Howard Jackson

Something like five years ago I sat with my elder daughter in the Oxford Union Bar at Oxford University.  I drank decent beer and relaxed on comfortable and tasteful chairs.  The place was only half full and the atmosphere evoked purpose and calm curiosity.  I

The Oxford Skyline

was seduced.   I finished my pint and my daughter asked me if I would like another.   I looked around the comfortable elegant bar and remembered how I had wasted my own days at University.

‘No,’ I said.   ‘These places are lethal for me.’

If I ever met David Cameron I would probably find him just as seductive.   His charm, attention and easy confidence would tempt me in the same way that the bar did five years ago.   This is why it is difficult to compare Cameron to Thomas Parker.   We should never underestimate how an English public school education benefits the rich.  They may be callous and have offensive views but the seductive elegance has a winning appeal.

Stanley Baldwin

The more obvious comparison with Cameron is, of course, Stanley Baldwin.   Both advertised themselves as one nation Tories but both have led governments that inflicted huge damage on the British working class.  Now the reputation of Baldwin is low.  He is considered to have been too tolerant of high unemployment and is condemned for beginning the tradition of appeasing Hitler.   Baldwin was undone by economics and Europe and more than one political commentator has predicted a similar fate for Cameron.

Much has happened in British politics since Baldwin but a key development of the last twenty years has been the emphasis on youth.  The leaders of the political parties have become attractive actors who are obliged to convince the electorate that they are ordinary just like them, the kind of men and women you would like to meet in your favourite bar.  Inevitably, this has weakened representative democracy.  The actor soon becomes a puppet and the establishment obtains a firmer grip of the strings it always pulls.  Representative democracy is now in crisis as it was 80 years ago.  Stanley Baldwin was not its saviour and it is unlikely the charm of David Cameron will rescue us this time either although like Baldwin he may prevail for longer than we would wish.

Philip Roth in ‘American Pastoral’ wrote that only two qualities were needed for success in the American corporate world.  These were a perpetual smile and relentless energy.  He was half right and it also applies to bureaucracies but Roth should have added an ability to operate under pressure and to survive close scrutiny.   Cameron has these abilities but, like his New Labour predecessor, they do not make him a leader, merely a highly talented lackey.   Those who find it difficult to imagine a Prime Minister as such should picture him as he was the night before the wedding of Charles and Diana.  He spent it camped on the pavement outside Buckingham Palace, loyal and faithful.   Believers in parallel universes can console themselves with the thought that somewhere Cameron will be obliged to exist as a working class female.  I picture him in a Northern working man’s club, impersonating Tammy Wynette and singing ‘Stand By Your Man’.

My views regarding Thomas Parker are also uncomplicated.  He was incompetent, misguided and to quote Dr Beecher Smith, a Presley Estate Memphis attorney, ‘There were villainous elements.’   The evidence against Parker is contained in the books of Alanna Nash and there is no need to repeat it here.  There is, though, a possibility that Parker was more of a lackey than his bravado and bullying manner indicated.  I suspect Parker had the same relationship with Hollywood that Cameron has with the establishment whose bidding he served in Brussels.

Parker and Elvis in Hollywood

Hollywood had massive economic power and was the priority for Parker.  The absence of Elvis from the stage between 1961 and 1969 and the sweetening of his music both in the movies and the recording studio reflected the wishes of powerful film studios.   They had a celluloid product that needed selling and wanted no competition from an alternative Elvis.  Parker picked sides and he was in favour of those whose ambition was only to make money.

The culture of ordinary people and their worth as human beings was not important.   For Parker and Cameron, ordinary people exist to help the rich become richer.  This was why Parker promoted junk at the expense of quality and why the government of Cameron was so intent on destroying the BBC.  Fortunately, the phone hacking scandal messed up the plans of the puppet masters for a private sector monopoly of broadcasting.   Of course, what undid Parker was a lack of a plan.  He was a promoter and a deal maker and more suited to being the number two in a management team.  Indeed, this was the original contract with Elvis.   Like Stalin, he leapt above others and, once in charge, he did his damage, signing Elvis to contracts that ensured development was virtually impossible.  Cameron also lacks a plan.   He is the corporate bureaucrat who when asked for a strategy merely dashes to others and asks them to tick boxes.   The responsibility of navigating the economy through a difficult recession he gave to his friend, George Osborne, whose main skill is as a political strategist and whose knowledge of economics is limited.  When asked to come up with something visionary David Cameron invented ‘The Big Society’.  This concept is so vacuous one wonders about the possible influence of hallucinogenic drugs.   The descriptions by Cameron of his ‘Big Society’ resemble a Tim Burton film without the horror although if his plans came to fruition the horror would be real enough – no guaranteed health care, no welfare safety net and employers able to drive down wages to below subsistence level.

Few of us anticipate a glorious future for Britain and many think Cameron is qualified to represent a nation that will become increasingly mediocre.   His survival skills are impressive and Cameron has vanquished his British opponents.  Despite the money and the glory nobody ever appeared to challenge Parker for the job of managing Elvis. 

There is also a bully in Cameron which has been revealed on more than one occasion in Parliament.  This has done him no harm and neither did the same trait in Parker.  A bully is not the same as a warrior but the two are easily confused by the British Press.

I visited Oxford University nine times in all.  Once a term I would spend the weekend with my daughter.  The charm of the University wore thin remarkably quickly.   Long before my final visit I noticed not just the elegance of remote privilege but its small minded smugness, the bubbles that insulate our myopic elite.  I said nothing to my daughter during my visits.  I was keen that she stayed motivated and obtained the glittering prize.   I revealed my misgivings to her much later, long after the prize was safely stored in her CV.   Even then, I was wary that my thoughts would be interpreted as inadequate parental pride.

‘I’m really proud of what you did,’ I said.  ‘I just went right off the place.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said.  ‘I really hated it in the end as well.’

Sir Jimmy Saville who died earlier this week became, in his life, rich, famous and successful.  In Britain, his radio and TV shows were listened to and watched by peak audiences.  Few, though, would have been persuaded he had any talent although presumably some of those listeners and viewers must have thought him likeable.   They must have endured him for a reason.  If he did convince many of his worth it was probably because he was sincere, hard working and always enthusiastic about people especially the anonymous.   His non-conformity was regarded as British eccentricity rather than rebellion although resistance did play a part because at some point Saville resolved to be different.  The absence of talent distances Saville from Elvis but as with all these challenges there are connections that can be made.  The most obvious in this case is that Jimmy Saville was a big Elvis fan and he was one of the first British media personalities to actually meet Elvis.  In the early sixties, Saville and the singer Billy Fury were famous for being British and having photographs of themselves posing alongside Elvis.

Elvis with Billy Fury

The DJ continued to champion Elvis records long after others had abandoned him and loyalty more than anything defined Saville.   Although mercenary he gave most of his £250,000 annual income to charity and he spent much of his spare time working in hospitals and care homes.  There was a period when his music programmes were broadcasted from hospitals.   Sir Jimmy Saville cared for the disabled with a concern that had dominated the relationship with his mother.   All this made him unusual and the psychiatrist Sir Anthony Clare concluded perhaps inevitably that such selfless behaviour although admirable was rooted in deep emotional scars.   Mother worship and childhood traumas remind us of Elvis but this is the least interesting of the connections.

Elvis with Jimmy Saville

Saville always reminded us he was working class.  He enjoyed being a miner and had fought criminals to run his early nightclubs.  Later, his popularity rested on his willingness to encourage on his shows the previously anonymous.  Saville never made a smart remark in his life or at least a remark that was intended to be considered smart.   He was always a man of the people.   He was proud to make the dreams of the ordinary come true which is what he attempted in his popular show Jim’ll Fix It.  This was one of the more tedious half hours on British television because the fixes were always so transitory, a shake of the hand of the famous, sitting in a jet plane for a few minutes or kicking into an empty net at a famous football stadium.  His no nonsense pragmatism was ultimately condescending.  But I doubt if Saville ever understood this.  One cannot imagine him saying after the show, ‘I said I’d fix it.  I didn’t say I’d make you happy.’

Perhaps that was why he he was popular.  Despite the failure he really did believe he could make anyone happy.  This almost American faith in happiness ensured that in Britain he was ahead of his time as did his bizarre outfits and his hair that changed colour frequently.  Oddly, I doubt that he ever persuaded anyone to become an Elvis fan.  For a DJ, he talked little about music and his early show on Radio Luxembourg was unusual because he would play the hits rapidly, with only one minute extracts.  The music was always marginal and that indifference to creativity also allowed him to anticipate the future.

The pragmatism or the empty spectacle which was his speciality – routine shows chaired by a personality that relied on gimmicks such as his appearance and a big cigar – remind us more of Parker than Elvis.  This is no coincidence.  When Saville decided to visit the States to meet Elvis and present him with a gold disc for a million sales of ‘It’s Now Or Never’ in the UK his first challenge was to persuade Parker.  Fortunately, the Dutchman found Saville entertaining and he supposedly stopped the filming on Wild In The Country so Elvis could meet Saville, pose for photographs and accept his gold record.  Note that despite the gold record the meeting was not prearranged.    The meeting proceeded with a mixture of conscious stupidity and horseplay.   I am no fan of Parker.   The more observant will have noticed I never acknowledge his honorary title but perhaps it was no coincidence that Parker became the manager of Elvis.  It needed an American equivalent of Saville.  Somebody interested in making money but anarchic enough to tolerate the singularity of Elvis, somone who could console the insecure performer with his faith in empty spectacle, persuade Elvis that failure could be side-stepped.  But where Parker was cynical Saville had faith.  I am prejudiced but I imagine Parker as the overweight man keen to avoid hard physical work.  Jimmy Saville was the opposite.   A driven human being who thrived on digging out coal and later when life became comfortable accepted the challenge of running marathons.

Maybe that is why we like him.   Sir Jimmy Saville may not have had any artistic talent but he had an energy and drive beyond mere mortals.   The British public saw him as unique and if his shows were an endurance test the audience could not resist them and the boredom they induced because the star was always willing to endure so much more.   Elvis was not a man we associate with endurance.  He was at his best with individual challenges.  He is like the existential hero in countless American movies, usually drunk when the film begins but once he is made sober he makes an effort that is only within the reach of the exceptional.  If anything, Saville style endurance is found in the audience of Elvis, those who stayed with him despite the endless movies, repeated live albums and dodgy songs of the seventies.  Of course, we endured for the same reason as the fans or supporters of Saville.  We recognised something unique and important, something that rendered the weaknesses irrelevant.  Saville may have been self-adoring and dull but he did work in hospitals, and he devoted his life to charity.  The psychiatrist may have been right, Saville may have only been administering self-therapy but it entailed loyalty and devotion and this made him unique and ultimately admirable.  Elvis may have been unable to sustain application and his compliance with Parker was both empty headed and irresponsible but he had that special talent.  We had seen the American movies and a little like John Wayne with Dean Martin in Rio Bravo we always gave Elvis one more chance on another album.  So perhaps that is what the two men had in common.  Both men gave an awful lot in very different ways but both took more than they should have.

Note – This has been the third obituary on the trot.  Next week, whoever dies, the challenge will be neo-conservatism.