Watch what you say. There may be people around who haven’t really been listening
‘Say what you like about servicemen amputees,’ said the comedian Jimmy Carr on stage last week, ‘but we’re going to have a f–—g good paralympic team in 2012.’ Odd to see Patrick Mercer, of all people, calling on him to resign. From what, though? From leaving the house? Maybe Mercer thought this self-employed stand-up comedian was somebody else. Some sort of junior minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, perhaps. Scottish, obviously, with a name like Jimmy. Maybe one of those fat ones who used to hang around with Michael Martin, who all have faces like sanctimonious haemorrhoids. ‘He said what? Well, he should bloody resign. Like I had to.’
You remember Patrick Mercer? He’s a former soldier and a Tory MP, and he was the first person to be sacked from David Cameron’s front bench. His big offence was to use the word ‘nigger’. He didn’t use it in a terribly bad way, although he did not, alas, plead a rap defence. He just mentioned that he’d heard it said a few times as a soldier and hadn’t, in the general scheme of things, felt this to be a terribly big deal. Bang. Gone within a week. Not because he’d offended any actual black people, as far as one could tell, but more because a whole brigade of other people sprang up and started shrieking that he could have done. People vicariously offended on the behalf of others. People, it turns out, a bit like Patrick Mercer.
I’m working on a theory about this sort of thing. It’s pretty fresh and it could probably do with a bit of fine-tuning, but it is basically that anybody who ever calls upon anybody else to resign is wrong and stupid and a faffing hysterical moron. What do you think? Too strong? Ditch the ‘moron’ bit? I don’t know, I sort of think that’s maybe the crux. When people do something badly wrong, they should be sacked. That’s what a boss is for. A PM can sack a minister, MPs can sack a PM, a board can sack a chairman and a producer can sack a TV star. Clamour for that, by all means, but if somebody isn’t going to get the sack, then whatever they’ve done can’t be all that bad.
Who is going to sack Jimmy Carr? The only people who could would be his fans, only his fans don’t seem so terribly bothered. Not even, awkwardly, his fans in the military. And he does seem to have quite a few, which is why all the papers could neatly illustrate their articles about this with pictures of Carr himself standing over soldiers in beds on visits to military hospitals and rehabilitation units. What do you reckon he might be saying in all of those, then? My hunch would be that he might be making jokes. Young squaddie, lying in bed, coming to terms with not having a foot, and Jimmy Carr leans over and tells him to cheer up and think of the para-lympics. How would that go down? I couldn’t express a view with the same confidence as, say, the Sunday Express, but my hunch would be pretty well. Army humour is the bleakest around. If Patrick Mercer was really in a battalion where they’d happily throw the word ‘nigger’ around, you’d think he must have heard worse.
How was this even so offensive, anyway? I’m not always a fan of Jimmy Carr, but this is a brilliant joke. It oozes with admiration for those who ought to be admired, and it kicks out, with a fury, against the waste of it all, the perfect bodies so brutally vandalised for nothing. It’s a joke, almost, without a butt. So no, I don’t think Patrick Mercer was really offended, any more than Bob Ainsworth was, or Liam Fox, or any of the newspapers either. I think they all just decided that they ought to be, and then stopped thinking. Honestly, the fuss we make about libel laws, and discrimination laws, and the effect that whoever we do or don’t let on to Question Time has on free speech, and all that guff. What we ought to be worried about, blatantly, is this. It’s the moral dictatorship of idiots. It’s the way that certain topics become unmentionable, not because you’ll be jailed for saying the wrong thing, but because saying anything at all will spark a deafening and indignant squawking from a horde of people who haven’t really been listening.
To my old college in Cambridge last week to give a talk. I graduated from Emmanuel just over a decade ago, when that nice Mr Blair was all shiny and new. Students have changed.
I wonder if one could chart the general improvements in the British standard of living over the past ten years by looking at the circumstances of the average Oxbridge undergraduate. I think you probably could. In my day we had one telephone to a staircase, and left messages on each other’s doors. They all have mobiles. We wore jeans and fleeces, shopped second-hand and bought exciting t-shirts at markets. Now they’re all gleaming and Topshop and H&M. When we wrote essays, we used pens. Hilarious. Remember pens? Do students still use pens? Can they?
What grabbed me the most, though, were the bikes. I had two bikes as a student. The first was a rust heap, bought for £15, which nearly killed me midway through my second year when the front axle suddenly sheered in half on a hill. The second, at £35, was an investment. God knows what that was. Black, repainted, ancient. These days, the bike sheds at Emmanuel are a gleaming swirl of Ridgeback, Giant, Brompton, Claude Butler and Dahon. They put the racks under the Times to shame. I didn’t see inside any rooms, so I can’t tell you about flat-screen TVs and Nintendo Wiis. I’d bet there were plenty. These students, they don’t do shabby. They don’t have to.
I doubt they have much more money than we did. It just goes a lot further. And because of that, I’d imagine, their expectations go further, too. I know that environmentalism is a dirty word in these parts, particularly with him on the page next door, but for me it shook the received wisdom that the young have these things sorted, and it’s us aged old gits over 30 who are ruining the world with our profligate and excessive lifestyles. Rubbish. Next to them, we’re all basically Gandhi.
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