If this is Tuesday, we must have a new Prime Minister

My family was a BBC family: but for some reason, once a week, we were allowed to “turn over” to the “other side” and watch Opportunity Knocks.

You remember the format? An amateur singer, an amateur conjurer, and a man who did farmyard impressions would each perform a short turn, introduced by a friend or a family member. Viewers were invited to send in postcards with the name of their favourite performer, and the person who got the most votes got to open the show the following week. A sealed envelope was an acceptable substitute for a postcard, and if you couldn’t remember the act’s name and wrote “Irish Singer” they would know exactly who you meant. There was also a clap-o-meter but that was for fun only. 

“And I mean that most sincerely, folks” stands with “Beam me up, Scottie” and “Play it again, Sam” as a well known quote that no-one ever actually said. 

So: there was a particular singer who had written a perfectly harmless romantic ballad, and we the nation voted that he should come back next week and sing it again. The crop of talent in Week Two was so dreadful that he was invited back for a third week, and a fourth, at which point "the man with the quite good song" became "the man who had won Opportunity Knocks more times than anyone else". It was clear to me even at that tender age that everyone was voting for him because everyone else was voting for him; that he was winning because everyone expected him to win; and that either they would have to introduce some kind of Twenty Second Amendment, or else admit that the format was broken.

I know perfectly well that the singer was Bernie Flint and the song was I Don’t Wanna Put No Hold On You, but it suits my carefully cultivated online persona to pretend I can’t quite remember. I believe he resigned voluntarily after thirteen weeks.

*

We all hate Sir Kier Starmer, but we can’t quite remember why. The Right regard him as a radical left wing lunatic. The Left see him as somewhere to the right of the Conservatives, with policies on immigration that threaten to out-Reform Reform. If the Left think you are a Fascist and the Right think you are a Communist, there is a good chance that you are actually somewhere in the middle, and "somewhere in the middle" is the exact place you would expect to find a Centrist. 

After the trauma of Jeremy Corbyn, and the farce of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, it looked like a good idea to put a boringly moderate man in charge for a bit. “Not being Jeremy Corbyn” and “Not being a Conservative” was a pretty good pitch for Leader of the Opposition, but not a viable unique selling point for the actual Prime Minister. Having elected a Centrist the electorate quickly got very bored with Centrism.

We all love Andy Burnham. I have no idea why. I am not even quite sure I know which one he is. I vaguely remember him trying to become Labour Leader in 2015; he would probably have won if not for the unexpected late Corbyn surge. Perhaps the idea is that if he wins this time we can rewind and pretend the intervening eleven years never happened? There is a general sense that he has done a good job as Mayor of "some town".  We have even coined the word "Some-Town-ism" to represent that idea. Recently, he didn’t lose a safe Labour seat to a Reform candidate in a by-election, which is a fairly low bar to have cleared.

I gather that he thinks that Brexit may have been a bit of a false step; and that possibly we oughtn’t to have privatised transport and water and air in the 1980s. The US President is cross with him because he doesn’t think we should dig any more oil out of the sea, and the Daily Mail is very cross with him because he believes in Net Zero. I too am in favour of going back into Europe, nationalising monopolies and not having another summer as hot as this one. He dresses casually and likes the Pogues. He has a degree in English Literature. I find it hard to convince myself that anyone who likes Tony Harrison can be entirely evil. Donald Trump says that he is “extremely liberal extremely”.

"Extreme Liberal" has a contradictory ring to British ears, as if you had said that someone was a "Catholic atheist" or a "nice PE teacher". We use "liberal" to mean "not too far to the Left and not too far to the Right": as a synonym, in fact, for Centrist. Americans tend to use it to mean "much too far to the Left". 

It may that Andy Burnham is extremely much too far to the Left extremely. It may be that he is extremely in the middle. It depends a good deal on where you are standing.

* 

You might think that Centrist and Liberal (in the British sense) mean roughly the same thing. But Mr Tony Blair has invested the word Centre with his own, esoteric, meaning. For him, Centrism is the belief that policy comes before politics. It is the belief that you should first establish what the “correct” answer is, and only then try to persuade voters to support that answer. So a Centrist is not always Moderate. “When the correct answer requires radical change, the centre should be the radical change maker.” On Blair’s terms, Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell and Tony Benn were all equally Centrists. They unquestionably did what they thought was right even when it was unpopular, and tried to persuade the public that their ideas were the right ones. 

Blair says directly that Starmer won the 2024 election because people thought he was a Centrist, although in fact he is not. I suppose the accusation is that Starmer shapes his policies around what he thinks he can convince the electorate to vote for; that he looks for vote-winning policies and then pretends that he believes in them. This is, of course, precisely the accusation that was frequently levelled at Blair himself, not least by me.

I am also intrigued by Blair's use of the word "correct". It seems to assume that everyone wants the same thing: that we are all trying to get to the same place, and that there is theoretically one "right" answer to the question of how we get there. Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are aiming for the same destination, but unable to disagree about the best route. The possibility that different people might honestly want different things is relegated to the waste bucket marked “ideology”.

*

I recall from my History "O" Level that one of the things the Chartists wanted was annual elections. They also wanted secret ballots, universal suffrage, the payment of MPs and roughly equally sized constituencies. We have long taken those things for granted: but if I proposed that from now on we should have an election every twelve months, you’d think I was very silly. If I proposed a system where an incoming Prime Minister could be kicked out of office if he had not achieved his stated objectives in the first eighteen months of a five year parliament, you would think I was very silly indeed. And if I proposed a system where, after that eighteen month trial period, a new Prime Minister could be selected, without an election, by the same MPs who three weeks previously were professing utter loyalty to the deposed one, and that this new Prime Minister would be expected (but not constitutionally compelled) to follow the policies laid out in the rejected one's manifesto, you would think I had gone doo-lally.

And yet this is where we find ourselves.

Starmer forced to resign twenty three months after winning a landslide majority. Seven prime ministers in ten years. Liz Truss and the Lettuce.

Can we all agree that the format is irretrievably broken?

When it suits us, we still think of the Prime Minister simply as the prime “minister”, the MP who happens to have been chosen by the other MPs to be in charge for the time being. I still think that’s not a bad system: the people elect local representatives and the local representatives choose a leader.

But when it doesn’t suit us, we act as if the Prime Minister is the President; the single person who the People jolly well elected to “run the country” and who all the MPs should jolly well defer to as if he were King. In 2016, the Labour Party went out of its way to frame the leadership election as an American style primary. By the end of her term in office, Mrs Thatcher was referring to herself with the royal “we”.

If the Prime Minister is just the fella who happens to be managing the club this week, then bringing on a substitute from time to time if you don’t like the job he is doing makes perfect sense. But if everyone who put the tick in the “Labour” box thought they were voting for Kier to be President, swapping him for a different President, with a different style and possibly different policies, without checking if the People are okay with the idea, seems markedly undemocratic.

I don’t think it would be a good idea to add yet another jigsaw piece to our already hopelessly diffuse constitution. Tomorrow someone could introduce an Automatic General Election Following a Prime Ministerial Resignation Bill. You could, in fact, introduce a bill to do whatever the hell you like, provided it doesn’t contravene the Human Rights Act, and there are quite a lot of people who would like to drop the “provided” part. That’s the beauty of parliament being sovereign and us not having a written constitution, and I suppose, Brexit. But by the same token, the day after tomorrow, a different politician could introduce an act to overturn said measure. When it was convenient, we invented the Fixed Term Parliament Act, which meant that the Prime Minister could no longer call a general election on a whim. But when a Prime Minister wanted to call a general election on a whim, they repealed it again.

If my constituency voted for Joe Bloggs of the Red Party to represent it by an overwhelming majority two years ago, I am not entirely sure that it makes sense that he should have to stand for election all over again because the Blue Party has decided to defenestrate its leader. Or at any rate, it makes no sense if you still see MPs as local representatives. If you see them as delegates to an electoral college whose only purpose is to cast their vote for the Red Party or the Blue Party’s Prime Ministerial candidate, perhaps it does.

What is needed, obviously, is a complete overhaul of the whole system and a written-down-in-one-place constitution. Do we still want MPs to choose a “prime” minister, or do we want separate Presidential elections? Do we really want to keep the House of Lords, and if not, what do we want to replace it with? And is it sensible that someone can have “a landslide majority” when two out of three people voted for the other guy, or do we want some more sane method of counting the votes?

But we’ve been through that movie before. The people hate voting and will never support a system where they have to put three crosses on a piece of paper instead of one. No-one, not even a Prime Minister who studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Cambridge understands how instant run-offs work. And a proportional system could generate results where no single party had a majority in the House of Commons; where the Commons and whatever-replaces-the-Lords were controlled by different parties; where the directly elected President was Red and the proportionally elected Commons was Blue. Politicians of different parties would have to start talking to each other and working together and making compromises, and then where would we be?

Someone might say that the fact that our present system produces decisive results from indecisive electorates is a feature, not a bug: that we actually want a Prime Minister who can do broadly what ever he likes, and a system where 30% of the votes equates to 60% of the seats has a certain elegance. I might be prepared to make out a case for a system where the people select a King, and for four years, agree to treat him like a King. But that’s rather undermined if the other house mates can vote him out whenever they feel like it.

Any major constitutional rethink would take years to thrash out. So I think we have to resign ourselves to a lachrymose speech on the lectern outside Downing Street every eighteen months or so. The format, as I say, is broken.

*

There is no point in re-litigating the strengths and weaknesses of Jeremy Corbyn. He was, on Blair’s terms, a Centrist: he put policy before politics; and tried to persuade voters that the things he believed were the things they ought to believe as well. The right wing press thought he was a communist, but the right wing press thinks that everybody is a communist. There is a strong body of opinion that rejects the legitimacy of any non-Tory Prime Minister on general principles. They crucified Jeremy Corbyn and they went on to crucify Kier Starmer and Andy Burnham hasn’t been installed in office yet and they are already sharpening the nails for him.

It used to be thought that the hoi polloi voted the way their newspaper told them to vote and that any leader had to court the good graces of the Sun and the Daily Mail to be in with a chance. But while supermarkets still sell newspapers, or at any rate have them on display near the hobnobs and digestives, the idea that “Daily Mirror readers” represent an identifiable club now seems faintly quaint. Trump and Obama both understood that he who controls Social Media controls the world. Perhaps we should not fear “Red Andy” headlines in the Mail as much as we used to. We probably oughtn’t to pay too much attention to Elon Musks tweets, although we probably should pay an awful lot of attention to his money.

Before the 2024 election, I said that since socialism was a busted flush, we had a binary choice between a Prime Minister who was a Tory and a Prime Minister who was not a Tory, and since Kier Starmer was the only Not-a-Tory candidate who had the remotest chance of winning, all non-evil people should support Kier Starmer, even if he was a little too far one way on Israel and not quite far enough the other way on gender. (I rejected the option of tactically voting Lib-Dem because the last time I tactically voted Lib-Dem they acted as Tory enablers. One of my friends correctly said in 2010 that if I had wanted a party that would never make an alliance with the Conservatives under any circumstances, I should have voted Labour.) 

I qualified this by saying that I would withdraw my support from Starmer if he crossed anyone of four, red, or possibly blue, lines. I said I would not vote for him if he reneged on his commitment to human rights, and especially, his opposition to the death penalty. I said I would not vote for him if he cut or threatened to cut Labour’s historic links with the Trades Unions. I said I would not vote for him if he started to treat Donald Trump as a friend — in the way that Tony Blair cosied up to George Bush Jnr. I accept, of course that a Prime Minister has to have diplomatic relations with all sorts of unsavoury people. And I said I would not vote for him if I ever caught him using the word “woke” as a pejorative. To my knowledge, he never crossed any of those lines, although he put his toe alarmingly close to some of them.

When I wrote that essay, I had not predicted just how toxic Labour’s language about immigration would become; how authoritarian the anti-anti-semitism campaign would become; and how ready he would be to throw my trans friends under the bus when the equalities commission decided that nursery school taboos about boys and girls toilets were going to be enshrined in law. But he never reached a point where I felt inclined to say “We would be no worse off if Kemi Badenoch were Prime Minister” or indeed “Labour is now functionally as bad as Reform.” I was rather alarmed that in his resignation speech, he said that one of his key achievements was that he had persuaded the Labour Party to start brandishing the Union Jack all over the place. And when his Home Secretary said that white liberals should "fuck right off", I did feel inclined to say “To which party should we fuck off, oh Lord?”

All of the above still applies. I don’t know who Andy Burnham is or what he believes in, but I am pretty sure that he is Not-A-Tory. I don’t think we should split the Not-A-Tory vote because Lord Binface has some sensible suggestions about the price of kebabs.

*

Assuming that he is able to dislodge excalibur from the anvil on July 16th, Andy Burnham will not be short of people offering him advice, but if he is reading this, I would offer him the following counsel:

Do not assume that, because you beat the Faragist fairly and squarely in the by-election, that the bubble has burst and we can resume business as usual. Do not think in terms of winning a second term: think about mitigating the disaster when you lose. Ask the question: if I were the last Prime Minister before the new Dark Age, what would you do? Because you probably are.

The single best thing you could do: and the single best thing that any Prime Minister could have done since Kinnock threw the 1992 election would be to introduce Proportional Representation. The ideal system would probably be fairly complicated, and it would be easy for believers in the Divine Right of Pluralities to block or talk out any complicated proposal, in the way they talked out the perfectly sensible and reasonable proposals about physician assisted suicide. So simply go for a first-second-third choice / alternative voting / instant run-off system. It’s imperfect, but it massively reduces the chance of the Faragists gaining power on the basis of a large number of tiny majorities.

Form close alliances with the Green, Lib-Dem and other Not-Farage parties. Agree not to run candidates against each other; decide now that after the next election you will form a coalition government of national unity. More there are with us than them, but that doesn’t signify if we keep on voting against ourselves.

I understand that you would like to replace the House of Lords with a High Council of Realms and Shires. But if this is not feasible within the time frame, then use your Prime Ministerial fiat to flood the existing chamber with women, with people with dark coloured skin, with people who use different words than “God” to refer to God, with people who believe that climate change is real and that vaccines work, with people who think that women should control their own bodies, people who don’t much care which public loo anyone goes in provided there is sufficient paper, with scientists and economists and experts, and in general, with as many people who are not likely to be Faragists as possible. Do this on the understanding that they will lose this role as soon as the Great Council is introduced. The House of Lords cannot prevent a future Prime Minister from doing something obviously crazy but it can hold him up a bit.

Some of us are old enough to remember how, when local governments started doing things that Mrs Thatcher didn’t agree with, she enacted laws to reduce the powers of local government to do those kinds of things. She abolished the Greater London Council altogether, because the people of London would keep electing Ken Livingstone as leader. She passed deeply illiberal laws to prevent local councils allowing schools to say nice things about gay people. When there was a campaign of non-payment to protest about a deeply regressive tax she’d introduced, she tried to make a law that any local politician who supported the campaign wouldn’t be allowed to vote at council meetings. You may be able to think of other examples.

We have seen some rather half-arsed attempts in Reform controlled councils to dictate what books can be displayed in council schools and libraries, and what flags can be hung on council buildings. If I were the last Prime Minister before the Dark Age, I would enact laws and regulations to make it as hard as possible for my successor to impose his ideology on the country. I would fill libraries and schools with the best anti-hate books on the market. I would enact laws, or repeal existing ones, so that local and national government have no power to censor the curricula schools or colleges or adult education courses, or to make dictates about what insignia can and can’t be displayed. I’d look at making specific laws about secularism: safeguarding the rights of Muslims, Christians, Malaysian Frog Worshippers and atheists to pray and dance and sacrifice newts and evolve before council meetings, but absolutely prohibiting the imposition of official religious acts. I'd introduce much, much stronger rules about online hate speech, with violators barred from public office for, say, five years. I'd introduce a new criminal offence of using language likely to incite rioting -- I find it hard to believe that such a law doesn’t already exist. I'd look at how to strengthen the Human Rights Act. I believe that at present Parliament is not allowed to debate the restoration of the death penalty. We are looking at a situation when in incoming Monster Raving Loony Prime Minister might introduce a law that says that redundant churches can never be repurposed as places of worship for other faiths; or that canteens in government buildings will be required to serve pork twice a week with no veggie alternative; or to introduce French style beach patrols that would order ladies who were dressed too modestly to uncover themselves. We want to get to the position where Sir Humphrey could say “I am afraid you can’t do that Sir: it is unconstitutional.”

There is no precise British equivalent of a Presidential Executive Order: but is there a danger that a future MUKGA leader would find ways to misuse the Royal Prerogative? If so, that loophole needs to be closed, forthwith. But conversely, is there any way that our status as a Constitutional Monarchy could be a bulwark against extremis? Could we envisage a situation where, even if the Commons and the High Council voted in favour of bringing back witch-burning or sending orphans up chimneys, King Charles would be permitted — nay, constitutionally required — to withhold Royal Assent?

I am brain storming here.

I can very well see why you would object to these kinds of measure. 

Perhaps you hold fast to the Good Chaps theory of government: we may not necessarily agree with everything Mr Farage says, but at the end of the day he is a Hinglishman as opposed to a Proosian or a French or Dutch or Roosian, and he won't do anything as terrible as all that, because a Good Chap never would. 

Or perhaps you believe in Playing The Game. The really important thing is that, should the wrong guy win the election, we respect the Will of the People, the Fine Traditions of This House, and have an Orderly Transfer of Power, and let them do their thing until 2033. Just because they would play dirty if the situation was reversed is no reason to come down to their level.

Or perhaps you believe that if you do a Jolly Good Job like you did in Some Town, and that when the people start to see a real differences in the price of potholes in their pockets, everyone will love you and vote for you in sheer gratitude. 

I wish you luck. 

You have about eighteen months.

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Away In a Culture War

In England, complaining about the Post Office’s commemorative stamps is almost as important a Christmas tradition as the sending of cards. This year’s stamps seem particularly innocuous: slightly abstracted illustrations of the traditional nativity story characters. 

Nowadays we have Big Stamps and Small Stamps to go on Big Letters and Small Letters: so the big second class is an angel and the small second class is Mary and Joseph; the first class stamps have Mary and the Baby Jesus and the shepherds, respectively, on them. The Wise Men get a £3.40 stamp to themselves. That’s the flat rate for sending cards air-mail anywhere in the world, apparently. It’s all a bit irrelevant because everyone uses Amazon and Moon-Pig.

I think the pictures are intended to suggest a kind of collage: Mary’s robe is a single, two-dimensional block of patterned fabric or paper. Mary and Joseph are riding a donkey; one of the three shepherds is bringing a lamb as a gift; and there are specifically three wise men, who seem to be wearing crowns. Those details owe more to Victorian carols than to the actual gospels, but then so does the whole popular nativity tradition. All of the pictures have a starry, starry background, and there is one big yonder star for we three kings to follow. Mary and the Baby have halos.

So far, so nice. But all eleven figures have dark skins. And Mary is wearing some sort of head-covering. So naturally the usual suspects have crawled out of the woodwork to say that the stamps are anti-white propaganda, the most Muslim Christmas stamps ever, and to chant about the halo looking like a crescent moon. Which it does, a bit, if you squint.

Well: Bethlehem was in modern Palestine and Nazareth was in modern Israel. The Maguses came “from the East”, which would be modern Iraq, and the idea that they were Persians or Babylonians fits the story pretty well. None of these people were white Europeans. Unless you are going with the legendary Wee Three Kings: then I suppose there is a quite well established tradition that one was European, one was Asian and one was African. That probably represents the idea that the rulers of the whole world came to pay their respects to Jesus.

But I don’t think the Post Office’s artist was shooting for historical accuracy: the clothes certainly aren’t based on first century garb. I think—at any rate, I hope—that he drew them that way specifically in order to annoy the sorts of people who are, in fact, annoyed that he drew them in that way. We are living at a time when a resurgent Christian Nationalist sect is systematically othering brown-skinned people, and celebrating a shield-bearing crusader Christ. So of course every piece of artwork, every carol service and every nativity play should make the point—be it ever so subtly—that in the story, Jesus was not one of us: he was one of them.

Yes: Christians have always localised the story. Art galleries are full of paintings of renaissance noble women giving birth in rather clean fifteenth century sheds. The Mystery Plays showed Caesar ordering the whole world to attend a census—even if they live as far away as Barnsley or Rotherham! Whisper it softly: African churches sometimes imagine African Jesuses, and black children sometimes hang their stockings out for a Black Santa. In any other year, a white baby would have been quite unobjectionable. 

But if you are living in 1930s Germany, it is incumbent on you to make the point that, as a matter of historical fact, Mary and Joseph were Jewish.

*

Roderick Spode’s Christmas-themed rally is, in the grand scheme of things, merely absurd. A thousand black-shorts singing Away in a Manger at an open air carol service should scarcely register as a news item. Every city in England has a thousand-seater cathedral and every one of those cathedrals will be standing room only for multiple iterations of Christmas carols during the festive period. It is all very well to want to demonstrate your commitment to faith and homeland, or, indeed, to be a shining beacon of light against the fading of our cultural identity. It is slightly odd to do so by doing exactly what nearly everyone up and down the country was going to be doing in any case.

But I found some of the discussion around the non-event rather interesting.

If you were a very devout vegetarian, you might, I suppose, refuse to acknowledge the distinction between chicken, pork, and beef and refer to them all as “meat”. Or, indeed, “dead animals”. But it might prove problematic to fry beef in Col Sanders eleven spices, or to make a chicken wellington. Words usually mean things, and definitions usually include some things and exclude others.

In 1979, the Monty Python team released a highly successful mind-virus which causes carriers to believe that all disagreements about religion or politics are intrinsically ridiculous. It wouldn’t be funny if there wasn't some truth in it. In any political movement or church or fandom there really will sometimes be bitter disagreements about matters which seem trivial to anyone outside the cult. Or in some cases, matters which are really genuinely trivial. But as a result of the mind virus, whenever anyone asserts a point of principle on any subject, there will invariably be a wiseacre on hand to mutter “popular front of Judea” as if that terminated the discussion.

If we ask whether or not Spode is "really" a "Christian" are we indulging in that kind of sectarian hair-splitting? We have, I think, a perfect right to be skeptical about any sudden conversion. The man in the pew, and indeed in the pulpit, could be forgiven for asking if the man who has knelt down with a thousand other people in a crowded football stadium (while Cliff Richard is belting out Blessed Assurance with a Pentecostal choir) had in any meaningful sense "turned to Jesus". Billy Graham himself used to play down claims that so-many-thousands of people had been “saved” at one of his evangelistic meetings. They came forward, he would say: only God knows if they were saved. 

But in this case there is a more specific skepticism because of a perceived mis-match between Spode’s new-found faith and his political beliefs. Someone suggested that he was “about as Christlike as a traffic cone full of angry wasps.”

Possibly. But if the criteria for genuine conversion is Christosimilitude then I should say we are looking at roughly two thousand years of false conversions, with Spode falling only slightly shorter than everyone else. All the popular candidates for "Christlikeness"—Mother Theresa, say, or Saint Francis, or Desmond Tutu, or John Paul the Second—have their detractors. The Catholic Church maintains a list of around ten thousand people who it thinks quite definitely went to heaven, but there are some odd people on it. Actually having existed has not always been an essential criteria for canonisation. 

Our good friend CS Lewis was once asked if there was such a thing as a non-practicing Christian. He said yes, in fact nearly all Christians were non-practicing. The only person who ever practiced Christianity perfectly was Jesus himself. Lewis's definition of “practice” was quite specific: 

“It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God. It means looking at everything… and saying ‘How would He wish me to deal with this?’”

Which is a pretty high bar to clear.

A nice sounding Anglican clergyman (a part time comedian and former Satanist, apparently) wrote in the Guardian that:

"Jesus was very clear that none of us is in a position to judge each other, so I’m generally loth to pronounce anyone 'not a real Christian'".

Which is very charitable of him. But he goes on to say that “care for the most vulnerable in society” has always been the core Christian value, and that Spode’s followers might have an issue with (for example) the passages in Exodus which exhort Jews to be nice to foreigners and immigrants because they were foreigners and immigrants in Egypt. Perfectly good point, that. But it does rather make it sound as if Christianity is a social movement and that there is a suspicion that Spode is not fully on board with the programme. The headline to the opinion column, presumably added by a sub, stated that there is no sense in which someone like Spode could be considered a genuine Christian. None. 

The same paper carried an extended essay by an American, Bill McKibben, bewailing the way in which, in his country, the far-Right has co-opted Christianity.

According to this essay, in the 1950s and 1960s the overwhelming majority of American Christians believed in a broadly liberal Jesus. As the decades wore on, a re-branded fundamentalism which conflated Christianity with a narrow range of conservative causes came to dominate the protestant church, to the point where opposing abortion and homosexuality had become almost the whole of the faith.

At the end of the 1950s, he writes:

“a cool 52% of Americans were part of the so-called mainline denominations: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and the like. That meant most of the nation subscribed at least nominally to a religious life marked by a kind of polite civic normality and a somewhat progressive reading of the Bible….”

The mainline Jesus was “a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”:

“The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message is about love for others, especially for the poor—and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ’s response to violence is to turn the other cheek—not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater too.” 

"Not as an act of passive acceptance" is an interpretation of the text, incidentally: not what it literally says. Jesus's parents were "homeless" in so far as they were not in their home town and couldn't find a hotel: they weren't destitute. 

McKibben seems to take it for granted that sweater-sharing and cheek-turning would naturally be expected to get a person crucified. I don't buy this. It is a good joke to say that Jesus was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, but it doesn't make much historical sense. Bart Ehrman has written that any convincing reconstruction of Jesus has to be able to answer the question "Why did he get the death penalty?" I don't think "For being nice" is a plausible answer. 

McKibben goes on to say that it is “entirely fine” to believe in a Jesus-story shorn of its supernatural elements: it's all about the message. Any talk of "resurrection" seems to be a round-about way of saying that the preaching wasn't forgotten when the preacher died:  

“This person’s message is sufficiently subversive that he is eventually put to death by the reigning imperial power, but that execution is powerless to quell his spirit or his message, which then spreads across a growing community of followers who try to behave as he had.”

It was Jesus' message—not any faith the he had literally come back to life—that the Church preserved: it was Jesus behaviour that they sought to emulate. When workin' folk are out on strike, that's where you'll find Joe Hill. 

“The idea that personal salvation—as opposed to concern for others—was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical…”

Really? Did mainline Methodists and Lutherans in the 1950s really believe that Wesley and Luther—not to mention St John and St Paul—were borderline heretics? I find it hard to believe that this could literally have been the case. A hymn-book full of far away green hills and rugged old crosses says differently. 

But let’s take him at his word. For the first half of the 20th century, the American church had substantially abandoned the New Testament’s divine saviour in favour of a humble rabbi. America may have been colonised by puritan extremists, but its civil system was created by skeptical deists. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson go through the Bible and tear out all the religious bits? So perhaps the proposition isn't as absurd as all that.

If the liberal consensus only arrived at their ethical Jesus by denouncing the Christ of the New Testament, then the evangelicals have done nothing worse than restore the church's historic faith. They have literally put the Christ back into Christianity. But their restored Christ is a macho culture warrior with a gun in one hand and a spanking paddle in the other.

How should we understand this? Should we say "In the 21st century, a large cohort of Americans rejected the purely ethical Jesus and restored the theological Christ: and it just so happened that most of them were hard-line political conservatives?" 

Or are we obliged to say that "the Christ of Christianity and the ideology of the far-Right go together like a horse and carriage?"

Plenty of anti-theists would gleefully go along with the second option. Once you overwrite the humble rabbi with God’s supernatural offspring, you have already committed yourself to a whole complex of authoritarian and patriarchal ideas. If you replace the jobbing carpenter with a divine world-saviour, you have opened the door to some very unhealthy ideas about divine retribution. Have you ever seen Passion of the Christ? In a church which preaches that version of the Atonement, James Dobson and John Smyth are features rather than bugs.

CS Lewis, again, argued rather cogently that you couldn’t and shouldn’t have a “Christian” political party—let alone a “Christian” government—because Christians don’t necessarily agree about all the nitty-gritty bread-and-butter political questions. What would be desirable would be a strong Christian presence in all the parties. 

He thinks that you could perfectly well have a sincere Christian fascist and an equally sincere Christian communist—or at any rate, sincere Christians prepared to make common cause with the British Union of Fascists and equally sincere Christians willing to ally with the British Communist Party. The hypothetical Christian fascist might think that humans were so sinful that they need to be governed by a theocratic dictatorship. The hypothetical Christian communist might believe Jesus was primarily a social reformer and that the church departed at a very early stage from his teachings. That is, the Christian fascist misapplied and exaggerated doctrines which Lewis thought were sound; but the Christian communist worked from premises that Lewis utterly rejected.

So, it seems we have a consensus. All parties are agreed that if you believe in the Christ of theology, you are more or less bound to be a conservative; and that if you are a liberal, you are more or less bound to believe in a non-theological Jesus. Your only options are to embrace the Republican Christ, or else assert that since Saul of Tarsus tripped over his shoelace on the way to Damascus, there have been hardly any True Christians. 

In order to test my hypothesis, I turned to an online magazine called Christian Today. I think it would be fair to describe this publication as a bit on the socially conservative side. A representative sample runs thus: 

“The judgement of God has finally come upon the United Kingdom. Quietly. Silently. Like a thief in the night. It came in the form of an irrational, emotive and Godless parliament who this week voted to permit the killing of babies in the womb up until birth, and has now introduced the National Suicide Service, with its vote to permit assisted suicide. God has given us what we voted for.”

The magazine tries to navigate a "both sides" critique of Spode and his opponents. A sub-headline directs our attention to the parable of the mote and the beam. Aren't both sides, the far-Right and the anti-fascist, guilty of co-opting the Christian message to their political beliefs? Aren't both sides equally prone to demonise their opponents? When the liberals speak of Spode as if he was some kind of anti-Christ, aren't they guilty of the very same divisiveness they accuse him of? 

The essay acknowledges that there are valid criticisms of the Unite the Kingdom rally: that it illegitimately shoe-horns politics into Christmas. But they note that an anti-fascist counter meeting depicted Mary and Joseph in a refugee boat. Surely that is also political? And therefore just as bad? The Left should not demonise the Right over what is, after all, a mere difference of political opinion. (This approach does not, of course, apply to questions about assisted dying and legalised abortion: it is perfectly okay to demonise people who disagree with you about that.)

But the Left are far more culpable than the Right in this regard. The Right may have introduced politics into religion; but the Left have replaced religion with politics. The established church has been reduced to a party political mouthpiece: 

"It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer. Now it seems more accurate to describe it as the Green/Labour/Progressive party at politics."

Well: when people said that the Church was the Tory party at prayer, I think they meant that Conservatives generally worshipped at their parish church, where Labour voters were more likely to attend one of the non-conformist denominations. The Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. No-one, I think, ever claimed that the Church of England consistently supported Conservative party policy.

The Guardian writer said directly that there was a consensus in liberal churches that a gospel of salvation was heretical. The Christian Today article accuses church leaders of being unable to tell their flock "what God says about salvation", preferring instead to claim divine authority for their personal beliefs about "the EU, immigration, climate change and Donald Trump!" 

The Guardian writer said that Christmas is about "a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”. Which rather reminds one of Geraldine Granger telling the good folk of Dibley that the Christmas story was about a baby born in a stable ("the poorest of the poor") who "says things that are so astonishing that millions of people are still living their lives by them today." So Christian Today is being perfectly fair when it hauls liberals over the coals for reducing the meaning of Christmas to "let's all be nice to each other because a cute baby was born to a teenage mum and became a refugee."

So perhaps Christmas does belong to the Conservative Christ much more than to the liberal Jesus. The baby in the Nativity story is not a humble carpenter with some new-age theories about love. Like Harry Potter and Anakin Skywalker, he's the Chosen One. As a baby, he is celebrated by a whole army of supernatural beings. As a young child he is venerated by all the Kings of the world. The Right can validly claim that by abolishing the liberal Jesus, they have put the Christ back in Christmas.  

The Christian Today essay ends with another attempt to be even-handed—offering prayers for both the Right and the Left, the Spodests and the liberal Church Leaders. But the writer 

“prays that Christ will really be exalted in [the Unite the Kingdom] carol service in London on Saturday” 

adding that 

“I suspect that I would be more likely to hear the actual gospel of Christ at the rally on Saturday, than I will in some churches on Sunday.” 

Whereas he prays that the Left 

“will stop using their own personal Jesus for their own personal politics and instead come to know and proclaim the Christ who really is there.”

Is this where we are? The Far-Right have the wrong politics, but the correct Jesus? The Liberals have only politics; they don't have Jesus at all? It sounds depressingly like the English Civil War, in which one side was Romantic But Wrong, and the other side were Rotten But Right. 

*

In the 1980s, a rumour occasionally went round campus that the GaySoc had decreed that on such-and-such a day; homosexual students would identify themselves by wearing blue jeans to lectures and straight students by wearing something else. I don’t suppose it was actually true: but it was quite a clever thought experiment. Everybody wore blue jeans all the time. So the question was "If I wear my Levis tomorrow, will everyone assume I am gay? And if they do, does that matter, particularly?"

If everyone agreed that wearing red baseball caps represented my support for Roderick Spode then I would not wear a red base ball cap ever again. Not that I was planning to do so in any case. If I watch the new TV show about the kid with the magic wand, it will be widely taken as signifying my assent to the proposition that my trans friends shouldn’t be allowed to go to the lavatory. So I won't: although I probably wouldn't have done anyway. 

I accept that we may have to cede the Union Jack to the far-Right. I will be quite sad if Christmas goes the same way: but I expect that it will. The more people tell me that I must say Happy Christmas and that saying Happy Christmas signifies my opposition to the Woke war on Christmas, the more inclined I am to say Season’s Greetings or Happy Holidays. 

This year, it is one rather ludicrous man saying that we should all get together and sing Away in a Manger in order to assert our national identity and resist cultural erosion. Next year, the thought may creep into actual churches. Five years down the line, there may be general agreement that singing Away in a Manger is what we do to stick it to the brown folk. In which case, all us non-fascists will have to stop singing it. Which would be a shame. But we managed without the song from the first year of the Christian era through to, I think, the one thousand eight hundred and seventy eighth. Go back to the eighteenth century, and you'd find people struggling through December the twenty-fifth without Silent Night, turkey, Santa Claus or the Muppet Christmas Carol. I think we’ll cope.

But what happens when Spodist converts start to attend ordinary services? What is the Rev. to do? 

Perhaps he will say “We welcome everyone—money-lenders, pedophiles, Nazis, people who saw Monty Python's, Life of Brian….” and continue preaching whatever message he was going to preach in any case. In which case I suppose the Spodists would say that the Vicar, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King and the Pope were Woke. Liberals may be reluctant to say that people who don't agree with them are Not True Christians; the Right have no such compunctions. 

So what is Rev. to do? Stick to his pacifist guns, watch the Christian Nationalists drift away and lament his pews returning to their previous bum-free status?

Or experience a sudden revelation that the core of Jesus message was always white-ethno-nationalist-anti-Islamiscism?

In 2015, it would not have been possible to imagine a British Conservative leader using the language that Badenoch does—and completely impossible to imagine a Labour leader talking like Starmer. Who knows where the Overton stained glass window might be in 2030?

I take it for granted that, by then, either Spode or someone more extreme will have kissed King Charles's ring. And the church, like the schools and the museums, will have to choose between bending the knee to the Party or being disestablished or abolished. 

At which point, carol services will be the least of our worries

Happy New Year.


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Sunday Bible Study

A not very nice man from a not very nice political party has reportedly "invaded" a meat production plant and harangued the staff because he does not think that halal meat ought to be available in this country.

"In ths country" seems to be the crux of his argument: if the newspaper reports are to be believed, he basically shouted "this is the United Kingdom, this is the United Kingdom" over and over again as if that settled matters.

One of my co-workers once told me that they wouldn't buy a sandwich from Subway. In fairness, this is a pretty sound moral principal. Only a barbarian would toast a tuna mayo sandwich, and why do you have to go through the ritual of choosing between six different kinds of bread roll when they all taste identical, although I must admit I like the cookies. When I went to America, Subway seemed exciting and exotic, but then so did Starbucks.

My colleague's objection to Subway is that they serve halal food. Certainly the branch near us does: given that there are quire a lot of Muslim people in the area, this seems to make sound commercial sense. (I do not know if Subway is kosher in majority Jewish areas: perhaps there aren't enough majority Jewish areas for that to be a question.) 

I am pretty sure that a Spicy Italian contains salami; and I am pretty sure that salami is made from pork; and I am pretty sure that pork is not halal. Maybe you can make convincing salami out of fish? Maybe the lamb and beef is halal but they take it for granted that observant Muslims wouldn't order pork to start with? They put cheese into all their sandwiches unless you beg them not to, so presumably Islam doesn't have the meat/dairy restriction that Judaism does?

Halal simply means "permitted", as opposed to haram which means "forbidden". And jihad means "struggle", and hijab means modesty and shariah means "law" and Allah means "God". (Arabic speaking Christians call God "Allah".) But I suppose most people take halal to mean "filthy foreign food" and shariah to mean "chopping peoples heads off" and jihad to mean "terrorism". Up to 10^th September 2001 it was common enough to hear boring men in pubs and the leader column of the Daily Telegraph explaining that you can say what you like about Johnny Foreigner but criminals who have had their heads chopped off hardly ever go out and do it again, which is more than you can say for this country. There seems to be a widespread belief that you can catch Islam off a halal foot-long pepperoni with salad but no olives and conversely, that you can cure someone of Islam by throwing bacon butties at them.

This article covers the inconsistencies in the not-very-nice man's approach quite comprehensively. Why was he singling out halal slaughter houses for his animal welfare initiative, when kosher butchers use pretty much the same methods: indeed, the one sometimes supplies the other? If the objection is that Muslim baa-lambs are not stunned before having their throats cut, then actually they usually are. Hard, in any case, to suppose that the religious slaughter of chickens is a bigger welfare concern than your average bootiful factory farm.

But what interests me is the specifically religious question.

The not-very-nice-man is alleged to have asked "Don’t you realise you’re in Great Britain?.....Why are you offering these animal up to Allah, a fake god, Satan. Do any of you have any morals?....You are in Great Britain....This is a Christian country and the Bible says no Christian should eat meat offered to a false god."

Quite a lot of questions are raised here. 

I am not sure if any good Christian has ever believed that other monotheistic faiths are indistinguishable from Satanism. I think that he may be falling into Dawkins Seventh Fallacy, which states:

a: The gods of Christianity, Muslim and Judaism are separate and distinct non-existant entities, in the way that Captain Ahab; David Copperfield and the Tooth Fairy are separate and distinct non-existent entities

b: When a Christian says that he disbelieves in the Jewish and Muslim deities, he means the same thing by "disbelieve" that an atheist does when he says he disbelieves in all deities whatsoever

c: Christians are therefore the same as atheists with respect to two out of the three major monotheistic faiths, and might as well go the whole hog and disbelieve in all of them. 

In the real world, people who believe in God invariably say that other people who believe in God believe in the same God they believe in, although they very frequently say that they've got special inside knowledge that the others haven't got, or that the others have picked up some wrong ideas along the way. 

But even if you do think that Dio is a false God invented by the evil Italians, "this is Great Britain" seems to me to be a bit of a non sequitur. People In Great Britain have been perfectly free to worship Satan since 1735: certainly since 1951. Religious tolerances is one of the things which makes us Great and British. David Cameron says so. 

But the bit which really intrigued me was the bit about the Bible saying that no Christian should eat meat offered to a false God. 

Where does it say that, exactly?

The Christian Bible contains the complete text of the Jewish Bible and therefore contains a lot of passage about which kinds of food are kosher and which kinds are terefah. (I looked it up.) No pork, no shellfish, no lamb cooked in its mother's milk, wash your hands carefully, put the toilet a long way from the kitchen, and so on. But the Christian "New" Testament contains a number of passages in which Jesus permits his followers to apply those rules with leniency, or to set them aside altogether. Sometimes he seems to be saying that his own presence puts the rules on hold temporarily; sometimes he seems to be saying that the rules, as practiced at that time, went way beyond what God had intended or that they were being applied in an unspiritual, rules-lawyering way. But some of his clearest and least equivocal statements say that eating the wrong kind of food doesn't affect your spiritual status one way or the other: 

There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man....Do ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man it cannot defile him. Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?

Naturally, the gentile converts to Christianity found it much easier to accept this idea than the Jewish ones; and it was a point of contention in the early Church. About the only thing we know about Paul's personal relationship with Peter is that they had a public falling out over whether Christians needed to keep kosher. 

The not very nice man seems to have had one of Paul's letters in mind: 

Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question for conscience sake: "For the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." If any of them that believe not bid you to a feast, and ye be disposed to go; whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience sake.But if any man say unto you, "This is offered in sacrifice unto idols", eat not for his sake that shewed it, and for conscience sake: "for the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof" Conscience, I say, not thine own, but of the other: for why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience? For if I by grace be a partaker, why am I evil spoken of for that for which I give thanks?

Whatever is sold in the market, just eat it, and don't ask questions, because everything in the world belongs to God. It is hard to see how you can read that as saying "the Bible forbids us from eating mean offered to false gods". It actually seems to be saying the very opposite. 

Obviously, Paul isn't talking about halal meat, but he is talking about meat which has been offered to the gods of the Greek pantheon. He is quite clear that it doesn't make any difference if an animal was killed in the temple of Jupiter or in front of a statue of Hercules because Jupiter and Hercules don't actually exist.

But there's a problem. Monotheists have always said "There is no other God but God, so whatever you do, don't worship any of the other Gods" and "Idols are totally meaningless, so whatever you do, don't worship them." Paul seems to be saying that idol-worship is, so to speak, a subjective sin: if you think of a statue of a pagan god as just being a lump of dead marble, then it is; but if at some level you think of it as a rival deity, then you'd be cheating on God by worshiping it. People who converted to Christianity from Greek polytheism might well still think of the statues as potentially being gods of some kind; so if they had a sandwich which they thought might have been used in the worship of one of the Greek deities then they might be committing idol worship in their head. 

C.S Lewis said that the generalization of this principal was "on non-essential matters the person without scruples should always give way to the person with scruples." It leads to all sorts of uncomfortable conclusions. If my weaker brother honestly believes that playing Dungeons & Dragons is a kind of devil worship then I (knowing very well that it is not) should never play Dungeons & Dragons again for fear of leading him into subjective sin. I suppose we all accept that we shouldn't have a drink in front of a former alcoholic; should we refrain from eating meat around vegans because meat is murder to them even though to sensible people it isn't?

The not-very-nice-man asserts that the Christian Bible teaches that Subway sell demonic sandwiches. It does not. Even on the assumption (that I am very far from accepting) that the God of Islam is, from the point of view of a good Christian, a false god on a level with Baal, then the Christian Bible is perfectly fine with me eating halal because false gods are precisely that: false. The Christian Bible says that when I go into a sandwich bar, I shouldn't ask questions about the religious affiliation of the sandwiches. It doesn't matter either way. However, if someone tells you that the food is halal and if that person honestly believes that eating a big hearty Italian is pretty much the same thing as drawing a pentacle on the ground and sacrificing a goat to it, then I shouldn't eat sandwiches in their presence. Or maybe at all. If they think it's wrong, then it's wrong for them.

Nothing remotely suggests that Paul thought that the Greeks shouldn't be allowed to carry on performing their own ceremonies in their own ways. The idea that there is a continuity between "I will not eat halal meat"; "No Christian should eat halal meant" and "Muslims living in the UK should not be permitted to eat halal meat" is clearly nonsense. It might be that the not-very-nice-man thinks that there should be no mosques, temples or synagogues in England and that all the Jews, Muslims and Hindus should be rehoused in the American mid-west. But in modern times, countries with Christian majorities have always permitted other religions to be practiced in their borders. There have been Mosques and Temples in the the UK since Victorian times and Synagogues since the the time of Oliver Cromwell. 

So. It's quite awkward. It's none of the unpleasant man's business whether I go to Subway or not; and it's certainly none of his business whether Muslims do. But what does his conscience tell him? If he feels that he is eating the devil every time he worships a sandwich then I should not encourage him.

So: tell me, Mr England First. 

Do you consider your own faith to be a bit on the weak side? 

And now a hymn, during which a collection will be taken

Bless you.

Sunday Politics

I wrote this a couple of months ago. (I really wrote it a couple of months ago. I found it on my Scrivener while looking for something else.) I didn't publish it at the time, because I didn't think it was very interesting:

Our own beloved Ken Livingstone has been accused of a faux pas.

Apparently, he felt that a Labour MP accepting a donation from a hedge fun manager was “like Jimmy Savile funding a children's group”.

The press can be awfully innocent about this kind of thing. The Sun prints the words SEX and BOTTOMS in capital letters, as if they can hardly believe such things exist; anything stronger is blocked out with asterisks. It is okay to print photographs of ladies with no bra on page three of a family newspaper, but god forbid a child should see the word T*TS. They go pale and start to tremble, like your maiden aunt, if anyone uses the F-word. No news reporter has even heard it before.

The formulation like putting X in charge of a Y is so common that it barely reaches the dignity of being a cliche. Like putting Herod in charge of an orphanage barely counts as a simile: it's proverbial. As popular as a pork chop at a Passover; as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest. You might have thought that Blackadder’s as cunning as a fox who had been awarded a degree in Cunning from the University of Cunning (or merely as cunning as a cunning thing) would have killed it off.

Jimmy Savile has a special and strange status which is probably not comprehensible to anyone outside of England or under the age of 45. He isn’t the only entertainer to have been retrospectively exposed as a sex offender; but I think most of our reaction to Rolf Harris’s conviction was “that’s really sad — he seemed so nice”. And Harris was famous for something: it is possible to think that he deserved his jail sentence and that Sun Arise is a terrific song. But so far as anyone can tell, Jimmy Savile never did anything apart from sit around being Jimmy Saville. He played records on the radio, but no-one tells us that he was a master of the craft (like Terry Wogan) or that he championed bands that no-one else cared about (like John Peel). He somehow just existed; being vaguely flamboyant; fronting shows he had nothing to do with; universally present.

I have said elsewhere that in the 1970s the BBC was a genre, almost a place, in a way that can hardly be understood today. More than one of us felt that Basil Brush must be a friend and neighbor of Tom Baker because their shows were on straight after each other. Savile wasn't the guy who fronts that make-a-wish show (“Dear Jimmy, Please could you fix it for me to play the drums with Gary Glitter”); he was more like that weird neighbor you keep bumping into. So the discovery that he was not merely a children’s entertainer who was also a child molester (though God knows that would have been bad enough) but a child molester who appears to have become a children’s entertainer in order to gain access to hundreds and possibly thousands of children genuinely feels like a bomb has gone off through our collective memories. You are thinking about that nice show where the young boy got to star in his own episode of Doctor Who, and then you remember whose show it was. There was that day when Boy George visited my school (true story) after some girls had written to complain that morning assembly was too boring. But who had they written to? Oh yes. Better stop telling that story.

The press love a villain. They compete with each other to see who can condemn the villain in the strongest terms: never mind “disgraced entertainer Jimmy Savile”, not even “evil Jimmy Savile” it needs to be “vile pervert Jimmy Savile”. But what they love even more is a stick to beat the BBC with. (The same journalists who shake when they hear the word “fuck” still regard the idea of showing pictures on the radio as a peculiar fad which will pass before the days of fleet street and hot metal come to an end; their masters hate anything state run because they can’t buy it.) Never mind that Savile was courted by Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles; never mind that Norman Tebbit was one of the few people prepared to defend him when the child rape allegations came out; never mind that he was lauded by anti-sex campaigner Mary Whitehouse. He was a BBC man to the core, and therefore the BBC is infected by his evil.

(The BBC did, in fact, behave reprehensibly, failing to respond to complaints and allegations and evidence because Savile was high profile and rich and could afford the best lawyers in the land. But so did everybody else.)

But what has happened as a result of this is that Savile has been invested with a peculiar kind of anti-sanctity. There is a weird process by which a tiny minority of celebrities become untouchable. You aren’t allowed to say anything against Diana; you aren’t allowed to speak against dead soldiers or appear without a poppy between Halloween and New Years Eve. (When I say “you aren’t allowed to” I mean “if you do, the papers will attack you, not for what you said, but for daring to take the name of our beloved royal family or our brave servicemen in vain”. There's no actual law against it.)

Savile seems to have achieved a level of anti-sanctity in a way that hardly anyone else ever has. When the serial killer Myra Hindley died, she was cremated in private, her ashes scattered in secret and the hospital room she had died in was repainted. That kind of fear of contamination, which features in no actual religion, is the true faith of the Englishman and woman. Someone isn’t a criminal at one time of their lives and not at another; people who murder children without motivation aren’t mentally ill. They have a disease called evil which is communicable — through bed sheets; through white emulsion; through saying their name. Jimmy Savile is like a Weeping Angel; his evil somehow transmissible through his image. We’re allowed to see bad 1970s pop music shows, but his face has to be pixellated, like when someone takes their clothes off on Big Brother and the viewers would be struck blind if they saw a willy. The tabloids got cross because they found there was still an interview with him on a no-longer updated BBC website.

In real life, most of us don’t think that way. Most of us think of the Queen as a somewhat anachronistic feature of the British constitution that we are nevertheless vaguely affectionate towards; that fuck is quite useful as an exclamation mark but shouldn’t be used as a comma; and that Jimmy Savile was a nasty sex criminal who they should have caught earlier. There are other nasty sex criminals; it’s a truism that most kids who are abused are abused by members of their own family. I shall forebear from telling the P.E teacher story again.

It would have been better if Ken Livingstone had said like putting Herod in charge of a children’s home rather than like putting Savile in charge of a children's charity. It would have been better if he'd thought it through a bit and realized that, er, one of the nasty things about Savile was that he actually did support children's charities. Quite likely the tabloids were simply looking for someone from The Left at whom to direct mock outrage but Ken should have thought it through and not offered them an open goal.

But ultimately, he has misused a holy name. The drawing of a line of sanctity around something is never good; it always prevents thinking. The question to ask about a sex offender is how he got that way, how he got away with it for so long, what we should do if this situation arose again, and whether bleating about "elf and safety” necessarily helps. The anti-sanctification of this figure means he is merely a symbol of evil in general and the evil of public service broadcasting in particular.

And it neatly distracts us all from Ken’s point. What is a Labour MP doing taking money from a hedge fun?

Isn’t that like the Resistance being financed by Kylo Renn?

Anyway. That was the essay. Can anyone think of any other profane figures of proverbial evil that Ken should avoid make glib remarks about?

* Ken Livingstone is a politician, former Mayor of London, and sometime Labour MP. In the 1980s, Mrs Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council specifically in order to stop him being leader of it. The press called him “Red Ken” because he held extreme views such as children should be taught about homosexuality in school sex ed lessons and Sinn Fien would have to be brought into the mainstream political process. If not for his policy of cheap travel on the London Tube, putting 1 Dalling Road and Denmark Street within easy reach of suburban schoolboys, it is most unlikely that I would have become a Dungeons & Dragons player or a comic book collector.

Just give me your fucking money.

(Please.)

Sunday Extra

When sorrows come they come not single spies

But in battalions. 

Shakespeare

There are some perfectly good things to be said about “grief athletics” and “grief inflation”. One might indeed compare the outpouring of public grief over the very funny Victoria Wood (2016) and compare it with that over comedy legends such as, say Eric Morecambe (1984), Charlie Chaplin (1977) or even Stan Laurel (1965). One could do a similar compare-and-contrast with Prince and Bowie on one hand and John Lennon and Elvis Presley on the other, and wonder how on earth we are going to top it when Paul McCartney finally shuffles of this mortal coil. (Fortunately, Bob Dylan is going to live forever.)

My working hypothesis is: “Until 1997, the death of a singer or sportsmen was show-business news or sporting news; after 1997 it became simply news. Before 1997, a death from natural courses would be reflected by an obituary and possibly an season of old movies on BBC 2. After 1997, the amount of newsprint given over to the death had to reflect the perceived importance of the deceased person. Not giving enough column inches to the departed would be a faux pas on a level of bowing from the neck instead of from the waist at the cenotaph, or being seen out in October without a poppy. AN INSULT TO THE DEAD." Prior to 1997, a tabloid might make Elvis Is Dead it’s front page story; after 1997 the serious broadsheets did so as well. 

My mother used to say that people always died in groups of 3, although the rule didn’t apply to major family bereavements. Great Uncle Bulgaria said something similar, so I suppose it was a proverb. I suppose that if old Mrs Dodsworthy three doors down passed away; and a few days later you heard that old Rev Bandersnatch kicked the bucket in his home for redundant clergyman, then you would be consciously waiting for Number 3, and be positively relieved when the paper recorded that Uncle Tumble, who you used to watch on the radio when you were a kid had gone to join the choir invisible, and could stop counting. 

. 

It’s an old saying that “Dog bites man” is not news, but “Man bites dog” is. But if a local man dies after being bitten by a labradoodle (which is “news” in practically anyone’s book) then, for the next three weeks, the local paper will (quite understandably) think that every dog bite in the hospital’s incident book is worth a mention giving the punter (quite wrongly) the impression that there has been a terrible epidemic of men being bitten by dogs. It only required two deaths — David Bowie and Terry Wogan — for someone to decide that 2016 was a terrible year for celebrity deaths; and from then on every obituary  has been underlined in magic marker. 

No such thing as a Curse of Superman had even been thought of before Christopher Reeve had his riding accident.

One of the most boring and annoying rhetorical devices is the one where you pretend that because you think that something ought to be true, it actually is true. It might, in fact, be that the United Kingdom would be better off electing it’s next titular head of state rather than handing the title to the eldest child of the present incumbent. (1) I am, as everyone knows, agnostic on the issue. I tend towards saying that the process would be so complicated and divisive that it’s not worth the effort. Would we simply elect a new King when the old King dies, or would we stop having Kings and elect a President every five years? What would he be President of? “The United Republic”? “Greater England”? “New Britain”? “The Margaret Thatcher Memorial Islands”? This is a country where people claim that a preference for simple plurality vs instant run-off elections is a matter of ineffable religious conviction, for goodness sake.

But, as a matter of fact, we do have a Queen, and it is not too unkind to think that the time is not remote when we must, in the course of nature, have a new King. So there is a certain amount of interest in the day to day life of the Queen, and the next King, and the next King but one, and even the terribly cute next King but two. As arguments go, “Why are we interested in a photograph of an old lady and her grandchildren” and “Why does this require any coverage beyond a simple ‘Elizabeth Windsor, 90 today’ in the announcements column” makes republicans look like grumpy old twits. Republican twittery is cut from very much the same cloth as atheist twittery. I suppose it has to do with being against something rather than in favour of something. 

It might be that the public ought to care more about the finer points of the E.U referendum than about the death of a funny person who used to come on the telly when they were kids. But thinking that a thing is so does not make it so. (Patrick Stewart is getting worryingly close to his 80th birthday.)

There was a point, just after I left college for the second time, when all the legendary geek writers and artists seemed to be turning up their toes. The Golden Age of science fiction and comic books was the 30s and 40s, so many of the participants were always going to to die in the 90s. (2) The 1970s were the Golden Age of television: everyone had a TV, but there were only two channels (plus a third one which only showed nature documentaries in Welsh) and there wasn’t much else to in the evenings, so a very fine comedy actor like Ronnie Corbett could easily become a household name. A generation before, he’d have been making a very decent living as a much in demand stage actor; remembered by no-one except a few aficionados; a generation after, his well reviewed comedy shows would have had to compete with eighty five channels showing rolling 24 hours footage of cats falling off sofas. The entertainers who were always going to die in the second decade of the second millennium weren't cleverer or funnier than the entertainers who have died at other times. But they were famous in a way no-one had ever been before, or ever will be again. 

It isn’t big or clever to look at a photo of the next-but-one King and the next-but-one Queen outside the Taj Mahal and say “Why is a couple sitting on a bench news, especially?” It isn’t big or clever to pretend that you don’t know who Prince is. I suppose that it is possible to cut yourself off from popular culture to that extent (”and what exactly is a ‘beatle’?”(3)) but that rather prohibits you from talking bout it. I don’t think I could name a single professional football player. (There used to be someone called David Beckham, but he retired to sell perfume and knickers.) 

For some people, it may simply be a logical error. If A is better than B then it follows that B is positively bad. If B is not quite as good as some people say, then it follows that B is awful. So the correct way of expressing the insight that "I am quite surprised, actually, by the importance the media attached to David Bowie" is "David Bowie was a talentless hack who couldn't sing."

But some people are, sadly, positively addicted to saying horrible things. If a lot of people are sad because a singer they liked as died their drug forces them to say "Who the hell was he?" A mad, sad man who writes for the Telegraph managed to describe Prince as “an obscure, sparsely talented performer”. A below the line commentator spoke about his “welcome death”. (4) The humans suffer from a disease called hatred: one day it may be possible to cure it. 

I was a bit surprised, actually, that a left wing paper like the Guardian ran a full page solid black front page to mark the death of a singer. I used to think it was silly to feel sad when a performer you liked died: since I have been going to live gigs, and since several of the performers I most revere are the wrong side of 70, I don’t feel that any more. If Prince merits a front page and a pull out supplement, then nothing short of suspending all other reporting and printing 60 pages of black ink will suffice for Dylan. But as I say: he is immortal. 

I blame Diana. 

(1) Another thing I find boring and irritating is when people say "titular" when the actually mean "eponymous". 

(2) Gene Roddenbury, 1991; Isaac Asimov, 1992; Joe Shuster, 1992; Jack Kirby, 1993; Jerry Siegel, 1996; Bob Kane, 1998

(3)It is very doubtful is any judge ever actually said this. And if even if he did, every word spoken in an English court is recorded verbatim so it is fairly important that slang terms and terms from popular culture are defined for the benefit of future generations. I know this from having watched Crown Court when I was off school with ‘flu. An American Judge would have said “And for the record, Mr Starr, could you tell the court what a Beatle is…” and no-one would have found it especially funny.

(4) Imagine being a Daily Mail journalist and having to sit up all night working out how to get some hatred and bile into reporting the death of an elderly middle-of-the-road comedian who just about everybody like. Imagine reading the Daily Mail and learning of the death of Mr Ronnie Corbett under the headline “WHY WASN’T HE GIVEN A KNIGHTHOOD”. (Due to an establishment conspiracy, apparently.) 

If I had $1 for every person who read this essay I'd have £108.65