UNLOOKED-FOR PROMOTIONS

I’m truly sad that Alan Johnson felt the need to leave front-line politics. This was done, as some outlets are beginning to explore in lip-smacking detail, in order for him to try to save his marriage. I hope that, if and when he sorts that out, he can return. Johnson is too likeable and reliable a man to be spared.

At least his departure was unforeseen, is not the result of a clamour, does not damage Labour or its leader and has been smoothly and swiftly covered. Compare and contrast today’s resignation, after months of resistance, by David Cameron’s media advisor Andy Coulson, increasingly mired in the phone-tapping scandal at his former home, the Murdoch press.

Alan Johnson: leaving the shadow cabinet to pursue a career in rock

But it’s as odd that Ed Miliband has replaced Alan Johnson with Ed Balls as it was that Miliband overlooked Balls’ claim to be shadow Chancellor in the first place. If Miliband thought Balls’ economic arguments were at odds with his own when he constructed his first shadow team, what can have changed in the four short months since? What’s more, moving Balls from shadowing the Home Office, means that Miliband felt it necessary to reshuffle all his candidates for the “three great offices of state”, so Yvette Cooper (Mrs Balls) moves over from shadowing the Foreign Office and Douglas Alexander steps into her shoes from Work and Pensions. Alexander has been a great success since the general election. It would have been simpler to move him into Johnson’s role.

It is argued that Cooper was wasted and/or sidelined as shadow Foreign Secretary. I have certainly argued on these pages before that of all shadow posts, that one is the least powerful. I would not have put Cooper there in the first place. Now Alexander’s articulate, street-smart style will be less available for arguing the domestic issues that will preoccupy this parliament.

Ed and Yvette Balls shadowing economy and home

Commentators like to pretend that Ed Balls is Gordon Brown to Ed Miliband’s Tony Blair and that enmity will take root between the leader and the economics spokesman. Such parallels as may be found do not take us very far. Both Miliband and Balls were protégées of Brown but both have put distance between themselves and Brown’s policies, though on different issues and in different ways. Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that there could be any kind of a Granita pact for Balls to invoke when he thinks Miliband has been leader long enough.

What will change most is the dynamic of relations between government and opposition. Theresa May’s brief will give Cooper something immediate and palpable to get her teeth into. Douglas Alexander will be a good foil for William Hague. And where Cameron and George Osborne could scoff, not always without malice, at Alan Johnson’s feel for the economy (or rather lack of it), they won’t dare do that with Ed Balls. Indeed, I imagine Osborne will be waking up in a muck sweat at least every morning between now and the end of the debate on his next budget.

Miliband and Alexander apparently declining to give up their seats on the tube to Westminster

The trick – and it will be a trick for both Balls and Miliband – will be for the Labour team not to let any disparity between the two men’s economic instincts be detected by the government because Cameron will miss no opportunity to try to suggest that the opposition is divided. That Miliband initially shrank from letting Balls loose on Osborne will need to be parlayed into yesterday’s news rather more decisively than Labour has so far managed to shrug off the daily claim that all of the coalition’s unpopular policies are the fault of Labour’s irresponsibility.

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This week’s ruling in the Bristol County Court by Judge Rutherford in favour of a gay couple who sued the owners of a Cornish hotel for excluding them as guests was a rare and enormously welcome landmark. Peter and Hazelmary Bull describe themselves as “devout Christians” and claim that their exclusion policy relates to marital status only and not to sexual orientation. Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy contended that as civil partners they were entitled to be allowed to share a room. The judge agreed.

Preddy and Hall: not married enough for acceptance

A spokesman for the Equality and Human Rights Commission said that “when Mr and Mrs Bull chose to open their home as a hotel, their private home became a commercial enterprise. The decision [of the court] means that community standards, not private ones, must be upheld”.

Being in thrall to supernatural superstition does not render bigotry any more acceptable or respectable than does the indulging of racial hatred. To deny accommodation to paying guests on the grounds that they have not celebrated a Christian marriage is as morally bankrupt as to deny them for being black or Jewish. The Bulls were justly found guilty of discrimination in this case.

On December 14th, The Guardian quoted Mrs Bull thus: “we accept that the Bible is the holy living word of God and we endeavour to follow that”. The Book of Exodus decrees that “whosoever doeth any work on the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” [31:15, not my italics]. That is quite a severe sanction, you might think, and not to be lightly ignored. I have studied the hotel's website in vain for any evidence that it is closed on a Sunday. How are rational people to guess which particular cherries the devout will be picking from their holy scriptures?

The Bulls: no room at the inn

It’s just as well that William Hague has not had occasion to travel into Cornwall lately.

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I am reading for the first time Trollope’s masterly novel of 1864, The Small House at Allington, in the Penguin Classics edition. Bethinking myself (as Trollope might put it) that, 550 pages in and with some one hundred to go, it was safe to do so, I happened to glance at the blurb on the back of the edition and damn if the upshot of the main story wasn’t there revealed. Why do publishers do this? One certainly doesn’t read a great book solely for the working out of the plot but, at least on first acquaintance, this aspect is apt to give much pleasure. I could not go so far as to say that the completion of my reading has been spoiled for me, but I much regret being denied the satisfaction of discovery at the author’s chosen pace.

SPEAK UP, I CAN'T HEAR YOU

"There's nothing more surprising and enjoyable than getting a comment on your blog" wrote Guy Browning in The Guardian Weekend magazine the other day ('How to ... Blog' December 16th). I'm sure what he suggests is true but I really (clearly) wouldn't know.

When I worked as his producer on the television serial King of the Ghetto, the director Roy Battersby said many things that I remember and by which I remain nourished. Pertinent to the matter in hand is his description of taking home rushes (the daily unedited footage on tape) for long and detailed discussions with his family. "Christ," I thought when I first heard this, "I'll be lucky if anybody in my family even gives me any sort of indication that they watch it on transmission, let alone volunteering to put in their twopenn'orth during the process of making it".

My father who, as the saying goes, "never read a book in his life", certainly never read any of my three books published in his lifetime; or, if he did, he never told me so. My mother lived to read my novel, not a work she would ever have encountered had it not been, as it were, related to her. Her only comment was to deprecate a passing reference in the story to a man taking a shower, pulling back his foreskin and soaping the glans of his penis. It was hardly the pivotal moment of the story and I waited eagerly for her to find something in the main traffic of the plot to remark upon but she never did. While they were both alive, I published a large body of journalism which, I fondly imagine, she at least would comprehensively have read, but as to whether it ever entertained, educated or informed her, I remained unenlightened. My father used to spend a long time with his face buried in "the paper" but I never heard that he read anything that his son wrote. Maybe it was just a cover for snoozing, or avoiding issues.

Even my partner of nigh on 27 years, as voracious a reader as I know on seven continents, is not what I would venture to call forthcoming about my own stuff. If he has read my book Common Sense (freely downloadable from the link to the right of this entry) and if he reads this passing squib, I do not expect ever to discover it (but if I do, I will report back).

Why is this? Is it something about me? Is it something about writing? Some 15 years ago, I worked for a while in a bookshop. The shop manager was also a singer in the local choral society, a highly regarded body of voices that has appeared on professional recordings. Now, you understand, she was one voice among many. Even so, she manifested lasting indignation that, while working at the shop, I omitted to attend a performance by this choir, the choir needless to say playing a supporting role in which, as I say, she was but one unidentifiable voice. I thought – but did not say – "I wonder which if any of my books you have read. Books, after all, are your business as a book shop manager. And a book is a considerably more personal investment for its writer than is a performance in a choir by one of its members". I did not lay indignation on her. But I thought her own indignation was, to put it mildly, disproportionate.

Performers do seem to think that they are entitled to a remarkable degree of reassurance. All the actors I have known over the years – quite a few – have expected me AS A MATTER OF COURSE (I don't want to shout but I have yet to find how to access italics on this blogsite) to make the effort to witness their performances, however paltry the role in however humdrum the telly serial or play above a pub, however fugitive the advertisement or inaccessible the regional rep production. I think to myself: "Here I am forcing myself to watch an episode of The Bill that I would really rather not bother with for one scene towards the end but to how much trouble does this actor put himself in order to read all or any of my exquisitely honed pieces of journalism? Does it even occur to him that to seek my pieces out would be an appropriately equivalent gesture?"

I have been hugely gratified by the volume of downloading that my book has attracted. Of course, in one's fantasy version, one anticipates THOUSANDS of downloads so that, after just a week or two, one can tell the sceptical publishing editors who thought one was "too intellectual" for their market (ha!) that one has attracted sufficient readers that, were they paying, one would be in the best seller list. (Well, dear reader, unless you pass the word as assiduously as I hope you might, this will not be achieved for all that the download has exceeded my expectations). But I really wish I had a better idea of what response the stuff has wrought. Instructively enough, with the odd bright exception, the initial feedback came from writers of one kind or another, not least the aforementioned Mr Battersby, an auteur manque if ever there was one (as well as italics, I have still to find accents here). They KNOW that writers need quite as much reassurance as performers do. I don't want to bleat but I do wish everybody understood that.

So please, if anything in this blog or the associated book touches any chord at all for you, either positively or negatively, do take a few moments and a deep breath to say so. It makes far more sense to me than an uninterpretable digit on a visitor counter. And do have a cool yule.

The DOWNLOAD PATH

As you may know, the world has degenerated into a sorry place – a loud, thuggish environment in which, with a few honourable exceptions, the race goes not to the swift but to the steroid-enhanced; the spoils go not to the victors but to the party donors; and history and philosophy are written not by historians and philosophers but by comedians, soap opera actors, day-time chat-show hosts, ghosted footballers and people who have thrust themselves onto what is laughingly called “reality television”.

In such a world, out-dated qualities such as expertise, modesty, kindness, wit, knowledge, reticence, honesty, irony, patience and understatement go not so much unrewarded as incomprehensible to the decision-makers and opinion-formers.

It follows that having had three books previously published is no passport to the publication of a fourth. After a long and disheartening struggle, I have elected to offer my latest volume as a free download to anyone minded to dip into it. The book is called, somewhat combatively perhaps, Common Sense. It is a tour d’horizon of the world as seen by a baby boomer for whom the age of 60 is just around the next corner.

You need be no whiz kid of the computer to access this text. Simply go to the sidebar link on the right above that says

COMMON SENSE: The BOOK

This links you to my website; just follow the instructions you find there. You can readily download the book and its index onto your own desktop: the book occupies 2.7MB of space and the index (which itself, I suggest, is a diverting dip) 352KB. The thumbnail device on the left side of the Adobe reader will facilitate finding the page you want (the Chapter Headings will be found on page 3 of the volume).

Creatures that inhabit the ether survive by word of mouth or, I suppose I mean, word of keyboard. If you find anything in the text that engages, enrages, amuses, enthuses, mystifies, edifies, horrifies or revivifies you, please direct the occupants of your address book to the download. Who knows? – perhaps one day some lame-brained publisher will come to rue the day she failed to project a whole book from a sample chapter or, more common still, he declined to read it at all.

Thank you for your indulgence.