Second front, now!

There’s something in the wind. The natives are restless. Those yips and harrowing screeches bode ill for the Cameroonie Fifth Cavalry.

Fox hunting

In particular one particular hunting party has it in for Dr Liam Fox. Scalp-taking is the order of the day.

The Guardian has Werritty was running Atlantic Bridge out of Fox’s parliamentary office.

The Torygraph , revisiting its old hit-parade, has Werrity living rent-free in Fox’s flat, which was funded on parliamentary expenses (David Laws casting a shadow there). That, in itself, is well worth watching: Fox was done for £25,000 expenses on his second home. He went screaming to the appeal, and lost humiliatingly.  He was one of the “magic circle” of Cameron close associates (Gove was another) who were not defenestrated: this caused pain and grief amongst those with less-offensive duck-houses and moats.

Now we conceivably also have the ghost of “Sir “Mark Thatcher knocking at the door:

It has emerged Mr Werritty set up a meeting for Dr Fox with businessmen in Dubai, despite having no official role.

Fort Tory has sent out a message: “pull the wagons into a circle!”

Moreover, read the puffs on the near horizon:

• ConHome is as opaque as an Apache smoke-signal, giving priority to boilerplate stuff from Osborne and making Fox fifth item, even below the Shadow Education spokesman visiting a “free school”.
• Paul Staines’s scandal sheet, now under the daily direction of Harry “Tory Bear” Cole, is little more than an outhouse for spewing Tory bile. Still, give the bear half a sniff of fresh blood  and he’s off  prowling the prairie:

Next week could be a big week for Fox hunting.

And Neo-Guido is certainly posing some good questions:

Fox has said it is unacceptable for Werritty to say he is an advisor, but he needs to clear up whether his office had anything to do with the cards. Like paying for them out the stationery budget…

Which would be a real knee-trembler were that to be on either Fox’s or Atlantic Bridge’s account.

The M18A1 Claymore mine with the plastic trigger and detonator wire (from wikipedia)

Death after a thousand cuts

This would be a very good weekend for the aggrieved brasshats of the Ministry of Defence to be briefing discreetly their acolytes in the Sunday heavies.

Malcolm is sure that the brown jobs, the fly-boy crabs and the navy types all have enough animus to do the business.

All it needs is the whispered hint, a juicy bit of political dirt.

One thing is well known: the apolitical British military are as sophisticated political operators as any. They know where the bodies are buried. Not all wet-jobs require the usual heavy hardware (as illustrated right).

So tomorrow’s papers may be fun.

Son of Marmite (STV edition)

Following on from that passing thought about electoral Marmite, Malcolm’s thoughts went back to Cameron’s Conference speech.

The bit about poisoned pens had boosted Malcolm’s wordpress stats to rarely-experienced heights, largely by a nudge from — of all unlikely places — the Daily Telegraph.

Yet there was an earlier paragraph in Cameron’s unedifying sucking-up to the few faithful present that needs a moment’s attention:

And thank you for something else. In the AV referendum, you did Britain a service and kicked that useless voting system off the political agenda for decades to come.

Well, if AV was “useless” (and Malcolm would not necessarily disagree), why was it countenanced as the subject of a very expensive referendum issue?

Answer:

• because it bought the LibDem parliamentary party for the duration of the Parliament. On present accounting that’s around £1.5 million of public money per LibDem MP — an even more attractive bargain since a fifth-to-a-quarter  is coughed through local authority taxes and charges;
• because it was the one the Tories knew they could steamroller over, easily;
• because it clouds the whole issue of electoral reform (as Cameron was admitting quite shamelessly);
• because it really is a useless system, and — even if sanity hadn’t won through — would have left the Tories no worse off.

Where Cameron — it is to be hoped — is profoundly wrong is that electoral reform will now, conveniently, go away.

It won’t.

All of the corruptions of first-past-the-post remain.

The Great UK electorate may actually come to like coalition government.

The satrapies of the Celtic fringe already have improved systems for their “provincial” elections. Whatever happens to devolution (another thing that won’t go away) Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not going to return to FPTP.

All of which means, once the dust is settled, once the other shoe drops — fixed-term parliaments seriously screwing up the synchronisation of the economic cycle — the creaking system will be fully exposed for the mass-manipulation it unabashedly always has been, and remains. Mixing the dropped footwear metaphor, the brogue will still pinch.

Rather than Cameron’s pathetic belief that the issue is off the political agenda for decades to come, Malcolm confidently expects to see it coming round again in the next parliament.

Next time, though, it should be a full, decent, honest, honourable single-transferable vote.

Accept no imitations.

Shlock! Horror! Shinners running second!

At least two of the candidates for the Irish Presidency are on record, suggesting that Ireland might join the Commonwealth. For the record, “join” is historically  correct. “Re-join” is plain wrong. Were such an unlikely event to transpire, the revised Irish flag might look something akin to the above.

On with the motley!

Following up yesterday’s (predictable) Presidential beauty parade, the Irish Times had IPSOS do a swimsuit round for the party leaders — and, apparently as an after-thought, check out the party standings/

The leader thing went like this:

All that really, really says is that Fianna Fáil are still in the pits, and their appeal as “the republican party” is shuffling off elsewhere. Read on and we find:

When people were asked who they would vote for if a general election were to be held tomorrow, the figures for party support – when undecided voters are excluded – compared with the last Irish Times  poll on July 20th were: Fine Gael, 35 per cent (down three points); Labour, 17 per cent (down one point); Fianna Fáil, 16 per cent (down two points); Sinn Féin, 18 per cent (up eight points); Green Party, 2 per cent (no change); and Independents/Others, 12 per cent (down two points).

On the +/- 3% of error, with the one obvious exception, that amounts to a stand-still.

Still, The Irish Times had paid good money for the poll, and had to milk it for all it was worth. So that’s where the editorial cat slurped the cream:

The finding has the potential to reshape the political landscape once again and demonstrates that those shifts in allegiance that marked the general election campaign remain active. The sudden surge in support for Sinn Féin is almost certainly linked to the presidential election campaign and the high-profile candidature of Martin McGuinness. But the party’s consistent emphasis on unemployment, falling living standards and cuts in services are likely to have played a significant role too.

Where Malcolm feels the opinionating goes adrift, is any assumption that this is Big Stuff.

In the bourns where Malcolm gets his hollingsworths of feed-back, the general drift is that Sinn Féin are very much the Marmite of Irish politics:

So putting it into customer-friendly, squeezy pots may add a bit to the sales dynamics, but — as sure as Malcolm’s taste is thick-cut marmalade — that opinion of SF is pretty binary, or manichean (Malcolm’s word-of-the-week, y’know). All the packaging expertise won’t greatly help in shifting the second- and third-round transfer.

And that’s where Irish STV elections get settled.

Clarification needed

Ms Lynne Featherstone MP (bottom of the list of six Home Office ministers, so Theresa May’s most junior understrapper’s understrapper) has just circulated her views on “human rights and wrongs”.

She clearly finds herself between a rock and a hard place:

In the Blue Corner, Theresa May (my Home Office boss) launched an attack on the Human Rights Act on the morning of the Conservative conference in the Sunday Telegraph saying that saying she “personally” would like to see it go because of the problems it caused for the Home Office. On Marr the same day David Cameron – when questioned on his Secretary of State’s position – backed it up, saying he too would like to see it go and be replaced by a written British Bill of Rights.

In the gold corner, Nick Clegg – my other boss (and Deputy Prime Minister obviously) – at our Conference a couple of weeks ago defended the act: “So let me say something really clear about the Human Rights Act. In fact I’ll do it in words of one syllable: It is here to stay”.

She should, then, be on the phone to the Adelphi Theatre, booking a seat for the return of One Man, Two Guv’nors (as above).

Ms Featherstone concludes her great thoughts with this:

As even David Cameron said, the real issue with the Human Rights Act is its over-interpretation by some. We do see stupid judgements and ridiculous trivialisation of the Act and the intention of the Act.

So there is scope for common ground on dealing with those excesses, but outside of that the Home Sec’s ‘personal’ desire to see the Human Rights Act go is just not going to happen under this government.

It behoves Ms Featherstone to explain precisely what are those stupid judgements, that over-interpretation, any ridiculous trivialisation (except, presumably that by Mrs May), and  those excesses. And who should be blame for all of that.

Malcolm will be sending her a billet-doux accordingly — 

Thank you for you circulated views on “human rights and wrongs”.

You say that there are “stupid judgements”, “over-interpretation”, “ridiculous trivialisation”, and “excesses” over the Human Rights Act.

Since you seem to be siding with Mr Cameron’s view and find “common ground” with him and Mrs May, could you kindly identify what all those failings are? And whom we should blame for them?

A vice-regal lodging

Good to see the spirit of Roy Brooks still persists among the provisional wing of the estate agent profession.

As among today’s Irish Times property porn:

For newbies, Roy Brooks operated out of the King’s Road, Chelsea. He died in September 1971, having made a reputation for himself with unmissable advertising in the Sunday Times and the Observer. For example, this gem:

Wanted: Someone with taste, means and a stomach strong enough to buy this erstwhile house of ill-repute in Pimlico. It is untouched by the 20th century as far as conveniences for even the basic human decencies are concerned. Although it reeks of damp or worse, the plaster is coming off the walls and daylight peeps through a hole in the roof, it is still habitable judging by the bed of rags, fag ends and empty bottles in one corner. Plenty of scope for the socially aspiring to express their decorative taste and get their abode in The Glossy, and nothing to stop them putting Westminster on their notepaper. Comprises 10 rather unpleasant rooms with slimy back yard, 4,650 Freehold. Tarted up, these houses make 15,000.

Desmond Wilcox was a friend of Brooks, and used him to sell his house. The friendship survived Brooks’s ad, which described the corner of Wilcox’s sitting-room:

… a white painted brick feature for holding exotic drinks. Rather theatrical and in keeping with the pretentious style of the owner.

The wit and wisdom of Roy Brooks is still available in two booklets (The successor firm’s web-page includes a further example of the inimitable Brooks style).

 

“It must be true — it’s in the papers!” revisited

What that previous post should have debated further is what exactly do we expect from the papers?

We soon recognise the very term, “newspaper”, amounts to one of the greatest con-tricks ever.

Thanks to the ever-ready Oxford English Dictionary we have a precise date for the earliest sighting. On 18th October 1667, the Earl of Arlington writes to William Temple:

  I must refer you to our News Papers for a further account of the Proceedings of the Parliament.

Arlington, the former Henry Bennet (who has a walk-on part as messenger-boy between the Royalists and Ormonde in Ireland) has a track-record: he is one of the As in the CABAL, as Charles’s Secretary of State. In terms of restoration politics, we already have his hat-size, then. Temple, his correspondent there, was a Royalist, spent the Cromwellian period on the Continent, shifted to the paternal home in Dublin, and entered politics as a King’s man for Carlow. Later on, a young Jonathan Swift was employed as his Secretary.

One thing we can be assured of: the likes of Arlington and Temple were mainly interested in those News Papers telling the Tory side of the story.

When the John Walters, father, son, and grandson, established developed The Times as a “newspaper”, there was already an explicit political agenda. They had the precedents of Henry Muddiman’s London Gazette (Tory) and William Woodfall’s  Morning Chronicle (Whig) as exemplars.

From the earliest period, then, “newspapers” were deeply involved in the business of “making” the news, formulating opinion to fit preconceived ideologies. We have to wait until the late 1970s for this to be described as “spin”.

And, as often as not, getting it wrong.

There is the August 6th, 1923, edition of Time magazine celebrating Mussolini’s 41st birthday with a delightful encomium:

Benito Mussolini is largely a miniature Napoleon, whose gestures he loves to imitate. Of medium height and pale complexion, with lustreless eyes, he controls the Italian ship of state, firmly convinced that his Fascisti are the saviours of his country. In affairs of state Mussolini exhibits remarkable self-control, rare judgment and an efficient application of his ideas to the solving of existing problems.

Ah yes! How can we fail to recognise remarkable self-control, rare judgment and an efficient application of his ideas.

Time put Franco on the cover no fewer than six times. From those images alone we might induce a benign, genial type. As if. — except first impressions count. But then Time’s founder, Henry Luce, had an explicit agenda, as detailed in The American Century.

In  January 31st, 1933, the London Times felt warm about Herr Hitler:

… the most powerful and the best organized … hmmm.

The Times love affair with Hitler went on for much of the 1930s, thanks to Geoffrey Dawson, its editor, and his close attachment to Chamberlain. Dawson, like J.L.Garvin of The Observer (another appeaser), frequented those Astor gatherings at Cliveden. Gore Vidal, in his third novel, shortly after the end of WW2, wryly noted:

The Cliveden-Churchill Set are too well entrenched and I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if they created some sort of dictatorship that could never be thrown off without a revolution.

Cliveden, as a political stage-set,  closed its long-running show soon after the Profumo Affair brought down a fair bit of the scenery. Yet, that formula is how things are done, policies endorsed, opinions made in Britain to this day. Think the pre-Election nexus of the Cameroonies of Notting Hill, those close relationships of press and PM that exist around Chipping Norton.

The catalogue of wrong calls is endless

Back in October 1959 the Daily Telegraph reckoned that Harold Macmillan’s general Election victory would settle British political realities, and the dominance of the Conservative Party, for a generation. The Torygraph came up with something similar when Heath won in 1970, and — with more success — for Thatcher in 1979.

For another dimension, in 1987 both Bill Giles and Michael Fish called the weather forecast wrongly, just before the south of England took the full brunt of a tropical cyclone.

Most instant calls of government measures turn out to be very, very wrong: Iraq, anyone? George Osborne’s budgets for growth?

All examples of just how wrong the media can be …

Malcolm awards no prizes for those seeing where this is trending.

Something happened

No, not Joseph Heller’s second novel (though that’s on Malcolm’s shelf alongside Big Brother and its five junior — and lesser — siblings).

For the first time since the site launched, Malcolm has been able to access Dale & Co.

Whoopie do!

In the past every attempt to access had been blocked. Malcolm’s browser froze solid. The PowerBook overheated (the CPU sweating its megaherzian socks off). Eventually the browser (anyone of the three installed) would call it a day and clock off.

This evening Malcolm installed a Flash blocker.

Result!

Now the Dale & Co. site comes through clean and clear, currently with four — count them! — great grey empty boxy spaces (see above and right) where the Flash crap has been blocked.

Malcolm used to have similar problems with Dale’s previous site. That one would come through eventually, if only because it generally ran just the one Flash ad, usually a spin-out from Paul Staines’s propaganda factory.

So here’s the issue:

• Like it or notMr Dale et al., thinking, creative types are just the decile of the market place to which you and your stat-porn aspire.
• Such are just the sort who sit in Starbucks and places where they slurp with those fancy, showy, high-end Macs.
• Macs don’t like Flash.

Yet, as Malcolm knows from a past previous brush, Dale couldn’t be arsed about such a trivial matter. If the platform can’t cope, change the platform seemed to be his theme. It’s a PC world out here, ducky, come and share the duck-pond. Which probably amounts to: I’ve spent a wallet-load on this web-designer, and I can’t afford to get him to do the job properly.

 Which seems cutting off one’s beak to save one’s face.

Or, to put it another way, think E.M.Forster.

A professional communicator should, above all, communicate.

Forster had a motto for all the Flash Harries:

Only connect.

One for the record books

It happened in the 1979 Perth test Match:

Lillee c Willey b Dilley 19

Or, better still :

Lillee c Willey at gully b Dilley 19.

41 tests are creditable. 521 runs at an average of 13.35 none too bad for a lower-order batsman. 138 test wickets at an average of 29.76 not to be sniffed.

None of that, though is why the late Graham Dilley (1959-2011) of Kent and Worcestershire will still be in cricketing memory, and bar room recollection, as long as the game is played.

Another Cameron oddity?

Following May’s cat — which is most thoroughly eviscerated by David Allen Green at the New Statesman — we have Cameron’s marker pens:

… one of the biggest things holding people back is the shadow of health and safety. I was told recently about a school that wanted to buy a set of highlighter pens. But with the pens came a warning. Not so fast – make sure you comply with the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002. Including plenty of fresh air and hand and eye protection. Try highlighting in all that.

Now, why couldn’t anyone predict that, along with those dastardly Yumun Rites, Elfan Safety would put in an appearance?

In this case Cameron, loving parent, should be made to answer on two grounds: xylene and toluene.

So let’s go for a small experiment:

• Detach the cap of said marker pen.
• Inhale vigorously.
• You are getting a dose of one or the other. You may notice that, unless you replace the cap firmly and shortly, the pen dries out and is useless. That is because xylene and/or toluene are solvent.
• You may also, should you wish, imagine quantities of such stuff floating around an ill-ventilated (and most are) classroom
• Ever heard of solvent abuse?

Xylene

According to the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, xylene is a colorless, sweet-smelling liquid that catches on fire easily. It has interesting and unhelpful effects on the liver, the nervous system and the kidneys — especially during periods when organs are developing.

Toluene

Again, let us refer to the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. There we realise that toluene is what ordinary folk call paint thinner. It has alternative uses at the nasty end of your local skid row. If you’re into drinking nail varnish remover, that’s your substance of choice. It, too, goes for the nervous system, but also the heart and the circulation.

Both of these chemical poisons seem exactly the kind of stuff to have around the school class-room.

But, with his experience of Eton, Cameron wouldn’t have much knowledge of such lower-class ways of getting your kicks, now would he?

What do you get …

for a mere —

A mention in Cameron’s conference speech!

And a name-check (with numbers attached) at Political Scrapbook.