'Doctor Forrest' has risen from the presses...

Osborne's narrow choices, and ours

I look at David Cameron and see someone who strikes me as passable. This is mainly – and, I concede, a tad worryingly – on account of his dignified, principled bearing on occasions when he has handled matters related to HM Armed Forces: most strikingly, the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and, last week, the issue of deployment of British forces over Libya to enforce UN 1973.
The Libya question, it’s been widely noted, proposes more strongly than ever that Cameron is the ‘heir to Blair’. – a perilous mantle to hold, but you would count on Cameron not to be fazed by it. Even now one hears familiar critiques of his character – that he is a glib and shallow PR man, an aloof and pampered toff, merely Thatcher’s bastard offspring, i.e. one of the ‘same old Tories’, to use the lumbering terms of Labour’s current and hopeless leader. At times it seems to me that observers might as well resort to the analytical method of Harry and Paul’s old club buffers in this celebrated sketch.

Of course, Cameron is patently not a politician who could have been slotted (even by time machine) into one of Thatcher’s 1980s cabinets; and while he is undoubtedly several leagues more posh than me he looks (from my myopia-ridden remove) to be one who mixes well and without condescension (other than in his ripostes to the aforementioned Hopeless Labour Leader, who doesn’t even ‘speak human’ on what I’ve heard, for all that his fan club boasted otherwise those 7 long months ago.)
What does Cameron believe in? To quote from Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, I think ‘he believes in himself.’ That, too, can be dangerous, a vulnerably Blair-esque distinction. But it certainly suggests someone who will not run into any of the nervous-wreck hazards of leadership, i.e. unlike the excruciating personal style of the now-invisible man whom Cameron replaced.
Approving Cameron to that degree, I find it easier to speak of all the things that are disagreeable about George Osborne, whom I doubt mixes well at all and, worse (as Martin Kettle argues here) seems to be trapped in some hellish mirror-image homage to the wiles of Gordon Brown. John Rentoul did no messing in describing Osborne's Budget speech of yesterday as “the most appallingly crafted, third-rate peroration of any parliamentary set piece I have had the misfortune to witness.”
You can probably trust the view of a Tory who trashes the first routinely scheduled Budget of a Conservative chancellor in 14 years: thus Fraser Nelson, today poring over the Office for Budget Responsibility's report, seeing no authentic pro-growth measures, only creeping inflation, steadily ahead of wages, until possibly mid-2013. (“Result: real wage falls, real drop in living standards and real misery.”) Nelson is avowedly a hardcore tax-cutter and deficit-slasher, believing too that the former aids the latter, and he criticises Osborne for insufficient zeal on the controversial issue of The Cuts (“In 2011-12, the estimated bill for debt interest will be £48.6 billion — a staggering £4.7 billion more than the estimate in the November forecast.”) This may be in part why John Rentoul, however scornful of Osborne's presentation, concludes that “overall, the Cameron-Osborne judgement on public finances seems more right than the Miliband-Balls one, so far as that can be defined.” Or as Martin Wolf puts it in the FT, "The UK is caught between a chancellor who insists his policies are perfect now and a shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who insists that policy was perfect under Labour" - or, at least, Labour under the glorious leadership of Balls' padrone, Brown.
This week Rentoul quoted with permission a plaintive letter he'd had from one Darren Canning, a Labour member and campaigner:
“I keep hearing how a new generation is in charge of Labour now and keep wondering if there is any place left in it for me... All we have had to say is ‘Vote for us, we’re not Tories.’ It isn’t enough to get excited about... I am pulling out of active campaigning and am seriously thinking of leaving the party altogether. At least then I will be free to defend the last 13 years without constantly being accused of being ‘disloyal’. I am writing to you asking for counsel, is there a place for those who still value the New Labour project in this new Labour party or is it time to take a break?”
On one level you have to say, tough-mindedly, that there is no point whining about where Labour's internal convulsions have taken it, because it's hardly unprecedented, and there's hardly anywhere else to go. But to sound a tad less brusque - I do approve the Canning analysis.

Forrest/Finds: Comparative blogging...

This rather feels like some weird form of autogenesis, but I'd like to point readers to some recent posts on My Other Two Blogs... Over at Faber Finds I've been especially enthused in relation to William Sansom and James Baldwin, and at the Doctor Forrest platform I've had a few things to say about Egon Schiele, William Hjortsberg, Bela Bartok, Alice Krige (pictured) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (What a dinner party that would be, no...?)

Stylist endorses Doctor Forrest...

In case it ever be mooted that I invented the show of support given me by Stylist, of which I blogged a little while ago - well, here is the proof. 'The Chilling Read of the Year', mate. Black and white. I'm pleased to say there have been some other subsequent votes of confidence in the book, and I look forward to taking the wraps off these shortly...

True Faith: Inside Mike Ashley's Mind...

I simply have to quote the following from the latest editorial at the staunch and pawky True Faith site:
"I’ve often wondered what Ashley gets from owning Newcastle United. Quite apart from why he bought the bloody thing in the first place. I don’t believe he makes money from United, he has hardly gilded his business reputation and if it’s a 50,000 new mates he was after when he walked into SJP in May 2007, then he has been sorely disappointed. Ashley has at rough estimate £900m+ available to him. If he never struck another bat in his life he would never want for anything and neither would his grandchildren or their grandchildren. I think I could think of a few things I’d rather be doing with my weekends than sitting in the best seat in a football stadium at the other end of the country on match day watching a team I aspire to be average go through the motions, surrounded by thousands of people who would love to see me fall down the steps and burst my face open..."

Mary Shelley@NT: Claire Tomalin, Daisy Hay (and me)

It's happening this Tuesday March 15 2011, at 6:00 pm, and forms part of the National Theatre's 'Beyond Frankenstein' series of platforms in support of the current Nick Dear/Danny Boyle production. The session title is Frankenstein's Creator: Mary Shelley and it's billed as "a glimpse into the life of Mary Shelley with Claire Tomalin, biographer of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, and Daisy Hay, author of Young Romantics, celebrating the idealistic circle who were there when Shelley first told the tale of a monster." It will be chaired by me, is due to last 45 minutes, and will be followed by a booksigning with these two fine literary historians. Tickets £3.50 (£2.50 concessions). See you there then...?
Oh, and - girls? - the quite fabulous image to my left is actually available to wear on a babydoll tee-shirt courtesy of ThinkGeek here...

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest - the blog

I've been claiming the existence of this for so long without substance, you would think I believed in ghosts or something... However I'm pleased to say the official blog companion to the novel - www.doctorforrest.co.uk - is now online, and in early dispatches you can read my deathless views on Bram Stoker's Dracula and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, with much, much more to come...

The ecstasies of Faber Finds...

It's increasingly easy for me to wax evangelical about Faber Finds, also to think of myself as occupying the happiest little job in publishing, when my editorship of the list allows me - indeed requires me - to be continually sourcing and reading brilliant if neglected books. Over on the Finds blog I've had a few things to say lately - such as this about the counter-insurgency theories of General Frank Kitson, and this on the fiction, long and short, of William Sansom. Sansom (pictured) would be a poster-boy for what I'm saying here - just a fantastic writer, a phenomenal crafter of sentences, and a highly deft storyteller. He is truly worth getting to know on the page. And this biographical sketch is worth a look too.

David Peace, Mike Hodges, Newcastle, & Me

The Story Engine is an annual forum (founded by filmmaker Ian Fenton in collaboration with New Writing North) where British screenwriters and filmmakers convene in Newcastle to discuss their work and working methods. This year’s focus is on crime fiction – genre’s conventions, creative choices within those, adaptation from book to film. Story Engine: Scene Of The Crime takes place at the Tyneside Cinema on Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of March. Scheduled for the Saturday at 11am is a session entitled THE BLOODY NORTH, where the brochure promises that Mike Hodges and David Peace will “explore the importance of place within the genre and discuss the problems of mixing fact and fiction.” (It further proposes that Peace’s celebrated Red Riding Quartet “lies squarely in the shadow of Hodges’ Get Carter.”)
I tell you all this because I’ll be the chairperson of this Peace-Hodges symposium, which will be a considerable pleasure for me as well as an interesting listen, I expect. There’s little I need say myself about Get Carter (though I do always like to remind people that it marked the memorable screen debut of the Pelaw Hussars Juvenile Jazz Band.) But I can’t wait to hear what Mike Hodges will say of it, looking back nearly 40 years to his masterpiece. I’m extremely keen to know what David Peace will think of it too. And then what will Hodges make of the TV version of Peace’s Red Riding, which was widely felt to be as strong a piece of British ‘cinema’ as these shores have produced in years? (I remember Nicolas Roeg marvelling to me about the James Marsh-directed 1980 episode in particular, wondering also why we’re not allowed to be so stylistically bold in movies anymore. I remember Paddy Considine enthusing to me, not long after 1980 was in the can, about the joyous experience he’d had on the production. I drop these names really because Considine and Roeg are, I think, the last two people I interviewed on stage, in November 2008 and August 2009 respectively. I used to do more of this stuff, actually, but I’m always happy to turn my hand to it, and am also available for children’s parties.
Two clips: Red Riding in US trailer form because it shows just how forcefully this package was assembled from a modern genre perspective. And the ageless , glorious beginning of Get Carter – because that’ll be me in a week’s time, see – on the train from London to Newcastle, the finest of all journeys, and one to which I paid homage in the opening chapter of Crusaders...