The Ministry Of Truth

Welcome to Edinburgh – home of RBS!

Made in Scotland… by chancers.

(With apologies for the poor photo – it was dusk and I was late for check-in.)

Forty years ago today, at lunchtime on Thursday 30 January 1969 five musicians, a few roadies, a camera crew and assorted hangers-on clambered onto the roof of the building at 3 Savile Row, London.

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg shouted, “All cameras, take one!” and his crew started to record The Beatles’ last public performance, accompanied by Billy Preston on keyboards:

1. The band start with Get Back. It is met with the sort of polite applause one might find at a county cricket ground on an overcast Tuesday afternoon in May.

(Things got a bit more lively in Savile Row itself when London twigged on to what was actually happening – The Beatles’ first live performance in the UK for more than three years, since their tour-closing set at the Capitol Cinema, Cardiff on 12 December 1965.)

2. Another version of Get Back.  (The Let It Be film combines footage from both performances of this song.)

3. Don’t Let Me Down (as subsequently featured in the Let It Be film).

4. I’ve Got A Feeling (used on both the Let It Be film and album).

5. One After 909 (Let It Be film and album).

6. Dig A Pony.  Begins with a false start and ends with John saying, “Thank you, brothers. Hands too cold to play the chords.” (Let It Be film and, in edited form, album).

7. I’ve Got A Feeling, again. (Unreleased.)

8. Don’t Let Me Down, again. (Unreleased.)  Ringo sparks up.

9. Get Back, a third, distracted version with some humourless boys in blue actively seeking to bring the show to a close. As Apple employers advise the band that they’re about to be arrested, John briefly stops playing. George, bless him, turns his amp up louder. The song lurches to an end, as Paul ad libs, “You’ve been playing on the roofs again and you know your Mama doesn’t like it: she’s gonna have you arrested!” John closes proceedings with, “I’d like to say ‘thank you’ on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition.” (Let It Be film; the Let It Be album fades from the studio recording of this song into these rooftop ad-libs.)

Nine performances of five songs.

42 minutes.

And that was that.

All over bar the lawsuits. Oh, and Abbey Road.

I do try not to fellate the Moptops too often within the Ministry’s corridors, but there are times when it’s entirely appropriate to prostrate oneself before their altar of musical excellence. Today is one such occasion.

The Bootleg Beatles, incidentally, have been prevented from recreating the rooftop performance today by Westminster Council, citing – ahem – “health and safety concerns”.  Political correctness gorn mad.  Boo to The Suits.

The ‘Rooftop Concert’ (edited) from the Let It Be film:

How pathetic is this?

Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week’s Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: “They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance.”

Almost 15 long years on from the man’s death, it reminds me of something…

Reflecting at the weekend on his pisspoor performance on Radio 4′s Today programme last Friday and the latest in a long line of corruption scandals, it occurred to me that Arrivederci Gordon now resembles nobody so much as John Major.

Both seem fundamentally relatively decent men who inherited a premiership tarnished by a long-standing and arguably deranged predecessor along with an economy plunging irretrievably into recession, both were former Chancellors tainted by their own complicity in the economic failings that caused those recessions and both are surrounded at every turn by Chancers, liars and crooks.

It seems I’m not alone.

Yesterday I caught up with Sunday’s Observer and happened across Nick Cohen’s unmissable and devastating excoriation of New Labour’s performance history while today’s Harry Potter Bugle surprisingly allows George Monbiot slowly to pour a bucket of steaming hot shit all over poor Gordon’s noggin:

So the circle is closed. The government that won a landslide in 1997 after Tory MPs were revealed to have taken cash for parliamentary questions now faces far graver allegations: cash for laws. Along the way, almost every policy that distinguished it from John Major’s corrupt and pointless regime has been abandoned.

The difference between these two moments is that now there is nowhere to turn. There are the minor parties, but they have been systematically excluded by another broken promise: the failure to reform the electoral system. New Labour has engineered the worst of all worlds; it has sustained a system that ensures only one of two parties has a chance of power, and it has rooted out the policies that made a choice between the two worthwhile. At least when the Tories were in government we could dream of something better.

It is fitting and unsurprising that the scene of the new scandal is the unelected second chamber, whose proper reform Blair and Brown have spent 12 years avoiding. The deregulation of the banks, the love affair with the neocons, the failure to tax the rich, Peter Mandelson… is there any slithering cop-out that has not now returned to haunt this government?

For 12 years the British government has acted as an agent of other powers: the US; big business; big money; anything except the electorate. It is hard now to believe that it was elected in a frenzy of hope very much like the excitement surrounding Barack Obama.

Tomorrow, with impeccable timing, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency launches its campaign in parliament for public scrutiny of the contacts between legislators and professional hustlers. There’s a major lobbying scandal about once a month, and no one who is aware of the government’s failure to regulate this industry should be surprised. It was elected to stamp out sleaze, but since 1997 has done almost nothing.

The sleaze scandals, as they did during the dying days of the last Conservative government, will now emerge thick and fast, as disillusioned officials risk their liberty by leaking documents that should have been freely available, and journalists, scenting blood, close in. Labour will be driven from office with the same howls of execration that saw off the Tories in 1997. But this time there will be no bonfires, no bunting, no dancing in the streets: just the tired shuffling sound of a million more voters turning away from politics.

A nostril-scorching stench of decay surrounded the last years of Major’s administration.  As in so many other ways, it appears that New Labour intends to emulate – and perhaps even exceed – the Tories.

To quote with approval – and profound dismay – Cohen’s conclusion:

I cannot think of a more revealing measure of [Labour's] failure than the transformation of the English aristocracy from pantomime villains and chinless wonders into viable leaders of the nation. At the end of the longest period of left-wing government in British history, the Etonians were back for the first time since the fall of the Empire. A battered public seemed willing to embrace its old ruling class with something approaching relief.

The Minister loves you.

The Minister wants you to enjoy the t’Internet as much as he does.

The Minister also wants you to laugh at Microsoft at every possible turn.

The Minister has already made mention of Microsoft’s latest offering, Songsmith.

The Minister would now like to introduce you to a new concept – classic songs as, er, “reinterpreted” by Songsmith – vocal tracks fed into the software and the output being tacked on to the original videos.

Have you ever wondered what Wonderwall would sound like as a techno track…?

…or Eye Of The Tiger as a piano and flute ballad?

Explore and enjoy the YouTube Channel – Classic Songs by Microsoft Songsmith.

Laugh.  Weep.  Lose bladder control.

You know it makes sense.

We all need a little light and humour to illuminate the way in these dark, dark days.

Not for the first time, the Minister finds himself cast adrift.

A solitary man.

I am a rock.

I am, indeed, an island.

For while critics, audiences and judging panels the length and breadth of the (western) world can’t get enough of Slumdog Millionaire, I sat through it on Saturday afternoon wondering when the Oscar-worthy film would begin.

The Minister’s Wife thought it was wonderful.

Everyone seems to think it’s wonderful.

The Minister, though, thinks it’s a poorly-plotted, badly-scripted, erratically-acted drone through an over-familiar story that has been photographed by someone with a pronounced tremor, lit by someone with cataracts and edited by someone with ADD.

The Minister contends that had this movie been set anywhere “conventional” it would have been met with the same criticism that was thrown at Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet – ie that Danny Boyle has taken a hackneyed and melodramatic story and added layer upon layer of loud music, bright lights and overenthusiastic editing to create something less than the sum of its parts in a desperate attempt to appeal to the groovy hipster cats.

It didn’t help that I saw it while under the weather and it didn’t help that I saw it in a multiplex screen whose front tweeter speaker wasn’t working, so some parts of the dialogue were muddied and flat.  But even putting that to one side, I just didn’t like the movie, didn’t connect with any of the characters, felt the child actors were – how shall I put this kindly? – not very good and sat there for two hours thinking that I could be doing something far more constructive like taking painkillers and sleeping.

(At this stage I should add that we saw Frost/Nixon before Slumdog Millionaire and, while it was a little stagey – inevitably – and made one wonder when Michael Sheen is going to play roles that don’t involve watching old videos, I thought it a fine all-round piece of film-making.)

On the whole, I like Danny Boyle.  I really like 28 Days Later.  Shallow Grave and Trainspotting are good movies.  Millions is solid enough, though a little preachy.  I even quite like (small) parts of A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach.  (I haven’t seen Sunshine.)

Part of Boyle’s appeal to me is that the plots of most of those movies have some quirk or hook that make them at least a little bit different from so much of the dross piped by Hollywood into our eyeballs.  For me, Slumdog Millionaire falls flat because there is no such quirk or hook other than the location of the story.

If an Indian movie depicted poverty and the underclass in Britain in the same way that Boyle depicts Mumbai, the Daily Mail would be demanding the director’s extradition and questions in the House.

(And, while I don’t wish to suggest that parts of our towns and cities have anything like the grinding poverty of the developing world, let’s not forget that hundreds of thousands of children in the world’s fifth richest Clusterfuck To The Poor House nevertheless still grow up in what equates with the United Nations’ definition of “poverty”.)

The Daily Express would accuse the film of glamourising a culture of violence and gang warfare.

The Sun might notice that the poor aspire to subsistence and that wealth is a dream for other, more affluent people.  (It would, however, illustrate the point with a photograph of a young woman’s breasts.)

The Daily Telegraph would take glee in pointing out that gambling is a vice, not an aspiration, and that intellect, education, application and creativity are more reliable ways of earning a living than taking part in game shows.  It would accuse the film-makers of displaying shocking naivety in the face of a massively complicated problem.

Boyle’s heart is undoubtedly in the right place – the Minister’s Wife, usually a fairly reliable source, assures me that the child actors will receive an education and the benefit of a trust fund as a result of their participation in the movie – but the Slumdog Millionaire, I contend, wears the Emperor’s new clothes.

Not for the first time, style has prevailed over substance and the Minister is nonplussed.

This is real.

I am speechless.

Oh, I say.  This all sounds rather promising.

There must be profound changes in the banking system if a repeat of the current crisis is to be avoided, the Financial Services Authority has said.

Lord Turner, head of the City watchdog, said parts of the regulatory system were “seriously deficient”.

He said bankers, regulators, central banks, finance ministers and academics across the world shared the blame for failing to identify the risks which had been building in the financial system for a number of years.

“The changes which we need to make to create a sounder system for the future will be profound,” he said.  “Central banks and regulators between them need to… identify the combination of measures which can take away the punchbowl before the party gets out of hand.”

Excellent.  Splendid news.  Ministerial endorsements all round.

How nice to know we now live in an era of close co-operation between Lord Adair’s newly vigilant Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England and Arrivederci’s Army.

Ah…

A rift has opened up between the government and the financial authorities after a furious Alistair Darling was kept in the dark over the lifting of the ban on short-selling, which may have contributed to this week’s tumultuous crash in the value of banking shares.

The chancellor is thought to have been given just one hour’s notice by the Financial Services Authority that hedge funds would once again be able to place bets that bank shares would fall. Darling believes the ban will have to be reintroduced, given the fragility of the financial system.

Shares in high street banks have crashed since the ban was removed at the end of last week.

The short notice given to the chancellor about the announcement of the change in FSA policy two weeks ago demonstrates the ideological differences between the authorities involved in regulating the financial system. The problems were first highlighted during the Northern Rock collapse, when the so-called tripartite authorities – the FSA, the Treasury and the Bank of England – had difficulty agreeing a strategy for the lender.

While Darling has no authority to tell the FSA what to do, it is believed he strongly advised it not to lift the ban.

According to Treasury sources, when Darling inquired why he only been given 60 minutes’ notice, he was told it was an oversight.

Well done, everybody.  Bravo!  Take a bow.

I knew I liked Barry for some reason.

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. 

The Minister has been under the weather these past few days and still stands shoulder to shoulder with Jeffrey Bernard.  It has meant I have not fully enveloped myself in the inauguration in quite the way I had hoped, but isn’t it just absolutely fucking fantastic to wake up in a morning knowing that, at long last, those unspeakable cunts are no longer in charge?

Anyway, brace yourselves, chaps: the Clusterfuck officially begins tomorrow.

£90k a year to become Legislative Drafter for the Falkland Islands?

Seriously – it’s got to be worth considering at the moment.

Chapter One

So this is very good news:

An atheist UK bus campaign which uses the slogan “There’s probably no God” does not breach the advertising code, a watchdog has ruled.

The Advertising Standards Authority said it assessed 326 complaints. Some claimed the wording was offensive to people who followed a religion.

But the body concluded the adverts were unlikely to mislead or cause widespread offence and closed the case.

HAHAHAHAHA, ALPHA COURSE DRONES!!!

Chapter Two

And this is very good news:

Ministers have shelved plans to exempt MPs’ expenses details from the Freedom of Information Act, after the Tories and Lib Dems said they would fight it.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the government had thought it had cross-party agreement but would now “continue to consult on the matter”.

Campaigners said it was a victory for “people power” after a web protest.

The Conservatives accused ministers of a “U-turn” while the Lib Dems said it was a “humiliating climbdown”.

MPs were due to vote on Thursday on plans to exempt their expenses from the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.

Well, well, well.  Perhaps Arrivederci Gordon listened to Barry’s inauguaration address?

Those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

What’s that?  Oh…

Labour MPs were to be ordered to vote through the changes, while the Tories and Lib Dems said they would instruct their MPs to vote against them.

Mr Brown was challenged about it by two Tory backbenchers at prime minister’s questions who asked why there “should there be one law for the people and another for politicians”.

At the start of PMQs Mr Brown told MPs there would be a free vote on the matter.

He said: “We thought we had agreement on the Freedom of Information Act as part of this wider package.”

“Recently that support that we believed we had from the main opposition party was withdrawn. On this particular matter, I believe all-party support is important and we will continue to consult on that matter.”

But less than an hour later the government said the plan would be shelved.

The Minister’s Parliamentary representative, one of the New Labour Cannon Fodder and a man I am sure I have slated before, had written in Sunday’s local newspaper about this vote before it was announced that Arrivederci had – to use the phrase du jour – “bottled it”.

MPs expenses are published annually and can be viewed by anyone on the web. The proposal considered this Thursday will improve this system and result in more detailed information being published, for instance, not just the overall cost of a London flat, but the amounts claimed for furniture etc. The proposals also close a dangerous loophole arising from the Freedom of Information judgement last year which would have resulted in wide availability of the addresses of MP’s London accommodation. This would have been helpful information for burglars, terrorists and nutters and I believe that it is sensible to withhold such details. What will not be withheld is the amount of money claimed. I am very much in support of clear information being made available so that my constituents can judge for themselves how I use the legitimate expenses of doing my job.

So now we know.  It’s all about nutters.

How very true that is, albeit in a manner my honourable friend perhaps did not anticipate.

Chapter Three

But this is a big, steaming crock of shit.

Britain’s train operators face a “potentially devastating” blow from the economic downturn and need government assistance to stave off disaster, public transport chiefs warned ministers yesterday.

The heads of the five largest train companies – Stagecoach, National Express, Go-Ahead, Arriva and FirstGroup – urged the transport secretary, Geoff Hoon, to consider shortening trains, rewriting the financial terms of franchise agreements and putting up state funding for an extra 1,000 staff across the rail network.

The unprecedented call for state help came in a meeting with Hoon in which the rail operators warned that rail contracts forged during an economic boom could soon become untenable.

Few things annoy the Minister more than the grasping scumballs who trouser massive public subsidies to run the “privatised” railways, while fleecing rail passsengers for every last brass farthing they possess, before announcing massive profits, paying out millions in dividends and awarding themselves huge bonusses for getting a packed train 100 miles in more time than it used to take when things ran on steam.

The very fattest of cats, next to whom Garfield stands in order to look slimmer.

While I would gladly throttle numpties like Sir Fred Goodwin and Sir Win Bischoff until just before the moment they expire, I am not sure I would let go quite so soon where the Chairmen and CEOs of “rail franchise operators” are concerned.

Given the staggering amount of tax I already pay, and the Godknowshowmuch amount of tax I am going to have to pay in the future to fund the current fashion of “£20 billion here, £30 billion there”, if a single penny more goes to this bunch of Chancers I might just go into meltdown.