Call me a Stalinist, but whatever happened to party discipline? First, the wife of the ex-PM publishes a self-serving memoir describing the conflicts between her husband and his successor; then the former Deputy Prime Minister (who, coincidentally, also has a book out) adds his ha’porth of tittle-tattle.
I know we live in an emotionally incontinent age, when every Z-list celeb wants us to “feel their pain”. But for two party insiders to publish material damaging to an embattled Labour administration shows a gross lack of political commitment, to put it mildly. Frankly, I expected no better of Cherie Blair, but it is disappointing that John Prescott, who has built a career on his image as a blunt, straightforward working man, should turn out to be as much of a big girl’s blouse as any reality TV contestant.
The collapse of Microsoft’s attempt to take over the search engine Yahoo has drawn attention to the overwhelming market dominance of Google, which it had hoped to rival. Of course, people use Google because is fast, easy to use and comes up with pretty good results. But I’m sure that inertia also plays a part – it’s simply the search engine most of us are used to. It’s worth looking beyond the giants, though. A new search engine called Everyclick will raise money for your favourite charity as you search. Like other search engines, Everyclick makes money through sponsored listings, banner advertising and commissions from retailers featured on its shopping pages. Unlike other search engines, Everyclick gives 50 per cent of its revenue to charity.
Are there any really wild places left in Britain and Ireland? The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane’s lyrical, intelligent and marvellously eccentric account of his travels around these islands, answers the question with a qualified yes – qualified in the sense that many of the places we fondly imagine to be wild have in fact been shaped by human activity since the Neolithic.
It’s not just Gordon Brown’s premiership that’s looking increasingly threadbare and motheaten. Every time we open our wardrobe, a cloud of moths flutters out like bats taking wing from the ramparts of Castle Dracula. Clothes moths, apparently, are on the increase. Last year, Rentokil reported a 25 per cent increase in the number of callouts to deal with moths, and anecdotal evidence from friends and colleagues seems to bear this out. Like just about everything else that goes wrong these days, you can blame it on global warming; our winters are no longer cold enough to kill off the eggs.
It’s not the adult moths that munch their way through your favourite fabrics, of course, but their vile and verminous offspring. Trouble is, they have expensive tastes, and wouldn’t be seen dead in a polyester cardy from Primark; only pure wool and silk will do. And they cluster to my partner’s favourite jackets and dresses like, well, moths around a flame.
I was talking to a German literary agent at a London Book Fair party last week, who was complaining about how difficult her clients were. She mentioned one in particular – one of the few living German writers whose name is known in this country – as particularly arrogant and conceited, expecting to be deferred to as The Great Writer at every turn.
This struck me as a very German phenomenon, rooted in the concept of the writer as “der Meister”, a fount of wisdom whose every word lesser mortals must greet with awed respect. British literary culture, I said, is much more irreverent. No British writer, however distinguished, would get away with that kind of thing. I thought of several novelists I’ve had the good fortune to meet, and how affable, pleasant and modest about their achievements they seemed.
“Maybe they just learn to hide it better,” she said.
I was saddened to hear of the death the other day of the colourful Green Party (and former Liberal) peer Lord Beaumont of Whitley. Tim Beaumont was a tireless advocate of green causes, homosexual law reform, animal rights and voluntary euthanasia, but one concern of his has received comparatively little attention. He was a long-term supporter of Pipedown, the campaign for freedom from piped music, and in 2006 introduced a Private Member’s Bill to ban piped music and televisions in public areas of hospitals.
One of my more pleasant responsibilities is to sit on the judging panel of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. It’s all the more gratifying to see the prize go to a novel I was deeply impressed by when first asked to review it for this newspaper about a year ago: Goodbye Lucille, by the Nigerian-born British writer Segun Afolabi.
The Seven Deady Sins ain’t what they used to be. It’s not enough that the Vatican has ditched them in favour of “New Forms of Social Sin” such as environmental pollution and genetic manipulation. Even good old pride, envy, gluttony, lust and the rest have been redefined as medical conditions. Instead of lust, we have “compulsive sexual behaviour”. Instead of gluttony, we have eating disorders. Instead of envy, we have “low self-esteem”. Instead of wrath, we have “issues with anger management”.
The latest addition to this catalogue of disorders, according to Dr Jerald Block in The American Journal of Psychiatry, is internet addiction.
Do you believe in the sanctity of human life – or would you like to find a cure for motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer's and many other wretched, debilitating illnesses? The obvious answer is that it’s a false dichotomy, but Cardinal Keith O'Brien, leader of the Catholic church in Scotland, is using his Easter sermon today to attack the Government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill on the grounds that it violates the “sanctity of human life”.
In a speech larded with scaremongering expressions such as “grotesque”, “hideous” and – yes, you’ve guessed it, “Frankenstein” experiments – the Cardinal conjures up a nightmare vision of science run mad in order to block a humane and sensible piece of legislation designed to allow the use of human-animal hybrid embryos for medical research that could save lives and alleviate human misery.
“Easter was early that year, the season backward and inclement; there was snow on all the hills.” Thus the protagonist of Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves, recalling a childhood holiday in Snowdonia with his father. It’s a happy coincidence that I should be reading it as we approach another early Easter for which the meteorologists forecast snow. White Easters are actually commoner than white Christmases in many parts of the country; with pleasing symmetry, the phenomenon occurred 10, 25, 50 and 100 years ago. The action of Huxley’s novel takes place in 1924. His protagonist, like the author at that time, is about 30; the remembered holiday took place when he was “about twelve”. Huxley, born 26 July 1894, would have been 12 at Easter 1907, which fell early (on 31 March). Presumably, we had white Easters in 1907 and 1908, in the Welsh mountains at least.
Every year, the Office of National Statistics publishes a “shopping basket” of 650 goods and services that reflect national purchasing habits, on the basis of which the national rate of inflation can be calculated. I must confess to some bemusement at the latest list, published this week. Muffins? Now they’re a bit like a crumpets, aren’t they? But a smoothie? Is that something women hire from an escort agency, or put on their face? And I have scanned the list in vain for such trusty staples as corned beef, light ale and a packet of five Player’s Weights.
Some years ago, at a summer school in Germany, I met a Scottish lady who had lived in Vienna for many years, where she worked for the Atomic Energy Authority. Her 18-year-old son couldn’t wait to get out, and she fully supported his plan to go to university in Germany. Vienna, she told me, was suffocating. There was a meanness about everyday transactions, snobbery, poisonous gossip and a frigid disapproval of difference.
I was put in mind of this when Austria this week commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss, and an opinion poll showed that almost two thirds of Austrians wanted an end to the "endless discussion" of the country's Nazi past.
As our Berlin correspondent, Tony Patterson, reported last week, Germany has been riven by controversy since the Defence Minister, Franz Josef Jung, announced plans for a medal, “similar in shape to the Iron Cross”, to be awarded to German troops risking their lives in Afghanistan. The proposal was greeted with fierce opposition from the Greens, Social Democrats, and Jewish groups, and within 24 hours, he had backed down, stating that any new medal would bear no resemblance to the Iron Cross.
The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, says that those troubled by the Government’s proposals to introduce biometric ID cards will be able to use a driving licence or passport of they prefer. As the campaigning group Liberty points out, this is simply an attempt to soften up public opposition to the scheme. The issue is not the card itself: it is the idea that innocent people will have to go to a police station or passport office to give a DNA swab and have their fingerprints taken, to be stored on a biometric database.
So Margaret Hodge, the Minister of State at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, has attacked the Proms, claiming that they do not represent today’s multi-cultural Britain or make people from different backgrounds "feel at ease”.
Excuse me, but have I missed something? Can this be the same Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking, who last year claimed that British residents should get priority in council house allocation? Or who, in 2006, claimed that her white constituents were turning to the BNP because “they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry."
Poor old Norman Foster. As my colleague Adrian Hamilton reports, the great architect has to go to China to find people who appreciate his genius and won't tie him up with tiresome planning regulations.
For another example of the bone-headed hubris of the celebrity architect, look no further than Richard Rogers’ website, and its description of his Coin Street scheme. Back in the early Eighties, Rogers proposed to demolish most of the buildings on London’s South Bank between Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges, and replace them with a 20-storey office block and a chain of shopping malls.
One of my more pleasant duties is to serve on the committee overseeing an annual literary prize. Traditionally, the award dinner has been a black-tie do, but last year it wasn’t, for the simple reason that we, ahem, forgot to notify people. So this year it’s up for discussion. Some authors, agents and editors, it is argued, might feel uncomfortable in the full DJ regalia, so maybe we should drop it.
Normally I’m regarded as very much on the modernising wing of our committee, but for once I find myself speaking up for tradition.
There were fierce protests last December when the Arts Council announced that it was slashing funding to several small presses. At the beginning of this month, the Council relented and reprieved several of them - but not Dedalus Books.
Since 1983, the Cambridge-based firm has been publishing writers such as Robert Irwin and Alan Hollinghurst; modern European fiction in translation; and European classics. Its grant was tiny – just £25,000 per annum – but the firm’s publisher, Eric Lane, says its loss will almost certainly lead to closure. Now Mr Lane plans to launch legal action against the Arts Council which, he claims, has not followed its own “disinvestment” guidelines.
Sometimes I am forced to concede that there’s no fool like an educated fool. Interviewed on Radio 4's World at One today, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, claimed that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system and that adopting sharia law would help to maintain social cohesion.
He is not, thank heavens for small mercies, advocating that it should apply to criminal matters, only that Muslims could choose to have marital or financial disputes dealt with in a sharia court. But this is already the case. There are dozens of sharia courts in the UK, though their findings are binding only on those who agree to be bound by them – or are forced to do so by peer pressure.
Universities are up in arms about a recent decision by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills to shift £100m of funding away from people studying for qualifications equivalent or lower than those they already have (ELQs, in the jargon), towards those entering higher education for the first time. This might seem a perfectly reasonable decision, and the minister, Bill Rammell, has vigorously defended it in the House of Commons as a means of reaching the Government’s target of getting 40 per cent of the population a degree-level qualification. After all, why should taxpayers’ money be given to people who have already got one perfectly good degree and want another?
In Monday’s Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown laments the resurgence of racist abuse, which she attributes in part to “the rise of rude discourse.” She’s right. You only have to tune into what she calls “the cacophony of British life” to realise that we’ve turned into a nation of ranters, “blaming and insulting each other”.
So the driver was drunk. Well knock me down with a feather. Did it really take an inquest which has occupied London’s High Court for the past three months, at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of £10m, to establish what was already clear from a thoroughgoing French inquiry into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed? Why is this necessary? The Diana soap opera is like a tepid bath; the memory of that satisfying swirl of warm emotion keeps us there, reluctant to move even as the water gets ever colder around us.
Good novels resonate long after they are written and, once the original fuss has died down, new themes continue to emerge. Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, currently nearing the end of its serialisation on Radio 4 is no exception. When it was first published in 2003, most comment focused on the supposedly shocking portrayal of Eva, the mother of a high-school killer, as cold, sarcastic and unmaternal. How could a woman feel so little affection for her own child, and why had the novelist made her protagonist so unsympathetic? Then discussion shifted as the book was championed by feminists and psychologists for its honest examination of a taboo subject.
What few reviewers seemed to have examined in depth, however, is the role of Franklin, the absent husband to whom the letters that make up this epistolary novel are addressed. One reading group question asked: “Franklin … interprets whatever Kevin gets up to in the most favourable light. Do you find this eagerness to give his child a break sympathetic, or is Franklin a fool?” Franklin is neither: he is the embodiment of Middle America.
Like my colleague John Rentoul, I have no intrinsic objection to Tony Blair accepting a highly-paid job with a merchant back after leaving office. I am sure that the former Prime Minister has taken care to avoid any conflict of interest, actual or perceived, of the type that forced the second resignation of his colleague David Blunkett. Nor do I think it inappropriate that he should wish to become president of the EU. But what I do find a little sad is the decline in the spirit of humility and public service that once animated many politicians. We now take it for granted that prime ministers should quit domestic politics entirely on leaving office. The very same day that Tony Blair tendered his resignation as Prime Minister to the Queen, he applied for the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, thus resigning his seat as MP for Sedgefield and precipitating a by-election.
When did you last listen to a piece of music? I mean really listen, from beginning to end, following the interplay of the instruments, the development of the ideas, the build-up and release of tension in the harmonies, without doing anything else at the same time?
"I'm told that the Prime Minister recently went to see a play at the National Theatre, but asked that his visit be kept private", reports our Arts Editor, David Lister, in this Saturday's Independent. "I wonder", he goes on to ask, "if such a request for privacy would be made over a visit to a football match. There's something very odd, and a little disturbing, that the Prime Minister and his opposite numbers are uncomfortable talking about culture."
Sadly, there is nothing odd about it. Despite some brave words on lifelong learning from David Blunkett in the high noon of New Labour idealism back in 1997, Mr Brown's reticence about his cultural tastes is entirely consistent with Labour's record in office. In 2006, during her tenure as Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell flew at the taxpayer's expense to see Britain's floundering World Cup squad not once but twice. If she's ever been to a first night at the National, she has kept very quiet about it. In 2003, when he was Education Secretary, her colleague Charles Clarke remarked that medieval studies were "an adornment" and that there was "no need for the state to pay for them" (this at a time when both President Bush and Osama bin Laden were invoking the rhetoric of the Crusades).
Well, that's all right, then. A team of British police will be flying to Pakistan to investigate the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, at the personal request of President Musharraf. No doubt they will be drafting in hand-picked officers from the Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor investigations, and getting Sir Ian Blair to handle the public relations side of things. That should ensure a most satisfactory outcome ...
For those of you who had the good fortune to miss it, Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz of the Year is one of those pieces of lazy programming that bulk out the holiday schedules. Under the flaccid chairmanship of Jimmy Carr, celebs are quizzed about the news trivia of the past 12 months. Reviewing the year 2007 the other night, the panel returned to a tired old controversy with some tired old jokes.
It oozes from the speakers in Tesco, and the radio in the motorway service station. It seeps out of the telly and forms a gloopy mess on the carpet: “So this is Christmas/ And what have you done?/ Another year over/ And a new one just begun.”
Well, thank goodness for that: I won’t have to listen to this bloody awful dirge for … well, not until next October, if I’m lucky. I’m sure everyone has their least favourite Christmas single. Slade and Shakey may be cheerfully naff, and as for “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, what were you thinking of, Bruce?
Driving up the A1 from London to Leeds at the weekend, we broke the journey at a little service station in Rutland. Stepping out of the car into the frosty night air, we were surprised by a fine display of stars: the great square of Pegasus, the celestial cross of Cygnus and, way up overhead, the sprawling zigzag of Cassiopeia.
It was splendid, much better than you can usually see in central England, but nothing to what I saw a few weeks ago at Haapsalu, on the west coast of Estonia. Over the frozen, reed-fringed bay was a sky full of stars: Andromeda, with the Great Spiral Nebula clearly visible, the big pentagon of Auriga, with blazing Capella reflected in the water, and the Milky Way streaming down. What hit me like a sharp intake of breath was the sheer depth of the sky: beyond the brightest stars were smaller ones, and beyond them smaller ones still, receding ever deeper into infinity.
You have to go to deepest mid-Wales, or the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, to see such a tremendous, three-dimensional universe from the British Isles. Over most of mainland Britain, none but a few first- and second-magnitude stars peer through the orange haze that clouds our skies.
The issue is often presented as if there were a conflict between environmental protection and safety. This is far from the case: as Defra points out in its guidelines, light streaming skyward contributes little to the safety of pedestrians or motorists on the ground, while glaring security lights cast deep shadows in which a miscreant can lurk.
If you’re planning to stop off for a few pints on the way home from work tonight, watch out for a beady-eyed bloke nursing a Diet Coke in the corner. Every Friday and Saturday this month, plain-clothed police will be posing as drinkers in the nation’s pubs, waiting to slap an £80 fine on anyone who appears to be drunk. The scheme, to which the Home Office Minister, Vernon Coaker, has allocated £180,000, is intended to clamp down on drink-related violence in the run-up to Christmas.
Its absurdities are manifest. There is no legal definition of what constitutes drunkenness, in terms of milligrams of alcohol in the blood that could be measured with, say, a breathyliser - it will be down to the opinion of the police officer. So at what point on the spectrum between slightly squiffy and obnoxiously, steamingly stocious do you become liable for a fine? And what if you have the misfortune to encounter a bloody-minded – or prejudiced – officer?
The crime, surely, is not being drunk, but committing acts of violence or public disorder, against which there are adequate laws already. All this kind of measure will only reinforce the widespread perception that the generally law-abiding get clobbered if they step a millimetre out of line, only to find that when they’re on the receiving end of a robbery or assault, they’re given a crime number and referred to their insurance claims department.
It’s a White House tradition under the Bush administration and an annual treat for connoisseurs of kitsch: the Christmas video featuring the adventures of Barney, the President’s Scots terrier. We see Barney, who has his own page on the White House website, chase Christmas decorations along red-carpeted corridors and scamper on a snow-covered White House lawn. The main theme this year, however, is a plan by the presidential pooch and his companion Miss Beazley – a gift from the President to First Lady Laura Bush – to become park rangers.
Cue Presidential homily on the wonders of America’s national parks. Cue Laura reading to Barney from a book on the duties of a park ranger. Cue the Bush twins Jenna and Barbara, intoning “We love the national parks” in unison. Did anyone mention drilling rights? Towards the end of the vid, who should hover into view but our own dear Tony Blair (of course I wouldn’t dream of stooping to a poodle joke here) to congratulate Barney and Miss Beazley on becoming Junior Park Rangers. “ Well done,” he says, eyes glued to the autocue. “As someone born in Edinburgh, Scotland, it’s always good to see the Scots doing well.” So sweet of him to spare a thought for Gordon at the festive season.
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