David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

Flood alert: pay up or keep your fingers crossed

There was something awe-inspiring about the scale of the disaster enveloping Central England yesterday. From Pangbourne on the Thames to Tewkesbury under the Severn, and a score of places besides, locals seemed overwhelmed by the deluge of television reporters that had descended upon them. The luckiest journalists stood on bridges with roaring rivers as a backdrop, the less fortunate organised themselves a shallow lake or a watery road, the effect often subverted by the kids on bicycles riding over the supposedly impassable floodwaters. In Gloucester, by a large puddle, the BBC news was securely anchored by Kate Silverton, wearing a distressed expression and an even more distressed maroon waterproof. George Alagiah circled overhead in a helicopter, rescuing no one.

The perils of this inundation were obvious. The BBC website carried one item inviting the flooded to send their pictures “and moving footage” to a web address, and another informing readers that motorists who had stopped to photograph the floods had been slammed by the police for “endangering themselves and other road users”. From Standlake in Oxfordshire (“where the Windrush meets the Thames”) a reporter periodically stopped volunteers filling sandbags so that she could interview them. Then there was the danger of runoff from the concerned furrows of Silverton’s brow.

There is a rubric for moments like this, and it’s usually a slightly silly one. “Chaos” refers to irritating disruption, not a state of anarchy; “tales of human misery” don’t signify imminent death, but pensioners being taken upstairs and given hot meals by volunteers; “a wall of water . . . expected to roar down the Thames through the heart of England” is an abrupt rise in river levels, not an inland tsunami.

Someone wake me from this nightmare of withdrawal

Last week a breeze of excitement rippled through the bruschetta crowd. Certain Labour Party members, almost all BBC radio presenters and just about everyone I heard being interviewed on the subject, became animated by the possibility that Gordon Brown had a new and admirable attitude towards the Americans. He was distancing himself from them, no doubt about it. This warm zephyr was mingled with a mightier blast from across the Atlantic, to the effect that the Americans were also distancing themselves from themselves. Everywhere the fantasy of disengagement was being dreamt.

In fact, the evidence for the first proposition was slight, but the will to interpret it was great. You will recall that Douglas Alexander, the Secretary of State for International Development, was seen as being critical of the Bush Administration when he suggested that states should be seen as being great as much because of what they might create as what they could destroy. Since it is a matter of art in the galleries, theatre bars and green rooms that the only country that ever destroys anything is America, Mr Alexander’s speech was capable of just one understanding. His aspirational passage running “internationalist not isolationist; multilateralist not unilateralist; active not passive” – a peroration learnt at the feet of T. Blair – was ignored.

Such a reading seemed sensible following the interview that Sir Mark Malloch Brown, the Minister for Africa, Asia and UN, gave to The Daily Telegraph. His “not joined at the hip” comment either suggested a shift in policy, or else it was meaningless. Happy days, implied a relieved-sounding Mike Gapes, Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Now he and his colleagues were free to be more critical.

Don’t blame Campbell. It was the media’s fault

Why, asked my American friend yesterday, concerning the furore over Alastair Campbell’s diaries, “are the English so up their own asses?” The thing seemed simple to him. In the US publication follows resignation as pension follows job. George Tenet, Director of the CIA till the summer of 2004, published At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA within 30 months. The former counter-terrorism boss, Richard A. Clarke, completed Against All Enemies rather faster than that. In both cases the ensuing argument was about the accuracy of their claims, rather than the probity of their bibliographical activities.

Here it’s invariably – as my friend suggested – an ultra-sphinctal matter. When Sir Christopher Meyer, the retired ambassador to Washington, came out with DC Confidential, in which he loftily and self-revealingly took second-class politicians to task for being seen in their underpants, the ire was not directed at his indiscreet fastidiousness but at his supposed lack of professionalism. Sir Christopher was condemned in editorials and even found himself up before a collection of select committee beaks, all keen to point out to him that he had badly damaged trust between civil servants and politicians. Perhaps, some suggested, the only way to stop kiss, tell and be paid memoirs was to get senior people to sign nondisclosure contracts such as those entered into between the Blairs and their nannies.

Anti-Zionists should grow up (Jewish Chronicle)

It has long been one of the perverse talents of British middle-class activists to be able to devise campaigns which, instead of drawing attention to real grievances, divert attention away from them. I spent a lot of my early adulthood in observation of this phenomenon and recognise the inevitable moment when the movement stops being about the thing it says it was about and becomes about itself.

So it is with the boycott. Today the question in Britain is no longer what should be done about the Middle East, but how to spread or defeat the boycott. For almost everyone involved, the debate is — if the truth is admitted — hugely enjoyable. This isn’t really surprising, because it is all a fabulous diversion from the extraordinarily painful business of making or soliciting peace.

This is only one way in which the boycott movement is entirely counter-productive. It has emphasised the gulf between activists and memberships in all the unions where it has been debated (does anyone seriously believe that most Unison members want to boycott Israel?). And as Jonathan Freedland has pointed out, it has also forced an unhelpful solidarity upon those who are normally enemies, making it more, not less difficult for a hegemonic Israeli peace faction to arise.

All this should be bleeding obvious, yet somehow it is not. That’s why I believe there is something deeply irrational about the boycott movement. This “something”, I think, rests not in a genuine sense of injustice concerning the Palestinians, but in a negative ideology that calls itself anti-Zionism.

The horror of the Paris Hilton school of privacy

On Sunday evening during an arts debate at the Manchester festival I heard about the artist who had wrapped himself up in felt and spent a few days in a box in a gallery with a coyote, peeing each morning on a pile of The Wall Street Journal. Then I went back to my hotel, turned on the television and found myself watching the Diana memorial concert from Wembley and thinking what a lot of incomprehensible things are done in the name of art.

I could understand, however, why the late Princess’s sons had wanted to shift the public memory of their mother away from crash pictures, Fayed-induced conspiracy theories and endless inquests, and towards something marginally less unsavoury, such as her taste for schlock musicals. But was even this, back in September 1997, what the People that she was the Princess of had rather solemnly and collectively agreed to learn from her death? No, it wasn’t. As I recalled it, the applause that began spontaneously in Hyde Park and ended in Westminster Abbey was for the sentiments expressed by Charles Spencer.

The speech, if you remember, contained the suggestive bit about the Royal Family, but there was also the much more important description of his sister as having been “hunted”. The hunters, we knew, were the paparazzi acting on behalf of tabloid newspapers and some magazines.

The people who were fed with the meat they provided, were, of course, us. If we wanted to stay true to Diana’s memory, or some such thing, then that was what should have changed.