DROPPING BY

Recently Google published its annual survey of search criteria, which survey it is pleased to call Zeitgeist. Hardly any of the names featured on the list means anything to me, so I am clearly well outside the zeitgeist. I suspect, though, that, unlike me, most of those who have sought the persons on the list never have cause to use the term zeitgeist in any other context (unless, of course, there is a pop combo, unknown to me, called Zeitgeist – which seems perfectly likely).

This blog, like many (most?) others, features a visitor counter to keep me (and indeed my readers) abreast of the rate of visits made to the site. It appears as a numeral framed off-centre in an elongated rectangle predominantly of yellow on the right side of the screen, below the archive list, the “about me” paragraph, the site search box and the roster of regular readers, stubbornly stuck at five (go on, register: it costs nothing). The counter, as it declares, is supplied by blogpatrol.com and it is a free service.

Blog Patrol gives me access to quite a lot of useful information about my visitors. Not their identities or their email addresses, you will be relieved to know, but their countries of origin (which always fascinates and thrills me as I imagine readers in circumstances, cultures and time zones far removed from my own) and the specific search criteria of those who have arrived by search engine. This last information is the most electrifying of all.

By a long stretch, the single search term that has brought more visitors than any other to this blog (and continues to do so) has been Elin Nordegren. I first mentioned her, rather in passing, when I wrote about her then husband, Tiger Woods, at the time that his life and golfing career first began to unravel (‘Go Get ’im, Tiger’ November 29th 2009). Because the photograph of her that I found through Google Images was so amusing – she looks, if she will forgive me, like the archetypal gentlemen’s club cocktail waitress that seems to be the type to which Woods is unfailingly drawn – I included the image in the posting. For a while, my visitor numbers went through the roof. Never slow to capitalise on a good thing, I attempt to repeat the trick here:

Here she is, boys, back by popular demand: Elin Nordegren

The other big draw – at least at the time – was William Hague and his bedroom-sharing escapade with his aide Chris Myers (‘Don’t Be Vague …’ August 28th 2010 and ‘Smear Studies’ September 5th 2010). This blog was almost the first to name Hague, way before the print and broadcast media did so, and that, I imagine, generated much of the traffic. Hague survived, Myers didn’t, which is the way round you would expect with Tories.

Somebody came several times to this blog with the search “HAGUE AND Myers sitting in a tree” (searcher’s use of upper case). I hope he found what he was looking for, but if it was a photographic image or a reported sighting, I never came across it myself.

A great many people got very exercised about the Hague/Myers matter. A man living within walking distance of us wrote to The Sunday Times complaining that it was a pretty poor show when two chaps couldn’t thriftily share a room without people making something of it. I wrote in reply, pointing out that this wasn’t a case of two teenaged backpackers on a budget cycling tour bunking down together, it was a millionaire Foreign Secretary and a man young enough to be his son whose entire career depended on the older man’s patronage, but the paper obviously thought this was too extreme to publish.

The Moet & Chandon room at the Hotel Du Vin in Birmingham where, staff confirm, William Hague entertained his young fellow spartan

Other search criteria have been considerably more perplexing. I have had visitors looking for references to eBay and to Michael Jackson. When I checked just now, there were approximately 215 million results of a Google search for the late Jacko and 425 million for the on-line trading site. I do not imagine – and do not imagine that I tested the theory – that the two mentions of Jackson in my blog index (there may be other unlinked references) appear in the first 214.5 million of those results or that the three mentions of eBay are ever again likely to be reached in a Google search. Whoever came to my blog on his (her? – no, surely his) quest for stuff on Jackson must have devoted hundreds of hours to that quest before getting to me and, on visiting Common Sense, been deeply disappointed. Not even a pic! Here’s one as consolation:

Jacko or at least a fair facsimile

Another search that must have required a multitude of stops before it arrived at this blog was the question: is ed miliband circumcised (searcher’s lower case and lack of question mark). As the Labour leader is Jewish, I think the answer is an unforeskinned conclusion, but why ask me?

Some devotee of James Lundie has sought him on this site, once accounting him “handsome” and once “fit”. The James Lundie who once appeared here is the partner of the former coalition cabinet minister David Laws. There also seems to have been a Scottish footballer of that name (not knowingly referred to by me before) but of course “fit”, in modern parlance, can mean, nicely defined as well as regularly exercising.

One search that made me smile was “Simon Longland leaves Harrods”. This evidently had not exactly been a headline across the international press. I put it into Google myself and was informed that there were no results if the line was placed in quotes. Without the quotes, there were 576 results, the first three of them pieces from The Financial Times about this Longland character who is – or was – fashion accessories general merchandise manager at Harrods’. This blog was listed eighth, on the strength of my referring to Sir Jack Longland, the late chairman of the wireless quiz My Word, linked up with a different reference on the site to “leaves” in the sense of foliage. It’s this kind of serendipity that makes using search engines a somewhat laborious business.

Another unfamiliar name that brought me a visitor was cited in the search “donna e carroll adultery”. Again searching for the phrase myself, I found this blog listed because I entitled one posting ‘The Woman Taken in Adultery’ (a piece about the Northern Irish political couple Peter and Iris Robinson). The Mrs Carroll sought appears to have been the subject of a trial in Wisconsin in 1990 at which archaic laws concerning adultery were invoked – it sounds quite diverting. That Google should list my blog under this search seems excessively tenuous.

Two queries about other public figures needlessly brought searchers to this blog: “sue lawley rumour” and “pj proby benefits fraud”. Google appears to carry no satisfaction for anyone wanting to spread a rumour about Ms Lawley and my only reference to her concerned her asking Gordon Brown on Desert Island Discs if he was gay. There was an evidently inconclusive story about the famously trousers-splitting ’60s pop star and a fraud inquiry some years ago but as there has (until now) been no reference to Proby on this blog, it is curious that Google should ever have directed anyone here.

Some of the criteria are just weird. The search itself is weird and any notion that I might provide satisfaction is even weirder. One seeker after truth had as his quarry “the song from movie here on earth where chris klein is drinking by himself in the %”. I’ve seen a few movies so I know who Chris Klein is and the search makes a bit more sense when you know that Here on Earth is a movie title. Klein was a coming man a decade ago but is so no longer and, my enquiries reveal, has, as it happens, been in and out of alcohol-related rehab. But this is his debut on my blog.

Here are some other searches that have disturbed this quiet corner of the net:
– chappie-shasta ohv 1990 Dedicated to Chappie
– como ter um bumbum como os dregs quij
– bruce1btrfancy wheel 60[1]
– 2010 GMTC steel &metals market research Bars rank
– MIAO NATIVE PEOPLE
– youtube zonal restriction
– winking 101 in russia1 acter
– show iqra carner in min caster
– beaumondeau
– sweet words of pismotality
– the heights where is big coke is processed
– HnKO«P Ã COUPT
Why any of these searches should bring their perpetrators to my blog is most mysterious. The last appeared in Cyrillic and I used some ingenuity to get all the letters reproduced but they have not been retained as I determined them in transferring to the blog.

However, these mysterious quests all add to the gaiety of nations and, as far as I am concerned, such visitors are all most welcome, no matter how eccentric their requirements. Come one, come all, I say.

For the sake of balance, here is a recent portrait of Miss Ann Widdecombe

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Now, any idea what this is? –

“The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway.
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, LA.
But it’s December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up north”.

Well, it’s the verse, usually omitted (certainly by Bing Crosby in his most famous version) of Irving Berlin’s imperishable seasonal standard ‘White Christmas’. And of course it goes some way to explaining the particular yearning quality of the song. People in California and other southern and western states, especially those who have moved there, are rather apt to envy those in the north and east of the US the more wintry weather that they often experience. If you want to hear the song complete with verse and not just with refrain, go to Phil Spector’s vintage album, A Christmas Gift for You (the first real collectable pop album, released in 1963), where Darlene Love sings it very nicely; or the first of Barbra Streisand’s two magnificent Yule collections, A Christmas Album of 1967 or Bette Midler’s Cool Yule CD of 2006.

White Christmas? Bah. Technically, a white Christmas is one on which snow is recorded as falling on the day. Various parts of Scotland had a white Christmas. But everyone else in Britain saw nothing but white for weeks and we were sick to the back teeth of it by Christmas Day. Yes, I know southern California and even Los Angeles actually had flooding (most bizarre) and that blizzards have brought the eastern seaboard to a standstill in the last few days, but these people are johnny-come-latelys. Since the third week of October, there have only been three days, at the start of this month, when there wasn't lying snow in the UK and since those three days it's been deep and crisp and even, turning to impacted, frozen and frankly dangerous. Over the last couple of days, a steady thaw has set in and suddenly there’s the unfamiliar view of grass and pavements and roofs. But there’s further snow in the forecast. The boffins are now saying that this has been the coldest December in Britain since 1890. I don't doubt it.

Anyway, our celebrations were put on metaphorical as well as actual ice. My partner and I were both ill for the duration, he much more than me (and he is the chef), and what’s more while he is a brilliant nurse and I an ideal patient, the reverse cannot be said to apply. So the seasonal fare all went into the freezer, the presents finally got opened on Wednesday night and still it is largely a house of sickness. I don’t somehow think there will be much wassailing at New Year’s here either. So bah. And humbug.

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I blubbed my way through the concluding pair of episodes of Ugly Betty, shown back-to-back in Britain on E4 the other week. I’m sorry to see the show end, because it has certainly diverted me over its four-year run, but that wasn’t what got me blubbing. Nor was it the playing out of Betty’s own particular (peculiar) career path. No, it was the resolution of the treatment of Betty’s kid nephew that got to me. Justin’s subplot has traced the growth of a gay boy from 12 to 16, really without ever putting a foot wrong, a remarkable achievement in a mainstream US television comedy drama. Whether the Colombian show from which it derives, Yo soy Betty, la fea, is quite so enlightened, I cannot say.

Happy 2011 to all my readers.

LYING FALLOW

A couple of postings ago (‘Messenger Shooting’ December 5th), I mentioned an unpublished letter that I had sent to The Guardian in response to David Hare’s “hymn of praise” (as I called it) for Simon Callow, who frequently reviews theatre-related books for the paper. Sir David’s review of – or rather disquisition upon – Callow’s collected occasional pieces along with a new biography of Sarah Bernhardt may be read here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/nov/20/david-hare-actors-sarah-bernhardt

You may wonder, as I did, whether the world is truly short of books telling us how wonderful actors are. Sir David requires to keep actors as a breed rather sweeter than do the rest of us because they are the ones who bring the majority of his important words to us.

My letter went like this:

“Dear Madam,

The paperback edition of Simon Callow’s Love is Where It Falls (Penguin 2000) was prominently adorned with a quotation from David Hare: ‘Exquisite … Perhaps the best theatrical memoir of our day’. As a theatrical memoir was precisely what the book wasn’t, one naturally fell to wondering whether Sir David had indeed troubled to open it.

The puffing of one’s friends, particularly in the books pages, is a harmless and timeless sport, save when it perpetrates an injustice. In further beatifying Mr Callow (Give actors a break, November 20), Sir David commits several of these, not least the rendering of Sir Antony Sher as hors de combat in his gathering of an imagined consensus around the notion that Callow is ‘the best writer-actor we have’.

Having been (I thought) woefully miscast as Mozart in the original stage production, Callow fared better in the much smaller role of Schikaneder in Milos Forman's movie of Amadeus

Finding himself in general agreement with Callow on individual actors reinforces Sir David’s admiration. They evidently concur that Paul Scofield was ‘the supreme actor’, in whom they detected ‘emotional wisdom’. The tired technicalities and career-spanning mannerisms of Scofield find a contemporary mirror in Sir Ian McKellen, whose wheels may be observed noisily turning in every performance. Hare does manage to name one player with a genuine gift for accuracy of reading and truth of effect in Penelope Wilton, for me the Celia Johnson of our generation – now there was an actress whose economy of means and unerring emotional authenticity was supreme, but her stage work is forgotten, far more so than that dear old ham o’ the halls, Sir Peter Ustinov [whom Hare had bogglingly described in his piece as ‘forgotten’].

As to the resentment that Hare detects towards actors among journalists, I merely observe that, as one of a multitude squeezed out of a journalistic career in recent years by the daily invasion into our trade of actors, comedians and, I dare say, playwrights, I will be pleased to slap down any actor who crosses my path, however fêted.

Yours faithfully,”

That Hare and Callow are old chums may not be doubted. In the index to Callow’s first book [Being an Actor 1984], there are more references to Hare than to anyone else save for Laurence Olivier, Callow’s hero.

When I first came to London in the mid-1960s, I immediately began to haunt the Old Vic. At this lovely old theatre, Olivier’s National Theatre Company were in residence and presenting a revolving repertoire of (mostly) classics with the occasional new play. I saw everything they mounted there. Though I retain no memory of his face, I remember that there was one noisy, chirpy, flirtatious chappie often on duty in the box office. It was only after I got to know him about a decade later that I was able to confirm that this was certainly Master Callow.

Never perform with children or animals

The first of Simon’s acting performances that I saw would have been his role in Martin Sherman’s Passing By, presented by Gay Sweatshop at the Almost Free Theatre off Shaftesbury Avenue. Gay Sweatshop – which came to be known to its familiars as Sweaties – was an attempt to establish a tradition of theatre that addressed homosexual issues of all kinds. It was set up by Roger Baker, Gerald Chapman, Drew Griffiths and Laurence Collinson – all of them now dead – and, after a perilous start, it attracted Arts Council funding and enjoyed a bumpily productive run for several years. The other actor in that inaugural season to catch my eye was a South African called Antony Sher.

I don’t recall the occasion upon or circumstances in which I first properly met Simon – it turned out that we had quite a few friends in common, as was apt to occur on the London gay scene (or, I dare say, on the gay scene anywhere) – but I was gravely informed by a mutual friend later that Simon found me “the most sexually exciting man” whom he had met all year. And, before you ask, we met in November. So I was predisposed to look upon him favourably. At what point we bumped into each other at Bang disco – the only place to be, in those days, on a Monday night – and found ourselves back at my place, I cannot now recall. But we passed a jolly night.

Thereafter, I followed his career with particular interest. And in those days, Simon Callow was beginning to be a name to drop. He was terrific in Mary Barnes, Epsom Downs and A Mad World, My Masters. The critics loved him and he caught the eye generally but he was yet very much a star of what was still a new movement in the theatre: the London fringe.

The birthplace of fringe theatre was the Edinburgh Festival, where indeed Callow had first trodden the boards. In August 1978, when I was a drama producer at BBC Birmingham, I went to the overlapping Edinburgh Television Festival, then in its infancy. Following a screening at Film House one afternoon, I sat down in the lounge area with various industry pals while we loudly discussed what we had just seen. Already at the table where we sat was a strikingly beautiful young man, whose eye I caught. As I carried on being dazzling with my chums, I found myself playing kneesie with this vision and, whenever I caught his eye again, he dissolved into smiles. As far as I could see, my colleagues (one of whom, bizarrely, was a woman with whom I had earlier been involved) were unaware of this private romantic comedy. Then we all got up to go, having a reception to attend and, thereafter, a party. I turned to my new friend and invited him to join us – which, to my delight, he readily did.

His name was Aziz Yehia. His late father had been what Aziz termed a pasha in Egypt – pasha is in fact a Turkish word – and the family had been driven out under Nasser’s rule. Aziz always described his mother as “a Turkish peasant”; she lived in Switzerland where Aziz had citizenship. He had divided his growing years between Zurich and Los Angeles. In both locations, the Yehias seem to have mixed with a movie crowd: the Gene Kellys, the William Holdens, Kay Kendall (who supposedly dropped the baby Aziz from her lap when drunk), Marlene Dietrich and so on. Sydney Guilaroff, a name familiar from thousands of Hollywood credits, did his mother’s hair.

Aziz was then a student at the National Film School in Beaconsfield. He was wholly a movie brat, but very much in a glossy, romantic tradition, the sort of fare that he would have seen constantly while growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s. He fancied himself as Audrey Hepburn, in whose elfin image he was certainly cast by nature. He liked to tease me with Audrey’s most charming lines: “Do you know what’s wrong with you? Nothing”.

But he was also damaged goods, as indeed seemed to be everyone with whom I discovered a mutual attraction. He was clearly what we now call bipolar. When in one of what he called his “black lagoons”, there was no reaching him. Even when he was up, he drank suicidally strong coffee first thing and later Carlsberg Special Brew, the tipple of serious drunks.

Callow, always a colourful character

All that aside, he and I had a delightful relationship that extended through the better part of a year. We went to a lot of theatre and cinema together and one riveting occasion was a revival of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the tiny Half Moon Theatre in Aldgate. The lead was taken by Simon Callow. The night we saw it, he had an explosive, streaming cold. In the role, he wore a clownish false nose on an elasticated string. His cold poured out around this nose. At his fittest, Simon is an exudative performer, perspiring and spitting and generally leaving a trail of mucus, snot, sputum and sweat. On this night, the audience was drenched in bodily fluids.

In the pub afterwards, I introduced Simon to the highly excited Aziz. We lathered the star with praise. Looking back, I think this was probably his finest piece of work. Another evening, Aziz and I had dinner with friends I had made through my fan-like attachment to Sweaties: Peter Whitman and Alan Pope. Also present were Simon and his then boyfriend, the actor Robin Hooper. After dinner, we were prevailed upon to play a sort of variation of the television game Mr & Mrs, rather against my better judgment. Alan and Peter, the longest established couple, won this easily. I found I did not much enjoy Aziz and I being asked searching questions about our relationship, especially when I gave answers that I thought tactful and kind and then Aziz contradicted me.

I doubt that this was any kind of augury of the end of our relationship. Nor do I think that Aziz began to see Simon before we broke up. A decent interval passed after we agreed to go our separate ways before I heard that Simon and Aziz were an item. Not everyone thought them well suited. I recall one member of Simon's circle saying that he thought Aziz played the “beauty and the beast” card a little too obviously.

At some point in their relationship, Aziz lost his right to stay in Britain. He returned to Switzerland from whence I occasionally heard from him. His depressions not surprisingly deepened. In 1982, my then flat-mate Phil Taft took his own life. Aziz, who had known and rather scorned Phil’s skittishness and youth (he was ten years younger than me, seven younger than Aziz), was electrified by this event. Two years later, he followed suit.

When Callow published the aforementioned Love is Where It Falls, I decided not to rush to read it, having swiftly learned that Aziz figured in it as well as its second lead (after Simon himself), Peggy Ramsay. But I inadvertently blundered into the author reading from the book late at night on the BBC World Service and then could not switch off. The first thing that struck me was that Callow pronounced his late lover’s name as As-is. He had introduced himself to me – and I had always known him as – As-ease. This was strange.

What Simon writes of Aziz in the book only occasionally chimes with what I knew and/or would have written. His characterization of the boy as some kind of intellectual is perfectly absurd, the kind of exorbitance that, pace David Hare, only an actor would reach for. My sole appearance in the account is this: “[Aziz] and I had met some two and a half years before. He had then been involved with a mutual friend, but in the fullness of time, this involvement had come to an end, and I had seized my moment” [p 22]. “A mutual friend” is a curiously inapt phrase but, along with the variations on the notion of being “involved”, it seems to argue from Simon’s perspective that my relationship with Aziz was to be discounted in the light of his own grand passion. He doesn’t mention, also, that I acted (brilliantly, I can confidently add) in one of the short films made by Aziz at Beaconsfield, to which Simon alludes. I can’t help remembering, too, that a resonant backdrop to all this is Callow’s earlier feeling declared about me.

The unbridled account of Simon’s mourning after Aziz’ death is hard for a non-theatrical to take. One part, coming after the lovingly detailed description of his first expressions of emotion, particularly sticks in my craw: “the days were filled with telling his friends and mine what had happened. They already knew, of course; such news seems to pass around almost before it’s happened, but they needed to hear it from me, and I needed to tell it to them” [p 125]. All, that is, except the “mutual friend”, whom Simon didn’t think to call until Aziz had been dead over a week. And I didn’t already know because all our other mutual friends assumed that Simon would have told me. That left a bitter taste that has yet to go away.

Simon describes a week he spent on Capri “howling like an animal, till my throat was sore” [p 129] yet is in love with someone else within eight pages, like any actor ringing down the curtain on one role and rushing off to the next read-through. Is it any wonder if I find actors a shallow breed?

Apart from a passing encounter in the auditorium before one of the last shows at the lamented Mermaid Theatre, I have not seen Simon Callow to speak to in many years. In 1998, I left a message on his answering machine because I wanted to pick his brains about the control of emotion when one is reading to an audience – I was going to recite a Shakespearean sonnet at my father’s funeral and I once heard Simon read the entire sonnet-sequence, stumbling only over the most famous (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”) – but he never returned my call.

In truth, Simon Callow is one of the most personally generous people I have ever known. The generosity of his laughter is known to anyone who has ever sat in the same audience as him. He is, in all things, profligate and no one is ever in want when he is near.

I once wrote a stage play of which I felt rather proud. I had hugely enjoyed Tony Harrison’s rhyming-couplets translation of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, with which the National Theatre had a huge hit, starring Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg. Under its influence, I wrote a comedy in rhyming couplets called The Secretive Agent, wherein a London literary agent was comprehensively embarrassed by a sudden visit from his parents, whose dull suburbanism he wished to keep from his circle and from whom he wished to keep his own homosexuality. I don’t suppose for a moment that the satire was either very penetrating or very correct but I believed that I had handled the discipline of the verse with considerable niftiness.

Simon read the play and was kindly about it. He was more than kindly; he offered to arrange a reading of it at his flat. He and I between us recruited a stellar cast (Miriam Margoles, Pam St Clement, Drew Griffiths). He supplied the food and drink and the paper and printing machine upon which I ran off enough copies for the cast to read. He was enormously supportive but the reading taught me that the play really didn’t work.

With (right) Sir Antony Sher and (centre) Gregory Doran (Lady Sher)

But he also did something odd. On another occasion I had told him that I wanted to write a play for him, entitled The Private Life of Charles Laughton. I knew of his obsession with this extraordinary actor – he later wrote a book about him and played (excitingly) Perelli in the gangster saga On the Spot and (not too well) Brecht’s Galileo, two of Laughton’s signature roles – and I thought he could embody Laughton, whose life as a self-hating, closeted gay man was certainly powerful. I told him that I thought Zoë Wanamaker would be wonderful as Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s wife (then still alive).

Some time later, I ran into him at a watering hole where he was holding court – in those days, Simon frequently had a claque about him – and he suddenly started talking about the notion of a play about Laughton, claiming it and the casting of Wanamaker as his own idea. I was astonished and resolved that instead I should write the play for the up-coming Simon Russell Beale who anyway was already the better actor. I never wrote it, needless to add.

But it is the failure of Callow’s promise as an actor that is the most distressing aspect of his career. In the ’70s, he was marked for leading the profession. Dusty Hughes, then the theatre editor at Time Out, remarked that he would be the first knighted actor of our generation. But he wasn’t. That honour fell to Tony Sher. I don’t know whether Callow and Sher were great rivals or whether such rivalry is something I imagine. For a long time, their lives and careers ran in parallel, even to the point that when Simon was stepping out with Robin Hooper, Sher’s boyfriend was Robin’s actor brother Jim.

But a chasm opened up because Tony started to scale all the peaks of the classical stage and Simon never did. The only Shakespeare roles he has taken are a rather unlikely Orlando in As You Like It at the National, in which he was the first ever Orlando who was clearly never in danger of losing the wrestling match, and Titus Andronicus at the Bristol Old Vic (which I didn’t see). He played Falstaff at Chichester, but in Orson Welles’ restructuring of Henry IV parts 1 & 2 as The Chimes at Midnight (Welles is an even greater Callow obsession than Laughton). That was his only performance that I ever got to review and I said that he would grow into it but in truth it was terrible.

All his vanity projects have been disastrous. There was the only movie he has directed, a rendering of Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café, which was a doggedly comprehensive hommage to the only film that Laughton ever directed, itself an hommage to DW Griffith, The Night of the Hunter. The gulf between them is that the Laughton was gradually recognised as a knockdown masterpiece whereas the Callow is, and I confidently predict will remain, forgotten. Then there was his stage version of Marcel Carné’s rapturous movie Les enfants du paradis, which we knew long before we saw it lose the RSC a huge fortune to be a truly wretched idea.

Callow’s trouble – not uncommon among thespians or among outgoing, ebullient, generous-hearted non-thespians – is that he finds it impossible to say no to anything or anyone. Tony Sher has chosen wisely and discriminatingly and planned the arc of his career with imagination and wonderful timing. He’s also much the better writer, of fiction and drama as well as books about acting. He has not enjoyed the success that Simon has had in movies but the Callow filmography is all over the place and the clear successes have not depended on his participation. His turn in Four Weddings and a Funeral is charming and touching, largely because he is pretty much playing himself, but the most affecting thing about it is the reciting of Auden’s verse by John Hannah as his bereaved lover at his funeral and the most haunting thing about that – which, to my amazement, I have never seen remarked in print – is Hannah’s facial resemblance to Aziz Yehia.

But for every Room with a View or No Man’s Land, there is an Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls or a Thunderpants. And Simon’s willingness, nay eagerness to fling off his clothes at every opportunity – to the point where, at one time, we thought the requirement must be a clause in his standard contract – is no longer sought by producers or front of house.

If there are two classes of person the young Callow excoriates in Being an Actor, they are directors and critics. Needless to say, he went on to practice both professions. I remember going to see him in Restoration, a revisionist restoration comedy at the Royal Court. I “went round” afterwards – a theatrical ritual that I loathe and only ever did regularly for Simon (and once for Tony Sher) – and he had no topic of conversation but the iniquity of Edward Bond who had not attended the press performance the night before, which sin Simon could almost forgive in him as the writer but not at all as the director. Nothing, he declared, should keep a director from seeing the cast through the first night. Not so very long after that, I heard him interviewed on the radio about his direction of a play out of town, whose first night, he mentioned en passant, he would not be able to attend.

I find him useless as a critic because he is a wholly uncritical enthusiast. He mostly reviews books about practitioners of theatre and/or film and he loves them all. Simon is one of those people – perhaps the leading one – who positively invites the properly despised term “luvvie” because he embodies every trait that that term seeks to parody. He talks and writes about actors as though they are pioneers, heroic and creative. They are not. They are gypsies and vagabonds, hired to flesh the imaginations of truly creative artists. It makes my blood boil to see actors described as having “created” a role. The playwright created the fucking role, you morons. And don’t start trying to bring things to the script. Try finding things in it instead.

Simon Callow is not the only person I have known who went on to be famous. He shares with the others the fact that I am no longer in their address books. Fame removes you from real friendships and delivers you into a world of celebrity in which you know all the other members to say hi to and know them like friends barely at all. Since his affair with Aziz, Callow has become very famous and has failed, or so I read, to find a lasting relationship. I only wish him well. I hope he can find someone who values him for himself and not for his fame. And I hope that he can turn down crap projects, refuse a few of his unnecessary reviewing offers and apply himself really self-critically to the senior years of his acting career. He could be a great Lear or a great Krapp if he truly wants to be. He could still be the fine actor he once promised to be, but he doesn’t have a lot of time.

STUDY in DEBT

My own university studies, taken up in the late 1960s, were not wholly a gift from the nation. My generation received student grants but these were means-tested and my father, being relatively comfortable, was obliged to contribute financially to the cost of my further education. Bless him, he never troubled me with knowing at what level he continued to subsidise me even as, for a while, it ominously appeared that I might be turning into what was known as “an eternal student”.

Another tag that attached itself to our generation was that we were “the children of Robbins”. The 1963 report delivered to the government by the committee chaired by Lord Robbins recommended an extensive expansion of higher education and enunciated the principal that university places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment”. The then government embraced the Robbins Report in its entirety. This was, incidentally, a Tory government; Sir Alec Douglas-Home became Prime Minister just a week before the incumbent Education Secretary, whose services Home had retained, accepted Robbins. He was Sir Edward Boyle, by a wide margin the most liberal education minister the Tories have ever fielded.

Lionel Robbins: our Daddy

Another quotation evokes the climate in which my baby boomer generation grew up, a most delicate and fastidious line that appeared frequently on notices in shops: “Please do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends”. There were no credit cards in those days and only the most disreputable elements in society asked for anything “on terms” or, in the vernacular, “on tick”. To buy furniture and other large items by hire purchase – in other words, on an instalment plan – was thought to betray a low class mentality. Respectable people “paid their way”.

Sir Edward Boyle, more liberal than Vince Cable

The arrival of the Diners’ Club card, then American Express, then Visa and Access and Mastercard transformed all that. Nowadays you’re thought a fool to pay in cash, chequebooks are being phased out and people think nothing of causing a queue to build up at the checkout because they’re waiting for the PIN to go through to pay for a carton of milk on credit.

The mindset that believes that the only way higher education can be financed is on tick and that students should be happy to graduate with substantial burdens of debt built into their futures – futures in which the housing ladder will anyway be out of reach for decades and no pension schemes will take care of them before they are at least 80 – is utterly alien to my generation. “Live now, pay later” was a dreadful warning for us when we were young. “Study now, pay later” is an obligation to any present school pupil hoping to pursue her studies.

You might imagine that the political generation who have lived with the recession that began in 2008 – which originated, you recall, in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco that caused the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the States – would be scrupulously cautious about resorting to credit as a tool of governmental policy. As always, lessons are only learnt when it suits. Universities are expensive and need to be paid for. What better way than to load the cost onto those who, in the crudest terms, benefit most? This is not a party political question. Labour introduced tuition fees. Politicians of all colours are mired in this mess.

The point is made that, for the sake of argument, a welder should not be obliged to stump up for some middle class kiddie sitting on his arse for three years pretending to read media studies. Put like that – in that highly reductive manner – it sounds like a bloody outrage. But we all pay for stuff that does not obviously benefit us. I have no children but I finance general education from nursery to present graduation level. I don’t drive a car, but I pay for roads and – you could say that roads benefit me, though a non-driver, in myriad ways, but you’d be hard put to argue that I derive much benefit from this provision – parking lots. I don’t support – indeed I vehemently oppose – the UK breaching the sovereignty of other nations, but I am still obliged to finance the Afghan War, as I was to pay for the invasion of Iraq. I don’t especially relish funding bankers’ bonuses, Trident, the Olympics, Trooping the Colour or Strictly Come Dancing, but I am not invited to vote on specific disbursements of public funds.

Nick Clegg in his subsidised Ziggy Stardust phase

Moreover, it is extremely narrow to propose that degrees in objective and scientific disciplines are the only ones to bring benefit to the whole of society. I am as disdainful as you are about some of the modern study areas that seem – on the face of it and without our troubling to go into it – indulgent and unprofitable. But whichever way you cut it, the more educated the populace – the electorate – the better.

In broad terms, an extension of general educational attainment benefits the whole of society. To fix such educational attainment in public philosophy as a privilege that must be paid for far into the future by its agents is a destructive and reductive argument. You want your doctor, your solicitor, your children’s teacher, your accountant, your chief constable, your MP, your poet, your philosopher and the maker of your television programmes to be competent and to deliver the goods. So you benefit if they are fully educated. That’s not a bad investment for society to make on your behalf.

The government argues that the deficit requires all to make sacrifices. It’s a seductive but also a reductive argument. Government is a process of choice. Economic policy is not shaped by what is affordable but by what is chosen. I would argue that foreign wars are not affordable. I maintain that everyone knows that the Taliban will take over in Afghanistan within six months at the most of NATO’s withdrawal and therefore that every day further spent in a country that, as history shows, will not yield to foreign invasion is a day – and the lives sacrificed on that day – wasted. But this government, like its predecessors, professes to imagine that building up resentment against ourselves across the Muslim world somehow guarantees the safety of our own streets. So the government chooses to spend money on waging futile war rather than on college provision or any other pressing matter at home. As I put it, they prefer to destroy livelihoods at home so that they can continue to destroy lives abroad.

Vince Cable as a student Macbeth: "Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,/Loyal and neutral in a moment? No man"

And then there is the Lib Dem dilemma. The argument is advanced that the Liberal Democrats have to be "realistic" over tuition fees because they are partaking in a coalition government. I would rather propose that, in making their solemn pledge over tuition fees during the election campaign, the Lib Dems were then being far from realistic. In what circumstance did they anticipate forming a government other than within a coalition? How far – if at all – did they plan for an accommodation in practice with either Labour or the Tories? They sprinkled undertakings like confetti because they did not imagine that they would ever be called upon them. Now, in the harsh glare of administration, the chickens have begun to come home to roost.

So I suggest that the cynicism demonstrated by Nick Clegg and his team resides not so much in the stance on tuition fees that they have taken in government but in the stance that they adopted in opposition. There is a warning here for Ed Miliband and he has shown some realism in resisting the temptation to pledge that a Labour government will repeal the government's measures. It probably won’t do him any immediate electoral good because people are, even now, susceptible to the promises of politicians. But it’s a shrewd move.

Nick Clegg well cast as a supremely arrogant student

There can be little doubt that the Lib Dems will, in the fullness of time, be punished at the ballot box for their antics on this issue. By a quirk of governmental dispensation, it fell to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, to execute the government’s policy on tuition fees. Cable’s own humming and hahing this last week about how he might vote has made him look a fool. Nick Clegg as deputy PM and Lib Dem leader has been the lightning rod for the students’ righteous anger. Both of them have been badly wounded by this episode. It’s hard to find much sympathy. We all recall Cable’s lethal thrust, when acting Lib Dem leader, against Gordon Brown at PMQ’s when he noted “the remarkable transformation of the Prime Minister from Stalin to Mr Bean”. This is not yet the moment, but I have readied a letter to The Guardian noting the remarkable transformation of the Business Secretary – whom David Cameron introduced to his new department as “an absolute star” – “from absolute star-turn to Mr Has-Been”.

MESSENGER SHOOTING

On Friday, that nicely assorted pair Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Williams both turned 80. In these straitened times, do you think they combined their celebrations?

On the BBC1 10 o’Clock News on Thursday, the sports editor David Bond posed, by my reckoning, five “big questions” concerning the failed bid to bring the football World Cup to England in 2018. There’s only one question around this matter, in my view, and it’s hardly “big”: why do grown men take this piffling stuff seriously?

Everybody in England seems to believe that FIFA, the governing body of international football, is corrupt from top to toe and that its individual members may be bought for – oh – a designer handbag or some other such trinket. On the other hand, many grumble that some supposed exposé of FIFA corruption, aired on Panorama last Monday (I didn’t see it), hobbled the English bid, even going so far as to accuse the BBC of being “unpatriotic”.

What drivel. If FIFA is corrupt, it should be exposed. Indeed, the FA (the governing body in England) should refuse to have any dealings with it. But they should refuse before World Cup hosting duties are dispensed, not after. After looks like the sour grapes that it undoubtedly is. Had Sepp Blatter and co given the nod to England, we should now be hearing how wise and farsighted FIFA is.

And what possible sense would it make for Panorama to hold over its report until the World Cup was not news? Don’t football people grasp the role of topicality in news and current affairs? They don’t report on matches several weeks afterwards, do they? Putting the programme out later would certainly have smacked of sour grapes.

The assigning of the World Cup 2018 to Russia (and in 2022 to Qatar) was met with various disobligingly racist remarks among vox pops gathered and lovingly transmitted by the BBC. For my taste, anyone involved in professional football, either as player, manager, administrator or commentator, is a Neanderthal twonk, whether they are Russian, Argentinian, Thai, Kenyan, English or Qatari. But I don’t think I’d tell that to a BBC news researcher on camera.

Various suits were dragged onto the news bulletins to essay how many kersquillions of pounds “losing” the World Cup 2018 will have set back the English game. I doubt it. Everyone knows that the bloody Olympics in 2012 are going to leave this country even more poverty-stricken than it is now, save those in a position successfully to leech off such five-ring circuses.

As to whether Vladimir Putin “played a blinder” by staying away from Zurich, I cannot guess. Certainly the embarrassing platitudes being peddled by David Cameron, David Beckham and – if imaginable, even worse – by Prince William cannot have done an iota of good for the supposed “cause”. The idea that the English “love” their football more than any other nationality is plainly false. And keenly wanting something has never been a major qualification for actually receiving it, unless you happen to be a child with a doting parent and your birthday or Yule imminent.

What seems most likely is that Blatter determined that Russia would have the tournament from the very outset of the exercise and that his fellow judges were happy to be guided by him. Russia has never hosted the World Cup before, which cuts off at the knees English bleats about the “long wait” since 1966. Neither has Qatar. The sense of outraged entitlement emanating from the English camp – “there’s never been a World Cup in England in my lifetime” wept Cameron, born three months too late – sits ill beside all those nations that have never been preferred. His predecessor in Downing Street, fifteen years Cameron’s senior, could say the same about his country and his lifetime, because Scotland has never been accorded the privilege. “Sour grapes are coming home” seems to be the main message of this shaming spectacle.

Also getting the English bleat going lately has been that perennial favourite, the weather. I don’t doubt that being stuck for ten hours overnight on a train in Kent is an ordeal one would not seek, but I also think that rather a lot is put on the transport operatives, the local councils and others who are expected to wave some magic wand over deep snow and black ice. The first casualty of such conditions is mobility; lack of mobility is the element that causes the greatest difficulty for the services trying to relieve those stuck or stranded. It’s impossible to grit a road if that road is blocked by jack-knifed juggernauts.

The point has been well made that most countries experiencing the grip of severe weather do so on a regular and predictable basis. But Britain’s weather – especially England’s (there’s a lot less fuss being made in Scotland, where they don’t talk airily and ignorantly of “Arctic conditions”) – is as variable as any in the world. We have not had such severe conditions as early as November – still autumn, after all – for as long as most of us can remember. Now it is predicted to linger into next year: the phrase “cold snap” ought to have been retired from reporters’ language long since.

To have the various services on permanent stand-by all year round against the possibility of extreme conditions – deep snow, excess cold, flash floods, droughts, forest fires – would entail more expense than either governments or voters will stand. Indeed, most of the effort to get the country moving again after a “weather event” is carried out by public sector workers and in winters to come there will be significantly fewer of them available to do that work because of the government cuts.

Meanwhile, the sky has fallen upon the head of Julian Assange, the Australian creator of the WikiLeaks site that has given internet accessibility to hitherto classified material of a wide-ranging kind since 2006. The major disclosure of American and other diplomatic cables over these last few days has provoked a storm of vengeful fury from government and diplomatic spokespeople, some of it clearly designed to put Assange in fear of his liberty if not his life.

Needless to say, a great blast of sanctimonious hot air has blown over this matter. That large tracts of the material was available to as many as three million individuals before it was put into a more obviously public domain has rather reduced the grounds for official complaint. Moreover, there is no evidence that any disclosure by WikiLeaks in the current crop or among its earlier documentation has put a single individual in heightened danger, save for Assange himself. WikiLeaks has invited the American government to cite instances of individuals being put at risk by the disclosures but, not too surprisingly, the State Department refused to play.

I find myself a little divided on this issue. Naturally one laughs when highly touted and expensive security systems are readily shown to be worthless. In practice, the greatest disadvantage the US authorities seem to have suffered can be put no higher than acute embarrassment. The candid opinions of foreign dignitaries held by US ambassadors and others have been aired when they were certainly not intended for conveyance to those thus belittled.

But I can’t help feeling that no human activity can be successfully pursued if one can never feel that one can speak candidly and in confidence in the hearing of those and only those of one’s choosing. I had rather expected that such a feeling might be shared by others at the time of Gordon Brown’s exasperated remarks about the Labour voter Gillian Duffy that were picked up and broadcast by Sky News. But by then there was so little compassion for the hapless Brown anywhere in the media or the political community that he was universally condemned for the remarks and, it seemed, held uniquely responsible for their dissemination because he happened to be wearing the Sky mic. This was most unjust, as I said at the time in my blog and in an unpublished letter to The Guardian. But nobody then wanted to consider that the whistleblower had some responsibility for the impact of the whistle.

The poetic way for those who have “suffered” at the hands of WikiLeaks to get their own back would be to publish all the private stuff they can find on Assange, especially such that he might find personally embarrassing – his school reports, his adolescent love letters, his clap clinic record. I should not wish to peruse them myself but then life is also too short to bother reading what the US ambassador to St James’s thinks about Mervyn King.

On the subject of letters spurned by The Guardian, that paper ran a three-page tribute to Leslie Nielsen last week. I wrote thus:

Dear Sir,

I enjoyed Leslie Nielsen's performances as much as anyone else did, but I don't rate him as some kind of comic genius. He was an actor who could do a particular kind of traditional comic delivery, deadpan with deadly accuracy. It was the writers who actually created that comedy, but you can bet your boots that, when they go in their turn, they won't be accorded a spread in G2 (November 30) and a selection of their – and I do mean their – "best" lines.

Celebrity culture exactly mirrors the state of western capitalism. We have come to value service industries way above manufacturing. Isn't that putting the cart before the horse?

Yours faithfully,

The paper published a letter from someone else making the narrower point about the specific writers who wrote screenplays that Nielsen spoke. But I liked my parallel between celebrity culture and capitalism and I shall reframe it in a letter on a further subject before too long.

A week or two earlier, The Guardian also passed on my letter in response to a hymn of praise to Simon Callow by Sir David Hare. The paper just doesn’t care for critical letters – and it has championed Callow as a reviewer. Perhaps I shall return to this matter in my next posting, if nothing more compelling presents itself betweentimes.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED …

“A majority of the British public believes Prince William would make a better king than the Prince of Wales,” announced The Sunday Times at the weekend. “Most people also think Prince Charles should stand aside for his son”.

Charles' christening during the previous reign: with his mum, grandad and great-grandmama

This is a prime example of what the Irish call “the higher bollix”. Just think of all the questions begged here. What, for starters, is “a better king”? The monarch, after all, is a figurehead, nothing more. We don’t require a king who interferes in the business of state or who expresses opinions that might embarrass any (let alone all) of his subjects. All we want is someone who can read the government’s clunking prose at the State Opening of Parliament without a palpable tone of disdain, get through a garden party without asking someone in a motorised wheelchair if they’ve “come far”, and play host at a state banquet with the head of some god-forsaken state somewhere a long way away without keeling over into the crème brûlée or goosing any of the HOSGFSSALWA’s wives. These are all cogent reasons why neither Russell Brand nor Boris Johnson would be first choice for head of state in a republican UK.

The heir to the throne with an unlikely rival as head of state

Prince Charles is of course in many ways a dismaying testament to in-breeding and private education, but he has gamely survived as Prince of Wales – than which there is no more resonant “number two” designation in the history of the world – for more than half a century, having been handed his title a decade before his formal investiture at Caernarfon Castle in 1969. Princes of Wales have, from time immemorial, behaved as licensed fools and Charles has been accorded an inordinate amount of time in which to do this – on April 21st next year, he will have waited longer than any previous heir apparent, overtaking his great-great-grandfather who eventually became Edward VII.

HM Queen Elizabeth II is not going to abdicate, you can bet your boots, just to give her eldest son a good run at it. If she lives to 105, which seems perfectly feasible, she will have been the longest-reigning queen in the history of the world by more than fifteen years and her successor will be 82 or 83, a good age for a new career. It seems unlikely that Her Majesty will exceed the longest accredited male reign, however. That hard-to-beat record belongs to King Sobhuza II of Swaziland who retired to join his ancestors in 1982, having reigned since the last December of the previous century.

The intended William Waleses

More questions arising: Prince Charles has been a public figure for sixty years and, for good or ill, he has a fairly well-defined public profile. No doubt like anyone else in the public eye, his actual persona is very different in many crucial ways from the public perception. I do not know him personally, so I cannot say. (I stood in for his mother once, but that’s a matter for another day).

Charles has many firm views, not all of them completely batty, and he has had the temerity to express them. I should have thought that on balance his public expression of notions has probably done a bit more good than harm. I am also quite sure that he knows enough to know that, if and when he does ever become king, he will need to keep his views to himself thenceforward.

Prince Charles wears Canadian aboriginal ceremonial robes (as you do)

Prince William, on the contrary, is pretty much a closed book to most of us, I would suggest. Can you think of five adjectives to describe what you perceive to be his character? Neither can I. He seems a somewhat immature boy for 28, the age at which both Tim Buckley and Heath Ledger, who seemed rather older, died. His fiancée, who is a little his senior, might well have a beneficial influence on him. After all, he should still have time to grow into his role, which is doubtless to become our baldest king since the days when they wore wigs as a matter of course.

According to the Sunday Times survey, 44 percent of respondents agreed with the proposition that the Prince of Wales should “make way for William to become king when Elizabeth II dies”. Of course, this was what is known as a prompted response. What we cannot know from the report is the exact wording of the question that prompted the response. It seems to me that there are only two intelligent replies to such a notion: “no” or “it depends”. Does the survey distinguish between Prince Charles “making way” immediately after his mother’s death and his making it clear right now that he renounces his claim on the succession? Obviously not. In any case, his mother would never sanction the latter course.

The Duke & Duchess of Cornwall – always in the market for Goonish gags about knees

And did any of the respondents consider the constitutional mechanics of Prince Charles renouncing his claim? A number of those whom you might expect to find in the line of succession – or at least the first hundred in that line – are excluded from any claim by dint of joining the Roman church or by marrying Catholics. The most senior of these are the children of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, who would be respectively 28th, 29th and 30th in line but that they followed their mother into the Roman church and consequently carry out no royal duties – indeed Lord Nicholas Windsor, the youngest, was married in Vatican City, the first member of a British royal house ever to be so.

But for the heir to the throne himself to step aside would be unprecedented and would undoubtedly spark a controversy around the future of the House of Windsor quite as far-reaching as that of Edward VIII’s abdication. I expect the diligent market researchers carefully explained that when they asked their question.

Wills with not Kate (actually Christina Aguilera)

The trouble is, of course, that most members of the public are what are known formally in the opinion-forming trade as “fuckwits” and their opinions on everything from Michael Gove’s policies for primary schools to the state of their own armpits are not worth having. Points West, the news magazine broadcast on BBC1 in the west country directly after the evening bulletins, ran various vox pop reactions on the day Prince William’s engagement to Miss Middleton was announced. “Oh yus” said a bloke in a cloth cap “I think it’s really good that they’ve got married”. It was probably just as well that they didn’t ask him something harder – like “what is your name?” – but why do such boneheads appear on the screen at all?

Prince Harry early earned a playboy image

Returning to the matter of the succession, Prince William currently ranks second after his father, followed by his brother Prince Henry (known to all as Harry). Third is probably the highest that Harry will ever reach, especially now that William is to marry. But if Prince William and the future Princess Catherine were to produce no children, Harry would be first in line once William became king. And his own children, if he produced any (legitimate ones), would lead the new line.

Now there is a persistent question over Prince Harry’s paternity. It arises because his physical resemblance to the Windsors is much less notable than is his brother’s and because his mother was thought to have taken lovers by the time of his conception. If Harry’s natural father were indeed one of Princess Diana’s men friends, a line wholly lacking a drop of blood royal would have leapfrogged to the top of the succession. This could be readily determined by a DNA test and perhaps such a test has already been applied. But consider the implications. It would all be very fine were such a test to confirm the paternity of Prince Charles. But what if it proved that Charles had no paternal link to Harry? Could Buckingham Palace contrive a credible scenario for severing Harry’s claim? Wouldn’t the real reason get disclosed or be widely guessed at? And what would Harry be told? And how would he react?

James Hewitt and Prince Harry or perhaps vice versa

Would it not perhaps be better for all concerned to ignore the whole issue and let nature take its course? It probably would. But it would only need Harry’s Uncle Andrew, perhaps the most notorious royal philanderer since Edward VII, to notice that his own line would rise to the top if Harry were excluded. The Duke of York – whose title Prince Harry would be certain to take upon Andrew’s death – might well insist that Harry’s paternity be put beyond question.

Stranger things have happened. Who knows, perhaps the next monarch but two will turn out to be Queen Beatrice.

AH, THOSE REVOLTING STUDENTS

I come belatedly to the matter of the anti-tuition-fee demonstration, having passed a very busy and rather fraught ten days absorbed in other matters. Expressions of common sense, I maintain, know no sell-by date, however. How depressingly familiar was the reaction to the generally rather heartening expression of defiance that was the raison d’être of this march. All the politicians and pundits immediately weighed in with a sustained bleat about “the violence”. What violence? There was some damage but that’s not the same thing as violence.

On a typical Friday or Saturday night in many a British city, as much damage is routinely meted out to blameless town centres by drunks. Football derbies usually spark comparable damage and bloody internecine fights as well. Pop stars and other culturally important figures regularly turn over hotel suites without honourable members getting up on their hind legs and high horses.

You might scorn the language of the modern student, but I have a slide, taken after a 1968 demo, of a slogan spray-painted onto a public monument: "Fuck the Fuzz"

When fisticuffs break out at demos, the police certainly give as good as they get, as may be gauged by respective casualty figures. I would suggest that, over the last (say) half century, more civilians than police have lost their lives during street mêlées in Britain.

“The violence” is a convenient means by which the government can divert attention from what the demonstration was about. The suggestion is made that somehow the cause is rendered null by the “deplorable” behaviour of the marchers. The government found a second line of counter-attack with which to shrug off criticism in its scorn of Labour’s supposed lack of a coherent policy on financing higher education. It’s true that Ed Miliband – still away on paternity leave – has yet to reconcile a variety of views in the shadow cabinet but if there were any placards on the march aimed at Labour’s prevarications and procrastinations, I didn’t see them.

Demonstrators on the Millbank roof, from where the fire extinguisher was thrown

It’s doubly dreary but wholly par for the course that Labour spokespeople should obediently do the government’s work for it by just as loudly deploring “the violence”. If the Labour party sees any merit in identifying itself with the cause of universities that encourage the best brains to enrol and benefit all of society rather than supporting a system that beggars bright kids for years into the future and denies society the opportunity to make the best of its best talent, it should deploy more constructive arguments. Of course no sensible person advocates “violence” – and no legislator or would-be legislator can afford to do so – but the damage done to Tory HQ at Millbank was reparable and has doubtless been repaired by now. The damage that government is doing to the education system will take years to put right and is irreparable for the generations of students directly affected.

A triumphant demonstrator breaches the Tories' Millbank HQ

And what do Labour and the pundits – especially the latter – say to the argument that if a march passes off without incident, it fails to generate what Margaret Thatcher famously called “the oxygen of publicity”? Having a coherent argument, being earnest about it and carrying placards with pithy slogans doesn’t get you onto the television news or into the headlines. Trashing buildings does. It’s always a fine judgment whether breaking windows will achieve more gain in overall publicity for the cause than loss in alienation from the “violence”. What would Labour advise?

The idiot who chucked a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank onto police below is not the yardstick for measuring the merit of the demonstration. He’s lucky no one below was killed. But there was a highly pertinent letter about him in today’s Guardian: “The masked thug seen dropping a fire extinguisher from a rooftop near police below need not worry – surely, after investigations lasting more than a year, the CPS will go on to rule that there is no realistic prospect of a conviction. Or have I misunderstood the way these things work?”

Michael Gove and David Willetts: the government clearly equates education policy with good looks

Adjacent to this beautifully turned letter is another on a related topic: “So the policeman who injured a woman in a cell wins an appeal. It seems the door was to blame as usual”. This refers to the Melksham station sergeant who dragged a drunken woman across the floor of the station reception area and flung her into the cells. The appeal court judge said that he was satisfied that the cop “did not intend” to throw her into the cell. But the world has seen the incident on CCTV and can doubtless watch it time after time on YouTube; we know for sure that he intended to throw her into the cell. It wasn’t in any way inadvertent.

Tariq Ali was a star of civil disobedience in the days before celebrity culture

That the courts favour the police is not news. But it’s useful to be reminded occasionally that they favour the police so blatantly. I have been pondering the possibility of standing myself for election in one of these police commissioner roles that the government has decreed will come into being and be locally elected. I think I might be a good person to do such a job: I’d be both the force’s and the government’s worst nightmare, relentlessly unforgiving of police malfeasance and the investigation of it by favourable commissions and judges but equally unforgiving of governmental starvation of funds for the policing functions to be effectively carried through. The Melksham police, were I to be elected, would – lord help them – come under my purview. I would want that station sergeant publicly flogged.

Grosvenor Square 1968: they tried to control us with horses then but we came armed with marbles to roll under their hooves

During his recent trip to China. David Cameron revealingly suggested to local students that those of them aspiring to pursue their studies at British universities might find themselves financially penalised not quite as brutally as native students. It was instructive to see that his and his team’s constant wearing of Remembrance Day poppies while visiting a nation whose relationship with opium is, to put it delicately, complex was not the only heedless step that the PM took into a bear trap. Now that Cameron is safely home, the Home Office has revealed that a large part of its crude policy to cut the rate of immigration into Britain will be achieved by hugely stemming the rate of student visas issued to suitably qualified students from overseas. The coalition government is gathering a reputation across the world for speaking with a forked tongue. The young, who are the most concerned with the matters aired here, are the least likely to forgive such foolhardiness.

PARTY HARMANY

I find it hard to squeeze out many tears for the fate of Phil Woolas. The erstwhile MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth has been barred from elective public office for three years at a court hearing and banished to political outer darkness for rather longer than three years by the Labour leadership.

Woolas has always struck me as a chancer, not someone whom I would admit to my confidence. His offence during the election was, the court found, to have promulgated in his election literature an untruth about the campaign of his nearest rival, Elwyn Watkins, the Liberal Democrat candidate. Given that the Lib Dem was beaten by only 103 votes (there must have been a few recounts), it’s hardly surprising that Watkins should seek to overturn the result by other means.

Phil Woolas: if I pull my right ear, it means I'm fibbing

The complaint is that Woolas accused Watkins of “wooing Islamist extremists” in the constituency. As immigration minister in the outgoing government, Woolas ought to have been able to be relied upon to raise such an issue with authority and sensitivity. He cannot have helped his case at the election court by conceding that the disputed leaflet “sailed very close to the wind”.

What the leaflet (reproduced below) actually says is this: “Extremists are trying to hijack this election. They want you to vote Lib Dem to punish Phil for being strong on immigration. The Lib Dems plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay. It is up to you. Do you want the extremists to win?”

The leaflet that did for Phil

It rather depends on where you are coming from whether you find this archetypally robust knock-about of the kind that occurs in elections or in one way or another unacceptable. The case has certainly raised a number of issues. The first is that of Islamophobia. Two days before the general election, the Lib Dem leader of Oldham Council lodged a complaint before the Equality and Human Rights Commission against the leaflet: “I believe that this type of inflammatory literature is incredibly detrimental to community relations and promoting equality” he wrote.

The Oldham Labour party’s conflation of immigration and extremism was certainly inflammatory and it seemed to yank a perfectly understandable nervousness in the community towards radical Islam into a much less sympathetic pitch – “strong on immigration” – that hardly differs from that of the BNP. But whether that constitutes an offence under the Representation of the People Act seems to me to be highly moot.

It’s perfectly legitimate to debate Islam and its acceptability or otherwise as a force in British society. Political leaders generally have allowed themselves to be persuaded that such discussion is somehow off-limits, both because it might suggest that one might be racist and because the Muslim vote is critical in several constituencies, usually Labour ones. In my view, politicians need to be a bit more grown-up and a bit braver in stating what they think. After all, Muslims living in Britain are considerably freer to pursue their superstitions than are non-Muslims in countries where Islam furnishes the government.

An earlier moment of Woolas fame, when bearded by Joanna Lumley (that look!) over the Gurkhas

Islamophobia – if that is indeed what is involved in this particular matter – does not derive from the same kind of perception as xenophobia. To put it in a nutshell, I would suggest that xenophobia is a response a priori and Islamophobia a posteriori. In the last week, a fanatical Islamist woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to knife to death her constituency MP, Stephen Timms, like Woolas a minister in the outgoing government. Her rationale was that Timms had voted for the invasion of Iraq. So did hundreds of other MPs. Many more vote frequently on social and other issues in ways that would put them at odds with radical Islam. There is cause for concern here in a way quite different from generalised xenophobic rantings against an imagined “flood” of immigrants.

At the same time, it was widely commented during the election campaign that all the major parties were running away from immigration as an issue and refusing to debate it. As part of the post mortem discussions in all the parties – and especially in Labour – there was wide acknowledgment that the issue ought to have been addressed more thoroughly. Woolas might not have been actually discussing it in his literature but he certainly wasn’t ignoring it.

The Labour leadership has taken an impulsive and heedless line on Woolas, one that suggests a number of knee-jerk reactions based on fear: fear of being thought Islamophobic; fear of being thought soft on party transgressors; fear of a run of abuse from the media. By the Labour leadership, I mean just now Harriet Harman, who is acting leader in Ed Miliband’s absence on paternity leave (though she will doubtless have cleared her line with him). Her line, in short, is that Woolas has been hung out to dry.

Harriet Harman tells Andrew Marr what a good egg Phil Woolas is (not)

The parliamentary party gave Harman a rough ride at its meeting on Monday night. She was accused of pre-empting the final outcome of the case – Woolas is attempting to appeal the court’s decision and must raise £50,000 to pay his legal fees because Labour will no longer support him – and pandering to supposed public opinion which is probably misinformed. What’s more, beyond the Labour party, thoughtful members on the government benches have publicly wondered what restrictions are now likely to be deemed necessary in election literature and whether this doesn’t set a damagingly restrictive precedent.

As it happens, no party has been more often accused of conducting dirty campaigns than the Liberal Democrats. At the May 6th general election, I decided not to vote for our local Lib Dem candidate because he had made a wholly mendacious and unjustified charge against the Tory candidate and refused to withdraw; instead I cast my vote (vain in this Lib Dem/Tory marginal constituency) for the Labour candidate.

Politicians libel each other all the time; it’s part of the game. But the Woolas case has changed the rules. He is the first MP since 1911 to be barred from the Commons by court order. MPs across the house say that it should be for the electorate, not the courts to decide who sits in parliament. They have a point.

Furthermore, there is a dark suspicion that the Labour leadership feel confident about a by-election in a Labour marginal just now, especially one where the challenger is a Lib Dem. They reckon that aggrieved Mr Watkins will end up as toast, after having had to defend the policy reversals that his party have made since the election against a Labour favourite parachuted in for the occasion. (You may stake folding money on it that Oldham East and Saddleworth Labour Party will not get to select a candidate without firm direction from Central Office).

La Lumley reflects sadly on her little friend's fate in her own special way

The Lib Dems have certainly handed Labour a good case, what with comprehensively reneging on their highly trumpeted pledge to oppose any rise in university tuition fees and their broad support for a manifestly unfair assault on the unemployed and those claiming sickness benefit. What is the point of Lib Dems being in the coalition if they cannot effect as rigorous a squeeze on the tax-shy as their Tory partners are applying to the alleged “work-shy”?

The other ingredient in Harman’s position reiterates the spineless stance that all the parties have continually taken over the matter of MPs’ expenses. There is little doubt that the rules were confused and poorly enforced. MPs clearly ought to have sought to uphold the spirit as well as the letter of the regulations.

But the media embraces many much larger snouts that are forever in the trough and ministers and shadow ministers ought to have had the gumption to point this out. Fiddling exes and taking backhanders is no less egregious just because it occurs in the private rather than the public sector. On the contrary, successive Tory and Labour leaderships have bent over backwards and forwards to do the bidding of billionaire media owners, Rupert Murdoch in particular. Harman probably feared that The Times, The Sun and the Daily Mail would have kept up a daily barrage, had she waited to see whether Woolas won his court case. Well, sometimes leadership means stiffening your resolve against the daily slings and arrows in pursuit of the more just cause, even if the upshot takes time. The Woolas case, unattractive though its protagonist might be, is one of those occasions.