Image via Wikipedia

And so the race goes on, the gap between the contestants narrowing, the competition fiercer than ever.

Just what will be the next hallmark of stylish exclusivity? Not being mentioned in the Honours List, or not having a tattoo?

Image by divinenephron via Flickr

At this rate, it won’t just be policemen we’re tempted to ask about having nothing better to do with their time.

Last week’s leak of the Lib-Dems’ makeover plans would have been hilarious were it not for the fact that these people are supposed to be helping run the country. As a reminder of just how secondary the electorate’s interests are to politicians’ interest in self-preservation, it was quite sobering.

Not to mention an object lesson in how to make yourselves unelectable. A propos of which, here we go:

1.  Employ a ‘brand adviser’. Unless you feel up to making this country function half-decently, of course, in which case your ‘brand’ tends to take care of itself.

2. Focus on “short-term political expediency”. Or ‘gimmicks’, as it used to be known. So much more fun than all that tedious ‘vision’ and ‘joined-up thinking’ stuff.

3. Make sure everyone knows the way you’ve successfully handled all those hot potatoes that dominate the political landscape in these turbulent times. Like the abolition of slavery.

But there again, let’s cover all the bases here and assume that, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Nick Clegg actually likes the idea of not sinking without trace. Now, the tactics become a whole lot simpler: he simply puts as many miles as he can between his party and its ‘brand adviser’.

One hike in the unemployment statistics for which I’m sure we would all be prepared to excuse him.

Related articles

• How would you rebrand the Lib Dems? (guardian.co.uk)

Image via Wikipedia

Good to see the Morning Star pushing forward the boundaries of quality journalism yesterday.

Their front page banner headline, on view for all to see at newsstands around the country – CITY KNOWS IT’S TAKING THE PISS.

That’s it, is it? The sum total of the Star brains trust’s command of the English language?

And there I was thinking that what separates professional writers from the man in the street is that they take the trouble to convey anger in intelligent prose while Joe Public merely reaches for the first expletive to come to mind.

I know the Internet is supposed to have made everyone a journalist but I had no idea just how much the divide has narrowed.

And how counter-productive for a newspaper with the Morning Star‘s politics. I’m trying to think of a more emphatic way in which its editorial staff could have made themselves look like peasants. But I’m struggling.

Image via Wikipedia

Think of all the scenarios in which you can imagine bargain hunters at work en masse and motorway service stations are unlikely to be among them.

The only commercial scenario in which these ‘hike’ houses are likely to feature prominently, let’s face it, is the  Milking a Captive Audience category.

So hats off, briefly, to the midland motorway service area that offers a bit of a killing to those customers who show up sufficiently late in the day, as I did on Thursday evening.

“Oops, we made too many…now only £1,” read the sticker on a range of sandwiches.

Customers were responding to this rare largesse with such gusto, it occurred to me that with the addition of just a single word, motorway services could be onto a real winner.

“Oops, we made too many profits…now only £1,” plastered on a far greater range of foodstuffs, could revamp the sector’s image.

But then, as the very same service station was retailing cups of tea for £2.10, it’s probably best we don’t hold our breath.

Related articles

• Drivers ‘ripped off’ on motorways (autonetinsurance.co.uk)
• High motorway services prices ‘are safety issue’ (admiral.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Somewhere on the Internet, I’m sure, debate rages long and hard as to how true to the real thing was Spooks, the BBC spy drama that ended for good last weekend.

With no expertise whatsoever in such matters, I wouldn’t dream of joining in any further than to venture that I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the melancholy that lay behind all the action and high-tech skullduggery was indeed art imitating life.

Peter Firth (left), as section head Harry Pearce, captured it brilliantly, from the first series to the last. Whatever the triumph, whatever 11th hour disaster came to naught, Pearce seemed incapable of any emotion more boisterous than quiet relief.

The cares of the western world permanently on his shoulders, his was cynicism that had mutated into a sorrow that could only ever be briefly swatted away and the more I saw of his pained resignation to that fact, the more I began to suspect that his character might be portraying the toll taken by this line of work to a tee.

For while you can derive huge satisfaction from sparing hundreds of lives as a result of your work for the intelligence services, how much collateral damage must you yourself sustain when your working life revolves around trusting no-one, looking repeatedly over your shoulder and having to deal with a heavily blurred line separating your friends from your enemies?

Even if the shoot-outs and car chases are little thinner on the ground when you work for the real MI5, I can easily imagine some people on its payroll being genuinely damaged emotionally by a career that has a one-word mission statement. Suspicion.

They work on battles that never end, that have no rules and that care nothing for whomever gets trampled in their wake. Day, after day, after day. That must exact a price, surely?

It certainly has in my case. After Firth’s tour de force, I may never watch a James Bond film again.

Related articles

• Spook: the final episode,so ludicrously silly it might just be true, review (telegraph.co.uk)

Image via Wikipedia

I suppose that Spiked‘s consistent excellence mean that we were due a stinker sooner or later but Mick Hume’s article on the bigger picture behind the Hillsborough disaster still comes as something of a shock, maybe because it’s precisely the kind of breathless polemic from which Spiked normally takes a step back in search of a better perspective.

The stall is set out early in Hume’s piece…

“…the current narrow focus on the details of exactly who said and did what in Sheffield on 15 April 1989 risks missing the most important factor of all: the wider political context of the state’s war against football supporters in the 1980s”

War? With the real thing still scandalously rumbling away in Afghanistan, Hume might have picked his words more carefully but in fairness, the inadvertent hyperbole does at least fit beautifully with what follows. Football and those who despised it 20 years ago were but a metaphor for class warfare, we learn; football fans were “demonised” by media propaganda, vilified by middle-class society and used as “lab rats on whom police tried out a raft of control measures”.

On this kind of roll, you’d be disappointed if Hume didn’t have a quick stab at equating Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to transform one-man power trips into responsible trade unionism, with the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto. Fear not, he does precisely that.

“Call me a bitter old Red (in every respect),” the Manchester United supporter invites us. Nothing wrong with his mind-reading skills, then.

I think what jars most about the article is the way in which a very pertinent contemporary issue – the bereaved’s hunger for truth – is shrouded in one man’s obsession with the past. Hume indeed, may eventually look back on the following paragraph as self-absorbed condescension worthy of the very worst kind of Tory twit:

“No doubt it is understandable that the bereaved families of the 96 victims…should want every shred of evidence about how and why their loved ones died. For the rest of us, however, this should be more than a question of setting the historical record straight or naming, blaming and shaming a few guilty coppers.”

Step aside, mourners. Man with a real axe to grind coming through.

Only it’s not a real axe. It’s yesterday’s axe. One that loses its edge in the face of scrutiny.

People hated football fans in the ’70s and ’80s because some of them were violent and damaged people and property with a collective callousness that could put the fear of God into you. The truism that it was always only a minority is irrelevant – it was a minority sufficiently significant to present British society with a serious problem that required serious answers.

If it unearthed snobbery among those looking on in distaste, that was just human nature; knee-jerk embroidery on a crisis of public disorder that for so long seemed insuperable. You might expect genuine class warfare to outlive the general demise of hooliganism, yet ‘gentrification’ of football crowds has been a buzzword beloved of cod sociologists everywhere since the fences came down. Funny, that.

I stood in football crowds as Mick Hume did and came in for the same suspicion and brusque treatment from police officers. Where he and I part company is that any irritation I may have felt at the herding and post-game confinement in the visitors’ enclosure was aimed at the knuckle-draggers who’d got  us into this mess, not at the forces of law and order trying to keep a lid on it. So we were subject to a raft of control measures: would Hume have rather they hadn’t bothered?

Truth is, while the Hillsborough families’ desire just to know the full story is as fresh and urgent as it ever was, the venting that rides on its shoulders in this article is way past its sell-by date. When it comes to football, swaying crowds, baton charges and every-day-a-riot don’t live here any more: if you want the new address for Them and Us, ask an Occupier.

By the end, even the author seems to have recognised the limitations of his argument. His grand finale after 2,000 words – “…the authorities play on a different team from us.“

Well blow me down. Who knew?

“I believe the plan is now to retire him. If he raced next year, he would just be winning the same races he won this year.”

Well of course he would: that’s how sport works; with a series of annual renewals that builds tradition and history. I’m trying to think of a sport that produces a completely different set of challenges every year but I’m afraid I’m struggling.

Imagine if everyone had the same attitude to such humdrum routine as Mr Dasmal. Tiger Woods would have retired a decade ago with one of each Major title to his name and Red Rum would have been booed across the Aintree finishing line in 1977, his audience resentful of the fact that it had seen that particular party piece twice already. As for Sir Alex Ferguson: 12 Premiership titles? The poor bloke must be bored out of his mind.

I think Dream Ahead’s owner is being a little bit cute here, hitting upon a silly euphemism with which to mask the same old, same old where the Sport of Kings’ summer code is concerned.

Top-drawer Flat horses retire because their owners feel they have hit the perfect sweet spot between winning enough races to boost their stud value and not losing enough races to prejudice it. Hence, the reign of too many great Flat stallions lasts about as long as a pint of milk: you bunk up their marketability and then retire them pronto – often in the same season – so that they may embark upon an equally lucrative career making babies.

That’s the real reason Dream Ahead may have galloped in anger for the final time. Having several more cracks at winning “the same races he won this year” could possibly make him a legend. Avoiding defeat, however, definitely makes his owners a fortune.

There’s the rub.

Check out this classic of celebrity narcissism from Kennedy’s Radio 2 replacement; confessed from Vanessa Feltz‘ own lips on yesterday’s early morning show.

Now I’ve always cut Ms Feltz some slack over her supposed ‘meltdown’ in Celebrity Big Brother. It’s standard TV hyperbole to label as ‘meltdown’ what you and I would call ‘letting off steam’. Is the woman mad? Absolutely not.

But now I’m wavering: tune in at the 1:11:50 mark, when one listener confides that she wished she could take a tablet that would stop her daughter going to China for 10 months.

Turns out Ms Feltz has been in the same situation, when her own daughter went to work on ambulances in the Middle East (wonder which side of the Green Line that was?)…

“Saying goodbye wasn’t enough,” Feltz recalls. “I suddenly screamed ‘Saskia, I love you more than any other mother in this airport loves her child…’”

Her daughter apparently gave her a withering look, which was probably mild compared to what any parent within earshot would have liked to have given her at that moment.

I’m still not buying ‘mad’ but it would seem I must now grant you ‘delusional’.

Image via Wikipedia

I know the tension must be ratcheted up each new season but there are ways and ways of doing it. And last night, The X Factor chose its nastiest way yet.

As if the producers felt that the humiliation of a deluded woman who clearly needed saving from herself wasn’t enough, last night saw the encore: drag 180 audition survivors from all over Britain to the ludicrously-named ‘Boot Camp’ in London and then immediately send a number of them back home before they even get to sing another note in the competition.

Turns out that the four judges were reviewing audition tapes even while the Boot Campers were unpacking their suitcases, to weed out those who “were never going to make it”. The fact that these were the same four talent-spotting geniuses who okayed these latest rejects in the first place was a detail sadly overlooked in presenter Dermot O’Leary‘s commentary.

It was a mean, spiteful stunt that didn’t care whose hopes it crushed or time it wasted in a bid to feed the hype machine.

And, assuming that it wasn’t his idea, Gary Barlow was the one member of the judging panel with sufficient clout to tell the production team that either they come up with a new ratings ruse or they find a new judge.

Only he didn’t. Barlow, whose tilt at being the new Simon Cowell is rather like watching Aled Jones try to play The Godfather, just looked sternly on and muttered inanities about it being a tough business.

I do like a man who never forgets where he came from.

That I was only ever taught how compound interest works, never that it is one of life’s most powerful forces, is one of the few regrets I have over my own education and having watched the early promise of an endowment policy erode to something somewhat less glamorous over 25 years, without an ounce of contrition from the company that provided it, I am on a personal mission to ensure that my own children are capable of investing their own money in future without recourse to the so-called financial services sector.

As to how much support – genuine support – the Mail can expect from the Government in its endeavour, however, I harbour serious doubts, for it is just a matter of days since revelations that our rulers are considering plans to penalise graduates who repay their student loans early.

What a message to send out. What better way to reinforce the mindset of an irresponsible, clueless age where money is concerned: an age in which bankruptcy is seen no longer as a cause for embarrassment but as a genuine tool in financial planning. An age so clueless that one muppet interviewed by Radio 1′s Newsbeat yesterday was clamouring for an end to cuts because they haven’t achieved anything, as if a double-dip recession is something you see off in a week.

Shamelessly, the Coalition is poised to add its own six penn’orth to this madhouse: dare to display some precocious thrift where your student loan is concerned, be savvy enough to realise that the first rule in any sensible financial strategy must be to cut debt, and you won’t be encouraged or supported, you’ll be fined.

It’s okay for the Government to cut deep and fast in trimming its own debt, apparently, but you plebs in higher education must wait. Turns out that George Benson and Whitney Houston were wrong; children aren’t our future in the eyes of this shower but cash cows to be milked ad infinitum.

Shame on them and to the newspaper that would spit into this wretched wind, the best of British.