A Grand Day Out

High noon for Starmer at PMQs showdown.

Palace of Westminster, Big Ben, and Westminster Bridge as seen from the south bank of the River Thames.

One of the many pleasures of being retired and living in London is the variety of free entertainments on offer. One such, not everyone’s cup of tea perhaps, is a seat in the public gallery for Prime Minister’s Question time at the House of Commons. Anyone can apply to their local MP for tickets, but I have had the misfortune of being resident in Beckenham, for years a rotten borough for the Conservative Party. It’s been said of the Labour Party that in the old days, in Red Wall seats, Labour could put up a donkey and it would still be returned with a landslide. The Tories in Beckenham seem to have tested this theory in real time, via their MP for fifteen years, Bob Stewart, an embodiment of the term “Gammon”. Not for him the common courtesy of replying to the emails of his constituents, particularly those with an affiliation to Labour. Of course not. Where would the votes be in that?Bob had resolutely ignored all my emails requesting tickets over the years, so my delight in Labour finally breaking up the one party state of Bromley, had personal significance. Our new MP, Liam Conlon replied immediately, and after a wait of about 8 months, I finally got the nod and was informed that tickets would be available to pick up from the Admissions Order Office in the central lobby on Wednesday February 4th. Little did I know then that this would prove to be one the more significant PMQs, when The Epstein/Mandelson shit finally hit the fan.

It was a fascinating day – I’d recommend it to anyone with any kind of commitment to democracy and any kind of empathy for the idiosyncrasies of the quaint historical British system. Walking up to the Parliament building is like a guided tour of the democratic right to protest. Encamped at the traffic light island at the end of Parliament street was a very familiar face conducting a permanent protest with a cacophonously loud sound system.

The game was partly given away by the banner festooned around the railings of the traffic island: “We’re still here because Brexit is still crap.” Hard to disagree really – Steve Bray, the patron saint of eccentric British protesters, is still the man.

There are other smaller protests dotted around: Gaza, Greenpeace, Global warming etc . Then on to the building itself. Once you’re through fairly strict airport style security with scanners and plastic trays, and you negotiate a winding walkway past the statue of Oliver Cromwell, you enter through the main doors of Westminster Hall, before getting to the central lobby, a place as familiar as a film set, so often does it appear on nightly news bulletins.

The building is magnificent and oozes history. I ended up walking around gawping at the medieval Hammer Beam roof and the statues and paintings and plaques reminding everyone of the famous folk who have trodden the flagstones there.

It’s a long wait to get access to the public gallery, which is at one end of the debating chamber behind a perspex screen. You get a very good view of the Speaker’s chair, and the main players on both sides . The sound is well miked up and the proceedings are broadcast on screens in the gallery itself. I was disappointed that this masks the ghastly Reform UK fascists from view, and I had to content myself with a tv version of Cruella Braverman making her first intervention as a Reformista, to a satisfying chorus of boos.

Speaking of which, it’s made very clear through a series of official notices that you pass on the way to the gallery, that no clapping, shouting, cheering or jeering will be tolerated and throughout the proceedings, several frock-coated officials, probably all with names like Ermine Wolf or Black Hammer, hovered threateningly, glaring at the suitably silent and cowed members of the public.

The fact that the officials all seemed to be Dickensian in age as well as dress, and couldn’t police a determined gang of toddlers, didn’t seem to matter to the crowd, who all behaved impeccably. Unlike the rare protesters pictured above. That was on another occasion sadly.

A few random takeaways from the experience:

1.It’s a very beautiful, interesting, historic building and worth a visit just for that

2. It felt very different from the event I later saw reported in the media. On line, on the TV news programmes and in the press, it was all presented as an occasion of high drama, but in reality, it wasn’t like that at all. It was all very quiet and polite, to the point of being rather tame.

Perhaps this was the distancing effect of being behind the screen. Or perhaps the strange, artificial, performative nature of the whole event. Badenoch, as leader of the opposition, gets to ask 6 questions, but it seems perfectly possible to field those questions in a bland way, and wait until you get one of the series of “dolly drop” questions from your own side. Those questions had the effect of draining away any drama or sense of jeopardy.You know the sort of thing: “Does my honourable friend the PM agree with me that the opening of a new sausage factory is a welcome sign of this Government’s commitment to sausages, meat products in general and to the residents of my constituency, (insert name of town the MP represents but has only lived in for the past 6 months)

3. Although it’s better than nothing, it’s not really a good way of ensuring accountability. The adversarial layout of the chamber doesn’t help and neither does the in-built imperative to produce snappy sound bites for later broadcast. The select committee system provides a much more focused cross examination where it’s harder to get away with not answering the question or not being prepared.

4. The most disturbing thing happened right at the end of the event when we were leaving via the central lobby. It was full of the great and the good, a very familiar scene from countless TV news interviews. We passed Farage and Braverman chatting to two other people. Their conversation finished just as we were passing them, and Farage strode past us on his own wearing a very expensive looking dapper blue suit.

Tanned and confident, he was every inch the wealthy member of the establishment, aware that all eyes turned towards him as he walked along. Westminster Hall was packed with visitors, including loads of Sixth Formers and school parties. Many of these young people, shouted out to Farage. “Nigel! Nigel! This way Nigel!” as if he were a Pop Star. I’ve thought for years now that political education in this country was utterly pathetic, and it’s left at least one generation completely vulnerable to charlatans who are good communicators. Into this vacuum step Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk lying shamelessly, all in the name of “Free Speech”. The young always used to be my hope for the future, being naturally attracted to the idea of social justice. Now I’m not so sure. Social Media has a lot to answer for.

5. The entire population of UK political journalists are having a laugh when they say the Mandelson affair is a worse political scandal than Profumo. I have no time for Starmer, and he will eventually go (probably after the May council election debacle), but all that has happened here is that he’s made a mistake. He’s not in the Epstein files. There’s no suggestion of corruption. There’s plenty of other things to accuse him of. Appalling policy on Gaza. Appalling weaponising of antisemitism against the Corbyn Labour Party. Appalling lies during his own leadership campaign. But in the grand scale of things, it’s small beer really. Have people really forgotten the shameful performance of Boris Johnson? – utterly corrupt, utterly venal, utterly dishonest and utterly unexamined when it comes to leaking state secrets to Russia via secret Bunga Bunga party attendance in Italy.

Later the same day there was an Opposition Day Debate on the whole Mandelson fiasco. Guess who wasn’t there? That’s right, man of the people, Nigel Farage. I wonder why?

We live in dark times and a trip to the Mother of Parliaments has not reassured me that our democracy is safe. Perhaps my next grand day out in that there London should be Madam Tussauds.

Ungovernable? Unspeakable more like

A review of Simon Hart’s Political diaries

Just to give you a flavour of Simon Hart’s powers of political analysis, here’s a memorable sentence from the book:

Their styles are so different, that I’ve decided that when it comes to politics (thank goodness for this clarification!) Boris “fucks” and Rishi “makes love”. Both are strangely effective.

Both presumably guarantee an earth-moving orgasm every time. No such joy from Simon Hart’s political memoir, which will not trouble the scorers in the pantheon of political history. The lack of an index is a bit of a giveaway. This is not serious history, just tittle-tattle, self-justification and whining about unfairness. By the end even Hart seems a little embarrassed about how the thin gruel is that his book contains, (yet rather pleased about the raunchy sentence above – Tories are sexy, Labour are dull. Yawn.)

Several factors conspired to bring me to this book: a series of glowing reviews (“remarkable insight”, “engrossing, entertaining, ..so funny”,) an unquenchable appetite for revelations about the disaster of government since 2010, and the serendipity of finding it available, pristine and untouched in my local library. Circumstances that were too good to turn down at the time, but, in the end, I almost wished I had passed on this and got something else instead.

It barely delivers on the shocking revelations front, apart from a couple of scarcely believable, tawdry anecdotes that were well-trailed prepublication.

The first was the tale of the Tory MP ringing in the middle of the night to be rescued, having found himself in a brothel with a Russian spy (well, we’ve all been there).

The second was this beauty: “ a departmental SPAD went to an orgy at the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another persons head…..in a separate incident a Commons employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Saville and ended up having sex with a blow up doll” Obviously, apart from that, the Tories are straight up regular guys.

Don’t read the book if you’re expecting page after page of scandalous behaviour like this by the naughty party. The majority of the book is mind numbingly dull: endless reports of Cabinet awaydays, PMQs, events in Wales (Hart was Secretary of State for Wales at one point) and name dropping accounts of drinking sessions or meals out with sycophantic journalists. It does, however, perform an invaluable public service in reminding us just how ghastly, how inept, how morally bankrupt the Tories in office were. Barely a page goes by without details of one Tory after another getting found out for a misdemeanour: child abuse, rape, corruption, bullying, watching pornography in the commons. The cases accelerate when Hart becomes Chief Whip under Rishi Sunak, presumably because in that role he was privy to information about all badly behaved MPs. The main conclusion Hart draws from this is that the Tory party needs to improve its candidate selection process, to avoid the serial sex offenders, criminals, bullies and freeloaders. It seems to have escaped him that the Johnston intake, in 2019, was so full of those sorts of loathsome chancers that a better vetting process would have left them with a list of suitable candidates down to double figures.

To everyone else in the country, it was perfectly clear that these rogues were quintessentially Tories. Their sins, not aberrations or mistakes, but an essential part of who they were and what they believed in. Born to rule, rich, entitled and convinced that the rules laid down to regulate behaviour were meant for the little folks, not for them. It was The Bullingdon Club writ large.

It appears from these diaries that virtually no work of any meaningful kind goes on. Yes, there are late meetings and early meetings, but they are all fuelled by expensive lunches and dinners, where the drink flows freely. The meetings involve endless wrangling, navigating a route around different political factions, leading to absolutely nothing in terms of improving the lives of people. All of their energies appear to go into party management to ensure a compliant parliamentary party, using patronage and threats of exposure to keep everyone in line. This becomes clearer in the years when Hart was chief whip, when the diary is overwhelmingly about Tory MPs relentlessly hassling him for honours. Hart himself says that he was thinking about calling the book ”About my Knighthood” because that’s how most Tories started a conversation with him. It’s a portrait of a system that runs on naked corruption, and self serving venality. These people ooze entitlement, and the notion of serving their constituents seems never to cross their minds.

The biggest insight the book provides is into the full, horror shit show that is the mindset of the average Tory MP: entitled, snobby, completely deluded about their values, actions, and how they are viewed by Joe Public. Everything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault, usually the media in general and the BBC in particular which Hart ludicrously seems to think is a branch of the Communist Party. Here are a few snippets, giving us a pretty accurate snapshot of the cut of Hart’s jib.

First is his description of Mark Drayford, the Labour leader of the devolved Welsh Assembley. Hart as Welsh Secretary had a lot of dealings with him and seems incensed that Drayford was more popular than him and got a lot of plaudits for his handling of Covid. Here’s Simon Hart’s verdict: “Drakeford’s public persona was one of a dull academic, the sort of lefty philosophy lecturer you used to find at Luton Polytechnic in the 1970s. A Welsh Jeremy Corbyn…” “ Drakeford looks like a scruffy old university lecturer with dirty shoes” Multi-layered snobbery or what?

His contempt for public service is also never far from the surface. Here is one example he casually throws in when describing Starmer. “ He may have been the Director of Public Prosecutions but as some of our MP lawyers observe, any decent lawyer goes into private practice”

His political judgement is hopelessly awry. Every description of PMQs, whether it be Johnson, Truss or Sunak at the helm, gives the impression that the Tory incumbent aced it every week, with Starmer missing open goal after open goal. He is baffled by the reputation of Gavin Williamson, who he describes as “one of us” and who is treated “terribly unfairly”.

He opines, with a straight face presumably, that “we have done a good job on water.” Blimey. Just imagine how bad it would have been if they’d messed it up.

He describes a lunch with Laura Kuensberg and provides further evidence of his razor sharp political antennae: “ For all the years I have known her, I would have no more clue now how she votes than on the day we first met.” Really, Simon? You must be the only person in the country with a double figure IQ who doesn’t know that Kuensberg is virtually in the Tory cabinet.

Once again, Hart provides clear evidence that the average Tory really doesnt see what all the fuss is about. It’s perfectly normal that the news should have an instinctive Tory bias because well, so does the country. If anything, the BBC is in the grip of Commies. The depth of delusion is compounded by his casual barbs about the left in general. “Why are they always so angry? It must be so exhausting.”

Perhaps because they see that all that has gone wrong with the country was avoidable. The damage inflicted as policy by a series of governments from the Right and Far right. You got away with it for so long because at first the damage only affected the people at the bottom, and no-one gives a toss about them. Things began to get sticky for the Tories in power as more and more people could see with their own eyes the damage being inflicted on the institutions of civil society. Just walk down the High Street, try to rent a flat or swim in the sea. That’s Tory shit you are navigating around.

Just like your swim, this is a book that will require you to wash your hands after reading it.

Ps – nearly forgot. Surely Hart has some insight into the Government’s handling of Covid? And the parties?

Parties? Didn’t happen, mate. Vaccine rollout. Starmer Curry.

Caledonian Road

O’Hagan triumphs with that rare beast – a State of the Nation novel with heart.

The latest novel from Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road, is a big beast, in every sense of the term. Physically, it’s got some heft. 640 pages of hard back book makes demands on the wrists. It’s also dealing with weighty, contemporary issues, so all told, the experience of reading it provides a holistic mind and body workout. Sounds like a week at a Spartan health farm, where the motto is no pain, no gain, but fear not dear readers, this novel also provides pure pleasure.

O’Hagan handles the intermingling of the personal and political with real skill and delicacy. A lesser novelist would have eschewed ideology and party politics for fear of committing the ultimate sin in the eyes of the serious, sensitive, superior and above-the-fray Literature Critics, that is the sin of taking sides. Ideology is both vulgar and limiting in this fragrant, lofty world. Evenhandedness is much more mature, much more subtle, much more human, darling. Perhaps. It’s certainly much more boring, in my opinion.

O’Hagan says a hearty bollocks to that and has dived in headfirst to this dissection of contemporary London society, and the power structures that both drive it and destroy it. He does it primarily through great storytelling. The novel succeeds first and foremost on that fundamental, primary level. The characters, their relationships, triumphs and disasters are memorable and compelling, even the utterly ghastly ones. Maybe especially the ghastly ones.

For the protagonist, Campbell Flynn, O’Hagan treads well-travelled paths. Working class lad done good, from the grim dereliction of 1970s Glasgow, Flynn at the time of the novel’s start is an academic, a cultural commentator, and a media darling down in that there London. Not a million miles away, obviously, from O’hagan’s own background, material previously plundered in his exquisite Mayflies. And not just London, but very specifically Kings Cross, an area recently reinvented by money and gentrification, but one which has pungent resonance for any refugee from the North. As a first entry point for East Coast Scots and Northerners, its streets, legends, and institutions retain a powerful grip on those arriving wide eyed from the sticks. Judd Street, the Eight till Late, the Scala, Peabody housing, Squats and Short Life flats, ULU, one hour rooms in lines of seedy hotels, kicking used syringes and condoms to one side leaving one’s flat in the morning – they are all part of the memory kaleidoscope conjured by the name Kings Cross.

As a big beast, the novel is teeming with characters, so much so that O’Hagan thoughtfully provides a cast list of two fully crammed pages. It’s essential if you want smooth passage through this behemoth, and a trick that Dickens himself could have profitably employed. The plot is multi-stranded and brilliantly handled, so that by the time the book has reached the halfway point, every time a new section of the book begins, there’s a sense of excitement at the resumption of that particular plot thread. That happens for all of the separate threads. That’s a real achievement. Usually, there’s always at least one thread that the reader has less engagement with, where you feel you’re treading water and sticking with, out of a sense of obligation. Here, all of them sing.

It’s a novel with laudable ambition, tackling big, serious issues. Any analysis of the current, woeful state of the UK would examine these topics in some depth, and O’Hagan looks them straight in the eye and explores them with both a pitiless forensic gaze and nuance, which allows him to eschew simplistic judgements and portray the issues and the characters with multilayered complexity. These are not the scribblings of a naive schoolboy marxist. He manages to cover

People trafficking
Cancel culture
British exceptionalism
The aristocracy
Public Schools
Russian money laundering
Social Media
Celebrity Culture
Gentrification
Housing

All of this produces an excoriating picture of the malign influence of the British establishment, their sense of entitlement and superiority, and the devastating impact they have had on destroying Civil Society for everyone except the super rich. The “freedom” this class espouses becomes simply freedom for millionaires to become billionaires without the state interfering.

There will be readers at this point who are thinking, “Bloody hell, this sounds far too political for me. I don’t understand this stuff and/or I just want a story about people and relationships” Keep the faith, you apoliticals! O’Hagan delivers on that front as well, with a huge range of individuals and families, all of whom, even the nasty Tories, are portrayed sympathetically. It’s Dickensian in that sense, and similar in many ways to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. An energetic, densely populated romp set in multicultural, class-riven contemporary London, it is, like Dickens, a serious work masquerading as an entertainment. Or the other way round.

There was one dud note for me at the beginning. His portraits of Media stars, the establishment, and the political classes all rang true and had the hallmark of authenticity. I found, at first, his depiction of knife wielding, estate dwelling, drug dealers less successful. It felt as if he had spent some time eavesdropping on an unfamiliar underclass and had produced a two dimensional portrayal. By the end, however, I was convinced and O’Hagan had totally won me over. This is A Great Novel, and I can’t wait for the adaptation, film or TV. Already commissioned, apparently.

My Novel of the Year – by a mile.

One last push, madam

Lest we Forget…..

Before we start, it’s always good to remind ourselves of the calibre of Tory MP we have had to suffer for the last 14 years…

Ah, that’s better. Now, lets think about the election for the last time.

At the time of writing, the general election is only four days away. It can’t come soon enough, after what has been a thoroughly miserable, profoundly depressing campaign. And the polls haven’t shifted a notch in terms of closing the gap, so we might as well have had a seven day campaign and spared everyone the grief. Instead, there’s been five weeks of watching a dwindling band of Tories, the few left who are still prepared to debase themselves, lie through their teeth on the media treadmill every day, which has left me feeling very detached from the whole business. Those Tories that have declined to take part in the undignified circus have done so, not because of an outbreak of guilt, or remorse, or shame, or the sudden rediscovery of a moral compass, but because they realise the game is up and there’s nothing in it for them anymore. Some (Jenrick, Patel, Braverman) have been largely silent and/or invisible because they are busy plotting their post election-rout leadership bid. Others like Jenkyn have been shamelessly brown nosing Nigel Farage, and fantasising about their dream merger with Reform and a possible comeback for Johnson. Students of 1930s Germany might recall strange parallels with Von Papen, Hindenburg and Hitler. That didn’t end well for anyone. Others have gone on holiday (Baker), gone to the betting shop (Williams) or gone mad (Nadine Dorries, Liz Truss) Yes, I know Mad Nad is not standing, but it’s always good to remind everyone just how ghastly the last fourteen years have been. Johnson posted one troop-rallying video, looking like a man who had just returned from a treasonous Bunga Bunga party in a Russian Oligarch’s Italian mansion, security detail nowhere to be seen, having over indulged on everything he was offered: cocaine, call girls, state secrets. When nobody took any notice he clearly thought, “Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I’m off” and buggered off back to the Sardinian villa ( paid for, of course, by some other gullible rich bastard who hasn’t the wit to realise that Johnson currently has the establishment clout of Matt Hancock, is shagging his wife, and has left a steaming turd in the middle of the villa’s marble floor.)

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak has just plain gone, being helicoptered in to factory after factory wearing yellow hi vis and a glassy fixed smile giving the same answer to every question: “bold action….no plan…no surrender…” The loyalty troops (James Cleverly, Mel Stride) in the party are talking up the idea that losing but getting over a hundred seats would be an act of heroic, leadership brilliance, before preparing to shaft him on July 5th. “Et tu, Jimmy?” gasps Sunak as the knife strikes. It almost makes one nostalgic for Matt Hancock, who has been airbrushed from History. I sometimes wonder whether someone called Matt Hancock did actually exist, or whether I just keep having a recurring bad dream. It can’t be that though, because when I wake up, the reality is even worse.

It looks like the ever wonderful Channel 4 news’ undercover filming of the Reform racist members/ workers/volunteers might shoot Farage’s fox, or at least wound it so they take votes from Tories, but not too many. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of them not taking any seats and having a lower share of the vote than the Tories. It would be the icing on the cake if Farage were to fail in Clacton, but that remains a real risk. The undercover filming was like one of those mad bits of social research that pop up now and then. You know the sort of thing, a research project that concludes that school students in classes that suffer from poor behaviour tend to achieve less well academically. No shit, Sherlock. I’m sure it’s come as an earth shattering shock to most sentient UK electors, that people associated with the sexist, homophobic, racist Reform party, led by the sexist, racist and homophobic Nigel Farage, are, deep down, er, sexist, racist and homophobic.

And yet, it still feels like squeaky bum time, regardless of what the polls say. What would be the perfect outcome, in Fantasy General Election land?

A narrow Labour majority
Lib Dems as second largest party.
Greens having 4+ MPs
Tories below 100
Reform with 0
The last two items generate wider support for PR
Starmer drops the mask, acts according to his centre left instincts, pushed by the Lib Dems, and jettisons the woeful policy positions taken up to appease the Daily Mail.

I am planning Election night, laying in a choice selection of fine wines and delicacies, having cleared my diary for the day after. I am determined to enjoy the evening because the cold-light reality of the next day will be depressing: a hangover, a Starmer-led Labour Government, with a shameful list of frit, populist policies and a weather forecast of rain. I’d like to think that, if the choice of 2024 General election songs was between Steely Dan, Change of the Guard (If you live in this world, you’re feeling the change of the guard”) of The Who, Fighting in the Streets (“Yeah, come meet the new boss, Same as the old boss”) then Steely Dan would win. But no, I fear The ‘Oo will triumph. Have a listen here and make your own mind up

We Dont Get Fooled Again

But I suppose it could be worse. Biden or Trump, anyone?

Finally, just to remind you where all the hollowing out of British society started, have a look at my memories of the infamous 1979 election, and the day I broke the law in the struggle against fascism. Or Margaret Thatcher at any rate. Enjoy the night, comfort yourself with how much worse it would have been under the fascists, and get ready for disappointments ahead,

Back to the Future. Part 1:1979, Margaret Thatcher, and the end of Civilization

Stop Press! The last word to Rishi Sunak, who this morning trumpeted his opinion that life in Britain is much better now than it was in 2010. Clueless.

I bet Rishi’s house is warm

I bet Rishi’s house is warm.
No extra jumper for him.
Perhaps a silken dressing gown
Over shorts and sliders, as
He pads across the heated tiled floor,
To eat eggs benedict and read the FT.
He never stops working, to keep the economy safe.

I bet Rishi doesn’t turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees,
Or shares the bath with his wife to save a few bob on the bill.
To be fair, she’s a non-dom, so she doesn’t live here.
Not really.
Unlike Dom, who does.

I bet Rishi has a shiny walk-in fridge, with banks of delicacies from around the world
To sustain him when he’s peckish.
He will choose between smashed avocado on sourdough
or locally sourced quails’ eggs with truffle oil.
We will choose heating on, or white sliced toast with marge.
He’s just like you and I, underneath, honestly.
Because we are all in this together.

He does not know how to use contactless,
Or fill his small, grubby car with petrol, bless him.
He’s too busy for that. Because
He never stops working, to keep the economy safe.

So, it is just terribly unfair
When moaners smear his wife for avoiding tax.
After all, Rishi, a very modern Conservative, 
Does not own his wife.
He just owns
Us.