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.

Sphere: Related Content

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 viewer) 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. Sphere: Related Content

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 still 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. Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

Crisis in the Redfellow diaspora

Redfellow Hovel was over-populated with grandchildren over the holiday period. The Redfellow menage and its paintwork largely survived.

Now, comes brave news.

One of the outings was to Billy Elliot, the Musical.

As a result, two New Jersey grade-school children have returned home to share a song with their fellows. It goes like this:

So, merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher:
May God's love be with you.
We all sing together in one breath
"Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher".
We all celebrate today,
'Cause it's one day closer to your death.

Probably their other grandfather, a good comrade out of Brooklyn, would not wholly disapprove. He might need a concordance to recognise the minor politico tagged in the punchline:

Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling Heseltine:
You're a tosser, you're a tosser
And you're just a Tory Swine.

The Pert Young Piece sardonically adds that it's just as well they haven't yet found the DVD of Brassed Off, with Mr Chuckles's speech on God and the Tory Party.

Ah, there's not much wrong with the kids of today.

Sphere: Related Content

Shafting the Leader

Notice Ken Clarke's glorious up'n'under?

It went like this:

Ken Clarke says Tories cannot rule out putting up taxes

A Conservative government would not rule out raising taxes in order to shrink the UK's soaring deficit, shadow minister Ken Clarke has said.

That ran as the BBC website's political lead all day, smothering Cameron's anodyne stream of clichés for the New year re-launch which rose to the dizzy heights of number 13 on the Mail's list of stories -- and didn't raise a twitch with the Torygraph.

Bet that had them really chuffed at Tory HQ.

Well done, the people's (other) Ken! Sphere: Related Content

Moral amazements

1. Salt in the wound

Irish Catholicism is in crisis over the child molestations: this is a continuing agony that will not quickly go away.

Now, what could the Irish government possibly do to exacerbate the issue? Ah, yes! Pass a blasphemy act.

As is the common view up the Rathgar Road: "Jaysus, Mary and Joseph!"

2. A Major intervention

John Major, of famed repute, has uttered his view, according to the BBC:

Former Prime Minister Sir John Major has criticised Tony Blair's handling of the Iraq war and his presentation of the case for invasion in March 2003...

He told the BBC the argument that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and must be removed was an "inadequate" one.

A "bad man"? Phew! strong language! Obviously, Saddam should have been sent to sit on the naughty step.

Niceties of international law apart, and ignoring the gargantuan failure to plan for the aftermath, what is objectionable about dethroning a bloodstained totalitarian dictator, whose penchant for genocide of his own minorities is well-attested? In Major's utterance one hears the echoes of the Tory appeasers (a majority of the Party for too many years) of the 1930s.

Now, consider Major's own record in Iraq. Did he condone the mass-extermination that was Highway 80? Did he approve of the decision to lewave Saddam in power, to continue his pogroms and murders?

Blair was, and remains a controversial figure: that is a measure of his stature. e e cummings got Major bang to rights: an arse on which everything has sat, except a man.

Sphere: Related Content

The not-so-good and the not-so-great, number 19: Kate Meyrick

Sometimes things creep up on one.

This one did; but, in a way, it follows from the piece about Eliza Gilbert, a.k.a Lola Montez. Of course, the sneerers and nay-sayers would suggest it's here because Malcolm cannot get on with the job over the Cromwellian settlement and its consequences. And ... sigh ... they

would be right.

Mrs Meyrick rose to the surface because of doings on Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service. Iain Dale had featured a 1929 Tory election poster. The poster was a mild fore-runner for Churchill's despicable "Gestapo" attack. As Malcolm suggests in his posting on the other channel, the irony is that the real repression in 1929 came from the reactionary Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks.

A naice Dublin protestant gel

Kate Evelyn Nason was born in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in 1875. Within a year, her father (a doctor) was dead. Her mother re-married a Lancastrian cleric. At the age of seven, Kate was an orphan, living with her grand-mother. She briefly attended Alaexandra College, that academy for the best of protestant Dublin's rising misses. In the true Alex tradition, she found herself a respectable professional, another medic, to wed. The surname (Merrick) became gentrified to Meyrick, and he set up practice, first in Southsea, then in Basingstoke.

By 1909 Mrs Meyrick was ten years married, the mother of six (three of each) and bored, bored, bored. Briefly, she upped with the kids and left. Reconciled to the good nerve-doctor, she took lessons in hypno-therapy and (thanks to trench warfare) soon had plenty of neurasthenic subjects on which to practise. At the end of the War, the marriage had finally collapsed (Dr Meyrick was a spend-thrift).

The Clubland entrepreneur

The Mrs Meyrick, though, was enterprising. She promptly moved to London, took a share in and managed Dalton's Club in Leicester Square. The law said closing time was ten o'clock: Mrs Meyrick took no heed of such niceties. The club was raided and shut down, Mrs Meyrick was guilty of running "disorderly premises" and fined £25. Two premises later, Ma Meyrick (as London society knew her) had her own club at 43 Gerrard Street in Soho. There then began a repetitive cycle of police raids, in which the newly-appointed Tory Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks, generally known as "Jix", took a personal interest, as part of his self-ordainedl morality campaign.

It was now clear that it was Ma Meyrick versus the blue-noses. In November 1924 she came up before the Bow Street magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, who sent her down for six months. There is at least a hint of regret in his comment:

She was a lady, of good appearance and charming manners, and conducted her various clubs with more decorum than many, but with also a fine contempt for the law.

Note that "her various clubs", for Ma Meyrick now had the Manhattan in Denman Street, the Silver Slipper in Regent Street, and a substantial slice of the action at the Folies Bergères in Newman Street.

Into the peerage

Ma Meyrick came out of Holloway to general public acclaim. She was soon back in the celebrity gossip columns when her daughter, Dorothy Evelyn, married the nineteen-year-old Edward Southwell Russell (he falsified his age), 26th Baron de Clifford. As an aside, de Clifford (who frequently spoke in the Lords, urging that driving laws be tightened) was the last peer to be tried in the Lords -- for manslaughter caused by his driving on the wrong side of the road. He was also a Mosleyite. Two years later, another Meyrick daughter, Mary Ethel Isobel, was hitched to George Harley Hay-Drummond, 14th Earl of Kinnoull in the Scottish peerage.

Crime does not pay?

The police raids continued, and in 1928 Ma Meyrick did another six months in Holloway. Her compensation was to build herself a substantial fortune: the clubs were each making up to £1,000 a week (of which perhaps half was profit). Her investments were guided by Alfred Loewenstein -- who provides yet another story (to be dealt with as an annex) -- until Ma Meyrick was worth something in the region of half-a-million. In 1928 money.

Ma Meyrick's nemesis was Sergeant George Goddard of the Metropolitan Police. He had led the first raid on the 43 in February 1922. In November 1928 Goddard was found to have accrued over £12,000: an impossible sum on an honest copper's wage. Goddard had been taking £100 a week from Ma Meyrick in protection money, with other nice little earners on the side. This time Ma Meyrick was hit with fifteen months, with hard labour, for bribery and corruption. She was back inside for six months in late 1930 and again in mid-1931. By then her health was destroyed: she died of pneumonia at her Regent's Park home, aged 57.

Her funeral was at fashionable St Martins-in-the-Fields.

Ma Meyrick had an after-life

Evelyn Waugh recreated her in Brideshead Revisited, and the "43" became the "Old Hundredth". Try Chapter five:

Mulcaster said, "I say, let's slip away from this ghastly dance and go to Ma Mayfield's."

"Who is Ma Mayfield?"

"You know Ma Mayfield. Everyone knows Ma Mayfield of the Old Hundredth. I've got a regular there - a sweet little thing called Effie. There'd be the devil to pay if Effie heard I'd been to London and hadn't been in to see her. Come and meet Effie at Ma Mayfield's."

"All right," said Sebastian, "let's meet Effie at Ma Mayfield's" ...

"D'you know where this place is??

"Of course I do. A hundred Sink Street."

Sphere: Related Content

Esprit de corps

First, put down all sharp-edged tools, anything hot or breakable.

Then consider this:

Parents who send their children to private school have been so stigmatised that they have been made to feel their decision is "tantamount to treason", a leading headteacher claimed last night.

Andrew Grant, chair of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, said politicians and other critics of the fee-paying system should be grateful for the money parents are saving for the state sector.

And he added that without them "Britain would not have enough officers to lead its army."

Not to mention the upper echelons of the Tory Party, half the places at Oxbridge, the massed ranks of barristers and judges, the MCC, and all those hereditary peers.

It is, with good reason, the story which has attracted most comments on the Guardian site.

Oik at the back: stop sniggering, this instant! Sphere: Related Content

A dead cert and conservative "justice"

The Court's Duty
The Supreme Court should make clear that the Constitution prohibits the execution of death row inmates who can produce convincing evidence that they are innocent.

Addressing both sides of the argument, and using not more than one side of the page, discuss the statement above.

For more, see the source article at today's New York Times.

Ghouls, not wishing to undertake the main task, might consider, from the same source, the following:

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dismissed the idea that the courts have a duty to ensure that they are not putting an innocent man to death.

Sphere: Related Content

Shit-of-the-year nominee:

This is, word-for-word, from Tory Diary on ConservativeHome:

The Daily Mail is reporting that Andrew Pelling was held by police yesterday on suspicion of "assaulting his wife". He's been released on bail.

Andrew was elected as the Conservative MP for Croydon Central in 2005 with a majority of just 75 votes, and retains his position as an active London Assembly Member and Councillor in the area.

If this is proven to be true and his wife presses charges, he will face a difficult parliamentary election.

Comments have been disabled on this post.

Pelling uses his own website to say of himself:

Andrew does not really see himself as a politician.... Even the Leader of the London Greens called him 'the acceptable face of Conservativism."
Andrew, who lives locally, also has an independent streak.

The Mail (for all its innumerable faults) does this kind of story quite poetically, with the right admixture of offended horror and salacious detail. So, here's how it goes:

His first wife, of 18 years, went back to Japan to care for her father. In those ten months, Pelling started an affair with Lucy Slaytor, half his age and a Tory campaign worker, even installing her in the house with his three teenage children:

... daughter Elizabeth said her father brought Miss Slaytor home while her mother was away.

Elizabeth said: "She spent a whole weekend here.

"She just thrust herself upon me and my sister and brother. They told us together over breakfast that they were in love and wanted to get married and have children. We all felt awful. We couldn't believe he was doing this to us."

Now, Malcolm finds this next bit sooo touching:

After his relationship with Lucy Slaytor was made public his first wife, Sanae, accused Mr Pelling of posting envelopes containing housekeeping money through the family home letter box so he could avoid her.

She said at the time: "Once my children ran out to catch him before he left, but he drove away. They were in tears. They couldn't understand how their father could choose a woman half his age over them."

Mr Pelling moved in with Miss Slaytor's parents and admitted putting cash through his wife's letter box, saying: "I am proud that I support my wife and our children financially."

It's that nice "I am proud..." that sets the whole thing off, don't you think?

The Mail's news item is rounded off by two other details:

Mr Pelling hit the headlines again in February this year when he advised two constituents to vote for the BNP...

In January he tabled a parliamentary Motion marking the death of chef Rick Stein's dog, Chalky.

ConservativeHome's treatment tells Malcolm all he needs to know about the Tory mind: that friendly use of the first-name, 'Andrew'; the bit about the 'difficult parliamentary election'; that ambiguous 'active' and the refusal to allow comments.

Meanwhile, let us not forget where the leader of the Conservative Party stands:

... stressing that families must remain the bedrock of society and should "matter more than anything else in our society", Mr Cameron insisted: "If we can get the family right, we can fix our broken society."

Sphere: Related Content