A poignant moment

Regard, and respect Malcolm’s record to date on wordpress.com:

This, to his amazement, is post number 1000.

It ought to be a significant, dignified, seminal essay on one or other matter of great importance.

Instead, he found himself reflecting on the sad state (heh, heh!) of the Liberal Democrat Party.

This derived from a valid point being raised by Paul Waugh.

Waugh earned Malcolm’s respect, and the commendation of others, while he was political columnist for the London Evening Standard . He was uniquely worth the effort of hefting that rag-tag piece of newsprint. Now Waugh prates for “Lord” Ashcroft’s PoliticsHome, and is one of the few things in front of the pay-wall (but, still, usually well worth the effort).

Waugh is now suggesting a serious cash shortfall coming up for the LibDems.

LibDems “tithe” their elected representatives (so, admittedly, do other parties, if less blatantly).

Note that Waugh is here addressing only the English local elections:

Mike Smithson at Political Betting suggested earlier this week that Labour ought to be winning 500 seats each from the Tories and the Lib Dems. A Sun/YouGov analysis by local elections expert Colin Rallings then suggested that things could be even worse, with the Libs losing 700 of their 1850 councillors and the Conservatives losing 1,000 of their 5,050 councillors.

But whether it’s 500 or 700 Lib Dem losses, there’s a very significant fact that applies to them in a way it doesn’t to the Tories.

Losing seats means not just losing prestige and power – it also means losing hard cash.

There’s a good gloss on the Rallings Sun/YouGov poll (without messing with pay-walls) by Mike Smithson at politicalbetting.com

Now apply all that equally to the Assembly elections in Scotland and, indeed, to Wales.

Scotland looks dire for the LibDems: this week’s Scotsman/YouGov poll has the Party trailing in fifth spot — as graphic, right —  even behind the Greens (who seem to be emerging as the protest vote of choice). That is a loss of some 11 seats (down from 16 in the present Assembly).

In Wales, the latest polling suggests at least one LibDem loss in the Assembly (which, admittedly, is a better deal than the predicted collapse of  Plaid Cymru).

Suddenly the LibDem apparatus looks distinctly “shook” — as they (used to) say in West Cork).

Furthermore, now that the LibDems are inside the belly of the ConDem beast, they have already mislaid their “Short Money”, and therefore are another £1.75 million out of pocket.

A rook’s parliament

No: not a further response to the expenses scandals of the last Westminster Parliament.

The collective noun for a group of rooks is “a parliament”. The noise must be the basis of the metaphor.

This was seen at dusk in the grounds of the Manor House Hotel at Killadeas, by Lough Erne:

Malcolm’s Dear Old Dad: You know the difference between a rook and a crow?

Malcolm (with resignation): Tell me again.

Dear Old Dad: When you see a rook on its own, it’s a crow. When you see several crows together, they’re rooks.

Boom! Boom!

Now, turn your back on the rooks, look the other way, towards the setting sun:

There are worse places to be.

Positive root agitator

Here’s one with all kinds of subversive messages:

As seen outside Dan Winter’s Cottage (the birth-place of the Orange Order).

Make of that what you will.

Rebekah Brooks: she talk with forked tongue

Even the dimmest in Malcolm’s classes would understand the ambiguity in advertisements such as:

Nothing works faster than [Brand x]!

Indeed, the odd cry of “so buy nothing!” became the (cleaned-up) norm when faced with a double-entendre.

Thus, such students, now reached maturity and more, would have looked wryly at the strap across the front page of yesterday’s Times.

We see a mash-up of royals, sportsmen, William Hague, President Obama, an opera singer, all hailing the boast:

Britain’s bestselling digital newspaper

That should, of course, be translated to:

Britain’s only digital newspaper

Now consider the numbers, which appear as the single story on page 5, so deemed more significant than minor matters such as Libya (page 6) and Japanese fall-out (page 15).

Here’s the skinny:

News International announced in November that the papers’ new digital products had recorded more than 105,000 sales in four months. At the end of February the total sales figure stood at 222,000.

That, too, is ambiguous.

It could (and logically does) mean that after seven months (212 days, if Malcolm’s count of the calendar is correct) the average daily “sale” for the on-line Times and Sunday Times may be little more than 1,000 a day:

222,000 = 1,047
212

What makes that even more remarkable is that pre-paid subscribers to the print edition get the on-line one free. Are they included in the numbers?

Malcolm buys his daily dose of the Times/Sunday Times and the Guardian/Observer through the token scheme. Every quarter he receives a small booklet of identified daily tokens. The result is he gets the expensive Saturday and Sunday issues for “free”. He can also access the on-line Times/Sunday Times sites without charge, let or hindrance.

These tokens cause persistent problems at check-outs: “Oooh, I’ve never seen one of these before!”. That suggests they are not widely used.

One way and another, the News International digital editions may not be anything like the success claimed. As Malcolm recalls, when the November claim was made, Guido Fawkes noted that the Times numbers paled into insignificance, and by a considerable factor, against his daily stat-porn.

An equally cynical view comes from Dan Sabbagh in Tuesday’s Guardian, armed with an alternative — and authoritative —view of the numbers:

A total of 79,000 people pay to subscribe to the Times and Sunday Times online, on an iPad or via a Kindle, a gain of 29,000 over the past five months, according to figures for the end of February released by News Corporation on Tuesday.

The figure is up on the 50,000 reported in November, suggesting that News Corp is making some progress with the much debated ‘paywall’ model, although it comes at a time when higher-priced print sales of the Times are falling sharply.

The Times’s printed circulation – as measured by the number of copies sold in the UK and Ireland – has fallen by 12.1% or 58,421 copies in the past year, hitting 425,627 in February. A more resilient Sunday Times declined 6.9% or 74,557 to reach 1,005,206 in the same month.

Online subscribers are worth far less to News Corp because the price it is charging is so heavily discounted compared with the print edition. The £2-a-week online charge amounts to £8.67 a month – by comparison a loyal, daily buyer of both titles at the newsstand pays £8.70 a week.

So all the heavy plugging, across all News International outlets and elsewhere, has garnered just a thousand new e-subscribers per week, while shedding a slightly larger number from print sales.

Hardly a raging success story.

Update: Glad to stay at home

Yesterday, at Redfellow Hovel, Malcolm overheard an ominous telephone call between the Lady in his Life and Number One Daughter (on the way to work in Noo Joisey).

It involved a firm promise to “come over later in the year”. Since the Noo Joisey contingent is firmly scheduled for Easter in London, this bodes ill for an expedition in the other direction.

Meanwhile, the “adolescent” Egyptian Cobra is gaining greater fame and following.

Malcolm knew this story would creep and creep.

Through the Sperrins, inadvertently

Here’s one made earlier (Tuesday, 15th March); but not posted in the absence of a wi-fi connection.

Coming off the Coleraine ring road (it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it) the Lady in his Life was driving Malcolm south and west. Somehow the SatNav and Malcolm’s interpretation thereof significantly differed.

With her barely-nuanced sigh of frustration, the Goddess of the Sat Nav (apparently, she is “English Annie”) declaimed “Recalculating” and made further suggestions.

The result was a direct(-ish) route through the Sperrins. First up the Banagher Glen, with the snow lying on Mullaghmore (that’s anglicising An Mullach Mór, “The Great Summit”, of which there’s another in the County Sligo) and Mullaghaneany (An Mullach an Ionaidh, “the Summit of the Wonder”). A wriggle between the biggest of the lot, Sawel (an effete translation of Samhail Phite Mheabh, well worth the Googling) and Mullaghcloga, and down the B47 in the Glenelly River valley to Plumbridge (which does have a fine bridge). Then a brief encounter with the A5 to nip through Newtownstewart (here’s that Perthshire-Tyrone-Virginia link of Betsy Bell and Mary Gray, mapping the Ulster-Scots migration, to ponder on). Notice the second “W” there, not to be confused with the Galloway town the expedition by-passed on Monday.

By world standards these are pathetic as “mountains”: the Sperrins struggle to exceed 600 metres, but do so repeatedly along the east-west ridge. The old pre-Famine fields stretch up from the townlands in the valleys to where the rocks take over and defeat even the most desperate of soil-scrubbers. In March the main crop is sheep: at this height, unlike the lower country, the lambs are unborn as yet. The tops of the mountains have a dandruff of snow still.

There’s little traffic beyond school buses and the odd ag-rick-ul-cher-al ve-hick-al (it is a tradition between the Lady in his Life and Malcolm that the expression be given its full weight and length. Inevitably, each ag-rick-ul-cher-al ve-hick-al trundles at its own rate, and is impassable on these roads. Equally inevitably, this means we are trapped in noxious proximity to a dung-card laden high with … soil-enhancing nutriment.

By this time (not having the detailed 1:50,000 Discoverer Series number 12 and 13) Malcolm is totally lost and reliant on “English Annie”, who seems to be stuck on In point five of a mile, turn left, turn Left!

Eventually a Turn right, turn Right! meant arrival on the B4, and west down the valley of the Glendarragh River, but not (as Malcolm had been expecting) at Ederney, but some miles further to the east. This meant another of those pointless Lady in his Life/Malcolm exchanges, based on punning permutations of the placename Lack:

— What does Lack lack?
— Pretty well everything by the look of it.

There’s no disrespect there for An Leac: Ware, Wye, Hoo, Ugley and Looe (along with many others) get the same treatment. At the extreme end, there even a book to help one with such idiocy. Otherwise, the young idea put it into perspective:

— I’m bored. Tell us one of your bad jokes, Grand-dad.

Anyway, past Lack and Ederney, cutting the corner at Kesh and south on the B82, there’s finally an occasional glimpse of the Lough over the hedges.

Past Castle Archdale (now a marina and caravan park, but an important piece of recent history) and it’s touch down at the Manor House Hotel at Killadeas.

A stroll in the late evening light (which persists this far west). A shower. A beer (or three) in the cellar bar. A decent meal (and an adequate Cabernet). To roost in the widest four-poster bed outside a museum.

Titfer, no tat.

This day, the goodly citizens of Muswell Hill had their first sighting of Malcolm’s new titfer:

This is now his officially-designated End-of-Empire Hat.

It will be worn on suitable occasions.

Why, “End-of-Empire”, Malc?

First, the political element: it is a fine product of Hanna Hats of Tirconaill Street, Donegal Town, so escaped the galling chain in 1922, which is one fair reason.

Secondly, the geographic argument:  it was purchased in Belleek, in about the last retail premises before County Fermanagh reaches the bridge over the Erne, and therefore probably the most western gents’ outfitters in the UK. Indeed, so far west, so adjacent to Donegal, that the price was quoted in Euros.

Now, if anyone knows the whereabouts of Malcolm’s Pendleton Indy hat (OK: mock, if you must), bought in Portland, Oregon, size 7³⁄₈, a small reward might be payable.

Pants on fire

Only the facts, Ma’am!

We’ll come (hem!) to Wee Johnny, right, in due course.

Back in December 2010 the usual suspects on the Labour back-benches (Corbyn, McDonnell … and fouteen others, equally predicatable) signed a Commons Early Day Motion in support of UK Uncut. They’ve now been boosted to a total of twenty-seven, including such raging lefties as Gregory Campbell and Nigel Dodds of the DUP.

On Saturday last, as an adjunct to the TUC March, UK Uncut organised a wholly peaceable (but, using loudhailers, not quite peaceful) flash mob at at the luxury London grocers Fortnum & Mason:

• owned by Associated British Foods (which also owns Primark),
• which is 54% owned by tax-dodging Whittington Investments,
• which is 79.2% owned by the Garfield Weston Foundation, a trust which is 20.8% owned by members of the Weston Family.

The fiddle is achieved by Whittington Investments stuffing its monies through a Dutch retailer, De Bijenkorf, operating through Luxembourg.

Nothing is simple in global capitalism.

On Saturday afternoon, after causing no damage (beyond a few vapours among Fortnums’ rarefied clientèle), the UK Uncut types were stitched up by the Met Police:

Activists say they were given repeated assurances by a chief inspector from the Metropolitan police that they would be shown to safety after the protest, which she described as non-violent and sensible. However, when protesters left the luxury Piccadilly store on police instruction, they were kettled, handcuffed and taken into custody.

Their claims are backed up by footage, obtained by the Guardian, showing that, rather than being asked to leave, the protesters inside the luxury food retailer were told they were being kept inside for their own safety.

Most (138 of the 201) arrests made on Saturday were as a result of the “peaceful” Fortnums flash-mob. The hard core “anarchists” who caused the may-hem and damage in Piccadilly seem to have escaped largely unscathed. The obvious conclusion is that the Met Police simply wanted to up their quota by the easy method of “doing” middle-class professional types, rather than the more aggressive yobs.

This seems to continue a pattern:

• the police have apparently infiltrated UK Uncut more earnestly and successfully than the extremist cells;
• Home Secretary, Theresa May, is ambivalent about the use of water-cannon, but never quite rules it out. This is another of those moues to assuage her right-wing, as the ConDem government enters its mesolithic phase;
• it was UK Uncut who were sprayed with CS gas in January, a significant escalation of police hard-line tactics.

Enter Boris

— How do you know if you’ve an elephant in the fridge, Daddy?
— You see its footprints in the butter.

Or, in this case, Monday’s Daily Telegraph:

After all those strategy reviews, all those blank bits of paper, we have finally heard Labour’s response to the fiscal crisis bequeathed to the nation by Gordon Brown. The plan is to get a load of aggressive crusties and Lefties to attack the Ritz hotel, to storm Fortnum’s, and to cause so much argy-bargy that 4,500 police officers are obliged to waste their time (and our money) in putting out the bonfires and controlling events as peacefully as they can.

For some inexplicable reason, this reminds Malcolm of a chance remark by an on-line commentator:

Stalin['s] propaganda rested on the tripod of media control, a fostered personality cult and a claimed legacy. Most of this propaganda was the result of experiences during his childhood and youth that exposed him to plaguing gang warfare, poverty and street brawls.

Well, all except the “poverty”. of course.

BoJo is anxious to identify the Labour leadership with those signatories to EDM1146, and clean-cut, preppy UK Uncut with those “crusties”. It is, of course, specious nonsense; as all and sundry are happy to note, and Simon Hoggart dutifully and tartly reports:

The Commons held a sombre discussion about the weekend rioting in London. There was much anger at the roughnecks, but there was no doubt who the shared enemy was: Boris Johnson. The mayor of London is mistrusted by Tories because he is popular and they fear he wants to depose Dave Cameron as Tory leader. Labour mistrusts him because he is popular, and they fear he might be re-elected mayor of London.

BoJo’s self-interpolation has been met with delight, if only because it evidences that inane hypocrisy in which the man revels. Sunder Katwala, at Liberal Conspiracy, says it as well as any:

Mayor of London Boris Johnson badly overstepped the mark yesterday, ludicrously claiming that Labour leader Ed Miliband will have been “quietly satisfied” by the violence in the capital which risked overshadowing the TUC’s March for the Alternative on Saturday…

In his youthful days, Boris was more than quietly satisfied when his Bullingdon pals threw a flowerpot through a restaurant window. Indeed he was so proud of the incident that he even invented the tale of being arrested over it, as Jim Pickard of the FT has reported in exquisite detail, even though Friends of Boris have since revealed that he scrambled away through the flowerbeds to avoid being caught.

A Malcolmian aside:

Johnson was hired by Londoners on a time-limited contract, at a salary of £143,911 a year. He is a multiple-jobber; and reputedly gets a further quarter-million a year for his Telegraph rantings.

In this piece Johnson was earning his shilling by dissing many tens of thousands of his London employers.

When Malcolm was employed in public service, his contract included a clause which prevented him taking a second employment without his employer’s approval. It also insisted that no employee could directly contact the media, without going through “official” channels. Breach of either or both conditions was a potential sacking offence [Ms Birbalsingh, please note.].

Dishing the dirt

All of which provides Malcolm with yet another opportunity to recall that Johnson did not get the boot from Michael Howard’s Shadow Cabinet because he was screwing (and impregnating) Petronella Wyatt.

He was outed, deliciously, by the fragrant Lady Verushka Wyatt (Petsy’s loving Mum), as the Mail salaciously recounted :

Sacked shadow cabinet minister Boris Johnson was the victim of a revenge plot by the mother of the mistress he ditched, it was claimed yesterday.

Lady Verushka Wyatt is said to have been incensed by the way he treated her only daughter Petronella.

Reports that he quibbled over the price of an abortion infuriated her further.

Lady Wyatt leaked news of at least one abortion which Miss Wyatt underwent after sleeping with the Spectator editor.

Father of four Mr Johnson last week rubbished reports of an affair but after Lady Wyatt briefed journalists that the allegations were true, he was fired as Tory arts spokesman by party leader Michael Howard late on Saturday.

Yesterday Lady Wyatt, the widow of the Tote boss Woodrow Wyatt, said she had no sympathy for him. Speaking from the £3million house she shares with Petronella in St John’s Wood, North-West London, she said: “I’ve no views on his dismissal. It’s none of my business really.”

Howard’s memorable contribution to Conservative family values was:

“Howard said the sacking was because Johnson had lied over the affair. It had nothing to do with morality.”

Malcolm has little time for Howard, the arch-Tory, but considerable sympathy for him when the BNP and such sneer at his Jewish origins. Leslie Bunder, at PointsofJew blog (now deceased), recalled that Howard’s his own father, Bernat Hecht was a cantor at a synagogue in Romania. Bunder, acidly appends that to an account of the 2005 Tory Conference (and Cameron’s enstoolment):

Michael Howard may not be the most committed of Jews. He married out, his son Nick is a born again Christian nutter and priest in training, but when it came to Rosh Hashanah during the Tory party conference in Blackpool, the outgoing Conservative leader managed to spend some time with the local community and when it came to praying, Howard could certainly take part without too many problems.

In Howard’s world, the Seventh Commandment is void, but not the Ninth.

All of which leaves one further uncomfortable thought:

BoJo’s chronic priapism continues to afflict him.  Meanwhile, his great intellect fails to grasp the mechanics of basic contraception (most recent known case: Helen Macintyre).

Yet the workings of a great city are in hands defeated by a rubber johnnie.

Glad to stay at home

Despite pressure from Number One Daughter (the Noo Joisey high-flyer), Malcolm has resisted making the jaunt across the Atlantic, to enjoy the delights of the triState Region.

Today’s New York Times provides yet another small, but useful argument.

The Bronx Zoo has mislaid its “adolescent” Egyptian cobra.

The Gray Lady is, as always, authoritative in its research:

The Egyptian cobra, a favorite of snake charmers — and probably the asp whose venom Cleopatra used to commit suicide — is a dark snake with a narrow hood, and grows up to two yards in length. (The missing animal was only 20 inches, a zoo employee said.) Native to Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, it usually preys on toads and birds, not humans, but zookeepers notified the public in an abundance of caution. The snake’s toxins can cause respiratory failure.

As previously:

CLEOPATRA:
Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there,
That kills and pains not?

Clown:
Truly, I have him: but I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal; those that do die of it do seldom or never recover.

Tuesday at Sotheby’s

Malcolm has noted previously how the Irish took to those portraits by Sir John Lavery. With good reason: Hazel Lavery was not just the best-looking, the most-fetching ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’, she was also the most exchangable. Even allowing for inflation, if Malcolm had been able to cling onto a few, he’d now be turning a pretty profit.

This Tuesday Sotheby’s have their annual sale of Irish art.

They are putting up a nice pair of Paul Henrys (as below), which are sufficiently domesticated to fit any cottage wall (as if):

Henry must have had a one-man production line of such scenes.

Jack Yeats (brother of the more famous …) is there in in full vulgarity:

Another one to live with (provided you have a twenty-odd-foot long viewpoint for something 42 in by 36 in) is a magnificently voyeuristic Orpen…

Its original title was Digby Cave, and it represents a 1908 holiday at (of all exotic places) Margate. The two girls are Grace Orpen and Mabel Nicholson. As the catalogue note has it:

The Lady in his Life and Malcolm concur that this is a good one. Kentish beachlife must have been different in Edwardian times. In unimaginable circumstances …

The star of the show, though, is a Lavery lovely:

Her working title is “Lady in Brown”, which is good enough in itself. At a certain distance she fixes the viewer with that penetrating, aristocratic glint in her eye. Better still, the guy at Sotheby’s has been busy with his homework, and reckons he has identified The “Lady in Brown” (and, incidentally, by association enhanced the portrait’s value and significance):

This one belongs in one of those ancestral homes — Florence Court or Castle Coole —  which Malcolm visited last week. Even there, perhaps, it might be just another picture. On the end wall of the Sotheby’s gallery, she’s a stunner.

Gwendoline Bertie was, in passing, Anthony Eden’s mother-in-law. The artist John Spencer-Churchill was her son.