Saturday 10 December 2011

Not so much a riddle as a total bloody enigma. Perhaps we’re trying too hard to understand Russia. I’ll drink to that

Things are looking a tad bleak for Vladimir Putin if he believes the presidential election next year in which he has said he intends to stand again will be a glorious coronation. As I write, demonstrations protesting against what many believe were rigged elections are taking place in Moscow and are due in several other cities. But it has to be said that according to official figures, the proportion of the vote which went the way of United Russia, ‘Putin’s party’, dropped from 64pc, which is was at the last election, to 49pc. That’s still a majority, but as ‘rigging’ goes, it’s rather subtle: 15pc fewer votes. United Russia still has a majority, of course, so maybe there is a bit of rigging going, but the figure is way short of the 110pc the Pope always gets and the 98pc support various dictators around the world are accustomed to.

At some point I am duty-bound to quote Winston Churchill on Russia, so I might as well get it over with. Russia, he said, is ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, which is just a
fancy way of saying we haven’t a clue what makes the Russians tick. For example, the man who would like again to lead a nation of incurable dipsomaniacs who cannot apparently let a goodbye pass without toasting it with a shot of vodka is reported to be a teetotaller. Good for him, I say, but it does rather suprise. Then there is the sheer size of the place. Trying to take the pulse of all-Russia by commenting on what lads and lasses are doing in Moscow and St Petersburg strikes me as being just as silly as drawing conclusions about the state of Great Britain from what’s going on in High Street Kensington, London W8 5TT. What do the other Russians, those living in the many towns and small villages in that vast country, feel? I don’t know and the chances are that you don’t, either. Then there is the question about why exactly the West feels Russia is such a threat.

The last time I looked things were going tits up in Iran, Syria, the eurozone and Libya, so why are we so worried that ‘Putin will be president until 2020’ if he serves another two terms? OK, so he’s not exactly Mr Democracy, but how exactly is he a threat? When push comes to shove, what we want from Russia is their gas, a modicum of stability and for them to keep their gangsters out of Western Europe. And were I a Putin supporter arguing with someone slagging off my man as ‘not being democratic’, I would point out that both Greece and Italy now have prime ministers who were more or less appointed by Brussels eurocrats on the urging of Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. The ordinary Greek and Italian voters had absolutely no say in the matter. That doesn’t strike me as being overwhelmingly democratic, either.

Having said all that, the reaction of the Russian authorities to the planned protests is to flood the relevant parts of Moscow with troops. And that doesn’t bode well, either. When the Communist Party ran Russia as a dictatorship, it always had the figleaf of the party to hide behind. Putin has none of that. He might eventually claim to be ‘acting in the interest of the nation’, but if he does, he will also be aware that that is hackneyed line used by would-be dictators everywhere. Somehow, I don’t think the situation in Russia is quite as cut and dried as we here in the West like to make out. The Soviets survived for so long because they had almost supreme control of the media. Russian television, I understand, is under state control and hasn’t reported on the anti-election result protests, but many newspapers did.

Crucially, however, Russians can now travel abroad and have access to the internet. A putative Russian dictator would have to successfully achieve a massive clampdown on all kinds of institutions if he wanted to do things the old way. Instead, he would be obliged to do things the new way, to buy off the middle-classes by ensuring that their lives of ease continue. That, it seems, is largely what has been happening for these past ten years. The trouble is that people living a life of ease grow weary of their current comforts which for them are the norm and they demand even more. Reportedly, the Russian economy is still limping along and it is still only gas exports on which the state can rely for income. Putin is no dumbo and will know that Russia must rely less on a finite resource. But to revitalise the economy and attract foreign investment, the rule of law must be trusted. So Vlad the Lad might well decide that a modicum of democracy is no bad thing for Russia, as long as he stays in charge.

Then there is also the question of his support: I have always been very puzzled by the intricate nexus of alliances and dependency which keeps a strong man in power. Certainly, as with Gaddafi and others, over time he will have a network of others who see him remaining in place as the guarantee of their own status. And one can only assume Putin relies on a similar network. And that makes me wonder whether, perhaps, he really the main man, or whether a power bloc at the top (with, I should imagine, extensive business interests they want to protect) has agreed to him being the main man. Most certainly that seems to have been the way the Communist Party operated once Stalin had popped his clogs (and who lay dying for three days in his study because no one dared try disturb him). Who knows? Not much of a payoff line, but with Russia, that’s about all one can attempt.

Thursday 8 December 2011

What’s sauce for the goose . . . the Guardian tries its hand at solving an ancient ethical conundrum. And one Vladimir Putin must decide: should he or shouldn’t he? But then he’s such a cutie at heart!

Well, well. Not only was the Guardian so thoroughly outraged by the News of the World hacking onto the mobile phones of various celebs and politicians that it launched an investigation into the whole scummy business, it also thought such hacking was such a good wheeze that it did a little itself. David Leigh, the paper’s assistant editor and head of investigations, has admitted that he, too, as hacked into voicemail messages in an, ultimately successful attempt to substantiate a story about a corrupt businessman.

Actually, the news is not quite as shocking as it might sound, and the Guardian isn’t shown up to by thoroughly hypocritical as my intro might have indicated. In fact, Leigh had already admitted in a piece for his paper in 2006 that he had also indulged in a spot of hacking and even admitted to feeling a ‘vicarious thrill’ while doing so, but his intention was to plead that there are exceptional circumstances in which such subterfuge is justified. And I seem to remember hearing on the radio yesterday that Leveson announced that when he makes his recommendations to as to what kind of journalistic practices he felt should be criminalised, he will also say that whatever laws are made should allow for exceptions. (I tried to find a link to press report on this but so far I haven’t been able to.)

So far, so good, although so far, so muddy. Because Leigh’s admission highlights a perpetial and perennial problem in - er - moral philosophy which is always best summed up in the question ‘does the end justify the means?’ Given what Leigh told Leveson’s inquiry and given Leveson’s subsequent comments on the matter, the answer would seem to be yes. But, as any keen sixth-form philosophy student will tell you, one can quickly think up any number of examples where the answer would seem to be an unequivocal no. For example, if a mother were told that the rest of her children would be saved if she year to murder her youngest, would that murder be justified? So, the answer to the question ‘does the end justify the means?’ would strictly become: sometimes. And that is worse than useless.

We are not dealing with dusty, theoretical philosophy here. The question of ‘when is immoral behaviour acceptable’ raised its ugly head several months ago when the Americans admitted they had resorted to the torture of Al Qaeda suspects. At the time, their response was ‘if a practice is acceptable, it is no longer immoral’, but in truth that is a pretty threadbare argument which merely shifts the burden of proof. A pound of flour is still a pound of floor whether it is weighed on an old-fashioned set a scales or a modern digital set.

Unusually, your resident loudmouth is not about to pronounce and suggest an answer. I’m merely going to take the easy way out and remark that it’s a tough one. I will add, though, that I am more inclined to play it safe and believe that, no, the ends don’t justify the means, for admitting that sometimes they might allows any number of thugs, such as one Joseph Stalin, for example, to justify themselves and their actions. But to point out just how tricky the question is: were the murders of occupying Germans committed by French Resistance more, less or equally as justified as the murders of U.S. and British troops in Afghanistan by the Taliban (or the murders of Soviet troops by the mujahideen)? Sticky, isn’t it?

. . .

If Vladimir Putin were a brand, his owners would be urgently considering a relaunch. If he were an ageing rock star, his managers would be urgently considering a comeback tour. As it is, he’s fucked and faces a huge dilemma: do the crackdowns on protesters in Moscow, St Petersburg and - somewhere called - Samara get heavier until they cease, or does he carry on with the ‘we’re all aspiring democrats now’ schtick and lose even more face? In all this, of course, I’m assuming that his position is safe within the ruling establishment, that he is not, perhaps, in part a placeman who could be replaced if and when those nominal folk pulling the strings decide. And that consideration takes us to an essential difference between the old Soviet regime and the new, it would seem quasi, dictatorship in Russia under Putin. At least the Soviets had the fiction of ‘the Communist Party’ and ‘the interests of the Party’ to fall back on and any reshuffle or internal realignment of power could be camouflaged. Putin has no such fig leaf, and it would seem he stands slap-bang in front of a dilemma.

A month ago I googled Putin’s biography as I realised I knew so little about him. The occasion was a curious story in the Daily Telegraph - you can find it here - about claims made by a former West German secret service agent that Putin used to beat his wife and had several affiars while he was working for the KGB and stationed in East Germany. The agent (whose codename as ‘Balcony’ - she had rather large breasts we are told, although I must be honest and say that is more a British than a German joke, or rather I have never heard it made by a German) had, in the course of her duties, managed to become a confidante of Mrs Putin, and Mrs Putin told her about her husband’s behaviour. Google took me to Wikipedia and, of course, I have the standard reservations about that site, but from what I read there it would seem to be that Putin was, initially, something of an accidental President. His biography doesn’t read as that of someone scheming to get his way to the top. Now he is there, of course, he most probably wants to stay there, but his initial appointment as a prime minister seems to have been something of a matter of chance. But there is now no doubt that he wants another two full terms in charge and will do a great deal to achieve it.

It would be misleading to claim that the people have other ideas. It would be more truthful to say that a number of liberal-minded, middle-class folk in Moscow, St Petersburg and Samara have other ideas, although the numbers who turned out to protest at what they regard were flawed elections can give us no indication at all as to whether there are a great many others in the whole of Russia who feel the same or just a few. (Incidentally, I have often wondered just how we British, or the French or the Germans, would react if the Russians announced they were sending monitors to our countries when an election is due to make sure it was all fair and above board. We might resort to crude language when telling them what to do with their election monitors.)

As that old roue Bill Clinton once remarked ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ when asked what made the voters tick, and the Russians will be no different. If things remain rather comfortable for a great many of them - and there is a great many of them - questions such as why are there no credible alternative candidates to Putin at the coming presidential election will remain unasked. If, on the other hand, the electorate’s standard of living does start to suffer badly, it could well be another matter. And in that case no amount of pictures of Putin strangling bears in the Urals, rolling around naked in Siberian snows, or fishing for shark in the waters of the Volga would soothe them. I have given a selection of Putin action man pictures below. And then, Lordy be!, I have also come across some pictures of Putin expressing his feminine side. He’s such a cutie!

On the lines of Putin PR stunts, one of the funnier videos I have recently seen was of Putin helping to promote a new Lada model. In he jumped to take the smart-looking car for a test drive and turned on the ignition. Sadly, the engine failed to spring to life for several minutes. I do hope he isn’t vain. Because he did look rather silly.





Sunday 4 December 2011

The Times they are a changin’ and have been for quite some time. If you want to make money, leave The Thunderer well alone. Oh, and things could well be looking up for the scruffs on the extreme Left/extreme Right. Now there’s an enticing prospect for another 50 years of peace in Europe

Years ago, about 24 although it doesn’t feel that long oddly enough, when I was more naive than I am now, I thought that it would be a good idea to try to get a documentary series about the Press barons onto TV. As far as I was concerned, they were a fascinating bunch, some completely off-the-wall, some not quite so off-the-wall, but all of them not at all like you and me. I still think so, but as for getting a documentary made, well forget it. It pains me to do so, but I shall do so again: I was very naive, though sadly no more naive than a great many other people.

This was in the early days of Channel 4 when it largely stuck to its brief of being ‘different’ (it doesn’t do so any more), and it did screen a lot of interesting stuff. I thought it might well be a natural home for such a series. Sadly, these days ‘different’ doesn’t ring any bells, and if it doesn’t involved celebrities cooking, celebrities dancing, celebrities buying bric-a-brac, celebrities eating nasty insects in some faux jungle a mile or two from Brisbane city centre it hasn’t got the faintest chance of making it to the small screen.

The culture of TV has changed a great deal since then and there is far less money around, and what there is has to be spread so thinly because of the number of competing channels that if you can’t get your programme made for peanuts, it ain’t going to be shown. Thus we now have the proliferation of property programmes, cookery programmes and antiques programmes, as well as all the ‘reality’ TV crap. The one virtue they have as far as the TV luvvies are concerned is that they are cheap to make. But even in those days, pre Sky and all the other Freeview bollocks when there were only the two BBC TV channels and ITV (which was still flying high and which in those days still consisted of a number of regional companies, all under the ITV tent), getting a documentary made wasn’t just down to some bright spark having a good idea.

Before I contacted Channel 4 and three or four of the bigger ITV companies, I did what, were I to bullshit, I could call ‘research’. Actually, what it boiled down to was that I read a few books. And that is how I came to know a little of the history of The Times and why it has been something of a nine-bob note (nine dollar/euro/rubel bill) for the past 100 years. It was most certainly true that at one point The Times was not only the most pre-eminent paper in Britain, but also had a good worldwide reputation. But that was not necessarily down to its journalism. It was all rooted in something of a stroke of luck.

The rotary press was invented in the early 1840s and patented a few years later. It transformed the British newspaper industry. Until then, newspapers had been printed on flatbed press - type was laid out in a frame on a flat bed, inked and it was covered with a sheet of newsprint which had a page printed on it. Not only was the process time-consuming, it was also expensive, and the circulation of even the leading papers of the day was around 10,000. They simply couldn’t print enough in one night to sell any more. These papers were then distributed and as they were expensive, each edition was read by a great many people. But the rotary press changed all that. With a rotary press the number of copies which could be printed rose tenfold, and it was also a cheaper technology. And this is where The Times stroke of luck came in. For under its then editor John Delane, the Times managed to lease exclusive rights to use the rotary press for ten years. Suddenly it could print far more copies than its rivals and its production costs came down. And it made a great deal more money, which it used to extend its network of reporters and correspondents. (Incidentally, its nickname The Thunderer, which those self-regarding eejits at The Times like to refer to proudly, was originally a satirical gibe at how the The Times took itself so seriously.)

As usual, success begat success, and in the mid-19th century The Times really was top dog. What they won’t happily tell you was once their ten-year exclusive right to use the rotary press ended and all the other papers could get in on the act, their circulation also shot up as their costs also fell. And by the second half of the 19th century, the Daily Telegraph, even today, the only true rival to The Times, had already overtaken it in circulation. By the end of the century it was no longer making a profit and at the beginning of the 20th century it was even briefly owned by Lord Northcliffe, who had made his name and fortune with his new downmarket Daily Mail (‘written by office boys for office boys’ was the opinion of Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister), but even his undoubted newspaper genius couldn’t get it back into the black. And it has not turned a profit in more than 110 years.

These days, under the ownership of News International (‘Britain’s No 1 Phone Hacker’) it is still subsidised by group profits, but there is talk of shutting it down now that those profits are massively dented by the closure of the News of the Screws. It’s circulation in October 2011 was a piss-poor 417,197. Ten years earlier it was 678,498. Maths isn’t my strong suit but I make that a decline of more than 38pc. It has, admittedly, been a bad decade for newspapers all round. The figures for the Telegraph are 974,362 and 603,901, also just over 38pc, for the Daily Mail 2,421,795 and 1,998,363, a decline of 17.5pc, and The Sun 3,451,746 and 2,715,473, a decline of 21.3pc. Most alarming of all are the figures for the Mirror, The Suns’ sworn rival: 2,180,227 and 1,118,120, a decline of a deeply alarming 51pc.

So much for The Thunderer.
. . .

The really silly thing about all this euro crisis nonsense is that the people who matter most, the very people on whose behalf the EU purportedly does all its good deeds - viz the plethora of regulations making life better, safer and prettier - are almost forgotten in all the argy-bargy. Yes, Merkel does this and suggests that, and Sarkozy suggests that and does this, but at the end of the day, they are only there on sufferance. And both face election. (Incidentally, in an EU of equals - well, in theory - where are all the other heads of state? One of the justifications for the EU was to end the dominance and rivalry of Germany and France in European affairs, a rivalry which had led to war on several occasions. Yet which two countries are now ‘taking the lead’ in trying to sort out the country? Latvia and Portugal? Try again. Netherlands and Cyprus? Er, not quite. Germany and France? Well, done! Give that man a chocolate!)

France goes to the polls to elect its new president at the end of April next year, and Merkel faces elections 18 months later in September 2013. The accepted wisdom is that membership of the EU is such a good thing that in all member states the sitting government and its opposition are in favour. Ah, but what about the people, those ordinary men and women who, so far in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland are having a very shitty time because of what they regard as the behaviour of EU placemen. Enda Kenny appeared on TV last night preparing the Irish for even further austerity measures, including raising VAT to 23pc. How to the ordinary people - let me remind you: the very people on whose behalf this is all being done - feel now? Are they really as well-inclined to the EU as once they were when those two letters were regarded as shorthand for an easy life of plenty at no cost whatsoever? When it comes to ticking the ballot paper, what will be uppermost in their minds: the easy life they once had or the shitty life they now have? But, I hear you cry, it doesn’t matter: both the incumbent government and the opposition are EU supporters, so there is no chance ...

Well, sadly, there is a chance, a rather frightening chance that some opposition might opt for political expediency and stop toeing the party line on all things EU. They might choose to destroy the cosy consensus which has always been part of the EU’s strength. But that would not be the worst scenario. Presented with the Hobson’s choice of voting to re-elect a government which is bringing them nothing but pain or to replace it with an opposition which also promises to continue the pain, the voters might be inclined to favour some of the scruffier individuals who exist on the margins of political consensus. And there are enough of those.

On the left, Greece, Spain and Portugal all have a thriving extreme left, and were that not to worry you, it is neatly balance in those countries by an extreme right. In Franct the Front National is doing rather well in the polls, now standing at 20pc. In Italy the Northern League has a great deal of support, and although it is not regarded as a right-wing party, it is on its way. The real problem for European democrats is that should any of these, whether on the left or the right, garner substantially more votes - and a protest vote is still a vote - and be in a position of holding the balance of power, they have no choice but to accept it. After all the people will have spoken. Trying the trick they used successfully in Ireland - holding a second ballot when the voters rather inconveniently did not give the EU the result it wanted - will not be possible. What to do? Aux armes citoyens! Now there’s a prospect for the institution which many claim has ensured peace in Europe for the past 60 years.

Saturday 3 December 2011

Am I being harsh or is Caitlin Moran just a tad pleased with herself?

I was listening to the radio this morning and as usual on that particular programme, the last item, just before 9am, takes the form of a general discussion. If the overnight news has been grave - euro not yet collapsed but for God’s sake start knitting, or Elton John loses cufflinks given him by the Queen - the big, authoritative guns are rolled out and we are treated to the wisdom of those thought to know what they are talking about.

The ‘names’ will be people who are relevant to the story - a highly respected diplomat who, now retired, can stop lying, some chap from the LSE (well, until recently - since they were caught selling a Phd to Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi for a very good price indeed, their stock has rather fallen and they will now count themselves lucky to get a gig on Countdown) or a German journalist from one of the serious papers who speaks English better than almost all of us who live in the United Kingdom.

That, in the interests of ‘balance’- the BBC is very keen on ‘balance’ - each authoritative side will utterly contradict the other and describe what is being put forward by his antagonist as nonsense means that once the discussion ends, we, the listeners are not one jot wiser and the whole excercise was largely pointless.

Often the discussion is what the BBC refers to as ‘light-hearted’ and ‘the names’ are allowed to make jokes and not take the topic of discussion entirely seriously. This morning, the discussion was about one Jeremy Clarkson who either outraged the nation a few days ago by claiming our striking public sector workers should be lined up and shot in front of their families or who played up to his professional persona as loudmouth at large and was merely joking.

What you believe on that score will be entirely down to your own political prejudice. The Left were, rather predictably, thoroughly outraged as only the Left can be outraged, whereas the rest of us know Clarkson was making a joke, although a weak one. And for the record, I think Jazzer is a pain in the arse but otherwise perfectly harmless.

So that was the topic, and to bat it around for five minutes or so until the 9am pips, Today rolled out Toby Young (a kind of well-trained, more diplomatic and classier sub-Jeremy Clarkson, who has also been known to speak out and frighten the horses, but who in recent years has chosen to acquire a more sober persona now that he is hoping to make his fortune by setting up private schools) and one Joan Burnie, who I have never come across before and who was trailed as an associate editor Scotland’s Daily Record for whom she also writes a column.

They made some good points, and Young mentioned how Dave Prentiss, a union leader - you’d be hard-pushed to find a Tory or someone from the respectable wing of the Lib Dems styling themselves Dave - revealed he was ‘seeking urgent legal advice’ on Clarkson’s comments. Yes, the whole thing is as silly as that. But at one point Young mentioned a Caitlin Moran and my ears pricked up.

Until that moment I had only heard her name and knew nothing more about her, but from Young’s comments it would seem she is, in part, that oddest of creatures, a right-of-centre feminist and I was intrigued. So I looked her up on the net and discovered that she is a ‘broadcaster, writer, TV critic and columnist’. And when I looked her up I realised just how out of touch I am with what’s happening, man. Even the fact that I had to look her up underlines rather sadly how much further down the road to fuddy-duddyland I have travelled than I have feared.

For Caitlin was, it turns out, something of a young media prodigy, winning the Observer’s Young Journalist of the Year in 1990 when she was still only 15, writing a novel at 16 and going on to present a Channel 4 rock show. Now that she is no longer a young media prodigy - you can’t be, really, at 36 - she has joined the media establishment (expect her to join the Booker Prize committee at some point in the next few yers) and her day job is to write for three columns for the Times, work which has won her Columnist of the Year for 2010, and BPA Critic of the Year 2011, and Interviewer of the Year 2011 (all, you will gather, curiously anonymous: who sponsors these awards? Would it surprise you to know that I am also an ‘award-winner’? I recently won Oldest Inhabitant of Lanke Cottage, St Breward, for the third year running and I am, my colleagues tell me, a strong contender for the prestigious Feature Sub-editor Nicks Most Biros From Stationery Cupboard Award 2011.)


What first turned me off was young Caitlin’s relationship with The Times. I worked regular shifts on The Times (which came to an abrupt halt when I was quite wrongly suspected of spending the night with one of the news editors’ wives, but that’s another story) and was rather taken aback by the paper’s self-image. To this day - seriously - it thinks of itself as the best paper in the world.

Worse, it regards those who, like me, don’t agree with that estimation as fundamentally stupid. Well, I’ll give it to you straight: I find The Times dull, dull, dull, uninformative and distressingly middle-brow. So that young Caitlin writes not just one but three columns, one rather ominously described by Wikipedia as ‘the satirical Friday column Celebrity Watch’, is not in her favour.

As is my wont, I also google-imaged her (sorry, sisters, but don’t pretend you don’t do the same with guys) and that was the nail in young Caitlin’s coffin as far as I am concerned. For in almost all the pictures in Google’s collection, she has a look of ineffable smugness and self-satisfaction.

But make up your own minds. Above is a selection. I’m afraid what we think of ourselves is very often reflected in our habitual expression and young Caitlin’s expressions rather convey, to me at least, that if she were chocolate she would just love to eat herself. But that’s media folk for you. If I had my way, I would have them all lined up in front of their families and shot. Not once, but twice!

Thursday 1 December 2011

Ah, the Indy, the eccentrics’ eccentric. Plus the best and clearest account I have yet come across of why the euro is going down the pan

Every country has its self-image, which is more often than not is rather flattering. The French like to see themselves as intellectuals, folk who would far, far rather discuss ontology than developments in the latest soaps. The Italians are convinced they are the great seducers, although apparently Italian women are the first group to pooh-pooh that one. (It doesn’t help that for economic reasons - largely - Italian men often live at home until they marry and expect their new wives to carry on where their mothers left off.) The Brits like to see themselves as quirky, slightly off-the-wall, the exception which prove most rules (which is just as well because portraying themselves as great intellectuals or great seducers would do nothing but elicit hoots of risible laughter from every other nation).

As it is, you can find eccentrics in every nation, not least, counter-intuitively, Germany: my sister once had a neighbour who thought his water company’s charges were getting too high and began drilling his own well in is back garden. He had got about 40ft deep before ‘the authorities’ - it’s always ‘the authorities’ - told him enough was enough and what he was doing was illegal under several laws, including one which stated that ‘borehole drilling, drilling boreholes, drilling any hole which might be interpreted as a borehole and which meets the different criteria leading to or leading from the definition of boreholes is not allowed if the area of land in which the borehole is being drilled is less than 20sq m, if work on drilling the borehole takes place predominantly between the hours of 5pm and 8am or at weekends, if the borehole driller cannot comprehensively demonstrate the need for a personal borehole (but see the section below on the impact of proposed new EU legislation) and the borehole/borehole drilling do not meet the general criteria of Safety At Work, Environmental Concerns and Tighter European Integration.’ As it was, he took ‘the authorities’ to court which ruled in his favour on all of those official objections except the last which we all know overrules every other law known to mankind.

Where was I?

It has to be said that if not the wackiest nation in the world, Britain is up there with the wackier ones. An example: to date we have here in Great Britain TWO parliaments and TWO assemblies. Both parliaments can raise taxes, although the second parliament (in Scotland) can only do so in some areas (taxes on litter, billboards, kerbstones, that kind of thing). Neither of the assemblies can raise taxes. In fact the assemblies, one in Belfast and one in Cardiff can do very little except meet and complain about the main parliament, the one which sits in Westminster, although I believe they do have limited responsibility for certain bye-laws - when folk can hang out their washing, the number of times you can spit in the street on weekdays, that kind of thing. The members of both parliaments and both assemblies, however, are reasonably content with the arrangement, and very good salaries, very generous expenses, subsidised restaurants and bars, very generous pensions and the insistence that it is all very, very democratic go a long way to ensure they don’t rock the boat too much.

My thoughts turned to wackiness when I logged on and did my morning trawl through the websites of the Telegraph, the Guardian, The Independent and the Daily Mail.
The Independent front page was especially puzzling, which is to say it was more puzzling than usual. Under the headline ‘Victory within reach - but cuts could spoil it all’ there are pictures of Hillary Clinton (looking rather old), Carla Bruni (still looking youngish and they call her Carla Bruni-Sarkozy) and Elton John (looking rather old). The overnight news was that all the rich folk in the U.S. have decided to make it easier for European banks to borrow their money (so good of them), Iran has decided it wants to be invaded by Britain, and our Chancellor has released a single (‘You Think It’s Bad? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ - quite catchy). What, I asked myself do Clinton, Bruni (‘Bruni-Sarkozy’) and Elton John have to do with any of that? The answer, of course, is nothing. For the Indy, as it is know to the few families in West London who still buy it, had decided to ignore the obvious news stories and lead on World Aids Day. Good on you, you might say, and I agree (after having read some of the pieces by the three involved) that it is timely to remember that aids is still a threat to many lives. But to splash on it in the run-up to Armageddon? That is eccentric.

But the Indy has form. It was launched in October 1986 to universal goodwill. It would be fair to say it hit the ground running. It’s design was fresh, clear and attractive, its use of photography was imaginative and its philosophy of political non-alignment very welcome indeed by many of the newspaper reading public who were thoroughly fed up with the entrenched attitudes of British newspapers, and its launch ad campaign - We’re independent. Are you? - very clever indeed, playing as it did on the conceit and vanity of potential readers. And from that high spot it began a slow, slow, painfully slow decline.
If I remember rightly, its initial circulation was more than respectable at around 300,000, although this was, admittedly, in the days before the internet when the Telegraph was still selling over one million, The Times far more than half a million and the Guardian’s figures did not look as sickly as they do now. So, off to such a promising start, the Indy decided to shoot itself in the foot: for no very good reason, it underwent a redesign. There was nothing wrong with the old design and at the time circulation figures were holding up, even though they were no longer as high as at launch. Redesigns (and ‘relaunches’) are usually the first sign that ‘things are not healthy’. Sometimes they come off (and as in the case of the revitalised Marks & Spencer chain under Stuart Rose, they come of spectacularly) but that is the exception which proves the rule. At the Indy, however, things were going rather well (as far as I know) and the redesign was entirely superfluous. Be that as it may, it unsettled some readers and circulation started drooping a little.

Its attitude didn’t help, either. Like many, I started reading it when I was launched but was soon turned off by an indefinable smugness. I once met a reporter, on The Times at the time, who told me he was headhunted by the Indy. He went for the interview and was seriously considering jumping ship until he was told the salary the paper was offering him. ‘But that’s several thousand pounds less than I’m getting now,’ he told them. ‘Ah, yes,’ they replied, ‘but you would be working for The Independent.’ That attitude seemed to permeate the paper, by then six years old. When I was living and working in London in the early 1990s, I worked regular shifts on the Indy in its City Road offices. It seemed to me the people I worked with were split right down the middle: regular, very professional sub-editors and then a gang of hacks who really thought they were the bee’s knees. It was rather odd.

Since then the decline has been inexorable. It has had ten editors in the past 25 years, including many who should never have been allowed near the editor’s chair in a month of Sundays. I shall name names: Andrew Marr (him again), Rosie Boycott and the ever delightful Janet Street-Porter. Circulations among the broadsheets have, admittedly, fallen dramatically all round: in October 2011, the Telegraph sold just 603,901 (in Oct 2010 it was 655,006, a decline of -7.80pc), The Times (another paper which thinks the sun shines out of its arse) 417,197 (479,107, -12.92pc), 230,541 (276,428, -16.60pc) and the Indy 133,449 (182,412, -26.84pc). To be fair, I should add that the Indy has recently launched the i, a kind of Indy lite (the main paper without the pretentious bit?) I gave up on the Indy when I found that all too often I simply didn’t understand too many of its feature articles, not a sign of my stupidity, but that the paper was badly written: the first rule of communication is Don’t Baffle The Reader), and one can assume that of the one in four readers who stopped buying the Indy year on year, almost all will have instead gone for the i. And this is selling rather well: 211,467 in October 2011, more than its older sister paper and just 19, 074 fewer than the Guardian. Now if that isn’t wacky, I don’t know what is. For a fuller account of these figures as well as those for the tabloids, you can go to this page.

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Here is the most succinct, clearest and best explanation of the euro crisis I have yet read. It explains everything.