Here are two things to bear in mind when reading about the News of the World phone-message hacking. The first is that all tabloid papers are even more disgusting in their methods than people realise. They act like a privatised secret police. To them, there is nothing more thrilling than a pretty, underage, murdered girl, and they would have no scruples about any means of getting information about her. But the other thing to remember is that the persecutors of the News of the World are not themselves disinterested seekers after truth. The BBC believes that its power depends on beating off Rupert Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB, so when the Milly Dowler, Soham and July 7 ‘twists’ appeared, the corporation leapt to it without any of the normal care about how these were only allegations at this stage, or any pertinent questions about why, after years of doing nothing, the police were suddenly pushing this information into the public domain. It was striking that the Today programme chose Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, to tell the story. Why is tabloid behaviour towards Milly Dowler’s mobile phone a business story? Because the BSkyB bid is being decided now, and the BBC’s monopoly depends on stopping it.
On Monday, I attended the great Ronald Reagan celebrations in London. At the banquet in Guildhall, Condoleezza Rice and William Hague spoke about how Reagan’s fight in the cause of freedom was as relevant, a century after he was born, as ever. One wants to believe this, of course, but I’m afraid I don’t quite. Hague is right that the Arab Spring exhibits the desire for freedom which was so evident in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. But the great difference between then and now is that the United States has somehow ceded the moral leadership which, under Reagan, it possessed. No other power has taken that leadership, and it is true that President Obama has ensured that the presidency remains the most interesting political office in the world, but nevertheless, things are different now. Reagan — and Margaret Thatcher — understood something so simple that policy elites tended to miss it, which was that the Soviet system, though threatening, was also moribund. The mainly European peoples enslaved by communism could see that there was a better way of life available, often yards from where they were living, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In the Muslim world today, the regimes are certainly moribund, but the alternative is much less clear, much more contested. And because of the credit crunch, it is much harder to argue now, as one could then, that the way of life represented by the United States, the United Kingdom or the European Union is unambiguously on the side of the ordinary citizen. The Reagan jamboree was designed to renew hope, but I’m afraid it made me feel nostalgic for what the West has lost.
The Eton Society, better known as Pop, is 200 years old. It is the self-electing body of prefects at the school, entitled to wear spongebag trousers, fancy waistcoats and, until about 30 years ago, to beat (‘tan’) other boys. On Saturday, Pop’s celebratory dinner was addressed by its second most famous former member (the most famous being Prince William), Boris Johnson. The New Statesman mischievously suggested that Boris would use this platform to launch his bid for re-election as London Mayor. But what he actually did, I gather, was to mock the unease an Etonian tends to feel if he didn’t get into Pop. He invited his audience to feel sorry for such people, and to recognise, caringly, that the disappointment may drive them on to great efforts in later life — into 10 Downing Street, to take a current example. ‘Floreat Etona,’ cried Boris, expanding the school motto, ‘Floreant rejecti!’.
In his just reissued book The King’s English, the late Kingsley Amis identified ‘spelling-pronunciation’ as a bad thing. He meant ‘the tendency to allow or encourage the way a word is spelt to influence the way it is spoken’. This sounds silly (imagine if the way any word was spelt bore no resemblance to how it was pronounced), but he is right. Spelling, after all, comes after the fact. It is the formalisation of what was first of all said: it should not dictate the way people say things. Thus the word condom, Amis complained, is now pronounced ‘condom’. I have even heard the word London pronounced as written. This week, the BBC said that, in Canada, the ‘Duchess’ of Cambridge was being rapturously received, pronouncing the word as if no one had ever said it before.
If you are feeling unkind, you will enjoy watching Ed Miliband’s BBC interview last week, entitled ‘These strikes are wrong’, on the internet. Asked a variety of questions about the one-day public sector strike by teachers and others, Mr Miliband says almost exactly the same thing — about getting round the table, parents and public being ‘let down by both sides’ etc — again and again. Bloggers on YouTube take this as proof that Mr Miliband is an automaton, and so, certainly, he appears. But what the film really illustrates is the difficulty for a politician in tailoring his remarks for the modern electronic media. Mr Miliband is following the technique perfected (not the right word) by Gordon Brown. This is to recognise that the clip of one’s remarks actually broadcast on news bulletins is usually between 16 and 22 seconds long. If one wants only one message to get across, therefore, one keeps on saying the same thing to ensure that it will be broadcast. But in this case, Mr Miliband did not realise that he was doing an ‘as-live’, and so the whole lot, in all its confected, repetitious boredom, was broadcast. Goodness modern politics is humiliating.
Next time you hear yet another person, speaking of the euro debt crisis, say that people are ‘kicking the can down the road’, kick the man down the road.
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