TEDDY BARED

Had I met any of the Kennedy boys, I suspect I would not have found them to my taste. Surpassingly arrogant – a self-confidence based upon eye-watering wealth, parental expectation, unrivalled connections, continuous celebrity, legendary sexual magnetism and a very useful lack of moral compass (useful in fixing day-to-day problems) – they would not, you would be bound to feel, be remotely interested in you, save insofar as you might be placed to do them some sort of favour.

I remember Jack Kennedy’s administration vividly. After the Eisenhower years – “cosy but crass” as Stephen Sondheim succinctly despatched them – JFK seemed almost superhumanly glamorous, young, creative and enlightened. His administration could be said to have been a triumph of style over substance even (perhaps especially) in the Bay of Pigs crisis during which the world really did appear for a few days to teeter on the brink of World War III.

Jack’s early and shattering death sealed his legend. It was simultaneously as public as any in the twentieth century and yet enduringly inexplicable. The theories will never die. My favourite – infrequently aired -– goes like this. Kennedy didn’t die but was left by the bullets in a vegetative state. This accounts for the succession of visits allegedly paid to the Parkland Hospital in Dallas by Jackie after the President was formally pronounced dead.

Meanwhile, Mama Rose, mindful of the need to avoid any repetition of the family’s disastrous attempt to bury the embarrassment of their lobotomised daughter Rosemary, determined that Jack would be officially dead, a much more manageable outcome. Once a weighted coffin had been laid to rest before the eyes of the world in Arlington, there was just the little matter of “burying” the uncomprehending Jack. They needed a secure refuge, somewhere like a well-fortified island. Now, who owned such an island? Well, Aristotle Onassis for one. The rest you know.

Of course, Jack’s reputation was bound to decline. Anyone so incapable of keeping his pants on (even, it was said, within the Oval Office) was bound to generate stories sooner or later. In the late 1970s, a feature of Bette Midler’s seductively raucous stage act was her claim to have “slept with Jack Kennedy. And you know what?” – and here she’d rake the audience with a blood-red fingernail – “They slept with Jack Kennedy”.

The instinct to fix things was deep-grained in the Kennedy clan long before Ted was born. Irish-American political chicanery in Boston is as endemic as the more widely known history of Irish-American political chicanery in Chicago (Mayor Daley and all that) and the Kennedys were up to their necks in it for decades before Joe covered up Teddy’s rustication from Harvard for cheating and then fixed it for him to take over Jack’s Senate seat when Jack became President. Political favours were called in repeatedly to smother Kennedy scandals, misdemeanours and crimes. The least controllable of Ted’s disasters was the Chappaquiddick affair, least controllable in the sense that even Kennedy money and influence couldn’t prevent it killing any expectation he still entertained of succeeding to the White House. But anyone other than a Kennedy would have gone to jail and, never formally required to explain his actions on the night a young woman died while in his company, he rode it out and the full truth of the matter dies with him.


caricature by Steve Nyman from aaacaricatures.com

It’s hard to imagine socialising with people who sincerely imagine that the law does not apply to them. I imagine the Kennedys must have been much like the Krays, only with ‘class’ in its American meaning. Add to this the Catholicism they inherited from Joe and Rose, a religious subject indeed for it was clearly an ingredient that would not brook mockery or even discussion. How devout Catholic men square their conviction with the addiction to adultery that ran rampant among all the Kennedy men in every generation is hard for rationalists to figure. Did they think they were redeemed every time they went to confession and hence were cleared to sin again just as soon as possible?

I don’t know how the women put up with it but the Kennedy girls seemed inured. In the English-born actor Peter Lawford, Pat Kennedy found a husband quite as devoted to booze, recreational drugs and sleeping around as any of her brothers. Kathleen Kennedy was never forgiven by Rose for marrying outside the faith, even though it was into the English aristocracy, but she had adulterous affairs of her own. Alone of the family, Joe attended her funeral after she and her lover perished in a plane crash, the same fate that befell Joe Jr (in World War II), Jack and Jackie’s only son John and indeed Teddy, who survived with a broken back and lumbar pain for the rest of his life. Only Eunice, who died a fortnight before Teddy, seems to have led a pretty blameless life (if you can forgive her being the mother-in-law of Arnold Schwarzenegger).

And yet … and yet … There is always an “and yet” with people of real talent. I was in the States one election year and turned on the C-Span channel in my hotel room just in time to watch from the start a speech by Ted Kennedy. It was no great occasion, just a routine stump speech in the marathon that is the American democratic process. The Democrats didn’t even win that year. But it was magnificent. I hung on his every word, because it was all so beautifully crafted, cogently argued, magically lacking in spin or patronising or political trimming. It was proper, old-fashioned oratory of the kind we used to get from Nye Bevan, Michael Foot, indeed Winston Churchill. It was just enthralling.

Kennedy was a politician to his fingertips if not in that part of the cerebrum that weighs appetite against consequence. I wouldn’t have trusted him with a boiled sweet – I certainly wouldn’t have left him alone for two minutes with either of my partner’s nieces – but I would have trusted him to know how the system works and to get things done. And getting things done, that’s what politicians are for, isn’t it? Kennedy got things done in Massachusetts, thereby ensuring that he had a thumping majority every time his senate seat was contested and becoming the third longest-serving senator in US history. And he got things done in the Senate, keeping the often flickering flame of liberalism alive there through screeds of legislation.

Of course, the Kennedys were progressive only as and when it suited. Like Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy spent part of his youth working for the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the most anti-progressive force in the most anti-progressive period of modern American history. Unlike Nixon, the Kennedy clan was real close to Joe McCarthy, who was godfather to Bobby’s eldest child. This was the Irish Catholic mafia taking precedence over fine judgments of politico-moral stances. Nonetheless, however much that kind of connection tarnishes the Kennedy legend, it is still the progressive liberal image that tops all others when we contemplate Teddy and Bobby and Jack.

In reality, Teddy achieved more in the public arena than Jack or Bobby ever did, not just by being granted comparative longevity but because he lived to attain the maturity to see that real legislation on the statute books achieves more than any amount of glamour, fame and snatched sexual gratification. For that alone, he deserves to be hailed as an American hero. I’m just grateful that I never had to meet him.

OVER the RAINBOW

The news media goes into overkill mode when faced with a story like the death of Michael Jackson. Editors evidently imagine that it’s impossible for them to run too much stuff about the deceased, especially if they can make use of that well tried and much loved soubriquet “the troubled star”. Jackson allows that in spades, of course. Given the gravity of some of the allegations that have surrounded him, it is thought appropriate to haul in the weightiest commentators to cover this aspect of his life. And out come the other superstars to make utterances quite as banal, hyperbolic, tacky and indeed incoherent as the maunderings of the fans, both on mic and on line, which are now considered an essential part of the mix.

from BBC website


This morning’s Guardian carried a front-page think-cum-reminisce piece to which I couldn’t resist emailing a rejoinder: “According to Richard Williams, Michael Jackson had a ‘terminal vibrato’ and was ‘terminally sentimental’. That’s what killed him then, right?” I know they won’t publish that. But even a distinguished scribe like Williams can fall into cliché under pressure of deadlines. That’s the trouble with news: they want it considered but they want it yesterday.

Commentators and fans alike – the one influencing the other and it’s chicken and egg -– have been drawing parallels with the deaths of Kennedy, Diana, Elvis. A better comparison, I suggest, is with Judy Garland, the fortieth anniversary of whose death Jackson survived by just three days. Both were child stars, ruthlessly exploited by their respective businesses. Both were vastly popular at their peak and attracted especially devoted (some might say demented) followers. Both were insecure in their sexuality and about their appearance, both of which they tried to adapt. Both were at their most dynamic when seen live, as the greatest performers always are. Both ran into colossal financial difficulties and could not keep their personal lives on track. Both became addicted to prescription drugs, which destroyed their health and certainly contributed to their deaths, Garland’s at three years younger than Jackson.


I don’t know if I think Jackson was very smart. Too unworldly ever to have a very shrewd take on things, I figure. I particularly think of his absurd, wide-eyed remark when he and Lisa Marie Presley met the press some three months into their mind-boggling marriage: “And they said it wouldn’t last!” Well, children, it lasted about two years, which, out here in the real world, is called “not lasting”.
from Answers.com website

Garland, on the other hand, had a brilliant brain. There’s an extant recording of a television interview she gave to Jack Paar that sets you back on your heels at the quickness and astuteness of her responses to the hackneyed probings of conventional showbiz. She doesn’t miss a nuance or an undertone and her answers are detailed, unconventional and lickety-spit. It’s a stunning turn. If the whole thing was scripted and rehearsed (often true in those days as more often true now than you want to think), she carries it off with complete conviction.

Next week, I’m going to a gig by Neil Sedaka. He’s never been a star to rival Jackson and it’s certainly never been at all hip to like him, as I have done for fifty years – Sedaka had his first hit the year Jackson was born. Even so, he wrote the best-selling song (in the UK) so far this millennium: none other than (Is This the Way to) Amarillo?

There are aspects of his shtik that I’m not keen on: those Liberace/Richard Clayderman touches of classique pretension, for instance. But Sedaka always had an exquisite singing voice, surprisingly little worn at 70, and with his writing partner Howard Greenfield (who died of Aids more than twenty years ago) composed a string of numbers that were, one after another, simply perfectly crafted pop songs. I’m sure there’ll be some dedicated fans there: women in their 60s and 70s still with beehive hair-dos. I suspect there’ll be much less of a gay contingent than you would get at a Jackson concert or (overwhelmingly) at a Garland show but I can live with that.

When Sedaka goes, especially if it’s not for two or three more decades, he perhaps won’t even make the news bulletins (though he certainly should; Gene Pitney did). And for those of us who liked him, that will actually be a mercy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW MANY TEARS CAN YOU CRY?

I happened upon BBC1’s Breakfast yesterday morning – something I usually avoid but my partner has it on in preference to the rival fare – and who should be on the studio sofa but Bobby Vee. Ah, young Robert Thomas Velline of Fargo, North Dakota. Not so young any more: 65 in fact. Not cute any more either, indeed rather odd looking, but having had something extremely expensive done to his hair, of which he flourished rather more than when my friend and I saw him at the Albert Hall in 1985. The British tour, of which that gig was the climax, featured other rock and pop legends including Ricky Nelson whose stock had been low for some years. His career thereby revived, Nelson toured the southern States later that year and died (while apparently freebasing cocaine) in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve.

Vee’s career began because of a famous plane crash, the one that killed Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and, most significantly, Buddy Holly. The stars were flying to Fargo to play a gig and 15 year-old Vee (an authentic Holly fan) and his outfit (called The Shadows: yes, really) volunteered to stand in when news of the crash broke. It will be fifty years since that event next February.

Buddy Holly was five minutes before my time. Vee and his contemporaries were the big sellers when I first bought singles. They had a very short span. Sian Williams on Breakfast hazarded that “the mid-‘60s” was his main period but by the mid-‘60s Vee and his contemporaries were dead meat, swept away by the Beatles and the British invasion and the American groups who flowered at the same time. Just as Vee began as a Holly clone, his career went down the pan pathetically imitating the mop-tops: I bet there are very few who, like me, can muster a bit of Vee’s rip-off of ‘She Loves You’, carefully entitled ‘She’s Sorry”.

Months of pestering finally brought me my own record player for my 14th birthday in 1961, which was Vee’s annus mirabilis. A Brill Building product, he was lucky enough to be assigned several songs by the cream of Brill songwriters. Lyricist Gerry Goffin and composer Jack Keller wrote ‘Run to Him’, a simple up-and-downhill stroll (compare Cliff Richard’s later and very similar ‘The Next Time’) and hence enormously addictive. Even better, Goffin wrote with his wife Carole King ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’, one of the dozen or so greatest pop singles of all time with its brilliantly bouncy harmonic tensions and that genius discord in the accompaniment near the end. Vee told Sian Williams that he’d sung this imperishable hit at his daughter’s wedding “because it was so appropriate”. I’m afraid he’s not a very interesting man. And the choice was only appropriate at the most superficial level. ‘Take Good Care’ is not about losing your baby daughter but losing your baby doll.

This was the defining feature of Vee and his contemporaries. The great majority of them were young, white, American males of a boyish appearance. And, on single after single, they sang about how horribly women treated them. The tears shed in the singles of Gene Pitney, Del Shannon, the Everly Brothers, James Darren and the very unboyish Roy Orbison would have floated the US fleet. Self-pity was the order of the day. These chaps were utterly unmanned by their women and frankly presented their predicament as terminally woeful. Quite why this parade of tearful wimps connected to the 1961 Zeitgeist is pretty hard to figure. It was the first year of the Kennedy presidency: you’d think American youth would have their tails up.

There were other young male singers who indulged less frequently in lachrymosity. Bobby Darin, as old as Orbison and in the charts since 1958, was generally upbeat, but a self-penned B side, ‘Not for Me’ (not to be confused with the Gershwins’ wry and rueful ‘But Not for Me’), is as bitter an outburst as pop music has ever devised, reinforced by an astounding burst of Rachmaninovesque piano flourish right in the middle. Neil Sedaka – never hip or fashionable but a singer/songwriter of the highest class – could even make his partner Howard Greenfield’s most pleading lyric, ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’, into a sunnily clap-along number (and another contender for all-time great pop single).

But the prevailing mood was doomy and tragic. “I’m a-walkin’ in the rain,” sang Del Shannon in ‘Runaway’, just about the biggest selling disc of 1961. “Tears are fallin’ and I feel the pain”. Was it the girls who were buying these singles and feeling that they had the boys over a barrel?

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this curious sub-genre of pop came in the following year. Johnny Burnette, the most country-inflected of the pop idols of the early 1960s, was generally celebratory about women in his singles: ‘Dreamin’, ‘You’re Sixteen’, ‘Girls’. But ‘Clown Shoes’ is a buttock-clenching tale of the public humiliation of a boy by a girl, quoting her with a kind of self-lacerating relish as she presents the gift that constitutes the song's title: “I bought these specially/For all your friends to see … In these you’ll look real smart/Because they match your heart”. The soaring melody and lush string backing only add to the small-town melodrama foregrounded in the yarn. It was written by one James Marcus Smith, who was later better known for the outlandish performing persona he adopted as PJ Proby. One of Smith’s Proby singles was called ‘I Apologize” and he should have done so for his complete lack of probity as the trouser-splitting Proby. But ‘Clown Shoes’ is a perverse work of genius.

At least Proby is a survivor, like Bobby Vee and Neil Sedaka. Several of the performers who sang of such heartache died prematurely: Burnette at 30, Darin at 37, Shannon, a suicide, and Orbison – whose life was marked by personal tragedy – before they were 60.

Gene Pitney suffered a fatal heart attack a couple of years back at 66. He died the classic showbiz death, alone in a provincial hotel room. Pitney was a songwriter before he was a singer – he wrote Ricky Nelson’s biggest British hit, the catchy, optimistic ‘Hello Mary Lou’ – but as a singer he favoured tragic material penned by others. His biggest hit in Britain was 1964’s ‘I’m Gonna Be Strong’, written by another great husband-and-wife team from the Brill Building, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. This song, built simply on a relentlessly rising figure, belies its own title with the lyric’s climax: “And you’ll never know, darling,/After you’ve kissed me goodbye,/How I’ll break down and cry”, the last word sustained over a succession of notes that rises into the stratosphere. Its opening musical phrase is identical to that of Chris Farlowe’s biggest hit two years later, Jagger & Richards’ ‘Out of Time’ (Pitney knew and worked with the Stones). Both songs deserve support as all-time-great-pop-single contestants, along with Colin Blunstone’s revival of the crushed boy threnody in ‘I Don’t Believe in Miracles’ of 1972. But Farlowe’s hit is the opposite of self-pitying, a disdainful dismissal of a “poor, old-fashioned baby”.

Of course Farlowe’s generation of heroes of popular music had their own share of casualties, as well as the odd song that wallowed in the fickleness and faithlessness of women. But I doubt that any other period of popular culture has ever announced itself as quite so sorry for itself or quite so sexually insecure.

The WASTELAND

I thought at the time that there could never be a regime in a democracy more mendacious, more underhand and more impervious to reality or criticism that the Nixon White House but once again on Monday the Bush II White House topped it.

Acknowledging that the death toll of American personnel (including eight civilians) in Iraq since the invasion five years and a week ago has now reached 4,000, President Bush declared: “One day people will look back at this moment in history and say ‘Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve, because they laid the foundations for peace for generations to come’.” To anyone with a scintilla of sensitivity, the obvious rejoinder is the famous line of Tacitus: “They have made a wasteland and called it peace”.

That Bush spends his every waking hour in denial has been clear since he began actively running for the presidency in 1999. Yet he has astute advisors around him – Condoleeza Rice stood at his side when he made his latest vapid claim – and, if they wished to make it clear that it wasn’t them who told him to say that, they could brief him with some harmless observation (one that could be seen to be erroneous even by unreconstructed neocons) which would only redound on him and not on them. It is surely the case that Bush is exhaustively coached every time he is unleashed on the press and, through them, the public; the impression he often gives of a man who doesn’t quite understand the points he is making confirms that.

The back-up material that the White House releases on occasions like this is equally expressive of an administration that does not listen to what it says. The latest roll call, observed Bush’s press secretary Dana Perino, was “a sober moment”. Even if the President were not himself a recovered alcoholic, the phrase is unfortunate. Government is not a game, it’s not for fun. All of Bush’s business should be sober and conducted in a sober frame of mind, whether it be his policy on stem cell research or his plans to try to prevent the world sliding into recession.

Perino went on: “President Bush believes that every life is precious and he spends time every day thinking about those who’ve lost their lives on the battlefield”. No he doesn’t. Nobody does that, not even somebody who is (unlike Bush) genuinely devout as a matter of life-long conviction and upbringing. My late parents loomed immeasurably larger in my life than any serviceman or woman whom he has never met does in Bush’s and yet weeks go by without my giving either of them a thought. Nonetheless, my feelings about them run no less deep. If Bush makes some kind of religiose daily routine of contemplating the deaths of American warriors, then its very ritual nature robs it of substance. In any case, what about the lives lost other than on a battlefield? Are they of no account just because most of them were not American? And if he genuinely and literally thinks that “every life is precious”, why did he confirm more death sentences when Governor of Texas than any other gubernatorial American in the nation’s history?

“He gets a report about every single soldier who passes away” went on Perino, resorting to craven euphemism. “And he always pauses a moment to think about them and to offer a prayer for their loved ones”. The making of empty gestures is bad enough: to have these gestures described as if they are meaningful is treating us like boobies.

And there’s more from Perino: “The President has said the hardest thing a commander-in-chief will do is send young men and women into combat and he’s grieved for every lost American life, from the very first several years ago to those lost today”. Dana Perino may be a bright girl but she has the look of one chosen for her looks (it’s an enjoyable irony that toothsomeness has become a liability for women who want to excel in a career where you need to be taken seriously). Given that most of those who heard or read her will know precisely which year it was that the first American lives were lost fighting in Iraq, the looseness of “several years ago” is pretty insulting. But it is difficult to credit that sending unknown cannon fodder to war is so darned hard when the only comprehensible reason for Bush not to bring them all home right now is his unwillingness to lose face. Indeed, the White House has been putting it about that the expectation of troop withdrawals this summer is too optimistic. This is also perfectly understandable. As Bush clearly cannot resolve the Iraq quagmire before leaving office, he may as well drive his troops deeper into the Iraqi sand so that his successor has a worse mess to clear up. Bush may be calculating that, as happened to LBJ after JFK over Vietnam, the blame for the calamity of Iraq may in time be transferred to President Obama, McCain or H Clinton. Add ‘cynical’ to mendacious, underhand and impervious to reality or criticism.

HARRODS COLLUDING HAUL

I have a confession to make – or, as they say nowadays, I want to ’fess up. I was part of the conspiracy to kill the Princess of Wales. Yes, me. Little me. Shocked you, didn’t I. Of course, I wasn’t in it on my own. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a conspiracy. Jade Goody was in it too. And Britney Spears. And Michael Winner. And oh, Derek Conway, you know, the MP who put his ne’er-do-well sons on the parliamentary payroll. And Sir Elton John. And Wayne Sleep. And John Travolta. And Gianni Versace. And Diana Dors, Diana Ross, Dame Diana Rigg, Lady Diana Mosley, Lady Diana Cooper, Diana Vreeland, Diana Krall, Diana Wynyard, all of whom deeply resented the way the Princess annexed a name they had hitherto considered to indicate themselves. Resented enough to kill. Oh, and Guy Fawkes. And the Count of Monte Cristo. And Alice in Wonderland.

Of course, we all resent even more the failure of that wise and astute observer of the scene, Mohamed Al Fayed, to drop our names in court. After all, he dropped so many. I think he should have played it like Bette Midler did in her stage show at a time when many revelations were emerging about the late American president. She pointed melodramatically to herself: “Hey, guess what, I have a secret to impart. I slept with Jack Kennedy”. And then, raking the audience with both hands, she shrieked: “And you know what? They slept with Jack Kennedy”.

What I admired so much about Mr Al Fayed’s testimony was the forensic detail into which he went in his evidence of this truly astounding conspiracy. A lesser man would have taken advantage of the freedom that a law court permits to make accusations without fear of slander. Mr Al Fayed could so easily have taken that low road. Instead he went into astonishing detail.

For instance, his revelation that the Duke of Edinburgh is a German Nazi whose actual name is Frankenstein clearly changes our very conception of the Royal Family. We had always understood His Royal Highness to be of Greek nationality. Perhaps after all it is the Queen who is the Greek. Her consort probably hails from the Schwarzwald area of south-west Germany that borders Switzerland (Dr Victor Frankenstein was, after all, Swiss by birth; also of course – which may be news to Mr Al Fayed – he was fictional). I hope the Harrods boss will endeavour to confirm these origins, perhaps by means of his charming spokesman, the famously coiffed Michael Cole.

Where Mr Al Fayed rashly overplayed his hand was in speaking out on the street outside the high court. He told a journalist he was “an idiot” which is surely not likely to provoke legal action (the greater difficulty would be to ascertain that a journalist was not an idiot). But he further accused him of being “part of the conspiracy” before he was hustled away by his minders. It would be the worst of luck for the Harrods boss if he happened to fling this accusation at the one man in Britain who was not in fact in on the conspiracy, In that case, I hope the journalist is public-spirited enough to sue Mr Al Fayed for slander. Then the great conspiracy can finally be tested properly in court and Mr Al Fayed can at last have the opportunity of laying out his compelling evidence for the public to marvel at, an opportunity so grievously denied him by the terms of the inquest.

Should the case go against him, Mr Al Fayed may of course refuse to pay the substantial compensation to the reporter that the court would certainly levy. And then he would be liable to go to jail. Mr Al Fayed might then take the route of Mr Pickwick and elect to be incarcerated as a matter of principle. This might prove to be a mistake. Notoriously, Mr Al Fayed is not a British citizen. Indeed, there is a widely but doubtless scurrilously held view that Mr Al Fayed’s conspiracy theories all stem from the persistent refusal of the British authorities to award him citizenship. I wonder if Mr Al Fayed is sufficiently familiar with the regimes commonly pursued in the jails of Egypt to wish to serve his sentence in one of them.

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of this whole fantastical episode is Mr Al Fayed’s announcement that he will accept the findings of the inquest. We would do well to remember that this is one Mohamed who is not a prophet.

FIVE DAYS ARE A LONG TIME IN POLITICS

The United States has enjoyed some striking names among its presidents – Millard Fillmore, Ulysses S Grant, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge – and perhaps even more among its vice-presidents – Aaron Burr, Eldridge Gerry, Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, John Nance Garner, along with two recent ones we’d all rather forget: Spiro Agnew and J Danforth Quayle. But though the world’s media and the political chattering classes had all but crowned Barack Obama as the 43rd president 24 hours ago, the absurd presumption of that éclat has suddenly been tempered by reality. Between now and the Nevada primary (for complex reasons, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate at the intervening vote in Michigan where the Democratic Party has ruled that no delegates will count towards the national total), Mr Obama may find himself no longer expected to be the next chief executive with a funny name. His campaign will perhaps be dismissed as having “peaked too soon”. Like Senator Clinton, he should be patient. The convention, which will finally endorse the official candidate, is all of seven months away.

It’s odd how the media and the chatterers never learn anything. Today’s lead story on the front page of The Guardian and the cover of the new issue of Private Eye were already as dead in the water before they reached the shops as they thought Mrs Clinton was. Perhaps the letters editor of The Daily Telegraph (to whom I wrote because The Guardian seems no longer prepared to run my letters) will regret that he did not publish this on Monday:

Dear Sir,

Two observations on the Iowa caucuses: first, the results may well have no significance in the long term. In 1988, Vice-President Bush got 19% of the Republican vote to Bob Dole's 34%. Mr Bush went on to be President, Mr Dole to be the defeated presidential candidate eight years later. Even more strikingly (and resonantly), Bill Clinton won only 3% of the Democrat vote, as against Tom Harkin's 76% in 1992. Mr Clinton became President, Mr Harkin a mere footnote in presidential history.

Furthermore, I note that commentators were united in their pre-caucus view that both parties' races were "wide open", "too close to call" and so on. Had Dennis Kucinich or Duncan Hunter won their respective caucus votes, the exclamations that the results produced might be justified. But in a "wide open" race, it seems curious that either actual result should be thought so earth-shattering.

Yours faithfully,

W Stephen Gilbert

The paper might have been unique (come on, I couldn’t check them all) in having a view dissenting from a consensus that proved wide of the mark. Indeed, the consensus had been so clamorous that the Clintons had begun to believe it themselves (if – and it’s a big if – those same media outlets are to be credited at all). And who could blame the Clintons for feeling written off when the BBC Washington correspondent is yelling at you “Will you withdraw if you lose New Hampshire, Senator?”?

I adore elections in the US, precisely because they offer such a switchback ride. I’ve watched fascinated some astonishing campaigns: Jack Kennedy’s white-knight charge to a White House that became Camelot; Barry Goldwater’s campaign, the most right wing in American history and easily shrugged off by Lyndon Johnson, though we now know that Goldwater was in favour of gay rights before more than a handful of people knew they might want them; Eugene McCarthy’s thrilling student crusade of 1968; the strange and disruptive interventions of George Wallace, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader; the inevitable disaster of the most liberal candidate ever, George McGovern, still serving at 85 as the United Nations’ global ambassador on hunger; the bitter humiliation for those would-be second-termers thrown out of office by the electorate (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush); the serial runners who didn’t make it – George Romney (the father of Mitt), Robert Dole, Jesse Jackson; the candidates who, though clearly not up to the job, still reached the White House (Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, the last two twice).

The one thing I feel sure of this time is that there is no Republican candidate, even the standing-by and credible Michael Bloomberg, who can win the presidency. There may be Democrats who can lose it and they may include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright astutely observed in a World at One interview the other day, all candidates have negatives but Senator Clinton has the undoubted advantage that hers are already all known. Senator Obama may bristle at the questions that Mrs Clinton has asked of him but they are very small beer compared with what the Republican attack machine would unleash, were he to win or to be drawing near to winning the nomination.

There is no doubt, however, that Mr Obama has caught a wave. In states as virtually all-white as both Iowa and New Hampshire, it is wonderfully reassuring that a man of colour can draw such levels of support right across the electorate. The respective races for the nomination – but especially the Democratic race – have attracted unprecedented numbers going out to vote in the snow that traditionally accompanies these primaries and caucuses.

Whether Obama’s wave will peter out cannot be predicted. If it doesn’t (or even if it does), Mrs Clinton would be smart to invite him to be her running mate. He would then be in a very good position to run as the Democrat candidate in 2016 (as Vice-President Obama) when he would still only be 55. That way the Democrats could be looking at a healthy prospect of providing the administrations until 2024, by which time no doubt Jeb Bush’s half-Hispanic son John will be ready to carry the Republicans back to the White House. As he will no doubt be known officially by his current nickname of Jebby, he will be able to extend the run both of previously unrepresented demographics in the Oval Office and of unusual names on the presidential roll.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

This blog is not the only task (or friend) neglected by me since yule. The internet of course is the greatest time-waster and displacement activity since the spread of television and I have lately been much exercised by debate and discussion on the richarddawkins.net site wherein those who know that there are no supernatural powers, beings or states of being hammer out their differences. Furthermore, I have (rather late in the day, characteristically) discovered the enormous pleasure of repairing errors and omissions on Wikipedia. I shall endeavour to do better. (After all, I have a play that I’m supposed to be writing).