Pride of our alley?

Let Malcolm start with two confessions:

1. Yesterday’s Sunday papers got short shrift, mainly because of that long liquid lunch at Ye Olde Cherry Tree, a decent meal well lubricated with St Austell’s Proper Job.
2. He is distinctly ambivalent about the Bercows. Obviously, since John Bercow as Speaker gets up the noses of so many Tories, he cannot be entirely a bad thing. He seems to do the business; but doesn’t cut it along with the recent great Speakers of recent memory: say, Bernard Weatherill (recently the star of James Graham’s This House at the Cottesloe) and Betty Boothroyd (a great hoofer, never out-shone by anyone). As for wife Sally, well, she does seem a trifle OTT.

And it is of Sally Bercow of whom we now speak.

The story so far:

Back in the darkening days of last autumn a frisson ran through the British political establishment. Some well-rehearsed ‘revelations’ from decades gone by, about paedophile rings in high places, bubbled to the surface of the settlement pit. One particular name involved was McAlpine. Unfortunately two McAlpine cousins, “Jimmie” and Lord Alastair, were confused by the media, including the BBC (who later paid McAlpine £185,000 for the mistake).

In the course of which Sally Bercow tweeted:

Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*

The noble Lord McAlpine (believed to be down to his last ten million) then set about cleaning up. He issued writs for libel against all and sundry, collecting large sums of moolah in the process:  the Guardian columnist George Monbiot coughed; and comedian Alan Davies is supposed to be down for £200,000. McAlpine then generously desisted from cleaning out the bank-accounts of lesser beings, making a special, public and explicit exception of Sally Bercow’s seven words and ornamental punctuation.

Sally, blessed her little convoluted heart, stood up to the bullying. Yesterday’s Sunday Times reminded us how things went from there:

The libel case is centred on whether Bercow’s tweet was defamatory. A key issue will be the level of innuendo implied by the use of asterisks in her comment. Such punctuation represents the mimicking of a physical action by the user.

Hold on!  There is a precedent for this, which — at first, even second sight — seems to contradict the old maxim de minimis non curat lex. When English law wants to, it could — as with Roger Casement, hang a man on a comma.

Back to the Sunday Times:

At a High Court hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for McAlpine, 70, will ask for permission for the case to be split into two parts: one to determine the meaning of the tweet, and a second, if required, to award damages. The peer is seeking up to £50,000.

If the case goes against her, Bercow fears a two-part trial will drag proceedings on for months, with legal costs likely to overtake damages. This is why she is thought to want a full trial to be heard in one go.

Bercow has instructed solicitors at Carter-Ruck on a no-win, no-fee basis and is believed to have taken out insurance to cover costs of up to £100,000 should she lose.

She will be represented in court by William McCormick, QC, a defamation and privacy expert whose previous clients have included Sir Elton John.

McAlpine’s barrister is Sir Edward Garnier, a Tory MP and former solicitor-general.

Andrew Reid, of the RPMI firm of solicitors, who is also representing the peer, said, “It is very disappointing that Mrs Bercow still wants her day in court. But there is a huge public interest in this. The sooner the meaning of what she said is settled, the greater the benefit to the public at large.”

Focus, if you will, on that last quoted paragraph.

What does it mean?

• One plain insinuation is that plutocrats, who can afford the bill for the thrill of the chase, might mulct lesser creatures through just a threat of action. But the lesser being is not supposed to use the proper legal remedy of “a day in court”. Of course, with verbose senior barristers involved, the chances of this being settled in a “day” are precisely zilch. Scattering writs like confetti was patented by such low-lifes as Robert Maxwell, to the great profit of his tame lawyers, who have refined the operation ever since.
• Second, McAlpine’s lawyers would clearly prefer not to have all that embarrassing “huge public interest”. Not in front of the serviles …
• Partisan politics, and a bully’s need to humiliate, seems a major contributory factor.
• As for “benefit to the public at large”, any sensitive and sensible mind boggles. We have here another of the myriad attempts by those with power to throttle and constrain each and every twitch, tweet and twaddle of the social media. Underlings’ sympathy for La Bercow derives from the good British principle of nil carborundum.
• The moral superiority of Lord McAlpine fades when we recall he was on the take, albeit on behalf of Thatcher’s Tory Party, from the likes of Asil Nadir. His love-of-country amounts to being a non-dom. His family firm, the construction giant McAlpine, made vast sums from Tory policies, and also operated the notorious black-list: since McAlpine started his career with the firm as a clock-watcher and pay-clerk on the South Bank site, his distance from victimizations cannot have been too great.

One last thought …

This Sunday Times piece was illustrated by yet another from a photo-shoot of Lord McAlpine cruising (make of that word what you will) around Venice.

The chequered suit and a gaudy tie, guaranteed to bar any on-course bookie from frightening the horses, tells us all we need to know. This present image, arms propped on true-blue umbrella, Rialto Bridge and moon-faced cheesy half-grin to the fore, mushy-peas Grand Canal beyond, is the latest, and even least appealing of the sequence.  Even Sally Bercow, in her more flirtatious and ill-advised moments didn’t sink that low.

Coagulating creaking crap!

The Tory poster campaign for the 2005 General Election was hardly subtle:

Wherever you went across the country, two months before the expected (and eventually declared) date, these posters appeared. All with the same “closed question”: Are you thinking what we’re thinking? Fortunately Michael Howard’s attempt at mood-management didn’t work. The Tories had bought in Lynton Crosbie, who had been the political strategist for John Howard’s four election victories in Australia. Britain was thus introduced to the dubious benefits of “dog-whistle politics”.

In 2013 the Tories are just as desperate — and even more blatant. There’s a short, bottom-of-the-page piece by Marie Woolf in the Sunday Times. Well, they had to squeeze it in somewhere: much of the rest of the issue is devoted to “Maggie Thatcher still dead! Official!” Here it comes:

Poor countries should be paid to process asylum seekers who are trying to get to Britain to stop them “disappearing” onto our streets, says a plan published by a group of influential right-wingers within the Conservative party.

Now Malcolm reckons he’s read that opener at least three time — and still doesn’t “get it”. Why the “disappearing” bit? If people immigrate, and then are indistinguishable within the whole population, have they not assimilated successfully?

The rest of the pieces is very much “tell me the same old story” — all the predictable terms are there: the Tory fret over a surge in support for the UK Independence party, the need for harsh immigration controls; deportees should appeal only after they being deported …

There has to be a Wizard behind the mask of this Oz nonsense. Step forward the plan’s begetter:

Julian Brazier MP for Canterbury [who] claims that housing, schooling, the welfare state and even the sewerage system are creaking under the strain of immigration.

Excuses! Excuses!

Gids Osborne has been baling the failure of his economics of the previous government (until that one was laughed down), the weather, snow, floods, drought, the royal wedding, the Olympics and anything else that came to mind. That set the pattern:

• Now the housing crisis in the South-East (and it is mainly in the South-East and where the bourgeoisie buy their second and holiday homes) is the fault of immigrants! Not, as most realists thought, because the privatising of social housing has been a disaster.
• The schools crisis is not because Gove pulled the plug on the previous government’s plans — no, no! it’s all down to immigrants who don’t speak English.
• The social security system is also stretched because of the number of immigrants who are unemployed … three of the top five nationalities for settling in Britain — Bangladeshis, Nigerians and Pakistanis — “have well above average unemployment rates”.  Actually, as other statistics show that’s more a function of social class than ethnic origin. And what are the determinants of class — and so employability? Education, perchance, for one?

The blockage in the pipes

Sitting on the 299 bus, en route to a liquid lunch at Ye Olde Cherry Tree in Southgate, it was the Lady in Malcolm’s Life who spotted the killer: the creaking of the sewerage system.

It’s got to be vindaloo.

National Sisterhood Week continues …

For poison in your sabbath morning porridge, there’s no better source/sauce than the Murdochian Sunday Times [£]. With added brimstone.

What seems to be a straightforward partisan piece, from only the first paragraph and the second sentence, turns into precisely the opposite:

Tory victim of by-election ‘dirty tricks’

The Eastleigh by-election battle turned personal yesterday after Labour and the Liberal Democrats were accused of dirty tricks over the Conservative candidate and her family. Opponents of Maria Hutchings, who is running for the Tories, questioned why her house still had a lit-up Christmas tree in its window long after Christmas.

Which decodes as either ‘absentee’ or ‘nutter’.

Then we get the recital of William Hutchings (age 11) and his ambition to be a cardio-respiratory surgeon, which can only be satiated outside the state system of education. Now back to the Great Christmas Tree riddle:

Supporters of Hutchings pointed out, however, that both the Christmas tree and her comments about education should be seen in the context that she has autistic children with special educational needs.

Conservative campaign HQ said Hutchings kept the tree up until it died for the benefit of one of her children, although neighbours said it was there all-year round.

Immediately from there, into a very odd semi-sequitur:

Diane James, the UKIP candidate, said she felt she had to justify publicly why she did not have children in the face of a Tory campaign focusing on the fact that Hutchings is an accomplished mother of four.

James said: “I couldn’t have children. It’s a big regret of my life, but I can’t do anything about that. I presume the Conservatives are mentioning that their candidate is a mother because they want to focus on family values.

If that seems odd, it is because it is — to the extent of weirdness. Even more so, when Mike Thornton, the front-runner Liberal Democrat (who, like O’Farrell for Labour, is never mentioned by name) features himself as a parent whose daughter went through the local schools to become a medical student. One might feel such a contrast is more relevant than Ms James’s aside.

After a side-track (three paragraphs on the betting odds — LibDems 8-13, Tories 7-4 and Labour on 8-1), we are back to the complex private life of Mrs Hutchings:

Some Tory activists have privately expressed concerns over the selection of Hutchings as their candidate.

In the run-up to the last general election in 2010, in which she was battling to unseat Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem MP whose resignation sparked the by-election, Conservative headquarters was warned that she faced “severe financial problems” and desperately needed more support for her campaign. A confidential file submitted to Tory central office described her as being “at breaking point”.

The party eventually agreed to help Hutchings with mobile phone, petrol and other costs. A source said: “There was a serious worry about Maria last time. She was under a huge amount of strain and the party had to be strong-armed into supporting her.”

The source said Sir George Young, the chief whip, would have been alerted to concerns held on file.

Curiouser and curiouser. Why Sir George? It’s not immediately in his remit; and wouldn’t be unless Mrs Hutchings wins the seat. Why is he dragged in, rather than — say— Greg Shapps, who is currently responsible? Obviously the mobile phone, petrol and other costs are to do with private life: otherwise they would be part of the statutory electoral expenses. And as far a candidate in a highly-marginal seat, up against a star-player from the other side, not being under a huge amount of strain … words fail.

The Sunday Times piece concludes with a paragraph of ritual praise from Eric Pickles (why him?) and another ticking off Mrs Hutchings’ merits as an opponent of gay marriage, her Euroscepticism and that she is “not a Tory toff” but a local mother who has “campaigned tirelessly for special needs children”. Which neatly overlooks that she was parachuted in, from Essex, for the 2010 election, as a ‘Cameron cutie’.

One other mystery persists about this Sunday Times piece. On-line it is counterpointed by two graphics. One is the latest YouGov opinion poll (Labour 43%, Conservatives 32%, Lib Dems 12%, UKIP 9%). The other is a grimacing Nigel Farage with his candidate, both with rosettes and against UKIP posters. In the print edition there is an extra: a singularly unflattering upward-shot portrait of Mrs Hutchings’ treble chins.

You don’t need a semiologist to detect a strong sub-text in all this.

An end to Dicking about

After a week or so, the all-purpose political metaphor that is Richard III ought to have breathed its last.

Sadly, it hasn’t.

Chris Riddell’s editorial cartoon for today’s Observer is one more death-rattle:

Paul Goodman, who should also know better, entertains the stupid party through today’s Sunday Times [£], with a similar meme in his assonant Blue on yellow: it will be beastly in Eastleigh:

Even Conservative MPs who are sympathetic to Cameron are viewing Downing Street’s dysfunctionality with bewilderment. And any voter benefit that the prime minister may have won from the first budget cut in the European Union’s history will have evaporated by polling day.

I don’t believe Eastleigh will prove to be another Eastbourne [the October 1990 by-election, won by the Lib Dems, which contributed to Thatcher's unseating]. For while a core of irreconcilables would like to see Cameron buried beneath a car-park for several hundred years, like some latter-day Richard III, he has no obvious successor — in the Commons, at least (although Boris Johnson lurks outside). However, poor results in the local elections in May could put the prospect of a leadership challenge back on the table.

Rather laboured, don’t you feel?

Except, in that article, Goodman knocks off Labour in two sentences, and that in a bracketed aside:

(Ed Miliband’s interest will surely be focused on inflicting maximum damage on Cameron. It follows that he will want his party, a distant third three years ago, to lie low and not filch support from left-leaning former Lib Dem voters.)

The other side of the hedge, back at the Observer, that’s exactly what Andrew Rawnsley reckons, devoting his whole article to:

It is too early for Labour to write off its chances in Eastleigh

Ed Miliband’s party shouldn’t just jeer from the byelection ringside as the Tories and the Lib Dems slug it out

Where Malcolm sits, Rawnsley is by far the more observant, and has a better grasp of the history:

At first glance, Labour has no chance. On the party’s list of target seats, Eastleigh is number 258. Yet Labour cannot afford to sit it out and just jeer from the ringside as the coalition parties slug it out. Ed Miliband now likes to style himself as the leader of the “One Nation” party. He declares that Labour is recovering support in southern England. So he must be seen to be trying to win here. And is it quite such a hopeless prospect for Labour as most people, including the bookies, are assuming? At the general elections of 1955 and 1966, Labour came within fewer than 1,000 votes of winning Eastleigh. Admittedly, the shape of the seat and its demographics have changed considerably since then, but more recent elections also suggest that Labour should not entirely write off its chances. The last time there was a byelection in the seat, in 1994, Labour came second, ahead of the Tories, with more than 27% of the vote. At the 1997 general election, Labour achieved a similar score.

In 2010 it didn’t make sense for Labour to throw resources against Huhne. A 10% return on minimal investment was acceptable — and it was a seat denied the Tories. Not this time. All previous outings suggest there is a natural 25% Labour vote here. With a few more LibDems switching against the ConDem coalition (and Lib Dems happily split allegiances between local and national polls), with a few more plaguing both houses and staying at home, with a bit of natural disgust at ConDem in-fighting, with UKIP picking up disaffected Tories, and with a few more Labour feet on the streets, the 25% Labour vote is rock-bottom. The blue sky of a three-way marginal is the limit.

Rawnsley, unlike Goodman, has done the demographics:

This is not posh Hampshire. Benny Hill is Eastleigh’s most famous product. While it is hardly one of the most impoverished parts of Britain, nor is this former railway town a place that oozes privilege and easy wealth. The typical Eastleigh voter will be first- or second-generation home-owners feeling a painful decline in their living standards and worrying what the future holds for their children. These are the classic “squeezed middle” voters whom all the parties identify as crucial. These are voters whom Labour must aspire to represent if it is serious about forming the next government.

Precisely. To which could be appended: these are voters with no great reason to feel gratitude to either faction in the government. It is also suburban Southampton: not, one might feel, the place where contact with the Continent is most scorned — and the Tory lady does seem a dodgy prospect under close scrutiny for the next three weeks. We can bet on one thing: she will be closely minded.

No, you read it here first

Rawnsley’s closing is this:

A Labour win in Eastleigh seems hugely unlikely to most people today. Because it would be so unexpected, it would be a spectacular result for Ed Miliband and a shocking humiliation for both the coalition parties. If it happens, remember you read it here first. If it doesn’t, forget I ever mentioned it.

For Labour, it is anyway better to fight and lose than not to fight at all. For the Tories and the Lib Dems, only victory will do.

Which is what Malcolm has been suggesting, here and elsewhere, for some time.

1% of austerity. 99% of low calculation

The British Sundays know what — pending a major disaster — next week’s stories should be.

It’s all about The Make Labour Look Like the Party for Skiving Fat Slobs bill, as Andrew Rawnsley explains:

This is the legislation that will put a 1% cap on increases in most state benefits over the next three years. Nominally, this is being done in the name of collective national belt-tightening and fairness. The country is brassic. Working people, in both the private and public sectors, will have been very fortunate if their incomes have kept pace with price rises over recent years. Many have seen their living standards badly corroded. It is therefore only just that those drawing benefits should also suffer a period of retrenchment. That was the argument rolled out by Iain Duncan Smith last week as he prepared the pitch for the vote. But there has always been a partisan purpose to this measure, which has never really been disguised since George Osborne announced it in his financial statement last month. The state pension is excluded from the squeeze, even though the elderly have generally done relatively better than any other group over recent years. But, then, there are more pensioners than there are unemployed and pensioners are much more likely to vote.

It is doubtful that legislation was actually necessary. Putting it to a parliamentary vote was a cunning device to create a dividing line – or so the chancellor hoped – that would put the Tories on the side of hard-working “strivers” and force Labour to choose between endorsing a benefits squeeze that many in its ranks would see as a betrayal of its core values or looking like the defenders of idle “scroungers”.

On the other hand, as the Observer‘s front page headline story (by Daniel Boffey) notes:

Half a million soldiers, nurses and teachers will have their income slashed under the coalition’s benefits crackdown, according to a new report. The chancellor’s sub-inflation rise in benefits and tax credits over the next three years will hit a whole range of the country’s most trusted professionals.

Up to 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose cash, in some cases many hundreds of pounds, according to the Children’s Society. The revelation appears to contradict the government’s stated intention to target shirkers and scroungers, and will raise the temperature of the Commons debate and vote on the plan on Tuesday.

Which suggests that Cameron and Osborne are betting the farm on casual opinions from focus groups being more viable than righteous anger among millions of ripped-off middle-class voters. Hmmm … could make 2015 tricky.

In the shrubbery, something very nasty stirs …

The Sunday Times [£] goes even further. The editorial shrieks:

2013: THE YEAR WE CRACK THE WELFARE STATE

If that seems grotesquely and Murdochian neoCon, the content equally suggests such a superficial impression is not unfair:

The coalition’s record, as it will new presented tomorrow, is not bad. Financial storm clouds have not gone away and the risk is of a loss of Britain’s triple-A credit rating, but the country has moved away from the fiscal edge. Michael Gove’s school reforms are welcome and have further to run. A different health secretary has taken the heat out of changes to the National Health Service. Crime has fallen by 10% over the past two years despite spending cuts and tension between ministers and police. Yet this is also a government prone to drift and bouts of incompetence, as we saw last year.

Fortunately the Sunday Times, even at the expense of  half-a-dozen tired  clichés and the odd very partial statistic, is ever-present to insert anally a poker alongside any missing backbone. Let’s not pause to think:

• Have Gove’s “reforms” worked? Is education really on the up?
• Is the “heat” out of the NHS?
• Has real crime (and opposed to “reported crime” — reported and recorded, that is, to fewer desk-sergeants and closed police stations) actually declined by such a conveniently measurable amount?

No, let’s be swept along by the Sunday Times editorialist’s flow:

British people are not averse to change and know that the size of the state in general, and the welfare state in particular, has to be reined back. Welfare changes should be simple and fair. When the chancellor decided to take away child benefit from most higher-rate tax-payers, he thought this ticked both boxes. But while HM Revenue & Customs has made the best of a bad job, the change is anything but simple. Some of those who are losing out would also question its fairness.

Of course, had those “losing out” read Saturday’s Times, avoiding any unfairness would have been made pellucid clear (cut your hours, up your pension contributions, do a fiddle with your partner …). Note, too, no blame can — in this definition — fall on the putative 18th baronet Osborne of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon — he of the “omnishambles” budget. He was merely “ticking boxes”. The devil is in the detail, and HMRC’s implementation.

Onward and … err … upward?

The mid-term review will signal the government’s intent of implementing the Dilnot commission’s recommendation of a cap on individual liability for care costs, although Treasury worries about the long-term bill mean the cap is likely to be set at more than double the £35,000 that the commission had recommended. A white paper on pensions will pledge a new single-tier pension but is already setting hares running about big increases in the retirement age in decades to come.

Gosh: isn’t all that positive inducement to vote Tory in 2015? Particularly when the ST‘s front page (and page 2) has it that:

Elderly people will have to pay £75,000 towards their care home bills before the government steps in to provide financial help.

Lest we forget: the essential issue at stake in care of the elderly is that homes have to be sold to pay care bills. £75,000? Just lift it out of the bank? Well, perhaps not:

On average, a Brit has the grand total of just £2,205 sitting in the bank. This is peanuts – it equates to just 1.7 times the average monthly take-home pay…

There are, of course, some people who save lots. They’re called the rich. ING has a model of the distribution of savings across the UK population, and after about the 95th percentile, it starts to really take off. It was ever thus, of course, but I’d bet my cash Isa that just as income inequality has grown markedly in the past decade, so has savings inequality.

When unemployment is so high (although the jobless figures are becoming meaningless these days), when wage growth is zero or falling, when inflation is at 2%-3% (and with VAT rising), then the idea that the ordinary ­person could or will be saving more was ­always a stretch of the imagination.

We can, but naturally, skim lightly over such pinko propaganda (it was Patrick Collinson in the Guardian, and as far back as those cliff-edge days of January 2010).

For the sake of brevity, the ST‘s paragraph on Duncan Smith’s universal credit can be passed: it’s going to be a total cock-up, we all appreciate, but provided we keep the perpetrator’s name in the frame, we also know whom to blame — and it’s not going to be Dave or Ozzie if the ST can help it! And so, to a happy conclusion:

The public mood has shifted on welfare but will still become impatient with a government that displays incompetence, let alone presides over a disaster. It is important to get this right. Indeed, it must be one of the biggest priorities this year.

As opposed to a priority of government being not getting it right? And, of course, we well recognise that, this last Leveson year, the whole Murdoch Empire has been shown to be admirably competent, on the side of the angels, disaster-proof, and “right” — as here, far right. After all, across the water, the WSJ, on Rupert’s order, picked Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate, and then spent the campaign ignoring all the polling evidence. Not to mention Fox News.

Austerity: economy, parsimony, and judgment

Malcolm doubts it one of the best-known or quoted (or, as more often, misquoted) bit of Edmund Burke, though it deserves to be. It’s Burke at his vituperative and vitriolic best.

Malcolm hat-tips Hugh Dalton’s Principles of Public Finance, all the way from 1922. And that, hardly coincidentally, from very early in the text, page 7 of volume 1: — Dalton, like most economists and moralists, like Marx and Joyce in their different spheres, being one of those many authors of whom it is easy to tire, even in the first chapter.

Therefore, a well-composed word to the wise (and a dearth of cliché) from Edmund Burke, Collected Works, volume V, page 229. Burke has it in for his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator. Bedford had criticised the payment of a state pension to Burke — and Burke had no compunction is contrasting his public service to those of the Russell family, who had become great and good by pandering to Henry VIII.

Burke saw an overgrown Duke of Bedford machinating to oppress the industry of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense and great expense may be an essential part in true economy. Economy is a distributive virtue and consists not in saving but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment and a firm sagacious mind.

Honourable friends?

Well, it’s Day Five of Gate-gate, and no sign of the storm in the caffè latte losing its froth.

What has been instructive has been the Band of Brothers (and the odd Sister — for Mad Nads Dorries had to stir herself to frisk up the Mocha) who allegedly stand, wait and serve as Mitchell’s bodyguard.

Malcolm had been intending to collect all the references to Mitchell’s “friends”, all thrusting themselves forward to tell us what Mitchell thinks, thought, says and said — only to find the Guardian had already done the job:

Friday 21 September

Friends of Mitchell brief newspapers, including the Telegraph, saying the chief whip specifically did not use the words “plebs” or “morons”. They also insist that, as a former shadow policing minister, he has a “deep respect” for officers. An unnamed friend tells the Times: “He does accept he used language that he immediately regretted. He doesn’t want to contest the version of events given by the police – in the heat of the moment, people remember different things. But those words are just not something he would say.”

Sunday 23 September

Mitchell’s own version of events, according to the Sunday Telegraph, is that he asked police officers to open the main gate to Downing Street, calling out: “Look, I’m the chief whip; I work at No 9 [Downing Street].” Upon being refused, the paper claims he “muttered”: “You guys are supposed to fucking help us.” The paper quotes a “friend” of Mitchell as saying that he did not swear directly at the police officers. “He does not dispute he lost it a bit. It was in frustration at the episode and not aimed directly at the officers … He is absolutely not accusing anyone of lying. He realises there may be differing versions of what was said but he is adamant he did not use the words he is reported to have used.”

We seem to have arrived at a hierarchy of friends:

• A friend in high places — very useful in moments of political difficulty;
• The support of a friend in need, who are friends indeed; and
• Err … a “friend”. When even the press award a “friend” those telling inverted commas, we know what a quotation mark truly is.

When the Sunday Times [£] did its profile of Mitchell [Thrasher's turn for a tongue-lashing] the legions of Mitchell friends (or “friends) were obviously missing:

Tory MPs  who had been bracing themselves against the anticipated moron-style rants as the combustible chief whip bullied them into submission — could hardly contain their sniggers. “It is characteristic behaviour,” said a Tory source. “He is a nasty piece of work. I think you will find there are an awful lot of people throughout the party who are rubbing their hands saying, ‘It’s about bloody time he got his comeuppance’.”

Malcolmian asides:

1. Perfect dictation and punctuation exercise (omitting the bloody) for Year Nine on a dismal wet Monday morning.

2. Which is higher in the credibility stakes — a “friend” or a “Tory source”?

3. Nice ambiguity in the use of “awful”. The Tory party en masse can be pretty “awful”.

Readers of “The Mole” on The Week site may be able to narrow down that Tory source:

Meanwhile, friends of Iain Duncan Smith, the social security secretary, are rubbing their hands with glee at the roasting Mitchell has received over ‘gategate’.

One minister who is a close ally of IDS has told the Mole: “It couldn’t happen to a nicer man… ha ha ha.”

The reason for their barely concealed glee at Mitchell’s discomfiture is that they hold Mitchell responsible for plotting IDS’s downfall when he was briefly the leader of the Conservative party in 2002.

Under Duncan Smith, Mitchell had been cold-shouldered and given no shadow ministerial role or party appointment. Mitchell immediately benefited from the palace coup in early 2003 and was immediately appointed by IDS’s successor Michael Howard as a shadow treasury minister and in 2004 became shadow home office minister responsible for the police.

More “friends”, but precious little amity.

Bleeding heart plutocrats

The Sunday Times [£] today has a first leader, bewailing

This is not a serious government

Most of the bewailing and bemoaning focuses on Nick Clegg. Which, in general, is fair and reasonable. Only when we get down to detail does the argument seem a trifle dysfunctional in itself:

Earlier in the year [Clegg] mused about a tycoon tax which led to the budget mess on tax relief for charitable donations. Now he wants another tax on the rich although he knows the top 1% already pay 28% of income tax …

Two glaring mistakes there:

1. The cock-up that was the 2012 budget mess is entirely down to one person, and it’s not Clegg. It’s the presumptive heir to a wallpaper fortune and the  Osborne baronetcy of Ballentaylor, in County Tipperary, and Ballylemon, in County Waterford.

2. That bit about the top 1% already pay 28% of income tax must be the most elastic of statistics going. It application seems to depend on how far it is intended to frighten the horses:

In February 2011, Henry Wallop for the Telegraph had:

Top 1pc of workers pay quarter of all income tax

A quarter of all of Britain’s income tax revenues this year will be paid by just one per cent of earners, according to official data.

This was justified on the basis:

HMRC published its forecasts for all income tax revenues for the current tax year. It suggested that 275,000 individual, those that will pay the 50p rate, will pay £41.4 billion in tax – 25.7 per cent of the country’s total income tax bill.

Meanwhile, in February of this year James Chapman for the Mail reckoned on more equine fright:

Highest-earning 1% pay £47 billion a year… almost a third of all income tax

The highest-earning 1 per cent of Britons pay almost 30 per cent of all income taxes, according to research.

The 308,000 on the 50p top rate – who earn more than £150,000 – pay £47 billion a year to the Treasury. 

Since 2000, the share of tax paid by the highest earners has risen from 22.2 to 27.7 per cent.

Interesting that: the Mail is usually yelling about the innumeracy of school students; but here we see:

Almost a third = almost 30% = 27.7%.

What’s the odd seventeen percent difference (33.3 — 27.7 = 5.6 = 16.8% of 33.3) between friends? Doubtless the Mail works to the same number system as Representative T.I. Record, who attempted to make the value of pi officially equal 3 (but that was back in 1897, and applied only in the State of Indiana).

The official HM Revenue & Customs 2012-13 figure for the top 1% is 24.2% of all tax, contributing £15.5 billion to the national tax take. Significantly lower than any of the horse-frighteners above.

For comparisons sake, Michael Meacher did a piece for the Guardian on 31 May 2012:

The richest 1% of the population own a quarter of total UK wealth, and the richest half control no less than 94% of total wealth. Ownership of land is even more skewed: 69% of it is owned by 0.3% of the population.

If that’s correct, it means the richest 1% take about a quarter of all income and are paying just under a quarter of the income tax.

So where’s the unfairness?

If you’re in one, stop digging

Denis Healey is guaranteed his eternal place in the anthology of political axioms for his 1983 First Law of Holes, as in the headline here.

William Keegan, in today’s Observer, gives the saw a new burnish:

Indeed, when the economy is depressed, and business and the general public (we so-called consumers) are cutting back, the only way to prevent the situation from becoming worse is for the public sector to fill the gap, not to make it even bigger.

“Healey’s Law” has been quoted before in this column and is worth repeating. It goes as follows: “When you are in a hole, don’t dig any deeper.” As for all that public sector borrowing, it is being done at negligible interest rates – much lower than the rate at which the private sector can borrow for all those “private” infrastructure initiatives the government is doctrinally trying to encourage. As Robert Stheeman, head of the UK Debt Management Office, observes: “It’s extraordinary. If you had told me just a few years ago how low they [the UK's borrowing costs] could go, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

That, as part of a heart-felt plea for the early re-deployment — by preference to unemployment— of Gideon George Osborne:

… one notes that there is much speculation about a cabinet reshuffle, although there is also much guidance that this will not involve the most obvious candidate for such a shuffle, namely the chancellor.

Cameron’s more illustrious predecessors, such as Harold Macmillan, would have had no hesitation in giving a discredited chancellor his marching orders. But to sack Osborne would of course be to admit the failure of the strategy, and invite retribution from the rating agencies. A Macmillan, of course, would have been big enough to call their bluff.

Osborne is having a difficult weekend elsewhere. The Sunday Times [£] dishes a bit of dirt with:

The Osbornes at No 42 — and at No 48

Sir Peter Osborne, 17th baronet, and his wife, Lady Felicity, have put their six-bedroom house in a prestigious street in Notting Hill, west London, on sale for a reported £15m.

But they have also found an estimated £10 million to splash out on a five-bedroom house near-by.

This is what certain circles regard as “down-sizing”. Malcolm understands the problem full well, and himself has contemplated removing from Redfellow Hovel to a kennel. That apart, the ST [still £] gives it both barrels:

Earlier this year Osborne Sr embarrassed his son with an interview in which he talked about his lavish lifestyle at a time when the chancellor was under fire for cutting the 50p top rate of tax to 45p. George Osborne claimed in 2009 that “we’re all in this together” when he announced a public sector pay freeze.

For those who have been in a Tibetan lamasery these last few years, that George Osborne utterance was delivered to the 2009 Tory Conference. Even then, and among his own, it went down like a bucket of rat’s regurgitation, as here from George Pitcher in the Torygraph:

My esteemed colleague, Dr Simon Heffer, opens his critique of George Osborne’s Manchester speech by wondering what the shadow chancellor’s mantra “We’re all in this together” might mean and why he repeated it so often.

I think I know precisely why. It’s the upper class way of saying “I feel your pain”. And there is an alternative view and it’s this: No you don’t. It’s a bit rich frankly (and, yes, I do see the irony in that phrase) for the son of a baronet and the heir to a trendy wallpaper fortune to claim that we’re all in this together, all up the same creek in a chicken-wire tub with a similar absence of paddles.

Somewhere a trifle more soigné than “a chicken-wire tub”, we re-encounter Sir Peter Osborne, still in the ST [£ — lest we forget]:

In the magazine How to Spend It, the 69-year-old baronet said he had his eye on a £19,000 Italian writing desk and spoke of his love of Savile Row suits and “unforgettable” holidays on the exclusive Caribbean island of Mustique.

Somehow that pretentiousness is echoed, and answered, in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, acknowledging the death of Gore Vidal.

An unnamed friend of ours had lunch with Vidal in his final home in the Hollywood Hills… a house that could have served as backdrop to one of the more Gothic episodes of Columbo. Mini-staircases connected proliferating rooms; plaster arches stretched between functionless beams; a wrought-iron gate guarded the living-room. Vidal had left La Rondinaia, his fabled villa on the Amalfi coast a few years before, no longer able to negotiate the steep cliff paths.

And then this gem, which is the epitome of Vidal’s astringency:

Around the dining table were six chairs with metallic backrests moulded into the shape of goats’ heads at the crest. ‘I bought these in Rome twenty years ago. The dealer saw my interest and immediately started, Oh . . . ancient-this, cinquecento-that . . . . I said, No they’re not. They’re the chairs from the movie Ben-Hur. I wrote it.’

Let us hope Sir Peter, 17th baronet of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon, would as easily recognise any dirty work when acquiring his £17,000 work-station.

Still digging

If the young Master of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon is in need of excavation guidance, so — it would seem — is Willard Romney, another of those tortured souls with forename problems. As Gideon was forsaken for George, so Willard prefers to be called a glove.

List to the authoritative Nate Silver at FivethirtyEight:

When a prudent candidate like Mitt Romney picks someone like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama. The theme that Mr. Romney’s campaign has emphasized for months and months — that the president has failed as an economic leader — may have persuaded 47 or 48 or 49 percent of voters to back him, he seems to have concluded. But not 50.1 percent of them, and not enough for Mr. Romney to secure 270 electoral votes.

Further to the Right, but also under the NY Times Big Tent, we find an equally unconvinced Ross Douthat. Doubthat, we should recall, was the co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. That, though, was 2008, and before the rise and rise of the Tea Partyers. Now Douthat is plaintively wondering Why Paul Ryan?  [That headline has to be a direct rebuttal of the WSJ's endorsement last Thursday, entitled Why Not Paul Ryan?]

Malcolm feels Doubthat’s pain:

Romney has been running a cautious, content-free campaign, and picking Ryan will effectively force him to become much more substantive on policy, while giving the country the clearest possible choice heading into November. But setting up a clash of worldviews doesn’t address Romney’s most glaring policy weakness, which is the (understandable) fear among hard-strapped voters that Republican policies will benefit the rich more than the middle class. Ryan’s association with entitlement reform is at best orthogonal to that weakness, and at worst it exacerbates it substantially. What’s more, by picking him Romney may have passed up a golden opportunity to take advantage of the Obama campaign’s leftward tack over the last year: Instead of making a sustained play for the center of the country, he’s chosen to raise the ideological stakes.

If there is a bigger hole to be dug in US politics, it’s anything that involves “ideology”. In the case of Ryan, a policy wonk of high orders, the ideology involves shrinking US public debt (a good thing!) over forty long years (i.e. kicking it as far as possible into the longest grass) by killing off healthcare spending. Critics note that means increasing public debt (from $10 trillion to $16 trillion) over the next ten years. Any comparison with the economics of the Bush years are, naturally, profoundly unwelcome.

In the latest conservative.org ratings Ryan scored 80%, down from a 96% a year earlier. Considering Michelle Bachmann rated 95% (but still doesn’t qualify for the ACU “Defender of Liberty” rosette), we into serious weirdo bat-shit here.

Observer of a train-wreck

In the absence of Andrew Rawnsley, normally Malcolm’s first port-of-call on a Sunday, but “away”., “Michael Cohen in America” gets the Observer‘s main political comment spot, right under Chris Riddell’s, as usual, smart, tart cartoon.

Cohn bemoans:

The defining characteristic of modern American politics is the growing conservatism, even radicalisation, of the Republican party. Beginning in 2009 with the birth of the Tea Party movement, a party that was already fairly conservative began moving to an even more isolated spot on the American political spectrum. The result was, and is, an unprecedented period of legislative obstructionism, pronounced political polarisation and a party that is more ideologically conservative than perhaps at any point in history.

He checks off the newest notches on the extremists’ gun:

• Texas where, in a Republican primary, Tea Party darling Ted Cruz defeated the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst.
• Kansas, where in Tuesday’s Republican primaries for the state Senate, conservative candidates, pushed by the state’s Republican governor, Sam Brownback, and backed by dollars from the infamous Koch brothers, trounced all but one of the body’s remaining moderate Republicans.
• Missouri, where congressman Todd Akin, another conservative darling, won a Republican Senate primary versus two more moderate contenders.

All of which, and more. is pushing Romney further and further rightwards:

Romney has followed the crowd, adopting increasingly strident political positions. This was true throughout the Republican primary season as Romney, facing off against a motley collection of Tea Party-approved also-rans, was forced to take stances on immigration, government spending, taxes, abortion and a host of other issues favoured by the party’s most conservative members but that left him vulnerable to Democratic counterattack.

Illegal immigration is perhaps the best example. It’s an issue that is a veritable cri de coeur for the Tea Party and Romney embraced their views to the point where he attacked unpopular Texan governor Rick Perry for insufficient rigour in cutting social services for illegal immigrants in the state. It gave Romney a boost in the Republican primaries but also provides a hint as to why he is losing Hispanic voters to Obama by a 2-1 margin.

If that doesn’t amount to digging a hole, the selection of Ryan seems like excavating a slit-trench:

With confirmation that Romney has selected a conservative favourite, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, to be his running mate the capturing of Romney by the far right is complete. While Ryan is popular on the right, he is the author of the so-called Ryan budget, a House of Representatives-passed bill that would eviscerate the social safety net and end the federal senior health programme, Medicare. His selection allows the Obama campaign to attack Romney even more directly over the most unpopular elements of the Ryan budget (which the candidate has already foolishly endorsed). It is a disastrous pick, but is emblematic of the extent to which Romney’s hands have been tied by the Tea Party. Pacifying them is as important as reaching out to less conservative voters. Rather than leading the GOP, Romney is simply following the herd.

Not just a conservative favourite, but — we now hear — the one anointed by Rupert Murdoch (and therefore, by osmosis, Fox news), no less:

Thank God! Now we might have a real election on the great issues of the day. Paul Ryan almost perfect choice.

God? almost perfect? This is getting a little too teleological for Malcolm.

Malcolm feels we should have sympathy for moderate Republicans — now an endangered species — in their hour of need. Steve Morris, one of the sacrificial victims in the hecatomb that was the Kansas primaries, was affronted:

Morris, the president of the National Conference of State Legislatures which is holding its annual summit meeting in Chicago this week, said conservative groups including Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Kansas Right to Life spent between $3 and 8 million.

Morris noted that the Koch brothers also helped fund the campaign, using Kansas as a testing ground for their ideas. “They said it will be an ultraconservative utopia,” Morris said of the Kochs. “It depends on your definition of a utopia.”

A new definition of “digging for victory”?

Between the present and when the reaction comes, as it surely will, there will be many more political graves. And decent men and women in them.

Monday, bloody Monday

It might be the damp gloom of a London morning, as drizzle festers into heavy, slow droplets.
It might be the twinge of a pulled leg muscle (Moral: “Don’t run after a bus or a woman: there’ll be another along in a minute”).
Most likely it’s the faintest lingering of a white wine hang-over.

Anyway, Malcolm is distinctly Gershwin-ish:

I was a stranger in the city:
Out of town were the people I knew.
I had that feeling of self-pity —
What to do, what to do, what to do?
The outlook was decidedly blue

Any day improves on a dose of Ella, even though that isn’t her best version.

as rough As are the swelling Adriatic seas

Coffee taken, it’s catch up with yesterday’s unconquered newsprint. Susannah Clapp, doing theatre for The Observer (in a very good edition, all round), is a trifle snippy about Trevor Nunn’s Kiss Me Kate at Chichester:

It could be called Trevolution: that peculiar pace at which a Nunn show unwinds. At its best it brings a long array of new detail. At its worst it’s sluggish and wit-dispelling. Kiss Me Kate is Nunn at his worst. Cole Porter’s terrific music and dextrous, startling rhymes can both leaven and expose that most arid of Shakespeare’s plays on which it is based. Not in this production, which adds facetiousness to the disagreeableness of The Taming of the Shrew.

That will transfer to the Old Vic in September, and the Redfellows are already booking for it. Most of the other critics are far more positive: Christopher Hart, all Cultured up for the Sunday Times, coos nicely:

Alex Bourne, playing Fred Graham/Petruchio, has the necessary mordancy and domineering harshness, but he convinces with actorly vanity and hamminess … Hannah Waddington is … perfect and touching as Lilli, swaggeringly, boorishly manly as Kate in I Hate Men.

Possibly the best laughs come from the fantastically dim and subservient blonde (or is he?) Lois Lane, played by Holly Dale Spencer. Of the minor characters, Wendy Mae Brown makes the most of a sadly small role.

The choreography by Stephen Mears is an absolute joy, as good as anything you’ll see in the West End, and the singing is crisply clear … Trevor Nunn’s productions have not always been entirely successful recently, but this is a great return to form, loading on numerous neat touches and visual gags ..

There has to be salt with all this red meat, so Hart chimes with Clapp to conclude:

Tighter pacing and some cutting might have helped. The one universal complaint you regularly hear among theatre-goers is that it went on too long. I’ve never heard anyone say it was too short.

Her name is Katharina Minola

Malcolm has had a very soft spot for Kiss Me Kate, ever since Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson at the long-gone Regal:

Having occasionally to teach The Shrew convinced Malcolm that the druggist’s son had improved on the son of the glover.

Later he saw Michael Blakemore’s Broadway revival at the Martin Beck Theatre, still running in the summer of 2001. On that same trip, the Lady in his Life and Malcolm agreed to defer viewing New York City from the top of the World Trade Center: it would always be there another year. Marin Mazzie was Lilli/Katharine then, and came to London with the production, where Malcolm caught the show again.

Harkening back to Christopher Hart on lengthy performances, there’s an obvious rejoinder in the magnificent patter-duet that is Brush Up Your Shakespeare. With the requirements of Eisenhower-era “decency”, this was necessarily and shamefully abbreviated for Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore in the 1953 MGM film. As a result, Malcolm had never relished the full-length version until done by Lee Wilkof and Michael Mulheren, which was one of the show-stoppers. Here (in a rostrum performance) is the finest five-minute scene change in theatrical history:

As the rain passes, and the day moves to noon, with a hint of brightness, the lethargy lifts.

And, that, folks, is how Malcolm clears his head, this World UFO Day.

Very silly. But improvable [Part 2]

Where that Sunday Times spread went badly wrong was to assert that “best bars” (on the cover of the travel section) means “greatest bars” (when one gets to page 6 inside) and that equates to “classiest joints” (in the sub-headline).

To illustrate the point, there are just six places names in Britain:

• 69 Colebrook Row, London;
• Artesian at the Langham Hotel;
• Bramble Bar in Edinburgh;
• Connaught Bar at the Connaught, London;
• Milk & Hooney, London;
• Worship Street Whistling Shop, London.

All, doubtless, fine places, if that’s your sort of thing. Take this as a sampler:

Connaught Bar at the Connaught, London

The Connaught is arguably the best hotel bar in the capital. Ornate doesn’t begin to describe the art-deco interior, another shimmering masterpiece by David Collins. Drinks are exceptionally crafted, the martini trolley oozes theatre and you can snack on tapas by the Michelin-starred Hélène Darroze.

Order: Connaught Martini, stirred at your table (£17.50).

Clearly style wins over substance.

Oddly, in Malcolm’s lexicon a “bar” is a step down from a “pub”. So we can rest assured, such locations are —

Not Malcolm’s scene

However, the old boy flicked through his greatest hits and fits (or at least those which spring to his fading mind). Even that would stretch this posting to the crack of doom. So here he confines himself to a tight category, starting with:

• Adnams’ The Bridge House, on Tower Bridge Approach (because it’s a favourite, celebrated serially, most recently noted here, and due for a further visit tomorrow).

Now, swiftly on to some of the finest river views in London, where the price of a pint or two rents a seat on a terrace that is over the water, are:

• The Nicholson’s pub, the Old Thameside Inn at Pickfords Wharf, Clink St, right beside the replica of the Golden Hinde, with a terrace that is over the water;
• Taylor-Walker’s The Yacht in Crane Street, Greenwich;
• The Yacht’s near neighbour, the Trafalgar in Park Row, Greenwich;
• Across the river, there’s the small-but-perfect-in-every-detail Grapes in Narrow Street, Limehouse. It’s a nice prompt to find a residual (albeit tarted-up) of real London near the concrete and glass jungle that is Canary Wharf. Preferable to the Prospect of Whitby at Wapping Wall if the coach-parties are in town (though the Prospect is open all day, all the week);
• Upstream, Fuller’s the Dove, on Upper Mall, Hammersmith (to be avoided assiduously whenever there’s a major rowing event);
• Close by, and quieter (perhaps because it’s not so heavily featured in the tourist guides) is the tidy Blue Anchor, Lower Mall.
• Not quite on the river (there’s paved public area between the real business and the embankment) are a couple of places in Brewhouse Lane, by Putney Bridge: the Rocket (a spanking-new Weatherspoon’s, widely disliked by the beardies who write on-line reviews, but suits Malcolm very nicely) and the Young’s effort (done-over, done-up, made-over, made-up), the  Boathouse, right next door.

There’s a full ten name-checks.

In every case the views are better, the wallet less lightened, the company more normal than any mentioned by the Sunday Times.

Though the Martinis may not be as exquisite,