Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Page 29

  Suffice to say, I have a better idea. It goes like this. Instead of filling a House of Colins with a bunch of biscuit-eating nonentities, who left to their own devices would struggle to wire a plug, we use the computer that’s used to pick premium bond winners to select eight people at random each week from the electoral roll.

  Of course, it will be a nuisance for them to take a week off work, but on the upside, they will be brought to London and put up in a swish hotel. And all that will be asked in return is that they have a quick look over the bills being discussed in the House of Commons to make sure none involves reintroducing slavery or invading Portugal.

  Humourless people in suits will suggest at this juncture that the second tier of government is rather more complex than that. And they may have a point. But it can’t be that difficult because for hundreds of years the House of Lords has been run by a squadron of dribbling infantile buffoons who think they must be right because they talk more loudly than anyone else. And they managed just fine. Many managed even when they were fast asleep, dreaming – and not in a good way – of their old nanny.

  Seriously. Who would you rather have doing the job: a man who thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to wear a fur scarf on a hot day or your mate Jim from the builder’s yard? Quite. We trust randomly selected juries on the important business of a person’s liberty so, on the basis that most people can tie up their shoelaces and not get run over while crossing the road, why wouldn’t we trust a similar system to apply the checks and balances in government?

  A few moments ago I put this idea to Alastair Campbell who popped round for a cup of tea. I know. Strange. And what he said was, ‘You’re talking about a focus group.’ As though this were a bad thing.

  It isn’t. These days, focus groups choose what we eat, what we drive, what we read, what we watch and how we furnish our houses. Almost nothing makes it on to the market without being presented first to a small group of people selected at random. Occasionally they let something daft through the net, such as cherry-flavoured Coca-Cola and the Toyota Prius, but for the most part the observations they make are reasonable. Business trusts them. Shareholders trust them. So why shouldn’t we?

  Certainly I’d rather have a government’s ideas checked for idiocy and recklessness by a small, cheap group of ordinary people than by 450 expensive Colins. Although, truth be told, the solution I’d most like to have is the solution we have now.

  I understand, of course, why David Cameron allowed his tea boy Clegg to go off and work on House of Lords reform. Because if he’s doing that, he’s not mucking up something more important. But now that we’ve seen what Cleggy has in mind, it’s probably a good idea to take his mind off it with another idea. Can’t he be made to clean the silver or something?

  1 July 2012

  Cheer up, Mewling Murray, you’ve made it into Boohoo’s Who

  Last weekend all the tabloid newspapers were full of huge headlines wishing Andy Murray well as he prepared to become the first British man to win Wimbledon for 3,000 years.

  This was odd. Normally tabloids are extremely good at judging the mood of the nation but on this occasion they were well wide of the mark. Because I couldn’t find a single person, in real life or on Twitter, who wanted the miserablist-in-chief to win. There’s a good reason for this. He’d had the bare-faced cheek to plough through the entire tournament playing nothing but tennis.

  There had been no hopping, skipping or clowning around of any kind. He was a man with the personality of a vacuum cleaner and in post-match press conferences the sparkle of an old man’s brogue. That’s why we were all rooting for the man in the monogrammed blazer.

  When the final was over and Murray had lost, I was praying he’d express his anger and disappointment by high-fiving his opponent. In the face. With a chair. That’s what I’d do if I were ever to lose a game of Boggle. But what he actually did was blub, whimpering and mewling like a hysterical little girl whose puppy dog had gone missing. It was pathetic. And guess what. All of a sudden he became a national hero.

  Why? We live on a solid little rock in the north Atlantic. It’s cold. It’s wet. We admire the bulldog spirit. We keep calm and carry on. We get a grip. Crying? It’s like eating a horse. Something foreigners do.

  In America a stiff upper lip is something that only ever happens when intimate plastic surgery goes wrong. There is no American word for ‘stoic’. Americans cry more often than they don’t. The smallest breath of wind and they’re all on the news, tears streaming down their blubbery faces as they stand beside their fallen-over wooden houses, explaining between heaving sobs how the good Lord has deserted them.

  Even Germans cry, a point that was demonstrated by the enormous and manly Carsten Jancker, who broke down and wept when his side were beaten by Manchester United in the 1999 Champions League final. Finns? Yup. The former racing driver Mika Hakkinen took himself off for a little weep when he thought a mistake had cost him the world championship. And Italian men cry a lot, too. Probably because most of them aren’t actually men.

  Here, though, things have always been different. A man could come home to find his wife in bed with the plumber, his dog nailed to the front door and his business a smoking ruin, and still he could be relied upon to put on a brave face and think of some suitable understatement to make it all seem not so bad.

  It is impossible, for instance, to imagine a tear in the eye of Nobby Stiles or W. G. Grace. I bet Earl Haig had no tear ducts at all. Or Arthur Harris.

  And certainly when my father-in-law was surrounded by overwhelming German forces at Arnhem, there is no suggestion that he broke down and wept. He just blew up another tank.

  In Britain lachrymosity has always been seen, quite rightly, as a sign that you are not really a proper chap. That you may be someone who bowls from the other end, or a colonial. But, oh dear, that’s all changed now.

  Every night on the news in recent weeks fat people who’ve watched far too much American television are to be found standing in front of their moist sofas sobbing as they explain how the flood waters came all the way up to their knees. It’s sick-inducing and should be banned from the airwaves. People aren’t allowed to bare their breasts on the news. So why should they be allowed to bare their souls?

  It gets worse. Nick Faldo wormed his way into the nation’s hearts by crying after he won a stupid game of golf. And the only reason we feel sorry for Paul Gascoigne is that he let us see his feminine side during a football match against Germany. Nowadays a little tear on television can win you not just the love of a nation, but also a lucrative advertising deal and a lot of sex with women who think you are all gooey and nice.

  Well, that’s what they say. They argue that the tear-stained face of a man is a sign that he likes to eat celery and that he gives half of his salary each month to a home for distressed kittens. They say that this is a good thing. They also say they don’t want us to come home at night in a bearskin and demand our wicked way. And that isn’t true, either. Women want a crybaby in the house in the same way that men want their wives in a pair of Y-fronts.

  That said, I can cry. I cried in Born Free when Elsa was released into the wild, and I’m told by my mother that I was inconsolable in a film in which Norman Wisdom went to bed with a horse. But as an adult? Well, when our pet Kristin Scott Donkey died I had to go for ‘a little walk’, and I’m afraid I get quite sniffly in Educating Rita. But that’s it.

  And rightly so. Because, as Britain changes, it is very difficult to think of one single defining national characteristic. We don’t wear bowler hats any more. Benny Hill is dead. And our army is now smaller than the Padstow Tufty Club. All we have left is a stiff upper lip.

  Which brings me on to the citizen test that all new boys have to pass if they want to become British. At present it’s full of irrelevant questions about the number of parliamentary constituencies, what quangos do and who is allowed to vote.

  There should be one question only.

  When is it acceptable for
a grown man to cry in public?

  a) Never.

  b) Whenever he is upset by something.

  Anyone who ticks b) should be taken directly to Heathrow and put on the next flight to abroad.

  15 July 2012

  We’re all running as Team GB, the grim bellyachers

  Soon the waiting will be over, and we shall be able to find out whether a Kenyan man we’ve never heard of can jump further into a sandpit than an American man we’ve also never heard of. Plus we shall be able to see Russian women with scrotums like tractors hurling hammers about the place. And with a bit of luck, one of the triangular-torsoed diver boys will bash his head on the board. As you may have gathered, I’m no fan of London’s forthcoming running and jumping competition, and in recent weeks I’ve joined in wondering why its officials, among others, should be given one lane of a dual carriageway while 8 million Londoners have to hutch up in the other.

  However, even I am now starting to grow weary of the salivatory anticipation that the Olympics will be a soggy festival of incompetence, and that the wall-to-wall television coverage is bound to be ruined by Fearne Cotton saying ‘wow’ a lot.

  When any other Third World country is asked to stage an international event, it doesn’t actively hope for it to be a failure: Inner Mongolia, for instance, is hosting this year’s Miss World and no one in the local press is saying that all the competitors are sure to get a nasty bout of genital itching.

  Here, though, things are rather different. A lone American athlete arrived last week and tweeted to say his first impressions of London weren’t good. And somehow this was seen as proof that the whole event was turning into a fiasco.

  Of course, what we should have said is, ‘Why? What happened? Were you barked at by a furious immigration official and made to go to the back of a two-hour queue because you’d accidentally said on your visa waiver form that you had committed genocide? And then did you climb into a taxi that had no legroom at all and was being driven by a non-English speaker who had no idea where he was going? No. Well, shut up, then, you disgusting little ingrate.’

  Then came news that some of the on-site cleaners were being asked to share a shower. Like everyone who goes to a £30,000-a-year public school such as Eton. Not that you will have noticed this little nugget because you were too busy watching Twenty Twelve on your iPlayer.

  Meanwhile, a hastily organized select committee was trying to find out why Nick Buckles, the G4S boss, had announced with just two weeks to go that he’d been unable to find enough guards to sit at the back of the stadium, smoking.

  But instead, a Labour MP called David Winnick, who couldn’t even do up his tie properly, shouted, ‘If I demand over and over again that you admit it’s a humiliating shambles, can I appear on the front of all tomorrow’s papers?’

  Where was he going with that? And why didn’t poor old Mr Buckles, with his Bay City Rollers haircut, simply tell the publicity-hungry moron that a much better question would have been, ‘Why did so many of Britain’s 2.5 million unemployed people decide they’d rather stay on benefits than put on a high-visibility jacket and do a job?’

  Whatever. We now get to the hated Olympic lanes, which have been provided in the hope that visiting journalists are made to feel so warm and fuzzy that they go home and encourage business leaders to open an office here.

  Do we see it that way? No. What we see instead is one tiny little mistake on one tiny little road where one lane is for buses and one is for someone from the Kampala Gazette. And for this, apparently, Seb Coe’s head must be amputated.

  There’s more. One woman went to the papers to say that her son hadn’t been allowed to wear his expensive training shoes while practising in an east London gym because they hadn’t been made by Adidas, one of the Olympic sponsors. Well, yes, I too despair about the commercialization of sport, but the truth is that without Adidas and EDF and BMW, there’d have been no stadium.

  Not that we need one, scoffed the cynics, because no tickets at all have been sold for any of the basket-weaving events. And anyway, it’s just going to be a white elephant for the rest of time unless Bernie Ecclestone can be persuaded to remove the Monaco race from the grand prix calendar and replace it with an event through the streets of Newham.

  By Wednesday last week the hysteria and general sense of impending doom had reached such a pitch that observers were quoting a German magazine that claimed the Games would be a washout because of the weather. And instead of saying, ‘Well, yes, but at least the Queen won’t storm out if Usain Bolt wins,’ we took this as yet more proof that Britain is seen around the world as a useless, wet rock full of tax dodgers, benefit frauds and cheating bankers.

  Even Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, jumped on the bandwagon, saying that because the swallows were flying backwards and the cotoneaster berries were a little paler than usual, the whole of east London would be soaked for the duration of the Games. Really? Because the weather forecasters say that the jet stream is moving north, that sunny skies are on the way and that as a result the beach volleyball girls will be allowed to perform naked as usual.

  I’m not saying the Games are bound to be a triumph, but I am heartily fed up with the mongers of misery who think they’ll be a rain-spattered orgy of mud, incompetence, striking bus drivers, disgruntled staff, angry Americans, corporate greed and empty stadiums. And that the army is almost certain to shoot down a patrolling Eurofighter with one of its Fisher-Price ground-to-air missiles.

  We need to think positively. We need to imagine that the opening ceremony is rather more than a celebration of diversity and sustainability. We need to picture a bright summer sun glinting off all the gold medals our athletes have won. In short, let’s enjoy the hope now and deal with the despair later.

  22 July 2012

  Stop, or I’ll shoot … about 100 yards off to your right

  Many people in the civilized world were a bit surprised when they heard that the good Christian folk of Denver, Colorado, had responded to the cinema killings by rushing out the next day to stock up on sub-machine guns.

  Firearms permit applications were up 40 per cent.

  What were they thinking of? ‘Right. Good. I have in my belt a Mac-10, so now if I’m interrupted while out for a romantic dinner with my wife, or walking the dog, I shall be able to kill the assailant before he kills me.’

  This is extremely unlikely. Gun-toting maniacs tend not to announce their intentions with a shouted warning. Which means that by the time you have located your weapon, withdrawn it from its hiding place, taken off the safety catch, aimed and pulled the trigger, you’re already fairly dead.

  And even if by some miracle you aren’t, have you ever tried to hit a target with a gun? It’s pretty much impossible, even if the target is an American. Once I was given a machine gun by a member of the army and asked to hit, quite literally, a barn door from a range of perhaps fifty yards. The first round was successful, but thereafter I was mostly spraying the sky while stumbling backwards with my eyes closed and my face all screwed up as if I were sucking hard on an unripe lemon.

  There is no metaphor that quite captures the sheer violence of pulling the trigger on an automatic weapon. One second, it’s as still and as silent as a rock. The next, you are attached to a living thing that is trying desperately to break free from your grasp. If you are a trained soldier, you can just about deal with this. If you are an overweight solicitor out for dinner with your wife, you will end up blind, deaf and surrounded by the thirty bodies of all the people you’ve just shot by mistake.

  It’s interesting. Since the Batman shootings, a handful of teary Democrats have been saying that automatic weapons with large magazines should be banned. In other words, they want to ban baddies from buying precisely the sort of gun that can’t actually hit anything.

  Mind you, a pistol is not much better. Only recently a deeply worrying man in North Carolina took me to his outdoor shooting range and asked me to ‘double tap’ one of his Osama bin Laden targets. So,
aim carefully at the man’s heart, fire and then straight away put the next round in his head. Seen it done in a million films. Simple.

  It isn’t, actually. The first carefully aimed round grazed Mr bin Laden’s shoulder. The next hit a bush several hundred yards to the right.

  Americans must know this. Many are descended from cowboys and gunslingers. So they must be at least aware that in the hands of an amateur, in the heat of the moment, a gun is about as useful as a pencil sharpener.

  Politicians must know it too. So Mr Barack should simply explain that in the olden days, when there were Indians and Frenchmen and bears rushing about, it was fair enough to keep a Winchester above the fireplace. But today it’s ridiculous.

  He doesn’t say this, though. After the Aurora massacre, instead of announcing an amnesty or a change in the law, he mumbled something about the need to address violence and explained that every day and a half the same number of young Americans are shot to death as died in Denver. It was a presidential shrug.

  That’s because asking a working-class American male to hand in his gun is like asking him to hand in his penis. Mr Barack knows that Bud and Hank won’t vote for him if he takes away their right to have a machine gun. Which gets us back to the question: why would you want one in the first place?

  Well, first of all, you grew up in the Cold War. You were taught by your leaders that when the bad guys have intercontinental ballistic missiles, you must have intercontinental ballistic missiles too. Plus the constitution says you can have a gun to defend yourself from the British.