David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

No real sex please, we're ironic

Later today the luminary authorities who run the magazine The Literary Review will — for the 15th time — announce the winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The original object of this prize was to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. Clearly this is a long-term project because, as I write, those who are threatened with receiving the unwanted gong in front of a sniggering audience include the novelists Iain Banks, Norman Mailer, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson, as well as Ian McEwan for his detailed descriptions of various low-key sexual fumblings in On Chesil Beach.

Allow me now to draw a line of connection — one that is going to seem tenuous. Just last Friday the Health Protection Agency reported on an important aspect of non-fictional sex. This was that, in 2006, the number of sexually transmitted infections (or STIs) rose to 620,000, up by 2.4 per cent on the previous year. It estimated that 73,000 people in Britain live with HIV, one third of whom are unaware that they even have the virus. Nor is this, as some like to imagine, about African migrants; among gay men there were 2,700 new diagnoses of HIV in 2007. Naturally, young adults accounted for a high level of infections, including genital warts (the virus for which is linked to cervical cancer), gonorrhoea and chlamydia.

It's possible, of course, that the greater effort put into screening is partly responsible for the year-on-year rise. Even if this is the case, we are still left pondering a British paradox: how does it come about that there is so much sex in the culture and yet so little knowledge of how to prevent oneself getting or passing on this life-threatening virus or that unpleasant germ? Since this is my column, I will dispense peremptorily with the eternal lobby that links disease with “too much” sex education and argues that if we knew even less about sex, then we'd be less likely to do it so often. They would not apply such logic to any other realm of human existence.

Not all hypocrisies are equal (Jewish Chronicle)

Every week, when I open my JC, there to seems to be an article about how many frummers there are these days. Millions of ’em, cluttering up Jewish schools, congregating in Jerusalem to persecute gays, and breeding like Catholics. Soon, the subtext seems to be, they will have taken over Jewishness from its rightful owners, that great amorphous group whose main distinction is that it isn’t Orthodox. And then where will we be?

It may be that, as someone on the far edge of all this, I have got my anthropology wrong. And maybe not. There was a wonderful episode of the sophisticated American comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which the Jewish anti-hero needed to schmooze the director of a private hospital into bumping a friend up the queue for kidney transplants. This director is frum, so David puts on his kopel and peppers his speech with achs and schpls in order to suggest that he is also Orthodox. Unfortunately, his plan unravels when he is stuck on a ski-lift with the frummer’s daughter, who — unwilling to be alone with a man after sundown — jumps and breaks her leg.

As ever, David captures both the comedy of the subject, and the hypocrisy of its critic. When I first heard the word frummer, some 25 years ago, it was from a Hackney Jew, who used as a child to earn money on Shabbat from doing the things for the Orthodox that they weren’t allowed to do for themselves. As he recounted the list of switchings-on and off and lavatory flushings, it became clear to me that he didn’t respect his employers at all. There was, in his voice, a mixture of contempt for their superstitions and resentment that they didn’t seem to care what happened to his soul as a result of all his rewarded infractions.

Tony Blair: The war? I believed in it, I believed in it then, I believe in it now

Months ago, when I knew I would be interviewing Tony Blair for a series of programmes on BBC One, I would ask friends, politicians and other journalists what questions they most wanted put to the former Prime Minister. Reduced to its essentials, the answer would almost invariably be the same one, “Why, really, did you go to war in Iraq?” Today this, as far as I can tell, is what happened.

When Tony Blair became Leader of the Opposition in 1994, he — like Margaret Thatcher — knew little about foreign policy. What he did have was a series of instincts about how the Major Government and the international community had handled affairs in Bosnia, and he wasn’t impressed. Ever the anti-fatalist, once in office he was inclined to see such problems as requiring a solution. And passing across his desk in autumn 1997 were a series of intelligence reports concerning the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction. “We cannot let him get away with it,” he told Paddy Ashdown that November.

Although military force short of invasion was used several times against Iraq in the following years, the first killing ground was to be the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999. When a campaign of airstrikes against Milosevic’s Serbia seemed to be getting nowhere, Blair began to agitate for Nato to threaten the use of ground troops and eventually persuaded a very reluctant Bill Clinton to agree to such a line. Two days later Milosevic backed down. The lesson that Blair took from this, he told me, was that the credible and united threat to use force could succeed where all else failed. In fact he didn’t believe that Clinton would have carried out the threat.

As the Kosovo crisis developed, Blair had delivered a major foreign policy speech in Chicago that spring. This address outlined a doctrine of liberal interventionism, arguing that there were circumstances when, though its interests were not directly threatened, the international community might intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. The speech singled out two major villains: Milosevic and Saddam. One critic of Blair’s foreign policy activism was — I was reminded by a senior Blair aide — then an academic at Stamford, Condoleezza Rice.

Why ditch Blairite foreign policy?

There is much to admire about David Cameron: the hair, the skin, the sticking to the task when the going was hard, the job-creation schemes for John Redwood and Boris Johnson. I attend gatherings full of Labour nervousness or Tory optimism and note that, among the trendies at any rate, shares in Brown are at Northern Rock levels and Cameron, in bright Bermudas, surfs the political rollers.

Mr Cameron has done well. And insofar as we may discern a Cameroonian ideology, it could be said to be Blairism sans Blair. This is sensible, because the former Prime Minister, while outstaying the patience of the political classes, was always located by voters as the politician whose instincts were closest to their own. So Mr Cameron is big on academies, big on choice, big on tolerance, big on “leadership”. He has done well.

It has been interesting, then, to see the most obvious aspect of Tony Blair's leadership legacy — his foreign policy — subtly disowned by the Tory leader. Three weeks ago, visiting Germany, Mr Cameron gave a speech outlining his new principles of conservative action abroad. His first principle was that “to help protect international security, any state must put its own national security first”. “Every good military commander,” Mr Cameron opined, authoritatively, “understands that no campaign will succeed unless you secure your home base first.” The 7/7 bombers, he declared by way of evidence, were British citizens, not Iraqi agents.

Consequently we had to beef up the “four types” of domestic security — institutional, cultural, economic and physical. We had to have a clearer and more confident national identity like, er, India (his choice, not mine, though China would have been a more honest example), we had to promote national cohesion, bear down on those who threaten said cohesion and strengthen our border protection.

Love from Lisbon – an explosive package

Sometimes in politics (though rarely in journalism) your sins will find you out. One of the lessons that Tony Blair says he learnt from his time in office was how his choices were affected and constrained by what he had said in opposition. He thinks he spent a lot of time undoing the effect of claiming that it was “standards, not structures” in education, reintroducing a previously abused internal market into the NHS, and now believes that he ended up suffering from Labour's successful pre-'97 taunting of John Major's Government as having been “sleazy”.

Of course, it all seemed like a good idea at the time, as now does the Conservative party's demand — backed by this newspaper — for a referendum to endorse ratification of what will become known as the Lisbon treaty. It is, is it not, a simple problem for poor old Gordon, trying desperately to justify to the electorate the breach of a promise made back in 2005? And it is, is it not, something of an open goal into which the Conservatives can keep scoring, from now to the next election? An election that, according to some of my more tribally Tory colleagues, is as good as in the bag.

I am not going lean against my mental five-bar gate, remove a straw from my mouth and give readers the wise shake of the head and the “Gordon bain't be as stoopid as he be painted” bit of political folk-wisdom. But I will remind them that there is something important being missed here.

Who really killed de Menezes?

A couple of years ago I did my second stint of jury service at a Central London court. We ended up hearing a case in which a middle-class couple were terrorised one evening by a man who had decided, wrongly, that they were connected with an earlier argument he’d lost with someone else entirely. There was a lot of punching, threatening and door-smashing involved, and the woman was still so scared that she testified from behind a screen so that the accused wouldn’t see her face. “I don’t like her,” said one of my fellow jurors. “Stuck-up. Brought it on herself.”

I was reminded of this moment when reading Sean O’Neill’s comment in this paper last week, that while everyone in Britain now knew who Jean Charles de Menezes was, few of those most vociferously calling for action against the Metropolitan Police, were likely to recall more than one or two names — if that — of the victims of the July 7, 2005 bombings, which happened 15 days earlier. The police end up with a fine of £175,000, condemnation for having permitted “an unwarranted risk to the public” and a barrage of calls from newspapers and politicians for the head of Sir Ian Blair. Those who beguiled the bombers from inadequacy into mass murderousness remain unpunished and unpunishable.

We are in a strange condition not to have noticed that the two main criticisms of the Met in the de Menezes case are — more or less — incompatible. The one case is that, for whatever reason, the officers involved acted with appalling and undue violence, as a result of which an ordinary member of the public was left with seven dum-dum bullets inside him, and there but for the grace of God die we. The other is that the police, believing Mr de Menezes to be a 21/7 bomber returning to public transport to fulfil the jihadi duty that he’d flunked the day before, allowed him to board a bus and then a train, without intercepting him.

It's all a wicked plot by the Tories and the SNP

Some of Britain's more bruised politicians, surveying the broadcasting coverage of Alex Salmond's appearance before his party faithful at Aviemore, must have wondered what the Scottish First Minister had that they didn't, for no cloud was permitted by the BBC or anyone else to cross the saltire sky.

Part of it was novelty, of course; Salmond in power is new, even if the impulses he represents are as old as any Cairngorm cave. Some of it was the particular and material appeal that Salmondism possesses for the journalistic classes, gesturing left while acting right. Who benefits from dropping all prescription charges and all student fee contributions, given that the poor were already exempt? What could be nicer than congratulating yourself on your public virtue while pocketing the state's largesse?

So the man got the benefit of the doubt and not a word did I hear questioning the constant tone of national chauvinism running through the Aviemore speeches. Allow me to parse one of them for you. “People,” predicted Mr Salmond, “will look askance at the budget squeeze on Scotland when this morning's price of Brent crude is $86 a barrel... and the revenues from Scotland's North Sea resources flood into the Chancellor's coffers.” So, if the minority SNP administration finds it cannot afford to subsidise Scotland's middle classes to the extent it has promised, it will be the fault of the English who have stolen the oil revenues. Or, as John Swinney, the SNP finance minister, said, creating an image that politics could have done without: “Our black gold is filling the Chancellor's self-inflicted black hole.”

I worry about the SNP because I hate this scapegoating business. “The London way,” said Mr Swinney, “means taxes on small businesses go up and a squeeze on Scotland's public services takes an effect.” The London Way. Or, at other times in other places, the Irish Way, the Jewish Way, the Way of the Other.

A weapons expert, a rose grower and a fantasist

One of Ming Campbell’s more light-hearted legacies to his party was the elevation to the position of Shadow to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster of Norman Baker, the MP for Lewes. In fact Mr Baker’s job represented a repromotion, since he had previously been environment spokesman for the Lib Dems, but had decided to give the post up to pursue other matters. The nature of those other matters became clear at the weekend with the serialisation of his book, entitled, The Strange Death of David Kelly, or, as the headline put it, “Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death.”

This charge, from a senior MP in an influential newspaper, is sensational in the truest sense of that word. Surely, the reader may be entitled to imagine, such an accusation would not be made lightly and that Mr Baker will have done his homework. His accusations, therefore, deserve scrutiny.

Mr Baker’s initial objections to the verdict of suicide on Dr Kelly were both intuitive and practical. Mr Baker simply doesn’t believe that the senior arms inspector was suicidal, since he was a “strong character who had survived many difficult situations in the past”, including the self-destruction by overdose of his own mother when he was 20. And Mr Baker worries too about a series of what he believes are discrepancies about the finding of Dr Kelly’s body on Harrowdown Hill in July 2003. Was he wearing a coat when found? And had the body been moved?

The obesity debate: clarity begins at home

There is a writer we both know and love, you and I, who hates fat people. Every time there needs to be an example of personal unloveliness – from flatulence to bad manners – it is somehow bracketed with excessive girth. At first I just thought I was being oversensitive, but over time I realised that this expression of distaste, though possibly unconscious, was invariably there. I began to wonder whether, in adolescence, there hadn’t been some attempt on the author’s virtue by a very fat lady indeed.

This is just one small example of why it is a drag being big; few are hated simply for being slim.

So the wonder is why so many of us are fatter than we should be, or would like to be, and why so many of us will become that way. With cigarettes at least it was once considered cool to smoke; outside Tonga and Idaho it hasn’t been considered good to be plump for at least the past couple of centuries.

Yesterday the outward problem of obesity got it with both barrels at the conference of the gold-standard organisation in the field, the National Obesity Forum. The chairman of the forum argued that “levels of childhood obesity will lead to the first cut in life expectancy for 200 years. These children are likely to die before their parents.” Some have called for what I suppose would become known as a Lard Czar to coordinate the fight against flab.

I have to admit that, knowing what I know (and I know quite a lot about fat), I find this debate, as it is carried out in public, intensely irritating. The campaigners for change are always on the edge of exaggeration (“worse than climate change”), so fearful are they of inaction. This gives credence to the deniers who will invariably claim that the whole idea of obesity is a scare got up by the Government so as to deprive the public of its pleasures.

From scandal to panic: the agony at the BBC

For as long as it lasted, it was a fabulous image: the BBC’s slightly pompous arts supremo, Alan Yentob – never a man to wear his talents inside his clothes – having himself edited into encounters that he wasn’t actually there for. My imagination furnished me with Yentob interviewing Tchaikovsky, Yentob bobbing alongside Mao on the Yangtse, Yentob witnessing the Great Fire of London from Jeffrey Archer‘s penthouse flat.

You may recall that, in the wake of what has ludicrously come to be known as “Crowngate”, it was revealed that “noddies” of Mr Yentob had been inserted for interviews at which, according to the BBC website, “he had not been present”. This hilarious malpractice was widely believed to have taken place.

And it could have happened, I suppose. Having worked for most of my early journalistic life in television, I think I did once hear of someone doing it. Certainly the practice of recording the interviewer’s questions once the interviewee has departed is a long-standing practice where there is only one camera. Presenting Newsnight a decade or so ago, I had to record questions I had supposedly asked Lionel Jospin in English, only for him to reply in French.