Howard Jackson

These are the words of my father, ‘At the end of the day, it’s a ball bouncing around between two onion bags.  I wouldn’t line the cockloft with any of them.’

Translated into English it means, ‘ The progress of any football team is much more dependent on luck than observers acknowledge.   Footballers and their managers are nowhere near as competent and worthy as they like to pretend. ‘

Dalglish was a great footballer and probably the best who ever played for Liverpool.   Certainly, Dalglish was the best buy that the club made.  He was a great team player, was consistent and rarely missed a game.   The perfect target man, he ensured the ball almost always went from him to another Liverpool player.  He could do this without relying on the pass back unlike many other strikers.  His passes either went sideways or split defences.   He is, for many football fans in Liverpool, the ultimate hero.   But this does not mean that he would be suitable for the cockloft.  No man is a hero to his valet.  Spend ten minutes with a taxi driver in Southport and you will often hear a different perspective about the great man.

Adrian Beecroft has proposed that sacking people in Britain is too difficult.  It appears that you need a reason and thinking of one is just too confusing for our great entrepreneurs who supposedly have the ability to lead us to a new high definition economic plateau.   This proposal should make us all angry but this week the sacking of Dalglish has occupied fans more than the erosion of their industrial rights.   The annual salary for Dalglish necessitated six figures.  The compensation payment is rumoured to be several millions.  Supposedly, he was offered an alternative post within Liverpool Football Club.  He chose the compensation payment instead.  There has been little indignation about the Adrian Beecroft proposal from football fans.  Without any flattering smiles from attractive young women, Vince Cable, who is also a member of the Coalition Government, described the proposal as ‘completely the wrong approach.’   This means that he disagrees with it and it will be dropped.   We have been fortunate.    The single parents who will have to register as unemployed as soon as their marriage explodes into fragments are not so lucky.

Meanwhile, sacked Dalglish has become for too many fans their Diana.   His response to the Hillsborough disaster when he made it a personal responsibility to attend as many funerals as he could should never be forgotten.  He demonstrated real valour and worth.     But the dismissal of Dalglish has happened now.   He is not a victim.   Not because he is a bad man but simply because of how the economics of this society work.    There are those who receive rewards that can never be justified.   It may not be his fault and, admittedly Dalglish only belongs in that category because he was exceptionally talented, but the winners are invariably overpaid and are always able to move on.   The ordinary people in low paid jobs whom half the Government want to be able to sack without a reason, they call it ‘no fault dismissal,’ will find themselves in Job Centre gangs chasing part time jobs.   In a couple of months, King Kenny would be welcomed on any TV show as a football commentator.   Actually, I think he will be better than that and resist the offers.   His hostility to the media which has been criticised and may have lost him his job is one of his more admirable qualities.    And, no, I am not defending his handling of the Suarez affair.

Football is becoming a dangerous distraction.   True, I have been preoccupied with rock and roll for all my life.   But I hope that these challenges demonstrate that a love of Elvis music and rock and roll can be combined with a sense of political responsibility.   The fans who believed that football was important because of its working class roots and the solidarity it created need to open their eyes.   Season tickets at a £1000 each have nothing to do with working class unity.     Some working class people can afford them but many cannot and the numbers of the disenfranchised are increasing.

But this is the point argue some of those that have bemoaned the loss of Dalglish.   Liverpool Football Club is not like Chelsea.  It had socialist values.   This is nonsense.  The connection to socialism was always remote.  That marvellous working class hero and its most famous manager, Bill Shankly, voted Labour and assumed he was a socialist but he was more a class conscious populist with strong and somewhat dangerous meritocratic sympathies.   His phrase ‘First is first and second is nowhere’ is not redolent with egalitarian compassion.   Many Liverpool fans are anti-Tory but the club has always been a business.   Football was about money from the very beginning, even when clubs were not allowed to make a profit.   God, those were the days.   Brian Clough, our other working class hero, was certainly interested in the green stuff which is why he was so interested in heavy brown envelopes.

The difference today is that business is more ruthless and calculating.   Now, it is either about getting super rich or gangsters and despots using their money to buy success.  Who was it who won the Champions League and the Premier League?  Well, yes.   The only hope that Liverpool fans have is that the owners, Fenway Sports Group, are competent at running businesses based on sporting competition.  They clearly know how to get wealthy from hedge funds but I have never been convinced that millionaires are cleverer than the rest of us.   Rich people queued up to buy overpriced Facebook shares.    The face of John Henry which appears to be far from authentic makes me uneasy.   I never wear them but if I had to have dinner with him I would feel safer with a cravat around my neck.

Still, we all want success?  I am not so sure anymore.   People have accused Elvis of becoming fake showbiz in Vegas but compared to the patronising rituals Manchester City fans had to endure in Manchester the other week Elvis looks like a man who was determined to honour his roots.  (Actually, I think Vegas Elvis was a lot more faithful to his working class roots than people realise but if you want an argument you will have to buy the book.)

I am in the half of Liverpool fans that believe Dalglish should have been sacked but like most of them I would have been happier if he had accepted to stay with the club in another capacity.  The debate about what his record last year justifies will never be resolved because a football team is always a work in progress.  Half the fans were convinced by what they saw and half were not.   I belong with the latter.   In a world where we appear keen to sack people with a no fault clause there should also be some financial responsibility or sense of proportion.   The £100m that was squandered has to have significance.   And like my father I do not believe in the myth of the manager ‘who turns it around’.  They can exist and Shankly and Clough are fine examples but success often requires other factors such as infrastructure, opportunity and good old fashioned teamwork and support.  Maybe our millionaires and football heroes should remember that when they vote for governments who want to fire people without a reason.

If you want to read about Elvis, rock and roll and much more click here.

If her Guardian column on Monday 14th May is an indication, Polly Toynbee is becoming the Joe Louis of the left.   There is something inspiring about a tough two fisted heroine.  And since the Coalition Government, Polly Toynbee has been slinging punches faster than we thought possible.    Meanwhile, Ed Milliband is a different kind of fighter, the kind who prefers the monotonous jab.   We have to be hesitant about being convinced by Milliband but if he does eventually triumph and claim a place in history he will not be the first defensive jabber to be underestimated.    The rest of us scream from the other side of the ropes and demand a punch that will knockout Cameron.    But we are impatient spectators.   The trainers at the side of the ring understand the rigours of a championship fight.   Jab and keep your guard high and do not let the opponent get close.

‘What about hitting him with some policies, coach, you know, show him we have ideas?’

‘Just keep jabbing, son.  You’ll be all right.  His nose is bleeding and his eye is opening.’

There was a time when Polly was a jabber.   She always had compassion which she proved by taking routine and unpleasant jobs but she believed pragmatism rather than idealism had to prevail.    Thatcher had that effect on many of us.   When a leader preaches hatred and contempt for half the population and the other half respond by cheering then your ideals suffer.    In an odd way, Thatcher did shift the political opinions of almost everyone to the right.   Much has been made of the massive majority Labour had in 1997 but many people voted Labour back then without any real expectation of reform.     There is an irony.   Blair and New Labour deserve all the condemnation that they have received because they continued with Thatcherism.  But if their initiatives did nothing about the gap between rich and poor, the progress made in the NHS and the impact of tax credits was more significant than most thought possible in 1997.   The problem for New Labour was that Thatcherism did not work.   Industries vanished and Brown felt that he had no choice but to support an economic system based on finance and debt.   He was clever enough to know it was flimsy but lacked the one virtue he admired, courage.  His remark about abolishing boom and bust was misunderstood.   He had abolished it, his policies were designed to maintain spending and growth at a steady rate and they were feasible providing that there was no wholesale financial collapse.   Unfortunately, greed was not quite as good or as beneficial as some had promised.

The plates stopped spinning but long before the crash Toynbee had re-invented herself as a malcontent.   She wanted to do more than jab.    Note that the word radical has been avoided.   Her social democracy values demanded efficient management from left wing governments and when Labour returns to power she will no doubt repeat her pleas for responsibility and efficiency.    Somewhere and at some point, though, Toynbee became disgusted by what she saw in the elite of Britain.   She acquired a quality that is hard to resist when it spills out on to the keyboard.   Toynbee discovered the joy of loathing.  This has been missed by her left wing critics.  The lady who back in the eighties deserted Labour for the SDP has never been forgiven.  Yet the world and people change.   Toynbee who campaigns in The Guardian today on behalf of the poor and who exposes the callous greed of the rich is unrecognisable when compared to her predecessor, except the previous incarnation was also a battler.

She must be doing something well because the right wing hates her so much.   This is how motor mouth Boris Johnson describes her; she “incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair’s Britain. Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and ‘elf ‘n’ safety fascism.’     In other words, she is concerned about social justice.   Boris who managed to be re-elected as Mayor of London without promising any reforms that might improve the lives of ordinary Londoners presumably thought that thinking about the human hardships within his city constituted ‘elf ‘n safety fascism’.

Polly Toynbee angers the rich and powerful because her background means that she knows and understands them.   In the British class system that pretends to be a society the word background is sometimes changed for pedigree.   Because she knows them she can spot stupidity with the precise eye of an expert rifleman.   And on Tuesday in The Guardian the repeater rifle was loaded and she took aim.  I know she will not be flattered by the comparison but it reminded me of Elvis in Vegas when he used to do impressions of his rivals and then sing the song in his own voice.   ‘And this is the real thing,’ he would say.    He was right if arrogant.  Like Elvis, Toynbee understands that the grinning upstarts who think they can brush aside others and avoid scrutiny and accountability will always justify contempt.

This Tuesday, she described the Government as ‘unwise’ which she soon demonstrated was sarcastic understatement.   If that sounds oxymoronic read the article.   Admittedly it has been a week when her opponents have stood like imbeciles next to the shooting targets but nothing defines present day economic absurdity better than her sentence, ‘iron laws set by bankers whose grotesque pay flows from bailouts by states they impoverished’.   While the rest of us were still gobsmacked by cabinet ministers, William Hague, Phillip Hammond and Eric Pickles, arguing that economic growth would only be achieved if everybody worked harder she quickly held them all to account.  She soon found opinion within the Chambers of Commerce and the CBI to remind the three not so wise men that economic growth requires a strategy from government.   Swatting three ministers would be enough for anyone and any article, but Toynbee also battered Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Gove and Duncan Smith.   This is impressive even though she is correct, ‘the bungling and dogmatism are unrivalled in post war Britain.’   1500 words and seven victims later she sneers at the end of the column.   ‘You Gov yesterday reported Ed Milliband polling higher than David Cameron who with every passing day looks increasingly like the prime minister of a one term government.’   The reader can almost hear Cameron splutter his breakfast over the kitchen table.  We cheer, hope and wait.   Loathing and contempt have to be managed but when Duncan Smith talks about disabled people ‘festering’ he actually means eating and surviving.  He deserves every blow that two fisted Polly lands.  So does Michael Gove whose empty head supposedly yearns for a working class for whom ‘deprivation need not be destiny.’   Presumably the deprivation is fine; it is just the destiny that is embarrassing.   Gove does not last long and is soon felled by blows from Toynbee to the head and the body.  Clegg is the easiest target; he is knocked out with a direct upper cut.

Not everybody approves of the detours that this blog takes into politics.  But rock and roll and Elvis grabbed me at an early age and insisted that I was entitled to heroes and fighters, especially those like Elvis who know a life that values consistency over growth is mistaken.   The two fists make a difference.

If you want to read about Elvis, rock and roll and much more click here.

Take a breath everyone.  This next sentence is not quite what it seems.  Every time I look at Jeremy Hunt I think about sex.  See? People are already jumping to conclusions.  No, not that.  The people who lust after Jeremy belong to a rare category of probably damaged human beings and I am glad to say that it does not include me.   First, Jeremy makes me think of sex because he has that empty headed fervour that reminds you of sixties hippies who believed that all they had to do was take off the clothes and make love to everyone and communal bliss would follow.  Hunt has the same naive faith in neo-liberalism.  What we need to do is remove employee protection and health and safety regulations and we can all walk naked, our muscles bristling with economic purpose, towards fulfilment.   The fact that some bodies do not bristle quite as attractively as others does not matter.  It is his own that concerns him which may be why this narcissist spends so much time jogging and dancing the lambada.  Second, he is a reminder of how the male libido can have unintended consequences.   We all know that, before he met Cherie, Tony Blair was a vacant extrovert without any real interest beyond being famous and popular.   A woman and his own sexual urges led him almost without thinking towards left wing politics and a position where he could finally indulge his talents as an insincere performer.   So, sex is important when we think of Mr Blair, as anybody who has read ‘Ghost’ by Robert Harris will know, and it is the connection between Blair and Hunt that makes me think of sex.   I never see Jeremy Hunt without thinking of Tony Blair.

If Blair is the corrupt individual that haunts every left wing soul with a conscience, there is now some compensation.   Jeremy Hunt is what Tony Blair would have been with a less complicated libido.  Hunt is what a Tory Tony Blair would sound and look like.   These are men whose only concern is personal glory, men who somehow think they can romantically sweep away all social problems.  Tony Blair talked about the welfare state as if he could abolish sickness, and he dreamed that equality could be resolved simply through education.  The plan was that after 15 years of Tony nobody would ever be weak or fragile again.  It was baloney, of course, but Tony prayed to God and he had faith and the sun even shone on that fateful day in 1997 when he shook so many hands.

Dangerous romance is invariably rooted in a too strong attachment to adolescence.  It was obvious in Blair and it defines Jeremy Hunt.    These are men who will struggle to grow old.  Hunt, of course, was head boy at Charterhouse, so his attachment to his own adolescence is understandable.   And, presumably, there would have been some sunny days on its cricket fields.   Romance would have been in the air on more than one occasion.  Unfortunately, this romance festers on exclusivity and privilege.  If it inspired some of the more fluent passages in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ it was also responsible for some of the silliest writing of Evelyn Waugh.  Despite its popularity ‘Brideshead’ is far from being his best book.  This is ‘A Handful Of Dust’.   Waugh was a brilliant cynic but his intelligence floundered when he became sentimental.    Hunt, of course, is no Evelyn Waugh.   All he had in his vain dreams was neo-liberalism and self-serving economic theory.   And he needed to be popular.   We all know how Head Boys and Head Girls are not inclined to rebel.   This is why we do not like them.   It is why rock and roll and Elvis became so entrenched.   He and the other rockers were the alternative.  You could either become a teacher’s pet or grow sideburns.  Later, rock and roll raised the stakes.  Sideburns were insufficient and wild coloured hair and facial jewellery became essential.  But if the rebellion has sometimes been silly, remember what the rebellion is against.  That’s right, people like Jeremy Hunt.

The good news is that a Tory Tony Blair is so much worse than a Labour Tony Blair.    If Hunt has a redeeming feature it is beyond most commentators.  The assertion by David Cameron that Jeremy Hunt was doing ‘a good job as Culture Secretary’ sounded like it belonged in an episode of the TV series on the Titanic.  Admittedly, these are difficult times and Rupert Fosters Confucius Murdoch is a loose cannon but it takes an awful lot of wrong-headed incompetence to fail as a Culture Secretary.     No doubt there will be people who think Cameron has been unlucky in his choice of friends and that he has been let down by someone whose judgement is not as sound as his own.   But what did he expect, appointing, to evaluate impartially the bid by Murdoch, a man who described himself as a cheerleader for BskyB.  Well, guess what, he was not impartial, or as David and his look alike Captain Pugwash would say, ‘Shiver me timbers.’    The notion that a special advisor would send 150 emails without the minister knowing is simply absurd.   My own career as a Civil Servant was modest but I did occasionally meet mandarins from Whitehall.   These people are programmed not to say more than two sentences without using the words, ‘The minister says/thinks/wants/believes etc.’   Remember the number, 150 emails, and think of what Cameron claimed.   ‘He is doing a good job.’   This is the best comedy show on the TV.   Is satire dead?  I would hate to have to listen to its bronchial tubes.   The sound of suffocation is too eerie.

Perhaps, Jeremy Hunt has strengths.    He may be pitifully weak on compassion for those less fortunate but there is always a chance that the ideals of Charterhouse left him with a strong sense of integrity.   Well, he refuses to resign or walk so I can only assume he did not captain the cricket team.   Those who are generous also overlook his placing of Naomi Gummer, his former Parliamentary Assistant, within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport after Hunt had proposed departmental cuts of 35-50%.   Notice their jobs are not cut, merely those of the rest of us.   He also had to refund parliamentary expenses that he had incorrectly claimed.   If his errors were modest compared to some MPs he stands condemned because of his attachment to high minded romance.   A man who eschews pragmatism should not expect it in return when his failures are being accounted.

Finally, we are left with a man who decided that the Hillsborough disaster was the result of football hooliganism.   What qualified him for this opinion? Well, nothing because he never researched the subject.   Blog readers will know that I am a Liverpool football fan.   So, if this blog has been more personal than some perhaps readers will now understand why.   You can take the boy out of Charterhouse but you cannot take Charterhouse out of the boy.   Head boys?  If he was a rock and roll star he would be in The Bay City Rollers, smiling according to instructions.  No, give me Elvis instead.  That’s why he was invented.  We will always need our alternatives to pious, corrupt courtiers who when they are not passing glib judgements on the rest of us are bending at the knee.

“Mr Murdoch, you must be the first mafia boss in history who did not know he was running a criminal enterprise,” so said Tom Watson to James Murdoch of News International at the Parliamentary Select Committee hearing last November.   At the time not everybody approved.    Alexander Chancellor in the Guardian was quite sniffy.  He described the remark as silly and concluded that James Murdoch was safe.    Tom Watson had been unable to resist playing to the gallery and had failed to master the forensic talents of skilled interrogators.    These are my words not those of Chancellor but they summarise what his critics said.    Not surprisingly, Sky News was not quite as concerned about the adversarial skills of Watson.    They were more interested in the spiritual redemption father Rupert had experienced in the back of his limousine on his way to the hearing.  Rupert Murdoch, the man who prefers to think of days as being humble rather than himself.   If the Tom Watson wisecrack was not to the taste of everyone at least it was grammatically accurate.  God knows who taught Rupert Murdoch how to use English grammar.  Perhaps he lost his grammatical grip while managing his empire.   ‘It was the Sun wot done it,’ may be a half decent excuse.

Well, James Murdoch was not safe and News International is now rocking and will rock a little more after this week and the publication of the Tom Watson and Martin Hickman book ‘Dial M for Murdoch.’   The book reveals that members of the Parliamentary Select Committee were put under surveillance by a ‘crack’ squad of News International reporters.  The objective was to find secrets about the committee members.    At the London Book Fair this week, Watson made clear to all those who listened that his lawyers had read the book and insisted on corroborative evidence.    To use the tortured language of Murdoch, ‘Dial M for Murdoch’ had more than one corroborative day.   So we can believe the story is true, just as we can accept the allegations about the once Director Of Public Prosecutions, Ken McDonald, being wined and dined by News International editors and Chief Executives.   And if dirt had been found then threats would have followed.     ‘Fix the jury and buy the judge?   We’ll do our best, Mr Capone.’  True, there is no evidence that either the Select Committee or the Director of Public Prosecutions responded to the behaviour of News International but all this proves is that Capone had superior influencing skills.    Whatever the Foster adverts might say, Australian villains are no match for authentic Chicago gangsters.

Watson has predicted that his book ‘Dial M for Murdoch’ will be the most attacked book this year.   Trevor Kavanagh at the Sun is already leading the way but it would take a better man than me to summarise the opinions of that particular hysteric.   His journalistic style consists of disconnected slurs and random resentments that avoid argument and defy logic.   Somewhere in his prose, though, he mentions that Watson is an intolerant bully and, worst of all sins, is even a socialist.    When Tom Watson was interviewed by Jonathan Heawood of English Pen last Monday the response of the audience at the London Book Fair was far more appreciative.   Many of those listening dwelled on more serious matters such as how close Murdoch had come to owning all of BSkyB and controlling rather than dominating the British media, and how members of the Government were determined to help Murdoch undermine what are the pathetic remains of British democracy.  The catastrophe was averted in the same way Kevin Costner sorted Robert De Niro in ‘The Untouchables’ or Alan Ladd blasted Jack Palance in ‘Shane’.  For once, the good guys won and it was impressive how Tom Watson at the London Book Fair resisted praise and glory.   The Kavanagh caricature was not present.  Indeed, Watson several times stressed the contribution and importance of others.  The work done by Martin Hickman on the book ‘Dial M for Murdoch’, and the moment when Ed Milliband decided he would fight elections without the support of Murdoch.   We will all have a view as to what constituted the McCarthy moments that punctuated the sordid saga of News International but only lost self-centred souls would deny Tom Watson praise and respect.   He made a difference and that is the best epitaph there is.

I was older than many of the audience on Monday.   I can remember the Murdoch version of the Sun being launched in Britain.  Prior to this there had been tabloids but not tabloid culture.  Newspapers reported the news and news meant politics.  Newspapers had something else besides dirt and gossip.   But once Murdoch outlawed serious news from his papers he drove arrogantly into his own cul de sac.  Of course, he always intended to finish in a cul de sac but what he envisaged consisted of a dumbed down population that would mindlessly vote for the powerful simply because they were supposed to be glamorous.    He missed the second dead end, that with nothing to write about but dirt and gossip he was obliged to dig deeper and deeper into personal lives.   The empire of Murdoch did not go into decline or lose its way.    The mistakes Murdoch made were inevitable and the seeds were sown forty years ago.    The dirty tricks were the consequence of the trashy tabloid culture that Murdoch created.   The elite of Britain should have treated the bad taste of Murdoch with contempt.  Instead, they embraced it like the corrupt policemen you see in a cheap Hollywood ‘B’ movie.   Make no mistake, this scandal will run and run.   Our elite is shabbier than ever.   When Watson resigned his post as Government Minister he was condemned by Tony Blair for being disloyal.  Tom Watson had had the temerity to state the obvious, to remind Blair that his leadership was the reason long standing Labour voters were abandoning the Labour Party.  The avarice and war mongering of Blair had gone out of style.  Some have claimed that Watson was a puppet of Gordon Brown but after the performance I witnessed at the Book Fair I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt.   Nobody else, in quite the way Watson did, challenged the most repulsive leader the Labour Party has ever had or stood up to Murdoch.  Let us give credit when it is due.

And, of course, Tom Watson is a suitable topic for an Elvis Presley Challenge, more suitable than most as it happens.  He is not only an Elvis fan and has a potentially great rockabilly hairstyle but he has the same birthday as the supreme rock and roller.  We all know the scene in ‘King Creole’ where bar sweep Danny Fisher stands up to the gangster bully Walter Matthau.   As Elvis sang in this great movie and later resurrected brilliantly in his ’68 TV special, ‘if you’re looking for trouble you came to the right place.’  Last Monday, we listened to Tom Watson describe how resistance eventually led to the Leveson enquiry into a corrupt press.  The London Book Fair felt like the right place to be.     Enjoy the clips.

If you want to read about Elvis, rock and roll and much more click here.

Follow Howard Jackson on Twitter: @howardjackson09

The name alone tests belief, makes us wonder what happens in the mansions of our rulers.  Johnny Cash was right to invoke our

Abingdon School

sympathy for ‘A Boy Named Sue’ but even Johnny failed to imagine the double whammy inherited by the Minister for the Cabinet Office.   Even if most of it was spent at £10,000 a term Abingdon School, Francis or Maude must have had a complicated childhood.  Maybe somebody assumed his names would toughen him and anticipated Francis or Maude battling the school rugger team, similar to what happened to Sue in the Johnny Cash song.   David Cameron understands public school privations as well as anyone although his schooling was only at the charity institution Eton College where as many as thirty boys (whose noses presumably point sideways) do not pay any fees at all.  Cameron probably concluded that the harsh existence of Francis or Maude made him favourite to deal with the civil contingencies his policies would create.   Cameron told the others, ‘When the going gets tough you find a man called Sue or Francis or Maude.’

These are cheap jibes, I know, but the history of satire and politics in Britain up till now has been simple and crude.   When the programme, ‘That Was The Week That Was’, first appeared on TV the satirists were content to giggle at the absurdities of politicians.   They accused them of not being very bright and not much more.  Fifty years ago, though, politicians had tried to appeal to as many voters as possible.  The political parties lined up on the left and the right because that is where politicians were supposed to be.   They represented themselves, the powerful and sometimes even the powerless but whatever their bias they assumed some responsibility to everyone.  Difficult issues that divided the nation were referred to cross party committees and parliamentary commissions.   Consensus was considered desirable.   These courtesies were shattered in the sixties by trenchant and rebellious teenagers.  An absence of manners and an unwillingness to compromise led eventually to a much more abrasive revolutionary champion.  She was called Margaret Thatcher.   Not quite what the left expected but there is a history of unintended consequences and the young of the sixties were always casual about history.   As politics changed so did the satire.   The gentle reminders of ‘That Was The Week That Was’ were replaced by the savage insults of ‘Spitting Image’.   There is a cliché, long unfashionable, that a nation gets the government it deserves.   The same can be said of politicians and satire.   They started the nastiness so they should not be surprised that they are now held to account through foul mouthed ridicule.   Thatcher probably relished such attention, was happy to bathe in a fame that left its stain.   She liked it rough and tough and the head butting puppet of ‘Spitting’ defined her well.

Nobody, though, could have anticipated what followed.  Now the politicians satirise themselves before the satirists.    When did this phenomenon begin?  Was it Tony Blair walking across Camp David, a man with too many teeth wearing too tight trousers and pretending to be a cowboy?   It could have been the palpably false break in the voice when he announced the news about Princess Diana.  Actually, there are too many Tony Blair moments for anyone to say.   Nor should we forget Thatcher on the tank, wearing goggles and wrapped inside freshly laundered white linen.  The moment we saw a crazed woman pretending to be Lawrence of Arabia, Boadicea and John Wayne (take your pick), a nightmare filtered through shimmering desert heat.  The unthinkable had happened.  The politicians were now more terrifying than the puppets on ‘Spitting Image’.

Francis Maude should not be in this company.  He is too like the quiet bloke in those sinister ensemble scenes that occur in a Shakespeare play.   Maude is the gang member whom we imagine saying something like, ‘Perhaps Richard we should count to ten.’    His ability to look harmless has been his political skill.   He can talk about vindictive social engineering and pretend it is logical and essential.   They all do it, of course, but Maude sounds as if he actually believes it, although forty years of neoliberalism has given him plenty of practice.   Cameron is different, he sounds like he is preparing to sell you an encyclopedia.

Last week, though, Francis or Maude acquired a taste for satire and to describe the absurdity of what happened is beyond me.  Imagine this; a minister says that he had no intention of causing a panic by telling people to fill their car fuel tanks.  He only wanted to remind the British people to take sensible precautions.   This is the same British people who have created a Christmas of such excessive consumption and indulgence that even God has abandoned the festival.  The supermarkets are closed for Christmas Day and the people immediately forfeit their favourite carol and sing ‘Please, please, tell us where we can get our bread?’  Less than twenty four hours after Francis or Maude had issued his ‘sensible precaution’ garages were putting up signs that said ‘No petrol for sale.’    That’s right; Francis Maude is one of the people who run the country.   What a pity they cannot swap places with the rioters.  We might have effective government and ineffectual riots.    Inevitably, the response has been quick.   One blog talked about a pending tax on sex and an outbreak of panic shagging by the Brits.  I know, I try to keep the blog family friendly but the image is irresistible and, I hate to say, the notion all too plausible.

But everybody makes mistakes and a slip of the tongue can happen to anyone.  Unfortunately, Francis or Maude also came up with the idea that we should store petrol in our garages, later described as ‘sensible topping up’.  ‘We meant a couple of pints, no more.’  One woman, unaware that Francis or Maude was a devotee of Bertholt Brecht, assumed he was serious and the result was that she was taken to hospital with 40% burns.   And if that is not enough to leave you flabbergasted, not only is Francis or Maude still in a job there are Tories claiming that his comments show a brilliant grasp of strategy.   ‘Look how he has put Unite and Len McCluskey on the back foot,’ say some.   Indeed, William Hague is still defending these remarks as practical advice but then the man whose baseball cap was an earlier defining satirical moment has always played his part.

Elvis was surrounded by idiots and it is tempting to line them up and pick a corresponding character.   But maybe the connection is more abstract than that.  This is about the urge of the famous and powerful to be absurd.   The phenomenon of politicians ridiculing themsleves is mirrored by the descent of Elvis into bizarre and excessive caricature.   Think of Francis or Maude but do not think of the usual Elvis villains – Parker and RCA and so on.   No, remember the white suit and Elvis stoned in the Jungle Room.  It might just give us an idea of what happens to politicians who think their personal whims should define the lives of others.

If you want to read about Elvis and much more click here.

His original name was George Gideon Oliver Osborne but at the age of thirteen years he dropped the name Gideon.  He wanted to be considered normal like his other chums at his expensive London private school.   It clearly failed because Osborne more than any other Cabinet minister looks like the man ready to pull the switch on the gas oven.  He has a vampire smirk that suggests his dark desires will prevail or as Ann Widdicombe once famously said about Michael Howard, ‘There is something about the night about him.’  There have even been rumours about Osborne salivating over cocaine lines with eccentric ladies giggling sweet Gideons in his ear.   But at least he tried.   Some have alleged that the name change was done deliberately to help his career in politics.   Something helped him switch jobs from stacking shelves in Sainsburys to discussing policy in Conservative Central Office.    This happened very quickly; think about Robert Johnson at the crossroads where he became a guitar genius.   The fans of Robert Johnson believe the bluesman sold his soul to the devil.    Most Tories become blank eyed when you mention the devil but a few wonder if perhaps Satan really did put a hand on the shoulder of one of his favourite vampires.

For many on the left, Osborne is the most hateable of those within the present government.  Cameron is more of an empty headed performer than a vicious architect.  We may not like his friends but Cameron is at least nice to his own.  George Oliver is an almost unique mix of social advantage and sycophancy.  His haters think of the photograph of Osborne out in the countryside shooting grouse.   Osborne looks like a parvenu, a spare part amidst all the wellingtons and waxed jackets.  The effect is odd, even mysterious considering his private education, privilege and wealth.   Osborne likes to pretend his family was a typical hard working family of wallpaper manufacturers.  This may explain some of the stickiness but the wealth of the family has benefited much from their membership of the British aristocracy.   Inevitably, his education was ultra expensive but in the case of our economic tiller the return was poor.   Osborne graduated from Oxford with a 2-1 in Modern History.    This can be roughly trranslated as thick posh.   So the left not only hate him, he makes them feel superior.   But he is not the first Tory averse to intellectual curiosity.  He is amongst friends and that helps.

One characteristic above all enrages his enemies.   George Oliver Osborne appears to care about nothing or no one other than himself.    When he inadequately explains his policies and argues incorrectly that high income tax discourages investment (not that 50% on income over £150,000 is high) it becomes clear that he has one ambition and that is to pass money from the poor to the rich.   So far his performance as a chancellor has been awful.   Economic growth, employment, investment have all deteriorated and Britain’s credit rating has acquired hostile caveats.   He persists, though, in arguing that Britain needs more neo-liberalism economics.   He claims that he is friendly to business and understands business but his desire to cut the welfare state indicates a man who has failed to grasp the principles of limited liability.  This exists to ensure that businessmen do not go bankrupt only their businesses.  It is how businessmen and businesswomen are given a second chance.   The welfare state is limited liability for the rest of us.   It allows us to start again after misfortune.   But in case you believed his shameless phrase ‘we are all in it together’ George is not really an equality man.  When it comes to limited liability ordinary people will just have to miss out.  To quote Polly Toynbee from The Guardian, ‘In the US and UK the gap between the income of the top 10% and the bottom 10% multiplied by 14 times in the last 25 years.’   She should have added that growth rates have been disappointing throughout that period, half of what they were when the rich paid high rates of tax on incomes over £150,000.   But the great blunderer does not do statistics and his dewy eyed view of laissez faire indicates he is also averse to modern history.   He has been lucky.  He suits this modern age of madness.

When the going gets tough the tough get going is the famous phrase.   Well, when these challenges involve the really nasty I usually sidestep them.    Thatcher was ducked and Cameron was compared to Parker.   This challenge is one of the least pleasant.  Elvis has his faults but George Oliver Osborne operates at his own chilling level.   But an Elvis doppleganger does exist for our chancellor.

Freddie Bienstock like Osborne was supported by family connections.   He had the responsibility of finding songs for Elvis and it required his vigilance and scheming to ensure that Elvis recorded as much cheap rubbish as he did.   He is famous for two incidents, in particular.   On one occasion he told Leiber and Stoller, ‘I don’t care how good it is.  I want a song here tomorrow.’   On another he tried to slip a song past Elvis that several months earlier had been rejected by Elvis after he had heard a couple of bars.  Elvis, though, remembered it and told Freddie. ‘I didn’t like it the first time and I don’t like it now.’

Bienstock was not interested in quality, only in placing songs that earned him, Parker and others decent royalties.   They were the musical equivalents of supply side economists.   The impact on the demand from the public did not interest them.  Osborne has the same feelings about the UK economy.   If Bienstock squeezed from Elvis’ music the affection Elvis had earned from his fans then Osborne is more than willing to sacrifice economic purchasing power.  Make the rich even richer and they will invest and the economy will grow is his one dimensional belief.   Worrying about how customers will buy what is produced and having compassion for the unemployed is for economic softies.   Bienstock had the same hard heartedness towards the talent of Elvis and to his fans being served tripe.   Presumably, this was part of his ego.  He wanted others to realise he could be brutal and competitive within the Elvis environment.   It is easy to imagine Osborne doing the same with awful economic projections and the embarrassing comparisons with the positive effects of the Obama stimulus in the States.   We picture him toughing out the horror with a smirk and a raised eyebrow, his wilfulness making him supreme to the too many competitive males that exist in the coalition.

Special circumstances need to apply for men and women to take pride in failure but they often exist as many of us know from our workplaces.  Perverse ambitions from unqualified men with huge egos applied in the career of Elvis Presley and they apply in the economic policies of the coalition government.   Bienstock employed crazy accountants who were unable to understand long term consequences.  Osborne is luckier.  He has the Treasury and their myopic madness.    All of this takes us back to why Osborne is hated so much and why Bienstock was willing to do such damage.    Neither men cared about what they should have nor understood that they had responsibilities.   Bienstock did not suffer and neither probably will Osborne.    The rest of us are not so lucky.

To read more about Elvis and his music, click here.

These new style recessions are confusing everyone.  Ordinary people either lose their jobs or watch their wages lose value.   Meanwhile, an out of town currency speculator visits Liverpool to watch Arsenal and spends £205,000 on a drinks bill in one of its bars.   The residents of Liverpool are shocked.   ‘There isn’t £205,000 worth of booze in the whole city,’ said someone interviewed by the local radio.  Well, there is and we now have an idea of the kind of throats it goes down.  Admittedly, the beer is better in the North but this is excessive.  ‘Where is this bar?  I think I’ll rob it,’ says another.   Those prone to conspiracy theory suspect something sinister was happening.  Perhaps a couple of billionaires were raising Ayn Rand from the dead.

Similarly, whatever happened to our landed gentry and its affinity to horses, and what kind of world do they live in?   Everybody makes mistakes but few men have been as disloyal to the opposite sex as Cameron has been to Raisa, the lady loaned by the Met to Rebekah Brooks.   And while we are talking about confusion where did the k come from in Rebekah?   The girl is from Warrington.   Nobody spells Rebekah with a k in Warrington.   In fact, Rebekahs, even those with two cs in the middle, are about as rare in Warrington as currency speculators are in Liverpool.

Whatever happened to our honest Prime Minister? You know, the man who calls people chum and who so believed in his ‘proper and upright’ friend Andy Coulson.   David Cameron, he rolls up his sleeves, shouts a lot and is somewhat overweight.  If he had been more careful about his backside he would never have got in this mess.   First, David denies ever riding with Rebekah, maybe he thought it was two cs and a different girl but then he says he did ride a horse with Rebekah but nothing as common as a girl from petty cash.  Later, Cameron, not in shirt sleeves but as grim faced as ever, stated he probably could have ridden the horse and finally, yes he did.   He remembers it now.  He sat on it and it moved forward.  The horse was called Raisa, that’s right, the name of the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev.  The easiest thing in the world, forgetting a horse named after the wife of a leader of a once evil empire.  According to a locked up Russian punk band member, ‘It’s not too pleasant at the moment, either.’   We best not mention the famous beefcake pose of Putin on horseback naked from the waist up, Putin not the horse.  Actually, they are easily distinguishable.   Putin is the one with the face lift and the watery eyes.

Thank God the Met are in the clear.   Rehoming horses is something they do after the poor creatures have been traumatised from confronting the lower classes in street riots and outside football games.   What else can they do?   Horses cannot recover from visiting Anfield football stadium by popping into a bar and spending £205,000 on booze.  Horses don’t like bars.   In Anfield, a neighbourhood in Liverpool where Joe Fagan ex-manager of Liverpool football club was happy to spend all his life, houses can be bought for under £30,000.   Sell a street and you would still be unable to get a round in.   But, just in case Plato is turning in his grave at what is happening to his vison of the elite, we have a rescuer.   The Ferrarri revs into view from a distance and from it emerges a self-effacing gentleman to calm us all.   ‘I can categorically state that he never rode that horse.   I do actually live there.  It’s all rubbish.’   Well, Mr Clarkson, we all make mistakes and the next time you overtake a not so clapped out police horse in your Ferrarri perhaps you should slow down and take a proper look.

In the great movie, ‘Notorious’, by Alfred Hitchcock there are two scenes that involve horses.  Both have glamour but they are dark and sinister.   Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergmann are out riding at a stable in Rio de Janeiro.  They make a gorgeous couple.  Cary has an open necked shirt and has never looked more handsome.  Bergmann does what she does better than anyone else.  She wears a trilby.  What makes the scene sinister is the intention of Devlin (Grant) to lend Alicia (Bergmann) to Nazi agent Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains).   Devlin stampedes Alicia and her horse, and Sebastian rides to the rescue.  He collects not just the horse but Alicia.   Sebastian claims his woman through masculine assertion.  The movie, ‘Notorious’, is full of men too vain to have real compassion.   The boss of Devlin is easily flattered when he hears he has been described as handsome and Sebastian is as impressed as Alicia by the good looks of Grant.

According to the Met, Raisa was returned to them in poor condition.   She died in pasture not long afterwards.  Alicia also suffered whilst she was on loan to Sebastian but like Raisa was rescued in the only way possible.  Devlin claimed her back.  He walked in and took her away.   This is what the powerful do with people and their animals.  The other scene in the movie that has horses also has a romantic and exotic setting.   Devlin and Alicia are at a ractrack that faces the Copacabana beach.  They have no interest, though, in the racing.  Devlin learns that the plan is working.  Unfortunately, Sebastian has had sex with Alicia, the girl that Devlin loves.    If the world of ‘Notorious’ is cruel, the villains within the film all have elegant manners.  They sip brandy, smoke cigars and wear bow ties while they arrange a murder.   Hitchcock makes clear that he has no illusions about the rich and, of course, in his later movie ‘Marnie’ his fragile heroine falls over the edge into craziness whilst out riding amongst them.   As the Americans almost said about Hitch, ‘You can take the boy out of the East End but you can’t take the East End out of the boy.’

Elvis also had affection for horse riding.  Often, he would return from a ride around the grounds of Graceland and without leaving his saddle sign autographs for waiting fans.   He became so obsessed with the freedom horse riding offered him that he tried to create his own ranch where he and his friends would escape the world.   He probably believed that the man who sat on top of the horse was worthwhile and likeable.   Fresh air and motion does that to people.  The ranch plus essential accessories like not too far apart barbecue stands led Elvis to spend over a million dollars on the venture.  Parker finally intervened although by then Elvis was already becoming bored.   There are only so many times you can ride around the outskirts of Memphis.  I am no fan of the Dutchman but this may have been one of his better moments.    Parker said that Elvis needed to regain focus and, just as important, stop spending so much money.    The irony is that Parker had a father who trained horses and Parker was an animal lover.    Indeed, there is nothing wrong with liking horses and nobody should be begrudged the pleasure of the saddle, I suppose.   Horses trample the countryside and ruin the bridle paths but they do make a lovely sight or they would if only some of the people on top of them could behave a little more honestly and, like currency speculators, not get carried away with themselves.

If you want to read more about Elvis, rock and roll and much more click here

The mens’ toilet at Wembley was crowded.  The bloke who stood next to me was tall, broad and loud. ‘Stewart Downing,’ said the large man in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘man of the bleeding match.  When I saw that I thought I was back on the drugs.’

I said nothing.

‘Let’s be honest, mate,’ he said.  ‘We were dogshit.’

‘We have played better,’ I said.

Bliss and disbelief occur often in football.   Liverpool had just won a penalty shoot out to clinch the 2012 Carling Cup Final despite missing their first two penalties.   Later, in the car, the disbelief and the bliss was compounded by the Analysis programme on BBC Radio 4.  The Trade Union economist, Duncan Weldon, demonstrated how, during the last ten years in the UK, wages had flattened for ordinary people.  He challenged the self-serving establishment view that it was an unavoidable consequence of globalisation and technology.   He compared countries with neo-liberal policies with the few remaining social democracies and stated that the latter had been far more successful at protecting the jobs and living standards of working people.   The penalty shoot out was bizarre by even the somewhat dodgy Cup Final standards of Liverpool Football Club.  Neither is economic heresy normal for the BBC.

The social democrats are fighting back and Richard Murphy, the number one economics blogger in the UK, is leading the fight.   He wrote ‘The Courageous State’ in three months.  This compares to Elvis producing the classic albums ‘Elvis Is Back’ and ‘Elvis Country’ in a matter of days or, for the more serious, Joseph Conrad writing ‘Heart Of Darkness’ in a month.    I have spent my life deferring to superior talent but this effortless mastery is definitely sickening.

In the week before the Cup Final, ex-cabinet minister, David Laws, wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper defending the chancellor, George Osborne.   Laws is the man who made fifty million in the City and who believes that the free market always produces the best possible outcomes.   He resigned from the Government because of expenses claims which culminated in him being paid money to which he was not entitled.   I have no way of verifying this but I am prepared to bet some of my own cash that he supports Harry Redknapp for the job of England football manager.  The article by Laws was short on analysis and quoted just one statistic, the rate of inflation.  Instead, he intimidated with a superior tone and used words like serious and informed.    He had the comfort of knowing that other people thought like him and that these people were invariably powerful.  That’s right, he agrees with the idiots who created the current economic mess.

Richard Murphy may not thank me for featuring him on an Elvis blog but it should not do him too much harm.  He is combative, confident and energetic enough to be everywhere.  He was interviewed today on Sky News about Barclays Bank and the £500m underpayment of tax.

‘We ain’t done anything wrong, mate.   It’s all legal,’ said a spokesman from the Bank.

Richard Murphy used to work as a tax consultant.  He knows the dirty secrets and the insatiable greed of the rich.  Indeed, his book has a good section on why they are so callous.   He is not a man who made a £500m fortune without a hint of personal doubt and subsequently felt obliged to claim expenses to which he was not entitled.   This merely makes him a better human being and is not the reason we should trust Richard Murphy rather than David Laws.  Murphy has qualities that make opportunists and networkers like Laws sneer.   He is capable of original thought and he is not afraid of facts.    The most alarming that his book ‘The Courageous State’ reveals is the £20bn unpaid tax, and the 97% portion of the UK money supply created by the private sector.   Before Thatcher, the State created most of the money, now it creates a mere 3%.  This 97% is debt disguised by the banks as assets (my words not those of Richard Murphy).   Debt attracts interest and this interest is paid to the rich and the bankers.   No wonder their bonus payments amount to billions.

Richard Murphy is right.  The State has been enfeebled and those economic libertarians who are joyfully welcoming this should consider an alternative history to their romanticised view of the industrial revolution.   The two leaps forward in human development were precipitated by the rise of Rome and Athens, and the emergence of powerful nation states in the 18^th Century.   (These are my words again.)

‘The Courageous State’ argues for the nation state to assert itself once more.   A civilised society is obliged to maximise the development of the potential of its citizens and to reduce the income gap between the very rich and the poor.   Richard Murphy is offended by an economy where the richest do not pay tax and the poorest pay more of their money in tax than those who have more.   Only in our crazed world of neo-liberalism are his views described as extremist.

‘The Courageous State’ is a 300 page book and the future of the world is a big subject.  There are omissions.  Faith in his future is undermined by the knowledge that too much economic power has shifted to outside the nation state.   Richard Murphy admits this but we need another book to convince politicians that it is in their interests to cooperate with each other rather than their financiers.  Also, within the left, somebody needs to talk about the tyranny of government AND the tyranny of the market.  I have no doubt that Murphy will rise to the challenge.

Murphy is right to argue that we should use a different language for tax. We are citizens and we do not give money to the Government in the way the British press describes.  We pay the Government what we owe it for services such as roads and hospitals.   But when Murphy says that it is the money of the Government and not ours he does not help the argument.

The book offers clever alternative circular economic models to the familiar co-axial graphs of economic theory.  In some, the circles are too conveniently concentric but the underlying assumptions are valid.   Diagram 10.14 sums up brilliantly what is wrong with neo-liberalism and its sole emphasis on money and is a fabulous moment of epiphany that demonstrates how lives are wrecked and distorted by narrow economic ideology.

I hope this inspiring economist is not offended by being included on an Elvis blog.   60 years ago the establishment argued that Elvis could not sing but he prevailed and now people realise he could warble better than the rest of them.  He also inspired other rockabilly singers such as Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis.    These men were not prepared for the world to stay the same.   Like Richard Murphy, Elvis was not alone.  Murphy has Ann Pettifor, Paul Krugman, Roger Bootle and Robert Skidelski for company.   He is not the only brave economist talking sense.   I am a pessimist by nature but on Sunday I enjoyed bliss and disbelief for almost the whole 200 mile journey back to Liverpool.   With heroes like Richard Murphy around we may yet be pleasantly surprised.

If you want to read about Elvis, rock and roll and much more click here

In which speech did Margaret Thatcher say this?

‘The old days of grab and greed are on the way out.  We are beginning to think of what we owe the other fellow, not just what we are compelled to give him.  Time is coming when we shan’t be able to fill our bellies in comfort while other folk go hungry, or sleep in warm beds while others shiver in the cold, when one shan’t be able to kneel and thank God for blessings before our shiny altars while men everywhere are kneeling in either physical or spiritual subjection.’

Okay, you soon spotted the deceit.   Margaret Thatcher never did say that or anything like it.   The speech was uttered by Basil Rathbone at the end of the Universal movie ‘Sherlock Holmes Faces Death’.   No doubt many have heard the speech and dismissed it as no more than cheap Hollywood tripe.  The stirring music certainly makes it sound corny.   The movie, though, was made in 1943 which is why the speech is significant.  It captured well and accurately the mood that was emerging from the experience of a World War.

Around the same time that the old movie was beginning to appear on TV, the cinemas in Britain were showing ‘The Innocents’, the film version of ‘The Turn Of The Screw’, the classic novel by Henry James.   The movie was a sophisticated entertainment and it was impossible to watch it back then and not be conscious of the patriarchal civilisation that inspired the movie and had welcomed Henry James and Joseph Conrad.    There is a long standing cliché about the underbelly of the American and British left.   Americans of all political persuasions are patriotic and believe America is the ‘promised land’ and the British, even on the left and sometimes more so, are snobs who think that Britain represents a superior civilisation.

The post war consensus that supported social democracy in Britain is referred to as Butskellism.  Prior to Thatcher, both political parties believed the state and its elite had responsibilities to its citizens that included food in the belly, a warm bed and freedom to be different.   This consensus required not only post-war ambition and purpose but also a sense of decency, responsibility and patriarchal largesse.  We should not romanticise the past but between 1945 and 1973 there was little faith in neoliberal ideology.

For various reasons, social democracy did not unite Britain like it did other European countries.   Sweden has its own unique history and, if we exclude it from the comparisons, we realise that the countries that have been mostsuccessful at sustaining social democracy are those that were conquered or beaten in the Second World War.   They also had to avoid the Russians, of course.   In Britain, our version of social democracy created tensions and the sympathy for the working man soon became, as Joseph Cotton had famously predicted in the classic Orson Welles movie, ‘Citizen Kane’, resentment of organised labour.   Many yearned for the past and those that did voted for Thatcher.

This time her appearance has been quite brief and is of less consequence.    The movie, ‘The Iron Lady’ is, despite the performance by Meryl Streep, no more than tenth rate ‘King Lear’.   The film reveals how dementia and old age has confused Thatcher but the Iron Lady was always more blunt instinct and prejudice than reason.   She thought that a national ecnonomy could be managed like a shopping bill and argued that the Government could control inflation by restricting the supply of money, even though it only partially created that supply.   Thatcher did not need dementia to leave her looking addled.  In her prime, she may have intimidated the left but there were few who thought her intellectually superior.

The beguiled voted for Thatcher thinking she would make British industry competitive.   This was what she promised.   As today, the pain was supposed to be worthwhile.   Instead, British industry perished and Britain now survives on financial services and debt – public and private.   The manufacturing that remains is still as uncompetitive as before.  Productivity increases have shrunk since social democracy was dismantled.

The movie has been an odd phenomenon.  The cinemas in the South have been busy and audiences chortle with satisfaction as they recall her triumphs.  In the North, the cinema seats have remained largely empty.   Any Northerner who watches ‘The Iron Lady’ needs only to observe the empty seats and feel the silence to understand the anger and hatred that exists outside the cinemas.    ‘Go and see that film.   Not likely.  I had to live through it and the first time was bad enough.’   In London, the buses that advertise the film pass by frequently

But all this only describes the grievance of the Northern working class.  In the eighties, I was obliged to visit the industrial estates in and around Merseyside and observe the For Sale signs multiply and scar the region.  Although the pig headed persecution of ordinary people is the greatest of her crimes, the tragedy of Thatcher, or what followed her, is greater again.   I think of myself watching ‘The Innocents’.  I was a teenager on a council estate outside Liverpool.  It was not called a sink estate because then our estates were something different.  The fathers had jobs and their children were better educated than their parents and all received free health care.  Young Britons could watch ‘The Innocents’ and respond to its subtle messages about self-control and civilisation, feel as if they were being invited by their superiors to share their doubts and inadequacies.

Eventually, neo-liberalism arrived and everything was supposed to be resolved by the decision making of the market.    We soon understood it was a fancy name for survival of the fittest.   Once that became the creed, there was no civilisation to inspire pride in anyone.   Cheers have been replaced by jeers.  Today, Thatcher looks less important to neo-liberalism than the sixties that preceded it.  In that decade, the British too often confused mature restaint with repression.  The sixties did represent progress for previous casualties but neoliberalism would not have been possible without the self indulgence that many assumed to be freedom.    Neoliberalism gave what the worst of my generation wanted most of all.  It sanctioned their appetites.

All of which leads to the ultimate irony in Thatcher.   She would have hated modern Britain, its non-judgemental attitudes and devotion to gluttony.  Others have made the same point about Elvis, that he facilitated a generation whose behaviour shocked him.   There are more comparisons between Thatcher and Elvis to tempt us.  The argument about whether Elvis invented rock and roll is similar to the debate about Thatcher.  Was she no more than a mouthpiece and was it really sixties libertarianism and the receding memory of war that undermined social democracy?   But, the lady and her memory are wearisome.  I was obliged to write this Challenge because that is the nature of these Challenges but, of all of them, this is the one I resent the most.  Elvis had his faults but comparing Thatcher to him really sticks in my throat.   She offends not just the normal loyalty to class and birthplace but also any sense of what once made Britain half decent.   The advert will soon disappear from the the buses.   Soon is not soon enough.

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.’