The Ministry Of Truth

Stop the presses, we’ve a late entry for Cultural Nadir.

A woman has left her job!

She must be a very important woman in a very important job because Arrivederci Gordon and Posh Boy Dave both deemed the event important enough to record farewell messages for her.

Arrivederci Gordon opined: “Congratulations on the support that you’ve won throughout the country.”

PBD said: “The sofa will never be the same without you.”

Support throughout the country?  A departure that means the end of comfy chairs as we know them?

Who can this be?  A senior Ikea designer?

Oh, it’s Fiona Phillips from GMTV.

So the voluntary departure of an overpaid woman barely anybody knows from a programme barely anybody watches (1.1 million viewers each day is not exactly up there with The Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show 1977 is it?) is deemed worthy of political comment.

Our economy is in meltdown; our armed forces are engaged in the illegal occupation of another sovereign state; and the planet is melting.  Yet our “leaders” (sic) have got enough time to tit around like this.

It’s your vote in 2009: cast it wisely.

Each December the man who is julesallen puts together a Cultural Review Of The Year, with contributions from friends, acquaintances and hangers-on.  The Director’s Cut of this year’s Ministerial contribution is reproduced below for your delight and amusement.

Written Word

I put together a fine share purchase agreement this summer: does that count?

Stage

I failed to set foot inside a theatre all year.  The theatrical world did not complain.

Cinema/DVD

I don’t think it was a great year for Cinema overall - The Dark Knight, Mamma Mia and Quantum Of Solace all made me pray for death to come - but I enjoyed quite a few DVDs.

The year started well, with me catching up with the brilliant Tell No One and The Lives Of Others on DVD.  Juno deserved its success and I thought Ellen Page’s performance was terrific.  No Country For Old Men was just excellent in every respect.

I really enjoyed 2 Days In Paris and Paris, Je T’aime.  I liked Vantage Point until the final 20 minutes.  Venus made me laugh a lot, as did Stranger Than Fiction and Priceless.  Rendition was a well made movie, notwithstanding the presence of Meryl Streep.  I surprised myself by liking Catch And Release: chick-flick producers take note - cast Kevin Smith in a romcom and even I’ll watch it.

My favourite movie of this year, though, was Lars And The Real Girl.  I only finally saw it on DVD in October but I loved every frame (even, surprisingly, those frames in which Emily Mortimer featured).  Ryan Gosling is one of the five most interesting actors working today and, while I’m automatically well disposed towards any movie that emphasises the importance of society and socialism, this was just a smashing story, well told.

Website

I’ve really enjoyed the writing on Popdose throughout its first year, a collective effort from a network of lovers of popular culture.  Lifehacker continues to feed my inner geek.  One of the many music blogs I visit, The B Side, introduced me to many new pieces of great music and the incredible life story of ‘Sir’ Lattimore Brown.

Above all, though, three websites made the US general election for me: Politico and FiveThirtyEight.com were invaluable resources, while Things Younger Than Republican Presidential Candidate (Oh, And Did I Forget To Mention War Hero?) John McCain was a daily treat that occasionally had me weeping with laughter.

Televisual Entertainment

I’ve all but given up on TV.  If I had my way the Ministerial Residence would no longer have a television: now I’ve finally learnt how to use proxy servers and torrents it’s just a big, irrelevant box in the lounge that used to insult my intelligence.

For lack of anything better to watch over dinner I sat through and quite enjoyed Reaper (E4) and Chuck (Virgin 1) but neither pulled up any trees.

30 Rock was and is immense, though why it’s taken Five so long to show the second series is beyond me.  Fortunately, copyright-bending technology means I’m already onto the third…

The only other thing I’ve gone out of my way to watch is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (More4).  161 editions in 2008 and about 120 of them were laugh-out-loud funny, which is a mighty strike rate.  I suspect Stewart is even more gutted than me that the show is on hiatus when someone threw shoes at Dubya…  It’ll be interesting to see if the producers can keep up the standard when their fella moves into the Oval Office.

I feel I should like Gavin & Stacey, as lots of people I respect rate it very highly.  However, every time I see a clip it leaves me cold.

Sport

For the first time ever I don’t have a single football memory from the year: the game has eaten itself and barely interests me anymore.  Padraig Harrington retaining The Open was great viewing; for a few hours on one Sunday in July, I became a tennis fan - the Wimbledon final was astonishing; it was lovely to see Paula Radcliffe win the New York Marathon, particularly after her insane insistence on completing the Beijing race despite being unable to walk had me in tears at 3am one Sunday; and the last lap of the season’s last Formula 1 grand prix was like something out of Boy’s Own.  (That said, I’m delighted the nonentity of a man that is Lewis Hamilton was beaten to the BBC Sports Personality award by Chris Hoy, who not only deserves it for his brilliant achievements but also seems actually to have a personality.)

Otherwise it’s the Olympics.  Lots of great moments - Michael Phelps, Christine Ohuruogu, Rebecca Adlington (you can take the girl out of Mansfield, but…), the rowers, the sailors, the breathtaking performance of our cyclists (I’ve become a big fan of Victoria Pendleton) - but the stand out was the performances of Usain Bolt.  Sometimes your brain can’t quite comprehend what your eyes are seeing and I had to re-watch his performance in the 100 metres final a few times before I believed it.  Thank God he appears to be clean.

Music

Best Album
Raphael Saadiq – The Way I See It
Mark Ronson has inexplicably built a career and reputation out of slapping some half-hearted horns on a karaoke backing track and claiming that this lends it a Sixties/Seventies Motown/Philly vibe.  Raphael Saadiq (Charlie Wiggins to his friends) shows the preening prinny how it’s done and has produced some blissful tracks that at times stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the output of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Gamble-Huff.  As the beatspermil.com review says:

The Way I See It is a good record to give to your dad, it’s a good record for making love, and it’s a good record for your wedding reception. And it won’t make you want to blow your brains out after you hear it at your fifth high school dance. Because this isn’t just a retro throwback – Raphael Saadiq has out-mastered the masters. Play it for your girlfriend – you’ll get laid.

Very Good Albums
The Killers – Day & Age: shouldn’t work but it does
The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age Of The Understatement: at times sublimely good
Snow Patrol – A Hundred Million Suns: strictly by the numbers but no less listenable for that
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Raising Sand: I hope this is a one-off because I’m not comfortable liking anything with which Plant is involved

Good Half-Albums By Those Who Could Have Done Better
Bon Iver – for Emma, forever ago
Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
Ray LaMontagne – Gossip In The Grain
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Cardinology
Adele – 19
Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
Kings Of Leon – Only By The Night
Kaiser Chiefs – Off With Their Heads

Partial Returns To Form By Those I’d Long Since Written Off
R.E.M. – Accelerate
The Verve – Forth
Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul

Those Whose Back Catalogues I Have Explored In Depth For The First Time And Greatly Liked
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Chic

A year on and I still can’t decide about Duffy.

I’m going to shoehorn radio into this category.  I love radio but have despaired over the paucity of British commercial radio for years.  While BBC Radio 2 has diversified and widened its scope and - in so doing - become the most popular radio station in the country, commercial radio has responded by constantly narrowing its computer-generated playlists in an attempt to elminate any risk of alienating its core audience without ever attempting to attract new listeners.

Radio 2 plays 750-800 different tracks each week, whereas in the week to 27 September, Capital Radio played just 234 different tracks and repeated them an average of 9.7 times.

When Virgin Radio re-branded as Absolute Radio it bucked this trend.  In its final week as Virgin, it played 500 unique tracks and repeated them an average of 3.5 times.  In its first week as Absolute, it played 732 unique tracks with an average repetition of 2.4; in its second week it played more than 900 unique tracks with an average repetition of 2.  Whether this approach will work remains to be seen, but the station has become much more listenable at least for the time being.  I’m enjoying it while I can.  (Absolute also employs Iain Lee, whose Sunday night phone-in is the funniest thing on the wireless.)

Cultural Highlight

Undoubtedly, the US Presidential election result.  Enough has been written on that subject by far better writers than me (indeed, more than enough has been written previously by me): suffice to say I had a smile on my face on 5 November, 6 November, 7 November, 8 November…

I’ve quite liked how a fun-sounding little “credit crunch” has turned into the most profound failure of free market capitalism in history.  Still, never mind, eh?  We all make mistakes with other people’s money.

In the same vein, it was nice to see a few Chancers getting their comeuppance, even if another dozen filled each gap they left.  For example, Richard Branson’s increasingly tarnished marque was rejected by the people who bought his Megastores and the people who bought the radio station – meaning that he lost two massively lucrative trade mark licence fees in the space of nine months: that should make for interesting reading in the group accounts.  Oh, wait a minute: he doesn’t publish his group accounts, does he…?

Gideon Osborne was exposed by one of his Bullingdon chums as the Chancer he is after his Club Med freebie; the Barclay brothers got the caning they deserved by the serfs of Sark and promptly showed just how much they respect democracy; the twonk who co-founded the Carphone Warehouse eventually learnt that public companies are not private playthings, while that nice Conrad Black chappie is nine short months into a 78-month prison term for failing to learn that lesson himself.

And Jim Beresford and Douglas Smith, partners in the Doncaster-based Beresfords Solicitors, were struck off for ripping off hundreds of invalided ex-miners and their families to the tune of tens of millions of quid.  Shame.  My heart will bleed even more for them when those funds are traced and find their way back to their rightful owners.

Let’s hope 2009 holds a similar fate in store for Satan Cowell.

A late contender for cultural highlight came from Muntadar al-Zeidi who managed to hold Dubya to greater account with a pair of size nines than any of the American legislature, the American judiciary, the American people, the United Nations or the International Court in The Hague.  A marvellous piece of old-fashioned political protest.  I loved the fact that CNN reported it with the explanation: “In Arab culture, throwing shoes at someone… is considered an insult,” as though doing so in Pig’s Knuckle, Arkansas is a sign of affection.

Cultural Nadir

Manuelgate.  Seriously: WTF?

For the first time in ages, I think I’m speechless.

The outgoing US vice-president, Dick Cheney, last night gave an unapologetic assessment of his eight years in office, defending the invasion of Iraq, the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, secret wiretapping and the extreme interrogation method known as waterboarding.

In his first television interview since the presidential election in November, Cheney displayed no regrets and gave no ground to his many critics within America and around the world. He summed up his record by saying: “I think, given the circumstances we’ve had to deal with, we’ve done pretty well.”

The last time I saw chutzpah like this, Liberace was still alive.

From today’s Independent:

Britain has become a worse credit risk than McDonald’s and a host of other large companies, figures produced for The Independent reveal.

The collapse in Britain’s credit rating has taken place over the past two and a half months, since the Government underwrote the banking system and decided to spend its way out of recession. Investing in UK government debt is now almost twice as risky as buying McDonald’s corporate bonds, according to the market in credit default swaps (CDS), which provides insurance for the buyers of such debt.

The government debt of large economies such as the UK would normally be considered far more secure than corporate bonds. However, on 29 September, the cost of buying insurance against default on UK five-year government debt became more expensive than the equivalent cover for the US burger chain and has since overtaken Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola, according to data from Bloomberg.

The cost of insuring for a year against default on £10m of five-year UK debt has jumped from less than £30,000 to £120,000, compared with the current price of £77,000 to protect against a similar McDonald’s default.

The extraordinary movements in the CDS market also reflect market concerns about the highly leveraged British economy, which is sliding into a recession that the International Monetary Fund has predicted may be worse than the slowdown in the US.

“It looks daft, it is daft, but that is where the buyers and sellers are and the way business is getting done in the CDS market,” one analyst said.

Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play…?

Today, the Cameron Experiment ended.

For three years, in a haphazard and incosistent manner, PBD’s been trying to convince us that his NuTories were different from the rabid right-wing Conservative options served up at the 2001 and 2005 General Elections.

Until today PBD’s NuTories - if you’ve believed the hype - have been green, caring, touchy, feely, concerned about “society” (which therefore may actually exist after all) and generally bloody good chaps.

Today, with PBD’s poll lead all but wiped out and - unbelievably - no evidence of anybody having the cojones to put Arrivederci Gordon out of his misery, NuTories became SameOldTories.

Today, PBD stood in front of a bunch of economic wonks and did a Geoffrey Howe:

The first step is to set realistic targets for public spending.

It’s simple. Borrowing is now going beyond acceptable limits. Taxes are already too high – and Labour’s plans for even more taxes will act as a drag anchor on recovery. They’ll put people off from investing here and help to destroy jobs not create them.

So the choice is clear, and it’s a tough one – we need to restrain public spending…

So I can announce today that in order to keep spending at a responsible level and to ensure the quickest possible end to the recession and the strongest possible recovery, we will not match Labour’s new spending plans for 2010 and beyond…

But setting tough targets for public spending is only the first step.

The next step is showing how we will meet those targets and that requires a credible long-term plan. A credible long-term plan for controlling public spending has three components.

First, reducing the demands on the state by fixing our broken society.

Second, increasing the productivity of the state by reforming our public services.

And third cutting Government waste.

Even the Economics Editor of The Daily Telegraph can’t hide his opprobrium.

It was the 31st President of the Untied States of Yankee Doodle, Herbert Hoover, who first fucked up a modern recession when he raised taxes and cut spending with the Revenue Act of 1932 in response to the recession that folllowed the 1929 stock market crash.  This led to a decade-long global slump called the Great Depression which saw American unemployment rates hit 25% and was only truly reversed by a worldwide war.

Forty years of economic orthodoxy followed - the way to handle a recession is to borrow a bit more, spend a bit more and cut taxes a bit.  That way a recession does not become a depression.

Fuck that, thought That Bloody Woman, as she sent Geoffrey Howe in to bat in 1981 with instructions - despite double-digit inflation, spiralling unemployment and plummeting economic output - to slash the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement.

The ever-affable Howe duly obliged - spanking the poor bastards already struggling to pay their rent with a freeze on income tax personal allowances (at a time of 13% inflation), increases in VAT and excise duties and big public expenditure cuts.

Jim Prior got a bit huffy but wasn’t pissed off enough actually to be arsed enough to resign from the Cabinet.  A couple of Tory MPs joined the SDP.

364 economists wrote to The Times to point out that this was, er, fucking stupid and that it would make the recession become a depression.  364 economists were told to fuck off because That Bloody Woman knew best.

Cue panic on the streets of London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol and pretty much everywhere else; more than 3½ million unemployed; the systematic destruction of British manufacturing.

That depression lasted five years.

And most people with half-an-inch of brain now accept that Howe probably did go a bit over the top.

Stephen Nickell, now a member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, still thinks that the budget was over the top, and that it did deepen the recession, because unemployment continued to rise for several years afterwards.

So, having no concept of history or ability to learn from past mistakes, PBD has now abandoned all pretence of seeking to reposition the Conservative Party and decided that he’s going to repeat the mistakes of Hoover, Hilda and Howe.

He’s not going to cut taxes, he’s going to cut public spending and he’s going to shrink the state.  In the middle of a recession.

It didn’t work last time.

It won’t work this time.

But at least we’ve now learnt PBD’s true colours.  After three years the mask has come off.

Vote PBD, get more Thatcherism.

Arrivederci Gordon’s Christmas has come early.

But the rest of us should be working out if we’ve got enough points to be able to emigrate to Australasia…

A Chancer is forced to resign in disgrace following the discovery of financial and regulatory irregularities.

And goodness gracious me, who do we have here floating around the edges of the latest Chancerism controversy?

Disgraced Chancer David Ross and his former girlfriend
Shelley Ross with Dave and Smanfer Cameron
at a Conservative Summer Party at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, 2006

Well, well, well…

In October, Mr Cameron flew from London to West Yorkshire and back on Mr Ross’ private helicopter. Two summers ago, Mr Ross paid for Mr Cameron’s return flight from Germany for a World Cup match. Since 2001, Mr Ross has donated £117,560 to the Tories, either to Conservative Central Office or to local branches of the Conservatives near his home in Northamptonshire.

Who’dathunkit?

You’re not fit to wear the shirt, PBD, you plastic-faced doughball.

Chancerism: a right, not a privilege

Channel 4 News.

Gideon Osborne.

It’s very important to try to keep people in their home [and] if necessary to restructure their mortgages to help them do that, and we’ll look at the detail of this scheme and support anything that works.  But the real thing you could do is keep people in work and I’d like to see much more done to help businesses in this difficult time.

If you don’t believe me, the soundbite begins at 2:25 in this clip:

Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s a Conservative finance spokesman advocating state intervention in commerce to protect jobs.

You may remember the Tories: free market economics, 3½ million unemployed, get on your bike, let’s destroy entire communities because there’s no such thing as society, survival of the fittest, never bail out any business unless it sells arms, fuck the poor and disadvantaged proletarians, annoying woman with pompous hair.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

Cock it.

I agree with Marcel Berlins.

I cannot remember the last time there has been such hysteria over something so relatively minor as the Damian Green affair. Rarely can so many normally reasonable people have lost so many of their marbles.

Marcel clearly must have missed Manuelgate…

The political and media reaction has been stunningly excessive and mostly misguided. The band of columnists and so-called expert commentators fearing the demise of parliamentary democracy - as absurd a slippery slope argument as I’ve heard - or worrying about the decline in our civil liberties, have taken the concept of disproportion to a new level. If I were to look for evidence of our traditional liberties being diminished, it is there in abundance in the laws passed by parliament over the past few years.

Let us look at the reality of what has happened. We don’t know all the facts; indeed, we can be sure of very few. But even accepting a worst-case-scenario speculation, there has been a quite extraordinary over-reaction. I’m not saying everyone involved has behaved perfectly. Mistakes appear to have been made all round. But they do not justify the response that has occurred…

After a flurry of inquiries and furrowed brows, whatever wrongs were committed this time won’t happen again. The Speaker won’t be as accommodating in letting the police into parliament, the police will learn to be more subtle when investigating certain kinds of crime, and the home secretary may learn not to look quite so shifty and terrified each time she appears on television. The unnecessary panic and the suicidally gloomy prognostications will be laid to rest.

What I fear, though, is that this relatively unserious incident will be used to rearrange the relationship between police, politicians and government. This would be damaging.

I’m going to have to kill myself.

You know, I didn’t like Sir Ian Blair until he started locking up Tories.  Shame to see him going now, really…

A political row erupted last night after counter-terrorism police arrested the shadow Home Office minister, Damian Green, after he published leaked documents allegedly sent to the Tories by a government whistleblower.

An angry David Cameron condemned the arrest as “Stalinesque”, after Green was taken into custody at about 1.50pm in his Ashford constituency and escorted to a central London police station.

A Tory source said: “David Cameron is angry.”

I’d love to see that.  I bet his silly little voice gets all squeaky and his chubby little cheeks go all pink.  Does plasticine melt when it gets hot…?

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, told the BBC: “To hide information from the public is wrong.”

Quite right, that man: you should never try to hide embarrassing stuff.

Now Gideon Osborne (for that is George’s real name - he just hides the fact) is, of course, a former member of the Bullingdon Club, the “exclusive” drinking club comprised of wealthy Oxford undergraduates who go around kicking in (other people’s) chairs and knocking down (other people’s) tables for laughs.

That’s the same Bullingdon Club of which his chums Posh Boy Dave Cameron and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson were also members.

(Oh, and that Nat Rothschild chap: he’s the one with the fantastically popular yacht.)

The same Bullingdon Club that somehow persuaded the photographers Gillman & Soame (the copyright holder) to withdraw permission for the reproduction of the group photograph of 1986 Bullingdon members showing Posh Boy Dave and Boris in full Buller costume.

In March 2007, the photographers’ line was that it had taken a “policy decision” not to allow any school photographs they own to be published.

Of course, if Gillman & Soame had copyright issues in March 2007, you have to wonder how this…

…ended up in the Daily Mail a month later.

Not to mention in The Times and Daily Telegraph.  And probably every other newspaper, too, if only I could be arsed to search for it.

Young Gideon is on the left of the photograph looking like an extra from Brideshead Revisited.

That’s the fella!  Devilishly handsome, isn’t he?

Not - you understand - that Posh Boy Dave has anything he wishes to hide from the public.

Oh, no.

I mean, it’s not like the man who would be Prime Minister won’t even answer a simple question about his drug use, is it?

The upshot is that, while Damian Green’s arrest was ridiculous, I’ll take lessons in freedom of information from this particular morally bereft bunch of Tories when the Leader of the Opposition is prepared to allow the electorate to see photographs of precisely what he got up to when he was 19 years old.

And tells the world when he last did blow…

PBD and Gideon interact with some proles, yesterday

Robert Peston - with his bizarrely pompous (some deliciously call it “ragged and querulous”) delivery manner and risible dyed hair - is Britain’s hack du jour.

If there’s a financial story to be broken he’ll break it, despite apparently having the economic gravitas of Derek Trotter.

So it’s amusing to note that, last Friday afternoon, this prediction appeared on Peston’s blog:

So which taxes will rise?

Well my prediction is VAT…  [A] deferred increase from 17.5% to 22.5% in the VAT rate would raise around £20bn.

Captain Darling, House of Commons, 24 November 2008:

I therefore propose to cut VAT from 17½ to 15 per cent until the end of next year. This reduction will come into effect next Monday, 1 December.

Hard to believe the BBC could find a business editor more absurd than Jeff Randall, but…

This is the Ministry’s 500th post.  Help yourself to a cigar.