'Balancing Acts' revisited

This morning I read a comment piece by Martin Kettle in the Guardian, in praise (a little overstated, in my view) of the present Home Secretary’s accomplishments to date. I then gritted my teeth and scrolled through some of the readers’ Comments. They weren’t, altogether, so bad. But one of the bad ones – who tried to contend that the Guardian has no sane and cogent writers on its books, just Kettle on the right of Labour and Polly Toynbee on the left, balancing/cancelling one another by their commensurate wrongness – reminded me of someone... yes, the late muckraker Alexander Cockburn, who wrote the following in the Nation on October 27 1984, having thrown aside his New York Times in despair at the Reaganaut fervour of William Safire followed so hard upon by the dead liberal hand of Anthony Lewis:

  

This is what Op-Ed intellectual discourse has got us into. So long as you can strike some sort of ‘balance’ it doesn’t matter that on one end of the seesaw sits a man saying things that in a rational world would have him held by doctors for observation...

So I didn’t agree with that Guardian Commenter, see – just as I didn’t agree much with Alexander Cockburn, at least in the later years. And yet the conviction they had in common seemed to rise up again like a rank odour when I saw the guest list for tonight’s BBC Question Time, onto which the show's entertaining bookers had shoehorned – alongside the now customary comedian – the Guardian’s Zoe Williams and the Telegraph’s James Delingpole. Christ alive. And you wonder why you never hear a decent argument on that show? Evidently they make it incoherent on purpose. And presumably people still watch. I don’t think I can manage that now, not after Harry Enfield’s rightly praised parody, which took out the show’s middle stump with a fairly straight and medium-paced delivery.

Labour's Newsnight hustings, and a clear choice

Wanting to assess the performances of the Labour leader candidates on Tuesday’s Newsnight, I had to struggle to see past the truly wearisome MC-ing of Jeremy Paxman, who managed to be snide, peremptory, and unclear – who also, in the chief scripted bit of ‘humour’, thought it witty to characterise Diane Abbott as some sort of high school cheerleader. Eh bien, nice work if you can get it.
Still, moving on. It seems the main thing people say for Ed Balls is that he would be a 'combative performer' at the despatch box. Cameron will be dreaming of such combat, with a man who has the tense, breathless quality of bluster, and is now completing the feat of talking out of both sides of his mouth.
I confess the apparent popularity of Ed Miliband For Leader has so far been a mystery to me and, having had my head sunk in my hands through most of his contributions last night, I only hope it ends up proving a mystery to 'EM' too.
Andy Burnham did better, got in some sharp points with seeming conviction. A caveat for Andy, though: I’m a proud northerner too, and I (and, I believe, others) wouldn’t vote for you solely or even partially on those grounds. Pack it in, eh?
On the subject of Diane Abbott, nothing occurs to me, other than in respect of her curious attribution of the ‘seeming’ public concern over immigration to an actual concern over housing and jobs – as if immigration were not an actual factor in the actual pools of the latter resources. I guess Diane must feel the working class of England continue to labour under false consciousness.
So, to Diane’s champion, and my pick, David Miliband. He said many impressive things and said them impressively, on the need for economic growth, for hard choices in foreign policy, for keeping a cool head on civil liberties and about the size and role of the state. We glimpsed a touch of prideful stiffness in this seemingly irreducible need to don the mantle of Anthony Crosland, but it’s quite forgivable, especially when Paxman (who attended Cambridge and whose own public service amounts to 30-odd years of sneering at elected politicians from a padded BBC chair) leapt in to thumbnail Crosland as some sort of sad ‘intellectual’ loser. Again, nice work, Jeremy. Rave on, our David.

Yer actual Brit-fascist, or Roderick Spode's eternal return

Aryan fascism? My take on the subject is clear to me as the nose on my face, and I've held said view for years, even though it probably only took me about five seconds to form it - as quickly, in other words, as it takes a racist to figure out his measure of a man based on the colour of the epidermis. Still - and yes, call me shallow - but doesn't it strike you too that those in our society who decide to speak up loudly and proudly about a 'master race' (presuming all the while to count themselves as staunch members of said societal backbone) always look to be made out of the most paltry genetic material? You never get the sense that such evolution-resistant specimens could ever have succeeded in getting our great big budding human race out of the trees.
The estimable James MacIntyre of the New Statesman - who has himself done time as a BBC politics producer, putting wise words into the earpieces of adept-if-overpaid anchormen - says all that needs saying here about the risible performance of our state broadcaster last week. Meanwhile, in the absence of a Wodehouse to nail up the latest "perfect perisher" swanking about as spokesman for our Aryan inheritance, we at least have the splicing brilliance of Cassetteboy, below.

Jacqui Smith: at the point of Nick Robinson's stiletto

I don't doubt for a moment where Nick Robinson's instinctive political sympathies lie, any more than I doubted what side Andrew Marr or Robin Oakley would take on certain issues of the day when enjoying a drink with friends. Robinson himself seems to have gradually taken onboard the extent to which the public have got his number, certainly in the time since his early months in the BBC Political Editor job, when his slip was continually showing, and he didn't seem to have the nous to tuck himself in.

Still, a measure of how he's come along is in today's BBC blog entry on the Jacqui Smith debacle, in which he strikes a tone that is also increasingly present in his to-camera stuff: reasonable and rounded and personally sympathetic, to some extent, you'd have to say.

"She is not, after all, just a minister or an MP but the mother of two school age boys who may now come to hate the day their mum went into politics."

And yet, what is the quintessence of dust...? Because what one truly takes away from the piece is the unmistakeable savour of a career and a government consigned to the rubbish-bin. Get to the end and you'll see the cleverness of Robinson's construction.