Out of step

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

WARNING FOR LENGTH, RANTING, POLITICS OVERLOAD, AND CONTRARINESS.

Years ago, London’s glittering West End put on a show called The Play Wot I Wrote. (Or something similar; too tired to Google.) It was a huge, whacking, roaring, screeching success. People fought in the streets for tickets. Hardened critics sobbed with joy.

I ruthlessly sold my grandmother and got tickets. I took my lovely Man of Letters and his Beloved, as a very, very special treat.

The theatre was packed to the gunnels. (I am sure that will go soon onto John Rentoul’s banned list, so I am using it while I can.) Almost from the moment the actors came on stage, people started to bark with laughter. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I checked my funny bone. No tickling yet. Never mind, it would surely come.

It never did. For two excruciating hours, I sat, with a face like stone, whilst the rest of the audience rocked and wept with hilarity. At one point, the waves of laughter were so corporeal it felt like being on board ship in a high swell.

I did not dare look at the MOL. I did not hear him laughing, but perhaps he was shrieking on the inside. As we filed out of the theatre, the three of us looked at each other, a little island of solemnity amidst the happy crowds.

‘Awful,’ we all said in unison. ‘AGONY.’

There was a tremendous, streaming comfort in knowing that at least we had each other. But we spent most of dinner discussing what was wrong with us. We could not work out why we were so utterly out of step with the taste of the great British public, the chattering classes, and the theatrical establishment. Sometimes it’s rather a lovely idea, being a contrarian; sometimes it just makes you feel slightly peculiar.

I had that over the MPs’ expenses. I could see it was bad and regrettable and wrong, but I did not see that it was the most scandalous scandal that had ever hit British politics. I remember thinking at the time that it was nothing like as bad as the scandal of the billions of pounds wasted on IT projects that did not work, or the fact the soldiers in Afghanistan did not have boots, or the practice of extraordinary rendition, and no one made a huge fuss about those for week after week.

I start to feel the same about the hacking scandal, and its political ramifications. It’s a fascinating story; it’s a shocking crossing of journalistic lines; it should absolutely be remedied. But it’s being treated as if it is the only news just now. Is it really as important as the fact that the entire Euro Zone is teetering on the brink? If the Euro goes smash, on account of Greece defaulting and God knows what happening in Italy, Portugal and Spain, then the banking crisis will look like the Teddy Bears’ picnic.

At the very same time, even if President Obama finally gets a deal on the debt ceiling, the ratings agencies are threatening to downgrade America’s credit rating. This sounds very dry and geekish, but it will have unintended consequences as far as the eye can see. (One clever person I know speculates it could even spell the collapse of NATO.)

Gold is shooting through the roof, always a sure sign that the people who know are panicking. I am starting to consider getting goats and planting carrots and going self-sufficient.

As all this outrage rages, it is quietly reported, by a journalist who should know, that the head of one electricity company took delivery, last week, of a large home generator. Old coal-fired plants are reaching the end of their lives; there has been no coherent policy announcement about what to do to replace them. The CEO clearly knows something we do not: there is a real danger that the lights will start to go out. Along with the keeping of goats and the growing of root vegetables, I may have to start collecting firewood and stockpiling candles.

Disproportion is always a worry, in any story. I still can’t get over George Monbiot saying ‘this is our Berlin Wall moment’, when Mr Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB was withdrawn. Now, people are starting to say: Worse than Watergate. Twitter is alive with reports that William Hill has the odds of David Cameron resigning at 8-1.

As I write, the House of Commons is baying at the Prime Minister over the matter of Andy Coulson. Apparently, according to the Leader of the Opposition, this is the most important matter of the day. Over the last two weeks, he has repeatedly said that he is acting on behalf of the People of Britain. ‘The People think,’ he says. ‘The People want to know.’ When the BSkyB bid failed, he actually said: ‘This is a victory for the People.’ A poll out yesterday revealed that six percent of The People put the hacking scandal in their top ten concerns. SIX PERCENT.

It’s a very easy thought experiment. Imagine you have just lost your job. Is your number one worry that the Prime Minister hired Andy Coulson? Or would you not want to know what his policy is for employment, economic growth, and the welfare state? Would you consider it a resigning matter that his erstwhile Director of Communications once edited The News of the World, or would you hold your fire until you see what he will do when Greece defaults?

It’s not that political leaders and newspaper tycoons should not be held accountable for their decisions, but that there should be a sense of proportion. But I suppose that does not make for a sexy headline.

It’s not that I am not interested. I’m slightly embarrassingly interested. It’s geek heaven. But it’s not the most important thing in the world, and I worry that it is being treated as if it were.

And one more thing, since I am ranting. I feel embarrassed and ashamed that all this newspaper dodginess happened on the watch of a Labour Party for which I voted. I voted for them proudly, until Gordon Brown lost me. There is something slightly odd about the current tone of self-righteousness coming from the Left, when it was Mr Blair and Mr Brown who were all over Mr Murdoch, with tea parties and weekends and flying visits and wedding trips and the horridly named ‘slumber parties’. Where was the outrage then? And how does the outrage now actually help in the running of a very complicated country? I’m just asking.

I suppose I should at least be grateful that all these questions are taking my mind off my bashed old heart. Perhaps I should stop being cross and write all those shouty outragers a nice thank you letter.

And, to reward you for your patience, here are some diverting pictures of the garden and the trees and the sheep and the DOG:




































Look at old Posy Posington, all ready for her close-up. At least she knows what is important. To whit: biscuits, and rabbits. Oh, and The Love, of course. Perhaps she should be running the country.

Really must stop now, before I am entirely overcome by whimsy.

Is there a sense of proportion in the house?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

All right: I'm going to have one last shot at it, and then I promise faithfully I will stop and give you my new recipe for flatbread.

I freely put my hands up. When I said I was not sure how angry the phlegmatic British public was about the expenses row, I was being too optimistic. The public is now officially Angry. Although I still wonder at the amount of time it has taken for them to get furious, and how much of that fury has been stoked by raging, unremitting newspaper headlines. Many of the stories in the papers are skewed to put the very worst possible spin on some fairly ordinary claims, and all the pundits have been using incendiary language from the start. Peter Hitchens did a particularly hilarious piece on This Week on Thursday where he sat in a rather enchanting greasy spoon and claimed that the ordinary people, like those eating breakfast around him, were absolutely livid at the venal shenanigans of their elected representatives: ‘everyone is angry’ he said, angrily. The diners around him continued to eat their beans and chips and sausages with calm decorum; I’ve never seen a collection of people look less cross.

Still, the letters pages, call-in shows and the set of Question Time are exploding with ire. One pensioner told one newspaper reporter that she would not be surprised if people got guns and started shooting MPs. The always rational Diane Abbott said that the public wanted to see MPs hanging from lampposts. The exceptionally tired old trope of ‘they are all the same’ is being repeated so frequently that I expect soon to see it etched in stone above the Members’ entrance of the House.

Despite everything, I still think the anger is out of all proportion. The system of allowances is antiquated and wrong, and should be fixed. The fees office is clearly run by very strange people indeed. Some of our parliamentarians have behaved as fools or knaves. All this is true and should not be glossed over and excused. But I still say it is not the most scandalous scandal in the history of scandals.

Let us look at this on a purely financial level. A huge part of the anger derives from the notion that MPs are living high on the hog at public expense; people talk of wanting their money back for the lav seats and moat cleaners and housekeepers. It’s our money, the outraged citizenry is saying, and we want it returned with interest. Well, taking into account salary, expenses, allowances, and staff wages, the cost of each MP to every taxpayer in the UK averages out at around £4 per year. Obviously, some people pay more tax than others, so Stephen Fry probably pays about a tenner for his MP, while someone on the minimum wage pays about 40p. But for the sake of argument, let’s take the £4 figure.

Here is what the latest round of spending on Afghanistan cost each taxpayer: £1400. I should remind you that in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent, the government is properly corrupt (they would shriek at the idea of measly pipe under a measly tennis court), girls have acid thrown in their face for daring to go to school, the poppy is flourishing, and our brave boys are bogged down in Helmand Province. If you want to get really angry about something that deserves proper incandescent fury, read James Fergusson’s brilliant book A Million Bullets and you will see what I am talking about.

Here is what the the financial crisis and the bailout of the banks will cost each taxpayer, according to the International Monetary Fund: £5,000. So it would take your MP a thousand years to charge you as much. Bear in mind that the scale of the disaster could easily have been avoided if the bankers had not be stupid enough to bet the farm on complicated financial instruments that they themselves often did not understand, if the regulatory agencies had actually done their job, and if someone, somewhere, had listened to Paul Krugman.

Here is what the airline industry costs every taxpayer in subsidises: £300. Now you may love the airline industry. I am sure that it never indulges in Spanish practices or dodgy expenses. It might be doing more than its bit to promote pollution, but you know, people must go on holiday. But do you really think that is a good use of your hard-earned tax pound?

I could go on, but I know you will lose the will to live. My point is that surely our collective rage should be 350 times higher in the case of Afghanistan and a thousand times higher in the case of the bank bailouts. If I were being really naughty, I might even point out that four quid a year for an MP is quite good value. You cannot even buy a packet of fags for four quid. For this, your member of parliament will sit on select committees, take part in debates, vote on issues of the day, answer hundreds of letters, participate, to a greater or lesser degree, in the formulation of policy, throw surgeries where concerned voters may come with their problems, sometimes mount campaigns on behalf of their constituents, open flower shows, and attend various dinners and events and speaking engagements (which might sound feckless and frivolous and quite fun, but often involves earnest conversation with not entirely fascinating people). They must be prepared to keep no detail of their private life private, be polite at all times, even when in the presence of nutters or crashing bores, and be pilloried in the press. Some of them absolutely deserve to be pilloried in the press, and put in the stocks too, but the blameless must expect this treatment along with the culpable.

On top of all this, they must accept that they will be generally regarded as incompetent at best and crooked at worst. The scale of the recent outcry demonstrates vividly that the expenses scandal only confirmed what most people already believed. All surveys show that Members of Parliament have occupied the same subterranean position in public esteem for years. In 2006, when there was no scandal, they ranked below business leaders and only just above journalists in the three least trusted professions. There is no need for violins; they are grown-ups and choose to go into politics. They must know that a thick skin is part of the job requirement. I am not saying that we should not get angry with MPs; of course we should. That is our right, even our civic duty, as concerned citizens. I feel very strongly about this: don’t just carp on the sidelines, get involved – write a letter, sign a petition, start a blog. There is an idiot strain of non-idea abroad that says we should punish the lot of them by not voting. Peter Hitchens told us solemnly on Thursday that ‘the right to vote is just as precious as the right not to vote’. Some sententious moron on The World Tonight said it was this kind of scandal that led to apathy amongst the electorate; then stated smugly: ‘that is why I have not voted since 1974’. I almost started throwing things. If you do not participate, I think you forfeit your right to bitch, but I am a bit hardline like that. I get all sentimental about the people who died for the right to vote, the women who had to fight and scratch and chain themselves to railings so they might mark their ballots.

So I do not shrug my shoulders and say it does not matter. It does matter, but other things matter much, much more. The electorate has an absolute right to hold the political class to its promises. It is not that fury should not be hurled, but that it should be hurled at the right target. Because when the whole thing turns into a blind witch-hunt, not only is nothing achieved, but the really terrifying scandals go unanswered.

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.