The new planet, hoax or not, and my dream about Evelyn Waugh (in tweed)

Interesting news this week about a possible ‘giant planet’ being discovered. It is said to be apparently part of our solar system but is so far away and hidden in something called the Oort Cloud that it hasn’t been spotted before. The report I read comes from the impeccably po-faced Independent, which is not known for sensationalism (it’s readers are far too well-behaved to fall for that kind of thing, and anyway as almost all of them – 52 at the last count, according to ABC circulation figures, although doesn’t included the editor’s extended family – can tell a shiraz from a merlot merely by the way it moves in the glass, they are naturally more accustomed to higher stuff).
You can find another report here and here.
The planet, which has been called Tyche, is said to be made of hydrogen and helium and has a surface temperature of -73c, although quite how they can know all this stuff if they haven’t yet even seen it is beyond me. It’s rather like all those claims about dinosaurs: we can apparently tell what its diet was, whether or not it lived in groups and how ferocious it was just from a 2cm slither of shin bone. Yeah, right.
The discovery – make that ‘discovery’ – is excellent news for those who believe in ‘aliens’ and suchlike, because although the planet Tyche is said to be wholly made of gas, it is likely, claim Bill and Ben Tugendhat, from the Wichita Academy of Space Exploration, Cancer Cures and Stem Cell Research Inc., who are behind all this nonsense, that it will have loads and loads of moons. And where to the aliens come from who spend most of their waking moments visiting the third rock from the Sun? Got it in one: the moons of various planets in our solar system. Case closed.
You’ll have gathered that I don’t believe in little green men or any other kinds of aliens, but I must confess that I find it utterly implausible, which is to say, a complete certainty, that life has evolved elsewhere in the universe, given its size. By life, of course, I include the kind of single-cell life forms from which we (and, I’m told even Tony Blair) evolved. And given the size of the universe, I think it is also highly likely that somewhere out their such single-cell life forms have also evolved into what we laughingly called intelligent life. However, and there’s always a however, given the size of the universe and given, for example, how long intelligent life has been around on Earth – the common comparison is that if the time life has existed on Earth is compared to a 12-hour clock, intelligent life has existed hereabouts for the last minute of the last hour of the day – it is also highly unlikely, not to say downright impossible, that one such form of intelligent life will come into contact with another form. The chances are that we do not coincide, and if we do, we are so bloody far away from each other, there is no danger that we will come across each other by chance. Many folk, of course, talk of ‘travelling through dimensions’ which would, if true, solve the problem of our astronauts dying out (and most certainly of boredom) before they got anywhere close to anywhere else, but I think it is complete cobblers.
According to the Independent’s report, more data on the new plant Tyche is due to be released in April, and in the meantime Bill and Ben Tugenhat, of Wichita, wonder whether they couldn’t interest you in a little more life insurance.

. . .

Alongside the report in the ‘Indy’, was a little feature as to why claims that the Apollo Moon landing were faked are bollocks. It goes through ten common charges, for example how come the astronauts’ boots left footprints on the Moon’s

surface then there was no moisture around? I once again belong firmly in the sceptics camp about claims that the whole thing was faked and was filmed in a huge warehouse in Wichita which Nasa rented from Bill and Ben Tugendhat, but looking at the pictures, I was struck by one anomaly. I have included one here: from the astronaut’s shadow, it is clear that the Sun is behind him, though at an angle. Yet from my life as an unsuccessful photographer I know that if the light source is behind your subject, it could well end up being completely underexposed, and unless some form of fill-in flash were used to illuminate the astronaut from the front, we should not be able to see anything at all. He would be an outline and nothing else.
However, we can see quite clearly. In fact, it is rather a good photograph. So some form of flash was used. But for some reason that strikes me as a little implausible, because the astronaut is almost opposite the camera i.e. not at an angle, and if flash had been used, there would most certainly have been a reflection of it in the astronaut’s visor. But there isn’t. One explanation is that flash wasn’t used, but another kind of light source. An objection to that, however, is that it, too, might well be expected to be reflected in the visor and also that it would have to be a light source of the magnitude of a studio arc lamp to cast that much light. On the other hand, the same objections apply if, as the conspiracy theorists claim, the whole thing was photographed in a studio. Then, too, given the strength of the light source behind the astronaut, another light source, whether flash or arc light, would be needed to fill in the detail of the astronaut. But again there is no evidence of it in the man’s visor. So, so far, even stevens. I suspect it’s those bloody little green men again.

. . .

Many years ago, I had a very vivid dream. In it, the novelist Evelyn Waugh was cooking m a fry-up. He was dressed as you see him in the picture, and was obviously at the end of his life (he died at 66 from too much good living). In the
dream he was a very friendly man and very pleasant. I was just an ingénue pleased to meet a writer I whose work I liked a great deal. This would have been in the mid-Sixties, more or less around the time he died. Apart from having read all his novels up until that point (and having had the very good fortune of starting with Decline And Fall, his first, and then, fortuitously, more or less reading them in the order in which he wrote them, I had read nothing about Waugh. So I didn’t know much about him. I later found out that he wasn’t always very nice, although there is often the suggestion that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, but that if you were courteous to him, he could also be courteous and charming. I find his humour to be unique, and I do think he was able to laugh at himself, which is a trait not quite as common among the famous as it might be.
That dream has always puzzled me. Undoubtedly, by the time I had had it, I had come across the picture I have supplied or a similar one below, or else I would not have dreamed about him wearing a tweed suit. And why did I dream it. Who knows?

An ego writ large? Two of them? And Egypt: perhaps it’s best not to hold one’s breath

Rather a silly situation at work today, with which you might well be familiar even if you don’t work for a newspaper. The situation on the travel desk ever since the then travel editor was promoted to a commissioning editor (but has now left to become deputy editor of a very well-known magazine for genteel women and those who regard themselves as genteel women) is that a freelance journalist is employed as a part-time travel editor, and when he is not there at the beginning of the week, the role is taken up by a woman who was one the travel desk assistant. Before coming to the Mail, she had never worked as a hack and had no journalistic experience. In fact, I don’t know what she did. That she is not pug ugly (though I don’t fancy her – she is one of those tall, willowy types who don’t float my boat and never have done), is impeccably middle-class and graduated in fashion design will not have hindered her first being taken on as the travel desk assistant. She might well have remained in the position for some time to come had management decided not to appoint another full-time travel editor and would have carried on doing what the assistant always did, hunting down pictures, liaising with travel companies and generally – metaphorically – keeping the travel desk tidy. But these days, on Mondays and Tuesdays, she is acting travel editor which means she oversees the paper’s midweek travel feature. That she started in a relatively lowly position doesn’t, of course, mean that she must therefore be incapable. But the converse is also true: that she fulfils the role of travel editor for two days a week doesn’t necessarily mean she is any good. And I’m afraid her lack of previous experience does show time and again. That is not necessarily a bad thing in that the page is read and seen by many people, especially the deputy editor of the day, and they often make changes. But it would help if she didn’t think she could write well and it would help if she could write a headline, which she can’t. I used to get on with her OK, but when she was bumped up a notch to the role she now fulfils after the full-time travel editor left, she developed a bad habit of taking long lunch breaks, often ‘at a meeting’, delivering her ‘marks’ to us late, and then urging me to hurry up because she wanted to go home. I suppose it was that which first got up my nose. I also get rather fed up with women who reckon try to get their way around men with a false smile and by laying on the femininity. I prefer to work with women who are good at their job. Today she read through the page, made her changes and then I read through it, and it was pretty bloody awful. The secret to any feature is to make it interesting, and what she had sent through read like a bus timetable and was even less interesting. There was little I could do about it, but start from scratch, which I did. And this rather got to her. So she decided she ‘wanted the picture to be bigger’, which entailed a cut in the copy, and she set about rewriting again, reducing the piece once more to its previous yawn-inducing state. The whole episode was bullshit from start to finish, because had she ‘wanted the picture bigger’, she could have made it bigger before I set to work and I would simply have had less space. The Mail being the Mail – actually, the Mail being a newspaper, but the Mail has its particular quirks – there’s this idea that the Wednesday travel feature is ‘her page’ and that we subs should bow to her decisions. That would be all fine and dandy, and I would have no problem with it at all if she was any good at what she does, but she isn’t. But I suspect she rather thinks she is. Oh well

. . . .

On a lighter note, the ‘British travel industry’ (or whoever speaks for the ‘British travel industry’) today announced that the ‘troubles in Egypt’ will probably reduce this year’s profits by 20 per cent. My heart bleeds. The turnout in Cairo’s equivalent of Trafalgar Square surprised everyone by being far larger than expected. Until last night many of the media pundits were fearing that the protest movement was running out of steam. Despite today’s turnout, I have a terrible feeling that it will: unless the army in Egypt decides enough is enough and kicks Mubarak out, he can more or less hang on until the time suits him to leave, all the while ensuring that the current regime changes its clothes but then it is business as usual. And so far the army has stayed clear of everything. I heard on the radio last week that things will not be that straightforward anyway, as the army ‘owns’ something like 25 per cent of all ‘private businesses’ and will not want to lose that (although I must admit I am baffled as to how the army can ‘own’ anything). But unless the army decides to throw in its lot with the protest, the regime simply has to sit tight, make all the right noises (i.e. form several ‘committees of investigation’) and wait – it won’t be long – until the rest of the world’s media gets bored and shifts its attention elsewhere There’s lots of woolly talk about the winds of change blowing through the Near and Mid East as they did through the former Communist bloc countries, but that strikes me as mere journalism, cacking up the story to keep it on the boil. I’m not the best informed on either topic, but it does strike me that you can only compare like with like. And given that countries such as Romania and Bulgaria have got the same thugs in charge merely whistling different tunes while they count their fortunes, these winds of change – if the same ones are blowing - don’t necessarily mean the outcome will be any better.
The U.S. is coming horribly unstuck over the upheaval in Egypt and gives the impression it is finding it very difficult distinguishing between its arse and its elbow. (I would write ‘the Obama administration’ instead of ‘the U.S.’, but that would sound far too partisan given the George Dubya wasn’t exactly Mr Competent when it came to foreign affairs and I have no axe to grind.) But all those Brownie points Obama gained over the mass shooting in wherever (there are plenty to choose from) and ‘uniting the nation in its moment of grief’ or whatever miracle he achieved are well and truly down the tubes given his and Hillary Clinton dire and utterly incoherent performance over whether Murbarak should stay, leave or simply buy everyone a round or two, tell a few jokes and go home to his palace. Is the U.S. in favour of democracy or not? Well, actually, the real answer is: only when it suits U.S. interests which would be despicable, except that every other country in the world is equally hypocritical. But it has now lost a great deal of credibility over Egypt.
In a sense it is, in fact, quite unfair of me to single out the U.S. over its response to the crisis in Egypt. The rest of the West has also behaved like a one-legged drunk at a hoedown and in a way you can see al Qaeda’s point when it suggests that bombing’s too good for them, squire, and we had that Satan in the back of our cab once, not as bad as he’s made out to be, quite the reverse, really, got some good ideas, has that Satan, no sorry, I don’t go south of the river. (That last bit will be truly incomprehensible to each and every non-Brit reading this, but do I care? Do I fuck.)

UPDATE — We all like a happy ending but it seems that is not what is in store for Egypt. According to the Guardian, the army, which made great play of ‘remaining neutral’ over these past few weeks has ditched that position and is now firmly playing the regime’s game. It did all seem to good to be true.

Let me clear up a slight misunderstanding...

After I told the anecdote I had heard about Piers Morgan lording it over his one-time deputy, a regular reader has commented that she was glad I had given Piers a write-up as she has a soft spot for me – though she put it far more bluntly and regretted the fact that he is married – and that and very much appreciates his wit. Were I feeling more jaundiced, I would write ‘wit’, but it is the end of the day, I am due off work soon and I’m feeling reasonably mellow. Unfortunately, I am not feeling mellow enough to put my reader straight: sorry, K., but my piece was not intended to be complimentary. As far as I am concerned Piers Morgan is a 24-carat pillock. (‘Pillock’ might be very much an English expression with which non-English readers are unfamiliar, but I’m certain they get the gist of what I am saying.) Morgan’s comment to his former deputy – along the lines of look where all his deputy’s hard work had got Morgan – might well have been funny, but unfortunately a sense of humour is no guarantee that a chap is a straight-up guy, especially in our industry. I have met many lawyers who have had me in stitches but who were also complete bastards. Stalin had a tremendous sense of humour, but no one insists what a lovely chap he was. So, sorry, K., I’m not Piers’s greatest fan (make that second-greatest, as you are claiming the top spot). Nor, I should imagine, is the first Mrs Morgan. Incidentally, a columnist for this paper who I chat to regularly and who once co-hosted a TV programme here in Britain (and who is also no great fan of Piers’s) tells me that the new Mrs Morgan, a Celia Walden, is said to be very nice and sweet, but not the sharpest blade in the box, which explains why the gal hasn’t yet rumbled Piers.

. . .

Like many people, I am rather fond of the very long list of colourful expressions we have in English, but, of course, all languages have their colourful expressions. Not the sharpest blade in the box is one, and along similar lines there are a sandwich short of a picnic, the lights are on but no one’s home and the lift doesn’t go to the top floor. Expressions with other meanings I’m fond of include referring to a man’s wedding tackle and describing a practice men engage in on their own (well, usually, I suppose) as the five-finger shuffle. Then there’s describing shoplifting as a five-finger discount. A neighbour once said of my father-in-law, a retired Cornish farmer who would rather not spend money than spend it, that he would skin a turd to save a penny. Of course, there are all the standard expressions and phrases which you will have heard – a great face for radio, fur coat - no knickers, and up and down faster than a whore’s drawers. Then there’s describing someone one knows who has a tendency to corpulence as having more chins than a Chinese phonebook.
I’ve got to get off now, but if I think of any more, I shall record them here.

My man Mozart, the egregious Tony Blair, three cheers for Neville Brody and Mandy Rice-Davies (again. Hi, Mandy)

There are times when a beautiful piece of music demands to be pissed about with. This is one of my favourite short pieces. and when I hear it, I think of just one thing - traffic. Some things simply have a companion with which they will forever be associated whatever the weather: strawberries and cream, Russia and corruption, Britain and rain, and, of course, Mozart and traffic.



I am indebted to my good friend Jacques Pernod for all the help and advice he has given me over the years, and he, I’m sure, would also like me to mention his assistants Peter Schnaps & Dieter Esel.

. . .

Few crises survive beyond a few hours without an appearance by the egregious Tony Blair. So with the crisis in Egypt: Blair appeared on Sky TV and did what he always does: state the bloody obvious at great length and with apparent authority as though dispensing a unique wisdom from on high. Here are two quotes from the interview he gave Sky News:
‘What is inevitable is that there’s going to be change and the question is; what change and how do you manage it?’
Then there is this startling insight:
‘Change is inevitable in Egypt and that the country cannot put the “genie back in the bottle”.’
Well, call me a cynical fart, but anyone seeing the images being screened on TV at the moment will have gathered that it isn’t a storm in a teacup. But that’s Blair’s schtick: he says what everyone else knows, but appears to make it sound profound and wise.
I have long, long believed that he suffers from some kind of psychological flaw akin to sociopathy, but without the violence. I have no doubt at all that he really does believe his own bullshit. A few years ago, at a Labour Party conference and when he was still PM, he gave a speech which became increasingly unreal. He seemed to go into a trance. But what he was telling his audience was merely what he knew his audience wanted to hear.
It is always difficult to be objective about someone one dislikes, and I readily admit that I am open to the charge of being biased against him. I also admit that there might still be some who still believe Blair is a man of principle, but I should imagine their number is diminishing by the day. But I do believe that Blair as the man who gives all conmen a bad name, and I am proud to say (although there is no way I could prove as much) that I regarded him as a nine bob note (nine dollar bill, nine kopek piece) long before he was first elected Prime Minister in 1997. As, of course, did a large number of ‘old’ Labour, but who went along with the man because he could apparently deliver an electoral victory. Looking back, and bearing in mind the slow-motion car crash that was the last few years of the Major government, it’s pretty obvious that Sooty and Sweep would also have delivered that victory. The big mystery is how on earth did Neil Kinnock (now Lord Kinnock, natch – nothing seduces an old leftie faster than the smell of ermine) manage to lose against Major in 1992?
I shall not recite the list of Blair’s misdemeanours here as that list will be well-known to those who loathe him and those who still have a soft spot for him (rather as one might have a soft spot for a rogue uncle who you know is purloining any small change he comes across and regularly finishes off the whisky, but who has a raffish charm it is hard to resist). Well, I for one have never found it hard to resist Blair’s raffish charm, his faux sincerity, his ‘man of the people’ act. The only positive thing is that he is now yesterday’s man, and for someone with his ineffable conceit, that will rankle. Good.

. . .

Usual routine on a Monday morning (although later today, as my brother didn’t get up and thereby wake me, but had a lie-in. I assume he had a day off), and I listened to Andrew Marr’s Start The Week in bed, while getting up, and on the way to work. The man himself still irritates me – I cannot rid myself of the suspicion, which seems to be confirmed every time he opens his mouth – that he thinks of himself as rather a bright, well-informed, well-connected and cultured sort of chap, and I have no doubt at all that at some point in the future he will be considered as a suitable candidate to chair the Arts Council and might even land the job. The British Establishment are not daft, and their talent for
survival is without equal. But his guests are usually an interesting bunch, and this morning’s included a Neville Brody (left).
Neville is now about 55 years old, but grew up in the punk era and carried with him that age’s vitality. He first came to prominence as the guy who art designed The Face (which I never read as I was then entering my 30s and really felt it was a magazine for younger people). Many of that magazine’s stylistic devices, often developed because of a lack of money, have been – now there’s a surprise – taken one by mainstream graphic designers working for banks, insurance companies and international conglomerates. But that is not Brody’s fault. He has recently been appointed the head of Department of Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art, and started his job on January 1 by promptly renaming the department the Department of Visual Communication. He went on to say that he does not believe in the student/teacher relationship but in ‘collaborative research’. It was at that point that I felt my hackles begin to rise, but I listened on and I’m glad I did. Brody went on to bemoan that for the past 20 odd years, students have been in the grip of a ‘success culture’ where they learnt in order to grab some lucrative employment and make shedloads of money. But the times now being hard, he reckons all that is over and that instead there will be an ‘explosion of ideas’. Well, I bloody well hope he is right. There was nothing quite as disheartening as everyone buckling under to ensure they were fucking rich by the age of 30. And ironically it was the same culture which made the abortion of Brit art and all its ‘conceptual art’ possible. So here’s to far more interesting times. Let’s hope all these new students can somehow shock us without resorting to daubing their work with shit, as those two charlatans Gilbert and George did.
. . .
Part of my daily routine, at some point in between brushing my teeth in the morning and brushing my teeth at night, is
to check how many people have read this blog during the day. I started doing this when I discovered Google’s stats feature, and it tickles me that, for whatever reason, folk as far away as New Zealand, Russia, Canada and Indonesia drop in. How long they stay is another matter, and is not recorded in the stats. And whether it is the same people from those countries is also not indicated, but I do like to think that to a man and woman, they are astonished by the breadth of my learning and interests and do nothing for the rest of the day but tell their friends about ‘this amazing blog I’ve found, man, I mean it’s far out, too much, you gotta, just gotta check it out, I mean, you just gotta, man’. Or something like that. Note that I assume all readers are, like me, raddled sixtysomethings whose best days are long behind them and rooted in the days when we could think of nothing better to do than grow our hair and give each other beads and the clap.
One feature of that facility is to list ‘referring URLs’ and from this something very puzzling has emerged: a disproportionate number of visitors happen upon my blog after tracking down piccies of Many Rice-Davies (above). I can’t even remember in which blog entry she was mentioned, but
I do remember grabbing a picture of her from Google images and using it. And that is the one which leads others to this blog. It has to be said that she is a very attractive woman, although the picture was taken several years ago when she was still a spring chicken. But I like to think she is probably still as attractive, though older. She and Christine Keeler came to prominence in the Profumo affair. Mandy apparently has a head on her shoulders and seems to have thrived. Christine (and I've used the image which is always trotted out on these occasions - sorry, Christine, but it is a nice pic of you) didn’t do so well in life, although for all I know she is happy. Either way, I wish them both well.

Plus ça change . . . (or why dog can rarely resist the temptation to take a large chunk out of other dog)

Now here’s an odd thing: New York’s esteemed Times is undoubtedly a heavyweight and serious newspaper of record. It is unlikely to carry reports about the most recent breast enlargement of whichever TV starlet is elsewhere flavour of the month or, given the number of other newspapers in the world, that one has just sacked an assistant editor. Like vice-presidents in US corporations, assistant editors on British papers are two a penny despite their rather high-falutin’ title. As a rule, when a senior hack is pipped at the post for the deputy editor’s job, he or she is sweetened with the title ‘assistant editor’ and, doubtlessly a pay rise, to ensure they aren’t tempted to jump ship and take with them editorial secrets to a new berth on a rival. But back to the New York Times and its surprising decision to report on a sacking at Britain’s News Of The World. The Screws, as we call it as the mainstay of its content is stories of illicit sex by footballers, soaps stars, politicians and businessmen, is certainly on of Britain’s bigger titles, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Times should therefore take an interest. But two days ago, it carried the shocking news that one Ian Edmondson, an assistant editor on the Screws had been sacked. It went on to explain that Ian (who might well be fat, paunchy and balding, but I really don’t know, so don’t assume he is) knew about a practice engaged in by Clive Goodman, one of the paper’s reporters, of hacking into the voicemail of celebs’ mobile phones. This practice is now officially frowned upon though when it went on under Edmondson’s indulgent eye, it most certainly wasn’t and proved to be a lucrative source of stories. But times have changed and our Ian now got the chop.
This was not the first time the venerable, oh-so-proper New York Times reported on the phone hacking allegations. Two weeks ago, it reported that an official investigation into the allegations was being reopened by the Crown Prosecution
Service which had earlier decided there was not enough evidence to bring charges against Andy Coulson (pictured and looking far younger than he has any right to do), who was Screws editor at the time the practice was going on. Coulson resigned after Goodman was jailed for his journalistic initiative, although he denied then and has always since denied that he knew what Goodman was up to. He went on to work as prime minister David Cameron’s ‘communications director’ and is credited with sharpening up the Tories’ public performance considerably, but he resigned that post, too, after the story of the hacking allegations and questions as to whether he knew more than he says refused to go away.
Well, you might think, there’s the story the New York Times was interested in: the ‘communications director’ of Britain’s prime minister leaves under a cloud. Not exactly world-shattering news, but certainly something a paper of record can take an interest in. Well, funnily enough, the Times didn’t take an interest in that aspect of it at all. So why is the Times so concerned with a relatively minor, semi-criminal practice engaged in by at least one (though we all suspect far more) more than 3,000 miles away? All becomes obvious when you mention the name ‘Rupert Murdoch’. It is a name which is most probably familiar to many: he owns, or largely owns, a ‘media empire’ which most of the rest of us don’t. It is called News Corp and part of that empire is a company called News International which owns the News Of The World. Oh, and another part of that empire is Dow Jones & Company which owns and publishes the Wall Street Journal which just happens to be one of the New York Times’s arch rivals. Oh, and Murdoch also owns the New York Post, another of the Times’s rivals, although given the Post’s constituency, it would be silly to describe the paper as an arch rival. Rival will do.
So there you might have it: serious ‘paper of record’ not above a little commercial mischief-making. Perhaps. Certainly, the Times has ample wriggle room and could well deny it is up to nothing of the sort, but to that I would respond ‘pull the other one, it’s got bells on it’.

. . .

There is no denying that, whether you love him hate him or – surely the view of the vast majority of people – you are indifferent to him, Rupert Murdoch has achieved a great deal in building up a his media empire. It has to be said that he did not do so from scratch but built it from a comparatively small newspaper group his father had owned. But before he inherited the business, he did spend a little time getting to know what life as a hack was like. I know this because around 1955, the writer and journalist Michael Green (The Art Of Coarse Rugby and The Art Of Coarse Acting, and the Squire Haggard column in the Daily Telegraph) spent some
time as a sub-editor on the Birmingham Post where, for a short time, Murdoch (pictured) was a fellow sub after graduating from Oxford. His time on the Post was quite short because his father died, and Rupe returned to Melbourne to take over the family business. I mention this because 25 years later, I spent two years working as a sub on the Birmingham Evening Mail, the post sister paper. So Rupe and I have a connection. Spooky.
I know Murdoch is the bête noir of loads and loads of people, but there is one comment he made which somehow endeared me to him for life. The Times is now part of News International and, as far as I know, still not making a profit. In fact, the last time it did make a profit, again as far as I know, was in the 19th century when it lease the patent for the then revolutionary roller press and was able to produce, distribute and sell far more copies than its rivals who still had to make do with laborious flatbed press. Eventually, the patent expired and the good times were over for The Times. It slipped into making a loss and even when it was taken over by Lord Norhtcliffe in 1908 (though he was then still Alfred Harmsworth and arguably the Rupert Murdoch of his day), it could not be coaxed into making a profit.
In 1981, two years after the Times was closed because of an 11-month strike, the Thomson Organisation realised it could not carry on and the paper (with its sister title The Sunday Times) was bought by Murdoch. By then it had firmly sunk into the habit of believing its own bullshit and regarded itself (though few others did) as the world’s premier newspaper. Murdoch’s British profits were firmly base on the decidedly downmarket Sun and News Of The World, and the maiden aunts who predominantly staffed The Times were horrified to be associated with such folk. It has long been regarded and had long regarded itself as the Establishment’s newspaper and there were even ‘questions in the House’ as to whether it was advisable that a paper of such a pedigree should be allowed into the soiled hands of some such upstart as Murdock. So its ‘editorial board’ demanded an undertaking from Murdoch that ‘he would not interfere editorially with the paper’. To which Murdoch, now perhaps the holder of a Yankee passport but in spirit forever an Australian, replied: ‘I didn’t spend fucking £5 million pounds buying a newspaper not to interfere editorially’. Even now it makes me smile with pleasure.

I am a man: An apology

I can’t speak for the rest of Europe, the US or the rest of the world, but something very odd has happened in Britain in these past 20 years. Once women were regarded as the skivvies of the world, when a vacuum cleaner and washing machines were seen as a great present for a man to give to the wife to help her ‘do the

housework more efficiently’. So thoughtful. Sadly, a woman’s lot has changed very little in almost every part of the world, and women still get the thin edge of the wedge. The Taliban diktat that women should be locked away from the age of 12 is just a very extreme manifestation of the attitude of many cultures.But here in Britain the boot is, in many ways, very much on the other foot, and we have apparently progressed in leaps and bounds to a situation where women are now equal. In fact, make that ‘more than equal’ Women professionals in the broadcasting media in particular delight in what they regard as a complete reversal of fortune. Well, bugger that because, incredibly, in 2011 many women are still paid less than men for doing exactly the same job, many women. However, that is no barrier to a very British pseudo-feminist triumphalism that the sisters have now finally come out on top. And boy do they like to let you know it. There is not even a pretence that ‘equality’ has been achieved. No, sir, they are now das Damenvolk. Tune into Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on any day of the week and you won’t have to wait long until you come across the unshakable conviction that all men are pretty useless. And it is a conviction which has also become a mainstay of much radio drama and of the routines of quite a few women stand-up comedians.
Attitudes purveyed in the media, whether in factual or fictional programming or in TV advertising are very rarely a true reflection of real social attitudes. They are more a kind of wishful thinking or something akin to a political manifesto. But given our habit of imitating what we see on the small screen, such highly artificial poses soon gain a broader currency. To put it another way, it is a question of life imitating art.
Without a second thought young and not so young lasses up and down the land will strike attitudes in imitation of what they see in their favourite soaps and sitcoms. And the prevailing attitude in a great many of these is that men are hopeless, hopeless, hopeless, fickle, unreliable and self-centred, and many a cheap laugh can be had from saying so. ‘Typical of a man’ is a refrain one has increasingly heard, and it is one which is repeated so often that anyone querying the observation is liable to have his intelligence as well as his integrity questioned. But beware the man who is foolish enough to say ‘typical woman’ — a shitstorm of biblical proportions is liable to explode and engulf him in such self-righteous anger that a six-month spell in jail would seem far more preferable.
Professional feminists, by which I mean those hacks and TV types for whom being feminist strikes me as being solely a strategy for career development, are still probably in the minority and their numbers are wholly disproportionate to the noise they make. And most certainly they do the real sisters no favours at all. The drive to ensure woman are treated equally has achieved a great deal in these past 40 years, and few women will allow themselves to be condescended to as once they were, and we should always remember that in many areas a woman is paid less than the man she works next to, so there is still quite a lot still to be done. But trying to do so by insisting, and apparently believing, that men are complete and total wankers isn’t doing it.

. . .

Part of the problem is, I think, that we always try to impose our ideas on life rather than accept what life tells us. Years ago, I heard the following short parable: A young boy and a young girl, still children of about seven or eight, are happily playing around a pond stark naked, with the lad strutting around as though he were king of the castle. So the girl asks him what he is so proud of. He points to his willy and tells her: ‘I’ve got one of these.’ So the young girl points to here mary and tells him: ‘My mummy says that because I’ve got one of these, I’ll always have one of those.’ Too true. For unless a man is homosexual and not in the slightest interested in women, they can, in many situations, run rings around a man purely because they have what he wants. Our professional feminists (and I stress that by that somewhat dismissive term I do not mean those many women who have worked very hard to change our thinking and ensure that woman are treated less like skivvies) might not like it and deny that it is true, but they are all too often inclined to deny, if it suits their agenda, that water is wet.
At this point the reader might feel I am being rather crude. Not at all. For when I talk of ‘man’, I mean the male of the species. And the prime purpose in nature for the majority of the male of the species is to reproduce as often as possible to ensure the survival of his genes. The female of the species, on the other hand, is not interested in reproducing with any old male who might be in the mood, but wants to ensure that the male she does choose to mate with has the best possible genes. To put it bluntly, the male is interested in quantity and the female in quality. So she chooses, but he doesn’t. And so, I suggest, there is not, as we seem to suppose, symmetry between the sexes. Each gender has his and her strengths and weaknesses, but in our intellectual arrogance we try to impose our views on life.
So I have always thought it rather ironical that in this ostensible feminist age men are urged to ‘find their feminine side’ and are applauded when they do. But were we similarly to urge women to ‘find their masculine side’, we would, quite rightly, I think, be accused of talking complete cobblers. (I was going to write ‘complete bollocks’, but in context that might not be the most useful phrase to use.) But in many ways that is exactly what has happened. One of the ‘achievements’ of the past 20 years (NB yet again: it still hasn’t been to ensure wage parity between the sexes), all in the name of ‘equality’, means that woman are now allowed to emulate men. And that, ironically, means that it is more or less officially sanctioned that they can behave just as badly as men: they can now, without attracting opprobrium, get just as rat-arsed, use just as much bad language and sleep around just as much. And this is seen as progress, this is regarded as improving the lot of the sisterhood. Give me a break.

. . .

In the interests of quality and assisting women with their choice of mate, I offer the following. I have been made aware that there are doubts that I was ever young. This is a libel which hurts and offends me deeply, so here (pic gone missing, but O shall find it, don't worry) I offer definite proof that I was not always an old, semi-balding fart with grey hair (dear American reader, that’s ‘gray hair’) and a very short beard, but a youngish, reasonably dashing blade about town. It is a photo I came across recently after many years and which I cherish deeply. And you think I’m joking. Think again. My best wishes to old farts and fartesses the world over. I feel your pain. Fan mail and, more pertinently, very welcome invitations to join suitable women in bed to the usual address, please.

You forgot your long spoon, Andy, Fleet Street in a funk and Blair off the hook (more or less)

I’ve never really known when using a proverb or a saying shades off into using a cliché, so I shall leave it to my reader (how are you, by the way?) to decide whether the following is still a quaint precautionary saying or just a tawdry common or garden cliché: When you sup with the Devil, us a long spoon.

Whether or not it is a cliché or still a venerable piece of good advice is, however, pretty irrelevant in the case of Andy Gray, one-time Dundee United, Aston Villa, Wolves and Everton player as well as regularly turning out for Scotland (he was born in Glasgow), who then became the regular football pundit for Sky Sports when he retired. For Gray it is too late to do the wise thing and sit at the far end of the table when breaking bread with Lucifer. Yesterday, Sky sacked Gray over ‘sexist remarks’. Preparing for a touchline
interview at which one of the ‘assistant referees’, once known as linesman, was Sian Massey (right), Gray and made several ‘sexist’ comments about her. These were not broadcast publicly and would not have come to the undoubtedly profoundly horrified public’s attention if Sky had not decided to release the material on which these comments were made.

That was rather an odd thing for Sky to do, but I’ll get to that a little later. Sky then discovered two other instances when Gray made ‘sexist’ remarks – one to, Charlotte Jackson, a fellow sports presenter who was a woman – and decided that enough was enough and that Gray had to go. Pretty straightforward, you might think: man makes comments which, in 2011, are too off-colour, and his employer decides they cannot be tolerated.

The comments are, it must be said, rather low on the scale of what not to say, and I would be extremely surprised if Ms Jackson was in the slightest discomfited, although I shall be equally extremely surprised if the sisters who belong to our commentariat, many employed on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, don’t make a full and quite substantial meal of this issue. I don’t work in broadcasting and for all I know it is a very different environment, although I doubt it.

But here in the wacky world of our female colleagues are not only treated with respect professionally, but they also hear – and dish out in equal measure – appallingly sexist comments every day they turn up for work. (A few years ago, I and two or three colleagues were on our way across the road to The Greyhound (aka The Rottweiler) for a drink before 11pm closing time. I passed a female colleague who had not been there when a visit to the pub was suggested and asked her: ‘Do you fancy a quickie?’ She said she didn’t. So I then said: ‘Well, why don’t you come across to the Rottie with us, then?’ Quite appalling.)

Back to Gray and how this tale of outrage over sexism is a tad murkier than might at first seem. Sky is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation which also owns News International which, in turn owns our very own News Of The Screws.

Now, the Screws is in the shit because the saintly Guardian discovered a year or two ago that its reporters had been hacking into the mobile phone message boxes of rather a large number of celebrities and politicians. At the time, a token reporter and private investigator were jailed for doing it, but the story didn’t go away. Surely, everyone asked, the practice was far more widespread among Screws staff? And surely, they asked, the then editor Andy Coulson knew what his reporters were getting up to? Coulson denied it – to universal disbelief and cries of ‘well, he wasn’t much of an editor, then, if, as he claims, he didn’t know’ – but the it all caught up with him this week when, by now chief spokesman to Prime Minister David Cameron, he decided to resign because the story ‘wouldn’t go away’.

Next, the heat is on Scotland Yard to reveal exactly what its investigation into the phone hacking revealed; and, more pertinently, rather a lot of celebs are suing News International for apparently allowing the Screws staff to do what they did or, at the very least, not putting an end to the practice. And among those suing News International is one former footballer and, until yesterday, star football pundit Andy Gray. This did not go down well with News Corp. But bear with me, as it might even be murkier than that, although being murky it is not too clear what is going on and just how it relates to Gray’s sacking.

News Corp wants to buy the shares in Sky (or Sky BSB as it officially is) it doesn’t yet own. It wants full control of the satellite television station. But as News Corp ultimately owns The Sun, The News Of The World, The Times and the Sunday Times as well as holding a majority share in Sky, many claim gaining full control of Sky would not be healthy for competition in the media industry and the Government has been asked to take a look at it all.

Well, the Government has done so and might well refer the matter to our Competitions Commission. But it has first asked News Corp to take another look at its holdings and perhaps consider getting rid of some. So there is talk the Sky News might be sold (which I think is pretty unlikely, but then I have absolutely no specialist knowledge in these matters) or that Murdoch (OK, News Corp if you want to be pedantic) might rid himself of The Times and the Sunday Times. That, I think, would make more sense, because the The Times makes a loss and circulation is falling, although I think the Sunday Times still turns a profit.

As I say, I can’t for the life of me imagine how the desired complete takeover of Sky by News Corp would fit in with the sacking of one of Sky Sports football pundits, so I offer the above as background. What is, however, rather clearer is that News Corp, which is wholly embarrassed by the continuing phone hacking saga, is none too pleased with having one of its star pundits suing another part of its empire for potential millions. So the next time Murdoch, or more realistically one of his underlings, turns up on your doorstep to join you for supper, do remember the long spoon you would be advised to use.

. . .

You can believe that it was just the one rogue Screws reporter in cahoots with a private investigator who hacked into mobile phones or you can assume, as I think most of us do, that the practice was more widespread. After all, if he got stories that way and didn’t keep it too himself (something which hacks are utterly incapable of doing – if you want to spread a rumour, tell a hack and tell him to keep it secret), every other hack who heard about it will have tried the same schtick. And that is what other newspapers are worried about. Because if not just one Screws hack, but several did it, you can bet your bottom dollar that hacks on the Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, The People and the Daily Star were up to the same.

I can’t speak for the Daily Express or the Daily Mail, although yesterday I asked the chap who was news editor at the time the practice was rife whether the Mail got up to it, and he told me, no it hadn’t. Well, as Ms Rice-Davies would have said, he would, wouldn’t he. And it is not at all impossible that the Daily Telegraph would have been tempted to do the same. And if they did, it will all come tumbling out.

Which is rather bad news, because any number of MPs still smarting from being discovered with their fingers in the expenses till – claiming for duck islands, antique bookshelves, second homes which turned out to be a kennel in Govan - who are very keen indeed to get their own back for the mauling Fleet Street’s finest handed out. In the long run, with everyone looking like a loser over this one, I should imagine it will be brushed under the carpet, the Guardian will huff and puff and search its cliché dictionary for suitable descriptions of what has happened, the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

. . .

Speaking of caravans moving on, that would seem to have been the salvation of Tony Blair, who might perhaps be rather relieved, if not a little peeved, that he is now yesterday’s man and the invasion of Iraq is now yesterday’s news. We have far more modern issues to anguish over.

In evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, Lord Turnbull, one of his Cabinet Secretaries, more or less implied Blair was lying through his teeth when he claimed that at all times his Cabinet was kept fully informed of plans to invade Iraq. Not so, said Lord Turnbull, they knew very little about it until three days before the invasion when they were asked to rubber stamp it all.

But – apart from the friends and family of the estimated 100,000 Iraqis who have died in post-invasion violence and of the U.S. and British servicemen and women who have been killed – who cares. Most certainly not the public, who after the artificial prosperity of the Labour years now face having to pay the bill for the profligacy. Not being able to buy yet another 48in plasma TV for the kids’ bedroom? The shame of it!

Why we should kill all poor people and save the planet. And Piers Morgan stands in for God as the lad himself goes on extended leave

I’m a rather dull sort and subtlety tends to elude me. So you will understand why I am baffled that, on the one hand, the news this morning is that if population continues to grow at the rate it is, but we continue to waste food at the rate we do, we’re screwed. On the other hand, science (make that ‘science’) is finding ever cleverer ways of prolonging life and ensuring we all live well into our second century, so glory, glory be.
As for food, it seems that as we all grow ever more prosperous (another goal which is apparently sine qua non in the western ‘civilised world’), we can afford ever more arcane food from all corners of the world, which we ship in but don’t always eat. Then there’s our ‘concern’ for our carbon footprint which means we are looking for alternatives to fossil fuels, of which bio-fuels are one. The trouble is that to ensure we have enough bio-fuel in the western world so that we can reduce our ‘carbon footprint’, land so far used for growing food crops is now being increasingly used to grow bio crops to produce bio fuels. Why? Because they sell for more: the western world, concerned as it is to save the planet for future generations is willing to pay more for bio fuels than the poor of the world can afford to pay for food crops. Obvious, really, when you think about it.
Here in Britain (and in other parts of Europe) we have related tomfoolery. While scientists (make that ‘scientists’) beaver away to ensure we live longer, governments (I am inclined to write ‘governments’) are getting increasingly worried that there won’t be enough young working young people around who they can tax in order to pay for the care of an ever larger group of elderly. A short-term solution has been to ‘raise retirement age’, so that people carry on paying their own way for longer. All fine and dandy you would think, except that industry is rather less inclined to employ older folk because they can get away with paying young folk lower wages. Younger folk are also thought to be more adaptable to change.
All in all a fuck-up in the making. So what’s new?
Here’s my solution: kill off everyone over 75 irregardless of material status, and kill off as many ‘Third World’ poor people as we can decently get away with without raising too many eyebrows. It might sound like a drastic solution, but the imperative to ‘save the planet’ surely takes precedence over our somewhat sentimental regard for life.

. . .

There can now be few in the world who have never heard of Piers Morgan and the lad is now well on his way to world domination. From the factory dormitories of Xianxing to the call centres of South Shield the talk is of nothing but how the man’s talents, charisma and ambition have landed him the Top Job: standing in for Larry King on (I should imagine it’s called) The Larry King Show. If, on the other hand, you haven’t yet heard of Piers Morgan (aka the Honourable Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan, 8th Baron Wapping when he’s in his birthday suit) you’re either a Trappist monk or dead.
It seems his first appearance in the hot seat was a complete triumph in which he managed to get one Oprah Winfrey to talk about herself and her new TV channel. Well! That shows
Piers poses with God
the doubters who said it was all stuff and nonsense when young Piers first announced he was in line for the position.
I’ve never met him, although when I worked subbing shifts on the Sun, he was editing the paper’s Bizarre column and he would be around the feature backbench every night, cutting what I always thought was a rather incongruous figure in a Tweed sports jacket. He is said to be insufferably Tiggerish, but to be fair I know three people who have worked with him and two of them speak quite highly off him. The third jointly presented a TV programme with him and she is rather less of a fan. The first two knew him, respectively at the Sun in the early Nineties and when he edited the Mirror (which might still in those days have been called the Daily Mirror).
His rather less enthusiastic acquaintance knew him several years later, after he had been sacked from the Miror, but by which time his ego had apparently grown rather large.
The guy who worked with him on the Sun (and was rather more senior than Piers, although in a different, tho’ related department) now works on the same desk as me, and he told me an anecdote about Piers from when he ran and wrote the Sun’s Bizzare column. In fact, he didn’t write quite large chunks of it — that would have been impossible — and had a deputy and staff writers, but everything appeared under the ‘Piers Morgan’ byline. That is not necessarily an indication of an outrageous ego, it’s just how many such columns operated and operate. At the Sun Piers’ deputy was a chap called Peter Willis, a rather pleasant unassuming chap, and, of course, everything he produced appeared under Piers Morgan’s byline. After few years, Rupert Murdoch, who owns News International, plucked Piers and made him the editor of the News Of The World, which was the lad’s first step to stardom. (From there he went on to edit the Mirror, although as the Mirror was the Sun’s arch-rival, the move across didn’t go down well with Murdoch. But that move came later.)
As editor of the News Of The Screws, Morgan hit pay-dirt and among his perks was a chauffeur-driven car. It seems that one dark and rainy night he was being driven home from the Wapping plant in whatever luxury limo he had been given when he spotted his old deputy Peter Willis leaving the building, his coat wrapped around him to keep out the cold. He had the chauffeur stop car and he offered Willis a lift, which his former deputy accepted gratefully. As the two of them were driving along in the back of the limo, Morgan asked Willis:
‘Peter, do you remember all those stories you found working on Bizarre which you then wrote up and which then appeared under my byline?’
‘Yes,’ said Willis.
‘Well,’ said Morgan, proudly indicating the interior of his plush limo and all its luxuries, ‘look where they got me.’

Rational debate: thy name does not appear to be James Delingpole. But Talbot Church gets my vote

It is fair to say that in the long run everything is balanced out, although I am obliged to add that, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, ‘in the long run we are all dead’. In the short run and in politics, the left must put up with government by the right, but, don’t worry, for in time the right will give way and be obliged to put up with government by the left. Were British politics to be viewed over the past 200 years, it would be apparent that, more or less, the awful ‘progressives’ have had their hand on the tiller for about as long as the awful ‘reactionaries’ and neither has had a disproportionate time in office. (I should add, though, that as far as I am concerned both terms are next to meaningless: there are as many reactionaries who regard themselves as ‘progressive’ as there are innovators who are seen as ‘reactionary’.) Naturally, if the perspective is a lot narrower, the balance isn’t always too apparent. So someone born in the mid to late Nineties, such as my two children, will only have known Labour government (I won’t say ‘New Labour’ as that was just so much PR bullshit dreamed up by the essentially red-top mentality of one Alastair Campbell, he of Diana, ‘the people’s princess’.) They will now know that Labour isn’t the be all and end all of politics, by the time they get to be my age, they will also come to realise that politics is not the be all and end all of life.
When I was at college, the lefties all thought of me as a righty and the righties thought of me as a lefty. In fact, I was – and am – neither and have remained, overall, pretty much dead centre all my life. My father once accuse me of being ‘dangerously liberal’ which, at the time – I was still in my salad days – I thought of as being a contradiction in terms. Now I know it isn’t and I fully understand what he meant, but then from his 30s on he was always pretty much ‘on the right’.
I usually do my best to avoid political discussions because they are invariably horribly dull. Either both sides agree with each other completely, or the ‘discussion’ quickly degenerates into a slanging match. Very rarely indeed are both sides prepared to listen to what the other has to say, to consider it and to responded rationally.
All this occurred to me when I visited the Daily Telegraph website for a general mooch around and spotted the name James Delingpole. I’ve twice met him very briefly and on the second occasion decided to take against him when – he was still wearing his hair exceptionally long – he wrote off the band Steely Dan. Everyone is entitled to their opinions and own tastes, of course, but anyone who writes off Steely Dan wholesale, even if they don’t like their music, is either striking a pose or downright stupid. I now suspect that in Delingpole’s case it is the former, because he is now an established youngish journalist who makes his living writing for right-of-centre publications and producing pieces along the lines of ‘how awful the world is/is becoming/will be in the future’. That’s fine and dandy from some hack in his late
50s with a drink problem (I intend calling him George Rant), but Delingpole is not in his 50s (as you can see from the piccy) and, as far as I know, doesn’t have a drink problem (which the piccy cannot establish either way).
The piece I spotted in the Telegraph, which you can read here, is true to form. It is headlined ‘Why we still love Sarah Palin’ and to give you a taste of the kind of reasoned, intelligent polemic it sets out to be, contains the observation that ‘President Obama is a socialist and his administration a crazy house of eco-loons, crypto-Marxists, progressives, collectivists, surrender monkeys and anarcho-lesbian harpies’. I could live with the opinion that Obama ‘is a socialist’, but the rest of that sentence can be taken no more seriously than you would the rantings of your local bar bore. On the face of it, Delingpole does not strike me as the kind of chap who would contribute very much to a rational political debate.
For a taste of something a little more rewarding, I can recommend a distinguished writer and journalist called Talbot Church who is currently employed by The Independent ('The Inday'). You can find his latest piece (or, if you are reading this in the year 2015, a piece he wrote several years ago) here.

Are hedge funds listening to the right Chinese whispers. And who exactly are the experts? And Blair is back in the limelight, the slimy little toad

Mention hedge funds to most people, and you could well have them spitting blood. The conventional – and ill-informed wisdom – is that those nasty hedge funds, in cahoots with the banks, more or less brought the western world to its knees. But that is all rather unfair on hedge funds.
Admittedly, they are, like the law and The Ritz, open to all – i.e. they are open to all who have several million to spare and can afford to take advantage of the expertise they offer, but in principle you and I can do what hedge funds do and if we get it right, we, too, would be quids in. That is, of course, a big if. For the fact is the hedge fund managers put in a hell of a lot of work to spot winners – and losers. And it is the profits they make on spotting the losers which seems to upset everyone.
That is odd, because no one objects to anyone identifying a stock it believes is undervalued and buying up that stock in the belief that in the future it will gain in price. It so happens that hedge funds often do the opposite: they identify stock which they believe is overvalued and then short-sell it. Moralists might claim that such action profits from failure, but I can’t see it at all.
I began to understand a little more of what hedge funds do when I heard an interesting piece on the radio by the guy who made a pile for his hedge fund by spotting that Enron was a wrong ’un.
In the course of his work, he was going through the published financial information of a variety of firms and something about what Enron had published didn’t add up. So he concentrated on Enron and decided – quite rightly as it turned out – that Enron was just another house of cards. So he bet that the house of cards would come tumbling down and that the stock would be worthless. It isn’t, of course, quite that simple, and a fair degree of luck is involved in the timing. But, broadly, that is what hedge funds do (and I suspect a large amount of the hostility towards them is based on the fact that we can’t get a piece of the action.

Naturally, not all hedge funds are a success and that is part of the risk taken by those who agree to lend to hedge funds. There was the famous case a few years ago (so famous, I can’t even remember the name of the fund) which had to be bailed out in order to ensure the whole system didn’t collapse, but I assume that was the exception which proved the rule.
I mention this because I came across and interesting piece in the Telegraph the other day about how a number of hedge funds have done their homework and expect China to come crashing down sooner rather than later. Naturally, there is any number of Cassandras who, some gleefully, predict doom and disaster several times a day at the drop of a hat, but what I feel is significant is that in this case – to use a phrase usually employed elsewhere – this isn’t personal, it’s business. Hedge funds who do think China is going to go tits up sooner rather than later and are prepared to act on their analyses are not interested in making a political point. They are neutral.
It is common knowledge that a massive price bubble exists in the housing market in China’s coastal cities and bubbles always – always, always, always – burst. Always. Every so often some idiot comes out and foolishly pronounces that ‘boom or bust’ has been beaten, and the announcement is always followed pretty soon by the very bust which was never again going to happen.
The problem with China is that it is not playing by the ‘rules’ (if, indeed, there are any rules in the capitalist game of beggar my neighbour.) So its factories are working flat out,
but because the value of the yuan is being kept artificially low, the goods they produce are cheap, cheap, cheap. We buy them cheap and feel prosperous, and China sells shedloads and feels successful (as, I’m sure, does the couple left). But it can’t go on forever.
I also read recently that China has built any number of ‘ghost cities’ just to keep its workforce occupied. They are called ‘ghost cities’ because no one is living in them. What compounds the problem is that with all the money it is making by selling cheap goods to the western world, China has been busy buying up whatever assets it can – from agricultural land in New Zealand to rare mineral mines in Africa and, most pertinently, sovereign debt in Europe. In the past few days, Portugal, which is deep in the shit and issued more government bonds to raise more money, got a pass because good old China came along and bought a great deal.
Of course, anyone – including China – who buys such bonds always runs the risk that the seller will eventually go bust and be unable to honour them, but that’s the name of the game.
But the hedge funds have done their homework and many of them believe the writing is on the wall for the present round of Chinese good times. They could well be right.
The real problem is that the west is banking on a prosperous Chinese middle class buying up the goods and services it produces to help us out of the current slump. If China does go to the wall, it won’t just be the Chinese middle class who suffer.

. . .

A few years ago, the Economist did an experiment: it choose a number of shares in three different ways. First it asked acknowledged ‘stock pickers’ (the kind of guys who choose which stock your investment fund should invest in) to make their choice. Then it simply picked stocks which tracked the FTSE. Finally, it took a pin and, with whoever was wielding the pin suitably blindfolded, stocks were chosen at random. A year later it looked at how those stocks had performed.
Well, you know exactly where this is going: the stocks picked at random did better than those picked by the professional stock pickers, which did more or less as well (or badly) as those which tracked the FTSE. Well, it’s a good anecdote and one which should be taken seriously, but it has to be said that there are several variables here which make the tale rather less shocking than it might seem. (OK, ‘shocking’ is laying it on a little too thick, but you know what I mean.)
First, there is the element of luck, which simply cannot be quantified. Then there is the ‘expertise’ of the stock pickers, which on the face of it rather undermines what I have written above. But still, it does rather put all that hi’falutin City stuff in its place.

. . .

Make a note in your diary: this Friday (January 21), a certain Anthony Charles Lynton Blair has a second date with our very own Chilcot Inquiry, which is looking at why Britain under Blair decided to invade a sovereign country without UN authorisation of any kind and got away with it. It will be his second appearance, and it seems he has been
recalled because of discrepancies in the evidence he gave the first time. This morning’s papers carry report that in previously classified evidence Blair’s Attorney General Peter Goldsmith admitted to the inquiry that he had been ‘uncomfortable’ with Blair’s interpretation of his legal advice on the legality of invading Iraq. Given that we in Britain have made polite euphemism a way of life, for ‘uncomfortable’ read ‘after what I told him, I didn’t know what the bloody hell he was playing at’.
For the record I think, and have always thought (though I admit that is a very easy thing to say now, but – honest, guv’ – it’s true) that Blair was a nine-bob note (a nine dollar bill or a nine euro note – you get the drift). I have also thought that he was and is a sandwich short of a picnic, although quite in what way I couldn’t tell you. No doubt he will try his usual trick of stating the obvious at length and with great authority, thus seeming to say something while, in fact, saying nothing whatsoever. And, of course, the real irony is that even if things were to do against him drastically, it wouldn’t matter. The moment has gone. He is yesterday’s man and of no importance anymore, so what would be the point of pursuing him, as some want to do, in the International Court?
For the record and according to the website Iraqbodycount between 99,374 and 108,492 Iraqi men, women and children have been killed since the invasion in 1983, rather more than were dying when Saddam Hussein was in charge. Blair and others would perhaps claim that they wanted to rid the world of a dictator and bring democracy to Iraq. To which I say, why just this one dictator and just how patronising, not to say neo-imperialistic, to insist that the rest of the world should do as we in the west say and adopt our way of governing. (I like to think in terms of self-determination rather than ‘democracy’ – ‘democratic’ Belgium has been without a government for ten months; and if the majority in a country are in favour of, say, a theocracy, who are we in the west to object?)