On Sir Terence Conran, RIP

Sir Terence Conran has died.

I knew him vaguely – he once put the phone down on me during an interview because he thought I was being rude. Probably rightly. He did not suffer fools, such as me, lightly.

It comes to few people to change the lives of a generation and more. We all make fun of Habitat – “Shabitat” – but much of our stylish furniture, when we were first married 35 years ago, came from there.

Conrad understood that when people have more money, as in the early 1960s, they want to improve their lives in ways that cannot be measured economically. They want a better environment, better design, better stuff around their homes. The pleasure of a piece of furniture that does not look like it was owned by their parents.

He provided goods, for the home, that were far more aesthetic and pleasing than the drab, grey utilitarian rubbish that endured in the 1950s and the early 1960s. A touch of Scandinavian/Mediterranean light and colour to enliven the lives of a generation that were about to discover the same, at least in the Med, at first hand.

You have to have lived through those times to understand how important that was. The awful food, the drab streets, the sense that nothing in your home could ever be a statement of your own personality and be the creation of designers working through traditions not your own.

Conran grasped instinctively, not through some business plan but like all great retailers do, not just what his customers wanted but what they didn’t know they wanted.

RIP. That Habitat furniture has moved on elsewhere. But we felt better for owning it.

On Despair

I despair. I despair.

The words “race to the bottom” were coined by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1933 to describe the behaviour of large US corporations who would behave as badly as they could, within the parameters of what was permissible.

We need to revive the concept.

We have a Prime Minister, and I know some of you find this boring but please do not normalise this because this is what he wants, who has:

1) fathered an unknown number of illegitimate children, by some mothers who did not want necessarily to be pregnant.

2) conspired to have a fellow journalist beaten up or worse with a fellow old Etonian, subsequently done for fraud.

3) been fired for laziness and dishonesty from at least two employers. (One my former employer.)

4) had £126,000 of public money diverted to a business run by a former lover.

5) lied persistently, shamelessly and obviously. Not even seen as a problem any more. Just normal.

6) taken a Caribbean holiday off an unknown benefactor, lied about his or her identity. Value an estimated £25,000 to £30,000. We do not know to this day where the money came from. A Russian oligarch? Those are who his friends are.  We know this. What favours were awarded in return?

7) that Jenrick/Desmond affair. Money to the Tories in return for planning favours?

8) the biggest cash donor to the Tories is the wife of Putin’s former finance chief. She funnels the money legally because she is established as a UK citizen. Why? What in return?

9) the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, lied on camera on her stance on capital punishment within several days of taking office. These lies were never challenged. And other lies by Gove, Hancock – who claimed lockdown started on March 16. On the record, he said it. It is out there. Look at your diaries.

10) the latest awards of political honours. Peerages for a Russian oligarch, just days after a formal report suggested Russian oligarchs had too much influence over our political system. Someone Johnson has taken favours from. And for an IRA apologist. And forJohnson’s brother. Why?

11) a Brexit fanatical loyalist, and we all know

who it is, do we not, is accused of rape. The defences circle around. No whip withdrawn because he is a Brexit loyalist. Get sacked, though, for standing up to Johnson on anything.

12) and where is the lying charlatan? Been seen recently?

We just shrug, don’t we? It is just the way it is. What do you expect? It is just Boris being Boris. It’s just Trump being Trump.

This is how democracy dies.

It is the race to the bottom. How badly can we behave, and get away with it?

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On Masks, Parachutes And The Virus

 

I have just gone into a shop. I have worn a face mask. This is as a courtesy to those people serving there, who must interact with hundreds of people a day. They would prefer me to do so. If it makes them happier and feeling more secure, I will do so.

Let us look at the science, and parachutes. The only practical way of testing parachutes is to take, say, 500 people and equip them with parachutes. Take 500 more and do not. Throw them all out of a plane and see who survives.

If the ones with parachutes are still alive, then parachutes work. We know this.

We can’t do that experiment, never could, so we rely on the theoretical science. Air drag, and on the fact that the kinetic energy released on collision with the ground is a function of the velocity of the descending object, a human, and his or her mass. Cut the velocity by air drag and the kinetic energy released is insufficient to kill. Basic physics.

To prove that masks work and lessen the spread of the virus, we need to take a sample of, say, 20,000 people and equip them with masks, then take another 20,000 without masks. Leave them to do  what they will. Come back in two months and compare the relative infection rates between the two sample populations. This will tell you if masks work or not.

This study has never been done.

We therefore fall back again on the theoretical science. This tells you that if you strap a piece of Laura Ashley fabric to your face, the pores within the fabric are several orders of magnitude larger than the virus. You might as well strap a colander to your head.

Proper medical masks work fine but there are not enough to go around for the doctors and nurses who need them. You should not use one to go to your local Tesco.

Sorry, and I am not a mad anti masker on political grounds. Far from it. This is where the science, as I understand it, takes me.

“But if you wear  a mask it must do a bit of good.” Indeed: to pursue the analogy, if you wear a parachute a tenth of the size needed, it must do a bit of good. But not enough.

I will wear a mask where necessary, as a courtesy and to prevent social friction. But can some scientist explain why, if it was deemed essential to wear masks in shops, it took ten days for the Government  to implement this?

On Voting, And Emma Nicholson

“If voting could change anything, they’d make it illegal.” Old saying, from the 1960s counterculture.

The latest eruption in the ongoing culture wars, fuelled by Twitter as ever, is against Baroness (Emma) Nicholson of Winterbourne, who has been stripped of her largely honorary post on the committee that awards the Booker Prize. Her late husband set up the award many years ago.

Her crime was to vote, again some years ago, against the legal establishment of gay marriage, as I understand. Various authors, one of them gay, say this now makes her unsuitable.

Not entirely clear how this connects, especially as this is an honorary post, as I have said. I know a little about Nicholson. She appears to be a typical Shires Tory lady. I doubt she and I agree on anything much but I have to respect her views. She has done a lot of good work for the disabled.

The key point here, and one largely missed I think, is the word vote. Nicholson has been vilified and sacked because, in a democratic vote some years ago, she voted in a way that some now disapprove of. This is how democracy is supposed to work, a free and fair ballot on any subject, and to punish someone for voting the wrong way, some years later, negates the whole concept of democracy, then. And sets, I suggest, a very dark precedent.

For a fair discussion of all this, see today’s column by my fellow Suffolk resident, former colleague and a very brave journalist, Janice Turner. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-righteous-anger-train-is-out-of-control-0zq3cgdkk

ECONOMY, EU, POLITICS

On Voting, And Emma Nicholson

 

“If voting could change anything, they’d make it illegal.” Old saying, from the 1960s counterculture.

The latest eruption in the ongoing culture wars, fuelled by Twitter as ever, is against Baroness (Emma) Nicholson of Winterbourne, who has been stripped of her largely honorary post on the committee that awards the Booker Prize. Her late husband set up the award many years ago.

Her crime was to vote, again some years ago, against the legal establishment of gay marriage. Various authors, one of them gay, say this now makes her unsuitable.

Not entirely clear how this connects, especially as this is an honorary post, as I have said. I know a little about Nicholson. She appears to be a typical Shires Tory lady. I doubt she and I agree on anything much but I have to respect her views. She has done a lot of good work for the disabled.

The key point here, and one largely missed I think, is the word vote. Nicholson has been vilified and sacked because, in a democratic vote some years ago, she voted in a way that some now disapprove of. This is how democracy is supposed to work, a free and fair ballot on any subject, and to punish someone for voting the wrong way, some years later, negates the whole concept of democracy, then. And sets, I suggest, a very dark precedent.

For a fair discussion of all this, see today’s column by my fellow Suffolk resident, former colleague and a very brave journalist, Janice Turner. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-righteous-anger-train-is-out-of-control-0zq3cgdkk

On The Collapse Of Our Civilisation, And More Cheerful Matters

So where are we today? (I did love the story the other day that NASA, I think, had detected activity in the outer atmosphere of Mars. A bit like the first chapter of HG Wells’ The War Of The Worlds. And a potential war between the nuclear-armed India and China. 2020 is truly the gift that keeps on giving, and we are less than half way through.)

Johnson has ended lockdown, effectively, because he thinks several hundred thousand more deaths will be less politically damaging than five or six million job losses.

Those job losses will be laid at his door because they would not have happened, thosee jobless will know, if he had not ended the lockdown. They will diminish that, to me, baffling popularity he enjoys among a proportion of the electorate who accept that bumbling, Billy  Bunteresque, fluffy haired persona he has constructed. (The reality is something much darker, as those who know him better than I do have written.) It will hit those people especially hardest in the former Labour constituencies that gifted him the last election.

Two hundred thousand deaths or potentially more can be spun away as an unavoidable sacrifice – “world-beating” efforts to combat the virus, the Olympic levels of lies and deceit we have seen so far. “Hundreds of thousands’” of tests each day. Demonstrably untrue. Just lies, in plain sight.

People want to believe Johnson because they do not want to accept they have taken in by the lies so far and been deceived. Confirmation bias, it is called.

Let’s move forward. Tory MPs know Johnson is leaking that baffling popularity that won him the last election like air from a deflating balloon. The Cummings affair only accelerated that. They will bin him when he is no longer able to win elections for them, they judge. Not long now.

No one wants to take over, even though, as I have suggested here, he might not want to continue. Get the next few months over, and let him and his advisers take the blame.

We face the twin effects of a virus-induced economic collapse, our national net worth down by a fifth as measured in terms of GDP already, and the aftermath of a No Deal Brexit, which looks like what will happen because madmen think it is a good idea and the hedge fund managers will benefit and make billions. Is this where you want to be, in a country run by the functionally insane and those who will become rich from your future misery? Answers on one side of the paper only.

Put those two together and think forward for a moment.

The consequences will be at best catastrophic. Five, six million unemployed, the end of whole industries, travel, hospitality, chunks of retail, commercial property now worthless, a disintegrating housing market, banks valueless as compulsory debt forgiveness destroys their net worth. This will happen.

That is the best case scenario. The worst is this. There comes a stage when the government can no longer print/create money because no one will take it. (Economists are divided on this one.)

Food shortages, leading to mass starvation as the poor, in inner cities especially, cannot buy what they need at prices they can afford.

A level of civil disorder that resembles a minor civil war.

The lack of basic pharmaceuticals as they are held up at our borders that means hundreds of thousands will die from a shortage of anything from asthma treatments through cancer drugs to antibiotics. (Try to work out how many of our antibiotics are sourced from abroad. Not easy.)

This is pretty much the collapse of our civilisation. It is all very well to say this kind of thing can never happen here. Not in this country. Except that we have already suffered enough from the myth of British exceptionalism.

On Covid-19, And Conspiracy Theories

 

I do not normally do conspiracy theories, having had a few offered to me as a journalist which I politely rejected. But let us assemble a few facts and see where they might take us.

This morning Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, is widely quoted as saying the Covid-19 virus was “manufactured” in a Chinese laboratory, presumably the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (This exists; look it up.)

He quotes a Norwegian-British research paper that suggests elements of the virus’s genetic code were “inserted” artificially.

Hardly conclusive. However, fact 2. A couple of weeks ago Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his work on the AIDS virus, suggested that the Covid-19 genome, which has been decoded, seemed to include elements of quite different viruses, namely a respiratory Coronavirus and AIDS. This suggests “manipulation”, he said. “It’s not natural.”

Montaignier is something of a maverick. But I know enough science to appreciate that it is almost impossible for two such different viruses to exchange genetic material – like crossing a flamingo with a hamster. Or leaving two books together and finding that, overnight, pages of one had migrated to the other. Viruses are indeed like books – mere strings of genetic information.

This is over-simplifying, scientists will appreciate, but correct me if I am wrong. Still, a virus that affected the respiratory system and so was easily spread, combined with an immuno-suppressant, is especially lethal. If that was what you wanted.

Again, not conclusive. Still, fact 3. A week or so ago Rachel Sylvester, a columnist on The Times, where I used to work, said the Tories, left and right of the party, were turning strongly away from the PRC government. Her reasons were not entirely convincing – human rights abuses, the need to strike a trade deal with the US. This is, however, a complete turnabout from the pro-China policies of the Cameron Government, which were based on the need for stronger trade links.

She said that we could expect to see more evidence of this in coming months. Sylvester is an extremely well sourced columnist – if she says the Government is doing this or that, she will have been told this at the highest level.

Since then we have heard, extraordinarily, that the Johnson Government, not exactly a great fan of mass immigration, plans to extend citizenship rights to all three million inhabitants of Hong Kong. A plan written up approvingly by its usual supporters in the press but which has infuriated the Chinese authorities. (Who, incidentally, are frustrating attempts to research the source of the virus.)

Where does this all lead? The security services will know a great deal more than you or I about the aetiology of the virus and how it may have emerged from Wuhan.

Does someone, somewhere, know something that might make it politically expedient, a few months down the line, to say, no, we never liked the Chinese? And here is the proof.

Conspiracy theories are occasionally right. I’d give this one, say, 50/50?

On Covid-19, And Morality

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Aleister Crowley, fraudulent English occultist.

There is a scam doing the rounds. You are called by someone claiming to be from the NHS. You have been traced as being in contact with someone diagnosed with the Corona-19 virus. You need to take a test. We will send it by post, cost £500. Banking details please.

Most people spot it. Some do not, which is how scammers make their money.

As someone on my Facebook page asks, how do these people sleep at night? Making money out of all this misery?

Rather well, I suspect. Criminals need to make a living, and they do so by committing criminal acts.

Let us conduct a small thought experiment. (Sorry, this is one of my regular musings on philosophy and morality. No religion involved, I promise.)

You are in a queue at the bank, say, and there is ahead of you an elderly person, obviously not well off. He or she walks away from the counter and accidentally drops a £20 note. Which he or she clearly needs more than you do.

What do you do? Rationally, you pick it up unnoticed. You spend it on a couple of good bottles of wine, a (pre-lockdown) night at the cinema, whatever. There is no downside, you just get something enjoyable for free.

Yet you don’t, do you? Because you would not enjoy it, knowing your enjoyment came from someone else’s suffering.

This is called conscience. From the Latin, knowing with. The ability to feel others’ pain, and not add to it. It is the basis of most religions and most moral systems.

Now put yourself in the place of someone whose response would be to surreptitiously pick up that £20. They have no conscience. They are, without getting too technical, sociopaths.

I have interviewed any number of business leaders I believe were sociopaths. It is sometimes easy to rise up the greasy pole in business, politics or anywhere if you can treat colleagues, subordinates like pieces of furniture, to be moved around according to your will, without regard to their feelings.

I have worked alongside several others I also regarded as sociopaths. (Being very careful here; some of you who know me will know why.)

I am forever glad that I am not, and never will be, one of them. If you are on my Facebook page, neither are you. Take a brief moment to celebrate your good fortune. How awful to be like that. No matter what the material rewards.

On Cummings, And The Things You Learn On Twitter

There was a woman on Twitter yesterday making a telling point. Not a natural Tory voter, she was in a constituency where the Tories were in the majority. She was discussing Dominic Cummings with her Tory neighbours.

She was astonished by the sheer amount of rage coming over the garden fence. These people hadn’t seen their grandchildren for months because they had obeyed the rules. As people like them do. And now they learn that only the little people are expected to obey those rules.

Note, this was well before Johnson’s apparently ill-judged defence of his aide, a time when we all assumed he would be sacked. Tory MPs will be receiving heart-rending letters from angry constituents in their hundreds – you will have seen some. That elderly relative that died alone in pain because they were not allowed to visit. Two months spent in lonely isolation. The new grandchild they have yet to see.

Some of those Tory MPs will be running scared, especially those in the former Labour constituencies. (The job of MP is one of the few from which you can be removed at random because of events beyond your control. Think of it as a zero hour contract.)

So why did Johnson back Cummings, a stance which has attracted vitriol and outrage from even the Daily Mail?

Three factors. As I suggested here the other day, the two are locked in a cycle of co-dependency. Cummings does the work Johnson is too idle to do. He runs Number 10 and handles the press.

The second, largely unappreciated, is that if Cummings is ousted he could pull the temple down around him. He knows where the bodies are buried. There will be a diary. He could walk into any newspaper office, even those now pouring out the vitriol, and walk out with a column. Or there could be a hastily assembled book.

It would suit his faux Machiavellian style if stripped of power to take down the powerful.

There is a third factor here. I think Johnson is looking for an exit strategy. This is not the job he signed up to do – bumbling around Being Boris, the adoring party conferences, Getting Brexit Done, that was it. Beating the virus requires a level of commitment he conspicuously lacks. It threatens his place in history, how he will be viewed, something of huge importance to him. He must be aware he is failing.

He has a new family, a long way from his first, true, but this must exert its emotional pull.

I doubt he is fully recovered from the virus. He must be aware that affects his performance and threatens that historical legacy.

The final and I think clinching point is the EU. Negotiations appear to have broken down, largely unnoticed in all the kerfuffle over Cummings. The EU is tearing itself apart which does not make it any easier.

This means a hard crash-out and all those things written off as Project Fear. A hard Northern Ireland border seems certain. Queues of lorries outside Dover. A shortage of vital pharmaceuticals. None of these can feasibly be blamed on the coronavirus.

It would be typical of Johnson to walk away first. He could say, I got you out of Europe. Others screwed up in the aftermath. He, as he so often has in the past, evades the blame.

He needs a reason to go, though. Just resigning would look like cowardice. A point of principle? Supporting a loyal aide all others had turned on? Throw in the lingering effects of the virus, to make him a victim. That would work.

All speculation, but I suspect he will be gone by the end of the year. But who on earth would be insane enough, among that Cabinet of non-entities and no-hopers, to want to replace him? This would require someone devoted to public service and prepared to risk their reputation to get the country out of this mess. I don’t see too many of those.

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On Why Cummings Will Never Be Sacked (For Now)

(This blog could be overtaken by events.)

Let us try to think ourselves out of this. What Dominic Cummings did would have seen him sacked from any other position in any public office, and probably any private one.

Having told you and I we must not see our loved ones under any circumstances, and I know the pain caused by some of our friends, for example, being unable to see their grandchildren for the appreciable future, he drove half the length of the country to reunite his family.

Fact. His supporters, the jackals in the right wing, press pile in – they would, they need him for the usual drip feed of “briefings” by “sources close to Number 10”. A system, the press lobby, that has been utterly corrupted by this government. As they have corrupted so much else.

Why, if he has become such an embarrassment, does Johnson not just sack Cummings? Johnson has betrayed everyone else in his life, lovers, colleagues, friends.

Because they are tied together by co-dependency. Cummings needs to fuel his fantasies of being a Nietzschean superman by being close to power. He has achieved little.

Johnson is irredeemably lazy. His entire career has displayed a need to gain the top job, at whatever the cost, and do nothing with it. Just to be top dog, president of the Oxford Union, London Mayor, MP for Henley-upon-Thames, is enough. And PM, in the worst crisis in 75 years. He has no idea what to do.  So do nothing, run away again. Search the fridges.

Johnson needs Cummings to put in the hours because he is too lazy, too idle, to master the briefs. He feels he is too privileged to do so. Only little people work hard. Cummings fulfils that essential role, so he can never be got rid of.

When Stalin died, the first thing they did was to shoot Beria, Stalin’s enforcer. When Johnson goes, which I suspect will not be long, his Beria will not be far behind.