The worst of Times

There’s a letter, indeed the featured one, bold type ‘n’ all, in today’s Times.

On-line (though not in print) the correspondence is sub-headed:

The metropolitan liberal elite show contempt for the population of rural England and the democratic choice some of them have made

It is all a response to a piece by David Aaronovitch. As far as Malcolm’s comprehension goes, Aaronovitch was presenting the “modernist” case, particularly in one respect:

Prime Minister’s Questions … had begun with a warning about the almost imminent collapse of A&E services in England and bad unemployment figures across the UK. Yet of the six Conservative MPs who stood to ask questions, no less than five were talking about when to have a referendum on Europe. They might as well have been in Caracas.

But they are all MPs and all honourable men, I thought, so this difference in perception is probably mutual. Where they sit for in Essex, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire or Wiltshire, the EU may indeed be more important than it is to me in London. On questions such as immigration, perhaps my metropolitan attitude seems as peculiar to them as their parochialism does to me.

And it suddenly occurred to me that this difference in perception helps to explain the divided nature of Boris Johnson. When he is being touted (as periodically he is) by right-wing Tories as an acceptable successor to the backsliding Cameron, Boris can appear something of a shire hero. But when he’s actually talking seriously about the future of Britain, he’s a full member of the metropolitan elite.

Yes, Malcolm thinks he has a grasp on that.

So here comes Michael Patterson of Swineshead, Lincs:

Sir, David Aaronovitch seems shocked by the realisation that, outside London and the great cities and university towns, there exists an England that does not buy into the cosy liberal certainties of “an outward-looking, open-minded polity” (“Unshackle London from the backward shires”, Opinion, May 16).

He cites Boston, Lincolnshire, where the immigrant population — virtually all from EU countries — is now about 10 per cent. An unremarkable proportion in a capital city perhaps, but in this traditional market town a change that has come about within ten years, putting enormous pressure on housing, schools, the NHS and policing.

Mr Patterson suggests whom to blame:

[Aaronovitch] is largely right to suggest that these immigrants are filling agricultural jobs that locals are no longer willing to do. He seems to view the latter’s interests as unimportant in comparison with an immigration policy that is bringing about a radical change in the character of British society without the explicit support of the people.

Hold your horse, Mike!

That’s not the whole story, at all, at all.

The essential fault, if there is one, lies with agribusiness, and — at one remove — its unwholesome dependency on the big supermarket chains. Which makes us consumers and our demand for cheap food — at two removes — also culpable.

The economics mean that the whole food-chain relies on the gang-masters. Let’s hat-tip another Tory, worthy in one respect: the MP for Boston and Skegness is Mark Simmonds, Mr Patterson’s elected representative. Simmonds may feel a hunted man with the UKIP surge on his patch; but he deserves respect for his extended campaign to make gang-masters fully responsible.

Lincolnshire immigrants

Malcolm feels a letter to The Times coming on. Like all his other great thoughts, it will likely go unpublished.

He would wish to express sympathy to Lincolnshire folk threatened by alien incursions.

In his North Norfolk youth he recalls similar griefs being expressed.

Even after thirty years in the neighbourhood, one particular social out-cast was regularly denounced as a “furrener” [Sc. "foreigner"]. He was a yeller-belly, an incomer from Lincolnshire, one of the scab-labourers brought in by the local farmers to break the farm-workers’ strike of April 1923.

What goes around, comes around.

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:

1500

Yes: this is the one thousand, five hundredth Malcolmian spouting. He thanks his reader for such long-lasting supporter. Perhaps by three thousand, we will have at least two more —

if I be alive and your mind hold and your dinner worth the eating.

That quotation, brief as it is, cut-and -pasted from the MIT site, where you will also find this headline: “Big Julie”, of course, was the Chicago gangster (played by B.S. Pully, the “blue” comedian) in Guys and Dolls. Big Julie always played with his own dice.

While we’re “off-colour” …

… there are these insights from Damian Thompson, courtesy of Saturday’s Telegraph:

Here’s a trenchant headline for you: “Transgender community celebrates ‘great diversity of gender identity’ in new book.” And another: “President tells youth groups to be vigilant against racist attitudes and to value diversity in society.” Care to guess which venerable organ published them? Here’s a clue: “Multicultural awards take place in Dublin following three-year break.”

Actually, that last one is a bit of a scoop. To anyone who knows modern Ireland, the notion that Dublin went a whole three years without multicultural awards is frankly incredible. Somebody really screwed up. They’re supposed to happen every month at least. The newspaper is the Irish Times, which these days makes the Guardian look like the bulletin of the Prayer Book Society. Rumour has it that it employs a special nurse to soothe joints sprained by marathon sessions of finger-wagging.

This week was a good one for the finger-waggers. The Irish parliament passed a law stripping political parties of state funding unless 30 per cent of their candidates are women; in later elections the quota will rise to 40 per cent. This means that bright men will be dissuaded from entering politics because the system will fill the Dáil with dim hectoring feminists with DIY Sinéad O’Connor haircuts. (Incidentally, did you know that eight out of the past 10 World Hectoring Champions have been lady members of the Irish Green party? It’s called Comhaontas Glas. Don’t ask me how it’s pronounced: the bizarre vagaries of Gaelic pronunciation were designed to trip up the English.)

Anyway, my point is not that rigged elections will destroy the democratic mandate of the Dáil, though they will. It’s that an especially toxic strain of political correctness has infected almost the entire Irish intelligentsia. Small-government conservatives are treated like lepers – something that, the Guardian/BBC axis notwithstanding, isn’t true of British public life. Meanwhile, the sucking up to minorities is beyond parody: a recent Irish Times profile of the travellers made them sound like latter-day Athenians. How long before there’s a transvestite traveller quota in the Dáil?

Admittedly, the programme of thought reform is not complete: the Irish working class is still instinctively socially conservative. But it is, unsurprisingly, increasingly anti-clerical, and that takes us to the heart of the matter. Churchgoing in Ireland has fallen off a cliff, thanks to the clergy’s dreadful record of committing and covering up paedophile crimes. The moral vacuum at the top of a hierarchical society has been filled by political correctness, much of it imported from the European Union at the height of Ireland’s Brussels-worship.

Identify innate prejudices lurking in those five paragraphs. But — hey!— we can’t abide “political correctness”, can we?

Your starter for ten:

• Irish is a an alien tongue, so that’s fair game (just don’t try mocking the Frogs or the Huns, the Nips or the Chinks, when you’re looking to do business with them).
• Gender equalities?  can’t have that! who’ll cook dinner and wash my socks?
• It’s all the fault of the EU, isn’t it?
• And Guardianistas are always fair game.

Add your own pig-ignorances at (s)will.

Gutter xenophobia (would Tony Gallagher, editor of the Telegraph, be capable of arguing that Thompson wasn’t in the gutter?) is endemic to English journalism. Perhaps we should omit the “journalism” substantive. And Scottish independence could, happily, restore to its rightful place the lost verse of the National Anthem?—

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush.
God save the King!

Oh, dear! another irony! Field Marshall George Wade (1673-1748), whose roads crushed the Scots after the 1715 Jacobite Rising, was Irish-born at Kilavally, co. Westmeath, the son of a Cromwellian Major. So obviously a candidate for one of Malcolm’s occasionals on the Not-so-great and the not-so-good.

A Malcolmian aside

Sadly — for it would prompt an digression of some length, the story that Wade’s illegitimate daughter married Ralph Allen, whose quarries produced that gorgeous limestone to build Georgian Bath, seems just a tale.

Ralph Allen, entrepreneur, postmaster, Cornishman, patron and friend of Alexander Pope and Whig politicians, is better recognised in his literary version: Squire Allworthy in Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Hibernophobia

Thompson is mining a seam has been endemic in English thinking for centuries. Gerald of Wales, when he accompanied Prince John on his Irish trip, could claim the original copyright:

This people, then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress, but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner, just like the modern fashion recently introduced; indeed all their habits are barbarisms. But habits are formed by mutual intercourse; and as this people inhabit a country so remote from the rest of the world, and lying at its furthest extremity, forming, as it were, another world, and are thus secluded from civilised nations, they learn nothing, and practise nothing but the barbarism in which they were born and bred, and which sticks to them like a second nature. Whatever natural gifts they possess are excellent, in whatever requires industry they are worthless.

Bede, by comparison, had been much more positive. Perhaps that is because in AD730 conquest and domination were not the agenda, in the way they had become in Gerald’s day:

Ireland is broader than Britain, is healthier and has a much milder climate, so that snow rarely lasts for more than three days. Hay is never cut in summer for winter use nor are stables built for their beasts. No reptile is found there nor could a serpent survive; for although serpents have often been brought from Britain, as soon as the ship approaches land they are affected by the scent of the air and quickly perish. In fact almost everything that the island produces is efficacious against poison. For instance we have seen how, in the case of people suffering from snake-bite, the leaves of manuscripts from Ireland were scraped, and the scrapings put in water and given to the sufferer to drink. These scrapings at once absorbed the whole violence of the spreading poison and assuaged the swelling. The island abounds in milk and honey, nor does it lack vines, fish, and birds. It is also noted for the hunting of stags and roe-deer. It is properly the native land of the Irish; they emigrated from it as we have described and so formed the third nation in Britain in addition to the Britons and the Picts.

Advance the fiendish Fenian

By the time Punch could produce that gem, the main staples of the prejudice were established. “Britannia”, stern and wise, was defending  her dependent junior “sister” from the demons. the Irish peasant is characteristically deformed and depraved.

That is a mild version. There are far worse.

John Leech

He was the chief cartoonist for Punch between 1841 and 1861, and his illustrations for Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol became iconic. He was also seminal  in ramping up hibernophobia among English readers.

Repeatedly he reaches for repulsive anthropomorphic grotesques to depict things Irish.

This shows as early as 1848:That, of course, is the Young Ireland movement. Malcolm has been this way, recently, and feels no great need to traipse back through Widow McCormack’s potato patch.

Making John Mitchel (the usual spelling, despite Leech) the point of that cartoon, to the exclusion of O’Brien, Meager and Dillon, might seem perverse. It does however, precisely date the moment. Mitchel was — arguably — the hottest head, and, as editor of The United Irishman, a tall poppy to be cut down. Mitchel’s arrest in March 1848, his prompt conviction for treason felony, and sentence of transportation, pushed the Young Irelanders to their abortive rising.

Malcolmian aside: nine Irishmen

In the last couple of decades, they’ve become a regular on wall-plaques, posters and tea-towels. They inevitably have a faux-Irish bar named in their honour. Just off the Strip in Las Vegas, so you have been warned.

Have you missed the hype it goes like this:

In 1874, word reached an astounded Queen Victoria that the Sir Charles Duffy who had been elected Prime Minister of Australia, was the same Charles Duffy who had been transported into exile there 25 years before. On the Queen’s demand, the records of the rest of the transported Irishmen were revealed and this is what was discovered:

The Queen’s Record of the Rest of the Transported Irishmen:

• Thomas Francis Meagher: Governor of Montana
• Terrance MacManus: Brigadier General, U.S. Army.
• Patrick Donahue: Brigadier General, U.S. Army.
• Morris Leyne: Attorney General of Australia, in which office…
• Michael Ireland succeeded him as Attorney General of Australia.
• Richard O’Gorman: Governor General of Newfoundland.
• Thomas D’Arcy McGee: Member of Parliament, Montreal, Minister of Agriculture and President of Council Dominion of Canada
• John Mitchel: Prominent New York Politician, father of John Purroy Mitchel, Mayor of New York at the outbreak of world war I.

To which it is obligatory to add:

The moral of the story: you can’t keep a good Irishman down.

Malcolm suspects a lot of that is “improved” from Tim Pat Coogan’s own inventiveness, especially from Wherever Green is Worn. A cynic might add not all went well:

• Meagher drowned in the Missouri, having mysteriously — though probably drunk —fallen from a steamboat;
• MacManus died in abject poverty in San Francisco,as early as 1861, so no Civil War command;
• Donahue is frequently confused with his near-name-sake — the Patrick Donahoe who died in his bed, aged 90, a prominent Boston businessman, newspaper owner and philanthropist;
• Neither “Leyne” (even his name is disputed, though he seems to have come fromKerry) nor Ireland seem to receive an entry in the Dictionary of Australian Biography;
• McGee was never more than a Member of the Canadian Parliament, but was assassinated;
• Richard O’Gorman became a New York lawyer and judge, and here may be confused with Sir Terence O’Brien, Manchester-born Governor of Newfoundland 1889-95;
• Before 1901 there was no Australia, and the six territories were separate entities, so Duffy was no Prime Minister thereof — though briefly he was Premier and Chief Secretary of the province of Victoria, and ditto for Attorneys General of Australia: ;
• John Purroy Mitchel fell out of aircraft, having failed to strap himself in.

There are several fuller analyses of this superb urban myth.

More of Leech

When John Leech produced this one for Punch (14 December 1861), he was exploiting several contemporary ideas.

One was the notion of the “missing link” in evolution (Leech had used a similar representation  for a visiting French zoologist earlier in the year). Hence, the Irish nationalist belongs to an irrational and inferior species.

Specifically, though, the burning topic was the Trent incident. A Unionist captain had removed two Confederates delegates from a British merchant ship. Daniel O’Donoghue, a Nationalist MP, used a public meeting at Dublin’s Rotunda to declare that Ireland would offer England neither money nor men   at this moment of tension. Notice how Punch and Leech are leaning towards support for the Confederates (refer on this to Amanda Foreman, whom Malcolm has noted previously, and more than once).

Leech in Ireland

Through a shared enthusiasm for hunting, Leech became friends with the Reverend Samuel Reynolds Hole, squire and vicar of Caunton, Notts. In 1859 the two travelled through Ireland, and out of that trip came A Little Tour in Ireland, with illustrations by Leech.

After a long run up, getting to Dublin, and a rumination around TCD, we join Hole in Phoenix Park, amid the RIC:

Picked men, and admirably trained, they are as smart and clean, lithe and soldier-like, as the severest sergeant could desire. They do credit to him whose name they bear, for they are still called Peelers, after their godfather Sir Robert, who originated the force, when Secretary for Ireland. Fifty of them had left Dublin for Kilkenny that moring, to expostulate with the bold pisantry on the impropriety of smashing some reaping-machines recently introduced among them. The Irishman is not quick to appreciate agricultural improvements. It required an Act of Parliament to prevent him Attaching the plough to the tails of his horses …

We have Hole’s number: all that concern for the horses, rather than implied rural unemployment. And isn’t the pun on peasant/piss ant so neat and witty? Or not.

As these couple of examples show, Leech went along with the fun. even when he got away from the anthropomorphics:

Hole, who — for a beneficed and married cleric of the Church of England — spends a remarkable part of his narrative admiring young ladies (and Leech sketching them) manages the odd occasion of human sympathy, shows a capacity to write, and almost manages to maintain the effect:

We witnessed at the railway station, on our arrival at Galway, a most painful and touching scene, — the departure of some emigrants, and their last separation, here on earth, from dear relations and friends. The train was about to start, and the platform was crowded with men, women and children, pressing round for a last fond look. Ever and anon, a mother or a sister would force a way into the carriages, flinging her arms around her beloved, only to be separated by a superior strength, and parted from them with such looks of misery as disturbed the soul with pity. And then, for the first time, we heard the wild Irish “cry”, beginning with a low, plaintive wail, and gradually rising in its tone of intense sorrow …

Nor was this great grief simulated, … but came gushing from the full fountain of those loving hearts. There were faces there no actor could assume — faces which would have immortalised the painter who could have traced them truly, but were beyond the compass of art. Two, especially, I shall never forget. A youth of eighteen or nineteen, who had a cheerful word and pleasant smile for all, though you could see the while, in his white cheek and quivering lip, how grief was gnawing his brave Spartan heart … and the other, an elderly man, who had stood somewhat aloof from the rest, with his arms folded, and his head bent, motionless, speechless, with a face on which despair had written, I shall smile no more until I welcome death…

Many of the emigrants had bunches of wild flowers and heather, and one of them a shamrock in a broken flowerpot, as memorials of dear ould Ireland. Nor does this fond love of home and kindred decline in a distant land; no less a sum than £7,520,000 having been sent from America to Ireland, in the years 1848 to 1854 inclusive, according to the statement of the Emigration Commissioners.

No end of prejudice

Leech was not unique, not the first, and by no means the last in this mode. Nor is it entirely an English failing. This from as recent as 2005, and Vancouver:

So Damian Thompson can rest easy. He and his like have taught well. As Malcolm can personally testify:

• one can be born and raised in Norfolk,
• one’s speech still has those Anglian broad vowels and missed consonants,
• spend half-a-century of adult life in England’s fair and pleasant land,

but …

• because of a while at school and university in Dublin, one is inevitably “that mad Irishman”.

Spectating

Malcolm has an excellent relationship with a near-neighbour who subscribes to The Spectator. As a result, rather than pass directly to trash, the magazines are by-passed through Malcolm’s letter-box.

This may mean that as much as a month may have intervened before the next batch arrive; but that only puts into due proportion all passing enthusiasms of James Forsyth. Odd as it may seem, Forsyth’s weekly and presumably more leisured reflections in The Speccie do not gain in weight or wisdom compared to his instant frothings, on a more regular timetable, for the Mail. 

This delivery system may be laboured, but what does not stale is what happens back of the staple-fold.

The Spectator’s Book & Arts section is unfailingly worth the trip, even a month stale.

So here is Malcolm with the issue for 23rd June, where the main essay is A tough broad — Sam Leith on Lilian Hellman (the peg that is hung on is Alice Kessler-Harris’s Life and Times. Leith reviews Hellman, whereas — as far as Malcolm can judge — the book is something else: a distinguished academic historian‘s take on issues broader than a personality:

She was one of my heroines in the 1970s; I thought surely she would already have been taken, and grabbed her when I discovered that she had not. I was eager for something that would take me beyond the trade union women with whom I’d spent most of my life up to that point. And once I started to work on her, I was hooked.  Her life intersected in so many ways with elements of subjects that I had long been interested in. It spoke to questions about women, about Jews, about labor, about economic independence, about sexuality, about the peculiar nature of American radicalism…

I found myself relatively comfortable writing the parts of the book that had to do with the 1930s – Hellman’s relationship with trade unions, her viewpoints on the feminism of the 1970s – because those things are in my bones. I did my homework, but I didn’t feel as though I was researching an entirely new subject. When it came to writing about areas I knew less about – Hellman as a playwright in the 1930s, for example – that was more challenging. I had to think about who the major players and actors were; what it meant that Hellman was not a member of the radical left theater movement of the period; why she decided to be a serious writer and yet mount her plays on Broadway all the way.

No: that won’t be added to Malcolm’s guilt-pile (of which more later).

Nor will Harry Belafonte, My song: A Memoir. That is not because of any (by the look of it, considerable) worth of the text itself, nor because Ian Thomson’s review fails to do the book justice. It’s just that Malcolm doesn’t do celebrity memoirs. Still, Thomson makes almost a fair fist of it:

Like Duke Ellington before him, Belafonte was motivated always by a belief in black self-improvement. Rather than engage in a Garveyite agenda for black redemption , however, he chose to celebrate the African American experience through music. Later, he helped to finance Martin Luther King in his struggle against America ‘s racial divide. Belafonte did all this independent of Fifth Avenue patronage: by creating a single appreciative audience from both black and white (more often white), he was an important, even trail-blazing figure. Black celebrities such as Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson who had angrily denounced racism in 1930s and 1940s America soon found themselves out of work . Belafonte understood this. His insistence on snappy dressing and a hotel­circuit clean appearance was part of a plan to create a parallel world on a par with that of the white man.

Belafonte’s air of urbane calypso­cool helped to instil an image of racial pride in the American mind. Beneath the suave manner, however, was a gently subversive spirit, which served him well during times of ‘Jim Crow’ prejudice. Las Vegas in the early 1950s, where Belafonte often performed , was equally as prejudiced as the Deep South. In the showbiz city of champagne-corks, broads and finned convertibles, Frank Sinatra held sway with the Rat Pack; under Frankie the King Rat was Sammy Davis, Jr. In Belafonte’s view, Davis was a tragic, self-demeaning figure who, distressed by his blackness, chose to play court fool to white audiences; his ‘little black-boy routine’ looked undignified to Belafonte.

There’s nothing particularly original in that assessment. As for Sammy Davis, Malcolm felt uncomfortably embarrassed by the Rat Pack films and performances when they were new, and time — happily — has rendered them so excruciatingly obsolete they are no longer repeatable.

What Malcolm did enjoy in that review was the typo:

As their disenchantment deepened, Belafonte’s parents began to loose all affection in each other’s company and became, it seems, a mystery to each other.

On mature consideration, perhaps the Spectator‘s issue of 23 June (headlining James Forsyth extolling the coming neo-Cons on the Tory back-benches) wasn’t the finest example of the marque.

Pub-talk and legal parlance

When the rain came yesterday afternoon, Malcolm was emerging from the supermarket, laden. What to do? Silly question: turn right and, wind assisted, into the John Baird. Two pints of Fortyniner (yes: 4.9%) fortified the parts enough to struggle home.

What with Harvey‘s at the Hansom Cab on Friday, this was becoming something of a south-coast end to the week. As to that latter joint, follow Malcolm’s hot-link to John Walsh’s review for background, but trust not the views and comments therein: it’s a far, far better joint than than Walsh describes.

A Malcolmian aside

There’s this current vague (French, noun, female gender) for emphasising how many boozers are closing. And, yes, that’s sadly soundly-based.

The Irish Times is currently regaling us with an extended cri-de-coeur from Paul Cullen, under the title The pub loses its pulling power — as if any real pulling (apart from the subsequent interpersonal exchange of bodily fluids) has been going on in a land long devoted to top-pressure CO2 delivery.

Cullen rattles through the predictable:

Various reasons have been put forward for the collapse of the sector. For much of the past decade, publicans griped about the smoking ban and changes to drink-driving laws. Yet these changes took place some time ago — the smoking ban was introduced in 2004 and the first changes to drink-driving laws date back to the introduction of random breath-testing in 2003.

In the next paragraph Cullen hits a nerve through a quotation from Professor (of marketing) Mary Quinn:

“As people got richer and more sophisticated they weren’t prepared to sit in a dirty pub any more. Young people in particular wanted newer, brighter, more modern places to meet in.”

Which presumably explains why the pub-owners have a habit of ripping out old, authentic interiors to instal older ersatz ones.

So let’s address the problem from a different view-point. Why are some pubs (such as the Hansom Cab, and even the Baird) adapting and prospering, and why? In both those cases, along with the Nicholson’s houses, the Stag and The Bridge House, which all feature regularly in Malcolm’s life, and have been hat-tipped here, it’s because they have moved on from the days of the boozer. All are places where one can eat and drink — and drink good beers — in some comfort, the company of one’s nearest-and-dearest, without embarrassment. What if they tend to the trendy, to be dismissed as “gastropubs” or whatever? What if their prices permit decent facilities and amenities?

Oh, and reliable and regular public transport certainly helps. Though austerity, and loss-leader supermarket alcohol pricing most certainly don’t.

Back to the main event

Malcolm, remember, is in the corner of the Baird, with his pint of Fortyniner. He could (and eventually does) get out the copy of the Times for the world according to Murdoch. First, though, some light relief.

This week’s Times Literary Supplement has a couple of decent, deserving pieces among the other stuff: now why was Malcolm caught by an Antony Scull review of Simon Baron Cohen on A new theory of human cruelty? What grabbed Malcolm more was Brian Vickers running the rule over Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson — A Life.

This one looks very tasty indeed. Currently Malcolm’s other bedside book is John Stubbs’s delightful and delighting Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War, now available in paperback. Despite the title, Stubbs takes a long run-up, and prefaces the deal with the seminal figure of Jonson. Stubbs is sufficiently tangential to appeal to Malcolm’s butterfly mind — he is as near to a reincarnation of old John Aubrey as one could wish.

Moving on from Vickers on Jonson, the TLS has a two-column scamper, in the tail-gunner slot, by Ferdy Mount on Ronald Blythe’s latest, At the Yeoman’s House. This is a matured and marinated treatment of the book: all the main reviews came in a couple of months since. Mount starts with this observation, from the particular to the general:

Ronald Blythe has not budged much. In eighty-nine years, he has moved only a few miles down the Stour valley, and he has never left his home on the Essex-Suffolk border for more than a month on end. Nor did his ancestors, a long line of Suffolk shepherds who took their surname from the River Blyth, which dawdles past the great windows of Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, into the estuary at Southwold. Rootedness on this scale may seem odd to us who like to feel footloose, but it comes naturally to our great country writers: Thomas Hardy and William Barnes in Dorset, Richard Jeffries in Wilts, and John Clare in Northants (though William Cobbett did get about a bit). They stand out from other writers, too, by coming from the labouring classes as often as not, the sons of stonemasons and farmers, and in youth often labourers themselves. They have now and then been joined at the plough by the sons of the professional classes, such as John Stewart Collis and Adrian Bell, but the native sons of the soil are somehow different.

The cover (as right) of Blythe’s “elegy in a harsh key” (nice one, Ferdy!) is a 1954 John Nash oil-painting, The Barn, Wormingford, almost certainly the view from the top-floor studio of Bottengoms Farm (back to Mount for this):

… the very old farmhouse Blythe has lived in ever since he inherited it from the painter John Nash, whom he nursed when he was dying … For centuries, Bottengoms was a farm with seventy ill-favoured acres, from which the yeoman, defined by Cobbett as “above a farmer and lower than a gentleman”, scratched a precarious living. Gradually the acres fell away into other hands. In the 1920s, what was left was sold for £1,820, in 1936 for £1,200, and in 1944 Captain John Nash, Official War Artist, snapped it up for only £700.

Mount (born 1939) sums up on Blythe’s meditation:

This is a production of old age, gentle but not soft, othe tough-minded and charitable. Blythe is a lay Reader in the Church of England and nearly became a priest, like William Barnes and George Crabbe and Gilbert White before him. Yet I find his unillusioned, lyrical tone curiously similar to those ruralists who were lifelong atheists, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jeffries. It is as though the unblinking countryman’s eye has no room for religion, one way or the other.

Are we wholly happy with “unillusioned”? What other descriptor would possibly work there? Du mot vrai! Anyway, when Ferdy Mount ploughs through today’s Sunday Times, he will find Minette Marrin arguing that the Church of England exists for those who need “religiosity”, but not demanding beliefs, in their lives:

A sense of the numinous, a longing for ceremony, a love of the religious punctuation of the year, a need for a regular time to examine one’s conscience, a passion for church music — these are all things that appeal to Anglican unbelievers such as me and to unbelievers of all traditions.

On which, Malcolm would nearly as happily drink to Ms Marrin as to the third baronet Mount of Wasing Place.

Towards the bottom of the second pint …

… Malcolm reached the back page of the TLS, and the weekly miscellany. This week’s was a trifle disappointing — a long snarl at copyright-cuddling by the James Joyce Foundation (as if we needed to be told), then a nip on the ankles of “St” Jeanette Winterson. In between there is a bit of uplift, delicately balanced on passing wind about Lawtalk: The unknown stories behind familiar legal expressions.

It starts like this:

Heard the one about the dying man who insisted on studying to be a lawyer? After a great deal of trouble to his family, he qualified just in time. As he received his degree, a a relative aced the question: Why? “One less lawyer”, said the man as he expired.

The rest of this three-paragraph scamper covers the origin of

• The law is an ass

Yes, Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist, but “an obscure seventeen-century play called Revenge for Honour“. Not only “obscure”, though it merits a wikipedia entry and it was attributed to George Chapman: The Review of English Studies, as far back as 1935, reckoned this was a “worthless play”, but noticed it borrowed from Othello.

• with all deliberate speed

Famously, or infamously, from Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter’s draft for the 1954 Supreme Court judgement on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Yet, the term appears in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy. The TLS doesn’t help much here, but Malcolm can assure all and sundry that a visit to Chapter Nineteenth, in volume two, will locate this:

The Bailie … was obviously relieved from his impending fears of ridicule, when I told him it was my father’s intention to leave Glasgow almost immediately. Indeed he had now no motive for remaining, since the most valuable part of the papers carried off by Rashleigh had been recovered. For that portion which he had converted into cash and expended in his own or on political intrigues, there was no mode of recovering it but by a suit at law, which was forthwith commenced, and proceeded, as our law-agents assured us, with all deliberate speed.

That neatly exemplifies the ironic ambiguity which must also have been in Frankfurter’s mind, in 1954.

• blackmail

Oddly, both Lawtalk and the TLS assume that this is also from Rob Roy, though the TLS adds:

The same novel popularised “blackmail”, though the practice is as old as shame itself.

Malcolm cocks a wry eye at the MS Word “z” in what was once, back in the eighteenth century again, and derived from the French populariser (though the OED is happy with “popular adj. and n.  and -ize suffix“). Yet, there’s more to this than meets the eye. The exact use of blackmail is in the Editor’s Introduction to the Waverley edition of Rob Roy:

At Tullibody Scott had met, in 1793, a gentleman who once visited Rob, and arranged to pay him blackmail.

Do the TLS, and the authors of Lawtalk recognise that “blackmail” originally meant something very different from its modern context? The original meaning was a tribute extorted by the Border revers, and nearer in meaning to “protection money”. This is the sense in Rob Roy.

• jailbait

The TLS gloss here is:

We have the Chicago author James T. Farrell to thank for the evocative “jailbait”, over which the authors of Lawtalk lay down the law: “The term is best used sparingly: if intended or perceived as a slur upon the character of a girl it is offensive”.

 In point of strict accuracy, Farrell used it as two separate words (in Calico Shoes, from 1934):

She’s not hard on the eyes but she’s jail bait.

 By the time it has crossed the Atlantic, it has become hyphenated, as in John Braine’s Room at the Top from 1957:

I’m not interested in little girls. Particularly not in jail-bait like that one.

Quite when it became a single word is another question. For sure it was previous to Jonathan “Jonny” Spelman having his cabinet minister mother rush to the High Court to seek that injunction on his behalf.

The cause behind the injunction is still a mystery (it seems), but speculation includes the ill-advised posting to Facebook, as right, but now (it also seems) taken down. It does help to have a millionaire mother in a public office: such courtesies are rarely extended to lesser beings.

• play the race card

The TLS properly notes that this one has different meanings here and in the States:

British politicians in the 1960s who spoke about immigration were accused of playing the race card, but the proper use applies to a person under duress invoking the spectre of discrimination as a trump card — you’re only doing this because I’m black/ Chinese, etc.

Ho hum.

That’s a sanitized version of what Malcolm recalls of “British politicians in the 1960s”.  It went a bit further than accusations. Whether or not Peter Griffiths, fighting the Smethwick constituency in the 1964 General Election personally endorsed “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour” (as the many posters said, but almost entirely in that one constituency) is immaterial, it worked.

Home, James, and don’t spare the sauces

You may recall we began this phantasmagoria with Malcolm taking refuge from the rain.

Two pints later the wind was still strong, but the worst of the wet had passed over. So Malcolm returned his glass (a habit stemming from birth over a bar), rolled up his various newspapers, picked up the shopping, and headed off.

It all took rather less time than the development of this extended posting.

Even funnier olde worlde stuff

The Daily Mail, famously, has two obsessions (both attested, below right, from today’s edition):

¶ articles with headline-questions to which the answer unfailingly a resounding “No!” [© John Rentoul at the Indy]

and

¶ that online “side-bar of shame” with pics of D-list celebrities not quite showing their all, in bikinis or suffering wardrobe malfunctions (suitably edited).

We expect higher things from the Torygraph, so let’s segue swiftly there.

Ah! The sports report! Should be PG-viewing!

Alas, beneath the header:

we get some seedy stuff.

¶ Item: the hot-link to:

Owl Mascot Kicked to Death by Soccer Player

Fortunately nothing to do with Sheffield Wednesday’s Ozzie, Baz or Ollie.

¶ Then, clearly in the sporting tradition, there’s this:

Woman Blows Up Factory Where Dad Died   Sky News

In which case, Sarah Griffiths did well to rid the King’s Lynn skyline of the tower from the Campbell’s Soup Factory (also deceased). Lynn (as a Norfolk lad by origin, Malcolm feels he knows the place well enough to be on surname terms) has a marvellous, if neglected core, and some of the finest unappreciated buildings in Britain — it’s the hinterland that depresses.

¶ Much in the Mail tradition, there’s stuff like:

Oooh … Auntie! How naughty!

¶ Very sporty, there’s the link to Chelsea supporters on the 4 pm train back from Norwich.

Yes, they’re chanting racist slogans again. This is, of course, the hang-over from John Terry’s nose-to-nose job with QPR’s Anton Ferdinand (and Chelsea about to go to Loftus Road in a Cup Tie). What really makes the grade here is to scan down that particular page to the “authorised” and “approved” comments, such as:

Makes one speculate on how much poison is needed for a comment to be redacted.

¶ And, if you’re really, really lucky …

From the “sports” pages, you’ll get a link to

Housemate ‘raped live on Brazilian Big Brother’

A housemate on Brazilian Big Brother was allegedly raped live on television in front of millions of viewers.

The Telegraph is anxious for us to know that justice was done, and seen to be done:

Daniel Echaniz has not been arrested or charged with any crime but was removed from the programme by producers for ‘gravely inadequate’ behaviour

This sports lark reminds Malcolm of the inspirational thought of O.J.Simpson, no less:

The day you take complete responsibility for yourself, the day you stop making any excuses, that’s the day you start to the top.

Hilarity and mirth

Malcolm’s impending infarction may be caused by one of the following:

1. The Lady in his Life has introduced him to the splendour of Shite Shirts.

2. Not even in Norfolk: the green plastic sheep that need a visible barrier.

3. That honourable gentleman, Aidan Burley, MP … and his Israeli excursion.

Only one of these is a political disaster.

A sorry story

It looks as if Malcolm’s Googlemail address had been hi-jacked by some Islamicist.

If any subscriber or acquaintance received a missive therefrom, apologies.

It is to be hoped that normal service has been resumed.

Doubtless, at some stage, the scam offers will arrive. Malcolm particularly enjoys the invitations to renew his credit-worthiness and bank security. All of which is a tad of a problem for a pseudonym.

Every picture tells a story

Malcolm was, from an early age, inculcated with prejudice that those massive Victorian panoramas represented “bad taste”. As the mood and the times changed, he found he quite took to them.

So, last Saturday’s Irish Times magazine, with a full frontal of Louis Lang’s Return of the 69th (Irish) Regiment (see pages 10-11, or as above) and the accompanying article by Lisa Marlowe, was mustard on the beef.

It helped that, a few days earlier, Malcolm had been reading Dr Amanda Foreman. That reminded him the vast eighty-square feet of canvas was representing the aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run, 21st July 1861. This has in the last week been featured in the New York Times‘s running 150th anniversary memorial:

A crisis for the Federal forces had arrived; raising the Rebel Yell for the one of the first times in the war, Confederates built momentum until they forced their enemy into full retreat. Picnicking civilians who had driven out from Washington to witness a Union victory found themselves swept up in a fleeing mass of soldiers, pieces of artillery, supply wagons and carriages that choked the Warrenton Turnpike. Representative Alfred Ely of New York, captured during the chaotic aftermath of the battle and treated roughly by a hot-tempered Confederate colonel, found himself en route to Richmond and confinement in Libby Prison.

The focal point of that Confederate charge was the 69th New York, as Dr Foreman explains:

The field was littered with bodies when Sherman ordered the 69th to make their charge. By now it was late afternoon and many Union soldiers had reached the end of their strength. Sensing his enemies’ exhaustion, in one of his few sensible decisions of that day, General Beauregard ordered the Confederates to make a countercharge. The Rebels surged forward, letting out wild, whooping screams as they ran. The ‘Rebel yell’, as it became later known, froze the Union soldiers in their tracks. Just as Colonel [of the 69th] Corcoran shouted shouted to his men to rally to the flag, two other Federal regiments on the hill smashed into them, pursued by the Confederate cavalry.

The sudden urge to flee spread to other parts of McDowell’s army …

At some point there one might wonder just how magnificent the 69th had been at Bull Run. From which, we might adduce whether this Louis Lang wall-hanging is much more than a propaganda piece.

Now Malcolm would dearly, dearly love to make the 69th New York the heroes of the War — perhaps on a part with the 6th Louisiana Volunteers on the other side. Sadly, it just doesn’t quite work that way.

Up front and central

In the centre of that Louis Lang painting is Captain Thomas Meager, of whom we hear a great deal. Lisa Marlowe has him thus:

Cpt Thomas Francis Meagher is the central character of Lang’s painting, rising above the crowd on the back of his bay horse, waving his cap to the Irish-American grandees on the balcony of the Washington Hotel. After a trip to Paris to congratulate France on its 1848 revolution, it was Meagher who brought back the tricolour that would become the flag of independent Ireland.

Let us move swiftly on …

… to Dr Foreman on the Battle of Antietam (17 September 1862), when Captain Meagher has risen to higher things:

The Irish Brigade lost half its men in less than twenty minutes; the brigade general, Thomas Meager, ‘the Prince of New York’, survived by being too drunk to ride.

Meagher is thereby nominated as number 25 of The not-so-great and the not-so-good.

None of that may seem entirely fair.

However, scrutinise Louis Lang’s great effort carefully. Remember: this is the rough end of New York in 1861. Do you see a single black face? Now consider this, from Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (page 120):

On the docks, the Irish effort to gain the rights of white men collided with the black struggle to maintain the right to work; the result was perpetual warfare. Black workers had traditionally been an important part of the waterfront work force in New York, Philadelphia, and other Northern cities, as well as Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and other Southern ports. By the 1850s the New York waterfront had become an Irish preserve; few black men could find work on the docks except during strikes under police protection, and even Germans were unwelcome. In 1850, Irish laborers had struck demanding the dismissal of a black laborer who was working alongside them. During the strike of 1852, and again in 1855, 1862, and 1863, Irish longshoremen battled black workers who had been brought in to take their places. The Longshoremen’s United Benevolent Society, formed in 1852, was exclusively Irish, even marching annually in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. It is significant, however, that at no time did the Society declare its commitment to an Irish monopoly of jobs, stating instead that it sought to ensure only that “work upon the docks … shall be attended to solely and absolutely by members of the ‘Longshoremen’s Association,’ and such white laborers as they see fit to permit upon the premises.”

This, of course, is all a precursor to the New York Draft Riots of 1863 —which is a polite definition of a pogrom against Black people, which included the torching of an orphanage for back children. Then the (predominantly, but not exclusively) Irish working class of New York went on the rampage:

… by 1862 abolitionist speakers drew huge audiences, black and white, in the city. Increasing support for the abolitionists and for emancipation led to anxiety among New York’s white proslavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly the Irish. From the time of Lincoln’s election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York’s Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern blacks would supposedly flee north. To these New Yorkers, the Emancipation Proclamation was confirmation of their worst fears. In March 1863, fuel was added to the fire in the form of a stricter federal draft law. All male citizens between twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age were subject to military duty. The federal government entered all eligible men into a lottery. Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government three hundred dollars might avoid enlistment. Blacks, who were not considered citizens, were exempt from the draft.

In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government’s intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the “nigger war.” Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that “[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes.” In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery of the conscription law was held. For twenty-four hours the city remained quiet. On Monday, July 13, 1863, between 6 and 7 A.M., the five days of mayhem and bloodshed that would be known as the Civil War Draft Riots began.

At least 120 black New Yorkers (but “not citizens”) were murdered. Even after the Civil War, the reconstruction of an orphange for black children was resisted by good Irish-Americans.

It is worth remembering that the New York Irish were good fighters — but not for abolition.

 

Plots and rumours of plots

1. To Norroway, to Norroway, cross the foam ...

It looks to Malcolm as though the spade-work was done for a post on Harry’s Place. That excavated what seems to link Anders Behring Breivik with a mistaken view of British Labour government immigration policies:

arguing they are seeking to annihilate Europeans via multicultural policies, and imagining a future Nuremberg trial for them.

This was picked up and recycled by Nick Cohen, doing an excellent post for The Spectator website. What Cohen traces is the development of a story:

• from an original article by Andrew Neather in the London Evening Standard,
• which presented the benefits of immigration to the London economy,
• and which drew on a study-paper by by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office think-tank,
• which in turn provoked a thoughtful speech by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls, a speech which Neather says he himself wrote.

The result of all that was:

you can imagine how fantasists seized on what they inevitably called “Neathergate”. Labour was deliberately flooding the country with immigrants to boost its electoral chances; undermining Britishness and imposing alien cultures on the subject peoples of these islands just to wrong foot the Conservative opposition. The right wing press and blogosphere went wild with delighted fury. The Standard had confirmed their worst suspicions.

And the villain of the piece was depicted as Jack Straw. How this misrepresentation was done is shown by Tom Whitehead’s effort for the Telegraph:

The former Home Secretary, now the Justice Secretary, said it was “just untrue” that the Government had a deliberate policy in the early 2000s to use immigration for political ends and to attack the Right.

It follows claims last week by Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett, that the huge increase in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.

He said Labour’s relaxation of controls in 2000/01 was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration” but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its “core working class vote”.

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, yesterday told the Commons it would be “utterly disgraceful” for ministers to base immigration policy on party politics.

Denials by Straw and others were, of course, consigned well down the article. The Telegraph had managed to get the dog-whistle secret plot twice into its heading for Whitehead’s farrago.

That has remained a staple of Tory extremist invective ever since.

At some stage a cynic might wonder if the massacre of Utoeya wasn’t — if only in part — sparked by the opportunism of Cameroonie politicians on the make.

2. Cutting the Cable

The “Hackergate” shlock-horror du jour is in the New York Times. This is the start of Don Van Natta Jr dishing the dirt:

On Dec. 21 last year, The Daily Telegraph was preparing to publish a blockbuster exclusive: Vince Cable, the government’s business secretary, had been caught on tape boasting that he had “declared war” on Rupert Murdoch and would find a convenient legal excuse to block the News Corporation’s bid for British Sky Broadcasting, Britain’s most lucrative satellite television network.

But the day before The Telegraph was to run the article, the paper was scooped by Robert Peston, the business editor of the BBC. Mr. Peston reported that “a whistle-blower” had provided him with a secretly recorded conversation between The Telegraph’s undercover reporters and Mr. Cable.

In short, the Telegraph had been ripped off. Van Natta Jr (let’s not forget the cognomen) renders the “plot” like this:

The editors said they instantly suspected the hidden hand of William Lewis, the newspaper’s former editor in chief, who was dismissed from the Telegraph Media Group in May 2010 after a dispute with company executives. Mr. Lewis was now working at News International, the British subsidiary of the News Corporation.

The [Telegraph] editors’ suspicions grew when a computer technician at The Telegraph, Jim Robinson, left in January to work for Mr. Lewis at News International. The two celebrated the appointment over pints at a pub.

So, let’s reconstruct on the basis of cui bono:

• Lewis (who is always identified by Private Eye as “Thirsty”) had a grudge, and a way in.
• News International had an obvious interest in getting the BSkyB deal out from under Vince Cable, and into the hands of Jeremy Hunt, who was on record as far back as 2008 mouthing support for Murdoch and Sky.
• Peston is a long-term friend of Lewis.
• It would be better for News International, and cover the traces, for the story to come through the BBC rather than directly out of Wapping.

Pity it all (so far) came to nought.