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In that autobiography you may possibly have noticed former British PM Tony Blair is currently touting, the one called ‘A Journey’ (a title that masterfully captures the sublimely faux modesty of its subject), Blair compares himself to Princess Di.

‘“We were both, in our own way, manipulators” — good at grasping the feelings of others and instinctively playing on them.’

The papers of course have seized on the People’s Premier’s candidness, making headlines out of it.  That and his observation (conveyed in a kind of morse prose) that Gordon Brown had: “Political calculation, yes. Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero.”  And also his claim that he knew Gord’s premiership would likely be ‘a disaster.’

I agree with Tony.  Or rather, Tony agrees with moi.  Back in 2006, when Brown’s bizarre (and now conveniently forgotten) popularity with the media was rampant, just before his coronation as Labour Leader, I predicted, with Cassandrine accuracy, that Brown would be a disastrous leader of the Labour Party and that he had in fact already lost the next General Election.  I also compared Brown and Blair to Charles and Di, calling Brown an ‘operator’ and Blair a ‘great manipulator’.

Of course, it didn’t really take much insight to see all that coming, even if most of the media couldn’t at the time.  But in the piece I talked about how Blair’s ‘lying’ was what made him a much more successful, much more popular politician than Brown – who was very, very bad at it.  Which is not to say that Brown was a much more honest man – just that he wouldn’t and couldn’t perform for us.

‘Admitting he lied is not a mistake Blair is likely to ever make. Blair’s special talent, the thing that puts him ahead of most other politicians, certainly in British political history, is that he can convince himself his lies are literally the god’s honest truth, at least for as long as he’s telling us them. And – truth be told – in his mind, he never actually ‘lies’ to us at all. He’s an actor – an actor of the Stanlislavsky school: the emotion he shows us is ‘true’, it’s just usually attached to something that is not. This is why he’s such a great performer and politician – we appreciate and are flattered by the energy and the psychosis he puts into his performances. He is a great manipulator…’.

‘Brown on the other hand is a great operator. And operators, unlike manipulators, are painful to watch. They resent having to manipulate us and we resent having to watch them resenting having to manipulate us. Tony is Princess Di to Brown’s Prince Charles. Brown, who tells us he is ‘quite private’ and who prefers ‘substance over celebrity’ as if these were reasons why we should be interested in him, clearly wants power but he doesn’t really want to become the thing that power is in this mediated day and age: an actor. He won’t be forgiven for that by the electorate/audience.’

Brown’s desperate agreement to appear in those Election X Factor shows – in which David Cameron and Nick Clegg, both thespian heirs to Blair, shone with their ‘look, guys’ sincere insincerity – only threw his boring manse inflexibility into even more painful relief.  The electorate treated him with Cowellian disdain (the most damning thing of all was that those listening on the radio thought Brown had won the debates).

And even in the political afterlife the emotional gulf between Brown and Blair persists.  Blair of course is passionately hated, where Brown is merely despised. Or worse, pitied.

‘Doesn’t he look OLD?’ we spit, when Blair pops up in the papers or on telly, usually to tell us with those raised eyebrows how he doesn’t regret anything and didn’t fib about anything either, honestly guys.  ‘Hasn’t he aged BADLY?’ we gloat, pretending to be beyond his charms now.  But actually sounding just like a bitter ex trying to convince themselves that their former amore fell apart after the affair ended after he turned out to be sleeping with the au pair.

Truth is, Blair still has that Diana star quality – partly because he is still a great manipulator, but mostly because it’s so difficult to work out which side of the reason/unreason line he’s on these days.  You can’t but watch with rapt attention, trying to divine the content of his (Catholic) soul.

By Mark Simpson

So, pretty, svelte – and somewhat swish – David Milliband and his million-dollar smile, who was gushingly described by Hillary Clinton as ‘attractive’ and ‘vibrant’, is the front-runner in the Labour leadership contest to replace the big clunking grimace of Gordon Brown with something more electable.

It seems highly likely that soon all three main political parties in the UK will soon be led by adorable 40-somethings who look like moisturised, pampered 30-somethings who never miss the gym – and whose suits are cut to advertise their shape rather than disguise it. Metrosexual politicians rule. Literally. The ‘new politics’ is looking increasingly like a kind of ‘metro-politics’, in which male politicians have to seduce the electorate with their looks and sensitivity in order to have any chance of ugly, hard power.

Despite famously using a poster of Cameron next to an Audi Quattro and warning ‘Don’t let him take you back to the 1980s’, it was Gordon Brown who looked like the throwback. Gene Hunt without the swagger, or the nostalgia. And more creases. (If Cameron looks like anyone from the Eighties, it’s definitely not Gene Hunt or mannish Mrs T – it’s Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley at his most preening.) Even without the financial meltdown Brown was never going to win those brightly-lit TV debates on our Widescreen HDTVs. Not because of anything he said of course, but because he looked like death on toast. Dry toast.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg by contrast are politicians with prime-time skin who have gone one step further and entered into a political metro-marriage. A straight civil partnership which proclaims to the world: this is a progressive affair where there is no ‘husband’ and no ‘wife’: we’re equals who are sensitive to each other’s needs. Plus we both look really fetching in our matching blue made-to-measure.

Nor is metro-politics just a British phenomenon. The most powerful man on the globe Barack ‘smokin hot’ Obama is a President several trouser sizes smaller than most American men his age who makes the Free World wait every day on his morning workout. Even the great white male hope of his Republican Party ‘girly man’ hating enemies is a former Cosmo centrefold. In keeping with the dictums of metro-politics, President Obama is something of his own First Lady in front of the camera, always knowing exactly where the most flattering camera angles are – famously winning the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton because he was much prettier than her, and sending a ‘thrill’ up the leg of straight male commentators.

Which brings us onto an apparently paradoxical aspect of the ‘progressiveness’ of the metro-politicians admiring their reflection in the polls. Whilst they may be more appealing to many women voters than more traditional, plainer politicians, and are often keen to present themselves as ‘post-feminist’, they tend to regard themselves as so sensitive and lovely that they don’t actually need women in their cabinets. Unless they’re a bit camp like Theresa May. Or a bit scary like Hillary Clinton.

Although backbencher Diane Abbot has thrown her bonnet into the ring in the Labour leadership contest, she isn’t regarded as a serious contender – in part because she’s considered ‘too abrasive’. Instead the choice seems to be between David Milliband’s full-wattage metrosexuality and his brother’s Ed’s less dazzling eco-friendly variety.

The smart and nicely turned out money is on David. But either way, Her Majesty’s Opposition will very likely soon be led – like Her Majesty’s Government – by two surprisingly young-looking straight men who openly profess their love and admiration for one another.

A few months back I wrote a piece for The London Times arguing that straight couples should be allowed to have civil partnerships. Now that I’ve seen the UK’s first straight civil partnership ceremony in the Rose Garden of Number 10 Downing Street I’m not so sure.

In the romantic Spring sunshine the groom and the groom declared their ‘progressive partnership’ to the world and explained why they had decided to tie the knot with a full coalition – the first since the Second World War – instead of just having a more casual, living-together ‘confidence and supply’ shag-on-demand thing. “We both looked at each other and thought that it was uninspiring,‘’ said Dave Cameron, while Nick Clegg nodded and smiled serenely.  Something he will probably have to get used to doing a lot of.

Labour supremo Lord Mandelson’s famous warning, ‘Vote for Nick Clegg and you’ll wake up with David Cameron’, proved only half true. He should have told us: ‘Vote for Clegg and you’ll wake up with Cameron and Clegg giving it to you both ends, no lube and definitely no poppers’. Two super posh, privileged trust-fund kids preaching from lecterns about the sacrifices the rest of us are going to have to make while they shack up in Downing Street every so kindly providing us with the ‘strong and stable government’ that they were so clearly born to deliver.

Although clips from the Leader’s Debates are being played now to contrast the bitter antipathy of the Lib Dem leader and the Tory leader just a week or so ago with their smug love-in now, it was very apparent back then, even as they rowed, that these two had much more in common with one another than with 99% of their audience.  It was less X Factor than Blind Date.

Some say that Cameron hasn’t any real interest in Clegg and is just using his, er, mandate, but I think that’s a little unfair. Cameron is very interested indeed in Clegg and will hug and hold him closer than his favourite pajama case. After all, Clegg was fashioned largely as a Lib Dem knock-off of Cameron (and Cameron of course was a Tory knock-off of Labour posh boy Tony Blair). Cameron really does love Clegg – because it’s like looking in the mirror.  And because Clegg is the Tory wet that Cameron wants you to mistake him for.

They make a lovely, cloney-sloaney celeb couple, CleggCam, and they’re now living at the top address in the country.  Their mothers must be so proud.  But my cynical eye can’t help but alight on certain details that don’t augur quite so well for their ‘progressive partnership’. Such as the scary way that Cameron sprang out of No.10 to greet Clegg this morning like a smiley but very hungry trapdoor spider, quickly dragging Clegg into the bowels of Downing Street.

Yes, it was cute the way that they both tried to place their hand on each other’s back, to broadcast to the world they were both ‘versatile’ – but as the big, heavy door to No.10 began to close, it was Cameron’s hand ever-so gallantly, but ever-so firmly in the small of Clegg’s back, pushing him forwards into their ‘new politics’ and probably, after the door slammed shut, over.

Thanks to my pal Mark Downie for the civil partnership analogy

By Mark Simpson

So the Scots Nationalist Party has failed in its court action to force the BBC to include their leader Alex Salmond in the final TV leaders’ debate. Everyone south of the border in politics and the media seems to be very much agreed that this was the ‘right’ outcome. Except for this Englishman. Not least because of the breath-taking, downright imperious hypocrisy of the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg.

Clegg couldn’t wait for the court decision. He claimed a few days ago that Salmond was “stamping his foot on the sidelines in fury that he’s not on this debate programme. The broadcasters have arrived at the particularly reasonable position that the debates should be held by the three people fighting this campaign up and down the UK.”’

A ‘particularly reasonable decision’ because the chief beneficiary was Nick Clegg – someone who, if you remember, was mostly stamping his foot on the sidelines until he appeared on the TV debate himself a few weeks ago, upstaging the other two party leaders and provoking a wave of Cleggmania by calling for an end to the ‘old politics’. Perhaps he’s worried that if Salmond is permitted to appear beside him he might be upstaged by the new boy the way he did Brown and Cameron.

Especially since Salmond has a cheeky, Shrek-like, twinkly-eyed man-of-the-people quality that would probably play very well next to Cameron and Clegg’s silver spooning and Brown’s apparatchik chic. The last thing that Clegg wants is to be out-Clegged.

Of course, none of the three main Westminster parties – or the BBC – want to share the limelight with Salmond on their political X Factor show. David McLetchie, head of the Scottish Tories’ election campaign was equally dismissive of Salmond’s bid, invoking the ‘British’ thing: “It’s British general election. Alex Salmond isn’t a candidate in this British election and he doesn’t want to be prime minister. In fact, he wants to destroy the UK.’

In other words: we don’t want him on the show because he won’t play by our rules. But contrary to how it has been portrayed in the media, this isn’t an American Presidential Candidate debate – this is a party leader’s debate. And Salmond is the leader of a party that has several MPs in Westminster – and is running Scotland.

What these arguments overlook – deliberately – is that post-devolution, and with a party devoted to total independence for Scotland in power at Holyrood, ‘Britain’ as a political project has largely already ceased to exist. This is the really ‘old politics’ that the Palace of Westminster doesn’t want to give up. The Union and the imperial identity it engendered is pretty much a dead letter. We’re just waiting for the decree nisi.  Which admittedly has probably been delayed in the post by the recession – but rest assured a Tory Government in Westminster would certainly help focus Scottish minds on their future again.

North of the border almost no one with a Scottish accent is ‘British’, while south of the border it’s usually a way of not talking about the English – or letting them have their own Parliament, or National holiday. Or in the case of the TV election debates, ‘British’ means two slick, super-posh Englishmen in nice suits laying into the plain Scots guy in a bad one. Which is no doubt part of the reason why Salmond wants to muscle in.

Allowing Salmond on the show would be an acknowledgement of how out of touch the ‘old politics’ really is. It would break the spell of ‘let’s pretend she’s just having a kip’ that surrounds the demise of Britannia. Neither Clegg, nor Cameron nor Brown, nor the British Broadcasting Corporation, want to do that because it would severely puncture their own imperial and imperious self-importance.

Now that it’s clear that the TV election debates effectively are the election campaign, let’s have the SNP in one of them next time – and why not Plaid Cymru, UKIP and, if they win any seats, the English Democrats?  Let’s take an honest look at the crazy-paved, devolved nature of post-imperial 21st Century UK politics. After all, 90 minutes is a very long time to spend watching two Blair impersonators and an automaton audition for the part of Emperor With No Clothes.  Especially without a camp Irish compère to lighten the mood.  Bring on, I say, the political version of Britain’s Got Talent.

Clegg talks a lot about an end to the old politics, the urgency of the need for Proportional Representation and how coalitions are not something to be afraid of, but instead welcomed: politics as complicated, grown-up stuff.   But of course coalition government and PR mean taking ‘fringe’ parties that don’t happen to be the Lib Dems a little more seriously.  It means an end not just to two party politics but also and end to three party politics.  And the fond notion that Westminster is still the centre of the world.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2010

Tony Blair’s Jesus Christ Sings Edith Piaf performance yesterday at The Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, giving testimony at the Chilcot enquiry into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War, disappointed a lot of people who hoped he would get nailed, or at least express a few regrets.

I’m not one of them.  Now, I enjoy a good scourging as much as the next man, especially in the wake of a war that has cost so many lives, but it seems to me that the expectations of the media and public played into Blair’s (stigmata) hands.  Tone the Catholic convert barrister excels at crucifixions and turned in a performance Mel Gibson would envy yesterday, hanging from the cross of his ‘belief’ that ‘removing Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do’.  For all the spears in his side, nothing was made to stick.  He won’t need to rise on the third day because unlike Our Lord Jesus Christ he didn’t die — instead he thrived.

Besides, the thing that many if not most people in the UK long to pin on him – personal and complete responsibility for our involvement in a disastrous US war – isn’t something that can be really pinned on any one British politician, however annoying his grin.  It has to be pinned on history.  The history of the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

Blair is more than happy to play the self-aggrandising role he’s been allotted by public opinion and the public is only further infuriated by the evidence of this.  Blair of course interprets his role not as The Man Who Invaded Iraq Illegally And Has Blood on His Hands, but as The International Statesman Burdened by Heavy Responsibilities, Special Knowledge and Big Decisions Reluctantly Made to Guarantee Our and An Ungrateful World’s Safety.  But it’s essentially the same role: A bigger one than he deserves.  Blair is a much more pitiful figure than most of his enemies are willing to admit.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be offering Blair a vinegar-soaked sponge, but scapegoating him as all sides of the political spectrum want to do – He lied to us!  He was sycophantic to Bush!  A poodle!  A narcissist! – obscures the larger, much more painful issue: that the UK invaded Iraq not because of weapons of mass destruction.  Nor Al Qaeda.  Nor Saddam’s tyranny.  Nor Zionism.  Nor even for oil.  And certainly not because Tony Blair is a weak man or a strong man.  No, in the final analysis there was only one reason why we invaded Iraq. Because the US wanted us to.

Jump is what military satellites of imperial powers do when their master tells them to, and it’s very difficult to imagine that any other British Prime Minister since 1940, with the possible exception of Harold Wilson (and look what happened to him – you can be sure that Blair did) could have said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to Uncle Sam’s kind invitation, especially after it had been attacked on 9-11 (the fact that Saddam had nothing to do with that attack is irrelevant — or at least it was for America’s need for vengeance).  The Tories certainly wouldn’t have done, and their attempts now to wriggle out of their enthusiastic support for the war –without which Blair would not have won his Commons war vote – by bleating about being ‘misled’ by Blair is just shameless opportunism.

The former premier that Blair most calls to mind is Anthony Eden, who was forced out of office after the disaster of Suez in 1956.  Eden bigged up Nasser as a ‘monster’ threatening his own people and The World – and also famously lied to Parliament to justify  invasion, but this isn’t why he was shamed and shunned, even more so than Blair.  By fatally misjudging America’s wishes Eden had rubbed the UK’s nose in its post-war subject status.  Suez was actually a much more ‘justifiable’ war from the point of view of British interests than Iraq –  the canal was British and French owned and the route to (what was left of) the Empire.

But the Americans were not amused: they were competing with the USSR at the time for anti-colonial cred and told us to bog off home. And we did, pronto.  Eden was so reviled at home not for lying as many claimed, or even for losing, but because he succeeded in making it embarrassingly clear to everyone, most especially the French, that the UK no longer had a sovereign foreign policy.  He shamed us in the world’s eyes.  In our own eyes.

Likewise with Blair.  Those loud complaints about Blair’s ‘sycophancy’ to George Bush over Iraq – well, really it’s mostly about how we don’t like to be reminded of our national sycophancy towards US interests, unavoidable as it may very well be.  Sometimes its that very unavoidability that makes it so painful.

Blair, ever the actor, decided to make a virtue of what was essentially a political necessity.  Being something of a devotee of the Method School, he probably even succeeded in convincing himself of that necessity: and yes, doing so meant that, like Thatcher before him the US gave him a global stage to preen upon.  But this is what the US has done to the UK since the Second World War.  As a military satellite of the US – or giant American aircraft carrier, as the great American anti-imperialist Gore Vidal puts it – we’ve been bigged up by US power as a way of further projecting that power around the world.  Like, say, Austria-Hungary was by Germany in the early Twentieth Century, but with slightly less interesting headgear.  As a result we have remained far too big for our post-Imperial, post-industrial, post-everything breeches.  Though we of course prefer to term it: ‘punching above our weight’.  As if punching above your weight was something clever.  Even when you’re not teetering as we now are on the verge of bankruptcy.

In hindsight, to save our sensibilities Blair should have made it look like the UK wasn’t so easy.  He should have made Bush wine and dine us more – and put up more of a virtuous struggle before giving Bush everything he wanted and was going to get anyway.  Instead Tone seems to have gone the whole way on the first date.  We feel cheap instead of ‘special’.

True, the way Blair and his minions set about terrorising us and his own party with fairy stories of WMDs was very naughty indeed, but as he now cheerfully admits, if it hadn’t been WMDs it would have been something else.  After all, we elect politicians to lie to us.  And did anyone, apart from David Aaronovitch, really believe any of it?  Something else that shouldn’t be forgotten: Blair would probably still be in power and only hated by a small ‘bitter’ minority of the British public if the US occupation of Iraq hadn’t gone so spectacularly awry – he was remember, like his master Bush, feted by the press and much of the public in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. They only fell out of favour when they seemed like losers rather than winners.

Nailing Blair to the cross of Iraq now won’t change what happened, or even stop something like it happening again.  In fact, by obscuring the real nature of our ‘special relationship’ with the US and instead blaming one man’s weakness and mendacity, it may make it easier for it to happen again.

And it is already happening again. In a war that threatens to make Iraq look like a picnic.  Despite all the discussion and debate in the UK media about why we’re still in Afghanistan after eight years, what we hope to achieve, and what tactics should be employed, everyone in the media knows – but doesn’t say – there is only one reason why we’re in Afghanistan.  Because the Americans are. Everything else is hot air.  Or, in the case of Brown’s claims that the war in Afghanistan has to be fought to stop terrorist attacks in London: another 45 Minute WMD lie that no one believes.  After the UK distinguished itself in the 7/7 London bus and tube bombings as being the only country in the world that has succeeded in raising, housing and educating its own suicide bombers, everyone knows that the real problem the UK faces with radical Islamism is homegrown.

Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the Iraq Invasion and now Prime Minister in large part because of Blair’s unpopularity over Iraq, is very fortunate to have US imperial interests represented these days by someone much more appealing and persuasive than George W Bush.  Someone who gets handed plaudits and Nobel Peace Prizes just for being elected.  But however nice his smile is, the Emperor is the Emperor and our troops must still die for him.  Why are we sending even more troops to Afghanistan?  To liberate women, build power plants, and stop people being blown up on London buses?  No.  They’re going because Barack ‘I-didn’t-vote-for-that-war!’ Obama says so.

Blair should be held to account for his actions of course, but we shouldn’t fall for his self-aggrandising view of himself and history.  Even if it takes our mind off the rather vulgar details of the ‘special relationship’ and how embarrassingly, vanishingly small our influence is over our transatlantic boss.

© Mark Simpson 2010

By Mark Simpson

Claiming the moral high ground is, in my view, the lowest form of politics. No doubt this means that, like the voters of Pennsylvania, I don’t read The New York Times enough.

We’re really missing out. Yesterday’s haughty editorial in the wake of Senator Clinton’s convincing victory in that key state, despite having the Democratic grandees and the media on her back, and despite being outspent by Obama nearly 3-1, was headlined: ‘The low road to victory’. Congratulations on your win, Hillary!

The editorial, which managed the impressive feat of sounding both screeching and condescending at the same time, accused her campaign of being:

‘…even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.’

Wow. You make it sound much more fun than it actually was.

‘Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work.’

Because the NYT says so? Or because it produces big wins for Hillary? But you have to admire a newspaper that can actually print the sentence ‘demeaning the political process’ without it being the punch-line to a joke. Of course, just about the only thing that can ‘demean the political process’ is airy-fairy, hypocritical posturing in place of a good, honest – and, let’s face it, thoroughly entertaining – punch-up.

Limo liberals gazing out at the world through their smoked-glass rear windows while cruising along the moral high road might not know this, but blue collar workers who happen to be the electoral backbone of the Democratic Party appear to. Hillary certainly knows it, which is why she repeatedly compared herself to Rocky – a ‘low’ reference which no doubt also caused the NYT to wrinkle its patrician nose. Either way, the NYT has had enough of this vulgarity:

‘It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.’

And how would you like her to make that acknowledgement? By throwing in the towel? Committing suicide? Writing a mea culpa letter to the NYT? All three? If only Hillary would get out of the way, stop fighting and dragging everything down into the mud of hick states like Pennsylvania, we could get on with the business of reading the NYT:

‘After seven years of George W. Bush’s failed with-us-or-against-us presidency, all American voters deserve to hear a nuanced debate.’

Yes! America is crying out for nuance! From sea to shining sea, from Pennsylvania to California, they shout: give me nuance! Not jobs, peace, security, housing, or a Democratic candidate for the White House that can actually win, or even a serious set-to proper fight, as if any of this stuff really mattered – but civilised, sensible, op-ed nuance. (Not that there’s much nuance in this particular example, though.)

In point of fact, it’s past time that the Democratic Party and the NYT thanked Hillary for fighting dirty.

By fighting dirty – that’s to say, openly attacking her opponent instead of relying on email newsletters, memos, partisan journalism and the poisonous hysteria of fans as Obama has done until now – Hillary has begun to awaken the Democratic Party to the unpalatable truth it’s been avoiding for so long: that the Dali Obama has little or no life outside the Democratic Party and its sensitivities. He is the perfect candidate for defeating her, but the perfect one for the Republicans to destroy. She’s given them a small, relatively restrained taste of what the GOP will do with him – and where they will shove his halo. It’s past time for the NYT and the grandees of the Democratic Party to get down on their expensively tailored knees and thank her for doing so before it was too late.

Limo liberals will never thank her, of course. For many of them Obama was never really meant to win anything more than the Democratic Candidacy. Winning the Presidency itself would be far too vulgar, too ‘low’. He was meant to bring them something much more valuable than a change of Government, especially for those who already have everything. He was meant to make them feel good about themselves. Come polling day, he was supposed, like all Messiahs, to die. The Senator for Illinois is a human sacrifice designed to prove the moral superiority of liberals to the ‘Repugs’, as they like to call them – and in fact to politics itself.

The very reason Hillary is hated and scorned by the limo liberals is because she didn’t leave it to the Republicans to destroy their idol. She forced him to show his hand – and feet of clay – and splutter predictable lies, as he did in the last TV debate. ‘John McCain should go on holiday, Hillary is doing his work for him’ protested recovering Republican millionairess Arianna Huffington recently on her Obama-worshipping Hillary-loathing website.

No, Arianna darling, Hillary is doing the work that liberal journalists should be doing but aren’t because they’ve gone on permanent vacation in ObamaLand: she’s pulled back the curtain and showed the Wizard of Chicago to be… shock! horror! a politician. And a very inexperienced, untested one at that, who, even without Pastor Wright et al bumping around in his very crowded closet, will be crucified by the Republicans. Unceremoniously. There will be nothing morally satisfying or redeeming about it at all: it will just be messy, sickening and brutal. The NYT really will have something to be indignant about then – but it will be far too late.

But perhaps Hillary’s greatest crime, and her ‘lowest’ trick, is not being more electable than Obama and refusing to keep quiet about that, but asking who does the Democratic Party really belong to? Arianna Huffington, the New York Times and the former President of the Harvard Law Review, alias Mr Obama – or ‘bitter’ Scranton, Pennsylvania?

Shame on her. How low can you go?

© Mark Simpson 2008

As camp comic Kenneth Williams might say: ‘ark at ‘er!

An entertaining, often incisive, if rather, er, campy, Huffington Post article ‘The Diva’s Camp’ about Hillary’s diva power (and why this turns off ‘Obama-colytes’) compares Hillary Clinton to Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest:

‘Hillary Clinton is possessed by the spirit of Joan Crawford. Like that notorious über-bitch immortalized by Faye Dunaway in the camp classic Mommie Dearest, Hillary bulldozed into a Democratic primary dominated by men and brazenly declared, as any self-respecting diva would: Don’t fuck with me fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo!’

Now, that’s funny, but where did I hear that before?

Oh, yes, that was me a month ago talking about the “3am” ad in a piece after her Ohio comeback called ‘The Bitch is Back’ on Guardian Unlimited:

‘…Hillary answering the White House phone in scarlet lipstick, has both a touch of 1990s nostalgia, and also one of timeless thrilling glamour – a hint of Joan Crawford talking to the board of Pepsi in Mommie Dearest: “Don’t fuck with me, fellas – this ain’t my first time at the rodeo!“‘

Even though I hear that Guardian Unlimited is quite popular in the American blogosphere, I’m sure it was just a case of diva-revering minds thinking alike. And I very much doubt I’m the first person to compare Hills to Joan.

Actually, though, we weren’t really thinking alike. Despite my comparison when discussing the ad, I don’t think that Hillary is possessed by the spirit of Joan Crawford, or is camp as a row of tents full of impossible divas on the blob. Apart from anything else, camp isn’t really possible in a world like the all-singing, all-dancing shameless one that cavorts and disports itself before our jaded eyes these days.

Everything and nothing is camp. Including the Huffington Post. More to the point, to talk about Hillary as being ‘so camp!’ seems to argue, whether intended or not, that the notion of a woman as the most powerful person in the world is merely ‘failed seriousness’. Or a joke.

And this is a very serious business. Medically serious. Sometimes it looks as if the Democratic Party is having a gigantic nervous breakdown over the idea of Hills as their ‘man’, or, rather, over the ‘arrogant’, ‘hopeless’, ‘divisive’, ‘ugly’ idea that she thinks she could be rather than Mr Obama. It’s tangibly Oedipal.

Despite that, I do believe that America is slowly, slowly, very, very tortuously, negotiating the five-alarm idea of having a ‘bitch’ and ‘cow’ and ‘whore’ and ‘c**t’ – to use the progressive, uplifting, non-partisan vernacular of righteous Obama fans – as Commander in Chief. America will learn not to cross its legs and whimper when Hillary is on TV, even if MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson doesn’t.

After all, Hillary has almost all of the crucial big states, and if the Democrats used the same first-past-the-post electoral system used during the Presidential contest itself, she would be well ahead of Obama. Contrary to what the media likes to tell us, she’s anything but Box Office Poison.

Perhaps because it attracts insecure men keen to big themselves up, it seems to be mostly the US media that’s having the nervous breakdown. The more than slightly deranged and hysterical – certainly much more deranged and hysterical than she is accused of being – nature of the press bias against Hillary and the extreme, frequently all-but murderous personal abuse casually levelled at her,compared with the loving, swooning indulgence bestowed on her stripling rival, does rather suggest that anxiety about a female Big Boss, thus far at least, looms and lurks much larger in their minds, than a black (or, rather, half-white) male one. This isn’t to say that ‘sexism is worse than racism’, it’s just to point out that sexism – no, sorry, untrammelled, uninhibited, shuddering, shivering, gut-wrenching misogyny – unlike racism, is considered perfectly acceptable prime time fare.

And as somebody who isn’t entirely free of misogyny myself, I think it terribly unfair that they should be able to get away with it.

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Sometimes, watching the American Primaries coverage has been like watching an especially horrifying episode of 60s retrosexist drama Mad Men, but without the irony or the smoking.

In her bitter battle to win this unconscious – and therefore by definition unfair – struggle, Hillary is using every powerful American feminine archetype she can lay her hands on. Unfortunately for her, there aren’t too many. Unlike our first female leaderene Mrs T (whom America loved, partly because she was, like Churchill, and Tony Blair, great at giving America head, but mostly because she wasn’t their leader), she doesn’t have chariot-driving Boudicca or Armada-vanquishing Elizabeth I or globe-ruling Victoria to call on as legitimising ancestral memories.

Because of the vital symbolic importance of these women in our national mythology, or maybe just because of Coronation Street, the UK is sometimes rather more matriarchal than the US. Elton John, who admittedly is not perhaps the best argument for matriarchy, recently announced himself shocked by the misogyny America has displayed during these Primaries.

Republics and their ‘Founding Fathers’ favour women even less than monarchies. Monarchies, which are after all based on reproduction and families, occasionally cut them a break, when no worthy male heir turns up – which is what happened with the Tory Party in the 1970s when it anointed Maggie. Though if she had used the famous line of Elizabeth, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too,” everyone would have scoffed at the idea that her body was ‘weak and feeble’. Even her famous handbag was seen as a fearsome weapon.

Powerful women in American history, save perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt, don’t really exist – except as kindling in Arthur Miller plays. So they had to be imagined in 1940s Hollywood melodrama, aimed, of course, at powerless women: producing, literally, ‘divas’ such as Joan, Bette and Katherine. So if Hillary sometimes channels a little bit of Joan, Bette and Katherine it’s because she needs to imagine herself as a powerful woman in a man’s world, and American history doesn’t offer her much else to work with.

OK, she might possibly be a psychotic bitch too, but the media has yet to make that case – though it keeps trying. Hillary isn’t possessed by the spirit of Joan Crawford, as the Huffington Post has it – rather, Joan Crawford is possessed by the spirit of Hillary.

Handsome half white/half black but entirely male (if very eager to please) Obama can and does draw on both Martin Luther King and Jack Kennedy, and in fact American political history at least as far back as Lincoln for his legitimation – and invites us, with that sexy smile, to a ‘more perfect union’. It’s an invitation that, oddly, seems to turn men on more than women. Hillary hating MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, for instance, talks openly about how how listening to Obama gives him ‘a thrill up my leg’ (a very different kind of feeling, I’m guessing, to that experienced by Tucker Carlson listening to Hillary). Lots of guys are gay for Obama – and out and proud it seems.

And as for Hillary being a ‘gay icon’, despite gay parade marching Hills being closer in many ways to the gay community than Obama, and despite (English) Elton John’s support, most American homos I know can’t bear her, while the main gay blogs practically dance on her head daily. Preposterously bearded MTM transsexual and recovering Republican Andrew Sullivan is completely obsessed, practically screaming ‘DIE, BITCH! DIE!’ at her, calling her a ‘horror movie without end’ and comparing her to Glenn Close’s insane stalker character in the infamous 80s career-woman hating flick Fatal Attraction. Get a grip, Mary. And a shave.

Despite Mr O’s reluctance to be interviewed by the gay press or attend gay parades, his Christian church base, and his gay platform vagueness, he is much the ‘gayer’ candidate simply because he is younger, better-looking, better-dressed, cooler – and male. He is, in fact, metrosexual.

If we are going to talk about camp, and if camp is a form of style over substance, mediagenic Obama is much camper than Hillary – and more of a diva too. Doesn’t he roll his eyes during debates with Hillary? Doesn’t he fill stadiums with his performances? Didn’t he flounce out of a press conference in which he was actually grilled instead of applauded in a huff, protesting ‘You’ve asked me like, eight questions already!’‘.

It’s the male divas you have to watch out for in politics. Over here in the UK we are still getting over our own Christian pop star politician, that nice Mr Blair who took us, smiling his drag queen smile, into a disastrous American war.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

After being written-off and told to give up, Hillary has earned grudging respect

By Mark Simpson (Guardian CIF, 6 March 2008)

What is American voters’ problem? The media, on both sides of the Atlantic, has been telling them for weeks that dreary Hillary was “finished” and that Tuesday’s primaries were going to be her “Alamo” – and that Obama, the glamorous, smooth-talking 1960s tribute act, was unstoppable. The kindly Fourth Estate made it as clear as they possibly could which way the idiots should vote on Tuesday, practically hitting them over the heads with it, and what do they do?

Only go and hand “that woman” a stunning, breathtaking – and completely unforeseen by the pundits – comeback last Tuesday, pulling the coronation carpet from under Obama and Michelle’s smartly shod feet. The cheek of it! The racism of it!

Not that you’d know Clinton won big in the Democratic primaries from reading the sulking liberal media. According to them (here and here), it was “really” Republican McCain who won.

So how did it happen? What gave the voters of Texas, Michigan and Rhode Island the nerve to defy their betters and hand Hillary victory? Well, it’s quite ironic, really. You see, it was Hillary’s willingness to become the very thing that she has been painted as being by a hostile media and Obama supporters (who for followers of a man who preaches so much about “unity” and “peace” can be awfully unpleasant).

A bitch.

Yes, of course, she was always something of a bitch anyway – how could a woman who got that far in politics not be? But in the run-up to this do-or-die primary she came out about it. Rather than shedding some tears this time, she presented herself as an out-and-proud battling bitch. She started to go after that nice Mr Obama head-on, claws out, instead of pussy-footying around, or letting hubby Bill do it from behind the lines – or hoping, vainly, that the press might subject Obama to anything other than adoring scrutiny. So she clawed him on his double-dealings over Nafta, she slapped him about over his dodgy links with slum landlords, kicked him in the nuts over his inexperience and his hot air. She became a backbiting face-scratching brawling battling bitch that you’d better not mess with.

Inevitably, battling bitch Hillary was portrayed as simply desperate and bankrupt by a disdainful media, but voters seem to have respected her for it. Voters, especially blue-collar Americans in places like Ohio already experiencing recession, have begun to see her as their bitch, able to fight their corner in difficult times – and, strangely, they’re less concerned than limousine liberals about whether this looks “cool” or “presidential” or not.

The Hillary’s now (in)famous “children” ad – “It’s 3am, your children are asleep, a phone rings in the White House” – announced the emergence of the new Hillary. Denounced by Obama as “the politics of fear”, it showed that at last she was prepared to play hardball, in public, and mess with Obama’s sainted hair. That because she was willing to run such a ruthless ad, she was the kind of person, the kind of woman, that was worthy of that office. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will be up against the party of “national security” – in wartime. A party that won’t hesitate to play hardball will Obama’s halo.

Obama’s eager use of the “children” ad as a cue to play yet again that increasingly grating record of his blamelessness, his virgin stainlessness – “The phone DID ring, she answered it and she made the WRONG decision!” worked against him. Plaintively reminding the public how HE didn’t vote for THAT war (because, actually, he wasn’t in the Senate back then) reminded them that innocence and inexperience can be much the same thing – making him look a bit too goody-goody for the White House, with all its sulphurous compromise. That, whatever else it is, the Oval Office is not a pulpit.

Besides, didn’t Hillary spend most of the 1990s – the last time America was popular and at peace – in that house, surviving everything the Republicans could throw at her? Doesn’t her face, the one the press constantly jeers at for being so much less pretty than Obama’s (a candidate whose face appears to turn caricaturists into lovesick teenyboppers), bear the scars of those battles?

The end of the ad, Hillary answering the White House phone in scarlet lipstick, has both a touch of 1990s nostalgia, and also one of timeless thrilling glamour – a hint of Joan Crawford talking to the board of Pepsi in Mommie Dearest: “Don’t fuck with me, fellas – this ain’t my first time at the rodeo!” Or maybe Ripley in Alien: “Stay away from her you bitch!” (though of course Hillary is both Ripley and Alien Mother).

Hollywood itself didn’t rely on hints, meanwhile. The hit Jack Nicholson “Who Do You Trust?” YouTube ad – “there’s nothing sexier on this earth, believe me gentlemen, than a woman you have to salute in the morning” – endorsed, not just Hillary’s candidacy, but battling bitch Hillary: since we know a loveable bastard like Nicholson wouldn’t respect a woman boss unless she was at least his match.

After being written-off and told to give up, and fighting on regardless, her literally grim determination has earned grudging respect. People look at her face, and all the tiresomeness of it, its lines, its bitterness, its frozen, career-woman trailblazer features, and take them as terrible proof of her commitment. For Hillary, it doesn’t look like a dream; it’s closer to a nightmare. And so, of course, is real politics as opposed to stadium-rock politics. The White House is something she deserves – in every sense of the word.

Meanwhile, people looked at Obama’s much younger, much prettier, much softer, much more pleasing face, basked in his Hawaiian smile, heard his soaring words and phrases, and decided that, while this is one American Idol that they very much like the sound and look of – one who makes them feel mighty good -he just ain’t half the woman that Hillary is.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

An extract from The Queen is Dead:

London, 5 October 1997

Dearest Steven,

Greetings from the Kingdom of Diana.

I never thought I’d live to see a revolution in this country, but that’s almost what happened here after the Princess of Wales took a ride in a car driven by one of those Parisians who make you wonder why they bother painting white lines in the road. The famous stoic stiff upper lip of the English has quivered, cracked and broken into public sobbing. And who has achieved all this? A bulimic, self-mutilating, manipulative blonde bimbo from a broken home.

After our own (black) Velvet Revolution, Princess Diana is the dead drama-queen of all our hearts.

OK, so I exaggerate a tad. But by sheer pressure of public outrage over their silence after Di’s death the Royals were forced to return to London early from their traditional Scottish holiday at Balmoral. In the British context it was as if they’d returned in a cart lined with straw and rotting vegetables.

I visited Kensington Palace, Di’s former royal residence, the Day After, escorted by my glamorous tranny friend (and former male stripper ‘Stud-U-Like’) Michelle and her male-to-male trannsexual model friend Enzo (Pierre et Gilles have painted him, but this was an exercise in redundancy since the flesh-and-blood Enzo is so perfect, so airbrushed and colorized already – he’s post-production). Both Michelle and Enzo adored Di. They recognized a kindred spirit. But that didn’t stop Michelle joking, as we approached her former home, ‘It’s a good job she sold those frocks, otherwise William might have turned into a Norman Bates!’

Hundreds of candles guttered in the wind at the foot of the railings in front of the palace; thousands of bouquets of flowers and messages fluttered on the railings; an ocean of flowers in front of the gates gave off a shockingly strong smell of sweetness that filled the eerily silent air. A long, respectful procession of people clutching their own tributes inspecting those that had already been left there shuffled past – giving murderous looks to Mich and Enzo who were kneeling in front of the candles singing, a la Madonna, ‘Life is a mys-ter-ry…‘.

The next night I took The Divine David [a performance artist from Manchester who sings Smiths songs in the style of Shirley Bassey while looking like an exhumed Bette Davies to Ken Palace as well. At the sight of all this sombre devotion he burst into tears and croaked in a small, hardly ever heard un-ironic voice, ‘This is what love looks like, Mark.’ The implication being that this was the closest he or I would ever get to it. He cheered up, however, when I drew his attention to one of the madder messages pinned to the railings:

‘YOU who are responsible for the death of DIANA will find no hiding place, you will DIE in agony and be sent straight to HELL – the CURSE of TUTTENKAMON is upon YOU!’

A week later, the night before the funeral, I accompanied David to the gates of Buckingham Palace, where a different kind of demonstration was happening. Initially I hadn’t understood why people were placing flowers there, but it rapidly became apparent that for some it was a calculated snub to the Royal Family who were considered to be covered in Diana’s blood. David harangued the CNN cameras, shouting ‘LIARS!’ as they interviewed hand-picked people to announce how satisfied they were with the Queen’s humble-pie TV address earlier that day.

He also confused unsuspecting bystanders by asking them what they thought about the (non-existent) second broadcast she made: ‘Personally, I think she did the right thing,’ he’d say, looking suitably serious/sympathetic. ‘It’s the best for the country. I mean, abdication was the only thing she could do…’ Or: ‘Apparently they’ve announced open house and the Duke of Edinburgh’s having a barbecue in the back garden. Liz has also agreed to allow people to sit on ‘er throne and try on ‘er crown so they can get some idea of what it’s like being Queen.’

Then he produced, from where I have no idea, a pair of big inflatable red lips with a flashing torch attached to the back that made them pulse with light. Clambering clumsily over the floral tributes, he hung them on the palace gates making the large round ornaments above the hinges look like eyes and the whole gate like one huge crazy cartoon. As David put it, for a moment (before the police removed them) the Battenburg-Saxe-Coburg-Gothas had a human face.

Sadly, the evenings jinks came to an end when the police, who had been eyeing us warily since we arrived, suddenly accosted us, asking David threateningly. ‘Planning to ‘ang around, Sir?’

‘No, I think not officer, said David tactfully. ‘I’ll be on my way.’

Outside Westminster Abbey the next day I saw the coffin arrive on the gun carriage (David: ‘How offensive that they should have put a woman who campaigned against land-mines on a gun-carriage and wrap her in the Royal standard when they deprived her of her royal title coz they though it’d be a laugh that she would have to bow to her own kids!’). Sweltering in the sun, we listened to the service, and clapped loudly at Earl Spencer’s bitter speech. Some people cried quietly. I didn’t.

Which is just as well. A CNN camera was inches from my face. Not to worry though, CNN had apparently arranged for a couple of girls next to them to weep and sob openly through the service. When a woman fainted the cameraman leapt down to clear people away, shouting, ‘Give her some air!’, only so that he could start filming her. At this the crowd turned into a lynch-mob: ‘STOP FILMING HER!’ they yelled as one. And he did.

After the service ended I went home and watched on television the funeral cortege drive through North London, along Hendon Way (a mile or so from here) and up the M1 to the Spencer estate in Northampton. All along the route, which was over 50 miles, people lined the sides of the road and threw flowers in the hearse’s path. Then, in the privacy of my own home, I finally allowed myself some some tears. It would have been churlish not to at such an image.

Life goes on, of course. An hour or so later I went to the supermarket. Which meant driving along Hendon Way. Already the flowers had been crushed into the road by the traffic, forming ghostly flower-shadows on the tarmac. It’s astonishing how flat flowers press, how little substance they have.

The next day in the gym, a young football-crazy lad I often chat to spoke to me about watching the funeral on telly. ‘I had a little cry,’ he told me. Strangely, I couldn’t quit bring myself to tell him I did the same. I also saw another gym-romance of mine, a twenty-something squaddie farrier (two fantasies for the price of one) with the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery – the Regiment who provided the gun-carriage and escort for Diana’s coffin. He had shod the horses that drew Diana’s coffin himself. How did he feel about it all?

‘Very sad,’ he said, fixing me with his guileless clear green eyes. ‘She was the best we had. You couldn’t help but cry.’

Love,

M

Gordon Brown, clearly operated by remote control, briefly pops out of a cupboard in 10 Downing Street to warn us of the pressing need to try to stay awake during his speeches.

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Vigilant
adjective

Etymology: Middle English (Scots), from Latin vigilant-, vigilans, from present participle of vigilare to keep watch, stay awake, from vigil awake

Date: 15th century