Think 2024 was bad? Breaking news: 2025 could get a lot worse if Lady Luck doesn’t smile on the world. And from what I hear Lady Luck has taken the decade off

There was a comment by someone or other in one of the Times Radio interviews (many of which are available on Youtube) which, for me, sums up why after 80 years of comparative peace, the world might now be in for a colossal and very unpleasant shake-up.

Peace? Well, the relevant word above is ‘comparative’, and certainly when we think of the Congo, Libya, Vietnam, Biafra, Malaya, Cyprus, Korea, the Gulf and so on, there has been precious little peace for those living ‘locally’ in these past 80 years.

But, ‘locally’ is the second relevant word: however awful each war was, it was always ‘local.

What the Times Radio interviewee (I think it was Phillip Ingram) pointed out was that the huge danger facing the world – except, possibly, South America which tends go its own merry way, though it, too, has its troubles – is that the current crop of ‘local’ danger hotspots might ‘merge into one global hotspot’ (though cv above South America).

What do we have? Well, as far as war is concerned there is, at present, Ukraine and the Middle East. But a growing danger is the indisputable rise of and the indisputable growing support for the the far-right in Europe: in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and, if Nige’s Reform does hi-jack the Tory Party much as a virus can hi-jack a body, contentiously even Britain.

Hungary already has it’s own – in his own cynical words – ‘illiberal democrat’ in Viktor Orban (below right with his pal Vladimir Putin). Slovakia and Georgia are heading down that road, and there is active, if as yet reasonably

dormant and ineffective, far-rightism in Italy, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Poland.

One of the attractions of those far-rightists for the many ‘ordinary voter’ is that they are vociferously against, not just immigration, but immigrants who have already settled in their countries. And like all authoritarians those far-rightists like to play on ‘people’s fears’.

I have the usual and necessary respect for my fellow individuals, but something happens to individuals when they coagulate into ever larger groups: they become very stupid.

To be blunt, I have no respect at all for ‘the people’ or as it all too often manifests itself ‘the mob’. Sadly, ‘the mob’ thinks in monochrome – if it thinks at all – and is far too easily led. Furthermore, ‘the people’ is almost wholly an artificial construct which can be used to mean pretty much whatever one likes depending one what you are selling.

More obvious are the dangers in the Middle East: Iran is domestic pressure from a younger generation fed up with the old ’uns and its stooges in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza are getting their comeuppance. We do not have a clue how matters will pan out in Syria.  None.

 

And backed into a corner, Iran might choose to act is desperate ways. It does not, we think, yet have a working nuclear bomb, but it does have the necessary for a dirty bomb.

Furthermore there is the problem of Israel or – a far better way of putting it and more to the point – of its government of right-wingers, far-right-wingers and monsters.

I have and will not make a secret of my initial admiration for how Israel stood up for itself but since October 2023 increasingly Netanyahu (below right) has completely lost it: there’s ‘standing up for yourself’ and ‘how you stand up for yourself’, and the government – which must be distinguished from the people of Israel and, most

pertinently ‘the Jews – long, long, long ago overstepped the mark. Morally it is now on the same level as Hamas.

Putin, too, is in a corner, to put it mildly. And as I’m sure we have all heard over these past few years from someone or other, when in a corner Vlad gets ever more dangerous: he does NOT like giving up and it might seem now he has very little to lose.

Even if ‘after talks’ (and why should Ukraine surrender territory?) ‘the war ends’ that will not be the end of the troubles he will face by any measure.

Finally, there is Trump: the soft-bellied, blinkered, cuddly liberals out there – of which I am usually one, by the way – like to preach that Donny ‘likes to shake things up, he ‘likes to see how others react’, he ‘won’t do most of the things he has promised to do’ and so on. Really?

That thinking is flawed if only because it assumes Trump is rational, that he has an understanding of geopolitics, that he actually does understand economics and does not really believe his own barfly bore interpretations of ‘how things work’. I suggest and fear that he does not.

Ingram (if it was he) also pointed out that if the endgame in Ukraine sees the conflict ending with Putin and Russia acquiring a sizeable chunk of the south-east of the country, there might be ‘concern’ in the West, but after a few months it will die down. As the Arabs say, the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

His point was that Xi Jinping (below) might make the following calculation: take Taiwan now in the aftermath of attention being on the ‘war ending in Ukraine’, settle for the resultant global uproar and possibly hit to China’s

economy but that eventually ‘the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on’.

If Xi did move on Taiwan, what would America do? Trump has vowed he does not want to get involved in any more ‘foreign wars’ and might pass as ‘well, that’s Taiwan’s problem’.

Even far brighter folk in the US than Donny might counsel caution about getting involved as they would not know what outcome they are seeking – what’s in it for America? And Xi will know that and it will be part of his calculations.

Thus 2025 might seem to be taking on a rather bleaker hue than did previous years, however bleak the hue was in previous years.

As Ingram says ‘things are bad, but they would get a damn sight worse if all those ‘local problems’ merged into on big problem, rather was happened in the 1930s.

Well, well, well – a genius writes! Shame that it took until 2135 for the fucking world to catch on (by which time he was long dead)! And it’s not as though I didn’t do my fucking best to alert them! Fuckwits! What CAN you do!

In the previous post I suggested that, broadly, those who insist they ‘write only for themselves’ are talking bollocks. However, despite my apparent Attila the Hun persona, I do have a smidgin of ‘the liberal’ in my make-up (and stop sniggering at the back!) and I am obliged to concede that, yes, some folk do ‘write only for themselves’. Why, I don’t know, but I must accept that occasionally there are some and there is no faux modesty at play.

For example, my aunt, Ann Cipriani, (who is my stepmother’s sister but I regard her as an aunt) wrote short stories and poems ‘only for herself’ and knowing her, I believe that is true, or better, almost true. NB She chose for herself the pseudonym Annie Leary if you do look up here stories and poems.

What I mean by that is that a year or two ago she allowed me to have printed up a slim volume of four of her short stories and a second volume of several of her poems. If you do come across this blog – and again more later – you can find them here: the stories and the poems.

The printing was done by Amazon’s excellent KDP service which I have also used. It is ‘print on demand’ service which means that the books they print are all, as part of the printing process, listed on the Amazon websites (and worldwide if you ask them to so list them). That means that if you buy a book, that copy or copies of it are printed to order, i.e. there is not a stock of books.

I have used the service several times to have printed (and are thus ‘for sale’) a short novel, four volumes of verse, five volumes of short stories and my ‘magnum opus’ The Hemingway Enigma: How did that fraud finagle his status to become for many years, and possibly still, as ‘one of the greatest writers of the 2oth century?

That is not the title of the book (the true title is The Hemingway Enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame?) but it will give you a taste of my views).

But now to get back on track: I don’t just ‘write for myself’. However, despite having what I produce printed by Amazon’s KDP and put on sale ‘worldwide’ (fancy!), it is very, very, very unlikely to be read by anyone else despite my pious hopes and drams. And perhaps writing that is even overstating the case.

However, I do write to be read. As far as I am concerned, and to use the example I always use, cooks prepare meals to be eaten by others and writers write prose or verse to be read by others (and some of us, myself included and, as here, despite the preamble in the previous post) write blogs to be read.

You reading this – if anyone actually does come across it, might now be puzzled: didn’t I previously suggest that this was a ‘private blog’, not for anyone else’s eyes? Well, to be very clear and wholly unambiguous so there is not chance of any confusion: yes and no.

Yes, in as far as the posts relating to my private thoughts about family and friends are concerned, but most certainly no when it comes to this and subsequent entries are in play. THIS entry – even the version which appears in my ‘private blog’ – is fully intended to be read! And not just read, but admired and quoted and recommended and passed on! So do that now! The problem is, of course, that here being part of my ‘private blog’, the chances of anyone just happening across this are as close to none at all as it is possible to come.

As I have started drinking rum ’n Coke as I write this (well, actually Pepsi not Coke, but let’s not get anal) and have had rather a lot of ‘small ones’ to avoid becoming unsober, it is rather running away with me, but what the hell.

Anyway, this will be the last post I shall double up in that way, that is post on both blogs, from now, so enjoy it while you can. And to those reading this entry on my ‘main blog’, I shall make damn sure you cannot find the ‘private blog’.

. . .

The whole point of this post is that I, who does not ‘write for himself’, but most certainly ‘writes for others’, finds it quite useful to write down my thoughts by way of clarifying them when trying to think stuff out. For me that works and I don’t know why. And that is what I shall be doing from now on.

I began my main blog as a ‘diary’ at some point in the early 1980s (fucking more than 40 years ago! Damn, am I ‘getting old’? Yes, Ed). I did so as someone who has ‘wanted to write’ since I was 16 and had showed ‘a poem’ to a kind English teacher at my school. By the way, I far prefer call what some refer to as ‘poetry’ as ‘verse’.

This was at the Oratory School and the teacher was ‘Timmy’ Hinds, who did not take me for English, however, and was nicknamed C.T.S. Hinds because he kept posting Roman Catholic tracts. He read the poem and advised me to ‘carry on’. In fact, he simply did 

In fact, he simply did what all adults should do: encourage the young in whatever they are attempting, but being very young and a little stupid, I misinterpreted what he had told me as ‘frankly, Powell, you are a literary genius!’ and more or less believed that for the next 40 years until I, er, sobered up a little. 

And I believed it religiously despite writing next to nothing in those 40 years. It was not completely nothing, but I am certain that what I did write was in no way worth attention.

At some point in the early 1980s, I began reading East Of Eden (of which I can remember nothing) and somehow and somewhere (perhaps in the publisher’s introduction) I came across the fact that Steinbeck was having an attack of ‘writer’s block’ and found it difficult to start writing in the mornings.

So his publisher’s editor gave him a hard-back journal and advised him to try to get started by writing a short diary entry on the left-hand page to exercise his ‘writing muscles’ – my phrase, not the editor’s – and then to carry on writing his novel once he had ‘warmed up’ – again, my phrase.

Being very conscious that I was writing fuck-all for a guy who thought himself to be a ‘literary genius’, I decided that if I did the same, I might also start writing. Well, I bought myself a hardback A4 ledger and did start ‘keeping a diary’, but did I start ‘writing fiction’? What do you think?

As it happens I now have about ten or more of those A4 ledgers and carried on writing in them until I married in 1995, about 12 years later.

(NB My handwriting is so appalling I can very often not make out what I have written. And more to the point, I haven’t tried to read any of those diary ledgers, which, anyway doubled up as commonplace books as a dialy account of stool motions of every kind don’t much interest me and I can’t think mine will interest man others.)

The blog, my main blog that is, began as a kind of ‘son of diary’. But the rum has got to me and I am back off the track, so let me start again.

. . .

Those who have read my ‘main blog’ (from now on referred to without the rather coy quote marks) will know that I have already written ‘a novel’ and have had it printed and published by Amazon. Furthermore, I have plugged it rather a lot in my blog as well as the volumes of verse and short story collections, but so far no one has taken the hint and bought any them.

I am rather proud of that novel, to be honest. I do believe that I tried to do in writing it succeeded though it is perhaps not what one might expect and we should also bear in mind – and I do – the very wise and useful observation that

And for Christ’s sake don’t persuade yourself you are the exception, or even try to persuade yourself. Do yourself a big favour and accept that the observation is true.

Anyway, for several reasons I have not tried to get a publisher to accept it, and there are several reasons for that, one of which is that I hate loathe being obliged to ‘sell’ myself and always made a total fuck-up of it when I have tried.

However, what also occurred to me is the ‘second novel / second album’ dilemma, assuming, of course that the ‘first novel / first album’ was ‘a success’. So I thought that before I try my luck hawking that first novel around ‘the publishers’, I would have a second novel at the ready to be supplied as and when. And writing that second novel is what I am now engaged in and what this post is all about.

. . .

But here I shall end this particular entry as the rum ’n Pepsi is now getting to me a little and I want to go upstairs and bang away on my acoustic guitar. But don’t worry, more to come tho’ from now on only on my ‘private’ blog (and those fucking coy quote marks again).

Pip, pip!

Face it, America, you have finally fucked yourself

I am baffled. Although I am ‘merely’ a Brit and some might feel I am not at all qualified to criticise America, I’m going to do so anyway. Because I am baffled, so why not.

I pretty much have only yer average layman’s knowledge to the late 18th-century independence struggle, culminating in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, but I’m sure the few facts I know are pretty correct.

I have long given up on dutifully swallowing the myth that good, true and honest colonial British subjects – as then they still were – rebelled because they did not want ‘taxation without representation’ or some such.

Similarly, I have long stopped believing, as we are intended and expected to do, that the aim of the rebellion was to promote ‘liberty for all and universal happiness’.

From where I sit, the essence of the rebellion was a power struggle between the landowners based in ‘the American colonies’ and those landowners sitting in their estates back in ‘the old country’.

The colonial British landowners simply wanted more of the action: and they finally got it and have not relinquished their grip one little bit since. As the French so pertinently say ‘plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose’.

The ordinary ‘colonial Brits’ – the indentured folk, the servants, the labouring classes, and the otherwise disadvantaged – felt they really didn’t have a dog in that particular fight: if you are at the end of the broom being swept willy-nilly this way and that, you really don’t give a flying fuck who is doing the sweeping, whether it is a rich Brit overseas or local colonial Brit.

And they were not too keen on risking their lives in an ‘independence’ fight from which they would not at all benefit. Hence the need for the, albeit, limited conscription the rebel leaders often felt was necessary to drum up fighting men.

Granted that all nations have national myths which they cherish beyond any possible reason: we Brits do (that the world envies us and our institutions), the French do (that they are a nation of intellectuals), the Germans do (that they know best, always) and you Americans do.

So it doesn’t matter whether or not I believe the United States genesis account. It doesn’t even matter whether or not it is true, completely false, partly true and partly false or anything in between.

Only one thing matters: that it is believed. The Roman satirical poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, known as Martial hit the nail on the head when he wrote ‘It is not he who forms idols in gold or marble that makes them gods, but he who kneels before them’.

And to this day Americans whether Democrat or Republican, gay or straight, old family or immigrant-descended kneel before the myth and therey thus make it ‘real’. Shit, even black Americans, at least those with ‘aspirations’, feel obliged to ‘take the knee’ and salute the flag in spite of the unspeakable horrors afflicted their forefathers and even parents until very recent times.

How dare someone who is not American so rudely criticise the United States? Perhaps I should inform you who have so far not heard and remind you who have that no country on the planet regards itself as ‘the second-greatest nation on Earth!’

Sadly, given the irony implicit in that observation there might well be some who simply do not even understand the point it makes. And that would be an irony in itself.

I cannot square the notion that the much-vaunted ‘land of the free’ which has a total population of 335 million also has 1.8 million of its people in jail – a higher rate of incarceration than ‘Red’ China. China has a a total population at 1,400 million – four times as big – but ‘just’ 1.69 million under lock and key. Fancy.

For many Americans it would seem the ‘American Dream’ is not the usual one but simply to stay out of jail for as long as possible. And in a country where not using a designated road-crossing but ‘jay-walking’ can get you banged up, that might often be a tall order.

So far many, if not most, of you will think this is just another bloody lefty Brit on his high horse sounding off.

Well, first of all I am not ‘lefty’. Secondly, I am simply repeating a number of facts about the US which puzzle me a great deal. And one or two of those facts are really bizarre given the mythical genesis of the US, not least the US president’s right to pardon offenders.

Worse still, it seems to me to be very obvious that not all US citizens are ‘equal before the law’. That, too, is a myth.

Even those of you here who have by now come to loathe me and my ramblings above might agree that one Donald J Trump, an adjudged rapist, a convicted fraudster and a suspected insurrectionist and a man who – if the guilty

 

pleas of three co-conspirators are to be believed – attempted to rig the 2020 election result in Georgia and, finally, who finally stole any number of secret government documents, is now above the law.

You might disagree, but in your hearts you know he is: Trump has got away with it.

Even if he is as innocent as a newborn lamb of insurrection, alleged election rigging and theft, the American people will now no longer be able to find out: he will not come to trial.

The great United States myth you guys subscribe to includes that you were fighting to ‘free yourself from the yoke of the English crown’ and rid yourself of fealty to a king ‘who was above the law’. Well, face it, ladies and gentlemen, in the past 249 years you haven’t done that at all: all you have done is, in effect, created your bloody own ‘monarch’.

In 2024 the president can pretty much do what the fuck he likes – just as English monarchs could do what the fuck they liked until we chopped off head of one of them in January 1649, 375 years ago as a way of saying ‘not any more, matey!’

You Yanks adore our colourful pageantry at ‘royal’ weddings, trooping of the colour and state opening of Parliament. So you come up with your own ‘colourful pageantry’ – a 20-vehicle calvacade of armoured cars every time your prezzy ventures out and a pukey reverence for ‘Mr President’ that would nauseate even a hardened Brit sycophant.

What you don’t seem to realise is that we know all our pageantry is just for show, pure make-believe, pure colourful bullshit. But yours isn’t.

Face it: you have created your own king. And that process has involved the slow, slow, slow corrosion of those supposed ‘patriotic’ ideals before which you kneel and worship.

Granted that all – or perhaps only many – of you reading this wouldn’t piss on Trump if he were on fire. But you all still carry some of the blame for American creating King Donald I. Your sin: you took your eye off the ball. Your second sin? You now believe your own bullshit.

Because that corrosive process occurred of several decades, possibly over a century, it cannot and will not be rectified at all soon. And realising this, when I’ve had a couple, often about this time of day (18.02 as it happens), I become a little maudlin and believe that after almost 80 years of comparative peace and prosperity in the Western world, it will, over the coming decades, be ‘all change’.

Mass migration not experienced for centuries will be one catalyst for that change, certainly, and the impact it will have on trade relations.

But, in my cups, I also fear that after almost 400 years the ‘United States’ will gradually become rather less ‘united’, that the pressures it faces from the undemocratic inclinations of ‘King Donald I’ will be too much for some states, especially the ‘liberal ones’: why would New England any longer want to share a bed with Arizona or Texas of the loons in the North-West mountains?

On the other hand, out of my cups – so to speak – I think it’ll be fine, that that is all tosh, stuff ’n nonsense. But as someone who has increasingly read a lot of history these past few years I am these days less inclined to take much for granted, even when I suffer from a bout of optimism.

Would anyone in the mid-1980s have taken someone seriously who insisted that within four years the Soviet ‘empire’ would be no more. You get one guess, but you would be wrong. He or she would be sent off with a flea in their ear and told to stop being so silly. The US slowly fall apart? You think?

Now for another drink and hope that Donald fucking Trump really is just a bad dream.

This post is dedicated to reader John OC and the millions of other MAGA morons who have fallen for Donald J Trump’s bullshit

Yesterday I posted a dire warning about what Donny Trump’s presidency will mean not just for America but, given the size of of the US economy, the world. In response reader ‘John OC’ took me to task and commented

‘Wow - such a rant. Thanks for reminding me to come back to you on your
superb TDS rant last week. Was thrilled with the result last night’.

Well, to that all I can respond is ‘sucker’. But time will tell what a disaster Trump will be, given his economic naivety, his ultra-short attention span, his narcissism, his fatal flaw in believing his own bullshit.

Readers such as ‘John OC’ who were ‘thrilled’ by the election result will be crying into their beer with a year or two when Trump manages to make inflation soar again, millions are made unemployed and Trump manifest health problems – why are your afraid of releasing your medical records, Donny? – make him just a figurehead for the crooks and right-wing thugs such as Musk and Thiel who wanted him in the White House.

NB First of all the global covid epidemic, soon followed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine sparked global inflation – as in throughout the world not just America – and as such it was beyond the control of any government.

The problem with inflation is that its effects lad. So although it is right down again everywhere, prices are still high and that has fooled cretins like ‘John OC’. Don’t believe me? Well, take a look. This chart (below) showing US inflation over the past five years is provided by YCharts.

But morons like ‘John OC’ and his fellow MAGA suckers aren’t interested in ‘detail’ and ‘facts’ and they take the view, rather like six-year-old children that if a ‘fact’ doesn’t suit them it is ‘fake news’.

Remember, it’s all very well for ‘John OC’ to sneer at what he calls my ‘rant’ but he conveniently forgets the ranting is orange pin-up is a master of: take time out to listen to any of Donny’s speeches to see and hear for yourselves.

Morons like ‘John OC’ prefer to cosy bedside story, cut kittens and kindly fairy godmothers and all the other bullshit Trump provides for them for the real world.

The writer H L Mencken is supposed to have observed (though he probably picked it up somewhere) that

Nobody ever went broke underestimating
the intelligence of the American people

Trump has now proved just how true that is.

MAGA suckers, you will have no one to blame but yourselves

We have a saying in Britain, ‘Turkeys don’t vote for an early Christmas. To adapt if for American readers (and for the sake of those such as ‘John OC’ I shall use BIG LETTERS)

Turkeys don’t vote for an early Thanksgiving.

The problem now facing the US is that 72,641,564 of the nation’s voters have done just that.

PS Get a good night’s sleep, y’all, you’re gonna need it.

Thanks a bunch, America, you have now fucked up the world for the rest of us: are you guys even sane? Trump? This is not a party trick? Dear soul!

Although I’m merely an interested Brit addressing Americans, PLEASE be assured that despite what some might think when reading the following, it is NOT and is NOT intended as ‘anti-American’.

As a friend, a former Brit now a US citizen will confirm, there is unfortunately among ‘the left’ in Britain (to which I don’t count myself although I am in sympathy with many of its policies) a marked knee-jerk anti-Americanism and not only do I deplore it, I despise it.

Such thinking is sadly not unusual, but as far as I am concerned it is intellectually on the low level of MAGA thinking. So I repeat, please consider carefully what I write in the following.

As for this headline, taken from today’s Guardian, to do what, fuck up the US? Whatever his backers might like to believe, or better might like the voters to believe, Donny is economically illiterate, his ‘business success’ was

nothing but TV marketing hype and he is now immune from criminal prosecution for ‘presidential acts’.

Given the MAGA top-heavy Supreme Court, every dodgy decision Donny takes such as pardoning himself of his fraud conviction will be ruled a ‘presidential act’, and protests will get nowhere now that MAGA also control the legislature.

Such a ‘presidential act’ will take minutes to be put into practice but months if not years to be challenged. Yet a majority in the US seem quite happy with such a state of affairs. So much for ‘the world’s leading democracy’.

Also remember that as part of the legal argy-bargy that played out before the Supreme Court in the run-up to its ‘immunity’ ruling, it was admitted that even murdering a political opponent would be legal if it is ‘a presidential act’. Will Donny be that stupid?

Well, don’t bank on him not being that stupid, though he might well pull up short and simply – as he repeatedly threatened to do – jail those who opposed him. Doing so was a key part of the 1930s euro-fascist rulebook and Stalin and his ‘socialist’ fellow leaders also found it useful.

RIP Navalny, first jailed then murdered – watch out Dubya Bush, Liz Cheney, Mark Milley and the rest of those patriotic Republicans who had the guts to call out Trump for the utter fake that he is.

Judging by almost all of the comments made on Truthsocial by MAGA men and women, the US which has just elected as its next president an ineffably nasty sociopath and it can no longer boast that it is the ‘leader of the free world’.

That was fatuous claim at the best of times – the genocide of several million native Americans and the continuation of semi-official racism until about 60 years ago gives the lie to all of that.

More recently there were the stalinist HUAAC hearings led by Senator Joe McCarthy, ironically billed as ‘anti-communist’. And Joe’s main henchman was one Roy Cohn.

Cohn – a closet gay who blackmailed and denounced other closet gays – later went on to become young Donald Trump’s ‘mentor’, and taught him always to ‘attack, attack, attack’, ‘deny everything, admit nothing’ and ‘always claim victory, never admit defeat’, lessons Donny learnt well and which he applied again and again.

We might also care to recall America’s incessant tendency to manufacture ‘popular uprisings’ to topple democratically elected governments in nations which showed even the slightest indication of becoming less ‘friendly‘ to US business interests.

This was all done, nominally, ‘to protect democracy’. Some very cock-eyed thinking takes place there if we take the claim seriously, but of course we don’t.

Look up the coup In Iran in 1953 when the US covertly help to topple – with British help – the democratic government that had just nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company after it refused to open its books to confirm whether it was paying agreed royalties to Iran.

A year later, in Guatemala, the US created a ‘local’ militia to topple the government that had taken over unused United Fruit Company land for use by landless and very poor peasants and installed a more ‘US-friendly’ dictator.

The Vietnam War disaster is another case in point where America was only interested in ‘helping’ if its interests are in danger.

With Trump back in charge – and remember, this is a man who has no scruples, not principles (least of all Republican), is considered by pretty much all sane Republicans as a total potential disaster and a moron which is why so many of them backed Harris for president – that kind of global bullying is sure to make a comeback. Ukraine – nice knowing you, shame how it all turned out through no fault of your own.

Trump will have not boundaries, not checks, not impartial courts and no independent legislature to keep an eye on him. How’s that for a functioning democracy?

He will be free, courtesy of his ‘presidential immunity’ to go after and eliminate in one way of another all those who ‘did not support him’ – and he will do so as he has assure the world he will.

So America, remember this: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

You have largely had your years in the sun, America, though certainly not for those of you who were black, believed in unions and social democracy, welfare for the worst off and so on. But those years might now be drawing to a close.

Changes in history are rarely dramatic – though some are – and take years to gestate, but we might – and I merely say might – be witnessing the slow dissipation of ‘the Union’.

The well-known Chinese curse is ‘May you live in interesting times’. Well, they are now getting more interesting. At may age – 75 in two weeks – I might not make it to see them become rather less interesting again.

Might a new American civil war break out – irrespective of who wins on Novmeber 5, 2024? Guess who's the wild card? What the Orange Jesus himeself, Donald John Trump

Over the years I have joked about my age, pretending to be over 90 or even over 100. Were someone else to do that, this cynic would suggest it was essentially some kind of rather sad displacement measure by someone who was not quite as happy about growing older as he or she (but more probably he) might care to admit. However, here I shall come clean.

In twenty days, on November 21, I shall turn 75. But as this blog entry is not about me and shall explain why I mention my age: in my 75 years – or better about 60 as like most people did was not much aware of the wider world until I was in my early teens – I have seen many changes and heard about many more which occurred before I was born.

Over those years I also became accustomed to the standard media hyperbole which assures us that this gadget / this event / this revolutionary loo roll / this new leader in Somewhere or Other / this groundbreaking new law / this new what-fuck-ever is ‘probably the most significant in the past fifty years. And, of course, it was and is not, not by a long chalk.

I’m a great believer in the French notion of plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose or as Prince Tancredi had it in Tomasi di Lampedusa novel The Leopard Everything must change for everything to remain the same. That last doesn’t quite imply the same thing, but it is related.

So pretty much in for us pampered paps in the Western World, pretty much everything has remained the same, despite ‘changes’.

I have lived through the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Nixon Watergate scandal – which, by the way, I’m now beginning to believe was by far not quite what it seemed to be and that, ironically, Tricky Dicky himself might have been taken for a ride – and much else.

Then there was more than thirty years ago the collapse of the Soviet Union and its attendant satellite client states, the evolution of the internet and so on. You get the picture.

Certainly, many of these developments seemed significant at the time but in retrospect – and as we have become more accustomed to a new dimension to reality as in ‘going online’ and using a mobile / cell phone is now standard for pretty much all of us – that ‘significance’ has somewhat faded and much ‘remained the same’.

Over the past two centuries, however, there has been much which has not just remained the same, but which few saw coming or even suspected was on the horizon. One example might be the First World War or as was at the time The Great War, so-called because no one expected another ‘great war’ to follow on its heels just over twenty years later.

And, I suggest, the coming US presidential election next Tuesday, November 2024, might prove to be an exception to the rule that all ‘significant’ changes become less significant as time passes. Could America slowly then quite quickly fall into civil war? And outlandish suggestion, of course: don’t be so bloody mad, you lunatic – of course not! And I agree (but . . .)

. . .

The choice America faces in four days is between electing former President Donald Trump and the current US Vice-president Kamala Harris as its new president. Trump is – I have to say nominally – ‘a Republican’ and is standing for the Republican party (or what is left of it now). Harris a Democrat. According to ‘the polls’, the candidates are neck-and-neck and frankly who will be inaugurated in January next is anyone’s guess.

In my 75 years there have been sixteen presidential elections and the first I was aware of was the campaign fought between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when I was almost ten years aold. All US presidential elections have been fought hard and dirty and each side of the battle has predicted dire consequences if its man (and in 2016 woman, Hillary Clinton, its woman) was not elected. But this 2024 election is in a different league entirely, in many ways.

For one thing in the 2020 election between the then incumbent president Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s VP when Obama was in the White House, had very curious outcome: Biden won by a tiny margin in that he won the votes of the most delegates to the electoral college, although Trump won more voes nationally.

But that isn’t what was notable (and by 2020 is was not unique, either). What distinguished that election from every preceding US election was that Trump point-blank refused to accept the result.

Instead he declared that ‘the election had been stolen’ and that there had been ‘widespread voter fraud’ which had rigged the result against him.

This was unprecedented: despite previous electoral confusion, notably in the fight between George W Bush and Al Gore in 2020, one of the closest in American history when the issue of contention was whether votes in Florida which had fallen foul of a mechanical voting machine (the ‘hanging chads’ controversy) but also allegations that some votes intended for Gore were misdirected to a third candidate.

In the event the issue went to the Supreme Court which considered the various issues involced and decided 5-4 that Bush had won the election, even though Gore had, nationally, won more of the popular vote. And Gore graciously accepted the decision. ‘Grace’ is certainly not a trait in the Trump personality make-up.

. . .

I shan’t get into the US Electoral College system, but frankly it is now wholly outdated and has in recent years has caused ever more problems and is in dire need of reform. But given how it came about and evolved and the deep-seated political antagonisms which have riven the US such reform is less likely than the Pope entering into a civil partnership with one of his cardinals. So like it or not America is still obliged to live with its inane nature.

Who gets how many Electoral College votes is crucial. Each state is allocated as many Electoral College votes as it has senators. And even more crucial is that about five or six so-called ‘swing states’ and who is awarded their electoral college votes determines who will enter the White House.

Some states are either solid Republican or Democrat, but the ‘swing states’ to and fro, their ultimate result depending on the outcome of the vote in just three or four of of their counties.

Traditionally, and however bitter an election campaign was fought, at some point the losing candidate will ring his opponent and concede. This did not happen in 2020.

As I point out the crux of the danger here – and if you accept my outrageous suggestion that if things get really bad, the US could find itself in a civil war – Trump simply does not play by the rules. This, too, was unprecedented, but it got even worse.

Here I should declare my partisanship: I think Donald Trump is a nine-dollar bill to whom I would not even give the time of day. The man is what we Brits call ‘a toe-rag’. He has been convicted of fraud and in a separate fraud case has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in ‘disgorgement’. He has been adjudged guilty of rape by ‘finger-fucking’ a woman in a department store changing room, and in my book he is not only a crook but a despicable human being.

Others in the US reading this might well take the opposite view, and I accept that they entitled to it. Others still might even agree with me about Trump’s very dodgy character and morals, but, for a number of reasons, not least issues on which the 2024 election is being fought, they might still choose to vote for him not Harris because he is the Republican candidate.

And whether or not Trump is elected the US’s 47th president and what it’s consequences might be is what this blog entry is all about: from where I stand a new Trump presidency would be a disaster, not just for the US but for much of the world given the economic role the US economy plays in global affairs. Trump strikes me as a man who understands as much about economics as I do Han Chinese, which is nothing at all.

. . .

The 50 odd days after the 202o election were frankly very unsettling and confusing, not least because despite America’s smug boast of being ‘the leader of the free world’ it did not know how to deal with development. Then there was the problem that Trump’s behaviour was downright bizarre, and none of it in a good way.

Even before the November 2020 election, perhaps suspecting he might lose or simply as a precaution, he began insisting that if he did not win, it could only be because of fraud by the authorities. Pertinently, he never specified which authorities, just the ‘they are were to get him’.

In that way he was already – and not so subtly – laying the ground for what in the event became his post-election strategy: that fraud lay behind Biden’s victory and that he election was stolen from him.

He did not produce any solid evidence at all, and what ‘evidence’ he did produce was investigated and dismissed by the courts. All 60-odd cases he brought before the courts were dismissed, every last one of them.

But curiously that did not matter: his cry that the election was stolen was enthusiastically taken up by his supporters, and when he made a metaphorical call to arms to congregate in Washington to ‘stop the steal, several thousand turned up, their ‘protest’ got out of hand and they smashed their way in to Congress to attempt to delay certification of the election result by VP Mike Pence.

Shamefully, yet again ‘the leader of the free world’ was had no idea as to how to handle it and in practice did fuck-all.

All this has been well-documented, and it is redundant to repeat chapter and verse here. What is pertinent is that Trump is once again insisting that if he is not elected next Tuesday, it can only be because of fraud and that the election had been rigged. Yet it gets even worse.

Trump has repeatedly been asked to confirm that he will acknowledge the result of the election, and he has repeatedly refused to do so. This is unprecedented – as far as I know – in US history and worryingly America seems paralysed by Trump’s tactics and strategy: they do not know what to do. To be blunt, they are clueless.

This is where – whatever the outcome of the election – America could find itself in a dire constitutional crisis, and despite the outlandish theme of what I write, it would be better if I were completely wrong than that there should be any traction at all in what I suggets.

The Republican dominated US Supreme Court has already ruled that a US president would be immune from criminal prosecution for any ‘presidential’ acts and decisions.

In the legal preamble to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the question was broached – in all seriousness – as to whether the US President would be liable for criminal prosecution if he ordered the assassination – for which, let’s again be blunt, read ‘murder’ – of a political opponent. The answer seemed to be ‘no, he would not, he would have immunity’.

In that one Supreme Court decision America degenerated in an instant from the – supposed – fount of all democracy to the status of a totalitarian state. So far the court’s decision has not had to be tested. If Trump’s becomes the 47th president, he will have criminal immunity for ‘presidential acts’.

At that point all the subseqent arguing about what might be, or better have been, a ‘presidential act’ would be crucial but de facto redundant. We have seen in the past, in 1930s Germany and later elsewhere and most recently in Viktor Orban’s Hungary how democratic institutions and their attendant support structures – a free media and an independent judiciary – can every swiftly be neutralised then demolished unless they are constantly sustained.

One might argue as some do that Trump and his backers have already destroyed the neutrality of the Supreme Court. The only sanction the legislature and thus ‘the people’ have over the Supreme Court is financial: funds could be stopped.

But however ‘serious’ in theory, that is no sanction whatsoever in practice. Like it or not, rather too many pieces are now in place for Trump – and I’ll repeat ‘his backers’, because I think they are the brains behind all this, not Trump – to behave dictatorially.

. . .

The outcome of the 2024 can be only one of two possibilities: eventually either Trump or Harris is inaugurated as the US’s 47th President.

If Trump is ruled to have lost, it is more than likely that he will simply again refuse to accept the result and again call on his supporters to ‘rise up’. He is already reported to laying his plans to cry foul if he loses.

And judging by the response on January 6, 2021, thousands will respond. And what happens then?

If, on the other hand, Trump is eventually declared to have won the election, he will be free to act precisely as he likes.

Here we should remind ourselves that the number of military personnel, law agents and police who might have voted for Trump will be unknown. Of these many might feel as did General Mark Milley that his loyalty is to the US constitution not to the president, in this case Trump.

Others might not agree and when, say, called upon by Trump not to oppose any violent actions by his supporters, they might well decide that their loyalty is to the man they voted for. We simply do not know. Furthermore such a scenario has never been tested.

If Trump wins, what might be the reaction of the losers? We should remind ourselves that gun ownership is as widespread among those who identify as Democrats as Republicans. Will they peacefully accept the transfer of power to Trump?

Or might they declare that what was sauce for the goose should also be sauce for the gander and themselves now join the protests, many of which could turn violent?

If those protests did turn violent and if – as Trump has suggested he would be entitled to do and as he would not shy away from doing – he called on the US Army to repress them and those being repressed then shot back, it would all get seriously out of hand, and a new civil war could not be ruled out.

That is, of course, fanciful, but what is not fanciful is that the likelihood can be completely ruled out.

And American friend of mine, rather bemused by my then patchier knowledge of the US, once advised me, broadly, to view the 50 US states as ‘different countries’. They are, of course, not different countries: what he meant was that they all have their own traditions, often their own version of particular laws, their distinct cultures and so on.

It is this, for example, how jealously the different states guard their difference, which would be one of the many stumbling blocks in any attempt to reform the electoral colleges system.

So we might ask: do all the inhabitants of each unique state feel loyalty more to their state than the union? Or is it the other way round?

What if a staunchly ‘liberal’ as in Democrat state – California, say – felt it had been outplayed, especially given what it regarded as the partisan nature of the Supreme Court, and decided slowly to loosen its federal ties. What if a now powerful Trump administration retaliated by declaring martial law in that state? What if then the national guard of that state took up arms again the federal forces?

One so far accepted law is that in extremis federal law is always superior to state law. What if a state declared it now longer intended abiding by that agreement?

OK, we could carry on the ‘what ifs’ till kingdom come, but the point is that given the pronouncements, the publicly declared intentions by Donald Trump and the, it seems, real hatred between the MAGA republicans and the Democrats, such what ifs are not longer quite as fanciful.

. . .

Russia will be hoping for a Trump victory given his vow to withdraw military support and funding from Ukraine, and it seems Putin is getting a tad desperate.

The conventional wisdom holds, is more hopeful that Harris will prevail: for trade reasons it would far prefer a calm relationship with the US, steady as you go, despite the sanctions imposed by Biden, and given Trump’s wacky promise to impose severe sanctions on all US imports (although not just Chinese, it seems China would rather not have Trump as prezzy thank you very much.

This ‘cradle-Catholic’ sounds off about dreary, dreary ‘good news’

I’m sitting here in the kitchen at my aunt’s in deepest, darkest Gascony just about to have my second bowel of milky coffee, having risen from my sick bed briefly after three days of a bad cold. But that isn’t the point of this ramble (or as Donny Trump would have it this ‘weave’).

My aunt, 93 and not in the best of health, is sitting across from me waiting for her daily late-morning visit from a nurse. At breakfast and until just now she was listening to a Sunday morning mass being broadcast on the radio (or as I am now slowly obliged to call it, ‘the wireless’).

This surprised me, as although she is, like me, a ‘cradle-Catholic’ and was educated by nuns, she had - again like me - long, long ago escaped the snares of the left-foot establishment and declared herself an atheist.

But that isn’t the point of this ‘weave’, either.

The point is this: WHY are christian hymns and songs - well, let me be fair, WHITE christian hymns and songs - of every denomination, from RCs to Plymouth Maniacs to bells ‘n smells Anglicans, so sodding DREARY? It’s always like walking in the rain with no coat and nowhere to go. Yes, that cheerful.

On a related note, why does preaching the ‘good news’, ostensibly intended to cheer folk up, rely so heavily on doom, inducing fear and dread, restrictions, taboos, frightening young children and a kind of incomprehensible voodoo bollocks?

My favourite piece of bollocks ‘The Trinity’, explained to uncomprehending seven-year-olds as ‘three persons in one god’ ( and NO, it’s NOT three gods, just three persons in one god), is a case in point.

Of course, little ones are not supposed to understand, just accept, repeat and believe and shut the fuck up (as I was when young and now and then I queried this ‘n that). Once - when I was 17 - I queried the ‘virgin birth’.

My headmaster at the time who also gave us sixth-formers religious instruction, an Irishman called Webster Wilson (who sadly was a figure of fun at the OS, but who took me for German and I rather liked him and with whom I got on well), asked me:

‘Do you believe God created the world and the laws of nature, Powell?’ Yes, I told him, tho even by then I didn’t. ‘Well,’ said Mr Wilson, ‘he can also break em then, can’t he!’

As I say total bollocks. Yes, there are certainly more sophisticated christian apologists, but if you are apologising and defending bollocks, it’s still bollocks.

NB the piccy is of my second bowl of coffee. I was delayed posting the piccy and one or two ‘readers’ have arrived early. Forgive me, you are not going off your head – leave that to me – but my shortcoming.

Shysters anonymous, or how in just over three decades the ‘information superhighway’, the ‘democratising force to end all ‘democratising force’ has succumbed to simply parting you from your money. Greed – as always – regains the throne

I have been very lax about posting to this blog and intend to try to do so more regularly. There is much I want to comment on, not least the narcissistic and rather stupid crook Donald Trump and the real danger he poses to the democracy we know as the United States. However, that is a large topic and needs a great deal of thought, so to kick off my resurrection of my blog, here is an open letter to eBay . . .

Like pretty much every other online retailer - though the bigger and richer the company, the worse this problem is (so you, too, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft etc, who are now so big, one pissed-off customer more or less, who fucking cares).

I want to get in touch with eBay about an issue, but it is nigh-on impossible to do so. Instead I (and others, too) am cycled through the same routine: what is it about? If it is not about any of the topics listed - selling, payments, feedback etc - it’s pretty much ‘go fuck yourself, we don’t want to talk to you.

It is literally going round in a circle, and I don’t doubt many just give up - after all they are ‘just customers’ so why should eBay give a flying fuck.

Yes, listing topics is often more efficient and saves both time and money, both for eBay and the ‘customer’. But that is not always the case. Yet though eBay will also know that, the last thing they want is to be bothered by us poor schmucks who are are worth just one thing to eBay: money. Once they have our money, it’s ‘go fuck yourself’.

Above I have listed other offenders, but there is no ‘safety in numbers’. Just because many ‘big’ tech firms behave like that and essentially treat their customers ‘sheep to be sheared’ doesn’t excuse any of them.

My issue today is ‘Complete savings’: every time I buy something on eBay, I am offered ‘money back’, in this case £20.97 ‘back’ on a £281 purchase.

But this is a con and as close to a legal scam as eBay’ and Complete Savings’ lawyers will allow.

You don’t get any money back unless you buy more stuff: so to ‘save’ money you have to spend even more money. Neat, though just for shysters like Complete Savings, not for us, the customer.

But even worse, Complete Savings charge you £18 a month, directly debited from your credit card account, simply to be ‘on its books’ whether you choose to use its service or not.

So I wanted to get myself removed from that programme which pops up every time I buy something, hence why I wanted to get in touch with eBay.

But among their list of topics is there listed ‘Get yourself off hooks of one or our legally crooked partners’? What do you think? Is there listed ‘How to stop yourself being targeted by greedy shysters with whom we do business? What do you think.

Yes, you can opt not to join up, but I wonder how many elderly or rather inattentive shoppers sign up thinking ‘this might be a good thing’? But it is not ‘a good thing’ - wwell only for Complete Savings.

Remember, eBay, we ARE your income: without us you are nowhere. So take your finger out and stop dealing with crooks.

NB And even when you raise an issue - challenging feedback, say - no thinking human is ever involved. Matters are ‘decided’ by an algorithm. I came up against that problems when some shyster, nasty seller decided in revenge to leave me negative feedback, destroying my 100% excellent status. The algorithm decided not to remove it, but I pushed the issue and finally got to speak to someone on the phone, though it took several calls and it was removed. However this was at least ten years ago when there was still human contact apparently. Now . . .

Introducing one Murray Sayle, war correspondent and in newspaper terms very much the real deal. Sadly, Sayle was not quite as good as a novelist. Still . . . Then there's when he quit his job on the Sunday Times for telling the truth but the paper taking the easy way out and spiking his story

One of this world’s many clichés is that ‘everyone has a book in them’, although unhelpfully that observation can be understood in two, rather distinct, ways.

It might be thought to imply the charitable, humanist-lite and rather cosy view that ‘we are all valuable, all of us, we are all interesting and we all have a story to tell’. Sigh.

Though I like to think that I am neither charitable nor cosy, I do confess that there seems to me to be a small degree of truth in that interpretation: get anyone to talk about themselves and their lives, and you will sooner or

later be presented with often quite startling and unexpected details. I learnt that fact of life when I worked as a reporter for a few years before retreating into the comforts of the subs’ table.

On the other hand, as far as that first interpretation is concerned, we would be wise to remember that real writers are few and far between, and that there are even fewer ‘good’ writers.

That point might well be summed up in the observation that ‘it’s not the joke, it’s the way you tell it’. 

To extrapolate, in other words, it’s not the story, but ‘how you tell it’ or ‘how you write it’. I have met folk who could make an account of Judgment Day sound decidedly dull.

If someone, he or she – though it’s more likely to be a very boring ‘he’ – prepares to recount an ‘amusing’ incident, make your excuses and leave! If you don’t, you will have no one but yourself to blame.

The second interpretation is less kind: that everyone wants to ‘write a novel’ or possibly ‘my book’ and thinks they have one to produce. Actually, not ‘everyone’ does, and of those who do, it would be truer to observe that ‘they think they do’.

The writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens nailed it, though here I must paraphrase as I have not been able to find a definitive quote; but Hitchens (right) observed, more or less, ‘Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain’. Quite.

. . .

Perhaps one of the more useful lessons we can learn as we grow up – and many folk never learn that lesson – is that we are really not as interesting to others as we like to think we are. You might be the centre of your world, but you are most certainly not at the centre of their world – they are.

As for ‘that book inside me’, hacks – my preferred word for ‘journalists’ – are no exception and equally as frail and self-deluding in thinking they have ‘a novel to write’.

I should add that in my world the use of the description ‘hacks’ is not pejorative but far more admiring: as far as I’m concerned, ‘hacks’ are the real professionals, men and women able to turn their hand to all journalistic tasks required of them without a moment’s thought. They might be rough journeymen, but a true hack will always deliver and do the job.

Quite a few hacks, although most certainly not all, regard themselves as essentially writers who happen to be forced by cruel life and practical circumstance to earn their daily crust and rather than sell insurance or repair plumbing, they choose to do so by serving the Press (or, in these digital days, the media).

If only, their thinking goes, they could break free of the necessity to make a living, they could finally write The Great American Novel or The Great German / French / Australian / Russian – you get the drift – novel.

To get to the novel in hand, A Crooked Sixpence was Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s ‘book inside me’, written in his early thirties, and it is telling that it is the only novel he wrote.

Sayle had arrived in London from Sydney, Australia, in 1952, at the age of 26 and found himself a reporter’s job on the Sunday People, a British Sunday ‘red-top’. He had already trained as a reporter in Australia and was certainly no beginner, however. It seems he had schlepped across the world to Old Blighty in pursuit of a girlfriend who was relocating there (and who dumped him).

The Sunday People is still published today, although in common with all other British print media, it has fallen on very hard times and its circulation has declined alarmingly to almost nothing since the digital age began. 

At its height, pretty much when Sayle was working at the Sunday People, it was selling five million copies every Sunday. Its circulation is now said to be down to around 125,000 copies.

While the News Of The World still existed – it ceased publication in 2011 in the midst of the ‘phone hacking’ scandal – its main rivals at that bottom end of the market were the Sunday People and the Sunday Mirror (which in Sayle’s days on the Sunday People was the Sunday Pictorial).

All three papers dealt in the same subject matter: sex scandals, showbiz and celebrity news, ‘human interest’ stories and more sex scandals. Sayle’s novel is an account of his time on the Sunday People and we’re informed by all who were also active in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a very thinly disguised account indeed.

. . . 

The hero of Sayle’s novel is his alter ego, James O’Toole, who begins to get pangs of conscience about the work he does – it requires him to do behave pretty shabbily – and who eventually resigns his job, unable to take any more heaping shit on otherwise harmless and innocent people.

One can only assume that by 1956, Sayle was suffering the same pangs because after four years toiling at the Sunday People he, too, collected his cards and took off for Europe, living in Paris and Germany – accounts vary, in keeping with dealing with newspapers and their often elastic relationship with the truth).

Sustaining himself – we read on Wikipedia and in pieces which will also have relied on Wikipedia – by selling encyclopaedias door to door and flogging dodgy savings products to US serviceman, he wrote his novel in his time off. A Crooked Sixpence was published in 1961 by Doubleday, but was only briefly available because it soon ran into trouble.

Those who worked in Fleet Street in at the same time as Sayle say they are able readily to identify the – rather small – number of characters in A Crooked Sixpence: the editor, his features editor, his news editor, its crime reporters, his head of the art department and a photographer. All, it seems, were based on real-life journalists (the crime reporter was the, I’m told ‘famous’, Duncan Webb).

But it was not the ready identification of those men that lead to trouble. Also based on someone Sayle encountered was his friend Michael Alexander with whom he lodged in South Kensington and who, like his fictional counterpart in the novel, Michael Macedon, was for ever stony broke. So when A Crooked Sixpence was published Alexander decided to make himself a few bob by suing Doubleday for libel.

Sayle was not particularly happy about this apparent and, it will have seemed briefly, ‘foolproof’ ruse to acquire some cash, but was persuaded by Alexander that his libel suit would cost neither Sayle nor the publishers a penny as Doubleday’s insurance company would cough up.

That was the theory, but it didn’t work out that way: instead of claiming from its insurers, Doubleday pragmatically decided simply to junk publication and it pulped all the copies it had so far printed. And that was it for Sayle’s first and only novel for the next 47 years.

. . . 

Alexander died in 2004, and as the dead cannot sue for libel, the novel was again published in 2008, by Revel Barker, a former Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror reporter who also writes thrillers. By then Murray Sayle (left), 

suffering Parkinsons, had returned to see out his life in Australia with his third wife, but as he did not die until 2010, he did eventually see his novel back in print and on sale to the public. That might have been some comfort.

Sayle was and is spoken of as something of a one-off, an intelligent, engaging man with a sardonic wit and conversation who had a keen nose for sniffing out the real essence of a story, and going just that little bit further than many of his colleagues.

After he had realised that scandal-mongering for a red-top was not how he wanted to spend his life and had finished writing his novel, he began to work in France for a news agency and then, in 1964, found a berth on the Sunday Times.

Under its then new editor Harold Evans (below), the Sunday Times was being turned into a true newspaper of record and gained a great deal of respect. Evans left in 1981 when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, and since then the Sunday Times has, shamefully, lived off the reputation for investigative reporting it achieved under Evans.

It is now an embarrassing shadow of its former self, more given to plugging ‘must-have’ aftershaves and perfumes and ‘lifestyle’ features and still essentially dealing in gossip, though of the ‘top-drawer’ kind. While working 

for Evans, Sayle filed some remarkable stories, including finding the Soviet spy Kim Philby in Moscow and tracking down Che Guevera, reporting from Vietnam and from Prague during the Soviet invasion. 

However, he called it a day with the Sunday Times in 1972 after his – we now know very accurate – report about the January ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings of Irish civilians in Derry/Londonderry was spiked.

Sayle reported that the British Army had fired first and without warning, which would make the deaths of the 14 civilians who died plain murder. Some were shot in the back as they ran away, others were shot trying to help wounded.

The British government was insisting – wholly untruthfully – that the Army had merely ‘returned fire’ and the Sunday Times bosses, for whatever reason, chose to toe the government’s line. Sayle resigned.

In short, Sayle in journalistic terms was the real deal. What he was not, this reviewer believes, was a very good novelist.

. . . 

For all the praise heaped on A Crooked Sixpence as, for example – notably by Sayle’s pal and fellow Australian reporter Phillip Knightley – ‘the best book about journalism, ever’ – A Crooked Sixpence is something of an amorphous muddle.

Sayle relies heavily on dialogue, and although there is nowt wrong with that in itself, it all becomes wholly unconvincing in longer passages when the main protagonist O’Toole begins to philosophise. Perhaps I’m not the sharpest blade in the box, but more than once this reader was wondering what the hell O’Toole was talking about.

Worse – far, far worse, though – for ‘the best book about journalism, ever’ which centres on the vastly popular and best-selling Sunday Sun, the newspaper, its newsroom and its whole operation remains flat, two-dimensional and remarkably – make that unforgivably – dull: nothing but nothing comes alive, not the characters, the newsroom, or very much about the paper.

I’ve worked for Sunday newspapers (though as a sub-editor) and the newsroom is quite a quiet place from Tuesday to Friday. But even then it is far livelier than what comes across as an empty shell of a place in Sayle’s novel.

Sayle’s candour about the mucky work the Sun’s reporters and executives get up to is admirable, but is wholly lost and almost irrelevant.

That dull two-dimensionality extends to what occurs outside the Sun’s offices: here again nothing comes alive. A natural fiction writer Sayle most certainly was not. I suspect he realised as much in that he does not seem to have attempted any more novels and certainly published none.

A Crooked Sixpence was the book Sayle had in him, and at the end of the day, Knightley’s praise and other kudos notwithstanding, Sayle might have been best advised to have heeded Christopher Hitchens advice and let the book remain inside him.

There are other novels about newspapers – Michael Frayn’s Till The End Of The Morning, Michael Green’s two volumes of autobiography, The Boy Who Shot Down An Airship and Nobody Hurt In Small Earthquake and Monica Dickens ‘memoir/novel’ My Turn To Make The Tea are the ones I’ve read – and there will certainly be one or two others.

In a sense, the ‘gold standard’ is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. But Waugh, Frayn, Green and Dickens were first and foremost writers and – though not so much the Dickens – they carry it off. Sadly, Sayle does not.

. . .

While preparing for this post, I was digging around for more info on Sayle and 1950s / 1960s newspapers when I came across the following anecdote. As almost always it is attributed to many folk and sorting out is really true is a dull task I shall leave to others.

Several years ago, in a healthier, less moralistic age when boozing was not infra dig and reporters enjoyed refreshing themselves, one Daily Mirror reporter (when it was still the Daily Mirror not, as today The Mirror and also a pale shadow of itself) got so pissed while out on a job that he was incapable of doing anything.

A mate, a Daily Mail reporter on the same job, realised the guy would be in trouble as he would be in no fit state to write a story of any kind.

So after writing and filing his own story, he re-wrote it and phoned it in to the Mirror copy-takers under his Mirror mate’s name.

The next day, the story appeared under the Mirror man’s byline and later that day when he bumped into his Daily Mail mate, he proudly flaunted the Mirror with his bylined story and crowed ‘See, I can write a story even when I’m completely pissed!’

Thing is, he was so completely pissed the day before, he could not remember a bloody thing at all.

. . . 

LEST WE FORGET:

On January 30, 1972, Catholics in Derry/Londonderry organised and launched a protest march.

The British Army stood by in case of trouble, as undoubtedly did members of the Provisional IRA (the Irish Republican Army, first formed in 1917, then reformed in 1922, but largely inactive until the early 1970s).

At some point shooting broke out: the Army insisted its men were simply returning fire, the IRA insisted the Army had fired first and it had then returned fire.

The official Army line was taken up by the British government and repeated again and again until it finally 38 years later it finally came clean.

At first, within days of the massacre, the British government set up the Widgery Tribunal into what went on and – in hindsight predictably perhaps – it absolved the Army of any guilt and found that the Army had been responding to gunfire and bomb-throwing.

Twenty-six years later, in 1998, the Savile Inquiry was established and – after 12 years – found that the Army had ‘lost control’ and was responsible for the deaths. This completely contradicted Widgery Tribunal’s findings.

In June 2010, David Cameron, the then prime minister, made a public apology in the House of Commons for the murders.

In case you forgot – he’s still on the loose and roaming free. Last spotted in Iowa and police are warning the public to steer clear. Make sure he goes nowhere near your children and, most important, your wallet.