Malcolm spent yesterday afternoon at the British Museum form the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition. This being about Roman domesticity, penises form a large — nay, grotesquely inflated — part of the show.
… beyond a cluster fuck, worse than a FUBAR. Continued attempts to correct the situation only make the situation worse and more embarrassing.
This is La Treneman at her brightest and best, doing a delicious vamp:
Welcome to Eurovision, Westminster style. I had no idea when I went along to the Private Member’s Bill ballot yesterday that it was going to be so much fun. For this is not a ballot at all. It’s more a raffle, with a bit of bingo thrown in and also darts, as in when they bellow “One Hundred and Eighty!”
Our Master of Ceremonies was Lindsay Hoyle, the Deputy Speaker whose sense of fun and Lancashire accent are proving a huge hit these days. He had a glamorous assistant, of course. Tall, thin, dressed as a penguin with a white bow-tie, his real name was David Natzler and he was Clerk of Legislation but, of course, we started to call him Debbie.
She concludes:
“Shake ’em up!” cried Lindsay as the big moment arrived. “The winner of the day is … ”
“One hundred and ninety-nine,” announced Debbie.
“Oooohhhhh!” cried the audience.
Lindsay flipped through his list. “James Wharton!”
We looked at each other. Who? Still, within minutes, we were being flooded with information about Mr Wharton. He was the young (aged 29) Tory from Stockton and a Eurosceptic. His majority was tiny (332) and he had made the news for being linked with a company that sells stone statues of giant penises.
Sorry, but it’s true. It may not be in the best taste but, then, this IS Eurovision.
Two after-shocks:
1. Malcolm’s classical eddikashun makes him want to prefer the plural form as penes. It is also the Oxford Dictionary‘s preferred plural form, where penises is dismissed as Brit. Curiously, penes is also the term used to mean “in the possession of …” or “in the hands of …” One hits upon it occasionally in footnotes and bibliophile commentaries. Logically penises are commonly “in the hands of …”, but there is no direct etymological link.
2.Then there’s the business of It may not be in the best taste but …
Forty years ago there was a previous Pompeii exhibition in London. As Malcolm recalls, it was sponsored by the Daily Telegraph. An acquaintance of the Lady in Malcolm’s Life was commissioned to produce the educational poster to accompany the show. The artist’s proclivities were well enough known for the instruction to include “and definitely no penises”.
This became a challenge. Sure enough, there is at least one member, suitably disguised, included. Malcolm still has the mounted (ahem!) item in the Redfellow Hovel attic.
Nigel Farage’s regal progress was yesterday checked on the Royal Mile. Tee hee! It came down to both sides — Farage versus the “Campaign for Radical Independence” — declaring the other was “fascist” and “racist”. Pot-ism meet kettle-ism.
Let’s not get involved in the semiotics of racism and UKIP. Suffice it to quote a nice throw-away that’s been doing the rounds of late: the English Defence League backs UKIP, presumably because of their shared views on sustainable farming.
“We’ve proved we can get votes in Wales, England and Northern Ireland. We’re still untested in Scotland,” he said. “We’ve not had an opportunity to test Ukip policies with the Scottish people for a very long time.” Asked about Ukip’s chances, he was optimistic. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we did quite creditably.”
At last! a germ of testable UKIP “truth”
UKIP’s “elected” presence in Northern Ireland amounts to one local councillor and one Assembly Member:
David McNarry was elected the UUP AM for Strangford. There was a rancorous bust-up in the UUP. McNarry was unstoolled as Vice-Chair of the Assembly Education Committee. He got huffy; and was disciplined by the UUP. It was made clear by Mike Nesbitt that McNarry was unlikely to have the UUP whip restored. McNarry went rogue; and last October announced he had joined UKIP.
Henry Reilly was also UUP, but is now the duly-elected UKIP Councillor for The Mournes. His address seems to be also that for UKIP NI — which could imply a one-man band. Councillor Reilly is currently involved in a spat with his local press:
A high-profile councillor has been criticised after claims he described regional newspaper journalists as “Provos”.
Cllr Henry Reilly, who is chairman of the UK Independence Party in Northern Ireland, has been urged to withdraw his comments which came at a meeting of Newry and Mourne District Council.
The National Union of Journalists has condemned his comments, saying they were “entirely unacceptable”…
Journalists at the meeting represented the Newry Reporter, Mourne Observer, Newry Democrat, County Down Outlook and the Armargh Down Observer.
NUJ president Barry McCall said the journalists concerned had no right of reply at the meeting and should not have been subjected to verbal abuse.
For the record, at the last Assembly election UKIP stood six candidates and garnered the grand total of 4,152 votes — six-tenths of one per cent of the goal first preference poll. The Kippers didn’t manage quite so well at Council level.
There is this mistaken belief that the English have highly-developed sang-froid. They are cool, calm and collected. They learned it from Baden Powell:
A Scout smiles and whistles under all circumstances. When he gets an order he should obey it cheerily and readily, not in a slow, hang-dog sort of way. Scouts never grouse at hardships, nor whine at each other, nor swear when put out.
Don’t believe it.
Periodically the English go ding-bat. As they are doing round about now.
This time it’s the Tory end of the political spectrum; and the goad is the Europe thing.
We are led to believe that all we need is a futile Parliamentary gesture for a mythical referendum on a non-negotiation which isn’t going to happen and which won’t satisfy anyone:
DAVID Cameron’s EU referendum Bill is a bold act of political cunning.
At a stroke he has given a boost both to wavering Tories flirting with UKIP and to his panicking, mutinous back-benchers — while challenging Clegg and Miliband to back him or deny the public a say.
The PM knows his Bill for a 2017 referendum is probably dead without Lib-Dem and Labour support. And neither Europhile Clegg nor Miliband trust voters not to want out. They’d rather we had no choice.
As President Obama said yesterday, Cameron is right to renegotiate our position within the EU before he puts an in-out vote to the country.
But his Bill shows that this time his cast-iron referendum guarantee is what it says on the tin.
It may be doomed. But at the next election Cameron can now credibly present the Tories as the only major party ready to let Britain decide its own future.
A formula of words solves all problems.
So to the past …
It happens that Malcolm was re-reading Robert Hutchinson’s account of Elizabeth’s Spymaster: Francis Walsingham and the secret war that saved England.By pure coincidence, just as the news of Cameron’s and Hague’s self-serving and politically-cleaving shibboleth was hitting the tapes, he had reached Hutchinson’s Chapter Four, which starts with Burghley’s and Walsingham’s cunning plan. They:
… needed once and for all to defuse the powder keg of conspiracy they believed was threatening the survival of the Protestant realm of England.
The so-called ‘Bond of Association’ was their adroit solution.
In anyone’s language, it was little more than lynch law.
The idea, probably the product of Burghley’s devious ingenuity, had initially been very simple. It proclaimed that any wicked person who caused the death of Elizabeth would be ineligible to succeed her as ruler of England. Its objective was thus very clear: at a stroke it removed Mary as the focal point of any Catholic conspiracy. Then came a series of more hard-line revisions …
It certainly rallied the troops:
Despite some strong misgivings within the legal classes — lawyers and magistrates — men and women in their thousands did sign copies of the Bond, the illiterate simply with a cross as their personal mark. They pledged themselves before God to take the law into their own hands and to ruthlessly hunt down and destroy anyone associated with a plot to kill Elizabeth. There were even special church services to further sanctify the process of oath-taking.
As for the Queen of Scots, she did what any politico would do when faced with mass hysteria:
… she happily signed the paper herself on 5 January 1585.
At the moment the only questions are whether David Cameron comes out of his present difficulties looking silly, or very silly, and his party looking just split, or totally ruptured. We have had a quarter-century of this internal feuding; and on present form it looks as if the disintegrating English right will be dismembered for as long again. [The Scottish right is happily sailing along under the banner of the SNP.]
At some point the non-Tory parties and the vast majority of sane non-UKIPers will have to sit on their hands, look bemused, say nothing, and let the forces of unreason tear the political Right and Centre-Right asunder.
Prime Minister David Cameron is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King William IV.
William IV was third son of George III, whose elder brothers were the future George IV and … Frederick, Duke of York and Albany.
Taraaah!
Said Prince Fred is generally accounted to have been the Grand Old Duke of York, who:
… had ten thousand men. He marched them up to the top of the hill And he marched them down again. And when they were up, they were up. And when they were down, they were down. And when they were only halfway up, They were neither up nor down.
Fred, who now is dead, earned that reputation because of the futile Flanders campaign of 1799.
Cameron’s hill-climbing and descents are as well-established as Fred’s; but he doesn’t have ten thousand men. He has just 304 MPs, and 48 of them are definitely not men. Though many of those women have more balls than their male colleagues.
Further back
Malcolm can’t be bothered to work out what the precise relationship is; but Cameron must be related somehow to the Stuarts. Which brings us to James II and VII.
After the near-rout at the Boyne, James sweatily arrived back in Dublin where Lady Tyrconnell enquired how the battle had gone. He replied, “My cowardly Irish have run away.”
She responded with a hint of acid: “Then I see your majesty has won the race.” Again, a speedy characteristic to be observed in Cameron’s hereditary nature.
The gift of leadership
This is an art or a talent in which Cameron has rarely excelled. Particularly so on matters European.
David Cameron was trying to work out how on earth to deal with the latest Europe row in his party. He heard them demanding legislation in this parliament for a referendum in the next, and this evening, after nearly a year of letter-writing and speeches, he announced that the Tory party will publish a draft bill doing just that. They still can’t get it through Parliament through the government channels, so they’ll be putting it up for any willing backbencher (of which there are many) to adopt in the Private Member’s Bill ballot.
Figures close to the Prime Minister were hinting to Tory MPs this evening there would be a move for legislation, but they were taken by surprise when, just a few hours later, the announcement was made that the draft bill will be published tomorrow.
So is this it? Is the Conservative party falling on its knees with gratitude? Unsurprisingly, MPs are not doing anything of the sort.
Stonewall Jackson got his name by standing firm in the fray. Who was known to all his men as good ol’ “Paper Maché?” Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone; Jubilation T. Cornpone, he really saved the day!
Isabel was being as polite as the circumstances permit. For sheer vitriol — and a longer view — there’s Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, subtitled in near Marxist terms — and with a flourish from Mao for added relish:
Drama is giving way to farce. The eurosceptic demands are now plain odd
Touchingly, they really believed it would work. When David Cameron pledged a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU four months ago, his team were certain it would pacify eurosceptic Conservatives, disarm the UK Independence party and ensure he would not need to talk again about this electorally esoteric issue for the rest of this parliament.
That speech, his most important deed as UK prime minister after his austere fiscal policy, has failed on all counts. Tories now hound him to go further, Ukip romp on, and he is condemned to revisit the subject periodically on behalf of his party.
Downing Street is mystified by the collapse of the January truce, and commentators also scribble their surprise. But it is not surprising at all. It was predictable, and predicted. We are now a quarter of a century into the Tories’ rancorous fixation with Europe, a single-issue neuralgia that knows no equivalent in any major party in the west, and the pattern is familiar: no concession satisfies those who ultimately want to leave the EU, even if they say it will before receiving it. Mr Cameron, remember, has withdrawn his party from the centre-right caucus in the European Parliament, vetoed a fiscal treaty and cleared a path to exit. On each occasion, Tories have summoned a practised glee before returning to their core view of him as the craven running dog of a europhile establishment.
It may be, as some Tories tried to explain yesterday, that a cunning new strategy is evolving before our eyes, one that Mr Gove and his friend Mr Cameron are developing as part of their wider campaign to shove Labour – and the Lib Dems – on to the wrong side of popular causes. By this theory, Europe is no longer a divisive, dangerous issue for the Tories to be caught arguing about, but is in fact a vote-winner. Look at us, the Conservatives are now shouting, we are so crazy about Europe that we are desperate to give you a vote on it and – nudge nudge, wink wink – we might just join you in voting to get out. By allowing his colleagues to say it all in public, and say it loudly, Mr Cameron is giving himself free advertising for his Euro-robustness two years early. The tease of a referendum, the catwalk of Tory beauties sashaying in their see-through ideological out-fits, the Cabinet loyalists talking naughty – it’s all part of a great plan. By allowing his colleagues to talk up the possibility of a British exit, the Prime Minister’s hand is strengthened in the EU negotiations to come. First welfare, then immigration, now Europe: everything is lining up in Mr Cameron’s favour.
Except it isn’t, of course. No 10 has lost control of this one. Even those involved admit it’s a Euroshambles. After all, can any of this truly be said to advance the cause of a Conservative victory in 2015? Surely the first part of Mr Cameron’s negotiating strategy requires winning the general election? Does an inward-looking spat about Europe really fit alongside the message about a global economic race and the importance of the EU/US trade deal that Mr Cameron found himself promoting in Washington yesterday?
Surely soon we must be reaching the end-game? That can involve just one (or both) of two possibilities: the defenestration of Cameron, and/or the collapse of the ConDem coalition. Either way the lunatics have taken over the Tory asylum.
The Tory bourgeoisie are heavily into the Great UKIP furore. Over on the Spectator‘s Coffee House blog, James Forsyth is keeping the pot on the simmer: Why the Tories need their own Nigel Farage.
To which the answer inevitably and unarguably came:
Was Nigel Farage not the Tories’ very own Nigel Farage?
Malcolm offered his own take:
When I was an active candidate, the assumption was differential abstention. Our lot went down because our buggers wouldn’t turn out, not generally because they had defected. Anyway, the other mob quickly gave them a sickener, and soon enough (say two years) they were back on track.
By the same token, I have always suspected there really is a subterranean “nasty party” based on bloody-minded ness and perverseness, which only transpires to cause pain and grief to us decent types (of any proper persuasion). This vegetable growth, vaster than empires and more slow, is about the only political leaning that is thus burgeoning.
Moreover the hysterical media – Speccie excepted only on grounds of socio-economic classification – have laid the responsibility for all our woes at the door of the EU. Then only because Gordon Brown was no longer in town. This is scapegoating (my spell-check threw up “scape-gloating”, which is about the right flavour). Once the scape-gloaters have identified the scapegoat, all that remains is to drive it out of the hamlet.
Which, of course, received the usual raspberries.
Still, he’s a dogged old soul, and came back with:
No, I still don’t get it.
Nationally, UKIP has 147 out of a total of 2,439 council seats (say 6%). Tories have control of half the Councils (and will effectively add to that with by local arrangements with odds, bods and sods). On the usual deplorably-low turnout, UKIP scored 23% of the vote — what’s that: six or eight per cent of the total electorate?
It’s mid-term, and — thanks to the centripetal instincts of both major parties — local authorities have minimal residual powers. It’s child-welfare, street-cleaning, dustbins and dog-catching stuff. Yawn!
There were areas, and even regions, where UKIP did much better than average. So, what? Farage’s rag, tag and bobtail are never going to be the disciplined cohorts that the SNP or SF manage.
Then there is a specific example: Barking and Dagenham. When, in 2006, the BNP surged to a dozen seats on the local authority, it finally shook the local Labour operation out of its complacency, somnolence and decrepitude. Four years later, the BNP were wiped out.
Similarly, those areas where UKIP have made a showing tend to be where the old parties (especially the Tories) are at best lackadaisical, at worst senile. I’d be putting my money on the likes of the Greens being a bigger long-term threat to the established order than UKIP — particularly so if environmental issues can be brought to the fore, and folk can be induced to love windmills.
If there is one great, fat non-issue in these parts it is the EU. Outside the Tory kennel (the Torygraph, the Murdochery, and — were it to be considered a “newspaper” — the Express) the whole EU thing is of less national importance than whether Wigan can avoid the drop. Short of a real dog-fight the EU isn’t going to rise up the agenda.
Here’s a small Malcolmian prophecy: were the EU referendum to come about, barely half the electorate would bother to turn out. The in/out/shake-it-all-about decision would be made by around a quarter of the adult population of the UK. It’s like the old TUC retirement joke: “The General Committee have passed a vote of thanks for your services by 15 to 8, with 22 abstentions.”
Household insurance at Redfellow Hovel requires three locks on the rear doors to the garden. After all, that’s the weaker, less observed point of access. So very reasonable stuff.
In another context Malcolm found himself reviewing how Éire coped with the outbreak of World War II. That’s a far bigger topic than can easily be contained here; and others — Brian Girvin, John Duggan, and Clair Wills sit on Malcolm’s shelves, alongside more general histories — have done it more than adequately anyway.
Risteárd Ua Maolchatha: asked the Minister for External Affairs if he will state the number of occasions since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 25th April, 1938, on which there was direct personal discussion between Irish and British Ministers on matters of mutual trade, and if he will say in respect of each such occasion the date, the various Ministers who took direct part in the discussion, and the matters discussed.Minister for External Affairs (The Taoiseach): There have been no direct discussions between Irish and British Ministers since April, 1938. Questions connected with the trade between the two countries have, of course, been discussed from time to time through the High Commissioner and the British representative here, and within the last few months officials of the Department of Supplies and the Department of Agriculture, acting on behalf of their respective Ministers, have had direct discussions with officials of the corresponding Departments in Great Britain. I may add that, following these latter discussions, the Minister for Supplies and the Minister for Agriculture will go to London next week for conversations on certain outstanding points with the British Ministers concerned.
General Mulcahy: Seven months of the war situation have passed without any of our Ministers discussing their problems with the British, and nearly two years have passed since the Agreement was made. Is that so?
The Taoiseach: That is so.
General Mulcahy: Will the Taoiseach say whether he intends to report to the House, as a result of the meeting that, happily, it is proposed should take place next week after such a long period?
The Taoiseach: I do not know. Any arrangements that may be made will have to be reported to the House in one form or another.
Read, mark and inwardly digest!
Most sentient beings here present may be raising a knowing eyebrow.
That was happening a fortnight afterthe German invasion of Denmark and Norway, and six days afterthe Dutch PM announced a “state of siege” (doubtless aware of troop movements next door).
Risteárd Ua Maolchatha had been Chief of Staff for Óglaíg na hÉireann (should you prefer: the IRA), and it was his signature on the ceasefire order for 11th July 1921, when the Treaty negotiations were begun.
The Taoiseach is none other than de Valera, himself. Dev was never one to use words lightly, and without deliberation.
Richard Mulcahy was no goat’s toe: the image at the top of this post is Mulcahy, watching his back, while Michael Collins wonders what he has just stepped in. Even in 1940 Mulcahy was the coming man in Fine Gael. Ua Maolchatha was, as far back as the War of Independence, Mulcahy’s backstop. Even if this was no “planted question”, the speed with with Mulcahy jumps in, and de Valera’s reply implies all parties were aware more was being said than being spoken.
The question was, ostensibly, about “trade”; but the answer seems more general: “There have been no direct discussions between Irish and British Ministers since April, 1938″.
That has to be a clue to intense frustration in Dublin. In any case, “trade” (the ostensible subject of that question) was code for beef, bacon and butter in exchange for fuel and some minimal matériel for the Defence Force.
There had been constipation in London. A proper diplomatic channel with Dublin had not been opened. De Valera wanted a British minister or ambassador in Dublin (a grandeur which Chamberlain couldn’t accept). The term “high commissioner” was too colonial for de Valera: its parallel was the British High Commissioner in Egypt, the de facto power in the land. The gap was finally plugged by Sir John Maffey, retired as permanent under-secretary for the colonies, becoming the British “representative” in Dublin — a rôle to which he was shackled for the next decade. All too little, too late.
We’d need to have in mind the other numerous other frustrations the British imposed, mainly out of necessity, on the Irish. All telegraphic and external postal traffic — and pretty well all other communications — went through London. Folk from Donegal could not pass through Northern Ireland into Great Britain — Sam Beckett, born in Dublin, claiming Irish citizenship, was refused permission to return to France by the only route possible. And so on.
Meanwhile Churchill, in the Cabinet, was muttering about invasion and seizing the Treaty Ports.
What had Neville Chamberlain’s Government in London had done to keep De Valera and Éire on side? Even after eight months of the war, had no serious attempt been made to lock the back door?
