Cardinal Keith O’Brien

The dramatic departure from office of the Scottish Catholic Cardinal Keith O’Brien, amid allegations of sexual misconduct and gross hypocrisy, has all the ingredients of a potboiler play—lurid plot, supposed sexual shenanigans, political intrigue, impossibly dastardly authorities, impossibly innocent injured innocents—and looming behind it all, the Catholic Church, one of the major villains of the age, cloaked in medieval mystery. 

The Scottish Church’s troubles are themselves but a part of the global problems of a 2,000-year-old institution under vicious siege from modernity. As a stricken pope abdicates for the first time since 1415, the Vatican seethes more than usually with tales of gay sex, blackmail, and financial corruption, and the suddenly rudderless hulk seems to admit water at every seam. In his last public address as Pontiff, Benedict recalled the “stormy waters and headwinds” of his papacy, the times when it felt like the ship might sink while “the Lord was sleeping.”

Like all Catholics, the ex-cardinal has hundreds of thousands of enemies who hate him on principle simply because he is a Catholic. For these prepackaged foes, to be a Christian of any kind is at best stupid, at worst an unforgiveable insult against the spiritless Spirit of the Age. As Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister in 1928 when she heard that T. S. Eliot had found God:

…he may be called dead to us all from this day forward…there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.

Seen from this perspective, Catholics are the worst kind of Christian. They rudely reject the joys of secularism and the “equally valid” cultural claims of Islam, Baha’i, and aromatherapy. Even worse, they accept the built-in inequality of the Vatican, with its rich history, its hierarchy, its horrid “male, pale, and stale” character, and its real or alleged secrets. The Vatican City offers a ready-painted stage for conspiracy theorists. The baroque architecture, the Swiss Guards, and the crimson-slippered Pontiff are tantalizing targets for the world’s despisers of difference. 

These “conspiracies” often involve bankers and Freemasons—but most usually in recent years cover-ups of clerical sexual abuse. On this last point at least the theorists are too often correct. For an institution that prides itself on having survived two millennia, the Church has been very clumsy in the way it has dealt with recent allegations of child molestation by priests. Such allegations are almost as old as the Church and will always be leveled against those who make a fetish of celibacy, and traditionally the Church has managed to suppress them, relying on the shame of the abused and the discretion of the episcopate. Even in our age of sexual obsession, eternal grievances, and instantaneous media, the Church appears to believe it can simply obfuscate the issue as it has always done. That sexual abuse is even more common among the secular and that only a tiny proportion of priests are guilty in any case does not alter the fact that a would-be moral exemplar has to adhere to higher-than-usual standards.

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O’Brien attracted special opprobrium during his incumbency because of his frequent attacks on the government’s obsession with “gay marriage,” which he called a “grotesque subversion.” In November last year, this “insensitivity” earned him the inverse accolade “Bigot of the Year” by a monomaniacal group named Stonewall—the playground phraseology making the group’s corporate sponsors squirm in unease, doubtless fearing losing Catholic customers. (They need not have feared, because conservatives almost never act strategically.)  

Stonewall and their many allies were accordingly thrilled when four priests came forward this week to claim that this very public detester of “deviance” had subjected them to “inappropriate” advances. Not only did this remove one of their most inveterate enemies and undercut all conservatives, it reconfirmed one of their fondest pop-psychology theories—that the most fervent anti-homosexuals are often overcompensating for their own orientations. In the Guardian on February 26, Mark Dowd briefly discusses traditionalist “liturgy queens” who involve themselves in endless discussions about rites and vestments to distract themselves from more dangerous proclivities—and all of us probably know Catholics who fit this bill. 

O’Brien denies the allegations, but he brought forward his planned resignation (or had it brought forward for him), thereby losing the chance of helping to elect Benedict’s successor at March’s conclave.

In accordance with the usual practice when a man is down, the media was quick to kick the fallen cardinal, highlighting what some papers called his “close friendship” with the late kiddie-fiddler Jimmy Savile. Pictures showing them together at fundraising events suddenly sprouted up everywhere, an incongruous and unpleasing combination of a dignified prelate in canonicals and a lounging longhaired lad in some of the worst clothes that ever emanated from a Far Eastern sweatshop. 

According to at least one newspaper, Savile’s mother believed her infant son had been saved from early death thanks to the intercession of the Venerable Margaret Sinclair—and her son, for many an “icon” of pop culture and permissiveness, retained sufficient religiosity to accept a papal knighthood in 1990. The alleged “close friendship” between Savile and O’Brien did not, incidentally, prevent O’Brien from recommending that this be stripped from Savile as soon as stories emerged about the DJ’s priapism. 

Even if O’Brien is cleared of these charges, very similar stories will immediately be circulated about other senior prelates, and they will always do so—even in the unlikely event that a pope decides to abolish the celibacy rule, which some predecessors have acknowledged is more a matter of usage than of doctrine. Only a week ago, none other than Keith O’Brien—at that time, still a respected moral arbiter with (Stonewall notwithstanding) a general reputation for liberalism—recommended that the next pope should consider whether priests ought to be allowed to marry. But apologists cite Christ’s own example or quote Paul and Luke. And even if the Bible cannot be introduced in evidence, celibacy is a very long established custom, going back not just to the Church fathers but even before Christianity, to the notion that self-mortification facilitates religious realization. 

It would be a brave Pontiff who would take this on, and doubtless even if the rule was changed the Church will always be a target for the world’s wiseacres. It looks likely that the next pope, whoever he may be, will endure yet more stormy waters and headwinds as he struggles to keep his ship afloat.

King Richard III

On February 4th, the University of Leicester announced that the bones unearthed last August beneath a former parking lot in Leicester really were what had been hoped—the remains of King Richard III—and the audience of journalists burst into spontaneous applause. A 527-year-old mystery had been solved in the mud beneath the most prosaic of possible sites.

Despite current egalitarianism, the term “king” retains a resonance that will never pertain to “president” or “prime minister.” We are catapulted romantically into the ancient world and etymologically into Anglo-Saxon England. Even the journalists’ applause was reminiscent of the shouts of acclamation with which English kings were once crowned. Any royal remains would have been exciting, but when they are those of “Crookback Dick,” last of the Plantagenets, last of the Yorkists, the last medieval monarch, the last English king to die in battle, and the one with the foulest reputation—it captures all imaginations. Just as Leicester is central to English geography, so Richard is central to English history.

Richard was killed at Bosworth, eleven miles west of Leicester, on August 22nd, 1485 at age 32. Although the Wars of the Roses would limp on for two more years, Bosworth was the decisive engagement, and when Lord Stanley ordered his reserves to attack Richard’s troops rather than those of Henry Tudor, it ushered in the modern age. As he sat astride his charger looking down on the arena from Ambion Hill, Richard must have realized that his cause was hanging on a knife’s edge. According to tradition, he then saw Henry’s thinly protected red dragon banner less than a mile away and charged with eighty loyal Northerners, personally killing Henry’s standard-bearer before being hewn down. Had he managed to kill Henry, we would almost certainly remember him more kindly, and he would probably have long lain in magnificence at Westminster rather than under tarmac in Leicester.

His dead body was stripped, a halter was placed around his neck, and he was tied to a packhorse and taken to Leicester, where he lay exposed for two days before being buried in Greyfriars church. The tomb and its church were then pulled down by Henry VII’s son during his Dissolution of the Monasteries—and until last August, it had been thought that Richard’s bones had probably been precipitated into the River Soar. 

Richard had reigned for just over two years, clearing his way to the throne in a welter of intrigue and violence. In April 1483, Richard’s brother Edward IV died, leaving the throne to his 12-year-old son Edward. Richard was declared Protector, and he brought Edward to the Tower of London, then a royal residence. Then Richard claimed to have discovered an assassination plot against himself, and he arrested four members of the King’s Council, executing one the same day. Three days later, he had Edward’s nine-year-old brother Richard also placed in the Tower of London. 

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He then announced that his nephews were illegitimate and arranged for a public sermon on the theme “Bastard slips shall not take deep root” while simultaneously canvassing the king-making class. One of his most eloquent canvassers was the Duke of Buckingham; one witness of a Buckingham speech was impressed that His Grace did not even pause to spit between sentences. Richard feigned surprise when Parliament petitioned him to take the throne but accepted graciously—and he was crowned in July in a coronation which set a new precedent in splendor.

His reign started auspiciously. He introduced laws to ensure juries were qualified and free from intimidation, to grant bail for those arrested on felony charges, and for ending fraudulent property deals. He pleased Parliament by not demanding a subsidy—the euphemistically named “benevolences” enthusiastically levied by most monarchs. A celebrated soldier, he also made peace with Scotland. He was a noted patron of music and gave generously to buildings such as Windsor Castle, Westminster Palace, and King’s College in Cambridge. He had a reputation for abstemiousness in contrast to that of his voluptuary predecessor—and for honesty and loyalty. Crucially to a country that had been fighting over succession since 1455, he also had a legitimate heir. 

But there were enemies everywhere, and Richard had little aptitude for politicking or propaganda. His heir and then his wife died in rapid succession, and allies fell away as he fell apart. Rumors began that the “Princes in the Tower” had been murdered on his orders. Written long after and reliant on partisan sources, Thomas More’s account still chills:

Sir James Tyrell [an ambitious courtier] devised that they should be murdered in their beds. To the execution whereof, he appointed Miles Forest, one of the four that kept them, a fellow fleshed in murder beforetime. To him he joined one John Dighton, his own horsekeeper, a big broad, square, strong knave. Then, all the others being removed from them, this Miles Forest and John Dighton, about midnight (the silly children lying in their beds) came into the chamber and suddenly lapped them up among the clothes, so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the feather bed and pillows hard unto their mouths, that within a while, smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of heaven, leaving to the tormentors their bodies dead in the bed.

There is no evidence to connect Richard, but he was the likeliest culprit. An atrocious crime indeed, but as Anthony Cheetham commented drily in The Life and Times of Richard III, “Family loyalty is hardly the dominant motif of the Wars of the Roses.”

More’s was only one of many Tudor-endorsed traducements, culminating in Shakespeare’s celebrated character assassination of 1592. From the 17th century on there have been revisionists, and there is a dedicated Society, but they are all outweighed by one piece of superb melodrama.

York is contending for Richard’s remains, but Leicester may have more need of such symbols. Near the altar of Leicester’s tiny cathedral, there is even a large stone incised with his name which is regularly decorated with flowers. Leicester is already a city of ghosts, a place that belongs to the past rather than the future. It even has a medieval precinct still called Holy Bones. This is a city that was a ford for Celts—a fortress for Romans—a religious center for Saxons—and the legendary burial place of King Lear. It housed the first elected English Parliament. Chaucer was married in Leicester, and here Cardinal Wolsey came one night in 1530 to the Abbey of St. Mary of the Meadows (now under another car park) predicting “I am come to leave my bones among you” and promptly did. 

The city whose ironic motto is Semper Eadem (“always the same”) is furthermore passing out of the English orbit altogether, as immigration has tipped the balance of power away from the descendants of those Celts, Romans, and Saxons in favor of everyone else. What better place could there be to park the endangered English identity?

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Cooper, Artemis. Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure. London: John Murray, 2010.

On December 9th, 1933, an eighteen-year-old miscreant rushed through the rain at Tower Bridge to catch the Stadtholder Willem, about to hoist anchor and leave for Rotterdam. His luggage was light—a little money, a few letters of introduction, a knapsack, a sturdy pair of boots, an ash stick, some drawing materials, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and Horace’s Odes—all the more light because he did not intend to hang around in the Hook of Holland but to walk from there across Europe to the civilization-straddling metropolis that for him would always be Constantinople.

But deficiencies of kit or connection were amply compensated for by Patrick Leigh Fermor’s longing for picaresque adventure and a strong personality an exasperated former schoolteacher described as “a dangerous mixture of recklessness and sophistication.” He was also an instinctive antiquarian and amateur philologist—an unusual personality type, later summarized by one wondering journalist as “a blend of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene.”

His peregrination would take him through the intestines of a Europe on the verge of self-immolation into the most obscure corners of a continent where pre-feudal folkways had somehow persisted into the Art Deco era. He observed the lager-swollen, Lebensraum-thirsty stormtroopers spilling out of Munich’s Hofbräuhaus as a few years afterward they would spill over Germany’s frontiers. There were tanks on Vienna’s streets, and as he moved east he “became inoculated against Bolshevism.”

His wistful accounts of his walk would be suffused with sad awareness of what such manifestations of modernity meant for the Europe he had come to find. These classics of travel literature—A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water—were written decades later with the help of historical hindsight. They were the products of obsessive editing and some confabulation, but even the young Leigh Fermor could see that pre-modern Europe existed on borrowed time. Unlike his communist contemporary Laurie Lee, who poetically recorded the Gloucestershire and Spain he sought to turn into Soviets, Leigh Fermor traveled in the service of tradition, even taking part in a militarily insignificant but memorably evocative Greek Royalist cavalry charge.

He found old Europe just in time to write about its counter-temporal cultures in what Nicholas Shakespeare disdainfully terms “Manueline prose…overly crammed with truffles.” Yet Manueline style suits the subject in all its complexity and color, its crisscrossing connections and layers, lost landscapes, jealous identities, and ancient animosities. Leigh Fermor roots in a reverie amid history’s scattered fragments—giant catfish patrolling the untamed Danube, bears in the high woods, intoxicatingly empty seas of grass, shepherds in outlandish sheepskin overcoats with spiked-collared dogs to fend off wolves, churches still the centers of local cults, farmhands fervently reenacting pre-Christian rituals, eccentric polymaths with extensive libraries, relict ethnic groups left behind by long-retreated armies, crumbling cartouches, invalid flag-making, and sailors who played musical instruments that would have been recognizable to Odysseus. He mingled with representatives of all the nationalities he encountered, whether peasants or princesses, dining in cafés or caves, sleeping in haystacks or great houses according to the hazards of the highway, with the accepting flexibility of youth. Small wonder that his reminiscences should have met with favor among postwar Europeans, for whom Europe is no longer an epic, but a synonym for the barbarizing activities of Brussels’s bore-acrats.

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He augmented his Byronic life-legend by fighting with the Cretan resistance during the war and masterminding the 1944 abduction of a German general—an exploit commemorated in the 1957 Powell & Pressburger film Ill Met by Moonlight. Then he devoted the rest of his life to building his and his wife’s ideal house at Kardamyli on one of the Greek mainland’s southernmost tips. (John Betjeman swooned that the living room was “one of the rooms in the world.”) He also continued traveling.

Apart from the two European books (a third will finally be published next year as The Broken Road, reworked by Artemis Cooper from an early draft), he wrote about Greece (Mani, Roumeli), the Caribbean (The Traveller’s Tree, The Violins of Saint Jacques), monasteries (A Time to Keep Silence), and South America (Three Letters From the Andes) and turned out impossibly elegant review-essays. His last publication was in 2008, a collection of his correspondence with the Duchess of Devonshire (In Tearing Haste).

A painfully slow, easily distracted writer who was often bumptious and careless with other people’s money, he nonetheless contrived to lead an extravagant existence, moving in glitteringly gifted circles. He made almost no enemies in the course of 96 years (he died in 2011) except for hardline communists who tried to kill him in 1979, and in England a few less dangerous but equally unappetizing reviewers who disapproved of his maleness, class, and intellectualism. He had a chivalric understanding even with the abducted General Kreipe, with whom he exchanged Horatian snippets as PLF’s party took their prize furtively through the Cretan uplands to rendezvous with a British boat. Even a blood feud that commenced when he killed a resistance fighter by accident was eventually resolved in a flurry of ouzo and embraces from the dead man’s nephew, mixed with kindly offers to dispatch anyone Leigh Fermor wanted dispatched.

Artemis Cooper is Leigh Fermor’s first biographer, and she is well-placed to offer insights. If anything, she may be too close to her subject. Her grandmother, Lady Diana Cooper, was a close friend of Leigh Fermor’s, and the author has halcyon memories of childhood visits to Kardamyli, stroking the Fermors’ pet dog while listening entranced to its master’s stories.

She has done an excellent job of narration, whether she is telling us about London’s literati, Moldavian manors, Irish venery, or PLF’s venereal disease. If at times the reader feels he is not really getting under PLF’s skin, it is almost certainly due to a paucity of confessional source material rather than Cooper’s shortcomings as researcher or collator. Leigh Fermor’s generation did not weary the world with self-analysis; they just did things, quietly or showily according to taste. As Stephen Spender once observed, PLF was clearly “not an empathizing introvert.” That is not to say there are no revelations or inspired guesses in what could have been hagiography—the author senses when her self-romancing subject was being economical with the actualité, such as when she discloses his ignoble interlude as hosiery hawker around west London.

It would have been fascinating to know whether he ever came to any conclusions about all the wonderful things he had seen that mostly disappeared within his lifetime. He may not have been an empathizing introvert, but he must surely have fretted about Greece, England, and Europe’s future. Just as Joan and all his friends fell away during his life, leaving him a lonely relic, so too his vibrant Europe has dried up and diminished under the pressures of centralization, communism, fascism, globalism, homogenization, immigration, internationalism, rationalism, and technology. We read him as raconteur and stylist rather than as oracle, yet had he written of these things many would have paid attention. As we close the book at the end of his epic adventure, we are left wondering whether at the end the winsome Wändervogel was really content.

Rupert Murdoch

A venerable British political tradition dictates that whenever some important matter arises, the government commissions an inquiry chaired by a renowned expert. This expert duly conducts a thorough investigation—which sometimes takes years—at great public expense, eventually producing a highly detailed report. The government (sometimes by then a new one) welcomes the report, thanks the expert, and then ignores all or most of its recommendations. The government’s chief aim is that they have been seen to be doing something—and that if they can defer doing something for long enough, most people will forget all about it. 

It is too early to say whether this will be the fate of the 2,000-page Leveson Report into press practices and their links with politicians and the police, published with a groan on November 29th. Leveson comes with cultural momentum and the backing of powerful forces, from Labour to phone-tapped celebrities, all exploiting the symbolic suffering of genuine press victims such as Christopher Jefferies.

Ed Miliband, who appears to lie in wait for approaching bandwagons, has no qualms. Within sixty seconds or so of the Report’s issuance, he announced he would accept it “in its entirety.” He may come to regret his impressive speed-reading skills, because this “entirety” includes a footnote stating that the Independent was founded in 1986 by Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover, and Brett Straub—two well-known journalists and the third a 25-year-old Californian whose practical-joker friend had added Straub’s name into the Independent’s Wikipedia entry. 

Less amusingly, if more importantly, David Cameron has also said that he is “determined” to see Leveson’s principles implemented and therefore has instigated cross-party talks. Yet these talks are faltering, with Labour already drafting its own policy. Political practicalities will almost certainly prevent full implementation. The eminent judge has strained for sixteen months and brought forth a political football.

Leveson is highly ambitious—ending self-regulation, a new code of press conduct regulated by an independent body with the ability to fine newspapers up to £1,000,000, or one percent of their turnover. This new body should be underpinned by legislation (although, crucially, not statute) and should contain no serving editors or MPs. There should be rapid arbitration to deal with complaints and wider powers to deal with breaches of data confidentiality.

The new agency—supervised by an old agency, Ofcom—will offer legal protection to journalists who feel uneasy about what they are being told to do, and “ethical advice” to police officers about dealing with the press. Senior police will be required to record and summarize all contacts with journalists and should be dissuaded from “consuming alcohol in a setting of casual hospitality” with them. Media that adhere to the new scheme will be allowed to use a “kite mark” to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime.

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Leveson criticizes both David Cameron and New Labour for being too close to the media, although he found no evidence of any “deal” between Cameron and News International. Senior politicians, he avers, should declare their long-term relationships with journalists and summarize the proceedings of meetings and correspondence. The same will apply to ministers’ representatives and lobbyists. 

Many of these proposals will probably be dropped quietly into what Whitehall wags call “the circular filing cabinet.” But the government has yet to formulate its official response, and this may be long delayed. Downing Street may secretly enjoy having the whip hand over the press. When the Daily Telegraph contacted Culture Secretary Maria Miller’s office recently to inquire about her expenses claims, an adviser reminded the paper silkily:

Maria has obviously been having quite a lot of editors’ meetings around Leveson at the moment. So I am just going to kind of flag up that connection for you to think about.

It is likely that the government will agree to a new body, but not a statutory one, which most Tories fear would be subject to political interference. The difficulty is separating political from nonpolitical and legislation from statute.

The political divide is stark, with the right generally against statutory regulation and the left generally in favor—an ironic turn of events for those who see themselves as liberal iconoclasts. The left has always had a generally low opinion of the UK print media but a correspondingly high opinion of the UK broadcast media. In all the pages of Leveson there are no critical references to the Guardian, Independent, or the BBC.

But even within conservative ranks there are Leveson lovers, although they are partly counterbalanced by non-Tory Leveson loathers. The Daily Telegraph of November 9th pointed out that some of these public-spirited ones may have personal reasons, listing embarrassments for which they had been criticized or ridiculed, ranging from expenses to a wife who augmented her husband’s salary by turning tricks at £70 a time.

The chastened print media are still trying to find ways to avoid subjecting themselves to any kind of control, with Lords Black and Hunt attempting to put together a coalition of editors for stronger self-regulation—and whatever they say in public, practical politicians will not wish to break with this group completely. What may in the end undo the print media may not be so much political opposition but cultural changes, with all print media (whether regulated or not) losing ground to uncensored Web media—a growingly important subject almost completely beyond Lord Leveson’s remit (only one page in those 2,000 is devoted to the Internet) and which is making it more outdated hourly.

The situation is accordingly fluid and fraught with difficulties of definition as well as implementation, with politicians needing the media at least as much as they hate them. Much will depend on how long the Leveson-boosters can maintain their momentum and what else may come along to distract our attentions. It could be that there will be some kind of “breakthrough,” but it is equally possible that Leveson will linger long on everyone and no one’s agenda until its air goes out at last—half-embraced, half-rejected, an enthusiasm for radicals, an embarrassment for realists.

Julian Assange

In July 2011, in response to public anger at a few tabloid journalists’ illegal activities, David Cameron reluctantly announced the Leveson Inquiry into the specific allegations and the “culture, practices and ethics of the press.”

Sixteen months of media navel-gazing, 650 witnesses, and 3.2 million words of evidence later, the Inquiry is creaking to a close. Its recommendations on press regulation will be published at the end of November, either calling for continued industry self-regulation or statutory regulation. There could be ramifications far beyond the eight charged to date with phone-hacking offenses or those who have already resigned as a consequence of the Inquiry. Some say the results may mean the difference between a free press and a government-controlled one. 

The Inquiry has provided fascinating insights into the way power works in modern Britain and the incestuous, sycophantic-symbiotic interconnections between police, celebrities, politicians, and the press. Many relished seeing the tabloids being subjected to the kind of inquisition they normally conduct on others, as trial by media turned into trial of media. The cast of this expansive farce is a cultural cross-section—among them Julian Assange, Conrad Black, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Alastair Campbell, Charlotte Church, Nick Clegg, Max Clifford, Steve Coogan, Richard Desmond, Hugh Grant, Peter Hitchens, Sienna Miller, Piers Morgan, Max Mosley, Rupert Murdoch, John Prescott, and J. K. Rowling—all mutually dependent and mutually despising.

The proceedings also featured harrowing tales, including that of Bob and Sally Dowler, parents of 13-year-old Milly, abducted and murdered in 2002. In July 2011, the Guardian claimed that journalists at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had hacked into Milly’s mobile phone and deleted messages before it was known she was dead, thereby encouraging her desperate parents to believe she was still alive—and potentially destroying important evidence. It later emerged that perhaps the messages had deleted themselves automatically, but by then the Inquiry had already been set in motion. 

In any case, the NOTW had also published the private diaries of Kate McCann about her yearning search for her missing three-year-old daughter Madeleine. It had also hacked into the phones of relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and the 7/7 London bombing victims, as well as celebrities, politicians, and royals. It seemed hacking had been commonplace, carried out without the connivance of successive editors. The public which had for the previous 168 years devoured the News of the Screws now suddenly realized it had always found the paper distasteful. Murdoch swiftly closed down the hugely profitable publication (first securing the domain name http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/ on the off chance it might come in useful—as it has). 

But his swiftness could not salvage his BSkyB bid nor the careers and reputations of several employees or former employees, most notably erstwhile NOTW editors Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks. 

Nor could it prevent him being called to sit under the stern owl stare of Lord Justice Leveson in April, where he was expected to recall details of what was said at 2009 breakfasts with David Cameron and other “enemies, old toffs and right wingers”—repasts about which he had an understandably hazy memory. The one thing of which he was absolutely certain was that on none of these occasions had he even mentioned anything that might have a material bearing on the Murdoch fortunes. Nor had he ever dreamed of trying to exert influence through Andy Coulson (who became Conservative Party Director of Communications) or Michael Gove (ex-Times columnist, presently Education Secretary). His professed lack of interest in either politics or profits makes his attendance at all these political power breakfasts as marvelous as it is mystifying.

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A month later, a Labour/Liberal Democrat-dominated parliamentary select committee relishingly declared their reeling bête noire (his papers’ once-fervent Thatcherism has never been forgiven) “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” Few were willing to defend either his person or his dissipating empire, except his wife Wendy—who gallantly fought off a would-be attacker—and the commendably loyal Michael Gove, who memorably locked horns with Leveson, “delivering his evidence,” chuckled the Guardian, “as if he were addressing, at once, the cheap seats in the back row of the Coliseum, and posterity.” Gove explained patiently, to Leveson’s obvious annoyance:

[S]ometimes good intention can result in the curtailment of individual freedom and an unrealistic expectation of how individuals behave…[the cry that] something must be done often leads to people doing something which isn’t wise.

Similar warnings were made by Private Eye’s Ian Hislop:

Most of the heinous crimes that came up and have made such a splash in front of this Inquiry have already been illegal. Contempt of court is illegal. Phone tapping is illegal…policemen taking money is illegal. All of these things don’t need a code. We already have laws for them.

But such voices have been in a minority all through these proceedings, as the Inquiry extended first to all tabloid newspapers and was manipulated by single-issue fanatics to critique all of society. Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre and journalist Peter Hitchens were summoned despite there being no suggestion of illegal activity—merely incorrect attitudes. Suspicions of media moral malfeasance must have been reinforced by Daily Express proprietor Richard Desmond’s shrug that he did not know what “ethical” meant. But no ethical exegesis could have assuaged the frantic concerns of complainants such as End Violence Against Women Coalition, Equality Now, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, the London Muslim Centre, Mediawise, Trans Media Watch, or the Irish Traveller Movement, which wailed how “the British Police collude with the media and are increasingly part of the lynch mob.” There were more, yet even hundreds of such submissions would probably not have satisfied Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of the Independent, who detected a “gaping hole” no one else could see:

In the months of evidence gathering at the Leveson Inquiry there’s been no mention of race and ethnic bias or the demonisation of asylum seekers, migrants and blameless Muslims.

Others, less independent but more informed, might have detected a gaping hole somewhere else. 

But thanks to the anger of such voices, the awfulness of the Murdochs, and a split in Tory ranks, it seems probable that there will indeed soon be new rules for journalists—almost certainly some perfectly reasonable new procedures, but also possibly yet more truth-chilling ideological guidelines, all in the name of addressing public alarm and avoiding any future offense to anyone. “Who guards the guardians?“ Leveson asked at the outset—a good question, and one that will remain unanswered whatever he recommends. 

Jimmy Savile

On New Year’s Day 1964, a louche, longhaired Leeds lad presented the first edition of the BBC’s Top of the Pops from inside a converted Manchester church. Featured acts included The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Dusty Springfield. The Leeds lad would later claim it was the dawn of the discotheque—making him an avatar of the Age of Aquarius and an elder statesman of the new egalitarianism. 

All through the 1970s and 80s his hobgoblin physiognomy could be frequently seen on TOTP, grinning and gurning amid girls around whose soft shoulders he draped companionable arms. His clutching hands were festooned with chunky gold. His body—whenever it could be seen clear of the galaxy of girls—was usually clad in repulsive tracksuits in an eye-watering array of pinks, purples, and aquamarines, with hubcap-sized medallions cascading down inside his unbuttoned shirt. Even by the 70s’ sartorial standards, it was obvious Jimmy Savile was not outfitted from Savile Row. 

The same contrived carelessness was displayed on his hugely popular Saturday evening show called Jim’ll Fix It, in which he granted children their fondest wishes—anything from flying a plane to seeing the New York Christmas lights to dancing with some renowned terpsichorean. “Now then, now then, guys and gals,” Savile would say, and little boys dying of leukemia were visited by some famous footballer, the highpoint of their short and stricken lives. It was hard not to feel a lump in the throat and kindly disposed toward the cheeky chappie whose researchers had facilitated the event.

He often told us that he devoted most of his free time to cuddling chemotherapy kiddies and mixing it up with the mad and bad. He had privileged access to children’s homes, hospitals, hospices, and even Broadmoor Hospital, home to troubled souls such as Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper.” (There is a celebrated photo of Savile, Sutcliffe, and the boxer Frank Bruno.) Savile practically “ran the place,” he bragged, and he was even given his own room and set of keys.

The miner’s son with the ridiculous hair had few obvious talents, but thanks to his working-class credentials, tough single-mindedness, and ostentatious selflessness, he managed to surf all social waves. He was knighted by the Queen and the Pope, was admitted to the Athenaeum, and was fought over to front advertisements. Streets and buildings were named after him, and he was a patron of charities, a recipient of honorary doctorates, and a generic goodwill ambassador. He even carried marriage guidance messages between Charles and Di, and he spent eleven successive New Year’s Eves with Margaret Thatcher.

When he turned out the studio lights at the end of the final edition of TOTP in 2006, for many watchers it was as if part of their youth had died with the lights. When he died, his funeral was at Leeds Cathedral, and he was buried at his stipulated 45-degree angle in Scarborough Cemetery so he could “see the sea”—albeit through the concrete coffin-case designed “as a security measure.” A suitably vulgar black granite headstone was erected, bearing the legend “It was good while it lasted!”

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And then on October 3, ITV screened Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile. The program alleged molestation of ten women, one of whom had been 14 at the time. And then the floodgates of reminiscence opened—sordid tales of gropes and rapes and cover-ups carried out over decades. It seemed that the BBC had shelved a similar documentary almost a year beforehand. We who had always seen Savile as a bizarre-looking benefactor suddenly saw in plain view things that had always been hidden. He had even bragged about some of his exploits in his autobiography. We learned that there had always been mutterings about his vanity and his strangely solitary life. It seemed there had always been hints of roaming hands, winks, and jokes, as well as complaints about liaisons in unlikely places with very young girls. Wiser charities, including the BBC’s own Children in Need, had always kept him at bay. In 1991, psychologist Anthony Clare described him as “a man without feelings,” and on a 2000 documentary he admitted that when working as a nightclub manager he had beaten and incarcerated people. In 2007, police quizzed him about abuse at a girls’ home; in 2008, he sued The Sun over similar allegations. 

Now, with all threat of libel action removed, many have come forward to say they had once been targeted—including bedridden girls and Boy Scouts. He wore tracksuits, they said with a shiver, because it was quick to pull them down and up again. In late October, Scotland Yard said there may have been as many as 300 victims, and the allegations had encompassed the whole BBC and several coeval celebrities including Gary Glitter, actor Leonard Rossiter, and alleged comedian Freddie Starr. The BBC Director-General apologized for what seems to have gone on, and the BBC set up three internal inquiries to examine their sexual culture at the time. Even the Eric Gill statues on the BBC building in Portland Place have been dragged into the dock. Inquiries are also afoot at the Department of Health and the Crown Prosecution Service. 

Before a single allegation has been taken to court, let alone proved, there is wild talk of stripping his knighthood, his houses have been daubed with “paedophile,” “rapist,” and “beast,” and his £4-million estate has been frozen. There has already been an expunging of his memory—the closure of two charities, removal of a statue, renaming of a footpath and a conference center, destruction of his gravestone, and removal from the BBC website of an episode of Desert Island Discs.

Still the ripples roll outward, with the BBC reviving old rumors about a high-profile Conservative politician, MPs asking about supposed sex rings in Downing Street, and columnists agonizing over what-it-tells-us-about-men-and-society. “The evil of Jimmy Savile was not his alone,” intoned Jonathan Freedland on October 12, talking of “the devil who tries, and succeeds, in passing himself off as a saint.” To him, Savile was an exemplar of the old abusive Adam, similar to child-abusing priests and the (Asian) gang who targeted (white) Rochdale girls. The police should take sex abuse more seriously, but first:

Some wonder if the Met is overdue another “Macpherson moment,” in which it is forced to confront its own institutional sexism the way the Stephen Lawrence case laid bare its racism.

But what should really bother Freedland is not police imperfection but human imperfection—and the cultural chaos released by the shallow, sexualized pop culture the unlamented Leeds longhair personified. Savile was a Neanderthal in the guise of a modern—but then in a way we all are.

Judith Schalansky. Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands—Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will. London, New York: Penguin, 2012. 240 pp.

The West is writing over all the world’s white spaces. The unrolling triumph of occidental enlightenment and exploration has meant the near-complete charting of the planet—conquest of the tallest peaks, penetration into the remotest forests, sounding of the deepest submarine trenches, and attainment of the abstract Poles. We have stripped shadows from the world and bathed it in harshly antiseptic light. As we have driven back the frontiers of geography we have driven into extinction the many-headed monsters that once patrolled the edges of all atlases. Although there will never be an End of History, sometimes it feels as though we’ve come to the End of Adventure. 

How ironic that such an anticlimax should be the outcome of the greatest adventure of all—those eager centuries when the little countries at the westernmost end of the Eurasian “world-island” sent out their best and bravest to find new trade routes, to spread the fame of their country and deity, and to seek knowledge and excitement. The resounding language of the King James Bible expresses something of the mixed motivations and restless romance of the great explorations:

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; 

These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep.

The caravels, carracks, galleons, galleys, pinnacles, sloops, and whalers of the Europeans crept down perilous coasts and breached brooding horizons, often to die in the doing—bringing catastrophe (and civilization) to native nabobs, ancient insular cultures, and overly specialized ecosystems.

A desire to bring magic back to maps motivates Judith Schalansky—a German graphic designer who cannily combined her cartographic and typographic interests to produce a beautiful atlas-as-literature. “Now that it is possible to travel right round the globe,” she observes, “the real challenge lies in staying at home and discovering the world from there.”

Her Pocket Atlas, translated almost faultlessly into English this year, brings together depictions of some of the world’s loneliest rocks with whimsical or appalling tales from the islands’ past or present. It projects readers across thousands of miles of ocean until we are alongside the author, bobbing off some black-cliff behemoth in the banshee-winded south, or floating apparently on air in a white-sand-coconut-palm fringed lagoon while giant manta rays wing below. 

Islands are paradoxical places where even evolution bends its rules to make tortoises that can carry men and pigeons that once bulged grotesquely into doomed dodos. They are places we approach in unlimited hope, where convicts can become kings. No man can be an island, but we project onto them our deepest desires. As Schalansky notes:

The island seems to be in its element, still in its natural state, unchanged since the beginning, paradise before the fall from grace, innocent and unblushing.…A land surrounded by water is perceived as the perfect place for utopian experiments and paradise upon earth.

I think of Stevenson’s Tahiti or Margaret Mead’s Samoa—or a thoughtful young girl growing up in East Berlin, flicking longingly through the People’s Democratic Atlas and ignoring the socially significant statistics in favor of tiny yellow blobs floating in fathomless reaches of azure. The Pocket Atlas is awash with accounts of incurable romantics and seekers after spiritual peace or fabulous treasures.

But islands can also be pointless places where convicts simply stay convicts, such as the notorious Norfolk Island penal colony north of New Zealand.

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Islands can even be pocket hells where kings become convicts, such as Napoleon on St. Helena—places of eternal exile from decency as well as society, where evil is amplified because there is no alternative or escape. As the author says,

Human beings traveling far and wide have turned into the very monsters they chased off the maps.

We bring freight when we arrive at any island—rats in our luggage that race into the pristine paradise to lay waste the new land and replicate the troubles we have fled. Like the schoolboys in Lord of the Flies, we are imprisoned by inner-animal limitations as well as by logistics—and the open-eyed author duly brings us artfully imagined real-life horrors.

There is the dystopia of Tikopia, 700 miles to the east of Fiji, so small that even in the center of the island one can hear the waves’ maddening boom, home to 1,200 people who until recently practiced a ruthless euthanasia policy for all whom the island’s knife-edge ecology could not sustain. Only elder sons were permitted to reproduce, with superfluous newborns placed on their faces to suffocate. 

There is the saga of Pitcairn Island, where Fletcher Christian’s fugitives landed on the run from Royal Naval retribution and literally burned their boats to become rulers for a time, only to fight murderously and eventually inbreed themselves into casual acceptance of systemic sexual abuse. 

There are cast-up corpses on the Marshall Islands, murder mysteries from the Galapagos, rumors of Antarctic anthropophagy, and the melodramatic tale of Clipperton Atoll, a Mexican colony forgotten when Mexico dissolved into revolution and the rest of the world into World War I. The US Navy offered the residents evacuation in 1915, but the proud governor paraded his mound of ancient guano in Austrian-inspired parade uniform, arm-in-arm with his bejeweled wife, to reassure the governed that they could weather the world storm together, even on an island without grass and infested by millions of ravenous crabs.

But the ships from Acapulco stopped coming, their food ran down, and scurvy came calling to whisk one after the other away. The governor was drowned when he set out in a boat to get to a (possibly imaginary) passing ship, and soon the only man left was the lighthouse keeper/king, who raped and killed for two years before one of his victims beat him to death with a hammer. A providential US warship then took off the few women and children survivors, who recorded looking back at their receding prison and for a long time being able to see the orange of the crabs. 

The author ranges across all atlases, strewing insular images across our mental maps. We see whaling charnel houses where jawbones jut from still-sticky sand…grass-covered shipwrecks surrounded by defensive penguins…the genetic color-blindness of the people of Pingelap…the bird-faced goddess of Banaba…the last radio message of Amelia Earhart…atom bombs on atolls…the sad tale of the trusting Steller’s sea cow, hunted to extinction…US Marines iconically raising the Stars and Stripes atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi…and dozens of other highly theatrical productions lent force and poignancy by the smallness of their stage. 

Finally, she gives us some of the world’s last few untouched islands, still too difficult or dangerous to reach, or simply thought not worth visiting. Judging from the harm caused by human visitors and their forces of progress, such places are probably safer being ignored. Perhaps we have a psychic need to know that there are some islands still inviolate and that sometimes it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

Image of desert island courtesy of Shutterstock

When Scotland and England were united formally in 1707, the Scottish Earl of Seafield remarked in smug satisfaction, “There’s the end of an auld sang.” But if the Scottish National Party has its way, soon there may be a new song and a new chapter in the auld ongoing saga of these connected, colliding countries.

David Cameron and the SNP leader Alex Salmond have just agreed that there will be a referendum on Scottish independence in the autumn of 2014—seven hundred years after Bannockburn. The wording has not been decided—that will be up to the administration at Holyrood—but there will almost certainly be a single question demanding a Yes or No answer to whether the devolved government should begin negotiating full independence.

Concerned about the possibility of defeat, the SNP originally sought a face-saving second question offering the possibility of “devo-max”—not a sexual practice, but a further increase in Scottish Parliamentary powers. But they were persuaded to drop this in return for London agreeing that 16- and 17-year-old Scots should be allowed to vote in the referendum—a demand that may rebound on the SNP, because even in Scotland most teenagers are probably more interested in The X Factor than the Cross of St. Andrew.

The referendum is a high-risk strategy for the SNP, because all the UK parties and most business interests are against independence, the polling evidence is at best ambivalent, and even a narrowly lost vote would be a colossal blow after decades of dedication. (The SNP was founded in 1934.) The SNP has sought to maximize its chances by cannily sidestepping pesky details—such small matters as whether an independent Scotland could sustain present welfare levels, how much of the UK’s deficit burden the new/old nation will assume, the economic impact of tens of thousands of public-sector and military jobs transferred out of Scotland, whether England would allow Scotland to keep all of the revenues from North Sea oil and gas, the new/old country’s currency, relations with the rump UK, and relations with the EU, IMF, and UN.

Not only pro-Union politicians are clamoring for clarification, but apolitical, actuarial observers. In January, Martin Woolf of the Financial Times pointed out that even the great black hope of North Sea oil could not counterbalance an overall fiscal deficit of 10.6% of GDP in 2009-10—and that the oil was a declining resource in any case. An independent Scotland, he added, could not hope to obtain a Triple A credit rating. 

Last week, Scotland’s former Auditor General Robert Black queried how an independent Scotland could hope to finance a £4-billion backlog in road and public building maintenance, up to £500 million of travel concessions over the next decade, personal and nursing costs rising by 15% yearly, free prescription and optical tests costing £150 million annually, and yet other eye-watering invoices.

The SNP suggests that an independent Scotland would remain within the sterling currency area, but as Greece and other countries are presently proving, sharing a currency means sharing sovereignty. How strange that such ideological innumeracy should subsist in the land of Adam Smith. 

It is even stranger that the Queen will remain as head of state, and England and Scotland will be “united kingdoms”—especially as Salmond was once a leading member of the SNP’s socialist republican caucus known as the ’79 Group, banned by the party in 1982 after Sinn Féin sought embarrassing fraternal contact. Salmond was against any association with Sinn Féin, yet his instincts remain strongly on the left, and the party is suffused with a Calvinistic political correctness that contrives to be simultaneously dour and neurotic. (As P. G. Wodehouse observed, “It is never difficult to distinguish between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.”) But Salmond has always been a shrewd tactician, and he knows that if he is to have any chance of success in 2014 he needs to carry waverers as well as the readers of Waverley.

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There seems to be no conservative or “right wing” nationalism in Scotland. There was once a faction of the SNP called Siol Nan Gaidheal (“Seed of the Gael”), darkly rumored to be “proto fascist” and which the SNP leadership accordingly proscribed in the 1980s. There is still an organization bearing this name, as their unexpectedly diverting site explains proudly:

In the New Year of 1997, a third manifestation rose from the glowing ashes of the old.

But if SNG ever was “proto fascist” in its first or even second manifestations, it would not seem to be today:

[W]e embrace identification with other dispossessed and disempowered peoples throughout the world and with the great leaders of the worldwide anti-racist and anti-imperialist tendency such as Mahatma Ghandi [sic] and Martin Luther King. Ergo, we are Scots, we are “black”, and we are beautiful.

The beautiful blacks in any case eschew politics to concentrate on really important matters:

[T]he bright burning concept of Templarism and the perfervid and yet fully rational belief that human spirituality can and does rise above the things of this earth, in order to make even simple sense of our condition as a species; this concept then has survived all the damage that ill-disposed Princes and their patronage could inflict. All the damage inflicted by successively and concomitantly the ascendant Bourgeoisie with their prerequisite pallid, trite and tedious respectabilities, the crass pseudo-intellectualism of the Gauchist revolutionary tendencies….

Back on our pallid, trite, and tedious planet, as the referendum nears, old resentments will reemerge on the Scottish side, because like all small countries adjacent to larger countries Scotland has historically been its powerful neighbor’s plaything and therefore a thronging nest of rebellion. Scotland has been handled roughly by Southrons at least since Hadrian tried to subdue the Picts before retreating sulkily to the Cheviots to build his wall. From then until well after 1707’s “union,” mayhem and mosstroopers, riders and reivers rampaged repeatedly across the “Debatable Lands.” It makes for a sad and stirring tale in a lovely landscape, perpetually being reimagined in Hollywood as well as Holyrood—Robert Bruce, William Wallace, Edward I (“Hammer of the Scots”), the 1513 catastrophe at Flodden when James IV and all his knights fell on the field, which Scottish sports fans still bemoan when they sing “Flowers of the Forest,” Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Culloden, horror amidst the heather….

And after all that the “Clearances,” a blandly bureaucratic word belying a bleakness of clan cleansing, dispossession, embezzlement, and humiliation at the hands of outsider usurpers who in SNP minds are somehow connected with modern Conservatives (even Scottish ones) who long to visit “Dickensian nightmares” on Caledonia’s children. 

There has always been and still is another story, a counter-narrative of Scots heading south, making good and making empire, but in even successful Scots there was often this nagging feeling that something special had been stolen—and as the empire dissipated this sentiment has strengthened. It strengthened further during the Thatcher era. Now with the recession, the Better Together campaign’s rhetoric about “contributing to and benefiting from the multi-national, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural United Kingdom” seems unlikely to sway many Scots.

Yet like all national identities, Scottish national identity is shriveling in the face of globalization, internationalism, and migration, and the SNP has no strategy to counter these corrosions. It would be the saddest of ironies if independence were one day to be won against the odds, only for Scotland to lose herself in the achievement.

Image of mouth courtesy of Shutterstock 

Banksy

After four days of royalist reverie, the imported Union Jacks are starting to sag—drooping disconsolately as the proud people who “never ever shall be slaves” shake their heads free of the spell. There will not be another Diamond Jubilee in our lifetimes—and an 86-year-old woman has rushed to her sick 90-year-old husband’s bedside.

Graham Smith of the anti-monarchy group Republic, whose supporters include some of Britain’s most distinguished bores, had long been gearing up for the “biggest anti-monarchy protest in living memory.” He waxed incandescent about how the Crown Prince of Bahrain’s presence was “a catastrophic error of judgment”—as well as royals from other countries with their “poor human rights records, limited political freedoms, and histories of state violence.” The celebrations, he concluded, “will forever be associated with some of the most repressive regimes in the world.”

In the end, around 1,200 Republicans rolled up to make the People’s Point—a display of strength which doubtless made a deep impression on the 1,500,000 non-Republicans. 

Republic supporter Yasmin Alibhai-Brown contributed to the cause in a characteristically measured column decrying royalism’s “revolting dogma.” Matthew Norman was less ambitious. The Jubilee showed the jowly one that “in some significant ways, though far from all, we are impressively at ease with ourselves.”

This comforting cogitation was sparked by witnessing a homely scene in a Dorset setting he knows intimately (“we rent a little cottage”) and is careful not to caricature (“this Jurassic redoubt of unimpeachable traditionalism”). While enjoying a cream tea or three, he watched as locals delicately ignored a lesbian couple with their child. The same-sex setup “seemed the most natural thing in the world (as indeed it is),” he ruminated fondly. Yet even while the Queen is teaching Britain “how to become senescent,” there is still work to be done by brave radicals as the country awakes from a 60-year “schizoid nightmare” because there are still “slave labourers patrolling the Thames,” and “this Government would have us regard others as lower forms of human life, whose ill fortune in the accident of their births deservedly robs them of what we regard as fundamental human rights.”

The striking images from the Thames were unhappily accompanied by a BBC sound commentary so inept as almost to constitute lèse majesté. The BBC, the default narrator of national events since the 1930s—and honored (chiefly by foreigners) for independence, professionalism, and clipped vowel control—is experiencing a backlash from thousands of Britons who had hoped against all experience that the Beeb might besprinkle the extravaganza with some of that old “Auntie” assurance. But those who turned on their TVs to commune vicariously with their fellow subjects and forget for a time just how unlike 1952 the year 2012 is were not allowed simply to revel in the comforting illusion of continuity. 

There were stories by the score that could have been explored—a patriotic panoply of people who had come from great distances and made great sacrifices to be in London on this day, working and rehearsing tirelessly in sheds and schoolrooms around the country to sail their tug, fly their flag, play their instrument, and raise their singing voices in defiance of the deluge. There were countless dramatic possibilities, historic parallels to be drawn, and perhaps even lessons to be learned.

There could have been serious thinkers to place things in perspective—and make comparisons with 1953, when the “New Elizabethan” Age was ushered in with the end of rationing, the conquest of Everest, and what a sonorous Times editorial of April 1953 called “a feast of mystical renewal.” There could have been all this—even allowing for the weather and the austerity-aware staging. Instead, we got a junior newsreader and a presenter of a weekly waste of bandwidth known as The One Show—of which the Daily Telegraph’s Stephen Pollard noted acerbically, “Lightweight is being charitable.” 

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One can excuse mistakes—nervy presenters asking a woman with a Canadian maple-leaf flag where she was from—referring to the Queen as Her Royal Highness rather than Her Majesty—or a fashionista telling us that Kate Middleton’s hat had been made by the same milliners who made Nelson’s hat for Waterloo. 

There was less excuse for Fearne Cotton addressing World War II veterans as if they were children:

This is obviously a huge ship, this is a weighty ship. How have you enjoyed your day cheering the Queen?

Cotton gravely examined such elegant souvenirs as a solar-powered ice-cream scoop, a fluorescent tabard reading “High Viz, Diamond Liz,” and a sick bag featuring the royal physiognomy. There were transvestites in Battersea Park and amateur artists accompanied by Anneka Rice, now destined to go down to posterior—apologies, posterity—solely for having won 1986’s Rear of the Year Award. There were sapient asides—“Tower Bridge is about as iconic as it gets”—and concerns about when the Queen might get the opportunity to do a Royal Wee.

What Miss Cotton would call “seven hours of spotless TV” has been savaged.

“Low grade, celebrity driven drivel.” (Conservative MP)

“No Navy left so hordes of tatty boats. Queen freezing, BBC 5Live and TV commentary pathetic. A disgrace.” (Labour MP)

“Mind-numbingly tedious…eggier and cheesier than a collapsed soufflé. Deeply embarrassing.” (Stephen Fry)

“Please make it stop.” (Julian Clary)

The Beeb’s former controller explained:

The BBC…is worried and nervous about being seen as Auntie and being too formal and too stiff.

In this, at least, it succeeded. So far there have been almost 2,500 official complaints, and the rightish media are almost as peevish as the leftish. Some gripes may be as trivial as that of the Daily Telegraph commenter who briefly turned away from the BBC’s shortcomings to focus sternly on someone else’s:

SIR—I noticed that our Prime Minister had his braces insufficiently adjusted to allow his trousers to hang correctly.

The volume and fullness of the fulminations hint that the BBC is another institution that too often relies on its past.

So there is more than one way of looking at the Jubilee, but for most observers the miles of media footage—most memorably the 1,000 dowdy vessels drifting through Elizabeth’s damp and disheveled domain—will be filed in the national archives, accruing allure as it ages, and coloring the future’s view of our present as having been another, more magical country.

Abu Qatada

While British troops gallantly and pointlessly put themselves in peril’s way in Afghanistan, Iraq, and soon perhaps elsewhere, they must find great comfort knowing that back in Blighty, Abu Qatada (AKA “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”) is settling into a nice new home thanks to the kindly British taxpayer.

According to Qatada’s brother, the paunchy preacher is “the happiest man in England” and his wife and their five mini-Qatadas are “delighted” with the move to more commodious accommodations. Here the distinguished theologian lives life in the fast lane, “reading Islamic texts and watching Islamic TV channels” while musing on interfaith dialogue.

Wembley must be an improvement on Long Lartin Prison, where Qatada spent six-and-a-half years for links to sundry sanguinary monomaniacs until he was released in February. It is probably also an improvement on the Amman suburb our hero fled in 1993 in favor of Londonistan. He claimed he had been tortured in Jordan and was consequently granted asylum. Full of gratitude, he quickly involved himself in the most hardline variants of Islam then available, and his scholarly advice was soon being sought by such earnest truth-seekers as shoe-bomber Richard Reid.

In a series of equally well-reasoned judgments, he generously granted permission for apostates’ families to be eliminated, solicited money for Chechen militants, called for suicide attacks against Jews and Western soldiers, and generally insinuated his way into the small hearts and smaller minds of those who would become the 9/11 perpetrators. In 2001 he was placed in prison under new powers. This being ruled unlawful, he was placed under house arrest but was then rearrested and threatened with extradition to Jordan, where old friends are missing him. Thus began the present ping-pong against extradition, during all of which time he and his family have been subsidized by the same state whose soldiers he regards with such disfavor.

It is not yet known how much rent we pay for the great intellectual’s new accommodation, but the smaller house he just quit cost about £1,900 per month. And he cannot earn a living because, as his brother says, “there is so much hatred against him in England.” (Fancy that!) There are also food stamps, energy bills, child benefits, and healthcare if any of the precious pets gets paper cuts. These are added to the legal costs and the policing costs (the latter £100,000 a week). It would make sense to take the Italian approach in such matters.

Qatada is only one example of an unassimilable arriver whose pride, while fierce, is nevertheless flexible enough to allow him to accept infidel money. There is also Old Butterhooks, Abu Hamza, who according to one estimate has cost Britain £2.75 million in welfare and other costs. Then there is saintly Omar Bakri, who has managed to accrue an impressive £250,000 in handouts, and his chum Abu Waleed, who has it all worked out:

Obviously you want to make sure you walk with a limp when you leave the house just in case someone’s taking pictures.

Cases such as these give the phrase “benefits of immigration” an interesting new meaning. They must also make Britain’s war-weary soldiers ask whether the land they represent is fitter for zeros than for heroes.

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Most immigrants don’t cheat on benefits, although the knowledge that Britain has a welfare state is a powerful attractant. When they get here they are encouraged to apply for their “entitlements” with claims forms available in no fewer than 165 languages. Some who cheat may have been inspired by homegrown hucksters—such as the man who claimed £60,000 in disability payments for being unable to walk properly or dress himself yet won archery competitions and could drag trailers across fields. There was the rheumatoid arthritis sufferer filmed playing golf—and the woman who claimed child benefits for ten imaginary children and disability benefits for two real but non-disabled children. Then there was the Pirates of the Caribbean actor, the leading Paralympian, and an aristocrat of sorts. Even rock gods can fall: Iron Maiden’s former lead singer claimed almost £46,000 in disability, housing, and council tax payments for back problems. His error was in touring with the band while he was officially incapacitated and allowing these energetic performances to be broadcast on YouTube.

The previous government made halfhearted efforts to deal with benefit fraud—halfhearted because most of those they were investigating belonged to one or other of Labour’s client constituencies. In any case, they have a sentimental attachment to benefits, because the postwar left’s raison d’être has been to make extravagantly unaffordable promises to anyone, then shriek like banshees whenever an adult points out how feckless they’ve been.

In 2007/2008, the government spent £154 million to get £22 million back. In 2010, a trumpeted blitz on £93 million worth of benefit fraud recouped only £47,000. By the time the new government came in, the annual cost of fraud, error, and overpayments in the highly complex system (there are more than 50 benefits) was put at £5.2 billion; £1.5 billion of that was fraud.

The government proposed a “Universal Credit” to replace most existing benefits and started to assess 2.6 million disability-benefit claimants to see if they really were hors de combat. Judging from early results, the Department of Work and Pensions estimates that nearly 600,000 may be claiming sickness benefits (up to £99.85 per week) although they are fit for work—almost 40% of claimants.

In the meantime the bill continues to creep upward. Last November, the Audit Commission estimated that £2.1 billion had been lost in fraud from council budgets and only £185 million of this had been detected. So there is a long way to go, and progress will be slowed by the necessity of constantly comforting frightened Liberal Democrats.

In the meantime, we can relish some of the “explanations” fraudsters have offered:

I wasn’t using the ladders to clean windows, I carried them for therapy for my bad back.

My wallet was stolen so someone must have been using my identity, I haven’t been working.

He does come here every night and leave in the morning and although he has no other address I don’t regard him as living here.

It wasn’t me working, it was my identical twin.

But for the best excuse of all, we need to revisit Remi Fakorede, who invented phantom disabled children to amass an impressive £1 million. But it was not her fault, she told the judge in 2008. A “voodoo man” who had already killed her mother with a curse warned Remi that if she did not cooperate in the scam she would lose her fingers. To underscore her earnestness, she then reached into her pocket and took out the severed fingers of her daughter, who had lost them as a baby. And on that bombshell we leave her and the subject, symbolically sticking up her fingers at the speechless judge, and through her at the whole shambolic system.

Fabrice Muamba

It is sometimes said that football is like a religion to the English. As the legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once half-joked, football is more important than life or death.

Every Sunday, churches are echoingly empty while hundreds of thousands pay large sums to sit in chilly arenas wearing Chinese-made team colors as they cast aspersions on 22 men on a field far below. They make pointed observations about the referee’s inability to see properly or—for the sake of variety—his lack of neutrality, his relative intelligence, and the identities (if known) of his parents.

Footie’s feelers stretch beyond these scornful stadia into millions of Englishmen’s semi-detached castles. Expensive yet cheap-looking sofas bow under the weight of ever sturdier yeomen ingesting lager and crisps while they critique Burundians’ ball control or explain how they would have organized the lineup better than the trained coach.

These vicarious athletes live and breathe their faith between Sundays, too. On occasion they even assault others who prefer red shirts to blue ones, or the other way around. It is not uncommon when passing along England’s green and pleasant motorways to see car-window stickers bearing uplifting legends such as “I hate Man United” or “F**k Liverpool” (without the asterisks). There is an apocryphal but plausible French aphorism to the effect that “To the English, sport is war and war is sport.”

If football is a religion, the extraordinary events surrounding the on-field collapse of Bolton Wanderers player Fabrice Muamba during a game against Tottenham Hotspur on March 17 are reminiscent of a revivalist movement. The word ‘revivalist’ is appropriate, because the unlucky Muamba nearly died—his heart stopped for over an hour—out on that appalled pitch, as a never-detected cardiac problem suddenly manifested itself in the most dramatic way.

Luckily, Muamba’s life was saved, and he is starting to make some small recovery—thanks to the speed and professionalism of the staff at the ground and in the London Chest Hospital.

But many believe there is another, deeper explanation—one that lies beyond all this boring science stuff. Perhaps, people whisper, Fabrice is being aided by supernatural forces—as they used to say in Hammer horror films, by “someone—or something!”

Before you interject, “I don’t believe in all that baloney!”—which is always a very dangerous thing to say in horror films—consider the evidence.

The Sun and Star “newspapers” led the people’s paranormal investigation. The Sun and Star are not noted for their piety. Both journals have regrettable reputations for being more interested in portraying underwear than in piercing veils.

It is therefore all the more heartening to record that the sight of the toppled 23-year-old brought out their caring side and elicited some extremely useful observations. After pondering greatly, the Sun  doffed its metaphorical baseball cap and concluded at last that “God is in control.” This logic was so magisterial that all the Star could do was echo this beautiful sentiment and acknowledge that the affair was, indeed, now “In God’s Hands.” Whatever the well-meaning medicos did now, it would effectively make no difference, because the whole thing was beyond their control, out of their hands. It was now under the personal purview of a Supreme Being known for taking a personal interest in the beautiful game at least since 1986, when for reasons best known to Himself, He helped Diego Maradona push England out of the World Cup.

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There was only one thing now that would make any difference to the young man’s life chances. Chelsea footballer Gary Cahill was among the first to divine what needed to be done—have the words “Pray” and “Muamba” and the numeral 4 printed on a shirt, then show that selfsame shirt to the cameras. Fellow players and viewers soon cottoned on, and within seconds, warm waves of psychic energy were rolling in from all postal districts toward a certain hospital bed in London E9.

The effects were immediate, trumping all that ’round-the-clock intensive care by highly trained personnel. Worried watchers such as his fiancée became slightly less worried as the bombardment of blessings grew in volume and potency:

All your prayers are working people thank u so so much. Every prayer makes him stronger. To God be the glory.

Fabrice has felt every single prayer guys you’ve been INCREDIBLE!!!

The young lady’s strength of feeling is as laudable as it is predictable.

Bolton’s manager Owen Coyle was desperately anxious to see again his comrade’s “fantastic smile” and ensure he doesn’t shuffle off this mortal Coyle:

Everybody is praying for Fabrice, which is very important.

Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore reiterated the industry’s strategy in an interview:

We continue to pray.

The BBC’s Mark Easton asked,“Have you prayed for Fabrice Muamba today?” Easton’s interest was more scholarly—insofar as this area lends itself to rational examination. He referenced Galton’s celebrated 1872 paper Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer—which witheringly found it had none. Galton based his conclusion on the relatively short lives of monarchs, for centuries the chief recipients of the most fervent felicitations. So that he could tick the “balance” box, Easton also politely instanced a 1959 tome The Power of Prayer on Plants by one Franklin Loehr, who found that prayed-for plants did better than non-prayed-for ones—a fortunate finding, or else it might have made Loehr question his calling to the Presbyterian ministry. Easton also cited a 2004 BBC survey suggesting that some 60% of Britons still believe in a deity.

The warmth felt for Fabrice Muamba is genuine, and it does England great credit that so many are so concerned for this stricken stranger. Yet it is also superficial, and very soon the laser beam of love will be recalibrated on another recipient. But while it plays on him, it casts interesting light on England’s essential religiosity, a fact often overlooked in political debates. This impulse may presently be focused on football, but only because England’s impoverished public culture offers so few other outlets for faith. Football fanaticism is real, but it is a substitute for feelings otherwise forbidden to a fallen people.

English taxpayers awoke one morning in late February to discover that the nation’s gaiety had been greatly augmented. 

The BBC proclaimed joyous tidings—“Free HIV treatment on NHS for foreign nationals”—then the news was flashed from website to website, mouth to eager ear, setting pulses racing in patriotic pride, bringing the incense of global justice to a country tired of spending cuts. People told each other in rising excitement that the National Health Service had never been sick as they had always imagined—far from being broke, it obviously had zillions of spare funds. 

Not only that, but it appeared it was expanding in order to become an International Health Service. A whole new raft of hitherto unknown human rights was about to be conjured into being—all anomalies removed, all injustices smoothed away, the world’s wounds healed, and best of all there would be lots of new lawyers. No more would we witness that stain upon the English escutcheon whereby a lifelong provident citizen taxpayer had more rights than a promiscuous illegal immigrant. 

The modest instrument of this noble reform is a House of Lords select committee under Lord (Norman) Fowler, a former Conservative minister and party chairman previously best known for using the phrase “to spend more time with my family” to explain an unexpected resignation. As Secretary of State for Transport he drove through the legislation that made wearing car seatbelts compulsory. He contributed to the conservative canon with his 2008 jeremiad A Political Suicide, in which he caviled at lifelong party activists’ extremism and described himself with humility as “a media Jeeves for the politically oppressed.” Even at 76 he is a busy, busy baron, even finding the time to act as chairman of the Thomson Foundation, which promotes high journalistic standards. The Foundation’s website puts it masterfully—the Foundation’s team “learned their craft with some of [the] world’s leading media orgaisations [sic].”

He has long been interested in AIDS and in the mid-1980s headed the Thatcher government’s AIDS program, with “Don’t Die of Ignorance” superimposed on graphics of icebergs. Experts suggested that everyone was at risk of imminent and agonizing death.

But even these terrifying omens were not regarded as urgent enough by Elton John or George Michael, whose hard-earned revenues from their hard-to-listen-to songs helped propel the tiny Terrence Higgins Trust into a multi-million-pound organization employing 300. The Trust’s famous red ribbons made judicious appearances on the lapels of ambitious politicians and ostentatiously anxious celebrities.

Further out again, there is the out-there outfit OutRage!, which views a complex cosmos through an arguably narrow prism and is always urging ACTION on ingenious pretexts: 

The world ignores the fate of gay Iraqis at its peril. Their fate today is the fate of all Iraqis tomorrow.

Iraq is more bathhouse than Ba’athist, it seems.

In 2003, Norman Fowler was still plugging away, proposing that the EU should appoint an AIDS coordinator with ambassadorial rank. Last year, he and his lordly lieutenants were meeting in noble conclave to discuss this disease which had “fallen off the radar” even though diagnoses had doubled since the 1990s. His committee estimated there would be 100,000 people in Britain living with HIV (about 25,000 undiagnosed) by 2012 and calculated costs in 2009-2010 at £760m, with this expected to rise quickly to almost £1bn. 

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Reports have shown major mismanagement of monies allotted to fight AIDS, most notably in London, where 30,000 victims reside. Of 17 AIDS projects in the capital, only two “merited continued commissioning.” A year later all 17 were still receiving full funding. 

There are also increasing intra-rainbow wrangles about who should get the most cash, with the well-funded (and overwhelmingly white) homosexual organizations facing increasing competition from African activists. Africans constitute 32% of newly diagnosed AIDS sufferers despite making up only around 3% of the total UK population. The African Health Policy Network (AHPN) is proud to aver that it

…has used research to lobby the Home Office to delay the removal of people living with HIV from the UK until antiretroviral treatment becomes more widely accessible and has provided the Government with 10 key asks to improve the health and wellbeing of Africans in the UK.

These benefactors of Britain may as well ask an 11th ask—better diagram-drawing software. As if the world’s worst diagrams weren’t enough of a hindrance to African health and happiness, AHPN’s efforts are also hampered by well-meaning interventions from enthusiastic amateurs such as Forbes Rich Lister Pastor T. B. Joshua, whose cheerily ecumenical Synagogue Church of All Nations offers “cancer-healing” and “HIV-AIDS healing” thanks to “anointing water” which allows patients to dispense with the inconvenience of antiretrovirals. The church’s methods have met with signal success, with at least three sufferers already raptured away to Higher Ground. Meanwhile, even AIDS specialists can get distracted by domestic problems.

Another key consideration is indirect discrimination by the (too white, too straight, boo) medical establishment. As long ago as December 2009, the Guardian’s Hazel Barrett was losing sleep, fearing there were 

…very few culturally sensitive outreach sexual health promotion programs aimed at different immigrant groups from high HIV-prevalence source regions in the west Midlands.

Faced with all this and more, Lord Fowler and his committee chums want to amend the Health and Social Care Bill to extend free treatment to all who have been in the UK for six months or longer, and ministers have promised to incorporate it—without running a cost-benefit analysis. There have been grumbles that the NHS can’t afford this and that the policy will merely encourage “health tourism”—a practice politicians profess to oppose and which is already losing the NHS millions. Public health minister Anne Milton promised that “tough guidance will ensure this measure is not abused”—this tough guidance no doubt something like the tough guidance presently governing immigration policy. 

But the cynics who mutter about potential problems are missing the point. It doesn’t matter if the new policy does encourage thousands more AIDS victims to holiday or study in Britain, or if the £1bn becomes 2, 3, or even 4. After all, as his Lordship says, with all his customary close reasoning:

The case for change is overwhelming in human terms. The proposal almost speaks for itself and every group is in favor of this change.

I can think of at least one group that has never been asked for its opinion.

Eric Joyce MP

On Tuesday February 22nd, police were called to the Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons to remove a man who had allegedly gone berserk, assaulting several others and breaking a door. The alleged assailant was 51-year-old Eric Joyce, Labour MP for Falkirk. His victims were mostly Conservative MPs—AKA “f***ing Tories,” as Joyce reportedly called them immediately before launching into his hands-on debating style. The former judo champion was fair-minded enough to extend the horseplay to a Labour colleague who intervened to restrain him. Joyce was removed to Belgravia Police Station for 24 hours until he felt less tired. The following day he was charged with three counts of assault and suspended by Labour. It was a mother of a scuffle for the Mother of Parliaments—an unfortunate and undignified affair for someone once seen as a potential PM.

His political career had started so promisingly, too, with a mass denunciation of friends. After an army career starting as a private in the Black Watch and ending up as a major in the Education Corps—a rare peacetime accomplishment, especially as he was given lengthy sabbaticals—in 1997 he suddenly realized he had always despised his comrades. He authored a Fabian Society pamphlet called Arms and the Man, the “outspoken” premise of which was that soldiers were white, male, racist, etc. His sally was greeted with some disfavor and he was threatened with dismissal, after which nothing happened for 18 months while the Tories murmured the government was protecting him. And as good luck would have it, the honest major was soon on a list of approved Labour candidates. He also worked in public relations for the Commission for Racial Equality—more Black Watching, you could say. As the Daily Record commented, more in sorrow than spleen, he was viewed as

…a bold leader with a bright future, [and] his square-jawed, military bearing and smooth-talking style made him ideal material….

Since ex-soldiers with theology degrees are almost as rare among Labour MPs as ex-social workers with AIDS are among Tory MPs, he was elected as expected. He worked for several ministers, including Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth—although he resigned over Afghanistan. He edited a stirring work entitled Now’s the Hour: New Thinking for Holyrood and served as Chair of the National Executive of the Fabian Society, helping them to promote “an accountable, tolerant, and active democracy.”

He racked up hugely impressive titles—Chairman of the Great Lakes Africa All-Party Parliamentary Group, Vice Chair (digital) of Parliamentary Internet Communications and Technology Forum, and Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Skills. It will therefore come as no surprise to learn that our Eric is one of politics’ preeminent Tweeters, messaging incessantly on important subjects even during Prime Minister’s Questions. It is impossible to do justice to the depth of his thinking. In fact, some of his communications are beyond comprehension:

OK, who’s the hardest boxing correspondent in the country? Only one way to find out…

head in oven, feet in fridge; overall quite comfortable?

Just watched last 4 episodes of Killing 2. Scooby-Doo, Agatha Christie, Crossroads

Bloated hippo carcass on C4. Doesn’t look appetising. Predators accessing through anus and penis. We’re too harsh on humans, sometimes.

I’m in front of mirror in shorts,Das Kapital in one hand, @playethic in other.Putitwhereuwantit playing. Not promising.

No discussion? Then you are truly pathetic. Where’s your wind? Arse.

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One can hardly blame such a (digital) philosopher for becoming violently frustrated when compelled to commingle with non-digital intellects. After all, we’re too harsh on humans sometimes. 

There are yet more skills to his credit. Or perhaps that should be credit ledger, because in 2011 he distinguished himself by being the first MP to claim more than £200,000 in expenses. It was not the first time he had topped the prestigious list of MP expense claims, but he always had an excellent reason for everything. Asked why he had spent £180 on paintings, he responded with a connoisseur’s confidence—“because they look nice.”  

How could anyone dislike such a man? And yet behind the Perth-to-Parliament fairytale, there were mutterings of the kind that too often dog great men—anger mismanagement, a failing marriage, attempted coups among Labour activists trying to oust him, and a certain fondness for l’eau de vie that perhaps encouraged him to imbibe more than his fair share of the £5.8M of taxpayer-subsidized tipples in Parliamentary watering holes (how proud it must make Britons that even in these belt-tightening times we can still afford to underwrite MPs’ refreshments). In 2008, he was banned from driving for six months. In 2010 as Shadow Northern Ireland Minister, he was widely criticized for suggesting that middle-class voters were liars, hypocrites, and racists. Ed Milliband may have been privately relieved when shortly afterward Eric was arrested for failing to provide a breath test after a motoring misunderstanding. He was fined £400 and banned for 12 months. He resigned his shadow ministry but—to quote the Record again—“few shed a tear.” 

Even if the preux chevalier from Perth is found guilty of assault, he can still serve as an independent MP if the sentence is under 12 months, drawing his full salary (plus expenses) until the general election. Labour may be unwilling to force a by-election because of the Scottish National Party’s present political balance. One Labour source said off the record to the Daily Record:

They really would rather have a nutter in that seat than a Nat.

Note how high the interests of Falkirk’s electors are ranked in this calculation.

Still, Eric’s rapid rise has passed its apex. As one anonymous Labour insider observed:

Eric Joyce’s political career is over…Many of us are amazed that he has never been deselected by his own constituency or taken off the candidates’ list by the party. It’s been a complete mystery why he has survived this long.

The master communicator himself is more succinct. As he once wistfully observed in one of his soon-to-be-legendary Tweets:

Er, looks like that’s dead, then.

Prime Minister David Cameron

It all started, says Darcus Howe, as 

an insurrection of a generation of poor, primarily, black people from the Caribbean and from Africa.

Then it raced like a savannah fire from its Tottenham flashpoint to other areas of London and cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham, and Luton. The racial ramifications became partially subsumed within a wider outlawry in which the political became personal and the personal a pretext for profiteering. Suddenly, it was not only the Wretched of the Earth who needed to be liberated, but also plasma TVs and the personal possessions of Malaysian students plucked by their “rescuers.”

Police were shot at in Birmingham, and five people died elsewhere—including three Asian men mown down by a car outside shops they were guarding. A 68-year-old man died later of injuries suffered when he was attacked for trying to extinguish a fire in Ealing—as did another man shot in Croydon on the Surreymost edge of London.

After riots always come reactions, then reactions to the reactions—a concatenation of vignettes and vindications, anecdotes and alibis, urban myths and scapegoats, dividing along predictable political lines. 

The dependably disgusted right demanded to know why dum-dums weren’t deployed against the dumb-dumbs, while Max Hastings wrote hyperbolically in the Daily Mail:

They are essentially wild beasts…My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Meanwhile, the always outraged left felt mayhem and even murder must be seen in the context of Conservative cuts.

The World Socialists are in the running for the Most Fatuous Comment Award:

The bourgeoisie is aware that it has entered a second stage in the global crisis of capitalism that will exacerbate the class divisions already exposed across Europe, the Middle East and internationally….

How odd so few other observers have discerned this cross-frontier classist conspiracy against the workers! Admittedly, it takes advanced dialectical skills to see the rioters as being workers, considering that none of them seem to have been employed.

The Socialist Workers’ Party offered a characteristically sensible response:

The Tories…are parading around the country spouting bigotry and trying to shift the blame for what’s wrong onto ordinary people.

Among those striving to realize international workers’ solidarity was a 17-year-old from Suffolk who issued an impassioned Facebook war cry:

I think we should start rioting…come on rioters.

It has to be said that this is not one of the great calls to arms, but at any rate no one hearkened to the pimpled Proudhon. 

Nor did the benighted bourgeoisie of Northwich, Cheshire opt to “Smash down in Northwich Town,” notwithstanding detailed Facebook instructions from one of the town’s more towering thinkers to meet “behind maccies [the local McDonald’s] to get this kickin’ off all over.”

Nor yet did the revanchist residents in that Stalingrad of Gloucestershire—Bream, Forest of Dean—who clearly do not feel quite as strongly about the local Spar store as the 19-year-old who suggested they might think about attacking it. 

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In a widely anathematized BBC intervention, historian David Starkey said Enoch Powell had been correct in 1968 to warn of large-scale civil unrest caused by immigration. But Starkey noted that something other racial violence had occurred:

The whites have become black.…A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion…[which is] why so many of us have this sense literally of a foreign country.

Rather than all blacks assimilating upward to the habits of Kingston, Surrey, as multiculturalists pleasantly assumed they would, many working-class whites have instead assimilated downward to the habits of Kingston, Jamaica. 

Starkey’s comments elicited frustration from Dreda Say Mitchell:

Are the debates about “race” and criminality that were supposed to have been fought and won decades ago going to have to be rehashed?

Who “supposed” all this? And when were those “debates”?

Both she and her bête blanc Prof. Starkey may be too quick to write off the possibility of interracial conflict. While on the one hand black solidarity extended to a temporary gang truce, anti-black outbreaks were planned by Asians seeking retaliation for the three shopkeepers’ deaths—mercifully averted thanks to the murdered men’s families. 

Working-class whites (nastily nicknamed “chavs”) fared badly in all accounts. Those who weren’t accused of being bleached-out gangstas or brainless burglars were accused of white racism after some banded together to patrol Enfield and Eltham. While the actions of Asians defending their property were held up as examples of communal can-do, identical actions by these men were “vigilantism,” and the police broke them up. As Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill observed:

The riots have confirmed, once more, the gaping chasm between Britain’s elites and its white working-class natives. In the eyes of our betters and rulers, these whites are the true aliens.

Diversity is a gift that keeps on giving, and merely because ethnic unpleasantness is avoided on one occasion doesn’t mean it won’t recur on some other equally lively occasion. 

So far, almost 2,000 people have been arrested, and magistrates in some areas have been sitting all night to cope. Shaken and stirred, civil society has been cheered by the “tough” sentences handed out, with 70% of those convicted being imprisoned, as opposed to the usual 2%, and sentences on average 25% longer than usual for public-order offenses. As of August 19, the prison population of England and Wales was increasing by nearly 100 every day and had already reached a record level of 86,654. Ironic, under a government that wants to close prisons. 

Other crowd-pleasing government proposals seemed likely to run into the sand for lack of money or because they would clash with the Human Rights Act. The government must have been devastated that Tony Blair accused them of “muddled thinking.” No doubt the situation would improve rapidly if only the ex-PM could bring his Iraq-era acuity into play!

There is one thing lots of people do agree on, though, although few could it express it as succinctly as David Starkey:

The riots are the symptom of a profound rupture in our body politic and sense of national identity. If the rupture is not healed and a sense of common purpose recovered, they will recur—bigger, nastier and more frequently.

Iain Duncan Smith also predicted portentously in the Speccie:

This is our warning. That wasn’t the crisis, but the crisis is coming. We can’t let this go on any more….

In 1653, the year Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, there appeared the first edition of what would become a classic—Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. A country then devastated by war turned gratefully to the pastoral peregrinations of “Piscator,” “Auceps,” and “Venator,” who pass through what is now Tottenham on the road out of London and argue good-naturedly about the relative merits of fly-fishing, falconry, and hunting.

But the Tottenham that the fictive sportsmen traversed has become an especially insalubrious suburb whose name was flashed around the world over the weekend as massive race riots followed Thursday’s fatal shooting by police of Mark Duggan, AKA “Starrish Mark.”

Duggan’s girlfriend said she was shocked he had a gun but admitted he had become paranoid after a rapper cousin was stabbed to death. A 53-year-old friend commented, “Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person.” It appears the police agreed with the first half of that sentence if not the second, because this was a pre-planned operation. Fifteen minutes before he died, Duggan sent a BlackBerry message telling friends that undercover police had “jammed me up,” and his paranoia may have been justified.

There is a well-known colloquialism about Tottenham, first recorded in 1536—“Totynham shall turn French,” to refer to an unlikely or remarkable change. But Africanization is an even unlikelier metamorphosis.

Tottenham (whose western boundary is marked appropriately by Black Boy Lane) was poor in the 1950s and therefore attracted immigrants—it still does. The borough’s southern part is one of Europe’s most ethnically diverse areas, with nearly 300 languages spoken—but the dominant group is Afro-Caribbean. The sad suburb is accordingly an epicenter of “Operation Trident,” the Metropolitan Police’s always busy unit that deals with black gun crime. (Roughly 95% of gun crime in London involves at least one black participant, according to a police officer cited in the Daily Telegraph.)

A wide-eyed Wikipedia says,

Although Tottenham is a cultural center, it has also been one of the main hotspots for gangs and gun crime in the United Kingdom during the past three decades.

My, who’d have thought that?

The suburb is also notorious even by London standards for muggings, drugs, and rapes. It is therefore not only the police who get a bloody good hiding from “the community,” but “the community” itself, and the national taxpayer through benefits bills.

A farmer named Tota, mentioned in The Domesday Book and believed to have owned the land that is now Tottenham, would be bemused by the fate of his former fields. So would the Scottish royal family, who owned lands here until the 14th century. So would the 15th-century humorist who wrote The Turnament of Totenham, a lyrical ballad about drunken peasants jousting, using scythes instead of swords, and blowing wooden trumpets.

So would Henry VIII, who hunted in “Totnam” Wood and came to Bruce Castle (still standing in Lordship Lane) in 1516 to meet his sister Margaret. So would locals such as Luke Howard, the meteorologist who named the clouds; Rowland Hill, who introduced postage stamps; and Dr. Barnardo, the philanthropist of children’s-homes celebrity.

Last weekend offered a new “turnament” to beguile the borough, complete with a cumulonimbus of petrol bombs and a “democratic shopping” bonanza during which TVs, mobile phones, jewelry, carpets, reading glasses, and chemist’s products were looted by trolley-pushing activists “protesting” the “injustice” of Mr. Duggan’s “martyrdom.” They can ponder on philosophical matters while they admire their thick gold chains or apply their new hemorrhoid ointment—unless they’re like the dissatisfied client overheard talking of returning to the branch of H&M she had helped ransack in order to exchange her booty for better. If only she had been as wise as the other after-hours customers spotted trying on their new trainers before making their purchases—sorry, escapes!

On Sunday night, there were smaller disturbances in nearby Enfield, Walthamstow, and Dalston, in the center of town at Oxford Circus, and south of the river in Brixton—apparently organized by BlackBerry Messenger (recommended retail price £175) and reached in new Golf GTIs (£15,685). Not everyone was so prepared, though—some Brixton locals were reportedly surprised that looters asked them for directions to shops and banks.

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So far at least 35 police officers and three others have been injured—which indicates the efficacy of police methods—and over 200 people have been arrested. Large parts of the area are still sealed off as a massive investigation begins and the police are tensed for more frolics. Home Secretary Theresa May and London Mayor Boris Johnson have even cut short their holidays so they can utter banalities from closer to home.

The events aroused raw memories of 1985, when Police Constable Keith Blakelock was hacked to death by a machete-wielding mob below the squalid towers of the Broadwater Farm estate. Bernie Grant, a black man who was then the Labour MP, remarked, “The police got a bloody good hiding”—which enraged the tabloids but endeared him to his co-racial constituents and the ever-responsible Labour Party. The killing led to life sentences for the “Tottenham Three” (not to be confused with Piscator and his chums), but the convictions were quashed in 1991 after it emerged that police might have tampered with Winston Silcott’s confession. (The saintly Silcott remained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure until 2003, serving time for another murder.) Since then, police have felt “community” pain and sought to palliate it through “dialogue” and “outreach.”

Like the fires that ravaged Tottenham, these protests will soon be tamped down. Somewhat ludicrously, the Guardian’s Claudia Webbe referred to Tottenham as:

…an area so fractured, steeped in inequality and disadvantage that a significant minority have no pride in their community and don’t want to protect it.

Is there a long-term future for Tottenham? It is plain that the present approach to policing has failed and that there is almost as much resentment of the police now as there was in 1985.

Responding to the weekend’s events, the rapper who calls himself “Scorcher” Tweeted:

25 years ago police killed my grandma in her house in Tottenham and the whole ends rioted, 25 years on and they’re still keepin up fuckry

Police R here 2 uphold the law leading by example, so when they openly abuse & brake the law its a natural reaction civilians 2 do the same

He added a helpful postscript to emphasize his appreciation of nearly 30 years of outreach:

F**k the police *RIPMarkDuggen.

While Scorcher represents an especially ignorant minority which cannot even count or spell, it only takes a rabble to riot. And neutralizing the numbskulls is not as easy as it might once have been. More robust methodology is invariably greeted by shrieks. A favorite target is “stop and search,” when police search anyone who may be concealing weapons or drugs. This naturally often means black youths. The fact that these disproportionate searches are disproportionately effective doesn’t stop the claims that they are, err, disproportionate. The police’s appetite to tackle these things has been considerably lessened by budgetary constraints.

And beyond these minor operational points are much wider and deeper questions about alienation, assimilation, and multiculturalism—questions which are difficult even to ask, let alone answer. All these kinds of questions should now be asked, but they almost certainly won’t be as another London summer fizzles out in drizzle and the ashes settle sadly over the gutted edifices of Carpetright and community policing.