David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

I blame Geoffrey Alderman (Jewish Chronicle)

This column should have appeared in this slot a fortnight ago. So for what reason (I know many of you will have been demanding, albeit silently) didn’t it? You may remember that a week earlier Jonathan Freedland decided to start a war with Melanie Phillips, asserting that she was giving naïve Americans the impression that British Muslims were running around the country setting fire to synagogues. The benighted authorities who run this outfit then donated my space to Melanie for a right of reply, in which she inferred that it was Jonathan and his Guardian buddies who were — at best — in dangerous denial of the new antisemitism (and, at worst, responsible for some of it).

They both had a point, in my opinion. Behind all their “I’m sorry to write about another journalist, but…” apologetics, they were both recognising the increasing power being wielded by sections of the media, and facing up to the fact that this media are responsible for British Jewry currently getting a bad press. The trouble is that they were both shooting at the wrong target.

It’s sad but Dionysian orgies ain’ t what they used to be

Let me be careful. I bear the scars on my psyche for having dared in the past to suggest to readers that life may not be significantly worse under Labour than it was during the Wars of the Roses or the reign of Bloody Mary. I was an unlovable combination, it was implied, of Pollyanna and Peter Mandelson — a privileged journalist somehow insulated against the gothic impossibility of current social conditions.

So a fortnight ago, when there was a substantial opinion survey on happiness after the Blair decade, I thought I’d let it pass unremarked. It was, in any case, a strange affair. Asked whether Britain was a “happier place to live in” now than in 1997, only 8 per cent thought it was, while 58 per cent thought it wasn’t. But 22 per cent thought that it was a better place for women to live in, 35 per cent a better place for disabled people, 51 per cent for ethnic minorities and a bona 61 per cent thought that it was better for gay people. The suggestion here seemed to be that “they” were getting better treatment than “us”.

Does Blair deserve to be in the dock?

A week ago, given the choice between attending a theatrical performance of something entitled Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq – a Hearing or undergoing a third cataract operation, I would probably have opted for the knife. Hadn’t we heard and suffered enough from this sort of thing already, at the hands of lionised but profoundly mediocre writers such as Alistair Beaton, whose own The Trial of Tony Blair was shown on Channel 4 recently? The law professor Philippe Sands, who was also one of the principal consultants on Called to Account, was cited as being “a catalyst” for that particular instalment of Beaton’s lucrative satirical sequence.

Some writers and critics have become gradually disgusted by what is being done in the names of satire and “political theatre”. Terence Blacker, writing after Rik Mayall appeared in his new-Labour incarnation of the politician Alan B’stard, noted how much of Mayall’s material was “an expression of an easy, cynical assumption, which the audience is invited to share, that every politician is contemptible”.

What may not be achieved directly can be hinted at by dressing up the actors in Greek tragedies as GIs or Guantanamo detainees. This kind of political theatre, as with Beaton’s satires, is what David Mamet has called false drama, the drama that changes no one and nothing from the moment the first lines are spoken to the moment the audience leaves the theatre or turns off the TV.

On not running

As the London marathon runners set off this morning from Greenwich in the unhelpful heat, I was walking the dog on Hampstead Heath. 26 miles is a slightly silly distance and you shouldn't do it unless you're really fit. I wasn't, as became obvious to me about six weeks ago. So I flunked. I hope to try again next year, but I do feel a bit jealous of the 36,000 men and women, who even now are strung out between Woolwich and Tower Bridge. 

Don’ t be surprised. This is Big Brother in uniform

Easter Monday began with James Naughtie on the Today programme sitting astride a steed so high that I feared lest the fire brigade, even using its most extensible ladders, be unable to get him back down again. “Is there anything, after ten years of your Government,” he shouted to Labour MP and former soldier, Eric Joyce, “that is not for sale?”

That was a hostile opener — and further proof that balance and impartiality were clearly not required in the case of the decision to allow the Iran captives to earn money from their experience, was given in Naughtie’s first question to Joyce’s opponent, Lord Heseltine. “Lord Heseltine,” asked Naughtie, invisible lip curled, “what do you make of that?” The working assumption, which I was inclined to share until I was provoked by Naughtie’s tone, was that this sale of the stories was probably a bad thing. But Naughtie wasn’t dealing in “probably” and clearly thought it absolutely beyond defending — like paedophilia, seal-clubbing or cheap flights.

Pride and privilege (So London)

Cameron: the Rise of the New Conservative by Francis Elliot and James Hanning, Fourth Estate, £18.99

Until page 218 of this book, not only would I not have voted for him, but I would have liked to throttle David Cameron. Inevitably with a man who is so young and who has done relatively little, Cameron is more of an extended profile than a biography. Even so, in its outlines I saw a world that – naively – I thought had died some time ago, a world of titles, silver spoons, old school ties and exclusive dining clubs.

It goes like this. Boy Cameron begins life in a large Queen Anne rectory in Wiltshire, where he experiences an ‘Eden of cricket matches and gambolling’ in the bosom of a family which is described by a friend as ‘very wholesome, but not in a boring way’, thus subverting Tolstoy’s famous maxim about all happy families being alike. He is ‘sweet’, ‘well adjusted’, endearing, courteous, stimulating and – most galling of all – an ‘expert kisser’ at the age of 13.

The envious can only hope he learned his snogging at Heatherdown prep school, where the royal princes also attended, and where the parents’ evenings were like a roll-call from Debrett’s. There he meets the youngest Getty, whose birthday Cameron and several other gilded pubescents celebrate with a trip on Concorde to America, taking in New York, Walt Disney World in Florida, Cape Canaveral, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Hollywood. Then it’s Eton, about which I cannot be bothered to write a single word, then Oxford and the Bullingdon Club, where Cameron is never quite in the frame for pot-plant throwing or window-smashing (as Boris Johnson seems to have been) or, indeed, for cocaine-snorting, but where he does study hard and go punting with Jade Jagger.

I’m afraid Brown’s not as black as he’s painted

Dear Adena Johnson, widow, pensioner and Labour supporter of Ayr, this column is for you. When you appeared, cup of tea in hand, on our news pages yesterday, you told our reporters how you’d “always thought Gordon Brown was a very good Chancellor” but that now, upon learning that your eminent countryman had — as the piece put it — “defied repeated warnings over his pension fund tax raid”, you felt a deep sense of betrayal.

Before you go straight off and put an X next to the name of some Scot Nat whose idea of economic policy is to sprinkle fairy dust on the Scottish spending deficit while chanting “It’s Scotland’s oil”, I have some thoughts on what The Times described on the front page “the pensions scandal engulfing Gordon Brown”.

I did, Adena, have a slight problem with the pre-emptive use of the word “scandal” in this context. My dictionary gives scandal as being “an action or event that causes public outrage”, and given that we only broke the story on Saturday, I’m not sure that the public — yourself excepted — had really had sufficient time to be completely outraged.

Even so, the charge sheet against the Chancellor was a long and unpleasant one. In essence (the accusation runs), back in 1997 the incoming Mr Brown had come up with a wheeze for raising a few billion quid each year. But though he and his immediate band of ensofaed cronies thought it might be a splendid notion to abolish tax relief on pension contributions, the Treasury officials either (a) warned him not to do it or (b) told him that the consequences for pensions might be damaging if he did.