FREEDOM from INQUISITION

Today’s report that the Home Secretary is prepared to consider outsourcing the national database is one of the most alarming developments so far in the shaming story of New Labour’s flight from its own base, both in terms of its increasing instincts to control every damned thing and of its growing love affair with the private sector. As The Guardian put it, such a move “would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses”, but of course there can be no such guarantee, however “tough” the safeguards.

We know already that the security applied to supposedly encrypted and/or confidential data is close to non-existent and that those who behave in a cavalier manner with sensitive material are almost never in practice subjected to penalty, either through the courts or even in their career paths.

I would like to make a modest proposal. Let Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, build into the premise of the operation of the national database’s security a provision that, in the event of a leak or a data loss, the then holder of the office of Home Secretary along with Ms Smith herself (whatever her then status) be obliged to serve a term of not less than two years’ detention in a maximum security prison. Such a provision would offer a rather more reliable “guarantee” against leaks and data loss and, moreover, would furnish both the then Home Secretary and Ms Smith with useful first-hand experience of “tough” security.

It never ceases to astonish me that politicians cannot envisage situations in which the powers that they wish to arrogate to themselves might be considerably more oppressive, for instance in the hands of some as-yet unforeseeable successor. In my lifetime, several European nations, not so unlike Britain, have laboured under dictatorships, usually of a military stripe. It is sadly not beyond the power of imagination to picture Britain too being governed by a regime even less concerned to protect the freedom of the individual than is New Labour. In fifty years from now, Britain will doubtless be a Muslim state. How much more effective will it be to inflict upon the nation the extremes of Sharia law when the Blair and Brown governments have created the infrastructure of surveillance that will allow a future mullah-turned-Interior-Minister to enforce orthodoxy on a British people who once rejoiced in their non-conformist traditions.

Rather more urgent – because the present economic climate makes it unavoidable – is the certainty that forms of access to the national database will be sold for profit to commercial organisations. Once the control of the data moves out of the hands of central government and into the hands of entrepreneurs who are answerable first to shareholders, the rush to cash in will become a stampede and government, having acceded to the thin edge of the wedge, will be powerless to prevent, say, your insurance company having total access to every financial transaction you conduct, every email you send or receive and details of every visit you make to a website. Is that what you voted for?

Sir Ken Macdonald, lately Director of Public Prosecutions, told The Guardian: “The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people”. I couldn’t put it better.

Regulation is a perfectly honourable instinct in the make-up of the left. The current catastrophe of capitalism makes the case for regulation of the markets as no politician, however eloquent, ever could. But there is regulation and there is oppression. I do not say that the present government has turned to oppression … yet. But we are on a worrying path. Already more CCTV cameras gaze upon Britons than the residents of any other nation if measured by head of population. The suspicion that most of the cameras do not actually function properly helps to make the Brits relaxed about this chronic level of surveillance. After all, as a nation we are – we have always been – hopeless at maintenance. Count the clocks in public places that have stopped, the great majority of them not during the past month either.

If the level of surveillance actually delivered what it promised, there would be no shooting, no arresting and no convicting of innocent civilians. There would be much less theft, shoplifting, criminal damage and breaking in; much less speeding, hitting and running, dangerous driving and illegal parking; much less rape, kidnap, assault and child molestation; much less gang culture and fewer sink estates. The cost of this vast network of surveillance is nowhere near justified by its results.

So what the hell does the government want of this love affair with data-collecting? The knee-jerk response – that it is a crucial weapon in the front line of “the war against terror” – is a busted flush. The government could enact all manner of targeted controls on the community from which terrorism emerges if it were not so squeamish about giving offence to Islam. Faced by the loss of confidence in Labour among the non-Muslim population, part of it fuelled by the resentment at the imposition of oppressive regulation on communities that do nothing to justify it, you might think that Mr Brown’s advisors would suggest that he cut his losses and pursue a more broadly popular agenda.

STILL HERE

My thousands of regular readers may have wondered whether this blog, like many other enterprises over the last few weeks, has gone into receivership. The answer is no. I have been preoccupied elsewhere. I was away in London for several days and had intended to report on the shows and movies that I saw. Since then, however, we have been throwing into the air most everything in our home. It is a home stuffed with ... well, stuff, and said stuff has needed to be thoroughly rearranged ahead of an invasion. It is our turn to play host over at least part of the holiday – not before time, some family members will reasonably grumble – and we have to plan for up to seven, including two widowed aunts either side of 90, staying overnight. There has been such a to-and-fro of stuff – piles of things moved from room to room and back again – that for some days I was unable actually to reach my keyboard. Emailers have gone unanswered and junk mail undeleted. Only by dint of perching on a precarious pile and tapping with one finger was I able to get off a two-line letter to The Guardian (which the paper entirely rewrote before publication).

Anyway, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, at which time I will have some momentous decisions (for me, anyway) to impart and expound. In the mean time, assuming as I do that the hiatus will continue at least until that curiously deflated gap between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve, I bid you all a cool Yule.

MUMBAI’s 9/11

Almost ten years ago, we stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel in what was then just beginning to be widely known as Mumbai rather than Bombay. We were lucky to be in the old part of the building and very splendid it was. We ate a few times in its restaurants, including the one into which guests were barricaded during the siege this last week. I can vividly picture the cavernous foyer that has now been gutted by fire.

At one point during our stay, we had some small reason to complain – I no longer recall about what. As a conciliatory gesture, the manager had sent down to us a dish of the mangoes to which he alone had access. These proved to be the nonpareil of mangoes, the like of which I had never dreamed of before and can never hope to experience again. They were sheer magic. If the same manager oversees the Taj today, I hope he came through the ordeal unscathed.

It is a strange sensation seeing a place you have known being forced into a new and unwelcome role. Yesterday we were watching footage of stun grenades being fired at the hotel’s first floor windows in an attempt to flush out the last of the occupying terrorists. Many rooms and suites have been burned out, many others damaged by automatic weapon fire and besmirched by the blood of innocent guests. Had we been staying there when the attacks began, we would surely have been most vulnerable. I imagine myself having the presence of mind to shout “Deutsch, ich bin Deutsch” but that’s being wise after the event. Who knows how one would behave in a real situation like that? And anyway, would a German necessarily have been spared?

In the spring of 2001, we were on the viewing floors of the World Trade Center in New York City. No doubt some of the staff we glimpsed working there were to perish there six months later. How small the world is. Who imagines they are safe anywhere from modern terrorism? When the inevitable meeting of fanatics and nuclear weapons occurs, we shall all be in the firing line, wherever we hunker down.

Some hotheads in India are now calling for war with Pakistan as a response to the presumption that the terrorists emerged in the madrasahs and training camps of that country. Those who plan and direct these attacks will be delighted at this result. They will imagine Islam sweeping through a defeated India and overthrowing the Hindu hegemony. Though they will not achieve this aim, the attempt will profoundly destabilize the entire subcontinent. The Indian government, not the most far-sighted or imaginative in the region, will surely resist this impulse. Of course, more militant factions may come to power in New Delhi.

It’s important to keep hold of the knowledge that the world is wracked by a propaganda as well as a guerrilla war. The immediate conventional wisdom is that the one terrorist taken alive will yield much useful information about the origin and methods of the attackers. But he might as easily bamboozle the interrogators with well-rehearsed and plausible lies, lies that the authorities may be very ready to invest with credence. These fanatics are trained in psychological as well as urban warfare. The western media and the politicians who believe they must keep the insatiable media beast fed are very apt to get carried away with a theory based on little or no evidence, witness the flurry in some parts of the press about whether some of the Mumbai terrorists were British. “No” seems to be the conclusive answer. But what real difference would it have made if any of them had been British? Evidently the can of worms opened by such an idea is ugly, resonant but not quite articulated. Is it another twist to the image of Londonstan, the supposed western capital of Islamic fundamentalist recruitment?

Whatever precise national borders contained these young men when their ideas were forming, what is unarguable is that those ideas centre around Islam and jihad. Once again, religious bigotry rocks the planet and brings death and misery to random civilians, some of them no doubt themselves law-abiding Muslims. How we counter, reduce and finally eliminate that blind, righteous hatred is the $64,000 question that will not wait for a definitive answer.

THREE STRIPES, YOU’RE OUT

I love dance and I love to watch it, from Fred and Ginger to Fonteyn and Nureyev, from Torvill and Dean to the Nicholas Brothers. So of course I have never seen Strictly Come Dancing, any more than an aficionado of song bothers with karaoke or a barbeque draws a gourmet. I gather from the extraordinarily extensive media coverage of recent days that Strictly Come Dancing is a pro-am ballroom tournament shown as BBC1’s riposte to the “talent” tourney, The X Factor, on ITV at peak on Saturday nights, in which capacity the BBC evidently loses out, in ratings if not in the extent of publicity.

As I say, I have not seen any part of any edition of this particular “entertainment”, some of the reason why I come late to the discussion. You might argue that, given this lack of homework, I should shut my trap and forbear the expression of a view. To which I respond: grow up. No commentator, pundit or columnist, pro or am, allows innocence of a detail to prevent airing the “wisdom” of experience in the larger matter. I have seen enough evidence of this exhibit on the television news and in the papers to form a view. As was once remarked by Clive James (my least favourite television critic but he was sound in this instance), it isn’t necessary to eat the whole apple to know that it is sour (or at any rate words to that effect, and he certainly wasn’t the first to remark it, the proverbial curate’s egg being a variant of the same observation).

The “am” in this mix are not merely amateurs but, in the modern requirement, “celebrities”. So, part of the premise of this programme is understood to be that contestants are being gallant or, in the phrase enshrined in a Saturday night title of a generation ago, “game for a laugh”. Gallant indeed has been the focus of the recent media interest, one-time BBC News political correspondent John Sergeant. Sergeant has been competing as one of the “celeb” dancers, despite the – one might hazard – distinct disadvantage of being possessed of the physical grace of a hippopotamus that has contrived to emerge from the water on its hind legs. The judges in the studio – dance professionals all, I believe, one of whom used to step out with a flat-mate of mine – evidently have noted this departure from traditional ballroom practice and accordingly marked down Sergeant’s performance. However – ay, there’s the rub – the viewers get a say in the matter too. And the viewers, most of whom of course could not tell Ann Miller from Darcy Bussell, have been taught by television itself to be more captivated by celebrity than by ability.

So here is the contradiction at the heart of this particular enterprise: the experts and the lay viewers have differing expectations, differing requirements, differing judgments. There is indeed nothing strictly about it. And television, by gradually but decisively ridding itself of all reliance on gravitas, knowledge, experience and wisdom in favour of the culture of celebrity, has exactly set up the conditions in which its chosen experts in any field, however doubtful, are not going to be given any credit by the viewers. In this face-off, John Sergeant is the hero, the man of the people, the victim, the popular choice and the celebrity, all rolled into one. He has gallantly done what the judges could not: he has removed himself. However they play it, the judges are bound to come across as ungracious, churlish, pedantic and not in the spirit of the thing (I am surmising wildly here but you will tell me if I miss it by much). Sergeant, the while (and no surmise needed) can write his ticket as a celeb for years to come, opening fêtes, switching on Christmas lights, making after-dinner speeches, advertising anything he wishes to (footwear, perhaps) and entertaining customers on cruise liners. But I don’t think I’d cast him in a revival of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes.

All this was perfectly well adumbrated in the most recent run of the various knockout series (BBC1 Saturday nights again) in which performers who aspire to a career in the stage musical undergo repeated auditions for a role in an actual production in the West End. I have watched and been caught up in these entertainments because I love musicals (and genuine musical talent is at a premium in these contests), because something is genuinely at stake and because the contestants are not celebrities. Nevertheless, in the casting of a Nancy for Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s latest revival of Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, the final viewers’ vote did not favour the auditioner whom Sir Cameron and his ally Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted. The production, which opens early next year, is stuck with a Nancy whom Mackintosh would not have cast. You wonder whether Sir Cameron or Lord Lloyd Webber will agree to risk such an outcome again.

So there was an authentic talent contest going on in those series. Strictly Come Dancing would appear to be a whole other kettle of fish. It’s merely another celebrity survival contest. We live in a time in which any observation, sentiment, opinion, assessment, stance or philosophy – however vapid, commonplace, ignorant, malicious, oppressive or dangerous – is rendered somehow significant and valuable if uttered by someone who is deemed to be a celebrity. By the same token, any contribution made by an expert, someone with knowledge and experience, is dismissed out of hand if that expert has never appeared in a sitcom or soap, “competed” in some such farrago as I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! or had sex with somebody famous and then talked about it for money.

In a somewhat tenuous way, John Sergeant has been deemed a celebrity. His fame was sealed by a Moment that has become the stuff of telly-clip legend. This was the occasion when, as a political reporter, he was addressing the BBC news camera live on the prospects for Margaret Thatcher’s survival of a challenge against her by Michael Heseltine as party leader (and hence, at the time, prime minister) when the PM herself emerged from the building behind him and descended the steps with a gleam in her eye that betokened that she had something momentous to impart. Sergeant was obliged – you might think significantly – to execute a not particularly nifty sideways shuffle and utter some bromide along the lines of “here’s a microphone”, that he might play any further part in the scene. As a Great Telly Moment, it hardly bears much examination but it is thought – at least by BBC mandarins – to be up there with Michael Fish discounting the possibility of a hurricane.

You do fall to wondering who chose Sergeant for the dancing contest and why he was chosen. Was it perceived that his inability would indeed become a selling point, that he would prove an Eddie the Eagle of the Palais de Dance? Well, Sergeant now has his second claim to fame, his voluntary departure from the dancing fray so that he might avoid the absurdity of actually winning the thing. He could not resist, so the news clips revealed, a sly dig at the judges; former colleagues from the Westminster lobby have not been slow to account his demeanour in those days as less than collegiate and indeed inclined to the waspish. This is of no consequence to the celeb-loving viewers for whom Sergeant has become a Chaplinesque lightning rod, a little man against the world.

This is all very well but it is a further nail in the coffin of anything truly authoritative ever again being uttered on the broadcast media. If the BBC had wanted a programme wholly dependent on a popular vote, setting it in a world of accomplishment was bound to raise a brouhaha. Equally, there is little point in installing experts to give their opinions based upon long professional experience if the outcome does not require this input.

I appreciate that the matter of who governs us is determined by the lay vote but government and leadership are not solely about a particular skill and/or artistic presentation. Barack Obama appealed to a wide skein of responses, drawing support from many different constituencies and on the basis of many different expectations. Don’t rule out, however, the possibility that in the future prime ministers will be determined by a Saturday night knockout contest on television, featuring a panel of expert judges whose views may be discounted by the voting audience. I doubt somehow that John Sergeant will be invited to sit as a judge, though.

P BABY: NO MORE DRAMA

There seems no end to the current media frenzy over the child, known as Baby P, whose death at the age of 17 months more than 15 months ago only came to national attention last week. His identity and that of his natural father and mother, his younger half-sibling and the mother’s live-in bloke (who, along with her, has been convicted of his killing) are being withheld “for legal reasons”, though the names were briefly revealed on the BBC’s website. These legal reasons are never explained. If, as has been widely speculated, it is to protect the identity of the sibling, it seems unnecessarily punctilious. The sibling will certainly have been taken into care and can perfectly well be given a new name.

Despite this safeguard, cameras have been allowed into the flat where the child died, now stripped of its furnishings, and photographs showing his likeness have been widely circulated. ITV News has bought the rights to at least one of these pictures. I cannot but wonder who has been paid. There have also been distressing graphics of the injuries the child received during his short life. This is just the kind of 6 O’Clock News story that drives me to Eggheads on BBC2, in front of which I would ordinarily not be seen dead.

Armchair pundits, among whom I readily number myself, have turned their special venom on the hapless social workers of Haringey. Because Baby P died on their watch, they have, in an inimitable headline from The Sun, ‘BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS’. Being wise after an event that they didn’t even know had happened until they read about it in the news columns is the special talent of armchair pundits. Columnists who couldn’t find Haringey in the London A-Z (let alone their arses with both hands) profess to know better than seasoned social workers what constitutes a palpable risk. Columnists whose entertainment expense accounts are higher in a week than a social worker earns in a month demand that heads roll.

Social work is a vocational career. You need infinite patience and human sympathy. You have to be ready to work anti-social hours and be poorly paid. And you are immediately made aware that it is an art rather than a science. The decisions you make are based wholly on impressions and assessments that are subjective. There will be people whose casework you take on who will tell you what they think you’ll want to hear; others who will have few means of articulating what their situation is; and most of them will be in some degree desperate and not all of them can be saved from self-harm or harming others. Nobody pays you any heed until something “goes wrong” and then a bunch of scandalised know-alls in London, whose knowledge of social deprivation derives almost entirely from an occasional look at EastEnders, start writing about you as if you yourself are a serial killer.

I honestly don’t understand why cases like this are taken up by the media at all. They have no news value. Editors prate about “human interest” but if viewers, listeners and readers are “interested” it is because the media does its best to make them so. It’s mere prurience. The day after the Baby P case went large, there was a brief story, played almost as big for a day or two, of a mother who had been sectioned after killing her two small children. Tragically for the pundits, there was no evidence of social workers stoking the fire of this particular case so it fell off the news agenda. That didn’t prevent the BBC Television News bulletins from carrying a vox pop with a neighbour who was too emotional to be able to contribute anything useful. What is the value of this kind of coverage? Do the editors believe that we need to be shown someone upset before we can understand that the case is upsetting? And what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Wring our hands? Take to the streets? Perhaps write to our MPs – not least the prime minister and the leader of the opposition – and ask them to stop uttering the word “families” as though it has a religious connotation when all the media evidence suggests that families can actually be fatal for children?

Going through the courts at present is the Shannon Matthews kidnap case. This is of course sub judice and, besides, I deplore lofty conclusions drawn from cases by those who weren’t in court and/or haven’t read the comprehensive transcripts. But if it turns out that the jury finds an attempt was made to extort money as “reward” by the faking of a kidnapping, I hope the media will not be too slow to draw some inferences about what such a scam says about its own conduct. Even the people around Matthews – who between them would be unlikely to muster an intelligence quotient to rival that of a mayfly – might perceive that sucker-punching the media with a plausible kidnapping tale ought to be pretty easy and, the media being the route to instant celebrity, potentially rather lucrative. And of course the media does love a “human interest” story. Don’t rule out the possibility that, whatever the outcome of the court case, some level of media interest in these feckless people will survive in one form or other. “Based on a true story”, anyone?

WHITEY HASN’T GONE AWAY

Now that my body clock is back to something like normal, after an electoral night the emotion of which overwhelmed me in a way I hadn’t wholly anticipated, here are some lingering thoughts on the Obama revolution.

Looking at the demographic breakdown is fascinating and instructive. White America remains profoundly conservative: only 43% of whites supported the Democrat as against 55% for John McCain but that is nothing new, only a one percentage point difference from 2004. It would have been fascinating to see how the white vote broke if, as was mooted at one time, Condoleeza Rice had been the Republican candidate or if Colin Powell had been prevailed upon to run in 2000.

Breaking in almost identical proportion was the Protestant vote, while white evangelicals voted three-to-one in favour of McCain. This too is resonant for I think it is fair to say that religion seems more attached to Obama than to McCain. Of course there was the deliberate diversionary tactic of the proposal that Obama was a “secret” Moslem but you didn’t have to dig very deep to find that his Christianity is of a noticeably more active kind than McCain’s. As Martin Kettle observed sharply in The Guardian, “the white churches are too often racial division’s best friends”.

Race is still a big factor in America’s image of itself. However creative, sensitive and embracing President Obama is able to be, there will remain millions who will not be reconciled. You can picture the good ol’ boy leaning on his picket fence, chomping on the chewin’ tobacco and vowing laconically: “He may be President but if he ever shows his face here we’ll run him outa town”.

Does the race issue cut both ways? Obama won 95% of the black vote, but the black vote is the most unswervingly Democratic of any demographic and Obama’s support was only five percent more than that given to Al Gore, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in elections of the past quarter-century. Interestingly, Bill Clinton was the Democrat who won the lowest proportion – 83% and 84% respectively in his two successful runs – yet Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize-winning black writer, famously called him “the first black president”. Back in January, a CBS News poll gave Obama only 28% of the potential black vote against Hillary Clinton’s 52% at a time when Clinton was still widely expected to win the nomination. And again, you wonder how this split would have fared with a Rice or Powell candidacy for the Republicans. Which allegiance runs deeper, race or party?

Of course many blacks who voted for Obama have no more in common with him socially or economically than they do with McCain, and probably considerably less intellectually. That the candidates had advantages that large swathes of the electorate don’t enjoy only really began to tell when the financial crisis deepened and McCain’s tally of – he thought but he wasn’t entirely sure – seven homes played its alienating part. The strip cartoon Doonesbury, admittedly preaching to the converted, had some fun with the notion that McCain be obliged to “lose” one of his homes so that he could “feel people’s pain”.

There was some discomfort, expressed with trepidation in the media, about just how black Obama truly is, what with his white mother and grandparents. A column in January in the New York Daily News was headed ‘What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me’. In the same month, Joe Biden, still half-heartedly running himself for the nomination and having no way of foreseeing that he would duly find himself on the bottom half of the ticket, notoriously described Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”.

There will many who will not forget or forgive that. The deep, mellifluous rumble you hear is coming from the grave of Paul Robeson, as towering a figure as any in the 20th century in America, a man only prevented by the colour of his skin and the tenor of his times from achieving anything he set his mind to and "nice-looking" enough to have broken more hearts than Joe Biden would dare to dream of. And I won’t even mention Dr Martin Luther King. But Biden’s crass comment speaks to that subtext that Obama is not as truly black as those blacks who would never get entrée to the Democrats’ high table, men like Jesse Jackson (weeping freely in Grant Park, Chicago on Tuesday night, despite an earlier nasty dismissal of Obama) or Al Sharpton.

In exit polls this time, one voter in five said that race was a factor for them and more who said so voted for Obama than for McCain. Twice as many mentioned age and a large majority of them felt that at 72 McCain was too old rather than that, as a one-term senator, Obama was too inexperienced. Aside from the blacks and the (relatively) poor, Obama performed best among the young and first-time voters, seeing off McCain by at least two-to-one.

There is nothing to say that these demographics would not have favoured Hillary Clinton or any other Democratic candidate equally well, for it was the party as much as the Obama team that built and maintained the registration drive. Howard Dean was the candidate who, in the early months of the 2004 campaign, established the party’s reach through the internet and galvanised the party’s ability to raise funds. For almost four years, he has been the famously hands-on chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Obama owes a great deal of his victory to Dean’s organisational nous. Exit polls on Tuesday suggested that Clinton might have outpolled McCain by an even greater margin than did Obama.

It is idle of course to dwell on might-have-beens because if you change one ingredient you need to re-examine all. Had Clinton been the nominee, would McCain still have picked Palin? Would the GOP have been readier to let him go with Joe Lieberman, the Democrat renegade last seen in international profile as Al Gore’s running mate, on the ground that the (dis-)connection – Gore was her husband’s VP – would help to undermine Hillary, even if only obscurely? Could Hillary possibly have bettered Obama’s 56% of the women’s vote, given her hard-to-shake reputation as a divisive figure? And, in a nation where misogyny is every bit as immortal as racism, would McCain have won considerably more than his 48% of the male vote?

At bottom, it was hard not to feel that the factor that swung it most strongly for Obama was the one I, like the candidates, have failed to mention. That factor is George W Bush. Anybody following him under the same party colours would have been hobbled from the start. McCain made as insistent a case as he could that he was out of step with the neocons whom Bush fronted, but Obama had the vast advantage of lacking all taint of the Bush years. To his great and unexpected credit, the outgoing president has been as gracious and non-partisan as anyone could ask since the election and offered the president-elect congratulations and undertakings of support (both notional and practical) that seem wholly sincere. Perhaps, great reader that he is, he remembers Macduff’s line in Macbeth, that “Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it”, though of course Shakespeare meant “life” not “office” by that last “it”. Bush no doubt does remember how the Clinton team left a nasty taste by metaphorically trashing the place before leaving the White House.

Whatever the demographics demonstrate, imply or presage, Obama starts on a mighty task with more international good will than any president in modern times. He’ll need it. What goes up can soon come down, as the Scottish National Party found in yesterday’s by-election in Glenrothes. This was a sensational result, a bounce-back that absolutely nobody expected, not even the Labour party. Gordon Brown, who represents the neighbouring constituency and who broke with tradition by visiting the campaign twice while serving as prime minister, had been told soon after the polls closed that the seat was lost. This would have been in line with Glasgow East in July, where the SNP overturned a considerably larger Labour majority. Yet Labour not only held the seat, the party actually increased its vote since the general election by over 500 votes and its share of the poll by three percent. What contributed most to this victory, apart from the SNP not increasing its vote sufficiently, was the halving of the Tory vote and the vertiginous collapse of the Liberal Democrat’s support – both these parties lost their deposits.

I’ve said it so many times before and I’ll say it once again: a week is a long time in politics.

MORNING in AMERICA

With glorious hindsight, one can of course see that it was perfectly inevitable. John McCain’s campaign was a disaster. The mass of contradictions weren’t all his fault but he couldn’t begin to bridge them. He was running against his own party whose leader for eight years had been the least equipped and most maladroit and – which does not necessarily follow – the most unpopular chief executive in almost everyone’s memory.

McCain could not develop a theme, Barack Obama already having annexed change and hope, so he cast about and appeared indecisive and bumbling. In settling on questioning Obama’s fitness for office – the age-old technique of the GOP – McCain again and again asked the electorate to look at his opponent rather than himself but this only helped Obama more than it hindered him. Those fearful Republican voters talking of Socialism sounded like paranoiacs.

In the third television debate with his young opponent, McCain looked tired and old and, as tired, old men do, he repeated himself and waffled. His pick of a running mate was a nine-day wonder, filling in the gaps in enthusiasm that he himself had left in the party’s core support but alienating the middle ground he needed if he was going to be competitive and neutralizing his attack on Obama’s inexperience.

But Obama was never going to win merely by default. His victory is positive and constructive because it reached far beyond his party’s base – and most significantly he too barely ever mentioned his party. He was on a mission and the mission drew adherents in ever-increasing numbers from the very outset. The long bruising struggle with Senator Clinton only honed and focussed his appeal.

His specific commitments have been few because he is a realist. His inheritance is as inauspicious as any in-coming head of state has faced since Roosevelt. He knew perfectly well that promises he wouldn’t be able to keep would quickly tarnish his value. At this moment, he is the most inspirational figure on the world’s stage since Mandela and he knows it and he knows that the real hard work lies ahead. His presidency will fail on many fronts because that is the nature of politics but if, like Mandela, Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, he can rise above those failings, he will leave office as beloved as those men did.

The astonishing aspect, I think, is not really that he is black, or rather “of colour” as they say, in his case more appropriate because he is of mixed race. One of the precious few unalloyed achievements of his immediate predecessor is that, on his watch, nobody white represented the USA’s foreign policy, a quite remarkable occurrence that could not have been anticipated even after Andrew Young’s showy but short participation in the Carter administration. Of course Obama’s coronation is a defining moment in America’s story because of his colour and the history behind his ascent. As a contributor to last night’s coverage on the BBC pointed out, the first sixteen US Presidents could have owned Obama.

On the other hand his election does not say that there will be other presidents in the foreseeable future who are not WASP men. Margaret Thatcher’s entry into 10 Downing Street has not advanced, as far as can be judged, the prospects for a second woman prime minister in Britain, though it may have helped the cause of women leaders elsewhere. I hardly expect in my lifetime to see a president or a prime minister who is atheist or disabled or gay or even Jewish, despite a Jew (Michael Howard) having recently led the British Tory Party.

No, the astonishing aspect is that it’s the serious guy rather than the affable guy who won. (On the basis of this dichotomy, I anticipated a McCain victory in this blog on September 14th – Sit Down. You're Rocking the Boat – before the global financial crisis that McCain played so impetuously and unconvincingly). Obama patently has a fine intellect and the intellectual resource to field and answer unexpected questions fearlessly and frankly. He gives full rather than glib responses. He can be wryly witty but he is primarily a grave and dedicated politician. McCain and Palin appeared (separately) on Saturday Night Live but Obama did not. All of that, I felt, militated against his chances of success. Hitherto, the genial guy – Reagan, Clinton, Bush Jr – always beat the earnest guy – Carter, Mondale, Bush Sr, Dole, Gore, Kerry. But something has changed and now McCain’s winsomeness – and his concession speech was a model of grace and modesty – actually seems to have alienated elements of the Republican Party who want more attack dog and less fair dealing. If that means Governor Palin survives and thrives in the reduced GOP, so much the better. Four years of the Obama presidency will convince many of the more thoughtful Republican voters that their fears that Obama was Socialist or Moslem or a friend of terrorists or somehow “un-American” were misplaced. Enough Americans have seen the state of things and embraced seriousness as a political philosophy that suits them to give Obama the strongest mandate since LBJ’s in 1964. And, always accepting that LBJ is not a good precedent, being a good man brought down by uncontrollable events, one still may dare to believe that a lot will have to have gone wrong for Obama to fail to win four more years.

Incidentally, can anyone answer this: does history record who exactly it was that fixed it for Barack Obama, then a novice senator, to deliver the keynote speech at the Democratic Party National Convention in Boston in 2004? That creative and far-sighted person surely paved the way for America's wonderful leap of faith today.

SAVE the NELLIE ELEMENT

Our Los Angeles friend Jane wrote overnight and gave an account of driving 30 miles on Monday to a polling station where early voting is permitted. She was heartened to see so many African-Americans queuing – the wait was about two hours – though she feared that many of them would be voting “yes on 8”.

It’s an idiosyncrasy (a fabulous one) of the electoral system in the States that many posts and issues are up for a vote at the same time as the presidency: delegates to either or both of the houses on Capitol Hill, state officers including governor, attorney general and on through sheriff and even city dog-catcher, depending on the state constitution; and also specific proposals for changes in state law.

Proposition 8 on the California ballot paper this year is entitled “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry” and would add to the golden state’s constitution the clause that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”. It was in May of this year that the California Supreme Court voted 4-3 in favour of permitting same-sex marriage. Less than a month later, Proposition 8 was accepted for the ballot paper. In the five months since the court’s ruling was enacted, some 16,000 couples have availed themselves of the dispensation.

For myself, I have never embraced the desire to be married, which is why I was so satisfied with the British invention of the civil partnership – all the legal, economic and social rights that go with conventional marriage and none of the cant – and why David and I entered into a civil partnership two-and-a-half years ago. Being a rationalist, I never felt the need for some kind of superstitious ingredient in my primary relationship. By the same token, I never quite comprehended why gay people would want to enrol in the police, the military, the city, professional sport, parliament or any of the other bastions of homophobia. Life is too short to waste it being a crusader in a lost cause. I’m thrilled that so many uniformed police joined the Gay Pride march in Manchester this year – about 300, supposedly (and believably) the largest gathering of gay fuzz in the world’s history – but I would still feel more comfortable in the company of a straight actor, care-worker, teacher or nurse than a gay prison warden, club bouncer, priest or asset-stripper.

Nonetheless, if lesbians and gay men want to be “married”, they should have all the joy and security of it that it allegedly brings to straights and without the fear of being retroactively outlawed. The proponents of Proposition 8 are the usual suspects in such matters: reactionaries and the espousers of fairytale delusions. But among the nay-sayers are all six Episcopal diocesan bishops in the state, a large number of Jewish organisations including the Board of Rabbis of Southern California and many education organizations and boards. Governor Schwarzenegger’s careful position is that he doesn’t believe that a Supreme Court ruling ought to be open to being overturned by a popular vote. The hopeful signs are that the proposition is not all that popular. The no faction had a significant lead in polling until very recently but there is the danger that Jane identified, that Obama voters will not necessarily oppose the proposal; and Obama himself has taken much the same position as Schwarzenegger.

Musing on this has oddly reminded me of a documentary I saw when it was released thirty years ago. Word is Out was, I believe, the first to gather views from lesbians and gay men to tell, as the movie’s subtitle had it, “stories of some of our lives”. It was wonderful but it quickly seemed to drop from view. Searching on the net just now, I learn that its producer Peter Adair died of Aids in 1996 and that a 30th anniversary DVD has been released (actually a year late) and was shown in June, very properly, at a film festival in the Castro district of San Francisco (which I visited myself a couple of years after the filming was done).

All of those interviewed in the film were adorable and memorable, perhaps none more than George, a camp version of Oliver Hardy with a quiff. George reminisced about his discovery of the gay community in San Francisco in the early 1950s and, heartfelt and weeping, he told of the way groups would put their arms round each other at the end of meetings and sing ‘God Save Us Nellie Queens’.

Our friend Jane and her guy voted early because they plan to spend 14 hours today working to maximize the no vote on Proposition 8. She doesn’t have to do this but I love that she wants to. And of course she sees it as a matter of decency and politics and comradeship, supporting those who, though embracing a different sexual orientation, are still her sisters and brothers. Though they live in a different part of the world, the lesbians and gay men of California are also my sisters and brothers and I send them my love and support. Deliver all of us Nellie queens from oppression, marginalizing, stereotyping and the denial of full and equal rights everywhere in the world. And please don’t forget to elect Senator Obama while you’re about it.

The PRIVACY of the VOTING BOOTH

The time zone difference ensures that events unfolding in the late afternoon and evening in the United States occupy the small hours here in Britain. In years past, I could take in my stride sitting up all night, even on a pretty regular basis. But not any more. Even the Oscars now have to wait until next day.

Four years ago, I went to bed after Bob Worcester of the MORI polling organization had “called” the presidential election on ITV. I was staying at a friend’s house at the time and, had I been at home, I would surely have dallied a little longer. Sadly, Sir Robert (as he was able to style himself the following year, having by then taken British citizenship, which rendered his honorary knighthood “substantive”) had called the election for Senator Kerry. I awoke to the dismaying news that George W Bush had won a second term. It will be interesting to see whether ITV repeats its invitation to Worcester to add his supposedly expert take on the vote this time. Perhaps, if it does, I shall email an embarrassing comment.

Eight years ago, needless to say, the dawn found me still glued to all the American channels that our satellite dish could reach as the astonishing dead-heat drama played itself out in Florida. It went on, as you will recall, for several weeks (though I did go to bed betweentimes), thanks to the “hanging chads”, a phrase that veterans of that saga will forever utter with hushed reverence.

On the night of Britain’s 1997 election, thousands retired exhausted and exhilarated after the proverbial “Portillo moment”, the unexpected taking of a major Tory scalp by a charming and sweet gay man who was a lot more “out” than the defeated minister. But I lasted much longer and enjoyed many announcements almost as sweet. Bliss was it in that near-dawn to be watching live.

Every election of which I have been aware in my lifetime has been “the most significant for a generation”. Whatever the outcome, however, the race this time is especially compelling and I am already pacing myself for an all-nighter, unconvinced though I am that my dwindling stamina will permit me to last the course. The media on both sides of the Atlantic called it weeks ago for Senator Obama, save for the BBC, which includes a health warning in all its election reports – sometimes the health warning is the report. For the last few days, it has suited both Senators McCain and Obama to talk up the former’s prospects. Both want to motivate their base and nothing gets the vote out like a conclusion that is not foregone.

But I still fear that McCain really is in with a shout. And there must be a worry far beyond the Democratic Party that this is a possibility. For if the Republicans were to pull a victory from the jaws of defeat, there would assuredly be an explosion in the cities and maybe not confined to the cities. Black America has suffered so many reverses. For it to be denied now its moment to furnish a president with so much potential for good would be unthinkable as well as unacceptable. Many would cry “fix”, for remember that it was the Republicans who, with the help of a Bush relative in the Fox camp in Florida, pre-empted the knife-edge result in that 2000 poll and hung onto the election even though Bush had lost the popular vote to Al Gore.

More likely – and more significant – than suspicions of political chicanery would be what it would say about the American electorate. The hidden, unspoken issue in this campaign is race. It surfaces in the innuendo that Obama is, in an unspecified way (but you know what they mean), not a “true” American, whatever the hell one of those is (Governor Schwarzenneger, perhaps). The unprecedented drive to register blacks to be eligible to vote and the evident high turnout of blacks in the early voting that the system now allows may very well be offset – even overwhelmed – by voters who, though they would have voted even for Hillary Clinton (a woman!), cast their vote for McCain for no better reason than that he is the white candidate. These voters – and there may well be hundreds of thousands of them – will largely not have told polling organizations of their intention because, even in the deep south, racism is only rarely something you shout from the rooftops these days. Some who vote for McCain, kidding themselves that he is the “better” man and that Governor Palin would make a perfectly adequate replacement if he were to fail to complete his term, will feel a residual, secret shame for their action, especially if he has a narrow victory.

Can the States be that racist? Oh yes. Everywhere can be that racist. Look at the ugly abuse aimed at Lewis Hamilton on a website in Spain, abuse sparked by his close rivalry for the Formula One world title with an Hispanic driver, Felipe Massa, but shaped by the fact that Hamilton was the product of a white mother and a black father. Sports fans in other European countries (especially in the newly communitaire east) reserve their most hostile receptions for black football players. And, by the way, that Spanish website, now closed down, turns out to have been owned by TWBA, an advertising agency whose HQ is in New York.

And even here in the blameless West Country of England, prejudice can raise its head more readily than one might expect. 18 months ago, there were local elections in the town to which our village is attached. In this town, where live a number of families of Asian and oriental origin but few of African or West Indian descent, a councillor was elected on the BNP ticket. It was said that this was by default, that the major parties omitted to put up candidates and so the man got in without a fight. Looking at the results on the council’s website, it was hard to see how the BNP man had garnered sufficient votes to have taken a seat in any permutation of the results. The town’s good name was restored a little when the new member came to the town hall to take up his seat and the demonstration against him was sufficient to bring television cameras to the high street. But of course it was too late to stop him sitting in council, reminding us of Burke’s adage that “all that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing”.

The Democrats, I feel sure, are savvy about the submerged racism in the electorate and will be working right up to the moment that the polls close to maximise their vote, bussing people to the ballot who have never made the journey before and may never do so again. But if it turns out that the issue that determines the result is the one that no one has frankly addressed throughout this seemingly endless campaign, I fear for the safety of businesses, properties and even people in white neighbourhoods on Wednesday. I earnestly hope it doesn’t come to that and the way to be sure is to elect Barack Obama with the handsome majority – in both houses too – that he deserves.

The BBC is a DAMAGED BRAND

My thousands of regular readers will know only too well that I do not hold with pranks, hoaxes, practical jokes, impersonations, nuisance phone calls or any other variety of supposed jape. Accordingly, it will not bring the edifice crashing to the ground if I do not rush to defend the BBC in its handling of what will perhaps become known as the Answergate Scandal.

For those lucky enough to have had this particular – and particularly unattractive – episode pass them by (my many readers overseas, for instance), let me swiftly recap. Russell Brand, who is of course the son of comedienne Jo Brand, is a farouche and hirsute comic who has had fairly mystifying success in Britain during the last couple of years but has yet to convince audiences across the Atlantic of his appeal. Before we rush to congratulate them on their good taste, let us remind ourselves that Americans do laugh at Jerry Lewis, Rodney Dangerfield and Martin Lawrence.

Among his other duties in Britain, Brand hosts a Saturday peak-time programme on Radio 2, once the cosiest of the BBC’s wireless channels but latterly aimed at younger audiences. I have never felt it incumbent upon me to listen to this programme and severe readers may think this a laxity on my part. How may I presume to draw inferences upon a broadcast that I have never experienced? Such a shortcoming has not inhibited thousands of others from expressing forthright views, of course, on this or any other work of art or entertainment. In this case, however, rough video footage of the edition in question – perhaps taken on a mobile phone – has now been broadcast on dozens of television news bulletins so that even those not predisposed to make a judgment will at least have formed a strong impression.

Brand’s in-studio guest was the highly-paid BBC presenter Jonathan Ross. Telephone conversations are evidently part of the programme’s style and Brand attempted to contact the actor Andrew Sachs who, as every news bulletin has been at pains to point out, is 78. Whether this contact was pre-agreed or not has been disputed. At any rate, Sachs’ answerphone machine kicked in. Brand reckons to have a connection with Sachs in that he had enjoyed a relationship with the actor’s dancer granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. Brand and Ross talked into and across the mouthpiece of the phone, so that their remarks would be picked up by Sachs’ answering machine. At one point, Ross shouted “He fucked your granddaughter”. The pair then speculated as to whether this intelligence would drive Sachs to commit suicide.

A week later, The Mail on Sunday ran a story about the broadcast and Sachs let it be known that, not surprisingly, he had found the recording he discovered on his machine very offensive. Ms Baillie later gave it as her opinion that both Brand and Ross should be sacked by the BBC. By this time, the story was the lead in newspapers and broadcast bulletins. Much was made of the fact that, contrary to what is widely expected of most talk radio, The Russell Brand Show is not broadcast live. Consequently, producers and editors had two days to consider whether anything recorded was not suitable for broadcasting. It seems that the remark I quoted from Ross above was actually broadcast (a language warning is carried at the top of the show) and it would of course have been preserved on Sachs’ answerphone. The listening millions merely heard an expletive; the butt of the prank heard an expletive that attached to the person of his granddaughter.

It is not news that Brand’s programme is pre-recorded. Two and a half years ago, when the programme was carried by Radio 6, there was a fuss when it was discovered that a supposed competition based on text messaging had been faked and the prize awarded to a BBC staff member. The competition could only have been executed in a live programme and it was the revelation that it was not live that exposed the fake. So many broadcast scams were being exposed at that time, however, that the Brand version was doubtless considered small beer.

By lunchtime today, the BBC had by its own admission received some 18,000 complaints against Brand and Ross, an astonishing number. People clearly feel very empathetic towards somebody whose domestic space has been invaded and whose relative, not a public figure, traduced. Brand and Ross have been suspended pending an internal inquiry. As one who was dismissed from the BBC thirty years ago for “talking to the press without prior written consent” (a technicality which you might think – and you would be right – is breached daily with impunity), I cannot but feel that dismissal is justified here. Ross in particular looks culpable. The pair have been supported by a predominantly young listenership who reckon to think this is all a fuss about nothing but Ross is no youngster. At rising 48 he is of his apologists’ parents' generation. He is plenty old enough to understand what the parameters are and to recognize when adolescent behaviour looks merely pathetic in a middle-aged man.

But a lot of blame attaches to the BBC too. Who was sleeping on their watch when the recording was passed for broadcast? Why did it take so long for the Corporation to get to grips with this matter? It inevitably looks as though they were waiting to see how far they had “got away with it”, rather than confronting their expensive stars immediately and as a matter of course. And the supposed artistic defence about “cutting edge” humorists who “push the boundaries” looks pathetic when raised to support mere po-willy-bum juvenilia. Brand told journalists he thought the whole matter was “funny”. He is a person who has been given a free ride in a complaisant climate and it really is time that he got a wake-up call.

As for questions in the house and first Cameron, then Brown feeling that they need to deliver themselves of an opinion, I am simply aghast. As Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells might cry: “Has the celebrity culture gone mad?”

P.S: Seconds after I posted this, it was announced that Russell Brand had resigned from presenting his Radio 2 programme.

BANKS on the RUN

It’s very hard for an unreconstructed old Socialist like me to watch the current “financial crisis” without roaring with laughter. The triumph of capitalism – the worst historical development of my lifetime and the one that ensures the relatively imminent end of all life on the planet, because capitalism has no interest (and I do mean interest) in the long term measures necessary to reverse climate change or disarm the fanatics – is not, I think, about to meet its nemesis, but the shine has certainly come off it. Nearly 40 years ago, the centrist Tory leader Edward Heath coined the phrase “the unacceptable face of capitalism”. Now everyone has seen that face.

Of course you will say that I cannot be a proper Socialist because I don’t wear sackcloth and live off nuts and berries. Far from it, I aver. I may well be one of those Champagne Socialists they speak of. For that I make no apology. “When in Rome” and other wise old sayings will cover the case. When capitalism has triumphed and no political movement with a realistic prospect of power subscribes to Socialism any longer – Labour having torn up Clause IV and embraced not only the free market but privatisation, franchising, non-state education and private pension and health schemes – there’s not much point in holding out for Utopia. But I don’t have to foreswear what I still think is a better philosophy. I can have a portfolio of shares (inherited from my father, save for some small holdings I took when my financial advisor insisted that I was wasting my capital, along with a modest investment I made in the building society that once gave us a mortgage) and yet feel just as strongly against the principle of unearned income as I did when I was 20. Divesting myself of my shares won’t bring the revolution a day closer. The implosion of capitalism is much more likely to achieve that.

What stops me cackling at the “panic” (so called) that daily grips the money markets is the possibility that people I know and care about may be embarrassed and even hurt. However fastidious or timid or incendiary we might be, we have all made our accommodations with triumphalist capitalism, whether it’s accepting a queue-jump from BUPA because it’s a loved one’s health or taking out an ISA or buying to let. We deal with the world as we find it. Believe me, I’d change it if I had the power to do so.

There is some consolation in that the current climate is proving deleterious to right-wing parties. The easy money culture that Reagan and Thatcher promoted in the 1980s has tarred their heirs with all of the feathers that fly when – to change the image – the shit hits the fan. Good.

Of course it doesn’t ensure that Obama will win the US presidency, any more than it necessarily prolongs Brown’s tenure at Downing Street. But it puts conservative forces on the back foot, at least for now. The rallying cry for deregulation, silencing every other voice for a quarter of a century, falls now on unsympathetic ears. It cannot be a coincidence that the most regulated banking systems – that in Sydney, for instance – have taken the smallest hits. Fragile and opportunist new money markets, such as that in Russia, are in free fall. And the Icelandic banks, which tried to steal a march on their rivals by waving giveaway deals at all and sundry, have proved the least robust of all. Had we all known that our local councils and police services and charities had put so much trust in the Icelandic snake-oil salesmen, we might have raised our voices. We were no doubt naïve to imagine that the Council Tax that they took off us was being invested in actual services. After all, that’s not how venture capitalism works and we are all venture capitalists now, even individual care homes and hospices.

As for the Serious Money types in the city, we can only hope that they start throwing themselves from high buildings in significant numbers. The quarter-century gravy train won’t actually come off the rails, even if the high street banks do start to fold, because all those sharks are hedging their own funds as hard as they can and praying that no new rules will in reality begin to deleverage them. None will, of course. There are too many loopholes to plug and there is too much street-smart for the authorities to outwit. When RBS finally accepts that it will have to part company with the indefensible Sir Fred Goodwin, you can be sure that he will walk away with a sum nearer eight figures than seven.

People are paid top dollar to protect the ill-gotten gains of the asset-strippers and speculators and arbitrageurs. There are people in the city called reward advisors, even as specific as employee-benefits-and-incentive advisors. These people’s function is to maximize bounty and to minimize exactions. They are clearly not serving the general good. The whole financial district is designed to produce one result, the enriching of itself. For a very long time, it has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.

What has been most astonishing is the every-man-for-himself stance that kicks in as soon as the going gets tough. “Panic” only reigns if individuals are panicking. Each of them knows full well that the effect of “panic” is to exacerbate the climate because the panic spreads. The city seems to be chronically and pathetically short of individuals wise, experienced and authoritative enough to bang heads together and tell them to get a grip. Some money markets have been temporarily closed by their governments. Perhaps all the world’s stock exchanges should be shut down for a cooling off period. Liquidity will have to wait. Debts will go unpaid until the market settles again. There is no deal of any kind anywhere in the world, save for a medical emergency or natural disaster, that cannot be put on hold for a few days. The CEOs and market managers could use the time to gather their people together and tell them, upon pain of instant dismissal, that they are to behave like grown-ups instead of stampeding cattle.

For the rest of us, we marvel at how central government can put its hand in its pocket and pull out a wad of millions, at no notice. If they can do that to stop HBOS and co going into receivership, why can’t they do it to pay for the schools, hospitals, railways and arts organisations we need in order to remain a decent country? Come to think of it, they do that to fund foreign invasions and occupations too. They only ever “find the money” or run up the debt for exercises that the ordinary voters don’t care about. You could hardly ask for a more vivid demonstration of how political leaders, as a matter of course, lose touch with the needs of the people they serve. Now that they are faced with financial meltdown, they had better get back in touch with the people damn quick.

WHITE FLAGS of ALL NOTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIGHT HERE in ST LOUIS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANYBODY HERE SEEN KELLY?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIT DOWN, YOU’RE ROCKING the BOAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POWER BACK to the PEOPLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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