DOG DAYS

The last ten days have reinforced my conviction that humans can learn a good deal from animals. I am thinking in particular of dogs, but creatures at almost any stratum of evolution have something of value to tell us.

I am not unaware of my capacity to be a dog bore but I defend my frequent bending of my friends’ ears on the subject of our dogs by pointing out that we have listened patiently to their reports about their children for more than two decades without (much) complaint (at least, not to them). You might argue that dogs are not as “important” as children and I decline to engage the point. I will say, though, that dogs are assuredly a rather larger responsibility than children. There is not much mileage in packing dogs off to school or sending them to the high street with a shopping list and an injunction that they are to bring back the change (and not eat all the sausages on the way home). In the unfortunate circumstance that he attacked somebody, it is unlikely that your child would be, as they say, “put down”.

You expect that your children will grow up and leave you and you hope that they will duly outlive you, whereas a dog is for life, its span being something most likely to be subsumed within yours. While it might at a pinch survive ferally (quite a few do), a dog is entirely dependent on you, while in your charge, for its shelter, sustenance and general welfare. You can’t teach it to make itself an omelette or take its worming tablets on the due date.

Both my partner David and I were brought up with dogs and we have known many mutts belonging to others over the years. In his various domestic posts, David (who worked as “char to the stars”) often performed dog-sitting and dog–exercising duties and necessarily but easily bonded with his charges. As responsible and sensitive people, we manfully held off through many years of keen broodiness for a dog because we knew that our circumstances did not lend themselves. I have no doubt that many – perhaps most – dogs lead the “lives of quiet desperation” that Thoreau said were the lot of men. We wanted no dog of ours to enjoy less than a safe, stimulating and contented existence. Only in the last decade have we found ourselves able to make such provision.

The first and most defining aspect of dogs is that they are pack animals. Even if the pack consists of no more than the dog and a single owner, the dog nonetheless has its pack therein and needs to feel sure that the pack endures. Separation anxiety is one of the most common and most powerful stresses that a dog experiences. It follows then that a dog left on its own all day at home while the family – its pack – scatters is a dog that is profoundly miserable on a continuous basis. If the dog then tries to assuage its misery – veering from boredom through frustration and even to terror – with behaviour that a senior member of the pack (its master or mistress) deems to be destructive, it will perhaps be “punished” without gaining any sense of why this further misery is visited upon it.

Both of us are at home most of the time. Four hours is our limit for going out and leaving the dogs in the house, where they at least have the company of each other. Longer and we arrange for the neighbours to visit and let them out and, if necessary, to feed them. When we go away, we have house-sitters who know and happily look after the dogs.

We have our own field adjacent to our property in which the dogs are exercised. They are fed natural raw foods according to the BARF diet (see www.barfworld.com). They do not suffer the indignity of being dressed in dog versions of human clothes and are not treated as if they are somehow “little people”. They are, by any standard, lucky dogs. None of this – nor can it – guarantees that they will lead trouble-free lives.

The senior of our dogs, at seven-and-a-half, is a Great Dane, named Fargo after a movie we both love. His likeness provides the avatar on this blog. More than any dog I have ever known, Fargo has been a supreme ambassador for his species. When we first took him to training class (which he still attends, if fitfully), he was alluded to by certain of the more nervous owners as “the beast”, but before long even the most reluctant had begun to dote on him. Now, when there is an exercise that obliges us to handle a dog other than our own, people clamour for his leash. Among our houseguests, he ranks with David’s cooking and the comfort of our guest rooms as one of the chief lures. Even those indifferent to dogs – it seems odd that we should know such people – are comparatively won over. He is that walking cliché, a gentle giant. People anyway do take him for a giant at some ten-and-a-half stone. In fact, he was the runt of an unthinkably large litter of 11 and, though sturdily knit, often stands a little below other Danes we meet. But I would gratefully accept a tenner from everyone who has, however “subtly”, ascribed to him some equine quality (“if you saddled him up, my little daughter would love to ride him, ho-ho-ho”). Fargo takes it all with better grace than do I.

Our Dane is in the twilight of his years. Decades – indeed, centuries – of selective breeding have produced many strains of dog that are much bigger than the animals from which they originated, but their organs have not grown apace. Big dogs have small dogs’ hearts and inevitably they fail sooner. If we get Fargo to ten – and, with his healthy lifestyle, we hope to do so – we shall have achieved something admirable. Meanwhile, he has this year undergone a sad little operation. Variously afflicted by anal polyps and occasional traces of blood in his water, he was thoroughly examined by our superb vet who determined that his issues were hormonal and that a complete and speedy remedy was castration. Most reluctantly we acceded and the unkindest cut was made. I shall ever recall the two little boys – perhaps eight years old – whom we and Fargo passed at the village fête some years ago, only to overhear the stage whisper “cor, did you see the balls on him”. David and I both knew to whom the remark referred.

It must be said that the dog has been unmanned – or undogged – with remarkably little effect that one might call deplorable. His attempts to make love to his favourite chair have declined and his enthusiastic (and noisy) autofellating in response to the protein rush of his supper of raw chicken wings has ceased entirely. There is no evidence of regret about this on his part, hence none on ours. The junior dog made a few half-hearted attempts to renew his bid to be top dog but soon abandoned the mission. Fargo seems perfectly reconciled to his new state and, happily for all of us, is no longer inclined to spend long sessions in licking his poorly bum for the simple reason that it is no longer poorly.

The younger dog is a little over five and he is a Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen. That is quite a rare breed in this country, rather more common in France – the Vendée is the region on the Atlantic coast immediately to the south of Normandy. The breed name indicates that he is a small (about the size of a Cocker Spaniel), low-slung, rough-coated hound. There is also a Grand version: we have surprisingly seen one in our town. He has a beard and moustache, Denis Healey eyebrows and a sunburst of hair between his eyes. Like Fargo, he is a scent hound but he has a much more cultivated nose. He is tricolore – white, black and tan – and carries his tail very erect and ever ready to wag. We call him Tati, after the great French comic and director Jacques Tati, in part because, while he is certainly blithe and drôle, he will never be lanky but he can always aspire to be so. Unfortunately, some people who are not cinéaste think his name is a girl’s and so, being pretty, he must be a bitch. Very properly, he barks at this nonsense.

We first clapped eyes on a member of his breed in Central Park and, polite Englishmen that we are, asked his off-hand Manhattan mistress if we might say hello to him. When we asked of what breed he was, she shrugged “PBGV” as if only out-of-towners like us would not know this. It isn’t the easiest breed name to remember but I recommend to friends that they think of him as Stevie’s PBGV.

Tati is a most energetic dog, full of enthusiasm for every next move. He has learned shrewdly how to handle the much larger Fargo and pays court to him, cleaning his ears and eyes regularly and smartly leaping out of the way when Fargo goes on one of his mad tazzes round the field, less frequently these days. I am acutely aware of the need to avoid anthropomorphising the dogs and so I write this with due thought. But I think Tati is a very kind little dog. That kindness, though, is not an intention; it is a result.

For all our dedication to a healthy regime, both of them have suffered dermatological problems. Such afflictions are anyway almost universal among dogs, especially those who, like ours, live in an environment that is also visited by foxes, deer, badgers, hedgehogs and all manner of other infection- and parasite-bearing wildlife.

Both dogs are regularly medicated in their exposed regions – ears, pits – but Tati’s troubles of this nature, harder to detect under his dense coat, are the more resistant to treatment and, following a battery of tests, the vet has now determined that he is atopic. This means that he is allergic to a wide variety of phenomena – pollen, grass seeds, dust mites, storage mites – and needs more regular treatment. A dedicated vaccination is being prepared for him, designed to alleviate the worst aspects of the condition, and we currently await the insurers’ decision as to whether to pick up the tab for this ambitious treatment.

Last year, Fargo injured his eye. This is not uncommon among dogs who are apt to stick their noses into things without much caution. The eye didn’t heal as fast as it should and, somewhat alarmingly, the vet decided to injure the eye again, following a well-established procedure, the result of which was that the eye soon healed completely. Early this year, Tati suffered a similar injury. His eye also failed to heal immediately; indeed the cornea became disturbingly cloudy. Then he began to misjudge distances and objects at night. Further examination suggested that there might be a deeper-seated problem and he was referred to a specialist. Then his condition rapidly worsened. At this point, we understood that his cloudy eye was his “good” eye and that the more serious matter concerned the lens in his other eye. The complication of a fierce infection in the affected eye now arose. By this time, the dog was visiting the vet daily and undergoing a regime of medication daily adjusted to meet the latest development in his condition. Like his atopic status, the problem with his lens appears to be hereditary.

The crisis has now, we believe, peaked. As I write, Tati is some 100 miles away, kept overnight at a seaside veterinary surgery where, this afternoon, he underwent an operation to remove the front lens of his right eye. This lens was in grave danger of becoming wholly detached and causing more extensive damage than would the operation. The result, we are assured, is that he will be no worse than long-sighted, a condition shared by David. With his unrivalled nose, he should be able to adjust very happily.

And what have I learned from this peculiarly harrowing ten days wherein, pretty much by the by, workmen have daily clattered above us removing and restoring about a third of the area of our roof? Well, it has been instructive to see how the dog adjusted to each development of his condition and attempted to compensate. There is no doubt that he was brought low – indeed, all but overwhelmed – by the complication of the infection, the pain of which needed to be addressed by painkillers. I choose my descriptions with care. I think it would be anthropomorphic to call him depressed but he was certainly, objectively subdued.

I have thought before – and these days have reinforced the thought – that dogs live wholly in the moment. They of course have memories but these might be properly characterised as sense memories: retrieving the appearance and especially the scent of someone who once petted them; retaining a few words of command; recognising the route to a place where they have been carefree; feeling that a meal is due. Tati has had to cope with a changing degree of sight. There was a day or two when he was effectively almost blind, particularly at night, and had to be led round the field. But he works at it, adjusting and compensating. When he returns home with impaired vision tomorrow, he will work with what he has rather than moping because of what he has not. Now that the antibiotics and soothing ointments have done their work and the pain and discomfort that afflicted him are lifted, he will soon get his mojo back. He will learn how to steer around the close hazards in the field and the house and how to cope with differing light levels.

The experience of watching a dog play the hand he is dealt makes one reflective. I have been thinking how the gifts that we humans have (and animals do not have) complicate as well as deepen our experience of existence. Because we have language, we have the means to articulate worry and anticipation, sympathy and intent. I have troubles of my own with my eyesight. Because I have language, I may learn about my condition and my prospects, my treatment and my options. Because I can describe my experiences, I retain them as narratives and so can assess and compare them in quite a detailed way. Unlike animals, humans do not live in the moment. Arguably we live far more in the past and future – I mean, simultaneously – than in the present.

To the question “What is mankind’s greatest invention or discovery?”, I have often thought the answer is not the conventional notion of fire or the wheel or the combustion engine or penicillin or reality television (joke) but the twofold skills that must be learned anew in every generation and by which we break free of nature and become humans: walking upright and talking. With these means, having made the wheel, we can stroll over to the next valley and tell the people there about it. By walking upright, we learn to ride upright and we free our forearms for tasks other than walking (making calls on our mobile phones, for instance). By using language, we create concepts and find the means of exploring and accounting for the world around us. These accomplishments are what Tati cannot do. Because he cannot stand and use his front paws and understand the notions of illness, disability, treatment and cure, he cannot medicate himself nor know to do so. I can do all these things but I cannot, like Tati, discard my known past or imagined future experiences and avoid speculation, calculation, hope and dread.

We are at once liberated and oppressed by our evolution. We have fashioned the world to fit with our upright stance so that most activities suit our facing forwards at head height, the hands free to perform tasks, the legs able to convey us or to execute manoeuvres. One price is that about a third of the human race suffers some degree of back pain or damage because it is not natural for us to walk, sit and do things upright; another is that many of us suffer from too much pressure on our legs and/or feet; and we fret about our armpits made sweaty because they are “unnaturally” kept less aerated than if we proceeded on all fours.

Because we have language, we have invented the notions of dismay, hope, resentment, loyalty, blame, admiration, mendacity, courage, love, hate and all the rest. These complications may have enriched but they have not necessarily lightened man’s short span. John Stuart Mill asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. The irony in the question is that only the unhappy Socrates would think to ask.

CRASH and BURN

I was never one of those boys who couldn’t get his hands on a toy without taking it to pieces. I found myself to be mildly diverted by gadgets but only by what they could achieve, not by how they achieved it. In adulthood, I have never been seen as a pair of legs emerging from under a motorcar, feet pointing upwards. Indeed, I never even learned to drive. I have signally failed to attest to my manhood by stripping down a motorbike or dismantling a circular saw, two implements wholly alien to me. Changing the bulb in a torch is challenge enough. Sometimes I can’t even get the house keys to work.

So computers hold little intrinsic delight for me. By temperament and aptitude, I am a quill and vellum man. A computer is my friend if it does what I want it to do – indeed, does what I have been led to expect it can do for me – but beyond that I don’t care to know what goes on under the bonnet. Nor am I much given to taking delight in wrestling with – with a view to besting – a dumb but fiendishly clever object such as a programmed computer appears to be.

In a related matter, I derive little sustenance from the instruction books that come with modern electronic appliances. Time was, manuals were booklets of modest length, illustrated with colour photographs and expressed in simple, step-by-step directions. Now they are vast tomes hung about with line drawings and daunting diagrams, translated from the Japanese into unidiomatic English (and several other languages too, presumably with equal lack of feel and ear) and stupefyingly banal in their scope. For instance, they usually begin with tens of pages warning you against such unlikely behaviour as throwing the appliance into the bath while plugged into the mains, using it as a surface on which to stand a Bunsen burner or cut flowers in a vase of water, and allowing your gerbils to fornicate within its workings. Frankly, there ought to be graded electrical goods, some sold to geeks, some to grown-ups who eschew jargon but don’t need to be told the facts of life, and some to idiots. Naturally, I gravitate to Group B.

By now, my smarter readers will have intuited that my recent silence in these environs has been occasioned by PC purgatory. Actually, very specifically not PC. I am a Mac man, entranced around a decade ago by the newly launched iMac that seemed so cool and sleek and desirable. The thing served me well for a few years and was succeeded by a more recent model some three years ago. Perhaps because there is so much that is pleasing about the iMac, perhaps also because as I get older I get more sedentary, I surely spend the larger part of my waking hours in front of its screen, destroying my posture, worsening my RSI and further eroding my already compromised eyesight. My work and much of my communication, information and leisure activity resides in the iMac.

So being cut off from it is a big deal. The problem arose from a failure of the machine to accept or be able to read DVDs. This was a peripheral annoyance but I had stuff I wanted to burn onto DVD and I wanted my pound of flesh from my gizmo. So I bought a different brand of blank DVD, one that I was assured should be readily embraced by an iMac, but the problem persisted. A succession of friends now volunteered their services. Though of differing ages, they were united in being, to a degree, instinctive techies and/or mackies, able immediately upon being confronted with a computing problem to switch into that lateral thinking mode that utterly escapes me.

Not that they have yet been able to prevail. Acting on some strong advocacy, I bought a new external hard drive and loaded everything portable that lived in my iMac onto it, prior to conducting a reinstall of my system. The whole process anyway filled me with gloom, but the gloom turned to despair when the iMac started to react to the external hard drive as if it were a corrupted DVD and refused to recognise it. So I was cut off from all my stuff: it was inaccessible on an external hard drive that my iMac reckoned did not exist. Franz Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Well, the successive pals wrestled. Eventually the external HD and the iMac began talking to each other again, sufficiently for me to be able to reload at least the important stuff onto the iMac whose restored operating system was, the while, taking on all the software updates that had been lost in the reinstall. During the course of this, one of my teacher-pals enunciated a rule for wrestling with one’s home computer: “try everything, especially when you know you’re completely right. Then try the opposite”.

Of course “try everything” can be a dangerous philosophy. I know enough to know that, when the iMac again refuses to recognise the external HD, as it is now again so refusing, I should not click on the button that allow me to “initialise” the HD because if I do I will lose everything on it. Meanwhile, my system is crashing and freezing rather more frequently than hitherto, and some programs have been tricky to reactivate – getting the desktop mailer to communicate fully with my mail server was a work of many hours – and others just require a lot of dull repetition to bring them back up to speed – for instance, while all the music stored on iTunes appears to be safely retained, none of my playlists that organise the material has survived, so I am having to rebuild those, track by track. And the original problem – the refusal to read DVDs – remains.

It is the sheer volume of time that all this consumes that is the most frustrating aspect, only bearable of course if at the end of it all I have a computer that bends to my will: we’re a ways off yet (if I may use an American expression). And of course I have not attempted since disaster struck to post a new blog entry until now. Only if you are reading this can you know that this part at least of my computing life still functions. If you are not reading this, it perhaps means that the issues remain and are still worse that I feared. Or, of course, you may be doing something altogether more nourishing. How could you ...

The INTEREST in DISINTEREST

The story of the BBC and the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee for humanitarian aid to be distributed in Gaza has had a good run – almost a fortnight. My devoted readers, who naturally hold off from forming an opinion on such matters until I have instructed them as to what to think, may have grown impatient for my finding. I have stayed my hand because it seemed to me that the point I would make was so painfully obvious as to be superfluous. But no. No one, at least in my hearing or sight, has advanced my argument and so, if only out of compassion for my devotees, I unburden myself here.

The broad lines of the issue are readily sketched. Medication, surgical supplies and indeed safe places in which to tend wounds and save or amputate limbs; food; shelter; clothing and bedding; sanctuary; the basic infrastructure of trade and agriculture: all these and more are urgently required by the populace in Gaza. The DEC, a federation of 13 aid charities including Oxfam, the Red Cross, Save the Children and Christian Aid, readied a television appeal that, at the draft and shooting script stages, the BBC agreed to broadcast. Then the Corporation decided that, “to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of a news story”, it would not after all record and carry the appeal. ITV cameras shot it instead and the short programme was carried by ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Sky followed suit with the BBC.

The DEC has been putting together these packages for years and the BBC has always been happy to transmit them. The first refusal to carry an appeal based on an objection concerning impartiality came from the BBC over the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 2006, though it had broadcast the appeal for the Lebanese citizens whose homes were destroyed in the Israeli invasion of 1982. You can be sure that, both through official channels and by more informal means, various Jewish, pro-Israeli and Zionist interests will have worked on the BBC between 1982 and 2006.

Authoritative figures in politics and the Anglican church have weighed in to criticise the BBC’s decision. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, declared that “this is not an appeal by Hamas asking for arms but by the Disasters Emergency Committee asking for relief. By declining their request, the BBC has already taken sides and forsaken impartiality”. The former BBC foreign correspondent and former independent MP, Martin Bell, wrote that “the coverage of the 22-day conflict was flawed by a misconstruction of the concept of balance – as if a war were a general election and the main protagonists entitled to equal airtime”. The DEC chief executive, Brendan Gormley, had made a similar point: “The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime”. But even the Board of Deputies of British Jews noted that “there is no doubt that any appeal which simply seeks to raise money for innocent civilians should be applauded”.

Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, makes a fair point when he says that “the level and tone of some of the political comment is coming close to constituting undue interference in the editorial independence of the BBC”. Ministers such as Douglas Alexander and Hazel Blears would have done better to decline to be drawn into this matter.

The BBC rulebook states that “impartiality is and should remain the hallmark of the BBC … It is a legal requirement and should also be a source of pride”. It is with this text at his back that the Director-General, Mark Thompson, has led the BBC’s counter-attack and refused to budge.

But here’s my take on this. By what criteria is the BBC’s coverage of Gaza – or of any other issue where different factions contend – to be read as impartial? Most of us got most of our information about the Israeli assault from television and print news coverage. That there was widespread revulsion towards that assault among people with no tribal axe to grind is evident. By a week ago, the BBC had received 15,500 complaints about its stance. That is fewer than the number of complaints engendered by the Ross/Brand farrago, which says a good deal about contemporary public concerns (and indeed the mobilising power of The Daily Mail). But it is still an impressive response. Public confidence in the BBC’s editorial judgment has clearly eroded.

Is the conviction that the BBC has been over-zealous in applying its own rules in fact a result of sympathies among the public fostered by the BBC coverage that is supposed to be impartial? It was clear to me, as a regular viewer of BBC Television News, that a great deal more emphasis was placed day-by-day on the impact of missiles and then ground weapons fired into and in Gaza than on the impact of rockets sent into southern Israel by Hamas. But then that is only right and proper. The casualties in Gaza were a hundred times those among Israelis and many of the latter were invading military (some were victims of “friendly fire”). Had the BBC angled its coverage to favour Palestinians in the ratio 100:1, it would have been remarkable but would it have been merely just? Had the BBC made as much of the Israeli casualties as of the Palestinian, that indeed would have been a travesty of the facts.

But what are facts in these stories? In the first place, the facts that are presented by the reporters and their crews are necessarily selective. The information gleaned on the ground and passed on by reporters may be polluted by propaganda or may in subterranean ways of which the reporter is not even aware be skewed by the reporter’s own inclinations and prejudices. Furthermore, in recent years, very much more comment and “interpretation” has been permitted to – indeed, encouraged from – location reporters. These days, to-camera pieces in particular, narrated footage in general, often carry very little objective information. News reports tend to be largely a mishmash of rumour, conjecture, prophesy and received opinion.

How scrupulous, would you say, is the BBC on the matter of, for instance, Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe? President Mugabe himself would dismiss the BBC’s coverage as “all lies”. Indeed, because of these “lies”, the BBC is banished from the country. Our own feelings about Mugabe are substantially created by impressions formed on the basis of a very few verifiable facts – the rip-roaring inflation, the evidence of refugees leaving for South Africa – and a lot of subjective allegations and images – claims of repression, descriptions by Mugabe’s enemies of the continuing inability to agree on the composition of the new government, Mugabe’s own lofty disdain, anecdotal evidence of hardship and disease. But the “crisis” in Zimbabwe, you could argue, is a construct fashioned by BBC reporters. We want to think badly of Mugabe and the BBC plays to that prejudice. And what else do we have to go on?

What of other issues? Is the BBC impartial about racism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, gang culture, Andy Murray, climate change, Holocaust denial, paedophiles, the Queen? The BBC would no doubt wish to unbundle these matters and would then argue that it cannot be expected to stand neutral on illegality and that stances subsumable under notions of patriotism do not require disinterest. It ought, though, to accept that philosophical debate would be appropriate about each element, and that satisfying no one on anything is not exactly the highest common denominator to aim for.

What the BBC cannot be allowed to offer as an acceptable method is the one alluded to by Martin Bell, treating war – and by extension every issue – as though it were a general election. This is the philosophy of the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nor, as I have argued, does the BBC anyway uphold this kind of balance, however vaunted its fastidiousness. Even its coverage of parliamentary and party politics – the stuff that is most nearly like a general election and is most readily policed according to notions of equal or proportionate airtime – is plainly moulded by such subjective and highly partial notions as whether the government (or indeed each of the opposition parties) is “in trouble”. I am convinced that some wonk at, say, the Glasgow Media Centre, could soon come up with a chart that showed that by far the majority of news bulletin mentions of any figure in British politics could be listed under the general heading “in trouble”. After all, it is trouble – whether prime ministers up against it or children being killed or the south of England evidently paralysed by a heavily predicted snowfall – that gets the news editors’ cheeks up. In that sense, the row about the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal was actually nothing more than a thundering good news story.

PEOPLE’s PRESIDENT

I have been reading Dreams from My Father. It seemed the right time to do it. Apart from the evidence that he could have carved a major career as a writer if he had decided against politics, what the book reveals is that Barack Obama is that rare thing in politics: a real human being who has led a useful life among ordinary people. I cannot think that, in the fourteen years since the book was first published when he was 33, he has wholly forgotten the ideals that fired him then or the practical lessons that he learned. I feel sure that the White House is in the keeping of a man who will know how to stay in touch with his roots for much of, if not for all of, his first term in office.

President Obama has begun well in many ways. He of course understands that everything about him is now different, while at the same time the Obama who toiled earnestly in obscurity still walks with him. He wears the dignity of office lightly yet with suitable solemnity. Compare and contrast with his immediate predecessor. His stony face when the garrulous Vice-President Biden attempted a risky wisecrack told its own story. He is not afraid to tackle head-on the grave crises that beset his nation and the world. We can continue to hope that, as a rule, he will be bold and creative, progressive and empathetic.

Yet he already has blood on his hands, in his first week. American jets have, at his order, attacked targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Civilians on either side of the border have died in these raids. The new American president immediately loses the moral advantage that he could have taken with him to meet Ehud Olmert. He too has killed children of a foreign land and he cannot even plead that he was defending his own borders. This is a pity. Was it avoidable? Yes, I rather think so.

No doubt during the campaign the then Senator Obama sounded an aggressive note in the matter of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida because he felt the need to do so. These are enemies that every American can agree on. To let Senator McCain run with the suggestion that a President Obama would be “soft” on these enemies might have been fatal to his chances. It was ever thus for candidates from the left and, as a result, governments from the left on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to be even more likely to become embroiled in war than governments from the right, as though anxious to show that, expectations to the contrary, they are not an easy touch.

But if President Obama is going to prove just as ready as Former President Bush to launch missiles without consulting other governments – in this case, either in Islamabad or in Kabul – we shall not feel that the change of government in Washington has been all gain.

Meanwhile, there has been plenty of speculation, much of it somewhat wild, about the future of the so-called special relationship between Washington and London. In some quarters, it has been mooted that Obama might downgrade Britain’s status because of the abominations of colonial rule that were visited upon his father’s homeland of Kenya during colonial rule, as described in Dreams from My Father. I think this is fanciful. Obama is nothing if not a realist. Every nation’s history is littered with atrocities and, if diplomacy were conducted always with one eye on past events, nothing would ever be achieved.

Then of course the press, ever ready to sneer at Gordon Brown, has been setting up the Prime Minister for what the papers will declare is “a snub” if he is not the first European leader to be welcomed to the Obama White House. Again, this is unrealistic. Of course Brown will want to feel that he is privy to Obama’s thinking on a regular basis and indeed Brown’s long experience of international affairs will not be superfluous to the new president. Brown has been on familiar terms with the evolving Washington scene all his adult life and it’s probably no exaggeration to suggest that he knows more key people in the American capital – certainly has known them for longer – than does Obama, if not Biden and Secretary Clinton.

What is more, Obama’s perspective is different from that of George W Bush and indeed that of Washington veterans. He is bound to put out feelers to a much wider range of nations than any president before him and with a different order of priorities. Brown need not feel overlooked – and, I suggest, nor will he – if Obama’s focus is more immediately on the middle and far east and then on Africa, Asia generally and Latin and South America, rather less on old alliances with Europe that perhaps do not require too much restating. In any case, Brown was the first European leader granted a phone conversation with the new president. That should suffice. I know – indeed, I say it often – that how it looks is often more important in politics than how it is but it’s also important to judge by results and, in that case, appearances sometimes have to go hang.

If Brown has a really useful function in the transatlantic relationship at present, it is to warn Obama that deepening the engagement in Afghanistan, even though he promised it during the campaign, is fraught with unanticipated danger. I have advocated it before and I will advocate it again. Keeping the peace in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is much better done by UN forces than by the forces of nations that have vested interests in the outcome.

AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER

Rewind thirty years and a few more. I was then working as television editor at Time Out, the London listings magazine. TO was at the absolute zenith of its success and the magazine had considerable influence in the corridors of television power because it was virtually out on its own – the boom in press coverage of the medium was still in the future. I was working alongside Patricia Williams who was on the section before my return to the magazine to take up the television post. By rights she should have become section editor but Tony Elliott, the proprietor and sometime magazine editor, was notably leery of politically articulate women.

Happily, Pattie and I hit it off and, with complementary qualities, quickly became a successful team. We built up the amount of insider information that the section ran. A BBC producer told me that each week Television Centre went silent for half the morning while everybody digested the new Time Out television section. Someone at the mag cut out a headline from The Guardian about Bruce Forsyth – “the most important man in television” – and pinned it over my pigeonhole in the mail rack. Heady times.

It got headier. After barely a year, I was invited to join The Observer, which was greatly expanding its coverage of broadcasting. All the national newspapers were looking at TO’s success and learning the lessons. I was, I believe, the first TO journalist to “graduate” to Fleet Street, as the industry was still called in those days – by no means all the national newspapers were located on Fleet Street even then; indeed The Observer was on St Andrew’s Hill at Blackfriars.

The obvious succession was for Tony to pick Pattie, but once again he flinched at the thought of an editor who, as he saw it, talked a different language from him. Pattie sportingly suggested that seeing her as “too political” was a slight upon me. At any rate, Tony made a totally unexpected move. He appointed a beanpole newly graduated from Oxford as the next television editor. His name was John Wyver. Pattie was rapidly scooped up elsewhere: she was offered the editorship of the trade magazine Broadcast, which she gladly accepted and of which she made a fine fist. We all felt that this was one in the eye for Tony Elliott.

In my own role at The Observer, I inevitably came across young Wyver immediately and then regularly. It was natural to me to treat him with decency – after all, he wasn’t the cause of Pattie being passed over and anyway he was a fait accompli. He was well aware that his appointment was controversial and handled it and himself with grace and poise. I gave him all the help I could to find his feet.

Now fast forward to rather more than a decade ago. I was about to publish my critical biography of the television playwright Dennis Potter. It seemed to me that a television programme off the back of publication would be a good idea, both for the book and for, say, Channel 4. I had appeared on television in a few fleeting capacities but had never fronted a programme. Still, I considered myself wholly capable of doing so. During the intervening years, I had worked as a television producer for the BBC and some independent production companies – I had hardly been at The Observer a year before I was headhunted by the BBC as a producer, surely the least qualified person (as I observed at the time) to be a producer since the pioneering days of some 25 years earlier.

Meanwhile, there had been a fracture at Time Out, the political contradictions at its heart inevitably coming to the surface. Many of the staff, including Wyver, had left to found a rival publication, City Limits. It lasted a while but was never distinctive enough and eventually folded. In the new television world after the birth of C4, Wyver had formed a production company, Illuminations, which carved itself a useful and evidently pretty lucrative niche in arts programming. So it was Wyver whom I approached with the notion of a programme about Potter.

We did lunch. I hadn’t seen him in a long time and I was astonished. The beanpole had turned into Robert Maxwell. A vast expense-account stomach sloped away from his still bony shoulders. Underneath this weird disguise, John remained the same slightly bashful, rueful boy I remembered, still looking slightly shocked to be having his career. We chewed over the proposal and John told me to put it down on a sheet of paper and drop it in. Then he took me back to his suite of offices and, less boyish now, showed me round with a proprietorial air. At one point, he introduced me to a woman working at a computer screen and murmured “Truly my mentor”. “Oh,” I said to her, “then I’m very pleased to meet you”. “No,” snapped John, rather irritated as he evidently suspected that I was sending him up. “You are”. It was a wholly genuine misunderstanding on my part. I hadn’t seen it coming and it’s often hard to tell if people hold you in high regard, even when they do. We all know those occasions when everyone is celebrating someone newly dead and we wish the departed could hear this and wonder if she or he would credit it.

I posted off my proposal the next day (the time had yet to come when all communication was by email). John called me to acknowledge receipt and said he’d look it over and call me by the end of the week. After a fortnight, I phoned to enquire if he’d had a look at it yet and he said he was really sorry, he’d been very busy and he’d be sure to get back to me by the end of the following week. That was fourteen years ago. I have neither heard from him nor seen him since. Just occasionally, when I’m feeling a little bruised, I wonder how, if that’s how he looks after his mentor, he behaves towards his enemies.

Now let’s come into this century. My partner and I had moved out of London and I had set about the task of attracting some income by writing what I wanted to write rather than what an editor – in journalism or book publishing – wanted. One day I got a letter from a chap called Simon Farquhar who was writing a book about television drama. He said he had read my play Circle Line and loved it. This play began my professional career. I was at university when the BBC announced a playwriting competition open solely to college students. I had been going to write the play anyway and it was about a student: what could be more suitable? The play won the competition, was put into production and, after a delay while the BBC decided to fret about certain of its content, was broadcast in the first season of Play for Today in January 1971.

Simon could only read the script because that is all that survives of it. About three months after its sole transmission, the annual list came round to BBC heads of department from which they were obliged to choose which of their output from the year should be archived. The Head of Plays, Gerald Savory (back in the 1930s the white hope of drawing-room comedy with his one stage success George and Margaret), looked down the list and didn’t check Circle Line. So the master tape was duly wiped. A friend had made an audiotape of the broadcast – characteristically he’d missed the first few seconds – and I had the copy of that … somewhere … in a box.

I found that Simon had an astonishing encyclopaedic knowledge of vintage teledrama, all of it broadcast before his time: he was in his early 30s. We took to swapping anecdotes, firm opinions, memories on my side for research findings on his. I had always intended to write a book of my own on teledrama, a field on which I reckoned myself a bit of an expert. Simon both drew on and bolstered my own knowledge. And he was clearly in earnest about his book and the place of Circle Line. Though he’s never completed the book and so of course never published it, he showed me the chapter that treats of the play and it was extremely gratifying, not least because it was such an intelligent assessment.

Meanwhile, Simon’s own writing career was blossoming. He had a couple of radio plays produced and then the Royal Court bought his play Rainbow Kiss and gave it a run at the Theatre Upstairs. He was in his element. Knowing that I had an unproduced stage musical kicking around, he persuaded his leading man, who had some track record in the field, to make off with a copy of the show. This was clearly a mutually beneficial friendship (though, not too surprisingly, nothing has come of the actor having my musical).

A different thread comes into my story here, but it will interweave, so be patient. Some eighteen months ago, I was beginning to feel that there might be a television programme in my own burgeoning disenchantment with the medium that I had championed so keenly in my youth. I alighted on the title British Television: A Dim View. After all, every programme title these days has to feature a colon. It would be what is called in the biz an authored piece, which to say a report that is shaped by the reporter’s opinion rather than a (supposedly) impartial documentary with voice-over by an actor. I kicked the idea around for a while and then tried it out on my old compadre Pattie Williams.

During the intervening years, Pattie and I had drifted a little but had connected up again in the 1990s when I sketched out an idea for a series about the history of television drama. By this time, Pattie had her own production company, Case Television, which was very effective across a wide range of programming. The series was offered to BBC Knowledge, the forerunner of BBC4, but eventually declined. Now Pattie had just wound up her company but that, it seemed to me, was an asset in my quest to make a really hard-hitting programme about the parlous state of British television. I had no ambitions of my own in the medium, Pattie now had none either, so we could both offend anyone we wished without fear of career damage.

Dealing with Pattie over the proposal became a long drawn-out business and it took me fully a year finally to get her to admit that her heart wasn’t really in it. While I was waiting for her to come to this realisation, I wrote a new stage play, a four-hander revisiting the student life of the late 1960s that had informed Circle Line. It was called Observations from a Hill, after a number by a rock group that we adored at the time, Family. I was pleased with it and the few people I allowed to read it (including Simon Farquhar) were complimentary and supportive of it. But I couldn’t get any theatre to take it on.

Finally, Simon told me of a friend of his who was stretching his wings as a director. He had an in at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington and if he liked the play he might be able to persuade the artistic director to take it on. His name was Jason Lawson. I duly met up with Simon and Jason at the King’s Head where we watched the current production together. Jason was charming and very polite. He was about to start work on a new production but as soon as that was put to bed he would take a look at mine. At the end of the evening, he made off with a copy of my play. Meanwhile, Simon had told me a tale about how he owed a large sum of money and had been faced with threats of violence. He seemed truly scared. I immediately promised to pay off the debt for him but gave him to understand that he would have to repay me by the end of that year, 2008.

Jason duly read the play, said he liked it and thought it was very doable. I had hoped to see the production that he had been working on but he had never given me the details and it finally emerged that he was only the assistant director so seeing it would have taught me little. But we had a meeting to talk it over and I felt very bucked up. He asked all the right questions and he put his finger precisely on what was needed to improve the play. I came home and did some more work on it and posted off the rewrites. I was not alone in believing that I’d made an important difference to the play but Jason was not very forthcoming about what I sent him. However, he said that he would set up a reading with some actor friends.

That was last June. Since then all communication between us has been at my initiative and at greater and greater intervals. Jason remains elusive and nothing happens concerning the play. I sent him a Christmas card, which he did not reciprocate, and now I have given up on him.

Through the summer, the subject upon which Jason was most forthcoming was that of Simon Farquhar. I had not seen him since that evening at the King’s Head in March. His emails, at one time arriving almost daily, dried up. It turned out that he had moved house, though this had always been a regular occurrence. Jason, to whom it seemed he also owed money, tracked him down to a pub on the Hammersmith Embankment where he was said to be working. After many attempts to reach him by email, phone and text, I finally had a phone conversation with Simon in the summer, during which he enthused about his new job as a barman and reckoned the publican had taken to him, was appointing him assistant manager and was about to install him in the pub flat. Pub life, he maintained, was terrific grist to the mill of his writing, which he intended to resume before long. We didn’t speak of his debt to me.

Since then nothing. The deadline for his repayment to me has passed. A friend familiar with Rainbow Kiss reminded me that the main character in that play had unpaid debts and was threatened. Was Simon perhaps testing me to see if I was paying attention? Were he and Jason in cahoots to rob me? Well, tomorrow I go to town for a social event at the weekend and I shall take the opportunity to trawl the pubs of Hammersmith Embankment and find this ne’er-do-well. He will not find me sympathetic on this occasion.

After Pattie passed on British Television: A Dim View, I sought out an old chum from television days, Paul Kerr. I knew that, like so many of our generation, he was teaching media to university students – or, as he put it, teaching them to read and write – but he still took a bit of raising. We finally made contact and then met up. To no surprise on my part, we were of one mind on the state of British television. I was also glad to learn that his college was keen for him to continue to make occasional programmes. We agreed that I should set out some more of the proposal on paper and that he would look it over. I sent it off on October 7th and, after some chiding from me, he promised to read it in the first week of November. At the end of the week after that, I wrote to him expressing my disappointment at his silence. There was a distinct snappiness in his reply and since then he’s gone completely silent. I feel as if I am being punished.

In the summer, as the prospects for Observations from a Hilll dwindled, I came to the conclusion that I was going to retire from trying to make a living as a writer. Nothing since then has done other than reinforce that conclusion. The fact is that there is really nobody in the business in a position to determine that I get work whom I trust or on whom I feel that I can rely. Those very few organisations that are willing to consider unsolicited work, be it prose or drama, do not have readers who know how to read. In the early 1970s, I was trained to read scripts in the BBC Script Unit, a whole department set up to process unsolicited submissions. But of course that department was closed years ago and nobody now learns how to read, they just cast an unpractised eye over the work and guess at a response. I know from the rejection letters I receive – those few that risk any sort of assessment – that the reader has really no idea what a script assessment is. And frankly what is the point of trying to forge alliances with like-minded people in the business who then don’t have the time to deal with you, the kindness or courtesy to tell you where you stand or the conscience that would stop them treating you shabbily.

It was a hard and a quite emotional decision to give it all up. After all, to paraphrase Ray Liotta’s character at the outset of Scorsese’s Goodfellas: “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer”. I started to write my first novel when I was seven and I must have completed two whole, if rather short, chapters. That my first income from writing came from a play that I wrote at 21 was no surprise to me or to my parents. The surprise, I think, has been at how difficult it has been to sustain a career as a writer.

The rebuffs and disappointments over the 40 years since I was 21 are too long to rehearse in a blog posting and at present too painful as well. I have contemplated a book about failing as a writer – that’s not something I’ve read so I’m hoping it would have some prospect of at least being an original idea. I have its title – it’s from Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful song 'I’m Still Here', which the character Carlotta sings in Follies: “Then You Career from Career to Career”. But of course nobody will publish such a book. I’m not a comedian or a footballer or a graduate of the Big Brother house. And although such a book would be written out of my ever-sunny disposition, editors will reason that people don’t want to read about failure and the business doesn’t want books that suggest that those who run the business are less than brilliant. So I don’t suppose I will write it, even if I could afford to do so.

You see, I do have to earn. I am retraining, something that doesn’t come easy at my age but needs must. More about that can wait for a future posting. Meanwhile, I won’t stop writing the blog because it keeps my hand in. It’s just that the novels and plays and scripts and non-fiction books that are at various stages in my head will stay there, unwritten. I still have the pleasure of them and, if no one else ever does, that sure as hell ain’t my fault.

ISRAEL’s FINAL SOLUTION

What in hell does the Jerusalem government imagine itself to be achieving in Gaza? When it first began its aerial bombardment of the densely packed towns and cities where the Palestinians live, it reckoned it was “applying pressure” to Hamas, a mealy-mouthed kind of word-spinning. Now it says it means to “destroy” Hamas, but, it adds carefully, only militarily. Hamas, after all, is the legitimately elected government in Gaza. Matters of sovereignty of course arise in considering Israel’s ten days of relentless attack on its tiny neighbour but nobody is about to invoke the law in this matter, nobody anyway who has any clout in the corridors of power.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s thoughtful Middle East editor, has daily asked what Jerusalem will consider “a victory”. It’s a good question. In the year before Israeli fighters began attacking Gaza on December 27th, Hamas had been periodically firing rockets into Israel. Jerusalem says that it was to stop this rocketing that it attacked Gaza. So it must be assumed that Jerusalem will consider victory achieved when the rockets cease. In the ten days since Israel stirred, four Israeli civilians have died from Hamas rocket attacks. And that compares with how many in the preceding twelve months? Precisely one. On that basis, then, Israel’s assault has been a four-fold catastrophe for Israel itself. Up until now, in all conscience, Hamas rockets have been but an irritant, at least compared with a full-scale air and ground invasion.

Now I don’t know whether Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, is an intelligent man or not. It isn’t very easy to tell. But he must have anticipated that Hamas would not just lie down and let the Israeli tanks roll over them. He must have had it pointed out to him that the likelihood was that, as far as they possibly could, Hamas would continue to fire rockets into Israel because every rocket sent is a message declaring that Hamas is still there. So he went into this knowing that civilian casualties in Israel must rise. And he must have gone in with a pretty good idea that, if he really wished to destroy Hamas as a military force, this would not be the way in which such an aim could be achieved. Did he learn nothing from the Lebanon debacle two and a half years ago?

For Israel has spent ten days ensuring that thousands upon thousands of Arabs right across the Middle East now have a new and fiercely burning desire to destroy Israel. Olmert has cut Israel’s security off at the knees for generations to come. You can be sure that terrorist attacks will return in full measure to the streets of Israel, that hundreds of new suicide bombers are already signing up to be trained to inflict mayhem on public transport and in the streets and markets and meeting places of towns and cities from Haifa to Elat.

And what has Israel done for its own standing in the world? At best, you can say that it has tested to breaking point the remarkable international support it has enjoyed for 60 years. The retiring regime in Washington has predictably washed its hands of the matter, ostensibly blaming Hamas. The incoming president has very properly cleaved to the mantra that, as far as international affairs go, there can only be one president at a time. It is be hoped, however, that his representatives are making clear to the Jerusalem authorities that the blank cheque Israel has been scribbling upon for so long is no longer to be mistaken for the support of naked aggression. Gordon Brown’s remark today, that this is “the darkest moment yet for the Middle East”, strikes a wholly different note from that of Bush. David Miliband and Condoleeza Rice will have conferred. Washington will have known that London’s stance would differ from Bush’s. And Obama had better be ready to take a constructive and firm position, otherwise his first crisis will set a bad precedent for the rest of his term.

For, in one of history’s bitterest ironies, Israel is in serious danger of committing genocide in Gaza. When it talks of destroying Hamas, it may intend to draw a distinction between movement and people. But its actions, which it describes as “targeted”, are comprehensive. Today, Olmert has reportedly agreed to cooperate in allowing some food and medical supplies into Gaza. This, says his office, is “to prevent a humanitarian crisis”. Does he not hear the contradictions in that statement? Whence does he imagine the humanitarian crisis arises? From the wickedness of Hamas governance of the territory?

Since Israel attacked Gaza, there have been five military deaths among the Israeli military. Three of those, the majority, were as a result of what is known as friendly fire. So Israel has lost a total of six citizens at the hands of Palestinian aggression, none of them (if you think this important) women or children. This is an agreed figure. No two people are going to agree about Palestinian deaths. The Israeli assessment will be on the low side inevitably, just as Hamas will put it high. But by any objective count, it must be 600. A lot more than six. A hundred times more.

Hamas accuses Israel of indiscriminately attacking homes, mosques, refugee camps and shops. Today, three schools were bombarded by Israeli tanks and so inevitably many of the casualties were children. Jerusalem says that Hamas is responsible for this because it locates its rocket launchers in residential areas. It says that it drops leaflets warning civilians to leave. This is cruelly disingenuous. If an armed bank robber grabs a baby and tries to flee the bank, does the police marksman calculatedly shoot the baby? And where would Jerusalem have the rocket launchers sited? On open ground? It is unusual for any participants in conflict to go out of their way to make things more clear-cut for the enemy. Hamas might say in response: bring the Knesset nearer to Gaza’s border and dismantle the security around ministers so that we can kill them, then we will not need to spray rockets around Israel. No less fanciful, I venture.

Israel has a choice here. It could forbear bombing and shooting up civilians. There is no imperative in its relations with Hamas that says Israel must murder hundreds of people in order to hit at a few dozen militants. Israel could resort to diplomacy. It does not do so because the government imagines that its credit with the nations that matter is bottomless. I hope President Obama stands ready to disabuse them.

And those three schools attacked today: all were UN-administered schools, flying the UN flag. Does Israel have no regard for any authority other than its own? I hope the general assembly votes to throw Israel out of the UN and institutes war crime proceedings in the international courts of justice. But no such thing will occur unless Obama proposes a very different approach within the security council.

When you take a position about an issue, you are apt to be accused of bias. I write what I do from this perspective: I have friends in Israel about whom I care very much and many more friends who have family and friends of their own in Israel. I have none in any Arab country. I have visited Israel, Egypt and Iran. Anybody who has read much on this blog or who cares to trawl back will know that I am Islam’s foe and would dearly wish to see that barbarous bigotry banished from the face of the earth. None of that persuades me that what Israel is now doing is right. Or – perhaps more importantly – is wise.

FREEDOM from INQUISITION

Today’s report that the Home Secretary is prepared to consider outsourcing the national database is one of the most alarming developments so far in the shaming story of New Labour’s flight from its own base, both in terms of its increasing instincts to control every damned thing and of its growing love affair with the private sector. As The Guardian put it, such a move “would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses”, but of course there can be no such guarantee, however “tough” the safeguards.

We know already that the security applied to supposedly encrypted and/or confidential data is close to non-existent and that those who behave in a cavalier manner with sensitive material are almost never in practice subjected to penalty, either through the courts or even in their career paths.

I would like to make a modest proposal. Let Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, build into the premise of the operation of the national database’s security a provision that, in the event of a leak or a data loss, the then holder of the office of Home Secretary along with Ms Smith herself (whatever her then status) be obliged to serve a term of not less than two years’ detention in a maximum security prison. Such a provision would offer a rather more reliable “guarantee” against leaks and data loss and, moreover, would furnish both the then Home Secretary and Ms Smith with useful first-hand experience of “tough” security.

It never ceases to astonish me that politicians cannot envisage situations in which the powers that they wish to arrogate to themselves might be considerably more oppressive, for instance in the hands of some as-yet unforeseeable successor. In my lifetime, several European nations, not so unlike Britain, have laboured under dictatorships, usually of a military stripe. It is sadly not beyond the power of imagination to picture Britain too being governed by a regime even less concerned to protect the freedom of the individual than is New Labour. In fifty years from now, Britain will doubtless be a Muslim state. How much more effective will it be to inflict upon the nation the extremes of Sharia law when the Blair and Brown governments have created the infrastructure of surveillance that will allow a future mullah-turned-Interior-Minister to enforce orthodoxy on a British people who once rejoiced in their non-conformist traditions.

Rather more urgent – because the present economic climate makes it unavoidable – is the certainty that forms of access to the national database will be sold for profit to commercial organisations. Once the control of the data moves out of the hands of central government and into the hands of entrepreneurs who are answerable first to shareholders, the rush to cash in will become a stampede and government, having acceded to the thin edge of the wedge, will be powerless to prevent, say, your insurance company having total access to every financial transaction you conduct, every email you send or receive and details of every visit you make to a website. Is that what you voted for?

Sir Ken Macdonald, lately Director of Public Prosecutions, told The Guardian: “The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people”. I couldn’t put it better.

Regulation is a perfectly honourable instinct in the make-up of the left. The current catastrophe of capitalism makes the case for regulation of the markets as no politician, however eloquent, ever could. But there is regulation and there is oppression. I do not say that the present government has turned to oppression … yet. But we are on a worrying path. Already more CCTV cameras gaze upon Britons than the residents of any other nation if measured by head of population. The suspicion that most of the cameras do not actually function properly helps to make the Brits relaxed about this chronic level of surveillance. After all, as a nation we are – we have always been – hopeless at maintenance. Count the clocks in public places that have stopped, the great majority of them not during the past month either.

If the level of surveillance actually delivered what it promised, there would be no shooting, no arresting and no convicting of innocent civilians. There would be much less theft, shoplifting, criminal damage and breaking in; much less speeding, hitting and running, dangerous driving and illegal parking; much less rape, kidnap, assault and child molestation; much less gang culture and fewer sink estates. The cost of this vast network of surveillance is nowhere near justified by its results.

So what the hell does the government want of this love affair with data-collecting? The knee-jerk response – that it is a crucial weapon in the front line of “the war against terror” – is a busted flush. The government could enact all manner of targeted controls on the community from which terrorism emerges if it were not so squeamish about giving offence to Islam. Faced by the loss of confidence in Labour among the non-Muslim population, part of it fuelled by the resentment at the imposition of oppressive regulation on communities that do nothing to justify it, you might think that Mr Brown’s advisors would suggest that he cut his losses and pursue a more broadly popular agenda.

STILL HERE

My thousands of regular readers may have wondered whether this blog, like many other enterprises over the last few weeks, has gone into receivership. The answer is no. I have been preoccupied elsewhere. I was away in London for several days and had intended to report on the shows and movies that I saw. Since then, however, we have been throwing into the air most everything in our home. It is a home stuffed with ... well, stuff, and said stuff has needed to be thoroughly rearranged ahead of an invasion. It is our turn to play host over at least part of the holiday – not before time, some family members will reasonably grumble – and we have to plan for up to seven, including two widowed aunts either side of 90, staying overnight. There has been such a to-and-fro of stuff – piles of things moved from room to room and back again – that for some days I was unable actually to reach my keyboard. Emailers have gone unanswered and junk mail undeleted. Only by dint of perching on a precarious pile and tapping with one finger was I able to get off a two-line letter to The Guardian (which the paper entirely rewrote before publication).

Anyway, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, at which time I will have some momentous decisions (for me, anyway) to impart and expound. In the mean time, assuming as I do that the hiatus will continue at least until that curiously deflated gap between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve, I bid you all a cool Yule.

MUMBAI’s 9/11

Almost ten years ago, we stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel in what was then just beginning to be widely known as Mumbai rather than Bombay. We were lucky to be in the old part of the building and very splendid it was. We ate a few times in its restaurants, including the one into which guests were barricaded during the siege this last week. I can vividly picture the cavernous foyer that has now been gutted by fire.

At one point during our stay, we had some small reason to complain – I no longer recall about what. As a conciliatory gesture, the manager had sent down to us a dish of the mangoes to which he alone had access. These proved to be the nonpareil of mangoes, the like of which I had never dreamed of before and can never hope to experience again. They were sheer magic. If the same manager oversees the Taj today, I hope he came through the ordeal unscathed.

It is a strange sensation seeing a place you have known being forced into a new and unwelcome role. Yesterday we were watching footage of stun grenades being fired at the hotel’s first floor windows in an attempt to flush out the last of the occupying terrorists. Many rooms and suites have been burned out, many others damaged by automatic weapon fire and besmirched by the blood of innocent guests. Had we been staying there when the attacks began, we would surely have been most vulnerable. I imagine myself having the presence of mind to shout “Deutsch, ich bin Deutsch” but that’s being wise after the event. Who knows how one would behave in a real situation like that? And anyway, would a German necessarily have been spared?

In the spring of 2001, we were on the viewing floors of the World Trade Center in New York City. No doubt some of the staff we glimpsed working there were to perish there six months later. How small the world is. Who imagines they are safe anywhere from modern terrorism? When the inevitable meeting of fanatics and nuclear weapons occurs, we shall all be in the firing line, wherever we hunker down.

Some hotheads in India are now calling for war with Pakistan as a response to the presumption that the terrorists emerged in the madrasahs and training camps of that country. Those who plan and direct these attacks will be delighted at this result. They will imagine Islam sweeping through a defeated India and overthrowing the Hindu hegemony. Though they will not achieve this aim, the attempt will profoundly destabilize the entire subcontinent. The Indian government, not the most far-sighted or imaginative in the region, will surely resist this impulse. Of course, more militant factions may come to power in New Delhi.

It’s important to keep hold of the knowledge that the world is wracked by a propaganda as well as a guerrilla war. The immediate conventional wisdom is that the one terrorist taken alive will yield much useful information about the origin and methods of the attackers. But he might as easily bamboozle the interrogators with well-rehearsed and plausible lies, lies that the authorities may be very ready to invest with credence. These fanatics are trained in psychological as well as urban warfare. The western media and the politicians who believe they must keep the insatiable media beast fed are very apt to get carried away with a theory based on little or no evidence, witness the flurry in some parts of the press about whether some of the Mumbai terrorists were British. “No” seems to be the conclusive answer. But what real difference would it have made if any of them had been British? Evidently the can of worms opened by such an idea is ugly, resonant but not quite articulated. Is it another twist to the image of Londonstan, the supposed western capital of Islamic fundamentalist recruitment?

Whatever precise national borders contained these young men when their ideas were forming, what is unarguable is that those ideas centre around Islam and jihad. Once again, religious bigotry rocks the planet and brings death and misery to random civilians, some of them no doubt themselves law-abiding Muslims. How we counter, reduce and finally eliminate that blind, righteous hatred is the $64,000 question that will not wait for a definitive answer.

THREE STRIPES, YOU’RE OUT

I love dance and I love to watch it, from Fred and Ginger to Fonteyn and Nureyev, from Torvill and Dean to the Nicholas Brothers. So of course I have never seen Strictly Come Dancing, any more than an aficionado of song bothers with karaoke or a barbeque draws a gourmet. I gather from the extraordinarily extensive media coverage of recent days that Strictly Come Dancing is a pro-am ballroom tournament shown as BBC1’s riposte to the “talent” tourney, The X Factor, on ITV at peak on Saturday nights, in which capacity the BBC evidently loses out, in ratings if not in the extent of publicity.

As I say, I have not seen any part of any edition of this particular “entertainment”, some of the reason why I come late to the discussion. You might argue that, given this lack of homework, I should shut my trap and forbear the expression of a view. To which I respond: grow up. No commentator, pundit or columnist, pro or am, allows innocence of a detail to prevent airing the “wisdom” of experience in the larger matter. I have seen enough evidence of this exhibit on the television news and in the papers to form a view. As was once remarked by Clive James (my least favourite television critic but he was sound in this instance), it isn’t necessary to eat the whole apple to know that it is sour (or at any rate words to that effect, and he certainly wasn’t the first to remark it, the proverbial curate’s egg being a variant of the same observation).

The “am” in this mix are not merely amateurs but, in the modern requirement, “celebrities”. So, part of the premise of this programme is understood to be that contestants are being gallant or, in the phrase enshrined in a Saturday night title of a generation ago, “game for a laugh”. Gallant indeed has been the focus of the recent media interest, one-time BBC News political correspondent John Sergeant. Sergeant has been competing as one of the “celeb” dancers, despite the – one might hazard – distinct disadvantage of being possessed of the physical grace of a hippopotamus that has contrived to emerge from the water on its hind legs. The judges in the studio – dance professionals all, I believe, one of whom used to step out with a flat-mate of mine – evidently have noted this departure from traditional ballroom practice and accordingly marked down Sergeant’s performance. However – ay, there’s the rub – the viewers get a say in the matter too. And the viewers, most of whom of course could not tell Ann Miller from Darcy Bussell, have been taught by television itself to be more captivated by celebrity than by ability.

So here is the contradiction at the heart of this particular enterprise: the experts and the lay viewers have differing expectations, differing requirements, differing judgments. There is indeed nothing strictly about it. And television, by gradually but decisively ridding itself of all reliance on gravitas, knowledge, experience and wisdom in favour of the culture of celebrity, has exactly set up the conditions in which its chosen experts in any field, however doubtful, are not going to be given any credit by the viewers. In this face-off, John Sergeant is the hero, the man of the people, the victim, the popular choice and the celebrity, all rolled into one. He has gallantly done what the judges could not: he has removed himself. However they play it, the judges are bound to come across as ungracious, churlish, pedantic and not in the spirit of the thing (I am surmising wildly here but you will tell me if I miss it by much). Sergeant, the while (and no surmise needed) can write his ticket as a celeb for years to come, opening fêtes, switching on Christmas lights, making after-dinner speeches, advertising anything he wishes to (footwear, perhaps) and entertaining customers on cruise liners. But I don’t think I’d cast him in a revival of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes.

All this was perfectly well adumbrated in the most recent run of the various knockout series (BBC1 Saturday nights again) in which performers who aspire to a career in the stage musical undergo repeated auditions for a role in an actual production in the West End. I have watched and been caught up in these entertainments because I love musicals (and genuine musical talent is at a premium in these contests), because something is genuinely at stake and because the contestants are not celebrities. Nevertheless, in the casting of a Nancy for Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s latest revival of Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, the final viewers’ vote did not favour the auditioner whom Sir Cameron and his ally Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted. The production, which opens early next year, is stuck with a Nancy whom Mackintosh would not have cast. You wonder whether Sir Cameron or Lord Lloyd Webber will agree to risk such an outcome again.

So there was an authentic talent contest going on in those series. Strictly Come Dancing would appear to be a whole other kettle of fish. It’s merely another celebrity survival contest. We live in a time in which any observation, sentiment, opinion, assessment, stance or philosophy – however vapid, commonplace, ignorant, malicious, oppressive or dangerous – is rendered somehow significant and valuable if uttered by someone who is deemed to be a celebrity. By the same token, any contribution made by an expert, someone with knowledge and experience, is dismissed out of hand if that expert has never appeared in a sitcom or soap, “competed” in some such farrago as I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! or had sex with somebody famous and then talked about it for money.

In a somewhat tenuous way, John Sergeant has been deemed a celebrity. His fame was sealed by a Moment that has become the stuff of telly-clip legend. This was the occasion when, as a political reporter, he was addressing the BBC news camera live on the prospects for Margaret Thatcher’s survival of a challenge against her by Michael Heseltine as party leader (and hence, at the time, prime minister) when the PM herself emerged from the building behind him and descended the steps with a gleam in her eye that betokened that she had something momentous to impart. Sergeant was obliged – you might think significantly – to execute a not particularly nifty sideways shuffle and utter some bromide along the lines of “here’s a microphone”, that he might play any further part in the scene. As a Great Telly Moment, it hardly bears much examination but it is thought – at least by BBC mandarins – to be up there with Michael Fish discounting the possibility of a hurricane.

You do fall to wondering who chose Sergeant for the dancing contest and why he was chosen. Was it perceived that his inability would indeed become a selling point, that he would prove an Eddie the Eagle of the Palais de Dance? Well, Sergeant now has his second claim to fame, his voluntary departure from the dancing fray so that he might avoid the absurdity of actually winning the thing. He could not resist, so the news clips revealed, a sly dig at the judges; former colleagues from the Westminster lobby have not been slow to account his demeanour in those days as less than collegiate and indeed inclined to the waspish. This is of no consequence to the celeb-loving viewers for whom Sergeant has become a Chaplinesque lightning rod, a little man against the world.

This is all very well but it is a further nail in the coffin of anything truly authoritative ever again being uttered on the broadcast media. If the BBC had wanted a programme wholly dependent on a popular vote, setting it in a world of accomplishment was bound to raise a brouhaha. Equally, there is little point in installing experts to give their opinions based upon long professional experience if the outcome does not require this input.

I appreciate that the matter of who governs us is determined by the lay vote but government and leadership are not solely about a particular skill and/or artistic presentation. Barack Obama appealed to a wide skein of responses, drawing support from many different constituencies and on the basis of many different expectations. Don’t rule out, however, the possibility that in the future prime ministers will be determined by a Saturday night knockout contest on television, featuring a panel of expert judges whose views may be discounted by the voting audience. I doubt somehow that John Sergeant will be invited to sit as a judge, though.

P BABY: NO MORE DRAMA

There seems no end to the current media frenzy over the child, known as Baby P, whose death at the age of 17 months more than 15 months ago only came to national attention last week. His identity and that of his natural father and mother, his younger half-sibling and the mother’s live-in bloke (who, along with her, has been convicted of his killing) are being withheld “for legal reasons”, though the names were briefly revealed on the BBC’s website. These legal reasons are never explained. If, as has been widely speculated, it is to protect the identity of the sibling, it seems unnecessarily punctilious. The sibling will certainly have been taken into care and can perfectly well be given a new name.

Despite this safeguard, cameras have been allowed into the flat where the child died, now stripped of its furnishings, and photographs showing his likeness have been widely circulated. ITV News has bought the rights to at least one of these pictures. I cannot but wonder who has been paid. There have also been distressing graphics of the injuries the child received during his short life. This is just the kind of 6 O’Clock News story that drives me to Eggheads on BBC2, in front of which I would ordinarily not be seen dead.

Armchair pundits, among whom I readily number myself, have turned their special venom on the hapless social workers of Haringey. Because Baby P died on their watch, they have, in an inimitable headline from The Sun, ‘BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS’. Being wise after an event that they didn’t even know had happened until they read about it in the news columns is the special talent of armchair pundits. Columnists who couldn’t find Haringey in the London A-Z (let alone their arses with both hands) profess to know better than seasoned social workers what constitutes a palpable risk. Columnists whose entertainment expense accounts are higher in a week than a social worker earns in a month demand that heads roll.

Social work is a vocational career. You need infinite patience and human sympathy. You have to be ready to work anti-social hours and be poorly paid. And you are immediately made aware that it is an art rather than a science. The decisions you make are based wholly on impressions and assessments that are subjective. There will be people whose casework you take on who will tell you what they think you’ll want to hear; others who will have few means of articulating what their situation is; and most of them will be in some degree desperate and not all of them can be saved from self-harm or harming others. Nobody pays you any heed until something “goes wrong” and then a bunch of scandalised know-alls in London, whose knowledge of social deprivation derives almost entirely from an occasional look at EastEnders, start writing about you as if you yourself are a serial killer.

I honestly don’t understand why cases like this are taken up by the media at all. They have no news value. Editors prate about “human interest” but if viewers, listeners and readers are “interested” it is because the media does its best to make them so. It’s mere prurience. The day after the Baby P case went large, there was a brief story, played almost as big for a day or two, of a mother who had been sectioned after killing her two small children. Tragically for the pundits, there was no evidence of social workers stoking the fire of this particular case so it fell off the news agenda. That didn’t prevent the BBC Television News bulletins from carrying a vox pop with a neighbour who was too emotional to be able to contribute anything useful. What is the value of this kind of coverage? Do the editors believe that we need to be shown someone upset before we can understand that the case is upsetting? And what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Wring our hands? Take to the streets? Perhaps write to our MPs – not least the prime minister and the leader of the opposition – and ask them to stop uttering the word “families” as though it has a religious connotation when all the media evidence suggests that families can actually be fatal for children?

Going through the courts at present is the Shannon Matthews kidnap case. This is of course sub judice and, besides, I deplore lofty conclusions drawn from cases by those who weren’t in court and/or haven’t read the comprehensive transcripts. But if it turns out that the jury finds an attempt was made to extort money as “reward” by the faking of a kidnapping, I hope the media will not be too slow to draw some inferences about what such a scam says about its own conduct. Even the people around Matthews – who between them would be unlikely to muster an intelligence quotient to rival that of a mayfly – might perceive that sucker-punching the media with a plausible kidnapping tale ought to be pretty easy and, the media being the route to instant celebrity, potentially rather lucrative. And of course the media does love a “human interest” story. Don’t rule out the possibility that, whatever the outcome of the court case, some level of media interest in these feckless people will survive in one form or other. “Based on a true story”, anyone?

WHITEY HASN’T GONE AWAY

Now that my body clock is back to something like normal, after an electoral night the emotion of which overwhelmed me in a way I hadn’t wholly anticipated, here are some lingering thoughts on the Obama revolution.

Looking at the demographic breakdown is fascinating and instructive. White America remains profoundly conservative: only 43% of whites supported the Democrat as against 55% for John McCain but that is nothing new, only a one percentage point difference from 2004. It would have been fascinating to see how the white vote broke if, as was mooted at one time, Condoleeza Rice had been the Republican candidate or if Colin Powell had been prevailed upon to run in 2000.

Breaking in almost identical proportion was the Protestant vote, while white evangelicals voted three-to-one in favour of McCain. This too is resonant for I think it is fair to say that religion seems more attached to Obama than to McCain. Of course there was the deliberate diversionary tactic of the proposal that Obama was a “secret” Moslem but you didn’t have to dig very deep to find that his Christianity is of a noticeably more active kind than McCain’s. As Martin Kettle observed sharply in The Guardian, “the white churches are too often racial division’s best friends”.

Race is still a big factor in America’s image of itself. However creative, sensitive and embracing President Obama is able to be, there will remain millions who will not be reconciled. You can picture the good ol’ boy leaning on his picket fence, chomping on the chewin’ tobacco and vowing laconically: “He may be President but if he ever shows his face here we’ll run him outa town”.

Does the race issue cut both ways? Obama won 95% of the black vote, but the black vote is the most unswervingly Democratic of any demographic and Obama’s support was only five percent more than that given to Al Gore, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in elections of the past quarter-century. Interestingly, Bill Clinton was the Democrat who won the lowest proportion – 83% and 84% respectively in his two successful runs – yet Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize-winning black writer, famously called him “the first black president”. Back in January, a CBS News poll gave Obama only 28% of the potential black vote against Hillary Clinton’s 52% at a time when Clinton was still widely expected to win the nomination. And again, you wonder how this split would have fared with a Rice or Powell candidacy for the Republicans. Which allegiance runs deeper, race or party?

Of course many blacks who voted for Obama have no more in common with him socially or economically than they do with McCain, and probably considerably less intellectually. That the candidates had advantages that large swathes of the electorate don’t enjoy only really began to tell when the financial crisis deepened and McCain’s tally of – he thought but he wasn’t entirely sure – seven homes played its alienating part. The strip cartoon Doonesbury, admittedly preaching to the converted, had some fun with the notion that McCain be obliged to “lose” one of his homes so that he could “feel people’s pain”.

There was some discomfort, expressed with trepidation in the media, about just how black Obama truly is, what with his white mother and grandparents. A column in January in the New York Daily News was headed ‘What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me’. In the same month, Joe Biden, still half-heartedly running himself for the nomination and having no way of foreseeing that he would duly find himself on the bottom half of the ticket, notoriously described Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”.

There will many who will not forget or forgive that. The deep, mellifluous rumble you hear is coming from the grave of Paul Robeson, as towering a figure as any in the 20th century in America, a man only prevented by the colour of his skin and the tenor of his times from achieving anything he set his mind to and "nice-looking" enough to have broken more hearts than Joe Biden would dare to dream of. And I won’t even mention Dr Martin Luther King. But Biden’s crass comment speaks to that subtext that Obama is not as truly black as those blacks who would never get entrée to the Democrats’ high table, men like Jesse Jackson (weeping freely in Grant Park, Chicago on Tuesday night, despite an earlier nasty dismissal of Obama) or Al Sharpton.

In exit polls this time, one voter in five said that race was a factor for them and more who said so voted for Obama than for McCain. Twice as many mentioned age and a large majority of them felt that at 72 McCain was too old rather than that, as a one-term senator, Obama was too inexperienced. Aside from the blacks and the (relatively) poor, Obama performed best among the young and first-time voters, seeing off McCain by at least two-to-one.

There is nothing to say that these demographics would not have favoured Hillary Clinton or any other Democratic candidate equally well, for it was the party as much as the Obama team that built and maintained the registration drive. Howard Dean was the candidate who, in the early months of the 2004 campaign, established the party’s reach through the internet and galvanised the party’s ability to raise funds. For almost four years, he has been the famously hands-on chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Obama owes a great deal of his victory to Dean’s organisational nous. Exit polls on Tuesday suggested that Clinton might have outpolled McCain by an even greater margin than did Obama.

It is idle of course to dwell on might-have-beens because if you change one ingredient you need to re-examine all. Had Clinton been the nominee, would McCain still have picked Palin? Would the GOP have been readier to let him go with Joe Lieberman, the Democrat renegade last seen in international profile as Al Gore’s running mate, on the ground that the (dis-)connection – Gore was her husband’s VP – would help to undermine Hillary, even if only obscurely? Could Hillary possibly have bettered Obama’s 56% of the women’s vote, given her hard-to-shake reputation as a divisive figure? And, in a nation where misogyny is every bit as immortal as racism, would McCain have won considerably more than his 48% of the male vote?

At bottom, it was hard not to feel that the factor that swung it most strongly for Obama was the one I, like the candidates, have failed to mention. That factor is George W Bush. Anybody following him under the same party colours would have been hobbled from the start. McCain made as insistent a case as he could that he was out of step with the neocons whom Bush fronted, but Obama had the vast advantage of lacking all taint of the Bush years. To his great and unexpected credit, the outgoing president has been as gracious and non-partisan as anyone could ask since the election and offered the president-elect congratulations and undertakings of support (both notional and practical) that seem wholly sincere. Perhaps, great reader that he is, he remembers Macduff’s line in Macbeth, that “Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it”, though of course Shakespeare meant “life” not “office” by that last “it”. Bush no doubt does remember how the Clinton team left a nasty taste by metaphorically trashing the place before leaving the White House.

Whatever the demographics demonstrate, imply or presage, Obama starts on a mighty task with more international good will than any president in modern times. He’ll need it. What goes up can soon come down, as the Scottish National Party found in yesterday’s by-election in Glenrothes. This was a sensational result, a bounce-back that absolutely nobody expected, not even the Labour party. Gordon Brown, who represents the neighbouring constituency and who broke with tradition by visiting the campaign twice while serving as prime minister, had been told soon after the polls closed that the seat was lost. This would have been in line with Glasgow East in July, where the SNP overturned a considerably larger Labour majority. Yet Labour not only held the seat, the party actually increased its vote since the general election by over 500 votes and its share of the poll by three percent. What contributed most to this victory, apart from the SNP not increasing its vote sufficiently, was the halving of the Tory vote and the vertiginous collapse of the Liberal Democrat’s support – both these parties lost their deposits.

I’ve said it so many times before and I’ll say it once again: a week is a long time in politics.