Y'know, I once sat in a booth at Trader Vic’s in Hollywood with Tom Cruise and Claudia Schiffer, inter alia. I hadn’t invited them to join me, it was my booth, I was just sitting there drinking Wild Turkey and I suppose I could have told them to sling it. Instead, it was me who crept away, left the great ones to their symposium... What I did notice – it was Awards Night next door, and Cruise had been nominated but came out empty-handed – was how exceptionally, avidly pleasant and enthused Cruise was being to everybody, especially winners; but then so companionable was the mood he made that maybe even a schlump like me could have stuck around longer… On today’s Guardian my friend Ryan Gilbey writes about the inevitable usurpation of Cruise by Leonardo DiCaprio as Hollywood’s biggest male star. If you get to #1 the one thing you know for sure is you won’t always be there, but Cruise had an amazing run. DiCaprio is a brilliant actor and deserves every success. Cruise has done some good work in some good movies, but there are some notable offences in the oeuvre and the persona to consider also. What has to be respected is his work ethic. Ryan quotes adeptly from Sean Penn: His Life and Times, Sean talking about his work with Cruise on Taps when both were barely out of their teens: "This was a guy who was ready for his chance, no question about it. He wouldn't have known that himself – he was second-guessing everything all the time. But that didn't stop him from committing when it was time. Cruise was so . . . like he was training for the fucken Olympics. I think he was the first person I ever said 'Calm down!' to..."
Richard Darlington clearly has an important role at Demos but I don’t know whom he thinks he’s admonishing with this piece at Labour Uncut, wherein he laments a YouGov poll suggesting Labour is now thought ‘‘weak’ (73%), rather than strong (16%) and ‘divided’ (72%), rather than united (19%)’, also ‘out of touch’ and representing ‘‘the past’ rather than the future.’ That’s just what happens when you lose after 13 years in power, your beaten leader resigns, and you slouch over to Opposition benches, usurped by both larger parties that formerly sat there. No Labour leader could reverse these shallow, obvious perceptions right now, even if he or she were indubitably the one to lead the party to the new policy dawn Darlington rightly hopes is coming, but only after what will first have to be a long, slow dusk. Frankly, as an admonition I prefer the simple formulation of the Sun's "disenchanted Labour voter" cab-driver Grant Davis (46): "Whoever wins is going to have a massive job on their hands making Labour electable again." Grant is for Andy Burnham, as it happens, but that's a reasonable position to hold, if not my own, as you know...
For my Bookhugger column this month I was resolved already to write on Rob Young's splendid Electric Eden (of which you will surely read more elsewhere this month, the excellent blog-site in support of which is here.) But since music and its celebration in writing was the matter, and since Faber and Faber have serious form in this area, I thought I'd broaden the piece so as to say a little of the part in the story played by Pete Townshend, Faber's second-most-famous editor in the firm's history after Thomas Stearns Eliot. Townshend is also appropriate to any discussion of English music specifically, or of music as a higher (or lower, Chthonic) power, and such is the terrain of Rob Young's book. Anyhow, in writing up the piece I discovered on YouTube the 1985 South Bank Show on Townshend, and just wished to share with you a) the sheer genius of opening the show on an extreme close-up of Pete's vibrating strings as they are struck, and b) the commensurate genius of letting the emergent tune, Pete's 'Give Blood', run on over the opening credits as a replacement theme to the episode.
Since I'm Sean Penn's official biographer - a designation that never fails to generate surprise, amusement and/or bafflement in any social gathering to which it comes as news - I am rarely to be found in neutral mode when it comes to assessments of the worth of what Penn does with his time in this world. But I trust I'm not alone in thinking Sean's efforts for the cause of earthquake relief in Haiti are hugely honourable and commendable. This recent report by Guy Adams of the Independentdeserves to be more widely known. The photo of Sean putting his back into it is (c) Getty,
Further to my last... on the Guardian site today a theology lecturer called Luke Bretherton picks up and expounds on David Miliband's 'community' platform, pointing out some useful elements of the relevant British social history (also some things I never knew about 1930s Chicago...) and speaking very warmly of the CitizensUK organisation as a modern-day exemplar of grass-roots organisation. I don't quite agree with Bretherton that Gordon Brown's pre-election speech to Citizens London, drawing on 'his Presbyterian and Labour roots', was especially good or noteworthy, other than to the solid Labour faithful, who had surely heard sermons from Brown before, and to the Labour apparatchiks who'd been twisting and waiting in agony for the PM to get his game face on... But given Phillip Blond's coverage in recent months, clearly Labour needs some articulate theology lecturers on its side. The picture herewith is of the New Bearpark Lodge colliery banner, taken 27 July 1951, courtesy of Beamish Museum and the Durham Miner Project website.
'DM' gave a speech in Wales last week in honour of Keir Hardie, and I found the transcript impressive and well worth reading for numerous reasons. There are just two bits I want to comment on:
1. I owe to the excellent South Shields-born historian Robert Colls my conviction of recent years that the Independent Labour Party missed a trick (or else managed a sleight of hand) back in its formative years. To simplify Colls' arguments hugely (and I apologise for having mislaid the source reference): the late 1800s/early 1900s, certainly in the North of England, saw an extraordinary foment of working class culture and social-minded endeavour, based on the principle of 'the free union of individuals for the attainment of a common object.’ Colls cites 'the nonconformist and Methodist chapels and Sunday schools, the Cooperative Wholesale Society and Cooperative Union, and the national friendly societies, and after them, the allotment societies, the brass bands, voluntary bodies, sporting clubs, youth organizations and the like - which drew their members from the streets but which also projected their activities out on to a wider, civic world.' For Colls this foment wasn’t expressly 'socialist', but certainly socialistic. And, as he puts it, 'seen in this light, the emergence of a Labour party and a parliamentary road to socialism looks less like the culmination of an existing working-class politics and more like the beginning of a new, and rival, form. Nevertheless, the Labour party was nothing without the associations...' In other words, you might say, the working class had been getting on fine with organising itself, short of the Westminster representation bit...
Now then - here is David Miliband on the podium in Wales:
"The Independent Labour Party was self-organised. It brought together the co-operative movement, the building societies, the trade unions, all shades of faith communities into a broad based alliance for the common good… I don’t wish to simply be leader of the Labour Party. I seek to renew the Labour Movement – in idea and in organisation. Building relationships and a common life through common action for the common good in communities across the country. That is why part of my leadership campaign is the drive to train 1000 community leaders around the country – whether they vote for me or not..."
You see the problem(s)... First up, does an initiative to 'train 1000 community leaders' give any heartening sense of the pulse of 'common action' out there in the country? Or is it not the case, as Colls has often contended, that we talk all the more of community these days precisely because it's lost to us? More generally: is the Labour Party and its leader always and forever the best or most appropriate leader of 'the labour movement'? Pragmatically I'm used to saying yes, but when Miliband re-opens the annals in this fashion one does feel that slight and regrettable sense of entitlement within the belly of the Party beast. If DM thinks this 'renewal' he's proposing is a good idea in itself then good on him; doubtless he's aware it's not in itself going to refashion Labour as an electoral powerhouse, so that alone suggests he's doing it for love. Moreover would a Labour Party led by DM expect to be earning or inheriting the votes of all these communities he wants to link in with? But again, if he's not even bothered whether they vote for him then presumably he's not taking anything for granted.
2. This is just funny, if gratuitous:
"Why did Hardie refuse an alliance with the Liberals? Why did he insist that Labour had to be an independent party? It was not because he rejected the great causes of liberty – of freedom of the individual – but because he considered it vital that when the national interest is considered, the interests of working people are considered to be part of that. So that those who were then exploited and excluded could take their rightful place in the body politic and in the governance of our nation. Hardie said, repeatedly, that although there were many things that we can agree on with liberals, when it came to the conflict between capital and labour, between the banks and the real economy, they would always side with the Conservatives. He didn’t have a crystal ball, but he would have predicted that Nick Clegg would be busy defending a Conservative Budget over 100 years after he was elected MP for Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare..."
Sad to say, there is something quite specific in the collusion of the English summertime and the 24-hour news cycle that brings to undue prominence such a miserable story as that of the late Raoul Moat and the iniquitous violence he meted out to selected persons following his release from HMP Durham. Northumbria Police are going to face some harsh questioning over the length of the manhunt, but I'm not so sure it can be made any easier to hunt a man in difficult rural terrain that he happens to know very well. Nor am I sure it can be made much more rigorous to follow up on the many and varied threats and oaths uttered by prisoners as they prepare to exit prison. But I'm very sure we will learn more in days and weeks to come about Moat's professed grudge against the Northumbria force, who apparently arrested him on 12 occasions, and have charged him with seven separate offences at various times. I should confess that for a lot of last week I was unhappily reminded of the Tyneside demi-monde I looked into while writing Crusaders: specifically the fictional character of the Washington-born ex-bouncer Steve Coulson, both his body and his ability to enact violence massively inflated by steroids (his preferred ride also a black Lexus.) But if you take the length of this land then the tougher parts of Tyneside are hardly unusual in their creation (and mingled fear and admiration) of hard men. Often you hear efforts to mitigate the hardness through a sentimental local view of 'gentle giants', 'salt of the earth' and so forth. But such efforts have the feel of special pleading, or a bad conscience. And nobody who's been on the receiving end of iniquitous violence is ever fooled.
Last week I was chatting to an old friend, one of the most brilliant men I know – a Communist in his youth, undoubtedly a man of the Left thereafter – and he couldn’t have been more pleased about the ConDemNation, essentially on the grounds of Ken Clarke letting out the prisoners, fixed-term parliaments, having a capable Old Etonian in Number 10, and (my friend fondly imagines) the prospect of Tony Blair in the Hague for having ordered David Kelly’s death. ‘All my friends voted Lib Dem’, he told me. ‘Don’t tell me you voted Labour…!?’
John Rentoul would think my friend a certain psychological type (‘Blair-Hater’), though there are issues on which the two of them would agree: ‘Labour’, my friend scoffed very accurately, ‘spend their last months writing cheques they knew would bounce’ – and so, goes the argument, Labour must be mindful of how they criticise those doing the harrowing now. Still, Labour’s task is easier when George Osborne reneges on the pledge to preserve capital spending. The spiffy Michael Gove didn’t look too 'progressive' the other day, halting all those school builds and riposting to Labour, ‘What would you cut?’ Labour’s current mouthpieces famously don’t always have a ready answer, but I think they can be trusted for a sensible view on rotting Nissen huts that continue to serve as schoolhouses. (I’m more and more bewildered too as to why the NHS was ring-fenced. I don’t know 'what I would cut', was I President of Freedonia, but presumably a lot of it would be done line by line, and I’m pretty sure I'd know how to start there with the NHS.) Labour have it easier still when the slavering Tory blogger Guido Fawkes freely derides Danny Alexander as 'Beaker' while cheering on 'Beaker''s doltish but concerted axe-wielding. Thus your actual ideological Tory: let’s cut now, hard as humanly possible, it’ll hurt all the right sorts and come 2015 we’ll have the world turned rightside up and a ‘proper’ tax-cutting Budget. To this tumescence are the Lib Dems the soapy handmaidens. Veteran Commons sketch writer Simon Hoggart had some good sport with Clegg the other day, saying that he ‘often has the air of a schoolboy who has spent too long in his bedroom, working out plans for an imaginary country that exists only in his head.... an ideal state in which justice, fairness and sheer practicality fight each other for position.’
I think Hoggart astutely skewers a certain sort of Lib Dem sanctimony, but misses the actual nastiness of Clegg, so evident in his snide grin – not the debating society nerd, rather the seemingly dull but straight-arrow chap who secretly fancied being the Bully of Upper Sixth. For the moment I can’t think of a more risible, self-impressed figure in high-level British politics within my lifetime than Nick Clegg – and yes, I’m including John Prescott in that. It’s just the appalling inverse ratio of votes to status that goes on offending. During Clegg’s brief and imaginary ‘popularity’ prior to polling day, Christopher Hitchens (for whom Clegg once interned at The Nation, and who seemed to find him likeable) observed that ‘British society is actually a three-party system stitched and corseted into a two-party duopoly.’ I think, though, that the coalition exposed that notion as folly. Steve Richards argued today that ‘[a]s some of Cameron's allies recognised long ago, there was no gap between them and Clegg on the central issue of the economy, public spending and the role of the state. On the other side of Clegg's party are those who are closer to being social democrats…’ But the lesson is: it’s a duopoly really, all that matters is to which wing the Lib Dems peel off on the big issues once they have to; and once Clegg had compared the unions to non-dom Tory potentates like Lord Ashcroft then we knew for sure what way he peeled.
Many a pundit has thrown back at Clegg his pre-power conviction that the AV voting system would be ‘miserable little compromise.’ In response Clegg usually offers a lecture on the duties of power and leadership, which often involve miserable little compromises (Nick in his own person happening to be one such...) But I’m interested to be having a vote on electoral reform next May, though I’ve never been a fan of the notion, and I’ll wait to see how the arguments by those wiser than me stack up. The hopeless Mary Riddell wrote lately that for Labour ‘[to] vote No would be a move against progress and a sign that Labour is a disunited, foot-dragging party, committed to the broken, first past the post system for tactical reasons.’ Oh, the dishonour! Tactical reasons! Simon Jenkins, whom I generally like not one bit, calls it right when he says AV is no sort of ‘progress’, merely a redistribution of a man’s honest vote, ‘away from liking towards ‘not disliking’’. Jenkins continues: ‘Clegg is for AV because it helps his party, and Cameron and Labour will fight it at a referendum because it does not help them. The electorate is bored by the topic. Clegg is almost certain to lose, which will enrage his party and leave him with a bloodied nose and the coalition weakened.’ Good show. I can’t say I don’t like the sound of those tactics, or that imagined outcome. Presumably Mary Riddell thinks Labour need some more of that thrusting New Politics dynamism we’ve all heard so much of, until we vomited. Well, Mary, a week is plenty long in politics, and the time remaining before Labour elects a new leader still stretches in the distance, but the next election is still aeons away, during which time you and the rest of us should try to keep thinking. For now, Labour should attack the coalition partners whenever they see fit. Let’s see where we’ve got to in a few years. And finally, what news of my man David Miliband? It’s rumoured the Unite union are working out who to back (which ‘Stop David’ candidate) expressly in order to frustrate the hopes of the ‘Blairite’ candidate. Elsewhere DM put his name to a fairly blah column about Englishness in the New Statesman and gave a not-bad Telegraph interview (to Mary Riddell…) wherein he properly regretted the Iraq war’s ‘toll in British and Iraqi life’, properly abhorred the prospect of the coalition’s ‘constitutional gerrymandering’ and reasonably marked his priorities as education, crime and anti-social behaviour. In short, it's like Blair were in the room, a little humbled by recent history, nonetheless feeling its hand on his shoulder...
These, the words of Andy Carroll, as reported last weekend, Andy seemingly having decided to resist the mighty lure of Stoke City, and whatever Stoke has to offer by way of nightlife. Well said, Andy lad - now don't ever make us doubt you... And if you could see your way to a towering header for the winner at Old Trafford on Monday August 16 then I'd carry you into the Blu Bambu on my own bliddy shoulders...
Ah, The Exorcist... What frightful pleasure it's given down the years in the many and varied forms it’s taken (thus following the fashion of Satan himself, with his legion of names and faces.) I must have been 10 or 11 when some schoolmates and I discovered William Peter Blatty’s bestselling shocker of a novel: we passed it round, taking gleeful turns to read aloud the grossest, most horrendous bits (not all of which I quite ‘understood.’) William Friedkin’s extremely frightening movie version wasn’t nearly so accessible at that time, but I had definitely seen it by the late 1980s, when my brother was studying at Georgetown University and, in the course of a stroll through the neighbourhood, pointed out to me those infamous ‘Exorcist steps.’ Ten years later, in my editorial chair at Faber and Faber, I prepared an edition of Blatty’s screenplay for publication and had a number of chats with Bill Blatty himself, a highly affable and courteous man who always addressed me as ‘Rich’ and seemed very pleased that I was interested in the fortunes of the Georgetown Hoyas college teams. A few years after that, I oversaw a revised edition of Kevin Jackson’s marvellous book of interviews with Paul Schrader, at the point where Paul was putting the final touches on Exorcist: The Beginning, the third official sequel (actually a prequel) to Friedkin’s movie. You may know what happened next: Schrader was removed from his post after screening the film for his studio financier, and Renny Harlin was hired to shoot from scratch a less cerebral, tackier and more effects-heavy version. I confess I still haven’t managed to see Paul’s cut, though it looks terrific, but the Harlin was on telly last week and the low calculation of it was there for all to see. That said, it's hard to blame the suits for finally trying to do what some Exorcist sequel surely had to do if it was seriously looking for a place in the market: namely, to resurrect the Linda Blair model of the foul-looking, foul-mouthed female demon: as I call her in Ten Bad Dates, ‘a vile goblin who masturbates with a crucifix, knows all your dirty secrets, vomits forth obscene insults like bile, and also vomits forth a good deal of bile.’ The other obvious move was to get more of that Captain Howdy stuff going. Howdy (pictured) is of course the name little Regan MacNeil gives to her ‘imaginary friend’ in the early stages of her possession, and the name Exorcist fans gave cheerfully to the demonic face glimpsed in subliminal flashes during the movie. Warners certainly didn't stint on Howdy in the trailer below for Friedkin's 1973 original, a trailer that apparently had to be suppressed for being too disturbing, to which one could fairly say, too bloody right.
My column for Bookhugger this month is about Christopher Hitchens and his memoir Hitch-22; or at least about one aspect of the book and of Hitchens' life, which is the making and unmaking of friends as a consequence of one's political convictions. There are many other aspects of the book I would have happily addressed too, but then I hope one day I may find myself down the pub with someone else who's read it... This photo from 1990 of Hitchens and his second wife Carol Blue is by Annie Liebovitz. Enough said.
I’m almost sure that some ostensibly hip and politically active writer for the NME or maybe The Face circa 1983/4 availed himself of the view that what Labour needed for its leadership was ‘a funky politician’ – presumably meaning some Brother or Sister whose record collection ran from Nile Rodgers through to Gil Scott-Heron. What Labour got that year was Neil Kinnock cameoing in a Tracy Ullman video. But the prescription was wrong anyway: politicians shouldn’t be funky, there’s always far too much for them to be getting on with. What they need is to be able to unwind at the close of the day with a loved one and some nice Easy Listening. That’s what David Miliband does, presumably, no funky politician he – there’s can hardly be any other excuse for his selection of 'Desert Island Discs' as requested by Labour Uncut, which are: Sting – Englishman in New York Elvis Costello – Oliver’s Army Fritz Kreisler – Liebeslied Sibelius – Violin Concerto Shostakovich – Symphony No.10 James Taylor – How sweet it is (to be loved by you) Elton John – Your Song The Beatles – All you need is love Still, mark you some meanings, intended or otherwise. He picks the symphony that Shostakovich unveiled in safety once Stalin was finally six feet under, and the Costello track in which the great man waxed sardonic on ‘visions of mercenaries and imperial armies around the world...’
For me as for many, I suspect, the merchant bankers snagged by TV news cameras supping in Corney & Barrow last night (could have been any C&B, didn't matter) looked altogether too relieved and thirsty and ready for the weekend. Not that I didn’t want the markets to approve the ‘Unavoidable Budget’™, you understand – au contraire. I was just fantasising that the markets' handmaidens might have to feel as sober and filled with foreboding as the rest of us, at least for an evening. Because I have no imagination I couldn’t foretell any of yesterday’s Budget except for what had been leaked, plus the surety that Nick Clegg would be talking it up weasel-style in front of a camera and his imaginary legion of fans. I almost didn’t want to buy outright the Krugman thesis that we are on the brink of a historic error, austerity in a time of weak demand. And I didn’t fancy going along automatically with Alastair Campbell’s tribal reading of the runes: “...George Osborne puts the fragile recovery at risk with his ideological onslaught on public services, by pretending the economy is worse than it is, and using the quisling Lib Dems as political cover.”
However, it seems clear today that the poorest areas and people in this country have been disproportionately hit by Osborne’s cleaver. As Tory minister Bob Neill put it with such candour a few weeks back, "those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt." (Eh?) Anthony Painter gave a strong response today: “any group that disproportionately relies on benefits will be marginalised, plunged into poverty, and facing despair. This is not the way it’s meant to be. Not in a decent, relatively wealthy society. The basic post-war compact on support and advancement for all in exchange for doing the responsible thing was broken yesterday. Not only lone parents, but also those who are poor, mentally impaired or incapacitated, the disabled, certain minority groups, and anyone relying on benefits to get by.”
Now, to say quickly - I do appreciate the rebuttal that to live 'disproportionately' on benefit is not right for any capable and able-bodied person, and in those cases should not be encouraged/tolerated. I agree that the public sector contains waste (and by that I include the NHS) and that Labour was going to have to cut big too. I’m not in fear of 'Bankrupt Britain' but I can feel the horror in the concept of interest on national debt exceeding the economy’s growth rate. I just haven’t ever trusted the Conservatives to do the harrowing – they’ve never been notably skilful at it. But I agree with Hopi Sen that it’s not a case of 'whether' but of ‘whose public sector pensions and pay should be cut.’ (Even John Redwood seemed to show some appreciation of the case for exemption of the low-paid public servant on Newsnight last week.)
And still, the thought of 25% less spending by government departments is stomach-churning. Surely paying more tax would be cheaper? This blog favoured the D. Miliband ratio of spending cuts to tax rises (2:1) rather than what looks like the 77-23 split of G. Osborne. That would be what’s properly called ‘a progressive alternative’, if the tax rises were sensibly applied to some of the sorts of ‘middle and high-income earners’ who were feeling so cheery round the bars of Broadgate and Exchange Square last night. But, but… I also acknowledge and defer to what John Rentoul described the other day as: “a strong “tree” bias (“Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that man behind that tree,” as Andrew Dilnot, formerly of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, once surprised me by chanting in a television interview).” And if everyone with taxable earnings between £37K and £150K is to be taxed at 40%, and at 50% above that, then that’s about as much income tax as I would have thought proper or permissible.
I do understand the thinking and appeal of a firm smack from government so as to teach that Britain should ‘live within its means.’ But the other day John Redwood did that quaint Tory thing of comparing the nation’s economy to a domestic household knuckling down to unavoidable frugality: ‘I know it is asking a lot for an outbreak of commonsense by public sector CEOs in councils and quangos. But can they spare us the crocodile tears and the parade of the bleeding stumps? Can they do what any household or company does when faced with a few percent off their income? Just get on and manage it in the least damaging way possible.’ Redwood’s analogies, however, were all drawn Margaret-style from good Grantham housekeeping: (‘You can holiday nearer at home… eat in more than in the local restaurants… draw some money out of the savings account... buy more of the value items at the supermarket, and put more vegetarian dishes into the home menus.’) I’m sure a great many Britons have come to terms with the end of their excessive consumption based on borrowing, and so would fit Redwood’s model. If you are a company, though, then you just have to fire a proportion of your staff. And if you are someone who never earned enough to have significant savings, or weren’t reared on a middle-class diet, and did all your eating indoors on ‘value items’ anyway… What commonsense homily has John Redwood got to tell you then?
Labour has to offer an alternative, of course. No sitting on the hands. I further agree with Hopi Sen that this alternative ‘needs to be built on creating growth’, ‘we need to create jobs to grow’, and so we ‘need to be talking about measures to support private sector job creation and these can’t be simply extensions of State Aid.’ For sure, with all these benefit cuts we’re looking at a big reserve army of the unemployed. But, really, where will the jobs come from? Can anyone say? They’re hardly going to emerge blithely when people are afraid to spend, businesses afraid to invest, and our imagined export markets are outbidding each other in the austerity stakes, Germany 'leading by example' etc.
This World Cup is getting good, people. Argentina were admirably patient tonight in their disposal of Greece, inspired by their entirely-correctly-rated talisman, whom the coach properly kept in the starting XI ("I think it would be a sin", Maradona told the press, "not to give Messi to the people, to the team...") Brazil and Portugal showed their essential beauty to best advantage the other day. Holland are safely through and capable of better. I keep everything crossed for Germany and for Spain. Right then, who’s left…?
Sean Whelan, blogging from the World Cup for NUFC site True Faith, is presumably one Mag who’s shouting for The Ingerland, if we judge by the ‘we’ in his screed below. But on that basis his opinion of David Beckham’s presence on the England bench can be taken as less one-eyed, or more rounded, than mine (which is that Beckham is, quite clearly, one of the most disastrous liabilities ever to appear for England at (5!) major finals.) But forget me - come in, Sean:
‘David Beckham is p***ing me off. The players must be getting annoyed with him. If you’re not playing well, you don't need that self-obsessed whopper moaning on the bench. He's only there for his own benefit, he needs to be seen at the World Cup to promote the Beckham brand. He's a footballer, not a chief executive, so why wear a three-piece suit? Hair immaculate, the bloke's a w***er. He stopped being a serious footballer when he left Man Utd 6/7 years ago to become a bit part player at Madrid. As for going to America, well, it's a joke. He should be doing what Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs are doing at Man Utd. Scholes shows Beckham up for what he is; a flash c*** - more concerned with fame and fortune than football. I wish we had a Roy Keane in the squad just to grab that perma-tanned phoney by the throat and tell him how it is...’
A great friend of mine once told me feelingly how much he hated arranging his family’s summer holiday too far in advance: ‘You get it booked then you wait and it never comes’ was his existential complaint. Thus, the burden of hope and expectation that falls on an English summer, and the shadowing sense of inevitable disappointment - some of which I find myself feeling whenever I see Magritte's famous 'Empire of Light' (pictured). This morning London bathes in high June heat, pools of shade and light glinting off any exposed hard surface. It’s the longest day of the year, and for me that always comes too soon, feels like a premature curtain drawn down on the possibility of ‘Summer.’ ('Dark nights coming now, just you watch...') But maybe it’s part of the process, the turning of the earth, the subjective experience of Time. 21 years ago this month I sat my Eng Lit A level paper, composing my no-doubt deathless responses to a set of classic texts that included The Great Gatsby: the sort of novel a young person should read regardless of curriculum, and which will linger in the mind of any reader. Today is the day in the calendar when I always think of that enviable nameless sylph at one Gatsby soiree who says: "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year... Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." I only wish I could be so negligent… For me, though, the tenor is more in line with Tom Waits as ‘Benny’, the ponderous soda fountain proprietor in Francis Coppola’s Rumblefish – my favourite movie when I was 14, and still a cracker, I assume: "Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. Y'see, when you're young, you're a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years here, a couple of years there... it doesn't matter. Y'know? The older you get you say, "Jesus, how much I got left? I got thirty-five summers." Think about it. Thirty-five summers..." That many? Still, what are we waiting for?
Glimpsed in South Africa (courtesy of Getty images): the maestro, Zizou - brooding, quite likely, on this tournament's dysfunctional Domenech-led French team, as opposed to the previous tournament's dysfunctional Domenech-led French team, whom Zidane nonetheless managed to drag, as if single-handed and Sisyphean, to the brink of a second golden trophy. Would that he were out on the field this time too, doing (some of) that voodoo only he can do...
Not yet glimpsed in South Africa: much quality or verve or excitement, despite the outbreaks of local enthusiasm. I don't require the glut of goals so much as the quality play, from sides looking a bit less glum and gone in the legs (so speaks the Supreme Athlete, from his bathchair...)
The home nation's impending exit (barring a great result against the dysfunctional blah-blah French) is a major downer. Spain's misfire last night has me gloomy, too. My man in black-and-white, Jonas Gutierrez, is being played by Maradona as a defender due to Argentine injury bother. And I don't intend to spend the next 3 weeks just cheering on Miroslav Klose (another version of My Kind of Player.) What's wanted is a bit of magic from The Man in the #10 Shirt - yes, shirt of Zidane, Maradona, Platini, Pele, Puskas. That's where the inciting genius is usually found. So play up, Kaka, Messi, Podolski, Fabregas, Sneijder! Make sure you'll all be around come the knock-outs, then go do that voodoo that you do so well...
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.
Strange to recall that nearly nine years have passed since the day I called in as a visitor to the Saville Inquiry in Derry. It was on Monday, June 25 2001, that I stepped inside the Guildhall, out of a sunlit Derry afternoon, and found a breathtaking technical operation in progress. The Guildhall’s Gothic main chamber had been converted into what Richard Harvey – barrister representing the family of Jim Wray, a victim of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – called ‘Courtroom Starship Enterprise’. Sixty lawyers sat in attendance, a great nest of black crows: three for each victim, plus a group representing the paratroopers. Each was fitted out with a personal computer and a lectern from which they could question the witness, and such was the crowd in the chamber that each QC found himself gesturing to get the witness’s attention so that proceedings could commence. Large screens were suspended from the oak-beamed ceiling, displaying close-ups of highlighted transcript passages, contemporary photographs, and even a VR recreation of the Bogside, reviving the long since demolished Rossville Flats. As a witness testified, they could refer to a virtual panorama of the Bogside, move around 360 degrees, even draw on the screen with a marker in the manner familiar to us from sports programmes on TV. Taking the stand during my visit was Ms. Susan North, an Englishwoman in her mid-50s, elegant in a cream dress, pearls, and a hennaed bob. Her job as assistant to photo-journalist Fulvio Grimaldi brought her into the Bogside throng that day. When the shooting started she and others sought refuge in the Rossville flats. To get into a particular flat she had to step over the body of 17 year old Kevin McElhinney, shot dead as he tried to crawl to safety in a stairwell. Once in the flat, she and Grimaldi had to dive for cover as incoming shots were fired through the window. Ms North’s tape recording of this gunfire was played in silence that day at the Guildhall. Much argument ensued about a pretty well inaudible remark transcribed as ‘Let me get the bombs out first’: Ms North remembered hearing or seeing nothing of the sort. She did meet a man with a pistol in his pocket, who was afraid of being ‘lifted’, as they say in the North. And in the streets she saw more fallen bodies, people who’d been shot – five dead, three wounded. ‘Even the most hardened person’, she told the Tribunal calmly, ‘could not fail to have been touched by the monstrous scene.’ David Cameron’s speech to the Commons this afternoon, relaying the main findings of Saville’s Inquiry, moved me considerably. Not that I have any personal stake in the matter, you understand – it’s simply to do with the accumulated tensions of it, which anyone can feel who has read and reflected on the history. It’s reckoned that ‘The Troubles’ claimed 3526 lives, and certain parties will insist on arranging these names in columns and imagining that a slide rule can show beyond doubt which side was more sinned against than sinning. The poet Thomas Kinsella lamented the tragedy very well albeit at what turned out, sadly, to be a very early stage in the conflict: ‘There are too many dead, on all sides, and it is no use pitting them hideously against one another.’ What we now know for a fact is that in the Bogside district of Derry on Sunday, January 30 1972, at the culmination of a march by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against internment without trial, unarmed Catholic demonstrators were purposely shot dead by soldiers of the First Battalion Parachute Regiment under Colonel Derek Wilford. We know this now in spite of the subsequent inquiry of Lord Chief Justice Widgery, who decided swiftly and erroneously that Wilford’s men had met IRA gunfire as they entered the Bogside, and that several of the thirteen rioters then ‘dropped’ by Para sharpshooters were themselves armed.
Y'know, I once sat in a booth at Trader Vic’s in Hollywood with Tom Cruise and Claudia Schiffer, inter alia. I hadn’t invited them to join me, it was my booth, I was just sitting there drinking Wild Turkey and I suppose I could have told them to sling it. Instead, it was me who crept away, left the great ones to their symposium... What I did notice – it was Awards Night next door, and Cruise had been nominated but came out empty-handed – was how exceptionally, avidly pleasant and enthused Cruise was being to everybody, especially winners; but then so companionable was the mood he made that maybe even a schlump like me could have stuck around longer…
