Malcolm Redfellow's World Service

2010-10-25T21:09:00.002+01:00

Go to ... elsewhere

After near-850 postings here, Malcolm got fed up with the Blogger interface.

For some time his observations on the passing scene have been confined to:

Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service.

He welcomes you there.

And it's free.

2010-07-29T15:39:00.002+01:00

The word in the street
Malcolm was scanning the Irish Times in its moment of self-congratulation: Dublin was to be the next UNESCO city of literature.

Fair enough, even if some of Eileen Battersby's claims on "literary Dubliners" pressed the limits of l'actualité:
Seamus Heaney Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. While Heaney is very much identified with his native Northern Ireland, since 1976 he has lived in Dublin ...
Her claim on Oliver Goldsmith is even more dubious, depending as it is on an undergraduate course in TCD and a statue.

Were her hand also in the accompanying editorial, it had there a surer touch:
The submission to Unesco goes straight to the point when it states that “Dublin’s chief credentials as a City of Literature lie in the historical body of work that has come from its writers over the centuries and from the equally acclaimed contemporary output of writers native to, or living within, the city’s confines”.
Sometimes out of rejection or disillusionment with the home place, but often for economic reasons, many of those same writers chose escape and exile: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Bram Stoker, Wilde, Shaw, O’Casey, Beckett and most famously the author who declared that if the city were to vanish overnight it could be reconstructed from the pages of his quintessential Dublin novel Ulysses .
But there are others who stayed or finally settled in the city and that litany of names is equally illustrious: Mangan, Yeats, Behan, Flann O’Brien, Kinsella and Austin Clarke who, like Swift, returned after years spent in London.
As well as the writers native to the city, many others, by making it their home, have enriched its literary DNA: McGahern came from Leitrim, Kennelly from Kerry, Cronin from Wexford and Heaney from Derry.
When he once remarked that the city had its share of “assassins whose weapons are the tongue and the typewriter”, the poet Brendan Kennelly, no doubt, was in a playful mood. But the sense of Dublin as a writers’ city is all-pervading and the tradition lives on in the many contemporary novelists, poets and playwrights who today continue with the task of helping us in our self-understanding as a people. “Strumpet City” can indeed hold her head high as a city of literature.
Iowa City?
What caught Malcolm's attention even more firmly was the list of previously-designated "cities of literature": Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Iowa City.

Edinburgh is too obvious: no explanation needed.

Melbourne? Well, UNESCO's own definition is:
... a city of extraordinary diversity in literary activity, Melbourne is a vibrant arena for the creation of literary works. The capital of the south-eastern state of Victoria and a major business centre within the Asia-Pacific region is widely acknowledged as Australia's cultural capital.
"Australia's cultural capital" My, my! Just think of the competition!

As for native Melbourne literary figures, there's obviously Germaine Greer, and Jim Morrison ... and the Dirty Digger ... and the astral Kylie ...

But Iowa City? Why?

Well, Malcolm, prepare to be amazed:
It has a strong literary history and is the home of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, whose graduates include John Irving, Flannery O'Connor, T.C. Boyle and many other prominent American authors ...
This literary heritage is also shown in the Iowa Avenue Literary Walk, a series of bronze relief panels that feature authors' words as well as attribution. The panels are visually connected by a series of general quotations about books and writing stamped into the concrete sidewalk. All 49 authors and playwrights featured in the Literary Walk have ties to Iowa.
But as the Vonnegut quotation on that Literary Walk pertinently says:
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

2010-07-20T10:31:00.003+01:00

The smallest public tart

Over on much-improved (with added oppositional zing!) Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service there is a note about the latest invention of Britain's new reforming government.

Quangos are out! They have to be trashed for Better Government!

Instead we have "Offices":

the Office for Budget responsibility (main function so far, covering up the gaffes in the "emergency budget");

and now the bright, shiny:

Office for Tax Simplification (staffed by Tory re-treads and their Big Accountancy and Tax Lawyer friends).

Those who question whether such innovations are quite so advanced, progressive and "modern" should remember that Charles Dickens, too, was disenchanted by them:

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being
told) the most important Department under Government. No public
business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the
acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the
largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was
equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the
plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution
Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour
before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified
in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of
boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official
memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence,
on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

That was back in 1855.

All we lack now is a public official caught with his finger in the smallest public tart.

2010-07-18T20:26:00.005+01:00

Exit stage left, kicking himself

A Sunday exercise in Sherlockian investigation.

Suddenly Malcolm's aged and usually-reliable iBook began playing up.

For no accountable reason it was registering an endless random input, mainly commas interspersed with "r".

So, check out if the keyboard is jammed.

Since this is the original keyboard, now five years old, that would not surprise. Keyboard out, try an external keyboard. Actually, try two in succession. Same fault.

Oh dear, what used to an I/O problem.

So, let's rebuild the whole disk. Run a disk utility check; all well. Do a disk erase and reload from the Leopard master (G4s don't take MacOs 10.6 Snow Leopard). All well until the set-up screen. As soon as the first key was entered, same fault: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Umm. This looks critical.

Well, let's go through the process again, just in case.

Meanwhile, crank up the 15in G4 Powerbook (dodgy DVD and lousy battery charging: Apple say an excessively-expensive motherboard problem) inherited from the Pert Young Piece when she went MacBook.

Hell's teeth! What's this? Yes: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Again, rip out the extended mouse and keyboard, which, self-evidently, must be the cause. Try again: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

No: this is impossible.

Ah! what's this?

The Lady in Malcolm's life had discarded her inoperative Bluetooth keyboard (an incident involving a coffee cup), and lodged it under Malcolm's desk. It must have taken a kick or whatever, and turned itself on.

Extract the batteries therefrom, kill the Bluetooth connection, ... and Robert is most definitely brother to one's parent.

Incredible.

2010-07-13T07:46:00.006+01:00

Rooting for answers

The rains came to London overnight, and it looks like a steamy day. Climatics didn't much concern that early-morning urban fox, sniffing the length and breadth of Malcolm's garden.

Then came a couple of questions.

One was a hang-over (nothing to do with last night's cheapo Cabernet) from yesterday's Evening Standard.

If there ever was a prime example of If it didn't exist, nobody would bother to invent it, the Standard qualifies. On the rare occasions it falls into Malcolm's lap, he can see why they give it away free. The best he can say is there's a small improvement over the days when the old comic was a lying, ranting, canting Evening Boris.

Leith it alone!

Anyway, here is Sam Leith's half-page of gossipy snippets. For no accountable reason, apart from the accompanying photograph (rather as below, left) of the fetching young lady, Malcolm's eye fell on this paragraph:

Sex, spies and red-top wars
Funny the way epithets attach themselves to characters in the news. All the stories about Cold War cutie Anna Chapman introduce her as “the redheaded spy”, as if that were the key fact about her. The New York Post quotes her hairdresser saying she's a natural brunette, anyway. And imagine how odd it would sound if we called Guy Burgess “the brown-haired spy”. But then again, I don't imagine this article will be illustrated by a photograph of Guy Burgess. Woof!

There's a "dog eat dog" element in that already (though the Standard has adopted a LibDem ochre as its masthead colour). But why whinge about the sexist description of the lady if that's precisely what Leith then sets about doing? And, quite frankly, what goes on between a woman and her hairdresser should remain in the confessional (except for a diplomatic male compliment — no matter what — when she arrives home).

The ethnic question

Then the morning news bulletin on the BBC rolling news marathon was emphatic we should know:

Ethnic minority numbers 'to rise'
Ethnic minorities are set to make up a fifth of the UK's population by 2051 - up from the current 8%, researchers predict.

That makes as much sense as declaring: 52% of the populace are female, the rest are human. Why should 92% of us, falling in the next forty years to just 80%, be denied ethnicity?

Is it coz Ah isn't black?

When Malcolm taught in tougher London schools there would be the inevitable confrontation, where a prime example of yoof would denounce Malcolm as "Whitey".

Malcolm's habitual and disarming response was to visibly shrug and say "Well, I'm more of a pale pink person, actually."

With no exception, the yoof's accompanying girl-friend, for whose benefit the confrontation had been engineered, would snigger. Result!

So, for the record, Malcolm proudly affirms his Anglo-Irish-Icenian-Parisian ethnicity! See helpful accompanying map.

As for Malcolm's grandchildren, with admixtures involving Huguenot, Brooklyn and (shudder!) Lancastrian origins, heaven help them.

Just don't deracinate us.

2010-07-11T00:02:00.004+01:00

William Butler Yeats: rugby fan!

That previous post, about the mysterious Mrs Lia Clarke, turned up a small gem.

Here is Georgie Yeats, wife of the Great Man, writing to the London critic Thomas MacGreevy, on 15 March 1926:

I'd been very cock-a-hoop on Saturday night that Ireland hadn't won the triple crown (football - in case you don't know the allusion - Ireland has won against England, Scotland, but they "couldn't beat little old Wales" - and W. was surprisingly annoyed about it... when I arrived on Saturday night from Gort he said.. before anything else "Well I suppose you know that Wales beat Ireland and so we haven't got the triple crown" ) Anyhow he was most abusive and as he was beeing really very cross and unpleasant coming home from the Abbey and going on like a thorough paced Irish-anti-Englishman and Mrs Lia (or is it Leah?) Clarke just in front, and she'll probably write and tell you all about it...

Ireland lost that game, at St Helens, by a goal and two tries to a goal and apenalty (8-11).

That was the first of the three horrors: Wales depriving Ireland of the Triple Crown. History would repeat itself: 1951 and 1969. However, in every cloud there is a silver lining: by the time of Georgie Yeats's letter there was a nine-week-old babe in Belfast who would, in 1948 and 1949, change the run of play: John Wilson Kyle.

Ah, cmon! Jackie Kyle!

2010-07-10T11:50:00.007+01:00

Notes towards ...

The not-so-good and the not-so-great, number 21: "Lia Clarke"

A long time, some eight months, since Malcolm had one of these. And this one is in need of considerable and continuing effort. This, then, is merely marking a bit of territory for further exploration.

It began with a post from Casualbets on Politics.ie:

I'm trying to find out more about Lia Clarke, someone I hadn't heard about before today. She was born in 1889 in Drogheda - in 1901 She was in school in Waterford - I can't find her in the 1911 census. Apparently she was a playwright/author (possibly also suffragette) who married the poet Austin Clarke around 1920 - the marriage apparently lasted only ten days, but he spent a year in a mental hospital recovering from it. She later moved to Nassau Street in Dublin and wrote for the Irish Press. She may have been involved in a pro-nazi fringe group during World War 2. She died in 1943.

I'm very interested in finding out more about here, and in particular her early life and who her parents were.

Augustine Joseph Clarke

The obvious point of reference there is Austin Clarke (1896-1974), who was going to be Ireland's next great poet after Yeats. Indeed, for any Irish poet of that generation, the Yeatsian legacy was near-impossible to shrug off. One might wonder if Yeats did not inversely (ahem!) return the compliment by his selection for The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Those 500 pages included swathes of Oliver St John Gogarty (a mate), and Lady Dorothy Wellesley (more than a lady-friend), but nary a sniff of Wilfred Owen, Hugh MacDiarmid ... or Austin Clarke.

However, back to the main event

Clarke was the archetypal admixture of brilliant student and fragile post-adolescent. This from Amy L. Friedman in The Blackwell Com panion to Modern Irish Culture (1999: the hot-link is a later updated edition), page 114:

As a middle-class Catholic the gifted Clarke studied Gaelic and English literature at University College, Dublin. His early adulthood was tumultuous; after rapidly earning his BA and MA, a year in a mental hospital after a nervous breakdown in 1919, a 10-day unconsummated marriage in 1920, and the loss of his University College lectureship in English (due to a registry office instead of church marriage), Clarke fled to England. His exile lasted 15 years while he worked as a journalist and book reviewer, with a second, contented marriage to Nora Walker. He returned to Dublin in 1937...

Therein lies much of the scandalous curiosity.

What that doesn't quite spell out amounts to:

the age difference between Clarke and his first wife, and what the attraction was;
his reluctance to consummate, which elsewhere is attributed to an ultra-Catholicism acquired from a domineering mother; and his subsequent loss of faith, which both inspired much of his later work and allowed his second marriage to work;

and

(lest Malcolm, a Trinity-man, allow us to forget) the rigid mind-set that made University College, Dublin, a far-from-free-thinking enclave of orthodoxy and reaction.

Moreover, we are still totally in the dark about Miss Comyn/Cummings, and for the rest of her life "Mrs Clarke".

What Malcolm didn't do next

He did not reach for the Dictionary of National Biography. This was because he assumed that Austin Clarke was so obviously Irish he would not qualify. He overlooked the generous, even imperialistic sweep of the DNB (and the barely-justified assertion of British nationality on those born in Ireland before 1921). This, as we shall see, was a mistake.

Instead, Malcolm pursued those clues given by Politics.ie, especially this cribbed from a catalogue of Whyte's the auctioneers, of Molesworth Street:

Novelist, playwright, art critic and psychic medium, Lia Clarke (1889-1943) was a woman of many parts. Born Cornelia Comyn (or Cummins) the daughter of Nicholas Comyn of Balinderry, Co. Galway, her mother’s family were Blakes from Co. Cork, from whom she inherited a private income derived from her grandfather’s business as a glass maker. She was raised in Waterford by an aunt’s family, the Jennings, but later moved to Dublin, where she became involved in literary and theosophical circles. Possibly it was her experiments in automatic writing that interested Æ, who has captured her here with an inspired yet far away expression. In 1920 she married Austin Clarke, but the marriage lasted barely a fortnight. She later settled in Nassau Street, where she wrote articles for the Irish Press. A later portrait of her, by Gaetano de Gennaro, sold through these rooms (27 May 2006, lot 135); a photograph of her appears opposite.

That "later portrait of her" (dated 1940) is shown at the head of this post. The artistic interest and merits of the pencil sketch, above, are slight: because it came from the hand of AE, George Russell, it sold for €4,800, twice the estimate.

More to the point, the provenance is The sitter's family by descent. Hmmm ...

The DNB authoritatively states ...

That DNB entry is by Mary Shine Thompson, her only contribution to the entire oeuvre. Here is the significant paragraph:

In autumn 1917 Clarke was appointed assistant lecturer in the department of English at University College, Dublin. As civil unrest intensified, his mental health deteriorated and in March 1919 his mother committed him to St Patrick's Hospital, where he was confined for over a year with severe depression and physical breakdown. Before his hospitalization he had met Cornelia Alice Mary Cummins (1889–1943), daughter of Edward Cummins, a bank manager from Drogheda, co. Louth, and his wife, formerly Winifred Blake. A well-educated older woman with a small private income who had lived abroad, Cummins established a career as a journalist who also published short stories and poor-quality verse under the pseudonym Margaret Lyster. She was considered eccentric, even mad; violently antisemitic, she harboured strong Nazi sympathies in later life. She and Clarke married secretly in a register office in Dublin on 31 December 1920, but the union was probably unconsummated and lasted less than a fortnight. About 1928 Clarke instigated unsuccessful divorce proceedings.

Hostile stuff, but then it is part of a profile of Austen Clarke.

... violently antisemitic, ... strong Nazi sympathies

Malcolm can guess where that's coming from, and leading to: that clique around Madame Maud Gonne.

Sure enough, that's where Malcolm located her in the late 1930s. On such occasions, Madame Gonne is always a good place to start: the Irish Army's highly-efficient G2 Intelligence Unit opened one of its earliest files on her.

One of Madame Gonne's Hun contacts was Oscar Pfaus, who was deputed to make contact with the IRA at the time of the 1939 "declaration of war". Pfaus was officially the Hamburg chief of the Fichte Bund (in English: "The Union for World Veracity"). In the Fichte Bund's interpretation, the world's evils, including Irish partition, were the consequence of the all-embracing Jewish conspiracy. Madame Gonne's world-view conveniently coincided.

Meanwhile Joe Fowler was operating a book-shop out of 34 Wellington Quay, from where, around August 1939, was published a small pamphlet by Lia Clarke. Gonne sent this to Pfaus, who had it translated into German and given wider distribution.

Clarke's pamphlet was nominally on behalf of "The Celtic Confederation of Occupational Guilds": this fictional "front" was presumably an attempt to be relevant to the still-fashionable vocationalism of Quadragesimo Anno of 1931. Clarke seems to gloze hard Nazism under the guise of Mussolini's corporatism and his improvisations upon Rerum Novarum. The particular contemporary relevance is the 1938 Manifesto della razza/"Charter of Race").

Clarke's argument is crude anti-semitism, deriving from a statement by a certain Mr Magee (who he?) that Irish culture, as popularly-conceived, was:

noting more than a pattern of Jewish and Freemason interest dressed up in green clothing.

She went on to urge support for Hitlerite Germany, not omitting the usual reference to and citation from Sir Roger Casement.

Cornelia Cummins/Lia Clarke/"Margaret Lyster" had links to the Maud Gonne set from, at least, 1917. There is, on line, The Book of Saint Ultan, produced as charity & vanity for the new children's hospital (fewer than three dozen printed pages, and going on half the weekly wage for a working-class Dubliner). The contents page:

Which puts "Margaret Lyster" among some very distinguished company, indeed. The give-away is the name at the top of that list: Alice Stopford Green, later a pro-Treaty senator, who ran an artistic coterie out of her home, 90 St Stephen's Green (where she also sheltered the likes of Michael Collins). Another Trinity connection: R.B.McDowell, the Junior Dean, knocked off her brief biography in 1967.

Terminus ad quem?

And that, for the moment, is as far as Malcolm has gone.

2010-07-04T11:12:00.001+01:00

In praise of ... Shane Ross

Double-jobbing is a hot topic both sides of the Irish border. Nobody does it as organically as Shane Ross.
He has three existences, as inextricably related as parallel lines:

He is a columnist for the [Irish] Independent;
He has twenty years experience in the Oireachtas, and continues to grace the Senate. He and David Norris are First Count shoo-ins for the Trinity College seats (and, in Malcolm's estimation, that's the most sophisticated electorate this side of Gallifrey).
He serves as a continuing channel between Trinity alumni, local and the vast diaspora, and the state of play in Irish politics, especially on educational topics.

The reason for Ross's elegant success is, first and foremost, an acute intellect. That is such a rare commodity among Irish politicos it deserves a statue in itself. In his case intelligence is also applied: here is a former stock-broker who has gone straight, who knows how to peel-and-chip a balance-sheet like a spud, and neatly flick out the dodgy bits.

Lining the cat-litter tray apart, Ross amounts to the near totality of reasons for buying the Indo.

What makes him indispensable reading is not merely the shrewd insights, but the verve. Put Ross on the rugby field (and Rugby School is one of his almae matres), and he would be a cert for the Red Army at Thomond Park, not just winning handsomely, but taking apart; not playing dirty, just leaving a mark — if not flesh wounds — for future reference.

Example? Any week would suffice, but take last Sunday, putting the boot into the Dublin Airport Authority (trumpeting the third world airport's overdue, over-priced,unwanted second terminal), up before the Oireachtas Committee on Transport:

Chief executive Declan Collier strutted into the committee room with a couple of cohorts, ... [and] made a banal opening statement about the wonderful world of the DAA. Then he faced questions from Oireachtas members. Collier's replies were lifted straight out of the Alan Dukes school of arrogance. He must have been watching the chairman of Anglo's refusal to answer questions a week earlier. The two guys have plenty in common. Both are "public interest" directors of diseased banks. Declan is a state appointee to AIB. Alan is chairman of Anglo. Both are well connected and vastly overpaid. Declan nets just short of €600,000 from the two state gigs. Alan only pockets €250,000 (€100,000 as a ministerial pension and €150,000 from Anglo). Both "public interest" directors know how to brandish two fingers at the public.

A couple of years back, may thought Ross had his finest hour with FAS:

The national training and employment agency is the object of murky allegations. Inquiries are uncovering odd antics. People are asking: what does FAS do with its €20m a week? The answers are disturbing.

FAS tried to give Ross the brush-off, side-stepping his questioning. Bad mistake — Ross simply went out and got the dirt:

Luxury business-class flights for boss Rody Molloy and his wife, a €7,000 night out in a private dining room at the five-star Merrion Hotel, golfing at exclusive clubs, beauty salons and pay-per-view hotel movies are among the more extravagant costs incurred by top brass at beleaguered state job-creation outfit FAS.

Those "costs", Ross continued extended to:

a $410 bill at Solutions on West Cocoa Beach, Florida, also in August 2005. Solutions is a beauty and nail salon...

A Fas credit card was used to pay $942.53 for [DG of FAS] Rody Molloy to play a three-ball golf match at the Orlando Florida Grand Cypress Resort Golf club, described as “a golf resort more grand than you ever imagined”.

And so on, not forgetting the €6,962 dinner bill at Dublin’s five star Merrion Hotel, ... mostly featuring a cheeky little Cabernet Sauvignon at €48 a bottle.

In due course, it transpired the beauty treatment was a perk for Health Minister Mary Harney. And the good folk of the UK thought a duck-house was the nadir of sleaze.

The FAS exposé was merely the second-stage boost for hyperspatial Shane Ross.

Currently he is, in all senses, eating out on the phenomenon that is his book, The Bankers, How the Banks Brought Ireland to its Knees. They pile 'em high, and sell them as "three-for-two" in all good Irish bookshops. Ross doesn't complain: whatever he loses on the swings of discounting (and sales are going 40,000 or so), he more than gains in status as

the man who consistently gets it right.

2010-07-02T19:30:00.004+01:00

A sane, balanced voice

If there is, this week, one piece Malcolm wishes he had the intellect to have written, it is a piece in the Economist.

It is headed Austerity alarm, sub-titled

Both sides in the row over stimulus v austerity exaggerate, but the austerity lobby is the more dangerous.

Hunt it out.

It makes sense.

2010-07-01T14:48:00.001+01:00

The vagueness of Hague

In which Malcolm considers the descent into irrelevance of a once-significant political figure.

As Malcolm considered this post, he had one ear on William Hague, doing a tour d'horizon from his new-found fief at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Malcolm's problems with Hague start and finish with two images: the toothy youthful Hague beside Thatcher (left, but only here) and any one of Steve Bell's later grotesques (right, and more accurate).

Trite tripe

The speech, it transpired, was not vintage Hague: too tightly-scripted and designed-by-committee. For, ultimately, Hague is circumscribed in three obvious ways:

He has nothing new to say. UK foreign commitments have not changed significantly these last two months. The postures of the ConDems on matters transmarine differ little from their predecessors. Only yesterday, Liam Fox (the Mod getting its retaliation in first?) nailed the Union Jack firmly above the Kabul last-ditch.
The autumn spending review is the trumpeting Jumbo, still constrained for the time being in the junk-cupboard.
Don't mention the EU. It's all gone swimmingly for the Tories since they acquired the figleaf of coalition, as the continuing suppression of Daniel Hannan testifies. The fractious matter of Europe (the one topic guaranteed to stir trouble inside the party) demands the silence of the "p" in swimming-pool. Hague's single paragraph on the EU was sotto voce between nods to the left for Obama and to the right for Lord Salisbury.

That accepted, Hague was buffing up a decent gloss on the post-Iraqi and extended-Afghani turd.

One sure sign of a minister struggling is a heavy emphasis on the cyberspacial: sure enough, the FCO press-release is headlined: Britain's Foreign Policy in a Networked World.

Much is made about the hundred million young Pakistanis with access to mobile phones, from which they can derive opinions and views. This theme, decorated with a few gratuitous Twitter mentions (see below), suggests Hague needs to reconsider seriously any attempt to cut back on BBC overseas services and, especially, the potent BBC web-sites.

Two details from Hague went straight to the fillings in Malcolm's teeth.

Why decry the amount of trade the UK does with Ireland?

It is estimated that by 2050 emerging economies will be up to 50% larger than those of the current G7, including of course the United Kingdom. Yet the latest figures show we export more to Ireland than we do to India, China and Russia put together.

That is a totally fallacious factoid.

For a start the British and Irish markets are effectively integrated: look at the small print on your cornflakes package or toothpaste tube for evidence. When Malcolm's alter ego pays his annual MobileMe due to Apple, it is surcharged at Irish VAT rates. A large proportion of Irish imports are re-exports via Britain. The good folk of Buncrana are fated by geography to do some shopping in Derry. The Maheraveely motorist, in urgent need of a new tyre, may head for Clones.

What's this about Castlereagh?

For no obvious gain, except a rhetorical flourish, Hague trotted out this:

When Foreign Secretary Castlereagh went to the Congress of Vienna in 1814 it was the first time a British Foreign Secretary had even set foot overseas to meet any of his counterparts since 1782 when the position of Foreign Secretary was established. Today Foreign Ministers communicate through formal notes, highly frequent personal meetings, hours a day on the telephone to discuss and coordinate responses to crises, and quite a lot of us communicate by text message or in the case of the Foreign Minister of Bahrain and I, follow each other avidly on Twitter.

All that shows is an ignorance of the circumstances of the time of George III. It also ignores the scurry of delegates (foreign ministers of stature, if not in name) from London across Europe in those years. Leaving aside the facile notion that the involvement of a nominal Foreign Secretary comprehends the totality of a foreign policy, Hague might have reflected on (say) June, 1520, and The Field of Cloth of Gold. Was that not cutting-edge (if, ultimately ineffectual) foreign relations?

Anyway, consider what Oliver Cromwell's Secretary for Foreign Tongues (one John Milton, no less) might have been able to express, with or without the medium of Twitter. Hague (1 July 2010) will not endure as Long or as memorably as John Milton an Englishman His Defence of the People of England (24 February 1652). Milton's invective is more inventive, more vitriolic and more enjoyable, if nothing else.

Hmm: Milton's publsher there (see right) appreciated the organic link between Britain and its westward island: another lesson that Hague might note (though the Irish excoriators of all things Cromwellian might cavil).

A banal bottom line

After all his frotting and frothing, Hague concluding with a miserable punch-line. Pick the bones out of this, if you can find even one:

So we are now raising our sights for the longer term, looking at the promotion of British interests in the widest sense. In the coming months we will develop a national strategy for advancing our goals in the world that ties together the efforts of government, that is led by foreign policy thinking, that works through strengthened international institutions as well as reinvigorated bilateral relationships, that is consciously focused on securing our economic prosperity for the future, and that unashamedly pursues our enlightened national interest of seeking the best for our own citizens while living up to our responsibilities towards others. In short, it is a foreign policy that embraces the networked world. For seen in this light, although the next twenty years is likely to be a time of increased danger in foreign affairs, it is also a time of extraordinary opportunity for a country that sets out to make the most of the still great advantages the United Kingdom certainly possesses.

Hardly Miltonic. Where Milton present (a solecism which reminds Malcolm of a former Headteacher of Malcolm's acquaintance announcing to the full school assembly that "Beethoven is dead at the moment") he might find a Puritanical chortle as he struggled to decide which motto from Horace's Ars Poetica best summed Hague's spiel:

Difficile est proprie communia dicere. [It is hard to speak common truths in a way of one's own.]
Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio. [When I struggle to be brief, I make myself obscure]
Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. [The mountains labour, give birth to no more than a ludicrous mouse.]

2010-06-29T21:11:00.001+01:00

Passports, please!

It's almost impossible to get a legitimate Irish passport at the moment. The passport office is on go-slow, with the consequence that many would-be holiday-makers are re-discovering any UK roots.

Meanwhile, the Israelis and the Russians seem able to manufacture them at will.

Of course, not too long ago they were for sale. Arguably — well, just about — the scheme, cooked up in 1988, had merits. A financier investing £1M+, acquiring substantial residence in Ireland for five years, might be awarded a passport on the recommendation of the Departments of Justice, Foreign Affairs, Enterprise and Employment and the industrial development agency, Forbairt.

In 1990 Charlie Haughey handed over no fewer than ten (approved that very morning by Ray Burke as Justice Minister) to Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, as these two heroic democrats lunched at the Shelbourne. The return, allegedly, was £20M. Unfortunately, Mahfouz went down soon after, £9B up to his ears in the collapse of the BCCI bank.

When Albert Reynolds was Taoiseach, Palestinian businessman, Khalid Sabih Masri, made a £1.1M loan to Reynolds' dog-food firm, C&D Foods. This sprang a passport for a man who had no other credible link to Ireland. The fall-out brought down the FF-Labour coalition. Over the years before the plug was pulled, 143 passports were issued. The day she left office, Justice Minister Nora Owen still found time to issue one to Masri's daughter.

Reynolds' successor, Bertie Ahern arranged a similar facility for a Mr Norman Turner, of Manchester, whose main Irish connection was the wish to open a casino in the Phoenix Park. The Mahon Inquiry were assured that the sum of £20,000 deposited in Ahern's bank account, just the day before the passport was issued, was totally unconnected.

When Mossad topped Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, on 20th January, four of the assassination squad were travelling on forged Irish documents.

Now, one of the ten suspects, arrested in the USA on suspicion of spying for the Russians, is "Richard Murphy". That's an indicator of origin in itself, but Mr Murphy appears to be in possession of an alternative identity and Irish passport as "Eunan Gerard Doherty".

Only the native Irish are denied the facility, it seems.

The best Irish passport story, in Malcolm's opinion, involves the despicable Charles Bewley.

Bewleywas the Irish representative, first in the Vatican (1929-1933), then in Berlin, where his anti-semitism made him go native and Nazi. A bit late in the game, in August 1939, de Valera finally sacked him. Goebbels kindly found Bewley a sinecure, writing propaganda.

With the fall of Berlin, Bewley went walkabout. The British picked him up in northern Italy, waving expired Irish diplomatic papers, and thus putting both the British and the Irish authorities into a quandary. De Valera's man, Joe Walshe, consulted with the British representative in Dublin, Sir John Maffey, and came up with a final solution to the Bewley problem.

New papers were issued to Bewley. They were not diplomatic papers. They described the arrogant and self-esteemed Bewley as "a person of no importance", thus effectively trapping Bewley, who could not expose himself to such humiliation at any border, in Rome until his death in 1969. This Machiavellian device, according to one of Malcolm's sources, was the devious suggestion of a budding apparatchik in the Department of Foreign Affairs, one Conor Cruise O'Brien.

2010-06-01T16:57:00.001+01:00

Take the oath and in the soup

There are fools, damn fools, and people who should never be allowed near an edged tool.

Such as this one, using the tell-tale pseudonym of Battle of the Bogside:

I wonder how Mark ‘I’m a Republican’ Durkan feels about his party leader taking the soup?
Oh that’s right, he took the soup as well!

That is prompted by the SDLP's Leader Margaret Ritchie, the elected MP for South Down, taking her Westminster seat. And thereby causing great distress, and dampened underwear, among the adolescent protagonists of Sinn Féin's abstentionist policy.

The best, and least partisan explanation of the Oath taken by MPs is in a House of Commons Research Paper 00/17. It even, helpfully, includes a long section. starting at page 29, which addresses the issue of:

Sinn Féin and the Oath

One thing we find there (citing an Irish Times article of 5 December 1997) is that, contrary to most supposition, it is not the Oath which is the issue:

Mr Adams said the question of the oath was “a bit of a distraction”. While a change
might be good for British democracy, it would not alter Sinn Fein’s position. Asked
if he could see himself sitting in the Commons following a change to the oath, Mr
Adams said: “No, because the issue for us is the claim of that parliament to
jurisdiction in Ireland.”

One might reasonably have thought the weather has changed in these dozen intervening years. By various kinds of prestidigitation, all sides have made it possible for Sinn Féin not only to sit in the Northern Ireland Assembly, at Stormont, under the shadow of Brookeborough and Andrews. They even take positions which are, in any objective sense, “offices of profit under the Crown”. Moreover, Sinn Féin are quite happily taking parliamentary expenses for their non-parliamentary duties:

The party's two best-known figures, Gerry Adams, the party leader, and Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, jointly claimed expenses of £3,600 a month to rent a shared two-bedroom flat in north London. A local estate agent, who knows the properties, said a fair monthly rent for the flat would be £1,400.

he three other Sinn Fein MPs together claimed £5,400 a month to rent a shared, modern town house, which the estate agent said would rent on the open market for around £1,800 a month. At other times some of the MPs have stayed in a third property, another two-bedroom flat.

As the Research Document puts it, oh so neatly:

Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness had both announced before the election that although they would not take the oath if elected they would adopt a new policy of “active abstentionism”. Thus they would attend the Palace of Westminster in order to avail themselves of “the normal facilities afforded to MPs, namely office accommodation, staff allowances, research facilities, travel allowances, broadcasting services and access to restricted areas for the purpose of making informal contact with other MPs".

In other words, the Sinn Féin definition of an abstentionist MP is to take all the benefits, but not to do the work of the Chamber or Committees. So “active abstentionism” is qualitatively different from “abstentionism”. It’s at moment like this one seems to hear George Orwell’s sheep counting legs and their relative value.

There appears to be more to this story yet. In Hansard, HC Deb 4 Feb 2000 Vol 343 c 740W, we hear of correspondence between the Blair government and the SF MPs on the subject, which is kept confidential at the request of SF:

Mr. Field: To ask the Secretary of State for International Development how many letters she has received since 1 May 1997 on
(a) constituency matters
and (b) other matters of Government policy from each of those Members of the House who have not taken the Oath of Allegiance.

Clare Short: This information cannot be provided on the basis that correspondence between MPs and Departments is treated in confidence unless the originating MP chooses to make such issues public.

Now for the soup course

... out of Irish folk tradition there emerges, dear and burning, fierce hatred of official charity, given through Protestant stores, by degrading methods, sometimes only in return for abjuring Catholicism. Meal soup was offered on Fridays to starving Catholics by Protestant 'soupers'. Some Protestants would provide relief to Catholics only if they attended Protestant churches, schools or lectures, denied the main tenets of Catholicism. Or offered insults to statues of the Blessed Virgin. The association of food with proselytism burnt anti-Protestantism even deeper into Irish minds.

Thus Patrick O'Farrell, in Ireland's English Question: Anglo-Irish Relations, 1534-1970, in those less-questioning days, forty years ago.

This is one of the great untruths of Irish history. It doesn't withstand modern analytical criticism:

The myths of mass defection from the Catholic Church as a result of 'Protestant souperism' were unfounded. The 1861 Census showed no marked increase in the number of Protestants even in areas where proselytisation was most prevalent.

Where, then, did the story originate, except in some warped and guilty folk memory? A clue is the earliest sighting of the term, in the 11 November 1854 issue of The Tablet.

What is nearer the truth is that, in November 1846, the Dublin Quakers, in despair at the inadequacy of the Russell Government's policies, formed a Central Relief Committee. Over the winter some £20,000 of relief was raised and distributed, as food, bedding, seeds ... and through soup-kitchens. Catholic priests deplored the arrival of these do-gooders and urged their parishioners to have nothing to do with them. Quakers are not known for aggressive proselytising; but any Catholic seen consorting with them could quickly be damned as faithless and a "souper".

Catholic guilt?

During and after the Famine, the Catholic Church in Ireland was severely weakened, under criticism. While congregations starved and emigrated, there was still money for church-building (for one example, in 1845 Robert Peel donated £30,000 to Maynooth, and increased the annual subsidy from £9,000 to £26,000 a year). This continued and accelerated through the rest of the century. Only today, Peter Thompson does the Irish Times's Irishman's Diary to make pertinent points derived from:

a dissident Catholic of the past, Michael John Fitzgerald McCarthy, an Irish writer of the early 20th century who has been almost completely forgotten, but whose works are absolutely ripe for rediscovery.

Thompson suggests that McCarthy was an important influence in his time:

his most famous book, Priests and People in Ireland (1904), [was] a passionate denunciation of the domination of Irish life by the Roman Catholic Church which, read today, is truly shocking in its prescience of what was to happen in independent Ireland. Selling in its tens of thousands, it may have been read by, and influenced, James Joyce. Stanislaus Joyce, in My Brother’s Keeper (1958), records that he (Stanislaus) had a copy. Today, one could be forgiven for thinking that much of Priests and People came straight out of the Ferns, Murphy and Ryan reports.

It may not be directly relevant to the Famine, but what Thompson takes from McCarthy suggests a state-of-ecclesiastical mind that is unchanging:

In chapter after chapter, its author shows forensically, using census returns, how the Roman Catholic clergy grew in numbers between 1861 and 1901 so that by the latter year they represented a parallel economy to the actual one. In those 40 years, the population of Roman Catholics in Ireland fell by 27 per cent, but the numbers of clergy increased by 137 per cent!

McCarthy accused the Roman Catholic religious, in a phrase that has extraordinary resonance today, of being always “on the scent of money”, whether it be from industrial schools, laundries or from the solicitation, by means of wills and money for Masses, from wealthy Catholics of extraordinary sums.

He gives innumerable examples of this: after one garden party in the archdiocese of Armagh, for instance, Cardinal Logue came away with the (then) staggering sum of £30,000 for his new cathedral.

Cries of "Souper", then and now, seem little more than a defence mechanism and blame-shifting.

2010-05-31T11:44:00.001+01:00

Dreary steeples: 2

Fermanagh & South Tyrone ... yet again

If there is a competition for the most MPs (some eleven — which might yet reach the round dozen — over six decades) elected by a single constituency, in the shortest period of time, this one deserves consideration.

It is a vast rural stretch (see wikipedia's diagram, right). To the east it oh-so-nearly doesn't quite touch Lough Neagh. At the other end a finger-tip stretches for Bradoge Bridge, where the townland of Manger is the UK's Wild West (apart from sweet Rockall). In that fastness we are barely a spit-and-jump out of Bundoran.

Equally, politics is a weird business, wherein strange near-approximations to human life survive and prosper. But, for a prime selection of bizarre candidates over the years, this one has to be a runner. As Gawin Douglas said of his Eneados of 1513 (and Burns prefixed as the text above Tam O'Shanter):

Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this Buke.

Here's the sequence:

1950 General Election: Cahir Healy (an interesting character, who will inspire a subsequent post).
1951 General Election: still Cahir Healy, holding the seat on an increased majority of 2,635 out of 62,797 votes (an astounding 93.4% turn-out).
1955 General Election: Philip Clarke taking the seat for Sinn Féin by 261 votes in a straight fight;
August 1955: an electoral court disqualified Clarke as a convicted felon (doing time for IRA activities) and awarded the seat to his defeated opponent, Lord Robert Grosvenor (later the 5th Duke of Westminster).
1959 General Election 1959 Grosvenor held the seat with a huge majority over Sinn Féin.
1964 General Election: James Hamilton, the Marquess of Hamilton (cousin of Grosvenor, and a major landowner in the constituency) saw off Aloysius Mulloy, standing as an "Independent Republican". NILP and Liberals split the vote.
1966 General Election: the nationalist vote was split by a "Unity" candidate (J.J.Donnelly) and Sinn Féin's Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. Even so, Hamilton was back on a plurality.
1970 General Election: Frank McManus stood as a "Unity" candidate, and took the seat off Hamilton. There was again a remarkable turn-out: over 92%. Not many were deceived by MacManus's anodyne party label: one brother, Pat, was killed in an IRA "own-goal" bombing in 1958; another is Father Seán McManus of the Redemptorists, founder of the Irish National Caucus.
In the first election of 1974, the nationalist vote was shared pretty evenly between McManus and Denis Haughey (the SDLP's long-term, all-purpose man-beyond-the-Bann). This let the sulphurous Harry West in for the Unionists.
October 1974: Frank Maguire (an "Independent Republican") cleaned up, 2,500 ahead of West, with a nugatory Maoist in for a laugh. Maguire had been the IRA Commander in Crumlin Road gaol, during internment. Even so, he was not a total abstentionist: famously he attended the last rites of the Callaghan government in 1979, to "abstain in person".
1979 General Election: Maguire was returned despite a four way split (with an Alliance candidate making up the numbers). Austin Currie, as an "independent SDLP" candidate creamed off over 10,000 nationalist votes, but Ernest Baird, the chemist and hatchetman for the Vanguard Unionist rump, did the same for the unionist vote.
Frank Maguire's death in March, 1981, caused a famous by-election. Bobby Sands, on hunger strike in the H-blocks, squeezed past Harry West in a "straight" fight (thoughthere was little straight about the campaigning). Sands was dead four weeks later.
So a further by-election was held in the August. Since the law had changed, to prevent prisoners being nominated as candidates, Owen Carron (who had run Sands's campaign) won as the Anti-H blocks candidate (and as an abstentionist) over Ken Maginnis.
1983 General Election: the SDLP put up Rosemary Flanagan, split Carron's nationalist support, and let Maginnis in. With SDLP continuing the split for the next four elections (the Unionist mass resignations causing 1986 by-elections and then the 1987, 1993, 1997 General Elections) Maginnis was re-elected, until he stood down for 2001 and went to the Lords. Perhaps Maginnis was recognising that the 1997 redistribution had moved the constituency fractionally in favour of the nationalists.
In 2001, again on a four way split, Michelle Gildernew was the faintest scintilla of a nose (just 53 votes) ahead of James Cooper for the UUP. That was despite the ever-present GAA-man Tommy Gallagher putting up for the SDLP (his third of four successive runs) and hoovering up ten thousand votes.
2005 General Election: Michelle Gildernew had an easy ride, and a 4,500 majority, for Sinn Féin. This was because Arlene Foster inervened to take 14,000 for the DUP, pushing the UUP Councillor Tom Elliott MLA (who had been Cooper's agent in 2001, and should have known better) into third.
This time round, 2010, was the cliff-hanger. After much pushing-and-shoving, the DUP and UUP agreed Rodney Connor as an "independent Unionist". Since Cameron had made his daft commitment that the Tories be represented in every constituency, this involved a face-saving formula of words, that Connor would take the Whip on all non-constityency matters. Meanwhile, Fearghal McKinney, a transplant from Derry (not always a route to popularity in these parts) and local journo, thrust himself forward as the the SDLP candidate. Predictably he was squeezed out of serious contention. Even so, his 3,500 votes threatened Gildernew. After multiple recounts Gildernew was elected by just four votes. Connor was incandescent at the declaration, and is now pursuing his complaint through an electoral court.

Little of that will come new to anyone interested in this neck of the backwoods. Fermanagh & South Tyrone's shenanigans go through west-of-the-Bann political life the way letters go through seaside rock. Such recitals, though, help memory to be refreshed.

Malcolm, at the head of this posting, reached for Burns's Tam O'Shanter and Gawin Douglas on his Aeneid. That conceit now seems appropriate, for all sorts of reasons (some geophysical, some personal) when:

We think ... on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Where sits our sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

In Fermanagh & South Tyrone, even more than the generality of Northern Ireland's politics, wrath is warm, and revenge is eaten cold.

2010-05-28T20:09:00.001+01:00

Dreary steeples: 1

Mark McGregor has a neat reflection on Slugger O'Toole.

There, he does a think about the attempt by the "agreed" Unionist in Fermanagh and South Tyrone to have Michelle Gildernew's election (by four votes) overturned by the Courts. He notes that we went the same way in 2001, when James Cooper (for the UUP) failed. McGregor has the pertinent obiter dicta of Justice Carswell. All worth the trip: a Michelin 3-stars.

Mid Ulster, 1955

When Malcolm went into that thread, nobody had recollected the Mid Ulster shenanigans after the 1955 election.

In a straight fight, Tom Mitchell saw off Charles Beattie by 806 votes (with near on 60,000 ballots on the table). Mitchell was in chokey in Belfast: he had been done for the IRA raid on Omagh barracks. So, the Commons voted 197-63 to unseat him as a felon, giving the election to the also-ran. Not end of story.

The defeated Beattie, now enstooled as MP, was an Enniskillen auctioneer and general Unionist busybody. As a newly-minted MP he turned up and voted for the Tory government on numerous occasions. He seems never to have made a maiden speech: in Anglo-Tory terms, that must make him the perfect Ulster Unionist.

Alas! Beattie had been for many years a Unionist nominee on a whole splatter of appeal tribunals, which paid expenses. This trifle was then raised in the Commons. So, over the Christmas period of 1955-6, the wheels of parliamentary administration were grinding slow, but their pernicious smallness adjudged Beattie to have held “offices of profit under the Crown”. He, too, got the heave-ho.

Malcolm can assure all-comers the whole shebang merely reinforced the impression in Dublin that Northern Ireland was a very, very racketty joint.

What fun! What mirth! Now for Dick Martin!

Those who relish MPs’ elections being overturned on judicial appeal might care to refer to Richard Martin (1754-1834), MP for Galway (and one of the founders of the RSPCA).

He became popularised as “Humanity Dick” (let's have no Sid-the-Sexist snarfing, please!) after “Martin’s Act” of 1822, the world’s first legislation penalizing cruelty to animals.

When he was challenged on why he devoted so much time and energy to the cause, he responded: ‘Sir, an ox cannot hold a pistol!’ (there is an element of threat in that: his other moniker was “Hairtrigger Dick”, earned on the basis of fighting around a hundred duels, with both sword or pistol).

His significance here is that his re-election in 1826 was overturned on the ground of “illegal intimidation” (legal intimidation being, presumably, part and parcel of the business of politicking). Having lost his parliamentary immunity, he escaped his creditors by fleeing to Boulogne.

And, in another post, Malcolm will address the neighbouring constituency.

2010-05-25T16:52:00.002+01:00

Malcolm's heroes of the day ...

are Ana M. Garcia and the team of researchers from from the the University of Valencia, the Generalitat Valenciana, and the Institut Municipal d'Investigació Mèdica, Barcelona:

Malcolm came across this first in today's Guardian:

Alcohol cuts the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, especially among women and non-smokers, and drinkers are at lower risk than teetotallers, according to researchers from Valencia University in Spain, writing in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

"Our results for alcohol consumption generally point to a protective effect, especially light and moderate drinkers."

Or, from the original press release:

"Our results suggest a protective effect of alcohol consumption, mostly in nonsmokers, and the need to consider interactions between tobacco and alcohol consumption, as well as interactions with gender, when assessing the effects of smoking and/or drinking on the risk of AD," according to lead investigator Ana M. Garcia, PhD, MPH, Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, University of Valencia.

"Interactive effects of smoking and drinking are supported by the fact that both alcohol and tobacco affect brain neuronal receptors."

Since a previous study indicated:

Alcohol cuts the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis by up to 50%

it's all A-OK.

Cheers, Ana!

2010-05-24T13:54:00.002+01:00

Essential reading

Carl Hiaasen on a roll:

It's fashionable to be mad at the government these days, but many folks are unclear about how to join the movement.

The first step is to master the idiom of outrage. It's not just government, it's Big Government. Or even better: Big Guv'ment.

Huge, clunky, intrusive, exorbitant -- that's Uncle Sam. Get off our backs, get out of our lives and let go of our wallets!

The sentiment has been around for 234 years, but never before did we have the Internet to make it feel so fresh and original. Every red-blooded patriot should aspire to a life that's more or less free of government, which apparently can't do anything right.

Get the rest (What did the Romans ever do for us?) at the Miami Herald site.

2010-05-22T22:00:00.001+01:00

A glorious day ... what to do?

Find a decent pub and drink in the sun, obviously.

The Duke of York is quite a fine-looking building. Once upon a time it was the natural watering hole between Barnet and Potters Bar, on the old North Road. Today it is just out of earshot of the M25, a spit beyond the Greater London boundary line into Hertfordshire.

When the Lady in his Life and Malcolm started visiting here, it was little more than a roadside steak bar. It has brightened, expanded and now puts on a decent appearance. A bit suburban golf-clubby perhaps, but none the worse for that. A mixed clientele makes it a bit more appealing than the norm in these parts.

On draught three good beers, London Pride and Doom Bar as regulars. A grill and a bottle of Cab in between partakings. Then a long, leisurely sit in the pleasant beer-garden.

More out of cussedness (and a wish for both parties to drink) meant the Lady in his Life and Malcolm undertook the hike on public transport. The 84 from New Barnet all the way to St Albans is as far out as the London red buses venture: London travel passes seem to work as far as Potters Bar.

What's not to like?

2010-05-22T01:34:00.003+01:00

When friends fall out

The Spectator was Boris Johnson's plaything, the launch-pad for his campaign for the London mayorality. It is therefore enlightening to see this week's cover article:

Has Boris lost his grip?

The article that depends from this presumption is, sadly, hidden behind a subscription wall.

So, as a public service, here is what it says:

Must do better: Boris Johnson’s half-term report

Mira Bar-Hillel says that the lovable London Mayor was once a lodestar for the Tories nationwide, but his intellectual laziness and a tendency to listen to bad advice is leading him astray.

On Question Time last month, Boris Johnson, London's Mayor, was asked about his plans to build a new airport in the Thames estuary: an idea seen as reasonable by some and insane by others. As he blustered amiably away, saying not very much, a lady interrupted and asked: 'Why can't you just admit it when you are wrong instead of waffling on?' The audience roared with approval.

It was an Emperor's New Clothes moment. The innocent questioner had put her finger on Boris's fatal flaws: he can't admit he's wrong, but he's a little too lazy to do his homework properly, and that often leaves him intellectually denuded. The Mayor of London giggled, then drifted into silence; the cameras kept rolling and a question began to form itself in viewers' minds: just how well suited is Boris to power?

The questions that first arose in that silence echo even louder now, after the coalition deal. For unhappy Tory back-benchers and for the disgruntled membership, Boris is the Prince over the Water. His sister Rachel spoke for many when she tweeted — as the results came in — 'It's all gone tits up! Send for Boris.' And Boris has never made much of a secret of his rivalry with David Cameron. He has opposed his party leader on major contentious issues: amnesty for illegal immigrants (Boris is in favour), taxing bankers' bonuses and the 50p tax (Boris is against), the Tories' refusal to commit to funding the new airport Boris wants in the Thames estuary. The relationship between BJ and Dave is one of jovial, almost fraternal opposition. But if the Lib-Con pact falls apart, if Cameron falls under the number 59 bus, then the party may well be tempted to 'send for Boris' and find him a safe seat somewhere.

But before the grass roots start growing around Boris, it's worth taking a careful look at what sort of Mayor he is. Having served two of his four years, it is no longer premature to ask if this lovable, quotable Mayor can actually deliver. And I'm afraid the verdict on his mayoralty is the same verdict given by most newspapers to his new Routemaster bus unveiled on Tuesday: nice idea, good intentions, but shame about the bungled execution.

I first met Boris Johnson after his mayoral candidacy was announced in the autumn of 2007. I was desperate to see Ken Livingstone gone from City Hall for reasons too numerous to mention and couldn't wait for his replacement. I was keen to discuss with Boris the issues I had been covering for the London Evening Standard for over 25 years, and which I knew mattered deeply to the electorate: planning and housing. As he was MP for Henley at the time, we met in his parliamentary office and we chatted for two hours. He was charming, highly intelligent, quick-witted and sincere. The London he wanted to lead was, for him, a city of brick, stone, slate and tile, where the traditional streetscapes worked best and where Ken's towers were unwelcome and unwanted, apart from in the business centres of the City and Canary Wharf.

It was music to my ears and we parted with a warm handshake. I was then summoned to join Boris's election 'planning task force'. The session was a bit chaotic, but I clearly recall urging Boris to end Ken's eight-year war with the London boroughs and promise not to interfere with their democratically made planning decisions unless it was absolutely necessary. He agreed, and this message, especially to the mainly Tory outer boroughs, was acknowledged as one of the election tactics which helped win him the crucial suburban vote.

Boris also expressed strong opposition to skyscrapers in predominately low-rise suburban centres, with a specific mention of the 'penny whistle' at Ealing Broadway. I looked forward to a second meeting, where I hoped to raise the subject of London's massive housing crisis, which Livingstone had shamefully allowed to grow and fester. It never happened. The 'task force' proved a nine-minute wonder, but I remained optimistic.

After Boris was elected, I went to City Hall to brief officials about planning and housing and spoke to Richard Blakeway, an able and willing young man who didn't know very much but seemed keen to learn and took copious notes. In July I was approached by a firm of headhunters. They were, they said, looking for a Deputy Mayor for Housing and wanted to interview me as soon as possible. But after the interview, I was then told by the nice chap who had questioned me that the position of Deputy Mayor for Housing had been, er, abolished, and would I be prepared to be put forward as Director of Housing Policy instead? OK, I said, what the hell.

The poor man was too embarrassed to then tell me, some days later, that this position had also mysteriously disappeared, and I received an email instead. It was all very Boris. Oh, and it was eventually announced that the Mayor's housing adviser would be ... Richard Blakeway. The result, I regret to report, is that London has no housing policy.

Having laid my cards on the table, I am of course open to accusations of sour grapes. So be it. But my point here is not to suggest that Boris should have listened to me so much as to identify a pattern which he has established over these last two years: well-meaning enthusiasm, followed by listening to bad advice, several U-turns, and an unsatisfactory result.

In the past year I have crossed swords with the Mayor's office on several issues, some with Boris's direct involvement. And my sad conclusion is that, while I am still convinced that Boris is hard not to like and that his intentions are for the most part genuinely good, he (like Prince Charles) is too weak, too lazy and too ill-advised at the highest level to implement his policies. He lacks attention to detail and, because of his desire to be liked and to avoid confrontation with City Hall staff and agencies, he is all too easily fobbed off. And, as the Question Time woman revealed, he will not admit mistakes. Remember the ‘inverted pyramid of piffle’ — as he described the truthful reporting of one of his marital infidelities.

Worst of all, he seems to have fallen among thieves. No fewer than five of his top ‘aides’ have famously been forced out of office in lamentable circumstances, severely damaging the reputation of the man who first appointed them and then — in some cases — allowed them to stay in post long after it was no longer tenable. In March he had to sack Bertha Joseph, deputy chairman of the London Fire Authority, who had spent £900 of charitable donations on two ballgowns — but only after rejecting earlier demands to do so. He also waited far too long before dismissing the appalling Deputy Mayor Ian Clement, who was then convicted of misusing a City Hall credit card. It really makes you wonder who he consults before making his appointments.

A few weeks ago, an Audit Commission Report condemned the useless London Development Agency (LDA) for having ‘failed to meet the minimum requirements to manage its finances to deliver value for money'. The LDA was the anti-Conservative creature of Ken and his cronies and Boris should have dealt with it decisively and severely from day one. Instead he continues to rely on it for advice and has allowed it to mishandle the Olympics land budget to the tune of £160 million.

Then there's the cost of the Olympics Village (where athletes will be crammed to flats in blocks resembling 1960s council estates which no one will want to buy when the games are over) which is around £300 million more than can be justified. Boris seemed genuinely worried about this at first, but then allowed himself to be fobbed off by the Olympics Delivery Authority.

Another example of Boris's devotion to high-profIle projects and wilful blindness their consequences, is Crossrail. Boris is essentially a kind man and a natural defender of victims — so why hasn't he managed to curtail Crossrail's awful bullying of the residents and businesses standing in its way? St Patrick's Church in Soho Square is a listed building. It houses a soup kitchen which feeds and cares for some of London's most vulnerable inhabitants, but it is still waiting for assurances from Crossrail that it will be fully compensated for any damage done to it by the project. Its priest, Father Alexander Sherbrooke, has approached Boris but warm words have so far yielded no discernible results.

Even on what I believed to be heartfelt opposition to skyscrapers in unsuitable loca¬tions, Boris has been flip-flopping alarmingly. Almost immediately after his election, he failed to oppose an LDA-backed tower on the South Bank in spite of its negative impact on historic views. Having objected to the massive 'three ugly sisters' scheme at Waterloo, he inexplicably changed his mind and approved it — only to see it rejected as 'fundamentally unacceptable' by the former communities secretary John Denham. And what about the Ealing 'penny whistle' tower that Boris singled out for attack before he was elected? Well, another U-turn made him give it the thumbs up — but only to see that plan also rejected by John Denham, on the grounds that it would have had 'a dominant and overbearing impact' which would damage the area — which is precisely what Boris said back in 2007.

On 1 May 2008 Boris defeated Livingstone by a large margin and he still enjoys personal popularity, but his track record leaves too much to be desired, and Ken Livingstone is already hovering like Banquo's ghost. In the capital, congestion on roads and bridges is set to worsen, while the state of the Tube means that public transport is increasingly a hit-and-miss affair, especially at the weekend. Hundreds of overpaid folk at the Mayor's Transport for London are unable to mitigate the chaos, yet the man officially in charge of it offers little but mumbled apologies.

Boris must accept his organisational and administrative shortcomings and his reliance on key staff. He must therefore replace those who are letting him — and us — down, putting aside misplaced loyalties. He must clarify his priorities and insist that his lieutenants implement his agenda, not their own. If he does, his engaging personality could carry him through the tough economic times which lie ahead. If he fails, a different Mayor could be on the world stage, opening those 2012 Olympics — and a different Conservative PM will reunite the party in the post-Cameron era.

2010-05-21T18:40:00.003+01:00

The sordid side of a rustic retreat

To learn something of the story the estate agent isn't telling, go to Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service.

2010-05-17T08:38:00.001+01:00

Recipe for depression: number two

As the new barbarism (with value added tax at 20%) closes in, we have to wonder how much the Arts will suffer under the new "modernising" tendency. One looks long and hard for the cultured, the erudite, the reader among our new Master Race.

So, today, the Lady in his Life and Malcolm betook themselves on an outing, before the darkness closed in.

It started with a very pleasant lunch, reasonably-priced because it was just far enough away from the tourist-trap that is London's Covent Garden, accompanied by a rather nice bottle of red Cab. Then on to the National Theatre for the crusties' mat-in-ay of The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett's invention of an end-of-life encounter between W H Auden and Benjamin Britten. There are enough reviews around for passers-by to check it out:

Chirstopher Hart [sic] in the Times gave it four stars and reckoned it was sub-Brechtian:

Nicholas Hytner’s direction is a perfect match for Bennett’s charm here, and the performances are a treat. Frances de la Tour as Kay the stage manager is hilarious, for ever having to reassure her actors, to soothe their little tantrums and wipe away their tears. The only real weakness in the piece is the introduction of a rent boy called Stuart, an unconvincing shovelling of A Sympathetic Member of the Working Classes into these cosy proceedings, to make some point about inequality, social injustice and so forth. It’s all as woolly as a Marks & Spencer cardie.

In the Guardian, Michael Billington, also on four stars, is more to the point:

Bennett's play is at its strongest when it deals with the theme implicit in its title: the idea that, for the artist, creativity is a constant, if troubling imperative. We see this in the beautifully written encounter between Britten and Auden. Temperamentally, the two men could hardly be more different: the one a model of restraint, the other an apostle of sexual freedom and something of an intellectual bully. But Britten's anxieties about Death in Venice, and his fear that it may be an act of self-revelation, are movingly countered by Auden's desperate desire to be involved in the libretto. It never happened; but it acquires an imaginative plausibility and shows two great artists, towards the end of their lives, united in their belief in the power of the creative impulse. As Auden himself says, "what matters is the work".

A play that could easily seem tricksy is also given a superbly fluid production by Nicholas Hytner and is beautifully acted. Richard Griffiths bears no physical resemblance to Auden but he becomes a vivid metaphor for the poet. At the same time, Griffiths reminds us of the tetchy actor who is simply playing a role. Alex Jennings offers an equally potent echo of the angst-ridden Britten, spitting out the name of "Tippett" with calculated asperity. Adrian Scarborough as Carpenter and Frances de la Tour as the stage manager are no less magnetic.

Paul Taylor for the Indy was more positive, seeing the play as a personal "coming-out" by Bennett:

Nicholas Hytner directs with an unerring instinct for the volatile nature of the material in a cracking production that flirtatiously keeps the audience up to speed with the outrageous amount of information and allusion. The play-within-the-play is replete with potty, poetry-spouting personifications of, say, Auden’s fabled Wrinkles who kvetch about the strain of working on a face that, as Hockney once remarked, made you wonder how on earth his scrotum looked. The pastiche is always superbly pointed. I loved the moment when Britten, barking avuncular orders at one of his beloved boy sopranos, pounds strenuous pianistic dissonance into one of his nursery rhyme settings. The outer play is full of lovely observant comedy about the protocols of the rehearsal room, especially from Frances de la Tour all dryly witty, battle-hardened, managing motherliness with the egos who have landed in Rehearsal Room One. Hytner revealed at a press conference that Bennett at one stage wanted to call the play Caliban’s Day and you can see why. For just as The Sea and the Mirror, Auden’s poetic meditation on The Tempest gives the last word to the low-class monster, so Bennett allows the rent-boy to speak up at the conclusion for the culturally excluded bit-players who service the educated but don’t get a look-in at life’s ongoing arts festival. “I don’t even know what I don’t know,” he complains. “I want to get in. I want to join. I want to know”.

For a comedic romp which has an interlude inside a play inside a play, on a set which is both spare and cluttered, which is referential to drama, music, poetry, criticism and Oxford life (high and low), and has both Richard Griffiths and Francis de la Tour (previously together on stage here with The History Boys), it was all a fine way to spend an afternoon.

And so home, in the rain of mid-May, another bottle of something red, and a rather nice pie made by the Pert Young Piece.

2010-05-16T20:33:00.003+01:00

Recipe for depression: number one

Now we enter the dog-eat-dog days.

The Tories are already digging out the Karl Rove troupes. Let's recall one of his greatest hits: the departing Clinton staffers vandalising the computers in the White House. Allegedly, they removed all the W keys. The truth was 62 missing keyboards: out of how many, please? How many has the average blogger trashed with a loose coffee cup? Rove's apparatchik proposed enormous damage. $20,000 covered the lot: keyboards, 26 missing cell phones, two cameras, ten antique doorknobs and several presidential medallions and office signs. Not bad wear-and-tear for eight years occupation.

Despite Rove's quick-to-the-press room allegations, the Government Accounting Office took thirty months to conclude ... not much had really happened.

Today, predictably, the Cameroons are played the same game. They have fed their tame mouth-piece, the Sunday Times with this:

David Cameron fury at Labour's 'scorched earth' debts

David Cameron readied Britain for deeper spending cuts and higher tax increases today, accusing Labour of making crazy spending decisions during its final period in office.

The new coalition Government will tomorrow call in independent auditors to establish the true scale of official debts, the Prime Minister said.

There's a good old Wobbly song, with a resounding chorus, which Malcolm will be singing repeatedly, each and every time he comes across one of these tawdry little turd-slingings.

It goes like this:

Put it on the ground,
Spread it all around,
Dig it with a hoe:
It'll make your flowers grow!

2010-05-14T10:34:00.003+01:00

An illustrated and allusive guide to Noto55

Malcolm is frequently convinced that his iTunes feed is hexed: its degree of appropriate prescience is inspired.

He was about to post on the iniquitous 55% rule (see previous posts below) when John Cash started to belt out Remember the Alamo:

Tangentially relevant: Noto55 is a small Alamo. We may not win; but it is a strike for a significant freedom. Anyway, Cash is worthwhile at all times, any pretext to drag him into the discussion should be snaffled. And he is a one heck of a lot more impressive than the dismal prospect of Marty Robbins chirruping up on the same topic, with Paul Francis Webster's doggerel (he did much better elsewhere) to Dmitri Tiomkin's tune:

In the sand he drew a line with his army saber
Out of a hundred eighty five not a soldier crossed the line.
With his banners a dancin' in the dawn's golden light,
Santa Ana came prancin' on a horse that was black as the night ...

Well, we're not that far gone yet. But there is a line-in-the-sand. And, according to the Daily Mail, we have our Colonel Travis:

... a number of MPs want to retain the right to kick out a government by a simple majority of one, in a no confidence vote.

David Davis - once Mr Cameron's leadership rival - is understood to be among a growing number of politicians of the Left and Right opposed to the 'stitch-up'.

Davis is a Tory, and a rank one (so that's two strikes against him in Malcolm's elephantine memory). He is, however, an honourable man. Malcolm had to respect him when he went on his Quixotic by-election campaign against ID-cards and the rest of the surveillance society.

Notice that the iTunes playlist has now segued to equally-magnificent Jacques Brel:

If Davis is mustering, in the backwoods of Tory opinion something stirs. Over on Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service, our guide, philosopher and friend is noting two Tory grandees girding for a punch-up on the same issue.

Good on them all.

2010-05-14T08:42:00.003+01:00

The Pert Young Piece opines:

Regulars will previously have encountered Malcolm's daughter, the Pert Young Piece.

Her reaction to Noto55:

The coalition want 55% and we will have the power to recall corrupt MPs.

Well, surely any MP — Tory or Lib Dem —who votes for 55% is offending democracy and corrupt. So, let's recall them all, the day after the vote.

Sent from my iPhone

2010-05-13T23:34:00.006+01:00

The 55% rule

For the record, this was Southsea Expat's comment on Iain Dale's Diary:

The requirement for a no confidence motion to bring down the Government will remain 50% +1. The new 55% requirement is for a vote to bring about the dissolution of Parliament — a completely separate thing. It is standard practice in other countries which have fixed term parliaments — to prevent the party in power from getting round the fixed term by voting against itself and thus bringing about an election at an advantageous time of its own choosing. So it is a necessary part of the move to a fixed term parliament. Under the proposed new system the government could lose a confidence vote if 50% +1 voted against them. The Prime Minister would then have to resign and the Queen could invite the leader of another party to form a government. What the Prime Minister could not do would be to use a no confidence vote to trigger a general election. The actual dissolution of Parliament would require a 55% vote. This paper from the Constitution Unit at University College London explains the issue. You will see that the Liberal Democrat Manifesto pledged to
introduce fixed-term parliaments to ensure that the Prime Minister of the day cannot change the date of an election to suit themselves
whilst the Conservative manifesto pledged to make
the Royal Prerogative subject to greater democratic control so that Parliament is properly involved.
Since the Labour manifesto also contained a pledge to bring in fixed term parliaments, I am not sure why any of the parties are getting so upset about this.

All of that is fair; and above board. Except:

The 55% rule

There are (nominally: the following assumes Thirsk & Malton votes Tory) 650 seats. the outcome was:

Conservative: 306
Labour: 258
Lib Dem: 57
Democratic Unionist: 8
SNP: 6
Sinn Féin: 5
Plaid Cymru: 3
Social Democratic and Labour: 3
Alliance: 1
Green: 1
Independent Unionist: 1
The Speaker: 1

Now: 55% of that ConDemLib majority is:

(306 + 57) = 363

Whereas 55% of the Commons is:

357.5

So 358, curiously enough, is about the only round number which would guarantee a ConDem majority against all eventualities. In effect, the ConDem government is reckoning to lose just half-a-dozen by-elections in a five-year parliament. [See below.]

Were there more losses, or a few defections, would the 55% rule be suddenly adjusted upwards?

Bottom line:

There are two different issues here:

does an administration have the confidence of the House of Commons?
does the lack of confidence require the government to renew its mandate by seeking a popular vote?

Until this moment, those have been regarded as inseparable. This coalition seeks to perpetuate itself, for an unconscionable five years, by separating the two.

For a start, five years is above the normal quota: in practice in the UK, by legislation pretty well everywhere else. Four years (as for the devolved Assemblies) might, just might be more reasonable.

Consider that fifth year: a lame-duck parliament. It is in the interest of every non-government party, for sheer electoral reasons, to vote solidly against the administration. "Pairings" and other arrangements would go by the board. Many of those votes will be lost by the administration. In effect, for a year, the government is by that 55% rule.

Any, and every government is, to some extent, a coalition. Some are explicit. Others, even most, are not. This one, against all tradition is trying to impose a rule which suits only itself.

That is the breach of democratic principle involved.

2010-05-13T21:32:00.003+01:00

Fair play for Lord North!

The previous post sent Malcolm in search of what brought down Lord North's government. He was vaguely sure that it wasn't a full-blown vote of confidence (and, even if it were, in those days if that would have been terminal).

So here's the key bit from the DNB, written by Peter Thomas (who published the still-current biography in 1976:

The last act of North's ministry was played out on the appropriate stage of the House of Commons, during February and March 1782. Only once, on 27 February, was the ministry defeated, over a motion to end offensive war in America. The vain hope that George III would allow North to negotiate peace kept him from resigning, but he now lost the backing of MPs who had supported his stand against American independence. After his majority fell to nine on 15 March, a group of independent MPs informed him they were withdrawing support, and, facing defeat on the next vote of confidence on 20 March, he thereupon informed the king that he must resign:
The Parliament have altered their sentiments, and as their sentiments whether just or erroneous must ultimately prevail, Your Majesty, having persevered, as long as possible, in what you thought right, can lose no honour if you yield at length, as some of the most renowned and most glorious of your predecessors have done, to the opinions and wishes of the House of Commons. (Correspondence of George III, 5.395)

Only with ungracious reluctance on 20 March itself did George III accept this constitutional lesson, accusing North of desertion. He, by contrast, in his Commons resignation speech that day, behaved with ‘equanimity, suavity and dignity’, diarist Wraxall recalled, thanking the house for its long and steady support, and declaring his readiness to answer for ‘his public conduct’.

On the other hand, North was a rank and unreconstructed aristocratic bastard: both his American and Irish policies were disastrous.

So, let's not take this "fair play" thing too far.

2010-05-13T20:13:00.005+01:00

Free the Prime Ministerial Eleven!

Clearly, the Torygraph hasn't relented on its anti-Cameron campaign. The last couple of days brought huge doses of urine from Simon Heffer (not surprisingly) and little enthusiasm from Benedict Brogan. Today, on its blog-pages, Gerald Warner was licensed to bite the legs off Theresa May, the incoming Home Secretary, a.k.a. Commissar for Wimmin and Equality on the grounds that:

May is a one-woman disaster area, a ticking time-bomb of incompetence waiting to detonate in one of the more sensitive departments of state...

May is the archetypal moderniser, the Cameronian revolution’s Goddess of Reason. As shadow Transport Secretary she distinguished herself by failing to lay a glove, over months, on the mortally wounded Stephen Byers. At the Conservative Party’s 2002 conference she coined the ricochet phrase “the nasty party”, which damaged the Tories more than any demonising slogan that Mandy, McBride et al. could devise. At the 2005 conference she strutted the stage with kitten-heeled arrogance and lectured the assembled voluntary workers: “There is no place for you in our (sic) Conservative Party”, as she promoted the kamikaze modernising agenda. That was the first notification the party faithful had that ownership of the party had passed from them to a clique of the Entitled Ones.

As the “nasty party” example demonstrated, May has always possessed an uncanny capacity to damage the Tory Party. In the office of Home Secretary she will now have unrivalled scope to exercise that talent. She occupies the post because Chris Grayling who shadowed it, in a moment of fatal candour, confessed to a modicum of sympathy for B & B owners compelled to allow homosexual activity within their own homes.

That was enough to destroy his career: in the Compassionate Conservative Party the slightest hint of compassion for ordinary, non-metrosexual Britons – still worse, for Christians – is a ticket to oblivion.

Come on, Gerald! You can do better than that!

And, sure enough, he did. On a topic that needs far more attention than Ms May:

... there is the proposal to raise the bar for voting down a failing government on a vote of no-confidence to 55 per cent of MPs. At present, 50 per cent plus one is sufficient. This measure would preserve in power governments that had lost the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons as large as 54 per cent. Since the first vote of no confidence brought down Lord North, on account of certain little local difficulties in the American colonies in 1782, a total of 11 Prime Ministers have been ejected from office in this way.

In other words:

Lord North lost the confidence of Parliament along with the American colonies.
Jim Callaghan lost the confidence of the Commons because, honourably, he prevented the Whips dragging in the dying MP, Alf Broughton (while Frank Maguire, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, turned up to "abstain in person").

In point of fact, Lord North went before he was pushed. But let's not undermine a good story.

Suddenly now a "majority" of the Commons no longer means (Number of MPs voting)÷2 + 1 (which, in practice means about 310 "nay" votes).

No: it's 55% of (Number of MPs voting) + 1. Which means something like 630 or 631.

ConDems in action.

2010-05-12T15:45:00.003+01:00

Old verse revisited:

... for by many stories,
And true, we learn the LibDems are now Tories

Compare: Byron
The Vision of Judgment
Lines 207-8

2010-05-12T15:34:00.003+01:00

Old slogans revisited

2010-05-08T14:03:00.003+01:00

Harrods fit for humans again?

The BBC (along with others) is reporting that Mohammed Al Fayed has sold Harrods:

The department store Harrods has been sold for a purchase price of about £1.5bn, the BBC can confirm.

Owner Mohammed Al Fayed has agreed to sell the exclusive west London store to Qatar Holdings...

A colourful and controversial figure, Mr Al Fayed acquired Harrods in 1985 following a £615m takeover bid.

On the basis of those figures, and allowing for inflation over 25 years, it looks as if Al Fayed has just about broken even. Despite the spiral of London property values.

2010-05-07T09:53:00.000+01:00

From the BBC News website:

BREAKING NEWS We have a hung
parliament. There is now no chance of the
Conservatives winning a Commons
majority.

At the behest of the late Reverend John Ebenezer Brown, the congregation will now rise and sing:

Now thank we all our God,
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom his world rejoices ...

Perhaps, after all, the British are ready for Home Rule.

2010-05-02T11:43:00.002+01:00

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Sunday, 2nd May, 2010: the ever-mirthful IKEA catalogue

IKEA sell a skirt-hanger:

Why did that cause Malcolm's chortle?

2010-04-25T16:55:00.004+01:00

Ferns

Malcolm is no great gardener, yet he has a strange liking for any of the ferns in his garden.

Some years ago he purchased a tree fern, a Dicksonia Antarctica, as an unloved "for sale" item at the Eden Project in Cornwall. For the last few weeks Malcolm has found himself obsessing that it would recover after the hard winter. At last things are looking more positive.

And then, nearby, lurking under a shrub there is the spectacle of unfolding, coiled shoots. They are so perky they somehow remind Malcolm of meerkats.

Not an issue of major importance, just a nice feeling: summer is i-coming in.

2010-04-20T17:38:00.001+01:00

Hyperbolic movement (or lack of it)

There's a peculiarly-silly woman, apparently stuck in Spain, interviewed on the BBC news. She's taking time out to blame Gordon Brown, by name, for the travel problems caused by the Icelandic volcano.

So, it's time for Malcolm's own fuss-in-Channel, continent cut orff! travel nightmare.

Many years since, it was the habit of the Lady-in-his-Life, Malcolm and their developing brood to evacuate London as soon as the summer term ended, and to return only a few days before the autumn term began. This was regarded as a recipe for regaining sanity. After the first week or so, the traumas of teaching in London dissipated. There then ensued a fortnight when life was bearable. Then the tensions would again start to mount.

On this occasion, driving up through La France Profonde, a stage at a time, catching the last smidgeons of culture for another few weeks, the news came through. Revolting French fishermen were blockading the Channel ports over some grievance, of which they seemed to have an endless supply. This was a time long before the Channel tunnel.

So, the route was diverted to Zeebrugge, from where ferries were still operating.

It was also a time before the Euro made border crossings less painful. But also when it was exceedingly difficult to get a filling station to accept UK credit cards.

Suddenly the Lady-in-his-Life prompted Malcolm to note that the needle on the fuel gauge was very low. What to do? Stop and change money into Belgian francs? So Malcolm did a mental calculation: kilometres to go, divide by 1.6 to get miles, compare with expected fuel consumption. Hmm: should be OK.

That, of course, failed to account for the queues and delays into Zeebrugge port.

However, in due course, the car made it up the ramp, onto the ferry. The boat's siren blasted. The massed ranks of Brits spontaneously burst into a derisive Rule Britannia to spite those Froggies.

So far so good.

Fortunately it was down the ramp off the ferry. Which was when the fuel tank finally ran dry.

A customs official gave Malcolm a lift to the nearest filling station, where it was necessary to buy a can to contain a few litres. By the time Malcolm had paid all his dues, it remains to this day the most costly fuel he has ever bought.

Oh, and on the way back up the M2, late at night, while it was tipping down with rain, the car developed a flat. Fortunately it was possible to coast it under a bridge, and do the illegal tyre-change in shelter.

2010-04-14T13:58:00.001+01:00

Serious charges

Today's Irish Times reports an imminent sentence by court-martial. This is sufficiently important to be granted prime position, top right above the fold on page 3.

A matelot in the Irish Navy is on several charges:

unauthorised disclosure of the operation of State ships;
aiding drug running;
possession of cocaine ...

and, most heinous (if not inexplicable) of all:

being in possession of eight counterfeit hair straighteners.

This last is:

considered prejudicial to good order and discipline under military law.

The mind boggles.

2010-04-10T18:01:00.002+01:00

Refections of a fatal crash

Assume that Malcolm has made all the usual, conventional posthumous noises about Poland's President Lech Kaczynski and his entourage.

Accept that he is not totally without feeling: he admits to quavering moments at take-off and landing. They started back in the days when flights from Dublin to regional UK airports involved small high-wing piston-engined aircraft, and the mechanic (in Malcom's full view) finished off closing the engine casing with a rubber hammer.

Bear in mind he still winces from the kangaroo landing a Virgin Atlantic flight man-man-managed at LAX. Particularly when the voice of the chief stewardess came on the PA to say, "Any landing you walk away from is a good one".

Reflect on the ineptness of the lady-pilot's inappropriate announcement, while Malcolm's flight awaited the technician at Boston for the flight back to La Guardia: "Isn't it a bummer when the equipment goes down?"

Now, can we move on?

Last time round, it was 1943 and General Sikorski, Polish Prime Minister in exile, was flying from Gibraltar to London, after reviewing Polish soldiers in the Middle East. The converted Liberator bomber crashed into the harbour on take-off (right), killing all except the Czech pilot.

Time passed

By the later 1960s, the historico-revisionist, David Irving, sank his teeth into some apparent inconsistencies in the original story. He expanded these into Accident. The Death of General Sikorski.

Then Rolf Hochhuth wrote a play, Soldaten, Nekrolog auf Genf (1966) which was translated as Soldiers (1967). This implied that Churchill machinated the crash which killed Sikorsky. The motive was supposedly Sikorski playing footsie with Stalin.

When some (though perhaps, as Irving indicates, not all) documents had became available under the 30-years rule, there was renewed interest. At intervals thereafter, the whole thing has undergone review. Sixty years on, Harry de Quetteville wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph which was more specific still:

A British inquiry in 1943 found that the crash was caused by the plane's controls jamming. But rumours persist of a plot to kill Gen Sikorski, whose defence of the Polish national cause threatened to derail Britain's relationship with the Soviet Union.

Now Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski, and his prime minister, Donald Tusk, have demanded that Gen Sikorski's body be exhumed from its tomb in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, the traditional burial place of Polish heroes. "The tragic circumstances of the death of General Sikorski should be explained," said the president.

Moves to exhume Sikorski's body follow a long campaign by Polish historians, who claim that it was not examined properly before burial. They claim that he might have been killed before the crash, in which his daughter also died, and only the pilot survived. In particular, they want an examination of his skull to see whether he was shot.

de Quetteville goes further, taking the heat off Churchill, by joining some disconnected dots:

... the most insistent rumours suggest that his death was ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, incensed by Gen Sikorski's demand for an investigation into the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by Soviet troops.

Stalin's accusers claim that Gen Sikorski's plane was left unguarded on the runway at Gibraltar, and could easily have been sabotaged. They also point out that on the day of the crash, July 4, 1943, a plane carrying the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky and a small retinue of Soviet troops parked next to the doomed Polish leader's aircraft.

Allegations of a plot by the Soviet Union, determined not to let Polish nationalism get in the way of communist expansion after the war, have been further fuelled by the presence on Gibraltar of Kim Philby.

The notorious spy was in charge of British intelligence operations in the territory from 1941 to 1944. The crash occurred 20 years before he defected to Russia, but he is thought to have been a double agent from the start of the war.

Katyn again

Today's reports of this crash involving Lech Kaczynski and his party state:

Polish and Russian officials said no-one survived after the plane apparently hit trees as it approached Smolensk airport in thick fog...

The Polish delegation was flying in from Warsaw to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre of thousands of Poles by Soviet forces during WWII. (right)

This one appears a tragic accident, compounded by poor weather and a dodgy aircraft. The Tupolev 154 design dates from the 1960s. It is not a lucky aircraft:

There have been 64 serious flight incidents with Tu-154s, including 36 hull-losses with human fatalities.

Even so, it seems not to be inherently a poor machine:

Statistically, the Tu-154 has one of the poorest safety records. However, Tupolev 154's chequered safety record owes more to errors than technical problems. For individuals used to Boeing or Airbus airliners, the cabin of the Tu-154 can seem cramped. The impression is of an oval interior with a lower ceiling than is common on western airliners.

Even so -- and Malcolm has been beaten to the punch-line:

Conspiracy theories in 3...2....1....

2010-04-10T13:15:00.002+01:00

The dreary steeples re-emerge

No, not Churchill's original, apt and imaginative image, long rendered a cliché, please Malcolm!

Fair enough! says he.

Even so, the electoral pact between the DUP and the UUP in Fermanagh-South Tyrone has turned a near forgone conclusion into something far more interesting. Indeed, overnight, this has become one of the most intriguing constituency races in the whole General Election.

It's a weird abortion of a constituency, stretching half-way across Northern Ireland. One end butts up against the Donegal pan-handle, sniffing the Atlantic winds blowing from Bundoran and Ballyshannon. The other end stretches a toe toward Washing Bay on Lough Neagh. In a straight "us'ns" versus "them'uns", it is usually the nationalists who come out top-dogs. Last outing:

Chris Donnelly, as efficient as ever, crunched the numbers, and the implications, for Slugger O'Toole yesterday:

As of the 2005 Westminster election, Sinn Fein’s Michelle Gildernew held 72% of the combined nationalist vote -- some 18,638 votes compared to the SDLP candidate’s 7,230 votes. In that election the combined nationalist vote exceeded that of the combined unionist vote by some 2,933 votes.

On those figures, Gildernew would need to increase her share of the combined nationalist vote to some 89%, ensuring that more than 4,200 of those SDLP voters (or 60% of them) transfer their vote to Gildernew this time around. To put this in context, when Sinn Fein romped home with five of the six MLAs in West Belfast in 2007, it did so having taken 85% of the combined nationalist vote. Gildernew will need to match and exceed that figure if she is to retain the seat for nationalism.

It's worth the trip to the Ark site which Donnelly references there:

Fermanagh-South Tyrone's population in the 2001 census was 91,127 (10th of the 18 constituencies) ...

52.31% described themselves as Catholic (7th of 18 constituencies); 7.63% as Presbyterian (2nd lowest), 23.28% as Church of Ireland (highest in Northern Ireland), 3.95% as Methodist (10th highest) and 4.34% as members of other Christian denominations (14th highest). 8.27% were "no religion or religion not stated" (15th highest).
The translation into "Community background" was 55.58% Catholic (7th out of 18), 43.05% Protestants and other Christians (12th highest), 0.26% other religions and philosophies (13th highest) and 1.11% none (13th).

The all-seeing, all-wise Sammy Morse did the ultimate analysis for the 2007 Assembly poll, tracing the recent electoral history of this maverick constituency. Again, essential reading.

Enter and exit, stage right ...

... the Vice-chairman of the NI Tories, one Jeff Peel.

Peel has been doing much of the heavy-lifting for the UCUNF project, with Owen Paterson wafting in-and-out as "Dave" Cameron's celestial messenger to the world of men.

Paterson may resonate with the old "Big House" Unionists:

Paterson, married to the 4th Viscount Ridley's daughter, owns a large country estate in his North Shropshire constituency (he voted strongly against the hunting ban). He is a member of the Cornerstone Group, which published a report describing the NHS as "Stalinist" and calling for it to be replaced.

Perhaps it's the inevitable competition between blond(e)s, but he certainly didn't charm the Lady of the piece, Sylvia Hermon, the only UUP MP in the out-going parliament. She has bolted the pen, and should survive in North Down. Lady Sylvia has taken a couple of key local figures with her, and the UCUNF brand in North Down looks a broken one.

His chemistry seems to have lubricated better at that mysterious Tory/UUP/DUP cabaling at Hatfield House, in January.

Paterson now hails the result:

We recognise that Fermanagh and South Tyrone has characteristics that are unique within the UK. It has been without any democratic representation for the past nine years. It is the one constituency where there is currently an abstentionist MP, where a single cross community candidate could lead to the restoration of democractic representation at Westminster. In recent weeks and months there has been an upsurge of public opinion across Fermanagh and South Tyrone to find such a candidate. Rodney Connor has impeccable cross community credentials and has a first rate record of public service going back many years. He is hugely respected and admired on all sides. We therefore respect the decision of our Ulster Unionist colleague in Fermanagh to stand aside in his favour. We have had no discussions with the DUP on this matter at all. We are pleased by the fact that Rodney Connor has indicated that he will take the Conservative whip and support David Cameron, while always standing up for his constituents. If elected we will welcome him to Westminster.

MRDA.

Trebles all round?

Well, Peel will be spitting in the G'n'Ts:

If anyone was in any doubt as to how low the Conservative Party could stoop in its attempts to secure a seat in Northern Ireland such doubt will have disappeared today. The decision by Owen Paterson to agree to a joint Conservative/UUP/DUP sectarian candidate for Fermanagh South Tyrone shows that Paterson’s stated aims about introducing a new brand of non-sectarian national politics here is a total sham. For me I have reached the end of the road and will now be tendering my resignation from a political Party that has walked away from any sense of decency and honour in its pursuit of power. This is a very sad day for Northern Ireland. If the Conservative Party could stoop this low here it really begs the question whether the Party is fit to govern the United Kingdom.

That's more than toys-out-of-the-pram. Peel knows the score, where the bodies are buried, the details of the stitch-up. He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

The Chamberlain approach

What is nearly as interesting is the wall of total ignoral that all this receives across the narrow water of the North Channel. There seems to be a total block on any reference at ConHome (and a couple of other fan-sites) — although, of course, that could be defensive measures against the wit and wisdom of one Malcolm Redfellow and his all-penetrating IP-address.

It all comes back to the Tory take on all-things Northern Irish. It's the contemporary faraway country of which they know little.

And this Fermanagh-South Tyrone concordat is unabashed appeasement.

2010-04-09T23:55:00.002+01:00

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Friday, 9th April, 2010: from Dublin to Armageddon via Norway

Malcolm got engaged in a thread on politics.ie, which started off by wondering what the Easter 1916 Rising was intended to achieve:

Was the threat of partition a contributory factor that motivated some of the participants in the rebellion and if so was it wrong to oppose partition?

Later in that exchange came Malcolm's small moment of discovery. Flicking pages, a detail jumped out.

For those of a certain age, who cherish the memory of Anneka Rice's bum disappearing down the street, what follows here may be something of a Treasure Hunt.

Arthur Hamilton Norway (1859-1938) was a British Civil Servant in Dublin. He was, to be precise, Assistant Secretary of the General Post Office, responsible for the packet-boats (the "Mail Boats") to Britain. There's something of a family tradition there: Norway ancestors were involved in the packet service out of Falmouth (and one family member featured as a victim in a murder which led to the last public execution in Cornwall). Somehow that little lot involves the Norway Inn, which Malcolm remembers as a good roadside pub between Truro and Falmouth: which welcomed and catered for families with children (and is still going strong).

At Easter 1916, it was Norway's office that became the command post in the GPO for Connolly and Pearse.

Over many years, Norway had churned out books on a whole range of varied topics, but mainly on travel. Highways and Byways in Devon and Cornwall (1904) is based on local travels in a horse-and-trap by Norway and his brother (a country vet), and has a lingering merit and turn-of-the-Victorian charm.

His wife, Mary Louisa (née Gadsden], and he both wrote accounts of Dublin in Easter Week. Hers comprised half a dozen detailed letters she wrote, and was published in 1916 as The Sinn Fein Rebellion As I Saw It. His was Experiences in War. Keith Jeffrey's The Sinn Fein Rebellion as They Saw It (Irish Academic Press, 1999) comprises both (front cover, right).

Malcolm particularly liked Mrs Norway encountering the elderly lady in the Hibernian (where they were all staying) who complained she couldn't sleep: the guns had stopped, and the "silence made her nervous".

Onward, Malcolm!

The Norway's son, Nevil, aged 17, was on Easter holiday from Shrewsbury School. He volunteered as a Red Cross stretcher-bearer, and so saw the events in Sackville Street up close and personal, receiving a commendation for gallantry.

Nevil Norway was rejected by the RFC because of a stammer (!), and joined up as a private in the Suffolks. Fortunately for teen-aged Malcolm's reading development (that awkward transition from Biggles to adult fiction, that was the fag-end of the war, and young Norway got to nearer to the meat-mincer of the Western Front than North Kent.

Our Nev then went to Oxford to study aeronautical engineering. Then, after Oxford, he went to work for De Havilland and learned to fly. He became deputy Chief Engineer under Barnes Wallis, working on airships (it was the Vickers design that actually worked), and was on the R100's return flights to Canada. In his spare-time he followed a family tradition, and wrote stories and novels (his first published in 1926).

In the Second War he was a Lt-Commander in the RNVR, working on secret weapons. This put him in the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development which quickly became nick-named "The Wheezers and Dodgers". It also put him on the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

After the war he emigrated to Australia, continuing to write books, as Nevil Shute, which sold bushels through the '40s and '50s. Only the arrival of Ian Fleming knocked him off the top of the charts. The best one, for Malcolm, was one of the last: the nuclear-doomsday On the Beach (1957).

So, in a way, that's "four degrees of separation" from James Connolly to Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.

2010-04-09T14:38:00.003+01:00

MRDA

Mandy Rice-Davis applies: The acronym:

implies that someone is lying to protect their own interests.

During the trial of Stephen Ward (who was charged with living off the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and Rice-Davies), the prosecuting counsel pointed out that Lord Astor denied any involvement with her and Rice-Davies replied, "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

Not that such ever happens here, at Malcolm Redfellow's World Service! Perish the thought! But the memory of Ms Rice-Davis (right) should be invoked whenever a politico is cornered, caught, and reaches for a gross parody of the truth. As with:

Pretty well anything coming under the by-line of Paul Staines (by name and nature) a.k.a. Guido Fawkes: MRDA. In that prime example, it cannot be a coincidence that the acronym come so very close to the classical scholar's expletive of choice: Merda!
Those Tory "planned efficiency savings" which aren't going to affect jobs (by the old trick of deferring appointments). Particularly since half of the 40,000 lost jobs seem to come out of places like the Inland Revenue (but equally won't, of course, affect tax raising): MRDA.
Chris Grayling (of the great "B&B" issue) is not being kept well out-of-the-limelight, and is a "key" member of the Tory team: MRDA.
In the week that one Scottish Tory candidate was forced to resign over financial shenanigans, there will be, says Wee Wully Hague -- anticipating 11 gains north of the border -- a Tory beak-through in Scotland: MRDA.
And so, so much more. All MRDA.

One final bit of gratuitous merda

Mandy Rice-Davis remains a legend in her own bed-time for two things:

The technicians in at least one television news-studio expected a full drinks-round from any newscaster guilty of the predictable spoonerism: "Randy Mice-Davies".
Her bon-mot over the involvement with Lord Astor.

That would be John Jacob Astor, 3rd Viscount Astor of Hever. The present and 4th Viscount Astor is his son, William Waldorf Astor.

No, no! stick with it! It suddenly becomes interesting!

The one thing to be guaranteed among Tories (apart from involvement with unsuitable young females -- Miss Rice-Davis was all of just eighteen when she became an "acquaintance" of 55-year-old Astor) is serial monogamy.

So the present Lord Astor is not only David Cameron's opposition spokesman in the Lords, he is Samantha Cameron's stepfather.

From

From Pontyates, near Llanelli,
to a television set near you,
via Cliveden House.

2010-04-08T18:41:00.000+01:00

Genesis XVIII-XIX

There is a vice named for that early city by the Dead Sea.

And there's this:

The Vatican has again hit back in strong terms at those criticising the Catholic Church over its handling of the sexual abuse of children by priests.

In an interview yesterday a senior Vatican figure, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, said criticism of the Holy See over the issue was "truly incomprehensible".

Presumably that surname comes over better in the original Italian.

Or is Malcolm's mind hopelessly warped?

2010-04-08T16:44:00.000+01:00

The wrong road, retrodden

Many US news-sites, and a small mess of blog-artists, are fretting over the current phenomenon of the Tea Party movement. Fruit-cakes fully included.

Its insanities were adequately dissected in last week's Doonesbury strips:

There must be some intelligence in that little black wafer, for it transcends mere coincidence that Day Two of the Great British Election Campaign, the bedside iPod's sparrow's fart shuffled up a neat piece of déjà vu:

Oh, we're meetin' at the courthouse at eight o'clock tonight --
You just walk in the door and take the first turn to the right.
Be careful when you get there, we hate to be bereft,
But we're taking down the names of everybody turning left.

Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society,
Here to save our country from a communistic plot.
Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks
To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks.

That's from the Chad Mitchell Trio's live album, At the Bitter End, all the way back in March, 1962. It's on YouTube, but as a text-only karaoke version.

The real rib-cracker in that lyric comes just before the final reprise:

Fighting for the right to fight the right fight for the Right.

Which, of course, here, there and anywhere is what really matters.

As always, in any political faction, your opponents are in front of you.

Your political enemies are behind him, marking your back for the sharpened stiletto.

View, if one must, the chain-jerkings of ConHome, and their internecine frotting over the last hemi-demi-semi-quavering of Tory policy on Europe, the less than enthusiastic noises of approval for "Dave", and the constant fear of back-sliding. Any mild dissent marks the accursed troll.

Anything short of a Tory landslide on Election Night (which simply ain't gonna happen) will open the floodgates of recrimination.

A tea-party is the last thing to expect.

2010-04-07T23:02:00.001+01:00

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Wednesday, 7th April, 2010: a nice new-fangled reptile

When did Malcolm get his first twinges of Bolshiedom?

Well, one starting point may have been (and therefore at Wells-next-the-Sea in very formative years):

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue ...

... and discovered America.

Except, as Malcolm quickly appreciated, Columbus didn't because:

An awful lot of folk had got there before (all those native Americans, Incas, Aztecs, Inuits).
Some (St Brendan and Leifr Eiríksson, whoever did the Vinland map for examples) even left something of an account.
A large amount of land, and things living on it, had been there all along.

At which point Malcolm re-appraised the meaning of "discovery"

Now, today, we have something of the same:

A new species of giant lizard has been discovered in the Philippines.

The 2m-long reptile is a monitor lizard, the group to which the world's longest and largest lizards belong ...

The giant lizard is actually well known to resident Agta and Ilongot tribespeople living in the forests of northern Luzon Island ...

Yet scientists were unaware of its existence.

So, Varanus bitatawa has been there all the time. The locals knew it was there, and were happily chomping on it for lunch. But it didn't formally exist until somebody:

identified the new species on the basis of its body size, scales, colouration and DNA

and gave it a fancy Latin name.

And that's a "discovery".

2010-04-06T20:58:00.004+01:00

Parental choice

You don't teach for forty years (at least not in the kind of schools Malcolm did) without knowing there are two types of truly-frightening extreme parenthood:

the lot who are likely to beat their child for not excessively over-achieving;
the lot who are likely to beat the teacher for not exalting mediocrity or worse as something admirably spectacular.

Sadly, too, between those extremes one can find a dithering mass of incompetence and ignorance, often compensating for their feelings of inadequacy by either spoiling or neglecting, when talking and relating would be ample.

It is axiomatic that schools cannot be separated from the prevailing social climate and conditions, much as government statisticians and league-tablers might demand the opposite.

Which is why the arcane art of "turning a school round" has to involve parents in a big, big way.

Thus Malcolm's superficial observations in reading a nice Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post.

Richard Cohen considers the sad story of Phoebe Prince.

New readers start here:

Phoebe Prince was born in Bedford (that's Bedford, England). At the age of two, she was removed with her parents to Fanore, in the County Clare. Last autumn, at the age of fifteen, she started at South Hadley High School, near Springfield, Massachusetts. As the "new girl" she was on the receiving end of consistent, concerted bullying attacks, involving racism, sexual slurs and a full-blown Facebook campaign. On 14th January this year she was walking home: she had a can thrown at her from a passing car. This was the last straw: she hanged herself in her wardrobe. Even then the Facebook campaign continued.

In the aftermath all kinds of other blame was laid: the school authorities had been informed, and did nothing, the school nurse and counsellors had not acted ...

Last week six named students (four still at the school) were indicted as adults on a range of counts, from two charges of rape, through the usual paraphernalia of civil rights accusations, to harassment and stalking. Three more unnamed students were charged as juveniles.

Now we come back to Richard Cohen's powerful opinion piece. He takes us through much of the above, neatly appending it to William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Then he arrives at the key point:

You will notice that in all the finger-pointing -- the students, the teachers, the administrators -- not a digit is aimed at the parents. Their children are accused of hounding a classmate to death and the parents apparently knew nothing. Not only that, they are somehow not expected to know anything. The teachers are supposed to know what's going on. The principal. Maybe even the school nurse. But the parents? No. They're off the hook.

There is no point in fisking Cohen in detail: go and read the original. It is fair and balanced, and asks of all of us a load of questions we may not all want to consider.

Malcolm. though, sees one sentence worth broadcasting loud and widely:

We fail schools but never parents.

Indeed.

As we go into the UK election campaign, we have Mr Gove's well-intended, but totally useless programme for schools.

In its short form it consists of just four paragraphs, just 233 words.

It indites politicians and bureaucrats. It uses numerous abstract concepts: opportunity, social mobility, accountability, prestige, attainment ... It checks world league tables, standards (thrice), the curriculum (twice), exam(s) (twice), as well as violence, truancy, keep(ing) order. Teacher/ teaching profession get four mentions: children just the one (as know the children's names), and pupils just one.

Spot (as Richard Cohen undoubtedly would) the missing word.

And the final irony?

The Tory education programme is appended to the notion of "Broken Britain", which Mr Gove recommends we mend it in part by:

the kind of reforms that have worked so well in countries like the USA.

For the purposes of Gove's thesis, it is necessary to regard South Hedley as ... where?

2010-04-05T18:24:00.001+01:00

Of cartoons (eventually)

Last week the Lady in his Life and Malcolm made it to 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields for Sir John Soane's Collection.

This ought to be on the short-list for any visitor to London: get there early to avoid a queue (and it's free, though they solicit a contribution). Being not a visitor, but a permanent London resident, it has taken Malcolm many years to get there.

Since there is a perfectly good detailed description (and excellent panoramic view er) on line, we can dispense with that little lot.

The absolute stonker is the opportunity to view all eight episodes of Hogarth's The Rake's Progress, then turn around and take in all four of An Election (as at the top of this post, the third pane).

In that same Picture Room there is the odd "Raphael" (though probably not), a Watteau, numerous beautifully-drawn Soane architectural drawings, and a delectable Turner water-colour. And you get them all at one standing.

Of course there is more to come: three Canalettos (Riva degli Schiavoni, The Rialto Bridge from the North and Piazza S. Marco) down the other end of the corridor.

Back to the present day

But it was those Hogarths that came to Malcolm's mind with today's newspapers.

Yes, it is a bit of a stretch from Hogarth to Martin Rowson, but the sheer complexity, the busy-ness of his cartoon for today's Guardian deserves considerable respect:

The more one looks, the more one sees: the altar-boys, the nod to Kurt Westergaard. Was it an effective cartoon? Well, view the Guardian's Comment is Free for evidence.

To round off the morning, The Times had Morten Morland's pertinent dig at Cameron's weekend problems:All-in-all, a visual feast.

2010-04-05T17:14:00.000+01:00

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Here's another semi-regular which hasn't had a recent outing, so:

Monday, 5th April, 2010: daffodils and falling standards

This day Malcolm's sum of personal knowledge was increased in two small ways.

1. There is such a thing as the "National Daffodil Collection":

A field of yellow at the National Daffodil Collection at Trevarno, Cornwall (left), heralded the onset of spring as much of the country enjoyed Easter Day sunshine.

Alerted by that Times piece, Malcolm went to the fountain-head for clarification:

The National Daffodil Collection Showgarden at Trevarno now features over 2500 varieties and celebrates a joint venture with Ron Scamp, an internationally renowned daffodil grower, Mark Vandervliet of New Generation Daffodils in Cornwall and Carlos Vanderveek from Breezand in Holland. The collection has been extended to include much of Carlos’s own collection and that of the late Karol Vanderveeks famous collection in Holland.

The Collection at Trevarno is now the greatest available for public viewing and research to be found in the world today. As time and space permits more will be added. Surely a display not to be missed!

-- Ron Scamp?
-- No more cheap sniggering, thank you, Malcolm!

Anyway, Trevorno even has a web-cams (right) so one can watch the Cornish rain falling, the flag of St Piran a-flutter in the background, and the small birds feeding.

Not a bad bit of serendipity.

2. Denim for brekkers!

Also from the Times (page 13, sidebar) comes more deplorable laxity:

A last bastion of formality has crumbled with news that jeans can now be worn at the Ritz, London's most opulent hotel. However, the rule applies to breakfast only and sticklers for tradition will be reassured to hear that trainers will still not be permitted.

Phew! Malcolm can breathe again.
The old boy's cardiac arrest was imminent for an instant there.

2010-04-04T14:05:00.001+01:00

Clown Prince Dave's disunited kingdom

Black moods in the Black North

Malcolm has spent too long snickering about the collapse of the great UCUNF project. The scoresheet for this epic project amounts to a total debacle:

the only UUP MP (Lady Hermon) has gone AWOL and then been gifted a ticket to ride by the DUP;
she has taken with her a distinguished Assemblyman;
the South Armagh UCUNF candidature is still up for grabs, after Tory and UUP factions black-balled each other's nominees;
the Fermanagh-South Tyrone and South Belfast constituencies are sti ll bickering over a joint Unionist candidate, lest the Unionist vote be split to allow a nationalist the free ride.

The net result is that, in this moment of DUP weakness, the UUP faces a Westminster whitewash.

Hence Malcolm's persistent, spiteful, gleeful heh-heh (alternating with the sneezing of a foul cold).

A Glasgow kiss

There would seem to be problems, not wholly dissimilar from the South Antrim/North Down fusses, in Glasgow. This from today's Herald:

A leading Scottish Conservative has quit as a general election candidate amid claims that senior party members were like a “nest of vipers”.

Heather MacLeod, who resigned after a “bitter and bloody” feud with fellow Tories, said she felt “complete and utter disgust” with a section of the Scottish Conservatives.

She also accused the Scottish party of failing to match leader David Cameron’s progress and said she had concerns about an allegedly inappropriate relationship between two senior Tories.

There is yet another angle. Mrs MacLeod is under intra-Party attack because:

... some Tories raised questions about Mrs MacLeod’s financial background.

According to Companies House, Mrs MacLeod has been a director of companies that have gone into liquidation.

A Reigate chop

Meanwhile, perhaps stirred by the update from the latest issue of Private Eye, in deepest East Surrey, there is similar discontent:

David Cameron was hit by a Tory race row last night amid claims that up to 100 activists have signed a petition demanding the deselection of one of his leading black candidates.

Party sources say Sam Gyimah, a 33-year-old entrepreneur chosen to fight the safe seat of Surrey East, has faced smears over his business interests.

Allies of Mr Gyimah, a member of Mr Cameron’s ‘A-List’ of preferred candidates, claim the campaign to throw him out is racially motivated.

Tears before bed-time

David Cameron's "nasty Party" seems to be a somewhat "broken society". And that's even before Mr Grayling salts the wounds.

2010-04-02T13:32:00.000+01:00

The Alex Doonesbury neon-light issue

When Gary Trude au sent Alex to MIT, at first, like all first-year students at any decent university, she found the going tough.

One week's strip had her feeling homesick. Her night-time consolation was the myriad of neon indicator lights on various appliances and peripherals gleaming back at her.

Nearer home

As he sits at his Mac in Redfellow Hovel, Malcolm has before and around him:

the amber/green of the power cord indicator;
the two greens on the JBL speakers;
the green on the Epson scanner;
twin blues on the external hard drives;
and occasional lime-green on the Sony DVD-recorder;
a red on the surge-protected extension adaptor ...

Across the room:

a green on the Airport Extreme;
four greens and a flashing amber on the cable modem (Virginmedia can interrupt those in an instant, and too frequently do) ...

Were Malcolm to venture into the sitting-room, there would be neons on the tv, the cable box, the DVD, the sound processor, possibly the magsafe cord of the Lady's Macbook ...

When Malcolm awoke this morning, there was:

beside him, the green on the iPod dock;

while, across the room, something different, something Doonesbury:

a large blue on the Canon printer (moved into this bedroom in anticipation of the arrival of grand-children)

and

the green on the Airport, assuring that the printer was linked to the wi-fi.

The other side of the bed would be:

the digital radio-alarm,
a mobile phone charger ...

So, for heaven's sake, let's not venture into the tech-savvy Pert Young Piece's luxury suite, or into the kitchen.

And all that's a quick glance at one typical home, typical of thousands similar in North London alone.

Somewhere along the Trent Valley there is a multi-megawatt power station specifically dedicated to generating the juice for all these neons.

Alex Doonesbury would have a bumper-sticker to protest.

2010-04-01T16:16:00.002+01:00

Times for discrimination

Perhaps there should be a small graffito on the News International pay-wall: Mac-users not welcome.

The story so far:

Malcolm finds it convenient to pay for one of the Times subscription schemes: it saves a bit of money.

As part of that subscription, Malcolm finds he is entitled to be a "member" of the Times+ scheme. Over a period of many months, he has found that beneficial just the once: getting a discount to the British Library exhibition on Henry VIII.

The present:

It was inevitable, perhaps as an initial "come-on" later to be chargeable, that subscribers should be invited to access the on-line resources of the Times and Sunday Times (soon to disappear behind the pay-wall).

That led to Malcolm reconsidering the "benefits" of this involvement.

Why! here's one! An invitation to download an audiobook:

This month, you can download Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the huge bestseller that evocatively imagines the story of the girl behind one of Vermeer’s best loved paintings.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is set in seventeenth century Holland and follows the spirited Griet, a girl sent to work in the house of masterful painter Vermeer, inspiring him to produce one of his most magnificent works.

Times+ members can download their free audiobook of Girl with a Peal [sic] Earring, worth £10.99, by clicking on the download links on the right.

Except a large part of the potential invitees are excluded from that offer.

Go two stages further and find this:

WARNING: You are trying to download content for Microsoft Windows Media Player that requires a license. You must use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8 and make sure ActiveX is enable [sic] in order to download this file.

Now:

Malcolm, as frequently rehearsed here, is proudly and loudly a Mac-user.

But:

Microsoft suspended development of Internet Explorer back in mid-2003, with version 5.2.3.

So:

There is, therefore, no obvious way Malcolm (and other Mac-users) can access this download.

Go to the fountain-head!

Malcolm therefore e-mailed customerservices@timesplus.co.uk.

So far, the only response is an automated one:

Thank you for your email. This has been passed onto the relevant department for their attention. Should your enquiry require an answer you will be contacted within three working days.

Yes, it bloody-well does require an answer.

Added:

Response received:

Unfortunately, the audiobooks in the Culture+ Harper Audio promotion are available exclusively on Windows platforms and devices at the moment.

Despite our best endeavours, we have been unable to secure an alternative solution that will provide the quality and value that we would wish to offer. However, we will continue in our endeavours to find an alternative solution that will support more platforms and will if, and when, we secure this we will heavily advert the fact on the site.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

That makes News International involvement with iPad look iffy.

2010-03-31T20:53:00.001+01:00

A political bombshell

The Pert Young Piece (for new readers, that's Malcolm's youngest daughter) regaled the dinner table with the odd bit of "news". Her university mate, a young subaltern in the British Army, had volunteered for bomb disposal. A messy job, and potentially personally more so, but someone has to do it. Since she regards the mate as being high-strung and reckless anyway, she does not see bomb-disposal as his best career option.

That ties in, albeit approximately, with a thread running on politics.ie (where Malcolm finds he has just qualified as a "Senior Member". This thread runs under the headline (note the exclamation point) of:
FF Senator suggests Brit army operate in 26 Co.'s !
Inevitably this was regarded by many comers as treason of the highest order.

It seemed, to say the least, a curious story. So Malcolm checked it out. He found, inevitably, it was not all that it seemed, or had been presented.

He went looking for the on-line Derry newspapers. He was unable to satisfy the politics.ie hard-liners with any account in the Derry Journal, which seems to have missed this story. Across the Great Divide, in the Londonderry Sentinel, there was this:

Fianna Fáil senator Cecilia Keaveney made the call for cross-border co-operation between British and Irish army bomb disposal units following separate alerts in Letterkenny and Bridgend at the weekend.

That's after:

a potential car-bomb caused havoc on the border at Bridgend;

and

a device was found, and detonated in a Pearse Road, Letterkenny, "Head Shop".

Got that, patriots all?

Not the whole British Army (who are otherwise engaged, and a trifle over-stretched, at this juncture), just one technical detachment.

Not on a unilateral basis, either. Senator Keaveney expects two-way traffic.

Malcolm is sure either side could do it in plain overalls and send the bill, should that be the wish.

Since the Irish Defence Forces are likely to have been trained, in part or in whole, by their UK counterparts, and there is no copyright on knowledge in such a specialist trade, we can be reasonably asssured there would be adequate expertise on either side.

What stuck in Malcolm's craw was the pettiness and deceit of the original posting, and the froth and mendacity of the subsequent contributions (which had to include gratuitous sexism and much else).

Is he the only one who recalls the days when Irish fishermen had to be rescued by RAF helicopters and RN patrols? Isn't it grand the Irish forces can now repay the compliment, in some small part? On the other hand, for true patriots it would be an honour to be blown to blazes by a good guaranteed-republican IED!

Moreover, since the nearest (only?) base for the Irish Defence Forces bomb disposal team is Athlone (some 120 miles and 3½ hours away), Senator Keaveney of Donegal may have a point.

2010-03-30T20:11:00.004+01:00

Malcolm doesn't learn anything new ...

This evening ~~Farce~~ First Minister Peter Robinson is on the defence against accusations of sharp practice over land dealings:

According to an investigation by the BBC's Newsline programme, the land deal enabled the Robinsons to sell part of their back garden for nearly £460,000.

They sold the land for £5 to a different developer, allowing the deal for their garden to go through.

The DUP has accused the BBC of a smear campaign against Mr Robinson.

There will, of course, be the conventional denunciation by the DUP press office.

Only a few weeks back, the Belfast Telegraph was asking questions about ther better part of a quarter million involved a Robinson daughter. The Tele was on the receiving end of a similar response:

The DUP has reacted angrily to questions from this newspaper on the Dundonald property and other issues including planning-related lobbying by Mrs Robinson.

It claimed: “Belfast Telegraph Newspapers continues its despicable campaign against the First Minister. By lies, smears and innuendo it attempts to besmirch his name ..."

The DUP obviously has a bulk order with Tippex. Just change the name of the inquisitive party, and send.

2010-03-25T18:46:00.006Z

South of the border, down Muinchille way ...

Today's Irish Times property section must be provoking a collective drool:

The inside's not too bad, either:

And it's in a location to die for:

Plus a thousand acres from Cavan up into Monaghan Your own lake, river, woodland. Asking price: €7.5 million, at Knight Frank Ireland. And worth all of it.

For once Malcolm has no hesitation in a bit of unofficial advertising.

2010-03-22T10:28:00.002Z

Momento mori

It's one of those senior moments: the report of a death which ... doesn't seem quite timely.

The New York Times has a neat reflection, by Charles McGrath, on the death of Fess Parker:

If you grew up in the 1950s, then the character Davy Crockett, played by Fess Parker, who died at 85 late last week, is an essential part of your mental furniture. His ballad most likely still plays over and over in your head, especially the fourth line, with its odd Appalachian spelling and suggestion of folk tale strangeness: “Kilt him a b’ar when he was only 3.” Cosseted in your urban or suburban television room in Eisenhower America, how could you fail to be impressed by a feat like that?

It was, as Malcolm can testify, nearly as impressive in Eden/Macmillan East Anglia.

McGrath continues:

In truth, Davy Crockett was less the “king of the wild frontier,” as the song goes on to say, than the king of a merchandising juggernaut that convinced millions of children that they needed to own Davy Crockett pajamas and lunchboxes and coloring books and official Davy Crockett coonskin caps. We actually wore these little ratty-looking toupees with no irony or embarrassment at all.

For the Seattle Times, Dennis McLellan expands on this commercial epiphany:

TV's "King of the Wild Frontier" also touched off a merchandising frenzy: 10 million coonskin caps were sold, along with toy "Old Betsy" rifles, buckskin shirts, T-shirts, coloring books, guitars, bath towels, bedspreads, wallets — anything with the Crockett name attached.

Viewers also fell in love with the show's catchy theme song. Bill Hayes' version of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" soared to No. 1 on the hit parade and remained there for 13 weeks.

"It was an explosion beyond anyone's comprehension," Mr. Parker recalled decades later. "The power of television, which was still new, was demonstrated for the first time."

Even Disney was taken by surprise.

Disney planned three Davy Crockett adventures, with the hero dying heroically at the Alamo as the conclusion of the third. Sticking with McLellan:

"We had no idea what was going to happen to Crockett, " [Disney] later said. "Why, by the time the first show finally got on the air, we were already shooting the third one and calmly killing Davy off at the Alamo. It became one of the biggest overnight hits in TV history, and there we were with just three films and a dead hero."

Crockett and McLellan (both names from Galloway, both among the Border reivers), Parker (the North of England), McGrath (Donegal and, as McGraw, the County Down) ... is there a pattern developing here?

The title of the NYT piece, by the way, is:

An Enemy of Raccoons but a Friend of Marketeers.

The death of innocence

Malcolm recalls a time when any Norfolk moggie or squirrel went in fear of imminent re-invention as pre-adolescent headgear. Television came late to our part of the world. Image-making pyjamas and lunchboxes were bourgeois steps too far, too grand, too alien for our comprehension. But wildlife and the neighbour's pet pussy ... that's what catapults were for. After that, and a bit of amateur taxidermy, you, too, could act out the last episode. With added verisimilitude and confidence, if all other heads were crowned with mere rabbit pelts.

The Walt Disney Corporation (which Carl Hiaasen, much later, properly nailed as Team Rodent) was already getting into commercial exploitation of the dream-factory, and thereby of the impressionable young to be separated from their limited loot. Disney apparently withheld Parker from more grown-up pictures, working with John Ford (Jeffrey Hunter's part in The Searchers) or Marilyn Monroe (Don Murray got that one), for fear of contaminating the brand.

And thereby hangs another tale

McGrath's delicious punchline is:

It seems entirely fitting that in later life, having come to the end of his acting career, Mr. Parker reinvented himself as a successful vintner. Once an idol of baby boomers, a model of coonskin fortitude, he now became for them a source of middle-aged balm and solace, making wine they could sip in the evening as the shadows lengthened. Davy would probably have abstained, but he lived in an America where people were nobler and firmer of purpose.

So, Ave atque Vale! Fess Elisha Parker.

We shall not see your like again. It doesn't sell in the 21st Century.

2010-03-21T20:53:00.000Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Sunday, 21st March, 2010: Malcolm learns to love the French

The BBC reports:

President Sarkozy's centre-right party has suffered a heavy defeat in the French regional elections, early projections of the voting suggest.

Exit polls suggest the Socialist-led opposition alliance took 54% of the vote with Mr Sarkozy's UMP on 36%.

If confirmed the results leave the UMP in control of only one of France's 22 regions, the Alsace region in the east.

Sarkozy had over 53% at the 2007 Presidential election: Ségolène Royal had less than 47%. That's a swing of 12% to the good.

Suddenly, Malcolm forgives yesterday's robbery at the Stade de France.

2010-03-16T22:14:00.000Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Monday, 15th March, 2010: Malcolm rediscovers some roots

Anticipating a wait in the clinic, Malcolm intended to take with him a book. Nothing new there.

He went rooting in the attic stacks and found (to his small surprise, having forgotten he had either) not only D.George Boyce’s Nationalism in Ireland but also, alongside it, A.C.Hepburn’s anthology of documents on The Conflict of Nationality in Northern Ireland [out of print].

The coincidence of two books, vaguely relevant to each other, adjacently shelved, astounded Malcolm, so he had to rest for a moment to admire his own organisational efficiency.

He leafed through Hepburn, and found a prescient and durable abbreviated essay, lifted from Ralph Miliband’s (that’s the dad’s) Socialist Register for 1972. And here it is:

Anders Boserup: Contradictions and Struggles in Northern Ireland [1972]

As is nationalism elsewhere, Catholic Irish nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon dating from the mid-nineteenth century and the period of the Gaelic revival. Like other nationalisms, it has sought to establish a continuity with a past which has been reinterpreted in romanticized terms. It thus incorporates an entire set of myths about the Irish struggle against English domination and the Protestant Ascendancy and about a pre-plantation Gaelic society of a communistic type -- all of them myths, the foundations of which in historical fact are as tenuous as those of the corresponding Protestant ones.

British domination is thus seen as the root of all the problems of Ireland. In the socialist ideology British domination becomes British imperialism. In this way everything fits nicely into place in what appears to be a consistent socialist theory. The severing of the links with the British oppressor becomes the precondition for socialism in Ireland. The Orange oligarchy in the North (as well as the Green Tories in the South) become the middlemen, the neo-colonialist agents of British imperialism, and the Unionist workers, lured by petty privileges, its helpless tools. Most important: the existence of the common enemy, British imperialism, fuses Catholics and Protestants into one 'people' in so far as their objective interests are concerned. National differences conveniently recede into the background ...

Theories which ultimately reduce to notions like these are held with only minor variations by such diverse groups as the Communist Party, the IRA and People's Democracy ...

… Few nationalist ideologies could have provided a more fertile soil for socialist ideas than did the Irish since the socialist and anti-imperialist struggles were so easily shown to be two aspects of the same thing. In fact, of course, the Catholic left did not 'take over' a nationalist ideology; it was born of it and grew up in it. Its own ideology remained a variant of it, with somewhat different priorities, certainly, but with the main concepts and beliefs unchanged. This fusion of nationalism and socialism is particularly marked in the writings of James Connolly in the first decades of this century. Piety towards him has been such that all socialist groups today claim to be his heirs, and no-one even begins to ask whether his demand for an all-Irish Socialist Republic is as valid today as it was in his time. Instead, he has become part of the myths and the dogmas -- a further 'proof', if any had been needed, that a Socialist Republic is a 32~county Republic as a matter of course …

* * *

If it is to engage effectively in the struggle against the Orange system the left must necessarily dissociate itself from 32-county nationalism and accept the existence of the Northern State. As long as the left does not do this but. more or less wholeheartedly, plays the tune of Catholic nationalism it is in fact shoring up that system by providing it with a badly needed scarecrow to frighten Protestant workers.

The affirmation that Northern Irish Protestants constitute a separate national entity with a right to refuse incorporation in the Republic is usually considered to be divisive of the working class and therefore anti-socialist. On the contrary I think that it is the stubborn affirmation of unity and solidarity where none exists and the extravagant claim of Irish Catholics to the whole island which is divisive. The Catholic left demands a 32-county Republic and tries to sweeten the pill for Protestants by affirming that this will be a socialist, and ipso facto a secular Republic. Protestants would be fools if they believed it. Socialism in Ireland is not for tomorrow, and, even if it were, deeply entrenched ideologies do not disappear overnight. The Catholic left, by its espousal of the demand for a united Ireland. has demonstrated that even those who claim to constitute the socialist vanguard are trapped in nationalist ideologies.

Ultimately it is to put the cart before the horse to demand a 32·county Republic and hope that it can then develop towards socialism…

The unity of Ireland will come after the feudal and colonial remnants in the North have been swept away and after the South has given up its demands. Then, to paraphrase Marx, after the separation there may come federation, but federation on the basis of equal rights for nations and international working-class solidarity. To start with an imposed unity is to betray the ideals of internationalism, socialism and democracy....

To conclude I submit that there is a need for a reorientation of the struggle of the Catholic left, by which it would leave aside the windmills of British imperialism and the wholly counter-productive demands for Irish reunification, and would concentrate on the real issue of today: crushing the Orange system; and doing this in a revolutionary, rather than a reformist way, exploiting the opportunities it gives for raising the revolutionary consciousness of the workers -- which simply means their understanding of their own objective situation. Both among Protestants and among Catholics it is widely assumed that the Protestant ascendancy and the Union with Britain are two sides of the same coin: that the interests of'colonialism and those of imperialism, those of Orange rule and those of Westminster and British capital are coincident. I have tried to show that on the contrary it is here that the principal contradiction is to be found. To develop correct insight and hence revolutionary consciousness among Irish workers the best strategy seems to be to expose and to sharpen the contradiction. For in so doing both Protestant and Catholic workers will be forced to revise their received notions. As this contradiction is brought out into the open they will have to align with one side and against the other, but they cannot continue to align (or to believe they align) with both as do the Protestants, or against both as do the Catholics. Thus, whatever realignments occur they will facilitate common action by workers on both sides of the fence. The most pernicious aspect of the current struggle against 'British imperialism' is precisely that it perpetuates the false identification of Union with Unionist rule which lies at the very core of those ideologies which divide the working class ...

[source: R. Miliband and J. Savile (eds.) The Socialist Register 1972, pp. 181-90]

2010-03-15T19:54:00.001Z

Right ... out!

It seems that only yesterday (give or take the last month or three) we were being told that the Right were taking over in Europe. Frau Merkel had cleaned up in Germany. Sarközy was walking tall in France. The loathsome Berlusconi had nailed down Italy. Cameron was the coming-man in Britain.

The Left, everywhere, were on the defensive.

Suddenly, all is changed.

Angela Merkel had stated that she wanted her coalition to be judged on creating employment: at the turn of the year German unemployment was 3.43 million. Unemployment continues to rise, and the IMF reckon it could go to 5 million.
The IMF have a mission in Italy this week, doing the books. Meanwhile, the grossly-overdue review of the Italian tax system is still three or more years into the future.
All the opinion polls have David Cameron's Tories dead-in-the-water, and desperately hoping for a hung Parliament as their best hope.

Which leaves:

HE MAY have steeled himself for a poor result in the first round of French regional elections, held on Sunday March 14th. But the outcome for France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, must nonetheless have felt crushing. Polls had suggested that his ruling UMP party would be neck-and-neck at this point with the opposition Socialists. Instead, the Socialists bagged fully 30%, with the UMP trailing at 26%. At the second round vote next Sunday, Mr Sarkozy can now hope at best simply to hold on to Alsace and Corsica, the only two regions out of 22 in mainland France which the UMP governs. At worst, he might even lose both.

Ah, bless!

2010-03-15T12:48:00.001Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Monday, 15th March, 2010: Malcolm gets Frenched

It's Monday, so it's take-in-the-trash day, and bulk mailings pile through the letter-box.

This week's include The Traveller in France, the French tourist office's semi-annual puff. Free, and worth every centime. Loads of pretty piccies, loaded with happy memories (Albi and its Toulouse-Lautrec museum; Fontevraud, an ad for Serre-Chevalier) and come-ons for places yet to be enjoyed. There are far worse ways to spent an odd hour.

The "something new", please, Malcolm ...

Does anyone outside l'Hexagone get French comedy films? The ones that export (Jacques Tati, most obviously) do so because they transcend language. Then there are the Jacques Demy '60s musicals: Les parapluies de Cherbourg and (a personal favourite) Les desmoiselles de Rochefort:

Ah, the Dorléac/Deneuve sisters: can an old man cope with such excess!

Malcolm, the point ... now!

Well, it's this, from Roger St. Pierre's piece, That's Funny, in The Traveller in France:

In humour, a common tongue does not always help. Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis was a runaway 2008 box office smash in France -- claiming to be the fastest grossing movie of all time, in any language -- yet its humour was lost on most French-speaking Belgian and Swiss moviegoers, let alone French Canadians and the Francophone Cajuns of Louisiana ...

In France they laugh about the Belgians, and the perceived lazy people of the south, about allegedly tight-fisted Normans and Auvergnats and, especially, about the inhabitants of Northern France -- the Ch'tis -- whose accent they find almost unintelligible ...

The film opened in 793 French cinemas, sensationally grossing some $31.67 million in its first week. Seen in its first 20 weeks of screening by more than 21 million people -- close on a third of the population -- it comfortably broke the record for a French language movie ...

Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis however then went on to surpass Titanic as the most successful film ever in France.

We are then invited to visit Bergues (within an easy 45 minutes' drive of the Channel ports -- if Malcolm remembers correctly, that's all of six miles from Dunkirk), where the film was made. The town is one of those places, like so much of north-eastern France, knocked about a bit in 1940-1944.

Ummm ...

Until reading that, Malcolm had somehow missed the story in The Guardian, and had no awareness of Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis:

Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, set in a small town near Dunkirk, has proved such a hit in its opening days that Hollywood has bought the rights to make its own version set in a US backwater. Despite viewers from Marseille and even Normandy admitting they can't follow parts of the Ch'timi dialogue - a mixture of the Picard dialect of early French with the odd bit of Flemish - ticket sales are predicted to reach 10m, rivalling the mega-budget Asterix at the Olympic Games. Extra prints will be distributed to new screens after Paris cinemas were full this weekend.

The film tells the story of Philippe Abrams, a post office manager from Provence in southern France who is relocated to Bergues, a small town in the north - a prospect that fills him with dread and panic. But the town's local postman, his overbearing mother and northern friends ultimately win him over, despite ordeals like the local ritual of dipping stinking cheese on toast into coffee.

He was even unaware that les Ch'tis existed. However, it might explain why Malcolm's French, learned so painfully at school, didn't work out in the Sticks.

2010-03-15T10:28:00.000Z

Bash Baggott!

There's a small head of steam building over Matt Baggott, the in-coming Chief Constable for Northern Ireland.

Mark McGregor, on Slugger O'Toole, lays out his stall thus:

God is his co-pilot. Will he prevent a crash landing?
Seems our latest English Chief Constable, Matt Baggot, has decided on policing by easy sound-bite or completely lacks any understanding of dissenting republicanism.

Describing armed republicanism as ‘the same as street gangs in Brixton’ indicates serious naivety or a penchant for media spinning over addressing the situation he faces.

That's it. No more. No explication. Just light the green touch-paper and stand clear. Sure enough, the regular window-lickers piled in. Equally ill-informed. Equally careless of the detail.

Malcolm skims lightly, but contemptuously, over McGregor's inability even to spell correctly the name. McGregor's antipathies come down to these:

McGregor believes deism is a disqualifier.
McGregor is hardline Anglophobe.
McGregor believes there are differentiations of violence. His thugs are tougher, more brutal, more motivated than any others.

On the contrary, Malcolm believes Baggott has it right: the "dissident" republicans, and their parallels among the Proddy hard men, are murder-gangs seeking to impose their authority on their petty parochial patches. "Useless" Eamonn McCann, in the Daily Mail of all places, is allowed, at some length (presumably because he is paid by the line) to polish the same McGregor turd:

The RIRA may be tiny (perhaps 200 members) and with marginal support even in alienated, Catholic working-class areas. But the gunning down of Cengiz Azimkar and Mark Quinsey at the gates of Massereene Barracks will have confirmed Chief Constable Hugh Orde’s assessment that they pose a military threat which has to be taken seriously.

Yeah, sure, "Useless": RIRA shooting unarmed squaddies, and the pizza delivery lads, with the CIRA having to play keep-up by gunning down Stephen Carroll two days later ... that's class stuff. That's real guerrilla warfare. Nor should we overlook McCann's curious alteration of Sapper Azimkar's forename: everywhere else he is known as "Patrick". Now, why did "Useless" do that, should we think?

The occasional, and pathetic attempt at a "spectacular" (last month's revisit of the Newry courthouse, for an example) owes more to the need to recruit fresh muscle than any serious political gesture.

So, Malcolm went on record:

Baggott is not an “English” policeman, per se. He is a good, professional copper. He proved himself in the front line: Brixton, Tooting and Peckham are where the lads come as well-tooled up and brutal as any of Derry's or Ballymena's local boyos. The Stephen Lawrence inquiry was no doddle, yet Baggott was one of the few officers to emerge with anything like a clean skin. His work in Leicester (now there’s a divided community!) won applause on all sides.

In itself policing NI should be no different from anywhere else in these islands. Agreed? Which is why the interchange of senior officers, across the North Channel and with the Garda, is a “good thing”.

Baggott, then, arrived with a very particular mandate: to bring policing to the people (for the first time since the RIC days), and slashing an over-inflated budget.

Quite how deism and Baggott's Sunday mornings affect the issue is beyond Malcolm.

Unless, of course, one is terminally blinded by prejudice.

Or has a very alternative agenda.

2010-03-13T22:21:00.002Z

Detroit

This evening's BBC4 documentary on the history, decline and devastation of Detroit City was as good as it gets.

End of story.

2010-03-12T13:10:00.003Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Friday, 12th March, 2010: Malcolm makes a Scandinavian connection

Today the BBC web-site has this:

Archaeologists are trying to link the find to historical events

Weymouth ridgeway skeletons 'Scandinavian Vikings'
Fifty-one decapitated skeletons found in a burial pit in Dorset were those of Scandinavian Vikings, scientists say.
Mystery has surrounded the identity of the group since they were discovered at Ridgeway Hill, near Weymouth, in June.
Analysis of teeth from 10 of the men revealed they had grown up in countries with a colder climate than Britain's.
Archaeologists from Oxford believe the men were probably executed by local Anglo Saxons in front of an audience sometime between AD 910 and AD 1030.
The Anglo Saxons were increasingly falling victim to Viking raids and eventually the country was ruled by a Danish king.
The mass grave is one of the largest examples of executed foreigners buried in one spot.

Now that rings bells.

So Malcolm went back to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which reported local skirmishes with Danish invaders in:

A.D. 837. This year Alderman Wulfherd fought at Hamton with thirty-three pirates, and after great slaughter obtained the victory, but he died the same year. Alderman Ethelhelm also, with the men of Dorsetshire, fought with the Danish army in Portland-isle, and for a good while put them to flight; but in the end the Danes became masters of the field, and slew the alderman.
A.D. 845. This year Alderman Eanwulf, with the men of Somersetshire, and Bishop Ealstan, and Alderman Osric, with the men of Dorsetshire, fought at the mouth of the Parret with the Danish army; and there, after making a great slaughter, obtained the victory.

Both those dates lie outside the predicted period in the story above. Then we have:

A.D. 982. In this year came up in Dorsetshire three ships of the pirates, and plundered in Portland. The same year London was burned.
A.D. 998. This year coasted the army back eastward into the mouth of the Frome, and went up everywhere, as widely as they would, into Dorsetshire. Often was an army collected against them; but, as soon as they were about to come together, then were they ever through something or other put to flight, and their enemies always in the end had the victory. Another time they lay in the Isle of Wight, and fed themselves meanwhile from Hampshire and Sussex.

and finally:

A.D. 1015. This year was the great council at Oxford; whereAlderman Edric betrayed Sigferth and Morcar, the eldest thanes belonging to the Seven Towns... At the same time came King Knute to Sandwich, and went soon all about Kent into Wessex, until he came to the mouth of the Frome; and then plundered in Dorset, and in Wiltshire, and in Somerset. King Ethelred, meanwhile, lay sick at Corsham...

Pick the bones out of that lot.

Sing a song of ...

At some point in there, we had the origin of London Bridge in falling down ...

Then another link came to Malcolm's mind.

When it came out in about 1972, Malcolm acquired a copy of Karl Dallas's book of folk songs, The Cruel War [out of print: ISBN-13: 9780723404934; ISBN: 0723404933]. It's still there on Malcolm's shelves, and (like so much of his library) he wouldn't part from it this side of the crematorium.

The Cruel War includes a song Ruth Tongue, in her The Chime Child [out-of-print SBN: 0710029675/ ISBN-13: 9780710029676], claimed to have collected in 1918:

I had just finished a Folk Song Recital in London, and made my way back to sink exhausted into my dressing-room chair, when there came a hearty bang on my door which opened, and an elderly sea captain came in. He was smart, grey-haired, scarlet-faced, and as full of enthusiasm as a young westerly gale -- and he had a ballad for me. His family had been Porlock folk right back to Drake's time and before, and they had treasured and kept strictly to themselves this ancient ballad. Now having listened to that evening's Somerset wealth, he had decided regardless of family traditions that it must be brought to the free air of a singing world and that I was the one to do it. Before the force of this Severn Gale, I found my weariness blown clean away, and was soon singing too. He had a tremendous voice and it hit like hammer-blows into my memory. He sailed tomorrow he said, so I must learn it then and now. I did, every verse, and sang it back to him. He gave me a delighted smile, a hearty farewell and a handshake that clamped my fingers for the rest of the evening, and went away, forgetting to leave his name.

There are all kinds of suspicions about Ms Tongue's "accuracy", and her anecdote here seems as bit ... fishy.

However, hers is a good story. The ballad is Three Danish Galleys:

Three galleys come sailing to Porlock Side,
And stole me away a new-wed bride,
Who left my true love lying dead on the shore,
Sailing out and away.
I never shall see my dear home no more.

What makes that even more curious is a reference, again from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

A.D. 918. This year came a great naval armament over hither south from the [Breton-based pirates]; and two earls with it, Ohter and Rhoald. They went then west about, till they entered the mouth of the Severn; and plundered in North-Wales everywhere by the sea, where it then suited them; ... but the men of Hertford met them, and of Gloucester, and of the nighest towns; and fought with them, and put them to flight; and they slew the Earl Rhoald, and the brother of Ohter the other earl, and many of the army. And they drove them into a park; and beset them there without, until they gave them hostages, that they would depart from the realm of King Edward. And the king had contrived that a guard should be set against them on the south side of Severnmouth; west from Wales, eastward to the mouth of the Avon; so that they durst nowhere seek that land on that side. Nevertheless, they eluded them at night, by stealing up twice; at one time to the east of Watchet, and at another time at Porlock. There was a great slaughter each time; so that few of them came away, except those only who swam out to the ships...

These things come back to haunt us.

2010-03-10T17:41:00.004Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Wednesday, 10th March, 2010: life can go down the toilet

Yesterday was Barbie (39-18-33, and looking good as she reaches 50).

To carry the birthday theme forward, today marks the anniversary of the equally-surreal Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk.

So, happy 474th, Tommy!

This was the guy whom Elizabeth sent to the Tower in 1569, for attempting a marriage with Mary, Queen of Scots, and who was beheaded, 2nd June 1572, for the treasonous Ridolfi plot to put Mary on the English throne. Neither were good career moves; but religion and ambition are equally blind to reason.

Howard's Dad was the Earl of Surrey, the inventor of English blank verse (for his translations of the Aeneid). With his mate, William Wyatt, he translated Plutarch's sonnets and invented the English sonnet. Surrey, too, had an appointment with the axe-man, but was rescued by the overnight death of Henry VIII.

Phew! A close shave, that!

Howard's Mum was Frances de Vere, daughter of the 15th Earl of Oxford, which means she was aunt of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl, and favourite among anti-Stratfordians to be the real "Shakespeare".

Today is also the anniversary of Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

Memo: to aspirant take-over artists:

Some you win (Julius Caesar).
Some you lose (Thomas Howard).

Or as Sir John Harington (the DNB's preferred spelling), that eponymous inventor of the "John", had it in his Book of Epigrams:

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Toilet humour

The "John" was devised at Wardour Castle, in Wiltshire. There was what the DNB article (over the name of Jason Scott-Warren) calls a convivial gathering, and most would recognise as a booze-up. Present were:

Harington,
the host Sir Matthew Arundell,
the Earl of Southampton (Henry Wriothesley, Shakespeare's pal and patron)

and

Wriothesley's sister, Mary (who married into the Arundell family, and whose daughter went on to become Lady Philpott -- so no laugh in that).

Out of this evening came a plan for a working flush toilet, which Harington published as a pamphlet entitled New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596).

The pun, of course, is on the word "jakes". In any case, Harington acquired the nickname "Ajax".

Harington was "saucy god-son" to Queen Elizabeth, and she soon had an ajax installed. Two centuries later, Harington's device would be improved by Joseph Bramah. The ball-cock was allegedly patented by Thomas Crapper (his sole contribution, apart from his name and a flair for advertising). Crapper's nephew, George, finally got the syphonic bog perfected and patented it in 1898.

Which only leaves the question: did Shakespeare have a coded reference to all this in the gloomy Jacques of As You Like It?

2010-03-09T16:19:00.003Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Tuesday, 9th March, 2010: did we really need to know that?

Today is the birthday of Barbara Millicent Roberts, born 9th March 1959.

She is better known as Barbie.

Today is also:

Baron Bliss Day in Belize. No connection with "Lord" Ashcroft of Sleaze.

The Day celebrates the death of Suffolk-man Henry Edward Ernest Victor Bliss (who seemed to have created his title for himself. He made a fortune in oil shares, contracted polio, and set off for the Caribbean in a yacht. He found Honduras (now Belize) so suited to his health, he remained moored at Belize, never left his yacht, but on his death, 84 years ago today, left the people of Belize $2 million. This financed arts and culture.

Definitely no connection with "Lord" Ashcroft of Sleaze. Except for the dubious title.

2010-03-07T11:28:00.005Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Sunday, 7th March, 2010: Don't stand too close ...

Llama spit is ejected at 9 metres per second.

Source: Eureka, The Times monthly supplement on Science, Life, The Planet.

2010-03-06T11:34:00.004Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Sunday, 7th March, 2010: military intelligence

It is a well-known truism that the British War Office was always prepared to fight the last war. That needs a whit of modern updating, "... and the next spending review".

There are certainly quite a few retired brass-hats now able to assure the world that the military deficiencies shown up in the Irag campaign were all the fault of the Treasury.

It all goes with perfect 20/20 after-vision.
____________________

Now Malcolm is still recovering from the long effort of striving for the end of James Ellroy's Blood's a Rover. Perhaps labour worthy of a better cause. The effort was a month in the achieving, with delightful intermissions such as

Jasper fforde's Shades of Grey [get it in hard back for £8.49, rather than wait for the paperback at £7.99 in the late autumn], which owes something to Brave New World, to John Christopher's The Guardians, and to all those other dystopias;

and

Malcolm Pryce's From Aberystwyth With Love, the latest of his Louie Knight stories, in which West Wales becomes a hardboiled parallel universe.

So, what next?

Well, here by the bed is an unread, mint copy (Oxfam books at £4.99, and still over-priced) of The War Within, the fourth of Bob Woodward's investigative-journalist contemporary-histories of the Bush Administration.

That is where Malcolm found his insight for this "something new everyday". Here is Woodward's account of Colin Powell before the blue-ribbon Congressional Iraq Study Group:

Perhaps more than anyone in the administration, Powell had been the "closer" for the president's case for war. A month before the war, he appeared before the United Nations and the world to make the public case, displaying what he said were the "facts" proving that Iraq had threatening stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The 76-minute presentation had proven effective, too effective, with Powell displaying all his powers of persuasion.

Four years later, no WMD had been found, many saw the war as a catastrophe, and Powell's reputation was irretrievably linked to it, forever damaged. So the 10:30 A.M. meeting on this Friday was both a mission of accommodation and penance. He was going to have to confront the war and its aftermath for the rest of his life, and this was but another stop on the road to sort out his anguish.

As he entered the small conference room, Powell was greeted warmly by the members of the group. He gazed around the room. There must have been a jailbreak, he joked. The room erupted in laughter.

There was an obvious camaraderie between Powell and the group members, most of whom had dedicated much of their lives to building up American power and credibility, winning the last phase of the Cold War and shaping a world in which the United States was the only superpower. Now Iraq threatened to undermine all they had built.

[President GHW Bush's Secretary of State, James A.] Baker and [Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lee] Hamilton sat together at the head of a table, with Powell directly across from them. The other members lined the sides of the table, and staff sat along the wall.

Did Powell have something to say up front? Baker asked.

"I have no opening statement."

Okay, then why did we go into Iraq with so few troops? Baker asked.

It was an unusual starting point. The study group was supposed to focus on future remedies, not past troubles. But the question of troop levels seemed to be at the heart of the problem, and the relatively small invasion force of some 150,000 troops had contradicted Powell’s philosophy of warfare—namely to send a large, decisive force that would guarantee success. For the 1991 Gulf War—a far simpler military task of ejecting the Iraqi army from its occupation of Kuwait—Powell, then JCS chairman, had insisted on a force of 500,000.

Baker’s question sparked a monologue that went on for nearly 20 minutes.

"Colin just exploded at that point," Perry recalled later.

"He unloaded," [Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff] Leon Panetta added. "He was angry. He was mad as hell."

Powell cited pages 393 to 395 from American Soldier, the memoir of General Tommy Franks, who was in charge of Central Command at the time of the Iraq invasion. Quoting from memory, he noted that Franks had faithfully reported a call that Powell had made on September 5, 2002, six months before the invasion. "I've got problems with force size and support of that force, given the long lines of communications" and supplies, Powell had warned Franks.

"Colin Powell was the free world's leading diplomat. But he no longer wore Army green," Franks had written. "He'd earned his right to an opinion, but had relinquished responsibility for the conduct of military operations when he retired as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993.

"I picked up the Red Switch and spoke to Don Rumsfeld. 'I appreciate his call,' I said. 'But I wanted to tell him that the military has changed since he left.'"

Franks reported that "Rumsfeld chuckled," but wanted to make sure that Powell's doubts were aired. "I want him to get them on the table in front of the president and the NSC. Otherwise, we'll look like we're steamrolling," Franks quoted Rumsfeld as saying.

Again citing Franks's memoir, Powell noted that he had raised his concerns at an NSC meeting held at Camp David with the president two days later. According to Franks's account, "Soft-spoken and polite, ever the diplomat, he questioned the friendly-to-enemy force ratios, and made the point rather forcefully that the Coalition would have 'extremely long' supply lines."

Powell did not mention that two pages later, Franks wrote that he had outlined his war plan without objection. "Colin Powell didn't debate the brief I gave, and he didn't ask any more operational questions," Franks wrote, suggesting that Powell did not persist.

Powell acknowledged to the study group that he couldn't have predicted the insurgency or the chaos of post-invasion Iraq. But he did know that such a mission required plenty of troops. It was the Powell Doctrine: Go-in big. Go in to win.

Seven months before the war, Powell had asked for a private meeting with President Bush to layout what he felt were the consequences of an invasion of Iraq that the president and his team had failed to examine. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, summed it up this way: "If you break it, you own it."

At the study group meeting, Panetta later recalled, Powell said he had warned the president. "I did make clear that once this happens, you're the one who is going to have to pick up the pieces and put it back together again. And it's not going to be easy to do." Or as he put it later: "We not only did not have enough troops to stabilize the country and act like an occupying force, we didn't want to act like an occupying force. But we were the occupying force. We were the government."

In the classic sense, Powell told the group, there had never been a "front" to this war. The insurgency had begun from behind.

After his recapitulation on force levels, Powell moved without pause to the lack of postwar planning. He said he was stunned that Rumsfeld, when asked publicly about rampant looting in Iraq, had said, "Stuff happens." At a Pentagon press conference three weeks after the invasion, Rumsfeld had said that freedom was "untidy" and the extensive looting was the result of "pent-up feelings" from decades of Saddam Hussein's oppression. Powell quoted the defense secretary's "stuff happens" with utter disdain, suggesting it was an absurd evaluation and an abdication of responsibility.

Throughout that spring of 2003, Powell said, he'd kept thinking to himself, "When are we going to get this together?" All the Pentagon would say was, "Chalabi is coming, Chalabi is coming," a reference to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile with a checkered past who had long opposed Saddam Hussein. Chalabi had been the poster boy for a new democracy in Iraq, but Powell was dismissive.

"It was just Chalabi and 600 thugs," Powell said, noting that Chalabi failed to live up to the promise he'd made to the Pentagon to show up in Iraq with 10,000 men.

As secretary of state at the time of the invasion in 2003, Powell said he wasn't told about the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army until it happened. It was a monumental decision that disbanded the entire Iraqi army with the stroke of a pen, and its enactment was contrary to previous briefings that had been given to the president and to Powell. Nor was Powell told in advance about the sweeping de-Baathification order banning members of Saddam's Baath Party from many levels of government. It had effectively pulled the rug out from under the bureaucracy that made the country run, as many Iraqis had needed to be Baathists simply to get a job within Saddam's government.

Powell expressed astonishment that officials who lacked proper credentials had been sent to Iraq. He specifically mentioned Bernard Kerik, the troubled former New York City police commissioner, whom Bush had named to head the Iraqi national police and intelligence agency. "Bernie Kerik is in charge of police?" Powell asked, with a mixture of mock surprise and disgust. "Where did Bernie Kerik come from?"

Though he had been out of government for a year and a half, Powell's anger seemed fresh and raw. And now it had risen to the surface for them to see as he channeled years of accumulated resentments into his testimony.

Now, Malcolm reckons that teaches us a great deal:

Powell's Go-in big. Go in to win is conventional orthodoxy. It has been shown to be the most dependable strategy for most of military history and was Eisenhower's in North Africa and Normandy. One can assume it is the most basic rule taught at West Point. Yet, for the Iraq campaign and its lamentable aftermath, up to Bush's last-throw "surge", it was discounted.
If the supply lines were "extremely long" for the US logistical potential, they must be even more difficult for British forces, operating well out of their usual theatres. Did any UK military figure point this out to his political masters?
Not all the responsibility can be dumped on the Bush cronies. As Woodward comments (in connection with General George Casey being appointed to take over the Iraq command in May 2004):

The general attitude in the US military was "We can do this. Get out of our way. We'll take care of it. You guys stand over there."

This did not sell itself to Donald Rumsfeld. With such disconnection between the Pentagon and the Washington politicians, then, again, the British were further back in the queue.

If Powell, Secretary of State, was regularly by-passed on major decisions, we can reasonably assume that the British were equally kept out-of-the-loop. The whole of Woodward's book makes this clear by omission: Tony Blair achieves a single mention (pages 224-5): even Lawrence of Arabia gets two.

Throughout the book Woodward keeps coming back to what Powell says there, which is later defined as "the Pottery Barn rule": you break it, you own it. Deficiencies in US strategy, implementation and planning smashed the shop in Iraq (and, arguably, continue to do so in Aghanistan). Yet the opposition parties in Britain, and some political brass hats, seek to place the ownership of the breakages entirely on Blair and, now, Brown.

Surely something wrong?

2010-03-06T00:01:00.000Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Saturday, 6th March, 2010: improve your word power

Gerard Woodward reviews Waking Up in Toytown for the Times Literary Supplement:

John Burnside's second volume of memoirs, following closely behind his acclaimed A Lie About My Father (2006), begins by describing thje species of schizophrenia from which he has recently recovered: "When I was a full-scale lunatic I suffered from a condition called apophenia." First identified by Klaus Conrad, apophenia is characterized by the "unmotivated seeing of connections, coupled with the specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

Now there's a term Malcolm seeks to find early cause to employ.

2010-03-05T15:17:00.002Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Friday, 5th March, 2010: The Ham & High is crap

Someone did well to get together an obituary - half a tabloid page - for Michael Foot, albeit a cut-and-paste job, from freely-available sources. This was an important local story: Foot lived and died in the patch, in a fine terraced house stuffed with books, books, and books, as the archetypal Hampstead intellectual.

Foot's morning dander, with the shaggy Dizzy leading, out of Pilgrim's Lane, past the children's playground, and onto the Heath was a feature of Hampstead life. As was finding him on the 24 bus, with senior citizen's pass, on the way to Parliament. Virtually a door-to-door service.

Then, twice in the obituary we read the same error:

In 1949 he married his sweetheart and faithful supporter Jill Craigie, with whom he had three children...

Mr Foot was predeceased by his wife Jill Craigie and is survived by his three children.

That must come as a surprise to the three imaginary children.

For the record, Jill Craigie had a daughter by her first marriage to Claude Begbie-Clench. While still married to her second husband, Jeffrey Dell, she and Foot had a ten-day stay in the Negresco, Nice, and Jill became pregnant . She had an abortion, and was unable to conceive thereafter.

When the Ham & High had Gerald Isaaman as editor, it was the finest in the land, famously, the only "local" with a foreign policy.

Standards continue to slide.

Now it is little more than a resting place for Lib Dem hand-outs.

2010-03-04T23:59:00.000Z

Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Thursday, 4th March, 2010: The Word of God is Copyright

It was published in 1611, and four centuries on is still copyrighted.

A letter in the current issue of The Times Literary Supplement:

Bible copyright

Sir, -There has been some discussion recently in the TLS about copyright and the internet. On March 3, Cinnamon Press published my novel Livingstone's Funeral. In an early section, set c1880, an Anglican missionary to southern Africa is challenged by chiefs to prove the power of the new religion by making rain. He responds with a service which features a reading from 1 Kings 18, describing the confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. The passage is quoted from the Authorized Version.

It turns out to be very expensive to quote from the AV, in which the royal family holds a perpetual copyright. The Authorized Version was (in Joan Bridgman's words) "mostly cribbed" from William Tyndale's Bible of 1537. Tyndale was burnt at the stake for putting the Bible into the hands of any Englishmen who could read. An act of royal plagiarism, followed by an act of perpetual copyright. Is this what is meant by the title "Defender of the Faith"?

A minor consequence is that my novel is forced into anachronism, as my publishers use an alternative translation. Meanwhile, there are currently 300,000 internet sites from which the Authorized Version may be downloaded.

LANDEG WHITE
Quinta Terra da Vela, rua do Rigueirinho 19, Carapinheira, 2640-308 Mafra, Portugal.

2010-02-26T09:11:00.000Z

How big?

The BBC website reports an iceberg

the size of Luxembourg

and likely to:

disrupt the world's ocean currents and weather patterns

which could

result in colder winters in the north Atlantic.

This raised two thoughts for Malcolm:

The British are at last beginning to accept Europe.
An iceberg that size is not as impressive as one the size of Wales (the usual standard of measurement for Brits).

For the record eight Luxembourgs (each 2586 sq km) equals one Wales (20779 sq km).

Now, experimental science suggests one eighth of an iceberg is above water level. So that suggests this particular Luxembourger of a berg has a volume of ... an awful lot of double-decker buses.

2010-02-25T23:00:00.002Z

A new favourite?

No: nothing to do with the marvellous Alison Krauss song (wrong spelling, for a start). Rocky Schenck's video is none too dusty either. If that isn't "art", what is it? So we'll take that pretext for a moment of wallowing:

Of brands and blends

Malcolm's mother went for the straight Glenmorangie. Malcolm sighs, wishing that, two decades on, they could broach a bottle together.

There's the most northern mainland distillery, and very pleasant too. The "sixteen men" and their successors do a magnificent job. All donations gratefully accepted.

Malcolm's old Dad was a bit more basic. Quantity more than quality, perhaps. Standing the round at the bar or birthdays came a bit more economical. He went for Stewart's Cream of the Barley (which seems, of late, to be marketed a wee bit more upmarket). Again, not something which a decent mortal should miss.

As for our aul' fella himself, the Boyo Malcolm, he takes his delights where he can find them.

His marital involvements with things Ulster mean he has a taste for the true, the blissful Hippocrene from Bushmills. He reckons that, far better than air-freshener, one opens a bottle of Green Bush, allows the aroma to waft through the house, gently lowering the level of contents, watching the rugby, and keeping out of the way of the wee wifie preparing dinner in the kitchen.

Callers with intent

Now, there is one small beneficial spin-off from siring a spawn of daughters. Sooner or later the odd young man comes visiting.

In Malcolm's case, one of the passing callers had a dubious continental practice which involved passing repeatedly through airports. At that stage in the developing relationship, said young man felt the need to keep the aul' fella sweet. The consequence of that was a succession of desirable single malts, bought at duty-frees across the northern hemisphere. All gone, all lost and gone ... except ...

The glory hole

There, at the very darkest corner of the cupboard under the stairs, past the dubious port bought for a long-gone Christmas pudding, beyond that curious plastic bottle of ouzo (Memo: must unload that to a party sometime) where the various bottled bitters have sidled, was a cylinder. Not empty. Within was a full ... a full ... bottle of McClennan's Highland malt.

And it is heavenly.

2010-02-22T18:40:00.002Z

The lists, the lists are driving me bleedin' insane!

We'll get to the lists in a while. By way of intro, Malcolm was considering Mick Fealty, Lord of the Manor at Slugger O'Toole, trying to extrapolate from the Willie O'Dea resignation to a metaphysical consideration of how the media mediate (or, in the O'Dea case, how the establishment manage to ignore an imminent train-crash).

Those a whit distant from recent happenings in Caitlín Ní Uallacháin's right little, tight little Three Green Fields might need a quick update.

O'Dea! Oh, dear!

O'Dea (above, right) has been one of the cuter characters in recent Fianna Fáil history. He is, among that mixed bag of intellects, quite a bright guy: a lawyer and accountant. He has lectured at tertiary level, and remains a columnist for several Irish prints. He has been a TD for some three decades, was distinguished as one of Charlie Haughey's intra-party opponents, and has the throat of Limerick politics in a vampire bite.

For the last six years he was Minister of Defence in two Fianna Fáil governments: not in itself a great mark of distinction. O'Dea had done some good work at Education; and might reasonably have expected a better post. After all, Ministry of Defence is hardly the grandest office of state in the Twenty-Six Counties. Still, a FF Cabinet has to be a balance of many regional and ideological conflicting interests: O’Dea happened to tick many boxes. Moreover, the man evidently relished and cavorted in the job.

Then, in a local election campaign, O'Dea confided to a journalist that a prominent Sinn Féin candidate (subsequently re-elected) was involved in the running of a brothel. Ahem!

O'Dea at first denied he had made such an allegation, and swore to the same in an affidavit, only to be confronted with a recording of him doing just that. Oops!

Last December, the matter came to Court. The affidavit stood. Then O'Dea had to make a crawling apology, a specious excuse, and cough up a six-figure sum (according to the Sunday Times). Ouch!

Finally, the Opposition made an issue of the matter. Part of the delay is that Dáil Éireann has become a part-time legislature: part because nobody in the small world of Irish politics likes to stir noxious turds, lest they come back to haunt.

Last week, under pressure from Fine Gael (getting under the bar five seconds before Labour), the Cowen Government went for a vote-of-confidence. The government scraped home on the Ceann Comhairle's casting vote. Half a dozen TD's managed to absent themselves: Trevor Sargent of the Greens managed to be pre-booked for an unmissable engagement ... at an organic food fair. Indeed. Sargent's inability to attend could be typical of the Green point-of-view: they felt they had been "bounced" into the vote-of-confidence by Cowen.

O'Dea then resigned. There remains considerable contention about whether he walked, was pushed, or if indeed the Greens gave an ultimatum. If so, for once, the Greens were less of their usual “more of a dirty yellow colour” (© The Goon Show).

Listing to lunacy

None of that is directly relevant to Malcolm's other thought. This emerged from Fealty's philosophising about how the media, by inclusion, omission or emphasis, mediate the public agenda.

There is little new, or particularly profound in this. The mediaeval illiterate peasant was constrained to a horizon bounded by local gossip, the local parish priest's semi-literate theology, and the occasional passing pedlar. As information sources have grown exponentially, we increasingly and necessarily impose filters for ourselves. So we choose our sources by interest, by prejudice and by habit: Fox News or Russia Today, the Irish Times or the Miami Herald, Gay News or L'Osservatore Romano. Only one of which will have addressed the O'Dea business.

Malcolm, inevitably, found himself further trivialising the argument by considering the media's mania for lists. This is the particular unique-selling-point of the arts and entertainment pages, ultimately reduced to that inevitable five-star ranking.

At the eggheaded end, the likes of the Times Literary Supplement each Thursday not only reviews but fails to do so. This prescribes the scope of what literature is "acceptable" to that particular periodical and its adherents. That matters little, since there are other competing outlets, though it is clear that certain writers are "established" by being featured in those pages, while others are excluded. Reviews are inevitably nuanced: very few say"must read" and equally few are stinkers — though, last week, Heather O'Donoghue's magisterial belittling of Robert Ferguson was a gem.

At the popular="pop" end, the need to encapsulate creates more serious problems.

At its best, such an approach can be a classic: Walter Kerr's 1951 put down, for the New York Heral d Tribune, of John Van Druten's I Am a Camera ("Me no Leica") being the gold standard, as acerbic as anything from Dorothy Parker. The effect of Kerr's cryptic comment depends considerably on the reader recognising that I am a Camera is adapted from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin experiences. And, in turn, went on to be the basis for the phenomenon that was the musical and film Cabaret): thus producing the curious sequence of a decent pair of books provoking a mediocre stage adaptation and a great movie:

But those lists!

Yeah, well take the nadir achieved by Rachel Campbell-Johnson doing the "New Shows" for the Playlist supplement of last Saturday's Times. This is a page headlined by Henry Moore at Tate Britain, with Ron Arad featured further down page. We are also invited to consider posters from the wartime Ministry of Food, at the Imperial War Museum, and the Design Awards at the Design Museum. To this mish-mash, Campbell-Johnson appends a side bar of her "Critic's Choice". To achieve the full depth of the bizarre, these are worth taking in the reverse order established by Miss World competitions:
5. Dexter Dalwood's paintings and collages ... exploring the concept of "history painting" at Tate St Ives;
4. "Rembrandt in Focus", which sounds like making a commercial for a brand of make-up, but is a single portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet [left] on loan from Penrhyn Castle, together with etchings at the National Museum of Wales;
3. A major show of more than 120 images spanning the 70-year career of Irving Penn , at the National Portrait Gallery;
2. We are invited to Gaze into the giddily decorative surfaces of some of the best-known works of Chris Ofill (yes: the elephant turd man) at Tate Modern; and ...
1. Work by the the Armenian immigrant whose paintings were as powerful and important as he was mysterious. That's the typographic-disaster-waiting-to-happen, Arshile Gorky ("crazy guy! crazy name!" © Glenda Slagg), also at Tate Modern. Why is Malcolm unimpressed by this one, when opposite is a full page advertisement for a Times+ "exclusive private view" at £10 a ticket?

Any way one addresses it, there's a fair bit of mediation being done there.