It's tradition, Jimmy..

When I was a newish member of my London Club I was having a drink with the Oldest Member who complained, quietly and sadly, about a move by some other youngsters to extend the club’s membership to include women.

He forecast, rightly as it happened, that the change wouldn’t be effected in his lifetime, but he asked my views.

Fairly diplomatically, I thought, I said that I could not, for the life of me, imagine why any women would want to join it, and – adapting the Groucho Marks theory on clubs – that I didn’t think we would want to elect any women who would look at us and decide we were the sort of club they wanted to join.

‘What we should ask all candidates when they are put up for membership,’ he said, ‘is whether this is the club they want to join – or whether they wish to join it with the intention of changing its rules.’

Can’t say fairer than that, I think.

Peter Ustinov told me once that the US immigration form included a question: ‘Is the intention of your visit to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States of America?’ – And that he had written beside it: ‘Sole purpose of visit.’

But now, as Ben Elton might have said, let’s get political. Ooh, er, missus..

When refugees seek asylum and choose the United Kingdom, do they come because of its remarkable history of freedom of speech, expression, worship and lawful assembly?

Or do they come because they have looked around and found the one nation that they can adapt to be more like the place from which they have recently fled in terror?

Do they wish to integrate with their British hosts? Or to live peacefully in parallel lives with them? Or to make the Brits change to suit their own traditions?

Actually, what they want is fairly academic, because whether they want it or not the country is being adapted for them.

The Daily Express had a story from Scotland this week that you might have missed: Doctors and health workers have been banned from eating lunch at their desks - in case it offends their Muslim colleagues.

‘Health chiefs believe the sight of food will upset Muslim workers when they are celebrating the religious festival Ramadan. The lunch trolley is also to be wheeled out of bounds as the 30-day fast begins next month...’

I don’t want to sound like a London taxi driver here – honestly, I don’t – but didn’t the Muslim doctors who opted for greater freedom (and higher wages) in the UK know that the British, whether Christian, Jew or atheist, ate lunch during Ramadan? They must have been incredibly ignorant if they didn’t; any construction worker taking up a job in the Arab states knows about local and religious laws before he heads for the airport.

So does eating a sandwich, or having a vending machine on display, offend Muslims, do you think?

Or has some totally underemployed wanker decided that it MIGHT?

That’s my guess.

I have been in Muslim states during Ramadan and fairly gracious hosts have reminded me that, if I wished to eat during daylight hours, it was no problem but they would rather not see me do it. Simple as that. And it was their country, so I didn’t eat (or even smoke) in public view. Did they say that they would be offended if they actually saw me eating lunch in a Muslim country? No: they said they would just rather not see me, because it was not something that they did themselves.

So if a Muslim doctor told his infidel colleague that he was ‘offended’ by his snatching a sandwich at his desk, the answer would surely be: ‘That’s what we do here, Jimmy. It’s our tradition.’

He doesn’t even need to add: ‘If it offends you – boy have you chosen the wrong place to live and work.’
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Balloons and hot air

Tesco booked a clown called Barney Baloney to entertain children for five hours at a supermarket in Leeds, then wiped the silly smile off his face by telling him that he couldn’t use balloons as part of his act.

A children’s entertainer performing without balloons? Difficult to imagine.

But according to Tesco it was just possible that some of the children in the audience ‘might be allergic to latex’ (the natural rubber from which balloons are made).

I confess that I had never heard of latex allergy and had to look it up.

How many people are susceptible to it? Nobody knows, say dermatologists, but it is certainly less than 1% of the population. Oh, and it’s something that tends to affect children far less than adults.

Nevertheless, part of Mr Baloney’s act was to twist balloons into shapes – like dogs and giraffes and aeroplanes – and hand them to the children to take home.

Tesco were taking no chances of that happening, and one of its customer’s kids possibly developing a runny nose (which, in an extreme case, is what we’re talking about here).

He’d already been warned, at an earlier booking, that it was unacceptable to fashion balloons into shapes that looked like guns, in case children were encouraged to commit violence, although sword shapes were apparently ok.

That’s how it goes, as we know. Blow up a balloon and twist it so that anyone with a really vivid imagination could think it looked vaguely like a gun, and next thing the toddlers will do is go down to the hunting supply shop to buy revolvers and shoot all their classmates. But nobody would be daft enough to think you could successfully stab anybody with a bendy rubber sword or dagger.

You might think that would be bad enough for a kiddies’ entertainer to put up with – especially one who is booked for a full five-hour gig – but balloons were only the latest blow to his routine.

He’d already had his bubble-making machine banned because he couldn’t get public liability insurance for it.

The amount of damage that a few aerated drops of soapy water might inflict on an audience might seem negligible to you or me but, then, we are not in the Elfen Sifety industry.

No: what happens to these bubbles, inevitably, is that they fall to the ground.

Youngsters might slip on the liquid and hurt themselves.

Why hadn’t you thought of that?

‘The way things are going, I’ll soon have no act left,’ complained the sad clown, who is more formally known as Tony Turner, and comes from Sheffield.

But Tesco says: ‘This is a health and safety issue. [See?] We have banned balloons because latex is used in the manufacture of them and this can trigger an allergic reaction in some children. We always have the welfare of children at heart.’

Of course they do.

And so next, no doubt, they will ban the sale of balloons for parties, and of all rubber toys as well as those things babies suck on that we used to call dummies but are now called comforters or pacifiers. And teats for babies bottles, and rubber bands (how will they pack asparagus?) and adhesive tape and stretch bandages.

Has it occurred to Tesco or the Health & Safety nazis, I wonder, what condoms are made of?

So much for safe sex, eh?
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God save the Queen, from duff advisers

The Queen has instructed her lawyers to take action over the way a BBC programme trailer misrepresented her by suggesting she had stormed out of a photo shoot. – Sunday Telegraph

Reportedly the richest woman in the world – and how would we know, anyway, because she is not required to disclose her private wealth? – the Queen (described by BBC World Service as ‘Britain’s Queen Elizabeth’, to avoid confusion with all the others) wants for almost nothing.

All those houses, the royal flight, the cars, servants, coaches, the Brigade of Guards and Beefeaters, personal bodyguards, police escorts, aides and ladies in waiting, the crown jewels… the ability to close roads if she wants to make a trip out of doors. Her own train…

So what’s the qualifier in the intro? Why ‘almost’ nothing?

Because the one thing HM has been deprived of throughout most of her reign has been good advice.

Far worse, she was the recipient of a great deal of really bad advice. Worst of all, she was persuaded to accept it.

I think I can even put my finger on the pivotal event.

The Family invited TV cameras to record the Royal Year and at one stage – this was in 1969 – we saw them setting up a barbecue at Sandringham. Prince Philip had trouble lighting the thing and millions of other dads (and mums) watching his attempts to get the charcoal going smiled happily and said: ‘There you are. They’re just like us.’

And from that moment it was all downhill.

Because the whole point, the raison d’etre of the Royal Family is that they are not supposed to be like us.

They are supposed to be different.

It’s fine if we, the subjects, wish that we could be more like them. But suddenly the Royals had got the plot wrong. They are supposed to be the role models. The plebs sitting in front of the telly are not.

It’s certainly true that the first couple of decades of the last century suggested to their wise counsellors that some change was necessary if their heads were to continue to wear crowns.

The Queen Mother was still in her teens when the Family (she wasn’t yet a member of it) saw its cousins, Kaiser Bill and the Romanoffs, toppled in Germany and Russia, and the crowned heads of Austria, Turkey and Italy – all of them leaders of great empires – overthrown.

They reacted gently at Windsor. They allowed Prince Albert, Duke of York, to marry a commoner, daughter of an Earl, but a break from the stuffy tradition of finding and marrying suitable princesses from Europe who were, in any case, literally a dying breed. Fresh blood, but it was no big deal, really, for Bertie was not destined to be King: his elder brother had been reared for that job.

But, here’s the thing: big brother wanted to marry a divorcee. The Church of England, in those days, took the ‘til death do us part’ bit of the marriage vows seriously and did not allow divorced people to marry in church. As presumptive head of that church the potential King Edward had to choose between love and duty, and he chose love.

But that was not the beginning of the end, yet.

The Family recovered quickly with the coronation of Bertie as King George VI – apparently to his horror, because he had not been trained for the job and was basically a very shy man. But he had Princess Elizabeth at his side, and everybody loved her anyway, not least because she had been the first Royal ever seen to break into a smile.

They understood standards, however. And, diffidently or not, the new Royal couple took it all in their stride. They knew their duty, which is what took them out into the capital to console and encourage the victims of World War II bombing. When, a year and ten days into the war, Buckingham Palace received its first direct hit (there were nine, while they were living in it), the then Queen said: ‘I’m almost glad that we’ve been bombed. It means that I can go out and look those people in the East End in the face.’

Years later, now widowed and The Queen Mother, she told her daughter Margaret Rose that she could not marry a divorced man unless – like her uncle before her – she renounced her Royal status. Princess Margaret said she would choose duty over love, which may possibly have been out of respect for her mother (who presumably hated the thought of another divorce dilemma within the Family), although some critics suggested she chose only to stick with the money and the trappings.

Throughout this period little was known about the inner workings of life behind those high walls and gates. Photographs were taken by appointment and by arrangement. Nobody hid in the bushes around Sandringham to snatch pictures of the Family at leisure through the prying lens of a long tom. Indeed, royal photographs were so rare that many royalists of a now lost generation cut them out of newspapers and magazines and kept scrapbooks. It was all about respect and mystery.

‘The Queen sits on the lavatory, just like you and me,’ said the anti-monarchists. That may have been true, and was possibly why many people described the smallest room in any house as the throne room. But if she did, it was difficult to imagine, even if you wanted to.

Just before the 60s ended there was a strange stab at recreating the pomp and ceremony that made the Royal Family both a political and an economic (in terms of tourism) asset. Prince Charles, aged 20 but looking like a 12-year-old, was ‘invested’ as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle. Princess Margaret’s second spousal choice, a photographer by trade, was appointed Constable of the Castle and put in charge of the Ruritanian theatrical set-up that looked as if it owed more to Gilbert and Sullivan than to traditions that started with James II. It was overwhelmingly silly, with the new Prince pledging:

‘I, Charles, Prince of Wales, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship and faith and truth I will bear unto you to live and die against all manner of folks.’

But this was all too late anyway for somebody – and Prince Philip (described recently by a colleague as ‘the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus’) is widely suspected as the culprit – had already decided it was time for the family, in the vernacular of the 1960s, to ‘get with it’.

Hence that bloody barbecue, and photos of them lunching en famille - just like us - to balance the Caernarfon caper. The film, according to Radio Times, ‘covers a typical year in the life of the Queen and her family, and shows for the first time the behind-scenes existence of the Royal Family in both their off-duty moments and official engagements.’

About 30 million people in the UK – in other words, about 60% of the population – watched it, and it is still, after the 1966 World Cup and the funeral of Princess Diana, the most-watched British TV programme ever.

But the problem is, if they are just like us, why do we need them at all? A dozen years earlier it was virtually treason to ask. Malcolm Muggeridge was dropped by the BBC as a Panorama presenter for daring to ask, in the Saturday Evening Post in 1957, Does Britain Really Need a Queen?

Couldn’t we have just had an elected head of state instead? Mrs Thatcher as president (except that Denis had been divorced) or Tony and Cherie Blair (oh no: she’s a Catholic). An English George W Bush perhaps?

Need I say more?

The point is, I think, that we don’t trust politicians. We certainly don’t look up to them. Whether you approve of ‘royalty’ or not, it can be fairly said that they have a role to play. They are not supposed to be corruptible, for a start, and unimaginable and uncountable wealth is surely one way of ensuring that – for who could afford to bribe them, and with what? They are also understood to attract world tourism, something that they appear to achieve successfully for, if it’s pomp and ceremony that turns you on (and most countries don’t have crowned rulers of their own and for most of the rest the crown they have is the Queen’s) Britain is the place to visit.

What does all this cost the British tax-payer? About fourpence a year, each.

And, since we are paying for their duties and their upkeep, does that make us their boss? I ask because, if it does, I want a better sense of responsibility from them.

I expect the heir to the throne to know (to have known) from the start that, like any of his future subjects, if he intends to play away he must do it discreetly; I think it’s fine that Prince Andrew flew in the face of danger in the Falklands, but I didn’t want him to marry a slapper; I don’t want to learn from TV how Fergie files her knickers in drawers marked with post-it labels in a house that resembles South Fork, only without the touch of class; I don’t want Prince Edward (‘Hi, it’s Edward Windsor, here’) cashing in on the family name for commerce; I don’t (didn’t) want any of them to get divorced – there’s no shortage of accommodation if they can’t actually continue to co-habit after marrying and making their vows in front of millions of their subjects; and I don’t want Princess Anne travelling up to town on a supersaver ticket, which is apparently what she does.

Good grief, we’ll have the Queen on a bike, before you can say Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

I did not want the Queen’s children appearing on anything so mind-numbingly stupid as It’s A Royal Knockout in 1987, to show the world that they are just like us, and can get fun out of doing silly things, because I do not (did not) want them to be just like us. It undid, in an evening, any good that two Royal (if ill-fated) weddings had done in 1981 and 1986.

I want them to be different, distant, and mysterious, quietly doing good works and being wheeled out into public view only when necessary for the nation, or for sensible charitable causes, especially charities at home or, at a pinch, within the commonwealth.

So it follows that the Queen’s idea of doing yet another Royal Year for television was just another mistake.

Getting her royal knickers in a twist over a bit of cack-handed publicity-seeking footage suggesting, wrongly, that she stormed out of a picture session is yet another mistake.

Taking advice from the Royal solicitors, and threatening legal action is just the latest dumb idea.

It might be said at this juncture that what the Royals’ favoured firm is most famous for isn’t actions against newspapers (even though it is said they have something of a reputation for being able to apply pressure without necessarily resorting to the courts). It wasn’t divorce, either – although they have a specialist department, their solicitors managed to get the date of the Charles and Diana wedding wrong in the writ they issued: perhaps they were the only people in the realm who didn’t know it).

The firm is highly regarded for expertise on estates, income tax, wills… the sort of stuff you’d expect them to be good at with HM topping their client list.

The people who advise the royals worry me far more than the Family members themselves.

It’s now said that the Queen is pissed off with the idea of the TV film and wants it abandoned.

That would be an excellent plan. And the next thing she should do is sack the people who told her it would be a good idea in the first place.

And if there is footage of her anywhere walking quickly down a corridor with a bog roll in her hand and a copy of The Sporting Life under her arm, can they please keep it to themselves?
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’tis the season to be silly

It’s summer (on the calendar, if not at the Met Office) and as Parliament and the courts go into the long holidays newspapers perforce have to lower the definition of news, in order to fill all those potentially embarrassing gaps between the adverts.

One method, considered rather radical on some newspapers, is to ask reporters to think up ideas for stories.

The best that the Daily Mirror news desk could come up with recently was: ‘I know – let’s see how easy it would be for a terrorist to plant a bomb on a train.’

OK. Let’s get my declaration of interest out of the way from the start. For more than a quarter of a century the three English and two Scottish titles of the Mirror Group funded my lifestyle, either individually (at various times the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People) or collectively – those three plus the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail – and it would have been more lavish if it were not for the losses incurred by the Sporting Life.

Now for my declaration as a journalist and sometime editorial panjandrum: if anybody had come to me and made that suggestion, I would have sent him – or had him sent - home, with instructions to stop at his GP’s surgery on the way.

If I’d heard that a news editor had taken up the idea, I would have made the same recommendation about him to his editor, his boss: that he follow the reporter on the way out and for an immediate medical examination.

If you bend over backwards – and it would need to be beyond the horizontal – to look at the newspapermen’s point of view, you may accept that they were not actually going to plant a bomb, but merely a ‘device’ that could have been one.

If you listen to the paper’s defence for its action it goes like this: They were testing security in a time of heightened terrorist alert, therefore it was ‘a legitimate and justified journalistic exercise.’

Journalists, you see, have a God-given right to ensure that the people responsible for our security are doing their job efficiently.

And up to a point, Lord Copper, that last bit is true.

But you might think that, fully understanding that the security services are currently more than over-extended in uncovering and prosecuting real terrorists, to add to their burden with a time-wasting stunt was the height of irresponsibility. Not to say stupidity.

And if it works, what’s the message exactly?

It is exactly this: ‘Hey Ahmed – your idea of driving a jeep into the entrance of Glasgow Airport to blow it up and kill lots of people didn’t work… have you thought about just putting a bomb on a train, maybe one going through the Channel Tunnel?’

There are millions of separate passenger journeys on the trains every day. Most people carry some form of luggage. Last time I travelled by rail there was no personal or baggage checking – nor would it be practical for there to be any. Imagine the chaos it would cause.

So to get a device that’s not a bomb onto a train doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, to me.

But now here’s the good news.

Railway staff at Stonebridge Park depot (towards the end of the Bakerloo line in north west London, where Chunnel freight is loaded) spotted the journalists – dressed as railway workers in high-visibility yellow jackets and hard hats - carrying their fake ‘bomb’ and called British Transport Police before the guys had even planted it.

And they were immediately arrested under the Terrorism Act.

They were held for 12 hours while their homes were searched and their personal computer and photographic files examined. The Mirror described the police reaction – which many sensible people might think was the least that should have been done – as ‘heavy handed’.

The ‘midnight raids’ on their homes were ‘at best disproportionate and at worst intimidation of the most sinister kind.’

Nothing, then, disproportionate, intimidating or sinister – obviously – about pretending to plant a bomb on a train.

Gary Jones, the paper’s head of news, said: ‘You have to ask in whose interests the police are acting, and why.’

Perhaps I can help him, there. They were acting in my interests.

If anybody who isn’t a legitimate railway worker dresses up, trespasses on the railway, and pretends to be one, it is greatly in my interest for him to be arrested.

If he is planting a bomb I want him banged up for life, preferably in Guantanamo Bay with only a copy of the Koran as reading matter.

If he is pretending to plant a bomb, I want him locked up for pretending to plant one and for wasting police time, and for intentionally trying to scare travelling members of the public.

The Mirror, scratting around for some form of legitimate grouse, says the arrest of the two – at least one of whom, photographer Roger Allen, is an old Fleet Street hand and ought to have more bloody sense – ‘raises questions over whether the authorities can be trusted with new powers under Gordon Brown’s 56-day detention proposals’ [for suspected terrorists].

Well, I’d say that the answer to that one is a resounding ‘Yes – they can be trusted’, for the simple reason that they could have been locked up 28 days (and at some future date for up to 56 days), but were allowed to go home after only 12 hours. The system therefore clearly works, and it is excellent news that they appear to have proved that there is little fear of the jailing of innocent people.

Even if these two were not actually innocent.

Now for a reality check, lads.

Security systems need checking regularly, and that’s the job not of journalists looking for an ‘Oh what a clever boy am I’ story, but of the police and security services.

It happens, and it happens often. And it often happens that they find flaws in the system.

What happens then? Well (you’ll have to trust me on this one) they do not always report the security lapses – because it totally pisses off the people who are responsible for them.

The people with the awesome responsibility of performing checks at airports, for example, are not entitled to pick people out of a queue who they think look suspicious nor, incredible though it may seem, even to ask an Arab woman to show her face in order to check it against the photo on her passport. They have to be seen to be working without any visible sign of ‘discrimination’, which is why old ladies are siphoned off to one side while bearded mullahs who walk as if they might have something stuck under their thoub or dishdasha are allowed to pass through.

When a policeman manages, in a test, to get a gun through the screening and the security staff are called to account for it they therefore react angrily. Instead of deeply screening, say, one passenger in ten, they make a point of examining one in five – with the effect that the queue to get into departures stretches thrice round the terminal and out onto the taxi rank.

The Mirror has had its wrist slapped. It should have had its head whacked. And its Ed, too.

But at least it has proved that, on this one occasion at least, the railway staff was fully alert, the police reaction was prompt, and the Terrorism Act with its planned 56-day detention of suspects is nothing that the fully innocent need to fear.

The Mirror has done us all a service – like it used to – even if it was actually trying to put the fear of God into its few remaining readers. Now it should stop bloody whining and start looking for a proper story.
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A land fit for…?

What sort of nation imposes a charge on servicemen and women wishing to honour the memory of their fallen comrades?

Horwich, five miles north west of Bolton in Greater Manchester is a town that’s probably unheard of except by ramblers who favour the West Pennine moors. According to it’s [sic] town council website there is ‘a strong community spirit within the locality and it is becoming an increasingly desirable place to both live and work.’

It boasts – I think that’s the right word for it – its own branch of the Royal British Legion. Every year since 1945 the Legion has held a small parade on Remembrance Day to honour its local residents who have died in the defence of their country…

In two world wars, and also in forgotten wars like India, Palestine, Malaya, Korea, the Suez Canal Zone, Kenya, Cyprus, Suez again, Borneo, Vietnam, Aden, Radfan, Oman, Dhofar, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and many others, often virtually unreported, all since 1945. And also in Northern Ireland, the Falklands War, the Gulf War, and currently in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are the only ones most people will remember.

But according to the Daily Mail [link below] the parade is unlikely to take place this year because the local authority – the one that flaunts its own strong community spirit – wants to charge the organisers up to ₤18,000 for the privilege of remembering.

That’s a hell of a lot of poppy sales in a population that (including bits of neighbouring Lostock) was 19,312 at last count.

The council wants ‘a team of marshals’ to man the route at a cost of about ₤50 each. What does that work out at, as an hourly rate for the time taken to march to a war memorial? And why do they need marshals in the first place – in case parading pensioners (the only members of the community who have any understanding of discipline) become unruly before 11 in the morning on a Sunday in November?
The council also imposes a charge for closing roads. The more roads that need closing while the parade passes, the greater the price. What, in God’s name, does it cost to close a road for maybe an hour?

The Mail quotes Bernard McCartin, 65, of the British Legion’s Horwich branch, as warning that the cost of imposing so-called safety measures could affect parades across the country. Mr McCartin, who served with the Royal Observer Corps says: ‘This is very disappointing, but there is not a lot we can do.’

That sadly, is the mind-set into which a once proud nation – one that could take on the Boche, the Hun, the Arabs, the Wogs, the communists, the terrorists, the rebels, insurgents and revolutionaries, in steaming jungle, desert plains, rain-soaked hills and scorching bush – has fallen.

An old soldier saying ‘there’s not a lot we can do.’

That’s because the ‘British Way’ these days, is to find out what people want to do, and then – totally spitefully, because there is no logical reason for virtually any of this – impose wholly unnecessary rules to ensure that they can’t do it.

Well, here’s a suggestion about what the would-be marchers can do.

The Royal British Legion can tell the councillors of Horwich that it is not actually requesting permission to mark Armistice Day with a small parade, but is declaring its intention so to do.

It is not going to pay for that privilege because it has already paid, in blood and lives, and the free citizens of Horwich are still heavily in debt to its members and to their fallen comrades. On the balance sheet of reality the cost of raw material – human lives – for a Remembrance Day parade will never be settled.

All that they are demanding is the right once a year to proceed in orderly fashion to the town’s war memorial and lay a wreath or two in memory of their fallen comrades.

Is that too much to ask?

In Horwich, at this moment of writing, it apparently is. If those old soldiers, sailors and airmen died in the belief that they were defending a free country – with freedom from oppression, freedom of speech and peaceful protest – they died in vain.

Here are two diary dates:

Monday 13 August 7.30pm at Horwich Public Hall. Meeting of Horwich Town Council Finance & General Purposes Committee
Thursday 23 August in the Public Hall, Horwich. Meeting of Horwich Town Council at 7.15pm followed by the Planning Committee at 7.30pm.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=470581&in_page_id=1770
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