Category: Blog

The odyssey of Edward Snowden is nothing short of fascinating.

The chap is desperate to relocate from his native USA to any place where they won’t clap him in prison for a rather long time.

His options, never endless to begin with, are narrowing faster than you can say ‘the Yanks are angry.’ Potential havens have been told in no uncertain terms that harbouring Snowden would mean getting on America’s bad side.

For the time being he’s cooped up in a hotel at Moscow’s Shermetievo Airport, waiting for 21 countries to act on his application for political asylum.

His first choice was Russia itself, which shows just how desperate the poor man is getting. Putin was magnanimous enough to offer refuge, but only on condition that Snowden stop blowing his whistle.

If you aren’t fluent in Russian, allow me to translate: this means Snowden isn’t supposed to reveal American secrets to anyone other than the Russians. As if they haven’t pumped him dry already – if they hadn’t he wouldn’t be allowed to breathe the fume-stinking Sheremetievo air.

Anyway, Snowden has refused to play along, and quite right too. If he clammed up at this stage, he’d lose whatever celebrity status he has gained. And surely becoming a celebrity was the whole purpose of the exercise – what else would anyone else wish to become these days?

Apparently, however, Venezuela, Nicaragua and possibly Bolivia have begun to nibble on Snowden’s line.

Now I don’t know if living in Danny Ortega’s Sandinista paradise is better or worse than spending a few years in an American minimum-security prison. Suffice it to say that the choice isn’t necessarily straightforward.

Of course a maximum-security jail would be a different matter. The advantage there is that a weedy white chap is guaranteed a vigorous sex life. The disadvantage is that this may not be the kind of sex life he’d normally choose.

It’s fairly clear that Snowden’s motives are far from noble, closer to those of Herostratus than of St Francis. But it does happen at times that bad impulses motivate good deeds, and in this sense my sympathy is with Snowden, sorry excuse for a human being that he may be.

For I regard all modern, post-Christendom governments as profoundly corrupt by definition. They have become nothing but giant bureaucracies, meaning nothing but self-serving.

All such bureaucracies, be that governments, large corporations, the NHS, you name it, have one thing in common. They serve those who run them and hardly anyone else.

Just consider this. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when Marx’s dreaded capitalism was at its peak and robber barons at their most oppressive, the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 1:28. Yet in 2005, with ‘democracy’ in full bloom and egalitarianism proudly reigning supreme, this ratio was 1:158.

Thus the ultimate ends of any corporation, acquisition of wealth, are now reached by management only or at least predominantly. The arrangement is at heart more USSR than USA, and the same goes for our governments.

They are no longer our servants, our friends or even our allies. They pursue ends that aren’t just different from ours but are actively hostile to them.

Even as corporate executives are single-mindedly committed to maximising their own returns at the expense of everyone else’s, modern states are just as committed to increasing their power at the expense of our liberties.

Smugly growing ever more certain of their own impunity, they’ll impose any abomination upon us, provided their own power to impose even greater abominations grows as a result.

Thus our Education Secretary Michael Gove, who’s supposed to be a good egg, comparatively, is threatening severe punishment to anyone using the word ‘gay’ as anything other than ringing praise.

He hasn’t specified the nature of the punishment, but contextually it sounds like a custodial sentence. Now what would he do to a brazen chap quipping in jest that ‘gay’ is an acronym for ‘Got Aids Yet’? Nothing short of the death penalty would be commensurate with such a crime – bring it back, I say.

In light of all that one has to welcome anything (well, practically anything) that puts the brakes on the state juggernaut. Less power for them means more power for us – it’s as simple as that.

You’ll notice that modern governments have become past masters at using any conflicts, such as wars or threats of terrorism, to increase their power exponentially – this regardless of whether or not they achieve their ostensible objective.

Their ability to put paid to the privacy of our personal communications may or may not reduce our safety vis-à-vis terrorism. What it is absolutely guaranteed to do is reduce our liberty vis-à-vis the state, and this constitutes a far deadlier threat to our society than the odd bomb going off on a bus.

In any case, why does the state need free access to the e-mails I exchange with my friends Peter, Tony, James, Stephen and Sally? The chances of any of us ever flying a jumbo jet into a building are considerably less than zero, although the idea of doing it to 10 Downing Street isn’t without a certain attraction.

I hope you won’t think me unfashionably biased if I suggest that by far likelier culprits are to be found in a group whose members are typically named Ahmed, Mohammed or Tariq. This observation, I hasten to add, is based exclusively on historical evidence, not any ethnic or racial prejudice.

So why not monitor mostly e-mail exchanges between Tazeem and Abdul rather than those between Peter and Alex? Surely this would be logistically easier, cheaper and more productive?

It would also be impossible – just as it’s impossible for our police to favour tall black strangers for stopping and searching, or for our airport security to focus on the usual suspects.

To do so would be discriminatory – and discrimination of any kind, except in favour of state power, is a crime possibly worse than murder and certainly worse than burglary. So if airport security guards want to pat down a young Rasta wearing a psychedelic T-shirt, they must also pat down a middle-aged gentleman wearing a tweed suit.

So first the state introduces asinine, counterproductive, politically motivated regulations and then it uses them to justify infringing upon the most fundamental liberty of the individual.

That’s why I say more power to Snowden’s elbow. Any action that slows down the despotic growth of our spivocracy ought to be welcomed – whatever the perpetrator’s motives, personality traits or moral fibre.

 

 

 

 

Spring is normally followed by summer. Yet, defying this proven meteorological wisdom, the Arab Spring went back to winter, though not yet of the nuclear variety.

Of course as American neocon ventriloquists and their British dummy Dave told us at the time, flowers of democracy would blossom in Egypt.

Its people couldn’t wait to queue outside voting booths, and of course the country had a rich tradition of electoral politics.

However, before the Arab Spring of 2011 it was usually the military who had done the electing. All four Egyptian presidents since the ‘republican’ revolution of 1952 had been army officers and stooges.

For convenience’s sake, each president also acted as the supreme commander of the armed forces – just like in the USA. Unlike in the USA, this arrangement meant not that the civilian authority controlled the military but rather the other way around.

Mercifully the Arab Spring changed all that. As both American and British neocons explained, the events of 2011 reflected the inexorable march of democracy throughout the world. It may have taken the Arabs a bit longer than others to fall in step, but fall in step they finally did.

Naysayers like yours truly were screaming off the rooftops that Egyptians had neither any history of democracy nor any taste for it, but no one listened.

So they voted for their government – only to find that it wasn’t quite to their liking. Muslim fundamentalism is perfectly acceptable provided that there’s much wealth pumping out of the ground.

In countries where this isn’t the case, such as Egypt, Allah needs help from an industrious populace and an economy organised along the lines that postdate the eleventh century.

In the absence of such conditions, excessive piety equals abject poverty. This is something the Egyptians, spoilt rotten by decades of despotic but secular government, weren’t quite ready to accept.

Never mind democracy, feel the dollars, they screamed (or the Arabic words to that effect).

Rioting on an epic scale ensued, with yesterday’s democratic voters instantly turning into looters, vandals and rapists.

Actually, since the 101 women raped in Cairo’s Tahir Square were assaulted in full view of cheering multitudes, democracy was served. A landslide majority clearly supported the acts, which should make them perfectly acceptable to our democracy mongers.

Anyway, out goes the democratically elected president, in comes another military junta. But the military have done their reconnaissance, so they know the trick.

Put the word democracy into the Yanks’ shell-like, and subsidies will rain on your head faster than you can say post-colonialism. Use any other word, and what will rain down on your head won’t be dollars but drones.

The choice is straightforward: democracy and dollars or no democracy and drones. I know which one I’d choose and the Egyptians are no different (in this respect at any rate).

So Adly Mansour, the puppet of the military, reassures the West that elections, this time free and democratic (that is, guaranteeing the right result) will be held soon. Very soon. Very soon indeed. We’ll let you know.

You see, because the last elections brought to power those who “failed to meet the demands of the people”, they were flawed. Fraudulent, actually.

“This [a military coup d’état],” explained the in-coming leader, “is the only way for a brighter future, a freer future, a more democratic one.” Fair enough – anyone observing Dave in action must feel nostalgic about the Colonel Pride concept of parliamentarism.

Perhaps fearing that the Egyptians are setting a bad example, Dave demanded that a ‘democratic transition’ take place soon. You know, of the kind you chaps had back in 2011, during the Arab Spring.

Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s Foreign Minister, also bemoaned the “serious setback for democracy.” This shows that Guido can rise above his narrow personal concerns. After all, the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood would have joyously stoned him and his male wife/husband to death.

Barack Obama also said he was “deeply concerned” by the events in Egypt. The Arab Spring was just fine by him, but then the president may have a soft spot for Islam.

One can already see the scenario in the making. The military will hold their elections along the traditional Egyptian lines: how the votes will be cast will matter less than how they’ll be counted.

Dave, Barack and Guido will be mollified. Until the next rioting season when Egyptians will feel that their expectations aren’t being met. They will spill out into the streets, expressing their longing for true democracy by raping a few more women.

Press the reset button. Or else, depending on the prevalent sentiments in the USA, the button on the drone-controlling console. One way or the other democracy will be served.

 

 

Brazilians are supposed to be so football-crazy they’d do anything to host a World Cup. Sure enough, the 2014 World Cup will be held in Brazil.

So are the people rejoicing? Not exactly. They are, millions of them, out in the streets protesting against the billions their government is spending on the extravaganza. By the looks of it, the government isn’t long for this world.

So where does this leave our stereotype?

Or take another sport, tennis. A country is supposed to spend a lot of money to produce champions, right? So Britain spends £61 million a year and we have exactly one man in the world’s top 200.

Poland, on the other hand, spends £900,000 a year, and they have two players in Wimbledon’s last eight.

There goes another stereotype, tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.

And now for something less trivial: the Middle East is craving for democracy, isn’t it?

To satisfy that craving, the West, led by the Americans with their usual panache, has been fomenting trouble in the Middle East for over a decade.

Millions have died, stable regimes have been destabilised, armies of refugees have been set adrift, billions have been spent, a few nasty leaders have been killed and others ousted, civil wars have become either a reality or a distinct possibility.

Yet if you listen to the neocons of both American and British vintage, it has all been in a good cause: bringing democracy to the region.

You see, the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence has to lead people to the voting booth every few years.

That’s where happiness awaits, in the booth. Once they get there they’ll be deliriously ecstatic. Perhaps not quite so happy as the Americans are, but as near as damn.

This is a stereotypical idea sold to those who either can’t or won’t think for themselves. The binary notion is beautiful in its simplicity: democracy is good, anything else is bad.

Surely everyone understands that? The whole world wants to be just like the US of A, doesn’t it? Well then, the whole world wants to be democratic.

Take Egyptians, for example. They got their democracy a year ago, and they’re all happy as a sandboy. Of course, their free elections brought to power the kind of chaps who think all infidels must die, but that’s the way the couscous crumbles.

We may not like our democratically elected leaders, but as long as they are indeed democratically elected, we must all be happy. Consent of the governed, right? When a quarter of the population votes a government in, they’ve given consent on the part of the other three quarters as well.

That’s democracy, isn’t it? That’s what the whole world wants. Can’t be happy without it.

Egyptians are like that too. That is to say they’re just like us. Now they have their democracy, they’re happy. They… hold on a moment…

What’s that on the news? Is that millions of them demonstrating in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and every other place with a population greater than the Man City squad? Is that protesters getting killed? Is that civil war about to break out?

Is that the army saying such non-democratic things as “We swear to God that we will sacrifice even our blood for Egypt and its people, to defend them against any terrorist, radical or fool”?

Now when army spokesmen in those parts say they’re ready to sacrifice ‘even their blood’ fighting their own people, what they really mean is that they’re ready to shoot said people like rabbits.

Of course terrorists, one can understand. Even radicals, if they’re too radical. But going to war against fools, that’s a bit much. Perhaps those chaps don’t quite grasp the principal idea of democracy: a fool’s vote weighs as much as yours or mine.

And since there are more fools than people like you or me, they are much more important. A democracy doesn’t shoot fools; it puts them on a pedestal, so democratic politicians don’t have to bend to kiss fools’ backsides.

Nor do the broad masses of Egyptians seem to realise that in a democracy it’s not street riots but elections that are supposed to bring governments down. You know, you make your choice, you live with it. Until the next election all you can do is grin and bear it – not take on the country’s armed forces.

Perhaps, just perhaps – and I hope the skies won’t open and the God of Democracy won’t smite me with lightning for saying this – people in the Middle East aren’t really democrats at heart.

No, perish the thought. Of course they are. The whole world is – the neocons have told us so. The Middle Easterners are desperate to become just like the Midwesterners. All it takes is a few laser-guided bombs for them to see the light (and presumably hear the bang). Flash, bang, and Bashir is your uncle, Fatima is your aunt.

If you think there’s anything wrong with this scenario, you’re rejecting one of the most cherished stereotypes of modernity. Shame on you – and shame on me for feeling the same way.

Note 1: Eric Blair meets Tony Blair

Eric Blair, otherwise known as George Orwell, had much fun writing about totalitarians enforcing different, often diametrically opposite, meanings of words.

Tony Blair, otherwise known as Anthony, was one of those aspiring totalitarians who made Orwellian satire redundant by enforcing his own version of PC vocabulary.

Now Dave has outdone both Eric’s fantasy and Tony’s reality. His government has drawn up official legal guidance ‘clarifying’ the meaning of such highly controversial words as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’.

Actually these words were regarded as fairly straightforward for the first millennium of the English language, but they no longer are. You see, the previous 50 generations assumed, wrongly as it happens, that marriage united in holy matrimony a man and a woman.

Now that backwardness has been expunged, the use of such words has to acquire a new flexibility. 

Hence the guidance: “This means that ‘husband’ here will include a man or a woman in a same sex marriage, as well as a man married to a woman. In a similar way, ‘wife’ will include a woman married to another woman or a man married to a man.”

The lifelong champion of progress in me rejoices – that is until he, the champion of progress, is slapped in the face by a piece of blatant discrimination creeping into the guidance:

“The term ‘husband’ will in future legislation include a man who is married to another man (but not a woman in a marriage with another woman).” Two people living together as each other’s wives is rather odd, wouldn’t you say? Clearly more work is needed – Dr Johnson, ring your office.

One can only suggest that this semantic revolution ought to gather speed. The word ‘Dave’ should now also stand for ‘spiv’, but the word ‘spiv’ can have a broader meaning than just ‘Dave’, also to include ‘George’, ‘Nick’, ‘Vince’ and – for old times’ sake – ‘Tony’.

Note 2: The burgers of Westminster

Being prolier than thou is de rigueur for our leaders, especially those who were born with silver utensils in their various orifices.

Thus George Osborne, now also known as ‘spiv’, has to spend as much time on downplaying his poshness as he devotes to his day job.

Yet he must also convey the impression that his day job receives his undivided attention.

The day before he unveiled his spivocratic budget George decided to kill two birds with one meal.

To that end he tweeted a picture of himself at his desk late at night putting the finishing touches on the budget (day job) and scoffing a burger out of a polystyrene box, with a packet of greasy chips and a diet cola close at hand (man of the people).

Alas, George was to find out the hard way that those who live by spin will die by it. The papers quickly cottoned on to the fact that George’s repast came from a faux prole Waterloo burger place called Byron – not from any of the three McDonald’s shops that are closer to 11 Downing Street.

And, shock horror!, George didn’t get much change out of a tenner for his dinner – that, even though a Mickey D burger costs an impeccably populist 99p.

Now any sensible man would have responded to accusations of burger poshness by saying that, as someone on a salary of £134,565 a year, he can afford to spend £10 for dinner. And anyway, it’s none of anyone’s business what he eats.

But a man capable of such a response wouldn’t tweet a photo of himself playing prole. So George put his foot deeper in it by saying that the only reason he preferred Byron to McDonald’s (which he would otherwise dearly love, this being his favourite food) is that the latter doesn’t deliver and the former does.

Turns out George dug a hole for himself and sank into it by lying: as the tabloids have pointed out, Byron doesn’t deliver either.

In fact, George sent an aide to get his meal from Waterloo, and I bet the aide neither walked there nor went by public transport. So add another £15 for a round-trip taxi ride or even more for a limo – the hole is getting deeper and deeper.

Note 3: Dave’s marriage tax

Having done his best to destroy the institution of marriage with one hand, Dave is now going to throw a bone to married people with the other.

Soon – very soon! – married couples of any of the three or four known sexes will receive a whopping tax break equalling about £120 a year on average.

That means the husband/wife or wife/husband can treat him/her/itself to a Byron burger once a month – presumably provided they promise not to tweet pictures of themselves devouring the treat.

The move, which Dave resisted for years, is being hailed as yet another blow struck for the institution of holy matrimony that Dave holds in such high esteem that he wants to extend it to the entire animal kingdom.

Job done. Dave can now hide the bottle of Roederer Cristal, or whatever he drinks at home when no one’s looking, and take a convoy of armoured cars down the pub.

Nothing Dave likes more than a Goode Auld pint consumed in an intimate setting shared with George, their bodyguards, 100 paparazzi and half a dozen TV crews.

Oh well, I’d better stop before I do end up in a madhouse. Anyway, my husband Penelope tells me lunch is ready.

Quite a few years ago I found myself talking at a party to a young Dutch woman who worked for the UN.

Since both of us had lived in the USA for many years, the conversation veered towards that country, specifically its legal system.

“America’sh legal shyshtem is rayshisht,” said the young lady in fluent but accented English. “Mosht people in prisonsh aren’t white.”

“Well,” I said meekly, and I should have known better, “racism is certainly one possible explanation.”

“What other ekshplanation can there be?” demanded the UN employee in a tone that was rather the opposite of meek.

In for a penny in for a pound, I thought. “It may be that they commit more crimes,” I said, which made the young lady glower and move away from me diagonally across the room. We never spoke again at the party and haven’t since, even though her brother is a friend of mine.

I’m reminded of that incident every time there is a highly publicised case of a black person either executed or imprisoned in America. For most commentators, both there and here, proceed from the Dutch girl’s assumptions.

An article in today’s Times is a case in point. Its title is Texas Accused of Racism as Black Woman Dies, and implicitly the author feels the accusation isn’t unfounded.

All he says about the crime punished in such a racist way is that “McCarthy, who was black, was convicted in 2002 of stabbing to death a 71-year-old white neighbour five years earlier.”

That’s the truth, but it’s not the whole truth. For in this instance, as in so many others, the devil is in the detail.

Since we aren’t in a courtroom here, Miss McCarthy’s criminal record is admissible, and it does suggest she led a rather uninhibited life. Specifically, she was addicted to crack, which could be an expensive habit. McCarthy’s attempts to finance it resulted in a string of convictions for forgery, theft and prostitution.

On July 21, 1997, McCarthy asked a neighbour, a retired academic Dorothy Booth, if she could borrow some sugar.

Once inside the house McCarthy stabbed Booth five times with a butcher knife, beat her with a candelabrum and cut off her finger to steal her diamond wedding ring.

She then stole Booth’s purse and her Mercedes, and pawned the diamond ring in order to buy some crack.

It took the police all of one day to solve the crime. Evidence showed that McCarthy used Booth’s credit cards at a liquor store. A search of her house produced Booth’s driving license and the murder weapon, still glistening with Booth’s blood.

During the trial the prosecution also presented evidence linking McCarthy to the murders of two other old women, but she wasn’t charged with those crimes. There was no need: the prosecution already had enough for a guilty verdict.

McCarthy was sentenced to death in 1998, successfully appealed, was retried and re-sentenced in 2002. Since then she languished on death row until two days ago, when she was finally executed.

However one feels about the death penalty, and opinions are divided even among those on the side of the angels, Texas law has allowed it since 1976. In this case the evidence was incontrovertible and the sentence just.

So how does The Times comment on it? The author didn’t have enough column inches to give the details of the crime, but he managed to quote every one of McCarthy’s 31 last words about going home to Jesus.

He then offered some interesting but utterly irrelevant statistical information: “Thirty-nine per cent of the inmates on Texas death row are black, though only 12 per cent of the state’s population is black. In the past five years nearly 75 per cent of all death sentences in Texas were imposed on black and Hispanic people.”

I can almost hear the Dutch accent in that paragraph. Is the author implying that any deviation from proportionate representation among convicted criminals betokens racial hatred? Has he considered and rejected the possibility so indignantly discounted by the Dutch girl that the reason for this misbalance is that “black and Hispanic people” commit more crimes?

Then followed another irrelevant titbit, this time on the composition of the jury that had only one black member.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that jurors are supposed to judge the case on the evidence presented. The nature of the evidence, such as Booth’s DNA on McCarthy’s knife, doesn’t change depending on the race of the defendant, the victim or indeed the juror.

Is the author suggesting that an all-black jury would have disregarded the evidence? Or that the white jurors accepted it even though it was unsafe?

If that was the case, then by all means it should be made. Yet the author doesn’t say there was anything fishy about the evidence. He merely seems to regret that the defence didn’t manage to turn the trial into an interracial battlefield.

In fact there have been quite a few trials, on either side of the Atlantic, where this happened. Alas, the kind of education potential jurors receive these days makes many of them ill-qualified even to understand the concept of guilt and innocence, never mind distinguishing one from the other.

This brings into question the continuing validity of the jury system, and this point would not be superfluous in a piece like that.

Instead the author cites, without explicit comment but with implicit approval, a long list of statements coming from the defence and also from several fulltime (and paid) opponents of the death penalty.

That’s it, in a nutshell – yet another sample of factually accurate but in fact deceptive reporting. It’s such journalism that joins forces with education to undermine trial by jury. The system has served us so well for so long that I for one would be sad to see it go.

 

Exactly what is it? It can’t be Osborne’s cosmetic cuts in the welfare budget – everybody knows these have to do with politics, not economics. Cosmetics won’t improve an ugly face, George, which is the one our economy presents.

Nor is it the ruling of the US Supreme Court on same-sex marriage, which is now deemed to be in full accord with what the framers of the US Constitutions had in mind. Nothing controversial about that, unless you hoped American spivs were any different from ours.

It’s not even Boris Johnson yet again approving of homomarriage and also referring, in rather uninhibited language, to ways in which it can be consummated. There would be some controversy there if say the Pope said the same thing, but with Boris one just considers the source.

Well, I shouldn’t keep you guessing for much longer. This week’s biggest controversy has been caused by Serena Williams’s knickers. Or, to be more precise, their colour.

In common with most leading manufacturers of tennis clothes, Nike pushes a new style every year. That includes a new colour, and in this year’s Wimbledon it’s puce.

In keeping with their sponsorship deals all Nike players wear something puce, if only the logo which this year is that very colour.

Now the All England Tennis Club has a strict all-white policy throughout the year, not just during the grand slam tournament. Their charter says that the players’ clothes must be ‘predominantly white’, which I once found out the hard way by being denied access to a court there for wearing black shorts.

The conservative in me both approves of this bow towards tradition and deplores the discriminatory way in which the rule is enforced.

The reigning champion Roger Federer showed up for his first round wearing shoes with puce soles. Considering that the rest of his attire, other than the Nike logos, was snow-white, the ‘predominantly’ requirement was satisfied.

Not according to the members of the tournament committee though. They promptly expressed their outrage by demanding that Roger wear normal, predominantly white, shoes for his second round.

Federer, who pays inordinate attention to his grooming, was so upset that he promptly lost to a journeyman ranked 113 places below him. Of course other commentators came up with different reasons for his defeat, but you and I know better.

So far so good. Yet even as I write this, Serena Williams is on court, flashing her puce knickers underneath a very short white dress.

At the risk of sounding unchivalrous, the area covered by this garment is considerably larger than Federer’s shoe soles, and possibly his whole ensemble. Moreover, while Roger’s soles were only visible when he jumped, Serena’s knickers can be admired every second of the match (I did tell you her dress is very short).

Yet the tournament committee didn’t utter a single word of complaint. Discrimination or what?

I can’t for the life of me understand why women players deserve preferential treatment. Is it not enough that they get the same prize money as the men, even though they spend half the time playing their matches and, judging by their technique and conditioning, a third of the time training?

I mean, have you ever seen a fat man playing tennis professionally? I haven’t, and I watch a lot of tennis.

Yet here is Marion Bartoli of France, reproducing in her body the map shape of her native land. There’s something wrong when a professional athlete paid millions for her trade has a waist broader than her shoulders. And Marion isn’t the only one, believe me.

Now the tennis establishment has added sartorial discrimination to the fiscal kind. The egalitarian in me is aghast.

Let’s get Serena out of her knickers, I say. Let fairness rule.

 

 

 

 

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne are the sun towards which both Britain and America reach tropistically.

This close-knit family with three children shows that even in class-ridden Britain it’s possible to start from humble beginnings (Ozzy’s were humbler than Sharon’s) and end up with a fortune approaching a billion pounds.

Ozzy is a British heavy-metal singer who became a big hit in the States back in the seventies. On stage he pioneered such creative artistic techniques as loading a live goat with dynamite and blowing it up. Presumably his refined artistry made front-row seats cheaper than any other.

He’d also bite heads off various animals, mostly reptiles, and do all sorts of other things one has become accustomed to expect from modern performers searching for the ultimate artistic truth (I’ll spare you the details not to spoil your appetite for a week).

Off-stage, Ozzy once upset Texans by urinating on the wall of the Alamo, a fort in San Antonio that has some residual sentimental value for everyone who saw the eponymous film.

Ozzy was arrested but soon released, which went against the public demand for summary execution. “Folks who piss on the Alamo must be shoat,” was how the demand was enunciated.

Unlike Ozzy, whose ambitions are mostly artistic and pecuniary (these days they are one and the same), his wife also aims for social elevation. And Sharon has correctly identified obtaining a damehood as a useful step along the way.

The prospective Dame Sharon, one of the brightest stars in the firmament of reality TV, is prepared to go rather far in pursuit of her ennoblement or, depending on your vantage point, sink rather low.

Sharon has figured out that the way to the title lies through Prince Charles’s heart, or rather some other parts of his anatomy.

On Monday she divulged the details to American TV viewers: “I want a title. They call it a Dame … You just have to s**k his d**k.”

In case the respective spouses might feel left out, Sharon was prepared to be generous about sharing and caring: “He [Ozzy] can f**k Camilla while I’m with Charles.”

I don’t know exactly how the royal spouses have reacted to the implicit proposal, though I doubt that any reciprocity is on the cards.

But someone ought to tell Sharon that, though her desire to move up in life is perfectly consistent with British and especially American values, she has got the details wrong.

She should direct her attentions to our top politicians, not the heir to the throne. Nor does she really have to go all the way – just kissing their backsides would be sufficient.

Lamentably Sharon missed her best chance, for Tony Blair is no longer in office. Tony, you see, knew all about the importance of nobility, which is why he created 203 peers during his time in office.

Some of those noble gentlemen were Ozzy’s colleagues, for Tony had a weakness for pop music. Or perhaps he had a weakness for coming across as a pop-music lover, which is mandatory for any aspiring politician.

Can you imagine Osbourne fans voting for an MP (or a congressman) who prefers Bach to pop? If you can’t, then you realise that no such person can ever be elected. Professing affection for some sort of satanic perversion going by the name of music is a must for a career in public service.

For the Osbournes (or their moral and aesthetic equivalents), with their vile, unspeakable vulgarity, are the icons of our time. They cater to their public’s tastes, and they know exactly what those tastes are.

“Every nation,” said Joseph de Maistre, “gets the kind of government it deserves.” Quite. And also the kind of artists and TV personalities.

In June, 1959, Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel, then Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, got frightfully pissed on a club crawl in Soho, as one did in those days.

One drink led to another, and before you knew it Lord Home climbed on top of a table and went into a dance. Later he didn’t remember much of his choreographic exertions, so the exact tune and the dance steps remained shrouded in mystery.

However, both the song and the steps must have been rather energetic, for Lord Home fell off the table and broke his foot.

Later he hastened to reassure his colleagues and the local Tory organisation that no impropriety normally associated with Soho clubs was involved. In fact Lord Home was dancing not with naked strippers but with his wife Baroness Home who probably was dressed, at least partly.

Commenting on the mishap, Lord Home stuck to the bare bones: “I was dancing on a table in a bar in Soho when I fell off and broke my foot. My wife Elizabeth was with me – but thankfully she’s a far better dancer so didn’t fall off.”

No suggestion was put forth by anyone involved that the Baroness’s knack for dancing atop furniture could be parlayed into a lucrative career in that part of London.

Perhaps it was understood that a Soho couch dancer would be an inappropriate spouse for a Tory minister. Or else it was Lord Home himself who put his broken foot down (“A chap has to draw the line somewhere, what-what?”).

Instead everyone had a good laugh. For example a Tory councillor from Lord Home’s county said, “We found it hilarious and gave him plenty of stick. The imagination runs wild when you hear it was when he was dancing on a table at a bar in Soho.”

Another local activist also saw the hilarity: “Alec definitely has a fun side. Obviously we’re sad to hear he has broken his foot but we will be giving him some stick about how he did it. We’ll have to try and get him a buggy or wheelchair so he can do his usual tour of everything.”

In short, a good time was had by all – especially since Lord Home pressed on with his duties, courageously refusing to cancel his forthcoming tour of North Africa. “He’s a real trooper,” commented a ministerial colleague.

Do you believe this story? Of course you don’t – it’s too preposterous for words. No one in his right mind would believe for a second that the somewhat limited but utterly proper Alec-Douglas Home, the future PM, could have found himself in such a risible bind.

Well, you’re right. You shouldn’t believe the story because I’ve made it up.

Actually, I didn’t make up the events and the comments on them as such – I merely shifted them back to the 1950s from the time they actually happened, which was a couple of days ago.

I’ve also changed the participants’ names. So for Elizabeth read Margaret, and for Lord Home read Mark Harper, our current Immigration Minister.

Suddenly the story becomes eminently believable, doesn’t it? What would have been unthinkable for Alec Douglas-Home or any other contemporaneous minister, is par for the course for today’s politicians, Tory or otherwise.

If a modern PM can get so drunk that he leaves his children behind in a pub, why can’t a junior minister get pissed and make an obscene spectacle of himself in a public place? Or why can’t another MP be arrested for picking a fight in another public place?

No reason at all. We don’t really expect our leaders to have a modicum of dignity, do we? Of course not.

We expect them to be like regular blokes, but without the common sense many real regular blokes have to have to make their way in the dog-eat-dog world.

Our rulers needed no common sense to get into politics and they need none to stay in it. They needed all sorts of other qualities, which in no way preclude vulgar behaviour in the after hours.

Dignity? Honour? Respect for the office? Really, only a hopeless stick in the mud would expect today’s politicians to possess any of these, especially when ‘chillaxing’.

So I hope you’ll join me in wishing Mark a speedy recovery and success on his official visit to Algiers. I’m sure the Muslims will appreciate his fine qualities and idea of fun even more than we do.

 

  

 

 

 

 

The other day I listened to something or other on YouTube, and a link to Chopin’s Fourth Ballade performed by the Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili came up.

The link was accompanied by a close-up publicity photo of the musician: sloe bedroom eyes, sensual semi-open lips suggesting a delight that’s still illegal in Alabama, naked shoulders hinting at the similarly nude rest of her body regrettably out of shot…

Let me see where my wife is… Good, she isn’t looking over my shoulder, so I can admit to you that the picture got me excited in ways one doesn’t normally associate with Chopin’s Fourth Ballade or for that matter any other classical composition this side of Wagner or perhaps Ravel’s Bolero.

Searching for a more traditional musical rapture I clicked on the actual clip and alas found it anticlimactic, as it were. Khatia’s playing, though competent, is as undeniably so-what as her voluptuous figure undeniably isn’t. (Yes, I know the photograph I mentioned doesn’t show much of her figure apart from the luscious shoulders but, the prurient side of my nature piqued, I did a bit of a web crawl.)

Just for the hell of it I looked at the publicity shots of other currently active female musicians, such as Yuja Wang, Joanna MacGregor, Nicola Bendetti, Alison Balsom (nicknamed ‘crumpet with a trumpet’, her promos more often suggest ‘a strumpet with a trumpet’ instead), Anne-Sophie Mutter and a few others.

They didn’t disappoint the Peeping Tom lurking under my aging surface. Just about all the photographs showed the ladies in various stages of undress, in bed, lying in suggestive poses on top of the piano, playing in frocks (if any) open to the coccyx in the back and/or to the navel up front.

This is one thing these musicians have in common. The other is that none of them is all that good at her day job and some, such as Wang, are truly awful. Yet this doesn’t really matter either to them or to the public or, most important, to those who form the public tastes by writing about music and musicians.

Thus, for example, a tabloid pundit expressing his heartfelt regret that Nicola Benedetti “won’t be posing for the lads’ mags anytime soon. Pity, because she looks fit as a fiddle…” Geddit? She’s a violinist, which is to say fiddler – well, you do get it.

“But Nicola doesn’t always take the bonniest photo,” continues the writer, “she’s beaky in pics sometimes, which is weird because in the flesh she’s an absolute knock-out.

“The classical musician is wearing skinny jeans which show off her long legs. She’s also busty with a washboard flat tummy, tottering around 5ft 10in in her Dune platform wedges.”

How well does she play the violin though? No one cares. Not even critics writing for our broadsheets, who don’t mind talking about musicians in terms normally reserved for pole dancers. Thus for instance runs a review of a piano recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall, one of London’s top concert venues:

“She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand… [but] there’s more to her than meets the eye.”

The male reader is clearly expected to get a stiffie trying to imagine what that might be. To help his imagination along, the piece is accompanied by a photo of the young lady in question reclining on her instrument in a pre-coital position with an unmistakable ‘come and get it’ expression on her face. The ‘monochrome’ piano is actually bright-red, a colour usually found not in concert halls but in dens of iniquity.

Nowhere does the review mention the fact obvious to anyone with any taste for musical performance: the girl is so bad that she should indeed be playing in a brothel, rather than on the concert platform.

Can you, in the wildest flight of fancy, imagine a reviewer talking in such terms about sublime women artists of the past, such as Myra Hess, Maria Yudina, Maria Grinberg, Clara Haskil, Marcelle Meyer, Marguerite Long, Kathleen Ferrier? Can you see any of them allowing themselves to be photographed in the style of  “lads’ mags”?

I can’t, which raises the inevitable question: what exactly has changed in the last say 70 years? The short answer is, just about everything.

Concert organisers and impresarios, who used to be in the business because they loved music first and wanted to make a living second, now care about nothing but money. Critics, who used to have discernment and taste, now have nothing but greed and lust for popularity. The public… well, don’t get me started on that.  

The circle is vicious: because tasteless ignoramuses use every available medium to build up musical nonentities, nonentities is all we get. And because the musical nonentities have no artistic qualities to write about, the writing nonentities have to concentrate on the more jutting attractions, using a vocabulary typically found in “lads’ mags”.

The adage “sex sells” used to be applied first to B-movies, then to B-novels, and now to real music. From “sex sells” it’s but a short distance to “only sex sells”. This distance has already been travelled – and we are all being sold short.

 

 

To misname a British chancellor once may be regarded as a misfortune; to do so twice looks like carelessness; to do so three times bespeaks contempt.

With humble apologies to Oscar Wilde, this paraphrase does describe the situation adequately. For it was exactly three times in a short speech that President Obama referred to George Osborne as Jeffrey, thus confusing him with the popular soul singer.

Though acknowledging one’s own ignorance is never easy, I’m man enough to admit that until the incident Jeffrey Osborne had not exactly been popular with me. In fact I had never heard of him, which is both a necessary and sufficient definition of a celebrity.

In a further exercise of humility I have to accept that my musical tastes have no far-reaching geopolitical significance. However what may have such a significance is that in Obama’s world a pop singer clearly figures more prominently than the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Her Majesty’s minister second in rank only to the PM.

Do you suppose that was Obama’s subtle hint that even Jeffrey Osborne could make a better chancellor than George? If so, I’d be in perfect sympathy with the implication, but alas the real reasons for such forgetfulness are probably less praiseworthy.

Say what you will of the previous generation of British politicians, but one can’t recall American presidents referring to our chancellors as Henry Macmillan, John Callaghan, Rob Jenkins or George Howe.

Somehow foreign visitors to our shores tended to remember the Christian names of their counterparts. If they don’t do so now, it’s because they don’t feel such names are worth remembering, nor Britain worth respecting.

Hence American presidents won’t take a bow to the Queen, which in Britain is regarded as a violation of elementary etiquette. Fair enough, Americans stand proud in the world and feel no need to observe quaint foreign customs, especially those of no democratic provenance.

Yet all recent American presidents, and certainly Obama, go out of their way to observe Islamic or Far Eastern greeting rituals. Never mind that they look silly doing so – some customs can’t be flouted on pain of being accused of cultural insensitivity.

True enough, Britain’s standing in the world isn’t what it was at the time of Will Churchill, Hank Macmillan or even Mary Thatcher. Yet it’s still marginally higher than Burma’s, which doesn’t prevent Obama from holding his palms together in front of his chest and taking a bow when meeting a Burmese politician.

The relationship between our two countries may be special, but not in the usually implied sense of mutual admiration and respect. What’s special about it is that America has replaced Britain as the world’s leading empire – and a long lifetime after this flip-flop occurred Americans still have the urge to rub British noses in it.

Britain, on the other hand, shows every sign of the Stockholm syndrome by falling in rather obsequious love with her vanquishers. Hence the urgent need to play poodle to America under all circumstances, and certainly whenever the Americans get the urge to laser-guide some democracy onto a recalcitrant land.

The arrangement isn’t exactly reciprocal for Americans feel no corresponding obligation whenever Britain goes to war. Hence Eisenhower preventing Franco-British victory at Suez or Reagan refusing to cooperate with Britain during the Falklands War (America eventually did help with some satellite intelligence, but only because Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger acted on his own initiative).

Quite the opposite: Americans, or rather American politicians go out of their way to treat senior British officials in a rather offhand manner. Hence George W. Bush with his ‘Yo, Blair!’ or Obama tucking Dave into bed in a fatherly fashion. It’s not just Dave but Britain that’s well and truly tucked up.

The present slight could well be deliberate: a show of disdain for Europeans in general and Britain in particular is mandatory for any American politician. It’s worth several electoral brownie points for someone like Obama to be seen by the folks Stateside as a real ‘merican who can treat them foreigners like skivvies.

Perhaps the next step ought to be for Barack Hussein to assign to British politicians his own names, those he can remember. You know, the way aristocrats of yesteryear used to call every new butler James regardless of what his real name was.

May I suggest Elvis for the Prime Minister, Ray for the Chancellor and Chuck for the Foreign Secretary? Or perhaps Moe, Larry and Curly, as in the Three Stooges, would be an even better mnemonic.

That way the message will come across loud and clear, as will the true nature of the special relationship.