Zoo in the head

Pants on fire

I've used the "Calm down dear" line on my wife, but would plead in mitigation that a) I've loved her dearly for twenty-some years, and b) in casting myself as Michael Winner I'm effectively evacuating the moral high ground and conceding the argument. I don't think this would be a fair characterisation of what David Cameron thought he was doing when he put down Angela Eagle last week. 

Still, the scandal lay not in the rudeness or possible sexism but in the indifference to ordinary fact. Cameron - irrelevantly, to score a cheap point - had said that the former Labour MP Howard Stoate had been defeated by a Conservative candidate at the general election; Eagle pointed out that Dr. Stoate had stood down; Cameron made a bad joke. Knowing that you have said something untrue and refusing to correct the mistake - isn't that lying? It's depressing that the media were so uninterested in that aspect of the affair.

The prime minister was showing a similarly relaxed attitude to truth this morning on Radio 4: John Humphrys, interviewing him on the Today programme, asked about supposed falsehoods in the "No to AV" campaign; jesting Cameron replied that the referendum campaign had been "robust", and that he was not personally responsible for the content Humphrys was talking about. I wonder: when Damian McBride talked about spreading a rumour that Cameron had venereal disease, would Cameron have settled for Gordon Brown waving the matter aside as "robust" campaigning? Or is it only some sorts of lie that we don't allow?

Have you met Miss Jones?



In the Daily Mail, Liz Jones retraces Joanna Yeates' last steps and ponders her death's deeper meanings:

Leaving Jo’s flat, I return to my car. My satnav takes me to the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The theory is the killer took the long route from the flat to where he dumped the body to avoid the CCTV cameras. Perhaps he also wanted to avoid the 50p toll.

I don’t have 50p and try tossing 30p and a White Company button into the bucket. It doesn’t work.

There is now an angry queue behind me. Isn’t it interesting that you can snatch a young woman’s life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?

Finally, a man in a taxi jumps out, and runs to me brandishing a 50p piece.

‘Not all men are monsters,’ he says, grinning. Maybe not. But one monster is all it takes.

Poignant, sensitive, heart-breaking. Or, to take some of the milder remarks from the comments thread, "Shameful, inept, morbid, irrelevant, patronising", "insensitive, lazy, snobbish" and "unbelievably ill conceived".

Where we're at

David Cameron (right) and Nick Clegg hold their first joint press conference

My, that was an election, wasn't it? Not precisely exciting, as the media kept insisting it was - for that, we'd all have to have felt some deep emotional investment in the outcome; and for that to happen, we'd have had to feel that at least one of the parties was offering something new and different; and for that to happen, we'd have to have felt like they weren't treating us like idiots with their bland prescriptions for "change", their almost affected aversion to any concrete discussion of economic reality, and the party leaders' continual insistence on their affection for Britain. The vacuous irrelevance of that claim was brought home by Sky News's Adam Boulton, who capped a witless on-air spat with Alistair Campbell by whining "I actually care about this country." Quick, a quiz: "Patriotism is the last refuge of ..." — what? Is it a) "an idealistic and strictly impartial broadcaster"; b) "a wronged man, struggling to reclaim his reputation" or c) "a slimy prick"? (The answer is c), although I'm quoting from memory and can't guarantee that Dr. Johnson used those exact words.)

But it was, if not exciting, unpredictable. I was one of those who expected Labour to face electoral annihilation; and while my boyhood allegiance to the party has been loosened, I was relieved that it did as well as it did. By contrast, Andrew Sullivan - who had a terrible election, substituting wishful thinking about the Conservative Party's talents and chances for hardnosed analysis - wrote 10 days before the election: "There is nothing I'd rather see than the demise of the Labour party, the architect of the socialist state and the culture of class-hatred that I grew up in and that Thatcher alone helped partially dismantle." It's true! Before the Labour party sprang into existence, cultivating class-hatred in order to invent an electoral base that otherwise could never have existed, Britain was a harmonious nation whose major public health issue was that vast number of proles with heads scarred and depilated by over-enthusiastic forelock-tugging as the grateful lower-orders strove to express their appreciation of the paternal kindness constantly lavished on them by their betters. (By the way, I infer from that sentence that Sullivan thinks class-hatred is something felt exclusively by lower classes towards their betters - "the politics of envy" is the usual dismissive phrase. If he really does believe that, he ought to spend some time discussing education with middle-class parents in London.)

The oddest thing is how well things have turned out all round. The morning after the election, the consensus was that everybody had lost - the Tories didn't have an overall majority, the Liberal Democrats hadn't capitalised on their leader's supposedly marvellous (in reality, bland and trivial) performance in the leadership debates, Labour had seen its share of votes and seats slashed. A week on, Cameron is prime minister of a government with at least a paper majority; the Liberal Democrats have got a place at the table on surprisingly favourable terms; and Labour - having flirted dangerously with the idea of a minority coalition government of dubious legitimacy - has ended up shot of an unelectable leader and retiring into opposition with clean hands. All we need now is for Labour to shed some of its enthusiasm for markets and regain a little love for civil liberties and we're set.

Also, it would be good if the weather could stop being so unseasonably bloody cold.

A few things you ought to know

It's been a busy week of reviewing films - 13 of them - for the Independent. So a quick round-up of things you need to know:

1) Further to David Gentleman's New Penguin Shakespeare covers, the Guardian Review features an interview with him by Julian Bell, apropos his illustrations for a new edition of George Ewart Evans's Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. The Shakespeares are only mention in passing; the most surprising revelation is Gentleman's claim that he invented the "Bliar" slogan, which did so much to enrich the debate over the Iraq war.

2) The LRB blog includes a short piece by me on the witchdoctors of old London town. 

3) Nick Clegg's slightly mystifying surge of popularity (did he really say anything that interesting?) has at least riled the Murdoch empire to a rib-tickling degree. Yesterday's Sun devoted a page to bashing Clegg, including facts from his past:

THE son of a rich banker, he had a posh upbringing and an expensive private education. He went to elite Westminster school and Cambridge University.

Instead, the Sun urges you to vote for David Cameron, the working man's friend. Ian Jack in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago told you most of what you need to know. Short version:

The mantra prevails. Social class shouldn't matter in politics. "It's not who you are, it's what you believe." "George Orwell went to Eton, after all." "Britain has changed." "It's where you're going to and not where you've come from that should count." Simon Schama (Haberdashers' Aske's and Oxford) expressed it almost poetically to David Dimbleby (Charterhouse and Oxford) on Question Time this week [actually 7 April]. It was an old and honourable thing, he said, to "leave the circumstance of your pedigree and exchange it for a political philosophy".

David Miliband (Haverstock comprehensive and Oxford) agreed – no Eton-baiting for him. The faces of other panel members looked respectful. Nobody in the audience booed. Nobody pointed out that David Cameron's great grandfather, Sir William Mount, was the Conservative member for Newbury, or that his grandfather, another Sir William Mount, was high sheriff of Berkshire; or that both these gentlemen also went to Eton; or that, given this long chain of privilege and connection, Cameron's "political philosophy" surely derived from caste rather than intellectual conversion or conscience, parked at his bedside together with teddy and cocoa when his parents tiptoed in to kiss him goodnight.

4) That's all for now.

Adam Curtis Day

Yes, I'm declaring the 26th February a national holiday, to celebrate the continued existence of Adam Curtis, the film-maker who gave us Century of the Self and The Trap. He has a rather brilliant blog at the BBC website - the posts on Yemen's dirty colonial back-story and on Joseph Strick's film The Heckler are particular highlights; and some kind soul has posted all of The Mayfair Set (his best programme, because the one with the most substantial, substantiated thesis) on youtube. Your holiday homework starts here:

UPDATE: On the video posted above, at 0:18, an electronically treated photograph of a barn owl floats down the screen. Can anybody explain?

Hold the front page

The head of Telegraph Media Group's digital operation, Greg Hadfield, has announced his departure, telling a somewhat startled audience at the news:rewired conference that newspapers have no future. Understandably, Telegraph Media Group puts a slightly different spin on the story - it was a 12-month contract which was ending anyway.

But where on earth did Hadfield get the idea that newspapers are in trouble? It can't be from the Telegraph, which is still the kind of alert, responsible and intellectually vital news organisation essential to the health of any democracy: as evidence, may I point you to this story, and this one?

You will eat your babies

The Westboro Baptist Church, of Topeka, Kansas, channels Cormac McCarthy. More zaniness from Fred Phelps and his fag- and Jew-hating chums here and here:

Remember, Obama’s roots are deeply sunk in Africa, and his heart lies in Africa.  Can you name a single place in the world that needs food more than Africa?  Imagine how Bloody Beast Obama will be licking his chops at the thought of using the billions of dollars of fake money to pay a lot of worthless young white women to bear children, and nurse them for a year or so, in order to ship those freeze-dried plump white babies to Africa to meet their food needs? 

And there's even video.

Now hear this: The Shape of the Table

In a piece in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash writes:

Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened "hindsight bias"—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time (for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe). What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson talked of "the illusions of retrospective determinism." Explanations are then offered for what happened.

None of the factual histories of 1989 I've read, seen or heard gets across the tenuousness of what actually happened as convincingly as David Edgar's play The Shape of the Table, which depicts the haggling and horse-trading behind the scenes of a democratic revolution in an unnamed Communist country. Pavel Prus, a writer of "fabrications hostile to the state" - fairy-tales - finds himself thrust into the middle of negotiations as the modernising realists in the ruling party prepare to step back from government in the face of mounting popular protest; meanwhile, the old guard ponder the possibility of keeping things going through a judicious application of violence. Edgar shows how the transfer of power brings into play a whole new, unfamiliar set of ambitions, ideals and terrors; how many factions exist and compete in even the most monolithic forms of government; and how difficult it must have been to see through this mess to the future.

No doubt the freshness of events - the play was premiered at the National Theatre in November 1990 - helped Edgar; and I would guess that his socialist sympathies predisposed him to be more sceptical than most of the supposed triumph of capitalism (which is not to say that he didn't welcome democracy). But really The Shape of the Table is a demonstration of the power of applied imagination: this is, you think, what it must have been like.

In hindsight - ah, that stuff - aspects of the script are clumsy: from the start, references to fairy-tales ending with bells ringing suggest how this is going to finish. There are also some neat lines, though: told that the pro-democracy "disturbances" appear to be "more or less spontaneous", the hard-line Party first secretary says, "Comrade, you'll learn there's nothing needs more organising than a more or less spontaneous disturbance."

I hadn't registered it was going to be on Radio 4 this afternoon, and was chuffed to stumble on it (though also, as so often, puzzled that they recorded a new production when they have a perfectly good one in the archives). It's on iPlayer until next Saturday, 21st November.