The Questing Vole I n a speech about domestic security, delivered
to New York's John Jay College last week, the Home Secretary announced, 'An important part of my visit this week has been to go to Ground Zero, not in a morbid or macabre way, but to reinforce my understanding of the enormity of what happened and the changes that have occurred since.' Mr Blunkett. as most students of his political career will have noticed, is blind. Was he helped in 'understanding the enormity of what happened' by listening to the big hole in the ground? Apparently so. He continued, '1 was reminded of the impression the Twin Towers had made on me during a visit to New York in the 1980s, and the emotional impression and vision I had as I stood on the waterfront facing the skyline. I described then how I could feel — yes, feel — the skyline. How I could tell the presence of the Towers — because they dominated sound and not just sight.' Is Mr Blunkett the only person who can hear skylines, or are there more?
Tnlike certain other former foreign
secretaries we could mention, the former SDP helmsman Lord Owen has been sound on the war throughout. He is sound, too, on the post-war. 'This cry for a UN administration is much too glib,' he tells me from Russia. 'I don't think that is a role the UN is either able or expected to play. There will need to be a period of several weeks at least, probably months, where the essential task will be to go through the whole administration and get rid of everyone associated with the Baath party. We need to be tough, and the UN doesn't have the sort of intelligence that requires. It's a job for the military: Quite so.
Thegovernment's enthusiasm for saddling us all with identity cards. gussied up though they may be as 'entitlement cards', is something you would expect to exercise the humbug-hating campaigners for democracy on the New Statesman. Oddly, it seems not to have worried them. The end of the notional national 'consultation period' in January passed unremarked by the Staggers. It wasn't even raised in an interview with the Home Secretary that they carried in that week's issue. But the same issue did carry a full-page advert for the magazine's 2003 New Media Awards; sponsored, coincidentally. by SchlumbergerSema, a multinational IT conglomerate which is the world's biggest manufacturer of smart-card technology and
an energetic advocate of British 'entitlement cards'. By coincidence. the New Statesman last summer carried a brave leader attacking the 'sanctimonious. . .out-of-office politicians' and snobbish members of the monied middle classes who object to the cards, which, it affirmed, would benefit the needy (such as, I suppose, those who bet their shirts on IT conglomerates during the dotcom boom). A good, clear list of the reasons to oppose entitlement cards can be found at the direct democracy website www.stand.org.uk — an outfit commended for the way its 'original thought and work has served the public interest in developing a democratically accountable civil society' when it won the New Statesman's inaugural New Media Award a couple of years ago.
Alegal warning to shake the very foundations of the Chancery arrives on my desk. It recently came out in print where the Master of the Rolls likes to take his morning constitutional, and the Lord Chancellor's department has written to newspapers to request 'for security reasons' that there be no further publication of this key information. Nobody can begrudge Lord Phillips the chance to dip his wrinkly old behind in the pond unmolested by crowds of admirers, but this 'security reasons' nonsense seems a little over the top. Sir Robin Butler had no qualms while Cabinet secretary about his stately breaststroke in the Brockwell lido being advertised on a 1995 television documentary. Is it really likely that some revenge-crazed hooligan who Lord P. once jailed will murder him in his swimming trunks, in public, at sparrowfart, rather than, say, finding out what club he lists in Who's Who and staking out St James's?
peter Hitchens, a man valiantly campaigning to reappropriate 'reactionary' as a badge of honour, is
congratulated on the back of his new book, A Brief Histoty of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England, for sticking up for a long list of the exemplary patriotic virtues, among which is the Last Night of the Proms. Ole Loonybins wants it to be known for the record where he draws the line. 'I loathe the Last Night of the Proms,' he says. 'The correct place for the Union Flag is snapping from the mast of a warship, not being waved around in a concert. It makes me wince.'
Quietly, and almost unnoticed, a David and Goliath battle has been won in a New York court. The publishing giant Penguin has been found guilty of stealing 'comma for comma', and without acknowledgment, the work of an amateur anthologist who gathered together Dorothy Parker's uncollected poems. Later this month, failing a reversal on appeal, they may be forced to pulp their Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems as a result. Simply put, here is the case. In 1994, a Los Angeles lawyer called Stuart Silverstein assembled, edited and gave titles to a collection of Parker miscellanea, which he called Not Much Fun and offered to Penguin. They weren't interested in publishing it as a stand-alone, but offered him $2,000 to let them use it as part of their forthcoming Complete Poems. He rejected the offer, took his book to Scribner, and after its publication thought no more of it — until Penguin's volume appeared, and he noticed that the section 'Poems Uncollected By Parker' reproduced his own book exactly, down to editing errors and titles he had given to unknown poems. Penguin's case, legal experts suspect, was harmed when their editor, Colleen Breese, admitted to the court that she had, literally, photocopied Mr Silverstein's book. They declined to credit him, she said, because they didn't want to puff the competition. Judge John Keenan ruled that 'the failure to credit Silverstein was. . . deliberate'. Anyway, Penguin is appealing, at least in the legal sense.
APurple Heart, surely, for the BBC's John Simpson, defiantly broadcasting to the world even as he coped with bleeding eardrums and a legful of American shrapnel. The man's a trouper. Nor is this even the worst injury he has sustained as a war reporter. During the Kosovan intervention, he slipped in a Jacuzzi at the Belgrade Hyatt and spent most of the war in a wheelchair.
Previous page
