MARK SIMPSON.com

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.

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.

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

Excuse me, but who is our Prime Minister? No, really, who is he?

Yesterday I saw a dour looking Scottish geezer who looked like he’d spent too long working in the basement of a bank give a painfully awkward speech outside Number 10 about the changing need for change and how he will try us to his utmost, before grimacing for the cameras and scurrying inside. People tell me that he’s now our leader for at least the next couple of years.

That’s funny, I don’t remember voting for him at the last election. He wasn’t even elected by his own Party. And didn’t he rule out, just before he became our unelected PM, the possibility of a referendum on the new EU constitution/treaty? I get the feeling that whoever this guy is, he’s not exactly a great democrat.

Judging by his performance outside Number 10, one he’s had ten years to prepare for, I can see why our new PM might not be keen on public scrutiny - or elections. He’s never going to win any popularity contests. Odd also how after all the coverage of the handover from Blair to Brown in the last few weeks, not to mention his ten years in No.11, we don’t really have any idea who this man lording it over us is - or much real curiosity. His name could be Gordon Beige.

Yes, I know the official line. I know that we’re not a Presidential Democracy, that we supposedly vote for parties and not persons, but, frankly, that’s a tosh, and everyone knows it. It was already tosh in 1997, but ten years on it’s tosh on toast. As far as most voters in this ‘press your red buttons now’ age are concerned, Brown is someone who managed to rig the phone-voting and end up winning X-Factor (albeit the lower-rating, digital channel political version).

A ‘cabinet of all the talents’ as proclaimed by Brown won’t disguise the fact that his own talent as a leader in an age of mass media is hidden under a bushel. The more people are exposed to Brown’s charisma-deficit - and on TV he looks like death defrosted - the more they will rebel. Brown can talk as often as he likes about ‘the end of celebrity culture‘, and pray that people will be glad to be rid of Blair’s Hollywood ways, but it won’t change the fact that in this mediated age politicians have to be actors and performers who have to offer us - however simulated, however faux - intimacy. And have hair that doesn’t look like it’s been styled by a 1970s local authority.

Enter, stage-right, glistening with hair gel, moisturiser, and bottled shamelessness, whispering sweet nothings in our shell-likes, David Cameron who has successfully metrosexualised the Tories, and made them a more desirable, wearable, and almost shagable party.

Adding to New Labour’s woes, Brown is not just dull and unelected he’s Scottish - and representing a Scottish constituency. Not because the English are now plagued with Scotophobia (Scottish people are much more popular in England than the English are in Scotland), but because the Scottish are able to elect their own government. And a Nationalist one committed to independence at that. While the English are not - and Scottish MPs, like Brown, continue vote on English-only issues. Every time our Prime Minister opens his mouth it will remind English voters of their disenfranchisement.

Brown is aware of this. That’s why he plans to introduce a ‘British Day’. Which, of course, is not for Scotland or Wales: they would, anyway, have no truck with such arrant nonsense now that they are busy being Welsh and Scottish. It’s aimed squarely at England and the English. At keeping them deprived of their own identity and under the thumb of a Scottish-led New Labour dependent for power on Scottish votes. It’s not ‘Britain Day’ at all, but ‘Brownish Day’.

Not to worry though - it will probably be cancelled due to lack of interest.

This week British PM Tony Blair is finally handing over the reins of Government to former Chancellor Gordon Brown’s ‘big clunking fists’. Despite what they say about what big fists mean (big surgical gloves), it remains to be seen what exactly is under our Scottish premier’s kilt.

It won’t be until New Labour’s newly crowned king stands over the ventilation grill of the next General Election that Gordon will be revealed as either tossing a big fat caber of a mandate - or merely an embarrassing minority.

Tony Blair must be wondering where all the love went. Ten years on Tone, who once sported a poll so big that it caused a ‘landslide’, whose whopping majoritys made psephologists faint, is now largely reviled by voters and widely seen as Bush’s pussy.

New Labour hopes that good old Gordo will reignite the kind of passion that people once had for their party - and indeed there is some speculation on him calling an early election. My money however is on Brown proving, in the privacy of the polling booth, to be an immense disappointment.

Here’s a piece published just before his election in June 1997 which attempts to explain the fickleness of the electorate - with a final prediction about Mr Blair’s reputation that proved rather accurate. Even if it took ten years.

Cock au vote

by Mark Simpson

(Originally appeared in Attitude magazine, 1997)

Dame Democracy is a bit of a size queen.

Actually, she’s a lot of a size queen. The vital statistics she’s really interested in are not the size of the money supply or the rate of inflation, but the heft of a politician’s inflatable. All those graphs, statistics and ‘swingometers’ on election programs are trying to answer the only question that anyone’s really interested in: which candidate is hung like a baby’s arm?

And like a lot of size queens, Dame Democracy instinctively feels that men with faces like a bag of spanners are more likely to be packing a bigger monkey wrench. This is why we vote for men - and they usually are men - that you might be forgiven for thinking no-one, except the occasional bimbo with The News of the World’s telephone number and a cocaine habit to support, would lay if they were the last suit left standing at the office party.

Of course, there are exceptions: Kennedy was a looker and still made the Presidency of the United States. But the American public was swayed by the fact that his father had one of the largest penises in the American Underworld, and Jack’s encouraging habit of fucking everything that moved (including one or two things that didn’t, such as Cuba and Vietnam).

Nixon was a man who strutted around like the proud possessor of a real tonsil-teaser. Perhaps this is why he was elected in 1969. However, a special Senate Committee was set up to investigate the true dimensions of his masculine virtue, calling witnesses and threatening to sub poena certain ‘tapes’ which, it was rumoured, would reveal the ‘whole picture’ and the full extent of his naughtiness.

Exposed as a liar, Tricky Dicky spent the rest of his life in disgrace, proving that there’s nothing the public hates more than a pussy-teaser who doesn’t deliver in the luncheon-truncheon department. His successor, Gerald Ford, didn’t measure up either, despite the encouraging impression conveyed by his habit of losing his balance and falling forwards whenever he became excited.

President Carter, it goes without saying, had the smallest penis in the history of American democracy. Political scientists had to employ high-powered optical instruments to locate it. The American public was initially fooled by his lazy, self-satisfied Southern Drawl and his intimate knowledge of farming practises, but Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis soon revealed him for the short dick man he was.

So the US dumped Jimmy and plumped for Ronald ‘It’s Morning in America and I’ve got a woody’ Reagan whose virility was so enormous that it even promised to reach out into space, where it’s vast, hi-tech dome would protect America from penetration by Russian warheads, and eventually cow the Reds into submission. Which indeed it did. Even if it actually belonged to Nancy.

That his Republican successor was called ‘Bush’ was hubris indeed. Despite his reaming of Saddam in the Gulf War, it was inevitable that someone called ‘Slick Willy’ would force him to submit. By the same token, Dole was never in with a chance in 1996 as his name rhymed with ‘hole’.

The last British leader to sport a world-class weapon was Winston Churchill, a man who didn’t need to read foreign muck like Freud to understand what sucking on a Havana cigar could do for his public image. But then we lost an Empire and gained Clement Attlee, someone Churchill once described as ‘a harmless, penisless, grass-grazing creature in the clothing of a harmless, penisless, grass-grazing creature’.

Sir Anthony Eden lost his dignity up the Suez Canal in 1956 but his successor Harold Macmillan thought he knew what the public liked when he crowed that we’d ‘never had it so good.’ Even though he was a promisingly tall man with large feet, the punters decided that they had had it better, actually, and dumped him for Harold Wilson who smoked a big black pipe.

But Wilson suffered a foreign exchange crisis which shrank the ‘penis in his pocket‘ and eventually lost to Heath who had the biggest nose in British political history but who led us into an unwilling threesome with Europe and its garlicky vagina dentata. Happily, he was brought to his knees by the stalwart miners (stiffened no doubt by being raised on Attlee’s free school milk, which did much to ensure the full muscular development of the lower orders).

So Wilson won again, but suddenly cut himself off only two years into his term of office. Callaghan plugged the gap but despite palling around with the TUC big boys he never quite got over this psychological blow and was forced into the hands of Jeremy Thorpe and the Liberals who massaged his frail majority for him.

Little wonder then that he was no match for Margaret Thatcher, a woman with the largest penis since Winston, her idol. Indeed it is rumoured that her penis was Winston’s (which after his death had been pickled in a jar at Conservative Central Office for the day when England would need it to rise again).

But Thatcher proved that even in the greedy world of politics you can have too much of a good thing. The Poll Tax and EMU had nothing to do with her downfall. In-party jealousy over her gargantuan Hampton Wick was to blame. Excessive endowment, you see, can blow up in your face (see also Alan Clark and Michael Portillo).

To appease the humming-bird tendency and heal the rifts in the party, Maggie’s successor, John Major, was chosen precisely because, despite his bragging name, he possessed an even smaller penis than Jim Callaghan. After being trampled on for years by Maggie Stryker, Major was a man that the Tories could at last look down to.

That he managed to defeat Neil Kinnock, a bald Welshman with a large nose who played rugby is further evidence that size alone isn’t always the determining factor. Sometimes the electorate will choose a man with a smaller penis simply because he doesn’t have red pubes. Shape and symmetry also count for something. Despite a consensus amongst psephologists that Blair’s membrum virile is bigger than Major’s Minor, there does appear to be some anxiety as to the actual width and weight of his instrument and whether it is one of those nasty numbers that has an unexpected bend to the left.

Whoever Britain’s next Prime Minister is, and whatever the dimensions of his electoral tackle, it seems inevitable that Dame Democracy’s attitude will eventually echo that of Michelle, a tranny friend of mine who always crows about the size of her latest amour’s penis, only to announce, usually about a week later, that she’s no longer seeing him, saying: ‘Oh, I didn’t like ‘im anyway - ‘e ‘ad a really small dick.’

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Perhaps there will always be an England, but ‘Britain’ is a concept that has outlived its usefulness.

by Mark Simpson (Guardian Unlimited, April 8, 2007)

It’s over. ‘Britain’ and ‘Britishness’ are politically moribund terms. The proof? Scottish-flavoured New Labour’s recent laughable attempts to resurrect “Britishness” as an “inclusive” post-Imperial identity - not so much because they flopped as the fact that Britannia was now such an empty vessel that she could be so casually appropriated by New Labour.

Whatever the outcome of next month’s elections to the Scottish parliament - and at the moment the SNP are ahead - unionism as a political force and national identity is finished. Anxious New Labour strategists aside, there’s no appetite for it either side of Hadrian’s Wall. (Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea even ‘British Forever!’ Loyalists like Ian Paisley are now in government with Sinn Fein Irish nationalists.)

New Labour’s appeasement of Scottish nationalism with parliaments, unequal voting rights, free prescriptions and universities, shiny new bridges, and ever-increasing wads of English cash has failed. Worse, it’s only served to ignite the political frustration of those ‘British’ people paying for all this - people who, despite the best efforts of the political and media classes, increasingly see themselves as English. Amidst all the chatter in London about whether the Scots will embrace independence or not next May and whether it will be a good or bad thing for Scotland, hardly anyone is asking what the English want, or even acknowledging their existence.

There’s a good reason for this. Whatever they brought the English in the past, the institutions of ‘Britishness’ are now little more than a conspiracy against England and the English. A way to keep them disenfranchised and identity-less - except during international football matches (and then only because the Scots refused, years ago, to join the UK team). Those ‘chavvy’ plastic St George’s flags fluttering from black cabs and housing estates mocked by the middle classes are all the English are allowed.

The BBC, Westminster, the Monarchy and above all London all block the emergence of an English national - and political - consciousness. Why? Because it would undermine their power, their status, their very existence and indeed their point. The institutions of ‘Britishness’ may or may not favour ‘Scottishness’ (and ‘Welshness’) but they are quite definitely all set against Englishness. London is the former capital of a global empire turned capital of globalisation still pretending to speak on behalf of a ‘Britain’ that doesn’t exist any more - but located in the heart of an England that actually does.

Such impotent discussions about whether the English should also be allowed a parliament of their own that are occasionally indulged seem somehow to always overlook the rather salient point that there would have to be a revolution before the English got a parliament of their own. Even if Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the blinking Isle of Man all seceeded, London would probably still try to claim to represent ‘Britain’ rather than recognise English sovereignty - or the English.

For England to assert herself again power and status would have to be wrested out of the hands of ‘British’ institutions that reside in the English capital, institutions that claim to represent a country that no longer exists save in the speeches of apparatchik, globalising Scottish chancellors keen to smooth the way for their London coronation.

Gordon Brown, Labour’s leader-in-waiting, can’t win the next election. This week’s address to the Labour Party Conference might as well have been his speech conceding victory to David Cameron.

Why is Gordie such a liability? Not because of the disdainful verdict of dodgy Newsnight focus groups, or his recent impatient unleashing of political-suicide bombers on Number 10, or even because his Conference speech with its liberal use of the word ‘aspirations’ sounded like that of an ambitious TUC chief, but because he’s such a bad liar.

The proof? The most embarrassing, excruciating lie from that speech – “It has been a privilege for me to work with and for the most successful ever leader and Labour prime minister” – has dominated the coverage of it.

That it should have been Cherie Blair, wife of the most successful ever lying Prime Ministers in British history who pointed this out to the world is entirely appropriate. After all, she must, by now, be something of an expert. She was though entirely right when she claimed she was misheard: she didn’t say, ‘Well, that’s a lie.’, you see. What she actually said was, ‘God, you’re such a bad liar’.

Certainly, we all squirmed and tutted when we heard him. It may or may not have been an endorsement that was wrung out of Gordon by the application of a hot poker to the Chancellor’s red box, but it was definitely torture for the rest of us. Even though Tony has yet to relinquish the reigns of power, and despite the fact that we’re all, in one way or another, as tired of him as he now looks, it was difficult watching Brown’s near-autistic delivery not to feel like we were missing Tone already. A feeling only enhanced by Blair’s Hollywood performance the following day, complete with his trademark, quavery-voiced sincere insincerity and impressively shameless use of the word ‘truth’ in the first few seconds of his final speech to Conference.

Those who complained that ‘Blair lied to us!’ after it emerged that there those Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were so fiendishly well-hidden that they, er, actually didn’t exist at all, slightly miss the point. It’s his job. Tone has been so successful and so popular for so long precisely because he lies, and lies so well. Even after he has been caught lying in Lying Town, as with Iraq, he comes up with other lies that are equally if not more persuasive, or at least momentarily diverting. He was, if you remember, re-elected with another thumping majority after the criminal Iraq debacle.

Iraq aside, Tone usually tells us the lies we want to hear – and he tells them extremely convincingly. That’s what a politician’s job is. That’s what we elect them for. That’s what ‘aspirations’, the things Brown kept referring to in his speech, really are. Otherwise known as ‘illusions’. It’s the basis of most relationships. Like most suffering wives, however, what we don’t like and will not tolerate is having our faces rubbed in it . This is why the Hungarian PM and Blair pal Ferenc Gyurcsany got into such a pickle. Not because he lied but because he admitted – even behind closed doors – that he lied.

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. (His final tear-jerking address to the Labour faithful demonstrated that.)

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. Clearly he will lie and lie to get the top job and to keep it – he has already proved this to us by carefully parroting Tony’s lies about Iraq, for example – but unlike Tony he won’t do us the courtesy of lying convincingly, let alone entertainingly.

The delivery of his speech yesterday was full of visual proof of this. I have no idea what Brown is like in the flesh, but on telly – i.e. the real world – Brown looks like a loser. Dead, hooded eyes which offer no contact with the audience or the camera, choreographed but strangely ill-timed, clawing hand movements and weird goldfish-like gulps at the end of each line. After nine years of Tony’s glamorous drag queen charisma, he looks like a particularly deluded punter auditioning for X-Factor while Simon Cowell pulls faces.

Brown may well, as he says, ‘relish’ the opportunity to ‘take on Cameron’, but Cameron looks increasingly likely to simply sweep him aside. After a couple of years of Brown-ness the electorate will stampede to elect the smooth, moisturised, green-ish manipulator Cameron, someone who knows exactly what we want to hear and how to coo those sweet nothings in our ears. By then he’ll be seen as Tony Blair without Iraq. Tony Blair without the TUC. Tony Blair without the haggard face.

Tony Blair without Gordon Brown.
© Mark Simpson 2006

When, I wonder, am I going to receive my fee for my makeover of the Tory Party?  Metrodaddy, alias yours truly, appears to have been cast as the (reluctant) queer eye of the British Tory guy. 

As yet another sign of the total mainstreaming of male aesthetics, that once reliably retrosexual party that seems to have gone raving metrosexual – or, rather, ‘mincing metrosexual’ in the inadvertently revealing words of its chairman this week. 

First they elect a new, young, (relatively) stylish, rather moisturised, leader in the form of David Cameron.  Practically the first thing he does, before his trip to Norway to watch glaciers melt, before holding a shadow cabinet meeting/photo opp. in his lovely designer kitchen, is to announce that the The Queen is Dead by The Smiths is his favourite album of all time.  (I can’t help wondering if I’d chosen, for some inexplicable reason, to write a biography of Holly Johnson rather than that alternative 80s ‘Iron Lady’ Morrissey, whether Cameron would have named Welcome to the Pleasuredome as his favourite album instead.)

Then an ‘A list’ of parliamentary candidates is announced – featuring women, gays, non-whites, and celebs – as a kind of new, designer political wardrobe for Cameron, fast-tracking the Conservatives’ change of image from something retro into something more modern, more fashionable, more desirable, more… metro.

Pre-eminent among these ‘A-listers’ is metrotory poster boy Adam Rickitt, who despite his name, is an anything but mal-nourished chap whose major claim to fame until now is that he used to take his shirt off a lot on the soap Coronation Street to show us his boyish six-pack and pecs.  Kind of a Woolworths pick ‘n’ mix Marky Mark, or, perhaps more to the point, a BHS soft-furnishings department Joe Dallesandro (Warhol hustler and hunky, hairless shirtless cover star for The Smiths’ debut, eponymous album).  Not surprisingly, a gay character in that soap fell for him and tried to kiss him  - a pass which was, after a bit of hesitation, rejected by Adam’s hetro metro character.

Given the awful looks, shape, clothes and halitosis of most British politicians I reckon Rickitt’s guaranteed a buff majority at the next election as thousands of young women and gays hitherto unfamiliar with the arcane and occult practise of voting rush to the polls to put a big kiss next to his name – and a prominent front bench position.  After all, you wouldn’t be able to appreciate his pretty blond features properly in the backbenches, would you? 

What on earth would this lad with no previous political experience be minister for, I hear you demand?  Well, there’s a host of possibilities that his talents bring to mind.  Such as… Minister for Looking At.  Or Minister for Working Out.  Or Minister for Men’s Underwear.  Or Minister for Decorating the House.  Failing that, he can just bring along his own portfolio – of photographs. 

Politics has already been successfully aestheticized by New Labour – once the proletarian party of production and supply-side, now the party of consumption and seduction – and rendered skin deep.  Why not politicians?  At least then we’d have something nice to look at while we’re being lied to.

Little wonder though that die-hard, unmoisturised retrosexuals within the Tory Party are rather unhappy with what’s happening to the party that used to bathe once a week and used a whiffy flannel the rest of the time; the party that used to regard that gay-baiting crank with the pudding-bowl haircut Normo Tebbit as the summit of everything desirable in a man; the party that introduced legislation in the form of Section 28 to ban schools from promoting the use of male hair care products and gymnasiums.  Little wonder they have been making loud noises – mostly of buttock clenching.

Old-timer Tory chairman Francis Maude has tried to reassure them, to soothe their fevered brows and cramping sphincters, and counteract some unfortunate ‘misapprehensions’.  Alas, his Freudian unconscious sabotaged him and revealed his own anxieties about the policy he himself is having to implement in an hilarious slip of the tongue, or some such fleshly organ.  Appearing on Toryradio this week, railing against the wilder rumours, he found himself saying:

“The idea that what we’re actually trying to do is insert mincing metrosexuals into gritty northern marginal seats is complete rubbish.”’

Err, thanks for that, Frankie.  A choice of words and images that will definitely put all unsavoury and uncomfortable thoughts of bumming out of the minds of Tory stick-in-the-(non-beautyfying)-muds who can’t stop worrying about it - at the same time as reassure the public that the Tory Party has really changed (its underwear).

I suspect however that most self-respecting metrosexuals would probably rather not insert themselves into ‘gritty seats’ anyway.  Certainly not without a shower and a sack and crack wax first. 

More to the point, that colourful outburst would seem to confirm that Cameron is inserting ‘mincing metrosexuals’ into safe seats instead.  I told you we’d be seeing Adam on the front benches soon, sunbathing in a thong.  [Update: In fact, Rickitt has applied to replace former Tory Leader Michael Howard as MP for Folkestone and Hythe at the next election.  On one Tory web forum he’s described by an apopleptic Tory activist as a ‘ghastly hermaphrodite’.

Actually, despite the depressing, patronising view of the North held by Southerners such as Maude and the BBC (e.g. ‘The Street’) as some kind of Gulag for people who use short vowel sounds, I can assure you, as someone who has recently moved back to the North from the South, that working class northern men in this largely - thanks to Mrs T - post-industrial region are even more keen than Southerners on fake tan, hair gel, designer clothes and gym-bodies and least likely to apologize for it.  The centre of the nearest big city to me, ‘gritty northern’ Newcastle, is full of them milling if not mincing around wearing expensively little on a Friday night – Newcastle even officially calls its giant shopping mall the ‘Metro Centre’, in case local lads didn’t know where to go when they get their pay-packets. 

If the Tories want to insert themselves into more seats in the North, and God knows they can hardly occupy fewer than they do at the moment, they could do worse than recruit a few more Adam Rickitts.  If they want to seduce younger voters, the Tories need to convince them that they’ve abandoned the ‘Victorian Values’ – and aesthetics – of the Iron Lady and embraced the ’softer’, ‘selfish’, ‘superficial’  and ‘vain’ aspect of the consumer revolution she ushered in but tried, like most Tories, to disavow. 

That, in other words, the Tories are something that young people might actually want to wear.  Or even look at.

Damn – I’ve done it again.  I’ve given the Tories more consultancy advice.  For nothing.

How about a signed poster of Adam Rickitt canvassing himself in the altogether and we’ll call it quits?

© Mark Simpson 2006