In which I get grumpy about cheap labels.

I pause, in my work, and have a quick look at the internet. A huge class war has broken out, as James Blunt and Chris Bryant knock seven bells out of each other.

I hate class war. It is such a blunt instrument, and it contains so many cheap assumptions and category errors. It has no room for nuance or humanity. People on all sides of the political divide seem to adore it. They bash the idiot chavs who don’t know how to cook and spend all their benefits on televisions and cheap lager. They denigrate the ghastly metropolitan middle-class, the do-gooding bleeding hearts, who have never peered beyond the smug confines of Hampstead in their lives. They lambast the horrid public school cohort who only want to bray at their rich friends and think the poor should not have shoes.

The really odd thing is that no class is safe. The bourgeoisie are dull and unimaginative; the lower middles still twitch their curtains and talk about serviettes and put on airs; the upper middles insist on wearing garish corduroy trousers and think the world ends at Waitrose; the academy is so far up its own arse that it is looking at the world through its nostrils. There is a faint nostalgia across the sociological divide for what might be called the respectable working class, the one that epitomised stoicism and striving and bettering oneself, the very best of British, and which people seem to think does not exist any more.

Class itself, and the British obsession with it, is interesting as a sociological and anthropological subject, but it is the least interesting thing about an individual. (Apart, perhaps, from their star sign.) Just think of how you feel when you meet someone stimulating and fascinating and charming. Do you go home and say, I met a really interesting middle-class person today? Of course not. You remember that they know all about astrophysics or dry-stone walling or how to make bread. They made you laugh, they made you think, they made you feel better about yourself. They knew things you did not. They were kind; they knew how to listen. Do you really give a bugger what school they went to or what their parents did?

I sometimes think that arguments about privilege start from the wrong premise. I’m not sure that privilege is necessarily a fat salary and a seat on the board. Years ago, I went to a place where the very rich go. I don’t mean the well-off. I mean the ones who have not flown commercial since the old queen died. I never saw so many discontented faces in my life. I thought I might be intimidated, surrounded by plutocrats and captains of industry. Instead, I wanted to make them all soup. The real privilege, which no amount of cash or jobs or schooling can buy, is to love and be loved, and to have a sense of ease in your own skin. The real privilege comes with things that no rarefied education can provide – a sense of humour, resilience, a humane heart. I know this sounds like my hippy meter has gone off the scale, but I believe it to be true.

To understand privilege, I think one has to understand consolation. James Blunt went to public school. He then served in the Balkans. There are veterans I know who are still so haunted by the Balkans that they sometimes find it hard to function. It held a particularly poisonous combination of horrors seen and a sense of impotence, since the forces were there not to fight, but to observe. I don’t know what James Blunt saw there. I can pretty much guarantee that if he stood on the edge of a mass grave, he would not have consoled himself with the words: at least I went to Harrow.

Stephen Fry is another one who is routinely bashed with the privilege stick. There he is, with his expensive education, and his Oxbridge friends, and his mammoth erudition, and his cut-glass vowels. In a rushing media world, he is the ne plus ultra, the new aristocracy. À la lantérne les aristos! Let the baying mob chop him down, watched by beady rows of Mesdames Defarges. Fry battles with bipolar disorder, a particularly nasty form of mental affliction about which he has written eloquently. When he is in the midst of an attack, when the drugs don’t work, I very much doubt he might cheer himself up by dwelling on which university he went to.

A loving family, a good education, a warm house, opposable thumbs, enough to eat, water coming out of the tap, books to read, a view to look at, living in a free democracy where there are no religious police or state oppression are profound, uncountable privileges, to be keenly appreciated. In Saudi Arabia, women may not drive a car and a blogger is currently being given one thousand lashes. The lashes are being staggered, fifty at a time, so that the wounds may heal. (There is something particularly macabre about that.) In Turkmenistan, you can be arbitrarily thrown into jail if you are a journalist, human rights activist or even if you sing a song the president for life does not care for. In Cuba, the prisons are full of randomly arrested doctors, journalists, librarians and homosexuals. Juan Carlos González Leiva wrote of Cuba: ‘Day and night, the screams of tormented women in panic and desperation who cry for God's mercy fall upon the deaf ears of prison authorities. They are confined to narrow cells with no sunlight called "drawers" that have cement beds, a hole on the ground for their bodily needs, and are infested with a multitude of rodents, roaches, and other insects. In these "drawers" the women remain weeks and months. When they scream in terror due to the darkness (blackouts are common) and the heat, they are injected with sedatives that keep them half-drugged.’

Compared to that, the daily life of almost any free Briton is a verdant paradise.

I think it is the thoughtless herding into boxes that I find dismaying. Humans are individuals, whatever tribe they come from. Slap a label on them, reduce them to some crude sociological mark, and you deny their intrinsic humanity. Apart from anything else, it is lazy thinking. It has no utility. It does not get anyone anywhere.

As I get older, I start to think I’m going to ban the word typical from my vocabulary. Typical woman, typical thoroughbred, typical posh bloke, typical Scot, typical Geordie – none of these tell me anything much. All humans judge; it’s almost impossible not to. And many humans dearly love a category, and a list, and a dividing line. But I’d love people to be judged on what they do, not what accent they have. Are you funny, are you kind, are you generous? Do you try? Do you add some increment to the sum total of human happiness? Do you take your privilege, and do something useful with it?

As I look for a good place to stop, a final, ringing sentence, I think: oh, bugger it. Why wade in? Perhaps people are really enjoying themselves, with their sociological cudgels. Nobody cares what I think. James Blunt can take care of himself. He is trained in mortal combat and has an advanced sense of the ridiculous. But reductive labels make me crazy in the head, so I suppose I must publish and be damned.

 

Today’s pictures:

It was minus six today and glittering with sun, but I did not have time for the camera. Here is a motley selection of pictures from the archive instead:

A little bit viral. Or, the kindness of strangers.

Yesterday, at 10.47pm, I went viral.

It was absolutely terrifying.

I only went a little bit viral. I was not trending on the internet. But Stephen Fry retweeted the piece I wrote about Robin Williams, and for about ten minutes it felt like all hell was breaking loose.

A smashing packet of emotions broke over me. First of all, I was wildly excited that Stephen Fry, a man I admire keenly, whose books I have read, whose comedy has made me laugh since I was a raw teen, even knew who I was, let alone liked something I had written. I had been awarded that finest prize, the Fry challenge cup, and in my mazy mind I did a cantering lap of honour, all flags flying.

Then, complete strangers started saying kind things. My heart swelled and warmed. I was Sally Field. They like me. They really like me.

The strangers soothed me, because I had been fretting about the whole shooting match. I worry always when I address any serious subject, and I twist myself up into a pretzel about the rights and wrongs of writing about the death of a stranger. The fear is that it is an intrusive, even rude, thing to do. The danger is that one is doing the empathy tap dance. Look at me, caring. It should go without saying that everyone who admired Williams and who laughed like a drain at his comedic brilliance would feel sad. I had not let it go without saying. I had said, as if somehow I was important.

Then, just as I was smiling in astonishment, the terror hit.

I inhabit a very small, very private part of the internet. I have a tiny, gentle group of Dear Readers, who know all about my equine obsession, the ludicrous voices in my head, the enchanting Lurcher antics of Stanley the Dog, my ardent love of these blue hills. They put up with me with gentle grace, and seem to understand and forgive my shortcomings.

Now, someone had thrown open a door onto a huge new world, with a crowd of unknown people in it. They would expect something. I could not just tell them about the dancing canter I had this morning on the red mare, as the swallows practised their low flying in the hayfields, so that I whooped with joy into the bright air. They would want their money back. Mare, schmare, they would say; give us the good stuff.

The fact that this whole odd phenomenon happened on Twitter was even more worrying. I suddenly had a boatload of new followers, on the strength of that post on death and depression and the frailty of the human heart. But I use Twitter almost exclusively to indulge my passion for racing, with the odd grumble about people not answering the question on the Today programme. I had sold these new arrivals a pup. They would go back through my timeline and be baffled to find endless musings on the 3.30 at Kempton, intemperate shouts of joy about the beauty and power and grace of Kingman, and wild expressions of love for the genius that is Ryan Moore. Ryan what? they would say, scratching their heads.

The last tweet I posted before the Twitter storm hit was this: ‘Quite adorable. Royal Connoisseur, 2nd and 3rd in virtually all his races, pricks his ears in amazed delight as he sees the winning post.’

Royal Connoisseur is not a famous horse, for all his rather grand name. He is a bay gelding who has never won a race. He was running in a maiden at Thirsk, on an unremarkable cloudy evening, with £3000 going to the winner. I was particularly taken with him, because when he saw the winning post coming towards him, a wide sward of green turf before his eyes instead of the equine hindquarters he was used to looking at, he really did lift his head and prick his ears in triumph. A look of delighted amazement spread over his handsome face.

Horses are like humans in one way: confidence can make all the difference to them. They can grow demoralised if they are always the bridesmaid. Once they’ve got their head in front, their old herd instincts call to them, and they grow in stature. It’s a touching thing to watch. But it’s not exactly life and death and the whole damn thing. Those poor new followers, I thought. What will they think?

I had, for those ten minutes, a fleeting flash of what it must be like to be famous. I’ve always thought fame was something I would not wish on my worst enemy. Years ago, John Updike wrote that it was a mask that eats the face, and that hard line has haunted me ever since. You are no longer your own person, but belong to the world. People suddenly have a sense of entitlement, and an odd intimacy, as if they know you. The famous are quite often put into a box, and if they dare to jump out of that box they are ruthlessly punished. They are judged, and found wanting. Even if they are adored, the adoration comes with caveats: the expectations must be met. They are tall poppies, and every armchair critic is sharpening the scythe.

Luckily, the internet moves at warp speed. It soon settled down and went to shine its light on someone else. I could return to quiet normality.

I was also very lucky because the sudden rush of people responding to the post did so with lovely humanity and generosity of spirit. I met only kindness, in that frightening new space. It was as if they were all saying: it is all right, we come in peace.

The caravan will move on. It is already trundling off into the middle distance. I shall go back to tweeting about the 2.15 at Hamilton, and writing of the dearness of my red duchess, and offering goofy little slivers of my very ordinary life.

The fear subsides. It was, looking back, rather a lovely moment. I wrote something heartfelt, and unknown humans responded from their own good hearts. Out in the brave new world, I found all the same kindness of strangers that I encounter in the old world. Fortune smiled. I smile back.

 

Today’s pictures:

Stan the Man and Red the Mare, with tractor:

Goofy face:

Noble face:

Serene face:

She really was light as thought today, all willingness and generosity. I hardly had to ask. She just gave and gave.

Then, after the ride, I went up to do my HorseBack UK work. I watched veterans who are missing limbs learn to ride. This is always a useful corrective, not just because of the Perspective Police, but because they find me, in the nicest possible way, slightly absurd, and mob me up with glee:

Then, as if the universe was making sure that I did not get above myself, after my glancing moment in the sun, Patrick the Miniature Horse asked if I would scratch his quarters. This, it turns out, is his dearest wish. It would have been rude to say no. So there I was, on my knees, with a tiny arse in my face, which seemed about right. ‘I know my place,’ I shouted, as the shutter clicked:

The flappy wings of hubris have no chance, faced with that.

And one final word - of thanks, to all of you who came to this quiet space yesterday, and generously wrote your own words, and made me smile and smile with your kindness and grace.

Something to make you go Ah

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I hate to do this to my non-Blighty readers, for whom the BBC iplayer is a ruthless no go zone, but there is something on there which I think everyone who can see, should see. It is episode two of Stephen Fry's Last Chance to See: The White Rhino. I am not a mad fan of nature programmes, possibly because of having seen too many in my youth. My school thought it educational for us to watch every last episode of David Attenborough that was ever on ever, even though generally they believed television was the work of the Devil. I remember loving them at the time, but once I grew to adulthood the thought of having to see one more fruit bat, or a fellow puffing about in the African bush, or someone doing a special whispery wildlife voice just became too much. So it was in a desultory nothing-else-is-on mood that I sat down to watch this, and only really because it was lovely Stephen. And sure enough, there was the whispering and the puffing about and the fruit bats. But it was all quite fascinating and there was a bit of Congo politics thrown in and some interesting little interchanges between Fry and his conservationist friend, and I learnt the difference between the White Rhino and the Usual Rhino (nothing to do with colour; shape of the mouth, apparently). So I kept on watching. And then, at around twenty-one minutes in, something so unexpected happened that it actually made me cry tears. I am a terrible old weeper, especially over animals, something I inherited from my sentimental Celtic father, but I don't think my reaction was just sentiment. I think this might have been the most confounding and emotional moment I have ever seen in a wildlife documentary. Or maybe I am just a soft old fool. Well, watch it and see. Whether you weep or not, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mvbbx/Last_Chance_to_See_Northern_White_Rhino/

Into the Twitter trenches, redux

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Dear old Janet Street Porter has leapt onto the creaking Twitter-is-crap bandwagon, just before it disappears out of sight down a dusty road. Her piece is so silly that at first I did not think it worth writing about. I wanted to write about the cricket, or the recession, or the simple beauty of a perfect loaf of soda bread instead. But the little Twitter worm has been twitching away in my brain since Sunday, and so I must rush into the breach or I shall develop an irrevocable nervous tic.

Here is what Janet says: ‘anyone who suffers from the desire to communicate exactly what they are doing and thinking every moment of the day in fewer than 140 characters is best described as a twat’. Delighted by this opening salvo, she goes on to trot out the exact same exhausted arguments that all anti-Twitter columnists so adore: it is mindless, it is narcissistic, it is banal. She takes a dangerous swipe at ‘techno bore’ Stephen Fry, which is just asking for it. If Stephen Fry is a bore, then Janet Street Porter is Dull McDull of the Clan Mogadon. She is furious that proper reviews by proper reviewers are being replaced by one line tweets about cultural events, or that proper conversation is reduced to ‘knee-jerk reactions’. I am frankly amazed that she does not insist that the entire world is going to the dogs.

This is so staggeringly stupid that it almost does not merit a reply. I shall give one anyway, with a weary, patient nod of my head. The first and most obvious point is that no one, not even the most crazed, self-absorbed, absolutely-nothing-else-to-do Twitter users communicate exactly what they are doing at every moment of every day. To say so is just babyish and wrong and asinine. It also betrays a crashing ignorance of the nature of Twitter, which leads to the observation that it is slightly odd to mount a scathing assault on something of which you know so very little. But the more important point, the one that none of the Twitter bashers seem to understand, is that Twitter is not replacing anything. The idea that once you start tweeting you may never again have an interesting conversation or a complex opinion or a deep thought about the human condition is blatantly incorrect. People who use Twitter also read broadsheets and follow politics and have intricate jobs and fascinating friends and rich lives. It is not, as the business people like to say, a zero sum game. There is also this excessively curious idea that no one in real life is ever mindless, or banal, or narcissistic. No, no, it is only on the evil, soul-sucking Twitter that solipsism comes out and does the fandango. Has Janet never been cornered by the pub bore? She has spent her life in London media circles, where there are certain people who make a life’s work of the narcissistic. Do I really have to say again that Twitter is an exact mirror of life, where there are the bores and the non-bores, the generous and the mean, the self-promoters and the self-deprecators, the quirky and the pedestrian? Does she think the power of Twitter is so great that the moment it catches you in its drooling jaws it replaces your brain with a suppurating mass of green gloop? She starts to sound like those Area 51 enthusiasts who believe that half the population of Nevada has been kidnapped by space aliens and replaced by a pod.

The other oddity is that every exponent of the Twitter-is-your-very-own-secret-satan school misses the glaringly obvious aspect of the whole enterprise. Twitter is a finely honed Darwinian tool. It is absolutely survival of the fittest. If you are banal and mindless and narcissistic, no one will follow you. Janet need not worry; the dullards may tweet to their heart’s content about their bagels and their office chairs and what they ate for breakfast, but only one man and dog will read them, and the dog will almost certainly be doing so by mistake. Bores are ruthlessly cut. Ironically, this is much easier on Twitter than in life. At a cocktail party, you have to make up some convoluted excuse about seeing your second cousin twice removed across the crowded room; in Twitter, you merely press a button, with no need for mendacity or bad manners. If it is mediocrity that Janet hates so, she should be celebrating Twitter: it is a harmless outlet for the solipsists. They may warble away into the empty ether without bothering anyone. A possible unintended consequence is that, having got their quotidian concerns off their chests online, they may be less inclined to corner strangers at the bus stop to bang on about subjects of no possible interest. Twitter may, in fact, be saving us from the bores.

In every era, in every corner of society, there have always been exhibitionists. Look at me, look at me, see what I am doing; let me tell you what I think, look at my interesting hat, see how I can tap dance. They have found any possible outlet for their cherished self-expression – the stage, a public square, a newspaper, a sandwich board. As a writer, I have to admit myself to their number. (When I was small, I was told often to stop showing off; ‘oh do pipe down,’ my exasperated grandmother once told me as I rattled on and on about something which could only interest my six year old self.) When asked, which is not very often, I give interviews, I have my photograph taken, I go on the wireless to offer my view of the world. (My proudest moment is when I used the word ‘anal’ on Woman’s Hour. Jenni Murray very bravely took it on the chin. She was asking me about pornography, after all.) What is interesting about my own experience of Twitter is I find it has a chilling effect on my dangerous tendencies to egotism. I purposely do not talk about my latest book or my newest blog post or any kind review that has come my way. I quite often do not talk at all about what I am doing, instead tweeting about something out in the world that has caught my interest, and might be of interest to others. I try very hard to be either amusing or informative or slightly left-field. I do not always succeed, but the attempt is there. I am not certain where this imperative comes from. I have the same feeling that I have about this blog: I am communicating to complete strangers, who guard their precious time; if I am asking them to give me a moment out of their life, I had better give them something good in return.

Twitter is a series of bulletins from an astonishing variety of lives. It does not stand in for life, but is a cherry on the cake of existence. It is a little like the old traditions of sending postcards or telegrams, two great British habits. In my Twitter feed I get blasts from foodies, politicos, mothers, feminists, broadcasters, The Young People, activists, dog lovers, charity workers and the Mayor of London himself. I am in communication with people from America, Rome, New Zealand, Iran, Belgium and Canada, as if I have finally achieved my adolescent dream of being a citizen of the world. My months on Twitter have educated me about things I knew nothing about: the poet Frank O’Hara, the dusty towns of Sicily, ballroom dancing in Pakistan in the 1960s, the streets of Tehran, the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey. The nature of Twitter means that you do not get much detail, but your interest is piqued, and you may then roam across the wide prairies of the interweb until you are educated in any novel area you may wish to explore. Twitter is not War and Peace, nor was it meant to be. But all human life is there, and to knock it for its limitations is as vacuous as saying that a haiku is a travesty of poetry. There is value in brevity; pithy is not pathetic. Do I really have to write this all over again? Is it not time that the droning critics got onto their banality ponies and galloped off into the sunset?

Postscript: should you by any chance have missed the previous Twitter rants, and have a masochistic desire to catch up on my Tweetish despatches from the front line, here they all are. (Amazingly many; I am starting to think the nice people at Twitter should be sending me a fat cheque for services rendered.)

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-random-thoughts-from-broad.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-random-thoughts-on-twitter-young.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-thoughts-on-twitter-force-for-good.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/07/in-which-i-get-rather-cross-or-people.html

All right, that's quite enough narcissistic self-promotion for one day. Now I must go to Twitter and tweet about how fabulous and fascinating I am....

In which I get rather cross; or, people who should know better writing stupid things about Twitter, again

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I wasn’t going to do this, because it will mean ad hominem attacks and once you start on the ad hominem you know you have lost the argument. I told myself: oh well, it’s just one lousy thing that I read and no one is really going to notice and anyway what does it matter what I think about it? I shall write a nice domestic goddessy little blog post about homemade lemonade instead (supersecret ingredient: mint. I’m telling you.). But it has been eating at me all week, and now I must spill into print.

It was no great suprise. The mainstream media, as is now traditional on the third Friday of every month, had a go at Twitter. What was surprising was that the attack was mounted by Rod Liddle, roving editor at the Speccie. More surprising still, he chose all the usual arguments, trotted out like perfectly schooled show ponies: narcissism, banality, who the fuck CARES what you are doing for dinner, and on and on until the last syllable of recorded time. It is curious, because Liddle is usually an antic and counterintuitive writer. He gives really good comment because he avoids the why oh why boilerplate school, and you never, ever know which side of an argument he is going to come down on. He is not a set in stone ideologue; I have read his columns for years without having a clue what his politics are. If you put me up against a wall and made me guess, I should say left of centre on a bed of anti-authoritarianism with a libertarian coulis. He likes to laugh in the face of received wisdom and trample over cheap arguments. But this time, he was not only reheating every single tired old line that every single commentator has ever said about Twitter, he was attacking one of the most beloved elements of British life. Rod Liddle was bitch-slapping Stephen Fry.

The arguments about Twitter are easy to counter, because those who mount them have clearly never used it. They log on, go and have a look at a few tweets by someone like Fry or Ashton Kutcher, wander about for a bit, find someone who has written ‘going 2 get latte and bagel. Gr8 morning!!!!’, and conclude that the whole thing is a perfect shower. As anyone who uses Twitter regularly knows, there are, just as in life, the bores and non-bores. There are the ones who bang on about themselves, although, in my little corner of the Twitterverse, they are vanishingly rare. Mostly, the Tweeters are funny and informative and often unexpected. There are people who have TS Eliot quote-offs (Mrs Trefusis and clever Charlie McVeigh, you know who you are), some who swap recipes or songs or helpful household hints (a very nice woman called Julia Ball told me how to restore burnt cooking pots using Coca-Cola), some who do raging satire (the fake Gene Hunt is the king in this regard) and others who bring a shining surreal edge to the quotidian (Belgian Waffling raises this to Olympic level). This very morning on Twitter I have had a small discussion about the merits of DH Lawrence’s poetry versus his prose, revived memories of the sublime singing voice of Karen Carpenter, and been reminded of the wild magnificence of Last Year at Marienbad, a film which obsessed me when I was twenty three.

I could get tremendously poncy and claim that there is a great intellectual challenge in trying to say something interesting in 140 characters. I could talk about an extraordinary sense of global community in an I’d like to teach the world to sing New Seekers kind of way. But I probably won’t. I love Twitter most of all because it gives me little glimpses into other people’s lives, and I am incurably curious. I like also that it has a raging sense of social justice. The two subjects that I have written of which really caught fire on Twitter were the arrest of the journalist Roxana Saberi, and the plight of the women in the Congo. I don’t put up links to my own posts, because I have an odd, old-fashioned notion that this is a form of showing off – look at ME, look what I have written - and a certain shyness always sets in after I have got onto my hobby horses and gone galloping off in all directions. But these two serious subjects were immediately linked to by other kind Twitterers, and were tweeted and retweeted all day long, to my absolute delight and amazement. I could say that this proves that, far from banality and solipsism, Twitter is the very apex of selflessness and nobility, but then you would all fall off your chairs laughing. In the end, Twitter doesn’t need any defending. The people who like it, use it, and the people who don’t, won’t. All the rest is just sound and fury.

But when a man who left his wife to go and see his mistress whilst on his honeymoon starts bashing up a national treasure, things have officially Gone Too Far. (You see, I told you it would get ad hominem. I am very sorry. Well, slightly sorry. ) Rod Liddle found a tweet where Stephen Fry said he was going to ‘a dinner’. From this, he extrapolated that not only was Fry banal and narcissistic and self-important, and that he would like to bash Fry’s head in with a spanner for such banality and narcissism and self-importance, but that this one tweet demonstrated conclusively that the generation born between 1955 and 1985 is the most banal, narcissistic and self-important that ever lived. Which is, when you stop to think about it for more than three seconds, the most illogical and stupid generalisation of the year.

Rod Liddle is a very good writer. He is also a man who cheated on, lied to, and eventually left his wife, for a much younger woman. Following his logic, you could say that that all fifty-something men are cheating, lying philanderers. You could say that writing an opinion column is a much greater act of self-importance than sending out a tweet saying you are going to dinner. It seems odd that the people who attack Twitter the most are always columnists, who commit the ultimate act of narcissism each week, by telling the world exactly what they think of it. Twitter will sail on its merry way, whatever the pundits have to say about it. But I say: lay off Stephen, Liddle, or Gene Hunt will take you out the back and punch you in the nose.

In which I go all counter-intuitive. Health warning: this is very long, so you might like to get yourself a nice cup of tea first.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have a soulful black and white photograph of Martin Luther King on my wall. Why would I not? He spoke one of the greatest lines of the 20th century, that he dreamt that one day his children would not be judged on the colour of their skin but the content of their character. In an age where black people still had to ride at the back of the bus, it was an astonishingly bold statement. In any age, it was a one true thing. He was the youngest man ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. His legacy still resonates today.

Martin Luther King was famously unfaithful to his wife. We know this from memoirs by his close associates and observation from a paranoid FBI, which was determined to paint him as an evil communist. There are rumours also of prostitutes and threesomes, which may or may not be true. An ugly subset of the racist internet likes to play up these rumours, to make their claim that the reverend was a phoney and a fraud, who liked paying for sex with white women, as if that would negate every single thing he did for the civil rights movement. The great congressman John Lewis, who walked over the Alabama bridge and got beaten half to death for his pains, knew King, and once said of him: ‘he was not a saint, he was just another human being’, so making the tacit acceptant that he might have not been flawless in his private life.

If even half of this is true, does it make any difference to the King legacy? He has a national holiday named after him in America; he made an incalculable difference to race relations in a land that was scarred with the memory of slaves picking cotton in the fields. If there had been no Martin Luther King, there would be no Barack Obama. Would I rather not know that he had catted around? Yes. Did my heart sink a little in disappointment? Certainly. I am not so cavalier as Christopher Hitchens, who once wrote that Dr King spent his last night in dissipation and why not? In the same way, I would like to think that the venerable Gladstone did not have some strange obsession with prostitutes. This great classical scholar had a habit of bringing fallen ladies home to tea with his wife, and then going into a room and flagellating himself for being aroused by them. (We know this from little Greek characters that he wrote in his diaries.) This is slightly pathological behaviour, by any lights. Yet Gladstone fought like a tiger, even when he was old and frail, for Irish Home Rule. He did not win that battle, but just imagine if he had. There would have been no IRA. There would have been no Omagh bombing, no knee-capping, no hunger strikes, Lord Mountbatten would not have been blown to smithereens while his grandchildren watched.

All of which is a very long way of saying: flawed people can do great things, and those great things are not diminished by the frailties of the human being who achieved them.

So I find it hard to understand the frenzy of self-righteous moralising that is going on among the media classes. I love the media classes, adore the BBC, and think there is nothing in the rumour that they are all chatterati hacks who know nothing of life beyond the Groucho. But sometimes a story comes along and produces a mad herd instinct where all reason is forgotten, groupthink prevails, and a collective wail of why oh why can be heard throughout the land. The current unquestioned narrative is predicated on the idea that the public wants a snow white polity. This is why all good hard-working decent Britons are enraged (enraged, I tell you) by what has been going on in their name. I am not sure this is quite true. The British have always held a sceptical and unsentimental attitude towards their politicians. They can be ruthless, even towards national heroes. They adored Winston Churchill when Britain stood alone and only the power of his oratory convinced them that the beleaguered island might prevail. But the moment the war was won, they chucked him out. Pundits and commentators are telling us, day after day, that the public has never been so disillusioned by, despairing of, and disgusted at their elected members. Yet look back and you will find polls and statistics that show public faith in politicians has always hovered around a low mark. Last week, when the expenses scandal started cooking up, a survey showed that 60% of the public was interested in the Ghurkha story, and only 40% in the expenses story.

Personally, I don’t really give a damn about Keith Vaz’s scatter cushions. I could not care less about Alan Duncan’s garden. I have very little interest in Gordon Brown paying £6000 to his cleaner. My own cleaner says, when I ask her what she thinks about the expenses scandal: ‘What expenses scandal?’ I explain it to her. She cocks her head. ‘You mean they are taking the piss?’ she says. I say that some of them could be described in this manner. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I suppose we all take the piss sometimes.’ She is bright, honest as the day, and a good mother to two small children. Here is what she worries about: her little boy and girl getting a good education, the damp in her council house, and the fact that she and her partner are paying more tax than they used to. This last revelation shocks me senseless: this was the government that I voted for, partly because it promised to relieve the burden on the low-paid. Everyone is kicking up a stink about class war and the new fifty percent top rate of tax, while none of the newspapers are whipping themselves up into a frenzy of indignation over the fact that a mother of two in a council house who works part time is getting hit up for more tax in the middle of the worst recession in living memory. You crusaders over at the Daily Telegraph – where is your righteous fury over the immorality of that?

Down in the village shop, I try out another little vox pop. Jake, who works the till, a young man with an open friendly face, says: ‘Well, they are human, aren’t they?’ I am slightly surprised. Where is the outrage, the fury, the sense of death of the Mother of Parliaments? ‘I expect if I had an expenses account, I might do the same thing,’ he says, cheerfully.

Would I rather that John Prescott had not claimed for faux Tudor beams at his constituency home? You betcha. There is something awfully de haut en bas about Barbara Follett charging the taxpayer £25,000 for ‘security’. The thing with the moat is absurd. There are clearly many elements that are ropey and creaking about the allowances system, and MPs were idiotic when they voted against expenses being published. My prescription would be: put the whole lot on the internet. Claim what you want, but know that your constituents will be able to see it all online. I am not defending MPs who truly abused the system. They are public officials and should be held to account. But the number of egregious cases is a small percentage of the 645 parliamentarians, probably the exact same proportion of people who might steal something from the stationary cupboard in any large company. This does not make it right, or excusable, but in an ironic twist, probably makes the House of Commons quite representative of the public it serves.

I do not whitewash the expenses revelations, but I do attack the crazed reaction to them. ‘Gerry Adams slams expenses gravy train’ yelled a headline on the BBC news website. In 1987 Adams told the Oxford Union: ‘I have never condemned the IRA, and I never will.’ So it is perfectly fine to blow people up, but claiming for a fridge is beyond any ethical pale. A day later, Stephen Fry dared to point out that there really are more important things to get hysterical about, like waging illegitimate wars, say. Ah I thought: a cool dose of perspective. But the papers called foul. ‘Stephen Fry and his big brain don’t get it’ roared the headline in The Telegraph. ‘Stephen Fry dismisses the expenses scandal in typical arrogant-luvvie style, says Liz Hunt,’ it went on. Apart from indulging in clichéd stereotyping, this entirely missed the point of what Fry was saying, but he was so demoralised by the savage reaction that he confessed dolefully on Twitter that he wished he had kept his mouth shut. (Interestingly, the majority of Twitterers came out of the closet and admitted that many of them were thinking the exact same thing.)

If you want real ocean-going, five-star, fur-lined scandal, try this: the government is currently wasting £20 billion on an NHS IT system that, according to one person involved in the project, ‘isn’t working and isn’t going to work’. It is a story with more turns and twists than a convention of corkscrews. One of its finer elements is that Richard Granger, who was originally in charge, on a meagre salary of £285,000, failed his computer studies course at Bristol. Pricelessly, this nugget was revealed by his own mother, who called up The Observer to talk about it. ‘It was pretty serious, so I had to write to Princess Anne,’ she said (possibly my favourite line in any story in the last five years). Granger is currently threatening Private Eye with legal action for a story they want to run on him. Why is this not on the front page for five days in a row? Why does the press not expect good hard-working Britons to be up in arms about this, which takes many more of their tax pounds and directly affects their lives? Could it be that a man with a tennis court and someone claiming for a chandelier is just a sexier story?

A slightly baffled Italian journalist said on the Today Programme this morning that what British MPs are doing is ‘inappropriate’ but that what Italian MPs do is often ‘illegal’. It is worth remembering, in the middle of all this, that no law has been broken. This is not the Arms to Iraq scandal of the Thatcher years: ‘secret government encouragement of arms sales to a dictator who gasses civilians; ministers misleading parliament; perhaps a quarter of the cabinet implicated,’ as the Economist put it at the time. It is not cooking up dodgy legal opinions to justify torture, as has been revealed in America over the last two weeks – a scandal so big and deep that it takes the breath away, and yet gets hardly a mention in our press. It is not government officials in the Department of Energy having sex with oil industry executives and snorting coke off toaster ovens – another unlovely American political outrage of the fag end of the Bush years. (I do not know quite what a toaster oven is, or if you can claim one on expenses, but I am perfectly certain that very few of our parliamentarians are in the habit of using them to chop out grade A pharmaceuticals.)

I must declare an interest. One of my dear friends is a Member of Parliament. I know him to be a good, honourable and clever man. The gap between the person I know, and the current media version of MPs as chiselling crooks, venally out for everything they can get, is so wide I cannot bridge it. Menzies Campbell, whom I do not know, is a former Olympic athlete who took a steady, principled stand against the Iraq war. Now it has been revealed that he claimed £10,000 for decorating a flat. This one act apparently throws him into the cesspit along with the other scum, so much so that the Daily Mail now refers to him as ‘moral’ Menzies Campbell. This is a man who has devoted his life to public service and always displayed thoughtfulness and rectitude; now he is reduced to having the word moral put against his name in inverted commas. Perhaps more than any other individual example, this demonstrates how mad the reaction to this affair has become.

It is not that the thing itself is not bad. It is. But it is not that bad. It could be so much worse. In the context of wider politics, it may even appear rather petty. What frightens me more than a questionable claim for mole removal is when every single part of the press is following an identical narrative. It worries me when journalists I really love and admire, from Andrew Rawnsley to Nick Cohen to Michael White, are all saying the same thing. The story of what was done over the Iraq war, the questions of intelligence, the practice of extraordinary rendition, the odd saga of the Niger uranium claim, was a true matter of ethics and morality; it was a matter of actual life and death. I can’t remember anyone saying, as Nick Robinson did this week, that those involved in the darker aspects of the war should no longer be known as ‘honourable’ members. Most importantly, many varying degrees of opinion were expressed about the conflict, across all the different newspapers, not necessarily depending on political allegiance. This is exactly how it should be in a democracy that prides itself on a free press. The alarming thing about the current saga is that dissenting voices against the prevailing opinion are not only hard to find, but are pilloried for daring even to question the agreed line. I’m not asking for someone to come out and insist that all MPs are perfect, but I do wish that the press might cock an ear to Stephen Fry, take a deep breath, and rummage under the bed to find its mislaid sense of perspective.