Tories: 'A Little Child Shall Lead Them...'!?

On last week’s BBC1 Question Time Boris Johnson made one remarkably graceful and responsible intervention on the issue of the anonymity of Jon Venables and its impact on the public purse. He correctly cited the case of Mary Bell in arguing that the justice system should run its course. (In doing so he left sadly isolated his supposed co-thinker, the ridiculous Carol Vorderman, who was once fancied to be clever in a country clearly poor at maths, then became a TV-ad shill for ‘secured loans’, and now seems to have exposed herself conclusively as a shrill nitwit.)
That Johnson made his point succinctly was a miracle in itself, because for the remainder of the programme he talked his usual blustering, waffling, would-be-endearing nonsense and was quite often allowed to get away with it. But on the issue of defence spending a spirited young woman in the audience told Boris that if he didn’t know what he was talking about then perhaps he should shut up. And Dimbleby had him squirming ineffectually in the effort to deny that he has not, at times, through public utterances at odds to the party line, ‘undermined’ his party leader and fellow Etonian/Bullingdon alumnus Dave Cameron.
Anyhow Boris is rumbled again, and by his own utterances – surprise! – in this month’s astute Vanity Fair profile of Cameron by Michael Wolff:
"Cameron “alchemized a position of more or less glutinous consensus,” says Boris Johnson, whose own relationship with Cameron tiptoes a fine line between admiration for his evident electability and doubtfulness about his intellectual bona fides… “The lion lies down with a lamb, calf, and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them,” says Johnson dryly…"
Yes, comrades, this man still wants to be Prime Minister - nay, truly, madly, deeply believes he should be. On BBCQT he claimed frothingly that he could hardly countenance why on earth the British public might even consider plumping for Gordon Brown on May 6. That would indeed be the world turned upside down and God turfed out of his Heav'n, Boris old bean, what what?
(Vanity Fair's portrait of Cameron reproduced above without permission is, of course, by David Bailey.)

Jonás Gutiérrez's Spidey eye for goal

The Spiderman mask secreted by Jonás Gutiérrez snugly inside his jockstrap, to be produced and worn only for goalscoring celebrations, was one of the many grim jokes of Newcastle's relegation season of 08-09, mainly because we never saw the beggar once all bliddy year. Such was the Argentine's failure to deliver 'end product.' All smiles, though, after Saturday's tonking of Barnsley, Jonas's wonder strike for the fourth goal, and the SJP debut of The Mask, which, Jonas freely admitted, had been smelling a bit rank after all that time spent down south. Worth the wait, though. NUFC is the sort of club that deserves its own mercurial/erratic South American midfield wizard, capable, at moments of inspiration, of resembling a skinny Mexican superhero-wrestler. Fair play to Nicky, Kevin, Alan and all the northern lads but you do want a spot of 'Julio Geordio'-like diversity in your Magpie squad.
Photo (c) ACTION IMAGES

Ian Paisley: The Preacher Wearies...

Thanks to the mighty Tom Paulin and his 1982 essay for the London Review of Books entitled Paisley’s Progress, I learned that one of the Reverend Ian Paisley’s major sermons - published in his pomp at the helm of the Martyrs Memorial Church on Ravenhill Road, Belfast - made a great symbol out of the unpassable divide wrought by the sea. ‘Nothing separates like the sea’, Paisley preached. ‘What a terrible barrier the sea makes. Separation...’ Such sentiments were part of what led Paulin to read Paisley as one Ulster 'Unionist' determined to release Ulster from its bondage to both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom - while, of course, ensuring that Ulster retained its special and peculiar six-county majesty…
In 1970 Paisley became a Westminster MP for North Antrim. Next month he will be 84 years old. This week he finally gave up on his Westminster seat, and so renounced the need for all those flights across the Irish Sea from Antrim to London and the Mother of Parliaments. But he will still be a figure at the semi-devolved Northern Irish Assembly at Stormont, where, amazingly, he became First Minister, in 2007 leading the DUP, the party he founded, into coalition government with the party he called ‘Sinn Fein/IRA.’ Tony Blair and the Irish taoiseach Ahern stood by and blessed this marriage. Afterward Paisley joked for the TV cameras with Blair, remarking, ‘I wonder why people hate me so much, as I’m such a nice man...’
A few weeks ago I sat watching TV news with an Ulsterman of pension age when Paisley came on, trying to be charming in his dotage. ‘That’s a bad rascal right there’, muttered my friend, unbidden - an opinion I wouldn’t have predicted from him, and yet was unsurprised by. For such a populist vote-winner, such a ‘nice man’, so many of Paisley's admirers have been furtive and embarrassed, and so many of his critics left to feel surreal and lonely in pointing out what a cheerleader for thuggery he has so often been in the course of his quite inimitable career.

The Jennifer Connection(s)

Zoe Tapper, Jennifer's esteemed female lead, has a deservedly large and devoted following out there, and of course there are dedicated websites that track the progress of her career. I see that one such, zoetapper.net, has noticed my last post and added a few lines on Jennifer among their listing of Zoe’s current projects. They must have checked out my other Jennifer-related postings on here and, not unreasonably, took away the notion that Zoe might be playing the late Jennifer Jones in the film. I ought to confirm, then, that Jennifer is not a Hollywood true story but an entirely fictional tale, set in present-day London. One doesn’t want to spill too much about the plot; however it’s simple enough to reiterate that for me the titling of Jennifer was a sort of cinephile tip of the hat to William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (1948) and to Jennifer Jones’ luminous performance therein. But really that amounts to nothing more than a little movie-lover’s in-joke – you’d never suppose the connection from watching the film, even if you know the Dieterle picture inside out.
What’s for sure, though, is that Jennifer borrows (or steals…) some of the thematics of a certain family of Romantic film stories – Jennie being one, but Hitchcock’s Vertigo (with Kim Novak, pictured) undoubtedly the most admired – in which female beauty is shown to exert a near-mesmeric hold over a man, and could even, in a certain light, be imagined to derive from some supernatural origin. (I’m sure all fans of Zoe Tapper will have no difficulty envisaging her in just such a role.) There is a great Romantic line uttered by Jones in Jennie that could also, in my idle fancy, adorn some imaginary poster for Jennifer: ‘Of all the people who lived from world’s end to world’s end, there is just one you must love, and you must seek until you find him...’ (or, in this case, her.) But of course there are two ways to take such a sentiment: one as proof of a towering, heartfelt, quasi-religious love, the other as evidence of a disturbed mind...

On location with 'Jennifer'

‘How do you like your 'Jennifer'?’ Thus did director Michael Lennox greet me shortly after I stepped onto his set for the first time, this on the final day of the Channel 4/Touchpaper TV ‘Coming Up’ shoot, based at a centre for student medics within King’s College, London. Mike might have been referring to the industrious hum of activity all around the location, or simply to the immaculately dark and beguiling manner in which Hair & Make-Up had prepped actress Zoe Tapper for her day’s graft in the role of the film’s titular heroine. At any rate, ‘Very much’ was my feeling either way.
Of course I can’t really envisage how Jennifer will look and feel and function once it’s all cut into shape (though I’ll find out soon enough...) But what I saw on the shoot was hugely heart-lifting and compelling, thanks to the commitment and cares of Mike and his producers and crew, and to the work in front of camera by Zoe Tapper and Andrew Buchan, stupendously gifted young professionals whose combined presence and calibre have given a huge boon to this project. Observing Andrew’s and Zoe’s easy, astute shifts into and through the gears of performance, the well-turned smartness of their acting choices from moment to moment - it was easy for me to forget that I had scripted this drama. The only moments that pulled me out of this agreeable reverie were the occasions when it was clear I’d written some line that was not really sayable, or some piece of business that actually served no purpose.
I’ve been on enough film sets before as an observer, but this was my first time watching something I’d written get raised up onto its feet and shot. Once one’s head is screwed on thus, it’s fascinating to watch a crew, get the feel of its unique division of labour, and the lively personalities inhabiting the various specialisations. I’ll say this for starters: film crews always have the best active-wear jackets, combat trews and boots, not to speak of those techie tool-belts bristling with gear and lucky charms. Where do they shop for this stuff? Moreover: film crews still seem to chomp through cigarettes more (or more vigorously) than any other profession I know - this periodicy somewhat dictated by the incidence through the working day of clouds across the sun or droning aeroplanes overhead. The crew’s rhythms are many and various, but the chief one comes after ‘Action’, when a lot of diverse activity swiftly resolves itself then falls still, and 40-odd pairs of eyes are suddenly trained on a 15-inch monitor. But then that’s where the action is.
Anyhow, more on Jennifer to come, de rigueur...

Nic Roeg, iTunes and me

My iPod fix has stayed fairly true of late, for all that I use it mainly to hear Sweet Emotion or No Quarter as I'm headed down into the London underground. Still, last week I used the silvery machine so as to take in all of Bartok's string quartets while sat writing parts of a novel - so, in short, I don't say I'm a complete clod. Podcasts, of course, remain another source of possible self-improvement. On that note, if not quite in the right spirit - I see BAFTA are making available free podcast downloads of most of their film-personality event recordings, including the two sessions I was part of last year in honour of Nicolas Roeg: the truly star-studded (no, not me) 'Magician with a Movie Camera' night at BAFTA Piccadilly in March (no. 28 on the menu), and also a little chat Nic and I did for an audience at Somerset House in August (no. 12), this before an open-air screening of Don't Look Now, and also about 24 hours before my daughter Lucy was born...

Channel 4 'Coming Up' 2010: Jennifer

Jennifer, the 30-or-so-minute teleplay I've written for this year's Channel 4 Coming Up scheme, goes before the cameras this week - starting tomorrow morning, in fact... I await the outcome with great interest, of course, but first of all I'm just hoping that the rain stays away south of the Thames tomorrow, ideally from 7am, and at least until 6-7pm... I hope to drop by the Jennifer set at some point before it all wraps, if only to stand about in a down-filled coat, clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee, as I've often seen folk do in pictures... Still, if so, I will be blogging my observations in due course. Meanwhile, here's another picture of the late Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie, one of the presiding spirits of this project...

Building a Party, when not demolishing it

I have often wondered what a serious British party of the Left (i.e. ideologically to the left of the old Labour Party, but non-dogmatic in its 'analysis' of Marx and his inheritors; its membership founded on organised labour; free of the self-hating bourgeois; and determined to be a party of action rather than a debating society) might look like. And I still wonder, since no serious candidate has ever emerged, within my lifetime or previously. Listening to that well-known 'political' actress Vanessa Redgrave on the radio tonight, I was reminded fleetingly of her comrade Gerry Healy and what was essentially 'his' Workers Revolutionary Party - this before the moment passed like a minor stomach cramp. Meanwhile: the risible Socialist Workers Party is going through one of its seemingly perennial convulsions, this time with the loss of comrade Lindsay German, who, to her credit, has got her chosen cause onto television in the last 6-7 years more than any other member of an inconsequential groupuscule one could think of, barring her ex-comrade George Galloway, of course, whose rating is boosted on account of his principled appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. What web sources are running as German's own account of her resignation says nearly all that needs saying about the hopeless narcissism of small differences that has characterised the self-styled Trotskyist parties of these islands:

I resigned on Wednesday on my way to a Stop the War public meeting in Newcastle which I had been asked not to attend by the Central Committee. I was first phoned about this two days before by a CC member who told me this wasn't a proper STW meeting, that it was organised by ex members hostile to the party, and that most STW members in Newcastle knew nothing about it. This turned out not to be true, as two sets of minutes of meetings (in the public domain) make clear... I believe the CC was wrong in the particulars of this case, but that this reflected a more general political error. The meeting itself was a success, with 35 people including a number of Muslims attending. There were unfortunately no SWP members (two paper sellers didn't come into the meeting) and only a handful of ex members...

Once upon a Time in Newcastle...

A Tokyo-based Geordie by the name of Michael who runs a blog called Dolphin Hotel (stick that lot in your pipe) has just made my day with the following post about Crusaders, which I am strangely impelled to reproduce in full. In particular, his analogies with a hot bag of chips, and with a Proustian gangster film that I've loved since it came out, are such stuff as the novelist dreams of in a reader's response. Reassuring to know that he's also well aware of what are the canonical Newcastle texts. I should say that Michael's posts on other, more substantive matters around his blog seem to me even better...

"We're a small city, true enough, but there still isn't much in the way of good literature about Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There was Kiddar's Luck, of course, Jack Common's masterpiece - "one of the two best working-class novels of the 20th century" - Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners, and the poems that came out of Bloodaxe Books. Jack's Return Home - set in Scunthorpe and written by a Mancunian - feels like it's really about the Toon, but that's only because of the film (which really was a classic, by the way). And then there's Catherine Cookson, who I always suspected was a bit crap but haven't actually read.

I found Richard T. Kelly's The Crusaders in the Edinburgh branch of Fopp, drawn to the arch of the Tyne Bridge on the cover (ok, and the two quid price tag), and devoured the 540 pages like a bag of chips after a Saturday night out. Set in a semi-factional West End in the mid-1990s, with flashbacks to the early-80s, regeneration schemes and several cameos from the black-and-whites themselves, it has the kind of broad, generational sweep you find in the Victorian novelists. If it was a film, it'd be called Once Upon A Time in Newcastle - and Jimmy Woods and De Niro would be queueing up for the starring roles."

New Esquire (March 2010) on stands: The State of Man

An extraordinary cornucopia in the new Esquire, ranging from a photo gallery of British servicemen returned from Afghanistan, through interviews with Ryan Giggs and Ayrton Senna's nephew, to the rather revealing results of a reader's poll - how much we earn, how much we owe, what we spend weekly on alcohol... Oh and there's a spread featuring the actress Talulah Riley, of the sort the red-tops call 'sizzling.' Riley is also the cover star for the subscribers' special edition. The newsstand buyers get Robert De Niro, who is celebrated at length within, including tributes from Neil LaBute and DBC Pierre and a longish think-piece from your correspondent, in which I say... Actually, I don't - the following paragraph is one that had to be cut for space, following on from a quote by Sean Penn likening De Niro's preparatory rigours to those of a trained dancer:
"The discipline in which De Niro was himself steeped as a training actor was the famous and much-misunderstood ‘Method’, devised in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavsky, immortalised on American soil by such gurus as De Niro’s own acting coach, Stella Adler, who also taught Brando among many others. Most laymen assume The Method is an obsessive, interior mission to ‘stay in character’ at all costs, but Adler urged her students to cultivate life experience, observe the world outside their windows, and always respect the writer’s vision. ‘Don’t drag it down to your small self’ was an Adler mantra, one to which De Niro apparently subscribes..."
Yes, a little over-technical, that, I think you'll agree. Elsewhere my film column this month is on Clint Eastwood's Invictus, of which I say:
"The erstwhile Man with No Name remains deeply absorbed by classic western themes: the new lawman in town, the town as a fractious community on the brink of frontier wildness. Eastwood is famously obsessed by revenge, especially when contemplated by a once-violent man who has since sworn to beat his sword into a ploughshare. And he can’t resist the image of the lone hero standing up to make his case before a gathering of townsfolk, then demanding of the assembled, ‘Who’s with me?’ All these elements may be found in Invictus too, even though its hero – Mandela, in the shape of Morgan Freeman – is a septuagenarian with a smile and a kindly word for everyone."

Superbowl overkill: The Tebow Case

I was wittering on about The Who below but there's another and bigger media sideshow story at this year's Superbowl, namely the $2.5 million TV commercial that will air at some suitable break featuring boyish heartthrob football star Tim Tebow, 2007 winner of the Heisman trophy for best collegiate ballplayer, and his devoutly Christian mother Pam, who refused medical advice to abort the birth of Tim back in the mid-1980s, and is thus doubly convinced of the utter wrongness of abortion.
William Saletan of Slate offers this punchy rebuttal:
"Pam's story certainly is moving. But as a guide to making abortion decisions, it's misleading. Doctors are right to worry about continuing pregnancies like hers. Placental abruption has killed thousands of women and fetuses. No doubt some of these women trusted in God and said no to abortion, as she did. But they didn't end up with Heisman-winning sons. They ended up dead. Being dead is just the first problem with dying in pregnancy. Another problem is that the fetus you were trying to save dies with you. A third problem is that your existing kids lose their mother. A fourth problem is that if you had aborted the pregnancy, you might have gotten pregnant again and brought a new baby into the world, but now you can't. And now the Tebows have exposed a fifth problem: You can't make a TV ad."

Clare Short & the BBC: Endless Love

I guess on the whole I've been able to live in peace with 13 years of New Labour - there have been peaks and nadirs, to be frank - but it does still irk me that Clare Short ever got to sit at a cabinet table; and this solely, like Prescott, because Blair thought he was playing nice, palliating that useless/sanctimonious side of the Party in which he privately had no interest. Well, good work there, Tone - you wound up letting Short become the public face of the pseudo-sacred principle of 'cabinet government', i.e. the utterly unpersuasive voice that won't shut up ought by definition to be heeded. Having somehow attained the status of Minister, Clare Short was not going to be ignored - and her being her, who could expect otherwise?
Stolidly populist, Short has been the most easily quoted critic of the decision to topple Saddam. But her performance when it came to giving up that ministerial office is all one needs to know about her political gifts. (As the Telegraph heard one minister say, "better to have her as an unprincipled laughing stock rather than a principled martyr.") As for the value of her purported service to the cause of the Left, George Monbiot made a rather stark case for the prosecution back in 2003, in the Guardian, no less.
And yet, and yet... our state broadcaster takes Short very seriously, for what one supposes are personal reasons. Nicholas Witchell of the BBC has been awfully keen that we know who gets applause from the discerning gallery at Chilcot, and today we understand that Short finally gave those people just what they wanted to hear and more. It was truly painful to watch even the slightest fragment of her 'It's My Turn' efforts as played on the news bulletins - that scarf gaily trailing from her neck, those awful, chatty dismissals of top people and major matters to whom and to which she should never have been in the remotest proximity. Jim Pickard in the FT and Paul Waugh in the Standard have got the tone just about right in their reporting.

NUFC: Trouble, man?

If you see the football season as a 5-act play – I do at any rate, Act I being August-September (the pitches still splashed by summer sun, six weeks of clean new strips and surprise results), through the dramatic meat of autumn and winter, to the business end of April-May that constitutes Act V, and what Sir Alex Ferguson famously calls 'squeaky bum time' – well, if you’re still with me, then you see that we stand now on the threshold of Act IV: the passage of play that determines just how squeaky will be those derrieres.
What we of Division 2 have learned in Act III is that, sadly, this flight contains three sides of fairly consistent footballing ability – the Toon, WBA and Notts Forest – and so, with only two automatic promotion places to spare, then fatalistic Toon fans such as I are now envisaging a play-off spot... Moreover, with nothing to remember of Toon visits to Wembley in the lifetime other than capitulation, anti-climax and a general failure to show up, I can’t help feeling in my pessimistic bones that we will back to Barnsley and Doncaster next season.
The real concern is that the last half-dozen league games, while extending an unbeaten run, have been a plodding set of performances. We have been found out at this level, to take loan of the cliché. Injuries and opposition pace expose the defence. Pace of any kind troubles our 'senior-pro'-comprised midfield. Upfront even the disagreeable Marleen Harewood begins to be missed. No fan would have failed to jump at the offer of where we are now, 4 points clear with a game to spare, but there’s going to have to be a rising to the occasion for the big games of Act IV, the visits of Cardiff and Forest, the trip to Swansea, not forgetting all the rest...
This transfer window just gone has seen the completion of the retooling of the NUFC squad to high-end Division 2 standard: if it was hard to see the mob we started with doing any better in Div 1 (hypothetically) than they’d managed in 2009-09, the best XI we have at present would be fairing no better in the six-pointers with Burnley, Hull and Bolton. Still, this is our lot, and it has been rightly said in his favour that Ashley backed the club appropriately in the transfer dealings: cover at the left and centre of defence, some pace and wiles for the midfield, and another striker (Leon Best, pictured.) Perhaps a little competition for places, plus a bit more of what Kevin Nolan was saying back when he was scoring, about actually wanting to bag that Division 2 title… these things could only help.
Roll on this Friday then, and the visit of the 'soul crew'. Always liked that Aretha Franklin, myself.

Superbowl XLIV: The Who dares, wins?

This Sunday, Superbowl 44, Colts v Saints, and the bookies say Colts by 4. I haven't a clue myself, and if the Pittsburgh Steelers aren't in it then I have no-one to shout for. The half-time show, though, that's a different matter. For this year the Dolphin Stadium in South Florida, and a few hundred million TV viewers worldwide, will welcome to the stage the 'Orrible 'Oo.

The half-time entertainment is a Superbowl perennial, but looking back at its history one could be surprised at how long the organisers persisted in mounting tame little Disney-like family spectacles for 10 minutes or so, seemingly unaware that when you've got thousands of sports freaks crammed into a stadium, and folks at home getting rowdy and beery, the chief thing they'll want to do is rock.

Michael Jackson (XXVII) and Diana Ross (XXX) were gestures toward superstar power, but, again, whoever imagined that a significant portion of the fanbase wanted to hear La Ross do Ain't No Mountain High Enough or I'm Coming Out? Even Aerosmith were made to share the slot with N-Sync and Britney Spears. Finally, in the decade just past, some genius figured it out - U2, the Stones, Springsteen, unalloyed and no support act - that's what the boys want.

There is something self-defeating about the 10-minute format: I didn't much enjoy Springsteen's set, for instance, not just because the songs were edited but because of the songs themselves - obvious, middle-ground, crowd-pleasing choices from The Boss. With The Who, however, advance word suggests that they will cram in versions of Baba O'Riley, Pinball Wizard, Tommy, Can You Hear Me?, Who Are You, and Won't Get Fooled Again. And let it be said, brothers and sisters, you could not possibly get a better mini-setlist than that, not in the entire annals of rock's lost highway...

The Chilcot Inquiry: if you are so drawn to it...

An increasingly nervy, impulsive, hair-trigger atmosphere surrounds the Chilcot Inquiry and reportage of same, as the media and the ticket-possessing public await Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday. The last few days have offered rich pickings on the legal aspect of the matter. I should say that it used to be one of my (innumerable) gripes against New Labour that there were far too many bloody lawyers sat round its top table. But then I’m not aware that anyone ever claimed these people were any good at being lawyers. (Cherie Blair has her claims in this department, of course, but nobody ever elected her, perhaps to her chagrin.)
What an assured legal performance we have had, though, from Jack Straw! Not just in his testimony to Chilcott but in the documents under discussion, such as his 6-page rejoinder to Lord Goldsmith. The BBC, who nurse a private and wholly personal wound over Iraq, are currently headlining that Straw is ‘defiant over ignored legal advice’ on the illegality of the war, which is, I suppose, one way of saying that Straw considered one piece of advice from the Attorney General to be more salient than another (differing) one from the FO’s man.
Similarly it seems to be headline news to some outlets that Lord Goldsmith ‘changed his mind’ on illegality, or that he had admitted such - something we were aware of, also of Goldsmith’s reasons for same, many moons and Inquiries ago; just as we know the unshakeable anti-war line that he only reviewed his options once the Yanks leaned on him. At any rate Goldsmith put it this way today: the question to his mind was ‘‘Which side of the argument do you want to be on?’ And I took the view I would prefer to be on the side of the argument that a second resolution wasn't necessary.’ That’s politics. As Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard has it, more sceptically than would I:
‘I'm sure many will seize on 'Goldsmith's Law' as proof of his wrong-headed approach to the law: make up your mind first where you want to end up and then design your verdict accordingly. Not exactly what some expect of an Attorney General. But maybe that's unfair, maybe he was simply reflecting the political realities of the consequence of his decision…’
Yesterday the principled Elizabeth Wilmshurst said her piece in cool and calm fashion, and Nick Witchell on the BBC 10 O’Clock News made sure we were told that members of the public in the hearing room applauded the end of her testimony. Not to defame these spectators en masse but I suspect a fair few of them are the sort who have made BBC1’s Question Time such a drizzle of loud nonsense whenever Iraq is discussed.
Ms Wilmshurst also got in her shot at Mr Straw and his ‘ignoring’ of the Foreign Office legal view: ‘He’s not an international lawyer.’ So, by implication, he lacks that rigour, that basis on such an universally esteemed and binding body of case law? Sure, Ms Wilmhurst and Sir Michael Wood may have been more fastidiously following the letter of law in making sure their opinions genuflected toward the legally clear primacy of that peculiar body called the UN Security Council - for all that this was to defer to the polluted world of politics. If only the membership of said Council were as pure and rigorous in their legal assessment of a case as Wilmhurst and Wood! But then maybe the proud French former imperium, the wounded and bristling Russian imperium, and the quietly confident Chinese imperium were all entirely principled and law-abiding in their considered opinion that the tyrant Saddam Hussein would not be overthrown by any imperial warmongering US/UK-led coalition, at least not on their watch. Or as Kafka's thuggish doorkeeper tells the Man from the Country who seeks admission to The Law: 'If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful...'
The illustration above comes from the online petition site Ban Blair Baiting.

Mad Max in Midlife

My dear daughter #1, newly 4 years old, is in a phase where Her Absolute Indispensable Favourite Film has passed seamlessly from Mary Poppins to The Sound of Music. As such, her cinematic tastes have reached 1965, and she has learned why Julie Andrews – nee Julia Wells of Walton-on-Thames – was in her heyday the world’s biggest box-office draw: namely, because she was clean-limbed and fresh-faced, apparently unsullied, she sang well, and could even manage to act a bit while singing. Perhaps one day I will be forced to explain to Cordelia why Julia from Walton-on-Thames then married the increasingly vulgar Blake Edwards, watched her career decline none too gracefully, and felt the strange need to disrobe in a dismal picture called S.O.B. Eh bien, I guess that Cordi and I might yet manage to sit together through a viewing of Julie's one other hit, Thoroughly Modern Millie...
Before Cordi met Julie, i.e. last summer, she had a big thing for Babe The Pig, and this Christmas she seemed to approve of Mumbles the Penguin in Happy Feet. It was with great surprise that I discovered these works to be the brainchildren of Australian director George Miller, the affable and cerebral ex-doctor who did the boys a big favour by packing in medicine, getting some mates together in 1979 and making Mad Max.
Now then, when I was 10 years old my own Absolute Indispensable Favourite Film was Mad Max, and by the time I turned 11 it was Mad Max 2 (or The Road Warrior, as it was known in the US where few people outside of drive-ins had turned out for Mad Max.) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome duly followed in 1985, a let-down that showed Miller was a mite too inclined to the Jungian analysis of mythology popularised by Joseph Campbell.
Now the internet churns daily with reports of progress on Miller’s fourth Max picture, Fury Road, due for our screens in 2011, Tom Hardy taking the wheel from that villainous old soak Mel Gibson. Is Miller too old for this sort of thing now? Am I?

Stewart Lee: Theatre of Hate

Last Saturday my wife and I managed to get out of the house for the night a deux, yes, quite unaccompanied, and initially I was so fazed by the shock of the new that it was only as the lights went up on Stewart Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre that I remembered what had been the ostensible, entertainment-oriented purpose of the evening. (I had already drunk a pint of beer, in a glass - albeit a plastic one - so I was mildly euphoric - albeit clear-eyed about what the morning would bring, not to say what was owed the babysitter, and this after a £4 pint of beer...)
At any rate, I got over my initial stupefaction, because Stewart Lee was very funny, and gradually I remembered that this had been my confident expectation, based on my admiration for last year's BBC2 Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle, an admiration I'd expressed loudly enough for my wife to take a punt on these tickets. On Saturday night Lee made at least one gag about the low audience figures that series attracted, which may have been just an appealing mode of self-deprecation, or maybe a sign that his comedy lies on the cusp of the mainstream as it currently stands. Lee is a sort of anti-comedian: he certainly makes enough disparaging comments about lesser comedians; but more especially he does That Thing of deconstructing his act a little in the course of delivering it, such that the deconstruction almost seems to be the act itself - until, invariably, he exposes what is the actual essence of his comedic schtick, which is a form of moral disgust, a palpable sense that the world is simply not good enough, its faults both disguised and aggravated by certain popular loudmouth charlatans, some of them comedians. Part of this weltschmerz, Lee makes plain, comes from being a 41-year-old man, with 20 years in the job behind him, physically marked (on top of the usual dissipation) by being the father of a 2-year-old boy who, I imagine, gives Lee the runaround but also the impetus to keep protesting the inadequate state of the world...

10 Bad Dates With De Niro: The Softcover is Nigh (US Only)

My brother, currently on loan to Los Angeles, CA, sends the photographic evidence (above) that Overlook Press have indeed unleashed a paperback of Ten Bad Dates With De Niro upon the famously fickle North American book-buying market. If it has already landed in LA's delightful and legendary Book Soup store then we are sitting pretty. Good luck to the little fella. I will rest my case for its merits on the verdict of Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times: "A stimulating, necessary volume - and virtually alone amongst cinematic studies in the wit of its arguments and the seductiveness of its style."

Esquire (February 2010) now on stands, noticeably Female

I'm proud to be a contributing editor to a men's-interests magazine that doesn't feel the need to chase circulation through cover shots of ephemeral girly models in their scanties. No sir, when Esquire does feel the urge to put a beauteous woman up on its front, they always do so with plenty class: to wit, the quite stupendous image of actress Rachel Weisz by Greg Williams (left) that adorns the new issue. (Weisz is interviewed within by my mate Nev Pierce. Elsewhere the 'Rachel Cooke Interview', which a few months back was with Tony Blair, is this month with Peter Mandelson. Rachel Cooke gets some lovely gigs. As does Nev.)

I met Rachel Weisz once, in 1995, on the location (just outside Siena) of Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. With the rest of the cast and crew she was hanging out somewhat languidly in the Tuscan villa that was the movie's chief location - waiting for the Muse of the Next Set-up to descend on Bernardo and his DoP. In particular, she was hanging out with Liv Tyler, with whom she seemed to have as nice a rapport as they were meant to have in the movie (where Weisz played the sexually experienced young female to Tyler's over-ripe virgin.) As in that movie, Tyler in the flesh looked marginally more like the Hollywood movie star (at least to my gauche eye), and Weisz slightly more like the smart/gifted product of a Hampstead upbringing and a Cambridge education. Ms Tyler has done very well since, of course, but Weisz has really shot the works, with Hollywood franchise hits and an Academy Award. Now, apparently, she's polled as the woman most Esquire readers would like to marry - which, based on her CV and that cover shot, is setting the bar rather high.

Oh yes, my film column this month is on the film of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, of which I say:

"Post-apocalypse movies tend to excel in the poignantly desecrated landmark, and ever since Planet of the Apes Hollywood has routinely knocked the head off the Statue of Liberty. The beauty of The Road lies in the melancholy of an abandoned freeway bridge, a mighty and improving work of mankind turned to a reproach now that civilisation has receded. Across that bridge Man and Boy trudge, toward a jack-knifed eighteen-wheel truck; and ‘round the decay of that colossal wreck’, as the poet wrote, desolation stretches far away..."

Another round-up...

You'll have noticed I do, for my sins, take seriously any regard that's exhibited for my stuff out there in Blogville; also that I have an amateur interest in the art of top tens anyway... so I'm pleased to see Crusaders on another personal-best-read-of-2009 list, this one from blogger Nick Lacey (scroll down), where I'm in the esteemed company of Misha Glenny, Joe Sacco, Anne Tyler et al. Better yet, since David Peace and The Unthanks (pictured) rank high in Mr Lacey's 'Film' and 'Music' lists too, then I get the additional warm feeling of being part of a certain culture that's rattling around out there somewhere...

The Robinsons: Paint an Inch Thick

Mulling the possible fall-out of the Peter & Iris Robinson Debacle on Newsnight last week, scholar Paul (Lord) Bew warned viewers to be aware first of all that ‘there is no-one to the left of Peter Robinson in the DUP.’ Now, there’s a thought to make you gulp: Bew is right, of course, and it’s been that way for a while, and yet the plain statement of the truth does chill the blood somewhat. (The excellent David McKittrick summarises the state of things well in today’s Independent.)
The abrupt termination of Iris Robinson’s ludicrous political career is, of course, to be warmly welcomed. One always assumed that she was a contemptible hypocrite, but never that she would end up trumpeting the fact to us all with such fanfare. No further attempt on her part to show off the contortions of her Protestant conscience could afford her the slightest pathos – truly this is the sort of woman (cf. Wilde) whose hair would turn quite gold from grief. But she had a good run, absolutely maximised her limited abilities in life, and was able to carry on in the grandest manner. Now, as Hamlet instructs Yorick’s skull, ‘Get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.’
What of ‘Peter’, as McKittrick calls him with, one assumes, some sort of friendly regard? He looks to be on the out, for sure. He appeared red-eyed on television the other day, though his legendarily pinched and sour persona of the 1980s and 1990s makes him another hard fellow to feel sorry for. 'In all of my public life', he insists, 'I have acted in the most professional and ethical way.' That goddamned self-advertising Protestant conscience again. Says who, Peter?

I will always remember him as the would-be DUP autocrat trapped in the mountainous shadow of Ian Paisley: a chap with a decent mind who nonetheless affected a trench coat and tinted glasses, a nerd trying to be a thug, as when, notoriously, in 1986, he led a Loyalist mob to the little Monaghan town of Clontibret, in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. What idea of Ulster those eejits thought they were upholding by breaking windows and daubing graffiti on schools, the Lord only knows, but Robinson watched over the cudgel wielders and pronounced that this was Good. His subsequent attempts to squirm out of the legal consequences of his actions ought to have been the moment he learned to stop acting the tough guy.
The funniest twist in Robinson’s career was his adoption c. 1990s of a spiked, moussed hair-do, this coiffure perched above a pasty face that has always seemed about as cheerful as a kicked-in fridge door. Clearly Iris was urging him to play his proper part in the power couple they had become. And yet in the big stakes game it seemed Peter could never usurp Big Ian. Rather like Prince Charles, you might say, he aged and wearied and grew stale in the long wait to succeed. And yet, materially he prospered, his well-upholstered little empire in Castlereagh expanding indefatigably, with Iris ordering in the fancy curtains.
Moreover, as the mid-90s ‘peace process’ trained a new international spotlight on Northern Ireland Robinson proved himself to possess a decent set of political smarts, to be able to master a brief, exhibit a forensic mastery of detail. In his entirely auto-didactic way he was more impressive than the condescending ex-law lecturer David Trimble.
As Trimble’s UUP fell apart, Robinson’s utterly strange party gained, and Paisley's authority waned - Robinson himself seemed a bit more sensible, a bit more likeable, and distinctly atypical of that party of his. As he said in 2001, ‘Unless we have a structure that can enjoy the support of unionists and nationalists alike, it is not going to last.’ This observation remains true, and Robinson came round to it quicker than some of the other aspirant stormtroopers on his side. But if he’s now about to exit the field, then Paul Bew’s observation is the ominously correct one.

Jennifer Jones 1919-2009

In case I was sounding too morose below, I should say that one fairly solid-looking item on my professional dance card for 2010 is the filming, in February, for Channel 4, of a 30-minute drama script of mine entitled Jennifer, which is being developed under the channel's invaluable 'Coming Up' strand for writers and directors new to TV. The director is a very gifted young Belfast man called Michael Lennox, and the Jennifer script is a variation on such themes as the enigma of romantic attraction, and the mystery and mutability of female beauty. I named it Jennifer as a sort of hommage to Jennifer Jones, the long-retired Hollywood actress, star of (inter alia) Duel in the Sun, Cluny Brown, Portrait of Jennie, Gone to Earth and Beat the Devil. And I noted Jones' death on December 17 last year with a bit of sadness.

I admired her in many films, more as a presence than as an actress, though she certainly had something there. Above all, though, it was her performance as Jennie Appleton in Portrait of Jennie (1948) that made me such a devotee. In Ten Bad Dates I wrote the following on that score:
The cult of Jennie is founded on two exceptional film-historical factors: it was a pricey super-production from the obsessive mind of David O. Selznick, devised for his wife Jennifer Jones; and it is one of the few Hollywood studio products that had Bunuel in rhapsodies (‘a mysterious, poetical and largely misunderstood work’).

Joseph Cotton plays a penniless, disconsolate painter who encounters a strangely fervent little girl in Central Park. She dresses and talks as though from a bygone era, and sings an odd unsettling song (‘Where I come from, no-one knows / And where I’m going, everyone goes.’) Thereafter he continues to run into Jennie or, rather, she is continually running toward him from out of the gloom (always shot in low angle, a hazy sun or glowing moon behind her.) And she’s a little older each time.

Cotton’s painting, meanwhile, is marked by a new passion. He realizes the strangeness of what he’s doing – some basic detective work confirms to him that he’s in love with a dead girl – yet gives himself up to it, not least because of the powerful nothings she whispers into his ear (‘Of all the people who lived from world’s end to world’s end, there is just one you must love, and you must seek until you find him.’)

David Thomson, Selznick's biographer among his many distinctions, wrote a thoughtful obit of Jones for the Guardian, making reference to the unfortunate Brittany Murphy. The Telegraph obit took a rather dim, mordant view of Jones' Life & Work, and its recounting of some of the grimmer biographical details would make anyone wince. Some Telegraph readers, though, were moved to leap to Jones' defence in the comments section - such is the power of the movies, for they never met her. Even David Thomson never got near, as he ruefully recalls in his own piece. That was Jennifer, something of an enigma...

End of Year Round-Ups...

As an allegedly professional writer of fiction I might look back on 2009 with a certain sense of unease, insofar as one could say I failed to produce any writing of substance - at least, nothing fit for any significant number of people to actually read: a novel in the works, for sure, just as in 2008, but still a fair way away from home; a couple of screenplays, both in development limbo; bits and pieces of a couple of stage plays, still not resolved into wholes... you get the picture.
As such, I look over the literary reviews of 2009 in wonder at the wealth and diversity of published work, and am reminded, in the words of Roland Barthes, that the world is full without me.
So, it's heartening to see a couple of recent and friendly mentions for back-catalogue stuff of mine out there in the blogosphere: over in Maine, Mallory seemed to like 10 Bad Dates, while up in Hampshire Mark D gave a thumbs up to Crusaders. This is why we soldier on, see...

Capsaicin: the fire every time...

'A great meal fades in reflection. Everything else gains. You know why? 'Cause it's only food...' Thus pontificates Richard Roma, philosophically-minded top-dog salesman in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, a play that I once (rather haphazardly) co-directed while at college. Roma says so as part of a spiel to trap a prospective customer (in a Chinese restaurant...), so I don't know if he means it; but I do agree with him.
This Christmas I have enjoyed some exceptionally fine cooking courtesy of my Darling Wife's family. I even did some OK cooking myself - a braised rolled shoulder of lamb for nine people, weekend before last. In the act of food preparation I can see the point of any number of rigours, whether it's the honey and mustard for the parsnips or the goose fat/parboiling/shaking of the potatoes, or precisely what wine you use to break down the sinews of the meat while steeping in the pot. And this is only to speak of the strictly humdrum middle ground of cookery cares. If it's got right, the taste is the vouchsafe and validation. But on the whole I'm still with Roma, on the grounds that lesser cares can in theory lead to even happier results.
To whit, what little cooking I've done in the months since mine became a four-person household has been heavily 'influenced' by green chillies. I'm not proud, but I am a happy eater. God bless capsaicin, salve for the soul, (possible) reliever of umpteen ailments! I understand the stuff is addictive, but then so is cocaine, and as far as I've heard it that stuff never did no good for nobody, even as it siphoned all the money from their purses.
Tonight, pressed for time, we ordered in pizza and wine, the provider being the excellent Lupa, and my thin-crust pie loaded with fiery red chillies and shaved grana padano was, for me, the definition of culinary heaven - setting aside, just for the moment, certain curry houses dear to me, and the one London fish ship I know where the chips are still done in beef dripping... Cf. Roma, of course, even these simple/glorious meals fade in reflection too. But you can have a lot more of them in this life, for less expense of time and bother; and who thought happiness could be so cheaply bought, if not pursued in anything like moderation?

All I Want for Xmas is a Gritter

So Darling Wife and I got into the car at 3-ish today, bound for the nearest branch of Halford's for to pick up a Disney Princess bicycle on behalf of Old Saint Nick, intended for Dear Daughter #1. It was only while I was inside the shop, discussing self-assembly and spanner sizes, that the snow started falling spandule-like, thick and fast... Anyhow, upshot is, the whole journey added up to 3 hours we'll never get back. Mayhem on the Roads. Gridlock at Every Turn. People Getting Angry. Thank god ours was a non-essential trip of maybe 6 miles round. I pity the poor working men and women who've had to deal with this, and will continue to have to have to deal with this. Because I quit, frankly. Sightings of gritters within the M25 appear to be in short supply. I was just out on the pavements and it's all nice and darkly slushy underfoot out there, just in time for tonight's big freeze, and tomorrow morning's carnage...

Shearer-Berbatov: Football's Philosopher Kings

I always enjoy the experience of shifting my views about people and things, especially if the transformation is 180-degree: such changes of heart are what gives God hope for mankind. Initially I took something of a dislike to the Bulgarian Dimitar Berbatov as a footballing personality, perhaps in part because he's one of those guys who wears an alice-band in his hair on the pitch, but mainly because of his associations with Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United, two 'problematic' clubs; and the unsavoury, protracted, big-money saga of his transfer from one to t'other.
Anyhow, what did I know? I was blind, prejudiced - I just never knew Berbatov's hero and role model was Alan Shearer, not until the two sat down for this Football Focus interview, in which Berbatov's quiet-spoken admiration of Al is incredibly and touchingly direct: 'I was a Blackburn fan when you become champions... I was only a fan of Newcastle because you were playing there.' Good lad, that Dimitar.
Shearer compares Berbatov to his old teammate Matt Le Tissier, a hugely gifted player of questionable work-rate. I've always liked players who walk until they absolutely have to run, so long as the eventual running ends up yielding something splendid. (Consider, for one, Zinedine Zidane.) So, in this light, I now rather like Berbatov's style. But I like even better the flabbergasting way he chooses to express his commitment to the aesthetics of the game, namely by quoting Saint Augustine at Shearer: 'Unless there were beauty and grace in them, they would be powerless to win our hearts.' Truly I have never heard the like of it, not even from Eric Cantona... I don't think Al picked up the theological reference, but I hope he made note of it for the future.

PBR preview, second annual...

O happy day: amid the nervy, opportunistic, end-of-days irreality of our current politics, as we slouch toward an election - it’s Pre-Budget Report time again. Is it already a year since Alistair Darling did this last? Most of the key stats turned out worse than he predicted then, but he will say that’s no great surprise, and I daresay most of us, wearily or sceptically, will agree.
So what punts into the darkness has he got this time? I'm first to admit I’m no augur, never adept at sifting the guts for omens. Still, sifting the bloody auguries of others, I assume the price of my beer is going up. That NHS IT project will take a slash, presumably. One expects some action on the much-discussed want of Chinook helicopters in Helmand. Me and my Mumsnet comrades can probably expect to witness the further waning unto death of the middle-class tax credit. And it’s mooted there could be some great clunking ‘super tax’ on bankers’ bonuses, or rather the ‘bonus pools’ of specific banks.
If the last is true, one can expect to hear cries of outrage on behalf of the financial services, Britain’s last surviving industry of global stature. This blog does feel that the rich bankers could afford to take a bullet or two for the team, so I wouldn’t cry for them, not least if further changes to personal allowance and national insurance widened the net of straitened households obliged to reckon themselves ‘rich.’
The biggest issues remain the deficit and the scale of borrowing, the sitting-target scale of the public sector, and the quest for a return to growth, all issues that Darling claims to be thinking about for the purpose of the next 3-4 years. This package won’t change any of that, indeed couldn’t, because Darling won’t be Chancellor anymore come next summer, by which time we can expect an emergency budget from the new mob. The other day John Rentoul observed with a dab of acid that ‘Cameron's average lead in the polls has slumped from 14 points to about 12.’ Last year while I was thinking aloud about the PBR I wrote that Cameron’s average poll lead had ‘taken a bashing’ in falling from something like 17 points to something like 11 – obviously a wild provocation, one that briefly got this blog some zealous attention from the sorts of Tory bloggers I’d hoped never to meet outside of Hell, where we're all headed. But presumably those lads are a bit more relaxed inside their skins this year, those poll numbers being so settled, and Labour still led by this Prime Minister, the only cause for fret being the obvious urgency to get on with the great task of transforming the country...

Esquire (January 2010) now on stands: Nowhere Boy(s)

Robert Downey Jr is Esquire's cover star this month; and approximately a million times better a cover star for a mens' magazine than, just for instance, Simon Cowell. Downey has had an incredible Hollywood comeback from a low, low ebb. Like Sean Penn he's an alumnus of Santa Monica High School, and the two men are friendly, as Penn tends to be with most of the really brilliant American actors. Back in that extended narcotic blue period Downey said of Sean, ‘I remember him saying three or four years ago, “You have two reputations. I think you know what both of them are, and I think you’d do well to get rid of one of those reputations. If you don’t, it will get rid of the other one . . .”’ Well, the other one turns out to have outlasted the first; Sean is one of those Friends of Robert who aided that process.
My film column this month is about Sam Taylor-Wood's absolutely glorious Nowhere Boy, of which I say it 'is probably a softer-edged piece than the facts of this case would suggest, for it offers us a certain closure; whereas the real Lennon (who, aged 30, wept through primal therapy with Arthur Janov, then wrote the anguished ‘Mother’) clearly took longer to find his peace. Movies, though, are more like myths than analyses, and they have a duty to get us to catharsis in a shorter time-span. Certainly I sobbed throughout the last reel of Nowhere Boy. Bouquets, then, to Taylor-Wood, her cast and crew (not least the brilliant cinematographer Seamus McGarvey) for a lovely, lyrical picture that flows – one should say ‘swings’ – just as bitter-sweetly as the rock ‘n’ roll that Lennon and friends invented.'

iToons!

My brother bought me an iPod for my last birthday, an amazingly great gift, and this after a few years of my doggedly saying I didn't fancy one (whenever asked by nearest and dearest.) Well, so much for all that Luddite nonsense, because iPods are, as it turns out, magic. (Did you know that? Why didn't you say?) Of course I am merely and belatedly joining the multitudes. I do remember that in the months after the iPod launch there was supposed to be a steep muggers' premium on those distinctive white ear-plugs and cord. Yesterday, waiting in a queue for a bus and plugged into the 'deluxe' edition of Blind Faith (specifically the bonus 'electric' version of 'Can't Find My Way Home', possibly my favourite song) I turned to see three people sat waiting beside me, all sporting the distinctive white ear-jacks and cord... Hey, we are the world. My only fear now is that I walk blithely in front of a bus while nodding keenly to Aerosmith playing 'Back in the Saddle' live...

Memo to RBS Board: Walk, if you so wish

On the subject of the RBS board's alleged threat to resign should the traditional annual bonus pot be denied them by the Government (on behalf of we the people), the Times hedges its bets in a leader this morning, describing the course of denial as 'tempting' while repeating the oft-heard assertion that banks bleed talent when they can't pay these hard-driving geniuses millions in bonuses.

Thankfully, over on the Times' op-ed pages, Anatole Kaletsky doesn't mess about trying to graze his backside by sitting on the fence:

If these people threaten to resign, the Government should jump at the opportunity to clear them off the board, with no need for compensation payments of any kind... Who could run RBS if all these luminaries removed themselves? The answer is people with a sense of public service who have done well enough in other careers not to worry too much about the modest remuneration on offer — the sort of people who run public bodies such as the Royal Opera House or lead public inquiries into the reform of the health service...
 
The higher the salaries paid by RBS or any other bank, the more likely it is to fail, taking taxpayers’ money with it. The obvious and much discussed reason is that high salaries in finance generally reflect high-risk trading strategies… To maximise the chances of recouping its investment in RBS, therefore, the Government should ensure that the bank is run in the dullest, most risk-averse manner… the simplest banking operations should be quite profitable enough to recoup taxpayers’ money…
 
If limiting the size of the bonus pool encouraged the traders and investment bankers at RBS to move elsewhere, their departure should be a cause for celebration, not concern… What would then happen to the huge trading and investment banking businesses at RBS run by these highly paid and talented employees?... Now that global stock markets are on the road to recovery, selling off the higher-risk and more complex parts of RBS piecemeal would probably be more profitable than trying to keep the group together...
 
Which leads to the question of why bankers earn so much more than other similarly qualified workers. Is it really because they are so uniquely talented? Or is it because they have access to pools of capital, backed up by explicit or implied government guarantees? The answer is obvious… Rather than try to limit pay and bonuses directly, governments and regulators should simply insist that banks use all the revenues that they generate to increase their capital strength. In the case of RBS, a simple demand that the bank add a further £1.5 billion to its capital would drain the bonus pool and solve the problem.

Stately homes of England and me

The family and I passed last weekend in the country, don't you know - Essex Country, mate, a very nice stretch near to Saffron Walden. Our host was my esteemed editor Lee Brackstone (pictured, with me and wor bairns.) When it came to the sightseeing dimension of the sojourn, Lee was fairly sure that I would be wanting to tramp around the very turf where Cromwell made camp with the Roundheads; and ordinarily, of course, I would - but that's not really going to provide the requisite diversion for bairns, is it? In any case, it was classic turn-of-winter weather, hardly ideal for tramping.
Instead we had a fine late afternoon wander round the gardens of Audley End House, the former Walden Abbey, gifted by Henry VIII to Sir Thomas Audley - and the sort of magisterial estate that makes you marvel at the very thought that somebody once called it 'Home'. Late though we came to the tourist-oriented on-site proceedings, we made it at least to the kitchen shop and were able to enjoy a delightful jam-tasting, which was, obviously, just what the bairns had been after.

The invasion of Iraq, and the plain truth

Tony Blair's remark to CNN - concerning the current Chilcot inquiry and the rightness or wrongness of the Coalition invasion of Iraq - that he is 'happy to go through it all again', is likely to divide Blair's admirers and detractors as cleanly as a meat cleaver.
That division was never better exemplified in my eyes than by disparate columns last week from Sir Simon Jenkins in, I think, the Guardian, and John Rentoul in the Independent. Jenkins' sub-editor rather than Jenkins himself was presumably responsible for the headline 'We want Blair's head. But Chilcot won't give it to us.' (The Guardian is very good at speaking as 'We.') But Jenkins himself must be solely responsible for the following:
"We know the truth. The report can be written in a sentence. Tony Blair went to war in Iraq because he lacked the guts to stand up to George Bush, say the invasion was not justified by facts or law, and refuse to join him in Baghdad. Despite being told to his face by Hans Blix that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he deceived the cabinet and parliament and took his nation to war."
Now, quickly, compare with Rentoul on the same day:
"Everything important is known, with the kind of disclosure of official documents in the Hutton inquiry that would normally have taken 30 years or longer... in 2001 the British Government concluded that regime change in Iraq lacked a legal basis... the British view was always that regime change was inadequate legal basis for military intervention; that was why the legal basis was Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with UN disarmament resolutions."
In the gulf between these positions you will never see a meeting, and so like many I don't see the point of the Chilcot inquiry, which looks indeed to be rehashing old ground that was long ago sown with dragon's teeth and harvested bitterly.

Darcus Howe and the cunning of history

In 1981 the leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn, English-born but US-based, returned to the UK for the Village Voice to report on that year's spate of race riots and their originating tensions. Cockburn seemed to find most of what he was looking for in conversation with the then 38-year-old Darcus Howe, renowned Trinidadian-born activist. Reflecting on the Windrush moment of Caribbean immigration Howe made that familiar, plangent and suggestive recourse to the King James Bible, Joshua in this case: 'We were persuaded, encouraged to come to Britain, to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.' Howe's argument was that, while the West Indian generation who arrived in England were ready to put up with certain discomforts in the flux of the moment, their children would not suffer any such slight, or accept any misplaced burden of inferiority; and ought, indeed, to seek common cause with oppressed proletarian white kids. Howe was in favour of a 'black/white mass movement', one that would be necessarily unapproved of by the state. (He squeezed in a shot at the welfare system for its stifling of 'the political initiative of blacks.') And of course he was looking beyond Michael Foot's Labour Party, which in a broader dialectic manner he considered 'the creature of a certain moment in the material organisation of society.' On the decline of Labour (raised by Cockburn), Howe claimed to view this with optimism. But he also granted Cockburn's point that 'pathological symptoms, including racism, will increase as people fight on the scrap heap, as the economy goes down.'

I was reminded of all this tonight watching the beginning of a Darcus Howe season on More 4. Of course, subsequent to his interview with the Village Voice, Howe became a conspicuous filmmaker and presenter for Channel 4: first through the scholarly Bandung Productions, then as host/interrogator on the volatile Devil's Advocate. In 2000 he fronted a series called White Tribe, travelling well clear of London to investigate English identity: I recall him standing outside St James's Park, shaking his head over the pasty-facedness of the Toon Army, branding Newcastle (reasonably) 'the whitest of cities' and musing (rather more naively) that the natives 'were not English at all, they were Geordies. Their loyalty was to their team and to their city. England for them was another country.' (Precisely, and you need to have come lately to the question of English identity to imagine otherwise.)

Howe has since made films about racial hostilities between England's black and Asian populations; about his concerns for the children he's had by various women; and now about his struggle with prostate cancer - though this one, the kick-start for the new More 4 season, is somewhat unhelpfully coloured in the now-standard Jon Ronson manner by the presence of its director Krishnendu Majumdar, with whom Howe has worked previously.

In short, surveying this retrospective of the ‘charismatic black activist’ it's easy to see a story of Channel 4's gradual shift in interests from the polemical to the awkwardly personal - also, more reasonably, a familiar tale of the ageing process, that slow masterwork of Time, the Enemy.

The photo of Howe above is by and (c) Richard Ansett.

"We've got to get rid of Brown..."

Not my words, those, but my old student newspaper editor Peter Hyman's on tonight's Newsnight - a show that has an increasingly ragged, tendentious, feckless air to it in these bunker days that we're living through. Hyman surely reflects a Blairite consensus that would include, inter alia, the likes of his fellow former PM-speechwriter Phil Collins, John Rentoul with his AJ4PM campaign, and the retiring Stephen Byers MP of North Tyneside. But the midnight hour is nigh - can anyone be found among the Parliamentary Labour Party with sufficient backbone for the bloody work being proposed?
How bad could it be for Labour if the Party is electorally annihilated on Brown's watch? If he leads then he will lose, for sure - but how ruinously? One shudders a little at the thought of the floating voter weighing his feelings on another 5 years of Gordon's doughty individual conscience. And could Brown stick around after defeat and play a Michael Howard-like role in helping the team find a new young winning captain? Doesn't seem remotely likely, does it? No, the odds suggest he'd be off in high dudgeon as of May 31, still believing he was right, while Cameron got the removers round. By that measure, yes, Brown should take the bullet now, for all of our sakes.
Like John Rentoul I admired Blair more by the end of his premiership than at the start, when I found it hard to look at him, never mind listen. In that 'final act' swansong period of Blair's he made the stunning observation that, in respect of the century-old split in Labour's origins between proletarian ILP and namby-pamby Fabian, he felt himself to be naturally amidst the party of the former. That he could say this, whether or not he believed it, was part of my creeping regard for him.
His admirers are generally a less breathtaking lot. Last week as I watched Sally Keeble MP on Newsnight effectively warning Brown not to (further) estrange the middle-class Mumsnet crowd over the axing of subsidised childcare for kids of 2-years-plus, I felt ancient, decrepit hackles rising. Be it said, mine is one of those households very, very glad of said subsidy. But is it really, in Sally Keeble's eyes, the moral last ditch of a Labour government? Is it even worthy of consideration as an 'untouchable' in this, the moment of enforced cutbacks in government spending? At any rate, it's got the New Labour ultras rolling their eyes in O tempora fashion. I don't know if I want to sit beside those guys 'n' gals anyhow, and I'm not sure how many of them are really concerned about whether (as some surely hope) the green leather benches can be remuneratively traded for the boardroom. But since it's not my livelihood at stake here, I freely declare from my swivel chair, 'Yep, you've got to get rid of Brown.'

Sting: is from Wallsend

Like a lot of us (this blogger included), and, specifically, like many an entertainer of working-class origin (such as the late John Martyn), the former Gordon Sumner (known to the world as Sting) tends to deploy his native regional accent according to where he's standing and to whom he's talking. Fair play, but - he is from 'Wallsend on Tyne', as he calls it, and his thoughts on that locality and the wider North East are explored at very interesting length in his 2004 memoir Broken Music (which, for some odd reason, is available to browse online as a PDF here.) True, back in the early 1980s when he was en route to becoming a huge superstar he made some very disparaging remarks about Newcastle, making clear that the place had no claim on him and he had no time for misplaced industrial nostalgia. But similar frustrations have been voiced by more than a few artists of Geordie extraction, few of them famous enough to be on the cover of the Rolling Stone. And if you want to be a huge superstar you will probably have to take your leave of Wallsend on Tyne, at least for a fair old while.

Doing the PR rounds for his fine new record, which seems possessed by certain Northumbrian spirits, Sting has been sounding very Geordie, and that's clearly appropriate. Accordingly, people have been asking him what he reckons to the fortunes of the Toon. And in the course of consummately putting the boot into Simon Cowell's ghastly racket, he's paid homage to the pubs and clubs from whence he came as a lost hotbed of popular music. The fact that he now lives in a castle and has chateaux to spare in no way diminishes his points or his sincerity. And yet one sarky reviewer of aforementioned new record referred to Sting in passing as 'the world's most pompous man' - clearly he's yet to see Simon Cowell on ITV1. I've tuned in and out of Sting's stuff down the decades, and winced one or twice over certain ways in which he's chosen to express himself, but, really, what an embarrassment of musical talent this man has in his head and his fingertips, and what a commitment to a personal vision of what 'popular' music can be, whether played on a lute or a horn or in 9/8 time, whether inspired by the streets of Belfast or Buenos Aires - or just because of some girl. Back in 1983 'Every Breath You Take' was a tune I felt bored by after one hearing; now I don't think it's possible to write a more enduring, ingeniously 'simple' pop/rock ballad. Sting, of course, has moved on, though clearly he'll still play the oldies now and then. And were there to be a Sting Night on X Factor, per last night's pipsqueak protest-cum-invitation from La Cowell, I'm sure that song would be the one the karaoke kids fought among themselves for - rather than, say, 'I Hung My Head' or 'Synchronicity II.' However, I doubt Mr Sting will be blessing any such endeavour. I assume he just wanted to make a point. Point (annihilatingly) made.