The end of Swiveleyesation as we know it?

Another magnificent coinage by the great Steve Bell:

Yesterday Malcolm was attempting to find some kind of historical context — or, failing that, the comedy of errors — which has led to the present Great Tory Bad-Hair Day.

Today Benedict Brogan writes his Morning Briefing for the Telegraph blogs, and sweepingly assumes it’s all water down the sink. Happy Days are Hair Again. The skies above are clear again. So we’ll sing a song of cheer again:

Well, almost:

Cast your eyes along the waterfront this morning after the night before and you might conclude that things are fairly dire for Dave. He’s suffered another major rebellion (I know, I know it was a free vote, but he still failed to persuade his colleagues to follow his lead), there’s lashings of backbiting, and he’s been reduced to sending a pleading ‘Dear Mr Loon, I still love you’ letter to his members, something even American commentators have picked up on as a bad look. Nick Watt, a keen reader of Tory runes, spots a sea-change in attitudes to Dave among MPs and raises the prospect of a move against him in The Guardian, with more letters going in to Graham Brady. As I mention in my column, grown ups inside No10 realise that they are stuck with a number of what they refer to as ‘legacy issues’, from not winning the 2010 election to the gay marriage idea.

The rest of Brogan’s musings stretch for, but don’t quite reach a Panglossian optimum:

Much of what has excited us in recent weeks will have passed the voters by, and after tonight’s vote gay marriage will be on its way to becoming law, and passing out of the current political debate. With the economy slowly improving and Labour wallowing, the Tories surely should be able to claw themselves off the rocks. This will require a fair wind, and a commitment by Mr Cameron and those around him to sharpen up. It also means not surrendering to the bullying disguised as advice from those agitating against Dave, whether it’s David Davis or Lord Ashcroft. The recess starts today, a good opportunity for everyone to calm down and for the PM to have a think about how he organises himself from now on.

[For the record, Voltaire in 1759 is parodying Leibnitz of 1698: not many people know that.]

Legacy issues

Such was the vein into which history-mining Malcolm was driving his shaft with yesterday’s piece. Let us then consider what rich ore Brogan has found:

Gay marriage served as a stark reminder of just how far removed Dave’s world view often seems from his troops. As The Guardian notes, the inter-generational divisions in the Tory party were particularly stark. Sir Gerald Howarth, the former defence minister last year knighted on the PM’s advice, warned in yesterday’s debate of an “aggressive homosexual community” in the country. Edward Leigh lamented that the “outlandish views of the loony left of the 1980s” had become “embedded in high places”.

Really? Really! It’s all those gays? Hardly!

Brogan concludes by passing us and the tar-baby onto Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times. Ganesh asserts it’s 2010 and All That:

… the election that should detain David Cameron is the last one. The prime minister’s estrangement from his party has many causes – the inexhaustibly vexed question of Europe, the same-sex marriage bill he takes to Parliament this week – but the rancour really set in with his failure to win in 2010. This original sin led to coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a political miscegenation that turns Tory stomachs, and broke the unspoken covenant that allows a leader to be as autocratic as he likes as long he delivers. Last week, a prime ministerial ally was reported to have disparaged the party’s grassroots as “swivel-eyed loons”. “Arrogant losers” tends to be the rejoinder.

Ganesh then reprises the course of the 2010 Tory election campaign, concluding:

For all the campaign’s haplessness, the Tories ended it with roughly the same poll lead over Labour as they began it. Mr Cameron was still preferred by voters to his party. The campaign was a non-event, as they usually are. The real reason for the Tories’ failure had more to do with the economic insecurity that nagged at voters when shown blueprints for austerity by a party they already mistrusted. That the economy was slithering out of recession at the same time hardened their risk aversion. Fiscal clarity made for bad short-term politics, and yet the blame has somehow gone to other, softer aspects of the Tory offering.

The Conservatives did not fail because they were seen as high-minded metropolitans, but because they were too redolent of the same old Tories. They had changed too little, not too much. The people who should have been vindicated by 2010 were the modernisers. But their chronic passivity, their lordly distaste for a fight, has allowed a misremembered version of that election to become the definitive history. This is undermining Mr Cameron and shaping a future in which only the ideologically orthodox can lead the Tories.

That is indeed the “high-quality journalism” that the FT prudently reminds low-life, thieving types (like Malcolm, shamelessly ripping of those extracts) needs paying for. [Again, for the record, Malcolm happily pays for the print edition, especially at weekends, if only to pre-empt what he knows the Sundays will regurgitate as original thought.]

Two small details (1):

Those televised debates (and Cameron’s foolish participation in televised debates that he flunked) really screwed up the opinion polls. In a different context (to which we may come in a moment), Malcolm was reviewing just how the 2010 polling went. The answer is not very well:

Got that? The main impact of the televised debates was to flatter the LibDem vote by anything between 3% and 6% (which amounts to gross “data artifact“), while under-rating Tory support just slightly, and Labour’s quite significantly. One might feel that Cameron & co. have been blinded by those errors ever since.

Two small details (2):

On their perception of the election result, and of the “reliability” of the LibDems, the Cameron & co. “modernisers” entered their Mephistophelean pact with Clegg & co. — two capitalist combines monopolising the market for their short-term profit. Let’s have another 18th-century great intellect’s view on that:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (see page 111 in this e-text)

An alternative history

Wind back to Friday, 7th May, 2010, with the last of the 649 results coming in (the 650th, a safe Tory seat — Thirsk and Malton, was delayed by the death of a candidate). This is what we saw:

• Tories: 305 (and bound to be 306);
• Labour: 258, plus Caroline Lucas, the Green for Brighton Pavilion, and Sylvia Herman, likely to attend infrequently but then vote with Labour (so call it around 260);
• Lib Dems: 57, plus Naomi Long for Alliance in East Belfast (so 58 at a pinch);
• DUP: 8;
• SNP: 6;
• SDLP, Plaid Cymru: 3 apiece.

The Speaker is neutral, though votes for the government in a tie, and Sinn Féin are non-attenders (so, n=650-6). A cynical calculation is the cash-strapped sand bruised Labour and LibDem contingents aren’t too keen on a quick re-run; but, more to the point, there are at least a score of odds-and-sods turkeys there who can’t afford to vote for Christmas (sayn n=650-26). The most basic “working majority” would be, in practice, well short of the nominal 326 (the calculation above suggests 312 at most)— and Dave’s Tories are within a spit of just that.

So, in the short term, Dave’s Tories could talk the talk, cobble a “confidence and supply” arrangement with even the DUP (306+8=314), and walk the walk through until a second election in the autumn. By which moment Tory coffers, uniquely among the main operators, would be topped up by the grateful and expectant clique of bond-traders and hedge-funders.

A second election, please note, that could have been contrived by losing a vote of confidence on some populist issue (immigration?). A second election, too, in which the Tory economic record would be buffed up by the tail-end of Alistair Darling’s economics (it was only in the autumn of 2010, thanks to Osborne’s austerity, that the UK economy went into flat-lining).

In short, had Cameron done the right thing, the Tory thing, he would now likely be sitting on a secure Tory majority, and figuring his way to calling the next election at his choosing, on his terms, and not on those of the LibDem dictated Fixed-term Parliaments Act. He would also have enjoyed the benefits of a greater patronage for Tory backbench nonentities, not having to service the self-esteem of LibDem nonentities.

All the Tory back-benchers, and the wannabes out in the cold have done that math. The iron has entered their souls.

One last thing

We were looking there at how the polling companies had cocked it up. Enter the new-boy on the block, Survation. Ben Brogan (see above) gave that a nod in passing:
The fightback could just start here. Though from a low base if you believe a new Survation poll in The Guardian. It has the Tories down to 24 pc – just two points above Ukip.

Look closer, and we find The Guardian, doesn’t give Survation more than the time of day.

Andrew Sparrow counters with the YouGov/Sun numbers:

Last night Survation released a poll showing the Tories just two points ahead of Ukip.

Here are the figures.
Labour: 39% (down 1 from YouGov in the Sunday Times)
Conservatives: 31% (up 2)
Ukip: 14% (no change)
Lib Dems: 10% (up 1)
Labour lead: 8 points (down 3)
Government approval: -34 (up 5)

Finally, let’s hear it from Anthony Wells (whose shock-factor is also set to minimum):

Survation have put out a new poll, the topline voting intention figures are CON 24%(-5), LAB 35%(-1), LD 11%(-1), UKIP 22%(+6). The 22% for UKIP is the first poll to show them breaking the twenty percent mark.
In many ways the high UKIP score here shouldn’t come as a surprise, for methodological reasons Survation tend to show the highest levels of UKIP support so if ICM have them at 18% and ComRes at 19% I would have expected Survation to have them in the low twenties. Striking it may be, but the increase in UKIP support is actually in line with what weve seen elsewhere, just using a method that is kinder to UKIP.
More interesting is the drop in Tory support, down five points on Survation’s poll in April. The poll was conducted on Friday and Saturday so at least partially after the “swivel eyed loon” story broke (it came out in Saturday’s papers, so broke about 10pm on Friday night). All the usual caveats I apply to any poll showing sharp or unusual results apply. Sure, it might indicate a shift in support, but just as likely its a blip – wait to see if it is reflected in any other polling. As Twyman’s Law of market research says “anything surprising or interesting is probably wrong”.

As Wells implies, there, swallowing Survation might not produce the glorious summer the Kippers expect. More likely, “up like the rocket, and down like the stick”: UKIP is hardly the best-presented pyrotechnic in the box.

Swiveleyesation may endure yet.

“Dave, where did it all go wrong?”

Malcolm would welcome the source of the famous George Best anecdote, with that punch-line. Some claim it was from George himself.

But where did David Cameron’s woes begin?

Nick Robinson hasn’t — as far as Malcolm can see — offered his definitive analysis yet [UPDATE: see here]. That cannot be long in coming. His most recent utterance was Europe – That Tory row ‘made simple’, which took the tale back as far as last week. Which cannot be the authoritative version.

James Forsyth, in the Spectator and still pre-occupied exclusively with the Europe thing, went back only to last October:

Shortly before the Conservative party conference last year, the head of the Fresh Start Group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs went in to see the Prime Minister in Downing Street. The group had heard that David Cameron might make his big Europe speech at the gathering and its head, Andrea Leadsom, wanted to set out what to ask for in any renegotiation.

When Leadsom returned from the meeting, her colleagues were desperate to know what the PM had said: which powers did he most want returned from the EU? What would be the centrepiece of his great diplomatic effort? All Leadsom could do was repeat what Cameron had told her: ‘I don’t like shopping lists.’

This sums up Cameron’s attitude towards this renegotiation: announcing it is enough for the time being. When he eventually did make his big Europe speech in January, it contained nothing as clear as a shopping list. There was lots of hifalutin’ language but painfully little detail.

Of the same parish (and the Speccie is about the best barometer of the local Tory weather), Alex Massie throws  gay-marriage into the argument, and then takes it further:

Gay marriage has cost the party members in (I think) every constituency in Britain. That does not make it a bad policy but it demonstrates, again, that it is better to win the argument than to impose something of this sort upon the party and expect everyone to fall into line because the thought of Prime Minister Miliband is enough to trump all other concerns. There comes a point at which people simply say Sod it, I’ve had enough.

The bigger problem still, however, is that the Tory party increasingly does not look very much like Britain or, especially, England. Worse still, it frequently – and despite all the talk of modernisation – does not seem comfortable with modern England. This is, for sure, in part a feature of the conservative temperament but it does make it harder for the party to recruit new members and harder for it to retain existing members. It is caught in a cleft stick.

The single sex marriage Bill

One day, in retrospect, we may untangle why this became so important. At one level, Malcolm wonders if it is not a form of code, a catch-all for a whole series of gripes and grievances (see below).

The Church of England is no longer the Tory Party at prayer (which axiom the Catholic Herald once attributed to an anonymous 18th-century wag; though it seems more likely to be derived from the suffragist and Congregationalist Maude Royden, reported in the Times, 17 July 1917). We live in a secular (even aggressively so) society, where even the remaining Tories of the shires do not seem the most observant of worshippers. Yet this non-issue has become a cause of massive grief to vocal Tories.

It has to be more signifier than substance: a shibboleth to distinguish “us” from “them”. One to watch here is that pillar of the Tory Right, John Redwood. In February he blogged his view:

I have found this a difficult and divisive issue within my constituency and in the Conservative party. I came to it with no preconceptions.

As a modern Conservative I understand the wish to allow people to live their lives as they choose, as long as they do not harm others.  There is a strong impulse to freedom in Conservatism which can pioneer desirable social reform. I suspect the reformers will win the vote today on the grounds that the law should not prevent same sex people marrying if they wish.

I also understand the strrength of feeling of many traditional Conservatives, who say Parliament should not change or reform long established institutions without good reason. They write to me to say they support civil partnership,  but for religious, historical and legal reasons think marriage has to be defined as a relationship between a woman and a man.  They do not write as bigots, though they are often criticised as such. They point out that the Conservative Manifesto of 2010 did not contain a pledge to change the law of marriage. They point out my personal Manifesto did not do so either.

He then voted “no”: the absence of a manifesto commitment being more important than freedom … which can pioneer desirable social reform.

Cameron: a poisonous, slippery individual

Malcolm has serially rehearsed the view of Ian King, published by The Sun (then still in the Labour camp), on the eve of Cameron becoming party leader:

Along with other financial journalists, I was unfortunate enough to have dealings with Cameron during the 1990s when he was PR man for Carlton, the world’s worst television company. And a poisonous, slippery individual he was, too.

Back then, Cameron was far from the smoothie he pretends to be now. He was a smarmy bully who regularly threatened journalists who dared to write anything negative about Carlton -which was nearly all of us. He loved humiliating people, including a colleague at ITV, who he would abuse publicly as “Bunter” just because the poor bloke was a few pounds overweight.

A recent Sun interview with Cameron generously called him a former Carlton “executive”. No, he wasn’t. He was a mouthpiece for that company’s charmless chairman, Michael Green, who operated him the way Keith Harris works Orville.

The financial press had one thing in common with Cameron  — he hated us and we hated him.

If we had any doubts, Cameron insisted on proving King correct: the oft-stolen bicycle (with his papers in the following Lexus),  hug a hoodie, the useless wind-generator on his Notting Hill house, the huskies …

Even then, there were rumblings:

What, many wondered yesterday, did the leader of a major political party hope to gain by dressing up in a duvet and driving a dog sled across the Arctic during the local election campaign? …

[Tory officials] fear Mr Cameron’s snowbound adventure will be seen as a photo-opportunity that will serve only to reinforce the impression that he is a nice chap without any firm policies.

That from the Telegraph, no less.

The Lisbon Treaty kerfuffle

Matters got serious with Cameron’s September, 2007, promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty; and his breaking of that commitment in 2009. Barry Legg, ex-MP, Iain Duncan Smith’s Chief Executive of the Tory Party, was incandescent:

The Tory leader stands condemned by his own words.
David Cameron’s future European policy is now incoherent, disingenuous and utterly unconvincing. This is a dark day for the Tory party, but a worse one for Britain.

That opinion did not stand on just one Legg. As recently as this January, Melissa Kite was regurgitating that, significantly again in the Spectator:

Tory MPs have fallen for David Cameron’s cast-iron pledges to hold a referendum before. So are they right in buying into his latest promise? …

Cameron has form on evolving his cast-iron pledges as he goes along. He promised in opposition to allow the British people a vote on the EU Constitution, then when it morphed into the Lisbon Treaty, and was ratified, he said rather legalistically that this meant a referendum was no longer possible or relevant. Then he promised that there would be no new ceding of powers to Brussels – and once the Coalition was formed that pledge was broken as well.

I hope the initial confidence being shown by eurosceptic Tories about his latest promise proves founded.

A life of grind

And, of course, the feet of clay were again spotted. Cameron, was called to order by his back-benchers, and had to up the ante with the nonsense of the draft bill on a 2017 referendum.

There are umpteen very obvious reasons why that one will fall short:

• it won’t get support outside the Tory party;
• it won’t get parliamentary time for the same reason;
• it attempts to bind a future government;
• it requires the Tories to win outright a General Election;
• it needs the co-operation and complicity of the other EU nations (all more than a bit pissed at Cameron’s inadequacies and posturings);

and — perhaps above all —

• it defies prime ministerial life-expectancy. Let’s assume that all the above “ifs” came to pass; and by Wednesday 1st November 2017 a mythical Prime Minister Cameron was launching his in/out EU referendum campaign. Cameron would, by then, have occupied Number 10 for 7 years, 5 months and 22 days (2732 days in total). That would make him the 15th longest-serving PM of all time, all the way back to Robert Walpole. Longer than Baldwin, nearly as long as Harold Wilson’s two sessions.

Cameron’s juvenile tendency

The starting gate for Malcolm’s ramblings here was Steve Richards in today’s Guardian. The headlines suggest this is quite an “end days” offering:

Cameron had the chance to defy the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ and remake his party. He failed

This week he’s been exposed. There was little thinking on what modern Conservatism might be like. Now he can only busk it

Richards starts with the Tory Party itself:

Relations between the leadership of the party and its activists are more strained and complex than at any point since the removal of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. Focus on the policy trail rather than the Harold Macmillan-like emollient character of the prime minister and Cameron is implementing a radical agenda that should largely delight his activists. He has delivered an economic policy to the right of the Republicans in the US, overhauled the NHS and welfare in a way that Thatcher would not have dared, and offered an in-out referendum on Europe. Yet the so-called loons are not content and want much more.

That is quite provocative. We are back where we started: where did it all go wrong?

Richards argues it isn’t that the Tory grassroots have gone “loon”, or Tea-Party, or are lost in the elephant grass to the far right of the fairway. It’s the inconsistency of the whole programme:

The Tory activists have a case too. They have been subjected to a clunky, unsubtle “modernisation” project in which social liberalism, while sincerely espoused, has been added on to the rightwing programme partly in an attempt to secure broader appeal. There has been little deep thinking from Cameron about what a modern Conservative party might be like, but rather a shallow effort to retain most of the thinking on Europe and the state that lost the Conservatives three successive elections, with the addition of support for gay marriage.

The result is an unsatisfying, insubstantial clash between unreformed dwindling local parties and a leadership that acquired the top positions far too early in their careers with only half-formed ideas about what they wanted to change in relation to their party and the country.

Ooof! There’s one deep in the solar plexus!

Now for some archaeology

For Richards, the cleaving goes back back:

The likes of Cameron and his senior advisers make their tentative moves at the top of a Conservative party that has changed fundamentally. None of Thatcher’s successors has addressed the nature of the change. Famously, she transformed the party from the top, making it much more ideological. Much less reflected on is when it became far more rebellious in spirit. The change from below can be precisely identified, taking place at two key moments in its recent history.

That’s the trouble with ideology: once the bacillus is out of the test-tube, the plague is imminent. Particularly so among Tories, who had no previous exposure to any -logy, and so had no immunities.

Then Richards retraces to two seminal moments:

The first was the activists’ response to the introduction of the poll tax in the late 1980s. Previously ultra-loyal Conservative councillors, the rock on which the party was based, were passionately opposed – and for the first time in their lives vented their anger in public…

The next key event was the Conservative conference in the autumn of 1992, held after the government had been forced to leave the European exchange rate mechanism. The anger aimed at the then prime minister, John Major, in speeches from the platform was unyielding and, crucially, the insurrectionists were starting to enjoy themselves.

That’s quite convincing. It traces a direct life-line from the Bruges Group, through John Major’s “bastards”, to (the wasted talent of) Hague, to the loopy enstoolment of Iain Duncan Smith as Hague’s successor, the “dog-whistle” politics of Michael Howard’s 2005 Campaign (when Lynton Crosby whistled to a dog that wasn’t there), through the growing distaste for Cameron’s PR-style, to the present “loons”.

Richards may be in error in several respects:

• He omits the anger over Cameron’s double-standards and double-dealing at the time of the expenses scandals. Some Tory MPs went to the wall, while other offenders (Gove, as one example) were exonerated.
• He misses the further resentment over Leveson, that Cameron turned loose a beast that came back to rend his natural allies in the Press. Clearly, The Daily Telegraph does not easily forget and forgive, even if Murdoch may.
• He glosses over the NIMBY factions, all steamed up over wind-turbines, HS2, lessened building controls, loss of local authority powers (and revenues). Malcolm suspects all, and more, of that is in the sub-text of resistance to “gay marriage” — someone, something has to be blamed for the diminution of Tory power in the shires.

There’s three ways in which Cameron has offended the Code, betraying the old loyalists, the Press barons, and the “turnip Taliban” (remember them?).

• And over his assumption about Labour:

They ["the insurrectionists"] have been enjoying themselves ever since while Labour, though with its own deep structural problems, has acquired an iron discipline in public.

And again:

Cameron had an opportunity to remake his restive party and perhaps widen the membership when he won the leadership in 2005, although it would have been a titanic struggle. In terms of daunting context he was much closer at that point to Neil Kinnock, who acquired the Labour leadership 1983 and began a long, painful, arduous journey. Cameron opted for the primrose path instead, declaring that his party must be nice to the poor in Darfur and being photographed on a council estate or with huskies. This did not amount to a significant challenge to activists in the way Kinnock and then Tony Blair updated Labour, partly because on many issues Cameron was at one with his grassroots.

The Stolen Bacillus

Ah! we’re into H.G.Wells at last! We’ve been waiting for this!

Indeed. In the ’70s, in Opposition, Labour took the ideology wholesale. It didn’t infect all-comers. It did inoculate the host, though it took many years for the infection to clear the body. And Labour is not readily going to take the Kool-Aid so soon again.

Now it’s the Tories’ turn. We must observe closely to see if their infection becomes the UKIP pandemic we are promised (Malcolm suspects not).

As H.G. finishes his neat little tale of the bacteriologist and the purloined bacillus:

“You see, that man came to my house to see me, and he is an Anarchist. No – don’t faint, or I cannot possibly tell you the rest. And I wanted to astonish him, not knowing he was an Anarchist, and took up a cultivation of that new species of Bacterium I was telling you of, that infest, and I think cause, the blue patches upon various monkeys; and like a fool, I said it was Asiatic cholera. And he ran away with it to poison the water of London, and he certainly might have made things look blue for this civilized city. And now he has swallowed it. Of course, I cannot say what will happen, but you know it turned that kitten blue, and the three puppies — in patches, and the sparrow — bright blue. But the bother is, I shall have all the trouble and expense of preparing some more.”

The best of Times

As Malcolm has previously opined, if it’s got to be a Tory, Matthew Parris is as house-trained and gentlemanly a specimen as can be found.

His column for today’s Times starts with a good’un:

“God,” said an excited Tory after a fellow MP was pulled from the sawdust of Thursday’s Private Member’s Bills tombola clutching a euro-referendum Bill, “must be a eurosceptic.”

No. God must favour the sane for He directed my steps that same night to a book launch at the National Gallery where the totally sane Conservative MP for Hereford, Jesse Norman, was unveiling his new study of Edmund Burke. And as I walked across Trafalgar Square contemplating the great 18th-century liberal conservative philosopher, God reminded me of the last time the Tory Right were deafening us, and I quoted Burke on this page: “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate clink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

What madness has seized my party? Is it only the noisy ones? Have the rest been brainwashed? Or just scared into silence? If so, that silence is flattering the hysterical minority. The silence must be broken. The Tory MPs keeping their heads are more numerous than we may suppose; we need to hear them.

Let’s be honest here, when Parris quoted that from Burke, it was mid-December 2012, and Parris was even more extreme in his denunciation. The header was:

Stamp on the grasshoppers of the Rabid Right

These spittle-flecked, obsessive reactionaries belong in UKIP. Don’t let them shelter under the Conservative fern

Furthermore, in that earlier piece, Parris continued the quotation (which should end above with a wholly-grammatical and super-Goveian semi-colon):

… that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

The original is in the 143rd paragraph of Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution.

The spirit of a gentleman

Malcolm recalls, a bit earlier in that Burkean out-pouring (he checks: it’s the 133rd paragraph), the great man (as are all Trinity men) was pronouncing on the natural relationship of learning to the established social order:

Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

Which, in small part, is simply arguing that learning is its own reward: not a thesis accepted by the utilitarian Gradgrind-Gove types who dominate the curriculum.

Trinity colours

Our undergraduate scarves are still like those once sported by the Lady in his Life and by Malcolm himself: they should be in a closet somewhere. If the moths haven’t reached them.

The colours were dark blue and light blue, which suggests the desired comparison, with a stripe of red. There has always been a radical streak about TCD. Once upon a not-too-distant time (thanks to the provision of the College’s foundress, and the bigotry of John Charles McQuaid) Trinity had a particular spirit of religion. But the spirit of a gentleman was ever on the syllabus (and it wasn’t restricted to Jameson Redbreast).

Trusted truths

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

Psalm 146, a chorister’s favourite (it has just ten verses — and that could be one of few verifiable truths in this post).

And so, by a natural progression, to Anthony Wells at ukpollingreport.co.uk.

Wells had spotted an oddity in the ICM/Guardian poll:

More unexpectedly the ICM poll also found a jump in support for the BNP, up to 4%, the highest any poll has had then at for years. This is strange. The BNP have certainly not had any great publicity boost, at the local elections they seemed essentially moribund. It may just be an odd sample, or perhaps as Tom Clark suggests it is just a case of confusion amongst respondents, with some people getting the names of the BNP and UKIP mixed up.

ICM also asked about voting intention in an EU referendum, finding voting intention fairly evenly balanced – 40% would vote to stay in (22% definitely, 18% probably), 43% would vote to leave (32% definitely, 11% probably).

UPDATE: ICM tabs are up here. Topline figures without reallocation of don’t knows would have been CON 27%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 19%, BNP 5%.

That strange boost of support for the BNP is almost wholly amongst women, almost wholly amongst C2s, almost wholly amongst over 65s and almost wholly in Wales. The unweighted number of 2010 BNP voters in the sample was 1, increased to 18 by weighting. What that strongly suggests to me is that there was one little old C2 BNP-voting Welsh lady who got a very high weighting factor, and probably makes up almost all of that 4%! Such things happen sometimes, but it means the BNP blip is probably just a data artifact that can be ignored.

A euphemism newly minted

Now, there’s a nice one: “just a data artifact”. Try typing that, and most spell-check utilities flag up an error. That’s because the preferred version is subtly different, another form of “truth”.

It’s also a prime example of word-drift. Once upon a  time there was:

artefact: An object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes.

At some point the alternative spelling seemed to be the norm for an alternative signification:

artifact: Science. A spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself. Also as a mass noun: such effects collectively.

As a point of fact, Mr Chairman, the entire public opinion polling business is based on such “data artifacts”. Notice, even in what Wells says there, how an eight-point Labour lead (35-27) is manipulated down to just six points (34-28) for a headline figure.

Today there are two types of truth …

That’s the start of page 40 of the current Private Eye (#1340, 17th-30th May, so verifiable, if not a “truth”). It becomes an exposé of a criminal Yorkshire property developer who is running the usual rings around the Serious Fraud Office, but begins with a telling generalisation:

Today there are two types of truth. Electronic truth — provided via the ever expanding knowledge universes of the internet. And historic truth — provided by those facts not yet or no longer recorded on easily searchable internet databases.

An American truth

There is a poem by the American romantic, Professor John Russell Lowell, which Malcolm has always assumed to be essentially anti-slavery and pro-”freedom”. Its best-known snippet is the eighth stanza:

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

A bit too theist for Malcolm, but he appreciates the sense and sensibility.

[For the record, Lowell was President Chester Arthur's appointee as US Ambassador in London. Here he was a literary lion, running Henry James around the Bloomsbury salons, and becoming Virginia Woolf's god-father.]

Trussed truths

Electronic “truth” contains too many “data artifacts” for comfort. Pseudo-statistics (those perpetrated by serial-offending politicians as much as by their natural allies, the opinion-pollsters) are just one source of this creeping corruption.

Psalm 146, of course, prefers the eternal (and unprovable, and frequently controvertible) truths:

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God:
Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever:
Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners:
The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous:
The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

Therein you may find your “truth”. If so, it is where you find all you need to know about:

• how Huhne was released after 62 days of an eight-month incarceration (and there are still many of us wondering why Vicky had to go down, too),
• why Tory policy on immigration is misguided (thank you, Gordon, we knew you still had decency in you),
• why Iain Duncan Smith needs to review his unChristian welfare policies,
• why ATOS are malevolent rascals,
• indeed, all about life, the universe and everything. Though that “electronic truth” comes close to the mark:

City(e)scape 1

The current issue of The Times Literary Supplement, despite the exotic and even scary cover (Beauty and terror), has something of a metropolitan theme (and will keep Malcolm happy for these couple of posts)

Joycean

With both The Guardian‘s  Doonesbury strip and the TLS rear-gunner NB (initialled J. C., so assume James Campbell) Malcolm starts at the back and works forward. Since J.C. subtitles NB as ‘Londoners’ we know where we’re heading. It’s a subtle sophistication: NB‘s first and main item concerns James Joyce in London  (‘Londoners’ — geddit?)

This includes the quite perverse statement:

In an article in the current James Joyce Quarterly, Gordon Bowker writes that the Irish writer’s link with the former ruling power “has not received the attention it deserves”.

Really? Really?

Malcolm diffidently suggests that Bowker revisits Oxen of the Sun. What Joyce does there is filter the authentic voices of Dublin through the tradition of ‘English’ authors, or rather those represented by a couple of contemporary collections: William Peacock’s The English Prose: From Mandeville to Ruskin (1903) and George Saintsbury’s The Anthology of English Prose (1912). Anyone who, like Malcolm, studied the snippets anthologised for Leaving Certificate (1960) will see where this sub-litcrit is coming from.

Those who wrestle Joyce’s Episode into submission may well do so with help from the explanatory letter Joyce sent Frank Budgen on 20 March 1920:

Am working hard at Oxen of the Sun, the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition. Scene, lying-in hospital. Technique: a nineparted episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude (the unfertilized ovum), then by way of earliest English alliterative and monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon (‘Before born the babe had bliss. Within the womb he won worship.’ ‘Bloom dull dreamy heard: in held hat stony staring’) then by way of Mandeville (‘there came forth a scholar of medicine that men clepen etc’) then Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (‘but that franklin Lenehan was prompt ever to pour them so that at the least way mirth should not lack’), then the Elizabethan chronicle style (‘about that present time young Stephen filled all cups’), then a passage solemn, as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a choppy Latin-gossipy bit, style of Burton-Browne,  then  a  passage  Bunyanesque  (‘the reason was that in the way he fell in with a certain whore whose name she said is Bird in the hand’) after a diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn (‘Bloom sitting snug with a party of wags, among them Dixon jun., Ja. Lynch, Doc. Madden and Stephen D. for a languor he had before and was now better, he having dreamed tonight a strange fancy and Mistress Purefoy there to be delivered, poor body, two days past her time and the midwives hard put to it, God send her quick issue’) and so on through Defoe-Swift and Steele-Addison-Sterne and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel. This progression is also linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. The double-thudding Anglo-Saxon motive recurs from time to time (‘Loth to move from Horne’s house’) to give the sense of the hoofs of oxen. Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo.

Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1966), pp. 139-40.

Hardly hidden in there is the Anglo-Irish thing that plagues us all: Swift (born Dublin, 1667), Steele (born Dublin, 1672), Burke (born Dublin, 1729), Goldsmith (born Roscommon or Longford, probably 1730) — all who made their reputations in London. In fact the ‘nationality’ crisis is implicit throughout: Mandeville was really Jan de Langhe from Ypres, a Fleming writing in Norman-French, Sir Thomas Maleore may have been Welsh … Newman, the London High Anglican who translated himself from London to Dublin(at the request of the Irish bishops) establishing the Catholic University of Ireland.

Anyway, back to J.C. filleting that James Joyce Quarterly:

The English were generous to Joyce, Bowker says: he received a grant from the Society of Authors and a pension from the Royal Literary Fund. In 1923, T.S.Eliot, who would later publish Finnegans Wake at Faber, took him to see (in Eliot’s words) “some of the waste lands around Chichester”. On a gravestone in Sidlesham churchyard, Joyce read the name “Earwicker”. Thus, Bowker writes, “an ancient English name stands at the centre of Finnegans Wake and winds through it”.

Nora Barnacle, who loved London, went shopping while Jim And Anna Livia set about enlarging basic Irish-English. He and Nora were married at Kensington Register Office in 1931 (Pound was married at the church next door). In the Electoral Register for 1931-2, James Joyce of 28b Campden Grove is listed as eligible for jury service. The other tenants were Nora and May Joyce … A neighbour was called Miss Gertrude Stein.

Quite what all of that ‘proves’, beyond West London being then, as now, cosmopolitan and liter-arty, is beyond Malcolm’s comprehension.

Send for the Reverend Dodgson

[If you don't get the headline, try here.]

We learn:

The Scotland Yard inquiry in to the “Plebgate” row which led to Andrew Mitchell resigning as chief whip has cost an estimated £144,000 so far…

Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Patricia Gallan is leading the investigation, dubbed Operation Alice.

She wrote: “It remains that I have 30 officers at my disposal and the Operation Alice is estimated to have cost £144,000 to date.

The interesting thing there is not the numbers (Metropolitan Police numbers — as when declaring how many were demonstrating — are notoriously ‘elastic’) but the title.

‘Operation Alice” as in

… Wonderland?

or

Through the Looking Glass?

Getting it in proportion

Again from the London Review of Books, John Lanchester warming up for a rave review of [ahem!] George R. R. Martin’s [A] Game of Thrones, etc:

The writer Neal Stephenson, in response to a question about his own fame or lack of it, came up with a usefully precise and clarifying answer:

It helps to put this in perspective by likening me to the mayor of Des Moines, Iowa. It’s true of both the mayor of Des Moines and of me that, out of the world’s population of some six billion people, there are a few hundred thousand who consider us important, and who recognise us by name. In the case of the mayor of Des Moines, that is simply the population of the Des Moines metropolitan area. In my case, it is the approximate number of people who are avid readers of my books. In addition, there might be as many as a million or two who would find my name vaguely familiar if they saw it; the same is probably true of the mayor of Des Moines.

The crucial contributing factor to this condition, which involves being both incredibly, outlandishly famous by serious-writer standards while also being unknown to the general reader, is the fact that Stephenson works in the area of SF and fantasy writing. For reasons I’ve never seen explained or even thoroughly engaged with, there seems to be an unbridgeable crevasse between the SF/fantasy audience and the wider literate public. People who don’t usually read, say, thrillers or military history or popular science will read, say, Gone Girl or Berlin or Bad Pharma. But people who don’t read fantasy just simply, permanently, 100 per cent don’t read fantasy.

Let us meditate thereon.

First of all, there is, at least in Malcolm’s mind, an unbridgeable crevasse between SF and fantasy. They tend to arrive on the same book-stack in many, less salubrious bookshops (who don’t know better). And there is a certain amount of overlap. The differences and distinctions, though, are huge.

Above all, too much ‘fantasy’ is prolix in the extreme. Martin’s ever-expanding saga is currently up to seven tomes, and — probably — as many thousand pages. Life is just too short, unless one is a nerd stuck in a garret with no other time-displacements. On which note, Harry Venning’s ever-pertinent, and delightfully-concise Clare in the Community strip:

Then, of course, fantasy tends to the dystopian. And that’s where Malcolm is heading away from here.

At its best, SF is precisely-focused. As an exemplar — and in the same context as Neal Stephenson (as will become clearer in a moment) — Malcolm was reminded of Robert A Heinlein’s story, Requiem. This was (as far as Malcolm can see) the third published effort of Heinlein, in Astounding Science Fiction in January 1940. [Wikipedia has a synopsis for newbies.] It is, above all, a statement on what makes us, and our individual existence and its inevitable termination, worthwhile:

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

In the attic of Redfellow Hovel, Stephenson and Stevenson follow from Steinbeck and Sterne. Appropriately so.

Out of Requiem developed the entire Future History sequence. The schema for this was seemingly established by early 1941. The Second Unpleasantness intervened, and Heinlein (with Annapolis and some UCLA education) spent the war working on naval aeronautics — and also recruiting/conscripting Asimov and Lymon Sprague de Camp. What ensued is quite intriguing. Heinlein (along with his third wife, Ginny) was a committed ‘liberal’ and was taking his writing  into ‘social’ SF, and into something more sophisticated than the ‘pulps’ where the genre was born.

What squares the circle here is Stephenson’s involvement with Hieroglyph. Malcolm came across this through a recent article on Slate:

What should we expect from science fiction? In a recent Smithsonian article by IO9’s Annalee Newitz, author Neal Stephenson criticized the dystopian cynicism that currently pervades the genre. Instead he calls a more optimistic, realistic approach—fewer zombies and man’s folly-style catastrophes, more creative inventions and solutions. In the spirit of being constructive, he’s also taking action. The first step is an anthology of optimistic, near-term science fiction, forthcoming from William Morrow in 2014, that will tackle this challenge head-on. Smithsoniandescribes the project, Hieroglyph, as a plan “to rally writers to infuse science fiction with the kind of optimism that could inspire a new generation to, as he puts it, ‘get big stuff done.’ ”

The seed for Hieroglyph was planted at a Future Tense event in 2011, where Stephenson’s lament about the cynicism of contemporary science fiction drew some fire from Arizona State University president Michael Crow. (ASU is a partner in Future Tense with Slate and the New America Foundation.) “You’re the ones who have been slacking off,” Crow responded, leading to a conversation about how to inspire more constructive writing and thinking about the future.

The upshot was Hieroglyph, as well as an evolving partnership with Arizona State. Full disclosure: I’m working with Stephenson to implement this idea on an institutional level at ASU, where we have unusual opportunities to connect creative thinkers and researchers with cutting-edge work across almost every scientific and humanistic discipline.

This takes us to the heart of what good SF should be — and frequently is. So, let’s have the obvious examples:

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C Clarke, as a young RAF radar technician, wrote a letter to Wireless World (which had to pass through RAF scrutiny and censorship) mainly about the future of rocketry, but including a speculation about a world-wide stationary-satellite system. That wasn’t an original idea: Herman Potočnik had published  as early as 1928, but Clarke gave it the ‘oxygen of publicity’ — and the idea was realised through the work of American scientists such as John Robinson Pierce.

Today the ‘Clarke belt’ is getting crowded with something like 200 geostationary satellites.

Isaac Azimov

Azimov anticipated the robotic future with a series of stories, I, Robot, but his Three Laws of Robotics were formulated as early as 1941. All later writers and philosophers have done is apply those Laws — and develop from them.

And so to Stephenson:

My life span encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. At the age of 51—not even old!—I watched on a flat-panel screen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my orbiting, donut-shaped space station? Where’s my fleet of colossal Nova rockets? Where’s my ticket to Mars?

But until recently I have kept my feelings to myself. Who cares that an otherwise fortunate nerd has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled?

Nonetheless, I’ve had a vague feeling of disquiet that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general inability of our society to do Get Big Stuff Done. Those feelings were crystallized by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 and the Fukushima meltdowns of 2011. We’re better than this, people.

Which seems as good an approach — to science, to literature, to the Big World we are trashing — as we are likely to get.

Pseud’s Corner

Steve Hilton in The Spectator:

I saw her as thrillingly anti-establishment; as much of a punk, and as brilliantly British, as Vivienne Westwood, who once impersonated her on the cover of Tatler.

Margaret Thatcher had the virtues most valued in today’s culture: innovation, energy, daring. She was Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Lady Gaga all rolled into one — and a thousand times more consequential than any of them. In today’s techno-business jargon, she was the ultimate political disruptor: determined to shake things up, unleash competition, challenge and confront vested interests. To be transformative, being reasonable doesn’t get you very far. In government, it is unreasonableness that improves -people’s lives.

Letter in London Review of Books, 11 April 2013:

I’m indebted to Gerald Smith for his expert take on the health of Henry VIII. I don’t in fact endorse the Whitley-Kramer postulate that Henry was Kell positive and went on to develop McLeod syndrome; I just throw it on the table … 

Hilary Mantel, Budleigh Salterton, Devon.

Flow, sweet river, flow

The view from the 72nd floor

From Shadwell dock to Nine Elms Reach
We cheek to cheek were dancing
Her necklace made of London Bridge
Her beauty was enhancing
Kissed her once again at Wapping,
Flow, sweet river,  flow
After that there was no stopping,
Sweet Thames, flow softly…

Or, if you must (and you should), the original by its originator:

Though, even that has a progenitor:

From those high towers this noble lord issúing
Like radiant Hesper, when his golden hair
In th’ ocean billows he hath bathèd fair,
Descended to the river’s open viewing…
     Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.

Bragging or fagging?

It’s one of the many obscene puns that Bill Shakespeare … err … slipped in. It’s there at the end of Love’s Labours Lost:

Adriano de Armado: I do adore thy sweet grace’s slipper.
Boyet [Aside to Dumain]: Loves her by the foot, —
Dumain: He may not by the yard.

You don’t get it? Well, try the Wycliff Bible version of Genesis XVII.11:

 Ȝe shulen circumside the flehs of the ferthermore parti of ȝoure ȝeerde.

That  Ȝ is the letter ‘yogh’ (read the letter as a ‘jhuh’) and solved the problem implicit in the modern ‘y’ — either a consonant or a vowel, with two very different pronunciations.

If you’re still at a loss, the OED gives the eleventh meaning of “yard” as “the virile member”.

That’s the groundwork done.

So consider why Malcolm was amused by this one:

As seen in the Thomas Becket, 21 Best Lane, Canterbury.