Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (16 page)

There’ll be no victory cigar for Clegg because he’s given up smoking. This is a shame as it was one of the few things I still liked about him. I’m not saying it’s good to smoke, but it was an engaging reminder of his humanity, his frailty – it helped me believe that he was acting more out of weakness than malice. Although an aide said that Clegg “hasn’t needed gum or hypnosis
or anything like that. Willpower alone has done the trick.” A fine time to suddenly find some of that.

The main reason I’m disappointed by Clegg’s health drive is that it means he’ll stay looking exactly like all our other neat, slightly boyish politicians: Cameron, Osborne, several Milibands, Andy Burnham. Brown hair, black suit, white face, plausible smile – that’s what you’ve got to look like, conventional wisdom tells us, if you aspire to the front rank of power. Forgettable, identical, cast in the image of Blair. Clegg’s ageing and broadening features had begun to make him look like a recognisably different person – not quite as noticeable as Eric Pickles, but it was something. But now, with exercise and a diet, he’s squeezing himself back into the mould.

Well, I think it’s about time someone broke it. People are always claiming that a bald man can never be prime minister in the television age. But what about John Major? I know, technically, he had a full head of hair but, if they’re saying that baldness makes you seem ineffectual, then Major was metaphorically worthy of a coot simile. He exuded the air of the loser, the underdog, the submissive, and yet no prime minister’s government, in all of British history, has polled more votes than Major’s did in 1992. Maybe it was because the country, after a decade’s cruelty at the hands of a savage dominatrix, wanted to get fucked normally for a bit. But still, it’s a sign that our leaders don’t necessarily all have to look the same.

Not many of our top politicians from any of the main parties would declare themselves fans of Blair, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It would have been difficult to believe postwar Germany’s rejection of fascism if its leaders had taken to growing little moustaches. It’s depressing that Blair’s rise to power is the only sort our politicians have the imagination to believe possible. Surely the electorate must be sick of that style of politics?

In television, for all that people talk of creativity, the percentage game is in being deftly derivative. Don’t have the big, risky, original idea, be the first to copy it. The steady money is in remakes, reworkings, shows you can signal to an audience as being similar to something they’ve enjoyed before. These programmes don’t change the world, but they pay the rent.

It seems that politics is the same: everyone’s still aping Blair. But the world is changing fast (just because people always say that doesn’t mean it isn’t currently true). Our next important leader is unlikely to obey the same rules as the last. Maybe the time has come for someone bald, or old, or obese, or disabled – or just less slick. It never looked likely that it would be Nick Clegg. Now he’s dutifully pumping iron to make sure.

When did rebranding start? Pretty shortly after branding, I imagine. It must have been an uncomfortable feeling for those early cattle, still smarting from having the first mark seared into their hides, to notice the iron-age farmer firing up the furnace again on the advice of a trendy neighbour:

“Two straight lines is all very well, man, but I think if you added another one and a squiggle, you’d be projecting a much more powerful image.”

“Would people think my cattle were more modern?”

“Totally.”

“I like that bone you’ve got through your nose.”

“Thanks – it’s the new ‘scourge of my enemies’ chic. Makes you look like you’ve killed a chieftain, although in fact it’s a badger’s tibia.”

I suppose there was a rebranding explosion when Europe Christianised: loads of mosaics having to be relaid, crosses nailed on to temples, altars altered. Plenty of lucrative work for artists
who specialised in making Jupiter look like Jesus; and then, when the Vikings came, look like Odin; and then, when the Vikings converted, look like Jesus again. There can’t have been a bigger payday for the rebranding industries until British Rail was smashed up into a dozen new made-up companies. That probably added more to the GDP through business-card printing than Brunel ever managed by building viaducts.

The first rebranding I was aware of was when Marathon became Snickers. It was a profoundly unsettling moment. The manufacturers were trying to mess with something inside our heads: the noise we associated with a certain object.

It’s like when you start worrying that blue looks yellow to everyone else and that when they say “blue”, they’re thinking of yellow, and vice versa. How can you check? How do you describe blue? The mournful one? Aqua-brown? Red’s old sparring partner? Ultimately it’s just “the same colour as all the other things that are blue” – which, as I say, might look yellow to everyone else. When Marathon became Snickers, blue became yellow and words suddenly looked as flimsy as capital in the credit crunch. We’re only two confidence tricks away from grunting and barter.

So I’m suspicious of rebranding. The recent abolition of antisocial behaviour orders, asbos, and their replacement with, among other things, criminal behaviour orders was dismissed by Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children’s Society, as “more of a rebranding exercise than anything else”. Well, unusually, it’s a rebranding exercise I’m in favour of because, unlike Jif becoming Cif, it actually means something.

Antisocial behaviour is not necessarily illegal. There are no laws against farting in a lift, smoking at an asthmatic’s housewarming, browsing ringtones while travelling on public transport or picking your nose over dinner, and nor should there be. Taking crack is illegal; neglecting to offer some to other people when taking it in company – an act as antisocial, I’d have thought,
as failing to get your round in – is not. “Antisocial” is a word for the general public to use when making informal judgments about each other. It should be outside the province of lawyers, politicians and police.

So I welcome the removal of the name “asbo” and all its rhetorical implications. To me, it always suggested that the authorities were punishing behaviour of which they disapproved, when disapproval is an entirely inappropriate, indeed insolent, emotion for public servants, acting in their professional capacity, to feel. If people break the law, the authorities must dispassionately intervene. Otherwise, the less they opine, the better.

That’s why I hugely prefer the term “criminal behaviour orders”, even if it comes to refer to the same ineffectual fudge (now Kraft fudge, I think). Criminal behaviour is within the state’s area of legitimate concern. CBOs, unlike asbos, don’t suggest that we’re one step away from the introduction of Get-Your-Hands-Out-of-Your-Pockets-and-Stand-Up-Straight Orders.

I can’t remember the last time I approved of a politically motivated rebranding. Throughout the New Labour years, I was maddened by the frequent renaming of government departments. What was once the Department of Education and Science, for example, has changed its name five times since the early 1990s. It’s been the Department for Education twice (both at time of writing and from 1992–5), but has also at various times been “for” Employment, Skills, Children, Schools and Families. Every change cost us money and gained us nothing.

It makes me want to scream: “Listen, you’re in government. Shut up and get on with it. We’ll listen to the opposition because words are all they’ve got. You get to be judged on what you do!” Being “for” education, rather than “of” it; proclaiming your belief in a “big society” of kindly volunteers; and indeed, as has been mooted, moving the May Day bank holiday to October to become a “UK Day” on which we can all preen about how
great our country is (which, in my view, is the kind of vulgar thing foreigners do) – this is all window dressing. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and we should be firm in making it clear to our elected leaders that we consider it outside their brief.

I’m not against a society with shared values, “truths we hold to be self-evident” etc, but I hate it when politicians try to determine what those values are. It’s not a job we can trust them to do because they will instinctively use it to appeal for votes. Our elected representatives are there to decide how much money the government should collect, where it should collect it from, and how it should be spent. Their chances of re-election should be determined solely on how effectively, and equitably, they perform those roles. Politicians should make laws and ensure their enforcement by funding and protecting the independence of our judiciary. They absolutely should not sit in crowd-pleasing judgment themselves.

What our values are, what our civilisation stands for, what it means to be British – these are issues on which they are less qualified than the average citizen to take a view, because they have too big an incentive to be dishonest. We can’t trust them, when discussing such subjects, not to descend to self-serving demagogy.

Renaming is a great tool for the demagogue or propagandist. I approve of the asbo/CBO rebrand because the new name is plainer and more accurate. But, in general, we should avoid changing the names of aspects of the state or government because politicians’ tendency will always be to make the new names more emotive, more like adverts. And the government has nothing to sell us that we don’t already own.

A senior member of the judiciary has got himself into terrible trouble for not being sufficiently judgmental. When sentencing
a burglar, Judge Peter Bowers said that burglary took “a huge amount of courage”. “I wouldn’t have the nerve,” he added, before letting the guy off with a suspended sentence.

As a result of these remarks, Bowers was formally reprimanded by the Office for Judicial Complaints, which must have come as a relief to him because, at the time he made them, he expressed concern that he “might be pilloried”. If he thought that, he should probably go on a refresher course before he sends some poor hoodie down for a keelhauling instead of community service. Maybe he feared that if he didn’t let the burglar off, the guy would get hanged. Or maybe that’s what he wanted – maybe he thought that’s what “suspended sentence” means.

The judge’s comments drew complaints from all sides – and by “all sides” I mean the prime minister, the chairman of the National Victims’ Association (don’t miss their Christmas party if you like a passive-aggressive ambience) and LBC’s Nick Ferrari. David Cameron said that burglars weren’t brave at all but were “cowards”. I don’t know how he knows that but it’s a good job because presumably, if they were braver, they’d break into loads more places. “Thank the Lord for the comparative cowardice of these dishonest people,” he must be saying.

He isn’t, of course. He just wants to slag burglars off, and so is associating them with the negative end of the bravery–cowardice spectrum without really thinking about what those words mean. He may as well have countered that burglars weren’t handsome but ugly, not tall but short, not symmetrical but wonky and not fragrant but stinky. Having established that burglary is a bad thing, he thinks linking it or its practitioners with any positive attributes, however incidental, is an idea too sophisticated for the British public to grasp.

I don’t mean to blame David Cameron: this culture in which any concepts more complicated than good and bad are too nuanced to bother trying to express is not of his making. And he’s
never seemed particularly keen to change things, either for better or worse. He just wants to make his way to a fireside in a cosy House of Lords bar, the words “prime minister” indisputably inked on to his CV, with the least possible fuss. He makes Macmillan look like Thatcher.

But obviously Judge Bowers is correct. In many cases, doing a burglary is going to require considerable courage. In order to break into a house and steal stuff you have to be brave, show a bit of gumption. In order to go and get someone else’s property, you literally have to be a go-getter. Now, I’m not saying that the judge chose the best time to point out these evident truths. It would have been more appropriate and, more importantly, diplomatic to have emphasised some of the less praiseworthy attributes that burglary requires: dishonesty, unkindness, selfishness, thoughtlessness, disdain for the integrity of a window, raging narcotic withdrawal. I can understand those who dislike what he said. Not all truths need to be spoken. But that doesn’t make what he said untrue.

Personally, I like it. I find the way it has annoyed people extremely satisfying. I’m attracted to its inappropriateness. It sticks out, it’s noticeable, which is refreshing in the current era of public discourse, when all prominent figures seem at pains to be blandly appropriate: to show the expected level of respect, rage, shock, support, joy or grief. I like the judge for having taken the trouble to find something odd to say – something interesting and off-message.

It’s a rare skill. PC Gary Archer of the British Transport Police doesn’t seem to possess it. He described a series of thefts of dog-shaped charity collection boxes from station platforms in Oxfordshire as “simply unacceptable”. I don’t disagree but he didn’t grab my attention as much as the grainy CCTV snap of a youth tiptoeing off with a large plastic labrador. It would probably hurt the policeman’s career if he described the crimes as “funny” or
“refreshing”. “More fun than a stabbing in a nightclub.” “Makes a nice change from inveigling your way into an old lady’s house by pretending to read the meter.” “Not what you’d ideally have people doing, but it shows a bit of enterprise.” Some might say that was belittling a crime; I reckon it’s looking on the bright side.

At the risk of sounding like those people who go on about how the Nazis had nice uniforms, it’s worth remembering that bad things often have good aspects to them: burglars show bravery, smoking looks cool, Jeffrey Archer was quite good at athletics, the theme tune to
Casualty
is catchy. The good aspects don’t stop the things being bad. It’s vital to our understanding of a complex world, and to our intellectual dexterity, to be able to hold two different concepts in our heads at once without assuming that they’re mutually exclusive.