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.