If you prick us, do we not bleed?

“Easy!” says Malcolm. “Shylock to Salarino, Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene 1″. And so it is.

For pricks have been a big topic around these parts of late. The matter had been raised (ahem!) by Ms Treneman of The Times, in connection with James Wharton MP:

His majority was tiny (332) and he had made the news for being linked with a company that sells stone statues of giant penises.

What Malcolm had not fully appreciated was the full story of …

James and the Giant Peach Penis

The full story is courtesy of the Chronicle (Malcolm’s regular read in his first teaching post on Teesside), under the arresting title:

Stockton Tory MP’s bid to get cash for his pal
A NEW Tory MP tried to help a former Conservative colleague who sells giant penis statues get £30,000 in Government aid.

The credited author, Adrian Pearson, continues:

Stockton South MP James Wharton is facing criticism after he wrote to jobs quango One North East asking them to speed up a grant to Trocabart, a company run by his former Conservative party pal Jason Hadlow.

The newly elected MP asked spending chiefs to hand over £30,000 as “a priority” to his mate whose other company Simply Dutch was at the centre of a media storm earlier this year when police seized a four-foot tall sandstone statue of a penis following indecency complaints.

Mr Hadlow, a former chairman of Yarm’s Conservative Association and now an independent councillor, hopes to create dozens of jobs in Teesside by expanding the secondhand goods market. To help his business plans, Mr Hadlow asked One North East for a grant but soon hit a problem after the Conservative party nationally ordered the development agency to freeze business support.

As the cuts began to bite, Mr Wharton contacted One North East in June saying he had met with the firm and wanted to know why it hadn’t been given any cash yet. The MP had campaigned against the need for a jobs agency in the run up to the General Election. When spending chiefs explained to him that they were powerless to act because his own party had ordered a freeze, Mr Wharton took the issue to Parliament and asked written questions to the Department for Business in July to see when the grants would be freed up again.

Let’s get that straight:

• Our James had campaigned for one policy, and promptly (once elected) reversed his position.
• He was lobbying against a ConDem policy he had voted for in Parliament.
• He was doing so out of personal friendship and fellowship.
• He had the notion that a national policy could be reversed for his political and local ends.

Yes. We’ve got that. Sounds eminently … err … reasonably. Well, subjectively so.

… his former Conservative party pal Jason Hadlow

Malcolm knows when he is hearing a bit more than is said.

Jason Hadlow is a fifty-something (+/-) who was six years the perpetual mayor of that nice little, tight little town of Yarm.

• In October last year he announced his intention to resign his position.
• He walked out of a council meeting, and declared that any subsequent business was illegitimate.
• He had been involved (literally) in a spat with a fellow councillor (an elderly lady, Cllr Marjorie Simpson of the Yarm Independents, whom we shall meet later in this post). Hadlow said she had spat upon him and punched him. Despite his submission, the Police did not proceed with any charges.
• He had deliberately infringed the parking restrictions, as a way of challenging the regulations (this whole business — Yarm versus Stockton — cost Yarm some £70,ooo in legal costs).

Simply Dutch

That was the curious name of Mayor Hadlow’s store in Leeming Bar, North Yorkshire. Last year he suddenly closed it, sacked his staff, then as suddenly re-opened:

selling unusual furniture, homewares and antiques.

It was, apparently, all the fault of the weather. Simply Dutch seems also to operate via the Internet, with strong lines in replica guns, samurai swords and  “militaria” (as right).

That apart, let’s be honest: what do things “Dutch” imply in the lowest popular mind? Oak furniture (Mayor Hadlow’s version)? Or could it involve 200 hundred coffee shops — which are definitively not the same as cafés — in Amsterdam and their Bond van Cannabis Detaillisten (and there’s a clue)?

On that basis, what was HM Customs to believe when Mayor Hadlow imported a vast fibreglass dinosaur through the port of Hull? Right! They impounded it, and sent for the sniffer dogs, on the possibility that it might have “contents”.

Subsequently Simply Dutch went for the Big Time. A huge sandstone phallus, apparently one of 200 hundred made in Indonesia for which English gardens were in crying need, was put on public display in the shop window. Susceptible passers-by complained. The Police (spoilsports!) confiscated the object. A public order offence was issued: Mayor Hadlow was fined £80. He fomented a “Free Willy” campaign (Geddit?), and involved Janick Gers of heavy-metal rockers Iron Maiden,  a North-Easterner from Hartlepool, whose family home, coincidentally, is in Yarm.

Further back …

The earliest connection Malcolm sees between Hadlow and Wharton is in October 2007:

Following the local elections in May 2007, Yarm Town Council was made up of 9 Conservative councillor and 2 independents. Four months later James Earl resigned. The Local Government Acts 1972 states that once a resignation is received by the appropriate person, it takes effect immediately. Four days later James Earl withdrew his resignation.

The Council Chairman, (then-Conservative Councillor), Jason Hadlow, took the advice of a trainee solicitor, James Wharton, already the prospective Conservative candidate for Stockton South. At the subsequent Council meeting Hadlow first admitted he had read the letter (which made the resignation absolute and legal — that was also the advice of David Bond, the Director of Law and Democracy of Stockton Borough Council), then was advised by our trainee solicitor Wharton that he had not read the letter. So he hadn’t.

“Excellent”

It is remarkable, too, how often in Mr Wharton’s estimation Mayor Hadlow makes “an excellent speech”: not only at Yarm Fair (October 2009) but again at the lighting of the Christmas tree (December 2009). Was it the same speech? And then there are those repetitive mentions of Yarm’s excellent Conservative run Town Council and how Jason leads an excellent team of Town and Borough Councillors.

As to how many occasions Wharton spent some time discussing the issues facing Yarm with Town Council Chairman, Jason Hadlow, only Google may tell us.

♥ It must be love ♥

Not all are so taken.

Andrew Calcutt does a blog at newscompositor. He did a little skit on Clockwork Orange (where a giant penis is also a participant):

There was me and my three droogs, that is Dave, Georgie and Dim, and we sat in the Metrovia Milkbar trying to make up our rassodocks what to do about Europe. Dim, also known as Jim Whart, announces he’s up for a bit of the old in-out, in-out referendum on EU membership. Better to resolve the situation, he says. Release the pent-up frustration among grassroots activists so that afterwards we can focus on that which ordinary malchick- and devotchka-voters are worrying about all the time, namely ‘the cost of living’.

When he used that antiquated phrase – viddy well, oh my brothers, ‘the cost of living’ was last spoken of before there were even videos – the bile in me started to rise. I thought I could hear the blissful music of dear old Ludwig Van urging me to visit some actual ultra-violet upon Dim and his ilk; upon all the mad, swivel-eyed loons who populate the party with their outdated, provincial customs and embarrassing clothes.\

I looked across the table at Dim-Jim: still in his twenties and already the first signs of the-comb-over-to-come; veteran of the Officer Training Corps at Durham University where he studied law – making him the conservative conservatives’ conservative.  Why, oh my metrosexual brothers, is the party stuffed with such Dim antediluvians, dinosaurs who would stamp the life out of our ultra-modern, frictionless Westminster Village with their flat feet encased in socks and sandals? Watching his pudgy round face – surely the face of a boy who’s been carrying a briefcase since his first day at secondary school – I thought of the giant, model penis we had nicked from an artist’s house earlier that night, and I couldn’t stop thinking of ramming it right into him.

The latest thing

There is a delicious account, in — of all places — the Daily Star, of Hadlow’s more recent doings. It begins:

A MAYOR has quit after claiming he was assaulted, spat at and punched in town hall bust-ups with other councillors.

Tory Jason Hadlow alleged one of his political rivals turned up drunk for a town council meeting clutching a pint of cider, then chased him and another councillor out of the chamber.

The mayor said he has been sent poison pen letters and last May found posters all over his neighbourhood alleging he ran the town like former Chilean dictator General Pinochet, who tortured and killed political opponents.

Other posters appeared portraying the mayor of Yarm as Pinocchio – the Disney character famous for telling lies.

We are deep into Miss Marple territory here:

Last October Cleveland Police confirmed a man had been cautioned for sending poison pen letters to the mayor.

The notes had been sent to Mr Hadlow’s home, his ex-wife’s house and to Yarm Town Hall. He said he also received abusive fax messages, some calling him a “little shit and liar” and others saying “I hope you die”.

Welcome back an earlier acquaintance:

But the mayor’s rivals on the council claim the only person to turn up worse for wear from drink at meetings was him.

Councillor Marjorie Simpson said: “People who sit near him at meetings know he’s been drinking before he comes. He goes to the Black Bull. I’ve got a 100% attendance record at the council meetings and I’ve never seen the mayor or anyone else being chased out of the town hall.”

Let’s end at our beginning, with the ex-Mayor and his willy:

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.

The best of Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stamp on the grasshoppers of the Rabid Right

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

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

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

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

The spirit of a gentleman

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

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

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

Trinity colours

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

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

A cock-and-bill story

Malcolm spent yesterday afternoon at the British Museum form the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition. This being about Roman domesticity, penises form a large — nay, grotesquely inflated — part of the show.

Can it be coincidence that a similar manifestation occurs in Anne Treneman’s Political Sketch for the Times? Both occasions seem to involve, in the context of Europe and imminent fall-out, some form of goat-fuck:

… beyond a cluster fuck, worse than a FUBAR. Continued attempts to correct the situation only make the situation worse and more embarrassing.

This is La Treneman at her brightest and best, doing a delicious vamp:

Welcome to Eurovision, Westminster style. I had no idea when I went along to the Private Member’s Bill ballot yesterday that it was going to be so much fun. For this is not a ballot at all. It’s more a raffle, with a bit of bingo thrown in and also darts, as in when they bellow “One Hundred and Eighty!”

Our Master of Ceremonies was Lindsay Hoyle, the Deputy Speaker whose sense of fun and Lancashire accent are proving a huge hit these days. He had a glamorous assistant, of course. Tall, thin, dressed as a penguin with a white bow-tie, his real name was David Natzler and he was Clerk of Legislation but, of course, we started to call him Debbie.

She concludes:

“Shake ’em up!” cried Lindsay as the big moment arrived. “The winner of the day is … ”

“One hundred and ninety-nine,” announced Debbie.

“Oooohhhhh!” cried the audience.

Lindsay flipped through his list. “James Wharton!”

We looked at each other. Who? Still, within minutes, we were being flooded with information about Mr Wharton. He was the young (aged 29) Tory from Stockton and a Eurosceptic. His majority was tiny (332) and he had made the news for being linked with a company that sells stone statues of giant penises.

Sorry, but it’s true. It may not be in the best taste but, then, this IS Eurovision.

Two after-shocks:

1. Malcolm’s classical eddikashun makes him want to prefer the plural form as penes. It is also the Oxford Dictionary‘s preferred plural form, where penises is dismissed as Brit. Curiously, penes is also the term used to mean “in the possession of …” or “in the hands of …” One hits upon it occasionally in footnotes and bibliophile commentaries. Logically penises are commonly “in the hands of …”, but there is no direct etymological link.

2.Then there’s the business of It may not be in the best taste but …

Forty years ago there was a previous Pompeii exhibition in London. As Malcolm recalls, it was sponsored by the Daily Telegraph. An acquaintance of the Lady in Malcolm’s Life was commissioned to produce the educational poster to accompany the show. The artist’s proclivities were well enough known for the instruction to include “and definitely no penises”.

This became a challenge. Sure enough, there is at least one member, suitably disguised, included. Malcolm still has the mounted (ahem!) item in the Redfellow Hovel attic.

Half-awake and UKIPping

The Tory bourgeoisie are heavily into the Great UKIP furore. Over on the Spectator‘s Coffee House blog, James Forsyth is keeping the pot on the simmer: Why the Tories need their own Nigel Farage.

To which the answer inevitably and unarguably came:

Was Nigel Farage not the Tories’ very own Nigel Farage?

Malcolm offered his own take:

When I was an active candidate, the assumption was differential abstention. Our lot went down because our buggers wouldn’t turn out, not generally because they had defected. Anyway, the other mob quickly gave them a sickener, and soon enough (say two years) they were back on track.

By the same token, I have always suspected there really is a subterranean “nasty party” based on bloody-minded ness and perverseness, which only transpires to cause pain and grief to us decent types (of any proper persuasion). This vegetable growth, vaster than empires and more slow, is about the only political leaning that is thus burgeoning.

Moreover the hysterical media – Speccie excepted only on grounds of socio-economic classification – have laid the responsibility for all our woes at the door of the EU. Then only because Gordon Brown was no longer in town. This is scapegoating (my spell-check threw up “scape-gloating”, which is about the right flavour). Once the scape-gloaters have identified the scapegoat, all that remains is to drive it out of the hamlet.

Which, of course, received the usual raspberries.

Still, he’s a dogged old soul, and came back with:

No, I still don’t get it.

Nationally, UKIP has 147 out of a total of 2,439 council seats (say 6%). Tories have control of half the Councils (and will effectively add to that with by local arrangements with odds, bods and sods). On the usual deplorably-low turnout, UKIP scored 23% of the vote — what’s that: six or eight per cent of the total electorate?

It’s mid-term, and — thanks to the centripetal instincts of both major parties — local authorities have minimal residual powers. It’s child-welfare, street-cleaning, dustbins and dog-catching stuff. Yawn!

There were areas, and even regions, where UKIP did much better than average. So, what? Farage’s rag, tag and bobtail are never going to be the disciplined cohorts that the SNP or SF manage.

Then there is a specific example: Barking and Dagenham. When, in 2006, the BNP surged to a dozen seats on the local authority, it finally shook the local Labour operation out of its complacency, somnolence and decrepitude. Four years later, the BNP were wiped out.

Similarly, those areas where UKIP have made a showing tend to be where the old parties (especially the Tories) are at best lackadaisical, at worst senile. I’d be putting my money on the likes of the Greens being a bigger long-term threat to the established order than UKIP — particularly so if environmental issues can be brought to the fore, and folk can be induced to love windmills.

If there is one great, fat non-issue in these parts it is the EU. Outside the Tory kennel (the Torygraph, the Murdochery, and — were it to be considered a “newspaper” — the Express) the whole EU thing is of less national importance than whether Wigan can avoid the drop. Short of a real dog-fight the EU isn’t going to rise up the agenda.

Here’s a small Malcolmian prophecy: were the EU referendum to come about, barely half the electorate would bother to turn out. The in/out/shake-it-all-about decision would be made by around a quarter of the adult population of the UK. It’s like the old TUC retirement joke: “The General Committee have passed a vote of thanks for your services by 15 to 8, with 22 abstentions.”

So let’s get on with real life.

Back from the future

Malcolm would have to admit Mark Pack came as close as anyone yet to defining why UKIP causes cringing:

Some of UKIP’s support comes from places the Liberal Democrat should leave well alone — especially those yearning for a 1950s-style society of white men at work, white women at home and gays in the closet.

Why only LibDems, Mark? And why only Some of UKIP’s support?

An agenda for retrogression

Meanwhile, there are the opening four paragraphs of Tim Montgomerie’s piece in this Monday’s Times [£]. These provide as good a check-list of the present Tory malaise as you’ll find; so let’s rip them from behind the pay-wall:

Spend most of your time as Tory leader ignoring the issue that matters most to your activist members: Europe. Launch your bid to be leader by promising to introduce a tax allowance for married couples and then, once you’ve won power, fail to deliver that pledge at four successive Budgets. Tell parents that they can set up any school they want as long as it’s not the one they most want, a grammar school.Stop Gordon Brown holding a honeymoon election in 2007 by promising to abolish inheritance tax but then put it up in office. Spend the general election campaign talking about an issue that no one understands — the Big Society — and don’t talk about immigration, an issue that three-quarters of voters do care about. Subsidise expensive renewable energies at a time when families are struggling to pay their electricity bills.

Form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats even though 80 per cent of your members want you to lead a minority government. Promise not to reorganise the NHS, then reorganise it anyway. Oppose press regulation but then embrace it. Keep pledging to tackle European human rights laws but do nothing when Abu Qatada proves again and again that Britain is run by inventive lawyers rather than democratically-drafted laws.

Insist that you want to reach out to northern and poorer parts of Britain but stuff your Downing Street operation with southern chums who attended the same elite private schools as you. And, just for good measure, insult people who normally vote for your party as clowns, fruitcakes and closet racists.

There are six policy-points there, and counting, that Malcolm, as most decent types (probably including Mark Pack) must find close to abominable; but we’re not Tories, and we’re not seduced by Farage’s forked tongue to bite his rotten apple.

Even so, as Clegg was so emphatic that Europe was his main reason for urging Gordon Brown not to resign, to allow more time to knock sense into the Tories, we might reasonably ask: “How well is that one going, Nick?”

The light of evening, 11th May 2010

No election is a “good one to lose”; but that last one came close.

Any incoming administration was going to have to spatchcock a programme out of nowhere. Alistair Darling had already gone a fair distance in sketching one out. That Gids Osborne, not Darling, was the recipient of the poisoned chalice will tax future historians in finding enough ordure to chuck.

Instead we got Alec Issigonis’ (attrib) horse is a camel designed by a committee. The committee being the now-infamous “quad” of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, and Alexander. Read that as an interior decorator’s otherwise-unemployable son, an EU apparatchik, a huckster for a Scottish ski-lift, presided over by the:

PR man for Carlton, the world’s worst television company. And a poisonous, slippery individual he was, too.

No! No! Who was spawned was even more hideous! The ConDem creature came straight out of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein:

The Monster: For as long as I can remember people have hated me. They looked at my face and my body and they ran away in horror. In my loneliness I decided that if I could not inspire love, which is my deepest hope, I would instead cause fear. I live because this poor half-crazed genius, has given me life. He alone held an image of me as something beautiful and then, when it would have been easy enough to stay out of danger, he used his own body as a guinea pig to give me a calmer brain and a somewhat more sophisticated way of expressing myself.

What could possibly dissuade us from confidently predicting a quick ride to Hell in a handcart? Who could doubt there was something even more horrible and unprincipled waiting in the wings, stage right?

And then all our fears were doubly underlined: it was going to be gothic Dickensian as well:

• Veneerings in 10 Downing Street: bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London.
• Thomas Gradgrind for education minister: A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.
• Josiah Bounderby slashing-and-burning what was left of local government:  A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility.
• Culture courtesy of the Dodger: as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; … all the airs and manners of a man. … He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in his bluchers.
• Health in the claws of Quilp: … his complexion was one of that kind which never looks clean or wholesome. But what added most to the grotesque expression of his face was a ghastly smile, which, appearing to be the mere result of habit and to have no connection with any mirthful or complacent feeling.
•  Bumble the Beadle for welfare:

Oh yes, this is looking distinctly due for disaster.

Let’s change the literary media and revert to Young Frankenstein for Gids Frankenstein’s economic experiment on the British body politic:

[after failing to bring the creature to life] Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Nothing.
Inga: Oh, Doctor, I’m sorry.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: No. No. Be of good cheer. If science teaches us anything, it teaches us to accept our failures, as well as our successes, with quiet dignity and grace. [starts beating up the creature] Son of a bitch! Bastard! I’ll get you for this! What did you do to me? What did you do to me?

Laugh and the world laughs with you

At least one is allowed to laugh at, and with Mel Brooks. The imperial and imperious Cameroonie ukase has gone out that UKIP are no longer “clowns”. Well, respectable thesps do tend to look down on lesser theatrical species.

And that is a shame.

For, if there is anything more ludicrous than the pantomime camel that rules us, it is the troupe of performing Kippers.

What other “party” has been so prone to splits and harbouring frauds? How many kipper MEPs have cast themselves adrift, unable to stomach any longer the overweening pump and pomp of Farage?

And, what — may we ask — are kipper policies? The next mile-stones are the EU-elections (in which the kippers expect to do well) and the Scottish referendum (on which they might be expected to have an opinion). Try the Scottish UKIP websites and you find:

Not Found

The requested URL /scotland was not found on this server.

Hielan laddies

UKIP have a “Scottish chairman”. He is one Mike Scott-Hayward, a former Tory councillor … a former army major and ex-coastguard officer. And then we have the amazing political-chameleon,

UKIP’s first Scottish spokesman is Mike Haseler, an energy sector researcher from East Dunbartonshire. He was a Liberal Democrat candidate in Watford in the 1990s and stood for the Greens for the Holyrood elections in 2003.

Haseler has a blog, which explains what a well-rounded specimen he is: a self-proclaimed expert in physics, electronics and some philosophy, studying archaeology, learned Danish to understand the competition, worked in the wind industry (surely, a given for a politico) but is now a climate-change doubter. According to his blog, he joined UKIP as long ago as March, 2013. A “March violet“, indeed. Yet, a person of outstanding merit, to have risen so quickly from aspirant member to “first Scottish spokesman”.

As for “policy”, the aim seems to be to render Scotland into an administered colony:

Although UKIP wants to scrap MSPs, it says it would hold on to the Scottish Parliament, with MPs handling affairs on their doorstep three days a week and UK matters at Westminster the other two.

Presumably, some Tory presence would be required in Edinburgh were there ever to be a Tory government in Westminster. So we can confidently expect the Dáil Éireann solution of a nominated “taoiseach’s eleven” to keep the natives in order.

Slugging it out

Much of this came together in Malcolm’s recent recollection of Julian Critchley.

Critchley was a close buddy of Michael Heseltine, a dandy, a bon-viveur, a man-about-town, possessed of considerable wit, a sharp pen and a waspish tongue. As the Tory MP for Rochester between 1959-64, then retreaded for Aldershot for 1970-1997, that absence cost him promotion in the interim. He was a “country member” of the Westminster club, commuting for whipped votes from Ludlow. He was , by any contemporary standard, wringing”wet”, as the Guardian obituary summed him —

a liberal Tory, supporting one-nation social policies, membership of the European Community, and a defence policy based on Nato and a nuclear strategy. He would have been a natural and able young ally for Edward Heath, campaigning for him against the Conservative right, which was increasingly hostile to the Rome Treaty and current levels of public spending.

Everything that the present Tory tendency is not.

His saving grace was as a gad-fly to whom Thatcher never took (and whom he mocked disgracefully — it was he, not as frequently-cited Denis Healey, who stuck on her the moniker, “the Great She-Elephant”). As a result the ministerial team was denied one of the brighter sparks in sight.

Malcolm’s reason for this memory is that Critchley deplored the dumbing-down of the Tory Party, and the arrival of the “garagistes” (we stand correction on that spelling, though we can be sure Critchley would have made it as effete as possible). The “garagistes” were the golf-club nineteenth-holers, the wide boys, the “Essex men” who came to infest the Tory Party under Thatcher.

So, three decades on, and the change of a single initial letter F for g, we are fulfilling his prophecy, with Nigel of the cheesy grin and the ever-ready pint, as the apotheosis of all things garagiste.

The Times they are a-churning

This could be one of those intrusive Malcolmian asides. Indeed, that was how it started in another post that is cooking.

Let’s keep it as main text.

Malcolm’s morning trip to the doctor’s surgery allowed him to read Andrew Adonis’s account,  Five Days in May, of life in Downing Street, while the Quad were stitching up their ConDem package. This is being serialised in The Times.

Unless one is possessed of Mark Packian  (who will be featured in that other post) partial eyesight, Nick Clegg (along with the endearingly peremptory Captain Ashdown) does not emerge well.

This is part of the entry for 4pm Monday, May 10, 2010:

Gordon confirmed that Labour would definitely offer AV legislation and a referendum.

The issue now was the status of the Lib-Lab talks. They were for real, Clegg responded.

But, GB pressed, would he say that the talks with Labour were on the same basis as with the Tories?

“Well, we don’t want to bounce ourselves,” said Clegg, uneasily.

So they wanted to negotiate a final deal with the Tories while merely listening to representations from Labour.

The decision — at least on Gordon Brown’s part — was confirmed after Tuesday’s 1pm final Brown and Clegg meeting:

Ming Campbell, the most pro-Labour and pro-Gordon of the senior Lib Dems, erased any lingering doubts when Gordon spoke to him on the phone at about 4pm. “I wish it were otherwise,” said Ming, clearly dejected. Gordon called Vince Cable, who said much the same.

“OK,” said Gordon, putting the phone down. “I’ll do the call with Clegg at five. Get everything ready for the Palace immediately afterwards.”

Even in that 5pm phone-call, Clegg is procrastinating:

“I’m really sorry, but I still haven’t taken a decision,” was Nick’s opener. “Genuinely, I mean this. I’m sitting here with Vince and the party meeting now isn’t until 8.30.” […]

“I can’t wait that long, Nick. I can’t wait the whole evening,” Gordon said, urgent, insistent. “The country expects a decision.”

“Just two or three hours then,” said Nick, almost pleading.

And so Clegg bought himself another hour:

6.30 came and went. Still no Clegg call.

At 6.45, Sue put another call through to Tim Snowball in Nick Clegg’s office.

“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting and I can’t get him out, ” said Tim.

“It’s really got to be now, Tim. It absolutely has to be,” said Sue.

Thirty seconds’ silence then Nick Clegg on the line.

“Gordon, I’ll tell you what’s happening,” Nick began. “Following our conversation this afternoon I’m basically finding out how far I can push the Conservatives on Europe. I genuinely take to heart what you said about that. We need some sanity on Europe. We can’t seek to renegotiate. I’m trying my best …”

“I’ll tell you what’s happening …”, “basically”, “genuinely”, “some sanity”, “I’m trying my best …” It all seems somewhat pathetic. And unconvincing.

Adonis’s account immediately continues:

Gordon interrupted. “I need to resign immediately  Nick. I can’t leave this hanging. I can’t be hanging on to power while we can’t get an answer.”

“But Gordon, this isn’t over yet …”

“Nick, you are continuing negotiations with the Conservatives and you have rejected a deal with us.”

“No, Gordon. Today is Tuesday. We have only just started the talks. We have not rejected you. We are trying to play our role, to find a stable coalition.”

“I have to do the right thing by both the Queen and the country,” Gordon continued.

Nick again said he hadn’t made up his mind. “As you know the working group weren’t able to answer some of our questions …”

“Nick, it’s past that. I have to resign as people don’t understand my clinging on to power.”

“Why? In other democracies trying to do this takes weeks. It’s quite right for us to to do it methodically.” His big concern remained Europe, he added.

What was Clegg’s end-game here? Was it to remain centre-stage for weeks, in some kind of Belgian government stand-off? Or was it part of the Cameron-Osborne choreography, with Brown forced to sneak out of Downing Street in the depths of the night?

Back with Adonis:

“Nick, you’re a good man. But I have to respect the British people. They don’t want me hanging on. I wish you well in the future. I think your decisions are important. I prefer the progressive way forward …”

Nick interrupted, reverting yet again to the negotiations not having gone well, particularly on the economy.

More shaking of heads in the inner office. David Muir [Brown's SpAd] texted Jonny Oates [Clegg's Chief of Staff]: “He’s not bluffing.”

Gordon: “Nick, I’ve no choice. I have thought through the implications. I cannot go on for another day. Your are negotiating with another party…’

Nick, dramatically: “Just five minutes. There are two more people I have to speak to. Then let’s speak again. Please.”

A collective groan in the inner office as the line went dead.

We are now in the dénouement:

The No 10 staff were now crowding into the war room, along with Sir Gus O’Donnell and senior Cabinet Office officials.

Five or so minutes later, Nick Clegg again. “Gordon, I cannot give you assurances. That would be acting dishonourably. But please, please don’t resign…”

“I can’t delay. I’ve got to resign now, Nick. I need to go to the Palace.”

“You are holding me hostage. You don’t need to act unilaterally. We have only spent five days holding these important negotiations. I can’t do anything about that …”

“No, Nick. I’ve got to go to the Palace. I’ve got to resign. I haven’t any choice now.”

“It doesn’t need to be like this …”

“It does, Nick, I’ve got to resign. It’s got to be now. I wish you all the best for the future. You’re a good man, Nick. I’ve got to go now.”

We wouldn’t want Nick Clegg to be perceived as acting dishonourably, would we?

 

Weirder still and weirder shall her bounds be set

The Times is hardly recovering from its grief-stricken Thatcherfest. Today it was only — only — pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 25, and 29 before we arrived at the twelve-page supplement. That included, without any reflective irony, Ann Treneman pontificating about George Galloway’s rococo curlicues on his great anti-Maggie speech.

The absolute cracker has to be the full-page round-up of those turning up for the formal bit. This is headlined:

Argentina declines to pay respects to Falklands foe

So, it’s good to be reassured that Britain in general, and The Times in particular, will be unstinting in tear-stained tributes and regrets, when in due course they are required, for the soon-to-be-late Robert Mugabe. After all, de mortuis nil niso maxissimum bonum.

City(e)scape 2

Still with the Times Literary Supplement, Malcolm recognised many locations in J . Mordaunt Crook’s review:

London: Hidden Interiors — sponsored by English Heritage, in all the glory of digital polychrome … With 1,700 images of some 180 buildings, it guides the reader from Central London to the suburbs; spiralling out from Westminster, the West End and Mayfair to Soho, Covent Garden, Fitzrovia and Clerkenwell; then on to the City and its eastern fringes, winding clockwise around the capital’s southern suburbs, before moving westwards and terminating in the north. The text by Philip Davies is crisp and informative; the photographs by Derek Kendall are a revelation.

In short, a glossy coffee-table book, but none the worse for that. £40 on the label, but Amazon are knocking it out for £28. Malcolm is severely tempted.

Industrial majesty and might

What got to Malcolm wasn’t necessarily those grandiose palaces (which he has, in many cases, passed through) but the lesser, more unapproachable, even more domestic places. There is, for example, the alternative splendour of Battersea Power Station (which Christopher Fowler featured when he reviewed, briefly, this book):

Of this Crook says:

Battersea Power Station is only too well known. Outside, it is the biggest brick building in Europe. Inside, its mighty Control Room — all switches, buttons and flickering dials — seems like an Art Deco vision from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Yet, in a way, its electronic marvels are eclipsed in memory by engineering of quite a different sort. Crossness Engine House SE2 — the greatest achievement of the Metropolitan Board of Works — survives today as a cathedral or iron. It was opened in1865, and its throbbing machinery is guarded by sinuous polychrome grills and powered by the largest rotative beam engine in the world. It was designed to pump thousands of gallons of sewage into the ebbing tide of the Thames. This is function carried to the level of sublimity.

One thing is sure: millions of tourists visit London. How many will see such temples of industry? Indeed, how many Londoners have ventured to Crossness? They should. They really should:

A sense of déjà vu all over again?

When we see these images, even those who have never, ever, been in London, feel there is something familiar. There’s the Midland Bank vault on Poultry, just opposite the Bank of England:

Now, err … where do we see that? Ah! Goldfinger!

And again:

That’s the Masonic Temple, hidden in the depths of what used to be the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street (now the Andaz). Cit gents could nip in for a quick roll-up of the trouser leg before heading back to the sticks of East Anglia. You are told, when you penetrate this holy-of-holies that it was rediscovered by accident by the renovation works in 1997. Now it hired for weddings, hoolies, fashion shows and film shoots.

The 134 bus route to Redfellow Hovel

There’s a couple of these interiors, far less grand but worth the visit, on Malcolm’s road home:

In Muswell Hill Broadway [Davies] drops in on Martyn’s family grocers: its barrels of biscuits, its sacks of coffee, all marshalled with military precision.

If Martyn’s don’t have it, it’s not worth the tasting. When coffee is being roasted, the whole neighbourhood knows about it.

And:

In Kentish Town Road, he even marvels at the droopy garments in Bluston’s window: “frocks and gowns for the older woman” (also listed Grade II).

That’s the shop-front, one trusts. Not the “older woman”. The star “frock”, laid out now for some long time, has been a red-spotted outfit, which always reminds Malcolm of Minnie Mouse.

An afterthought

By a strange symbiosis, there’s another attraction on the 134 bus route in this week’s TLS. It’s the very last item on the back page, from that NB Londoners page noted previously:

We know that people say weird things to people who work in bookshops, which is the premiss of More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops …

All are related by Jen Campbell, who works at Ripping Yarns, a secondhand bookshop in London …

Now, let’s be precise here. Ripping Yarns is on the corner where Southwood Lane becomes Muswell Hill Road, and intersects with the fag end of the Archway Road. Right opposite Highgate tube station and the Woodman pub.

Malcolm knows it well. Once there, pubs not intervening, he’s nearly home.

City(e)scape 1

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

Joycean

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

This includes the quite perverse statement:

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

Really? Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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