Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (17 page)

A recent piece in Her Majesty's
Daily Telegraph
suggested there is a turning point in the career of all prime ministers after which their place on the scrapheap of history becomes assured.

This is probably true. Tony Blair was doomed from the moment he said to George W.: ‘Yes. Let's bomb Iraq.'

John Major had had it after Black Wednesday, and Gordon Brown became a spent force … well, when the nurse cut his umbilical cord.

According to Peter Oborne in the
Telegraph
, David Cameron's moment came when he chose to become involved with the Chipping Norton set – ‘an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners' who all have homes near one another in the Cotswolds.

I see. So this pretty little market town, whose most notable resident to date was the famously power-hungry and amoral Ronnie Barker, is actually a haven for the worst excesses of corruption. Behind the hanging baskets and the tea shoppes, the man in the hardware store is let off his VAT bill if he hands Cameron an under-the-counter tin of gloss paint.

It's all rubbish. The fact is that 99 per cent of the population of Chipping Norton are not in the Chipping Norton set, and that 99 per cent of the set don't actually live in Chipping Norton.

According to every single report I've read, Matthew Freud, the PR man who is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, is a leading light and the host of our most glamorous parties. But he
lives in Burford, which to most people in Chipping Norton – myself included – is basically France.

Then there's Steve Hilton. Apparently, he's a Tory adviser, but I've never met him. Nor have I met another chap who has been mentioned, Sir Howard Stringer. But that's probably because he lives in Chinnor, which is as far away as Russia. Last weekend the
Mail on Sunday
suggested Nat Rothschild is also involved simply on the basis he once used the M40.

I'll let you into a secret, though. There is a group of Chipping Norton people who do live close to one another and who do meet up most weekends for wine and cheesy things on sticks. I am one of these people. And so is the Blur bassist Alex James, who often brings his children round to swim in our pool.

We have other friends, too. There's Tony and Rita and James and Annabel and Dominic and Caroline. Bored yet? No? Well, that's because I haven't got to Emily and Miles, who have the pub.

Of course, there are some other people in the group who have been in the newspapers recently. There's Cameron and his wife Sam, but we don't see much of them these days, partly because he is jolly busy running the country and partly because Sam is one of those non-smokers who suddenly remembers when she's presented with a smoker like me that what she'd like to do is smoke all my bloody cigarettes. And then send me out to get some more.

Then there's Rebekah Brooks and her husband, Charlie. They actually met over supper in our house one night and are the most fantastically kind and generous people we know. I feel desperately sad that Rebekah has had to resign but the cloud does have a silver lining – I can see more of her. She has been a friend for a long time. She is now. And she always will be.

And now let's get to the meat. The question that has burnt brightly in the
Guardian
for the past six months. The infamous Christmas-time party at Rebekah and Charlie's house. Investigative journalists have established that the Camerons were there but they have not been able to establish what was discussed.

I'm going to tell you everything. I was there with my wife – and that's a story already for the
Mirror
. James Murdoch was there too, with his wife. There were two other couples, neither of whom have even the slightest connection to newspapers, the police force or the government. They were simply neighbours.

We began with a cocktail made from crushed socialists and after we'd discussed how the trade union movement could be smashed and how News Corp should be allowed to take control of the BBC, Rupert Murdoch joined us on a live video feed from his private volcano, stroking a white cat.

Later, I remember vividly, a policeman knocked at the door and Rebekah gave him a wad of cash. Cameron tapped the side of his nose knowingly and went back to his main course – a delicious roast fox.

That's what you want me to say happened, isn't it? But what you're going to get now is the truth. I've kept quiet for six months but I feel the time is right to tell all. What Rebekah and Cameron talked about most of all – and I'm a trained journalist so I understand the need to get things right – is sausage rolls.

We were planning a big walk with all our kids over Christmas and thought it might be a good idea to build a fire in my woods and stop off for a picnic. Rebekah was worried about what we'd eat. Cameron thought sausage rolls would be nice. My wife said she'd get some.

Aha, you cry. But what about evil James Murdoch? Was he
not to be found sticking pins into a waxwork model of Vince Cable?

No, actually. James was sitting opposite me and we spent most of the night arguing about the environment. He likes it and I don't. The row only ended when Samantha Cameron suddenly remembered that what she'd like was 400 of my cigarettes.

In other words, it was much like a million other Christmas-time dinners being held in a million other houses all over the world that day. BSkyB was not mentioned. Nor was phone hacking. And it was the same story the next time we all met. That time, we played tennis. You might call this disgustingly middle class. Going for walks and picnics and tennis. And I won't argue with you. But louche? Amoral? Corrupt? No.

Of course, much has gone wrong in recent years and many will spend the next few years wondering what caused the rot to set in. But I can assure you that the root cause of it all will not be found in Chipping Norton.

17 July 2011

British prisoners of war in some of the more barbaric Japanese camps were not allowed to speak to one another. So, to get round the problem, they developed a new language that featured no Bs, Ms, Ps, Vs or Ws. This meant they could at least whisper, without moving their lips, and thus avoid arousing the suspicion of the guards.

People in certain villages in North Wales perform a similar trick even today: when an English person walks into their local pub, they switch to a version of English in which the A, E, I, O and U are replaced by the letter L.

Then, of course, there were the eighteenth-century plantations where slaves, often from different parts of Africa, conversed in English. But not the sort that their English master would have a hope of understanding. The language has lasted, and now I have literally no idea how the courts work in Barbados since the defendant invariably answers all the questions by speaking in a way that is indecipherable to anyone in a suit. ‘Dah you own?', for example, means ‘Is that yours?' Not guilty is ‘Ah'n do dah'. Which is literally ‘I didn't do that'.

So, there have been good reasons in the past for using language as a device for not being understood. But today people seem to mangle language just to make themselves sound more important.

This began in about 1840 with the birth of Cockney rhyming slang and is practised extensively in the world of light aircraft. Instead of speaking to the tower in a manner the
passengers can understand, the pilot chooses to say things that make the task look much more difficult than is actually the case. ‘Whisky Oscar Tango Squawking on niner niner two decimal seven. Requesting basic service ILS Echo to outer beacon.'

We see a similar problem with the practitioners of business who now talk about ‘quantum' instead of money and ‘P and L' instead of money and ‘piece' instead of money.

It's like footballers coming up with a million new words for ‘goal'.

Lawyers are also annoying, never using one word when several thousand will do. And then several thousand more, until the reader has completely lost the point and sometimes the will to live.

You think you have just about got to the end of a sentence but then there's a colon and you know that there's at least a fortnight to go before you get to the next verb. I signed a legal document a while ago, not because I agreed with what it said: I was bored.

So, some people talk strangely to hide what they're saying from eavesdroppers. And some because they want to make a simple job look more difficult. So what excuse, I wonder, do golfists have?

Last week there was a golf tournament in Kent that must have been jolly important because it was the only thing on the news apart from the people who knew the person who once met someone at a party who may or may not have illegally listened to Sienna Miller making a hair appointment.

I'm not kidding. Every half hour on every radio station, we had the phone hacking stuff, and then instead of the collapse of the euro, or the famine in East Africa, all we had was a breathless report about the leaderboard at Sandwich. And I'm sorry, but I couldn't understand what they were on about.
A man, whom I'd never heard of, was four under par behind another man I'd never heard of who needed an eagle and a bogey to win. It was as though the reporter were reading a Scrabble board.

No other sport does this. Even if we are not interested in football, we understand who has won when we are told that Manchester United have scored two and Chelsea have scored three. But in a golf report your car radio needs to have the decoding powers of Bletchley Park or you are left completely in the dark.

Golf fever even spread to the traffic reports. Normally, these begin with Scotland and we all think: ‘Oh, do us a favour. They have no idea what a jam is.' But last week they all began with news of hold-ups in Kent, caused, apparently, by people going to the golf match.

That's even more baffling than the leaderboard. I can, if I squint, understand why people play the sport – they don't like their wives – but I cannot understand why anyone would want to watch it, because, so far as I can tell, you choose whether you want to watch a man you've never heard of hit the ball or whether you want to watch the ball land.

Isn't that like being forced in a football match to choose whether you want to watch the man take the penalty, or the other man try to save it? Imagine if the bowler and the batsman in cricket were made to stand three miles apart and you had to choose which one you'd like to see.

Except there is no batsman in golf. A man hits a ball and all you can do if you're at the other end is watch it land. Can you imagine anything in life quite so dreary?

And it was raining. Doesn't that strike you as odd? That you would drive through severe traffic and stand in the rain for hours watching a selection of men in nasty trousers thwack a ball into the clouds. Or, worse, peering into the
heavens in the hope that you've selected the right spot to watch it come back down to earth. And you have no idea who's winning because reports of the scores don't make sense.

It's almost like a secret code. Which it is, in a way, since in the early days golf was played almost exclusively by Freemasons. And Freemasons do not make a habit of speaking openly about their activities or their handshakes or their funny words.

Today, of course, most Freemasons are to be found in the police, who don't talk properly either.

24 July 2011

In my continuing quest to prove that airport check-in times are fraudulent nonsense, I arrived at Ronaldsway on the Isle of Man the other morning twenty-three minutes before the scheduled departure time.

And made it on to the flight, easily.

I was feeling extremely smug as I cast my eyes over the other passengers. ‘Ha,' I thought, ‘while I was catching a few more zeds in bed this morning, all you slaves to convention were marooned in the departure lounge, having your hair redone by static electricity from the seats.'

But then the plane took off, and I realized that, unlike everyone else, I hadn't left myself enough time to buy a book or a newspaper.

This meant I had to spend the entire flight looking out of the window. And as we began our descent into London City an hour or so later, I arrived at an interesting conclusion: from the air, England is much too dreary. I realize, of course, that we don't have any Alps and there's no desert – apart from a small one between Birmingham and Coventry – but we do have many towns, and from the air they're all extremely similar and very horrid.

Stoke-on-Trent looks exactly like Stafford. Milton Keynes looks like a retail park. Lichfield appears to serve no purpose at all. And every building you see looks like a prison. Except for all the actual prisons, which look like supermarkets.

There's a very good reason for this. It's because the planning rules were drawn up when only the very tall had an aerial
view of anything. Architects therefore concentrated hard on frontal aspects and put all the flotsam and jetsam and the air-conditioning plant on the roof where no one could see it. Now, though, thousands of us can – and do – see it every day.

There's more. Think how much effort is put into a town's ground-level entry points these days. You get a little gate, and some flowerpots, a sign asking you to drive slowly and often a reminder that back in 1996 the Britain in Bloom judges had bestowed upon the council a special commendation. All this effort for a few people in cars.

Whereas people flying overhead are given nothing. It's just a big brown splodge that looks exactly the same as all the other big brown splodges.

So what about a bit of civic advertising. ‘You are now flying over Rutland – the best little county by a dam site.' Or ‘Mansfield – birthplace of Rebecca Adlington
and
Richard Bacon'. Or ‘Chipping Norton – nothing to see here'.

From the air, there seems to be no point at all to Preston. You realize why it was the first town to be given a motorway bypass. There was simply no need to go there. But this was the first British town outside London to be lit by gas. So why not light it up by gas again?

Think of all those eager little American faces, pressed to the windows of their planes, straining in the pre-dawn light to get a better look at Britain's only town to be completely on fire.

Companies, too, could get in on the act. They spend a fortune getting their message across to motorists who have better things to do than look at billboards.

But they spend not a single penny pushing their slogans to the thousands of trapped businessmen who fly over the factories every day.

We know of the story of a man in Wales who became so
fed up with low-level RAF sorties that he put a message on his roof saying ‘Piss off Biggles'. Inevitably it backfired because when news broke of his stunt, everyone with a pilot's licence flew over his gaff for a gawp.

But you can see from this story that rooftop advertising has power. Pilots will fly hundreds of miles out of their way, just to be abused. That's how boring Britain is from the air.

As you come in to land at Heathrow, there are thousands of nondescript warehouses on either side of the final approach and I think I'm right in saying that only one owner has had the gumption to festoon his otherwise useless roof space with an advert. That's madness.

At present, escort girls ply for trade by leaving cards in telephone boxes. Why? The only people who use a telephone box these days are people who are desperate for a wee. So why not put a photograph of yourself, a phone number and a brief list of the services you offer on the roof of a warehouse in Hammersmith? One Korean jet and you'd be rushed off your feet, literally, for a month.

It's the same story with Windsor Castle, over which you descend when the wind's blowing from the east. I'm pretty sure that most airline passengers haven't a clue what it is, so why not use a banner to tell them of opening times and ticket prices? Mrs Queen would have enough for a new royal yacht in weeks. And airline passengers would have something to read.

But it's farmers with whom I have the biggest gripe. Who says that crops have to be planted in squares? What's the matter with a good old-fashioned cock and balls?

In Oxfordshire there's an estate on which all the woods were planted in the precise formations of various troops at some battle in the Crimea. The old buffer who did this could not possibly have known that one day people would be able
to enjoy the fruits of his imagination. But today, every time I leave Heathrow, I do.

And certainly, if my farm were on a flight path, I'd be doing all sorts of things that would be invisible to arbiters of good taste on the ground but clear as day from 30,000ft in the sky. Some of the things I have in my mind would involve messages, perhaps about Gordon Brown. And if I had some land in Sussex, I'd plant a wood in such a way that Lufthansa's passengers would know that I shared their view of the Greeks.

My plans are good news for everyone. They are good for business, good for tourism, good for civic pride and good for those airline passengers who see the airport as a glorified bus stop. And not a two-hour compulsory shopping trip.

31 July 2011