Politics

Crab Apple

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The Minister finds himself shivering in sub-zero New York City.

Last night I paid $200 for two tickets to see The Vertical Hour, the new Broadway play by Sir David Hare starring Bill Nighy and Julianne Moore, at the charming Music Box Theatre (built by Irving Berlin, no less).

In the words of the Minister’s wife, Sir David has “fallen off a bit”.

I do not believe the following analysis of the Iraq invasion to be worth $200 of my – or anyone else’s – money:

Moore: “Oh, God – we really made a mess of it, didn’t we?”

Nighy: “You could say that.”

Now that Harold Pinter is effectively out of commission, Hare is theroretically the best dramatic polemicist the British Isles has left to offer.  If that’s the case, I should be up for the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hare has Nighy’s character complaining about his enormous self-esteem and crushing lack of self-confidence.  It’s a shame Hare’s gone the other way.

Julianne Moore, incidentally, may be preternaturally beautiful but she can’t act on stage to save her life.  And if Nighy’s twitches, tics and gurning are not genuine acting, he needs to see a neurologist immediately for some extra strength Dopamine.

Two hours and fifteen minutes and I still don’t know whether or not it was meant to be a comedy…

Celeb-spotting so far: we sat in front of the BBC’s Brian Barron on the flight over (he’s a big jazz fan; and he agrees that the BBC’s news output these days “is not the best” but doesn’t want to sound like a grumpy old dinosaur about it) and while taking the backstage tour at the Metropolitan Opera we bumped into the small-but-perfectly-formed West Wing alumnus Kristin Chenoweth.

Slight return

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Now there is officially no need to satirise our political leaders, will satire itself die?

Tony Blair has been accused of double standards after he declined to comment on the execution of Saddam Hussein after returning from his holiday in Miami.

MPs are demanding a statement from the Prime Minister about the taunting and unauthorised filming of the former Iraqi dictator just before he was hanged last Saturday. They recalled that Mr Blair has commented on the deaths of footballers, musicians and disc jockeys as well as speaking for the nation after the death of the Princess of Wales and the Queen Mother.

In 1998, he authorised a Downing Street statement backing a campaign for the release from prison of Deidre Rachid, a character in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street.

Masochism

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I respect Simon Jenkins a lot but his piece today seems a bit odd.  He appears only recently to have twigged on to something that the rest of the world has known for 50 years:

Why is there no British Baker/Hamilton report? Why must Britain’s war in Iraq, now its most protracted, costly and savage war in half a century, dance attendance on events in Washington? While “stay the course” has been abandoned in America, even by George Bush, the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, indicated yesterday that it remained British policy. Tony Blair is now in Washington, apparently seeking permission to make a change. This is humiliating.

References to poodles aside, the UK aligned itself with the US in the 1940s and ever since has reaped what was then sown.  With perhaps one exception – Suez (and didn’t that go well?) – the United Kingdom has not done anything of significance in terms of foreign policy that has not first been sanctioned (implicitly or explicitly, publicly or privately) by the then US President.  And with perhaps one exception – Vietnam (and didn’t that go well?) – the UK has only once given America the bird when called upon to join in arms.

Prime Minister Bliar’s closeness to President Bush is the norm, not the exception, because Britain has been in the States’ financial and military pocket for over half a century: Harold Macmillan didn’t get along with Jack Kennedy just because he wanted some tips from the latter about how to succeed with the laydeez.

In fairness to the Churchill-Attlee generation of politicians, such alignment was the only way Britain could hope to retain a place at the high table of world affairs and, in that respect if no other, the special relationship has served us very well.  (The crumbling of the Commonwealth meant that the only other option was to embrace European federalism alongside the same Germans whose bomb craters still dotted the land: hardly an idea that would have played well on the doorsteps in the 1950 General Election, I suspect.)

For me, the biggest humiliation in the whole of Bliar’s Middle Eastern antics is not our subservience to the USA but the current generation of politicians’ inability and/or refusal to learn from our historical mistakes.  Anyone with half-an-inch of brain and a passing knowledge of modern history knows that Britain has been mired in unwinnable conflicts in or around Palestine, Afghanistan and Mesopotamia for 150 years.  What arrogance makes Bliar think he can succeed where superpowers have consistently failed?  What folly makes him believe that modern day Iraqis and Afghans would take any more kindly to foreign invaders than their ancestors did?

The humiliation is that, for all the billions of pounds pumped into the UK’s education system since 1945, so many people have had to die to enable Mr. Bliar and his friends to learn the lesson a half-decent history textbook could have taught them in one evening.

Ticket To Ride

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Sir Rod Eddington‘s report into the future of the UK’s transport infrastructure seems to have drawn remarkably little media flak.

Personally, I find it odd that the task of developing the blueprint for UK transport was handed to the man whose Chief Executive high-back, leather chair at British Airways was still warm from his butt cheeks.

It seems to me a bit like, for example, recruiting the sitting Chief Executive of Virgin Trains to become both the Chairman and Chief Executive of the Strategic Rail Authority and then wondering why the SRA revoked the licence of Silverlink, the only direct competitor to Virgin Trains on the route between London and Birmingham.

Nevertheless, Sir Rodders has seen the future and – fuck me gently with a chainsaw – it involves masses more air travel and huge airport expansion. The airline industry, you will doubtless know, does not pay tax on aviation fuel, despite the proven damage it does to the planet.

Eddington says that air travellers should pay full environmental cost of their journey through taxes and surcharges. That’s air travellers, you note – not air carriers, who will presumably therefore still be free to fly half-empty planes around the globe with impugnity.

Eddington also says that he has found little evidence to support a truly high-speed rail link between London and the north. Not least because, at £200 for a Standard Class Open Return rail ticket between London and Manchester, it is now actually cheaper to fly between the UK’s first and third cities. And, given the shambolic state of the West Coast Main Line, it’s very nearly as quick to fly, too.

There is one part of Eddington’s report with which I agree: the re-regulation of buses outside London.  Deregulation was one of Thatcher’s maddest follies, made during that wild-eyed period when she seemed to have no clue what the day, month or year were.  Since deregulation we mere provincial mortals have seen bus routes slashed, fares spiral and timetables rendered increasingly meaningless.
There are no cheap, easy or painless answers to 40 years of underinvestment, corner-cutting and neglect: it’s going to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to sort out the messes that are this country’s current road, bus and rail networks.  “New” Labour has wasted nine years and appears to have fudged yet another opportunity; let’s hope that the next Prime Minister – whoever he or she is – has the cojones to grasp the nettle properly and stand up to the air lobby.

…but I can’t trace time

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Apparently it’s the first anniversary of Plastic Dave Cameron’s ascension to the Tory throne.

Apparently this means it’s time for State Of The Party pieces in the Sunday broadsheets.

Apparently the State Of The Party is confused.

In the Sunday Telegraph, a focus group thinks Plastic Dave is:

“[a] family man; posh; English; nice but dim; quasi cyclist; highly intelligent; cheerful; unknown quantity; slick; interesting; directionless; PR friendly”… Something stark is becoming apparent: Cameron is inspiring the most admiration among those who usually tend towards Labour, the Lib Dems or minority parties or who didn’t vote at the last election. He provokes the most critical comments from those who most frequently vote Tory.

Tory traditionalists are hostile towards Cameron for the same reason socialists (remember them?) were aghast at the rise of Mr. Tony Blair – because he’s full of shit as far as they’re concerned.

Consider that previous Conservative Secretaries of State for the Environment number the notorious greens Nicholas Ridley, Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker (who were, in fairness, complicit in the destruction of our coal industry, thereby significantly reducing the nation’s carbon emissions – if you don’t count the emissions involved in now shipping in all that cheap coal from Poland), Kenneth Baker and – oh, yes – Michael Fucking Howard: that line up shows you exactly how serious the last 30 years’ worth of Tory leaders took their responsibilities to the planet.

All of a sudden the annual conference finds itself addressed by a plastic man who rides a pedal cycle (as alien a concept to them as it was to Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid) standing in front of a picture of a tree scrawled by a five-year-old with ADHD. When conference ends, the delegates drive home in their Jags and 4x4s and go back to work in businesses raping the planet with gay abandon. They don’t “get” it any more than Scargill and Benn “got” the blue-pencilling of Clause IV and the fellating of business tycoons.

And it would, of course, be more convincing to the rest of us if that pedal bike wasn’t being shadowed by a car carrying Plastic Dave’s change of clothes.

Almost everyone thinks he is caring and compassionate… Jane adds: “It seems to come naturally to him.” Even Colin agrees: “There is sincerity in him. You can’t fake that.”

You can’t?

Can’t you?

CAN’T YOU REALLY?

The Observer worries that Plastic Dave’s approach to politics might lead voters to see that the emperor is naked:

The greatest risk David Cameron takes is that being fashionable will go out of political fashion.

The newspaper’s Andrew Rawnsley also points out that eventually someone is going to ask Plastic Dave actually to say something meaningful instead of mouthing sanctimonious platitudes.

But then, what’s this in The Sunday Times?

David Cameron, the Conservative party leader, is facing an official investigation for hosting a series of fundraising events in the House of Commons. He and other senior Tories have hosted 32 fundraising lunches or dinners in private parliamentary rooms in the past two months. They are thought to have raised more than £100,000.


Last week, two backbench Labour MPs filed a formal complaint with Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary commissioner for standards.

Parliamentary rules ban the use of Commons dining facilities for fundraising. They state: “The private dining rooms are not to be used for direct financial or material gain by a sponsor, political party or any other person or outside organisation.”

The sale of dinners in the Commons is the latest fundraising controversy to hit Cameron. Last week the Tories disclosed they had taken substantial loans running into millions of pounds from several offshore trusts and companies at rates below those offered by conventional banks.

Thank fuck for that: sleaze and money. After a year, at last I can identify with the Tory leader.

Oh-oh, atomic

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You know if nuclear power is so safe and our Government is so confident about building all these new nuclear power stations and nuclear powered and armed submarines?

Then why the Hell are they running around the country impounding planes and shutting down restaurants just because a bloke who died of nuclear poisoning flew on them or dined in them?

Just a thought.

Saw Jeremy Hardy tonight. A very funny man. He doesn’t like wasps either.  His description of Scary Ruth Kelly as the Buggery Czar was a particular highlight.

Dedication’s what you need

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Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter would be proud of “New” Labour and its record-breaking efforts. I’m sure I remember as a kid watching someone on Record Breakers trying to get 40 people inside a Mini. Messrs. Blair, Straw, Blunkett, Clarke and Reid are attempting the same in Britain’s gaols:

  • 80,000 Prison population today. There are just 317 spare places.
  • 60 Pieces of legislation relating to criminal justice since Labour came to power in 1997.
  • 25,000 10-year rise in prison population.
  • £100,000 Cost of each new prison place.
  • 4,452 Female prisoners in 2004 compared with 1,804 in 1994
  • 10,089 Foreign national prisoners.
  • 78 Self-inflicted deaths in prison in 2005. There were 65 in 1997.

Tough on crime, not really all that arsed about the causes of crime.

Lord Ramsbotham, the former head of the prison service, today describes this approach as:

the Government’s headlong and self-induced race to absurdity as far as the conduct of imprisonment is concerned.

THIS, however, still remains The Best Criminal Justice Idea Floated By A Serving Home Office Minister In The World… Ever!(TM)

Hilary Benn plans to run for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 2007.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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