BITER BIT

I no longer tweet. If you’d told me first thing yesterday that by the end of the day I would have cancelled my Twitter account (as it’s called – in fact no money changes hands), I would have been very surprised. But there it is.

Maybe I was subconsciously ready to give it up. There is a certain justice in the prejudice among Twitter atheists that tweets are largely of the “just-eating-a-cress-sandwich-and-cutting-my-toenails” variety. Tweeters – and I cannot in conscience exclude myself – do abide by the notion that there is abiding interest in what they happen to be doing, purely because they happen to be doing it. Of course this can go to ludicrous extremes. Why should anyone give a flying fuck if some bozo in Arkansas is watching reruns of CSI:NY series two (whatever the hell that is)? And such banality gets designated a “top tweet” (according to some flummery about algorhythms) while your original, witty and grammatical bon mot on this or any other subject is listed under the hashtag system as an also-ran. If the bozo just added “and I’m HATING it”, at least there would be a frisson of novelty about his comment.

Then there are the huge numbers of tweeters who ‘retweet’ (i.e. reproduce) for the benefit of their ‘followers’ (those who choose to read their tweets regularly) all the complimentary tweets that they receive. This seems to me to be a definition of bad form. The only person who is obliged to endure your pleasure in people saying nice things about you is your mother or, at a pinch, your partner; and if you have neither, you should – as tweeters are apt to say – STFU (I do not propose to translate that piece of internet lingo). I would no more retweet somebody else’s admiration of me than I would post a nude photograph of myself (something that millions of internet users indeed do).

And of course there’s a lot of nasty and boring stuff on Twitter. Even tweeters capable of wit, perception and pith see no cruelty in inflicting on their followers a regular running commentary on some jackass television programme or some dreary sports event that most of us go onto Twitter precisely to avoid.

But the biggest disappointment about Twitter concerns the difficulty in engaging interesting and/or important matters in 140-character bites. Because of this, I have found some discomfort with that ingredient that has always been the most elusive and fraught in internet and other instant dealings (emails, texting, messages on website forms): to wit, tone. I think a lot of people have difficulty with this, not just me. It’s one of the reasons why some professional commentators get to be so disliked and resented.

And it was the business of tone that drove me from Twitter. Here’s how it played out. I was introduced to the site by an old chum who thought it would suit me. She also recommended that I and a journalist friend of hers follow each other because she thought we might hit it off. Given this matchmaking role that she played, I will call her Dolly Levi. And the journalist had better be William Boot.

Now Boot and I do have a certain amount of attitude in common, I think. But we fiercely disagree about one matter. I think Ed Miliband is a smart and competent leader of the Labour Party who deserves to be supported and encouraged. He thinks Miliband is a dead loss. And he has the advantage that, as a journalist with a regular outlet, he can say so to a fairly substantial readership.

Last week, Boot paid his first visit to a Labour Party conference and wrote a big colour piece for his paper. I told him afterwards that I found it disappointing – I have sent him admiring messages about good pieces – but candidly I thought it was a dreadful piece. “Ed Miliband, Harriet Harman and four unknowns sidle on to the stage and sit behind a large desk, looking like a quiz team”. Well, Boot, just because four people are unknown to you, the conference virgin, it doesn’t mean that the hall was full of people whispering to each other “who are they?” What a lofty, mean-spirited, snide little crack.

The whole article is in that vein, scoring piffling points off the conference and its participants with pawky jokes and belittling slights. But of course this is merely reflecting the zeitgeist. In celebrity culture, everyone is fabulous and awesome and visionary and a genius and no one in public life has less than a fawning word about anyone else in public life. Perhaps to counteract this, politicians are universally considered fair game for the most disobliging comments, no matter how wounding or unjust. Otherwise impeccably enlightened people who deplore the kind of scorn that Tories hand out to, say, John Prescott for his gamely admitted eating disorder, see no contradiction in mocking Eric Pickles for his girth. The subtext is easily readable: politicians are beneath respect or compassion.

On Saturday, Boot tweeted a few summary notions about his adventures among the politicians, including repeating something he’d been told by a “top shadow cabinet person”. I tweeted a reply: “You journos: WHICH “top shadow cabinet person”? How can we know that you didn’t make it up. Journos are less to be trusted than politicos”. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I wrote but having quit Twitter I now have no record of it. Boot sent three replies to this in four minutes and I have their texts because they come as email: “I am very tempted to unfollow you for that insult. I probably will actually. I don’t make things up”. Then: “It is perfectly legitimate to protect the anonymity of sources in circumstances where they would be compromised”. Then: “I’ve unfollowed you for a Tevez-like cooling off period. (Tevez is a footballer BTW)”.

The last bit in parentheses refers to his knowledge of my uninterest in football. In fact, like Mary in The Pickwick Papers, I affect not to know as much as I do for I have read about the Manchester City business and know that Carlos Tevez has won himself less than golden opinions there lately (I have no idea which team BTW is, however).

I had genuinely thought that my original tweet was jocular in tone, perhaps veering towards a touch more asperity in the concluding sentence. But I was forgetting that you twit journalists at your peril. Like critics, they can hand it out but they can’t take it. Boot wouldn’t think twice about remarking that politicians “make things up” but the suggestion that he might do so is a red rag to a bull.

Now, this little spat speaks to a problem that I have had with political coverage for years. It is the whole notion of stuff that is “off the record”. You know the sort of thing: “a minister told me unattributably”, “sources say”, “party officials are indicating privately”. Bunkum, I say. In which alternative universe do people speak “privately” to a journalist?

Boot declares grandly that he had to “protect the anonymity” of his source, but did he give two minutes of thought to why he was told what he was told? This kind of shabby exchange short-changes those who read the result on two levels. First, we are expected to take what the journalist/reporter claims at full face value. So let’s examine Boot’s claim. The phrase he deployed was “top shadow cabinet person”. Now, the three “top” cabinet jobs are traditionally considered to be Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary, so Boot’s source was either Ed Balls or Douglas Alexander or Yvette Cooper. If none of these was his source, he was aggrandising his contact, one must assume, to make himself seem more important.

Inevitably, given the space constraints, Boot didn’t quote Alexander or Mr or Mrs Balls directly so we next are obliged to assume that he summarised what they said accurately and gave due weight to the element of what they told him “anonymously” that he alluded to. That’s quite a skill but of course journalists have to do that all the time, even Johann Hari.

But why does Boot think Yvette or Ed or Douglas gave this nugget to him, rather than to Nick Robinson or Michael White or Adam Boulton? He’s a neophyte doing a colour piece. Given that he has this little scoop, the temptation must be to make more of it than it merits – although here Boot, negligently, seems to have omitted to drop the nugget into his article. You worry that he’ll never be entrusted with a private word again.

Journalists are indeed human (boy, are they human) and the ambitious journo (among whose numbers I guess Boot doesn’t really figure) will perfectly understandably – if unforgivably – run with his exclusive nugget, project it beyond its merit, juice it up to make it more saleable and, at a pinch, invent it. Oh yes. Do not believe that you have never heard a sentence beginning “government sources tell me” that didn’t end in an utter fabrication.

Second level: what is the game of the politico? Is she flying a kite, chucking a phial of black propaganda into the pond, whistle-blowing a resented colleague? Does Boot know what he is doing, what game he is being roped into, when he repeats something told to him under conditions of anonymity? These are dark arts, my old friend, and you mix with them at your peril.

At any rate, Boot clambered perilously onto his high horse and struck me off his Twitter thread. At first I laughed and sent Dolly Levi a message, asking her to ask Boot whether I was to be Roberto Mancini and he Carlos Tevez or vice versa. Dolly wasn’t playing that game, however. She came back with this: “I think it would be wisest if you had your own cooling off period while you try to develop a less confrontational tweeting style”. Ouch!

I sent a direct message via Twitter back to Dolly. I no longer have the text but I believe I noted that I felt some tweeters were too sensitive and that I had been called on Twitter a moron lately but had rolled with the punch. Dolly knew that I had been called this: it was she who wrote it. But she was up for a scrap: “The persistent dig dig dig of so many of your tweets get people’s backs up. It comes across as rude, especially to strangers”.

I thought this was perfectly outrageous. How can she know how other people feel? Has she commissioned YouGov to conduct a poll of strangers to discover how they react to my tweets? I quickly replied that I didn’t recognise the “persistent dig dig dig” she described. What does she mean? I certainly sometimes twit fellow tweeters – it seems appropriate on a medium called Twitter – but I don’t do it with malice. Has she had the kind of hate mail that I received when I had the temerity to defend Kenneth Clarke against angry tweeters who patently hadn’t troubled to listen to his radio interview about rape sentencing? Is she living in the same world as me?

After brooding on this for some time, I decided that life was too short to be bothered with such nonsense. I untangled myself from Twitter and realised that it felt like a liberation. David my partner pointed out that one off the list of displacement activities was no bad thing,

I emailed Dolly: “I am mortified to think that people who don’t know me have complained to you about my tweeting style. That this might in some way redound on you, as the person who introduced me to Twitter, only makes matters worse. I offer you my apologies and to all those whom I have unwittingly offended. Clearly, I am not cut out for social networking. Accordingly, I have terminated my Twitter account”. Shrewdly if brutally, her response did not give me the satisfaction of seeing her rise to it: “Probably for the best”.

What Dolly and Boot don’t know is that there are some few followers of my tweets – none of them self-important writers and journalists – who regret my retirement, who have found my aperçus and departures from conventional wisdom bracing and provocative in a good way. I am in fact a loss to Twitter. I’m not at all sure that Dolly’s former friendship and Boot’s potential comradeship are any kind of a loss to me.

DEAD LETTERS

Recently, I was asked a small favour by the younger of my partner’s delicious nieces, Gaby (not her real name). She had written a letter of application for a sub-editing post and wanted me to run my eyes over it. I readily agreed. As Gaby is a terrifically smart cookie, widely read and highly articulate, I anticipated that this would be the work of a moment.

Not so. Indeed, I found it a ticklish assignment. I didn’t want to recast the letter in the words I would have used – no help in that – but I did feel some of her phraseology struck the wrong tone, both for a job application and for someone needing to be seen as rigorous in the matter of language. In my computing incompetence, I managed to delete the annotated version of her letter that I had prepared from her email attachment, so I rang her and talked it through instead.

It was a few days later that I finally realised what was wrong with the application. It was simply that no one knows how to write a proper letter any longer. No shame on Gaby, for whom epistolary style is as archaic as ploughing with horses. How often has she been required to put pen (or even keyboard) to paper in a formal manner?

When I was a boy, early in the reign of Queen Victoria, we were called upon to write letters rather frequently. Letter-writing modes were taught at school and, unless one were unlucky with one’s parents, at home too. We all understood the important distinction between “Yours faithfully” and “Yours sincerely” and we knew what the strange terms “inst” and “ultimo” meant. I still favour those terms in business letters and use them scrupulously (especially when I am writing a letter of complaint), even while expecting that the recipient will be puzzled. (For the record, “Yours of 3rd inst” means “your letter to me of the 3rd of this month” and “Mine of 25th ultimo” means “My letter to you of the 25th of last month”).

All givers of birthday and Christmas presents had to be thanked by post, carefully set out by hand in fountain pen on headed notepaper. We had to write everything at school in ink too; hence the proverbial pre-computer schoolboy with stained fingers. Now we have Mrs Janes, the bereaved mother to whom Gordon Brown wrote, complaining that the PM should have typed it. In days past, the idea of typing a personal letter would be unthinkable.

The telephone was used much more sparingly in those days. People would write to each other with news. Anything sent through the mail in a business or retail transaction would have a personal covering letter. Compliment slips were thought too sloppy and informal. Letters of acknowledgment were a matter of course – now they are an unexpected occasion for pathetic gratitude. And of course there was no email or texting.

These last two developments have played a great part in the destruction of writing style. I have no doubt that their spread has meant that many more people do actually write to each other than hitherto. But the conventions of these two modes have grown up spontaneously and therefore in an unstructured way. I still am uncertain whether to address somebody whom I do not know or to whom I am emailing for a business reason as “Dear” and to sign off with the usual “Yours sincerely” (if I know their name) or “Yours faithfully” (if the address is to “Dear Sir or Madam”). “Hi”, “Hello”, “Best wishes” and “Kind regards” seem to be the usual style in emails but I cling to older ways.

Texting, by its comparatively laborious method, is more informal and abrupt still. I have yet to learn the common abbreviations that young people bandy about. Only recently did I discover that “lol” is “laughing out loud”: I had assumed it to mean “lots of love”, a rather different sentiment.

What is everywhere apparent in the explosion of writing onto screens is that most people have no idea how to spell (and cannot be arsed to check their spelling with a dictionary) and/or that few of us look over what we have written before we send it. For a positive festival of bad spelling and worse expression, you need look no further than eBay. But I have several friends whose emails are frequently more or less incomprehensible, largely because they hit “send” as soon as they have written what they want to say and do not, as we were enjoined to do at school, “check your work”. We all make mistakes, of course, and those of mine that come to my attention are suppurating wounds for days (sometimes even years) afterwards – did I ever tell you about the phrase “a cheque shirt” that fetched up uncorrected in the published version of my first novel? (Cheque your work, indeed).

Gordon Brown’s letter to Mrs Janes has caused him enormous grief, both in the sense of his own unmistakeable anguish that his unavoidable shortcomings – crap handwriting, compromised eyesight – should have let him down in a way that has been made so public and in the sense that he has been mercilessly harried by a woman with an agenda and a newspaper with an axe to grind. I feel for him. My own penmanship is terrible, ruined by the years of taking scribbled notes as a student and then as a journalist, so now I type a letter unless it is really unavoidable: condolences for a bereavement provide just such an occasion. My eyesight is compromised too, though not nearly as profoundly as Brown’s. And like him I favour felt-tips over nasty biros.

Brown’s effort – which evidently now ranks with the Zinoviev Letter in the annals of political mischief making – was clearly thoughtful and well-meant. Mrs Janes was outraged that he misspelled her name, though it seems to me that, in his hand, it could quite as well have been read as Janes rather than James. Nick Robinson, speaking on BBC News, referred to her at one point as Mrs Jane. Surely that gives The Sun new ammunition in its campaign against the BBC too.

Mrs Janes went to The Sun in the first instance – whether by way of Max Clifford or on her own has not been revealed – and says that she has not been paid by the paper. Not everybody believes her. When Brown telephoned her to apologise in person, she recorded the conversation. The Sun says it had nothing to do with this recording. Not everybody believes it. The Sun of course has very publicly turned its back on the Labour government and is now doing everything in its power to ensure a Tory victory at the general election. There is little doubt that the Tories will go out of their way to please Rupert Murdoch by hobbling the BBC, allowing Sky to take a larger stake in ITV and doing nothing to force non-residents (example: R Murdoch) to pay tax on their income earned here.

Of course, The Sun has never made an error, be it of spelling, of fact, of judgment or of taste. Indeed, the mounting evidence that, on the matter of the Brown letter, it has wholly misjudged the public mood may very well be the first miscalculation that it has ever made.

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The other day, the son of my oldest friend turned 21. I sent him a message – “welcome to big school” – that he probably didn’t appreciate. But to the generation of his pop and me, born within ten days of each other in 1947, 21 will always be the age at which one attains one’s majority. Back in the 1960s, that’s when everything came to you, all the rights and responsibilities (save for sex, which was permitted five years earlier, as long as you were a heterosexual or a lesbian). So Tony and I could not vote in the 1966 general election, when we were 19. As it happens our respective partners --– Tony’s wife Tricia and my civil partner David who, spookily, were born on the very same day – both could vote in the 1970 election when they were 19, because the Wilson government had betweentimes changed the law and allowed 18 year-olds the vote. I always felt a tad deprived by this change, voting myself for the first time at the same 1970 election, although the Labour Party that I would have voted for in 1966 did get back into power.