‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s
famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002. Today, deflation looms, and Gordon Brown seems to want ‘moneyfinanced’ (i.e. paid for by printing money) tax cuts. The Conservatives have responded by promising to cut loose, from 2010, from their adherence to Gordon Brown’s huge spending plans. They will be the responsible party. In terms of exposing Mr Brown on the prudence which was once his strongest point, the Tories are putting themselves in the right place for an election campaign. But their greatest problem is simple: suppose that Mr Brown is right, and is in league with Mr Bernanke. Suppose that the world does act in concert to despatch the necessary metaphorical helicopters to avoid a slump. Then the Tories look like dreary arithmeticians who want to condemn voters to self-reinforcing hardship. They now have a huge interest in British economic failure in order to be proved right. Mr Brown, much assisted by Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy, will point this out, again and again.
When told that stars such as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand should not ring up private citizens to boast, on air, that they have slept with their grand-daughters, some BBC ‘entertainers’ and their supporters protest at what they call ‘censorship’. But censorship, surely, is an external force. The decision not to broadcast or publish something is rightly made by the organisation which does the broadcasting/publishing. It is called ‘editing’. One thing that emerges from the Ross affair, on which the BBC Trust reports this week, is that the editorial function was sacrificed in favour of ‘compliance’. A compliance officer, whose job it was to check that various bureaucratic rules were being followed, ran round picking up all mentions of the f-word to make sure that they ticked the boxes of when its use is permitted. He did not link the f-word with the word ‘grand-daughter’, because the latter does not appear in the rules. The Ross/ Brand tape was then handed over to the editor who, knowing that compliance had been accomplished, did not bother to listen to it. It is a perfect BBC story: even when they think they are ‘pushing the boundaries’, they are actually tripped up by red tape.
Asinister aspect of BBC ‘edgy’ humour is that it delights in attacking old people. So, when I refuse to renew my television licence fee unless Jonathan Ross is sacked from the BBC, I shall give the £139.50 due to Help the Aged. It is therefore fitting that the Oldie magazine got on to Jonathan Ross before the storm about his telephone call to Andrew Sachs broke. In its October issue it published the results of a readers’ competition in which entrants had to write a clerihew beginning with the name of a television programme. David Rundle, of Cheltenham, contributed the following: Friday Night with Jonathan Ross/ Makes me exceptionally cross/ Since, having always shunned it,/ I help to fund it.’ Exactly.
Aclergyman who owns a derelict cottage with no television sends me copies of two letters from TV Licensing. One thanks him for his letter explaining the situation and agrees that he does not need a television licence. The other says, in huge red letters: ‘your details are being passed to our enforcement officers’, and threatens him with a fine. The two letters arrived in the same post.
Waiting for my guest at lunch in the Wolseley last week, I thought I recognised the man at the next table, about three feet away from me. It was, I am almost certain, Oleg Deripaska, friend of Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy, yachtowner, Russian oligarch. As is often true of very rich people nowadays, he was casually dressed, and armed with expensive, slim, small computer/telephone equipment, which he was jabbing. I was thinking about introducing myself and asking him a few questions about his holiday in Corfu; but when I looked up from the book I was pretending to read and stole a glance at him, I found that his cold blue eyes were boring right into me. Then I noticed that sitting opposite Mr Deripaska was a big man with a shaven head, dressed in a very dark suit which bulged alarmingly. From time to time, this man would get up, survey the room minutely and then sit down again. Now his gaze rested on me. It occurred to me that, since I was sitting so close, and alone, I was an object of suspicion. Not wanting to sleep with the sturgeons (our editor’s excellent phrase), or even, like poor Nat Rothschild, be forced to write a letter to the Times, I returned, in cowardly fashion, to my book.
The book in question was Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, which was published 100 years ago this month. I have to admit that, despite being in favour of Chesterton in principle, I find him difficult to read. It is partly because his method, which is automatically to invert every conventional wisdom, is itself reductive. By asserting that everything is exactly the opposite of what it seems, he is cheating on behalf of Christianity. If this were so, it would be easy to discover the truth; but it is not easy. One gets sick of hundreds of aphoristic, paradoxical pages which keep saying things like ‘Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.’ He is right, though, in his central perception that ‘orthodoxy’ is a bigger, deeper, freer thing than making everything up for yourself. ‘I am the man,’ he writes, ‘who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.’ Our original sin is an obsession with originality — or does that sound too Chestertonian?
There was a widely reported ceremony at Verdun last week. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, exactly 90 years since the end of the first world war, the crowd, led by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, fell silent in commemoration. Except that it didn’t, because President Sarkozy and his wife Carla were 13 minutes late. The two-minute silence was delayed for their convenience. You have only to imagine the utter impossibility of the Queen being late for such an event to see what a strange, high-handed thing it was. But the ‘hyper-President’ seems to have attracted no more than a bit of muted tuttutting. I sometimes wonder if Sarkozy, who is always rushing around and shouting into his mobile phone, might be the first head of state literally to have been driven mad by modern technology and its accompanying illusion that constant, frenetic work gets good results. It speaks well for the American way of doing things that one of the first acts of Presidentelect Obama’s officials has been to confiscate his BlackBerry.
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