After the Twitter Storm, and Mr Rifkind’s Grand Remonstrance

This is the first chance I’ve had to make some general conversation after the various controversies and insult storms that have kept me busy over the past two weeks, which I had originally meant to be fallow.  Two of my controversies have now become formal procedures, and I will let you know when I get the verdicts on them.

But  a few more continue. I’ve been tickled by the hatchet-faced attempts by various contributors to defend the police in the ‘arrested for not smiling’ incident. I thought it telling that the story was carried by the two most partisan (and most opposite) daily newspapers in the country. That’s why I linked to both of them, to stop both the ‘typical Daily Mail’ and ‘typical Guardian’ dismissals which I would otherwise have got.

Nobody is actually saying that the victim of this piece of heavy-handed policing was officially charged with ‘not smiling’.  ‘Facecrime’ is yet to become part of English law (though ‘Thoughtcrime’ has made it on to the Statute Book with surprising ease, and very little protest).

The phrase ‘arrested for not smiling’ was used by the person involved. Once this has attracted your attention, you can see (if you are in the least dispassionate) that the increased officiousness of the police, excused in all things by the terror bogey (Slow, mechanical voice intones ‘If we can prevent just *one* terrorist incident, then it must surely be worthwhile to tattoo a bar code on the forehead of every British subject, and subject anyone on the street to search and arrest at all times, etc, etc’) , plus the conformist frenzy of the Olympics, combined to produce an inexcusable absurdity. The same sort of people who resorted to utterly desperate and baseless predictions of a boy cyclist’s likely course and speed, to excuse the Haverhill incident, turned out again to excuse the manhandling of an entirely innocent man. What was wrong (in either case) with having a quiet, polite word, on the basis that the police are the servants of the people, not their grim-jawed masters? Well, the police long ago forgot that they were civilians, and started calling us that. They serve the state, not us.

To make a change from the usual online free psychoanalysis, someone (doubtless reaching deep into his own experience of live broadcasting on the BBC) has offered me a few helpful tips on broadcasting and humour. He has even pointed out that I speak more slowly when I am presenting programmes that I make and write myself, than when I am being interviewed on someone else’s programme.  (For this change of pace, I supposedly have a director to thank, as I would never have thought of it myself). Well, as they say duh! How many times do I have to point out that it is the post of presenter (granted to me a few times by Channel Four, but not by the BBC) that is crucial in broadcasting.

The presenter chooses, subject, angle of approach, interviewee, timings, last word, you name it. The interviewee doesn’t choose the subject, never knows when he will be interrupted, faded down or cut off, and can only get the last word by luck or (sometimes, and I’m not saying how) subterfuge. The same is true of the member of a panel on such programmes as ‘Question Time’, or ‘Newsnight’.

I might add that I actually don’ t particularly want to be loved by complete strangers. If my fate is to be loathed by people who think that Russell Brand is an expert on drugs because he’s taken lots of them, it is a fate I can endure.  And as for the jokes, if you are officially funny, you could read out the KFC price list and the audience would roll about clutching its sides (this already happens to Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson. ‘Boris’ ,not the name his own family use, is really the name of a national comic character). If, however, you are a pompous reactionary bleep with No Sense of Humour, you can tell all the jokes you like, and even sometimes surprise your enemies into laughter, but afterwards you will still have No Sense of Humour.

Then there is the free psychoanalysis. I can get this any day by pointing out to cyclists on footpaths in Kensington Gardens that they have ridden straight over ten inch high lettering which says ‘NO CYCLING’ (in actual capitals).  Are they perhaps visually impaired? Can I help them in some way? I always try politeness first, but it is usually a matter of seconds before I am on a metaphorical psychiatric couch, with my motives, previous life and general character being subjected to a searching and uninhibited examination. And all free.  On one particularly delicious occasion, my analyst attempted a new type of shock therapy, which involved aiming his fist at me while still riding (don’t try this at home). Not realising that the approaching blow in the face was meant for my own good, I uncooperatively stepped backwards, causing my analyst to crash to the ground amid  a satisfying crunch and tinkle of broken bike accessories. When I asked him if he was all right, and if I might help him in any way,  he could only emit an odd, snarling noise, and had apparently been robbed of the power of speech. Well, you know what they say about heaping coals of fire.

Something similar has been going on on Twitter, which I enter from time to time by a secret back door, so that I can observe what’s being said about me. Dear me, it is mostly so banal.  But I missed this amusing and almost flattering contribution from a lady who (if I have the right person) is  Scotland’s answer (if it needs one) to Louise Bagshawe, the chick-lit author and occasional MP . She is called Jenny Colgan. Her website proclaims ‘Life is Sweet with Jenny Colgan’. Not always, it seems. She was due to be on the Radio 2 ‘Jeremy Vine Programme’ on Monday, where we were about to discuss the wild Olympophilia that has the country in its grip. As she prepared for this ordeal, she wrote (if it was indeed her)


‘@Jenny Colgan ‏@jennycolgan
Oh GOD I am on Radio 2 debating the #limpicks at 1.30 with PETER HITCHENS #WAYoutofmydepth #whimperingwithfear #ohgod’
She underestimated herself. In fact the presenter of the programme, Vanessa Feltz left us both free to make our individual cases with little interruption,  and we didn’t really clash much.
What was really odd was that Ms Colgan received the following reply:

‘Simon Mayo ‏@simonmayo
@jennycolgan don't worry Jenny. You give him enough rope and he does your job for you.’

If this is the Simon Mayo who is a BBC radio presenter, should he be taking sides on issues of public controversy, as he appears to be doing here? Of course, if it isn’t that Simon Mayo, it doesn’t matter. But if it is, perhaps it does

Next, to Mr Hugo Rifkind.

Now, Mr Rifkind works for the Times, so I can’t direct you to the article in which he had a go at me on Tuesday. It is behind a pay wall.  But I’ll try to give a fair account of it.

Mr Rifkind is one of the young metropolitan smoothies, Cameroon social and economic liberals with a vague allegiance to the Modernised Tories,  who have appeared all over the formerly conservative unpopular papers in the past few years, adorning columns of one kind or another. He is also to be heard quite a bit on BBC Radio 4. If I’ve ever met him, I wasn’t aware of it.  I believe he is related to the former Conservative cabinet minister of the same surname. In former times, columns in newspapers tended to come either to people who were distinguished in other walks of life, or to journalists who had long careers behind them, were quite gnarled and had knocked about a bit . Now they seem to be more readily available.

Anyway, he told me off for saying (on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today' programme on Tuesday morning) that the opening and closing ceremonies at the Olympics were victory parades to mark the triumph of the cultural revolution. Or, as I put it on air :’telling people who were not part of the cultural revolution that they had lost’.

In a future post I’ll analyse his arguments in more detail, such as they are. (Nick Griffin features, of course, as he must in all smears of cultural conservatives). But he said I was ‘precisely wrong’, and then told me that the Boyle event was a ‘reconciliation’ of two sorts of Britishness . Well, my kind wasn’t represented and I’m not reconciled. And the fact that Mr Rifkind is telling me that I am, or ought to be, makes my point rather well. 

Smile, can’t you? Or else.

A footnote on the Blair creature. I gave my contribution to the ‘Today’ programme from a  remote studio in Oxford, so I didn’t meet the creature when we were both on the same segment on Monday. I would just remind readers that, however relaxed and amused he pretended to be about what I had said on Monday, his minders used to make elaborate efforts to keep me from asking him questions in public .

These included trying to exclude me from the Labour manifesto launch in 1997  (two press officers attempted to close the door in my face, bleating ‘it’s full’ , when it obviously wasn’t. I pushed past them, laughing,  in my aggressive, humourless way).

Then he and his minders refused  to take questions from me however long I held my hand up. The correspondents from the Azerbaijan Courier and the Limpopo Herald benefited greatly from this.  Towards the end of each press conference, anybody, but anybody who had his or her hand up would be called in preference to me. When he was eventually embarrassed into taking a question (about the contrast between his education policy and his choice of school for his eldest son) he refused to take a follow-up question  about his first unsatisfactory answer, and ordered me to ’sit down and stop being bad.' (Mr Slippery, taking his role as heir to Blair very seriously, followed a very similar procedure 13 years later).

A few days later, I waited outside a building in Birmingham in which Mr Blair had given a speech, in the hope of questioning him again on his way to his car. A TV crew was nearby, so any encounter would have been recorded.  After a long interval of immobility, Anji Hunter was sent outside to promise me an interview with the Labour leader, immediately,  if I would come inside. Like a fool, I trusted this promise and went in, and as I sat down, Mr Blair and his mental valet, Alastair Campbell,  jeered at me, got up and left. There is a photograph of this moment which hangs in my house,  to remind me not to be tricked like that again.

Actually, I doubt very much whether Mr Blair ever understood the project for which he was the figurehead. He has never been very bright or well-informed, but was a pleasant, falsely reasssuring front for a very determined and successful effort to change Britain forever. This is why I never feel quite comfortable when I hear him described as a  ‘war criminal’. The charge makes him sound more important than he was.

What’s interesting, however, is that the Twitter mob, even so,  prefer Mr Blair ( who ordered the invasion of Iraq they claim to hate) to me (who opposed the Iraq war they claim to hate). Similarly, many of them rave about how my very existence profanes the memory of my late brother (who vigorously and unapologetically supported the Iraq war they claim to hate). I reckon this is because the only things the modern left really care about are sex, drugs and rock and roll, and of course God (‘He doesn’t exist, and I hate him’ being their motto). The anti-war stuff is just a self-indulgent, shallow pose.