BLINDED BY THE LIGHTWEIGHT

I know it feels like 100 years ago now, but if you can possibly cast your mind back to the eve of the 2019 General Election, you might recall there was an unprecedented rash of preemptive exits as a wipe-out of the Westminster Remoaners beckoned following months of undemocratic chaos when they tried their damndest to reverse the 2016 mandate delivered by the people. The fragile majority Boris Johnson had inherited from Theresa May was whittled down to a minority as numerous Tory Members crossed the floor of the House and the PM removed the whip from 21 rebels; some even formed their own Party in conjunction with Labour MPs dismayed at the Momentum dominance within Corbyn’s Labour – anyone recall Change UK? – and some relocated to the Lib Dems; but all were desperate to prevent the General Election Boris was eager to call in order to sort out the problem once and for all, preferring the red herring of a Second Referendum. When it became clear this wasn’t feasible, there were even characteristically bonkers suggestions such as the one proposed by the Greens’ Caroline Lucas, which suggested an unelected emergency administration should be formed with her (naturally) at the centre of it. All of these moves served as a blatant indication as to just how much the Remainer elite within Parliament mistrusted the British public to do the right thing.

When those parties with the loudest Remoaner voices were summarily rejected at the ballot-box in the May 2019 European elections – obliterated by Nigel Farage’s newly-formed Brexit Party – many of them belatedly realised the electorate were not going to look warmly upon them come the next national vote. No wonder they were against it. However, when Boris finally managed to call his General Election in the wake of the proroguing of Parliament, and Brits found themselves confronted by a welcome democratic disruption to the annual assault of Christmas, the most blinkered and diehard still imagined the British people would come round to their way of thinking; Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson was unashamedly candid in her promise that her party would do its utmost to scrap Brexit if it found itself holding the balance of power. In the end, Swinson lost her seat. But there were others who never even got to that stage; eager to avoid a ‘Portillo Moment’, these were the ones who bottled it before their constituents had the opportunity to have their say.

Once the December Election was given the go-ahead, you suddenly couldn’t move for MPs voluntarily walking the plank in anticipation of the public shoving them off it. Sure, it’s not uncommon for veterans to announce their intention to stand down on the eve of an Election, but never before had so many Bright Young Things done likewise; a fair few had been earmarked as ones-to-watch, with some (in the case of the governing Conservatives) rising through the ranks to Cabinet posts with such speed that they were seen as potential future leaders. Amber Rudd, Justin Greening, Rory Stewart and Jo Johnson were some of the younger quitters from the Tories who jumped before the electorate pushed, whilst Jezza’s 15-minute challenger Owen Smith did likewise from Labour ranks. Some, such as the Scottish Conservative saviour Ruth Davidson, had quit upon Boris Johnson gaining the keys to No.10, whereas Tom ‘Bunter’ Watson got out because his embarrassing association with serial paedophile liar Carl Beech had ended his hopes of the Labour leadership; incidentally, both Davidson and Watson now sit in the Lords, having a hand in the passing of legislation without being answerable to the electorate. Nice work if you can get it.

Although some of the most prominent Remoaners did indeed have their Portillo Moments come the General Election – Jo Swinson, Chuck Umunna, Anna Soubry and Heidi Allen being the most notable – most had gone before the public had their say. And whilst their decision to stand down at a relatively young age (for an MP) was undeniably influenced by the humiliating drubbing they anticipated, it also highlighted just how much being a people’s representative is little more than another impressive notch on a CV for many of today’s intake into Parliament. It’ll look good when fishing for the directorship of a hedge fund company, I guess. Whatever happened to public service? Dennis Skinner may have lost his seat in 2019, but he’d put in almost half-a-century at Westminster; Tony Benn had surrendered a peerage and gone all the way to changing the law in order for him to continue as an MP, so committed was he to the cause of public service; these guys put the hours in and were there for more than a chance to appear on ‘Strictly’ or join Matt Hancock in the jungle one day. Indeed, as even Russell Brand pointed out on a recent YT video, how low have we sunk that the only place in which the opportunity to confront the former Health Secretary with the consequences of his pandemic actions is not in the Commons or on ‘Question Time’, but on an ITV reality show, where he’s grilled not by Andrew Neil but by Boy George?

Apparently, there was even a recent reality show in which two past political figures who’ve never stood for election in their lives – Alastair Campbell and Baroness Warsi – acted as the expert judges overseeing a bunch of ‘Apprentice’-style wannabes competing to become an imaginary Prime Minister; as far as I’m aware, Liz Truss was not amongst the contenders. Although I didn’t see the programme, I’ve a pretty good idea of the kind of show it was – after all, most TV produced in the name of ‘entertainment’ today follows a formula based on one hit show that is then reproduced endlessly; but maybe a public utterly exhausted with mendacious MPs evading every question put to them on a serious political programme see this route as the way forward for our elected representatives? And maybe our elected representatives are thinking along similar lines. It could perhaps offer one explanation as to why the public respond more to voting a celebrity out of the jungle than they do to voting candidates in or out of office; and it could also explain why those candidates view their political careers as merely another job they do for a bit before looking for something else.

Moreover, this situation could equally explain why so many recent recruits to the Commons Chamber come across as so lightweight and uninspiring compared to most of yesteryear’s big beasts. The intense level of commitment and the hunger to change society for the better is simply not there anymore, nor is the unswerving conviction that they actually have it in them to do so. Last time round, those that abandoned ship before the 2019 iceberg hit did so because they knew nobody would offer them a lifeboat; this time round, with polls pointing towards a similar catastrophe for the Conservative Party as a whole (rather than just its Remainer rebels), some have already revealed their indifference to public service by announcing their intentions to stand down before the date of the next General Election has even been decided.

The most invigorating incident of the 2019 Election from a Tory perspective was the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall and the once-unimaginable capture of eternal Labour strongholds by young Conservative upstarts; yet, the casual approach to commitment so prevalent in careerist politicians who seem to view their Honourable Member status as no different from being on the board of a financial institution or some soulless corporation surfaced again when 29-year-old Dehenna Davison, who won Bishop Auckland for the Tories in 2019, announced she’d be standing down next time round. One could argue Boris blew all the advantages that came with the Red Wall seats and that the chances of Davison’s re-election may have been rendered slim as a result, but it still seems to suggest Parliament is no more than ‘work experience’ for the young MP passing through en route to a more profitable position, as though it were some gap-year assignment in an African village; if that is indeed the case, the electorate will be better off without any of them; but one suspects whoever succeeds them will be cut from the same transient cloth.

© The Editor

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WOMAN’S WORLD

‘Hard Times’, the often-overlooked 1854 novel by Charles Dickens set in a fictitious Northern Powerhouse named Coketown, features the character of Thomas Gradgrind, a school board superintendent whose rigid adherence to cold, hard facts at the expense of imagination is drilled into the children in his charge; one of his star pupils is known as Bitzer, a humourless product of Gradgrind’s educational model. Towards the end of the book, Bitzer – who has matured into an emotionless bank clerk allergic to any appeal to humanity against which his education has immunised him – appears unmoved by Gradgrind’s change of heart, and Gradgrind belatedly realises the error of his ways. In many ways, the story is a morality tale based upon the ‘you reap what you sow’ maxim, but it could also be interpreted as a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’. The character of Bitzer is a warning of what can happen when a malleable individual is exposed to an immovable ideology at an impressionable age by those too full of their own righteousness to countenance the possibility that their utterly inflexible dogma might not be the be-all and end-all after all. But it is too late.

For some reason, ‘Hard Times’ sprang to mind when I was watching an interview on the ‘Triggernometry’ YT channel with Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull, better known by her user-name of Posie Parker, the so-called ‘anti-Trans activist’ (© Wikipedia) who has endured a campaign by the MSM and social media over the past three or four years demonising her as a (Shock! Horror!) free speech advocate and campaigner for women’s rights. The interview included graphic descriptions of the kind of state-sponsored butchery which even Nazi surgeons would’ve regarded as a bit much, but brainwashed ‘Trans-teens’ are subjected to in pursuit of their perceived human rights, and was an eye-opener as well as further sad confirmation of the sorry state we’re in. But it also made me think of the long-term feminisation of the western world, something which is all around us (often in the most innocuous places), and something that has perhaps led us to where we are now, including the brand of insanity Posie Parker has based her public career in opposition to.

It made me wonder if the way in which traditional masculine virtues have been repeatedly rebranded in a negative light over the past two or three decades – AKA ‘toxic masculinity’ – could be indirectly responsible for the extremities of the Trans movement that Posie Parker is such a virulent opponent of. Whilst some men have been driven towards suicide by a society that regards their once-prized qualities as poison, others – specifically on the far fringes of the Trans cult – have dealt with the negativity by aping ‘feminine’ characteristics to the point whereby they come across as female caricatures, straight out of a sensationalistic 90s ‘Jerry Springer Show’ dealing with drag queens. But their freak-show personas make sense in some respects; it is almost as though they’ve realised the only way in which they can be validated as human beings in an increasingly feminised society is to transform themselves into women – even if that transformation neatly sidesteps all the awkward and uncomfortable biological factors that separate natural-born men from natural-born women.

As part of the illusion, they simply pretend to be in possession of these factors, such as pregnancy and menstruation – just witness the revamped unisex marketing of female-exclusive products like tampons in recent years – and their successful monopolisation of the victim narrative so prevalent within mainstream culture has guaranteed them the co-operation of a corporate world eager to signal its virtue; the near-religious worship of the Stonewall interpretation of LGBTXYZ values before which all have to bow down has enabled them to implement their non-binary fantasy into every strata of society and to indoctrinate another gullible generation in the process. But we already have one generation that has been taught the only way to get on and get ahead is to be a woman rather than a man. Over-representation within the MSM as a hackneyed method of compensating for past discrepancies has its undoubted drawbacks – even my mother has complained she’s sick of women presenting everything on television, particularly sports programmes; but this is one of the more noticeable results of submitting to the demands of radical feminism. There are no contemporary Des Lynam or Dickie Davies figures for granny to drool over anymore; they have to make do with the likes of Alex Scott because women obviously only want to see other women on their TV screens. A younger female friend of mine made a similar complaint that all the male presenters today seem to be gay, but that’s what diversity and inclusivity’s all about innit. TV executives used to make the same mistake when producing kids shows presented by kids; they didn’t twig that kids didn’t want to see other kids on the telly; kids actually want to see grownups instead of nauseating little brats they fantasise about punching.

There are far more serious unforeseen side-effects when one chooses to use radical feminism as a blueprint for society, however; is it any wonder some men conclude that avoiding the dreaded masculinity and embracing what they believe to be feminine traits is the way forward if social mores have been reorganised to fit the Rad Fem agenda? The ‘fashion acccessory’ Trans-fanatics that aren’t prepared to commit to the time-consuming surgical processes of actual transition but imagine wearing a dress and donning makeup is enough are the monsters that radical feminists have created. And this is the monster that has come back to bite them, for now we have men in drag encroaching into women’s spaces that legislation provoked by radical feminist doctrines has facilitated. So, we end up with a sadly ironic situation that has diminished hard-won women’s rights and has marginalised biological women to a reduced status within society once again – a place where they’re described as ‘bleeders’ or ‘birthing people’ in official literature produced by the likes of the NHS so as not to offend the Trans lobby, where the actual word ‘women’ itself has become so loaded that even a darling of the Left such as JK Rowling can be cast out, ostracised and blacklisted from polite society for daring to say it.

Posie Parker claims that the ultimate manifestation of ‘toxic masculinity’ is the adoption by some men of female trademarks in order to pass themselves off as women and to therefore be accepted by a western world that has remodelled itself along feminine lines – and she may well have a point. When we think of toxic masculinity we usually picture a pea-brained macho idiot who talks of women solely based on their physical attributes; but some of the unhinged Trans activists who turned up to protest outside the venues comprising Posie Parker’s recent US visit were – for all their superficial co-opting of visual female tropes – far more vociferous and vicious in their aggressive misogyny towards the actual women attending than a mob of MAGA hat-wearing rednecks. By exposing their surgically-manufactured breasts in a show of narcissistic exhibitionism and haranguing attendees, they did far more damage to their own cause than someone like Posie Parker could ever do; but it does make one wonder why such evidently mentally-ill individuals are so indulged in their imaginary worldview. Or is this the actual patriarchy in action, not the old-school, testosterone-fuelled male stereotype, but reborn as the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing of imitation women – the worst kind of toxic masculinity?

The pendulum which once swung in a very masculine direction appears today to have swung to the absolute opposite, yet the one place it would work for both sexes is somewhere in the middle, a place where there is room for the old-style male and female archetypes as well as those that borrow a bit from both and blur the lines in a healthy fashion. But that’s not where we’re at right now, unfortunately; like Thomas Gradgrind, we’re confronted by a poisonous harvest of our own making.

© The Editor

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WILKO AND OUT

Having lost three friends to cancer in the past five years, I’m well aware that no diagnosis delivered to the luckless recipient ever states that he or she has nine years to live; cancer diagnosis on the whole tends to deal with months rather than years, and celebrated guitarist Wilko Johnson was informed way back in 2013 that he had less than twelve months of life left to look forward to. Following this announcement, Johnson threw himself into a workload characteristic of someone conscious of the clock ticking; he recorded an LP with Roger Daltrey of The Who, knocked-off in a week due to it not containing any original material, and the result of their collaboration – ‘Going Back Home’ – was released in March 2014, reaching the Top 3 of the album charts, the biggest commercial success either man had enjoyed in over 30 years. By the time of its release, Johnson had already completed what he understandably referred to as his ‘farewell tour’, but it turned out the cancer he’d been informed would kill him was not inoperable after all, and he underwent surgery to have the tumour successfully removed. For several years, Wilko Johnson was a living, breathing survivor of a disease that seemingly remains immune to all that medical science can throw at it – a man who had spurned the double-edged sword of chemotherapy, the delaying tactic that often leaves its victims in a worse state than the actual cancer that provoked it; and now he’s gone at the age of 75.

Despite expressing concerns he’d be largely remembered as ‘that cancer bloke’ as opposed to the explosive axe-man his previous reputation was based upon, Wilko Johnson’s legend was relatively secure as a pioneer, a key figure who served as a bridge between two iconic eras in British pop music. ‘Oil City Confidential’, Julien Temple’s acclaimed 2009 film biography of Dr Feelgood, the band Johnson made his name with, was a reminder of just how important – if briefly – Dr Feelgood were in shaping the change of direction that occurred in the mid-1970s. It provided some intriguing background on the band’s roots, with a particularly fascinating clip from an early 70s TV debate on the future development of Johnson’s Canvey Island hometown in which a long-haired Johnson heckles a pompous politician sticking up for the oil companies that had scarred the landscape of that coastal Essex outpost. The documentary also featured an eye-opening snippet of Johnson as a hired guitarist bolstering the performance of early 60s fifteen-minute teen idol Heinz when he played low down on the bill at Wembley Stadium’s memorable Rock ‘n’ Roll Show in 1972.

John Peter Wilkinson – AKA Wilko Johnson – had already followed the hippie route to India by the time he joined the band that morphed into Dr Feelgood in the early 70s, shortly to become a fixture on the nascent ‘Pub Rock’ scene of the period; perhaps having sampled enough spiritual sustenance, Johnson decided to revert back to the R&B blueprint of British Rock when he began his musical odyssey. Pub Rock was viewed as an affordable alternative to the then-dominant Prog orthodoxy in the UK, offering a revival of the kind of sounds that had been routine in the club scene prior to Psychedelia and then Prog elevating pop to Art and relocating its stage from subterranean dive to vast arena, pricing many punters out of the market. Whilst most acts grouped under the Pub Rock banner pedalled a nostalgic dead-end form of music guaranteed to appeal to few beyond the veterans of the original British R&B boom of the 60s, the Feelgoods were in possession of an agitated urgency that had more relevance to the 70s and was mirrored on the other side of the Atlantic in the embryonic New York Punk scene.

Unique amongst the Pub Rockers, Dr Feelgood gradually attracted a large fanatical following drawn to their energetic live performances. Vocalist Lee Brilleaux was a distinctively menacing frontman, whilst Wilko Johnson was a one-off guitarist, pacing up and down the stage as though he was receiving ECT the minute he plugged his axe in, duck-walking like Chuck Berry on cheap speed; the pair bestrode their platform with a defiantly anti-showbiz ambience that was enhanced by their unusual (for the time) image – dressed in sharp suits and wearing cropped haircuts; it’s often been said that Dr Feelgood resembled a villainous gang of blaggers from ‘The Sweeney’ rather than a rock band of the era, yet this truism places them very much in that violent and brutal mid-70s period instead of the cosy cul-de-sac many of the Pub Rock acts seemed content to inhabit; when Malcolm McLaren was putting The Sex Pistols together, he’d routinely take his snotty young charges to see the Feelgoods live, with the spotlight firmly on Wilko Johnson’s manic contortions as the way forward. Remarkably, the record-buying public followed suit.

In terms of pop music serving as a relevant soundtrack to the chaotic times in which it was produced, maybe the best place to look in 1976 wasn’t necessarily amongst the chart-topping albums of the year. Old timers such as Perry Como, Roy Orbison, Slim Whitman, Bert Weedon and The Beach Boys scored No.1 LPs, as did more contemporary acts like Queen, Status Quo, Rod Stewart and Led Zeppelin. And, of course, there was the mighty Abba, complementing their trio of No.1 singles in ’76 with their first volume of greatest hits topping the album charts twice that year. Yet, alongside the more predictable fare of the era was an LP titled ‘Stupidity’, which shot straight in at No.1 and held the top spot for one week in October. ‘Stupidity’ was the only real commercial smash to emerge from the Pub Rock scene and was, fittingly, a live album; it was the third LP release from Dr Feelgood, hot on the heels of two albums that, despite being critically-acclaimed, hadn’t suggested the band were destined to dethrone The Stylistics at the top of the charts; but they did. They hadn’t even dented the singles charts yet, which made the achievement all the more impressive.

For an extremely brief period, it suddenly seemed Pub Rock was where it was at – the sound of the past reinvented and reinvigorated for the future; and then Punk happened. Overnight, thanks to a timely encounter with a pissed-up reactionary name of Bill Grundy, The Sex Pistols stole Pub Rock’s thunder; their sound may have borrowed some of the razor-sharp intensity to be heard on ‘Stupidity’, but it dispensed with the old-school R&B tropes and its snarl was that of the adolescent. Wilko Johnson was born in 1947 – Johnny Rotten was born in 1956; at a time when 30 was considered a cut-off point when it came to pop culture, the younger man won out. Just four months after The Sex Pistols earned their notoriety effing and blinding on teatime TV, Johnson and Dr Feelgood went their separate ways; although the band managed to capitalise on the success of ‘Stupidity’ by remaining a popular live draw and finally scored a Top 10 hit in 1979 with ‘Milk and Alcohol’, their amazing impact in 1976 thanks to the dynamic double-act of Wilko and Brilleaux was limited to that solitary year. Pop music had picked-up its pace again and the Feelgoods were left behind.

Wilko Johnson formed his own band and also had a brief stint in Ian Dury’s Blockheads; unfortunately, the dream marriage of two of British music’s most charismatic eccentrics didn’t quite work out, and Johnson was thereafter a peripheral figure on the music scene, hovering around the same hinterland as the likes of John Cooper Clarke and John Otway. But the Julien Temple documentary on the Feelgoods revived interest in the band and gave them some long-overdue credit for their significant place in the scheme of things; Johnson’s reputation received a boost due to the amusing eloquence he displayed in the film, and even led to him being cast in ‘Game of Thrones’. And then came the cancer, something he himself had already experienced first-hand when it claimed his wife of more than three decades in 2004; Johnson’s philosophical stoicism when confronted by the disease and then his remarkable survival served to seal his status as an alternative national treasure, but his death robs the nation of the kind of character we once had in abundance and now appear to ration. We’re all the poorer for it.

© The Editor

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HEART AND SOUL

They may have been produced as ten-minute fillers to be screened between the support film and the main feature back when a night at the flicks wasn’t restricted to a solitary movie preceded by a hundred annoying ads, but the likes of Rank’s ‘Look at Life’ series now serve as a portal to a lost world arguably more fascinating than the films they propped-up. Running from 1959 to 1969, the ‘Look at Life’ shorts were shot on top notch 35mm film in crystal-clear Eastmancolor and show a Britain we’re more accustomed to seeing through a murky monochrome lens; as a result, they make the era come alive and are a unique archive of everyday life in the UK at the time. Like the rival series, ‘Pathé Pictorial’, there’s a hangover from the old cinema newsreels in that each short is accompanied by an RP voice-over and a jaunty, jolly soundtrack in the Light Programme fashion; but this merely adds to the period charm. By the late 60s, audiences becoming used to the grittier documentary techniques of television no doubt found them rather antiquated in style, though the visual record they left behind is increasingly invaluable.

From the dawn of talking pictures to the beginning of the 1970s (when the small screen had more or less completely taken over the format), documentary shorts of this ilk were a staple diet of cinema-going, though many of the ‘instructional’ variety eventually found an unlikely home on TV as ‘Trade Test Colour Films’ during the early years of colour television, when they were broadcast on BBC2 in the barren daytime hours. Unsurprisingly, as an established cinematic sub-genre, the documentary short wasn’t entirely in the hands of Rank and Pathé; several other studios specialised in producing them. British Transport Films was another company that provided endless behind-the-scenes profiles of industries and trades a well as focusing on the day-to-day experiences of Brits. One such British Transport short is 1962’s ‘All That Mighty Heart’, the title lifted from the celebrated poem by Wordsworth, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’. This 1802 ode to London at the crack of dawn is recited at the film’s opening as we see the sun slowly rising over the city and follow the morning rituals of those whose professions necessitate an early start.

The London the film portrays is one that wouldn’t be out of place in a Ladybird book; indeed, the colourful clarity of the capital on a summer’s day uncannily echoes the vivid illustrations to be found in such pages. Bright red Routemaster buses are in abundance, as are the Times crossword-studying gents commuting on the Tube and proper Bobbies in the Sgt Dixon mould; even the fact that the first act of the geezer whose alarm clock signifies his day begins at 6:45am is to reach for a fag and cough his guts up is as much a distant sign of the times as his missus collecting the milk bottles from the doorstep. I myself recently re-cut many of the film’s scenes for a video of my own, accompanying its day-in-the-life narrative with theme tunes and snippets from mainstays of BBC Radio that had been the aural wallpaper for a generation by this time. The likes of ‘Housewives’ Choice’, ‘Music While You Work’, ‘Listen with Mother’, ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’. ‘The Archers’ and ‘In Town Tonight’ all feature, along with snatches of the Third Programme and Network Three before the day draws to a close with the forecast for coastal waters. I guess nobody who appeared in the film could ever have imagined a day without such signposts, yet even though a small handful of those mainstays cling on into the present day, most are museum pieces in the 21st century, distancing now even further from then.

But we don’t simply visit the usual tourist haunts and famous streets in ‘All That Mighty Heart’; we also observe sporting venues like Lord’s and Wimbledon as well as London Zoo. We also see the suburbs as a pretty young housewife’s progress from her newly-built estate to a newly-built shopping precinct is tracked. She waves off handsome hubby to work from the doorstep as the two of them resemble one of those impossibly-innocent kissing couples on the sleeve of a Sinatra Capitol LP. Then she’s shown beginning the washing before dolling herself up to catch the bus and excitedly anticipating the consumerist ceremony sneeringly described by The Rolling Stones in ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ – ‘So she buys her instant cake/and she burns her frozen steak’ – doing so in the sparkling supermarket that constitutes a vital element of the Modernist master-plan of the suburban shopping precinct, one which looks like it was seamlessly transplanted directly from the corporation architect’s drawing-board.

The sight will be familiar to anyone who can recall ‘Mary, Mungo and Midge’, the turn-of-the-70s pre-school children’s show that depicted life from a child’s perspective in one of the high-rises of that brave new world; everything is so spotlessly immaculate, from the materials that comprise the houses to the manicured lawns and verges surrounding them. There isn’t a sprinkling of litter or ugly graffiti to be seen. This optimistic portrayal of the ‘homes for heroes’ ideal that characterised the first quarter-century of redevelopment after WWII is never better illustrated than in a film from the dawn of the 60s, a time before corrupt councillors were bribed by bent builders to cut corners and erect their shoddy Brutalist tributes to Le Corbusier prior to their multiple faults being exposed to unfortunate tenants via rising damp and mould, or them simply collapsing of their own accord. Within less than two decades, most were bulldozed from the landscape and the great post-war dream of a Utopian Jerusalem in concrete was erased from the history books as an embarrassing episode we don’t talk about in front of the children. How unimaginable all that is in ‘All That Mighty Heart’ – a long way from the few surviving estates degenerating into the crumbling sinks we avoid today.

It goes without saying that it’s an idealised version of Britain, one that consciously overlooks the grinding poverty and social injustices that many members of the country’s population were experiencing at the time it was produced; but it’s not a film intended to highlight such issues, merely to present the aspirational lifestyle that the incoming age of social mobility was to make within the reach of thousands before the window sealed-up again at the end of the 20th century. In its own way, it apes the similarly idealised images of the American Dream that characterised Eisenhower’s USA of the 50s; those images also obscured numerous uncomfortable truths, but proved enduring as a selling point to outsiders looking-in, and as many of the British cinematic shorts of the 60s were exported to the colonies, it was important to uphold a positive image of the mother country.

In my own edit, I inserted clips from a contemporary public information film that encourages a nascent Neighbourhood Watch approach, as a shifty character in a shabby suit is spotted on one of those shiny new estates whilst he tries a few doors of houses with hubby at work and his wife at the shopping precinct. A vigilant housewife dials 999 and a chain of events is set in motion that concludes with the opportunistic thief being apprehended by a police patrol car before he’s even exited the estate. This in itself is as much an image of a vanished Britain as anything in the original film and offers curious comfort that if crime should be noted and reported it will actually be dealt with. Besides, is the vision of Britain as seen in the likes of ‘All That Mighty Heart’ any less idealised than the vision of Britain as espoused by someone like Sadiq Khan, which likes to portray the nation as a kind of permanent multicultural Pride parade? Both visions contain grains of truth, but neither can be said to accurately reflect the attitude of the country as a whole; therefore, we can look back at ‘Look at Life’, ‘Pathé Pictorial’ or ‘All That Mighty Heart’ and genuinely mourn what we’ve lost, because we have lost something, even if it was merely an ideal.

© The Editor

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BACKSIDE OF THE NET

Alas poor Mick – the former Southampton centre forward named Channon was one of the few permanent fixtures of the unstable era in English international football that constituted the sad decline and fall of Sir Alf Ramsey as well as the inconsistent tenure of Don Revie. Mick Channon made his England debut in 1972 and played his final game for his country in 1977. At a time when England were incapable of finding a settled side and rarely played the same line-up two games running, Channon’s name was one of the few automatic choices on the team-sheet, and he collected a total of 46 caps, scoring 21 goals over five years. Yet he remains the most-capped Englishman never to have played in a World Cup or European Championships tournament, for he was prominent amongst a generation of great English footballers that also included the likes of Tony Currie, Gerry Francis, Roy McFarland and Malcolm Macdonald – men who unfortunately missed out on the kind of international competition today’s players take for granted because they were playing at the wrong time.

The 1970s was a curious period, almost reminiscent of that pre-war era of international football, when the England team effectively opted-out of the World Cup, regarding the newfangled tournament as being somehow beneath them; at least the team tried to qualify during the 70s rather than declining to participate, but they still failed to do so. The blow to national morale that came with the fatal draw against Poland at Wembley in October 1973 meant that, for the first time since their inaugural entry in 1950, England wouldn’t be going to the World Cup Finals. To add insult to injury, Scotland had qualified, and the tournament would be held in the backyard of another old enemy, West Germany; oh, and the Germans ended up winning it as well. 1974 could have been written off as an unpleasant blip for English football, but it happened again four years later.

After having to pretend to support Scotland at the 1978 World Cup (something that didn’t stretch much beyond the lacklustre draw with Iran), it was a relief that England finally qualified for the 1982 tournament; for my generation, it was the first time we’d been able to cheer on our own country in the contest, and the excitement in the build-up – along with familiar, misplaced optimism – was something that has become mandatory ever since; well, until this year. Indeed, given the uniquely low-key overture to the 2022 World Cup, you’d be forgiven for not knowing it kicks-off this coming Sunday. I’ve never previously experienced such muted hyperbole preceding the World Cup before, especially with England participating; and, for once, England go into a tournament having performed exceptionally well at the previous two – semi-finalists in the 2018 World Cup and runners-up at Euro 2020. However, there are reasons for this noticeable dearth of enthusiasm, and it says a great deal about the multi-million dollar business the beautiful game has become in recent years.

Qatar is a country that has never qualified for the World Cup and has no footballing pedigree whatsoever. It had no notable stadia when winning the right to host the tournament, so embarked upon an intensive building programme thereafter, undertaken by cheap migrant labour; many of the exploited labourers died during the construction of this stadia, though estimates vary as to the numbers. Mind you, considering summer temperatures in the country can reach up to 113º Fahrenheit, it’s probably fair to say hard labour in such conditions isn’t recommended. The searing heat is utterly unsuitable for running around a football pitch for 90 minutes, which is why a sacred tradition has been broken to accommodate the fact and this World Cup has been put back to the end of the year. Of course, this has meant the suspension of domestic league programmes, smack bang in the middle of the season; league football is the weekly bread-and-butter of the football fan, and the majority would rather see their own club win the title or the cup than have their international team do well instead. World Cups and Euros have increasingly become a summer side-dish to the main course of club football – the snack between meals you can eat without ruining your appetite; the prospect of a season being interrupted just so the World Cup can be held in an appalling autocracy where being gay means a prison sentence and women are second-class citizens frankly stinks. Sure, countries with dubious human rights records have held global sporting events before – the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the 1978 Argentina World Cup, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and indeed the very last World Cup, which was held in bloody Russia. But this feels even worse.

The awarding of the World Cup to Qatar back in 2010 embodies everything that is ugly, obscene and unedifying about football today. 11 of the 22 members of FIFA’s Executive Committee who gave the vote to Qatar twelve years ago have subsequently been suspended, indicted, banned or fined; two were excluded from the decision-making process even before it took place due to allegations they’d offered to sell their votes; a year after the right to host was won by Qatar, the Sunday Times alleged two other committee members had each been paid one and-a-half million dollars to vote the right way. The stench of bribery, corruption and brown paper bags has not cleared since the disgraced voting of 2010; anybody with half-a-brain knows the sole reason the World Cup went to a footballing backwater like Qatar was that Qatar bought the tournament. And this blatant truism has definitely filtered through to the TV stations, presenters and pundits, who are conspicuously quieter than usual. One gets the feeling that even the overenthusiastic cheerleaders for the competition are ashamed, toning down their normal giddiness at the prospect of the World Cup being just days away.

Unsurprisingly, some in the game have echoed FIFA’a scruples by taking the money and running with it, struggling to uphold their routine Woke posturing in the face of hilarious hypocrisy. Just a couple of months on from winning plaudits after choosing to queue-up to see Her Majesty’s coffin at Westminster Hall rather than using his celebrity status to jump that queue, David Beckham’s reputation is in the gutter following revelations of a handsome gratuity from his Qatari paymasters; similarly, infuriatingly right-on pundit Gary Neville – the arch-advocate of taking the knee – has decided not to boycott the World Cup and will instead be covering the contest on site, for a mouth-watering fee. It was almost a throwback to the glory days of ‘Have I Got News for You’ when Ian Hislop ripped into Neville a couple of weeks back, and he was as deserving of it as Matt Hancock is of being showered in koala crap on his own primetime reality show. But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. After two years of bombarding football fans with nothing but political issues and slogans, the football authorities are now claiming politics has no place in the sport and supporters should concentrate on the games instead of questioning the ethics of holding the World Cup in a country like Qatar. You couldn’t make it up.

When the MSM has cautiously touched upon those ethics, the focus has predictably been the threat to travelling members of the ‘LGBTXYZ Community’, something a Qatari World Cup Ambassador provided ammunition for by stating, ‘Homosexuality is damage in the mind’. But as football isn’t primarily regarded as a particularly ‘gay’ sport, the impact of such prejudice is probably more minimal than some of the other unsavoury elements surrounding the whole atrocious circus. Like most, I’ll no doubt tune in to see how England fare, but I won’t be especially annoyed if they fail to make it out of the group stages this time round. The sooner the team are jetting home to prepare for the recommencement of the domestic season, the better. Qatar bought the tournament, so Qatar may as well buy the bloody trophy; let them have it. Any other winner would only be tainted by association.

© The Editor

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UP THE HILL BACKWARDS

Even the most fanatically slavish supporter of the EU view of Europe must be able to see by now that Britain’s commitment to the great European adventure was always half-hearted at best. Throughout the on-off negotiations of the 60s and old big nose’s repeated ‘Non’, the UK’s emotional and sentimental connections to anywhere beyond these islands were largely restricted to the Commonwealth, with the cultural exports of another English-speaking ex-colony (the USA) running a close second. Europe to the British wasn’t some shiny new experiment in democratic brotherhood, but something mired in monochrome memories of the War, or typified by the nonsensical nursery rhymes of funny foreigners at the Eurovision or giant foam creatures on ‘Jeux Sans Frontières’, or associated with cheap continental holidays in which the Great British tradition of bacchanalian Blackpool debauchery was re-enacted on a foreign field. For all of Ted Heath’s enthusiasm, the Brit masses never really embraced Europe in the way their political overlords did, so should the events of 2016 have really come as a great surprise? And, despite the ongoing pro-Euro stance of the MSM and the hackneyed game of blaming everything on Brexit whilst pandemic policies are rewarded with an ‘amnesty’, one only need take note of the disproportionate coverage last week’s midterm American elections received over here.

An actual Presidential Election of the kind we only get every four years is, to a degree, understandable; but midterm? It’s been bad enough this year having to endure two Tory leadership contests in which a miniscule proportion of the electorate got to choose this country’s Prime Minister, but at least their decision had a direct impact on the lives of the rest of us. Who really cares in Blighty if the Democrats or Republicans capture a State most Americans, let alone Brits, would struggle to locate on the map? A week ago last Tuesday, Radio 4 cancelled its usual late night schedule and devoted no less than 6 hours 20 minutes to live coverage of the US midterm elections. For all the supposed unity we’re repeatedly told we naturally share with our continental cousins on the European mainland, I can’t recall the last time France or Germany were the recipients of such generous reportage when their people visited the local polling station. The fact is we’re still in thrall to the American Dream, however hard the mainstream media’s EU cheerleaders try to persuade us otherwise.

I admit I didn’t personally pay much attention to last week’s midterm US elections, despite the blanket coverage it was difficult to avoid. That said, the predictable announcement by Donald Trump that he intends to run for the Republican candidacy again in 2024 is something guaranteed to prick up the ears of even the most disinterested overseas observer bereft of the vote. Sleepy Joe has yet to confirm his intentions to run in 1974…sorry, 2024 – had a bit of a Biden moment there; but the prospect of two befuddled geriatrics squaring up to each other again as though fighting for their place in the post office queue to cash their pensions doesn’t exactly fill one with optimism for the future of the West’s solitary superpower at a moment when the West is at its most vulnerable in living memory. The Republicans’ underwhelming performance in the midterms was something many attributed to Trump’s unwelcome intervention, with the chances of the Party taking power in the House of Representatives remaining in the balance whilst the Democrats have retained the Senate.

As though proving once and for all that the Donald is effectively a one-man party with no sense of loyalty to the Republican cause beyond the fruitcake fringes he appeals to, this announcement is probably music to the ears of most Democrats and the last thing most moderate Republicans needed to hear. The candidates Trump gave his blessing to last week, in the likes of Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all failed to win; their attempts to ape Trump’s more extreme claims – such as his conviction of being robbed of the 2020 Presidential Election – didn’t connect with voters, though one Republican who managed to achieve a considerable success by eschewing fanciful and discredited conspiracy theories was summarily dismissed by the Donald – Ron DeSantis. The Florida Governor achieved over 1.5 million votes, despite a political CV stretching back barely a decade; and whilst Trump conveniently avoided being drafted to Vietnam, DeSantis served a tour of duty in Iraq when a member of the US Navy. His popularity in Florida may have irked Trump into nicknaming him ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’, but some Republicans are looking to DeSantis as a more credible alternative to another journey into the absurd with Trump, a journey that threatens to scupper any hopes the Republicans have of recapturing the White House two years from now.

DeSantis was the man who infamously staged the headline-grabbing stunt that saw him chartering a plane to deliver a bunch of migrants to the rich-man’s playground of Martha’s Vineyard to see how immigration appeasers coped with migrants in their manicured backyard; he’s publicly opposed Critical Race Theory and Trans propaganda indoctrination in schools; he was vocal about his disapproval of OTT restrictions during the pandemic; he put his signature to anti-riot legislation when Democrat politicians were giving BLM and their affiliated anarchists free rein to burn down American communities; and he’s made his feelings on the Culture Wars crystal clear with statements such as, ‘We’re not gonna let this State descend into some sort of Woke dumpster-fire’. In short, he’s saying the kind of things that appeal to a huge swathe of the American electorate who feel left out in the cold by the progressive agenda of the Biden administration, and he’s doing so without attaching himself to the kind of redneck yahoos that venerate Trump – the very tribe that could cost the Republicans in 2024 if Trump’s candidacy is approved.

Certainly, if anyone’s star is rising in the Republican Party right now it’s that of Ron DeSantis, making him the only real contender capable of taking on Trump and crushing the prospect of the Second Coming – should he choose to run. Other hats thrown into the ring by commentators include the one belonging to the Vice President Mike Pence, the Born-Again Christian with former connections to the noughties loony tunes movement known as the Tea Party; Trumps’ former Secretary of State and CIA director Mike Pompeo is another name being tossed around, as is Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz – even though she’s a considerable rank outsider, having voted for Trump to be impeached and losing her Wyoming seat as a consequence; but Republicans dreading the Donald’s return are desperate for someone to come along to neuter the possibility of the Party being forever tarnished as a refuge for the more deranged members of America’s electorate.

Comebacks, particularly political ones, rarely work; even Boris Johnson found that out just a few weeks ago when he realised he lacked the numbers needed to be able to stroll back into Downing Street. Perhaps the most notable comeback in US history was that of Richard Nixon in 1968; after losing to JFK in the Presidential Election eight years previously, Eisenhower’s Vice President had a long spell in the wilderness, failing in his 1962 bid to become Governor of California and being written off as a has-been. His surprise winning of the Republican candidacy in 1968 was aided by Lyndon Johnson dramatically pulling out and by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy leaving the Democrats without a suitably charismatic candidate; Tricky Dicky’s remarkable triumph was achieved without him having previously served as President, however, and the likelihood of a man like Trump, whose tenure in the White House still reads like a surrealist soap opera, regaining the keys to the Oval Office is something of a long-shot. His slate is far from clean now – if it ever was – and backward steps are not the way forward.

© The Editor

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LONDON CALLING

Many years ago I visited a museum housing the numerous inventions of Thomas Edison and heard with my own ears his 1878 recording of ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ on a tinfoil sheet via phonograph cylinder, having been led to believe it was the first-ever recording of the human voice. I subsequently learnt of Edison’s protection racket that forced the embryonic moving picture industry to relocate from the East Coast to the West, and was pleased to discover this apparently unpleasant individual had been beaten to sound recording by the best part of 20 years. It is now officially acknowledged that the actual inaugural recording of the human voice took place in 1860 by a Frenchman, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. It’s worth putting his achievement into context by noting other events of 1860. This is the year that saw the publication of George Eliot’s ‘The Mill on the Floss’, Wilkie Collins’s ‘The Woman in White’, and the beginning of Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’ as serialised in his magazine, ‘All the Year Round’; it was the year that Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce defended Darwin’s theories in one of the most famous Oxford University debates, with none other than Lewis Carroll (AKA Charles Dodgson) in attendance; and the further laying of future foundations took place with the first recognised football fixture, Sheffield FC versus Hallam FC, as well as the opening of the first-ever fish & chip shops.

So, into this mid-Victorian melee we’re all familiar with arrives the means of preserving the present on tape – or paper, or cylinder, whichever you prefer. However one looks at it, this was one of the great breakthroughs of mankind in an epoch that seemed to contain an abundance of them. Like all inventions of the 19th century, it took place with simultaneous experiments that would eventually combine to produce the mass-media communications of the 20th century, with radio being the first beneficiary. The technology of wireless telegraphy can be dated as far back as the 1830s, but numerous pioneers in the field throughout the 19th century led the way to the groundbreaking visionary Gugliemro Marconi, who set up his own company in 1894 to develop the potential of wireless telegraphy centred on Hertzian radio transmission waves. Marconi worked out a way to transmit signals around a mile and-a-half, which was then believed to be as far as radio waves could be transmitted; once Marconi calculated the means of transmitting as far as two miles, he was awarded a British patent and established a radio station on the Isle of Wight in 1897 as well as opening a wireless factory in Chelmsford.

At the same time that Marconi was working in the UK, the Canadian-American inventor Reginald Fessenden was claiming he’d transmitted the human voice rather than Morse Code messages by 1900, managing a distance of a mile; Fessenden was responsible for the first recognisable radio broadcast, taking place in Massachusetts in 1906, when he read a passage from the Bible and played the violin, a broadcast that was picked up by ships at sea. The US continued to pioneer radio with the first acknowledged news broadcast from Detroit in 1920; an indication of just how rapidly radio technology was moving also came in 1920 when a New York station transmitted a series of music concerts that could be heard up to a distance of 100 miles away, a great leap forward replicated in Argentina that same year, despite the dearth of radio receivers to actually hear it. Meanwhile, back in Blighty Marconi’s experiments paid off with the establishment of a station known as 2LO in 1922, situated at Marconi House in the Strand.

As with all technological breakthroughs, the development of wireless technology in the opening decades of the 20th century is so easily taken for granted when those of us for whom it’s always been there find it impossible to imagine a time without it. Prior to the invention of recorded sound, let alone the radio, one could only listen to music if one happened to be within physical earshot of where it was being played; suddenly, it was possible to hear a past-tense recording of an orchestra or hear it as it was being played live hundreds of miles away; this had never previously been possible in the history of human civilisation, so it’s no wonder the seemingly limitless possibilities of recorded and broadcast sound caught on like wildfire in the 1920s. However, with the GPO responsible for issuing licences to broadcast in the UK, concerns over interference with military communications cautiously limited transmissions on 2LO and its sister station 2MT to an hour a day. The pastime of tuning in to wireless broadcasts had been something of a minority interest in Britain until it was decided to bring everything under one convenient umbrella organisation which was christened the British Broadcasting Company. Stations broadcasting in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Cardiff and Glasgow fell under the BBC banner and laid the foundations for the future BBC Regions in the process.

The formation of the BBC in 1922 – inaugurated by the debut broadcast of 2LO from Marconi House exactly 100 years ago today – helped spread radio beyond the confines of audio enthusiasts hunched over their ‘cat’s whiskers’ sets and transformed it into a mainstream phenomenon. Within a year, the BBC had relocated to new studios at Savoy Hill, had established its own listings magazine, the Radio Times (first edition published in September 1923) and had extended its reach to Aberdeen, Bournemouth and Sheffield. By the end of 1923, Big Ben’s chimes had been transmitted for the first time as a means of welcoming the New Year across the country and networked news bulletins had become regular fixtures on the airwaves; 1924 was barely out of nappies before the Shipping Forecast had made itself heard on the BBC, and the likes of the Greenwich Time Signal, ‘The Daily Service’ and ‘Choral Evensong’ were not long in following. It wasn’t until 1927 that the British Broadcasting Corporation was born, but the various elements we continue to regard as BBC mainstays were already in place before the company became a corporation.

Like many contemporary listeners and viewers, being exposed to all the self-congratulatory centenary celebrations of an institution that hasn’t resembled the institution it used to be for the best part of a decade or more makes the contrast between then and now unavoidably glaring. Being forced to look back is an exercise that merely serves to remind us of everything the BBC has lost – or has voluntarily surrendered – of late, and the BBC itself has unwittingly indulged in this exercise to its own detriment, having to fall back on its rich cultural legacy because it can hardly point to its current output in order to justify its continued existence. The impression one comes away with is that the BBC is another one of this country’s glorious museums, with its most priceless exhibits at least 30 years old; although these dusty artefacts are all worthy of preservation, to carry on pretending anything produced today will one day stand alongside those heirlooms is to fail to recognise the ongoing value of the BBC’s family silver expired sometime at the beginning of the Millennium.

Yes, it’s worth recalling the genesis of the BBC as a means of tracking the progress of mass-communications in this country, for it was indeed a significant development that shaped the nature of broadcasting for three invigorating decades – until the inevitable breaking of the monopoly with the arrival of ITV in 1955. It’s futile to try and recapture the sense of excitement there must have been in turning the dial in 1922 and coming across a string quartet playing live at a venue situated at the other end of the country; I guess you had to be there. But it should be acknowledged as an important signpost on the road to where we are now, even if where we are now is somewhere that a BBC has little relevance; and the main blame for that rests with the BBC itself.

© The Editor

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CLOSE YOUR EYES AND COUNT TO ZERO

Who says satire is dead? Well, I’ve said it plenty of times – an opinion based largely on the dearth of satire on TV & radio (or the pitiful post-Brexit/Trump excuse that passes for satire in the 2020s). But I stand corrected as, like many, I saw one of the best satirical sketches since the heyday of Chris Morris the other day, featuring a genius new comic character – a parody of a posh activist on a par with past creations satirising pop culture archetypes, such as Ali G. This character went by the name of Indigo Rumbelow, and whilst on the surface she owes an undoubted debt to Andrew Doyle’s well-established intersectional feminist icon Titania McGrath, by making Rumbelow part of the climate change death cult, whoever created her hit on a canny contemporary angle to distinguish her from Doyle’s brilliantly accurate trust-funded SJW. Another factor that gave Indigo Rumbelow a distinctive gimmick was the presence of a straight man; he went by the name of Mark Austin, and his suit-and-tie newsreader style provided the perfect foil for Rumbelow’s studied scruffiness characteristic of the young middle-classes slumming it as faux-Bohemians. The whole performance was so well-observed you’d almost believe it was for real.

The sketch took the form of an interview, with straight man Austin grilling Rumbelow on the protest tactics of Just Stop Oil, the imaginary fruitcake fringe outfit to which she was supposed to belong. What made it so funny was that every time Austin tried to ask her what she thought the organisation’s infantile acts of civil disobedience achieved for her cause, Rumbelow had no answer and replied by reciting her apocalyptic mantra, screeching it over the top of Austin like some wild-eyed, possessed banshee whose voice increased several shaky octaves as she became more animated in the face of her inability to justify her counterproductive activism. It was a spot-on pastiche of the kind of privileged, attention-seeking narcissists with daddy issues that the real-life equivalent of these cults tend to attract; at one point she dismissed the concerns Austin voiced about the economy during a cost-of-living crisis and how Rumbelow’s simplistic solution to the world’s ills would make life even worse for anyone beyond her cosseted bubble – and it was easily the funniest thing I’ve seen on mainstream TV in years. Mark my words: one day, they’ll include this scene in a comedy compilation along with Basil Fawlty’s goosestep, David Brent’s dance, and Del Boy falling over at the bar.

I think this new satirical comedy series featuring the hilarious character Indigo Rumbelow was called ‘Sky News’; I’ve not heard of it before, but I’ll be keeping an eye open for the next time it’s on – certainly if the one sketch I saw was an indication of the quality comedy it intends to provide. Ah…hold on a minute…I’ve just been belatedly informed this ‘Sky News’ show is actually a genuine news channel, and Indigo Rumbelow wasn’t the inspired caricature of a posh activist I assumed, but is unfortunately the real thing, an utter car-crash of a saleswoman for her movement. Well, in my defence, it’s an easy mistake to make when one watches her performance. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so spectacularly fail to convert viewers to their cause and in the process expertly confirm (if not strengthen) the existing opinion of Just Stop Oil as a creepy coalition of bored rich-kids and yoghurt-knitting hippies whose fanatical, tunnel-vision obsession borders on a religious cult that cannot handle the challenging voices of non-believers.

If one tots-up the cheap stunts Just Stop Oil and its affiliated loony tunes have inflicted on precious works of art, monuments to national heroes and the Queen’s (King’s?) Highway of late, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that this cult is one with nihilism at its core. If you deconstruct anything and strip it of all meaning, there is no longer any barrier to destroying it because it’s without value, utterly worthless; everything becomes a housefly to be whacked with a rolled-up newspaper, an action entered into bereft of guilt or conscience because the dying fly means nothing. If you don’t care about something, you don’t care about its continued existence; indeed, you’d prefer it to end – if not actively attempting to accelerate that end, which is precisely the real motivation of such ‘activists’, emphasising the comparisons with brainwashed evangelicals praying for the Rapture with a copy of the Good Book in one hand and a can of Kool-Aid in the other, counting down the days to the end of days. And they want to take all of us with them, desperately determined to convert us to their deranged, demented death-wish, like coke-addled Jehovah’s Witnesses. Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion don’t want to save the world; they want to end it. And the few survivors in the ashes, scrabbling around for bugs to feast on, will need a privately-educated, elite class to rule over them – which is when the instigators of the cult will emerge from their bunkers to initiate the planet’s second ‘Golden Age’ as we resume the feudal order of olde.

The countless Doomsday predictions from the special-needs wing of the climate change lobby could rival Neil Ferguson in terms of plucking worst-case-scenario imaginary stats out of the air; over the past quarter-century we’ve been bombarded with such predictions, most of which have pencilled-in future dates at which we were scheduled to pass the point of no return. Having subsequently survived all of these dates intact, the goalposts are simply (and quietly) moved so that ecological Armageddon remains safely ten years hence. Some of the most mind-bogglingly cuckoo statements yet heard dripped from the lips of Indigo Rumbelow during her Sky News appearance; talk of ‘birds falling from the sky’ during last summer’s heat-wave or attributing floods in Pakistan to climate change when long-term deforestation of the country has more to answer for were dispatched as though they were facts in the same way a head-shaking resident of the US Bible Belt will repeatedly declare ‘God created Adam and Eve’ when presented with evidence of the origins of our species. The sudden upsurge in public protests has been the petulant, foot-stamping response to the increasing proof contradicting their faith, the cries of Kidults to whom nobody has ever said the word ‘no’, like some latter-day Violet Elizabeth Bott from ‘Just William’.

It matters not to them that sitting down in the middle of the road prevents a mother collecting her children from school, a son missing his father’s funeral or a cancer patient being unable to make it to hospital for life-saving treatment; it matters not to them that the Chief Constable of Essex Police has been moved to state, ‘I think it is only a matter of time before somebody gets killed. The only way this is going to stop is if Just Stop Oil frankly grow-up and realise they are putting lives at risk.’ The fact a Chief Constable has come out with such a statement suggests the widespread exhaustion with stunts like weeping me-me-me activists ascending gantries on the M25, forcing road closures and more commuter chaos, has finally breached the ideological walls of our police forces. So far, the police’s pathetic response to Just Stop Oil – idly standing by, failing to move them on, and presenting us with yet another example of today’s two-tier policing – has forced members of the public to adopt vigilante tactics; perhaps now that the angry mood of the plebs with these deluded, hysterical extroverts has prompted a Chief Constable to issue an unusually stark warning, our alleged law-enforcers will actually intervene.

Virtually everything the likes of Just Stop Oil indulge in deters Joe Public from any semblance of sympathy with their cause. They also provide the opposing extreme – the lunatic fringes of climate change deniers to whom everything is a conspiracy theory (probably due to the Jews) – with additional ammunition, as well as risking the further extension of legislation to limit any form of public demonstration and thus curb civil liberties even more than the pandemic managed. But at least they can write a good comedy sketch, eh?

© The Editor

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THE RESIGNING SPIDER-MAN

Political stars seem to rise and fall in such a quick blink of an eye these days that I can type-in a politician’s name on the Winegum archive and all past posts in which they figure will appear before me, effectively chronicling their entire duration in the public eye. In just under a month’s time, the Winegum Telegram will have been with us for seven years – a timescale which doesn’t feel long in the great scheme of things, yet the amount of faces that have come and gone in that relatively brief period is innumerable to the point where seven years bears more of a resemblance to seventy. For example, by skimming through past posts I can trace the key developments in the career of Gavin Williamson, reported upon as and when they happened. And it’s perhaps fitting than the man who once courted a Mandelson-like Dark Lord persona via his pet tarantula now stands to rival the architect of New Labour with the amount of times he has been hired and fired by the Prime Minister of the day – and there’ve been quite a few Prime Ministers in the lifespan of the Winegum Telegram.

The first entry on Williamson I came across was dated 2 November 2017 – five years ago; titled ‘The First Line of Defence’, it dealt with the end of Michael Fallon as Defence Secretary, following revelations of Fallon’s hand coming into contact with journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer’s knee a decade before; in the wake of hardcore porn being discovered on the office computer of Cabinet member Damian Green, a list of illicit dalliances between MPs and their acquaintances had briefly circulated online and Westminster was awash with talk of ‘sex scandal’. The fact this event is barely remembered now, whereas the far more distant Profumo Affair remains the touchstone for all sex scandals involving Honourable Members, again demonstrates the here today/gone tomorrow nature of the social media age, where one day’s shock-horror headline is all-but forgotten the next. Anyway, this was the climate that enabled then-Chief Whip Gavin Williamson to step into a top job. Having revelled in his role as a faux-Kingmaker during the dodgy deal that secured DUP support for Theresa May’s tiny majority following the disastrous 2017 General Election, Williamson was rewarded with the post of Defence Secretary. Some were even touting him as a future PM.

May also felt indebted to Williamson for organising her leadership campaign in 2016, so he was bound to ascend the greasy pole thereafter; however, within barely a year-and-a-half, Williamson was sacked as Defence Secretary by the woman he’d apparently boasted he’d ‘made’ and could therefore ‘break’. His crime was to allegedly leak news to the press that secret discussions had been taking place between May’s inner circle and the Chinese Government’s telecommunications wing Huawei, with a view to the latter winning the contract to run Britain’s 5G network. If Williamson was responsible for passing this worrying revelation to Fleet Street, good on him; I gave him the benefit of the doubt at the time in a post titled ‘Gavin in Stasis’ (Dated 2 May 2019). But this was a period in which leaks from May’s Cabinet were happening on a virtual daily basis, something that in retrospect can be seen as a sign that her runaway train of an administration was destined to shortly hit the buffers.

Once May was out, Williamson was back in again. A little over two months after May had fired him from the Cabinet, Boris brought him back – this time as Education Secretary, a post he didn’t exactly sparkle in; to be fair, though, as with all of Boris’s appointments, Williamson hardly had the chance to make his mark in the post before the coronavirus brought everything to a grinding halt. The pandemic certainly sorted the men from the boys, and most of the men were found wanting; Williamson presided over the mass exclusion of schoolchildren from their seats of learning, the cancellation of exams, and then the whole cock-up of the ‘algorithm A-levels’, a farce which contributed to his eventual dismissal as Education Secretary in September 2021. Part of his golden handshake from Boris was the awarding of a knighthood; well, he was probably too young (and not quite corrupt enough) for a peerage, so being a ‘Sir’ – even on the backbenches – was a nice going away present. Williamson only really re-emerged last summer when he whipped up support for Rishi Sunak’s first leadership campaign, a tactic he was poised to repeat before Sunak swiftly replaced Liz Truss at No.10 effectively unopposed. Just as Theresa May had rewarded Williamson with a Cabinet post in 2017, Rishi did likewise last month by promoting him to Minister of State without Portfolio. Now, merely a few weeks later, Williamson is back to being MP without Portfolio, following his resignation as he seeks to clear his name over allegations of bullying.

As with similar allegations levelled against Priti Patel when she was Home Secretary, Williamson has been accused by an ex-civil servant of behaviour in the workplace that we’re currently only seeing from one perspective. Nobody likes a bully, and a bully being brought down is something to be celebrated; but there’s always the possibility the underling in question may have been deserving of a bollocking from a Minister exercising his authority, and we’re unaware of the context that provoked outbursts from Williamson advising the civil servant to ‘slit their throat’ and ‘jump out of the window’. It would appear the anonymous civil servant has played the mental health card to strengthen his complaint to Parliament’s Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme, so we don’t know if his is a genuine case of Gavin Williamson overstepping the mark and inflicting unwarranted suffering on an innocent party, or if it’s a Government employee incapable of taking a necessary dressing-down.

From the perspective of Gavin Williamson, the timing of this particular complaint is unfortunate in that it comes hot on the heels of another complaint in a similar vein, this time from the former Conservative Chief Whip Wendy Morton; she’s also gone to the ICGS, claiming Williamson sent her abusive texts, the alleged content of which blamed her for his exclusion from the guest-list at the Queen’s funeral. If both allegations are rooted in fact, the unflattering portrait they paint of him as an arrogant and unpleasant individual suggest he’s worthy of everything the ICGS can throw at him; but we don’t yet know. Either way, his continued presence in Cabinet was what news outlets usually refer to as ‘untenable’, and Williamson has now left Government for a third time, adding to the questioning of Rishi Sunak’s judgement in light of the ongoing Suella Braverman controversy. I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this.

LESLIE PHILLIPS (1924-2022)

Not every actor has a catchphrase, but Leslie Phillips – whose death at the grand old age of 98 was announced yesterday – had two, both of which were repeatedly evoked in his obituaries across the media. As the last survivor of an era of British comic cinema that lives on in the collective consciousness of Brits over a certain age, Phillips was regarded with the same kind of affection that greeted the death of Bernard Cribbins a few months ago. We don’t make ‘em like them anymore, and Leslie Phillips specialised in playing a now-redundant archetype recalled with undeniable fondness, the cad. His portrayal of this shameless, upper-middle-class philanderer with an irresistible twinkle in his eye was something he cornered the market in for decades, even taking it to TV screens in the early 70s with one of those sitcoms no broadcaster would countenance today, ‘Casanova ‘73’. Not unlike David Niven, Leslie Phillips represented a vanished world of well-spoken, well-turned-out English gentlemen whose effortless charm and sophistication could make those around them feel sartorially and socially inept, yet inspired not resentment but admiration. Impossible to dislike and incapable of not provoking a smile, Leslie Phillips will be much-missed, though while ever his celluloid legacy remains, there’ll always be an England.

© The Editor

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COCK OF THE JUNGLE

Anyone looking for proof of Peter Capaldi’s gifts as an actor need not only recall the fact he continued to exude the necessary charisma and gravitas as Doctor Who despite the diminishing quality of the scripts and the Doctor’s impending exile on Planet Woke, but that he also gave us the memorably visceral Whitehall spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker in ‘The Thick of It’. There were dozens of scenes from the series in which Tucker’s hyperactive potty mouth scaled heights of genius linguistic obscenity, but Capaldi’s character was much more than just a viciously funny caricature of Alastair Campbell at his worst. I remember one episode in which Tucker had been toppled from his position of power and, suddenly deprived of his raison d’être, cut a lost, pathetic figure, realising he had little else to occupy his time; contacted by the producers of a reality TV show of the kind that seeks out has-beens and down-at-heel celebrities, Tucker swallows his pride and meets the producers. As the format of the programme is explained to him, Tucker’s despair at how low he’s sunk is writ large on his despondent countenance, and sympathy for a character who had previously elicited anything but is brilliantly coaxed out of the viewer. In the end, Malcolm Tucker walks out of the interview and shows his true grit by staging a successful comeback without recourse to reality television; perhaps Matt Hancock should have been taking notes.

The former Health Secretary, who presided over one of the most disastrous policy decisions in the history of the post, was fortunate to escape the post-Covid fallout with just the loss of his job; but at least the public received some consolation via the humiliating nature of his exit – caught on camera breaking social distancing rules in the most toe-curling manner by snogging and groping a female aide in a corridor like some geeky adolescent indulging in his first kiss at the High School Prom. Once exposed as a ‘love rat’ (as the tabloids used to say), Hancock left his wife and family for said aide and then embarked upon a fittingly embarrassing online ‘comeback’, responsible for soaring sales of sick buckets as he declared his love for his former bit on the side. Perhaps it’s therefore no surprise that Hancock has now succumbed to the lure of reality TV, recently announced as a contestant in the upcoming series of the show that seems destined to run until the bomb drops, ‘Help! I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here’. The reported fee of £400,000 probably helped too – that’s if he could read the cheque on account of his ‘dyslexia’, the convenient cause he claims his appearance on the programme will highlight.

When the subject of Hancock’s participation in the annual kangaroo-knackers banquet cropped-up on this weekend’s ‘The Week in Westminster’, columnist and broadcaster Matthew Parris attempted to defend Hancock, deflecting criticism of Hancock’s decision by dismissing it as snobbishness, citing past appearances by the likes of Nadine Dorries on reality TV whilst a serving MP. However, Parris eventually declared an interest by admitting ‘Cockers’ was a friend of his. Lest we forget, Matthew Parris first sprang to national prominence when, as a Conservative MP himself, he took part in a 1984 edition of ‘World in Action’. This famous experiment, which Mrs Thatcher advised him not to do, was a test to see if the promising young MP could live on the weekly social security benefit his Government said was perfectly adequate. Dispatched to a neighbourhood of Newcastle with a high rate of unemployment, Parris struggled to make it through the week on the dole and ended up running out of money for the meter before the seven days was over.

Parris stood down as an MP a couple of years after his first foray into television and took over from Brian Walden as host of ITV’s Sunday lunchtime institution, ‘Weekend World’; but he has often hinted his experience on ‘World in Action’ opened his eyes to not simply the world of broadcasting – he also received first-hand knowledge of how the other half live. Parris returned to Newcastle twenty years after his sobering education on the dole for a follow-up programme and discovered little improvement in the lives of the residents there; he found the legacy of the early 80s economic decimation of the city was that many in the community were now dependent on antidepressants. Both programmes validated Parris’s appearance in them, but particularly the first one; it was a serious, worthy attempt to test an advocate of Government policy by inviting him to try living under it himself – something that should actually be a compulsory course for anyone attempting to stand for Parliament. There’s a huge difference between the motivation behind ‘World in Action’ and the Ant & Dec circus, so I don’t really think Matt Hancock signing-up for that is any way comparable to Matthew Parris’s 80s venture into the North East.

Regardless of Hancock’s unconvincing attempts to justify his participation in the programme, the now-backbencher has had the whip suspended as a result, and though still a member of the Conservative Party, he now sits as an independent in the Commons. The fact Hancock chose to take part in the show with Parliament in session understandably didn’t go down well with his West Suffolk constituents either; I often think gaining an audience with a member of the Cabinet at their constituency surgery must be considerably harder than it would be with any ‘normal’ MP, but when that MP is no longer running a department there should be no excuses for their non-appearance. Not that the loss of power seems to make much difference to their accessibility within their constituencies, mind; after all, imagine if your local MP was Boris Johnson, needing to discuss a pressing problem with him in that capacity, yet being told he’s sunning his considerable bulk on some distant exotic shore. And now there’s the disgraced ex-Health Secretary to be found Down Under, hanging out with the usual leftovers from all the other reality shows when his constituents might actually require his assistance for the job he’s being paid to do on their behalf.

Ah, but he’s got estranged children to support as well as financing his love-nest with Gina Coladangelo, and the wages of a backbencher don’t quite match up to the ministerial salary. Overly-optimistic rumours of a return to Government under Rishi Sunak came to nothing, so Hancock has clearly chosen an option he seems to imagine will somehow rehabilitate his trashed reputation amongst the general public. And a man referred to as a ‘showbiz guru’ by the name of Jonathan Shalit reckons Hancock has a profitable celebrity career ahead of him, claiming ‘Cockers’ could earn up to £1 million a year if he plays his cards right. ‘I’m A Celebrity provides an opportunity to go on a new journey,’ says Shalit, foreseeing an increase in Hancock’s income if he performs well on the programme. ‘Someone like Matt can probably make about £1 million a year, quite often on weekends. For example, he could probably do three or four appearances for £10-15,000 each, minimum, if not up to £60-70,000.’ Yes, these guys do like to talk in numbers, but showbiz types share that with greedy Honourable Members, and someone did once say that politics is showbiz for ugly people, so there you go.

Matt Hancock’s deserved political downfall was a consequence of the double standards at play in Boris’s administration during the pandemic; this is the man who threatened to outlaw outdoor exercise if the plebs didn’t adhere to the social distancing rules he himself evidently regarded as unnecessary when indulging in a spot of buttock-clutching, who was photographed sans-mask when he told the rest of us to wear them at all times, and who handed out PPE contracts to his buddies – typical corruption of the kind we expect from our MPs, I guess. But the buck stopped with him when Covid-infected pensioners were returned from hospital to care home; if anyone killed granny, it was Matt Hancock. And no amount of Barrymore-esque efforts to court forgiveness via light entertainment will change that.

© The Editor

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