Narcolepsy inducer

I'll be on Sky News tomorrow at 12.30 (ish) talking about Gordon Brown.

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Dead Israelis are invisible to Ian Jack

Ian Jack is fast becoming my least favourite columnist; a man who seems to deeply ignorant and utterly in thrall to prevailing liberal attitudes. A few Saturdays ago he wrote a piece which bemoaned the end of "the grammar school years" without considering that the cause might be, er...the end of grammar schools.

Today, he offers us 1200 words on how: 

Israel's behaviour towards its captive Palestinian population is profoundly racist, oppressive and unjust.

According to United Nations figures, there are now 621 Israeli army checkpoints and barriers spread throughout the West Bank - this week Tony Blair was celebrating the good news that he had persuaded the Israelis to remove four of them (though "subject to Israeli security assessments") and at most of those we passed through we witnessed the same kind of caprice in action: Palestinians of all kinds - women, children, old men with hospital appointments - sent back for "security reasons" or because they had the wrong piece of paper, journeys abandoned or started again by circuitous routes.

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Waffle

I've just recorded a discussion on political memoirs with Steve Richards and Lord Howe for A Week in Westminster. If you're so inclined, you can hear it on Saturday on Radio 4 at 11am. 

UPDATE: It's here.

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Boris' first mistake?

Hmmm. I've a feeling this could turn out to be Boris' first mistake:

Newly elected London mayor Boris Johnson will return to the Daily Telegraph - where he is expected to earn about £250,000 a year for his weekly column.

Johnson will resume writing for the newspaper in the summer and write the column at weekends for publication on Monday or Tuesday, his spokesman Guto Hari confirmed.

In the end he'll be judged on how he does as mayor, but I do think it's a mistake for him to appear so cavalier about his main job.

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Shut up, Charles

Prince Charles was busy abusing his position again this morning, lecturing us on deforestation on the Today programme. 

This man has a choice to make: it he wants to take part in political debates, step aside as heir to the throne. If he wants the privileges that come with his position: shut up and behave like his mother.

There was a line I liked, however, when he was speaking about lobbying President Sarkozy:

I had a word with President Sarkozy the other day. I had to pick him up at the airport and take him to Windsor, so I spoke to him then.

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Over and out

There's a bizarre post by Conor Ryan on the Democrat nomination process:

A 67-26 victory in West Virginia by the woman whom the media has been declaring a lame duck is a reminder why this contest is not over yet. The maths of the Democratic race may dictate that Obama is the likely candidate, but the maths of the Presidential election are rather more complicated, and suggest Hillary is more likely to beat McCain. 

The argument about who'd be best to beat McCain is now irrelevant.  Obama will be the nominee. All Hillary is doing is getting her 'I told you so's in now, ready for 2012. And turning it into a self-fulfilling prophesy by expanding, rather than minimising, voters' splits.

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Hillary's downfall

I know yoiu might think yet another Downfall skit is is one too many, but this one really is fantastic (via Antoine Clarke):

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Worthy of Der Sturmer 

Jonathan Steele's piece in the Guardian today wouldn't merit any special attention were it not for the image which accompanies it. The piece is the usual drivel about US foreign policy being in hock to you know who:

Although he repeatedly outlines a general principle that the US should talk to every important player without preconditions, he does not apply this in the Middle East. In 2006, Obama blamed Hizbullah for the war with Israel and did not join the appeals for Israel to accept a ceasefire. Last month he criticised Jimmy Carter for talking to Hamas. "We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel's destruction," he said.

As I say, I'd not concern myself with Steele normally; his warped view of the Middle East is regularly trotted out. But this image appears below his piece:

The inference - not so much as inference as a statement screamed at high volume - is that Israel runs the US. The image is about as classic an anti-semitic trope as exists. Indeed, it's almost exactly the sort of thing highlighted by last year's All Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism report (you can read the government's progress report here).

A think tank with which I am involved, the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, is carrying out research on just this sort of thing. As the report puts it (the work is being funded by DCLG):

Given the difficulties in clarifying the character of antisemitic discourse, the proposed research project aims:

To identify and illuminate the main component parts of anti-Semitic discourse, such as stereotypes, allusions, characterisations, prejudicial topologies and revisions of core antisemitic ideas

This will include an examination of how criticism of Israel and Zionism can cross-over into and become polluted by antisemitism through the expression or assumption of core antisemitic concepts.

The research will be published in September 2008.

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Plonk

In an otherwise somewhat sycophantic post about John Pilger, I rather liked this:

Once, it was said, Pilger had a house in Tuscany and invited some friends round for lunch. One of the guests sipped a glass of vino and said to Pilger: “Where does this wine come from?”

Pilger gestured grandly to his estate. “From the bottom of my garden,” he said.

Said the guest: ”Doesn’t travel very well, does it?”

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The serial killers (The Guardian)

I have a piece in the Guardian today about political memoirs. Here's an extract:

According to the rumours, Cherie Blair has received around a million pounds for her book and Prescott half a million. Nice work if you can get it, and lubricant enough to prise open the most tightly shut mouth.

But even if the Prescott family's other options for securing an income are somewhat more limited than the Blairs' - Cherie Blair is at the pinnacle of her lucrative profession, with a high-earning husband, while Prescott has no discernible skills to offer and a wife who does not work - it's not true that money is the only factor behind political memoirs. The first insider accounts of the Blair government, after all, came from Jonathan Powell, Blair's former chief of staff, and Lord Levy, his former fundraiser. Powell's advance will not have been huge, and he now has a well-paid job at Morgan Stanley bank. And Lord Levy is already a multimillionaire. Neither needs the money.

What they want is a hearing. Cherie Blair, Powell and Levy have had one thing in common for the past 11 years: they were regularly attacked but they kept - mostly - silent. Now Tony Blair is out of office the rules have changed, and they want to put their side. I suspect that they'd each have paid a publisher to produce their books if that had been the only option.

As for Prescott: far from keeping silent, his mangled syntax seemed to be a non-stop mechanism for noise production. But even in his case, I'm sure that putting his own side of things was important in his decision to publish.

...The real damage of such revelations is usually in the timing. Cherie Blair's extracts appeared on Saturday out of thin air - the book was expected in October. But when better than now to capitalise on Gordon Brown's collapse? In 1991, Norman Fowler published a famously dull memoir, Ministers Decide. It sank with barely a trace. Had he published it before Margaret Thatcher left office, while she was in political decline, even his modest criticisms would have had an impact.

My book was due to be published in the spring of 2005 but when news of Blunkett's affair broke (to my chagrin, as I had the details), I told the publishers that if we went for it now, we would have a triumph; if we stuck to the planned publication date, we would have a turkey, as the home secretary would be long gone by then. And so I rushed to finish it, the Daily Mail brought forward the serialisation, and 10 days later it was in the shops.

The key to these books is the serialisation. They turn a book into a news story. And they provide the real money behind the mega-deal advances. I made some money from sales but almost all my advance came from the serialisation. The same will be true for Cherie Blair and Prescott.

You can be sure that both of them will profess astonishment at the fuss being made. Those who use such books to wound or settle scores rarely accept responsibility for their actions. Blunkett's office, for instance, expressed anger and bewilderment at the whole thing, saying they had no idea what was in my book or that it was being brought forward.

Out of courtesy, I had contacted them to tell them it was coming out early, and precisely when each extract would appear. As for the content: months before, I had sent them the first draft and two of his staff had gone over it with me word for word, asking me to take some comments out - each of which I did (they have never appeared anywhere, and were far, far worse than anything which I published). They signed off on every other dot and comma.

You don't need me to tell you that, when it comes to political memoirs, there's always a hidden story.

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