NEVER UNKNOWINGLY RUDE

I have gravely offended a friend. That is, of course, if I am permitted still to use the term “friend” in relation to him. I was “rude”, it seems. He has told me this often enough for me to accept that this must be his settled conviction. I don’t think I’ve been rude at all. Like all things, this particular fracas has to be seen in context. I will try to give a flavour of the context and then you may be the judge. The exchanges in question have all taken the form of email.

My (hitherto) friend is in the way of being a bit of a writer. Recently he wrote a piece on spec for the newspapers and he sent a copy to me. Candidly, I thought the piece was pretty awful and wholly misconceived but I didn’t tell him that. Having said how I was out of knowledge and sympathy with the subject of the piece – in other words, to give him to understand that I wasn’t really qualified to judge – I then concluded with a short paragraph beginning “If I may say so – and I know you bristle at criticism – I think that …” and then made a mild and entirely constructive suggestion as to how he could improve the piece. I ended with: “Still, you ’av a go, sir, you do ’av a go”.

I have no way of knowing if he took tut at this (as I thought) entirely light and friendly approach to giving him the benefit of my opinion based on thirty years of being a freelance journalist. Whether he incorporated my suggestion or managed to place the piece or was at all grateful for the help I offered he never vouchsafed.

Now this is a man about whom I have written before on this blog. At that time, I hadn’t heard from him in a long while. This was, it seemed to me, not entirely unconnected with the fact that I had lent him a tidy sum of money and the agreed date for its interest-free repayment was some time passed. He had moved house (several times, it seemed), he had changed his phone number and email address and people who knew him could not direct me to him. So I wrote about him and I named him.

Eventually the sum was repaid – not without extra outlay by me in the form of expenses incurred – and connection was renewed, though I still have no address or phone number for him. A couple of times, he has asked me to alter the reference earlier on this blog. The first time I ignored the request. The second time – quite recently – I addressed it. I will not now use his real name so let me hereafter refer to him as Colin. It’s the sort of name he deserves.

Before I repeat the burden of my demurral to his request for a blog rewrite, let me add some context. Colin has a page on Wikipedia. When I first looked at it, I thought it read rather ickily, as if written by himself or his agent. Wikipedia itself evidently thought so too because, subsequent to my first reading it, the site has appended two announcements at the top of the entry. One, decorated with a pair of scales, says: “A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view”. The other, led by a large exclamation point, says: “This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources”.

In asking me to remove the material on my own blog, Colin calls what I wrote “suppositions and not at all true”. I responded thus: “I don't feel the slightest bit inclined to alter my posting for these five reasons:
1) You may not care for it but I don't believe anything in the piece is unjust, unfounded, malicious or mendacious.
2) The number of people who will have read it is vanishingly tiny. I have had about 7,500 visitors to the site, many of them returning, many of them staying only for a few seconds, a huge number of them just wanting to view the picture I ran last year of Tiger Woods' wife (which puts it all very much in perspective). Only two searches to the site have used your name as a searching criterion and both those searches, I would submit, were done by you (I don't get informed who visitors are but I do learn how they come, from whence and why). If anybody other than you reads that piece in the future (which is a very, very remote possibility), it won't be anyone who will use it as an excuse not to commission you, believe me.
3) Nobody who knows you will have read it. Even fewer people who know you will read it in the future. Put your moniker in Google and tell me whereabouts on the list is a link to that piece (I don't know myself because I haven't looked but I'm confident it won’t be in the first 5,000).
4) If you want to be concerned about something about you on the internet, attend to your Wikipedia entry. That seems to me a) vastly more likely to bring people who want to know about you, especially people in the biz who might do you some good and b) vastly more likely to make such people think you're a flake and not to be trusted.
5) I don't as a general principle approve of rewriting published documents other than in very exceptional circumstances. Anyway, it would be a chore and I have enough to do just now. You're lucky I squeezed you in at all”.

Reading that again ten days later, it seems to me to be forthright and comprehensive but neither unduly unfriendly nor uncalled for.

At the end of his reply, which largely dealt with other matters, Colin wrote “I guess there is not much I can do to get you to remove those comments. But why does my Wikipedia entry suggest I’m a flake?”

I found this question pretty astonishing. It seemed to me to suggest that he needed a wake-up call. My reply went on to other matters but began with this paragraph: “The editorial comment that the monitors have placed on your Wikipedia entry acts as a caveat emptor. It strongly suggests that they think this is a self-promotional entry rather than an objective one. That's what anyone who doesn't know you will assume (people who already know you already know that that's exactly what it is). As a consequence they (the people who don't know you) are likely at the very least to think twice about you. If you reckon that does you less damage than a passing reference buried in an obscure blog, you're putting your vanity way before your commonsensical approach to the business; and you're a lot dumber than I took you for”.

Reading that again now – and, as is my practice, I read it over several times before sending it, very different from Colin who never looks over his emails and habitually sends stuff that is full of typos and often phrased so obscurely that I cannot glean his meaning – it seems to me to be the robust good sense of someone looking out for a friend. I didn’t think I needed my usual cautious approach – “if I may say so – and I know you bristle at criticism” (see above).

Back came Colin: “Well the Wikipedia page was actually built by someone I used to work with at the BBC, and done out of kindness, as he was aware of such things are [sic] Wikipedia long before I was. Look I know this won't do anything to rebuild our friendship, but I do have to quote my partner on reading the first paragraph of your email: "why the hell would you let anyone speak to you like that?" I have always had the utmost respect for you Stephen as you know, and as I have admitted before I have also found you brusque to the point of bloody rudeness on occasion. But I really can't put myself in the firing line for this sort of thing any more. I know you are as staunch a believer in good manners as I am, so I really must register my upset at the way I am being spoken to here. If you don't think you are being unnessarily [sic} rude then fair enough, but I have to be allowed to say how I feel. xx”

I found this perfectly outrageous. My first instinct was to write back thus: “Why would I give a tuppenny fuck what your fucking girlfriend says? Is she a fucking professor of moral philosophy? Has she read the whole fucking correspondence? Over the years, my partner has made many sarcastic and disobliging remarks about you, but I’ve never quoted a single one of them at you because a) I don’t need reinforcements; b) he is biased in my favour and therefore not what I would consider a reliable witness; c) he’s never met you and only knows from what selected morsels I share about you and hence he simply and literally doesn’t know what he is talking about”.

However, I didn’t write that. Instead, I wrote: “Before I buckle under the lash of your partner's rush to bitter judgment, let her consider these questions:
– Does she know that my email was in response to your query ‘why does my Wikipedia entry suggest I'm a flake?’?
– Has she seen the Wikipedia page in question?
– What is her own considered view of the impact of the two cautionary notes flagged up there by the site monitors on the expectations of anyone visiting that site in the hope of learning something about you?
– Can she find it within her to see that only someone with your best interests at heart would be trying to knock sense into your head about this matter?”

Incidentally, I nearly declined the invitation to refer to the woman in question as Colin’s “partner”. I have never met her and don’t know her name; indeed this was the first time he had referred to her. Colin is, if his own account is to be credited, a serial womaniser and very few of his relationships, as far as I know, have lasted past three months, but I depend for this intelligence wholly on what he has indicated to me over the years. This one, the professor of moral philosophy, may be The One for ought I know but, as I say, she was news to me. David and I, on the other hand, have been together for thirty years. I submit that my own use of the term “partner” is justified.

Colin began his next email thus: “I do appreciate that, and it was nothing to do with what you said, it's to do with the way you say things. There's just no need to be so brusque about everything. I sincerely appreciate you have my best interests at heart and your advice is always welcome, but so often it comes across as unnecessarily violent”.

Brusque, rude, violent … it comes hard to a congenital pacifist to be called violent, especially “unnecessarily violent” (I’m not sure I would know how to identify necessary violence). I felt a little sarcasm was called for. My next email began: “Isn't it a lovely day? The birds are singing. The fish rise to the food with a will. There's a slight breeze. The dogs are sleepy and not very keen to walk round the field. Of course, the nights start drawing in now. It'll soon be deepest February. Oh god, sorry, I've turned unnecessarily violent. Even brusque. What a heartless bastard”. I then complained about something he’d written to me on a different matter that was perfectly impenetrable in these terms: “It's said that a true gentleman is never unknowingly rude and when I am rude to you it's because I bloody well intend to be, but I'm not sure you realise how bloody rude it is to toss off an email without reading it through, correcting the mistakes and making sure that it is coherent. But then if I whinged about that, you'd think I was giving you a hard time” and I ended “So, what did your girlfriend have to say about your Wikipedia page?”

Colin replied: “I just don't see the need to write in that tone. I don't mean to sound like Derek Batey when I say this, but I simply can't imagine anyone reading an email like that and not finding it bewilderingly hostile”. By this time, I felt I was being lectured about how I should conduct myself and I resented it. Back I came: “Oh I say, do chuck it, Carruthers, old man. If I felt hostility towards you, I wouldn't write at all. But if you keep on with this dreary bleating, I shall indeed start to get hostile. And I don't particularly appreciate being told how to write. You need to be able to face robust knockabout to survive in this business. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen”. And I added: “I ask again: what did your girlfriend say about your Wikipedia entry?”

Uncharacteristically, I heard nothing for four days. I had been reading a novel set in New York, where Colin had, a year or so back, had a play mounted off-Broadway but was never able to go and see it. So I wrote again: “You're not actually sulking, are you? Oh puhleeze. If, as we all hope, you are eventually going to make it properly in New York, you will have to grow a thicker skin. Manhattanites are brutal and robust and take no prisoners. Sensitive types don't last five minutes.
I'll tell you a New York joke:
– How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?
– OK, how many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?
– None of your fuckin' business.
You still don't tell me what your girlfriend says about your Wikipedia page. This is because she agrees with me. Am I right or am I right?”

Colin came back: “No of course I'm not sulking, I just have been busy the last few days. It's not as if I work for the BBC any more and get paid to send emails all day!
I actually have a thicker skin than you may thick [sic], but (and this is my final word on the subject) whether I do or not is no excuse for rudeness. This isn't the Eighties for fuck's sake.
And no, my girlfriend didn't agree with you about Wikipedia, she just said ‘I wouldn't let anyone speak to me like that’. But you don't think you were being rude so we'll have to agree to differ. Life’s too short”.

Perhaps I was being over-sensitive now, but I thought this was Colin eating his cake and having it too, so I replied (in full): “The next email you send me which contains either of the words ‘rude’ and ‘rudeness’ will be deleted unread. If you think I'm rude, you haven't lived”. And that’s where it stands at the time of writing.

Colin ended his most recent email to me with the following request: “Would you read something of mine if I send it to you?” It takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Well, it does mine. Perhaps it doesn’t yours. I’m always very reluctant to read friends’ stuff because what they want is an unequivocal cascade of praise and there’s not much point in your reading their stuff if nothing less will do.

Some years ago, a friend in the biz asked if I would look over the first few chapters of the autobiography she was writing. I said that there wouldn’t be any point in my doing so if she didn’t give me carte blanche to be entirely candid. No, no, that was exactly what she required. I read the material, largely enjoyed it and write her a six-page letter of notes. The most damning criticism I made was that she had written too generously about others and left herself and her own feelings out of the narrative too much.

I heard nothing from her. Three or four years went by and I never knew whether the book was published. Then I fell over it in a remainder shop and bought a copy. She hadn’t included me in the acknowledgments. Before I had read it, she invited me to a party at her house. I arrived before more than half a dozen others were there, none of them people I knew, and we stood about making aimless small talk. Then another guest arrived, the hostess brought her in and announced loudly enough to shut everyone up: “Now, Steve, I want you to meet this old friend of mine. You see, she really liked my book”.

Given the evident sensitivity of Colin, I’m not sure I can face the potential nuclear winter of making any comment at all about his latest piece of writing. As he wrote just two days ago, life’s too short.

WHAT ABAHT the STRIKERS?!

I know precious little of football. I didn’t watch any of the World Cup matches. Had I been caught up in the tournament, I am sure I would have followed the South American teams, who seem to exhibit a flair for and relish in the game always singularly lacking in the English and apparently in some of the other European sides this time too.


Tevez scored for Argentina against Mexico in the World Cup yesterday

Paradoxically, I take a mild academic interest in results, always checking the progress of the teams from the county where I was born and brought up: Northampton Town, Kettering, Rushden and Diamonds. When the last named is referred to on television, it is always mispronounced. It’s not “Rush-ton”, it’s “Ruzh-den”. Northampton are known as The Cobblers, in recognition of the area’s traditional industry, now almost entirely departed. None of these teams troubles the headline writers very often. That George Best scored his double hat-trick in a cup match against Cobblers is more apt to be invoked than the little club’s famous defeat of Arsenal in a different cup year. Cobblers spent one season in the top flight – I remember a report on them for Sportsview in which a young Frank Bough motored up the M1 to interview the legendary manager Dave Bowen. They were relegated with a higher number of points than any previously downgraded team had ever won.

I may not know much about football, but I know a thing or two about capitalism. From what I see and hear, the many commentators now being wise after the event about the “problems” of the England side are obsessed with trivia. “Capello refuses to resign ahead of crisis meeting with FA chairman” declares a headline in The Guardian’s sports section; reporters are so self-important that they expect announcements at press conferences before any of the powers-that-be have been consulted, rather as they expect cabinet ministers to reveal the date of the next general election in media interviews. But the identity of the manager is not the key to raising England’s game or that of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.


Girls playing urban soccer in Peru

What has gone wrong, it seems to me, is that capitalism noticed that football was a killing waiting to be made. Rupert Murdoch saw that a man like himself with bottomless pockets could pretty much corner the market in televising routine as well as big occasion matches. By selling the advertising within and around the broadcasting of live games at a premium rate, he pumped up the price of football. The clubs themselves began to rent out everything visible to the cameras as platforms for advertising. So-called player power, whereby the players took on phalanxes of agents and media consultants and held out for grotesque transfer fees, quickly turned the Premier League into one where most of the players were multimillionaires.

Awash with broadcasting money, the big clubs became easy prey for speculators and asset-strippers who saw them as cash-cows to use as a hedge against debts. Foreign businesses, not constrained by British regulation, bought in heavily and landed all the big clubs with staggering levels of debt.

That this ludicrous situation has been allowed to come about is because the running of the game has been so ham-fisted. The Football Association, the Football League and the Football Conference have allowed the boards of the Premier League clubs and the agents of the international star players to ride roughshod over the best interests of the game as a whole, out of an unregulated desire to make quick and easy profit. The bankrollers of football, like capitalists everywhere, are not concerned about the long-term good of the field in which they operate, only about the short-term benefit of the share-holders.

The result is that the grassroots of the game have been pitifully starved of support. The bringing on of young local players was handled more professionally half a century ago by retired professionals and other sharp-nosed volunteer scouts than it is now. Nobody is suggesting a fantasy return to some Corinthian ideal, just something other than an asylum where the inmates have taken over.

The FA needs to put its foot down or, if necessary, to be given the new powers to put its foot down. There should be a swingeing levy on every transaction (broadcasting rights, advertising deals, transfer fees, wages, golden handshakes), the proceeds of which are invested directly into the game at schoolboy and girl level, developing the skills and attitudes of young players with coaching of the highest quality. The FA should place a cap on the number of players that a club may acquire from overseas, say five at any one time. The current Chelsea squad (as of a fortnight ago) was 52 strong; just ten of them are English-born. It’s 14 years since the club had a fulltime manager who was English and until that time every manager in the club’s history had been English or Scottish, with Danny Blanchflower’s brief tenure in the late 1970s as a single Northern Irish exception.


Metropolitan street football in Brazil

But there is clearly a cultural problem too. In any poor country, you see small boys spending all the hours of daylight kicking a ball about in any open space, however confined. Across the main road that runs past our house, there is a housing estate with plenty of greensward. Though plenty of the households have children and many of the houses were hung with the flag of St George until yesterday evening, it’s pretty rare that you see much football played on the greens. Two or three times a summer, there might a dozen or so boys playing quite hard between two improvised goals. More often, two or three are mucking about with a ball and one goalmouth. But it’s a relatively rare event, certainly not as frequently as once a week. No doubt this generation of kids thinks of games as something you play on a screen, sat on your arse. The football they play is doubtless more likely to be Wii than WW.

HERE COMES EVERYBODY

Tony, my best friend at school and my earliest writing partner, left a year before I did to study English and drama at Birmingham University, a good move as it transpired. I stayed on an extra year to do scholarship entrance to Cambridge, in vain as it turned out, but that’s a tale for another day.

One weekend, Tony rolled up in his battered old jalopy, flourishing two tickets for a concert. Granted parental permission, I jumped into the passenger seat and we motored off to London down the M1, still something of a novelty in 1966 for country bumpkins like us.

My musical education had been somewhat piecemeal up to this point. My recent forebears had all been musical in their various ways. One grandfather was a silver bandmaster for forty years, the other a village choirmaster for forty years. My parents met in the local amateur operatic society, she in the dancing chorus, he a decent light tenor, well suited to playing the hero’s friend but not actor enough to lead a cast. He had a local triumph as Detlef in Romberg’s The Student Prince. My mother had studied piano to a pretty good standard – her plaster bust of Wagner I still have – and she obliged me to take lessons in my turn.

But we did not own a gramophone until I held out for a Dansette-type record player for my 13th birthday, putting pressure on my Dad by starting to buy singles in anticipation, even without the wherewithal yet to play them. As I grew more serious in the Vth and VIth forms, I started to read reviews of new classical releases and to supplement my pop stuff, soundtracks and show albums with haphazardly chosen grown-up music, everything from Bach to Pfitzner, from Mendelssohn to Mimaroglu.


Gustav Mahler

There was also a school record library, a motley of purchases, donations and swag. This collection exactly reflected the serendipitous nature of my own growing collection of LPs, save that some of them were so old that they were 10-inchers and even 78s. I borrowed indiscriminately and, having set up my reel-to-reel tape recorder to copy from my record player, I soon had half the school’s haul on audio tape.

The composer whose work we were to hear in London was not represented in the school collection. He was Gustav Mahler. Both Tony and I had liked what we had read about this late romantic but had still not heard a note of his work. Mahler had become fashionable over recent years, rediscovered thanks as much as anyone to the American conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein, whose own music was greatly under Mahler’s influence. Bernstein had recorded several of Mahler’s massive symphonies in the States and Europe and now he was coming to London to record the 8th symphony after giving it in concert at the Albert Hall.

Lenny Bernstein was also a persuasive advocate. He was a gifted teacher and talker and, in an era when “mass communication” was the only way to go, he made for terrific television, whether talking or conducting. I had a recording by him of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony that had a bonus EP of a talk on the work by Lenny. Not many people could get away with a phrase like “Beethoven the gigantic one” and still not seem a fraud. In a Sunday Times review that I vividly recall of another Mahler concert, Desmond Shawe-Taylor remarked that “Bernstein concluded with a left and a right that had Mahler sprawling against the ropes”. That sounded just the kind of conducting that got me going.


Otto Böhler's famous silhouettes of Mahler in action

The 8th, a grand choral work, was known as “the Symphony of a Thousand” because of the massive forces involved. The Albert Hall gig was to be populated by the London Symphony Orchestra at full stretch, the London Symphony Chorus, the Leeds Festival Chorus, the Orpington Junior Singers, the Highgate School Boys’ Choir and eight soloists. We knew we were in for a show but we couldn’t guess quite what a show. From the electrifying crash of the opening, a thunderous octave leap on the giant Albert Hall organ, immediately followed by the roaring invocation of the massed voices – “Veni, veni, creator spiritus!” [“Come, creator, holy spirit!”] – we were, as comparably impressed teenagers would say now, blown away.

The whole first section of the work, lasting around 25 minutes, is a switchback ride of emotion, power, retreat and renewal, packed with exquisite melody and daring orchestration. The second part, a realisation of the climactic scene of Goethe’s play Faust, is more than twice as long and rather more measured and discursive before returning at the end to the tumult of the earliest bars. By that end, we were mentally, physically and psychologically shredded. It was the most enthralling experience, not least because of the dynamism of Bernstein’s conducting.


Lenny gives it his all

Afterwards, we slept in Tony’s car parked in the Kensington side-street where, the previous year, Winston Churchill’s life had drawn to its close. Next morning, we breakfasted in the café of a nearby hotel. We were served by a very chirpy waitress with whom, by curious coincidence, I enjoyed an affair a decade later (oh yes, I cruised both sides of the street in those days. I always cherish Gore Vidal’s famous answer to the question “was your first sexual experience homosexual or heterosexual?” – “I was too polite to ask”).

Naturally, when the double album of Bernstein’s version of Mahler’s 8th was released the following year, I rushed out to buy it. I still have it but it is so worn down by constant playing as to be unbearable. My CD replacement is a rather embarrassing item from a series called ‘The Royal Edition’, all works conducted by Lenny but decked out with watercolours by the Prince of Wales who, you can bet, has not listened to the Mahler as often as I have. But the piece has had an important function in my life. If ever I felt sad or defeated or confused or in any other way negative, all I needed to do was to lie on the floor and play Part I of the 8th, very loudly and preferably in darkness. After that, everything seemed possible.

Over the years I got to know and love all of Mahler’s music. Though the individual pieces are all large-scale, it’s as assimilable a body of work as Jane Austen’s, as opposed to the sprawling canon, across several genres of, say, Haydn or Bernard Shaw. Mahler was, after all, only ever a part-time composer, making his living as a conductor, primarily of opera. He was born in July 1860 so, next month, we mark his 150th anniversary. Next May will be the centenary of his death; he lived only four years longer than Schumann whom we think of conventionally as having “died young”.


The musical prodigy at 5 or 6

It is evident that Mahler was, with Keats, “half in love with easeful death”. Mortal terror stalks his music. Seven of his eleven siblings died in childhood, including his closest brother. One of his two beloved daughters also died in childhood, giving a retrospective poignancy to his most agonised song cycle, Kindertotenlieder (I am listening to it as I write in the rapturous rendition by Kathleen Ferrier with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter). Soon after Maria’s death, Mahler learned that his own heart was defective and that his prospects were not good. He was working on the 8th symphony at this time. Always superstitious, Mahler deferred writing a further symphony because of the notion that nine was the most a composer could complete – Beethoven, Spohr, Schubert, Dvorak and Bruckner had all died without completing a tenth. Instead he wrote Das Lied von der Erde, which has an unmistakeably symphonic structure. After that, he dared to write a huge and magnificent 9th symphony before, inevitably, leaving an unfinished 10th (it has been superbly realised in performable form by Deryck Cooke and, subsequently, in several other versions).


Mahler in his late 20s

That Mahler was driven and a mass of contradictions is both clear and not to be wondered at. A Bohemian Jew, he converted to Catholicism in order to carve himself a highly influential role in the life of a city devoted to music, Vienna. The extent of anti-Semitism in late 19th century Vienna can only be imagined. Like the cliché of an opera conductor – perhaps he inspired the cliché – Mahler was autocratic, perfectionist and relentless. He made many enemies. His tenure at the Vienna Opera, like all his conducting posts, was wracked by quarrels, resentments, resignations and outrageous ferocities both suffered and inflicted. He would flee to a succession of summer retreats to compose, but his symphonies and song cycles received mixed responses. His greatest triumph, the last of his lifetime, was the world premiere of the 8th in Munich on September 12th 1910. The composer was denied the savour of its reception, however, for he discovered on the eve of its performance that his adored wife Alma was faithless with the architect Walter Gropius. Despite this blow, Mahler dedicated the symphony to Alma.


Alma Mahler

Mahler’s music resounds with the sounds and flavours of the world around him. The quality of gemütlichkeit, so beloved of the indulgent Viennese, thrives alongside the doom and despair. Band music of all kinds – from military marches through town band tunefulness and funeral dirges to oompah corniness – passes through the sound picture. The music of the Viennese café and salon, of street players and folk singers, of the church choir and the klezmorim rub shoulders with the particular writing for projected voice that Mahler studied so closely for his work in the opera house. Forerunning geniuses – Bruckner (his teacher), Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner – inform his taste and his decisions, as do his extensive readings in philosophy and theosophy. Had he lived, I have no doubt that jazz and the new forms pioneered within a very few years of his death by the likes of Stravinsky and, in Vienna itself, Schönberg would have contributed to his joyous eclecticism and perhaps indeed he would have made the obvious move into writing for the opera house, though it is hard to see any librettist surviving such a collaboration. More than any other ingredient, the summer sounds of nature that surrounded him while he wrote in the Austrian countryside fed into his aesthetic.


Contemporary caricature of Mahler's aesthetic

It’s a rich and dense fabric that he weaves. Mahler isn’t for everyone and certainly not for those who take a more ascetic view of art. At the time of the ‘60s revival, I remember Kingsley Amis remarking that he couldn’t bear Mahler’s stuff. Given Amis’s own politics, character and world view, I felt comfortably in the correct camp (and anyway, isn’t Lucky Jim one of the most overrated of novels?). Mahler appealed to me at that time because I had a young man’s passion for artists who created teeming worlds. I remember a Sunday newspaper headline over a piece about James Joyce’s writing: “Here comes everybody”. That was what I loved in Joyce and Günter Grass and Lawrence Sterne and Dickens and later in Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Lawrence Norfolk; and what Mahler’s crowded canvases also seemed to offer.

In the fifty years before that Bernstein-led revival, Mahler’s reputation had dwindled while the Baroque was rediscovered and the classical composers took their place at the centre of the repertoire. A few conductors kept his name known on the continent – Willem Mengelberg, Hermann Scherchen, Karel Ancerl, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Jascha Horenstein – and in Britain – Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli, than whom no two conductors could be more different in style and approach. But none did more to fan the flame than Bruno Walter who worked as Mahler’s assistant at the Vienna Opera and who was perhaps unique in refusing to hear a word said against the maestro. After Mahler’s death, Walter conducted the world premieres of both Das Lied von der Erde and the 9th symphony at Alma’s invitation and, a quarter of a century later, made the first recordings of both works. A later recording of Das Lied with Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak is among the finest recordings of great music ever made. Walter, whose long life ended in 1962, once said that the two greatest musicians he had ever known were Mahler and Ferrier and that perhaps Ferrier – that hugely loved English contralto who died so tragically young – was the greatest of all.


Bruno Walter

In recent years, Mahler recording has become a vital industry. No conductor worth his or her salt foregoes the opportunity to record not just a favourite from among these symphonies that were once thought too demanding and exhausting to attempt, but the whole canon. Since Luchino Visconti drew on it so extensively for the soundtrack of his movie Death in Venice of 1971, the Adagietto of the 5th symphony has turned into Mahler’s “lollipop”, an extractable sweetmeat for busy people to swoon at momentarily. But the movement has from the get-go been teased out as a crowd pleaser. Sir Henry Wood introduced it into a Prom concert as long ago as 1909 and Lenny Bernstein extracted it for the memorial mass given in New York for Senator Robert Kennedy.

What Mahler himself and the scornful Viennese haute bourgeoisie would have made of it all is anyone’s guess. Secure in the Pantheon, his last laugh would at least have been heard by the famously scandalous Alma, who married and divorced Gropius and who outlived even Bruno Walter by two years. For his part, the erudite composer would have read his Hippocrates and so would have known that ars longa, vita brevis.


The maestro on the podium

GETTING ONE’s KICKS ELSEWHERE

Perplexingly, thousands of people seem to be travelling around the country promoting syphilis …

Like many others, I greeted the end of another season of football last month with relief but now I discover that we are in for even more of the wretched stuff than ever from this weekend onwards and, if the team representing England manage to progress past the first rubber, for weeks thereafter. I read that England’s opening match is against the USA and, as a student of history, I happen to know that the same nation’s then team defeated England in the same cup sixty years ago. Then, as now, England and her apologists presented themselves in a miasma of hubris and richly deserved to be taken down several dozen pegs. Like all thoughtful people, I shall be fervently hoping for a repeat of that result. With luck, Master Rooney will be sent off for calling one of his opponents a despicable cad.

Whatever else the South African World Cup will be, it will certainly be a festival of cliché. Which dumb and exhausted phrase will win the ultimate prize, I wonder? Look out for “a rasping shot”, always an impenetrable favourite among commentators. But I would put folding money on “44 years of hurt” as combining the proper level of hyperbole with the appropriate overlay of surrealism. This phrase refers to the fact that England last won the Jules Rimet trophy on home soil in suitably controversial circumstances in 1966 and has not come notably close to winning since. It isn’t so much “hurt” that is the problem; by any criterion, it’s a combination of incompetence and inflated expectation.


Matt in last weekend's Telegraph

The fact is that Britain doesn’t invest remotely sufficient resources in the game at grass roots level to have any prospect of bringing on world-beating native players a decade from now. Half a dozen of the premier league teams are potentially richer than any comparable businesses in the world because of the wealth drawn from television rights, yet they are impoverished by asset-stripping foreign owners and grotesquely inflated rates of pay offered to players, the majority of whom do not qualify to play for this country.

That England’s prospects are objectively so poor doesn’t deter anyone, especially those seeking to cash in, from talking up the notion that England “can” win. (It always seems to me a fake argument; of course England “can” win because they are playing. Aberbaijan can’t, because they’re not). Last time, at the outset of the competition, Radio Times ran a mock-up of the England players, topped by David Beckham, flourishing the trophy. At least the editor (so far, at any rate) has had the basic sense not to repeat this absurdity.

Whenever “Ingerland” (as the fans evidently chant it) plays in one of these international tourneys, thousands of men with unusually small willies buy pairs of massively expensive flags of St George (no doubt stitched for next to nothing by starving peasants in the Far East) and attach them to their otherwise unremarkable motor vehicles, from which said flags flap in the breeze like wounded birds.

On a previous occasion when Ingerland were playing in one of these continuously hyped events, a friend and his son came to lunch and then asked to be permitted to watch “the match” on our television that afternoon. The son (a grown-up) was wearing an Ingerland shirt, though he lives in South Africa and is indeed half South African (his father is wholly South African but of East European Jewish origin). We reluctantly concurred on condition that we were not required to enter the television room for the duration.


Rooney: "cad"

Ingerland were playing Portugal. I didn’t have the heart to point out to the son that he was in fact wearing the favour of the patron saint of Portugal. St George has enjoyed this status in Portugal rather longer than he has in Ingerland. “Säo Jorge” was a Portuguese battle cry as early as the first half of the 14th century. George’s origins are disputed: some sources say he was born in what is now Turkey, others Israel or Palestine or that he may have been Lebanese. At any rate, it seems unlikely that he ever came to Wembley or was what I understand is termed a “Man U” fan.

The flying of George’s flag – a very simple thin, red cross horizontally laid on a white ground – indicates that the team is unquestioningly supported by the owner of the car (or indeed of the house for, as at Yule, otherwise ugly and depressing houses are now festooned with flags and bunting). What none of these unthinking buffoons considers is that, Portugal aside, there are many other communities and causes to which George is patron and therefore to which, unwittingly, they are attaching their reputations. In Brazil – like Portugal, a potential rival for Ingerland in the imminent tourney – George is quite as hallowed a saint as Sebastian. George is also the patron saint of Georgia, of Slovenia, of Moscow, of Beirut, of North Ossetia, of Milan and several other Italian cities, of Aragon, of Kerala, of Gozo and of Malta. There are St George’s Day celebrations in Canada, Belgium, Palestine, Serbia, Bulgaria and Catalonia.


The Jules Rimet trophy: but the players would rather have the cash

The Boy Scouts have George as their patron saint. He also gives his blessing to farmers and agricultural workers, shepherds and sheep and butchers; to horses and horsemen, cavalry and saddle-makers; to soldiers, knights, archers and armourers; and to leprosy, plague and skin diseases. Oh … and to herpes and syphilis. Clap for George!

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RULES BROKEN – LAWS FAR from BROKE

Is there anything more purely enjoyable than a political scandal in a party that you don’t support? And who would have guessed that such a scandal would break this soon into the life of the Con-Dem coalition government? Brave face though he may put on it, the David Laws humiliation is a disaster for David Cameron. The grumbling on the Tory benches, already rising to a roar over Capital Gains Tax and Cameron’s ham-fisted attempt to neuter the fiercely independent backbench grouping, the 1922 Committee, is further provoked by this evidence of Liberal Democrat unreliability. Make no mistake: there can be no second major error by a Lib Dem member of the Cabinet. Such an eventuality would cause a mass revolt on the government benches. The party will say: “throw the buggers out. It’d be better to go it alone as a minority government”.

David Laws’ folly, sin and crime – all these things, really – was to claim a sum that grew to £40,000 as a legitimate parliamentary expense characterised by him as payment to his landlord for a room rented conveniently for Westminster. The problem here was that the landlord was not simply his landlord. He was also Laws’ lover and had been so since 2001, exactly as long as Laws had been an MP. The rules about second home allowances for members of parliament were crystalised in 2006: no such allowance could be paid to an MP’s spouse or partner.


La Laws, before the storm broke

When first confronted on Friday morning with the intention by The Daily Telegraph to expose his situation in the next day’s paper, Laws took the line that he had not hitherto revealed James Lundie as his partner because the pair desired to preserve their privacy; that they could not properly be considered “partners” insofar as, for instance, they maintained separate bank accounts; and that he had never intended to profit from his expenses claim. Unfortunately, had he wished to maintain Lundie as, in The Telegraph’s phrase, “his secret lover”, and had he indeed intended to profit from his expenses claim, the facts of the case would be no different. Besides, he’s a multi-millionaire (there are 18 such in the Con-Dem cabinet, so they’re not much troubled by the trumpeted government pay cut). Why the hell is he claiming expenses at all?

Laws has been touted by Lib Dems and Tories alike as one of the great talents of his generation. A Guardian columnist this morning even called him “a man of exceptional nobility”. Oh pur-leeze: exceptional stupidity, more like. If he’s so brilliant, how come he made such a bish?

Doubtless David Cameron and Nick Clegg, as well as David Laws himself, soon saw that his position was not tenable. Inevitably, before the end of business on Saturday, he had stepped down. Today he is said to be considering a wounded exit from politics altogether, while government spokespeople and their supporters in the press loudly hope that he may be rehabilitated and restored to office as soon as possible.


James Lundie, Laws' firm partner

Of course, every party blackguards the sinners among its rivals and characterises the fall of its own as “a tragedy” and considerably less culpable than would be the same sin committed by one of another party. In the circumstances, Labour people have demonstrated admirable tact and taste in saying very little. They know, mind you, that expenses-fiddling on their own side of the house has been even more epidemic than among the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Not that any party has been quite as holier-than-thou about it all as the Lib Dems. But there’s also, I detect, a reticence in Labour’s response that may be traced to the gay aspect of the scandal.

From Ian Harvey and his guardsman in St James’s Park in 1958, via Jeremy Thorpe and “bunnies can and will go to Paris” and the Norman Scott murder plot, through the racist right-winger Harvey Proctor and his conviction for gross indecency with minors, to the entrapment of Michael Brown with an under-age boy by a Sunday newspaper, to Ron Davies’ “moment of madness” in a west country cruising ground, the untimely ripping of gay MPs from the closet has always been a messy business.


Ian Harvey, scandalous MP half a century ago

Even MPs who come clean voluntarily don’t avoid a bumpy ride. Alan Duncan, a noted motormouth, is a lot lower on the Tory greasy pole now than he was five years ago. Duncan, always unmistakeably gay, didn’t actually come out until Iain Duncan Smith was Tory leader and I know exactly why. It’s because for some years he shared a flat with William Hague. Hague remained a bachelor until 36, the age at which he became leader of the Tory opposition and the sense that he was “advised” to marry Ffion Jenkins was palpable. Had Duncan come out during Hague’s accident-prone tenure, awkward questions would have been asked. Quite right too.

Hague’s great rival at the time was Michael Portillo. Some two-and-a-half years after the famed “Portillo moment” in the small hours of the day after the 1997 general election, when the Defence Secretary discovered he had been unexpectedly unseated from Enfield South by the out gay Labour man Stephen Twigg, Portillo spontaneously revealed that he himself nursed a gay past. As it happens, I used to know Nigel Hart, the older man (now dead) with whom the young Portillo conducted an affair, rather longer (by Nigel’s account) than Portillo ever vouchsafed.

When a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge, Portillo had fallen under the spell of the legendary Maurice Cowling, the dizzyingly high Tory who held court at that college for thirty years. Cowling’s acolytes included Roger Scruton, Oliver Letwin, Niall Ferguson, Charles Moore, Norman Stone, Edward Norman, Andrew Roberts and David Watkin. Reported Anne McElvoy: “Peterhouse had a gay and bisexual life, conducted through dining and drinking clubs, and Portillo was a popular figure in an atmosphere of studied eccentricity and ritual dissolution” [The Independent September 30th 2000]. “Peterhouse was a great institution,” Scruton reckoned, “but probably is no longer – it was gratuitously destroyed by the admission of women” [quoted in The Guardian September 10th 1999].


Maurice Cowling, the Sage of Peterhouse

Whether Maurice Cowling was the queen or just the high priest of this hive of Tory preening is hard to ascertain. That he married for the first time at the age of 70 could betoken a “monastic life” (see below) or one of ungovernable promiscuity in any one or more of several directions or merely an understandable desire, upon retirement, for quiet companionship with someone amenable after a long hothouse career. Perhaps I would have found out the truth, had I fulfilled my old English master’s wish for me to follow him as a Petrean (he was there before Cowling’s time). Sadly – or rather I think I mean thankfully – I fetched up at London University instead and was taught by such radical Socialists as Ted Honderich.

Certain commentators have protested that the revelation of David Laws’ sexual orientation is nothing to do with the case and hence should not attract comment. I disagree. A great deal is made of the notion that Laws was “only” trying to keep his arrangements private, that even his family did not know of them – so he claims, but he wouldn’t be the first gay person who had never come out to a family that knew perfectly well on which side of the street he walked. When, already knowing that he was fit and neat-looking (very cute when he was young), I read that he was unmarried and lived what was called “a monastic life”, I immediately knew that he was gay. As Ben Summerskill slyly noted in The Observer, “observers often speculated that he might well be gay … How many straight men have perfectly flat stomachs at 44?”

Looking further into it, I discovered that the reason why he refused to join the Tories – with whom he was as one on economic and other policy (being the chief begetter of the famous Orange Book of 2004 that proposed a return of the Lib Dems to favour the free market rather than the post-Beveridge social market) – was that he deeply disagreed with them on social policy, particularly over Section 28. This was the notorious measure included in Margaret Thatcher’s Local Government Act of 1988, outlawing the ”promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities, primarily in schools. Labour didn’t get around to repealing it until 2003.


The Thoughts of Chairman Laws

Of course, I hesitated to name him as gay in my posting of May 12th because, even these days, accounting a heterosexual homosexual may be deemed libellous. No one remotely close to Laws’ solicitor is remotely likely ever to see this blog, but I don’t believe in offering hostages to fortune. The Telegraph says that it had no plans to “out” Laws in its lead story on Saturday and that it did so only because, in trying to pre-empt the scandal, Laws had publicly outed himself. This is somewhat fanciful: how could the paper have run the story at all without making clear that Laws was paying his partner? The paper already had long-lens shots (which it duly published) of Laws and Lundie separately leaving the house.

Before the scandal broke, Laws gave an interview to The Times to be published last Saturday, the text of which he substantially amended on Friday night. “When I grew up,” he then told the paper, “being gay was not accepted by most people including many of my friends. So I have kept this secret from everyone I know for every day of my life”. (This is according to an account in The Guardian; all trace of the text of the interview in The Times seems to have been removed from the paper’s online record).

Sexual acts between two adult males in strictly defined circumstances were decriminalised by the Sexual Offences Act in 1967. I was then twenty. David Laws was one. Once the gay liberation movement got under way in the early 1970s, I came out. David Laws was then still under ten. Even Ian McKellen, a late starter, came out as long ago as 1988, when Laws was 22. The idea that remaining in the closet is one’s right and in some way worthy and even perhaps admirable was difficult enough to sustain in the 1980s. Thirty years later, when out gay people routinely hold high office across the world, openly gay ambassadors represent the USA and Australia, gay mayors have been elected in Berlin, in Paris, in Providence, Rhode Island and Houston, Texas and transgender mayors elected in Cambridge, England and Silverton, Oregon and even the head the government in Iceland is a lesbian, Laws’ reticence looks like what it is: moral cowardice.

Another whiney bit of self-justification offered to The Times on Friday night was that Laws was brought up Catholic and that he had never told his white-haired old Catholic mother that he favoured the cassock over the surplice. Yes, here’s another example of a life blighted by religious bigotry and the lies of supernatural superstition. Because, if you hide your nature, you do eventually find yourself telling lies. In the first version of his Times interview, Laws was asked if he had a partner. His answer was “no”. Liar. He lied about his expenses too. And he evidently didn’t tell Clegg or Cameron that he had attempted to cover his tracks in his expenses claims, even though he was well aware that both leaders had made a big deal of fresh starts, clean sheets and full transparency. Exceptional nobility? Pah!

And before we all get terminally swept up in the “tragedy” of David Laws, let’s not forget that the reason he had come to be so highly regarded in the short time since the election was that he was thought to be nearly as good as a real Tory at fronting the Conservatives’ programme of slashing and burning benefits, jobs and front-line services.

CRITICAL CONDITIONS

Back in the day (as the fashionable phrase has it), I really craved a berth as a full-time critic on a national newspaper. During more than thirty years of journalism, I wrote quite a lot of reviews across what I reckoned were my three areas of expertise: theatre, film and television (I wrote about the odd book too). Most of these pieces appeared in magazines but now and again there’d be a one-off in a newspaper or a stint of holiday-relieving. As a proper first-stringer, I pictured myself diligently criss-crossing the country (indeed, the world), covering theatre in a scrupulously anti-London-centric manner; or rounding up wide swathes of televisual genres in regular packages, as I did when passing a happy year as reviewer for the trade mag Broadcast three decades ago; or constructing a new auteur theory of film out of the post-post-movie-brat generation of Hollywood directors and indeed of indie production companies, but always leading my movie columns on the state of the perpetually dying British industry and the ever changing picture in non-English language cinema.

I fancied myself pretty damned good at reviewing. At least, I had a clear and determined view of what was the critic’s function and of what constituted bad reviewing (of which there was always plenty and now there is little else). “Ok, clever-clogs”, I hear you cry, “so how come you didn’t get a proper reviewing gig?” There’s really not much mystery to it. You won’t be surprised to learn that reviewing jobs don’t get advertised (“Opera critic required by national Sunday newspaper: must be able to read a score and know some good jokes” – I don’t think so).


Nancy with the laughing face

The first most of us learn of a critical changing of the guard is the column that ends thus: “Well, that’s my final piece for this newspaper. I’ve enjoyed every minute of the last 28 years. Next week, Stuart Maconie will be reviewing dance in this slot. I wish him well”. And you think “Oh bugger, I’ve been waiting 28 years for that useless old bitch to move on and suddenly it’s all done and dusted and I never even got my cv in the post”.

In the old days, arts editors deliberated long and hard over which particular learned authority might be persuaded to stoop to contributing notices on a regular basis. That began to change in the 1960s: new critics tended to be appointed from among those artsy types who happened to be hovering near the arts editor’s desk looking winsome at the moment when the incumbent suddenly dropped dead, had a last and decisive hissy fit or got a more lucrative offer from The International Herald Tribune. Some time in the late ‘80s, that shifted again. Newspapers no longer wanted people who could write out of passion, discrimination, erudition and long absorption in the particular art to be reviewed. Instead they wanted some jackass who knew diddly-shit but who could be relied on to be funny. This is precisely how someone as empty-headed as Toby Young gets to be a theatre critic. The rumbles you hear are Ken Tynan and Harold Hobson stomping out of their graves before the houselights come up.

One reason why I fancied myself a worthwhile critic was precisely because I was interested in film and television and theatre. After all, if you were Richard Eyre or David Hare, Ralph or Ian or Miranda or Joely Richardson, you worked all these beats. Isn’t it appropriate for the critic of one to be versed in all? They’re not, though. Very few movie reviewers ever set foot in a theatre, almost no theatre critics get to watch mainstream evening television and television reviewers … well, they know nothing about anything.

It happens all the time that even the liveliest critics in one of those spheres reveal woeful ignorance of the allied arts. I remember the peerless Nancy Banks-Smith in the 1970s reviewing a Play for Today whose cast was led by Robert Lang and that led to her perplexed cry: “Where has this wonderful actor been all my life?” Well, Nancy, the answer is that he was leading Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic. If you’d been to almost any production there in the previous dozen years, you would have known that.


Billington, the fat owl of the stalls

Though he’s hardly what you’d call an inspired theatre critic, The Guardian’s veteran Michael Billington consistently writes with shrewd judgment and immense knowledge (I do wish he wouldn’t always expect plays to make “points”, though) and much of that authority derives from his history of reviewing film and television as well as theatre. He also – and this helps immensely – has occasionally taken a turn as a director.

During my time as a journalist, I alternated with jobs in television and I continued to submit projects (though rarely with any result) to theatres and movie production companies. I like to think that my reviewing was informed by a feel for how work was made and by a certain amount of objective (and I hope interesting) assessment of technique. If a play or musical or movie or programme works, there are usually discernible reasons why that should be the case; and often enough there are explicable flaws that militate against its success. A critic ought to be specialist enough to tease out these factors, or so it seems to me.

If there is one critic who changed all that, I submit that it was Clive James. James, who happens to be about five weeks older than Michael Billington, had a ten-year platform as designated television reviewer on The Observer. For a while, in the middle of that time, I shared a page with him as the paper’s television previewer. Demand for this latter function had grown in the national press, partly in response to the success of the television previewing on Time Out, from the executing of which I was duly recruited.

The view I had developed was that reviews of all the other arts except for live concerts were read like television previews: in other words, you read the critique and got to see the show afterwards, as you did with a movie, book, ballet, exhibition and so on. So it was legitimate to write fully and critically about a programme yet to be transmitted because in practise the advantage you enjoyed over your readers was not significantly more than that of critics of the other arts. Evidently the arts editors were beginning to accept this philosophy.


The young(ish) Renaissance Man, James

I have no idea what James thought of my previewing: we had very little contact during my time at The Observer. Perhaps he sensed my hostility. At any rate, I thought he carried no torch for the medium whatsoever. He just used television as a vehicle via which to write about the world and/or whatever he wished. He had no feel for what programme-makers were trying to do. While I am sure he subscribed to the auteur theory of the movies – as we all did in those days – he was blithely uninterested in any notion of a hierarchy or a hall of fame of television programme-makers.

There was one episode – immensely enjoyable for me at least – when James loftily attacked the documentarist Angela Pope because, out of his ignorance of technique, he assumed that she could not have gathered the footage that appeared in her film without some degree of manipulation. She sued him. I recall him rampaging around the newspaper’s open-plan office, fulminating against this “cunt”; not that this was anything new, because I had already learned that James’s generic term for women was “cunts”. The paper duly withdrew his observation and apologized. I was a bit disappointed. I had been hoping that he would go to jail.

What I always suspected duly came to pass. James really wanted to be on television himself. I imagine his broadcasting career has been less glittering than he would have wanted or imagined. He’s probably pleased with it but it’s objectively the case that almost nothing memorable came out of it, especially the feeble LWT documentaries that he fronted.

But James’s column was very popular, even in some parts of the business. He made readers laugh. They thought the world of him at the paper. I even heard one of the executives claim that James accounted for a quarter of the paper’s sales. As one who felt that his own mission was to champion television, to make it “better” by chiding programme-makers when they weren’t stepping up to the mark and to make it more “readable” to viewers by writing about its tropes and techniques, I thought James was vulgar, down-market and self-regarding. But look around the critical landscape today and all you see are those who want to emulate James: writers like AA Gill, Charlie Brooker and Charles “theatrical viagra” Spencer.


Milton Agonistes

Plying my own trade in the ‘70s, I bore a suspicion that some of my seniors took a rather dim view of their readers. I remember covering an opening at the Greenwich Theatre, at the interval of which most of my fellow critics lolled in the stalls chewing the fat. Unremarked, I remained among them and listened in, hoping to learn something. Most vociferous on this occasion was Milton Shulman. This Canadian Jewish ex-pat was, for donkey’s years, chief theatre reviewer for The London Evening Standard, always wielding a straight bat on behalf of the unchanging values. No new play, unless it be written by William Douglas-Home, escaped the lash of Milton’s scorn. Your work had to be at least fifty years old before he would consider it worthy of revival.

On this occasion, everything Milton had to say was witty, wise and to the point. His fellows – Billington, Benedict Nightingale, John Elsom, Robert Cushman – had nothing remotely as perceptive to say. I looked forward eagerly to Milton’s notice the next day. And not a whit of this gossamer gold appeared in the paper. It was his habitual, curmudgeonly drone.

The Guardian is presently running its third annual competition for “young critics” and as the top age limit is 18 I guess I’ll have to rule myself out. In a feature earlier this week, various established critics reminisced about getting started and about the critics who inspired them, an unsurprisingly dispiriting exercise. One reviewer thus hailed as a heroine was notorious in her day for having her copy made coherent by her journalist boyfriend. Tragically, the couple suddenly broke up. “How will she cope?” we wondered, to which the noted wit John Lyttle replied: “She’ll soon be back in the social swim, looking for Mr Rewrite”.

Peter Bradshaw, far from my favourite movie reviewer, complained in his piece that his parents took The Daily Telegraph in the 1970s and “I would no more want to read their reviews than to read the lines of stock market prices in The Financial Times”. Certainly no one at that time would have made a decision about what to see in the theatre based on the opinions of “Colonel” John Barber, but The Telegraph did then have one of the most incisive and diligent television critics in the business in the form of Séan Day-Lewis.

Bradshaw offers as his critical hero – yes, you guessed – Clive James. “James more or less invented the critic-columnist trope of riffing, digressing, zooming off at a tangent” reckons Bradshaw, which pretty much encapsulates everything I deplore in reviewing.

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Perhaps you clocked the hint of enquiry I offered about the sexuality of David Laws in the posting ‘Cabinet in the Sky’ on May 12th. If you want to keep abreast, just keep watching this space …

The ODDS COUPLE

I had intended to entertain my readers with intelligence of the odds that William Hill are offering against a collapse of the Con-Dem coalition within six months but alas, the leading name in gambling both on and off line shows no interest in responding to my queries, either by email or by phone. I am no betting man myself but I imagined (perhaps over-stimulated by the musical Guys and Dolls) that those who live for a flutter would bet on absolutely anything. Perhaps like everyone else William Hill are pulling in their horns. Perhaps they’re confining themselves to bingo.

What odds would you take against Vince Cable being the first minister to walk? Six-to-four on, do you suppose? And when? Three-to-one against him going before the end of July, is that realistic? Not that I doubt the sturdiness of the coalition agreement revealed in all its glorious detail yesterday, you understand. I just beg to propose that the fixed smiles will start to hurt their teeth before too long.


Steve Bell's image of Vince Cable as the elephant in the room

Cable doesn’t strike me as someone who will submit to suffering fools gladly on a daily basis for more than a few weeks. And George Osborne looked like the epitome of the hollow man when Cable was opposing him in the general election battle and looks the same today. They make doubtful bedfellows, not so much Osborne & Little as Osborne & Little Patience. Then there’s the unfathomable David Laws, the Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who reportedly sent Osborne away with a flea in his ear when he, Osborne, attempted (clumsily, you picture) to recruit him to the Tory cause a year or two ago. Laws is nobody’s patsy, methinks.

Apologists for the new government are apt to trot out the bromide that the political parties are themselves coalitions. This is true, of course, up to a point. Harold Wilson described the Labour Party as “broad church”. Harold Wilson knew of what he spoke and intended the remarks he passed to be memorable. He was probably the last prime minister we will ever have to speak often with an eye to posterity. He is certainly the most recent to do so. Quotable lines from Blair – “I’m a pretty straight kind of guy”, “this is not a moment for sound bites, but …” – and Thatcher – “we are a grandmother” – are remembered more for their idiocy than for their resonance; Thatcher abandoned consciously speaking for the history books after her risible St Francis of Assisi moment and her clunky “the lady’s not for turning”, Ronald Millar-scripted speech.

The Labour Party of Wilson’s time could comfortably straddle Ian Mikardo and Sir Frank Soskice, brought together under the notion of “pragmatism” (a Wilson watchword, one that I notice that Cameron has revived), but after the Callaghan government was defeated in 1979 the broad church was racked by schism. Michael Foot defeated Denis Healey for the leadership and thereafter Tony Benn came within one percent of Healey in the battle to be deputy leader. Then Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers (“The Gang of Four”) left Labour and set up the Social Democrat Party which, for a time after it merged pragmatically with the Liberals, threatened to replace Labour as the chief party of opposition to Margaret Thatcher. You think we live in interesting times now? You know nothing.


Party-goer Donnelly

There were always honourable members who found themselves out of sorts with the prevailing tenor of the times in the parties up to which they had signed. I recall a rum cove called Desmond Donnelly who, Wikipedia kindly reminds me, “moved between parties on five occasions” which might well be a world record, though only four moves are actually recorded (counting has ceased to be a skill in contemporary Britain). I became aware of him in 1968 when he and fellow Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt fell out with the party. Donnelly set up something called The Democratic Party which lasted for two years before, without warning, he defected to the Tory Party which, you figure, was his natural home all along.

Donnelly and Wyatt “crossed the floor”, in the parliamentary jargon. They left the governing party benches and sat across the aisle with the Tory opposition. Wyatt stayed there; his daughter Petronella famously had an affair with Boris Johnson. It is an oft-remarked tendency in people – especially men – to grow more conservative – and indeed Conservative – as they grow older and so there have always been Labour MPs who have drifted towards the Tories. Others have hardened in their Socialism. Well-known defectors from Labour include Ray Gunter, Dick Taverne, Chris Mayhew, John Stonehouse, Reg Prentice, Bryan Magee, Bob Mellish, Dave Nellist, Dennis Canavan, George Galloway and Ken Livingstone, the last of whom of course has been reconciled.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the first post-war Attorney-General in the Attlee government and maker of the much quoted remark “we are the masters now”, was daily expected to defect, earning him the blithe nickname Sir Shortly Floorcross. Instead, he sat in the Lords as a crossbencher (i.e. with no party affiliation) and lived to the ripe age of 101.


Sir Shortly

But not all the traffic has been away from Labour. Alan Howarth, Shaun Woodward and Quentin Davies all quit the Tories and became Labour ministers. And many more have loudly walked out on the leadership of one or other party while in government without changing allegiance: George Brown (though he did eventually leave Labour), Michael Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe, Robin Cook, Clare Short and quite a parade from Gordon Brown’s administration.

The Cameron-Clegg coalition may well have trouble from their own backbenchers. The Tory right has kept very quiet for the five years that Cameron has been leader and the making of the coalition has stretched their silence to the limit. What will snap their patience: Europe? Taxation? Parliamentary reform? The cabinet appointment of former leader Iain Duncan Smith is meant to placate the right but he has become something of a one-issue merchant and hence his acquiescence is rather a special case. Bar-room gossip suggests that the Lib Dems are haemorrhaging members appalled by alliance with the Tories. It will be fascinating to see what the delayed election in Thirsk and Malton throws up next week. Most likely, all the commentators will find themselves reading far too much into it, whatever the voting pattern.

CABINET in the SKY

A few quick musings on the new cabinet. After having a really atrocious election, fluffing and blustering through interviews on subjects she did not grasp, Theresa May is the new Home Secretary, far higher up the ranks than she ever was in opposition. There’s only one explanation and that is Cameron’s dire shortage of women in his new team, even fewer than Gordon Brown had. Indeed, she, Caroline Spelman at Environment and Cheryl Gillan in the Welsh Office are the only women announced and May has to double up on policy for women and equality. Although Sayeeda Warsi will attend cabinet too, you can’t call hers a government post because she is there as party co-chairman under the age-old non-job title of Minister Without Portfolio. Her fellow co-chairman, Andrew Feldman, will not attend cabinet. The Lib Dems, even more poorly supplied with leading women, bring none to the cabinet, though Sarah Teather has often been touted as of ministerial potential.

Though he has found a position for Iain Duncan Smith to go with fellow ex-party leader William Hague, Cameron has given nothing to his erstwhile leadership rival David Davis. I wonder whether he offered and was refused or whether he has written Davis out of the history of his rise.

Meanwhile, the only gay member of Cameron’s shadow cabinet, Nick Herbert, is one of the casualties of coalition. No one outside his circle evidently knows whether the apparently monastic Lib Dem David Laws would be qualified to fill this breach. Talking of sexual chemistry (which I wasn’t), I learn that the new Foreign Secretary is flying to Washington as early as this Friday. You can bet your life, however, that Hillary Clinton will not go all giggly and moist over William Hague to quite the degree that she very publicly did over David Miliband. She will be fervently hoping that Miliband is indeed the shoo-in to be Labour leader that he clearly looks. It seems weird that, were the boyish Miliband to succeed, he would be the oldest leader among those of the three main parties, if only by fifteen months.

COITION GOVERNMENT or WHO GETS SHAFTED?

The Cameron/Clegg era has begun. One day – possibly one day quite soon – we shall look back on that first joint press conference and laugh. The instant commentaries were largely favourable, citing the relaxed demeanour, the assumed mutual respect, the body language. Even the fact of the session being in the Downing Street garden excited comment but hey, Tony Blair held key press conferences there and it’s also where John Major launched his put-up-or-shut-up fight back against the backbench critics of his government, after which John Redwood (remember him?) resigned from the cabinet to mount a challenge immortalized by The Sun as “REDWOOD v DEAD WOOD”.

Cameron said as much as he decently could and sought to make it all seem very natural and straightforward. Clegg’s prepared statement was awful, like something left over from the election campaign or a peroration he might have wished he’d used in one of the television debates. This was a callow miscalculation.

The press questioning harped dully on the arrangements, even unto a second administration – I would guess that little serious thought has yet been expended on how they will play the 2015 election, the date of which evidently will soon be determined by statute. But it reminded me of nothing so much as an in-coming US president, assuring us all that the vice president has a real and important job to do. That’s never how it turns out in practice, prompting Cactus Jack Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s VP, to remark that the post “wasn’t worth a bucket of warm shit” (history’s version: “a bucket of warm spit”).


Clegg and Cameron's first joint press call


One of the trajectories to plot under the new regime will be that of the growing disillusionment, resentment and sheer day-to-day boredom evinced by Deputy Prime Minister Clegg. There was a bit of banter about how “Nick” will take Prime Minister’s Questions when the PM himself is away and Cameron threw away a line about a lot of foreign travel – I can’t find the passage on the net – but that immediately reminds us that DPM Clegg won’t be going to Washington and Moscow and Jerusalem and Paris, he’ll be kicking his heels in Downing Street trying to reform parliament like some junior policy wonk. John Prescott took the odd PMQ for Blair and Harriet Harman for Brown and all it underlined was their relative irrelevance.

We’re told that as many as twenty Lib Dems will have jobs. I wonder where that leaves the other 37. Are they obliged to support the government? Presumably they will be whipped to do so. But if among their number are Simon Hughes, Norman Baker, Nick Harvey, Norman Lamb and the former leaders Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell, they may well prove to be – let’s say – an independent-minded group. And what will the party do at by-elections? Because of the death of the UKIP candidate during the general election campaign, the ballot in the constituency of Thirsk and Malton has been delayed and will be held a fortnight tomorrow. What those voters have to say will be quite as interesting as what the candidates have to say. The Lib Dem candidate there is called Howard Keal so I imagine he will say “My defences are down” or perhaps “Where is the life that once I led?”

Naturally everyone who isn't a Labour MP is putting a hopeful smile on it all. But I still bet that, for all the determined talk of strong, stable government, this arrangement will not last much beyond eighteen months. Why? The remark that legend has credited to Harold Macmillan is the answer: “Events, dear boy. Events”.

PERSONATION is a CRIME

Yesterday on The World at One, Martha Kearney interviewed the new Liberal Democrat MP for St Austell and Newquay. She said his name was Stephen Gilbert. I object, your honour. Nobody is permitted to pass himself off as me. On Wikipedia, I find that this person calls himself Steve Gilbert. He has traded in both of these brands for 29 years fewer than have I. And the concluding paragraph of his entry reads in its entirety: “He is openly gay”.

How dare this man confuse the public in this manner. Looking further into the outrage, I discover that there is another “openly gay” Liberal Democrat, the returned member for Bristol West. And his name is Stephen Williams. My own first name is William. The whole business is an absolute scandal. You’ll be telling me next that there are “openly gay” Tory and Labour MPs called, respectively, Gilbert Stephens, William Gilbert and William Stephens. I shall go raving mad. Especially as one of David Cameron’s most trusted kitchen-cabinet, behind-the-scenes guys is called Stephen Gilbert. He’s described as “Michael Ashcroft’s right hand man” so he won’t be short of a bob or two.



The Lib Dem chap and the Cameron crony

There have been other Stephen Gilberts. The Irish writer Gilbert Ralston, perhaps most widely known for the movie version of his creepy yarn Willard (his only work of fiction), was born in the same year as my father and took the name Stephen Gilbert as his nom de plume. The Scottish-born English painter and sculptor Stephen Gilbert was far from a household name but highly regarded. I remember coming across one of his sculptures in Kenwood when I was first in London as a student. He died at a splendid age, three days shy of 97, in 2007.

The founding co-director of the New Zealand Institute of Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery is called Stephen Gilbert. All I can say is, he has some face. Another making use of the moniker is the chief executive of the Printers’ Charitable Corporation of Great Britain. I bet he’s a font of wisdom. There’s another one who markets himself as Interim Solutions but he won’t last the course. Yet another is a valedictorian senior at Shiloh High School, California and we say to him “piss off, sonny”. Then there’s the faculty lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University. He’s making me paranoid. Still another has a website called Common Sense Internal Communications. I should sue.



Logoman + US boy with table design

Clearly, my only recourse is to ensure that I am the first up on Google when someone puts the name in a search engine. I have some way to go and this is easier said than done. But if you feel an appropriate degree of compassion for me, you’ll need vast reservoirs for my partner. His name is David James.