WEAK in POLITICS

“The last throw of the dice” is the main headline on today’s Guardian front page over a report on the PM’s conference speech. I immediately banged off my letter to the paper: “I didn’t realize the general election was this week”. They won’t run it, though. They don’t much care for my letters haranguing them for their coverage.

The continuing assumption in the media that the election is already lost is seriously damaging the credibility of the media itself as well as undermining the Prime Minister. That the Tories will win is entrenched as a foregone conclusion so that it gradually transforms into a self-fulfilling prophesy: there will come a point when so many natural and potential Labour voters take as read, consciously or subconsciously, that it’s all over bar the shouting that they won’t bother to go out to vote; the no-shows will mount into such numbers that the more motivated Tory vote must prevail.

The standfirst on Polly Toynbee’s column yesterday said it all: “The election may be lost, but an inspired fightback could give its bright young candidates the chance to rebuild the party”. That isn’t actually what she wrote in her piece – standfirsts, like extracted quotes, frequently rewrite or paraphrase the source and then the meaning changes – but it fairly summarises the stance that she and every other Guardian columnist has taken for a year and more.

You might expect them to remember their electoral history. We’ve all seen the famous wire photograph of President Harry S Truman holding aloft like a victory emblem the premature front page story “Dewey Wins”, another result that was a foregone conclusion. I vividly recall a double-page spread in The Observer (not then The Guardian’s stable-mate) the Sunday before the election of 1970: it was headlined “The agony of Edward Heath”. The following Sunday, Heath was forming his government. That story was wrong five days before the election, not eight months. But, as I’ve noted here before, the BBC’s exit poll gave Labour the victory on the night of the 1992 election and Bob Worcester called the presidency for John Kerry on the night of the 2004 American elections. Angela Merkel was not expected to be comfortably re-elected last weekend in Germany, even after the polls closed. It ain’t over till it’s over.

Now admittedly all but the first of these failed predictions are over-estimations of the vote won by parties of the centre-left, whether in government or opposition. Electorates everywhere tend to the cautious and conservative and indeed Conservative. Parties of the right – including old Communist parties and other reactionary forces – tend to think of themselves and to be seen by their electorates as “the natural party of government”. Parties that are liberal in fact as well as in name – the Liberal Parties in Australia and Canada would not be deemed very liberal by most liberal-inclined people in Britain – tend to be elected only as brief respites from long-serving and/or corrupt right-wing regimes that have lost significant support in the largely apolitical middle ground.

Even after 13 years in power – its longest stint ever in Britain – Labour is objectively the alternative rather than the default ruling party. If the Tories don’t come back in 2010, that really will signal a seismic shift in Britain’s political landscape.

What we voters need to bear in mind – and the politicians even more so – is that the election won’t be won and lost until election day itself. What happens then is what counts and nothing before then – no opinion poll, no columnist’s opinion, no conventional wisdom among the chattering classes – means diddly-shit. Until then, as William Goldman wrote repeatedly in his enthralling account of working in Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade: “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING” [his caps]. The confident assumption of all the commentators is futile and pointless. If they turn out to be wrong, they look incredibly foolish (and I shall be writing another letter for The Guardian to decline to publish, urging the paper to sack its high-paid “experts”). If they turn out to be right, where’s the triumph in subscribing to so commonplace an opinion? Who will have the neck to crow “told you so”? Perhaps only me if Labour is returned.

To her credit (although, frankly, it’s not much credit, now, is it?), Toynbee did, in her piece today, address some of the policy both stated in and omitted from Brown’s conference speech yesterday. But she still described it, at the outset, as “not ‘the speech of a lifetime’ they said he must make. But it was probably the last prime ministerial conference speech of his lifetime”. Her paper’s coverage didn’t quote a key passage in Brown’s address – “ the election to come will not be about my future. It’s about your future: your job, your home, your children’s school, your hospital, your community. It’s about the future of your country” – because it doesn’t suit the media’s concentration on personalities, crises and party manoeuvres. If the media chose to concentrate on policy and ideology, it would have to forego the simpler fun of constructing the verbal equivalent of a Steve Bell cartoon version of politics.

The danger is that, in following broadcasting’s reduction of politics to a kind of game show for (political) celebrities, the written media changes the nature of the democratic process. If the election of 2010 becomes an X Factor final between Brown, Cameron and Clegg rather than a well-informed national reaction to the direction of national policy, a rather different question is being asked and answered even than was resolved by the American electorate as recently as last November.

At least one distraction has been laid to rest by the conference – temporarily, anyway. Last weekend, the media was again speculating about Brown’s chances of actually leading Labour into the next election. Already, that fox has been shot. It shows how a couple of days can rewrite the agenda. Now Labour needs to despatch another canard, the one that says that Labour “cannot” win the election. Actually, this is not so difficult. The media has long experience of striking a stance that is completely antithetical to the pose it adopted just last week and assuming that its audience will notice no discrepancy. “There is nothing in life that is inevitable” Gordon Brown concluded yesterday. “It is the change you choose”. He’s not wrong.

STANDS SCOTLAND WHERE SHE DID?

The case of Baroness Scotland and the Tongan housekeeper – one for Poirot, surely – is the absolute type of the pickles into which the government seems to find itself pitching almost on a daily basis. Whatever the eventual upshot, it looks like a lose-lose situation.

The bones of it are these: Lady Scotland is the Attorney General, the first woman ever to hold the office and only the second black woman (after Valerie Amos) to have a seat in the cabinet. She was a junior minister, though not in the Justice Department, when legislation was passed making employers liable for employing illegal immigrants. It emerged last week that she had hired a woman whose visa had long expired. A fine of £5,000 – half the maximum the law allows – has been imposed.

This is a sorry situation. Patricia Scotland is clearly a diligent and honourable minister and in every way an ornament to a government short on style and grace. But she is a law officer. Like Caesar’s wife, she must be above suspicion. The test of her probity is harsher than one imposed on you or me. Her somewhat callow dismissal of the offence as equivalent to neglecting to pay the congestion charge does not stand much scrutiny: for that offence, the standard penalty charge is £120. On the other hand, this remark, much quoted in the press, does not actually appear in the Sky News video of its interview with her, the alleged source of the comparison.

Scotch mist (from BBC News website)

No doubt guided from Number 10, Scotland has rolled with the punch and palmed off the inevitable opposition and press cries for her head. This has been the method adopted in just about every case where a minister’s judgment, honesty or loyalty has been called into question and in the majority of such cases the minister has after all gone, just later rather than sooner. It’s the least good option. Saying you’ll stay, along with Gordon Brown saying you have his complete confidence, only pays dividends if two things happen: the shemozzle completely dies away and is forgotten and no bad smell, however faint and indefinable, attaches to you. The best course, but the least often taken, is to resign at once and work diligently from the backbenches to restore your reputation. Peter Hain might have pulled that off if he hadn’t taken so long to resign but some taint still attached to him and, since he rejoined the cabinet, he has been put in to bat for the government far less frequently than heretofore. Charles Clarke might have been back in government by now (not that he deserved to be in office in the first place, in my view) if he could have kept his bloody trap shut.

Now Patricia Scotland has been put in a (surely) untenable position by the resignation of a parliamentary private secretary in her department. Stephen Hesford told the BBC that “you shouldn’t be in a position where the office that you hold could be called into account for something that you’ve done or that you could possibly embarrass the government”. He may not put it very cogently but he’s certainly right. There can be little doubt that he is not alone in his view on the Labour benches.

If Scotland clings on now, she will take a long time to rebuild her authority. If she resigns now, she will look indecisive and weak. Moreover, Number 10’s guidance once again proves to have jumped the wrong way. For here is the nub of this particular embarrassment: one of the senior law officers in the land has discovered to her heavy cost that a piece of legislation brought in by this government is extremely difficult to observe, even by one so close to the matter of legality.

The status, rights and obligations of economic migrants and other seekers of “a better life” in the UK remain unclear and impossible to police. That is precisely because the government – like all its predecessors – has failed to address the matter root and branch. New Labour has now had twelve years to put this right so the phrase “like its predecessors” excuses nothing. Nor indeed, for all its pious talk on the matter, has New Labour done anything meaningful to assist career women who also have families, which is why Patricia Scotland found herself employing a housekeeper in the first place and why such responsibilities always seem to devolve to working women rather than working men.

The ROAD to RECOVERY

The political parties are now competing to look for ways to render more palatable the raising of taxes and the lowering of public spending. Here are some suggestions.

1) Slap a considerable tax hike on alcohol and smoking materials but ring-fence it entirely for the NHS. The tax can be presented as a charge for the “nanny-state” treatment drinkers and smokers will need from the health service in the future. Such targeted taxation is both socially constructive and morally defensible – and rather more effective than the British Medical Association’s advocacy of a ban on advertising and sponsorship. It puts the onus back on the individual to take responsibility for his behaviour. A further range of surcharges might be imposed on fast foods, on food packaging and, eventually, on all processed and perhaps even non-organic foods. Food producers will have an incentive to put themselves in a position where they can demonstrate the healthy nature of their ingredients and processes. This is taxation as organic carrot rather than as resented stick.

2) The government should introduce punitive charges against those whose drunken behaviour necessitates the calling out of emergency services. Specific spot charges for the handling of incidents need not be the thin end of a wedge of general charging for police and/or paramedic services; indeed, voters generally would welcome knowing that they are not having to pay for the clearing up after anti-social indulgence in town centres. This would be a targeted surcharge that would also win a lot of votes.

3) If the courts stopped committing those convicted of non-violent crime to prison, there would be no need for capital expenditure on new gaols. Financial crimes could be countered with swingeing financial penalties over a commensurate number of years (those convicted would have their finances regularly audited by court-appointed accountants). Other white-collar crime, burglary and petty offences could be penalised by rigorous regimes of community service. Incarceration would be reserved for those who are found by the courts to constitute a danger to the public. This way society benefits from – rather than paying the keep of – the supervision of all but its most recalcitrant and antisocial transgressors.

4) Announce an imminent date for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. This would be a popular change of policy. That our occupation of parts of another sovereign state keeps our streets safe from terrorists is a theory, not a fact. Many of us argue that our presence in Islamic countries rather recruits terrorists with a grudge against Britain: “don’t mess with the Moslems” as last week’s convicted would-be airline bomber declared on his suicide video. Nations that do not take it upon themselves to police the world do not, by and large, have a problem with terrorists. But here’s the clincher: we simply can’t afford this monstrous expense. Let the UN take on the task of making the world safe. That’s what it’s for.

5) Then begin scaling down our entire military capacity, starting with Trident. Britain’s present status in the world does not require us to remain armed to the teeth. Maintaining nuclear capacity and a military strength that invites our presence in every international conflict is colossally expensive. We have far greater need for renewed infrastructure, libraries, schools and university places that do not impoverish those that win them. That is what the electorate wants.

6) Bring in a new top tax level of 100 percent for all those remunerated (including supposed bonuses and share options) to the tune of £1million or more per year. In a recession or even not in a recession, nobody has need of more than £1million per year. “Oh,” the city will squeal, “but there will be a haemorrhage of talent to other countries”. To which I have a one-word reply: “Goodbye”. There might be some departures among those who are more interested in raking in the shekels than finding job satisfaction. But frankly the rest of the world is not so short of talent of its own that it would come recruiting here in significant numbers. In any case, few of the city fat cats have demonstrated much in the way of talent in recent years. What the public justly resents is that these titans of business get paid bonuses that make you clench your arse-cheeks even when their businesses are tumbling down the lavatory pan. Had I been a government minister, I would have tendered my resignation because Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling did not make agreed levels of pay restraint a condition of the bank bail-outs that they offered on the tax payers’ behalf.

7) Scrapping the ID cards is a no-brainer and it seems certain to happen whichever party forms the next government. Dismantling much of the surveillance state ought to be on the agenda too. Britain’s infrastructure of surveillance is, as so often noted, the most extensive in the world, yet so many recent cases have shown that the surveillance simply doesn’t work. Whether it is Britain’s tradition of a chronic lack of maintenance skills or the public’s slyness in avoiding being seen while at nefarious activities, the investment is clearly not worth it.

8) I do not favour cutting into the culture of benefits. It always used to be that the left supported benefits even when some people received them who didn’t need them and the right supported cuts in benefits even for people who could not manage without them. But that distinction has become blurred in both directions. New Labour is more ready to let deprived people swing in the wind and the Tories are more anxious at least to give lip service to the welfare state. Better that we risk losing the supposed talent of asset strippers and financial speculators than that we starve a whole class of people that might generate all sorts of talent.

The Chancellor warns of hard choices. These are easy ones.

EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE

“Product placement” is to be allowed on evening programmes on ITV. Hurrah! It’s what I have been waiting for: the clinching factor that ensures that I will never ever watch an ITV programme again. After all, once The South Bank Show has finished its final run that began at the weekend, there will not even be a residual sense of regret at missing any of ITV’s naff programming.

It tells you a lot about broadcasters’ contempt for both the audience and, more bizarrely, its own output. What is “product placement” for? Why, to catch the attention of the audience and drop a cookie-like presence into its brain so that when, god help it, it next goes to buy, say, “oven chips”, it will be sure to buy the brand that was “placed” on the telly.

But if you’re looking at the product, you’re not looking at the programme. What is the point of poor, unregarded Piers Morgan struggling to wrest every nuance from his subtle but definitive appraisal of the caterwauling of some no-talent more than ready to be god’s next gift to the showbiz if the audience is transfixed by the can of cola that he is the while throwing down his neck in a wincingly reluctant attempt to fulfil his obligation to the sponsor? How can we be sure that we are keeping up with Miss Marple’s reasoning as she reaches for the conclusion of her analysis of the way the easily-overlooked facts point to the least likely person in the room as the murderess when our concentration has been shattered by our noticing that the livery of the carefully displayed packet of tea biscuits that the dear lady simultaneously reached for is not quite in period with the noticeably branded computer games console not so very idly discarded on the arm of her armchair?

It’s bad enough that in-programme advertising breaks destroy the rhythm and continuity of movies and other material that was not designed for interruptions and impose an infrastructure of such interruptions on made-for-television programmes that otherwise would lay out a seamless argument. Sport has become unwatchable on television (unless your brain is inured to tuning out visual interference) because the venues, the equipment and indeed the players are festooned with logos and slogans. There have been sporting events (and music gigs too) where bouncers have refused entrance to ticket-holders unless they surrender some item they are carrying that bears the brand name of a sponsor’s rival. Lately it seems – the only sport I see on television is in snatches on news bulletins so the developments that I notice may have been a long time coming – there are animated hoardings around the edges of football pitches, expressly designed to take the eye and so rob the play itself of attention. In other sports played on greensward (but not yet in football, I think), sponsors’ logos are painted in perspective on the grass so that they are readable from the master camera position but appear merely as weird shapes from any other angle. What would happen if, say, a sliding rugby player did such violence to the logo that it no longer performed its promotional function? Would the game have to be stopped so that a re-spray could be effected? Are there painters standing by against that very eventuality?

More seriously, why do clubs want to collaborate in such destructive exercises? Don’t they care that viewers are distracted from the play? Because believe me, if the advertising did not succeed in its aim to take the eye from the sport, the advertisers that pay big money to be allowed so to disfigure sporting venues would not go to the trouble.

Truly, the thick end of the wedge that came into British broadcasting with the setting up of ITV in 1955 has arrived. People still argue that the BBC should give up the licence fee and be made to take commercials. Do these people not recognise advertising for what it is: pollution and mendacity in neon?

You may guffaw at the ferocious speech made in 1952 in the Lords by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director-General, against the prospect of commercial television: “Somebody introduced dog-racing into England; we know who for he is proud of it, and proclaims it urbi et orbi in the columns of Who’s Who. And somebody introduced Christianity and printing and the uses of electricity. And somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting into this country”. I find myself in Reith’s corner. In my view, television advertising has been the single most destructive, corrupting influence in Britain over the last fifty years. It has indeed been our Black Death.

Over the years, advertising has encroached more and more on the output. A so-called commercial hour – the amount of programme left in a one-hour slot after allowing for the advertising – has dropped and dropped. On ITV, twenty or so years ago, it was pretty rigidly set at 52 minutes. It now hovers just above the 45-minute mark, below which it fell some years back on American television. Half-hour programmes made for peak viewing routinely run to 23 minutes. In some slots, particularly those for American imports on Channel 4, the first ad break can intrude as early as before the first three minutes of the episode have wholly elapsed, even before the series title sequence. In the present advertising slump, late-night transmissions often carry nothing but programme trails during the commercial breaks; even so, the culture demands that the transmission must still be interrupted, even if for fewer than 90 seconds.

Advertising is a blight. It is a blanket of lies laid across the urban and rural landscape, a succession of promises that cannot be delivered and guarantees that will not be honoured. It undermines our self-image, promotes greed and acquisitiveness, proposes absurd ideals of how we should look and live and consume, distorts and undermines language and makes prostitutes of all those actors and others in the public eye foolish enough to be corrupted by its easy money. (“Oh but it’s far from easy. It’s really concentrated and very demanding” – “Selling dodgy financial services is harder than playing Lear? Then you’re not playing Lear right”).

Advertising insinuates itself into our most intimate places, our most domestic circumstances, undermining our assumptions that our surfaces are clean, that our bottoms are properly wiped, that our periods do not impede us, that our children are properly cared for, that our time is not wasted in preparing food that we can buy ready-made, that our teeth are sparkling and our breath sweet, that we have not missed the opportunity to sue for compensation or to compare prices on some website, that our homes smell of the most harmonious blend of chemicals, that we have full cover and have acquired every diversion that our children might fancy, that we conform. Adland rarely posits any world that is not spotless, flawless, whole, wholesome and antiseptic. On the rare occasions that it breaks out from the lovely home of Norman and Norma Normal, it courts danger and is usually slapped back by some busybody body or other. The centre of gravity of advertising has grown more down-market, vulgar and flash in recent years because that’s how society has leaned. But it remains quintessentially conventional. Try this simple test: when did you last see an ad that featured somebody Jewish but not funny?

Product placement is the second wave of the commercials marauding out of their designated “breaks”. The first was the sponsorship of programmes that allows a single brand’s brief promo to top and tail each fletch of each episode that falls within the deal. It’s noticeable that the programmes on ITV and Channel 4 (and, for aught I know, on Five if I ever watched it) that seal sponsorship deals are always proven successes – long-running regulars or US imports. (In the latter case, you wonder what the sponsor is financing. Do the acquisitions people make their bids for bought-in programmes in consultation with would-be sponsors? That would give advertisers an actual say in programme policy, something that is supposed to be a breach of the various channels’ respective charters).

Now we are to have brands and logos flourished within programmes, doing potentially fatal violence to the suspension of disbelief that drama requires and the trust in fair dealing that, for instance, competitive game and talent shows depend upon. Such product placement is already familiar in roadshow movies made in Hollywood and after the Hollywood model. The James Bond franchise, for instance, has long attempted to defray a portion of its eye-watering capital costs by embracing placements and even endorsements, but this element has grown more irksome of late. Notoriously, Daniel Craig’s Bond now sports a particular brand of wristwatch. I don’t wish to give it any more free publicity so let’s call it The Crapola. In Casino Royale (which, as it happens, has its terrestrial premiere on ITV this coming Saturday), Bond is asked if his “nice watch” is a Rolex and replies stiffly: “No. Crapola”. That this perfectly stilted exchange has been dragged in kicking and screaming merely to allow the production company to take the Crapola Corporation for hundreds of thousands of dollars is never going to be justification enough for a bad filmic moment.

What kind of numbskull invests in a watch purely because a fictional character is characterised as favouring it? It’s not as if Ian Fleming designated Crapola as the brand of watch that 007 would wear. This is not an artistic, character-driven choice, it’s a pragmatic, fund-raising imposition. Down and down go the standards and no one cares as long as someone makes considerably more moolah than is strictly necessary. So stand by for the inevitable arrival of this sort of inorganic intrusion in ITV’s regular programming next year: “It’s extraordinary that you should perceive that he did the murder, Miss Marple. Whatever is your secret?” “Lil-lets, of course”.

007 Omigod ...

CREATURES’ COMFORT

There was a spider in the bath this morning. I am no Annie Hall, so I did not summon assistance. It’s curious that people are so “afraid” of spiders. Like all such fears, there is no basis for it in rationality. Poisonous spiders are not apt to turn up in England. Arachnids have no designs on humans; indeed, like all creatures on the planet, they have far more reason to fear man than vice versa. I suppose it is that spiders scuttle that makes them unsettling. You can’t guess where they will get to next and, relative to their size, they make cheetahs look torpid. I used to be bothered by moths which, I guess, had to do with the combination of their fluttering (the airborne equivalent of scuttling) and their unpredictability. But I got over it.

Before I run the bath, I wipe it round with an old sponge topped with a splodge of Cif. Cif used to be called Jif, a much more apposite name. Now I can only think of cleaning the bath as The Revenge of the Cif. After I have splooshed water around, I also slosh some into the jacuzzi jets. I’m not swanking, just describing what sort of bath we inherited when we bought the house. Spiders that have found themselves marooned in the bath sometimes hide in the jets. I only found this out one morning soon after we moved in when I was enjoying a soak and a very large and very dead spider floated past my head.

Today’s spider was also a casualty. Despite The Revenge of the Cif, I was just lowering my foot into the water when a house spider, much the same size as its late predecessor, appeared on the water’s surface. I was dismayed. I fished it out on a sponge and lowered it onto the sloping roof below the bathroom window but there seemed no hope that it was alive. However, when I looked again after the bath there was no sign of the bedraggled creature. Had it recovered and staggered away or had a passing bird snapped it up? I shall never know.

I don’t take a Buddhist view of the sanctity of animal life, nor subscribe to the Blakean notion that “everything that lives is holy”. But I do not think that living creatures should lose that life merely for my convenience. I am not a vegetarian so of course animals, birds and fish do perish on a daily basis for my consumption. I think this is a necessary process and – I have argued elsewhere in this blog – a practical one. All the creatures that we humans would have eaten next week will not be free to relish long and productive lives if, tomorrow, the eating of flesh is declared unlawful.

Spiders, though, perform a function useful to humans. They kill and part-consume flies and other insects that do not benefit us. I have no quarrel with any spider and, if I find one in a situation that endangers it, I will endeavour to catch it alive and convey it to a safer place. We do the same all summer for bees, butterflies, moths and hornets that become trapped in our conservatory and soon succumb to dehydration. If a daddy-longlegs (that is, a harvestman or crane fly) put in an appearance, I would save that too but these benign, spindly oddities are becoming rare. I am not in the slightest aggravated by wasps, knowing full well that to demonstrate aggravation to a wasp is likely in turn to aggravate it. Those people who get stung are usually those who wave their arms about ineffectually when a wasp is present.

The other day, I found a wasp struggling in the kitchen sink. Its wings, having got wet, seemed to prevent it from righting itself. For fully ten minutes, I attempted to prize it onto a kitchen cloth but every time it seemed within a whisker of safety, it wriggled away. In the end, I gave it up and washed it down the plughole. Instantly I regretted it. What right did I have to seal its fate, even though, at this time of year, wasps are anyway doomed and dopey? I know that, in the objective order of things, a wasp is nowhere near as “important” as a human. And yet I cannot say that its life is any less dear to it than mine is to me. Indeed, wild creatures perform a daily drama of staying alive, surrounded as they are by predators or threatened with starvation. They must have a more vivid sense of danger than we humans ever have, unless we live in a war zone.

I have told this tale before but some years ago I came across an earwig in the house. I had a formative experience of these rather alarming-looking little blighters when, playing in a friend’s garden, I stuck the end of a bamboo cane in my mouth and then found myself spitting out a nest of earwigs. Not nice. In the grown-up experience, it was winter and so we had a log fire going. I gathered the intruder onto a sheet of paper and dropped it onto the fire, expecting it to be instantly consumed. Instead, it bounced on a log and secured a foothold, then ran about seeking means of escape. There was none. Nor could I help it. Now I felt bad. As I watched, it clearly became increasingly desperate and then hopelessly pressed itself into a crevice in the wood where no doubt it soon braised to death. I know that, while my memory lasts, I shall not forget that earwig whose drawn-out death I needlessly caused.

Why are we fearful of and cruel to insects? It is true that the creature that has killed more humans than any other is not the snake, crocodile, rhinoceros, lion, tiger or water buffalo but a tiny insect, the mosquito. I have no compunction whatever about squishing mosquitoes whenever I encounter one – and, as we have an ancient pond quite near the house, I do so rather often on summer nights.

Some years ago, in Kerala in southern India, I was just closing my book before bedding down in a circular hotel room when I spotted an unfamiliar insect on the wall six or eight feet from me behind a piece of furniture. It was a rather noticeable insect, highly coloured and on the large side – somewhere between the size of a dinner plate and a small family car. I regarded this beast quite evenly. I thought of my options: 1) run screaming from the room; 2) hit it with a chair; 3) smother it in an item of clothing and bundle it out of the door; 4) switch off the bedside light and go to sleep. It wasn’t very difficult to decide on option 4 and I drifted off in seconds. In the morning, the insect had gone without taking any of my limbs with it. I couldn’t guess how such a huge insect could have escaped the room. Had I swallowed it in the night? I think I would know if I had. Probably it was clinging to the underside of the bed. I didn’t bother to look.

Generally, I pursue a policy of live and let live with any living thing. Under the jetty that juts out over our ancient pond, a rat took up residence last summer, unperturbed by the scent of dogs. Our little dog, before he lost his sight, loved to chase him. But there has been no sign of him this year so he has perhaps moved on. I rather miss him. And I am not in the slightest alarmed by his recent proximity. The conventional wisdom has it that there is a rat within fifty feet of everyone on the planet (much closer in London). We are routinely warned about the danger of diseases carried by rats but did you ever hear of anyone being made ill by the proximity of a rat? I think people who drive too fast are a much greater danger.

But that, finally, is the important point about creatures. None is remotely such a danger to us, to their fellow creatures or to the very survival of life on earth as humanity. It is man who is the creepy-crawly, the bug, the vermin, the pest.

TEDDY BARED

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

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

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

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

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

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


caricature by Steve Nyman from aaacaricatures.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIBYA, LOCKERBIE, LIBERTY

I listened to the extremely judicious and statesmanlike statement by the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill, this lunchtime. As he averred, the decision as to whether to release Ali al-Megrahi was his and his alone. He was – no doubt painfully – aware that whichever way he jumped he would attract intense, even vituperative criticism.

The vituperation has come almost entirely from the United States. There seems no sentiment anywhere in that nation on behalf of release. One bereaved mother declared that MacAskill’s decision was not compassion but weakness. This is hard to compute. The most pressure was coming from the US and the US is used to getting its way. Buckling to that pressure might well have been characterised as weakness.

Nobody on the American side of the Atlantic appears to take into account the very real concern over whether al-Megrahi was justly convicted. The evidence was wholly circumstantial. The court at the time alluded to “others” who were not arraigned but those others have never been tracked down or even named. Among those asking for further investigation of the case are bereaved people from this side of the Atlantic. That they do not subscribe to what inevitably comes over from the Americans as a naked desire for vengeance and punishment is as eloquent as it is moving.

David Cameron, ever looking for a bandwagon, has joined the condemnation of Obama, Clinton and the American families. His statement sounds like that of a self-confident but naïve Vth former: “I think this is wrong and it’s the product of some completely nonsensical thinking in my view … This man was convicted of murdering 270 people. He showed no compassion to them”. Cameron is in the same tit-for-tat mindset as the Americans. He’s probably getting his head ready for switching to an American-style attack on the NHS.

By all means should there be a fresh investigation of the evidence that remains of what is somewhat misleadingly known as the Lockerbie bombing. The debris of the exploded aircraft still exists. It is obviously a disadvantage that 21 years have elapsed since the atrocity. All this time, the conviction has looked unsound and al-Megrahi has been protesting his innocence and trying to effect an appeal. If his name comes to be cleared posthumously, it will be instructive to see what the Americans have to say about it then.

OH, SAY, CAN YOU SEE?

Here are ten sets of important and urgent questions for right wing Americans.

1: What do you understand by the term ‘Socialism’? Do you imagine it is simply a synonym for ‘European’? In what ways do you believe President Obama – or any previous American president or indeed any current world leader – is or was a Socialist? (Write on one side of the paper only).

2: The party of Adolf Hitler called itself the National Socialist Party (hence Nazi). Was Hitler actually a Socialist as you understand the term, though? Could (for instance) Hitler, Trotsky, Gorbachev, Castro, Mitterand and Blair all be deemed Socialists? Is it possible for Obama simultaneously to be Socialist and Hitler-like? Discuss with illustrations.

Images like these are all over the net and the current health debate in the US

3: According to a Facebook entry by Mrs Sarah Palin (the former governor of Alaska and apparently thought to be a significant political commentator in the United States), the President intends to introduce a new health care system whereby senior citizens and the disabled “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’, whether they are worthy of health care”. Never mind the carelessness with which Mrs Palin describes the disabled as “standing”; what do you imagine would in practice be the function of these death panels? What kind of public servants would agree to serve on a death panel? (“Hello, darling, how was your day?” “Oh, I had such a long afternoon on the death panel. Do you know we condemned 127 seniors and six autistic children to the electric chair”. “Poor darling, you must be quite exhausted”).

4: What do the letters NHS stand for? What does the NHS do? How many death panels does it fund? Do you really and truly know anything at all about the NHS? Have you seen any English people with teeth lately?



5: What do you think is the domestic political status of Daniel Hannan MEP? As he is a member of the European parliament, doesn’t that make him a European and hence a Hitler Socialist? Does the fact that his views were immediately repudiated by the leadership of his party mean that they are in some way unrepresentative? In any case, if he works in continental Europe, how much contact does he actually have with the NHS in Britain?

6: Does it trouble you at all that as many as 45 million American citizens have no health insurance and therefore cannot afford to seek treatment when they are ill or injured? Have you ever heard the pathetic appeals for help that are routinely broadcast on some public service radio stations? Isn’t there quite an embarrassing dislocation between the fact that the USA is the richest and, you don’t tire of telling us, the greatest nation on earth and the lack of a health system that tends to people who need it. Would you want a fire department that only came out to douse fires at premises that could show up-to-date fire cover, a police department that looked the other way if your policy protecting you against muggers wasn’t fully comprehensive?

Of course if you went through all the pix of any public figure – Ann Widdicombe, say – you could always find one that seems to mirror some gesture of somebody else's

7: How much cash has the health insurance industry put into your campaign? Does it ever occur to you that insurance is the most corrupt, self-serving industry in the whole capitalist system, little more than a form of sophisticated casino operation in which, as everyone knows, the house always wins? What do you say to this proposition: that the president wants to establish a public health system because he believes that Americans will benefit from it and that it is the right thing to do, whereas the insurance companies want to preserve their businesses because they make a vast amount of profit? Does that really sound like a fantasy to you?

8: Don’t you know that there is already a huge public sector in the American health system, just as in many other services you take for granted? Do you think that, unless you were a multi-millionaire, you would survive in a totally free market that had no public provision and no public regulation?



9: Isn’t it a little bit anti-American to attack your own president and government in the terms that you have been employing lately? Anyone being so extreme about Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes would have been denounced as unpatriotic. Isn’t it time someone did a comprehensive exposé of the shock-jock fascists, the Fox News bigots and all the other detritus of the American commentariat who have no compunction about spreading the wildest of lies about anyone with a decent thought in their heads?

10: And finally, are you fucking insane? (You may need health care).

You can play this game with anybody

(PS: This posting is a little late; my server has lately been experiencing difficulty both contacting and maintaining contact with blogger.com. I don’t know why – no other internet address presents such a problem).

END of ROUNDED ONE

I have been reading – and much relishing – The Return of the Native. I should prefer to say that I have been re-reading The Return of the Native but, to my shame, it was a Hardy that I had never read, though (I hasten to add) I galloped through most of his great masterpieces when I was young.

Why do I say “to my shame”? Some three years ago, a friend alluded to the book in an email. He didn’t, I think, actually use that phrase that writers (critics especially) are wont to use when making reference to some aspect of a celebrated work of art: “you remember how [as it would be in this case] in The Return of the Native Eustacia … etc” but he may well have written something of the sort. The assumption – assuredly a polite and generous one – is that you of course know the work in question. In replying, I certainly confessed that I had not read the book, “to my shame”. And I determined so to do, though, as you see, I had to get through three years’ worth of other books before I achieved it.

Who of us does not – even if only without revealing it – quietly look down upon someone who has failed to do those things that we consider essential? It might be watching a particular television series or listening to a certain pop group or visiting some well-known venue or event: “Really? You’ve never been to Glastonbury/Wimbledon/The Met/The Yorkshire Moors/The Louvre … ?” After all, it’s only a short step from the disdain that we are apt to feel about any display of what we consider to be ignorance, particularly that kind of ignorance that appears to be the product of prejudice or being a dimwit or just not trying.

This is a curious area of sensibility. I don’t think I would be alone in claiming – or at least affecting – a sense of “shame” about some cultural gap. But it implies that there is almost a moral imperative involved in keeping one’s knowledge of the world and its output in good repair. We’ve all been told that we should read so-and-so or that we ought to hear such-and-such or that this or that is a must-see. The implication is that it is “for our own good”, that we are somehow deprived without this particular cultural input.

Who draws up the prescribed lists of works with which one ought to be familiar? Or rather, whence is the consensus about this derived? I doubt that many of us would feel the need to “confess” that we had never read a particular novel by, say, Bernard Cornwell or Joanna Trollope “to our shame”. Indeed, I wear the fact that I have never seen an episode of Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here as a badge of honour. Not all knowledge – as I am sure I would find myself pointing out to Anne Robinson if I were ever ill-advised enough to go on The Weakest Link – is equally worth having. (And mention of that particular telly quiz reminds me that it furnishes much material for the regular ‘Dumb Britain’ column in Private Eye, precisely because it is perceived that you don’t have to boast much of a cultural education to go on the programme. It is noticeable that foolish answers on University Challenge or The Book Quiz do not find themselves twitted in this column).

Keeping the focus on books, I think those volumes that attract the notion that they ought to have been read by anyone pretending to the status of well-rounded person would be those considered to have what we might call – mindful of the minefield that lurks hereabouts – “literary merit”. Since the notion of elitism went into everyday use some two or three decades ago, it has become difficult to talk about merit, quality, value and other elevated notions without being roundly barracked, with the term ‘snob’ frequently called up as an unanswerable nuclear device. We are no longer allowed to propose – certainly not in a manner that suggests that such an argument is not worth having – that, say, JS Bach might have a bit more to him than does Dizzee Rascal. If on no other count, elevating Bach above Mr Rascal is fraught with suggestions of patriarchy and racism.

Nonetheless, the cultivated know what they know and they are not about to surrender their conviction that a thoughtful, sensitive and knowledgeable person would be more likely to be familiar with Bach or Hardy than with, say, the autobiography of Paul O’Grady, not that the latter lacks for anything in the ability to divert. Diversion is a rather lower aim than erudition, after all.

A week or two ago, we were at a social event – a book launch, as it happens. A woman of our acquaintance also attended with, in tow, both her husband and her mother, neither of whom we had met before. The kind of desultory chat ensued that characterises these events. On our way home, we found that we had each remarked the woman’s declaration that, on a recent holiday in Italy, she and her husband had tasted snails for the first time. (Whether her mother had accompanied them and partaken of this unfamiliar delicacy or whether they had had a consignment of the crustaceans shipped back for her to try in the safety of home we did not register). More to the point, neither of us could fathom the precise spirit in which this intelligence was vouchsafed. Were we to marvel at the couple’s brave leap into an unknown that they imagined we must necessarily share? Or should we smile indulgently upon what they were ruefully offering as their innocent parochiality?

It seems quite plausible that they thought they were being – and that by association we would also find that they were being – pretty outlandish in tucking into snails: so unnatural, so foreign. In their circle, we were tempted to surmise, anything off the beaten track of meat and two veg in front of BBC1 or ITV would be thought to be rather raffish and liable to frighten the horses. To us, however – unbridled citizens of the world that we are, drawing from every well that we encounter with no fear of the consequence – snails were old news in our teens because nothing yet untried stayed untried very long.

So of course a well-rounded person ought to have quaffed snails just as she ought to have read Hardy. Nobody ever got a reputation as a conversationalist or as one who habitually set the dinner table on a roar by running round admitting to the things he has never done. On the other hand, there is very little satisfaction to be had if one only ever encounters people to whom mention of Hardy puts them in mind of “Kiss me, Hardy” or Laurel and Hardy or Jim Hardy of Wells Fargo or Hardy Amies or Jeff Hardy (who, I believe, is an American wrestler). And as a cultivated class of person is as endangered a species as the white rhino, the need for any of us to “keep up” is in any case beginning to be wholly academic.

Next time I read a great novel that I have hitherto unaccountably neglected, I shall almost certainly shut up about it.

WHERE IS THY STING?

When I was a boy, my maternal grandfather lived with us. Long a widower, he had done so as soon as my parents married and set up home together. It was the accepted thing in those days - my parents married in 1940. Essentially a positive person, his last years were certainly much enlivened by having an enquiring grandson to whom he could devote all his attention. He taught me to read (rather younger than the average) and fired my interest in history, geography, fiction and, in general terms, the world around me.

Grandpa had two old friends, contemporaries who each lived in a town not far away, and we would visit them once or twice a year. My dad never came with us. He found the notion of such visits a trial and anyway, as I’m sure he would emphasise, they weren’t his friends. As a little boy, I didn’t much relish these visits either but I wasn’t permitted to cry off. In particular, I dreaded calling on Mr Bruce and Alice. JS Bruce was a rather fearsome Victorian with a bristling white moustache, a bald dome and a quantity of lurking nose and ear hair. He was a widower with several daughters – at least three – and the plain, dim one remained a spinster and lived with him as timid, fussing housekeeper.

I don’t think my memory is playing tricks if I report that, as late as the mid-1950s, his semi-detached house was still lit only by gas. My grandfather, my mother and I would sit in the gloom, drinking the tea and eating the dismal sandwiches that Alice provided. Mr Bruce – I never knew his first name and their Christmas cards were always signed “JS Bruce and Alice”, even though their primary recipient was his good friend for more than half a century – presided, and we all took our cue from him. This meant frequent long pauses – interminable to a boy of seven or eight – while Mr Bruce slowly masticated his dry sponge cake and found nothing of import to remark. The grandfather clock ticked laboriously and seemingly deafeningly through these hiatuses.

Less of a trial were the trips to see May Allman. She was a charming old dame who always made a fuss of me and usually had some little gift to bestow. She had never married and had a younger woman living with her as paid companion, another one called Alice who was a plain spinster but certainly not dim. May and Alice seemed to get by on pretty much equal terms; whether there was anything more to it, it didn’t at that age occur to me to wonder. Then a calamity occurred. Alice died. Left alone and with no prospect of replacing her helpmeet, May struggled gamely on. The last time I saw her was, I think, after my grandfather had died just before my 14th birthday. He had enjoyed a long and happy life and had been in robust health and high spirits until the day he died. May, on the other hand, was now frail and apt to lose track. On the way home, my mother told me that May had drawn her aside and confided that all she wanted was to die.

May duly got her wish, as did JS Bruce and Alice, and indeed my mother and father; as we all shall. I have no idea what were the circumstances of May’s passing. As a teenager, I had much more pressing concerns. But the purposelessness of her lingering stayed with me. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that a settled wish to hasten what is anyway inevitable is a perfectly reasonable position to take. If suicide were simple, as a practical proposition, there would be no need for the courts or the law lords to take a view. But it, like the issue, is not simple.

When I was in my middle 30s, a number of my friends killed themselves. One was my flat mate Phil, ten years younger than me and a sweet boy. He threw himself off the cliffs at Dover. Such was the damage done to his head on the rocks below that he was buried unidentified. It was six months before a dental match was made and then the Dover authorities refused to allow his bewildered parents to exhume the body and re-bury it where they wished. In the meantime, we had not known what had become of him or indeed whether he was alive. Some weeks after the identification was confirmed, I received a small jiffy bag. The postmark indicated that it came from the Dover police but there was nothing in the bag save a door key. It of course was Phil’s and examining it I now knew for sure that he was dead. The key was green. It had been in his pocket in the sea.

Like any thoughtful young man, I mused on suicide myself once or twice. But the means are the taskmaster that asks all the questions. Phil’s desperate leap demands a certainty about what you want to achieve and perhaps an innocence about the ramifications: I doubt that he would have intended his family, friends and lovers to pass six months in painful speculation about his disappearance. If there were a pleasant-tasting draft available at any supermarket that you could drink and that would then carry you into a painless sleep from which you would never awaken, millions of us would have gulped it down before we turned 40, many of us on the merest whim. But of course millions more would have fed it to someone else. That rather rules it out as a permissible, let alone a marketable product.

But this is exactly the problem with the notion of assisted suicide. At what point does assistance become coercion and who decides whether a line has been crossed and on what basis? Let’s first exclude the busybodies from the equation. These are the ones who have a fixed view of the world, characteristically one based on supernatural delusion, and who want to impose that view upon everyone else. Prominent among these are the groups who scandalously characterise themselves as “pro-life”, as if somehow everyone else is “anti-life”. Given that so-called pro-lifers are almost invariably subscribers to the full ticket of right-wing views, they tend also to advocate capital punishment, pre-emptive military strikes and armed responses, which makes them rather more comprehensively anti-life than I am.

Then there are some, to whom one is certainly obliged to pay attention, who are severely disabled or suffering from terminal illness and who want to protect themselves from officious assistance to suicide, because they fear on the one hand self-interest on the part of the putative assistants and on the other hand temporary weakness or suggestibility on their own part.

These are genuine fears and must be addressed. There are grey areas here in which, for instance, psychological pressure might be put on an elderly person about “being a burden”. At the same time, of course, not wanting to be a burden can be a genuine matter of concern and distress for a dependent. It is argued that a relaxation of the rules that protect the elderly from being put under undue pressure might lead to a climate in which the elderly are widely seen as constituting a burden on society. As one only three years away from the time when he will be defined as a pensioner, I do nothing to encourage such a prospect.

But like all matters of private morality, each case needs to be considered on its own merits and not according to some ordained blueprint of action, behaviour and prejudice. It ought to be possible for medical and other professionals to determine whether or how far an elderly dependent is being manipulated by someone who stands to gain financially or in other ways from that dependent’s hastened demise. One of the Any Questions? panellists this weekend made some play of the charges that Dignitas, the Swiss body that offers an assisted suicide service, makes for that service and the fact that the further expense of travelling renders the whole exercise a privilege of being comfortably off. I was unclear what he was arguing: does he suggest that assisted suicide ought to be available on the NHS? Perhaps Dignitas ought to offer a means-tested sliding scale.

Neither this nor any other is sufficient reason to disallow the proper support required from family members and other close parties in cases where someone severely disabled or terminally ill has no doubt that a willed end is necessary before physical and/or mental deterioration makes it impossible.

What is required is a climate and a system within which everybody is capable of being satisfied for their own circumstances, not according to some methodology or supposed morality advocated by others. Indeed, that is rather what obtains now, in practice if not in law. Dignitas has come about because there is a demand for it. Technically, those spouses, partners and other family members who have accompanied those wishing to die have breached the law. The law has compassionately winked. Debbie Purdy’s wholly understandable – indeed wholly admirable – attempt to “seek clarity” in order to ensure that her husband would not be penalised for taking her to Switzerland has forced the law lords’ hand. They have been obliged to make a ruling and they have ruled, rather unexpectedly but very properly, in favour of compassion and liberality. But of course they have united the opposition behind a cause. We cannot know how this will end. It ought not to end badly for Omar Puente, Purdy’s husband. But the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, now has to draft a policy. As Peter Hain said on Any Questions?, “I hope he’s not forced to clarify things in a rigid way”. On this as on so many matters of private morality, rigidity is the enemy of both compassion and good law. All the more reason to exclude the rigid god-botherers from playing any part in the process.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

In London last week, I caught up with friends, shopping, the germs that inhabit public transport, and a bunch of plays and movies. I also visited an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It was called Gay Icons. The object was to ask each of ten “prominent gay figures in contemporary culture and society” to name six people “whom they personally regard as inspirational, or an icon for them”.

Scope for confusion, dissatisfaction and idiocy is already well laid in this rubric. To begin with, we have the dog-eared term ‘icon’. It was only as recently as 2001 that the following ‘draft addition’ was added to the meanings of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, esp. of a culture or movement; a person, institution, etc, considered worthy of admiration or respect. Freq. with modifying word”. This is a gallant attempt to arrest the tsunami of generalised gunk that has assailed a previously harmless term, one that once minded its business and proudly boasted very specific and narrow meanings.


Gerard Manley Hopkins – bigger than at the NPG
(from Google)

In today’s degenerated discourse, anything can be ‘iconic’: a joke, a news headline, a fart. ‘Iconic’ is just another loose description – along with, say, ‘classic’, ‘fantastic’, ‘awesome’ – of something the speaker (and increasingly the writer) approves. There is no distinction of meaning or degree – and certainly not of either substance or subtlety – between these interchangeable positions.

Clearly there is nothing to be gained by insisting that an exhibition with the word ‘icons’ in the title should exhibit anything of the religious or the statuesque. But I would have thought that at least the chosen ‘icons’ might betray some connection to the legendary, the totemic, the idolised. Only one of the “prominent figures" asked to choose did so, or so it seemed to me, in that spirit. Waheed Alli’s six choices were David Hockney, Lily Savage, Jeff Stryker, the Village People, Diana Princess of Wales and Will Young. The late princess, whom I believe to have been heterosexual, was indeed a gay icon in the sense that gay men in particular adored her. Other such women – enormously famous stars who had or have a predominantly gay male following – include Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Midler, Madonna and Kylie Minogue, none of whom is cited in the show. But this is what I understand by the term ‘gay icon’. Lord Alli’s other choices have all created strong images of themselves as gay, if very disparate, men. And that seems a fair enough alternative (but secondary) reading.

At the other extreme are such doltish choices as Elton John’s of Rostropovich and the football manager Graham Taylor, and Billie Jean King’s of Mandela and her own family. Such choices are by no sense of any imagination – save that of a numbskull – gay icons. These participants are simply choosing people who reflect back on themselves, without reference to the thrust of the actual exhibition. They should have been excluded from the jury in favour of self-aware choosers.

Most of the icons cited by others have an identifiable gay penumbra but what they really are – for the gay community, as represented by the choosers – is not icons but heroes (I am using the term ‘heroes’ to encompass ‘heroines’, much as we are now enjoined to call women who act ‘actors’). This is fine and dandy but it does not make up a show of icons. Indeed, many of the choices are of figures who are more or less obscure, which surely wars with the contemporary understanding of what an icon is. The professional writers among the choosers inevitably haul in worthy but widely ignored fellow writers: Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch, Bryher, Sylvia Townsend Warner. As it happens, I have read the first two of these and I still contend that they are far from any generally recognisable iconic status.

Another, rather different problem cuts across the choices. This is, after all, a show at the National Portrait Gallery. But rather too high a proportion of the subjects throve before photography was widespread and were not esteemed sufficiently to merit the painting of portraits. Accordingly, the images available of (for instance) Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter and Audre Lorde are very restricted. The only image of Gerard Manley Hopkins evidently to be had is about the size of a postage stamp. This makes for a pretty fitful visual show.


Paul Rudd not in character but indistinguishable
(from Celebrity Dream Cameo site)

At any rate, there was a healthy turnout prepared to pay a fiver for one of the NPG’s weediest efforts and they certainly weren’t all – or even a little bit – screamers. So I suppose one should be pleased at some level. I would have liked to have found the exhibition a little bit interesting, informative, challenging or unpredictable, however.

I saw three movies, one that I adored, one I detested and one that perplexed and disappointed me. The last of these (though the first that I saw) was Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. Naturally, I am drawn to any work whose title doesn’t need to be explained to me but clearly does need explaining to most punters, even if they know how to pronounce it (“sin-neck-dock-ee” – it is that part of speech that conveys a whole by citing a part, as does the word ‘hands’ in “all hands on deck”, and is used here as a gloss on the up-state town in New York, Schenectady). The movie’s opening line boded well too: “Harold Pinter’s dead”. Cultural allusions put me at my ease, among characters with whom I may hope to have plenty in common. The cast list is further encouragement : Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, thoroughbreds all.

But the movie gets away from Kaufman. Because his story is not anchored in reality – especially a temporal reality – the story-telling disciplines start to go hang. The difficulty you give yourself by throwing out the rulebook is that your audience loses its bearings. I do not ask for the Aristotelian unities but I do need Kaufman to show me a world whose functions I recognise. He doesn’t do that and so, although I have gladly placed myself in his hands, I feel cheated and grow restive and eventually bored and recalcitrant. So ultimately the movie, for all its intelligence and thoughtfulness, is a failure.

Sacha Baron Cohen is, I think, an enormously talented man and a fearless one too. I hope, once he has become an established fixture on the international scene, that he does not follow the career trajectory of so many original comedians and humorists by taking increasingly dull and undemanding character roles in increasingly vapid and unnecessary movies. Nonetheless, the two vehicles that have raised him to supernova status leave me cold. In recognition of the rogue umlaut assumed by Cohen’s Austro-fashion fag figure Brüno, Universal Pictures styles itself Üniversal at the top of Brüno. And that was the last time I laughed throughout the whole picture. (Oh wait, I did smile at a gag at the expense of, severally, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kevin Spacey but that hardly counts).

Well, my old friend, we shall get nowhere engaging an argument about what is funny. I merely insist upon my entitlement not to be amused. It does seem to be necessary to insist upon this. In The Sunday Times, Cosmo Landesman declared “There’s no denying how funny Brüno is”. Mr Landesman evidently brooks no dissent. I am reminded of Penelope Gilliat’s famous thrust that “it would be unfair to suggest that one of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday is the sound of Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree”; I only ever read Mr Landsman on a Sunday if I am quite sure that I am completely ready to embrace a diametrically opposite view to my own commonsensical one, which is to say an unutterably wrong view.

Philip French has forgotten more about film than Mr Landesman ever knew but he too appears to lose his critical edge when Master Cohen heaves into view: “his satire seeks to create chaos as a way of exposing the absurdity and fragility of society and life itself”. I am not at all sure that this Observer observation means anything at all but it is certainly ill expressed.

Critics generally credit Cohen with a mission a little less elevated. They think he wants to make fools of people, especially pompous and bigoted people – he “delivers a few genuine stings to people who deserve it” reckons Kim Newman in Sight & Sound – but I would argue that he achieves nothing of the kind. A sequence in the earlier movie, Borat, did effect a kind of cathartic exposure of the self-regarding shallowness of a trio of frat boys and what was notable about that sequence was that Cohen was called upon to do almost nothing in the way of setting the boobies up – they lead themselves eagerly to the slaughter. But throughout Brüno, as through the rest of Borat, Cohen confronts innocent civilians (whether they “deserve” it or not) with increasingly manipulated situations. The dupes are hoaxed. How not very surprising. What is remarkable and rather encouraging about human behaviour – contrary to Philip French’s intimations of existentialism – is how gamely and how politely these poor mutts deal with someone who has torn up the social rulebook. Mind you, this all assumes that a large proportion of what makes it into the cut is authentic and not a put-up job and it is, I submit, quite a large assumption. It’s a movie, after all. Why waste expensive man-hours and film-stock when you can fake it very professionally and nobody is any the wiser?

Much has been made of the supposedly “outrageous” sequence in a hotel bedroom where Brüno starts to come on to Ron Paul, the septuagenarian candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination. Let’s be brünoly frank: the sequence doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Paul does not react in any way different from the way any elderly heterosexual man would react in this rather unlikely and tiresome situation, whether or not (and it really doesn’t signify) he knows that there are cameras on him. Paul keeps polite while increasingly frosty, then sees the need to scoot and does so complaining loudly. Well, of course he does. If Cohen and his team think they bagged anything of any interest there, they’re insane. The only residual glimmer of anything is the mild amazement we might feel that Cohen has the chutzpah to carry it through, staying in character.








Mark Rylance in Jerusalem
(from The Independent)










Nevertheless, it’s a thin achievement. As is testing the patience of hotel staff to destruction. Any drunken teenager can achieve that. However good a show he puts on for the camera when he is called upon to release Brüno from the partner to whom he is supposedly affixed by sex toys, you can bet that the hotelier has seen it all before, and worse.

I cannot help but feel that all this is rather low-grade and juvenile. Grown-up critics, confronted by Cohen, are apt to collapse into helpless giggles like six year-olds when someone farts. The very fact that relatively well-connected players in the politics of the Middle East allow themselves to be persuaded to go in front of cameras with Brüno – if indeed that is who they are and indeed they do so unknowingly and indeed it is not all a phoney – suggests that the most interesting aspect of these encounters is very much not their awkward and doomed brevity (what a lot of wasted footage must have been shot) but rather the nature of the preliminary negotiations that set up these encounters. Did nobody film those?

I Love You, Man is a modest comedy of manners in which a couple air and tackle the problem that the bridegroom-to-be cannot raise a pal suitable to stand as best man. That’s about all there is to it and it would come off as flimsy fare indeed if it were not for the fact that John Hamburg’s movie, building from a story by Larry Levin, never puts a foot wrong. In particular, he has cast it in the way that the great tradition of romantic comedy was always cast, seeking maximum charm. Paul Rudd and Rashida Jones are simply gorgeous as the engaged couple and Jason Segel – as the new buddy who, clearly unsuitable though he is, is equally obviously going to fill the bill – complements Rudd perfectly. But it is down to Rudd to carry the movie and he is pitch perfect. I have liked his work ever since Clueless, naturally fell in love with him in The Object of My Affection and have seen him several times on the London stage (though brought up American, he is the son of immigrant English Jews). Rudd’s comic timing has become one of the contemporary screen’s great delights and it is impossible to picture any living actor playing the lead in I Love You, Man with more deft charm. This was the movie I saw that I adored, a completely unassuming crowd-pleaser.

I live in decreasing hope of ever seeing a play by Jez Butterworth to top his first, Mojo, which is now 14 years old. He’s back at the Royal Court with his new one, Jerusalem, which I saw on the eve of its press night so with no preconceptions. It was therefore a delightful surprise to find it set round our way with many name-checks for places we know. A portrait of the English non-conformist tradition as it survives on the fringes of society (Jerusalem as in Blake), the play was more entertaining than substantial but still provocative and admirable. Butterworth was lucky, moreover, in his director (the faultless Ian Rickson) and his leading man: Mark Rylance giving a toweringly charismatic performance as a doomed rebel who still serves as a rallying point for the disaffected local youth. If Rylance doesn’t hoover up all this year’s stage acting awards, it will only be because he is appearing in a new play.

All the other plays I saw were on the National’s big stages. Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice was, I had understood, quite an inflammatory piece but I found it just an extended soap opera – the reference to EastEnders towards the end seemed rather reckless. Bean’s play-within-a-play format purports to tackle waves of English immigration and the way the increasingly mongrel native population assimilates them. But it really offers no more than anecdotal evidence and plays to received ideas. The conclusion appears to be that everyone hates the newest arrivals until they too become part of the scene – so the Somalis are the latest to suffer prejudice and rejection. To suggest that this is schematic and reductive is no more than stating the obvious. Bean’s vision is like a cartoon, which is perhaps what spurred director Nicholas Hytner to introduce some animation into the mix. It makes for a lively but very long evening – all four plays I saw were comfortably over three hours.

My remaining NT visits were to revivals of “problems plays”. Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well has traditionally been so designated. Priestley’s Time and the Conways is, as its title suggests, one of his exercises in the manipulation of time (I wonder if Charlie Kaufman has studied Priestley). Generally these days I avoid revivals on the argument that, when my London theatre visits are so limited in number, I really don’t need to see another production of The Cherry Orchard or She Stoops to Conquer. The Priestley was one I had unaccountably never seen, however, and All’s Well is very rarely put on – I reckon it’s more than 35 years since I last saw it.

Both plays were superbly staged and each director had found a means of taking the curse off the respective play’s problem. Rupert Goold employed some rather beautiful effects so that a couple of the Conway siblings were able to seem present in both their young and their middle-aged manifestations (Acts I and III are set in 1919, Act II in 1938). Marianne Elliott played a look of abject terror over the faces of the promised couple at the conclusion of All’s Well, cleverly distancing the general welcome for an arranged marriage that, in the play’s world of fable and court etiquette, was accepted as a proper reward for service.

Each of these two plays is superbly crafted by a dramatist in his around-40 prime and I was very glad of the opportunity to see them. That they both propose unacceptable takes on the world is beside the point. The National under Hytner is really fulfilling its brief.

DYING in VAIN

Not before time, the government’s conduct of the war in Afghanistan is beginning to be questioned. Those of us who questioned it from the get-go welcome the late converts. Lord Lamont made a particularly astute and well thought-through survey of the problem on Any Questions? at the weekend. What he had to say contained phrases that have not emanated from Tory mouths very often over the last eight years: “foreign invaders” (by which he meant us), “the mission is very ill-defined”, “we need an exit strategy”. Lamont believes that withdrawal can only be achieved through a deal being brokered. He believes – something which is self-evident to me but apparently unthinkable to many politicians and brass hats – that we are very hard pressed to talk with any credibility about a military victory.

Warfare has its own sort of momentum, its own remorseless logic. The moment it is engaged, what is at stake seems to be dominated by the face that politicians need to save. That is why so much is made of the troops themselves, of national pride in them, of the need to safeguard them and of the terrible overweening fear that their blood might appear to have been spilt without national benefit.

With so many deaths of British soldiers in so short a space just lately and such a head of steam building over perceived shortcomings in matériel, it may be that perceptions of the Afghan escapade have reached a tipping point. The Guardian today claims what it calls “firm” public support for the war, though in fact the poll commissioned for it and Newsnight reports approaching seven out of ten respondents as wanting the troops home either immediately or within six months; the government of course has no such plan. The pollsters interviewed 1,000 randomly chosen adults by telephone on Friday and Saturday; in other words, it was a small sample, not weighted by profile, not spoken to face-to-face and there is no record of how the questions were framed. Accordingly, it is best to treat such a poll with utmost caution (which is not of course how The Guardian treats it when looking for a lead story on a Monday).

Gordon Brown and David Miliband, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all say that prosecuting the war prevents terrorism here in the west. This is a highly debatable proposition. Which of terrorists and what Norman Lamont calls “foreign invaders” is the chicken and which the egg? How many Afghans are recruited to the Taliban by ideological pressure and how many by resentment at occupation? As Lamont put it on Friday, “if you are foreigners, civilian casualties are held very, very heavily against you”.

Those who would continue the war on this basis may be acting on conviction but it is still a gamble. No one can prove that fighting the Taliban reduces rather than increases the incidence of terrorism. No doubt they have links with al-Qaida – links surely born more from tactical convenience than from strategic ambition – but it is unarguable that the Taliban’s mission is to prevail in their own country rather than to extend the war beyond their own borders. So the west’s war is explicitly about control of Afghanistan. To continue George W Bush’s “war on terror” would require a different theatre, across the badlands of north-western Pakistan rather than in Helmand province. The argument about terrorism sits better on that war (which is not currently being fought by any other than Pakistani forces against Islamic fundamentalists) than on the Afghan war.

What the west is doing in Afghanistan is prosecuting an old-fashioned colonial war of the kind the British fought with utter futility several times in the same country in the 19th century. Neither geopolitically nor economically is such a war remotely justified. It is another expression of western hubris just like Iraq and it is just as futile.

The wave of doubt over the war in Britain seems to have been wholly occasioned by the accelerated casualties among the military and the sense of frustration and despair that these deaths engender. Civilian casualties do not seem to signify. Why is this? The deaths of British soldiers make the news. These casualties are usually named, their likenesses shown and, as a strange ritual over the last year or two, their biers go a progress through the market town of Wootton Bassett, which is not far from where we live. The way they are presented to us is as “our boys” (now “our boys and girls”) and it has been so since World War I. Hence the banner slogan seen so extensively in the marches against the Iraq war: “not in my name”.

In the global age, many of us think of ourselves not as citizens of a particular arbitrary territory bordered and characterised as a separate sovereign state but as citizens of the world. All those caught up in war are our sisters and brothers, our children and parents, whatever their national origin. So as I see it the death of a sapper at the hands of a sniper or a tank driver hit by an IED does not diminish me any more than does that of a market stallholder caught by an explosion or a bedridden geriatric whose hovel is shelled.

We sometimes hear estimated numbers of such “collateral damage” casualties and, if cameras can get there, we see generalised images of carnage. Sometimes a photogenic child is recorded lying injured in some (often make-shift) hospital. But generally these casualties are anonymous – safely so, you might observe. The way we relate to them is oddly like the way we relate to the animal world. Any harm to our pets and domesticated beasts hits us hard; the constant visitation of death and injury to wild creatures in the world just beyond is something we ignore or at best notice in passing.

But of course those civilians are much more vulnerable than the military. They do not have weapons for protection or pre-emption nor armour against attack. They don’t have a choice to be other than where they are because they are poor – the comfortably off tend not to live in war zones. They have no recourse but to sit it out and hope that the next bomb falls on someone else. Unlike the soldiery, they are not there because they love it, as the bereaved soldiers’ families so often say. They don’t have a choice.

Politicians seem not to take these factors into consideration. In his first week in office – his first week – Obama ordered an air strike over the Pakistani border that not only violated that nation’s sovereignty but also killed civilians. He seemed to take it in his stride, like swatting a fly. I was very disappointed.

Perhaps long in the future – not in my lifetime, surely – someone will run for office in the States who takes the view that war is merely futile and destructive, that scarce resources need to be invested in construction rather than destruction, that jaw-jaw is better than war-war, that sufficient nuclear weaponry to destroy the planet once is more than enough and that all the rest is superfluous to requirements. And perhaps such a candidate will take the view that all such interventions in the affairs of other nations should be conducted through a body that represents a plurality of nations rather than the vested interests of a few rich economies, a body like the United Nations. And perhaps a future British government, having made such a continuous fuss about the bravery of our troops and the necessity to eschew any expression of an opinion that might be construed as critical of them or doubtful about the value of their deployment, will be the first since at least Victorian times to take proper care of those troops who come home injured in either body or mind and not do everything possible to avoid giving them adequate recompense for the injuries they sustained in “our” name.