And treat those two impostors just the same

OK: that one started with those reports of Cameron and Clegg posturing, and imposturing at the CNH tractor plant at Basildon.

The photographers, out on the jolly, seemed to take pleasure in capturing very odd body language (example, right), while the columnists were just out for a laugh, The Guardian‘s Michael White as much as anyone:

Almost exactly two years after their fateful tryst in the Downing Street rose garden, David Cameron and Nick Clegg are sick and tired of people likening their coalition knee-trembler to a marriage. Politically speaking, they’re not even engaged. And, if they were, they’d be dividing up the CDs after last week’s election battering.

Where better to shake off the taint of matrimonial metaphor and renew their alliance on a more business-like footing than in Basildon? No one goes on honeymoon to Basildon. Southend perhaps, but not to the 60s new town, home patch of the legendary reality TV show, The Only Way is Essex. So Essex it was.

Just to be on the safe side and eradicate the last vestigial scent of the rose garden romance (how could they have behaved that way on a first date?), their minders dispatched the pair to the thriving, Fiat-owned New Holland factory where they assemble 26,000 tractors a year, mostly for export. If only all Britain could be like this!

The macho, male-dominated backdrop thus provided for the Cameron-Clegg anniversary speeches, plus Q&A, was strangely evocative of the Soviet era of heroic five-year tractor plans and targets regularly smashed, at least on paper.

Ann Treneman, in the new “Dave-not-so-friendly” Times [£], was up for the odd zinger, too:

A mere two years ago Dave and Nick strolled down the garden path, birds singing, sun shining, bees buzzing. I suppose the danger signs were there last year when they spent their first anniversary at the handball arena in the Olympic Park. But tractors?

Next year, who knows? Maybe it will be an abattoir.

The award for Murdochian butchery, though, must go to Michael Savage’s twitter message:

The tractor factory Cam and Clegg are visiting appears to make Big Blue tractors that pull little yellow trailers…

Another dimension of If

Joy, indeed, to find old-friends back among the strips in The Guardian. Steve Bell has brought back Seaman Kipling, apparently for the Falklands anniversary:

The penguins can never be far away — another of Bell’s inspired creations.

No Bell artefact could possibly be cute and cuddly. His penguins are not the photogenics featured by the London Zoo. They have teeth. They bite. As did Professor Pongoo, who ran fifth (behind two assorted Hendersons and a couple of Tories  — by the way, it looks as if the Scottish Tories haven’t quite got the hand of this transferable vote business) in the Edinburgh Pentland Hills Ward. As is widely reported and commented upon, Pongoo was well ahead of the LibDem. Which is one of the two “astonishing statistics” about that Ward: the other is that all but fifty of eight thousand ballots cast were deemed “valid votes”. The strong temptation must have been to scrawl Trams!, and leave it at that— one issue above all else did for any hope the Edinburgh LibDems had, as well as for any vestige of a competent reputation. What doesn’t get so noted in the reports is that Pongoo also bit off the Green candidate. That ought to be worthy of note, for the Greens in Scotland are pro-SNP referendum, and had a working relationship with the SNP in the 2007 Assembly, so have some claim to be a “national” party.

One last thought

For now, at any rate.

There’s a lot of imposturing pretence in politics at any time. With the revelations we are promised from Leveson, courtesy of Mrs Brooks and Coulson, there’s rather more than usual this week.

For all the palaver over the Queen’s Speech, it took much padding to get it to stretch out over a mauvais quart d’heure.

So, back to Kipling and If.

We are blaming it on you, Cameron and Clegg. Even among your own, many doubt you. You have, most assuredly, dealt in lies. As Peter Cruddas crudely expounded, some men, those laden with lucre, clearly count with you … too much. You walked and talked, and rode, with Murdoch’s, and — with that and the 50p tax rate — were seen to lose the common touch. You can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of twaddle and distortion. You certainly don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.

Your reward: even the Bookies are giving odds that that Labour will be the biggest party after the next Election.

Lost in translation

Hugh Muir, back doing the day-job on The Guardian Diary, today encounters a linguistic problem. In full:

… it has fallen to Northern Ireland assembly Speaker Willie Hay to rule that the term “village idiot” is not acceptable for use within the chamber, after health minister Edwin Poots said his political rival Kieran McCarthy was acting like one. This appears to overturn precedent. Lord Alderdice, a previous Speaker, judged “eejit” to be OK. The key seems to be pronunciation. Fewer problems in the Republic, where there is a list of words banned in the Dáil, including chancer, coward, guttersnipe, rat, scumbag and fascist. But then they had reason to act after one former representative shouted “Fuck you, Deputy Stagg, fuck you!” Seemed better to have some rules.

Two points of clarification, there, Ceann Comhairle:

First, the loose mouth

Emmet Stagg (brother of the more famous, loopier, and more defunct Frank) can look after himself, and needs no defence. Anyway, as a Labour man with a TCD connexion, he gets respected here.

However, Paul Gogarty deserved all he got, and has a track-record for staging similar stunts — Babygate, Callely, numerous “celebrity” outings for RTÉ (not that the bar for celeb-status is that much lower in Dublin). He won the soggy biscuit when he denounced Free Education for Everyone protestors as “muppets” and supported the physical intervention of the Gardai — doubtless in retaliation for FEE previously taking over his office. How Green! What a brave civic activist!

The electors of Dublin Mid-West had Gogarty’s number, all right: in the 2011 General Election, he lost his seat ignominiously. He took all of 3.5 % of First Preferences, limping in eighth of the fourteen runners. The previous outing he had taken 10.8%, and finished second after transfers.

After Gogarty’s excursion in English guttersnipery, it involved a change in Irish parliamentary proceedings:

CHANGES ARE likely to be made to the document dictating acceptable parliamentary language in the Dáil and Seanad after Green Party TD Paul Gogarty’s defence of his use of an expletive in the Dáil last week.

The 18-member Dáil committee on procedure and privileges, which meets tomorrow, will deal with Mr Gogarty’s use of the “f-word”, directed against Labour party whip Emmet Stagg.

Second, a cultural chasm

Anyone familiar with Hibernicisms knows that “eejit” and “idiot”are no way near synonyms.

You’d take a drink with an “eejit”, even a “mad eejit”, and even respect him. You take a swing at an idiot, and be cheered for doing so and laying him out. Gogarty, for example, belongs in this latter category.

Believe it or not (number 94)

There really is an academic study on what is acceptable in a parliamentary exchange. The key “finding” goes this way:

Parliamentary insults are offensive rhetorical acts performed in a highly competitive institutional setting. They are deliberate in the sense that they are intended to be perceived and recognised as such by the person targeted. Unparliamentary language uses can provide important clues about moral and social standards, prejudices, taboos, as well as value judgements of different social and political groups in a community. Because they underlie culturally defined negative values and norms, insults are meant to reduce the targeted person, group or institution (and what they stand for) to stereotypically undesirable or detestable attributes. Cross-cultural studies are particularly enlightening in this respect, since it can safely be assumed that the forms and functions of insults and their respective feedbacks vary in different cultures and institutional settings.

Enjoy that? Then your sociology degree must be showing.

Compare and contrast:

1. David Cameron, 6th December 2005:

… we need to change, and we will change, the way we behave. I’m fed up with the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster, the name calling, backbiting, point scoring, finger pointing.

2. David Cameron, 18th April 2012:

The right hon. Gentleman will not take any lectures on the fuel strike because he is in the pockets of the people who called the fuel strike. That’s right. They vote for his policies, they sponsor his Members of Parliament, they got him elected. Absolutely irresponsible—that is what we have heard once again from the right hon. Gentleman. Not good enough to run the Opposition, not good enough to run the country.

Of which Ann Treneman said in her Parliamentary Sketch for The Times [£]:

Dave did his usual Flashman, refusing to answer the questions, changing the subject to Ken Livingstone’s taxes, playing to the gallery. He was sneery, insulting, preening. When you seeDave like this, you just know he deserves to end up in panto.

Oooh, no missus!

No… no…hold on…
wait a moment…

Either she’s the best Frankie Howerd impersonator in town, or she just doesn’t get it.

Here’s Ann Treneman doing the ‘Conference Sketch’ on page 25 of Malcolm’s Times:

Mariella [Frostrup] wondered what he had done when he [Gordon Brown] was young.
“I played sports,” he announced (he didn’t say during which meal). He had gone to University at 16 but, in the first week, hurt his eye playing rugby.
“I spent several years in and out of hospital. Some of you may not know this but this was the Sixties and Seventies. At my hospital at 9 o’clock in the evening—this was the NHS, free at the point of need!—and I was only 17 and 18, they would serve all the patients with drinks!’
The audience barked, possibly with shock.
“Yeah! You could have Guinness. You could have beer! Free beer for all the workers!”

Oh god, where does one start?

Look, Anne dear; that is true. Arthur Guinness and Co believed that their product was healthy and good. They provided, free of charge, one third of a pint bottles for patients in hospital. Malcolm knows that, for sure, because, at the age of barely sixteen, because of a broken arm in a rugby game, he was in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, and was provided with, and—yes— joyfully imbibed the stuff (and looked for seconds).

So what?

Meanwhile, Gordon’s punchline: you simply didn’t get it, did you?

Well, dear, there’s this song, you see. It used to be very popular among the Lefties. Particularly after pay-day.

Some say it came from the Wobblies (and they’re still out there, you know!)

Everyone can make up verses to infinity. Basically, it goes like this:

[Invent your own iambic dodecasyllabic line, as offensive as possible, or]
We’ll hang [any four-syllable name] from a sour apple tree
When the red revolution comes.

Then the only other rule is that every verse, however inane or inflammatory, has a rousing chorus:

Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever!
When the red revolution comes!

After a requisite intake of mild, bitter and comradeship, everybody staggers home, carolling an obligatory final chorus:

Free beer for all the workers! Free beer for all the workers!
When the red revolution comes!

Gordon knew that. The Labour membership knew that. The Times readership, alas, remain no better informed from Ms Treneman’s efforts.