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Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking by Pauline Prescott | Book review
Mar 14th
Pauline Prescott’s story is one of remaining plucky and loyal through good times and bad. A national treasure, says Rachel Cooke
It’s easy to sneer at Pauline Prescott, to take the mickey out of her fondness for such things as cutting the crusts off sandwiches, and plenty of people already have. They should be ashamed of themselves. The older I get, the more I admire women like her: kind, self-effacing, loyal, plucky, polite, always beautifully turned out. Her pleasure in simple things – a decent bun, the occasional illicit glass of hotel champagne – speaks to the deracinated Yorkshirewoman in me, who was brought up to believe that the very worst thing you can be is spoilt. Midway through her autobiography, Prescott refers to the “Beverley days out” she enjoys with her girlfriends. If you don’t know Beverley, the minster town that passes for posh in the East Riding, this phrase will be lost on you. But it wasn’t lost on me. The treat of Beverley! Faster than you can say “Dorneywood”, I was on the internet, looking for a hotel.
Dorneywood, traditionally the Chancellor’s grace and favour house, is where Pauline and her husband spent their weekends during the decade he was deputy prime minister. The original plan, on his elevation in 1997, was that he would get Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s retreat. But Pauline took one look and thought: too big, much as she did when she first saw the couple’s rather grand castellated home in Hull (“All I could think was: how am I going to clean all this?”). This is Pauline all over: easier to get Cherie Blair to admit that Tony cocked up Iraq than to turn Pauline Prescott’s head. Of course, if it did happen to turn, not a hair would stir in the process. When she married her merchant seaman beau in 1961, in a satin dress from Nola Gowns of Chester, her day was ruined by, among other things, the fact that her “industrial-strength” hairspray melted the diamante on her tiara, spattering her back-combed hair with silver. In her book, Pauline pays dutiful lip service to her husband’s Labour values; when he first stood for parliament, she made him the biggest, reddest rosette you’ve ever seen. But you can tell that what she really believes in is the power of the can, be it hairspray or furniture polish.
Pauline Tilston was born in Chester in 1939, the daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaner. As she tells it in Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking, the family is poor but happy, and Pauline, a keen dancer, dreams only of becoming a television “topper”. Then, calamity. Her beloved father dies suddenly; her brother contracts TB and is exiled to a sanitorium; her mother suffers an industrial accident at a local laundry. It’s all a bit John Braine at this point. Life, however, picks up when Pauline, beautiful and by now a hairdresser, begins dating an American serviceman called Jim. She likes Jim so much she gives him her bronze tap-dancing medal as a keepsake. He is married but intends divorcing his wife, or so he claims. When he leaves for home, Pauline is certain that he will return and claim her.
You know what’s coming next. Poor old Pauline, who is only 16, discovers that she is pregnant. Jim does not return, and his girl is dispatched to St Bridget’s House of Mercy, a home for unwed mothers, where the nuns encourage her to scrub the floors because “this helps get the baby’s head into position”. Pauline’s mother insists she cannot keep her baby – there is no money – and, having resisted the idea of adoption for three long years, during which time her son, Paul, remains in state care, she signs the papers. By this time, Pauline is seeing John Prescott, whom she met at a bus stop (their first date was a trip to the cinema where her Uncle Wilf played the Wurlizter). Now, there is plenty to be said about Prescott and the way he carries on; when I interviewed him, he flung his legs over the arms of his chair and pointed his groin at me like a gun. But he comes out of this period faultlessly, often travelling with Pauline to visit Paul, and, unlike his mother, never making her feel in the slightest bit ashamed. Given the time, and their social class, is it any wonder that she married him?
John decrees that Pauline must stay in his constituency with their own two sons when he is in Westminster, so no exciting New Labour gossip in her book’s dull middle section. Yes, she discovers that her husband is bulimic – food keeps disappearing – but as her mother says: “It could have been worse, Pauline. John could have become an alcoholic, and that would have been much more expensive.” Flip through a few pages, however, and the story picks up. The tabloids find Paul, a Tory-voting military policeman, and they are joyfully reunited. Then John confesses to an affair with Tracey Temple, his diary secretary. I imagine that Pauline found telling her ghost writer about this extremely painful; certainly, she’s coy so far as the, er, ins and outs go. But you cheer when she describes her coping mechanism: her downstairs loo, which she is doing up, a project that cannot be derailed. Lipstick, mascara, a permanently boiling kettle: these things comprise Pauline’s armour, and it’s John, not her, who, some days later, must nervously inquire if their marriage is over. Even better, as she seems to know, these events, combined with her cherishable cameos in the television shows her husband has made since leaving government, have since turned our heroine into a bona fide national treasure. At Mr Chu’s of Hull, the Prescotts’ favourite restaurant, it’s now Pauline’s beautifully manicured hand that people secretly want to shake, and I don’t blame them. She’s great. A peach,and a trooper.
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Famous, Rich and Jobless; Jobless; Inside John Lewis; Wonders of the Solar System | TV review
Mar 14th
It’s very hard to care about minor celebrities pretending to be out of work when a documentary about real unemployed people shows how difficult it is
Of the many difficulties facing the unemployed, perhaps the most overlooked is the lack of empathy expressed by obscure celebrities. Most of us are aware of the hardship, the boredom and the social stigma suffered by the jobless. Up until now, however, few have been prepared to acknowledge that the out-of-work also have to endure not knowing if the woman who used to be married to Noel from Oasis and that Irish bloke off the gardening programme fully appreciate their plight.
To its deathless credit, Famous, Rich and Jobless was no longer willing to ignore this shameful social injustice. For if millions are going to live without the prospect of secure employment, it must surely help to know that Emma Parker Bowles recognises what they’re going through. No doubt the unemployed would argue that it would help more if they knew who Emma Parker Bowles was, but they have to accept that reality TV is very different from most contemporary job markets, in that there is an excess of work and a shortage of skilled workers.
When it comes down to it, living in a bedsit in Hartlepool or Hackney for four days and pretending to be unemployed doesn’t feature high on the list of minor celebrities’ ambitions. Your former cricket players and young soap actors are looking for their agents to secure a slot on Strictly Come Dancing or, failing that, Dancing on Ice – something with a spangly uniform and an attractive partner, who might wish to pay testament to the onetime sportsman’s sexual magnetism in an exclusive tabloid interview.
But who wants to ponce around the depressed areas of Britain looking for non-existent work? It’s the TV equivalent of cockle picking. So the economic laws of supply and demand force programme makers to recruit from a more desperate workforce, whether that means extraterrestrial, older, completely forgotten or never known. In this case it meant Parker Bowles, Larry Lamb, Meg Mathews and Diarmuid Gavin.
This game quartet was variously described as “four well-known personalities” and “four famous volunteers”. Once the mark of fame’s flexibility was that it was possible to be famous for being famous. That seems like an impossibly rigorous qualification now that the concept of fame has been stretched to include those who are famous without being famous. Let’s not quibble over the magnitude of the celebrities, though, and instead concentrate on the size of their efforts.
Sent to Hackney, Gavin, who turned out to be a TV gardener, set about pounding the streets at seven in the evening in search of employment. He inquired in several forlorn shops and takeaways, but in each place he was rebuffed. “They’re always amused that you’re looking for a job,” Gavin said after his unsuccessful search. “And the amusement comes out of embarrassment, I think, because it’s one of those taboos.”
That’s certainly one explanation. Another might be surprise that a middle-aged Irishman was out at night in Hackney seeking work in an Asian corner shop. And yet another could be a certain nervous mirth at the sight of the camera crew gathered just behind the shoulder of the garden designer.
Either way, having been quite sanguine about his prospects, by the end of the evening Gavin was emoting away before the camera like, well, a reality TV participant. According to Jobless, a documentary concerned with real unemployed people, research shows that “within just five weeks, those who lose their jobs start to experience low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and insomnia”. Within just five hours of not finding a job, Gavin reported all those symptoms. That’s what television can do to you. As a result, he completely rethought his previous views and gave impassioned voice to the bottomless frustration of the workless. Not since George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London has there been such a searing indictment of economic deprivation.
Then he went and ruined it all by finding a job the next morning. Mathews and Parker Bowles also found gainful employment with similar haste, which was impressive given that their employers had to put up with the accompanying video cameras and sound booms and TV personnel. If only the government was prepared to arrange camera crews for all job interviews, unemployment could be wiped out in a few days.
Only Larry Lamb, veteran of the legendary ferry epic Triangle, and late of Gavin and Stacey and EastEnders, refused to play the game. He didn’t bother looking for work, preferring to focus on surviving on the job-seeker allowance of a tenner a day. He ate tuna out of a can and was found by the show’s two “experts”, neither of whom was able to demonstrate their expertise, walking around on Hartlepool beach. Taken to task for not looking for work, he testily replied: “I’ve enough money to sustain me, so what’s the panic?”
The obvious answer, of course, was “the ratings!” But the experts preferred to mount the more enterprising argument that Lamb had entered into a state of denial common to many who find themselves without work. Like everything else about the programme, it was the purest nonsense. Lamb was just an actor on the lam, turning a bit-part in provincial theatre into starring role of self-discovery. He also managed to save half of his 40 quid.
The apparent lessons of Famous, Rich and Jobless are that it’s easy to find work and not difficult to live on the job-seeking allowance. As such, it was possibly the silliest and most misconceived piece of television since The Trench, the documentary that tried to recreate the horror of the first world war by getting a bunch of young men to sit around in a big muddy hole.
There was not a pseudo-celebrity to be seen in Jobless, which was only one of its commendable features. Following several families of the unemployed, this astutely made film showed the anxiety and uncertainty that are the exhaust fumes of redundancy, and did so with wit and warmth. There was a lot of quiet desperation but also some uplifting scenes of old-fashioned solidarity and familial support.
In one scene, Derek, a Scottish journalist, visited a job centre with bright surfaces and optimistic logos – “jobs for everyone”. His interviewer explained that she could input “journalist” into her computer and instantly see what work was on offer. The answer came back: “No vacancies”. Ah, the wonders of modern technology.
It seems to have been a special recession gloom week at the BBC. Inside John Lewis was a dully formulaic documentary that had little to say beyond diminished sales and reduced profits. No one wants to buy running machines any more, apparently, but there’s been a run on plastic cocktail glasses. There’s a snapshot of the British in 2010: the treadmill has ground to a halt and we’re drowning our sorrows in plastic cups.
Thank heavens for the bigger perspective offered by Wonders of the Solar System. In five billion years the sun will implode. “And when it goes,” explained Professor Brian Cox, “it really will be the end of us all.” As with everything he says, it was expressed with the breathless awe of the teenage chess prodigy who’s just been introduced to marijuana.
But perhaps we’d all sound like that if we’d been whizzed from Death Valley to the Arctic, via Varanasi in India, the Amazon and South America’s Atacama desert. If Cox does rave on a bit about the sun’s incredible power, he can’t be accused of hot air. He’s a physicist, remember: it’s solar wind.
Scene of the week
It’s a tall order to deliver on a promise of a “substantial” interview when you’re surrounded by a lilac backdrop of flowerpots and ornamental urns, but David Cameron rose to the challenge on The Alan Titchmarsh Show (ITV1). “Coronation Street or EastEnders?” asked his greenfingered inquisitor. A nation paused and the thoughts of political historians turned reflexively to the great television stand-offs of yesteryear – John Nott storming out on Robin Day or Jeremy Paxman repeating the same question to Michael Howard 12 times. This was clearly a moment of that order. The mark of a great statesman is to be able to display equanimity under intense pressure. So it was that the leader of the opposition declared an addiction to neither soap. “I like escapism,” he said, explaining his taste for Lark Rise to Candleford. When his job involves taking on “the Titch”, we can all understand why.
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A Day at the Racists | Theatre review
Mar 9th
Finborough, London
There’s a lively online debate about whether theatre can “beat” the BNP. Obviously, it can’t single-handed. But what it can do, as this vigorous if unsubtle play by Anders Lustgarten proves, is expose the gulf between the party’s emollient tactics and its extremist views.
Lustgarten’s play depends upon two rather shaky propositions. One is that a discontented old Marxist militant would be naive enough to fall for BNP propaganda and become a party agent. The other – harder to believe – is that the BNP would field a mixed-race, female candidate. But, even if the play is built on wobbly foundations, it successfully punctures the divisions within the BNP. Gina, the candidate, wants to appeal to traditional notions of patriotism. The party leader suggests that political speeches are like erotic films: you hint at the naughty bits without revealing them. Meanwhile, the regional boss is an unreconstructed racist who fantasises about a return to an all-white Britain.
David Edgar’s Destiny, which explored the muddled motives that drive people into ultra-right groups, remains the best play on the subject. But Lustgarten latches on to something important: the ability of the BNP to shift its stance depending on its audience. The party leader privately talks of “third world sewage”, but one of the best scenes shows Pete, the Marxist convert, gaining new recruits by leading a community rubbish-clearing day.
Ryan McBryde’s production, though a bit shouty, contains good performances. Though no play can “beat” the BNP, this play confirms it would be crazy for theatre to bury its head in the sand.
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The Greatest Trade Ever: How John Paulson Bet Against the Markets and Made $20 Billion by Gregory Zuckerman
Mar 7th
The story of one man’s refusal to believe in the health of the housing boom tells us a great deal about the financial crisis, but is not a gripping general read, says Heather Stewart
The mania that gripped investors in the wild bubble years of the 00s is widely portrayed as a universal affliction, but in fact a few stubborn souls refused to succumb. This book tells the story of one such refusenik, hedge fund manager John Paulson, who was not only sceptical about the health of the over-inflated US housing market, but bet against it – and won.
The scale of Paulson’s big bet, “the greatest trade ever”, as Greg Zuckerman describes it, was extraordinary. By piling into complex “credit default swaps” against mortgages – in effect, insurance policies that would pay out if homeowners defaulted – his fund made an unthinkable $15bn (£9.8bn) in a year, $4bn of which he took home himself.
On a single morning in 2007, when gung ho sub-prime lender New Century announced it was in trouble, Paulson’s fund clocked up gains of $1.25bn – more than his idol George Soros made in his notorious gamble against sterling in 1992, when Britain was forced out of the European exchange rate mechanism.
Zuckerman also tells the stories of others who placed similar, much smaller trades, such as west coast property developer Jeffrey Greene, a friend of Paulson’s before they fell out over his refusal to invest in his hedge fund. All these pessimistic investors were mavericks or outsiders, underlining how tough it was in those heady days to stand alone against the herd of charging bulls.
Zuckerman, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, is excellent at explaining the financial engineering that left bank bosses with only the vaguest understanding of their own balance sheets, and the trail that leads from bafflingly complex securities such as “collateralised debt obligations” to cash-strapped homeowners across the US. He is less successful, though, in turning his tale into a compelling human story. Whenever he sketches in biographical details, they tend either to be clunky and implausible, or to remind us how dull financiers are. One of Paulson’s few distinguishing characteristics is apparently that, notwithstanding his immense wealth, he still travels by train. When, after leading a playboy lifestyle well into his 40s, he decided to settle down, he wrote a list of the characteristics a suitable wife would need. At the top was “cheerful”. “He quickly realised there was a woman he was attracted to who fit the bill and was sitting nearby: his assistant, Jenny.”
Greg Lippman, a Deutsche Bank trader and one of the few insiders at a Wall Street investment bank to bet against the sub-prime market, “was so over the top and had so many affectations – such as pronouncing the world ‘tranche’ with a soft ch, as if to remind colleagues that it was the French word for slice – that his colleagues grew to enjoy his company.” Crazy.
Some of the best books about Wall Street – Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, and Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed, for example – are packed with larger-than-life characters whom we end up either rooting for or loathing. Admittedly, Zuckerman’s subjects offer him scant material, but the less-than-thrilling personal tales he recounts make this book better as a telling exposition of one aspect of the financial crisis than a gripping general read.
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The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley
Mar 7th
This blow-by-blow account of the past nine years of Labour is a compelling but depressing read, says Chris Patten
Just after finishing this important if depressing book, I saw TV news interviews with Peter Mandelson and John Prescott, the former denouncing criticism of Gordon Brown’s alleged behaviour in Downing Street as part of a personalised Tory plot and the latter attacking the author of The End of the Party, Andrew Rawnsley, for seeking to make money. Prescott also defended the prime minister’s management of civil servants and political retainers.
Beginning with the absurd and moving on to the surreal, there is clearly something of the Blackpool postcard about turning to Prescott for sermons on the wickedness of trying to make money out of political books, and on the treatment of staff. Prescott, as they say, has form. As for Mandelson, I never cease to wonder at his brass neck; it should be donated in due course to one of the South Kensington museums. There must be many Observer readers who will themselves have heard the Lord President of So-Very-Much talking about the prime minister in recent weeks. Has anyone (apart from Cherie Blair) ever been as rude about Gordon Brown as Peter Mandelson? While he is an accomplished master of the darker political arts, he should learn that there is a difference between a spin doctor and a whirling dervish.
It is inevitable, though a pity, that all the attention regarding this book has focused so far on the lack of anger management at the heart of government. It deserves far more serious attention. It was awaited in the Whitehall village with nervous anticipation because Rawnsley has established a justified reputation over the years for getting the members of the big, happy family of New Labour to sing. There are over 70 double-columned pages of references to sources, mostly identified, although the number remaining anonymous appears to increase as the story of Gordon Brown’s premiership unfolds. Perhaps with flying staplers darkening the heavens, personal safety was a consideration here. The sheer weight of evidence about the years from the sanctimonious bling of Bush’s henchman, Tony Blair, to the clunk of his successor gives a certain credibility to the tale. Do Rawnsley’s detractors claim that he has fabricated all these quotations?
I do not normally much care for blow-by-blow instant political history. For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. Yet the monumental scale of Rawnsley’s evidential base, and his journalistic mastery of the story, make this a compelling read. The End of the Party will be a bestseller. But I doubt whether it will encourage many people to go into politics. John Buchan called politics “an honourable adventure”. Not here, it isn’t.
In his last book on the New Labour project, Servants of the People, Rawnsley followed Blair through his first term. Here he carries the story on to the present day. At the heart of the tale are the Iraq war, the personalities of New Labour’s main characters and their style of government, and the triangular relationship – Blair, Brown, Mandelson – on which the whole enterprise was built. Turning over these pages of our recent history, the old joke about the inmates taking over the asylum often came to mind. I am mildly surprised that government in Britain appears to have survived the ordeal.
The story of the Iraq war is told in considerable detail. Blair’s role as the Bush administration’s pliant feudatory – “Yo, Blair” – is set out in all its gruesome detail. As Rich Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the state department put it, “We’ve taken your support and buried your conditions.” Mind, Powell himself could not remember any conditions. “It was always given that Blair would back us militarily,” he says. As the former senior law lord, Tom Bingham, makes clear in his recent book The Rule of Law, the invasion of Iraq was illegal. Blair postponed any discussion of the legal basis for military action, presumably fearful of the outcome, despite questions from Patricia Hewitt. When the attorney-general eventually produced his 337-word statement on the legality of the invasion, it appeared, as Rawnsley rightly says, to depend on the tautological proposition that the attorney could deem the war legal because this is what the prime minister had told him it was. Rawnsley’s judgment is that Blair was not an out-and-out liar. He was “a sincere deceiver. He told the truth about what he believed; he lied about the strength of the evidence for that belief.”
So the prime minister did not enjoy a Kosovo-style triumph in Iraq. There was no shower of petals. Iraqis and British soldiers died and were maimed. Dr Kelly took his own life, but of course no one in Downing Street was to blame. Chaos overwhelmed Iraq, but according to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Blair “didn’t want to confront the horror of it all”. Not much of a surprise there.
We know from Lord Butler’s Iraq report that the New Labour project eschewed the traditional processes of government – cabinet meetings, minutes, that sort of old-fashioned stuff – in favour of chats on the sofa. The idea was that you delivered a speech, got a headline and then someone, somewhere made whatever you wanted to do that day happen. But what complicated this seamless operational style for achieving very little was the relationship between the prime minister and his chancellor, the marriage from hell that parented New Labour.
You need to be pretty resilient to get through all this, with the plots, the counter-plots, the character assassination, the accusations of loose screws, the effing and blinding. On page 361 we read: “Blair’s relationship with Brown was at a new nadir.” The nadirs came thick and fast; one rock bottom after another. There are times when one almost feels sorry for Blair, except that he weakly abandons loyal colleagues like the brave Alan Milburn to the mercies of the manse, and should have taken the advice of his wife in the first place on how to handle the next-door neighbour. Brown’s camp followers, such as Mr Balls, apparently proved their loyalty to the “capo di capi” by their brutality.
Then it happened. To adapt Frank Field’s happy phrase, Mrs Rochester was let out of the attic. Paddy Ashdown thought that a Blair handover to Brown would turn Camelot into Gormenghast. According to Jonathan Powell, Blair’s handling of the succession “will be a bigger criticism of Tony than the Iraq war”.
But at first the owls did not hoot in Downing Street, even though Norman Tebbit offered the new prime minister a word of praise. We got a show of competence in the handling of floods and animal disease. The stage was set for an election. Then Brown bottled the decision, and an avalanche of bad news hit him and his government. The man who not long before had opened the spanking new headquarters buildings of HBOS and Lehman Brothers, who had lauded Alan Greenspan, watched these and other banks founder as “a flaw” was revealed in Greenspan’s thinking.
Advisers came and went, including the clearly execrable Damian McBride. How on earth could someone with a famous “moral compass” have appointed and promoted him in the first place? At last, when all seemed lost, Peter Mandelson, forgiven but not forgotten, returned home from distant Brussels to save New Labour. The political symmetry was almost complete.
The attention given to Brown’s behaviour as a boss is understandable. Yet I do not myself think that having a bad temper makes someone a bad man. The trouble about Brown is not necessarily his temper; it is that he is a bad prime minister. There is a certain tragedy about a life obsessively dominated by the ambition to get a job which your friends correctly predict that you will be very bad at doing. If Brown was any good, presumably his colleagues would not have spent so much time fruitlessly plotting to get rid of him.
So here we are. What has it all been about? A devolved administration in Edinburgh, half of one in Cardiff, a hard-won settlement in Belfast, no advance in Brussels, a splurge of public spending, a mountain of debt, Brown’s very own “boom and bust”, the stuttering beginnings of reform to our education system, the mother and father of all scandals in the mother of parliaments. But there has not been what Tony Judt recently called for, a redefinition of social democracy, an end to economism, the restoration of values to political debate. All that we got was the Third Way, described by Judt as “opportunism with a human face”.
You would not expect a former Conservative chairman to like what has happened. But I recognise that politics is about give and take, in and out, turn and turn about. So the Labour party deserved its chance. Now we’ve seen what New Labour can do. Rawnsley explains it very well. Could old Labour have been worse? It is very sad that John Smith died so prematurely. At least under him there would have been a sense of public service and moral purpose about the government of Britain.
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The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley | Book review
Mar 6th
Andrew Rawnsley has produced the best book yet about New Labour, says David Hare
In The New Old World, his recent study of the European Union, Perry Anderson indulged in a piece of academic high camp when he defended the omission of Britain from his consideration on the grounds that “British history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment”. Any friend of Anderson’s thoughtful enough to dispatch a jiffy bag to California will surely force the New Left Review stalwart into a graceful volte-face. No dispassionate reader of Andrew Rawnsley’s thumping 800 pages could doubt that we have lived through a strange and fascinating passage of British history which is still obscure. Our fate – through the lie-infested trauma of Iraq, the resultant general loss of faith in democratic politics and the clinching catastrophe in the money markets – has all the while been determined by a couple of the weirdest people ever to attain Downing Street.
Advance publicity surrounding The End of the Party had suggested that Gordon Brown’s temperament would be its principal subject. Far from it. In his second book about New Labour, the Observer’s political columnist is much more concerned with the transformation of Tony Blair. We had all understood that in a matter of only six years following the attack on the Twin Towers, Blair went from someone unhealthily obsessed with popularity to someone convinced that the only true mark of authenticity was its extreme opposite. “I’ve lost my love of popularity for its own sake.” We had also grasped that this appetite for thrilling martyrdom played to something uncanny in Blair’s religious character. But it is only through appreciating the sheer perversity of his decision needlessly to write what Rawnsley calls “an emotional blank cheque” to two very different men – Gordon Brown and George W Bush – that you begin to realise how dramatically skewed his period as prime minister became.
Nobody is ever going fully to understand why Blair felt recklessly beholden to people so much less gifted than himself; why, as Jeremy Greenstock put it, Blair was always happy to “handcuff himself to the wagon”. All we can do is look at the evidence. Nor do we yet know why he preferred to fool himself about the influence he held over either. In both cases, he made bargains that turned out entirely in the other man’s favour. In trying to explain his disastrous inability to confront Bush, a man possessed, as Rawnsley says, with considerable “peasant cunning”, it has always been the conventional wisdom to say that Blair was a sort of head prefect with a fatal weakness for sucking up to headmasterly power. For that reason, it is said, he ignored Bill Clinton’s stark warning “He’s using you”. But in these pages it is not so much power as mere activity which drives Blair. What on earth are we to make of a man who, on the day he left No 10, had already inked in 500 appointments for his first 12 months out of office? What are we to make of a government which came up with 3,600 new criminal offences in 10 years?
Any psychiatrist who began to question the behaviour of a leader permanently surrounded by half-eaten bananas would already have noted that images of insanity haunt the whole volume. Blair’s closest confidant, Alastair Campbell, was a manic depressive who bears out Booth Tarkington’s observation that arrogant people are the most over-sensitive. At one point, Campbell admits to liking nobody in the world but his partner and his children. Brown’s corresponding best friends were significantly known as Mad Dog McBride and Shriti the Shriek. Before Brown ascended to the top job, Frank Field cracked a good joke to Blair about not letting Mrs Rochester out of the attic, but the prime minister had long ago been advised to put a sign above his desk reading “Remember the Chancellor is mad”. Most interestingly, Blair kept quiet about his private beliefs because he worried that voters might think of him as a “nutter” who communed with “the man upstairs”. His principal reason for leaving No 10, after his suicidal refusal to call for a ceasefire during the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006, appears to have been his fear of being taken out through the door as unhinged as Margaret Thatcher. “I don’t want to leave like her.”
The book’s authority rests on an impressive breadth of research. But perhaps because he is driving a narrative at such cracking speed, Rawnsley rarely stops to risk profound analysis. Throughout, the author has gifted his critics free ammunition by putting so much of the story into inverted commas. This lends immediacy but not authenticity. As in bad plays, the characters all speak with the same voice. Peter Mandelson is allowed some tin-eared Victorian dialogue along the lines of “I love you, but I’ll break you! If you do that, I can destroy you!” But almost everyone else is forced to forgo poor Trollope in order to mouth lousy Mamet. When made foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett’s predictable reaction is to say “Fuck”. You know she’s going to use that word because Alastair Campbell has used the same word when told of David Kelly’s death – which, characteristically, Campbell seems to regard as being more his tragedy than Kelly’s. Brown tells Blair “You’ve stolen my fucking budget”, and later asks “When are you going to fucking go?” Alan Milburn, the Blairite health secretary, does his best to confound Brown with what sounds like a Rada warm-up exercise: “I know what this is fucking all about. You know what it is fucking all about.” But Brown zings back a reciprocal tongue-twister: “You shouldn’t have fucking done what you did in the summer.” David Cameron quickly masters the language of New Labour: “I should have stayed at fucking home.” By the time the Queen makes a late appearance in the book, putting down an insufferable Silvio Berlusconi at the G8, you expect her to burst into the room with a heartfelt “Give us a fucking break!”
The book is by no means perfect. Rawnsley has taken such a long lease in the plushest quarters of the Westminster village that when he does finally allow himself to shift from telling the story to passing judgment he tends to equivocate, as if he fears losing access to people still active in politics. John Prescott’s infidelity is cruelly rehearsed in excruciating physical detail, while Tessa Jowell’s far more bizarre decision to split from her husband as soon as he represents a political danger to her is, for some reason, given a free pass. (This is not so much protecting your sources as wrapping them in hot towels and sprinkling them with eau de cologne.) A lonely sentence about the condoning of torture being “arguably the largest personal moral failure of Tony Blair’s premiership” has clearly been inserted at a late stage and is not backed up with the investigative rigour it merits. The Observer’s own abject eagerness to collude in the neoconservative adventure in Iraq, which lost a once-serious newspaper both the patience of most of its readers and some readers altogether, is passed over entirely, as is any more general mention of the press’s wider disgrace. Throughout, Rawnsley shows a faith in the infallibility of Fleet Street as a political windsock that few outside the profession will share. Nor is Rawnsley’s style free of taint. Is it only journalists of a certain age who insist that homosexual politicians are always “feline” and that they must invariably “sashay” down Downing Street?
Sadly, by their cack-handed strategy of pompous embargoes and ill-judged excerpts, thrown like raw meat into the 24-hour news grinder, Rawnsley’s publishers have done their author few favours. By their clumsiness, Viking has forced a fair-minded writer into a position where, through no fault of his own, he has been made to appear as seedy and underhand as the party managers he despises. A more honest approach to releasing the book would have demanded a more honest response from the people it reports. This lively Shakespearian account is far too important to be remembered only for the stupid headlines it generated. When the smoke of mock-battle clears, we shall be left with the most thorough, the most enjoyable and the most original book yet written about New Labour.
David Hare is a playwright and screenwriter.
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What Works by Hamish McRae and Drive by Daniel H Pink | Book review
Feb 27th
William Leith looks at the world through rose-tinted glasses
Here are two books vying for attention in what you might call the Gladwell market. They are books about how the world works. They are fundamentally upbeat. They tell us stories about clever people, and how these people, in the authors’ opinions, have made the world a better place. Hamish McRae’s book is about things that, in his view, function well. I really enjoyed reading it. But I think a lot of the things he writes about don’t function well at all.
One thing that works, says McRae, is the City of London. Certainly, the City boomed when it was the financial centre of the world before the first world war. Then it slumped for decades. In the 1960s, business picked up again. Regulations became more lax. “In 2006,” McRae tells us, “more money was raised for business in London than New York.”
McRae, a financial journalist, began the process of writing this book before the economy crashed in 2008. For my money, the City does not work. It attracted money because its rules were lax, which made it grow bigger and bigger; then it crashed, pulling lots of other things down with it. In other words, the very things that made it successful are the core, not just of its failure, but of the mess we’re all in. Still, the City has deep roots, going back centuries – and, according to McRae, “It has much to teach the world”. He also says: “I believe that global prosperity will be rekindled.” I only wish I felt the same. So what else works? The Celtic Tiger? Actually, says McRae, yes. Again, to my cynic’s mind, the Celtic Tiger is the very embodiment of economic catastrophe. As John Lanchester points out in Whoops!, his recent book on the economic crisis, Ireland is in a terrible state because a quarter of its GDP was based on the housing market, and the housing market has collapsed. And why has Ireland’s housing market collapsed? At least partly because of the failure of McRae’s other paragon – the City of London.
Still, there’s always Ikea. Why does it work? McRae is good here – Ikea works because of specific Swedish qualities. Good, egalitarian design. Furniture you buy in kit form, which makes it easy to transport. It’s cheap, and it’s not horrible. And why do people want so much of it? My cynic’s view nagged away at me here: it’s because people are always moving house these days, I kept thinking, in a world full of debt-fuelled stress and property speculation, courtesy of . . . the City of London.
Other things that work, according to McRae: Dubai, the international baccalaureate and Harvard. Let’s take Dubai. The place has had a terrible property crash recently. But did it ever work in the first place? McRae says it did, and will again. “Dubai is constructing a medical city, a financial city and a media city. There is an internet city, a knowledge village, a Gold and Diamond park and so on.” Does that sound like something that works? To me, it sounds like the theme park from hell. But maybe it’s just a matter of taste. True, the international baccalaureate works as an alternative to A-levels. That’s because, unlike A-levels, it hasn’t been dumbed down. And that, in turn, is because the baccalaureate does not need to attract a wide spectrum of candidates. Won’t it get dumbed down, if and when it gets more popular? And how did Harvard succeed? It’s rich, which enables it to attract the best teachers and researchers, and the wealthiest students, who pay through the nose first in the form of fees and then later in the form of endowments. You might as well ask why Chelsea is a successful football club.
If you’re an optimist, like the author, you’ll have no trouble with the book. And if, like me, you’re a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, it’s still worth reading, if only to see how the other half think.
Daniel H Pink’s book is also pretty optimistic. It’s about human motivation. At first, says Pink, we were motivated by the need to survive. Then we built our civilisation, which required us to perform lots of repetitive tasks. The way we motivated people to do these tasks was simple: the carrot and the stick. But now things have changed. Machines do lots of the repetitive tasks for us. We have moved on to a new, more creative plane – “heuristic”, rather than “algorithmic”. In other words, we need to be creative. But the trouble is that the old carrot-and-stick model doesn’t work when you want people to be creative.
Take artists. They are more creative, says Pink, when they’re not working for money. Lots of experiments tell us similar things. The carrot of money limits your thinking. What really motivates people, he says, is doing something because they love it. Pink memorably uses the example of Tom Sawyer: faced with the tedious task of whitewashing a fence, he pretends to be enjoying it, and pretty soon, everybody wants to help.
I found myself agreeing with Pink. The carrot-and-stick managerial style sucks if you want people to think creatively. His book is inspiring; if you think of your work as art, rather than drudgery, you’ll do it well. And I don’t disagree with everything McRae says. I imagine that giving addicts free heroin, as the authorities did in Zurich, helped the local problem. If only because it made the dealers go elsewhere. There I go, quibbling again. But I liked both these books.
William Leith’s Bits of Me Are Falling Apart is published by Bloomsbury.
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On Expenses
Feb 24th
A sombre study of corruption it wasn’t, but On Expenses did rattle along nicely, says Lucy Mangan
It was clear, from the opening scenes of last night’s hour-long drama On Expenses (BBC4), that this wasn’t going to be a massively subtle affair. We began with MPs staggering down panelled corridors, laden with shopping bags. Tim Pigott-Smith stopped Brian Cox, playing Michael Martin, and asked: “Have you heard? Betty’s stepping down. They’re looking for a new speaker!” That’s Betty Boothroyd, you at the back. New Speaker of the House required! They cut to Gorbals Mick playing the bagpipes in his office. It made a sound a bit like a dying pig.
Barely nine months have elapsed since the scandal hit the headlines, and it was clear that On Expenses’ gestation had not been quite long enough to enable delivery of anything greater than an assemblage of the furore’s major highlights (or low points, depending on your point of view.) It purported to put Heather Brooke back in her rightful place; Brooke was the journalist who, armed with nothing but grim determination and a copy of the Freedom of Information Act, spent five years gathering details of MPs’ personal expenditures, before she was scooped by the Telegraph and effectively written out of the story.
But, in fact, the rush job meant that her characterisation was so thin (at least we could flesh out the more high-profile figures with knowledge gleaned from other sources) that, despite fine work from Anna Maxwell Martin, the line between heroic monomania and tiresome obsession was too often blurred. Her unremitting earnestness might have been true to life – I don’t know – but it made it hard to root for her as surely as we should have.
An opening disclaimer warned that, although the show was based on real characters and events, “some scenes have been imagined [and] some dates compressed” – then it added jauntily: “But, mostly, you couldn’t make it up.” As long as you took your cue from this, approaching it in a broadbrush, cartoonish spirit rather than hoping for a sombre anatomising of corruption, it rattled along quite nicely.
Fat winks of complicity between Martin and those whose interests he had sworn to protect (along with his own) became stares of disbelief as the insistent requests multiplied, and the corridors of power began to yield their secrets, until finally Martin was effectively deposed and left shouting at cold shoulders and retreating backs. “Ye greedy ungrateful bastards,” he spat. “Ye wasnae worth it. Ye really think getting rid ae me is goin’ tae let youse off the hook?” Hell hath no fury like a Glaswegian scorned. Especially one who still doesn’t really see that he did anything wrong.
How Earth Made Us (BBC2) concluded its tale of how geology, geography and climate have shaped mankind with a switcheroo episode that looked at how we – little ol’ bipedal us – have made the Earth. Presenter Iain Stewart (another Scot) took us from the mud volcano in Indonesia caused by drilling for natural gas and which has so far engulfed 10,000 homes and displaced 30,000 people, to the flotillas of discarded plastic that are gathering in the oceans. Also shown were the Great Plains of western America, which were enriched by millions of years of accumulated nutrients, and degraded within decades by human settlers. There were other depressingly defining features of the anthropocene epoch – not least the use of constant, intrusive so-called “background” music in prog-rammes that need no such accompaniment. How Earth Made Us is a prime offender. I estimate 98% of the show was smothered in it. Producers, I beg you. You’ve got pictures of the Grand Canyon. The Rockies. Even the Alberta tar sands are breathtaking in their own, horrific way. Leave. Them. Be.
Not that the anthropocene epoch was all bad. Yes, we’ve made the oceans 30% more acidic and halved the thickness of the Arctic sea ice, but on the upside: a) the advent of agriculture 11,000 years ago staved off, albeit inadvertently, another ice age, so there’s always a chance that something we’re doing now might pay dividends in the future (though it might still be wise to move to higher ground while we wait); and b) Professor Stewart pronounces “epoch” as Scottishly as he does “loch”. Every girl’s got her weakness, and that’s mine.
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Michael Billington reviews the arts under the Tories
Feb 22nd
Conservative Central Office, London
I’ve never met the shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt. I’m sure he’s a decent, civilised chap. But his proposals for the arts, under a putative Tory government, leave me cold. They may look plausible on paper but they don’t stand up to close examination.
First, there is the little matter of history. In 1979, we had a similar situation. The incoming Tory arts minister, Norman St John Stevas, was an articulate champion of culture who faithfully promised that there would be “no candle-end economies in the arts.” What followed in the Thatcher years was exactly that. Public funding of the arts was subject to progressive cuts. Only in pre-election periods was new money suddenly found as a sop to the arts community. Do we want to go throuugh all that again? And is there any evidence that Jeremy Hunt would carry any more clout inside a Cameron government than the quickly marginalised St John Stevas did under Mrs Thatcher?
Secondly, there is the Hunt philosophy. What he seems to be arguing is that, while preserving the principle of state funding, we should shift gradually towards the American model in which endowments and individual philanthropy provide extra income. Charlotte Higgins nails the weakness of the argument for endowments: fine for big institutions, with their teams of fundraisers, but no use at all for small, struggling or experimental organisations. Beware also of individual philanthropists. All the American evidence suggests that there are far more strings attached to private than to public money. The Metropolitan Opera in New York, a byword for artistic conservatism, used to depend heavily on a big donor who gave her money to productions that depended on lavish, chocolate-box glamour. Do we seriously want to go down that path?
Hunt even hedges his bets on public funding by saying that a prospective Tory government doesn’t know “the state of the books.” Obviously the future is uncertain: no one knows whether, or when, growth will materialise. But there is a clear choice between a Keynsian commitment to public spending and the fiscal tightening of the deficit-fetishists. I’m no economist, but I’d have thought that to cut arts spending, which accounts for .007 per cent of the government budget, would have no impact whatsoever on the national debt. It could, however, blow lots of arts organisations out of the water.
Hunt is not all bad: I sympathise with his desire to trim the bureaucracy of the Arts Council – though I hope there is no petty, politically motivated urge to ditch its chair, Liz Forgan. But, in general, I fear Hunt is offering us a dodgy prospectus. I’m sure, personally, he loves the arts. But what I want to hear is a passionate defence of state funding, an assurance that a new culture minister will have a seat at the top table, and as big a commitment to regional growth and innovation as to shoring up the established institutions. I don’t get any of that from Hunt.
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The Bible: A History and Pineapple Dance Studios | TV Review
Feb 22nd
It was billed as a history of the Bible, but this was more about Gerry Adams’s own legend
The money shot comes about 10 minutes in. Taking Gerry Adams into a first-century AD burial chamber, a well-mannered archaeologist warns conditions are about to get dark and claustrophobic. In a beat, Adams deadpans back with, “That’s OK, Sinn Fein used to be an underground organisation.” The archaeologist is momentarily speechless, unsure whether to laugh or check to see if his kneecaps are intact.
Channel 4’s The Bible: A History (Sunday) has been rumbling along inconsequentially for four weeks, filling in time as documentary God-slot fodder, but this week’s helping was more of a contract with the devil. Now you could say that if Tony Blair can successfully position himself as just one papal visit away from full canonisation, then Adams has long since crawled through the eye of any number of needles, but much as Channel 4 might want to claim that Adams is now a respected politician, that’s not why they gave him the TV gig.
Adams is known primarily as the president of Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist organisation that had the Provisional IRA in its pocket; as such he is one of the main faces of sectarian hatred and violence over the past four decades. A man with blood on his hands, as many are. And that’s why Channel 4 got him in; to give the ratings a healthy kick. Adams must know all this perfectly well, but he’s never looked a gift horse in the mouth, and here he got an hour’s prime-time TV to continue the rewrite of his legend.
This week’s instalment was supposed to be Adams’s mission to uncover the real Jesus. But since all he seemed to find out was that not everything written in the gospels about Jesus is wholly reliable and that much of his ministry took place in the last year of his life – things most of us discovered at primary school – it’s probably fair to say Adams had a rather different agenda. Rather, in what looked like a sombre black cape and backlit to resemble St Francis of Assisi, Adams’s goal was to present himself as a Man of God. All that was missing was a guest appearance from Dan Brown to claim Adams was a direct blood descendant of the Messiah.
So what we got was Jesus as misunderstood freedom-fighter, a man who was prepared to die to lead his people to the kingdom of heaven. A man remarkably like Adams. In a limited way, it’s a moderately interesting – if quite familiar – take on Jesus, but the comparisons had become overstretched long before Adams strolled to the top of the Mount of Olives to consider the Sermon of the Mount.
In his own mind, Adams is one of the great peacemakers. In one of the few feeble attempts made on screen to confront his past, he was asked about forgiveness. He replied that the Catholics had been badly treated, that conditions in Long Kesh had been brutal but he forgave his oppressors. He didn’t seem to realise that he was being asked if he felt forgiven for his own actions.
Ever so timidly, Adams was pressed a little harder and responded with the familiar line of “regrettable things happened” and that he was more sinned against than sinning. And on the subject of sin, he explained that God understood he was only mortal and therefore bound to make mistakes. It was typical politician stuff – never explain, never apologise – but even to an atheist it was clear this was third-rate religious programming. Jesus would have been turning in his grave. If he had one. And the lasting message of the Bible from this documentary is that it owes its longevity to its ability to have its meaning twisted to suit any brand of bigotry.
Such a bitter taste requires spoonfuls of saccharine, something to be found in abundance in Pineapple Dance Studios (Sky1, Sunday). Supposedly it’s meant to be the antidote to all the live dance stuff that clogs up the entire Saturday night schedule; a gritty portrayal of the harsh realities of a dancer’s life. In fact, it’s a joyous 30 minutes of show-offs, high camp and freaks held together by a voiceover from Michael Buerk. Quite how the host of Radio 4’s Moral Maze turned up on this is anyone’s guess. You couldn’t help feeling we’d have all been better off if Buerk had been over on Channel 4 giving Adams more of a hard time.
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