The SEASON TO BE JOLLY

I spent a merry hour yesterday evening searching for and downloading Christmas carols. Not that we lack for piles of CDs and indeed LPs of traditional favourites in this house, but the beauty of iTunes and other sites is that you can cherry-pick what you want; you don’t have to acquire the whole album and hence a bunch of duplications.

I had been especially missing ‘Adam Lay Ybounden’, an anonymous 15th century madrigal most widely known these days in its 20th century setting by Boris Ord. We used to sing this one when I was in the school choir and I was always moved by the way Ord caught its medieval spirit without being either unduly pious about its age or unsympathetic in his own modernity.

A second favourite unaccountably missing from the CD compilations was ‘The Boar’s Head Carol’, another 15th century lyric that was later published in the collection of Christmasse Carolles by Wynkyn de Worde, great ally of William Caxton in the fledgling business of The Print and possessor of one of the most enviably distinctive names in fame’s history. ‘The Boar’s Head’ is so rumbustious a crowd-pleaser that it warms up the most perishing congregation, even in the bleak mid-winter.

Despite my knowledge that there are no supernatural powers, beings or states of being, I have absolutely no difficulty in appreciating carols or, come to that, hymns from all through the calendar of ‘Ancient and Modern’. Music is music and poetry is poetry and one doesn’t need to be put off by the illusory nature of its inspiration. A huge proportion of art of all kinds is expressive of fantasy and none the worse for that. What’s more, low-church music is very redolent of my childhood and so has a powerful claim on my emotions.

Brought up in the Anglican tradition – by which of course I mean a calm, benign and very nearly agnostic approach to worship – I was well able to distinguish between the theatre and the propaganda from an early age. Had I been a Catholic, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jainist, a Jew, a Parsee, a Zoroastrian, a Mennonite, a Sikh, an Amish or a member of any of the other faiths, I would doubtless have had a bloodier battle to escape. As it was, once I was confirmed by the then Bishop of Peterborough, I rapidly moved from being a daily reader of selected passages of the Bible (“that boy’s going to be a vicar” said my Dad, who never possessed the gift of prophesy) to the warm embrace of apostasy. In my book Common Sense (see the link in the right column), I wrote about my rationalism, but it wasn’t until this year, when I started to read Richard Dawkins and then Sam Harris (the latter of whom is nearer to my own position), that I discovered that the battle against the dangerous power of religion is at last being joined in earnest. The site richarddawkins.net has been the year’s best discovery for me and I have been greatly stimulated by the range of (often heated) discussions among people who are, at the level that counts, like-minded.

In an unusual declaration, Nick Clegg answered the question of whether he believed in god, posed on Radio Five Live yesterday, with the word “no” (at least that’s what The Guardian says; I listened to the entire phone-in on the BBC iPlayer and the matter never came up). It is rare indeed for party leaders anywhere in the capitalist world to reveal such things and Clegg was instantly transformed from being the least promising-looking Liberal Party leader since Clement Davies to a bold and interesting chap. Alas, as politicians are apt to do, he blew it immediately. “I have enormous respect for people who have religious faith,” he ‘clarified’ later in the day. “I’m married to a Catholic and am committed to bringing my children up as Catholics”. So, rather as his website cites “Jonny [sic] Cash” as his favourite singer, Clegg looks like another disingenuous opportunist saying what he hopes is the ingratiating thing rather than what he knows is the true thing.

In another part of the (same) forest, year’s end is the conventional time for the computation based upon the names given to the year’s new-born (not, one assumes, that there will have been no more over the remaining twelve days before January 1st). The Office of National Statistics – whose data, you imagine, could hardly be expected to extend beyond, say, June (say, 1994) – reckons there were 6,772 Jacks joining us this year. Thomas was the next most popular name with 5,803 votes; that is unless you count together those christened – to use entirely the wrong word – Mohammad, Mohamad, Muhamet and Muhammed, in which case Thomas is relegated to third, the M guys registering 6,368 hits.

What this demonstrates is the alarming penetration of Islam into British society. Will our children or our children’s children find themselves constrained under Sharia law in Britain? It will surely occur sooner in France, where more than five million Muslims have settled and where they are widely expected to become a majority before 2030. That’s France, our nearest neighbour on mainland Europe. In due course, Nick Clegg may find himself saying that he is “committed” to his grandchildren being brought up as Muslims. And, by the way, Islam is a faith that promises suicide bombers the attentions of the curiously precise number of 72 virgins in paradise (I don’t think the Qur'an specifies that they should be attractive or female or even indeed human virgins) and that routinely countenances murder for the 'sins' of adultery, homosexuality and being an infidel, which is to say not being a Muslim. By the time the first Muslim government is sworn in at Westminster – and don’t doubt that it will assuredly be an all-Muslim government – Adam will certainly lie ybounden.

ENDGAME

The Bali summit is a waste of time. Maybe some accommodations will be made between China and India, Europe and the US, but even unprecedented, unimaginable concessions will be vastly too little, years too late. Face it: we can’t now save the planet from its fate. Probably not in my lifetime, perhaps not in the lifetime of my friends’ children but surely in the time of my friends’ children’s children, all life will be obliterated on the planet. The seas will rise sufficiently to displace millions of people, not just on the islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans but first along the coasts of all countries and the flood plains of all continents, then penetrating quickly and deeply inland. The refugees will overwhelm those on higher ground, all government and administration will break down and terminal anarchy will spread across the earth. With national boundaries gone and law and order forgotten, the rule of the jungle will obtain, except that we have lost the skills to be self-sufficient. Indeed, there won’t be any actual jungle to learn from by then. The planet will have lost its capacity to feed its inhabitants because climate change will have destroyed the world’s agriculture. Disease and strife, starvation and despair will finish off the last survivors.

Does this seem too apocalyptic, too Cassandra-like? I don’t think so. Climate change is already irreversible. Since the end of World War II, this catastrophe has been growing and shaping and there has been no power to stop it. Our will has been wholly sapped by the relentless rise of capitalism, a philosophy that cements the rich into place and protects their investments to the detriment of all else. Communism could not resist it. Keynsian economics could not hold it back. Now liberal democracy has been fatally undermined everywhere. No government is as strong as the leading multi-national corporations that can act independently of all national and international legal frameworks. Except in a few no-account South American and African countries, it is no longer possible for anyone to get within a popular vote of office without the approval of world capital. These multi-nationals have promoted the twin deities by which we all live and which will prove fatal to us: expediency and short-termism.

The capitalists are behind the flat-earther-like reaction to climate change, which is to pretend that it isn’t happening. But even if the predictions of disaster were exaggerated, which position do you want to go with: a pessimism that turns out to be wrong and costs a few billions in safeguards that prove unnecessary or an optimism that turns out to be wrong and condemns all life to oblivion? Is it a difficult one?

Every new declaration by the thousands of scientists across the globe who are monitoring this crisis amounts to the same short message: it’s worse than we thought. The political leaders, all controlled by their capitalist paymasters, play a game of dare with each other about who can hold out longest against doing anything meaningful but they’re all to blame and they’re not even the first generation of political leaders to blame. They, however, have been given the facts, the data, the projections and the worst-case scenarios that were not available to their predecessors. They squabble about reducing carbon emissions by 0.001% by the year 2150 as if that makes a ha’p’orth of difference. Not one of them is willing to give a decisive lead on the matter by making profound change mandatory at home and calling on all others to do the same, even though what is at stake is not the outcome of their next domestic election or their “place in history” but the very survival of life on earth.

The States ought to have been the nation to take a lead, of course, but it has been humanity’s misfortune to have at the helm of that most powerful nation for these eight crucial years the most vacuous waste of space ever to occupy the oval office. It’s not a matter of whom Bush listens to. Bush doesn’t listen to anybody. He has no intellectual capacity to discriminate between subtle or even wide divergences among his advisors. So he takes his line – his “orders”, you might say – from the global oil interests who have funded his whole public career and whose mouthpiece in government is Vice-President Cheney, the most influential man ever to hold that office. It isn’t in the interests of these oil barons to make sacrifices during their years of preposterous wealth so that their own great-grandchildren can hope to have any life at all. They don’t care if the next generation but one is the last.

It would be encouraging to hope that the next US president would be astute enough to figure that something fundamental might be called for. Don’t bother to hope. The cockamamie American electoral system is infinitely manipulable and capitalism has myriad options available to ensure that somebody it can live with is elected.

In any case, nothing any politician can do now will save us. What the Bali summit ought to be addressing is the increasingly urgent matter of meltdown management. Plans should be in development now for handling the crisis when it begins to unfold in earnest. We have seen enough post-apocalypse books, movies and plays to know that there is an instinctive consensus about how humans will behave when they know that the game is up. Global agencies need to be constructing models of the various ways in which the rising seas will overwhelm us and plan accordingly. Perhaps they are indeed doing that. If so, the futile and farcical “negotiations” over minuscule pointless gestures are even more cynical than I thought.

STILL AUDITIONING

On Tuesday, I went to Golders Green crematorium for the funeral of the television producer, Verity Lambert, whom I had known and adored for nearly 40 years. It was the starriest affair I have attended for a long time. Not just the whole of the old school teledrama world but many women in public life (like Helena Kennedy and – looking fabulous – Katherine Whitehorn: Verity had been due to receive a Women of Merit Award next week).

The service was presented by a woman from the British Humanist Association and that's just what I would want. She had done a huge amount of diligent work on getting an authoritative account of Verity's life and style together and it was fine except a bit heavy on the generalized grief counselling – her congregation was hardly callow enough for that – and rather too long (we could all hear V in our heads shouting for a script editor).

Lots of good friends told sweet and funny stories. Somebody enumerating the things she loved began "1: friends, 2: cooking, 3: dogs ... " so I knew why I liked her so. In fact I'd already remembered that the first Great Dane that David and I both fell in love with was Verity's some 25 years ago. He was called Arthur after Arthur Daley and he was just adorable. Now we have our own Great Dane, a daily (Daley?) reminder of Verity in our lives. At Golders Green, Alan Davies told a lovely story about Arthur (I think V had a succession of Danes called Arthur) and another about a Jack Russell who was supposed to savage Jonathan Creek and who simply refused until V stormed onto the set and the Jack Russell immediately knew, as Davies put it, "whose pack he wanted to join".

The most moving tribute was given last by Dame Eileen Atkins. She also told us that V had originally wanted the filing-out music played as we all passed the coffin to be ‘My Way’ on a 30-minute loop. Thankfully, she'd been persuaded that this was a terrible idea so she elected instead to have a piece of music that would make her feel that we all embraced her: it took us a moment to recognize because there was an unfamiliar twiddly bit of introduction but then it was unmistakably the theme tune to The Archers to which, we'd learned, V was devoted. After that came the Dr Who theme (her first hit) and then all her other theme tunes.

Later at The Groucho I caught up with some old friends I hadn't seen for years and managed to avoid several more I didn't need to be reacquainted with. The trouble was that there was so little finger food – and it was an hour appearing – and, as we'd been standing at the crematorium from 12.00 until 2.00, and then made our way into town, I for one was ravenous so I finally fled in search of sustenance. Verity certainly wouldn't have approved of that. She always kept a full table.

What struck me forcibly was that, while almost all of these people were in their 50s, 60s, 70s and indeed 80s, hardly any of them had had an on-screen credit in years. The best they can do now is lecture and teach on some fantasy-orientated “media course”. Of course they all talked of “projects in development”, the purgatory through which programme-makers have to suffer these days before they are consigned to the flames of damnation. Yet here was the cream of British television drama of the last 50 years. Apart from the mysteriously all-licensed Stephen Poliakoff (who wasn’t there; his sponsors in television are people who know almost nothing of drama), there are no questers after originality in teledrama any more. When any of these people puts up an idea, they get no special hearing because none of the commissioners has any knowledge of anything broadcast earlier than last Easter.

But of course nobody in any field wants experience, coherence or cogently argued points of view. I wrote the following letter to The Guardian at the weekend:

Dear Sir,

I am often asked why I no longer write letters to The Guardian. Would you be kind enough to publish this explanation: I indeed still do write to The Guardian with my accustomed alacrity but my efforts are no longer favoured to the extent that they were favoured by the present letters editor's predecessors, as may be gleaned from the new edition of the collected letters to the paper.

Yours faithfully

W Stephen Gilbert

Needless to add that they haven’t published it.

LET MISS GIBBONS GO OR THE BEAR GETS IT

The urgent need for all courageous and determined people to band together and rid the world of the scourge of religion has been heavily underlined this week. If you have yet to hear of it, here is the grotesque situation: a 54 year-old teacher from Liverpool, Gillian Gibbons by name, volunteered out of the goodness of her heart to teach in a primary school in Khartoum, Sudan. The school was founded a century ago, when The Sudan (as it was apt to be called then) was a condominium jointly administered by Egypt and Britain. Its catchment is comparatively wealthy but I dare say a British teacher is still an asset and the school and its pupils can consider themselves lucky to have her.

One of the children brought a teddy bear to class and Miss Gibbons suggested that the children might like to think of a name for the toy. With a commendable – if perhaps unwarranted – regard for democracy, the teacher accepted the children’s choice of a name. It was Muhammad. There are two things to note about this moniker. First, it is the name of the prophet of Islam. Second, it is commonly given to Muslim boys or assumed by Muslim men (the world famous boxer Cassius Clay converted to Islam and renamed himself Muhammad Ali).

Now accounts diverge. Some say fellow teachers raised objection, others that parents protested to the school authorities. What is not in doubt is that offence was taken, the prophet had been “insulted” and Miss Gibbons was detained by the authorities and held in jail where, at the time of writing, she waits to discover her fate. She may be released in the unlikely event that common sense prevails or if the British embassy makes a sufficiently cogent case. Or she may be incarcerated for up to six months. Or she may be assaulted by forty lashes. Here we see the full wisdom, might, compassion and (above all) righteousness of Sharia Law in action. And – hoorah for the thoughtful pastoral care of the little children – the school has been closed down until next year. Everyone’s a winner, baby!

You might wonder, as I do, about Islam’s confidence in its own prophet if he can be “insulted” by a harmless teddy bear being given his name. Isn’t he just a bit bigger than that? Just a touch more untouchable? Doesn’t this touchiness on the part of his advocates make him seem something of a wuss?

Fundamentalist Muslims think nothing of threatening to kill infidels and anyone else to whom they take a gratuitous dislike. The charmingly preferred method is beheading, a suitably medieval method. We infidels might find such menaces a bit offensive. What about our sensibilities? For my part, apart from being scorned as an infidel, I am condemned as a homosexual. There isn’t any religion in the world that respects me, yet I am expected – indeed obliged by law – to respect them. The miserable, hypocritical bastards.

Who are these Imams who make their self-important, posturing, anti-human, po-faced pronouncements? It’s a teddy bear, for Pete’s sake. Grow up. And what about the seven year-olds who decided to call the teddy bear Muhammad? Are they to be flogged? Or their parents who didn’t teach them any better? Or their religious instructors who didn’t teach them any better – more at fault, surely, than a foreign non-Muslim teacher of secular subjects. And what about the prophet’s name being given to mere mortal boys? Doesn’t this insult the prophet? If a boy called Muhammad turns out to be laggardly in his studies of the Qur’an or parsimonious in the payment of zakat or progressive in the licence he gives to his wife or a butterfingers in goal, does he not dishonour the prophet more than a boy named Muhafiz or Mujaddid or Muharrem? Isn’t his name (to coin a phrase) a cross to bear?

Whatever the fate that awaits Gillian Gibbons, I hope that, when she’s safely back in Liverpool, she will have the gumption to take the Sudanese government before the International Court of Human Rights. I hope that the United Nations will have the gumption to take an effective stand on the issue. Most of all, I hope that others, apart from me and Professor Dawkins, will stick their heads above the parapet, even if the result is that those heads are swiftly separated from their bodies. And anyway, Muhammad: it’s a crap name, isn’t it?

A FINE SAVE

Wild claims are swilling around that the four national football teams’ wholly predictable failure to qualify for the next “major” international tournament will cost the United Kingdom anything up to £2 billion in lost revenue. What utter drivel.

In the first place, the drunks who follow these teams to their matches (the so-called “fans”) will be purchasing their liquor at home instead of in some hitherto blameless European town. The amount of alcohol needed to sing as badly as these “fans” do is obviously prodigious, so already the home economy is quids in.

Much of the estimated loss is accounted for by pub sales: apparently thousands of people take themselves off to public houses to watch these football matches. Why they would want to stand for the duration on a carpet that is sticking to their footwear, barely able to see the screen of the pub’s television or hear anything above the hubbub beats me, but then I rarely go to pubs, even for a quiet half. Is this the legendary “atmosphere”? You can so keep it. Anyway, the only “atmosphere” really worth savouring would be at the ground where the match is being played. Even I can understand that.

What is certain is that this combination of drink and football, frequently at a point in the day far from the mid-evening because of the time difference between the venue and the viewer, is responsible for a vast amount of absenteeism, both during the match and thereafter. Assuredly, many (perhaps most) employers and supervisors take a liberal view of such lax practices at work – after all, they will be drunk and shouting along with the rest. It would be instructive to determine how many workers who have no interest in football and who hence stay back and toil diligently during the long hours of euphoria and/or self-pity and subsequent recovery are allowed comparable time off of their own choosing, to attend an opera at Glyndebourne or an exhibition at Tate Modern, for instance, or just to kick back.

But my larger point is that this mass absenteeism must also go into the calculation of lost revenue. It would be fascinating to have an authoritative and persuasive estimate of the revenue that would be lost to the nation if it ever happened again that one of the national football teams got within a match of actually winning one of these oh-so-important trophies. Perhaps, like the 1966 World Cup final, it would take place on a Saturday, thereby considerably diminishing the impact on absenteeism (Sunday for millions is a day of rest, i.e. sleeping it off). This would not be the case, however, if a British team were to reach a final played in, for instance, Israel.

Apart from absenteeism (surely the biggest single cost of national success or near-success at football), there would be many smaller hidden costs: police and bar-staff overtime; the repair of damage caused by drunks; the comparative losses sustained by all manner of enterprises that would have enjoyed a regular day’s business but which will have lost takings because so many customers are detained elsewhere; the immediate pressure on the health service caused by exploding bladders and other binge-drinking damage and the long-term pressure on the health and other public services caused by the hastening of the effects (physical, mental, social) of alcoholism – all these should be factored in.

Finally, there is the unquantifiable cost of the embarrassing behaviour that premature celebration engenders. At the outset of the knockout stage of the last World Cup, Radio Times published a graphic of Beckham and his team-mates holding aloft the Jules Rimet trophy that they were to get nowhere near winning in practice. Such infantile hubris erodes still further the dwindling, vestigial regard in which Radio Times is held by those who remember a time when it had some status (not since the 1970s). Put into the calculation, then, the declining market value of Radio Times.

After the qualifying match wherein Israel’s team (vainly) eased the pressure on England with an unexpected win, the still callow Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who was in Telaviv, appeared before news cameras to “thank” Israel’s foreign minister on behalf of “all Englishmen”. It was hard to gauge what was most embarrassing, the assumption that “all” Englishmen are as soft-brained as Miliband evidently is, the assumption that only men are interested in football or the assumption that anyone in Israel or anywhere else in the world gives a flying fuck about England’s bloody football team. So Miliband’s stock in the next-leader race declines and the bookies notice a falling off. At any rate, the Israeli foreign minister’s face seemed to suggest so; and who can blame her?

SECURE in the KNOWLEDGE THAT the KNOWLEDGE is SECURE

My principal objection to ID cards has always been that, while of course I accept that the present government will not sell or release the data that has been collected about me, I have no confidence that future governments will not see this data as a useful source of revenue. Indeed, if this country ever elects a prime minister comparable to, for instance, Robert Mugabe, the ID data bank will be of great use to him in establishing absolute power and suppressing democrats.

But the absurd security breach at HM Revenue and Customs, whereby discs containing bank and tax details of some 25 million people have been mislaid, adds a further dimension to my objection. Along with the possibility of greed and expediency, breath-taking incompetence must form the basis for a strong objection to allowing the authorities access to my private information.

At least this glitch is out in the open. You could understand a government seeking to bury such bad news as this. In the Commons, Chancellor Alistair Darling and the PM appear to have made a clean breast of it on successive days. The Tories are presently stopping short of demanding any ministers’ heads on platters, perhaps mindful that no future Tory minister is going to be able to invigilate every civil servant’s daily caseload. If HMRC and other departments make a concerted effort to blame staff cutbacks and/or government targets and other methodologies on ministerial fiats, Gordon Brown himself, after ten long years as Chancellor, will inevitably come into the frame. Government managers must be braced for this crisis to get worse before it gets better.

Over the next few days, Darling will be praying that another wave of panic among customers does not sweep through the already jittery banking market. On the other hand, customers are entitled to be sceptical. Only because of this much more serious security breach have I learned that records went missing as long ago as September from a finance company with which I have an arrangement. The company has not seen fit to alert me of this breach. ‘Caveat emptor’ cannot be allowed to apply when the data holder has failed to protect its customers’ confidence.

We need a clear statutory obligation on all data collectors wholly and in perpetuity to protect the security of that data, on pain of a fixed and punitive scale of compensation to anyone whose data has been accessed by an unauthorised party, whatever the outcome of that access. It’s not good enough for HMRC blithely to advise all those parents who have received child benefit – the sector of society directly affected by the security breach – that any passwords they have used that reflect their child’s name or date of birth should be changed. As a basic security precaution, such advice should have been given when the parent first registered for child benefit. Putting out a public statement now that may be heard by those who happen to watch or listen to the news or read the more public-spirited newspapers is not going to reach all the recipients of child benefit.

Whenever some sudden crisis engulfs an administration, the best tactic is to ensure that ministers do nothing to exacerbate an already regrettable situation. Tested thoroughly by a succession of unlooked-for events in the first weeks of his premiership, Gordon Brown won great credit for establishing his authoritative grip and being steady under fire. He will need to invoke that heady honeymoon period if his government is not to be stuck with a lingering appearance of incompetence, especially if that incompetence can be characterised as a failure to implement its own measures.

A WISE FATHER KNOWS HIS OWN CHILD

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is passing through the House of Lords. Among its provisions is one that grants the full legality of parenthood to both partners of a relationship that generates a child by IVF treatment. Needless to say, that fiercest of lobbies, the sanctity-of-marriage brigade, is back up on its high horse. A lesbian couple, they shriek, will be able to co-parent without benefit of a father figure.

The reigning father figure of the Catholic church in Britain, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, leads the charge. His letter to The Times on Monday raised a number of disputed areas upon which the bill touches, but none is more clearly in his sights than the family that does not conform to scriptural teaching or rather (to be scrupulous about it, given the lousy deal that women receive throughout The Bible) to contemporary theology. The Cardinal is most famous, of course, for his history of giving succour to pederast priests who operated in his see when he was a mere bishop. Despite being an unmarried virgin, he reckons to know more about the morality of parenthood than anyone else in Britain. We should listen to him carefully, though only because he wields power and influence out of all proportion to his experience of parenthood and family life.

On Monday’s World at One on Radio 4, M-O’C declared that “children need a known father and this bill seems to me to be saying that children don’t need a known father and I oppose – I think the majority of people in this country oppose – the deliberate creation of a situation where there’s no father”. Later, he said: “It’s not just about rights, about legislation even, it’s about the fundamental understanding of our country about marriage”.

A number of elements are at work here. The religious lobby – particularly in the United States – has been squaring up for a long time to grow a movement that aims to overthrow the legislature by irresistible force or to seize power by electoral means and control the legislature or (the least preferable option for them but the most likely to occur) to begin a campaign of civil disobedience. You see a nod to that development in the Cardinal’s sly downgrading of rights and legislation.

Meanwhile, the fear among the religious that the church’s control of the notion of family has been seriously weakened since World War II has persuaded even moderate church-goers to start to sound more fundamentalist on the differing family models that now obtain, even in religiously influenced nations like the States. Marriage and family have become interchangeable concepts for these people since co-habiting (as opposed to “living in sin”) became widely accepted and civil partnerships between same-sex couples were enshrined in law. M-O’C and his kind desperately wish to turn the clock back. Preferably a couple of thousand years.

I want to ask the Cardinal: “which is more desirable: for a child to have a quelled mother who works in vain to bring in money and a wastrel father who fritters the money away on drink and/or drugs and abuses (mentally, physically or both, take your pick) both the mother and the child; or for a child to have two loving, well-adjusted mothers?” It’s what is now called “a no-brainer”, isn’t it?

It is odd that Catholics prelates, who themselves foreswear conventional family life, fight so hard to uphold the conventional family model. Today, Elizabeth Windsor and her Greek husband mark 60 years of supposed wedded bliss. There is no need for me to air any of the rumours, some of them going back almost 60 years, of the Duke’s many and sustained infidelities. Conceivably they are all groundless. Your guess is at least as good as mine.

But the royal couple, whose durable arrangement was celebrated in the Abbey on Monday, head a family considerably more dysfunctional than the families of many of her subjects (and probably most of her church-going subjects). The Queen’s late sister and three of her four children went through the divorce courts. To the generation of Her Majesty’s mother, such a thing would have been unthinkable. After all, her own brother-in-law was obliged to abdicate because he insisted on marrying a divorcee.

To Catholics of the generation of Murphy-O’Connor’s parents, divorce was simply not permitted. Yet you don’t hear this leader of British Catholics condemning the royal divorcees. Perhaps the simple truth is that unnamed lesbian couples make a safer target.

TAKING DICTATION, MISS RICE?

The present crisis in Pakistan is far more dangerous for global stability than the now-forgotten crisis a few weeks ago in Burma/Myanmar. Western governments will, in my estimation, come to rue their failure to react immediately and decisively. Announcing that they "may" have to “review” their aid to the Musharraf regime is pusillanimous and evasive.

Pervez Musharraf has taken draconian powers, putting the whole superstructure of the justice system, the opposition parties and the independent media under house arrest or worse, casting aside any undertaking to hold free elections and to divest the government of its military cloak. His prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, announced that these powers were “to ensure the writ of the government”. If the writ of the government can only be ensured by the suspension of civil rights, then it is not the government’s writ that runs but the government’s oppression.

At a stroke, General Musharraf has transformed himself from a benevolent despot who was inching towards free elections into an old-fashioned dictator. The west will rationalize its continuing (if now more conditional) support by claiming that Pakistan remains withal a key bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalism that expresses itself in terrorism. This is a false reading. Musharraf’s state of emergency is the best news that either al-Qaida or the Taliban have heard from Pakistan in years. It is the most effective recruiting sergeant that those organizations could have dared hope for and any possibility of characterizing the west as a continuing ally of a man who is now seen to be a ruthless dictator will be seized upon as more evidence of the west’s infidel credentials.

This is where Condoleeza Rice can play a role that transforms her from one of the least effective Secretaries of State since World War II to one who really makes a difference. I doubt that Gordon Brown can do this because he has no clout with the Bush regime. Rice does. She needs to square up to Bush (with Cheney safely shut out of the oval office) and make it clear to him that all his prating about loving democracy and freedom means diddly-shit if he doesn’t pull on his cowboy boots and ride into the east to save Pakistani democracy and freedom from the world’s latest absolute ruler. Washington needs to make it crystal clear to Islamabad that the state of emergency is to be suspended forthwith or Pakistan will no longer be supported politically, financially, economically, militarily or diplomatically. The US embassy will be closed, the UN security council will be summoned to declare Pakistan a pariah nation and – yes, it may come to this – American troops are standing by and ready to invade Pakistan and remove Musharraf (“the General” as Bush famously called him in a pre-presidential interview when he had no idea of the leader’s name or, come to that, the whereabouts of his nation) from power. And Rice needs to do this today. Every hour of delay is an hour closer to an unprecedentedly horrific outrage against western individuals and interests in the name of revenge upon our perceived support for Musharraf.

WEARING YOUR HEART on YOUR LAPEL

It’s poppy time again. Spot the parliamentarian, business executive or home-based television presenter, especially in news and current affairs, who isn’t already wearing the symbol of the fallen soldier in his lapel or on her blouse. Oh, right, there isn’t one. And now that Mr Blair is out of the spotlight, who was the first public figure to be spotted poppying this year? Oh, I think it was the Wootton Bassett council spokesman talking to reporters about the local people who drowned off the Portuguese coast when their children (subsequently saved) got into difficulties. Gordon Brown was a day or two later.

They’re all wrong of course, as is anyone sporting a poppy before Friday. The poppy’s run should be from All Souls’ Day (November 2nd) until Remembrance Sunday (which this year happens to fall on the 11th). Proper people who respect tradition know that and keep to it. I’ll bet Her Majesty didn’t wear a poppy to Matins yesterday, nor any of the royal household. Politicians of course have their electorate to impress and it’s a rash backbencher who doesn’t grab a poppy at the earliest opportunity (one Labour chap was the other day accused of saving his emblem from last year so that he could be first in the House). Braver still would be the (as yet unseen) MP who forswears the poppy or – worse yet, though widely misunderstood – counters with a white poppy. The Women’s Cooperative Guild devised the white poppy in the 1930s to memorialise the non-combatants who died in the First World War and to stand as a symbol of peace. Red poppyists are apt to blackguard the white poppy as a symbol of cowardice, appeasement, pacificism and every other unspeakable sin attributable to commies, lefties and subversives. Harrumph. It’s academic anyway. Where could you buy one?

You don’t see many poppy-wearers in the street these days because, quite frankly, you don’t see many poppy-sellers in the street. No doubt if you popped into a branch of the British Legion, you’d be able to pick one up. In my childhood, as October turned to November, there’d be a poppy-seller on every street corner, vying with the penny-for-the-guy kids, but both figures have melted away. Bonfire Night, Firework Night or Guy Fawkes Night (as November 5th was variously known) has been displaced by Halloween, an American device imperfectly grasped by British children. Those who fought in the Second World War are too old to stand on draughty street corners and their children and grandchildren aren’t interested in Remembrance. So wearing the poppy has become a phenomenon that you see on television, something public figures do.

The BBC always protests that poppy-wearing is voluntary among newsreaders, weather forecasters and other studio-visiting pundits but it seems most unlikely that anybody fronting for the Beeb who declined to pin on the symbol would hold onto their job for long. Some pretext would be found for the change but it would be for defying what is clearly an unwritten house rule. The BBC regards the poppy as politically neutral, which of course it isn’t. No reporter or presenter would be allowed to wear a breast cancer ribbon or a gay pride badge. These symbols would be thought to compromise the BBC’s neutrality. But the BBC is not neutral about national remembrance.

I have several objections to the poppy. First, I dislike ostentatious displays of charitable donation. I think a sandwich board that shouts “I gave” is vulgar and self-serving and that is what the poppy is, even if BBC people or MPs are “issued” with poppies without any actual donation being made. The fact that I don’t wear a poppy doesn’t mean that I don’t make a donation to the British Legion. You don’t need to know whether I do or not. It’s my business.

Second, I don’t see why one has to conform to someone else’s timetable. When I was a student, I bought a poppy in November, put it away and then got it out again and wore it in April. I told those who enquired that if the fallen were worth remembering in November, they were just as worth remembering in April. People got surprisingly cross. They thought I was taking the piss. Perhaps I was, I don’t remember. Mostly, I think I was making a valid point.

Thirdly, there isn’t just a poppy. There’s a single poppy, a poppy with leaf trim, a poppy with double leaf trim, a double poppy with double leaf trim and, doubtless, a poppy corsage. This brings in an element of competition, particularly among MPs, over who appears more generous or supportive or ingratiating or pretentious. So the poppy is not an affectless gesture, a simple show of respect, as BBC managers would have us believe. It is a surprisingly complex symbol of establishmentarianism. It identifies the wearers as part of a tribe, the tribe that, had it been of age then, would have been proud to join up and fight the Kaiser and the Hun or the Führer and the Nazis, even without all the benefits that hindsight brings.

If it weren’t for the fact that all factions of the Commons sports the poppy, from the unreconstructed Thatcherites and Paisleyites to those Liberal Democrats who opposed the invasion of Iraq even before it happened, we could accuse MPs of, in their own quaint expression, “playing politics” with the war dead. As it is, we are faced with a solid wall of convention, the poppy-wearing class. It is odd that such a tiny proportion of the general public now identifies with that class by the most direct and simple means, themselves wearing a poppy. Perhaps there are the beginnings here of a genuine, popular, anti-establishment movement.

NICE GUYS FINISH LASTING WORK

“For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks – not that you won or lost,/But – how you played the game” (Grantland Rice, Alumnus Football).

I cannot but wonder why anyone follows – let alone pursues – sport. Save for a very, very few practitioners and punters, sport means recurrent disappointment or (in media histrionics) heartbreak, tears, tragedy, a shattered dream, the end of the world, etc. Even for Tiger Woods, even for Roger Federer, there is occasional “defeat” to weather along with the regular “victories” to be savoured. Dominating sportsmen like these inevitably begin to aim higher and then, if they do not manage to surpass some ancient record of achievement, they feel obscurely that they too have failed. Oh please. Take up gardening.

This weekend, apparently, Christine Hamilton (whose talent I have evidently underestimated) failed at the last to win some driving contest, having led the race all season. (I hadn’t known one race could go on so long). I guess she’s still a shoo-in for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, a title that I have always thought to be the most extreme contradiction of the multimedia age. Good grief, it’s been won in the past by a woman wholly devoid of personality, Princess Anne’s numbskull daughter, who proudly boasts that she’s never picked up a book in her life. (Sports Bore of the Year would be a much more close-run contest).

Before Christine’s shame, some bunch of rugger buggers was seen off in Paris by a team from a nation that surely needed the psychological boost of victory more than England did. I read that the English players had been so written off at the contest’s outset that, had they won, many bookmakers would have been bankrupted (aha, one tangible reason to have wished the English team good fortune). To have done as well as they did was apparently a remarkable achievement and “they can hold their heads up high” unless, like me, you think they should have grown out of such a schoolboy activity long ago. (I saw the English rugby captain on a news bulletin. He sports one of those so-called cauliflower ears that boxers always had in the comics of my childhood. Not attractive).

To pursue or follow any sport is to elect to spend almost all of your time sunk in dismay. After all, “there can only be one winner” (sport is of course rife with cliché). This means that trailing behind the winner is a crowded field of losers and also-rans, all of them disheartened, self-disgusted or proclaiming forlornly “we wuz robbed”. Most of them anyway are on steroids and other performance-enhancing (i.e. cheating) drugs. Why would any sentient human being want to subject his leisure hours – or worse, his (inevitably short-lived) career – to recurrent frustration?

I suppose the only comparable field is politics. J Enoch Powell, a shrewder observer than he was political operator, once declared that “all political careers end in failure” and with very few exceptions he must be deemed right on the money. Most politicians want to get their hands on one or two of the levers of power and, once having done so, begin to fancy their chances in the top job, be it president, prime minister or dictator-for-life. Consequently, almost all of them fail as the number that reaches what is sometimes called “the top of the greasy pole” is of course a vanishingly small proportion of those who think they might like a shot at it. Of those who do get to perform the top job, even fewer leave office with enhanced reputation and the enduring love of the people. There are barely any winners in politics, only better or worse losers.

Sport is not dissimilar. Even those who rise to be champions again and again inevitably continue to compete when their skills are waning and so at last fall to younger, fitter, hungrier contestants who want to become even more famous champions than those they supplant.

The arts offer so much more satisfying a field of endeavour. Of course there are meretricious awards and lists of supposed “greats” so that the media and, to a lesser extent, followers and consumers of the arts can feel that they have tamed the artists by providing a framework of competition and struggle and so a spurious sense of triumph and loss. That shrewd old bird, the Irish playwright Brian Friel, graciously accepting an Olivier award for his magical play Dancing at Lughnasa in 1991, declared to the assembled dignitaries: “Success is merely the postponement of failure”.

But happily the arts are not measured by the mechanistic standards of sport: score lines, worth totted up in points. In art, in self-expression, “success” and “failure” are far more complex and subtle notions than the winning of a tennis game “to love” or a golf match “four and three” or a cricket match “by an innings and 17 runs” or a wrestling bout by "two falls, two submissions or a knockout". Accordingly, books and paintings, movies and musical compositions, verses and dances, plays and programmes have a more lasting and mature relationship with their audiences than a sports event ever can. Of course sports fans mistily recall a George Best dribble, a Len Hutton cover drive, an Arnold Palmer sand chip, a Muhammad Ali upper cut and in such images lies the poetry – all the poetry – of sporting prowess. But who would prefer a whole season of flat racing to a single bar of Bach or a stanza of Shelley? Plenty of people, you reply, and I counter: “but they’re all STUPID people”.

And of course there are far more stupid people than the other kind, so sport is perceived to be more popular and newsworthy than the arts and therefore Doris Lessing, Nobel literature laureate (not in competition with anybody for that award), gets considerably less media coverage than the aforementioned Christine Hamilton. It seems to me, however, that Lessing brings far more credit to this country for the recognition of her extensive body of work over many years than does the failure of various journeymen in the objectively judged struggles of this week's sporting event. No motorcade to Trafalgar Square for Lessing. No special stamp issue. I hope there was a message from the Queen and a statement by the Prime Minister but I heard tell of neither. Lessing at least has this consolation: if there are humans still extant a hundred years from now, her work will still be read when all trace of Johnny Wilkinson – is that his name? – is forgotten.

SCHWANENGESANG of DEAR LEADER?

Five minutes ago, David Cameron’s position as leader of the Conservative Party was under some pressure. Now Gordon Brown’s in the Labour Party is reportedly being questioned by so-called Blairites (I suppose we should be calling them counter-counter-revisionists). And always, always, the press is out for the head of Sir Menzies Campbell served up on a silver charger.

I am not a Liberal Democrat. I was never a Liberal when the party was called The Liberal Party and I wasn’t a supporter of the short-lived breakaway from the Labour Party that called itself The Social Democratic Party and that went on to merge with the Liberals to form the present Liberal Democrats. The critics of Sir Ming who have actually put their heads over the parapet – apart from the ever perverse Simon Hughes – are former Social Democrats like William Rodgers who, in his dotage as Lord Rodgers, has come facially to evoke Ken Dodd, a resemblance that doesn’t assist his (never very deep) credibility.

I voted Liberal Democrat in the general elections of 2001 and 2005, however. As I have written before, there were particular reasons in 2001 to vote against the Blair government and against its representative who was our MP at the time. By 2005, we were domiciled in a constituency that is represented by a Conservative – one who has become personally controversial since the last election and who certainly will lose some of his base when the next election comes – but that is never going to elect a Labour MP. The best hope of unseating the sitting tenant is to vote Lib Dem which is what I did last time and, no doubt, what I shall do next time. Ideology tempered by practicality seems to me the most civically responsible as well as the most efficacious spirit in which to cast one’s ballot. In any case, I feel I can vote Lib Dem in good conscious as a democratic socialist. On almost every issue in recent years, the Lib Dems have been well to the left of New Labour. Come to that, so has David Cameron. If you had told Nye Bevan that there would one day be a Labour government that was actually the most right wing grouping in the Commons, he would have said … well, he would probably have said “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, boyo, but don’t ask me to support it”.

How should Ming Campbell deal with the continuous undermining of his leadership in the media? It is, as I have observed before, a measure of how shallow and trivial the media has become but, as Orson Welles used to declare, it’s no good moaning about the unfairness of the system, you have to play the hand you’re dealt.

I think, if I were Sir Ming, I would make a speech specifically aimed at his own party. I should make the point I just made, that the media is crap but you have to get used to it. I should add, however, that the most pernicious collaborator in this crap is the MP who gives off-the-record briefings. It may be – indeed, in these base and unprincipled times, it is a certainty – that political correspondents are often making it up when they claim that they have been told “privately” that this or that is happening or should happen. Because it’s an unattributed claim, it can’t be verified or tested. How convenient. On the other hand, Westminster is a seething nest of gossip and speculation and it would be unthinkable that all backbenchers – or even ministers and shadow ministers – could resist the temptation to spread some occasional mischief and thereby imagine that they are influencing events in a way that their official status does not permit.

Campbell should point out that the opinion polls, taken between elections when attention on third parties is characteristically confined to reports of supposed trouble, do not reflect the support the party actually wins in by-elections at either parliamentary or council level. He should denounce anyone who briefs anonymously, calling them cowards and fools who are undermining not just his leadership but the credibility of and prospects for the whole party, and propose that they should make their comments openly or hold their tongues or stand down and resign the whip. He should further note that the pot-stirrers who conduct a whispering campaign (if there actually are any such) make a number of rash assumptions: that he, Ming, will voluntarily step aside; that the gossip in Westminster and Fleet Street accurately reflects sentiment among the party’s grassroots and indeed among the wider electorate; that a change of leadership, either by his stepping down or by some kind of coup, will automatically improve the party’s standing; that any likely successor has sufficient recognition among the public to raise the party’s profile, the named candidates being obscure and not exactly charismatic (he could well risk such a jibe); that a leadership election will not precipitate a policy argument, even an ideological struggle; that a week in politics is not a long time. Ming could say that he doesn’t know, any more than anyone does, whether any of those assumptions is correct, save for the first and last. And he can tell them the answer to the first one: he isn’t going to step down.

Politics is a tough trade. Public opinion is volatile and shallow: if the England rugby players win whatever the tournament is that is presently going on and, shortly thereafter, the England football players qualify (or whatever it is they have to do) to play in whatever the next big thing is in their sport, the resultant euphoria among volatile and shallow people might boost Gordon Brown’s standing back to its summer level. That in turn might make Ming look stronger in contrast to Cameron. Stranger things have happened. An MP could die, precipitating a by-election at which the Lib Dems do much better than their opinion poll rating suggests. That would ease the pressure on Sir Ming, at least for a while. A week is still a long time in politics.

SMALL EARTHQUAKE in WESTMINSTER – NOT MANY DEAD

As sensible people expected, there will be no general election in 2007. It may come as a surprise to those who spend their lives turning over stones in Westminster but I can confidently inform them that the vast majority of people who do not go picking through the entrails of “sources” did not give a rat’s arse whether the Prime Minister called a “snap” election or not. Only journos, backbenchers, political wonks and men with very small willies worried their silly little heads about this matter.

Unfortunately that same cast of ne’er-do-wells has a disproportionate influence on what the chattering classes chatter about and what is imagined by those chattering classes to be News (with a capital ‘N’). Consequently, the last three weeks – what is known in the trade as “the conference season” – have been hijacked by endless, empty speculation about The Election That Never Was.

The claim that this was all an exercise in what politicians like to call, in their lofty way, “playing politics” would have some merit if the media didn’t so energetically and obediently pick up the ball and run with it repeatedly to the same corner of the field. Thus every news bulletin during the Liberal Democrats’ conference focussed on whether the party might dump Sir Menzies Campbell and every bulletin during the successive Labour and Tory conferences was concerned primarily with whether there would be an election on an imminent date, gradually narrowing to November 1st. Consequently, it was something of a triumph on the Tories’ part – and one rapidly reflected in the way-too-influential public opinion soundings – that within the hubbub they managed to get heard the notion that they would slash inheritance tax if elected.

A most revealing account of this media madness was offered on the Radio 4 programme Feedback yesterday by the producer in charge of BBC Radio’s coverage of the conferences – though, as his name was given as Jamie Donald, he sounded more likely to have been in charge of entertaining the tots in the conference crèches. Jimjams, as I think of him, was quizzed well and persistently by Roger Bolton (who happily is not credited as Rog) and his answers (with my annotations) to the extensive grumbles conveyed from Feedback listeners who, like me, wanted some substance and less froth in the news from the conference halls are worth quoting at length:

“It may well be that the listeners and viewers aren’t looking at the totality of what the BBC offers …” (oh, right, so it’s our own fault then, we shouldn’t expect, say, The News to tell us the news, we need to distil the news from a 24-hour watch on the whole output, bearing in mind that Farming Today, The Archers and The Most Annoying TV Moments might all be germane) “… I do accept that as part of our coverage we have looked in detail at issues like the election, the presentation, the branding and the leadership …” (well, excuse me but “the election” wasn’t an actual issue because no election had been called, so it was merely a subject of gossip. As for “the presentation, the branding”, did you know that these were “issues” because I certainly didn’t? Does Jimjams come from a career in Marketing by any chance?)

On the subject of news bulletins, Jimjams got himself into something of a pickle “… you have to remember that they have 15/20 minutes to cover the world … When you’ve got crises like Northern Rock, Burma and other things going on, are you seriously saying that they should chuck out international and major national stories to cover policy in detail when other parts of the BBC … are covering that policy in detail? …” (No, but we are saying that repetitive and pointless speculation about Ming’s chances of survival and Gordon’s election strategy is even less appropriate and more time-wasting on the news than detailed policy discussion. In any case, nobody expects the bulletins to “cover the world” and if we did we’d be sorely disappointed),

“An election is one of the most important moments in our political life. This idea that we might have an election has burst upon us over the last two or three weeks. It’s a time when the entire country needs to be mobilised to understand that this is the high point of our democratic system. If it turns out on Monday that’s what the country will have to do, our last three weeks will be extremely well spent”.

This, in its turn, is the high point of Jimjams’ delusion so I propose to look at it in some detail. As it turned out, we didn’t even get to Monday before we knew that that was not what the country would have to do, so Jimjams’ messianic fervour was not only misplaced but misplaced by a whole weekend. In the absence of an election, does he still think that the BBC’s last three weeks were well spent? What is he planning to do to prevent the country’s excited state of mobilisation – orchestrated (he would claim) by the BBC’s news coverage – turning into the kind of behaviour that occasions the mass issuing of ASBOs? Does he really think that we are so stupid, so overawed by the so much more significant doings of Paris Hilton, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, Jade Goody, the Beckhams and the rest of the sideshow freaks that we don’t understand what an election means? And how does it get to be the job of BBC News to remind us? Just give us the facts, ma’am, we’ll interpret them for ourselves. Moreover, this idea “bursting” over us: wasn’t it the BBC and the other news media that pricked the balloon that unleashed the fine spray of blather over us all the last two or three weeks?

Jimjams now returns to the Lib Dem conference, seeming so long ago already (do remember, as Gordon Brown certainly does this weekend, the truest thing – perhaps the only wholly true thing – that Harold Wilson ever said: “a week is a long time in politics”): “Ming Campbell’s age isn’t the issue but to suggest for example that there wasn’t a great deal of discussion behind the scenes, that members of his party weren’t discussing among themselves and briefing journalists privately about the issue of the leadership would be to misunderstand the nature of that conference. We have a duty to report both what the parties want us to and what’s really going on there …”

This raises the matter of “private briefing”, a source of great irritation to viewers of and listeners to news bulletins, whether the news editors like it or not. Phrases like “sources indicate”, “a frontbencher let it be known to the BBC privately” and “off-the-record, I was told that” make the viewer feel excluded from some masonic process and, more significantly, undermine everything that is said publicly and for attributable consumption. Moreover, while the correspondents doubtless believe themselves to be sophisticates who wholly comprehend “what’s really going on” in the Machiavellian game of power politics, you do wonder about the motives of anyone in the political battle who briefs anonymously. How can the correspondent be sure he himself is not being played for a sucker? It’s incredibly likely that, if a cabinet minister or shadow spokesperson lowered his voice and told you, out of the corner of his mouth, that “I shouldn’t be telling you this and it must never be known that it came from me but …”, you’d feel a tad flattered and “important” and you’d want to share with your viewers this conviction that you’re at the cutting edge. Indeed, you’d need to be a very canny old hack indeed to put it through your internal shit-detector and come up with the foolproof conclusion that your secret-teller is just using you as a conduit through which to fly a kite. That of course is what most of the unattributable stuff is surely about, however.

What’s more, the story is changed by the reporters themselves as the days roll by. I saw the snatch of interview on the news with Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat MP who is unsurprisingly spoken of as potentially the next leader of his party – after all, he did stand for the leadership last time when Ming Campbell won it. Huhne was asked about his present intentions and answered, reasonably and straightforwardly enough, that it was “premature” to talk in such terms. There was no reason to believe that he had heard Nick Clegg, another MP spoken of as a potential leader, answer to a similar question – in an equally reasonable and straightforward way, if differently but why would it be a significant difference? – that he would indeed stand “if there was a vacancy”.

This innocent, straight-bat stuff is parlayed in today’s Daily Telegraph into “a thinly-veiled swipe at Mr Clegg” on the part of Mr Huhne. Until the day comes when MPs answer every media question with the formula “no comment” – and it would go hard against the grain for a profession that lives to talk at length – it will be an unusually twinkled-toed politician who can ensure that no passing remark he makes is ever left unexamined for resonance, subtext, insincerity and spin or, if free of all four, is not then misreported by some enemy newspaper or, unlike the Queen’s invented huff with Annie Leibovitz, not moved to some timeframe that makes it seem rather more hurtful than it naturally is.

Insofar as Gordon Brown’s team was, as many reporters indicate, slipping out nods and winks; insofar as there was tangible evidence of the option of a November election being kept open (the government let it be known that certain hirings and arrangements were being put in place); and insofar as Brown could have talked more openly about the exercise he was undertaking with his advisors if only his every sinew wasn’t bursting to do David Cameron a piece of no good, the PM could be said to have done himself and his party some harm – probably not lasting harm – over the last weeks. Brown does know what the media’s interest is like and his people clearly do go in for playing trusted reporters off against less trusted editors. By not stamping on the rising tide of hysterical excitement, he has allowed the Tories (in particular among opposition parties) to panic themselves into pulling the party together and settling for the leader that they’ve got rather than some mythical alternative no more capable, in practice, of offering credible opposition to Labour. By electing to wait until 2008 or 2009, Brown has given himself time to build an irresistible electoral juggernaut. Of course, he has given his rivals the same amount of time. If a week is a long time in politics, eighteen months is an aeon.

Meanwhile, we could hardly have hoped for a more eloquent argument for fixed-term parliaments than that provided by this cheesy episode. I would advocate a 54-month term so that general elections alternate between, say, the third Sunday in March and the third Sunday in September four-and-a-half years later. That way, whatever advantages or disadvantages are imagined to lie in the spring are balanced by the counter-arguments concerning the autumn. The earliest Easter Sunday ever falls is March 23rd – it does so next year in fact – and that is the fourth Sunday of the month. The clocks would still be on Greenwich Mean Time but the lengthening of the days is very evident by mid-March. By the third week of September, schools are back but not universities and that might make a difference in college constituencies. But at least knowing the date of the election would allow for the kind of planning – by electoral officers, MPs and voters alike – not now possible.

It is often said that determining the date of the general election is one of the most powerful advantages in a prime minister’s armoury but, as Gordon Brown has found, it needs to be deployed with masterly subtlety, otherwise that power becomes a stick with which your opponents may beat you. He would leave an important legacy if he were to be the premier who changed electoral law and, as Ming Campbell has consistently argued, gives us fixed-term government.

STUDIO PORTRAIT

The most interesting thing on television at present is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I’m sure the endgame of The Sopranos on E4 is really the high point of current British transmission but I wasn’t able to tape the first episode of the renewed screenings – it was bizarre of Channel 4 and its satellite channels to break the last series into two chunks – and when I tried to set Sky+ to catch the same-week repeat there was a mysterious block on recording that particular slot on the hard drive. So I let it go. I can wait; I’ll catch it on its C4 screening (in the spring perhaps) and that anyway will be without the disfiguring channel ID in the top left corner of the screen.

Aaron Sorkin’s successor to The West Wing shares that legend’s sensibility. It assumes an unusually literate, educated, liberally-minded and well-informed audience. There are far more allusions in the scripts than on any other programme, often to really quite abstruse matters and people, with a special concentration on British subjects, beginning with Gilbert and Sullivan in the pilot episode.

The milieu of the drama serial is a late-night satire show, televised live across the US from Los Angeles. I worked in and around British television for a quarter of a century, so this of course has a powerful interest for me. There isn’t really much reason to expect it to have wide appeal, however, insofar as viewers on both sides of the Atlantic have never been encouraged by television to take much interest in the background of the medium itself, whereas the behind-camera personalities, industry workings, history and techniques of cinema-making have been meat and drink to television for decades. Accordingly, Studio 60 never did well in the US ratings and seems not to have been inked in for a second series. It picked up five Emmy nominations, an impressive haul, but only won with John Goodman as guest actor.

Studio 60 is, I think, a failure but a most interesting one. Its failings are surprisingly large. By far the least convincing aspect of the show is the show-within-a-show. I know a lot of topical comedy doesn’t travel too well but the glimpses we get of the show that everyone is working on so earnestly are lame in the extreme. I suspect that the writing team – I mean Sorkin’s writing team, not the one depicted in Studio 60 – lacks any old pros from the television comedy game. The young drama-scripting turks, along with Sorkin himself, think they know how to mimic another genre but one of the things television drama gets most wrong is the true smell and feel of non-drama television, whether it’s news, chat shows, game shows or comedy. This is a pity and it undermines Studio 60’s credibility.

The next yawning hole in the show is the lack of a really persuasive or well-realised female character. Amanda Peet is impossibly glamorous and exquisitely clad as the station’s director of programmes. This is not the main reason why she doesn’t begin to convince as a big player in television but it doesn’t help. Sarah Poulson has to try to bring alive a gratingly flaky character as the still-smarting ex of the show’s co-resident genius. This latter is played by top-billed Matthew Perry, not my favourite actor. (One of the reasons I was never attracted to Friends was that, of the six leads, only Lisa Kudrow held any appeal for me).

Another problem is structural. Sorkin clearly made an early and surely a correct decision that he couldn’t have every episode constructed as a filleted week, climaxing with the weekend transmission of the satire show. But he hasn’t found a satisfactory substitute. The episode most recently broadcast here (#9, entitled ‘B-12’ after a virus, the role of which was not at all clear in the plot) suffered badly from what I took to be deliberate continuity shifts back and forth between different days. I say that I took them to be deliberate. More4, which shows Studio 60 here, managed after an ad break to rewind and play a second time several minutes of one segment the other week. It really is time More4 solved its problems in its presentation suite, not least the one that continually mangles its own transmitted sound. That wouldn’t matter if the linkpeople would shut up during the programmes but when they talk over the end credits the music always starts to break up because the sound is now being augmented by the permanent glitch in the presentation suite sound.

Much of Studio 60’s appeal lies in seeing how its inherent problems will be addressed in each episode. Snatches of music by guests, some of them as famous as Sting, seem a little desperate. On the other hand, a running discussion on product placement had me looking for the advertising deals that Sorkin himself has done and one just knew that the fruits of this were being flourished in a spirit of post-modern irony-and-realism mix. In a way, that is the main thing that floors Studio 60. It’s just too self-aware for its own good. Its gestures are there because they’re smart, rather than because they’re germane to story or character. That’s why in the end it’s not as successful as Ugly Betty or Desperate Housewives. But hey, like those invigorating imports, it beats anything home-grown that British television can offer since the end of Green Wing. Unless I am to except The IT Crowd. And I’m not quite sure that I am to …

BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM

Having admired her earlier book, Jack, I meant ages ago to buy the novel This Book Will Save Your Life by AM Homes but I neglected to do so. Then I picked up a copy in a branch of Waterstone’s, our local independent bookseller having run through his quota. The copy I bought had in its top right hand corner one of those “3 for the price of 2” stickers: they never have any influence whatsoever on my purchases but Waterstone’s use them to favour books that are already selling well – you’d think it would make more sense to use the ploy on underselling titles. When I got it home, I peeled off the sticker and found beneath it a circular promotion for something called “Richard & Judy”. This was not a sticker but an overprint on the cover.

Upon enquiry, I established that this mysterious couple are a daytime television programme. The presenters are clearly so famous that they don’t need surnames, like Bill and Ben. It (the programme) promotes various books that come its way and, it seems, a mention on the programme can have its effect on sales. This is a deplorable development. In the States, apparently, no book sells any copies at all unless it has been blessed by the Oprah Winfrey programme. At a time when corruption in television is a daily news story, the broadcasters will need to be especially vigilant that the money to be made out of such television exposure is not tempting publishers to attempt to influence the producers of the programme. There might well be a case for suggesting that the use of a book cover to promote Richard & Judy – a piece of reciprocal product placement, if you like – is itself a corrupt practice.

On three separate counts, I did not want to own a copy of this book defaced by this piece of cover advertising. First of all, I am a proper grown-up book reader. I don’t need to be told what to read by the presenters of some daytime television programme. They are not, I take it, professors of semiotics or critics from the intellectually reputable journals. As a rule, I only allow myself to be guided to a hitherto unfamiliar writer by reading a combination of reviews by critics with whose tastes I am already comfortable in the better newspapers and magazines.

Not even friends are necessarily reputable guides when it comes to books. Over many years, one particular friend has strongly recommended just two novels to me. I read one and thought it a piece of derivative twaddle. I have never read the other although it sits pristine on the bookshelves. Quite recently, my friend’s partner revealed that my old friend almost never reads fiction at all. It would be putting it too strongly to suggest that I felt a sort of betrayal on the part of my friend in perhaps only ever having read two novels and then presuming to recommend both of them to me; but I was sorely aggrieved. For myself, I can think of hardly any book that I would commend wholeheartedly to everybody. Just occasionally I will tell a friend about a particular book that I fancy might appeal to her. This is a gambit used very sparingly.

But I digress. My second objection to the publisher’s despoiling of the cover of Ms Homes’ novel concerns the slither down into the murky world of marketing that has been imposed upon literary fiction. These days it’s hard to find a paperback edition of a novel that is not festooned with promotion. Either there is a quote from some such goon as Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons or Stephen Fry on the cover, as if their approbation is any kind of commendation: after all, Fry will be revealing on a television programme tomorrow night that among his pleasures are Countdown, darts and Led Zeppelin. And I am meant to be encouraged by his sensibility? Otherwise we must be assured that the novel in question was “shortlisted for the Booker Prize” or even, dear god, “longlisted for the Booker Prize”. Any day now I expect to pick up a paperback that proclaims it was “overlooked for the Booker Prize”.

Writers who have yet to join Valhalla routinely have their Nobel laureateships emblazoned on the covers of their books: see Coetzee, Grass, Morrison, Saramago, Mahfouz and so on. Happily, the old masters who received the same recognition – Tagore, Kipling, Mann, Mauriac, Steinbeck, Shaw, O’Neill, Sartre and so on – are evidently sufficiently classified as “classics” for their Nobels to be omitted from the marketing.

Finally, I have an aesthetic objection to the promo on the cover of the Homes. Its paperback cover design is a symmetrical arrangement of six doughnuts, quite a cute image. The promo obliterates one of the doughnuts, ruining the look of the book. What is the point of a publisher paying good money for a jacket design if he’s then going to spoil it with trash?

I visited a great many bookshops in the dwindling hope that an overlooked copy of the Homes with an unsullied cover might lurk but bookshops are less musty and disorganised that they used to be, sadly for the customers. Evidently the publisher had recalled the pre-Richard & Judy copies and replaced them.

There was nothing for it but to contact the publisher direct. I emailed the Sales & Marketing Department of Granta. A gentleman called Julio Ferrandis replied, saying that he had “a hard copy of this book sitting on my desk (it’s a new copy!) for you”. Well of course I didn’t want a hardback copy. I could buy one of those at a bookshop and save the postage. What I wanted, as I had explained carefully, was a paperback without the Richard & Judy promo. Had they really pulped all the early editions? It seemed so wasteful. I wrote again, in self-deprecatory terms (“grateful for … your patience with what I am sure you will see as my unnecessary pickiness”). Sr Ferrandis wrote back saying they had no “pb copies without the sticker at the present. What I can send you however is a picture of the pb cover without the sticker! Hehe”. That “hehe” seems calculated to be offensive. I feel disinclined to believe Sr Ferrandis on the lack of copies but I shall not pursue the matter with Granta. I shall look for a decent copy of the book in a second-hand shop.

Even if I eventually find an acceptable copy of the Homes, I shall probably never get to read it. The American novelist Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, which I have read) once declared that he had calculated his life expectancy, reckoned up how many books he read in an average year and realized that he already, in his mid-30s, owned more books than he could possibly read. I too probably passed that point in my mid-30s but I continue to amass books at a rate that, by true bibliophile standards, is very modest. There is something blissful about the home none of whose internal walls can be seen for the mass covering of bookshelves. We do not go that far, we have pictures too. And a few empty spaces. Oh, and videotapes (thousands of those).

There is a quotation from Cicero on display in one of our guest rooms: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”. I think I might add a kitchen and a means of listening to music but I like his thrust. People sometimes find a display of books a bit overwhelming, especially perhaps if they never read a book from one month’s end to the next.

Occasionally, some visitor (usually a woman, perhaps because men are less likely to notice such things) will exclaim “Look at all your books!” and you rejoin, with a tiny touch of asperity, “oh, this is but the tip of the iceberg” while you wonder “did you never enter a cultivated home before?” And then comes the inevitable corollary, as predictable as it is dull: “have you read them all?” “And where,” you ask yourself pityingly, “would be the pleasure in that?” To have a myriad of masterpieces – and diversions too, let’s not be precious – from which to choose is to be alive and engaged.

I know that there are copies of books on our shelves that will remain virgin until after I am gone. There are, as a New York teeshirt often worn by my partner declares, “too many books, too little time”. But that is the condition of our short passage through this vale of tears. We can never see all the places, meet all the people, indulge all the joys, sample all the flavours. Rousseau complained that “the mountain of books is making us ignorant” and that was 250 years ago, even before Barbara Cartland added several small hills of books to the range. Maybe I can do without This Book Will Save Your Life altogether.

LEFT WRITE WRONG

Lately I have been conducting a bracing debate with a fellow blogger, Panopticon, on his lively site at www.thinkhard.org. We have been considering politics or, more specifically, politicians. Panopticon is a hardened sceptic. I will not go so far as to say that he is a cynic. But he is convinced that anyone who chooses to seek a role in the political arena is, to some degree, a control freak wishing to interfere in people’s lives and arrangements. I summarize no further; it is not for me to (mis)represent his arguments; indeed, he is of course most welcome to restate them and develop them himself in this forum.

Inevitably, in the heat of a dialectical situation, I have occasionally been tempted to overstate my case, either for the sake of provocation or to (imagine that I) clinch an argument. I do not in reality support unstintingly the notion that professional politicians as a breed stand for probity and altruism in all things. Politics is clearly a subtle and treacherous mistress and those who pursue her favours may be easily persuaded to begin to forget about duties, principles, scruples, even old friendships.

Over the weekend, the death was announced of Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar. I doubt that I will ever find myself supporting the Conservative Party, however reactionary the advancing years encourage me to be, but thoughtful old school Tories – whether aristocratic, Eton-educated baronets like Sir Ian Gilmour (as we remember him) or more humbly-born toilers like John Biffen who died a few weeks before – kept the decent-cove tendency alive while Thatcher was busy turning it into “the nasty party”.

Politicians like Biffen and Gilmour clearly did see a political career as a life dedicated to public service. Indeed, both were surely held back from advancement by their refusal to say ‘yes’ when they thought ‘no’ and to trim their views for expediency, fashion or support from above or below that might otherwise be withheld. If Gilmour was the person most responsible for reconciling his leader to the rise to power of Robert Mugabe, he can hardly be blamed for failing to anticipate that the first president of Zimbabwe would metamorphose into an old-fashioned tyrant of the worst kind. Mugabe’s supporters at the turn of the 1980s were far more numerous on the left and they failed equally.

Parliamentary politics is a tough and unforgiving trade. If you insist, like that ever-recalcitrant Labour backbencher Bob Marshall-Andrews, on being as sceptical about your own party’s leadership as is Panopticon about all political leaders, you cannot expect ever to be valued or trusted by that leadership or indeed by most of your fellow MPs who understand, often to their own discomfort, that there are bullets that must be swallowed when you agree to belong to a particular grouping.

Marshall-Andrews sits on one of the tiniest of electoral majorities and he cannot be surprised if the party managers feel that they would rather lose his seat (temporarily) at the next election, whenever it comes, so that he may be replaced by a candidate more congenial to the party that he claims to represent. I would feel a lot more sympathetic to Marshall-Andrews’ stance if he were less like an earlier member unanswerably skewered by Churchill as “a sophistical rhetorician inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity”, in other words a pompous windbag delighted by the sound of his own voice.

But I want to address here a different point. Most of us who reside – happily for us – beyond the narrow purview of the Westminster village have to study the daily doings of parliamentary politicians through the distorting glass of the media. Now nobody wants us to go back to the days when Leslie Mitchell, representing the BBC, could begin his 1951 pre-election interview with the shadow Foreign Secretary: “Well now, Mr Eden, with your very considerable experience of foreign affairs, it’s quite obvious that I should start by asking you something about the international situation today – or perhaps you would prefer to talk about home. Which is it to be?” (The entire interview had been rehearsed and Anthony Eden learned all his answers like an actor). Since at least the 1960s, when deference began its comprehensive retreat, the politicians and the reporters, commentators, leader-writers and pundits have struggled against each other, seeking to “set the agenda” for the political discussion of the moment.

The media puts great store by its assumed role as the people’s tribune but I cannot help believing that the agenda the media seeks to set – whether Newsnight and The Guardian on the one hand or The Daily Star and Planet Rock radio bulletins (if there are such things) on the other – is increasingly trivial, sensationalist and hence (if paradoxically) anti-political. Last week’s media coverage of the Liberal Democrat Party Conference was not just dominated by but positively overwhelmed by pointless, gratuitous speculation on whether Sir Menzies Campbell was going to survive as party leader. It didn’t matter how many times delegates at all levels of the party declared that it wasn’t an issue, the reporters and news scripters returned to it each day as if the airing it had received the previous day had never happened.

It is already proving to be a similar story this week at the Labour Conference where the only story in town, as far as the media is concerned, is whether the Prime Minister is going to call an early general election. Indeed, when Labour delegates reasonably reply, with increasing and understandable irritation, that they’re there to debate policy, the interviewers actually sneer (eg Martha Kearney on today’s World at One). Perhaps next week there will be a doubly narrow focus for the Tories to fend off – can David Cameron survive as party leader and does the party really want an early election? – or perhaps it will be the tired but still largely unresolved question of whether Cameron smoked/smokes dope.

Political sceptics will say that the politicians deserve it because of their use of “spin”. A little perspective needs to be applied to this argument. Tony Blair didn’t invent spin. Alastair Campbell didn’t invent spin. Politicians didn’t invent spin. The first human who spoke a coherent sentence invented spin: “I meant to bring a mammoth carcase home for dinner but the bloody thing got away”. (Translation: the hunter was too slow to catch it). Everybody uses spin on a daily basis. When Jonathan Dimbleby refers to “the Saturday edition” of Any Questions on Radio 4, what he really should call it is “the Saturday repeat” because it differs in no particular from the version that goes out live on Friday. That’s spin.

With the broadcast media’s reliance on sound-bites and the print media’s relegation of serious political analysis to page 94 (or the website), politicians are required not only to toe the party line but also to conform to what plays on telly and what is incapable of being misinterpreted when reproduced in print. Far from being control freaks, most of them are lucky if they get through a whole day without being pilloried and traduced. What’s worse, a growing proportion of us spends all the time between elections grousing about the government and then doesn’t even bother to use our democratic duty to cast a vote. As in so many of these matters of perception about the state of the world, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars (even our political stars) but in ourselves.

RUNNING SCARED

In Oxford on Thursday, I happened to pass a branch of the Northern Rock bank and, do you know, there wasn’t a single person queuing outside. Nor would there be ordinarily but earlier this week they were doubtless queuing round the block there, as at other branches. Watching the news footage of the queues and listening to the customers’ comments, as hapless as they were arbitrary, I couldn’t help wondering whether any of those standing in line to withdraw their life savings, some of them as far ahead of opening time as 5.00am, ever thought to themselves: “Maybe by contributing to this run on the bank I am actually making the situation worse”.

Panic is a weird mechanism. No wonder the cliché adjective that goes with it is “blind”. No wonder Clive Dunn’s Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army always accompanied his cry of “don’t panic” with a well-drilled pantomime of running in several different directions simultaneously. Panic is not merely unthinking, it is also wholly self-serving. “Panic buying” is stocking up in bulk against imagined shortage. It doesn’t matter to the buyer that his cornering the market in, say, lavatory paper leaves everyone else short, even ahead of the expected drying up of supplies (I use the terms ‘leaves’, ‘short’ and ‘drying up’ with no thought to any relevance to the form or function of lavatory paper).

You might think that it ought to occur to the exampled panic buyer of lavatory paper that, once an actual shortage has set in, his neighbours are liable to start to whisper to each other that he seems to suffer no such shortage, that a deputation – even an unruly mob – could appear at his door, brandishing the unwiped bottoms of their small children and aged dependants and demanding that he yield his selfishly grabbed supply.

When there was a clean water shortage in the west country in the wake of the early summer floods, people were caught on news camera finagling more than their designated share of handed-out bottles and hotly (because embarrassed as well as self-righteous) they argued that they had family duties of some exceptional order. The fact is that panic brings out the worst in people, leading them to clamber over others in flight from the burning building or the stampeding crowd, to shoulder the weakest aside in order to grab the supplies airlifted in for the relief of famine.

A man (a Brit, happily for the news story) managed to tear open the emergency door of the burning plane wreck in Thailand, thereby allowing others to escape as well as himself and, to my surprise, he was hailed a hero when all he did was something natural and obvious. I suppose if you take Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure”, the guy was being courageous. At least he didn’t panic.

On the other hand, the two police auxiliaries who declined to jump into a six feet deep lake to help a drowning boy who had himself jumped in to rescue his sister were robustly defended by their superior: they “weren’t trained” to save lives. Is that to suggest that trying to rescue him would have been the panicky thing to do, that phoning for the appropriate service to carry out that function was the correct response, even though the kid died? It’s not exactly a persuasive argument. I’ve never actually been trained to pay my taxes but I dare say the Inland Revenue will fail to sympathise if I try it on as a reason for getting my accounts in late this year, even if I say that I did contact the appropriate service (my accountant) and had to wait for her.

We all act in the heat of the moment and frequently regret it later. Queuing for hours is not exactly the heat of the moment and panic seems an inappropriate term for what went on at Northern Rock this week. But the self-protective instinct that panic betokens was certainly in play here. And it was just as destructive and blinkered as the panic of running about shrieking.

Meanwhile, you wonder how reflective and thoughtful was the BBC news reporter on business affairs, the fluffing, blustering Robert Preston, when he, as the BBC has been telling us all week, “broke the story”. He kept trying to justify it as important because it was “the first run on a British bank in 150 years” but of course the BBC’s coverage was the most influential ingredient in creating and spreading the panic that exacerbated the run. If the Bank of England and the Chancellor were tardy in their remedies for the situation, it was surely because they do not understand – as politicians and professionals for whom television is a marginal matter frequently do not – how influential television is on the inert portion of the population. The viewers may not believe everything they read in the papers but they still think “the camera never lies” and if it’s “on the box” it must be so. All I pray is that no latter-day Orson Welles – needless to say without a soupcon of Welles’ talent – is permitted to attempt a contemporary equivalent of the master’s wireless version of The War of the Worlds. We’ll all be killed in the ensuing hullabaloo.

HAPPY GAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

This month, as Channel 4 did in July, BBC4 has been marking the 40th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act that decriminalised sex acts between two consenting males in certain circumstances. I was in London when most of the BBC4 programmes went out and we have resumed playing host to a steady stream of summer houseguests since then, so I only now get to blogging the matter. If it all seems rather old hat to you, dear reader, well … tough.

BBC4 took the opportunity to repeat several profiles of famous gay people (though not its film that thought itself very bold by – yawn! – outing Nöel Coward), along with a decent little series called It’s Not Unusual. Its one new programme made a pair with one of C4’s, for each channel presented a film dramatising events that directly led to the drafting of the Act. A Very British Sex Scandal, made by Blast! Films for C4, covered the trial of Peter Wildeblood and Lord Montagu, the most high-profile airing of the law relating to homosexual regulations since that of Oscar Wilde more than fifty years before. This was a mixed-genre piece, intercutting narrated history, interviews with (mostly anonymous) veterans of the pre-Wolfenden gay male world, newsreel (including an unremarked glimpse of the notoriously gay MP Tom Driberg up to no good in Moscow) and acted sequences. Montagu appeared both as an acted character and, very gamely, in his present condition, profoundly reduced by old age.

Wildeblood himself, a true hero in the story of gay liberation, was decently and credibly characterised and his life as a 1950s journalist was well caught, the Daily Mail newsroom looking straight out of Michael Frayn’s novel Towards the End of the Morning. The level of self-important ignorance that informed society’s attitudes to how other people lived their lives was also cannily invoked. There was some well-used research: the Queen’s first Christmas broadcast provided a painfully ironic counterpoint to the tightening of the screws by the authorities on illegal sexual adventuring.

If this story was new to you, I’m sure the mix of disciplines would have helped to show what a compelling sequence of events it was. But if, like me, you knew this history, it was hard to feel that here was the best way to tell it. A better scripter than writer-director Patrick Reams would have relied solely on dramatisation and would have avoided the linguistic anachronisms that occurred much too often. It always infuriates me when directors and producers lavish resources on exact detail of period locations, costumes, decor, hair, props, vehicles and lighting and then let modern phrases go by without a thought. It costs nothing to get the language right, chaps.

Lion Productions made the film Consenting Adults for the BBC. This traced the story of the enquiry conducted by John Wolfenden into the efficacy or otherwise of the laws then constraining homosexual acts and also, by the by, prostitution. Sir John, as he became, had been portrayed in the C4 film, played by Nicholas Le Prevost. He’s a fine actor but he never got close to giving a whiff of what Wolfenden was like. William Chubb, who played a chief constable in the C4 film, would have made a better match. In Consenting Adults, Wolfenden was acted by Charles Dance, a far less accomplished performer but better cast – indeed I’ve never thought him more sure-footed than in this role. Julian Mitchell, a proper writer, provided the script, though, while finding much enjoyable period flavour, he too couldn’t avoid the odd anachronism: “I have to tell you” and I’m sure we didn’t use “straight” in the current sense back in the ’50s.

The scenes between Wolfenden and his louche gay son were clearly intended to form the heart of the piece and they bore Mitchell’s most thoughtful writing and the most attentive direction (by Richard Curson Smith). But I couldn’t help wondering whether Wolfenden Jr can have cut quite such an Andy Warhol-ish figure avant l’événement – it seemed a bit drama-neat rather than actuality-rough.

There was a fictional subplot concerning a family baker and his male piece-on-the-side that was never going to pull its weight, as diluting of the main matter as were the interviews in the C4 film. Rather, playing real or representative people gave several of the performers scope to have some fun: Hayden Gwynne as a feisty committee member, Mel Smith as blustering Home Secretary David Maxwell-Fyfe, Mark Gatiss as a supercilious chief constable, David Bamber as an enquiry witness, an unrepentant but pain-wracked ‘invert’, as homosexuals of that generation were often termed.

In many ways this was an honourable summary of the way the world differed in the 1950s, without too much Shavian personification of attitudes. And it reminded us that it took another decade after Wolfenden’s report before the law was changed.

C4’s most substantial contribution to the anniversary was a new fictional drama, Clapham Junction, written by Kevin Elyot and directed by Adrian Shergold, both former actors. Elyot’s work has always foregrounded gay issues – his widest-known play is probably My Night with Reg, which began at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs and transferred to the West End and television (David Bamber was its heart-breaking lead actor). I won’t attempt a substantial review of it here because Kevin is a friend but I will write of it as it relates to the discussion programme that I now discuss.

40 Years On presented an evolving debate with an evolving cast, chaired by David Aaronovitch. It began with Clapham Junction, which Aaronovitch described as “a drama that showed gay men in 2007 enjoying vigorous cottaging, depicted them at constant risk of sudden and terrible violence and believing that precariousness and danger are part of the pleasures of modern gayness. But is this what it’s really like to be homosexual in 2007?” This wholly reductive summary asked all the wrong questions. Elyot’s script never claimed to demonstrate what it is “really like” to be gay. It was much more about the philosophy and practice of living dangerously, something that some gay men (and some straight men) get off on doing. But to parlay that into a comprehensive statement of gay life is as absurd as proposing that, say, Coronation Street is a definitive depiction of life in the north of England. Late on in the programme, Simon Fanshawe took the opportunity to refute this reductiveness: “‘gay men’ is not a very coherent concept”.

Clapham Junction’s producer Elinor Day was put up to field on its behalf, not an ideal advocate in that she appeared to concede that some exaggeration had crept into the film. (No it hadn’t). Matthew Parris reckoned that, insofar as the film depicted male gay life, it was twenty years out of date, just about the length of time that Parris himself has been well enough known not to be able to cruise Clapham Common anonymously. The rapper known as Q Boy, much younger, was much more supportive of the film’s credibility. Mark Simpson, a widely recognised commentator on gay politics, offered a highly confused response, from which I extract the preposterous suggestion that the film represented “a desperate attempt to make gayness seem perhaps more interesting or more dramatic anyway than it perhaps is now”. Fancy a dramatist writing drama!

Later, Simpson spoke up for the right of people to express distaste for homosexuals, a curious concession that would hardly pass the test of substituting non-whites or the disabled in the argument. This occurred in a diffuse discussion about how far gayness is “still an issue”. The fact that Aaronovitch felt it necessary to indicate twice that he was among, in his patronising phrase, “the tedious old heterosexuals” provides the answer.

Male promiscuity was briefly but usefully discussed and Paul Sinha, a comedian-cum-GP, made the challenging point that “there is no reason for us to believe that the whole world is our sexual playground”. Julie Bindel, pressed into representing the otherwise missing lesbian view (“we didn’t need to be decriminalised because we were under the social control of men”) was listened to in eerily respectful silence by the fellers. On civil partnerships, the sceptical Mark Simpson missed the whole point: taking these vows is not done to ape heterosexuals but to avail ourselves of the tax breaks that go with them.

Simon Callow repeated the Simpson line on civil partnerships in a new documentary on C4 called How Gay Sex Changed the World. This was a superficial gallop through gay history since before the Act, touching all the bases but doing no more than touch, with a lot of sweeping generalisations and easy phrase-making in the script (“the uptight, sexually-conflicted straight world”). Simpson turned up again in this. If he’s an expert on gay matters, he really ought to know that horizontal stripes put fat on you.

Mark Turnbull’s film for October Films demonstrated all the shortcomings of contemporary documentary-making: snatches of interview taken out of context; unchallenged inaccuracies; wild assertions; the notion that a viewpoint is more important and indeed more true if spoken by a celebrity. The fact is that all these witnesses are immensely privileged, even if they weren’t necessarily so when they were growing up, and that disqualifies them from representing ordinary gay experience.

We got to see actual ordinary men in another C4 docko called Queer As Old Folk, except that these mature chaps were … I don’t want to say extreme cases but they were certainly quite extraordinary. There was the camp old couple doing the civil partnership thing on Tenerife after 43 years together – but the kiss at the ceremony was their first and, says the one who never allowed kissing, “I’ve never had sex with a man with my penis, ever in my life … there are other things that you can do sexually”. There was the 57 year-old who’s gone gay only recently and who runs around like a teenager with a permanent hard-on (“in the last two weeks I’ve had sex about a hundred times with at least seventy different people”), who weeps over the liberality of his wife and whose 17 year-old son has the shrewdest take on this new life. And there was the former deputy head teacher who’s 'married' to a former student almost forty years his junior and who manages his strapping young partner’s career as a male stripper. There’s no soap opera anywhere on the box that could do justice to these inordinate stories.

Had Kevin Elyot put such characters in a fictional film, David Aaronovitch would have asked if what they were all doing was “really” what it is like to be homosexual in 2007. I think Andy Wells’ film (for Transparent Television), like Elyot’s own, simply showed that the gay world is just as rich and varied as any other. There was one odd little thread through all the programmes except Queer As Old Folk, however. This could have been called the Richard Lintern Season because that actor, not exactly a household name, turned up in all three of the acted films and was even glimpsed in a Bronski Beat promo that was excerpted in C4’s gay history programme. I hope it helped his career and hasn’t fatally type-cast him.