Rebekah Brooks and the horse

On the way home today I listened to ex Blue Peter presenter and former coke snorter Richard Bacon, now rescued from supermarket-opening obscurity and enjoying the limelight again with an afternoon show on Radio 5, announcing the names of his guests for the afternoon. One them, Bacon said, would be his Radio 5 colleague Simon Mayo.

Like many such shows, Bacon's programme often consists of him interviewing people who have a film, book or TV show to plug. It's a cheap way of making a programme, and the interviewees probably shift a few more units as a result. And yes, it turns out that Mayo, who used to present the afternoon programme himself (and actually still does so on Fridays), had a product to flog: he has written a children's book.

So Mayo gets to appear on the programme he used to present, to enable him to drum up more publicity for something out of which he hopes to make money. So far so unedifying.

What's this to do with Rebekah Brooks and the horse, lent to her by the Metropolitain Police? Well this was the top story on Bacon's programme, and the ingenuous presenter wheeled out two guests, Labour MP Denis McShane and phone-hacking solicitor Mark Lewis, neither of whom could find a good word to say about Ms Brooks (although neither did they have the wit to point out that if the Met was concerned to save money on surplus horses they might have done better to try and sell them). It seemed therefore that Ms Brooks, the Met and the horse = corruption.

On the other hand, Bacon plus Mayo plus book-plug is apparently quite OK.

It looks to me as if it's not just News International's stable which could do with a good clean out.

PS - On Bacon's programme the next day up pops Mark Austin, BBC Home Affairs Editor. Guess what Austin has done? Yes, he too has written a book. Just to make sure we know this, he mentions it twice in his first sentence. Bacon then refers to it as "your excellent book". Pass the sick bag.

Dangerous Abu Qatada

What to make of the furore surrounding "dangerous" Abu Qatada, the international terrorist wanted on, er, terrorism charges in Algeria, the United States, Belgium, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Jordan?

(If this list is incomplete, please don't bother emailing - it is surely long enough to be going on with.)

The curious thing, if that's the expression I'm looking for, about Mr Qatada is that he has been in prison in Britain on and off for six years, fighting deportation to Jordan. The British Courts were persuaded that Qatada was too dangerous to release on bail. Only the other week the European Court ruled that Qatada couldn't be deported, because the Jordanian Court might admit evidence obtained by torture, and now the British Government has had to release him on "control order" bail, whatever that is, with total release in three months if there is no progress on the Jordanian trial negotiations.

A number of things strike me. One, I really don't like the idea of someone being detained for six years without trial just because the Government thinks they might be too dangerous to release on bail. "Control orders" are indefensible. Two, Qatada would rather languish in jail here without trial than take his chances with Jordanian justice. Three, Qatada and people like him tend to be very keen on the rule of law when it can be used in their favour, but are paradoxically quite happy to violate it by blowing other people up (or exhorting others to blow people up) when it suits them.

Fourthly, how short sighted is the European Court? After all, if there's a risk that evidence against a person has been obtained by torture, any lawyer worth their salt will have a field day discrediting the witnesses. Many a defendant going through the British courts would give their right arm to be able to cast such a slur. The proper course surely would be to let the Jordanian witnesses have their say, and then let Qatada's Defence lawyers off the leash. Assessing the evidence - whether it's any good or not - is the Court's function.

Of course if half the things our government says about Qatada are true, he would not last long on the outside in Britain without putting his foot in it somehow. Perhaps Qatada is a kind of Joey Barton of the Islamist world, unable to open his mouth without urging Jihad or the killing of all infidels. Given a decent amount of surveillance by Scotland Yard, it wouldn't be long before he had committed an imprisonable offence.

On the other hand it's perfectly possible that Qatada might come out and live peaceably amongst his family, doing nothing more dangerous than claiming benefits, going to the mosqe, keeping his nose clean and watching daytime Al Jazeera. What a life.

hockney v hirst - good and bad?

Reviews in the Guardian and Torygraph this morning of the David Hockney and Damien Hirst exhibitions running in London, at least one of which I would dearly love to see: since photographs of Hockney's landscapes started appearing in the papers a few years ago I have been beguiled by their generosity and proper reverence for the natural world.

Martin Kettle in the revamped Grauniad writes movingly in praise of Hockney, and thinks that the painter expresses and addresses "the kind of people and country that he and we wish we were . . . when Hockney takes a pop at Hirst, I, for one, will cheer, because he is taking a pop at the kind of country we have become, in which attitude is more important than morality, price trumps value, and in which to shock and make a name is privileged over doing something lovely or true . . . " Kettle writes that Hockney's work has "the sensibility and the feeling, even the moral feeling, which is missing from so much that is merely fashionable . . . The modernists, like the conceptualists today, believed that the past had nothing to teach them and the rules all had to change. They were utterly wrong".

It's very rare that someone in the Graun writes something I agree with wholeheartedly. Kettle's words remind me slightly of an interview with Nicholas Maw in which the composer, when taxed with his failure to follow the groundrules of modernism, said that he believed that he was the inheritor of a tradition, and he didn't want to stray too far from it. My sentiments exactly.

Over in the Torygraph Peter Oborne, an opinion farmer so splenetic that he makes me look positively restrained, also thinks he can detect something in the Hockney and Hirst exhibitions that tells us something about the state of the nation, as well as about aesthetics. Hockney's art, writes Oborne, "is accessible, which is why he is loved by ordinary people. He loves them back. At the artist’s request, his canvasses have been hung high on the wall of the gallery so that more people can see them. Hockney understands, in a way that the arts establishment abhors, that art does not belong to an informed elite. . . [Hirst's spot paintings on the other hand] are abstract and universal, lack humanity and have zero reference to time or place: his exhibition is being shown simultaneously at 11 galleries around the world. Skill is not required: no late nights at life class for Hirst, who gained an E grade at art A-level and scarcely knows how to draw. . . Hence the need for experts to explain to a baffled public why Hirst matters: the arts establishment love him so much because he gives them a priestly role. . . "

But it isn't just the arts establishment that is a fraud on the people, apparently - "Progressive ideas are being exploded, Conservative ones are coming back. This affects every aspect of our national life, not just politics. David Hockney did not return to Britain after a long stay in the United States because he had been told that David Cameron would be the next British prime minister, but his arrival here nevertheless says something very important about the national direction of travel. Appearance and reality are no longer identical. Good and bad are no longer indistinguishable . . . Britain is moving back towards a world with solid, enduring values in which, for the first time in many years, public figures can make confident judgments about truth, beauty and morality. It is a world in which David Hockney OM has an honoured place as the greatest artist of his age."

Now I have a soft spot for Hirst, who comes across as a surprisingly unaffected and unpretentious artist in person, and I feel Oborne is probably protesting slightly too much if he thinks Hockney's resurgence is attributable to a sea-change in aesthetic and political values. But the phrase that really grates is "Good and bad are no longer indistinguishable". Philosophers have argued for millenia whether it was possible to distinguish between moral good and bad, and, so far as I have been able to keep up with the debate, have come to no particular conclusion.

In aesthetics it is far easier. It is not possible to state whether one piece of art is good and another bad, because we can only do so by reference to aesthetic criteria - balance, subtlety of form, pithiness, clarity and so on. Even if we could agree on a complete list of such criteria, how would we begin to address the knotty question to what extent a piece of art satisfied one or other of them? And even if we could do that, how would we agree which of the criteria were the most important? What if one work had subtle form, but went on a bit? Or another were concise but a bit obvious in its construction?

I sometimes think the comparison with athletics (yes, athletics, not aesthetics) is instructive. You measure the best hundred-metre runner by lining up the athletes, firing the gun, and handing the garland to the person who gets to the tape first. In art however you aren't even inviting the artists to the starting line. You are saying, "Well you could begin at the starting line, but not necessarily; you could start by the long jump pit; and you don't have to run - you could walk, hop, crawl. In fact you don't even have to come to the Olympic stadium at all. You could just sit at home and watch Richard and Judy". That is how hard it is to measure one piece of art against another. You might just as well try and argue that one kind of cheese is "better" than another. It's a waste of time.

If there are no objective criteria there can be no objective evaluation. Ultimately one's instinctive feeling - that you either like something or you don't - turns out to be vindicated by an examination of the tools which criticism offers for the job. They are inadequate ones. Oborne is wrong about aesthetic good and bad. I liked him more when he was on Newsnight shouting at EU commissars; and I didn't like him much then.

I said at the top of this piece that the Guardian had been revamped, and so it has, with the sports section being lumped in with the main bit of the paper, and other changes in layout which I haven't quite come to terms with yet. This revamp is in the name of cost-cutting, and in a way it tells us more about the state of the nation than Oborne's beloved Hockney exhibition.

The Guardian, losing money hand over fist, has woken up to the fact that its own finances need putting in order, just about the same time that its editorial team - Kettle is I think chief leader writer - is grasping slowly that in the long run there is no alternative for a nation to living within its means. The Graun's readership is way behind on this still, and whenever Kettle writes a piece which shows some signs of an acquaintance with economic reality, the cries of "betrayal" on the following day's letters page are long and strident.

Oborne's sea-change really will have come about when the tone changes to glum acceptance. At the moment we're still in anger and denial.

Alex Salmond gets my groat

A sign this morning that the more we stop talking about the process of the Scottish independence referendum and the more we start talking about the substance, the harder it will get for the Nationalists to make their case. The unionist side, on which I broadly find myself, has some reasonably heavy hitters in Alastair Darling and Malcolm Rifkind, and now the Torygraph reports them saying something I've been thinking for a while now.

Alex Salmond used to say the Scots would join the Euro. For a time this was a sellable proposition, but as recent events have made this less and less credible, Salmond has reverted to saying a newly independent Scotland would keep the pound.

Fine. Let's assume Westminster agrees (although it might not). Now, who will be your central bank, Alex? Would it be the Bank of England, by any chance? And when that Bank sets interest rates, will it set them according to economic data from the UK as presently constituted, or will it just take data from England, Wales and Northern Ireland?

That's a no brainer: there is no way that a post-independence Bank of England will be taking account of what's happening in Scotland. For one thing, it would be politically unacceptable in England. No, after independence, if Scotland keeps the pound, it will have interest rates determined by the Bank of England, ignoring conditions in Scotland. That means that even if Scotland doesn't have the wrong base rate from day one, it'll have the wrong rate pretty soon after. Given that England tends to have stronger growth, in practical terms it means Scotland is likely to have base rates that are too high, strangling its economy.

And if Scotland were to join the Euro, what then? For the forseeable future it's a fair bet that national budgets of Eurozone countries will have to be vetted by Brussels. What kind of independence is it which exchanges the pooling of economic sovereignty with the rest of the UK for pooled sovereignty with twenty-odd other countries across a cold stretch of sea? Countries moreover with whom one has none of the ties of geography, language, culture, history and personal affection that bind, however loosely, the UK?

No, for the Jocks it'll be the Groat, or nothing.

Diane Abbott makes the news

At the gym today, pounding away in preparation for another mountaineering trip that will probably be lost to the weather, I learned that Diane Abbott has tweeted that "white people love playing divide and rule". It was the lead item on Sky News, although over on the BBC it didn't figure until later on. Make of that what you will.

Although I don't like much being lumped in with a group of people who, apparently, love playing divide and rule (I'm racking my brains for evidence of that kind of behaviour) I guess that's small beer in comparison with the sort of stereotyping black people have to put up with, and on the whole I rather like Diane Abbott. I agree with virtually none of her views, as far as those are available to the public, but I like people who say what they think, even if it sometimes means they say stupid things like this, and I don't share the widespread perception that she is a hypocrite for sending her son to an expensive public school. If I had a black or mixed race son I'd want to keep him well away from the kind of culture which affects an awful lot of young black men in Britain.

Please excuse the stereotyping there, Diane.

When the BBC did get round to reporting the story about ten minutes in to its lunchtime bulletin, its reporter rather let the side down, I felt, by describing Abbott's explanation for her tweet - that she was referring to 19th century colonialism - as "bizarre". I am quite capable of making up my mind whether Abbott's explanation is rational or barking mad without any help from you, madam.

There may be no such thing as objective reporting, but need it be quite so obvious?

stephen lawrence - institutionally rubbish #3

This blog has long argued that the most significant inference to draw from the Stephen Lawrence murder is that the police are quite often incompetent. The Macpherson inquiry found differently - it said that the police were institutionally racist.

Following the conviction of Messrs Dobson and Norris yesterday for Lawrence's murder, Dr Richard Stone, one of the inquiry's members, is quoted as follows in the Guardian this morning: "We couldn't believe the police investigated murders in general as they had done with the Stephen Lawrence case .... insufficient evidence was presented to us to draw the conclusion that it might have been corruption so we were left with one other possibility, that it had to be racism".

It's the first sentence which stands out for me. I saw first hand how the police did their investigations when I was a lawyer, and I find it only too easy to believe that they messed up not just the Lawrence case but many others as well. I've previously cited the Michael Barrymore swimming pool death. So when Dr Stone says "we were left with one other possibility", he's wrong. There were two others - racism, yes, but incompetence too. So far as I can gather, the Macpherson inquiry did not look at any other murder investigations, with or without a racial element, to see how well they were conducted. Maybe Macpherson wasn't that competent either.

Doreen Lawrence said yesterday "Had the police done their job properly, I would have spent the last 18 years grieving for my son rather than fighting to get his killers to court". That hits the nail on the head. I thought Mrs Lawrence behaved with a dignity, poise and restraint that were very characteristically British. Go on, laugh if you like. But black people being British is rather the point, isn't it?

Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel

Engaged in a session of Dad's-taxiing the other night, I nearly heard Julian Barnes in the radio talking about the Booker prize. Actually I did hear a little of it; Barnes spoke of his anticipation with a childishness eagerness at odds with his reputation as a serious writer. I couldn't help but think that he'd have sounded rather different if he'd lost. Perhaps that's a given. Then my journey came to an end and I missed whatever momentous stuff followed.

In keeping with my new found status as person up-to-speed with modern literature (see posts passim) I have read The Sense of an Ending, Barnes' winning novel. Tony, a man of middle years, divorced, seeing old age approaching, recounts his friendship as a young adult with Adrian, and with Veronica, his first serious girlfriend (NB Spoilers coming). He and Veronica split, and Adrian writes to ask Tony if he'd mind if the two of them got together. Tony remembers replying facetiously; but it then turns out, many years later, that Tony wrote a rather different letter, and we are invited to believe that this led to a series of awful consequences for which the elderly Veronica cannot forgive him.

I found myself uttering a series of increasingly exasperated Paxman-like "Oh for God's sakes!" as the faintly melodramatic denouement of Barnes' book unfolded. For it to be effective - and for the novel to work - we have to accept that Tony's letter led to those awful consequences, whereas in fact a moment's reflection would convince us that they would probably have happened anyway; we would have to accept that Veronica, a clever woman, was incapable of perceiving this; and we would have to accept that Tony, himself a clever person, rather than meekly accepting his guilt, would not have the wit to utter a rather tart "Get over yourself" to Veronica and get on with his retirement. Moreover since what Hitchcock used to call the McGuffin of the story is that we all create our own histories, blurring the past, it seems strange that this should happen to everyone in the story apart from Veronica, for whom the reverses of the 1970s appear to be as painful as when they were fresh. If we as readers find any one of these things implausible (and I found all three so) the novel collapses.

Once more I found myself saying exasperatedly to my friends in the Males from Hale, a book group, "But people just don't behave like that!" I find myself increasingly hamstrung by the divergence of some art from observed behaviour. We watched Atonement the other day at home, and I was reminded anew of my exasperation with Ian McEwan's novel. You have to believe that the Keira Knightley character, caught in flagranto with the gardener's son by her sister, would have said nothing when the sister denounces him to the police, another guest having been sexually assaulted in the grounds. Yes, McEwan really thinks we will meekly accept that the Knightley character would rather have watched her lover go to prison than stand up for him. Oh, and that the victim of the assault in the grounds will one day marry her attacker. Folks is strange, but not that strange. "It's only a film", says my wife. "It's just not a very good film", I reply. Or novel, for that matter. Both Barnes and McEwan write beautifully; but no amount of beautiful writing can camouflage an unbelievable plot.

One advantage of magical realism is that it matters slightly less whether authors get this kind of thing right. When normal rules of physics and taxonomy cease to apply, one is inclined to be a bit more forgiving of aberrations of human psychology. I have also been reading Ali Smith's The Accidental, in which Amber, a woman, unbelievable in naturalistic terms, intervenes in the lives of a seriously dysfunctional family, with dramatic effect. We accept that it's not naturalistic and accept what Smith tells us. Smith makes Barnes' book feel plodding, and McEwan look like a navel gazing coin polisher. She has more talent in her little finger than either of them.

Of course the disadvantage of magical realism is that it makes us all the more aware that we are being manipulated by the author, and that it's the author's decision to make the characters move in a particular way. Good novels make it seem inevitable that, say, Sidney Carton should give up his life for his double, and it's only if we stand back and think about it that we realise Dickens could have done it differently. When Alan Breck gambles away his money in Kidnapped we are blissfully unaware that it is Stevenson who is making it happen. It seems to happen because that's what Alan Breck is like. It's the fact that we don't think about the alternatives when we're reading that gives a good naturalistic novel its peculiar force. It seems to me as a non-novelist that that's too important a quality to throw away.

Although Smith's book was wonderful, I found myself thinking afterwards about its ethos. Thanks to the wonderful Amber's intervention in The Accidental, the four members of the family are liberated from their various unhappinesses; or rather all are bar the truly unpleasant father, Michael. In particular the mother, Eve, embarks on a liberating journey in America while the others remain at home.

I would be willing to bet that Smith, Scottish and a lesbian, is of the bien-pensant Left. In case we had failed to work out how horrid Michael is, we are told quite early on that he supported the Iraq war. How ghastly! And yet the tone of the book is one in which the pursuit of personal freedom leads to fulfilment. I find this a surprisingly right-wing, even libertarian, outlook. One of the reasons so many of us lead lives which, from the outside, appear no doubt stultifying and conventional is that association with others (spouses and children in particular, but other people too) brings with it responsibilities which require that one's own personal freedom is constrained. In The Accidental Eve's Thelma and Louise-like Odyssey is described in some detail; the effect on her children, abandoned in London with their asshole father, is glossed over. Everything we know about these dysfunctional kids tells us that they will be lost without their mother. But Smith more or less ignores that. After all, gritting your teeth and getting on with family life doesn't make much of a story, does it?

It turns out that I'm not the only one who didn't think the Booker winning novel was up to much. Geoff Dyer has written a withering review of it in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/books/review/julian-barnes-and-the-diminishing-of-the-english-novel.html). Dyer's objection was that it was kind of OK, but no more. I think that the English novel is big enough to withstand being diminished by Barnes, and by McEwan and Smith. But I do wish they'd write with a bit less polish and a bit more plausibility.