The Tories, The Wire, Law & Order and Chris Grayling

I'm glad I went to the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham last September. No, really. It's the sort of thing one ought to do at least once. And I saw and heard some interesting things and some reasonable people. Chris Grayling, currently the Shadow Home Secretary, popped up at numerous meetings and talked a fair bit of sense, at least to my mind. I was particularly struck by his contributions to a panel on work and welfare, where he talked about the need to 'reinvigorate social mobility’ and spoke with what sounded like sincere feeling about the 'appalling worklessness’ of failed estates left to fester as ‘separate worlds’ in our society. Being a Tory, he advocated more back-to-work support for people wanting to get themselves sorted out, and big sticks to be wielded on non-participants. But he didn't mind when someone suggested that he and James Purnell at Work & Pensions didn't seem to have too many vital differences on policy. ‘I hope there’s not many’, Grayling offered. (He testified too to the influence of David Freud, a Blair-appointed government welfare advisor who duly jumped ship to the Tories this year.)
Where I found Grayling most human and appealing was when he argued that beggars, addicts, thieves and other individuals with form in the criminal justice system could yet be wooed back into meaningful work, albeit under a form of threat in the shape of loss of benefit entitlements. A guy from NAFCAS in the attention argued that some such people are hair-trigger types who might get pushed over the edge by such hardline strictures. But Grayling was quietly, ruefully insistent that there had to be a stick behind the carrot - there just had to be… He struck me as the most mild-mannered guy one could imagine donning the judge's black hanging cap.
But all of those good impressions seem soft and slack to me now, following Grayling's utterly foolish Silly Season argument that the American TV show The Wire functions as a portrait of contemporary inner-city Britain. I can't improve on Alastair Campbell's assault on said comments here. But I hope Grayling will think again, and put that bit of opportunistic shallowness behind him.

NUFC: Crisis Club turn to Fenham Eusebio...

The most cynical of Toon fans (myself most likely included, like) had taken to saying that Shola Ameobi has finally found his level in Division Two even before tonight's Shola match-winner against Sheffield Wednesday extended his hot streak from Saturday's treble versus Reading.
A sardonic edge has always attended fans' assessments of Ameobi, hence the lovely Geordie irony of the nickname 'The Fenham Eusebio', which Ameobi himself, not surprisingly, would like to see taken more seriously. Still, those such as me who were hoping to see Andy Carroll and Nile Ranger shoot the Toon to a good start in the Second Division must instead give all due thanks and praise to Foluwashola. His annoying languor and relative lack of strength (for a big lad) have surely ensured that he won't ever be an absolute top-rank striker; but if he keeps this rich form up then he could be a full-blown black-and-white legend yet.
And speaking of legends... over at Turf Moor tonight they saw the Man Utd debut of the man who was just Too Big for Newcastle United. And yet, as BBC Sport's Phil McNulty reported, "Not Michael Owen's night so far. Two presentable chances have both passed him by..."; and then, "Dimitar Berbatov is on for United, replacing Michael Owen, who had a frustrating night..." A stunning win for Burnley, and a stunning blow to Man U, duly ensued.
As Alan Shearer has often said of his mate - Michael Owen will always score goals. He will probably need to start scoring them quick, mind, if he's to satisfy all those loyal life-long Reds in Tokyo, Paris, Florida, Kabul, Hackney Wick, etc etc. Meanwhile I and umpteen other Toon fans won't be cheering England's Little Michael on.

David Leland's The Big Man

Over the nights with a newborn spent more awake than asleep, you catch up on late telly if not on much-needed kip; and so the other evening I finally got round to seeing David Leland’s film The Big Man on BBC1, 20 years after its cinema release.
I remember it getting a rough ride at that time, yet it seemed to me like a good picture. Back then, just as now, the British cinema industry was utterly convulsed by the pressure to find a mainstream audience, both at home and overseas, and that sometimes led to quasi-commercial errors of style, packaging and casting, some of which The Big Man, too, certainly exhibits. But it also testifies to the ambitions of Steve Woolley’s and Nik Powell’s Palace Pictures, which produced the movie, and to the gifts of David Leland, one of the most formidable figures to have worked in British film and TV in the last 30 years.
The Big Man anticipates a raft of British films from the late 1990s that took the effects of the Thatcher government’s industrial policy as the starting point of the drama. Like Brassed Off and Face, this one’s heart beats on the left. Unlike Billy Elliot, it takes the 84/85 Miner’s Strike very seriously and doesn’t act as if the redemption of One could be consolation for the damnation of Many. The only thing glaringly wrong with the picture is Joanne Whalley as a doughty pit wife of middle-class provenance. (British cinema’s It Girl of the late 1980s, Whalley got a lot of parts she wasn’t right for before she moved to the US and got a lot of parts that I’m sure she hated.)
The Big Man taps into the gangster genre very directly but quite smartly: the underworld is evoked with familiar strokes but also genuine menace. Its Morricone-ish score sounds a little too familiar until you realize the score is indeed by Morricone, stealing from himself as usual. The thematic bleakness of the picture has force, in that characters one likes are made to suffer, Liam Neeson’s lead Danny Scoular above all. And there’s a useful terseness in the visual metaphor of a bag of money for the price of a man’s soul. Having tried to pull a few strokes of this sort myself in Crusaders, I thoroughly respect Leland’s efforts here.
I got to know David a little when I was compiling my book on Alan Clarke, a project to which he was immensely helpful, and I found him just as impressive in person as his body of work had suggested. He has a quiet force about him: a calmly-spoken, eloquent intelligence with a steely edge. He first met Clarke in 1973 by acting for him in a BBC taping of The Love Girl and the Innocent by Solzhenitsyn (or ‘Solly Neasden’ as Clarkey rechristened him.) Later he ran the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, putting on tough new plays at a time when the venue was more famous for hosting world snooker tournaments. Clarke encouraged him to write: Psy-Warriors and Beloved Enemy were fascinating political dramas made at the BBC; Made in Britain, done for Central TV, is as good a film as Britain made in that decade.
Leland and Clarke were wonderfully matched in terms of their interests and uncompromising bents. As David told me, ‘In the time that I knew Alan, everything he did was coming out of current affairs… He was digging into what was happening here and now, which is always the most uncomfortable area to explore in drama. Real contemporary drama has become a thing of the past on television. First of all it’s very hard to do, it’s a fight to articulate what is out there in the present – how do you get it on paper and how do you portray it, by what means? Then it’s even harder to get the space to get it made.’
Leland duly moved into films. His script for Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa was very interesting on class, sex and crime. He made the tone a bit lighter for his directorial debut Wish You Were Here (1987), but it was so lively and unsentimental on the subject of a girl’s sexual self-awareness that it wowed Cannes and made a star of Emily Lloyd. The Big Man didn’t perform, though. And for a few years after, I guess David had trouble getting things made. The Land Girls (1998) is an attractive period piece but it disappeared quickly.
Still, I do recall the last occasion I saw David was in 2002, across the room at Morton’s restaurant in Hollywood at a party after the Emmy Awards ceremony, where he had won a trophy for directing on Band of Brothers. Out with the Tom Hanks gang for the night, he was dapper in a black frock-coat and looked very ebullient. The best people always deserve their comebacks.

Esquire (September 2009) on stands, and in suits

The current Esquire is devoted largely to the current state of the men's suit, and as such it reminds me fondly of why I first started reading lifestyle magazines for men back in the late 1980s, i.e. to look in wonder at fine clothes that I couldn't ever afford, draped upon men far better looking than I. As if, delusion of delusions, a suit of clothes could function as a magic mirror to another persona, another posture, another universe... For the wise word on this theme, consult The Great Gatsby, not to mention The Talented Mr Ripley.

My column is about Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces, wherein I make good on my pledge made in this blog to draw in the waspy wisdom of the late La Sontag:

"Almodovar’s cinema is quite often ‘camp’, in the playful, discerning, hyper-aesthetic sense that was famously hymned by Susan Sontag. And yet camp, as Sontag also showed, is quite inimical to tragedy. Where it can excel is in conveying a kind of wistful regret for the transience of sexual passion and physical beauty. Almodovar does inject some of this feeling into the latter stages of Broken Embraces..."

As it happens, I saw that Pedro Almodovar walking through Leicester Square a fortnight ago, shortly after I had left an Esquire party, speaking of devils. He didn't look too cheery, but then maybe he'd had a bad flight, or a bad meal, or was in general finding the London summer altogether less appealing than Madrid's.

"Tastes Like Ashes..."

... was, as I recall, the ruefully witty comment from master commentator Richie Benaud after sipping from a glass of champagne offered him by his BBC colleagues live on air, the occasion being the 1985 series victory sealed by David Gower's England over Allan Border's Aussies. Well, the bitter savour is all England's at present, after the stunning, incompetent failure at Headingley. All those noisy, beery oafs who reckon themselves England's most ardent and essential fans may now start to wish they had listened to Geoff Boycott's withering opinion that booing Ricky Ponting out to the crease is both unmasculine and counter-productive.

I don't always shout for England in cricket, just as I don't necessarily shout for them in any sport. It depends how I feel about the composition of the team and the individuals in it. Admittedly, this is very much an armchair fan's ethos - whereas people who carry on playing competitive sport all their lives tend in any contest to shout for The Team they're ostensibly closest to. Still, you can't make such enthusiasm up, you can only call it how you see it; and I've never seen a test cricketer I liked better than Steve Waugh, utterly consummate as batsman and captain, so I couldn't begrudge his share of the Aussie's 18-year Ashes domination following the Botham/Gower glories of the mid-1980s.

Andrew Flintoff, though, is the sort of sportsman it's very hard not to get thrilled to bits by, and so I've shouted for England as long as he's played, and got myself truly hopeful about this Ashes series after his efforts with ball and bat wrenched the initiative back England's way, despite that poor show in the first test. It's hard now to see England coming back, and I expect they'll have to try to do it without 'Fred', since he can no more take further cortisone injections in his knee than I can abide steroids in my right elbow...

Is there time for a happy end? I almost want to shout 'Yes', just because all the rest of my doomy Cassandra-like nay-saying about sport this summer has been dismally borne out. Newcastle relegated gutlessly, without a fight; Roddick left hollow-eyed by Federer's indominability at Wimbledon; Tom Watson's great failure at Turnberry (and failure, sadly, it was - a huge effort over 71 holes finally serving only to confirm that Watson will be remembered as much for the timid putting and the choking as for the eight majors won.)

I don't think the England cricket team can redeem all or any of that, Flintoff or no Flintoff, but by all means give it a go, lads. For my part I will try now to spit in the eye of the Fates and predict 2-1 to the England...

We Are Family: Darling Daughter #2 debuts

Things have been fairly quiet on the update front in the last week largely because of the little lady to my left, and the charged run-up to her first appearance in the world on Friday. Updates are not about to get any more frequent, not for a while at least... but one's priorities have changed too, of course...

Sir Bobby Robson 1933-2009: From Langley Park to St James's

‘I’m black and white’, said Bobby on the day he walked into the job at St James’s Park. And he said it in that doughty fashion that made clear, even in his mid-sixties, he was not to be treated as anyone’s affable grey-haired uncle. Fact is, the stature and esteem in the game that Robson bore with him from his services at Ipswich, Barcelona, Porto, PSV, and for the English national team, were more than Newcastle could have hoped for from a boss at that particular low ebb in fortunes.
He was born in Sacriston and raised in Langley Park, and County Durham, town by town, village by village, can go either way when it comes to football loyalties and the rivalry of the region. But there you have it: black and white was Bobby, proven thus by years of boyhood terrace allegiance. His dad was black and white, and so Bob got on the bus to St James’s, every Saturday.
I recall rather more hope that expectation when Bobby took charge, but obviously I should have known better. Robson’s five more or less full seasons at Newcastle were, on the whole, wonderful. Twice he put NUFC in the frame for the title, right at the sharp end of the race. He saved the club from relegation in 1999-2000, largely by getting Alan Shearer to stop playing with his back to goal. 2000-2001 was a big letdown (though we’d take it now) and, for all that he could buy, Robson bought poorly. But 2001-2002 was in many ways a glory season, thanks to his acquisitions of Craig Bellamy and Laurent Robert. Robson seemed rejuvenated that year, never more endearingly than when asked to comment on the somersaulting goal-celebrations of another of his smart purchases, Lomana Tresor Lua Lua. Quoth Bobby, ‘Yeah, he’s quite gymnastic. Very fantastic…’
Robson should never have been sacked by Newcastle, not even in August 2004, by which time the team he had built looked spent. Nevertheless, and without doubt IMHO, this was round about the time he was due a graceful retirement. In 2003-2004 I think we won about thirteen games in the course of sneaking a highly flattering fifth place on the last day. Craig Bellamy’s big mouth and execrable manners had become more conspicuous in NE1 than his (occasional) goals or assists, and as Robson told David Walsh of the Times, retrospectively but feelingly, ‘For how long do you put up with that sort of guy?’ Not too long when you’re pushing 70 and you’ve already been grievously ill, and there’s the considerable matter of your being a bloody cast-iron legend in the game. Robson had more than earned the right to spend his days in the company of a better class of person, i.e. free from the likes of Kieron Dyer and Lee Bowyer too.
Still, be it said, Robson’s Newcastle departure should have been a mutual matter, carefully negotiated, for the sake of strategy and continuity as well as dignity and just deserts. That it wasn’t tells you much of what you need to know about the rancid karma Newcastle United has stored up for itself in recent years and the payback they’ve rightly suffered.
As Alan Shearer is reported to have said of SBR this morning, ‘He was a great man, a winner and a battler...’ Many more tributes from greats of the game will surely follow.

Another summer of black water...

'The summer came and went / It passed us over...' So sings David Sylvian in the elegant Blackwater by Rain Tree Crow, an ironic favourite of mine from what I remember as the fairly heady and sun-baked summer of 1991. But lately the British summer has been black water all the time, indeed black sheets of rain...
Today the Met Office has issued a 'revised' forecast for more 'unsettled weather' until the autumn - though 'the end of August might be better again.' Cheers. Apparently when the Met was enthusing about a 'barbecue summer' back in April it was doing so 'to help journalists' headlines.' An ‘independent meteorologist' called Philip Eden has blamed ''spinners' in the Met Office' for going to town on same. Has every workplace got to have a spinner now?
Also we're told that 'at the time of the ['barbecue summer'] forecast there was pressure on the Met Office from tourism chiefs in the UK to be positive about holidays at home...' As if those Brits who were financially fortunate enough to contemplate a holiday this summer weren't already poring over the UK brochures, knowing their hopes of sun were written in sand...
Now we're told the fact of the matter is that the jetstream is stuck above the UK, locking a weather system in place. Result? Black water...

Helmand/Panther’s Claw: Our Watches, Their Time?

And so Operation Panther's Claw, the five-week mission that cost the lives of ten British soldiers, has ended in Afghanistan, with our forces claiming success. An area 'the size of the Isle of Wight' has been cleared of insurgents ahead of the elections on August 20. The MoD says British troops will remain to secure the area won for three-to-six months. ‘I’m very proud’, Gordon Brown hads said, ‘of what our forces have achieved over the last few weeks – indeed for all the time they've been in Afghanistan.'

The funerals of those servicemen killed in Helmand have been a sombre fixture of our news so far this summer. There was something uncommonly grave in the coverage of the interring of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe: the most senior British officer to die in action since the fighting on Goose Green during the Falklands War. That gravity was embodied in the deeply dignified bearing of the widow, Sally Thornloe (pictured above in Shaun Curry’s striking photograph), required to manage that unanswerable sorrow of which I suppose the greatest empathetic version we have is Andromache’s lament for Hector in The Iliad (‘… for you did not die in bed, and stretch your arms to me, nor tell me some last intimate word…’)

Currently we are having a passionate national debate about the worth of a soldier’s ultimate sacrifice in respect of ‘our mission in Afghanistan’: a phrase that came to made to sound either dutiful or scornful depending on from whose lips it issues – for instance, those who don’t want to see the recrudescence of a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, breeding and exporting global jihad in concert with a nuclear/jihadist Pakistan; or, alternatively, those who say that Afghanistan is merely a notorious graveyard of imperial hubris, now occupied merely for the sake of America’s longterm strategic interests in the region. (Whatever side one favours, it's possible to believe that the craggy ungovernable vastness of Afghanistan will devour more lives and efforts than are truly worthwhile - or as one Taliban commander supposedly said, 'They may have the watches, but we have the time.') Personally, I can see the case for both arguments, but if one has to state a preference (and one does) then I’m in the former camp, supportive of 'the mission', as dangerously stretched and implausible as it can often seem.

Last week Paddy Ashdown defined that 'mission’ as one that has migrated from ‘the limited military aim of driving out al-Qa’ida’ into ‘another full-scale attempt, in a far-away country, to create a state of which we in the West can feel proud.’ This analysis is echoed whenever General Stanley McChrystal, head of the NATO force, speaks of 'fighting for the population.' Today David Miliband has tried to confirm that sense of a worthy endeavour: 'In Helmand, we are working to help build schools, provide clean water and electricity, surface roads and support agriculture...'

In this context the grisly fight in Helmand was part of a clear military strategy known as ‘Clear, Hold and Build’: that is, to take ground into which constructors and committed democrats can move and start to work peacefully. Today that clearing of Helmand is supposedly done, ground taken from the Taliban in the area between the economic hub of Gereshk and the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. This was an intense fight with, inevitably, a high risk of casualties. Alan Mallinson described it as ‘very like the ‘break-in’ phase of any offensive battle in conventional war.’ And so British soldiers were killed, at a rate that I suppose would be commensurate with losses sustained during the Falklands campaign.

But people of conservative instincts contend that in the Falklands there were material British interests at stake, it wasn't in the name of ‘good projects’ or ‘nation building’ or humanitarian windiness. Moreover, in both liberal and conservative media alike you can now read the charge that our forces in Afghanistan are lions led by donkeys, armed for the task by a lying miserly government.

As far as I can see, what really matters right now is what the Army thinks: lose the morale of the troops and you’ve lost the war. The British Army seems to be holding its course, though its commanders would - to say only the least - like more helicopters. Clearly helicopters allow faster action or response, they aid force protection, assist supply lines, evacuate casualties quicker. Our options would be enlarged if we had more. And yet Paddy Ashdown (one of the few politicians the general public respect on military matters) believes the real issue is ‘having enough ‘boots on the ground’ to do the job.’ Allan Mallinson agrees, citing ‘a bluff saying in conventional warfare: the more you use, the less you lose.’

It's hard, though, to be sanguine about such 'losses.' And clearly a significant swathe of the British public are fed up with it and want us either to do the job by remote control or get Our Boys out of it altogether. Of the former party, those who simply call for more choppers must surely be aware that helicopters too can be shot down in spectacular and deadly fashion by forms of ordnance available even to cave-dwelling mujaheddin. Some people believe our mission can be accomplished better by safe removal of ground troops and occasional bursts of heavy ordnance, laser-guided aerial bombing. If they seriously believe that, they must be ready for the accidents: the collateral-damage annihilation of wedding parties.

Those who want us to wash our hands of The Mission altogether are never going to be convinced by the argument that we are doing Good Works out there, and so the Government has a tough case to make. Miliband is clearly trying his best when he says, ‘We are not fighting in Afghanistan because girls were not allowed to go to school, but helping them do so will lead to a better future for Afghans.’ Paddy Ashdown too stressed the element of self-help: 'The key principle through all this should be not to seek to do things 'for' Afghanistan, but to increase Afghan capacity, especially at the local level, to do things for themselves.' As such it's no surprise that the UK is subtly and carefully shifting the focus to whether or not the Afghan Army has the will and calibre and capacity to do the 'holding' stuff, and whether Afghan people and their politicians will 'build'. (One notes the care with which the text of Miliband’s speech has been entitled, ‘How to help Afghans defeat the insurgency.’)

The hope is that the main way Afghans will be helped is by legitimate local politics. It’s hard to be dewy-eyed about Afghan democracy when the main choice on offer is the compromised and placeman-packed Karzai government. And one can’t shoot one’s mouth about a renaissance of women’s rights when the young female Afghan politician Malalai Joya makes clear she thinks things are no better in that respect. Joya wants the West to clear off, and her voice clearly rhymes with the message of any Stop The War platform: ‘The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination.’

Well and good, but I just can't see that there's any prelapsarian choice available here. Our fortunes are all tied together now: we are the world. When it comes to the rights and wrongs of one’s country at war I try not to mouth off too confidently from the comfort of my swivel-chair when it’s not my backside that’s getting shot at. But I'm on the side of 'good projects' and against the Taliban. And as Christopher Hitchens puts it, ‘Might we not be able to shape events in Afghanistan nearer to our heart's desire without making ourselves responsible for the running of the whole nation and society?’

George Steiner's 'The Cleric of Treason'

The British Library has given up a 25-year secret as stipulated by its donor, and so Anthony Blunt's memoir - penned in sunny exile in Rome after Blunt's public exposure/disgrace of 1979, and given to the BL in 1984 - is now available for inspection. Guess what? Having suffered the frightful indignity of surrendering his knighthood and his fellowship of Trinity College, Blunt was moved to write that passing state secrets to the Soviet Union had been 'naive' and the 'biggest mistake of [his] life.' Apparently he had got himself caught up in something far bigger than himself: 'The atmosphere in Cambridge was so intense...' Golly. I bet.
I don't imagine there is anything finer to read on the subject of Blunt than George Steiner's magisterial, annihilating 'The Cleric of Treason', first published in the New Yorker in 1980. The Google Books entry on The George Steiner Reader seems to offer the browser a chance to read this essay in full online, and - per the previously noted online availability of Susan Sontag's 'Notes on Camp' and the hope that other such classic pieces of cultural commentary be open to inspection and exchange over the web - this seems to me a reason to rejoice. As for Blunt, the best verdict is in Steiner's imperishable last line...

Gordon Burn 1948-2009

It’s a very hard thing to think that Gordon Burn is no longer with us. One of England’s foremost prose stylists, Gordon wrote so finely and insightfully on so many diverse subjects – the reader never quite sure on what topic his plenary mind would next alight - that one feels a sharp and singular sorrow knowing that we’ll not get any more of his brilliant books. So consummately did he tell the stories of two appalling serial murderers (Peter Sutcliffe and Fred West) that he was sometimes labelled a True Crime specialist. ‘I slightly bridle’, he told me, ‘because the implication is that you’re some nutter who’s obsessed with violence. I’m not at all.’ Indeed he wasn't.

When I spoke to Gordon last summer for an essay I was writing about the literature of the North East, he offered me an amused and amusing list of ‘the qualities – good and bad – that we have come to associate with the N.E.: hard-grafting, plain-spoken, open, canny, dogged, leftish, laddish, nostalgic, sentimental, chippy, suffering fools not at all, happy to appear dafter / less genned-up than one is, built-in bullshit-detector on permanent full alert…’ Needless to say, I think that was not a bad summary of Gordon’s own personal qualities, aside from his writerly gifts. I will always remember interviewing him and David Peace for Esquire in April 2008, beneath the pearl-strung chandeliers of an incongruously posh restaurant serving a French menu devised by a Japanese chef. Within minutes of our being seated, Gordon, looking just a bit twinkly, let it be known he would have much preferred a pie and a pint in the pub down the road.

Gordon was born and grew up in the west of Newcastle, only a short hop from St James’s Park and the brewery. His adolescent imagination was fired by the famous mid-1960s ‘scene’ created by poet Tom Pickard at Morden Towers (where Basil Bunting’s career began its second life.) But Gordon’s chief inspiration has been America (first Capote and Mailer; later Ford and Carver), and he felt the pull down to London. So he left Newcastle aged 18, and only renewed his tie to the place in recent years, with the passing of his mother and father. Around this same time he wrote his first overtly ‘north-east’ book, The North of England Home Service, a reflection on the changing face of Tyneside, and also a sort of homage to the Northern Novel – John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow – that he had belatedly begun to read with pleasure: ‘this’, he said, ‘after 25 years of loving American writing.’

Reviewing it for the Independent, Sean O’Brien felt that Gordon had captured ‘exactly the mixture of pride and insecurity which characterises this most resilient and fiercely defended of English working-class cultures at the moment when its coherence and integrity may be truly under threat.’Gordon was a prize-winning novelist who openly disdained the usual staidness of the ‘literary novel.’ Certainly he was not a man given to magic realism. ‘I can see the point in reading Dickens and Jane Austen’, he told me. ‘But ‘literary fiction’ seems to be me increasingly pointless… Until I wrote a novel I’d had no interest in novels whatsoever. I’ve no interest in the imagination. I would always fall asleep within two pages of a novel, or ten minutes at the pictures… I still do.’

He was being mischievous, of course, for he simply had his own definition of imagination and its uses, loaned from an esteemed literary source: ‘There was a quote by John Berger that I had in mind all the time I was writing Born Yesterday – that imagination is not, as most people think, the ability to invent, it’s the ability to disclose what already exists.’

Gordon’s lodestar in writing terms was the New Journalism of the 1960s, as exemplified in the pages of American Esquire: home to Mailer and Tom Wolfe and such seminal pieces as Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’ where the writer-as-participant-observer would write the story as it actually appeared to them, rather than as a gig preordained by journalistic and narrative conventions. As Gordon described it, ‘it was taking real life and writing about it in a kind of poetic way or a way that had the resonance of fiction. There was a thrill to having real life written about with some art involved in it. All the techniques I learned about the novel were through reading Wolfe, Talese, Mailer. And it was through them talking about their techniques that I realised what novelistic techniques were, without reading any novels...’

His last major deployment of these techniques was 2007’s Born Yesterday, a New Journalism ‘novel’ in which he both recorded and subtly transformed his responses to the dismal British summer of 2007 and its appropriately lousy lead news stories – of floods, failed bombings, and a lost little girl with a flawed eye, a condition she happened to share with the new Prime Minister. With a novelist’s eye he inhabited and explored and articulated these stories more powerfully than any 24-hour rolling news camera; and he had a modest theory as to why, one he had learned on the job while getting to know the close relatives of the 'Yorkshire Ripper': ‘You get these huge news stories, and basically nobody knows anything that’s really happening because the news agenda is so tiny and narrow, set by two or three people or media organisations, and everybody goes along that line. I always like to come at things from some kind of oblique angle, or to find a person or a situation that’s been ignored that you’ve got a good feeling is important to the story, so you just chase that down or try to find if your gut interest is true or not...'

Gordon liked to enlist V.S. Naipaul to his argument that non-fiction is more interesting than the novel, fiction a distortion of reality: ‘Naipaul says that people who write stuff that is, basically, the material for TV drama – they’re assuming they know the world already, there’s no need to investigate it any further, so they make up a story and stick it on top of the real world. Whereas he, Naipaul, finds the real narrative of life so endlessly enthralling that it’s arrogant to say ‘I know the world now.’ And that’s where I stand. Life is poetic in ways that are never covered by the word ‘poetry.’ Everybody rubs up against things in passing that touch them profoundly in a second – in a railway station or a pub, wherever.’

Gordon's particular brand of poetry is all over the extraordinary body of work he's left us, which I trust is about to be re-examined and enjoyed afresh by readers old and new. His personality, which I think he deftly managed to conceal a lot of the time, is in there too - writing can't hide that stuff - and I trust readers will also discern all those Great North Eastern qualities of his in spades.

David Beckham: Reassuringly Ridiculous

David Beckham has done majestically well in life for a not-so-bright lad who's very good at football, or certainly at taking free-kicks. His ardent fans are legion, and many of them read in him qualities and attributes far beyond that straightforward dead-ball expertise. Give a man a reputation as an early riser and thereafter he may forever sleep 'til noon. England fans, always a curious bunch, have forgiven him some stunningly undignified, inadequate, showboating performances in the finals of international contests. I seem to remember one self-styled tough-nut sports writer of an English broadsheet chiding Beckham's critics for jealousy, even hailing Becks as the best of men, a 'model husband and father' - this not long before the news broke that he'd been diddling his kids' nanny.
I'm trusting, though, that no-one has even seriously believed that Beckham is a worky ticket, a hard man, a chap with whom one would fear a physical confrontation. I'm not dismissing his claims here just on the basis of all that posing in little pants for Armani. I'm talking Dave Mackay, Tommy Smith, Stuart Pearce, Alan Shearer, even Eric Cantona - that's hard. When Cantona decided to call out a (rival team's) fan who was (snidely) goading him from the stands, we all remember what happened, yes? Whether we condone it or not...
So the helping hand of spin that still attends Beckham's every move was clear in the press coverage of his contemptible response to the (rightly) protesting fans (of his own team) at the LA Galaxy game. Coos the Press Association, "The former England captain attempted to jump over a barrier as he left the field at half-time to remonstrate with a section of the crowd that had been jeering him. He was held back by security staff, members of whom were also needed to restrain an angry fan who left his seat and rushed towards the footballer."
Oh yeah, right. He was like an effing panther trying to leap that barrier, before, strangely enough, finding three dozen burly blokes at his back, ready to help him out with one irate Hispanic guy. 'Hold me back, lads, or else I'll kill him...'

Tom Watson: The Leader in the Clubhouse, and in much else besides...

Fair play, Brendan Gallagher of the Telegraph got in first this week with the headline/subhead that you'll see in all coverage of today's first round of the Open golf at Turnberry. 'Tom Watson Rolls Back the Years' was Gallagher's heading, and this on the strength of nothing more momentous than Watson's Monday practice round:

"Even at the age of 59, Watson insists he could be competitive this week if granted four days of wind. It is the great leveller, shots have to be conjured from the imagination, muscles matter less than maturity. Experience can really count... I wouldn't discount, for one minute, the possibility of Watson shooting a 68 some time this week."

Well, the wind hasn't stirred today and Watson just shot 65 for an early first round lead; just as he did in the 2003 US Open, when he was very much playing for his longtime caddie Bruce Edwards, stricken by Lou Gehrig's Disease. Great stuff from one of this particular game's few gentleman-champions; sadly it's too much to expect Watson to hold on and win a major these days, even at Turnberry, where he famously bested Jack Nicklaus in 1977. Nicklaus seemed like a wizened veteran to me when he won the last major of his career, the Masters, in 1986. (He was probably in his mid-40s...)

Watson has had good days and scores at the Open in the last 25 years, shadows of the five claret jugs he actually won. I think he went into the weekend as the leader back in 1994. But even by then he had gone from the Guy who could confidently charge a putt past the cup and knock it back in to the Guy who seemed to be in agonies of neurotic indecision every time he bent down over a 4-footer. The shame was that Watson's short game is what set him apart and made him a great champion back in the 1970s and 1980s. A lot of guys could hit it longer, though few hit it straighter than Watson. But where he excelled was getting up and down from tight spots, which is always a special inspiration to young golfers. (Severiano Ballesteros, the man who invented the car-park escape-shot, was a similar-but-different lodestar.)

I became a fan of Watson's watching him win the Muirfield Open of 1980 with remarkable grace. There were a lot of low rounds that year, but Watson was the Guy who put four of them together. Two years later he sneaked a win at Troon, but his real triumph that season was the US Open at Pebble Beach. I can still recall the thrill of watching live his great coup de grace (pictured): a pitch into the hole on 17th, from impossibly dense and verdant Californian greenside rough - birdie snatched from probable bogey, Nicklaus bested again.

Pro golf doesn't produce too many charmers or 'characters', which is why certain golfers can get reputations as loveable/irascible rogues solely on the strength of wearing stupid outfits. Watson has never seemed like a huge jokester, but he's always managed to sound reflective and wry about his sport, and has generally played with an engaging and deeply American smile on his face, sufficient to get certain commentators reaching for their Mark Twain.

That said, I also recall him looking as cheerful as a man who'd been gored by a bull as he lined up a par putt on 17 at the St Andrew's Open of 1984. He was chasing a record sixth title, a third win in a row, and had led for most of the tournament. But Ballesteros had just made birdie at 18 for the lead and was pumping his fist in the air like a matador: a 'classic' Open moment repeated constantly ever after, and I still feel sick when I see it. Watson missed his putt, lost his title and never won another major.

This weekend isn't going to change that, but Watson will presumably be around for the final day, will receive further much-deserved ovations, and give younger fans cause to note his name for reasons other than endless re-runs of that 1977 'Duel in the Sun'. That said, Watson's own account of same - given to the Telegraph this week - reaffirms the special drama of that particular contest, as well as Watson's affable thoughtfulness on the game he loves - 'the spirituality of golf', indeed...

Nicolas Roeg in Conversation + Don't Look Now: Somerset House, Wednesday August 5 2009

"The eerie atmosphere of misty Venice creeps across the courtyard of Somerset House as Nicolas Roeg's 1973 masterpiece casts its sinister spell..." So goes the siren's call for the Film4 Summer Screen open-air showing of Don't Look Now scheduled for 9.15pm Wednesday August 5. Beforehand (and indoors, I believe) at 6.30pm I'll be in conversation with Nic, under the aegis of BAFTA, on the subject of Don't Look Now and, I imagine, other things, some of those including films. The maestro will also take questions from the audience. All the needful information and advance ticketing stuff can be accessed here.
There's also a really good page over at BAFTA, devoted to their Roeg tribute evening of March 27 earlier this year. There you can watch and hear all the speakers from that evening, whether they were live or on tape, including Danny Boyle, Kevin Macdonald, Stephen Frears, James Marsh, Christopher Nolan, Terry Gilliam, Guillermo del Toro, Seamus McGarvey, Paul Greengrass, Mike Figgis, Sam Taylor-Wood... and, er, me, the one who hasn't directed a masterpiece box-office smash... But I was honoured to be in that line-up, and also in the team photo taken at the end, #14 in the Photo Gallery, wherein James Fox is at my side - a big moment for a Performance fan such as I.

Missing the Glorious Twalth... Happily

The last time I stood and watched a parade go by on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne - in fact, I should say the only time - was in 2000, and a dispiriting occasion it was too, other than for the fiercely determined and fairly skilful efforts of the many adolescent baton twirlers-and-tossers. After the first five minutes of (admittedly impressive) Lambeg drum din, any Twelfth of July march becomes as tedious as that martial pounding over time: block after block of dapper and dogged walkers, old men in bowler hats quite often proclaiming their temperance, younger men and boys squeezed into smart gear, disciplined for sure, but looking like they could murder a pint... And on the pavements, the real gala event, awash with booze, already waiting for the night to fall. A summer festival of sorts, but not the sort of party you'd want to stumble upon.

Even after all the ironies of the 'Peace Process' it was odd to hear Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly speak scowlingly of the 'Real IRA''s supposed orchestration of protests against yesterday's marches. If Sinn Fein and their supporters have come to see 'The Twelfth' as an irrelevance that should be allowed by the 'Nationalist Community' to pass off without so much as a rock tossed in anger, then far we have travelled indeed...

Eminent Anglicans on Crusaders...

Toward the end of 2008 I was naturally pleased that one or two scribes in reputable print outlets (notably Robert Collins in the Observer and Boyd Tonkin in the Independent) recommended Crusaders to their readers as a Christmas gift-purchase. But, since my reading is only so wide, I wasn't to know that at the same time the Durham-educated retired clergyman Frank Sargeant (Bishop both of Stockport and of Lambeth in his day) had taken the time to write in the Retired Clergy Association Newsletter of Christmas 2008 that "If you have a Christmas book token, you may like to investigate 'How others see us' by reading Crusaders by Richard T Kelly..."
This I learn via the blog Dulverton Ramblings, which also reproduces Joel Rickett's January 2008 Crusaders interview with me from the Independent on Sunday. Ah, happy memories... and how time flies, for the estimable Mr Rickett, at that time deputy editor of the Bookseller, is now an editorial director at Viking Penguin, actively bringing books into the world rather than heralding their arrivals.

Esquire (August 2009) now on stands: Harry Potter assaulted

Per my previous Wimbledon-inspired comments on the slow ebbing-away of summer once the Longest Day has gone by - there's something additionally dispiriting on that score about the standard one-month-on cover-dating of monthly magazines. So (wistfully) here we now have the August Esquire, just in time before we're all back to school... On the upside, the as-ever excellent content includes tips on how best we should kit ourselves out in all this blazing weather...
The cover star is Daniel Radcliffe. The special subscriber's cover (above) has a 50s-era Hollywood head-shot feel to it, but for the cover that's actually on the newsstands Radcliffe has been made up with blackened eye and bloodied nose, as if some wizard-hater had just knocked seven bells out of him on the street.
Elsewhere, my column is given over to the 2-part French film Mesrine: to be precise, Mesrine: Killer Instinct & Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1, both due for UK release in August. "Both films were big hits on French soil", I write, "and Mesrine is surely the most boldly and peculiarly French anti-hero the cinema has shown us in recent years."
Vincent Cassel plays the eponymous anti-hero, and it's a genuine balls-out big-movie-star performance from him, though I was just as interested in Cecile De France as his female doppelganger Jeanne, whom I decided to call "a kick-ass, gap-toothed bombshell who spurs [Mesrine] to new heights of infamy. De France, one of those mutable beauties who never looks the same in any two photos, is perfectly suited to the shady glamour of this project..."

Robert McNamara: Long Time Going

The great American playwright David Rabe once protested the labelling of his magisterial Vietnam Plays (Streamers, Sticks and Bones, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel) as ‘anti-war’, arguing that plays about unruly youth, for instance, were not considered ‘anti-youth’; and that war, like youth, was ‘permanently a part of the eternal human pageant.’ A medical corpsman in Vietnam, Rabe knew of what he spoke, albeit not so comprehensively as Robert McNamara, who has died at the age of 93. ‘I’m not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war’, McNamara told the filmmaker Errol Morris a few years ago. ‘We’re not going to change human nature anytime soon.’
McNamara lived long enough to revisit the byways of his awful career for a new generation perhaps less familiar with the name and face of the notorious cerebrate/’wonk’ who prosecuted the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson, thus developing the intentions of John F. Kennedy. But once propelled to the zenith of the Pentagon, McNamara’s celebrated intellect crashed, as anybody’s would in the face of a mission so wrong-headed as Vietnam.

Nearly 40 years later he would insist that he came to see that war as a hopeless endeavour before his Pentagon peers, but still insisted upon the seriousness of the high Cold War stakes of the age. The McNamara of the 21st century also showed an interest in counterfactual history that befitted both a scholar and a man with compendious causes for regret. (Naturally, he suggested that had Kennedy lived, the US would have smartly extricated itself from Vietnam.)
McNamara’s attempted rehabilitation also received a certain late-life boost from the Coalition occupation of Iraq, as he developed a critique of US unilateralism that was highly palatable to the critics of Bush’s war. ‘If we can’t persuade nations of comparable values of the merit of our cause’, he told Errol Morris, ‘then we’d better re-examine our reasons.’ McNamara himself, though, seemed to have done only a certain amount of self-re-examination and no more. In his 90s he was not, one sensed, a broken man, but rather someone who still believed that ‘tough choices’ – the tough consequences of which are felt by other people – are the unhappy lot of truly substantive individuals.

In Praise of A-Rod: Andy Roddick's Character, and his Destiny

'I can play some tennis sometimes...' Such was Andy Roddick's customary light touch at yesterday's post-match press conference, his humour maybe spiced with a mild urge to throw a jab at the monomaniacal British press. I was totally delighted by Roddick's semi-final win over Andy Murray, because Roddick is one of my favourite contemporary sportsmen.
He plays a powerful game with good aggression and energy, maybe lacking all the finesse and range that's needed to be one of the greats, but his best yesterday was certainly too much for Murray, who had clearly been expected to walk this particular match. Moreover, Roddick is a real guy - he has a foursquareness to him, as opposed to the perennial schoolboyishness that seems to be the defining characteristic of top British tennis players, be they from Oxford or Glasgow. And to top it all Roddick is really, really funny, capable of cracking up a room. (His immemorial remarks in 2005 about wanting to win Wimbledon primarily in order to check out what Maria Sharapova would wear to the champions' ball were the first I heard of this particular gift of his.)
Sadly I no more believe that Roddick can defeat Roger Federer tomorrow than I believed Alan Shearer could save Newcastle from relegation, despite their similar reserves of aggression, guyness and good humour. (Cockneys, of course, believe Shearer is entirely humourless, because they themselves are so effing hilarious...) But Federer has been awesome this past fortnight, and has got Roddick's measure of old, and (unlike Murray) won't be distracted for long by any variations of game that Roddick has to offer. Still, Roddick's progress gave me a lot of pleasure this Wimbledon and I will continue to root for him keenly.
As for Andy Murray, I tried to like him this time out but it just didn't happen, and I say that as someone who instinctively has always favoured Scotland over England in sport, unless the England in question contains substantial Northumbrian representation. With Murray, though, the elements just don't coalesce into a guy you could truly shout for. Or, as a mate of mine put it most pithily, 'It's his mam I can't stand'.
Anyhow, Roddick will get another runner's-up plate tomorrow and then I guess the summer is over. It's bad enough the Longest Day has come and gone, which always feels like the end to me, nights now drawing in and all that... (Not to sound like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, who famously waited with bated breath for the Longest Day and then missed it.) But by the time Wimbledon fortnight is done then, really, to all intents and purposes, it's time to go out and get your new school uniform - same as last year but one size bigger, in grey...

Heartlands? Anne McElvoy on the Tories and the North

The political journalist Anne McElvoy is from Durham, it turns out, and for the BBC she has been thinking hard about the Conservative Party’s long quest to win votes and seats in the North of England, which for our purposes might be defined as anything below Scotland and above the M62 motorway (the trans-Pennine route that links Liverpool and Hull, passing Manchester, Bradford and Leeds – Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage calls this road ‘a belt drawn tightly across the waistline of Britain.’)
In a text that accompanies her short Radio 4 documentaries on this topic, McElvoy writes: ‘David Cameron's troops, in open-necked shirts rather than cloth caps, are making the first serious attempt in decades to woo the North: something that would have been impossible amid the bitterness and division of the Thatcher years, when deindustrialisation hit the region hard.’
Apparently William Hague now heads the Tories' 'Northern Board', and does a lot of stumping around the Pennines, where he’s fairly popular – a local lad and all that, born in Rotherham, having his seat in Richmond. And of course there are votes for the taking for the Tories in the common-sense market towns of James Herriot country.
But more northerly still, in the North East, like, it's a different barrel of biscuits. Even in Labour’s Euro/local poll debacle of last month, you’ll have noted the North East portion of the electoral map still managed to end up looking quite scarlet. Alan Duncan, apparently, is Cameron’s 'North East envoy'. I’d like to see Duncan on the stump in Scotswood. Just a photo would paint a thousand words.
McElvoy focuses more on the North West because that’s where she thinks Cameron’s focusing too, pragmatically. It’s a coming area for the Tories, and if the best Labour can put up is Hazel Blears, then you’d have to suppose Cameron fancies the fight. Blears has told McElvoy, ‘The danger is if we're not careful, we lose the aspirational voters on the one hand, and the poor people in our communities who are tempted to go to the far Right.’ Old news, Hazel, and that 'if we're not careful' is a desperate choice of words.
So, trouble in the heartlands of Labour, eh? One has to say that a Labour voter lost to the BNP was scarcely a voter worth keeping, if that was the sum of what they had on their minds. But if you consider that Labour has lost Scotland to the SNP, and Newcastle upon Tyne to the Lib Dems… At the next general election there will be people voting for the first time who weren’t born when Margaret Thatcher left office, and that could mark a shift of sorts; for, as justly reviled as Thatcher still is by northern people whose livelihoods and communities she destroyed, some of those new-minted voters will be on Tyneside.
Moreover, it's no accident that Northumberland could bring forth a man such as Sir John Hall, who claimed that his heroes were Thatcher and Mao. Hall was clearly one Geordie waiting for Thatcherism to happen, so deeply did it speak to his own sense of get-ahead wits-about-you resourcefulness. He’s the sort of Geordie Alan Duncan is presumably hoping to meet on Cameron’s behalf. (As a mouthy businessman tells Martin Pallister in Crusaders, ‘People care about the north-east. Top people. Get ‘em up here and they love Geordies. The Tories admire us, they do. Not as a job lot, mind you. But they’re on the side of any have got initiative.’)
And then there is a deep decades-old disillusion with Labour in the North East, something I felt very forcibly back in late 2007 when I was up in Walker by the Tyne, writing a long piece for Prospect, and met a spirited woman called Betty Cheetham who, in her sixties, had got herself actively involved in local housing issues and regeneration schemes. ‘I’ve no faith in the Labour Party now’, Betty told me, ‘for the way they’ve tret the North East.’
There’s perhaps another wrinkle to consider in terms of how votes can come and go. The northern Leftism that I feel I know fairly well contains a particular strain of social conservatism that isn’t always so far removed from the Tory view, though it certainly doesn’t sit too close to the Islington-style identity-politics Leftism that evolved in the 1980s while Labour were out of power. That social conservatism is embodied in Crusaders by the pension-age Geordie electrician/carpenter Jack Ridley: someone for whom socialism is all responsibilities rather than rights, dutiful adults working hard and expecting their neighbours to do likewise, so spreading good order in the society. For that reason, such men are as tough on ‘benefit cheats’ and ‘idle youths’ as any Tory. And however tough Labour talks on this matter, people may choose to feel that other parties exhibit greater and deeper conviction…