Intelligence Squared Debate Autumn Series ’05
Apart from Chavs, the British Have no Class 7.12.05
Chaired by Sir Clement Freud
For: Deborah Moggagh, Boris Johnson, Howard Jacobson
Against: Kate Fox, Ferdinand Mount, Simon Fanshawe
Continue reading Apart from the Chavs, the British have no class
*Announcement on Tuesday 6th December at 3.00pm*
The great Boris-Johnson.com debate on the Conservative leadership is still going strong! The most exhaustive, in depth, dynamic discussion of the battle for the toughest job in politics has now received over 600 comments – the blogosphere has never seen anything like this before!
But it’s not over yet! What do YOU think? The Boris Johnson office is listening! There’s still time to tell us…
Mac’s insight into the leadership race:
There’s a hush in HQ, (for we all know the name),
Of the one who came first in this race.
They were still neck and neck as they came round the bend,
But one of them fell off the pace.
There was lots of good money we bet on these two;
And each trainer was true to his yard.
First one then the other seemed to ease to the front;
Changing odds made the bookies work hard.
The punters were all of a dither;
But it seems now the race has been won,
One fell behind , and could not make lost ground,
And the race is all dusted and done.
We’ve waited so long for this moment;
The counting of votes took an age,
But now that we have a new leader.
A new act will take centre stage.
*BORIS ON DESERT ISLAND DISCS – SUNDAY 30TH OCTOBER, 11.15AM, RADIO 4*(repeated on Friday 4th November, 9.00am)
Transcript of the Show
Eight discs chosen:
1. Beatles – Here Comes the Sun (Boris thought it was fantastically optimistic)
2. Theme Tune for Test Match Special – Soul Limbo, Booker T and the MGs (had memories of playing cricket in the yard with his brothers, although he wasn’t very good)
3. Bach – Ich will hier bei dir stehen – Here would I stand beside thee (of great sentimental value – “it fueled and fortified me” – listened when going through Mods exams – also was falling in love)
4. Rolling Stones – Start Me Up (His friend James Delingpole has long despised the Rolling Stones, but he should eat his words – “it may be corny, but it’s brilliant”)
5. Brahms – Finale of Brahms Variations on a theme by Haydn (father played it endlessly when he was ill as a child and recovering)
6. Van Morrison – Brown Eyed Girl (cheery and you could overdose on him – you can’t get enough)
7. The Clash – Pressure Drop (Joe Strummer, the leader of The Clash, was a good poet and a fantastic rock musician – it was a proud moment when, as an avid Telegraph reader, he wrote to Boris saying how much he liked an article he had written about hunting)
8. Opening of the last movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (good when driving fast along an Autobahn)
He would choose Brahms and all the Variations if he had to choose only one record.
His book would have to be Homer to translate.
The luxury item would be a huge, supersized pot of seedy mustard as any meat tastes good with mustard.
Introduction
“One of the most memorable and unpredictable MPs …. Boris Johnson in a moment …”
Sue Lawley – “you are prone to getting into scrapes – affair with one of your colleagues…” Questions about ambitions followed.
Boris was full of bonhomie and explained that he was always interested in being an MP. It is the single most interesting job you could do – it is such a broad canvas. He would also like to keep up journalism. If he had to choose he would choose being an MP. As far as politics goes he is interested in agriculture, trade – where he has had personal experience.
Apparently Boris’s ex mother-in-law claims that he always wanted to be PM. Boris replied that MPs are like crazed wasps in a jam jar. Of course everyone would like to lead the party he explained.
All politicians in the end are like crazed wasps in a jamjar, each individually convinced that they are going to make it.
My ambition silicon chip has been programmed to try to scramble up this ladder, so I do feel a kind of sense that I have got to.
Sue listed his academic achievements and Boris admitted he was a colossal swot – he strongly recommended boning up. “I’ve got a lot of energy and need to use it all up”. Time is ticking away and he feels programmed with a sense of duty and to climb up and achieve more – “we need all these grasping hacks to compete”.
Career
After The Times Max Hastings rescued him and he owes a huge amount to him. He was Brussels correspondent (Daily Telegraph) for five years including the time when the Berlin Wall fell. He finds being Editor of The Spectator (since 1999) a wonderful job.
From this point on Sue presses very hard about “misdemeanours“. Boris said: “this isn’t talking about Haydn – this is being a hidin’ to nothing”. The image conjured up through this tenacious probing about his shortcomings was of a Boris pushed into a tight corner held up at knifepoint. After a few uncomfortable spluttering moments there was a response of: ” … okay, there have been misdemeanours – you keep referring to misdemeanours … but there are far fewer demeanours than there have been misdemeanours”.
Latest book (Seventy Two Virgins)
His book is about four suicide bombers from the North and the heroine is called Cameron, so it is quite uncanny. It is a comic thriller.
Roger Barlow rides a bike and is exercised by whether the papers will discover his extramarital affair – playing with fire – does that have any resonance with real life, asked Sue. Did he like playing with fire. Boris replied that if this was her theory about him then there might be an element of truth in this – but he wouldn’t take unnecessary risks.
He was asked whether he used comedy to override his ‘misdemeanours’ – or did he use charm to get by, taking into account his reported misdemeanours or mishaps. Boris explained that when he was young he should have used grommets because he couldn’t hear and he therefore developed an evasiveness.
So, finally alone, how would he feel on this deserted island? Boris would have a disciplined plan to rebuild civilisation. He likes making things with wood and recently made a treehouse for his children. He would sing a few hymns, march up and down and he would write. His aim would be to get to the heart of things – “It may sound pretentious” he said. He is writing a thesis on the meaning of nationhood at the moment and getting up very early every morning and it was knocking his brains about a bit. He was also working on a book about how the Romans ran Europe. Of course on an island there would be no data so he would download all he had and then start plagiarising it (Sue erupts into giggles).
MCW
A little bird told me a story, it happened just today
Sue Lawley and our Boris will soon have lots to say
We haven’t heard from Boris: no broadcasts for a while
But now he’s playing castaway; upon a desert isle
His favourite bits of music he’ll play, explaining why
I hope he’s into Mozart: because ; well, so am I
But it’s not so much the music: Sue really digs the dirt
Will she spare our Boris? I wouldn’t bet my shirt!
ARNOLD McGREGOR
Morning bloggers!
I am very sorry to have been so dilatory in my blogging, but as you all know by now, i am just a potemkin figurehead in this blog – the real star is of course Melissa.
I want to make three points today.
The first is that David Cameron offers the Tories a real chance of winning the next election, reconquering huge sections of the electrorate that think we’re a bunch of space cadets, and so on and so forth blah blah fishcakes (see last article).
The next is that we must launch a national crusade to save cottage hospitals. Across Britain there is an undeclared war to close valued local hospitals, such as the one in Henley. These institutions were created and funded by local people, usually out of public subscription. They were then of course nationalised by the NHS in 1948. Now people are finding that their hospital is about to be shut, and there seems to be not a damn thing they can do about it. I object to what is being done not just for clinical reasons, though these are powerful in themselves – it is very useful to have step-down hospitals, relieving pressure on the acute sector, and of course providing a local service for people who need immediate treatment. It seems insane to shut the smaller local hospitals, when so many beds are blocked in the acute sector with patients who shouldn’t really be there, and when we are still afflicted by waiting lists unknown to any other western society. There is a further point. It is an outrageous hollowing out of local democracy that a hospital built by local people, funded by local people, loved and treasured by local people, can be shut on the say-so of a healthcare hierarch who is ACCOUNTABLE TO NO ONE. It is time for people across the country to seize the initiative and stop this national campaign of demolition, and any interested parties can begin by coming with an Oxfordshire delegation to Downing Street on October 20, when we will present a petition to Tony Blair.
Last point: paternity leave. I can think of nothing more calculated to drive young fathers up the wall than to be required or otherwise pressured into taking six months off on the birth of a child. I can think of few things more maddening for small firms already struggling with regulation of one kind or another, than to be required first to fill in for these absent fathers, and PAY them during their absence, and then to make way for them again on their return. And frankly, folks, is it really in the interests of the babies that they should be incarcerated with their fathers, otherwise loving and doting men who will, I am afraid, be driven mad with cabin fever in an intensifying hell of milupa and perfumed nappy sacks?
Best,
Boris
A Rake’s Progress III: The Orgy by William Hogarth
Britain’s Greatest Painting
BBC’s Radio 4 Today Programme in association with the National Gallery are asking the public to vote for Britain’s favourite painting. The hundreds of paintings nominated have now been whittled down to a final shortlist, drawn up by Today’s panel of experts (Jonathan Yeo, Deborah Bull and Martin Gayford) each backed by a celebrity advocate.
The ten paintings in the frame are:
The Arnolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck
The Fighting Temeraire by Joseph Mallor William Turner
The Hay Wain by John Constable
A Rake’s Progress III: The Orgy by William Hogarth
The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere by Edouard Manet
Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh
The Last of England by Maddox Brown
The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Lock by Sir Henry Raeburn
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy by David Hockney
Comment on the Today programme:
Hogarth is a peerless 18th C painter and the reason he is peerless is because he is so honest and so truthful about human life. This Rake’s Progress is a satire of what happens to this chap, Tom Rakewell, and the various scrapes he gets in to. We see him here in an orgy where he is being fleeced by a prostitute who is reaching her hand into his bosum and stealthily passing his watch, which is set at 3am so you can see how late it is, to an accomplice behind him. Meanwhile another girl is about to take her clothes off and dance naked. All the human characters you can imagine turn up in Hogarth’s work, every human frailty, every human vice is depicted here and above all satirised here and the reason I want everyone to vote for Hogarth is because he so represents this English tradition of satire and irreverence. If all countries had the same ability to make fun of people’s frailties and foibles then the world would frankly be a lot less terrifying, because, in a way, what you see here in the Rake’s Progress is the essential concommitant to the enlightenment. How about that eh?!
The polls close on the 4th of September, with the winning painting announced on the Today programme on the 5th, so get your skates on, get out there, vote early and vote often here till closing date!
See comment on the result
Yesterday’s disgusting attack on London will naturally be seized upon by politicians of all hues to advance their various agendas. Opponents of the war in Iraq have lost no time in blaming Tony Blair and British engagement for the bombs that hit London and killed dozens and injured many hundreds. They have a point. As the Butler report revealed, the Government was explicitly warned before the Iraq war that our involvement would exacerbate the risk of terrorism in this country. But that does not for one moment mean that if Britain had not been involved in Iraq, then London would have been safe. It bears repeating that more British people died in the attacks on the World Trade Centre than in yesterday’s brutal outrages, and it must never be forgotten that 9/11 preceded the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, as did the series of vicious Islamicist bombings in Paris in the 1990s.
Which is to say that we in London, Paris, New York and the rest of the civilised West face a terrorist threat which cannot be said wholly to have been provoked by Iraq. These are people whose hatred of what they see as Western values is seemingly ineradicable. It is impossible to negotiate with them. Their grievance is not just with the war in Iraq or with the treatment of Palestinians by Israel but with the whole system of Western values that they find troubling and disturbing, not least the emancipation of women.
We must tackle the terrorist threat with calm resolution and without recourse to wild or hysterical measures. Yet the Government will now seize on this event with no less vigour than their opponents to campaign for a series of repressive and illiberal measures of doubtful utility in the so-called war on terror. Prime among these is the compulsory ID card. It must be stressed that whatever the merits or demerits of an ID card system, it would have done absolutely nothing to prevent the horrors of yesterday. As with the 19 suicide killers of 9/11 the problem was of intention and not identity.
In the coming days and weeks the public will urged to accept such restrictions on their liberty as ID cards as a price we must all pay for liberty itself. We believe that argument to be absurd and fallacious, and hope that defenders of liberty will recognise that it is exactly this kind of panic-stricken measure that will most gratify the killers.
Congratulations to David Dawson and his fantastic team in Henley – well done on your latest superb copy of The Henley Standard with a record-breaking 96 pages including a special Regatta supplement!
Also, this amazing picture of Boris and family enjoying a river boat cruise – in this week’s Henley Standard. Well you can also check Mitcccny for more information.
Continue reading Boris and family ~ messing about on the river
Boris once likened the demise of a political career to a wasp breathing its last in a jam jar: (see full text here)
it is not in the nature of politicians to surrender their own political lives; they are like wasps in jam jars. They buzz on long after hope has gone. They go on because it is in their nature to do so, because all political careers must end in tears
Continue reading Wasps in a jam jar
Hi folks
This is your errant blogger here, reporting for duty.
It is becoming ever clearer to me that you all really want to read the words of Melissa rather than me – and I don’t blame you – but since my name and superscription appears on the site, I feel I should provide you with the latest freshly-brewed stuff, still steaming from the urn.
Today I am sitting in my boiling and un-air-conditioned office getting psyched up for an afternoon in the House of Commons.
Continue reading Racial and Religious Hatred Bill: Second Reading
Broadcasting House programme, Radio 4, Sunday 4th June, 9 – 11am
The Anglo Saxon model is a sweet and bonny lass
And the victim of much calumny in France
They say she’s cruel and ruthless and her heart is made of glass
They say, they lie, she doesn’t change her pants
The rude deluded Frenchmen have the gall to blame our model
For the sufferings of four million on the dole
When the truth is the reverse ……
Listen to programme here
