Bring Up the Bodies wins the Booker

The replacement of Stella Rimington as chair of the Booker judges by Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, has had predictable consequences.  Rimington's much derided "readability" has gone, and "literariness" has come storming back.  I'm glad about this, because I thought Bring Up the Bodies, which has taken this year's prize, a much better novel than Julian Barnes' 2011 winner, The Sense of An Ending.  I found Barnes' book very slight, crashing to the ground, like so many contemporary English novels, over some very basic plausibility hurdles.

I've written about both these books before, but am more convinced than ever that whilst Bring Up the Bodies is a tour de force, incorporating an ambiguous meshing of first and third person narrative styles that I have never encountered before, it tells us little about Thomas Cromwell, its protagonist.  Cromwell is clearly a ruthless fixer, but lacks the venality expected of ruthless fixers, and lacks any other qualities which might have explained why someone we find so sympathetic should be willing to skewer his enemies in such a cold-eyed manner.  There is an extent to which everyone is hard to pin down, and elusiveness is part of the human condition; but in Mantel's book Cromwell seems to me not so much elusive as hardly there at all.

As for her grasp of the period, all the detail is there, and it is never showy.  But neither does she seem to have understood that those people 500 years ago were, as well as being the same as we are, also utterly different.  Mantel has got the sameness, but that's all.

Lady Sybil and the Dead Parrot

Watching Downton Abbey on Sunday I was reminded that nothing ruins a story as much as the intrusion of the real world outside its confines.  We all know there's a puppet master outside the narrative, but woe betide the artiste that allows us to notice the strings being pulled.  It kills involvement at a stroke.  There's a Margaret Attwood novel, Alias Grace, where the author dangles two alternative versions of a story in front of us for - what seemed to me like - the last third of the book.  "For Heaven's sake", I wanted to shout at the author, "Make your flippin' mind up!"

At a rather less exalted level than the grumpy Canadian, on Downters the fragrant Jessica Brown Findlay, alias Lady Sybil, was misdiagnosed in pregnancy by snooty consultant Tim Pigott-Smith.  Piggot-Smith is no more appealing now than when he was a pervy flogger in Jewel in the Crown all those years ago, and I wonder whether his life has been ruined by association with the horrible characters he has to play.

Anyway, while Brown Findlay was croaking quite movingly of child-birth complications, behind it all lay another complication - she has had offers of work in LA.  I found it impossible to put this out of my mind.  Nothing confirms Downters descent into a posh soap than the realisation that Lady Sybil was being written out of the story.  Moreover, it wasn't even Julian Fellowes pulling the strings, but Brown Findlay's agent.

RIP Downters.  RIP Lady Sybil.  Not dead, just gone to Hollywood.

Azhar Ahmed, the Guardian and free speech

So a young British Muslim man has been given a stiff community sentence for a post on the internet to the effect that he hopes British soldiers killed in Afghanistan go to hell.  And a white boy gets 12 weeks inside for publishing something horrible about someone else which now escapes me.  I am surprisingly unhappy about all of this.

I can't articulate my response better than the following, posted by one BuckHucklebuck on the Guardian's Commentisfree website this morning:

"The right to offend is sacred.  The right to be a vile, disgusting, subhuman ... is sacred.  The right to think and say terrible things about the dead, the dying, the best and brightest is sacred.  Any abridgment of it is far worse than anything I could say about a missing child.  There is no combination of hateful, hurtful, disgusting, lewd or vicious things I could say that would be worse than the removal of my right to say it."

Amen to that.  Thankfully the DPP, Keir Starmer, is now looking afresh at s.127 of the Communications Act 2003.  This section, passed by a Labour government, makes it an offence to send "by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character".  It effectively invites anyone to go to the police if they are offended by something you or I say online.

In its leader today the Graun observes that "in the end the solution will have to be rewriting or even repealing, as opposed to reinterpreting, this law".  Fine words; and I'd have liked to post a grateful response to BuckHucklebuck online.  However, on Commentisfree my contributions are now being pre-moderated.  In practice this means if I post something, it doesn't appear.

Free speech for all then.  Except on Commentisfree.

QE Balls

The papers have become fond of aping Private Eye's Number Crunching feature, where figures are contrasted to ironic effect.  Here's one of my own.

£4bn - the sale proceeds of the new 4G licences, which Ed Balls says he would use to kick-start the economy.

£400bn - the amount of QE the Bank of England has pumped into the economy in the last two years without kick-starting the economy at all.

Jimmy Savile - Monarch of the Glen

If anything has wrecked Glencoe more comprehensively than the traffic pouring down it along the A82 and the insensitively sited car parks crawling on summer days with coach parties of Japanese tourists, it is the knowledge that this week's paedophile hate figure, Jimmy Savile, owned a house there.

A friend told me years ago, as we were off to climb some clag-shrouded hill or other.  In one way it seemed almost impossible to believe.  The track-suited TV personality showed in his public manifestations absolutely nothing which might have indicated a love for the outdoors.  And yet it was perfectly possible that Sir James might, on some TV jaunt or other, have driven, or more likely been driven, down the Glen, seen a For Sale sign, and forked out on a whim.

If I was going to buy a house in Scotland, Savile's wouldn't have been the one.  It is in one of the most spectacular places in Britain, but it's right by a very busy road, with lorries thundering by.  Moreover it looks out up the glen to the little Buchaille rather than across to the Lost Valley or Stob Coire nan Lochan.  For someone as famous as Savile it can't have provided much privacy, and I wonder how much time he actually spent there.  Certainly on many dozens of journeys up and down Glencoe I have never seen any sign of life at the house.

Long before the allegations about Saville's sex life became public, the Glen seemed diminished by Saville's presence.  To me, he represented everything that was tawdry, cheap and meretricious about the world; the Glen everything that was worth doing in it.  The fact that he had raised millions for charity didn't figure; the knowledge that he had owned the house rankled then, and still does.

Nevertheless it's a shame Savile isn't around to answer the allegations against him.  If true - and we'll probably never know - they feature conduct unacceptable in any era; but before the BBC gets blamed for carrying on employing him despite rumours about his taste for underage girls, its as well to remember that times have changed a lot since the 1970s.  I heard the sainted John Peel make remarks about schoolgirls on his show which would have got him sacked on the spot today.  I loved Peel, but, like Saville, he was lucky to be working when he did.

PS - Thank goodness the Metropolitain Police are investigating Savile's crimes.  He's dead, and there's no prospect of a prosecution, but it's reassuring to know that at last Plod is on his tail.

Yes Minister, Pre-Distribution and the Big Society

A Yale political scientist, one Jacob Hacker, has come up with an idea he calls "pre-distribution", focusing work done by John Rawls and others on how to make society fairer.  At the moment the state tries to do this ex post facto via taxation and welfare.  Hacker wants to do it much earlier on.

I heard Hacker interviewed on the radio the other day because his ideas have been taken up by Ed Miliband  (the Tories have been quick to link the hapless author with Yes Minister's Jim Hacker; David Cameron delightedly pointed out at PMQs that the academic has written a book called The Road To Nowhere).  Jacob Hacker seemed a thoroughly amiable chap, partly bemused and partly flattered by the attention he is getting.

Basically, he wants employees to be given more money.  This is all very laudable (and if it could be achieved by making sure their Chief Executives got less, it might even work); but if you pay employees more, you immediately raise the company's cost base and make its products and services less competitive.  More money for the employed means fewer jobs for others.  If we did what Hacker - and now apparently Ed Miliband - want, the Germans and Chinese would be laughing their heads off.  Because they are the people who would benefit.

Hacker's view is shared by by Dave Prentis, head of public sector union UNISON.  Prentis has bitterly criticised the Government's public sector pay freeze.  He may be justified in trying to get better pay and conditions for his members, because this is after all what unions are there to do, but he is wrong to suggest, implicitly if not explicitly, that higher wages for public sector workers are somehow good for society at large.  They aren't.  Every pound spent on higher public sector wages is one less that can be spent somewhere else in the economy.  That's why Ed Miliband has endorsed the Tory pay freeze.  Prentis needs to explain which service (or whose jobs) he would cut to pay for his members' wage increases.

For the disaffected, alternative employment and better pensions may be available in the private sector.  Or not.

If the pre-distributionists really wanted wages at the bottom end to rise, they would be calling for an end to unskilled immigration.  Its effect has been much studied (not the least by Prof David Blanchflower) and is well understood.  The pool of available labour increases.  Employers don't have to compete for staff by raising wages.  Wages at the bottom end stagnate while those at the top rise.

During the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born outside the UK, leaving many British people (some of them, incidentally, with brown skins) languishing on their sofas.  Ironically, those most in favour of unrestricted immigration are those most likely to complain about the inequality which results when you have it.

Like other big ideas, Pre-Distribution will come and go.  Blue Labour.  Red Tory.  Ed Miliband mentioned Disraeli's One Nation during his party conference speech - that one, more than a century old, flickers briefly into life now and again.  Will the Third Way still have legs in 2112?  Perhaps.  But I don't think we'll be hearing much about the Big Society.

Mario Draghi as Jan Tomaszewski - keeping the Euro in the game.

Eurozone watchers like me underestimated at first the willingness of the apparatchiks to keep the single currency going.  Whilst good leadership might have been in short supply, a story has emerged in the last year of striking resourcefulness in taking steps to defer the final Euro crunch.  In retrospect this should have been obvious - a generation of European leaders has grown up believing in the The Project, and they are not going to see their dreams chucked on the scrap-heap just because of a yawning currency imbalance between north and south.

No leader has emerged with greater credit (admittedly in a below-average field) than Mario Draghi, ECB chief.  First of all his Long Term Financing Operation, allowing banks access to cheap three-year money, kept the banking system afloat at a time when it might well have foundered.  Now, when it looks as if Spain could get sucked into the abyss of unaffordable bond yields, up pops Draghi with a promise to do "whatever it takes" to keep yields down, a promise which has taken the concrete form of Outright Monetary Transaction, a scheme by which the ECB will buy sovereign bonds on the secondary market in exchange for fiscal reforms by the sovereign in question.

Draghi reminds me of Jan Tomaczewski, the legendary Polish goalkeeper, who flung himself in the way of the missiles bombarding his goal during World Cup qualifier against England in 1973.  Like Tomaczewski, Draghi seems equal to everything that is thrown at him.

But his interventions are short-term only.  Draghi is a good shot-stopper, but he cannot stop the relentless attacks on his goal.  The country most likely to need OMT now seems to be Spain.  But Spain doesn't want to ask for the money yet, because it would be politically humiliating and in October there will be regional elections.  Meanwhile the country has youth unemployment at 50%, and yesterday Madrid cut 40 billion Euros from its budget (perhaps to forestall the demands the ECB will make for triggering OMT), which will only push its economy further into recession.  And this at a time when Catalonia is pressing for a secession referendum which Madrid says would be illegal.  Old Spanish generals are warning about military action if Catalonia goes ahead.

Thus even the most competent Eurozone leader's measures are made at the expense of ordinary people in countries of the southern periphery.  They are anti-democratic in several senses.  Draghi and his like have no democratic mandate in Spain.  They aren't even Spanish.  Their decisions profoundly affect the Spanish electorate, but Spanish voters have no say in them.  Their effect on Spain as the country struggles to do what is required of it is so grindingly awful that it jeopardises not just Spanish democracy, barely half a century old, but the existence of the country in its current form.

That all this should be happening in pursuit of a monetary union that was meant to ensure a united and peaceful Europe is a bitter irony.

A prediction then - if a country leaves the Euro it won't be because EU leaders have run out of imaginative road.  On the contrary, they will keep thinking of ways to kick the can on a bit further till hell freezes over.  Instead it will happen because somewhere people decide that they have had enough.  At this stage Spain looks the most likely candidate.