The best of British?

I have no faith in the United Kingdom winning the Eurovision Song Contest this evening, but at least it's an excuse to remind myself of my favourite photo of Engelbert Humperdinck, wearing a suit of two halves:

The photo is by Harry Goodwin and comes from the book My Generation: The Glory Years of British Rock, published by the V&A.

A hundred days later...

Today is the hundredth day since I started to write my book on the 1990s, the sequel to Crisis? What Crisis? and Rejoice! Rejoice!. And it currently stands at just over 105,000 words, which means that I'm five days ahead of schedule, since I aim to average a thousand words a day.

And that's good news, because back on day 25, I was four days behind schedule, with a daily average of just 852 words.

I'm not entirely sure it's healthy that I should know such things. But I keep an Excel spreadsheet, into which I enter the wordcount every day, and which then calculates daily and weekly averages. A touch Aspergian perhaps, but it does entertain me when I get to the end of a long night's writing, so I shall continue.

Obviously I don't want to spoil the ending for any potential readers, but I have to say that John Major's grip on power is looking very insecure at the moment.

As a matter of fact, he's back

I've written about Gary Glitter on this blog before. He was a terrific rock and roll star, responsible for some of the best singles of the 1970s. Not solely responsible, of course, since he had the brilliance of producer Mike Leander and the fine support of the Glitter Band to assist him. But it was his concept and we shouldn't lose sight of just how good he was.

It's difficult, though, because there's effectively been a ban on his music for years now, ever since the jail sentence for possessing paedophile pornography.

So, all credit to the BBC for finally lifting the corner of that ban with its broadcast of a 1977 edition of Top of the Pops. Not the most obvious place to start with Gary's work, but I always rated that single, It Takes All Night Long - one of his sleazier recordings from one of the early comebacks:

There's been a lot of criticism, of course, but for once the BBC have got it right on this issue: 'It would be inappropriate for the BBC to rewrite history, so the programme was shown in its entirety.' Quite right, too. That should have been the position for the last decade and more.

The best comment I ever read on the subject came from Craig Brown in the Daily Telegraph back in November 2005:

'Around the time that Gary Glitter was riding so high, Bernard Levin was busy writing articles in The Times about Wagner. As far as I can remember, he would argue that it was perfectly possible and legitimate to deplore the thoughts and actions of the artist while continuing to rejoice in his art. The same must surely be true of the equally rumbustious sounds of Gary Glitter.'

Yesterday's Papers: Gay marriages and the Daily Telegraph

The Queen's Speech this week omitted any mention of the proposed Bill to legalise gay marriages, presumably as a sop to those on the Tory right who regarded David Cameron's enthusiasm for the subject as 'the last straw'.

That quote comes from a piece by Fraser Nelson in the Daily Telegraph. Here's more from the same source:

'There was something wonderfully British about the passage of the Civil Partnership Act, which was approved one rainy Tuesday evening to no fanfare at all ... [A]lmost nobody cared. Civil partnerships were seen, quite rightly, as ironing out a legal crinkle: it seemed common sense to grant gay couples the same rights over issues such as inheritance and hospital visiting rights.'

Is there a slight rewriting of history going on? These are some headlines from stories published in the Daily Telegraph back when the Civil Partnership Bill was first proposed by the Labour government of Tony Blair:

'Williams denounces gay marriages' (27 May 2003)
'Legal rights for homosexuals denounced - by gays' (30 June 2003)
'Taxpayers face £240 million-a-year bill for gay contract' (1 July 2003)
'Gay unions denounced as charter for tax dodgers' (1 July 2003)
'Outrage greets National Trust's plan for homosexual "weddings"' (28 December 2003)

Not quite true, then, that 'almost nobody cared'. The Telegraph clearly did, and spent some time agonising in its leader columns on what the correct Tory attitude should be. This was an early sortie:

'Homosexuals clearly have some special grievances - over hospital-visiting rights and funeral arrangements, for example. But there are other ways of righting these wrongs, one by one, than by inventing a form of quasi-marriage ceremony that would be open to widespread abuse. The problem of inheritance rights, for instance, might be solved at a stroke by abolishing inheritance tax altogether.' (1 July 2003)

But then the Conservative Party, under the leadership of Michael Howard, decided that there would be a free vote on the issue, a major shift in its position, and the Telegraph followed suit:

'Allowing gay people to affirm their relationship within a civil contract does not undermine the institution of marriage. It might even reinforce it. We will all benefit from greater recognition of stable relationships, of whatever kind.' (25 November 2003)

So all's well that ended well. But it wasn't quite as smooth a passage as Fraser Nelson implies.

Quote for the Week 16

'It is true that pornography does exist online, but your children will not be subjected to pornographic images every time they connect to the Internet. They would have to actively seek out sites where it can be found.'
- Sunday Times, 7 January 1996

So, farewell then, Lord Redken

In my memory of the great political war of the first half of the 1980s, the big figures in the Labour Party seem impressively diverse in character and background, if not in gender: Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Eric Heffer, Neil Kinnock, Peter Shore, Derek Hatton, Arthur Scargill, Len Murray, Denis Healey, Gerald Kaufman, Roy Hattersley, Moss Evans - to name just a dozen at random.

And then there was Ken Livingstone, the man who had a more enduring impact than any of them.

Often accused of being a relentless self-publicist, he used the media attention he generated in the GLC days to espouse what was sometimes dismissively known as identity politics. And, despite all the vitriol and venom directed at him, he changed Britain to an extent achieved by very few politicians.

This would be a different country had he not existed. For those who remember the days of the 'loony left' stories, there's something rather ironic in the sight of the Conservative Party advocating gay marriages. As there was about Carol Thatcher losing a BBC gig for using the word 'golliwog'.

In my book on the 1980s, Rejoice! Rejoice!, I cited Livingstone alongside Margaret Thatcher as the political victors of the decade. I still think that's about right: Thatcher won the economic battles, Livingstone won the social struggles.

I voted for Ken as my constituency MP when he was first elected to Parliament in 1987, and I voted for him when he stood as an Independent candidate in the first mayoralty election in 2000. I even voted for him again when he then rejoined the Labour Party.

And now he has announced that he won't contest any more elections, having been defeated by Boris Johnson in the London mayoral election.

I regret that he stood at all this time; it just didn't feel right or dignified. But I regret even more that there was no one else in whose favour he could stand down, and that there still isn't. He was the last leader of the left.

And he's also the last of that great cast from the early 1980s to leave the political stage. It feels like the ending of a personal, as well as a political, era.

Here Comes the Mayor

So there we are then. The race to become London mayor was closer than some predicted, and longer than anyone wanted. But before anyone takes too much encouragement from their results, it's worth bearing in mind just how low the turnout is.

These are the first preference votes recorded by the candidates of the three main parties in the four mayoral elections, expressed as percentages of the registered electorate:

(Incidentally, I do know that Ken Livingstone was an independent in 2000, but let's be kind and look over the sad case of Frank Dobson.)

None of it is much of a ringing endorsement. It's also worth bearing in mind that there are a huge number of people living in London who aren't registered to vote in the first place.

Perhaps it's not too surprising that - with the exception of Bristol - all the other cities who were asked yesterday whether they too wanted a mayor decided that, no, on balance, they'd rather not bother.

Nick Cohen

In the new edition of Standpoint magazine, Nick Cohen spends most of what is ostensibly a television column writing about Things Can Only Get Bitter. And, happily for me, he's very flattering: 'the most interesting essay on British culture I have read since George Walden's New Elites.'

He also, I'm glad to see, credits Dan Atkinson's blog entry that originally inspired the piece.

There's the bit where Cohen says my 'grasp of politics is feeble', of course, but obviously I think he's wrong. It's not really true that I'm 'interested solely in the left' - hell, I've just spent the last two months writing about the John Major government for my forthcoming book on the 1990s. But this essay is about the left-inclined section of a particular generation, and is therefore necessarily partial.

He is right, however, that my interests are parochial. Britain fascinates me, and British culture is what I write about. I don't really feel qualified to comment on international subjects.

This is the bit I really like: 'Yet for all his parochialism, his description of how we moved from the harsh and confrontational world of Thatcher to the soft and mendacious world of Blair remains superb.'

As someone who's enjoyed Cohen's own books, I'm rather pleased with that.

Camden New Journal

I just got my copy of this week's Camden New Journal - always a fine publication - to find that there's a full-page review/feature on Things Can Only Get Bitter. Many thanks to Dan Carrier for such splendid treatment.

I'm slightly surprised to be described as an 'Islington author', though, since I live in Camden and I'm not sure I entirely approve of Islington. But apart from that, it's grand stuff.

I also bought today a copy of The Spectator with Lloyd Evans's hysterical attack on the same essay. Apart from decrying my 'wrist-slashing pessimism', his main complaint seems to be that this e-book business is a rip-off, since the recommended price is £2.99 for a 72-page essay.

It is, however, available from Amazon for only £1.64, which I think is pretty fair. Certainly when compared to, say, a 64-page magazine that retails at £3.50 and isn't available anywhere at a discounted price.

Voices from the Blank Generation

I'm a few weeks behind the pace here, but I've just been reading Paul Anderson's piece from Tribune, marking the thirty-fifth anniversary of the release of White Riot, the first single by the Clash.

The Clash were never as big for me as were the Ramones, but apart from that, Anderson's reflections strike a chord. Only two more and I'll be able to form a band.

An excellent column, I was thinking, as I nodded along in agreement. And that was before I had the pleasant shock of seeing my New Statesman piece being quoted.

And while I'm on the subject of my contemporaries: my thanks to Dan Atkinson for the mention in his blog.

The Spectator Speaks

Having never had a review in The Spectator before, I'm tremendously excited by Lloyd Evans giving Things Can Only Get Bitter a very thorough kicking. I can't really do his piece justice here, but these are some of the highlights:

'It’s a pity he can’t write terribly well, although it helps to explain the book’s extreme brevity.'

'Turner, a lifelong gloom addict, approaches even the most innocent and joyful developments in a mood of sulky intellectualism.'

'[The publishers] asked a lazy editor to commission a lazy author to propose a lazy idea and turn it into a lazy book.'

'The flimsiest and most banal 72-page tome in history.'

That's terrific stuff. If I'm reading this correctly, he doesn't like the essay very much.

I regret to say that, not being a regular reader of The Spectator, I'm unfamiliar with Lloyd Evans's work. I only knew him previously from Just Boris, Sonia Purnell's excellent biography of Boris Johnson, as an investigative journalist conducting 'an inquiry into Swedish lavatorial habits'.

But he's clearly a man of some taste and discernment, and I thank him for his kind words.

Seasons in the Sun

It's nice to see Dominic Sandbrook's new book, Seasons in the Sun, on the Wilson-Callaghan years of the 1970s, getting such positive reviews, including this fine Book of the Week piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph:

But hold, what's that down in the corner, in the Read On section? Excellent - it's a plug for my own Crisis? What Crisis? Still available in paperback.