David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

We heard the deep voice. But what lies behind it?

Fathers should have deep voices, and Gordon Brown’s bass is now so profound that he makes Paul Robeson sound like an Elizabethan counter-tenor. Over the past weeks these tones seem to have reassured an electorate, brought up on rock, at some sub-aural emotional level, unreachable by the pipings of Boy Cameron or the great-uncling emanating from the figure of Sir Menzies Campbell.

As Peter Riddell wrote yesterday, this voice has established its right to speak from the very centre of power, partly by not being the weird OCD-sufferer depicted by his critics, unable to cope with people, bus tickets and lavatories. Mr Brown is continuity and change at the same time: Not-Blair, but still massively experienced in government, and just the chap you want around when threatened by bluetongue. In any case, who needs new when you’re facing old-fashioned crises over terrorism, floods, runs on the bank or agriculture? In three months Mr Brown has shown that he is probably the most deeply serious and substantial politician currently at work in this country.

Naturally, there has been much nonsense spoken and written about this apparent transformation from grumpy bastard to Father of the Nation. Take the notion that the country is grateful that the dodgier presentational arts are no longer practised in No 10. On which basis we must believe that, last week, some lunch-timing staffer spotted an old lady dressed in red wandering about near the Cenotaph, muttering “I used to live round here” and took pity on her, just as a group of press photographers on an office outing happened to be passing. And did the Glaswegian “Have a Go Hero” John Smeaton, holidaying by chance in Bournemouth yesterday, mistake the conference centre for a cinema, only to find himself starring in the movie he was watching? I don’t think so.

What links Shakespeare and the McCanns?

Chichester. The weekend. Enter that lovely man Sir Derek Jacobi, the actor-manager and playwright Mark Rylance and the 300 signatories of the “declaration of reasonable doubt” into whether Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare. These doubters include professors of literature, a bulse of distinguished thespians and – pressed into posthumous service – past geniuses such as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud.

In evidential terms, say these querying anti-Stratfordians, there are too many anomalies and unanswered questions. Such as (take a breath): “not one play, not one poem, not one letter in (his) own hand has ever been found”; he signed his name badly and in shaky writing; his will “contains no clearly Shakespearean turn of phrase”. And lots more in the same vein.

All these things are true. But they contend with some awkward confirmations of the essential truth of William Shakespeare of Stratford having been an actor-playwright at theatres where his plays were produced, and being attributed with authorship of the plays we associate with him. No one in the 17th century doubted his authorship, and contemporaries regarded him as a great poet. And an elaborate hoax or fraud would have to have been perpetrated over two decades by someone seeking to disguise authorship of plays that were popular but not seditious.

Fundamentally, anti-Stratfordianism comes down to one proposition: Shakespeare was too low-class to have been a literary genius. By contrast Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, “received an education incomparable among his peers, exactly the kind one would expect of the writer who was destined to become Shakespeare”. Though, problematically, he was dead at the time of the first production of all of Shakespeare’s later plays.

If the rich stay rich, what happens to the poor?

Along with my good wishes and personal papers that my daughters will inherit, on my death, this piece of advice for dealing with the world: always, my dears, reverse the stat. So, if a polling headline tells you that an extraordinary 50 per cent of people questioned think A, remind yourselves that the corollary of this is that a possibly far more incredible 50 per cent don’t.

Yesterday we discovered, courtesy of the publicity for a new study from the Institute of Education, that the child of a labourer is six times more likely to suffer extreme poverty by the time he or she reaches 30 than the child of a lawyer. This seems amazing until you apply Old Aaronovitch’s rule, and realise that this means that a lawyer’s child is only six times less likely to suffer poverty than a labourer’s child. And that really did surprise me.

If I’m sniffy about the top claim, I’m not all dismissive of the Institute’s report. Entitled Reducing Inequalities and using a cohort study of 17,000 people born in 1970, it has discovered a complete hierarchy of risk, with plumber’s children likely to do better than bus driver’s kids, who in turn fare less badly than the progeny of shop assistants. It’s an important study and is being taken to show how increased social mobility, despite all the Government’s efforts, remains an elusive aspiration.

Even so, I would have thought that it represented a considerable negative achievement for the child of a lawyer to become poor. You would really, one imagines (and I know many lawyers), have to struggle to get to the bottom. In the modern world only addiction or a decision to become a writer could really explain such a descent.

In defence of Lord Levy and son (Jewish Chronicle)

A few weeks ago, readers will recall, there was a something of a bad press day for the firm of Levy and Son here in the JC. First there was the letter from a judge, Barrington Black, regretting that he could not rejoice in the decision by the CPS not to prosecute anyone — including Lord Levy — in the so-called “cash for honours” case. There had to be — despite the decision — “lingering concern”, and His Honour also seemed to question the rumoured CPS judgment about the admissibility of certain evidence. “It is still well accepted,” he wrote, “that it is possible for circumstantial evidence to be put before a jury, subject to careful direction.”

If you cut through the ponderous language here, you seem to discover an exciting proposition, and one that owes more to Judge Roy Bean and border justice than to British jurisprudence. Which, essentially, is that whatever the law says (which is that there wasn’t even a prosecutable case to answer), Barrington Black privately thinks Lord Levy is guilty as hell and ought to go down for it.

That his view was that lynch law ought to apply appeared to be confirmed by the astonishing final paragraph of his letter. This referred, a propos of nothing legal, to the poor “public perception” that the case had created of both the Labour Party and “the Jewish community”, before signing off by making an entirely illogical link between cash-for-honours and Lord Levy’s role as Middle East envoy.

The story of a happy wedding and a sad magazine

Bank Holiday Monday, North London, and the adolescent boy suddenly emerged from the shop doorway, a mobile-clutching friend beside him. “Excuse me,” he said, “But do you know the way to the Tinseltown café, please?” I showed him where to go, and he thanked me. If he had a gun, a knife, a cosh, a lack of respect for authority or gang membership, he kept them well hidden. Was this polite boy too, I asked myself on the way to Tesco, typical of modern society? Or are violence and abuse the only things that count? They’re certainly more exciting.

Two days earlier we were preparing to drive to my nephew’s wedding in Sussex when a magazine called The Salisbury Review dropped through my letter-box. Started up by the conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton and named after the Victorian PM rather than the cathedral city, TSR describes itself as an organ of thought, hoping to demonstrate that conservative opinion is “varied, fertile and catholic”.

The articles, specially chosen from the last few years of the magazine’s history, seemed to me to be neither varied nor catholic, and I had doubts about their fertility. But they certainly did represent a strand of thinking that I recognised from many letters, e-mails and Today’s Papers slots on the radio.

The real logic of circumcision (Jewish Chronicle)

Years ago someone (I forget who) told me it was because of the sand; men who live in deserts are liable to get grit where it most isn’t wanted and where it unfortunately doesn’t turn to pearls. So the religious leaders of the desert folk — who doubled up as wise persons and doctors — transformed a rather radical way of dealing with the possibilities of sub-preputial inflammation, into a supernatural injunction. QED.

In the past few weeks there has been a smattering of brit talk. There was the claim that circumcision diminished the chances of Aids, though safe sex still seems to me to be a better and less contingent option. And there was the news about how an increasing number of Jewish men were reluctant to have their sons circumcised, possibly seeing the operation as a rather violent intrusion.

This chat just got me interested in the why of it all. Of course, to some believers God told Abraham to do it, and what more do you really need to know? But it’s the anthropology and the psychology that are really fascinating here — so if you want a pretend-medical discussion of penile hygiene or (heaven forfend) a women-prefer-X debate on genital aesthetics, look for the appropriate internet site.

All right; God made his covenant with Abraham. So why, any child would ask the ineffable, might a God, creator or created, want that particular covenant? Sand was one answer, both simple and glib, but theologically unsatisfying. There are other hot places where the local religions don’t demand this particular form of sacrifice, or require it later in life, and other body parts one might modify to take account of weather conditions.