Whenever I do pundit telly, which isn’t very often, I always want to answer every question by saying, ‘How the hell should I know?’ Only once, though, have I done so.
Whenever I do pundit telly, which isn’t very often, I always want to answer every question by saying, ‘How the hell should I know?’ Only once, though, have I done so. That was on Question Time Extra, about three years ago, which may have been my first ever live TV outing.
From the start, it didn’t go well. I didn’t inadvertently call a Cabinet minister ‘Mr Shitsinabox’ or anything, like the real pros have started doing (who can wait, incidentally, until Liam Fox is next on the Today programme?) but still, I can’t pretend I excelled. The main thing I remember is the show starting, and seeing my own feet on the studio monitor, clad in one red sock and one blue one. I tried to shuffle them out of view and repeatedly failed; I think because seeing yourself on live TV is the opposite of seeing yourself in a mirror. This way and that they danced, while my upper body remained still and my head nodded sombrely at a question about troop casualties. I imagine I looked rather like a Thunderbird.
Anyway, eventually the host asked me what I’d do about something. I can’t remember what it was, only that it was something I didn’t have a clue about, and that I replied by saying, ‘Well, I’d start by not asking a gossip writer.’ This was the wrong thing to say, partly because jokes don’t work on live broadcasts, especially when you’re talking about troop casualties, but also because they plainly were asking a gossip writer (i.e. me) and if they didn’t want to do that, they wouldn’t have invited me on. As, indeed, they subsequently haven’t, ever again.
I don’t trust people who have coherent views about stuff. I’ve written about this before, I know, but I can feel that 2011 is going to be a year of firm beliefs, and it scares me. They had Michael Howard and Ken Clarke sparring on the radio, battling away again over whether or not prison works. How do they know? How can they avoid saying, ‘Well, there’s arguments on both sides, it’s a bit of a bugger’?
I don’t know if WikiLeaks is a good idea or not. I thought it was, then I thought it wasn’t. If I’m honest, I initially thought the latter mainly because I saw a picture of Julian Assange, and he looks like the sort of man whose hand, if you shook it, would be really cold. Then I thought it with a bit more conviction, because his leaks seemed to be bad for the world, then I briefly changed my mind because they seemed to be good for the world, then I changed it again, because they seemed bad again. At no point, crucially, do I think I was wrong about this. There’s some good, there’s lots of bad. Verdict: hmmm. And you try getting a column out of that.
Or tuition fees. I was broadly in favour of them, but now that Britain’s under-21s have erupted in near-unanimous howls of betrayed rage, I’m considerably less so. ‘What sort of person are you [I hear you cry], to show such weakness in the face of unrest?’ To which I would reply, ‘A normal one? A not-mad one?’ You might think the coalition’s plans are flawless, but I’d suggest that the fact that almost everybody they are supposed to help hates them is, in fact, a quite glaring flaw. It doesn’t seem fair that Vince Cable is getting slammed for floundering around, wringing his hands and wailing ‘I don’t know what to do!’ all the time. That’s what I’d do. Nick Clegg’s line seems to be, ‘You might think you’re annoyed, students, but actually you aren’t.’ But they are. And they’re going to keep being. And overarching rightness or wrongness doesn’t really come into it.
Conviction, that’s what I lack. A former minister once told me that the secret to his success wasn’t being right or wrong, but being decisive. In government I suppose that’s important, otherwise a country begins to flounder, in a state of what you might call Brownian motion. But when talking heads get off the fence, it always makes me edgy. Lean over it, by all means. But down in the boggy ground, you lose sight of the other side.
But I’m not entirely conviction-free. These stories from Egypt about sharks trying to eat people have been making me think of my own policy towards eating shark. I’d forgotten I had one. I formed it years ago, when I lived in Africa.
My theory is this: it’s a bad idea to eat a creature that might feasibly eat you back. Actually, it’s not a theory as such, more a superstition. Still, it’s stuck with me. If a cow or a pig or a sheep wants to jump me in a dark alley and have a go, so be it; that’s their prerogative and I’ll take my chances. But no shark, and no crocodile, either. The carnivores, they’ve got nothing on me. Nonsense? Fine. But it’s a conviction, and it’s mine, and you did ask.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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