The lunacy of newspapers – Pt 4,337 of an occasional series

This is not, admittedly, the worst example its kind, and one or two jugheads around the world might even ask themselves what the hell is he talking about. But for me the following does somehow typify, in a quiet way, just how wacky newspapers and those who produce them are and why in any sane country all its hacks would be settled quietly in a corner out of harm's way with a bottle or five of spirits and a tin of shag.

Anyone turning to Page 60 in today’s Daily Mail (May 23, 2012, available at all good newsagents) will find the Wednesday travel page. Today we are highlighting several spots around the world where you can get a great view of the sky at night. The – rather obvious – headline says it all: Star struck, and the sub-head reads: Nothing beats sleeping in the big outdoors. Follow our sparkling guide to the top star-gazing holidays. Several pictures accompany the piece, of which the main one (which has the headline superimposed on it) shows a night sky and a modern four-poster bed on a terrace. Sleeping out in the open, geddit? That’s when the trouble started.

Rather late in the day – that is the page was due ‘off stone’ at about 7pm and the deadline was approaching – someone noticed that there were precious few stars in the night sky for whoever would be sleeping in the four-poster to gaze at. In fact, there were none at all. And gazing at stars at night while sleeping in the great outdoors was the whole point of the piece. So the picture was sent of to the colour studio to have stars added. Back it came, but those in charge decided there weren’t enough stars, so off the picture went again for the addition of more stars. Then it came back for a second time, and now those in charge decided that there were enough – it has to he be said, fake – stars to give the impression of a star-filled sky, but that they weren’t, umm, bright enough. So off the picture went for the third time for the bods in colour to brighten the stars.

If you are able to get a copy of the paper today, buy it and turn to Page 60 and see if you don’t agree with me that not only is this kind of modus operandi just a tad short of mad, but the ‘stars’ in the picture won’t win any prices, either. For those who can’t get hold of the paper, here is the picture, though it was obviously posted online before the bods in colour applied their peerless skill.

Pip, pip!

I’m back and still predicting doom, gloom and misery. And a short break in Spain was very welcome

After something of a hiatus, I'm back. Just as many opinions and just as much bullshit will be on offer, but I should tell you that one of my few principles - dangerous things principles, but I do risk it once in a while - is 'bullshit for fun, never seriously'. There is too much of it around and I don't want to add to the sum total in this world. I stopped posting for a while because I suspected I was beginning to take myself a little too seriously, so I wanted to knock that on the head as soon as possible. So no posts for a while.

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Nothing much has changed out there, as you will have noticed from the news. Greece, and now Spain, are still going to the dogs, though Greece is doing so rather faster than our Iberian cousins, and everyone, but everyone knows the outcome: Greece will leave the euro and resurrect the drachma, in time the euro will collapse and the whole rasion d'etre of the European Union will be up for question. Why, countries will ask themselves are we members if, in the long run, we aren't assured the prosperity we were hoping for. That's not so say that they aren't, just that the outcome they all so fervently hoped for is simply not as achievable as they thought it was. The trouble is that people are apt to remember bad times rather longer than good times, and they will see what is happening in Greece, Portugal and Ireland and wonder whether that might not happen to them, too.

One glaring mismatch between the EU and those who have recently joined or still hope to join is that whereas the apparent guiding princple of the EU, one fondly encouraged by those running it - superannuated to-the-left former Sixties politico hippies - was a kind of brotherhood of man, a vaguely capitalistic socialism in which everything is done for the common weal is hugely at odds with the motivation of new and aspiring members, namely self-interest.

Self-interest most certainly wasn't behind the idealistic thinking of the original Iron, Coal and Steel Community members, who later became the 12 before insanity took over and the 'European Community' became the horribly unwieldy 27 member states, but that is what now drives most members forward. In the early days, the motivation was quite simple and delightfully admirable: to ensure that a merciless war such as World War II would be a thing of the past. But now look where we are. Germany is once again being blamed for everything. Admittedly, it only has itself to blame in as far as Berlin obviously cannot understand how others might not share its values, but to my dying day I shall defend Germany against the charge that it is 'trying to dominate Europe'. Germany is, at worst, guilty of appalling political naivety and incompetence, but if that were a capital offence, there would few far fewer politicians round. Sarkozy would have been one of the first to have last his head.

I think the real problem is that the EU all too soon lost sight of its fundamental objective: to unite Europe through trade by bringing down barriers to trade, spreading prosperity and ensuring that we all had too much to lose by going to war. But when things were going well, as most certainly they were for many years, it all went to their heads and the idealists committed the cardinal sin of believing their own bullshit. The rather more down-to-earth Brits were labelled troublemakers for urging caution and refusing to join in an increasingly silly game, but mainland Europeans went ahead. They did not understand that most people are still intrinsically local, that loyalties are still local and all this bull about a political union was simply not welcome or, at least, way ahead of its time.

But now we have the mess. Launching a common currency would only have been a good idea within a political union, but as such as union was still decades off, the euro was far too premature. And now we have the mess, a mess which will not only bring misery to Europe but North America, China and Asia. The only part of the world which will be spared a great deal of misery is South America. Am I too much of a doom monger? No, I really don't think I am..

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I have just returned from a very pleasant and relaxing seven days in Spain. I wasn't, thank goodness, on the Costas rubbing shoulders with Brits complaining that you can't get a decent cup of tea for love or money, but in the back of beyond about 70 miles north of Valencia between a one-horse town called Els Ibarsos and a rather bigger places (a three-horse town?) called Albocasser. I was visiting a friend of my stepmother's who I knew vaguely before I went and who was very good company. He is a potter, and the son of one of Brtain's famous potters with wide interests. More about that, perhaps, another time when I am not at work and pretending to be beavering away on something, anything, which isn't personal. I took quite a few piccies and shall post some of those, too. Pip, pip!

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Well, there has been movement of a kind on the Eurozone front as various EU state finance ministers prepare for the next in a long, long, long series of ‘make or break’ summits, so having regained my verve for adding my two ha’porth, I thought I might add a word or two to the above.


It does strike me that were one to set out to create a messy situation which would be farcical were its implications not so tragic, then you would be hard-pushed to do better than the current cock-up with the euro. Quite simply, there is now no longer and acceptable outcome. Whatever happens will be unpleasant for everyone, not just those of us living in Europe, but for the American and Asian economies. South American economies might be spared as long as they don’t rely too heavily on exporting to the rest of the world. But we should all be clear: the shit is going to hit the fan soon, whatever clever ruses the EU finance ministers come up with on Wednesday.

The talk is that France now has the upper hand over Germany in as far as there is widespread support among member states for the creation of so-called Eurobonds. These are the same as national sovereign bonds but imply that the EU is one fiscal unit, with every member of the Eurozone being equally responsible for every other member’s debts. Well, I can’t see the good and thrifty folk of Germany settling for that. Furthermore, the Eurozone is not a fiscal unit and the chances of it becoming one any time soon are rather smaller than me getting a romp in the hay with Holly Willoughby. Germany is against such Eurobonds, though not for sensible reasons: it wants to carry on with austerity.

This is all a supremely good recipe for the mainstream democratic parties in the EU to lose ground to the various crackpot groups on the left and right. Hungary already has one in power. For a venture which was designed to ensure peace in Europe for ever and a day, it is all pretty poor going.

Blame who you want, but don’t blame the Vietnam War on the vets. (And the bookies win again)

Thirty years ago, Britain achieved a remarkable victory over Argentina when it successfully deployed ships and troops to the Falkland Islands more than 8,000 away and retook them after they had been invaded and occupied by the Argentines. Whether it could do so again were that lovely woman Cristina Kirchner, Argentine’s president, to decide that the domestic situation is dire enough to warrant a foreign adventure to concentrate Argentinean hearts and minds is another matter and - thank goodness - not the point of this entry. What is most certainly beyond doubt is that Britain’s response might have been a great deal less wholehearted had Labour been in government or even Tories of another stripe.

As it was Mrs Margaret Thatcher was in charge and she was never one to do anything by halves. Whether or not you actually believe retaking the Falklands was actually worth the effort involved to say nothing of the deaths it cost is again not the point of this entry. I happen to believe it was, in as far as Britain, then as now, is still one of the world’s leading nations and has a reputation to protect, and allowing the Argentines to get away with it would have done a great deal of damage diplomatically. So having Maggie in charge was a stroke of luck. Some cynics claim that going to war over the Falklands was also a stroke of luck for Maggie herself. Politically things were not going too well for her at the time as economically things were pretty dire in the country, so not only did the Falklands crisis take away a great deal of attention from the domestic situation, but once it had been concluded successfully, it also earned her a great many very useful brownie points.

Naturally enough, and for a variety of different reasons, some honourable and some most certainly not, not everyone supported the campaign to retake the Falklands, and of those who were opposed, some were employed by the BBC. The BBC, from its inception and throughout its history, has often been accused of being a tad pink round the gills and are only too pleased to oppose when the government of the day is right-of-centre. There were, of course, others in the BBC who, professionals to their fingertips, were keen to ensure the BBC’s coverage of the conflict, initially in the run-up and then the campaign itself, remained studiously neutral. Good for them, I say, but others disagreed and felt that as the country was once again ‘at war’, the BBC should wave the flag as vigorously as possible, if not even more so.

It all came to a head when the current affairs TV programme Panorama broadcast an edition about the crisis simply called Can We Avoid War? That, of course, went down like a lead balloon with the Tories who smelt treachery at every turn. What especially enraged Thatcher at the time was a comment by someone or other in the BBC that it was not the corporation’s role to boost the morale of British troops and that ‘the widow in Portsmouth is no different from the widow of Buenos Aires’. To that I must - and shall always - give three cheers. And that quote brings me rather closer to what this entry is about (although you might already have an inkling from the title of this entry).

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That quote likening the widow in Buenos Aires to the widow in Portsmouth says it all for me. Being half English and half German I was always angry - or, at least, always once I was old and mature enough to understand these things - with the prevalent attitude in the Fifties that, in World War II, for exampe, there were the guys in white hats and the guys in black hats. Most certainly no one in his or her right mind would spend more than half a second defending the Nazis who created the conflict. But to equate each German squaddie fighting on the ground with the party elite seemed to me particularly asinine. Yet that was what many did and still do. But growing up in the Sixties (and living in what was then still West Berlin) I was caught up in the Cold War and its equally moronic monochrome view of the world. We, the West, stood for all that was good, honest and true in life. They, the East were Commie rats who opposed us and were thus, by definition the personification of evil.

I should like to make it very clear as soon as possible that you will never find me breaking a lance for any of the shower in power in any of the Soviet bloc countries, but we now know that the motivation of the West, and especially the United States was anything but pure and principled (unless, of course, you regard it as a matter of principle that we should do anything and everything, ethical or not, to maximise profit. I don’t). In his address to the nation on national television on January 17, 1961, the outgoing U.S. President (and very admirable) Dwight D. Eisenhower was quite explicit about the threat to democracy posed by his country’s growing military-industrial complex, (you can find the text of his speech here and even the most benighted idiot alive would be hard-pushed to persuade anyone that Eisenhower was a commie stooge. As it happened no one seems to have heeded his warning. Most certainly many took it seriously and knew that Eisenhower was no alarmist hootsie-tootsie, but this was in many ways the height of the Cold War and I imagine many would have argue that now wasn’t the time to get to get the problem under control. If only they had.

I think the suspicion that America’s military-industrial complex actively promoted escalating the war in Vietnam is pretty uncontentious these days (but then these days we seem to have overshot the mark rather badly: where once we were naive saps who believed everything, now we are cynical saps who believe nothing). There were enough politicos in Washington who were persuaded that ‘something had to be done and something had to be done now’ to halt the spread of communism and what was called the domino theory so it was not difficult to persuade everyone who needed persuading that South Vietnam needed more U.S. ‘military advisors’ to combat the threat from the North of the country. Later, of course, the figleaf of describing the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops who were sent out to South-East Asia as ‘military advisors’was dropped completely, but by then America was so entrenched that that was the least of its concerns.

But back to the widow in Buenos Aires and the widow in Portsmouth and how in many ways they are soul sisters. There might not seem an obvious link between them and the grunts fighting the Vietcong, but to me the link is quite obvious: at the end of the day, both widows deserve our sympathy and in a curious, but for me related way, so do the grunts. They didn’t start the war. And although - according to various statistics I dug up once I had decided to write this piece - only a third of the U.S. servicemen and women were actually conscripted (i.e. two-thirds had signed up to serve wherever their country chose to send them), that cannot - to my mind, at least - justify the shit that was figuratively poured over many of them once they had returned home and once the Vietnam War and its perceived evil had become a national shame. That, really, is the point - the only point - of the video I have posted above.

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I should say that from the first time I heard Third World Man by Steely Dan on the Gaucho album I imagined it to be about a Vietnam vet who had been to hell and back and simply lost his marbles. That’s in as far as any Steely Dan song can be ‘about’ anything. Yesterday I decided to scour the net for any images of wounded soldiers serving in Vietnam and any I might find after they had returned home. These are the ones I came up with (or, at least, most of them.) I enjoy putting images to music as I have done for this video and doing so, indulging myself, so to speak, was as much a reason for constructing it as posting it and making a point I have long felt should be made. But earlier on today something odd happened. While editing and constructing it (in Apple’s iMovie), I realised that one of the images I had included was anything but what I thought it was. It is the fifth in the sequence. Look closely: what you’ll see is three U.S. soldiers engaged in water-boarding a prisoner (I assume a Vietcong). So how does that fit in with my purported motive.

I must be honest: these were my thought - look at the image and it is pretty unmistakable as to what is going on. In anyone’s lexicon ‘waterboarding’ is ‘torture’ and that is what these guys are doing. So what was I to do? The obvious thing was simply to remove it, but I decided not to. I decided that whatever the image did actually portray, it did fit in with the other images. In fact, some people might not have spotted what was going on unless I hadn’t alerted them to it as I am doing here. And my second thought was that one get-out clause might be to do what I am doing now: coming clean, alerting the viewer to the fact that one of the images is not what is seems. So that is what I have done.

It did occur to me to add a line suggesting that as war brutalises those who engage in it, in a sense (or, more honestly, ‘in a sense’) these three have become brutalise by a war which was not of their making and so, in a sense (i.e. ‘in a sense’) they are not ultimately responsible. Thus, they were demonstrating what could be regarded as a dramatic truth (‘dramatic truth’).

But that is, of course, complete bullshit. The more astute among you mgiht, however, have noticed that I have, perhaps, pulled off a double bluff: by giving the line of the three being ‘brutalised by war’, but then apparently rejecting it, I have succeeded in giving the line (and possibly gaining from it in some quarters) but then scored a moral point or two in other quarters by rejecting it. Then, of course, there are the super-astute among you who might have noticed that I might even have managed to pull off a triple bluff simply by writing the very paragraph you are now reading and by coming even cleaning underlining my integrity. But as for the super-super-astute - get to fuck.

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But I don’t really want to end this entry on such a flippant note. The end of my video says it all: blame the Vietnam War on whoever you want to blame it one, but give those who had little choice in the matter a break. Don’t blame the vets. It wasn’t their war.

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Well, if there are easier ways to lose your money than by backing a horse, or several horses, in the Grand National, I have yet to hear of it. Laying bets online with Ladbrokes for my family, both close and extended, we are all in total about £60 down because none of us came within a country mile of getting the winner.

The New Yorker reluctantly makes it official: the Daily Mail is not quite as evil as North London claims. Damn!

When I thought of writing this piece about a profile of the Daily Mail which has just appeared in The New Yorker, the phrase ‘the man you love to hate’ kept occurring to me which I could then adapt to ‘the newspaper you love to hate’. But being a nosy sort, I googled the phrase to see to whom it was applied and came up with the names of German film director Erich von Stroheim and South London wrestler Mick McManus. I should imagine that the phrase was first applied to von Stroheim, courtesy of a studio press office, and McManus, or his manager, adopted it as being far too good to be wasted. All that by way of a rather unnecessary preamble. Now onto the Mail and its profile by one Lauren Collins in The New Yorker.

When all is said and done about the only honest conclusion one can make about the piece is that it is distinctly odd. I might be wrong on this, but I’ve always assumed The New Yorker is generally read – avidly in some case, I should think – by folk who like to think of themselves as a tad brighter than the hoi polloi and most certainly more enlightened, not to say liberal. Whether fairly or not, I’ve often got the impression that your average New Yorker reader is, well, just a little up him or herself, and although they have more than a great deal of sympathy for the dispossessed of this world, they most certainly wouldn’t be seen dead socialising with them. Being of a liberal, quite possibly left-liberal turn of mind, they most certainly would not approve of the Mail, its readers and its assumed politics, and reading the piece by Ms Collins I got the distinct impression that she was itching to disapprove. But she never quite manages to do so. Why not?

The Mail and its web sister the Mail Online are a modern success story. According to circulation figures released by the ABC, all the circulation of all British nationals is falling, in some cases dramatically, not to say embarrassingly, but the Mail – damn its eyes – is, ahem, doing rather less badly than the rest. And bien pensant folk hate, hate, hate the fact. I am not, and would never, suggest that the fact that the Mail is holding its own has anything to do with the worth of its assumed politics, but it has a great deal to do with the popularity of the paper: whereas fewer and fewer people are prepared to part with £1 to buy the Independent or the Daily Telegraph or £1.20 to buy the Guardian or The Times, the number who will gladly part with 55p to get their own copy of the Mail is, again ahem, holding up rather well. Ah, you cry, but it’s half the price of the ‘serious newspapers’. Well, yes it is, and so what? The Express is also half the price of the ‘serious’ newspapers and its circulation is plummeting.

The New Yorker’s Ms Collins must have spent quite a few days in our offices and, given the potted history of the paper and its current editor Paul Dacre, she obviously did her homework. She was even invited to sit in on conferences (and, according to Private Eye, those attending were warned to be on their best behaviour and to eschew the kind of coarse language which is the lingua franca of most newspaper offices I have worked in) and her piece is the kind of workmanlike and rather long feature article we have come to expect from a Yankee hack working at the serious end of her

“Well (sniff) one doesn’t really want to condone such popularism and Lord it is such an awful rag, but well (sniff) one is, one must admit, obliged to be fair (sniff), though more’s the pity”
industry. And I’ll repeat: while reading it I got the impression, time and again, that she was just dying to let fly, to be outraged, to be disgusted, yet she never quite managed it. It could, of course, be because she had no reason to. Ms Collins touched on the Mail’s alleged institutional racism but, in the event, she was again obliged to pull her punches. And I suspect that this was because for an allegedly racist organisation, the Mail employs a great number of folk whose origins, or that of their parents and grandparents, lie in Asia, Africa and the West Indies. More to the point, they are not kept hidden away in cupboards: anyone walking on any floor and in any department – for some reason particularly in the IT department will spot them very, very easily and with no effort at all.

Well, if the paper is not racist, it can be charged with being trivial. And that it most certainly is: the print edition, but even more so the online edition, brims with what at my most charitable I can only describe as celebrity crap and bollocks. But the fact is that that is what the punters rather like to read, that and that the world is going to hell in a handcart. In the unlikely event that the saintly Guardian decided to start printing just as much celebrity crap and bollocks, we would all witness is harsh decline in circulation being reversed. Can the Mail be condemned for providing – this is me speaking, not the paper – morons with the kind of fodder morons relish? Not in my world they can’t. And, as it turns out, not in Ms Collins’s world either. But read the piece for yourself and make your own mind up. Incidentally, don't ever

A naive twat writes: why can’t there be more political consensus? And something ugly might be stirring in China, though exactly what is anyone’s guess

A few years ago, I did something which to many of my friends seemed quite inexplicable and which even I must admit was out of character. But if I outline why I did it and what took me to the point of doing it, it might, perhaps, make a little more sense.
I am not, for a variety of reasons what can for the sake of simplicity be call ‘a joiner’. I like to plough my own furrow and loathe following the party line on anything. But about ten years ago I signed up with the Conservative Party, although it is only fair to me that I should add that 14 months later I signed down again, that is I wrote to the branch vice-chairman informing him that I would not be renewing my annual subscription, thank you and goodbye.
My reasoning at the time was simple: Blair was about to help to invade Iraq, which I was wholly against, and he was anyway proving to be the nine bob note I had long suspected him of being. It is easy these days to claim that one spotted what a self-serving, shifty cunt he was and is early on, but I thought so even before the 1997 election which brought New Labour to power. Being, ten years ago, the father of a six-year-old and a two-year-old and — ahem — having matured a little more in my old age (I had just turned 52), I took more seriously the direction the country was going in and what was happening. But I was reluctant to be just another pub bore, sounding off about ‘that bastard Blair’ or ‘that idiot Duncan Smith’ before getting another round in. There are enough pub bores around, sounding off in every language under the sun, to populate the world twice over, and I did not want to be just another one. So I thought to myself that the time had come to put up or shut up, to become politically active or to resign myself to being just another of the sheep. But I also knew that no one can do anything on his or her own in the way of politics and that, my ‘non-joining’ mentality notwithstanding I would have to throw my lot in with one of the three main political parties. Ah, but which one? I fell in with the Tories by a process of elimination. I asked myself with whom did I disagree least, and the answer was the Conservative Party.
I am not ‘a Tory’ and I have never been ‘a Tory’ and I hope to God I never shall be ‘a Tory’, and from the off I felt like a fish out of water. But that, I told myself, was a sacrifice I would have to make. I did become active: I stood for the local council and thoroughly enjoyed the campaigning, I did more than my fair share of licking envelopes, I organised a ‘fund-raising event’, I attended a party conference in Blackpool (although to be fair I did that because I was curious to see what such conferences are like and as Blackpool once played such a significant part in the British psyche, I wanted to visit the place). I even managed to get myself onto the Conservative Party list of approved parliamentary candidates and put myself forward to be the local Tory candidate.  And I put up with the discomfort of being regarded by most of the other branch members as something of a pinko. And the truth is that in their political terms I am ‘something of a pinko’.
What struck me from the off and what disappointed me right from the start was that no one, not one of the members I came into contact with or for some reason or other spent time with seemed to be interested in ‘politics’. Not one. For many it was more a social club. For a few, those who were active, it was ‘to do with politics’, but their efforts in that regard almost wholly consisted of trying to raise funds in some way or another. Politics themselves (itself? I’ve always wondered) just didn’t come into it, but it was for the politics that I first swallowed my pride, overcame my reservations and signed up. Another sacrifice was having to put up with people saying, when I had put forward my view, ‘well, you would say that — you’re a Tory’. No, dear heart, I would tell them, I’m not saying it because I’m ‘a Tory’ but because it’s what I believe. Then there was the discomfort with having to keep my mouth shut when in the company of hangers and floggers and swallowing the sarcastic comment I was just itching to make. And after 14 months I had had enough. I was simply wasting my time. But I didn’t want my membership to dribble away: it was important to me that I should do the thing properly. So I wrote to the vice-chairman (a retired rear-admiral and a nice guy) telling him I would no be renewing my membership and why. It meant, and means, that I am back at square one, of course, itching to be politically active but not having the wherewithal to do much, but that, I’ve decided is the lesser of the two evils.

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More to come...

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Meanwhile, after an unexpected invitation to lunch at Rick Stein’s seafood restaurant in Padstow, no supper but a glass or three of red wine, all followed by a pretty aimless trawl through the net in search of nothing in particular, I have come across rather odd reports of an ‘attempted coup’ in Beijing. What is being reported, but for one reason or another can no longer be substantiated, is that there as a ‘movement of tanks’ in an around Beijing (and I am itching still to spell it Peking, but I understand the British PC police will have my guts for garters if I even consider doing so), followed by ‘reports of gunfire’. The Washington Post has carried a report as had the Daily Mail (‘The Trumpet of The Truth’ as guardianistas like to call it), but what is going on – if anything – is your gues as well as mine. Apparently, and my ‘apparently’ must of necessity be more speculative than any previously used ‘apparently’a power struggle has started. I can’t actually tell you between whom, but I can say that it is at present being presented as a struggle between those who want a return to the purer values of Mao and those who are keener on business. It seems a chap called Bo Xilai was sacked in these past few days. The Mail bills him as an ‘anti-corruption official’, but at this point think was should hold fire on sanctifying the chap as there are also claims that his ‘anti-courruption’ zeal was rather limited to his habit of rounding up his ‘corrupt’ political opponents. Mr Bo is said to have close ties with the ‘nationalistic military’ whatever that means. As ever it would seems in all things Oriental, ‘inscrutable’ is the word we are all obliged to use when describing, or trying to describe, what is going on, so perhaps my sagest advice here might be to ignore every word I have just written. If, of course, things are beginning to go tits up in China, that is not very encouraging news for the rest of the world in as far as something like 99pc of what is produced in the world is made there. On the other hand this must surely be very good news indeed for the commentariat as whatever they claim is going on there is utterly unverifiable and thus whatever they say cannot be proved wrong.

How one of Britains's most noble redtops/prominent gutter newspapers (delete as appropriate) is slowly going to the dogs at the hands of one Sly Bailey

In the whacky world of newspapers which I inhabit and which I trust I shall be able to inhabit for the next two years and eight months (of which, as the Mail like to put it, more later), the career of one Sly Bailey must be one of the whackiest. If her abilities are to be judged by her performance as chief executive of Trinity Mirror, she has less talent than a one-legged tap dancer. But surely, you might be asking, she could not have risen to the dizzy heights in which she now exists unless she had some kind of ability? That’s the £64,000 question. In the past few weeks I have come across three facts about La Bailey which, put together, do make curious reading:

Last Sunday, Peter Preston, an ex-Guardian editor and – except for one unfortunate incident when he shopped a source, the great no-no for hacks – one of the great and good of the London liberal left, wrote a piece in The Observer defending our Sly. The lady had not only been awarding herself – or allowing herself to be awarded ‘renumeration packages’ exceeding £1.5 million, she did so while profits in the group she leads fell by 40pc to just £74 million. For a media organisation that is a truly appalling figure. She blames all sorts for the fall, but the question has to be asked why Trinity Mirror is doing so badly when other print media groups are not doing so badly? They are all, after all, facing the same ‘adverse conditions’ or whatever euphemism is the currently trendy one to use. Certainly there will be variations in how they go about doing business which ensure that one group is doing better than another, but it is those very ‘various ways of doing business’ which are the point: if Sly Bailey isn’t coming up with any which are as effective as those the opposition is pursuing, I think it is reasonably to wonder whether she is any good at her job and whether she deserves and ever-increasing ‘remuneration package’.

Preston’s piece would seem to be a response from a chap called Roy Greenslade, a former red-top deputy editor but now a professor of applied cliché or something in some university media department or other (University of Southwark?) who reports the City equivalent of ‘the natives are getting restless’ – shareholder unease. Well, I’d be uneasy, too, if the business I part-owned was reporting repeated falls in profits while the man, in this case, woman put in place to ensure the profits rise rather than fall was not only apparently useless at her job but was paying herself ever-greater wads of dosh.

Most people in the business will have heard the name Sly Bailey (her given name is Sylvia and Sly is just a pet name, though an extremely unfortunate one, it has to be said) and most people in the business will be familiar with her tactic to try to re-float a sinking ship: sack staff to cut the wage bill. Why this ploy is attempted again and again is beyond me because it never, but never, ever, works. Staff are sacked, the ‘product’ gets shoddy, sales go down, more action is needed so more staff are sacked, the products gets shoddier, sales go down even more, more action is needed, and the whole sorry routine is repeated until there is no more ‘product’ to sell, the poor bloody infantry are cast off as just so much baggage while the senior officer class move elsewhere, probably to fuck up some other entrerprise.

One ruse Ms Bailey is attempting to bring down the bills and stave of the evil day when the Mirror goes down the tubes is by raiding the Trinity Mirror pension fund to pay off debts in the U.S. Quite apart from the dubious ethics of the move – newspapers and ethics, now there’s a comic partnership – Mirror proprietors – or rather one of them – have form on matters pension fund. Good ole’s Captain Bob aka Robert Maxwell, about the crookedest nine bob note to haunt Fleet Street for many a year – and there is a long list of characters to choose from – also raided the Mirror pension fund when his web of grandiose and bent deals finally began to unravel. So naturally when the words ‘Mirror’, ‘pensions’ and ‘fund’ are used in the same sentence alarm bells ring loudly from Kensington to Cheapside. Well, Sly is doing it again, which is why just under half of the big investors in Trinity Mirror are wondering just how healthy the company is.

. . .

At the top right of The Guardian’s comment website page is a piccy of some Victorian-looking gent whose name is given as C.P. Scott. Left-liberals revere the man, a former Guardian editor, and often quote, as the website does, his noble pronouncement that  ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Sounds grand, of course, and what right does a cynical bullshitter like me have to query such a noble sentiment? Well, let me give an example by way of trying to explain that when all is said and done, Scott’s thesis is just more vacuous nonsense which, rather like candyfloss, melts in the mouth in a moment with no discernible aftertaste except a sickly sweetness. Take for example ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘terrorist’, or, if you like and are feeling in a particularly pernickety mood ‘terrorist’ and freedom fighter’. Who would be foolish enough to claim as a fact that any individual is the one but not the other? For whatever you choose to insist upon, as sure as eggs is eggs someone will pop up and insist that the opposite is.

I would give another example if I could think of one, but I can’t, so that one will have to do, but you will already have taken my point: facts simply aren’t the copper-bottomed certainties we pretend they are. Is the Pope a bastard (whoever he is)? Well, yes, and that’s a fact if you are an enthusiastic Orangeman. Is Israel more or less a fascist state behaving intolerably towards and oppressed minority? Most certainly, and that’s a fact if you are your average Guardian reader. No, she’s not if — as far as I am concerned — you try a little harder to understand the ineffably complex history of the Middle East and the genesis of the state of Israel. So, here’s a plea: let’s have a little less of the ‘facts are sacred’ bull. They should be, of course, but they rarely, if ever, are.

. . .

If you are a sentimental old hack (which I hope to goodness I am not) the ongoing decline of The Mirror, once known as the Daily Mirror, is sad, sad, sad. In it’s heyday, the late Thirties, the war years and the Fifties, it was a force to be reckoned with. But by the Sixties it and its staff had been corrupted by very generous expense accounts and the paper had become a flabby version of its former self. Furthermore, the world of which it was once the mouthpiece had changed. Between the world wars it still made sense to talk of a ‘working class’ and ‘working class values’ and ‘working class culture’, the Andy Capp world view. It was the world of ‘factory fortnights’ and workingmen’s clubs, when the Labour Party consisted of real socialist rather, as it does today, with vaguely left-of-centre politocrats who regard politics as just another career.

By the Sixties the Mirror, or the Daily Mirror as it still was, was loathed by men such as my father (he told me in all seriousness after Harold Wilson was first elected in 1964 that Britain ‘would be communist within six months’) but its days were numbered. Yes, it was still a successful paper which sold well and made oodles of dosh, but it was by then going through the motions. It was no longer the Daily Mirror, it was playing at being the Daily Mirror. Then, but the early Seventies when The Sun was launched by Rupert Murdoch the decline started. It’s always a bad sign when a newspaper has several proprietors within just a few years but the Mirror did. At one point it was being run by some guy who had cut his business teeth running a building society and knew as much about newspapers as I do about nuclear physics.

A real irony is that the Mirror was first established by Alfred Harmsworth, later known as Lord Northcliffe, in 1903 as a paper for ‘gentlewomen’ and was a nice genteel middle-class paper owned and run by Harmsworth’s brother Lord Rothermere until he sold his controlling interest in 1931 and the new editor took it in a left-wing direction. (The word tabloid gained its modern meaning after Northcliffe told someone that he wanted his new paper, the Daily Mirror, to go down as easily ‘as a tabloid’. This was a reference to a particular kind of headache tablet called a ‘tabloid’ by the guy selling it which he insisted was easier to swallow than conventional tablets. Bet you never knew that, although thinking about it, I might well have written that before in some earlier entry.)

After the chappie who was quite possibly a whizz at running building societies but hopeless at publishing newspapers, the Mirror fell into the hands of the infamous Robert Maxwell (who was, in fact, really called Jan Hoch and originally from Czechoslovakia). And once he had nearly wrecked it it passed into the hands of the Trinity group (I think) and the decline is almost complete. Something similar— a once great newspaper collapsing in on itself on itself and becoming an embarrassing verision of it former proud self — is also happening to the Daily Express which is now owned and run on a shoestring by a pornographer. But that’s another story, it is now way after midnight, I am tired, so if you want to know more along those lines, count me out.

We all had a youth and mine was The Kinks. But even they can do nothing for the PIGS, and the Baader-Meinhof gang throw up a disturbing fact (if it’s true)

We all had our fave bands when we were still in our salad days and life was a roller-coaster ride which seemed beautiful and perfect one minute, dull and dreary the next. In those days 25 was old, 30 was ancient and - as I now know for certain - anyone over 40 was invisible or dead. We were all, each and every one of us, unique, except that, oddly, no one else seemed to realise it. That was in those moments when life was beautiful. When the following moment life was nothing but abject misery of a kind surely no one else had experienced before, ever, I would put on one of my favourite tracks by one of my favourite bands. It was I’m Not Like Everybody Else by The Kinks, and I listened to it again and again and again.


In those long off days The Kinks and The Beatles were my bands, and although in time I went off both, to this day their early stuff is still for me magical. And had I been asked to choose between the two, I would, without hesitation, have plumped for The Kinks as my favourite. The first ‘LP’ I owned was on the long defunct Marble Arch label, one of as far as I can tell several thousand Kinks compilation albums (and it is the sheer number of Kinks compilation albums available which sparked this particular blog entry.) On that album there were around ten songs, and each one was gold: Set Me Free, Where Have All The Good Times Gone, Till The End Of The Day, Tired Of Waiting, A Well-Respected Man, All Day And All Of The Night, Don’t You Fret and You Really Got Me Going (plus a couple of others I can’t remember off-hand): pure gold.

This period came immediately after the first Kinks period when they played R&B (not the R&B now known as R&B, but the R&B then known as R&B if you get my drift) and played debs parties and hunt balls. It was followed by the Sunny Afternoon Years. The first single I ever bought was Dandy, and then I bought the LP Face To Face, which I thought was also gold. I liked the guitar sound. I’ve always been a sucker for guitar sounds, everything from The Kinks Dave Davies to Jo Pass, John Scofield, Dave Fiuczynski, Jimi Hendrix, George Benson, Jeff Beck and any number of other guitarists - give me a guitar band any day, although grunge does fuck all for me, as does heavy metal. Then there was Ray Davies’ voice: most certainly not sweet, but he managed to project all the cynicism, irony and occasional venom I felt, but he could also hold a tune, rather like Donald Fagen and Bob Dylan can despite their somewhat unorthodox voices. The harmonies he and his brother Dave came out with were sublime, in my view far, far better than anything The Beatles or The Beach Boys could produce. Just listen to the harmonies on Waterloo Sunset. And the songs: they were not just funny, but could be very sad, poignant (Little Miss Queen Of Darkness), telling, lyrical (Autumn Almanac), scathing (Plastic Man) and honest.

The last album I went for in a big way was Muswell Hillbillies (Skin And Bone, Demon Alcohol), before they took off - or, I suppose, Ray Davies took off in a direction I didn’t really want to follow them in, for example Schoolboys In Disgrace. I could never see the point of it all.

But it is the compilations which to this day astound me. Ray Davies is undoubtedly and extraordinarily prolific songwriter, but there must be tens if not hundreds of compilations which all, more or less, contain the same songs. I like to think that they had a good business manager who ensure that they get a fair whack of the royalties, but I suspect and rather fear that rights to the songs were sold of early on and someone else is trousering all the moolah from those compilation albums. More’s the pity.

I had another brush with The Kinks when they got their third or fourth wind in the Eighties, but I only bought one album and I can’t even remember what it was called. But nothing, but nothing could top that early stuff (Beautiful Delilah, Long Tall Shorty) and I listen to it to this day.

. . .

Despite Ray Davies’s unfortunate flirtation with a rather theatrical theme, as far as I can see The Kinks never committed the cardinal sin of taking themselves seriously as ‘artists’. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t put their soul and whole being into their work, but there came a point, as far as I am concerned a very shameful point, when rock and pop became respectable, which killed off much of it for me. It became ‘art’ and was treated as ‘art’ by any number of fuckwits writing for the Guardian. Why must everything be intellectualised in that way. John Lennon fell for it, as did Paul McCartney. I don’t think the Rolling Stones did, but then they disappeared up another cul-de-sac, becoming increasingly ordinary despite all the PR hype as ‘the greatest rock ’n roll band in the world. Says who? Well, says their record labels marketing department, and there were plenty of impressionable young idiots to swallow that line. The general standard of guitar playing has improved 1000pc, so that your average pub band plays ten times better than many of the pop professionals (though not necessarily the jazz guitarists of the time, who were, however, being comprehensively ignored by the whole Sixties’s pop phenomenon).

My next fave band was Steely Dan who I ignored for quite a while for the very silly reason that they were cool. I was the left-field type (or thought of myself as the left-field type) who scorned what was ‘cool’ and thought himself even cooler for doing so. Then one day in 1976 I disvovered in, of all places, a bargain bin in a newsagents in Ebbw Vale, where I was working as a reporter, Aja by Steely Dan. It cost a song and had me hooked. I bought all the previous LPs one by one and Gaucho when it came out, followed by Donald Fagen’s first solo album, Nightfly. After that they gave up the ghost for many years. They finally got back together to write songs and came out with Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go, both of which I like, but ... But they, too, now give the impression of taking themselves a little too seriously and I just can’t stomach that.

Then came Prince, but he, too, eventually went off the boil and, sad to say, if you have heard one Prince funk workout of recent times, you have heard quite a few of them. Oh well.

Now to listen to a few more early Kinks tracks. The magic is still there.

. . .

I’ve have stopped ballsing on about the euro and the EU, though not because I am bored. It’s just that the collapse of the euro seems not such a racing certainty that there seems little point to bang on about it. Remember, according to the chap from The Slog (John Ward or Anthony Ward, I can’t quite work out which) March 23 is the day to look out for. But it could all go tits up tomorrow or it might limp on for another six months. The more I consider the whole shambles - Brussels insisting the Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland should starve their people in pursuit of what most now realise was an utterly inconceived project - the more I realise that the one difference between you and me and the idiots who decided to go into politics is that, in some odd way, are a sandwich short of a picnic. I don’t doubt that many of them are quite clever, but I also know that there are even more quite clever people out there to whom it never occurs to go into politics. But I am also quite certain that there is a greater proportion of mediocrities pursuing their destiny in politics than in the secular world. You have probably heard it quoted before, not least quite possibly here, but someone perceptively observed once that ‘politics is Hollywood for ugly people’. And Lord is the euro crisis proving him right.

. . .

I saw a very good film on BBC iPlayer the other night which threw up a very frightening statistic. It was called The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhor Komplex), directed by Uli Edel, and it traced the evolution and development of the gang. I have no idea how accurate the film was in its depiction of the various characters, but if it was accurate, Christ what a bizarre bunch they were. Andreas Baader came across as nothing but a charming, psychopathic, narcissistic idiot without a political thought in his bones who basically got off on the excitement of it all. Ulrike Meinhof had rather more intellectual

backbone but quite how she could make the transition from thoroughly disaffected leftie hack to part of a murderous gang is also bizarre. Gudrun Ensslin came over as a rather hysterical retarded adolescent and Brigitte Mohnhaupt seems to have been yet another psychopath.

All of them seem to have come from middle-class backgrounds and, except for one or two characters who escaped from youth centres, they did not seem to want much (want as in need). There has been and always will be any number of disaffected youth who flirt with the extreme left for a while, but few will make the transition to actually killing people and, furthermore, spend a great deal of time justifying it intellectually.

As I say, I have no way of know just how accurate the film was, or whether it was in some way skewed - the police rank and file didn’t get much of a sympathetic portrayal, although a character played by Bruno Ganz who was apparently top man on the police anti-terrorist side of things did show some intelligence in that he argued that in order to combat the gang, one had to understand what made them tick. But the frightening statistic was that unbelievably amid all the mayhem and murder a reputed one in four of Germans questioned confessed to having some sympathy with the gang. Now that is frightening. Incidentally, there is a very good piece about the film by Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair which you can find here.

. . .

Now here’s a strange thing: courtesy of this blog’s stats feature, I know that in the past 12 hours or so, readership has soared, and one entry in particular - this one – has been getting all the attentention. It can’t be the ongoing (as in going on and on and on) euro crisis involving Greece, because that has never before elicited must attention. That leave my mumblings on The Kinks, Steely Dan, Prince and The Beatles on the one hand and the Baader-Meinhof gang on the other. I have no way of know which it is, but my gut instinct is the Baader-Meinhof idiots. What does that prove? Well, I don’t know, except it would seem to indicate that we all still live bad boys and gals. The stats also indicated that many visitors actually stayed and read the entry rather than find it, take one glance, decided boring, and bugger off again. Odd.

. . .

Later that same day: I now know why this particular entry has attracted an unprecedented number of visits. Mention of The Kinks was picked up by a Kinks fansite and its link was followed to this blog. So it wasn’t after all, as I initially expected, just a surge of interest from several thousand Baader-Meinhof wannabes with murder on their minds looking for a useful website to pick up a couple of tips (‘Disaffected? Spotty? Can’t cut it with the chicks? Want to be a psycho killer with political pretensions like wacky Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin? Here’s how. And don’t bother with cheap, inferior websites - we give you the real lowdown.’).

Incidentally, Anonymous (not, I think, the same Anonymous who has left an earlier comment) has left a comment (below) pointing out that ‘Ray Davies is God and undoubtedly far more important than Jesus Christ’ and ‘what the fuck make me think I am even allowed to speak His name?’

Why for this old fart tweet is still rather uncomfortably close to twit. But don’t worry, you young things, I know my place

For many years after Twitter came into being, I simply could not see the point of it. Tweeters, I thought, were simply irritating neophiles who would sup on shit if they were assured it was the latest, coolest thing to do. It wasn’t that I was behaving as your standard meldrew, hating whatever happened within 20 years of my birth. In fact, I didn’t hate it at all. It was that I simply couldn’t see the point of it. At it’s silliest it is just another PR tool to keep the client in the public eye. Or there is the angle of drumming business, with Robin Lustig trailing an interview with the Devil in tonight’s The World Tonight (he’s a keen tweeter) or Evan Davis twittering away about what this morning’s Today will be doing.

Most certainly there’s an element of neophilia, as evidenced by the disproportionate number of Guardianistas twittering to inform us of their most recent thought. But there is most certainly more to it than that, although for the life of me I can’t put my finger on it. The silliest thing is that I have had a Twitter account for the past few months and have tweeted now and again. But still can’t tell you what the point of tweeting is. And how daft is that? I do it but I don’t know why I do it. Unkind readers might suggest that I have lost the plot, and who might I be to deny it. If I have indeed lost the plot, I would most certainly, by definition, be the last to realise it.

It’s not that tweeting is simply a new technology. The fact that a great many people tweet - and here I really must stress that in the following analysis I am not including those press agents who tweet on their clients behalf - in an odd kind of way signifies a paradigm shift of some kind. It seems to indicate dimension in our conception of how we might relate to others. Now that sounds, or possibly sounds, rather grand, so let me bring it down to earth if possible. I suspect that essentially tweeting is not very new at all. What gives it the impression of novelty is the technology which makes it possible. That is to say if in years and decades and centuries gone by folk were able to proclaim their very opinion to the world, they would most certainly have done so. The difference is that they didn’t have the technology. That reminds me of what someone once said after the first transatlantic cable had been laid and Europe and America were able to communicate telegraphically. ‘Now,’ said someone portentously, ‘London can speak to New York.’ To which someone replied with what to me seems to be the obvious comment: ‘Yes, but does London have anything to say to New York?’

It’s rather the same as tweeting: it’s all find and dandy that we now have the means to trumpet our view and opinions to everyone on the planet with  access to a smartphone or a computer, but it doesn’t necessarily make those views and opinions any the more important or even interesting. Part of me is as yet unconvinced and suspects that it simply boils down to the fact that the larger the crowd able to make a noise, the greater the cacophony. I’ll be more impressed by technological advances such as Twitter and the epistemological shifts they are claimed to bring about when rather fewer people vote in X Factor polls than bother to turn up to cast their vote in national elections. We all have opinions, but unfortunately 99 per cent of us are also as thick as shit.

Dictators v democracy: a (perhaps necessary) clarification. And as things go ever more wrong in Argentina, it begins to fake inflation figures and pick another fight with Old Blighty over the Falklands

After my entry of a few days ago highlighting Peter Hitchens report from Moscow, it occurred to me that I should, perhaps, clarify my view in case it is misinterpreted. The essential point I was trying to make was that everything comes at a price, just as energy cannot be created from nothing, but merely changed from one form to another, or ground gained here must be lost there.


Most certainly I would like to live in a free society, a democracy, and I do. But Britain achieved its freedoms after many centuries of complex evolution. Even the Commons we had at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century was more a gathering of rival gangs of cronies than anything resembling a group which represented the citizens of Britain. The apparently progressive Reform Act of 1832 was, at heart, just a cynical exercise by the ruling class – that is no mere buzz phrase, there really was one – to ensure its survival by allowing the upcoming commercial class to vote. This was done while memories of the French Revolution, which took place uncomfortably close to Britain, were still real for many.

It is, therefore, not just sheer nonsense to claim that democracy can be introduced to countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, is dishonest nonsense. Certainly, they can have a parliament which is elected by universal franchise and most certainly the voters will be glad for the chance to have their say. But there is far more to democracy than holding an election every few years. And it takes just a little more than an edict from Washington for a people to think democratically, for its culture to be so suffused with the principles of democracy that not living in a democracy is quite inconceivable. Democracy demands, at the very least, the rule of law, and where the rule of law is absent, claims that a country is a ‘democracy’ are pretty premature.

By all accounts the rule of law has absent from modern Russia. Certainly, a the level of traffic offences, of course, or petty theft, there is likely to be the usual mechanisms involving the police and the courts, although one does here that corruption among the police is widespread and that is quite possible to bribe one’s way out of trouble. But rule of law most certainly doesn’t exist where the stakes are higher. Any number of businessmen who fell foul of the Russian leadership – for which read Vladimir Putin – suddenly found themselves under lock and key for ‘tax offences’. And until there is a true rule of law, which would, for example allow businessmen and women who feel a contract has not been honoured to go to court for an impartial judgment on the matter, Russia can kiss goodbye to any thoughts of a thriving economy which doesn’t rely on selling off the family silver, or in its case oil and gas.

The trouble with democracies is that they can be messy. When a free vote was held in the Gaze Strip several years, Hamas came to power, an outcome which the West and Israel could well have done without. One of the difficulties slowing down all attempts to resolve the euro crisis is that our democratic principles demand that everyone affected should have their say according to the protocol laid out in a country’s constitution. And it is that delay (which in the case of the euro will most certainly lead to disaster) which is the price we pay for living in a democracy.

Conversely, in countries led by a ‘strong man’ there is, apparently, far more order. Things happen far faster (although the country is not necessarily more efficient as a result), for the simple reason that no one need be consulted. Wise ‘strong men’ ensure that the majority of their nations people life in comfort and have no immediate cause to get uppity and question the arrangement. Those at the bottom of the pile, of course, are kept in check by terror and sheer brutality.

My analysis is, of course, broad brush and each country will have its own local variations on the two themes. But I feel my central point still holds: you pays your money and you makes your choice. Opt for freedom and the rule of law and put up with any number of irritations, delays, petty differences and the like. Opt for a more totalitarian state and, if you watch your Ps and Qs life need not be too bad. But you have to watch what you say.

There’s the story of the dog who arrived at the Ukrainian/Russian border and demanded to be let into Russia. The amazed border guard told him that he got many dogs coming the other way, but he was the first actually wanting to leave the Ukraine.
‘Why do you want to go to Russia?’ he asked.
‘Because I’m fed up with going hungry every day,’ the dog told him. So he was let through.

The dog was back a week later.
‘I thought you were fed up with going hungry in the Ukrained,’ the border guard told him.
‘I was said the dog, and I shall be hungry again. But at least I can bark in the Ukraine.’

. . .

No one would or could, I think, claim the Economist is sensationalist, although almost every fourth issue contains an apology of some kind or another, so it might even gain a certain reputations among those who care about these things as being a maverick. It does often take an oddly high-handed tone as in: ‘The world is coming to an end: here’s how to stop that happening’, and my brother once suggested that the line it would take in the issue which appeared after Armageddon would be: ‘Well, the worst is over. What lessons can be learnt.’ But as a rule it is surely classed as one of the world’s more ‘boring’ newspapers and magazine (despite is glossy, A4 format, it likes to call itself a ‘newspaper’) along with the FT, the FAZ, Die Zeit, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Actually, they are anything but boring, but that, at least, would seem to be how they are regarded by the mass of people who would prefer to watch a soap opera than think.
One of the Economist’s features at the back of the magazine (‘back of the book’ is the newspaper jargon to this day I have never been able to get used to, though I couldn’t tell you why) are loads of economic data. This is very interesting stuff, I’m sure, if you understand it, but I don’t (understand the data, though I do many of the issues) so I have not spent more than eight seconds reading that section since I started reading the Economist.
Part of that data is the rates of inflation from around the world, and last week the Economist announced would no longer be publishing the official Argentine inflation figures, but would still publish relevant data from private sources. Why not? Well, because as far as the Economist is concerned, they they are thoroughly phoney: whereas Argentina claims inflation is running at around 8/9 pc, private sources reckon it is well above 20 pc. Remember, Argentine pulled the plug on all is debtors and defaulted a few years ago, so it has form.
When official figures are fake (as we can now only suppose they are), the obvious conclusion is that the economy is in a terrible state, and has been for some time. In recent months, Argentina has also become increasingly bellicose about what they like to call the Malvinas but which we all know are really called the Falkland Islands. This is no flash in the pan and it has already persuaded neighbouring countries to deny access to British flights and  only yesterday a cruise ship was unexpectedly and without notice turned away from the Argentine port it was heading for. Things are going wrong domestically, so external trouble is created to take the restless citizens’ minds off matters: a strategy as old as the hills.

. . .

It is just before 9am. Just outside my brother’s flat in London where I sleep when I come to work is a primary school. By this time I am usually up and gone to work (a short 20-minute walk away in Kensington) but occasionally I am still here. And as the young children arrive for school, they gather in the playground and play until the bell is rung to summon them in. And from around 8.45 until just before 9, there is a crescendo of young shouts, young shrieks, young calls and all the other noise young innocents make when they are playing with each other. For me, it is one of the most delightful (and when I am in a certain mood, most moving) sounds on earth: children playing. I just love it.

A ‘strong man’ or ‘democracy’? Peter Hitchens sticks his neck out (again). And three cheers for a man who refuses to play the game

Oh, if everything in life were as simple as it was when you were five, supper at 5pm, followed by bath, story and bed. We who are no longer six know what lies in store for all innocent five-year-olds. Most of us survive into and beyond adulthood more or less painlessly, learning and adopting along the way into our dotage various strategies which will make the transition from birth to death a little easier. Others, of course, have shitty lives. But what we all have in common is that for three, four or five years we were utterly innocent of the ways of the world.

I mention this innocence because, ironically, as we grow older, it is what lingers longest if life is reasonably kind to us. The usual knocks and bumps meted out to us as we hit 20, then 30, then 40, then 50 might hurt, but at least they teach us a little and the personal innocence diminishes by the year. But there is another kind of innocence which no amount of experience seems to be able to - well, I was going to write ‘cure’, but even for me that would seem cynical beyond imperatives which dictate the attitudes of a hack writing a blog. So I will settle for ameliorate. Often that innocence, or some aspect of it, is necessary if the kind of idealism which fuels the anger of the young is to survive.

For us old fogeys youthful protest - for a freer country, against this, that or t’other dictatorship, for lower college fees, the list of what the young want to protest against is endless - might often elicit a sigh of resignation, but without that youthful idealism, are sighs would, sooner or later, come a lot thicker and a lot faster. We might despair that ‘the young’ rarely seem to wash, listen to ‘awful music’, drink far too much for their own good, and never seem to get a good night’s sleep, but at the end of the day they are doing us all a very big favour. And it mainly down to the fact that more or less each and every one of them is as innocent as the driven snow.

The innocence which keeps the world alive occurred to me when I came across a piece by a certain Peter Hitchens in today’s Daily Mail. Peter, the brother of Christopher who died recently, prides himself on being right-wing. And there is nothing wrong with that. Whenever guys like Peter Hitchens are derided for their political views, I always reflect on just how intolerant are a bunch which regards tolerance as one of the cornerstones of its philosophy life. The irony is, of course, that they tolerate only what they sanction. Views which are wholly at odds with their own are not to be tolerated.

So Peter Hitchens is something of a rarity in our liberal society: a man utterly at odds with established thinking, but one who is not insane, evil or stupid. That Hitchens (I shall now drop his first name because it should be obvious that I am talking about Peter not the late Christopher) is not a member of the great liberal consensus is important because as far as I am concerned he is a vital counter-balance to a great deal of woolly thinking.

In his piece today, which you can find here, he is skating on thin ice. But that is something he always does anyway, as he is rather more inclined to speak his mind than many another commentator. Next week, Russia goes to the polls to choose a successor to President Dmitry Medvedev and his predecessor, mentor and prime minister Vladimir Putin seems like a shoo-in. And Hitchens, who worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow for two years in the dying days of the Soviet regime, is backing Putin.

The headline to his piece in the Mail on Sunday will give a flavour of what he writes and works well as a neat summary: ‘If not Putin, who? It’s because I love my own country that I can see

A Russian democrat. He might even be a liberal
the point of this sinister tyrant who so ruthlessly stands up for Russia.’ You can see why I describe him as skating on thin ice. There were surely gasps of disbelief around Britain when many opened their Mail on Sunday or logged onto the Mailonline website and saw what Hitchens was writing.

I trust readers overcame their horror and went on to read what Hitchens writes, because I think he makes some very good points. Were one to be very unfair, and, it has to be said, dishonest, his thesis could be described as: ‘What Russia now needs is a strong man’. But he is not actually saying that, and it should be obvious to all but the dullest that Hitchens values freedom and the rule of law. He is not urging the Russia should once again be ruled by a dictator, but warning (yet again, as it happens, it is more or less the leitmotif of his journalism) that not only is a certain kind of liberalism rather less effective than it might consider itself to be, but that it can often prove to be quite dangerous. The innocents of this world will cry out: Russia/Libya/Syria/Burma and the rest must become democratic. To which I give two cheers. But the rather less innocent, those who have been scarred by life a little will also know that it is rarely that simple and even more rarely that neat.

In short there is a dilemma: neither arrangement is perfect (and the naive search for perfection has caused a lot of misery). A ‘strong man’ might well ensure that the lights turn on when you want them to, that food is in ready supply and that, generally, order is predominant. But you have to be very careful what you say, and the rule of law is rather fragile. In a ‘democratic state’ you are free to express your thoughts and feelings and, in theory, are protected by the rule of law, and that will keep the idealists happy. But such states are often chaotic, especially when they are in the throes of transition from a dictatorship to a democracy.

Don’t forget that for all our huffing and puffing and rather smug pride about living in a stable democracy, it took centuries of political evolution to get here, and the road could, at times, be very bloody indeed. And in the United States, which can, at times, be the most insufferably smug of all the smug democratic states, racism, poverty and unemployment make life extremely unpleasant for a substantial minority. Yes, they are free to vote for whoever they want, but if you are being evicted, you’re hungry or you’ve fallen ill and can’t afford health insurance, that freedom slips rather lower on your list of priorities. And, another irony, in a democracy too many citizens take their freedoms for granted: in the 2008 presidential election only six out of ten voters bothered to go to the polls. That’s not bad, I hear you say. Perhaps, but it’s not good either.

Here I must confess to a certain cowardice. I like to make out that I am neutral, neither proposing nor opposing ideas. When I write above of the eternal dilemma between, very broadly, a ‘strong man’ who brings stability and a ‘democracy’ in which too much tends to chaos, you will notice that I don’t come down on one side or another, which would be in keeping with my ‘neutrality’. I like to present myself as solely describing the dilemma. But therein lies my cowardice: at the end of the day none of us is ‘neutral’. All of us must make a choice. But we should also be fully aware of the consequences of that choice. That is one reason - there are many others - why life is just so much sweeter for a five-year-old. The trouble is none of us remains five for longer than a year.

. . .

Peter Hitchens is an interesting cove. Like his brother Christopher, he was a member of the hard left in his salad days, but quite soon drifted to the right of centre. Christopher did the same (though he would have denied it). There was a terrible sibling rivalry between the two, which began, according to Christopher, when Peter was born. Pyschologists could have a field day sorted out the roots of it all, but then psychologists could have a field day delving into the psyche of each and every one of us, and furthermore, as it quite a lucrative profession, at least, for private practitioners, psychologists treat themselves to as many field days as they possibly can.
As far as I can tell, Peter is a one-off. There are swivel-eyed, proudly right-wing Englishmen and women (and the women are twice as bloodthirsty as the men) who demand the return of capital punishment, flogging, the deportation of ‘immigrants’ (the irony being, of course, that we are all the descendants of ‘immigrants’ and insist to the point of apoplexy that garlic has no place whatsoever in an English kitchen. Peter is not one of these. In fact, I am often quite surprised that he calls himself ‘right-wing’. He seems to me less interested in the politics and rather more interested in highlighting the hypocrisy and cant which plays such and important part in our lives. I find I agree with a great deal of what he says, and I most certainly do not regard myself as right-wing.


His one failing might be that given we have to deal with the hand we are dealt, he is rather unworldy. For example, the Conservative Party under David Cameron has become as insufferably right-on as Labour and the Liberals. The point is that they really have no choice: no politician in his or her right mind would these days refuse to sing the praises of ‘green policies’ and ensuring ‘sustainability’ even though privately they think it’s all a load of cock. If you take part in the game, you are obliged to play the game. What I like about Peter is that he resolutely and honestly refuses point-blank to ‘play the game’.