ONE LAST THING…

One strange tradition that never fails to deliver is that of a year entering its final days and the Grim Reaper embarking upon a frenzied period of visiting famous names; for Death, the climax of the twelve-month calendar usually consists of breakneck house-to-house calls as though he’s required to fulfil a specific celebrity quota before 31 December and always leaves it till the last minute. Indeed, he left it so late this year that he ended up calling on two exemplary figures in their chosen fields on the same day, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Brazilian football legend Pelé. The latter’s battle with cancer had been publicised and his hospitalisation routinely referenced during the recent World Cup, when Lionel Messi became the latest player to wear the crown that the man born Edson Arantes do Nacimento had copyrighted from the age of 17; in contrast with an anticipated passing that had felt inevitable for several weeks, news that Vivienne Westwood has also died came as more of a surprise, with few beyond her inner circle aware she was fatally ill. Born within six months of each other, one was a king and one was a dame, and both left an indelible mark on 20th century pop culture that will long outlast their mortal remains.

At a time when access to football played beyond Europe was minimal to say the least, the World Cup was the only real window to the global game available to football followers in the UK and on the Continent – and even then it could be something of a logistical challenge for it to reach British and European screens. If the tournament was staged in South America – such as Chile in 1962 – the fact that broadcasting’s satellite age was still a twinkle in Telstar’s eye meant games would be shot on film and then rushed to a waiting plane; in 1962, TV viewers over here had to wait an unimaginable two days after the Final itself was played before they actually got to see the match transmitted on the BBC. Four years earlier, at the least the contest was a little closer to home, staged in Sweden. This was just the sixth World Cup tournament, and up to that point the Jules Rimet trophy had only been held aloft by three countries – Uruguay, Italy and West Germany. Brazil had reached the Final on one solitary occasion – 1950 – and had suffered an inconceivable loss on home soil to Uruguay; they felt it was their destiny to win, but despite their dazzling flair, Brazil never seemed able to leap that final hurdle to immortality. And then, in 1958, they unveiled a prodigy.

In 1958, the 17-year-old Vivienne Swire had relocated from her birthplace in working-class Derbyshire to begin student life on a jewellery course at Harrow Art School; on the other side of the world, Edson Arantes do Nacimento – who had emerged from a poverty-stricken corner of Sao Paulo – was the great discovery of Brazilian club Santos and was a year into his international career when the World Cup in Sweden came calling. Rapidly on his way to becoming a household name in his own country, Pelé (having adopted the time-honoured Brazilian tactic of going by a nickname) was Brazil’s secret weapon in 1958. Although he didn’t make his debut until the third and final group game, by the time the team entered the knock-out stage – which in those more manageable days of just 16 teams was the Quarter-Final – he scored the only goal against Wales; in the Semi-Final Vs France he netted a hat-trick and the rest of the world sat up and took notice. In the Final, he scored twice as Brazil hammered the host nation 5-2 and finally fulfilled their destiny by getting their hands on the most coveted prize in football. Overnight, the teenager had become a global superstar.

Four years later, Pelé’s reputation had grown to the point where Santos had received numerous tempting offers for their greatest asset from a string of eager English and European big guns – including Manchester United and Real Madrid – but had held firm, with the Brazilian Government declaring him an official national treasure in order to prevent his export. He kick-started Brazil’s defence of the World Cup in Chile with the expectations of a nation weighing heavily on his shoulders, but suffered an injury early in the tournament and played no further part in the contest; despite Brazil retaining the trophy without him in Chile, Pelé fared even worse in England in 1966, exposed to the worst ‘professional tackles’ of the era as he was kicked out of the competition by Bulgarian and Portuguese defenders; the holders exited at the group stage and Pelé vowed to never grace the global stage again. Whilst all this was happening, Vivienne Westwood had walked out on her first marriage (from which she took her surname) and had set up home with Malcolm McLaren, a partnership that would prove fruitful for both. Although earning a wage as a primary school teacher, Westwood was already designing her own clothes, and by the early 1970s she and McLaren had opened a boutique called Let It Rock on Chelsea’s King’s Road, one that specialised in vintage Teddy Boy gear from the 50s.

As Westwood and McLaren were establishing themselves on the King’s Road, Pelé had relented from his decision of 1966 and was back in the Brazil line-up for the Mexico World Cup in 1970. Like Maradona in 1986 and Messi in 2022, this was Pelé’s chance to justify his reputation before a global audience, and he – and his team – didn’t disappoint. Even now, over half-a-century later, that Brazil side is still acknowledged as arguably the finest team ever to win the competition; indeed, so overwhelmed were FIFA by Brazil’s performance that they allowed them to keep the Jules Rimet trophy forever as they became the first country to capture it for a third time. Yes, Pelé was the star man, but he was ably supported by players whose names evoked Renaissance artists – Jairzinho, Rivelino, Carlos Alberto – and who played with an artistic flair unparalleled in the history of the game. Prior to the Final, the game of the tournament came between Brazil and defending champions England; Brazil won 1-0, but the match is chiefly remembered for Gordon Banks’ miraculous save against Pelé – as memorable a moment as Pelé’s attempted goal from the halfway line against Czechoslovakia. Brazil defeated Italy 4-1 in the Final, with the opening goal coming from the man himself; it was Pele’s last game in the World Cup, retiring from international football a year later and resisting efforts to coax him out of international retirement in 1974.

By the mid-70s, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren had renamed their boutique ‘Sex’ and had begun selling the kind of fetish gear normally unseen outside of Soho backrooms; Westwood was certainly ahead of her time, considering such gear is now commonplace with gimps on dog-leads entertaining toddlers on Pride parades. They then tapped into a craze amongst impoverished London art students (including a certain Johnny Rotten) for wearing ripped clothes held together by safety pins; the two strands combined and created the Punk look, which – when stitched to the music produced by the band McLaren managed, The Sex Pistols – ended up selling a lifestyle. It was the springboard for Westwood to become Britain’s most renowned and radical young designer, and she never really looked back. As Punk was bubbling on the King’s Road, Pelé had done the unthinkable and relocated from Santos to the US, helping to launch the North American Soccer League in the colours of the New York Cosmos. Hip Americans who were finding football a hard sell instantly warmed to the fact a black man was considered the planet’s finest footballer, and even though Pelé was arguably past his best at 35, he still outshone most of the competition on the stateside field of play and didn’t finally retire for good until 1977.

Whether an elder statesman still selling his sport around the world or an established fashion designer attaching her profitable name to whichever cause she sought to promote, both Pelé and Vivienne Westwood had become global brands by the time they simultaneously bowed-out of the spotlight and both are pretty much irreplaceable, however many pretenders to their respective crowns they survived in their lifetimes and will continue to withstand in death.

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AROUND THE WORLD IN 365 DAYS

2022 – yet another one of ‘those years’; yes, this glorious century hasn’t exactly been short on them, and if you, like me, had a fittingly crap Christmas then you won’t be sorry to see the back of 2022, even if 2023 is hardly loaded with optimistic anticipation. When a year is characterised by chaos, chances are the chaos is as prevalent at the top as it is at the bottom, and we certainly had that in abundance from our ‘betters’ this year. The fact that 2022 saw the UK led by three different Prime Ministers – including one who had the shortest run in the history of the office – suggests either those at the top are keeping up with the rest of us, or they’re largely responsible for the chaos, depending on how one apportions responsibility. But when one recalls the year began with the fall-out from the Partygate affair that eventually led to Boris’s premature exit, and that by the autumn his immediate successor managed to set off alarm bells in the City – provoking an even more premature exit – then looking to leaders for leadership proved an utterly futile exercise, fracturing even further the already fragile faith and trust in our elected representatives.

And then, the Health Secretary overseeing the pandemic response turns himself into a tawdry celebrity with a staggering absence of shame and guilt in a desperate attempt to court redemption; who in their right mind could respect an unprincipled worm like Matt Hancock, a man whose actions seemed as emblematic of the corrupt, degenerate decay at the amoral heart of an amoral administration as Boris Johnson himself? If that’s the way those at the top behave, perhaps it’s no wonder those of us who reside closer to the bottom express nothing less than absolute contempt for them – and no longer have any belief in their ability to make our lives better; and if they can’t, who can? That can’t really be good for democracy. But it’s not as if the UK was alone in being exceptionally ill-led in 2022. Out in the colonies, Monsieur Trudeau reacted to a grass-roots challenge to his authority by unleashing every verbal weapon in the Woke arsenal to demonise and discredit the protesting truckers and their supporters; he even stooped to freezing their bank accounts, exploiting the vulnerability of a monetary system the public has been bludgeoned into depending on and using lessons learnt during the pandemic, when those doubting the wisdom of lockdowns and untested vaccines were smeared as enemies of the people.

Closer to home, in Soviet Scotland, the even more authoritarian and illiberal SNP pressed ahead with their plans to allow men who simply ‘identify’ as the opposite sex to be legally recognised as women – surgery not included – after a mere three-month trial period. Hot on the heels of wee Nicola’s attempt to push for yet another independence referendum being rendered null and void without Westminster’s say-so, the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill not only faces potential legal challenges in the rest of the UK, but could prove to be an Identitarian step too far, certainly if the uproar amongst women’s and children’s rights campaigners is anything to go by. One hopes it might belatedly alert the more English-phobic Scots that their nasty nationalist darlings don’t necessarily have their best interests at heart. The long-overdue revelations of the crimes committed in the name of ‘diversity’ by the likes of the butchers at the Tavistock Clinic and the pseudo-paedophilic charity Mermaids had at last enabled dissenting voices to finally be heard without censorship, yet the SNP turned a blind eye to all this, displaying greater sympathy towards the ‘human rights’ of male sex offenders than in preserving natural-born women-only spaces.

The ‘empowerment’ of confused adolescents by such a bill is a dangerous development that threatens to set back progress just at the point when it was finally being made; the scandal of Tavistock and its ilk was gaining exposure as endless stories of children brainwashed into believing gender reassignment was the answer to all their teenage problems were being heard, yet the SNP bill fails to acknowledge the damage done just as it fails to recognise Transgenderism in its most superficial form is effectively the latest adolescent cult. Online videos of schoolboys in makeup undergoing ‘period pains’ in their bedrooms is a sick trend that recalls devotees of fanatical religious sects being possessed by the Devil; however, unlike past tribal loyalties with a short sell-by date, any emotionally disturbed teenager buying into this particular cult and paying the ultimate price with life-changing surgery can’t simply bin the clothes and haircut that served as the visual hallmarks of the cult once he or she moves on to the next one – as teenagers are prone to doing; and the SNP bill ignores the evidence to appease its rainbow flag-waving activist friends. Mind you, those activists now have such a deep foothold in so many of our institutions that the 2+2=5 dogma they espouse is in danger of becoming legal fact; even revered dictionaries have capitulated to this fantasy reality, further adding to the sense that the West is rapidly disappearing down the toilet.

No wonder Vladimir Putin doesn’t see the West as an obstacle to his imperial ambitions; in his own way, Vlad is as much a fantasist as the Trans activists or the Net Zero climate zealots vandalising works of art, and he’s getting away with it as much as they are; only a couple of days ago, yet another former ally who had the nerve to question Putin’s Ukraine adventure ‘committed suicide’ via the familiar leap from a skyscraper window; I wonder why Putin’s enemies never just opt for the old gas oven or bottle of pills, eh? Funny, that. But while Vlad disposes of his foes on foreign soil completely unchallenged, he found that his assault on Ukraine received its most devastating setback not from the timid West, but from the courageous Ukrainians themselves. The perfectly natural wave of sympathy for the innocents exposed to the merciless march of the Russian war machine led to Brits who just a few months earlier weren’t even allowed to visit each other being encouraged to open their doors to Ukrainian refugees; less public sympathy was reserved for illegal economic migrants hailing from the war-less environs of Albania as the unscrupulous people-smuggling trade appeared to be one of the year’s few boom industries. Whether Rwanda is the answer is another matter; sadly, the Channel has rarely been kind to opportunists.

If Vladimir Putin was shaken out of his complacency by the unexpected resistance of the Ukrainian people, Iran’s similarly ruthless rulers were equally taken aback by a rebellion on home turf, largely led by incredibly brave young women publicly trashing the symbols of their oppression – something that was again met with notable silence from the gutless West. And when overseas protests did receive tacit support from the West, such as those that occurred as a result of China’s futile attempts to maintain a ‘Zero Covid’ policy, that support came from none other than Justin Trudeau, incapable of discerning the parallels between the inhumane authority of the Chinese Government and his own approach to both the truckers and the coronavirus. Indeed, having been presented with unimagined control over their own people during the pandemic, it was unsurprising that many Western leaders have been reluctant to relinquish the powers they’d acquired, continually extending their over-reach into the private lives of their citizens in an insidious trend that needs to be resisted.

Back home, a series of strikes by both rail and postal workers served to gift additional joy to a British public already browbeaten by a surge in fuel costs, though at least the whole ‘cost of living’ narrative has provided the MSM with a boost to the flagging Project Fear plotline. The fact that the one certainty of 70 years’ vintage should breathe her last in the middle of all this chaos seemed almost symptomatic of a year in which nothing and no one could be relied upon or trusted anymore. 2022 was a year bereft of certainties, and after the last twelve months, only a fool would confidently reach for the crystal ball and predict what comes next.

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SPECIAL BREW

Provincial cities often tend to define themselves more in competition with their nearest metropolitan neighbour than engaging in the futile exercise of trying to out-London London; perhaps the lengthy rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester is the most famous example, with these twin titans of 19th century industry extending their pissing contest well beyond industrial decline and into the arena of pop culture. The football field has long been an outlet for old intercity enmities, with the weighing scales of North-Western dominance sometimes falling in favour of Liverpool FC and sometimes Manchester United; elsewhere, the long shadow cast by The Beatles has always been a thorn in Manchester’s side, though post-Beatles notables like Joy Division, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and Oasis have made enough inroads into the public consciousness to redress the balance, if only temporarily. Beyond the North, what of the Midlands? Birmingham and its Black Country satellites is the behemoth few have ever challenged. The Moody Blues, The Move, Slade, Black Sabbath, half of Led Zeppelin, ELO…no wonder the rest have always struggled to get a look in. However, there was a very brief period at the turn of the 80s when Coventry outshone Brum.

Divided from its overbearing neighbour by the greenbelt of the Meriden Gap, Coventry’s main claim to fame for centuries was as a renowned medieval showpiece city ala York; and then came the Blitz. Rather than demolish great swathes of a historic city centre, post-war town-planners were provided with a clean slate thanks to the Luftwaffe, and a familiar ‘concrete jungle’ facelift was gradually unveiled. The once-prosperous motor industry’s slide into stagnation by the late 70s became emblematic of Coventry’s downturn, and while high unemployment coupled with racial tensions (the city saw large immigration from Asia and the Caribbean in the 50s and 60s) may have made life hard for its citizens, these conditions also provided the perfect breeding ground for a short-lived musical revolution that put Coventry at the centre of the pop map.

The sad death of Specials frontman Terry Hall this week was received with a wave of genuine sadness from people of a certain age, those old enough to remember when his band were the most important post-Punk act in the country; not only did The Specials manage the impressive feat of achieving both critical acclaim and commercial success, but the name of the record label the band established to ensure their independence – 2 Tone – also gave its name to an entire scene that thrived around them, the first scene for kids too young for Punk. They enjoyed two chart-topping singles and maintained their credibility throughout, spurning the silly inverted snobbery of The Clash by regularly appearing on ‘Top of the Pops’ and never once being accused of the heinous crime of ‘selling out’. Moreover, with the exception of The Equals a decade earlier, The Specials were the first notable mixed-race British band to break through, successfully merging the distinctive sounds of the two musical cultures the members of the band had inherited, musical cultures that had served to bring the members together.

The black members of The Specials had been raised on a diet of Jamaican Ska imported to these shores by first-generation West Indian immigrants; but the white members of the band had received exposure too. The skinheads of the early 70s may have drifted further to the Right as the decade progressed, but Ska and Reggae constituted their original soundtrack, uniting black and white at a time when racial unrest – exacerbated by the contemporaneous emergence of the National Front – was spawning an exceedingly unpleasant climate. Punk bands like Sham 69 effectively split due to the far-Right shit-stirrers they inadvertently attracted to their gigs, and the descent of one Punk strand into the unlistenable and politically dubious ghetto called Oi! meant the invigorating marriage of recognisably black sounds with the same energy (and socially-conscious lyrical content) that had fuelled Punk was a potentially combustible mix at the end of the 70s. Happily, the melting pot produced pure gold, and the nation’s singles-buyers responded positively to the new hybrid from the second half of 1979 onwards. The Specials’ ‘Top of the Pops’ debut saw them performing ‘Gangsters’, which refitted Ska legend Prince Buster’s track ‘Al Capone’ with a distinctly cutting-edge engine; so swift was the sound’s rise up the charts that when The Specials returned to TOTP to promote their second single, ‘A Message to You, Rudy’, they were joined on the same show by another 2 Tone act, The Selecter, and a band whose debut single had also been released on the same label, Madness. It was hard not to conclude that here was a scene that was set to carry British pop into the 80s and beyond.

1980 was the real year of 2 Tone, even if – as had happened before with Psychedelia and would happen again with the New Romantics – it was all over and done with in the blink of an eye. Madness opened the first TOTP of the decade performing ‘My Girl’, and barely a month had passed before The Specials achieved their first No.1 single with ‘Too Much Too Young’, an uncompromising ditty about teenage pregnancy that limited its Radio 1 airplay. Birmingham’s The Beat were another band bearing the 2 Tone sound and they achieved several hits throughout the year, whilst Madness were already in the process of becoming a hit machine that would end up transcending and outliving the scene that bore them. But it was The Specials who remained the most interesting and intriguing act of the lot; the hit singles continued – indeed, every single the band released during their original incarnation reached the Top 10 – and they proved their value with the release of their second album, ‘More Specials’, one of those albums that grows richer the further we travel from the moment of its arrival. In fact, it was actually greeted with a degree of bewilderment at the time.

A brilliantly eclectic and adventurous shift away from the formula, ‘More Specials’ sowed the seeds of the band’s demise and exposed the different directions its creative forces were heading in. Keyboard player and founder Jerry Dammers was delving into the kind of movie soundtracks that would later provide the sampled roots of the 90s ‘Trip Hop’ scene as well as exhibiting a fondness for what would eventually be labelled ‘Lounge-core’; the rest of the band were not so enthusiastic. The Specials could have imploded there and then, right at the point when the 2 Tone craze had peaked, but they kept their cool long enough to deliver their masterpiece the following summer, bowing out with a single that rightly ranks as one of the finest slices of pop-as-social-comment ever committed to vinyl, ‘Ghost Town’.

A song such as ‘Ghost Town’ reaching No.1 right at the very moment when rioting was incinerating many of Britain’s inner cities is as retrospectively a mind-boggling occurrence as Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ providing the nation with its unlikely Xmas chart-topper in 1979; but it happened. In some respects, there was nowhere for The Specials to go after that and they finally splintered into both The Special AKA and The Fun Boy Three. Terry Hall was the frontman of the latter, dispensing with the sharp suit that had been the sartorial trademark of The Specials and allowing his cropped thatch (another trademark) to grow a little. The Fun Boy Three were TOTP regulars for a good couple of years and then they too split. Hall’s amusingly glum countenance and deadpan delivery were less visible in the charts thereafter, though he hovered on the maverick fringes for a decade or two before the inevitable Specials reunion and accompanying sell-out tours. Unlike many such enterprises, however, the reunion was regarded as something far more than just another nostalgic cash-cow for hard-up middle-aged musicians. The Specials had always been smarter than the usual music biz mentality, and they always will be.

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MESSI PLAYED QATAR

Considering the nature of events over the past two or three years, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves in a time when the World Cup Final is staged seven days before Christmas Day; the topsy-turvy, upside-down nature of where we are now expects nothing less – ditto the fact that (against all odds) a tournament rightly mired in controversy from the off climaxes with a match that ends up being one of the most edge-of-the-seat contests anyone can ever remember, one that also confirms a 35-year-old is officially acknowledged as the planet’s finest footballer. After all, the natural order was shown the door when this dismal decade was no more than a couple of months old, and ever since then we appear to have been living through a strange age when anything that had previously been logically written-off as fringe lunacy now goes – an era in which double-speak, thought-crime and 2+2=5 are the new normal; and questioning this trend is verboten in polite society. Not that Lionel Messi will be complaining; he’s finally got his hands on the one trophy that has always eluded him in a professional career that began as far back as his league debut for Barcelona in 2004. A lot of the talk over the past month has been focused on ending that career on a high, but there are a small handful of precedents should he care to dip into the history books.

The legendary Stanley Matthews played his last game for England at the age of 42 in 1957 – 23 years after his international debut; the fact he didn’t retire from football altogether until the age of 50 in 1965 is all the more amazing when one remembers he belonged to a generation of players whose careers were interrupted by six years of World War; moreover, he was unfortunate to be playing at a time when England’s performances at the World Cup never matched up to pre-tournament expectations. Lionel Messi has himself experienced many occasions during his five World Cups when the hopes of a nation have rested on his shoulders, shoulders weighed down by the burden of carrying average talents unworthy of his boots; but soldiering on eventually paid off. Due to his quiet, unassuming manner, Messi’s fame within the game has never really transcended football in the way of his flamboyant contemporary Cristiano Renaldo – nor indeed the ghost who haunts Argentina’s international side, Diego Maradona. But perhaps the additional crowning glory to Messi’s career has been to finally achieve global pop cultural status.

On Sunday’s field of play, Messi’s reputation was up against a young contender in the shape of his Paris Saint-Germain teammate, Kylian Mbappé of France. The other 20+ men on display almost seemed superfluous next to the God-like genius present in the feet of these two, certainly if pre-match hype was to be believed; but it was Messi who lived up to that hype in the first half, scoring the opening goal from the penalty spot and inspiring his side to a 2-0 lead that appeared unassailable to the lacklustre defending champions. France’s unexpected comeback towards the end of the game, levelling things at 2-2 and coming close to a shock victory in the dying light of normal time, revived a match that looked to be smoothly careering towards a preordained conclusion. But, as with the late West Germany equaliser that enabled 1966 to loom so large in the collective memory of all Englishmen, extra-time proved to be the making of the 2022 Final; and a game that seemed to contain everything had other echoes of 1966 too. There was Messi’s second goal (making the score 3-2) momentarily disputed at having crossed the line, and there was Geoff Hurst’s 56-year-old record finally being equalled as Mbappé scored a hat-trick, with a late penalty bringing the score to 3-3.

Okay, so it was eventually decided on penalties; but this wasn’t the contrived climax to one of those drab, fun-free Finals of recent years (1994 and 2006 spring to mind) – instead, it served as the only fitting icing to a nail-biting drama unparalleled in the footballing memories of most watching. And, whilst there may have been an interminable wait between the winning penalty and Messi being handed the trophy by a FIFA President who clearly didn’t want to let go of it (not to mention the player of the tournament being inexplicably draped in what resembled a see-through negligee from a 70s sex comedy), in the end the script penned by celestial hands was upheld and Argentina were recognised as world champions for a third time. A month ago, such an outcome had seemed pretty unimaginable, not least due to the fact Argentina had begun their campaign humiliated by the first of many upsets the contest produced, losing 2-1 to Saudi Arabia. Gianni Infantino, the same FIFA President who evidently wanted to bask in Messi’s magic glow on the podium, had opened proceedings with a bizarre press conference in which he responded to justifiable criticisms of the Qatar setting by declaring, ‘Today I feel Qatari; today I feel Arab; today I feel African; today I feel gay; today I feel disabled; today I feel a migrant worker.’ He didn’t add, ‘Today I feel President of an institutionally corrupt organisation that will bend over for any country with enough cash to roger it senseless and drag the sport through the mud.’ But you can’t have everything.

Opening in a key so low only Paul Robeson had previously been there, the 2022 World Cup prompted a generous amount of somewhat belated questions on the part of mainstream TV presenters and pundits from their executive boxes in stadiums built by slave labour prior to a ball being kicked; once the football actually began, anticipation over which players would choose to stage a protest was as widely discussed as any proposed performance on the pitch. As has been said before, however, there was always the 1978 example of the great Johan Cruyff, who opted out of that year’s World Cup in Argentina on account of refusing to condone the country’s ruling military junta – though none of today’s soccer superstars decided to follow suit. Despite rumours that the England team would honour their manager’s Woke credentials once again by running on the field bedecked in rainbow armbands, they restricted themselves to the jaded knee-taking ritual; that this virtue-signalling ceremony is well past its sell-by date was highlighted in an amusingly ludicrous manner when England played the USA, and the American players – who had started the whole thing in the first place – remained standing whilst the England team knelt before them; one could almost see it as a metaphor for the ‘Special Relationship’.

Sure, the German players added to the checklist of virtuous signals by indulging in a spot of pre-match mouth-covering before another embarrassing exit at the group stage, but the one visual statement made by a team that represented genuine bravery rather than the superficial ‘stunning and brave’ accolade routinely awarded to millionaires making a token gesture to ensure they remain on the Right Side of History was made by the Iran team. Their incredibly courageous decision to remain mute during the playing of the Iranian national anthem took balls, especially when one considers their families back home risked reprisals from the powers-that-be, let alone what might await the players themselves upon their return. In some respects, this memorable moment couldn’t be topped, and the focus more or less settled on the sport itself thereafter. And there were various surprises along the way, none more so than Morocco’s remarkable progress to the Semi-final, disposing of favourites such as Belgium, Spain and Portugal en route.

But, of course, whatever sour taste so much of this World Cup leaves in the mouth, at least it enabled Lionel Messi to fulfil his destiny; and I suspect that incredible Final will be the lingering memory of a tournament that should never have happened yet eventually served as a novel distraction from all the other cheery issues of the moment that are bringing so much joy into our lives. And all will recommence again three-and-a-half years from now in North Korea…er…sorry, North America. Well, you never know with FIFA…

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SPIRIT OF ’78

As if the past two or three years haven’t been difficult enough, yet again it’s the hospitality industry that’s being punctured by the sharp end of the latest crises. Footage of empty bars, bistros and restaurants in central London this week were mainly blamed on just one of the seemingly myriad industrial disputes of the moment, that being staged by rail workers. Naturally, this is the time of year when organised parties descend on such venues and get the festive cash tills ringing; but after being brought to its knees by lockdown and then being forced to limit its custom due to the inconvenience of social distancing regulations once reopened, hospitality is now confronted by endless cancellations and the non-appearance of impromptu punters due to the fact that commuting has been severely impacted of late. Much like the Labour Party, one almost gets the impression a union leader such as the RMT’s Mick Lynch isn’t so much concerned with improving the lot of the working man as he is with scoring political points over a government not necessarily in tune with his own worldview. That’s not to say the Conservative Party hasn’t provoked a good deal of this – far from it; but while the current stalemate produces no winners, losers are abundant – whether they be small businesses struggling to make ends meet or simply the browbeaten general public, confronted by even fewer reasons to be cheerful as the chain reaction of industrial action goes viral.

Right now, the roll-call of ongoing or imminent strikes seems to expand on a daily basis. We’re already feeling the effects of rail and postal workers withdrawing their labour at a time when we’re most dependent on it, but the Christmas & New Year schedules promise everyone from nurses to Border Force officers to bus drivers to baggage handlers to junior doctors to driving examiners to teachers to university staff and civil servants will at some point be declaring ‘Everybody out!’ 10,000 ambulance workers are also set to strike, though considering how long one has to wait for an ambulance to arrive these days, one wonders if anyone will actually notice. Of course, now we’re in December, the Royal Mail being afflicted by this virus is the one industrial dispute that is already proving to be a more effective souring of the seasonal spirit than a ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ Xmas special. Ever since the knock-down sale of the Post Office by Old Mother Cable during the Coalition years, the split between it and the Royal Mail has hardly been a roaring success, with the scandal that saw the false imprisonment and ruined reputations of hundreds of sub-postmasters during the Horizon IT affair emblematic of this centuries-old institution’s decline and fall.

As used to be the case with the music business (and remains so with the publishing industry), Christmas is the one period of the year when a public now largely content to spend its money and time online actually gets off its arse, fuelling an upsurge in productivity where Pat and his black & white cat are concerned. Therefore, it doesn’t take a genius to calculate this is the most opportune moment for postal workers to strike. Sure, when it comes to birthdays, many today prefer the instant method of issuing a meme, message or humorous image on the likes of Facebook or Twitter to mark the occasion rather than the antiquated ritual of buying a physical card and popping it in the post box; but Christmas remains the one exception to the new rule, whereby season’s greetings are still dispatched the old-fashioned way. And then there’s also the gifts requiring packaging, carried to the counter of a post office now often reduced to an appendage to a supermarket or shop or – in the case of my own ‘local’ – a library. This annual ceremony is entered into by millions up and down the country, and those millions expect their parcels to be delivered to the recipients at least before 25 December. I wonder how many of those millions saw the images from the Royal Mail’s main depot in Bristol yesterday.

The photographs highlighting a backlog of packages so immense that it has spilled beyond a building no longer big enough to house it included a shot of a fox wandering amongst the undelivered goods open to the elements; the accompanying story also suggested rats have been feasting on the overspill. Although the Royal Mail responded by claiming parcels at the depot are ‘moving very quickly through the centre and on to the next stage of their journey’, an anonymous member of staff at the Bristol Mail Centre told a different story, rubbishing an idea to cover the exposed parcels by pointing out ‘It would have to be the biggest tarpaulin in the world as everything has been ruined’; a spokesman for the Communication Workers Union said, ‘This backlog will take a month to clear…if you post a first-class letter or parcel today, hand on heart, I do not know if it will get there before Christmas Eve – that’s the truth, but it’s not what people are being told.’ Reports indicate hand-delivering cards is becoming an alternative, with trust in the Royal Mail diminishing due to the strikes; but not everyone lives within walking distance of a card’s destination. What if the recipient resides at the other end of the country – or in another country altogether?

Inevitably, images of the mountainous backlog offering urban vermin an early Christmas treat revive memories (if you’re old enough to have them) of the piles of uncollected refuse that contaminated pavements 44 years ago during what is remembered as ‘The Winter of Discontent’. For three months between November 1978 and February 1979, Britain gave every impression of falling apart at the seams with a series of private and public sector strikes bringing the country to a grinding halt. Everyone from bin-men to hauliers to NHS staff to gravediggers downed tools and took up placards to picket the workplaces they wouldn’t return to until receiving a pay rise. For several days in the run-up to Christmas, the BBC temporarily shut down, with its TV output off the air and the then-four national radio stations combining into an uneasy mix of a solitary network service; meanwhile, small screens in the Yorkshire TV region were blacked-out for the entirety of the festive season. ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ was the Sun’s headline response to PM Jim Callaghan accusing the press of being parochial as he came into the cold from a summit meeting with other world leaders in the Caribbean, a costly moment of misjudgement on a par with Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’ comment over 30 years later.

The swingeing measures of Callaghan’s Labour Government to combat spiralling inflation had exasperated the Party’s natural allies in the unions and, in turn, the actions of the unions alienated vast swathes of the electorate with time running out on a Parliament that had been in session since October 1974. Having been denied the right to vote by Callaghan’s decision to abandon an autumn Election, when that Election eventually arrived in the spring, memories of the winter were still fresh and the public instead took a gamble on Mrs Thatcher. Labour wouldn’t be in office again for 18 years. Compared to the bleak chaos of 1978/79, current events appear lightweight – at least for the moment. But this certainly feels like the most severely the public have been tested by industrial turmoil since that period, coming as it does hot on the heels of an endless run of doom ‘n’ gloom designed to sap the spirit.

After one Christmas that was all-but cancelled and then one which was given the green light at the eleventh hour, the prospect of returning to pre-pandemic festivities was deemed by some as the antidote to recent trials; yet now even that prospect is in peril courtesy of union moves that ultimately prove counterproductive in garnering public support, however much most agree on the uselessness of this Government and the unfair distribution of wealth on its watch. The blame game is naturally in full swing, but although there remains a niggling suspicion that the excessive coverage given to the cost-of-living crisis is in part another offshoot of the Project Fear narrative, the impact of real strikes on real lives is indisputable, not to mention making those lives even more boring than they already are.

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FESTIVE FEAR

Amazingly, it seems there are still people out there excitedly awaiting the unveiling of the festive schedules on the mainstream TV channels, as though the DVD box-set or streaming sites cease to exist on at midnight on 24 December, and for the duration of Christmas Day the only option for visual entertainment will be to watch the seasonal special of a BBC1 or ITV show nobody wants to watch the rest of the year. Even as far back as the late 80s, the one-time dominance of television to provide the masses with their yuletide viewing habits was being eroded by the gift-wrapped live comedy video, which would be shoved into the VCR instead of sitting through an over-familiar Bond movie or second-guessing which character would top themselves on the Xmas ‘Eastenders’. Television’s unchallenged power to monopolise leisure time on 25 December was broken long before the novelty of a Christmas Day terrestrial film premiere was rendered redundant by multiple means of seeing said movie months in advance of BBC1 getting hold of it. In a way, I suspect broadcasters are more aware of this than they let on, which is probably why they put so little effort into their Christmas output now than they used to; why waste time and money making festive telly people might want to watch when the people are planning their own personal schedules?

Like most unburdened by ‘family get-togethers’, I myself have the luxury of not having to take anyone else’s taste into account; I could watch ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ at 2.00 in the afternoon on Christmas Day if I wanted to. I don’t, but that’s not the point. Instead, I’ll no doubt dip into those neglected gems from the TV archive that the BBC will only trot out occasionally; indeed, what better way to feel seasonal without opting for the obvious than revisiting the fondly-recalled ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ series that annually aired on or around Xmas Eve from 1971 to 1978? An author whose low-key spine-chillers always appear best served by the small screen, M.R. James provided this series with the stories that comprised the first five entries, beginning with ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ in 1971; with its characteristically creepy Victorian setting, the chills are masterfully achieved on a shoestring budget, and though this psychological horror starring Robert Hardy as an Archdeacon tormented by voices and glimpses of imagined spectres in the shadows was intended as a one-off, it prompted a follow-up the following Christmas and swiftly established a tradition that spanned seven years.

There’d been successful televisual attempts to illustrate James’s talent for unsettling the reader prior to the start of this series; in 1968, Jonathan Miller directed an especially nightmarish adaptation of ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ in which Michael Horden’s twitchy academic suffers uncomfortably realistic nightmares during a spell on vacation in coastal Suffolk. It followed a familiar James path of placing pompous clergymen and dons in positions of peril, confronted by the consequences of their hubris when up against supernatural forces. ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (as it was re-titled) made enough of an impact at the time to warrant further James adaptations, though by the time ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ appeared, television had grown out of its monochrome roots and director of all-but one of the BBC Ghost Stories, Lawrence Gordon Clark, made full use of colour location filming in East Anglia to visualise James’s written words. Perhaps the finest example of this came with his second outing, 1972’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’, in which Peter Vaughan stars as an amateur archaeologist in search of the lost crown of the Saxon kingdoms; against all odds, he discovers it, though he bargains without the presence of the crown’s guardian, an out-of-focus figure who pursues Vaughan’s character even when he is convinced enough of the trophy’s curse to return it to its burial place. It remains a uniquely eerie 50 minutes that hasn’t lost its ability to unnerve.

By the time of the third entry in the series, ‘Lost Hearts’, the annual Ghost Story was in danger of becoming as much of a Christmas tradition as the Xmas Day ‘Top of the Pops’ or ‘The Morecambe and Wise Show’ – albeit an alternative sedative to the usual festive cheer, reconnecting with a gleefully disturbing Victorian and Edwardian sensibility which had been lost in the wholesome Americanisation of the season that had become the norm by the late 20th century. 1974’s ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ returned to recognisable M.R. James territory by featuring Michael Bryant as a smug medieval scholar looking for the lost fortune of a disgraced cleric; when he finds it, the ramifications of his avarice reduce him to a gibbering victim of his own superior attitude towards the unknown. The following year’s ‘The Ash Tree’ delves even deeper into pagan superstition, recalling the witch-hunts of the 17th century and evoking primal arachnophobia with the mutant ‘spiders’ lurking in the tree of the title. However, by 1976 the M.R. James adaptations were deemed worn-out and the series then turned to a short story by Charles Dickens, ‘The Signalman’.

An early outing for the now-veteran TV adaptor of classic fiction Andrew Davies, ‘The Signalman’ features Denholm Elliott as the title character who recounts a bloody train crash on the line outside his signal-box to an unnamed traveller, an event that continues to haunt him in his solitary exile from society. The fact the original story was penned a year after Dickens himself survived similar carnage on a train travelling through Staplehurst in Kent is probably no coincidence, but it certainly taps into the nightmares that remained with the author until his premature death on the fifth anniversary of the incident in 1870. The television adaptation of ‘The Signalman’ bears the same psychological tropes that opened the series with ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ five years previously, and is – along with ‘A Warning to the Curious’ and ‘The Treasure of Abbott Thomas’ – perhaps the most effectively chilling of all the entries in the series.

In 1977, the series received something of a contemporary makeover by dispensing with adaptations of classic authors and commissioning a newly-written story set in the present day, ‘Stigma’; although this tale, starring the dependable Peter Bowles, has its moments by calling upon the same pagan myths that fuelled ‘The Ash Tree’, a key element of the series is lost by relocating events to the here and now, and the trend was carried over into the following year’s ‘The Ice House’, the final Ghost Story of the 70s run. Bar the odd repeat screening, the tradition was discontinued for several decades until BBC4 decided to revive the series during the period when the channel was producing daring drama the mainstream channels had largely abandoned. 2005’s adaptation of a previously-untouched M.R. James story, ‘A View from a Hill’, managed to retain the creepiness of the 1970s adaptations as well as adding a slicker look and feel that made the revival more than merely a nostalgic rehash. It worked well enough to lead to another James adaptation the year after (‘Number 13’) and the series has continued off and on ever since. A new instalment is scheduled for this year, hot on the heels of last year’s ‘The Mezzotint’, and all (bar one) have been derived from the works of the master, M.R. James.

Post-lockdown, the ongoing ‘things can only get worse’ mood of the nation has led to an annual ‘Oh, well – let’s just enjoy Christmas’ attitude that obscures the fact that, for many, this is a time of year when detachment from one’s fellow man is intensified by an overemphasis on convivial group gatherings that not everyone is party to. The likes of ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ serves as a much-needed antidote to such facile clichés and any addition to a series that now stretches back half-a-century is a welcome – not to say rare – contribution from mainstream broadcasters that acknowledges the needs of viewers for more than a Christmas ‘Strictly’ special to lure them away from online attractions. Long may it continue.

VICTOR LEWIS-SMITH (1957-2022)

A shadowy, near-mythical figure whose brilliantly offensive and near-the-knuckle manipulations of archive TV illuminated late-night Channel 4 back in the days when the station had balls, Victor Lewis-Smith was also renowned as a witty, sardonic journalist for publications as varied as the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and Private Eye. His death at the age of 65 will probably pass most people by, but his pioneering prank calls (which were unremittingly amusing, if deliciously beyond the pale) paved the way for the likes of Ali G; I particularly recall his call to Hughie Green in the late 90s, when he asked the one-time ‘Opportunity Knocks’ host if he’d ever f***ed Lena Zavaroni, which provoked laughter from Green rather than apoplexy. His call to Michael Winner was even better; if Lewis-Smith’s ‘TV Offal’ series is still available on YT, track it down; it also features the Gay Daleks. Say no more. The Winegum salutes you as a master satirist, sir.

© The Editor

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7 UP & DOWN

It tends to be a given that most works of fiction which imagine the future usually offer an exaggerated vision of the times in which they were written, reflecting the hopes and – more often than not – the fears of the here and now. Numerous elements of a book such as ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ become more worryingly prescient the further we travel from the Cold War nursery that inspired it, though its source material is still unmistakably 1940s Europe. Equally, whilst Anthony Burgess ingeniously kept ‘A Clockwork Orange’ relevant for each generation of teenage hoodlums by inventing slang for his gang of Droogs, their actual genesis was in the moral panic that accompanied Britain’s original adolescent bogeyman, the Teddy Boy. Trying to second-guess what will happen next involves observing the most concerning present day developments and projecting them forwards, imagining how their progress will continue along a similar path, morphing into even more horrific manifestations of their contemporary incarnation. I guess today there are several schools of thought that maintain this tradition, depending upon where one stands on the pressing issues.

For example, by now we’re accustomed to the relentless Doomsday prophesies of the more extreme wings of the climate change lobby, and their forecast rarely varies from the worst case scenario; then there’s the Covid branch of the soothsayer’s union, who only ever seem to see the virus in terms of how many bodies their fevered imaginations can picture; and, of course, there are those who envisage the control of the individual by the State moving closer to the Chinese model as our civil liberties are eroded by successive legislation cloaked in the guise of benign intervention. It goes without saying that images emerging last week of people unable to leave Guangzhou due to the Chinese authorities remotely switching their Covid digital QR passport from yellow to red ought to serve as a warning of what can happen when the individual surrenders the majority of their autonomy to the State; and it’s easy to foresee the leaders of the West pushing for the same powers in the not-too distant future. Then again, every gallows has its humour; after all, it’s hard not to laugh at the utter absence of self-awareness in a risible figure such as Justin Trudeau, declaring his solidarity with protestors in China whilst failing to discern parallels with the way he took back control from Canada’s truckers by first demonising them and then freezing their bank accounts.

If, rather than looking forward, one were to momentarily look back perhaps seven years to December 2015, the pattern of events that brought us to where we are now is easier to discern than predicting the pattern that will take us to December 2029 – even though we instinctively know the direction of that pattern will be a progressively darker one; the feeling is all-but irresistible, yet who can blame us after what we’ve been through over the past seven years? Can anyone seriously argue the world is a better place in 2022 than it was in 2015? One might even come to the conclusion that things have only got worse every year from 2015 onwards. Mind you, what’s interesting is that anticipating the next seven years as something even more awful than the last is far from being the pessimistic prognosis of a wannabe Nostradamus in the wilderness; it’s pretty much become the consensus. The future is now only sold to us as a negative, with a daily roll-call of crises-to-come that hardly make getting up in the morning something worth waiting for; it’s no great surprise so many children are terrified that the Earth will be reduced to a barren wasteland by the time they come of age. Optimism in the future no longer sells.

I think I tried to convey that in a recent post titled ‘Heart and Soul’; this was inspired by watching an old ‘day in the life’ primary coloured-portrait of London from the early 60s called ‘All That Mighty Heart’; it’s the kind of film short that sticks rose-tinted spectacles on the viewer without the viewer’s consent, yet if one can manage to avoid being seduced by the naive nostalgia the film radiates, there’s still no getting away from the fact that it oozes a wonderfully refreshing self-confident optimism in the future – optimism in better homes, better living and working conditions, better roads, better transport, better public amenities, better leisure facilities, and a better life. I suppose the era in which it was produced, long before the ambitious Utopian visions of town-planners collapsed into the rubble of Ronan Point, give it that joyous energy; a generation who had fought the War and a generation that had grown up in the shadow of it took a quick glance over their shoulders and then understandably saw the future as a better place than the past. And they believed it was within their powers to make it so. Maybe that’s why this kind of film can seem such a breath of fresh air when looked at today, a time when we’re so worn down by the MSM generating nothing but negativity when it comes to the day after tomorrow.

Okay, so we overcome one crisis; give it 24 hours and there’ll be another to keep us in a state of agitated anxiety, perennially worrying if it’ll be the next virus that kills us or if hypothermia will beat the virus to it or if the planet will burst into flames and incinerate us before we even get to cannibalism. The cost-of-living crisis is currently being marketed as though it’s the first suffered by a wide cross-section of the British public since the 1970s, though whether we are going through boom or bust there will always be people who are struggling to make ends meet, just as there are always those who are doing alright, Jack – like the landlord of Matt Hancock’s local. Yes, some did indeed have a ‘good pandemic’. Fair enough, he might have had to settle for a knighthood rather than a PPE contract in a brown paper bag, but Chris Whitty is now warning us that this winter’s annual ‘NHS in crisis’ story will consist of multiple deaths arising from all the life-saving diagnoses for cancer and other fun diseases that were sidelined by diverting resources into the likes of empty aircraft hangars called Nightingale hospitals; whose fault was that, Professor Mekon?

Ditto the alarming deaths of children from Strep A; the reintroduction of social interaction in the school environment is being blamed by ‘experts’, yet perhaps if the kids hadn’t been unnecessarily kept away from each other and clad in masks by paranoid parents in thrall to Project Fear, maybe their immune systems would have been sufficiently developed to resist the bacterial infection. Yes, all of these upbeat headlines skimmed from a cursory glance at our beloved news outlets at least bear a relevance to the general tone of this post; but to get back to where we were a few paragraphs ago, what’s all this about December 2015? Well, I didn’t select December 2015 as a random date; the eagle-eyed and long-term amongst you may have realised the Winegum debuted seven years ago this month as of Tuesday just gone (incidentally, this post was ready and waiting to be posted on the actual anniversary, but ongoing ‘internet issues’ prevented me from fulfilling the bloody deadline). Anyway, I struck gold beginning this enterprise when I did; from a purely writing perspective, I couldn’t have wished for a more turbulent time to be documenting and commenting on; it has certainly been a remarkably eventful period of our recent history, and I recognise good fortune when I see it.

Had the last seven years been materially comfortable, culturally static, politically stable and free from drama on both the home front and the global stage, they might not have added up to much in the way of either writing or reading. I suppose if I can put often-unpleasant personal experiences during that timespan to one side and reflect on 2015-2022 solely in terms of ‘art’, I have absolutely no complaints. Duran Duran once infamously claimed they wanted to be the band the people were dancing to when the bomb drops; well, if you’re still up for reading the Winegum Telegram in your cave as you shelter from your plague-infected friends & family, shivering in the perma-winter or sweating in the perma-summer of tomorrow’s killer climate, I’ll keep buggering on.

© The Editor

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DOG WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK

Back when Fleet Street still had some clout in dictating the mood of the nation, a regular tactic employed to garner headlines during a quiet week was the journalistic ‘sting’, whereby the likes of an avaricious individual such as, say, Prince Andrew or his estranged missus could be set up for an encounter with a hack disguised as an African prince or Middle Eastern potentate and thus expose themselves as self-aggrandising parasites prepared to sell their inherited prestige down the river for a few tax-free quid. At the time of these kind of manufactured meetings, there would be a palpable reaction from the public bordering on shock, whereas we’re all now so used to our public servants being bent bastards that we barely batter the proverbial eyelid when they’re caught out. It’s symptomatic of how low we’ve plummeted since more innocent times, I guess; we expect nothing less these days. The contemporary redeployment of these techniques by self-identified ‘activists’ can therefore be counterproductive due to the fact that the plebs have wised-up.

While it goes without saying that anyone who includes gender pronouns in their Twitter account is deserving of every ounce of contempt we can muster, anyone describing themselves as an ‘activist’ is equally asking for it; and when the latter attempt a sting of their own we no longer respond with shock and awe; we see it for what it is and reserve our contempt for the instigators of such stunts. Step forward Ngozi Fulani, a BLM-sponsored, Marxist ‘activist’ with an adopted ethnic moniker and culturally-appropriated wardrobe; over the past couple of days, she has maximised her fifteen minutes by doing the daytime TV chat-show circuit and milking every ounce of her encounter with one of Brenda’s former ladies-in-waiting at Buck House. In case you missed it, Fulani is the ‘activist’ who managed to add her name to a Royal guest-list on the pretext of representing a charity, though to many it seems she accepted the invite with the intention of locating racism at the heart of the British establishment. I often wonder if such characters have a tool-box akin to Batman’s utility belt, crammed with hi-tech gadgets designed to detect racism whether it’s there or not.

It would appear Ms Fulani certainly came prepared, primed with a prearranged agenda to lift the lid on the enemy and build a career on the back of it; to ensure success, she opted for native dress – native, that is, to various African countries. I’d imagine she knew full well that an elderly employee of the House of Windsor accustomed to meeting and greeting Commonwealth dignitaries would probably mistake her for an African ambassador of some sort; and she apparently arrived armed with a hidden tape recorder just to be on the safe side. It’s hard not to conclude that Ngozi Fulani went to this reception with a mission in mind; she may as well have been an agent programmed by some race-baiting branch of the SIS to carry out a task guaranteed to generate fevered discourse on social media and in broadsheet columns, thus further exacerbating an imaginary, unbridgeable gulf between black and white that is essential to dividing and ruling, not to mention upholding the myth of Britain as a racist hellhole obsessed with a long-gone Empire which only the over-60s can even remember the tail end of.

Since Ms Fulani’s version of events went viral, she has displayed the customary victimhood hallmarks, claiming she’d been ‘traumatised’ and ‘violated’ by her meeting with 82-year-old Lady Susan Hussey, who had slipped into a default polite conversation mode with this exotic-looking Woman of Colour; Lady Hussey understandably assumed – given the context – Ms Fulani was a visitor to our fair shores due to wearing the kind of garb commonplace amongst overseas invitees to such events. The dressed-to-kill Fulani honed in on an aged official, sniffing-out an easy ‘toxic’ target in a career move possessing all the premeditated intent of a grandchild mischievously coaxing a mildly right-wing opinion out of a grandparent around the Christmas dinner table. And we only have Fulani’s version of events due to the fact her version has provoked the inevitable cancellation of the only other person witness to it. That’s convenient, for it means the familiar, unquestioned narrative can be maintained free from contradiction.

As has subsequently emerged from the routine root through her social media history, Ngozi Fulani is a committed race-baiter who believes Meghan Markle was a victim of ‘domestic violence’ at the hands of her now-deceased in-laws; gaining access to the lion’s den behind enemy lines must have been like all her Christmases coming at once for said ‘activist’, and she clearly didn’t waste the opportunity when it was presented to her. The ensuing media storm in a chipped teacup has certainly given her the spotlight she evidently craved and has resulted in a demonised servant of more than half-a-century stepping down from her post with the compulsory grovelling apology and a notable absence of support from former gutless associates like that dim Woke marionette Prince William. Ms Fulani has apparently declared Lady Hussey’s forced retirement is ‘not enough’ – what precisely, one wonders, does this ‘activist’ want? A public procession along the length of the Mall in which Lady Hussey receives a hundred lashes? After all, Identity Politics is a religion that doesn’t countenance forgiveness and redemption. Even if Lady Hussey was strung-up for her heinous crimes and her severed head was displayed on a pike for all eternity at the entrance to London Bridge, it still wouldn’t suffice as punishment.

If any punishment needs dishing out, it should be directed towards Identitarian opportunists who promote sectarian dogma that will callously toss irrelevant octogenarians onto the landfill site of public opinion in pursuit of its nihilistic aim. I can do no more than defer to the wise words of Jonathan Meades before changing the subject: ‘To emphasise differences merely consigns people to their background, to where they’ve come from, to their tribe, their caste, their religion. It creates ghettos.’ Everything Ngozi Fulani accuses Lady Hussey of is everything Ngozi Fulani embraces; it is her raison d’être and has provided her with all the invaluable attention she’s received in the past 48 hours. She owes Lady Hussey big time.

CHRISTINE McVIE (1943-2022)

The two threads that run through both distinct incarnations of Fleetwood Mac are the drummer and bassist that gave this long-running transatlantic soap opera its brand name, but of equal importance is the unsung singer-songwriter who replaced the band’s original creative force Peter Green when he succumbed to post-LSD delusions in 1970. The Blues revivalists who morphed into a proto-Hard Rock powerhouse at the end of the 60s suddenly found themselves in a similar situation to contemporaries Pink Floyd upon the loss of Syd Barrett – who was going to write the hits? In the case of Fleetwood Mac, the moment Green departed the hits dried up, despite the handy fact that John McVie’s missus was a proven hit-maker with the band Chicken Shack. Christine McVie joined her hubby’s band at a point when their commercial fortunes nosedived, yet she stuck with them throughout the tricky early 70s; by the time they relocated to a more receptive California in 1974, the recruitment of two new members to a band with the kind of personnel changes that would put Spinal Tap to shame revitalised the enterprise and gave Fleetwood Mac a facelift that turned them into one of the best-selling acts of the decade.

Overshadowed by the dramatic theatrics of the Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks love/hate saga, McVie quietly churned-out some of the most memorable tracks on the landmark 1977 LP ‘Rumours’, such as ‘Don’t Stop’, ‘You Make Loving Fun’ and the immortal ‘Songbird’; lacking the photogenic flamboyance of Nicks, McVie got on with her job from behind the keyboard comfort zone and delivered the goods on the band’s succeeding albums, maintaining a low profile that perhaps robbed her of the recognition that has now belatedly come with her untimely passing at the age of 79. But, as with anyone capable of penning songs of such enduring quality, McVie is survived by her art.

© The Editor

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