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.
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The surreality of apologies

When Monty Python was only a glimmer, there were several BBC Radio programmes experimenting in the same genre of humour.

Malcolm recalls a quick sketchette which went something like this:

[Official newsreader voice] A nuclear device has just eliminated the County of Essex. Will anyone who saw the accident please contact the police on [invented telephone number].
[Military voice] Sorry!

Holy Island

Then, last week, Malcolm saw one even more worthy of a mock.


Hanging by the sanctuary arch at Lindisfarne Parish Church, St Mary the Virgin (above), is a small cast copy of a sculpture and two framed documents. One of the documents is from a Scandinavian bishop. The other is an explanation.

In AD 793 Lindisfarne received the first Viking visitation. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had it:

In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria, which sorely affrighted the inhabitants: there were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying through the air. A great famine followed hard upon these signs; and a little later in that same year, on the 8th June, the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church by rapine and slaughter.

In 1993 the Scandinavian Bishop wrote his letter of apology, and sent the token of the sculpture as a peace-offering. And so the matter rests.

Haringey hoo-ha

That old war-horse, and Malcolm's fellow-councillor, Bernie Grant (who could never resist a theatrical gesture) once demanded the British Government apologise for slavery, and chuck the Crown Jewels in as compensation. Those who knew him understood Bernie's sense of humour was as grand as his bellowed laugh.

Downing Street does it right

Today we have Gordon Brown saying "sorry" to the ghost of Alan Turing:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a posthumous apology for the "inhumane" treatment of Alan Turing, the World War II codebreaker who committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexuality and forcibly treated with female hormones.

The mathematician helped crack Nazi Germany's Enigma encryption machine — a turning point in the war — and is considered a father of modern computing.

In 1952, however, Turing was convicted of gross indecency for having sex with a man and offered a choice between prison and "chemical castration" — the injection of female hormones to suppress his libido. His security clearance was revoked and he was no longer allowed to work for the government.

Allow Malcolm to annotate that:

• It was the benighted 1950s, for heaven's sake.
• The Home Secretary (1951-54) in Churchill's Government, presiding over the final persecution of Turing, was Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. That honourable member, and soon to be noble lord, fancied his chances to succeed Churchill as PM. Accordingly he set about ingratiating himself with the Tory Right Wing, by being a hanger-and-flogger. He sent poor David Bentley to the gallows. He led the Tory Lords in homophobic opposition to the Wolfenden Report (having himself set up the Committee as a way of kicking any reform into the long grass).
• Turing was, in any case, a delicate flower. Check out any history of his work at Bletchley for confirmation. Somewhere near Shenley, just off the M1, are the silver bars he buried there in 1940; and was never again able to relocate.
• His security clearance was already questioned by the Americans, who had been finding difficulties since 1942. By 1952, when Senator Joe McCarthy was in full rant, Turing (like so many others) didn't stand a chance of a fair hearing, either side of the Atlantic.

Far better than a few words of apology is the manner in which Turing has been celebrated: roads named after him; a blue plaque on his birthplace; statues here and there; a postage stamp ...

Gordon Brown's statement ticks all the boxes, answers each and every realistic demand of the petitioners:

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

Watch that space. That apology will not be enough. Sphere: Related Content

Oooh, no missus!

No... no...hold on...
wait a moment...


Either she's the best Frankie Howerd impersonator in town, or she just doesn't get it.

Here's Ann Treneman doing the 'Conference Sketch' on page 25 of Malcolm's Times:

Mariella [Frostrup] wondered what he had done when he [Gordon Brown] was young.
"I played sports," he announced (he didn't say during which meal). He had gone to University at 16 but, in the first week, hurt his eye playing rugby.
"I spent several years in and out of hospital. Some of you may not know this but this was the Sixties and Seventies. At my hospital at 9 o'clock in the evening—this was the NHS, free at the point of need!—and I was only 17 and 18, they would serve all the patients with drinks!'
The audience barked, possibly with shock.
"Yeah! You could have Guinness. You could have beer! Free beer for all the workers!"

Oh god, where does one start?

Look, Anne dear; that is true. Arthur Guinness and Co believed that their product was healthy and good. They provided, free of charge, one third of a pint bottles for patients in hospital. Malcolm knows that, for sure, because, at the age of barely sixteen, because of a broken arm in a rugby game, he was in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, and was provided with, and—yes— joyfully imbibed the stuff (and looked for seconds).

So what?

Meanwhile, Gordon's punchline: you simply didn't get it, did you?

Well, dear, there's this song, you see. It used to be very popular among the Lefties. Particularly after pay-day.

Some say it came from the Wobblies (and they're still out there, you know!)

Everyone can make up verses to infinity. Basically, it goes like this:

[Invent your own iambic dodecasyllabic line, as offensive as possible, or]
We'll hang [any four-syllable name] from a sour apple tree
When the red revolution comes.

Then the only other rule is that every verse, however inane or inflammatory, has a rousing chorus:

Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever!
When the red revolution comes!

After a requisite intake of mild, bitter and comradeship, everybody staggers home, carolling an obligatory final chorus:

Free beer for all the workers! Free beer for all the workers!
When the red revolution comes!

Gordon knew that. The Labour membership knew that. The Times readership, alas, remain no better informed from Ms Treneman's efforts. Sphere: Related Content

A mystery trip to Islington and paranoia

Malcolm has always had difficulties with Child Ballad 105, in which the Bailiff's Daughter of Islington pursues her lost love all the way to London. The whole thing makes much more sense if the Islington in question is in Cambridgeshire, rather than Postal-district N1.

Saturday, Malcolm pursued new loves in Islington, at Borders more-than-adequate bookshop. This meant three new novels for the weekend (the new Jasper Fforde is first up and running) and a leisurely sit in a congenial pub. Ah! bliss.

But when his friends did understand
His fond and foolish mind...

Now, the intention of this entry was to comment on Saturday's Irish Times. Not for the surreality of the cover of the weekend Magazine section: Midlands Chic — Shaking up the Mullingar fashion scene. Malcolm assumes that was just someone having a laugh at the "affluent midlands clientele ... [of] Athlone, Tullamore, Longford and beyond." No, not indeed. Instead he spend a rivetted quarter-pint scrutinising Paul Gillespie's Worldview column on the Opinion&Analysis page (Malcolm is still not convinced about the IT's use of such TheGuardian-like conflations: even the Guardian is passing on).

Now, Paul Gillespie, once a stalwart of Trinity Fabians thereby shares in Malcolm's fictional DNA. He has had a distinguished career at the IT and can boast some laudable publications.

This week's piece. "Gordon Brown's Atlantic dilemma" is a Michelin two-star "worth a visit." It had, as its major premise, the way Brown's US trip was:

a necessary shift, part of the wider recalibration in the choreography of power on which Brown has been engaged for the last month.

She was coy, and she would not believe
That he did love her so ...

Malcolm would agree with that in large part. However, one needs to keep in mind that Brown needed, and apparently achieved something less than a Hugh Grant moment at Camp David:

I love that word "relationship". Covers all manner of sins, doesn't it? I fear that this has become a bad relationship. A relationship based on the President taking exactly what he wants and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to, erm... Britain. We may be a small country but we're a great one, too. The country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter. David Beckham's right foot. David Beckham's left foot, come to that. And a friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the President should be prepared for that.

Brown was more circumspect than that, but the dog-whistle has not gone unheard. Bush is well on the way to dead-duckery: we are now into the last eighteen months of the Bush-Cheney imperium. No British PM is going to hitch a wagon onto that falling star. Equally, no one in Whitehall is going to be too eager to satisfy the foreign-policy credentials of any one potential Presidential Candidate. Until November 2008, anyway: then a fully-fledged fawn is in order.

‘Many a tear have I shed for her sake
When she little thought of me.’

And for the minor premise, but the major thrust here:

an article by John Bolton, the former neoconservative US ambassador to the United Nations. Writing in the Financial Times, he said Britain must chose between its special relationship with the US and its deepening involvement with the European Union.

Malcolm missed the original publication, which is on-line. Bolton is being mischievous. He states:

whether the “special relationship” grows stronger or weaker lies entirely in British hands. Americans across the political spectrum are content to keep it as it is and has been essentially since the second world war. That does not mean that the two countries always agree, nor has it ever meant that Britain is a poodle following America’s lead, self-flagellating Brits notwithstanding.

Well, John, it sure don't feel like that. And that's a nice piece of double-think: if we masochists chose to talk EU, we're breaking the concordat; if we don't ... So Bolton forces the question into an either/or:

... saying that the UK’s “single most important bilateral relationship” is with America, but is not comparable with UK membership of the EU, is a clever but ultimately meaningless dodge. Drop the word “bilateral”. What is Britain’s most important “relationship”? Does Mr Brown regard the EU as a “state under construction”, as some EU supporters proclaim, or not?

The answers to these questions are what Washington really needs to know. What London needs to know is that its answer will have consequences.

Is there anybody, apart from dissimulating Bolton, who does not know the answer whether Mr Brown regard[s] the EU as a “state under construction”? If so, there is need for a quick revision course on the "five economic tests", which meant Gordon Brown at the Treasury had an economic lock on political decisions over the Euro.

As she went along the road,
The weather being hot and dry...

And so we come to the explicit threat (as Gillespie phrases it):

Can Washington any longer trust Britain not to share US intelligence with its EU partners when it advocates policies based upon it which they do not have?

Which neatly begs the obverse of that coin: can London, post Iraq, trust DC to share valid intelligence anyway?

And the touchstone of Britain's reliability will be toeing the US (and, specifically, the neoCon) line on Iran. Let Bolton have his say:

Iran’s nuclear weapons programme ... will prove in the long run more important for both countries than the current turmoil in Iraq. Here the US has followed the EU lead in a failed diplomatic effort to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. If Mr Bush decides that the only way to stop Iran is to use military force, where will Mr Brown come down? Supporting the US or allowing Iran to goose-step towards nuclear weapons?

Phew.

‘She’s dead, sir, long ago.’

Fortunately Gillespie sees through that:

US foreign policy is now polarised ... in a way not seen in many decades. Most Republicans believe US security relies on military force, rather than international co-operation, while most Democrats define themselves as supporting multilateral diplomacy rather than coercion.

And,

it is not in the US interest to have the EU emerge as a competing power in a multipolar world. Such a view would also be held by an incoming Democratic administration.

Gillespie's analysis concludes with a shrewd appreciation of an alliance of sinister forces, between the "right-wing fringes of the Bush administration" and the likes of Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch. These define any "special relationship" as Britain as a junior partner in

an Anglosphere bringing together the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and an emerging open global marketplace based on neoliberal values and deregulation.

Meanwhile Gordon Brown's emphases on "climate change, international development and world trade reform" are areas "where he cannot rely on Washington to share his values".

All the maids of Islington
Went forth to sport and play...

All of that is thought-provoking stuff: well done, young Paul. What really sticks in the craw is Gillespie's assumption, repeated from Bolton, that the real problem is:

how the Iran question is handled over the coming year.

If that really is the biggest, biggest issue Gordon Brown's Government faces in the next twelve months, then we're in the clear.

I will into some far countrey,
Where no man doth me know.’

Except, of course, for the background mood music about Iran. Expect what goes around to come around, largely by courtesy of the German Press. There it seems to have a cyclical existence ever since Spiegel had a report, uncredited, anticipating a possible US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. This was recycling for the popular market a report from the Berlin Tagesspiegel (for which Malcolm's German is inadequate). That, in turn, was derived from the DDP agency report, way back in December 2005, by Udo Ulfkotte, who was believed to have close cuddles with the German intelligence service, the BNP. In the "Anglosphere", of course, one could trace the ancestry of this particular horror-story back to Seymour Hersh's articles in the New Yorker.

Malcolm assumes that, on this one, the Brits will choose to sat (literally) out of the firing line, lurking somewhere behind a (reasonably-) disciplined EU line on Iran. And, therein lies the disgruntlement of the neoCons, including Bolton, about British policy.

‘O farewel grief, and welcome joy,
Ten thousand times and more!'

But, for Malcolm, there is another, more immediate problem. The first edition of Jasper Fforde's new novel is corrupt, missing many footnotes. He sees that, if he is prepared to mutilate the title page and send it to the publisher, he will receive a revised edition. That seems a no-brainer: keep the first edition for possible investment value.

Similarly, keep the original Brown policy, unreconstructed by Pentagon bullying.
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