WHITE FLAGS of ALL NOTIONS

While not accounted by any disinterested party ‘the winner’ of the Vice Presidential debate, Governor Palin was widely held to have drawn a little blood from Senator Biden with her disdainful dismissal of Senator Obama’s proposal to bring home the troops from Iraq in sixteen months: “Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq and that is not what our troops need to hear today, that’s for sure”. It’s the kind of jut-jawed fundamentalism that gets plain folks whoopin’ and hollerin’ in the small towns where many of the votes are still up for grabs. Joe Biden didn’t squash it flat; Barack Obama needs to do so before the polls open. Because it’s rubbish.

“We’ll know we’re finished in Iraq”, Mrs Palin went on, “when the Iraqi government can govern its people and when the Iraqi security forces can secure its people”. This was less incendiary. Indeed, it was a tacit admission that Senator McCain’s commitment to the famous “surge” and its continued implementation is open-ended. Under successive Presidents McCain and Palin, American troops could still be in Iraq in 2024 at a cost at today’s prices (let alone tomorrow’s) of $10 billion per month. The home economy will be in more tatters than it is now.

The Obama team needs to nail the McCain camp on what they mean when they proclaim that the surge is working and that the troops are winning and that they won’t withdraw until they secure victory. What do they mean by victory? Is Sarah Palin’s answer the official one and how widely will such a resolution be recognized? To Joe Six-Pack and his Hockey-Mom wife sitting at home, it looks easy: American tanks rolling through a town cheered by civilians. That’s what Bush’s proclaimed victory looked like in 2003 in Baghdad. Joe and Honey now know that it wasn’t a victory, that it was just, in Churchill’s phrase, “the end of the beginning”.

What would constitute a situation that John McCain could genuinely call a victory? Any spin-doctor can dress up a picture and make it look better than it is but, in these days of embedded reporters and troops who are used to talking to the media, it’s harder to bamboozle the public than, for example, our leaders found at the time of World War I. What’s more, the media’s interests are global, like everyone else’s, and knee-jerk patriotism is no longer on offer as coverage.

A supporter of the surge, like McCain, is bound to stick with it because he cannot admit that he might be wrong. Unfortunately, most politicians have the same problem. Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, an elegant diplomat and a wily observer of the international scene, is fond of the saying: “The gentle art of saving face may yet destroy the human race”. If we get a President McCain, I hope the Prince emails it to him on his first morning.

Over the weekend, the Commander of the British Air Assault Brigade in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, told The Sunday Times: “We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.

“We may well leave with there still being a low but steady level of insurgency … If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this. That shouldn’t make people uncomfortable”.

The Brigadier’s observations would not be welcomed by McCain who said in his debate with Obama – and Palin repeated the jibe – that to sit down with the enemy “without preconditions” is naïve and self-defeating. But to be unconcerned with saving face is not the same as being irresolute and, quoting Churchill again, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”. Preconditions are too easily an excuse for refusing to talk at all. A truly strong and perceptive and fearless leader is prepared to go anywhere to talk to anyone about anything if it might preserve or hasten peace.

The US is not going to have a victory in Iraq in any form that its homeland will understand. Modern war is not like Wellington winning Waterloo. And you have to wonder whether a remotely recognizable victory is actually worth the cost, in lives and damaged minds and the destruction of communities as well in material ways. When the last American troops do finally leave Iraq, whether in the first term of a President Obama or at the behest of some as yet unknown future incumbent, what will we be able to point to and say “that has been achieved”? The danger for the US is that, by the time its troops leave, the reign of Saddam Hussein will be so far in the past that it will no longer seem to have been any part of the exercise.

And the conundrum that a President McCain or a President Palin would have to face is that as long as there are US troops in Iraq, they will be acting as a spur to insurgency. Whether an American politician thinks it justified or not, the fact is that many if not most Iraqis view the Americans as an invading army and will not rest until they are gone. It is the presence of foreign troops that keeps insurgency alive. just as it would do in any self-respecting country. Was it not the Americans who threw out the British more than 230 years ago? Had the British decided that they would stay until they had ‘victory’, they might still be there.

There is something a new president can do. Reject the Bush administration’s disdain for the rest of the world, go to the UN and ask the security council to agree to replace all national troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan with a non-partisan UN force of peace-keepers. That way, the western allies do not leave the respective regimes in those countries at the mercy of revolutionaries, fundamentalists and terrorists but they do pass the absurd costs of playing global policemen to the organisation whose function is to do just that. I don’t know why Bush and Blair didn’t think of this in the first place. (Well, I do know why but it does neither of them any credit).

RIGHT HERE in ST LOUIS!

Alongside our drive and garden, we are lucky enough to have a two-acre field that is part of our property. Just three years ago, we sank in this field a big, fat pond, twelve feet deep and some twenty feet long. We let the water mature for a year before transferring to it the fish that lived in the wildly overplanted and rather tired shallow pond that we had inherited much nearer the house. The fish loved their new home and have thrived. They’ve had lots of babies.

We installed an elaborate arrangement of bamboo canes to frustrate and bamboozle Ron, the heron who is a pretty frequent visitor. He has never succeeded in taking any of the named fish that enjoy the freedom of the pond, named because recognizable. There are many anonymous residents, probably a majority of them (in the nature of things) sports, and it is impossible to begrudge so majestic a hunter any haul from among those that he may make.

But I would be distressed if he managed to harpoon Big Bill Broonzy, the splendid carp with the bright blue patch on his head, who came to us from a pond that he had outgrown in Crouch End; or Chubby Checker, another large carp with a hatchwork marking pattern, a refugee from my partner’s sister’s pond in Bristol; or Orpheus, the always chirpy blue orfe who is the sole survivor of seven orfe who were resident in the old pond when we came here ten years ago.

And I wouldn’t want to lose Jane the white goldfish, whose life I once saved when she trapped herself by swallowing an anchored grass root at the pond’s edge and who is named for a Los Angelino whom we first met this year and now consider a friend; or Andi, the largest of our ghost koi, who is named for the old friend from Telaviv who made the introduction to Jane – Andi swears she doesn’t mind lending her name to the greediest of our pond dwellers.

Yesterday, Ron was there, the first time I’d seen him in some weeks. But also visiting was a wonderful creature, one whom David (who is an early riser, unlike me) had seen once or twice but whom I had yet to clap eyes on: a kingfisher. My heart leapt. We’ve seen hummingbirds feeding in the Caribbean, lionfish shoaling in the Red Sea and all manner of exotic birds and fish on either side of the Indian Ocean. But nothing beats a kingfisher.

Its iridescence – blue and green on the back and wings, orange on the chest – was dazzling, caught in sinking sunlight as he shot the length of the pond, then back again and then veered away to the hedgerow beyond. Unexpectedly, he flew back to the pond, as if not convinced that I was really a threat, as if there might still be a chance to snatch a comet that had caught his eye. Then he gave up, zipped back towards the hedge and then up and over the hawthorn branches. Ron was long gone by this time, big birds being much more cowardly than little ones.

I hugged myself over my luck. We are blessed every day with the birds who grace our feeders with their visits – every sort of finch and tit, dunnocks and treecreepers, wagtails and warblers, both spotted and green woodpeckers. Wrens and robins nest widely in our gardens. We see owls and all manner of falcons and hawks in and over our field and we are overflown twice daily by a honking flock of Canada geese. All this is of course not to count the less welcome birds, the pigeons and crows and, worst of all, the magpies that, I believe, are most responsible for the decline of sparrows and thrushes.

Today, both Ron and the kingfisher – shall I call him Gregor? – were there again. Ron indeed had brought Ronette, his better half, and, perhaps because of that, made himself scarce even more swiftly. The sighting of Gregor was also briefer but now that we are on his regular circuit we shall perhaps see more of him. I hope so. The odd lost goldfish/carp cross is a small price to pay for playing host to one of nature’s great glories.

ANYBODY HERE SEEN KELLY?

I make no bones about the fact that, when Ruth Kelly’s imminent departure from the cabinet was disclosed on Wednesday, my response could be encompassed in two words: “good riddance”. Kelly has been precious little asset. Her political touch and administrative competence have been much questioned. She is one of those ‘modern’ politicos – David Miliband is apt to be another – who seems to believe that to speak of “going forward” is to make a major policy statement. Most deplorably of all, her membership of the lunatic fringe group Opus Dei aligns her with fundamentalist supernatural views that are in direct conflict with much of the Labour government’s social programme. This was a grave embarrassment when fellow Roman Catholic sympathiser Tony Blair created for her the very Blairite post of Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. It was a job she held for 14 months before Gordon Brown gave her the transport portfolio.

It was quickly clear that, in purporting to represent “communities”, Kelly could not square her brief with her own views about the gay community. As Peter Tatchell remarked on her appointment, “Tony Blair would never appoint someone to a race equality post who had a lukewarm record of opposing racism”. Before her transfer from the Education brief that she had handled so poorly, Kelly had absented herself from twelve of the fourteen votes on issues concerning gay rights and had voted against adoption by same-sex couples. Happily the geriatric falangista and others of Kelly’s Opus Dei cohorts seem not to have a policy on transport.

All that being said, I have been outraged by the media coverage of Kelly’s political demise. She could hardly have been more categorical in her explanation of her departure. As she told reporters in successive sentences, it was “purely a decision taken for family reasons … absolutely and completely for family reasons”. It seems to me that the appropriate reaction for the media is to accept that as a categorical statement. Anything else and you should stop beating about the bush and call her a liar outright.

The BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg, reporting from the steps of the Manchester conference centre where the Labour party was gathered, asked rhetorically, “Could her action spur cabinet ministers into thinking about their jobs?” Well, Laura, of course it could because Gordon will have to appoint a new Secretary of State for Transport and is anyway widely claimed to be planning a reshuffle sooner rather than later. But if you mean “might they think about resigning for family reasons?” well, I suppose it depends on how young their respective children are.

Here is what the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, wrote in his blog on Wednesday: “The fact is, though, that Ruth Kelly has been profoundly worried about the direction of her party and has spoken with other cabinet ministers who were contemplating resigning too, to make their point. What this illustrates is that there is a big gap between talk behind the scenes and action”.

This is a “fact”, is it? Has Kelly aired her “profound” worry to Robinson personally or is this just a rumour in Westminster? And I take it that the ambiguity of the word “direction” is carefully chosen. It could mean the thrust of policy or it could mean the management of the party. Robinson leaves it for us to interpret. There are certainly areas of policy where there are differences of opinion in the government, as too within the opposition parties and across the country: ID cards, detention of terrorists, the future of troop deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, the imposition of a windfall tax on power companies. But generally, as I observed in the previous entry, the cabinet seems as ideologically like-minded as any I can recall over the last half-century. So what “point” would some of its members be making by resigning?

Who are the other cabinet ministers who were contemplating resignation? What are they waiting for? What is their game plan? I find all this sort of political gossip profoundly – if I may use Robinson’s weighty word – unsatisfactory. In his journalism, Robinson is very keen on hints and glosses. He is given to formulae such as “cabinet ministers say privately …”. What does that mean?

It seems to me that there are several possible readings of such a claim. If “privately” is taken literally, Robinson must mean that at least one minister is an old friend of his with whom he chats frequently as old friends do. In such circumstances, the minister(s) would surely expect confidences to be respected. Robinson is a disloyal friend to whom “privacy” means nothing.

More likely, Robinson means that he has had informal contact with ministers in the professional context of journalist and politicians – the opposite of private – and that he has been given information either off the record or on the record but on an unattributable basis. In the former instance, Robinson could still be considered to be betraying a confidence. Off the record is generally taken to mean that the information is not for conveying baldly to the public but to be understood as background to the journalist’s understanding of a wider picture.

Anonymously quotable information is a different ballgame altogether. It raises a number of important supplementary questions: what is the politician’s motive in putting this information into the public domain? how reliable is the information? is the journalist being used as a means to make mischief for somebody else? is it proper that, in this case, the BBC should be unwittingly inveigled into machinations that might be mere politicking rather than politics?

What is more, it raises important questions about the reporter’s own probity. Why is the reporter acceding to the politician’s gambit in throwing a stone into the pool? How sure can the reporter be that the information given is kosher and not some species of black propaganda? And, given that the story is run anonymously, what is to stop the reporter inventing a rumour supposedly given to him by a cabinet minister and creating a story of his own from nothing? You will say “his professionalism” will prevent that. But all reporters have agendas too. There is no reason why Labour should trust Nick Robinson, a former president of the Oxford University Conservative Association and a former national chairman of the Young Conservatives.

Robinson does not reveal his political history in his blog biog. Journalists – especially those in broadcasting who are expected to be more disinterested than their print equivalents – dread the exposure of such past activism. I vividly recall a BBC Election Night special in the 1960s wherein the anchor, Cliff Michelmore, handed over to Robin Day who was perched in the roof of the studio interviewing a succession of politicos. Michelmore lightly noted that Day had once stood as a Liberal candidate. Day leaned precariously over the barrier of his eyrie and, incandescent with rage, bawled “I asked for that not to be mentioned”. Thereafter both he and Michelmore comported themselves as if nothing untoward had occurred. But clearly Sir Robin (as he became) feared that such history might compromise his stance as an impartial tribune.

On The World at One, Nick Robinson gladly accepted Martha Kearney’s invitation to speculate on the details of the reshuffle that reporters – on no formal basis – presume to expect next week. What an idle exercise. If the speculation happens to be mostly accurate, Robinson will bask in imagined brilliance while the viewers yawn. If it is wide of the mark, he will present the reshuffle as a missed opportunity or “Gordon seeking to spring a surprise”. If there is no reshuffle, the predictions will be quietly forgotten. But all of it is a waste of valuable airtime.

The Guardian ran a good deal of “background” on the Kelly resignation, much of it contradictory – “one source said a junior number 10 official may have been indiscreet in the bars of the Labour conference” (the plural “bars” suggests drunk and indiscreet); “allies of the prime minister … [said] that the ‘toxic timing’ of the resignation was designed by Blairites to give the impression of ‘dirty tricks’ by no 10”; and so on.

Of course, when politicians gossip unguardedly to journalists, they only have themselves to blame if rabbits run and end up eating the crops that the gossips had meant to protect. I recently read John Hutton, James Purnell and Caroline Flint named among those who were plotting against Gordon Brown. Such reports reflect badly on the named from any point of view. If they are known plotters, the plotting is not subtle. If the claim is false, they should issue a statement refuting it – they should probably do that whether it is true or false. If they are briefing journalists unattributably, it will serve them right if the upshot is not part of the plan.

Were I Gordon Brown, I should revert to the tried and tested gambit of divide and rule. Sack Hutton: there are no votes in him. Hope he makes common cause on the back benches with Charles Clarke because the pair can easily be nullified by being characterised as Laurel and Hardy. Move Purnell sideways. His presence in the cabinet at all is a mystery to me. He shares with the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg the pasty look of someone who spends too long in front of his computer. I wouldn’t trust him with a boiled sweet. Send him to Northern Ireland. Evidently (and bewilderingly) Brown admires and wants to promote the current Northern Ireland Secretary, the millionaire Tory turncoat Shaun Woodward. The pair could swap jobs. Promote Flint to the cabinet. She already attends it often as Minister of State for Housing and Planning. She has form in education and health and she combined American literature and film studies as a student. It’s too soon to shift Andy Burnham from Culture but she could have the portfolio of John Denham – Innovation, Universities and Skills – and the admirable Denham could take the Transport brief. What’s she gonna do? Say “no thanks, I’d rather disappear into obscurity on the back benches”? In the end, most of these politicians are realists.

SIT DOWN, YOU’RE ROCKING the BOAT

It’s a pity that so few in the Westminster village evidently have much historical perspective. Almost every government of my lifetime has suffered, to some degree or other, the mid-term blues. Despite the catastrophe for Eden of the Suez Crisis in 1956, it took Labour another eight years to win a general election. Before the Falklands War, you would have got long odds on Thatcher gaining a second term. Labour was supposed to win the 1992 election right up to the count – indeed the BBC proclaimed Neil Kinnock prime minister on the basis of exit polls – but the Major government came back from the dead. In 2000, William Hague was thought for a time to be well placed to capitalise on Blair’s then unpopularity. As it turned out Hague was the first Tory leader since Austen Chamberlain not to become prime minister, his successor Iain Duncan Smith was the second and his successor Michael Howard the third. Conversely, I still can picture the double page spread in The Observer the Sunday before the Tories won in 1970: “The agony of Edward Heath” was its headline. Save in Zimbabwe, no election result is a foregone conclusion; no poll counts except the actual vote.

My point is that This Too Will Pass. For Labour backbenchers – both perpetual ones and those newly relegated from the front bench – to run around like recently beheaded chickens is the merest folly. How the government’s foes, from Cameron to Salmond, must rub their hands with glee. All the Tories need do is watch. Opposition could not be easier.

The media has decided that Labour cannot possibly win the next election, whether it comes in 2009 or 2010. Nobody notes that just a year ago, the picture was very different. In an ICM poll, the results of which were published on September 19th 2007, Labour was supported by 40% against the Conservatives’ 32% and 20% for the Liberal Democrats. Gordon Brown’s approval ratings among voters of all party allegiances was +32, David Cameron’s was +25 and Sir Menzies Campbell’s was –5; their respective ratings among their own party followers were +73, +25 and +48. Only a fool would propose to anticipate where such ratings will be in mid-September 2009.

Yet Labour MPs – not excluding, if so-called ‘private briefings’ given to journalists have any merit and I always doubt that they do, actual ministers – are queuing up to hurl their own careers and the prospects for their party onto the pyre by telling anyone who will listen that Gordon Brown has to go. And what, in god’s name, do they imagine will be gained by that? Who presently in the house, let alone the cabinet, has the charisma or the credibility to transform the government’s fortunes?

The sad fact that these hysterics cannot grasp is that the government’s present unpopularity rests largely on the economy’s downturn. If David Cameron or Tony Blair or Ming Campbell or Nick Clegg or Ann Widdecombe or Jade Goody or David Beckham were presently prime minister, the polls would still not favour the government. All the ministers who might remotely be likely to stand if there were a leadership contest know this. In the present circumstances, being in government is a bed of nails. Only a masochist would gladly take over at number 10.

Joan Ryan, who resigned as vice-chairman of the party at the end of last week, told a BBC reporter: “lots of people are saying, you know, we need now to have this debate”. What debate? David Davis resigned and prompted a by-election because he wanted a national debate on the eroding of civil freedoms. Did you miss that debate? So did I. There are certain individual policies – ID cards, detention of terror suspects – that do not command the full support of the Labour party and when they come before the house they are hotly and exhaustively debated. Otherwise, the cabinet is as united on policy as any since World War II.

So what is the debate about? Well of course it’s about personalities. On Any Questions this weekend, Tony Benn was gallantly arguing yet again that the debate ought to be about issues, not personalities. But the fact is that Benn’s argument was lost years ago. The media is not interested in issues or policy but ‘stars’ and, because the media is powerful, even professionals pay it heed and begin to believe what it says. The media has decided that Brown’s fall from grace is a good story. Consequently, Brown almost never gets any coverage, either broadcast or print, that does not begin from the premise that there is “more trouble” for the prime minister. If Brown slashed everyone’s taxes, took Britain out of the European Union and gave the electorate a referendum on, inter alia, capital punishment, ID cards, smoking in public places, immigration, troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and the weather in summer, the media would still find a way to present it as “trouble” for Brown.

His worst trouble is the inward-looking, easily swayed nature of politicians today. In his big speech at the party conference, the PM will need to make it clear that he isn’t stepping down this side of an election in any circumstances save unforeseen illness; that if backbenchers care to run their version of Sir Anthony Meyer against him (the so-articulate Joan Ryan perhaps) they are welcome to try but that she and they should expect to lose the whip; that nobody this side of the horizon has any better ideas about getting through the downturn and changing the leader will not change the ideas; that all this hysteria only makes the party look like an amateur rabble instead of a mature political movement; that the media is not the government’s friend and those feeding it tittle-tattle off the record do very much more harm than good and indeed give the media cover under which to make up stories and claim they reflect reality; that he has earned backbench loyalty by being the most successful Chancellor in a century and that he expects to be able to draw on that credit now that the going is tough.

Pace Mr Benn, let’s talk personalities for a moment. I agree with Tam Dalyell, father of the last house, that Tony Blair was the worst prime minister of our lifetime. I rejoiced that the Tories chose a Blair Mark II to lead them, believing that the electorate would have had enough of “pretty straight sort of guy” spin. I omitted to note that the electorate never went off Blair sufficiently to vote him out of office, though, had they been given a chance to do so in 2010, who knows what the result would have been? Cameron has played his first years in opposition exactly as Blair played his, even repeatedly accusing the prime minister of “dithering”, a charge that fitted John Major far better than it does Gordon Brown.

It was Blair’s plausibility as much as any other quality that stuck in my craw and Cameron strikes me the same. These guys are snake-oil salesmen: Blair was a lawyer, Cameron a career politico. Brown is, I believe, much more grounded in reality. His forte is not being ingratiating. But that’s a harder sell in a sound-bite culture. America will elect McCain (I now feel sure) because the American electorate always prefers the genial guy over the earnest guy: Reagan over Carter and Mondale, Clinton over Bush Sr and Dole, Bush Jr over Gore and Kerry. It doesn't matter much if the laid-back guy is obviously a duffer. Sufficient numbers like to imagine having a beer with their president that they overwhelm those who contemplate with equanimity being nagged by their president. No need to make it more complicated, pundits.

Labour is a bit short of geniality. Maybe Brown is indeed doomed against Cameron but which of its top brass wouldn’t be? Ed Balls is probably as chirpy as any member of the government but the press hate him and he suffers from having spent so long as a super-loyal Brownite. Alan Johnson might be their best bet: bluff, twinkly enough and certainly a contrast to Cameron. But has he got a thick enough skin? Brown has this much going for him: he exhibits no iota of discomfort or pain or bewilderment at the daily onslaught he has to undergo, not in public anyway.

It may be that there is no way out for Labour, that the downturn will be politically fatal as it would be fatal for any party that had to deal with it. But these strident absolutes are folly: that Labour cannot win, that Brown must go. Anything can happen in politics and the party needs to keep its nerve and present a united front so that the government can have the best shot at coming through the crisis unscathed.

POWER BACK to the PEOPLE

The indiscreet executive from the power company E.On, one Mark Owen-Lloyd, was only confirming what most of us already knew when he affably remarked at an Ofgem seminar that the current rip-roaring price hike for electricity and gas was fine because “it will make more money for us”.

Ministers attacked Owen-Goal with incandescent fury. Hilary Benn raged that it was “not funny”. Gordon Brown poured the full weight of prime ministerial scorn on the remark, coruscating it as “inappropriate”. Of course the post-Thatcher and –Blair Labour Party knows that the point of business is to make profits. That’s what business is for. That’s why these ministers were implicitly criticising the tone of the remark rather than the substance.

Because ‘New’ Labour wants to keep business sweet, it will not – there was never any chance that it would – impose a windfall tax on the power companies. Left-inclined backbenchers who have been ‘demanding’ such a tax are not living in the real world, on two counts. First, because they think the government still might be susceptible to arguments about social justice. Second, because a windfall tax would defeat the purpose that they intend for it. For the power companies would simply pass it on to the customers.

Gordon Brown, ever a man for a ‘package’, has come up with one supposed to alleviate the poleaxing rises in power bills. “Lag Your Loft” may not rank with “Workers of the World Unite” as a rallying cry for the proletariat but it is not an unworthy basis for a programme of action. But of course the power companies, inasmuch as they are expected to fund cavity wall and loft insulation schemes, will quickly find ways of preventing these costs from reducing the profits for their shareholders. Those of us who do not need help with insulation will surely find ourselves paying for those who do, just as we will be called upon to subsidize the bills of the 600,000 poorest customers. This is not quite the kind of redistribution of wealth that Marx and Engels had in mind.

Any government that had any kind of nodding acquaintance with Socialism would be resolving this issue in the only way that makes any sense: it would take the public utilities back into public ownership. Renationalisation need be no more fraught a process than was the original nationalisation. After all, the administration in Washington, about as far from a Socialist outfit as a government can be, has just taken into public ownership two of the biggest US businesses, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), commonly known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yes, these were failing concerns while the power companies are cash cows with the moo to fight any restraint of profit. But former utilities are in a special position, benefiting from the appearance (if not always the reality) of holding local monopolies. Private companies cannot construct a rival national grid any more than they can build their own rail network or telecommunications system.

The Tory governments of the 1980s and 1990s privatised British Airways, the British Airport Authority, British Rail, British Steel, British Telecom, the bus service, the coal industry and what remained public of British Petroleum as well as outsourcing gas, electricity and water. The Blair government accepted all this as a fait accompli, even resisting the overwhelming case made by the new rail operators’ inability to maintain a coherent service. The accepted bromide became ‘public-private partnership’ because, by leaving shareholders largely unscathed, Blair kept the support of an unprecedented proportion of business and the press.

I would venture that privatising the power companies would be the vote-winner that Gordon Brown so urgently needs. After all, only those who invested in them love the power companies and many of the companies that now own our utilities are based abroad. By taking these essentials back into public administration, Brown would demonstrate that his concern for the people’s welfare outweighs narrow party interest. And it would steal a terrific march on David Cameron.

A NO-BRAINER: WHO FOLLOWS the NO-BRAINER?

It’s a mug who predicts election results – who predicts pretty much anything in this cockamamie world. But after Barack Obama’s speech and John McCain’s left-field pick of a vice presidential candidate who, at first blush, looked a mistake on every count, it was hard to resist the feeling that we’d witnessed the 48 hours that sealed the presidency.

Now I’m less sure. The American electorate is a terribly conservative animal. It doesn’t follow inspiration with great zeal. The legend of Jack Kennedy has obscured the fact that he almost didn’t win the electoral battle of 1960 with Richard Nixon. This conservatism, paradoxically, may be McCain’s greatest fear and why he chose the governor of Alaska, to shore up the conservative core vote. As it is too late for him to shrug off his image as a “mavrick”– to quote a prominent banner at the convention – McCain is only being realistic if he glories in that image. Sarah Palin brings to his ticket all those certainties he cannot so persuasively call down: small-town blinkers, God, apple pie and the American way.

That she is a woman will, it seems to me, pay diminishing returns (and anyway alienate as many reactionaries as it delights), unless the Democrats – and especially bluff Joe Biden in the televised vice presidential debate – make the mistake of patronising her. But to suggest that Palin offers a home for the disaffected Hillary vote is absurd and the most patronising notion of all, that the “women’s vote” is some monolith that blindly supports a female candidature. Senator Clinton’s electorate in the primaries will not have contained very many bear-hunting, evangelical, pro-drilling anti-abortionists. Such women would already be Republicans. Besides, Palin may be a successful woman but she’s no sister. “This is America” she told the convention “and every woman can walk through every door of opportunity”. Oh, get real, Sarah.

Beyond the party faithful, her hockey mom/PTA shtik won’t have legs. In fact, she’s exhausted it already, unless no one is steering her away from self-parody, her greatest danger. Saturday Night Live would have a field day with her, especially if they could get some witty high-profile guest to do her: Sandra Bullock, say. And what is with the hippie names of her children: Bristol, Track, Summer, Liberty, Joaquin, Rain and River? That’s begging for parody. There is something completely weird about the way the boy who got her daughter up the duff has been embraced and brought into the Republican fold like he’s some war hero. But there’s no mileage for the Democrats in a god-fearing woman’s daughter having an illegitimate child these days. If Dick Cheney could smile through his daughter’s lesbianism, they all know that ‘family’ stuff is off-limits, even, it seems, Mr Palin’s drink-driving conviction.

In her convention speech, Governor Palin said something wholly false and unworthy and the Democrats should nail her for it: “Here’s how I look at the choice Americans face in this election: in politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers and then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change”. That kind of reversal is an age-old rhetorical trick that sounds smart because it sounds poetically precise. The Democrats should challenge her to spell out exactly what (and who) she means by it, if indeed she means anything at all. She has no lack of chutzpah: she can be taken down a peg or two.

I’ve looked at Palin’s speech because in many ways it is the most important one. Obama and McCain both reached some 40 million viewers, astonishing ratings that give some evidence of the degree to which the race has compelled the public. Fewer Americans watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, the final of American Idol or this year’s Oscars. But Palin attracted almost as high figures, far more than Biden or indeed either Clinton.

She is the surprise package of this election, someone none of us had heard of a week ago and now can’t ignore. If she becomes deputy to a president of 72 who has a history of skin cancer, she could herself be president before we know it. That’s one of the craziest aspects of the American system. It is almost true that anyone can be president. It is at least true that you don’t have to spend decades building bases and forming alliances like you do in most countries (admittedly in some of those countries the groundwork you do is in the military rather than the political world, before you lead a coup).

Good sense still clings to Obama making it. It remains clear that he galvanises audiences both in the flesh and on the screen. He speaks well: his convention speech was feisty, combative, ambitious, elegant and yes, inspirational. “It’s about you” he cried and McCain, presumably consciously in his own speech, echoed that: “I work for you”. McCain’s speech was far less accomplished and far less excitingly delivered, for all the ballyhoo in the hall. (I wondered if people were periodically chanting “Judas” but I think it was “hero”, a puerile chant. They were probably the same people who set out to undermine John Kerry’s military service credentials four years ago).

McCain comes across as too genial, so that his protestations of strength and courage seem to be protesting too much. But then maybe Americans like that and that’s why they elected Ronald Reagan and George W Bush rather than Jimmy Carter for a second term, Walter Mondale, Al Gore and Kerry. To someone like me – a socialist sceptic – the signs that the Republican crowd held up looked pretty feeble: “Straight Talk”. It’s hardly “Give ‘em Hell, Harry”.

I still think it will be astonishing if McCain wins. It still sure is Obama’s to lose. But here’s a hostage that McCain offered to fortune, to be put by and read back to him if he does serve a term: “I’m not in the habit of breaking promises to my country and neither is Governor Palin. And when we tell you we’re going to change Washington and stop leaving our country’s problems for some unluckier generation to fix, you can count on it”. Well, many a new president, formerly a bit of a “mavrick”, has ridden a high horse into DC and soon found that actually there’s more power on the hill and in the departments and the lawyers’ offices and the lobbyists’ rollerdex and, especially, the financiers’ clout than he had ever imagined. And that goes for Obama as well as McCain. And once again you remember that, for all the talk about the president being “the most powerful man in the world”, nobody governs save by consent and most of that consent comes from the vested interests and the international capital that the candidates think they’re going into government to tame.

DATA DAY DÉBÂCLES

It’s been a bad few days for outsourcing. Today the Police Federation has denounced the neighbourhood wardens scheme as “half-baked”, a pretty devastating dismissal. This scheme empowers selected members of the public – there are now over 1,400 of them in England and Wales – to carry out certain low-level law enforcement duties, including the imposition of on-the-spot fines. The wardens are identified only by a lapel badge that describes them as Community Safety Scheme Accredited. They are not recruited by, not trained by, not financed by and not answerable to the police.

Did you know there were such people in our midst? Neither did I. Have you ever seen one of these badges? Nor have I. Would you take orders from or hand over money to somebody in the street who claimed to have special powers, just because they had an enamel badge on their tit? Neither would I.

On Tuesday, it emerged that an IT manager in Oxford had bought on eBay a computer that he found contained account and personal details of several million customers (probably including you and me) of American Express, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the NatWest. The computer had been part of the equipment of an archiving firm that stored the information on behalf of the banks.

Did you know that your bank franchises your personal details to other companies for supposed safekeeping? Neither did I. Have you ever been told this by your bank? Nor have I. Would you agree to your details being outsourced were the bank ever to have the courtesy to ask you? Neither would I.

Last Thursday, we learned that a computer memory stick holding personal data on every prisoner in Wales and England – some 84,000 convicts – and a further 10,000 or so prolific offenders presumably still at large has been mislaid by a private consultancy working for the Home Office. I do not have a prison record – I do not even offend very prolifically – so I am not plagued by easily-answered questions about this matter.

But the common factor here is that these questionable practices are being committed not by a public body, a national institution or government department or by a representative thereof but by a private enterprise or an untrained individual paid out of public funds. This is the fruit of the lamentable post-Friedmanite dependence successive Labour governments have flourished for what they have called Public Private Partnerships, a wretched betrayal of Labour’s historic commitment to public ownership. Those few of us left who still do not believe that capitalism is the answer to every one of the world’s problems have watched this slide into liberal economics with growing gloom.

Of course all organisations of whatever stripe are operated by human beings. And human beings, whatever their particular politics or loyalty or training or Weltanschauung, are fallible, vulnerable, corruptible. But we take it as a given that national bodies, ‘official’ concerns, public utilities and traditional companies (even banks) are visible, answerable and largely dependable. They suggest a philosophy of WYSIWYG, as the computer people put it. So when, for instance, it transpires that your local water company is actually part of a French conglomerate, you feel obscurely let down. When what used to be a perfectly dull but unobjectionable local independent restaurant changes over to buying in all its meals pre-packed and portion-controlled – so that the only skill required of the restaurant is to put it in and take it out of the microwave and bring it to the table without falling over – you retire hurt from going out to eat.

It’s hard to understand how it can be more cost-effective for the prison service to contract out computing tasks, especially when the security undertakings that the contractor would have been required to give turn out to be worthless. It’s hard to understand why the education service pays an incompetent American outfit millions of dollars to screw up royally the marking of the annual examination papers, a task performed perfectly adequately by the education service itself for generations. It’s a mystery to me why the phrase ‘in-house’ has become deemed excess baggage to every public enterprise from the BBC to the NHS.

But if you think that these crass instances of cavalier incompetence with confidential data on the part of unqualified free market cowboys are going to end any time soon or lead to a reverse of the mania to outsource, well … don’t hold your breath.

A GENERALLY MODERATE VIEW

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales has delivered himself of a tirade against the continuing experiments in genetically modified agriculture. Needless to say, the journalistic commentators have taken the opportunity to diss the Prince as, more or less, an in-bred moron. “Does it matter” enquired Rod Liddle rhetorically in The Sunday Times “that Prince Charles is talking magnificently ill-informed bollocks once again? Only, I suppose, in that it makes irrational people like myself wish to rush out of the house and consume a genetically modified tomato before dusk, on the principle that if Chazza says something, it must be wrong”. Irrational? You said it, Buster.

Actually, HRH has the advantage over this particular thought policeman – or Rozzer as I shall henceforth call him – in that he is a farmer and Rozzer, as far as I am aware, is not. The environment editor of The Guardian – whose special knowledge also renders him a more reliable guide than Rozzer – subjected the Prince’s Daily Telegraph interview to careful scrutiny and found that nothing he had said was out of step with various United Nations agricultural agencies, “authoritative farm analysis groups” and other experts and NGOs or indeed the G8 itself. Perhaps Rozzer knows better.

The Prince reckoned the prospect of continuing GM experimentation would “guarantee the biggest environmental disaster of all time”. He scorned the agricultural future “all run by gigantic corporations … the classic way of ensuring that there is no food in the future … What we should be talking about is food security, not food production, that’s what matters and that’s what people will not understand”.

The Telegraph’s recording of the interview (available on its website) suggests that the Prince was talking off the cuff and that the paper’s business editor, Jeff Randall, may have taped him opportunistically. At any rate, the recording begins in mid-sentence and is abruptly curtailed and there is no questioning. You might say that the Prince ought to know better than to talk unguardedly to a journalist and that he ought to know that it is always better to present a complex and controversial argument in a carefully considered piece of writing (an article or a speech) than in an unstructured interview.

All that being said, I find myself broadly in sympathy with the Prince’s view. If he fulminated intemperately – well, as I say, that’s the nature of loose talk. At least he didn’t drop the dreaded name of Frankenstein, as those with a supernaturally based objection to genetics are apt to do. For my part, I am generally inclined, as one professional to another, to credit scientists with intellectual honesty and as keen a desire to do good in the world as any layperson may possess.

But scientists are as susceptible to manipulation as anyone else. Those psychologists, whose purely speculative testimony condemned to jail as child-killers the mothers of young children who had otherwise unaccountably died, carry a heavy burden of guilt for cruel misuse of the authority that their vaunted expertise bestows. And the question mark that hangs over the geneticists who are interfering with the DNA of crops is the one that the Prince raised in his phrase “gigantic corporations”. These scientists are owned by global capitalism. The food journalist Felicity Lawrence (whose book Not On the Label should be compulsory reading for the Rozzers of this world) remarked to The Guardian that the Prince’s talk of “corporate control” is “not exactly left wing but it is radical. I would place him in that tradition of philanthropic, experimental landowners like Robert Owen, who does things in a patriarchal and paternalist way but genuinely wants to leave the world a better place”.

There is a great non-conformist tradition in Britain, of which the Owenites were a significant part, and, if the heir to the throne identifies with such non-conformism, so much the better for his future subjects. There is no evidence that the likes of Monsanto have any interest other than yielding the biggest possible profits for its shareholders (of whom maybe Rozzer is one; I think we should be told). What the GM companies certainly want to do is to tie up the agribusiness and drive out the smallholder. Their terms for those farmers prepared to permit GM crops in their fields are notoriously rigorous and self-serving.

We are entitled to be sceptical about genetic manipulation. Like all research, it is an attempt to discover whether a theory works in practice. The trouble with intervening in natural processes and own-pace evolution is that it may upset delicate balances that even experts do not perceive, just as an extinction in nature can have far-reaching effects on other species of flora and fauna, way beyond any naturalist’s ability to anticipate. This is chaos theory, the proverbial beating of a butterfly’s wing in a rainforest leading to the collapse of a civilisation on the other side of the planet.

GM is a genie out of a bottle. However “controlled” the experiments are, the spores and seeds will get into the general crop population so that we can never be sure that any produce really is, as billed, “GM-free”. And the only way to determine what will be the effect of a genetic mutation over the course of, say, a century, is to let it loose for a century. If the effect proves baleful, what can then be done to reverse the invasion?

SINO-SHORTSITIS

There is nothing in the contemporary world thicker than the skin of George W Bush. On his way to Beijing to become the first sitting US president ever to attend an Olympic Games staged on foreign soil, Bush stopped off at Bangkok to deliver a lecture over the head of his uncomplaining host, Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej, to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao.

“America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious activists,” he said, flashing that trademark smirk that evidently betrays no intended irony. “We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly and labour rights, not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential. And we press for openness and justice not to impose our beliefs, but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs”.

Even while Bush was speaking, a military tribunal in the United States was holding a sentencing hearing for Salim Hamdan, who has been incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for 61 months by the US’s reckoning (though he was apprehended in 2001). This poor shmuck was found guilty earlier in the week of “supporting terrorism”, which crime he perpetrated by being driver to Osama bin Laden. He has been given five years in military custody, including the time he has already served, but the Pentagon have made it clear that they do not intend to release him at the end of his sentence.

As the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, John Wesley Hall, drily observed, “the Pentagon must be very proud of itself today … it convicted a truck driver of being guilty of driving a truck”.

Washington does not pretend that torture is not used at Guantánamo, which, it should be remembered, is the facility that we know about. There are doubtless others operating in secret on American soil and it is known that there are yet more controlled by American authorities dotted around the world, operating under the quasi-judicial aegis of friendly or beholden governments. So Osama bin Laden’s luckless former driver will have been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment over a considerable period before he achieved the distinction of being the first military prisoner from Guantánamo to be brought to what passes for justice in Bush’s America.

Along with a willingness to flout international law governing the use of torture upon political and military prisoners and the terms under which such prisoners can be tried, the Bush administration has also introduced the term “extraordinary rendition” to the language. This is the practice of transferring war prisoners out of formal American jurisdiction to such nations as Syria, Egypt and former Soviet bloc satellites where torture is a way of life. Through CIA contact and control, America’s historic expertise in torture techniques is refined by personnel who have no responsibility to American law.

If the Bush administration has anything to teach the Chinese government about human rights, it will be news to all but the most partisan neocons. But China is an easy target for everyone just now. A couple of callow Brits may unfurl a ‘Free Tibet’ banner on a lamp-post outside the Bird’s Nest Stadium and suffer nothing worse than deportation because their images are available from every news agency in the world for 24 hours. I guess the London authorities will go no harder on, say, a handful of Moslem protesters who stage some trivial event ahead of the Stratford East Olympics in 2012.

I make no claim on the Chinese regime’s behalf. I have never been to Tibet, nor indeed to China. Like other viewers of television news bulletins. I have seen the smuggled footage of the brutal putting down of dissidence. Indeed – and like practically every other nation on the planet – China has a bloody history: at times, it has inflicted dictatorship and privation on its own people and sought and sometimes achieved genocide against the peoples of other nations, tribes and sects.

Britain’s human rights record is hardly blemish-free – if nothing else just now, we are complicit in the illegal use of torture and violation of other nations’ sovereignty practised by the States. It is idle, of course, to imagine that the Olympics could take place in some pure state untainted by the corruption of the world. After all, the modern Games is, as much as anything, a pageant of globalised capitalism. But if the Games becomes an ideological battleground for politicians and protesters, alike drawn by the spotlight already shining on the spectacle, it will be tough on the athletes, for whom the sporting events themselves really are the focus of attention (save, of course, for those participants whose primary focus is on getting away with the illicit enhancement of their performances). I have suggested before that a permanent Olympiad home on a site declared neutral and independent like Vatican City could avoid the difficulties inherent in bestowing the prestige of hosting the event on successive participants in the eternal jockeying between nation states. Nothing that has occurred during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics has altered my view.

GOT IT MADE

I finally caught up with the first of three new programmes on BBC1 under the title The Making of Me. In each, someone in the public eye explores, as far as is feasible, how her or his particular personal make-up came to be formed. These being contemporary documentaries, such material can only be filtered through the medium of what are claimed to be ‘celebrities’. Whatever the viewers may actually want or be open to, broadcasting executives believe that no pill can be administered without a coating of stardust. So, if you happen to abominate the chosen ‘celebrity’ (and such abomination – like its opposite, adoration – is entirely subjective and even wilfully absurd), you will be deterred from taking your pill.

The episode I wanted to see was certainly for its pill – the subject matter – and not its sugar coating. John Barrowman is an actor and singer who specialised in musicals until he gained a wider audience through acting in Doctor Who and its spin-off, Torchwood. He has also regularly appeared as a judge in the series of musical audition shows that BBC1 has favoured for Saturday night prime-time fare. Barrowman was born in Scotland of Scots parents but his family moved to Illinois when he was eight and he now sounds like – and comes on like – an American. His parents, still US residents, remain resolutely Scottish and, in their company, Barrowman’s accent joins theirs, though he reverts when talking in their presence to his American nephew. There’s an interesting question hovering in the air as to which persona is his ‘correct’ one.

The other significant aspect of Barrowman’s make-up is that he is gay. Even in these liberated times, it is relatively rare for actors to be ‘out’, believing as they do – and there is some evidence that they are not wrong – that being tagged as gay will do harm to their job prospects. This fear is especially rife in Hollywood where movie and television actors are quite as closeted as gay sportsmen everywhere. The difference between the worlds of sport and drama is that the latter is, in everyday practice, highly tolerant of omnisexuality and indeed tends to attract people of unbuttoned sensuality. As that charming old thespian Alec McCowen once told me: “all actors are more or less gay …” [exquisitely timed pause] “… with the possible exception of Jack Hawkins”.

So I take my hat off to John Barrowman. He has always been upfront about his sexuality. And indeed the burden of the programme here under consideration was to explore and try to determine the source of that sexuality. Personally, I am not very interested in Barrowman’s sexuality qua the sexuality of this particular person. For my taste, he is too much the cardigan model in looks, too much the always-on performer in behaviour and too much the class show-off in style (“less talking” crisply advised one of the scientists who examined him in the film). His predictably elegant civil partner appeared in the film, their ceremony cheesily preserved in Barrowman’s screen-saver (he in his kilt, Scott in a dapper suit, the two dogs oblivious to the fuss). Way too self-conscious for moi.

And I fear that there is a large and largely unexamined question mark over the wisdom of the quest. Barrowman declared his starting-point boldly enough: he believes that sexuality is a given and that he couldn’t alter it even if he wanted to, which he certainly doesn’t. He hoped his quest would reinforce this conviction. But as Johann Hari notes in a related article in the current issue of Attitude, “there is a dark possibility we will end up wishing we hadn’t asked the question in the first place”. I agree with Hari. I have always feared that a conclusion will be reached in the struggle between nature and nurture for the recognition of responsibility for determining our sexuality. While the matter remains in doubt, the enemy cannot select its weapons. Once science has made a definitive pronouncement, the bigots will begin to prepare their means for eliminating homosexuality once and for all.

If science finds for nature – the elusive ‘gay gene’, the event in the womb, the chemical balance brought about by a succession of male foetuses – geneticists will move in to eliminate the gay gene, biologists to ‘correct’ the flow of testosterone and parents will sign up for the abortion of foetuses that are thought to be potentially gay. If science determines for nurture – learned behavioural patterns, social influences, the enduring nexus of accounts first put forward by Freud – behaviourists and moralising busybodies will launch a re-education programme to ‘save’ parents from unwittingly ‘making’ inverts of their children. Either way, it’s bad news for the gay community.

There is a great deal to be said for science’s interventions in the structure of human cells. The prospect of pre-empting the onset of deadly diseases or inherited disabilities is not lightly to be passed up. As in many other fields of human quest, the dangers arise when vested interests, particularly those driven by supernatural superstition, begin to make demands on the uses to which such research and development is put.

There is of course a fundamentally homophobic basis to the whole field of research and, sadly, to Barrowman’s attempt to answer his personal question. “What makes you gay?” presupposes that being gay is some departure from the norm and is therefore itself questionable. We might just as fairly ask “what makes you straight?” or – a better question still – “what makes you sexual?” Such a question would not, I hope, carry within it the implication that the answer will furnish the means by which it can be stopped.

LOSING YOUR SHIRT, BLACK or OTHERWISE

I cannot imagine that I would hit it off very readily with Max Mosley. The president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile has always moved in worlds that would bore me as much as they would repel me: motor-racing, engineering and right-wing politics. Mosley was born into the latter; his parents married in 1936 at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Reich Chancellor Hitler the only other guest not present in the role of witness. His father was Sir Oswald, the 6th Baronet Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists (known as the Blackshirts), and his mother was Diana Guinness, third of the celebrated Mitford sisters. After World War II, during which the Mosleys were interned, Sir Oswald attempted to rekindle his messianic political career and launched the so-called Union Movement in 1948.

From his teens, Max Mosley was active in the Union Movement and often acted as an advocate and apologist for his father’s views and political actions. When the Union Movement collapsed, he tried to forge a career as a Tory politician but found that his name counted against him. Given the alleged Nazi role-playing involved in the evening of sado-masochism that was the centre of Mosley’s just-concluded court case against the News of the World, it may be surmised that his name still carries a large degree of baggage.

The tabloid splashed its story in March under the headline ‘F1 BOSS HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH HOOKERS’. In this bizarre sentence, ‘F1’ means Formula One, the type of motor racing that the FIA administers, and ‘hookers’ (a somewhat outmoded term, it might be thought) means the five women who supplied Mosley with sexual favours for payment of £500 each. One of the ‘hookers’ also took £12,500 from the tabloid for secreting a camera into the ‘orgy’ (the results of which, I understand, could be temporarily admired on the tabloid’s website) and a further £10,000 from Sky News for an ‘exclusive’ interview. The News of the World and Sky News, it will be remembered, are both owned by that noted family man, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch organisations therefore paid the woman 45 times more for her cooperation than did Mosley for her sexual services. Perhaps the term ‘hooker’ needs to be re-examined.

In a further strange wrinkle to the case, the husband of the wired-up ‘hooker’ was obliged to resign his post as a result of the publicity fall-out from the case; he was an employee of MI5. The now out-of-work spook may feel that he is harder done by than anyone else caught up in this curiously English affair.

Mosley himself decided to tough it all out. He called an Extraordinary General Meeting of the FIA and won a comfortable if not resounding vote of confidence. His term had already been artificially extended and has been marked by recurring controversy and bad feeling, so Mosley cannot have been sure that he would carry the day. In the event, many voices influential in the sport and its administration have been raised to advise him to resign. He has not so far done so and I cannot say that I blame him. To resign now would be to hand a suggestion of moral victory to the tabloid, even while it is licking its wounds at the record £60,000 damages and a substantial slice of the £450,000 costs.

Mr Justice Eady very properly articulated the point of law upon which the case hinged: “The claimant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to sexual activities … carried on between consenting adults on private property”. This was the nub of the case against the paper, whose reporters had clearly made a gross invasion of Mosley’s privacy, without ensuring that there was a watertight justification in so-called public interest.

What Mosley chooses to do with his privacy is nobody else’s business. The tabloid tried to dress its synthetic outrage (read: “glee at a juicy story”) with high-horse stuff about Nazis. Eady found “no evidence that the gathering [sic] … was intended to be an enactment of Nazi behaviour” and saw “no basis at all for the suggestion that the participants mocked the victims of the Holocaust”. Nor indeed ought it to matter a tuppenny damn if he had found such evidence. No victims of the Holocaust would have known of the ‘orgy’ if the tabloid had not reported it. People may strike whatever political stance they care to in private, without fear of reprisal or penalty.

The tabloid’s editor, Colin Myler, issued a statement outside the high court which declared that “taking part in depraved and brutal S&M orgies does not, in our opinion, constitute the fit and proper behaviour to be expected of someone in his hugely influential position”. He said Mosley had been guilty of “serious impropriety”, the kind of orotund pronouncement on the sexual behaviour of others that we haven’t heard uttered by anyone save with satirical intent in forty years. The hypocrisy of scandal-sheet editors knows no bounds. Myler wouldn’t know fit and proper behaviour if it jumped up and bit him in the leg.

The editor also declared that “our press is less free today after another judgment based on privacy laws emanating from Europe”. If the press is less free to spy on adults disporting themselves in whatever way they choose, then good for European legislators. But it is another intriguing aspect of this case that the Murdoch press, always anti-Europe, sees the judgment as a stick with which to beat Strasbourg while the Union Movement, in which Mosley cut his political teeth, was an early advocate of a Europe united into one superstate.

‘The freedom of the press’ and ‘the public’s right to know’ are two of the most abused rallying-cries of the modern era. The press is only as free as the international capital that controls it will permit it to be. Journalists are constrained by the writ of the proprietors fed down to them through editorial control. The duties of the press are more socially significant than its trumpeted but compromised freedoms. And the public has no right to know merely out of curiosity or prurience. There was nothing in the News of the World’s sting on Max Mosley that had any merit. It was another example of Oscar Wilde’s sly characterisation of “the English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” [A Woman of No Importance Act I]. At least Mosley got the result denied to Wilde.

ENGLAND OVER-EXPECTS

Hold the front page! There was no picture of Andy Murray on the front page of The Guardian today. Not since Monday has the gangly, scowling, air-fisting Scottish youth with the devoted mum, the modest tennis-playing ability and a curious fixation on his own (very average) bicep, been off the supposedly intelligent paper’s cover.

You might reasonably wonder if anyone else has been playing in the annual fortnight of overpriced and flavourless strawberries and sport that is Wimbledon. Indeed, there have been photographs of and reports about other players. But the word ‘disproportionate’ does rather spring to mind. I counted the pictures of male competitors printed in the paper from the first day, Monday of last week (yes, you’re right, I do have more important things to do, but there are many forms of displacement activity and this happens to be the one I chose today). Including today’s edition, The Guardian has carried 88 shots of male tennis players who were in the draw on Day One. Of those 88 pictures, 27 (including a totally gratuitous one today) have been of Murray, nearly a third. There were 128 players in the Men’s Singles draw and Murray was seeded twelfth. Roger Federer, the top seed and expected to win his sixth title in succession on Sunday, has been depicted in 14 photographs, just over half as many as Murray; Rafael Nadal, the second seed who defeated Murray easily in the quarter finals, has appeared 11 times as an image.

What’s more, Murray has appeared four times on the front page of the paper’s sports section and four times on the front of the main body of the paper. All other male players combined have appeared four times on sports front and just three times on the cover of the paper proper. Even Jamie Murray, Andy’s elder brother and a doubles specialist, has had his face in the paper six times, including once on sports front, and I’m not counting his picture on the column he ‘writes’ for the sports section (I put ‘writes’ in quotes because such columns are frequently ghost-written by an office hack and published over the name of an agreeable ‘celeb’ who likes getting paid for doing nothing). Oh, and there were two pictures of Chris Eaton. Remember him? You probably don’t; he was a very lowly – but British – competitor who survived to the second round as, by definition, did half of all the entrants.

It is a nakedly jingoistic impulse that drives this coverage. Tickets were changing hands for Murray and Nadal’s Centre Court match for £2,000, not because the buyers had suddenly discovered that they were fans of tennis but because they wanted to see a British victory. Had they known anything about tennis, they would have known that the hope was vain. But the press encourages this stupid jingoism, not just with its pictorial bias but also with the kind of stories it chooses to run. “Murray: I’m fit enough to win Wimbledon” was the headline on a sports front story this Monday. No he isn’t. Nadal is far fitter and has a far more mature game, though he’s barely any older than Murray. The Scot, like the Tinman whom he succeeds as Britain’s Vain Hope at Wimbledon, is an also-ran and – face it – he always will be.

Later this year, one of the most jingoistic of the world’s sports events takes place in Ireland, the biennial Ryder Cup, in which a European and an American team compete in match-play golf. A few tournaments ago, on the most recent occasion that the Americans won, there were disgraceful scenes when the winners began celebrating before the last European player had holed out at the 18th, thereby certainly influencing the putt. All nations are jingoistic about sport but none more than the States, where there is no television audience for any sporting event that holds no immediate prospect of an American victory. (Men’s tennis is in historic decline in the USA and so there will have been few takers there for Wimbledon coverage this or any recent year).

Football bores me to tears but I suppose we should take some heart from the interest shown here in the recent Euro tournament, despite the absence of all the British nations’ teams. This speaks of a degree of genuine interest in the game for its own sake, despite the attempts of the press, notably The Guardian, to talk up some alternative nation whose fortunes British viewers might “follow”.

Meanwhile, the closed season transfer market has been characterised as ever by footballers being bought and sold for eye-watering sums by the wealthiest clubs across Europe, regardless of their own national origins. Two or three years back, Arsenal played against a Spanish side in a cup match, where there were only two British players on the pitch and neither was playing for Arsenal. In what sense, then, is Arsenal an English football team? It and its vast new stadium are owned by arabs, its long-serving manager is French and its playing strength speaks in dozens of different languages. What kind of idiot gets ‘patriotic’ about this team’s results? There is barely a team in the premier league of English football that is owned by anybody or any organisation that is British. Liverpool FC no more represents Merseyside than does Paris Hilton. It just spends more time in the area than she does.

From time immemorial, the fan has equated a team’s or a sportsperson’s talent and prospects with its/their nationality, even while – here in Britain, at least – we ruefully subscribe to the notion that we are “good losers”. I’m not very interested in sport but, if I were, I hope I would value it for its beauty and grace at the highest level, irrespective of national boundaries. Nobody objective could really have wanted Andy Murray to beat Rafael Nadal. Apart from any considerations of tennis talent, the Spaniard is so much sexier.

DOG DAYS for GOD

God has had an interesting week. Robert Mugabe, unexpectedly re-elected by a grateful nation for a sixth term as leader of the flourishing and happy land that is Zimbabwe, explicitly put himself out of reach of democracy ahead of the presidential run-off in which he was the only candidate: “only god who appointed me will remove me,” he assured us, “not the MDC, not the British”. And, though he didn’t say so, not the votes of his own people either.

I hadn’t realised until his campaigning speech that his eminence the Zimbabwean president was in office by divine decree. But indeed the oath of office he took yesterday goes like this: “I, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, do swear that I will truly serve in the office of president, so help me god”. That neither the word ‘truly’ nor the word ‘serve’ sticks in his craw is an indication of just how deep Mr Gabriel Mugabe’s devout and pious conviction runs.

Of course, religious people across the world and throughout history will understand exactly where the president is, as they say, coming from. No one knows better than the religious what it means to exterminate, murder, rape, pillage, mutilate, oppress, torture and terrorise. By such means has religious superiority been expressed and clerical writ run since long before the lives of any of the prophets. Of course Mugabe is a religious man. The vast majority of dictators, oppressors and tyrants have been guided by a belief in their own divine right. Religion itself is a tyranny, a system of imperatives and obligations designed to keep the masses quiescent while the leisured classes plunder the riches of the planet without guilt or fear. That’s what religion is for.

Meanwhile, the Anglican communion is imploding across the world. A group of reactionary bishops, many of them representing African sees, announced this weekend the formation of the exquisitely named FOCA. This acronym (which clearly requires to be spoken in a Brooklyn accent) stands for The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Though the organisers demur at the suggestion, this is of course a deliberate act of schism. The Archbishop of Canterbury will be forgiven if he mishears the new organisation’s name as FOC-U.

And what is the great issue upon which the Anglican church is foundering? Murderous tyranny, perhaps? Famine? Poverty? Terrorism? Climate change? None of the above. Never mind the matters that affect the safety and survival of human beings and indeed of the planet itself. It is the wicked and irreligious practice of love. The miserable old gits who make it their business to interfere in the lives and arrangements of others in the name of supernatural mumbo-jumbo are prepared to destroy their ancient church over the love that now dares to speak its name.

All religions are homophobic. Many of them declare same-sex love to be a capital offence. They wash their hands of the persecution that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people suffer in all societies to some degree. You might think that a Christian of colour would know something of persecution and feel some human sympathy for those who suffer it. You might well imagine that their scriptures, that are allegedly so suffused with goodness and holiness, would instruct them not to cast a stone until they are themselves without sin or to attend to the beam in their own eye or to turn the other cheek or to forgive the sinner. This guidance evidently only suits when it is convenient. Scripture is a cut-and-come-again cake and you eat what you fancy and leave the rest. Like all rules and regulations, they only apply to other people.

Archbishop Jensen of Sydney, the likely king over the water of FOC-U, can feel very pleased this week that history has twinned him with someone almost as kindly and sensitive and inclusive and sympathetic as himself, Gabriel Mugabe. If we rationalists turn out to be wrong after all, then no doubt these two dear men will enjoy eternity together, burning in hell. Because, god knows, they’re wrong.

GIRL HUNT

It just hadn’t occurred to me that Cyd Charisse would die. The death any time soon of Kirk Douglas (her co-star in Two Weeks in Another Town) or Mickey Rooney or Olivia de Havilland or Olivia’s unbeloved sister Joan Fontaine wouldn’t be a surprise, but then they are all from an earlier Hollywood generation. Even Doris Day and Shirley MacLaine, respectively three and thirteen years her junior, do not look like they’ll go on forever (though of course Shirley will come back). Charisse’s close contemporary Jane Russell is increasingly frail. Paul Newman and Tony Curtis are both being treated for cancer. And Elizabeth Taylor? Whoever guessed she would get to 76? Yet at 87 Cyd Charisse floated away on that endless bolt of chiffon that she wore for the clouds sequence of the ‘Broadway Melody’ ballet in Singin' in the Rain. It defies reason; more important, it defies romance.

Charisse seemed too ethereal, too much of a fantasy figure to be mortal. “She came at me in sections” drawls Fred Astaire’s private dick in the ‘Girl Hunt’ ballet in The Band Wagon. “She had more curves than a scenic railway”. Her legs made Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth look bowed and, even after childbirth, her wasp waist, that ideal of the 1950s, was only emulated by Gaye Gambol. Her face was flawless yet not, at the same time, sexless, as perfection in humans can so often be. Curiously, her chronic inability to deliver a line made her seem even more remote. She didn’t even try to act. Beside her in Band Wagon, dear Nanette Fabray looks like a wind-up toy, signalling wildly.

Cyd Charisse: an impossibly glamorous, romantic, exotic name. Yet it had such prosaic origins. She was born Tula Ellice Finklea. Only in America do you get such preposterous names and only in America can you hope to recover from such a start and go on to conquer Hollywood, as did Lucille Fay le Sueur and Spangler Arlington Brugh (respectively, Joan Crawford and Charisse’s Party Girl co-star Robert Taylor). ‘Sid’ was supposedly her kid brother’s attempt at ‘sis’, respelt to look feminine and foreign by MGM. Charisse was the surname of her first husband Nico. Like so many women – Susan Sarandon, Shirley Williams, Janet Street-Porter, Tessa Jowell, Antonia Fraser – she retained the name, even through subsequent marriages. After Nico, she married the mediocre crooner Tony Martin and they stayed together like few other Hollywood couples (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson). What did she see in him? When last sighted, he was a malign old toad.

She didn’t sing. She was said to be quite tone deaf. Mostly, a woman called India Adams dubbed her voice. In some of the melodramas in which MGM later cast her, notably Party Girl and Two Weeks in Another Town, she proved to be a rather more accomplished and convincing actress than had been thought. Professionals do get better, more adjusted. Fred Astaire’s first movie audition elicited the notorious judgment “Can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little”. Turned out he could do the first two to alpha level and the third beyond the stratosphere. And dancing up there with him was Cyd.

We watched again (for the umpteenth time) The Band Wagon. The ‘Dancing in the Dark’ number is perhaps the most rapturous ever performed on screen, right up there with – indeed, ahead of – Fred and Ginger in ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek’. The setting, a sound stage version of Central Park, helps, as do Mary Ann Nyberg’s elegant costumes and Vincente Minnelli’s wonderful direction of the camera, informed both by his design background and by his instinctive feel for choreography. And it’s one of those dances where Astaire ‘accompanies’ the woman, so that he directs you to her even while you can’t help but watch him and she rewards you amply for accepting the presentation of her. And it’s so sensual. Dance is more than anything a metaphor for making love and here it is as transforming and bewitching as it can be. Now she’s gone, it made me cry more than ever.

That’s not to say that Charisse was Astaire’s “best” partner, whatever that means (it used to be asked whenever a new Astaire picture was released). Ginger Rogers was of course his best-known and most regular partner and strong enough to match him often. For my money, the most perfect of Fred’s dances with a woman (rather than solo) occurs in that piece of fluff, The Broadway Melody of 1940. Eleanor Powell really was as fine a hoofer as Fred and she was a threat in every department (Charisse didn’t do tap, for instance). The big number in the movie, led by Astaire and Powell, is ‘Begin the Beguine’ but the one that does it for me is a little throwaway routine in rehearsal togs called ‘The Juke Box Dance’. With its improvised air, it encourages Powell and Astaire to raise each other’s game in delighted competition and the sheer pleasure they take in each other’s skills is certainly not acted.

Looked at severely, Cyd Charisse was not so much a great dancer as a great storyboard upon which an imaginative choreographer could sketch. I saw her at the Palladium in the early 1980s. She was 60-odd then but she came to give a show and give a show she did. She didn’t sing of course and, when you concentrated, you saw that she didn’t exactly dance either. Mostly, she was lifted by young chaps in leotards and, hoisted up and smiling prettily, she posed and flashed those extraordinary gams and we all thought we’d seen a fine show from a great star. Actually, of course, she doesn’t do very much more than that in the ballet sequence in Band Wagon, whereupon Astaire and Oscar Levant tell us that she’s an incredible dancer and we buy it.

So she really was an illusion. A sort of imaginary woman. No more real than Jessica in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? She hasn’t really gone because she was never really there yet she will exist on film as long as film exists because she is one of the indelible images of movie-making: sitting arch-backed in that shimmering green shift with Gene Kelly’s straw boater dangling from the elongated point of her right shoe at the end of a hundred yards of sheerest-nyloned leg. Or sublimely dancing with Fred in the park in the dark.

The CLASSIFIEDS – OPEN to ALL

Each day, another breach of security is reported. Everybody tut-tuts and says that the government is hopeless. The government says it is enquiring into the breach and such things will not happen again. But they do.

This needs to be put in context. The security services have always been terrible at … um … security. We have a friend who worked at the Admiralty in the 1970s. He says that everybody was wholly cavalier with secret information. Filing cabinets of classified files were routinely left unlocked and unattended. Papers from restricted files would lie on desks for days on end. It sounds like the Ealing Comedy version of Whitehall but the reason that Ealing Comedies were so convincing is that they were true.

In those days, the professionals may have been lax but the climate was otherwise. To risk the disclosure of state secrets was thought to be the gravest of crimes. The newspapers operated a self-denying ordinance called the D-Notice whereby editors agreed that they would not publish any classified material that came into their hands. Reporters like Chapman Pincher who specialised in covering intelligence work were more likely to cooperate with the authorities than to embarrass them.

Whenever any material covered by the Official Secrets Act did leak out, the government of the day would invoke extraordinary powers to seal the leak and punish those journalists thought to wish the authorities ill. The latter would routinely be hauled before some specialist court of law and be expected to defend themselves without the prosecution being obliged to disclose fully of what they were accused.

It will be noted that the emphasis then was on the receipt rather than the delivery of classified information. For sure, “passing secrets” was a grave – at one time a capital – offence. But accepting such material, especially for the purpose of embarrassing the government, was usually considered the more heinous sin, at least by successive home secretaries.

The climate is very different now. We have become so jaded and cynical that we believe the state has no secrets worth keeping. The laxity of civil servants and jobsworths in the intelligence and other public services is now what catches the media eye. I feel sure that highly sensitive paperwork has been left on trains since Brunel’s time, but now it is reported and thought lamentable. This is primarily because a great deal more of the data now held by the authorities concerns the innocent citizenry rather than the threatening spooks. We want government to look after those interests that are more obvious and urgent to most of us than the security of the nation. What is to be done?

One thing suggests itself immediately. Make the failure to carry out the duty of care that falls on all individuals handling classified material a prosecutable offence. The nitwits who not only took home stuff that should never have left the office but forgot it when they alighted from their commuter trains should be appearing in court very soon. Let’s see who they are and be told what wince-making penalty they will suffer for their stupidity. This would certainly have a swift effect, not least pour encourager les autres.

Better yet, it would make the government appear decisive and tough-minded. Rather surprisingly, given his previous reputation for bullying and bluster, Gordon Brown has been more a mouse than a lion since receiving the keys to no 10 Downing Street. Rather too much hand-wringing – whether over Burma and Zimbabwe or the economy and the incompetence of civil servants – has been indulged. It’s high time that the government made someone a whipping boy before that role falls to the prime minister.

An UNEXPECTED HERO

The Conservative Party has always had a penchant for political theatre. From Quentin Hailsham’s futile offer at the party conference to renounce his peerage so that he would be available to lead the party, to Enoch Powell’s “Tiber foaming with blood” speech that so angered Edward Heath, to Michael Heseltine’s petulant walk-out from the Thatcher cabinet over Westland, to John Redwood’s quixotic tilt at John Mayor’s leadership (eliciting one of the most damaging of all brutal headlines in The Sun: “Redwood versus Deadwood”) and now to David Davis’ gallant resignation to precipitate a by-election, Tories certainly know how to get the Westminster pulses racing.

Mr Davis has earned my astonished admiration. That he took everyone, not least David Cameron, by surprise was evident as the news broke during The World at One. What surprises me even more is how courageous and principled his decision seems, at least on the face of it. I had thought – admit it, so had you – that this was one of the most devious, calculating politicians of the present generation. Yet no one, including him, can begin to guess what will be the result of Mr Davis’ gamble. He may lose his 5,000 majority at Haltemprice and Howden, especially if, as conventional wisdom has it, voters resent what they see as unnecessary by-elections and if, as some claim, Gordon Brown has widespread support for his desire to put on the statute book a provision for terrorism suspects – or indeed anyone else of whom a police officer happens not to like the look – to be held for up to 42 days.

The MP will surely not lose the seat, however, because the party leader of his chief challenger, the Liberal Democrats, moved very quickly to announce that there would be no candidate under his colours at the by-election. Nick Clegg moved so quickly, indeed, that one wonders whether he consulted the local party or whether this was a fait accompli handed down from central office. If the latter, he may come to regret it. As I write, there is strong speculation that Labour will not field a candidate either. That would leave Mr Davis’ gesture looking rather empty. Indeed, there might be a danger of the turnout being so low for an election that has become a foregone conclusion that Mr Davis loses credibility; or even gets beaten by a minor party candidate. What a disaster it would be if the British National Party were to capture the seat by default.

We may discover in the fullness of time that Mr Davis has badly miscalculated. For this is the kind of unforeseen event that can change the political weather. We may find ourselves looking back and feeling that we can date the moment when Labour turned the corner and won the 2010 general election to this one.

But whatever the outcome, I take my hat off to David Davis. He has put himself in great jeopardy – in particular, perhaps, within his own party where there was always a residue of suspicion that he has a maverick temperament – in order to take a matter of great national importance to the electorate. The contrast to the government’s squalid scramble to save itself from a humiliating defeat in the vote is there for all to see. While Davis raises his standard and dares democracy to deny him, the prime minister tells a press conference with a straight face that no deal was done for the nine votes of the Democratic Unionist Party that secured his victory in the house by nine votes. As an SDLP member said unarguably after the vote, instead of a humiliating defeat, the government got a humiliating victory. The fact that nobody believes Brown when he denies any deal renders it immaterial whether there was a deal or not. As I’ve written before on this blog – and as Brown is smart enough to know – how it looks in politics is very much more important than how it is. And Brown emerges looking like a liar.

Meanwhile, David Davis is absolutely right to make libertarianism a cause worth politically dying for. As a libertarian socialist, I watch in horror as a Labour government dismantles the freedoms that we have taken for granted for centuries. If Brown does survive to 2010, we may yet see a British equivalent of Guantánamo Bay. And where will that be sited? I humbly suggest the Falkland Islands.

REASON FOR RHYME

The Guardian has lately been running a long correspondence in which readers cite admired examples of rhyme in song – usually pop song – lyrics. I fired off my inevitable letter, conscious that it was a mite long for the letters page’s purposes, a view confirmed by the letters editor who kindly suggested that I send it to the “comment” editor. He in turn rejected it for “lack of space” (by which he means that he would rather run error-strewn pieces by Mark Lawson) and suggested I submit it to the on-line comment editor. This I did and have heard nothing. Today the paper includes my short letter correcting recent misattributions but it’s hardly the same.

In case my reader is at all interested, I reproduce the article below. It draws heavily on the chapter about theatre in my book Common Sense (still available as a free download from the link in the right hand column) and it still of course may surface in Guardian On-Line.

“On this newspaper’s letters page, an extended correspondence has been vying for the accolade of most deft rhyming couplet. The generality of the suggestions makes it clear, however, that the nature and rules of rhyme are poorly understood. Many of the examples offered are, rather, false rhymes, near rhymes and non-rhymes (spouses/trousers, rainbow/lumbago, language/sandwich, Sweden/read them, tour/before).

Ben Elton, lyricist to Andrew Lloyd Webber on The Beautiful Game, told a radio interviewer that he was “very proud” that he had managed to rhyme ‘vegetables’ with ‘testicles’. He might as well claim to rhyme ‘idiot’ with ‘garbage’. There is no rhyme for the word ‘vegetables’. Nor is there a true one for ‘testicles’. You could reasonably pair the singular ‘testicle’ with these three adjectives (which you can hardly pluralize): ‘majestical’, ‘anapaestical’ and ‘catachrestical’.

As it happens, the second and third of these are peculiarly appropriate to the matter in hand. ‘Anapaestical’ means having “a metrical foot of three syllables, the first two short, the last long” (which means of course that the noun ‘anapaest’ is itself nicely anapaestical). ‘Catachrestical’ pertains to “the incorrect use of words”. To write successful lyrics or verse, you need to use words correctly. You need a finely tuned ear for sounds as well as an awareness of nuance and a willingness to hone the line until it flows naturally. Deftness is a basic. Cleverness is a bonus. And the syllables that the metre determines must rhyme should do so exactly, and no others.

If you seek cleverness in rhyming, try this as a cause for pride. It’s by Lee Adams to the music of Charles Strouse for the song ‘Put On a Happy Face’ from the musical Bye Bye Birdie: “Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy,/It’s not your style./You’ll look so good that you’ll be glad you de-/cided to smile”. The rhyme is delicious and the stress is in just the right place.

Or how about this by Stephen Sondheim to the music of Richard Rodgers in the title song of Do I Hear a Waltz?: “Do you hear a waltz?/Oh my dear, don’t you hear a waltz?/Such lovely Blue Danube-y/Music, how can you be/Still?” That rhyme puts me in mind of Tom Lehrer’s own mischievous contribution to the 3/4 time genre: “I remember the night I held you so tight,/As we danced to the Wiener Schnitzel Waltz./Your lips were like wine (if you’ll pardon the simile),/The music was lovely and quite Rudolf Friml-y”. Rudolf Friml, I dare say, is not much remembered now but he did write the score for Rose Marie, the movie of which draws fans of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald to the telly whenever there’s an afternoon screening.

Here’s another breath-taking piece of wordplay from the Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along in a song about planning a soirée at the Kennedy White House: “Evenings of the Budapest playing Vivaldi/And Munch doing bits of Ravel./I’ll get Leontyne Price to sing her/Medley from Meistersinger/And Margot Fonteyn to dance Giselle” . The joke of the Pryce-to-sing-her/Meistersinger rhyme is nicely enhanced by knowing that Ms Price has almost certainly never sung a note of Wagner in earnest in her entire career. This is grown-up rhyming, correct and yet so free-flowing that you hardly notice that a rhyme has slipped past. I suggest that Ben Elton take a few lessons before he blows his own trumpet again.

One of your correspondents reckoned that “only Ella Fitzgerald could get away with” the pairing of ‘spoil’ and ‘goil’. But everyone who has ever sung ‘Manhattan’ has “got away with” that rhyme because it was of course created by the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who was guying the accent of Manhattan’s neighbour Brooklyn (goil = girl). Singers generally enhance a lyric if they find the jewels within it rather than bringing their own supposed pearls to it.

Fitzgerald was a great exponent of lyrics because she understood them and delivered them as written. Her version of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ is rapturous. Porter loved internal rhyming and that number contains a world-beating rhyme scheme: “Flying too high/With some guy in the sky?/Is my idea of/Nothing to do”. Frank Sinatra ruined it by substituting ‘gal’ for ‘guy’.

The great Broadway lyricists also understood feminine rhymes, wherein the stressed syllable (the one that rhymes) is not the last and the subsequent syllables do not change. The first three lyrics I quoted above are feminine rhymes. Lorenz Hart provided some of the finest examples throughout the song ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’. Dorothy Parker’s front of me/lobotomy rhyme, quoted in the correspondence, is not a proper feminine rhyme but the elegance of the wordplay helps to excuse her.

In ‘On the Street Where You Live’, Alan Jay Lerner (Broadway’s most overrated lyricist) paired ‘bother me’ with ‘rather be’, an attempt at a feminine rhyme that simultaneously breaks the rule and tortures the vowels. Bear in mind that the argument of My Fair Lady is the opening line of the refrain of the first song we hear: “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” Professor Higgins’ irascible entry sets the bar pretty high for the pin-accuracy of Lerner’s lyrics and of his ear for idiomatic English (rather than American) expression.

Consider the song whose rhyme I deplored above. The very title is a solecism: in Britain, if you’re “on the street” you are homeless, with perhaps the suggestion that you are a prostitute. The singer should be ‘In the Street Where You Live’. Anyone interested may apply to me for my rewrite of this entire lyric in proper rather than mid-Atlantic English [see pp 189-190 of Common Sense, the book].

You don’t get Lerner’s sort of looseness in lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, Noel Coward, Porter, Hart or Sondheim. But it has become standard in pop songs, which is perhaps why so many listeners think they’ve heard a brilliant rhyme when what they’ve heard is an approximation.”