamic nations reciprocate and allow non-Muslims and (especially perhaps) apostates to bend to arrangements other than those prescribed by Sharia. I have no expectation that any Islamic nation would subscribe to such an arrangement but, if I were wrong, it would constitute a major breakthrough.
Further, I made this point on the Dawkins site: I remember lodging for a while in the 1960s in the Bourneville area of Birmingham (England). There wasn't a pub to be found for miles because the Cadburys were religious teetotallers of some stripe (quakers?) and their writ ran throughout the area. Maybe it still does. By itself, this is of no great moment (unless you're a lush) but it is really only a small step from that to the Bishop of Rochester's “no-go areas” and then on to a situation where Sharia is more powerful than the law of the land in the ghettoes that we always said we didn't want.
Another poster asked “How will it affect you if you're not Muslim?” Not to put too fine a point on it, I repeat that Islam is set on world domination. Today Southall, tomorrow south London, next week the home counties. If I live in a society or a world where being an infidel (which is to say, not a Muslim) is a capital offence, I think I will justifiably feel that the rise of Sharia has affected me more than somewhat.
This week is General Synod. Someone from high in the Anglican church must be monitoring the Dawkins site, it being always one's duty to keep an informed eye on the enemy (serious lefties take The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal). That spy, I suggested, should encourage Synod to tell Cantab that he ought to resign unless he can satisfactorily answer the largest question that his musings raise: whether anyone whose convictions run against the law of the land might expect to be heard before a court more sympathetic to his own stance.
In another part of the forest, the American primaries game (much relished by me if evidently not by everybody) has moved nearer to a resolution. In my earlier entry Five Days Are a Long Time in Politics (January 9th), I counselled that the respective party conventions were months away. Time enough for much to occur.
Events over the last month have refined my analysis and eliminated a number of the players. It seems to me now that the next president is most likely to be Barack Obama. He has astutely handled the obvious negatives that hang about him – his inexperience, his race – without offering other hostages to fortune. He has remained unknowable while yet firing up millions of voters. Who, even among the American chattering classes, could list five of his policy positions? What he offers is freshness, charisma, his mantra of change, the promise (probably undeliverable) of politics very much not as usual. Will he cope with his first crisis as president? Well, he will have shrewd advisors to head him away from the rocks.
Why him rather than Clinton or McCain? Because I think neither Clinton nor McCain has smothered the negatives so well. Every advance by Obama hurts Clinton double because it makes her look less and less the inevitable and the unbeatable candidate. Obama can cast himself as the underdog all the way to November. Clinton looks less and less likely to be able to maintain her image as the heir apparent. What is more, Bill Clinton has unexpectedly begun to seem more of a hindrance than a help. When he shines, he dims her light and people fear that he would interfere in her administration. When he attacks, he makes her seem simultaneously mean and weak. Meanwhile, McCain is no nearer being loved by his own party. The Republican electorate sent him a stark message in the votes yesterday. Mike Huckabee cannot hope to catch McCain in the delegate count but he certainly can hurt him.
No candidate is a sure thing. There may be more racism hidden in the anonymity of the November ballot than anyone has yet bargained for. Clinton would be just as hurt by unspoken misogyny and indeed McCain will be deprived of the votes of deep-dyed conservatives who might even switch to “punish” him. But I feel sure that the Democrats will begin crucially to realize that Obama can beat McCain more surely than Clinton can. Obama offers a sense of the positive that neither McCain nor Clinton can match. His presence underlines the doubts that the electorate have about two candidates who are both seen as machine politicians and yet who are both seen as divisive. To a degree, I think this a pity and that the Democrats may be missing a trick. I argued before for a Clinton/Obama ticket that could look forward to holding the White House for 16 years. But Hillary sure as hell won’t agree to be Barack’s running mate. When Obama wins the nomination, she and Bill will decide to retire to the semi-showbiz world in which Bill now operates.
In The Sunday Times today, Andrew Sullivan argues that the catastrophe (not his word) of the Bush presidency is the ingredient that will most determine the outcome of the state primaries and the national vote. There is something in his argument as presented, though to hazard that Bush has “crafted” (Sullivan’s word) the election is absurd. Had America enjoyed two terms of President Al Gore (whose Vice-President Joe Lieberman – perhaps not his only VP – would hardly be running now as a Democratic contender; what he is actually doing now is backing John McCain), the contenders would probably be the ones we have and the situation would probably be just as poised.
Few retiring presidents are able to bequeath a satisfied nation to an anointed successor as Ronald Reagan did (or could have done, had he taken the remotest interest in the identity of his successor). As president, Al Gore would surely have found a more cultivated response to 9/11 than the attack on Iraq. He would certainly have ratified the Kyoto Agreement and the US might now be in the vanguard of tackling climate change. But I bet Gore’s popularity would have suffered accordingly, especially insofar as his measures required personal sacrifice. So it’s just as likely that the 2008 candidates would have been distancing themselves from a Gore presidency (as indeed Gore himself did in 2004 from the Clinton administration of which he was part).
Most political careers, as Enoch Powell sagely observed, end in failure. Even President Obama’s may do that. And of course archbishops may also make a conclusive bish of it.
My regular reader may perhaps be surprised to have found no comment here yet on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s outrage. (For the record, he tentatively advanced the notion that certain disputes in the Muslim community in Britain might be settled by specially convened courts operating under Islamic Sharia law). It seems an obvious one for me to write about, he or she would hazard (and not be far off the mark). I confess I have not “privileged” (as they say) my own blog on this matter. Upon listening to His Grace’s interview on The World at One (which preceded the formal address in which he formally unveiled his thinking on Sharia law), I did something that I have never done before which was to email a comment to the programme. For a few hours, I believed that my comment had been sucked into cyberspace. There were apparently no comments at all posted within three hours of the programme – all were timed later – and many of them were trivial and even rude. I wrote to the website asking why I should have bothered to email. Impressively, I received a prompt reply from no less a personage than the deputy editor of The World at One (who certainly must have more pressing duties to which to attend) and was able quickly to verify his assurance that my comment was after all there in all its glory. (Needless to say, I sent him a grateful and admiring response). The BBC had by then received upwards of 17,000 emails. Just processing them must require a dedicated team.
I was also an early joiner of the thread that inevitably spun out to inordinate length on the Richard Dawkins website. On-line newspapers and every other kind of forum have been humming with this matter. Cantab has unleashed a vast hornets’ nest and very, very few of those roused are buzzing in his support. The (pretty feeble) consensus among his few apologists appears to be that his view has been misunderstood, misinterpreted or taken out of context. It is true that there is a large amount of personal abuse in the reaction, not least in the tabloids. I tried to give Dr Williams some credit in my postings. He is, after all, about as liberal a leader as the Anglican church can boast in my lifetime (since Michael Ramsey, anyway) and, if this storm ensures that his successor is a flint-faced fundamentalist, the church and wider public life in Britain will be the poorer for it.
The argument that I put forward in my postings which I have yet to see in any others is this: I rather suspect that Rowan Williams is fundamentally a decent and caring man (and far from stupid) but he doesn't appear to comprehend the aspiration of Islam to control the whole planet. Here's a refinement of his proposal that would leave him with less egg in his beard and, at the same time, would demonstrate vividly where Islam stands. Let the Archbishop propose that all Islamic nations reciprocate and allow non-Muslims and (especially perhaps) apostates to bend to arrangements other than those prescribed by Sharia. I have no expectation that any Islamic nation would subscribe to such an arrangement but, if I were wrong, it would constitute a major breakthrough.
Further, I made this point on the Dawkins site: I remember lodging for a while in the 1960s in the Bourneville area of Birmingham (England). There wasn't a pub to be found for miles because the Cadburys were religious teetotallers of some stripe (quakers?) and their writ ran throughout the area. Maybe it still does. By itself, this is of no great moment (unless you're a lush) but it is really only a small step from that to the Bishop of Rochester's “no-go areas” and then on to a situation where Sharia is more powerful than the law of the land in the ghettoes that we always said we didn't want.
Another poster asked “How will it affect you if you're not Muslim?” Not to put too fine a point on it, I repeat that Islam is set on world domination. Today Southall, tomorrow south London, next week the home counties. If I live in a society or a world where being an infidel (which is to say, not a Muslim) is a capital offence, I think I will justifiably feel that the rise of Sharia has affected me more than somewhat.
This week is General Synod. Someone from high in the Anglican church must be monitoring the Dawkins site, it being always one's duty to keep an informed eye on the enemy (serious lefties take The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal). That spy, I suggested, should encourage Synod to tell Cantab that he ought to resign unless he can satisfactorily answer the largest question that his musings raise: whether anyone whose convictions run against the law of the land might expect to be heard before a court more sympathetic to his own stance.
In another part of the forest, the American primaries game (much relished by me if evidently not by everybody) has moved nearer to a resolution. In my earlier entry Five Days Are a Long Time in Politics (January 9th), I counselled that the respective party conventions were months away. Time enough for much to occur.
Events over the last month have refined my analysis and eliminated a number of the players. It seems to me now that the next president is most likely to be Barack Obama. He has astutely handled the obvious negatives that hang about him – his inexperience, his race – without offering other hostages to fortune. He has remained unknowable while yet firing up millions of voters. Who, even among the American chattering classes, could list five of his policy positions? What he offers is freshness, charisma, his mantra of change, the promise (probably undeliverable) of politics very much not as usual. Will he cope with his first crisis as president? Well, he will have shrewd advisors to head him away from the rocks.
Why him rather than Clinton or McCain? Because I think neither Clinton nor McCain has smothered the negatives so well. Every advance by Obama hurts Clinton double because it makes her look less and less the inevitable and the unbeatable candidate. Obama can cast himself as the underdog all the way to November. Clinton looks less and less likely to be able to maintain her image as the heir apparent. What is more, Bill Clinton has unexpectedly begun to seem more of a hindrance than a help. When he shines, he dims her light and people fear that he would interfere in her administration. When he attacks, he makes her seem simultaneously mean and weak. Meanwhile, McCain is no nearer being loved by his own party. The Republican electorate sent him a stark message in the votes yesterday. Mike Huckabee cannot hope to catch McCain in the delegate count but he certainly can hurt him.
No candidate is a sure thing. There may be more racism hidden in the anonymity of the November ballot than anyone has yet bargained for. Clinton would be just as hurt by unspoken misogyny and indeed McCain will be deprived of the votes of deep-dyed conservatives who might even switch to “punish” him. But I feel sure that the Democrats will begin crucially to realize that Obama can beat McCain more surely than Clinton can. Obama offers a sense of the positive that neither McCain nor Clinton can match. His presence underlines the doubts that the electorate have about two candidates who are both seen as machine politicians and yet who are both seen as divisive. To a degree, I think this a pity and that the Democrats may be missing a trick. I argued before for a Clinton/Obama ticket that could look forward to holding the White House for 16 years. But Hillary sure as hell won’t agree to be Barack’s running mate. When Obama wins the nomination, she and Bill will decide to retire to the semi-showbiz world in which Bill now operates.
In The Sunday Times today, Andrew Sullivan argues that the catastrophe (not his word) of the Bush presidency is the ingredient that will most determine the outcome of the state primaries and the national vote. There is something in his argument as presented, though to hazard that Bush has “crafted” (Sullivan’s word) the election is absurd. Had America enjoyed two terms of President Al Gore (whose Vice-President Joe Lieberman – perhaps not his only VP – would hardly be running now as a Democratic contender; what he is actually doing now is backing John McCain), the contenders would probably be the ones we have and the situation would probably be just as poised.
Few retiring presidents are able to bequeath a satisfied nation to an anointed successor as Ronald Reagan did (or could have done, had he taken the remotest interest in the identity of his successor). As president, Al Gore would surely have found a more cultivated response to 9/11 than the attack on Iraq. He would certainly have ratified the Kyoto Agreement and the US might now be in the vanguard of tackling climate change. But I bet Gore’s popularity would have suffered accordingly, especially insofar as his measures required personal sacrifice. So it’s just as likely that the 2008 candidates would have been distancing themselves from a Gore presidency (as indeed Gore himself did in 2004 from the Clinton administration of which he was part).
Most political careers, as Enoch Powell sagely observed, end in failure. Even President Obama’s may do that. And of course archbishops may also make a conclusive bish of it.
Monday, February 04, 2008
LISTEN UP
“A secret overhearer might have followed, by these occasional exclamatory utterances, the course of a devouring trouble prowling up and down through his thought” Scribners Monthly July 1880, cited in the OED.
Britain is more burdened under the yoke of mass surveillance than any nation since the heyday of state Communism in the Soviet Union. Under successive Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers – and rather more of them of a Labour than a Tory stripe – citizens’ rights have been eroded and compromised at an alarming rate. To account Britain a police state would be to overstate the case. To protest that the powers arrogated daily by the state are excessive and inappropriate is a stance any thoughtful citizen can take with an easeful conscience.
This past weekend, some details of the electronic bugging of a constituent’s confidential conversation with his MP have come to light. That the constituent was being held in a jail awaiting possible extradition to the United States on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities is neither here nor there. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously observed that “hard cases make bad law”. We have a government that has abandoned any pretence that there may be means not justified by the ends. If the extreme measures that are claimed necessary in order to “fight terrorism” are assimilated into the system without let or hindrance, those extreme measures will make state oppression, dictatorship and the suspension of the democratic process a relatively straightforward matter for any so-minded regime that takes power here in the future.
I once had described to me, by one of those involved, the early days of the setting up of premises in Derbyshire by the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s. The WRP was one of the more prominent Trotskyite groupings at a time when left politics were much espoused by people in education, the media, the public services and the trades unions. The Red House – the name, I think, may have fortuitously predated its new owners – was to become infamous through a barrage of propagandist coverage by the right wing press but, before that happened, the WRP members set to work to make the building secure.
A member skilled in surveillance techniques soon turned up a system of routine bugging devices embedded in the walls of the house. The less experienced members applauded his initiative but he counselled patience. “These” he declared “are the bugs they want us to find”. It took many days of dedicated investigation before he finally turned up the devices he was not expected to locate. Given the press campaign that subsequently grew against The Red House, it remains always possible that a third level of surveillance devices, still less discernible even to an experienced sweeper, did indeed escape his attention.
Surveillance is permitted under licence in special circumstances. I wonder what is the legal status of anyone under such surveillance who discovers and disables the devices; or indeed of anyone who, suspecting surveillance, knowingly gives false intelligence in the form of overheard dialogue. There is something disturbing about the “special powers” allowed at the perimeters of intelligence-gathering. It is as if the rules of engagement have been relaxed in certain circumstances for one side. You feel as if that side would bitterly complain to the ref if its sanctioned special powers were discovered and neutralised by its quarry, as though the enemy had also relaxed the rules or, as they might say, “moved the goalposts”.
Strictly, the bugging of an MP is not against English law, always provided that the necessary licence has been acquired. But it does offend against the famous Wilson Doctrine, dating from the premiership of Harold Wilson, whereby MPs were considered off limits or “not fair game” for state surveillance. The MP whose confidential conversations were tapped in this case, Sadiq Khan, might think there is an interesting case here to be tested before the European Court of Human Rights or in some other forum of international law. This is a far more important matter than a backbencher remunerating his idle sons from the public purse.
For myself, having substantial reason to believe that I will have caught the attention of the intelligence services in the past, I maintain that the right of the citizen to consult certain professionals in terms of strictest confidence – his MP, his doctor, his lawyer, his accountant, his bank manager, his teacher, his spiritual advisor, his manager, his agent, his personal trainer, his dietician, his hygienist, his plastic surgeon – is sacrosanct and at least as worthy to be strictly upheld as his right to be protected from the – in reality, rather remote – threat of suicide bombers and urban terrorists.
Recent cases have shown government agencies to be remarkably cavalier with confidential data pertaining to vast numbers of the public. We have no basis for any assurance that surveillance records are any more secure in the hands of government agencies than are bank account, credit card, benefit and other kinds of record. I think I am entitled to expect that my file from the STD clinic that I frequently visited in my youth will not turn up to general merriment on YouTube. Similarly, an MP ought to be able to feel that she can speak openly in conditions of mutually assured confidentiality without being overheard by some bored jobsworth from MI6, in just the same way that she shouldn’t fear to have her private conversation transcribed in The News of the World or led on by Rory Bremner posing as her interlocutor.
“A secret overhearer might have followed, by these occasional exclamatory utterances, the course of a devouring trouble prowling up and down through his thought” Scribners Monthly July 1880, cited in the OED.
Britain is more burdened under the yoke of mass surveillance than any nation since the heyday of state Communism in the Soviet Union. Under successive Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers – and rather more of them of a Labour than a Tory stripe – citizens’ rights have been eroded and compromised at an alarming rate. To account Britain a police state would be to overstate the case. To protest that the powers arrogated daily by the state are excessive and inappropriate is a stance any thoughtful citizen can take with an easeful conscience.
This past weekend, some details of the electronic bugging of a constituent’s confidential conversation with his MP have come to light. That the constituent was being held in a jail awaiting possible extradition to the United States on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities is neither here nor there. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously observed that “hard cases make bad law”. We have a government that has abandoned any pretence that there may be means not justified by the ends. If the extreme measures that are claimed necessary in order to “fight terrorism” are assimilated into the system without let or hindrance, those extreme measures will make state oppression, dictatorship and the suspension of the democratic process a relatively straightforward matter for any so-minded regime that takes power here in the future.
I once had described to me, by one of those involved, the early days of the setting up of premises in Derbyshire by the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s. The WRP was one of the more prominent Trotskyite groupings at a time when left politics were much espoused by people in education, the media, the public services and the trades unions. The Red House – the name, I think, may have fortuitously predated its new owners – was to become infamous through a barrage of propagandist coverage by the right wing press but, before that happened, the WRP members set to work to make the building secure.
A member skilled in surveillance techniques soon turned up a system of routine bugging devices embedded in the walls of the house. The less experienced members applauded his initiative but he counselled patience. “These” he declared “are the bugs they want us to find”. It took many days of dedicated investigation before he finally turned up the devices he was not expected to locate. Given the press campaign that subsequently grew against The Red House, it remains always possible that a third level of surveillance devices, still less discernible even to an experienced sweeper, did indeed escape his attention.
Surveillance is permitted under licence in special circumstances. I wonder what is the legal status of anyone under such surveillance who discovers and disables the devices; or indeed of anyone who, suspecting surveillance, knowingly gives false intelligence in the form of overheard dialogue. There is something disturbing about the “special powers” allowed at the perimeters of intelligence-gathering. It is as if the rules of engagement have been relaxed in certain circumstances for one side. You feel as if that side would bitterly complain to the ref if its sanctioned special powers were discovered and neutralised by its quarry, as though the enemy had also relaxed the rules or, as they might say, “moved the goalposts”.
Strictly, the bugging of an MP is not against English law, always provided that the necessary licence has been acquired. But it does offend against the famous Wilson Doctrine, dating from the premiership of Harold Wilson, whereby MPs were considered off limits or “not fair game” for state surveillance. The MP whose confidential conversations were tapped in this case, Sadiq Khan, might think there is an interesting case here to be tested before the European Court of Human Rights or in some other forum of international law. This is a far more important matter than a backbencher remunerating his idle sons from the public purse.
For myself, having substantial reason to believe that I will have caught the attention of the intelligence services in the past, I maintain that the right of the citizen to consult certain professionals in terms of strictest confidence – his MP, his doctor, his lawyer, his accountant, his bank manager, his teacher, his spiritual advisor, his manager, his agent, his personal trainer, his dietician, his hygienist, his plastic surgeon – is sacrosanct and at least as worthy to be strictly upheld as his right to be protected from the – in reality, rather remote – threat of suicide bombers and urban terrorists.
Recent cases have shown government agencies to be remarkably cavalier with confidential data pertaining to vast numbers of the public. We have no basis for any assurance that surveillance records are any more secure in the hands of government agencies than are bank account, credit card, benefit and other kinds of record. I think I am entitled to expect that my file from the STD clinic that I frequently visited in my youth will not turn up to general merriment on YouTube. Similarly, an MP ought to be able to feel that she can speak openly in conditions of mutually assured confidentiality without being overheard by some bored jobsworth from MI6, in just the same way that she shouldn’t fear to have her private conversation transcribed in The News of the World or led on by Rory Bremner posing as her interlocutor.
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