Cheltenham is here!

10:37am

Posting non horse-related issues will be light for the rest of this week, because the best four days of the year have arrived.

Cheltenham week is sacrosanct in the Pollard household. The other 51 weeks of the year are simply preparation for Cheltenham.

My ante post book this year is paltry. The halcyon Best Mate years (when I backed him at 20/1 for his first Gold Cup and then used a large slice of the profits every year to back him on the day of his victory for the next year's race) are over. I've had an long-standing each way investment at long odds on Pigeon Island, who happens to be my favourite horse in training, and that looks quite good as he's now down to 10/1 in the opener today. But I can't say I am certain he'll win, not least because I've been advised by the stable that Khyber Kim has to be backed, so I've done him as a saver.

I think the banker of the meeting runs in the last today. 11/4 about a horse carrying 11 stone 12 in a handicap seems cramped but I think Ahkazar at 11/4 is actually a huge price. For what it's worth, I've linked him with Noland in the 2.35 and Wonderkid in the 4.40.

My ante post bet in the Champion Hurdle was Bob's Pride, who runs today but I don't fancy him at all. I think, unoriginally, that Sizing Europe will win. But Catch Me looks best value to me at 10/1.

In the 4.00 my heart tells me King Harald, my head Abragante. So I've done both.

That's my book for today. Chances are none of them will win (although I really can't see Ahkazar getting beaten). If you want to take them as tips, do so with a very large health warning...

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Hillary, Silda here...

7:30am

More on the 3AM Call. My friend Robert George's take: 

The phone rings. Hillary Rodham Clinton picks it up.

"Yes?"

"Hillary, it's Silda Wall Spitzer. Sorry to call so late. Eliot's still not home. Based on your experience, what should I do?"

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Change

6:55pm

You will have noticed that the design of this site has changed a little. There is now a continue reading link to press on the longer posts, and only the most recent five or so  posts appear on the front page.

I hope this doesn't inconvenience you. The powers that be tell me it's all to do with speeding up the time it takes for the page to load.

If you have strong feelings about this, let me know.

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Calling Hillary, calling Hillary

3:10pm

The 3AM Phone Call ad has proved a rich seam to be mined for satire. This is my favourite so far:

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Pompous twits

10:11am

Tucker Carlson, who had a go at the journalist who got those choice quotes from Samantha Power, has just had his show axed. Good - he comes across to me as a right little twerp.

It is indeed true that there are different conventions in the US and UK over the use of 'off the record'. Here's how a friend of mine put it to me yesterday:

In the US, interviewees can ask that a particular quote can be off the record. If the journalist really wants to use the quote, he is supposed to go back and ask the interviewee if it is OK to use it. If they say “no” then it is supposed to be left out.

That said -- there are some shades of gray in this case. You are supposed to say “I am going off the record here – please do not quote this” BEFORE you say something, not after. Samantha Power must be very naïve or very arrogant to have thought she could take back the “monster” quote.

Exactly. Gerri Peev behaved completely properly. For Carlson, of all people, to have a go at her for journalistic standards is very, very rich. Here's what the Huffington Post reveals:

But this seems to be a bit of sore spot for Tucker. In a 1997 column, Howard Kurtz wrote about a dust-up over an article Tucker Carlson had written in The New Republic, in which he slammed Grover Norquist as a "cash-addled, morally malleable lobbyist" for his dealings in the Seychelles islands -- but failed to mention that his father, as U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, had butted heads with Norquist over those dealings.

At the time, Tucker Carlson told Kurtz that there had been no need for him to run a "disclaimer" because "I didn't talk to my dad about the piece."”

I have my own interest in such quotes and the issue of what is and is not on the record.
A few years ago, my biography of David Blunkett got a fair bit of coverage because I extracted some quotes from him about his fellow Cabinet ministers. I took the precaution not only of recording the interviews but, because I was so gob-smacked by his frankness, of reminding him repeatedly that he was on the record. I was, if anything, too fair to him - he was a big boy well versed in the media and didn't need protecting from himself. But I was so startled I thought I should be ultra-cautious.

At no point did he ask for me to ignore the quotes. And to give him his due, when the book was published, he did not deny saying anything I had reported him as saying to me about his fellow ministers. Given that I had (have) them all on tape, and he knew that, he could hardly have done so.

That wasn't the end of the story, however. In the book, I revealed his view of Lord Stevens. As I put it:

Blunkett considered Stevens to be a weak commissioner, lacking in judgment. He could talk a good game but was rarely able to deliver

I cited David Blunkett’s response to Sir John’s behaviour over the incident when, in June 2003, Aaron Barschak (the so-called “comedy terrorist”) made it past the police’s supposed watertight security into a party at Windsor Castle. Sir John promised root-and-branch reform and strong disciplinary action. And yet 11 months later there was a similar breach.

Clearly, Stevens had failed to do what he had promised. Blunkett called the commissioner, pointing out that both their jobs were on the line . . . Blunkett was not impressed with Stevens’s response: more bluster, as he told his colleagues, and more empty promises.

I then wrote that Blunkett had told one of his advisers:

That man [Stevens] needs to start feeling the pressure he is under.

Blunkett had been even angrier when, in February 2003, he discovered that tanks had been placed around the perimeter of Heathrow. I quoted his description to me of the police’s decision:

It was male, macho, silly laddism. Boy’s Own comic stuff. They couldn’t help themselves.

Lord Stevens' autobiography revealed, however, that Mr Blunkett had written to him on the day that my book was serialised:

[A]long came a two-page letter from Blunkett himself . . . apologising for all the rude remarks about me, and alleging that he had never made them. Indeed, he claimed that he had hardly spoken to Stephen Pollard, and believed, on the contrary, that I had been a splendid commissioner.

He must have forgotten the six hours of on-the-record interviews, not to mention the days I spent with him, shadowing him at the Home Office and Labour Party conference.

Despite his famed memory, it seems that Mr Blunkett's deserts him sometimes. Curiously, however, this only appears to happen at convenient times. When the news broke of the speeded-up visa for his own son’s nanny, he claimed to have no recollection of having raised the matter with his private office. And he lost any memory of having spoken to me for my biography.

I realise that this isn't quite about the idea of what is and isn't 'on the record'. But it is about what should and should not be reported. And in that context, Ms Peev deserves congratulations on an interview well done. And Tucker Carlson deserves to be treated as a pompous twit.

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The malign influence of Powell

8:40am

Oliver Kamm has a post on the legacy of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech that so exactly reflects my own views that it's almost uncanny. Oliver's premise is surely right:

Powell was the most destructive British political figure of my lifetime. His speech was a nice instance of incitement masquerading as prophecy.

I heard Powell in the flesh only once, when I was an undergraduate. He gave a talk to the Oxford University Conservative Association. I was eager to hear him, being an OUCA member at the time. So many people spoke and wrote of him and his intellect in revered tones that I relished hearing him.

It was, however, a deeply depressing experience. I vividly recall my two reactions. First, it soon became clear to me that there was no penetrating logic and no great intellect at work, merely prejudices and gut instincts dressed up in severe syntax to give the appearance of deep thought.

That was bad enough. What really got to me was an experiment I tried at the meeting. I wondered how I would react if it was not Powell but John Tyndall (the then leader of the National Front) speaking. And the shocking conclusion I drew was that Powell's words would have been what I would expect to hear from Tyndall.

Oliver makes this especially important point (referring to an excellent documentary on BBC2 on Saturday which I also saw):

Not all of Powell's critics grasped the point of what was wrong with his interventions. Powell maintained in his speech that "to imagine that such a thing [integration] enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one". Yet (to take the obvious example, which last night's documentary dwelt on) the suicide terrorists of 7/7 were turned to their horrific acts. They killed because they had adopted a fanatical ideology remote from their own upbringing and family traditions. The proper response to racial demagoguery ought not to have been, and isn't now, a version of multiculturalism that "confuses political equality with cultural identity". (That apt formulation comes from the writer Kenan Malik, who took part in last night's documentary.) It is rather to stress that, while we may belong to ethnic or religious groups, our only civic identity is a shared and equal citizenship under the rule of law.

One of the most interesting features of last night's programme was a comment by the leading human rights lawyer Lord Lester....Lord Lester said this about his old friend [Roy Jenkins]. Towards the end of his life, Jenkins had said to Lester that in the charged debates about integration and assimilation, he (Jenkins) had not perceived the necessity of volubly defending the principle of a secular society. This seems to me exactly right. The problem we have now is not the one predicted by Powellite demagoguery. It is that liberals have taken their own principles for granted, rather than asserting them as a common set of civic values that supersede every other attachment.

This, of course, is the crux of the problems we face today. The divide that matters in Britain today is between an ideology of religious fascism and the rule of secular law.

 

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High-flown nonsense over terror (The Times)

7:10am

I have a piece in today's Times on the US' demand to know details about passengers flying over US airspace. Here's an extract: 

When was the last time you let a bunch of potential terrorists into your house? Indeed, when was the last time you let any group of strangers walk around your house without asking them what they wanted or where they were from?

You haven’t done either of these, of course. You’d be mad not to want to know who they were before you let them in. And you’d have to be especially mad if you had recent experience of people blowing your house up.

...Forgive me for stating the obvious, but isn’t Mr Chertoff being perfectly sensible? Given the experience of 9/11, of the shoe-bomber Richard Reid and of other Islamist terrorists’ attempts to use aircraft as flying bombs, the most basic security precautions surely involve cross-checking passengers’ data against suspicious behaviour patterns. Or should the Americans have no rights to keep out people they consider to be a threat?

The latest issue of The Economist adopts the outraged tone of the objectors, arguing that “risking death alongside American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan makes you a valued ally – unless you want to visit the US. Then you are a security risk and have to pay a hefty fee for a visa . . .” Eh? As if the welcome behaviour of some EU governments in sending soldiers to support the War on Terror means that they are less likely to harbour terrorists. Unfortunately, terrorists are not renowned for deciding that they will not operate from America’s allies.

The real issue, surely, is not the US; it is why we don’t demand the same information about passengers flying over our own airspace.

...The solution to this non-existent problem is straightforward. If you don’t like America’s terms of entry, don’t go.

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Hold the front page

10:46am

For those of you who share my delight at mind-numbingly dull news stories, this one is a treat:

Eurostar train fails to stop at Ebbsfleet

...One couple’s plans for a day trip to Paris went off the rails after the 12.45pm train sped past without stopping last Thursday. Gavin Meeser, 60, of North Road, Cliffe, near Rochester, said they could do nothing but watch as their transport to France whizzed past. "We heard that a signalman had forgotten to tell the driver to stop at Ebbsfleet," he said. "The next train was at 1.15pm, but we had to get off at Lille and wait another 15 minutes before we could get the next train to Paris. "We only arrived about 45 minutes late in the end, but as we were only going for a few hours anyway, it did affect our day."

What a story: a man and a woman arrived 45 minutes late after a train journey.

UPDATE There's a great comment below:

I think the best bit is how it says at the bottom of that article " For FULL story see today's Gravesend Messenger"...

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Bowen's at it again

12:38pm

This Jeremy Bowen comment in a BBC report of yesterday's murders in the Jerusalem yeshiva is about as close to an excuse and justification as I've ever seen:

Dani Speigel, a student from the seminary - called a yeshiva in Hebrew - told the BBC of the loss that his school had suffered.

"Well, it's very hard here in the yeshiva, we're having a very hard time. What people do not understand is that kids, 14 years old, 15 years old, 16 years old, high school kids died here yesterday," he said.

The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen says that the school was no ordinary seminary. It was the ideological cradle of the settler movement in the West Bank, which could be the reason it was targeted.

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Come off it, Denis!

3:54pm

I like Denis MacShane a lot. Politics would be better if there were more MPs like him. However, he's guilty of the most almighty whopper in his New Statesman piece today:

Mainstream Tory MEPs, such as Caroline Jackson, are in despair. In the Financial Times last month, she criticised the "bad manners" of her colleagues towards sister right-wing parties in Europe - in particular Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP and Hague supporter who had compared the mild-mannered German Christian Democrat president of the European Parliament to Hitler.

No he didn't. He did nothing of the sort and Denis is too intelligent not to know that. Here's Daniel Hannan's account of what happened (do read it all):

For a few weeks, I have been blogging about the protest by a handful of MEPs against the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty in anticipation of formal ratification and despite the cancellation of the promised referendums. “Filibuster” would be too grand a name for our little wheeze: “working to rule” would be more like it. After every vote, a group of us would demand the right to explain, in not more than a minute, why we voted as we did. I would end every speech, in playful echo of Cato’s “delenda est Carthago”, with “Pactio Olisipio Censenda Est” — “the Lisbon Treaty must be put to the vote”.

At worst, our protest would occasionally keep MEPs from their lunch for another 20 minutes. But even this was intolerable to the authorities. In plain violation of their own rules of procedure, they demanded — and, this morning, were disgracefully granted — the right arbitrarily to set aside the rules as they sought fit.

I made a point of order to protest. An electoral majority, I said, could not over-rule a constitution. Majority or no, the Parliament still had to follow its own rule book. To do otherwise would be to replace the rule of law with arbitrary government.

I repeated the point I made in this blog last week: that the 1933 Enabling Act had had a technical majority in the Reichstag, but that it opened the door to unconstitutional rule. Whatever else MEPs are, they are not Nazis: many of them have proud records of fighting totalitarianism throughout the world. That is why it was so disappointing to see them resorting to this appalling measure in order to silence dissent.

As I sat down, the EPP leader, Joseph Daul, sprang to his feet and announced that he wanted me thrown out of the group. He had lost patience with my filibustering, he said. Enough was enough.

That's his account. So was he being acurate? These are his exact words:

To disregard the rules under which we operate is indeed an act of arbitrary and despotic rule. It is only my regard for you Mr Chairman and my personal affection for you that prevents me from likening it to the Emachtigungsgesetz of 1933 which was also voted through by a parliamentary majority.

A striking parallel, yes. An ill-advised one, perhaps. But not even in the most stretched construction of his words could they be taken as comparing the chairman to Hitler.

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