Fathers should have deep voices, and Gordon Brown’s bass is now so profound that he makes Paul Robeson sound like an Elizabethan counter-tenor. Over the past weeks these tones seem to have reassured an electorate, brought up on rock, at some sub-aural emotional level, unreachable by the pipings of Boy Cameron or the great-uncling emanating from the figure of Sir Menzies Campbell.
As Peter Riddell wrote yesterday, this voice has established its right to speak from the very centre of power, partly by not being the weird OCD-sufferer depicted by his critics, unable to cope with people, bus tickets and lavatories. Mr Brown is continuity and change at the same time: Not-Blair, but still massively experienced in government, and just the chap you want around when threatened by bluetongue. In any case, who needs new when you’re facing old-fashioned crises over terrorism, floods, runs on the bank or agriculture? In three months Mr Brown has shown that he is probably the most deeply serious and substantial politician currently at work in this country.
Naturally, there has been much nonsense spoken and written about this apparent transformation from grumpy bastard to Father of the Nation. Take the notion that the country is grateful that the dodgier presentational arts are no longer practised in No 10. On which basis we must believe that, last week, some lunch-timing staffer spotted an old lady dressed in red wandering about near the Cenotaph, muttering “I used to live round here” and took pity on her, just as a group of press photographers on an office outing happened to be passing. And did the Glaswegian “Have a Go Hero” John Smeaton, holidaying by chance in Bournemouth yesterday, mistake the conference centre for a cinema, only to find himself starring in the movie he was watching? I don’t think so.
Continue reading "We heard the deep voice. But what lies behind it?" »
Chichester. The weekend. Enter that lovely man Sir Derek Jacobi, the actor-manager and playwright Mark Rylance and the 300 signatories of the “declaration of reasonable doubt” into whether Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare. These doubters include professors of literature, a bulse of distinguished thespians and – pressed into posthumous service – past geniuses such as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud.
In evidential terms, say these querying anti-Stratfordians, there are too many anomalies and unanswered questions. Such as (take a breath): “not one play, not one poem, not one letter in (his) own hand has ever been found”; he signed his name badly and in shaky writing; his will “contains no clearly Shakespearean turn of phrase”. And lots more in the same vein.
All these things are true. But they contend with some awkward confirmations of the essential truth of William Shakespeare of Stratford having been an actor-playwright at theatres where his plays were produced, and being attributed with authorship of the plays we associate with him. No one in the 17th century doubted his authorship, and contemporaries regarded him as a great poet. And an elaborate hoax or fraud would have to have been perpetrated over two decades by someone seeking to disguise authorship of plays that were popular but not seditious.
Fundamentally, anti-Stratfordianism comes down to one proposition: Shakespeare was too low-class to have been a literary genius. By contrast Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, “received an education incomparable among his peers, exactly the kind one would expect of the writer who was destined to become Shakespeare”. Though, problematically, he was dead at the time of the first production of all of Shakespeare’s later plays.
Continue reading "What links Shakespeare and the McCanns?" »
Along with my good wishes and personal papers that my daughters will inherit, on my death, this piece of advice for dealing with the world: always, my dears, reverse the stat. So, if a polling headline tells you that an extraordinary 50 per cent of people questioned think A, remind yourselves that the corollary of this is that a possibly far more incredible 50 per cent don’t.
Yesterday we discovered, courtesy of the publicity for a new study from the Institute of Education, that the child of a labourer is six times more likely to suffer extreme poverty by the time he or she reaches 30 than the child of a lawyer. This seems amazing until you apply Old Aaronovitch’s rule, and realise that this means that a lawyer’s child is only six times less likely to suffer poverty than a labourer’s child. And that really did surprise me.
If I’m sniffy about the top claim, I’m not all dismissive of the Institute’s report. Entitled Reducing Inequalities and using a cohort study of 17,000 people born in 1970, it has discovered a complete hierarchy of risk, with plumber’s children likely to do better than bus driver’s kids, who in turn fare less badly than the progeny of shop assistants. It’s an important study and is being taken to show how increased social mobility, despite all the Government’s efforts, remains an elusive aspiration.
Even so, I would have thought that it represented a considerable negative achievement for the child of a lawyer to become poor. You would really, one imagines (and I know many lawyers), have to struggle to get to the bottom. In the modern world only addiction or a decision to become a writer could really explain such a descent.
Continue reading "If the rich stay rich, what happens to the poor?" »
A few weeks ago, readers will recall, there was a something of a bad press day for the firm of Levy and Son here in the JC. First there was the letter from a judge, Barrington Black, regretting that he could not rejoice in the decision by the CPS not to prosecute anyone — including Lord Levy — in the so-called “cash for honours” case. There had to be — despite the decision — “lingering concern”, and His Honour also seemed to question the rumoured CPS judgment about the admissibility of certain evidence. “It is still well accepted,” he wrote, “that it is possible for circumstantial evidence to be put before a jury, subject to careful direction.”
If you cut through the ponderous language here, you seem to discover an exciting proposition, and one that owes more to Judge Roy Bean and border justice than to British jurisprudence. Which, essentially, is that whatever the law says (which is that there wasn’t even a prosecutable case to answer), Barrington Black privately thinks Lord Levy is guilty as hell and ought to go down for it.
That his view was that lynch law ought to apply appeared to be confirmed by the astonishing final paragraph of his letter. This referred, a propos of nothing legal, to the poor “public perception” that the case had created of both the Labour Party and “the Jewish community”, before signing off by making an entirely illogical link between cash-for-honours and Lord Levy’s role as Middle East envoy.
Continue reading "In defence of Lord Levy and son (Jewish Chronicle)" »
Bank Holiday Monday, North London, and the adolescent boy suddenly emerged from the shop doorway, a mobile-clutching friend beside him. “Excuse me,” he said, “But do you know the way to the Tinseltown café, please?” I showed him where to go, and he thanked me. If he had a gun, a knife, a cosh, a lack of respect for authority or gang membership, he kept them well hidden. Was this polite boy too, I asked myself on the way to Tesco, typical of modern society? Or are violence and abuse the only things that count? They’re certainly more exciting.
Two days earlier we were preparing to drive to my nephew’s wedding in Sussex when a magazine called The Salisbury Review dropped through my letter-box. Started up by the conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton and named after the Victorian PM rather than the cathedral city, TSR describes itself as an organ of thought, hoping to demonstrate that conservative opinion is “varied, fertile and catholic”.
The articles, specially chosen from the last few years of the magazine’s history, seemed to me to be neither varied nor catholic, and I had doubts about their fertility. But they certainly did represent a strand of thinking that I recognised from many letters, e-mails and Today’s Papers slots on the radio.
Continue reading "The story of a happy wedding and a sad magazine" »
Years ago someone (I forget who) told me it was because of the sand; men who live in deserts are liable to get grit where it most isn’t wanted and where it unfortunately doesn’t turn to pearls. So the religious leaders of the desert folk — who doubled up as wise persons and doctors — transformed a rather radical way of dealing with the possibilities of sub-preputial inflammation, into a supernatural injunction. QED.
In the past few weeks there has been a smattering of brit talk. There was the claim that circumcision diminished the chances of Aids, though safe sex still seems to me to be a better and less contingent option. And there was the news about how an increasing number of Jewish men were reluctant to have their sons circumcised, possibly seeing the operation as a rather violent intrusion.
This chat just got me interested in the why of it all. Of course, to some believers God told Abraham to do it, and what more do you really need to know? But it’s the anthropology and the psychology that are really fascinating here — so if you want a pretend-medical discussion of penile hygiene or (heaven forfend) a women-prefer-X debate on genital aesthetics, look for the appropriate internet site.
All right; God made his covenant with Abraham. So why, any child would ask the ineffable, might a God, creator or created, want that particular covenant? Sand was one answer, both simple and glib, but theologically unsatisfying. There are other hot places where the local religions don’t demand this particular form of sacrifice, or require it later in life, and other body parts one might modify to take account of weather conditions.
Continue reading "The real logic of circumcision (Jewish Chronicle)" »
This was sent to me by an old comrade, name of Charlie Wood..................
"Hi Dave, we last met at the CP students caucus at the NUS conference in 1979. I recollect you sat cross legged on the table half asleep whilst Sally Hibbin went through the amendments in her role as student organiser, it seems like another world does'nt it??. I would be delighted if you would permit your many readers to read my blog 'An Unrepentant Communist' http://unrepentantcommunist.blogspot.com/ which shows that at least one of us in that room has not altered their views as much as you have, (which of course is no claim to being right !!). Nevetheless I still would like to keep an old fashioned CP -type flag flying in the blogosphere and perhaps a post on your blog may help.."
And here it is.
It is good to know that, by the time summer’s rains give way to autumn’s hurricanes, what Xenophilius Lovegood had to say to a scar-faced boy wizard concerning the Resurrection Stone and the Elder Wand will be informing the actions of our Liberal Democrat MPs. It feels more reassuring, however, that Tory MPs were planning – less demotically but more virtuously – to plough through William Hague’s biography of William Wilberforce. Don’t you agree that it is so important that our rulers should have a proper sense of history?
Now substitute the word “physics” for “history” in all those sentences that seem to appear four or five times a week, uttered by this academic or that think-tank, and lamented over by columnists and leader writers. Is it vital that every child should have a grounding in physics? Is it necessary that every senior politician should have a keen understanding of physics? Is the operation of the physical world an essential part of comprehending the world we live in? Is it heck as like.
Is the physics curriculum too narrow? Is it repetitive? Is it well taught? Do pupils give up physics too early? Who knows? But everyone with more than two GCSEs and a humanities degree to rub together has an opinion on the teaching of, and learning from, history.
Continue reading "The lessons of history? That’s a lot of bunk" »
There was something awe-inspiring about the scale of the disaster enveloping Central England yesterday. From Pangbourne on the Thames to Tewkesbury under the Severn, and a score of places besides, locals seemed overwhelmed by the deluge of television reporters that had descended upon them. The luckiest journalists stood on bridges with roaring rivers as a backdrop, the less fortunate organised themselves a shallow lake or a watery road, the effect often subverted by the kids on bicycles riding over the supposedly impassable floodwaters. In Gloucester, by a large puddle, the BBC news was securely anchored by Kate Silverton, wearing a distressed expression and an even more distressed maroon waterproof. George Alagiah circled overhead in a helicopter, rescuing no one.
The perils of this inundation were obvious. The BBC website carried one item inviting the flooded to send their pictures “and moving footage” to a web address, and another informing readers that motorists who had stopped to photograph the floods had been slammed by the police for “endangering themselves and other road users”. From Standlake in Oxfordshire (“where the Windrush meets the Thames”) a reporter periodically stopped volunteers filling sandbags so that she could interview them. Then there was the danger of runoff from the concerned furrows of Silverton’s brow.
There is a rubric for moments like this, and it’s usually a slightly silly one. “Chaos” refers to irritating disruption, not a state of anarchy; “tales of human misery” don’t signify imminent death, but pensioners being taken upstairs and given hot meals by volunteers; “a wall of water . . . expected to roar down the Thames through the heart of England” is an abrupt rise in river levels, not an inland tsunami.
Continue reading "Flood alert: pay up or keep your fingers crossed" »
Last week a breeze of excitement rippled through the bruschetta crowd. Certain Labour Party members, almost all BBC radio presenters and just about everyone I heard being interviewed on the subject, became animated by the possibility that Gordon Brown had a new and admirable attitude towards the Americans. He was distancing himself from them, no doubt about it. This warm zephyr was mingled with a mightier blast from across the Atlantic, to the effect that the Americans were also distancing themselves from themselves. Everywhere the fantasy of disengagement was being dreamt.
In fact, the evidence for the first proposition was slight, but the will to interpret it was great. You will recall that Douglas Alexander, the Secretary of State for International Development, was seen as being critical of the Bush Administration when he suggested that states should be seen as being great as much because of what they might create as what they could destroy. Since it is a matter of art in the galleries, theatre bars and green rooms that the only country that ever destroys anything is America, Mr Alexander’s speech was capable of just one understanding. His aspirational passage running “internationalist not isolationist; multilateralist not unilateralist; active not passive” – a peroration learnt at the feet of T. Blair – was ignored.
Such a reading seemed sensible following the interview that Sir Mark Malloch Brown, the Minister for Africa, Asia and UN, gave to The Daily Telegraph. His “not joined at the hip” comment either suggested a shift in policy, or else it was meaningless. Happy days, implied a relieved-sounding Mike Gapes, Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Now he and his colleagues were free to be more critical.
Continue reading "Someone wake me from this nightmare of withdrawal" »
Why, asked my American friend yesterday, concerning the furore over Alastair Campbell’s diaries, “are the English so up their own asses?” The thing seemed simple to him. In the US publication follows resignation as pension follows job. George Tenet, Director of the CIA till the summer of 2004, published At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA within 30 months. The former counter-terrorism boss, Richard A. Clarke, completed Against All Enemies rather faster than that. In both cases the ensuing argument was about the accuracy of their claims, rather than the probity of their bibliographical activities.
Here it’s invariably – as my friend suggested – an ultra-sphinctal matter. When Sir Christopher Meyer, the retired ambassador to Washington, came out with DC Confidential, in which he loftily and self-revealingly took second-class politicians to task for being seen in their underpants, the ire was not directed at his indiscreet fastidiousness but at his supposed lack of professionalism. Sir Christopher was condemned in editorials and even found himself up before a collection of select committee beaks, all keen to point out to him that he had badly damaged trust between civil servants and politicians. Perhaps, some suggested, the only way to stop kiss, tell and be paid memoirs was to get senior people to sign nondisclosure contracts such as those entered into between the Blairs and their nannies.
Continue reading "Don’t blame Campbell. It was the media’s fault" »
It has long been one of the perverse talents of British middle-class activists to be able to devise campaigns which, instead of drawing attention to real grievances, divert attention away from them. I spent a lot of my early adulthood in observation of this phenomenon and recognise the inevitable moment when the movement stops being about the thing it says it was about and becomes about itself.
So it is with the boycott. Today the question in Britain is no longer what should be done about the Middle East, but how to spread or defeat the boycott. For almost everyone involved, the debate is — if the truth is admitted — hugely enjoyable. This isn’t really surprising, because it is all a fabulous diversion from the extraordinarily painful business of making or soliciting peace.
This is only one way in which the boycott movement is entirely counter-productive. It has emphasised the gulf between activists and memberships in all the unions where it has been debated (does anyone seriously believe that most Unison members want to boycott Israel?). And as Jonathan Freedland has pointed out, it has also forced an unhelpful solidarity upon those who are normally enemies, making it more, not less difficult for a hegemonic Israeli peace faction to arise.
All this should be bleeding obvious, yet somehow it is not. That’s why I believe there is something deeply irrational about the boycott movement. This “something”, I think, rests not in a genuine sense of injustice concerning the Palestinians, but in a negative ideology that calls itself anti-Zionism.
Continue reading "Anti-Zionists should grow up (Jewish Chronicle)" »
On Sunday evening during an arts debate at the Manchester festival I heard about the artist who had wrapped himself up in felt and spent a few days in a box in a gallery with a coyote, peeing each morning on a pile of The Wall Street Journal. Then I went back to my hotel, turned on the television and found myself watching the Diana memorial concert from Wembley and thinking what a lot of incomprehensible things are done in the name of art.
I could understand, however, why the late Princess’s sons had wanted to shift the public memory of their mother away from crash pictures, Fayed-induced conspiracy theories and endless inquests, and towards something marginally less unsavoury, such as her taste for schlock musicals. But was even this, back in September 1997, what the People that she was the Princess of had rather solemnly and collectively agreed to learn from her death? No, it wasn’t. As I recalled it, the applause that began spontaneously in Hyde Park and ended in Westminster Abbey was for the sentiments expressed by Charles Spencer.
The speech, if you remember, contained the suggestive bit about the Royal Family, but there was also the much more important description of his sister as having been “hunted”. The hunters, we knew, were the paparazzi acting on behalf of tabloid newspapers and some magazines.
The people who were fed with the meat they provided, were, of course, us. If we wanted to stay true to Diana’s memory, or some such thing, then that was what should have changed.
Continue reading "The horror of the Paris Hilton school of privacy" »
Say you have a good friend, practically family, whom you’ve known for some time and whose advice you value. Of course there are differences in emphasis. He likes angling where you prefer soccer and he occasionally forgets – where you remember – that parking wardens also have a job to do. Then one lunchtime, over a glass of tap water, he reveals that he is a long-time member of Britons Against Fluoridation and regards the addition of any chemical to his water supply as an attempt by shadowy powers to interfere with his brain. Though disconcerted, you have two options – to nod or to argue. Columnists argue.
I’ve been writing on these pages for just over two years now, and that period has been relatively free of Euro controversy. This has suited me, because Europe (in the way the word “Europe” has come to be used in media discourse) has never excited me that much. After a few years of being vaguely and doctrinally anti-common market, I eventually saw the benefit of what they call “pooling sovereignty”, but since then the stormy enthusiasms of the Philes and the Phobes for their federal states or their magically separate nation states have seemed abstract and distant.
Continue reading "A referendum? Sorry, they’re not our cup of tea" »
HERE’S ONE TO SPOIL your weekend. Within the next few years some country somewhere is likely to use nuclear weapons against its enemy. This is the conclusion – made without apocalyptic language – reached in William Langewiesche’s long essay on nuclear proliferation.
A spare, almost austere writer – as some of the best American journalists are – Langewiesche can make the complex area of nuclear policy comprehensible to the layest of laypersons, from his description of how 220,000 were killed in the two bomb blasts over Japan in 1945, to his summary of 60 years of big-power attempts at keeping the nuclear club as small as possible.
He has set out to answer two questions: first whether terrorists are likely to get the bomb, and secondly whether countries we don’t like will get the bomb. After he has travelled to Russia and the Middle East, his answer on the first is mildly reassuring, to the second most certainly not. To make a device you need a certain amount of highly enriched uranium, which is hard to steal and very hard to make. Once you have the enrichment for civilian purposes, however, you can then carry straight on and make a bomb. Only international inspection can tell whether or not this is happening.
Continue reading "The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche" »
Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire. And I’ll bring you the hide of Patricia McKeever, the internet Torquemada of Scottish Catholic gaydom. Ms McKeever, of Catholic Truth is, as reported in The Times yesterday , a one-person outing operation, determined to uncover closeted cassock-lifters, to drag them shrieking and naked from their metaphorical priests’ holes and thereby to cleanse the Church. Ms McKeever has restored me to myself, reminding me – at an age when I expend my passions carefully – of just what it is in the public sphere that makes me most angry.
It’s the gap – the abyss – between the stated reason for the actions of the world’s McKeevers and their real (if hidden) motives that so appals. Why does Ms M send letters and e-mails to priests and seminarians whom she suspects of going to gay clubs? Why does she demand of an Edinburgh clergyman to know whether he is a homosexual? Ostensibly to “raise awareness of the problem . . . ultimately to ensure the safety of others in the Church. Not just the physical safety of children, important though that is, but also the spiritual safety of people and congregations entrusted to the care of a homosexual priest or bishop.”
Continue reading "The virtues of blackmail, misery and cheating" »
Last summer I went to the prize-giving at a school in the country. Very few of the absurdly tall and elegant teenagers receiving heavy books and shiny plaques were being cited for just one quality. Some had, it seemed, run for their counties, played the oboe to concert level, achieved field marshal rank in the school cadets and saved several African villages from drought. And they were so polite.
That their ascent up the ladder of achievement had started early was obvious from watching their happy parents, as they sipped wine on the lawn afterwards. The parents had, many of them, done most of the things that they could and been all the things that they had to be, in order to reach this point on this warm day, their children poised balletically for flight into the adult world.
But what were these things? Yesterday the University of London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies (based at the Institute of Education) published its outline findings into the attainment of a cohort of 15,500 children born between 2000 and 2002. The study found that by the time that the kids were three years old the offspring of graduate parents were ten months ahead of children from relatively unqualified parents in vocabulary, and a year ahead in their comprehension of sizes, shapes, colours, letters and numbers. And while this may be an expected advantage, it is still a hell of a gap to have opened up at such a young age.
Continue reading "What’s the secret to raising bright children?" »
I was somewhere between Airfix and puberty when, 40 years ago today, the Six Day War began with preemptive Israeli strikes on Egyptian airbases. Then, it was exciting, the culmination of a period of heightening threats from President Nasser, with newspapers carrying diagrams of how many tanks, men and aircraft each combatant had. As a juvenile collector of information on planes I tended to take the Arab side as they flew interesting MiGs and Ilyushins as compared with the boring French Mirages of the Israelis. As for the implications of the extraordinary Israeli triumph, I had even less understanding of the consequences of catastrophic victory than did the Israeli leaders themselves, and that, it turns out, is saying something.
Four decades later I was watching a documentary about the West Bank – conquered in that brief war – with my 14-year-old daughter. Narrated by someone not hostile to the Jewish state, it was nonetheless a catalogue of arrests, imprisonment, harassment, land and water grabs, Berlin walls and checkpoints. A girl with moral sense, she was amazed by the fundamentalism and foul behaviour of some of the settlers, and bemused by their American accents. Why were they there? Who had let them take the land? How could there be peace with them around?
The Six Day War was, as Israelis have always claimed, a defensive conflict, as was the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Had Israel lost either badly or quickly, the chances are that it would have ceased to exist long before Great Power intervention could have saved the country or its people. As with the response to the attacks by Hezbollah last summer, it seems to me that Israel was entitled to take the action it did. We in the UK would have done the same.
Continue reading "Six days of success. Then 40 years of bitter harvest" »
A fortnight or so ago I received an email from a film-maker. A leading public figure had suggested that I might help him publicise his television programme about the Middle East, which was due to be shown on a major channel. Though the film had a good slot, the problem was, he explained, “that despite our best efforts, no one wants to hear about this”. Then he added: “It seems the pro-Zionist lobby in the UK is as strong as ever.”
Getting coverage for serious documentaries is — from my experience — a hit-and-miss affair. In fact, usually it is just a miss affair. Often this is because the channel’s publicists themselves, with a list of that week’s offerings, prefer the sensational over the sober, or the new issue over the old, no matter how important. This is certainly true of reviewers. But in this case, this very serious man, who had made a very serious film, was clear that the culprit was the pro-Zionist lobby.
Continue reading "‘Zionist lobby’ paranoia is growing (Jewish Chronicle)" »
Even the most compulsive side-taker should find it hard to choose between two such unattractive combatants as the Daily Mail and Channel 4. But let’s try.
The Mail said yesterday that Channel 4 intended to broadcast a Diana’s death documentary next week (only the 500th or so ever screened), which will – for the first time – use pictures of the nearly lifeless princess at the crash scene, being given oxygen by a French doctor. The Mail was cross, and it was easy to see why. As well as being tasteless, hurtful and intrusive, the use of such pictures would break an uninscribed British TV rule about what material relating to the recent death of public figures gets to be shown on screen.
By midday Channel 4’s commissioning editor had put himself about to reassure everyone that the Mail story was nonsense. The documentary was an important contribution to understanding the accident and therefore fulfilling the public service duty of knocking back the legion of conspiracy theories. And it absolutely didn’t show any dead Di pics. In the one snap being talked about the shape of the princess was tastefully blacked out (presumably leaving the doctor administering to empty space), so the Channel 4 man said that he thought more hurt would be caused by the Mail’s wrong story than anything appearing in the film.
Continue reading "Psst! Wanna see my crash pics? Very educational" »
David Aaronovitch is
a regular columnist for The Times. He won the George Orwell prize for political journalism in 2001 and was the What the Papers Say Columnist of the Year for 2003.
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