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Hoo Hahs And Passing Frenzies: Collected Journalism, 1991 2001
1st trade edition paperback, fine
335 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Francis Wheen
28 books85 followersFrancis James Baird Wheen (born 22 January 1957) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster.
Wheen was educated at Copthorne Prep School, Harrow School and Royal Holloway College, University of London. At Harrow he was a contemporary of Mark Thatcher who has been a recurring subject of his journalism.[citation needed] He is a member of the 'soap' side of the Wheen family, whose family business was the long-established "Wheen & Sons", soap-makers, as was revealed in the gossip column of the Daily Mail on 26 March 2007. He was married to the writer Joan Smith between 1985 and 1993.
He is the author of several books including a biography of Karl Marx, which won the Isaac Deutscher prize. A column for The Guardian ran for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism – Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies won him the George Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard.
Wheen broadcasts regularly (mainly on BBC Radio 4) and is a regular panellist on The News Quiz, in which he often referred to the fact that he resembles the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. He is also one of the more frequently recruited guests for Have I Got News For You.
Wheen wrote a docudrama, The Lavender List, for BBC Four on the final period of Harold Wilson's premiership, concentrating on his relationship with Marcia Williams, which was first screened in March 2006. It starred Kenneth Cranham as former Prime Minister Wilson and Gina McKee as Williams. In April 2007 the BBC paid £75,000 to Williams (Baroness Falkender) in an out-of-court settlement over claims made in the programme.
Francis Wheen is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto and a close friend of Christopher Hitchens. In late-2005 Wheen was co-author, with journalist David Aaronovitch and blogger Oliver Kamm, of a complaint to The Guardian after it published a correction and apology for an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. Chomsky complained that the article suggested he denied the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The writer Diana Johnstone also complained about references to her in the interview. The Guardian's then readers' editor Ian Mayes found that this had misrepresented Chomsky's position, and his judgement was upheld in May 2006 by an external ombudsman, John Willis. In his report for the Guardian, Willis detailed his reasons for rejecting the argument.
Wheen was educated at Copthorne Prep School, Harrow School and Royal Holloway College, University of London. At Harrow he was a contemporary of Mark Thatcher who has been a recurring subject of his journalism.[citation needed] He is a member of the 'soap' side of the Wheen family, whose family business was the long-established "Wheen & Sons", soap-makers, as was revealed in the gossip column of the Daily Mail on 26 March 2007. He was married to the writer Joan Smith between 1985 and 1993.
He is the author of several books including a biography of Karl Marx, which won the Isaac Deutscher prize. A column for The Guardian ran for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism – Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies won him the George Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard.
Wheen broadcasts regularly (mainly on BBC Radio 4) and is a regular panellist on The News Quiz, in which he often referred to the fact that he resembles the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. He is also one of the more frequently recruited guests for Have I Got News For You.
Wheen wrote a docudrama, The Lavender List, for BBC Four on the final period of Harold Wilson's premiership, concentrating on his relationship with Marcia Williams, which was first screened in March 2006. It starred Kenneth Cranham as former Prime Minister Wilson and Gina McKee as Williams. In April 2007 the BBC paid £75,000 to Williams (Baroness Falkender) in an out-of-court settlement over claims made in the programme.
Francis Wheen is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto and a close friend of Christopher Hitchens. In late-2005 Wheen was co-author, with journalist David Aaronovitch and blogger Oliver Kamm, of a complaint to The Guardian after it published a correction and apology for an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. Chomsky complained that the article suggested he denied the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The writer Diana Johnstone also complained about references to her in the interview. The Guardian's then readers' editor Ian Mayes found that this had misrepresented Chomsky's position, and his judgement was upheld in May 2006 by an external ombudsman, John Willis. In his report for the Guardian, Willis detailed his reasons for rejecting the argument.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 1, 2016
Francis Wheen, "bullshit's enema number one" according to one critic, is worth re-reading regularly.
His collected journalism (1991-2001) was published soon after I moved to London and linked my university days to a new life at the fag end of an academic publisher's long history in that city. I even, somehow, made it to the book launch. That's a different, name-dropping, story you'll have heard if you've ever spent any time in my company.
Wheen's journalism involves employing a combination of wit, memory, expertise and old-fashioned fact-checking effort to call out nonsense, humbug and illogic. And the sources of that were endless. Since we're living with the consequences of Blairism (such as it was), Wheen's early insights into the man and his methods are particularly worthy of re-treading. To select just one article, analysing the vapid "third way", the author reminds us that Hillary Clinton proposed a "unified field theory of life" as her husband called it a "third way". Looking closely though, it appears that we aren't going too well when applying Hoggart's Law (of the ridiculous reverse) here. Also, Blair was all about using "market mechanisms" to meet "social objectives" using "entrepreneurial zeal" to reject "inefficiency". Companies will "devise ways to share with their staff the wealth their knowhow creates" but apparently will require "government intervention to protect the weak". So which is it? Blair et al "reconcile contradictions by pretending they don't exist." This is Wheen identifying the rhetorician Blair five years before he applied the dark arts to lead us into Iraq - aided by loud support from his "favourite tycoon, Rupert Murdoch." The genius of Wheen is not to leave us there though, but to recall the fate of "an earlier experiment in political innovation" - the French proto-fascist General Georges Boulanger, whose opponent urged "disaffected electors to support a 'Third Way' candidate - Boulanger's horse." The horse actually won some votes, and Wheen remarks that it was "still a more substantial alternative than the vapid, vacuous musings of our PM."
You listen around yourself at what passes for comment and analysis in today's "flat earth news" environment and that noise you don't hear is silence.
His collected journalism (1991-2001) was published soon after I moved to London and linked my university days to a new life at the fag end of an academic publisher's long history in that city. I even, somehow, made it to the book launch. That's a different, name-dropping, story you'll have heard if you've ever spent any time in my company.
Wheen's journalism involves employing a combination of wit, memory, expertise and old-fashioned fact-checking effort to call out nonsense, humbug and illogic. And the sources of that were endless. Since we're living with the consequences of Blairism (such as it was), Wheen's early insights into the man and his methods are particularly worthy of re-treading. To select just one article, analysing the vapid "third way", the author reminds us that Hillary Clinton proposed a "unified field theory of life" as her husband called it a "third way". Looking closely though, it appears that we aren't going too well when applying Hoggart's Law (of the ridiculous reverse) here. Also, Blair was all about using "market mechanisms" to meet "social objectives" using "entrepreneurial zeal" to reject "inefficiency". Companies will "devise ways to share with their staff the wealth their knowhow creates" but apparently will require "government intervention to protect the weak". So which is it? Blair et al "reconcile contradictions by pretending they don't exist." This is Wheen identifying the rhetorician Blair five years before he applied the dark arts to lead us into Iraq - aided by loud support from his "favourite tycoon, Rupert Murdoch." The genius of Wheen is not to leave us there though, but to recall the fate of "an earlier experiment in political innovation" - the French proto-fascist General Georges Boulanger, whose opponent urged "disaffected electors to support a 'Third Way' candidate - Boulanger's horse." The horse actually won some votes, and Wheen remarks that it was "still a more substantial alternative than the vapid, vacuous musings of our PM."
You listen around yourself at what passes for comment and analysis in today's "flat earth news" environment and that noise you don't hear is silence.
September 20, 2013
LAUGHTER AND DISSENT
To my mind, Francis Wheen, has gone down hill in recent years from the heady of heights of this book and his two brilliant biographies ("Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions" and "Karl Marx"). I put it down to the company he keeps, in particular Oliver Kamm, one time hedge fund-ist, self declared lefty and pedant in chief for The Times; and David Aronovitch, smug-alec par excellence whom I last came across puffing up David Milliband, likewise in The Times. But all this was in the future. This collection of journalism from the 1990's and the first couple of years of the millennium sees Wheen in full stride, dissenting in his singular and seriously funny style against the perceived wisdom of the day, sniffing out hypocrisy and hum-bug with un-erring accuracy.
His range of targets is laudably wide, and includes many prominent figures of that period. There was no honeymoon period vis-à-vis Tony Blair for our Francis, he smelt him out in early on when Blair was in opposition. Not the only writer to do so (Blair was and is an open invitation for satirical writers), but no other writer skewers him with quite as much skill and wit. Likewise with John Major's and his most (only?) favourable attribute: his alleged "decentness", which Wheen rationally appraises and finds to be overstated to say the least.
Lower order figures come under scrutiny, including a well deserved mauling for Robert Maxwell's mendacious minions within the Labour Party not a few of whom re-surfaced (unlike Captain Bob) under Blair, for example Helen Liddell ("I never worked for Robert Maxwell"), "The truth is slightly different [retorts Wheen]. During the 1988 Commonwealth Games [while Maxwell's director of corporate affairs] she clung to him so closely that at one point she even follows him into the gents lavatory - a scene that was recorded for posterity by a BBC TV documentary crew".
The focus isn't purely on politicians, Wheen also writes about literature, class, the media industry and a variety of other subjects. Even when I didn't agree with him, and his piece on the Nato attack on Serbia is one that I thought a little disingenuous, he still makes pertinent points.
"Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies" contains some of the best journalism on the Major and early Blair eras. Wheen's wit and sense of fun are ideal companions for revisiting that depressing period. This book is one that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend and shall no doubt read again.
To my mind, Francis Wheen, has gone down hill in recent years from the heady of heights of this book and his two brilliant biographies ("Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions" and "Karl Marx"). I put it down to the company he keeps, in particular Oliver Kamm, one time hedge fund-ist, self declared lefty and pedant in chief for The Times; and David Aronovitch, smug-alec par excellence whom I last came across puffing up David Milliband, likewise in The Times. But all this was in the future. This collection of journalism from the 1990's and the first couple of years of the millennium sees Wheen in full stride, dissenting in his singular and seriously funny style against the perceived wisdom of the day, sniffing out hypocrisy and hum-bug with un-erring accuracy.
His range of targets is laudably wide, and includes many prominent figures of that period. There was no honeymoon period vis-à-vis Tony Blair for our Francis, he smelt him out in early on when Blair was in opposition. Not the only writer to do so (Blair was and is an open invitation for satirical writers), but no other writer skewers him with quite as much skill and wit. Likewise with John Major's and his most (only?) favourable attribute: his alleged "decentness", which Wheen rationally appraises and finds to be overstated to say the least.
Lower order figures come under scrutiny, including a well deserved mauling for Robert Maxwell's mendacious minions within the Labour Party not a few of whom re-surfaced (unlike Captain Bob) under Blair, for example Helen Liddell ("I never worked for Robert Maxwell"), "The truth is slightly different [retorts Wheen]. During the 1988 Commonwealth Games [while Maxwell's director of corporate affairs] she clung to him so closely that at one point she even follows him into the gents lavatory - a scene that was recorded for posterity by a BBC TV documentary crew".
The focus isn't purely on politicians, Wheen also writes about literature, class, the media industry and a variety of other subjects. Even when I didn't agree with him, and his piece on the Nato attack on Serbia is one that I thought a little disingenuous, he still makes pertinent points.
"Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies" contains some of the best journalism on the Major and early Blair eras. Wheen's wit and sense of fun are ideal companions for revisiting that depressing period. This book is one that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend and shall no doubt read again.
April 25, 2013
The passage of time between first appearance in newsprint and anthologising means that collections of journalism can't really ride the zeitgeist, but they can aspire to reflect it, maybe even record it - if, that is, they are as accurate as Francis Wheen's sardonic & assured (not to say minatory) overview of the irresistible rise of Blairism. How far away it all seems now...
March 24, 2020
Particularly like as it as immesely funny astute , shows new labour whats they are, and kills any small felling for tony blair.. and lot of other politician malarkey and hypocrisy of that period.
April 12, 2013
Terrifying.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews