‘There’s no point in being a liberal if you’re just a furry little herbivore on the edges of British politics,’ declared Paddy Ashdown on Sunday on Private Passions (Radio 3). It was a revealing comment. The programme went out last weekend after the LibDem’s disastrous results in the local elections, but it would have been recorded much earlier. Ashdown was meant to be talking about his favourite music, and why he had chosen it, but he could not resist telling us what he thought of the Con-Lib Coalition. ‘This [being in government] is not going to deliver a dividend for the LibDems until a little before the next [general] election,’ he said. Might he not have avoided the topic, knowing that he was not yet sure what would happen on 3 May? But then, of course, he’s a politician, now a life peer, and talking is his profession, his leitmotif, his reason for being.
This Radio 3 conversation with musical interludes was peppered with the strangest of comments from Ashdown. Most striking, however, was the way that the presenter, Michael Berkeley (who composes music as well as knowing more about it than Ashdown ever will), was scarcely given an opportunity to say anything about the pieces Ashdown had chosen. Yet usually Berkeley shares his enthusiasm, his knowledge, with his guest of the week, taking us on a journey of deepening understanding and reflection.
Ashdown revealed that he first heard Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony at the age of 11 while ‘walking through my prep school’. Not his fault he was sent away to school but so pompous in the way he phrased that, confirming yet again the elitist bias of the Westminster brigade. He probably thought he was safe to say it on Radio 3, not realising that its listener base is changing, broadening. Then again, Ashdown airily discussed with Berkeley, on air, his religious beliefs, confessing he’s not sure about God. Nothing unusual in that. But then, out of the blue, he pronounced, ‘I could as easily have been a Muslim.’
What on earth did he mean? The idea behind what he said is probably rather fine, both liberal and multicultural. It was the flip way he said it that was weird and discomfiting in a politician of his stature. As if belief is a whim, rather than a commitment.
Nothing flip about Andrew Rawnsley’s new series Leader Conference (Radio 4, Wednesday evenings) in which a group of journalists sit around a table discussing what they should be writing about for next day’s ‘virtual’ newspaper. ‘Leader’ is short for leading article, that page of comment pieces at the heart of any newspaper, telling us, the readers, what we should be thinking about the queues at Heathrow, the potential consequences of the French election, or (and there’s always a ‘soft’ item on this page) Tom Jones versus Engelbert Humperdinck.
Rawnsley and his crew had only 45 minutes to come to their decision about which three topics should be the leaders for the day. That’s the time usually spent in such meetings if the newspaper is a daily production. You have to work quickly, eliminate the detail, focus on what matters, have a clear vision of who your readers (or listeners) are, settle for a compromise. If not, there’ll be a big hole in the paper next day.
It’s a model way of working. And, despite what Rupert Murdoch and News International have tried to do to journalism, newspapers are still probably the best way to protect a democracy. Hacking scandals, tawdry tabloids, mean-spirited exposés apart, we need their daily protection from the hubris of the rich and powerful. Another series on the same lines could perhaps take us inside the workings of a parliamentary select committee? How revealing might that be?
If you live in Rotherhithe, Birmingham, Seattle, Delft, Qatar, Newcastle, you might already know that libraries, far from being in the doldrums because of digital competition, are experiencing a renaissance, with millions being spent on state-of-the-art new buildings. In Jonathan Glancey’s The Library Returns (Radio 4, Wednesday), we discovered that libraries are changing from the old ‘hush’ environment to the spanking new ‘buzz’ environment.
It sounds dreadful. No more quiet rooms, filled with those wonderful large tables on which to spread your papers. No more stacks of shelves, lined with books often serendipitously connected. No more date stamps and card indexes. And instead huge glassy spaces, where you can listen to music, surf the net, spend hours playing computer games.
But actually I think I’ve been converted. As the librarian in Delft, who runs an online radio station all about libraries, explained, ‘Books don’t protest when a library closes …People do…Democracy is sharing stories and listening to other people, and you can do that in the library.’
Comments