“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”
Now, tell, Malcolm: what was it, in the following, that nudged your memory of that, when you read this:
My old friend Bruce Anderson has penned what sounds like an extraordinary piece for this week’s issue of The Spectator. He has attacked a Conservative leader, and seemingly in strong terms. “Never has a government been better at exasperating its own supporters; rarely has a government been so politically inept,” he writes. Bruce is a friend of the Prime Minister’s. It will be interesting to see if he has used any caveats later in the piece, such as saying that it is not Cameron’s fault or emphasising that it can all be turned around. We’ll see.
It should worry Cameron that such a loyalist and good friend holds that view, as he is someone who has supported Cameron from even before the days when his leadership campaign consisted of David and Samantha Cameron, the Goves and three other people. While Bruce has some modernising friends, he often has good instincts for what the wider Tory tribe will tolerate. He understands Tory history and the shires.
That’s Iain Martin, a young’un, but already a doyen of the Telegraph. Any other mental disturbance, such as the title of that piece, In the Tory modernising bunker it’s all getting a bit Berlin, April 1945, is entirely your own problem.
On Malcolm’s second thoughts, it’s obviously that final word: shires.
There’s the problem!
The Tory Party has entrenched itself in the green suburbs and the counties of old England. It’s been a long process;, but it was John Major — MP for Huntingdon, not surprisingly — who put it in to words:
A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.
A Malcolmian humilation
Aw, shucks! Malcolm remembers it well!
Look at those surnames. You could make the register of Malcolm’s primary school there.
The Sea Scouts lined up at Wells War Memorial, to be inspected by the Earl of Leicester, with his Home Guard medal. The Great Man doing the proper thing, stopping half-way down the line, to address a whippersnapper (who promptly saluted, on instruction, and responded, again as instructed): “Yes, y’r Lordship!”.
Thereafter followed, not contempt, but a kind of Hummph! from his Dear Old Dad.
Sadly for Malcolm’s self-esteem, Dear Old Dad, one generation from the 1912 Yorkshire miners’ strike, and despite being an inveterate reader of the Beaverbrook press, held no admiration for those as has dominance o’er us. A Dear Old Dad, who, moreover, had done his bit up in the Mediterranean and up the Aegean in an MTB, while other didn’t.
Moving on
Does this really need explaining?
The Tories remain a party which believes the fox-hunters deserve priority, while suburbanites are wakened, once a year in the early hours, by the urban vixen in orgasmic howl, and marvel they are still so close to nature.
The Tories remain a party where half the parliamentary vote goes against single-sex marriage, while most of us either are or live alongside, by the standards of Mother Church, irregular liaisons.
The Tories remains party where Euroscepticism is the norm, while most of us work for multi-nationals, take our holidays in EU countries, and actually enjoy an evening at the local Spanish, Greek or Italian restaurant.
That’s out of the playbook of Ana Sol Alliegro (as right), whose name comes close to combining a bad pun, a Mexican beer, and the worst car even British Leyland managed to produce. She appears in the Miami Herald as the star of a convoluted Floridan political scandal:
From a shooting to shoplifting, David Rivera’s pal in FBI probe has checkered past
Ana Alliegro, who has had previous run-ins with the law, isn’t cooperating with the FBI or a federal grand jury investigating the campaign finances of Justin Lamar Sternad and the possible ties to Rep. David Rivera.
When Justin Lamar Sternad met Ana Sol Alliegro at a Miller’s Miami Falls Ale House, he didn’t know the political consultant would help lead his campaign into the FBI’s crosshairs or that she had prior legal run-ins — including the time she shot at her ex-husband while naked.
She then sat naked at a desk with her leg up and compared the gun to a male sexual organ.
“If you think your [expletive] is powerful (showing the gun), this is mine,” Alliegro told ["her ex-husband, Moshe Cosicher, at his Tigertail Ave. home in Coconut Grove"], who tried to ignore her by going to make coffee, a report said. Alliegro followed him and told him to sit on the couch.
She fired a round into the ceiling.
“You see. It’s loaded — this is business,” Alliegro allegedly said. He tried to leave.
Somethings must run in the genes: that story has three credited by-lines. One is Scott Hiaasen McAputo, “22-year-old son” of the aforesaid,
who once deflected questions from a high school typing teacher about his Father-The-Writer by saying his dad wrote how-to home repair books.
Our British domestic scene rarely manages such delights as Ana Sol Alliegro, and her direct approach to politics and personal relations. We do our best, even in these days of the ConDem degeneracy:
David Laws, the shortest lived Chief Secretary to the Treasury, now happily redeemed and whitewashed after
Huhne, the first Cabinet minister in all British history to resign over a criminal charge. We have Regina v Christopher Huhne and Vasiliki Pryce, marked in our diaries for 2nd October, with interest.
His confederate-in-deceit, Nick Clegg, who apologises not for breaking his word, but for giving it in the first place.
Now Andrew Mitchell, who after six days still hash’t managed to produce a coherent account of what he thinks happened at the Downing Street gates. Yes, he used foul language — that admission came along about Day Four — but the “fucking” was only employed “adjectivally”. As Malcolm has put himself at pains to point out, an Old Rugbeian and a History M.A. (Cantab) should be able to recognise the difference between an adjective and an adverb of degree.
A Daley dose
All this, happily, is severely up-the-nose of Janet Daley at the Telegraph blogs. For all sorts of reasons what is about to ensue, the combination of author, subject, context and medium, seems almost as surreal as La Belle Dame (sans ou avec merci) Alliegro. Yet, here it is:
Time to tell the truth about the “nasty” party: as someone who has defended the Conservatives (or at least defended their arguments) for so many years, it is time to come clean. Tories can be bloody difficult to like. The Andrew Mitchell Debacle is not an uncharacteristic, deranged and inexplicable lapse. It is just an extreme example of the kind of attitude with which many people who circulate in this world are familiar.
While most of us who associate with Conservatives do not get sworn at or described at “plebs”, we (by which I mean those not included in a small circle of either known-since-childhood social intimates or devoted sycophants whose uncritical loyalty is beyond question) have been variously snubbed, dismissed, or found ourselves becoming pointedly invisible in the presence of people to whom we are no longer of use.
She is remarkably warm by contrasting all this:
with Labour politicians – even though we are clearly in genial disagreement over major issues. They inevitably greet me with warm recollection years after a joint radio or television gig – even if the occasion involved heated conflict.
Then it gets down and dirty.
Ms Daley expresses a variation of the distaste many of us, including Malcolm, have felt for some time:
it is the Tory modernisers – perhaps because they are more likely to be “toffs” than striving achievers from ordinary backgrounds – who are the worst. It is not the Thatcherite, aspirational, state school-educated Tories who look over your shoulder when they are talking to you: it is the snotty, condescending “one nation” paternalists for whom you are only of interest so long as you are being “supportive” (ie as faithful as a Labrador). No names, no pack drill, but you know who you are.
Oooh, err, Missus.
In one episode (season 4, episode 1) of The West Wing, President Bartlet meets a young Congressman, Peter Lien. Bartlet has the handshake farewell line: Welcome to the game that never ends.
What Malcolm didn’t appreciate was here is a quotation — as many of Sorkin’s gems deliberately and referentially are. This one is from a life-long socialist, George Reedy —(below, laid back with the characteristic hair), LBJ’s press secretary:
Politicians will always see the press as an arena for warfare… The concept that newspaper or television news exists to foster the political dialogue in a free society is incomprehensible to the political mind. Welcome to the game that never ends and will pull you in all directions at once!
Fed and watered (well, pinot-ed and Broadsided), the Lady in Malcolm’s Life upped and offed in search of whatever Ladies do when “shopping”. The arrangement was to meet up in Islington for more scoffing.
In due course, Malcolm headed the same way. The bus stop at Islington Green is close by an Oxfam book shop.
Oxfam’s success in the books market has caused complaints from high-street retailers. Tim Godfray, chief executive of the Booksellers Association, which represents the likes of Waterstone’s and Blackwells, is concerned by the new, slick image of Oxfam bookshops.
“Oxfam are really professional, and therein lies the rub, says Godfray. “In the old days, charity shops projected an image of, dare I say it, amateurism – books stacked on trestle tables run by well-meaning volunteers. But now the retailing arms of many charities are run by hard-nosed professional retailers. Oxfam has more outlets selling books than Waterstone’s.
“In general, registered charities pay no more than 20 per cent of normal business rates on the buildings they use. Because of this, they are able to offer lower prices than commercial booksellers. Charity bookshops like the ones Oxfam run are now competing against our own members and, as they obtain these preferential fiscal benefits, we believe the competition is unfair.”
Serendipity
Any individual Oxfam bookshop will have a very limited range on offer. You missed out on the oeuvre of Dan Brown, and need to catch up on The Da Vinci Code? Oxfam books will happily have a whole stack. Beyond that, too much depends on what got chucked in their direction in the last few days.
On the other hand, that is the attraction of the operation. You have an unrequited love for all things Sumerian. Professor Glompotz, the world-renowned expert on Sumeria, recently popped his clogs. His long-suffering daughter dumped a couple of shelf-loads on the local Oxfam shop. Bingo!
Thus, in Islington Malcolm hit on a collection of small curiosities, obviously the bequest of some like-minded loopy lefty.
Fifty years on
One thin Fabian pamphlet that kept him going to the early hours was Austin Mitchell’s Election ’45.
It consists of little more than a menagerie of contemporaries reminiscing about how they were selected, how they fared, how they felt, about the great Labour landslide. Alongside the later greats (Lieutenant Callaghan, Major Healey, Flying Officer Lever) we hear individual voices of the grassroots.
Writing his preface for 1995 Mitchell reports:
Of sixteen hundred and eighty-three candidates, a hundred and ten are still alive half a century later. Of six hundred and forty MPs, forty-three are still alive. I was privileged to interview thirty-three, the most enjoyable piece of research I have ever done …
Enjoyable to research, delightful to read. If nothing else, it reminds how successful the 1945 generation were, and how mediocre were the achievements of the next Labour landslide of 1997. When comes such another?
Besides which …
From as far back as 1989, Adrian Mole’s creator, Sue Townsend explains Mr Bevan’s Dream: why Britain needs its Welfare State. Very personal, very angry, and, at times, very funny. Savage indignation about Thatcherite savagery and denial of dignity.
A couple of other items, including the star of the show: Fame is the Spur, Howard Spring’s great, great novel of the rise of the Labour movement — and intimations of its inner corruption.
This will be the third, or possibly fourth, copy that has come Malcolm’s way. The first (a Fontana paperback) fell apart with re-readings and being passed around TCD student circles in the early ’60s. The second, a hardback from the ’50s, was rescued from being given the heave-ho by a school librarian who thought it too “heavy”: that’s still on the attic shelves.. And now this, so the Pert Young Piece may have her own copy, be enlightened, be warmed, and be warned.
All, some five items, for some thirteen quid or so.
Whoever you are, your generous donation to Oxfam does not go unappreciated, and unloved. When Malcolm’s clogs, too, need popping, it is to be hoped some successor finds a small trove in a later Oxfam.
Somewhere in there, it entered the Folk Revival and Skiffle song-books.
Malcolm’s Saturday peregrination
The Lady in his Life and Malcolm betook themselves on a circular tour. The weather was — to be frank — somewhat mixed. So pubs were going to play a large part in the day.
Bruno
For starters, once through Waterloo and onto the Jubilee Line, heading east, Malcolm was pleased to note an Olympics “volunteer” deep into S.J.Parris’s Prophecy, the middle of her three Giordano Bruno frolics (and, in Malcolm’s recollection, arguably, the best). Those three have now completed their voyage from Malcolm’s guilt pile to being shelved in smug satisfaction. In the end, he delighted in a head-long rush to complete the sequence, as far as it goes. There is a glint in Malcolm’s eye whence Stephanie Merritt is heading.
Giordano Bruno was in England for only a short space: April 1583 to October 1585. Merritt/Parris has already mined that for three novels, so time is a-wasting. With Sacrilege we have reached the summer of 1584, which approaches the mid-term of Bruno’s span in England. Either the locale has to be widened, or the sequence self-terminates. At the end of Sacrilege, the femme fatale (and she so nearly was) has debunked to France, taking with her the book of hermetic magic that Bruno craves — and which is now established as the MacGuffin of the sequence. Another thought: to what extent is Merritt/Parris referencing Frances A Yates on this?
By DLR to the Royal Arsenal
Changing from the Jubilee to the Docklands Light Railway was a bit confusing: you have to go down and under to reach Platform 1, and so to the DLR spur past London City Airport, and then under the river to Woolwich.
That brings you to the entrance to Woolwich market. As of now, this is somewhat decayed and downtrodden: we are promised — and there are already signs of — a major regeneration. Whether the pledged £6.6 million is enough seed-money remains to be seen. What would make the difference is the arrival of Crossrail towards the end of the decade. Yet all we have for certain is ambiguous:
Agreement has been reached to build a new ‘station box’ on the Crossrail line through Woolwich, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond has announced …
The station box, which could be converted into a complete station in the future, will be privately funded by developer Berkeley Homes under an agreement with the Department for Transport, Transport for London, Crossrail Ltd and Greenwich Council.
Philip Hammond said: “A Crossrail station in Woolwich would make travel to the centre of London quicker and easier and would help bring new investment to the area. I am pleased that we have secured this site for a future station and have reached an agreement to build the ‘box’ for the station at no extra cost to the taxpayer, bringing the benefits of a station in Woolwich a step closer.
We are already one Transport Secretary on from Hammond. A further successor is at least a possibility in the autumn re-shuffle — Justine Greening’s staunch adherence to the ConDem position on the Heathrow third runway could be her coup de grace. There is no honour among Tories in their ambitions and repositionings. We have no firm proposals for Woolwich Crossrail going beyond could be developed and would make travel and would help bring new investment. And Greenwich and Woolwich (Labour majority: 10,153) is not a Tory marginal.
Not to mention that London City Airport (two stops back up the DLR) is coming on nicely for feeder services, that Southend (half an hour in the other direction) has potential for medium-hop and charter services, both — with Crosslink — on direct routes to Heathrow. But who expects an integrated transport policy from this shower?
This may be a mistake
Through Woolwich Market and across the A206 Plumstead Road, into the Royal Arsenal development, and you have crossed a social and cultural divide.
Suddenly there is open space. You have entered mortgaged, aspirant middle-class England. There are enough old structures — some dating back three centuries — to prove antiquity. Vanburgh left his mark here:
So did Hawksmoor:
The development of the Royal Arsenal site has been going since the early last decade. Its completion will be another ten years ahead. At the end it will comprise some 5,000 new homes. The likelihood has to be that this will move the political complexion of the locality — as it is already changing the cultural tilt.
From neglect and ruin (though full of history), an old disused warehouse has been transformed into the wonder and glory that is now the reputed Dial Arch.
Situated in the natural heart of Royal Arsenal Riverside in Woolwich, the original Dial Square building dates from 1720, although an excavation of the site uncovered relics from the time of the Roman occupation! The building itself acted as the gate house for the historic home of British defence and munitions production. Inside, we have a plush and unique style, with exposed brickwork, chandeliers, wooden and stone flooring with fantastically original artwork on the walls.
Oozing charm and rustic character, our picturesque surroundings provide the perfect setting for savouring the hearty, seasonal gastro-pub food on our Menu and the carefully nurtured cask ales and fine hand picked wines gracing our bar.
OK: you’re not convinced, and shouldn’t be.
The Dial Arch is something of a Warren (that, in fact, is its address). There are several “rooms’, all different in style and furnishing. The bar is, for Malcolm’s antediluvian taste, somewhat too glitzy. Service seems (on two experiences) to be excellent. There is a good choice of liquids, including half-a-dozen working beer-engines. Those with exotic tastes seem to be well provided with the fizzy yellow stuff. There is a useful food menu (though whether it is truly “gastro-pub”, Malcolm has no opinion).
Put it like this: the Dial Arch ticks most of Malcolm’s boxes. The Lady in his Life wasn’t displeased, either.
The day that the rains came
Around this time the sky turned inky. There was thunder. There was lightning. There were downpours. Just what a man and his Lady need to extend a stop in a pub.
Eventually, though, it was the stopping train back to London Bridge. Since the storm had taken out the signalling at Cannon Street station, more stopping than usual was involved.
Ignore the carping critics. You can, and will get decent real ale here. The food is at least adequate — though, if you’ve worked through one Nicholson’s menu, you’ve seen them all. The wines list doesn’t flatter, but provides for all except the loftiest palate (to which Malcolm — quantity over quality — has no pretension). It’s the dressed-up basement of an office block. The loos and facilities have been overworked, especially now, towards the end of the tourist season. The service and prices are reasonable, especially so for one of the finest views of the river.
The winter of our discontent
The Lady in his Life and Malcolm were here to meet the Pert Young Piece, who had been to the afternoon matinee of Richard III at the Globe, just along the river-front.
PYP had revelled in the torrential rain: the Globe hasn’t got its drainage right (that’s something of a period feature). Flip-flops are what is needed in a summer cascade, so Pert Young Piece among the groundlings felt she was definitely scoring ankle-deep points against tourists in Manolos.
For the record, Pert Young Piece is becoming an insufferable Bardista, as she happily contrasts Rylance and Kevin Spacey as Dick the Turd. What got her was the Kingdom for a horse! As always, the problem here, as elsewhere in the canon, is getting out from under Olivier: Rylance makes it the regretful lament of a rueful defeated man. In effect: Strewth! I lost life, kingdom … and all because of a horse. Different, but a fair reading.
Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig
Foddered and drenched (internally as externally) we return to base in bourgeois Muswell Hill (No Hawksmoor. No Vanburgh) by the number 43 bus. Humming gently:
My daddy was an engineer, My brother drives a hack, My sister takes in laundry , While the baby balls the jack ; And it don’t look like I’ll ever stop my wandering.
Last evening, late, Malcolm polished off Christopher Brookmyre’s latest, When the Devil Drives.
Malcolm’s considerable enthusiasm for Brookmyre stalled somewhat when the author farmed out Jack Parlabane. The last two books, this one and Where the Bodies are Buriedare developing a new series — and, in Malcolm’s reading, are a return to the accessible, hardly-straight, but bolied-hard neo-noir of Parlabane.
Were there any doubt we are meant to see these two as linked, there is the glaring visual clue of the covers. Then we find the two female characters are carried over: the senior and cynical policewoman, Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod, and the aspirant found PI, Jasmine Sharp. Also along for the ride, riding shotgun for Jasmine, is Glen Fallan, the Glasgow hardman who had topped Jasmine’s father.
This outing has Jasmine engaged to discover what had happened to actress Tessa Garrion, missing these three decades.
All of Brookmyre’s conventional hobbyhorses are allowed a quick trot: the corrupt aristocracy, drugged, drunk and disorderly, the Lowland Scots arty-literati and self-anointing bankers, the sub-insular non-nationalism (a deft reference to “Englandshire”, for one example), the debunking of mysticism and godliness in all its many forms, the left-field social commentaries:
Catherine’s hackles were well-risen by the time she had made it from the front entrance of the Royal Scottish Bank’s ostentatiously plush Edinburgh headquarters to the reception desk on the far side of the lobby, across an expanse of marble floor larger than her garden. Clearly not everybody was quite so struck by the building’s interior splendour as management would like, as there was scaffolding up on two sides as part of a controversial multi-million-pound refit. Having been bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of eleven figures, i their chastened state it was heartening to see the banks embracing a new era of corporate austerity. We were, let’s not forget, all in this together.
Looking at the opulence of her surroundings, she couldn’t help but think of the condition of most police stations she’d been in recently, and more to the point the state of Duncan and Fraser’s school. It was a flimsy eighties-built one-storey structure that looked like a temporary building-site headquarters, an effect enhanced by a proliferation of men in hard hats who had concluded that the place was literally falling down.
Mustn’t go down that road, though, she thought. That’s the ‘politics of envy’. If anybody in this country eve deserved a slap in the dish with a dead salmon, it was whichever smug and spoiled little prick came up with that one. Execs were trousering bonuses of several million pounds, even for the years in which their companies had recorded a huge loss, while freezing wages down the line where they weren’t simply laying people off. But if you pointed out the inequality of this, that phrase was their catch-all comeback.
That is tailed by a version of the banker, Daily Mail reader, social worker (in this iteration, asylum seeker) biscuit joke.
Monday morning, 2 a.m.
The itch woke Malcolm, as it does each couple of hours.
Apply the itch-cream; reach for another book. The one to hand was, as noted previously, S.J.Parris’s Sacrilege. Before sleep returned Malcolm was a couple of chapters in, and looking good.
Unfortunately …
The morning post brought a package from Amazon, and this is one Malcolm had been anticipating for some time.
Here, to hand, is the latest instalment of Jasper Fforde’s extraordinary imaginings. Short-hand is TN7: the seventh “Thursday Next” novel. In full that’s The Woman Who Died A Lot.
Now, which to read first?
As of this moment, it looks as if Tuesday is squeezing Bruno back to the guilt-pile.
Fret not, patient reader, this will get all political, partisan and polemical in a paragraph or three.
However, Malcolm chooses to start in the choir stalls of St Nicholas Parish Church, Wells-next-the-Sea. Since St Nicholas spectacularly burned down, and was rebuilt in later Victorian times, it held no exotic distractions such as the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum’s Hugo van der Goes (above).
In St Nicholas, he half-attended to well-meaning sermons, and developed a taste for the rituals of the Church of England. That didn’t prevent him becoming progressively agnostic over the years. Since the Church of England, and to almost the same extent the Church of Ireland, makes no great demands on its adherents, there’s plenty of time and scope to reflect on ecclesiastical architecture, and the sinuous prose of the 1662 prayer book. And to half-attend to well-meant sermons.
Out of all that evolves a Self-Correcting Internalised Guilt Mechanism (hereinafter, and above, S-CIGM).
In extreme cases (and Malcolm is sociopathic) that also requires taking the faults of the wider world upon one’s self. The evils of the divisive capitalist society have to be confronted, and corrected by continued engagement with The Guardian and Tribune Magazine, as well as annual subscription to the Labour Party and CAMRA.
For the same reason, Malcolm each evening carried home with him personal guilt for his failures as an educator: that Tommy still couldn’t grasp the distinction of its and it’s; and Tracey, bewildered by the text of King Lear, asked “Can’t we just watch the video?”
On the other hand …
There are those at the other end of the scale, who missed out on S-CIGM. These know instinctively it is all someone else’s fault.
It’s all there In the beginning in Genesis 3, vv. 12-13. It was all her fault! It was all that damned snake’s fault!
Serial criminals lacking a S-CIGM can blame society: Well, you shouldn’t have left it lying around! and You should have stopped me earlier!
By definition politicians are serial criminals
The further to the political Right they are, the closer they come to [Godwin's Law alert!] the Eichmann Defence.
Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has been blamed by close allies of David Cameron for failing to protect the Prime Minister from the pitfalls of creating the Leveson inquiry, according to reports. Mr Heywood has been accused of being too enthusiastic in advocating such an open inquiry.
More of that exculpation, lack of S-CIGM, serpentine seduction and passing-the-buck in today’s Times, it seems.
A cover up
Hugo van der Goes had the discreetly-positioned male hand, and the Iris flower.
The flower symbolism associated with the iris is faith, wisdom, cherished friendship, hope, valor, my compliments, promise in love, wisdom. Irises were used in Mary Gardens. The blade-shaped foliage denotes the sorrows which ‘pierced her heart.’ The iris is the emblem of both France and Florence, Italy. The fleur-de-lis, one of the most well-known of all symbols, is derived from the shape of the iris flower. The fleur-de-lis is a symbol of the royal family in France and is the state flower of Tennessee.
Political figures, finding themselves over-exposed, have their equivalent of the hand and iris — those all-purpose, faceless-but-ever-helpful “Sources close to“. These are, presumably, Self-Correcting Externalised Guilt Mechanisms [S-CEGMs, perhaps]. In the spirit of “getting the retaliation in first”, theyfeature heavily elsewhere, as in the Daily Mail:
A blame game has started behind the door of Number 10 Downing Street over who thought it was a good idea to set up the Leveson Inquiry, it was claimed today.
Sources close to David Cameron say his most senior civil servant is being blamed for not protecting him from the firestorm caused by the probe, despite the Prime Minister setting it up so enthusiastically less than a year ago.
Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has been branded not ‘cautious’ enough about the pitfalls of the Inquiry by Mr Cameron’s allies, which has since exposed how close he and his colleagues got to the Murdoch empire.
Lynne Truss, in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, revisited the trial of Roger Casement, in search of a comma.
Roger Casement was tried, found guilty, sentenced and executed under the Treason Act of 1351. That was, and is (for it remains in force in English law to this day) quite an enlightened piece of legislation, in that it attempts to define and circumscribe what is involved in an act of treason. Essential to the conviction was whether or not Casement had been
adherent to the King’s enemies in his Realm, giving to them aid and comfort, in the Realm[,] or elsewhere.
Notice that critical second comma: if it’s there, Casement was indeed guilty, and Mr Justice Darling was entitled to read that “giving aid and comfort” were words of apposition: that is to say, if one took the side of the king’s foes, one was a traitor irrespective of whether one was in or out of the kingdom. On the other hand …
Casement had done his stuff in Germany, not in the lands of George V. Once back in Ireland, still part of the United Kingdom, he had behaved impeccably, surrendering to the police, and obeying the law. Serjeant Sullivan, imported for the occasion and a stranger to English courts, argued the 1351 Act:
neither created nor declared an offence of treason by adherence to the King’s enemies beyond the realm.
The precise wording meant:
the giving of aid and comfort outside the realm did not constitute a treason which could be tried in this country unless the person who gave the aid and comfort outside the realm, in the present case in the Empire of Germany, was himself within the realm at the time when he gave the aid and comfort .
It took the keen eyes of two learned judges, and a trip to the Public Record Office, to spot there might, just might, be a second comma. Anyway, the mood of the time probably made Sullivan’s nit-picking pointless, and so Casement was condemned. Presumptions of innocence and guilt tend to get a bit clouded when matters are so politically polarised, as they were in 1916.
A Malcolmian aside
That picture has a history in itself.
The presiding judge, Sir Charles John Darling, invited Sir John Lavery into the Court. Lavery had to keep his materials out of sight while he sketched. The finished version (above) was not completed until 1931, and remained in Lavery’s studio until the artist’s death in 1941. Casement is put at the centre, straight in front of the viewer, who is thus rendered judge and jury.
The painting became part of the Irish National Collection, and is generally to be found at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin, though it came to London for restoration work in 2003 — which was its first display in the United Kingdom.
Yeats, however, put the painting (or was he thinking of some sketches for it?) in The Municipal Gallery Revisited as early as 1938:
Around me the images of thirty years: An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side; Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars, Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride …
How might this apply to the arrest, for perjury, of Andy Coulson?
Well, it might come down to a similar piece of pettifogging.
Another Malcolmian aside:
from the OED:
pettifogger, n.1
1. Originally: an inferior legal practitioner who dealt with petty cases; formerly occas. also as a professional name … (now hist.). Hence: a lawyer who engages in petty quibbling and cavilling, or who employs dubious or underhanded legal practices; a lawyer who abuses the law. Usu. derogatory.
Consider:
Tommy Sheridan represented himself at his perjury trial.
He called Coulson as a witness.His crucial question to Coulson was: Did the News of the World pay corrupt police officers?”
Coulson replied, “Not to my knowledge”.
Coulson could answer no other way: he would have been incriminating himself, for corruption law makes both briber and bribe-taker guilty.
But, even now, Coulson has a get-out: it may be the NotW didn’t pay off “corrupt” coppers, but honest ones. The NotW had no knowledge whether the individuals receiving dosh were “corrupt” or not. The paper was serving the wider good,covered by the public-interest defence: a small technical offence to expose a greater one, etc., etc. And with one bound our hero is free!
Coulson the escapologist
Sheridan also questioned Coulson on why he had left the NotW. As always, he gave the noble answer.
There had been a crime committed by a member of the NotW staff: Clive Goodman had been done for intercepting Clarence House telephone messages, and for that went inside on a four-month stretch. At that stage the NotW management were maintaining that Goodman was the single “bad apple”.
Coulson had accepted “taken the ultimate responsibility and stepped down” for this “illegal phone hacking”, even though —perish the thought! — he had “no knowledge of it”.
That has been Coulson’s consistent stated position. Sheridan had pressed him further, particularly over Goodman’s connection with Glenn Mulcaire, he of the numerous records. Coulson denied he had any awareness at all of Mulcaire, did not even know the name until Mulcaire’s arrest: “I never met him, spoke to him or emailed him.” The £105,000 the NotW paid Mulcaire was inexplicable to Coulson: this, and other outgoings, had been “made without my knowledge”. Coulson believed that just “five other people” had had their voice-mails hacked. We now know (and many of us studying the US press had wind at the time — read down to Malcolm’s comment) Coulson was out by an underestimate by about 2,668.6%.
We also now know that, included in multitude of victims, was a wide swathe of Sheridan’s family and associates, all targeted by Mulcaire. The extended as far as Sheridan’s mother and Joan McAlpine (who co-authored with Sheridan a book on the Poll Tax Revolt).
All of this, and far more, will be revisited if, and when Coulson is tried for any perjury. It is worth noting that, in the Scottish system, an arrest is not made until a pretty-convincing case has been prepared. Coulson has, most definitely, been arrested and charged.
What adds to the drama is that the Sheridan trial, and any wrong-doing by Coulson in that court, happened while Coulson was on the 10 Downing Street pay-roll. In other words, while Cameron was giving Coulson his “second chance”.
Meanwhile — and it must, surely, be coincidence — Cameron is also given a convenient let-out: he cannot answer any pointed questions at Leveson, for fear of muddying the waters of Strathclyde.
Malcolm’s headline
So, has Coulson been nailed this time?
For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
The earliest versions of that date from around the time Edward III’s legal team was formulating his Treason Act.
It was already proverbial when John Gower used it in Confessio Amantis, around 1390.
What is worrying, though, is the first page 0f Google images for “Finnish model” turns up endless leggy lovelies — and a single anti-tank gun.
On this occasion Malcolm’s mind is on things intellectual, particularly because LinkedIn directed his attention to an article in The Atlantic. This piece, by Anu Partanen (very much the model of a Finnish journalist working in NYC), is written specifically for the American audience; but has strong resonances for the English version of education, as promulgated by Gove and his acolytes.
The Swedish model of free schools, lauded by the Conservatives, has not significantly improved pupils’ academic achievement, a study suggests.
The research, published in Research in Public Policy, found the biggest beneficiaries tended to be pupils from educated, professional homes.
The Swedish model has influenced the government’s free schools policy.
Education Secretary Michael Gove believes free schools will lead to higher standards in England’s schools.
In Sweden, non-profit and for-profit organisations are able to set up and run schools which are publicly funded, but independent from government control.
In a fresh blow to the coalition’s free school programme, Nick Clegg has pledged that for-profit schools shall remain banned. This is unfortunate and does not make sense. By displaying continuing hostility towards profit-making schools, his ideological convictions are at odds with his progressive goals: without the profit motive, the prospect of a broad-based free school revolution – with the potential of increasing social mobility and improving educational standards for all – looks grim.
The can is finessed to Clegg, but surely (especially while Lansley was taking stick over the NHS “reforms”) Gove would not happily privatise the English state education system? At least not yet. So the “free schools” lack the profit motive. Even so, there is a way round that: a private operation “sponsors” a “free school”: curiously, as many activities and services as possible are then contracted back, at cost-plus, to the “sponsor”. It’s the way you sell’em.
Now, with the Swedish model proving a false floozy, can a swerve in affections be long delayed? So the political language subtly alters: no more Swedes, it’s now “Nordic” or Finnish”.
That is what made Malcolm take an interest in Anu Partanen’s essay:
… lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life — Newsweek ranked it number one last year — and Finland’s national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.
Finland’s schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top…
Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model — long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorisation — Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation’s education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.
Remember: it was those PISA comparisons that got the Blairites and the Goveians are hot-and-sweaty in the first place. Then Partanen drops the other shoe:
Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K[indergatern] or a Ph.D.
All publicly financed. That won’t wash with the ConHome crowd.
Nor will two further “issues”:
“There’s no word for accountability in Finnish, … Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”
Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school …
Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools…
There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.
And, in the ConHome mind-set, it gets worse and worse:
… the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.
Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
In the Finnish view … this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
In fact, since academic excellence wasn’t a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland’s students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland — unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway — was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.
Got that? The keys to wholesale educational improvements are two:
trust the professionals, the teachers;
restore an egalitarian ethos.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to the petty-scandal of the day and Diane Abbott. Yes, she was silly at best, and misguided at worst (though a bit of whitey-bashing will not go too far wrong in certain Hackney communities). Only a cruel long-in-the-tooth begrudger would recall that Diane has had her previous problems with Finns and Finnish models nurses. Where she, like so many other avowedly “socialist” minds go wrong is to step back from the real problem with England’s (and it is specifically England’s) growing social divisions.
1959 was a magnificent summer, long, hot: just what a tired Tory government needed to a groom the Great British public for Macmillan’s never had it so good autumn election.
That summer Malcolm’s mid-teen alter ego had his first regular job. At a time when “unemployment” was measured in hundreds-of-thousands, not multi-millions, a sprog — however hamfisted and inept — readily found summer employment. This job was at Claxton’s mineral water factory in Park Road, Wells-next-the-Sea. And the future Malcolm spent the early hours of a sweltering Bank Holiday Monday humping crates of whistle-wetter across the sand-dunes to Wells’s beach café.
Claxton’s was the very epitome of localism. The business involved inserted aerated sugar water, with one of a variety of syrup flavourings, into recycled bottles. These concoctions were then distributed, under the trade-name of Selwel, by a single lorry around the immediate locality. As Malcolm’s memory has it, the pineapple flavour was the most nauseating, but the grapefruit had a decent piquancy, and the ginger beer (in traditional squat brown glass) was the pick of the bunch. John Claxton (son of the below-mentioned, who was by then sadly deceased) was doing a worthwhile job, providing a useful local service, and employing a couple of women, a few blokes in the works and on the lorry, and a summer casual or two. Just the kind of establishment that Dave Bullingdon should approve, encourage and foster.
An establishment which, sooner rather than later, would be driven out of business by the multinationals with their one-size-fits-all products and blanket advertising. Just the kind of combine that keeps Dave Bullingdon’s Tory boys in election expenses.
Half-a-century on …
… what has changed?
What hasn’t! And much of it, admittedly, for the better for many of us. On the one hand, back in the late ’50s, Malcolm’s uncles and cousins were sweating in Hallamshire pits and Rotherham steelworks — the miner’s lung and the cancers have now had them all, …
Any moment now Malcolm will be reaching for the iTunes icon and summoning up Boyce:
Certainly the Rhondda is far more scenic than it was in the days of the slag-heaps — the Council even has the odd Tory (some “independents” and three LibDem fellow-travellers) but no longer anyone from the CP.
Which iTunes play-list would lead straight into Phil Coulter.
Ah, why wait? Let’s do it for the hell of a good thing!
And it’s a damn good vid.
Hardly relevant, perhaps, for Derry (another place for which Malcolm has considerable affection) has suffered far, far worse than the bourgeoisification of Wells.
But, Malcolm, what now provokes this nostalgia?
Well, into his mailbox popped one of those estate-agent prompts. Herein lies the pain:
Or, as the song had it:
… oh, my God, what have they done To the town I loved so well?
… but it helps when one happens upon a few old CD burns of forgotten .mp3s.
Now, what’s this?
It’s Utah Phillips reprising one of the Greatest Hits (words by John Brill to a tune ripped off a hymnal) from the Little Red Songbook (9th, Joe Hill memorial edition, March 1916):
Are you poor, forlorn and hungry? Are there lots of things you lack? Is your life made up of misery? Then dump the bosses off your back. Are your clothes all patched and tattered? Are you living in a shack ? Would you have your troubles scattered? Then dump the bosses off your back.
Are you almost split asunder? Loaded like a long-eared jack? Boob – why don’t you buck like thunder, And dump the bosses off your back? All the agonies you suffer You can end with one good whack; Stiffen up, you orn’ry duffer And dump the bosses off your back.
Or, if you prefer:
What a shame the Occupy! lot (be they in NYC, St Paul’s Churchyard, or around this shrinking globe) lack the nous to produce dissident material as potent.
