MARK SIMPSON .com

Oscar Wilde has been added to the UK’s National Curriculum. Teenagers in English secondary schools will now study the aesthete author alongside Dickens and Shakespeare.

Whilst I think this is welcome news - Wilde is a writer as vital and as brilliant today a century after his death as he was when he was when he was quipping in the salons of London, or lying in the gutter looking at the stars and the thighs of messenger boys - I wonder whether Fisher’s biography, reviewed below, shouldn’t be required reading also.

Revenge of the Psychocrumpet

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, March 2002)

There is a terrible, disgusting, filthy vice which should strike horror and shame into the hearts of any red-blooded Englishman and which is closely and intimately associated with an effete 19th-century Anglo- Irish dramatist. In fact, his name has become a by-word for it. It is the love that once dared not speak its name but now won’t pull its pants up. It deports itself in shameless ways everywhere these days: in films, newspaper articles, television, and countless books.

I’m talking of course about Wildolatry.

The worst of it It isn’t that Mr Wilde has become overrated and over-espoused, his every utterance treated as a gem of eternal wisdom and precious paradox. Or that public nuisances such as Stephen Fry seem to have based their entire claim to relevance on a life-long low- rent impersonation of The Witty One.

No, the most revolting aspect of this tendency is its sentimentality. The central article of faith in Wildolatry is that Oscar (oh, how the Wildolators like to utter that name, their lips forming an “O” like drooling communicants on their knees) was and is the most exquisite victim. A victim of “bigotry”, a victim of English philistinism, a victim of political intrigue, a victim of his psychocrumpet boyfriend (well, who could resist Jude Law?), and a victim of the lad’s jaw-clenching, whip-brandishing, eye-popping, violent dad, the Marquis of the Daily Mail, who famously left a card for Mr Wilde at the Groucho Club addressed to that “posing Somdomite”, setting in motion a sequence of events that would lead to Wilde being sentenced to two years’ hard panto in Reading.

Precisely because we’ve heard the story too many times, fact, fiction and fellatio have blurred into one soggy mess in the Wilde myth. However, as Wilde himself hinted, he was the author of his own downfall - and with it his posterity. As he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1885: “I would go to the stake for a sensation… To be a master of moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and I am not sorry that it is so.” In Trevor Fisher’s ‘Oscar and Bosie: a Fatal Passion’ (Sutton), it becomes clear that the great dramatist was also a common-or-garden drama queen.

One, moreover, who had ideas above his station. He thought he could take on drama queens who had been in the business of mastering and being mastered by “moods” for centuries. What’s more, this lot played for keeps. The blue-blooded battiness of the Douglases, described by Bosie himself with dramatic understatement as a family with “theatrical tendencies”, was entirely out of his league. Wilde may have been Irish, with an eccentric father and a formidable mother, he may have been a homosexual, he may have been the greatest playwright of the late 19th century, he may have penned one of the most extraordinary novels in the English language which is even more relevant today than it was then, he may even, you might be forgiven for thinking, invented postmodernism and irony, but the Douglases were drama queens who made him look like a lisping bar-stool amateur and who outgunned him in a feud with life and sanity that for them had been going on for generations.

They also knew more about real suicide, which is frequently the last and definitely unlovely gesture of the drama queen. Queensbury’s father shot himself, as did Lord Alfred Douglas’s elder brother Drumlanrig. Queensbury’s letters to Bosie threatening to shoot him are signed in a manner which typified the “cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-my-face” technique of the serious drama queen: “Your disgusted so-called father, Queensbury”. (To which Bosie replied, with filial obedience: “What a funny little man you are.”) The Douglas instability was not without its darkly comic moments, however. Bosie’s uncle, Lord Jim, caused a scandal when he filled in the 1891 census describing his wife as a “cross sweep” and a “lunatic”, and his stepson as a “shoeblack born in darkest Africa”. (He committed suicide shortly afterwards by slitting his throat from ear to ear.)

When Queensbury was stalking his son and his playwright boyfriend, Bosie took to carrying a loaded revolver in his jacket, which he somehow managed to discharge accidentally one evening in an expensive restaurant, like an early, high-class gangsta rapper (no one was hurt, though Wilde probably needed several glasses of absinthe to calm his nerves). Of course, you or I or Jennifer Lopez would decide that things were getting a tad out of hand, that we were getting a teensy bit out of our depth and quietly move on. Not Wilde. The self-styled “Lord of Language” thought he could master both Bosie and his father when in fact, as events showed, he wasn’t equal to either of them.

But then again, perhaps I underestimate Mr Wilde, or at least his unconscious. After all, Queensbury succeeded in destroying Wilde’s reputation - in a manner which guaranteed Wilde’s present-day fame. Bosie destroyed his private life - in a manner which guaranteed that their love affair would be one of the most famous ever. Though, it’s worth asking, as Fisher does, what kind of “love affair” it was.

Bosie and Wilde shared appetites more than they did each other’s beds, or hearts: chiefly an appetite for teenage working lads. “On Saturday,” Fisher recounts, “the [16-year-old boy slept with Douglas, on Sunday he slept with Oscar. On Monday he returned to London and slept with a woman at Douglas’s expense.” Suddenly, Jonathan King’s extravagant comparisons of himself with Oscar Wilde make a certain kind of sense. After all, Wilde was prosecuted and sentenced not for gross indecency with Bosie but for gross indecency with teenagers from the lower orders. Indeed, Wilde could have been tried and convicted of the same offence for another hundred years - and decades after the ‘decriminalisation’ of homosexuality in the 1960s, until the Age of Consent for male-male sex was equalised with male-female sex at 16 in the 1990s.

Bosie’s designation by Wilde as his “Judas” in history’s longest and bitterest Dear John letter, De Profundis, is arrant, self-dramatising nonsense, as Fisher makes clear. In fact, Bosie stood by Wilde during his trial and while he served his sentence. Though it’s difficult not to suspect that this was down to the dramatic potential of the situation - shortly after Wilde was released they met in Naples and promptly lost interest in one another.

Fisher’s charmingly old-fashioned book (he can’t quite bring himself, for example, to write “anal sex”) is a necessary corrective to Wildolatry, and if it is sometimes rather repetitive, then so were Wilde and Bosie, who were on and off more times than a tart’s knickers when the fleet is in.

“Do you want to know the great drama of my life?” asked Wilde of Andre Gide after his downfall. “It’s that I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.”

Perhaps. Trouble is, the “great drama” in its full, unabridged detail is ultimately rather tedious.

Something, of course, utterly unforgiveable in Wilde’s books.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

By Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 28 January, 07)

['Pies and Prejudice: In search of the North', by Stuart Maconie (Ebury)

Stuart Maconie is looking for the North. It’s not really so difficult to find, but we’re only a few pages in to the book and he’s already hopelessly lost. Perhaps he’s spent too long in the south (the blurb describes him as “a northerner in exile, stateless and confused”), or perhaps he’s visited the buffet car once too often. Whatever the reason, he’s more off-course than the MSC Napoli as he claims categorically, ludicrously, that “the north” (and it should be The North, by the way) “undeniably begins in… Crewe”.

Crewe. Possibly, just possibly, to indulge a perfectly likeable Radio 2 DJ with good taste in music and the star pundit of “I Love Any Decade You’re Making a Series About”, you might say that the North West begins at Crewe. But then, no one is interested in when the North West begins. That’s why Maconie’s travelogue is called “In Search of the North” not “In Search of the Granada TV Region”.

As everyone should know, The North begins (or rather ends, if you’re looking at England from the right way up) further south than Crewe on the other, more important, more attractive, more modest side of England in Grantham, Lincolnshire, on the usefully named Great North Road and Great North Eastern Railway. A helpful hint: if you departed for The North from Euston station or turned left at Watford Gap you’re going the wrong way. Sorry to be pedantic, but The North is, well, north.

Grantham is the real gateway to The North partly because the name forces you to speak Northern (it’s definitely not pronounced “Hugh Grantham”), partly because you can taste the self-reliance and bluff no-nonsense in the air, like chip fat at teatime, even in an air-conditioned coach at the station, but mostly because it’s on the Eastern/Yorkshire side of the country - ie the correct side.  And the next stop is Doncaster.

The North isn’t a mythical, imaginary or obscure place. It was clearly mapped out, more or less, in the Dark Ages AA Atlas. But back then it was called the Danelaw: the Danish Viking kingdom which ran the better half of England from the late 9th century until the early 11th century with its capital at Jorvik/York. Roughly speaking, everything above a diagonal line from Chester to London was Norse and horny-helmeted. Everything below it was Radio Four.

Despite what the history books may say, the Danelaw never really ended and god’s own county of Yorkshire remains at the proud, stoic heart of The North. However, as London has grown exponentially over the centuries, the South Eastern boundaries of the Danelaw have retreated further northwards - to Grantham (well, would you want Peterborough?).

It’s not really Maconie’s fault that he’s so confused. He’s from Wigan, you see. By a terrible accident of birth of the kind that can seriously shake your belief in a benign creator, he’s a Lancastrian. So of course the poor lad has no idea what he’s talking about - all that matters to a Lancastrian is that he’s talking. Perhaps this is why some of this book seems less written than transcribed from an especially long and breathless on-air motormouth monologue, full of random facts, random connections and random geography - diverting enough, but not really going anywhere. Save Crewe.

OK, OK, he does cover the North West rather well: visiting pie-loving Wigan, leafy Cheshire (the designer-sunglasses shop capital of England), up-and-coming Liverpool (soon to be cultural capital of Europe), booming Warrington (home to the UK’s very first IKEA), strumpet Blackpool gearing up for Super Casinos, and makeover Manchester (”a jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place”, quoting from both Morrissey and Peter Shaffer at the same time).

But, as I said, who’s interested in the North West? Yes, our kid Maconie makes a reluctant day-trip across the Pennines to the actual North, visiting Leeds, Durham and Newcastle (where the locals understandably denounce him as being “from the midlands”) but this is really a book about the damp, camp North West that pretends to be about the glamorous, shining North.

Perhaps you think me unkind. Perhaps you think me a tad biased, as a son of York (did you guess?). Well, you’d be right. But you should read some of the things Maconie has to say about Yorkshiremen. Apparently, we’re dour, cold, humourless and mean (clearly he knew this review was coming). But the truly unforgivable slur is that he thinks that Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys are closet Yorkshiremen. If Maconie can capriciously decide to exempt Lancastrian Liverpool from The North because he feels like it (apparently they’re more New York than Northern), why can’t I exempt the whole of the North West?

But even Yorkshiremen and Lancastrians have something that can bring them together: the South. As someone who has lived in York, Sheffield, Manchester and London, but who now lives just off Scotch Corner because I reckon that here I might just possibly be out of range of Ken Livingstone’s next extension of the Congestion Charge Zone, I cheer on Maconie when he moans about the way that the decadent South loves to patronise the glorious North, the way that the BBC has a “North of England Correspondent” but no “South of England Correspondent” - whom is he corresponding with? Half of the population of England live in the North.

The way that faux-northern films like Brassed Off, The Full Monty, and Billy Elliot portray The North as a poverty-stricken wasteland gasping for the generous charity of southern audiences; the way that Englishness is always cast by the London media in terms of the South, despite the obvious truth that Englishness, like pop music, is clearly Northern: the English language was invented in the North (by a Geordie monk), along with The Beatles, The Smiths, ABC, the Human League, the Artic Monkeys and Alan Bennett.

“If Durham were in Kent or Sussex we’d never hear the last of it…” writes an amazed Maconie, having happened across the magical beauty of the place. “It would have its own boat race and its own folk festival and its own TV show where an irascible, beer-swilling, opera-loving detective finds corpses in every cloister and bookshop.”

And if it were in the North West instead of The North it would probably have had its own chapter in this book, instead of a mere few pages.
Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

‘Achtung Schweinehund! A Boy’s Own Story of Imaginary Combat’, Harry Pearson (Little, Brown)

By Mark Simpson

Independent on Sunday, 21/01/07

When I was a boy in the languorous 1970s I looked forward to Christmas not just for the prezzies but the boredom that only cold turkey and just three TV channels could produce. I calculated that the more bored everyone was the more chance there was that they might succumb to my outlandish, vaguely indecent suggestion: ‘Let’s play Escape from Colditz!’

‘Oh, no! Not Escape From Colditz!!’ everyone would cry, shrinking away in horror as I brandished the unfeasibly large box for the game ‘based on the hit BBC TV series’, with it’s crazily complicated board, myriad fussy pieces and cards and incomprehensible gameplay. ‘It’s so silly!’ my sister would huff. ‘The rule-book is the size of dictionary!’ Dad would snort. ‘It takes forever!’ Mum would moan.

These all sounded like recommendations to me. But no dice. Escape from Colditz would go back in the cupboard for another year. For you, Tommy, ze Christmas is over. Everyone hated that game. Except me. I thought it was almost as exciting as ‘The Battle of Britain’ (my favourite film). But now, after all these years, I think I’ve finally found someone to play Escape From Colditz with.

Not only did Harry Pearson, author of ‘Achtung Schweinehund! A Boy’s Own Story of Imaginary Combat’ also love this tragic game as a boy, he like me spent his childhood re-enacting the Second World War, devouring Commando comic books, wearing Clarks Commando shoes, playing with plaggy Airfix soldiers, assembling Airfix scale-models of Spitfires and re-watching ‘Sink the Bismarck!’. We were a generation raised to win the Second World War over and over again. Something most of us were only too happy to do.

It’s a shame that Pearson didn’t live next door to me. Pearson and I would have been best of chums. We even share the same boyish dislike of unisex hairdressers that colonized the 1970s, secretly suspecting that ‘they didn’t actually cut your hair at all. They just folded the untidy bits away and fixed them there with the heat gun.’ The only cloud on the horizon would have been who was going to play the Germans.

And then again…. Maybe it’s best he didn’t. You can have too much in common with someone for both your own good – which seems to me to be the essential the problem of male friendship. If Pearson had lived next door I would probably have ended up that peculiarly disdained species of failed man known a wargamer. Instead of just a fondly indulged homosexual. You see, Pearson never stopped battling on the fields and on the beaches, ‘in his head on the sitting-room floor and across his bedroom ceiling’ as his book blurb puts it. Thirty years on he’s still at it, collecting vast, anally-accurate historical tin armies, hand-painting them all and lugging them up and down the country in search of other people who share his proclivities.

For years he has kept this ‘niche’ side of his life secret from most of his friends, for fear they wouldn’t understand. This book is his grand coming out: ‘It’s time to stop living this double life. It is time to unleash the geek,’ he declares. He’s not under any illusion how sharing his ‘specialist interests’ is likely to be received and how, once he starts talking about this side of his life, he is frequently compelled ‘by a force stronger than me’ to blurt out information that he probably shouldn’t, such as the exact number of buttons on an early 19th Century Hungarian Hussar’s Sunday pantaloons. ‘I know that even while you are nodding and saying, “Really? Is that so? How fascinating,” many of you will be gradually edging towards the exit.’

But not me. While much of the general population may regard a wargamer as only a few rungs up from a nonce, I refuse to cast aspersions. Because I know they’ll boomerang. Like most men, not so deep down, I’m really a wargamer inside myself. When we are boys, wargames simulate manhood. When we are men manhood simulates wargames.

So I understand wargamers. I sympathise. I just don’t want to go there – in case I don’t come back. Fortunately, there’s no need to live next door to Pearson and take the risk because instead we have his funny, scourgingly honest and sometimes affecting autobiographical book about his childish-mannish obsession and the childish-mannish nature of men. All in all, it’s even more fun than ‘Escape From Colditz’.

Pearson is perhaps at his most hilarious when he’s being bitchy about other wargamers. Lampooning the acronym-happy wargamer who likes to show off their superior knowledge a little too much he writes: ‘�See amongst those AFVs, there’s a Panzer IV Auf HSd.kfz 161/2 Pz. Div 12 in pattern T4G75Y. But – heh-heh-heh – this is supposed to be Eastern Front, 1942 and [pause like Perry Mason about to catch a witness in a lie - T4G75y was Normandy, 1944!�.’ Of course, this is how all wargamers sound to non wargamers, but Pearson is painfully aware of this.

Anorak or no, Pearson is also capable of poignancy and perhaps even philosophy, admitting his own disillusion with his compulsion, perhaps with masculinity itself: ‘In my view, the aspect of wargaming that was most like real war was that it was never quite as thrilling as you hoped and imagined it would be’. Everything looked lovely, but once the fighting started it ‘all dissolved into a chaotic slogging match.’

If you think that Pearson’s sagacious observations the way of the sword are somewhat devalued by the fact he has spent his life playing at war but never actually taking part, then you should probably consider that quite a few wargamers are former or serving military chaps, including a squaddie chum of his called Tony who wrote from Iraq, ‘Keep sending news of your wargaming activities they are a welcome dose of sanity in all this craziness.’ He was killed by a bomb at a checkpoint shortly afterwards.

As the famous Colditz escapee Major Pat Reid notes in the pamphlet that came with the Colditz board-game, ‘There is no greater sport than the sport of escape.’

So, Harry, fancy a game? I’ll even play the Germans.

Make it best of three?
Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

If Viagra has turned the penis into a `punctureproof balloon’, does that mean it’s not funny any more, wonders Mark Simpson

[This review of 'A Mind of its Own: A cultural history of the penis' by David M. Friedman (Robert Hale), first appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 2002

INVESTIGATING THE PENIS can be an eyewatering business.

Examining the urethra of an impotent young man, using a long nickel-plated probe called a ‘No 25 Explorer’, a 19th-century American urologist appropriately named Dr Gross wrote: “As soon as the instrument entered the passage it occasioned tremor and retraction of the testes… the muscles of the lids, nose and mouth twitched convulsively”; finally the patient “lost consciousness, his face livid”.

Well, yes - I think, under the circumstances, most of us chaps would be a bit narked. Mind you this patient doesn’t appear to have been dettered from returning to the good Doctor Gross to have blasts of hot and cold air sent down his urethra, a hot rubber plug jammed into his rectum and - hurrah! - a trusty friend No 25 Explorer reinserted, this time after being dipped in some cheeky corrosive chemicals.

Nowadays there are places where you can go and get this kind of thing for free, though usually you have to dress as one of the more intense members of the Village People to get in. Fortunately for those of us who are a little less venturesome, David M. Friedman’s examination of the penis and the, ahem, pointed role it has played in Western culture (’A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis’; Free Press), is a rather more agreeable - and useful - journey than Doctor Gross’s.

And of course, we all have an interest in the penis, don’t we? Er, or at least, we all have a position on it… Um, what I mean to say is… Oh, bollocks.

Well, you can see the problem with writing a book about the membrum virile: uninvited knob gags have a way of puncturing your carefully maintained hymen of seriousness.

Herein lies the strange and powerfully “fascinating” (derived from the Latin for a phallic charm) dichotomy of the penis: you can’t get any more serious and you can’t get any funnier. It’s ticklish and terrifying, titillating and tremendous all in one lunch-box. Commendably, Mr Friedman maintains an erudite and respectable tone in his book, and while he is occasionally at pains to let us know he has a sense of humour, he avoids cheap laughs. Unlike this reviewer.

The phallictastic journey begins with the Greeks, who as we know went “commando” in their gymnasia. However, the Greeks, hot as they were for the masculine body, considered exposing the glans the pinnacle of bad taste and would “infibulate” their John Thomases, drawing the foreskin forwards over the glans, and then tying it closed with string or clasping it shut with a circular safety-pin-like instrument. (It is not known if this was also indicative of a shortage of toilet facilities in Greek gymnasia.)

The Greeks disliked large members, considering only dainty ones desirable: “hung like a hummingbird” was a compliment. Aristotle gave this Tinymeat tendency a scientific basis, explaining that a small penis is better for conception because semen cools down in a large one, becoming “not generative”. And perhaps less appetising. Semen was considered by the Greeks as a vehicle for the transfer of arete: manly virtues such as courage, strength, fairness and honesty which a boy needed to grow into a man. As you’ve probably worked out, this cunning theory meant that young Greek men had to spend a lot of time receiving ‘arete’ from older men.

Romans, on the other hand, were less versatile; they thought penetration always emasculating, and saw the penis as a sacrosanct weapon of the Roman State - glans is apparently also Latin for bullet. When launched by slings, Roman bullets often had lurid inscriptions written on them comparing their use to acts of rape (reminiscent of the slogan “Take this, faggots!”, daubed on American bombs due to be dropped on the Taliban).

Populating the legions was also a duty of a Roman: Augustus Caesar penalised bachelors and rewarded fatherhood. Romans celebrated a son’s first ejaculation as part of a state holiday, the Liberalia. You can imagine the proud father: “Nice one, our kid! No, don’t put them in the washer - yer mam’s gonna show them to the neighbours and then frame them!”

The Christian “peter” was different. In fact, next to the rampant Roman pagan prick it was difficult to see it at all. The Kingdom was God’s, not Caesar’s; true freedom was freedom from lust. God’s only son was born of a virgin and remained one, and admired those men who would become “eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven”. Some, such as Origen, took him literally and castrated themselves. In the fourth century, Augustine’s rather exciting idea of the “demon rod” as the organ of corruption became the dominant influence on Western Christianity and Western culture, and perhaps the reason why there are so many homo priests today. After all, if one penis is sinful, two penises and twice as much semen must mean double the sin/fun.

Or perhaps it was because Jesus was the only person allowed a penis. Jesus’s organ - because it was never used and was the product of a penisless birth - was as holy as all others were damned. His foreskin or prepuce became a holy relic, so holy that there were thousands of them. Hence the taste test, a medieval version of the Pepsi Challenge: chewing the shrivelled leather to determine whether it was wholly or partly human. Saint Agnes imagined she was swallowing the Holy Prepuce at Communion (with no gag reflex).

In a classic case of projection, Christians accused Jews of ritual cannibalism - in part because of the ancient practice where a child’s freshly circumcised, bleeding penis was placed briefly in the Rabbi’s mouth. Of course, the use of the somewhat phallic word “projection” is another example of the humungous impact of the Jewish dentist Sigmund Freud and his very phallic theories of the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety and penis envy.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t believe that a cigar is ever just a cigar that I feel Friedman’s book really only reaches full tumescence in his chapter on Freud, who as far as Western culture is concerned, discovered the penis as surely as Cook discovered Australia. Actually, the penis, or at least the phallus, is Freud’s. Any book about the cultural history of the penis is de facto a history of Freud. He’s the daddy. In an interesting passage, Friedman points out that Freud and Augustine, so far apart in other ways, meet on a crucial point: each recognised the psychic and historic potency of the penis. “For the Bishop of Hippo original sin is passed from one generation to the next by semen, and the punishment for Adam’s insult against God is erections we cannot control. For Freud the killing of the primal father and the sexual appropriation of the mother is passed on as the Oedipus complex, and the punishment is a civilisation which controls our erections.”

Oddly, one of the ways that modern civilisation has controlled our erections is to prescribe them to us. In his, he believes, literally final chapter on the history of the cultural signification of the penis, Friedman examines how Viagra has changed our relationship to it and the anxieties it produces, by turning it into a reliable thing: a “punctureproof balloon”. This is because, while Viagra is rather less fun than our old friend Explorer No 25, it does - unlike No.25 and almost all the other attempts to make the penis obedient - actually work.

The really bad news, I suspect, is that if the penis no longer has “a mind of its own” it might not be funny any more.

© Mark Simpson 2006

By Mark Simpson, Independent on Sunday (December 3, 2006)

We all know that Australians are better than us.  Better looking, better at sport, better at partying, better at sex, better at reality TV shows.  Mostly because they told us so.  Very loudly.  Little wonder recent Government figures showed half the population of the UK is giving up on Britain and moving to Australia – while the other half is trying to become Australian by watching Neighbours or Kath and Kim or by wearing shorts and flip flops and drinking lager until they hurl.  Even the UK’s version of Big Brother is clearly just a bunch of Brits pretending to be Australians living in a shared house in Willesden.  In this topsy-turvy, antipodean world, The Mother Country now wants nothing more than to be the Lucky Country.  Mate.

But not everyone is completely open about their Ozspirations.  Richard Beard’s ‘Manly Pursuits: beating the Australians’ (Yellow Jersey Press) is clearly about a nice, middle-class sporting Englishman’s quest to stop being English and become Australian – while pretending to research a book about why the Australians are so much better at sports than we are.  But he doesn’t say this.  Instead he says he wants find out why the fifty-third most populated country is fourth in the medals table at the Athens Olympics – and always spanking our much more populous country’s puny, pale not-very-sporting bottom with a big, firm, sun-tanned hand. 

So he travels to Manly, Australia (so named by Captain Arthur Philips because of the manliness of the naked aborigines on the shore shouting ‘Go home whingeing Poms!’) and takes on the locals at bowls, shooting, golf, swimming, surfing, running and… pub quiz trivia.  He mostly gets thrashed.  Even by pensioners and ladies.  In between thrashings, he waxes lyrical about the strength and beauty of the sporting Australian male, compares and contrasts Oz and Brit culture (they’re great; we’re rubbish), and dips into some colonial history (they’re plucky; we’re just guilty).  He of course, like most people, isn’t really interested in beating the Australians so much as joining them.  Even if he hasn’t quite admitted it to himself.

I have to say that while Mr Beard is a good, thoughtful writer, and his book is certainly more fun than a game of rugby against Australians on steroids, I didn’t find his shameless Oz-worship something to smile about.  But then, I’m very peculiar: you see, I don’t believe Australians are ‘better’ than us and certainly don’t want to become one.

Oh yes, I once shared Beard’s – and everyone else’s – enthusiasm for all things Australian.  Raised on ‘Skippy’, Rolf Harris and swimwear catalogues I too yearned for a country where the sun shone all day everyday, where everyone was your mate, kangaroos could talk and ‘Speedos’ was Australian for ‘Y-fronts’.   

And then I visited Australia.  And it quickly dawned on me that Australia, like Australian skin, is much better in long-shot.  Australia is much more Australian from a distance.  Close up, it’s just not really worth 24 hours of recirculated flu viruses, deep-vein thrombosis and ‘Love Actually’.  It’s been left out in the sun too long. 

There is though one thing that Australians are indubitably good at: selling Australia.  Perhaps this shouldn’t be so surprising since they run the world’s media.  Oh, and, sorry, all the best-looking Australians we’ve seen already – either in their visiting rugby teams, their TV soaps, the movies, or in the Escort section at the back of gay magazines.  Leaving behind those hit with the ugly didgeridoo to mind the Barbie. 

OK, so they are actually better at sport.  Beard comes up with some reasons why.  These are: the weather, booze (if you’re an Australian social club the easiest way to get a license is to organise ‘sporting activities’ – so playing sport in Oz is quite literally a way to get drunk), the weather again, all that meat in the diet, and the German Democratic Republic.  Apparently Australia slavishly copied the GDR’s hugely successful centralised approach to Olympic sports in the 1970s (and, I’d like to think, for much the same reason: both were tiny countries that everyone was leaving that desperately needed some good PR.)

Oh, and: homosexuality.  ‘Sport allows men to stare, in detail, without homosexuality alleged or feared,’ Beard explains.  ‘Especially in swimming, where in this all-male club bodies are straining, on their fronts, buttocks up, naked, except for tiny lycra Speedos.  It’s surely nothing but coincidence that everyone’s favourite words are “mate��? and “fuck��?.’  Now, I’ve always wanted to believe that Australian sportsmen and their Speedo-clad butts are gagging for it – or rather me – but now I can cite Beard, someone I presume is happily heterosexual, in case any Oz sportsman dares to disagree.

I though have a crazy hunch that, lycra fetishism aside, the main reason why Australians are better than us at sport is because they don’t hate themselves. 

Beard’s oh-so-English self-deprecation, amusing for a while, does end up sounding like self-hatred (though when he really lets rip, as he does at the cringeworthy Mike Atherton for example, he can rise to spiteful poetry).  On the perennial Republican campaigns to redesign, i.e. de-Brit, the Australian flag he offers: ‘My own idea is to shrink the Union Jack in the corner of the existing flag by half a centimetre each year.  No one will notice, and in twenty years it’ll be gone.’

This seems to be Beard’s and much of today’s English middle-class’ attitude towards their own identity.  They hope their embarrassing, awkward, damp, guilt-ridden Englishness will just wither away unnoticed and one day they’ll wake up something innocent, tanned, laid-back and athletic with a swimming pool and actually be able to barbecue meat without sending people to hospital. 

Sorry cobbers, it ain’t gonna happen.  Australians have got not use for self-hating whingeing poms and their whimsical self-mutilating sense of humour.  They’re too busy telling the world how great it is to be Australian.  And conquering it.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Decadence in the dole queue

by Mark Simpson

First appeared in the Independent on Sunday, May 5, 2002
Thanks largely to a new crowd-pleasing musical, the crowd-panicking Mr Bowery’s name is forever linked in the public mind with Taboo, the fin-de-siecle drugs, sex, and dressing-up club in Leicester Square he captained in the 1980s, the decade in which the 20th century and possibly Western civilisation actually ended. I, however, will always associate him with a club called The Asylum, Heaven’s “alternative” night, where I often used to glimpse - in teenage terror - his enormous, corseted frame gliding and fluttering past like a hand-sewn battleship, Copydex-spattered head glowing under the UV light, lime-green nylon ruffs bouncing, black- lipsticked mouth pouting.

You see, just like most of the people who now claim they were there every week, I never went to Taboo. This was partly because I knew I’d get turned away as I didn’t wear astro-turf or cellophane, and partly because I knew that there was nothing I’d want to pull there. But mostly because I was scared. Like the majority of the punters at The Asylum, I was doing my best to look alternative and individual, but not at the cost of looking unshaggable. Like Mark Lamarr and Mark Kermode, I tried, vainly, to say it with a quiff.

One of the fascinating, frightening things about Mr Bowery on the other hand - in addition to the fact that you could fit three or four Matt Lucases inside him - was that he quite clearly didn’t give a f***. He was going to make you look at him and he didn’t care if the looks he got were admiring or just appalled. It simply wasn’t your call - he would take your looks how he wanted. Unlike most of us who hung around that nightclub back then thinking ourselves the bee’s knees, he really was, but he didn’t seem to be interested in what kept the customer satisfied - something which made his famous week’s “residence” in a Tokyo department store window in 1988 even funnier.

The 1980s, you may remember, was the decade of the High Street when we were constantly being told by our prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, that there was “no alternative” - although, confusingly, every club had an “alternative” night. Nowadays of course “alternative” is just a TV/TS internet chatroom, and whatever post- punk aesthetic energies it represented have been assimilated by fashion and magazine culture - but back then it could stand for a sincere and reckless rejection of normality and mainstream values, or at least a kind of decadence on the dole.

Bowery was one of the last and the most gorgeously talented decadents.

Leigh Bowery was born in 1961 in a town in Australia called Sunshine. (No, really, it’s actually called that.) After leaving school he studied Fashion Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for a year. He then ran away to London where he became part of the Blitz scene and, inevitably, appeared in David Bowie’s kooky “Ashes to Ashes” video. Unlike many of the other “alternative” weirdos he appeared alongside, however, this was not the apogee of his career. He was the subject of his own 30- minute documentary in 1985, worked with Michael Clark at the height of his powers and posed for Lucian Freud. He also pursued a performance art career that should have drawn a line under performance art, famously “giving birth” with lashings of offal, or having an enema on stage and spraying lucky audience members with the results.

However, as these astonishing pictures taken by the photographer Fergus Green between 1988 and 1994, the year of Bowery’s early but perhaps timely death, testify, this Australian bugger was witty and playful in a way which you had forgotten could be so intense, sharp and alarming. Since the 1980s “wittiness” and “playfulness” have been employed to sell all sorts of banal and toothless things to us… including rubbish musicals about the 1980s. Bowery was more than performance art - some of his best work is better than much of contemporary art. He managed to combine conceptual art with a sense of humour (something that most “real” conceptual art, with more than one eye on the collector’s chequebook, cannot afford). His work was also truly and vividly ephemeral in a way that conceptual art these days increasingly goes out of its way merely to simulate. Oddly, for all its alleged unpopularity and difficulty, modern art is sitting behind the department store window - but without the irony.

Bowery employs surreal spotted patterns and bizarre sartorial geometry, such as lacey spherical ruffs where his head should be, and asymetrical clothing to break up the shape, form and outline of what we take to be human, rendering the familiar unfamiliar again - forcing you to realise how little you know the human body, and perhaps how little you want to. There’s a genuine queerness to these pictures, in the meaning of the word which obtained before the 1990s spoilt it. Bowery was an original “in-betweeny” - awkwardly positioning himself between fibre and skin, convention and improvisation, art and craft, male and female, humanity and commodity.

He even turns his own ample flesh into a kind of fabric, marshalling it with corsets and leggings that leave you wondering what’s surface and what’s structure, what’s inside and what’s out. As you might expect in a lad who liked dressing up, there’s more than a hint of a parody of monstrous femininity in his work: fake vaginas appear regularly. But with those pouting lips (on his face) it feels as if “sexiness” is being parodied more than femininity - his creations often resemble Dali doodling his ideal inflatable doll.

Looking, sometimes between your fingers, at these terrifyingly, exhilaratingly bold, ballsy images, in a culture which is now completely aestheticised and lip-glossed to death, you’re reminded with a jolt of when aestheticism was still a rebellious, satirical strategy. Gratifyingly, Bowery was never a “success”; he never launched his own label or got his own chat show. His death from Aids in 1994 saved him from that at least.

As these pictures testify, Leigh the Anti-Graham Norton prophesised, embodied and savagely deconstructed celebrity culture all in one outfit. In a particularly piquant photo, his head, styled charmingly as a turd, emerges blinking from a toilet seat around his neck.

Since his death, of course, celebrity culture has backed up and overflowed everywhere, forcing us to wade through shits much less talented than Mr Bowery.

 

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

‘Sorry, Bono, you’re too doubting’ 

Review of ‘Body Piercing Saved My Life’, Andrew Beaujon (Da Capo Press)

by Mark Simpson

Independent on Sunday, 27 August 2006

Americans are insane. The proof? Well, there’s a host of clinical evidence confirming this self-satisfied Old World view of New World nuttiness, from the invasion of Iraq to American Football (which looks much like the invasion of Iraq, but less conclusive and with more pom-poms).

However, the real clincher, the cast-iron proof for us that our colonial cousins are mad as soft cheese past its sell-by is the way so many of them can’t stop shouting about mysweetlordjesuschrist! and how He diedonthecrossformeee! And that’s just their President. Americans are at their bug-eyed barmiest when they are banging on about Gawd. After all, everyone knows that He is actually British and hence he doesn’t like to make a fuss.

But Americans at their fruitiest are also usually at their most entertaining. At least from a safe, smug distance. How many mediocre media careers on this side of the Atlantic have been made out of pointing at yonder Yankee craziness and smirking? Which reminds me, here’s another example: Christian rock music. It’s booming, apparently. Christian rock bands such as Mute Math and Resurrection Band are selling faster than hot cross buns and almost as fast as, well, sin - along with a whole “spiritual” parallel pop culture Universe of “extreme teen Bibles”, skateboarding ministries, Christian tattoo parlors, Christian coffee houses and nightclubs. Hey dude! Being Christian is, like, way cool! Look, man, my bitchin’ skateboard is made from the Cross of Jesu!

Perhaps because he’s an American living in America, Andrew Beaujon, author of Body Piercing Saved My Life (a piously punning slogan on T-shirts popular with Christian rock fans), isn’t smirking, though his wife seems worried.

“My wife is British,” writes Beaujon. “And it kind of freaks her out how vocal people here are about their faith, but I love it. There’s something so beautifully American about this country’s crazy-quilt religious landscape, where you can find a hundred different views of God within a five-minute walk.” Well, yes, “crazy-quilt” sounds about right. Though I wonder how fast he’s walking, and what kind of population density there is in his neighbourhood.

Beaujon of course doesn’t mean the word “crazy” in the way that you or I might. He may not, unlike the vast majority of his fellow Americans, believe in God, and I suspect he’s something of a liberal, but he seems, like our liberal RE teacher premier Tony Blair, to believe very much in religion. Richard Dawkins might never forgive me for saying this, but he does have a point. America may have given the world a very secular pop culture, but America itself is anything but secular. God may be dead in the Old World, or at least living in a retirement bungalow in Rottingdean, but in the New World he’s going skateboarding - and running the country.

The “craziness” of American religiosity, the “legion” of millenarian voices in America’s head that helped build that great country, and to make Americans as optimistic and generous, as spontaneous, as creative, as industrious and as weird and as finally unknowable as they are is not something that should be smirked at. Probably. Without it, American secular culture - like rock music - wouldn’t be what it is and we in Britain would still be buying skiffle records. So it’s perhaps not so strange that non-believer Beaujon, a writer at Spin magazine, would want to “celebrate” America’s religious mania in its musical form. Especially since, as he points out, no one else has written a book about Christian rock before - and, being economically realistic (the flip-side to American religious psychosis), believers are most likely to buy it.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t succeed in making it sound very appealing. I don’t know what it’s actually like to attend a Christian rock concert, or chat to Christian rock stars, or to be saved for that matter, but reading about it is perfectly hellish, when it isn’t so tedious that it makes you want to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards.

Beaujon’s “accentuate the positive” ethos may be very American, it may be shrewd, but it’s a literary and critical disaster of near-Biblical proportions. It’s only two thirds of the way through the book when writing about “worship music”, a praisethelord! genre of Christian music strictly for the already converted, (which, if I was the Lord, would incline me send a plague of toads and locusts by return heavenly post) that he allows himself to say something nasty - something worth reading:

“Worship tunes tend to evince an adolescent theology, one that just can’t get over how darn cool it is that Jesus sacrificed himself for the world,” he writes. “Our God is an awesome God.” “O Lord, you are glorious.” “How can it be? That you, a king, would die for me?”‘

The problem for Beaujon and for Christian rock is that that while, yes, quite a few of the people buying Christian rock in the US are not that Christian, and some Christian bands are not without critical merit, essentially all Christian rock (as opposed to rock made by Christians) is by definition a form of worship music, when it’s not screeching about how gay marriage is legalised bestiality and abortion is a holocaust. All monotheistic religious belief is slightly adolescent - my daddy is bigger than yours. Of course, rock music is itself very adolescent (praise God), but the point is that “proper” rock music doesn’t pretend to be grown up and respectable and going to heaven. Unless you’re U2.

Actually, as Beaujon points out, U2 are banned by Christian radio stations because of their “doubting” lyrics - and Bono’s criticism of grasping American tele-evangelists. Though they will play cover versions of their songs. And that, I’m afraid, despite Beaujon’s protests, is what Christian rock seems to be: a lame cover-version of the real thing. One that for all its piety, strangely lacks conviction.

In the end - or at the last trumpet - the problem is that Christian rock isn’t bonkers enough. It’s too wordly. It’s Christian consumerism: a holier-than-thou but essentially second-rate XstianTM lifestyle.

The son of Iraq War enthusiast, Vietnam hero and possible next Republican President John McCain is joining the US Marines.  He could find himself at the sharp end of US foreign policy and US firepower (the two becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart) - as the author of ‘One Bullet Away’ did.

‘One Bullet Away: the making of a Marine Officer’, Nathaniel Fick (Orion)

Reviewed by Mark Simpson
Originally published in the Independent on Sunday, 26 March 2006
Why do we blokes - and it is almost always blokes - read war books, catch war movies and play twitchy first-person Second World War shooter games like Call of Duty? Why do we crave “war porn”?

Because we still believe, deep down, in this post-masculine era of digitised, virtual life and professional/quasi-mercenary armies that “take care of business” for the rest of us, that one day we will be called up. That one day we will be roused from our comfortable cosseted techno-textured vanilla-flavoured semi-slumber and tested. And we wonder whether we will be able to find the necessary selflessness, courage, virtue, toughness, and, well, murderousness.

Most of all, we worry that they’ll find out we’re sorry sacks of shit.

And, let’s face it, we’re all sorry sacks of shit compared to… blond, square-jawed, Nathaniel Fick, former elite USMC officer, Afghan and Iraq war vet, Classics scholar, talented writer (damn him) and all-round gent. Fick is one of that strange minority of men who isn’t interested in what it’s like to go to war. He’s one of those oddities: someone who actually goes to war. Voluntarily. So, during a particularly hellish, sleepless, hungry moment in Basic Training he spies from a helicopter commuters on the freeway headed to work, rested, showered, well-fed, calm and finds himself not wishing to change places with them for a minute. Moreover, unlike, say Anthony Swafford, the slightly neurotic author of Jarhead (about the first Gulf War) he’s no passive grunt. He’s a man who makes things happen, who takes decisions, who looks after his men and, even argues with superior officers. Not surprisingly, he comes across as inspiring but also rather peculiar.

His memoir ‘One Bullet Away’ provides the self-loathing civilian with almost everything he is looking for. We get the officer version of USMC boot camp, which turns out to be much the same as the grunt version, except even more gruelling, and starring the same homo-sado DI we know and love: ‘”What’s in here?” He grabbed my toiletry bag. “Drugs? Booze? Maybe a tube of K-Y jelly and a big cucumber?”‘

We get action, and rather more of it than Swafford was able to offer: with almost Hollywood-style scripting, Fick passes the terrifying training programme in time for 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. A swift promotion follows a successful tour of duty, and he joins the elite Recon Battalion, the Marines of the Marines, and the vanguard of the Coalition forces invading Iraq; he describes the action and his own experience of it in economical, fluid, convincing and occasionally lethal prose. Though not always “unflinching”: for example, when the firing started, sitting in his unprotected Humvee, he would will his limbs to retract into his body armour (but, rest reassured: this was only because he didn’t like to be stuck in a vehicle during combat and preferred to feel the ground beneath his feet).

We also get the “money shot” of war porn: and not just gruesome descriptions of exploding heads (though we do get some of that), but lashings of manly love in the form of camaraderie: Fick was devoted to the Spartan Band that is the USMC, is unafraid to quote Classical Greek poetry and Rudyard Kipling, and takes an almost maternal interest in his men. Fick even confronts his superior officers when they appear to him to be taking reckless risks with his chaps. He is rightfully proud of the fact that he succeeded in returning from Iraq without having lost a single man from his platoon.

Fick, who is clearly a thoughtful and sensitive man - as well as a well-oiled killing machine - eventually leaves the Corps because he doesn’t feel capable of regarding the lives of his men as expendable. If this is “war porn”, it is definitely the better kind.

So what’s a civvie pussy to complain of? Well, Fick may question the policies of his superior officers, but not of his Commander in Chief - and blocks any discussion of whether it was a “just” war or not with a riposte that seems to have come from Platoon: “We fought for each other.”

Then again, Fick joined the Marines because he wanted to fight. Having been called upon to fight for his country, it’s not so surprising that he wasn’t keen to question the cause, especially in the dusty wake of 9/11. No, the main reservation I have - my armchair whinge - is that I don’t feel that either Afghanistan or Iraq tested Fick enough.

Although Fick sees much more action than Swafford, and is fired upon regularly, he and his men always have absurdly superior firepower to the enemy, who most of the time run away or surrender, or can’t aim their weapons. And when they don’t run away, Fick can usually call in the Cobra gunships or F-16s or an artillery barrage and wipe them out in seconds. Which he does, frequently. The disparity in firepower is greater than that between Mussolini’s troops and the Abyssinians - or the stormtroopers and the giant bugs in Starship Troopers. I don’t mean to diminish the training, skill, bravery or all-round awesomeness of Fick and his men, without which the technology would be worthless, nor do I wish any more of them dead or wounded, but Afghanistan and Iraq were not heroic wars. They may or may not have been necessary, and are tests that I would have failed miserably, but they would have sickened the Spartans.

I suspect Fick feels uneasy too, but in a way that he has yet to accept. After a battle, surveying the piles of lightly-armed enemy corpses shredded by American weaponry, one “stapled to a tree trunk by .50 caliber machine gun rounds”, another filled with “thousands of tiny metal slivers” from a Cobra’s flechette rocket, Fick reflects: “I found no joy in looking at the men we’d killed, no satisfaction… But I wasn’t disturbed either. I fell back on an almost clinical detachment. The men were adults who chose to be here. I was an adult who chose to be here. They shot at us and missed. We shot at them and didn’t miss. The fight was fair.”

Much as I admire Fick and his book, and much as I consider myself unworthy to polish his boots with my tea-towel, I find it difficult to believe any of these statements about his feelings - or the nature of the fight that provoked them.

 

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

Berlin Bromley, Bertie Marshall (SAF Publishing)

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 23/07/06)

 

“Oh, Bertie, when are you going to write your memoirs?� asks punk academic Jon Savage at a chance meeting with the author in Berlin. He replies: “Oh, I don’t know, Jon… what would I write, a teenage boy lost in suburbia, prostitution and drugs?�

This, you’ll be glad to hear, is exactly what we get, in this “post-glam, pre-punk version of The Naked Civil Servant�. This memoir consists of the day-dreamy reminiscences of a pathologically, fabulously narcissistic 15 year-old-boy, perpetually trapped inside 1976 and his own lip-glossed, suburbohemian delusions. He re-christened himself Berlin after reading too much Isherwood and tried to re-create the Weimar Republic in Bromley, Kent - and came perilously close to succeeding.

This is the gloriously pointless autobiography of a boy who never really did anything but take Mandrax, wear lots of make-up and turn tricks. A boy who was in at the birth of punk, but somehow managed to absent himself when it threatened to get too real. A boy who should have been the leaderene of the New Romantics, a movement he personally prefigured, but who told Steve Strange “it’s not gonna happen,� and went back to Bromley just before it spectacularly did, to take some more Mandrax and daydream his life away (with the odd side-trip to hardcore Earls Court gay cruise bars).

Next to Bertie Marshall’s passivity, Quentin “if you like…� Crisp looks like a particularly perky contestant in The Apprentice. Still, it’s a bonus that he spends as much attention on his writing as he once did on his eyeliner. No one is more aware of his gloriously wasted life than Marshall. His honesty is as breathtaking as Marshall’s profile used to be. Even if you find yourself wondering whether honesty and truth aren’t always quite the same thing (Marshall is also a novelist), you’re left with a clear sense that a life spent as a passive observer, even of your own life, can make for powerful prose.

Essentially, Berlin has one main claim to fame. You might not have heard of him, but you’ve probably heard of that party, held at his mum’s semi-detached in Bromley while she was away. It was attended by his friend Siouxsie Sioux in plastic Ribena apron and fishnets (and nothing else), taking welts out of the artex ceiling with her cat-o-nine-tails, the rest of the Bromley Contingent mouching around, and the Sex Pistols shagging everywhere (save Johnny Rotten, who just snorted speed and grinned a lot).

The climax of the party, and possibly of Marshall’s life, is where the next door neighbour, a little old lady called Mrs Hall, leans on the doorbell to complain about the music. Marshall hides behind SS’s fishnets and plastic apron strings while she answers the door and spits: “Oh, fuck off.�

Trouble ensues when Mrs Hall, “trembling with fear and rage, eyes filling up behind her Fifties fly-away glasses,� calls Sioux a “little slut�.

“How dare you call me a slut, you f****** old c***!� snaps Sioux. “[She leant forward and gave the old bag an almighty slap across the face, knocking her glasses into the nearby privet hedge.�

The most famous moment in Marshall’s life happens at the age of 15, on page 58. And he’s observing it from behind SS’s fishnets.

Personally, I wouldn’t have Berlin, or Bromley, any other way.

 
Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

Review of ‘Britain’s New Power Elites’, Hywel Williams (Constable, £12.99)

by Mark Simpson

Appeared in Independent on Sunday, 14 May 2006

‘Among the most significant achievements of the modern British elite,” argues Hywel Williams, limbering up in the early pages of his polemic against Britain’s rulers in the form of an incompetent executive class, a meaningless political class and a degraded professional class, “is the promulgation of the essentially ideological idea that Britain is an anti-ideological place. Criticism of its fundamental features can therefore be dismissed as the ravings of the marginalised - those whose temperaments fail to show the kind of finesse required in order to understand Britain and the British - and who need not therefore be admitted into the contest and the debate.”

Mr Williams, I hope, will take it as a compliment that I found his temperament singularly failing in finesse. I don’t know whether the author of the classic text of the 1990s implosion of Toryism, Guilty Men: Conservative Decline and Fall, 1992-1997, world historian, and contributor to the Guardian’s Op-Ed pages is a marginal figure or not, but I certainly enjoyed his ravings.

Less of a book than a steel-toe-capped kicking of the great and the good, Britain’s Power Elites is an invigorating volume of spleen and informed invective of the kind that is in short supply in this enervated, “ironic” age. A donnish punk, Williams argues that the problem with our contemporary political culture, the biggest symptom of its deathly monopolisation by careerists, capitalists and creeps, is precisely its deadening politeness. The fact that Williams is so learned only makes his aphoristic assault all the more enjoyable.

On politics: “… a good profession for people who are mentally agile, intellectually incurious and physically robust. The political elites’ conformist agreement that it is the drama of personal jealousy which explains the very foundation of politics is a conventional judgment which suits all those personal traits.”

On lobby correspondents: “Worker bees, if fed on royal jelly, may become queen bees, and so the point of this journalistic class is not so much to expose as to honour the greater power it observes and tries to decipher.”

On bankers: “The perverse, but almost universally accepted, practice within elite banking circles sanctifies the position of those who are in power while also protecting them from those market shocks that they are otherwise so eager to elevate as the justification for capitalism.”

Even when his malicious metaphors over-reach themselves it’s still enjoyable, in a scatological fashion: “If Churchill finally made it to No 10 at 65, then there’s always hope for the rest who, all greased-up, can slide their way up and down the back-passages of elite ambition while waiting for recognition to wind its way towards them.”

Maybe it’s his refusal to hide his braininess and reading, maybe it’s his chippiness, but I suspect that Williams is one of that dying breed, a grammar-school boy: “The dominant tone of the new legal elite is that of a clever philistinism,” he complains, “which is not that different from the dominant tone of British broadcasting.”
He contrasts previous generations of grammar-school elites such as Roy Jenkins, Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, and Edward Heath who openly displayed their intellectual prowess, their meritocratic certainty, with modern power elites “who have to play the game of ostentatious anti-elitism in order to maintain, covertly, their elite power”. Discretion, like talking about democracy all the time (”press your red buttons now!”) but making sure that it never happens, is a very British way of doing business.

Williams is particularly scathing about the egghead collaborators: “What typifies the British intellectual class… is its successful absorption within the power elites to a point at which its thoughts and stances are reified and appear to be simply the neutral observation of questions of fact.”

Conservative intellectuals come in for a special drubbing: “All have failed to observe, or chosen not to see, how powerful is the thrust of monopoly in capital’s command of the world, and how the urge to create larger and larger units is the true lifeblood of its existence and its motive for being.” Well, of course. That would be the ultimately ideological and therefore ultimately un-British impoliteness. Dear boy, it would be practically Marxist!

Although he hardly mentions the German curmudgeon, Williams’ central thesis is rather Marxoid. He identifies the problem with our eviscerated political and professional culture as being caused by the total dominance of international finance capital in the form of The City. Capital has swallowed everything, but, he argues, this is hardly acknowledged. In the 1980s, the money men conducted a quiet and stunningly successful coup d’etat, moving smartly into the power vacuum created by the collapse of ideological politics and faith in the State. This revolution was so successful that most aren’t aware of it; those that are, the political, professional and legal elites, are largely at their beck and call - and in their pay. The financial elites are out of control and in control. There are no other elites to stand in their way because all other institutions are now effectively their servants. The old political elites are “front of house” flunkeys, while the money men themselves, with their “offshore” interests and allegiances, get on with the global business of making billions.

It’s why an actor and failed rock star is our Prime Minister. It’s why the first thing the first Labour Chancellor in 18 years did was abandon his main economic lever, the setting of interest rates, to the Bank of England, when he started work in 1997. It’s also why Labour ministers marry dodgy international financiers; after all, this is no more nor less than what New Labour has done.

This, above all, is the reason for the stultification of British politics which so enrages Williams. It is polite, mediocre and tedious because it doesn’t matter. “Britain has allowed its power elites to effect a transformation which amounts to the degradation of an entire country,” he explains; a statement that should shock people into recognition, but which will probably be interpreted merely as proof of his shocking faux pas.
Copyright Mark Simpson 2006